Rogue performances
Subtitle: staging the underclasses in early American theatre culture
By: Peter P. Reed.
Series: Palgrave studies in theatre and performance history
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2009
Place of publication: New York, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 249
Subjects: American drama -- 18th century -- History and criticism; American drama -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Theater and society -- United States -- History -- 18th century; Theater and society -- United States -- History -- 19th century; Poor in literature; Working class in literature; Rogues and vagabonds in literature
Description: Rogue Performances recovers eighteenth and nineteenth-century American culture's fascination with outcast and rebellious characters. Highwaymen, thieves, beggars, rioting mobs, rebellious slaves, and mutineers dominated the stage in the period's most popular plays. Peter Reed also explores ways these characters helped to popularize theatrical forms such as ballad opera, patriotic spectacle, blackface minstrelsy, and melodrama. Reed shows how both on and offstage, these paradoxically powerful, persistent, and troubling figures reveal the contradictions of class and the force of the disempowered in the American theatrical imagination. Through analysis of both well known and lesser known plays and extensive archival research, this book challenges scholars to re-think their assumptions about the role of class in antebellum American drama. -- Back cover of book.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: Atlantic underclasses and early American theatre culture; title: Gallows performance, excarceration, and The beggar's opera; title: Algerians, renegades, and transnational rogues in Slaves in Algiers; title: Treason and popular patriotism in The glory of Columbia; title: Pantomime and blackface banditry in Three-finger'd Jack; title: Class, patronage, and urban scenes in Tom and Jerry; title: Slave revolt and classical blackness in The gladiator; title: Epilogue: escape artists and spectatorial mobs.