Garrick Claims the Stage: Acting as Social Emblem in Eighteenth-Century England: 10 (Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies)

Whenever an actor is adopted by a culture that actor can fairly be said to represent certain composite features of the audience which applauds his efforts on the stage. In the remarkable degree that David Garrick was adopted by the mid-eighteenth-century English theater audience the resonance between his acting and that which his society found provocative must have been unusual in both its richness and its intensity. This study will attempt to describe the sympathy which existed between Garrick and his public and it will seek the consistencies between his public functions as an actor - documented and validated as they were by his contemporaries - and his private experience. A great and popular actor such as Garrick functions to unify and embody his culture in ways that to some extent transcend the ordinary divisions enforced by social class or by narrow professional interest. Indeed the definition of any actors popularity lies precisely in an ability to appeal to people of all kinds and at all times. This study generalizes a good deal about tendencies and beliefs which seem to have figured prominently in eighteenth-century English life but it is the public and consensual nature of Garricks role in the life of his times that prompts such generalizing. His career presents a model for exploring tensions and contradictions central to his age and the last chapter in particular investigates the sense in which the man was himself both a composite and a walking paradox.