Wednesday, February 25

The birth of the "star" actor: David Garrick (1717-1779)




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.

Monday, February 23

The European Enlightenment & Middle Class Theatre

18th century European thought is often grouped under the name of the Enlightenment. This was a reaction to all the religious wars that had torn Europe apart throughout the 17th century. A recognition of the power of science to explore the world, and a new faith in the capacity of pure reason and rationality to answer not only scientific, but also political and social issues. There was a new focus on finding truth not in religion but in nature. However, there were ongoing debates that would continue into the nineteenth century about what that nature really was. The diehard rationalists advocated a mechanistic view of a universe that was rigorously logical and could be understood through empirical observation and experiment. Others believed that truth resided within the soul of each human being. This is the Jane Austen dichotomy between sense and sensibility. Both had an impact on thinking about theatre.

In stark contrast to Hobbes, who advocated a benevolent monarchy to elevate humanity from a state of nature which was innately bad (“Life is nasty, brutish and short”), Enlightenment philosophers frequently started from the premise that human nature is innately good, and that both personal and social bonds would thrive if individuals were true to their innate virtues and their moral sentiments, resisting selfishness and exercising benevolence.

Rousseau epitomizes this view when he writes in The Social Contract, “Man is born free, but everywhere finds himself in chains.” The philosophical approach known as romantic individualism stems from this. Be true to yourself and you can’t go wrong. The measure of truth is in our own soul. People are good. It is society that is corrupt. Evil is not innate, but rather a corruption of our good natures that can be reformed. This was a view also promoted by Addison and Steele in periodicals such as The Tatler and The Spectator. They argue that theatre should be a vehicle for educating the public in these moral sentiments appropriate to a new middle class. These are the roots of what we will later speak of as liberalism—the belief that prosperity and justice are best served by limiting the role of government and all other social institutions and letting people do whatever they want. Of course, the heroes of liberalist thought are the capitalists and industrialists who take advantage of such freedoms to amass huge fortunes.


The new drama, by extension, should abandon the aesthetics of Restoration comedy and French comedy of manners in which fops and rakes ridicule each other with witty repartee for a new kind of middle class drama about the struggles of middle class characters in which the middle class virtues such as thrift, hard work and family loyalty are rewarded and vices that destroy the family or the productivity of society are punished. This is the poetic justice that Rymer hinted at in the Restoration, but which became the moral compass for the new bourgeois drama. The important point to keep in mind here is that these shifts are a response to specific changes in European society. You can’t understand the rise of some of these things that start to look like realist drama outside the context of a middle class, capitalist and increasingly nationalistic society.