Their Majesties' Servants. Annals of the English Stage

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

Rating 3.2
Word count
625K words
Chapters
63

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 2 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 second of three volumes of Dr. Doran's Their Majesties' Servants: Annals of the English Stage, an electronic reprint of a public-domain theatrical history. Doran chronicles the people and events of the English stage in annalistic fashion, in the leisurely, anecdotal manner of a nineteenth-century mean of letters; the material is rich and the narration unhurried, making the book better suited as supplementary reading in English theatre history than as a rigorously academic monograph. This volume continues the thread of the preceding one, focusing on the theatres, actors, and court theatrical relations of a particular period; read alongside the other two volumes, it completes the picture. Its value lies in preserving an early first-hand narrative of the English theatrical world and in showing the kind of source material on which later theatre histories have relied. Because the original is in English and dates from the nineteenth century, its sentences are dense and its names of persons and plays numerous; annotations or reference works are recommended. The electronic edition is easy to search and excerpt, making it convenient for scholars to consult while writing and for theatre enthusiasts to browse at leisure and savor the tone of old-style historical essays.

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Reading tips

  1. Begin with the table of contents and the opening note to establish the period and figures covered in this volume, then proceed chapter by chapter.
  2. Keep pen and paper or a digital notebook at hand to jot down recurring names of persons, theatres, and plays for cross-reference.
  3. Read in conjunction with Volumes I and III to complete the chronological thread and avoid the gaps that come from reading a single volume.
  4. When names and play titles become dense, use theatre-history reference works or online resources for background.

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

FAQ

Is this book the complete three-volume set? No. This entry corresponds to the second of three volumes; the first and third volumes are separate books. To gain the complete chronological thread, you need to read or consult all three.
Is the content original source material or later research? This is Dr. Doran's stage chronicle written in the nineteenth century—an old-style historical work in its own right, not a modern scholarly monograph. It presents how people of that time recorded and commented on the English stage and its figures.
How difficult is the English, and what background is needed? The original dates from the nineteenth century, with long sentences and dense names of persons and plays, placing it at the upper-intermediate level of reading difficulty. Good English proficiency and background material on theatre history are recommended.

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.