Byron in Theory and Theatre Land: Finding the Right Address

Abstract

Would you please ensure your mobile phone is switched off? Any articulated, industrialized spectacle, whether it be a wedding, an academic conference, or a performance at Drury Lane in the early 1800s, requires certain moments of visible orchestration to effect transitions between its parts. Formal greetings, introductions, announcements and valedictions do the job. A typical evening programme at the patent theatres in London around the year 1800 would have featured two such addresses, a prologue and an epilogue, flanking the main piece. In addition to these routine addresses, there was the ‘occasional address’, geared to a specific event, and occasional in the two senses of such an event being rare, on the one hand, and important, on the other; great occasions tend to be occasional. In the theatre, however, unlike at a wedding, all these moments of address figure, in one respect, as less artificial and thus more natural than the main spectacle itself. By projecting themselves directly through the fourth wall and at the audience, theatrical addresses insist on their authenticity, even as they remain rigidly, and creakily, formal. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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