David Garrick was a hundred per cent, fourteen carat star and, though many tried, few could convincingly deny it. If he was alive today he'd be Marlon Brando, Liam Neeson or one of the Toms, Cruise or Hanks. But their work is seen by millions within weeks of its release, while he worked for nearly all his life in a single theatre, one of only two "legitimate" (that is, legal) ones in 18th century London, where only houses with a royal patent were allowed stage plays.
As with his modern counterparts, much of what he appeared in was dross, for his career coincided with a low point in English drama. He was born too late for the bawdy but lively work of the Restoration and too soon for the revival of the late 18th and early 19th centuries - Sheridan and Goldsmith wrote during the final period of his career, but he missed the chance to stage them both, their early works going to the rival Covent Garden rather than Garrick's Drury Lane. Fortunately there was - as fortunately there always is - Shakespeare. In the fashion of the time, Garrick repeatedly bowdlerised the Bard, cutting and adding whole characters and scenes. But in the great roles - Lear, Richard III, Hamlet and others - he was, according to his contemporaries, simply superb. "Damn him", said his contemporary, the actor Kitty Clive, "he could act a gridiron!" What was the secret? We can only guess.
He was born in Hereford but grew up in the market town of Lichfield in 1717, the grandson of a refugee from the French persecution of the Huguenots. His father, a minor army officer posted to the town, fell in love with and married one of the daughters of the vicars-choral of the cathedral there. Like many of the great figures of English life, Garrick - wholly French on his father's side and partly Irish on his mother's - had little English blood in his veins. His boyhood was one of genteel poverty, but he received a basic grammar-school education. For a short time he was taught by another soon-to-be-famous son of the town, Samuel Johnson. The two were to enjoy a life-long but often acrimonious friendship.
Coming to London, the young Garrick tried his hand for a time as a wine merchant, but he was already stage-struck, his mind turning to an acting career which his family (and families don't change much) considered shameful until they discovered he was a success.
The 18th-century theatre was nothing if not colourful. The classes, upper, lower and middle, had each their assigned places - boxes, galleries and pit - but were literally crammed in and, in an age not notable for washing, the atmosphere must have been pungent in every sense. Pickpockets and prostitutes plied their trades freely. Bad behaviour was the order of the night; people talked through the actors' speeches and hurled oranges or eggs at them, while young bloods would wander on the stage wearing swords and would at times feel up the actresses. As the stage was lit by candelabra, stage lighting was rudimentary, so it was surprising that people saw or heard anything. But they knew no better and the theatre was hugely popular, the plays and players being debated with a vehemence that would land most modern critics in the libel courts.
Actors were regarded, if they were male, as rogues and vagabonds - two of the greatest figures of the day, Quin and Macklin, both Irish, had stood trial for murder - while their female counterparts were looked on as little better than whores. Garrick gave a new respectability to his profession and, though he was never knighted (that had to wait for Queen Victoria and Henry Irving a century later) many of the greatest aristocratic figures of the age were happy to regard him as a friend and to ask him into their homes. After the Puritan suppression of the theatre and the restoration of Charles II, French models influenced the English stage heavily. Actors advanced to the footlights and gave forth soliloquies in slow, heavily sonorous tones, complete with stock gestures. The style was now 80 years old and ripe for change and it was Garrick who supplied the push. His first role of any stature was in a version of King Lear at Goodman's Fields. He was an instant sensation, gave up all ideas of being a wine merchant and launched himself on what was to be the most glittering of all stage careers. Though he was small, not especially handsome and by all accounts had a voice that was liable to strain, he overcame all handicaps by the sheer vivacity, passion and variety he brought to his roles. Instead of declaiming, he spoke his lines conversationally, was a great mimic and was constantly looking for new approaches to the characters he played in both comedy and tragedy.
Soon he was filling theatres on his name alone. In the company of the Irish actress Peg Woffington - he was also one of her many lovers - he went to Dublin and played in Smock Alley so successfully that "Garrick fever" was said to have swept the town.
In 1747 he took over as joint patentee in Drury Lane and was to run the theatre until his retirement, shortly before his death. He enlarged and refurbished the old theatre several times and by the end of his life he was a rich man, with houses in London and the country, servants and a fine coach. He married an Austrian dancer, Eva Maria Veigel, whose stage name was Violette, a protegee of the grandee Lord and Lady Burlington, and it proved a long and happy union, uninterrupted by the infidelities which were the commonplace of his circle. All this and much, much more is chronicled in Mr. McIntyre's biography, so much so that one cannot but think of the old adage about less being more.
Yet, at the end, one cannot but admire Garrick. If, as Byron said of Thomas Moore, he "loved a lord", perhaps to excess, his entree to fashionable society raised his profession to new heights. But he also enjoyed the friendship of many of the truly great figures of his day - Johnson, Boswell, and Hogarth, the bluestocking Mrs Montagu, Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke, who burst into tears when he heard of Garrick's death. For half a century or so, he kept the show on the road at Drury Lane, filling the roles of supreme actor, manager and what today would be called director, as well as writing copiously.
Perhaps his greatest achievement was his revival in the fortunes of Shakespeare, even to the point of what Shaw was to call "Bardolatry". The plays had fallen into abeyance at the time of the English Civil War, so that no more than a handful of them were in the repertory. By the time Garrick's career had ended, collected editions had been edited by such illustrious names as Pope and Johnson and, according to Mr McIntyre, more than one in six London productions were of works of Shakespeare. If he wasn't always as true to the texts as one might wish, that was the manner of the day, and who's to say we are any better, when fashionable directors take so many liberties with the Bard, whether to get themselves noticed or to make up for their inability to create their own new work.
Fergus Linehan is a novelist and critic