This book presents Edwardian entertainment and the Edwardian entertainment industry as parts of a vital, turbulent era whose preoccupations and paranoias echo those of our own day. Responding to recent shifts of attitude toward the Edwardians and their world, the essays in this collection take as their provenance broad patterns of theatrical production and consumption, focusing on the economics of theater management, the creation of new audiences, the politics of playgoing, and the meteoric rise of popular forms of mass entertainment, including musical comedy, variety theater, and the...

This is the first book to explore the complex relationship among theater, fashion, and society in the late Victorian and early modern eras. Examining such diverse topics as the emergence of the society playhouse, fashion journalism, the role of the couturier-costumier, department store marketing, and the establishment of "dress codes" by militant suffragettes, Kaplan and Stowell provide a new context for assessing plays by established writers such as Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Arthur Pinero, and Harley Granville Barker, as well as lesser know figures such as Edith Lyttelton, Emily Symonds,...

This book presents Edwardian entertainment and the Edwardian entertainment industry as parts of a vital, turbulent era whose preoccupations and paranoias echo those of our own day. Responding to recent shifts of attitude toward the Edwardians and their world, the essays in this collection take as their provenance broad patterns of theatrical production and consumption, focusing on the economics of theater management, the creation of new audiences, the politics of playgoing, and the meteoric rise of popular forms of mass entertainment, including musical comedy, variety theater, and the...