Title Playing Sick : Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine

Published Milton : Routledge, 2018

Click on the following:
ProQuest Ebook Central

Copies

Description 1 online resource (233 pages) Series Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies Routledge advances in theatre and performance studies. Contents Cover; Half Title; Series Title; Title Page; Copyright Page; Dedication Page; Table of Contents; List of Figures; Abbreviations; Acknowledgments; Introduction; An illness lived; An illness performed; Notes; Bibliography; Part I: Performing consumption; Chapter 1: Rosy cheeks and red handkerchiefs: Performing Camille's consumption before, during, and after the contagionist turn; The making of the consumptive myth; Unmaking the consumptive myth; Scripting consumption in Dumas's La dame aux camé lias; Playing the romantic disease; Playing clinical tuberculosis; Notes; Bibliography Chapter 2: Foreign invasions: The transatlantic consumptives of Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora DuseThe sublime and the grotesque in Bernhardt's neo-romantic Camille; The myth unmasked: Eleonora Duse's naturalistic Marguerite; Camille and the death of consumptive sentiment; Notes; Bibliography; Part II: Performing drug addiction; Chapter 3: Early dramaturgies of drug addiction in stage adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Sherlock Holmes; The nineteenth-century pharmacopeia; Imagining addiction in the late nineteenth century Adapting addiction for the late nineteenth-century popular stageLove in the time of narcotics; Notes; Bibliography; Chapter 4: Master, martyr, monster: The addict archetypes of William Hooker Gillette and Richard Mansfield; Dosing and detecting in Gillette's Sherlock Holmes; "His failure is a disease": Virtue and vice in Mansfield's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; The anatomy of a fin-de-siè cle addict; Notes; Bibliography; Part II: Performing mental illness; Chapter 5: The madwoman in the theatre: Normalizing the disordered female mind in Ellen Terry's Lyceum repertoire "A mind diseased" in Ellen Terry's Lyceum repertoireThe hysteric and the madwoman; Notes; Bibliography; Chapter 6: Neurotic princes and enfeebled kings: Stigmatizing male mental illness in Henry Irving's mad roles; Mathias, 1871; Hamlet, 1878; King Lear, 1892; Irving's emasculated madmen; The doctor is out: The closing of the Lyceum laboratory; Notes; Bibliography; Notes; Bibliography; Index Summary Few life occurrences shaped individual and collective identities within Victorian-era society as critically as witnessing or suffering from illness. The prevalence of illness narratives within late nineteenth-century popular culture was made manifest on the period's British and American stages, where theatrical embodiments of illness were indisputable staples of actors' repertoires. Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine reconstructs how actors embodied three of the era's most provocative illnesses: tuberculosis, drug addiction, and mental illness. In placing performances of illness within wider medicocultural contexts, Meredith Conti analyzes how such depictions confirmed or resisted salient constructions of diseases and the diseased. Conti's case studies, which range from Eleonora Duse's portrayal of the consumptive courtesan Marguerite Gautier to Henry Irving's performance of senile dementia in King Lear, help to illuminate the interdependence of medical science and theatre in constructing nineteenth-century illness narratives. Through reconstructing these performances, Conti isolates from the period's acting practices a lexicon of embodied illness: a flexible set of physical and vocal techniques that performers employed to theatricalize the sick body. In an age when medical science encouraged a gradual decentering of the patient from their own diagnosis and treatment, late nineteenth-century performances of illness symbolically restored the sick to positions of visibility and consequence Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Print version record Subject Diseases in the theater -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century Theater -- England -- History -- 19th century English drama -- 19th century -- History and criticism PERFORMING ARTS -- Theater -- General. Diseases in the theater English drama Theater England Great Britain Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. History Form Electronic book ISBN 9781351787703 1351787705 9781315203331 1315203332 9781351787710 1351787713 9781351787697 1351787691

  Permalink