The success of The Jubilee indemnified Garrick and mollified Lacy, bringing a fourfold return on every shilling they had ventured at Stratford. “It is no wonder that he should endeavour to make a God of Shakespear,” grumbled Charles Macklin, “since he has usurped the office of his High-priest; and has already gained money enough by it, to make a golden calf.” While cash flowed freely into Drury Lane, the Stratford “adventurers” who had put up their own money to support the Jubilee recorded a dismal loss. After initially being told by George Garrick that each man would receive a profit of £100, it became increasingly apparent that they would get nothing. Even John Payton, who was popularly assumed to have made a fortune from food, transport, and accommodation, had lost £200—thanks to the criminal dishonesty of the waiters he had hired from London, many of whom had palmed the guinea fee for the turtle feast and dropped it into their own pockets. Garrick promised that he would cover their losses and instructed his brother to see to it. But George was being evasive, not only about the money, but also about the condition in which he had left the College. The Reverend John Fullerton, the building’s new owner, had repeatedly written to William Hunt with complaints of damage to the “Walls, Windows and Deficiencies in catalogue of goods etc. etc.,” and of the litter of debris that George and his scene men had left behind.
As it became clear that the Garricks might not keep their word, relations between Stratford and Drury Lane deteriorated. “I am sorry that my Brother has such reason to complain of ill usage at Stratford,” Garrick wrote sniffily to Hunt, “and particularly from Mr. Payton—I had ye greatest opinion of him, and his probity, and hope still I shall have no reason to change it.” This was the prologue to a warning: “I will not suffer the least dirt to be thrown upon me, or my conduct, in an affair which I undertook for ye good of Stratford, and which has employ’d both my mind, body and purse.” The letter closed with an invitation to Hunt to bring his wife up to London to see The Jubilee. George continued to promise restitution for a year, during which time the sole compensation Hunt received was a pile of wood worth £20 salvaged from the dismantled Rotunda.
“Dear Sir,” Hunt wrote to Garrick in November 1770,
I shou’d be sorry to hurry either you or him, yet I am persuaded you will both upon Reflection think that I have been too long out of my money.
I do not in the least regret the Sums & the Time I have voluntarily expended, about what has proved so great an Honor and Advantage to some of my Neighbours, & to others.
But it is too much that the only person in this place who was at any great trouble or Expence upon the Occasion, shou’d be alone capitally injured, & I am convinced you will not suffer it.
The letter made Garrick so furious that he had directed a servant to pen an immediate reply—he himself had injured his thumb and couldn’t write. “Dear Sir,” wrote Garrick’s amanuensis, reminding Hunt what it meant to be a “volunteer Adventurer,”
these words from you have hurt me much, from you who are ye Admirer of Shakespeare, a friend of Mine & was with me a Chief promoter of ye Whole—what a different Spirit from that, which us’d to say with a liberal convivial Smile—I don’t mind spending a hundred or two of pounds in this Cause, & upon this Occasion! indeed I did not expect you would have written to me in ye Manner you have after you Knew I intended to pay ye losses of ye Adventurers, & before I had settled ye Account—but I will not have Mr. Hunt ye only capitally injur’d person, & therefore (tho I flatter’d myself that I might have made a little more free with him that ye rest) I desire he will send his Acct. directly to be paid to his Order in Town, & if he means that ye Capital Injury may arise too from ye loss of Interest upon ye sum due to him wch. by his own Acct. is less that 80 pds. Mr. Garrick begs him to add that too, as he will not suffer (as Mr. Hunt expresses it) one he esteems so much to be too long out of his Money.
This was Garrick at his most pompous, coin-rubbing worst, but Hunt refused to be cowed. From “Mr G Garrick’s Hints when I was last in Town,” Hunt replied, “I must own I did understand that you had exprest some Intentions of reimbursing the Jubilee Loss.” However,
no such assurance could I ever obtain till I received the favour of your angry Letter. I heard that other persons were satisfied, I found myself slighted, and refused an answer—I did not chose to beg the money—nor did I wish by the involuntary Loss of it, to bosome the ridicule of some about me, as a project Hunter or a fighter of windmills.
When Mr. G. Garrick soon after the Jubilee informed me that each adventurer wou’d profit 100£ or more, I was blamed by my prudent friends in looking out for an Eminence to erect a Pillar in Honor of Shakespear with ye Money—When he afterwards told me of my Reverse of fortune I think he will satisfy for me, that I neither repined or reflected upon myself or any men. My smiles have been as liberal since the Jubilee as before (till lately), and who can smile when you are pleased to frown?—and when I made ye Declaration you mention in the warmth of my Heart I spoke as I thought, and have always done so to you. —My stations in Life will not permit me to despise £20, I will not affect to do so, yet I think the Loss of such a sum will never hurt my Peace, nor wou’d I now accept the money, but to throw it into the Avon.
Having admitted to his hurt, Hunt went on to say that he defended Garrick at every opportunity, even to the extent of lying about the financial arrangements of the Jubilee. “The tongues of Envy and Slander in Warwickshire have been industrious to misrepresent your unbounded acts of Liberality at Stratford as proceeding from lucrative views,” he wrote.
There is scarce a Gentleman’s Table, or a publick meeting in that county, that will not witness for me, that I have stopp’d that Torrent of Scandal urging my personal Knowledge of the transactions, against every villainous hearsay—That a noble Statue, that a magnificent Picture, that the elegant Decorations of a publick Room, were the spontaneous acts of your Bounty long before a Jubilee either in Town or Country. —To prove your worthy and disinterested Principles beyond a Doubt, I have sworn a thousand Times (ye powers forgive me if it was a Crime) that the sums advanced by me and every Loser were generously returned by you immediately after the Jubilee, before it was possible to know that success wou’d crown it here; nor is there a person breathing (not even my wife) but believes it, unless you or your Brother have declared the Contrary—you may well laugh at my feeble Efforts to add the Smallest Ray to your Glory—but if I had not opened my Heart to you, it would have burst—It rejoices to hear that your early Intentions, have verified my Prediction.
Having thus given vent to his frustrations, Hunt concluded his letter with a litany of the ill effects that Jubilee had wrought upon him, including the anger of his friend,
for pressing him to cut down his Willows—The anger of Mr. Fullerton for giving up the College to your Friend and Mine. —The abuse of my Neighbours of the Lower sort for endeavouring to prevent their extortion—The Sneers of the witty—The Pity of the [pious] and Solemn—Thanks from no person living that I know of. —This I cou’d have laughed at, all this I cou’d have despised, and have Set down happily with a Balance so amply in my favour; for the greatest Genius of the age, had condescended to call me his Friend. —I now, alas find that felicity vanished also, and my Credit Side, become a total Blank. —Experience the surest Guide of human affairs remains indeed sagely to advise me; so to form my future Conduct, as never to meddle with what I do not understand—nor aim at Friendships, beyond the Reach of my abilities, to presume.
With that, William Hunt of Stratford remained unpaid, a warning to provincial clerks everywhere to tread carefully when dealing with London celebrities intent on worshipping their idols.
David Garrick acted less and less, taking instead the role of theatrical innovator and bringing to the stage more refinements and visual spectacles, before making an emotional series of farewell performances in the spring of 1776. He and Eva retired into the newly built Adelphi town houses backing on to the Thames at what used to be Durham Yard, the wharf of warehouses where he and his brother Peter had begun as wine wholesalers almost forty years before. Some of his friends urged him to become a member of Parliament, but his health was not up to it. When he died of kidney failure in 1779, a funeral cortege of thirty-three coaches worthy of a head of state carried him to Westminster Abbey and laid him to rest at the foot of the monument to Shakespeare. Three months later, George made his way to a grave of his own. When someone in the greenroom at Drury Lane noted what an extraordinary coincidence it was that George Garrick had died so soon after his brother, the old actor John Bannister said, “Not at all. DAVID wanted him.”
For the rest of his life, James Boswell continued to carry with him a reverence for Shakespeare and the artistry of the theatre. By most reckonings, that life might be considered to have been a happy and accomplished one. He and Margaret had five children, among them James Boswell the Younger, who would himself support Shakespeare’s legacy by working alongside Edmund Malone, the most significant Shakespeare scholar of his age, and helping to shepherd his 1821 variorum edition of Shakespeare to press after Malone’s death. The elder Boswell attained the estates of Auchinleck and role of laird following the death of his father, while his literary celebrity and talent for clubbability meant that he was always traveling and spending time with Johnson and other close friends.
However, to a mind as restless and self-questioning as his own, it fell short of what, as a younger man, he felt his life had promised. Disconsolate that he had not attained wealth by means of the law and greatness through some significant public office, he mithered to his friends and drank with the recklessness of a man half his age, falling often into the familiar pattern of embarrassing himself and deepening his disappointments. When Margaret died after twenty years of marriage, he was riddled with guilt at his chronic infidelities and the significant amount of time he had spent away from her and their children. The success of his Life of Samuel Johnson. LL.D., published in 1791, a work that would ensure his literary immortality by giving form and structure to modern biography, afforded episodic boosts of cheer, but it was a depressed and waning James Boswell who entered his final years. Perhaps this dullness of spirit is why, in 1795, he was so ready to be moved when, having finished a tumbler of warm brandy, he got down on his knees in an attic room in the London home of Samuel Ireland and bowed before a trunk filled with brittle parchments tattooed with scratchy inkwork. In the discovery of the century, Ireland’s son, William Henry, had found some unknown manuscripts of Shakespeare’s in an old chest, including a letter the poet had written to Anne Hathaway, some additions to King Lear and Hamlet, and a note of thanks from Elizabeth I. Bringing them to his lips, Boswell kissed the documents again and again. “I now kiss the invaluable relics of our bard,” he wrote, “and thanks to God that I have lived to see them!” It was a formulation remarkably Garrick-like in its admixture of Shakespeare worship and scriptural allusion, echoing as it did Luke 2:29–30—“Lord, now lettest thou my servant depart in peace, according to thy word: For mine eyes have seen thy salvation.”
Boswell did not live long enough to learn it, but William Henry Ireland was a fraud and his relics were a fake. Shakespeare remained elusive still.