Academic literature on the topic 'Inc Todhunter'

In 1926 Eleanor and Marion purchased a private school for upper-class New York girls. Marion was principal and Eleanor became one of the most popular teachers, taking her students on field trips to visit court rooms and tenement districts to broaden their educations. Eleanor commuted back and forth to Albany, where she presided as First Lady during FDR's two two terms as NY Governer, assisted by his close friend and secretary, "Missy" LeHand.

The interrelationship between sexual and social revolutions in London in the 1890s shaped both the Irish dramatic revival and twentieth-century English drama. W. B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw both embraced a socialism rooted in the radical eros of Percy Bysshe Shelley and developed by William Morris, Oscar Wilde, and Edward Carpenter. This “queer socialism” (the chapter acknowledges but departs from from Patrick Mullen’s earlier use of the phrase) was defined by its insistence on pleasure as the means and as the end of social progress. Yeats, Shaw, and John Todhunter—all Shelley enthusiasts, and all fascinated by Florence Farr’s bisexuality—contributed plays to a season that Farr produced at the Avenue Theatre. The opening night audience violently protested the double bill of Yeats’s Land of Heart’s Desire and Todhunter’s A Comedy of Sighs, in part because both plays mythologized the New Woman’s transgressive sexuality through occult representations of lesbian desire. Shaw moved to protect himself from homophobic condemnation by replacing Farr in the lead role of Arms and the Man with a more gender-conforming actress. After Shaw’s brilliant success, Yeats decided to pursue his dramatic career in Dublin, leaving Shaw to found a straightforwardly socialist dramatic revival in London.

In the 1880s, Wilde responded with enthusiasm to reconstructions of classical Greek theatre staged in Oxford, Cambridge, and London, and his published reviews draw extensively on his own classical training together with ideas taken from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Walter Pater, and John Addington Symonds. He took a similar interest in contemporary plays based on classical subjects, such as Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Cup and John Todhunter’s Helena in Troas. This chapter describes how Wilde’s experience of Greek theatre and its offshoots in live performance contributed to his fascination with the art of the actor, with theatrical space, with the deployment of scenery, and with the relation of archaeology to architecture. It concludes by tracing an underlying shift in his dramatic theory from ‘plasticity’ to ‘psychology’.