This volume contains edited texts of five plays by two late eighteenth-century dramatists. The plays have been chosen to represent the range of the two playwrights and the variety of dramatic material on offer during the period. The full-length plays and afterpieces by George Colman the Younger and Thomas Morton were as popular as Sheridan's works in their time, but today are seldom performed or read. This discrepancy lies at the heart of Barry Sutcliffe's extensive introduction, which explores the critical and social background to the dramatic activity of the period and relates the dramas to the shifting demands of the theatre audiences for whom these plays were written.

As playwrights David Garrick and George Colman the Elder showed themselves to be practical men of the theatre, providing excellent acting parts and well-constructed scenes capable of provoking laughter in any age. At one time they were rival managers of the two main London theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, but their friendship was greater than their rivalry and survived until Garrick's death. This volume includes five plays: three short farces by Garrick, a full-length play by Colman and the famous collaborative work The Clandestine Marriage. The playwrights' abilities complemented each other and their eventual parting illustrates the divergence of comic styles that were popular at the time - the satirical and the sentimental. In his introduction Mr Wood describes the composition and expectations of the contemporary London audiences and the theatrical careers of the two playwright-managers.

Hannah Cowley (1743–1809) was a very successful dramatist, and something of an eighteenth-century celebrity. New critical interest in the drama of this period has meant a resurgence of interest in Cowley’s writing and in the performance of her plays. This is the first substantial monograph study to examine Cowley’s life and work.

William Godwin is one of the most important figures of the Romantic period. He wrote four plays at the end of the 18th/beginning of the 19th centuries. This book has two main objectives: to provide the first comprehensive discussion of these four plays, and to consider the notion of theatricality in relation to Godwin’s political project.

This 2001 book examines how Romantic women performers and playwrights used theatrical conventions to intervene in politics.

Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716-1783) is the iconic figure at the head of the English landscape style, a tradition that has dominated landscape design in the western world. He was widely acclaimed for his genius in his own day and his influence on the culture of England has arguably been as great as that of Turner, Telford and Wordsworth. Yet, although Brown has had his biographers, his work has generated very little analysis. Brown was prolific; he has had a direct influence on half a million acres of England and Wales. The astonishing scale of his work means that he did not just transform the English countryside, but also our idea of what it is to be English and what England is. His work is everywhere, but goes largely unnoticed. His was such a naturalistic style that all his best work was mistaken for untouched nature. This has made it very difficult to see and understand. Visitors to Brown landscapes do not question the existence of the parkland he created and there has been little professional or academic analysis of his work. This book for the first time looks at the motivation behind Brown’s landscapes and questions their value and structure whilst at the same time placing him within the English landscape tradition. It aims primarily to make landscape legible, to show people where to stand, what to look at and how to see.

An original study of the relationship between comic acting and the visual arts in late-Georgian and Regency England.

This 2001 book looks at how British drama and popular entertainment were affected by the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.