Garrick and the Private Theatres: With a List of Amateur Performances in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

No one has as yet written that chapter in the history of the eighteenth century theatre which will record and study the immense vogue of the amateur gentleman actor and the private theatre, a special feature, as Professor Nicoll has remarked, of considerable influence upon the drama of the time.1 The eighteenth century's equivalent of what we now call the little theatre manifested itself, like its predecessor of Tudor and Stuart times, in the activities at schools and colleges as well as in the private productions of aristocratic adults wvho, for the most part, had developed a taste for theatricals at school or the university. It could not be expected that the principal actor-manager of the professional theatre could or would be indifferent to such a movement; but Garrick's several biographers do not give us much help in determining his connection with the amateurs. This paper will attempt, in a general way, to relate Garrick to the aristocratic private actors, to the drama in the schools, and to his amateur playwright friend, James Townley. The influence which the adult amateur movement exerted upon the professional stage in the eighteenth century was not comparable to the healthy competition of Tudor times, when professionalism was just emerging from the amateur state, and when the amateurs produced their fair share of innovations, inventions, original writers and talented actors. Rather in the eighteenth century did the amateurs supply realistic models for behavior to theatres which wished to serve the upper-class without being of it. In an era of manners, the aristocratic amateurs set the fashions for an actor class which had not yet even begun to be socially acceptable. Late in the century when the amateur vogue had reached its