Blackwell Reference Online

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In his contemporary biography of David Garrick, Arthur Murphy recounts a curious episode that summed up Garrick's art as a performer of Shakespeare. The player apparently received a poem written on behalf of a deaf-mute who insisted that he understood all passions from Garrick's acting even though he could not hear the words: What need of sound? When plainly I descry Th'expressive features, and the speaking eye; That eye, whose bright and penetrating ray Does Shakespeare's meaning to my soul convey. Blest commentator on great Shakespeare's text! When Garrick acts, no passage seems perplext. ( Murphy 1969 , 2: 183) In the subsequent discussion, the deaf man explained that Garrick's power of communication was perfect because “his face was a language” ( Murphy 1969 , 2: 185). It may seem curious to use this, possibly apocryphal, story in the afterword to a collection of essays on screen Shakespeare. The events it records took place more than a century before the development of film as a technology of representation and it concerns a figure whose fame in the history of Shakespeare's afterlife lies in his restoration of Shakespeare's text in the theater. Nevertheless, it signals the beginning of a set of metaphors for the communication of Shakespeare that transcend the primary relationship of text to reader. “That eye, whose bright and penetrating ray / Does Shakespeare's meaning ... log in or subscribe to read full text