History of the London Theatres

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Part architectural history, part performance history, this course is a London Seminar on the History of London Theatre. We will use particular plays to provide a history of the professional theatre in London, encompassing the all-male companies of the early modern period, the introduction of women actors in the Restoration, the patent theatre system in the eighteenth century, the dominance of melodrama in the nineteenth-century, and the development of the musical in the twentieth century. Our focus will be on the architecture of the theatre buildings and a history of the way the theatre industry has developed. And we will be especially interested in the role of audience members, how players interacted with their audiences, and how various architectural configurations encouraged certain behaviors and attempted to control others. We will study individual plays in the classroom, learning about their original performance conditions and the theatres in which they were first performed, we will see live productions in the theatres surrounding the LGG, to consider how theatres incorporate their architecture into the logics of their plays. We would also consider the letters, diaries newspaper reviews, legal cases, and fictional representations of the theatre, to gain insight into what playgoers noticed about the theatres they visited and what they noticed about the audiences. The course will provide a rigorous training in thinking about the history of the theatre through the lens of architectural and performative space.