{"id":297,"date":"2016-05-09T21:33:01","date_gmt":"2016-05-10T01:33:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/romanticimprov.utoronto.ca\/?p=297"},"modified":"2017-04-02T16:19:18","modified_gmt":"2017-04-02T20:19:18","slug":"suid072","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/romanticimprov.utoronto.ca\/?p=297","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Medwin, <i>The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"aei-root\" lang=\"en-GB\"><!-- suid=72 --><\/p>\n<dl id=\"aei-dl-meta\">\n<dt>Performer Name:<\/dt>\n<dd> Sgricci<\/dd>\n<dt>Performance Venue:<\/dt>\n<dd> Paris, Lucca<\/dd>\n<dt>Performance Date:<\/dt>\n<dd class=\"aei-half-line-below\">1820<\/dd>\n<dt>Author:<\/dt>\n<dd> Medwin, Thomas<\/dd>\n<dt>Date Written:<\/dt>\n<dd>&nbsp;<\/dd>\n<dt>Language:<\/dt>\n<dd class=\"aei-half-line-below\"> English<\/dd>\n<dt>Publication Title:<\/dt>\n<dd> The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley<\/dd>\n<dt>Article Title:<\/dt>\n<dd>&nbsp;<\/dd>\n<dt>Page Numbers:<\/dt>\n<dd> 265-66<\/dd>\n<dt>Additional Info:<\/dt>\n<dd class=\"aei-half-line-below\">Ed. H. Buxton Forman<\/dd>\n<dt>Publisher:<\/dt>\n<dd> Oxford University Press<\/dd>\n<dt>Place of Publication:<\/dt>\n<dd> London<\/dd>\n<dt>Date Published:<\/dt>\n<dd> 1913<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<p class=\"aei-one-line-down\"><strong>Text:<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote id=\"aei-blockquote\">\n<p>[265] Sgricci also passed some evenings at his house. [266] He was perhaps the greatest of <i>improvisatores<\/i> that ever existed, and gave us more than one specimen of his talent. He used to say that &quot;the God when invoked was always propitious.&quot; He was on his way to Lucca, there to give a tragedy on the stage, as he had done at Paris, where his improvisations were taken down in shorthand, and published; but they did not bear strict criticism, though they abound in passages of great beauty. Shelley went to Lucca, to be present at his acting, and came back wonderstruck; of several subjects proposed at random, he selected the <i>Iphigenia in Tauris<\/i>, and I remember Shelley&apos;s admiring greatly his comparing Orestes to one high column, all that remained for the support of a house. Shelley said that &quot;his appearance on the stage, his manner of acting, the intonations of his voice, varied to suit the characters he impersonated, had a magical effect, and that his Chorusses in the most intricate metres, were worthy of the Greeks.&quot; Had Shelley <i>read<\/i> this Play, he would in all probability have formed a different estimate of its Merits. Several of those which he improvised at Paris were afterwards published from the Shorthand Transcripts but are totally unfit for the Closet. This was, I believe, the last time Sgricci appeared on the boards of a theatre. He soon after obtained a pension from the Grand-duke of Tuscany, and his pension extinguished his genius. There is a proverb, that singing birds must not be too well fed! He died in 1826 or 1827, still young.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p class=\"aei-one-line-down\"><strong>Notes:<\/strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"aei-blocktext\">\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<dl id=\"aei-dl-meta-unimportant\">\n<dt>Collected by:<\/dt>\n<dd> DP<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Medwin discusses Shelley&#8217;s relationship with Tommaso Sgricci, noting Shelley&#8217;s enthusiasm for the improvisatore. Medwin himself holds Sgricci in lower esteem, mentioning the inferiority of the latter&#8217;s poetry in written form, and recounting the end of his career. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,134],"tags":[74,50,73],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/romanticimprov.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/romanticimprov.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/romanticimprov.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/romanticimprov.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/romanticimprov.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=297"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/romanticimprov.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3547,"href":"https:\/\/romanticimprov.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297\/revisions\/3547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/romanticimprov.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/romanticimprov.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/romanticimprov.utoronto.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}