Chartist Drama

Description

The first collection of its kind, Chartist Drama makes available four plays written or performed by members of the Chartist movement of the 1840s. Emerging from the lively counter-culture of this protest campaign for democratic rights, these plays challenged cultural as well as political hierarchies by adapting such recognisable genres as melodrama, history plays, and tragedy for performance in radically new settings. A communal, public, and embodied art form, drama was linked for the Chartists with other kinds of political performance: the oratory of the mass platform, festival-like outdoor meetings, and the elaborate street theatre of protest marches. Plays the Chartist wrote or staged advanced new interpretations of British history and criticised aspects of the contemporary world. And Chartist drama intervened in fierce strategic arguments within the movement. Most notably, poet-activist John Watkinss John Frost, which dramatises the gripping events of the Newport rising of 1839, in which twenty-two Chartists lost their lives, defends the rising and the Chartist recourse to violence as a means for the movement to achieve its aims. Gregory Vargos introduction, notes, and appendices elucidate the previously unexplored world of Chartist dramatic culture, a context that promises to reshape what we know about early Victorian popular politics and theatre. Front Matter Dedication Contents List of figures List of tables Acknowledgements A note on the texts Introduction Wat Tyler (1794/1817)–Robert Southey John Frost (1841)–John Watkins The Trial of Robert Emmet (1841) St John’s Eve (1848)–Ernest Jones Appendix 1: Chartist dramatic performances Appendix 2: Newport sonnets Appendix 3: Passages omitted in Cleave’s trial version as they appear in Cleave’s source, The Life, Trial and Conversations of Robert Emmet, Esq., Leader of the Irish Insurrection of 1803 Appendix 4: Advertising placard for a performance of The Trial of Robert Emmett, Esq.