Since her work as a professional playwright in the 1670s and 1680s, critics have sought to equate Aphra Behn and her plays, to fix and stabilize the body of the writer and of her work. She has been marked as a prostitute, a feminist, and a masculinist hack, in each case her gender determining the value of and audience for her writing. This dissertation argues that Behn's plays--and Behn--should be read in terms of her controlling tropes and forms of performance and intrigue. Her plays and her presence use these tropes and forms to decenter the idea of identity and manipulate conventions of gender roles in the patriarchal Restoration theater. In doing so, she recasts and reconstitutes the structure of the patriarchal theater and economy. Chapter 1 introduces my argument and presents an overview of critical and feminist responses to Behn. I use this overview to present my own view of identity as performance, opposing such essentialist theorists as Helene Cixous. Chapter 2 develops the historical and metaphorical associations of intrigue and performance, beginning with her Preface to The Dutch Lover; in reading two of her lesser-known intrigue-comedies, The Dutch Lover and The Feign'd Curtezans, or a Night's Intrigue, I then argue that performance and intrigue challenge the conventional engendering of roles such as the rake and the courtesan. Chapter 3 expands these associations and reads her economic metaphors, as I look at Behn's most famous intrigue-comedy, The Rover, and its sequel; as well as challenging conventional roles and economic valuations, however, The Rover, Part II emphasizes the ultimate inescapability of these roles and valuations in the patriarchal theater. Chapter 4 moves to her town-comedies; I argue that Behn adapts the intrigue-form to her comedies of manners, working out the characters' struggle between convention and nature to define public and private selves. Sir Patient Fancy sets up the power that the manipulation of convention offers; The City Heiress emphasizes the limits of such manipulation; The Lucky Chance offers magic and ambiguity as new theatrical possibility to subvert convention and recast role.

Some of the older actors of the Restoration provided a link between the pre- and post-Commonwealth stages by preserving their craft during the years from 1642 to 1660, despite the harsh and numerous restrictions enacted by the Parliament. Some of the younger players, on the other hand, quickly mastered their art and continued the tradition preserved for them by men such as Charles Hart and Michael Mohun. The greatest actors and actresses of the period certainly influenced the direction of Restoration drama in several ways. Thomas Betterton and Elizabeth Barry were so skilled that on several occasions leading dramatists asked their advice about dialogue, character development, and stage business. Other actors, such as Samuel Sandford and Colley Cibber, developed into great character actors, and the dramatists created roles especially suited to their talents. William Congreve 's admiration for Anne Bracegirdle's talent and beauty perhaps contributed substantially to the creation of the character of Millimant in The Way of the World. Actors such as William Penkethman and Joseph Haines often insured a play's success by their antics on the stage. In addition to the major figures of the period, a substantial number of competent minor actors and actresses mastered the character roles which appear with frequency in much Restoration drama. The Restoration players exerted an influence on both the direction and content of the drama of the period. A better understanding of their performances and personalities could well lead to a better understanding of the drama itself. I have followed the alphabetical listing of the actors and actresses given in Part I of The London Stage, making a few additions where I found them necessary. For the most part, each entry contains information on the player's first and last recorded performances and on his best roles. Whenever possible I have included commentary about his ability. In addition, I have tried to provide data about the character and personality of each player when possible. In some instances I felt that the physical appearance was important and included that information. Much of the information in each entry comes from Restoration and eighteenth century sources. John Downes's Roscius Anglicanus and Thomas Davies' Dramatic Miscellanies were especially valuable, as was John Genest's Some Account of the English Stage. In the twentieth century, the works of John Harold Wilson and Sybil Rosenfeld were very helpful. Finally, the massive scholarship of The London Stage pervades this dissertation. Without that work my task would have been impossible.

In 1982, Richard C. Frushell urged the necessity for a critical study of Susanna Centlivre's plays. Since then, only a handful of books and articles briefly discuss herand many attempt wrongly to force her into various critical models. Drawing on performativity models, my reading of several Centlivre plays (Love's Contrivance, The Gamester, The Basset-Table and A Bold Stroke for a Wife) asks the question, "What was it like to see these plays in performance?" Occupying somewhat uneasy ground between literature and theatre studies, I borrow useful tools from both, to create what might be styled a New Historicist Dramaturgy. I urge a re-examination of the period 1708-28. The standard reading of theatre of the period is that it was static. This "dry spell" of English theatre, most critics agree, was filled with stock characters and predictable plot lines. But it is during this so-called "dry spell" that Centlivre refines her stagecraft, and convinces cautious managers to bank on her work, providing evidence that playwrights of the period were subtly experimenting. The previous trend in scholarship of this cautious and paranoid era of theatre history has been to shy away from examining the plays in any depth, and fall back on pigeonholing them. But why were the playwrights turning out the work that they did? What is truly representative of the period? Continued examination may stop us from calling the period a "dry spell." For that purpose, examining some of Centlivre's early work encourages us to avoid the tendency to study only a few playwrights of the period, and to avoid the trap of focusing on biography rather than text. I propose a different kind of aesthetic, stemming from my interest in the text as precursor to performance. Some of these works may not seem fertile ground for theorists, but discarding them on that basis fails to take into account their original purpose: to entertain.

The thesis continues the work undertaken in recent years by (in alphabetical order) James J. Marino, Scott McMillin, Paul Menzer, Simon Palfrey, Tiffany Stern, Evelyn Tribble, and others to put to use what is now known about the purpose, distribution, and usage of early modern actors' parts. The thesis applies the new methodology of reading 'in parts', or reconstituting early modern plays 'in parts', to the body of plays written by Ben Jonson. The aim of the project is to offer a reconsideration of Jonson as a man of theatre, interested not only in the presentation of his works in print, but also in their production at the Globe and at Blackfriars. By reconstructing and examining the parts through which the actors performing in Jonson's plays accessed their characters, the thesis proposes answers to the questions: how can we read and analyse Jonson's plays differently when looking at them in terms of actors' parts; did Jonson write with parts in mind; what did Jonsonian parts have to offer actors by way of challenge and guidance; what can we learn from parts about Jonson's assumptions and demands with regard to the actors; and how did actors themselves respond to those demands. These questions are significant because they engage critically with the tradition of seeing Jonson as a playwright dismissive of actors and distrustful of the theatre; they seek to establish a perspective that allows us to assess Jonson's abilities to instruct and challenge his actors through staging documents. More generally, the research contributes to the studies of the early modern rehearsal and staging practices and invites consideration of Shakespeare's part-writing techniques in contrast with those of his major rival. With no surviving early modern parts from Jonson's plays (indeed with only a handful of surviving parts from the period), the first task is to determine the level of accuracy with which the parts can be reconstructed from Jonson's printed plays. Stephen Orgel was by no means the first critic who used the example of Sejanus to assert that Jonson habitually doctored his plays before they were published, but his view has become a critical commonplace. This thesis re-examines the case of Jonson's revisions and concludes that, far from being representative, the 1605 Sejanus quarto is an anomaly which Jonson himself needed to account for in his address to the reader. It is true that Jonson cultivated a distinct style of presentation of printed material, but the evidence that he extensively tampered with the texts themselves after they were performed is scarce (again, the revisions found in the Folio versions of Every Man in His Humour and Cynthia's Revels are addressed and found to be exceptional, rather than typical), while the evidence of his pride in the original compositions and performances is much stronger. Since such enhancements as dedicatory poems, arguments (i.e. plot summaries), character sketches, or marginalia have no bearing on the shapes of actor's parts, they do not in any way compromise the reliability of the printed texts as sources from which Jonson's parts can, argues the thesis, be reconstructed with reasonable accuracy. Jonson, himself an actor and apparently a friend and admirer of a number of great actors of his age (Edward Alleyn, Nathan Field, Richard Robinson, Salomon Pavy, Richard Burbage), knew from personal experience how much depended on actors mastering, or, in their terminology, being 'perfect' in, their parts. By granting the actor access only to select portions of the complete play-text (i.e. his own lines and cues), the part effectively regulated the performance in cases when the actor had only limited knowledge of the rest of the play. Such cases seem to have been very common: documentary evidence suggests that actors had to learn their parts on their own over the course of a few weeks, and only then attended group rehearsals, most of which were concerned with 'business', not text which had already been learned. While some might have attended a reading of the play (if one was arranged for the benefit of the sharers, for instance), or gained more information about the play from their fellow actors, the parts remained their chief means of internalising their text and acquiring a sense of the play they were in. Jonson, who was not a resident playwright with any company performing in London and thus probably did not always have easy and regular access to the actors, could sometimes have taken advantage of the actors' dependence on their parts and crafted the parts as a means of exercising control over the performances of his plays. Building on this premise, the thesis examines various features of actors' parts that would have made a difference to an actor's performance. It draws on recent advancements in the studies of textual cohesion (linguistic features such as reference, substitution, ellipsis, etc.) to point out how the high and low frequency of cohesive ties (pairs of cohesively related words or phrases) in various sections of the part would have given an actor a good idea of how prominent his part was at any given moment. It examines Jonson's use of cues and patterns of cueing: like Shakespeare, Jonson was fond of using repeated cues to open up a space for improvisation, and he seems to have been aware of the need to provide the apprentices in the company with parts cued by a limited number of actors so as to allow for easier private rehearsals with their masters. The thesis also examines the common feature of Jonson's 'split jokes' - jokes that are divided across multiple parts - and asks whether any kind of comic effect can be achieved by excluding the punch line of a joke from the part that contains its setup, and the setup from the part that delivers the punch line, offering a fresh look at the nature of early modern comedy. In structural terms, the thesis considers how a narrative constituted solely by the lines present on an actor's part can diverge from the narrative of the play as a whole and how an understanding of a play as a text composed of actors' parts, as well as of acts and scenes, can help to refine arguments about Jonson's assumptions about the strengths of the companies for which he wrote. What emerges is an image of Jonson who, far from concerned only with readership, consciously developed a brand of comedy that was uniquely suited to, perhaps even relying on, the solipsistic manner in which the actors received and learned their parts.

Prior to his career as a painter, Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1940) was employed for a number of years as an actor. Indeed the muse of the theatre was a constant influence throughout Sickert’s life and work yet this relationship is curiously neglected in studies of his career. The following thesis, therefore, is an attempt to address this vital aspect of Sickert’s œuvre. Chapter one (Act I: The Duality of Performance and the Art of the Music-Hall) explores Sickert’s acting career and its influence on his music-hall paintings from the 1880s and 1890s, particularly how this experience helps to differentiate his work from Whistler and Degas. Chapter two (Act II: Restaging Camden Town: Walter Sickert and the theatre c.1905-c.1915) examines the influence of the developing New Drama on Sickert’s works from his Fitzroy Street/Camden Town period. Chapter three (Act III: Sickert and Shakespeare: Interpreting the Theatre c.1920-1940) details Sickert’s interest in the rediscovery of Shakespeare as a metaphor for his solution to the crisis in modern art. Finally, chapter four (Act IV: Sickert’s Simulacrum: Representations and Characterisations of the Artist in Texts, Portraits and Self-Portraits c.1880-c.1940) discusses his interest in the concept of theatrical identity, both in terms of an interest in acting and the “character” of artist and self-publicity. Each chapter analyses the influence of the theatre on Sickert’s work, both in terms of his interest in theatrical subject matter but also in a more general sense of the theatrical milieu of his interpretations. Consequently Sickert’s paintings tell us much about changing fashions, traditions and interests in the British theatre during his period. The history of the British stage is therefore the backdrop for the study of a single artist’s obsession with theatricality and visual modernity.