Location: BSECS 2018, St Hugh’s College, Oxford

Of all the tragedies performed at Drury Lane by David Garrick, only two appeared in more than twenty consecutive seasons. The first of these was Hamlet, which was acted every year from 1747 to 1776. In second place, however, lies a play whose tragic passions are less well known to modern audiences: Aaron Hill’s Zara, a translation of Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732), first performed privately in 1735 and then revived, with slight alterations, by Garrick in the 1750s, appeared in twenty-three seasons in a row. This paper offers an analysis of Hill’s tragedy two key aims. The first is to demonstrate how this translation tested the effectiveness of a particular kind of passion – the enthusiastic – on an English stage that Hill believed to be desperately in need of it. The second is to suggest that Hill’s choices as Voltaire’s translator, by emphasizing moments of transition, help mark out a path from the seventeenth-century ideal of a play producing “monuments” of the passions, to the late eighteenth-century ideal of its creating a dynamic sequence of emotion, what Daniel Webb called in 1769 a “chain of feeling”.