FIGURE 9.1 David Garrick as Richard in Richard III by William Shakespeare, by Johan Zoffany
Courtesy of the Garrick Club, London
FIGURE 9.1 David Garrick as Richard in Richard III by William Shakespeare, by Johan Zoffany
Courtesy of the Garrick Club, London
A whole century swept away.
(Richard Cumberland)
As a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, the future playwright Richard Cumberland saw the young David Garrick perform at Covent Garden. Years later, he recalled his delight:
When, after a long and eager expectation, I first beheld little Garrick . . . come bounding on the stage . . . it seemed as if a whole century had been swept over in the transition of a single scene; old things were done away, and a new order brought forward, bright and luminous, and clearly destined to dispel the barbarisms and bigotry of a tasteless age, too long attached to the prejudices of custom, and superstitiously to illusions of imposing declamation.1
Audiences were ready to reject the old-style declamatory acting in favor of an easier, more natural way of speaking and acting. Garrick didn’t invent the natural style. More than a century earlier, Shakespeare had Hamlet instruct the Players of the play within the play to avoid the kind of overacting that would “tear a passion to tatters,” but rather to “suit the action to the word, the word to the action.” Hamlet added that the purpose of acting is “to hold the mirror up to nature.”2 No doubt these were the thoughts of Shakespeare himself, who was an experienced actor. But his successors in Restoration and early eighteenth-century England had abandoned these precepts in favor of a more formal style of acting, accompanied by sonorous declamation. Thus, when Garrick first took the stage in 1741, his acting style was welcomed as new and revolutionary.
How natural Garrick’s acting really was is open to question. There are many contemporary accounts of how he repudiated the artificiality of the acting of the previous era—the mechanical singsong tone of voice, the robotic stride crossing the stage—in favor of an easy, familiar way of speaking and acting.3 He banished ranting, bombast, and grimace; and restored ease, simplicity, and humor to performance.4 But some critics, including Macklin (an unsympathetic colleague, to be sure), accused him of what we today would call “ham” acting: “squeezing his hat, thumping his breast, strutting up and down the stage, and pawing the characters that he acted with.”5 Some scholars today downplay the naturalness of Garrick’s acting, asserting that his talent was essentially to present “a series of impressive tableaux, shifting with great efficiency from one to another.”6 This view is difficult to reconcile with the enormous impact that his performances had on so many viewers, and with Garrick’s own written dissections, described later in this chapter, of the psychology of the great tragic Shakespearean characters, including Lear and Macbeth.
A broader point can be made. Acting can never be completely natural, nor should it be. It is an artificial process, aimed at giving an appearance of natural behavior. If players spoke and acted on the stage as people do in their ordinary lives, the result would be repetitious and tedious, as well as often difficult to hear and comprehend. Audiences would either go to sleep or walk out of the theatre. As many amateur actors and their audiences have learned to their chagrin, one can’t act naturally on the stage if one wants to connect to the audience: acting requires a special kind of projection and emphasis that would seem artificial in the ordinary course of interaction between people. Macklin taught his acting pupils to speak naturally as they would in their normal life and then to say the same words with more force for the stage but keeping the same emphasis.7 Soon many London actors had adopted the natural acting style pioneered by Macklin and Garrick.
Moreover, the stage has its own conventions, which conform to the particular time and conditions of the society of which it is a part. A modern theatre historian has written that every master of underplaying looks like a ham thirty years later.8 For example, much of the theatrical realism of the 1930s seems stilted today; the acting in most movies of that period now seems mannered and unnatural. In the drama as in other art forms, it is only the rare work of genius that does not run the risk of becoming dated. If a twenty-first-century theatregoer were able to travel back in time to see Garrick perform, she might well be as enthralled by his acting as his contemporaries were, but it is unlikely it would seem natural to her.
Garrick’s supremacy as an actor was universally recognized. The leading politician Charles James Fox was so eager to see Garrick revive his role as Macbeth, which he had not played for several years, that he offered to play Banquo opposite him. And when Garrick played Lear, Fox could be seen in his theatre box vigorously waving his hands in the air to show his friends how much he admired the performance.9 Kitty Clive, a plain-spoken leading actress who resented Garrick’s vanity, nevertheless sobbed throughout his performance as Lear and burst out at the end, “Damn him, I believe he could act a gridiron.”10
The novelist Fanny Burney, a friend and neighbor of Garrick, wrote in her diary, “We had yesterday,—I know not whether to say pain or pleasure—of seeing Mr. Garrick in the part of Lear. He was exquisitely great; every idea which I had formed of his talents, although I have ever idolized him, was exceeded.”11 The father of one of Burney’s friends paid Garrick the compliment of threatening to punish his children by taking them to see Garrick in King Lear.12 A playgoer commented to Garrick: “You are a totally different man in Lear from what you are in Richard. There is a sameness in every other actor.”13 But perhaps the finest tribute to Garrick’s genius as an actor was in a work of fiction. Burney had the heroine of her novel, Evelina, write to a friend after seeing Garrick perform: “I could hardly believe he had studied a written part, for every word seemed to be uttered from the impulse of the moment.”14
What was the secret of Garrick’s greatness as an actor? His short stature, only about five foot four, could be a handicap. One evening, while acting the role of a suitor in a comedy, he cried out to the leading lady: “Alas! I seem too little in your eyes.” A man in the upper gallery shouted: “Why, to be sure you do, it would be very odd if you did not.” The audience dissolved in laughter. Garrick cut the line when he next performed the play.15 But Garrick’s diminutive size never disqualified him from playing Shakespeare’s great tragic roles: Macbeth, Hamlet, or Lear. He made up for it by his boundless energy; his limbs were constantly in motion, and his facial expression changed from moment to moment to match the emotional changes of the character he was portraying. He gave the impression that his features followed the workings of his mind. “His face rippled with thought, and his quickly-moving brow and black, far-darting eyes commanded his hearers as completely as they dominated his plastic mouth and restless nostrils.”16 He performed Richard III so strenuously that, in his dressing room after the curtain went down, he was “panting, perspiring and lying prostate.”17
Garrick used his body with speed and agility. He did not just stand and speak his lines, as many of his predecessors did; he coupled his words with appropriate actions. An audience member described his performance of Hamlet on first seeing his father’s ghost:
Garrick turns sharply and at the same moment staggers back two or three paces with his knees giving way under him; his hat falls to the ground and both his arms, especially the left, are stretched out nearly to their full length, with the hand as high as his head, the right arm more bent and the hand lower, and the fingers apart; his mouth is open; thus he stands rooted to the spot, with legs apart, but no loss of dignity, supported by his friends, who are better acquainted with the apparition and fear lest he should collapse.18
A newspaper critic described his performance as Lear:
It was in Lear’s madness, that Garrick’s genius was remarkably distinguished. He had no sudden starts, no violent gesticulation; his movements were slow and feeble; misery was depicted on his countenance; he moved his head in the most deliberate manner: his eyes were fixed, or, if they turned to any one near him, he made a pause, and fixed his looks on the person, after much delay; his features, at the same time, telling what he was going to say, before he uttered a word. During the whole time he presented a sight of woe and misery, and a total alienation of mind from every idea, but that of his unkind daughters.19
Garrick’s voice was melodious but not overpowering. He didn’t have a powerful stage voice; but his whisper, sharp and piercing, could be heard in the last seat of the upper gallery, without losing the appearance of a whisper. Garrick explained why his stage whisper was effective, whereas the loud declamation of some of his colleagues was unintelligible: “The reason is, that many of the actors have no idea of distinctiveness in their pronunciation, and forget the lesson of acquiring a temperance that may give it smoothness.”20 Jacob Decastro recalled that, as a fifteen-year-old student in a Hebrew school run by the Portuguese synagogue, he and his friends would pool their pocket money to visit the theatre when Garrick played. They went not just for entertainment but in the hope “that the frequent hearing of his oratorical powers would facilitate their true pronunciation of the English language, of which they were ardent admirers.”21 Perhaps inspired by Garrick’s performances, Decastro went on to become an actor.
Above all, Garrick was able to get inside his characters, to understand their motivations, strengths, and weaknesses. “The only way to arrive at great excellency in characters of humour,” he said, “is to be very conversant with human nature.”22 Early in his career he wrote an Essay on Acting, in which he examined the psychology of Macbeth. It is worth quoting, not only for Garrick’s perceptive analysis but also for the prosaic practical advice to other actors playing Macbeth that he gives at the end of the passage:
When the murder of Duncan is committed, [Macbeth’s] ambition is ingulph’d at that instant, by the horror of the deed, his faculties are intensely riveted to the murder alone, without having the least consolation of the consequential advantages to comfort him in that exigency. He should at that time, be a moving statue, or indeed a petrify’d man; his eyes must speak, and his tongue be metaphorically silent; his ears must be sensible of imaginary noises, and deaf to the present and audible voice of his wife; his attitudes must be quick and permanent; his voice articulately trembling, and confusedly intelligible; the murderer should be seen in every limb, and yet every member, at that instant, should seem separated from his body, and his body from his soul: This is the picture of a complete regicide . . . . I hope I shall not be thought minutely circumstantial, if I should advise a real genius to wear cork heels to his shoes, as in this scene he should seem to tread on air, and I promise him he will soon discover the great benefit of this (however seeming trifling) piece of advice.23
Garrick made a habit of observing everyone he came into contact with. If he was to play a shopkeeper, he noted the way shopkeepers behaved.24 He carefully studied the psychology of the characters he played. An example is the analysis of Lear’s personality that he gave to a playgoer who had written to him after seeing him perform the role:
Lear is certainly a weak man, it is part of his character – violent, old & weakly fond of his daughters. Here we agree, but I cannot possibly agree with you . . . that the effect of his distress is diminish’d by his being an old fool – his weakness proceeds from his age (fourscore & upwards) & such an old man full of affection, generosity, passion, & what not meeting with what he thought an ungrateful return from his best belov’d Cordelia, & afterwards real ingratitude from his other daughters, an audience must feel his distresses & madness which is ye consequence of them . . . .25
For many years Garrick had wanted to visit continental Europe. It was then common for wealthy British travelers to make what was called the “Grand Tour,” which usually included France and Italy. He and his wife Violette had spent two months in Paris in 1751, but for many years England’s wars with France prevented another European trip. In 1762, while peace negotiations were going on, the novelist Laurence Sterne wrote to him from Paris, “You are much talked of here, and much expected, soon as the peace will let you.”26 Once a peace treaty was signed, Garrick left the Drury Lane theatre in the charge of his partner James Lacy and in September 1763 the Garricks set off on what was to become an eighteen-month tour of France, Italy, and Germany.
In Paris, Garrick was lionized by the social and intellectual elite. He was introduced to Mme. Suzanne Necker, the wife of Louis XVI’s finance minister Joseph Necker and hostess of a celebrated salon. It was the beginning of a friendship and an affectionate correspondence that lasted for many years. Many years later, she and her husband traveled to London to see Garrick perform at Drury Lane before he retired.27
After three weeks in Paris, the Garricks set out for Italy. They visited Turin, Florence, Rome, Parma, Padua, and Venice, and spent the winter in Naples. Wherever they went, noblemen and literati sought their company and asked Garrick to give them a taste of his art. Happy to oblige, he displayed his versatility to the Duke of Parma and his guests. First, he acted the dagger scene in Macbeth,
his eye creating for the spectators the imaginary dagger; and leading himself, and them, to the royal closet, where the intended victim of assassination, fatally secure, became the prey of horror-struck ambition . . . . As a full contrast to this, he exhibited a gaping apprentice, who drops his master’s pastry in the mud, becomes stupefied at first with terror, and then gives himself up to tears.28
To show his admiration, the duke presented Garrick with a gold enameled snuff box.
The Garricks’ Grand Tour continued in Munich and eastern France, and in November 1764 they returned to Paris for another six months. There Garrick renewed acquaintance with two actresses he had met on his 1751 visit: Claire Josèphe Hippolyte Léris, the leading actress of her day, who went by the stage name of Clairon, and Marie Françoise Dumesnil. The illegitimate daughter of a seamstress and a soldier, Clairon was renowned for her beauty as much as for her acting; Oliver Goldsmith said he had never seen a woman with a more perfect figure.29 Like Garrick, she was skillful in portraying a range of emotions, one after the other, but even in the midst of passionate anger she remained intensely feminine.30 Soon after his arrival in Paris, the Garricks and Clairon were invited to a party of “nobles and the literati,” who asked the two theatrical stars to perform for them. Clairon recited a passage from Racine, and Garrick gave them the dagger scene from Macbeth, and then the passage from King Lear where Lear heaps terrible curses on his daughter Goneril.31
Garrick went to the theatre to see Clairon perform, and they soon became fast friends. At a supper party, Clairon asked Garrick to give another demonstration of his art. This he did, astounding his audience by acting out the dagger scene from Macbeth, and then contrasting this tragic role with a scene from The Provoked Wife, a Restoration comedy, in which a character simply goes to sleep. At another party, Garrick told one of his favorite stories, an occurrence he said he had seen in a French province, which had taught him how to act King Lear’s madness. A father was holding his infant daughter at an open window when the child sprang from her father’s arms and fell to the ground, killing herself. Garrick acted out the unutterable sorrow of the father, causing the whole company to weep. When he was finished and everyone applauded, Clairon impulsively took Garrick in her arms and kissed him, apologizing to Violette that she was so overcome that she couldn’t help herself.32 Garrick frequently told this story, but when he was in France he placed the incident in France and when in England he placed it in England, so there is some doubt whether it actually occurred.33
Dumesnil made her debut at the Comédie Française in 1737. Shy in her personal life and scarcely above medium height, she underwent a transformation when she took the stage. As Clytemnestre in Racine’s tragedy Iphigénie: “Her dark eyes seemed to flash fire; her voice became sonorous and terrible; her figure dilated until imaginative spectators thought it towered above all others.”34 Clairon and Dumesnil represented two contrasting acting methods. Clairon believed that, in preparing herself for a role, an actor must methodically repeat the same lines a hundred times so that they became embedded in her memory; while Dumesnil disdained such mechanical methods, relying on the spark of inspiration to express a character’s emotions.35 Dumesnil thought that an actor should actually experience the emotions she was representing on the stage, while Clairon took the opposite view.
Garrick had given a lot of thought to the question whether an actor had to feel the character’s emotions in order to portray them successfully. In Paris, Garrick demonstrated his acting skill to Denis Diderot, the encyclopedist and philosopher of the Enlightenment, who was deeply interested in the art of acting. Garrick’s virtuoso display of versatility persuaded Diderot that a skilled actor can make an audience experience emotions that he himself does not experience. Diderot wrote:
Garrick will put his head between two folding-doors, and in the course of five or six seconds his expression will change successively from wild delight to temperate pleasure, from this to tranquility, from tranquility to surprise, from surprise to blank astonishment, from that to sorrow, from sorrow to the air of one overwhelmed, from that to fright, from fright to horror, from horror to despair, and thence he will go up again to the point from which he started. Can his soul have experienced all these feelings, and played this kind of scale in concert with his face? I don’t believe it; nor do you.36
Garrick explained his own views on acting in a letter he wrote on his new friend Clairon’s talents:
She has everything that art and a good understanding, with great natural spirit can give her—but then I fear . . . the heart has none of those instantaneous feelings, that life blood, that keen sensibility, that bursts at once from genius, and like electrical fire shoots thro’ the veins, marrow, bones and all, of every spectator.—Mme. Clairon is so conscious and certain of what she can do, that she never (I believe) had the feelings of the instant come upon her unexpectedly.—but I pronounce that the greatest stokes of genius have been unknown to the actor himself, ‘till circumstances, and the warmth of the scene has sprung the mine as it were, as much to his own surprise, as that of the audience.—Thus I make a great difference between a great genius, and a good actor. The first will always realize the feelings of his character, and be transported beyond himself, while the other, with great powers, and good sense, will give great pleasure to an audience.37
Garrick, who studied and rehearsed every role he played with extraordinary diligence, nevertheless believed that to be a great actor one has to be able to generate a spark, “an electrical fire that shoots through the veins” of the audience. It has been suggested that Garrick anticipated theories of the subconscious of Sigmund Freud and others, making the point that “unconscious and unconstrained emotions are the source of the most impressive theatrical explosions.”38 Garrick made a fundamental distinction between geniuses and merely good actors, believing, with some justice, that he belonged in the former category.
The idea that an actor can move his audience only if he feels the emotions he is acting can be traced to Horace, the poet of Ancient Rome.39 With the introduction of “natural” acting by Garrick and Macklin in the 1740s, this idea gained new currency. Garrick’s stage representation of Richard III early in his career inspired a poem in a Dublin newspaper wondering how a man who seemed so gentle off the stage could play the villainous king with such conviction.40 And King George II, who went to see plays only two or three times a year and was hardly a theatrical sophisticate, probably reflected the views of many of his subjects when he remarked that he could not see how anyone who portrayed Richard III’s crimes on the stage could possibly be an honest man.41
Others disagreed. Diderot saw the actor as an empty vessel or blank slate, “an automatic instrument waiting to sound the notes composed by other men’s feelings on the strings of his own neutral memory.42 Diderot wrote that Garrick’s
talent consists . . . in imitating the exterior signs of emotion so perfectly that you can’t tell the difference; his cries of anguish are marked in his memory; his gestures of despair have been prepared in advance; he knows the precise cue to start his tears flowing.43
Put another way, the actor on the stage becomes two persons, the character he has invented out of his imagination and himself, the vessel into which that character has been poured.44 Dr. Johnson went even further, saying that if Garrick really believed himself to be that monster, Richard III, he deserved to be hanged every time he performed it.45
It is not easy to reconcile Garrick’s “electrical fire” with Diderot’s “automatic instrument,” but perhaps the two views of acting can exist side by side in an actor of exceptional ability. Having decided how to play a role—the essence of the character he was portraying—a great actor such as Garrick could perform the role reliably night after night, but the consistency of his acting did not foreclose the touch of genius that could make an audience gasp in astonishment and pleasure.
It appears that Garrick solved instinctively a problem that the Russian acting teacher Constantin Stanislavski purposefully decided to find an answer for two centuries later. An actor may be in a creative mood on one day, wrote Stanislavski, but “how was one to make this condition no longer a matter of mere accident, to create it at the will and order of the actor?”46 Although his solution was complex and beyond the scope of this book, its essence was to train the actor to concentrate, and to fix his concentration on the stage, not the audience:
[T]he more the actor wishes to amuse his audience, the more the audience will sit in comfort waiting to be amused . . . . But as soon as the actor stops being concerned with his audience, the latter begins to watch the actor . . . . If nobody amuses the spectator there is nothing left for him to do in the theatre but to seek himself for an object of attention. Where can that object be found? On the stage, of course, in the actor himself. The concentration of the creating actor calls out the concentration of the spectator and in this manner forces him to enter into what is passing on the stage, exciting his attention, his imagination, his thinking processes and his emotion . . . . [T]he concentration of the actor reacts not only on his sight and hearing, but on all the rest of his senses. It embraces his mind, his will, his emotions, his body, his memory and his imagination.47
Like Stanislavski two centuries earlier, Garrick believed that actors must be thoroughly trained in their craft. He had little patience with temperamental actors. He saw acting as a profession, in which the actor must separate his own persona from the one he represents on the stage. A modern writer imagines Vivien Leigh playing Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, in her dressing room fifteen minutes after the curtain comes down, sipping a cocktail, smoking a cigarette and arguing with Laurence Olivier over where to go for dinner. And when a would-be actress compliments her on her portrayal of Blanche’s desperation, pain, and madness, Vivien replies that she stepped painfully on a nail on the stage. It was her foot, not Blanche’s. She had to be careful not to limp.48
When Garrick returned to London in April 1765, King George III honored his first appearance on the Drury Lane stage by ordering a command performance of Much Ado About Nothing. The reception he received showed that his celebrity had not waned during his absence. The comic role of Benedick was a favorite of Garrick’s—and of his audience. It was a role he had played for nearly thirty years, “a performance of most exquisite humour, in which he was never seen without sympathy and laughter equally irresistible.”49 A critic for the London Chronicle had written in 1757 that one of greatest attractions of the play was Garrick’s speech when he “first deliberates whether he shall marry Beatrice. His Manner of coming forth from the Arbour, and the Tone of his Voice, when he says ‘This is no Trick,’ etc. is diverting in the highest Degree.”50 According to Garrick’s early biographer Thomas Davies, he got “such loud and repeated applauses . . . as perhaps no actor ever before was welcomed with. The joy of the audience expressed, not in the usual methods of clapping of hands and clattering of sticks, but in loud shouts and huzzas.”51
In 1761, a young poet and obsessive theatregoer named Charles Churchill summed up Garrick’s acting genius. In a long satirical poem, The Rosciad, he wittily described the virtues and faults of the principal actors on the London stage and set up a competition as to who was the best.52 Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson were the judges, and at the end they gave the prize to Garrick:
If manly sense; if nature linked with art;
If thorough knowledge of the human heart;
If powers of acting, vast and unconfined;
If fewest faults, with greatest beauties joined;
If strong expression, and strange powers, which lie
Within the magic circle of the eye;
If feelings which few hearts, like his, can know,
Deserve the preference;—Garrick take the chair;
Nor quit it—‘till thou place an equal there.53
Notes
1 Richard Cumberland, Memoirs of Richard Cumberland (Philadelphia, PA: Parry and McMillan, 1856), 47.
2 Hamlet, Act III, Scene II.
3 Cooke, Memoirs of Charles Macklin, 98–99.
4 Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, i, 43.
5 Appleton, Charles Macklin: An Actor’s Life, 158–59; Cecil Price, Theatre in the Age of Garrick (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973), 15.
6 Lisa A. Freeman, Character’s Theatre: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 34.
7 John Hill, “The Actor: A Treatise on the Art of Playing,” in Thomas, ed., Restoration and Georgian England 1660–1788, 345.
8 Thomson, Why Acting Matters, 68.
9 Private Correspondence of Garrick, (V&A), xlvi-xlvii.
10 Fitzgerald, The Life of Mrs. Catherine Clive, 77.
11 Burney, Early Diaries, i, 199–200.
12 Ibid., i, 199 n. 2.
13 Private Correspondence of Garrick (V&A), viii.
14 Fanny Burney, Evelina, or, The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press., 2008), Letter X.
15 Wilkinson, Memoirs (reprint), 15.
16 T.W. Robertson, “David Garrick: A Love Story” in Caines, ed. Lives of Shakespearean Actors: Garrick, i, 400.
17 West, Image of the Actor, 66.
18 Ibid., 101–02.
19 Undated and unidentified newspaper clipping, Garrick Memorial (GC), 114.
20 Cooke, Memoirs of Samuel Foote (2), ii, 203.
21 Decastro, Memoirs, 2–3.
22 David Garrick, An Essay on Acting (London: printed for W. Bickerton, 1744 [Gale Ecco Print Editions]), 9–10.
23 Ibid.
24 Auburn, “Garrick at Drury Lane, 1747–1776,” in Donohue, ed., The Cambridge History of British Theatre, ii, 148.
25 David Garrick to Edward Tighe, Feb. 23 [1770?]. Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, eds., ii, 682–83 and notes 1 & 2.
26 George Winchester Stone, Jr., ed., The Journal of David Garrick: Describing his Visit to France and Italy in 1763 (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1939), 40, n. 10.
27 Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, iii, 1095, n. 1.
28 Private Correspondence of Garrick (V&A), xxxix-xl.
29 Kohansky, The Disreputable Profession, 86.
30 Frederick Hawkins, The French Stage in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Greenwood Press, 1888), i, 373–74.
31 David Garrick to George Colman, Oct. 8, 1763, Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, i, 387.
32 Ibid,; Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, ii, 81–83.
33 Private Correspondence of David Garrick (GC), xl.
34 Hawkins, The French Stage in the Eighteenth Century, i, 317.
35 Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1985), 110, 136.
36 Denis Diderot, The Paradox of Acting (New York: Hill and Wang, Inc., 1957), 32–33; Thomson, The Cambridge Introduction to English Theatre, 1660–1900, 151.
37 David Garrick to Helfrich Peter Sturz, Jan. 15, 1769, Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, ii, 634–36.
38 Roach, The Player’s Passion, 109, 179.
39 West, The Image of the Actor, 59.
40 Sheldon, Thomas Sheridan of Smock-Alley, 29.
41 Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, i, 185.
42 Roach, The Player’s Passion, 135
43 Ibid., 133.
44 Ibid., 128.
45 William Archer, Masks or Faces? (New York: Hill and Wang, Inc., 1957), 93.
46 Constantin Stanislavski, My Life in Art (New York: Theatre Art Books, 1924), 462.
47 Stanislavski, My Life in Art, 464–65.
48 Thomson, Why Acting Matters, 91–92.
49 Private Correspondence of Garrick (V&A), xxii.
50 Price, Theatre in the Age of Garrick, 128.
51 Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, ii, 96–97.
52 In the poem’s title, the author paid tribute to David Garrick, who had acquired the nickname Roscius, after Quintus Roscius Gallus, the legendary actor of ancient Rome.
53 Churchill, The Rosciad, 34.