This collection uncovers connections and coincidences that challenge the old stories of pioneering performers who crossed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. It investigates songlines, drama, opera, music theatre, dance, and circus-removing traditional boundaries that separate studies of performance, and celebrating difference and transformation in style, intention, and delivery. Well known, or obscure, travelling performers faced dangers at sea and hazardous journeys across land. Their tracks, made in pursuit of fortune and fame, intersected with those made by earlier storytellers in search for food. Touring Performance and Global Exchange takes a fresh look at such tracks-the material remains-demonstrating that moving performance does far more than transfer repertoires and people; it transforms them. Touring performance has too often beenconceived in diasporic terms, as a fixed product radiating out from a cultural centre. This collection maps different patterns-ones that comprise reversed flows, cross currents, and continually proliferating centres of meaning in complex networks of global exchange. This collection will be of great interest to scholars and students in theatre, music, drama studies, and cultural history.

Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice presents the most current international scholarship on the complexity and subversive potential of women's comedic speech, literature, and performance. Earlier comedy theorists such as Freud and Bergson did not envision women as either the agents or audiences of comedy, only as its targets. Only more recently have scholarly studies of comedy begun to recognize and historicize women's contributions to-and political uses of-comedy. The essays collected here demonstrate the breadth of current scholarship on gender and comedy, spanning centuries of literature and a diversity of methodologies. Through a reconsideration of literary, theatrical, and mass media texts from the Classical period to the present, Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice responds to the historical marginalization and/or trivialization of both women and comedy. The essays collected in this volume assert the importance of recognizing the role of women and comedy in order to understand these texts, their historical contexts, and their possibilities and limits as models for social engagement. In the spirit of comedy itself, these analyses allow for opportunities to challenge and reevaluate the theoretical approaches themselves.

Treading the bawds challenges the traditional boundaries that have separated the histories of the first actresses and the early female playwright. It brings the approaches of new histories and historiography to bear on old stories to make alternative connections between women working in the business of theatre. Drawing from feminist cultural materialist theories and historiographies, Bush-Bailey analyses the collaboration between the actresses Elizabeth Barry and Anne Bracegirdle and women playwrights such as Aphra Behn and Mary Pix, tracing a line of influence from the time of the first theatres royal to the rebellion that resulted in the creation of a player's co-operative. This is a story about public and private identity fuelling profit at the box office and gossip on the streets and investigating how women's on- and off-stage personae feed each other in the emerging commercial world of the business of theatre. Employing the narrative strategy of the micro-history, Bush-Bailey offers a fresh approach to the history of women, seeing their neglected plays in the context of performance. Competition with the patent house resulted in a dirty tricks campaign that saw William Congreve supporting the female rebels or, as this book suggests, being supported by them. By combining detailed analysis of selected plays within the broader context of a playhouse managed by its leading actresses, Bush-Bailey challenges the received historical and literary canons, including a radical solution to the mysterious identity of the anonymous playwright 'Ariadne'. It is a story of female collaboration and influence with the spotlight focussed on the very public world of women in the commercial business of theatre. This book is for those interested in a new way of reading 17th century theatre and for all students of performance, culture, women's studies and gender history.

Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice presents the most current international scholarship on the complexity and subversive potential of women's comedic speech, literature, and performance. Earlier comedy theorists such as Freud and Bergson did not envision women as either the agents or audiences of comedy, only as its targets. Only more recently have scholarly studies of comedy begun to recognize and historicize women's contributions to-and political uses of-comedy. The essays collected here demonstrate the breadth of current scholarship on gender and comedy, spanning centuries of literature and a diversity of methodologies. Through a reconsideration of literary, theatrical, and mass media texts from the Classical period to the present, Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice responds to the historical marginalization and/or trivialization of both women and comedy. The essays collected in this volume assert the importance of recognizing the role of women and comedy in order to understand these texts, their historical contexts, and their possibilities and limits as models for social engagement. In the spirit of comedy itself, these analyses allow for opportunities to challenge and reevaluate the theoretical approaches themselves.

This groundbreaking anthology, part of the Women, Theatre and Performance series, brings together an extraordinary mix of one-act and full length plays and solo performance texts written by women. Included in the volume are texts by Beatrice Herford, Ruth Draper, Zora Neale Hurston and G. B. Stern, originally performed across commercial and amateur theatres in Britain and America. Some of the plays have remained unpublished since their original performance - Georgina Weldon's Not Alone, Clothilde Graves' Mother of Three, Rachel Crother's Ourselves and Marie Stope's Our Ostriches. Others are anthologized here alongside plays with which they connect aesthetically and historically, for example, Edith Lyttelton's Warp and Woof, Elizabeth Robins' Votes for Women, Elizabeth Baker's Edith, Sophie Treadwell's Machinal and Aimee Stuarts' Nine Till Six. The volume, for students and scholars, provides an accessible collection of texts exemplifying the range and breadth of women's theatre writing from the 1880s to the early decades of the twentieth century. -- .

Stage Mothers explores the connections between motherhood and the theater both on and off stage throughout the long eighteenth century. Although the realities of eighteenth-century motherhood and representations of maternity have recently been investigated in relation to the novel, social history, and political economy, the idea of motherhood and its connection to the theatre as a professional, material, literary, and cultural site has received little critical attention. The essays in this volume, spanning the period from the Restoration to Regency, address these forgotten maternal narratives, focusing on: the representation of motherhood as the defining female role; the interplay between an actress's celebrity persona and her chosen roles; the performative balance between the cults of maternity and that of the "passionate" actress; and tensions between sex and maternity and/or maternity and public authority. In examining the overlaps and disconnections between representations and realities of maternity in the long eighteenth century, and by looking at written, received, visual, and performed records of motherhood, Stage Mothers makes an important contribution to debates central to eighteenth-century cultural history.