David Garrick

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  David Garrick stepped onto the stage at Goodman's Fields Theatre on the 19th of October 1741 and, within weeks, had London completely transfixed. He was playing Richard III, and Horace Walpole later noted that "there was a dozen dukes a night at Goodman's Fields" to witness him. That is an extraordinary fact: the aristocracy abandoning the fashionable theatres of the West End to crowd into a house that was technically operating in defiance of the Licensing Act 1737.

  Garrick was born on the 19th of February 1716 and died on the 20th of January 1779. In between, he remade the English stage almost entirely. He was actor, playwright, theatre manager, and cultural impresario. When he retired from Drury Lane in 1776, he left behind 29 years of management during which the theatre had become one of the leading houses in Europe. When he died, three years later, he was given a lavish public funeral at Westminster Abbey and buried in Poets' Corner.

  Samuel Johnson, his friend, former teacher, and the era's most formidable literary mind, said of him that "his profession made him rich and he made his profession respectable." How a wine merchant's apprentice from Hereford managed that transformation is the subject of what follows.

• 2. A Huguenot Inheritance

  ›

  Garrick was born at the Angel Inn on Widemarsh Street in Hereford, into a family that had fled religious persecution in France. His grandfather, David Garric, was living in Bordeaux in 1685 when the Edict of Nantes was revoked, stripping French Protestants of their rights. The grandfather escaped to London. His son Peter, who was an infant at the time, was smuggled out separately by a nurse, carried to safety only once he was deemed old enough to survive the journey.

  That son Peter became David Garrick's father, a captain and recruiting officer in the British army. Peter was stationed in Gibraltar through most of his son's childhood, leaving David largely in Lichfield, the Midlands town that was his mother's home. Garrick was the third of seven children, and his younger brother George, born in 1723, would eventually spend the rest of his life as David's aide and companion.

  The bond between the brothers was so close that when David died in January 1779, George followed him within 48 hours. The playwright Charles Dibdin recorded that George, on discovering his brother's absence from any room, would habitually ask "Did David want me?" The timing of George's own death seemed to some observers to answer that question with finality.

  At 19, Garrick enrolled at Samuel Johnson's Edial Hall School in Lichfield, where he threw himself into theatrical performance. His first recorded role was Sergeant Kite in George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer, a school production that prefigured a professional career by more than a few years. When Johnson's school closed, the two friends travelled to London together in 1737, each hoping to make something of himself in the capital.

• 3. Wine and Amateur Stages

  ›

  On arriving in London in 1737, Garrick and his brother set up a wine business with branches in London and Lichfield, David taking the London operation. The venture was not a success. Samuel Foote, the playwright and satirist, remarked that he had known Garrick to have only three quarts of vinegar in his cellar while still calling himself a wine merchant.

  The distraction was theatre. Garrick haunted the Bedford Coffee-house, a gathering spot for theatrical and literary people, and his contact there led to a useful friendship with Henry Giffard, who managed the Goodman's Fields Theatre. Giffard had helped Garrick win the coffee-house's wine business. In return, Giffard gave Garrick small professional parts at Goodman's Fields, even though the theatre was operating in legally ambiguous territory after the Licensing Act of 1737 had closed venues without royal letters patent.

  In 1740, Garrick's first play, Lethe: or Aesop in the Shade, a satire, was produced at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. That was the same house that had rejected him as a performer. The following year Garrick began appearing professionally, playing minor roles under Giffard's management and quietly assembling the craft that would, in a matter of months, make him the most talked-about performer in England.

  His professional debut came during a summer tour to Ipswich in 1741, where he played Aboan in Oroonoko at the theatre on Tankard Street. He performed under the stage name Lyddal, anxious to shield his family from embarrassment. That anonymity did not survive his return to London.

• 4. Richard III and the New Acting

  ›

  Charles Macklin, actor and playwright, coached Garrick in the role of Richard III before the Goodman's Fields performance of October 1741. What Macklin helped Garrick develop was a departure from the declamatory, bombastic style that dominated English stages at the time. Garrick's biographer Alan Kendall later observed that Garrick's naturalistic manner "would probably seem quite normal to us today, but it was new and strange for his day."

  Alexander Pope attended three of Garrick's performances in those first months and arrived at a verdict that circulated widely: "that young man never had his equal as an actor, and he will never have a rival." In a second report, Pope admitted to being afraid the young man "would be spoiled, for he would have no competitor." Even James Quin, an established actor committed to the old style, was brought to concede: "If this young fellow be right, then we have been all wrong."

  The convert George Lyttelton told Garrick directly that "he never knew what acting was till I appeared." Garrick recorded that compliment himself. Within the first six months of his professional career he had taken on 18 roles, moving from Tate's adaptation of King Lear to Pierre in Otway's Venice Preserv'd, from Bayes in Buckingham's The Rehearsal to comic parts that demonstrated range no one had expected.

  Not all commentary was praise. Theophilus Cibber, writing in his Two Dissertations on the Theatres of 1756, argued that Garrick's naturalism went too far, attacking what he called "his pantomimical Manner of acting every Word in a Sentence, his Unnatural Pauses in the middle of a sentence." The critique was sharp, but it also confirmed something: Garrick's style was unmistakable enough to be parodied in detail.

• 5. Managing Drury Lane

  ›

  In April 1747, Garrick and James Lacy purchased the letters patent to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, after Charles Fleetwood's patent expired at the end of the 1746-1747 season. The theatre had been in decline for some years. What followed was 29 years of management by Garrick that transformed it into one of the most admired houses in Europe.

  The opening night under the new partnership began with an Ode to Drury Lane Theatre, written by Samuel Johnson and read aloud by Garrick. The ode contained a couplet that Garrick seems to have taken as a personal charter: "The drama's law the drama's patrons give, / For we that live to please must please to live." Garrick's management did balance artistic ambition against public taste, and that balance was part of what made the theatre profitable and prestigious simultaneously.

  Garrick's reforms extended beyond the stage itself. He pushed to change how audiences behaved during performances. That campaign created friction with some theatregoers, but many of his measures eventually held. He also brought a unified approach to production, coordinating set design, costumes, and special effects into something more coherent than the patchwork arrangements that had preceded him.

  In September 1769, Garrick organised the Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford-upon-Avon, a multi-day celebration marking, as the source notes, five years too late the bicentenary of Shakespeare's birth. Heavy rain cancelled the planned Shakespeare Pageant during the event itself, but Garrick staged it the following month at Drury Lane under the title The Jubilee, where it ran for 90 performances. During the Jubilee, he publicly credited the Shakespeare Ladies Club as those who had "restor'd Shakespeare to the Stage." The song "Soft Flowing Avon," with music by Thomas Arne and lyrics by Garrick, was composed for the occasion.

• 6. Marriage and Shakespeare's Temple

  ›

  Eva Marie Veigel was a German dancer who had worked in opera choruses before emigrating to London in 1746. She was born in 1724. Garrick married her on the 22nd of June 1749. William Hogarth painted the couple together and made separate drawings and paintings of each of them individually. Garrick called Eva Marie "the best of women and wives" and the two were famously inseparable through nearly 30 years of marriage.

  Garrick's growing wealth allowed him to buy a substantial estate at Hampton in 1754, which he named Garrick's Villa. On the riverside grounds he built a Temple to Shakespeare to hold his collection of Shakespeare memorabilia. Hogarth collaborated with Garrick on furnishing the temple, and the relationship between the two men, and their shared identification with Shakespeare, has been the subject of serious scholarly attention by the writer Robin Simon.

  Garrick retired from the management of Drury Lane in 1776. He continued performing after the handover, and Posthumus in Cymbeline was among his final celebrated roles. He died at his house in Adelphi Buildings in London, less than three years after leaving Drury Lane. Among his last projects was work on the production of The Camp with Sheridan, during which he caught a severe cold. The Camp satirised British anxiety over a threatened French invasion, and some observers joked that Garrick was the only casualty of that ultimately abandoned military venture.

• 7. A Name Across Centuries

  ›

  Garrick was the first actor to be buried in Westminster Abbey, interred in Poets' Corner in the ground directly in front of the monument to William Shakespeare. Henry Irving, the first actor to be knighted, was later buried beside him on the same spot. Laurence Olivier became the third actor to receive that honour in 1989.

  In 1797, the sculptor Henry Webber installed a memorial to Garrick on the west wall of Poets' Corner. The historian Rev. Nicolas Tindal offered what may be the most compressed account of Garrick's gift: "The deaf hear him in his action, and the blind see him in his voice." Samuel Johnson's monument inscription in Lichfield Cathedral, which Johnson himself wrote, mourned that Garrick's death "has eclipsed the gaiety of nations, and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure."

  Thomas Davies, who lived from around 1712 to 1785, wrote a two-volume biography titled Memoirs of the life of David Garrick, Esq., covering 36 years of theatrical history. The Garrick Club in London was named in his honour. The lyrics Garrick wrote for "Heart of Oak," set to music by William Boyce, remain the official march of the Royal Navy. In Lichfield a school house at King Edward VI School bears his name, and the Lichfield Garrick Theatre carries it into the present.

  The Garrick Theatre on London's West End, which opened in 1889, is still running. The Garrick Theatre Club in Guildford, Western Australia, established in 1932, is the longest continually running amateur theatre in metropolitan Perth. A pub in Belfast has carried his name since 1870. One in Urmston, Manchester, since 1830. The reach of a man who died having never seen most of these places extended outward, it seems, for as long as there were stages to name.