ABSTRACT
The name of one Perkins, hair-dresser and wig-maker, enters into the history of the eighteenth-century stage on the strength of a technical contribution to David Garricks Hamlet. The actor employed Perkins’s services to enliven the Prince’s first encounter with his father’s ghost, a scene in which Garrick’s famous start made Lichtenberg’s flesh creep, set poor Partridge’s knees to knocking, and moved Dr. Johnson to express concern over the effect of the shock on the ghost. The fact is that Perkins’s wig and other specimens of eighteenth-century theatrical practice which resemble it in kind if not degree take on a new meaning when confronted in their proper context, one that takes into account the conceptions of the body and its inner workings promulgated by the scientists and psychologists who were Garricks contemporaries, not ours. Generally speaking, no literate layman living in the eighteenth century could avoid at least peripheral acquaintance with the attainments of enlightened physics.
