Location: BSA 2014, University of Stirling
This paper briefly sketches the hostility of eighteenth-century editors of Shakespeare exhibited towards the acting profession, before concentrating on performers’ own claims to literary critical authority in the period. I argue that these claims to authority involve two different ways of connecting the actor and Shakesepare: there are, first, pre-Garrick genealogies of apostolic succession, of stagecraft handed down from actor to actor since Shakespeare’s time; and, in contrast to this, Garrick’s claim to be a second coming of Shakespeare, not his grandson but his twin.