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Rh Glover (“Leonidas”) attended every performance; the duke of Argyll, Lords Cobham and Lyttelton, Pitt, and several other members of parliament testified their admiration. Within the first six months of his theatrical career he acted in eighteen characters of all kinds, and from the 2nd of December he appeared in his own name. Pope went to see him three times during his first performances, and pronounced that “that young man never had his equal as an actor, and he will never have a rival.” Before next spring he had supped with “the great Mr Murray, counsellor,” and was engaged to do so with Mr Pope through Murray’s introduction, while he was dining with Halifax, Sandwich and Chesterfield. “There was a dozen dukes of a night at Goodman’s Fields,” writes Horace Walpole. Garrick’s farce of The Lying Valet, in which he performed the part of Sharp, was at this time brought out with so much success that he ventured to send a copy to his brother.

His fortune was now made, and while the managers of Covent Garden and Drury Lane resorted to the law to make Giffard the manager of Goodman’s Fields, close his little theatre, Garrick was engaged by Fleetwood for Drury Lane for the season of 1742. In June of that year he went over to Dublin, where he found the same homage paid to his talents as he had received from his own countrymen. He was accompanied by Margaret (Peg) Woffington, of whom he had been for some time a fervent admirer. (His claim to the authorship of the song to Lovely Peggy is still sub judice. There remains some obscurity as to the end of their liaison.) From September 1742 to April 1745 he played at Drury Lane, after which he again went over to Dublin. Here he remained during the whole season, as joint-manager with Sheridan, in the direction and profits of the Theatre Royal in Smock Alley. In 1746–1747 he fulfilled a short engagement with Rich at Covent Garden, his last series of performances under a management not his own. With the close of that season Fleetwood’s patent for the management of Drury Lane expired, and Garrick, in conjunction with Lacy, purchased the property of the theatre, together with the renewal of the patent; contributing £8000 as two-thirds of the purchase-money. In September 1747 it was opened with a strong company of actors, Johnson’s prologue being spoken by Garrick, while the epilogue, written by him, was spoken by Mrs Woffington. The negotiations involved Garrick in a bitter quarrel with Macklin, who appears to have had a real grievance in the matter. Garrick took no part himself till his performance of Archer in the Beaux’ Stratagem, a month after the opening. For a time at least “the drama’s patrons” were content with the higher entertainment furnished them; in the end Garrick had to “please” them, like most other managers, by gratifying their love of show. Garrick was surrounded by many players of eminence, and he had the art, as he was told by Mrs Clive, “of contradicting the proverb that one cannot make bricks without straw, by doing what is infinitely more difficult, making actors and actresses without genius.” He had to encounter very serious opposition from the old actors whom he had distanced, and with the younger actors and actresses he was involved in frequent quarrels. But to none of them or their fellows did he, so far as it appears, show that jealousy of real merit from which so many great actors have been unable to remain free. For the present he was able to hold his own against all competition. The naturalness of his acting fascinated those who, like Partridge in Tom Jones, listened to nature’s voice, and justified the preference of more conscious critics. To be “pleased with nature” was, as Churchill wrote, in the Rosciad (1761), to be pleased with Garrick. For the stately declamation, the sonorous, and beyond a doubt impressive, chant of Quin and his fellows, Garrick substituted rapid changes of passion and humour in both voice and gesture, which held his audiences spellbound. “It seemed,” wrote Richard Cumberland, “as if a whole century had been stepped over in the passage of a single scene; old things were done away, and a new order at once brought forward, bright and luminous, and clearly destined to dispel the barbarisms of a tasteless age, too long superstitiously devoted to the illusions of imposing declamation.” Garrick’s French descent and his education may have contributed to give him the vivacity and versatility which distinguished him as an actor; and nature had given him an eye, if not a stature, to command, and a mimic power of wonderful variety. The list of his characters in tragedy, comedy and farce is large, and would be extraordinary for a modern actor of high rank; it includes not less than seventeen Shakespearian parts. As a manager, though he committed some grievous blunders, he did good service to the theatre and signally advanced the popularity of Shakespeare’s plays, of which not less than twenty-four were produced at Drury Lane under his management. Many of these were not pure Shakespeare; and he is credited with the addition of a dying speech to the text of Macbeth. On the other hand, Tate Wilkinson says that Garrick’s production of Hamlet in 1773 was well received at Drury Lane even by the galleries, “though without their favourite acquaintances the gravediggers.” Among his published adaptations are an opera, The Fairies (from Midsummer Night’s Dream) (1755); an opera The Tempest (1756); Catherine and Petruchio (1758); Florizel and Perdita (1762). But not every generation has the same notions of the way in which Shakespeare is best honoured. Few sins of omission can be charged against Garrick as a manager, but he refused Home’s Douglas, and made the wrong choice between False Delicacy and The Good Natur’d Man. For the rest, he purified the stage of much of its grossness, and introduced a relative correctness of costume and decoration unknown before. To the study of English dramatic literature he rendered an important service by bequeathing his then unrivalled collection of plays to the British Museum.

After escaping from the chains of his passion for the beautiful but reckless Mrs Woffington, Garrick had in 1749 married Mademoiselle Violette (Eva Maria Veigel), a German lady who had attracted admiration at Florence or at Vienna as a dancer, and had come to England early in 1746, where her modest grace and the rumours which surrounded her created a furore, and where she found enthusiastic patrons in the earl and countess of Burlington. Garrick, who called her “the best of women and wives,” lived most happily with her in his villa at Hampton, acquired by him in 1754, whither he was glad to escape from his house in Southampton Street. To this period belongs Garrick’s quarrel with Barry, the only actor who even temporarily rivalled him in the favour of the public. In 1763 Garrick and his wife visited Paris, where they were cordially received and made the acquaintance of Diderot and others at the house of the baron d’Holbach. It was about this time that Grimm extolled Garrick as the first and only actor who came up to the demands of his imagination; and it was in a reply to a pamphlet occasioned by Garrick’s visit that Diderot first gave expression to the views expounded in his Paradoxe sur le comédien. After some months spent in Italy, where Garrick fell seriously ill, they returned to Paris in the autumn of 1764 and made more friends, reaching London in April 1765. Their union was childless, and Mrs Garrick survived her husband until 1822. Her portrait by Hogarth is at Windsor Castle.

Garrick practically ceased to act in 1766, but he continued the management of Drury Lane, and in 1769 organized the Shakespeare celebrations at Stratford-on-Avon, an undertaking which ended in dismal failure, though he composed an “Ode upon dedicating a building and erecting a Statue to Shakespeare” on the occasion. (See, inter alia, Garrick’s Vagary, or England Run Mad; with particulars of the Stratford Jubilee, 1769.) Of his best supporters on the stage, Mrs Cibber, with whom he had been reconciled, died in 1766, and Mrs (Kitty) Clive retired in 1769; but Garrick contrived to maintain the success of his theatre. He sold his share in the property in 1776 for £35,000, and took leave of the stage by playing a round of his favourite characters—Hamlet, Lear, Richard and Benedick, among Shakespearian parts; Lusignan in Zara, Aaron Hill’s adaptation of Voltaire’s Zaire; and Kitely in his own adaptation of Ben Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour; Archer in Farquhar’s Beaux’ Stratagem; 