This chapter explores the interplay of voices, poses, and masks that mark all of Nietzsche’s writings, but especially his later writings. His models are the ancient Cynics and “Lui,” the titular hero of Diderot’s satirical dialogue, Le Neveu de Rameau. A latter-day Cynic, Lui is a pantomime artist who uses physical and vocal mimicry to expose social hypocrisy through a shameless display of parrhēsia. Both Lui and the Cynics, literary artifacts themselves, explore philosophical problems in a performative mode that is hostile to conventions of all kinds, including those that govern literature and philosophy. Nietzsche follows suit with his own polyphonic and multi-gestural style of presentation, now directed at a late nineteenth-century audience. A self-conscious poseur and master of the falsetto, Nietzsche is supremely aware of his ability to trigger and lay bare his contemporaries’ ideas, fantasies, and fears by giving voice to them, not least by “sampling” them through a kind of theatrical extroversion of roles that are even today routinely mistaken for his own. A cultural pathologist whose primary object is the material of cultural fantasy itself, Nietzsche is ultimately concerned to critique the conventions that produce the very categories of literature and philosophy.

Proposals that gesture played a pivotal role in the evolution of language have been highly influential. However, there are many differences between gestural origin theories, including different definitions of ‘gesture’ itself. We use a cognitive semiotic approach in order to categorize and review these theories. A semiotic system is a combination of signs or signals of particular type, defined by characteristic properties, and the interrelations between these signs/signals. Signal systems like spontaneous facial expressions and non-linguistic vocalizations are under less voluntary control than sign systems. The basic distinction relates to the question of whether gesture played an exclusive role in early stages of language evolution (monosemiotic theories), or whether other semiotic systems were involved as well: polysemiotic theories. The latter may be equipollent, where language and gesture are considered equally prominent from the onset, or pantomimic, where gesture played the main but not exclusive role in breaking from predominantly signal-based to sign-based communication. We conclude that pantomimic theories are the most promising kind.

Despite strict censorship laws, social and political critiques sometimes occurred in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century British theatre through comic and visual elements in melodrama, pantomime, farce and comedy. Drawing on texts and performances c.1790-1830, this chapter focusses on the evasion of censorship, particularly through non-verbal performance. While the pantomime or Harlequinade is the most obvious source for non-verbal critique, there are many other visually subversive moments in the drama of this period, including instances in John Bull (1803) Speed the Plough (1800) and Killing No murder (1809), which will be specifically addressed. The visual power of theatre to undermine censorship will be examined in conjunction with the satirical impact of contemporary prints and caricatures. While an emphasis on action and visual communication in theatre is partly attributable to the increasing size of theatres and growing demand for theatrical entertainment, less attention has been paid to the significance of this development for greater license in what can be communicated to spectators. While the theatrical politics of this period are somewhat more complicated than those of the print shop windows, the markets for theatrical spectacle and satirical prints must have overlapped, creating reciprocal modes of perception in this period.0

This chapter studies the decline and disappearance of the ecumenical synods in late antiquity. As agonistic festivals were the raison d’être of the ecumenical synods, their fate was intertwined with that of the agonistic network. The fourth century ad saw a gradual unravelling of the festival circuit, due to financial problems, socio-political changes in the Greek poleis and changing mentalities and habits. As a result, evidence on the ecumenical synods declines sharply from the late third century on. Important sources discussed here are a tetrarchic rescript on the privileges of competitors, issued in response to a request of the two synods, and a long and complex inscription from ad 313 that was erected in the xystic synod’s headquarters and dealt with a donation by a rich family. This chapter refutes the opinion of some earlier scholars who argue that the synods were absorbed by the circus factions. Rather, it appears that they remained tied to the world of traditional Greek agonistics and that they disbanded when the last of the important Greek agones ceased to be held, that is by the 420s ad at the latest.

This chapter moves from the physical and visual aspects of the theatre to discuss the nature and varieties of performance as these may have been experienced by ancient spectators, while taking into account too what we believe we know about the cultural role of theatrical and spectacle entertainments. The various diverse forms of theatrical performance are detailed included Atellan farce, mime and shows in the arena. We discuss the varieties of scenic provision, and also explore the nature of the theatricalised experience and perception of ancient spectators. We describe at length the particularly important and highly popular art of pantomime.

This chapter turns from religious and political explanations to those that frame demythologization in terms of other social and cultural shifts. Some have proposed that it reflects a rising populism, a widespread decline in education levels, or a diminution in the value Romans assigned to mythological culture. Others have seen in the rise of mythless genres a growing desire for imagery that more clearly projected social status. All are examined.

Chapter 5 looks at the music that elite men and women made at their banquets, including their singing and dancing, and the types of professional entertainments they provided as hosts of social affairs. Music of the concert stage and theater were sources of entertainment for upper-class banquets and included excerpts from plays, solo works by citharodes, various kinds of dance (including mime and pantomime), and occasionally even staged plays with music and all. Elites differed about which forms of entertainment were suitable for a dinner party and whether it was proper for an aristocrat to sing or dance at a dinner party. Where aristocrats of the classical era had performed music as a form of personal self-display, reflecting their educations, elites of the Roman era engaged in self-imaging through their choices in music and their talk about it.

Chapter 5 offers an account of how vaudevilles were introduced on the Fair theatre stage, and how they were developed as an operatic medium. ‘Raw Materials’ provides contexts for understanding what vaudevilles were and how they were transmitted. ‘Vaudevilles on stage’ uses official reports to build a history of process: how musical dialogue in vaudevilles evolved from 1709. ‘Lyric pantomime’ formed an intermediate stage. Contemporary reactions to Italian recitative are used as a deductive basis for imagining vaudevilles in sound; the enquiry is extended in ‘Accompaniment’ and ‘Continuity’ by historical evidence and through scrutiny of Le Théâtre de la Foire, but also by the author’s report made of a 1991 performance. Historical evidence suggests that performance in Paris was regularly dialogic and spontaneous, not tied to fixed keys or accompaniment, but also sometimes lyrical. Highly expressive vaudevilles were sometimes grouped to form either narrative or sentimental scenes in operas by Lesage and d’Orneval, some works having affinity with common tropes in contemporary novels. ‘La Chercheuse d’esprit’ is an account of Favart’s famous vaudeville opera, here interpreted through unique performative information deduced from a manuscript in the Bibliothèque municipale, Versailles, hitherto unknown to scholarship.

The transatlantic circulation of circus acts during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries created opportunities for circus’s somatically spectacular acts to appear on pantomime and variety theatre stages. This chapter assesses a neglected aspect of circus scholarship: understanding how and why circus acts appeared in other popular entertainment forms. Circus, pantomime, and variety cultivated unity through their reliance on novelty. By tracing the performance engagements of a major circus-style act, Lockhart’s Elephants, in iconic variety venues in London, Paris, and New York City, I demonstrate the deep interrelatedness of modern circus and music hall/vaudeville. Performers frequently established and sustained their reputations in these economically powerful cosmopolitan centres, where heightened competition in the leisure marketplace increased circulation of circus performers. Nineteenth-century industrialisation and changing theatre regulations had transformed genres, allowing audiences more opportunity for leisure activities and theatres more opportunity to blur spoken drama and spectacle. The somatic spectacularity of circus acts provided essential counterpoints to pantomime and variety’s dominant performance modes. This dynamic relationship complicates our understanding of circus, pantomime, and variety as distinct genres, pressing scholars to reconsider the relative stability with which we deploy the terms and write their histories.

This chapter focuses on the Sufferings in Love, the mythological collection of racy stories by Parthenius of Nicaea. It proposes that Parthenius’ ‘little notebook’ was eminently ‘good to think with’ in the context of the various dance idioms evolving in first century BC Rome, particularly in the period of vigorous miscegenation and experimentation leading up to the flamboyant, official entrance of pantomime dancing into Roman public life. Although we are unlikely ever to know whether any performances wrought around the material assembled by Parthenius actually materialized in the twilight of the Roman Republic, the possibility should act as a warning against any uncritical assumption that stylish Hellenistic/ neoteric work and corporeal, performance dialects could not have much in common. The chapter uses the example of Parthenius’ putative afterlife ‘in the flesh’ to make a wider case about the need of writing the non-verbal, kinaesthetic, and thoroughly embodied medium that is the art of dance into the bigger narrative of reception in antiquity. ‘Reception into dance’ is neither inferior nor futile but immensely liberating, empowering, and potentially pathbreaking

Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo sparked both a spate of cultural responses and a debate over the shape of post-revolutionary Europe. Wordsworth’s “Thanksgiving Ode” volume was his entry into this conversation. Cox creates the context for Wordsworth’s poems on Waterloo, as he takes up contemporary celebrations and religious services and explores theatrical responses to the British victory.Putting Hunt in conversation with Southey and his laureate poems, Cox shows how Wordsworth’s poems on Waterloo respond to Hunt’s earlier Descent of Liberty on Napoleon’s abdication. Wordsworth’s volume inspired its own set of responses, as there was a kind of media war in 1816 over Wordsworth, Waterloo, and Wellington. The most famous of these responses comes in Byron’s Childe Harold III.

Built around two visits to Westminster Abbey, this short coda compares early eighteenth-century attitudes to theatrical transitions to William Hazlitt's and Charles Lamb's writing about actors. Both Lamb and Hazlitt emerge as hostile to what I have called the art of transition, as they each denigrate the performance of a character in favour of the study of that figure’s psychological constitution.

This chapter reveals the elaboration of a set of critical priorities, transition prime among them, crystallised by Aaron Hill in the 1730s. Offering what he claimed to be a purified version of pantomime’s techniques for arresting attention, Hill wrote of how actors could become a ‘true FAUSTUS’ for the theatres through transition, creating iconic and dynamic moments of suspension during which they could shift mind and body from one passion to another. Hill’s emphases continue into the time of David Garrick, whose transitions into ‘pensively preparatory attitudes’ were praised as intellectual achievements and blamed as pantomimical tricks. Ultimately, pauses and the transitions that occurred upon them became moments when an actor could be described as asserting their artistic autonomy and the focal point of critical attention. The realisation of Hill’s dreams — a theatre where sophisticated emotion replaced slapstick motion as the key source of spectacle — soon, however, risked becoming a Faustian pact, for an insight into the transitions of a play seemed to demand as much private attention to the page as public engagement with the stage.

The Conclusion draws connections between the Archaic and Classical discourse outlined in this book and the representation of dance, especially pantomime, in the Roman Imperial period. It focuses on a set of key passages in Lucian’s treatise On the Dance, suggesting that by reading dance with Lucian, we can further refine our perspective on the complex interplay between literature, culture, and the potential of the dancing body. I choose to conclude with Lucian in part because his character Lycinus offers an illuminating model for the creative, subversive, and provocative reading of dance. I show that Lycinus uses familiar forms in new ways and rescripts stories about dance encoded within earlier literature, yet in doing so, he also continues a tradition of using the description of solo dance to foreground generic exploration and experimentation – of bringing the unruly body into contact with the workings of a literary text. Reading dance with Lucian and Lycinus thus reveals how the collision of dance and literature bears fruit across diverse creative and cultural contexts.

This chapter by Marian Wilson Kimber explores the relation between music, dance and poetry in late nineteenth-century amateur dance performances in the United States, specifically Delsarte. With reference to little-known archival sources (musical scores, photographs, programme leaflets and educational guides), Wilson Kimber examines how elocutionists combined their recitation with posing in imitation of ancient Greek statuary. These performances grew from the expressive physical fitness movement named after the nineteenth-century French musician and teacher Delsarte. The practice is itself rooted in elocution, recitation or public speaking that was a common form of entertainment on programmes with chamber music throughout the United States. To the accompaniment of hymns, women recited and posed to entertain one another, but also with the goal of self-improvement. Describing these practices, Wilson Kimber articulates a historical case of what we might call choreographic legitimization, considering ways in which dancers sought to elevate the seemingly suspect status of their art with reference to ancient Classical values and sacred music.