The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama brings together the work of key playwrights from 1660 to 1800, divided into three main sections: Restoring the Theatre: 1660–1700 Managing Entertainment: 1700–1760 Entertainment in an Age of Revolutions: 1760–1800 Each of the 20 plays featured is accompanied by an extraordinary wealth of print and online supplementary materials, including primary critical sources, commentaries, illustrations, and reviews of productions. Taking in the spectrum of this period’s dramatic landscape—from Restoration tragedy and comedies of manners to ballad opera and gothic spectacle—The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama is an essential resource for students and teachers alike.

The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Performance brings together a selection of particularly memorable performances, beginning with Nell Gwyn in a 1668 staging of Secret Love, and moving chronologically towards the final performance of John Philip Kemble's controversial adaptation of Thomas Otway's Venice Presever'd in October 1795. This volume contains a wealth of contextual materials, including contemporary reviews, portraits, advertisements, and cast lists. By privileging event over publication, this collection aims to encourage an understanding of performance that emphasizes the immediacy - and changeability - of the theatrical repertoire during the long eighteenth century. Offering an invaluable insight into the performance culture of the time, The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Performance is a unique, much-needed resource for students of theatre.

This exciting second edition provides an exceptional range of plays edited by leading scholars of Restoration and eighteenth-century theatre. In addition to fifteen plays from the first edition are four new plays and one new afterpiece: Nathaniel Lee’s The Rival Queens, John Vanbrugh’s The Provoked Wife, David Garrick’s Miss in Her Teens, Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian, and Elizabeth Inchbald’s Such Things Are. Every play now features an engaging headnote and a fully edited dramatis personae, prologue, and epilogue. The innovative introduction plunges its readers into the experience of playgoing in London, and the edition features supplementary texts, including select actor and actress biographies and theatrical documents that provide a vivid cultural context.

This collection reveals the wide-ranging impact of the Stage Licensing Act of 1737 on literary and theatrical culture in Georgian Britain. Demonstrating the differing motivations of the state in censoring public performances of plays after the Stage Licensing Act of 1737 and until the Theatres Act 1843, chapters cover a wide variety of theatrical genres across a century and show how the mechanisms of formal censorship operated under the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays. They also explore the effects of informal censorship, whereby playwrights, audiences and managers internalized the censorship regime. As such, the volume moves beyond a narrow focus on erasures and emendations visible on manuscripts to elucidate censorship's wide-ranging significance across the long eighteenth century. Demonstrating theatre archives' potency as a resource for historical research, this volume is of exceptional value for researchers interested in the evolving complexities of Georgian society, its politics and mores.

The Routledge Anthology of British Women Playwrights, 1777-1843 brings together ten eclectic plays by female dramatists and writers, to stimulate a rich discussion of women, writing, and theatre history. Ranging through tragedy, comedy, musical theatre and mixed-genre texts, this volume celebrates the breadth and experimental spirit of women's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dramatic writing. Each play is accompanied by an introductory essay that addresses its sociopolitical and theatrical contexts, and outlines its performance and reception history. The selections included here invite teachers and their students to study particular works by authors of note, but also to consider the differences between works written for page and stage. While many of the plays are recognizable as published dramas, they have been placed alongside textual artifacts that suggest plays or theatrical events of which no definitive record exists, as well as supplementary materials that invite teachers to engage their students in exploring women's dramatic writing in this era. Organized in chronological order, The Routledge Anthology of British Women Playwrights, 1777-1843 traces a history of women's writing across genres and styles, offering an invaluable resource to students and teachers alike.

The Routledge Pantomime Reader is the first anthology to document this entertainment genre—one of the most distinctive and ubiquitous in nineteenth-century Britain. Across ten different shows, readers witness pantomime’s development from a highly improvisational venue for clowning, dance, and musical parody to a complex amalgamation of physical and topical comedy, stage wizardry, scenic spectacle, satire, and magical mayhem. Combining well-known tales such as "Cinderella", "Aladdin", and "Jack and the Beanstalk" with the lesser-known plotlines of "Peter Wilkins" and "The Prince of Happy Land", the book demonstrates not only how popular narratives were adapted to the current moment, but also how this blend of high and low entertainment addressed a whole range of social and cultural anxieties. Along with carefully annotated scripts, readers will find detailed introductions to all of the collected pantomimes and supplementary materials such as reviews, reminiscences, and a host of visual materials that bring these neglected entertainments to life. The plays collected here provide a remarkable perspective on the history of sexuality, class, and race during a period of vast imperial expansion and important social upheaval in Britain itself—essential reading for students and scholars of theatre history and popular performance.

In this timely collection, teacher-scholars of “the long eighteenth century,” a Eurocentric time frame from about 1680 to 1832, consider what teaching means in this historical moment: one of attacks on education, a global contagion, and a reckoning with centuries of trauma experienced by Black, Indigenous, and immigrant peoples. Taking up this challenge, each essay highlights the intellectual labor of the classroom, linking textual and cultural materials that fascinate us as researchers with pedagogical approaches that engage contemporary students. Some essays offer practical models for teaching through editing, sensory experience, dialogue, or collaborative projects. Others reframe familiar texts and topics through contemporary approaches, such as the health humanities, disability studies, and decolonial teaching. Throughout, authors reflect on what it is that we do when we teach—how our pedagogies can be more meaningful, more impactful, and more relevant. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.