Chapter 3 - Odes

Summary

This chapter considers David Garrick's performance of odes in order to demonstrate both how eighteenth-century attention to transition crossed twenty-first-century modal boundaries and how the recovery of this approach might help us understand anew a form of public poetry that brought together star performers and musical accompaniment. Focusing jointly on two works of 1769, Garrick’s delivery of his Ode to Shakespeare and Daniel Webb’s Observations on the Correspondences between Poetry and Music, I show how transition, as a technique for emphasising the passions through contrast and comparison, aligns the dramatic and lyric modes. This is especially true of the Shakespeare ode, which positions the Elizabethan playwright as both Britain’s national dramatist and Britain’s national poet, a figure who is simultaneously lyric and dramatic through his mastery of the passions. Indeed, Garrick, who incorporated references to his own performances of Macbeth, Hamlet, and Lear into his ode, also might be seen to make the same claim for himself as the pre-eminent interpreter of Shakespeare.