Australian Plays for the Colonial Stage, 1834-1899

"This Academy Edition presents the scripts of nine colonial plays, one of them in two versions. Beginning with Melville's short melodrama and ending with the best known of the Kelly Gang plays, first staged in 1899 in Sydney, the volume also contains a scurrilous satire Life in Sydney (1843), a pioneering romance Arabin: or, The Adventures of a Settler (1849), a short choral 'masque' The South-Sea Sisters (1866), a proto-nationalistic pantomime in Melbourne and Sydney versions The House that Jack Built (1869 and 1871), a city murder-mystery Hazard (1872), a comic-horror saga of a bush heroine For [pounds]60,000 (1874) and the first Australian stage classic, adapted in 1886 from Marcus Clarke's novel, For the Term of His Natural Life." "Each script has been carefully edited or reconstructed from unique manuscripts or rare colonial printed editions, giving full respect to their historical forms and usages. .The plays have been given generous historical and textual introductions and are supplemented with explanatory notes on the many people, places, events and stories referred to. The extensively illustrated general introduction describes the Australian colonial theatre industry - its stories, artists, stage traditions and innovations - and explains their appeal as art and who business to men and women from different social groups living in both city and country. An appendix contains nearly sixty pages of music for the songs and tunes used in four of the productions; it is edited by Angela Turner of the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University."--BOOK JACKET.Fotheringham, Richard is the author of 'Australian Plays for the Colonial Stage, 1834-1899 ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780702234873 and ISBN 0702234877.