Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage

2004 ◽  
Vol 99 (1) ◽  
pp. 170
Author(s):  
Angela Escott ◽  
Misty G. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
London Stage

Restoration Theatre and the Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Transition ◽  
Strong Affinity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Restoration Theatre ◽  
Restoration Comedy ◽  
London Stage

This chapter explores the broad cultural transition from drama to novel during the Restoration period, which triggered one of the most productive periods in the history of the London stage. However, when it comes to the eighteenth century proper, the novel is more likely to be identified as the century's most significant and appealing popular genre. The chapter considers why the novel has largely superseded drama as the literary form to which ambitious and imaginative literary types without a strong affinity for verse writing would by default have turned their attention and energies by the middle of the eighteenth century. Something important may have been lost in the broad cultural transition from drama to novel. This chapter, however, contends that many things were preserved: that the novel was able to absorb many of the functions and techniques not just of Restoration comedy but of the theatre more generally.

''John Bull, pit, box, and gallery, said No!'': Charles Macklin and the Limits of Ethnic Resistance on the Eighteenth-Century London Stage

2002 ◽  
Vol 79 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Goring
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Urban Expansion ◽  
Minority Ethnic Groups ◽  
The Social ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
A Site ◽  
Cultural Shifts ◽  
Minority Ethnic ◽  
London Stage

THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES REPRESENTATIONS of Irishness on the eighteenth-century London stage as a basis for reconsidering the theater's role as a site of interethnic contest and negotiation. Ethnic interaction is thematized in numerous eighteenth-century plays - a tendency that highlights the function of the stage as a mediator of the social and cultural shifts that followed urban expansion, the growth of the British empire, and, with immigration, the increasing multiculturalism of Britain and particularly London. The theaters of the period have consequently been presented as spaces in which minority ethnic groups were able to express forceful antihegemonic resistance - both from the stage and from the auditorium. That such resistance typically inspired vigorous counterresistance has received minimal critical attention. The article examines several Irish-themed plays, particularly those by the celebrated Irish actor-playwright Charles Macklin (1699?-1797), and it investigates their reception by the heterogeneous London public. Exploring issues of both authorship and reception - and presenting previously unpublished writings by Macklin - it uncovers a dialogue between ethnic resistance and counterresistance, and thus it interrogates the radicalism attributable to London theaters as sites of ethnic negotiations. It argues that the ethnic voice gained only circumscribed legitimacy during the eighteenth century, and that, despite the efforts of writers such as Macklin, traditional modes of representing Irishness were not radically overturned.

Profits at Drury Lane, 1713–1716

1989 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Milhous ◽  
Robert D. Hume
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Financial Information ◽  
Reference Number ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Drury Lane ◽  
London Stage ◽  
Day By Day

Surviving records of early eighteenth-century London theatres include a number of account books recording daily receipts, but fewer than we would like. ‘Rich's Register’ gives us daily totals at Lincoln's Inn Fields from 1714 to 1723, and we have accounts in one form or another for a good many seasons at that theatre thereafter. Drury Lane is a different matter. Not until 1741–2 do we possess day-by-day totals for a season there. In view of the comparative paucity of information about receipts at Drury Lane, neglect of one of the few sources of financial information available to us seems odd indeed. The MS at issue was quoted in print as early as 1939, and is cited in The London Stage (under the wrong reference number) – but no one has ever printed or analysed more than a small sampling of the figures available.

Beaumont and Fletcher on The London Stage 1776–1833

PMLA ◽  
1948 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 1245-1264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald J. Rulfs
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Drury Lane ◽  
London Stage ◽  
Edmund Kean

Although the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher had been revived in great numbers after the reopening of the London theaters in 1660, their popularity declined so steadily during the eighteenth century that by the time of Garrick's retirement from the stage in June, 1776, only two plays, Rule a Wife and Have a Wife and The Chances, both comedies, were still being presented as stock pieces at Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket. Shortly after Garrick's retirement, however, several of the neglected plays were revived, and, in spite of the competition of intensified Shakespearean revival and the unquestioned predominance of assorted spectacle and melodrama, a varying degree of interest in the Elizabethan twin playwrights continued until the retirement of Edmund Kean from the stage in March, 1833. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to determine the extent to which the neglect of Beaumont and Fletcher was amended during the years 1776–1833 and to ascertain the significance of the revivals as related to various contemporary interests as well as to the generally favorable or unfavorable circumstances for production.

Love à la Mode and Macklin's Return to the London Stage in 1759

1996 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew J. Kinservik
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Drury Lane ◽  
London Stage

In the 1750s, Charles Macklin's theatrical career was in limbo. While he is now remembered and studied as an important playwright and one of the principal (and longest-lived) actors of the eighteenth century, by the mid-1750s he can only have felt that he was a failure. Poor relations with the managers of Drury Lane and Covent Garden, a series of unsuccessful plays, and a diminishing repertory of roles led to his (enforced) retirement in 1753. He then opened a tavern, which quickly bankrupted him. Too little attention has been paid to this grim period in Macklin's career and to the triumphant retrieval of his theatrical fortunes in 1759 with his farce Love à la Mode. The importance of Macklin's return to the stage was recognized by William W. Appleton, who devoted an entire chapter of his 1960 biography of Macklin to this episode. Nonetheless, several important biographical questions remained unanswered or insufficiently answered—questions I would like to reopen based on some newly discovered evidence.

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