This volume contains key articles and chapters which represent both seminal and innovative scholarship on European theatre performance practice from 1750 to 1900, with a particular focus on acting and performance, staging (including set design and lighting), and audiences. The selection of significant texts on this rich period of theatre history fe

Contents: Introduction. Part I Acting and Performance: Nature to advantage dressed: eighteenth-century acting, Alan S. Downer; Vitalism and the crisis of sensibility, Joseph R. Roach; Garrick, the ghost and the machine, Joseph R. Roach; The performance practice of acting: the eighteenth century part I: ensemble acting, Dene Barnett; The dangers of the new sensibilities in eighteenth century German acting, Gloria Flaherty; ’Reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning’: challenging the foundations of Romantic acting theory, Tracy C. Davis; Researching the acting of French melodrama, 1800-1830, Gabrielle Hyslop; The training of actors at the Paris Conservatoire during the nineteenth century, F.W.J. Hemmings; Players and painted stage: nineteenth century acting, Alan S. Downer; On natural acting, George Henry Lewes. Part II Staging, Scenery and Lighting: Lighting at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, 1780-82, Judith Milhous; Appendix A. Pantomime trickwork, David Mayer; The German stage in the nineteenth century, Brigitte Schatzky; Gas man’s duties. Lighting the rehearsal. Exterior lighting. Pilot lights and electrical ignition. Rehearsing the lighting, Terence Rees; The modern theatre - the stage, M.J. Moynet (translated and augmented by Allan S. Jackson with M. Glen Wilson); Professor Pepper’s ghost, George Speaight; Erasing the spectator: observations on nineteenth century lighting, Victor Emeljanow; Art in the theatre: I - scenery, William Telbin; Art in the theatre: the painting of scenery, William Telbin; Art in the theatre: spectacle, Augustus Harris; From political to cultural despotism: the nature of the Saxe-Meiningen aesthetic, John Osborne. Part III Audiences: From courts to consumers: theater publics, James Van Horn Melton; Tears and the new attentiveness, James H. Johnson; Working-class audiences, F.W.J. Hemmings; The audiences of the Britannia Theatre, Hoxton, Clive Barker; New views on cheap theatres: reconstructing the nineteenth-century theatre