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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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Beinecke: Introduction and Various
I have spent the last week or so in New Haven, Connecticut, alternately attending the NEASECS and delving into manuscript material at the Beinecke Library. I’m going to publish a few posts bringing together the various things I discovered there, but this time I want to offer a kind of preface. The Beinecke Library was…
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Queen and My Thesis
This idea for a post came to me during a run. Around the twelfth kilometre, as the endorphins were kicking in and the village of Coton disappearing behind me, Queen’s 1991 hit, The Show Must Go On came up on my playlist, and it struck me that the lyrics of the song – recounting Freddie…
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Marian Hobson-Jeanneret and My Thesis
Following on from my post on Anne Barton (née Righter), this post is dedicated to Marian Hobson-Jeanneret (née Hobson), and, more particularly, her book The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-Century France, published in 1982. Like Barton’s Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, this book grew out of Hobson-Jeanneret’s thesis, so…
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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…
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“The rubbish cast on thy fair page”
I have just submitted this paper proposal for the BSECS in early 2014. It also works as a rough overview for part of what I’m currently calling chapter 1. 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…