-
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.
-
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,…
-
Thou art a scholar; speak to it…
Time for something slightly different. In order to prepare for my upcoming presentation on Diderot and theories of acting, I recorded myself reading a draft version of my paper. As well as informing me that I need to cut about 800 words (a matter of some concern), this experiment with Audacity also left me with…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
The Canons of Criticism
I’ve just finished yet another book in the series Eighteenth-century Shakespeare, this time called The Canons of Criticism, by Thomas Edwards, first published in 1748, and reissued six times thereafter, finally stopping in 1765. The book is a critique of Bishop Warburton’s 1747 edition of Shakespeare’s works. It functions by fulfilling Warburton’s over-ambitious promise of…
-
Voltaire and Falstaff
This post was written when my work was orientated towards the influence of French literary criticism on the eighteenth-century appreciation of Shakespeare, and is thus slightly out of sync with the rest of the material presented on this website. More details here. I admit that Voltaire and Falstaff make for an unlikely pairing: one is…