FIGURE 12.1  David Garrick leaning on a bust of Shakespeare, by Thomas Gainsborough

By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

12

SHAKESPEARE MANIA

I would not leave the stage till I had rescued Hamlet from all the rubbish of the 5th Act.

(David Garrick)

More than a century after Shakespeare’s death, his plays had not lost their appeal for British audiences. In fact, the Bard had become something of a national saint, with people buying chips from his supposed chair as relics.¹ Not a season passed during the first half of the eighteenth century without some half-dozen of Shakespeare’s works being shown in London theatres.² For example, the 1738–39 season at Drury Lane included performances of Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Othello, Richard III, Macbeth, Henry VIII, and King Lear.³ In 1740 a group of notables, including the poet Alexander Pope, raised funds to erect a monument to Shakespeare in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, and it quickly became a tourist destination.⁴ Then a year later, Charles Macklin as Shylock and David Garrick as Richard III electrified theatre audiences, further stimulating the demand for Shakespeare’s plays.

Garrick did not just respect and admire the works of Shakespeare, he revered them. He created a shrine to the Bard at his riverbank country home at Hampton, near London; and he brought Shakespeare’s plays to the public both by his interpretations on the stage and by what today we would call shrewd marketing. Garrick himself admitted: “I am afraid my Madness about Shakespear [sic] is become very troublesome, for I question whether I have written a Single Letter, without bringing him in, head & Shoulders.”⁵ Indeed, Garrick could not resist quoting Shakespeare in his correspondence. In a dispute with an actor over his salary, Garrick began a letter: “Our Shakespeare says, ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men.’”⁶ And, replying to a letter from the Parisian writer and intellectual Mme. Suzanne Necker, Garrick thanked her “from my heart of hearts (as Shakespeare calls it) for the most flattering, charming, bewitching letter that ever came to my hand.”⁷ Even when asking his friend, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, to appoint his brother as marshal of the King’s Bench prison, Garrick could not resist making a reference to the Bard: “. . . if, as our Shakespeare says, a brother may commend a brother, I do not know a man of more probity and humanity . . . .”⁸ (Mansfield declined to make the appointment).

Amateur Shakespeare productions were a sign of the growing popularity of his plays, leading to revivals of several plays that were not well known at the time, including Henry V, King John, and Richard II.⁹ In 1737, a group of fashionable women known as the Shakespeare Ladies persuaded John Rich, the manager of the Covent Garden theatre, to produce a number of Shakespeare plays privately in his home. Their efforts played a part in igniting interest in several comedies that had been ignored for a century, including As You Like It and Twelfth Night.¹⁰ By happenstance, Rich’s encouragement of amateur Shakespeare theatricals launched the career of George Anne Bellamy. At the age of fourteen, Bellamy had become friendly with Rich’s daughters. On a visit to Rich’s house, Bellamy and his daughters decided to give a private performance of Othello, with Bellamy in the title role. She tells what happened next:

When we were perfect in the words, we began to rehearse. During the rehearsal, as we were only playing for our own amusement, and I concluded we were not overheard, I gave free scope to my fancy and my voice; and I really believe our performance was more perfect, as it was truly natural, than if it had been aided with the studied grace of professors. As I was raving in all the extremity of jealous madness, Mr. Rich accidentally passed by the room in which we were rehearsing.¹¹

Attracted by the power and sweetness of Bellamy’s voice, Rich told her she could end up as one of the finest actresses in the world; he would be happy to engage her if she wanted an acting career. After overcoming her mother’s resistance to seeing her daughter on the stage, Bellamy, described by a fellow actor as “small, blue-eyed, and beautiful,” went on to become a leading lady at Covent Garden and later to play opposite David Garrick at Drury Lane as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet and in other Shakespearean roles.¹²

Aristocratic amateurs sometimes were able to use their influence to perform Shakespeare’s plays in a professional theatre. On one occasion, members of the family of Sir Francis Delaval, a dissolute but well-connected playboy and theatre enthusiast, acted the leading male roles in Othello at Drury Lane, while professional actresses played the female roles. In the audience were members of the Royal Family, including the Prince of Wales and his son, the thirteen-year-old future King George III. In a more private setting, William Pitt, Britain’s fiery wartime leader in the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), enjoyed reading Shakespeare’s history plays, particularly Henry IV and Henry V, aloud with members of his family. He appropriated the more spirited and warlike roles for himself and assigned the passages of low comedy to his relatives.¹³

Although Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet had been largely neglected for eighty years, audiences were familiar with the story, because other dramatists had used it in their own plays. Perhaps the best known of these was the Restoration playwright Thomas Otway’s tragedy, The History and Fall of Caius Marius, “a brilliant and imaginative mash-up of Romeo and Juliet and a plot of Roman politics and rebellion,” with material borrowed from other Shakespearean plays.¹⁴ Thomas Sheridan revived Shakespeare’s Romeo at Dublin’s Smock Alley theatre in 1746 with great success, and this inspired the two London theatre managers, David Garrick at Drury Lane and John Rich at Covent Garden, to put on their own revivals of it, leading to one of the most famous rivalries in the history of the London stage.¹⁵

The Romeo that Garrick staged in 1748 and again in 1750 was not exactly the Romeo that Shakespeare wrote. Responding to the sensibilities of eighteenth-century audiences, Garrick made some big changes in the play. He cut over 800 lines—almost a quarter of the play— including some bawdy lines, puns, and rhyming couplets, which he considered inconsistent with the tragic mood of the play; and he eliminated the character Rosaline, with whom Romeo is in love before he falls in love with Juliet, on the ground that audiences might see Romeo’s apparent fickleness as a blemish on his character.¹⁶

Most important, Garrick altered the plot in order to heighten the pathos of the tragedy. In the original play, Juliet takes a potion that puts her into a two-day sleep, during which she appears to be dead; when Romeo finds her, he despairs and takes poison; and when she awakens and finds Romeo dead, she fatally stabs herself with Romeo’s dagger. Garrick had Juliet wake up before Romeo dies from the poison; which enabled him to add a 75-line death scene between the lovers before he dies and she in horror stabs herself to death. The audiences loved it.¹⁷ A critic wrote: “No play ever received greater advantage from alteration than this tragedy, especially in the last act; bringing Juliet to life before Romeo died is undoubtedly a change of infinite merit.”¹⁸ From then on, the altered Romeo and Juliet had a permanent place in the Drury Lane repertory, being shown over 200 times during the years Garrick was manager.

Garrick staged his altered Romeo in the 1748–49 season, with Spranger Barry and Susannah Cibber as the lovers.¹⁹ Garrick, who was not in the habit of praising other actors, regarded the tall, handsome, well-spoken Barry as the best lover he had ever seen on the stage.²⁰ A fashionable lady who saw both Garrick and Barry play Romeo said: “When I saw Garrick, if I had been his Juliet, I should have wished him to leap up into the balcony to me; but when I saw Barry, I should have been inclined to jump down to him.”²¹ A critic observed that, although Garrick may have been the better all-around actor, “in all the scenes of love and domestic tenderness [Barry] stood alone.”²²

Susannah Cibber had roots in London’s artistic world. She was born in 1714 in the middle of London’s theatre district. Her father-in-law, Colley Cibber, was a former manager of Drury Lane as well as a prominent actor and England’s Poet Laureate. Her brother, Thomas Arne, was a well-known composer, who had to his credit the patriotic air “Rule Britannia,” as well as many musical pieces for the theatre. Susannah’s husband, Theophilus Cibber, was an accomplished actor who at one time had been co-manager of Drury Lane, but was also a violent drunkard, who disgraced himself by bringing a notorious adultery lawsuit. After he had stolen his wife’s valuable stage costumes and sold them to pay his debts, she began a love affair with a wealthy young man named William Sloper. Theophilus encouraged the love affair, reportedly even going into the room where they were in bed together and putting a pillow under their heads, and then sued Sloper for adultery.²³ Although technically Theophilus won the case, Sloper’s lawyer, William Murray (later to become Lord Chief Justice Mansfield), persuaded the jury to award Theophilus the derisory sum of £10, the smallest banknote then in circulation.²⁴ Susannah and Theophilus soon separated, and she and Sloper spent many years together as unmarried partners.

Although the lawsuit and her long affair with Sloper tarnished her personal reputation, Susannah’s standing as a singer and actress only grew. Her plaintive, musical voice appealed to the emotions of her audience;²⁵ the composer George Handel was so taken with it that he wrote a contralto aria for her in his oratorio The Messiah.²⁶ A contemporary wrote: “The harmony of her voice was as powerful as the animation of her look. In grief and tenderness her eyes looked as if they swam in tears; in rage and despair they seemed to dart flashes of fire.”²⁷ Garrick described Cibber as “our first actress.”²⁸

In the summer of 1750, despite the success of his earlier portrayal of Romeo, Barry was unhappy at Drury Lane. He complained that his acting schedule interfered with his social life, but he was not appeased when Garrick asked him to choose his own performance days. The more likely reason for his discontent was that Garrick was drawing larger crowds than he did. Soon, Barry signed up with Covent Garden and urged Cibber to come with him.²⁹ Rich, the Covent Garden manager, promptly announced that he would produce Romeo and Juliet in September.

By mid-century, each of London’s two theatres had a charismatic manager. Garrick was firmly in command at Drury Lane, while Rich’s greatest success at Covent Garden had come in 1728 when he produced John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre (Samuel Johnson said that the work “made Gay rich and Rich gay [in the original, not the modern, sense of the word]”).³⁰ Rich was a flamboyant personality, who introduced pantomime to the London stage. Like Garrick, he was an actor as well as a manager, but his best known acting role was not in spoken theatre but in pantomime as Harlequin, an acrobatic character who does magic tricks and prances around the stage wearing a mask and spangled tights.

Rich was an astute, though somewhat eccentric, businessman. He would interview playwrights in his drawing room, caressing his dozen or so well-fed cats.³¹ According to one of Garrick’s biographers:

In Rich’s ideal world there would have been no five-act tragedies, with their improbable plots and high-flown language, no temperamental actors and actresses with their inflated egos and even more inflated salaries; he would have peopled the stage with sword-swallowers, dancing bears and undermining rope-walkers.³²

Garrick was contemptuous of Rich’s emphasis on spectacle rather than serious theatre. In a letter to a friend he expressed disgust that a rope dancer had performed on the Covent Garden stage, writing that he would never allow “such a prostitution” at Drury Lane: “nothing but downright starving would induce me to bring such defilement and abomination into the house of William Shakespeare.”³³ Nevertheless, he found it necessary to compete with Rich, and so he began producing “entertainments” as afterpieces to the main plays. A German visitor described these entertainments as “a happy mixture of dialogue, song, and dance . . .. The people are uncommonly attached to this kind of diversion.”³⁴ Both managers took whatever steps they deemed necessary to ensure the success of their productions: Rich planted his friends in various part of the house in order to produce the desired applause;³⁵ while Garrick was accused of writing reviews of his own performances for a newspaper in which he owned a share.³⁶

When Rich announced his plans to produce Romeo, with the leading male role acted by Barry, Garrick secretly decided to stage a competing Romeo, with himself playing the leading male role. Feeling sure that Cibber, who was dissatisfied with the parts she was required to play at Drury Lane, would join Barry at Covent Garden for the coming season, Garrick fixed on the nineteen-year-old Anne Bellamy to play Juliet.³⁷

Bellamy later claimed that Drury Lane hired her by trickery. Soon after she arrived in London that summer, Rich had asked her to play Juliet at Covent Garden. She demanded the very substantial salary of £700 for the season, but nothing was agreed on. While Rich was drawing up a contract, James Lacy, Garrick’s co-manager at Drury Lane, approached Bellamy with a contract for three years at £300 a year, telling her that Cibber was engaged at Covent Garden for the coming season, which meant to Bellamy that she would not get to play many of the best parts at that theatre.

Hearing this, and angry at Rich, Bellamy impulsively signed the Drury Lane contract. Only then did Lacy tell her that Cibber had not signed with Covent Garden; there were reports that she had signed, but Lacy could not vouch for their truth. “However,” Lacy added disdainfully, “at all events you must be a gainer by playing with my partner [Garrick], whose consequence stamps merit where there is none, and increases it where there is.”³⁸

On the same day that Bellamy signed the Drury Lane contract, Rich came to see her with a three-year contract in hand which he had drawn up, offering her £500, £600, and £700 for the next three seasons. When he learned that Bellamy had signed with Drury Lane, he was incredulous, telling her that he had counted on her signing and for that reason had resisted Barry’s urging him to bring Cibber over to Covent Garden. Eventually Cibber did make the switch, and Rich cast Barry and Cibber as the lovers in his new production of Romeo and Juliet. Bellamy regretted her hasty decision to sign the Drury Lane contract.³⁹

For the next two months, Garrick studied the role of Romeo and instructed Bellamy in how to play Juliet.⁴⁰ Thomas Davies, Garrick’s first biographer, called Bellamy “a young actress of merit, whose person was elegant, and whose voice, when well regulated, sufficiently harmonious, in the part of Juliet.” The Theatrical Review noted that she had;

a soft wildness, which commands pity. . ..[H]er talents lie chiefly in the pathetic . . . she is not like most of the other actresses, reduced to the poor shift of hiding her face. . ..real, dissembled tears then speak her feeling, and call forth fellow-drops from every eye.⁴¹

When Rich announced his opening night at Covent Garden, Garrick caught him by surprise, revealing that his Romeo would open at Drury Lane on the same night. For twelve consecutive dates, the two theatres staged competing Romeos. Any twelve-day run of a play was unusual in the London theatre of those days: for example, Drury Lane had put on eight different plays earlier that September, only one of which was shown more than once.⁴² Covent Garden and Drury Lane competed for audiences, sometimes performing the same plays within days of each other; but for the same play to run concurrently at the only two theatres in London was unprecedented.⁴³ Although a rare occurrence, it was repeated in 1936, when John Gielgud and Leslie Howard played competing Hamlets in New York; taxi drivers would ask Gielgud which Hamlet he was when he asked them to drive him to the theatre.⁴⁴

Given the enthusiasm for the theatre—and for Shakespeare—that existed in London in Garrick’s time, the absence of any choice of offerings was frustrating to many playgoers. Some attended Covent Garden for the first three acts and then went over to Drury Lane to see Garrick play the last two, a course of action made economically attractive by the theatre managers’ practice of charging only half-price after the third act.⁴⁵ But after a few days, the rivalry began to disgust playgoers, who “were put under the necessity of sacrificing their amusement to the jealousy of rival actors.”⁴⁶ It may have been Garrick himself who composed the ditty:

‘Well, what’s to night?’ says angry Ned,

As up from bed he rouses;

‘Romeo again!’ and shakes his head;

‘Ah! pox on both your houses!’⁴⁷

Theatregoers and critics were divided as to which of the two Romeo casts was better. The tall Barry had the advantage in looks over the five-foot-four Garrick, but others thought Garrick more than made up for it by his acting skill. As to the part of Juliet, some said that Bellamy’s figure was better suited than Cibber’s for the character of an amorous beauty.⁴⁸ One critic thought Romeo better performed by Garrick, but “Juliet, tho’ not better, as least more affectingly by Mrs. Cibber,” adding that Charles Macklin, who played Mercutio at Covent Garden, burlesqued rather than acted the role.⁴⁹

Unsurprisingly, Garrick claimed that Drury Lane had won the competition. On October 4, while the rival Romeos were still playing, he wrote to the Countess of Burlington: “Our house to night was much better than theirs, & I believe ‘tis generally thought that our performance is best – but this your ladyship must hear from other people.”⁵⁰ A few days later, he wrote to the countess that he and Bellamy had played the final night of Romeo to a very full house to very great applause. He added that Barry and Cibber came over to Drury Lane incognito to see the competition, Covent Garden’s Romeo having closed one night earlier.⁵¹ But whether or not Garrick really believed he had won the competition with Barry may be doubted; he never played the role of Romeo again.

Romeo and Juliet was not the only Shakespeare play that Garrick altered. He staged adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew (renamed Catharine and Petruchio), Much Ado About Nothing (renamed Benedick and Beatrice), and The Winter’s Tale (renamed Florizel and Perdita),⁵² but King Lear was a special case. When Garrick took over at Drury Lane, the Lear being shown in London theatres was a drastic revision of the play, written by an Irish poet named Nahum Tate in 1681. Tate invented a love relationship between Lear’s daughter Cordelia and Gloucester’s son Edgar and eliminated the part of the Fool, Lear’s wise jester. But Tate’s main change was to replace the play’s tragic ending with a happy one: Cordelia and Edgar married and reigned peacefully as king and queen of Britain while Lear, Gloucester, and Kent retired to spend their last days in relaxed contemplation.⁵³

Garrick played Lear eighty-five times during his acting career, at first using the Tate version of the play. But early on, he began restoring King Lear to Shakespeare’s original version. He deleted many of the lines Tate had created and reinstated 255 lines of Shakespeare.⁵⁴ But he was unwilling to set aside the most drastic of Tate’s changes, which were popular with Garrick’s audiences. In his final performance of the play shortly before he retired from the stage, the Fool was still absent, and Tate’s anodyne ending remained intact.

Garrick’s cuts in Hamlet, while not quite so drastic as Tate’s surgery on Lear, aroused criticism and ridicule, though his version of the play enjoyed packed houses for several years.⁵⁵ Among other things, he deleted the grave-digging scene, the part of the oily, ambitious courtier Osric, and the sword duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Garrick defended the changes:

I have ventured to produce Hamlet with alterations it was the most imprudent thing I ever did in all my life but I had sworn I would not leave the Stage till I had rescued that noble play from all the rubbish of the 5th Act . . .. The alteration was received with general approbation beyond my most warm expectations.⁵⁶

Garrick may have cut the fencing scene for a personal reason; when he altered the play he was fifty-five and in poor health, and by Act V of Hamlet (Shakespeare’s longest play) he was too exhausted for the physical exertion that the scene required.⁵⁷ After Garrick’s death, the new Drury Lane manager restored the original version of Hamlet.⁵⁸

Arthur Murphy wrote a parody of Hamlet, which poked fun at Garrick, ascribed his cuts in the play to vanity and greed, and suggested that he had murdered the play. In the parody, Garrick was Hamlet while Shakespeare was the Ghost of Hamlet’s father. It is worth quoting at some length:

The Ghost:

“I am Shakespear’s Ghost,

For my foul sins, done in my days of nature,

Doom’d for a certain term to leave my works

Obscure and uncorrected; to endure

The ignorance of players; the barbarous hand

Of Gothic editors; the ponderous weight

Of leaden commentator . . ..

List, list, O list!

If thou didst ever the fam’d Shakespear love –

. . .

Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.

. . .

But public taste, the sport of fickle fashion,

May sate itself in a celestial page,

And prey on garbage.

. . .

My works have made your fortune;

And Hamlet brought to you, the mere reciter,

The organ of another’s sense, more money,

Than e’er it did to me, who wrought the tale.

Yet on my scenes, by ages sanctified,

In evil hour thy restless spirit stole,

With juice of cursed nonsense in an inkhorn,

And o’er my fair applauded page did pour

A Manager’s distilment, whose effect

Holds such an enmity with wit of man,

That each interpolating word of thine

Annihilates the sense, and courses through

The natural turns of fable and of thought;

And, with a sudden stupor, it doth damp

And chill, like sheets of water on a fire,

The clear and glowing lines: so did it mine;

And a most instant numbness crept about,

Most blockhead-like, with vile and paltry phrase,

All my smooth writings.

Thus was I, ev’n by thy unhallow’d hand,

Of both my grave-diggers at once dispatch’d,

Cut off in the luxuriance of my wit,

Unstudied, undigested, and bemawl’d:

No critic ask’d, — but brought upon the stage

With all your imperfections on my head!”

Garrick:

“O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible!”

Ghost:

“If thou hast nature in thee, dare it not;

Let not the immortal pages of Shakespear be

A place for ev’ry puny whipster’s trash.

But, howsoever thou pursuest this act,

Attempt no more, nor let your soul conceive

Aught ‘gainst my other plays; I leave thee now

To the just vengeance critics will inflict,

And to the thorns that in your bosom lodge,

To goad and sting thee.

. . .

Reflect in time; farewell! remember me.”

Garrick:

“There’s ne’er an actor strutting on the stage

That can do Shakespear justice, but myself.”⁵⁹

It’s not clear whether Murphy’s parody was ever performed, but those who read it most likely found it apt—and hilarious.

The high point of Garrick’s veneration of Shakespeare was the Stratford Jubilee of 1769. The Jubilee, arranged and presided over by Garrick, celebrated the 200th anniversary of the Bard’s birth (Shakespeare was born in 1564, so the celebration was five years late).⁶⁰ By Garrick’s time, Shakespeare had become almost a national saint, and Garrick was recognized as his chief promoter and interpreter. A wealthy clergyman, who had bought the house where Shakespeare lived after he retired, ordered a mulberry tree, which Shakespeare had planted 150 years earlier, to be chopped down because it overshadowed his window. The people of Stratford were so enraged at the desecration that the priest was forced to leave town. A carpenter bought the wood and cut it into various shapes of snuff boxes, tea chests, etc., including “a very elegant little square box,”⁶¹ which the Stratford city council sent to Garrick with a document inside it bestowing on him the honor of the “freedom of the city.” They asked Garrick to send them a bust, statue, or painting of Shakespeare, as well as one of himself, to be placed together in the Great Hall at Stratford to celebrate, side by side, Shakespeare and the chief supporter of his memory.⁶² Garrick sent them a portrait of Shakespeare, as well as a copy of a Gainsborough painting of himself leaning against a bust of Shakespeare.⁶³ These events gave Garrick the idea of staging a Shakespeare Jubilee.

Garrick wasted no time in promoting his plan. At the close of the Drury Lane season in May, he addressed the audience with a poem, which began:

My eyes, till then, no sight like this shall see,

Unless we meet at Shakespear’s [sic] Jubilee!⁶⁴

During May and June, the newspapers carried publicity about the Jubilee. An article that appeared in several newspapers, including the St. James’s Chronicle (partly owned by Garrick),⁶⁵ stated:

The preparations at Stratford-upon-Avon, for the celebration of the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, are wholly under the direction of Mr. Garrick. It is to last three days, and there are to be three entertainments every day, viz. at morning, noon, and evening. Dr. Arne is to conduct the musical entertainments, and the orchestra is to be formed of the best masters on each instrument⁶⁶

Garrick hinted to William Hunt, the Stratford town clerk, that King George III was interested in the Jubilee and would like to hear the Ode that Garrick had written for the occasion.⁶⁷ The King did not attend the Jubilee.

Preparations occupied the entire summer. An amphitheatre, a wooden octagonal building supported by eight pillars, was built on the banks of the Avon. Garrick supervised every detail of the planning. His letters to Hunt discussed the arrangements, including some unconnected with Shakespeare, such as a horse race and a fireworks display. He also asked Hunt to find “8, 10 or a dozen of ye handsomest children in your town, by way of fairies & cupids for our pageant.”⁶⁸

The Jubilee began on Wednesday, September 6th, and by the previous Saturday all the inns at Stratford were filled and the roads from London were clogged with carriages.⁶⁹ The crowd that made the trip to Stratford included James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson. Boswell described the Jubilee in a letter to The London Magazine as

an elegant and truly classical celebration of nobility and gentry, the rich, the brave, the witty, and the fair, assembled to pay their tribute of praise to Shakespeare . . .. The morning of the first day was ushered in with a pleasing serenade by the best musicians from London in disguise.⁷⁰

It was followed by an oratorio in Stratford’s Great Church. Then Garrick led a procession from the church to the amphitheatre, where dinner was served while a large orchestra played. After that, Garrick delivered an ode to Shakespeare, written by him and set to music by Thomas Arne. “What delighted me,” wrote Boswell, “was to observe the warm sincerity of Mr. Garrick’s enthusiasm for his immortal bard.”

Large paintings on transparent silkscreens, which were illuminated at night by colored lamps set up behind them, almost certainly created by Philip James Loutherbourg, Garrick’s set designer at Drury Lane, had been installed on the banks of the Avon.⁷¹ One was of “Time leading Shakespeare to Immortality”; another, inspired by a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, showed Garrick torn between two female figures representing tragedy and comedy.⁷² On the second day of the Jubilee, there was a masquerade ball, to which Boswell came costumed as an armed Corsican chief. (Boswell had recently visited Corsica, where an uprising against the French had engaged British sympathy and support.) Three women came as the witches in Macbeth.⁷³ Boswell noted that the masquerade ball featured “many rich, elegant, and curious dresses, many beautiful women,” but he thought “that a masquerade is an entertainment which does not seem much suited to the genius of the British nation” because English taciturnity and reserve “makes us appear awkward and embarrassed in feigned characters.”⁷⁴

On the second day of the Jubilee, disaster struck, in a particularly English manner: bad weather. Leaving the masquerade ball, the ladies had to be helped along planks from the amphitheatre to the footsteps of their coaches, whose wheels were two feet deep in water.⁷⁵ Heavy rain and wind forced the cancellation of the central event of the Jubilee, a pageant in which 170 actors from the London theatres, dressed as Shakespearean characters, were to participate. Garrick thought cancelling the pageant was necessary to preserve the actors’ expensive costumes, as well as their health. The planned fireworks were also cancelled; although a horse race scheduled for the third day was held as planned, but in mud and rain. But by the end of the second day, many in the gathering were leaving for London. Those who stayed attended an Assembly in the town hall on the third day, where “Mrs. Garrick danced a minuet beyond description gracefully, and joined in the country dances, which . . . put an end to the Jubilee.”⁷⁶

After the rain washed out much of the Jubilee, Boswell expressed the hope that “Mr. Garrick will entertain us with it in the comfortable regions of Drury-lane.”⁷⁷ The Jubilee opened at Drury Lane on October 14, 1769, enjoying a run of ninety-two nights, the longest continuous showing of any theatrical production in the eighteenth century.⁷⁸ It continued to be shown at Drury Lane into the 1780s. One German visitor attended twenty-eight times. He wrote: “In Macbeth one saw the big witches’ cauldron; in Coriolanus, this general’s tent, ornamented with weapons, and in Romeo and Juliet, Juliet’s tomb . . ..” The Drury Lane sequel took one and one-half hours and included the pageant “as it was intended for Stratford upon Avon.”⁷⁹ George Colman, who had succeeded John Rich as Covent Garden manager after the latter’s death in 1761, grabbed the Jubilee’s coattails: he changed the setting of a play he was producing to Stratford, so that he could insert his own version of the pageant and the masquerade in it. Colman’s version was well received, but its success did not match Garrick’s at Drury Lane.⁸⁰ Although the original Jubilee was a financial failure, costing an estimated £50,000, the success of its Drury Lane offshoot more than made up for the losses.⁸¹ Garrick later referred to the Jubilee as “my folly,” but his unquenchable optimism and instinct for showmanship transformed a disaster into a triumph.⁸² Despite the problems, the Jubilee came to be seen as a crucial moment in the growth of the Shakespeare industry.⁸³

The popularity of the Jubilee did not insulate it from criticism of its cost and its content. Some complained of the high prices charged by the residents of Stratford for food and lodging. Boswell disagreed:

It was reasonable that Shakespeare’s townsmen should take of the jubilee as well as we strangers did; they as a jubilee of profit, we of pleasure. As it lasted but for a few nights, a guinea a night for a bed was not imposition.

Another criticism was that much of program (the fireworks, masquerade ball, horse race) had little or nothing to do with Shakespeare. In fact, there was no performance at Stratford of a play by Shakespeare, probably because there was no theatre in Stratford capable of staging one.

Charles Macklin attended the Jubilee and in late September wrote Garrick a detailed criticism of Garrick’s ode. We don’t have Macklin’s letter, but it is clear that Garrick was enraged, by it. He defended his encomium to Shakespeare in a long, caustic reply:

I am afraid (God help me) that I differ totally with you, & yet I have an humble opinion of ye performance .. . . The great characteristic difference between Shakespeare & and all other poets whatsoever –. . . I will try to break thro’ your sophistry – such is ye power of Shakespeare, that can turn & wind the passions as he pleases, & they are so subjected to him, that tho raging about, & unchain’d they wait upon his commands, and obey them, when he gives ye word.⁸⁴

Garrick made a copy of his letter, on which he wrote: “I might have spent my time better than supporting a foolish business against a very foolish man.”⁸⁵

The strongest and most persistent critic of the Jubilee was Samuel Foote, a longtime friend and rival of Garrick. Foote attended the Jubilee, sarcastically—and unfairly—telling anyone who would listen that avarice and vanity, rather than genuine admiration for Shakespeare, prompted Garrick’s Jubilee. Newspapers reported that Foote planned to stage a mock Jubilee in London, but he thought better of it. Instead, he wrote caustically about the Jubilee in one of his plays, calling it:

a public invitation, urged by puffing, to go post without horses to an obscure borough without representative; governed by a mayor and aldermen who are no magistrates; to celebrate a great poet whose works have made him immortal by an ode without poetry; music without melody; a dinner without victuals; lodgings without beds; a crowd without company; a masquerade where half the people appear bare-faced; a horserace up to the knees in water; fireworks extinguished as soon as they are lighted; and a boarded booth by way of amphitheatre, which is to be taken down in three days, and sold by public auction.⁸⁶

Foote is largely forgotten today, but he was a flamboyant and effective participant in the London theatre scene. It is time to turn our attention to him.

Notes

  1    Porter, The Creation of the Modern World, 93.

  2    Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660–1900, ii, 67.

  3    Ibid., ii, 58.

  4    Porter, The Creation of the Modern World, 93.

  5    David Garrick to the Countess of Burlington, Aug. 26, 1749, Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, 119–120.

  6    David Garrick to William Smith, June 19, 1773 (quoting Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene iii), Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, ii, 877.

  7    David Garrick to Suzanne Necker, Nov. 10, 1776 (quoting Hamlet, Act III, Scene ii), Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, iii, 1139.

  8    David Garrick to Lord Mansfield, Mar. 21, 1768, Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, ii, 602. I have not been able to find the Shakespeare quotation that “a brother may commend a brother.”

  9    Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660–1900, ii, 69.

10    Robert Shaughnessy, “Shakespeare and the London stage,” in Fiona Richie and Peter Sabor, eds., Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 181–82.

11    Bellamy, An Apology for the Life of George Anne Bellamy, i, 50–51.

12    Wilkinson, Memoirs (reprint), 222.

13    Basil Williams, The Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1966), i, 213–14.

14    Jenny Davidson, “Shakespeare adaptation,” in Ritchie & Sabor, eds., Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, 186.

15    Sheldon, Thomas Sheridan of Smock-Alley, 78.

16    Vanessa Cunningham, Shakespeare and Garrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 70.

17    Cunningham, Shakespeare and Garrick, 64–73. Charles Gounod’s 1867 opera Roméo et Juliette made the same change, enabling the lovers to end the opera with a duet.

18    Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, ii, 619–20, n. 5.

19    Caines, ed., Lives of Shakespearean Actors): Garrick, i, 159; Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660–1900, ii, 58–59.

20    Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, ii, 117–18.

21    Archer, ed., Eminent Actors, 87; Appleton, Charles Macklin: An Actor’s Life, 92–93.

22    Cooke, Memoirs of Charles Macklin, Comedian, 158.

23    Adultery was called “criminal conversation” in the eighteenth century.

24    Poser, Lord Mansfield, 51–52; Mary Nash, The Provoked Wife: The Life and Times of Susannah Cibber (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1977), 107, 137–49.

25    David Erskine Baker, Biographia Dramatica, in Thomas, ed., Restoration and Georgian England 1660–1788, 369.

26    Wilkinson, Memoirs (reprint), 222–23.

27    Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, ii, 109–110.

28    David Garrick to Marguerite Louise Noverre, Jan. 18, 1758, Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, i, 274.

29    Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, i, 123–24.

30    The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd ed., 1979), 282.

31    Stone and Kahrl, David Garrick, 85.

32    McIntyre, Garrick, 132.

33    David Garrick to Somerset Draper, Aug. 17, 1751Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, i, 172.

34    Price, Theatre in the Age of Garrick, 76.

35    Bellamy, An Apology for the Life of George Anne Bellamy, i, 59–61.

36    Kendall, David Garrick, 104–05; Price, Theatre in the Age of Garrick, 139.

37    Garrick wrote to a friend in June 1750: “If Bellamy is disengaged, why are we not to engage her? We know Cibber will not be with us; . . .then how can we patch up our broken fortunes better than with Bellamy.” David Garrick to Somerset Draper, June 22, 1750, Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, i, 146.

38    Bellamy, An Apology for the Life of George Anne Bellamy, ii, 115.

39    Ibid., ii, 118

40    Cooke, Memoirs of Charles Macklin, Comedian, 159.

41    Price, Theatre in the Age of Garrick, 41.

42    Gentleman’s Magazine, Sept. 1750, 427, Burney Collection (NYPL).

43    Robert Shaughnessy, “Shakespeare and the London stage,” in Richie and Sabor, eds., Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, 166–67.

44    Gielgud, Backward Glances, 70.

45    Shaughnessy, “Shakespeare and the London Stage,” in Richie and Sabor, eds., Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, 167.

46    Cooke, Memoirs of Charles Macklin, Comedian, 160.

47    Ibid.; Gentleman’s Magazine, Sept. 1750, 427, Burney Collection (NYPL).

48    Ibid.

49    Caines, ed., Lives of Shakespearean Actors: Garrick, i, 162.

50    David Garrick to the Countess of Burlington, Oct. 4, 1750 Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, i, 155.

51    David Garrick to the Countess of Burlingham, Oct. 13, 1750, Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, i, 156.

52    Cunningham, Shakespeare and Garrick, 116–17.

53    Nahum Tate, The History of King Lear (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), passim.

54    Cunningham, Shakespeare and Garrick, 129.

55    Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, ii, 846, n. 1.

56    David Garrick to Sir William Young, Jan. 10, 1773. Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, ii, 845–46. For a detailed discussion of Garrick’s changes to Hamlet, see Cunningham, Shakespeare and Garrick, 140–161.

57    Cunningham, Shakespeare and Garrick, 157.

58    Ibid., 159.

59    Foot, The Life of Arthur Murphy, Esq., 270–73.

60    Celebrating Shakespeare’s birthday by a feast at Stratford has become a tradition. His 400th was marked by “a lot of people from Who’s Who, assembled around Prince Philip, eating smoked salmon and steak.” Brook, The Empty Space, 52.

61    Mary Hamilton Dickenson, Mary Hamilton, Afterwards Mrs. John Dickenson, at Court and at Home: From Letters and Diaries 1756 to 1816 (London: J. Murray, 1925), 252–53.

62    Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, ii, 209–11.

63    Many years later, Garrick’s widow liked to show visitors the famous box and other Shakespeare mementoes that her husband had treasured. Dickenson, Mary Hamilton Letters, 252–53.

64    David Garrick to James West, May 19, 1769. Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, ii, 644–45.

65    McIntyre, Garrick, 303.

66    St. James’s Chronicle, June 17–20, 1769; Middlesex Journal, June 17–20, 1769.

67    Garrick to William Hunt, Aug. 15, 1769, Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, ii, 658.

68    Garrick to William Hunt, Aug. 16, 1769 Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, ii, 660.

69    Johanne M. Stochholm, Garrick’s Folly: the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769 at Stratford and Drury Lane (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1964), 43.

70    The London Magazine, Sept. 1769. Garrick Memorial (GC).

71    Stochholm, Garrick’s Folly, 17.

72    The original painting, David Garrick between Comedy and Tragedy, is in the Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor in Oxfordshire.

73    Stochholm, Garrick’s Folly, 98.

74    “A Letter from James Boswell on Shakespeare’s Jubilee at Stratford-upon-Avon”, The London Magazine, Sept. 1769. (GC).

75    Stochholm, Garrick’s Folly, 102.

76    Ibid., 106.

77    A letter from James Boswell on Shakespeare’s Jubilee at Stratford-upon-Avon. The London Magazine, Sept. 1769. (GC).

78    Auburn, “Garrick at Drury Lane, 1747–1776,” in Donohue, ed., The Cambridge History of British Theatre, ii, 151.

79    Stochholm, Garrick’s Folly, 153.

80    Ibid., 143–44, 146, 151.

81    Caines, Lives of Shakespearean Actors: Garrick, i, 213.

82    Stochholm, Garrick’s Folly, 174.

83    Caines, Lives of Shakespearean Actors: Garrick, i, 213.

84    Garrick to Macklin, Oct. [?] 1769, Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick, ii, 671–73.

85    Little and Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garric, ii, 673.

86    Nigh, Lesser Luminaries, 268.