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As You Like It
I could write a great deal about this play, but will try and limit myself to a single section of non-eighteenth-century matters. After all, this play is rather special: there weren’t many of Shakespeare’s comedies performed during Garrick’s tenure at Drury Lane, as tragedies, as they are now, were the hot ticekts. Nevertheless both As…
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The Anatomist
Ravenscroft’s play is another short afterpiece, being a mere two acts long. The plot, based on Crispin Médecin is easily summarised as well: Old Gerald and his son, Young Gerald, both love Angelina, the daughter of Monsieur le Médecin, a French doctor and anatomist. Young Gerald is aided by his servant Crispin, Old Gerald by…
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The Miser
This is Fielding’s translation of Molière’s L’Avare. The American edition from 1823 I found online, opens its preface with observations that “This piece is a plagiarism from Molière, but it might well pass for a tree of English growth, for the characters are copies from nature, and nature is everywhere the same.” Intriguing as the…
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The Lover his own Rival
I’ve decided that I quite like reading afterpieces: they are – of course – not long, many of them still have some decent jokes in them, and – as is the case here – they have some usefully clear titles. This play turns on the competition of two men, one young, called Clerimont (our hero),…
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The Provok’d Husband
I was expecting to get round to reading this play, the third on my list, a bit sooner: as it turns out however, the text was harder to find than I anticipated. Things got a bit easier once I worked out that the version performed in 1753 was almost certainly Colley Cibber’s reworking of John…
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Shakespeare Interleaved
At the end of my post on the collection of Richard Warner’s notes in the Beinecke, I mentioned that his editions of Shakespeare, complete with working notes on interleaved pages, had been digitised and was available online. With a day between returning from America and planning out my work for the term with my supervisor,…
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The Lying Valet
This is the first play on my list of pieces performed in the 1753-4 season that I hadn’t already read. It was written by David Garrick and first performed in November 1741, before going on to notch up over a hundred performances before Garrick’s death in 1779. An afterpiece of just two acts, it is…
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The Beggar’s Opera
This three-act play by John Gay was one of the runaway successes of the eighteenth century, and was a regular on London stages from its first performance in 1727 right into the mid-twentieth century. It still appears now from time to time. Calling this work a ‘play’ does it a bit of an injustice. Gay…
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Beinecke: Warner
This is my last and shortest post from the Beinecke materials for now, and it will focus exclusively on the notes of Richard Warner, a friend of David Garrick who began an edition of Shakespeare but abandoned his efforts when he learnt of preparations for the Steevens edition. What remains of Warner’s attempt to become…
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Beinecke: Garrick
This post is only going to deal with the Beinecke’s William Smith papers, as its topic is nostalgia. I quoted Loftt’s reminiscences about how Garrick inspired him in an earlier post, and this time I want to explore other similar instances in letters sent to William Smith. Of course, it is not surprising to find…