art.6 Like Voltaire,Diderot had been nurtured very largely on English thought.Although he never witnessed English theatre, except in theperson of Garrick, he read widely, especially Englis

. The inspiration of nature is stressed, to be sure,but the artist does more than merely imitate nature: he drawsfrom within himself. Art is the creation of the individualimaginat

. Voltaire sought also to introduce more action intotraged

From his friend the theatre-manager Jean Monnet he orderedreflector oil lamps such as he had seen used in Castor et Pollux,as well as scenic designs. Returning to Drury Lane after a tourabroad in 1765-6 he produced the magic opera Cymon withsplendid scenic effects. Horace Walpole described another ofhis showpieces, King Arthur, remarking of some of its scenes-arustic bridge, a Gothic church with stained glass window-that Garrick was attempting to compete with the Paris opera.Whatever Garrick's debt to Continental staging, he becameidentified on the Continent during his lifetime with a style ofacting and staging of unprecedented realism. He also becameinseparably identified with Shakesp

. Part of the audience sat on the stage at Drury Laneuntil the house was enlarged in 1762. Lighting and scenerywere poor before Garrick made improvements along the linesof Continental practice. Whereas he had scorned the declama-tory style of acting at the Com6die frangaise, scenery, stagingand lighting at the Opera had favourably impressed h

Drury Lane in 1747. He continued tplayed no fewer than seve

ss of the subjecrespects, by using many paspeaking) while continuinkeeping with the role. Apraised his walk and thesaid

ave a rival'. From ttragedian James Quinn, on the other hand, cation (intended to be devastating): 'If this yoright, then we have a

David Garrick made his debut as a youth ofplaying Richard III. Charles Macklin had earlway to a more natural acting style with his Shythereby, Garrick made a rapid conquest of thplayed eighteen characters in six months, anremark from Pope: 'that young man never haactor, and will never

ic ballet. On English stages Gafecting a style of acting that broke sharply wdeclamation and movem

e recent trend in treating Shakespeare's standing in thRestoration and early eighteenth century has been in the directionshowing how little Shakespeare was regard

Garrick’s career illustrates that, when it came to address-ing the fleeting nature of fame and life, no one type of memorial wassufficient.

Sterne’s tomb, with all its violations, stands as a testament to how hisstrategies of reenactment are appropriated by others—how, in death, he wasrecast as the character he brought back to life. And as the platform for thispractice, Sterne’s novel shows that tributes to the dead exist not merely inmonumental or written records, but in how these records are taken up byothers and reperformed

Garrick shortens Hamlet’s act 4, scene 3 discourse on worms; hedoes the same with Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s death.47 Then,in 1772, Garrick cut the gravedigger’s scene altogether, a drastic emen-dation meant to rectify what he termed the “rubbish of the fifth act.” 48Ostensibly, he cut the scene to speed up the pacing of the play, and alsoto address what contemporaries had found a disturbing juxtapositionbetween the play’s tragic ending and what the nineteenth-century biog-rapher James Boaden termed the graveyard scene’s “rude jocularity.”4

Garrick’s rewritings of Shakespearepresent the playscript as dynamic—something whose afterlife rests in thepromise that it can be rewritten. 5

is increas-ing reliance on newspapers to publicize his acting—what Stuart Sher-man terms his “tactical intimacy with newsprint”—in which his strategyof self-promotion depended on the fact that “by replicating their for-mat and changing their content every day, [newspapers] push toward anopen-ended run.”46 In both print and in performance, Garrick workedto reframe as a virtue those qualities of liveness and ephemerality that inanother context would carry with them the promise of decay.

Garrick’s constantrevisions to the text of Hamlet illustrate an attitude toward print consis-tent with his attitudes toward performance, in which keeping “the enter-prise alive” depends on the promise—all too familiar to an actor—of aninstallment yet to come.

The preference for Garrick as a monument, in these tributes, draws fromthe very ephemerality of his art—its “liveness”— that he, as an actor, else-where struggles against. It is the dynamism of his monument that prom-ises Shakespeare’s “revival,” something “the sculptor’s curious art” cannever bestow. In contrast to the static monument that smacks of dead-ness, its lack of animation confirming the lost life it commemorates butcannot renew, the actor as “living monument” promises the playwrightaccess to constant life

As he did so, he became notsimply a manifestation of the playwright’s characters, but a “living mon-ument” to the playwright himself

Isaac Taylor’s 1769 print Garrick with Shakespearean Characters,in which Garrick leans against the bust of Shakespeare while instruct-ing the other characters to “o’erstep not the modesty of nature,” or the1769 enamel miniature that features Shakespeare on one side, Garrickas Hamlet on the other (Garrick’s likeness is captioned, “Who heldthe mirror up to nature”). 39 Even more than the “point” that inspiresWilson’s portrait, such images emphasize the symbiotic relationshipGarrick encouraged between performance and the “sister arts.”

Such tributes reinforce the belief that thethoughts of Shakespeare, like those of Old Hamlet, remain accessibleeven from beyond the grave, as long as a suitable mouthpiece for thesethoughts exists. By inserting the actor back into one of his most famousroles, these tributes appoint Garrick as this mouthpiece, casting him asthe “Hamlet” to his “father’s” ghost. 3

Lichten-berg also considers how Garrick’s Hamlet urged spectators to become“attuned to Shakespeare’s mind,” and for More, the melding of Garrickwith Hamlet showed how “naturally, indeed . . . the ideas of the poetseem to mix with his [Garrick’s] own.”

his biographer Arthur Murphy would writeof his performance in the role, “the character he assumed, was legiblein his countenance; by the force of deep meditation he transformedhimself into the very man.” 31

Writing in 1775, towardthe very end of Garrick’s career, the theater aficionado Georg Chris-toph Lichtenberg would reflect on the cultural impact, as Hamlet, thatGarrick had made

Similarly, accordingto Hannah More, Garrick as Hamlet “seemed himself engaged in asuccession of affecting situations, not giving utterance to a speech, butto the instantaneous expression of his feelings . . . it was a fiction asdelightful as fancy and as touching as truth.

Associating himself with the part Shakespeare was rumored to haveplayed, then moving to the son who will commemorate his forgottenfather, Garrick used the role to advertise his aspirational relationshipto Shakespeare.

Benjamin Wilson further memorialized Garrick’s reaction in hisoft-reproduced 1754 painting of the scene. 27 Garrick himself encour-aged this focus by treating this moment in the play as a “point,” or apose held static specifically so that audiences could pause and appre-ciate the artistry of what the actor achieved onstage, and, in the caseof Wilson, translate this artistry into a portrait or print. 28 Years later,Lichtenberg duplicates the posture preserved in Wilson’s image, in hisdescription of seeing Garrick see the ghost:His hat falls to the ground and both his arms, especially the left, arestretched out nearly to their full length, with the hands as high as hishead, the right arm more bent and the hand lower, and the fingersapart.29

“As no Writer in any Age penned a Ghost like Shakespeare,”

It was this role in particular that would cement Garrick’s reputationas Shakespeare’s mouthpiece and successor.

“the definitive Hamlet.”2

Garrick’s Shakespeare obsession canbe seen throughout his career: in his performances of Shakespeareancharacters, his decisions as a theater manager to include more Shake-speare in the Drury Lane repertoire, and his experiments as a playwrightwith rewriting and restaging popular Shakespearean plays.18 As discussedin my first chapter, his major Shakespearean roles included, but were notlimited to, Richard III, Lear, Macbeth, Romeo, and Benedict; among hisShakespearean adaptations are Macbeth (1744), Romeo and Juliet (1748),Catharine and Petruchio (1756), Florizel and Perdita (1756), two versions ofThe Tempest (1756, 1773), and two versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream(1755, 1763). 1

emerging national reputation, such that the canonization of Shake-speare’s plays and the apotheosis of the author emerged from the full-scale adaptation of his works.

as the moment at which British society was mostdevoted to preserving the playwright was also the moment at which itwas most devoted to changing him.

Yet Garrick alsoembraced his transience as an advantage, a strategy evident in his deci-sion to absent himself for two years (from 1763 to 1765) from the Lon-don stage, so as to convince “the public, that the success and splendorof the stage depended solely on himself.” 16 This strategy, in which theexperience of his absence would inspire the clarion call for his return,was also one he developed in his interactions with the playwright whosework would likewise inspire Sterne

performance as the source of one’s—even another’s—lasting reputation:the author writes the words, but the performer and act of performanceimmortalize what the author has done.

“fleeting and shadowy essence of thestage.”12 Garrick, too, was wracked by fears of what Stuart Sherman calls“theatrical extinction.”13 Throughout his career, his biographer ArthurMurphy explains, “The love of Fame was Garrick’s ruling passion, evento anxiety,” and if “Anxiety for his fame was [Garrick’s] reigning foible,”such anxiety seemed to emerge from Garrick’s fear that, as an actor, hecould always and easily be replaced.

Sterne’s understand-ing of how Garrick’s immortality was affirmed by the actor’s art.

One answer was animmediate association with the theater and the theater’s ability to“captur[e] the attention of a mass audience.

Garrick had taken over the theater management ofDrury Lane, married, and established himself as the preeminent actorof the day.

align the practices of print with thoseof performance

Ephemerality in the play thus becomes crucial to, as opposed toat odds with, the process of commemoration, and it is this fact, I argue,that explains the importance of Hamlet to both Garrick and Sterne.

Hamlet, then, challenges the idea that memorials must exist solelyin fixed and static records, distinguished from the ephemeral qualitiesthey commemorate

Hamlet’s ability to ventriloquizehis father’s spoken command—work in tandem with the preservationalcapacities of print.

The tablets, papers,stones containing written tributes will, like the human body, erode andage, while the verbal tribute, read or repeated, exists only in the momentof its articulation

This passage thus stands out not only for its general emphasis onmemory—a concept central to the play—but for its exploration ofremembering as a process that relies upon both writing and speech.

amlet exposes writ-ten records to be only partial memorials, in need of being supplementedwith some alternate technique

move beyond tradi-tional attitudes toward ephemerality, commemoration, and the printedword,

the concept of the living monument heldout the promise—to the memory of Shakespeare, but also to Garrick—of constant life. For worshippers of Garrick, the concept of the livingmonument also asked them to reconsider how they had thought aboutthe function of more traditional monuments, from portraits, to statues,to the printed text.

but while playing Ham-let, Garrick’s identity would merge increasingly with that of his charac-ter, and eventually with that of Shakespeare himself. This phenomenonwould help Garrick offset his own ephemerality by supporting his statusas what his contemporaries termed a “living monument” to Shakespeare.