Location: Barbarism and Behaviour, BSECS Postgraduate and Early Career Seminar, Maison de la recherche, Aix-en-Provence
This keynote lecture divides into three parts:
- I begin with two of the biggest French influences on Ducis’s translation: Voltaire and Pierre-Antoine de la Place, demonstrating how what la Place called ‘vérité de sentiment’ offers a way of understanding Ducis’s approach to Shakespeare, including its fixation on Garrick.
- My second section uses Ducis’s adaptation of Macbeth, a play whose supernatural soliciting and bloody execution presented an even greater challenge than Hamlet, as an example of how Ducis’s practice in the course of the decade he spent working on the translation was particularly Garrickean.
- I conclude with some reflections on what it meant to be ‘Garrickean’, which is to say on the mediation of Garrick’s international reputation, and how this might affect the way in which we, as critics today, think about the lasting impact of a particular actor’s ephemeral performances.
