1. Jonson, Ben, “To the memory of my beloved, The Author Mr. William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us,” in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, a photographic facsimile of the First Folio edition prepared by Helge Kökeritz and Charles Tyler Prouty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954)Google Scholar.

2. On the ideological implications of the contention that Shakespeare is “the bearer of universal truths” and “depicts a universal and unchanging human nature,” see Howard, Jean E. and O'Connor, Marion F., “Introduction,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Howard and O'Connor, (New York: Routledge, 1987), 1–5Google Scholar.

3. The term “alternative Shakespeares” was coined by John Drakakis in 1985. For a discussion of the terminology associated with the reuse of Shakespeare, see Fischlin, Daniel and Fortier, Mark, “General Introduction,” in Adaptations of Shakespeare: A Critical Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, ed. Fischlin and Fortier, (London: Routledge, 2000), 1–20Google Scholar. On the “reinvention” of Shakespeare over time, see Taylor, Gary, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989)Google Scholar. On the appropriation of Shakespeare in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Bate, Jonathan, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)Google Scholar. On the previous period, see Dobson, Michael, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)Google Scholar. The first full-length study of adaptations was Kilbourne, Frederick W., Alterations and Adaptations of Shakespeare (Boston: Poet Lore Co., 1906)Google Scholar. On the adaptation of Shakespeare's history plays, see Hoenselaars, Ton, ed., Shakespeare's History Plays: Performance, Translation and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

4. Marsden, Jean I., ed., The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991)Google Scholar, 1. More recently, Margaret Jane Kidnie has argued that “a play, for all that it carries the rhetorical and ideological force of an enduring stability, is not an object at all, but rather a dynamic process that evolves over time in response to the needs and sensibilities of its users”; Kidnie, Margaret Jane, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar, 2, Kidnie's italics.

5. Hazlitt, William, “A View of the English Stage,” in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. Waller, A R. and Glover, Arnold, 12 vols. (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1903), 8:173–379Google Scholar, at 182.

6. See Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1759; repr., Menston, Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1970), 58–9Google Scholar.

7. Hazlitt, “View of the English Stage,” 212; Hazlitt's italics.

8. Ibid., 182.

9. Garrick played Richard eighty-three times. For an analysis of Garrick's interpretation of the character, see my “Performing the Passions: David Garrick and Edmund Kean in King Richard the Third,” Assaph: Studies in the Theatre 24 (2010): 75–100Google Scholar. For general biographical information on Garrick, see Stone, George Winchester Jr. and Kahrl, George M., David Garrick: A Critical Biography (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

10. For attacks on Cibber as Richard, see the anonymous letter from “Somebody“ in The Grub Street Journal, 31 October 1734; Aaron Hill in The Prompter, 19 November 1734, 2, reprinted in Hill, Aaron and Popple, William, The Prompter: A Theatrical Paper (1734–1736), ed. Appleton, William and Burnim, Kalman A. (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1966)Google Scholar, 6; and the anonymous The Laureat; or, The Right Side of Colley Cibber, Esq. (London: J. Roberts, 1740), 34–5Google Scholar.

11. On the flourishing of adaptation during the Restoration and its subsequent decline in the early eighteenth century as a consequence of the gradual loss of fluidity of Shakespeare's text, see Marsden, Jean I., The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, & Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995)Google Scholar. On the adapters' techniques, see Rabkin, Norman, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

12. Clark, Sandra, ed., Shakespeare Made Fit: Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare (London: J. M. Dent, 1997)Google Scholar, lxxvi.

13. Suffering women were another leitmotif in Restoration “improvements” of Shakespeare, which developed out of the popularity of pathetic plays in the late seventeenth century. See Marsden, Re-Imagined Text, 30–46.

14. In Cibber, Richard appears in fifteen of twenty scenes and speaks 40 percent of the lines in the play, whereas in Shakespeare he appears in fifteen of twenty-five scenes and speaks a little over 31 percent of the total lines. See Spencer, Christopher, “Introduction,” in Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare, ed. Spencer, Christopher (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), 1–32Google Scholar, at 27.

15. Shaw, George Bernard, “Richard Himself Again,” Saturday Review, 26 December 1896Google Scholar, reprinted in Shaw, George Bernard, Our Theatres in the Nineties, 3 vols. (London: Constable & Co., 1932)Google Scholar, 2:287.

16. Shakespeare, William, King Richard III, ed. Hammond, Antony (London: Methuen, 1981)Google Scholar, 69.

17. On this subject, see Webb, Timothy, “The Romantic Poet and the Stage: A Short, Sad History,” in The Romantic Theatre: An International Symposium, ed. Cave, Richard Allen (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1986), 9–46Google Scholar, at 37–8.

18. This was true for George Frederick Cooke (on 31 October 1800) and for Junius Brutus Booth (on 12 February 1817). Edmund Kean first appeared in London as Richard III on 12 February 1814. It was his second role after his debut as Shylock on 26 January, but it was Richard who decreed his triumph, and he almost invariably chose this role to open his seasons both in London and on tour.

19. Garrick reintroduced line 6 and, sometime between 1756 and 1774, another four lines (ll. 15–17 and 19) in the soliloquy that in Shakespeare (but not in Cibber) opens the play. In the lines Garrick added later, Richard's sense of uneasiness at his own deformity is stressed, a trait the actor emphasized in his interpretation of the character. Cooke reintroduced the first four lines of Shakespeare's opening soliloquy, see Dunlap, William, Memoirs of the Life of George Frederick Cooke, 2 vols. (New York: D. Longworth, 1818)Google Scholar, 2:181, and some lines from Richard's address to his army before the battle. Kemble shortened the play, but on the whole the changes to Cibber's adaptation were very limited in the revision he published in 1810. He modified a couple of names and, as Albert Kalson notes, “frequently altered the order of the phrases within Cibber's lines, mainly in Act I, so that the audience might be aware of a slight difference in the play from the start”; Kemble, John Philip, King Richard III (London: Cornmarket Press, 1972)Google Scholar, 1.

20. Hazlitt, “Characters of Shakespear's Plays,” in Waller and Glover, Collected Works of William Hazlitt, 1:300.

21. Ibid.

22. Hazlitt, “View of the English Stage,” 181.

23. Hazlitt, William, “Mr. Kean's Richard“ (1817), in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt: Art and Dramatic Criticism, ed. Howe, P. P., 21 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1967)Google Scholar, 18:255.

24. Lamb, Charles, “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation” (1811), in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. Lucas, E. V., 6 vols. (London: Methuen, 1903–5)Google Scholar, 1 (1903):97–111, at 105.

25. Here I am obviously referring to the couplet supposedly spoken by Alexander Pope upon seeing Charles Macklin's Shylock in 1741: “This is the Jew/That Shakespeare drew.”

26. “Covent Garden Theatre,” The Times (London), 13 March 1821.

27. See Carlson, Marvin, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28. Bridgman, Thomas, The Historical Play of King Richard the Third: Newly Altered and Adapted for Representation from the Original of Shakespeare by T. Bridgman (London: Thomas Cope, 1820)Google Scholar, viii and vi. (Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text.) This attempt at restoration has been neglected by criticism: if we exclude Albert Kalson's very brief introduction to the facsimile edition (Cornmarket Press, 1971), a study of Bridgman's adaptation does not exist. The only editor of Richard III who mentions the experiment in passing is John Jowett (Oxford Shakespeare, 2000), 90.

29. “Juvenis,” “To the editor,” The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine 7 (December 1800): 516–17. Kotzebue's Die Spanier in Peru, oder: Rolla's Tod, “a tragic play in five acts,” had been adapted to the English stage as Pizarro by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. The correspondent called for the intervention of the government to prohibit German plays from being performed.

30. In the preface, Bridgman defined the scene as “the dull unmeaning whine of Henry the Sixth” (vi), apparently echoing Hazlitt, who had deprecated “the tedious whining morality of the uxorious King”; Hazlitt, “Characters of Shakespear's Plays,” 300. Restoration adapters usually balanced portrayals of evil with representatives of good, as in William Davenant's Macbeth, where the virtuosity of the Macduff couple is contrasted to the wickedness of the Macbeths, or in Nahum Tate's King Lear, where the vicious triangular intrigue among Edmund, Goneril, and Regan is juxtaposed with the pure love between Cordelia and Edgar.

31. However, even if the council scene no longer found a place in Richard III, eighteenth and nineteenth-century audiences could still see a revised version of it in Nicholas Rowe's Tragedy of Jane Shore; see Rowe, Nicholas, The Tragedy of Jane Shore: Written in Imitation of Shakespear's Style (London: Printed for Bernard Lintott, 1714)Google Scholar, 4.1.208–58.

32. After having explicitly mentioned suicide (“Now, wert thou not afraid of self-destruction, Thou hast a fair excuse for't”), Bridgman's (and Cibber's) Richard concludes the exchange with the following exclamations:

Bridgman, 35. (Bridgman's text does not include line numbers and so is cited by page number[s] only.)

33. See Colley Cibber, The Tragical History of King Richard III, in Spencer, Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare, 275–344, at 4.1.

34. See ibid., 5.9.21–6.

35. Cibber, “The Preface,” in Tragical History of King Richard III, 279.

36. For a list of Cibber's new soliloquies and their positions in the play, see Spencer, Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare, 27–8.

37. Shakespeare, William, King Richard III, ed. Hammond, A. (London: Methuen, 1981), 4.3.27–30Google Scholar.

38. Bridgman, 53–4 (Cibber, 4.3.47–52). Cibber had found this account, which obviously increased Richard's brutality, in Shakespeare's sources. The adapter had chosen, however, the worst version of the story, a version that Thomas More, who had reported the episode, had not given for certain:

On Cibber's reliance on Shakespeare's sources, see Kalson, Albert E., “The Chronicles in Cibber's Richard III,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 3.2 (1963): 253–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and my “‘I can add colours to the chameleon’: King Richard III's Metamorphic History,” in Proteus: The (Meta)language of Metamorphosis, ed. Dente, Carla, Ferzoco, George, Gill, Miriam, and Spunta, Marina (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 243–54Google Scholar.

39. Bridgman, 61 (Cibber, 4.4.204–8).

40. Bridgman, 73 (Cibber, 5.9.11–20). However, Cibber 5.9.14 reads: “Than even his Bodies parting with its Soul.” Cibber also has “To feed contention in a lingring Act“ (5.9.16).

41. Bridgman, 74 (Cibber, 5.9.44–47). Romanticism is even heightened by Bridgman through the addition of “well” on l. 47.

42. Although editors and stage historians have usually acknowledged the existence of Macready's adaptation, its real nature has often been misunderstood. In 1975, Bernard Grebanier stated that Macready “discarded Cibber's version of Richard III . . . and gave the play Shakespeare wrote”; Grebanier, , Then Came Each Actor: Shakespearean Actors, Great and Otherwise (New York: David McKay Co., 1975)Google Scholar, 212. In 2006, Don-John Dugas declared that “Shakespeare's original . . . was briefly revived in 1821”; Dugas, , Marketing the Bard: Shakespeare in Performance and Print, 1660–1740 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006)Google Scholar, 56.

43. In his otherwise careful and reliable stage history of the play, Scott Colley is wrong when he asserts that Macready's experiment was abandoned “after several performances”; Colley, , Richard's Himself Again: A Stage History of Richard III (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992)Google Scholar, 86. On the stage history of Richard III, see also Wood, Alice I. Perry, The Stage History of Shakespeare's King Richard III (New York: Columbia University Press, 1909)Google Scholar; and the Plays in Performance edition of Richard III, ed. Hankey, Julie (London: Junction Books, 1981)Google Scholar.

44. E. L. S. [Edmund Lewis Lenthal Swift], “To the editor of The Times,” The Times (London), 24 September 1868.

45. “Covent Garden Theatre,” The Morning Chronicle, 13 March 1821.

46. Playbill for the first performance of The Life and Death of King Richard the Third (12 March 1821), Bill Box G2 C85 1820–21, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC.

47. “March 12,” The British Stage and Literary Cabinet 5.52 (April 1821): 114–16Google Scholar, at 114-15.

48. J. T., , “Theatrical Review: The Pretended Revival of Shakespeare's Richard III,” The Champion, 18 March 1821, 164–5Google Scholar, at 164.

49. For a comparison between the two versions (and a refutation of the accusation), see Kalson, Albert E., “Introduction,” in King Richard III, [Adapted by] T. Bridgman 1820 (London: Cornmarket Press, 1971)Google Scholar, n.p.

50. “Shakspeare's Richard III,” The Times (London), 29 January 1844.

51. E. L. S., “To the editor of The Times,” my italics. I have never found any mention of Swift's letters in discussions of the adaptation traditionally attributed to Macready.

52. Macready, William Charles, Macready's Reminiscences and Selections from His Diaries and Letters, ed. Pollock, Frederick (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1875), 161–2Google Scholar.

53. “Shakspeare's Richard III,” The Times (London), 29 January 1844Google Scholar.

54. [Macready, William Charles], “Preface,” in The Life and Death of King Richard III. A Tragedy: Restored and Re-Arranged from the Text of Shakespeare, as Performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden (London: R. & M. Stodart, 1821), iii–viiGoogle Scholar, at iii; Macready's italics throughout. (Subsequent citations appear parenthetically in the text.)

55. In the previous year, he had performed Hotspur in one act of Henry IV and Posthumus in The Winter's Tale on two benefit nights and two other major Shakespearean roles—Henry V and Othello—with modest success. The best biography of the actor is Downer's, Alan S.The Eminent Tragedian William Charles Macready (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56. Macready, Macready's Reminiscences, 141.

57. On the Vice heritage of Richard III, see Spivack, Bernard, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 386–407Google Scholar; Weimann, Robert, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; and Weimann, , “Performance-Game and Representation in Richard III,” in Textual and Theatrical Shakespeare: Questions of Evidence, ed. Pechter, Edward (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), 66–85Google Scholar, reprinted in Weimann, Robert and Bruster, Douglas, eds., Shakespeare and the Power of Performance: Stage and Page in the Elizabethan Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 42–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58. Classicists deemed the mingling of the tragic and the comic and the introduction of low characters, clowning, and buffoonery into tragedy reprehensible. Charles Gildon asserted: “There is no place in tragedy for anything but grave and serious actions”; quoted in Kilbourne, Alterations and Adaptations of Shakespeare, 14. Accordingly, the Fool was omitted from Nahum Tate's King Lear, and the porter scene and the gravediggers were left out of William Davenant's Macbeth and David Garrick's Hamlet, respectively. Similarly, Cibber's Richard is more of a villain but much less of an ironist and a humorist.

59. Lamb's comment is taken from his essay “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare,” in Lucas, Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, 1:105–6.

60. Hunt, Leigh, “Theatrical Examiner,” The Examiner, 31 October 1819, 699–700Google Scholar, in Leigh Hunt's Dramatic Criticism 1808–1831, ed. Houtchens, Lawrence Huston and Washburn, Carolyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 219–21Google Scholar. An extensive description of Kean's and Macready's respective portrayals of Richard III was also offered in the 40-page anonymous pamphlet entitled A Critical Examination of the Respective Performances of Mr Kean & Mr Macready, in Cibber's Alteration of Shakespeare's Historical Play of King Richard III (London: Simpkin & Marshall, 1819)Google Scholar. For a modern assessment of Macready's interpretation, see Green, London, “‘The Gaiety of Meditated Success’: The Richard III of William Charles Macready,” Theatre Research International 10.2 (1985): 107–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61. Lamb, Charles, “G.F. Cooke in ‘Richard the Third’,” Morning Post, 8 January 1802Google Scholar, in Lucas, Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, 1:38.

62. See, for instance, Elizabeth Griffith's highly successful treatise that set out to show, as was typical in the period, that Shakespeare had fulfilled the moral duties of drama and respected the principle of poetic justice. Here, the critic peremptorily asserts, “no designing or determined villain was ever chearful . . . or could possibly be able to assume even the semblance of carelessness or ease, upon any occasion whatsoever”; Griffith, Elizabeth, The Morality of Shakespeare's Drama Illustrated (London: T. Cadell, 1775)Google Scholar, 317. Behind Mrs. Griffith's criticism lay the sentimentalist imperative that a villain must exhibit remorse for his crimes, together with the requirement, voiced by Home, Henry, Kames, Lord, in his Elements of Criticism (1762)Google Scholar, that tragedy respond to a principle of verisimilitude.

63. Lamb, “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare,” in Lucas, Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, 1: 105. On Cooke's “butcher-like” Richard III, see my “Melodrama Gets to the Heart of Shakespeare: The ‘Ogreish’ King Richard III of George Frederick Cooke, Textus 24.1 (2011): 97–116Google Scholar.

64. Macready, Macready's Reminiscences, 162. Even more caustic was the comment in his 1838 diary, where, years after the failure of his attempted restoration, he declared himself “astonished at the base venality of the disgusting newspaper writers—the wretches—who dare to laud the fustian of Cibber, and tried to keep the many in ignorance by praising his trash called Richard III”; in Toynbee, William, ed., The Diaries of William Charles Macready, 1833–1851, 2 vols. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1912)Google Scholar, 1:470.

65. Playbill, 12 March 1821, Bill Box G2 C85 1820–21, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Furthermore, while presenting the experiment as “an attempt to restore . . . the original character and language of Shakespeare,” the playbill also awkwardly admitted that the new adaptation still included some “extraneous matter” and that omissions had still been deemed necessary “for the purposes of representation.” As John Genest noted a decade after Macready's endeavor, there were two reasons for the lukewarm reaction to the new adaptation: first, people generally do not like “to acknowledge that they have been applauding, or at least tolerating, wretched stuff for ten, twenty, or thirty years”; second (and more important), the revival was managed in “a bungling manner” because the performance was not preceded “by some observations in the newspapers, in which the faults of Cibber's execrable alterations” were pointed out. Instead, the stage manager absurdly declared that “Cibber's alteration was ingenious.” Genest, John, Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830, 10 vols. (Bath: H. E. Carrington, 1832), 9:108Google Scholar; Genest's italics.

66. “March 12” (cited in n. 47), 116.

67. Schoch, Richard W., “Shakespeare the Victorian,” in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Hodgdon, Barbara and Worthen, W. B. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 233–48Google Scholar, at 233.

68. Playbill, 13 March 1821, Bill Box G2 C85 1820–21, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC.

69. Macready, Macready's Reminiscences, 162.

70. “Covent Garden,” The London Literary Gazette, and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, etc. 217 (17 March 1821): 174Google Scholar.

71. “The Drama,” New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal n.s. 3.4 (1 April 1821): 166–7Google Scholar, at 166. The reviewer seemed to echo Leigh Hunt's observations on Macready's 1819 performance when he stated that the adapter had “vindicated to the gay aspirant his own regality of soul, restored to him his vein of kingly wit, and given back to him ‘the sovereign sway and masterdom’ of spirit” (166–7).

72. “Covent Garden Theatre,” The Times (London), 13 March 1821Google Scholar. The review is quoted almost in full in Odell, George C. D., Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1966)Google Scholar, 2:153–4.

73. See J. T., “Theatrical Review,” 164–5 (cited in n. 48). The analysis is continued in “The Pretended Revival of Shakespeare's Richard III (Concluded from our last),” The Champion, 25 March 1821, 183–4.

74. “March 12,” 115.

75. J. T., “Theatrical Review”; reviewer's italics.

76. The clipping, dated 18 March 1821, is contained in an oversize Folger Shakespeare Library scrapbook labeled “Dramatic Cuttings 1807–1838.” Whereas the reviewer is ready to accept theatrical adaptation as necessary, he objects to the contamination of Shakespeare's texts: “If the fame of Shakespeare stands in need of any vindication, it is rather from the interpolations which his contemporaries and immediate successors have foisted into his writings, than from the avowed transposition and abridgment which his scenes have undergone in modern times, for the purpose of adapting them better to representation.”

77. Macready, Macready's Reminiscences, 162.

78. Vandenhoff, George, An Actor's Note-Book; or, the Green-Room and Stage (London: John Camden Hotten, 1865), 216Google Scholar; Vandenhoff's italics.

79. The character of Margaret was not present in Bridgman's adaptation, which had reintroduced Edward IV.

80. J. T., “Theatrical Review,” 164.

81. Forster, John, “The Restoration of Shakespeare's Lear to the Stage,” The Examiner, 4 February 1838, 69–70Google Scholar. Reprinted as “February 1838, John Forster on W. C. Macready as King Lear,” in Shakespeare in the Theatre: An Anthology of Criticism, ed. Wells, Stanley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 72–7Google Scholar, quotation at 75.

82. Macready and Swift's adaptation repeated eight of the thirteen lines Cibber's Richard pronounced on the appearance of Lady Anne (beginning with “But see, my Love appears!” Cibber 2.1.54–66) and reproduced verbatim four of the five speeches that have already been mentioned with regard to Bridgman's adaptation: i.e., Cibber 2.2.128–40, 3.2.270–82, 4.3.19–38, and 5.5.1–25.

83. [Macready and Swift], The Life and Death of King Richard III, 68; Cibber, 5.8.1–8.

84. [Macready and Swift], ibid., 69–70; Cibber, 5.9.1–10.

85. [Macready and Swift], ibid., 22–3.

86. Hazlitt's criticism originally appeared in The Morning Chronicle on 24 February 1814; reprinted in Hazlitt, Complete Works, 18:191.

87. Moody, Jane, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, 241.

88. See Webb, “Romantic Poet and the Stage,” 37.

89. On Kean's “Romanticism” and its contradictions, see my “Edmund Kean or ‘the Romantic Actor,’” in The Languages of Performance in British Romanticism, ed. Crisafulli, Lilla Maria and Pietropoli, Cecilia (Berne: Peter Lang, 2008), 127–39Google Scholar.

90. Dana, Richard H., The Idle Man, 2 vols. (New York: Wiley & Halstead, 1821)Google Scholar, 1:42.

91. “Notices of the Acted Drama in London. No. IV. Mr Kean,” Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 3.13 (April 1818): 77–81Google Scholar, at 80. However, the reviewer appeared to be conscious of the fact that such an assertion could lay him open to criticism and was quick to clarify his position in a note: “The reader will, of course, not suspect us of meaning to compare his genius with that of Shakespeare generally, but only with reference to this particular play” (ibid.).

92. Genest, 8:495.

93. “Covent Garden. Oct. 15.—Richard III,” The Monthly Mirror 18 (November 1804): 351Google Scholar. The fact that the reviewer's quotation of Cooke's newly introduced lines ends with “&c.” suggests that the anti-French tirade continued, perhaps to the end of the original oration (another eight lines). In their stage histories of the play, neither Wood nor Hankey nor Colley seem to be aware of Cooke's restoration of these lines.

94. Cibber, 5.9.21–26.

95. Spencer, Hazelton, Shakespeare Improved: The Restoration Versions in Quarto and on the Stage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967)Google Scholar, 122.

96. Wood, 133.

97. Sprague, Arthur Colby, Shakespearian Players and Performances (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1954)Google Scholar, 151.

98. Hawkes, Terence, Meaning by Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 3, i.

99. See Margaret Jane Kidnie, “Where Is Hamlet? Text, Performance, and Adaptation,” in Hodgdon and Worthen, Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, 101–20, at 115.

100. Ibid., 116.

101. According to Christopher Spencer's count, of a total of 2,156 lines, 1,066 are Cibber's; see Spencer, “Texts and Variants: Richard III,” in Spencer, Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare, 451–3, at 452. The figure does not include the lines that, according to Cibber, were “generally [Shakespeare's] thoughts in the best dress [he] could afford ‘em” (Cibber, “Preface,” 279), which appeared in single quotes in the first edition of the play.

102. Macready, Macready's Reminiscences, 69.