This drole tale, written in 1835 on the cusp of Bouchardy’s switch from engraving to drama, is his first work ever translated into English. In it, Lady Anna has fallen in love at a performance of Romeo and Juliet—but does she love the famous Romantic actor Garrick, or the character of Romeo, or the play itself? In any case, her father has offered £20,000 to anyone who can cure her infatuation. Bouchardy swings the reader deviously back and forth between wistful sentiment and disillusioned irony. He also sheds some light on Romanticist attitudes toward theatre, history, truth, fiction, and the blending of life and art.
The life of this actor, manager, playwright, and eighteenth-century gentleman is here refracted through the volurninous correspondence and analyses of roles, plays, and performances in this, no doubt final, biography of David Garrick. As the direct result of modern scholarship accessible only since the 1960s, it is now possible to appraise fully the life of this remarkable person who was born in Lichfield 19February 1717, a childhood friend of Samuel Johnson, who became the greatest English theatrical luminary who ever lived, and who when he died 20 January 1779was mourned by the nation and eulogized by Dr. Johnson as one whose death "eclipsed the gaiety of nations." For twenty-nine years (1747-1776) Garrick managed Drury Lane theatre, caring passionately for its well-being. His own acting set the pace for the performances, his discipline carried it on, and his theatrical innovations attracted the audiences on which the lives, hopes, and families of some 140actors, actresses, singers, dancers, and others depended. In addition, he wrote, adapted, or altered some 49 plays and wrote nearly 100 prologues. What emerges from this big, new critical biography is a fully drawn portrait of an eighteenth-century gentleman, with a wide range of acquaintances, elegant socially, morally, and personally, and an engaging conversationalist with and respecter of women of mark and with his closest friends. He was also, as the evidence now shows, the solid link with his own age and the great dramatic artists of the past, from the Restoration playwrights to Massinger, Jonson, Shakespeare, and early English dramatists.
Revenance is dedicated to the forgotten or untold histories of 19th Century avant-garde and dissenting countercultures. It promotes historiography practiced as game, as activism, as trans-generational collaboration, as communal memory, which running athwart the academic, refuses to describe history as finished, and does not stand apart to observe its object from a distance, in the posture of false 'objectivity' which Power always assumes. Instead: a committed historiography, which does not stand outside the stream of time or apart from its object: intellectual and precise, yet ludic and multi-form, one moment manifest as an essay, the next as a poem. A historiography created within the utopian fringe, and for the same community, responsive to our changing conditions, needs, and desires. A historiography that we take personally, merging imperceptibly into experiments in daily life, social praxis, and thought. Volume I collects the first five issues of the journal, from 2016-18.
Rotherham (U. of Cambridge, UK) provides a study of the juridical doctrines of English common law that allow for the acquisition of rights of ownership without an owner's consent and the issues raised by such redistributions of property rights. He ar gues that there is a fundamental tension in English law between the idea that property is inviolable and a de facto recognition of remedies that redistribute property rights. This tension leads to doctrines that are highly misleading and often indefe nsible. He suggests that the refusal to acknowledge the normative dimension of common law reasoning has precluded rational policy-making and has led to legal justifications that obfuscate rather than explain. A more rational doctrine would reject the absolutist paradigm of property, recognizing proper limits. Distributed by ISBS. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
David Garrick's accomplishments as an actor, manager, and theatrical innovator brought him great fame and fortune, and his ideas influenced not only his own age but succeeding ages as well. Yet as a playwright, a part of the elegant combination of talents that was David Garrick, he has never achieved the critical reputation he richly deserves, in main because of the unavailability of texts and the lack of proper assessment of the historic importance of his plays in the English theatre. This first complete edition makes available to scholars and students all the plays of Garrick in well edited texts, with commentary and notes. The two volumes of Garrick's own plays published together here include the twenty-two plays of the Garrick canon attributable to him. Garrick's claim to serious consideration as a playwright rests upon these plays, written between 1740 and 1775.They are not all masterpieces, but their inclusion here, arranged in chronological order, will enable the stage historian to assess Garrick's progress as a dramatist. Contents: Lethe; or, Esop in the Shades. A Dramatic Satire, 1740; The Lying Valet, 1741; Miss in Her Teens; or, The Medley of Lovers. A Farce, 1747; Lilliputt. A Dramatic Entertainment, 1756; The Male-Coquette; or, Seventeen Hundred Fifty Seven, 1757; The Guardian. A Comedy, 1759; Harlequin's Invasion; or, A Christmas Gambol, 1759; The Enchanter; or, Love and Magic. A Musical Drama, 1760; The Farmer's Return from London. An Interlude, 1762; The Clandestine Marriage. A Comedy, 1766; and Neck or Nothing. A Farce, 1766.
