In 1770 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg remarked, 'What a work could be written on Shakespeare, Hogarth, and Garrick! There is something similar in the genius of all three.' Two-and-a-half centuries on, Robin Simon's highly original and illuminating book takes up the challenge.

William Hogarth (1697-1764) and David Garrick (1717-79) closely associated themselves with Shakespeare, embodying a relationship between plays, painting, and performance that had been understood since Antiquity and which shaped the rules for history painting drawn up by the Académie royale in Paris in the seventeenth century.

This book offers a fresh examination of theatrical portraits through a close analysis of the pictures and of the texts used in performance. It also examines the central role of the theatre in British culture, while highlighting the significance of Shakespeare, Hogarth, and Garrick in the European Enlightenment and the rise of Romanticism.