Romantic Drama: Acting and Reacting
Cambridge University Press, 2/19/2009
EAN 9780521889674, ISBN10: 0521889677
Hardcover, 354 pages, 23.5 x 15.8 x 2.3 cm
Language: English
Drama in the Romantic period underwent radical changes affecting theatre performance, acting, and audience. Theatres were rebuilt and expanded to accommodate larger audiences, and consequently acting styles and the plays themselves evolved to meet the expectations of the new audiences. This book examines manifestations of change in acting, stage design, setting, and the new forms of drama. Actors exercised a persistent habit of stepping out of their roles, whether scripted or not. Burwick traces the radical shifts in acting style from Garrick to Kemble and Siddons, and to Kean and Macready, adding a new dimension to understanding the shift in cultural sensibility from early to later Romantic literature. Eye-witness accounts by theatre-goers and critics attending plays at the major playhouses of London, the provinces, and on the Continent are provided, allowing readers to identify with the experience of being in the theatre during this tumultuous period.
Introduction
1. Periscopes into the theatre
2. Nationalism and national character
3. Genre
the realism of fantasy, the fantasy of realism
4. Acting, histrionics, and dissimulation
5. Transvestites, lovers, monsters
character and sexuality
6. Setting
where and elsewhere
7. Gothic and anti-Gothic
comedy and horror
8. Blue-Beard's castle
mischief and misogyny
9. Vampires in kilts.