Mary Morein (fl. 1707): Drury Lane Actress and Fair Performer

1991 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-30
Author(s):  
Cheryl Wanko
Keyword(s):  
Employment Conditions ◽  
Biographical Dictionary ◽  
History Of ◽  
Court Of Chancery ◽  
Drury Lane ◽  
London Stage

In 1708 an actress named Mary Morein filed a bill of complaint in the Court of Chancery against William Pinkethman. Morein's name appears nowhere in The London Stage, and there is no entry for her in the Biographical Dictionary. Other than the lawsuit testimony by and against her, I am aware of no evidence about her. Thus the lawsuit is of interest because it documents the existence of an otherwise unknown performer at a stormy time in the history of the London theatre. Perhaps more important, however, it contains significant factual evidence about the employment conditions of minor actresses, and gives specific figures for what such a person might earn by performing at the Fairs.

Shakespeare in Tottenham-Street: An “Aesthetic” Merchant of Venice

1975 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Kleb
Keyword(s):  
Stage Management ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Financial Failure ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
History Of ◽  
Poetic Drama ◽  
Drury Lane ◽  
London Stage ◽  
The Way

The 1860s and 1870s are generally considered a hiatus in the history of Shakespearean production on the London stage. Accounts of the period usually move quickly from Charles Kean's retirement in 1859 (or the end of Samuel Phelps' management of suburban Sadler's Wells in 1862) to the beginning of Henry Irving's regime at the Lyceum in 1879—acknowledging the Phelps-Chatterton collaboration at Drury Lane as worthy, but hardly remarkable, and mentioning in passing such isolated events as Fechter's new Hamlet in 1861. Nevertheless, while no management comparable to Kean's or Phelps's, devoted principally to poetic drama, appeared during this time, there were occasional Shakespearean productions of exceptional interest. One such was the Bancrofts' version of The Merchant of Venice, which opened at the Prince of Wales's Theatre in out-of-the-way Tottenham-street on 17 April 1875. It ran for only thirty-six performances and lost the famous actormanager team £3,000. Despite its financial failure, however, the production attracted considerable critical attention at the time, much of it favorable, and it has since gained an honorable place in stage history. Beerbohm-Tree, for example, in an address to the Oxford Union Debating Society in 1900, called it “the first production in which the modern spirit of stage management asserted itself.”

The lives of three rhinoceroses exhibited in London 1790–1814

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kees Rookmaaker ◽  
John Gannon ◽  
Jim Monson
Keyword(s):  
Rhinoceros Unicornis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Drury Lane

The history of three living Indian rhinoceroses (Rhinoceros unicornis) exhibited at the Exeter ’Change and the adjoining Lyceum on the Strand in London is detailed. The animals were owned by three successive proprietors of the menagerie: Thomas Clark, Gilbert Pidcock and Stephen Polito. Clark's rhinoceros arrived on 5 June 1790 as a two-year-old from India, largely exhibited at the Lyceum, but shown at Windsor and Ascot races in June 1793 and elsewhere in England until his death in Cosham near Portsmouth (not Corsham) in July 1793. The skin was mounted, possibly bought by William Bullock and subsequently by the Royal Museum in Edinburgh. A painting by George Stubbs should show this animal, but a discrepancy in age and stature is discussed. Pidcock's rhinoceros was acquired in 1799, dying early in 1800 in Drury Lane, after acquisition by an agent of the German Emperor, Francis II. He is shown on token half-pennies issued by Pidcock, and sketched by artist Samuel Howitt. Polito's rhinoceros arrived in July 1810, toured England in 1811, and was sold to the continent in October 1814. Howitt incorporated this animal into his artwork.

‘Of Neuter Gender, tho’ of Irish growth’: Charles Churchill's Fribble

2013 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-130
Author(s):  
Declan William Kavanagh
Keyword(s):  
Direct Response ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Literary Source ◽  
David Garrick ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Identity ◽  
Eighth Edition ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Drury Lane ◽  
Fitzpatrick Functions

This essay argues that the work of a lesser-known mid-eighteenth-century satirist Charles Churchill (1731–1764) provides a rich literary source for queer historical considerations of the conflation of xenophobia with effeminophobia in colonial imaginings of Ireland. This article analyzes Churchill's verse-satire The Rosciad (1761) through a queer lens in order to reengage the complex history of queer figurations of Ireland and the Irish within the British popular imagination. In the eighth edition of The Rosciad – a popular and controversial survey of London's contemporary players – Churchill portrays the Irish actor Thady Fitzpatrick as an effeminate fribble, before championing the manly acting abilities of the English actor David Garrick. The phobic attack on Fitzpatrick in The Rosciad is a direct response to Fitzpatrick's involvement in the ‘Fitzgiggo’ riots of January 1763 at the Drury Lane and Covent-Garden theatres. While Churchill's lampooning of the actor recalls Garrick's earlier satirizing of Fitzpatrick as a fribble in The Fribbleriad (1741) and Miss in her Teens (1747), The Rosciad is unique in its explicit conflation of androgyny with ethnicity through Irish classification. The portraiture of Fitzpatrick functions, alongside interrelated axes of ethnicity, class and gender, to prohibit access to a ‘normative’ middle-class English identity, figured through the ‘manly’ theatrical sensibility of the poem's hero, Garrick. Moreover, in celebrating a ‘Truly British Age’, the poem privileges English female players, in essentialist and curiously de-eroticized terms, as ‘natural’ though flawed performers. By analyzing Churchill's phobic juxtaposition of Garrick and the female players against the Irish fribble, this article evinces how mid-century discourses of effeminacy were also instrumental in enforcing racial taxonomies.

Restoration Theatre and the Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Transition ◽  
Strong Affinity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Restoration Theatre ◽  
Restoration Comedy ◽  
London Stage

This chapter explores the broad cultural transition from drama to novel during the Restoration period, which triggered one of the most productive periods in the history of the London stage. However, when it comes to the eighteenth century proper, the novel is more likely to be identified as the century's most significant and appealing popular genre. The chapter considers why the novel has largely superseded drama as the literary form to which ambitious and imaginative literary types without a strong affinity for verse writing would by default have turned their attention and energies by the middle of the eighteenth century. Something important may have been lost in the broad cultural transition from drama to novel. This chapter, however, contends that many things were preserved: that the novel was able to absorb many of the functions and techniques not just of Restoration comedy but of the theatre more generally.

The Virtual Infernal: Philippe de Loutherbourg, William Beckford and the Spectacle of the Sublime

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain McCalman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Special Significance ◽  
Virtual Reality Technology ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
William Beckford ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Drury Lane

Abstract In the autumn of 1781, shortly after being elected to the British Academy of Art as a landscape painter, Alsatian-born artist Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg was hired by the wealthy young aesthete William Beckford to prepare a private birthday spectacle at his mansion in Wiltshire. De Loutherbourg, who was also chief scenographer at Drury Lane theatre and the inventor of a recent commercial “moving picture” entertainment called the Eidophusikon, promised to produce “a mysterious something that the eye has not seen nor the heart conceived.” Beckford wanted an Oriental spectacle that would completely ravish the senses of his guests, not least so that he could enjoy a sexual tryst with a thirteen year old boy, William Courtenay, and Louisa Beckford, his own cousin’s wife. The resulting three day party and spectacle staged over Christmas 1781 became one of the scandals of the day, and ultimately forced William Beckford into decades of exile in Europe to escape accusations of sodomy. However, this Oriental spectacle also had a special significance for the history of Romantic aesthetics and modern-day cinema. Loutherbourg and Beckford’s collaboration provided the inspiration for William to write his scintillating Gothic novel, Vathek, and impelled Philippe himself into revising his moving-picture program in dramatically new ways. Ultimately this saturnalian party of Christmas 1781 constituted a pioneering experiment in applying the aesthetic of the sublime to virtual reality technology. It also led Loutherbourg to anticipate the famous nineteenth-century “Phantasmagoria” of French showman, Gaspard Robertson, by producing in 1782 a miniature Gothic movie scene based on the Pandemonium episode in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

1. Foundations

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-32
Author(s):  
Gary Watt
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Special Concern ◽  
Trust Property ◽  
Court Of Chancery ◽  
Conceptual Foundations ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Historical Origins

This chapter focuses on the historical and conceptual foundations of trusts and equity, first examining the history of the relationship between law and equity, including the historical origins of the trust. It then explains the idea of equity and how it is intertwined with the common law, and compares the trust with concepts such as gifts and contracts. The chapter shows that the trust arose in response to equity’s special concern to ensure that legal rights are not used in bad conscience, but later developed into a sophisticated institution governed by established rules. It looks at the reform of the Court of Chancery and considers trust property, equitable rights under a trust, separation of legal and equitable title, and the paradox of property and obligation.

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