Wagner worked indefatigably to establish ‘model’ performances of his operas. But he hoped that others would devise better solutions to the huge problems of stage performance that were intrinsic to their conception. His widow Cosima set the clock back by insisting on fidelity to the imperfect ‘models’ that had been left behind. This attitude proved a powerful spur to the theatrical revolutionaries who were knocking on her door. Their revolution was to demonstrate that Wagner’s works could be staged in different ways in different times and that this would be more faithful to his mythopoeic ambitions than Cosima’s deluded strategy.

This chapter attempts to describe the principal landmarks in stage production between Wagner’s inauguration of the Ring in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1876 and Patrice Chéreau’s sensational presentation of the same work in the same theatre a hundred years later.

The Introduction takes as its starting point the desire expressed in James Wright's Historia Histrionica (1699) to 'guess at the action' of early modern players, arguing that the 'action' of boy performers is partially recoverable from the texts that have come down to us provided that we are willing to read with physical skill in mind. It surveys the past century's critical fascination with boy actors, suggesting that a great deal of pre-existing work has neglected the embodied stagecraft required of these young performers. It additionally makes a case for the value of practice-based research in the study of early modern drama's corporeal dynamics, and maps out the book's integration of this method into its analysis of a wide range of plays from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Introduction ends with an outline of the book's structure, which explains how the chapters cumulatively build a more physically and theatrically sensitive picture of the work of boy actors in this period.

The introduction to Playing and Playgoing: Actor, Audience and Performance in Early Modern England argues that the study of theatrical culture is crucial to the scholarly investigation of dramatic texts: not merely of historical interest, but necessary for a full understanding of the plays themselves. Playing and Playgoing works with and reflects on approaches drawn from literary scholarship, theatre history, and performance studies, in seeking to advance the critical conversation on the interactions between: play-texts; performance spaces; the bodily, sensory and material experiences of the playhouse; and playgoers’ responses to, and engagements with, the theatre. This introduction explores three textual and archival examples that suggest the significance of the player-playgoer relationship at the heart of this book – and in so doing, it sets up the questions raised by this volume, and the shared interests that operate across the range of approaches these chapters offer.

This chapter explores singers’ repertoires, from whence they were derived, and their networks of dissemination, and centres on my formulation of a cultural ‘mainstream’ of songs. I begin by placing the notoriously mixed repertoires available to us within a theoretical framework of the miscellaneous as a form of cultural consumption, before moving beyond specific lists of songs to a consideration of historical process. I examine the remarkable ways in which singers appropriated tunes from other cultural spaces, and the varying methods by which a lyric might be sourced. I look at the question of circulation both within and without London, and the movement of songs between different physical and social sites, demonstrating in particular the overwhelming musical importance of the theatre to mainstream song culture. I construct an image of this ‘mainstream’ as a working model for understanding how songs were produced, performed, and consumed in an age before sound recording: a model that necessarily takes issue with Peter Burke’s influential theory of the separation of elite and popular cultures by 1800. As the century progressed and harmonic forms of songwriting, informed by keyboards, came to prominence, this cultural model was no longer tenable, and newly-literate workers with a slightly improved disposable income began to consume songs in both physical and performative forms that bypassed the ballad-singer.

Chapter 5 examines the importance of the playbill in general in Romantic-period culture. Playbills represent by far the largest body of ephemeral texts that have survived and this chapter explores the history of their interest to collectors and how the theatre, as part of the category of ‘public amusements’, was integrated into ephemera collecting as a whole. The history of the playbill also focuses a discussion of changes in printing technology around 1800 – mainly the introduction of larger typefaces that could be read from a distance – which led to the emergence of the poster and the increasing colonisation of urban space by print. I argue for the importance of ephemera and ephemerality to Romantic-period media history and also to the genealogy of theatre history as a discipline. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the earliest printed document in Australian history to be discovered to date, a playbill for a performance of the tragedy Jane Shore at the ‘Theatre, Sydney’ in 1796.