Location: BSA 2018, Queen’s University, Belfast

David Garrick’s delivery of his ode to Shakespeare by the banks of the Avon in 1769 was the undisputed climax of an event intended to canonize Shakespeare as a national poet and Garrick himself as his leading interpreter. This paper offers a new analysis of the ode in terms of contemporary theories of music and poetry. In so doing, I demonstrate how this work operates a peculiarly eighteenth-century conflation of the lyric and dramatic, one which both illuminates Garrick’s approach to Shakespeare’s works and subsequent interpretations of Shakespeare as a poet.