Equestrian Drama: An Anthology of Plays is a collection of four representative equestrian dramas. It includes four annotated plays: Timour the Tartar by Matthew G. Lewis, The Battle of Waterloo by J. H. Amherst, Mazeppa by Henry M. Milner, and The Whip by Henry Hamilton and Cecil Raleigh. An introduction precedes the collection, providing the information necessary to understand and contextualize the genre and the plays as both written and performance texts, and within the time period of their original productions, as well as within the larger histories of theatre and equestrian entertainments. Additional related plays are identified, excerpted, and explored, providing readers with a wide range of examples to better understand the development and significance of this unique form of popular theatre. Also identified and explored are significant contributions made to stage technology and design by the patented stage machinery designed for the production of the mechanized form of equestrian drama, which became popular in the late nineteenth century. Equestrian Drama is suitable for undergraduate, graduate, and professional students in theatre history, dramatic literature, performance studies, and equine studies. An online supplement to this book is available to provide readers with additional content relating to this collection, including original English language translations of La Fille Hussard and Rognolet and Passe-Carreau, as well as the full annotated text of Turpin's Ride to York.

A History of Equestrian Drama in the United States documents the history of equestrian drama in the United States and clarifies the multi-faceted significance of the form and of the related stage machinery developed to produce hippodramas. The development of equestrian drama is traced from its origins and influences in the sixteenth century, through the height of the form’s popularity at the turn of the twentieth century. Analysis of the historical significance of the genre within the larger context of U.S. theatre, the elucidation of the importance of the horse to theatre, and an evaluation of the lasting impact on theatre technology are also included.

Since the beginning of the nineteenth-century, many forms of theatre have been called 'popular', but in the twentieth-century the term 'popular drama' has taken on definite political overtones, often indicating a repudiation of 'commercial theatre'. Does this mean that political theatre is or tries to be more attractive to more people than commercial theatre? Does it conversely mean that commercial theatre has no political effects? The articles in this book were submitted as papers for a conference on the theme of 'popular' theatre, film and television. Contributions came from people with very different types of experience: from an ex-animal trainer to a lecturer in film studies; from playwrights, directors and actors to professional critics and academics. Each author focused on a particular problem of defining drama in performance, drawing together the conditions of performance, the types of audience and the political effects of the plays or films in question. The result was a series of fruitful connections and juxtapositions that shows the remarkable continuity of the problems raised in attempts to create a popular political drama.

This book covers the history of theater as well as the literature of America from 1880-1930. The years covered by this volume features the rise of the popular stage in America from the years following the end of the Civil War to the Golden Age of Broadway, with an emphasis on its practitioners, including such diverse figures as William Gillette, Mrs. Fiske, George M. Cohan, Maude Adams, David Belasco, George Abbott, Clyde Fitch, Eugene O’Neill, Texas Guinan, Robert Edmond Jones, Jeanne Eagels, Susan Glaspell, The Adlers and the Barrymores, Tallulah Bankhead, Philip Barry, Maxwell Anderson, Mae West, Elmer Rice, Laurette Taylor, Eva Le Gallienne, and a score of others. Entries abound on plays of all kinds, from melodrama to the newly-embraced realistic style, ethnic works (Irish, Yiddish, etc.), and such diverse forms as vaudeville, circus, minstrel shows, temperance plays, etc. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of American Theater: Modernism covers the history of modernist American Theatre through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 2,000 cross-referenced entries on actors and actresses, directors, playwrights, producers, genres, notable plays and theatres. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the American Theater in its greatest era.

Relevance and Marginalisation in Scandinavian and European Performing Arts 1770–1860: Questioning Canons reveals how various cultural processes have influenced what has been included, and what has been marginalised from canons of European music, dance, and theatre around the turn of the nineteenth century and the following decades. This collection of essays includes discussion of the piano repertory for young ladies in England; canonisation of the French minuet; marginalisation of the popular German dramatist Kotzebue from the dramatic canon; dance repertory and social life in Christiania (Oslo); informal cultural activities in Trondheim; repertory of Norwegian musical clocks; female itinerant performers in the Nordic sphere; preconditions, dissemination, and popularity of equestrian drama; marginalisation and amateur staging of a Singspiel by the renowned Danish playwright Oehlenschläger, also with perspectives on the music and its composers; and the perceived relevance of Henrik Ibsen’s staged theatre repertory and early dramas. By questioning established notions about canon, marginalisation, and relevance within the performing arts in the period 1770–1860, this book asserts itself as an intriguing text both to the culturally interested public and to scholars and students of musicology, dance research, and theatre studies.

"The period of 1880 to 1929 is the richest theater era in American history, certainly in the number of plays produced and significant artists, as well as in the centrality of theater in the lives of Americans. As the impact of European modernism gradually seeped into American theater during the 1880s and 1890s, more traditional forms of theater gave way to futurism, symbolism, surrealism, and expressionism. Such playwrights as Eugene O'Neill, George Kelly, Elmer Rice, Philip Barry, and George S. Kaufman ushered in the golden age of American drama." "The A to Z of American Theater: Modernism focuses on legitimate drama, both as influenced by modernism in Europe and by the popular entertainment that also enlivened the era. This is accomplished through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced entries on plays, music, playwrights, performers, producers, critics, architects, designers, and costumes." --Book Jacket.