The richness of Victorian theatre has often been neglected because of the era's most celebrated productions of Shakespeare's plays. Judith L. Fisher and Stephen Watt present a vigorous collection of eighteen essays covering the vast expanse of this "other" theatre, including social dramas, Christmas pantomimes, and adaptations of Gothic novels such as "Guy Mannering" and "Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags."
Reflecting both the longings and values of the public and the theatrical conventions of the times, Victorian productions could capture audiences with the historical verisimilitude of William Charles Macready's production of "Richelieu "or incite a storm of public outrage with the too explicitly fallen woman in Olga Nethersole's interpretation of "Sapho." Playwrights worked at adapting such popular classic works as "The Count of Monte Cristo" or devising new melodramas such as "Rent Day" and "Luke the Labourer." Pandering to the tastes of an expanding middle-class audience, theatre bills reflected popular fascination with the daily newspapers' stories of social maladies. Transposed to the stage, "bad" men and women could be punished for wrongdoings in a way that was unlikely or impossible in real life. Emphasizing the variety of stagecraft in the Victorian age, the contributors to "When They Weren't Doing Shakespeare" present a composite portrait of the vibrant theatrical worlds that existed in both nineteenth-century New York and London.

In this groundbreaking study, Bruce McConachie uses the primary metaphor of containmentOCowhat happens when we categorize a play, a television show, or anything we view as having an inside, an outside, and a boundary between the twoOCoas the dominant metaphor of cold war theatergoing. Drawing on the cognitive psychology and linguistics of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, he provides unusual access to the ways in which spectators in the cold war years projected themselves into stage figures that gave them pleasure.McConachie reconstructs these cognitive processes by relying on scripts, set designs, reviews, memoirs, and other evidence. After establishing his theoretical framework, he focuses on three archtypal figures of containment significant in Cold War culture, Empty Boys, Family Circles, and Fragmented Heroes. McConachie uses a range of plays, musicals, and modern dances from the dominant culture of the Cold War to discuss these figures, includinga"The Seven Year Itch," a"Cat on a Hot Tin Roof";a"The King and I," "A Raisin in the Sun," a"Night Journey," anda"The Crucible."aIn an epilogue, he discusses the legacy of Cold War theater from 1962 to 1992.Original and provocative, a"American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War"ailluminates the mind of the spectator in the context of Cold War culture; it uses cognitive studies and media theory to move away from semiotics and psychoanalysis, forging a new way of interpreting theater history."