Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century ed. by Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor (review)

In the introduction to this excellent collection of essays, the editors identify an important theme that most of the contributors share: “Key to this project is the acknowledgement that the eighteenth century’s Shakespeare is not our Shakespeare” (7). From 1660 to the late eighteenth century, Shakespeare’s plays were known largely through adaptations that excised large sections we now consider indispensable. Hamlet was performed without the gravediggers, and King Lear without the Fool. Naham Tate’s version of Lear, with its romance between Cordelia and Edgar and its happy ending, was widely considered superior to the Bard’s original. One might detect a note of irritation in the comment by Tiffany Stern, a Renaissance scholar, in her chapter on “Shakespeare in Drama”: “What affected eighteenth-century dramatists was not the actual Shakespeare but the works and the person that they were able to make him be” (142). We have inherited attitudes from the last decades of the eighteenth century, as in the ground-breaking contextual research of Edmund Malone, when educated audiences began to set a much higher priority on the “authentic” Shakespeare. Nevertheless, the adapted Shakespeare of the preceding age was informed by a coherent set of cultural and aesthetic values, however different from our own. In the words of Jenny Davidson, “the adaptations represent a body of work worthy of study in its own right for the light it casts on eighteenth-century literary, intellectual, political and theatrical culture” (186).

The general shift towards a greater appreciation of the “authentic” Shakespeare is introduced in Marcus Walsh’s opening chapter, “Editing and Publishing Shakespeare.” Beginning with Samuel Johnson’s 1765 edition, augmented by George Steevens’s variorum edition of 1773, editors became more respectful of the original quarto and folio texts and less prone to “improve” Shakespeare’s lines by means of conjecture, the habit of earlier editors from Rowe to Warburton. The trend towards greater fidelity to the original Shakespeare had other ramifications. As noted by Robert Shaughnessy, Charles Macklin may have been the first to stage Macbeth in authentic Scottish costume in 1773, rather than in wigs and contemporary dress. The experiment did not go well, as Macklin ended up in fisticuffs with the audience, yet his willingness to break with theatrical convention was increasingly adopted by other artists, such as in visual representations of Shakespeare. As described by Shearer West, the tepid response to John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, opened in 1789, reflected impatience with the artists’ reliance on standard theatrical representations and stage business. Corresponding with the rise of Romanticism was a greater willingness to visualize Shakespeare’s plays as they appeared in the imagination of the reader, as notably in the Shakespearean art of Henry Fuseli. The Shakespeare embraced in late eighteenth-century Germany, discussed by Roger Paulin, was above all an imagined and readerly Shakespeare. For A.W. Schegel, “it was effectively the reader, not the viewer, who can enter into Shakespeare’s world” (322).

For the previous generation, in the mid-eighteenth century, on the contrary, Shakespeare was above all a public and theatrical presence, expected to dramatize a set of cultural values and to perform a certain kind of cultural work. This national role was most obviously exemplified by David Garrick’s Stratford Jubilee in 1769. As discussed by Kate Rumbold, the Jubilee raised Shakespeare to the status of a national hero who could absorb and mediate many competing “languages,” though this festival largely took his words away, celebrating the “Bard” in odes written by Garrick, and in mute pageants of beloved characters from Falstaff to the bear in The Winter’s Tale. Versions of Shakespearean language nonetheless permeated eighteenth-century literature. In the novel, characters are often ready with an appropriate line from Shakespeare, as shown by Thomas Keymer. David Fairer’s illuminating chapter traces Shakespearean echoes through a large body of eighteenth-century poetry. It is significant, however, that characters and poets were habitually quoting not...