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On Death
A cheery subject to start 2014, I know. I’m going to be giving a lecture at the English Faculty in mid-January (which I’ll probably post a recording of here too), entitled ‘The Death of the Actor: Shakespeare and Tragedy in the Eighteenth Century’. Before writing the whole thing, however, I wanted to sketch my ideas…
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Editors and Actors: Capell
Working on this edition nearly broke me. That’s an exaggeration, but not much of one. Starting out, things looked to be plain sailing, with a brief introduction and a relatively unadorned text to the plays. I spotted, though, a few footnotes directing me to the ‘notes’, which I dutifully called up from the bowels of…
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Editors and Actors: Blair/Reid
In order to look at this Scottish edition of Shakespeare, edited by Hugh Blair and John Reid, I had to take my first trip to the British Library. Even in this collection, the only version available was a 1753 London reprint of the original 1752 Edinburgh edition. It was all I needed to see, though,…
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Editors and Actors: Steevens
George Steevens’s edition of twenty plays of Shakespeare, being all those works published during the playwright’s lifetime, has a clear, and wonderfully scholarly, aim: disgusted at the variously exaggerated and insufficient efforts at collating Shakespeare’s plays so far, Steevens aspires simply to have “collected materials for future artists”, by making the quartos accessible to a…
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Small pricks to their subsequent volumes…
My supervisor asked me to write an overview of my thesis as it currently stands. I thought it would be a useful text to post here, under a title drawn from a rambling speech by Nestor in Troilus and Cressida: “in such indexes, although small pricks / To their subsequent volumes, there is seen /…
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Editors and Actors: Johnson
Of all the editors I am reading for my first chapter, Samuel Johnson both excites and terrifies me the most. There’s just something so distinctive about his way of writing: the preface to his edition, first published in 1765, is a far more remarkable document than anything Warburton, Hanmer, Theobald or even Pope could manage.…
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Editors and Actors: Warburton
I’ve emerged from reading the (roughly) 2 395 footnotes Warburton affixes to his edition of Shakespeare’s plays, and once more have a few observations about how this editor uses the idea of that actor. Like Pope, whom he praises, and like Hanmer, whom he criticises, Warburton is very antitheatrical, and doesn’t mince his words. As…
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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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On Love
Now this is a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, since everything I read to do with acting seems to have something to do with it. Sticotti, about whom I just spoke at the Early Modern French seminar, argues, for instance, that both actors and authors need to have felt (or be feeling)…