The Brady collection and the mediation of eighteenth-century women's performance in theatrical ephemera

This thesis explores the mediation of eighteenth-century women’s dramatic performance in contemporary print both within, and outside of, the theatre. Taking the performance ephemeron as its subject, and the theatrical archive as its setting, it interrogates the presence of eighteenth-century actresses’ performances in specific forms of printing found in one collection. This is the Brady Collection, a large assemblage of theatrical ephemera dating from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, collected by Francis Bridgford Brady (1890-1981) and held at Christ Church Library, Oxford. Using a series of case studies of individual print forms to reflect on the mediation of performance, this thesis analyses the interconnected relationship between theatrical celebrity, gender, and print in the period. It adopts an interdisciplinary and self-reflexive methodology to explore the different layers of mediation that pervade theatrical performance, printing, and the writing of theatre histories. This work opens with an overview of the Brady Collection and its collector as crucial context for the following chapters that interrogate individual forms of theatrical ephemera. Chapter 1 argues that the theatrical playbill, and its typography, played a crucial role in constructing an actress’s career. Chapter 2 considers how an actress’s theatricality is translated into text by the printed epilogue. Chapter 3 turns to theatrical portraiture, arguing that portraits published by John Bell appear to mediate an imagined instance of performance read against an actress’s repertoire. The fourth and final chapter, homing in closely on the Brady Collection, uses a case study of a scrapbook of Sarah Siddons to explicate the mediatory power of the theatrical archive itself. Additional appendices provide limited lists of some of the Brady Collection’s significant contents that are relevant to and can serve as a guide for, fellow researchers interested in eighteenth-century theatrical ephemera and its collection.