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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,…
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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…
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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…
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Anne Barton and My Thesis
I came across Anne Barton’s Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play on a nicely named ‘local interest’ shelf at the Chaucer Head bookshop, Stratford-upon-Avon. The title immediately leapt out at me, as it offered a way of formulating my own thoughts on Shakespeare and drama in the eighteenth-century: the phrase ‘the idea of’ neatly…
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“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…
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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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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…