Location: ASECS 2025 (online)

Twenty-five years ago, Mary Crane used a sixteenth-century document recording payment to a carpenter for ‘performing a door’ to remind us all that ‘early modern conceptions of performance embraced a wider range of possibilities’ than are present to us now. This paper attempts to map the range of possibilities offered by eighteenth-century conceptions of performance, and, in doing so, offer new insights to the period’s writing about theatre.

Samuel Johnson defines ‘performance’ as both ‘action’ (something you do) and ‘composition’ (something – like that sixteenth-century door – you make). Such a way of thinking helps us reconsider some of the most salient features of eighteenth-century theatre critique. The period’s many comparisons of acting to other arts, for example, remains an attempt to raise the status of acting as a profession, but we might also think of it now as a raising of an actor’s performance to sit alongside the performances of sculptors, poets, and painters. The labours of eighteenth-century editors of Shakespeare, like Pope and Warburton, with their hostile comments on the ‘ignorance of the Players’, are trying to separate Shakespeare’s performance from the performance of the King’s Men. And in Garrick’s letters we find correspondence critiquing an author’s ‘performance’ (i.e. the script they have composed) but also, and tellingly, an invitation for first an ‘account of me and my performance’ and then – by way of clarification – ‘the account you have written of my action’.

Garrick’s letters, early editions of Shakespeare, acting manuals, and more all seem to draw on a conception of performance, whose range of meanings, as both composition and action, is different to our own. This paper asks how our understanding of theatre critique might change when we return to that way of thinking.