The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre 1737-1832 provides an essential guide to theatre in Britain between the passing of the Stage Licensing Act in 1737 and the Reform Act of 1832 a period of drama long neglected but now receiving significant scholarly attention. Written by specialists from a range of disciplines, its forty essays both introduce students and scholars to the key texts and contexts of the Georgian theatre and also push the boundaries of the field, asking questions that will animate the study of drama in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for years to come.

The Handbook gives equal attention to the range of dramatic forms not just tragedy and comedy, but the likes of melodrama and pantomime as they developed and overlapped across the period, and to the occasions, communities, and materialities of theatre production. It includes sections on historiography, the censorship and regulation of drama, theatre and the Romantic canon, women and the stage, and the performance of race and empire. In doing so, it shows the centrality of theatre to Georgian culture and politics, and paints a picture of a stage defined by generic fluidity and experimentation; by networks of performance that spread far beyond London; by professional women who played pivotal roles in every aspect of production; and by its complex mediation of contemporary attitudes of class, race, and gender.

Julia Swindells, Previously affiliated with Homerton College, Cambridge, and then Anglia Ruskin University.,David Francis Taylor, Associate Professor of English at the University of Warwick

Julia Swindells was a writer and teacher in Cambridge. She authored Glorious Causes: The Grand Theatre of Political Change, 1789-1833 (2001), and co-edited Pickering & Chatto's edition of Eighteenth-Century Women's Theatrical Memoirs (2007-8).

David Francis Taylor is Associate Professor of English at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Theatres of Opposition: Empire, Revolution, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (2012), as well as a number of articles on the political contexts of theatre in the Georgian period.

Abbreviations and Conventions
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Introduction, David Francis Taylor
Theatre, Theory, Historiography
Enlightenment, Exclusion, and the Publics of the Georgian Theatre, Angie Sandhu
Theorizing Audience and Spectatorial Agency, Betsy Bolton
Theorizing the Performative Event, Marvin Carlson
Theatre Managers and the Managing of Theatre History, David Francis Taylor
Legislating Drama
The 1737 Licensing Act and its Impact, David Thomas
The Political Context of the 1737 Licensing Act, Julia Swindells
The Dialectics of Print and Performance after 1737, Matthew J. Kinservik
The 1832 Select Committee, Katherine Newey
Looking Towards 1843 and the End of the Monopoly, Jim Davis
The Changing Cultures of Performance
Georgian Theories of the Actor, Frederick Burwick
Theatrical Celebrity and the Commodification of the Actor, Heather McPherson
Shakespeare in the Georgian Theatre, Gefen Bar-On Santor
Performing Variety, Packaging Difference, Kristina Straub
Interrogating Legitimacy in Britain and America, Peter P. Reed
The Whole Show: Spectacles, Sounds, Spaces
Painting the Scene, Kathryn R. Barush
Manufacturing Spectacle, Shearer West
Orchestra and Theatre Music, Vanessa L. Rogers
Dance and the Theatre, Erin J. Smith
Restoring a Georgian Playhouse, Colin Blumenau
Genres and Forms
Genealogies of Comedy, Misty G. Anderson
The Challenge of Tragedy, Felicity Nussbaum
Pantomimic Politics, John O'Brien
The Gothic Drama: Tragedy or Comedy?, Jeffrey N. Cox
The Writing and Staging of Georgian Romantic Opera, Michael Burden
The Stages of Closet Drama, Catherine Burroughs
The Formation of Melodrama, Matthew S. Buckley
Theatre and the Romantic Canon
The Case of Byron's Marino Faliero, John Gardner
Shelley, Vigano, and Coreodramma, Jacqueline Mulhallen
William Godwin and the Politics of Playgoing, David O'Shaughnessy
Jane Austen's Stage, Penny Gay
Women and the Stage
Theorizing the Woman Performer, Helen E. M. Brooks
Women Theatre Managers, Thomas C. Crochunis
Women Playwrights, Marjean D. Purinton
Retrieving Elizabeth Inchbald, Paula R. Backscheider
Performing Race and Empire
Empire, Sentiment, and Theatre, Bridget Orr
Theatre, Islam, and the Question of Monarchy, Daniel O'Quinn
The Georgian Theatre in Colonial America, Odai Johnson
Staging Atlantic Slavery, Prathibha Kanakamedala
Colman's Inkle and Yarico: four perspectives, Nandini Bhattacharya, Mita Choudhury, Frank Felsenstein, Jean I. Marsden
Historic Williamsburg: Theatre, Memory, and Colonial Slavery, Marcus Wood
Index