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Shakespeare’s off-stage beauties
The Beauties of Shakespear, Regularly Selected from Each Play, with a General Index Digesting them under Proper Heads, Illustrated with Explanatory Notes and Similar Passages from Ancient and Modern Authors was a bestseller: my text was from 1752 (first edition), but reprintings of this anthology, each larger than the last, abounded. As well as being…
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Malone’s Method
The following comes from an exchange between Edmund Malone and Joseph Ritson, where the latter violently attacked Malone’s 1778 edition of Shakespeare, stooping so low as to attribute any errors to Malone’s “irishness”. At one point, Malone gives his method regarding which texts to use as the basis of an edition. The second edition of…
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Gildon on Illusion
Another quick post, this time after perusing Gildon’s Miscellaneous Letters and Essays (1694). I spotted two things here. First, that this text contains an early hypothesis about Shakespeare being influenced by the theatrical conditions of his time, with the idea that “the Person that Acted Iago was in much esteem for a Comedian”, so “Shakespeare…
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Theobald and the Theatre
The first book ever published about Hamlet was a scathing attack on the way Alexander Pope had edited the play, supplemented with additional point-scoring on the back of errors found elsewhere in the poet’s 1725 edition. This book was Theobald’s Shakespeare Restored, and I came to it with the slightly odd question of whether this…
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The curious ‘life’ of Thomas Betterton
Charles Gildon’s The Life of Mr Thomas Betterton (1710) is not really about the life of the famous actor, but rather has some claim to being amongst the earliest attempts at codifying acting in English. Given its novelty, the text unsurprisingly finds legitimacy where it can: the biographical skeleton offers an alluring framework and the…
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Rescuing Shakespeare
An Attempt to Rescue Shakespeare that Ancient English Poet and Playwright, Master William Shakespeare From the Maney Errors, Falsely Charged on Him by Certain New-Fangled Wittes […] by a Gentleman Formerly of Grey’s-Inn (1749): this is a title that starts strong and then falls off, to the point that Arthur Freeman (the editor of my…
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What an actor knows…
In 1785, Thomas Whately was persuaded to publish something he’d first drafted in the 1760s and put back in the cupboard in order to work on a treatise on Modern Gardening. This was his Remarks on the Characters of Shakespeare, which, when it finally did appear, had some success (whether more or less than the…
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Morgann, Falstaff and the Stage
I’ve already written about Maurice Morgann, but wanted to post another short thing, this time more about the theatre than the French. This also connects rather usefully with my thinking about William Richardson, namely that argument that, although his psychological approach removes characters from the stage, it nevertheless is deeply connected to thinking about the…
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Back to Johnson
I have lost count of the number of times that I have read Samuel Johnson’s Preface to his edition of Shakespeare (1765). This time, however, I came to it with some pretty sharp questions, and this post will offer a brief look at what this approach led me to in the text. The questions were,…
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A Brief Response to A General View of the Stage
Thomas Wilkes’s A General View of the Stage (1759) is an enormous and rich mine of information about the eighteenth-century stage. An attempt at raising the profile of the stage, defending it from its many detractors is both the book’s starting point and its over-arching theme. What I hope to do here is sketch out…