Harriman-Smith, James, ‘Authority of the Actor in the Eighteenth Century’, in Shakespeare and Authority: Citations, Conceptions and Constructions, ed. by Katie Halsey and Angus Vine (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), pp. 249–64.

Shakespeare rose to cultural prominence in England during the eighteenth century, his work and his myth nourished by new editions, essays, performances and more. Yet who, in all this, provided the most authoritative version of the playwright? Alexander Pope’s edition of the plays in 1725 inaugurated an influential argument for the editor’s authority at the expense of players who, both during Shakespeare’s life and since, had apparently done little but mangle his writing. Against this, other writers, like Theobald, Roberts and Downes, claimed that actors did possess literary critical authority since they were both involved in the creation of the plays and, importantly, had been handing down Shakespeare’s own stagecraft across the turbulent seventeenth century.

If apostolic tradition supported the actor’s authority in the early decades of the eighteenth century, the arrival of David Garrick’s innovative and popular acting changed this paradigm. The authoritative star performer was no longer the great-grandson of Shakespeare, but rather directly connected to the playwright, his “twin”. A new tradition of influential actors begins with Garrick, and continues in John Philip Kemble, who, despite stylistic differences, was seen as successor to the “English Roscius”, not least for his authoritative analyses of Shakespeare’s characters.

Locating literary critical authority in the practice and the person of the actor complicates Shakespeare’s eighteenth-century reception, rivalling text-based approaches, but also borrowing from them. The distinction drawn here between apostolic and Garrickean tradition notably parallels the shift in editorial methods from textus receptus to Quarto and Folio copytexts. On stage and page, proximity to the source became all.