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Reviewed by:
  • Shakespeare and Garrick
  • Stuart Sherman (bio)
Shakespeare and Garrick. By Vanessa Cunningham. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Illus. Pp. viii + 232. $90.00 cloth.

Shakespeare and Garrick: in copulative titles, it’s the and that often matters most—but that this time partly mystifies. How exactly does the linkage work, what does it mean, and why does it matter? Vanessa Cunningham, providing no subtitle, keeps her study’s rubric notably noncommittal. The strength of her book resides in [End Page 141] the range of possible meanings she assigns to that and, its weakness in her failure to sort and sift them fully.

For Garrick’s admiring contemporaries, the and read almost as an equal sign. The luminous living actor and the long-dead playwright, they repeatedly affirmed, were each unimaginable without the other. This close identification was of course the result of the actor’s careful crafting. A medallion struck as souvenir for Garrick’s ambitious, rain-soaked Jubilee at Stratford portrayed Shakespeare on one side, Garrick (as Hamlet) on the other. And Samuel Jackson Pratt, in the final couplet of the epitaph inscribed on Garrick’s Westminster Abbey tomb, figures playwright and player as identical celestial siblings: “Shakespeare and Garrick like twin stars shall shine, / And earth irradiate with a beam divine.”1

Pratt’s pairing may have supplied Cunningham’s title; it certainly forecasts her intelligent but not always intelligible argument. By her reckoning, Shakespeare and Garrick are closely matched in one significant respect, now largely forgotten. Each operated (albeit in differing proportions) as actor, manager, and playwright; each worked brilliantly and successfully at the switch point where page meets stage, where scripts need constantly to be reshaped (cut, resequenced, reworded) in response to the carefully monitored, ever-shifting appetites of the audience. What’s more, this commonality of practice and purpose was compounded by direct interaction: throughout his career, Garrick, successful playwright, ardent collector of old play texts, and eager if amateur scholar, energetically reworked the texts for every one of the Shakespeare plays that he produced and starred in. Such alterations were of course de rigueur; by the time Garrick got his hands on the plays, none had appeared in anything like its original form for more than a century.

Cunningham contends that Garrick’s accomplishments as redactor have been long obscured by two opposing oversimplifications: “Garrick the great restorer” (7), who (according to his twentieth-century champion and biographer George Winchester Stone) made the plays of Shakespeare and other dramatists “‘live anew by restoring them in many ways to their authors’” (9); and “Garrick the vandal” (8), who (in the words of Robert D. Hume) was “‘an aggressive appropriator’” who “‘spouted pieties and hacked about the texts any way he pleased’” (44). Between these visions of Garrick as savior and slasher, Cunningham proposes to take a prudent middle course—to study the actor’s alterations “with respect,” on the grounds that Garrick, like his predecessors in Shakespearean revision (Davenant, Tate, Cibber) was “only doing what acting companies (including Shakespeare’s) have always done, and some still continue to do” (11): reshape the play text in concert with the audience’s current taste. Garrick, altering Shakespeare, was only recapitulating what his author did before him.

This approach makes sense, and it takes Cunningham some distance into the terrain she hopes to cover. In the book’s three core chapters, she tracks the motives, tactics, and significance of Garrick’s Shakespearean alterations through three phases of his career—early (Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet), middle (A Winter’s Tale, Antony [End Page 142] and Cleopatra), and late (Hamlet, King Lear)—with a scope and focus that surpass those of any previous study. She sets forth a closely detailed account of exactly what Garrick did with, and to, the Shakespearean texts he had at hand, and by such scrutiny she manages at least to complicate the opposing myths of rescuer and destroyer that she sets out to unmake. Her reader will come away with a strong sense of “the ebbs and flows, the advances and retreats, of [Garrick’s] engagement, across his long career” (119) with the playwright whose work had launched that career...

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