18th & 19th century British drama and theatre culture

Ξεκινώντας από την αναμορφωμένη και εξιδανικευμένη εικόνα της Μαρίας-Αντουανέτας που ο Edmund Burke έπλασε στη διάσημη πραγματεία του ενάντια στη Γαλλική Επανάσταση και τις αρχές της, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), και με αναφορές στα θεατρικά κείμενα που γράφτηκαν στη Βρετανία για την απαγχονισμένη βασίλισσα της Γαλλίας την εποχή αυτή, θα συζητήσω στην ανακοίνωση τα γυναικεία πρότυπα που κατασκευάζονται μέσα από το θέατρο, στο τέλος του 18ου αιώνα και στις αρχές του 19ου, και καθορίζουν τον ρόλο και τη θέση της γυναίκας στην μετεπαναστατική κοινωνία. Η συζήτηση γύρω από τη Μαρία-Αντουανέτα, τις απεικονίσεις και τις (ανα)παραστάσεις της στη Βρετανία, τη χώρα που ανέλαβε να υπερασπιστεί για όλη την Ευρώπη τη μοναρχία απέναντι στις δημοκρατικές διεκδικήσεις των γάλλων επαναστατών και των υποστηρικτών τους, αλλά και γενικότερα, η μελέτη των γυναικείων δραματικών προσώπων που επιτρέπουν λογοκρισία και θεατρική κριτική να παρουσιαστούν στη λονδρέζικη σκηνή, υποδεικνύουν τις ιδεολογικές, αισθητικές, σκηνικές και πολιτικές συμπλεύσεις που επιβάλλουν στη Βρετανία τον αποκλεισμό των γυναικών από τη δημόσια σφαίρα.

Focusing on British plays portraying Marie Antoinette as a devoted mother and virtuous maiden at the end of the 18th century and Burke's response to French women participating in the Revolution, the paper discusses issues of female sexuality and conduct at the turn of the century and in the aftermath of 1789.

The word 'star' normally denotes well-known performers in the area of entertainment and the arts, such as the theatre, cinema, music, opera and dance. During the past few decades, the same word has also been assigned to popular sports players. Examining these performers and athletes as a group functioning in the wider cultural context, one could say that they are part of the more comprehensive category of 'celebrities'. The latter is used to signify individuals, who, owing to the widespread impact of the media, and because of their public position in economics, politics, arts, sports and fashion, become objects of common interest to large sections of people at a national or international level. Clearly, the issues of the star and the celebrity are too extensive to become the subject of a single essay. For this reason, this thesis has confined itself to the study of the theatre star-performer in the eighteenth-century British theatre, approaching only the periphery of the general issue of stars. Moreover, any remarks related to the hyper-category of 'celebrity' are only occasional because it is a fairly unexplored area and it lacks conclusive studies which could be used in a specific account such as the present one.

In its dramatic use of the emerging sciences of sanitation and prophylaxis, An Enemy of the People extends the medical field of Ghosts and other early plays to the triumphs and promises of the newly implemented germ theory that was transforming the medical and social landscape of disease. In its exploration of the culturally ascendant man of science, it addresses the communal and psychologically problematic dimensions of a missionary reformism in a society resistant to its demands.

In mid-nineteenth-century Philadelphia, plays with classical subjects were nearly as popular as Shakespeare. Contemporary reaction to one of these plays, Thomas Talfourd's Ion, or The Foundling of Argos, reveals its audiences' expectations about gender on stage and in society. American audiences, unlike their English counterparts, expected to see the role of Ion played by a woman. Especially in the 1830s, actresses playing Ion faced audiences who expected to see their feminine qualities preserved. They were disguised as a boy on the edge of manhood, but to be successful, the disguise had to fail by preserving their essential character as women.

The outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 caused an unprecedented exodus of stage performers from the US. Liverpool-born James Unsworth Jr. and his partner, the New York native Eugene d’Ameli (known simply as Eugene), were among the first to leave. Having risen to minstrel show stardom in the US, they arrived in the UK as virtual unknowns, but within months were headlining at London’s Oxford and Canterbury music halls. After two years in the capital, they joined Christy’s Liverpool-based company as the star attractions there and on tours throughout the British Isles.

Building on the work of Featherstone, Pickering, and others, this paper will explore the place of minstrelsy in British culture through the performances of Unsworth and Eugene. The paper will examine how the duo adapted their act for audiences in London, Liverpool, and in Scotland, and focus on the reception of their performances in the press. These reviews provide insights into the diversity of the audiences they attracted and a seeming acceptance of the duo’s apparent homosexuality, but with slavery and economic hardship in the background, they also hint at the political tensions that then existed between the two countries.

David Greig is a playwright from Scotland who has opened up to the world
and has dealt with social, political and economic problems related to
globalization, an issue of central focus and interest in his plays. The characters
of Europe can be categorized under binary oppositions, and the main setting
of the play, the train station, is representative of Europe as a continent. The
existing system at this station parallels the social and economic structures seen
in today's Europe. The train station, on the other hand, is the "in-between"
space that connects the two poles, referring to a metaphor that corresponds to
the in-betweenness in a society. The purpose of this study, putting this inbetween space in the centre, is to interpret the concepts "the other" and
"border" and to examine, define and describe the binary oppositions such as
Europeans vs immigrants, self vs the other, solidarity vs mobility, a running
system vs a collapsing system, cleanliness vs dirt and structure vs restructure
within the framework of this analysis and interpretation.

In May 1732, Handel’s Acis and Galatea was performed at London’s Little
Theater in the Haymarket. The 1718 masque was newly dubbed “An
English Pastoral Opera,” and newspapers touted that this first major
public performance was also “the first time it ever was performed in
a Theatrical Way.” There has been considerable scholarly discussion
about the “pirated” nature of this production and the mystery of its
genesis, but little attention has been paid to the aesthetic relationship
between Acis and the other English-language operas of this season.
Doing so provides not only a glimpse of Acis’s earliest public context,
but also hints why the backers of this production, whoever they may
have been, chose to turn Acis into the first Handelian “English Opera.”

Acis was one of six English operas in 1732-33. Four of them featured
the young Susanna Arne, called “Mrs. Cibber” after marriage. Cibber
is known to music historians as one of Handel’s oratorio singers, but
during her lifetime she was principally a celebrated actor. Like almost
all thespians of her day, Cibber specialized in a particular “line of
business.” After her death, an admirer would recall her greatest talent:
“Cibber, Sir, seemed to need and dispose of your tears from the delicacy
of her frame.” In the earliest phase of her career, Cibber specialized in
the damsel in distress. Winton Dean once dismissively referred to the
eighteenth century’s “morbid obsession with virginity,” and, indeed,
Cibber’s early roles almost always hinged upon the maintenance or
violation of this status.

Before she spoke a word in the theater, Cibber cultivated her theatrical
“line” in opera. The libretti of Cibber’s English-language operas of
the early 1730s present her characters in the same ways that spoken
plays later did. They allowed Cibber to cultivate a legible character
type that served her throughout her acting career, as well as a musical
specialization that Handel drew upon in later oratorios, and they
provide an interesting point of contact between spoken and musical
theatrical milieus.