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- Title
Abnormal Personages and Substantial Lumps: Theatre's Dialectic of Fairy Magic and Human Work.
- Authors
Young, Martin
- Abstract
This article treats the nineteenth-century theatrical fairy as a paradigmatic figure for considering the relationship between work and magic. It explores what I am referring to as 'the dialectic of fairy magic and human work', which is constitutive of theatre in industrialised capitalism, in order to expose an ideological tension in bourgeois thought. In nineteenth century scholarship, we see that the institution of the theatre was regarded as inferior to private reading because dramatic poetry was marred by the practical limitations of live performance. This attitude, most clearly articulated in relation to Shakespeare's fairy play A Midsummer Night's Dream, has been termed 'Romantic antitheatricalism' and can be understood as an iteration of the bourgeois privileging of idealism over materialism. I read Romantic antitheatricalism in the context of Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre's 'Romantic anticapitalism', and I treat the distaste for theatre's materiality as an anxious response to the emergence of industrialised capitalist society. This anxiety, however, is most fully expressed as contempt for workers' bodies: the corporeality of performers and the visibility of stagehands. I frame these concerns around the reviews of Samuel Phelps' production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at Sadler's Wells (1853).
- Subjects
MIDSUMMER Night's Dream, A (Play : Shakespeare); DIALECTIC; PHELPS, Samuel
- Publication
Platform (17510171), 2018, Vol 12, Issue 2, p18
- ISSN
1751-0171
- Publication type
Article