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Editors and Actors: Hanmer
After going through Theobald’s hundreds of footnotes, Hanmer’s relatively unannotated text came – I must admit – as a bit of a relief. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot to study here, but rather than this edition has to be studied in a slightly different way. That said, I did, as usual, start…
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Editors and Actors: Theobald
I’ve returned to Shakespeare’s editors, continuing the groundwork to chapter one begun at the end of summer. Having gone through Rowe and Pope, it was now the turn of Theobald. The UL had the first volume of his 1733 edition, but the rest I had to squint at on the HathiTrust website. It’s taken me…
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Reprinting lost books…
NOTE: This a reposting of something I wrote a while back, but as the website it is hosted on will soon be closing, I wished (aptly enough) to preserve it here. I’m afraid that the pictures will only last until the host website goes down, since I haven’t been able to extract them easily. Of…
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Thou art a scholar; speak to it…
Time for something slightly different. In order to prepare for my upcoming presentation on Diderot and theories of acting, I recorded myself reading a draft version of my paper. As well as informing me that I need to cut about 800 words (a matter of some concern), this experiment with Audacity also left me with…
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Method in my Madness
I’ve just handed in a draft of my paper on Diderot, and, as I wait for my supervisor’s verdict, I thought I’d compose a post about how I wrote this latest piece. For the first time in a while, I was returning to familiar ground by writing about Diderot and the English stage, having worked…
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The Plan
The organisers of the annual BSECS conference have just confirmed that my paper on editors and actors has been accepted. As well as reporting this good news, I thought I’d take a post to sketch, however roughly, my plan for the second year of my thesis. Without further ado, then, this is what I’ll be…
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Shakespeare Interleaved
At the end of my post on the collection of Richard Warner’s notes in the Beinecke, I mentioned that his editions of Shakespeare, complete with working notes on interleaved pages, had been digitised and was available online. With a day between returning from America and planning out my work for the term with my supervisor,…
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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.…