Theater and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture

Jenn Fishman

Stanford University

During the past fifteen years, scholars working under the rubric of "the new eighteenth century" have carried out an ongoing "revision and problematization of period, canon, tradition, and genre" in eighteenth-century studies. The result of this project, which Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown helped to inaugurate as editors of The New Eighteenth Century in 1987, has been the expansion of eighteenth-century literary studies to include an ever-increasing corpus of texts and cultural forms, as well as critical practices. And yet, in spite of these changes, theater remains on the margins of the field, while theatrical performance—a counterpart to all theatrical literature—remains largely ignored by literary scholars, save for a few notable exceptions. In classrooms today, plays appear irregularly on eighteenth-century course syllabi, and stage performances are seldom discussed, even in courses that include Restoration and eighteenth-century drama. More surprisingly, given the commitment that scholars of the new eighteenth century made to emerging theoretical discourses, eighteenth-century studies has been slow to take up the new and urgent critical questions and practices that have been developing in the related field of performance studies. In particular, eighteenth-century literary scholars have been slow to respond to the strategies that performance studies offers for researching and writing about theater, for incorporating performance into discussions about different cultural forms of representation, and for challenging language- and print-based definitions of literary culture. The course "Stage and Page" offers an alternate model for envisioning and teaching eighteenth-century literature. By bringing together theater and the novel, it shows how different forms and media were vital to literary culture during the period that extends from the Restoration to the turn of the nineteenth century. And by bringing together theories of performance and literature, "Stage and Page" teaches students different strategies for approaching eighteenth-century literary culture as the combined study of performance and form.

This course focuses specifically on the development of theater and the novel. It covers plays including The Rover and The Rivals, performance practices such as acting and mise en scène, and the novels Oroonoko, Amelia, and The Absentee. In this course we treat these different forms of representation as discrete subjects, considering their individual uses of language, generic conventions, and modes of production. At the same time, the juxtaposition of materials encourages students to discover numerous points of intersection amongst these forms and to consider the breadth of literary culture during this historical period. The term "literary culture" thus describes the parameters of the course: it refers to the material, social, and intellectual world in which related genres, media, and disciplines develop. At its most broad, literary culture designates as potential subjects of study a wide range of written and printed materials, as well as related events including preaching, public speaking, and playhouse performances. Literary culture also emphasizes the material aspects of literature, which include not only practices such as writing and printing, but also the physical aspects of activities such as theatrical performance. By locating the study of theater and the novel within this frame, this course integrates visual images, physical objects and artifacts, and affective experiences into literary study. It actively seeks ways to incorporate the non-verbal and the non-linguistic into the process of teaching eighteenth-century literature.

Necessarily interdisciplinary in scope and approach, "Stage and Page" is an advanced undergraduate course intended for students majoring in literature, as well as students with backgrounds in drama, history, and, to a lesser degree, art. It is designed to challenge undergraduates who move with increasing facility amongst twentieth-century media to consider a range of different eighteenth-century forms of representation, how they work, and the ways in which, together, they constitute eighteenth-century literary culture. Designed to make the category of literature both familiar and strange, "Stage and Page" crosses disciplinary boundaries in order to engage students in a historically-focused exploration of the broad scope and varied nature of eighteenth-century literary culture.
This one-quarter course is designed to meet for two ninety-minute sessions per week. It divides the ten teaching weeks of the term into three separate units, each one centered on a different nexus of texts and events. The first unit focuses on late seventeenth-century experiments with performance and form. Starting with Of Dramatic Poesy by John Dryden, we discuss the cultural status of theater at the start of the Restoration, focusing on the political and national significance that Dryden invests in dramatic form. We also consider the distinctions between drama and theatrical performance that Dryden implies by never once mentioning performance in his essay. We further examine the relationship between Restoration plays and performance by reading Aphra Behn's comedy The Rover along with selected materials on female actors. Next, we read Behn's Oroonoko, and, for the first time during the course, we ask how to define the novel. We end the unit by comparing representational forms and media and reading Thomas Southerne's dramatization of Behn's story.

The second unit focuses on mid-eighteenth-century literary culture, starting with examples of theater's social and political status in the 1730s. We read Henry Fielding's The HistoricalRegister of 1736 and consider its connection to theatrical censorship and the Stage Licensing Act. We re-examine the relationship between drama and performance by looking at materials about mid-eighteenth-century acting that feature David Garrick, and then we turn to the rising form of the novel. We read Henry Fielding's Amelia alongside selected materials about theatrical character, modes of expression, and forms of entertainment in order to compare novelistic strategies of representation with theatrical ones. The third and final unit begins with selected readings that address the cultural significance of late eighteenth-century theater and the gradually elevated form of the novel. We go on to explore the relationship between written drama and performance by discussing Maria Edgeworth's play The Absentee, and we read her later novel of the same name in order to consider the intersections amongst drama, theater, and the novel at the end of the long eighteenth century.

"Stage and Page," though not a survey course, incorporates many of the different kinds of texts that make up eighteenth-century literary culture. Every unit includes an example of dramatic writing and a novel by a single author. Such pairings of texts by Behn, Fielding, and Edgeworth make issues of authorship part of an ongoing exploration of literary form and literary culture. Every unit also includes some combination of newspapers, journals, pamphlets, letters, and government documents. This arrangement of materials establishes a comprehensive definition of literary culture, while the inclusion of a play and a novel in each unit enables students to focus on the development of two particular forms. The juxtaposition of materials also encourages comparative thinking. Reading Aphra Behn's Oroonoko together with Thomas Southerne's dramatization, for example, enables us to compare how authors use different literary forms to represent versions of the same story. These readings also demonstrate different ways of portraying gender, race, and nation—issues whose crucial relation to the production and reception of eighteenth-century literary culture we examine and re-examine throughout the quarter. Other play and novel pairs provide further contexts for making comparisons: in unit two, for example, we contrast the ways in which Fielding incorporates elements of Othello into Amelia with Garrick's unwillingness to play the title role, and in unit three we examine the ways in which Edgeworth transforms her play The Absentee into a section of her later novel. Teaching plays and performance in a literature course presents unique opportunities to raise questions about the historical relationships between different forms of representation and ideas about what counts as "literary" at different points in time. However, this method also presents unique pedagogical challenges. Students often lack strategies for reading dramatic writing, and few students have experience with the historical study of theatrical performance. Thus, my goals in developing this course include teaching students different ways of approaching theatrical literature. One strategy focuses on dramatic form: the course is designed to familiarize students with eighteenth-century dramatic genres including tragedy, comedy, and farce. Of Dramatic Poesy gives an example of early modern ideas about dramatic structure, and excerpts from a 1777 publication of The Alchemist demonstrate how previously written plays changed in relation to eighteenth-century performance practices. In concert with each unit's focus on form, every unit also investigates actual performance practices such as acting methods or mise en scène. This strategy focuses attention on the distinctive elements of the medium of theater, which we consider by examining selected materials about Restoration female actors, mid-century acting styles, and late eighteenth-century production practices. These materials, which include satirical essays, prologues and epilogues, paintings and engravings, actor's biographies, acting manuals, personal letters, familiarize students with eighteenth-century performance practices and prepare them to formulate what Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume have called "producible interpretations" of plays: readings of dramatic texts informed by analyses of the performance contexts for which they were written. For example, we might interpret the violence that underpins The Rover in relation to attitudes towards female actors in the 1670s. Or we could interpret Richard Brinsley Sheridan's mockery of sentimentalism in The Rivals in relation to the simultaneous development and popularity of Garrick's highly emotional acting style.
By teaching performance along with drama, I also wish to encourage students to develop a historically-oriented, performance-minded way of reading theatrical literature. If producible interpretations use performance details to help make sense of written texts, the activity that theorist Peggy Phelan calls "performance-minded reading" makes those details the starting place for discussions about the concepts of performance that inform them. As a method of analysis, performance-minded reading starts with a particular aspect of a specific theatrical production. For example, when The Historical Register was first performed, Henry Fielding cross-cast Charlotte Charke, infamous for her cross-dressing, in the male role of Hen, an auctioneer. Charke's performance introduces the politics of gender into discussions of the play, which usually focus on Fielding's political satire. Thus, this performance-minded reading of The Historical Register opens up discussions of the power—as well as the danger—of performance in the eighteenth century. Performance-minded reading also makes it possible to return to Oroonoko during the second unit of the course in order to discuss the performance of Southerne's play that marks the start of David Garrick's career. In 1741 Garrick acted the role of Aboan, Oroonoko's loyal friend, in a regional production that predates the actor's more frequently cited London debut as Richard III. A performance-minded reading would start with the Garrick's appearance as a blackface character in a regional playhouse. It would consider how a performance that gave Garrick valuable professional experience also did not count as a performance, thereby enabling the ambitious actor to debut a second time at a different theater in a very different part. As a critical method, performance-minded reading consistently raises issues about reading and interpretation relevant not only to studying theater, but also to the study of literary works and literary culture. Each of the critical essays included on the syllabus contributes to this project, introducing students to different ways of approaching the materials in the course. In the first unit, essays by Victor Turner and Peggy Phelan introduce students to performance-minded issues as well as the field of performance studies while raising several of the central questions of the course. In the final chapter of From Ritual to Theatre, Victor Turner describes theater as a uniquely active form of cultural reflection in which on-stage dramas reflect the social dramas that play out in everyday life. According to Turner, theater provides spectators with both entertainment and a complex "metacommentary" on the society in which they live. Turner's work presents a useful frame for our own investigation of the relationship between eighteenth-century theatrical practices and different aspects of eighteenth-century British society. We also read "The Ontology of Performance" in which Peggy Phelan makes an important distinction between performance, whose "only life is in the present" or in the moment of performance, and written or printed works, which are be reproduced, bought, sold, and collected. Phelan's characterization of the differences between these two forms of representation raises a series of questions we explore throughout the quarter: how, for example, does writing about eighteenth-century performance differ from writing about performance in general, if we understand all performances to be past performances as soon as they have ended? what kind of evidence about performance does writing give us? and how much do eighteenth-century critical values—and our own—reflect the values of a print economy in which worth is determined by buying, selling, and owning reproducible goods?

Both Phelan and Turner make claims about performance that are similar to claims that historians of the novel make about that genre's development and its relationship to culture. Thus, in the second unit we turn to critical readings that introduce students to studies of the novel, and we reexamine the frequently made claim that the British novel is uniquely suited to representing eighteenth-century society. We start by reading the essay Drama and the Novel in which Laura Brown contends that the novel has a unique ability to represent the moral consciousness of eighteenth-century British society. Brown describes a reflexive relationship between society and literary form that students can compare with Turner's discussion of theater and society and test against their own readings of The Historical Register, Oroonoko, and Amelia. Unit two also includes selections from The Rise of the Novel and The Dialogic Imagination, which introduce students to formal realism, notions of the novel's open-endedness or "plasticity," and the "novelization" of literary genres. Additional critical essays present permutations of these issues in conjunction with specific class
readings. Selections from Catherine Gallagher's discussion of Behn in Nobody's Story, Joseph Roach's work on mid-century acting, and Alice Rayner's discussion of Sheridan and sentimentality in Comic Persuasion engage students in three different extended analyses of course materials. The inclusion of a variety of critical styles and often contradictory claims not only provides students with useful analytical tools, but also challenges them to treat the arguments they encounter as questions and to formulate their own theses about eighteenth-century literary culture.

The structure of "Page and Stage" reflects my overarching goal to give students an array of strategies for approaching eighteenth-century literary culture. In order to facilitate this goal, I try to keep reading assignments short (between one hundred and one-hundred and fifty pages) by excerpting critical materials, limiting readings on library reserve to an average of one selection per week, and spreading out discussions of long novels over multiple class meetings. In order to foster student participation and to foreground students' contribution to the intellectual life of the course, half of every class is devoted to discussion. Writing assignments give students additional opportunities to practice different interpretive strategies and to develop their own ways of thinking about theater and the novel. Every week, students write reading responses that they post to an electronic class server, a format that increases the pedagogical possibilities of the course, enables class discussions to take place outside the traditional structure of the lecture and discussion course, and integrates students' writing into the fabric of the class. Via the server, students not only respond to assigned readings, but also continue classroom discussions, introduce new topics, and respond to each others' writing. As the quarter progresses, students' postings become a class resource, providing shared points of reference as well as a record of ongoing interests and concerns. Postings take the form of "well-formulated questions," a reading response assignment that I have borrowed from a literature course designed by Amy Robinson and refashioned for this course. The well-formulated question is a two-part, four- to five-hundred word assignment (equivalent to one-and-a-half to two pages). In the first short paragraph, students pose a focused critical question about the week's reading. In the second part of the assignment, students present a two- or three-paragraph answer or set of possible answers to their own questions. Designed to emphasize both critical and creative thinking, well-formulated questions challenge students to identify complex critical problems and to experiment with different ways of linking course materials. The task of answering their own questions encourages students to become self-conscious about the kinds of questions they ask and the intellectual issues that most interest them.

Because well-formulated questions are complicated, students can feel overwhelmed at the prospect of formulating, answering, and posting one every week. Thus, it is useful to introduce the assignment in stages and to begin by asking students to respond to one of several pre-set questions. This option gives everyone a chance to become familiar with the assignment as well as the format of the class server, and pre-set questions give students models for the questions they will write later in the quarter. For the first posting, one of the pre-set questions might ask students to consider The Rover and Restoration attitudes towards female actors:
In April De Angelis's Playhouse Creatures, a recent play about female actors set in 1670, Mrs. Farley loses her part in a production because she is visibly pregnant. Her condition is not only unacceptable, but also against the law. In this scene, De Angelis dramatizes one of the ways in which Restoration female actors made public both female bodies and cultural anxieties about female sexuality. How does a particular character or episode in The Rover dramatize these same issues?
In answer to this question, students might write about Helena and argue that her characterization as a female Rover challenges stereotypes about the public display of female desire, or students might write about Florinda, Helena's sister, who is a passive figure of female virtue rather than an actor per se. Students might also choose to analyze a specific part of the play. In this case, a response might focus on the fifth scene in act three, where Willmore, the Rover of the title, mistakes Florinda for a courtesan and attacks her. Students might consider the limits of female action represented in this scene and then compare Florinda's mistaken identity to the misapprehensions suffered by some of the female actors featured in the weeks' selected readings. Noting that Mrs. Betterton played Florinda in the first performances of The Rover, students might consider De Angelis's interpretation of the period, particularly her portrayal of Mrs. Betterton, the character who fires Mrs. Leary in Playhouse Creatures.

As the quarter progresses, well-formulated questions can be directed in different ways to suit different class dynamics. They can be used to focus students' attention on issues of form or theme, and they can be used to encourage students to examine and critique arguments that they encounter in their readings. Pre-set questions are especially useful in teaching students how to engage with difficult materials. In week six a pre-set question presents one way for students to consider The Dialogic Imagination in conjunction with Amelia and the week's readings on Othello. In Dialogic Imagination Bakhtin describes they way in which novels incorporate or cannibalize other literary genres. Are the traces of Othello that appear throughout Amelia evidence of the novel's ability to consume dramatic tragedy? Or does the failure of the play to map neatly and directly onto the novel suggest limits to the novel's ability to assimilate this literary form?

Responding to this question, students might focus on particular examples of plot and characterization, making use of earlier class discussions about dramatic form. Students might also answer the question by discussing Fielding's use of quotations from Othello or by considering the idiom of marital jealousy that recurs throughout Amelia. Students might also choose to compare episodes from the novel with scenes from an eighteenth-century acting edition of Othello. Or, keeping in mind responses to eighteenth-century productions of Othello, students might discuss whether or not theatrical performances affect the novel's ability to assimilate dramatic literature into its form.

Well-formulated questions structure students' work throughout the quarter, foregrounding different reading and writing skills and forming the basis of subsequent written assignments. They ask students to read class materials closely and to take into account broad thematic concerns. Good responses identify and analyze specific passages, articulate clear arguments, and synthesize class materials. Good answers also include speculations about course materials that raise further questions and shape on-going class discussions and assignments. Thus, later in the quarter, well-formulated questions form the basis for students' final papers, which begin with either a newly formulated question or a significantly reformulated one from a previous posting. During week eight, students post their paper proposals to the class server, and in week nine the server becomes the site of a writing workshop, where students read and respond to each other's proposals in assigned groups. In week ten students exchange rough drafts with their groups, and final papers along with draft portfolios are due at the end of the term.

While the syllabus below describes a ten-week course, "Stage and Page" could easily fill a fourteen- or fifteen- week semester, and a number of texts could be added in different combinations to augment the course. The introductory unit, which focuses on Restoration literary culture, could also include Congreve's first publication, the novel Incognita, and his last mainpiece play, The Way of the World. This pairing presents a rare example of an author who published a novel before, rather than after, starting a career as a playwright. Congreve's works are also unique during this time because of the care that he took with the publication of his plays, which raises questions about how printing practices affected the relationship between performance and dramatic literature. In a longer course, The Beggar's Opera would fit in well during the second unit, which already focuses on literature's capacity for social and political critique and the cultural status of different kinds of entertainment. The final unit of the course could include a selection of readings and slides that portray late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century mise en scène. New lighting techniques and the increasing use of elaborately painted scenery raise questions about the changing relationship between theatrical performance and language. These questions are pertinent to reconsidering literary culture during a period better known for its novelists, such as Edgeworth and Jane Austen. The course could end with Austen's famously anti-theater novel, Mansfield Park, and excerpts from her dramatization of Samuel Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison. Mansfield Park provides a distinct counterpoint to Edgeworth's novel in matters of style and subject, and Austen's play offers several points for discussion: though Edgeworth's play precedes her novel and Austen's dramatizes a previously published one, both dramatic pieces were written for domestic performances by the authors' families. They provide insight into the domestication of public theater, as well as Edgeworth's and Austen's dramatic imaginations and their attitudes towards performance.

Even with these suggested additions, this syllabus does not begin to exhaust the possible combinations of texts that might be incorporated into a course designed to examine the relationship between stage and page in eighteenth-century literary culture. The course could also include works by authors such as Margaret Cavendish, Eliza Haywood, James Thomson, Frances Brooke, Charlotte Lennox, Samuel Johnson, Tobias Smollett, Frances Sheridan, Sophia Lee, or Hannah More; the careers of theater personnel such as Thomas Betterton, Colley Cibber, Charlotte Charke, Thomas Sheridan, Jean Georges Noverre, or Philippe de Loutherbourg; and selected materials on subjects ranging from public fairs, Irish theater, and playhouse riots to stage journalism, playhouse renovations, and drama anthologies published in the eighteenth century. Rather than proscribe a set canon for teaching theater and the novel, "Stage and Page" offers a method for approaching eighteenth-century literature as a cultural and historical investigation of performance and form. The course addresses issues of literary tradition and period by posing a series of questions about the development and reception of different representational practices. It examines different genres and media by exploring the relationships amongst diverse texts and events. And "Stage and Page" brings together theories of performance and literature in order to develop new strategies for reading, writing about, and teaching eighteenth-century literary culture.

Course Syllabus

Required texts:
Course Reader (available at campus bookstore)
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works (Penguin)
Henry Fielding, Amelia (Penguin)
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Rivals (New Mermaid)
Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee (Oxford)

Course reader contents:
Excerpts from April de Angelis, Playhouse Creatures
Female actors (selected materials)
Excerpts from Thomas Southerne, Oroonoko
Henry Fielding, The Historical Register of 1736

Stage Licensing Act documents:
David Garrick, "An Essay on Acting" Mid-century acting selected materials)
Othello in the eighteenth century (selected materials)
Excerpts from Ben Jonson, The Alchemist (Bell's 1777 edition)
Excerpts from Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
Selections from Ioan Williams, ed., Novel and Romance
Late eighteenth-century theater (selected materials)
Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee (selected materials)
Nineteenth-century literary reviews (selected materials)

Reserve readings:
Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982)
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993)
Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of women Writers in the Marketplace 1670-1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)
Laura Brown, "Drama and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England," Genre 13 (1980): 287-304
Joseph Roach, The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993)
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957)
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981)
William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of novel Reading in Britain, 1684-1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
Alice Rayner, Comic Persuasion: Moral Structure in British comedy from Shakespeare to Stoppard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)

Class requirements:
Students are required to attend class regularly, participate actively in discussions, and complete assignments on time. All assigned readings are from the required texts for the course or from materials on library reserve, which are available at the library's circulation desk for two-hour loan periods during regular library hours. The course reader, which is available at the campus bookstore, is also on the reserve list at the library. Written assignments include regular reading responses posted to the class server, a paper proposal, a rough draft, and a final 8-10 page paper. Electronic postings are always due two hours before class meets on Thursdays.

Unit I: Restoration literary culture

Week 1: Restorations

Tu Introductory lecture (includes slides and andouts)

Th Reading (handout): John Dryden, Essay on ramatic Poetry

Reserve reading: Victor Turner, From Ritualto Theatre, p.102-123

Week 2: Innovations

Tu Reading: Aphra Behn, The Rover

Th Reading: Selected materials on female actors; April de Angelis, Playhouse Creatures

Reserve reading: Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story, p.8-35

Due Thursday: First posting

Week 3: Adaptations

Tu Reading: Aphra Behn, Oroonoko

Th Reading: Thomas Southerne, Oroonoko

Reserve reading: Peggy Phelan, The Ontology of Performance, p.146-152

Due Thursday: Second posting

Unit II: mid-eighteenth-century literary culture

Week 4: Representations of mores

Tu Reading: Henry Fielding, The Historical Register of 1736; Stage Licensing Act documents

Th Reading: David Garrick, "An Essay on Acting"; selected materials on mid-century acting

Reserve reading: Joseph Roach, The Players' Passion, p.28-57

Due Thursday: Third posting

Week 5: representations of character

Tu Reading: Excerpts from The Alchemist; excerpts from Tom Jones

Reserve reading: Laura Brown, Drama and the Novel

Th Reading: Henry Fielding, Amelia, books 1-2

Reserve reading: Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, p.9-34

Due Thursday: Fourth posting

Week 6: forms of expression

Tu Reading: Henry Fielding, Amelia, books 3-5

Reserve reading: Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, .3-13, 27-40

Th Reading: Henry Fielding, Amelia, books 6-7; selected materials on Othello in the eighteenth- century

Due Thursday: Fifth posting

Week 7: forms of entertainment

Tu Reading: Henry Fielding, Amelia, books 8-10

Th Reading: Henry Fielding, Amelia, books 11-12

Reserve reading: William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment

Due Thursday: Sixth posting

Final paper proposals due Thursday of Week 8

Unit III: Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary culture

Week 8: Redefining

Tu Reading: Selections from Ioan Williams, Novel and Romance; materials on late eighteenth- century theater

Th Reading: Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Rivals

Due Thursday: Final paper proposals (seventh posting)

Week 9: Revising

Tu Reading: Selected materials on Maria Edgeworth,

The Absentee (drama) Reserve reading: Alice Rayner, Comic Persuasion, p.152-164

Th Reading: Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee, chapters 1-5

Due Thursday: Proposal workshop (eighth posting)

Final paper drafts due Thursday of Week 10

Week 10: Reconsidering

Tu Reading: Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee, chapters 6-12

Th Reading: Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee, chapters 13- 27; selected nineteenth-century literary reviews

Due Thursday: Rough drafts (hard copies distributed to draft groups)

Week 11: Final papers and draft portfolios due

Additional references:

Paula Backscheider, Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and ass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
Gösta M. Bergman, Lighting in the Theatre (Stockholm : Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1977).
Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986).
Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1962).
Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678-1730 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, Producible Interpretations: Eight English Plays 1675-1707 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985).
Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown, The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987).
Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach, Critical Theory and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).
Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
Sybil Rosenfeld, Georgian Scene Painters and Scene Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
___, A Short History of Scene Design in Great Britain (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973).
Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1985).
Richard Southern, Changeable Scenery: Its Origin and development in the British Theatre (London: Faber and Faber, 1952).
David Thomas, Restoration and Georgian England, 1660-1788 (Theatre in Europe: A Documentary History) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
James Anderson Winn, Pale of Words: Reflections on the humanities and Performance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).