This book provides a taxonomy of prologues and epilogues with a corresponding appendix, and demonstrates through case studies of Anne Bracegirdle and Anne Oldfield how the study of prologues and epilogues enriches Restoration theater scholarship.

Drawing on feminist cultural materialist theories and historiographies,?Treading the bawds? analyses the collaboration between actresses Elizabeth Barry and Anne Bracegirdle and women playwrights such as Aphra Behn and Mary Pix, and traces a line of influence from the time of the first theatres royal to the rebellion that resulted in the creation of a player?s co-operative. Bush-Bailey offers a fresh approach to the history of women, seeing their neglected plays in the context of performance. By combining detailed analysis of selected plays within the broader context of a playhouse managed by.

“The Public’s Open to Us All”: Essays on Women and Performance in Eighteenth-Century England considers the relationship between British women and various modes of performance in the long eighteenth century. From the moment Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660, the question of women’s status in the public world became the focus of cultural attention both on and off the stage. In addition to the appearance of the first actresses during this period female playwrights, novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, theatrical managers and entrepreneurs emerged as skillful and often demanding professionals. In this variety of new roles, eighteenth-century women redefined shifting notions of femininity by challenging traditional representations of female subjectivity and contributing to the shaping of eighteenth-century society’s attitudes, tastes, and cultural imagination. Recent scholarship in eighteenth-century studies reflects a heightened interest in fame, the rise of celebrity culture, and new ways of understanding women’s participation as both private individuals and public professionals. What is unique to the body of essays presented here is the authors’ focus on performance as a means of thinking about the ways in which women occupied, negotiated, re-imagined, and challenged the world outside of the traditional domestic realm. The authors employ a range of historical, literary, and theoretical approaches to the connections among women and performance, and in doing so make significant contributions to the fields of eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies, theatre history, gender studies, and performance studies.

Secret history, with its claim to expose secrets of state and the sexual intrigues of monarchs and ministers, alarmed and thrilled readers across Europe and America from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Scholars have recognised for some time the important position that the genre occupies within the literary and political culture of the Enlightenment. Of interest to students of British, French and American literature, as well as political and intellectual history, this new volume of essays demonstrates for the first time the extent of secret history's interaction with different literary traditions, including epic poetry, Restoration drama, periodicals, and slave narratives. It reveals secret history's impact on authors, readers, and the book trade in England, France, and America throughout the long eighteenth century. In doing so, it offers a case study for approaching questions of genre at moments when political and cultural shifts put strain on traditional generic categories.

The essays in English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800 explore the theatrical anecdote’s role in the construction of stage fame in England’s emergent celebrity culture during the long eighteenth century, as well as the challenges of employing such anecdotes in theatre scholarship today. This collection showcases scholarship that complicates the theatrical anecdote and shows its many sides and applications beyond the expected comic punch. Discussing anecdotal narratives about theatre people as producing, maintaining, and sometimes toppling individual fame, this book crucially investigates a key mechanism of celebrity in the long eighteenth century that reaches into the nineteenth century and beyond. The anecdote erases boundaries between public and private and fictionalizing the individual in ways deeply familiar to twenty-first century celebrity culture.

Deborah C. Payne explores how the duopoly of 1660 impacted company practices, stagecraft, the box office, and actors and writers.

Nicholas Rowe was the first Poet Laureate of the Georgian era. A fascinating and important yet largely overlooked figure in eighteenth-century literature, he is the ‘lost Augustan’. His plays are important both for the way they address the political and social concerns of the day and for reflecting a period in which the theatre was in crisis. This edition sets out to demonstrate Rowe’s mastery of the early eighteenth century theatre, especially his providing significant roles for women, and examines the political and historical stances of his plays. It also highlights his work as a translator, which was both innovative and deeply in tune with current practices as exemplified by John Dryden and Alexander Pope. This is the first scholarly edition of all Rowe’s plays and poems and is accompanied by 15 musical scores and 31 black and white illustrations. In this first volume, a general introduction by Stephen Bernard and Michael Caines introduces Rowe's works and the five volumes that comprise this set. It then presents the early plays, The Ambitious Step-Mother, Tamerlane, and The Fair Penitent along with a newly written explanatory introduction by Rebecca Bullard and John McTague which precedes the full edited text. Appendices covering dedications performance history, the related music and textual apparatus are also included. A consolidated bibliography is included with the final volume for ease of reference.

From 1642 to 1660, live theater was banned in England. The market for printed books, however—including plays—flourished. How did this period, when plays could be read but not performed, affect the way drama was written thereafter? As Katherine Mannheimer demonstrates, the plays of the following decades exhibited a distinct self-consciousness of drama’s status as a singular art form that straddled both page and stage. Scholars have commented on how the ban on live performance changed the way consumers read plays, but no previous book has addressed how this upheaval changed the way dramatists wrote them. In Restoration Drama and the Idea of Literature, Mannheimer argues that Restoration playwrights recognized and exploited the tension between print and performance inherent to all drama. By repeatedly and systematically manipulating this tension, these authors’ works sought to court the reader while at the same time also challenging emergent concepts of "literature" that privileged textuality and print culture over the performing body and the live voice.

A wide-ranging set of essays that explain what theatre history is and why we need to engage with it.

Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948, Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of that year's textual and critical studies, and of the year's major British performances. The theme for volume 62 is 'Close Encounters with Shakespeare's Text'. The complete set of Survey volumes is also available online at http://www.cambridge.org/online/shakespearesurvey. This fully-searchable resource enables users to browse by author, essay and volume, search by play, theme and topic, and save and bookmark their results.