British Shakespeare Association Biennial Conference 2005
Contacts | Community / Schools | Booking | Getting here | Accommodation
Programme : Panels - Seminars - Workshops
Panel - Eighteenth-century Shakespeare: stage and page
Sunday 4th September 2005, 9.30-11.00am,
Herschel Lecture Theatre 2
Participants
Chair - Michael Dobson
Fiona Ritchie, King's College London/Dr
Johnson's House
"Shakespeare and the
18th-century actress"
Kate Rumbold, Trinity College, Oxford
Shakespeare quotation in the mid-eighteenth-century
novel
Kathryn Prince, Roehampton University
Shakespeare for Children from Perrin
to the Lambs
Abstracts
"Shakespeare and the 18th-century actress"
Fiona Ritchie, King's College London/Dr Johnson's House
Thomas Davies’s 1784 Dramatic Miscellanies is one of the first works about the English stage to give serious consideration to female performers. Davies is particularly interested in Shakespeare’s female characters and gives extended descriptions of the performances of actresses such as Susannah Cibber and Hannah Pritchard, as well as detailed discussion of their merits as performers. This paper will analyse Davies’s accounts of Shakespearean performances by actresses and will argue that it was not only Garrick who revolutionised the acting profession through his appearance in Shakespearean roles; the actresses he performed with were also extremely talented and were influential in pioneering a new concept of Shakespeare on the stage. I will also examine how performing Shakespeare helped actresses be taken seriously as artists for the first time, being admired and respected for their skill in their profession, rather than treated simply as “ornaments to the stage” as they were in the Restoration.
Shakespeare quotation in the mid-eighteenth-century novel
Kate Rumbold, Trinity College, Oxford
Shakespeare is so widely quoted in the eighteenth-century novel that the practice seems almost innocuous. Closer examination of his quotation by novel characters, however, reveals a tension between this polite convention and its dangerous association with the pretence of the stage. Richardson’s Clarissa, for example, dissociates her own modest Shakespeare quotations from the showy declamations and ‘theatrical air’ with which Lovelace and other morally dubious characters handle his words. This paper will argue that Shakespeare’s multiple availability to the eighteenth-century public – via the stage, adaptations, gentlemanly editions, cheaper texts and anthologies – renders his quotation an ambiguous act, capable of representing simultaneously a stagy self-dramatisation and a benign, readerly admiration. Looking at some of the ways in which novelists such as Richardson, Fielding and Sterne have their characters variously maximise or minimise the theatricality of their quotations, the paper will show how they creatively exploit Shakespeare’s complex status at this historical juncture for subtle shades of characterisation.
Shakespeare for Children from Perrin to the Lambs
Kathryn Prince, Roehampton University
In the eighteenth century, the major intellectual currents of Shakespeare reception,
Anglo-French relations, and the new interest in childhood as an area of scientific
and philosophical investigation coalesced in Shakespeare adaptations for children.
J.B. Perrin's book of morality tales from Shakespeare (1783), written in French
but published in England and explicitly intended for the edification of English
children, is an important milestone in all three of these areas. Published before
the French revolution had sundered, for many in England, any possible connection
between France and morality, Perrin's is an important but misunderstood work.
By considering how Perrin's project influenced Shakespeare for children at the
time of its publication and in the aftermath of the revolution, this paper reveals
the political underpinnings of later projects such as the Lambs' Tales from
Shakspear and suggests that, far from being innocuous introductions for young
readers, these projects helped to shape the politics of a generation.
