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 of general nature’ to their readers. With the help of such material, I will argue that those writing about drama in the 1700s conceived of nature – especially human nature – as something so large and complex that it was best represented indirectly, as the product of a succession of distinct impressions upon the reader or audience.

We will study the emergence of this conception in different writers, as they each move between the specific and the general. Those writing about performance seem particularly interested in highly emotional sequences of striking moments, recognizable poses and the transitions between them (Roach, 1985), which induce audience fascination (Roach, 2022). In contrast to this, Johnson’s ‘Preface to Shakespeare’, at the start of his eight-volume edition of the Plays, praises the pleasure to be found in the dramatist’s creation of characters who are ‘species’ rather than individuals because they seem to possess an extraordinary depth and richness (Parker, 1989). And, finally, so-called character critics, like Richardson, seem to inherit from both theatrical and editorial traditions, positioning striking passages in Shakespeare’s writings as both an illustration of principles of human nature and, potentially, a laboratory in which to discover new ones too.

Overall, there is a double interest here, both epistemological and aesthetic: in the extent to which one might know or define nature, and in the extent to which different strategies of representation rely on or enable such knowledge and definition. These concerns are not limited to the theatre, or indeed to the eighteenth century, but writing about English drama, and above all about Shakespeare, constitutes, I believe, a particularly rich set of materials for exploring them.