Their Majesties' Servants. Annals of the English Stage

Doran, Dr. (John), 1807-1878Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.2
Word count
676K words
Chapters
68

Tags

English Originals Dramatic Literature Portrait GalleryLegendary LivesGroup BiographyPopular Narrative19th CenturyCultural ChangeFolk Customs

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today."Their Majesties' Servants." Annals of the English Stage (Volume 1 of 3) by DoranAuthor: Doran, Dr. (John), 1807-1878,Language: English, Class: PN: Language and Literatures: Literature: General, Criticism, Collections, Release Date: Oct 14, 2014

Editor's review

This is the first volume of the three-volume Their Majesties' Servants: Annals of the English Stage by the English clergyman and author John Doran. It traces the history of the English stage in chronicle form, gathering anecdotes and personalities along the way. Doran wrote in the nineteenth century, and his prose has the flavour of Victorian miscellany: it prizes anecdote, character and backstage lore over the systematic theatre history of modern scholarship. For today's reader its value lies chiefly in two things, source material and entertainment. It offers a glimpse of the working conditions of early English actors, of theatre ecology and of audience customs, and it lets us hear how nineteenth-century English men of letters talked about the stage. The Project Gutenberg electronic edition is easy to search and excerpt, making it a useful supplementary source for research on English theatre history or a volume of literary-historical essays to dip into. Read it as a book of materials rather than a book of conclusions, and keep a certain distance from judgments shaped by the prejudices of its age.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Start with the table of contents and chapter summaries, then jump between figures or theatres rather than reading straight through.
  2. Keep notes on names, plays and theatres worth looking up later, as threads for further reading.
  3. Read it alongside a modern history of English theatre, using this book for detail and the modern work to correct its judgments.
  4. If reading purely for pleasure, take one or two chapters at a time and treat it as bedside literary-historical essays.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. 63
  64. 64
  65. 65
  66. 66
  67. 67
  68. 68

FAQ

Is this a complete history of the English stage? No. It is the first of three volumes, telling the story of the English stage through chronicle and anecdote, with an essayistic bent rather than systematic argument. If you need an overall framework, read it alongside a modern theatre history.
Can I read it without any background in theatre history? You can, but it will be hard going. The book assumes some familiarity with the many names, plays and theatres it mentions; without that grounding you may see only anecdotes and miss the larger thread. It helps to acquire a concise outline of English theatre history first, then return to the details.
How is the electronic edition best used? The Project Gutenberg edition is an English public-domain ebook, well suited to searching for names and play titles or excerpting passages for research. It has no modern annotation or index, so verify facts and edition information yourself before quoting.
Can the views in the book be quoted directly? Not as settled historical conclusions. The author writes from a nineteenth-century perspective and with personal likes and dislikes, and some of his judgments look prejudiced today. Treat them as evidence of how the theatre was viewed in his time, and check them against modern scholarship before quoting.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Doran, Dr. (John), 1807-1878 Author

Dr. John Doran (1807–1878) was an English writer whose life and education are sparsely documented in publicly available sources; five of his works are held in this collection. He drew mainly on the history of the English court and stage. His History of Court Fools examines the origins and anecdotes of the court jester across the centuries. Their Majesties' Servants: Annals of the English Stage chronicles the English theatre and its actors in annalistic form, while his Memoir of Queen Adelaide, Consort of King William IV, recounts the life of the queen. His writing favours archival detail and personal anecdote, in a plain yet engaging style, leaving readable popular histories of nineteenth-century English social and theatrical life that are still cited in works on these subjects.