This is the first bibliography in its field, based on first-hand collations of the actual articles. International in scope, it includes publications found in public theatre libraries and archives of Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Florence, London, Milan, New York and Paris amongst others. Over 3500 detailed entries on separately published sources such as books, sales and exhibition catalogues and pamphlets provide an indispensible guide for theatre students, practitioners and historians. Indices cover designers, productions, actors and performers. The iconography provides an indexed record of over 6000 printed plates of performers in role, illustrating performance costume from the 18th to 20th century.

Breaking every prescription of ideal femininity, American actresses of the mid-nineteenth century appeared in public alongside men, financially supported nuclear and extended families, challenged domestic common law, and traveled the globe in the transnational theater market. While these women expanded professional, artistic, and geographic frontiers, they expanded domestic frontiers as well: publicly, actresses used the traditional rhetoric of domesticity to mask their very nontraditional personal lives, instigating historically significant domestic innovations to circumvent the gender constraints of the mid-nineteenth century, reinventing themselves and their families in the process. Nan Mullenneaux focuses on the personal and professional lives of more than sixty women who, despite their diverse backgrounds, each made complex conscious and unconscious compromises to create profit and power. Mullenneaux identifies patterns of macro and micro negotiation and reinvention and maps them onto the waves of legal, economic, and social change to identify broader historical links that complicate notions of the influence of gendered power and the definition of feminism; the role of the body/embodiment in race, class, and gender issues; the relevance of family history to the achievements of influential Americans; and national versus inter- and transnational cultural trends. While Staging Family expands our understanding of how nineteenth-century actresses both negotiated power and then hid that power, it also informs contemporary questions of how women juggle professional and personal responsibilities—achieving success in spite of gender constraints and societal expectations.

"You ought to see Livy & me, now-a-days—you never saw such a serenely satisfied couple of doves in all your life. I spent Jan 1, 2, 3 & 5 there, & left at 8 last night. With my vile temper & variable moods, it seems an incomprehensible miracle that we two have been right together in the same house half the time for a year & a half, & yet have never had a cross word, or a lover's 'tiff,' or a pouting spell, or a misunderstanding, or the faintest shadow of a jealous suspicion. Now isn't that absolutely wonderful? Could I have had such an experience with any other girl on earth? I am perfectly certain I could not. . . . We are to be married on Feb. 2d." So begins Volume 4 of the letters, with Samuel Clemens anticipating his wedding to Olivia L. Langdon. The 338 letters in this volume document the first two years of a loving marriage that would last more than thirty years. They recount, in Clemens's own inimitable voice, a tumultuous time: a growing international fame, the birth of a sickly first child, and the near-fatal illness of his wife. At the beginning of 1870, fresh from the success of The Innocents Abroad, Clemens is on "the long agony" of a lecture tour and planning to settle in Buffalo as editor of the Express. By the end of 1871, he has moved to Hartford and is again on tour, anticipating the publication of Roughing It and the birth of his second child. The intervening letters show Clemens bursting with literary ideas, business schemes, and inventions, and they show him erupting with frustration, anger, and grief, but more often with dazzling humor and surprising self-revelation. In addition to Roughing It, Clemens wrote some enduringly popular short pieces during this period, but he saved some of his best writing for private letters, many of which are published here for the first time.

Women played an integral role in the theater of the Antebellum and Civil War South. Yet their contributions have largely been overlooked by history. Southern actresses were important public figures who helped mold gender identity through their theatrical performances. Although cast in parts written by men, they subverted the norms of femininity in their public personas and in their personal lives. Educated and often wealthy but never accepted by the landed elite, women distinguished themselves by carving out an in-between class status, and many proved to be sophisticated entrepreneurs. Southern actresses also helped shape racial perceptions and regional politics as the South entered the Civil War.

In this, the first thoroughly researched scholarly biography of British actor Junius Brutus Booth, Stephen M. Archer reveals Booth to have been an artist of considerable range and a man of sensitivity and intellect. Archer provides a clear account of Booth’s professional and personal life and places him in relationship to his contemporaries, particularly Edmund Kean and William Charles Macready. From 1817 to 1852 Junius Brutus Booth toured throughout North America, enjoying a reputation as the most distinguished Shakespearean tragedian on the American continent. Still, he yearned for success on the British stage, a goal he never attained. His public image as a drunken, dangerous lunatic obscured a private life filled with the richness of a close and loyal family. The worldwide fame assured for the Booth family of actors by John Wilkes Booth’s bone-shattering leap from the President’s box had eluded Junius Brutus Booth throughout his lifelong exile in America. But from that event until today, no American family of actors has stimulated such scrutiny as the Booths. Eight years of research, pursuing Booth from Amsterdam to San Francisco, has resulted in an accurate, fascinating narrative that both records and illuminates the actor’s life.