David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity by Leslie Ritchie

Abstract

Reviewed by: David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity by Leslie Ritchie Emrys D. Jones Leslie Ritchie, David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 312; 11 b/w illus. and 3 tables. $99.99 cloth. The magnitude of David Garrick's fame is firmly established, trumpeted as it was from an early stage of the actor-manager's career and now accepted as something of a self-evident fact by historians of celebrity culture. It can be tempting, given the wide array of texts and artifacts attesting to Garrick's renown, to explain it either as the result of incredible natural ability, or—if one acknowledges his business acumen at all—as a fluke convergence of public taste and theatrical strategy. With singular focus and discussion of newly unearthed material, Leslie Ritchie's David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity argues that we should attend still more closely to Garrick's cultivation and protection of his own "brand." While not rejecting genuine talent as a possible factor in his reputation, she demonstrates that Garrick's manipulation of the wider media landscape and his management of negative publicity were just as crucial for his celebrity, and were in fact the elements distinguishing his peculiarly modern public profile from anything that had come before. Celebrity is, according to this analysis, not merely a more artificial or more immediate kind of fame, but "an iterative form of public recognition that is the product of repeated media exposures across multiple media platforms" (10). Ritchie's introduction makes this argument and contextualizes it within the fields of celebrity studies and Garrick studies, particularly demonstrating how even seminal works such as George Winchester Stone, Jr. and George M. Kahrl's David Garrick: A Critical Biography (1979) have underplayed the actor's media influence even as they overestimated the press's capacity for—or aspiration to—impartial judgement. These points are convincingly corroborated in the five chapters and coda that follow. Chapter One provides an overview of the media landscape, and more specifically the function and organization of newspapers, during Garrick's career, as well as reflecting on his own habits of informed newspaper reading. Chapter Two progresses to a detailed reconstruction of Garrick's ownership of newspaper shares, a situation which Ritchie describes using the modern business terminology of "vertical integration" (55). Such a framework (in which a business owns and controls its own supply chain) perhaps too readily casts the newspapers as subordinate to the demands of Garrick's theatrical projects, but it helps to explain the sheer extent of his media reach, the sense that his "name, writing and reputation were inescapable elements of eighteenth-century culture, even if one never attended the theatre" (60). Chapter Three elaborates on this by exploring the different avenues for theatrical advertisement available in Garrick's time, from the paid-for paragraphs that were subject to taxation to less easily identifiable (hence non-taxable) promotional verse and "puffery." From there, the chapter anatomizes some of the most notable facets of "Brand Garrick" consolidated through such channels: for instance, the popular fascination with his captivating eyes and his celebrated ability to excel in both tragic and comedic roles. As well as promoting these various aspects of his reputation, and above all capitalizing on variety itself as the basis of his popular appeal, Garrick was also skilled in his handling of negative publicity. Chapter Four of Ritchie's book finds the actor and his defenders both countering and pre-empting attacks upon him. It becomes clear that apparent physical deficiencies—his short stature and absences from the stage due to illness—were regularly manipulated to Garrick's benefit. In [End Page 743] works such as Garrick's own anonymously-published Essay on Acting (1744) and Tobias Smollett's "The Character of Mr. Garrick" (1742), shortness was reframed as "perfection of proportion" (118). Published apologies for bouts of sickness or exhaustion likewise ended up contributing to his brand rather than detracting from it, creating what Ritchie describes as a "culture of care" around him and assisting in the depiction of tragic performance as physically and emotionally demanding work (128). The Garrick presented in this chapter...