GARRICK: Allen Lane. The Penguin Press.
Review by David Bromwich
Ian McIntyre GARRICK 678pp. Allen Lane The Penguin Press. £25.
David Garrick was an insider as only an interloper can be. His grandfather was a Bordeaux merchant who had emigrated to England in the reign of James II and purchased for David’s father a commission in the English army. His mother was part Irish. His uncle returned to the Continent, and found work in the wine trade in Portugal, a family business that would be kept up by David’s brother Peter. This might well be viewed as David Garrick’s road not taken, and yet in all his life there seems to have been no crisis and no moment of truth. He grew up in Lichfield, where, with his brother George, he became, in 1735, one of the first students in Samuel Johnson’s school. Two years later, he travelled with Johnson to London to try his fortune. Johnson brought with him the unfinished tragedy Irene; Garrick had a vague idea of becoming a lawyer; but the theatre found him – as much as he found it – at the age of twenty. The speed of his ascent as an actor is without parallel. He was small of stature but athletic – the word most frequently used about him by witnesses is “bustle”. By 1747, Garrick was co-patentee at Drury Lane. By 1749, he was in a position to grant a nine-day run to the indigestible Irene.
Seventeen forty-one was Garrick’s marvellous year. He made his debut as Richard III and appeared in plays by Cibber and Otway and a stage adaptation of Pamela. A year later, he would play Lear for the first time, with Peg Woffington as Cordelia. His dedication to Shakespeare was prodigious, though not self-evidently the way to a profit. By 1748 he had brought Romeo and Juliet to the stage, closer to its original form than any version in sixty-five years, and his Antony and Cleopatra in 1759 would be the first to be staged since Shakespeare’s death. In his early years, he also revived plays by Jonson and Fletcher, and made a popular success of Sir John Brute in Vanbrugh’s Provok’d Wife. But in the public mind it was the association with Shakespeare that stuck. The tragic role Garrick played most often was Hamlet, now widely supposed a mark of Romantic taste,. The tragic role that Garrick played most often was Hamlet, now widely supposed a mark of Romantic taste. One would like to know more about the details of his interpretation, which was, Ian McIntyre informs us in Garrick, initially not so well received as his Richard or his Lear.
Though he truly earned his public honours for having restored Shakespeare as a vivid part of the dramatic repertory, Garrick had some able assistants in his circle: Johnson, in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare and in some of his notes on the plays; and Burke, whose speeches in the House of Commons are often a tracery of buried allusions to Macbeth or Hamlet. To regard an author as plainly canonical and therefore in need of an introduction, and to treat his words as profoundly familiar and requiring no ascription, are kinds of homage which augment Garrick’s staging of the works. Compared with the careers of his best-known contemporaries, the ease of the success enjoyed by Garrick is astonishing. Intimations of fallibility were kept alive only by the occasional dud. Among these was The Fairies, a transposition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream into the mode of Italian opera – not one of Garrick’s happier adaptations, if that is the word for a version that scrapped three-quarters of the original text. He absorbed his failures with cryptic good cheer, and would sometimes inoculate himself against criticism by publishing anonymous broadsides against his current production.
As early as 1740, Garrick had made his debut as an author with a successful farce, Lethe, and formed a close friendship with a member of its cast, the Irish actor Charles Macklin. This was the first of a score of full-length dramatic works, to say nothing of squibs and epigrams, encomiums and satires on himself, prologues, epilogues, inserted speeches and full-length adaptations. McIntyre is right to speak of his “relentless busyness”. The stage licensing act of 1737 had established a loose de facto censorship, which could be circumvented by tricks of allegorical emphasis, or by pointing out new meanings in old texts. The crafty tolerance that was presumed as well as fostered by such an arrangement (between artist and authority and also between artist and audience) suited Garrick’s temperament well. He wrote occasional verse with polish and facility. But set ten lines by him alongside an equal number by a poet such as Charles Churchill, and it is clear that Garrick is unable to summon anything like the same level of intensity. In the poet who commands a singular purpose or animus, the details are tighter everywhere.