![]() ![]() ![]() As her opening epithet by William Hazlitt speculates: "What would the actors say to it, if, by any spell or necromancy, all the celebrated actors, for the last hundred years, could be made to appear again on the boards of Covent Garden and Drury Lane, for the last time, in all their most brilliant parts?" (1). Throughout the book, McPherson is particularly attuned to the ways in which the mechanisms of visual culture work to resurrect the ephemeral performances and embodied presence of actors and actresses. ![]() ![]() This interdisciplinary and wide-ranging approach allows her to move through an array of materials (portraits, prints, caricatures, accessories, letters, diaries, biographies, memoirs, and various theatrical ephemera) in support of compelling new ways to think about how and why certain figures became public icons. McPherson envisions celebrity as "a dynamic sociocultural phenomenon produced by a multidirectional matrix of factors, evolving over time but also possessing a period specific, culturally identifiable footprint" (7). For those of us who are familiar with Heather McPherson's scholarship on the inextricable relationship between visual art and the theatre in eighteenth-century England, it is a thrill to see her impressive new volume, a majestically illustrated and beautifully researched analysis of the emergence, growth, and nuances of celebrity culture, particularly in the 1780s. ![]()
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