Staging "The Mysterious Mother"

Staging Author: Cynthia E. Roman
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300274858
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
The first book-length study of Horace Walpole’s scandalous The Mysterious Mother, including critical essays, an abridged script, and a facsimile edition Horace Walpole’s five-act tragedy The Mysterious Mother (1768), a sensational tale of incest and intrigue, was initially circulated only among the author’s friends. Walpole never permitted it to be performed during his lifetime except as a private theatrical. He described his play as a “delicious entertainment for the closet” and claimed that he “did not think it would do for the stage.” Yet the essays in this volume trace a history of private readings, amateur theatricals, and even early public performances, demonstrating that the play was read and performed more than Walpole’s protests suggest. Exploring a wide variety of topics—including the play’s crypto-Catholicism, its treatments of incest, guilt, motherhood, orphans, and scientific spectacle, and the complex relations between print and performance—the essays demonstrate the rich relevance of The Mysterious Mother to current critical discussions. The volume includes the proceedings of a mini-conference hosted at Yale University in 2018 on the occasion of a staged reading of the play. Also included are the director’s reflections, an abridged script, a facsimile of Walpole’s own copy of the full-length play, and reproductions of the illustrations he commissioned from Lady Diana Beauclerk.

Staging "The Mysterious Mother"

Staging Author: Cynthia E. Roman
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300274858
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 373

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first book-length study of Horace Walpole’s scandalous The Mysterious Mother, including critical essays, an abridged script, and a facsimile edition Horace Walpole’s five-act tragedy The Mysterious Mother (1768), a sensational tale of incest and intrigue, was initially circulated only among the author’s friends. Walpole never permitted it to be performed during his lifetime except as a private theatrical. He described his play as a “delicious entertainment for the closet” and claimed that he “did not think it would do for the stage.” Yet the essays in this volume trace a history of private readings, amateur theatricals, and even early public performances, demonstrating that the play was read and performed more than Walpole’s protests suggest. Exploring a wide variety of topics—including the play’s crypto-Catholicism, its treatments of incest, guilt, motherhood, orphans, and scientific spectacle, and the complex relations between print and performance—the essays demonstrate the rich relevance of The Mysterious Mother to current critical discussions. The volume includes the proceedings of a mini-conference hosted at Yale University in 2018 on the occasion of a staged reading of the play. Also included are the director’s reflections, an abridged script, a facsimile of Walpole’s own copy of the full-length play, and reproductions of the illustrations he commissioned from Lady Diana Beauclerk.

The Mysterious Mother. A Tragedy

The Mysterious Mother. A Tragedy PDF Author: Horace Walpole
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description


Stage Mothers

Stage Mothers PDF Author: Laura Engel
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611486041
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Stage Mothers explores the connections between motherhood and the theater both on and off stage throughout the long eighteenth century. Although the realities of eighteenth-century motherhood and representations of maternity have recently been investigated in relation to the novel, social history, and political economy, the idea of motherhood and its connection to the theatre as a professional, material, literary, and cultural site has received little critical attention. The essays in this volume, spanning the period from the Restoration to Regency, address these forgotten maternal narratives, focusing on: the representation of motherhood as the defining female role; the interplay between an actress’s celebrity persona and her chosen roles; the performative balance between the cults of maternity and that of the “passionate” actress; and tensions between sex and maternity and/or maternity and public authority. In examining the overlaps and disconnections between representations and realities of maternity in the long eighteenth century, and by looking at written, received, visual, and performed records of motherhood, Stage Mothers makes an important contribution to debates central to eighteenth-century cultural history.

The Gothic Novel and the Stage

The Gothic Novel and the Stage PDF Author: Francesca Saggini
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317319516
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
In this ground-breaking study Saggini explores the relationship between the late eighteenth-century novel and the theatre, arguing that the implicit theatricality of the Gothic novel made it an obvious source from which dramatists could take ideas. Similarly, elements of the theatre provided inspiration to novelists.

Blood on the Stage, 1600 to 1800

Blood on the Stage, 1600 to 1800 PDF Author: Amnon Kabatchnik
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538106167
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 830

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Book Description
This volume examines the key representations of transgression drama produced between 1600 and 1800. Arranged in chronological order, the entries consist of plot summary (often including significant dialogue), performance data (if available), opinions by critics and scholars, and other features.

The Gothic

The Gothic PDF Author: Fred Botting
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9780859916196
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
These essays reexamine the literary, historical and cultural significance of the Gothic. Examples range from Horace Walpole to Angela Carter and the modern television programme, The X-Files, as well as new and more familiar texts.

Displacing Female Bodies on the Eighteenth-Century Stage

Displacing Female Bodies on the Eighteenth-Century Stage PDF Author: John Robbins
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527581721
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
Displacing Female Bodies on the Eighteenth-Century Stage is driven by a central question: why were women playwrights in the Romantic period obsessed with silencing their female characters, pushing them off the stage, and announcing the removal of their own texts to the closet? These playwrights were some of the most well-known and commercially successful writers of their era, but were paradoxically also among its most marginalized figures: they were mocked by largely conservative audiences, suffered intense criticism for placing their works on display before the public eye, and frequently found their plays rejected by theater managers in favor of works by established male playwrights. This book argues that these writers did not simply craft plays that would please the crowd, but that they deftly incorporated the suppressions and subjugations to which they were subject into their works. It demonstrates that within their plays, gaps in discourse and representation contain a productive capacity, denoting spaces of imaginative potential or drawing into focus the conditions by which such silencing and erasure takes place, and argues that the long-standing critical misapprehension of these works stems from precisely these strategies of resistance, which of necessity took non-traditional forms and thus have not been readily recognizable to audiences, then or now.

The Theatre of Shelley

The Theatre of Shelley PDF Author: Jacqueline Mulhallen
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1906924309
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Based on the author's thesis (Ph.D., Anglia Ruskin University).

Blood on the Stage, 1800 to 1900

Blood on the Stage, 1800 to 1900 PDF Author: Amnon Kabatchnik
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538106183
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 738

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Book Description
This volume examines the key representations of transgression drama produced between 1800 and 1900. Arranged in chronological order, the entries consist of plot summary (often including significant dialogue), performance data (if available), opinions by critics and scholars, and other features.

Horror on the Stage

Horror on the Stage PDF Author: Amnon Kabatchnik
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476646236
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
There are numerous publications about the horror genre in film and television, but none that provide information about horror on a legitimate stage until now. This book highlights the most terrifying moments in theater history, from classical plays like Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound and Euripides' Medea to the violence of the Grand Guignol company productions in 18th-century France, and present-day productions like Stephen Sondheim's musical Sweeney Todd, Stephen King's Carrie and dark 21st-century plays by Clive Barker and Conor McPherson. The book compiles the history and behind-the-scenes tales surrounding stage productions about monsters, hauntings and horrors both historical and imagined. Included are the nightmarish adaptations of popular writings from Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, H.G. Wells, Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others, as well as plays starring popular characters like Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Invisible Man, the Phantom of the Opera, and the Woman in Black. More than 500 plays are documented, accompanied by dozens of photographs. Entries include plot synopses, existing production data, and evaluations by critics and scholars.