Authority of the Actor in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

This chapter distinguishes two ways in which the authority of actors with regard to Shakespeare was articulated during the playwright’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rise to the status of a national poet. From the reopening of the theatres to the early 1700s, actors appeared as apostles, handing down Shakespeare’s intentions from generation to generation as part of an independent performance tradition. The career of David Garrick, from 1741 to 1776 was marked, however, with the claim that, rather than inheriting a connection to Shakespeare, this new star was Shakespeare reborn. Resurrection had replaced succession as a mode for articulating the actor’s authority. Harriman-Smith explains this paradigm shift with an analysis of the rise of textual editing between the death of Betterton and the debut of Garrick, showing how it destabilized the transmission of theatrical practice while also justifying Garrick’s claim to bring Shakespeare to life through a close study of his writing. The chapter then concludes with a brief study of theatrical authority beyond Garrick, focusing on the critical writing of John Philip Kemble.