Location: Characterologies Roundtable, ASECS 2019, Grand Hyatt Hotel, Denver

My aim in this short paper is to demonstrate how the essays of William Richardson (1743-1814), long read as an early example of ‘character criticism’, nevertheless remains sensitive to earlier, more theatrical ways of apprehending identity. In particular I show that Richardson shapes his critical commentary around the ‘points’ or ‘hits’ of Shakespeare’s plays, identifying the passions within them, and then setting out to explain such sequences of passions as typical of human behaviour more generally. In doing so, Richardson hovers between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century understandings of dramatic affect, between pathos and psychology and between the type and the individual.