My tutor shuddered. “With the best of generous intentions, that I might aid a dear friend in the compilation of his life’s work, back in forty-six I naïvely made a loan of them to Dr. Johnson to use in the research for his dictionary. I should have recalled that the man had a nasty habit of scrawling all over everything.”
“I’m surprised, too, that such a treasure is so dusty,” I remarked, blowing away some motes.
“I’m afraid that’s not dust,” said Garrick, taking the volumes from my hands. “It’s scurf.”
Ugh. It was my turn to shudder. I hunted for a handkerchief to brush away the flakes of dandruff and dried skin that had landed on my skirts.
“Never mind,” Garrick added, “I had expected you to become familiar with Shakespeare’s text of King Lear before we began to work on my versions.”
Having compared the Bard’s quarto to the script we were to play, I noted that the role of Cordelia was somewhat larger than Shakespeare had intended, for Garrick had, in his words, “improved upon the improvements already made to the text by Nahum Tate,” giving the tragedy a happy ending where Cordelia marries Edgar!
Having puzzled for days over this decidedly un-Shakespearean finale, I finally summoned the courage to ask my mentor why we were offering the public such imaginative reworkings of the original. His reply was succinct: “No doubt, Miss Darby, you have observed that happy endings are the fashion nowadays. Good must always triumph over Evil.”
At Mr. Garrick’s insistence, in addition to weeks of study on my voice, carriage, and singing—the last of which I confess myself rather more deficient than my mentor would have liked—I had been attending the theatre as often as I could manage, with Mother as my chaperone. We did see the presentations at Covent Garden, but it was at Drury Lane, sitting in the great actor’s private box, where I most felt the magic. For here was a veritable temple to the arts. The interior had recently been remodeled—to Garrick’s plans—and it seemed to my young mind that no expense had been spared. Lush draperies the color of garnets and trimmed with gold fringe framed the stage. Elegant plaster medallions festooned the exteriors of the boxes, crimson paper lined their rear walls, slim pillars inlaid with colored glass glittered like rubies and emeralds, candles flickered in gilt branches. I craned my neck to enjoy the to-ing and fro-ing in the upper tier, where the Cyprians plied their trade amid the green boxes, and discovered that these wealthy seats of pleasure were richly painted and adorned with gilded busts.
“Imagine! Here, here is where I shall one day reign,” I would whisper to Mother, my head filled with glittering triumphs yet to come. I had been too often in public not to be observed and the word was out that I was the juvenile pupil of Garrick—the promised Cordelia. And as I was fast becoming the heir apparent to many other leading roles of the day, I was treated like the princess royal by many illustrious personages, who would make a point of visiting Mr. Garrick’s home in Adelphi Terrace or his box at Drury Lane just to pay a call on his new protégée. The melancholy child had shed her cocoon of morbid and maudlin sensibilities, metamorphosing into a gay butterfly who craved the latest fashions.
I was fiercely determined to make something of myself, and—as our breadwinner had turned libertine and truant—would proudly support our little family on my talents.
I had never been happier. “Surely, Mother, you must find it preferable to spending the latter part of my girl-hood hunched over a flame, scribbling tortured verses!”
“Indeed, Mary, you’ve a fine eye for color and silhouette, and no one knows better what becomes you,” Mother agreed. “Fair warning, however: you’re playing with fire.”
I found myself an object of attention whenever I appeared at the theatre, and I admit I loved the “buzz.” It was all a grand game to me, being cosseted and admired, all a prelude to the day when I would leave Mr. Garrick’s tutelage for the other side of the pit, where I was already assured of a loyal and devoted following.
It was the end of 1772. I had just turned fifteen, and my little heart throbbed with impatience for the hour of trial. My tutor was most sanguine in his expectations of my success, his encomiums were of the most flattering kind, and every rehearsal seemed to strengthen his flattering opinion.
Never shall I forget the enchanting hours that I passed in Mr. Garrick’s society: to me, he possessed more power, both to awe and to attract, than any man I’d ever encountered. Even his smile was fascinating. Yet I confess that he had at times a restless peevishness of tone that so excessively affected me that I shall never forget it.
One morning when we were rehearsing an exchange in the first act between Lear and Cordelia, I had a taste of the frustration that could unleash Mr. Garrick’s temper.
He had just addressed me as Lear, and I had replied as Cordelia:
Unhappy am I that I can’t dissemble,
Sir, as I ought, I love your Majesty,
No more nor less.
Dismissively waving his hand to halt my speech, the master interrupted. “While you’re busy not dissembling, apply yourself to not mumbling, Miss Darby.”
Endeavoring to retain the simplicity for which Garrick’s own acting was much vaunted, I repeated my line with more volume. But my efforts were apparently unsatisfactory, for Mr. Garrick corrected me again, yet this time as King Lear.
Take heed Cordelia,
Thy Fortunes are at stake, think better on’t
And mend thy Speech a little.
Frustrated with my inability to get it right, I ended up raising my voice to such
