ABSTRACT
Throughout his career as actor, adapter, and manager of the Drury Lane theater in London from 1747-76, David Garrick helped to popularize the notion of Shakespeare as a man of feeling during an age in which the Bard was becoming a national icon. Garrick produced twenty-six Shakespeare plays, adapted twenty-two of them for the stage, and performed seventeen roles in original and adapted versions of his plays at Drury Lane and other venues. He was particularly good at eliciting affective responses from audience members as a result of the depth of feeling he conveyed through his eyes, vocal intonations, bodily gestures, and choreographed movements on stage. His shedding of tears when performing roles ranging from King Lear to Leontes generated considerable revenue at the box office. As James Boswell recorded in his London journal in the early 1760s, he arrived two hours early to get a seat to see Garrick play the role of Lear: “I kept myself at a distance from all acquaintances, and got into a proper frame. Mr. Garrick gave me the most perfect satisfaction. I was fully moved, and I shed an abundance of tears.”74 Boswell’s journal entry highlights the increasing acceptability (and financial marketability) of weeping and wailing men close to the time when Garrick performed the role of teary-eyed Leontes in Florizel and Perdita in 1756.
