The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian TheatreKerry Powell This 2004 Companion is designed for readers interested in the creation, production and interpretation of Victorian and Edwardian theatre, both in its own time and on the contemporary stage. The volume opens with a brief overview and introduction surveying the theatre of the time followed by an essay contextualizing the theatre within the frame of Victorian and Edwardian culture as a whole. Succeeding chapters examine specific aspects of performance, production, and theatre, including the music, the actors, stagecraft and the audiences themselves; plays and playwriting and issues of class and gender are also explored. Chapters also deal with comedy, farce and melodrama, while other essays bring forward new topics and approaches that cross the boundaries of traditional investigation, including analysis of the economics of theatre and of the theatricality of personal identity. |
Contents
| 3 | |
Actors and acting | 17 |
The show business economy and its discontents | 36 |
Victorian and Edwardian stagecraft techniques and issues | 52 |
Music for the theatre style and function in incidental music | 70 |
Victorian and Edwardian audiences | 93 |
Performing identities actresses and autobiography | 109 |
Comedy and farce | 129 |
The music hall | 164 |
Theatre of the 1890s breaking down the barriers | 183 |
New theatres for a new drama | 207 |
The fallen woman on stage maidens magdalens and the emancipated female | 222 |
Reimagining the theatre women playwrights of the Victorian and Edwardian period | 237 |
| 257 | |
| 277 | |
| 279 | |
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Common terms and phrases
actor-manager actors actress Arthur Wing Pinero artistic audience Bancrofts Beerbohm Bernard Shaw Booth Britannia British Cambridge Companion Cambridge University Press character Charles comedy comic contemporary conventional critics culture Dickens domestic drama dramatists Drury Lane early East East-End theatres edited Edwardian theatre Elizabeth Robins Ellen Terry English entertainment essays fallen woman farce genre George George Bernard Shaw Granville Barker Hedda Gabler Henry Arthur Jones Henry Irving hero heroine homo economicus husband Ibid Ibsen Independent Theatre Irving's J. M. Barrie John Lady London Theatre Lord Chamberlain's Lyceum marriage melodrama Michael moral music hall music-hall National Theatre nineteenth century orchestra Oscar Wilde pantomime Paula performance Pinero play Playbill playwriting political popular production repertory Robins's role Sadler's scene sexual Shakespeare Shaw's social society song stage style suffrage Tanqueray theatre's theatregoing theatrical traditional Victorian Victorian and Edwardian Victorian theatre West-End wife William Archer women playwrights writing