Chapter 1 concentrates on the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) and the performance of Shakespeare at the Theatres Royal in London to show how several prominent productions construct a triumphant narrative of the conflict and commemorate Britain’s participation through the figure of the monarch. This period of war involved a number of widely celebrated victories that were seen to solidify Britain’s dominance as a global power, imparting a retrospective unity to the conflict that was marked by growing war weariness, escalating costs, and uncertainty about its justification and aims. This chapter concentrates on John Rich’s Henry V at Covent Garden and David Garrick’s Henry VIII at Drury Lane in 1761, both of which incorporate replicas of George III’s recent coronation, establishing a connection between the histories of the plays and contemporary royal spectacle. It shows how the use of Shakespeare seems to authorize an approving view of British conquests, despite George III’s own interest in peace negotiations and the disparate aims of production and reception agents connected to these performances.

Contra readings of Harlequin’s Invasion that characterize the play as a patriotic call to arms during the Seven Years’ War, this essay argues that David Garrick constructs a different myth for Shakespeare than the myths of bellicose nationalism, celebrating a Harlequin Shakespeare over a nationalist one. The play suggests that comedic variety is more crucial to Shakespeare, to his ability to draw a plethora of characters who all seem true to life, than any nationalist zeal rooted in an unruly masculinity. Just as the play calls attention to the fluidity of citizenship, it calls attention to other fluidities that valorize nature and Harlequin as polymorphous. Garrick’s myth is predicated on a celebration of difference that is united in the same way that natural fecundity is harmonious. While nationalist myths yearn for unity as a totality that regulates, suppresses, and subsumes difference via antagonism, Harlequin’s Invasion valorizes nature’s spontaneity, its transformations and improvisations, more so than glory or self-sacrifice. The play uses Harlequin and his marvellous transformations to restore theatrical play and the daily enjoyments of theatre as a force for national unity that can accommodate the many differences that exist in a nation.

This chapter uses David Garrick’s career-long engagement with Nahum Tate’s King Lear (1681) to demonstrate two points about Restoration Shakespeare. First, it shows how Garrick’s production of Tate’s alteration continued the work undertaken by the late seventeenth-century playwright to fit the Jacobean tragedy to new theatrical contexts. Promptbook evidence and review accounts indicate that Garrick, like Tate and his contemporaries, added music and other special effects to the King Lear story, thus augmenting the already strong multimedia dimensions of the Restoration versions of Shakespeare’s plays. These same sources, however, also indicate how Garrick modified Tate’s own alteration to provide an even greater focus on the monarch, one of this actor-manager’s most famous and most often performed parts. Second, this chapter takes Garrick’s reworking of Tate’s King Lear as an example of how generations of theatre practitioners – including our own – might use the writings of Tate and his contemporaries as a useful intermediary between themselves and Shakespeare’s works.

This essay examines how in editions, on the stage, and in biographies, Jonson was revised and reinterpreted for the eighteenth century, generally as a foil to Shakespeare. The first illustrated Jonson was published in 1716, with the plays for the most part represented as if on a modern stage, though few had been performed since the early seventeenth century. Portraits of Jonson too went through much revision, even at one point substituting a slim, youthful, lively poet for the heavyset middle-aged scholar of the previous century. Critical treatments of the playwright were ambivalent, even maintaining that the role he conceived for himself, and that best expressed his character, was that of Morose in Epicene. David Garrick made the roles of Kitely in Every Man in His Humour and Drugger in The Alchemist particularly his own, with the latter even spawning a series of tobacconist sequels. But these productions rebalanced the plays around star performances and increased their sensationalism and emotional temperature. In print, portraits, and performance Jonson was not afforded the same care and respect that were lavished on Shakespeare and was increasingly overshadowed by him.

This chapter focuses on David Garrick as the most important catalyst for acoustic change in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. His naturalistic style of acting has often been discussed within the wider context of the Enlightment. Largely overlooked, though, is the impact of his voice, which was notoriously marked by regional inflections, and of his debut as Richard III in one of London's illegitimate theatres, on two important movements, led by two men, both called John Palmer. These two movements aimed to widen access to Shakespeare by obtaining licences for regional theatres and by encouraging non-professional actors, amateurs and enthusiasts from lower-status social groups to perform Shakespeare in non-conventional venues, ranging from minor or private theatres, to smaller performance houses and song and supper clubs.