David Garrick's accomplishments as an actor, manager, and theatrical innovator brought him great fame and fortune, and his ideas influenced not only his own age but succeeding ages as well. Yet as a playwright, a part of the elegant combination of talents that was David Garrick, he has never achieved the critical reputation he richly deserves, in main because of the unavailability of texts and the lack of proper assessment of the historic importance of his plays in the English theatre. This first complete edition makes available to scholars and students all the plays of Gar­rick in well edited texts, with commentary and notes. The two volumes of Garrick's own plays published together here include the twenty-two plays of the Garrick canon attributable to him. Garrick's claim to serious consideration as a playwright rests upon these plays, written between 1740 and 1775.They are not all mas­terpieces, but their inclusion here, arranged in chronological order, will enable the stage his­torian to assess Garrick's progress as a dramatist. Contents: Lethe; or, Esop in the Shades. A Dra­matic Satire, 1740; The Lying Valet, 1741; Miss in Her Teens; or, The Medley of Lovers. A Farce, 1747; Lilliputt. A Dramatic Entertainment, 1756; The Male-Coquette; or, Seventeen Hundred Fifty Seven, 1757; The Guardian. A Comedy, 1759; Harlequin's Invasion; or, A Christmas Gambol, 1759; The Enchanter; or, Love and Magic. A Musi­cal Drama, 1760; The Farmer's Return from Lon­don. An Interlude, 1762; The Clandestine Mar­riage. A Comedy, 1766; and Neck or Nothing. A Farce, 1766.

David Garrick's accomplishments as an actor, manager, and theatrical innovator brought him great fame and fortune, and his ideas influenced not only his own age but succeeding ages as well. Yet as a playwright, a part of the elegant combination of talents that was David Garrick, he has never achieved the critical reputation he richly deserves, in main because of the unavailability of texts and the lack of proper assessment of the historic importance of his plays in the English theatre. This first complete edition makes available to scholars and students all the plays of Gar­rick in well edited texts, with commentary and notes. Contents: Macbeth. A Tragedy, 1744; Romeo and Juliet, 1748; The Fairies. An Opera, 1755; Catherine and Petruchio. A Comedy, 1756; Florizel and Perdita. A Dramatic Pastoral, 1756; The Tem­pest. An Opera, 1756; and King Lear. A Tragedy, 1756.

David Garrick's accomplishments as an actor, manager, and theatrical innovator brought him great fame and fortune, and his ideas influenced not only his own age but succeeding ages as well. Yet as a playwright, a part of the elegant combination of talents that was David Garrick, he has never achieved the critical reputation he richly deserves, in main because of the unavailability of texts and the lack of proper assessment of the historic importance of his plays in the English theatre. This first complete edition makes available to scholars and students all the plays of Gar­rick in well edited texts, with commentary and notes. Contents: Alfred. A Masque (James Thomson and David Mallet), 1751; Every Man in His Humour. A Comedy (Ben Jonson), 1751; Zara. A Tragedy (Aaron Hill), 1754; The Chances. A Comedy (John Fletcher and George Villiers), 1754; and Rule a Wife and Have a Wife. A Comedy (Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher), 1756.

David Garrick's accomplishments as an actor, manager, and theatrical innovator brought him great fame and fortune, and his ideas influenced not only his own age but succeeding ages as well. Yet as a playwright, a part of the elegant combination of talents that was David Garrick, he has never achieved the critical reputation he richly deserves, in main because of the unavailability of texts and the lack of proper assessment of the historic importance of his plays in the English theatre. This first complete edition makes available to scholars and students all the plays of Gar­rick in well edited texts, with commentary and notes. Contents: The Rehearsal (George Villiers and Others), 1742; The Alchymist. A Comedy (Ben Jonson), 1743; The Provok'd Wife. A Comedy (John Vanbrugh), 1744; and The Roman Father. A Tragedy (William Whitehead), 1750.

A revelatory history of the characters that playwrights and managers created out of the real lives of women in intimate relationships with military men to serve Great Britain's greatest needs during the war-saturated eighteenth century. During the long eighteenth century, Great Britain was almost continuously at war. As the era unfolded, the theatre gradually discovered the potential in having actresses, recently introduced to the stage in the 1660s, perform as wartime women characters. As playwrights and managers began casting women in transformative roles to meet each major national need, female characters came to be central figures in bringing the war home to the nation, transforming them into deeply patriotic British subjects. Paula Backscheider's Women in Wartime is the first study of theatrical representations of women with intimate connections to military men. Drawing upon her extensive expertise in gender, performance studies, popular culture, and archival studies, Backscheider traces the rise of the London theatre's acceptance that one of its responsibilities was to support its country's wars. Rather than focusing on the historical, mythical "warrior women" on the battlefield who have been much studied, Backscheider explores the lives and work of sweethearts, wives, mothers, sisters, barmaids, provision sellers, seaport prostitutes, and more, whose relationships to active-duty men made them recruits, volunteers, or even conscripts. They represent a distinct group of thousands of real women, and the actresses who portrayed them gave performances of change, struggle, celebration, mourning, survival, love, and patriotism. Backscheider explicates more than fifty plays—from main pieces, short farces, interludes, afterpieces, and comic operas to entr'actes, pantomimes, and even masques—as both entertainment and as ideological and propagandistic vehicles in times of severe crises. She also reveals how these works, many written by men with military experience, attest to the context of difficult, inescapable realities and momentous needs. Through the debunking of sexual stereotypes and attention to audience-pleasing roles such as impoverished-wife and breeches parts, Backscheider adds a dimension to theatrical history that substantially contributes to women's and military histories. Women in Wartime demonstrates the startling acuity and prescience of the repertoire in responding to the war-steeped culture of the period.

Charles Macklin (1699?–1797) was one of the most important figures in the eighteenth-century theatre. Born in Ireland, he began acting in London in around 1725 and gave his final performance in 1789 – no other actor can claim to have acted across seven decades of the century, from the reign of George I to the Regency Crisis of 1788. He is credited alongside Garrick with the development of the natural school of acting and gave a famous performance of Shylock that gave George II nightmares. As a dramatist, he wrote one of the great comic pieces of the mid-century (Love à la Mode, 1759), as well as the only play of the century to be twice refused a performance licence (The Man of the World, 1781). He opened an experimental coffeehouse in Covent Garden, he advocated energetically for actors’ rights and copyright reform for dramatists, and he successfully sued theatre rioters. In short, he had an astonishingly varied career. With essays by leading experts on eighteenth-century culture, this volume provides a sustained critical examination of his career, illuminating many aspects of eighteenth-century theatrical culture and of the European Enlightenment, and explores the scholarly benefit – and thrill – of restaging Macklin’s work in the twenty-first century.

Focusing on the playwriting careers of Henry Fielding, Samuel Foote, and Charles Macklin, the three most controversial and heavily censored satiric dramatists of the century, Disciplining Satire pays particular attention to what type of satiric expression the law encouraged, not just to what it prohibited."--BOOK JACKET.