Criticism, Performance, and the Passions in the Eighteenth Century

Eighteenth-century theatre critics reserved their highest praise for the transitions of a play, recognising its most striking passages as moments of larger sequential transformation. Through a recovery of this perspective, scholars of theatre and literary culture gain renewed understanding of performance, the passions, and criticism in the 1700s.

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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.