The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage

by Michael Richard Booth, Joel H. Kaplan

Overview

This book presents Edwardian entertainment and the Edwardian entertainment industry as parts of a vital, turbulent era whose preoccupations and paranoias echo those of our own day. Responding to recent shifts of attitude toward the Edwardians and their world, the essays in this collection take as their provenance broad patterns of theatrical production and consumption, focusing on the economics of theater management, the creation of new audiences, the politics of playgoing, and the meteoric rise of popular forms of mass entertainment, including musical comedy, variety theater, and the cinema.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521087988
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	12/11/2008
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

Table of Contents

List of illustrations; List of contributors; Acknowledgements; Introduction Joel H. Kaplan; 1. What is Edwardian theatre? Joseph Donohue; 2. 'Naughty but Nice': musical comedy and the rhetoric of the girl, 1892–1914 Peter Bailey; 3. Varieties of life: the making of the Edwardian music hall Dave Russell; 4. Beating the bounds: gender play and role reversal in the Edwardian music hall J. S. Bratton; 5. Edwardian management and the structures of industrial capitalism Tracy C. Davis; 6. The New Drama and the new audience Dennis Kennedy; 7. Towards an ideal spectator: theatregoing and the Edwardian critic Victor Emeljanow; 8. Suffrage critics and political action: a feminist agenda Sheila Stowell; 9. 'A woman of genius': Rebecca West at the theatre John Stokes; 10. The East End Jim Davis; 11. Changing horses in mid-ocean: The Whip in Britain and America David Mayer; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"...interesting historical material unavailable elsewhere....belongs in the bookshelf of anyone seriously interested in cultural studies and the theatre." Theatre Journal

"While these essays vary in focus and originality of research, they may be excitingly crossread to discern the contours of the dominant—usually economic and sexual—themes which claim for this decade the distinction of a separate study." Veronica Kelly, Victorian Review

From the Publisher