In 1997 Claire Sponsler argued that, contrary to conventional interpretations, the anarchic, disruptive bodies of sin in medieval morality plays do not “unproblematically and unilaterally lead to the ratification of virtue over vice.” Instead, “the memory of the pleasures of misbehavior, of the satisfactions that come from unruly bodies allowed free rein” lingered with spectators to the extent that any “attempts made by these plays to bring misbehavior to a halt look highly unsatisfactory and incomplete.” For Sponsler, the powerful allure of vice performed was such that morality plays would have been unable fully “to negate the charms of misgovernance” they enacted. In this article, however, I want to argue against Sponsler's assumption and investigate how one English morality play, The Castle of Perseverance, understood very well the allure of performed sin and actively cultivated it as part of its dramaturgical and didactic strategies. All morality plays, as Sponsler observes, use representations of “disorderly behavior grounded in the misuse of bodies and commodities,” investing these figures of sin “with remarkable energy, interest, and vitality, so much so that the vices are … very seductive.” The Castle is no exception, and the vast majority of its roughly three thousand lines are spoken by the Three Enemies of Man and their affiliated Sins. In addition, the playtext also provides unusually rich, detailed descriptions of how these spiritual enemies and sins should move around the performance space. Drawing on the theory of kinesthetic empathy, I examine the kinesic dimension of these “unruly bodies” and argue, contrary to Sponsler, that it is their presence, and the audience's own embodied responses to them, that deepens and enhances, rather than detracts from, the play's moral message.

In her recent book on celebrity pregnancy, legal scholar Renée Ann Cramer writes, “in the years from 1970 to 2000, popular culture became more open to performances of pregnancy; once kept secret and articulated as private, pregnancy became ‘public.’” This is not wholly true. In the English-speaking world, “celebrity pregnancy,” with its overt performances of femininity and maternity, bodily monitoring, and careful dance between the concealment and revelation of private information, had its first public moment in the long eighteenth century. That century's professional theatre was a site for the intersection of two forms of women's labor: the maternal labor of pregnancy and birth, which affected women of all classes throughout a century with rapidly rising birth rates, and the theatrical labor of professional actresses. Although the latter has been the subject of much-needed study in recent decades, the impact of maternal labor on the professional theatre of the time is only beginning to be explored. Between 1700 and 1800, birth rates for middle- and upper-class British woman rose significantly. Among the aristocracy, rates doubled from four to eight children, and middle-class women averaged seven births by the end of the century. At the same time, women in the professional theatre were inventing and modeling new forms of public womanhood, capitalizing on a burgeoning culture of female celebrity, and, in some cases, wielding exceptional economic and artistic power. Though not all actresses had children, many did, and at rates that were not unlike those of their nontheatrical counterparts. For these women, the successful balancing of maternal and theatrical labor could be vital to their careers and, in many cases, their family's survival. The need to balance personal and professional demands was all the more imperative within the hectic and extremely competitive repertory system. The day-to-day repertory of a London company was of necessity a malleable thing, accommodating short runs of popular pieces, audience requests, illnesses and absences of company members, and the perpetual state of competition between the patent houses of Covent Garden and Drury Lane. To compete profitably, managers needed competent and popular performers (bodies) and performance vehicles (texts) in which to feature them. As the available bodies changed, then, so too did the available plays for performance.

In an influential essay on the place of autobiography in theatre history, Thomas Postlewait puts Fanny Kemble's memoirs at the crux of a historiographical problem. The literary sensibility of Kemble's work appears to Postlewait an instance of both the theatrical memoir's cultural richness and its limitations as biographical evidence: although Kemble's “epistolary mode of self-representation” gives her autobiography Records of a Girlhood “a documentary quality,” for example, even her “earliest letters reveal a calculated literary style” that signals her awareness of the “traits and conventions” of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels. In her consciousness of narrative trends, Kemble stands out as a particularly clear example of a general tendency in theatrical autobiographies of the period. As the nineteenth century's booming print market expanded the audience for stories about theatregoing, it also drew readers who were increasingly familiar with novelistic experiments in plotting, characterization, and point of view. This shared audience encouraged an exchange of discursive conventions across fictional and historical narratives, which makes memoirs a compelling but complicated source of historical data about nineteenth-century theatre. Indeed, the two-way influence between genres is so strong that Postlewait argues scholars “need to ask to what extent these autobiographies exist not only as historical records but as epistolary fictions.”

In 1900, performer Junie McCree debuted a new character on the stage of vaudeville theatres in New York City. In a short playlet written by McCree entitled The Dope Fiend; or, Sappho in Chinatown, the actor took to the stage in a black suit, fedora, and thick mustache to perform a comic version of an opium-smoking addict from the West of the United States. McCree's addict was marked by his slumped posture, his wisecracks and chicanery, and a broad assortment of inventive slang that was intended as a sign of the character's frontier roots. Undermining expectations regarding addicts as vicious or subhuman, this vaudeville dope fiend was charming in his insouciance and playfully eccentric in behavior. McCree's interpretation was distinct from the already established stage drunk or tramp clown; he was not sloppy or bedraggled, but more the figure of a slow-moving but cunning saloon poet. McCree quickly became famous for the portrayal, spawning numerous imitators who helped make the vaudeville dope fiend a standard character convention, recognizable to Progressive Era audiences of variety entertainment, but almost entirely ignored by modern scholarship. Dissecting the anatomy of McCree's characterization, including its sources and cultural impact, this article argues for the inclusion of the comic dope fiend in the pantheon of stage characters from the period and calls attention to popular entertainment's contribution to the national debate over drug addiction.

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines disability, in very broad terms, as the difficulty an individual may have relating to his or her surrounding environment. Nonetheless, since the eighteenth century, Spanish literature has portrayed disability as a metaphor for deficiency, imperfection, monstrosity, disorder, and even excess. In this sense, the grotesque amputation suffered by the protagonist, Tristana, in Benito Pérez Galdós's famous homonymous novel written in 1892 can be interpreted as a settling of accounts of society with a woman who was too independent and intellectually ambitious for her time. Literary production became in that sense a reflection of a society that wove together a series of prejudices regarding disability, resulting in the stigmatization and invisibility of these individuals.