This is the first major study of the Douglass family of England and the institution of the National Standard Theatre. It includes an examination of the theatrical aesthetics of the mid-Victorian theatre and the methods used by the Douglasses to achieve their success, as well as biographical material on a number of the actors and actresses and on the Douglass family itself.

This Companion is designed for readers interested in the creation, production and interpretation of Victorian and Edwardian theatre in its own time and on the contemporary stage. The volume opens with an introduction surveying the theatre of the time, followed by an essay contextualizing the theatre within the culture as a whole. Succeeding chapters examine performance, production, and theatre, including the music, the actors, stagecraft and the audience; plays and playwriting and issues of class and gender. Chapters also deal with comedy, farce, melodrama, and the economics of the theatre.

The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel contributes substantially to a thriving scholarly field by offering new approaches to familiar topics as well as essays on topics often overlooked.

The book deals with five European film directors who were forced to remain in exile in the wake of the rise of Hitler and who subsequently enriched the American motion picture industry with a reservoir of new talent that had been nurtured in Europe. The directors treated are Fritz Lang, William Wyler, Otto Preminger, Fred Zinnemann, and Billy Wilder.

A captivating look at the origins of our own tabloid culture in the salacious and titillating media of the Victorian era.

This book examines the dramatic work of Dickens, Browning, Collins, and Tennyson, their interaction with the theatrical world, and their attempts to develop their reputations as playwrights. These major Victorian writers each authored several professional plays, but why has their achievement been overlooked?

British theatre has a greater tradition than any other, having started all the way back in 1311 and still going strong today. But that is too much for one book to cover, so this volume deals with early theatre and has a cut-off date in 1899. Still, this is almost six centuries, centuries during which British theatre not only developed but produced some of the greatest playwrights of all time and anywhere, including obviously Shakespeare but also Marlowe and Shaw. And they wrote some of the finest plays ever, which are known around the world. So there is plenty for this book to cover, just with the playwrights, plays and actors, but it also has information on stagecraft and theatres, as well as the historical and political background. This book has over 1,183 entries in the dictionary section, these being mainly on playwrights and plays, but others as well including managers and critics, and also on specific theatres, legislative acts and some technical jargon. Then there are entries on the different genres, from comedy to tragedy and everything in between. Inevitably, the chronology is quite long as it has a long period to cover and the introduction provides the necessary overview. The Historical Dictionary of Early British Theatre concludes with a pretty massive bibliography. That will be of use to particularly assiduous researchers, but this book itself is a good place to start any research since it covers periods that are far less well-known and documented, and ordinary theatre-goers will also find useful information.

A revelatory history of the women who brought Victorian criminals to account—and how they became a cultural sensation From Wilkie Collins to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the traditional image of the Victorian detective is male. Few people realise that women detectives successfully investigated Victorian Britain, working both with the police and for private agencies, which they sometimes managed themselves. Sara Lodge recovers these forgotten women’s lives. She also reveals the sensational role played by the fantasy female detective in Victorian melodrama and popular fiction, enthralling a public who relished the spectacle of a cross-dressing, fist-swinging heroine who got the better of love rats, burglars, and murderers alike. How did the morally ambiguous work of real women detectives, sometimes paid to betray their fellow women, compare with the exploits of their fictional counterparts, who always save the day? Lodge’s book takes us into the murky underworld of Victorian society on both sides of the Atlantic, revealing the female detective as both an unacknowledged labourer and a feminist icon.

This innovative work begins to fill a large gap in theatre studies: the lack of any comprehensive study of nineteenth-century British theatre audiences. In an attempt to bring some order to the enormous amount of available primary material, Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow focus on London from 1840, immediately prior to the deregulation of that city's theatres, to 1880, when the Metropolitan Board of Works assumed responsibility for their licensing. In a further attempt to manage their material, they concentrate chapter by chapter on seven representative theatres from four areas: the Surrey Theatre and the Royal Victoria to the south, the Whitechapel Pavilion and the Britannia Theatre to the east, Sadler's Wells and the Queen's (later the Prince of Wales's) to the north, and Drury Lane to the west. Davis and Emeljanow thoroughly examine the composition of these theatres' audiences, their behavior, and their attendance patterns by looking at topography, social demography, police reports, playbills, autobiographies and diaries, newspaper accounts, economic and social factors as seen in census returns, maps and transportation data, and the managerial policies of each theatre.

This collection provides a representative set of theatrical performances popular on the nineteenth-century British stage. All are newly edited critical editions that account for variant sources reflecting the process of rehearsal, licensing, and production. Detailed introductions and extensive notes explain the texts’ relationship to repertoires, the circulating discourses of intelligibility that constantly recombine in performance. The plays address the topical concerns of slavery, imperial conquest, capitalism, interculturalism, uprisings at home and abroad, modernist aesthetic innovation, and the celebration of collective identities. Adaptations from novels, travelogues, and other plays are discussed along with the theatrical history that sustained these works on the stage.