AM delves into the dynamic world of theatre with The Nineteenth Century Stage: Industry, Performance and Celebrity

This new resource from AM reveals the shifting and expanding world of the nineteenth-century stage. Drawn from eight archives across the UK, USA, and Australia, the material explores topics such as the development of theatres and design innovations, theatre management, costume, and set design.

The content, featuring unique and engaging materials such as the playbills and broadsides used for promotion, allows users to uncover how theatre became a powerful cultural force with insights into iconic figures.

Collections of theatre ephemera highlight the huge expansion of printed and visual resources showing how the audience experienced the stage and how spectacular entertainments drew crowds across the country. The collection also spotlights the emergence of celebrity, and explores the development of theatrical careers with insight into well-known individuals of the day including famous actors and actresses, playwrights, critics, producers and actor managers.

To aid user experience across all levels of research, each document in the collection is tagged from a list of document types which can be easily filtered, as well as tagged with theme or themes to enhance browsing. The broad range of content makes this resource ideal for studying the intersection of performance, literature, and social influence.

To find out more about this resource, visit the collection page.