Melodramatic Tactics and Jewish Emancipation through Elizabeth Polack’s play Esther, the Royal Jewess (1835)

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how Elizabeth Polack's 1835 melodrama Esther the Royal Jewess, or The Death of Haman, used artistic elements to reflect its political attitude toward the Anglo-Jewish experience of emancipation among Britain's working and lower-middle classes in the nineteenth century. This dissertation specifically investigates how Polack's melodrama reflected the Anglo-Jewish experience of emancipation, stressing the connections between melodrama and the history of the Jewish movement