Courtly Shakespeare, IV

By the 18th century, acting styles also invested Shakespeare with “courtly” virtues of control, dignity, stateliness. Dobson writes, “Shakespearian acting . . . in the decades following Betterton’s death in 1710, seems to have settled into a grandiloquent vein of static declamation, best exemplified by the stout James Quin (1693-1766) . . . . Reminiscences of Quin on the Covent Garden stage picture him holding forth as the central, heavily bewigged figure in a deferential semicircle of immobile colleagues, and such accounts of his performances suggest a style that was almost a parody of Betterton’s . . . . According to contemporaries, the only part in which he may have equalled Betterton was Falstaff, a role in which his ponderous grandeur of delivery was transformed into a triumph of mock-heroic comedy.” One wonders if it was deliberate.