Volume 8 dis­cusses, among others, the careers of Charles Incledon, the "English Ballad-Singer," boxing champion of England, "Gentleman" John Jackson, and members of the famous Kemble family-- Charles, Maria Theresa, Frances, Henry, John Philip, Priscilla, Elizabeth, Roger, and Stephen.

Volume 7 includes such notables as the composers Handel and Haydn and the alluring actress Elizabeth Hartley.

The penultimate volume of the vast project begun some two decades ago, Volume 15, illustrated like its predecessors with bandw portraits and other artwork, provides information on theatre people including singer Catherine Tofts, comedian James Tokely, bearded lady and harpsichordist Barbara Van Beck, proprietor, playwright, and architect John Vanbrugh, theatrical families like the Vaughans and the husband- and-wife thespians John Baptista and Susanna Verbruggen and the dancing Vestres--Gaetan Appoline Balthazar and his illegitimate son Marie Jean Augustin, as well as a host of Wards (some related, some not). Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Women performers played a vital role in the development of American and transatlantic entertainment, celebrity culture, and gender ideology. Sara E. Lampert examines the lives, careers, and fame of overlooked figures from Europe and the United States whose work in melodrama, ballet, and other stage shows shocked and excited early U.S. audiences. These women lived and performed the tensions and contradictions of nineteenth-century gender roles, sparking debates about women's place in public life. Yet even their unprecedented wealth and prominence failed to break the patriarchal family structures that governed their lives and conditioned their careers. Inevitable contradictions arose. The burgeoning celebrity culture of the time forced women stage stars to don the costumes of domestic femininity even as the unsettled nature of life in the theater defied these ideals. A revealing foray into a lost time, Starring Women returns a generation of performers to their central place in the early history of American theater.

Henry Fielding is most well-known for his monumental novel Tom Jones. Though not necessarily common knowledge, Henry Fielding started his literary career as a dramatist and eventually transitioned to writing novels. Though vastly different in their approach and subject, there is a common thread in Fielding’s work that spanned his career: marriage. Errors and Reconciliations: Marriage in the Plays and Novels of Henry Fielding explores this theme, focusing on Fielding’s fascination with matrimony and the ever-present paradoxical nature of marriage in the first half of the eighteenth-century, as a state easily attained but nearly impossible to escape.