The five plays included in this volume William Wycherley's "The Country Wife," Sir George Etherege's "The Man of Mode," William Congreve's "The Way of the World," Sir Richard Steele's "The Conscious Lovers" and Richard B. Sheridan's "The School for Scandal" are the most distinguished comedies written during an especially exciting and innovative period in the London theater and English society. This Norton critical edition offers an authoritative text for each play and a unique collection of documents and critical essays (ranging from Charles Lamb to the present) for a deeper understanding of them.

This Companion offers a wide-ranging and innovative guide to one of the most exciting and important periods in British theatrical history. The scope of the volume extends from the age of Garrick to the Romantic transformation of acting inaugurated by Edmund Kean. It brings together cutting-edge scholarship from leading international scholars in the long eighteenth century, offering lively and original insights into the world of the stage, its most influential playwrights and the professional lives of celebrated performers such as James Quin, George Anne Bellamy, John Philip Kemble, Dora Jordan, Fanny Abington and Sarah Siddons. The volume includes essential chapters about eighteenth-century acting, production and audiences, important surveys of key theatrical forms such as tragedy, comedy, melodrama and pantomime as well as a range of exciting thematic essays on subjects such as private theatricals, 'black' theatre and the representation of empire.

A rollicking review of popular culture in 18th century Britain this text turns away from sentimental and polite literature to focus instead on the jestbooks, farces, comic periodicals variety shows and minor comic novels that portray a society in which no subject was taboo and political correctness unimagined.

Sentimental comedy became a distinctive dramatic form on the London stage in the eighteenth century, featuring a complex blend of humour and pathos. Frank Ellis's authoritative study of the genre expounds a theory of sentimental comedy derived from detailed knowledge of a comprehensive range of plays in this period. Women, the lower classes, money and the past are shown to be typical objects of sentimental attitudes, which are not always merely comic, but also potentially indicative of social revolutions such as the growing sympathy towards negro slaves. The practice of sentimental comedy is illustrated by detailed analysis of sentimental attitudes in ten popular plays from 1696 to 1793. An appendix comprises the texts of The School for Lovers by William Whitehead (1762) and Elizabeth Inchbald's Every One Has His Fault (1793). This major study, providing a wealth of fascinating detail about eighteenth-century performance and stage production, will also appeal to scholars interested in revising the current understanding of sentimentalism.

The ten plays in this new collection show both the continuity and the changes in comedy over the course of the Restoration and eighteenth century. Each play includes its original prologue and epilogue, as well as an historical introduction and full annotation. The editor’s Introduction provides a rich historical and literary context for the plays’ composition and production. A glossary of frequently used words likely to be unfamiliar to general readers is also included.

If the whole world acted the player, how did the player act the world? In Character's Theater, Lisa A. Freeman uses this question to test recent critical discussion of eighteenth-century literature and culture. Much current work, she observes, focuses on the concept of theatricality as both the governing metaphor of social life and a primary filter of psychic perception. Hume's "theater of the mind," Adam Smith's "impartial spectator," and Diderot's "tableaux" are all invoked by theorists to describe a process whereby the private individual comes to internalize theatrical logic and apprehend the self as other. To them theatricality is a critical mechanism of modern subjectivity but one that needs to be concealed if the subject's stability is to be maintained. Finding that much of this discussion about the "Age of the Spectator" has been conducted without reference to the play texts or actual theatrical practice, Freeman turns to drama and discovers a dynamic model of identity based on eighteenth-century conceptualizations of character. In contrast to the novel, which cultivated psychological tensions between private interiority and public show, dramatic characters in the eighteenth century experienced no private thoughts. The theater of the eighteenth century was not a theater of absorption but rather a theater of interaction, where what was monitored was not the depth of character, as in the novel, but the arc of a genre over the course of a series of discontinuous acts. In a genre-by-genre analysis of plays about plays, tragedy, comedies of manners, humours, and intrigue, and sentimental comedy, Freeman offers an interpretive account of eighteenth-century drama and its cultural work and demonstrates that by deploying an alternative model of identity, theater marked a site of resistance to the rise of the subject and to the ideological conformity enforced through that identity formation.

'Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition' is a timely study of the 'sentimental' in Dickens's novels, which re-evaluates his presentation of emotion as part of a complex literary tradition that enables him to critique nineteenth-century society.

For contents, see Author Catalog.