General Introduction

On November 14, 1746, a young scholar of Westminster School, the future playwright Richard Cumberland, had the good fortune to attend a performance at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden. Understandably, his attention fell on the celebrated actors rather than the play they performed. Even decades later, Cumberland could recall how the renowned but old-fashioned James Quin had

presented himself upon the rising of the curtain in a green velvet coat, embroidered down the seams, an enormous full-bottomed periwig, rolled stockings and high-heeled square-toed shoes; with little variation of cadence, and in a deep full tone, accompanied by a sawing kind of action, which had more of the Senate than of the Stage in it, he rolled out his heroics with an air of dignified indifference, that seemed to disdain the plaudits that were bestowed upon him.

Susannah Cibber then came to Cumberland’s mind, along with her unvaried manner of singing out her lines:

when she had once recited two or three speeches, I could anticipate the manner of every succeeding one: it was like a long old legendary ballad of innumerable stanzas, every one of which is sung to the same tune, eternally chiming on the ear without variation or relief.

Next was Hannah Pritchard, ‘an actress of a different cast’, who ‘had more nature, and of course, more change of tone and variety both of action and expression’ than Mrs Cibber. It was only then that the star of the moment made his entrance:

… when, after a long and eager anticipation, I first beheld little GAR-RICK, then young and light and alive in every muscle and in every feature, come bounding on the stage, and pointing at the wittol Altamont and heavy-paced Horatio – Heavens, what a transition! it seemed as if a whole century had been stept over in the transition of a single scene; old things were done away, and a new order at once brought forward, bright 2and luminous, and clearly destined to dispel the barbarisms and bigotry of a tasteless age, too long attached to the prejudices of custom, and superstitiously devoted to the illusions of imposing declamation. ¹

Cumberland’s recollections of that occasion, as published in his Memoirs (1806), are conventionally interpreted as a reliable illustration of the crucial transformation that acting on the English stage underwent during the eighteenth century. Yet it is seldom acknowledged that the effectiveness of his recollection relies on theatrical continuity, at the same time as it recalls a break with the past. For the actors Cumberland saw that night were acting a tragedy that had first been performed in 1703, and which was still a stock piece a century later: The Fair Penitent by Nicholas Rowe. Cumberland’s readers would have recognized his allusions to characters such as Lothario and Calista, Altamont and Horatio; the ‘whole century’ that Cumberland saw traversed in Garrick’s acting was not accompanied by an equally sweeping revolution in terms of the British theatrical repertoire. That was, in general terms, to be a more gradual process.