Disapproval of acting and the theatre was a distinguishing Roman characteristic, in the eyes of many ancient authors. The significance Romans attached to the different ways actors were viewed in Greece and in Rome is indicated by Cornelius Nepos, in the preface to his Lives, where he sets out some of the principal contrasts between Greek and Roman culture ... While Greeks admired actors, according to Nepos, to display oneself on stage, to make a spectacle of oneself, was considered by Romans to be shameful. Other writers, too, saw differing attitudes to the theatre as a significant indicator of the contrast between Greek and Roman culture.

Chapter 1 explores the use of gesture in preaching, with reference to the branch of rhetoric known as pronunciatio, which provided the theoretical basis for much of the discussion of gesture in the early modern period. The basic rules of pronunciatio were derived from classical sources, but were developed and adapted by sixteenth-century writers on sacred rhetoric. All these writers were united by a shared insistence on the need for decorum and moderation, but in the early seventeenth century a contrast began to emerge between the techniques favoured by Reformed theologians in the Ramist tradition, who stressed the importance of bodily restraint and self-control, and the more dramatic style of preaching pioneered by Jesuit rhetoricians in France. One of the unexpected findings of this chapter is that the Jesuit style was widely admired and copied by seventeenth-century English Protestant preachers as a way of giving their sermons more emotional impact. Against the common assumption of an anti-theatrical prejudice in early modern Protestantism, we should think of a dynamic relationship between the pulpit and the stage in which preachers and actors watched and learned from each other.

Experimental physiology was exploited as a metaphor and a model for the work of authors and critics. The final two chapters advance the book’s trajectory which takes in increasingly diverse literary forms and traces how vivisection became loosened from its ethical and political contexts. Chapter 7 studies how Émile Zola and August Strindberg drew up principles of naturalism by fashioning themselves as literary vivisectors and presenting the stage and the novel as sites of experimentation. They did so by interrogating the connection between observation and intervention and by cultivating an attitude of objective absence imported from experimental physiology. By reframing their works within the context of the vivisection debates (to which naturalism was deeply indebted), the chapter offers a reconsideration of how these writers sought to uncover physiological and psychological laws that would make literature entirely scientific.

In ‘Theatre in the 1850s’, Kate Newey writes about the ‘mapping of London as an international entertainment centre’ and looks at the ways in which theatre began to create a new collective national identity, based in the act of spectatorship, and in what was seen on stage, even when that included the Irish Dion Boucicault’s adaptation of a French melodrama. Newey reminds us of the persistent popularity of melodrama, and of the use of the theatre as a site for discussion of contemporary events, and gives an extended reading of Charles Kean’s work with Boucicault on his drama, The Corsican Brothers (1852), which went on to become one of the most popular plays of the century. The chapter also considers the links between the stage and realist and sensation fiction, the internalisation of British theatre culture, and how nineteenth-century theatre became part of an international, commercial, cultural matrix.

The evolution of Russian drama from the early twentieth century to the present day has been shaped by an alternation between censorship and relaxation, and has included exciting periods of formal innovation. The psychological realism of Konstantin Stanislavskii’s stagings of Anton Chekhov’s plays was challenged by the post−1917 radicalism of Vsevolod Meierkhold, exemplified in his production of Vladimir Maiakovskii’s Mystery-Bouffe. Experimentation gave way to rigidity under Socialist Realism, but the post-Stalin era saw cautious innovation in playwriting succeeded by a flourishing culture of ‘director’s theatre’, led by figures such as Iurii Liubimov. Innovations gathered pace under glasnost, opening out to the bold variety of ‘New Drama’ in the twenty-first century. This has now given way to the rigid constraints imposed by the Putin regime.

This chapter explores contexts for Goldsmith’s career as a playwright, such as competition between Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres that were factors in the moderate success of The Good Natur’d Man in 1768 and the surprise runaway hit that was She Stoops to Conquer five years later. These plays are considered in the light of how the Seven Years’ War, which greatly expanded the British empire, challenged conceptions of Britishness at home and abroad. Goldsmith’s comedies respond to the perceived effeminization of culture in the 1770s, associated with the possibility corrupting influence of luxury and commerce as a result of imperial expansion. This influence was manifested in new kinds of fashionable sociability such as the masquerade with its uppity women, and the phenomenon of the male ‘macaroni’. Goldsmith also tests the conventions of the comedy of manners in how he deploys minor characters in The Good Natur’d Man and the cross-class appeal of Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer.

This chapter recounts the manner in which Goldsmith’s pamphlet The Mystery Revealed (1762), uncovering the hoax of the famous Cock Lane Ghost in London, is a sign – as are the many significant references to ghosts in his works – of his rejection of supernatural occurrences and his defence of rational Enlightenment values.

This chapter makes a case for the importance of the 1830s in the history of the British novel. Although unmarked by the publication of novels that enjoyed the longevity of fiction published in the decades before and after, this decade produced a conjunction that was to have a major impact on the future development of the novel form: the emergence, on the one hand, of the young Charles Dickens as a talented new writer and, on the other, of London as a major subject of (predominantly visual) representation. This conjunction, the chapter argues, was to produce a new branch, in Franco Moretti’s sense, on the tree of the British novel. Specifically, the chapter shows how Dickens’s earliest work, Sketches by Boz, already fabricates, in terms of characterisation and its organisation of the social spaces that could potentially underlie plot relations, a London-driven urban aesthetic that would differ from the principles of what, by the 1860s, became consecrated as the canonical British novel.

British theatre’s post-war cultural impact would be hard to deny, having produced generations of actors, writers, directors, and designers who have populated the world’s stages and screens. This vitality has often been explained in aesthetic terms, in the successive waves of generational artistic renewal in British theatre (from the ‘angry young men’ onwards). The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945 seeks to outline the discursive and material changes that have made this theatre possible; that is, the economic, infrastructural, and legislative structures that underpin what can and cannot be done in theatre and the structures and habits of discourse that govern what can and cannot be said about the theatre. Hence the book focuses on the working conditions of actors, writers, and directors; the economics of the West End, subsidised sector, and fringe; the theatre’s interaction with the British nation-state at the level of policy, theatre buildings, and in its nations and regions; finally, the book considers the theatre’s civic function, its changing engagement with audiences and the development of Black British and Queer theatre.

This chapter investigates Caroline Watson’s understudied theatrical subjects which testify to her technical mastery and ambitious agenda as a printmaker and provide a lens for examining how gender, printmaking hierarchies, and patronage impacted her exceptional career as a female stipple engraver. Her prints of female Shakespearean characters, Garrick Speaking the Ode and Sarah Siddons as Euphrasia, after Robert Edge Pine, from the early 1780s, and her two large plates for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery in the 1790s affiliated her with Shakespeare and the most significant artistic enterprise of the late eighteenth century. In terms of scale, narrative complexity, and narrative scope, Watson’s theatrical prints demonstrate her extraordinary skill as a stipple engraver and challenge gender and printmaking hierarchies. Appointed Engraver to the Queen in 1785, Watson signed her prints, publishing a number under her own name, and supported herself comfortably through her printmaking. Despite her professional achievement and technical prowess, her extended independent career was circumscribed by hierarchies of gender that paralleled artistic hierarchies.

In his essay On Humor, Pirandello effectively places himself in the tradition of Cervantes, who engaged modern problematic subjectivity, not with the tragic relativism of his contemporary Hamlet but with a nimble comic irony that learns to live within the condition. Some three centuries later, growing dissatisfied with the realist tradition Cervantes had helped to found, a number of early twentieth-century European writers, largely influenced by Nietzsche, including James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Thomas Mann, turned to myth not only as a literary form but also as a form of life. In their work, the poetic imagination seeks to become mythopoeic and thereby affirm the mythic basis of human culture. In three late plays – Lazarus, The New Colony, and the unfinished The Mountain Giants – Pirandello also turned to mythic motifs, but these works are not attempts at mythopoeic creation so much as they are political and moral allegories using mythic themes.

This chapter charts the impact of the establishment of systematic state funding on the nature of the relationship between theatre goers and theatre makers; the forms of theatre available to audiences; and theatre makers’ attitudes towards theatregoers. Citing Baumol and Bowen’s 1960s survey of British theatregoers – which noted their exceptionally elite status – it discusses the social, technological, and cultural shifts which have shaped the opportunities for greater audience interaction, agency, and ownership in recent years. Touching on the building of new civic, repertory, and university theatres in the regions between the 1950s and 1980s, the health and status of touring theatre companies, and efforts to create more accessible and inclusive experiences, the chapter acknowledges that the period since 1945 has seen extraordinary developments in the understanding of what being an audience means, in terms of visibility, conventions governing behaviour, marketing, opportunities for participation, and assumptions about what constitutes an appropriate place for the encounter between performer and spectator. It concludes, however, that twenty-first century British theatre still has some way to go before it can claim to have addressed its reputation for elitism and exclusivity.