English theatrical anecdotes, 1660-1800 / edited by Heather Ladd and Leslie Ritchie.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Ritchie, Leslie, 1970- editor.

Ladd, Heather, editor.

Series:

Performing Celebrity

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Theater--England--Anecdotes.

Theater.

Theater--England--History--18th century.

Fame--Social aspects--England--History--18th century.

Fame.

Genre:

Essays.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (299 pages)

Place of Publication:

University of Delaware Press 2022

Newark, Delaware : University of Delaware Press, [2022]

Summary:

"The essays in English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800 explore the theatrical anecdote's role in the construction of stage fame in England's emergent celebrity culture during the long eighteenth century, as well as the challenges of employing such anecdotes in theatre scholarship today. This collection showcases scholarship that complicates the theatrical anecdote and shows its many applications beyond providing the expected comic punch. Discussing anecdotal narratives about theatre people as producing, maintaining, and sometimes toppling individual fame, this book crucially investigates a key mechanism of celebrity in the long eighteenth century that reaches into the nineteenth century and beyond. The anecdote erases boundaries between public and private and fictionalizes the individual in ways deeply familiar to twenty-first -century celebrity culture"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Cover

Series Editor

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Miniature Stages of Celebrity: English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1600-1800 / Heather Ladd and Leslie Ritchie

Part I. Acting Badly: Misbehaving Performers

1. Killing Delane

or, Mimickry and the Anecdota obscura / Leslie Ritchie

2. Violent Afterlives: The Anecdote in Eighteenth-Century Theater Biographies / Máire Macneill

3. Samuel Foote, Esq.: Caricature, Class, and the Comic Theatrical Anecdote / Heather Ladd

Part II. Anecdotal Bodies

4. Pregnancy and the Late Stuart Stage, 1661-1702 / Chelsea Phillips

5. "A High Treat to the Anecdote Hunters!": The Body of Mrs. Sophia Baddeley / Nevena Martinović

6. A Bellyful of Nightingales: Seven Stories of Seven Singers / Michael Burden

Part III. Acting Careers And The Professional Anecdote

7. Anecdote and the Regional Actress: A History of the Farren Family in Several Anecdotes / Fiona Ritchie

8. Neither Confirmed nor Refuted: The Anecdotal Elizabeth Barry / Seth Wilson

Part IV. Anecdotes' Afterlives: Scholarly Encounters

9. Anecdotal Origin Stories: Mary Ann Yates's Trip to Drury Lane / Elaine McGirr

10. The Vanishing Subject in "Anecdotal" Abridgments of Theatrical Biographies / Amanda Weldy Boyd

11. Queering Roxane from Davenant to Richardson / Danielle Bobker

Coda: Whither Theatrical Anecdote? / Heather Ladd and Leslie Ritchie

Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781644532638

1644532638

9781644532621

164453262X

OCLC:

1337946514