10 - The Expanse of Character: Ranger

Summary

The unreformed rake, Jackey, of Samuel Richardson's Pamela was played in Giffard's dramatic adaptation (opened 9 November 1741 at Goodman's Fields) by a young actor, one David Garrick. Garrick fever had taken off less than three weeks earlier with the twenty-four-year-old actor’s subversive transformation of the part of Richard III: the one tragic part for which Colley Cibber – co-author of The Provok’d Husband and of a memoir of his own life which had enjoyed double-billing with Pamela as the publishing sensation of 1740 – had been celebrated. Jackey was the first newly written part Garrick took, and it set the terms for a comic type with which he continued to be associated: the flamboyant, energetic rake, more camp than predatory.

Garrick's tour de force in the part was Jackey's reading out of a letter in Franglais (that Garrick had himself composed) from a Swiss villain named Colebrand to Mrs Jewkes, revealing Colebrand's bigamous turpitude. In 1747 Garrick extended his rakish repertoire further when he played this type in two different incarnations at Covent Garden: on 17 January he debuted as the fashion-addict effeminate suitor Fribble in a farcical two-act afterpiece of his own composition, Miss in Her Teens, and the play ran for forty nights in that one season. And on 12 February he assumed the role of the rakish Ranger in a new five-act comedy The Suspicious Husband by Benjamin Hoadly at Covent Garden. It was a role he was to play more than 120 times over the next thirty years, the part he performed most often from his huge repertory.

The name of this stage rake signifies a debt to and departure from earlier versions of the type (and throughout his career as playwright and actor Garrick aimed to revisit, revise, adapt older parts and plays). The rake by definition is an invader of other's space, breaking into polite homes, penetrating the bodies of women. Aphra Behn's rake is a rover (Willmore of the 1677 The Rover), Hoadly's a ranger. However, Willmore is a drunk, a boor, a potential rapist, who trails mayhem in his greedy wake.