Chartist drama Vargo, Gregory
2020, 20200610, 2020-06-15, 2020-06-10
eBook
The first collection of its kind, Chartist Drama makes available four plays written or performed by members of the Chartist movement of the 1840s. Emerging from the lively counter-culture of this ...protest campaign for democratic rights, these plays challenged cultural as well as political hierarchies by adapting such recognisable genres as melodrama, history plays, and tragedy for performance in radically new settings. They include poet-activist John Watkins's John Frost, which dramatises the gripping events of the Newport rising, in which twenty-two Chartists lost their lives in what was probably a misfired attempt to spark a nationwide rebellion. Gregory Vargo's introduction and notes elucidate the previously unexplored world of Chartist dramatic culture, a context that promises to reshape what we know about early Victorian popular politics and theatre.
Modernist plays in the early twentieth century often resisted the theatre. Many circulated in print, in ‘little magazines’ dedicated to literature and the arts. Using Wyndham Lewis’s ‘Enemy of the ...Stars’ (1914) as a case study, this article considers what the medium of the little magazine offered modernist playwrights. The article first engages with some of Lewis’s earlier periodical publications and his interest in contemporary crowd theory, to trace how his attitude towards performance and the masses developed. Comparing the periodical publication of Lewis’s experimental play to a 1932 revision in book form then reveals that it is precisely the magazine’s dramatic potential that allowed Lewis to stage a closet play to be read by the individual, instead of watched by the masses that he despised. This article thereby argues for an understanding of the modernist periodical as a highly performative medium, and acknowledges its vital role in shaping modernist aesthetics.
