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Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography

Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography

Amanda Weldy Boyd

(2017)

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Abstract

“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.


Amanda Weldy Boyd, an adjunct associate professor of English at Hope International University, received her PhD from University of Southern California and her undergraduate degree from University of California, Los Angeles. She specializes in eighteenth-century theatre history, teaching courses in drama as well as literature.


“In a substantial and important first book, Amanda Weldy Boyd succeeds admirably in bringing to life the unsung praise-singers who kept alive the memories of the greatest actors of their time or perhaps of all time.”
—Joseph Roach, Sterling Professor of Theater, Yale University, USA


"Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography” examines theatrical biography as a nascent genre in eighteenth-century England. This study suggests a visible—but not impermeable—teleology from Thomas Davies to James Boaden in the development of theatrical biography as a professional enterprise. Chapter One explores Davies, the first significant biographer to throw off the shadows of anonymity and weld his own image to his subject, David Garrick. The second chapter traces three biographies of Charles Macklin written by biographers dueling amongst themselves for the right to tell Macklin’s story in the post-Davies competitive market. Finally, the third chapter tells the story of the serial biographer James Boaden’s attempts to build a professional reputation for himself as a biographer and prominent participatory character in the multiple “Lives” he tells, including those of John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, Dorothy Jordan, and Elizabeth Inchbald. In each instance of producing a theatrical biography, the author is confronted not only with his duty to represent the actor, but the need to do so in an original, compelling manner that sets his account apart from other contenders and guarantees the permanency of his account as a treasured artifact of the stage rather than a disposable commodity.

The willful encouragement of viewing literary materiality as an antidote to ephemeral stage-business leads in turn to the absorption of prior biographical works and letters by authors, and reverberates in their readers’ quests to augment their copies of theatrical biographies through adding playbills, marginal notes, etchings, paintings, newspaper clippings, and even funerary souvenirs that not only testified to their interest in the stage, but secured their existence as well by evidence of participation. Thus, the author at once guaranteed the thespian’s legacy would live on while hitching his own likelihood of being remembered to the actor. The audience followed suit by adding their own personal touches, forming a palimpsest of participants. Drawing heavily on primary sources, then-contemporary reviews, and archival material in the form of extra-illustrated or “scrapbooked” editions of the biographies, this book is invested in the ways that the increasing emphasis on materiality was designed to consolidate, but often challenged, the biographer’s authority.

The book provides an introduction to theatrical biography as an immensely popular genre in the eighteenth century that deserves more scholarly attention. Currently, theatrical biography is usually overlooked or encountered solely in excerpts offered to advance individual research goals; the texts are perceived as repositories of facts or the odd opinion, more akin to a reference work than anything innately artistic. This study’s contribution is to read these biographies in context, exploring their participation in a developing poetics of a new artistic subgenre, from the content of the works and the concerns of its authors to the responses that these biographies elicited from their readers.

Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Cover Cover 1
Front Matter i
Half-title i
Series information ii
Title page iii
Copyright information iv
Tables of Contents v
Acknowledgments vii
Chapter int-3 i
Introduction: Competition and Legitimacy 1
Colley Cibber’s Complaint as Generic Demand 1
Theatrical Biography as a Legitimate Concern 3
Overview of Chapters 8
Postscript: Forestalling Objections about the Decidedly Masculine Face of the Biographer 10
Chapter 1 “Davies’s Name […] in Fame’s Brightest Page Shall on Garrick Attend 13
Johnson and Davies 13
A brief sketch of Mr. Davies, and his motivations considered 15
The Earlier Biographies of Garrick 18
Generic conflation: The Juvenile Adventures of David Ranger (1757) 22
Testing the waters: Leonato/Davies’s “Eulogium on Mr. Garrick’s Leaving the Stage” (1776) 25
Defining moments in genre: Garrick by the “Old Comedian” (1779) 26
Serialized anonymous “Biographical Anecdotes of the Late Mr. Garrick” (1779) 28
The Main Attraction: Davies’s Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick (1780) 30
Reviews of the Life of Garrick as extensions of Davies’s character 37
Editorial and Readerly Interventions 40
Serialized Life of Garrick (Davies’s edition) 41
Improving on the original: Murphy’s Life of David Garrick (1801) 43
Unobtrusive updating: An editorial approach to Davies’s Life of Garrick (1808) 47
A different book of “scraps and ends”: Queen Charlotte’s extra-illustrated Life of Garrick 50
Overwriting a Life: An anonymous Life of Garrick scrapbook 53
Davies as an Enduring Figure of Theatrical Biography 58
Chapter 2 His Work, My Words: Anxiety and Competition in The Posthumous Lives of Charles Macklin, Comedian 61
Establishing Expectations: The Biographer as Artist 61
Tracing the parallels between actor and author 63
Rising to the Biographical Occasion 66
The part of the biographer 69
First Fruits: Congreve’s Authentic Memoirs of the Late Mr. Charles Macklin (1798) 75
Lines of Competition Embellished: Kirkman’s Memoirs of the Life of Charles Macklin (1799) 78
An Impressionistic Memoir: Cooke’s “New Species” of Biography (1804) 85
Macklin, Interrupted: Multiple Threats of Displacement 91
Extending the Memoirs of Charles Macklin: J. J. Cossart and the Act of Annotating 97
Chapter 3 Epistolary Resurrections: James Boaden and The Rise of The Professional Thespian Biographer 103
James Boaden as “Goodman Delver” 103
Professional Approaches: Privileging Aural/Textual and Documented Sources 107
Letters and Collected Personal Archives 125
Time’s Effects: Boaden between Davies and Campbell 140
James and John Boaden, Father and Son, Clash over Sister Arts 146
End Matter 151
Epilogue: The Limits of Materially Bound Permanence 151
Notes 155
Introduction: Competition and Legitimacy 155
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 157
2 His Work, My Words: Anxiety and Competition in the Posthumous Lives of Charles Macklin,Comedian 169
3 Epistolary Resurrections: James Boaden and the Rise of the Professional Thespian Biographer 178
References 189
Index 199