Displaced Rituals, Replaced Contexts: Reimagining Garrick's Shakespeare Jubilee in Charles Dibdin's The Younger Brother (1793)

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 no...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inRomanticism (Edinburgh) Vol. 29; no. 3; pp. 211 - 225
Main Author Chandler, David
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published UK Edinburgh University Press 01.10.2023
Subjects
Literary Studies
Shakespeare Jubilee
Stratford-upon-Avon
Shakespeare
Charles Dibdin
David Garrick
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Summary: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’.
ISSN:1354-991X
1750-0192
DOI:10.3366/rom.2023.0608