Queen Victoria and the Theatre of her Age

Schoch, Richard

doi:10.1057/9780230288911

Cited by 48 publications

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“…One reason for savvy commercial theaters to market to Jews for Purim is that the holiday generally falls during Lent, when theater attendance among the Christian majority could be expected to drop off a little. While Queen Victoria would change the rule shortly after assuming the throne in 1837, 70 in 1835 theaters were not permitted to perform spoken plays on Wednesdays and Fridays during Lent, which is why Handel's oratorios-including Esther-were performed on those days through the 1790s and beyond. Although the law forbidding nonmusical theatrical performance on these days during Lent was "flouted with impunity by minor theatres" such as the Pavilion, as Richard Foulkes explains, 71 this cultural tradition suggests that non-Jews as well as Jews would be attracted to Polack's musical play, which was kosher for all, so to speak.…”

Section: Purim Plays and The London Theatermentioning

confidence: 99%

Melodrama,Purimspiel, and Jewish Emancipation

Weltman¹

2019

Victorian Literature and Culture

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Long forgotten, Elizabeth Polack (fl. 1835–43) is the earliest known Jewish woman playwright in England. This essay argues that her first play,Esther, the Royal Jewess,or the Death of Haman!(1835), performed at a public playhouse in the Jewish working-class neighborhood of London's East End, radically realigns diverse genres and populations in advocating both Jewish emancipation and a voice for women. By way of a very brief introduction, I first point out the applicability here of Judith Butler'sNotes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Butler explores how group protest, such as Tahir Square or Occupy Wall Street, serves as a kind of communal bodily signification. Of course, her point is not to address how people come together in a public theater, where the cast arrives daily for salaried jobs and the audience plunks down cold cash for a fun night out. Yet something else meaningful can occur in assembly within the theater. Theatrical performances can take on the discursive power of political assembly that Butler defines, signifying “in excess of what is said,” bringing actors and audience together with potentially political valence. Butler helps us understand the stakes of theatrical performance and public assembly and why it is important to examineEsther, the Royal Jewessbeyond recovering a neglected author, though that too is part of my object.

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Section: Purim Plays and The London Theatermentioning

confidence: 99%

Melodrama,Purimspiel, and Jewish Emancipation

Weltman¹

2019

Victorian Literature and Culture

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“…The feeling that anything to do with the theatre must be immoral unless it was educational was very deeply engrained in the colonies and even after this time reassurances were still necessary. Fifteen years earlier British Theatres had certainly fallen on evil days and ways but now, with Queen Victoria herself a faithful patron and regular playgoer, 6 times were changing. The London theatre had become fashionable.…”

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Irish Playwrights and the Dunedin Stage in 1862: Theatre Patrons Performing Civility

Kuch¹

2013

JNZS

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Irish Plays on the Dunedin Stage in 1862 A first-rate actor of Irish characters is indispensible on a London Stage. Cumberland's British Theatre, 1828. Between 1862 and 1869 there were some 300 performances of Irish plays in Dunedin's theatres. Kuch, Irish Society for Theatre Research, 2010. A mere 14 years after it was founded by Presbyterians as a distinctly Scottish city that was-in the world but not of the world,‖ Dunedin possessed two splendid theatres that during their first decade of operation staged some 300 performances of Irish plays and plays by Irish playwrights. How did this happen? Why Irish plays? Why Irish playwrights? And why were two theatres, with capacities of 1500 and 1330 persons, opened in Dunedin a year before Otago Boys High School was founded, five years before the foundations of First Church were laid, and seven years before the Provincial Council turned its attentions to establishing a University? 1 Initially, it was the theatres that were a source of civic pride. According to an 1862 issue of the Otago Witness, Dunedin possessed-two of the handsomest theatres in the Australian colonies.‖ 2 While there are doubtless many explanations for this rush to build theatres, the short answer is that the city was overtaken by the very world it had sought to isolate itself from. But this is an answer that invites explanation. First, it has to do with what was on offer on stage. It has been well established by theatre historians that Irish playwrights (particularly Dion Boucicault) and Irish plays (particularly comedy and melodrama) dominated the nineteenth-century stage-whether in Dublin or London or New York. 3 It is also well known that, by the time the Theatre Royal and The Princess Theatre were opened in Dunedin, the-legitimate drama‖ 4 had become widely if not firmly established as the secular vehicle for social and cultural improvement. For example, the editor of the Daily Southern Cross assured his Auckland readers on 8 July 1856:-Believing, as we do, that the drama in good hands, has an elevating, rather than a demoralizing tendency-that it is calculated to assist the moral and mental development of a community;believing, also, that, a taste for dramatic entertainments having already been acquired, the people of Auckland would feel a deprivation, were the Theatre to be finally closed.‖ 5 And this was a view that was widely held, particularly in the colonies, where, by the mid-nineteenth century, building and supporting a magnificent theatre for the-rational enjoyment‖ of-legitimate drama‖ was considered a mark of civic maturity. From the latter half of the nineteenth century, colonial theatre-going became a way of consuming and performing metropolitan culture. Progress in communication and in travel meant that plays which had been successful in London and New York could, within a few months of opening, be enjoyed by audiences in Sydney, Melbourne, Dunedin and Auckland. Between the arrival of Dunedin's first settlers in 1848 and the opening of its theatres in 1862, Royal patronage, embourg...

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Shakespeare the Victorian

Schoch¹

2007

A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance

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Queen Victoria and the Theatre of her Age

Cited by 48 publications

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Melodrama,Purimspiel, and Jewish Emancipation

Melodrama,Purimspiel, and Jewish Emancipation

Irish Playwrights and the Dunedin Stage in 1862: Theatre Patrons Performing Civility

Shakespeare the Victorian

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