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Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography
Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography
Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography
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Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography

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“Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography” examines theatrical biography as a nascent genre in eighteenth-century England. This study specifically focuses on Thomas Davies’ 1780 memoir of David Garrick as the first moment of mastery in the genre’s history, the three-way war for the right to tell Charles Macklin’s story at the turn of the century and James Boaden’s theatrical biography spree in the 1820s and 1830s, including the lives of John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, Dorothy Jordan and Elizabeth Inchbald. This project investigates the extent to which biographers envisioned themselves as artists, inheriting the anxiety of impermanence and correlating fear of competition that plagued their thespian subjects. It traces a suggestive, but not determinative, outline of generic development, noting the shifting generic features that emerge in context of a given work’s predecessors. Drawing heavily on primary sources, then-contemporary reviews and archival material in the form of extra-illustrated or “scrapbooked” editions of the biographies, this text is invested in the ways that the increasing emphasis on materiality was designed to consolidate, but often challenged, the biographer’s authority. This turn to materiality also authorized readerly participation, allowing readers to “co-author” biographies through the use of material insertions, asserting their own presence in the texts about beloved thespians.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherAnthem Press
Release dateDec 15, 2017
ISBN9781783086689
Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography

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    Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography - Amanda Weldy Boyd

    Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography

    Anthem Studies in Theatre and Performance

    Anthem Studies in Theatre and Performance takes a broad, global approach to cultural analysis to examine and critique a wide range of performative acts from the most traditional forms of theatre studies (music, theatre and dance) to more popular, less structured forms of cultural performance. The twenty-first century in particular has seen theatre and performance studies become a major perspective for examining, understanding and critiquing contemporary culture and its historical roots. In addition to traditional theatre studies, then, the series takes as its subject international folk performances, minstrel and music hall shows, vaudeville, burlesque, ballroom dance, rock concerts, professional wrestling, football and soccer matches, snake charming, American snake-handling religions, shamanism, street protests, Nascar or Formula 1 races, tractor pulls, fortune telling, circuses, techno-mobbing, the gestures of painting and writing, and even the performance that denies itself, that pretends that it is not play(ing). Performance is thus a vital manifestation of culture that is enacted, a form to be experienced, recorded, analysed and theorized. It is among the most useful and dynamic foci for the global study of culture.

    Series Editor

    S. E. Gontarski – Florida State University, USA

    Editorial Board

    Alan Ackerman – University of Toronto, Canada

    Herbert Blau – University of Washington, USA

    Enoch Brater – University of Michigan, USA

    Annamaria Cascetta – Università Cattolica, Milan, Italy

    Robson Corrêa de Camargo – Universidade Federal de Goiás, Brazil

    Stephen A. Di Benedetto – University of Miami, USA

    Christopher Innes – York University, Canada

    Anna McMullan – University of Reading, UK

    Martin Puchner – Harvard University, USA

    Kris Salata – Florida State University, USA

    W. B. Worthen – Barnard College, Columbia University, USA

    Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography

    Amanda Weldy Boyd

    Anthem Press

    An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

    www.anthempress.com

    This edition first published in UK and USA 2018

    by ANTHEM PRESS

    75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

    or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

    and

    244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

    © Amanda Weldy Boyd 2018

    The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

    All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

    British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

    A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

    ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-666-5 (Hbk)

    ISBN-10: 1-78308-666-1 (Hbk)

    This title is also available as an e-book.

    CONTENTS

    Acknowledgments

    Introduction: Competition and Legitimacy

    Colley Cibber’s Complaint as Generic Demand

    Theatrical Biography as a Legitimate Concern

    Overview of Chapters

    Postscript: Forestalling Objections about the Decidedly Masculine Face of the Biographer

    1.Davies’s Name […] in Fame’s Brightest Page Shall on Garrick Attend: From Anonymous to Personalized Participation in the Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick

    Johnson and Davies

    The Earlier Biographies of Garrick

    The Main Attraction: Davies’s Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick (1780)

    Editorial and Readerly Interventions

    Davies as an Enduring Figure of Theatrical Biography

    2.His Work, My Words: Anxiety and Competition in the Posthumous Lives of Charles Macklin, Comedian

    Establishing Expectations: The Biographer as Artist

    Rising to the Biographical Occasion

    First Fruits: Congreve’s Authentic Memoirs of the Late Mr. Charles Macklin (1798)

    Lines of Competition Embellished: Kirkman’s Memoirs of the Life of Charles Macklin (1799)

    An Impressionistic Memoir: Cooke’s New Species of Biography (1804)

    Macklin, Interrupted: Multiple Threats of Displacement

    Extending the Memoirs of Charles Macklin: J. J. Cossart and the Act of Annotating

    3.Epistolary Resurrections: James Boaden and the Rise of the Professional Thespian Biographer

    James Boaden as Goodman Delver

    Professional Approaches: Privileging Aural/Textual and Documented Sources

    Letters and Collected Personal Archives

    Time’s Effects: Boaden between Davies and Campbell

    James and John Boaden, Father and Son, Clash over Sister Arts

    Epilogue: The Limits of Materially Bound Permanence

    Notes

    References

    Index

    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    The most difficult part of a book-length undertaking is narrowing down the field of people to whom I am indebted. When you think about the amount of effort on the part of so many people, you realize that every book is a miracle of sorts! I am grateful, then, to have the opportunity to thank many of these miracle-makers who have helped in the fruition of this project.

    First, and most immediately, I wish to thank my mentor, Emily Anderson, who guided me through grad school and then into the real world and made it look easy. I hope that you see your continued mentorship reflected in this text, and that I have done justice to the hours of discussion about this project that we have shared. I so fondly remember you imitating Colley Cibber’s cry of A harse, a harse, my kingdom for a harse! during one of our meetings with such immeasurable zest! May my words and delivery in the upcoming pages be similarly inspired by the exuberance of the eighteenth century and of its present-day fans.

    I wish to thank Joseph Dane for his clear-eyed insight, wisecracks, and wisdom, as well as Leo Braudy, Heather James, and Thomas Habinek, all of whom have provided helpful encouragement and criticism. My research skills have greatly benefitted from conversations with Bruce Smith, Rebecca Lemon, Anthony Kemp, and David Roman. I additionally thank the English Department at the University of Southern California (USC), which has funded research projects at the Folger and at the Houghton, as well as numerous conference presentations. I’d like to thank Peter Mancall and the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute for supporting me through a summer fellowship during which I first worked on theatrical biographies of Charles Macklin.

    I am appreciative of the assistance of many librarians and library staff who helped me secure materials for this project: USC’s Special Collections, the Houghton Library, the Huntington, and the Folger Library each provided inspiring workplaces in which to interact with the past. My particular appreciation goes to Melanie Leung, the Folger Image Request Coordinator, for her assistance in navigating the use of images for the collage that comprises the cover of this book.

    My gratitude goes to Craig Svonkin and his annual Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) conferences, through which I have gotten key feedback on aspects of the present work. I also celebrate with this project the celebrity/performance studies group at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), rather newly formed as an official caucus, for offering a network of scholars whose questions always lead to more questions, as it should be.

    It was through a paper given at ASECS that I met Mark Pollard, then a commissioning editor for Pickering and Chatto, who, by showing early and sustained interest in my research on Macklin, led me to consider how my ideas might resonate with a larger audience, and whose enthusiasm for my project led him to find my manuscript a home at his next job with Anthem Press.

    I am grateful to Tej P. S. Sood for offering me this opportunity, as well as Katy Miller, Abi Pandey, and the rest of the editorial staff at Anthem for having faith in my project, for designing clear expectations, and for making this adventure in publication so pleasant. I wish also to salute the three anonymous colleagues who provided encouraging and detailed reviews on an early chapter draft, and the three additional anonymous reviewers who commented upon a later full draft: I hope I have done justice to your insights. Additionally, this manuscript has benefitted heartily from the efforts of Annalisa Zox-Weaver and Isabel Stein, delightfully detailed copy editors. I am confident that any errors herein remaining are my own, for which I apologize to the reader, all six reviewers, and to Annalisa and Isabel.

    I wish to thank Steven Edgington and Cora Alley at my present institution, Hope International University, for encouraging me as I worked on this project, and to my colleagues at Hope for providing a friendly environment for teaching and thinking. My gratitude goes to Robin Hartman and Katy Lines of the Darling Library for their generous assistance and support.

    Among earlier influences that deserve my heartfelt gratitude is Helen Deutsch of UCLA, whose seminar on Alexander Pope illuminated the eighteenth century and introduced me to the joys of archival research. Karen Cunningham was also instrumental in teaching me how to craft a sustained argument and encouraging me to work within my own writing style to do so.

    My friends at First Presbyterian Church of Orange have cheered me on, supporting me with a scholarship and continual encouragement. My thanks also to the members of the Church of the Valley, as well as several early teachers who encouraged my interest in someday becoming an author, especially Stephen Collins, Patrick Schlosser, Ann Hampton, and Brenda Martin.

    A tip of the hat to several good friends and colleagues who perhaps have heard (and read) more than they ever might have wanted to about Garrick, Macklin, and Kemble: Amanda Bloom, with whom I have been lucky enough to travel, through laughter and tears, lock-step with through the eighteenth century in grad school and beyond, and to Kenni Palmer, whose Amazonian appetite for debate and discussion complemented by unflagging generosity of spirit makes her a cherished friend indeed. Andrew T. Post and John Kaucher each have provided a much-appreciated analytical eye for style and content. And, finally, to the best of friends, Beth Grimm, who found me in a library in the first place, and who has since provided a consistent sounding board for my ideas, responding with the perfect blend of humor and perspective.

    To my family—Jennifer, who stimulated the competitive desire in me that helps me get things done; Shelby, who is wise enough to know when to take a break for the day; and my extended family, who has cheered on my writing career from the very beginning, I thank you. As for my parents, Jonathan and Lisa, here is the book that you always said you knew would happen. Our day has come, and I hope you feel a great deal of accomplishment in having helped shepherd me (and my manuscript) in countless ways. Thank you for your steadfast belief in me. And a tip of the hat to Eric and Evan, whose presence during revisions was a constant source of delight.

    Finally—finally—to Jonathan Boyd, my husband and my constant champion, whose excellent examples of creativity and industry (seen in the form of the book cover’s collage of six meaningful pieces of theatrical miscellanea) are only matched by boundless goodwill and humor, and whose words brighten the heart as well as the mind—I am so glad that you have been riding the bus side by side with me every step of the way. I offer you this book and my love forever and always.

    INTRODUCTION: COMPETITION AND LEGITIMACY

    Colley Cibber’s Complaint as Generic Demand

    In 1735, Charles Macklin, a comedian, put out another actor’s eye with a cane in the green room at Drury Lane, claiming that the lesser actor had stolen his prop wig. The offending actor, Thomas Hallam, died shortly thereafter, much regretted by Macklin. Incredibly, Macklin recovered from this scandal and enjoyed a lengthy career delighting the British public. Possibly more incredible was the apocryphal claim that many potential witnesses were unable to supply testimony about the skirmish because they had been too engrossed in reading a draft of the riveting autobiography of a fellow actor, Colley Cibber.¹ Thus, legend has it that Nero played the fiddle while Rome burned, and actors read Cibber’s autobiography while Macklin lay in the center of the green room, weeping over the disfigured body of young Hallam.

    Before the story goes much further, it seems important to include that the source of the above story was none other than Colley Cibber himself, who, along with his duties as actor, stage manager, playwright, and poet laureate, appeared to be his own best publicist. Yet the popularity of Cibber’s An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (published in 1740) was—and is—undeniable, having outstripped all other accomplishments of a remarkably accomplished man.² While small attempts at theatrical biography already existed, the above anecdote indicates the novelty of Cibber’s book.³ Although it was technically an autobiography rather than a biography, Cibber’s book was revolutionary within the nascent genre, particularly because Cibber spent so much of the Apology functioning as a biographer of other actors in order to fulfill his stated desire of providing, concurrently, a history of the stage from the Restoration through 1740. As the bellwether of this new genre, Cibber attempted to describe both the need for, and the limitations of, the biographical project as specifically applied to thespian subjects: Pity it is, that the momentary beauties flowing from an harmonious elocution cannot, like those of poetry, be their own record; that the animated graces of the player can live no longer than the instant breath and motion that represent them; or, at the least, can but faintly glimmer through the memory and imperfect attestation of a few surviving spectators.⁴ Evidently the impulse for those surviving spectators to commemorate, critique, and compile was stronger than the fear of confronting the ephemera of performance.⁵

    Despite Cibber’s dubiously sincere call for approaching theatrical memoir with a sense of futility, and the sentiment’s popularity with biographers and critics thereafter, I would like to suggest that theatrical biography of the period does, to a certain extent, succeed in overcoming obstacles to representation because of unique formal features (such as points, which were a specific means of analyzing performance in the eighteenth century) and uniquely applied features (such as anecdotes and letters) that became ensconced in the archive available to theatrical biographers. With time, this archive broadened due to an increasingly competitive field for biographers, who were interested in finding new ways to claim their subject’s stories and, in effect, to overcome to Cibber’s seeming pessimism about the biographical enterprise.

    William Hazlitt, writing in 1817, expands upon Cibber’s observation by directly linking the ephemerality of acting with the need for a surrogate presence, or for a new presence entirely: he notes that the genius of a great actor perishes with him, ‘leaving the world no copy.’ However, he adds, This is a misfortune, or at least an unpleasant circumstance, to actors; but it is, perhaps, an advantage to the stage. It leaves an opening to originality [in the form of a new actor who, while replacing an old one, does not seek to be an exact copy].⁶ A careful reading of theatrical biography, with a focus on what the biographer is doing, and how, shows that the theatrical biographer is caught in the bind between Hazlitt’s temporally bound call for a copy of the actor and for a later occurring original to supplant the need for that earlier actor. Ultimately, biographers seek to copy (or reproduce) the actor through the individual author’s original approach to the subject’s life.

    This line of thought rests on the belief, buoyed up by close reading of these texts, that theatrical biographers are subject to concerns about temporality and nonpermanence that might otherwise appear to be solved, or at least mitigated, by the existence of a tangible textual artifact (the written biography) in contrast to a fleeting performance on stage. In The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), Diana Taylor argues that scholars pay too much attention to the supposed rift between the written and the spoken word, where from the sixteenth century onward the problem in fact lies with the Western preoccupation with a fixed, reliable (written) archive, in contrast to an ephemeral (performed, bodily) repertoire.⁷ In characterizing the written archive as reliable, readers might miss how performative the act of writing can be. Taylor herself alludes to this by noting that an individual entry in the written archive requires a framing device, fashioned by the specific author, and thus never is devoid of political, cultural, or social implications. She observes, too, that repertoire can be self-sustaining, but is less often in the case of individual performers (and never with individual performances); thus, individual performers rely on a written archive as presented by a framer or framers.⁸ The present book argues that the framing device, rather than acting adversely against the archive, works alongside it to create a product that functions on multiple levels to record not only the actor, who might otherwise be at risk of being lost to time, but also the anxiety of his biographer. In other words, it seems that the theatrical biographer, confronted with the difficult task of preserving a specific thespian and confronting the limits of his own genre and, in some cases, a cadre of rival claimants to his task, became exquisitely aware of his own ephemeral relation to time, and sought the assurance of his own reputation or legacy through his role as biographer.

    Marvin Carlson, in The Haunted Stage (2001), explains that all performers must confront the ghosts, or memories held by the audience and by the performer himself, of the previous persons who have played a role, of the previous roles the particular actor has assayed, and of other conditions that overlap with prior performer or spectator memory.⁹ He notes that all theatre is thus retrospective, because the audience evaluates the current performance based on past experiences. By amplifying and recontextualizing the temporal concerns of actors, the act of biographical writing becomes a performance more closely allied with theatre itself than with other types of writing or representation. Because theatrical biographers, in the process of completing their projects, are attuned to the actors’ temporal challenges as well as to the biographer’s own difficulties in trying to contain the actor’s performance within the text, the biography preserves two layers of artistic anxiety. These time-related concerns, shared by actors and their biographers, manifest in biography primarily through concerns about originality and competition: the theatrical biographer recognizes the need to be perceived as an artist, and with that, recognizes the threat to an individual’s relevance and artistic legacy posed by other practitioners.

    Theatrical Biography as a Legitimate Concern

    Is theatrical biography subject to a competitive spirit that is not encountered in literary biography or in fiction writing? Many scholars have suggested that the competitive basis of originality can be seen in most artistic genres, but I believe that the theatrical biography treats this conceptual quandary in a special way, both by virtue of its historical conditions and its generic goals.¹⁰

    Although I call upon performance studies scholars, this monograph is primarily one of theatrical and literary history: I am interested in what the biographer is doing, how he perceives his role, and how his readers received these efforts. My project takes its roots from my own challenges in finding criticism that deals with biography outside of literary biography, or the study of famous authors. In the rare instances that the eighteenth-century biographer is afforded any attention as author of the work, the investigation is either fleeting or is focused on Boswell.¹¹ A survey of the field clearly indicates that biographical studies hold a tremendous bias toward literary biography, and within that, toward more modern biographers. Nonetheless, even very modern literary biography cannot escape the suspicion of generic illegitimacy in the realm of original artistry. In 2000, critic Tom Paulin (who is also a poet and a biographer, notably, of Hazlitt, the first modern historiographer of fame) attacked Richard Holmes’s Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (2000), asking: Is the biographer an artist who can and should exist on equal terms with the dramatist, fiction writer and poet? The short and robust answer is ‘certainly not.’¹² Currently, many biographies are treated as permanent (if frequently flawed) vessels conveying important knowledge about their subjects rather than as dynamic texts worthy of aesthetic study. Jean Marc Blanchard (1978, p. 668) speaks to this problem by assuming in his criticism that autobiography is a literary genre, whereas biography is not. Laura Marcus, in Auto/biographical Discourses (1994), comments on biography’s strange position between history and literature,¹³ noting that whereas autobiography is approached as a literary genre, biography remains very largely untheorized.¹⁴ This division calls to attention the interplay between originality and truth, wherein autobiography is seen as original because of its remarkable authenticity, even if it is not always particularly authoritative regarding the truth. In fact, since a remarkable vogue for autobiography in the 1970s, that genre has enjoyed a great deal of scholarly attention, to the point that the majority of theoretical books preferentially focus on the author who writes of herself rather than of another.

    My task, then, is at least partially to examine theatrical biography as a proper scholarly concern, to supplement the myriad accounts of autobiography and literary biography. In attempting to account for how the theatrical biographer succeeds and fails at capturing his subject, I hope to reconsider the biographer’s potential role as artist rather than as rote recorder. In effect, my project’s theoretical makeup combines Jack Stillinger’s 1991 attack on the myth of the Romantic author, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius, with Leon Edel’s call in his BIOGRAPHY: A Manifesto (1978), which claims a spot for the biographer as an artist whose self is recorded within his work. Edel’s work is hardly finished. In 2012, biographer Stacy Schiff wrote an article entitled The Dual Lives of the Biographer, in which she expresses the difficulty of comprehending the unstructured present events in her own life while simultaneously attempting to recreate a seamless narrative of another’s (finished) lived experience. Despite Boswell’s clearly not strictly applied maxim that the biographer should use solely the subject’s words or correspondence to round out the historical record, the reality that the biographer uses himself to fill in gaps in the subject’s life—factual or interpretative —is understood. How the biographer might resonate through the absent subject, rather than within pockets of the subject’s absence, is less considered.¹⁵ Diana Taylor argues, The repertoire requires presence; the authors of theatrical biography, in seeking to enshrine the repertoire within the archive, offer their own presence, to varying effects.¹⁶

    Joseph Roach discusses the public intimacy that arises with the concept of celebrity, a desire that leads to the general circulation of their images in the absence of their persons […] a mental mélange of half-remembered public appearances, painted or graphic portraits and bits of anecdotal gossip.¹⁷ He equates the acting process itself with the fans’ obsessive attempts to claim access to the entertainer through material trappings vaguely associated with the artist: just as fans substitute images and items for celebrity presence, acting itself is an endless process of auditioning surrogates for an inaccessible original—the character as written, before the first interpretation in live performance.

    Both Roach and Carlson, by virtue of their focus on performance studies, are highly attuned to the temporality of criticism and standards: in assessing trends of natural acting through several decades of acting theory, Carlson notes a repetitive practice wherein the father’s ghost is passed over but only to summon the ghost of the grandfather.¹⁸ Reviving an old precedent can be an effective technique, as a new performer can do something that has already been done—but has not been seen by the present audience—under the guise of novelty. Thus, even after Davies seems to establish particular criteria for successful theatrical biography, later practitioners such as Congreve will jump backward to a prior precedent for general life writing. The difference is the ease of comparison between fathers and grandfathers when the written text still lingers, even if its popularity has faded.

    In staking its own claim for significance as a genre, and within individual efforts to establish lasting supremacy over a given thespian’s story, theatrical biography often sought novelty (and, ironically, distinction) by its association with other forms of art, especially the novel, painting, and newspapers. Before examining individual cases of innovation and hybridization (and, in some cases, regression), it may be useful to briefly consider theatrical biography’s relation to these three guiding presences, all of which provided inspiration to early practitioners.

    The novel as a genre achieves its ascendancy during the lifetime of my project, which spans from 1740 to 1833. The earlier date represents Cibber’s Apology and the approximate beginning of David Garrick’s and Charles Macklin’s mainstream London careers, and the later date is determined by James Boaden’s final biography of an eighteenth-century thespian. Both the novel and theatrical biography come into focus as genres during the same period. The novel becomes heavily invested in mock biography, and biography borrows from novelistic techniques in order to compete with pure fiction.¹⁹ Moreover, in a quest for perceived authenticity, both genres become interested in material artifacts, taking shape in the novel and in theatrical biography as epistolary correspondence. This trend would eventually mushroom into material collections of letters and artifacts inserted into Lives by fans intent on expanding the reach or comprehensiveness of their copy of a favorite thespian biography.

    Just as novels and theatrical biography seem to have a symbiotic relationship (see, especially, Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of the present work), painting emerges as a key facilitator of and competitor to theatrical biography’s project of preserving the actor’s memory.²⁰ The relationship between the two genres was not just theoretical, but formal, based upon a shared vocabulary. Shearer West argues that the change in acting styles and acting expectations (a circuitous relationship) was greatly affected by the establishment of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768 and the subsequent development of a critical vocabulary with which to evaluate painting.²¹ West’s argument extends to the possibility that acting styles shifted partially because of the remodeling of the theatres during actor and theatre manager John Philip Kemble’s tenure (a larger space meant more emphasis on sound rather than on facial expression or gesture), but also because periodicals liked to spark competition between actors who might otherwise assay a role very similarly, especially as the vocabulary for critiquing acting began to coalesce, and this vocabulary equally benefited theatrical biography and further linked it to painting and newspapers. It would stand to reason, by extension, that turn-of-the-century biographers got more competitive as their subjects, the actors, sought innovation in their field, and as painters encroached ever closer on biographical prerogative.²² The fraught but often productive relationship between the two genres will be touched on in Chapter 1 and explored at length in Chapter 3.

    A third and particularly advantageous partnership arises between theatrical biography and periodicals. Stuart Sherman, whose work is on newspapers and their effects on eighteenth-century perceptions of time, singles out periodicals as the place where diurnality and immortality converge.²³ Theatrical biography often started as germs in newspapers, and returned to circulation as bite-sized reductions of a full-length work. It is not coincidental that a surge in theatrical biography occurs in the 1780s, a time when the newspaper obituary becomes a fad; conveniently, 1779 marked the year of the actor David Garrick’s death. Garrick carefully curated his own image in newspapers and in other media, and the success of his campaign for immortality became apparent.

    Sherman sees in the efforts of Garrick and other thespians a quest to avoid obsolescence: At stake is the question not only of what press and player might do for each other tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow but also of whether the not-altogether-poor player’s reputation might outlast, in any way and to any extent, his corporeal hour upon the stage.²⁴ With the newspaper as Garrick’s perpetual-motion machine, print achieved a reputation as a safeguard of reputation, a testimony of having existed and created art. This material documentation is also, I believe, why literary biography seems more legitimate—the art that spurred the biography, and that serves as an extension of the biographical subject’s person, is still easily referenced. Furthermore, although newspapers were often thrown away, and easily replaced (an asset for keeping new information circulating about an actor), full-length theatrical biography increasingly became crafted and marketed as a collectible, permanent good—a fixed monument to the actor.

    The interest in generating an archive, and the potential to use contributions to that archive as a way of asserting one’s own presence in addition to that of the archive’s subject, can be seen in readers’ interactions with these texts. The final sections of

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