King George III was not mad about Shakespeare. “Was there ever such stuff as the great part of Shakespeare?” he complained to the novelist Frances Burney, listing all the characters and plays he objected to. “Only it’s Shakespeare, and nobody dare abuse him . . . one should be stoned for saying so!”
Why would the king, a monarch with dominions spanning five continents, need to hide his opinion of a playwright? Yet at the time of this royal confession in 1785, Shakespeare had attained near godlike status, and harboring an opposing view ran the risk of seeming lunatic. Such veneration was still relatively new, the result of a period of intense cultural and artistic focus that had transformed Shakespeare from one writer among many to the “Blest Genius of the Isle.” While this transformation occurred over several decades, one event stands out as the moment at which his ascension into national icon and literary deity was finally realized, the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769.
Following Shakespeare’s death in 1616, after two decades working in London as an actor, manager, shareholder, and playwright of the King’s Men, his plays fell quickly from the repertoire. Were it not for the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, they may never have survived at all. The war brought public entertainments to a halt, and with them a rich theatrical tradition that had been evolving since the Middle Ages. When the theatres reopened with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the new king, Charles II, gave the job of reviving the theatre to two of his loyal courtiers, Thomas Killigrew and Sir William D’Avenant, presenting each man with a royal patent to open a playhouse. With no new plays and few experienced actors, the task was a challenging one. Killigrew had the advantage, as thanks to a close friendship with the king he was allowed to style his troupe “the King’s Company,” and thus claim a direct lineage from Shakespeare’s King’s Men, along with the rights to perform its theatrical properties. While this included Shakespeare’s work, the real prize was the enormously popular comedies of Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson, as well as the tragicomedies of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Jacobean writing partners still held in high esteem. By contrast, D’Avenant, a pug-faced poet with a wig as thick as a privet hedge, was granted the rights to only two plays from the old repertoire. After much grousing, he petitioned the Lord Chamberlain with a “proposition of reformeing some of the most ancient Playes,” presenting him with a list that included “Tempest, Measures, for Measures, Much a doe about nothing, Rome and Juliet, Twelfe night, The Life of Kinge Henry the Eyght . . . Kinge Lear, the Tragedy of Mackbeth, [and] the Tragedy of Hamlet prince of Denmarke.”
D’Avenant got what he asked for, but only on condition that he make the plays “fitt”—that is, adapt them for a culture that had essentially moved on. As Shakespeare’s plays had first debuted when D’Avenant’s audience’s grandparents were children, it was clear that he would need to revise heavily. And this is what he did, changing endings and updating themes to suit the newness of the age, adding music and spectacle to exploit the technologies available in the new theatres, and introducing new characters and subplots, especially ones that emphasized another innovation—female actors in female roles. D’Avenant even conflated two plays to make one, all the while making sure to plane the knots and tubercles from Shakespeare’s original language that sounded archaic and tortuous to the Restoration ear. The result was a resounding success, as epitomized by his 1664 production of Macbeth, which featured flying witches, songs, dances, and a happy ending accompanied by a semi-operatic score. This Macbeth was not a Shakespeare play so much as a Shakespeare-inspired entertainment, one that had the contradictory effect of elevating Shakespeare within the culture even as its popularity was based on how far it had moved away.
The thought would not have crossed D’Avenant’s mind that Shakespeare’s text was sacrosanct, an inviolate canon that couldn’t be touched. It was instead a wellspring of concepts, characters, and situations to be plundered at will. This was the paradox that fueled Shakespeare’s initial ascent to cultural icon: the more that theatre audiences came to know him through versions that had been altered, adapted, and heavily revised, the more his capital grew. By the advent of the eighteenth century, this was buoyed by the appearance of many cheap editions of his works, permitting a more private and contemplative relationship with the plays to emerge. More often than not, these came prefaced with a biographical sketch written by the poet Nicholas Rowe for his 1709 edition of the works and reprinted in almost every edition of Shakespeare for the next hundred years.
As is often noted, the verifiable facts of Shakespeare’s life can be written on a postcard while still leaving room for a greeting: he was baptized, he married, he owned some property and wrote some plays. Into this void, Rowe threw unverified fragments and secondhand anecdotes to portray an Englishman of wit, sincerity, compassion, and good fellowship, “Sweet Willy,” “the Bard of Avon,” a raw talent tutored by nature and unhindered by the artificial prescripts of formal literary culture. This was the hero championed by groups like the Shakespeare Ladies Club, formed in the 1730s to oppose the influence of French and Italian dramatic models on the British stage, promoting instead an English drama that they felt represented “Decency and good Manners.” By the 1740s, Shakespeare’s status was such that a marble statue was erected to him in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner. Despite being praised by the London Evening Post for its presentation of the poet in “the Dress of his Time . . . natural, free and easy,” it was a highly Georgian vision of the past, not so much a likeness as the apparition of genius within English literature’s holiest spot.
Even as Shakespeare’s reputation grew, there was some way left to go before he would reach his current status as the world’s most famous writer. For that, we can thank the actor, dramatist, and theatre manager David Garrick, who, from his debut in 1741 to his retirement from the stage in 1776, was the most famous man in Britain after the king, not to mention a cultural broker so influential that the poet William Whitehead wrote of him that “a nation’s taste depends on you / Perhaps a nation’s virtue too.”
Garrick built his career around the performance and promotion of Shakespeare, becoming so closely associated with him that the biographer James Granger has written that “it is hard to say whether Shakespeare owes more to Garrick, or Garrick to Shakespeare.” Having taken over the management of Drury Lane in 1747, which, along with Covent Garden, was one of the most important theatres in the kingdom, Garrick immediately declared it “the house of William Shakespeare,” and embarked on a project intended to bring artistic and intellectual gravity to the stage. But Garrick was no purist either, cutting, adapting, and remodeling the works of his idol as he thought fit.
Sometimes, like D’Avenant before him, he made entirely new entertainments from more unpopular plays—his Catherine and Petruchio, for example, was a successful and much loved version of The Taming of the Shrew, which in its unaltered form was considered wholly unwatchable by eighteenth-century audiences. Even when largely following a text, he was unafraid to make structural alterations. In 1756, he debuted a version of King Lear built on the foundations of an earlier adaptation that gave the play a happy ending by making Cordelia queen and allowing Lear “to pass away his Life in Quietness and Devotion,” a version that was still standard when Queen Victoria came to the throne. For the critics of the day, this was a marked improvement. Garrick, claimed The London Magazine, had “assisted the deficiencies” of Shakespeare.
The Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769 was the conclusive moment of Garrick’s relationship with Shakespeare, a literal coronation of his muse witnessed and legitimized by some of the most influential tastemakers in the nation. Garrick’s friend James Boswell, the writer, lawyer, diarist, and future biographer of Samuel Johnson, was one of them. Describing it as “an elegant and truly classical celebration of the memory of Shakespeare,” he and his fellow attendees (numbering in the thousands) enjoyed three days of songs, balls, and pageants set in the “hallow’d turf” of Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon, culminating in Garrick’s bravura reading of the Dedication Ode, a long, rambling poem scored by the Drury Lane orchestra and delivered before a statue of the Bard Garrick had gifted the town.
But while the Jubilee was a formal instantiation of Shakespeare as the creative genius par excellence, capping a century of his movement toward the center of the literary pantheon, it was a peculiar foundation on which to build an enduring hagiography. The Jubilee was a hodgepodge, a gallimaufry of inconsistencies and contradictory motivations that featured little of the work of its honoree. Not a single scene from Shakespeare was performed, let alone an entire play. Shakespeare was more like the Jubilee’s “sponsor,” presiding over a series of events and entertainments that by themselves had very little to do with him, the body of his work featuring only as echoes and fragments, or as song lyrics and quotations, and allegorized images painted on the backlit transparencies that illuminated the windows of the Town Hall. While Boswell reveled in the event, others found the Jubilee bizarre. The writer Horace Walpole blushed to hear of Garrick’s “nonsense,” while Samuel Johnson boycotted it entirely. For the actor-manager Samuel Foote, a constant thorn in Garrick’s side, the Jubilee was nothing more than “avarice and vanity,” such was Garrick’s desire “to fleece the people and transmit his name down to posterity, hand in hand with Shakespeare.” Personal and commercial ambitions were certainly never far from the surface. This included the mayor and aldermen of Stratford-upon-Avon, who hoped that the influx of visitors would boost their flagging economy, as well as Garrick, whose own sense of finitude as he neared the end of his acting career and managed his failing health played a big part in his plans.
There were political considerations too. By choosing to celebrate Shakespeare in the town of his birth, with its timber-framed houses, reedy riverbanks, and airy open fields, Garrick sought to deploy Shakespeare as a soothing and bucolic parent to the nation at a time when Britain was in turmoil, with riots and hunger commonplace and political institutions shaken by a strong populist movement led by a pugnacious and resilient leader named John Wilkes. Add to this a ruckus in the papers, a giant sea turtle, crooked waiters, the suspicions of the locals, dubious relics, extortionate prices, chaotic organization, a floating rotunda, death from exposure, and unceasing floods of rain, and the Jubilee of 1769 comes to seem like an abject folly. Yet a multitude attended, albeit for a variety of reasons, some coming out of reverence for Shakespeare’s artistic achievement, others to be seen at what quickly became the most-talked-about society event of the year. Boswell, always such a candid and agreeable recorder of life, came to do both. His story adds useful context to the Jubilee, since in many ways he was the perfect audience for Garrick’s spectacle, making the most of everything it had to offer.
Boswell experienced the Jubilee in the fullness of its contradictions, not as a singular or prescriptive event, but as a space of loose and improvised connections providing the opportunity to braid together separate strands of the worlds he occupied, including his love of theatre, his talent for shameless self-promotion, and a chance to engage in the pleasures of friendship, hedonism, and the erotic possibilities of other people’s bodies. An outspoken advocate for Garrick’s project, Boswell believed devoutly in the civilizing power of communal artistic experiences and in the actor’s responsibility to serve as an agent of intellectual ennoblement via his or her role as the intermediary between audiences and great art. Whether being playful or somber, he made the Jubilee entirely his own, “like a Frenchman at an ordinary,” he said, “who takes out of his pocket a box of pepper and other spices, and seasons a dish his own way.”
In many respects, the ability to season the dish and adapt Shakespeare to suit one’s own palate is the lasting contribution of the Jubilee. For all its paradox and absurdities, Garrick’s revel on the banks of the Avon established the terms under which Shakespeare has infused our culture through the succeeding centuries, as an enduring ghost, ever present yet insubstantial, the weightiest of cultural authorities understood as much by his name and the associations he invokes as by sustained engagement with his works. As such, the Jubilee is a defining moment in our cultural history, and one that goes to show how, through a confluence of intent, mishap, and grubby self-interest, the most glorious and enduring of myths was made.
Garrick gazes adoringly at Shakespeare on a paper to be slipped in the cover of a pocket watch, c. 1769. © The Trustees of the British Museum