-
Beinecke: Performance
This post is dedicated to the various passages found in those papers of David Garrick and William Smith, held at the Beinecke, which deal with the more theoretical side of performance. I already touched on this when writing about attitudes to French actors, so this piece will, in some ways, extend ideas already evoked there.…
-
Beinecke: The French
This post concentrates on one element of the material I was looking through in the Beinecke library. Although not frequent, nor completely central to the current direction of my thesis, I couldn’t help but notice the odd reference to the French stage in both the William Smith and David Garrick papers. In the second folder…
-
Beinecke: Introduction and Various
I have spent the last week or so in New Haven, Connecticut, alternately attending the NEASECS and delving into manuscript material at the Beinecke Library. I’m going to publish a few posts bringing together the various things I discovered there, but this time I want to offer a kind of preface. The Beinecke Library was…
-
Three Plays by Sheridan
Left with a bit of spare time after handing in a draft of a conference paper, I decided to refamiliarise myself with some of the plays of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. I’d picked up the Penguin Classics The School for Scandal and Other Plays secondhand in Oxford, on the basis that I probably should own copies…
-
Marian Hobson-Jeanneret and My Thesis
Following on from my post on Anne Barton (née Righter), this post is dedicated to Marian Hobson-Jeanneret (née Hobson), and, more particularly, her book The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France, published in 1982. Like Barton’s Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, this book grew out of Hobson-Jeanneret’s thesis, so…
-
A School for Hazlitt
I am not a Hazlitt specialist, but I do enjoy reading and studying his writing a great deal. So I spent Saturday 14th September at UCL listening to a series of lectures on ‘Hazlitt and the Theatre’. They were all good, and, as a consequence, there is no way I could summarise them all here.…
-
Yale!
I just found out that I’ve been awarded a John O’Neill bursary to cover (some of) the costs of attending the Northeastern American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies annual conference in Yale next month. I’ll be speaking as part of a panel marking the tricentenary of Diderot’s birth, with my chosen topic as Diderot and Shakespeare,…
-
Editors and Actors: Pope
What attitude towards the stage does Alexander Pope’s 1725 edition of Shakespeare’s plays evince? That is the question. Answering it turns out to be quite difficult, so this post will be as much about methodology as about tentative conclusions. As most readers of Pope’s Shakespeare would, I began with the preface, where many differences with…
-
Editors and Actors: Rowe
Having chosen the topic of ‘actors and editors’ for the BSECS conference in January, I have started work on the voluminous editions of Shakespeare produced throughout the eighteenth century, looking for how the editors respond to the world of the stage. I’ve done some of this already, as exploratory reading for one chapter of the…
-
“The rubbish cast on thy fair page”
I have just submitted this paper proposal for the BSECS in early 2014. It also works as a rough overview for part of what I’m currently calling chapter 1. Pope relegates the “Interpolations” of actors to the bottom of the page; Johnson criticises Heminge and Condell as player-editors who divided up Shakespeare’s plays without “very…