Location: BSECS 2016, St Hugh’s College, Oxford

Francis Gentleman thought that the part of King Lear, adapted by Nahum Tate, adapted (and performed) by David Garrick, was beautiful. The beauty of the role lay in its “transitions”, which is to say its sequences of performed passions. While many have shown that, as Blair Hoxby argues, the “passions were dramatic units of crucial significance” on the early modern stage, few have considered how these passions occur in time, how a skilled actor can use the art of transition to bring them into relation with one another and so craft an arresting, beautiful spectacle. By paying equal attention to the cadences between the passions as to the chosen passions themselves, this paper thus proposes a re-evaluation of adapted Shakespeare, both written and performed. Tate and Garrick’s Lear, and Garrick’s Romeo and Juliet, not only reshape the emotional topography of Shakespeare’s original works, but also discover in the earlier text its own patterns of passion, patterns which modern approaches have tended to ignore. At its highest level, therefore, this paper both makes a case for the beauty of adapted Shakespeare and offers a more general methodology for the analysis of drama from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.