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A Brief Response to A General View of the Stage
Thomas Wilkes’s A General View of the Stage (1759) is an enormous and rich mine of information about the eighteenth-century stage. An attempt at raising the profile of the stage, defending it from its many detractors is both the book’s starting point and its over-arching theme. What I hope to do here is sketch out…
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Reynolds vs Fielding (avec version française)
Over the course of his tenure as the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, Sir Joshua Reynolds gave a series of Discourses, one a year, on the occasion of the annual prizegiving in December. These speeches were not easy to compose for a number of reasons: first, as delivered by the president of…
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Thinking about William Richardson
William Richardson (1743-1814) was a professor at Glasgow University and published five books on Shakespeare, all with similar titles, and, behind the titles, a similar and unusual approach to the bard. Over the last few days, I have read the following: A Philosophical Analysis and Illustration of Some of Shakespeare’s Remarkable Characters (1774). Essays on…