Abstract
This article examines three texts published between 1775 and 1840 that attempt to model an ideal reading of the Anglican liturgy and to render it on the printed page, exploring the ways in which elocutionary instruction, acting theory and accounts of public worship intersect within them through the figures of inscription and incorporation. Reflecting on the choice of the famous actor David Garrick as an exemplary reader in the two later texts, and drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, it discusses how and why these texts attempt to regulate competing ideas regarding the concepts of performance, embodiment, and assembly. The argument is made that although prescriptive in their demands, to varying degrees these texts acknowledge their own insufficiencies, and recognise not merely the difficulty of the task of transposing oral performance to a series of textual signs, or of accounting for the nature of devout worship, but also a more fundamental excess and irreducibility in the constitution of the self.
Highlights
In 1797, a pamphlet entitled The manner pointed out in which the Common Prayer was read in private by the late Mr Garrick, for the instruction of a young clergyman was published by one J.W
This article explores the nature of this singularity and makes the case that whilst Garrick’s presence registers wider patterns of regulation within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture that are bound up with matters of speech and print, it does so in complex ways, opening up but not resolving questions with respect to embodiment, performance, and the autonomy of the subject
Cull had full autonomy in his re-editing, and it is notable that he replicates Anderson’s text, and reiterates in his preliminary discourse the same paradigm of ‘seeming’ authenticity and apparent naturalness with reference to Garrick: Those who have a genius for public reading, like Mr Garrick and other great actors, have a power to bring their minds into a certain state, as if it were acted upon by real external circumstances; and a further power to allow that assumed state of mind to express itself in those tones and gestures which belong to it, and form part of that mental state (Cull 1840, p. xii)
Summary
In 1797, a pamphlet entitled The manner pointed out in which the Common Prayer was read in private by the late Mr Garrick, for the instruction of a young clergyman was published by one J.W. Anderson. It would seem that in the intervening years neither Garrick’s celebrity (he had after all died in 1779) nor concerns about the quality of clerical performance within the established church had much diminished. What another early reviewer described as the ‘singularity of an actor attending to the ceremonies of religious worship, with a view of instructing its officiates’, continued to be ‘pleasing’ even when it was no longer ‘novel’ This article explores the nature of this singularity and makes the case that whilst Garrick’s presence registers wider patterns of regulation within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture that are bound up with matters of speech and print, it does so in complex ways, opening up but not resolving questions with respect to embodiment, performance, and the autonomy of the subject
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