-
Shakespeare’s Ambassador: The Influence and Legacy of David Garrick in France and Germany
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,…
-
The Authority of the Actor
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,…
-
‘He who has given all countries and all ages the manners of his own’: Shakespeare and Edmond Malone
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…
-
‘The rubbish cast on thy fair page’: Shakespeare’s Editors and Actors
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…
-
Diderot and the Unperformable Shakespeare
Location: NEASECS 2013, Yale University Between 1770 and 1820, the perceived relationship between stage and page changed radically. Throughout the career of David Garrick, his performances were praised as a “commentary” on Shakespeare’s playtext; however, thirty years after the actor’s retirement, romantic critics such as Hazlitt and Lamb wrote that Shakespeare’s works were “impossible to…
-
‘Quand j’aurai fait recevoir Macbeth aux Français’: Ducis, Garrick, Talma and the Tradaptation of Macbeth
Location: ESRA 2013, Université de Montpellier On 12th January 1784, Jean-François Ducis succeeded in bringing his version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth to the stage of the Comédie Française. This paper will analyse his ‘tradaptation’ of the original play, arguing that both its roots and subsequent evolution are predicated as much on the myth of the Shakespearean…
-
Une tragédie possible : Corinne, ou l’Italie et Roméo et Juliette
Location: Paris 7 Diderot, Paris A la fin de Corinne, ou l’Italie, le prince Castel-Forte révèle deux portraits de l’héroïne du roman à son ancien amant, Oswald : le premier la montre « telle qu’elle avait paru dans le premier acte de Roméo et Juliette » et l’autre « telle qu’elle avait voulu se faire…
-
‘Le Corneille Anglais’: The Role of French Criticism and Culture in Shakespeare’s Eighteenth-Century Reception
Location: NEASECS 2012, Wesleyan University, Middletown Michael Dobson, Jonathan Bate and many others rightly argue that a resistance to French cultural dominance in a period marked by the Seven Years’ War contributed to Shakespeare’s status of “national poet”. This paper contends, however, that French culture and criticism played more than a purely adversarial role in…
-
‘Not unamusing’: the Vagabondiana and the pleasures of observing the London poor
Location: Literary London 2012, UCL July 2013: This paper was awarded The President’s Prize for best graduate paper at the Literary London Conference This is a paper about spectatorship and leisure in early nineteenth-century London, and how such terms related to the representation of the city’s poor at this time. In the period 1815-1825, the…