The stage of the 1700s established a star culture with the emergence of acting celebrities such as David Garrick, Susannah Cibber and Sarah Siddons. It placed Shakespeare at the heart of the classical repertoire and offered unprecedented opportunities to female actors. This book demonstrates how an understanding of the practice and theories circulating at the time can generate new ways of studying and performing plays of all kinds today. Offering theatre professionals a model for active engagement with stage history, this book provides stage historians with an approach to past performance practice that is centred on process and preparation rather than product. Initially, this book vividly introduces readers to the 18th century stage and the ideas that governed it through a study of the vast amount of writing about acting that appeared at the time, including letters, diaries, treatises and anthologies. The author then presents a series of exercises developed in collaboration with professional actors and directors informed by this literature. These exercises can be employed singly or combined into an iterative rehearsal process; they are also open to further adaptation and analysis as part of a work that treats theatre writers of the past as potential collaborators for those interested in theatre today. A truly unique offering, What would Garrick Do? Or, Acting Lessons from the Eighteenth Century offers a fascinating deep-dive into this important time in theatre history to illuminate practices and processes today.

Great art is about emotion. In the eighteenth century, and especially for the English stage, critics developed a sensitivity to both the passions of a performance and what they called the transitions between those passions. It was these pivotal transitions, scripted by authors and executed by actors, that could make King Lear beautiful, Hamlet terrifying, Archer hilarious and Zara electrifying. James Harriman-Smith recovers a lost way of appreciating theatre as a set of transitions that produce simultaneously iconic and dynamic spectacles; fascinating moments when anything seems possible. Offering fresh readings and interpretations of Shakespearean and eighteenth-century tragedy, historical acting theory and early character criticism, this volume demonstrates how a concern with transition binds drama to everything, from lyric poetry and Newtonian science, to fine art and sceptical enquiry into the nature of the self.

The stage of the 1700s established a star culture with the emergence of acting celebrities such as David Garrick, Susannah Cibber and Sarah Siddons. It placed Shakespeare at the heart of the classical repertoire and offered unprecedented opportunities to female actors. This book demonstrates how an understanding of the practice and theories circulating at the time can generate new ways of studying and performing plays of all kinds today. Offering theatre professionals a model for active engagement with stage history, this book provides stage historians with an approach to past performance practice that is centred on process and preparation rather than product. Initially, this book vividly introduces readers to the 18th century stage and the ideas that governed it through a study of the vast amount of writing about acting that appeared at the time, including letters, diaries, treatises and anthologies. The author then presents a series of exercises developed in collaboration with professional actors and directors informed by this literature. These exercises can be employed singly or combined into an iterative rehearsal process; they are also open to further adaptation and analysis as part of a work that treats theatre writers of the past as potential collaborators for those interested in theatre today. A truly unique offering, What would Garrick Do? Or, Acting Lessons from the Eighteenth Century offers a fascinating deep-dive into this important time in theatre history to illuminate practices and processes today.