Title: The rise of the director, 1734-1956
Description: The rise of the theater director in the late nineteenth century as a professional interpreter and artist created the theater of the twentieth century. The director, in whom authority was centralized, influenced the writing of plays, the development of actor training methods, the increasingly marginalized yet prestigious place of theater in the age of film, radio, and other mass media, and the representation of theater in novels and cinema. He or she made the attribution of authorship and the negotiation of authority the central questions in modernist production. The role of the director provides a compelling answer to the question, "What was modernist about the modernist theater?" Scholars have attended to individual theater directors and their importance to national theater traditions.

This study accounts for the intersection between directorial practice and historical and cultural forces more broadly in British and continental practice, particularly as part of an ongoing discussion about how directors ought to assert their authority within a new theatrical division of labor, what loyalty they owe to the elusive intentions of the texts they take up, and where the director's work is legible in a performance. This study also considers the ethical anxieties that surround directing as an artistic practice. The incorporation of new developments in industrial manufacturing onto an increasingly "automated" stage led to charges that directors reified the bodies of their actors by equating them with other machines behind the (now electrified) footlights. The strangeness of directing as a form of art making is that it takes the bodies of other people as materials. The ethics of making other agents into instruments in the name of manifesting individual creative intentions ignited debates in theater that still fire today.