George Colman the Elder

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Introduction to Plays by David Garrick and George Colman the Elder

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SOURCE: Wood, E. R. Introduction to Plays by David Garrick and George Colman the Elder: The Lying Valet, The Jealous Wife, The Clandestine Marriage, The Irish Widow, Bon Ton, edited by E. R. Wood, pp. 8-28. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

[In the following excerpt, Wood provides background information on Colman's theatrical career and his association with David Garrick.]

COLMAN AS MAN OF THE THEATRE

Colman's association with Drury Lane began as a member of Garrick's circle of friends and admirers, and it was as an amateur, earning his real living as a barrister, that he began writing plays. When Garrick set out in September 1763 for his prolonged continental tour, he left the theatre in the joint care of his partner James Lacy, his brother George, and his friend George Colman. Of the three, Colman was the best suited for choosing and adapting plays, recruiting and encouraging players, and promoting the business of the stage. But he had not yet abandoned the Law, and did not do so until his uncle the Earl of Bath died in 1764, leaving him a modest annuity instead of the fortune he had hoped for. He had always preferred the theatre: now he was free to choose. He needed to work seriously if the theatre was to be his profession. When Garrick returned in 1765 Colman may have felt a diminished role; and it is not surprising that he deserted Drury Lane when the opportunity arose in 1767 to buy a share in the Covent Garden patent. Garrick understood his motives, and was offended only because his friend had been secretive, and because he lured away some of the best Drury Lane actors.

Colman had stipulated to his colleagues that the organisation of plays and players should be in his hands, but he was soon involved in a bitter wrangle with two of his new partners, culminating in a lawsuit. They accused him of arrogating too much power to himself, of bad judgement of plays, of losing money; but he vindicated himself and the court found in his favour. He had set out to make Covent Garden a theatre for straight drama, but he had to modify his policy to suit the public taste for musical and spectacular entertainments. Yet he put on many full-length plays, a high proportion of them by Shakespeare, and several of his own plays, old and new. He early revived The Jealous Wife and when he produced The Clandestine Marriage his relations with Garrick were still so amicable that he was able to borrow two players from the rival company at Drury Lane. He gave Goldsmith his first hearing in the theatre, first with The Good Natured Man and later She Stoops to Conquer, both of which had first been offered to Garrick. Goldsmith, though a friend of both managers and a frequenter of the same clubs and coffee-houses, was despairing of ever seeing She Stoops to Conquer performed when he wrote to Colman, ‘For God's sake take the play and let us make the best of it.’ Colman took it, but gloomily, predicting failure; and he was not pleased when it proved a triumph. His judgement had erred—but so had Garrick's!

In the same year he suffered at the hands of a rioting mob a humiliation as deep as any of Garrick's. He had engaged Macklin to play Macbeth, but a faction hostile to this eminent actor refused to hear him. Macklin tried to appease the malcontents, but an apple hit him in the face and then everybody began to throw apples, and Macklin retreated. The mob demanded his dismissal, and insisted that Colman himself should announce it. The wretched manager was dragged on to the stage and abased himself to declare. ‘It is our object always to please the public, and happiness to conform to their pleasure when we know what this pleasure is.’

Apart from such troubles, Covent Garden flourished in the seven years of his management, and in 1774 he sold his share at a handsome profit. He then busied himself as a writer and resumed relations with Garrick, writing new plays for Drury Lane.

In 1776 he bought from Samuel Foote his special licence, renewable annually, for a summer season at the Haymarket, which had been the home of mixed entertainment, from opera to dancing dogs, until the Foote regime. Colman made of it an important addition to London theatre, recruiting a lively company of players, engaging new authors such as O'Keefe, Holcroft, Mrs Inchbald and his own son George the Younger, and presenting many new plays of his own and adaptations of Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Voltaire and Beaumarchais. Though increasingly afflicted by gout, epilepsy, paralysis and eventual insanity, he worked in the theatre until his son took it over in 1790. His career had amply justified his choice of profession.

THE PLAYS OF GARRICK AND COLMAN

Neither of the authors claimed originality as a virtue of their plays: indeed, Colman appeared unnecessarily eager to declare his sources as if needing their authority. They both exploited well-tried theatrical situations and themes, and easily recognisable comic types. Their plays are typical of their age, and among the best. Why, then, have they been so long neglected?

Classical comedy is preoccupied with the follies and foibles of a stable society, and some of these—cuckoldry, marriages of convenience, master-servant relations—seem less relevant today. Others, such as snobbery, affectation, intolerance between old and young, country simplicity set against city sophistication, still persist though in changing guises. The theatre nowadays craves for newness—a fresh, original viewpoint, a sharper bite, less ultimate reassurance—and the word ‘traditional’ has become a term of disparagement. Yet human folly is eternal, and theatre audiences can enjoy recognising in the sillinesses of past ages their equivalents in ours. And traditional stage situations can still make audiences laugh. …

THE JEALOUS WIFE (1761)

Colman's first play, Polly Honeycombe, was presented anonymously at Drury Lane, and at first widely attributed to Garrick, who had merely given some advice. He had a firmer hand in the next, The Jealous Wife. In the advertisement to the first edition, Colman acknowledges his obligation to Garrick: ‘To his inspection the comedy was submitted in its first rude state, and to … his advice in many particulars, relating both to the fable and to characters, I know that I am much indebted for the reception that this piece has met with from the public.’

Garrick was probably most concerned with cutting it to speed up the action. Arthur Murphy (Life of Garrick, 1801) says that Colman's next play, The Musical Lady, had originally formed part of The Jealous Wife ‘till Garrick saw it and discarded it as mere surplusage’. When this enjoyable little satire was presented a year later at Drury Lane, Garrick wrote the prologue.

Colman also made a point of acknowledging his debt to Fielding's Tom Jones, which he said must be obvious to the most ordinary reader. It is not. Hazlitt, praising The Jealous Wife half a century later, said that after seeing it several times he could not imagine what part of the plot was taken from Fielding. ‘Colman might have kept his counsel,’ he concluded, ‘and nobody would have been the wiser.’ It might be helpful, though, for an actor preparing to play Charles, to see him as a sort of Tom Jones, a bold wilful youth, prone to drink and fight and get into scrapes, but essentially a good fellow, rather than as a conventional young lover. And Tom Jones's Sophia could be a useful guide to playing Harriot, a girl of spirit who knows which of her three suitors she wants and will choose, even in defiance of her fond but wilful father.

Dr Johnson said of The Jealous Wife: ‘Though not written with much genius, it was yet so well adapted to the stage, and so well exhibited by the actors, that it was crowded for nearly twenty nights.’ Evidently a good piece of theatre rather than a work of literature.

Garrick as Oakly and Hannah Pritchard as his wife were the main attraction. Nowadays Mrs Oakly seems more tiresome than amusing, and Oakly perhaps shows too much forbearance to be effective; other scenes of the play seem livelier than theirs and other characters more rewarding to act. …

The success of The Jealous Wife was phenomenal. William Hopkins, the Drury Lane prompter, recorded in his diary that the applause was greater than any play had evoked since The Suspicious Husband, fourteen years earlier. It was revived in fifteen more seasons during Garrick's tenure, and held the stage for a century in Britain and America. Mrs Oakly became Sarah Siddons's best comedy role.

The text was published promptly and reprinted the same year. It went into five editions in Colman's lifetime. The first edition contained a letter of dedication to Colman's uncle the Earl of Bath. Colman was still practising the Law, as his uncle had wished, but he was thinking of abandoning this vocation for the theatre, and hoped for his approval. The earl was not placated, however, and Colman lost a fortune.1

THE CLANDESTINE MARRIAGE (1766)

The collaboration on The Clandestine Marriage probably arose from Garrick's help with The Jealous Wife. Its germ was an idea of Colman's, based on the first plate of Hogarth's series of six called Marriage à la Mode. This depicts the negotiation of a marriage between a rich business man's daughter and the son of an aristocratic family. ‘I had long wished to see those characters on the stage,’ Colman wrote to Garrick, ‘and mentioned them as proper objects of comedy, before I had the pleasure of your acquaintance.’ Garrick transformed the grim and gouty old nobleman into a more engaging and humorous character, a part offering wonderful scope for an actor of his quality, a faded and painted old beau with illusions of romantic youthfulness, Lord Ogleby.

To Colman's original theme of marriage as a financial transaction is added a romantic one, a secret marriage of genuine lovers. The two strands become interwoven when the young bride, turning in desperation to the old nobleman for help, but afraid to explain her situation clearly, causes him to leap to the ridiculous idea that he himself is the object of her secret love. The second theme of true lovers in distress was probably Colman's too.

The collaborators each wrote drafts of the plot, and then completed scenes which they discussed together, and by the time Garrick left in the autumn for a continental tour that was to last two years, they had completed three acts. Garrick wrote from Naples in December 1763: ‘I have not yet written a word of The Clandestine Marriage, but I am thinking much about it.’ In April 1764, he writes: ‘Speed your plough, my dear friend. Have you thought of The Clandestine Marriage? I am at it.’ Garrick seems eager to drive on: Colman, busy at Drury Lane, seems to have gone off the boil. There is a long hold-up when Garrick is seriously ill. Then he writes: ‘Did you receive my letter about our comedy? I shall begin, the first moment I find my comic ideas return to me, to divert myself with scribbling.’ But when Garrick came home in April 1765, the work was still to be done. They each did parts of the fourth act, and then came on great problems with the dénouement. Finally, Garrick wrote the brilliant fifth act.

In the early drafts of the work, Garrick had referred to his characters by the names of the players whom he visualised bringing them to life on the stage. Thus Ogleby was called Garrick; Sterling, Yates; Mrs Heidelberg, of course, was Clive; Lovewell was O'Brien. Melvil was then intended for King. It must have been a great advantage, in writing the play, to develop his characters to suit the particular abilities of his players. But now that the play was ready, the situation had changed. O'Brien, now in America, was replaced by William Powell, who had been a great success in playing Garrick's main parts in his absence. But a more serious change was that Garrick himself, for whom Lord Ogleby had been created, had decided after his illness—and perhaps some weariness of the theatre—to take on no new parts. He proposed that King should play Ogleby in his stead. Colman was deeply offended. He had counted on Garrick in the central role to ensure the success of the play. A quarrel resulted, which spread into a querulous dispute about who had written which parts of the play, no doubt exacerbated by trouble-makers passing on to each of them reports of what the other had claimed. All through his career Garrick was inclined to get into quarrels, but also capable of warm generosity in making them up. So in this case he cut through the pettiness: ‘I have ever thought of you and loved you as a faithful and affectionate friend,’ he wrote to Colman, ‘but surely your leaving London so abruptly and leaving complaints of me behind you was not a very becoming instance of your kindness to me. Your suspicions of my behaving in a manager-like manner are very unworthy of you. I have never assumed the consequence of a manager to anybody, much less to someone who—I leave your heart to supply the rest …’ Reconciliation followed and on Christmas Day 1765, in church, instead of listening to the sermon, Garrick scribbled a Christmas greeting to his friend, including these lines:

Though wicked gout has come by stealth
And threats encroachment on my health …
Yet think not, George, my hours are sad—
Oh no, my heart is more than glad!
That moment all my cares were gone
When you and I again were one.
This gives to Christmas all his cheer,
And leads me to a happy year.

Although relations were strained a number of times later—notably when Colman joined the management of the rival Covent Garden Theatre, without consulting Garrick—they always recovered the old friendship.

Controversy about the credit for The Clandestine Marriage has persisted. Colman's son gave it new twists with stories about what his father had told him. The evidence has been painstakingly sifted by scholars—most thoroughly by Elizabeth Stein and Frederick Bergmann—and leaves no doubt that the main credit should go to Garrick. Lord Ogleby is certainly his creation, being a development of Lord Chalkstone, a character in his early play Lethe. So is Mrs Heidelberg, who resembles Mrs Riot in the same play (where the part was also played by Kitty Clive). The lovers are in the sentimental tradition more congenial to Colman, and the satirical picture of the lawyers is surely based on his experience as a barrister on the Oxford Circuit. The last act, a lively example of skilled craftsmanship, is agreed to be Garrick's, very typical in its brisk pace. Twenty-five years on the stage, putting into practice his own positive ideas about acting and about the nature of comedy, had equipped him well for this first venture in creating a full-length play. Unfortunately, his only venture! The break-up of the collaboration may have robbed the English theatre of many great comedies. Colman was a man of letters with a good sense of the theatre; Garrick knew the techniques and traditional situations that worked in the theatre, and both knew their players and their capabilities. The withdrawal of Garrick's influence is supposed to have been a serious loss to Colman's future as a playwright, allowing him to move away from sharp comedy into a more sentimental vein. Certainly neither of them ever again achieved anything to equal The Clandestine Marriage.

A study of Garrick's first drafts shows that his revision was directed to shortening speeches or breaking them up with interruptions. As an actor whose guide was nature, he sought to make speech sound natural rather than literary. His dialogue shows a change from the elegant prose of earlier playwrights, still popular in his repertoire, such as Congreve. Only rarely do we find the sparkle of graceful wit, such as Ogleby's line: ‘Beauty, madam, is to me a religion, in which I was born and bred a bigot, and hope to die a martyr.’

Garrick once defined what he expected of comedy, in a message to a playwright whose work he found lacking: ‘the varying humours of the characters thrown into spirited action and brought into interesting situations, naturally arising from a well-constructed fable or plot’. Thus his characters are to be played as convincing people who evoke laughter by revealing their own follies unaware—not grotesques or butts of cold satire, nor distressed lovers shedding or provoking tears until a happy outcome is contrived. There is, of course, an element of this last in the secret marriage and in the volte face at the end which turns Ogleby into a generous benefactor of the lovers. After reading The Jealous Wife, one may reasonably attribute this to Colman. But Garrick was never so rigid as to eschew all sentiment; and the spirit of the play as a whole suits his definition of comedy.

Whatever profit or interest may be gained by pursuing analysis of Garrick's or Colman's hand in the play, the important point is that the collaboration was a brilliant success. Garrick at first concealed his share of the authorship, because, he explained, he had so many enemies among writers on account of his refusing their plays that he sought to avoid the torrent of abuse that their malice would pour upon him. But in a note to the printed play, published a fortnight after its first performance, he could safely claim his share. ‘Both the authors beg leave to make their joint acknowledgement for the very favourable reception of The Clandestine Marriage.’ …

It ran to nineteen performances in its first season, and sixty-eight in the remaining nine years of Garrick's reign. It was frequently revived for great actors to play Lord Ogleby during the nineteenth century. When it was performed in London in 1871, with Samuel Phelps as Ogleby, a critic in The Times wrote: ‘If forty years ago an habitual playgoer had been asked which was the best-known comedy in the English language, the two celebrated works of Sheridan being set aside, he would probably have named The Clandestine Marriage … This comedy might be regarded as one of the most genuine classics of the British stage.’

There have been a few memorable revivals in this century. When Donald Wolfit played Ogleby at the Old Vic in 1951, Ivor Brown wrote: ‘The crumbling gallant with December in his limbs, who fancies himself to be a lover in the flush of May, might be an ugly figure, a cruel cartoon; it becomes, with Wolfit, an essay in the courtesy of comedy, like a glimpse of a late Autumn garden, frosty but kindly, mellow in all its colours of absurdity.’

The printed text went into three editions in the first six weeks. In the nineteenth century it appeared in numerous volumes in Britain and America, and in German and Italian versions. In Britain it has remained available in the Everyman Library since 1928, and in at least four anthologies published in America.2

Notes

  1. Hazlitt's lecture The English Comic Writers of the Last Century (1818) contains an excellent critical appreciation of The Jealous Wife.

  2. An excellent critical appreciation of The Clandestine Marriage is to be found in Elizabeth Stein's David Garrick, Dramatist (New York, 1938).

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Introduction to New Brooms! (1776) and The Manager in Distress (1780): Two Preludes by George Colman the Elder