Abstract
The shock experience of modernity, as defined in my introduction, derives from the perceived realism of popular visual-cultural phenomena. Such a phenomenon was David Garrick. His first biographer, Thomas Davies, relates the impression Garrick made on his stage debut in October 1741:
Mr. Garrick’s easy and familiar, yet forcible style in speaking and acting, at first threw the critics into some hesitation concerning the novelty as well as propriety of his manner…. But after he had gone through a variety of scenes, in which he gave evident proofs of consummate art, and perfect knowledge of character, their doubts were turned into surprise and astonishment, from which they relieved themselves by loud and reiterated applause.1
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Notes
Thomas Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, ed. Stephen Jones (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969), 1:41.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Portraits, ed. Frederick Hilles (New York: McGraw Hill, 1952), 112.
Thomas Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies (London, 1785), 3:264–65.
The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 4:247.
“On the Tragedies of Shakspeare [sic] Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation,” The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb (New York: The Modern Library, 1935), 298.
A Satirical View of London at the Commencement of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1801), 238.
The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. R. A. Foakes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969-), 5(1):350.
“A Defence of Poetry,” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 490.
The Long Revolution: An Analysis of the Democratic, Industrial, and Cultural Changes Transforming Our Society (New York: Columbia University, 1961), 264.
Marilyn Gaull, “Romantic Theater,” Wordsworth Circle 14 (1983): 257.
The Romantic Theater: An International Symposium, ed. Richard Allen Cave (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1986), 9–46.
See Alan Richardson, A Mental Theater: Poetic Drama and Consciousness in the Romantic Age (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987), 1–3, 191. The tone for critical reception of Romantic drama was set by contemporary critics, who declared that “of all literary productions the most uninteresting, because the most unnatural, is the closet drama” (British Critic 21, April 1824: 403). The last decade, however, has seen a raft of critics attempt to rehabilitate the plays. In the spirit of post-80s excavation at the margins of the canon, Richardson, Jeffrey Cox, Frederick Burwick, Daniel Watkins, Julie Carlson, and Michael Simpson have all devoted monographs to Romantic drama.
Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973–82), 8:186–87; 5:170. Manfred was produced successfully several times after Byron’s death, most notably by Alfred Bunn at Covent Garden in 1835. But as Sherwyn Carr has documented, Bunn’s production exploited the luridly melodramatic and supernatural elements of the play over its literary possibilities, ruthlessly cutting Byron’s complex Faustian lyric monologues in favor of “spectacular scenic effects and liberal doses of music.” Henry Crabb Robinson attended the production, taking no “pleasure except from the splendid scenery.” In this sense, Bunn’s “adaptation” of Manfred constitutes a characteristic example of rather than an exception to the dilemma faced by the Romantics, as purveyors of traditional verse drama, in the new culture of theatrical spectacle. Sherwyn Carr, “Bunn, Byron and Manfred.”Nineteenth Century Theatre Research 1 (Spring 1973): 19; Robinson, The London Theatre, 1811–1866: Selections from the Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Eluned Brown (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1966), 144–45. In another revealing example of the Romantics’ mixed, sometimes contradictory attitude toward the stage, Wordsworth originally submitted The Borderers to the managers of both Covent Garden and Drury Lane, but later insisted in notes to the text that he was actually relieved at its rejection. “It was first written,” Wordsworth averred in 1842, “and is now published, without any view to its exhibition upon the stage.” The Borderers, ed. Robert Osborn (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1982), 813.
Lamb, Complete Works and Letters, 298; Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 93. Whatever his misgivings regarding the staging of his own dramas, the theater star system did not bother Byron, who kept a screen of prints in his Cambridge rooms displaying famous English actors, including Garrick, in their signature roles. See Henry Angelo, Reminiscences (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), 2:100.
Joan Coldwell, “The Playgoer as Critic: Charles Lamb on Shakespeare’s Characters,” Shakespeare Quarterly 26 (1975): 193–95; Janet Ruth Heller, Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 25; Greg Kucich, “‘A Haunted Ruin’: Romantic Drama, Renaissance Tradition, and the Critical Establishment,” Wordsworth Circle 23 (Spring 1992): 67.
Jonathan Arac, “The Media of Sublimity: Johnson and Lamb on King Lear.” Studies in Romanticism 26 (Summer, 1987): 210–11. Heller argues that modern critics of film adaptations of literature, from Kracauer to Iser, borrow Lamb’s terms in arguing that cinematic versions of novels lack the psychological texture and depth of characterization of the literary original. Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama, 115–16.
Dissertation on the Theaters (London, 1759), 73.
The History of the Theatres of London and Dublin from the Year 1730 to the Present Time (London, 1761), 1:61–62.
Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, 1:44; Paul Hiffernan, Dramatic Genius (London, 1770), 71.
James Ralph, The Case of the Authors Stated (London, 1758), 25.
“Images to Light the Candle of Fame,” Nadar/Warhol, Paris/New York: Photography and Fame, ed. Gordon Baldwin and Judith Keller (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1999), 15.
Society of Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 38.
See Charles Gildon, The Life of Mr. Thomas Betterton, the Late Eminent Tragedian. Wherein the Action and Utterance of the Stage, Bar, and Pulpit are Distinctly Considered (London: Robert Gosling, 1710).
Anthony Aston, A Brief Supplement to Colley Cibber (London, 1747), quoted in Actors on Acting, ed. Toby Cole and Helen Chinoy (New York: Crown Publishers, 1970), 114.
The Museum: or, the Literary and Historical Register 25 (28 February 1747): 382.
Memoirs (London, 1806), 59–60.
William Whitehead, Poems (London, 1788), 3:65.
Lichtenberg’s Visits to England, trans. Margaret L. Mare and W. H. Quarrell (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969), 30.
John Alexander Kelly, German Visitors to English Theaters in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Octagon Books, 1978), 40.
D. C. Stuart, The Development of Dramatic Art (New York: Appleton & Co., 1928), 440.
John Galt, The Lives of the Players (London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1886), 147.
John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830 (London, 1832), 4:14.
Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, 1:349; John Knowles, Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli (London, 1831), 1:39.
For an analysis of the evolution of Cartesian philosophy in the writings of Le Brun and Hill, see Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), especially chapter 2.
Francis Gentleman, The Dramatic Censor (London: J. Bell, 1770), 482.
Joseph Bertram, The Tragic Actor (London: Theater Arts Books, 1959), 109.
Joseph Pittard, Observations on Mr. Garrick’s Acting (London, 1758), 6.
The Actor (London, 1755), 265.
A General View of the Stage (London, 1759), 114.
Works (London, 1753), 4:368.
“The Rosciad” 1.1055-62. The Poems of Charles Churchill, ed. James Laver (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), 46.
Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), 120. See also Lance Bertelsen, “David Garrick and English Painting,” Eighteenth Century Studies 11 (1978): 308–24.
Ellis Waterhouse, Reynolds (London: Phaidon Press, 1941), 21.
Garrick to Draper, 1 December 1745. The Letters of David Garrick, ed. David M. Little and George M. Kahrl (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 1:70.
British Theatre and the Other Arts, 1660–1800, ed. Shirley Kenny (Washington: Folger Books, 1984), 20–21.
See John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 338–39.
A Bone For Chroniclers to Pick On (London, 1758), 6–8.
“Philippe James de Loutherbourg and the Early Pictorial Theatre: Some Aspects of its Cultural Context,” in The Theatrical Space, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 110.
Morning Chronicle, 23 December 1774, quoted in Russell Thomas, Spectacle in the Theatres of London from 1767 to 1802 (Ph.D. diss.: Chicago University, 1942), 30.
Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 119–27.
Frontispiece to Sir Nicholas Nipclose [pseud.], The Theatres: a Poetical Dissection (London, 1772).
Reminiscences, ed. William Van Lennox (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), 8.
Dramatic Criticism 1808–1831, ed. Lawrence Huston Houtchens and Carolyn Washburn Houtchens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 47–48. In addition to elevating visual spectacle over dramatic text, the democratic nature of the Regency theater threatened to marginalize another literary genre: dramatic criticism. The access of the lower classes to all forms of leisure and entertainment, Hunt argued, had “giv[en] them an increase in all sorts of intellectual pleasures, previous to their having anything like a critical knowledge of them, or care for criticism.” Writing in 1831, Hunt remains hopeful that “ten years hence, perhaps, the trade of a theatrical critic will be better than it is now,” but the projection only reinforces Hunt’s current impression of the declining audience for educated literary journalism. Dramatic Criticism, 282.
Collected Works, 5(1):564; Sir Walter Scott, Letters, ed. H.J. C. Grierson (London: Constable, 1932–37), 4:720.
Coleridge, Complete Poetical Works, ed. E. H. Coleridge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 1:817.
“An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe,” in Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 1:325.
This definitive tautology of modern celebrity was first formulated by Daniel Boorstin in The Image: What Happened to the American Dream (New York: Atheneum, 1962), see especially chapter 2.
Lichtenberg’s Visits to England, 7; Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, ed. Thomas Sadler (Boston: Fields, Osgood & Co., 1870), 1:214–15.
Treatise of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 1984), 299–311.
“An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men,” Miscellanies, ed. Henry Knight Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 1:155.
The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, ed. Edwin W. Marrs, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 1:267.
Shearer West, The Image of the Actor: Verbal and Visual Representation in the Age of Garrick and Kemble (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 89.
“Autobiographical Notes” to The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Joseph Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 209.
Richard Altick, Painting from Books (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1985), 27. Mixing portraiture and allegory had its precedents in European painting—the huntress-virgin Diana was a particularly popular guise for aristocratic ladies to adopt—but before Reynolds no one had undertaken this hybrid genre with such serious zeal. Reynolds met with critical resistance to his historical portraits from the outset. Goldsmith satirized the fashionability for grand-style portraiture in The Vicar of Wakefield, while Johnson regretted his friend’s pollution of the domestic art of portraiture with “empty splendour” and “airy fiction” (The Idler 45, 1759). The Victorians pronounced “Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen” an “absurdly artificial” conceit, and twentieth-century critics have largely concurred. F. G. Stephens, English Children as Painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds (London, 1867), 9.
Richard Wendorf, The Elements of Life: Biography and Portrait Painting in Stuart and Georgian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 243; Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 128; David Piper, The English Face (London: Thames and Hudson, 1957), 200.
Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 238.
Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 10.
Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 4.
Judith Pascoe has argued that literary women’s “theatrical modes of self-representation” constitute an important corrective to normative masculinist views of Romantic antitheatricality. Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). The exclusively female subjects of Reynolds’ historical portraits likewise suggest that theatricality, at the level of social identity, was a predominantly female preserve. On feminine masquerade as a form of pathology, see Joan Rivière’s seminal case-study, “Womanliness as Masquerade.” Psychoanalysis and Female Sexuality, ed. Hendrik Ruitenbeck (New Haven: College and University Press, 1966), 209–20. The notion of the theatricality or, more strictly, “performativity” of gender identity has featured prominently in recent feminist theory. See in particular Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990).
“Women in Disguise: Likeness, the Grand Style and the Conventions of Feminine Portraiture in the work of Sir Joshua Reynolds,” Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture, ed. Gill Perry and Michael Rossington (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 23.
Kimberley Crouch, “The Public Life of Actresses: Prostitutes or Ladies?” Gender in Eighteenth Century England: Roles, Representations, and Responsibilities, ed. Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (London: Longman, 1997), 75–76.
“Reynolds’s Theory and Practice of Imitation,” Burlington Magazine 80 (1942): 45.
Strategies for Showing: Women, Possession, and Representation in English Visual Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 60.
Reynolds, ed. Nicholas Penny (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 29.
Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Subject Pictures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3, 36–38.
Arthur Marwick, Beauty in History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988), 153.
“Talking of Mrs. Siddons, Lady Inchiquin said that Sir Joshua Reynolds had often declared that she was an Actress who never made Him feel” (emphasis in original). Joseph Farington, Diary, ed. Kenneth Garlick, Angus Macintyre, and Kathryn Cave (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 4:1297.
For biographical information I rely, with obvious reservations, on John Haslewood’s contemporary Secret History of the Green Room (London, 1795), 41–58, and John Fyvie, Comedy Queens of the Georgian Era (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1906), 200–230.
“The Public and Private Roles of Sarah Siddons,” A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and her Portraitists, ed. Robyn Asleson (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1999), 3.
The Meridian Anthology of 18th and 19th Century British Drama, ed. Katherine Rogers (New York: Penguin, 1979), 312.
For an alternative reading of the portrait see Joseph Musser, “Mrs. Abington as ‘Miss Prue,’” South Atlantic Quarterly 83 (1984): 176–92.
Charles Robert Leslie and Tom Taylor, The Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds (London, 1865), 1:226–27, 2:115.
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© 2001 Gillen D’Arcy Wood
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Wood, G.D. (2001). Theater and Painting. In: The Shock of the Real. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06809-5_2
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