English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800

by Heather Ladd (Editor), Leslie Ritchie (Editor), Leslie Ritchie (Contribution by), Máire MacNeill (Contribution by), Heather Ladd (Contribution by)

Overview

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 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644532607
Publisher:	University of Delaware Press
Publication date:	06/17/2022
Series:	Performing Celebrity
Pages:	298
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

HEATHER LADD is a former associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. She is the co-editor of this collection and has published on many eighteenth-century writers, including Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, John Gay, Thomas D’Urfey, and Elizabeth Craven. She is now located in Vancouver, British Columbia.

LESLIE RITCHIE is a professor of English at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity and Women Writing Music in Late Eighteenth-Century England: Social Harmony in Literature and Performance.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Miniature Stages of Celebrity: English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1600-1800 Heather Ladd Leslie Ritchie 1

Part I Acting Badly: Misbehaving Performers

1 Killing Delane; or, Mimickry and the Anecdota obscura Leslie Ritchie 25

2 Violent Afterlives: The Anecdote in Eighteenth-Century Theater Biographies Máire Macneill 44

3 Samuel Foote, Esq.: Caricature, Class, and the Comic Theatrical Anecdote Heather Ladd 60

Part II Anecdotal Bodies

4 Pregnancy and the Late Stuart Stage, 1661-1702 Chelsea Phillips 83

5 "A High Treat to the Anecdote Hunters!": The Body of Mrs. Sophia Baddeley Nevena Martinovic 99

6 A Bellyful of Nightingales: Seven Stories of Seven Singers Michael Burden 114

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 139

8 Neither Confirmed nor Refuted: The Anecdotal Elizabeth Barry Seth Wilson 160

Part IV Anecdotes' Afterlives: Scholarly Encounters

9 Anecdotal Origin Stories: Mary Ann Yates's Trip to Drury Lane Elaine McGirr 183

10 The Vanishing Subject in "Anecdotal" Abridgments of Theatrical Biographies Amanda Weldy Boyd 198

11 Queering Roxane from Davenant to Richardson Danielle Bobker 213

Coda: Whither Theatrical Anecdote? Heather Ladd Leslie Ritchie 231

Bibliography 247

Notes on Contributors 269

Index 273