Beyond the Picture-Frame Stage: Late Nineteenth-Century Pictorial Theatre Posters

Smyth talks about the nineteenth-century pictorial theatre posters which represent a largely untapped source of information about the theatre culture of the period. Though often portraying key scenes or several episodes of a play within one design, they have failed to attract critical attention. This material has, moreover, been neglected on more than one front. Though both referencing performance and forming part of a wider nineteenth-century visual culture, neither theatre history nor art history has engaged with theatre posters and this material has, for different reasons tended to fall below the attention of both disciplines. From a theatre history perspective, although valuable work has been done in cataloguing and describing posters, there have been few attempts to analyze them in terms of style, iconography and their relation to performance.