| Crowd Control: Reading Victorian Popular Drama finds its starting point in a gap in cultural history: nineteenth-century theatre between the decline of Romantic verse drama and the appearance of Wilde and Shaw. During this "lost moment," drama witnessed a historically significant struggle on the stage between competing discourses, demonstrating a larger contest between competing cultures. Imagined as promiscuous, criminal, riotous, and working-class, the crowd functioned as a form of representing and enacting social unrest. As the age progressed, however, drama worked to control the crowd's potential for creating social and political disorder by managing theatre crowds onstage and off. Working from a large body of archival evidence, this dissertation traces "crowd control" through the entire theatrical process---from the narrative and rhetorical structure of the text itself, to censorship, adaptation, production, and reception---and through a range of dramatic genres, from melodrama in large commercial theatres, to operetta in private theatres, and tableaux in the middle-class parlor.; The first part of this study uses the emergence of crowd sociology to examine disruptive crowds that threaten social, political, and textual worlds with chaos. An investigation of early nineteenth-century theatre riots produces a method for reconstructing audience interpretation, suggesting that the form of the crowd provides a space onstage in which the audience can find its own identity, generating interpretations that run counter to the dominant narrative of the play. The second part of this study traces the privatization of drama and a correspondent diminishing of onstage and offstage crowds. The violence of earlier crowds resonates despite the various strategies late-Victorian drama employs to contain this threat: the "entertainment"'s falsified history of novelistic origins, bourgeois theatre's elimination of the distinction between performers and audience, and the feminization of the crowd in parlor drama, as dramatic concern transfers from crowded working-class bodies to the middle-class female body.; Crowd Control provides a richer, more textured understanding of Victorian literature and cultures. In reanimating the lost genre of Victorian drama, this study provides a model for analyzing popular culture, non-canonical literary texts, and understanding the relationship between mass audience and performance. |
