English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800

The essays in English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800 explore the theatrical anecdote’s role in the construction of stage fame in England’s emergent celebrity culture during the long eighteenth century, as well as the challenges of employing such anecdotes in theater scholarship today. This collection showcases scholarship that complicates the theatrical anecdote and shows its many sides and applications beyond providing the expected comic punch. Discussing anecdotal narratives about theater people as producing, maintaining, and sometimes toppling individual fame, this book crucially investigates a key mechanism of celebrity in the long eighteenth century that reached into the nineteenth century and beyond. The anecdote erases boundaries between public and private, and fictionalizes the individual in ways deeply familiar to twenty-first-century celebrity culture.