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A Book of Hearts: Jean de Préchac’s Les desordres de la bassette (1682) and Susanna Centlivre’s The Basset Table (1705)
Location: Early Modern French Seminar, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge In both Centlivre’s play and Préchac’s novel a game of cards called basset is rigged in order to become a vehicle for operating on the affections of a character. In such a game, every gamble is shaped to have a specific emotional impact. In other words, the…
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Teaching The Language of the Passions
Location: TaPRA 2024, Northumbria University Three hundred years ago, in response to a theatrical culture shaped by the 1737 Licencing Act, literary nationalism, mass media, a star culture, and more, writing about acting in English exploded. For the last five years, in professional and amateur setting around the UK, I have been seeking ways to…
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Play Cards Like a Georgian
Location: Assembly Rooms, Bath; and Zoom This was not so much a paper as a two-part event, across two days. On the first day, I taught workshop participants how to play the games of Faro and Cassino. I also discussed some of the cultural aspects of card-playing. We then all attended a fancy-dress ball together…
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What was Performance?
Location: BSECS 2024, St Hugh’s College, Oxford In the eighteenth century it was common to a call a poem, a statue, or a painting a ‘performance’. One of the things that the word meant, for Samuel Johnson, was ‘composition’ or ‘work’. Nowadays this meaning of ‘performance’ has faded, marked as rare in the second edition…
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Eighteenth-Century English Drama and the Representation of Nature
Location: Swedish National PhD Lecture, Uppsala University, Sweden Eighteenth-century English writing about drama, both on the page and on the stage, frequently makes use of the concept of nature. The acting of David Garrick was praised by Arthur Murphy as ‘an exact imitation of nature’, while Samuel Johnson claimed that Shakespeare’s plays offered ‘just representations…
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Collaboration and What Would Garrick Do?
Location: Performance Research Network Collaboration Workshop, Newcastle University, UK As this was a short contribution to a roundtable, based on one of my book projects, I provide the entirety of my script below. Thinking of something to say today was difficult. I find talking about collaboration difficult. On one hand, I can say, in a…
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A Room to Play Cards
Location: BSECS 2023, St Hugh’s College, Oxford This was a workshop rather than a presentation, which I pitched as follows: Learn to play basset, ombre, and other such games, and try your luck against the bank in a laid-back setting. In so doing, I hope we’ll learn something about eighteenth-century sociability, the antics that led…
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Cultivating Macklin’s Garden: An Acting Lesson from the Eighteenth Century
Location: Actio! Actio! Acio! Symposium, Leiden University, Netherlands For the last year, I have been working with theatre professionals around the UK to develop rehearsal exercises inspired by eighteenth-century acting theory and practice. This paper tells the story of one such exercise, based on an account by John O’Keeffe of one of Charles Macklin’s actor…
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Tristram’s Engaging Transitions
Location: BSECS 2022, Online This paper was my first attempt at reformulating something I cut from early plans for my book. That book, Criticism, Performance, and the Passions is all about the way people wrote about the performance of emotion in the eighteenth century. Specifically, I was interested in how writers paid a lot of…
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Amazing and Easy Transitions (redux)
Location: Newcastle Inter-Faculty Seminar on Emotions, Online I redelivered a version of this paper for this event.