The essays gathered together in Volume 15 of the annual journal Theatre Symposium investigate how, historically, the theatre has been perceived both as a source of moral anxiety and as an instrument of moral and social reform.Essays consider, among other subjects, ethnographic depictions of the savage other in Buffalo Bill s engagement at the Columbian Exposition of 1893; the so-called Moral Reform Melodrama in the nineteenth century; charity theatricals and the ways they negotiated standards of middle-class respectability; the figure of the courtesan as a barometer of late nineteenth...