Acting naturally: Victorian theatricality and authenticity

Abstract

In Acting Naturally Lynn Voskuil argues that Victorian Britons saw themselves as authentically performative, a paradoxical belief that focused their sense of vocation as individuals, as a public, and as a nation. Rather than confirming the customary view of Victorian England as fundamentally anti-theatrical, Voskuil shows instead how the Victorians' fabled commitment to the culture of sincerity was often authorized, rather than invariably threatened, by their equally powerful fascination with acting and performance. She explores a diverse range of materials: plays, novels, drama and theater criticism, newspaper reviews and columns, theatrical memoirs, private diaries and letters, cartoons, political pamphlets, and satires. Throughout, Voskuil charts the mid-Victorian heyday of these beliefs and their late-Victorian transformations in a variety of cultural practices and controversies, among them the conduct of audiences at sensation theater in the 1860s, political debates over the Eastern Question in the 1870s, and the cult of personality that shaped the popularity of stage actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in the late 1880s. i

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