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…

Location: Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle Eighteenth-century acting manuals repeatedly advised their readers to study paintings. The best actors were those whose acting drew inspiration from the best artworks – but how did this work in practice? What exactly were actors meant to be looking for? And what does this tell us about how people studied…

Location: Georgian Theatre Royal, Richmond I will speak about death and the legacy of the eighteenth-century actor, with a particular focus on David Garrick (1717-1779) and Edmund Kean (1787-1833, and occasional performer at the Richmond Theatre). Garrick’s widow, upon seeing Kean act Richard III, claimed that he reminded her of her dead husband, and this…

Location: English Shared Futures, Newcastle-upon-Tyne A demonstration of how eighteenth-century actors may have worked their way through Shakespeare’s text.

Location: BSECS 2017, St Hugh’s College, Oxford This paper considers the relationship between celebrity and mortality. Since the publication of Joseph Roach’s work on public intimacy and the ‘it-effect’ of ‘abnormally interesting people’, critics such as Felicity Nussbaum, Helen Brooks, Heather McPherson and others have explored how ‘It’ has ‘to do with sex’, particularly for…