Location: Characterologies Roundtable, ASECS 2019, Grand Hyatt Hotel, Denver My aim in this short paper is to demonstrate how the essays of William Richardson (1743-1814), long read as an early example of ‘character criticism’, nevertheless remains sensitive to earlier, more theatrical ways of apprehending identity. In particular I show that Richardson shapes his critical commentary…

Location: ASECS 2019, Grand Hyatt Hotel, Denver I organized and chaired this roundtable session, which was built around the following five questions, each addressed to one of the speakers. For more information on my rationale, see here.  ‘”With madness, as with vomit, it’s the passerby who receives the inconvenience.”  Granting Orton’s premise, how did actors…

Location: Music, Literature and Performance Afternoon, Newcastle University This short talk argued that one of the great merits of recovering nineteenth-century melodrama as a subject of academic study is the way in which one might now trace a less contested progression between eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century aesthetics. Histories of theatre in the 1700s tend to argue…

Location: ATNU Lunchtime Seminar, Newcastle University As prompter to the leading London acting companies in the Restoration, John Downes was responsible for everything from preparing scripts to coordinating scene changes.  One of the many tasks undertaken by Downes and his underlings was to write out the ‘parts’ of a play, which is to say sheets…

Location: Literary Responses ot Mind and Music in Eighteenth-Century Drama, Operatic Workings of the Mind, Music Department, Oxford University In 1769 Webb’s Observations on the Correspondence Between Music and Poetry proposed that both music and poetry aroused emotion through a coincidence of acoustic and sentimental movements: the abrupt, smooth, growing and diminishing movements of a…

Location: Barbarism and Behaviour, BSECS Postgraduate and Early Career Seminar, Maison de la recherche, Aix-en-Provence This keynote lecture divides into three parts: I begin with two of the biggest French influences on Ducis’s translation: Voltaire and Pierre-Antoine de la Place, demonstrating how what la Place called ‘vérité de sentiment’ offers a way of understanding Ducis’s approach to…

Location: Cambridge University Shakespeare Summer School, Cambridge This keynote lecture argues that the way in which eighteenth-century audiences experienced King Lear can provide us with new ways to think about this play (and other tragedies) today. It breaks down into three parts. First a section defining transitions and the aesthetic experience of eighteenth-century art. Second an…

Location: BSA 2018, Queen’s University, Belfast David Garrick’s delivery of his ode to Shakespeare by the banks of the Avon in 1769 was the undisputed climax of an event intended to canonize Shakespeare as a national poet and Garrick himself as his leading interpreter. This paper offers a new analysis of the ode in terms…

Location: Death, the Dying and the Dead on the Early Modern Stage, St Catherine’s College, Oxford This paper examines the relationship between celebrity and death, arguing that intimations of mortality helped shape Garrick’s public appeal both during and after his life. While I draw some of my examples from accounts of Garrick dying on-stage and…

Location: BSECS 2018, St Hugh’s College, Oxford Of all the tragedies performed at Drury Lane by David Garrick, only two appeared in more than twenty consecutive seasons. The first of these was Hamlet, which was acted every year from 1747 to 1776. In second place, however, lies a play whose tragic passions are less well…