Stagestruck: The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Colonies

Acknowledgments

xiii Acknowledgments This book has been many years in the making. It is with great pleasure that I can now express my gratitude to those who have supported and encouraged me along the way. My initial research was funded by the Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and the University of Pennsylvania. At Texas A&M University, the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research,the College of Liberal Arts,and the History Department provided research funding and leave that enabled me to ask new questions and take the manuscript in new directions. With a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities, I was able to visit additional archives in France. The Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland welcomed me as a visiting scholar. An NEH Fellowship and Vanderbilt University supported a crucial year of writing. Vanderbilt also provided a subvention to underwrite this book’s publication. I thank all of these institutions for their generosity. In France, knowledgeable and efficient archivists and librarians in Bordeaux , Châlons-en-Champagne, Le Mans, Lyon, Nantes, Paris, Reims, Rouen, Saumur, Strasbourg, Toulouse, Valenciennes, and Vincennes helped me to navigate their collections, responded to queries, and facilitated the reproduction of images. I am especially grateful to the Bibliothèque-Musée de la Comédie-Française for allowing me to use their collections and to Jacqueline Razgonnikoff, who during my very first weeks of research in France located invaluable sources and helped me to decode the handwritten letters of eighteenth-century actors, while sharing her enthusiasm for my project. In the United States, the librarians at the New York Public Library, the Newberry Library, and the libraries of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania proved to be tremendously helpful. I also thank the indefatigable interlibrary loan departments at both Texas A&M and Vanderbilt , who did a heroic job responding to my countless requests. I had the great good fortune to begin studying the French theater industry at the University of Pennsylvania with Lynn Hunt as my adviser. As valuable to me as Lynn’s critical insight and astute advice has been her constant xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS faith that this project would, in fact, make a book. Over the years she has continued to give generously of her time,reading chapters of this manuscript with care, for which I offer my thanks. At Penn, Lynn Lees and Alan Kors challenged me to think about culture, commerce, empire, and urban life during the age of Enlightenment in new ways. Joan DeJean and the French Cultural Studies seminar provided inspiration for interdisciplinary inquiry, and allowed me to present my early findings on the eighteenth-century stage. Friends and colleagues including Ellen Amster and Catherine Bogosian Ash helped to make my Philadelphia years intellectually exciting as well as fun. I am also grateful to professors Suzanne Marchand and Theodore Rabb, who first opened the doors of the Bibliothèque nationale for me. In France, colleagues including J. P. Daughton, Richard Keller, Katherine Kuenzli, and Lara Moore helped me to get this book off the ground in conversations that were most often conducted over good wine and delicious meals. Roger Chartier graciously allowed me to attend his seminar, and Martine de Rougemont offered her expert advice. Luc Poirier extended his friendship and hospitality. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Alexis Albion and Brian DeLay reached across disciplinary boundaries to read my work, as did Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. At Texas A&M University, my colleagues in the History Department made College Station a warm and intellectually engaging environment in which to begin writing this book. Walter Buenger was supportive and accommodating. My appreciation goes to Cyndy Bouton, Chester Dunning, Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss, Troy Bickham, Jim Rosenheim, Lora Wildenthal, Daniel Bornstein,and the members of the Junior Faculty Reading Group for reading my work and offering valuable suggestions. Christian Brannstrom helped me to create preliminary maps. In Nashville, I was welcomed into another collegial and intellectually vibrant academic community. At Vanderbilt University, my department chairs, Liz Lunbeck and Jim Epstein, and Dean Carolyn Dever have supported my research with enthusiasm. I offer my thanks to Catherine Molineux , Eddie Wright-Rios, Holly Tucker, Jane Landers, Gary Gerstle, Joel Harrington, Celso Castilho, Marshall Eakin, Ole Molvig, Colin Dayan, and Jérôme Brillaud for their advice and recommendations, as well as for their encouragement and camaraderie. Sarah Igo has been a scholarly inspiration as well as a supportive friend. Bill Caferro not only read parts of the manuscript , he also provided countless morale boosts...