Garrick as a Personage

Abstract

That a prominent actor in a social order that judged individual worth on the basis of noble or ignoble birth should construct himself as a personage of national importance is hardly surprising, nor unusual as an aspiration. It should also be recalled that eighteenth-century Britain was in many senses a ‘servile’ society — with significant numbers finding employment as servants, especially in London (Sherman, 1995; Hecht, 1956). Garrick as an actor, rather than as ‘Shakespeare’s Priest’ and landed gentleman, was also a servant of the public, in a compound sense: as patentee meeting the expectations of Royal and noble court patronage, and as a performer at the service of the market and the conflicting expectations of a socially mixed audience. For my account, the distinctive questions arise less from his social climbing and the social manoeuvres he undertook to be accepted in polite society than from what these meant in terms of the grammar of identity defining his stardom.