Location: Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Research Seminar, Cambridge University

The collection of roles typically played by an actor, a connection to theatrical tradition, the text rapidly memorised before performance, the careful structure of a pose – all these things were known as “lines” in the eighteenth century. It may be argued that Garrick had none of them. He played a greater variety of roles than any other male lead, broke with the stylistic traditions of his predecessors, sought to instil a new attitude to the text of  the play, and became famous for his fluid transitions between moments of emotion.

What, then, is Garrick’s line? Through a study of how this actor composed and performed his adaptations of Shakespeare, as well as through the impact he had on contemporary artists and scientists, I offer an answer to this question. His line is one of fascination, a complex rhythm of transition and pause, calculated to capture the attention of an audience but with much in common with other aesthetic theories of his time.

This paper, which presumes no prior knowledge of eighteenth-century theatre, thus provides two things. First, a new approach to reading drama (particularly adaptation) of the eighteenth century, and, second, an argument for placing the theatre at the heart of eighteenth-century culture as an arena in which the theories of scientists, rhetoricians and painters took physical form.