The Rise of the English Actress
Author | : Sandra Richards |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : 305 |
Release | : 1993-01-01 |
Genre | : Actors |
ISBN | : 9780333456019 |
Download The Rise of the English Actress Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Rise Of The English Actress PDF full book. Access full book title Rise Of The English Actress.
Author | : Sandra Richards |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : 305 |
Release | : 1993-01-01 |
Genre | : Actors |
ISBN | : 9780333456019 |
Author | : Sandra Richards |
Publisher | : Springer |
Total Pages | : 323 |
Release | : 1993-06-18 |
Genre | : Performing Arts |
ISBN | : 1349099309 |
An account of the English actress's view of her own rise up to social and professional prominence from 1600 to the present. Examining the actress's experience as distinct from the actor's, this book charts her influence on each age's views of women's nature and their role in society.
Author | : Felicity Nussbaum |
Publisher | : University of Pennsylvania Press |
Total Pages | : 392 |
Release | : 2011-10-11 |
Genre | : Drama |
ISBN | : 0812206894 |
In eighteenth-century England, actresses were frequently dismissed as mere prostitutes trading on their sexual power rather than their talents. Yet they were, Felicity Nussbaum argues, central to the success of a newly commercial theater. Urban, recently moneyed, and thoroughly engaged with their audiences, celebrated actresses were among the first women to achieve social mobility, cultural authority, and financial independence. In fact, Nussbaum contends, the eighteenth century might well be called the "age of the actress" in the British theater, given women's influence on the dramatic repertory and, through it, on the definition of femininity. Treating individual star actresses who helped spark a cult of celebrity—especially Anne Oldfield, Susannah Cibber, Catherine Clive, Margaret Woffington, Frances Abington, and George Anne Bellamy—Rival Queens reveals the way these women animated issues of national identity, property, patronage, and fashion in the context of their dramatic performances. Actresses intentionally heightened their commercial appeal by catapulting the rivalries among themselves to center stage. They also boldly challenged in importance the actor-managers who have long dominated eighteenth-century theater history and criticism. Felicity Nussbaum combines an emphasis on the actresses themselves with close analysis of their diverse roles in works by major playwrights, including George Farquhar, Nicholas Rowe, Colley Cibber, Arthur Murphy, David Garrick, Isaac Bickerstaff, and Richard Sheridan. Hers is a comprehensive and original argument about the importance of actresses as the first modern subjects, actively shaping their public identities to make themselves into celebrated properties.
Author | : Michael Baker |
Publisher | : Routledge |
Total Pages | : 252 |
Release | : 2015-07-24 |
Genre | : Performing Arts |
ISBN | : 1317399102 |
Originally published in 1978. Between 1830 and 1890 the English theatre became recognisably modern. Standards of acting and presentation improved immeasurably, new playwrights emerged, theatres became more comfortable and more intimate and playgoing became a national pastime with all classes. The actor’s status rose accordingly. In 1830 he had been little better than a social outcast; by 1880 he had become a member of a skilled, relatively well-paid and respected profession which was attracting new recruits in unprecedented numbers. This is a social history of Victorian actors which seeks to show how wider social attitudes and developments affected the changing status of acting as a profession. Thus the stage’s relationship with the professional world and the other arts is dealt with and is followed by an assessment of the moral and religious background which played so decisive a part in contemporary attitudes to actors. The position of actresses in particular is given special consideration. Many non-theatrical sources are used here and there is a survey of salaries and working conditions in the theatre to show how the rising social status of the actor was matched by changes in his theatrical standing. A novel area of study is covered in tracing the changing social composition of the acting profession over the period and in exploring the case-histories of three generations of performers.
Author | : Catherine Hindson |
Publisher | : University of Iowa Press |
Total Pages | : 261 |
Release | : 2016-06-01 |
Genre | : Performing Arts |
ISBN | : 1609384261 |
Today’s celebrity charity work has deep historical roots. In the 1880s and 1890s, the stars of fin-de-siècle London’s fashionable stage culture—particularly the women—transformed theatre’s connection with fundraising. They refreshed, remolded, and reenergized celebrity charity work at a time when organized benevolence and women’s public roles were also being transformed. In the process, actresses established a model and set of practices that persist today among the stars of both London’s West End and Hollywood. In the late nineteenth century, theatre’s fundraising for charitable causes shifted from male-dominated and private to female-directed and public. Although elite women had long been involved in such enterprises, they took on more authority in this period. At the same time, regular, high-profile public charity events became more important and much more visible than private philanthropy. Actresses became key figures in making the growing number of large and heavily publicized fundraisers successful. By 1920, the attitude was “Get an actress first. If you can’t get an actress, then get a duchess.” Actresses’ star power, their ability to orchestrate large events quickly, and their skill at performing a kind of genteel extortion made them essential to this model of charity. Actresses also benefited from this new role. Taking a prominent, public, offstage position was crucial in making them, individually and collectively, respectable professionals. Author Catherine Hindson reveals this history by examining the major types of charity events at the turn of the twentieth century, including fundraising matinees, charity bazaars and costume parties, theatrical tea and garden parties, and benefit performances. Her study concludes with a look at the involvement of actresses in raising funds for British soldiers serving in the Anglo-Boer War and the First World War.
Author | : Chelsea Phillips |
Publisher | : Rutgers University Press |
Total Pages | : 305 |
Release | : 2022-01-14 |
Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | : 1644532484 |
Carrying All Before Her recovers the stories of six eighteenth-century celebrity actresses who performed during pregnancy, melding public and private, persona and person, domestic and professional labor and helping to shape wider social, medical, and political conversations about gender, sexuality, pregnancy, and motherhood. Their stories deepen our understanding of celebrity, repertory, and theatre's connection to a wider social world, and challenge notions of women's agency and power in and beyond the professional theatre.
Author | : Mary Luckhurst |
Publisher | : Springer |
Total Pages | : 248 |
Release | : 2005-10-18 |
Genre | : Performing Arts |
ISBN | : 0230523846 |
Theatre has always been a site for selling outrage and sensation, a place where public reputations are made and destroyed in spectacular ways. This is the first book to investigate the construction and production of celebrity in the British theatre. These exciting essays explore aspects of fame, notoriety and transgression in a wide range of performers and playwrights including David Garrick, Oscar Wilde, Ellen Terry, Laurence Olivier and Sarah Kane. This pioneering volume examines the ingenious ways in which these stars have negotiated their own fame. The essays also analyze the complex relationships between discourses of celebrity and questions of gender, spectatorship and the operation of cultural markets.
Author | : |
Publisher | : Manchester University Press |
Total Pages | : 178 |
Release | : 1996 |
Genre | : Women |
ISBN | : 9780719046520 |
This is one of a series of bibliographical guides designed to meet the needs of undergraduates, postgraduates and their teachers in universities and colleges of further education. All volumes in the series share a number of common characteristics. They are selective, manageable in size, and include those books and articles which are considered most important and useful. All are editied by practising teachers of the subject in question and are based on their experience of the needs of students. The arrangement combines chronological with thematic divisions. Most of the items listed receive some descriptive comment.
Author | : Andrew Sofer |
Publisher | : University of Michigan Press |
Total Pages | : 272 |
Release | : 2010-02-22 |
Genre | : Performing Arts |
ISBN | : 047202633X |
In The Stage Life of Props, Andrew Sofer aims to restore to certain props the performance dimensions that literary critics are trained not to see, then to show that these props are not just accessories, but time machines of the theater. Using case studies that explore the Eucharistic wafer on the medieval stage, the bloody handkerchief on the Elizabethan stage, the skull on the Jacobean stage, the fan on the Restoration and early eighteenth-century stage, and the gun on the modern stage, Andrew Sofer reveals how stage props repeatedly thwart dramatic convention and reinvigorate theatrical practice. While the focus is on specific objects, Sofer also gives us a sweeping history of half a millennium of stage history as seen through the device of the prop, revealing that as material ghosts, stage props are a way for playwrights to animate stage action, question theatrical practice, and revitalize dramatic form. Andrew Sofer is Assistant Professor of English, Boston College. He was previously a stage director.
Author | : L. Engel |
Publisher | : Springer |
Total Pages | : 143 |
Release | : 2014-11-28 |
Genre | : Performing Arts |
ISBN | : 1137427949 |
This interdisciplinary project draws on a wealth of sources (visual, material, literary and theatrical) to examine Austen's depiction of female performance, display and desire through her deployment of a culturally and symbolically charged accessory: the muff.