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…

Location: Les circulations musicales et théâtrales, 1750-1815, MSHS, Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis This paper tests out an idea from the end of my thesis, namely that the actor’s Shakespeare (and particularly Garrick’s Shakespeare) is particularly visible from abroad. Employing eighteenth-century diplomatic and missionary practice as a usefu l analogy for Garrick’s relationship with Shakespeare,…

Location: BSA 2014, University of Stirling This paper briefly sketches the hostility of eighteenth-century editors of Shakespeare exhibited towards the acting profession, before concentrating on performers’ own claims to literary critical authority in the period. I argue that these claims to authority involve two different ways of connecting the actor and Shakesepare: there are, first,…

Location: Early Modern History Workshop, University of Cambridge This paper discusses the importance of historical data to the study of literature. Its focus is the work of Edmond Malone (1741-1812), one of the most influential eighteenth-century editors of Shakespeare and the first to argue at length that successful vernacular literary editing depended upon a deep…

Location: BSECS 2014, St Hugh’s College, Oxford 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 exact or definite ideas”; Malone denies any utility in the second folio, despite its appearance at a time when Shakespeare remained in…