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.

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.

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.

Competition and Community: Mary Tickell and the Management of Sheridan's Drury Lane

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-206
Author(s):  
Robert W. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Theoretical Interpretation ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Theatrical Production ◽  
Performance History ◽  
Michel De Certeau ◽  
New Information ◽  
Theatre Production ◽  
Drury Lane ◽  
London Stage

Despite considerable advances in scholarship—achievements on which this essay builds—our knowledge of how eighteenth-century theatres were run remains worryingly thin. The managerial enterprise of theatre production, especially its daily practicalities, is largely obscure, though the facts of performance history are well documented. Knowledge of practice is not our only lacuna. Accounts of the interfaces among performances, institutional theatre practices, and the wider culture of the eighteenth century are too few, though wonderful work has been produced by Jane Moody, Felicity Nussbaum, and Gillian Russell, among others. This meager situation has arisen in part, as Robert D. Hume has argued, because scholars have yet to fully engage with those sources that have survived, although problems of missing evidence are serious and sometimes insurmountable. A related problem is that theatre historians are often averse to conceptualizing what they discover, as if analysis and certain modes of theoretical interpretation were the responsibility or more distinctly the failing of literary critics. But the discovery or reappraisal of an archive will only advance scholarship so far. New information about rehearsals, performances, finances, or contracts is vital, but it does not explain the motives or institutional momentum that animated theatre production. We need to know why some actors were favored by management while others seem to have been less well supported. It would also be useful to understand more precisely why some plays were performed repeatedly whereas others appeared only sporadically. The information contained in theLondon Stageshould be crucial for theatre history, yet the repertoire of the patent theatres remains understudied. The impetus it gave to managers is too often ignored, while its political significance is barely understood, prompting justified complaint from Daniel O'Quinn. Great care will be necessary when addressing these issues. Overly general or prescriptive claims are probably best avoided; there are simply too many local factors. We should also recollect that theatrical production is necessarily a collective endeavor, a process in which many voices might be heard. Yet patterns and purposes can be found, even when what is most apparent is what Michel de Certeau terms the “‘polytheism’ of scattered practices.”

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.

Players and Painted Stage: Nineteenth Century Acting

PMLA ◽  
1946 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 522-576
Author(s):  
Alan S. Downer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
General Interest ◽  
The Times ◽  
Edmund Kean

In an earlier paper, I undertook to show that the style of acting in the serious drama of the eighteenth century closely paralleled the general interest of the century in the imitation of nature—of nature methodized. Four principal “schools,” varying in technique but not in purpose, were examined: Betterton, the Cibber-Booth-Wilks Triumvirate, Macklin-Garrick, and Kemble-Siddons. The fourth school, with which the paper arbitrarily ended, extends well beyond the eighteenth century and provides a natural introduction to the study of acting techniques in the Romantic and Victorian periods. Like the eighteenth, the nineteenth century is primarily a century of great actors rather than great plays, and it is to the actors, rather than to the playwrights, that we must turn to find the theatrical expression of the spirit of the times. Edmund Kean and William C. Macready represent the earlier and later stages of romanticism as accurately as Shelley and Tennyson, and Victorianism is as plainly marked in Alfred Wigan and Irving as in Ruskin or Trollope.

The Catholic London District in the Eighteenth Century

2006 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-268
Author(s):  
David Butler
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
The South ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Segregation ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City ◽  
Drury Lane

The London of Challoner consisted only of some seven square miles, one square mile of which was, of course, the City of London. It can all be put onto some eight pages of the present A–Z map of London, which at the time of writing consists of 141 pages. John Rocques's map of London, on a scale of 200 feet to the inch, which he began in 1738 and finished in 1747, in its London Topographical Society format of 1982, perfectly illustrates the London of both Challoner and Defoe. The western extremities were at Marylebone, Knightsbridge and Chelsea, the eastern at Stepney, Limehouse and Deptford, the northern at Tottenham Court and Bethnal Green, while the southern limits were at Kennington and Walworth Common. The population of London was assessed by Wrigley in 1990 as c. 575,000 in 1700, as c. 675,000 in 1750 and as c. 959,000 in 1801. The 1767 papist returns indicated that most London Catholics lived in the parishes of St James and St Giles, within Westminster. Schwarz has pointed out the considerable social segregation in London, middle-class areas being in the west and central parts, with the poorer areas in the south and east. The St Giles area around Seven Dials going east to Bow Street and Drury Lane is reputed to have contained a third of the capital's beggars and to have been a notoriously criminal quarter. The Catholic numbers in Westminster were 7,724, the City numbers 1,492, with the Middlesex out-parishes having more than 2,000. The 1767 total for London, including the parishes to the south and east, comes to 12,320, clearly too low, as is the accumulated total for the London District of around 15,800. This gives about 3,500 for the London District outside the capital while Challoner's own figures give us a Catholic population of 5,261. If the errors in enumeration were the same in both areas (a large assumption), this enables us to guess that the 1767 figures could be corrected to about 18,500 London Catholics and about 24,000 for the whole District.

''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.

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