Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 12.djvu/89

 front rank in public estimation, and was received in a round of characters of importance with augmenting favour. In March 1795 he quitted the theatre on some frivolous excuse, the real cause being drunkenness. Various mad proceedings in 1766 culminated in his enlisting in a regiment destined for the West Indies. Prevented by sickness from embarking, he spoke, in Portsmouth where he was quartered, to Maxwell, the manager of the theatre. Through the agency of Banks and Ward, his former managers in Manchester, his discharge was bought, and after many relapses, which almost cost him his life, he reappeared in Manchester. While at Chester in 1796 he married Miss Alicia Daniels of the Chester Theatre. Shortly afterwards Mrs. Cooke, who had been engaged in Dublin where Cooke reopened as Iago 20 Nov. 1796, quitted her husband and her engagement. On 4 July 1801 Mrs. Cooke appeared before Sir William Scott in Doctors' Commons to dispute the validity of the marriage, which was pronounced ‘null and void.’ In Dublin as elsewhere Cooke was in difficulties with debt. His extravagance was so reckless that after in a drunken fit challenging a working man, according to one account a soldier, who, unwilling to hurt him, declined to fight a rich man, he thrust his pocket-book with bank notes to the extent of some hundreds of pounds into the fire, and, declaring he now owned nothing in the world, renewed the invitation to combat. After playing in Cork and Limerick he returned to Dublin. In June 1800 he accepted from Lewis, acting for Thomas Harris, an engagement for Covent Garden. What was practically his first appearance in London took place 31 Oct. 1801 as Richard III. His success was brilliant, though such limitations in his art as want of dignity, and indeed of most humanising traits, were even then noted. Shylock followed, 10 Nov.; Sir Archy McSarcasm in ‘Love à la Mode,’ 13 Nov.; Iago, 28 Nov; Macbeth, 5 Dec.; Kitely in ‘Every Man in his Humour,’ 17 Dec.; the Stranger, for his benefit, 27 Dec.; and for the benefit of Lewis, Sir Giles Overreach, 28 March 1801. During the season he behaved with commendable discretion, and Harris, the manager of Covent Garden, presented him on the occasion of his benefit with the charge (136l.) ordinarily made in the case of benefits for expenses. He acted sixty-six times in all, twenty-two of his representations being of Richard III. It was different upon his return. With characteristic recklessness and improvidence he put in no appearance on 14 Sept. 1802, when Covent Garden was announced to open with him as Richard. That night he was playing in Newcastle-on-Tyne. He did not arrive until 19 Oct. 1802, when he played Richard. Public disappointment was the greater, as Kemble, accepting the challenge involved in his appearance in Richard III, had, contrary to theatrical etiquette, announced that play as the opening piece at Drury Lane after it had been advertised for Covent Garden. An apology, which was far from satisfactory, was spoken by Cooke and accepted by the audience. The spell was, however, broken, and worse was behind. On 11 May 1802 he was, for the first time in London, too drunk to continue the performance. Between this period and 1810, when he quitted London, Cooke played among Shakespearean characters: Jaques, King Lear, Falstaff in ‘Henry IV,’ pts. i. and ii., and in ‘Merry Wives of Windsor,’ Hamlet, King John, Hubert in ‘King John,’ Macduff, Ghost in ‘Hamlet,’ Kent in ‘Lear,’ Henry VIII, besides principal characters in the tragedies of Otway, Addison, and others, and in the comedies of Sheridan, Colman, and Macklin. His great characters were Sir Pertinax McSycophant, Iago, Richard III, Sir Giles Overreach, Shylock, and Sir Archy McSarcasm, everything indeed in which greed, fierceness, and hypocrisy can be shown. Leigh Hunt disputes on this ground his claim to be a tragedian, saying that much even of his Richard III ‘is occupied by the display of a confident dissimulation, which is something very different from the dignity of tragedy’ (Critical Essays, p. 217). To his Sir Pertinax McSycophant Leigh Hunt gives very high praise. An opinion quoted by Genest (Account of the Stage, viii. 197) as that of a very judicious critic is that ‘Cooke did not play many parts well, but that he played those which he did play well better than anybody else.’ Sir Walter Scott speaks warmly of Cooke's Richard, giving it the preference over that of Kemble. His Hamlet, 27 Sept. 1802, was a failure, and was only once repeated. George III said, when he heard Cooke was going to play Hamlet: ‘Won't do, won't do. Lord Thurlow might as well play Hamlet’ (Life and Times of Frederick Reynolds, 1826, ii. 322). In 1803, while playing in ‘Love à la Mode,’ Cooke was hissed off the stage for drunkenness, and the curtain was dropped. For this offence on his next appearance he made an apology, which was accepted. The ice once broken his offences became more frequent, and the magazines of the early portion of the nineteenth century which deal with theatrical subjects are occupied with constant stories of his misdeeds. His apologies and references to his old complaint were in time received with ‘shouts of laughter.’ In 1808 Cooke married a Miss Lamb of Newark. After the destruction by fire of Covent Gar-