the romantic fascination with marionettes

For Monday, read pages 11-23, "German Sturm und Drang to Romanticism: Goethe, Kleist, ETA Hoffmann" in Harold Segel's Pinocchio's Progeny. Go to Google Books (www.books.google.com) and put "Pinocchio's Progeny" into the search engine. You should be able to scroll through the entire text.

Then take a look at this short video excerpt from a film version of Goethe's Faust by the great Czech animator, Jan Švankmajer. As you read in Segel, many of the theatre artists and dramatists of the period took inspiration from puppet theatre, and Goethe knew the story of Faustus especially from puppet theatre renditions. Think about what it is about marionettes and other puppets that fit with the aesthetics and values of such artists as Goethe, Kleist and Hugo even as the genre of melodrama is becoming so popular. How do both providential melodrama and this fascination with what today we might call "object performance" fit within the spirit of an age rocked by the French revolution and the rejection of Enlightenment rationalism?

Melodrama, Part II! Pixérécourt & Boucicault

René Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt (1773-1844) & Dion Boucicault (1820-1890)

In his case study on melodrama in your Zarrilli text (254-60), McConachie compares two nineteenth century melodramas that both achieved significant international popularity in their respective times. He argues that these two plays can give us some insight into the development of the form from its earliest context amidst the upheval of the French Revolution to later plays that responded to the conditions of the Industrial Revolution. Here we see the genre that we have defined somewhat narrowly demonstrating its capacity to be adapted to changing circumstances (an important test for any artform!)

I. Guilbert de Pixerecourt's Coelina, or The Child of Mystery (1800)

McConachie argues that Coelina, through its popularity, became a prototype for a sub-genre of melodrama called providential melodrama, which was popular from around 1800 to 1825. The characteristic elements of this play and its sub-genre include: "a single villain, alienated from the social institutions that provide order in this society of hard-working peasants and small shopkeepers"; a happy ending ensured by the fact that "God watches over innocent goodness" in which the villain departs and "the good characters return to the rural utopia from which they started. (255); and virtue prevails without having been compromised in any way.

II. Dion Boucicault's The Poor of New York (1857)

McConachie argues that Boucicault's play inspired a generation of materialist melodrama popular from around 1855 to 1880. Typical of this sub-genre, the play is set in a specific "time-bound, historical reality"; justice is provided not by God, but by "the institutions of liberal, bourgeois government and society" whose rules are broken by the villain; human agents like the detective in this play are required to unravel the mysteries of human injustice; and though justice is restored at the end, there is a great deal of Chance involved and the villains are not banished, but re-incorporated into society. In materialist melodrama, there are appeals to "bourgeois respectability" and much consciousness of class.

In summary:

Providential melodramas use timeless, universal settings; autocratic institutions ensure order; natural innocence is glorified; God ensures a happy ending; and there is a return to a utopian paradise.

Materialist melodramas use time-bound, historical settings; liberal, bourgeois institutions ensure order; social respectablity is honored; chance puts happy endings at risk; and there is acceptance of the material status quo. (257)

III. Why the change between the 1820s and 1850s?

McConachie argues that beyond the individual styles of the two playwrights, we can make sense of the shift from providential to materialist melodrama in relation to a change in audience tastes, and these tastes reflect the social morality, values and emotions of the audiences.

Providential melodrama thrived in the climate of the first decades of the 19th century in which Napoleon and the Catholic Church enjoyed considerable prestige for restoring order and stability to France while the utopianism and belief in natural intuition of the Revolution were still influential. The audiences of these melodramas were reactionaries who applauded the restoration of absolutism.

By the 1850s, the spread of industrialism and capitalism had created a very different climate that favored materialist melodrama. These melodramas reflected the decline of faith in old social heirarchies and religious beliefs that no longer seemed relevant to the new class mobilities, while at the same time protecting the captains of industry from criticism that might be dangerous by clothing them in bourgeois respectability.

Although we might initially guess that materialist melodrama would be more conducive to socialism or Marxism (recall that Marx's Communist Manifesto was published in 1848), McConachie counters that "this kind of melodrama was even more antithetical to working-class interests than the providential kind because it rendered fundamental reform unthinkable in a chance-ridden world." (260)

"having a good cry": an overview of Melodrama

"L'entrée du théâtre de l'Ambigu-Comique à une représentation gratis" (Entrance to a free show at the Ambigu-Comique Theatre) by Louis-Léopold Boilly-- an 1819 depiction of a crowd at one of the primary venues for melodrama in revolutionary Paris

We are talking about melodrama this week on the way to looking at Victor Hugo’s Hernani and George Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Melodrama was a defining popular theatre genre of the nineteenth century that builds on some aspects of the 18th century theatre we’ve been talking about and breaks with other aspects.

I. Melodrama as a dramatic genre found in many historical periods

Literally, melodrama means “song” or “music” drama. The term can be used both to refer to a genre found in many historical contexts and a specifc form that developed out of the cultural milieu of the French revolution. The term refers to the kind of music used to accompany such plays, usual intense, emotionally loaded themes. “In these melodramas, a premium was put on surface effects, especially effects evoking suspense, fear, nostalgia, and other strong emotions; the plays were written in a way that would arouse such feelings.” (Wilson/Goldfarb 364) Such conventions, for example, as building suspense with a climactic moment at the end of every act—a “cliffhanger”.

“Briefly defined, melodrama allows spectators to imaginatively experience an evil force outside of themselves, such as a greedy person, a rapacious criminal, or a vast conspiracy. Consequently, melodrama dramatizes social morality; it names the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ in our lives and helps us to negotiate such problems as political power, economic justice, and racial inequality. It may also point audiences beyond their present circumstances to transcendental sources of good and evil.” (Zarrilli 254)

“In addition to its heroes and villains, melodrama had other easily recognized stock characters: the threatened woman; the sidekick (a comic foil to the hero); and the ‘fallen woman’ who, even after repenting, is punished for her wicked past.” (W/G 364)

Melodrama achieves its effects through evoking intense, even extreme emotions in the audience. It is the intensity of these emotions that has been the focus of much of the bad connotations we have for melodrama nowadays. Our current prejudices owe much to how much naturalist and realist playwrights like Shaw and Zola denounced melodrama in relation to their own works, but Eric Bentley has defended melodrama against some aspects of their criticism.

Tears: Tears as “the poor man’s catharsis,” more the point of popular melodrama than its moral pretensions. “Having a good cry,” “feeling sorry for oneself”. Bentley charges that the late twentieth century resistance to representations of self-pity suggests a resistance to surging emotion in general, and in particular a preference for cold irony over surging emotion from the lamentations of Greek tragedy to the high emotions of Victorian melodrama.

Aristotelian Pity: We pity the hero of a melodrama because he is in a fearsome situation. We share his fears and pitying ourselves, pity him. This is the characteristic situation of melodrama: goodness beset by badness, hero beset by villain, heroes and heroines beset by a wicked world.

Fear is the genre’s stronger element, the source of its universality. Good melodrama heightens rational fear to an irrational level (i.e. making a genuinely bad villain superhumanly diabolical)

Exaggeration: Melodrama, like Farce, revels in absurdity. From our realistic prejudices, we admit only a narrow range of “artistic” exaggeration. Grand exaggeration requires different criteria. Any exaggeration is justified so long as it is intensely felt. – this is the essentially Rousseauian and Romanticist aspect to melodrama.

In summary:

• Melodramas emphasize exciting plot over character development, the sensational over the subtle, simple morality over moral ambiguity and complexity
• There is frequently an escapist element with a heavy stress on visual spectacle—there’s a clear line of development from spectacular 19th century melodrama to Hollywood action movies.
• Thus, designers began to gain a stature on a par with actors by introducing new stage machinery, flying and other illusionistic devices.
• There is almost always a moral dimension to melodrama with plots culminating in poetic justice (the good are rewarded, the evil punished).
• And melodrama accomplishes its effects by evoking intense emotions of pity and fear in the spectators.

* * *

II. Precursors in German romanticism

A. 1770s: The Sturm und Drang dramatists, inspired by Rousseau’s advocacy of natural, sentimental humanity against the restrictions of Enlightenment rationalism. Jacob M.R. Lenz’s The Soldiers advocated state-sponsored prostitution to satisfy the natural desires of soldiers. Some of these plays were censored, but many circulated in print. The early works of Goethe and Schiller were composed within the movement. (224-5)

B. 1780s: Friedrich von Kotzebue (1761-1819) became the most popular playwright in early 19th century Europe. Avoided the social controversy of the Sturm und Drang playwrights, but embraced their Rousseauian sentimentalism. Misanthropy and Repentance (1787) and over 200 works that followed explored democratic potential in Rousseau’s philosophy. “Kotzebue’s dramas appealed to a wider audience by encouraging them to believe that all people, with or without enlightened reason, were already natural, ethical, and authentic human beings.” (226)

C. 1790s: Gothic thrillers—started in fiction in 1790s, moved into drama—focused on hero-villains “usually a remorseful but still passionate figure who rules female captives and fights ghosts from his past in a crumbling castle. Although these hero-villains struggle in proper sentimental fashion to reform, most go to their deaths without renouncing their desire for lust and revenge” (226)—response to the failure of sentimentalism to explain evil.

* * *


III. The impact of the French Revolution

In 1789, much of Europe and the world still looked to France as the most advanced nation in the world. There was initial approval in Enlightenment circles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and abolition of state monopolies. However, the beheading of the king and the Reign of Terror (1792-1795), implemented by Danton and Robespierre in the name of Reason showed Enlightenment principles taken to a horrible extreme. The ensuing wars brought chaos. There was much admiration of Napoleon when he emerged in 1799 as France’s leader, but then Napoleon plunged Europe into catastrophic wars until 1815.

As McConachie argues, stories about individual villains provided scapegoats for people living during these revolutionary times, and these were the seeds of melodrama.

“The dynamic of the Revolution itself and the wars that followed enjoined Europeans to make absolute distinctions between friend and foe, hero and villain, ‘us’ and ‘them’. In addition, the Revolution (coupled with Rousseauian thinking) had induced a desire for utopia, the conviction that naturally good people might create a society in which evil could be banished from the world. Revolution and war degraded the value of enlightened reason, which many believed had led to The Terror, and elevated nature and intuition as better guides to morality and possible utopia.” (226)

In this climate, 18th century sentimentalism was reformulated for the stage with a simplified ethics. “The first melodramas presented a world in which a traditional utopia of order and happiness was just around the corner if only the good people used their intuition to root out and banish the bad people from society.” (227)

Working class “boulevard” theatres in late 18th century France presented all kinds of popular entertainments that had moved indoores from the fairground theatres, including pantomimes and tableaux vivants (usually with spectacular scenes of violence and suspense or historical events– think historical dioramas in museums).

A few of the first melodrama composed during the French Revolution:

1796 Victor, or The Child of the Forest by Guilbert de Pixerecourt(1773-1844). The first melodrama.

1800 Coelina, Or the Child of Mystery by Pixerecourt depicts the restoration of absolutist values in a French village while praising the superior intuition of common folk and the hope for a future free of bourgeois greed.

* * *

IV. The development and spread of melodrama

Melodrama brought demand for significant improvements in the painted flat scenography that was still dominant in 1800. Like the French Revolution itself, the aesthetic of melodrama was to hide nothing from the audience. Whereas neoclassical drama (like ancient Greek theatre) generally did not represent horrible deeds onstage to preserve the genteel sensibilities of upper and middle class audiences, melodrama emphasized such intense scenes. Exotic locales called for larger stages and three-dimensional scenery. In the 1840s, huge water tanks were installed to facilitate a craze for nautical dramas. Introduction of gaslight after 1825 enabled lighting effects and spectacular eruptions and explosions. By the 1880s, there were sinking ships, steaming trains and galloping horses.

Melodrama was initially rejected as crude by highbrow audiences, but it proved flexible enough to gain wide popularity over the nineteenth century. A huge increase in working-class spectators (who, thanks to the industrial revolution, were increasing in urban centers and gaining disposable income for entertainment) helped fuel the spread. There were politically-oriented works like The Bottle (1847, pro-temperance) and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852, abolitionist) that attracted even religious conservatives to the theatre. Actors like Charlotte Cushman and Henry Irving became celebrities on the melodramatic stage.

After 1850, playwrights like Eugene Scribe (1791-1861), Victorien Sardou (1831-1908) and Dion Boucicault (1822-1890) incorporated aspects of the well-made play into melodrama. “In brief, the plot of the well-made play depends on a secret, known to a few characters and the audience, on which the fate of many—perhaps an entire nation—hangs. Through the clever manipulation of chance and circumstance, all of which must appear logical and plausible, the playwright leads the audience to an ‘obligatory scene’ in which the secret is revealed and the characters must resolve their conflicts.” (228)

German cultural nationalism and romanticist theatre

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803)

First off, as Dave Bisaha appropriately brought up on Monday, the notion of affirming a national theatre based in some kind of local tradition was not new in the late 18th century. Rousseau, in his Letter to Msr. D’Alembert arguing against establishing a French theatre in Geneva, had made claims about a primitive folk culture that should be the true basis of a distinctively Swiss culture. John Dryden had argued that English drama had distinctive qualities superior to that of the French, and David Garrick had devoted most of his life to establishing Shakespeare as a great national poet. With the founding of the Comedie Francaise in 1680, the French had laid claim to a great national dramatic and theatrial tradition worth preserving from generation to generation. And we can look back to Lope de Vega in the early 17th century, and his argument for privileging Spanish uso against the claims of neoclassicism as a kind of primordial national theatre project. These were all promotions of local distinctiveness against claims for universal standards of art.

So what was so special about the arguments laid out by Johann von Herder in the 1760s and 1770s that lets Steve Wilmer claim him as the most important inspiration not only for a German national culture and theatre, but for the modern rhetoric of national culture throughout the world?

Herder encouraged German-speaking people to take pride in their own cultural traditions and their native language. Like Rousseau, he urged them to acknowledge the importance of the folk poets of the past. But unlike Rousseau and those who followed him, Herder promoted the notion that everyone in the world naturally belongs to a nation, that every nation is distinct in its culture and traditions, and that every nation should express the volksgeist, the spirit of its own people in its own unique way.

In this way, he broke through some of the basic assumptions that had informed the debate over neoclassicism for the past two centuries. Rather than worry about what the ancients really meant, or who was authorized to break the rules, he started with the assumption that there are no universal standards for art. Everyone should look for what is unique in the pasts of their own peoples, and this will give them distinct traditions to draw on in formulating an art particular to their own people. The ease with which we nowadays talk about American or English or French or German or Chinese culture as distinct things reflected in the practices of all representatives of those cultures owes a lot to this fundamental shift in thinking. As Wilmer points out, there were significant political consequences. A people with distinct cultural traditions, and a distinct national voice, could make a strong argument for having the right and the natural destiny to have the status of a separate nation-state. So we start to see revolutionaries taking an interest in various kinds of cultural expression, including theatre, as a tool for advancing their goals to establish new states. We see subjects of empires attracted to notions of building a national culture—like much of Europe during the Napoleonic wars, the Finnish in relation to Russia, the Irish in relation to England and the Asian and African peoples colonized by Europe.

Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of invention of tradition is important in this context. Nationalists, of course, would like everybody to think that their claims to distinctiveness are based in reality, that national identity is part of human nature and beyond dispute. The truth is always more ambiguous. The nations of England and France were forged through political and military actions and choices. It took people like John Dryden and David Garrick to promote the notion that there was such a thing as a great dramatic tradition that was distinctively English (rather than being the works of certain people who happened to be English). The disorienting experiences of modernity in the late 18th century with bloody revolutions and huge social uphevals like the industrial revolution made people think about “traditions” with a new kind of nostalgia and to define rigidly practices that had actually been more fluid. To preserve the purity of national origins, nationalists invented traditions that owed nothing to other cultures, conveniently forgetting any kind of complexity that might contradict their distinctiveness.

As Wilmer argues, Herder’s ideas about national culture can be seen in the rhetoric of national theatre projects around Europe and beyond. All these projects show aspects of what John Hutchinson calls cultural nationalism, whose goal is “the moral regeneration of the national community rather than the achievement of an autonomous state.” (64) In Germany, for example, where real political nationhood did not become feasible until the late nineteenth century, cultural nationalism was a significant force building the sense of a national community over the preceding century from the lat 18th century. The goal of such institutions as the German theatres of Hamburg and Munich and Weimar was to build up a national mythology independent from the cultural hegemony of France, England and Italy. As Schiller would put it, “if we had a national stage, we would also become a nation.” (69)

* * *



Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781)

Nationalism, Imperialism and 18th Century Theatre

TIMELINES

Rise of the British Empire

1707 Act of Union, a treaty with France and the Netherlands leaves England the dominant colonial power in North America and India. The dominance of the British Empire over its rivals might be dated from here.

1757 Battle of Plassey gives the British East India Company decisive control over India against French and indigenous rivals.

1775 American revolution begins (a setback for the British Empire)

1783 United States of America gains independence

1788 British penal colony founded at Australia

1795-1815 Napoleonic wars envelop Europe and their colonies throughout the world. Britain emerges as the pre-eminent global empire.

* * *

The Industrial Revolution

1721 John Lombe’s water-powered silk mill at Derby, arguably the first modern factory

1780s Steam engines increasingly used to power machines; iron foundry technology advances; patents on textile technologies expire, all leading to mass industrialization

* * *

German Romanticism and Cultural Nationalism

1765-9 A number of wealthy burghers in the free city of Hamburg embarked on the establishment of the first German National Theatre with Lessing as ‘theatre poet’. In this position, he issued the Hamburg Dramaturgie. But there was too little public support, and it closed two years later.

1776 The German Sturm und Drang movement begins with Friedrich Klinger’s play by that name–tumultuous dramas rebelling against political, economic, and artistic tyranny; celebrating ordinary people in natural (even primitive) settings; heroic peasants overthrowing villainous and tyrannical rulers; sensational action, Manichean conflicts of raging elements.

1777 A German court theatre established in Munich with Schiller as writer in residence.

1779 Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, the first German play written in blank verse on the inspiration of Shakespeare

1782 Schiller’s The Robbers establishes plot and character types that would become common with melodrama– damsel in distress, falsely accused hero, ruthless villain with labyrinthine castle.

1784 Schiller’s “The Theatre Considered as a Moral Institution’; Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind


1795 Napoleonic wars commence. The occupation of German territories inspires greater interest in cultural nationalism as a form of resistance

1798 Schiller joins Goethe at the court of Weimar, initiating a period of intense theatrical activity trying to articulate a German national theatre

* * * * *

NATIONALISM

The United States, coming into existence as it did in the late 18th century, has always been dominated by commercial theaters, popular and bourgeois. For us, the role of the government in the arts has always either been as a censor or as a provider of grants that are usually not as generous as those provided by private corporations. We had a national theater for a very brief period in the 1930s in the form of the Federal Theater Project, a producing theater funded by the US government. Since then, however, we mostly hear about our government being outraged at any taxpayers money being used to support controversial art, and defunding the NEA. The Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. serves some small part of the social function of a national theater, but not the basic economic relationship. As a presidential memorial, the Kennedy Center receives a direct, federal appropriation, but these funds can only be used for the operation and maintenance of the building. None of this funding goes toward the Center’s performances or educational activities. Without private donations and ticket sales, the Kennedy Center would stand only as an empty building. The Kennedy Center is also not ideologically committed to an American repertoire. It is just a big venue for theater in the nation’s capitol.

In most of the rest of the world, national governments have taken theater seriously as a way of promoting national culture and national identity. Making English into “the language of Shakespeare.” French as “the language of Racine and Moliere.” Most of the nations of continental Europe have prominent national theater buildings funded by the government. From the consolidation of many European nations in the 19th century to the new independence of colonized nations in the 20th century, governments have funded national theaters to promote national culture. The establishment of the Comedie Francaise in 1680 was a historic move in this direction, a very different initiative than the joint-stock companies of late 16th and early 17th century England, and a very different initiative than the professional Italian commedia troupes. This was, and still is, a state-sponsored theater whose purpose is to maintain a national repertoire of the great works by French playwrights.


IMPERIALISM

In 1600, China may have been the most economically and politically powerful nation on Earth. Biggest, most populous, most politically sophisticated, most technologically advanced, most economically advanced, most literate. In 1800, it might have been a little harder to say. Europe was getting rich on its colonies through much of the world, had taken huge steps towards advancing democracy and capitalism in their own governments, and was in the midst of accelerating scientific and industrial progress. However, much of the world viewed them, and they viewed themselves as just another set of warring powers who appeared to be tearing each other apart in the Napoleonic wars. Even their colonies were mostly limited to port towns and garrisons. By 1900, however, European powers directly governed nearly 90% of the surface of the Earth. In science, industry, economy, politics and culture and the arts, most of the world now sought to emulate Europe.

As Europe conquered the world militarily, politically and economically, it also did so epistemologically and culturally. Despite the reaction against Enlightenment rationalism in the Romantic era, the 19th century saw a new explosion of science that worked hand in hand with colonialism. European naturalists, such as Charles Darwin, accompanied military journeys to the colonies to catalogue and produce knowledge about all of Nature. Materialist political philosophy channeled Christian notions of emancipation from sin into a progressive emancipation from ignorance. Adam Smith, August Comte, Georg Hegel and Karl Marx all saw human societies and nations as progressing according to rational material causes (rather than God’s will or other super-natural forces) that should be shaped by educated and aware people to bring humanity closer to full knowledge and justice. This is the wider socio-cultural context of the "modern" theatre and drama that began with late 18th century Romanticism and eventually gave rise to 19th century Realism.

Keywords and Concepts for Midterm Exam

Renaissance or Early Modernity?

renaissance and neoclassicism
unity of disunities
invention of tradition
Gumbrecht’s 3 definitions of modernity
“a modern man can never look well dressed”
single-point perspective and prosecnium theatres
Sebastiano Serlio

Spanish ‘Golden Age’ Theatre

corrales de comedias
the cazuela
Lope de Vega’s “New Art”
Lope’s appeal to uso (custom)
Spanish comedias vs. tragedy and comedy
The setting of Life is a Dream
The Corpus Christi festival
Calderon de la Barca and the auto sacramental
Sor Juana and the auto contest in Madrid
Zeal and Religion
The Aztec ritual in Divino Narciso

French Neoclassical theatre

Aristotle vs. Horace
The Hotel de Burgogne
Cardinal Richelieu and the French Academy
the three Aristotelian unities
vraisemblance and bienseance
The controversy over Corneille’s Le Cid
Giacomo Torelli and the Palais Cardinal
The Comedie Italienne and Moliere’s company
The controversy over Tartuffe
Moliere’s relationship to Louis XIV
The Comedie Francaise

English Restoration theatre

The Puritan interregnum
Charles II and his time in France
John Dryden’s defense of English drama
Aphra Behn’s female characters
tennis court theatres
Davenant and Killigrew
Dorset Garden and Drury Lane
fops and rakes
the Glorious Revolution
Hobbes and Locke

Keralan Kathakali

the Mahabharata and puranas
The Natyasastra and the Hastalaksanadipika
rasa and bhava
Namboodiri Brahmins and Nayars
‘house and its land’
rasika
The four plays of Kottayam Tampuran
the Kidangoor style and the Kalluvayi style
illakivattam in the role of Sidhika
green and black character types
kalarippayattu and kathakali actor training
mudras and rasabhinava (facial expression)
the Kerala Kalamandalam

Qing Dynasty theatre

kunqu & jingxi
Peony Pavilion
clapper opera
sheng, dan/tan, jing/ching, ch’ou roles
which characters in Qing Ding Pearl correspond to each type?
Confucianism
teahouse theatres
Mei Lanfang
the cultural revolution & Chinese opera


18th Century Europe

The Bank of England
book culture vs. periodical culture
Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot
Rousseau’s opposition to a theatre in Geneva
the concept of ‘genius’
domestic middle-class drama
social rank or station vs. character
sentimentalism
“the paradox of the actor”
sense and sensibility
David Garrick and Diderot
David Garrick and Hogarth
The Enlightenment and China
David Garrick in Orphan of China

The birth of the "star" actor: David Garrick (1717-1779)

Garrick had an unsuccessful career as a wine merchant befoe he started acting in 1740 in Ipswich, which was an important stop on the touring circuit outside London. He debuted in London as Rechard III in 1741, and followed this with a string of other major Shakespeare tragic roles. He soon became one of the managers of Drury Lane, and remained in control there until 1776. Over the course of his career, Garrick made several important contributions to the development of English theatre. He promoted Shakespeare, not simply as an important member of the English dramatic repertoire, but as the supreme English poet and proof of England’s cultural superiority. The reputation that Shakespeare still enjoys as the greatest playwright in the world was established at this point by the devotion of England’s greatest actor. In the following two centuries, Shakespeare would become a cornerstone of English education throughout the British empire, making theatre a huge part of English nationalism.

Reciprocally, Garrick used his unrivalled status as an emissary of the English national poet to promote the legitimacy of acting as a profession. You’ll recall that in the Restoration, actors were still considered little more than prostitutes. Garrick became a model of the actor as “the new natural man of reason and moral sensibility. Easy and graceful in motion, with a quick intelligence, he planned his performances meticulously, offering a model of the century’s scientific ideal of the rational soul governing the mechanical body.” As Samuel Johnson put it, “his profession made him rich, and he made his profession respectable.” As ambassador or high priest of Shakespeare and model of the new enlightened man, he became a friend of the powerful in London and lived the life of a gentleman.

The article about Arthur Murphy’s 1759 adaptation of Voltaire’s Orphelin de la Chine argues that Garrick’s production of the play navigated between an English attraction to Voltaire’s original and interest in the Enlightenment craze for Chinese culture, but appropriated it to a context in which the play could become an argument for English superiority. This is quintessential Garrick.

He also was the first international acting celebrity. Your text associaties this with periodical culture. He was the subject of hundreds of paintings and engravings, including those by Hogarth described in the book. Benjamin Victor, writing in 1761, described his career as “a bright luminary in the theatrical hemisphere… [which] soon after became a star of the first magnitude and was called Garrick.” This is apparently the first recorded use of the word “star” to describe an actor.

He was praised for bringing a new “naturalism” to the theatre, though if we look closely at what this means from our contemporary perspective, we can see how much it was shaped by the conventions of the time. For the ghost scene in Hamlet, he had a special “fright wig” constructed whose hair could be made to stand on end through a hydraulic hand pump. To 18th century audiences, this was more real than reality.

In 1775, a German visitor to London named Lichtenberg saw Garrick’s Hamlet and wrote this description of the ghost scene. He fails to mention the wig, but the rest gives a revealing impression of Garrick’s intense style:

Hamlet has folded his arms under his cloak and pulled his hat down over his eyes; it is a cold night and just twelve o’clock; the theatre is darkened, and the whole audience of some thousand are as quiet, and their faces as motionless, as though they were painted on the walls of the theatre; even from the farthest end of the playhouse one could hear a pin drop. Suddenly, as Hamlet moves towards the back of the stage slightly to the left and turns his back on the audience, Horatio starts, and saying: ‘Look, my lord, it comes,’ points to the right, where the ghost has already appeared and stands motionless, before anyone is aware of him. At these words Garrick turns sharply and at the same moment staggers back two or three paces with his knees giving way under him; his hat falls to the ground and both his arms, especially the left, are stretched out nearly to their full length, with the hands as high as his head, the right arm more bent and the hand lower, and the fingers apart; his mouth is open: thus he stands rooted to the spot, with legs apart, but no loss of dignity, supported by his friends, who are better acquainted with the apparition and fear lest he should collapse. His whole demeanour is so expressive of terror that it made my flesh creep even before he began to speak. The almost terror-struck silence of the audience, which preceded this appearance and filled one with a sense of insecurity, probably did much to enhance the effect.