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As You Like It
I could write a great deal about this play, but will try and limit myself to a single section of non-eighteenth-century matters. After all, this play is rather special: there weren’t many of Shakespeare’s comedies performed during Garrick’s tenure at Drury Lane, as tragedies, as they are now, were the hot ticekts. Nevertheless both As…
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Beinecke: Warner
This is my last and shortest post from the Beinecke materials for now, and it will focus exclusively on the notes of Richard Warner, a friend of David Garrick who began an edition of Shakespeare but abandoned his efforts when he learnt of preparations for the Steevens edition. What remains of Warner’s attempt to become…
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Beinecke: Garrick
This post is only going to deal with the Beinecke’s William Smith papers, as its topic is nostalgia. I quoted Loftt’s reminiscences about how Garrick inspired him in an earlier post, and this time I want to explore other similar instances in letters sent to William Smith. Of course, it is not surprising to find…
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Beinecke: Performance
This post is dedicated to the various passages found in those papers of David Garrick and William Smith, held at the Beinecke, which deal with the more theoretical side of performance. I already touched on this when writing about attitudes to French actors, so this piece will, in some ways, extend ideas already evoked there.…
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Beinecke: The French
This post concentrates on one element of the material I was looking through in the Beinecke library. Although not frequent, nor completely central to the current direction of my thesis, I couldn’t help but notice the odd reference to the French stage in both the William Smith and David Garrick papers. In the second folder…
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A School for Hazlitt
I am not a Hazlitt specialist, but I do enjoy reading and studying his writing a great deal. So I spent Saturday 14th September at UCL listening to a series of lectures on ‘Hazlitt and the Theatre’. They were all good, and, as a consequence, there is no way I could summarise them all here.…
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Yale!
I just found out that I’ve been awarded a John O’Neill bursary to cover (some of) the costs of attending the Northeastern American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies annual conference in Yale next month. I’ll be speaking as part of a panel marking the tricentenary of Diderot’s birth, with my chosen topic as Diderot and Shakespeare,…
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Editors and Actors: Pope
What attitude towards the stage does Alexander Pope’s 1725 edition of Shakespeare’s plays evince? That is the question. Answering it turns out to be quite difficult, so this post will be as much about methodology as about tentative conclusions. As most readers of Pope’s Shakespeare would, I began with the preface, where many differences with…
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Editors and Actors: Rowe
Having chosen the topic of ‘actors and editors’ for the BSECS conference in January, I have started work on the voluminous editions of Shakespeare produced throughout the eighteenth century, looking for how the editors respond to the world of the stage. I’ve done some of this already, as exploratory reading for one chapter of the…
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Anne Barton and My Thesis
I came across Anne Barton’s Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play on a nicely named ‘local interest’ shelf at the Chaucer Head bookshop, Stratford-upon-Avon. The title immediately leapt out at me, as it offered a way of formulating my own thoughts on Shakespeare and drama in the eighteenth-century: the phrase ‘the idea of’ neatly…