About the Book
The Stage and the Page: London’s “Whole Show” in the Eighteenth-Century Theatre edited by Geo. Winchester Stone, Jr. reconceives eighteenth-century drama as a seamless interplay of script and spectacle. Refusing the false choice between literary text and stage event, this collection shows how London audiences experienced an evening as an integrated sequence—overture, prologue, mainpiece, entr’acte song and dance, epilogue, afterpiece, and final music. Essays by leading scholars map the century’s tastes and institutions: Robert D. Hume reclassifies comedy into five performative modes and periodizes shifting fashions; John Loftis reads *Tancred and Sigismunda* against the waning drama of political opposition; Leo Hughes restores the centrality of afterpieces to audience pleasure. Together they model a criticism calibrated to box-office realities, actor personalities, and the rhythms of the patent theatres.
Infrastructure and embodiment receive equal weight. Donald C. Mullin links playhouse architecture to production choices, while Ralph G. Allen’s account of “irrational entertainment” uncovers the sensorium of scenic effects. Four music-centered chapters (Stone, Knapp, Dircks, Lincoln) demonstrate how songs, burlettas, and mythic settings—from The Enchanter to Orpheus—suffused Garrick’s stage with sound, with companion audio illustrations that animate their arguments. Practice-based studies by Charles H. Shattuck (promptbooks), Shirley Wynne (gesture and dance), and Bernard Beckerman (norms for performance-aware criticism) translate ephemeral staging back onto the page. Richly interdisciplinary and methodologically eclectic, The Stage and the Page equips scholars, directors, dramaturgs, and music historians to reconstruct London’s “whole show,” restoring the eighteenth century’s theater as a living art where reading and performance illuminate each other.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.