Eighteenth-century theatre and performance

This completely new edition of The Recruiting Officer contains a freshly-edited play text, with new annotations, in modern spelling. Tiffany Stern's comprehensive and engaging introduction discusses the author's career and gives a history of the play including its staging, critical interpretation, date and sources, putting it its context of the late Restoration and illuminating its theatrical vivacity.

Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer is set in Shrewsbury in 1704 and describes what happens in a country town when the army come to stay. With cross-dressing and confusion in plenty, this is a comedy exploring the timeless themes of love and war. One of Farquhar's last two plays, The Recruiting Officer is both entertaining and touching. It has a light, humane touch and its original depiction of a real-life provincial town comically explores the impact that ongoing warfare had on its civilian society.

When George, Prince of Wales made his debut at the end of the 1770s, the Duchess of Devonshire observed, 'he looks like a woman in a man's cloaths.' She interpreted him as a cross-dressed actor. This article maps the Prince's role by charting a narrative of his royal emblem, the white ostrich feather. As a symbol and a prop, the feather exposes the Prince's difficult place in late Eighteenth-century discussions of gender, politics and slavery.

This essay considers the affect of the relationship between David Garrick and Samuel Johnson on Johnson's edition of Shakespeare . It argues that Garrick is not merely ‘forgotten’ in Johnson’s Shakespeare; Garrick, and the need not to mention his performances or use his books, determines the content and layout of the Shakespeare text and notes. Thus Johnson’s Shakespeare is shaped by the absence of David Garrick.

This panel promotes a discussion on artistic practices behind the creation of spectacle in 18thCentury Europe. The worlds of stage design, machinery, and popular attractions are inherently transient and contingent and often leave few traces. During this period, moreover, a host of stage decorators, machinists, fireworks technicians, circus performers, and foreign entertainers circulated across Europe, spreading ideas and practices that were frequently appropriated and
standardized while their origins or creators went unacknowledged. These influential artists and performers, often lacking strong institutional affiliation, have not been given the same critical attention paid to visual artists, musicians, or dramatists.
This panel encourages a behind-the-scenes look at such artistic practices that can expand our view and understanding of 18th-century spectacle and its varied constituents. For example, how did artists involved in ephemeral or peripheral activities exert their individual personalities? In what ways did certain attractions like wax statues and dioramas, cabinets d’optique, and Wunderkammer inform and overlap with science and technology? How might we account for the
status of the marvelous within an era of so-called “Enlightenment” rationality? How can we appreciate décor and other special effects not only as artistic products, but also as autonomous cultural phenomena?
The session seeks to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on performance creation, stage settings, and the circulation of artists and ideas. It welcomes submissions from scholars at any career stage, as well as from arts professionals in or outside academia. Contributions informed by the experience of staging (or planning to stage) an eighteenth-century work are especially encouraged.

Deadline: 17th of September, 2021.

This chapter is about the homage routinely paid to Shakespeare by dramatists and performers, and their ignorance of his actual works. It shows that Shakespeare’s plays were known best in their adapted Restoration forms; they were then further altered; and it was already-altered seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Shakespeare plays that provided characters, plot moments, and ‘beauties’ to be threaded through subsequent adaptations and, occasionally, imitations. Much of Shakespeare’s popularity, indeed, rested on the extent to which he had already been altered and was thus available for further alteration – his texts were seen as fundamentally unfixed and so free for remoulding and reshaping. Shakespeare was, then, assimilated through the process of adapting his adaptations: his staged works were always current, and that was because they were always substantially eighteenth-century. Though Shakespeare’s characterisation and storylines were regularly extracted for ‘popular’ theatre and puppet entertainments, his plays as a whole were relegated; only particular word-conscious ‘literary’ productions staged Shakespeare's plays in full at all. Even then, however, the playwright’s language and sentiments were updated to fit eighteenth-century mores and his stories were reduced to leave room for exciting new eighteenth-century entertainments. As all Shakespeare was adapted Shakespeare, a habit built up of staging a fictional version of Shakespeare the man to sanction the alterations of his plays. From this it was only a small step before the ‘Shakespeare’ character started to thrive in his own right on the eighteenth-century stage: extending beyond plays actually by the bard, ‘Shakespeare’ began authorizing other plays by other people. Thus both Shakespeare’s works, and ‘Shakespeare’ represent the way the eighteenth-century was able to tame and regularise its past and shape it to the present; what affected eighteenth-century dramatists was not actual Shakespeare but the works and person that they were able to make him be.

Diderot’s Le Fils Naturel is generally seen as containing the first developed
theories with regard to a new genre of dramatic literature, that will later
become known as «the dramatic genre». However, the composite structure
of Diderot’s book, which is made up of a framework-story, a dramatic model and
a theoretical discussion, also represents the crystallization of a slow turn in the
uninterrupted line of the countless possible relations between performance
and public. Diderot starts a change: the birth of an intimate and private bond,
that is set up in such a way as to involve the spectator in a continuous and destabilizing
game between reality and fiction, of which s/he is both protagonist
and Witness.

Ne Le Fils naturel di Diderot, viene identificata in genere la prima teorizzazione
articolata a favore di un genere nuovo di letteratura drammatica,
quello che poi sarà chiamato «il genere dramma». Ma il composito volume
di Diderot, formato da una storia-cornice, un modello di dramma e una
parte di discussione teorica, rappresenta anche la cristallizzazione di una
lenta virata all’interno di quella linea ininterrotta delle innumerevoli possibilità
di rapporto tra spettacolo e pubblico. Diderot inizia una svolta: la nascita
di un legame intimo e privato, organizzato, nel quale lo spettatore è
coinvolto in un gioco continuo e destabilizzante tra realtà e finzione, del
quale è al tempo stesso protagonista e testimone

We present here a study of the field of theatre in Portugal in the late eighteenth century, focusing especially on the detection of ideological meanings through paratextual repertoires significant for understanding the position and function developed by theatre in the cultural field. This means that politically or morally loaded ideas can be found in literary texts or, in this case, in theatrical plays or performances through elements of repertoire relating to the structure of the product, the conditions of its production, release or performance that do not explicitly relate to a moral or political pattern. The traditional analysis of literary products has mainly focused on what is said, but we think that how it is said is relevant as well. A connection can be traced between the literary and the historical tools of analysis through these paratextual elements of repertoire. Trata-se de um estudo sobre o teatro em Portugal no final do século XVIII, cujo ângulo de abordagem privilegia os sentidos ideológicos dos reportórios paratextuais no entendimento da posição e função desenvolvidas pelo teatro no campo cultural. Isto significa que ideias políticas ou morais podem ser detectadas em textos literários ou, neste caso, em peças teatrais ou actuações através de elementos de reportório relacionados com a estrutura do produto, as condições de produção, lançamento ou encenação que não se relacionam explicitamente com um padrão moral ou político. A análise tradicional de produtos literários tem privilegiado aquilo que é dito, mas nós pensamos que como é dito é igualmente relevante. A conexão pois ser estabelecida através de instrumentos de análise literários e históricos aplicados a elementos de reportório paratextuais.

L'articolo si concentra sugli anni della compresenza di Carlo Goldoni e Antonio Gori in qualità di poeti di compagnia al teatro San Samuele, al tempo del capocomicato di Giuseppe Imer. L'indagine sulla paternità dell'intermezzo musicale 'La pelarina' evolve fino al ritrovamento di un componimento analogo, 'Il Pomponio affettato', sul cui autore si aprono interessanti interrogativi.