David Garrick has long been associated with the renaissance of theater in eighteenth-century England; in acting style, in theater management, and in the elevation of stage actors to a respectable status in English society, Garrick was an innovative force. Less well known is his contribution to theater literature through his private collection of plays from the early years of printing. The collection of ''Old Plays,'' as he referred to them, represented a wide range of plays printed before his time in a number of languages.

David Garrick was born on 19 February 1717 in Hereford, England. His family soon after moved to Lichfield, the town where he grew up and received his early education. His association with Samuel Johnson began in 1735 when he studied under Johnson at the Edial Hall School. In 1737 he accompanied Johnson to London to study law. In conversations with Sir Joshua Reynolds and Gibbons, Johnson described Garrick as lacking the intellectual gifts that made up a great conversational mind; he was also quick to praise Garrick for the greatness of his endowed gifts. In Johnson's view, Garrick was no Homer, but he was a competent poet and man of letters. Indeed, his election into Johnson's Club in 1773 showed the respect he had won in literary circles. His marriage to Maria Veigal, a dancer popular in London social circles, in 1749, and his association with the Brethren of the Queen's-Arms, made him a favorite among the aristocratic elite of Europe.

Garrick dabbled in the study of mathematics and the vine trade, but he found his great talent in 1741 with his stage debut, made under an assumed name in case the audience did not take kindly to his performance. He progressed quickly in theater ranks. In five years he was the manager and chief actor in London's Drury Lane Company. Garrick's acting style was called a perfect representation of "a true idea of the author'' by his contemporaries; his performances were closer to the naturalistic style of a Gielgud or a Fonda than the parade of gestures, poses, and facial contortions that eighteenth-century English audiences expected from actors (George Winchester Stone, Jr., and George M. Kahrl, David Garrick: A Critical Biography [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979], p. 38). Acting theory of the time held that there were universal expressions that all people would recognize as conveying the emotion or passion of a person. The cliché of a master thespian "striking a pose'' from contemporary comedy sketches is a remnant of that acting style. As Garrick's style took hold in theater circles, so his managerial style became the standard for London theater. His tenure at the Drury Lane Theatre from 1747 to 1763 helped institute sound business practices in mounting shows

Garrick had a well-developed sense of social responsibility. His push for a Theatre Fund, both through his donations, including his wages from his 1775 farewell performance, and through his work with Parliament for passage of the Theatre Fund Act, resulted in retirement and disability payments for actors. In 1769 he organized and administered the Shake­speare Jubilee, a nationwide celebration centered in Stratford that helped cement Shakespeare's reputation as the national playwright of England. He lived out his last years quite happily with his wife and friends. In 1779 Garrick was interred in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey among other immortals.

He began to collect plays during the 1740s. His acquisition of early printed plays was motivated by scholarship and the desire to see posterity enriched more than by a collector's avarice. There had been collectors in the previous centuries, notably Samuel Pepys and the first and second dukes of Oxford who created the Harleian Collection. But most people responsible for assembling libraries, like Sir Thomas Bodley, viewed plays as ephemeral works of the popular press not worthy of serious consideration. Garrick had excellent consultants in the development of his library. Robert Dodsley, poet, publisher, and playwright, was certainly one of the most important; Dodsley sold him some of the Harleian Collection and other plays. Garrick also had the aid of Issac and Paul Vaillant, who had helped to organize the Harleian Collection. In collecting the first printings of Shakespeare's plays, Sommerset Draper, partner with the men who owned the copyright to the plays, and Edward Capell, bibliographer, editor, and restorer of Shakespeare's texts, proved invaluable to Garrick. Garrick depended on his friends for collection development; no sale catalogue has been discovered listing Garrick as a buyer, due to the conflicting times of book auctions and theater performances. Capell performed another vital service in his catalogue of Garrick's Old Plays Collection.

It was the Capell catalogue that served as the British Museum's initial means of access to the 1780 donation of Garrick's Collection. The first folio of Shakespeare and several of Beaumont's works in the catalogue were missing, much to the disappointment of the museum staff, but outside of those exceptions, the collection of over 1,300 works in 242 volumes and several unbound works was intact. These works, with the Thomason Collection of 1640-1660 Civil War tracts, for many years comprised the theater literature collection in the British Museum. Unfortunately, under the provision of the 1767 Act of Parliament designed to generate income for the museum, forty-two of Garrick's well-worn copies were sold as duplicates in 1788 for £529-14-9. The missing works by Shakespeare and others turned up in the 1822 Garrick Estate auction.

In 1840 Panizzi's arrangement to break down the bound "volumes" of Capell's plan into separate bound plays went into action. This operation turned up a number of missing plays; one example had a page ending with a header "The Epilogue." Some of the missing title pages turned up at the University of Texas Wrenn Library collection of the Humanities Research Center; among the items are pages from Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Heywood, and James Shirley. For all the losses and "strays," the British Museum Garrick Collection with the playbills and other ephemera is remarkably wide in its coverage of early printed theater literature.

The bookplate's designer was John Wood, also known as Issac Wood. Some discussion took place among bookplate aficionados about whether the present bookplate design was the original design; apparently two versions of the copperplates exist with minor differences between them. The quota­tion comes from the fourth volume of Menagiana, the "table-talk" of Gilles Ménagé (1613-1692), noted French man of letters. The book, collected and published by the friends of Ménagé after his death, was a favorite of eighteenth-century readers for its jokes, retorts, and general observations. The French phrase on the plate roughly translates as "The first thing that one must do when one has borrowed a book is to read it so that it can be returned as soon as possible." That included treating a book with respect. William Hardy expressed his doubts on whether "Davey" ever followed his own advice, especially with regards to Samuel Johnson and his habit of marking his place in a book with a butter knife (Bookplates [London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Truber, 1893], pp. 127-128). Given the reputation of Ménagé and Johnson as brilliant conversationalists, and the heavy use (or abuse, if accounts are accurate) of Garrick's library by Johnson in the creation of his edition of Shakespeare, it would be a marvelous irony indeed if the motto were chosen with Johnson in mind.

A bust of Shakespeare occupies a place of honor on the crest, with various symbols of the theater around the edges of the cartouche, such as a Fool's staff and the mask of Drama on the left, Pan's pipes and a bow and quiver on the right, and stage props including a crown, sword, and lyre at the bottom. The bookplate has been reproduced in a number of books, with the best images found in The Bookplate Annual for 1923 and Hardy's Bookplates.  

Kevin R. Cox

Graduate School of Library and Information Science

University of Texas at Austin