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- Title
'One Entire Nation of Actors and Actresses': Reconsidering the Relationship of Public and Private Theatricals.
- Authors
Brooks, Helen E. M.
- Abstract
This essay explores the range of meanings signified by 'private' in the private theatricals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries. Historically the term 'private theatricals' has led to associations with the domestic, intimate, and amateur, and resulted in such theatrical activity being side-lined within a field largely focussed on the sphere of 'public', commercial, professional theatre. Yet whilst our contemporary use of the term 'private' might suggest the binary division of 'private' and 'public' theatres, there was no fixed definition of 'private' in the late eighteenth century. 'Private theatricals' signified a number of different understandings of 'privacy', including the nature of the place itself and the performance's accessibility to the general public. Recognising that the term 'private' had broader meanings in the eighteenth century than are often considered today, particularly in the wake of Habermas, and that the term 'private theatricals' covered a range of different forms of theatrical activity, this essay investigates the historic division between public and private theatres. It explores how areas of overlap and interaction between the public and private theatres problematised the distinction between these two realms, arguing that only by re-evaluating this received idea of the division of public and private theatres can we counteract the elision of private theatricals from theatre history, and in the process, shed new light on our understanding of the theatre industry as a whole.
- Subjects
AMATEUR theater; PRIVATE sphere; PUBLIC sphere; THEATER history; HISTORY
- Publication
Nineteenth Century Theatre & Film, 2011, Vol 38, Issue 2, p1
- ISSN
1748-3727
- Publication type
Essay
- DOI
10.7227/NCTF.38.2.3