Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2020
David Garrick, having achieved unprecedented fame in a world newly shaped and suffused by the daily press, conducted his career from a perception that no predecessor had had reason to grapple with and that scholars now are just beginning to explore: that newspapers had altered the cultural timescape—had extended indefinitely the now wherein performer and public might mesh with one another. At stake throughout Garrick's career was the question not only of what press and player might do to or for each other tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow but also of whether the not-altogether-poor player's reputation might outlast, in any way and to any extent, his corporeal hour upon the stage. The answers Garrick tried for—at once ingenious and incomplete—can help us calibrate the intricate relation between performance and documentation, at a moment when each was newly, powerfully inflecting the other.