Eighteenth-Century Brechtians

Joel Schechter is Professor of Theatre Arts at San Francisco State University.  He is famous as a writer about clowns, jesters, satirists and their radical politics.  Much of his work has been focused on contemporary global mayhem. He was previously Professor of Dramatic Literature at Yale School of Drama, lecturer in Performance Studies at New York University and the New School for Social Research. He was Editor in Chief of the Yale journal Theater from 1977-92.

The Cast of Brechtians in Order of Appearance


List of Illustrations


Foreword by Peter Thomson


Introduction


Eighteenth-Century Brechtians


Cross-Dressing Soldiers and Anti-Militarist Rakes


Polly Peachum and the New Naiveté


Pirates and Polly: A Lost Messingkauf Dialogue


The Duchess of Queensberry Becomes Polly Peachum


Macheath Our Contemporary


Swift in Hollywood: Another Messingkauf Dialogue


Swift’s Polite Conversation with Falstaff


Henry Fielding, Brechtian Before Brecht


Fielding’s London Merchant, and Lillo’s


Literarization of Fielding’s Plays


Tom Thumb Jones, Child Actress


A World on Fire


Fielding’s Cibber Letters: Counterfeit Wit, Scurrility and Cartels


Bertolt Brecht Writes The Beggar’s Opera, Fielding Rewrites Polly


Stage Mutineers


Charlotte Charke’s Tit for Tat; or Comedy and Tragedy at War: A Lost Play Recovered?


Mrs Charke Escapes Hanging


Garrick and Swift’s School for Scandal—With a Digression on Yoko Ono


Brecht Praises Garrick’s Hamlet


A Portrait of the Artists as Beggar’s Opera Disciples—Including David Garrick, Epic Actor


Walpole in America


The Future of Eighteenth-Century Brechtiana: Polly Exonerated


Conclusion: The Future Promise of an Earlier Age


Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: A Timetable of Events


Bibliography


Index