GARRICK AND QUIN; GARRICK AND BARRY.
This new actor, Spranger Barry, who has come to London to wrestle, as it were, with Garrick, is now in his twenty-seventh year, and has been but two years, brief noviciate, on the Irish stage. He had previously followed, with some reluctance, the vocation of his father, that of silversmith; but, respectable and lucrative as it was, the stage had more attraction for him, and thither he went in pursuit of fame and fortune, nor missed the object he pursued so steadily. His success in Ireland was great at a time when there was a body of players there, which for ability has certainly never been surpassed. Spranger was very well connected, and it was by the counsel of his kinsman, Sir Edward Barry, that he turned his face towards London, and resolved to try a fall there with David Garrick.
His first appearance was at Drury Lane, October 2, 1746,[48] in the character of Othello; Iago, Macklin; Cassio, Mills; Roderigo, Yates; Desdemona, Mrs. Ridout; Emilia, Mrs. Macklin. What aspirant entering on a struggle of a similar nature now, would be gratified with such notice as the press, in the General Advertiser, awarded to the new actor, on this occasion? "Barry performed Othello before a numerous and polite audience, and met with as great applause as could be expected."
And the triumph was as great as the player could have hoped for. In some things, Barry profited by the suggestions and teaching of Macklin; and the fact that for nearly eighty nights, about half of which were given to Othello, Lord Townley, and Macbeth, Barry drew crowded houses, will show that a new and dangerous rival had sprung up in Garrick's path, at the moment he was contending with a skilled and older rival at Covent Garden. In the earlier part of the season, Garrick had played Hamlet, King Lear, Richard, Archer, Bayes, and Chamont; Quin had played Richard, with no success; Cato, Bajazet, and Sir John Brute. The two met together for the first time in the same piece, on the 14th of November 1746, in the "Fair Penitent;" Horatio, Quin; Lothario, Garrick; Altamont, Ryan; Calista, Mrs. Cibber.
This was the greatest theatrical event that had occurred for years; and when the actor of the old school, and he of the new met on the stage, in the second act, the audience who now first saw them, as they had long wished to see them, face to face, absolutely disconcerted them by a hurricane of greeting—a perfect storm of gratulation, expressed in every way that applause can be given, but in louder and longer peals than had ever been heard by actors of that "generation." When it had passed, every word was breathlessly listened to; every action marked. Some were won by the grand emphasis and the moral dignity of Quin; others by the grace, spirit, and happy wickedness of Garrick. Between them, it was difficult to award the palm of supreme distinction to either—and Mrs. Cibber was, for once, forgotten. They subsequently played together Falstaff and Hotspur; and Hastings and Glo'ster, repeatedly, in "Jane Shore." Glo'ster was one of Quin's "strut and whisker parts," and Garrick had such advantage over him in Hastings, that "the scale was now completely turned in Garrick's favour."
Was it from fear that Garrick declined to play Jaffier to Quin's Pierre? It could not have arisen from fatigue, as alleged, for Garrick wrote a capital farce, "Miss in her Teens," and played Fribble in it, and then created Ranger, in Dr. Hoadley's "Suspicious Husband," in which Quin declined the part of Mr. Strictland, and gave to Bridgwater the one opportunity which he seized, of being considered an actor. In Ranger, Garrick surpassed even what old playgoers could recollect of comic excellence. His "Neck or nothing; up I go!" became a popular saying, and the rendering it was a tradition on the stage, from his days to the days of Elliston, the gentlemanly impudence, and the incomparable grace of whose Ranger is still remembered by many among us.
The originality of style and expression in this comedy displeased Quin. He was a conservative, and disliked innovation; contemptuously called the piece a speaking pantomime—forgetful that the old comedies were often much more farcical (which is what he meant) in their incident, and when a name for it was being discussed, suggested scornfully "The Hat and Ladder." Some of Hoadley's friends kindly foretold failure, in order to afford consolation after a kind. Thence the epigram of one of them:—
"Dear doctor, if your comic muse don't please,
Turn to your tragic and write recipes."
Not merely as a character piece, but for construction of plot, simplicity and grace of style, and comparative purity of speech and action, the "Suspicious Husband" is the best comedy the eighteenth century had, up to this time, produced. It has a good story clearly and rapidly developed, and the persons of the drama are ladies and gentlemen, and not the dully-vivacious ruffians and the unclean hussies of the Aphra Behn, the Etherege, and Sedley period. The writer was a "royal physician," and son to the famous bishop who, for his opposition to civil and ecclesiastical tyranny, was treated as if he were an infidel. The bishop did not go to witness his son's play; but as all the Hoadleys had a theatrical turn, I feel sure he and his family read it, with many a cheery laugh, in the old room at Chelsea. George II. certainly did so at Windsor, and saw it, too, at the Garden, and was so well pleased with his physician, the author, that he gratefully sent him the handsome fee of £100.