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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Teaching Willmore, James Evans
Teaching Willmore, James Evans
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
Teaching Aphra Behn’s The Rover for nearly four decades, I have witnessed a considerable shift in students’ attitudes toward the play, especially toward Willmore. More positive about his character in the 1970s and 1980s, they have had a much more negative assessment since then. The only available video version, the Women’s Theatre Trust production, compounds my pedagogical problem through filming techniques and choice of actor; emphasizing male violence against women, its interpretation parallels feminist criticism of the 1990s. Asking students to examine theater history may lead them to see that Behn does not completely match this ideological paradigm. The original …
The Secret Life Of Archives: Sally Siddons, Sir Thomas Lawrence, And The Material Of Memory, Laura Engel
The Secret Life Of Archives: Sally Siddons, Sir Thomas Lawrence, And The Material Of Memory, Laura Engel
ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
This essay is in two parts, in the first I attempt to map out strategies for considering archival materials through the lens of performance, and in the second I enact or perform some of those strategies through a close reading of a letter from Sally Siddons, daughter of the famous actress Sarah Siddons, to the renown portrait painter and rakish bad boy, Sir Thomas Lawrence. I present a methodology that considers archival researchers as tourists who approach archival objects and images as material for curating a virtual exhibition. I argue that this strategy allows us to recognize and attempt to …