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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…
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The Canons of Criticism
I’ve just finished yet another book in the series Eighteenth-century Shakespeare, this time called The Canons of Criticism, by Thomas Edwards, first published in 1748, and reissued six times thereafter, finally stopping in 1765. The book is a critique of Bishop Warburton’s 1747 edition of Shakespeare’s works. It functions by fulfilling Warburton’s over-ambitious promise of…
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Voltaire and Falstaff
This post was written when my work was orientated towards the influence of French literary criticism on the eighteenth-century appreciation of Shakespeare, and is thus slightly out of sync with the rest of the material presented on this website. More details here. I admit that Voltaire and Falstaff make for an unlikely pairing: one is…
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Diderot and Shakespeare’s Performability
This is the text of a five-minute presentation I recently gave as a training exercise at Cambridge. Since it was for a non-specialist audience, and had to be kept both short and clear, I thought it would make a great blog post. Enjoy. Introduction Two observations. The performances of the eighteenth-century actor David Garrick were…
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A Muse of Fire
How international is a national poet? This blog is part of a doctoral investigation into the role played by French thought in the criticism and canonisation of Shakespeare in eighteenth-century Britain. Typically seen as a ‘national poet’, I believe that Shakespeare, from the outset, was read and interpreted in an cross-cultural and not an insular…