The Cambridge Introduction to English Theatre, 1660-1900Cambridge University Press, 2006 M09 14 - 310 pages This 2006 introduction aims to share with readers the author's enjoyment of the turbulent 240-year history of a theatre that tried, often against the odds, to be 'modern'. In each of its five parts, it deals successively with history and cultural context, with the plays and the actors who caught the imagination of their era. Peter Thomson's text, always approachable, is enriched by quotations and carefully selected illustrations that capture 'the spirit of the age' under consideration. Beginning with the reopening of the playhouses under licence from Charles II, Thomson introduces the modern English theatre by breaking off at key dates - 1700, 1737, 1789 and 1843 - in order to explore both continuity and innovation. Familiar names and well-known plays feature alongside the forgotten and neglected. This is a reading of dramatic history that keeps constantly in mind the material circumstances that produced, and sometimes oppressed, a supremely popular theatre. |
Contents
Section 1 | 19 |
Section 2 | 25 |
Section 3 | 30 |
Section 4 | 49 |
Section 5 | 62 |
Section 6 | 83 |
Section 7 | 95 |
Section 8 | 98 |
Section 14 | 155 |
Section 15 | 160 |
Section 16 | 168 |
Section 17 | 170 |
Section 18 | 197 |
Section 19 | 200 |
Section 20 | 205 |
Section 21 | 208 |
Section 9 | 115 |
Section 10 | 129 |
Section 11 | 134 |
Section 12 | 141 |
Section 13 | 146 |
Section 22 | 231 |
Section 23 | 246 |
Section 24 | 248 |
Section 25 | 253 |
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actor-manager actors actress Addison admired afterpieces audience Betterton Boucicault British Burgoyne characters Charles Colley Cibber comedy comic court Covent Garden David Garrick death drama dramatists Drury Lane Dryden Duke Duke's Company Earl eighteenth century England English farce fashionable French George Colman Haymarket Henry Arthur Henry Arthur Jones hero husband Irish James John Kean Kemble Killigrew and Davenant King King's Lady Lincoln's Inn Fields London Lord Chamberlain lover Macready marriage married melodrama metres moral never nineteenth nineteenth-century opened opera parliament passion patent houses patent theatres Pepys performance play playhouse playwrights plot political popular Prince prologue Queen Quin reform rehearsals repertoire Restoration Rich Richard Samuel Samuel Foote Scene sexual Shakespeare Shakespearean Sheridan Sir William Davenant social society Spectator stage success taste theatre manager Theatre Royal theatrical Thomas Thomas Killigrew title role Tory tragedy Victorian Walpole Whig wife William Davenant woman women young