Polite Gaiety: Cultural Hierarchy and Musical Comedy, 1893-1904

2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Newbury
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The State ◽  
Henrik Ibsen ◽  
Cultural Divide ◽  
Cultural Hierarchy ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
Musical Comedy ◽  
National Theater ◽  
The Brain

In 1903, Alan Dale, the theater critic for the New York American and Journal, when contemplating the state of the American stage, came to the conclusion that “the only national theatre I can find, after severe cogitation, is that beautiful, flip, and classic commodity known as musical comedy.” Dale pointed out that musical comedy's exorbitant popularity was a recent development, emerging only in the previous five or ten years, and that his anointing of the form as the national theater would not sit well with more serious-minded devotees of drama. “Well read gentlemen with heavy minds,” wrote Dale, would prefer different sorts of productions, plays that “mere commercial managers don't want to stage and mere amusement seekers don't want to see.” Seeking an improbable bridge over this cultural divide, Dale suggested that “[Henrik] Ibsen might air his neat little views on heredity in happy verse set to music…[His] favorite subject of maggots on the brain” could feature a “chorus of pretty girls disguised as maggots.”

Archer, William (1856–1924)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Postlewait
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Henrik Ibsen ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
Hedda Gabler ◽  
British Drama ◽  
Elizabeth Robins ◽  
Master Builder ◽  
Bernard Shaw ◽  
A Doll's House

Born in Edinburgh, William Archer served as a London theater critic from 1881 to 1920. He retired from weekly reviewing when his melodrama The Green Goddess was a major success in New York (1920–1922) and London (1923–1924). His translations of Henrik Ibsen’s plays began to be published in 1888 and culminated in The Works of Henrik Ibsen (twelve volumes, 1906–1908). He translated and helped to stage the first London productions of A Doll’s House (1889), Ghosts (1891), and Rosmersholm (1892), and in close partnership with the actress Elizabeth Robins co-directed the productions of Hedda Gabler (1891), The Master Builder (1893), Little Eyolf (1896), and John Gabriel Borkman (1898). He also translated and published plays by Maurice Maeterlinck and Gerhart Hauptmann. In his advocacy for modern English drama, Archer supported the plays of Arthur Wing Pinero, Oscar Wilde, James Barrie, Harley Granville Barker, and Bernard Shaw. He led the British campaigns against stage censorship and for a national theater. In 1907 he and Barker published A National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates. In the mid-1880s he and Shaw drafted a play entitled Rhinegold that Shaw later transformed into Widowers’ Houses (1892), the play that launched his playwriting career. Between 1892 and 1924 Archer wrote well over 100 articles and reviews on Shaw and his plays. Although he criticized some of the plays, he repeatedly praised Shaw as a modern dramatic genius. Their abiding friendship thrived on their debates about all aspects of modern drama, including Shaw’s plays. In 1923 Archer published The Old Drama and the New, a historical survey of British drama with a lengthy (and still argumentative) section on Shaw.

Thoughts in Dark Times of a World Made New

2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 492-497 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Global Warming ◽  
The State ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Nuclear Catastrophe ◽  
Hiv Aids

Greetings from faraway Australia. We used to think that we were separated from the world’s problems—at once victims and beneficiaries of the tyranny of distance. As recent events have shown, we are all liked together—all are vulnerable. Vulnerable to HIV/AIDS. To global warming. To nuclear catastrophe. To terrorism.In another September, also in dangerous times, the poet WH. Auden wrote in New York a message for our times. His words have been remembered in recent days. This is what he wrote:On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.

Settler Colonialism and the Revolutionary War

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 7-35
Author(s):  
Andrea Lynn Smith
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Revolutionary War ◽  
The State ◽  
The Public ◽  
150Th Anniversary ◽  
End Point ◽  
Indian Land ◽  
Indian Relations ◽  
Major General

The centerpiece of New York State’s 150th anniversary of the Sullivan Expedition of 1779 was a pageant, the “Pageant of Decision.” Major General John Sullivan’s Revolutionary War expedition was designed to eliminate the threat posed by Iroquois allied with the British. It was a genocidal operation that involved the destruction of over forty Indian villages. This article explores the motivations and tactics of state officials as they endeavored to engage the public in this past in pageant form. The pageant was widely popular, and served the state in fixing the expedition as the end point in settler-Indian relations in New York, removing from view decades of expropriations of Indian land that occurred well after Sullivan’s troops left.

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