Pub Date : 2025-01-01DOI: 10.1215/00982601-11523800
Mattie Burkert
From the Greek for “unpublished things,” the term “anecdote” entered English in the late seventeenth century by way of a translated secret history and quickly became a byword for all manner of literary commodities. Like secret history itself, published anecdotes often operated at the slippery boundary of fact and fiction, incorporating features of the picaresque, life writing, stage drama, jest, and satire. Typically short and often topical, they were ideally suited to a periodical and print marketplace sustained by the speedy reproduction and repackaging of familiar content. Anecdotes about the theater, and about the star actors and actresses who dominated it, were particularly popular. The new collection, English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660 – 1800, examines these “short, often humorous and titillating, sometimes moralistic tales of theater people” (1) and considers the ways they contributed to the rise of celebrity culture. Edited by Heather Ladd and Leslie Ritchie for University of Delaware Press's new series “Performing Celebrity,” this collection reflects an upswell of scholarly interest in the multimedia landscape of the long eighteenth-century theater and a newly serious attention to theater-adjacent cultural forms that were long marginalized, trivialized, or taken as documentary evidence rather than as cultural artifacts. Collectively, the essays in this collection raise important questions about the formal features, social functions, and circulation of theatrical anecdotes, as well as about the possibilities and challenges they raise for scholars of the period.English Theatrical Anecdotes stands out for its explicit attention to problems of method. The introduction and coda by editors Ritchie and Ladd mark out the epistemological minefield surrounding the use of anecdotes in historical research, and each of their individual essay contributions demonstrates the anecdote's potential for mystification. Ladd's piece, “Samuel Foote, Esq.: Caricature, Class, and the Comic Theatrical Anecdote,” identifies the role anecdotes played in Foote's larger image-management strategy during his career as an actor, playwright, and theater manager. Like a social media-savvy celebrity today, Foote harnessed a newly powerful cultural form to circulate and amplify stories reinforcing his image as a “gentleman clown” (62). As Ladd argues persuasively, the classism underpinning this persona becomes clear only once we recognize the centrality of anecdote to Foote's strategic self-fashioning.Celebrities like Foote might authorize or tacitly approve the circulation of anecdotes that were “on-brand” (75) regardless of their factual truth, but in other cases, anecdotes were crafted intentionally to mislead. In “Killing Delane; Or, Mimicry and the Anecdota Obscura,” Leslie Ritchie identifies a “shady subspecies” of anecdote that acts as a “false witness to history” (27). The anecdota obscura is a weapon in the hands of biographers who suppress historical evidence in t
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Pub Date : 2024-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00982601-11118352
Emily Anderson
In the early scenes of Richard Eyre's 2004 movie Stage Beauty, a period piece about the mechanics and gender politics of the Restoration stage, the fictionalized characters of Maria Hughes and Edward Kynaston engage in a telling debate. What would happen to male actors such as Kynaston, who were most celebrated for playing female parts, if and when it became legal for women to act women's parts onstage? Could a woman, such as Hughes, act the part of Desdemona with as much charisma, artistry, and beauty as Kynaston had shown in the part? While these questions form the warp and woof of the entire movie, the dinner scene debate is more precise. “No, Kynaston, Desdemona is yours alone!” pronounces an ebullient Rupert Everett as King Charles II, challenging the possibility that any other actor—man or woman—could perform Kynaston's signature role. Maria Hughes begs to disagree: “But, a part doesn't belong to an actor,” she states, channeling a sentiment that Kynaston had previously shared: “An actor belongs to a part. Don't you agree?”In the context of the movie, Rupert Everett doesn't know what to think. Billy Crudup, as Kynaston, looks down at his dinner plate, falsely modest, and evades. Still, the idea of whether or not an actor could “own” a part, or any part of performance, or who and how one could “own” anything that transpired onstage, forms a conceptual question that animates, equally, eighteenth-century theater and Jane Wessel's lucid, engaging new book. As Wessel articulates, ownership of intellectual property was a newly important category in the eighteenth century, thanks in large part to the 1710 Copyright Act. This piece of legislation allowed authors now to own the rights to their works, and to understand themselves as the owners of the same. As it did so, “authorship” expanded in the eighteenth century to mean the same thing as “ownership”—with the significant caveat that the only forms of authorship protected under this new law were print based.What then, Wessel asks, of forms of authorship that were not geared toward publication? What then of the manuscript culture that flourished in the theater, and which produced work that was often circulated and consumed in performance but never on the page? Did playwrights “own” the words they produced, even if these words were never put into print?Wessel's main point is that our studies of literary property, theater, and authorship have failed to ask these questions, and that in failing to ask these questions, we have missed key aspects of how theatrical culture developed in the eighteenth century, and how intellectual property was understood. She's right. Her book, in equal measures fascinating and conscientious, walks the reader through a new literary landscape in which an authorial resistance to publication emerges as a complementary strategy to establish literary ownership, one running in parallel with the ideas of authorial ownership established via copyright over printed works. This is a
理查德·爱2004年的电影《舞台美人》讲述了英国复辟时期的政治机制和性别政治，在这部电影的早期场景中，虚构的人物玛丽亚·休斯和爱德华·基纳斯顿进行了一场生动的辩论。如果女性在舞台上扮演女性角色合法化，像基纳斯顿这样以扮演女性角色而闻名的男演员会发生什么呢？一个像休斯这样的女人，能像基纳斯顿那样，把苔丝狄蒙娜的魅力、艺术和美丽表现出来吗？虽然这些问题构成了整部电影的主旨，但晚餐场景的辩论更为精确。“不，凯纳斯顿，苔丝狄蒙娜是你一个人的！”热情洋溢的鲁珀特·埃弗雷特饰演国王查尔斯二世，挑战任何其他演员——无论男女——都能扮演凯纳斯顿的标志性角色的可能性。玛丽亚·休斯（Maria Hughes）表示不同意：“但是，一个角色不属于演员，”她说，传达了基纳斯顿之前分享的一种情绪：“演员属于一个角色。你不同意吗？”在电影的背景下，鲁伯特·埃弗雷特不知道该怎么想。比利·克鲁普，扮演基纳斯顿，低头看着他的餐盘，假装谦虚，回避了。然而，演员是否可以“拥有”一个角色，或表演的任何部分，或者一个人可以“拥有”舞台上发生的任何事情，这些概念问题构成了一个概念性问题，同样为18世纪的戏剧和简·韦塞尔（Jane Wessel）清晰、引人入胜的新书注入了活力。正如韦塞尔所阐述的，知识产权的所有权在18世纪是一个新的重要类别，这在很大程度上要归功于1710年的《版权法》。这项立法现在允许作者拥有自己作品的权利，并将自己理解为这些作品的所有者。在此过程中，“作者身份”在18世纪扩展为与“所有权”相同的意思，但有一个重要的警告，即这项新法律保护的唯一形式的作者身份是基于印刷的。那么，韦塞尔问道，与出版无关的创作形式又会怎样呢？那么，在戏剧中蓬勃发展的手稿文化又如何呢？这种文化产生的作品经常在表演中流传和消费，但从未出现在纸上。剧作家是否“拥有”他们创作的文字，即使这些文字从未付梓梓？韦塞尔的主要观点是，我们对文学财产、戏剧和作者身份的研究没有提出这些问题，而且由于没有提出这些问题，我们错过了戏剧文化在18世纪如何发展的关键方面，以及知识产权是如何被理解的。她是对的。她的书既引人入胜，又认真尽责，带领读者进入了一个新的文学景观，在这个景观中，作者对出版的抵制成为确立文学所有权的一种补充策略，与通过印刷作品的版权确立作者所有权的想法并行。这是一种文学景观，在这种景观中，表演的短暂性成为剧作家的反直觉机会。不出版戏剧作品，只在舞台上流传，剧作家们就可以独享演出时的想法或创作，或者是他们忌妒地藏起来不让新闻界看到的完整手稿，或者是他们创作和独特表演的角色。一个演员可能不会像查尔斯国王鲁伯特·埃弗雷特所建议的那样“拥有”一个角色——从历史上看，演员从来没有合法地拥有一个角色——但18世纪的演员，同时也是剧作家，经常精心制作一些角色，然后以一种如此个性化、如此独特的方式表演，以至于把他们特殊的身体与这些创作分开，就相当于完全放弃了创作。因此，戏剧作者可能没有任何法律地位，但正如韦塞尔所说，“剧作家行使了他们在法律上缺乏的所有权”(4)。她认为，正是因为这一时期的剧作家缺乏法律保护，他们倾向于把表演作为一种品质，使他们的作品“更不容易获得和复制”，因此更不容易被盗版或被他人借用(4)。这种对一种或一种行为的所有权利益，在与现在熟悉的行为理论定义（如Richard Schechner的“双重行为”，即设计为被重新挪用和复制的行为）相对照时，听起来很违反直觉。在极端情况下，一个知识产权作品在任何媒介中被隔离，并以这种方式受到保护，就不复存在了。但正如韦塞尔的章节所表明的那样，那个时期的剧作家、演员和后来的剧院经理都认为，由于表演是短暂的，有时很难重现，因此可以“保护”一个人与作品的作者关系。 在戏剧中，有一种对名人和自我的崇拜：在韦塞尔的案例研究中，许多演员都有一种高度的、有时是被误导的意识，即他们对自己在某个角色或作品中的中心地位，以及他们自己在演出地点和时间的界限上巡逻的能力。演员兼剧作家查尔斯·麦克林（Charles Macklin）就是一个很好的例子，他是韦塞尔书中的首要人物。麦克林是一个精力充沛的人，他有足够的时间来完成自己的工作，就像他有足够的时间来监督和阻止别人做同样的事情一样，他可以为一个人创造条件，让他“拥有”自己创作的戏剧性内容。韦塞尔带领读者了解麦克林几十年来对夏洛克角色的“所有权”，以及他对未出版的闹剧《爱的模式》（Love la Mode）的痴迷和专权处理，揭示了麦克林的策略依赖于许多独立的作品。每天晚上演出结束后，他都会把他的闹剧手稿带回家，塞在外套的胸袋里；他允许抄写员抄写演员的个别角色，但禁止他们抄写完整的剧本；他严格监控未经授权的重建和他的闹剧表演，并将任何涉及盗版制作的人告上法庭。他并不总是能成功地阻止所有这样的作品，阅读这些描述，人们会意识到麦克林在维持闹剧边界上投入的精力一定和他在表演上投入的精力一样多。尽管如此，通过他的诉讼，他对自己作品所有权的渴望变得明显和众所周知。因此，“他把表演版权的问题放在了戏剧专业人士心中的最前沿”（44）。读到这一章，我想知道有多少人会有时间、精力和愿望去做麦克林所做的事情。在这方面，麦克林是一个异类，还是一个值得效仿和尊敬的榜样？但是正如Wessel解释的那样，性能描述了一组要被模仿的行为，即使这些行为表明了对相同行为的所有权。有一个人非常了解麦克林的想法，他就是与麦克林同时代的塞缪尔·富特（Samuel Foote），也就是韦塞尔第二章的主题，他是偶尔进行策略性宣传的聚会的大师——这种表演被刻意地描述为根本不是表演，而是为了“一杯茶”而进行的随意的社交聚会。大多数学者把这些集会解读为富特试图避开当时严格的戏剧审查法律，因为这些法律会阻止他传播他组织这些集会表演的政治讽刺作品。相反，韦塞尔的观点是，富特的表演，作为没有剧本的一次性作品存在，就像他对自己所做的事情建立了作者控制一样。富特是一位著名的模仿者，他以印象派的风格表演政治讽刺，只有富特才能制造出观众前来观看的那种“茶话会”；观众们反过来了解到，只有参加这样的茶话会，才能获得富特的体验。韦塞尔所说的富特展览的“战略性短暂性”意味着他可以逃避审查，但这种短暂性也意味着他将被认为是他所创作的任何作品的关键艺术组成部分。没有他，茶党就不可能存在，而一个超越自己的富特，在出版和印刷中，可以被吸收、盗版、审查、出售。然而，一个活在自己体内的富特也可能遭遇这种命运。富特表演的讽刺结果在某种程度上反映了我在麦克林的战略尝试中所感受到的讽刺，即声称任何表演，一种为复制和挪用而设计的媒介，都是他的，而且只属于他的。将表演重新定义为一个人的领域，可能会消除这些演员兼剧作家以及后来的剧院经理试图接受的类别。事实上，在富特的例子中，他对模仿的依赖向其他人暗示了一种策略，他们可以用这种策略来模仿他想要声称属于他的行为。在这种情况下，另一个人是泰特·威尔金森，他既是演员、剧作家，也是剧院经理。受到富特利用模仿来建立印刷品之外的所有权模式的启发，威尔金森同样是一位天才的模仿者，他将采用同样的策略，将富特的项目从伦敦带到各省，从而展示模仿的力量，从一个身体传播到另一个身体，并继续在舞台上昂首阔步。在将全部注意力转向威尔金森之前，韦塞尔花了一段时
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/00982601-10690093
Lina Jiang
This article focuses on Ann Murry's serial essay “The Moral Zoologist, or Natural History of Animals,” which appeared in the Lady's Magazine in sixty-seven letters between 1800 and 1805. I argue that Murry's “The Moral Zoologist” contested the bounds of women's scientific knowledge in the eighteenth century. Although some scholarship has argued that women's magazines usually did not provide a coherent curriculum for female readers and confined their female readership to the merely entertaining or domestic, Murry used “The Moral Zoologist” to present readers with a systematic view of animal life, as well as moral reflections on the relationship between humans and animals. In particular, “The Moral Zoologist” includes pointed critiques of the use of animal fur and feathers for clothing and therefore provides a contrasting perspective for readers to consider when they peruse the fashion pieces that also populated the pages of the Lady's Magazine. Murry's work, therefore, shows that eighteenth-century periodicals for women were complex spaces in which different ideas about the relationship between women, science, animals, and ethics could coexist.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/00982601-10690067
Peggy Thompson
Jane Austen uses “habit” and its variants four times as often in Mansfield Park as she does in her previous novel, Pride and Prejudice. In what seems, then, to be a deliberate exploration of habit, the novel repeatedly recalls Aristotle's views on habit, which could well have been conveyed to Austen through eighteenth-century divines who saw them as compatible with their Anglican theology. Like Aristotle, Austen emphasizes habit as crucial to an ethic that defines virtue not as self-denial, but as fulfillment within a well-governed polis, or, in her case, within an idealized estate. But as Austen explores the promise of habit in Mansfield Park, she also reveals the problems it can create. Most prominently, Austen's novel reminds us that the conditions for cultivating virtue through habituation can also function to cultivate vice or, what is more insidious, virtue understood as resignation and passivity rather than as active principle.
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Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/00982601-10690080
Alessio Mattana
This essay examines the myth of Isaac Newton's modesty in eighteenth-century Britain. By analyzing both primary sources by and on Newton and scholarship on the concept of “modest witnessing,” this essay argues that a number of actors concerned with Newton's public relevance progressively divested his scientific ideas of mathematics with the goal of smoothing their dogmatic edges and making them more accessible to the polite public. This process, it will be claimed, resulted in creating the myth of the modest Newton, the genius who had discovered the secrets of nature and made them available for the public good.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00982601-10394949
B. Keegan
Abstract:The essay examines the history of poetry written by sailors from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. William Falconer's The Shipwreck (1762, 1764 and 1769) inspired many seamen to turn poet and to write about their experiences at sea. Falconer's influence is seen in how sailor poets write about maritime labor and practices such as impressment and how they represent the beauties and threats of the ocean environment. They also share stylistic features, notably an emphasis on "terms of art" specific to shipboard life. Sailor poets provide key insights into important sociocultural developments related to the expansion of the British empire, including significant insights into the horrors of the slave trade and the cause of abolition. Falconer's legacy is one that is deeper than previously recognized.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00982601-10394936
Jamie M. Bolker
Abstract:This essay explores how William Falconer's A Universal Dictionary of the Marine exemplifies the "rhetoric of the sea," which operates according to an inclusive approach to maritime knowledge, which maritime authors adopted in an effort to translate into writing a unique, physical practice at sea. Since maritime practice involved diverse processes in an environment that could not be controlled, maritime and navigation books thereby contained diverse styles and forms, from poetry, to criticism, to illustrations, to definitions, in an effort to reflect the diversity, and experience, of the sea itself. This essay places Falconer's Dictionary (1769) into a longer history of maritime and navigation books, especially dictionaries, including John Smith's Seaman's Grammar and Dictionary (1626), and the development of specialized dictionaries in English. Building on developments in "blue ecocriticism," this essay concludes by suggesting that the eighteenth-century rhetoric of the sea provides us an understanding of the semantic and physical power of the world's oceans.
摘要:本文探讨了威廉·法尔科纳(William Falconer)的《海洋通用词典》(A Universal Dictionary of the Marine)如何体现“海洋修辞”，它根据一种包容的海事知识方法运作，海事作者采用这种方法，努力将其转化为一种独特的海上物理实践。由于海事实践涉及在无法控制的环境中进行的各种过程，因此海事和航海书籍包含了各种风格和形式，从诗歌到批评，到插图，到定义，以努力反映海洋本身的多样性和经验。本文将《法尔科纳词典》(1769年)与航海书籍，尤其是词典，包括约翰·史密斯的《海员语法词典》(1626年)，以及英语专业词典的发展相提并论。以“蓝色生态批评”的发展为基础，本文的结论是，18世纪关于海洋的修辞为我们提供了对世界海洋的语义和物理力量的理解。
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Pub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00982601-10394857
William Jones
Abstract:William Falconer (1732–1770) suffered a catastrophic shipwreck as a young man, which became the subject of his celebrated poem The Shipwreck (1762), with revised and extended editions in 1764 and 1769. He is also the compiler of the Dictionary of the Marine which remained the standard work of nautical reference until the end of the sailing ship. Largely forgotten through the 20th century, Falconer's work is now being recognised as a significant and unique contribution to our understanding of the literature, and indeed the world view, of the eighteenth century. This essay traces his life and intellectual development from an impoverished childhood to a career in both the merchant and Royal Navy, and to distinguished achievements as poet, sea-scientist and lexicographer.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-01DOI: 10.1215/00982601-10394923
Sandro Jung
Abstract:This article offers an account of all illustrated editions of William Falconer's The Shipwreck (1762), including anthologies such as John Roach's Beauties, that were produced up to the end of the handpress period. It examines both the illustrations of specific scenes or moments from the poem and other visual paratext. In addition to providing a detailed study of the editions, including their marketing and pricing, it focuses on interpretive shifts in the illustrations—from exclusively ship- and shipwreck-related iconography, to the expression of human concerns, especially in terms of the tragic-sentimental mode that characterizes a large number of these illustrations. The illustrations will not be discussed in isolation but will be related to how artists at various exhibitions in that period engaged with Falconer's work and made present various aspects of it. In its comprehensive coverage of how publishers catered to different groups of buyers, the essay recovers a hitherto uncharted visual archive stemming from Falconer's poem. Questions related to readership, visual literacy, the commodification of the visual images accompanying The Shipwreck, and the role illustrations played in the mediation of the work will underpin my account of how the visual apparatuses added to editions affected the marketing and reception of Falconer's poem.
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