Souvenirs of David Garrick
These images document Shakespearean star David Garrick’s 1753 performance of Romeo and Juliet, from the Folger’s extensive Garrick collection.
The leading actor-manager of the 1700s, David Garrick revolutionized English theater with a lively, naturalistic acting style that held audiences spellbound. The Folger’s collection of materials related to Garrick may be the largest in the world. This mezzotint and painted copper roundel document Garrick’s 1753 performance of Romeo and Juliet, to which he extended the death scene between himself and Juliet.
A natural self-publicist who encouraged the production of hundreds of portraits of himself, Garrick played a key part in the cult of bardolatry that continues today. Words he wrote for a 1759 pantomime are carved in the Folger’s Great Hall:
Thrice happy the nation that Shakespeare has charmed.
More happy the bosoms his genius has warm’d!
Ye children of nature, of fashion and whim,
He painted you all, all join to praise him.
In 1769, he helped organize the Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford, an event that culminated in yet another Garrick poem on the Bard.