Romantic Actors and Bardolatry

The Author: Celestine Woo is Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Empire State College in Hartsdale, New York, where she teaches Shakespeare, British literature, and writing. She received her Ph.D. from New York University. She has published poetry as well as articles on Shakespeare, Sarah Siddons, Asian American literature, and children’s literature.

«‘Romantic Actors and Bardolatry’ persuasively demonstrates that the best-known actors of the Romantic period not only helped shape the critical discourse on Shakespeare but also produced a body of theory that rivals critics and scholars of the age. By examining the writings of Garrick, Kemble, Siddons, and Kean – and the effects that their interpretations had on a culture increasingly drawn to the celebrity of its actors and its most famous playwright – Celestine Woo broadens our understanding of the history of Romantic criticism and theory. Her book makes the case that the actor as scholar is an important topic of analysis for all theatre historians.» (Catherine Burroughs, Wells College)«‘Romantic Actors and Bardolatry’ joins an impressive body of work on the theatre that has been transforming our understanding of Romantic-period literature and cultural production more broadly. Woo’s distinctive approach here is to consider the decisive and often quite calculated role that the leading Shakespearean performers of the age (Garrick, Kemble, Siddons, and Kean) played in the development of ‘bardolatry’, the treatment of Shakespeare as national icon and cultural commodity. Through close studies that range from stage gesture and elocution to theatre reviews and emerging scholarly analysis, Woo reminds us of just how central Shakespearean performance was to the development of Romantic culture, particularly where character and the passions are concerned. Indeed, the tendency to understand Shakespeare in terms of character, easily treated as a reductive Romantic development, emerges here as an opening on to a rich field of cultural possibilities. Romantic Actors and Bardolatry is particularly astute in its treatment of transactions between stage performance and critical reviewing, so that we witness performers responding to the press, even as familiar theorists of the arts (particularly Hazlitt) are conditioned by styles of contemporary performance.» (Kevin Gilmartin, University of York)