Few life occurrences shaped individual and collective identities within Victorian-era society as critically as witnessing or suffering from illness. The prevalence of illness narratives within late nineteenth-century popular culture was made manifest on the period's British and American stages, where theatrical embodiments of illness were indisputable staples of actors'repertoires. Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine reconstructs how actors embodied three of the era's most provocative illnesses: tuberculosis, drug addiction, and mental illness. In placing performances of illness within wider medicocultural contexts, Meredith Conti analyzes how such depictions confirmed or resisted salient constructions of diseases and the diseased. Conti's case studies, which range from Eleonora Duse's portrayal of the consumptive courtesan Marguerite Gautier to Henry Irving's performance of senile dementia in King Lear, help to illuminate the interdependence of medical science and theatre in constructing nineteenth-century illness narratives. Through reconstructing these performances, Conti isolates from the period's acting practices a lexicon of embodied illness: a flexible set of physical and vocal techniques that performers employed to theatricalize the sick body. In an age when medical science encouraged a gradual decentering of the patient from their own diagnosis and treatment, late nineteenth-century performances of illness symbolically restored the sick to positions of visibility and consequence.
Author(s): Meredith Conti
Series: Routledge Advances In Theatre & Performance Studies
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 233
Tags: Theatre, Performance Studies, Illness, Sick, Age Of Victorian Medicine
Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Series Title......Page 3
Title Page......Page 4
Copyright Page......Page 5
Dedication Page......Page 6
Table of Contents......Page 8
List of Figures......Page 10
Abbreviations......Page 11
Acknowledgments......Page 12
Introduction......Page 16
An illness lived......Page 17
An illness performed......Page 25
Notes......Page 32
Bibliography......Page 34
Part I: Performing consumption......Page 38
Chapter 1: Rosy cheeks and red handkerchiefs: Performing Camille’s consumption before, during, and after the contagionist turn......Page 40
The making of the consumptive myth......Page 43
Unmaking the consumptive myth......Page 47
Scripting consumption in Dumas’s La dame aux camé lias......Page 50
Playing the romantic disease......Page 52
Playing clinical tuberculosis......Page 60
Notes......Page 70
Bibliography......Page 74
Chapter 2: Foreign invasions: The transatlantic consumptives of Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse......Page 78
The sublime and the grotesque in Bernhardt’s
neo-romantic Camille......Page 79
The myth unmasked: Eleonora Duse’s naturalistic
Marguerite......Page 88
Camille and the death of consumptive sentiment......Page 95
Notes......Page 96
Bibliography......Page 99
Part II: Performing drug addiction......Page 102
Chapter 3: Early dramaturgies of drug addiction in stage adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Sherlock Holmes......Page 104
The nineteenth-century pharmacopeia......Page 108
Imagining addiction in the late nineteenth century......Page 111
Adapting addiction for the late nineteenth-century
popular stage......Page 115
Love in the time of narcotics......Page 122
Notes......Page 124
Bibliography......Page 128
Chapter 4: Master, martyr, monster: The addict archetypes of William Hooker Gillette and Richard Mansfield......Page 131
Dosing and detecting in Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes......Page 133
“His failure is a disease”: Virtue and vice in Mansfield’s
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde......Page 137
The anatomy of a fin-de-siè cle addict......Page 146
Notes......Page 150
Bibliography......Page 153
Part II: Performing mental illness......Page 156
Chapter 5: The madwoman in the theatre: Normalizing the disordered female mind in Ellen Terry’s Lyceum repertoire......Page 158
“A mind diseased” in Ellen Terry’s Lyceum repertoire......Page 162
The hysteric and the madwoman......Page 164
Notes......Page 182
Bibliography......Page 186
Chapter 6: Neurotic princes and enfeebled kings: Stigmatizing male mental illness in Henry Irving’s mad roles......Page 190
Mathias, 1871......Page 192
Hamlet, 1878......Page 198
King Lear, 1892......Page 203
Irving’s emasculated madmen......Page 210
The doctor is out: The closing of the Lyceum laboratory......Page 212
Notes......Page 215
Bibliography......Page 219
Bibliography......Page 227
Index......Page 228
