The Broadview Anthology of Nineteenth-Century British Performance

Provides a representative sample of plays and performances – from a range of genres, styles, and formats – that were popular on the nineteenth century British stage. The introduction explores the ways in which different plays and dramatic conventions related to each other, and how audiences understood these conventions.

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This collection provides a representative set of theatrical performances popular on the nineteenth-century British stage. All are newly edited critical editions that account for variant sources reflecting the process of rehearsal, licensing, and production. Detailed introductions and extensive notes explain the texts’ relationship to repertoires, the circulating discourses of intelligibility that constantly recombine in performance. The plays address the topical concerns of slavery, imperial conquest, capitalism, interculturalism, uprisings at home and abroad, modernist aesthetic innovation, and the celebration of collective identities. Adaptations from novels, travelogues, and other plays are discussed along with the theatrical history that sustained these works on the stage.