Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss

Abstract

What new remains to be said about David Garrick? As Emily Hodgson Anderson observes at the outset of this by turns fascinating, diverting, and provoking book, his career (both as a performer and pioneering bardolator) and its legacy have been exhaustively discussed. Thomas Davies's Memoirs appeared within a year of Garrick's celebrity funeral in 1779, an event which itself attracted thousands of spectators to witness the passage of the cortège from the actor's home in Adelphi Terrace to Westminster Abbey. In its wake have appeared both popular biographies (most recently, Ian McIntyre's gargantuan bestseller Garrick) and the large body of scholarship that has addressed what used to be termed "the age of Garrick." Anderson's theme, beginning with Garrick, is "the dynamic of desire and loss embedded in all acts of performance" (2), a topic previously explored by, most influentially, Joseph Roach and Peggy Phelan. Anderson's particular point of departure is Garrick's obsessive determination to become a histrionic living monument to Shakespeare and, simultaneously. to make Shakespeare a permanent commemoration of himself. Garrick's preoccupations were shared by his contemporaries and successors: after examining his self-fashioning debut as Richard III in 1741 and his failure to master Othello, Anderson probes the peculiarities of Laurence Sterne's relationship with his--and Shakespeare's-Hamlet; Garrick's Florizel and Perdita, his adaptation of The Winter's Tale, and its showcasing of Mary Robinson and Sarah Siddons (whose Lady in Macbeth is also considered at some length); Charles Macklin's Shylock and Kitty Clive's Portia; Garrick's 1756 retirement season; and Siddons's post-retirement staged readings.