Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film

Victorian actor Edward Saker began his career in Edinburgh before moving to Liverpool in 1865. There he established himself as a popular low comedian. In 1868, at the age of thirty, he became lessee of the Alexandra Theatre. Opened two years earlier as the New Prince of Wales, the Alexandra had struggled financially under previous managers, but it flourished under Saker. Using new evidence from the diaries of his close friend, wealthy Liverpool industrialist Andrew George Kurtz, this article describes the circumstances of Saker's transition from actor to actor-manager. Kurtz's diaries document his intimate friendship with Saker, recording how he nursed the actor through a period of serious illness and helped him financially to achieve professional success. Liverpool was an important provincial centre of Victorian theatre, and the 1860s were a turbulent time in the history of the Liverpool stage. Kurtz's diaries give fresh insights into this eventful period, as well as illuminating the private life of a notable Victorian actor.

Focusing primarily on Paris and London, this essay delves into fictional interiors crafted for exhibitions and commercial displays around 1900, contending that their genesis can be traced back to the practices and methods of theatrical stage design. Nineteenth-century performance, fervently inclined to material realism, established traditions for the staging of domestic objects. Theatres lent their techniques and their professionals to other types of display. From stages to homes, and from bedrooms to period rooms, the dramatisation of domesticity seized both public and private realms. Regardless of the purposes they served, be it memorial, educational, recreational, or promotional, fictional interiors of the turn of the twentieth century capitalised on the emotional resonance of material settings on individual sensibilities, and the ability of the audience to weave narratives from the arrangement of domestic objects.

Press coverage of Giuseppe Chiarini's circus in Mexico during the downfall of Maximilian shows the entertainment entrepreneur adapting and altering his promotional messaging in response to a volatile political climate. That Chiarini operated a transnational enterprise at the time allows direct comparisons of the differing messaging he employed between Mexico and the United States on two controversial issues: republican versus imperial forms of government that divided Mexico and slavery that divided the United States. His politically splintered audiences in Mexico also offered differing interpretations of the import of his company's performance, and subsequently employed his circus to bolster the emergence of a national symbol. The record in Mexico suggests that the circus's methods of communication were less resistant to the application of political meaning than they were flexible in incorporating such meanings, allowing for them to attract and maintain the most diverse, and therefore largest, possible public.

The Anglo-German drama, which comes to proliferate in London's patent theatres at the turn of the nineteenth century, renders ubiquitous an arms-bearing heroine whose foreign character and perceived ideological inferences render her a chief object of attack among British Europhobic commentators. Redressing the limited scholarship devoted to this pervasive Anglo-German figure, this essay foregrounds the remarkable extent to which she is implicated in the perceived social and political threats with which the German drama is freighted. The essay uses theatrical commentaries to spotlight three recurring, though not quite harmonious flaws, for which the violent German heroine is contemporaneously berated. Then, analysing performances of Joseph George Holman's The Red-Cross Knights (Haymarket, 1799) and Richard Cumberland's Joanna of Montfaucon (Covent Garden, 1800), the essay illustrates the meticulous methods employed by dramatists to mollify the subversive implications embodied by the Anglo-German Amazon and to uphold supposedly inherent distinctions between male and female conduct, and British and European females, at a moment when the blurring of such gendered and national boundaries portends the social anarchy witnessed across the Channel.