Location: BSECS 2026, Pembroke College, Oxford

When he updated Nahum Tate’s Restoration of King Lear in the mid-1750s, David Garrick repositioned the breaks between its acts. The curtain would now fall straight after the king spoke of how ‘sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child’; later, it would rise to reveal Lear recovery in the care of Cordelia. When Garrick made a controversial set of changes to the text of Hamlet in the early 1770s, he also rearranged this play’s act structure. The first act became two, so Hamlet met his father’s ghost just before the second interval; the fourth act was filled with action; and the fifth, shorn of the gravediggers, the duel between Hamlet and Laertes, and the arrival Fortinbras, finished swiftly.

This paper uses Garrick’s King Lear and Hamlet to think about how eighteenth-century adaptations of Shakespeare interacted with the four intervals that interrupted the performance of an evening’s mainpiece. Drawing on contemporary accounts, it proposes that these intervals were not just about trimming candles, resetting scenery, or varying ticket prices, they also served to provide the audience with what Henry Hume, Lord Kames, called ‘seasonable respite’: a moment of relief from the great passions of the play, such that audiences could better enjoy the performance as a whole. Building on this proposal, I argue that the study of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century needs to consider not just the big moments, but how such big moments were accommodated with a care for both the material and emotional circumstances of their performance.