Element contents
A Performance History of The Fair Penitent
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2024
Summary
Theatre is the most ephemeral of art forms. It is a truism that the ephemeral performance text is divorced from the static published play text. This Element is of the eighteenth-century performance history of The Fair Penitent demonstrates the interrelation of print and performance and models how readers can recover elements of performance through close attention to text. Traces of performance adhere to the mediascape in playbills and puffs, reviews and accounts. The printed text also preserves traces of performance in notation and illustration. By analysing traces found in performance trends, casting decisions, publication histories and repertory intertexts, this Element recovers how The Fair Penitent was interpreted at different points in the century and explains how a play that bombed in its first season could become a repertory staple.
Keywords
- Type
- Element
- Information
- Online ISBN: 9781009351850Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication: 21 March 2024
References
The Author of Helen of Glenross [attrib. H. Martin], 1802. Remarks on Mr. John Kemble’s Performance of Hamlet and Richard the Third. London: G. and J. Robinson.Google Scholar
The Author of Helen of Glenross 1797. Ann Brunton Merry as Calista in “The Fair Penitent”. London: J. Bell.Google Scholar
Anon., 1740. Advertisements and Notices. London Daily Post and General Advertiser, 10 November, p. 2.Google Scholar
Anon., 1741. Advertisements and Notices. London Daily Post and General Advertiser, 2 December, p. 2.Google Scholar
Anon., 1751. A Guide to the Stage: or, Select Instructions and Precedents from the Best Authorities towards Forming a Polite Audience; with Some Account of the Players &c. London: D. Job.Google Scholar
Anon., 1767. A Letter from the Rope-Dancing Monkey in the Hay-Market, to the Acting Monkey of Drury-Lane, on the Earl of Warwick. London: J. Pridden.Google Scholar
Anon., 1776–8. Bell’s British Theatre: Consisting of the Most Esteemed English Plays. London: J. Bell.Google Scholar
Anon., 1776–7. New English Theatre: Containing the Most Valuable Plays Which Have Been Acted on the London Stage. London: J. Rivington.Google Scholar
Anon., 1791. Remarks on the Fair Penitent. In: The Fair Penitent: A Tragedy, Adapted for Theatrical Representation. Regulated from the Prompt-Books. London: John Bell, p. iii.Google Scholar
Avery, E. L., ed., 1960. The London Stage 1660–1800. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.Google Scholar
Brooks, H. E., 2014. Actresses, Gender and the Eighteenth-Century Stage. Basingstoke: Palgrave.Google Scholar
Burnim, K. & Highfill, P., 1998. John Bell: Patron of British Theatrical Portraiture. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.Google Scholar
Carlson, M., 2001. The Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Charke, C., 1755. Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke. London: W. Reeve, A. Dodd, and E. Cook.Google Scholar
Chetwood, W. R., 1749. A General History of the Stage …. With the Memoirs of Most of the Principal Performers that Have Appeared on the English and Irish Stage for These Last Fifty Years. London: W. Owen.Google Scholar
Cibber, C., 1740. An Apology for the Life of Mr Colley Cibber. 2nd ed. London: W. Lewis.Google Scholar
Cibber, C. & and Shakespeare, W., 1700. The Tragical History of King Richard III. London: B. Lintott.Google Scholar
Cumberland, R., 1786. The Observer: Being a Collection of Moral, Literary and Familiar Essays. London: C. Dilly.Google Scholar
Cumberland, R., 1817. Critique of the Fair Penitent. In: Cumberland, R., ed., British Drama, a Collection of the Most Esteemed Dramatic Productions, with Biography of the Respective Authors; and a Critique on Each Play. London: C. Cooke, pp. x–xiii.Google Scholar
Davies, T., 1780. Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, Esq.: Interspersed with Characters and Anecdotes of His Theatrical Contemporaries. London: T. Davies.Google Scholar
Downes, J., 1708. Roscius Anglicanus, or An Historical Review of the Stage … from 1660 to 1706. London: s.n.Google Scholar
Engel, L., ed., 2011. Sarah Siddons’s Diva Celebrity. In: Fashioning Celebrity. Columbus: Ohio University Press, pp. 26–58 .Google Scholar
Engel, L., 2016. Stage Beauties: Actresses and Celebrity Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century. Literature Compass, 13(12), pp. 749–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedman-Romell, B. H., 1995. Breaking the Code: Towards a Reception Theory of Theatrical Cross-Dressing in Eighteenth-Century London. Theatre Journal, 47(4), pp. 459–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Genest, J., 1832. Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830. Bath: H. E. Carrington.Google Scholar
Gilbert Austin, R., 1806. Chironomia; or, a Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery. London: T. Cadell.Google Scholar
Gollapudi, A., 2012. Selling Celebrity: Actors’ Portraits in Bell’s Shakespeare. Eighteenth Century Life, 36(1), pp. 54–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halsband, R., 1983. Stage Drama as a Source for Pictorial and Plastic Arts. In: Kenny, S. S., ed., British Theatre and Other Arts, 1660–1800. London: Associated University Presses, pp. 149–70.Google Scholar
Hernandez, A., 2019. The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy: Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Highfill, P. H. J., Burnim, K. A. & Langhans, E. A. eds., 1973–93. Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.Google Scholar
Inchbald, E., ed., 1806. Remarks on The Fair Penitent. In: The Fair Penitent. London: Longman, pp. 3–6.Google Scholar
Johnson, S., 1817. Life of Rowe. In: Cumberland, R., ed., British Drama. London: C. Cooke, pp. v–xi.Google Scholar
Jones, R., 2013. Competition and Community: Mary Tickell and the Management of Sheridan’s Drury Lane. Theatre Survey, 54(2), pp. 187–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mayes, I., 1981. John Bell, The British Theatre, and Samuel de Wilde. Apollo, 113, pp. 100–3.Google Scholar
McGirr, E., 2014. ‘Inimitable Sensibility’: Susannah Cibber’s Performance of Maternity. In: Engel, L. & McGirr, E., eds., Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660–1830. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, pp. 63–79.Google Scholar
McGirr, E., 2016a. Authorial Performances: Actress, Author, Critic. In: Batchelor, J. & Dow, G., eds., Women’s Writing, 1660–1830: Feminisms and Futures. London: Palgrave, pp. 97–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McGirr, E., 2018. New Lines: Mary Ann Yates, The Orphan of China, and the New She-tragedy. ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830, 8(2), p. Article 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Neville, S., 1950. The Diary of Sylas Neville 1767–1788. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Noggle, J., 2020. Unfelt: The Language of Affect in the British Enlightenment. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, F., 2010. Rival Queens: Actresses: Performance and the Eighteenth-Century British Theatre. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pascoe, J., 2013. Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Potter, J., ed., 1772. Theatrical Review: or, New Companion to the Play House … Calculated for the Entertainment and Instruction of Every Lover of Theatrical Amusements. London: S. Crowder.Google Scholar
Ritchie, L., 2012. The Spouters’ Revenge: Apprentice Actors and the Imitation of London’s Theatrical Celebrities. Eighteenth Century, 53(1), pp. 41–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roach, J., 1806. John Brunton as Altamont and Miss Smith as Calista in “The Fair Penitent”, London: J. Roach.Google Scholar
Roach, J., 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Rowe, N., 1777. The Fair Penitent, A tragedy. As It Is Acted at the Theatres-Royal in Drury-Lane and Covent-Garden London. London: J. Wenman.Google Scholar
Rowe, N., 1806. The Fair Penitent: A Tragedy in Five Acts …. with Remarks by Mrs Inchbald. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Rubery, A., 2021. ‘Thus Let Me Wipe Dishonour from My Name’: Peg Woffington as Lothario in the Fair Penitent. Theatre Notebook, 75(2), pp. 76–93.Google Scholar
Russell, C., 2004. Merry, Robert (1755–1798), Poet. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.Google Scholar
Stern, T., 2012. Shakespeare in Drama. In: Ritchie, F. & P. & Sabor, , eds., Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 141–60.Google Scholar
West, S., 1991. The Image of the Actor: Verbal and Visual Representation in the Age of Garrick and Kemble. London: St Martins.Google Scholar
Whalley, T. S., 1863. Thomas Whalley’s Journals and Correspondence. London: R. Bentley.Google Scholar
Wilson, B., 2012. A Race of Female Patriots: Women and Public Spirit on the British Stage, 1688–1745. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.Google Scholar