“Highly Superior ‘Variety Turns’”: The Orthodox Roots of Suffrage Theatre
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Anna Farkas
Abstract
This paper locates the origins of the forms and practices of Edwardian suffrage theatre in a late-Victorian middle-class entertainment culture with which it shared many of its distinguishing features, if not its politics. Suffrage theatre has long been lauded for its radical embracing of alternative performance spaces and a democratic blurring of the lines between amateur and professional. However, these features were already present in the 1890s, in a theatrical scene which emerged from nineteenth-century enthusiasm for private theatricals and which offered women authors important artistic opportunities. “Dramatic recitals,” which combined the performance of short plays and dramatic sketches with recitation and music, developed independently of both the West End and the music hall, drawing instead on the traditions of home performance. This genteel variety theatre was written and performed by women and clearly directed at primarily female audiences, laying the foundation for suffrage theatre in spite of its own conservative gender politics.
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©2015 by De Gruyter
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Victorian Oral Cultures: Introduction
- Peepshows for All: Performing Words and the Travelling Showman
- The Schooled Voice: Sound and Sense in the Victorian Schoolroom
- The Author on Stage: The Redpath Lyceum Bureau and the Promotion of the “Literary” Lecture
- “The Subject Escapes Me”: Spellbinding Lecturers and (In-)Attentive Audiences in Late-Victorian Serialized Sensation Fiction
- My Fair Lady Automaton
- “Highly Superior ‘Variety Turns’”: The Orthodox Roots of Suffrage Theatre
- Book Reviews
- The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies
- Die Auswirkungen der Globalisierung auf den modernen Fremdsprachenunterricht. Globale Herausforderungen als Lernziele und Inhalte des fortgeschrittenen Englischunterrichts. Are We Facing the Future?
- The Fiction of America. Performance and the Cultural Imaginary in Literature and Film
- The Literary Life of Things: Case Studies in American Fiction
- Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture
- Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America
- Books Received
- Books Received
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Victorian Oral Cultures: Introduction
- Peepshows for All: Performing Words and the Travelling Showman
- The Schooled Voice: Sound and Sense in the Victorian Schoolroom
- The Author on Stage: The Redpath Lyceum Bureau and the Promotion of the “Literary” Lecture
- “The Subject Escapes Me”: Spellbinding Lecturers and (In-)Attentive Audiences in Late-Victorian Serialized Sensation Fiction
- My Fair Lady Automaton
- “Highly Superior ‘Variety Turns’”: The Orthodox Roots of Suffrage Theatre
- Book Reviews
- The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies
- Die Auswirkungen der Globalisierung auf den modernen Fremdsprachenunterricht. Globale Herausforderungen als Lernziele und Inhalte des fortgeschrittenen Englischunterrichts. Are We Facing the Future?
- The Fiction of America. Performance and the Cultural Imaginary in Literature and Film
- The Literary Life of Things: Case Studies in American Fiction
- Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture
- Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America
- Books Received
- Books Received
