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Garrick had an unsuccessful career as a wine merchant befoe he started acting in 1740 in Ipswich, which was an important stop on the touring circuit outside London. He debuted in London as Rechard III in 1741, and followed this with a string of other major Shakespeare tragic roles. He soon became one of the managers of Drury Lane, and remained in control there until 1776. Over the course of his career, Garrick made several important contributions to the development of English theatre. He promoted Shakespeare, not simply as an important member of the English dramatic repertoire, but as the supreme English poet and proof of England’s cultural superiority. The reputation that Shakespeare still enjoys as the greatest playwright in the world was established at this point by the devotion of England’s greatest actor. In the following two centuries, Shakespeare would become a cornerstone of English education throughout the British empire, making theatre a huge part of English nationalism.
Reciprocally, Garrick used his unrivalled status as an emissary of the English national poet to promote the legitimacy of acting as a profession. You’ll recall that in the Restoration, actors were still considered little more than prostitutes. Garrick became a model of the actor as “the new natural man of reason and moral sensibility. Easy and graceful in motion, with a quick intelligence, he planned his performances meticulously, offering a model of the century’s scientific ideal of the rational soul governing the mechanical body.” As Samuel Johnson put it, “his profession made him rich, and he made his profession respectable.” As ambassador or high priest of Shakespeare and model of the new enlightened man, he became a friend of the powerful in London and lived the life of a gentleman.
The article about Arthur Murphy’s 1759 adaptation of Voltaire’s Orphelin de la Chine argues that Garrick’s production of the play navigated between an English attraction to Voltaire’s original and interest in the Enlightenment craze for Chinese culture, but appropriated it to a context in which the play could become an argument for English superiority. This is quintessential Garrick.
He also was the first international acting celebrity. Your text associaties this with periodical culture. He was the subject of hundreds of paintings and engravings, including those by Hogarth described in the book. Benjamin Victor, writing in 1761, described his career as “a bright luminary in the theatrical hemisphere… [which] soon after became a star of the first magnitude and was called Garrick.” This is apparently the first recorded use of the word “star” to describe an actor.
He was praised for bringing a new “naturalism” to the theatre, though if we look closely at what this means from our contemporary perspective, we can see how much it was shaped by the conventions of the time. For the ghost scene in Hamlet, he had a special “fright wig” constructed whose hair could be made to stand on end through a hydraulic hand pump. To 18th century audiences, this was more real than reality.
In 1775, a German visitor to London named Lichtenberg saw Garrick’s Hamlet and wrote this description of the ghost scene. He fails to mention the wig, but the rest gives a revealing impression of Garrick’s intense style:
Hamlet has folded his arms under his cloak and pulled his hat down over his eyes; it is a cold night and just twelve o’clock; the theatre is darkened, and the whole audience of some thousand are as quiet, and their faces as motionless, as though they were painted on the walls of the theatre; even from the farthest end of the playhouse one could hear a pin drop. Suddenly, as Hamlet moves towards the back of the stage slightly to the left and turns his back on the audience, Horatio starts, and saying: ‘Look, my lord, it comes,’ points to the right, where the ghost has already appeared and stands motionless, before anyone is aware of him. At these words Garrick turns sharply and at the same moment staggers back two or three paces with his knees giving way under him; his hat falls to the ground and both his arms, especially the left, are stretched out nearly to their full length, with the hands as high as his head, the right arm more bent and the hand lower, and the fingers apart; his mouth is open: thus he stands rooted to the spot, with legs apart, but no loss of dignity, supported by his friends, who are better acquainted with the apparition and fear lest he should collapse. His whole demeanour is so expressive of terror that it made my flesh creep even before he began to speak. The almost terror-struck silence of the audience, which preceded this appearance and filled one with a sense of insecurity, probably did much to enhance the effect.