James Armstrong, Playwright

I recently finished reading Christine Kenyon Jones's excellent book Jane Austen & Lord Byron: Regency Relations . It's a must-re...

Today I chaired a panel on "New Approaches to Lord Byron " for the BARS/NASSR 2022 "New Romanticisms" conference, and to...

In 1833, composer Hector Berlioz married Harriet Smithson, but she had enjoyed a distinctive career on her own as an actress long before she...

In a recent post, I wrote about Margaret Somerville Bunn , one of the performers highlighted in  The Biography of the British Stage  in 1824...

The actress Margaret Somerville made her debut at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane playing the female lead in Charles Robert Maturin's play...

On this day in 1814, Edmund Kean appeared as Shylock on the stage of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. It would launch Kean's career,...

I recently finished Christopher Murray's biography of the actor and theatre manager Robert William Elliston . It's amazing the numbe...

An anonymous memoir of the actor Robert William Elliston published in 1825 declared that to do the man justice, "we should devote a vo...

In my last blog post, I wrote about the mysterious Mrs. Gibbs . Today, I'll be covering an actor about whom considerably more is known: ...

I'm back from the U.K. now, and the Society for Theatre Research conference in Cambridge was amazing. Our final day was jam packed. In...

As the author William Archer points out, Robert William Elliston acquired the lease on the Royal Circus Theatre the day before the Theatre R...