Magical glasses: Shakespearean character and cultural change in the eighteenth century

This dissertation explores the preoccupation with Shakespearean character in the middle to late eighteenth century. I argue that Shakespeare's art of characterization participated in shaping British culture and identity in this period. Recent scholarship on the history of Shakespeare's reception has concentrated on the appropriation of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century to demonstrate how his plays served ideological purposes, such as nationalism, imperialism, and bourgeois ideals of the autonomous subject. While such studies offer a valuable account of Shakespeare's promotion to canonical status, the focus on the historically contingent and socially invested readings of his works overstates the determined or constructed nature of literary meaning. I show that the complexity of his drama resisted easy appropriation and was formative of culture itself. A dialogic approach thus underpins my investigation of how Shakespeare's art of characterization raised questions and engaged audiences in a culturally productive way. Onstage and in the world of print, Shakespeare's characters were often scrutinized and examined as though they were real people. They took part in a mimetic moral exercise that helped people navigate the uncertain atmosphere of a modern commercial world. To understand the eighteenth-century engagement with Shakespearean character more fully and historically, I argue for the importance of the relationship between the transformation of the social order and aesthetic discourse in this period. Chapter one examines how major shifts in social structures resulted in the blurred boundaries of private and public paradigms. The interplay of private and public characterized the social order of the era and complicated ideas about morality and identity formation. This introductory chapter brings into focus anxieties about a newly commercialized public culture and the entertainment industry's potential either to cultivate or corrupt morality. It also highlights how aesthetic discourse emphasized the function of art in shaping conscientious citizens, and establishes the importance of aesthetic concepts, such as taste, the sympathetic imagination, and moral spectatorship in shaping the reception of Shakespearean character. Following this, I explore how reading and theatrical audiences productively interacted with Shakespearean characters: by using Shakespeare's characters as speculative tools that provided insight into human nature, readers and audiences sought to understand identity formation and morality as it occurred across shifting boundaries of private and public life. To demonstrate the culturally productive nature of Shakespeare's plays, my discussion engages with a broad range of material. Examples include Samuel Johnson's Preface and notes in his edition of Shakespeare's plays, works by Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Griffith, William Richardson and Maurice Morgann, theatre reviews and acting treatises. At the same time, I underscore how creative new modes of literary and theatrical entertainment evolved from this focus on character. Examples include the theatrical criticism of Joanna Baillie, a broad range of innovative responses that remove characters from the confines of plot, the autobiography of George Anne Bellamy, and David Garrick's enterprising introduction of Shakespearean characters to fashionable forms of performance, such as pantomime. I conclude with a focused investigation of various treatments of Falstaff to highlight the resistance of Shakespeare's art to easy ideological appropriation. My approach to reading eighteenth-century Shakespeare criticism is within the broader framework of the role and reception of literature in eighteenth-century society. Overall, this project explores the impact of Shakespeare's works in forming eighteenth-century culture and the role of aesthetic discourse in elevating Shakespeare to canonical status.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.