Introduction

Summary

Francis Gentleman recorded that David Garrick’s performance of Thomas Otway's Jaffeir ‘beggars description, by an amazing variety of transitions, tones and picturesque attitudes’. I use Gentleman's commentary to introduce here the concept of transition with respect to three things: theatrical practice, theories of the passions, and the eighteenth-century understanding of the mind in wonder. My argument throughout is that the identification of transitions leads to simultaneous recognition of the iconic and dynamic qualities of an object.