The ‘macabre’, as a process and product, has been haunting the theatre – and more broadly, performance – for thousands of years. In its embodied meditations on death and dying, its thematic and aesthetic grotesquerie, and its sensory-rich environments, macabre theatre invites artists and audiences to trace the stranger, darker contours of human existence. In this volume, numerous scholars explore the morbid and gruesome onstage, from freak shows to the French Grand Guignol; from Hell Houses to German Trauerspiel; from immersive theatre to dark tourism, stopping along the way to look at phantoms, severed heads, dark rides, haunted mothers and haunting children, dances of death and dismembered bodies. From Japan to Australia to England to the United States, the global macabre is framed and juxtaposed to understand how the theatre brings us face to face with the deathly and the horrific.

The greatest portrayer of blue-fire deviltry, Edward Fitzball was a melodramatist on the nineteenth-century British stage. His Theatre of the Macabre was very much a forebearer of the sensationalized media of today. This book discusses Fitzball's life, and his dramatic oeuvre.

A hooded figure wanders a lonesome road waiting for a special someone ... A criminal returns home to face old memories and new nightmares ... A man awakes to find himself living in a mirror image of reality ... and diners at a restaurant find themselves confronted with a terrifying revelation about who and what they are ... These are the nineteen nightmarish tales that await you in the THEATER MACABRE ...

Welcome to the Theatre!Got your popcorn and soft drink? Good! Have you turned your cell phones off? Splendid!Pay no attention to the orderlies strapping you in. It¿s more for our pleasure than your safety. What you are about to experience will make you squeal, cringe, and by the end, laugh maniacally!Roy C. Booth, the internationally award-winning playwright who brought us Brian Keene¿s Terminal: The Play, offers this trilogy of one-acts plays to chill your bones, kicked off by a brilliant introduction from Dr. David Beard.In ¿Death Under the Gaslights,¿ follow three robbers into a house filled with terror. Learn a valuable lesson in ¿Smoking Will Kill You.¿ And in ¿He Who Gets Laughed At Last,¿ see what happens when some people just can¿t take a joke.Before the lights dim, we want to thank you for coming. The price was your sanity, but the screams are free.Cover art by Mark McLaughlin

A study of Edward Fitzball, a melodramatic dramatist of 19th- century England, whose primary themes of horror, crime, and madness, reflected the insecurities of the time and foreshadowed the sensationalist media of ours. His life, the contemporary society and theater, and his dramatic principles and influences, are all considered. No index. Paper edition (unseen), $15.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Rasmus Vangshardt offers an original interpretation of one of the most famous images of literary history, the theatrum mundi. By applying methods of comparative literature, hispanic studies, and theology, he reconsiders the world theatre’s historical peak in early modern Europe in general and the Spanish Golden Age in particular. The author presents a new close reading of Pedro Calderón’s El gran teatro del mundo (c. 1633–36) and outlines the historical and systematic framework for a theatrum mundi of celebration. This concept entails using art to justify human existence in the face of changing conceptions of the cosmos: an early modern aesthetic theodicy and a justification of the world in that liminal space between drama and ritual. By discussing historiographical theories of early modern Europe, especially those of Hans Blumenberg and Bruno Latour, and through conversations with Shakespearean drama and Spanish Golden Age classics, Vangshardt also argues that the theatrum mundi of celebration questions traditional assumptions of great divides between the Middle Ages and Early Modernity and challenges theories of a European-wide early modern sense of crisis.