David Garrick Biography

Dromo's Den

GARRICK, David (1717–79). A celebrated English actor, long manager of Drury Lane Theatre, and the author of numerous comedies. Descended on his father's side from a family of Huguenot refugees named De la Garrique, he was born at Hereford, Feb. 19, 1717, and educated at Lichfield, the home of his mother's family. During his youth he went to live with an uncle, who was a wine merchant in Lisbon, but he soon returned to England and became a pupil of the famous Dr. Johnson. A few months later, in 1736, master and pupil left Lichfield together in the hope of improving their fortunes in London. Garrick attempted the study of law; then for a time he engaged in the wine business, his uncle having left him £1000; but the dramatic instincts which he had shown even as a schoolboy proved too strong, and after some amateur acting and falling in love with the famous Peg Woffington, he made, under an assumed name, his début on the stage at Ipswich (1741) in a play called Oroonoko. He succeeded so well that on October 19 of the same year he appeared in London in the character of Richard III. After being engaged for the following season at Drury Lane, Garrick went in the summer of 1742 to Dublin, where he excited the Hibernian enthusiasm to an extraordinary degree. His success in London, however, was not without unpleasant incident, for a quarrel arose between him and his friend Macklin, which was taken up by their partisans, and on one occasion Garrick's performance had to be given up. In 1747 he became one of the patentees of Drury Lane. Two years later he married Mademoiselle Violette, an excellent danseuse from Vienna. This seems to have alienated some of his company, especially of the feminine members, who went over to the opposition house, and in 1750 occurred the famous rivalry, when Drury Lane and Covent Garden were each playing Romeo and Juliet, Garrick and Mrs. Bellamy at the former and Spranger Barry (q.v.) and Mrs. Cibber at the latter, till after a dozen nights the town was tired and Covent Garden gave up the field. In 1763 Garrick visited the Continent and made the acquaintance of Diderot and other noted people. He conducted in 1769 the memorable jubilee at Stratford-on-Avon in honor of Shakespeare. To Garrick seems to belong much of the credit of bringing back to the stage Shakespeare's plays in their original form, in place of the altered versions which had commonly been in use since the Restoration. During his management also at Drury Lane he made an end of the old custom of admitting spectators upon the stage and introduced other improvements. His own last appearance was on June 10, 1776, in The Wonder, when at the close of the play he made an affecting speech of farewell. His health was failing, and he died less than three years later, in London, Jan. 20, 1779. He was buried beneath the Shakespeare monument in Westminster Abbey. Garrick is regarded as the greatest of English actors. He exhibited a Shakespearean universality in the representation of character and was equally at home in the highest flights of tragedy and the lowest depths of farce. But the naturalness which so distinguished him upon the stage often forsook him in real life. He was extremely sensitive to ridicule and had a curious fashion of forestalling the malice of the critics by bringing out, on occasion, pamphlets of bantering attack upon himself. In his financial affairs he was considered close, though his generosities were many. He left a fortune of about £100,000. He was on terms of intimate friendship with Johnson, Goldsmith, Burke, and other men of letters, and was a member with them of the famous Literary Club. As an author, he does not rank very high, though some of his farces, like The Lying Valet, have been repeatedly published, and his prologues were often extremely ingenious. A collected (partial) edition of his dramatic works was brought out in London in 1768 and again in 1798. Many of his letters are preserved in the Forster collection at the South Kensington Museum. On his life, consult: Knight (London, 1894); Fitzgerald (ib., 1868); Murphy (Dublin, 1801); Davies (London, 1780); "Mémoires de Garrick," in Bibliothèque de mémoires relatifs à l'histoire de France pendant le XVIII siècle, vol. vi (Paris, 1878); and Boaden (ed.), The Private Correspondence of David Garrick, with a biogŕaphical memoir (London, 1832); Parsons, Garrick and his Circle (Boston, 1907).

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. IX (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 479-480.