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…

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…

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…

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…

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…