Leach Glover, ‘Dancing Master to the Royal Family’ Part One: The Professional Dancer in Context

Leach Glover (1697–1763) danced in London's theatres from 1717 until 1741 and was a leading dancer for nearly twenty years. In 1738, he was appointed as a dancing master to Britain's royal family, a post he retained following his retirement from the stage. This article looks at Glover's family and professional background and places his theatrical career within the wider context of dancing on the London stage. It looks in detail at his first and last seasons working for John Rich, manager of the Lincoln's Inn Fields and then Covent Garden theatres. It examines not only Glover's repertoire but also his changing status in the dance company that existed within the theatrical company. As part of this investigation, it discusses some of Glover's contemporaries alongside its appraisal of his own work and looks at the challenges as well as the opportunities he experienced within the commercial environment of the London stage.

Conversional Thinking and the London Stage

This chapter begins to build a framework for understanding the relation between conversion and a key structure of early modern thought: theatrical performance. Taking early modern London as a specific focus, the analysis considers the embeddedness of conversional thinking within the city’s concentration of media resources, placing particular emphasis on the ability of theatrical affordances to facilitate creative experimentation and critical examination around received categories of identity. The central text under consideration is Dekker and Middleton’s The Honest Whore, but the analysis is also generally applicable to the theatrical culture and broader media environment of early modern London.

“The Farcical Tragedies of King Richard III”: The Nineteenth-Century Burlesques

Unlike other Shakespearean tragedies, King Richard III was never turned into a comedy through the insertion of a happy ending. It did, however, undergo a transformation of dramatic genre, as the numerous Richard III burlesques and travesties produced in the nineteenth century plainly show. Eight burlesques (or nine, including a pantomime) were written for and/or performed on the London stage alone. This essay looks at three of these plays, produced at three distinct stages in the history of burlesque's rapid rise and decline: 1823, 1844, and 1868. In focusing on these productions, I demonstrate how Shakespeare burlesques, paradoxically, enhanced rather than endangered the playwright's iconic status. King Richard III is a perfect case study because of its peculiar stage history. As Richard Schoch has argued, the burlesque purported to be “an act of theatrical reform which aggressively compensated for the deficiencies of other people's productions. . . . [It] claimed to perform not Shakespeare's debasement, but the ironic restoration of his compromised authority.” But this view of the burlesques’ importance is incomplete. Building on Schoch's work, I illustrate how the King Richard III burlesques not only parodied deficient theatrical productions but also called into question dramatic adaptations of Shakespeare's plays. In so doing, these burlesques paradoxically relegitimized Shakespeare.

Review of the London Stage Database

The London Stage Database is an open-access and open-source website that digitises the performance records contained in the print volumes of the London Stage, published in the 1960s. The database's flexible search function and intuitive interface open up new directions in research and will change the way we think about eighteenth-century theatre.

Discordant Visions: Spain and the Stages of London in 1823

This essay focuses on the presence of Spain on the London stage in 1823, the year of the French invasion that brought about the end of the liberal regime in Madrid. It specifically examines parliamentary debates (the theatre of politics), the Spanish Fete at Covent Garden, and ‘Spanish’ works performed in the patent theatres, especially the only two original Spanish-themed productions of that year – the operatic melodrama Cortez; or, The Conquest of Mexico and the farce Spanish Bonds; or, Wars in Wedlock. As these different spectacular manifestations reveal, British Romantic-era culture delineated Spain (and its former American colonies) by combining dissonant, ideologically charged materials which brought into focus conflicting political and cultural questions relevant to British, European and global contexts.