Joel Schechter is Professor of Theatre Arts at San Francisco State University. He is famous as a writer about clowns, jesters, satirists and their radical politics. Much of his work has been focused on contemporary global mayhem. He was previously Professor of Dramatic Literature at Yale School of Drama, lecturer in Performance Studies at New York University and the New School for Social Research. He was Editor in Chief of the Yale journal Theater from 1977-92.

The Cast of Brechtians in Order of Appearance

List of Illustrations

Foreword by Peter Thomson

Introduction

Eighteenth-Century Brechtians

Cross-Dressing Soldiers and Anti-Militarist Rakes

Polly Peachum and the New Naiveté

Pirates and Polly: A Lost Messingkauf Dialogue

The Duchess of Queensberry Becomes Polly Peachum

Macheath Our Contemporary

Swift in Hollywood: Another Messingkauf Dialogue

Swift's Polite Conversation with Falstaff

Henry Fielding, Brechtian Before Brecht

Fielding's London Merchant, and Lillo's

Literarization of Fielding's Plays

Tom Thumb Jones, Child Actress

A World on Fire

Fielding's Cibber Letters: Counterfeit Wit, Scurrility and Cartels

Bertolt Brecht Writes The Beggar's Opera, Fielding Rewrites Polly

Stage Mutineers

Charlotte Charke's Tit for Tat; or Comedy and Tragedy at War: A Lost Play Recovered?

Mrs Charke Escapes Hanging

Garrick and Swift's School for Scandal-With a Digression on Yoko Ono

Brecht Praises Garrick's Hamlet

A Portrait of the Artists as Beggar's Opera Disciples-Including David Garrick, Epic Actor

Walpole in America

The Future of Eighteenth-Century Brechtiana: Polly Exonerated

Conclusion: The Future Promise of an Earlier Age

Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: A Timetable of Events

Bibliography

Index