Abstract
What are the images most widely conjured up by the word ‘theatre’? The indoor stage, the lights dimming and curtain rising as the evening performance begins, the darkened auditorium, the irritation at late-comers groping for their seats or people who insist on talking throughout the play? The ice-creams and programmes, the scramble for the bar at the interval, the splendid scenery and costumes, the impatient wait for the entrance of the star, the burst of applause at the end?
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References
Frank Aydelotte, Elizabethan Rogues and Vagabonds (1913, republished London: Frank Cass, 1967) pp. 110–11.
Quoted in J. Dover Wilson, Life in Shakespearean England (London: Penguin, 1944) p. 231.
L. L. and F. O. Marker, ‘Sources in Audience Research,’ from Das Theater und sein Publikum (Wien, 1977) p. 26.
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Sir Barry Jackson, ‘Barnstorming Days’, in Studies in English Theatre History (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1952) p. 116.
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The Times, 5 February 1985.
Both Morley’s and Archer’s remarks come from Michael R. Booth, ‘East End and West End: Class and Audience in Victorian London’, in Theatre Research International, vol. II, no. 2 (February 1977) pp. 99–100.
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Richard Findlater, Joe Grimaldi (Cambridge University Press, 1978) pp. 11–12.
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See his essay ‘The Politics of Popular Culture’ in C. W. E. Bigsby, Approaches to Popular Culture (London: Edward Arnold, 1976) pp. 3–26.
Colin Chambers, ‘Socialist Theatre and the Ghetto Mentality’, in Marxism Today (August 1978), p. 249.
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R. D. Altick, The English Common Reader (London: University of Chicago Press, 1957) p. 243.
Rev. J. Panton Ham, The Pulpit and the Stage (London, 1878) p. 73.
Derek Longhurst, ‘Reproducing a National Culture: Shakespeare in Education’, in Red Letters, no. 11 (n.d.); also Derek Longhurst, ‘Not For All Time, But For An Age’ in Peter Widdowson (ed.), Re-reading English (London: Methuen, 1982) pp. 150–63.
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© 1987 Andrew Davies
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Davies, A. (1987). The Great Bard and All That: Some Traditions of British Theatre. In: Other Theatres. Communications and Culture. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18723-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18723-2_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
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