English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800

HEATHER LADD is a former associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. She is the co-editor of this collection and has published on many eighteenth-century writers, including Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, John Gay, Thomas D’Urfey, and Elizabeth Craven. She is now located in Vancouver, British Columbia. LESLIE RITCHIE is a professor of English at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity and Women Writing Music in Late Eighteenth-Century England: Social Harmony in Literature and Performance.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Miniature Stages of Celebrity: English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1600–1800
Heather Ladd and Leslie Ritchie

PART I
ACTING BADLY: MISBEHAVING PERFORMERS
1 Killing Delane; or, Mimickry and the Anecdota obscura
Leslie Ritchie
2 Violent Afterlives: The Anecdote in Eighteenth-Century Theater Biographies
Máire Macneill
3 Samuel Foote, Esq.: Caricature, Class, and the Comic Theatrical Anecdote
Heather Ladd

PART II
ANECDOTAL BODIES
4 Pregnancy and the Late Stuart Stage, 1661–1702
Chelsea Phillips
5 “A High Treat to the Anecdote Hunters!”: The Body of Mrs. Sophia Baddeley
Nevena Martinocvić
6 A Bellyful of Nightingales: Seven Stories of Seven Singers
Michael Burden

PART III
ACTING CAREERS AND THE PROFESSIONAL ANECDOTE
7 Anecdote and the Regional Actress: A History of the Farren Family in Several Anecdotes
Fiona Ritchie
8 Neither Confirmed nor Refuted: The Anecdotal Elizabeth Barry
Seth Wilson

PART IV
ANECDOTES’ AFTERLIVES: SCHOLARLY ENCOUNTERS
9 Anecdotal Origin Stories: Mary Ann Yates’s Trip to Drury Lane
Elaine Mcgirr
10 The Vanishing Subject in “Anecdotal” Abridgments of Theatrical Biographies
Amanda Weldy Boyd
11 Queering Roxane from Davenant to Richardson
Danielle Bobker
Coda: Whither Theatrical Anecdote?
Heather Ladd and Leslie Ritchie
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index