Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research最新文献

{"title":"The Indian Queen Giove in Argo La Serva Padrona","authors":"Angela Escott","doi":"10.5325/rectr.30.1-2.0135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/rectr.30.1-2.0135","url":null,"abstract":"Review of Henry Purcells The Indian Queen, directed by Peter Sellars, conducted by Laurence Cummings, English National Opera, London, February and March 2015; George Frideric Handels Giove in Argo, directed by James Bonas, conducted by Laurence Cummings, London Handel Festival, Britten Theatre, Royal College of Music, March 2015; Giovanni Battista PergolesTs La Serva Padrona, directed by Johanna Byrne, conducted by Clare Clements, Insieme, Wiltons Music Hall, London, February 2015.London opera-goers have been fortunate this spring to have the opportunity to view rare seventeenth- and eighteenth-century operas representative of very different operatic genres, two of which have not been performed since their first stagings until very recently due to the incomplete state of the source materials.A tour backstage and a view from the technical gallery of the Coliseum before the performance of Henry Purcells The Indian Queen (first performed 1695) gave a preview of the backdrops which were such a significant feature of this production. They were by the Los Angeles artist Gronk, \"the Banksy of LA.\" The technical manager called this a \"flying show\" because these specially commissioned backdrops dominated the performance, and there were few props. The technical manager explained that a season of opera which included Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger gave no space in the theatre for storing sets for the other two productions-The Indian Queen and La Traviata-which therefore had to rely on backdrops, curtains, and minimal sets. But there was nothing small-scale or minimalist otherwise about the production which expanded a forty-five-minute original work into a three-and-a-half-hour spectacular. Purcell scholar Andrew Pinnock argued in the program notes that while early music audiences would find an \"archeological reconstruction\" satisfying, something different was required in a large modern opera house. Californian director Peter Sellars is known to be eclectic in his use of theatrical and artistic influences. Sellars associates this semi-opera (\"dramatic opera\" as Purcell named it) with the work of Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, and Jean Cocteau in the 1920s, that is as a \"multi-disciplinary work\" which combines music, dance, and the visual arts. An exotic location and the use of magic were ingredients of opera in the seventeenth century. In such operas, both singers and actors performed and consequently Purcell had to write music for all of them.Purcell's The Indian Queen is loosely based on the play of that name by John Dryden and Robert Howard (first performed in 1664) which deals with the conflicts between the Inca and Aztec Empires before the invasion of the Conquistadors. There is speculation as to the date of the first performance of the semi-opera, but it is now thought to have been in June 1695. Following Purcell's death in November 1695, the work was completed with a masque by his brother Daniel. The first performance was jeopardized by the actor","PeriodicalId":366404,"journal":{"name":"Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research","volume":"61 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127263038","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":"Making Mary: Imitation and Infamy in the Eighteenth-Century Theater","authors":"E. Savage","doi":"10.5325/rectr.30.1-2.0073","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/rectr.30.1-2.0073","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay interrogates how the scandalous actress Mary Wells “shadowed” Sarah Siddons through her imitations of the actress; using performance theory and contemporary reviews, it suggests that these imitations allowed Wells to borrow some of Siddons’ fame at the same time that they exposed the duplicity at the heart of the tragic queen’s performance. The contrast between the simultaneously shifting and transparent Wells and the static and opaque Siddons would have been striking to the audience, as Siddons’ aloof distance from her admirers left a path of access to Wells, who would gladly make herself available instead. Wells also used her imitations to carve out a unique niche for herself as an actress, though those imitations simultaneously created a dependence on the actresses she imitated, ultimately leaving Wells with a marginalized place in theater history.","PeriodicalId":366404,"journal":{"name":"Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130973581","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 Rise and Fall of the New Edinburgh Theatre Royal, 1767-1859: Archival Documents and Performance History","authors":"J. Slagle","doi":"10.5325/rectr.30.1-2.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/rectr.30.1-2.0005","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In 1859 the Edinburgh house of Wood and Company published a Sketch of the History of the Edinburgh Theatre-Royal in honor of its final performance and closing, its author lamenting that “This House, which has been a scene of amusement to the citizens of Edinburgh for as long as most of them have lived, has at length come to the termination of its own existence.” The brief booklet provided the playbill as a frontispiece recorded a long evening to commemorate the theatre building’s ninety years of careworn performance history.\u0000 This essay incorporates evidence about the Edinburgh Theatre Royal from early publications and also incorporates new archival research to answer questions about the theatre’s ambitious number of performances, about its religious and political challengers, about the fiscal issues that impeded its success, about its supporters and actors, and about its reliance on talent from the ”south.”","PeriodicalId":366404,"journal":{"name":"Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research","volume":"153 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129469762","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":"Approaches to Teaching the Works of John Dryden","authors":"J. Winn","doi":"10.5325/rectr.30.1-2.0147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/rectr.30.1-2.0147","url":null,"abstract":"Jayne Lewis and Lisa Zunshine, eds. Approaches to Teaching the Works of John Dryden. New York: Modern Language Association, 2013. x + 197 pp. $19.75 USD (paperback). ISBN 9781603291262.In a fitting tribute to the range and variety of John Dryden (1631-1700), this volume offers twenty-one short essays by scholars who regularly present his works to undergraduates. Eight of these pieces address the poetry, nine the drama, and four the \"prose and translation.\" In an opening section on \"Materials,\" the editors lament the \"scarcity of affordable and fully representative editions of [Dryden's] poetry\" and complain that \"all the standard literature anthologies ... neglect the drama in favor of the poetry and criticism\" (3-4). These are not small matters. The latest edition of the Norton Anthology, still the most commonly used textbook for survey courses in English literature, includes only four complete poems by Dryden, along with pathetic snippets from the criticism and not a single play. As contributors to this volume frequently note, we all make do with photocopied texts, but it is scandalous that there is no affordable paperback offering a fuller sampling of this great writers work. Nor is the Internet, despite its multiplication of resources, a substitute for a comprehensive textbook; this very volumes section on \"online resources\" is marred by unfortunate errors that may stem from the absence of fact-checking on the Internet. The editors inform us that \"Purcell's setting of A Song for Saint Cecilia's Day' [is] widely available on CD and You Tube\" and refer to the \"many available recordings of Purcell's setting of Alexanders Feast\" (8-9). Neither of these items has ever existed. Although Purcell set inferior St. Cecilia poems by Thomas Shadwell and Christopher Fishbourne, he did not write music for Dryden's \"Song for Saint Cecilia's Day, 1687,\" which was set by Giovanni Battista Draghi, whose version survives in at least five manuscripts. The music has been splendidly edited by Bryan White [ \"From Harmony, from Heav'nly Harmony\" (Novello, 2010)] and intelligently recorded by Peter Holman [Hyperion CDH55257]. Purcell could not possibly have set Alexanders Feast (1697), as he died in 1695; the original setting, sadly lost, was by Jeremiah Clarke. Happily, the section on \"Background Materials and Criticism\" and the list of \"Further Reading Recommendations\" are more accurate and helpful. A survey designed to find out what works by Dryden the contributors and a few others teach, with results reported here, gives a useful snapshot of current pedagogical practice, richly supplemented by the essays that follow.The section on Dryden's poetry begins with a bracing and original essay on Religio Laid by Anna Battigelli, who argues that \"the poem's forceful dialogic presentation of competing arguments works against... a fixed interpretation. In particular, its attention to outlawed Catholic arguments functions as a kind of Trojan horse, injecting forbidden argum","PeriodicalId":366404,"journal":{"name":"Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114412433","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":"Love for Love","authors":"J. Munns","doi":"10.5325/rectr.30.1-2.0113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/rectr.30.1-2.0113","url":null,"abstract":"Review of Love for Love by William Congreve. Directed by Selina Cadell, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-on-Avon, September 2015-January 2016.A recent trend in staging plays, particularly \"classic\" plays, insists on authenticity and attempts to reproduce original staging conditions and atmosphere. The company Salon Collective, for instance, stages Shakespearean plays by providing the actors with only their speeches and cues- and has to scour the country to find actors who do not know the play in question (currently Two Gentlemen of Verona). Mark Rylance has memorably and brilliantly played Cleopatra at the Globe in the 1999 all-male production. More recently, in the Globe's 2012 all-male Twelfth Night, he played Olivia and was similarly memorable and brilliant. At the Globe and its new indoor space, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, \"authentic\" lighting, open air or candles, and acting techniques of direct-front or front-side stage address seek to reproduce the intimacy, conviviality, and interaction experienced between players and audiences in the plays' original settings.The Royal Shakespeares Swan Theatre has always offered such opportunities and has used a lot of the theatre space (including the galleries and aisles) for entrances. It is therefore understandable given the trend and the locale, that in the current Royal Shakespeare production of William Congreves Love for Love at the Swan, \"authenticity\" is the hallmark of this performance. In the lavish and well-illustrated RSC program, the director, Selina Cadell, herself an actress, explains that she \"loves Restoration Comedy because it is actors' theatre.\" This play, first performed in 1694, is not actually a Restoration comedy but rather a play that remembers Restoration comedies of about twenty-five years previously such as The Country Wife. Yet Cadell's methods work very well. The driving concept behind this \"actors' theatre\" is that a troupe of travelling/strolling players are performing the play to mark the thirty-second birthday of Queen Anne. There is a sort of double conceit here, first that we are in a provincial theatre, or maybe a Hogarthian barn, watching the eighteenth-century actors move around clumsily falling into curtains and dropping tables. Secondly, however, we are who we are, taking our seats and watching Royal Shakespeare Company actors who are playing eighteenth-century actors, but who are also reverting to being \"real\" people asking for help from the audience-\"Are my stockings straight?\" \"Can you help me tie my cravat?\" \"Can you give a hand moving the stuffed stag?\"-as well as chatting informally-\"What is the weather like? …","PeriodicalId":366404,"journal":{"name":"Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research","volume":"85 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117268838","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":"Restoration Plays and Players: An Introduction","authors":"Riki Miyoshi","doi":"10.5325/rectr.30.1-2.0175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/rectr.30.1-2.0175","url":null,"abstract":"David Roberts. Restoration Plays and Players: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 260 pp. $27.99 USD, £17.99 (paperback). ISBN 9781107617971.David Roberts' Restoration Plays and Players: An Introduction is a delightful read. It is highly informative and disarmingly accessible in equal measure. Each of the nine chapters seamlessly interweaves the two traditionally opposing approaches to Restoration drama: theatre history and literary criticism. Not only does Roberts' engaging style help to disentangle complex political and ethical issues that surround the plays, but the large and wide-ranging number of allusions to contemporary entertainment (e.g., Roberts compares the comedian James Nokes to Rowan Atkinson) render the theatrical practices during the Restoration more tangible and immediate. This way of juxtaposing the past with the present, no doubt honed by decades of teaching Restoration theatre from Osaka to Oxford, is not simply a device to make the subject matter seemingly more relevant. This approach crucially goes hand in hand with Roberts' larger objective of encouraging scholarship beyond the confines of the established canon by seeing how, through revivals and adaptations, Restoration drama has influenced the modern stage. Restoration Plays and Players is an exemplary introduction as it represents a happy marriage between a compelling learning experience and scholarly rigor.The first two chapters of the book form what are described as \"complementary chapters\" on \"parallel trajectories for Restoration plays\" (viii). Specifically, the first chapter opens with an in-depth analysis of what is often considered the epitome of Restoration drama, William Congreve's The Way of the World (1700), as a way of guiding the reader through the intricate political and cultural concerns that influenced the period's drama. The chapter then borrows Robert D. Hume's five-part division of late seventeenth-century dramatic history and shows how the major plays of the period, each of which is discussed in the book, fit into each category. The list, albeit brief, nevertheless comprises what Roberts aptly describes as \"Regime change theatre\" (1). The second chapter consists of a brief survey of the major practical theatrical innovations during the late seventeenth century, followed by an account of the \"life cycle of the play\" which delineates the process by which Restoration plays were developed, produced, and revived. Although, as Roberts confesses, topics such as \"Actors,\" \"Re- hearsals,\" and \"Audiences\" are repeated in subsequent chapters, the two initial chapters together constitute the introductory part of the book and clearly set the agenda for what follows. …","PeriodicalId":366404,"journal":{"name":"Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research","volume":"64 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114465679","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":"Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660-1830.","authors":"R. Ballaster","doi":"10.5325/rectr.30.1-2.0153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/rectr.30.1-2.0153","url":null,"abstract":"Laura Engel and Elaine M. McGirr; eds. Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660-1830. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2014. 274 pp. $90.00 USD (hardback). ISBN 7881611486032.Perhaps more remarkable than the fact that pregnant eighteenth-century actresses, even well into their third trimesters, appeared on stage as heroines prepared to sacrifice their lives for their chastity, is the fact that it so often went unremarked. Representational realism seems to have been less important to the audience than affective virtuosity. The carefully selected, richly various, and rewarding essays in Elaine McGirr and Laura Engel's edition not only bring this kind of information about the stage mother into view, but they often shift our angle of vision too.Helen Brooks' lively opening essay, \"The Divided Heart of the Actress,\" reminds us that actresses paid by performance could rarely afford to miss an appearance; more often than not, maternal duty entailed providing for one's family through dramatic labor rather than domestic retreat. Actresses thus sought to turn to their advantage the flying in the face of received wisdom about pregnancy-not to be overstimulated by passion, to avoid crowds, to undertake only light duties-by associating themselves with the maternal devotion they were often required to perform on stage.In their fine, brisk, and stimulating introduction, McGirr and Engel lay out their stall. The book \"attempts to analyse the performance and representation of maternity from the Restoration through the Regency periods\" on the English stage and \"to document the lived experience of both celebrity and supporting actress-mothers\" (8). The collection reevaluates and re-values the significance of maternity in the major stage successes of the long eighteenth century. Further, it brings theatre and literary history into productive dialogue by paying attention to the relation between role and player, offering a series of fascinating case studies across the entire range of the period and of private and public theatricals.The book is divided into three parts. The first explores and assesses the success of actresses in exploiting their performance to massage their questionable sexual and reproductive histories. J. D. Phillipson and Elaine McGirr draw attention to the ways in which Anne Oldfield, in the early decades of the century, and Susannah Cibber, in the mid-1740s, vindicated dubious sexual reputations in performances of virtuous mothers that drew attention to their own commitment to their children (Andromache in Ambrose Philips' The Distrest Mother for Oldfield and Constance in her ex father-in-law's Papal Tyranny of King John for Cibber). Ellen Malenas Ledoux comes to the surprising (but surprisingly convincing) conclusion that of the two young mothers acquiring a reputation on the stage in the 1780s, it was Mary Robinson whose public-relations strategy (of charting her maternal devotion in print) was to prove more enduring than Sarah Sid","PeriodicalId":366404,"journal":{"name":"Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research","volume":"256 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115080953","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 Horror Plays of the English Restoration","authors":"A. Byrd","doi":"10.4324/9781315557076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315557076","url":null,"abstract":"Anne Hermanson. The Horror Plays of the English Restoration. Surrey: Ashgate, 2014. 186 pp. $109.95 USD, £60 (hardback). ISBN 9781472415523.In order to explain the emergence of the genre of horror tragedy on the English stage during the 1670s, Anne Hermanson analyzes the cultural climate of social dislocation during this period. Hermanson begins by asking why these plays were written at this particular time, and why did they enthrall audiences during the period from 1670 to 1680, only to die away? In this timetable Hermanson is perhaps a little too selective; Thomas Porters The Villain was first performed in 1662 and was drawing audiences, due to Samuel Sandfords lurid performances, well into the eighteenth century, while a play such as Mrs. Pix's Ibrahim of 1696, a product of the 1690s horror revival, is astonishingly violent. However, undoubtedly the majority of plays in which villainy and gruesome violence are on display were written in the 1670s and early 1680s. For Hermanson, the reason for this is rooted in the traumatized collective psyche of the English people following the death of their king, Charles I, and the subsequent civil war. The turmoil, unrest, and instability of the period informed its drama, and many playwrights were writing from their own personal experience of violence and the ideological conflicts of the time. In this book, Hermanson successfully weaves together the influences of politics on the plays, but also (and often in surprising ways) the influences of theatre history, sociology, psychology, gender, religious ideology, philosophy, and scientific discovery.The methodology that Hermanson employs is built upon the foundation of seminal studies such as Derek Hughes' English Drama 1660-1700 and Susan Owen's Restoration Theatre and Crisis, which examine the complex interaction between drama and sociopolitical strife. Like Hughes and Owen, Hermanson grounds her textual interpretations of the dramas within a meticulous analysis of Restoration political history; however, her work does not attempt a comprehensive study of the major and minor plays of the period, rather, it discusses representative and selective plays. In all, the author paints a vivid, imaginative picture of Restoration culture that offers the first comprehensive study of macabre and gruesome dramas, and their appeal to authors and audiences alike.The opening chapter, \"Horror and Spectacle,\" begins with a brief over- view of the political history of England leading up to the civil war, continuing through the Interregnum, the Restoration of the king, the Popish Plot, and the Exclusion Crisis. Hermanson contextualizes the horror tragedies of the 1670s by comparing and contrasting them in a broad, sweeping manner to heroic drama, court masques, and Roman and Jacobean drama, providing examples from the Roman tragedies written by Seneca, as well as the Restoration dramas of Nathanial Lee, Aphra Behn, Thomas Shadwell, John Dryden, and Elkanah Settle, among others. ","PeriodicalId":366404,"journal":{"name":"Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research","volume":"74 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127074327","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 in the Eighteenth Century","authors":"Keith Gregor","doi":"10.5860/choice.50-3140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.50-3140","url":null,"abstract":"Fiona Ritchie & Peter Sabor, eds. Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xiii + 454 pp. $104.99 USD, £69.99 (hardback). ISBN 9780521898607.The compiling and re-editing of critical studies and of rewritings of Shakespearean work from the past have not only saved from possible oblivion a multiplicity of texts whose future was at best uncertain, but have shed considerable light on the processes by which the provincial actor, poet, and playwright was elevated to the rank of national and international icon. Addressing particularly this latter phenomenon, Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century constructs a rich and variegated picture of how the numerous reinventions, rewritings, or reinterpretations to which he was subject in the period allowed him to achieve the \"exemplary status\" the volumes editors, Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor, attribute to him in their introduction.Most of the rediscoveries were conducted through the medium of print, and part 1 of the volume, entitled \"The Dissemination and Reception of Shakespeare in Print,\" comprises essays on the editing, criticism, reviewing, and (that peculiarly eighteenth-century phenomenon) falsification of Shakespeare. Marcus Walsh's chapter, \"Editing and Publishing Shakespeare,\" unpicks the fiercely competitive world of Shakespeare editing, from the first (not quite) complete-work offerings from the house of Jacob Tonson, chief commercial beneficiary of the 1710 Copyright Act, to the single-volume editions that flooded the market following the commonlaw ruling which put an end to exclusive ownership of the plays in 1774. Walsh's thesis, that editing and publishing was \"a stage upon which were played out some of the most significant issues in British cultural, political and commercial history\" (21), is borne out by a consideration of the work of the most serious, and also successful, actors on it (from Nicholas Rowe to Edmund Malone, through Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, and George Steevens). Such work, from Walsh's evolutionary perspective, is seen to gain in philological rigor, explicative clarity, and interpretative acumen as the century advances. For Walsh, the \"end-point of an editorial journey\" from Pope's appeal to the educated reader to the more interventionist approach of the professional commentator (35), is that of Malone (1790), whose ten-volume octavo offering, including primary documentary evidence, historical contextualization, and a \"focused and selective in- terpretive method of real theoretical self-consciousness and cogency\" (34), set the standards for future interventions.The importance of the editions might seem overstated here, were it not for the fact that their mere existence helped to shape, and contributed to, other distinctly eighteenth-century forms of cultural intervention, such as criticism and reviewing. What Jack Lynch, in his chapter, \"Criticism of Shakespeare,\" describes as the \"symbiotic relationship\" between both entities, w","PeriodicalId":366404,"journal":{"name":"Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130384554","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":"Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates: The Making of the Modern Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century","authors":"P. Richards","doi":"10.5860/choice.46-6057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.46-6057","url":null,"abstract":"Erin Mackie. Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates: The Making of the Modern Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. 231pp. $57.00 USD (hardback), $29.95 USD (paperback). ISBN 9781421413853.In this work, Erin Mackie looks at a collection of very well-known works, John Gay's Beggars Opera (1728), Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748), William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), as well as some rather obscure works such as the nineteenth-century Dick Turpin romance, Rockwood ( 1834) by William Harrison Ainsworth. Mackie argues that behind, beside, alongside, and inside the civil, mild-mannered gentleman who emerged as the ideal masculine type in the eighteenth century, other types of masculinity were on display. These were the \"outlawed\" and old-fashioned, yet potent figures of the rakes, highwaymen, and pirates of the title-who were not so much oppositional to the ideal gentleman as they were a formative and constituent, if paradoxical, part of that ideal. The old Adam-or Dick Turpin-still lurks in the \"legitimate\" gentleman, for as Mackie points out in her introductory chapter, \"That masculine prestige clings so tenaciously to illicit modes of conduct through three centuries speaks to ways in which masculine power continues to rely on modes of privilege, aggression, and self-authorization that violate the moral, social, and legal dictates that constitute its own legitimacy\" (2). Yes indeed, and where would much modern cinema and television entertainment be if the \"good\" cop upholding civil society, or the pleasant law-abiding doctor set upon by villains, could not, with great ease, call upon wells of violence (and appropriate hardware) and side-step the law to vanquish villains and uphold the law? Dr. Mackie's insight that masculinity, even when tamed to Bevil-like proportions, still implies and instantiates, if not violence, the capacity for violence, is worth stating, but perhaps not for quite so many chapters. The performative nature of rakish behavior and the glamour of the rake is frequently mentioned, and George Etherege's Dorimant is mentioned, as a possible portrait of the Earl of Rochester and as part of a discussion of the relationship of the rake and the fop. Oddly enough, although rakes-not just Dorimant but more outrageous rakes such as Nathaniel Lee's Nemours or Aphra Behn's Willmore-might be considered part of a cultural discussion on the role and nature of the rake (of his absurdity or cavalier old-fashioned nature), few are ever mentioned. Indeed, generally the stage role of rakes, highwaymen, and pirates is ignored and all texts, novels, plays, essays, are flattened out: gender occludes genre. Equally, strangely absent is any discussion of those plays that sought to portray the new \"hegemonic\" gentleman-or any discussion of gender as performance.This book's lively and attractive title, and the engaging subheadings (e.g., \"Boys will be Boys\"), and chapter headings (e.g., \"Romancing the Highwayman\"","PeriodicalId":366404,"journal":{"name":"Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research","volume":"301 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":"122768632","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}