David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity

Ritchie, Leslie

doi:10.1017/9781108661942

Cited by 9 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Some of the most important recent work in 18th‐century theater history is interested in how we misuse or ignore certain types of evidence. Leslie Ritchie's David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity (2019) re‐evaluates star actor David Garrick's celebrity by tracing his machinations of the newspaper and periodical press. Focusing on the “social production of his celebrity” (p. 2), Ritchie argues that narratives about this towering figure, from the earliest biographies to modern scholarly works, have missed the extent to which they are shaped by groundwork that Garrick himself laid.…”

Section: Performance Historiography and Performance As Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Eighteenth‐century theater history and performance studies

Wessel

2021

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Over the last few decades, theater history has moved beyond a documentary and descriptive approach to become a field that increasingly embraces the “epistemological uncertainty” that comes with studying an unfixed medium. This shift owes much to the flourishing of performance studies in the 1990s and 2000s. This essay examines the effects of performance studies on 18th‐century theater history. Theater historians of earlier periods have long grappled with how to study a medium that is uncapturable by print alone. Performance's ephemerality and its embodiment, in particular, pose challenges to those working in the archives. This essay reviews the recent scholarship that brings together the archival work of theater history with newer performance‐oriented methodologies. The turn to performance studies allows us to better theorize the experiences and identities that archives have sometimes obscured, especially involving women and minorities. Moreover, taking the medium of performance seriously not just as an object of study, but as a mode of constructing and disseminating theater history enables us to experience vicariously sensory elements of performance that traditional print scholarship cannot fully capture.

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Section: Performance Historiography and Performance As Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Eighteenth‐century theater history and performance studies

Wessel

2021

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“…As it transpired he settled the debts, albeit too slowly for Stratford's liking, by restaging the 'dampened celebration' of the Jubilee as a light-hearted and gently self-mocking musical spectacular at Drury Lane. That decision was not entirely premeditated (Farnsworth Smith and Lawhon, 1980;Ritchie, 2019). Garrick had learned that that the theatre's competitors at Covent Garden planned to adapt George Colman's existing matrimonial comedy 'Man and Wife', shifting its focus to Stratford and adding new dialogue in a tongue-in-cheek review of the Jubilee (Burden, 2017, 152).…”

Section: After the Jubileementioning

confidence: 99%

Festival Cities

Gold¹,

Gold²

2020

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Festivals have always been part of city life, but their relationship with their host cities has continually changed. With the rise of industrialization, they were largely considered peripheral to the course of urban affairs. Now they have become central to new ways of thinking about the challenges of economic and social change, as well as repositioning cities within competitive global networks. In this timely and thought-provoking book, John and Margaret Gold provide a reflective and evidencebased historical survey of the processes and actors involved, charting the ways that regular festivals have now become embedded in urban life and city planning.Beginning with David Garrick's rain-drenched Shakespearean Jubilee and ending with Sydney's flamboyant Mardi Gras celebrations, it encompasses the emergence and consolidation of city festivals. After a contextual historical survey that stretches from Antiquity to the late nineteenth century, there are detailed case studies of pioneering European arts festivals in their urban context: Venice's Biennale, the Salzburg Festival, the Cannes Film Festival and Edinburgh's International Festival. Ensuing chapters deal with the worldwide proliferation of arts festivals after 1950 and with the everincreasing diversification of carnival celebrations, particularly through the actions of groups seeking to assert their identity. The conclusion draws together the book's key themes and sketches the future prospects for festival cities.Lavishly illustrated, and copiously researched, this book is essential reading not just for urban geographers, social historians and planners, but also for anyone interested in contemporary festival and events tourism, urban events strategy, urban regeneration, or simply building a fuller understanding of the relationship between culture, planning and the city.

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“…These works are all evidence of ‘The stage being an object of much attention amongst us' (p. 513), and, like those collected by Zunshine, their diversity indicates the breadth of material associated with the theatre in the 18th century. Recent studies have explored the range of theatrical media in new depth (O'Quinn & Russell, 2015), demonstrating, for example, how Garrick built his own media empire in the periodical press (Ritchie, 2019), and how theatrical biographers revived their subjects (Weldy Boyd, 2018). As for Boswell, this life‐writing periodical columnist lists treatises like John Hill's and Charles Pickering’s (1755), but also referred readers to works in French, periodical essays by Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, memoirs and biographies and poems on actors and acting.…”

Section: Acting and Ephemeralitymentioning

confidence: 99%

What James Boswell tells us about 18th‐century acting theory

Harriman-Smith

2020

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This article reads a series of essays on the actor by James Boswell through recent scholarship on the theory of acting in order to elaborate an expansive and historically grounded definition of what was and is meant by '18th-century acting theory'. I thus show how 18th-century texts on acting are important documents that should be read not as isolated phenomena but as works that can illuminate contemporary stage performance and the culture that produced it. In particular, I follow Boswell by placing a specific, illustrative emphasis on three key themes of professionalism, theatrical expression and ephemerality: each theme is both essential to thinking about the stage (and criticism on this topic) while also, like so much about the 18th-century theatre, applicable far more widely both then and now. K E Y W O R D S 18th-century, acting, Boswell, rhetoric, theatre 1 | INTRODUCTION One sometimes sees the study of 18th-century theatre divided into two complementary processes of extraction and reintegration. The former, by cutting 'the theatrical notices out of newspapers' and other such work, has allowed the construction of vital calendars and profiles, now given new life as online databases (Burkert, 2019; Roach & Robinson, 2020, p. 188). The latter has endeavoured to return such data to its original place and freshly observe how they functioned 'as significant elements within a wider social and cultural context' (Roach & Robinson, 2020, p. 188). This second way of thinking about 18th-century theatre has been particularly important for the This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity

Cited by 9 publications

References 31 publications

Eighteenth‐century theater history and performance studies

Eighteenth‐century theater history and performance studies

Festival Cities

What James Boswell tells us about 18th‐century acting theory

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