Product Description: A great deal of bibliographical and historical scholarship has been devoted to English drama up to 1660, but late 17th-century plays have received little such attention, and 18th-century plays hardly any at all. This ground-breaking study by two internationally renowned scholars in theater history addresses such fundamental questions as: who published plays? What was the cost of publication, the risk, and the potential profit? What did single plays cost, and what did play collections cost? What was the buying power of those prices, and who could afford to make such purchases? How much market existed for used copies and at what prices? What did playwrights earn from publication, and how important was it to their income? What was the commercial logic of various sorts of collections? What was the function of illustrations in published plays, and what can we learn from such illustrations? This study, a significantly expanded version of the Panizzi Lectures delivered by the authors at the British Library in 2011, will become a cornerstone work in the field and lays the groundwork for a generation of further scholarship...read more

Product Description: Following on from the volume on The King's Theatre, Haymarket, 1778-1791 (published in 1995), this interdisciplinary study of opera and ballet now turns to London's Pantheon Opera during the period 1789-95. The Pantheon Opera, founded in 1790, aimed to give London a kind of court opera that would feature opera seria and ballet d'action...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This interdisciplinary study attempts to make sense of what has long been regarded as a chaotic period in the history of opera in London. In 1778, R.B. Sheridan acquired the King's Theatre and its resident opera company in what we would now call a leveraged buy-out, plunging the opera into escalating debts that were to haunt it into the 1840s...read more

Product Description: The extraordinary correspondence between the impresario Felice Giardini and his friend Gabriele Leone lies at the centre of this study of Italian opera in London in the eighteenth century. Hired by Giardini in 1763 to engage Italian performers for a season of opera and ballet at The King's Theatre, Leone was sued by the impresario when the performers he had recruited proved to be second rate...read more

Product Description: This significant reference work is an unprecedented attempt to compile a chronological list of all documents related to the management and regulation of the theatres in England from the reopening of the playhouses in 1660 to the Licensing Act of 1737...read more

Product Description: “Producible interpretation” is a critical method used by Milhous and Hume to examine eight plays. For each play they present deductions based upon six kinds of investigation: close reading; analysis of the original cast and reception of the original production; study of the scen­ery and machines required for perform­ance; historical reading in terms of 17th-century values and views of subject matter; a survey of the play’s production history; and analysis of modern critical opinion...read more

Product Description: This thoroughly new investigation into the theatre management competition be­tween the Drury Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields companies revises the established view of Thomas Betterton’s manage­ment abilities by documenting the fact that his competition with the Drury Lane company made both an immediate and a permanent change in the course of Brit­ish drama...read more