Michael R. Booth – författare

This is a new selection of five English nineteenth-century plays, none of which has been recently available. In the case of "The Lights o' London", a famous drama of the 1880s, no printed text has ever before been published. Each of the plays represents the three dominant dramatic forms of the Victorian era: melodrama, farce and comedy. All were extremely popular with audiences, and much of the vigour, excitement and variety of dramatic expression of their time can be found in these texts.

This 1996 book presents Edwardian entertainment and the Edwardian entertainment industry as parts of a vital, turbulent era whose preoccupations and paranoias echo those of our own day. Responding to recent shifts of attitude towards the Edwardians and their world, the essays in this collection take as their provenance broad patterns of theatrical production and consumption, focusing upon the economics of theatre management, the creation of new audiences, the politics of playgoing, and the meteoric rise of popular forms of mass entertainment, including musical comedy, variety theatre, and the cinema. Individual chapters also offer fresh insights into key aspects of the Edwardian stage such as a definition of the theatre of the time, gender play and role reversal in the Edwardian music hall, as well as issues related to politics and the suffrage movement.

This 1996 book presents Edwardian entertainment and the Edwardian entertainment industry as parts of a vital, turbulent era whose preoccupations and paranoias echo those of our own day. Responding to recent shifts of attitude towards the Edwardians and their world, the essays in this collection take as their provenance broad patterns of theatrical production and consumption, focusing upon the economics of theatre management, the creation of new audiences, the politics of playgoing, and the meteoric rise of popular forms of mass entertainment, including musical comedy, variety theatre, and the cinema. Individual chapters also offer fresh insights into key aspects of the Edwardian stage such as a definition of the theatre of the time, gender play and role reversal in the Edwardian music hall, as well as issues related to politics and the suffrage movement.

Originally published in 1981. This study concentrates on one aspect of Victorian theatre production in the second half of the nineteenth century – the spectacular, which came to dominate certain kinds of production during that period. A remarkably consistent style, it was used for a variety of dramatic forms, although surrounded by critical controversy. The book considers the theories and practice of spectacle production as well as the cultural and artistic movements that created the favourable conditions in which spectacle could dominate such large areas of theatre for so many years. It also discusses the growth of spectacle and the taste of the public for it, examining the influence of painting, archaeology, history, and the trend towards realism in stage production. An explanation of the working of spectacle in Shakespeare, pantomime and melodrama is followed by detailed reconstructions of the spectacle productions of Irving’s Faust and Beerbohm Tree’s King Henry VIII.