Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research最新文献

{"title":"The Lively Arts of the London Stage, 1675-1725","authors":"J. Lockwood","doi":"10.4324/9781315238593","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315238593","url":null,"abstract":"Kathryn Lowerre, ed. The Lively Arts of the London Stage, 1675-1725. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. 324 pp. $119.95 USD, £65.00 (hardback). ISBN: 9781409455332.The aim of Kathryn Lowerre's new collection is promising: to focus on a fifty-year period, as Lowerre writes, \"neither 'Restoration' nor 'Eighteenth Century,\"' a time of \"theatrical and musical volatility encompassing the span of a hypothetical audience member's active theatre-going life\" (1). That promise, however, is only partially realized in a book whose contributions vary widely in quality.The first three chapters address different aspects of the competition organized by members of the Kit-Cat Club in 1701 (for \"the Encouragement of Musick\") to write the best setting of William Congreve's masque The Judgment of Paris. (Four entries, by John Eccles, Gottfried Finger, Daniel Purcell, and John Weldon, were performed at the Dorset Garden Theatre in successive weeks in March and April; Weldon was unexpectedly judged the winner, with Finger coming in last.) Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson use their impressive grasp of contemporary sources, both manuscript and print, relating to the production and reception of musical theatre in this period to \"bring together all the available evidence\" about the singers who performed in the competition (6). As Baldwin and Wilson admit, however, the only definite information we have comes from just one letter by Congreve about the performers of Eccles' setting; the bulk of their chapter consists of shrewd speculation, perhaps at its most valuable when, at its close, the chapter opens out to consider possible explanations for the competition's result.Matt Roberson's perceptive re-reading of familiar sources relating to the staging of the competition entries leads to new and persuasive conclusions, unfussily presented; the illustration showing his theories about the nature and positioning of the puzzling tin \"acoustical reflectors\" described by Congreve in the same letter is particularly useful.Robert Rawson's contribution attempts to identify \"Why Finger Failed in 'The Prize Musick'\": a difficult task, since Finger's setting does not survive. The chapter is not entirely successful. Rawson concludes that \"Finger's music had lost much of its relevance\" by the time of the competition \"since he continued to rely so heavily on central European conventions\" (45). While there is no doubt that, as Robert Pascall writes in his thoughtful article on \"Style\" in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, \"the differences between and the relative merits of the [\"national\"] styles of composition [...] were an important part of 18th-century musical consciousness,\" identifying the features of those styles and what they would have meant to different audiences can be very difficult. Considering the weight they are made to bear in his argument, Rawson's frequent references to aspects of \"Austro-Bohemian\" style in Fingers London music really need to be supported by examples of contem","PeriodicalId":366404,"journal":{"name":"Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132396141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Rival Sirens: Performance and Identity on Handel's Operatic Stage","authors":"Angela Escott","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-3740","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-3740","url":null,"abstract":"Suzanne Aspden. The Rival Sirens: Performance and Identity on Handels Operatic Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. xv + 291 pp. $99.00 USD, £65 (hardback). ISBN 9781107033375.Competing actresses have recently been the subject of Felicity Nussbaums Rival Queens (2010), a title that refers to Nathaniel Lee's heroic tragedy Alexander the Great: or The Rival Queens (1677) which was associated with squabbles between actresses. Suzanne Aspden treats the subject of competing opera singers, employing Charles Burney's reference to operatic rivals Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni as \"rival sirens.\" She explores the identities of the two singers through an analysis of the music and libretti written and adapted for them, and she examines the effect of their rivalry on the operas in which they were cast together. The cover illustration, a satirical image of the two women singing with the castrato Senesino, suggests the possibility of three rival sirens, and the castrate's professional relationship with the female duo is discussed in the final chapter. Handel scholars have emphasized the importance of the singer to the creative processes of librettist and composer of the fluid genre of opera seria. The chapters each focus on one or two operas, enabling the works to be understood in the context of London theatrical life. Aspden begins with a focus on the singer as actor, and concludes with a discussion of vocal style as an indicator of identity.Chapter 1 considers the concept of character in early eighteenth-century theatre and opera, noting the emphasis on representative types, the lack of psychological reality, and the merging of actor and stage role in the audience's perception. The different singing styles of Cuzzoni and Bordoni are compared, using musical illustrations to show how their music differed in relation to their operatic roles; Cuzzoni's arias were flowing and mournful, Bordoni's virtuosic. Evidence from previous roles sung by Cuzzoni challenges her stereotyping as the more feminine of the two women, and indicates that the women's personalities were not consistent with their typecasting. An early employment together was in Handel's Alessandro (1726), a libretto associated with female rivalry because of anecdotes about battles between actresses during performances of Lee's play on the same theme. Aspden notes the pairing of actresses as opposites in plays from the late seventeenth century, and suggests that the chaste-passive and the temperamental could be seen as two aspects of the whole female personality.Chapter 2 shows how in Handel's Rodelinda (1725) both roles of the rival women contain aspects of contrasted types of womanhood-unruly and virtuous-while these roles are clearly differentiated in Bononcinis Astianatte ( 1727), which was based on sources used by Racine and on Ambrose Philips' The Distrest Mother (1712). Aspden notes the pressure upon professional singers, as upon actors, to protect their virtuous private im","PeriodicalId":366404,"journal":{"name":"Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research","volume":"647 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116091446","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Thomas Killigrew and the Seventeenth-Century English Stage","authors":"Riki Miyoshi","doi":"10.4324/9781315551029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315551029","url":null,"abstract":"Philip Major, ed. Thomas Killigrew and the Seventeenth-Century English Stage. Farnham: Ashgate Publishers, 2013. 236 pp. £60.00 (hardback); also available in ebook PDF. ISBN 9781409466680.As part of Ashgate's New Perspectives series, the book celebrates the quadricentenary of Thomas Killigrew's birth and re-examines the life and career of a man who, in the words of Philip Major, \"possessed a ceaseless love of life, boundless energy, dogged determination, attractive cosmopolitanism, and witty articulacy\" (2). This new study on the hitherto \"strangely elusive figure\" (1) is especially timely because of the staggering paucity of scholarship on Killigrew: Alfred Harbage wrote the last and only biography in 1930 and William T. Reich's edition of Claricilla in 1980 was the most recent publication of any of Killigrew's plays. The book, furthermore, comes out at a time when studies in royalism are becoming ever more popular and nuanced, rendering a new monograph on an influential royalist courtier such as Killigrew not only desirable but also essential. In this \"more receptive and propitious critical atmosphere\" (2) the eight contributors to the volume deal with different aspects of Killigrew's tumultuous life and his varied career. Over half a century on from Harbage's detailed study of Killigrew, this volume challenges the narrow one-dimensional characterization of Killigrew as a mere cavalier bon vivant and provides a newly complex and insightful portrayal of a man who was not a saint and was undoubtedly \"one of the most colourful characters of the mid-seventeenth century\" (1).In chapter 1, Eleanor Collins examines Thomas Killigrew's early plays of the 1630s when he was a Cockpit dramatist. During the period of \"the second war of the theatres,\" Queen Henrietta's Men at the Cockpit produced two plays by Killigrew: The Prisoners and Claracilla. Through a close reading of the plays Collins persuasively argues against the conventional view that these pieces were primarily meant by Killigrew as a means of ingratiating himself with the queen. In particular Collins convincingly suggests that Killigrew's treatment of the theme of platonic love is not a \"straightforward endorsement of the court culture with which he was entwined\" (26). Instead of placing the two plays within the hitherto limited context of court politics, Collins explores the plays within a new setting of the stage rivalry between the Queen's Men and the King's Men. She argues that Killigrew's plays were employed as a competitive device by the Queens Men seeking to take their repertory in a new direction so as to distinguish itself from its rival and also as a way of engaging royal attention by employing, for the first time, a courtier playwright. Collins thus not only sheds light on the interpretation of Killigrews early plays but also increases our understanding of the repertory strategy of an important early modern playing company.In chapter 2, Victoria Bancroft analyzes Killigrews popular ","PeriodicalId":366404,"journal":{"name":"Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114611857","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History","authors":"J. Munns","doi":"10.5860/choice.49-2581","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.49-2581","url":null,"abstract":"Michael Dobson. Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 201 1. 265pp. £53.00 (US $85.00). ISBN: 9780521862349.Michael Dobson's thoroughly enjoyable book opens with a fascinating description of the first recorded amateur performance of a Shakespeare play. This was a performance of Hamlet on 5 September 1607 on board the Red Dragon, at harbor in Sierra Leone for the benefit of the local ruling families.The work concludes with an equally fascinating description of a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream by members of Cambridge University Press in 2009. In between these two types of performance, Dobson traces the \"significant ways in which the plays of William Shakespeare have participated in English-speaking culture over the four centuries since they were written\" (1). Overall the movement Dobson traces is from \"private performance\" in royal households and noble homes, to the emergence of amateur dramatic clubs from the late Victorian period onwards as nonprofessional performances of Shakespeare became a thoroughly middleclass activity. Bridging this movement is a chapter devoted to \"Shakespeare in exile: expatriate performance\" which explores Shakespeare's export as a \"national treasure\" (113) for elites travelling and living abroad, as well as military and colonial performances, defiantly asserting Britishness and \"Merry England\" (127). Beyond that, and very movingly, Dobson has unearthed descriptions of performances by British prisoners of war in World War II, such as an \"elegantly dressed\" performance of Hamlet in Oflag VIIIB in Bavaria in 1941 (136).Private performance in aristocratic households became very popular during the eighteenth century, \"part of a general withdrawal of the upper classes from the public sphere, which peaked in France, Switzerland, Italy and parts of what is now Germany as well as in Britain during the 1770s and 1780s\" (10). Such performances, especially in royal households such as those at Leicester House in the 1740s encouraged by Frederick, Prince of Wales, benefitted from advice and training from professional actors, in that case James Quinn. However, although briefly discussing performances in royal households (34-36), Dobson concentrates on reconstructing provincial performances by wealthy amateurs in Salisbury in the 1770s and then the spectacular \"great Kilkenny\" theatricals performed from 1802-19. In the Kilkenny performances, the lines between amateur and professional are very blurred, as Dobson notes musicians were hired from the Smock Alley theatre as well as actresses to \"spare decent women\" from playing unseemly heroines, such as Juliet (55). …","PeriodicalId":366404,"journal":{"name":"Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131983090","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage/Women on the Stage in Early Modern France: 1540-1750","authors":"P. Richards","doi":"10.5860/choice.48-3780","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.48-3780","url":null,"abstract":"Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin, ed. Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage. Series: Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Burlington VT and Aldershot UK: Ashgate, 2005. 2008. 329 pp. bibl. $130 (hardback). $29.95 (paperback). ISBN: 9780754665359.Virginia Scott. Women on the Stage in Early Modern France: 1540-1750. Cambridge University Press, 2010. 325 pp. $95 (hardback). ISBN: 9780521896757.Pamela Allen Brown's and Peter Paroline introduction to the collection of essays, Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage, justifies the contention which unites all the essays in the book, which is that women were involved in performance across all social groups and in religious and secular arenas and in a variety of places. \"In the alternative playing areas of the street, alehouse, market square, parish green, manorhouse and court, women could be found performing; connecting these places were female spectators, patrons and travelling entertainers\" (1).The essays that follow this feisty introduction are not all equally convincing to the reader but they are all enthusiastic and committed. They cover performance in both London and the provinces and include a European section entitled \"Beyond the Channel\" within the timeframe of about a hundred and fifty years. Overall the collection provides an excellent place at which to start any discussion about female participation in the varied culture of early modern England. The essays offer considerable information on female roles, duties, expectations, and obligations as understood in the period under review. Hence, the collection will be useful not only to students interested in theatre and performance but also will be a welcome addition to any course on women's history in early modern England.One of the most interesting essays in the collection is Melinda J. Gough's \"Courtly Comediantes: Henrietta Maria and Amateur Women's Stage Plays in France and England\" (193-218). Gough uses a specific performance at the early Bourbon court, that of Bradamante in 161 1, to demonstrate and discuss the tradition of accepted elite female performance at the French court which was sponsored by Queen Marie de Medici- a Florentine with knowledge of Italian theatrical traditions. The picture which is offered here of Marie de Medici is very much in accordance with Jean-Francois Dubost's revisionist study, Marie de Medicis: La reine devoilee (Payot: Paris 2009). As Gough remarks \"... play acting for invited elite audiences allowed young royal women ... to visibly exercise their most decorous sociopolitical function: the mirroring back to the court of its own most graceful magnificence ... and enhancement ofthat court's prestige within the European court nexus as a whole\" (194). This custom of elite female performance travelled with the Princess Henrietta Maria when she arrived at the English court in May 1625, and Gough demonstrates that the young queen and her ladies not only da","PeriodicalId":366404,"journal":{"name":"Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research","volume":"111 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116943362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theatre","authors":"Lora Geriguis","doi":"10.5860/choice.48-0780","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.48-0780","url":null,"abstract":"Felicity Nussbaum. Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theatre Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010 383 pp. $55.00 ISBN 978-0-8122-4233-1Over twenty years ago Felicity Nussbaum reinvigorated eighteenth-century studies when she championed the application of New Historicism to the field in her The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (Routledge 1988), co-authored with Laura Brown. Since then she has brought her refreshing perspective to bear on many of the period's issues related to race, gender, monstrosity, the body, and empire. In her latest book, Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theatre she tilts at a critical commonplace when she \"attempts to extricate the discussion of the actress from the restrictions that the familiar proper lady/prostitute opposition imposes upon women players\" (9). Instead, Nussbaum argues that eighteenth-century actresses \"with loyal fans in tow participated significantly in [a] shifting of public/private boundaries\" (16). In seeking \"to reinsert celebrity firmly within its inaugural moments\" (17), Nussbaum asserts that these actresses \"figured as spectacular examples of women capable of autonomous actions...[they] were among those who constituted the first female subjects in the public arena\" (17). Instead of being powerless victims of definitions imposed upon them by others, Nussbaum contends that these actresses \"were self-reflexive economic agents who actively shaped their identities to make celebrated properties of themselves in an historical period marked by increasing privatization of property and identity\" (17). She notes that this economic self-marketing by actresses was particularly remarkable as it took place \"in a period when .. . women were seldom able to possess property or to sign contracts in their own names\" (28).In chapter one, \"The Economics of Celebrity,\" Nussbaum outlines the process by which \"women's indispensability to the success of the commercial theatre was firmly, if sometimes grudgingly, established over the course of the eighteenth century\" (33). She argues that the emergence of acting as a profession for women provided a stage for experimenting with both gender and class definitions. By performing on stage, actresses provided women an example of non-domesticated femininity and seduced working-class audience members with the hope that \"celebrity. . . and instant success would relieve the drudgery of their manual labor\" (38).In chapter two, \"'Real, Beautiful Women:' Rival Queens,\" Nussbaum accounts for the continuing popularity of Nathaniel Lee's The Rival Queens (1677) during the eighteenth centuryas a consequence of women playing women. Borrowing language from Colley Cibber's Apology of 1740, Nussbaum argues that the fact that \"real, beautiful women\" were playing these roles \"animated the metaphor of women's theatrical rivalries and alluded to the pejorative meaning of queen''","PeriodicalId":366404,"journal":{"name":"Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128580023","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Theatrical Nation: Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian Britain","authors":"Aparna Gollapudu","doi":"10.5860/choice.48-3076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.48-3076","url":null,"abstract":"Michael Ragussis. Theatrical Nation: Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian Britain Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2010 288pp. $55.00In its focus on Englishness and notions of national identity in late Georgian Britain, Theatrical Nation brings together a range of \"domestic others\" not generally considered simultaneously. Previous studies have reflected critically on depictions of Scots, or the Irish, or Jews in eighteenth-century literature and culture;Michael Ragussis' innovative approach treats these three ethnic groups as mutually interactive identities in a variety of popular representations. In doing so, he offers valuable new insights into the multiple, shifting processes of Britain's national self-definition. Theatrical Nation inserts itself into the ongoing discussions about national identity in the eighteenth century as it complements the recent boom in studies contextualizing \"Englishness\" within notions of Empire. Focusing on the ethnic aliens within Britain's shores, Ragussis' study suggests that, in spite of the many uniting factors that scholars have identified, such as Protestantism, a well-developed internal economy, or a thriving print culture, the \"Briton\" was a shaky and unstable identity category, splintered into a multiplicity of partially assimilated ethnicities.Ragussis argues that a fundamental theatricality at the crux of ethnicity and nationhood in the late eighteenth centuryshaped Irish, Scottish, and Jewish identities. By \"theatrical ization\" of ethnic identity, Ragussisrefers to a set of complex, often contradictory, ways in which ethnicity was represented and perceived. A cluster of visual, sartorial, physiognomic, aural, linguistic, and behavioural codes, ethnicity could, on occasion, be either set aside or deliberately assumed. Nevertheless, as he notes, this potential fluidity also sparked the desire to fix and mark indelibly the ethnic other as an \"outlandish\" figure,as late eighteenth-century Britain struggled to stabilize the cultural and linguistic lineaments of national identity.Ragussis establishes this complex cultural theatre of ethnic identity in his introduction, titled \"Family Quarrels\" after Thomas Dibdin's 1802 comic opera, which sparked a riot by Jewish members of the audience because of its anti-Semitism. The playhouse incident was much debated in the print media,where the theatre's right to satirize all kinds of people was countered by Enlightenment discourses of toleration that decried unfair ethnic generalizations in progressive England, even as the articles sometimes rehearsed the very prejudices they sought to uproot. For Ragussis, this drama of ethnic caricature and minority resistance inside the playhouse,which spread beyond its walls to initiate broad discussions about what kind of nation Britain was and should be, is symptomatic of the ways in which the theatre mirrored the nation as a contested space. But Ragussis' opening gambit also introduces us to some of the strengths o","PeriodicalId":366404,"journal":{"name":"Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123997194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Aphra Behn Stages the Social Scene in the Restoration Theatre","authors":"Bill Blake","doi":"10.5860/choice.46-3700","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.46-3700","url":null,"abstract":"Aphra Behn Stages the Social Scene in the Restoration Theatre DawnLewcock Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2008. 245 pp. $104.95. ISBN 13: 9781604975499In her recent Aphra Behn Stages the Social Scene in the Restoration Theatre, Dawn Lewcock sets out to redirect attention away from trends that attempt to read Behn as a culturally revealing personality or a politically significant figure - for instance, an early feminist or a proponent of antiracism. Instead, Lewcock wishes to consider Behn \"simply as a dramatist\" (2). To do so, Lewcock wants to examine Behn's plays with an eye on \"practical production,\" treating the printed texts as \"theatrical artifacts\" from which the originai theatergoing experience can be recreated (xi). Although she somehow arrives at some clearly articulated conclusions emphasizing Behn's unique technical expertise in making full use of the new seenie stage, the bulk of the book is actually devoted to a much more general discussion of cultural context. Despite her own admonitions against doing so, Lewcock demonstrates a near-constant scratching at that biographical itch that comes with studying England's first professional woman writer.Lewcock presents two main lines of argument in her study. One is that Behn was among the first playwrights to realize fully the dramatic possibilities of the scenic stage (as opposed to the platform stage of pre-Restoration theater productions). The other is that Behn was a practical, professional-minded playwright, not an \"outstanding literary writer\" (5). Lewcock suggests that we should approach reading Behn's plays as pragmatically-crafted entertainments, not as works of moral reform, social advocacy, or politicai debate. The first thesis suggests that Lewcock's book will involve a detailed historical explanation of the differences between plays written for a platform stage and those written for the scenic stage, and an interpretation of how those differenees can be observed markedly in Behn's writing. This is not, however, what we are given. It is not until page 197, eighteen pages from the end, that Lewcock prevides any sustained discussion of Behn's use of the specific features of the scenic stage (a forestage with entrance doors, moveable scenery, and a discovery space), Almost all of what Lewcock has to say here (mainly focused on The Forc'd Marriage) can be found in a chapter previously published in Janet Todd, ed., Aphra Behn Studies (1996). Lewcock's second thesis leads her to eschew responding directly to previous scholarship on Behn. In passing, Lewcock refers to Derek Hughes The Theatre of Aphra Behn (2001) as a \"complement\" study to her own, which she characterizes as a \"philosophically and linguistically based theoretical and literary analysis of the texts\" in contrast to more \"practical\" approach (xii). Other recent studies that focus on the staging and reception of Behn's plays, such as Nancy Copeland's Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre (2004) or Jane Spencer's Aphra Behn's Af","PeriodicalId":366404,"journal":{"name":"Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114519022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Cult of Kean","authors":"Francesca Saggini","doi":"10.5860/choice.44-4947","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.44-4947","url":null,"abstract":"Jeffrey Kahan. The Cult of Kean. Alders hot (Hampshire) - Burlington: Ashgate, 2006. 205 pages + 15 b&w illustrations. $110 (£55) hardcover. ISBN 0754656500.The eternal problem with the mythopoietic figures of the Regency period is that today's fascination with their unruly - and, indeed, extraordinarily memorable - biographies proves too much of a temptation for even the saintliest of critics. Where tall tales meet speculation, and self-fashioning weds se If- marketing, there the hire of flamboyancy runs the ships of rigorous interpretation and textual exegesis aground. The problem of critical self-restraint and biographical rigour becomes particularly tantalising for the scholar of the Romantic fastliving star-actor, Edmund Kean (1787-1833). The critic is compelled to juggle and shift the several ambiguous masks of this character who artfully contributed to his own public mediatic consumption - or devouring, we might say - his unruly private life regularly taking precedence over his towering theatrical achievements.With the aim of deflating these problems, Jeffrey Kahan's The Cult of Kean chooses to perform both Kean's person and his persona - I would not be able to find another verb, which may more suitably define Kahan's chosen form of scholarship. Regrettably, the resulting book is an uneven labour - ambitious, full of energy, fitful, animated by the flashes of his exaggerated protagonist, and yet a work as profuse in detail as it is unorthodox in style. All these traits may not necessarily be faults and, in fact, they could have helped Kahan to turn up trumps had the plan of the work been only more coherent, and had Kean's sparkle not blinded the author. Kahan appears to find it indeed difficult to respect the critical pact established in the title of his book, The Cult of Kean, however broad an approach such an epitextual reference to cultural studies and the forms of cultural production may warrant.The structural unevenness of The Cult of Kean surfaces in the author's own webpage, where the book appears with its subtitle, A Study of Cultural Appropriation. This denomination - a savoury reminder of today's fashionable genre of metabiography - would in fact seem quite appropriate, at least in terms of Chapters Three to Six. These respectively analyse, among the sundry topics of discussion, Alexandre Dumas' 1836 play Kean (ch. 3), Mark Twain's parodie American 'Kean-eid' in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (ch. 4), the exploitation of the actor's name and style first by a self-styled Mr. Keene, aka the black performer Ira Aldridge, and later by Kean's own son, the thereafter-famous Charles (ch. 5), and, finally, some contemporary appropriations of Kean's life at the (existentialist) hands of Jean Paul Sartre, later viscerally brought on stage by those long-time Kean fans, Anthony Hopkins and Peter O'Toole.The two opening chapters of the study, however, resist this attempt at narrative and biographical plotting, and easily stand as individu","PeriodicalId":366404,"journal":{"name":"Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research","volume":"104 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122562462","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage","authors":"Maureen E. Mulvihill","doi":"10.5860/choice.40-0743","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.40-0743","url":null,"abstract":"Misty G. Andersen. Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage. New York and Hampshire UK: Palgrave, 2002. x + 262 pp. ISBN 0-312-23938-6. Cloth. $55. Indexed. Dust-jacketFunny women on the London stage usually steal the show. Misty G. Anderson, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and co-editor with John P. Zomchick of the journal Restoration, has written an important book on four successful English women playwrights of the Restoration and 18th century who evidently were funny and surely wrote funny. Over six chapters supported by 27 pages of endnotes and a 16-page bibliography, Anderson shows that her small cluster of women dramatists cleverly exploited the comic potential of contemporary marriage law and social beliefs about marriage, while also layering into their scripts bold feminist commentary on women's constraints in early-modern English law and society. Playgoers, one imagines, would leave the theatre both delighted and instructed. What they viewed on the stage would have the requisite comedic response, but there was also an intellectual impact; for behind the play's artifice, laughter was balanced by troubling questions about the conduct of real life.The principal strength of Anderson's inquiry is its economy and manageable focus. Her subject is four English women playwrights-Aphra Behn, Susanna Centlivre, Hannah Cowley, Elizabeth Inchbald-who collectively achieved prominent commercial success during a 130-year timeframe, 1670-1800, as entertaining yet astute commentators on English marriage law and English marriage conventions. Wisely benefiting from the spadework of Lawrence Stone, Susan Staves, et al., Anderson has assembled an exposition on a complex social and legal subject, which she smartly approaches from a comedic angle. And how refreshing is this, especially against the humorless and severe feminist essays of Anna Maria Van Schurman, Bathsua Makin, Poulain de la Barre, Mary Astell, et al. Anderson's focus takes readers to a lively comic literature on women and marriage, an approach which makes her overall treatment all the more readable and entertaining. As Anderson writes at the outset:These playwrights and their heroines measure the disparity between idealized marriage narratives and the real circumstances of characters in history through the gendered scripts of comedy. They found in comedy a narrative where the economic future, erotic possibilities, and public visibility of women merge, and they were able to engage generations of theatergoers in their versions of that story... .1 treat comedy both as a generic market that describes a story about marriage and as a designation of a performance that the audience expected to find funny. My study examines the relationship between comic closure, which tends to be predictable, and comic events, where the more-local jokes and comic conflicts of the comedies play out. (1,2)Surprisingly unmentioned ","PeriodicalId":366404,"journal":{"name":"Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research","volume":"104 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117178441","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}