{"id":5617,"date":"2025-06-07T22:19:41","date_gmt":"2025-06-08T01:19:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.twisitheatreblog.com\/?p=5617"},"modified":"2025-06-07T22:50:16","modified_gmt":"2025-06-08T01:50:16","slug":"dr-roberta-barker-on-how-tuberculosis-connects-romanticism-realism-in-ways-theatre-history-often-ignores","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.twisitheatreblog.com\/?p=5617","title":{"rendered":"Dr. Roberta Barker on How Tuberculosis Connects Romanticism & Realism in Ways Theatre History Often Ignores"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Dr. Roberta Barker is a beloved Theatre Studies professor at the Fountain School of Performing Arts<\/a> in Halifax and in 2023 she published a book called Symptoms of the Self: Tuberculosis and the Making of the Modern Stage<\/em>, which was published by University of Iowa Press<\/a>. It was the recipient of the 2023 Ann Saddlemyer Award, \u201cgiven to the best book published in English or French in a given year. The winning book should normally constitute a substantial contribution to the field of drama, theatre, and performance studies in what is now known as Canada.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As soon as Barker told me about the subject of her book I was immediately intrigued and wanted to read it. What could tuberculosis have to do with the theatre beyond being a hazard for folks in the audience during times when the disease was or is considered an epidemic?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After becoming engrossed in the book, I sat down with Dr. Barker to discuss it in more detail, especially because I was so curious how a theatre academic and historian would find tuberculosis as a lens through which to view the Modern Theatre in the first place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The answer, in short, was that Barker had a deep interest in 19th Century culture dating back to her teenage years. \u201cWhen I was a teenager I read tons and tons of 19th Century novels\u2026 if you do that you get immediately immersed in the world of all the consumptive characters. I was also very interested in poetry and music, so I was kind of growing up on all these mythic historical consumptives: the Bront\u00eb sisters, [John] Keats, [Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric] Chopin\u2026 so that was always sort of an interest to me. Why were these characters and these historical figures so glamorized and kind of iconic?\u201d Barker points out that even Charlotte Bront\u00eb, who had seen a number of her siblings die in the horrible reality of the disease, chose to romanticize it in her work. \u201cShe makes it this sort of beautiful spiritualizing disease,\u201d Barker says. She also read Susan Sontag\u2019s book Illness as a Metaphor <\/em>(1978), also as a teenager, and she characterizes it as \u201c[Sontag] was kind of the first person to write about [how] this is a real WTF about 19th Century culture. Why would you have a culture where tons and tons of people are dying epidemically of a really horrible illness that is not beautiful, and yet it is very romanticized in literature and in the culture?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barker says that consequently when she was a teenager these sort of \u201cconsumptive heroes\u201d were attractive to her. \u201cIt was kind of my bag,\u201d she says, and in the Acknowledgments section of her book, she says that many of the folks she names there as having been helpful to her throughout this research process are people who have known her since she was a teenager or in her early 20s. She had also been working on a project where she was looking at \u201crealist acting and realist theatre and how it\u2019s been applied to texts that come before Realism, like Early Modern texts. I was very interested in the vocabulary of Realism,\u201d she says, \u201cand where it came from.\u201d From there she encountered Alexandre Dumas P\u00e8re\u2019s play Ang\u00e8le<\/em> (1833), which, Barker says, \u201cpretty much no one had read, certainly no one who wasn\u2019t a Dumas P\u00e8re scholar, had read for like 150 years.\u201d Her reaction to the play was that it wasn\u2019t at all what she had been expecting from a play from the 1830s. \u201cThere\u2019s a huge period of drama that almost no one is interested in,\u201d she says, referring specifically to this part of the 19th Century canon, especially the plays that were written during this time in France, which she says often is regulated to being a special interest. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen I read Ang\u00e8le<\/em> my mind exploded because I was like this play is full of scenes that could have come out of [Anton] Chekhov. They read like something from the 1890s. It\u2019s massively subtextual and the subtext is all about sex and class struggle and gender power relations, and also about this idea of disease and hereditary disease, and, of course, you have this character who is a doctor who is dying of consumption. I was like \u2018what the hell is this?\u2019 And I got so obsessed with this play. I think I can confidently state that I am now one of the world experts on this play\u2026 What I got kind of convinced of was that this figure of the consumptive character, which Ang\u00e8le<\/em> was one of the plays that pioneered this and was viewed as quite shocking in its time, was a window through which you could actually see the growth of a whole theatrical language of what we now think of as Realism- actually coming out of Romantic, Melodramatic, Sentimental theatre- rather than being a response to it, which I think is the classic theatre history narrative\u2026. Ang\u00e8le<\/em> in particular made it really clear to me that, actually, so many aspects of Realism- like depicting everyday contemporary life, interest in heredity, [and] subtext- are all things that actually came out of the sort of Melodramatic and Sentimental tradition, the Romantic tradition, as a way of creating a sort of sense of pathos and a sense of interiority.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barker argues that this pathos and interiority were the tools that the Romantics were using to encourage their audiences to feel emotions at the theatre, to cry, and to identify with the characters with empathy. \u201cIt’s a legacy that\u2019s still very much with us,\u201d Barker says, connecting this to Neptune Theatre\u2019s recent production of Nick Green\u2019s play Casey and Diana<\/a><\/em>. She says, \u201cFrom the \u201880s to now this goal of making people think differently about society is very much with us in plays about AIDS, for example.\u201d She notes that even in the 1830s these Sentimental plays were liberal and progressive, in certain ways, and that the \u201cgoal involves trying to get audiences to identify with characters and feel for them. How do you do this?\u201d she asks, \u201cYou tap into audiences\u2019 everyday experience and things that they find moving. This idea of depicting characters who are suffering from an illness that a lot of people in the audience are either suffering from or know people who are suffering from it, because one in five people, at an estimate, die from [tuberculosis] in this period, so it\u2019s impossible that there\u2019s no one in the audience who has never known anyone who has this illness. I got super interested in tracing how this particular sort of character type of the consumptive goes all through 19th Century and into 20th Century theatre as a way of really depicting interior life, of depicting sort of modernity and, in a way, fusing what we now think of as the goals of the Realist Theatre.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n

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Alexandre Dumas P\u00e8re<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Barker mentions that Alexander Dumas p\u00e8re and his son Alexandre Dumas fils are remembered today largely for their novels- Dumas P\u00e8re, of course, wrote The Three Musketeers<\/em> and The Count of Monte Cristo<\/em>, and Dumas fils wrote La Dame aux Cam\u00e9lias<\/em>. Yet, not just their <\/em>plays, but most others from this period have largely been erased from mainstream theatre history. \u201cI think there\u2019s a huge theatre history problem\u2026 the French drama [of this period] was unbelievably influential and very controversial and was being played everywhere in translation throughout the 19th Century, but it\u2019s almost been erased,\u201d she says, noting that the play adapted from La Dame aux Cam\u00e9lias<\/em> is the exception. \u201cI personally find, especially in textbooks, but even in wonderful pieces of scholarship, that you\u2019ll see the entire early to mid 19th Century theatre being associated with Melodrama and this Dudley Do-Right, Nell on the train tracks, moustache-twirling villains kind of thing. When you read the Dumas, there\u2019s a series of these Dumas P\u00e8re plays that are set in the contemporary world that are really about very morally complicated characters and situations. Everybody is quite grey. Even the \u201cgood\u201d characters do things that [are morally ambiguous\/questionable]. What he is very interested in is basically social motivation and the social construction of identity and how people are driven by their backstories and their psychologies and so on. People are not ‘black and white characters.’\u201d Barker says that when playwrights began putting consumptive characters on the stages in Paris in the late 1820s and early 1830s audiences were shocked. \u201cThey were like, \u2018this is indecorous. This is sort of disgustingly realistic.\u2019 I think if we saw those performances now, if they had been filmed, we would think they were incredibly idealized and non-naturalistic, but for the time, it was this important way in which we sort of put on the table a lot of contemporary questions and ways of thinking and thinking about the body, thinking about the ways that people act are sort of shaped by their bodies and their physical life in the world, and also thinking about things like class, in particular, and gender.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFeud says this fascinating thing that [tuberculosis] is the only illness that you can use onstage that people will identify with psychologically,\u201d Barker continues, “He says there\u2019s something about the illness that allows psychological action to happen. I think this is the crux of it, that they understand it as an illness that basically arises out of the psyche and out of emotions. So it becomes a way of externalizing emotions that looks real. Even as the understanding of the science and biology around tuberculosis evolved into the 20th Century consumption continued to retain its more romantic implication onstage.” Barker cites Eugene O\u2019Neill, saying that he had grown up as the son of an actor who had been surrounded by this Sentimental 19th Century Drama, and that he is known in theatre history for being a reactionary against this to become a great American Realist whose work is known for both being gritty and honest. \u201cHe literally has tuberculosis and spends time in a sanatorium, and is in the era of Public Health\u2026like this is a bacterial infection\u2026 and yet, literally every play in which, and there are more than I even talk about in the book, but there\u2019s three main ones, in which he depicts tubercular characters, including two of them in which he basically depicts himself: totally romanticized and totally connected to emotion. You see that, actually, this sort of mythology is steeped into the way people come to see themselves and their world, even when it\u2019s been kind of debunked by [science].\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barker says that the other \u201ccrazy thing\u201d she encountered when researching this book was that for hundreds of years before the Romantic Theatre illness onstage was almost always funny for the audience. \u201cIt was viewed as grotesque\u2026 what you would mainly get is satire. So this moment when the ailing body becomes idealized and actually an image of a sort of martyred beauty and glamour and romance and interiority and depth is not a given. It\u2019s an innovation of the Romantic Period. Jure [Gantar] and I had this really interesting moment where our research intersected a number of years ago where he was doing research into comedy in the 17th Century, and in general how comedy works and this idea of making fun of yourself. Making it acceptable. You can make fun of other things if you\u2019re also making fun of yourself, and he used the example of Moli\u00e8re, who we think is someone who suffered from tuberculosis, in that he has a lot of his characters, Le Malade Imaginaire<\/dfn><\/em> and so on, who are these hypochondriacs or sort of these old guys coughing, and it\u2019s funny. As far as we can tell he lives with [tuberculosis] for quite awhile, which is not an uncommon thing for hundreds of years, and his way of navigating it is, alright we\u2019ll just work it into the character and make it funny. And the audience is good with that.\u201d She goes on to say that Chekhov, \u201cwho is literally a consumptive doctor\u2026 puts some relatively romanticized consumptive characters on the stage, especially Ivanov, but he, himself, in his own everyday life is downplaying and making jokes about [being sick]. It was fascinating seeing this 360 degrees of a hundred years of a culture where so many people are navigating this illness in their own everyday lives and the lives of their families and their friends, and then are thinking how do you represent this? And these different answers that get put forward: should we make light of it? Should we sort of cleanse it? Should we whitewash it so to speak? That\u2019s another part of the story,\u201d Barker says, which she also writes about in the book, \u201ctuberculosis on stage is extremely connected to whiteness. Which was not at all historically accurate.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n

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An illustration of Tom and Eva by Hammatt Billings for the 1853 deluxe edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Barker mentions that the medical theory of this time, especially coming out of the United States both before and after the Civil War, was actively, unbelievably, \u201cmind-blowingly\u201d racist, and was being used in the South as a way to excuse and justify, or indeed, affirm the institution of slavery. Tuberculosis was seen as a disease that affected \u201cemotionally complex\u201d white people, and thus, it was believed that Black folks were essentially immune to it. \u201cIn Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em>, which is trying to say that [slavery] is cruel and wrong, and we need to abolish this institution, nevertheless, still, [novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe] buys into this idea that it is the little white girl who is the saintly consumptive whose death is going to convert everybody, and Uncle Tom and Tospy, are these kind of hardy, resilient figures- [therefore], even when tuberculosis was sometimes being used to critique certain impacts of racism, it was nevertheless also being used to keep racism quite firmly in place.\u201d It is a strange aspect of white supremacism, Barker remarks, that chastises white folks for being too complex, emotionally deep, and intellectually profound, and thus bringing about this epidemic of illness, and yet, of course, horribly racist to assume those of other races don\u2019t have the needed complexity, depth, and vivid inner life and civility to warrant becoming infected. At the same time, Barker notes, tuberculosis is \u201cliterally decimating Indigenous populations. It\u2019s one of the tools of genocide\u2026. But that\u2019s not depicted on stage. [Indigenous characters on stage at this time] always die heroically in battle.\u201d \u201cThis story [of consumption] is bound up in all the huge stories of how we end up where we are today in ways that are rooted in 19th Century political culture and social culture, also popular culture and medical culture.\u201d     <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The consumptive characters, famously, are also written as being heroic in their own right. \u201cAnother fascinating aspect of this repertoire is that the most classic thing to say [as a consumptive] is, \u2018it\u2019s nothing, I\u2019m fine.\u2019 It\u2019s the heroism of ordinary middle class or working class people, which is not, The Three Musketeers<\/em> or The Count of Monte Cristo <\/em>doing these fascinating deeds, it\u2019s literally here is this very ordinary thing that humans have to deal with and I\u2019m dealing with it in a sort of heroic resilient way rather than feeling ostentatious and sorry for myself. I\u2019m here trying to keep my kid alive, if that means I\u2019m going to die, okay, that\u2019s fine, it\u2019s a self-sacrifice\u2026 a kind of martyrdom. You\u2019re no longer literally on the cross or being martyred in the arena or going to a crusade, your body is kind of destroying you in response to your self-sacrifice and there is this heroic ethos of ‘greater love hath no person in this than they lay down their life for their friend or their daughter or the person they love.’\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barker says that because of \u201cabiding sexism and abiding ideas about masculinity in particular\u201d the plays that were written in this period about the \u201cdeath of a beautiful [consumptive] woman, like Camille <\/em>and its modern retellings like Moulin Rouge<\/em>, have survived as cultural touchstones, yet an equal number of plays and novels were written about consumptive men, which have been largely cast to the wayside. \u201cThe consumptive hero, I think, was actually chic before the consumptive heroine and it had everything to do with these kinds of debates around masculinity in the period and this bourgeoisification of society, the urbanization of society\u2026 the rise of the power of the bourgeois dude who is pretty much spending his life being an accountant or being a doctor or being a lawyer\u2026 not these \u201cmacho\u201d employments. How do you make that figure heroic?\u201d She describes how Suzanne Voilquin, who had trained as a doctor and was a socialist feminist, who had been abused by her own husband and infected with an STI, and whose mother died of breast cancer after being subjected to misogynistic medical theories by doctors, wrote a review of Ang\u00e8le<\/em> in 1833 where she says that the villainous anti-hero in the play is typical of people in power: men who think [because] they\u2019re male they can get away with everything. They don\u2019t have to answer for anything\u2026 who is the person who is on the side of the heroine? It\u2019s the bourgeoise working man who is consumptive\u2026 she says that he is the icon of what men are going to be like in the future\u2026 men who treat women equally, who think that marriage should be founded on love and not power, and why does he get this? Well, it\u2019s partially because his body is weak and so he needs her [in a way that stronger, healthier men do not].\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barker says she\u2019s now working on a piece that expands on one of the \u2018side alleys\u2019 that didn\u2019t make it into her book- looking at the novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon who is best known for Lady Audley\u2019s Secret<\/em>. She wrote a number of novels that have these glamorous poetic consumptive heroes in them. \u201cShe even makes jokes about it. There\u2019s one of them in which one of the men goes, \u2018women have always been suckers for my cough.’ She is quite pointed about the fact that [for] these sort of young, progressive, poetic literary women the idea of these kind of fragile, intellectual, poetic, suffering [men] is very attractive to them.\u201d In her novel Mount Royal<\/em> a woman is choosing between a consumptive poetic man and a healthier more robust man that she can\u2019t stand, but who her parents want her to marry, and Barker characterizes her feelings saying, “he treats me like an underling, we don\u2019t have an intelligent conversation, he\u2019s got no poetry in his soul,” but the consumptive keeps trying to dissuade her from marrying him because she will have to become his nursemaid, but she would prefer to do that for someone who is kind and smart, while also being able to travel to climates more amenable for tuberculosis patients, than to stay in the city with a man she is sure will be abusive to her. \u201cI think this image of the consumptive male has been kind of edited out because, especially in the late 19th and early 20th Century, there was a real reassertion of the \u2018manly man\u2019 [that wanted to] erase the embarrassing Romantic masculinity.” Barker says it drives her crazy when scholarship focuses on a play like Les Dames aux Cam\u00e8lias<\/em> and views it simply as \u201csick voyeuristic masculine fetishization of sickly women\u201d when in fact that \u201cerases decades of female desire that is about female audiences and female readers finding this image of the beautiful young doomed man very attractive for a whole bunch of reasons, one of which is ‘I\u2019d rather be more equal with someone who was more physically fragile and has emotional depth and who kind of gets me\u2026 than the macho man who is wanting to kick ass all the time and is just going to treat me like his possession.’\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barker says that in Illness as Metaphor<\/em> Susan Sontag critiques the way writers of this period romanticized and glamorized tuberculosis as wrong. She adds, \u201cFor me the response to that is: how does a society deal with something this awful that it\u2019s struggling with, something this difficult that has such a deep impact on so many lives? You\u2019ve got to create some narratives that actually at least allow people to work through it\u2026 All these stories that they told on stage were a way for them to work through a lot of the questions [they had such as]: why are we chronically ill, what\u2019s wrong with our society?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n

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Rachel Felix, Lithographie von Joseph Kriehuber, 1850<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

\u201cAnother thing that kind of fascinated me is how many people you meet over the course of this story that are not only representing this illness onstage, but who are also living with it.\u201d Barker cites Mademoiselle Rachel, her personal favourite, who was this \u201ctremendous badass.\u201d She came from a Swiss Jewish peddler family, and with her own ingenuity, intellect, and talent she became the most famous classical actress in the world. She also \u201covertly defies every moral structure of the society.\u201d She made no attempt to hide her love affairs, often with very prominent (and married) men, boasting to folks, \u201cI prefer renters to owners.\u201d She told wild stories about drunkenly performing Ph\u00e8dre<\/em> (Jean Racine) on the table for the Czar of Russia. She was always physically fragile and when she becomes sick with tuberculosis she was on tour in the United States and her cast mates were literally having to hold her upright so she could continue to perform despite her illness. \u201cShe\u2019s like, \u2018I\u2019m gonna effing keep acting. I\u2019m fine.’ And they\u2019re like, \u2018You\u2019re Not. You cannot stand.\u2019 And she\u2019s like, ‘I\u2019m good. I\u2019m good!’ She fights and fights and fights.\u201d Barker compares this to the more physically robust Sarah Bernhardt whose sister died from tuberculosis, who advertises herself as \u201calways being on death\u2019s door\u2026 and she plays all these famous consumptive characters, but Bernhardt lives until she\u2019s like eighty\u2026 She was so tough, but she advertises herself as being thin,  and frail and spitting blood, because by then it\u2019s become glamorous and part of her persona. It\u2019s the same thing with Eugene O\u2019Neill\u2026 They\u2019re all people who have lived in proximity to this possibility of their own death and who get connected with this web of mythology, but actually their lived experiences of it are quite different.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe last great actor that I talked about [in the book] was Charles Ludlum, one of the inventors of kind of out Queer Theatre in New York in the ’70s, whose most famous performance was as Camille in drag with his chest hair sticking out, but in full Greta Garbo 19th Century drag, really having fun with all these tropes.\u201d She tells of the way he would do an over exaggerated coughing fit and then collapse in a heap on his lover\u2019s lap- someone would come in and say \u2018oh! excuse me!\u2019 \u201cOnly a few years after that Ludlum dies of AIDS and he really lives across the point at which, finally, by the \u201870s, tuberculosis has become a kind of trope, although unfortunately, indeed, infections are [now] rising again, even in the so called \u2018West,\u2019\u2026 Ludlum was part of that first generation that wasn\u2019t afraid of TB because of effective multi-drug antibiotics, so it could be a joke- and yet this same generation, who, with this kind of joyous Queer aesthetic makes a joke of it, then immediately lives through this horrific epidemic in which so many [Queer folks] are lost, so I think it really speaks to this sense in which the medical and the cultural histories, and we know this from Covid, the artistic and the medical histories of populations are so intertwined in such complicated ways, and the way the narratives that we turn to to try to help us make sense of what happens to us, medically, are really important to think about. \u2026 In some ways, if that repertoire in the 19th Century, the Consumptive Repertoire as I call it, had not been there for Ludlum\u2019s generation- would their way of navigating the AIDS crisis and living through it and memorizing the people who didn\u2019t live through it, have been different? I think probably in some ways it would have.”\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s easy for us to look back to the 19th Century and be like, \u2018isn\u2019t it weird that they dealt with [this disease] in this way, but that was how they dealt with it, and I think in the case of the AIDS crisis we can see the complexity of how a community dealt with- if we look at Angels in America<\/em>, if we look at Rent<\/em>, The Normal Heart<\/em>, the works that came out of the ’80s talking about the AIDS crisis- that language, that came out of the 19th Century theatre, was one of the things that they turned to as a way of making sense of something so horrific and nonsensical, and all these young, beautiful, gifted, cool, smart people suddenly being lost.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Going back to Ang\u00e8le<\/em> Barker says that as Dumas P\u00e8re encountered tuberculosis more and more in his life he started to put more and more of the reality of it in his work. In this play we see the young characters raging against the illness and how unfair it is to have their futures cut short and limited by an illness beyond their control, not unlike the way Tommy lashes out in anger in Casey and Diana<\/em>. \u201cWhen Lockroy who was playing Henri Muller in Ang\u00e8le <\/em>did the cough onstage the people were like, \u2018I can\u2019t believe he did that’\u2026 no matter how romanticized it was\u2026 to see it done on stage is shocking and it\u2019s evoking something that is really awful. The more repeatedly represented something becomes, the more it becomes normalized and almost a joke. I think it\u2019s why I\u2019m still really obsessed with [Ang\u00e8le<\/em>], that although in certain ways it\u2019s very romanticized, in other ways it\u2019s very honest about this idea of the injustice and stupidity of the whole thing, as in Casey and Diana,<\/em> becoming connected to the injustice and stupidity of other forms of social discrimination. Why the hell is someone treated as less good because they\u2019re lower class than somebody else? Because they work and the other person doesn\u2019t? Because they\u2019re gay? In what universe does that make any sense? And in what universe does it make sense for somebody young and smart and with all their life ahead of them to suddenly get struck with this illness and to not be able to have their life?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is just scratching the surface of all the interesting themes and stories from this time in theatre history- covering French, British, and American experiences- that Barker has both uncovered and chronicled so vividly and with such astute analysis. You can order Symptoms of the Self: Tuberculosis and the Making of the Modern Stage<\/em> at King\u2019s Co-op Bookstore<\/a> (6350 Coburg Road, Halifax) or from Chapters<\/a>. <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Roberta Barker is a beloved Theatre Studies professor at<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5618,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4673,4672],"tags":[8257,8256,4942,8264,7816,5873,5252,5060,8253,8258,8262,8254,5059,7814,8265,8261,7792,8263,8255,8259,8252],"class_list":["post-5617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-article","category-interview","tag-alexandre-dumas-fils","tag-alexandre-dumas-pere","tag-anton-chekhov","tag-charles-ludlam","tag-charlotte-bronte","tag-dr-roberta-barker","tag-eugene-oneill","tag-fountain-school-of-the-performing-arts","tag-frederic-chopin","tag-harriet-beecher-stowe","tag-jean-racine","tag-john-keats","tag-jure-gantar","tag-kings-co-op-bookstore","tag-lockroy","tag-mary-elizabeth-braddon","tag-nick-green","tag-sarah-bernhardt","tag-susan-sontag","tag-suzanne-voilquin","tag-university-of-iowa-press"],"yoast_head":"\nDr. Roberta Barker on How Tuberculosis Connects Romanticism & Realism in Ways Theatre History Often Ignores - The Way I See It Theatre & Music Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Dr. Roberta Barker is a beloved Theatre Studies professor at the Fountain School of Performing Arts in Halifax and in 2023 she published a book called Symptoms of the Self: Tuberculosis and the Making of the Modern Stage, which was published by University of Iowa Press. As soon as she mentioned the subject of the book I was immediately intrigued and wanted to read it. 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