As a Barnard student you can sign up for New York Public Library (NYPL) card! They're free!
The NYPL has more than 6 million items circulating, including books, e-books, audiobooks, music, and movies. Thank you to our friends at the George Bruce branch for working with us to make on-campus card signups happen! The NYPL has 92 locations in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island. The closest branches to Barnard are the Morningside Heights and George Bruce branches.
A Companion to Restoration Drama
by
![Philip Bosco [seated] and ensemble in the 1976 Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera](https://d2jv02qf7xgjwx.cloudfront.net/accounts/157298/images/nypl.digitalcollections.be5b14f4-98ca-b654-e040-e00a180605be.001.w.jpg)
If you need assistance identifying additional resources, search terms or strategies, you can schedule an appointment at https://barnard.libcal.com/appointments/mwisner or email me at mwisner@barnard.edu.
[Image] Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. "Philip Bosco [seated] and ensemble in the 1976 Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera" New York Public Library Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/be5b14f4-98ca-b654-e040-e00a180605be
Academic databases work most effectively when using AND, OR, and NOT or including "quotation marks" or asterisks * in your searching. The videos below do a wonderful job unpacking how these tools work.
Catalog search tips:
Source Book in Theatrical History
by
"An indispensable complement to the study of the drama." -- Educational Theatre Journal. A rich resource for students of theater and theater historians, this volume features an annotated collection of more than 300 unusually interesting and detailed articles. Passages by contemporary observers from ancient Greece to modern times include notes on acting, directing, make-up, costuming, stage props, machinery, scene design, and much more. "Most valuable. An inspiring guide." -- Theatre Notebook.
The Garrick Stage
by
Oroonoko: or the Royal Slave
by
Aphra Behn was one of the first professional English female writers and Oroonoko was one of her earliest works. It is the love story between Oroonoko, the grandson of an African king, and the daughter of that king's general. The king takes the girl into his harem, and when she plans to escape with his grandson, sells her as a slave. When Oroonoko tries to follow her he is caught by an English slave trader and taken to the same West Indian island as his love.
The Revels History of Drama in English, v. 3, 5 & 6
by
Four Restoration Libertine Plays
by
Thomas Shadwell, The Libertine * George Etherege, The Man of Mode * Thomas Durfey, A Fond Husband * Thomas Otway, Friendship in FashionThese four plays in the Oxford English Drama series capture the range of responses to the fashionable and daring libertine movement in the second half of the seventeenth century. A Fond Husband and Friendship in Fashion are lesser-known comic gems of the Restoration stage; The Man of Mode is Etherege's masterpiece, and The Libertine is Shadwell's experimental and dark version of the Don Juan story. The texts are freshly edited using modern spelling. There is a critical introduction, wide-ranging annotation, and an informative bibliography which together illuminate the plays' cultural context and theatrical potential for reader and performer alike.'The series should shape the canon in a number of significant areas. A splendid and imaginative project.' Professor Anne Barton, Cambridge University
The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre
by
This rich and varied portrait of the drama from 1660 to 1714 provides students with essential information about playwrights, staging and genres, situating them in the social and political culture of the time. No longer seen as a privileged arena for select dramatists and elite courtiers, the Restoration theatre is revealed in all of its tumult, energy and conflict. The fourteen newly-commissioned essays examine the theatre, paying attention to major playwrights such as Dryden, Wycherly and Congreve and also to more minor works and to plays by the first professional female dramatists. The book begins with chapters on the performance of the drama in its own time, on theatres, acting and staging, and continues with the main dramatic genres and themes, with a final chapter on the critical history of the drama. The volume also includes a thorough chronology and biographies and bibliographies of dramatists.
The First English Actresses
by
Before the Restoration of Charles II there were no professional actresses on the English stage, and female roles had almost always been played by men. This book describes how and why women were permitted to act on the public stage after 1660, and the consequences of their arrival for the drama of the period. Elizabeth Howe opens up a fascinating subject to non-specialists. Beginning with a general account of the workings of Restoration theatre, she goes on to explain the advent of the actresses and how they were treated. Perceived predominantly as sex objects, the actresses' sexuality was variously exploited in ways that had important consequences for drama. The book addresses questions that are relevant to women's issues in every period: how far did the advent of real women players alter dramatic portrayals of women? Did this encourage more or less equality between the sexes? Although in one sense merely playthings for a small male elite, the pioneering actresses also represent a distinct female voice in society and a fresh place in discourse.
Between Men
by
Hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most influential texts in gender studies, men's studies and gay studies," this book uncovers the homosocial desire between men, from Restoration comedies to Tennyson's Princess.
The Female Wits
by
British Dramatists from Dryden to Sheridan
by
Libertine Plays of the Restoration
by
In 1660 England celebrated the Restoration of the Stuarts, acclaiming the divine authority of the monarchy whose mortal weakness had been illustrated all too well. For the country that could kill its king, what could truly now be seen as sacred and where could true authority be found? A sense of vertiginous moral freedom lent the festivities a desperate edge. Cynical, stylish and seductive, the figure of the libertine embodied this destabilising force. No propriety was safe from his elegant derision, no chastity proof against his inveigling ways. In a series of outrageously irreverent comedies and bitter, disillusioned tragedies, he strode the Restoration stage. This anthology brings together Dryden's wittily risque comedy Marriage A-la-Mode, and his roaring farce The Kind Keeper; Shadwell's outrageous version of the Don Juan legend, The Libertine; Otway's bitter tragedy, The Orphan; Southerne's dark satire, The Wives' Excuse; and Aphra Behn's feisty ripostes to her male contemporaries, The Rover, Parts I and II.
England in the Eighteenth Century
by
Restoration Comedy in Performance
by
Restoration comedy disappeared from the stage for nearly 200 years until it was revived early this century. Without the benefit of a performance tradition has suffered from an inappropriate literary and moralistic criticism which continues to this day. Yet this brilliant court and coterie comedy of sexual and social behaviour was an extraordinary success in its own time, and enjoys a unique place in theatrical history as an example of the interplay possible between the stage and the audience. In this book John Styan persuades us that only through a performance approach to the great plays of Etherege, Wycherley, Dryden, Shadwell, Vanbrugh, Congreve and Farquhar can we recover a sense of their value. Restoration Comedy in Performance is liberally illustrated with contemporary drawings and modern photographs, and it draws extensively upon documentary and visual evidence of the seventeenth century in order to suggest the importance of the costume and customs, manners and behaviour of the age to an understanding of the sort of theatre and drama it produced. Professor Styan also discusses the problems encountered in the early attempts to revive the comedies in the twentieth century, and pauses frequently in order to offer a descriptive account of a moment of staging or to recreate a scene or a sequence of comic repartee or action. The book aims to bring back to life, therefore, something of a lost art form, not as a piece of conventional stage or production history, but as a true attempt to recognize the virtues of Restoration comedy as a performing art.
American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation (LOA #233)
by
For the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, here is a collection of writings that charts our nation's long, heroic confrontation with its most poisonous evil. It's an inspiring moral and political struggle whose evolution parallels the story of America itself. To advance their cause, the opponents of slavery employed every available literary form: fiction and poetry, essay and autobiography, sermons, pamphlets, speeches, hymns, plays, even children's literature. This is the first anthology to take the full measure of a body of writing that spans nearly two centuries and, exceptionally for its time, embraced writers black and white, male and female. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Phillis Wheatley, and Olaudah Equiano offer original, even revolutionary, eighteenth century responses to slavery. With the nineteenth century, an already diverse movement becomes even more varied: the impassioned rhetoric of Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison joins the fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and William Wells Brown; memoirs of former slaves stand alongside protest poems by John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Lydia Sigourney; anonymous editorials complement speeches by statesmen such as Charles Sumner and Abraham Lincoln. Features helpful notes, a chronology of the antislavery movement, and a16-page color insert of illustrations. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Restoration Theatre Production
by
English Dramatic Form, Sixteen Sixty to Seventeen Sixty
by
A Serious Proposal to the Ladies
by
Interpreting Ladies
by
This work provides an extended exploration of the roles and functions of female characters and elaborates a specific theory of the relationship of women to Restoration notions of wit and morality. The author draws upon the plays of Etherege, Congreve and Wycherley.
The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century
by
Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Comedy
by
The plays are fully annotated for the modern reader and are accompanied by six illustrations. The close relationship between theater and society during the period continues to be the focus of "Contexts." The editor offers contemporary discussions of the following topics: "On Wit, Humour, and Laughter: 1660-1775," "The Collier Controversy: 1698," "Steele and Dennis: On The Man of Mode and The Conscious Lovers," and "Stages, Actors, and Audiences." "Criticism" has been revised to reflect approaches in scholarly interpretations. Two seminal essays from the First Edition have been retained--Charles Lamb's appreciation of the period's comedy and L. C. Knights's condemnation of it. New essays by Jocelyn Powell, Harriet Hawkins, Elin Diamond, Martin Price, and Laura Brown have been added.
Popular Plays by Women in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century
by
This anthology offers a selection of popular dramatic works by female playwrights from Aphra Behn in the 1670s through Hannah Cowley in the later eighteenth century. These plays were successful as plays of their time, not just as plays by women, together providing evidence that women dramatists often managed better than their male counterparts to please diverse audiences, who were notoriously fickle as well as predisposed to oppose them. Accessible to both graduates and undergraduates, Popular Plays by Womenshows how these playwrights captured audiences through wit, social awareness, and dramatic dexterity. As well as including the prologues and epilogues of the four plays presented, this anthology provides additional materials in which female playwrights discuss the prejudices and special difficulties they face.
The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama, Revised Edition
by
The boldest and most distinguished introduction to drama available today, W.B. Worthen's pace-setting text continues to provide exciting plays usefully situated within their historical and cultural contexts. Based on the best-selling WADSWORTH ANTHOLOGY OF DRAMA, the Brief Edition provides many of the important elements of that anthology but in a more streamlined form.