David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity by Leslie Ritchie

This essay argues that the work of a lesser-known mid-eighteenth-century satirist Charles Churchill (1731–1764) provides a rich literary source for queer historical considerations of the conflation of xenophobia with effeminophobia in colonial imaginings of Ireland. This article analyzes Churchill's verse-satire The Rosciad (1761) through a queer lens in order to reengage the complex history of queer figurations of Ireland and the Irish within the British popular imagination. In the eighth edition of The Rosciad – a popular and controversial survey of London's contemporary players – Churchill portrays the Irish actor Thady Fitzpatrick as an effeminate fribble, before championing the manly acting abilities of the English actor David Garrick. The phobic attack on Fitzpatrick in The Rosciad is a direct response to Fitzpatrick's involvement in the ‘Fitzgiggo’ riots of January 1763 at the Drury Lane and Covent-Garden theatres. While Churchill's lampooning of the actor recalls Garrick's earlier satirizing of Fitzpatrick as a fribble in The Fribbleriad (1741) and Miss in her Teens (1747), The Rosciad is unique in its explicit conflation of androgyny with ethnicity through Irish classification. The portraiture of Fitzpatrick functions, alongside interrelated axes of ethnicity, class and gender, to prohibit access to a ‘normative’ middle-class English identity, figured through the ‘manly’ theatrical sensibility of the poem's hero, Garrick. Moreover, in celebrating a ‘Truly British Age’, the poem privileges English female players, in essentialist and curiously de-eroticized terms, as ‘natural’ though flawed performers. By analyzing Churchill's phobic juxtaposition of Garrick and the female players against the Irish fribble, this article evinces how mid-century discourses of effeminacy were also instrumental in enforcing racial taxonomies.

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David Garrick and Nicholas Nipclose

Educational Theatre Journal ◽

10.2307/3204671 ◽

1964 ◽

Vol 16 (3) ◽

pp. 270

Author(s):

John Jennings

Keyword(s):

David Garrick

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David Garrick (1717–1779)

Hamlet-Handbuch ◽

10.1007/978-3-476-00516-8_25 ◽

2014 ◽

pp. 130-135

Author(s):

Jens Roselt

Keyword(s):

David Garrick

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Theatrical, Periodical, Authorial: Frances Brooke’s Old Maid (1755–1756)

Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690-1820s ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474419659.003.0028 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Manushag N. Powell

Keyword(s):

Close Friend ◽

King Lear ◽

Charlotte Lennox ◽

Theatrical Performance ◽

David Garrick ◽

Theatrical Criticism ◽

Old Maid

Manushag Powell revisits Frances Brooke’s Old Maid (1755-6) to highlight its understudied interest in theatrical performance and criticism. Brooke’s interest in the drama was lifelong, encompassing not only personal ambitions that were partly thwarted by her famous quarrels with David Garrick over her Virginia and his King Lear, but also her friendship and eventual partnership with the powerful actress-manager Mary Ann Yates, who was also a close friend of fellow pioneering periodicalist Charlotte Lennox. Brooke’s interest in the theatre predated and reached far beyond Garrick’s involvement. Ultimately, the essay champions the radical ambitions of Brooke’s periodical writing and theatrical criticism, and both recognises and laments the fact that an alliance of female professional artistry could be enabled by the theatre, but not yet by periodical writing.

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