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A biography of one of the most popular dramatist of his day, friend of Fielding, Dr. Johnson, David Garrick, and the Thrales.
For this volume George Taylor has edited five plays by two largely forgotten eighteenth-century playwrights, Samuel Foote and Arthur Murphy. The plays are The Minor and The Nabob by Foote and The Citizen, Three Weeks after Marriage and Know Your Own Mind by Murphy. All, apart from the last, are two- or three-act farces, the main popular fare of the eighteenth-century theatre. They are still eminently playable today, each exploring a different aspect of London society. Both playwrights have an acute ear for amusing and socially revealing dialogue, with a deft sense of situation comedy. Foote was an important theatre manager who established the success of the Haymarket Theatre by his particular brand of satire and mimicry. Had Murphy been more assiduous in his theatrical career and maintained good relations with David Garrick, his reputation as a dramatist might now have ranked him alongside Goldsmith and Sheridan.
The "Gentleman's magazine" section is a digest of selections from the weekly press; the "(Trader's) monthly intelligencer" section consists of news (foreign and domestic), vital statistics, a register of the month's new publications, and a calendar of forthcoming trade fairs.
“Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography” examines theatrical biography as a nascent genre in eighteenth-century England. This study specifically focuses on Thomas Davies’ 1780 memoir of David Garrick as the first moment of mastery in the genre’s history, the three-way war for the right to tell Charles Macklin’s story at the turn of the century and James Boaden’s theatrical biography spree in the 1820s and 1830s, including the lives of John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, Dorothy Jordan and Elizabeth Inchbald. This project investigates the extent to which biographers envisioned themselves as artists, inheriting the anxiety of impermanence and correlating fear of competition that plagued their thespian subjects. It traces a suggestive, but not determinative, outline of generic development, noting the shifting generic features that emerge in context of a given work’s predecessors. Drawing heavily on primary sources, then-contemporary reviews and archival material in the form of extra-illustrated or “scrapbooked” editions of the biographies, this text is invested in the ways that the increasing emphasis on materiality was designed to consolidate, but often challenged, the biographer’s authority. This turn to materiality also authorized readerly participation, allowing readers to “co-author” biographies through the use of material insertions, asserting their own presence in the texts about beloved thespians.