Garrick at Drury Lane, 1747–1776

Abstract

A shortlist of European plays before Ibsen and Shaw still regularly revived today by amateurs and professionals would include many of the works of Shakespeare, a number by Moliere, one or two each by Racine, Wycherley, Congreve and Farquhar, and four other plays first produced in the eighteenth century: Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773), and Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775) and The School for Scandal (1777). The greatest actor of the eighteenth century, the most pictured man in Europe in his time, arguably created the conditions whereby Shakespeare’s works entered today’s repertoire and Goldsmith and Sheridan conceived their three contributions. David Garrick (1717–79) arrived in London from his native Lichfield in spring 1737 in the company of his teacher and lifelong friend, Dr Samuel Johnson (1709–84). Garrick registered as a law student at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and soon was assisting his older brother Peter in the wine brokering business of their Huguenot forebears. But he also pursued his interest in theatre, begun even before his first remembered appearance as Sergeant Kite in Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer at age 12, on the grounds of the cathedral near where his family lived. It was one thing to perform in amateur theatricals as a boy, quite another to consider a trade like acting, so less genteel than the law or vintnery, a trade whose practitioners were still legally defined – like their Elizabethan predecessors – as vagabonds and sturdy beggars. Garrick only gingerly and gradually discussed his ambition in letters to his older brother. In London, he gained the notice of Henry Giffard, the manager of Goodman’s Fields Theatre, which competed with Drury Lane and Covent Garden – the only two theatres in London since the Licensing Act of 1737 which could perform plays for paying customers – by the ruse of charging patrons for concerts during which free ‘rehearsals’ of plays might occur.