David Garrick

David Garrick (19 February 1717-20 January 1779) was an English actor, playwright, theatre manager and producer. He influenced nearly all aspects of theatrical practice throughout the 18th century and was a pupil and friend of Dr Samuel Johnson. Amateur theatricals comprised his first work on the stage and it was not until his appearance in the title role of Shakespeare's Richard III that audiences and managers began to take notice.

With the success of Richard III and a number of other roles, Garrick was hired by Charles Fleetwood for the following season at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. He remained with the Drury Lane company for the next five years, purchasing a share of the theatre with Lacy.

Early life

Garrick was born into a family with French Huguenot roots originating in the Bordeaux region of France. The name Garrick was a corruption of either Garric or Garrique which the family adopted after fleeing France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. At the time of David Garrick's birth, the family was living in the city of Hereford moving to Lichfield, home to Garrick's mother, a short time after his birth. His father, Captain Peter Garrick, was an army recruiting officer stationed, through most of young David's childhood, in Gibraltar.

At the age of nineteen, Garrick, who had been educated in the Lichfield grammar school, was enrolled in Samuel Johnson's Edial Hall School. Garrick showed an enthusiasm for the theatre very early on and he appeared in a school production around this time in the role of Sergeant Kite in George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer. Johnson's school was closed after about a year and a half and he and Garrick, now friends, went to London together in order to seek their fortunes. Upon his arrival in 1737, Garrick and his brother became partners in a wine business with operations in both London and Lichfield; David taking the London business. The business did not flourish, possibly due to Garrick's distraction by amateur theatricals. Playwright Samuel Foote remarked that he had known Garrick to have only three quarts of vinegar in his cellar and still calling himself a wine merchant.

He was coached in the role by actor and playwright Charles Macklin and his natural performance, which rejected the formal acting style so prevalent in the period, soon was the talk of London. Following his rousing performance, Garrick wrote to his brother requesting withdrawal from the partnership in order to devote his time completely to the stage. Having found success with Richard III, Garrick moved onto a number of other roles including King Lear, Aboan in Southerne's Oroonoko and Pierre in Otway's Venice Preserv'd as well as a number of comic roles such as Bayes in Buckingham's The Rehearsal; a total of 18 roles in all in just the first six months of his acting career. His success was so that Alexander Pope surmised that, "that young man never had his equal as an actor, and he will never have a rival."

Acting at Drury Lane

Zoffany-Garrick in The Alchemist.jpg.]] Following his successful debut season at the Goodman's Fields Theatre, the managers of Drury Lane and Covent Garden used their patents which made them the exclusive theatres in London, to close Goodman's Fields. Garrick was hired by Charles Fleetwood to perform at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane but before the start of the season, Garrick and actress Mrs. Woffington, with whom he was having an affair, performed in Dublin at the Theatre Royal, Smock Alley. It was there that he first played the role of Abel Drugger in Ben Jonson's comedy, The Alchemist which would become one of his most acclaimed roles. Again, as in London, Garrick found success in Dublin. Returning to London, Garrick opened at Drury Lane in Otway's The Orphan and he continued to receive acclaim for his performances as part of that company.

Five years after joining the acting company at Drury Lane, Garrick again traveled to Dublin for a season where he managed and directed at the Smock Alley Theatre in conjuction with Richard Brinsley Sheridan. After his return to London, he spent some time acting at Covent Garden under John Rich while a farce of his, Miss in Her Teens, was also produced there.

Managing Drury Lane

With the end of the 1746-1747 season, Fleetwoods' patent on Drury Lane expired in partnership with James Lacy, Garrick took over the theatre in April of 1747. The theatre had been in a decline for some years, but the partnership of Garrick and Lacy led to success and accolades. The first performance under Garrick and Lacy's management opened with an Ode to Drury Lane Theatre, on dedicating a Building and erecting a Statue, to Shakespeare read by Garrick and written by his friend, Dr. Johnson. The ode promised the patrons that "The drama's law the drama's patrons give,/For we that live to please must please to live." Certainly this statement could be regarded as succinctly summing up Garrick's management at Drury Lane where he was able to balance both artistic integrity and the fickle tastes of the public.

An easy, natural manner

Perhaps it was Garrick's acting, the most showy of his careers, that brought him the most adulation. Garrick was not a large man, only standing 5'4" and his voice is not described as particularly loud. From his first performance, Garrick departed from the bombastic style that had been popular, choosing instead a more relaxed, naturalistic style that biographer Alan Kendall states "would probably seem quite normal to us today, but it was new and strange for his day." Certainly this new style brought acclamation: Alexander Pope stated, "he was afraid the young man would be spoiled, for he would have no competitior." and Garrick quotes George Lyttleton as completing him by saying, "He told me he never knew what acting was till I appeared." Even James Quin, an actor in the old style remarked, "If this young fellow be right, then we have been all wrong."

While Garrick's praises were being sung by many, there were some detractors. Theophilus Cibber in his Two Dissertations on the Theatres of 1756 believed that Garrick's realistic style went too far:

His over-fondness for extravagant attitudes, frequently affected starts, convulsive twitchings, jerkings of the body, sprawling of the fingers, flapping the breat and pockets; a set of mechanical motions in constat use; the caricatures of gesture, suggested by pert vivacity; his pantomimical manner of acting, every word in a sentence, his unnatural pauses in the middle of a sentence; his forced conceits; his wilful neglect of harmony, even where the round period of a well-expressed noble sentiment demands a graceful cadence in the delivery.

Garrick would manage the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane until his retirement from management in 1776.

Garrick tried to portray characters as real people, rather than melodramatic caricatures. He encouraged fellow actors to act as they would in everyday life and avoid posing.

David Garrick died in London, England and was interred in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. A monument to him in Lichfield Cathedral bears Johnson's famous comment:

I am disappointed by that stroke of death that has eclipsed the gaiety of nations, and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure.

A carved stone medallion, a metre or more in diameter, showing Garrick is on display at Birmingham Central Library.

Major works

Lethe: or, Aesop in the Shades (1740)
The Lying Valet (1741)
Miss in Her Teens; or, The Medley of Lovers (1747)
Lilliput (1756)
The Male Coquette; or, Seventeen Fifty Seven (1757)
The Guardian (1759)
Harlequin's Invasion (1759)
The Enchanter; or, Love and Magic (1760)
The Farmer's Return from London (1762)
The Clandestine Marriage (1766)
Neck or Nothing (1766)
Cymon (1767)
Linco's Travels (1767)
A Peep Behind the Curtain, or The New Rehearsal (1767)
The Jubilee (1769)
The Irish Widow (1772)
A Christmas Tale (1773)
The Meeting of the Company; or, Bayes's Art of Acting (1774)
Bon Ton; or, High Life Above Stairs (1775)
The Theatrical Candidates (1775)
May-Day; or, The Little Gypsy (1775)

References

"David Garrick". Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition.
Hartnoll, Phyllis. The Oxford Companion to the Theatre. Oxford, Oxford University Press. 1983. 315-316.
Holland, Peter. "David Garrick". in Banham, Martin, ed. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. London, Cambridge University Press. 1992. 378-380.

External link

'David Garrick as Richard III' by William Hogarth at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool