INTERIOR OF DRURY LANE THEATRE.
[CHAPTER IX.]
GEORGE FREDERICK COOKE.
About the time when Garrick was reluctantly bidding farewell to his home on the stage, at Drury Lane, a hopeful youth, of twenty years of age, born no one can well tell where, but it is said, in a barrack, of an English sergeant and a Scottish mother, was making his first grasp at the dramatic laurel, in the little town of Brentford.
With the exception of a passing appearance at the Haymarket, for a benefit, in 1778, as Castalio,—when London was recognising in Henderson the true successor of Garrick—the town knew nothing of this ambitious youth for more than twenty years; then he came to Covent Garden to dethrone John Kemble; and he disquieted that actor for awhile. In ten years more, his English race was done, and while Kemble was beginning the splendid evening of his career, Cooke passed over to America, prematurely ending his course, in disgrace and ruin, and occupying a grave which a civilised Yankee speedily dishonoured.
If Cooke was an Irishman, it was by accident. He was certainly educated in England; and he early acquired, by reading Otway and seeing Vanbrugh, a taste for the drama. In school theatricals, he made his Horatio outshine the Hamlet of the night; and his Lucia,—though the boy cried at having to play a part in petticoats,[74]—win more applause than his schoolfellow's Cato. School-time over, the wayward boy went to sea, and came back with small liking for the vocation; turned to "business," only to turn from it in disgust; inherited some property, and swiftly spent it; and then we find him in that inn-yard at Brentford, enrolled among strollers, and playing Dumont in "Jane Shore," to the great delight of the upper servants from Kew, Gunnersbury, and parts adjacent, sent thither to represent their masters, who had not the "particular desire" to see the play, for which the bills gave them credit.
The murmur of London approval, awarded to his Castalio, was the delicious magic which drew him for ever within the charmed circle of the actors, and George Frederick passed through all the heavy trials through which most of the vocation have to pass. He strolled through villages, thence to provincial towns, and I think, when in 1786, he played Baldwin to the Isabella of Mrs. Siddons, that lady must have been compelled, perhaps was willing, to confess, that there was a dramatic genius who, at least, approached the excellence of her brother.
From York, after much more probation, Cooke went over to Dublin, where he acted well, drank hard, and lost himself, in one of his wild fits, by enlisting. Fancy the proud and maddened George Frederick doing barrack scullery-work, and worse!—he who had played the Moor in presence of a vice-regal court! If his friends had not purchased his discharge, Miss Campion would certainly soon have heard that her Othello had hanged himself. The genius who would not be a soldier, though born in a barrack, found an asylum in the Manchester theatre; and subsequently Dublin welcomed him back to its well-trod stage. There, he and John Kemble met for the first time.
John took the lead, George Frederick played,—I can hardly call them secondary parts, for Booth had acted some of them to Betterton, Garrick to Sheridan, and one great performer to another,—such parts, in fact, as Ghost to Kemble's Hamlet, Henry to his Richard, Edmund to his Lear, and a similar disposition of characters. What Kemble then thought of his acting, I cannot say, but he complained of being disturbed by Mr. Cooke's tipsily defective memory. George Frederick was stirred to anger and prophecy. "I won't have your faults fathered upon me," he cried; "and hark ye, Black Jack,—hang me if I don't make you tremble in your pumps one day yet."