If there was one man for whom the Shakespeare Jubilee was guaranteed to appeal, it was James Boswell. The idea of it was tailor-made for the sociable Scottish lawyer who considered himself finely attuned to the sensibilities of art and literature, and loved nothing more than to be at the heart of the fashionable swell. He first made Garrick’s acquaintance nine years earlier, when Boswell was twenty and the actor was forty-three. Meeting “the man who from a boy,” he said, “I used to adore and look upon as a heathen god” had made an indelible impression on him, and the two men had maintained a friendly relationship ever since, mediated often through Samuel Johnson, Boswell’s mentor and Garrick’s former tutor.
However, when Garrick announced the Jubilee from the Drury Lane stage, Boswell had no intention of attending at all. He was on a mission of his own, newly arrived in Ireland in pursuit of a potential bride named Mary Ann Boyd, a young woman he nicknamed “La Belle Irelandaise,” “formed like a Grecian nymph,” with a father worth ten thousand pounds. It was not the first time that Boswell had fallen dotingly in love, and as he raved about Mary Ann to his friends, many of them predicted he would fall out of love just as quickly. True to form, having anticipated the meeting for months, he found Mary Ann to be a disappointment and rather too childish and obeisant in person—“so much yes and no.” He had traveled to Ireland in the company of his cousin Margaret Montgomerie, who attended as chaperone, confidante, and ally. She was the perfect companion for a wife hunt, humoring him, consoling him when he drank too much or let himself down, and happily accompanying him down the cart tracks of speculative conversation along which he frequently ambled. Comparing Margaret with Mary Ann in a letter to his friend George Dempster, it dawned on Boswell that it was Margaret he truly loved. “Her most desirable person,” he wrote, was “like a heathen goddess painted alfresco on the ceiling of a palace at Rome” when compared with the “reserved quietness” of Mary Ann. “I am exceedingly in love with her,” he told another friend, William Temple. She was perfect for him, “but the objections are She is two years older than me. She has only a Thousand Pounds.”
Boswell was now twenty-nine years old and eager to secure his growing reputation and take his place as a respectable and upstanding laird, just like his father. He was enjoying a period of celebrity, what he called his “newspaper fame,” thanks to his Account of Corsica, a book that recounted his visit to that embattled island four years earlier, as well as his friendship with Pasquale Paoli, leader of the Corsican fight for independence against the Genovese. Corsica was wild and unknown to British readers, and the journey, undertaken at the recommendation of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, had become a defining moment that drew the line between his youth and adulthood: “I had got upon a rock in Corsica,” Boswell wrote, “and jumped into the middle of life.” Success had not been effortless, and neither had he left it to chance. His book’s reception had been built on foundations he had begun to lay in January 1766, by sending anonymous letters about himself to the London Chronicle. The letters falsely purported to come from various Italian cities and were intended to give the impression that his trip to Corsica had been the talk of mainland Europe. These he followed with a series of letters to politicians and further reports sent to the papers detailing the purported travels of “Signor Romanzo,” a nonexistent diplomat whose visits to foreign capitals and embassies were invented by Boswell in an effort to manufacture interest in the plight of his Corsican friends. In reality, Boswell’s trip had lasted only six weeks, two of which were spent with General Paoli, with another three spent recuperating from a fever. But by the time the truth had been massaged and mythologized, Boswell had become so synonymous with his adopted island that he had taken on the nickname “Corsica Boswell.”
Celebrity was sweet. “I liked to see the effect of being an author,” he wrote in his journal as the Account entered its third edition on the eve of the Jubilee. “It is amazing how much and how universally I have made myself admired.” With fame came famous acquaintances and the satisfaction of knowing the known. “I am really the Great Man now,” he told Temple, listing the writers, philosophers, and military men with whom he now socialized:
I have had David Hume in the forenoon and Mr Johnson in the afternoon of the same day visiting me, Sir John Pringle, Dr Franklin and some more company dined with me today and Mr Johnson and General Oglethorpe one day Mr Garrick alone another and David Hume and some more Literati dine with me next week. I give admirable dinners and good Claret. . . . This is enjoying the fruit of my labours, and appearing like the friend of Paoli.
It was a giddy period. Even his father had begun to treat him like a man.
Fame was important to Boswell as it shored up the moorings of a frequently wavering identity. As a boy, climbing the ancient trees that stood fieffal watch around his family’s estate at Auchinleck in west Scotland, he surveyed a landscape that presented him with dual visions of who he and his family were. Bounded on one side by the river Lugar and on the other by a swift brook that ran through red sandstone, the estate was the site of both the square and respectable Palladian manor house his father had built and the ruins of an old moated castle to which his ancestors—favorites of James I and kinsmen to the powerful Douglas clan—had cleaved in former years. The contrast between the orderly present and the wild past affected Boswell deeply, giving form to the internal forces that would pull at him in different directions throughout his life. It was green and rained often.
A mature James Boswell, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1785. © National Portrait Gallery, London
A fertile imagination offered vital respite from a cheerless family life. Boswell’s devout mother taught him “the gloomiest doctrines” of her Calvinist catechism, his brother John was subject to periodic contentions with lunacy, while his father was distant and disapproving. Alexander Boswell was one of the high judges of Scotland and the archetype of a stolid Scotsman, a respectable Tory landowner with an impatient and pragmatic view of the world. His title, Lord Auchinleck, had come as the result of his status within the legal profession as opposed to aristocratic sanguinity—a fact that, like his mother’s distant relationship to Scottish royalty, Boswell chose to fudge. Displays of affection were not indulged between the laird and his son, and their conversation came marbled with reproof. Boswell chose, to the extent one can, to be a sickly boy, as only when sick did he receive the attention he craved.
At thirteen, Boswell left home to study a broad curriculum of languages and liberal arts at the University of Edinburgh, a medieval city of wet slate and steep wynds as taciturn as the horseshoe crags that ringed it, still a moping boy, weighed down with grim, salvational preoccupations hewn from the cheerless Calvinist granite of his mother’s devotions. At sixteen, he fell into a deep depression, one of the many “hypochondrias” that would abduct him for sustained periods of his life. Carried back to convalesce at Auchinleck, he became attached to a sheep farmer and self-taught philosopher named John Williamson, who lived in the nearby village of Moffat. Williamson was an oddity in that barely literate farming community. Fascinated by geology and philosophy and the religions of the Far East, he read deeply in the history of the Hindu Brahmins, many of whose customs he adopted as his own. Williamson’s vegetarianism brought him into conflict with his profession as a sheep farmer, and his refusal to make a profit from his lambs or allow them to be slaughtered so frustrated his landlord that he was evicted from his farm and sent away to live on a small annuity. With no flock to tend, he adopted the life of a peripatetic prophet, reading and developing his beliefs in alchemy, polygamy (although he never married), the transmigration of souls, and the importance of worshipping on hillsides and moors. Boswell accompanied Williamson on these reverential hikes and, whether in spite of his association with him or because of it, he emerged from his depression almost a different person: “I do not know how,” he wrote, “I think by yielding to received opinions.” Gone was the reticent boy plagued by night terrors, to be replaced by a sociable young man who wanted to know everyone and do everything. As a template for his new persona, he looked to the example shown by The Tatler and The Spectator, the famous periodicals written by Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele published between 1709 and 1712, to which he had been introduced by a tutor. These magazines concerned themselves with the variety of metropolitan life, of opera and fine arts, fashion, coffeehouses, and satirical caricatures of aristocrats, businessmen, and oft encountered London types. Through the editorial persona of Mr. Spectator, Boswell found an urbane masculine archetype, known for his faultless critical judgment, wit, taste, and gentility. Mr. Spectator was cultured and clearheaded, ruled by a disciplined but unprissy morality, and capable always of self-reflection and improvement.
It was this Boswell who would return to study once again in Edinburgh. Almost immediately, he began to frequent the theatre, passing through the low gate and along the narrow gulley made by high tenement walls and dark windows to the city’s playhouse, established in 1747 as an unlicensed enterprise protected from legal censure by influential backers, but still subject to intermittent bouts of puritanical approbation and antitheatrical rioting. Prior to his nervous illness, Boswell had regarded the players “with a mixture of narrow-minded horror, and lively-minded pleasure,” wondering at the “painted equipages and powdered Ladies” as they passsed down Canongate. Now watching them perform, they far exceeded his expectations. Three actors in particular made a strong impression—the graceful James Love, who spoke so well Boswell would go to him for elocution lessons; the captivating Mrs. Cowper; and the rakish actor-manager West Digges, best known for his portrayal of the highwayman Macheath in Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, whose polished manners, irresistible charisma, and chaotic personal life Boswell found enormously attractive. “The impression he made upon a warm youthfull imagination is strong and permanent,” Boswell once told Garrick of Digges. “It was he who threw open to me the portals of Theatrical Enchantment, and therefore He and Pleasure are inseparably associated in my mind.”
“Theatrical Enchantments” would not only remain dear to Boswell throughout his life, they introduced him to many of his life’s most abiding themes—most notably, the cultivation of a large social circle, journalism (by way of his earliest publications, theatrical reviews), as well as his greatest literary achievement, his journals, which were begun at the urging of James Love. Just as important, the theatre gave form and vista to an urgent emerging sexuality. Characters like Macheath provided the template for a sexually commanding masculinity that the shy boy found desperately appealing, while the opportunity to sit and watch afforded a license to gaze upon women with a lingering, libidinous eye, assessing them against his urges and providing space to understand better the roles he hoped to play in the sexual game. One of the first objects of his passion was the actress Mrs. Cowper, of whom he wrote, “She has the finest Person, the most agreeable Face, and the politest Carriage of any Actress we remember to have seen on this stage.”
Lord Auchinleck did not approve of the way his son spent his time and, in 1759, recalled him from Edinburgh to send him instead to the University of Glasgow. By far a more sober and studious setting, Glasgow provided Boswell with the opportunity to attend lectures on moral philosophy delivered by Adam Smith, then on the verge of publishing his Theory of Moral Sentiments. In his lecture hall, Smith expounded on his belief that through their craving for “fellow feeling” human beings acquire a sense of right and wrong by shaping their actions to win the approval of others and attuning their emotions according to an internalized sense of how an impartial observer might judge them. This idea of values attained through collective experience, and of becoming by being seen, resonated strongly with Boswell, affirming his dedication to theatrical communality and the urbanity he encountered in The Spectator.
Although Boswell found Smith to be a generous and inspiring lecturer, the puritanical environs of Glasgow provided little opportunity to practice his philosophy, and loneliness weighed heavily on his mind. Depressed, his thoughts swung toward their other polarity, piety, and a small cache of Catholic tracts presented to him in Edinburgh by a Jesuit named Père Duchat. In March 1760, Boswell sent his father a letter declaring his intention to travel to London and become a Catholic priest, a decision that may have been inspired in part by his pining for the Catholic Mrs. Cowper. This announcement alarmed his father more than anything else his troublesome son had ever done. Conversion to Catholicism was a capital offense, and while the penalty was rarely imposed, Catholics were discriminated against in every walk of life, barred from practicing law or holding public office, joining the army or navy, or legally inheriting their family’s wealth. Boswell made good on his threat of going to London, so Lord Auchinleck contacted Lord Eglinton, a neighbor from Ayrshire who was himself resident in the capital, and pleaded with him to intercede. It was a stroke of genius on the elder man’s part, as Eglinton was a libertine bachelor who immediately managed to shake the teenager from his pious introspection by exposing him to the glamor of London life. Under Eglinton’s tutelage, Boswell attended the races, was introduced to writers and dramatists (among them Garrick), and socialized in the company of the Duke of York, brother to the future George III (to whom Boswell developed an immediate dislike).
After three heady months, Boswell returned to Scotland, where he published an anonymous poem in praise of theatre, “Ode to Tragedy,” most notable for its dedication to James Boswell, to whom the author (James Boswell) offers profuse thanks “for your particular kindness to me; and chiefly for the profound respect with which you have always treated me.” Three years later, having finally completed his studies, he returned to London again, this time with his father’s blessing. Once again, he met Garrick, and was overcome when the actor told him “you will be a very great man.” Boswell took Garrick by the hand. “Thou greatest of men,” he replied, “I cannot express how happy you make me.” In his journal, he admitted, “I was quite in raptures, to find him paying me so much respect.”
Garrick made “particles of vivacity” dance within Boswell “by a sort of contagion,” but never so much as when Boswell saw the actor perform. May 12, 1763, was particularly memorable. This was the night Boswell attended Drury Lane to see Garrick in King Lear, a performance that was due to begin at six, but “so very high is his reputation,” he recorded, “that the pit was full in ten minutes after four.” On any given evening the theatre was filled with representatives of all but the meanest classes, from the aristocrats who peopled the boxes, to the maids and footmen who waited for them in the highest galleries and the prostitutes and orange sellers “who lurk about the house avenues and parts adjacent.” The pit held around five hundred people, so crammed together that they often sat on one another’s laps while others walked over them, hopping across from bench to bench. This was the part of the house frequented by those who considered themselves theatrically literate—critics, opinion formers, and men who took an interest in the traffic of the stage—as well as “plain, sober Tradesmen, their Wives and Children,” army officers, and men about town. It suited Boswell perfectly. With two hours to wait, the audience had to entertain themselves. Many brought their dinners wrapped in handkerchiefs, played with their dogs, or amused themselves by dropping walnut shells and orange peel over the balconies onto the heads of those below. Once while waiting, in what he described as “a wild freak of youthful extravagance,” Boswell began lowing like a cow. The audience members cried out, “Encore the cow! Encore the cow!” and encouraged by his success, he tried imitating a range of other animals, although none were as well received. “My dear sir,” said his friend, “I would confine myself to the cow!”
At six o’clock, the bell rang and Garrick stepped out to deliver the evening’s prologue under the light of six wide-circumferenced girandoles suspended above his head, their sputtering tallow lighting both stage and auditorium. The audience quieted, although never really settled. People came and went throughout the performances, their evening plans assisted by guidebooks such as John Brownsmith’s The Dramatic Time-Piece: or Perpetual Monitor, which provided exact timings for each act of each play in the current repertoire so that patrons might plan their arrival and departure precisely (and demand a refund for whatever portion of the bill they didn’t see). At the close of the third act, a second wave of spectators was admitted to fill the empty seats, paying half price for their tickets. This was such a feature of the theatrical landscape that it shaped the writing of plays, many of which contained a summary of the plot at the beginning of Act 4.
The constant interruptions were especially annoying to Garrick, who every season tried to impose more order on the auditorium. When playing Lear, he demanded the attention of his audience to the extent that any conversation above a whisper was checked by “hush men” he had strategically placed around the theatre. Despite the distractions, Boswell primed himself to receive the emotion that Garrick injected into every performance—the gasps and pauses, the emphatic weeping and windmilling arms, the deployment of the “fright wig,” a hairpiece controlled by wires that could be raised at moments of extreme distress. Boswell “was fully moved, I shed an abundance of tears.” There then followed an afterpiece named Polly Honeycomb, after which the orchestra led the audience in a rendition of “God Save the King” before everyone pressed for the exits and the unpredictable London night, their ways illuminated by link boys padding ahead with lighted torches.
Drury Lane Theatre, as it appeared from the stage. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library
For all the chaos and inconvenience a night at the theatre entailed, it was the kind of experience that Boswell held to be transcendent, his belief in its civilizing influence vindicating the teachings of Adam Smith. There was his “soul refined” by “the exalted pleasure resulting from the view of a crowd assembled to be pleased, and full of happiness.” To experience theatre was to experience the formation of community, as to a “generous contemplative mind,” he wrote, “nothing can afford a more sublime satisfaction than to see happiness diffused thro’ a number of our fellow creatures mutually participating of the same entertainment.” Given the strength of his commitment to these principles, it was a shame he would miss the Jubilee.