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Ghostly Presences. Elaine McGirr (elaine.mcgirr@rhul.ac.uk) Departments of English and Drama Royal Holloway. How we envision character. The power of the stage to give body to fictional characters (e.g. theatrical adaptation)
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Ghostly Presences Elaine McGirr (elaine.mcgirr@rhul.ac.uk) Departments of English and Drama Royal Holloway
How we envision character • The power of the stage to give body to fictional characters (e.g. theatrical adaptation) • The power of narrative to shape our imaginative vision of a character (e.g. ‘wrong’ casting) • How/why we think we ‘know’ fictional characters • Reading the original back through layers of theatrical adaptation; recharacterising the novel through the stage • Celebrity and Character
Textual Haunting:Cibber’s Apology & Life • The Apology’s narrative voice gives (false) body to past stage presence • The present-ness of the Apology’s narrative voice and the novelistic ‘I’ • The text creates the character through which we read all other performances Mezzotint by and published by John Simon, after Giuseppe Grisoni, circa 1742 (NPG)
Staging the Text Since 1776, Behn’sOroonoko(1688)has often been illustrated with performance images from Hawkesworth’s 1759 adaptation of Southerne’s 1695 stage adaptation.