Cover

Politics, performance and popular culture

Contents

List of illustrations

Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction: the politics of performance and the performance of politics: Peter Yeandle and Katherine Newey

1 Conceptualising performance, theorising politics

1 ‘To the last drop of my blood’: melodrama and politics in late Georgian England: Robert Poole

2 The platform and the stage: the primary aesthetics of Chartism: Mike Sanders

3 Bubbles of the day: the melodramatic and the pantomimic: Katherine Newey

4 Theatrical hierarchy, cultural capitaland the legitimate/illegitimate divide: Caroline Radcliffe

5 Performance for imagined communities: Gladstone, the National Theatre and contested didactics of the stage: Anselm Heinrich

6 Women’s suffrage and theatricality: Sos Eltis

II Politics in performance

7 English pantomime and the Irish Question: Jill A. Sullivan

8 ‘Executed with remarkable care and artistic feeling’: popular imperialism and the music hall ballet: Jane Pritchard and Peter Yeandle

9 Drury Lane imperialism: Jeffrey Richards

III The performance of politics

10 ‘Love, bitter wrong, freedom, sad pity, and lust of power’: politics and performancein 1820: Malcolm Chase

11 Sir Robert Peel as actor-dramatist: Richard Gaunt

12 The performance of protest: the 1889 dock strike on and off the stage: Janice Norwood

13 Class, performance and socialist politics: the political campaigns of early labour leaders: Marcus Morris