Rise of the Monkey Tribe: Simian Impersonation in the British Theatre

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 357-373
Author(s):  
Bernard Ince

In this article Bernard Ince surveys and critically examines for the first time the bizarre phenomenon known as the ‘Monkey Drama’ in the British theatre. A genre of early origin, pre-dating the age of Darwinism, it is to be found in all areas of entertainment, especially during the nineteenth century when the quintessential characteristics of simian mimicry were established. Commonly juxtaposed with the legitimate drama in afterpieces, ‘man-monkey’ spectacles not only blurred conventional man–beast boundaries, but also challenged prevailing conceptions of theatrical legitimacy. The genre attracted myriad performers of varied origins and specialisms, whose ability to mimic simian characteristics stemmed not only from agility and flexibility, but also from careful study of the ‘monkey tribe’ itself. While some familiar names figure among the roll-call of simian impersonators, many artists are little known. Although difficult to quantify precisely, the genre had reached its zenith before the middle of the nineteenth century, the 1820s through the 1840s being a significant formative period. After mid-century, popularity was maintained, but to a lesser degree, largely through pantomime, only to decline significantly after 1900. In a broader context, the study furnishes new material for current interdisciplinary debates regarding the relationship between performance, evolution and visual culture in the Victorian period. Bernard Ince is an independent theatre historian who has contributed earlier studies of the Victorian and Edwardian theatre to New Theatre Quarterly.

Author(s):  
Clare Haynes

The relationship between art and Anglicanism had many aspects. The chapter begins with a very brief exploration of clerical portraiture, religious satire, Bible illustration, and topographical prints. The rest is dedicated to the visual culture of the church interior. It surveys the use of ornament on fittings, including fonts and pulpits, before exploring the expanding repertoire for painting at the altar. The extent to which paintings of Moses and Aaron, the apostles, and subjects narrating the life of Christ were admitted to Anglican churches during the period may surprise. Over a thousand examples have been identified. Although many of them were lost during nineteenth-century campaigns of ‘restoration’, sufficient were recorded or survive to recover a just sense of the vivid visual culture of eighteenth-century Anglicanism. The chapter also offers some observations about the largely tacit system of visual decorum that operated to guard the Church from the dangers of idolatry.


Zootaxa ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 3060 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
JESÚS GÓMEZ-ZURITA

The Chrysomelidae of New Caledonia are rich and unique, but insufficiently characterized. New species are being rapidly described, sometimes without careful study of the earlier taxonomic research. Karl M. Heller (Dresden, Germany) described in 1916 seven species of Eumolpinae which are redescribed here to distinguish them from other known species and to provide new information about sexual dimorphism and genitalic structures. New material is used to redefine their distribution. The males of Dematochroma lepros (Heller, 1916) and D. culminicola (Heller, 1916), and the female of D. difficilis (Heller, 1916) are described for the first time. Male and female genitalia are first described for seven and five species, respectively. D. difficilis (Heller, 1916) stat. rev., is revalidated from previous synonymy with D. terastiomerus (Heller, 1916). Lectotypes are designated for D. humboldtiana and D. terastiomerus.


2006 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-372
Author(s):  
NICHOLAS CANNY

This Focus addresses the relationship between historians and the societies they serve, particularly since the later nineteenth century when, for the first time, historians began to define themselves as a distinct professional group. One of the conclusions that emerges from the four case studies pursued here is that the independence of judgement which professionalism implies, founders the moment it is perceived by a wider public that historians are no longer providing them with the moral guidance they expect from those who have studied their pasts. It is also shown that the challenges and responses did not prove identical in any two sets of circumstances. This introduction also makes reference to general challenges to which individual contributors do not necessarily refer, but which have impacted on the work and independence of all historians.Historians, both now and in the past, have been aware that what they write is, of necessity, influenced by their personal circumstances as also by their political and social preferences. Perhaps out of recognition of this, some writers of history in all centuries, and possibly from every culture, have celebrated their ability to shape policy in the present by citing experiences from past times. Then, in the nineteenth century, as governments in the west established Public Record Offices, National Archives and National Libraries, it came to be accepted in that part of the world that historians were professionals who, having undertaken a prescribed course of training, were uniquely equipped to assess how politicians and diplomats in the past had conducted their business.


Author(s):  
Carl Phelpstead

The British reading public discovered the rich corpus of medieval Icelandic literature for the first time during the ‘long nineteenth century’. This chapter describes the ways in which British readers became aware of Old Norse-Icelandic literature through translations into English and through English-language editions of texts in the original language. Beginning with pioneering work of the pre-Victorian period, the chapter focuses on Victorian translators of medieval Icelandic literature (especially G. W. Dasent, William Morris, Sabine Baring-Gould, and W. G. Collingwood), as well as the collaborative editions and translations of Guðbrandur Vigfússon with Dasent or F. York Powell. The chapter shows that the dissemination of Icelandic sources was often linked with the discovery of Iceland as a travel destination or involved collaborating with Icelandic scholars resident in Britain. The conclusion briefly considers the legacy and influence of Victorian translators.


Author(s):  
Mary Beard ◽  
Christopher Stray

This chapter focuses on the foundation and early history of the British School at Athens. It shows how the story of such foreign institutes intersects with many of the key issues in the rethinking of the Classics in the late Victorian period. These issues involve: the role of archaeology within the study of Classics, how archaeology was to be defined and bounded, and the relationship between the study of Classics and the modern lands of Greece and Italy, particularly in the light of growing middle class tourism and its infrastructures.


Author(s):  
Katherine Newey

The theatre was a significant institution of public life in the nineteenth century, and an important source of aesthetic innovation and entrepreneurial energy in Victorian culture. The theatre offers an important perspective on Victorian affect and attitudes to the real. However, drama, theatre, and performance have been overlooked in subsequent histories of Victorian public life and culture, in part because of the theatre’s uncomfortable position between high art and popular culture. Despite its popularity, Victorian attitudes towards the theatre and drama were ambivalent, oscillating between huge enjoyment of spectacle, farce, melodrama, and pantomime, and concern over the moral standards and commercial status of the theatre. For scholars of the Victorian period, the Victorian theatre has a rich archive not limited to the dramatic text, and indicative of the interconnections between performance, dramatic literature, and visual culture.


2011 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 139-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gazi Islam ◽  
Sarah E. S. Zilenovsky

This note examines the relationship between affirmative action (AA) program perceptions and women’s self-ascribed capacity and desire to become leaders. We propose that women who believe that their organization implements a program of preferential selection toward women will experience negative psychological effects leading to lowered self-expectations for leadership, but that this effect will be moderated by their justice perceptions of AA programs. We test this proposition empirically for the first time with a Latin American female sample. Among Brazilian women managers, desire but not self-ascribed capacity to lead was reduced when they believed an AA policy was in place. Both desire’s and capacity’s relationships with belief in an AA policy were moderated by justice perceptions.


2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Funk

In the history of botany, Adam Zalužanský (d. 1613), a Bohemian physician, apothecary, botanist and professor at the University of Prague, is a little-known personality. Linnaeus's first biographers, for example, only knew Zalužanský from hearsay and suspected he was a native of Poland. This ignorance still pervades botanical history. Zalužanský is mentioned only peripherally or not at all. As late as the nineteenth century, a researcher would be unaware that Zalužanský’s main work Methodi herbariae libri tres actually existed in two editions from two different publishers (1592, Prague; 1604, Frankfurt). This paper introduces the life and work of Zalužanský. Special attention is paid to the chapter “De sexu plantarum” of Zalužanský’s Methodus, in which, more than one hundred years before the well-known De sexu plantarum epistola of R. J. Camerarius, the sexuality of plants is suggested. Additionally, for the first time, an English translation of Zalužanský’s chapter on plant sexuality is provided.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.


Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-215
Author(s):  
Alex Broadhead

In 2009, Damian Walford Davies called for a counterfactual turn in Romantic studies, a move reflective of a wider growth of critical interest in the relationship between Romanticism and counterfactual historiography. In contrast to these more recent developments, the lives of the Romantics have provided a consistent source of speculation for authors of popular alternate history since the nineteenth century. Yet the aims of alternate history as a genre differ markedly from those of its more scholarly cousin, counterfactual historiography. How, then, might such works fit in to the proposed counterfactual turn? This article makes a case for the critical as well as the creative value of alternate histories featuring the Romantics. By exploring how these narratives differ from works of counterfactual historiography, it seeks to explain why the Romantics continue to inspire authors of alternate history and to illuminate the forking paths that Davies's counterfactual turn might take.


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