Category: Eighteenth Century

  • A Thesis Abstracted

    I found writing up my thesis to be an exciting time. I have always enjoyed writing (hence this blog), but the assembly of so many words, ideas, arguments, was something new to me. For various reasons (publication, the fact I’m writing this before my viva, copyright), I cannot publish the thesis online here. I can,…

  • Orphan Black and General Sensibility

    Have you been watching Orphan Black? I have, and enjoying it immensely as a way to get away from writing up my PhD. Unfortunately, though, the fact that my thesis is all about performance makes it pretty much impossible to ignore my research completely when watching a TV series. Especially this one. I can’t help…

  • A wave o’th’sea

    My posts have been few and far between of late, as I am nearing the end of my thesis, and pouring my energies into making three years of thinking and reading presentable. I couldn’t, however, resist a little post about these lines from The Winter’s Tale. Florizel is watching Perdita. FLORIZEL When you do dance,…

  • Theobald’s Baobab Theatre

    Almost a decade ago now, I spent two months of my summer holidays teaching English in Madagascar as a volunteer for The Dodwell Trust. I worked in the capital Antananarivo, in the cattle town of Tsiromandidy and in Vatomandry on the eastern seaboard. Wherever I went, I met so many extraordinary people and learnt so…

  • La Haine de Shakespeare

    There’s  a conference this December entitled ‘La haine de Shakespeare’, part of a larger research project at the Sorbonne on ‘La haine du théâtre’. After going to one of their colloques, I really wanted to take part myself, and was glad of what seemed like an ideal opportunity.

  • Some more about Saint Omer

    In late November 2014, a First Folio was discovered in the Bibliothèque d’Agglomeration Saint-Omer. I realise I’m a bit late to the party with a blog post on this extremely rare qnd exciting event, but, still,I hope what I have to say here about another of Saint-Omer’s Shakespearean connections remains of interest.

  • Johnson and Shakespeare

    Just a quick post this time to announce the I’ve been invited to speak at a conference in Pembroke College, Oxford, marking the 350th anniversary of Samuel Johnson’s edition of the plays of Shakespeare. The event will take place in August 2015, so – all being well – I should have finished writing my thesis…

  • Curating Letourneur

    This is a bibliographical post. In the following table, I’m going to list the rough contents of all twenty volumes of Pierre Letourneur’s translation of Shakespeare into French. I am also going to provide a link to the digital copy of each volume on Google Books. To find out why I think this is important,…

  • Les Circulations Musicales et Théâtrales, 1750-1815

    I’m writing this early one afternoon in Paris. The sky is grey, the air is cold, and Nice feels even further away than a six hour train journey. I’ve decided to compose a little post on my time in this city, both to record some of the new thoughts the conference inspired and, more ambitiously,…

  • Shakespeare’s Dog

    I stumbled across an amazing quotation from Heinrich Heine the other day, as I was busy preparing for a talk in Nice and, beyond that, the writing of my last chapter on how an actor’s Shakespeare was seen from abroad in the long eighteenth century.