The German philosopher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99) remarked when he was in London in 1770 that a book on William Shakespeare, the artist William Hogarth, and David Garrick, the leading actor of the day, should be written. Two and a half centuries later, Robin Simon, the art magazine Apollo’s editor from 1990 to 1997 and the founder and editor of The British Art Journal, has “taken up the challenge,” as he writes at the beginning of this stimulating, large, and copiously illustrated book. Simon has written and lectured about Hogarth, notably in his Hogarth, France and British Art: The Rise of the Arts in 18th-Century Britain (2007), in which he showed how Hogarth, happy to present himself as an archetypical English bulldog down to his puggish looks, was more open to and influenced by French art than he admitted. Simon’s new book follows the same path to some degree, if only because French ideas about art and the theater dominated during the eighteenth century, the period in which Hogarth emerged as a painter and Garrick introduced into acting a new naturalism. The book charts a gradual shift in taste from the rule of French classicism, exemplified by Racine’s plays, to a British romanticism influenced by Shakespeare. At the beginning of the next century, Stendhal, a Frenchman, proclaimed himself a full-blown romantic in favor of Shakespeare and against Racine. Simon is in a good place to chart this evolution, not only because of his love and knowledge of eighteenth-century art and letters but also owing to his second residence in France, which gives him a foot on both sides of the Channel. Stage-struck, he is well equipped to tell us about the history of eighteenth-century theater and the painting of the period.

Before going further, I should say that I have known Robin Simon for three decades, from the time when he published articles of mine in Apollo. In 2012 he published in The British Art Journal my biographical article about Denys Sutton, Apollo’s editor for twenty-five years (1962–87) and a contributor to The New Criterion in its earlier days before Sutton’s death in 1991. More recently, Simon has been printing in his magazine essays of mine about Harold Acton. I can only smile to see in his new book the large number of paintings in the Garrick Club’s collection, since I know that Simon is a stalwart of the Garrick. His chapter about Laurence Olivier’s title role in Richard III reminds me of his telling me, at the Academy Club rather than the Garrick, how Olivier’s performance in the role impressed him in his childhood. The justification for Olivier’s appearance in this new book is that Olivier used parts of the 1699 Williamite reworking of Richard III by Colley Cibber (Alexander Pope’s “Head Dunce”) in his 1955 film adaptation of Richard III. Olivier restored Shakespeare’s “Now is the winter of our discontent,” which Cibber had cut, thereby preventing Garrick from ever speaking the line whenever he played Richard.

Stage-struck, he is well equipped to tell us about the history of eighteenth-century theater and the painting of the period.

The book discusses in detail how Shakespeare’s original texts were almost invariably altered and rewritten starting in the late seventeenth century and continuing on into the eighteenth and nineteenth. Even some of their titles were changed, The Taming of the Shrew becoming Catherine and Petruchio and The Winter’s Tale being renamed Florizel and Perdita. In 1681, Nahum Tate gave King Lear a happy ending. In the century after his death, Shakespeare was considered best approached through reading rather than the stage, despite the fact that the Bard wrote his plays for theater audiences rather than for readers and paid little attention to the publication of his plays, some of them appearing in pirate editions during his lifetime. Man of the theater that he was, he might have accepted the revisions dictated by changing times and tastes. Cibber’s Richard III was standard throughout the eighteenth century and indeed until 1896. Twentieth-century audiences were the first since Shakespeare’s own time to have the chance to enjoy versions of Shakespeare texts as close to authentic as possible, given that he left nothing in the way of edited, standard editions.

Simon’s emphasis on the French connection is pertinent since England from the first half of the seventeenth century to the latter part of the eighteenth was under the influence of French classicism and the rule of Aristotle’s dramatic unities of time, place, and action, which never bothered Shakespeare. Hogarth’s paintings of scenes from plays we think of as by Shakespeare came out of productions that were Shakesperean only in name, if that. The painter’s Falstaff Examining His Recruits (1730) came from Thomas Betterton’s 1700 remake of Henry IV, Part II, which was a hit at the Drury Lane Theatre in the 1730s, with Cibber playing Justice Shallow. It was so popular that John Rich’s Covent Garden Theatre had the gumption, almost unheard of in the period, to present Shakespeare’s original in 1736. It would be good to know how this novelty was received. Garrick, considered a champion of Shakespeare but also insistent on plays of three acts rather than five, never acted in an unadulterated version of Shakespeare. Hogarth did go to Shakespeare’s text when he painted a scene from The Tempest around 1735. The Tempest was never acted as a play in those days but rather as a musical or an opera, likely by the now-forgotten John Weldon (or perhaps the still-remembered Henry Purcell).

The book includes so much about Johann Zoffany that he might have been given equal billing in the title. The book’s cover is from Zoffany’s painting (now in the Garrick Club) Mr Garrick and Mrs Pritchard in “Macbeth” (1768), showing the petit (five feet four inches, or even smaller) Garrick beautifully dressed as an eighteenth-century Macbeth, his statuesque Lady Macbeth, Mrs. Pritchard, towering over him. Their faces and expressions seem appropriate to a comedy of manners rather than Shakespeare’s most gothic tragedy. The notion of using period rather than contemporary dress was almost unknown in the eighteenth century. Polite behavior and courtly deportment was judged essential, even in villains. Zoffany’s David Ross as Hamlet (ca. 1767) portrays a sheepish Prince of Denmark in correct black dress, the hose on one leg slightly turned down to indicate his disordered mind. Hogarth’s David Garrick as Richard III (1745) was unusual in that Garrick’s Richard is shown dressed in medieval armor, rare for the period. The recent debate about using current as opposed to period costume didn’t occur to eighteenth-century actor-managers, though they might question current habits of dressing Shakespeare productions in Victorian clothes, Nazi uniforms, or spacesuits to make moral points, often oblique. The habit of rewriting Shakespeare to suit a later period was more understandable when the plays were acted in eighteenth-century dress. Elizabethan language didn’t quite suit eighteenth-century settings and still less eighteenth-century ideas of acceptable etiquette.

This excellent book will interest lovers of art, especially those keen on theater history. It will also fascinate anyone curious about how Shakespeare was approached in the century following his own, when the Bard was still thought of almost as a contemporary.