The Theatrical R. L. S.: an Evaluation of the Theatrical Aspects of Robert Louis Stevenson

<p>Within a format of Shakespeare's seven ages of man, the seven stages of Robert Louis Stevenson are presented here as an inaugural investigation of his theatricality. The Introduction deals with this theatricality generally and is concerned, in its two parts, with the more technical elements of theatricality as they relate to the principles of dramatic theory. Stage One is a curtailed family history as a general background to his development and deals with his introduction to Mr Skelt's Toy Theatre. Consideration is also given in Section 3 to his first juvenile dramatic writing. Stage Two tells of his beginning to 'act a part' while at Edinburgh University. This stage also covers the amateur theatricals and the friendships with Fleeming Jenkin, Mrs Sitwell and Sidney Colvin. Stage Three introduces William Ernest Henley. With Stevenson he writes Deacon Brodie for Henry Irving. Stevenson courts and marries Mrs Osbourne while the playwriting goes on by correspondence. The London performance of Deacon Brodie is discussed and its American production with Edward J. Henley. Stage Four covers 1884 - the playwriting year at Bournemouth. Beau Austin and Admiral Guinea are discussed with comment and analysis offered under separate headings. The adaptation of Macaire is considered in relation to Beerbohm Tree. The Hanging Judge and the meeting with Thomas Hardy are also considered. Then follow general remarks about all the plays with special reference to Arthur Pinero's 1903 lecture on Robert Louis Stevenson as Dramatist. Stage Five is a consideration of Early Victorian theatre and its influence on the Henley-Stevenson partnership. This Stage features the final years of the two Henleys and includes a consideration of the Henley review of Balfour's official biography of Stevenson. Stage Six shows us Stevenson as the Scotch Tusitala, the Patriarch of Vailiama, reading his work aloud from the verandah. It is the final performance and in four short sections we see him rise only to die. Stage Seven is devoted entirely to adaptations of Stevensonia by other writers for all performing media to date. A comprehensive survey of R.L.S. and the drama is an area of Stevenson scholarship which has been either neglected or ill-considered. It is the intention of this study to offer a new focus to this dimension of his literary oeuvre and thus encourage a fresh approach to the Stevenson plays as a whole. It also offers an opportunity to consider his relationship with W.E. Henley and Mrs F.V. Stevenson, his collaborators in the five finished playscripts. In doing so, it puts into perspective the place of the plays in Victorian dramaturgy. Biographical facts and quotations from the Works are used where they may reflect his lifelong preoccupation with the theatre and where they may argue, by analysis or illustration, the theatrical potential evident, not only in the plays, but in every element of his personality. This is the man of theatre as theatrical man. A complete list of adaptations of his work in all the performing media and also selected reviews of his plays are added in support of the conclusion which is, sadly, that in considering R.L.S. as dramatist - one can only regret the loss to the theatre of what might have been...</p>

The Theatrical R. L. S.: an Evaluation of the Theatrical Aspects of Robert Louis Stevenson

<p>Within a format of Shakespeare's seven ages of man, the seven stages of Robert Louis Stevenson are presented here as an inaugural investigation of his theatricality. The Introduction deals with this theatricality generally and is concerned, in its two parts, with the more technical elements of theatricality as they relate to the principles of dramatic theory. Stage One is a curtailed family history as a general background to his development and deals with his introduction to Mr Skelt's Toy Theatre. Consideration is also given in Section 3 to his first juvenile dramatic writing. Stage Two tells of his beginning to 'act a part' while at Edinburgh University. This stage also covers the amateur theatricals and the friendships with Fleeming Jenkin, Mrs Sitwell and Sidney Colvin. Stage Three introduces William Ernest Henley. With Stevenson he writes Deacon Brodie for Henry Irving. Stevenson courts and marries Mrs Osbourne while the playwriting goes on by correspondence. The London performance of Deacon Brodie is discussed and its American production with Edward J. Henley. Stage Four covers 1884 - the playwriting year at Bournemouth. Beau Austin and Admiral Guinea are discussed with comment and analysis offered under separate headings. The adaptation of Macaire is considered in relation to Beerbohm Tree. The Hanging Judge and the meeting with Thomas Hardy are also considered. Then follow general remarks about all the plays with special reference to Arthur Pinero's 1903 lecture on Robert Louis Stevenson as Dramatist. Stage Five is a consideration of Early Victorian theatre and its influence on the Henley-Stevenson partnership. This Stage features the final years of the two Henleys and includes a consideration of the Henley review of Balfour's official biography of Stevenson. Stage Six shows us Stevenson as the Scotch Tusitala, the Patriarch of Vailiama, reading his work aloud from the verandah. It is the final performance and in four short sections we see him rise only to die. Stage Seven is devoted entirely to adaptations of Stevensonia by other writers for all performing media to date. A comprehensive survey of R.L.S. and the drama is an area of Stevenson scholarship which has been either neglected or ill-considered. It is the intention of this study to offer a new focus to this dimension of his literary oeuvre and thus encourage a fresh approach to the Stevenson plays as a whole. It also offers an opportunity to consider his relationship with W.E. Henley and Mrs F.V. Stevenson, his collaborators in the five finished playscripts. In doing so, it puts into perspective the place of the plays in Victorian dramaturgy. Biographical facts and quotations from the Works are used where they may reflect his lifelong preoccupation with the theatre and where they may argue, by analysis or illustration, the theatrical potential evident, not only in the plays, but in every element of his personality. This is the man of theatre as theatrical man. A complete list of adaptations of his work in all the performing media and also selected reviews of his plays are added in support of the conclusion which is, sadly, that in considering R.L.S. as dramatist - one can only regret the loss to the theatre of what might have been...</p>

“A Place Where It Was Acceptable To Be Unacceptable”: Twenty-First-Century Girls Encounter Nineteenth-Century Girls Through Amateur Theatricals and Dance

This self-reflexive article about girl-centered, performance-based historiography uses Carole Lynne D’Arcangelis’s cautions about self-reflexive research writing and Caroline Caron’s concerns about girl studies as activist research focused on social change to explore how the presence of girls and listening to girls shaped the knowledge that was created. By staging encounters between living 21st-century girls and 19th-century girls, the process reveals possibilities about the lives of girls in both eras. Encounters drew attention to issues concerning power, gender, agency, present-mindedness, emotion work, embodiment, and racialized identities. The article demonstrates how girls’ actions and insights complicated understandings about 19th-century girlhoods and at-home theatricals and, simultaneously, exposed power structures influencing their lives today and opportunities to work within or subvert them. Working through concepts like “radical reflexivity” (D’Arcangelis), “theatrical ethic of inappropriation” (Michelle Liu Carriger), “the wince” (Stephen Johnson), and the “foolish witness” (Julie Salverson), the article describes research pivot points and argues that ways of listening to girls alters how meaning is made.

Burney: Writing Life and Fiction

This chapter traces the interfaces between Frances Burney’s use of embodied language in her novels and her life-writing in journals and diaries. It considers how Burney inhabits a world of letters through her familiarity with poetry and plays (performed in amateur theatricals) and how this surfaces, in particular in her use of free indirect discourse, both in her life-writing and in her novels. Burney’s practice` of writing and editing is investigated through an analysis of the different stages of composition in the manuscripts for her tragedies. Burney’s reflection of conduct book writing and the emergent form of the Bildungsroman are related to how her encounter with Madame de Genlis features in her life-writing and in Camilla. Across life-writing and fiction, Burney keeps renegotiating the embodied style developed throughout the eighteenth century.

Teaching "the young idea how to shoot"

"The Burney family stood at the centre of cultural life of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, and excelled in several forms of artistic expression, especially in writing. Among the manuscripts preserved in the family archive are some collections of juvenilia produced by the children of Charles Rousseau and Esther Burney, Frances Burney’s elder sister. These literary projects helped the young authors to build confidence in their writing, refine their craft, and find a voice. This paper examines two: the first is an early example of a family-produced magazine that is patterned after one of the first-ever periodicals aimed at children. The second collection is a series of anthologies containing poems, plays, and stories written by Sophia Elizabeth Burney and dedicated to her novelist aunt. The plays seem designed to be performed in amateur theatricals; the stories contain images of female suffering, sharp satire on social pretentions, and a raucous (even violent) sense of humour that evoke the novels of Frances Burney. The newly discovered manuscripts reflect an environment that evidently encouraged creative play, self-expression, and artistic production. The study of these juvenile works yield insight into the creative world of the Burneys and, more generally, into the world of the child reader and writer in late eighteenth-century England.

Amateur Theatricals and the Dramatic Marketplace: Lacy’s and French’s Acting Editions of Plays

Historically an exclusive, upper-class entertainment, private theatricals became a widespread, primarily middle-class pastime in the course of the nineteenth century. To the emerging bourgeoisie, play-acting represented an important way to negotiate class identity by emulating the habits of social elites. The foremost raw materials for private stagings of drama were the acting editions of plays published most prolifically in the second half of the century by T. H. Lacy and Samuel French, consecutively. This paper examines Lacy’s and French’s publication and marketing strategies by placing side by side guide literature and play series issued by them, to illuminate the impact these strategies had on the dramatic marketplace, and the way that Lacy, in particular, engaged social anxieties about the theatre in establishing his business concept. It then traces the changing composition of Lacy’s and French’s Acting Editions to highlight a significant increase in plays by women from the 1880s onwards. I argue that this increase expresses the evolution of amateur theatricals into a distinctly middle-class social practice because the female dramatists that French’s favoured, produced work congruent with bourgeois interest in morally sound, domestic topics and educational value, and recommended themselves through the respectable public personas they created for themselves.

THE NAUTICAL MELODRAMA OFMARY BARTON

In hisMemoirs of anUnfortunate Son of Thespis(1818), the actor Edward Cape Everard recalled a performance of Sheridan'sSchool for Scandalthat was interrupted in its third act by a rowdy bunch of sailors. At the sight of Charles Surface drinking, the sailors allegedly left the auditorium, entered the stage, and accosted the actor playing Charles, “exclaiming ‘My eyes, you're a hearty fellow! Come, my tight one, hand us a glass’” (qtd. in Russell 104). As apocryphal as the encounter seems, it is not the only account of mariners rushing the early-nineteenth century stage to join in with the drama. In her analysis of these anecdotes Gillian Russell comments that though they may have been intended to depict the sailor “as naïve and unsophisticated, unable to make the distinction between fiction and reality. . . it is not surprising that the sailor should have disregarded the rules of mimesis and the distinction between stage and auditorium” (104), for the sailor's life lent itself to, and was structured by, theatricality. Service in “the theatres of war,” or more generally in the “wooden world” of the ship, demanded strict performance of custom and ritual in the forging of social identities and relations, not least of all in the ritualistic initiation ceremonies and corporal punishments that were enacted in front of the amassed audience of the crew (Russell 139–57; see Dening). At sea and in dock sailors entertained themselves with amateur theatricals. On shore, they were keen theatre-goers, and in auditoriums and elsewhere they played up to the characteristics of the sailor in the brazen assertion of an identity that was celebrated in stories, songs, and plays, but frequently also belittled, bemoaned, and victimized, the latter particularly while the press gangs were active.