In the first full-length study of the English dancer-actress Hester Santlow, Moira Goff focuses on her unusual career at Drury Lane between 1706 and 1733. Goff charts Santlow's repertoire and makes extensive use of archival resources to investigate both her dancing and acting skills. Santlow made a unique contribution to the development of dance on the London stage, through her dancing roles in dance dramas by John Weaver and pantomimes by John Thurmond and Roger, as well as the virtuoso dances created for her by Mr. Isaac and Anthony L'Abbé. Goff examines Santlow's fascinating personal life, including her relationships with the politician James Craggs the Younger and the Drury Lane actor-manager Barton Booth. Santlow was unusual in making the transition from successful dancer-actress to independent and respectable widow. Goff also traces her life after retirement as her daughter's family rose from the gentry towards the aristocracy. This book will be of interest to dance and theatre historians, to women's studies scholars, and to all who are engaged with ongoing debates on the lives and careers of women on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stage.

John Rich (1692-1761) was a profoundly influential figure of the eighteenth-century London stage. As producer, manager and performer, he transformed the urban entertainment market, creating genres and promotional methods still with us today. This volume gives the first comprehensive overview of Rich's multifaceted career. Contributions by leading scholars from a range of disciplines-Dtheatre, dance, music, art, and cultural historyDprovide detailed analyses of Rich's productions and representations.

Like the history of women, dance has been difficult to capture as a historical subject. Yet in bringing together these two areas of study, the nine internationally renowned scholars in this volume shed new and surprising light on women’s roles as performers of dance, choreographers, shapers of aesthetic trends, and patrons of dance in Italy, France, England, and Germany before 1800. Through dance, women asserted power in spheres largely dominated by men: the court, the theater, and the church. As women’s dance worlds intersected with men’s, their lives and visions were supported or opposed, creating a complex politics of creative, spiritual, and political expression. From a women’s religious order in the thirteenth-century Low Countries that used dance as a spiritual rite of passage to the salon culture of eighteenth-century France where dance became an integral part of women’s cultural influence, the writers in this volume explore the meaning of these women’s stories, performances, and dancing bodies, demonstrating that dance is truly a field across which women have moved with finesse and power for many centuries past.

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.

Examines the pivotal role of dance in the Italian operas of Handel, perhaps the greatest opera composer between Monteverdi and Mozart. George Frideric Handel set himself apart from his contemporaries by employing choreographed instrumental music to complement and reinforce the emotional impact of his operas. Of his fifty-three operas, no fewer than fourteen -- including ten written for the London stage -- feature dances. Dance in Handel's London Operas explores the relationship between music, drama, and dance in these London works, dispelling the notion that dance was a largely peripheral element in Italian-language operas prior to those of Gluck. Taking a chronological approach, Sarah McCleave examines operas written throughout various periods in Handel's life, beginning with his early London operas, including his time at the Royal Music Academy and the "Sallé" operas of the 1730s, and concluding with his unstaged dramatic opera Alceste (1750). In considering the various influences on Handel (particularly the London stage), McCleave blends analysis of information from eighteenth-century treatises with that found in more modern studies, offering an informed and imaginative understanding of the role dance played in the work of this major figure --one who remained responsive throughout his career to the vital and innovative theatrical environment in which he worked. Sarah McCleave is a lecturer at The School of Creative Arts at Queen's University Belfast.

Martin Folkes (1690-1754): Newtonian, Antiquary, Connoisseur is a cultural and intellectual biography of the only President of both the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries. Sir Isaac Newton's protégé, astronomer, mathematician, freemason, art connoisseur, Voltaire's friend and Hogarth's patron, his was an intellectually vibrant world. Folkes was possibly the best-connected natural philosopher and antiquary of his age, an epitome of Enlightenment sociability, and yet he was a surprisingly neglected figure, the long shadow of Newton eclipsing his brilliant disciple. A complex figure, Folkes edited Newton's posthumous works in biblical chronology, yet was a religious skeptic and one of the first members of the gentry to marry an actress. His interests were multidisciplinary, from his authorship of the first complete history of the English coinage, to works concerning ancient architecture, statistical probability, and astronomy. Rich archival material, including Folkes's travel diary, correspondence, and his library and art collections permit reconstruction through Folkes's eyes of what it was like to be a collector and patron, a Masonic freethinker, and antiquarian and virtuoso in the days before 'science' became sub-specialised. Folkes's virtuosic sensibility and possible role in the unification of the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Society tells against the historiographical assumption that this was the age in which the 'two cultures' of the humanities and sciences split apart, never to be reunited. In Georgian England, antiquarianism and 'science' were considered largely part of the same endeavour.

Writing the Lives of Painters explores the development of artists' biographies in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. During this period artists gradually distanced themselves from artisans and began to be recognised for their imaginative and intellectual skills. The development of the art market and the burgeoning of an exhibition culture, as well as the foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768, all contributed to redefining the rank of artists in society. This social redefinition of the status of artists in Britain was shaped by a thriving print culture. Contemporary artists were discussed in a wide range of literary forms, including exhibition reviews, art-critical pamphlets, and journalistic gossip-columns. Biographical accounts of modern artists emerged in a dialogue with these other types of writing. This book is an account of a new literary genre, tracing its emergence in the cultural context of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It considers artistic biography as a malleable generic framework for investigation. Indeed, while the lives of painters in Britain did not completely abandon traditional tropes, the genre significantly widened its scope and created new individual and social narratives that reflected and accommodated the needs and desires of new reading audiences. Writing the Lives of Painters also argues that the proliferation of a myriad biographical forms mirrored the privileging of artistic originality and difference within an art world that had yet to generate a coherent 'British School' of painting. Finally, by focusing on the emergence of individual biographies of British artists, the book examines how and why the art historiographic model established by Georgio Vasari was gradually dismantled in the hands of British biographers during the Romantic period.