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Garrick's King Lear and the English Malady

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2010

Leigh Woods
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Theatre andDrama at Indiana University

Extract

David Garrick played King Lear ninety times over the course of his career, a figure which qualifies the mad king as the most frequently performed among his tragic roles. Such frequency is not, I think, an accident; nor are the profusion and enthusiasm of contemporary accounts of Garrick in the role the result of chance. In this essay I shall depart both from the previous scholarly treatments of Garrick's Lear which have amassed eyewitness accounts of the performance, letting these speak essentially for themselves, and from those which have treated Garrick's alteration of King Lear as if it referred only to other pre-existent versions of the play.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1986

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References

NOTES

1 Woods, Leigh, “David Garrick and the Actor's Means: A Revolution in Acting-Style, in Relation to the Life of the Times,” Diss. Univ. of California, Berkeley 1979, p. 392.Google Scholar My figures differ slightly from those in Stone, George Winchester Jr, and Kahrl, George M., David Garrick: A Critical Biography (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1979), p. 656Google Scholar, in which Lear is ranked second to Hamlet among Garrick's tragic roles in number of performances, 85 performances to Hamlet's 90. Stone and Kahrl have their figures from the Index to The London Stage 1660–1800, comp. Ben Ross Schneider, Jr. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1979), the computerization of which, I believe, has not guarded it against some inaccuracies. My figures were compiled from a hand-listing of each of Garrick's performances, and so can be checked between Appendix G, pp. 399–456 of my dissertation, and the actual entries in The London Stage from which they were drawn. I have Garrick playing Lear 90 times, to 88 for his Hamlet.

2 Thorough and detailed accounts of Garrick's acting and production of King Lear can be found in Stone, and Kahrl, , David Garrick, pp. 532–40Google Scholar, in Stone, , “Garrick's Production of King Lear: A Study in the Temper of the Eighteenth-Century Mind,” Studies in Philology, 45 (1948), 89103Google Scholar, and in Burnim, Kalman A., David Garrick, Director (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1961), pp. 141–51.Google Scholar Garrick's alteration of King Lear has been examined in The Plays of David Garrick, ed. Harry William Pedicord and Fredrick Louis Bergmann (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1981), III, 443–52.

3 Cheyne, George, The English Malady, intro. Carlson, Eric T. M.D., (Delmar, New York: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1976), p. vGoogle Scholar of introduction.

4 See Klaus Doerner's examination of Cheyne, in Madmen and the Bourgeoisie: A Social History of Insanity and Psychiatry, trans. Neugroschel, Joachim and Steinberg, Jean (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), pp. 2930.Google Scholar

5 Voltaire, , Correspondence, ed. Besterman, Theodore, 1704–38 (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), I, 203Google Scholar; cited in Rosen, George, “Mental Disorders, Social Deviance and Culture Pattern,” in Psychiatry and Its History, ed. Mora, George and Brand, Jeanne L. (Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas, 1970), p. 174.Google Scholar

6 See Rosen, George, Madness in Society: Chapters in the Historical Sociology of Mental Illness (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 151.Google Scholar

7 Index to The London Stage, 1660–1800, pp. 763, 767. According to the Index, 45 performances of Hamlet fall in the period between 1660 and 1710 — many of these with Betterton in the leading role — in comparison to 19 for King Lear during the same period. All but two of these 19, it should be added, follow 1680, for it was not until the subsequent year that Nahum Tate completed his popular and durable adaptation of King Lear and saw the title role created by Betterton. It must also be added that performance records until 1705 are so incomplete as to make even such comparisons as these conjectural.

8 The most illuminating discussion of declamatory and pantomimic styles can be found in Joseph, Bertram, The Tragic Actor (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959), pp. 28172Google Scholarpassim. The others among scholars who have treated Garrick's acting extensively — Edwin Duerr, Alan Downer, and George Winchester Stone, Jr. — have argued either that Garrick's pantomimic style incorporated no intrinsic advantages, as does Duerr, in The Length and Depth of Acting (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), p. 247Google Scholar, or that Garrick was “more of a refiner than a reformer” of techniques he had inherited from Betterton, to quote Downer's words from “Nature to Advantage Dressed: Eighteenth-Century Acting,” PMLA, 58 (1943), 1013. This latter view has been essentially recapitulated by Joseph, and by Stone and Kahrl, too, in theirchapter on “Garrick and the Acting Tradition” in David Garrick, pp. 23–51.

9 Cibber, Colley, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (London: Printed for John Watts, 1740), p. 61.Google Scholar

10 For the fullest account of Garrick's rendition of the moment when Hamlet first sights his father's ghost, see Lichtenberg's Visits to England, trans. Margaret L. Mare and W. H. Quarrell (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1938), pp. 10–11.

11 Anon., “An Examen of the New Comedy, Call'd The Suspicious Husband” (London, 1747); cited in Stone, and Kahrl, , David Garrick, p. 534Google Scholar; The Plays of David Garrick, III, 324; Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare, ed. Christopher Spencer (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1965), p. 218.

12 Rubin, Lucille S. in “Voices of the Past: David Garrick, John Philip Kemble, Edmund Kean, 1741–1833,” Diss. New York Univ. 1973, pp. 161–62Google Scholar, contends that “Garrick did not possess a powerful stage voice, and at times he was literally without it. By playing tricks with his voice and body he perhaps compensated for what nature failed to give him.” Because of the nature and limits of her study, Rubin does not consider the advantages from nature which inhered in Garrick's pantomimic style.

13 For the nature and extent of Garrick's borrowing and his departures from Tate, see The Plays of David Garrick, III, 444–48.

14 The Plays of David Garrick, III, 343–44.

15 Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare, p. 229.

16 Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare, p. 230.

17 The Plays of David Garrick, 111, 345.

18 Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare, p. 209.

19 The Plays of David Garrick, 111, 309.

20 Anon., “An Examen of the New Comedy, Call'd The Suspicious Husband,” pp. 34–35; cited in Sprague, Arthur Colby, Shakespeare and the Actors: The Stage Businessin His Plays, 1660–1905 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1944), p. 293.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Woods, Leigh, “Crowns of Straw on Little Men: Garrick's New Heroes,” Shakespeare Quarterly. 32 (1981), 7374.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Foote, Samuel, “A Treatise on the Passions” (London: C. Corbett, 1747), p. 20.Google Scholar

23 Cibber, Theophilus, “Dissertations on Theatrical Subjects,” second dissertation (London: Printed for the Author, 1757), p. 36.Google Scholar

24 Murphy, Arthur, The Life of David Garrick, Esq. (London: Printed for J. Wright, 1801), I, 2830.Google Scholar

25 Davies, Thomas, Dramatic Miscellanies (London: Printed for the Author, 1784), II, 320.Google Scholar

26 Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare, p. 229.

27 Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare, p. 209.

28 The scenes which King Lear concludes in Garrick's alteration are l.ii, I.iv (end of Act I), II.v (end of Act II), lll.i, and V.iv (end of Act V and of the play).

29 Battie, William, A Treatise on Madness (London: Printed for J. Winston and B. White, 1758), p. 49.Google Scholar

30 Boswell, James, The Hypochondriack, ed. Bailey, Margery (1928; rpt. New York: AMS, 1973), p. 137.Google Scholar

31 Cheyne in The English Madness, pp. iii–vii, offers a synopsis of the cures which are elaborated in the later sections of the book.

32 Davies, , Dramatic Miscellanies, II, 318.Google Scholar

33 Davies, , Dramatic Miscellanies, II, 320.Google Scholar

34 The Plays of David Garrick. III, 386.

35 Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare, p. 270.

36 The Letters of David Garrick, ed. David M. Little and George M. Kahrl (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), I, 53. See Merchant, W. M., “Francis Hayman's Illustrations of Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 9 (1958), 142–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Burnim, Kalman A., “The Significance of Garrick's Letters to Hayman,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 9 (1958), 149–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 The Plays of David Garrick, III, 341.

38 Stone, , “Garrick's Production of King Lear,” 89–103Google Scholarpassim; Pedicord, and Bergmann, , The Plays of David Garrick, III, 443–52.Google Scholar

39 Boswell, , Life of Johnson, ed. Hill, G.B., rev. Powell, L.F. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1934), IV, 208.Google Scholar