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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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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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A Short Post on Dennis, Johnson and Montagu
This will be a short post. There’s just one part of Dennis’s Impartial Critick (1693) which caught my eye. It is found in the fifth dialogue, as the speakers continue to jusify (contra Rhymer) the absence of a chorus from the modern stage. Broadening the discussion, one interlocutor makes a comment about dramatic illusion: BEAUM.…
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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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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…
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Reynolds vs Fielding (avec version française)
Over the course of his tenure as the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, Sir Joshua Reynolds gave a series of Discourses, one a year, on the occasion of the annual prizegiving in December. These speeches were not easy to compose for a number of reasons: first, as delivered by the president of…
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Thinking about William Richardson
William Richardson (1743-1814) was a professor at Glasgow University and published five books on Shakespeare, all with similar titles, and, behind the titles, a similar and unusual approach to the bard. Over the last few days, I have read the following: A Philosophical Analysis and Illustration of Some of Shakespeare’s Remarkable Characters (1774). Essays on…