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The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama brings together the work of key playwrights from 1660 to 1800, divided into three main sections: Restoring the Theatre: 1660–1700 Managing Entertainment: 1700–1760 Entertainment in an Age of Revolutions: 1760–1800 Each of the 20 plays featured is accompanied by an extraordinary wealth of print and online supplementary materials, including primary critical sources, commentaries, illustrations, and reviews of productions. Taking in the spectrum of this period’s dramatic landscape—from Restoration tragedy and comedies of manners to ballad opera and gothic spectacle—The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama is an essential resource for students and teachers alike.
Ranging in approach from feminist to historicist, the eleven essays in this collection share the culturalist premise that the drama of late Stuart and early Georgian England helped to constitute the dominant ideology of the period. The contributors' varied approaches allow for the reconsideration of libertinism, the politics of sexual desire, and other classic issues, as well as such newer concerns as the social construction of the first English actresses, empiricism as an emergent epistemological discourse, cultural anxiety about novelty and repetition, and shifting tropes of inherent worth. By reading well-known works in unexpected ways and focusing on less frequently studied dramatists, from Sedley, Motteux, Pix, and Behn to Manley, Trotter, and Shadwell, the contributors also test the limits of the canon. In addition, they suggest that earlier critical perceptions, perhaps even more than the “innate worth” of the plays, determined the shape of the canon. These essays present a different image of Restoration and eighteenth-century theater, one that reveals how the drama was a site as important for the negotiation of cultural meaning as were novels and verse satires.
What were the causes of Restoration drama's licentiousness? How did the elegantly-turned comedy of Congreve become the pointed satire of Fielding? And how did Sheridan and Goldsmith reshape the materials they inherited? In the first account of the entire period for more than a decade, Richard Bevis argues that none of these questions can be answered without an understanding of Augustan and Georgian history. The years between 1660 and 1789 saw considerable political and social upheaval, which is reflected in the eclectic array of dramatic forms that is Georgian theatre's essential characteristic.
The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama, Concise Edition, with twenty-one plays, is half the length of the full anthology without compromising its breadth. Concentrating on plays from the heyday of 1660-1737, it focuses on Restoration drama proper and Revolution drama, with a selection from the early Georgian period and the later Georgian period's "laughing comedy." Seven of the nine sub-genres (personal tragedy, tragicomic romance, social comedy, subversive comedy, corrective satire, menippean satire, and laughing comedy) of the full anthology are represented, with the preponderance of exposure given to the jewel of this theatre, its comedy. Each play is fully annotated and prefaced with an historical introduction. Also included are a general introduction, a statement of procedures, and a glossary.
The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama, Concise Edition, with twenty-one plays, is half the length of the full anthology without compromising its breadth. Concentrating on plays from the heyday of 1660-1737, it focuses on Restoration drama proper and Revolution drama, with a selection from the early Georgian period and the later Georgian period’s “laughing comedy.” Seven of the nine sub-genres (personal tragedy, tragicomic romance, social comedy, subversive comedy, corrective satire, menippean satire, and laughing comedy) of the full anthology are represented, with the preponderance of exposure given to the jewel of this theatre, its comedy. Each play is fully annotated and prefaced with an historical introduction. Also included are a general introduction, a statement of procedures, and a glossary.
This study looks at developments in eighteenth-century drama that influenced the rise of the novel; it begins by asking why women writers of this period experimented so frequently with both novels and plays. Here, Eliza Haywood, Frances Burney, Elizabeth Inchbald, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen explore theatrical frames--from the playhouse, to the social conventions of masquerade, to the fictional frame of the novel itself—that encourage audiences to dismiss what they contain as feigned. Yet such frames also, as a result, create a safe space for self-expression. These authors explore such payoffs both within their work—through descriptions of heroines who disguise themselves to express themselves—and through it. Reading the act of authorship as itself a form of performance, Anderson contextualizes the convention of fictionality that accompanied the development of the novel; she notes that as the novel, like the theater of the earlier eighteenth century, came to highlight its fabricated nature, authors could use it as a covert yet cathartic space. Fiction for these authors, like theatrical performance for the actor, thus functions as an act of both disclosure and disguise—or finally presents self-expression as the ability to oscillate between the two, in "the play of fiction."
Born in the final years of the seventeenth century, and dying a decade before the beginning of the French Revolution, Voltaire was a quintessential figure of the eighteenth century, so much so that this era is sometimes called the Age of Voltaire. At a time when French culture dominated Europe, Voltaire dominated French culture. His influence was broad and powerful, and he made major contributions to almost every sphere of intellectual activity, including the sciences, trade and commerce, politics, and especially the arts. Despite the astonishing range of his literary activities, the theatre occupied a central position in his life from the beginning of his career to its close. His first and last literary triumphs were plays, the first written when he was only 17, the last completed when he was 84. He created a total of 56, and there was rarely a time in his life when he was not working on a theatrical script. At the end of his career, his works were produced more frequently on the French stage than those of any other serious dramatist and served as models for aspiring young playwrights throughout Europe. Written by a leading authority on French theatre and culture in the eighteenth century, this book traces the theatrical career of Voltaire from his college days through his final works. The most influential dramatist of the period, he successfully wrote in a number of genres, including tragedy, comedy, opera, comic opera, and court spectacle. His theatrical biography involves all aspects of acting and staging in amateur and society theatre as well as on major professional stages and performances at court. His extended visits to England and Germany are covered in chapters that also provide an introduction to the theatre in those countries, and his international interests and correspondence provide insights into the eighteenth century theatre in places such as Italy, Russia, and Denmark. Due to his literally life-long concern with the theatre, his dominance in this art, and his reputation and involvement with the theatre outside France, Voltaire's theatrical biography is also in large measure a chronicle of the European stage of the eighteenth century.
Collecting diverse critical perspectives on the topic of play—from dolls, bilboquets, and lotteries, to writing itself—this volume offers new insights into how play was used to represent and reimagine the world in eighteenth-century France. In documenting various modes of play, contributors theorize its relation to law, religion, politics, and economics. Equally important was the role of “play” in plays, and the function of theatrical performance in mirroring, and often contesting, our place in the universe. These essays remind us that the spirit of play was very much alive during the “Age of Reason,” providing ways for its practitioners to consider more “serious” themes such as free will and determinism, illusions and equivocations, or chance and inequality. Standing at the intersection of multiple intellectual avenues, this is the first comprehensive study in English devoted to the different guises of play in Enlightenment France, certain to interest curious readers across disciplinary backgrounds.