David Worrall
Biographic Data
| ID | 3685225 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Worrall |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Worrall |
| SIGNATURE | WORRALL D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Nottingham Trent University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 14 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Billy Waters is Dancing
For those of us who have been long-term Billy Waters watchers, Mary L. Shannon’s, Billy Waters is Dancing, is not just a delight but also a book no one would ever have imagined possible. William Waters was of Black or mixed-race parentage, born c. 1776–78, probably in New York. He died on an unknown day between 17 and 23 March 1823 in a London workhouse. On 5 October 1811, William Waters of New York joined (or was pressed into) the Royal Navy and…
Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century
Writing about the history of emotions is akin to skating on thin ice, doubly so if the emotions in question are those expressed during theatrical performances played long before the advent of audio or visual recording technology. In this case, Glyn McGillivray’s Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth-Century: Communities of Sentiment, part of the Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions series, is a fine contribution to the kind of …
The ‘Secret’ Life of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence And of Experience , Copy J
This essay investigates M.I.5’s telephone tapping in 1969 of Anthony Blunt’s conversations about his gifting to Emma Rothschild of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1795), Copy J. Blunt, Victor and Tess Rothschild had an agreement that Blunt would keep the book but bequeath it to Emma. M.I.5 suspected, wrongly, that the Rothschilds’ were extensions of the Cambridge Five spy ring. The essay draws on declassified documents in th…
How Much Do We Really Know About Somerset v. Stewart (1772 ) ? The Missing Evidence of Contemporary Newspapers
This essay examines contemporary English newspapers as sources for Somerset v. Stewart (1772), the landmark trial of the slave, James Somerset. The trial, on a habeas corpus contested by Charles Stewart, Somerset’s alleged owner, was headed by William Murray, Lord Mansfield, and ended in Somerset’s discharge. Newspaper coverage, which often produced partial verbatim transcripts, has been neglected. Most citations rely on Folarin Olawale Shyllon. …
British Enlightenment Theatre
Perhaps the most exhilarating promise of Bridget Orr’s new book—methodologically contrasting with her Empire on the English Stage, itself a pioneering study of drama’s contact with the East—is its offer to recuperate the politics of the British provinces and regions composed of market towns, spas, villages, and wooded lowlands and their representation on the late Stuart and early Georgian stage. Although with allusions to Ireland never far away, …
Charles Macklin and Arthur Murphy
This essay examines the litigation of the Irish actor, Charles Macklin (1699?–1797), born in Culdaff. co. Donegal, setting his career as an actor and playwright within the context of legislation affecting his profession with particular reference to the period up to May 1775 and his successful prosecution, under Lord Mansfield’s ruling, against a riotous Covent Garden audience faction in 1773 who had conspired to discharge him from his contract. T…
Celebrity, Performance, Reception
By 1800 London had as many theatre seats for sale as the city's population. This was the start of the capital's rise as a centre for performing arts. Bringing to life a period of extraordinary theatrical vitality, David Worrall re-examines the beginnings of celebrity culture amidst a monopolistic commercial theatrical marketplace. The book presents an innovative transposition of social assemblage theory into performance history. It argues that th…
Theatre in the Combat Zone
This paper will consider the connections between different types of theatre and theatricality under conditions of war in Philadelphia in 1778 during the British occupation. The ethical cleansing of the title refers to the Mischianza, the giant medieval tournament and naval regatta on the Delaware organized by the British on the eve of their departure in May 1778. Staged theatre, improvised by the personnel of both sides with army and navy soldier…
Theatric Revolution
The Politics of Romantic Theatricality, 1787–1832
This book sets out the political and cultural conditions regulating dramatic writing during an era of censorship and monopolistic royal theatres. Using a range of plays and manuscripts, it argues for
Moncrieff’s Tom and Jerry and its Spin-Offs
By the time Moncrieff wrote his Tom and Jerry for the Adelphi in the late autumn of 1821, there was already a strong metropolitan cultural tradition of dramatic representations derived from Pierce Egan’s original Life in London. This chapter, like Chapter 6, shows how dramas in London developed within a separate public sphere in an intertextuality gaining its own independence within the burletta form. It is perhaps worth reiterating at this point…
The Royal Amphitheatre and Olympic Tom and Jerry Burlettas
This chapter, and the one which follows, are given over to demonstrating the workings of the popular or plebeian public spheres of drama specific to the non-patent playhouses operating in late Georgian London. Burletta was the optimum dramatic genre for these theatres to develop since it was also the only form available to them which could be confirmed as legally permissible. Inevitably, the narrative of how burletta developed bears little relati…
Blackface and Black Mask
This chapter will analyse the portrayal of slavery in two late-1780s dramas, William Bates’s Harlequin Mungo; or, A Peep into the Tower (1787) and Thomas Bellamy’s The Friends; or, The Benevolent Planters (1789), and how this issue provoked dissimilar responses in London’s East End and West End playhouses. Different audiences, varied regulatory provisions and inconsistent attitudes to slavery initiated markedly diverse representations of the topi…
The mirage of real-time algorithmic synaesthesia
This article looks at algorithmic synaesthesia, a form of sonic intermedia involving synchronous computer-mediated manipulation of sound and image. In algorithmic synaesthesia extensively shared features are created in the two media. Examples of such work by austraLYSIS and others are discussed. What an audience member can cognitively access in such synaesthesia is considered: creators of intermedia works may overestimate this. The fact that a ma…
The mirage of real-time algorithmic synaesthesia
This article looks at algorithmic synaesthesia, a form of sonic intermedia involving synchronous computer-mediated manipulation of sound and image. In algorithmic synaesthesia extensively shared features are created in the two media. Examples of such work by austraLYSIS and others are discussed. What an audience member can cognitively access in such synaesthesia is considered: creators of intermedia works may overestimate this. The fact that a ma…
The mirage of real-time algorithmic synaesthesia
This article looks at algorithmic synaesthesia, a form of sonic intermedia involving synchronous computer-mediated manipulation of sound and image. In algorithmic synaesthesia extensively shared features are created in the two media. Examples of such work by austraLYSIS and others are discussed. What an audience member can cognitively access in such synaesthesia is considered: creators of intermedia works may overestimate this. The fact that a ma…
The Politics of Romantic Theatricality, 1787–1832
This book sets out the political and cultural conditions regulating dramatic writing during an era of censorship and monopolistic royal theatres. Using a range of plays and manuscripts, it argues for
Moncrieff’s Tom and Jerry and its Spin-Offs
By the time Moncrieff wrote his Tom and Jerry for the Adelphi in the late autumn of 1821, there was already a strong metropolitan cultural tradition of dramatic representations derived from Pierce Egan’s original Life in London. This chapter, like Chapter 6, shows how dramas in London developed within a separate public sphere in an intertextuality gaining its own independence within the burletta form. It is perhaps worth reiterating at this point…
The Royal Amphitheatre and Olympic Tom and Jerry Burlettas
This chapter, and the one which follows, are given over to demonstrating the workings of the popular or plebeian public spheres of drama specific to the non-patent playhouses operating in late Georgian London. Burletta was the optimum dramatic genre for these theatres to develop since it was also the only form available to them which could be confirmed as legally permissible. Inevitably, the narrative of how burletta developed bears little relati…
Blackface and Black Mask
This chapter will analyse the portrayal of slavery in two late-1780s dramas, William Bates’s Harlequin Mungo; or, A Peep into the Tower (1787) and Thomas Bellamy’s The Friends; or, The Benevolent Planters (1789), and how this issue provoked dissimilar responses in London’s East End and West End playhouses. Different audiences, varied regulatory provisions and inconsistent attitudes to slavery initiated markedly diverse representations of the topi…
Theatric Revolution
Theatre in the Combat Zone
This paper will consider the connections between different types of theatre and theatricality under conditions of war in Philadelphia in 1778 during the British occupation. The ethical cleansing of the title refers to the Mischianza, the giant medieval tournament and naval regatta on the Delaware organized by the British on the eve of their departure in May 1778. Staged theatre, improvised by the personnel of both sides with army and navy soldier…
Celebrity, Performance, Reception
By 1800 London had as many theatre seats for sale as the city's population. This was the start of the capital's rise as a centre for performing arts. Bringing to life a period of extraordinary theatrical vitality, David Worrall re-examines the beginnings of celebrity culture amidst a monopolistic commercial theatrical marketplace. The book presents an innovative transposition of social assemblage theory into performance history. It argues that th…
Charles Macklin and Arthur Murphy
This essay examines the litigation of the Irish actor, Charles Macklin (1699?–1797), born in Culdaff. co. Donegal, setting his career as an actor and playwright within the context of legislation affecting his profession with particular reference to the period up to May 1775 and his successful prosecution, under Lord Mansfield’s ruling, against a riotous Covent Garden audience faction in 1773 who had conspired to discharge him from his contract. T…
How Much Do We Really Know About Somerset v. Stewart (1772 ) ? The Missing Evidence of Contemporary Newspapers
This essay examines contemporary English newspapers as sources for Somerset v. Stewart (1772), the landmark trial of the slave, James Somerset. The trial, on a habeas corpus contested by Charles Stewart, Somerset’s alleged owner, was headed by William Murray, Lord Mansfield, and ended in Somerset’s discharge. Newspaper coverage, which often produced partial verbatim transcripts, has been neglected. Most citations rely on Folarin Olawale Shyllon. …
British Enlightenment Theatre
Perhaps the most exhilarating promise of Bridget Orr’s new book—methodologically contrasting with her Empire on the English Stage, itself a pioneering study of drama’s contact with the East—is its offer to recuperate the politics of the British provinces and regions composed of market towns, spas, villages, and wooded lowlands and their representation on the late Stuart and early Georgian stage. Although with allusions to Ireland never far away, …
Billy Waters is Dancing
For those of us who have been long-term Billy Waters watchers, Mary L. Shannon’s, Billy Waters is Dancing, is not just a delight but also a book no one would ever have imagined possible. William Waters was of Black or mixed-race parentage, born c. 1776–78, probably in New York. He died on an unknown day between 17 and 23 March 1823 in a London workhouse. On 5 October 1811, William Waters of New York joined (or was pressed into) the Royal Navy and…
Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century
Writing about the history of emotions is akin to skating on thin ice, doubly so if the emotions in question are those expressed during theatrical performances played long before the advent of audio or visual recording technology. In this case, Glyn McGillivray’s Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth-Century: Communities of Sentiment, part of the Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions series, is a fine contribution to the kind of …
The ‘Secret’ Life of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence And of Experience , Copy J
This essay investigates M.I.5’s telephone tapping in 1969 of Anthony Blunt’s conversations about his gifting to Emma Rothschild of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1795), Copy J. Blunt, Victor and Tess Rothschild had an agreement that Blunt would keep the book but bequeath it to Emma. M.I.5 suspected, wrongly, that the Rothschilds’ were extensions of the Cambridge Five spy ring. The essay draws on declassified documents in th…
Political science (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Art (8 works) · History (8 works) · Politics (7 works) · Irish and British Studies (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Art history (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Philippine History and Culture (5 works)