Location: Oxford Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture Seminar (online)

Francis Gentleman wrote of how David Garrick’s Jaffeir ‘beggars description, by an amazing variety of transitions, tones and picturesque attitudes’. Such praise was not uncommon: many of those writing about the stage in the eighteenth century praised the ability of playwrights to script and actors to execute fascinating sequences of emotional display that were simultaneously iconic and dynamic. In this paper I explore the relationship between such a way of writing about the stage and the philosophy of David Hume, especially his treatment of the ‘easy transitions’ that take place between our perceptions. Such exploration, I suggest, provides us with a way of understanding how a critical interest in spectacular sequence could lay the foundations for the rise of so-called ‘character criticism’ in the later eighteenth century, which includes those claims made by Elizabeth Montagu and William Richardson about Shakespeare’s extraordinary ability to ‘exhibit the movement of the human mind’.

Full video of talk: