The comet loitered in the heavens, 16 degrees and 6 minutes from Betelgeuse in Orion’s right shoulder. “It appears remarkably well defined, and doth not seem to carry any thing with it that may be destructive to any part of the planetary system,” reassured the New Daily Advertiser. Four days later it disappeared in the direction of Venus at a rate calculated to be “five hundred times the swiftness of a cannon ball.” By this time, most visitors had managed to find their way out of Stratford-upon-Avon. Some, like Boswell, were delighted with their memories, especially when he saw that the frontispiece of The Gentleman’s Magazine for September was a full portrait of himself in Corsican dress. Others made a more somber reckoning with their pilgrimage. “That you may not think I complain without reason,” wrote a correspondent to Town and Country Magazine, determined to enumerate exactly the reasons for his complaint, “judge if my diversion was adequate to the following expence”:
£. s. d. | |
Ticket |
1 1 0 |
Post-chaise to Stratford, at 3s. per mile the last sixty miles — |
11 0 0 |
Expences upon that road |
1 11 6 |
Lodging |
6 6 0 |
Board and other expences |
4 12 0 |
Masquerade dress |
5 5 0 |
Masquerade ticket |
0 10 6 |
Occasional impositions to know the hour of the day, &c. |
1 8 0 |
Chair hire |
2 2 0 |
Servants |
0 12 0 |
Post-chaise back |
12 0 0 |
Expences upon the road |
1 14 0 |
49 2 0 |
Forty-nine pounds was enough to pay a coachman’s wages for three years or Boswell’s rent for two. One might purchase seven horses with that money, or enjoy fifty lavish nights at Ranelagh Gardens. The extravagance became a popular joke. One visitor, asking what to do if his carriage should be held up by highwaymen on the way home, was told, “Tell ’em you have been at the Jubilee and they won’t suspect you have any money left.”
Even more outrageous than the cost to individuals was the amount spent on staging the Jubilee “even in these times of distress.” Musidorus wrote, “What with travelling expences, and the money, circulated immediately in the town of Stratford, the Jubilee has cost fifty thousand pounds”—much of it wasted. “The Amphitheater, which is now above a foot deep in water, from the heavy rains, and its low situation on the border of the Avon, will be useless, as there is no expectation of ever seeing another Jubilee at the place.” Even so, Musidorus was willing to aver that “after all the expence, fatigue, and disappointment” something special had taken place. “I candidly acknowledge that we were overpaid by the single recitation of the Ode,” he wrote: “This part of the Jubilee was so thoroughly admirable, and gave so perfect a satisfaction, that I should not hesitate at another Stratford expedition, merely to hear it, and I am satisfied the majority of the company are entirely of my sentiments.”
Such sentiments fueled a nationwide appetite to know more of this famous verse. The Dedication Ode was reprinted in newspapers and magazines, performed at Canterbury and Birmingham, and circulated among Garrick’s broad and influential group of friends. Peter Garrick, David’s once disapproving older brother, had it recited at his home in Lichfield. Even Voltaire had a copy. The supporters of John Wilkes, in an ongoing show of solidarity for their imprisoned hero and reiterating once again the parallels between their own models of expression and those of Garrick, held a “Patriot’s Jubilee” outside Wilkes’s prison cell. It included ribbons and favors, a song called “Middlesex” (based on “A Warwickshire Lad”), and a feast on a three-hundred-pound turtle.
Despite all the interest in his achievement, Garrick left Stratford in a stormy mood, retreating to the country to recover, telling his friend the clergyman Richard Kaye that “if the Heavens had favoured us—we should have returned to town in triumph—but it is over, and I am neither mad, or in a fever, both of which threatened me greatly.” Predictably, Charles Dibdin took an opposing view, feeling that the rain was the best thing that could have possibly happened as it “served as a veil to cover what would otherwise have been a disgrace; everything succeeded even beyond his most sanguine wishes.” This would indeed prove the case.
In mid-September, Garrick received a formal letter from the mayor, aldermen, and burgesses of Stratford, who “unanimously join in the general Voice of every Inhabitant of this place, in returning to you our most sincere and grateful Thanks,” reserving special praise for those “Beautiful Ornaments” (referring to the Town Hall paintings and statue that had started it all) and for so “elegantly expressing your abhorrence in your most incomparable Ode, of that cruel Design, to destroy the Beauty of this Situation, by inclosing our open Fields.” William Hunt, however, suspected that Garrick was not ready for such protestations of civic gratitude—“I expect you’ll burn every Letter with a Stratford post mark, without opening it,” he wrote in a note that accompanied the town’s thanks. Lacy, meanwhile, continued to berate Garrick for the damage done to the Drury Lane wardrobe and properties, not to mention the expenses George had accrued over the summer, a quick calculation of which amounted to almost two thousand pounds. To make amends, Garrick instructed his brother to stay behind and salvage every last penny from the soggy aftermath, leaving George to run tours of the Rotunda at a shilling apiece before auctioning the whole thing off for timber. Having initially proposed a jubilee every seven years, Garrick was now adamant that there would never be another. Asked for advice on how to stage a successful jubilee, he offered an acerbic reply:
Let ’em decorate ye Town (ye happiest and why not ye handsomest in England) let your streets be well pav’d, and kept clean, do something with ye delightful Meadow, allure every body to vist ye Holy Land; let it be well lighted, and clean under foot, and let it not be said for ye honour; and I hope for ye Interest that the Town, which gave Birth to the first Genius since the Creation, is the most dirty unseemly, ill pav’d, wretched-looking Town in all Britain.
While Garrick wanted nothing but to forget the whole ordeal, others seemed intent on litigating every detail, as a flood of pamphlets and Jubilee-related performances came out, with the first of them, George Saville Carey’s “Shakespeare’s Jubilee,” appearing in print even before the Jubilee was over. Most of them poked fun at the rain and the expense but were careful to treat Garrick with respect. Only Samuel Foote delivered the mockery he had promised, inserting into his performance of The Devil upon Two Sticks on September 13 this definition of “jubilee”:
A jubilee is a public invitation, urged by puffing, to go post without horses, to an obscure borough without representatives, governed by a mayor and aldermen who are no magistrates, to celebrate a great poet whose own works have made him immortal, by an ode without poetry, music without harmony, dinners without victuals, and lodgings without beds; a masquerade where half the people appeared barefaced, a horse race up to the knees in water, fireworks extinguished as soon as they were lighted, and a gingerbread amphitheatre, which, like a house of cards, tumbled to pieces as soon as it was finished.
The rumor persisted that a full-length piece was expected any day. Foote, it was said, was preparing to send out an actor wearing a brown velvet suit with a medallion, carrying a wand, and wearing white gloves. A ragamuffin was to address him with the lines from William Whitehead’s address to Garrick—“A nation’s taste depends on you / Perhaps a nation’s virtue too”—to which “Garrick” was to respond by flapping his arms and crowing “cock a doodle doo.” When news of this reached Garrick, he was so offended that he threatened dreadful retaliations until the Marquis of Stafford, a friend of both Garrick and Foote, stepped in to mediate; Foote then assured the manager of Drury Lane that he wouldn’t let anyone appear onstage as him again. The agreement did not extend to puppets, however, and Foote let it be known that he was constructing a cast of Jubilee characters from papier-mâché. When asked if they were going to be life-size, Foote replied, “Oh no—not much above the size of Garrick.”
As much as they irked him, Garrick knew that performances like these were an intractable part of a theatrical landscape that looked continually to capitalize on novelty and current affairs. He was no different, and in conversation with the painter Benjamin Wilson on the long drive from Stratford, hit upon a scheme to bring the Jubilee to London by opening the upcoming season with a rendition of his ode from the stage at Drury Lane. Delivered to the marble statue he had hauled up from his garden temple at Hampton, the performance played to a “cram’d house” and received “as much applause as his heart could desire.” Aiming to build on this foundation, he was annoyed to hear that George Colman at Covent Garden was ready to mount a jubilee play of his own. Titled Man and Wife; or the Stratford Jubilee, it was, in the best traditions of theatrical exigency, an anglicized gutting of Philippe Destouches’s farce La Fausse Agnés; it introduced the pageant of Shakespearean characters at the end of Act 2, and a representation of the masked ball in Act 3. Man and Wife opened on October 7, 1769, but in spite of Covent Garden’s reputation for superior pageantry, the haste with which Colman had mounted it let him down. The pageant “has no connection with the business of the play,” wrote Town and Country Magazine, “and as it is represented, is an absolute dead march.”
Garrick reciting the Dedication Ode at Drury Lane. The statue that appeared with him at this time had been hauled up from the garden temple of his villa at Hampton. © The Trustees of the British Museum
Colman reconsidered, and Man and Wife was temporarily retired as he looked to make improvements, by which time Garrick had readied a reply. Written in a day and a half, and titled simply The Jubilee, Garrick’s play debuted at Drury Lane on October 14. The Jubilee, like Colman’s play, began by erecting a precarious dramatic scaffold around what was essentially a costume parade. Consisting of the farcical comings and goings of a group of comic characters intended to represent the venal and superstitious locals, an Irish reveler forced to sleep in his coach (a caricature of Boswell’s friend Thomas Sheridan, who hadn’t even attended), and various guests who griped at the weather and struggled to obtain a hot meal, the scenes served to connect the songs from “Shakespeare’s Garland” before introducing the abandoned pageant. The ringing of bells and the piping of fifes announced nineteen tableaux, beginning, as originally planned, with As You Like It and concluding with Antony and Cleopatra. The ode was omitted from this production, replaced by further comic business featuring the Stratford maids “Nancy,” who had never left “this poor hole of a town,” and “Sukey,” her sophisticated friend who has been to Birmingham and Coventry and so understands “Shakespurs and the Jewbill” very well. Two large illuminated transparencies were then brought on stage “in which the capital characters of Shakespeare are exhibited at full length, with Shakespeare’s statue in the middle crowned by Tragedy and Comedy, fairies and cupids surrounding him.” Dancers and a troop of supernumeraries filled the stage, singing and waving banners. As the swelling chorus came to a crescendo, guns were fired, bells were rung, and the Drury Lane chorus led the house in cheers of “Bravo Jubilee! Shakespeare forever!”
The Jubilee ran for ninety-one nights, a record for the London theatres of the eighteenth century, its success a result of the instincts Garrick had honed over three decades as a dramaturge. William Hopkins, the prompter at Drury Lane, believed it to be “the most Superb” performance “that ever was Exhibited,” thanks to the variety of its dramatic textures “that gave so much pleasure to all Degrees Boxes pit and Gallery.” On the one hand, it poked good-natured fun at the well-documented disaster (while being sure to attribute the grossest absurdities to foreigners and Stratfordians), while on the other, it delivered an ecstatically perfect version of the pageant and its beatification of the Bard in the controlled environment of Garrick’s London theatre. In fact, the failure of the actual Jubilee became another means by which to measure Shakespeare’s sublimity, a writer so transcendent that no attempt to praise him could ever match his excellence. The German traveler Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz enjoyed it so much he went to see it twenty-eight times. “This was a real apotheosis,” von Archenholz wrote, “for it was not a literary fanaticism, but a just admiration of every thing that is truly great and sublime, which placed the statue of this immortal genius in the temple of immortality.”
James Boswell, who had taken his seat on the opening night in the hopes of seeing his Corsican alter ego parade before him, was similarly impressed with Garrick’s ability to turn mere entertainment into art. Since witnessing him commit the nation’s soul so solemnly to Shakespeare’s safekeeping, Boswell had reflected at length on the role actors played as intermediaries between the general public and the civilizing influences of the literary arts. Presenting his thoughts as a trio of short essays in The London Magazine, he argued that actors were “the real royalty of Great Britain,” members of the intelligentsia who “should be ranked amongst the learned professions.” No one had done more to elevate their status than David Garrick, said Boswell, by virtue of his principled coupling of aesthetic value to audience appeal, and by working studiously “not only to catch the immediate applause of the multitude, but to be the delight and admiration of the judicious, enlightened and philosophical spectators.”
Boswell’s belief in the nobility of actors was just one example of the heightened air of seriousness and solemnity that enveloped Shakespeare in the wake of the Jubilee. Writing in 1775, on the effect of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech on English audiences, another German visitor, Georg Christoph von Lichtenberg, noted,
A large part of the audience not only knows it by heart as well as they do a Lord’s Prayer, but listens to it, so to speak, as if it were the Lord’s Prayer, not indeed with the profound reflections which accompany our sacred prayer, but with a sense of solemnity and awe, of which some one who does not know England can have no conception. In this island Shakespeare is not only famous, but holy; his moral maxims are everywhere. . . . In this way his name is intertwined with the most solemn thoughts; people sing of him and from his works, and thus a large number of English children know him before they have learnt their A.B.C. and creed.
Such churchified reverence was the natural extension of Garrick’s Stratford religiosity, not to mention a realization of the desire he had expressed twenty-five years earlier, when he had opened the Drury Lane season by pointing to the stage and announcing, “Sacred to Shakespeare was this spot design’d, / To pierce the heart and humanize the mind.” Through the final decades of the eighteenth century, this seriousness was further magnified by renewed scholarly attention, as new editions of the collected works became available, each seeking to outdo its rivals in exhaustiveness, erudition, and commitment to excavating the “real” Shakespeare. In turn, these pages were scoured by new generations of writers and critics, some of whom found in them a bodiless Shakespeare much like the one conjured at the Jubilee. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, one of the first of the English Romantics to write extensively on Shakespeare, began to think of him primarily as a poet as opposed to a dramatist, one whose words contained such untrammeled imaginative force that they practically defied representation. In a series of lectures delivered across London between 1808 and 1812, he argued that Shakespeare was a poet of the mind’s eye, a “closet” dramatist who never intended for his plays to be augmented with scenery and the assorted trappings of theatricality, which served only to highlight their artificiality.
This was a conviction shared by Coleridge’s closest friend, the essayist Charles Lamb, co-author, with his sister Mary, of Tales from Shakespeare, an influential book of prose retellings of the plays that brought Shakespeare into the schoolroom and nursery for numerous generations of young readers. Lamb went so far as to claim that Shakespeare’s plays were not fit to be performed, asserting instead that they were “objects of meditation.” Such extreme antitheatricality was a reaction to the pragmatism of Garrick and the giants of former generations who had readily hacked and rewritten Shakespeare to better serve their audiences, but it was also a sign of the degree to which the Jubilee’s rhetoric of veneration had taken hold, inspiring a more private and internalized relationship with the works that cherished Shakespeare as somehow ineffable and too good for the world. Of course, the theatrical tradition not only continued, it flourished. Yet thanks to the Jubilee’s diffuse and ethereal conception of who Shakespeare was and what he represented, the Bard had made the most profound and lasting transition of all, from stage to soul.
Meanwhile, back in the real Warwickshire, the Corporation of Stratford also experienced an afterglow. They were rather pleased with themselves, both for dodging any debt (due to their refusal to invest in the Jubilee) and for the notoriety that had allowed them to reap a series of rewards, including even some of the civilizing effects that William Hunt had initially hoped would accrue to the town. For example, three new magazines had opened, appealing to a genteel audience with an appetite for news and opinion that was far more fashionable and cosmopolitan than had been common for the Stratford press. A market for Shakespeare’s works had also developed, serviced by Birmingham printers whose serialized editions improved with each new imprint.
But it was tourism that provided the most tangible benefits, as growing numbers of visitors came to town inspired by lofty thoughts of literary pilgrimage. The birthplace—part of which had been rented out to a man named Thomas Hornby, who converted it into a butcher’s shop—now sported a sign outside an upstairs window that proudly proclaimed, “The Immortal Shakspeare was born in this house.” In time it would be purchased on behalf of the nation and restored, its transference into public ownership setting the stage for the larger heritage industry that was to come, illustrating once again how fully Shakespeare had fused with the national identity. In the immediate aftermath, however, commercialism bore a more primitive aspect, as evinced by the pragmatic spirit of Mrs. Hart, lessee of the birthplace in the wake of the Jubilee, who cheerfully welcomed visitors and happily helped them to a memento, including swatches of wood from the bedroom floor. Hosting the Hon. John Byng in 1781, she stopped before an eviscerated chair identified as Shakespeare’s favorite and, noting its dilapidated state, said that “it has been carefully handed down by our family but people never thought so much of it till after the Jubilee, and now see what pieces they have cut from it.” Byng nodded and, without a second thought, Mrs. Hart kicked out the chair’s bottom strut and sold it to him.
The birthplace. © The Trustees of the British Museum