The book examines how gentility was portrayed at London's theatres during the early modern era.

An exploration of wit, witlessness and social and comic conventions in the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson and their contemporaries.

From 1695 to 1705, rival London theater companies based at Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields each mounted more than a hundred new productions while reviving stock plays by authors such as Shakespeare and Dryden. All included music. Kathryn Lowerre charts the interactions of the two companies from a musical perspective, emphasizing each company's new productions and their respective musical assets, including performers, composers, and musical materials. Lowerre also provides rich analysis of the relationship of music to genres including comedy, dramatick opera, and musical tragedy, and explores the migration of music from theater to theater, performer to performer, and from stage to street and back again. As Lowerre persuasively demonstrates, during this period, all theater was musical theater.

From 1695 to 1705, rival London theater companies based at Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields each mounted more than a hundred new productions while reviving stock plays by authors such as Shakespeare and Dryden. All included music. Kathryn Lowerre charts the interactions of the two companies from a musical perspective, emphasizing each company's new productions and their respective musical assets, including performers, composers, and musical materials. Lowerre also provides rich analysis of the relationship of music to genres including comedy, dramatick opera, and musical tragedy, and explores the migration of music from theater to theater, performer to performer, and from stage to street and back again. As Lowerre persuasively demonstrates, during this period, all theater was musical theater.

Often perceived as merely formulaic or historical documents, dramatic prologues and epilogues – players’ comic, poetic bids for the audience’s good opinion – became essential parts of Restoration theater, appearing in over 90 percent of performed and printed plays between 1660 and 1714. Their popularity coincided with the rise of the English actress, and Prologues and Epilogues of Restoration Theater unites these elements in the first book-length study on the subject. It finds that these paratexts provided the first sanctioned space for actresses in Britain to voice ideas in public, communicate directly with other women, and perform comedy – arguably the most powerful type of speech, and one that enabled interrogation of misogynist social practices. This book provides a taxonomy of prologues and epilogues with a corresponding appendix, and demonstrates through case studies of Anne Bracegirdle and Anne Oldfield how the study of prologues and epilogues enriches Restoration theater scholarship. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

London and Literature, 1603–1901 brings together papers by scholars and researchers interested in British literature of the period covered. It will be of value to the many students and colleagues of the contributors, as well as people connected with or influenced by the work of Eiichi Hara. This volume covers literature from the beginning of the Jacobean period to the end of the Victorian era. It takes the city of London as its focus, and the chapters explore different aspects of the interaction of literature and place, covering works by major figures within the time period. This connection is doubly significant as the book is also a Festschrift to celebrate the career of Eiichi Hara, the most renowned Dickensian in Japan and a scholar with a particular interest in London. With a preface by Gerald Dickens, the great-great-grandson of Charles Dickens, and a foreword by Toru Sasaaki, President of the English Literary Society of Japan, London and Literature, 1603–1901, brings together leading scholars in the field of English literature to offer a series of valuable perspectives on the city and its artistic life.

Ways of the World explores cosmopolitanism as it emerged during the Restoration and the role theater played in both memorializing and satirizing its implications and consequences. Rooted in the Stuart ambition to raise the status of England through two crucial investments—global traffic, including the slave trade, and cultural sophistication—this intensified global orientation led to the creation of global mercantile networks and to the rise of an urban British elite who drank Ethiopian coffee out of Asian porcelain at Ottoman-inspired coffeehouses. Restoration drama exposed cosmopolitanism's most embarrassing and troubling aspects, with such writers as Joseph Addison, Aphra Behn, John Dryden, and William Wycherley dramatizing the emotional and ethical dilemmas that imperial and commercial expansion brought to light. Altering standard narratives about Restoration drama, Laura J. Rosenthal shows how the reinvention of theater in this period—including technical innovations and the introduction of female performers—helped make possible performances that held the actions of the nation up for scrutiny, simultaneously indulging and ridiculing the violence and exploitation being perpetuated. In doing so, Ways of the World reveals an otherwise elusive consistency between Restoration genres (comedy, tragedy, heroic plays, and tragicomedy), disrupts conventional understandings of the rise and reception of early capitalism, and offers a fresh perspective on theatrical culture in the context of the shifting political realities of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain.