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Shakespeare and Nineteenth-Century Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2010

Extract

Although there was probably more drama written in English during the nineteenth century than in any previous century, the most popular dramatist of the period had been dead for two hundred years. The frequent presentations of Shakespeare's plays on the nineteenth-century stage caused certain problems—he had written for a different audience and a different theatre. The new audience found much in Shakespeare's plays to admire; but of special interest were the romantic and melodramatic aspects of the plays and the spectacle with which some of the managers interlarded them—the processions, the battles, the crowds, the tableaux, and especially the magnificent costumes and scenery.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1963

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References

NOTES

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48. Tribune (New York), November 4, 1875.

49. Evening Post (New York), February 9, 1875.

50. Ibid.

51. Montgomery, George Edgar, “A Revival of Shakespeare's ‘Midsummer Night's Dream,’The Cosmopolitan, V, No. 2 (April, 1888), 101102.Google Scholar Dioramas had also been used by other managers in Henry V and in Antony and Cleopatra.

52. Quoted in Felheim, , op. cit., p. 221.Google Scholar Some managers actually staged events for which Shakespeare intended only a verbal description as when Charles Kean in Henry V showed the French camp at night with men playing dice while it was being described by the Chorus. Odell, , Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, II, 355.Google Scholar