A Performance History of The Fair Penitent

This Element shows plays aren't read; they are experienced. The Fair Penitent's meanings are found in its century of performance.

Elaine McGirr (Author)

9781009485968, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 21 March 2024

84 pages
23.5 x 16 x 1 cm, 0.264 kg

Theatre is the most ephemeral of art forms. It is a truism that the ephemeral performance text is divorced from the static published play text. This Element is of the eighteenth-century performance history of The Fair Penitent demonstrates the interrelation of print and performance and models how readers can recover elements of performance through close attention to text. Traces of performance adhere to the mediascape in playbills and puffs, reviews and accounts. The printed text also preserves traces of performance in notation and illustration. By analysing traces found in performance trends, casting decisions, publication histories and repertory intertexts, this Element recovers how The Fair Penitent was interpreted at different points in the century and explains how a play that bombed in its first season could become a repertory staple.

1. Introducing the fair penitent
2. A tragedy Reviv'd: celebrity casting and Shakespearean intertexts
3. 'The Calista Mr. Rowe drew': picturing performance
4. Female lotharios and the power of repertory
Appendix A: the fair penitent 1703–1800 London performance calendar
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]