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Scholarship concerning David Garrick's (1717-79) adaptation of Shakespeares The Win- ters Tale (c. 1611) focuses almost exclusively on the privileged role of sentimentality in eighteenth-century drama. In particular, performance critics including Irene G. Dash, Jean Marsden, and Vanessa Cunningham go to great lengths to show how David Garrick - ac- tor, playwright, and Drury Lane manager from 1747 to 1776 - took Shakespeare's play and transformed it into a teary-eyed, family drama celebrating the forgiveness and redemption of Leontes the husband and father. It is, indeed, incontestable that almost all of the characters endure revisions in Florizel and Perdita (1756), with Leontes - originally played by Garrick himself - inserting himself into new scenes, appropriating other characters' speeches as his own, and in the process securing his place as a primary locus of sentimentality in the play. However, while such scrutiny of Garrick's adaptation is undoubtedly constructive, its engage- ment with Garrick's text and its relation to Shakespeare's original is limited.
For instance, scholars are quick to note that Garrick chopped The Winter's Tale in half, but they seem unwilling to consider the way in which he reconceived, rather than ignored, the back-story of Leontes's transgression in Sicily. Ironically, while scholars recognize the heightened role of the pastoral in Garrick's adaptation, they fail to analyze the sheep-shearing episode in any meaningful way, ignoring, for example, Garrick's additions to the roles of minor characters like Mopsa and Dorca. Overall, informed as they are by recent poststruc- turalist and deconstructionist approaches, performance critics appear only superficially in- terested in the rhetorical elements of Garrick's play or, for that matter, Shakespeare's. For example, while Richard Meek believes The Winter's Tale "explores the rival claims of visual and verbal modes of representation, and, implicitly, the relationship between narrative and drama," "sentimentality" scholars remain silent (147). One might thus assume that, if accord- ing to performance critics, eighteenth-century audiences demanded immediate, unrestricted access to the action and emotion on stage, then Garrick might have resolved or smoothed over these "rival claims" in his adaptation. But this does not seem to be the case, at least, not consistently. Such variability, as I will argue, helps to complicate certain reductive claims about Garrick's adaptation.
With these concerns in mind, I will first...