Since Georges Méliès made Pygmalion et Galathée (Pygmalion and Galatea) in 1898, Greek mythology has afforded filmmakers endless opportunities to display their medium to great public success, if at varying levels of artistic achievement. From short films such as those of Méliès at the dawn of cinema to gigantic widescreen and color epics, films set in ancient Greece and Rome have proven most durable for their sheer appeal as spectacles. Critics and historians have come to call them peplums or pepla after peplum, the Latin equivalent of the Greek word peplos(“mantle, cloak ”). But Germans and Italians tend to use an expression that characterizes most of these films even better: Kolossalfilm or il kolossal. Colossal visual pleasures unfolding in splendid if fake-classical architecture and involving invincible heroes, scheming villains, pretty damsels, wily seductresses, and menacing monsters had not been this easily available before. Cinema and its offspring, television, have proven the most fertile ground for reimagining and reinventing antiquity, not least by means of increasing technological wizardry such as computergenerated images. Long-running television series such as Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and its spin-off, Xena: Warrior Princess, animated Disney films such as John Musker and Ron Clements’s Hercules (1997) and its sequels, and big-screen extravaganzas such as Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (2004) all attest to our continuing fascination with ancient myth.

Probably the best-known example of a private theatrical in the Georgian period is a fictional one: the scheme to stage Lovers' Vows in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814). Literary critics have tended to focus on the moral and philosophical dimensions of Austen's representation of acting in the novel, taking its apparent antitheatricalism for granted, and it is only comparatively recently that the complexity of her engagement with private theatricals, and indeed with the theatre in general, has been properly acknowledged. Mansfield Park not only reveals Austen's familiarity with the practicalities of getting up a play in a country house in the early nineteenth century; it also demonstrates her awareness of how the fashion for private theatricals could illuminate some central concerns of Georgian society and culture, such as the relationship between public and private spheres, the changing meanings of family and issues of gender, sexuality, class and national identity. Insofar as Lovers' Vows is never actually staged in the novel (Austen instead focusing on preparations for a performance abandoned after the unexpected arrival of Sir Thomas Bertram) Mansfield Park illustrates the way in which the sociable rituals associated with private theatricals became at least as important as the performance itself. For the Georgians, the play was never entirely the thing: they were equally fascinated with the sociable, spatial and material contexts in which play-making took place. Because it was invested in such contexts, commemorated in ephemeral literature such as tickets and playbills, the phenomenon of private theatricals is especially revealing of this aspect of eighteenth-century theatrical culture as a whole.

“Plato is praised by greater men, Aristotle by a greater number.” This pithy statement by Petrarch (1304-74) in his work On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others is best read in context. Petrarch goes on in the same passage: “each of them is worthy of praise both by great men and by many - by all, really.” On the one hand, Petrarch reflects here a medieval commonplace, inherited from St. Augustine (354-430): that of all the ancient pagan philosophies, Platonism came the closest to Christian truth. Even more precisely, Augustine said: the ancients who had believed things about the creator that were close to “us” were represented by “Plato and those who had understood him correctly.” This process of “understanding” a past thinker is significant. It is primarily exegetical, and those who embraced it - as many adherents of Platonism in the Renaissance did - assumed that it was their responsibility as interpreters to bring out the truth of the ancient thinker or school that they were investigating.

On the other hand, Petrarch gives voice here to a historically specific sentiment which in the late fourteenth century was finding expression not only in the nascent humanist movement but also in other areas of spiritual and intellectual life, even in the realm of scholastic philosophy: that there was something about institutionalized forms of learning that was not responding to contemporary needs, that there existed a restrictive manner in which knowledge was being channeled, and that institutional structures of higher learning were lending themselves to a sometimes unhelpful social reproduction. The result of this social reproduction was that certain key questions associated with “philosophy” from the days of Socrates were becoming more difficult to answer satisfactorily.

Over the past two decades, scholars of British theatre in the long eighteenth century have produced some of the most imaginative and exciting work in contemporary cultural studies. Just as radical changes in the nature and scale of Britain's print culture spurred theatre's growing importance as a public experience in this period, so in our own historical moment the changing exigencies of the academy have transformed how we think about the period's theatre. Divergent approaches to studying or even defining theatre have long hindered conversation between scholars in different disciplines. While twentieth-century theatre historians maintained an interest in acting styles, repertories and production techniques, literary scholars - inheriting a Romantic fascination with the lyric imagination - neglected theatre's 'claims of the body, the institution, and the market' (Moody 2000). As Jacky Bratton (2003) has argued, this theoretical and institutional divide cut off the study of theatre as literature from the study of theatre as performance. Because they relied on a critical apparatus which placed elite dramatic 'art' in opposition to popular theatrical 'entertainment', literary critics tended to overlook the myriad ways that text and acting, production and reception, authorship and spectatorship intersected in British theatre.

Influenced by new historicism and by the emergence of interdisciplinary approaches to cultural history, a new generation has addressed these oversights by exploring more fully the material, social and political conditions of theatrical production. Scholars in fields as diverse as art history, literary and performance studies, women's studies, economics, sociology and anthropology have contributed to a bold reassessment of how theatre shaped the social, political, cultural and institutional life of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Concepts such as elite, popular, theatrical, performance, even Britishness itself have come under new kinds of scrutiny.

Readers who come to David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) equipped only with the taxonomies provided by modern histories of philosophy - “British empiricism” versus “continental rationalism,” scientific versus scholastic, ancients versus moderns - are likely to be taken aback at the way Hume in his first chapter, “Of the Different Species of Philosophy,” anatomizes the philosophy of his time. He distinguishes first a moral philosophy that “considers man chiefly as born for action,” which regards virtue as the most valuable of objects and “paint[s] her in the most amiable colours, borrowing all helps from poetry and eloquence,” treating the subject “in an easy and obvious manner.” Moral philosophers of this kind “make us feel the difference between vice and virtue; they excite and regulate our sentiments; and so they can but bend our hearts to the love of probity and true honour, they think, that they have fully attained the end of all their labours.” But there is a second species of philosophers who “consider man in the light of a reasonable rather than an active being, and endeavor to form his understanding more than cultivate his manners.” This kind of philosopher does not address the generality of men but “aim[s] at the approbation of the learned and the wise,” seeks “hidden truths” rather than an improvement in the behavior of mankind. Hume claims the first species of philosophy, being “easy and obvious,” will always be preferred to the “accurate and abstruse,” as is shown by the relative popularity of the first: “the fame of Cicero flourishes at present; but that of Aristotle is utterly decayed. La Bruyere passes the seas, and still maintains his reputation: But the glory of Malebranche is confined to his own nation, and to his own age. And Addison, perhaps, will be read with pleasure, when Locke shall be entirely forgotten.”

Philosophy as an academic discipline in schools and universities

During the Renaissance, the term philosophy could still denote learning in general: thus Gregor Reisch named his encylopedic textbook (published first in 1503 but reprinted extensively in northern Europe as well as in Italy throughout the sixteenth century) Margarita philosophica, a work which served as an introductory compendium of learning from the most elementary reading to theology, normally regarded as the pinnacle of knowledge. At the same time, however, Reisch focused on the subjects which had, in the course of the Middle Ages, come to constitute philosophy as an academic discipline: logic, natural philosophy (meaning natural sciences), morals, and metaphysics.

Up to the twelfth century, when Europe witnessed the emergence of specialized institutions of higher education - now known as universities but usually called studia or studia generalia in the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance - philosophy, as an academic discipline, regularly formed part of a unitary curriculum, beginning with elementary reading and grammar and terminating with theology, all of which was taught within one institution or school. Such schools usually had an ecclesiastical affiliation, often with a monastery or a cathedral. The best of these schools (e.g. at Chartres) embraced a remarkably catholic range of knowledge. William of Conches, for example, a great teacher who taught in the French schools during the first half of the twelfth century, left a series of commentaries reflecting his teaching activity: from grammar (on Priscian, in two different redactions) to moral philosophy, physics, cosmology, metaphysics, and theology (on Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Macrobius, and Plato’s Timaeus).

Garrick flourished during the years when educated Englishmen (and a few privileged English women) were admiring their own enlightenment at the same time as they debated issues of 'proper' public conduct. He both encouraged and benefited from a new, quasi-philosophical interest in actors as exemplars of controlled behaviour. Some measure of self-admiration is essential to any actor's wellbeing, and Garrick, despite his constant fear of ridicule, had plenty of it; a current of concern with how he 'looks' runs through his voluminous correspondence. His career marks a transition from an insistently aural theatre, represented by the sonorous James Quin (1693-1766), to a primarily visual one.

The demand for looking-glasses boomed during the final decades of the eighteenth century, indicative both of an increase in self-awareness and of 'the new prominence of beauty as a social and political category'. The idea of the spectator as detached observer and connoisseur, boosted by Addison and Steele's launching of The Spectator in 1711, was not swept away, but it was subjected to pressure by the contradictory cult of sensibility. Laurence Sterne's sentimental traveller carries with him everywhere 'the interest . . . which men of a certain turn of mind take . . . in their own sensations'. A Sentimental Journey was the publishing highlight of 1768, and not all its readers were alert to the wicked innocence of its irony. Hugh Kelly's False Delicacy, puffed into popularity that same year at Drury Lane by Garrick's publicity machine, imported 'sentiment', in the form of exaggerated altruism, to the theatre without a hint of irony.

“Gatekeeper of the modern age”

Nicholas of Cusa (Niklas Krebs, known as Cusanus, 1401-64), one of the most original and creative intellects of the fifteenth century, has been variously described as “the last great philosopher of the dying Middle Ages” (Alexandre Koyré), as a “transition-thinker” between the medieval and modern worlds (Frederick Copleston), and as the “gatekeeper of the modern age” (Rudolf Haubst). He is a lone figure with no real successor although he had some influence on Copernicus, Kepler, Bruno, and, tangentially, on Descartes. The German Idealists showed some interest in Nicholas of Cusa but the real revival of his thought was stimulated by the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), who called him “the first modern thinker” and by the existentialist Karl Jaspers. Cassirer compared him to Kant for his view that objects have to be understood in terms of the categories of our own thought. Other scholars, notably Alexandre Koyré, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans Blumenberg, Werner Beierwaltes, and Karsten Harries, all see him in a certain way as a harbinger of modernity. Yet his outlook is essentially conservative, aiming, as Hans Blumenberg has recognized, to maintain the medieval synthesis.

Cusanus was a humanist scholar, Church reformer - his De concordantia catholica (On Catholic Concord, 1434) included proposals for the reform of Church and state - papal diplomat, and Catholic cardinal. In the course of his life he attempted to reconcile papal and conciliar ecclesiology, Greek Eastern and Latin Western Christianity, Muslims and Christians, traditional theology and emerging mathematical science.

The story of female playwrights in the later eighteenth century begins with the eclipse of most of the women who preceded them. The Rover, Aphra Behn's popular comedy of Spanish intrigue, faded from the repertoire, along with the works of Delarivière Manley, Mary Pix, Catherine Trotter, Penelope Aubin and Eliza Haywood. The exception to this trend was Susanna Centlivre, but frequent revivals of her work and the occasional piece such as Charlotte Charke's The Art of Management (York Buildings, 1735) or Kitty Clive's Bays in Petticoats (DL, 1750) could not undo the cultural amnesia that was setting in. This eclipse occurred in a period of backlash against the libertine, rough gender play of the Restoration and early eighteenth century. In their place came more sentimental or 'humane' comedies, as well as the next generation of female playwrights including Frances Sheridan, Elizabeth Griffith, Hannah Cowley, Hannah More, Sophia Lee, Elizabeth Inchbald and Joanna Baillie.

The developing sense of bourgeois taste and propriety put the female playwright in a complicated position. Long-standing concerns about sexual impropriety in the theatre and the likelihood of critical censure in the rough-and-tumble world of reviewing made life in the theatre a suspect choice for a 'proper lady'. While many female playwrights successfully negotiated these concerns, women such as Frances Burney found themselves caught between aspirations and expectations. Even with a successful novel, Evelina, to her credit, Burney's father Charles was convinced that the production of her comedy, The Witlings, would endanger her reputation and that of the family:

The Aristotelian representation of the universe inherited from the Middle Ages remained dominant into the second half of the sixteenth century. It is true that the fifteenth-century revival of Platonism spearheaded by Marsilio Ficino as well as the more diffuse renaissance of Stoicism had undermined certain aspects of Aristotelian cosmology, such as the nature of the heavens as quintessence, the solid and impenetrable character of the celestial spheres, and the principle of the motion of celestial bodies. Nevertheless, even these alternative philosophies all embraced the key features of the Aristotelian universe - the finiteness and sphericity of the cosmos, the heterogeneity of and hierarchy between the supralunar and sublunar worlds, and the Earth as central and unmoving - and Aristotelianism thus retained an unthreatened hegemony, especially in the universities.

This was in spite of the publication in 1543 of Copernicus’ Six Books on the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri sex), which proposed a new calculus of planetary motion based on several new “hypotheses” (among them, heliocentrism and a mobile Earth). It also proposed a new cosmology consonant with these hypotheses and the immobility of the ultimate sphere of the universe (and therefore of the world as totality, as well). At the time, the dominant response to Copernicus’ work treated it solely as an astronomical hypothesis and ignored its cosmological implications. Consequently, at least until the first adherents of Copernicus’ cosmology (such as Michael Maestlin, implicitly, and Thomas Digges, explicitly) began to publish in the 1570s, the Aristotelian representation of the universe continued unchallenged.

The Renaissance occupies a paradoxical place in the history of political thought. It is famous for having nurtured two diametrically opposed, although similarly extreme theoretical positions: republicanism and absolutism. Yet neither position was remotely characteristic of Renaissance political theory as a whole. The result is an understandable, but nonetheless unfortunate skewing of the literature on Renaissance political philosophy. Because republicanism and absolutism are taken to be the signal theoretical contributions of the period, and because these ideologies tend to be of most interest to contemporary scholars, they receive a disproportionate amount of attention in chapters such as this one. In contrast, the overwhelmingly dominant political ideology of the age, which might be described as princely humanism, tends to be obscured by its more celebrated, but far less ubiquitous rivals. To put the matter a bit differently, the reader of most surveys of Renaissance political thought could be forgiven for concluding that, when taken together, republicanism and absolutism accounted for close to 90 percent of published Renaissance political writings. The truth of the matter, however, is quite the reverse: taken together, these two ideologies probably accounted for less than 10 percent of the political literature of the period. The analysis which follows aims to take seriously the dominance of princely humanism in Renaissance political thought, while at the same time explaining how the various tensions within it inspired important republican and absolutist critiques.

Thus James Frowde (1831-99), whose mother had been one of the famous Hengler family of pyrotechnists, rope-dancers, tragedians and circus proprietors, recalls his first memory of performance, some time around 1835. As he himself recognises, what he describes is an archetypal melodramatic moment. The play would seem to be one of the many stage versions of the heroic fable of St George and the Dragon, whose 1833-4 enactment on the classic boards of Drury Lane by Andrew Ducrow and his famous horses from Astley's Amphitheatre caused critical disgust. The drama clothed nationalist mythologising in gothic fairytale, spectacular horsemanship and special effects (Ducrow had a flying dragon that lifted him bodily from his saddle during the climactic combat). In little James's primal scene, evil - embodied in the scaly, tale-swinging beast of nightmare - menaces feminine innocence embodied in his handsome aunt. His telling of the story invokes the trope of the naïve theatregoer carried away by the fiction, overlaid with the intertheatrical joke of the boy's family relation to the stage: he not only took the dragon for real, but really knew and wished to protect the human performer.

In the black

Ripe for analysis is the startling fact that from the 1770s to the 1830s London patent theatre managers stood a good chance - often, their best chance - of being in the black by staging plays including black characters, topics or settings. Isaac Bickerstaffe's comic opera The Padlock (DL, 1768), famous for introducing the first blackface comic figure on the London stage, received fifty-four performances in its first season, 142 in its first nine years and instituted Mungo, the character's name, as a byword in late eighteenth-century cultural discourse. George Colman the Younger's version of Inkle and Yarico was not only the most popular new play in the 1787-88 season, but ultimately became the sixth most popular London mainpiece during the years 1776-1800. John Fawcett's pantomime Obi; or, Three Finger'd Jack (HM, 1800), featuring the rebellious activity of the escaped Jamaican slave, Jack Mansong, ran for thirty-nine nights in a single summer, the longest single season run for any play at the Haymarket between 1777 and 1811. In 1807 Drury Lane mounted a Christmas pantomime entitled Furibond; or, Harlequin Negro which enjoyed twenty-eight performances. Then there is the remarkable series of adaptations of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko that together comprise the second most frequently produced drama in the eighteenth century, beginning with Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko (DL, 1695) and including plays by John Hawkesworth (DL, 1759), Francis Gentleman (Edinburgh, 1760; DL, 1769) and an unstaged adaptation by Dr John Ferriar entitled The Prince of Angola (1788). Isaac Bickerstaffe's Love in the City (CG, 1767) and Archibald McLaren's The Negro Slaves; or, The Blackman and the Blackbird (Edinburgh, 1799) both deal with African slavery.

The nature of theatrical spectatorship during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was determined by a number of factors. After the Restoration, the democratisation of the theatre accelerated, the realms of box, pit and gallery accommodating and rendering visible different sectors of the community according to class and income. In general the social range of spectators attracted to the eighteenth-century patent theatres was very wide, while in the early nineteenth century the distribution of audiences became rather more variegated. The size of theatres also increased in this period: by the 1790s, both Drury Lane and Covent Garden Theatre could seat in excess of 3,000 spectators.

Audiences comprised a cross section of society: the more aristocratic, fashionable and affluent patrons in the boxes; intellectuals, less affluent gentlemen and professionals in the pit; tradesmen and their wives in the middle gallery and servants, footmen and sailors among the inhabitants of the upper gallery. At the patent theatres, royal command performances, attended by the reigning monarch and members of the royal family, regularly took place. As John O'Brien has observed, audiences went to the theatre not only to see a play but with the expectation of seeing their collective gathering as 'an image of the nation . . .an ideal “mimic state” that resembled the political state not only in its frequent dramaturgical focus on dynastic affairs but in its material form.'

Once we consider the constitution of audiences in the minor theatres which flourished in the expanding suburbs of London and the newer industrial cities from the late eighteenth century onwards, patterns of spectator attendance and composition become more complicated.

Actresses and sexual reputation

When English women first appeared on the public stage at the Restoration, some critics slighted them, in part by calling them whores. By the eighteenth century, however, women's place in performance had been fully established: while many public spaces, such as the century's famous coffee houses, excluded women, the playhouse simply could not function without them. Contemporary responses, nevertheless, remind us of the continuing volatility of the female body on stage - a result, at least in part, of the actress's indirect challenge to gender expectations.

Of course, all performers in this period became vulnerable to speculations about their personal lives. Yet sexual suspicion occupied an even greater part of the response to actresses: it is difficult to find a biography of an actress that does not devote significant energy to positioning its subject somewhere on (or off) the spectrum of female virtue. Critics have therefore debated whether contemporaries considered actresses as 'prostitutes or ladies', as 'reified objects or emergent professionals'. We need, however, to place this important question in the broader context of changing constructions of gender, the marketplace and the distinctiveness of eighteenth-century theatre culture instead of debating what might be a false opposition. By doing so, we can arrive at a more nuanced reading of the intertwined reputations of these two female professions (acting and prostitution) and thus achieve a better understanding of the actress's cultural position. The emergence in this period of an urban media culture, which offered to paying consumers an unprecedented variety of entertainment, located theatre as one choice in an expanding cultural market which ranged from the virtuous to the lurid. While conforming in some ways to the new bourgeois rhetoric of propriety, the stage also offered an intriguing though sometimes scandalous alternative to traditional hierarchies of rank and emerging ideologies of gender.

Early in the evening of 17 April 1521, in the German town of Worms, Martin Luther appeared before the young emperor Charles V and assembled dignitaries of the Holy Roman Empire. Almost four years had elapsed since the defiant young monk had posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the Wittenberg Church and in the interval, to the consternation of the papal authorities, opinion in Germany had begun to swing decisively in favor of the reformer. The previous year had seen the promulgation of a papal bull formally excommunicating Luther, whose response had been to burn the document at the gates of Wittenberg. As a final attempt to head off the impending crisis, Charles V was persuaded to give Luther a hearing at the Imperial Diet, then meeting in Worms. On that first evening Luther was confronted with a pile of his publications and a hostile emperor who demanded that he acknowledge the writings and recant them. Luther asked for time to consider his position and appeared again the next evening before a large crowd. He delivered a long speech, making it clear that he had no intention of recanting: