This collection provides a representative set of theatrical performances popular on the nineteenth-century British stage. All are newly edited critical editions that account for variant sources
reflecting the process of rehearsal, licensing, and production. Detailed introductions and extensive notes explain the texts' relationship to repertoires, the circulating discourses of
intelligibility that constantly recombine in performance. The plays address the topical concerns of slavery, imperial conquest, capitalism, interculturalism, uprisings at home and abroad,
modernist aesthetic innovation, and the celebration of collective identities. Adaptations from novels, travelogues, and other plays are discussed along with the theatrical history that
sustained these works on the stage.
