Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, by Simon Callow, London: Harper Press, 2012, xiii + 370pp, £16.99 (Hardback), ISBN 978 0 00 744530 1 Dickens’ Women, by Miriam Margolyes and Sonia Fraser, London, Hesperus Press Limited, 2011, 96 pp, £8.99 (Paperback) ISBN 978 1 84391 351 1 Reviewed by Gillian Piggott gillian-piggott@hotmail.com Two of our top actors have dovetailed the publication of their thoughts on Dickens with the Bicentenary festivities, providing an actor’s perspective on the great
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Richard Scully, ‘The Epitheatrical Cartoonist’; or, Matthew Somerville Morgan and the World of Theatre, Art and Journalism in Victorian London’
Richard Scully examines the close connections between the world of Victorian comic journalism and the theatre, taking Matthew Somerville Morgan (1837-1890) as a case-study. Morgan’s brilliant cartoons for Fun, Judy, and The Tomahawk (all competitors of Punch) owed much to his background as a scene-painter and designer of pantomime and melodrama. In fact, so bound up were his cartoons with theatrical modes of composition and subject-matter, that he can be described as an ‘epitheatrical’ cartoonist. ‘Epitheatrical’ is a recent coinage
Read moreRobert Burroughs, ‘Sailors and Slaves: The ‘Poor Enslaved Tar’ in Naval Reform and Nautical Melodrama’
Recent studies have demonstrated how, far from being confined to the theatre, ‘the melodramatic mode’ permeated various fields of nineteenth-century discourse, including politics and the law. Whereas most of the research in this area to date has concentrated upon domestic melodrama, in this article Robert Burroughs extends the discussion to the ‘tar drama’, or nautical melodrama. Burroughs examines how one example of this sub-genre, J.T. Haines’s My Poll and My Partner Joe (first performed 1835), engages in the political, legal
Read moreSusan Schuyler, ‘Crowds, Fenianism, and the Victorian Stage’
In her essay forthcoming in JVC issue 16.2, Susan Schuyler analyzes two Irish rebellion-themed plays in context of the growth of Fenianism in the months preceding the Clerkenwell explosion. The melodramatic dramas Oonagh; or the Lovers of Lisnamona (Her Majesty’s, 1866) and Achora Machree; or Gems of Ould Ireland (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1867) reveal the ways that popular theatre participated in a wider public discussion about what was seen as the modern phenomenon of the crowd. Produced on the eve of one
Read moreBook Series Announcement: Dramatic Lives
Dramatic Lives Series Editor: Katharine Cockin This series will present biographies, monographs and edited collections of scholarly essays about individuals who have worked in the theatre either as a principal occupation or who have made a significant contribution to the theatre. As well as studies of distinguished figures of the theatre, the series will include works on artists, writers, political activists and amateurs working on its fringes, bringing a wealth of other experience from fields such as literature, art, music,
Read moreBook Reviews (15.3)
Helen Brookman on Gail Marshall’s Shakespeare and Victorian Women (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2009) and Clare Broome Saunders’sWomen Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=3&spage=402. Gavin Budge on Mary Poovey’s Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, IL: Chicago UP, 2008). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=3&spage=406. Grace Moore on Radhika Mohanram’s Imperial White: Race, Diaspora and the British Empire (Minneapolis, MN: University
Read moreJournal Announcement and CFP: Upstage, a journal of turn-of-the-century dramatic literature, theatre, and theatrical culture
UPSTAGE, a peer-reviewed online publication dedicated to research in turn-of-the-century dramatic literature, theatre, and theatrical culture, seeks submissions for its second issue scheduled for the spring or summer of 2011. This is a development of the pages published under this name as part of THE OSCHOLARS, and will henceforth be an independently edited journal in the oscholars group published at www.oscholars.com, as part of our expanding coverage of the different cultural manifestations of the fin de siècle. Topics may include,
Read moreWhere Angels Fear to Tread
In JVC 15.2, Julie-Marie Strange discusses the relationship between academic and popular history with Andrew Davies whose book on the scuttlers, The Gangs of Manchester (2008), was adapted for stage by MaD Theatre Company. Mixing music-hall humour and the Madchester sound, Angels with Manky Faces was acclaimed by audiences in Manchester and Liverpool. Read Andrew Davies and Julie-Marie Strange in conversation: http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=2&spage=268. Watch Director Rob Lees on the making of Angels with Manky Faces [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkwzfUicehc[/youtube]
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