If the purpose of reading a theatrical biography is to feel more closely the presence of a particular actor, and if its authors in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century so frequently prove insufficient to the task, why should a contemporary audience continue to read these books? One answer is that they continue to retain relevance, in that, to the extent possible, the actor does live on in these works through anecdotes, descriptions of performance, comparisons, and facts that can help us to glimpse him as he might have appeared onstage. Of course, we know that scholars today read biographies quite often for characters on the periphery, and often for information about their private lives rather than public personae. Someone interested in Anne Catley might turn to Davies's Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, and, using the ECCO (Eighteenth- Century Collections Online), might be able to use the keyword function to isolate all Catley references without further need for its focus on Garrick. Other readers come to the texts with the intent of finding a pithy anecdote or two that “captures” eighteenth- century theatre, society, or a notable individual. Additionally, of course, other readers tune in to these works with an eye to learning more about the biographer himself, or what was expected of the genre in that time.

One might then ask, how do our current theatrical biographies stack up to then- contemporary offerings? Throughout my survey of the genre, I have found a curious and delightful trend that would confound Boaden and delight Kirkman: in more recent biographies, it seems less imperative to know for certain whether something is or is not a fact, if it seems to lead to some truth. Jeffrey Kahan, writing in 2006 about Edmund Kean's appropriation of anecdotes and mythos about his personal and professional lives to gain the upper hand in both arenas, notes with a gleam in his eye that is almost visible through his jaunty prose that the book will cover “farfetched stories […] which, if this were an orthodox biography of the actor, we might be forced by a lack of historical verification to disregard. But yarns have their value.”