Description
Book SynopsisSubscription Theater asks why turn-of-the-century British and Irish citizens spent so much time, money, and effort adding their names to subscription lists. Shining a spotlight on private play-producing clubs, public repertory theaters, amateur drama groups, and theatrical magazines, Matthew Franks locates subscription theaters in a vast constellation of civic subscription initiatives, ranging from voluntary schools and workers'' hospitals to soldiers'' memorials and Diamond Jubilee funds. Across these enterprises, Franks argues, subscribers created their own spaces for performing social roles from which they had long been excluded. Whether by undermining the authority of the Lord Chamberlain''s Examiner of Plays and London''s commercial theater producers, or by extending rights to disenfranchised women and property-less men, a diverse cast of subscribers including typists, plumbers, and maids acted as political representatives for their fellow citizens, both inside the theat
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"Drama and theater scholars will find much to admire in Franks’s Subscription Theater...The book is bold in its claims, careful in its argumentation, and self-aware in its practice. Even those readers who will perhaps have anticipated the claim that theatrical ephemera are not, in fact, ephemeral will come away with new methods for reading a multimedia archive and new ways to approach performance events through a material apparatus. Readers will also come away with an expanded sense of the literary and of the ways in which Victorian and Edwardian theatergoers made theater—and themselves." * Victorian Studies *
"Matthew Franks convincingly argues that subscription underlay the development of theater audience and repertoire in the modern period. His conclusions are original and make a substantial contribution to both theater history and print culture studies." * Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, University of California, Davis *
"Matthew Franks offers valuable knowledge about the wider cultural context-social as well as artistic-of British and Irish Edwardian 'new' drama and stagecraft, the regional repertory movement, and the widespread phenomenon of amateur theater. His methodological focus on printed ephemera presents exciting new ways of thinking about documentary evidence in theater history." * Claire Cochrane, University of Worcester *
Table of Contents
Introduction. Stages of Subscription
Chapter 1. Private Subscription: The Incorporated Stage Society and Ephemeral Repertoire
Chapter 2. Public Subscription: Audience Impressions in Dublin, Glasgow, and Liverpool##
Chapter 3. Subscription On and Beyond the Stage
Chapter 4. Affiliative Subscription: Paying to Play with Amateur Groups
Chapter 5. Virtual Subscription: The Mask as Readers' Theater
Epilogue. Subscribe Now
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
