Location: Seminario permanente di studi Shakespeariani, Sapienza University, Rome

In his Elements of Criticism (1762) Henry Home, Lord Kames, worried that it was possible to have too much passion on the stage. When a theatregoer’s ‘spirits are exhausted by close attention and by the agitation of passion’ an ‘uneasiness ensues’, which ‘never fails’ to break engagement with the performance. Scenes of powerful emotion needed limits, or else they ‘would overstrain the attention and produce a total absence of mind’. A ‘representation with proper pauses’, in his view, is ‘better qualified for making a deep impression, than a continued representation without pause’. The ‘seasonable respite’ provided by the four intervals that fell between a play’s five acts, for example, thus does not damage the theatregoer’s experience but rather heightens it.

It is the argument of this chapter that David Garrick’s eighteenth-century adaptations of Shakespeare’s King Lear and Hamlet adhered to the same aesthetic principles expressed by Kames. They both provided ample opportunity for Garrick to perform his much celebrated and discussed scenes of passionate intensity, while also making a (currently understudied) effort to provide audiences with respite from such passion too. This is visible within specific scenes and speeches, and in the way these plays are restructured, and sometimes replotted, around new act divisions.

Garrick’s Lear followed Nahum Tate’s in making Cordelia and Edgar lovers and providing a happy ending to the play. While some criticized such departures from Shakespeare, others praised the way in which these new plotlines provided the audience with a Kamesian ‘respite’ from passion. Thomas Davies even described a scene in which Edgar saves Cordelia as ‘a pause of relief’ for ‘the harassed and distressed minds of the audience’. Such relief, I argue, helped create a kind of emotional chiaroscuro, an eighteenth-century aesthetic of contrast intended to make a better impression on an audience than the Shakespearean original.

As for Hamlet, Garrick’s 1772 adaptation cut almost the entirety of Shakespeare’s fifth act, a decision explained by Vanessa Cunningham as the result of the influence on Garrick of French criticism and his own ill health. I show here, however, that such restructuring also allowed Garrick to create a new balance of passion and respite from that passion, particularly through the careful timing of the play’s intervals between acts.

Overall, this chapter argues for the study of passion in narrative terms, drawing on Benedict Robinson’s work on the ‘rhetoric of the passions’ and my own on ‘transition’. Garrick’s approach to the rendition of Shakespeare’s passions helps us to understand the importance of the sequencing, structuring and narrating of passion and the points of continuation and difference in such practice between the early modern period and the eighteenth century. By drawing attention to ‘respite’ as much as ‘agitation’, it also proposes a new methodology for future research into the theatrical representation of the passions.