Authority of the Actor in the Eighteenth-Century

Harriman-Smith, J

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-57853-2_12

Authority of the Actor in the Eighteenth-Century

Lookup NU author(s): Dr James Harriman-Smith ORCiD

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Abstract

This chapter distinguishes two ways in which the authority of actors with regard to Shakespeare was articulated during the playwright's seventeenth-and eighteenth-century rise to the status of a national poet. From the reopening of the theatres to the early 1700s, actors appeared as apostles, handing down Shakespeare's intentions from generation to generation as part of an independent performance tradition. The career of David Garrick, from 1741 to 1776 was marked, however, with the claim that, rather than inheriting a connection to Shakespeare, this new star was Shakespeare reborn. Resurrection had replaced succession as a mode for articulating the actor's authority.