ABSTRACT
What might be termed the ‘received view’ of George Frederick Cooke could hardly be more simple–that he was a potentially great actor ruined by alcoholism. There is, of course, a very great deal of truth in this, but it is also an over-simplification which suggests a stereotype, rather than the complex amalgam of paradoxes and contradictions that is the man himself. His first–and, only, full-length biographer was the American playwright William Dunlap, who knew Cooke during the last eighteen months before his death in the United States. Cooke was born, possibly in 1756, but almost certainly not in Westminster as Dunlap supposes, but in one of the many barracks then in Dublin. At King’s Lynn in 1774 Cooke was at the beginning of his career, a young man working like a beaver to learn his way around the repertory.
