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…

Location: BSA 2016, Hull University Death is a theatrical problem. Consider dying on-stage. How do you act death? You cannot perform it from experience, nor can you mimic the physical state for long without considerable personal danger. Yet the problem is larger than this: all performers are haunted by their mortality. How can any actor…

Location: Authorship and Appropriation Conference, University of Dundee In the course of the eighteenth-century, William Shakespeare became not just a national poet but an international one too. Michael Dobson, Vanessa Cunningham, Michael Caines and many more have shown how pivotal a role the actor-manager David Garrick played in the consecration of England’s national poet. I…

Location: BSECS 2016, St Hugh’s College, Oxford Francis Gentleman thought that the part of King Lear, adapted by Nahum Tate, adapted (and performed) by David Garrick, was beautiful. The beauty of the role lay in its “transitions”, which is to say its sequences of performed passions. While many have shown that, as Blair Hoxby argues,…

Location: Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Research Seminar, Cambridge University The collection of roles typically played by an actor, a connection to theatrical tradition, the text rapidly memorised before performance, the careful structure of a pose – all these things were known as “lines” in the eighteenth century. It may be argued that Garrick had none of…

Location: Johnson and Shakespeare 2015, Pembroke College, Oxford Samuel Johnson disappointed Elizabeth Montagu. In her view, the preface for his 1765 edition of Shakespeare’s plays failed to “address the particular excellencies of Shakespear as a Dramatick poet.” It is the contention of this paper that when Montagu came to write her own Essay on the…

Location: BSECS 2015, St Hugh’s College, Oxford Mixing spirituality and Shakespeare is not often seen as critically useful. Rather, it is bardolatry. This paper argues that such was not always the case, and that, in the eighteenth century, religious concepts and language offered a transnational way of understanding both the mysteries of Shakespeare’s style and…