A month passed between the announcement of the Jubilee and the start of any planning. It was early June by the time Garrick visited Stratford-upon-Avon with a retinue that consisted of his wife, Eva, his younger brother George, and the architect Richard Latimore. The party was greeted with the ringing of church bells and a civic dinner at the White Lion Inn, Stratford’s largest coaching inn, which stood on the Great North Road close by the house in which Shakespeare had been born. The dinner cost the Corporation almost fifteen pounds, money largely wasted as Garrick detested events of any kind in which he “considered himself as under the necessity of being a very delightful companion,” and “supporting his character as a wit.” After dinner, the party toured the environs, led by William Hunt, the industrious and hardworking town clerk. They began at the birthplace, before moving on to King’s New School, where Shakespeare had studied, and the remains of New Place, the home he had purchased for his retirement. As they walked, Garrick consulted with Latimore, pointing out sites that might be useful and the number and size of buildings that could be used for dinners, dances, and other repasts. Such had been the response that people had already started trying to reserve rooms, and now Garrick was wondering if the two days he had allotted would be enough as “every body will be there.” He told Hunt, “There is much talk, and great Expectations, and we must take care to answer them as well as we possibly can.”
The town was not designed for crowds. Situated in gentle hills beside the banks of the river Avon, it was a compact municipality of twelve streets and four hundred half-timbered houses sheltering two thousand souls. Its size and character had changed little in the two hundred years since Shakespeare had walked reluctantly from his home in Henley Street to take his place on his school’s narrow benches, just as the open fields that lay beyond remained largely unaltered since the once mighty forest of Arden had been cleared away by Anglo-Saxon handsaws. Its sovereign smells were lanolin and fresh air; its loudest sound the knelling of Holy Trinity’s bells.
Stratford rarely made the news and, prior to Garrick, its most recent appearance in the London papers was the report of a man who, walking home to Birmingham, had saved a baby owl lying in the road only to be attacked by its mother “with such violence as to deprive him of the sight of one eye.” Neither had it done much to exploit its connection to Shakespeare. The house in which he had been raised, for example, had been altered many times, with new rooms and extra kitchens, and the greater part of it being converted into an inn called the Maidenhead. Catering to visitors was not a priority, a fact that had dismayed the writer Horace Walpole, who passed through in 1751 and declared it “the wretchedest old town I ever saw, which I intended for Shakespeare’s sake to find snug, and pretty, and antique, not old.”
The quiet town of Stratford-upon-Avon, with a view of Holy Trinity Church across the Warwickshire fields. © The Trustees of the British Museum
The most extreme example of indifference, however, had been displayed by the Reverend Francis Gastrell, the vicar of Frodsham in Cheshire, who had retired to Stratford and purchased New Place with its ten fireplaces, five gables, two orchards, two barns, and two gardens, one of which contained the famous mulberry tree, planted around 1609 after King James I had thousands of them imported from France. Although slow growing, in the course of the intervening one and a half centuries the mulberry had become a thick and intervolving town landmark, attracting occasional tourists like David Garrick who would come up from London to stand beneath it while contemplating Shakespeare’s genius, helping themselves in summer to commemorative sprigs and branches and staining their lips in autumn with its wine-dark fruit. These intrusions so aggrieved Gastrell that, in 1756, he hired the carpenter John Ange to fell the tree and dismember it for firewood, so angering the townsfolk that they in turn formed an avenging mob who descended on New Place and broke all its windows. This did nothing to alter the reverend’s strong conviction that he could do whatever he wanted with his own property, irrespective of who had owned it before. Three years later, when faced with a bill for the monthly assessments toward the maintenance of the parish poor, he refused to pay on account of the fact that he spent a large part of the year residing in Lichfield. When the Corporation insisted, Gastrell vowed that his house would never be assessed again and had the entire building demolished, leaving a fresh stump and an exposed foundation as all that remained of Shakespeare’s estate.
While the citizens of Stratford went on living, largely unconcerned about the many ways in which they were failing to honor the literary ghost imprinted on their walls, the country around them was changing. One would not have had to travel far to find a starkly different version of British life, where sleepy parishes of wool combers and ribbon weavers, high hedgerow and rutted country lanes, gave way to towns black with soot, the din of cart wheels over crocodilian cobblestones, and the angry chattering of looms. Just twenty-two miles north of Stratford sat Birmingham, which in the course of a few short decades had grown from a small town into the most densely populated city in the country after London. Birmingham’s population had doubled in the 1760s alone, transforming itself into a hive of commercial invention that burned fifteen thousand tons of coal a week. The principals of Birmingham’s rise were the forge and the foundry: iron had been worked in the hills around the city since the sixteenth century, feeding the “toy-makers” to whom the city owed its great affluence. These manufacturers did not produce playthings for children, but rather an array of metal goods considered essential to modern living, from shoe tacks to belt buckles and the buttons on a waistcoat, as well as an infinite catalogue of other small and useful items, such as “Trinkets, Seals, Tweezer and Tooth Pick cases, Smelling Bottles, Snuff Boxes, and Filigree Work such as Toilets, Tea Chests, Inkstands &c. &tc. Cork screws, Buckles, Draw and other Boxes: Snuffers, Watch Chains, Stay Hooks, Sugar knippers &c.” Toy work employed over twenty thousand people in an industry worth over £600,000 a year, exporting its goods via a network of waterways that connected Birmingham to the world. “The West-Indies, and the American world,” observed the local historian William Hutton, “are intimately acquainted with the Birmingham merchant.”
As those merchants grew rich, they badgered at modernity, pushing the pace of invention while searching for efficiencies that would maximize their profits and increase their leisure. With income rising and tastes becoming more cultivated, Birmingham retailers stocked Persian rugs, finely tooled guns, enamels, and furniture finished with exquisite japanning. Speculators arrived, looking to fund their schemes through practical demonstrations of steam engines and condensers, magnetism, lenses, and hydraulics, jolting themselves with electric shocks while discursing on the properties of the Leyden jar, or experimenting with forms of horseless transport like Mr. Moore’s carriage, a self-propelling, four-wheeled vehicle that moved by means of a crankshaft.
Stratford’s economy, meanwhile, had been stalled for years due to the collapse of its trade in harrateen, a kind of linen used for curtains and the canopies that enclosed four-poster beds and kept the sleeping safe from the mice that fell from the rafters stupefied by wood smoke. Led by its mayor, Samuel Jarvis, the Corporation of Stratford had failed to raise sufficient volunteers to sit on the town council, which consistently numbered fewer than the twelve aldermen and twelve capital burgesses required by its charter, in spite of the thirty-pound fine levied against those who refused to serve. Even those who did agree to sit attended so sporadically that the council was often forced to disperse without conducting its business. “Surrounded with impassable roads, no intercourse with man to humanize the mind, no commerce to smooth their rugged manners,” wrote the historian of Birmingham of his provincial neighbors, “they continue the boors of nature.”
In the face of such apathy, the economic fate of Stratford came increasingly to rely on a handful of men—most notably, the town clerk, William Hunt. Hunt’s efforts to bring investment to Stratford had begun when the Corporation sought to rebuild the town’s market house, which had been in a state of near ruination since lumps had been shot out of it during the Civil War. Having received a builder’s quote for £678, and committing £200 of its own funds toward construction of a new building, the Corporation gave Hunt the job of raising the rest from local worthies. A list of potential subscribers was compiled that included the town’s biggest landowner, the Duke of Dorset, and the Earl of Warwick, who gave £21. Hunt himself gave £5, 5 shillings.
When completed in 1767, the new Town Hall emulated the Georgian elegance of many English market towns with its golden frontage of smooth Cotswold stone. Standing in marked contrast to the eaved and timbered dwellings that surrounded it, it boasted a spacious ballroom on its top floor, “sixty feet long thirty foot wide and twenty feet high . . . plastered with a good handsome plastering of light yellow colour,” separate card rooms for gentlemen and ladies, and—a sign of the greatest modern convenience—two purpose-built water closets complete with lead basins and brass fittings. On the ground floor were kitchens, a pantry, and the town prison, while the front portion of the building was left as an open colonnade to house the corn market. Although a source of great civic pride, one small detail prevented perfection: a recess that had been built into the exterior of the second story on the building’s north side. This concave space, the ideal home for some kind of statue or bust, remained unfilled, and standing noticeably empty, looked forlorn.
Just as the Town Hall was being finished, a man named George Alexander Stevens came to town. After an unsuccessful stint as an actor in Garrick’s company, Stevens had attained fame as a singer of comic songs and “spouter” of mock orations that he crafted into one-man shows like the wildly popular Lecture upon Heads, a satirical performance in which he performed characters such as lawyers, doctors, and gamblers, and historical figures including Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, and a Cherokee chief, with the aid of several wigs and busts of pasteboard and wood. The show had taken him all over the country and even to America, enabling him to amass a fortune close to ten thousand pounds, “the greatest part of which melted from his hands” according to The Gentleman’s Magazine. Stevens was a friend of John Payton, landlord of the White Lion, and, along with William Hunt, one of the Stratford’s more ambitious citizens. Payton—“as hearty, as sensible, and as polite a being as any man who loves and relishes society would wish to be acquainted with,” according to one guest who had stayed at his inn—had been one of the few who had tried to capitalize on Shakespeare’s reputation by showing visitors around the remains of New Place and taking them to “Shakespeare’s Canopy,” a crab tree growing from a hedge that the playwright had reputedly slept under after a night of drinking (the tree collapsed in 1824, another victim of relic hunters). It was during a convivial dinner with Payton and several members of the Stratford Corporation that Stevens first suggested that the Town Hall’s empty nook should contain a statue of Stratford’s peerless son. The matter was discussed, and it was decided that Stevens would approach Garrick, his former employer, with the idea of holding a benefit night at Drury Lane to raise funds. Although Garrick declined, he did share his regret with Stevens that nothing had been organized in 1766 to mark the 150th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.
Ambitions at this stage ran no further than obtaining a statue for the empty nook, and with a line of communication successfully opened, William Hunt charged Francis Wheler with following up. As steward for the Court of Records, Wheler’s business often took him to London’s Middle Temple, where he kept chambers at the spacious Jacobean house at 1 Brick Court. A fellow resident was Oliver Goldsmith, the popular author of The Vicar of Wakefield currently at work on his groundbreaking poem, the harbinger of Romanticism that was “The Deserted Village.” Wheler may well have passed Garrick on the stairs, since the actor and Goldsmith were good friends, and Goldsmith often hosted parties in his rooms. One acquaintance he certainly made was Garrick’s friend the poet George Keate, who agreed to intercede on the Corporation’s behalf. As degrees of separation diminished, Wheler felt confident that he was nearing his quarry and reported back to Hunt with a plan. “In order to flatter Mr Garrick into some such Handsom present,” he wrote, “I have been thinking it would not be at all amiss if the Corporation were to propose to make Mr. Garrick an Honourary Burgess of Stratford and to present him therewith in a Box made of Shakespears Mulberry tree.” The Corporation approved, delivering fifty-five pounds and a parcel of mulberry wood to Thomas Davies of Newhall Walk, Birmingham (and not to be confused with Garrick’s first biographer), commissioning him to carve both a box and an ornamental standish—a desk set for pen, ink, and writing materials—as a gift for Keate to thank him for his part in their plan.
George Alexander Stevens, meanwhile, paid Garrick a second visit, this time finding that the actor had grown more amenable to the idea of presenting a gift to the town of Shakespeare’s birth. Writing to Payton, Stevens declared,
I am Certain Mr Garrick; (at least as well as I can guess,) will present ye Town and Town Hal with either a Statue or Bust of Shakespear—but by all means address Him by Letter properly. Set forth his great merits, and that there is not a man in England (except himself) to Whom you can apply with equal propriety for a Bust, or Statue. Say Shakespear the father of the English Stage, Garrick the Restorer of Shakespear—and some other such phrases for all great Men Love to be praised.
Flattery was a proven method for dealing with Garrick, who, in the words of one rival, “never failed to enjoy adulation.” The hint was passed on to Wheler in London, who in December 1767 wrote to Garrick to formally request a “Statue Bust or Picture” of Shakespeare to be displayed in the Town Hall, along with “some Picture of yourself That the memory of both may be perpetuated together in that place wch gave him birth and where he still lives in the mind of every Inhabitant.” Moreover, continued Wheler,
The Corporation of Stratford ever desiring of expressing their Gratitude to all who do Honour and Justice to the memory of Shakespear, and highly sensible that no person in any age hath excelled you therein would think themselves much honored if you would become one of their Body; Tho this Borough doth not now send Members to Parliament perhaps the inhabitants may not be the less virtuous, and to sending the Freedom of such a place the more acceptable to you the Corporation propose to send it in a Box made of that very Mulberry tree planted by Shakespear’s own hand.
Doubly besieged, Garrick relented, and the next time Stevens saw him, “He told me he thought himself obliged to the Corporation etc. of your Town for their application, and declared He would present you as fine [a statue] as London could make.” Offering to write a dedicatory ode for the statue’s eventual unveiling, Stevens signed off with a promise to send his ice skates to Payton’s son, John junior, and retired from the negotiations.
When it came to Shakespeare statues, Garrick had form. The garden of his house at Richmond contained what Horace Walpole called a “grateful temple to Shakespeare,” a domed octagonal structure close to the riverbank that housed a fine statue by the French sculptor Louis François Roubiliac: “A most noble statue of this most original man,” wrote the playwright Hannah More, “in an attitude strikingly pensive—his limbs strongly muscular, his countenance strongly expressive of some vast conception, and his whole form seeming the bigger from some immense idea with which you suppose his great imagination pregnant.” The temple was unique, for while it was not uncommon in grand British gardens to find picturesque rotundas, pavilions, and exedrae like the Temple of British Worthies at Stowe in Buckinghamshire (built in 1734), Garrick’s was the only one devoted solely to a single writer. It was indeed, as Walpole claimed, “grateful,” an expression of thanks for the earthly rewards Shakespeare had bestowed upon the house of Garrick. It also served to flatter Garrick himself. The actor, it was said, had posed for the statue, suggesting that he was more than just a willing vessel. If not exactly a reincarnation of Shakespeare, it implied, the two artists were somehow collocated, existing in one body: “SHAKESPEARE revives! In GARRICK breathes again!” as the writer Richard Rolt would have it. The temple was equipped with a dozen chairs—including one made from mulberry wood—in which visitors were invited to sit and admire. Tea was served.
Garrick’s statue took as its template the Shakespeare monument installed in the southeast corner of Westminster Abbey in 1741, for which Garrick himself had helped to raise subscriptions. Sculpted by the Dutch artist Peter Scheemakers from sleek, lactescent marble, the Westminster Shakespeare was similarly pensive and elegant. The poet was depicted with a sheaf of paper pinched between forefinger and thumb, leaning casually on a pile of books as though inviting inspiration to come and read to him, surrounded by the symbolism of poetical solemnity—a dagger and a laurel wreath, and busts of the monarchs featured in his history plays. Both statues had been prohibitively expensive, so when it came to commissioning a statue for Stratford, Garrick turned prudently to John Cheere, maker of mass-produced statuary at his god-filled yard at Hyde Park Corner. Cheere sold to the price-conscious gentleman eager to stock his parks and halls with “frisking satyrs” cast from lead. The result was a close approximation of Scheemakers’s statue at a far more reasonable price, and with one notable improvement: when Scheemakers’s original had been unveiled, the parchment Shakespeare held in his left hand was blank, leaving a tantalizing space for any pencil-wielding Pasquino to scrawl rude and satirical verses. This was curtailed when the dean of Westminster Abbey had the empty page inscribed with lines from The Tempest (which in the event were misquoted). To ensure that the Stratford statue wouldn’t endure the same fate, it would display lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Next, Garrick attended to the paintings that Wheler had suggested might be hung in the Town Hall ballroom. A portrait of Shakespeare was produced by Benjamin Wilson, the tutor of John Zoffany and the current incumbent of the office of sergeant-painter to the king, a role that required him to produce royal portraits and adornments for celebrations. A second painting by Garrick’s friend Thomas Gainsborough depicted the actor gazing mistily into the invisible realms with his arm around a bust of Shakespeare in the grounds of Prior Park, the home of William Warburton, the bishop of Gloucester and an editor of Shakespeare. The painting was masterly, but Garrick, concerned that it might smack of vanity to present the town with a picture of himself and Shakespeare so lovingly entwined, suggested that the Corporation pay for it directly. With little choice, the town fathers complied, paying also for a magnificent gilt frame obtained by Wilson for a total cost of £137 and 4 shillings. Dealing with celebrities was expensive: when tallied alongside with Thomas Davies’s commission for the mulberry box, the cost of wooing David Garrick had almost doubled the Corporation’s investment in the Town Hall.
David Garrick with a bust of Shakespeare in the grounds of Prior Park, Somerset. This is a copy of Thomas Gainsborough’s original, hung in the Town Hall at Stratford-upon-Avon until destroyed by fire in 1946. © Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
Somewhere in the course of these negotiations, the idea of staging a festival around the presentation of the statue had been born. As with the artistic commissions, Garrick made sure this wouldn’t leave him out of pocket. Growing up under the perpetual threat of poverty had made him careful with money, and one of his first orders of business on arriving in Stratford was to determine the finances for the Jubilee. Forty years earlier, if such an event could have been conceived, the Jubilee would have been the product of patronage, paid for by an aristocratic sponsor and offered in the spirit of noblesse oblige. These days, it was an entirely private venture. Just as the economy was modernizing, the way in which high culture was consumed was in transition too, and the opportunity to venerate Shakespeare had to balance the books like any other commodity.
The aristocracy still played an important role, smoothing over with their presence any anxieties that might exist about the commercialization of culture, and invoking an older relationship between actor and patron that placed Garrick in the role of courtier rather than businessman. Garrick played the role impeccably by being studiously deferential and accommodating, but cash was now king. Garrick proposed that he and the Corporation cover all the expenses between them, including footing the bill for food and lodging for the performers, sharing any losses equally, but allowing any profits that might be made to be invested in Stratford and “entirely laid out in the Honor of Shakespeare.”
It was a generous offer, but the men of the Corporation were uneasy. Having sunk money into the paintings and mulberry box, and already committed themselves to making improvements to the house of Mr. Hatton next to the site of New Place in order to accommodate the Duke of Dorset for the duration of the Jubilee, they were reluctant to spend further.
If that were so, said Garrick, he would be better off turning the entire production over to London speculators, in which case any profit would leave Stratford entirely. He wondered aloud if there might be a small coalition of local “adventurers” who would be willing to shoulder the risk, a broad hint that was taken up by both William Hunt and John Payton, the landlord of the White Lion. Hunt and Payton were keen to speculate and perhaps emulate in some small part the success of men like their Birmingham neighbor Matthew Boulton, a captain of industry whose newly opened Soho Manufactory on Handsworth Heath had been designed to look like “the stately Palace of some Duke” in order to emphasize the braided strands of affluence, consumption, and taste that together formed the bonds of social progress. Men like Boulton understood the connection between the arts and industry, as evinced by his own attempts to bring a licensed theatre to Birmingham, arguing to the Earl of Dartmouth that it was an essential means of civilizing the people. “All well regulated states have found it expedient to indulge the people with amusements of some kind or another,” Boulton had told the earl,
and certainly those are most eligible that tend to improve the morals, the manners, or the taste of the people, and at the same time to prevent them from relapsing into the barbarous amusements which prevailed in this neighborhood in the last century, when Birmingham was as remarkable for good forgers and filers as for their bad taste in all their works. Their diversions were bull baitings, cock fightings, boxing matches and abominable drunkenness with all its train. But now the scene is changed. The people are more polite and civilized, and the taste of their manufactures greatly improved. There is not a town of its size in Europe where mechanism is brought to such perfection, and we have also made considerable progress in some of the liberal arts, which hath been a means of extending our trade to the remotest corners of the world.
Boulton continued, “It is certainly in our interest to bring a [theatrical] company to Birmingham, as it contributes so much to the public good, not only from the money they leave behind them, but from their explaining their wants to the manufacturers, and giving hints for various improvements, which nothing promotes so much as an intercourse with persons from different parts of the world.” In the minds of Payton and Hunt, a jubilee would provide a similar stimulus for Stratford, resulting not only in short-term profit but in a rising tide of gentility that would connect the town to the new economy—or so they hoped. A “determinate and final answer is desired on this matter as soon as possible as there is no time to lose,” insisted Garrick, eager to close the deal before leaving town and encouraging Hunt to put up one hundred pounds of his own money. The Whitehall Evening Post agreed. “The money which this Jubilee will cause to be circulated in Stratford and its environs,” it wrote, “will be very serviceable to many of the inhabitants of that town as they stand more in need of it than those of Bath, Bristol, Margate, Brighthelmstone, etc., many of whom have already become rich by the expensive pleasures of the opulent.”
Having taken his tour, Garrick returned to London, leaving behind his brother George to oversee the preparations. Six years David’s junior, George Garrick was a devoted sibling, albeit somewhat lacking in initiative and unable to capitalize on the many professional openings his brother had arranged for him. For the past twenty years, George had been the managerial assistant at Drury Lane, a job that involved little direct management but enabled him to serve as a counterweight to the demanding attention to detail that often alienated the actors from his brother. Managing such a talented group of performers was a constant strain, and Garrick frequently lost his temper with his “large family, in which there are many froward [sic] Children,” tiring of their greenroom arguments, feuds over preeminence, and chronic underpreparedness, leaving it to his brother George to soothe their wounded feelings and get them ready to perform. Some, like Spranger Barry, who had for a short while been considered Garrick’s rival in the role of Romeo, required every ounce of George’s détente, since he and his wife made increasingly outrageous demands of Garrick, or arrived at the theatre drunk or not at all. Others, like Giuseppe Grimaldi, master of the corps de ballet and a pantomime clown with enormous energy and a generous dash of insanity, had to be approached with the same caution one might approach a dangerous beast. Garrick, who labeled Grimaldi a “Tartar” and “impudent fellow,” considered him “ye worst behav’d Man in ye Whole Company and Shd have had a horse whip,” for his serial seduction of young dancers, the sadistic punishments he would inflict on the children of the company, and the beatings he would dole out to those who crossed him.
Fortunately, even Garrick’s avowed enemies found it hard to hate George—he was affable and easygoing and “had so many admirable traits of real goodness,” according to the librettist Charles Dibdin. In addition to serving as house mollifier, George was frequently employed as saboteur and spy, talking down plays that Garrick did not want to stage but didn’t want to see his rivals to perform either, and keeping watch on his brother’s servants, especially one named Molly at Southampton Street, a woman Garrick considered “particularly bebitched,” who took men back to the house and was “a great peeper into papers.” All this came with a salary of £200 a year, topped off by an allowance from his brother for another £100, as well as an unwritten agreement that Garrick would provide for George’s numerous children. Like many in the company, however, George knew what it was to enjoy a bohemian lifestyle in which time was of little consequence and money was thought to evaporate if left unused too long. He was constantly in debt.
In Stratford-upon-Avon, George headquartered himself in a large stone building known as the College, “capacious, handsome, and strong,” which in turn abutted Holy Trinity Church. The College was owned by Mrs. Kendall, a sickly widow recuperating in Bath. While now empty, it had once been the habitation of priests, and with its absentee landlord, large rooms, long gallery-like corridors, and monastic garden surrounded by a high stone wall that discouraged prying eyes, it was the perfect place from which to plan Jubilee surprises. To work on these marvels, George was joined by John French, a leading Drury Lane scenery maker, and his assistant, Porter. French was a talented artist and a heavy drinker. “Being addicted to inebriety,” wrote one account, “it was with difficulty that Mr. George Garrick could induce him to proceed, as French frequently made it necessary that drink should be sent to the painting rooms to secure his attendance there.” Deep in his cups, French hated to be left alone, and because George was known for being such a good fellow, he insisted that he stay with him throughout his long binges. In London, George was usually so assiduous in following out his brother’s commands that he “was always in anxiety, lest in his absence his brother should have wanted him; and the first question he asked on his return was, ‘Did DAVID want me?’ ” In sleepy Warwickshire, with no brother to superintend him, it was easy just to let the days pass in drinking and chat.
This was a problem as Garrick had left his brother with a long list of to-dos, including liaising with the locals, making arrangements for two public dinners, and commandeering vessels for the use of day-trippers on the river Avon (which amounted in the end to just “2 barges and Fishing Boat”). In addition, George was to find stalls for all the horses the visitors would bring, measure the span of the river (a measurement Garrick was inexplicably eager to learn, and which George was particularly tardy about delivering), and design a plan of decoration for the town’s sole bridge with its fourteen arches. He was also supposed to ensure that all the houses in the town would be adorned with streamers and flowers, and to arrange for the presence of the local militia to enforce public order and provide the fête with some martial dignity. Jubilee ribbons were to be commissioned from Mr. Jackson in Coventry, and a commemorative medal was to be engraved by Westwood in Birmingham with versions cast in copper, silver, and gold, to suit each pocketbook. George was to supervise French in the construction of a “triumphal car” that would bear the muses of Comedy and Tragedy at the front of a grand procession of Shakespeare characters Garrick had planned, as well as to arrange for the men of the Corporation to march in costume and audition some local children for parts. “We shall want 8, 10, or a dozen of the handsomest children in ye Town, by way of Fairies and Cupids for our pageant,” Garrick had written to William Hunt, “will you be so obliging to cast an Eye upon ye Schools for this purpose?—We must likewise collect as many seemly fellows as we can get to assist in ye Pageant.”
The pageant was going to be one of the most important parts of the Jubilee. Audiences loved processions and parades, especially after a long night of drama, and when done well they offered a shimmering vision of distant ages and exotic locales, accompanied by waving banners and stirring music that afforded the senses the pleasures of luxuriation without need for either close listening or critical discernment. One hundred and fifty boxes of dresses and scenery were sent up from Drury Lane to furnish the pageant, accompanied by an assortment of leather-aproned scene men and understrappers who would barrack in the College and spend the day knocking and sawing.
By far George’s most important commission was to bring into reality Garrick’s vision for a space large enough to fit more than one hundred performers and up to two thousand guests. The architect Richard Latimore had decreed that none of Stratford’s existing buildings would be sufficient, so it was decided that a temporary rotunda would be built under his direction similar to the one that stood in Ranelagh Gardens, a popular pleasure spot owned by James Lacy, Garrick’s business partner and co-owner of the patent of Drury Lane. Opened in 1742, on the site of a former mansion, Ranelagh was a private landscape of shady walks, formal plantings, and water features designed for al fresco entertainments. Located at the edge of the Thames and most charmingly approached by water, for two shillings and sixpence anyone could enjoy music, dancing, and firework displays, or spend time alone on its private paths and bowers before partaking of “fine imperial tea and other refreshments.” This ornate wooden pavilion, described by Horace Walpole as “a vast amphitheatre, finely gilt, painted and illuminated in which everybody that loves eating, drinking and staring is admitted,” was 150 feet in diameter and contained fifty-two dining boxes lit by a thousand lamps.
Garrick had initially intended his rotunda to be built behind the White Lion Inn, but the site did not provide good access, and so a spot on Bankcroft Mead, a meadow at the edge of the Avon, was chosen. This would permit of the prettiest aspect and, just like Ranelagh, allow visitors to enjoy the romance of approaching an illuminated palace from the water. To achieve the desired effect, it was necessary to remove more than one hundred willow trees that stood on the land. William Hunt sought permission to fell the trees, which was jointly granted by the Duke of Dorset, who owned them, and a lawyer named Dionysus Bradley, who held the lease. Once they were removed, an unobstructed view from the site to the bridge and so across to town was revealed.
Having seen the newly opened meadow, Hunt was moved to build a Chinese summerhouse on the opposite bank, which he would open to visitors. Hunt’s friend and fellow “adventurer,” John Payton, similarly busied himself. As the landlord of the White Lion, Payton took on the role of official caterer and hotelier for the duration. Garrick had asked him to rename his inn the “Shakespeare’s Head,” even offering him a good price on a new sign, but Payton was reluctant to give up the established reputation he had built. Nonetheless, he invested heavily, renaming his rooms after Shakespeare characters and hastily adding to his property by constructing an assembly room, card room, coffee room, and a suite of private apartments he would reserve for the Garricks. Even the menu was revised so that visitors might enjoy meals such as “Jubilee chicken.” To cater to the expected crowds, he had ordered 3600 pewter plates and cutlery to go with them, 1000 gallons of wine for his cellar, and (what had been the height of London culinary fashion five years earlier) a 327-pound sea turtle that until recently had supported its full weight in the green waters of the Caribbean.
The enthusiasm for the Jubilee shown by Hunt and Payton was not universally shared around the town. As George Garrick’s residency continued and the streets began to fill with strangers, many Stratford locals could be found “either pursuing their occupations in the old dog-trot way” (in the words of The Gentleman’s Magazine) “or staring with wonderful vacancy of phis at the preparations, the purpose of which they had very few ideas about.” “The low People of Stratford upon Avon are without Doubt as ignorant as any in the whole Island,” reported a correspondent for the St. James Chronicle,
I could not possibly imagine that there were such Beings in the most repost, and least frequented Parts of the Kingdom. I talked with many, particularly the old People, and not one of them but was frightened at the Preparations for the Jubilee, and did not know what they were about: Many of them really thought that Mr. G_______ would raise Devils, and fly in a Chariot about the Town. They ordered those whom they had Power over, not to stir out the Day of the Jubilee. . . . It is impossible to describe their Absurdity; and indeed Providence seems, by producing Shakespeare and the rest of his Townsmen, to shew the two Extremes of Human Nature.
The townsfolk’s anxiety was exacerbated by the fact that even with all this activity, no one had any real idea what the Jubilee would actually entail. Town and Country Magazine had announced that it would last five days and consist of concerts, masked balls and “riddotoes [sic] alternately.” An unsigned letter in The Gentleman’s Magazine made it sound entirely different, “an intellectual feast” akin to an academic conference whose first day would be devoted to a “eulogium . . . on the wonderful dramatic Genius,” the second to “an examination of the Poet’s verification,” including lectures on harmony and rhyme and “much delightful instruction” on the “errors of some modern performers in respect to accent, emphasis, and rest.” The whole was to conclude with an opportunity to view a copy of “the Stratford Swan,” a periodical devoted to literary criticism, which, according to this correspondent, Garrick intended to edit after retiring from the stage.
In August, two weeks before the Jubilee was supposed to begin, Joseph Cradock, a writer, amateur performer, the high sheriff of Leicester, and friend of David Garrick, took a ride over to Stratford to check on its progress but found that hardly any had been made. A tour of the sites found nothing but “desolate appearance.” Of particular concern was the Rotunda. “If that great and striking object, turns out as it ought to do,” Garrick had said, “it will make other matters very Easy.” However, not only had construction not begun, but a price for the wood to make it had still not been agreed with the Birmingham lumberyard. Cases of lamps sent up to illuminate the interior had arrived “shivered to pieces” and been dumped on the riverbank. Calling at the College to speak with some of the Drury Lane men there, Cradock was told, “We never were so uncomfortably circumstanced in our lives.”
We are sent down here to make some preparations for the entertainment, but we are absolutely without materials, and we can gain no assistance whatever from the inhabitants, who are all fearful of lending us any article whatever. We would do any thing in the world to serve our good Master, but he is entirely kept in the dark, as to the situation of everything here, and we only wish to return to London again, as soon as possible, to save expenses.
At a dinner with the Corporation, the message of doom was repeated. The Jubilee promised to be the largest single congregation of people outside London in living memory, and the locals, understandably nervous about the size of the crowd, were anxious that they would open their houses only to have their hospitality abused by vicious Londoners and “have all their plate stolen, and their furniture destroyed.” Most wanted only to lock up their houses and abandon the town for the duration, pleading with Cradock to take their concerns back to Garrick and ask that he cancel the Jubilee.
“Sure, you cannot think that any Jubilee will take place here,” a local told him. “I doubt whether any one was ever seriously intended; but if it was meditated, you may depend upon it, that it is entirely given up.”
Cradock assured the man that the Jubilee was definitely going ahead.
“There will be no Jubilee,” replied the man. “There will be a riot.”