(DOWNLOAD) "Sir Walter Scott and the Contract Between Playwrights, Actors, And Theater Audiences." by Nineteenth-Century Prose # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Sir Walter Scott and the Contract Between Playwrights, Actors, And Theater Audiences.
- Author : Nineteenth-Century Prose
- Release Date : January 22, 1994
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 206 KB
Description
Most critical studies of the works of Sir Walter Scott do not even mention his 130-page article for the Encyclopedia Britannica, "An Essay on the Drama" (1819). However, this essay contains important analysis of transactions between playwrights, actors, and audiences. Scott shares the distrust of elaborate stage spectacle expressed by S. T. Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt, whose essays about the drama have received more attention from literary critics. He also agrees with Lamb and Coleridge that there is a binding contract of mutual respect between good writers and their public. However, Scott adds actors to this contract, thus broadening the creative community involved in generating dramatic excitement. Scott uses legal terms such as "contract," "treaty," "partnership," "compound," "license," and "legitimate" to emphasize the serious obligations that writers, actors, and audiences/readers have toward one another. His ideas about drama are related to his views of novelists and their readers. Like the other Romantics, Scott insists that his readers be active and imaginative. He also demands the same level of imaginative activity from actors in the theater. Scott's literary criticism is scattered among his prefaces to novels and dramas, his book reviews, his biographies of earlier writers like Dryden, and his miscellaneous articles such as "An Essay on the Drama." Many of these works are out of print and languish in rare book rooms of university libraries, making it difficult for scholars to bring all of this material together and to examine the connections among Scott's writings in different genres. This is one reason for the neglect of his drama criticism. A scholarly edition of his nonfiction prose is badly needed.
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