Spectator Narratives: Print Representations of Performance and Nineteenth-Century Audiences

Abstract

Spectator Narratives: Print Representations of Performance and Nineteenth-Century Audiences examines print narratives about theatre events in letters, diaries, periodicals, and novels. Building an archive that recovers the productively loose relationship among genres in the nineteenth century, Spectator Narratives reads historical accounts of theatregoing in conversation with fictional representations of performance in contemporaneous novels. Such an inter-generic approach to theatre writing reveals, on the one hand, how Victorian actors and audience members use the techniques of nineteenth-century narrative to shape the meaning of performance events; and, on the other, how Victorian novelists incorporate scenes of theatregoing in their experiments with fictional form. This dissertation presents the spectator narrative in three acts, each oriented around a current question in theatre history and performance studies and a specific nineteenth-century narrative technique. Act I examines the intersection between scenes of spectatorship and narrative point of view. In close readings of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette, and theatre writing from Henry Crabb Robinson, Clement Scott, Fanny Kemble, Marie Bancroft, and Lady Maud Tree, Act I analyzes how spectator-narrators wield both the depersonalized authority of Victorian omniscience and a more embodied, partial perspective marked by the boundaries of gender, class, and disability. Act II moves from a narrator’s point of view to a text’s narrative mode, in order to ask what epistolarity reveals about the spatial and temporal presence of live performance. Two case studies examine the uses of “epistolary liveness” –Fanny Burney’s Evelina and Early Journals and Letters in the late-eighteenth century and Wilkie Collins’s No Name and Fanny Kemble’s Record of a Girlhood in the mid-nineteenth century – with a specific focus on how the presence and precarity of epistolary narrative highlight the vulnerability of feminine performance. Act III steps back from scenes of performance to consider narrative structures. Focusing on the intersection between performance histories and serial plotting, this Act analyzes both how novels like George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Great Expectations, and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone use scenes of performance to stage pivotal moments of connection and return and also on how theatre reviews and essays from Sir Theodore Martin, Henry Morley, George Henry Lewes, and Clement Scott draw on the dynamics of narrative seriality to plot changes in performance over time. This final act undertakes, in particular, a revision of Shakespeare performance history. While Victorian Shakespeare is often narrated as a story of inherited traditions and Darwinian evolution, Act III presents a more serial Shakespeare by reading across spectator narratives that use the plotting devices of contagion and ghosting. By offering comparative analyses that draw together insights from performance theory, narrative theory, reception theory, and Shakespeare performance studies, Spectator Narratives offers not only new insights into the particular relationship between Victorian theatre and the Victorian novel, but also a useful method for performance scholars working in other historical periods. As it shifts from a focus on the reading practices of audiences to an examination of audience tactics for writing performance narratives, Spectator Narratives opens up new avenues of research for scholars interested in historical audiences and reception studies.