On May 3, 1769, George Keate and Francis Wheler emerged from the vegetal shade of Covent Garden market and strode the twenty paces down to David Garrick’s house at 27 Southampton Street. Stiff with reverence for the object they bore before them, they made an unlikely pair. Keate, a camel-faced minor poet who in the course of many years abroad had become close friends with Voltaire, the genius of French literature, now enjoyed a leisurely life, thanks to a substantial portfolio of Whitechapel properties that afforded him the time to write delicate volumes of verse that he doted on like children. Wheler, by contrast, worked for a living, serving as the steward of the Court of Records for the Borough of Stratford in Warwickshire, the reward for which was a modest ten pounds a year.
Garrick greeted his guests with characteristic good grace, despite having only recently risen from what he described as “ye Bed of Death,” fighting off a combined assault of fever, gout, jaundice, and stones. Illness lowered him often, the result of being born with only a single kidney, and even more so now that he had entered his fifties. It was following a bout of sickness that he had first made Keate’s acquaintance while convalescing in Bath. Garrick’s skin was yellow then and, shaking and puking between curative dips, he had found that Keate’s drowsy, convivial manner and unusual face—he had no eyelashes or eyebrows—lifted his spirits. The two men had been on good terms ever since, which is why Wheler had asked Keate to come along. Being in the London home of the world’s most famous actor was an unsettling experience for this provincial man, and he mirrored his host’s cautious, recuperative movements in his own uncertain bearing. On the walls hung views of Garrick’s Hampton villa with its classically inspired “Temple to Shakespeare,” where Garrick, his wife, the Austrian dancer Eva Maria Veigel (“La Violette”), and their spaniel, Biddy, presided over a span of the Thames, fat and prosperous and fringed with lithe willows.
Introductions over, Wheler presented Garrick with a “cassolette,” an ornately carved box fashioned from wood the color of oxblood. On one side, the box showed the naked figure of Fame offering up a bust of William Shakespeare to be crowned with laurels by the three Graces, while behind them rose the sharp spire of Stratford-upon-Avon’s Holy Trinity Church. The other side showed Garrick performing King Lear, mad and unbattened on the moor. Garrick turned it in his hands like a magical object. With its fine carving and silver feet in the form of dragons, it was a thing of beauty with a divine provenance he understood immediately, carved as it was from a mulberry tree planted by William Shakespeare himself.
The box contained more than the Warwickshire air, for inside was a sealed proclamation resolving that out of “love and regard to the memory of that incomparable poet, MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,” and in honor of “the extraordinary accomplishments and merits of his most judicious admirer, and representative, DAVID GARRICK, Esq.,” Garrick had been unanimously elected an honorary burgess of Stratford-upon-Avon by the Corporation, as the small town council was known. He had been given notice that the honor was coming but was delighted all the same. “The freedom of your town given to me unanimously, sent to me in such an elegant, and inestimable box,” he wrote to the mayor and aldermen, “and delivered to me in so flattering a manner, merit my warmest gratitude. It will be impossible for me ever to forget those who have honoured me so much as to mention my unworthy name with that of their immortal townsman.”
An “inestimable box”: The Mulberry cassolette presented to Garrick by the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon. © The Trustees of the British Museum
Others saw darker motives. “I have long made it my Observation,” wrote a correspondent to the London newspaper Public Advertiser, “that no Gifts are in general so pernicious as those composed of WOOD. The most antient of these Gifts on Record was, I believe, that of the Gods to Pandora, and next in Order of Time, the Trojan Horse.” The box certainly came with intent, for at the same moment that Garrick was accepting the freedom of the town, the mayor and his aldermen were preparing paragraphs to send to the London papers that claimed that Garrick was considering holding an event in their town, a festival he would call “Shakespeare’s Jubilee.” The press did the rest. “We hear the Entertainments in general at the Jubilee will be the most elegant and magnificent ever exhibited in the country,” wrote the Public Advertiser, adding that the celebration was “to be kept up every seventh Year.” Placed on the back foot and keen to get ahead of the news, Garrick decided to announce the plans himself from the stage at Drury Lane following his final performance of the season, a benefit for the Fund for Decayed Actors. “My eyes, till then, no sights like these will see,” he told the audience on May 18, 1769,
Unless we meet at Shakespeare’s Jubilee!
On Avon’s Banks, where flowers eternal blow!
Like its full stream our Gratitude shall flow!
Then let us revel, show our fond regard,
On that lov’d Spot, first breathed our matchless Bard;
To Him all Honour, Gratitude is due,
To Him we owe our all—To him and You.
“Jubilee” was a curious word to describe a gathering in honor of a playwright. With its origins in Jewish antiquity, the word had become closely associated with the Catholic Church following its adoption in the fourteenth century by Pope Boniface VIII to describe a year of solemnity and pilgrimages in which the faithful might earn a plenary indulgence and be granted remission from temporal sin. Garrick chose it to connote the extent of his devotion, as well as time apart from the usual run of life, but whether he truly meant to invoke the full extent of its religiosity was unclear. As a pilgrimage, no one knew exactly what it would entail—least of all David Garrick.
The last time Garrick had seen the mulberry tree he had been standing in its patulous shade in the garden of New Place, Stratford-upon-Avon’s second largest house and the home William Shakespeare had purchased in May 1597 with the money he had made as a successful poet and playwright. When Garrick visited one fine afternoon in 1742, the tree was thriving, as was Garrick, who was fast on his way to becoming the most famous man in Britain.
The third of seven children, David Garrick had been born at the Angel Inn, Hereford, in 1717, before moving to the Midlands town of Lichfield, where his maternal grandfather was vicar choral. The family was of French descent, Huguenot Protestants from east of Bordeaux who had fled to Britain in 1685 following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, anglicizing their surname from “Garrique.” Garrick’s father had become an army officer, albeit one who spent much of his career on half pay. Despite financial constraints, the Garricks approximated a genteel life, which meant that at the age of ten, David was sent to Dr. John Hunter’s grammar school to receive a formal education. While too prankish and distracted to focus on his studies, it was here that he received his first opportunity to perform in a play, corralling his classmates at the age of eleven into a production of George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer. Soon after, the want of money forced Garrick’s father to take a commission in Gibraltar. David was also sent away, traveling to Lisbon, where he apprenticed for an uncle who worked in the wine trade.
This uncle, a somber bachelor who struggled to endure a lively twelve-year-old with a talent for mimicry, sent him home again. David returned to England to find that with his father away, his older brother, Peter, serving in the navy, and his mother and elder sister frequently ill, he had been promoted to the household’s titular head. The first signs of a talent for management emerged as David took on this responsibility, writing long letters to his father full of financial news and family matters that reveled in their own importance. As he grew and became better known around the cathedral close and its small but accomplished social circle, his open countenance, winning manner, and confidence in his own abilities began to show themselves as assets capable of overcoming his indifferent scholarship and modest family. Aged eighteen, he left Dr. Hunter’s school and went to study at the establishment of a young schoolmaster named Samuel Johnson, who had founded an academy three miles outside town. Johnson, an intense and lurching man of formidable erudition, was at odds with conventional schooling and wished to practice his own theories of education. Despite springing for an advertisement in The Gentleman’s Magazine, Johnson’s school attracted only three students, two of whom were David Garrick and Garrick’s younger brother, George. The experiment was doomed from the start. Johnson was too volatile to be a teacher and could not mask his perpetual annoyance or forbear from swearing. His pupils afforded him little respect, and would stand at his bedroom door giggling as he made passionate protestations of love to his wife, Tetty, twenty years his senior, and, according to Garrick, “very fat, with a bosom of more than ordinary protuberance, with swelled cheeks of a florid red, produced by thick painting, and increased by the liberal use of cordials; flaring and fantastick in her dress, and affected both in her speech and her general behaviour.”
Johnson closed his school within a year but retained a close relationship with his former pupil. In March 1737, having both outgrown Lichfield, they paired up to depart for new lives in London. Garrick’s father intended him to study for the law, whereas Johnson dreamed of becoming a playwright and carried with him a half-finished tragedy called Irene that he hoped to see onstage. To save money, they shared a horse with one man riding ahead and tethering it up the road where the other would find it and ride himself for a while. Garrick, compact, energetic, and fevering to meet the world, had just turned twenty. Johnson, twenty-seven, loomed over him, a monstrous house of bones, “hideously striking to the eye,” as his friend and biographer, James Boswell, would remember him, with “the scars of his scrophula . . . deeply visible.”
London in 1737 had a population of almost six hundred thousand—a tenth of all Britons—making it the largest city in Europe, choked with traffic and noise and narrow streets of stercoraceous mud touched by the slightest slivers of sunlight. The city had begun to burst its seams as ancient gateways were demolished to allow for more wheeled traffic, and fields and farmland were eaten up by new estates. Development bolted west, bricking over the marshes to establish gracious squares and terraces, while the rest of the city grew denser as householders filled in their yards and pinfolds, replacing their pigs and cows with new rooms and buildings at the back of their houses. Within two weeks of Garrick and Johnson’s arrival, Garrick’s father died, thus freeing him from his obligation to pursue the law. Partnering instead with his brother Peter (returned from the sea), he resumed the wine trade, a business that held no more appeal than the law but at least required less study. The brothers set up in Durham Yard, a sagging quad of timbered warehouses backing onto river wharves and the Gordian mesh of masts and rigging from the barges, boats, and wherries that crowded the Thames, plying their trade as wholesalers selling wine by the barrel. Johnson found himself a garret above the Black Boy tavern in the Strand and continued to work on his play.
Garrick hated the wine trade, but through Peter’s business contacts, he began to visit local inns and coffeehouses such as the Grecian and Tom’s, watering holes that served the workers and patrons of the royal theatres of Covent Garden and Drury Lane, less than a mile away. These visits yielded little business, but they did provide the occasion to loiter around theatre folk. Garrick soon became friends with the actor and manager Henry Giffard, as well as John Arthur, a comedian and stage machinist with whom he built a catapult. In time, these friendships led to a wholesaling contract with the Bedford Coffee House, a reeky bolt-hole nestling beneath the arches of Covent Garden piazza, its walls papered over with playbills and booths filled with jammering theatre buffs. The Bedford, which “signalized, for many years, as the emporium of wit, the seat of criticism, and the standard of taste,” was a harbor for many successful theatre people, as well as a significant number of unsuccessful ones, all in need of a drink and providing David with the perfect opportunity to immerse himself in their world.
The London theatre scene of 1737 was enjoying a wild and creative moment, driven by the juggernauts of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), with its innovative mixture of high art and low places, and the colorful, frenetic harlequinades devised by John Rich, Covent Garden’s pantomimical genius. Regular companies at Covent Garden, Drury Lane, Goodman’s Fields, Lincoln’s Inn, and the Haymarket competed for audiences with a medley of irregular venues that offered the spectrum of entertainments from rope dancers, jugglers, and acrobats, to dramas and spectacles, and operas by Handel and Bononcini. It was a city of curiosities and diversions, many of them borrowed from the theatrical cultures of Europe and performed by French and Italian singers and dancers who commanded enormous salaries and dictated fashion—“the English are the Frenchman’s Apes,” as a popular saying went.
Yet the swell of invention was about to end because, just weeks after Garrick’s arrival, the government of Sir Robert Walpole passed legislation that would shape the theatres for more than a century. The law, known as the Licensing Act, had been prompted by the increasing use of the stage as a platform for antigovernment mockery and invective, with the satirical beatings that First Minister Walpole and his fellow politicians incurred in plays such as Henry Fielding’s The Historical Register for the Year 1736, producing such offense among government officials that they moved to silence them forever. Campaigning for his bill in the House of Commons, Walpole read aloud passages from a play called A Vision of the Golden Rump, so “larded” with “Scurrility and Treason,” he claimed, that to perform it would mean endangering the moral fabric of the nation. Despite resistance—most notably from Lord Chesterfield, who called the proposed law “a dangerous wound to liberty”—the bill passed with the result that spoken drama was now banned throughout the country at all venues with the exception of those that had been expressly licensed by the Crown—in effect, the theatres of Covent Garden and Drury Lane, granted royal patent by Charles II at the end of the Civil War. In addition, all new plays and revisions to old ones had to be submitted for censorship to the office of the Lord Chamberlain fourteen days prior to production or face a fifty-pound fine. Censorship was sweeping but inconsistently applied. While some venues closed, others simply looked to exploit loopholes, such as advertising plays as “concerts,” whereby the audience were charged to hear music but offered a play for free. Other theatres offered a play gratis but required that patrons purchase a pint of ale. That the authorities let this go unpunished confirmed that the law’s real target was its political enemies rather than unlicensed performances more generally. One of the venues that escaped almost entirely unchanged was Goodman’s Fields, owned by Garrick’s new friend Henry Giffard. Coincidentally, it was Giffard who had supplied Robert Walpole with A Vision of the Golden Rump, a fact that led suspicious minds to speculate that Giffard had written the play to order, with no intention other than letting Walpole read it aloud to help secure the passage of his bill. Giffard’s reward, so rumor had it, was immunity from prosecution.
The drudgery of the wine business was making Garrick depressed, but his friendship with Giffard provided an outlet that led to him dabbling in theatrical piecework, even writing his first play, Lethe; or Esop in the Shades, a comic afterpiece in which a series of unworthy stereotypes cross into the underworld and are judged for their sins. The play was performed at Drury Lane, but despite this breakthrough, Garrick remained firmly in the wine wholesaling business, cautious not to reveal too much to his brother, who disapproved strongly of such disreputable interests. Things became easier once Peter Garrick moved back to Lichfield to oversee business from the family home. Delivered from filial oversight, Garrick took an irrevocable step toward his calling by appearing onstage in an amateur production of The Mock Doctor. The seal broken, an impressed Giffard offered him a place in the professional ranks appearing in a series of summer productions in the East Anglian town of Ipswich. Garrick accepted. Ipswich was distant enough not to run the risk of meeting anyone he knew, but to be doubly certain he adopted the pseudonym “Mr. Lydall,” hiding his features behind the blackface customary for his role as the African prince in Oroonoko. Standing at the footlights, dressed in a short linen tunic and old feathered turban, his face smeared with burnt cork and fixed with goose dripping, Garrick peered out across the faces shifting white and orange in the candlelight and knew that this was where he belonged.
Back in London, Garrick accepted an offer from Giffard to appear at Goodman’s Fields, making his debut there on October 19, 1741, playing Richard in a heavily adapted version of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Listed on the bills as a “GENTLEMAN (who never appear’d on any Stage),” Garrick once again hoped that this performance would be sufficiently anonymous to avoid a family row. Located at the wrong end of town, east of the Minories and behind the Tower of London, from the street, Goodman’s Fields had the look of a cooperage or a warehouse for municipal orphans. Its inauspicious appearance did nothing to shield Garrick from public attention as critics took note of his “easy and familiar, yet forcible style in speaking and acting.” According to Garrick’s first biographer, the actor-turned-bookseller Thomas Davies, while the public were at first uncertain what to make of him, their hesitation fell quickly away as scene after scene Garrick “gave evident proofs of consummate art, and perfect knowledge of character.” “Their doubts,” wrote Davies, “were turned into surprise and astonishment, from which they relieved themselves by loud and reiterated applause.”
Garrick was a new and different actor who “came forth,” it was said, “at once a complete master of his art.” Word soon reached London’s politer corners, emptying the theatres of Drury Lane and Covent Garden as “the splendour of St. James’s and Grosvenor-square” packed the seven hundred seats of Goodman’s Field to witness the sensation. Admirers included aristocrats and members of Parliament, among them the future prime minister William Pitt, who told him he was “ye best Actor ye English Stage had produc’d.” Such voluble accolades made it difficult to keep his new career from his disapproving brother, so having settled his accounts and taken stock of what was left of his wine, Garrick braced himself and wrote to Peter. “My Mind,” he said,
(as You must know) has always been inclin’d to ye Stage, nay so strongly so that all my Illness and lowness of Spirits was owing to my want of resolution to tell You my thoughts when here, finding at last both my Inclination and Interest requir’d some New way of Life I have chose ye most agreeable to my Self and tho I know You will bee much displeas’d at Me yet I hope when You shall find that I may have ye genius of an Actor without ye Vices, You will think Less Severe of Me and not be ashamed to own me for a Brother.
The confession appalled Peter, who was furious that his brother had let his business fail and scandalized lest the low reputation of actors should cast a pall over their respectable family name. David tried to assuage his fears, conceding that while the stage “in ye General it deserves Yr Censure,” some actors were received in the best company, and that “I have rec’d more Civilities & favours from Such Since my playing than I ever did in all my Life before.” Furthermore, he assured him, he could earn as much as three hundred pounds a year.
Peter remained “utterly Averse,” leaving his brother no choice but to forgo his approval and continue to pursue “what I am so greatly Inclin’d & What ye best Judges think I have ye Greatest Genius for.” His next step was to accept a summer season at the Smock Alley theatre in Dublin alongside the actress Margaret Woffington, an excellent comedian with a talent for impersonation that rivaled Garrick’s own. The actors began an affair, setting up house at 6 Bow Street when they returned to London to become members of the prestigious Drury Lane company. The relationship lasted only six months, with Woffington suggesting that Garrick was both a penny-pincher who saved money by reusing dried tea leaves, and a novice in bed—“he was,” she said, alluding to two contrasting roles Garrick would play later in his career, “Sir John Brute all day, and Billy Fribble all night.”
The house at Bow Street was home to a third resident whose effect on Garrick would be even more impactful—Charles Macklin, a broad-shouldered northern Irishman almost twenty years Garrick’s senior. Macklin was a minor genius, having first drawn attention to himself as a schoolboy by memorizing the challenging role of Monimia, the heroine of Thomas Otway’s tragedy The Orphan, and subsequently working his way up the theatrical ladder from appearing in booths at the London fairs to becoming the most influential member of the company at Drury Lane. As Garrick was making his debut at Goodman Fields, Macklin was himself stunning audiences with a radical interpretation of The Merchant of Venice’s Shylock, the Jewish moneylender traditionally performed as a clownish racial stereotype. Macklin, however, sought to plumb the complexity and contradictions of Shylock, a character who is systematically abused and dehumanized by Christian Venice even as it hypocritically turns to him to save it from its own improvidence. To prepare for this new interpretation, Macklin had taken the unprecedented step of researching the role, reading Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews and visiting the Royal Exchange to meet in person with Jewish merchants, taking care to emulate their mannerisms and accurately re-create their dress. The result was revelatory. Instead of being buffoonish, Macklin’s Shylock was, in the words of his biographer, “subtle, selfish, fawning, irascible, and tyrannic,” exhibiting a ferocity that opened up new interpretive possibilities, gave King George II nightmares, and garnered enthusiastic endorsement from famous men of letters. “This is the Jew,” said the poet Alexander Pope, allegedly, “that Shakespeare drew.”
Macklin’s reforms were at the vanguard of a profession that was sorely in need of change. The era of Barton Booth, Robert Wilks, and Colley Cibber, giants of the stage who had dominated the theatre until the 1730s, had ended without establishing a clear line of succession. There were notable actors, such as the stately and corpulent James Quin, although his roles, complained the critic Richard Cumberland, could barely be distinguished one from the other, “save by costume and outbursts of fury.” Quin’s acting remained firmly in the stiff, neoclassical mode in which actors would transition from one pose to another within a repertoire of “attitudes,” a language of gestures intended to reinforce the words by conveying emotions such as love or grief. Alternatively, they would interrupt the flow of action entirely in order to come to the front of the stage to deliver their “points,” big scene-stealing speeches or moments of dramatic climax that allowed an actor to demonstrate the range and virtuosity of his voice in a way that was calculated “to intrap applause.” It was awkward, artificial, and intended to appeal to the ear rather than the eye. “Declamation roared in most unnatural strain,” recalled another of Garrick’s earliest biographers, the dramatist Arthur Murphy, “rant was passion; whining was grief; vociferation was terror, and drawing accents were the voice of love.” It was not for nothing that Quin, with his habit of “heaving up his words,” was nicknamed “Bellower.”
Macklin’s assault on what he called “the fixed glare of tragic expression” began in the legs. He stood naturally when speaking, instead of taking a broad stance as if preparing to be tackled, and spoke as normally as possible while still being heard. Such innovations did not always win him admirers, as he discovered after being dismissed from Lincoln’s Inn theatre for speaking “too familiarly on stage.” Similarly, he did not follow the lead of his colleagues who would deliver their own lines in character and then look bored while they waited for their next turn to speak. Instead, he continued to act even when silent, inserting reactions and bits of naturalistic business into his performances that had a tendency to infuriate cast mates who were unprepared for it. One of these was James Quin, who grew so enraged at what he saw as Macklin’s unnecessary fidgeting during a performance of Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer that he flung a piece of apple in his face backstage between scenes. The result was a fight in which Quin was so badly beaten he was unable to go back on.
That Macklin would readily assault a man who was known himself to have killed two men in duels was a sign of how volatile he could be, a volatility that arose from his drinking, his uncertain social status, and the transient life he led moving back and forth across the Irish Sea. During a greenroom argument with the actor Thomas Hallam over the ownership of a wig, Macklin had bolted from his chair and in one fluid movement thrust a crab-tree walking stick, rapierlike, into Hallam’s left eye. Blood ran from Hallam’s face as he clapped his hand to his face and fell onto a settee. “Lord,” he said, “I believe my eyeball is shoved to the other side of my head,” and calling over to the young brother of the composer Thomas Arne, then dressed as a Spanish girl for that night’s play, he cried, “Whip up your clothes, you little bitch, and urine in my eye.” The boy was too terrified to comply, so Hallam was taken to another room where Macklin urinated on his victim himself. Urine was thought to have antiseptic qualities, but in this case the remedy was entirely ineffective as Macklin’s stick had entered Hallam’s eye socket so sweetly that it had broken the thin layer of bone separating it from his brain. He died the following day. Indicted for murder, Macklin got off with the lesser charge of manslaughter and was punished by having his hand branded with a cold brand.
It is unsurprising that such an imposing man should make a big impression on Garrick, and the two were rarely apart as the younger actor absorbed all he could of his mentor’s theories and meticulous habits of preparation. Under Macklin’s tutelage, Garrick went to visit a bereaved friend, a man who had accidentally let his baby daughter slip from his arms and fall headfirst onto flagstones, killing her instantly. Driven to distraction by his mortal carelessness, the man would stand “playing in fancy with his child” in a ghoulish mime at the spot where the accident had occurred. After some dalliance, recalled Arthur Murphy, “he dropped it, and, bursting into a flood of tears, filled the house with shrieks of grief and bitter anguish. He then sat down, in a pensive mood, his eyes fixed on one object, at times looking slowly round him, as if to implore compassion.” “There it was,” said Garrick, “that I learned to imitate madness; I copied nature, and to that owed my success,” channeling these observations into his performance as King Lear.
From that point on, the pursuit of “nature” became integral to Garrick’s conception of acting, and on days when he was due to play a part he would closet himself away, running through dialogue and slowly acquiring the mannerisms and gait he would use, while developing those pieces of inconsequential business that helped to build a sense of a consciousness beyond the lines. “The only Way to arrive at great Excellency in Characters,” he wrote in his Essay on Acting, published anonymously, “is to be very conversant with Human Nature, that is the noblest and best Study, by this Way you will more accurately discover the Workings of Spirit.” Conscientious study bore fruit. “When Garrick entered the scene,” wrote Murphy, “the character he assumed, was legible in his countenance, by the force of deep meditation he transformed himself into the very man. . . . When he spoke, the tone of his voice was in unison with the workings of his mind.” “He was so natural,” concurred the dancer Georges Noverre, “his expression was so lifelike, his gestures, features, glances were so eloquent and convincing, that he made the action clear even to those who did not understand a word of English . . . he lacerated the spectator’s feelings, tore his heart, and made him weep tears of blood.” To an anonymous writer in The Gentleman’s Magazine, Garrick performed “Parts so naturally, as that in Truth they are not perform’d at all.”
With his earnest approach to craft and capacity for hard work, David Garrick rose so rapidly that it unsettled the conservative hierarchy of the theatre, a profession in which “seniority was considered with as much jealousy in the green-room as in the army or navy.” By the time he stepped on stage alongside Bellower Quin in Nicholas Rowe’s The Fair Penitent at the close of 1746, it was clear that times had changed and that a new era was about to begin. Quin, in his full-bottomed periwig, high-heeled shoes, and an elaborately embroidered beryl-green frock pulled over his great swag belly, seemed ponderous and heavy, jerking his hand like a saw and rolling “out his heroics with an air of dignified indifference.” Garrick, by contrast, was “young and light and alive in every muscle and in every feature.” “It seemed,” wrote Richard Cumberland, “as if a whole century had been stept over in the transition of a single scene; old things were done away, and a new order at once brought forward, bright and luminous, and clearly destined to dispel the barbarisms and bigotry of a tasteless age.”
David Garrick by Thomas Gainsborough, 1770. © National Portrait Gallery, London