TRACY C. DAVIS is Barber Professor of Performing Arts at Northwestern University, USA, and author of Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture, George Bernard Shaw and the Socialist Theatre, The Economics of the British Stage, 1800-1914, and Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense. Her edited collections include Theatricality, and Playwriting and Nineteenth-Century British Women. She is President of the American Society for Theatre Research. PETER HOLLAND is McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies

• List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Series Introduction: Redefining British Theatre History; P.Holland Introduction: The Performing Society; T.C.Davis & P.Holland PART I: PERFORMANCE OCCASIONS Boxing Day; J.Davis What Are Faries For?; T.C.Davis Communal Performances: Royal Ritual, Revolution, and National Acts; E.Allen George Edwardes and Musical Comedy: The Transformations of London Theatre and Society, 1878-1914; T.Postlewait PART II: PERFORMANCE ANXIETIES Nation and Neighbourhood, Jews and Englishmen: Location and Theatrical Ideology in the Theatre of Victorian London; H.Holder Theatre History and Capital on the Victorian Stage; J.Moody Modernity, Geography and Historiography: (Re)-Mapping Irish Theatre History on the Nineteenth Century; M.Phelan PART III: REPERTOIRES The Death of Tragedy; or, the Birth of Melodrama; J.N.Cox Fitting the Bill: Acting out the Season of 1813/14 at the Sans Pareil; G.Bush-Bailey Charles Mathews, Low Comedian, and the Intersections of Romantic Ideology; E.Ziter The Persistence of Closet Drama: Theory, History, Form; C.Burroughs Shakespeare and the Music Hall; R.Schoch What is a Play? Drama and the Victorian Circus; J.Bratton Index

'The Performing Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre's History is a fine collection of essays, and unlike some other such collections is likely to be of lasting value.' - Early Popular Visual Culture 'This collection of essays marks the distance travelled in the last two decades in scholarship on nineteenth-century theatre. Thirteen essays, collectively and individually, weave history and historiography together in what are uniformly exemplary demonstrations of 'new theatre history'. The volume also reminds us that it is in this formerly most maligned of theatre-historic fields that some of the most interesting, innovative and critically engaged work is being done.' - Katherine Newey, Theatre Research International