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The eighteenth century has long been acknowledged as a pivotal period in Shakespeare's reception, transforming a playwright requiring 'improvement' into a national poet whose every word was sacred. Scholars have examined the contribution of performances, adaptations, criticism and editing to this process of transformation, but the crucial role of fiction remains overlooked. Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel reveals for the first time the prevalence, and the importance, of fictional characters' direct quotations from Shakespeare. Quoting characters ascribe emotional and moral authority to Shakespeare, redeploy his theatricality, and mock banal uses of his words; by shaping in this way what is considered valuable about Shakespeare, the novel accrues new cultural authority of its own. Shakespeare underwrites, and is underwritten by, the eighteenth-century novel, and this book reveals the lasting implications for both of their reputations.
This book examines Shakespeare's influence and popularity in all aspects of eighteenth-century literature, culture and society.
OXFORD SHAKESPEARE TOPICS General Editors: Peter Holland and Stanley Wells Oxford Shakespeare Topics provide students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. This book considers the impact and influence of Shakespeare on writing of the eighteenth century, and also how eighteenth-century Shakespeare scholarship influenced how we read Shakespeare today. The most influential English actor of the eighteenth century, David Garrick, could hail Shakespeare as 'the god of our idolatry', yet perform an adaptation of King Lear with a happy ending, add a dying speech to Macbeth, and remove the puns from Romeo and Juliet. Garrick's friend Samuel Johnson thought of Shakespeare as 'above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature'. Voltaire thought he was a sublime genius without taste. The Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu, meanwhile, could be found arguing with Johnson's biographer James Boswell over whether Shakespeare or Milton was the greater poet. Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century traces the course of a many-faceted metamorphosis. Drawing on fresh research as well as the most recent scholarship in the field, it argues that the story of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century has become a significant 'subplot' in later scholarship, made up of great debates about how to read Shakespeare and how to rank him among the great English writers, how to perform his plays and how to edit the texts of those plays. This book surveys the critical and creative responses of actors and audiences, literary critics and textual editors, painters and philosophes to Shakespeare's works, while also suggesting how the Shakespeare of the theatre influenced the Shakespeare of the study, and how other, less straightforward interactions combined to bring about this sea-change in English cultural life. It speaks of the crucial role of Shakespeare in eighteenth-century culture, and the importance of that culture's absorption of Shakespeare for subsequent generations. This is a book about what the eighteenth century did to Shakespeare - and vice versa.
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In Backstage in the Novel, Francesca Saggini traces the unique interplay between fiction and theater in the eighteenth century through an examination of the work of the English novelist, diarist, and playwright Frances Burney. Moving beyond the basic identification of affinities between the genres, Saggini establishes a literary-cultural context for Burney's work, considering the relation between drama, a long-standing tradition, and the still-emergent form of the novel. Through close semiotic analysis, intertextual comparison, and cultural contextualization, Saggini highlights the extensive metatextual discourse in Burney's novels, allowing the theater within the novels to surface. Saggini’s comparative analysis addresses, among other elements, textual structures, plots, characters, narrative discourse, and reading practices. The author explores the theatrical and spectacular elements that made the eighteenth-century novel a hybrid genre infused with dramatic conventions. She analyzes such conventions in light of contemporary theories of reception and of the role of the reader that underpinned eighteenth-century cultural consumption. In doing so, Saggini contextualizes the typical reader-spectator of Burney’s day, one who kept abreast of the latest publications and was able to move effortlessly between "high" (sentimental, dramatic) and "low" (grotesque, comedic) cultural forms that intersected on the stage. Backstage in the Novel aims to restore to Burney's entire literary corpus the dimensionality that characterized it originally. It is a vivid, close-up view of a writer who operated in a society saturated by theater and spectacle and who rendered that dramatic text into narrative. More than a study of Burney or an overview of eighteenth-century literature and theater, this book gives immediacy to an understanding of the broad forces informing, and channeled through, Burney's life and work.
A critical history of Shakespeare painting in its richest period - 1720-1820.
In this ground-breaking study Saggini explores the relationship between the late eighteenth-century novel and the theatre, arguing that the implicit theatricality of the Gothic novel made it an obvious source from which dramatists could take ideas. Similarly, elements of the theatre provided inspiration to novelists.