PUBLIC LECTURE: "Accompanied in our tears": Women, Shakespeare and sentiment in the eighteenth-century theatre

Letter and diary accounts by female audience members frequently attest to them crying in the playhouse as they watched actors renowned for their emotional acting style (such as David Garrick) perform in adaptations of Shakespeare plays designed to augment the affective impact of the text. Assoc/Prof. Ritchie will argue the emphasis in these accounts on the shared nature of this emotional response with others in the audience enabled sentimental playgoing to function as an important form of affective community. The tears shed by female playgoers as they watched Shakespeare on stage therefore allowed women audience members to play a crucial role in the eighteenth-century cultural phenomena of sensibility and sociability.