Pox on Both Your Houses: The Battle of the Romeos

Abstract

This article examines the 1750 “Battle of the Romeos,” a twelve-night run of Romeo and Juliet at both of London’s patent theatres, during which audiences sought to compare the performances of David Garrick at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane to those of Spranger Barry at the theatre in Covent Garden. With reference to Garrick’s 1748 and 1750 print editions of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, media representations of the battle, and insights from the Cross-Hopkins theatre diaries concerning the profitability of competition and the importance of paratexts such as prologues and epilogues, I argue that examination of non-parodic imitation and repetition in print and performance, and not only differentiation in performance, is crucial to understanding the effects of dramatized competition upon celebrity.

Recent approaches to paratext studies in eighteenth‐century literature

“…Genette's theory of paratexts as thresholds is especially relevant to situations where a performer may appear simultaneously as themself and in character, while the experience of a play is itself shaped by whether it is performed on stage or read on the page. The potential for paratexts to modify interpretation for new audiences is a recurring theme here, as Bloomfield (2010) identifies paratextual adjustments to Elizabethan era plays revived in the 1730s, while Ritchie (2015) addresses the use of ‘performative paratexts’ as a means of influencing ‘the circulation of critical opinion’ in competing eighteenth‐century productions of the same play. Craig (2022) builds upon this, investigating how actors' names included in the cast lists of printed play books evoke performance history and offer insight into Shakespeare's reception history at the start of the long eighteenth century.…”