Description
Book SynopsisThe 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 sides and applications beyond 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 fictionalizing the individual in ways deeply familiar to twenty-first century celebrity culture.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
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 obscuraLeslie 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 Martinocvić
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
