Kerry Powell

This Companion is designed for readers interested in the creation, production and interpretation of Victorian and Edwardian theatre in its own time and on the contemporary stage. The volume opens with an introduction surveying the theatre of the time, followed by an essay contextualizing the theatre within the culture as a whole. Succeeding chapters examine performance, production, and theatre, including the music, the actors, stagecraft and the audience; plays and playwriting and issues of class and gender. Chapters also deal with comedy, farce, melodrama, and the economics of the theatre.

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre

'I love acting - it is so much more real than life,' Oscar Wilde famously wrote. Acting Wilde demonstrates that Wilde's plays, fiction, and critical theory are organised by the idea that all so-called 'reality' is a mode of performance, and that the 'meanings' of life are really the scripted elements of a dramatic spectacle. Wilde's real issue was whether one could become the author of his own script, the creator of the character and role he inhabits. It was a question he struggled to answer from the beginning of his career to the end, whether in his position as the pre-eminent dramatist in English or as the beleaguered defendant on trial for 'gross indecency'. Introducing important evidence from Wilde's career-launching tour of America, the often tortured revisions of his plays, and the recently discovered written record of his first courtroom trial, this book reconstructs Wilde's strategic dramatising of himself.

Victorian Sexuality, Theatre, and Oscar Wilde

Acting Wilde

Kerry Powell examines Wilde's plays in relation to popular theatre of the 1890s, both in England and on the Continent. Along with revealing insights into the sexual and moral politics of the era, Powell provides an indispensable basis for understanding Wilde's achievement as a playwright. At his best, Wilde reconstitutes the dramatic fashions of the era, and partly as a result his plays have prevailed over the works, many now forgotten, that they simultaneously imitate and undermine. Through his analysis, Powell looks at the plays of, among others, Arthur Shirley, Lady Violet Greville, Sydney Grundy and W. Lestocq as well as the impact of Ibsen on Wilde. The book contains production photographs from plays by Wilde and by little-known playwrights and an appendix of biographies. Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s will be of interest to students and specialists of drama, theatre history and English literature.

Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s

The Reading and Writing Booklet includes four pages per unit to target specific skills. The first page focuses on reading, the second on comprehension with more of a range of texts than those offered in the CLIL and Wider World pages of the Pupil's Book. The third page offers reading and writing activities to revise the key vocabulary, and using the fourth page pupils have the opportunity to write texts which practice punctuation, syntax and structure. An answer key is provided at the back of the Teachers Book. Details of when to use this booklet are given in the teaching notes.

Islands Level 6 Reading and Writing Booklet

Peter Raby

Oscar Wilde was a courageous individualist whose path-breaking life and work were shaped in the crucible of his time and place, deeply marked by the controversies of his era. This collection of concise and illuminating articles reveals the complex relationship between Wilde's work and ideas and contemporary contexts including Victorian feminism, aestheticism and socialism. Chapters investigate how Wilde's writing was both a resistance to and quotation of Victorian master narratives and genre codes. From performance history to film and operatic adaptations, the ongoing influence and reception of Wilde's story and work is explored, proposing not one but many Oscar Wildes. To approach the meaning of Wilde as an artist and historical figure, the book emphasises not only his ability to imagine new worlds, but also his bond to the turbulent cultural and historical landscape around him - the context within which his life and art took shape.

Oscar Wilde in Context

Concise and illuminating articles explore Oscar Wilde's life and work in the context of the turbulent landscape of his time.

Kerry Powell

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