This chapter examines how William Hazlitt’s theatrical criticism represents to readers, in a variety of print venues, a critical subjectivity continually altered by periodic encounters with theatrical events. Throughout his theatrical criticism, Hazlitt imagines a self contingent upon experience, where the occasion of public encounter can alter the identity of the observer irrevocably, and where the inscribing of that occasion into criticism enables the possibility of a transformative experience for the reader. Edmund Kean’s performance of his character’s conflicted affective relation to the situations of performed drama correlated for Hazlitt to the contemporary subject’s vexed relation to the vagaries of London life. Hazlitt’s sensitivity to the exigencies of the periodical publishing world in which he worked enabled him to negotiate a critical path between the poles of elitism and commercialism the theatrical press comprised. Unlike much of the criticism I discuss in part one, Hazlitt’s writing imagines a discursive community defined not by a search for pre-existing categories of taste, but by a common interest among its participants in the occasion of the critic’s encounter with the performances he reviews. The chapter concludes discussions of Hazlitt’s influential essays The Fight and The Indian Jugglers.