Diderot and Shakespeare's Performability

This is the text of a five-minute presentation I recently gave as a training exercise at Cambridge. Since it was for a non-specialist audience, and had to be kept both short and clear, I thought it would make a great blog post. Enjoy. Introduction Two observations. The performances of the eighteenth-century actor David Garrick were praised as a “commentary” on Shakespeare's playtext; however, thirty years after Garrick's retirement, romantic critics such as Hazlitt and Lamb wrote that Shakesp..