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Beinecke: Warner
This is my last and shortest post from the Beinecke materials for now, and it will focus exclusively on the notes of Richard Warner, a friend of David Garrick who began an edition of Shakespeare but abandoned his efforts when he learnt of preparations for the Steevens edition. What remains of Warner’s attempt to become…
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Beinecke: Garrick
This post is only going to deal with the Beinecke’s William Smith papers, as its topic is nostalgia. I quoted Loftt’s reminiscences about how Garrick inspired him in an earlier post, and this time I want to explore other similar instances in letters sent to William Smith. Of course, it is not surprising to find…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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Queen and My Thesis
This idea for a post came to me during a run. Around the twelfth kilometre, as the endorphins were kicking in and the village of Coton disappearing behind me, Queen’s 1991 hit, The Show Must Go On came up on my playlist, and it struck me that the lyrics of the song – recounting Freddie…
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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…
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The Play’s the Thing
It’s been pointed out to me that I don’t read enough fiction nowadays. This is a fair point: a lot of recent work has been on acting manuals, editorial debates, press cuttings, pamphlets and so on. To remedy this, but also t improve my understanding of the eighteenth-century theatre, I decided to read more plays…
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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…
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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.…