Harriman-Smith, James, What Would Garrick Do? Or, Acting Lessons from the Eighteenth Century (London: Methuen Drama, 2024) The stage of the 1700s established a star culture, with the emergence of such acting celebrities as David Garrick, Susannah Cibber, and Sarah Siddons. It placed Shakespeare at the heart of the classical repertoire and offered unprecedented opportunities…

Harriman-Smith, James. ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century’. Performing Restoration Shakespeare, Cambridge University Press, 2023, pp. 97–117. Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays continued to appear on English stages throughout the eighteenth century. Like any collection of performances, however, the eighteenth-century performance of Restoration Shakespeare was never static nor homogenous: lines written in the Restoration were…

Harriman-Smith, James. ‘Zara’s Enthusiastic Passions’. Shadows of the Enlightenment: Tragic Drama during Europe’s Age of Reason, Ohio State University Press, 2022, pp. 76–98. Hill presented his Zara (a translation of Voltaire’s Zaïre) as an “Experiment” intended to reveal something about attitudes to tragedy and acting in 1730s England. My contention here is that such an…

Harriman-Smith, James. ‘Imitate the Action of the Tiger: Charles Gildon, Aaron Hill, and Shakespare’s King Henry V’. European Drama and Performance Studies, vol. 2, no. 17, 2021, pp. 49–70. Charles Gildon (1665-1724) and Aaron Hill (1685-1750) use lines from Shakespeare’s Henry V to explain how an actor is to produce a passion. Gildon treats the…

Harriman-Smith, James, Criticism, Performance, and the Passions in the Eighteenth Century: The Art of Transition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021) Great art is about emotion. In the eighteenth century, and especially for the English stage, critics developed a sensitivity to both the passions of a performance and what they called the transitions between those passions.…

Harriman-Smith, James, ‘Garrick’s Muse? Eva Maria Veigel and Her Husband’, in With a Grace Not to Be Captured: Representing the Georgian Theatrical Dancer, 1760-1830, ed. by Michael Budern and Jennifer Thorp, Music and Visual Cultures (Belgium: Brepols, 2021), pp. 30–45 William Hogarth’s 1763 portrait of Eva and David Garrick appears to celebrate its subjects’ powers…

Harriman-Smith, James. ‘The Dupes of Fancy’. Online Exhibition. Sterne and Sterneana, 2020. http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR-S-00721-D-00079-00026/1. This is a catalogue entry I wrote for an online exhibition. The full text follows: On 31 May 1792 The Morning Herald published its review of what appears to be this farce’s only recorded performance, which had taken place at the Haymarket Theatre two…

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/lic3.12600 This article reads a series of essays on the actor by James Boswell through recent scholarship on the theory of acting in order to elaborate an expansive and historically grounded definition of what was and is meant by ‘18th‐century acting theory’. I thus show how 18th‐century texts on acting are important documents that should…

Harriman‐Smith, James, ‘Garrick and Shakespeare in Europe’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2020, 1754-0208.12690 <https://doi.org/10.1111/1754-0208.12690> This article falls into two parts. In the first, I show how Garrick’s performances and responses to them in various media intersected with a particular understanding of Shakespeare’s beauties while also projecting across Europe a set of ‘Garrickean’ attributes. My second…

Harriman-Smith, James, ‘Garrick, Dying’, in Intimacy and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture: Public Interiors, ed. by Emrys Jones and Joule (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), pp. 83–107. This essay considers the relationship between celebrity and mortality. Since the publication of Joseph Roach’s work on public intimacy and the ‘it-effect’ of ‘abnormally interesting people’, numerous critics have…