Embodied Scholarship: A Performance History of William Richard Waldron’s Lizzie Leigh; or, The Murder Near the Old Mill (1863)

Abstract

Through a reflective account of the process by which William Richard Waldron’s Lizzie Leigh was staged by the Theatre Caucus at the 2018 North American Victorian Studies Association conference held in St Petersburg, Florida, I hope to present a picture of what it might mean to figure scholarship as an act of embodiment through performance as both a stimulus for and a mode of inquiry. Towards that end, I offer a process narrative that tracks the selection, editing, infrastructure planning, rehearsal, and performance of the play in an effort to capture the intentional, inadvertent, and retrospective avenues of inquiry that emerged through that process, with an emphasis on tracking as fully as possible the performance history of the play, of which the North American Victorian Studies Association performance became a part. In addition to documenting the performance history of the play in Victorian Britain, I will also document the career of the play’s author in relation to the changes in decade and in venue of performances of the play in order to suggest the appeal and staying power of an under-valued piece of Victorian theatrical culture that still can speak to audiences today.