{"title":"Displaced Rituals, Replaced Contexts: Reimagining Garrick's Shakespeare Jubilee in Charles Dibdin's <i>The Younger Brother</i> (1793)","authors":"David Chandler","doi":"10.3366/rom.2023.0608","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Charles Dibdin (1745–1814) played a central role in David Garrick's epochal Shakespeare Jubilee, held in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769, the biggest media event of the age. He later became a prominent critic of the Jubilee, but his major imaginative response to it in his first and most personal novel, The Younger Brother (1793), has gone unexamined. The ‘Jubilee of Hearts’ built into this novel is an alternative Jubilee, moved several miles up the River Avon to the Warwick area, where it can be divorced from commercial considerations, corrective in its emphases, and serve as a counter-ritual. Needing a theme proportional to Shakespeare's genius, Dibdin chose local harmony as a microcosm of national unity. Dibdin's effort to imagine a Warwickshire Jubilee which has nothing to do with Shakespeare was notably unsuccessful, though: thus Shakespeare is, revealingly, a powerful absent presence at the ‘Jubilee of Hearts’.","PeriodicalId":42939,"journal":{"name":"Romanticism","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Romanticism","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2023.0608","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Charles Dibdin (1745–1814) played a central role in David Garrick's epochal Shakespeare Jubilee, held in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769, the biggest media event of the age. He later became a prominent critic of the Jubilee, but his major imaginative response to it in his first and most personal novel, The Younger Brother (1793), has gone unexamined. The ‘Jubilee of Hearts’ built into this novel is an alternative Jubilee, moved several miles up the River Avon to the Warwick area, where it can be divorced from commercial considerations, corrective in its emphases, and serve as a counter-ritual. Needing a theme proportional to Shakespeare's genius, Dibdin chose local harmony as a microcosm of national unity. Dibdin's effort to imagine a Warwickshire Jubilee which has nothing to do with Shakespeare was notably unsuccessful, though: thus Shakespeare is, revealingly, a powerful absent presence at the ‘Jubilee of Hearts’.
期刊介绍:
The most distinguished scholarly journal of its kind edited and published in Britain, Romanticism offers a forum for the flourishing diversity of Romantic studies today. Focusing on the period 1750-1850, it publishes critical, historical, textual and bibliographical essays prepared to the highest scholarly standards, reflecting the full range of current methodological and theoretical debate. With an extensive reviews section, Romanticism constitutes a vital international arena for scholarly debate in this liveliest field of literary studies.