Key figures: David Garrick, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Thomas Linley
Summary
David Garrick, the most celebrated actor-manager of the eighteenth-century English stage, retired from performing in 1776 after nearly three decades managing the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and roughly thirty-five years since his stage debut. In the spring of 1776 he mounted a season of farewell performances in his most acclaimed roles — including Hamlet, King Lear, Richard III, and Benedick — allowing London audiences a final chance to see the actor whose naturalistic style had transformed British theatre. Press reports from January 1776 had already disclosed that Garrick was selling his proprietary share of the Drury Lane patent.
Garrick gave his last stage performance on June 10, 1776, appearing as Don Felix in Susanna Centlivre’s 1714 comedy The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret, a role for which he was especially admired. The evening’s proceeds were donated not to Garrick himself but to the Drury Lane Theatrical Fund, which supported aged and infirm actors. A scheduled afterpiece, the ballad opera The Waterman, was cancelled, as the audience’s emotional response to Garrick’s brief closing address made continuing the evening’s entertainment impractical; contemporary accounts describe tears and shouted farewells from the house.
Garrick’s retirement coincided with the sale of his controlling share in the Drury Lane patent to a consortium consisting of the young Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan — fresh off the success of his comedy The Rivals (1775) — his father-in-law Thomas Linley the elder, and Dr. James Ford, a court physician to King George III. The purchase price for Garrick’s share was reported at £35,000. Sheridan and his partners completed the purchase of Garrick’s remaining interest two years later, in 1778, by which point Sheridan had assumed the position of manager, directing the theatre’s day-to-day operations and productions.
Significance
Garrick’s retirement closed the era of the actor-manager whose personal celebrity and reformist stagecraft — including more naturalistic acting and the removal of spectators from the stage itself — had defined mid-century London theatre. His departure from Drury Lane made way for Sheridan’s tenure as manager, during which the theatre staged Sheridan’s own The School for Scandal (1777), one of the most celebrated comedies of manners in the English language. The 1776 transaction thus marks a hinge point in the history of Drury Lane and of English comic drama, transferring stewardship of Britain’s leading playhouse from its most famous performer to its next major dramatist.