Macklin:
Source: Richard B. Schwartz. ‘Charles Macklin: May, 1699-July 11, 1797’. Literature Resource Center. [ accessed 28 May 2008]
During a life that spanned almost the entire eighteenth century, Charles Macklin distinguished himself as a playwright, an actor / manager, and a champion of artists' rights. Apart from his life in the theater, Macklin enjoyed a brief period as a tavern keeper, which was a short-lived mid-career venture. His plays exhibit a passionate desire to reveal society's irrationality through the use of madcap humor; his theatric style, it is said, initiated a revolution in acting technique. Besides his work as an actor and a playwright Macklin was well known for his excellent method of teaching acting, his emphasis always falling on the improvement of elocution.
He was the first actor of his generation to make a clean break from the old declamatory style, in which the words being uttered did not necessarily carry any emotional content pertinent to the psychological reality of the character the actor was portraying. Macklin attempted to wrest the process of acting from the jaws of monotony and boredom, and he started a movement for which he still receives far too little credit. His reforms in performance as well as theater etiquette, especially stage management, accelerated a trend toward professionalism in the theater world. If actors had usually been treated as second-class citizens it was often because they themselves had acted irresponsibly. Macklin valued his profession and worked dilligently throughout his career to raise its stature; in the process he became known for his difficult temperament and his standards of perfection. However, his demanding efforts were not in vain. He became famous for his revolutionary interpretation of Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and in his later years he increased his fame by playing two parts that he had created, that of Sir Archy Macsarcasm in Love à la Mode and Sir Pertinax Macsycophant in The Man of the World. In fact, Macklin made the better part of his fortune by using aspects of his own personality in the creation and depiction of a cast of unforgettable characters.
No stranger to controversy, Macklin's fierce independence led to a ceaseless determination to secure artistic control over creative works as personal property, a stance which would embroil him in numerous legal battles. More than once he filed suit to maintain control of the fruits of his creative labor. Macklin lived an active and provocative existence throughout his turbulent career. His life and works serve as the linkage between two ears in the history of the theater.
The background of Macklin's life is shrouded in self-created mystery. However, the most likely date of his birth is 1699 (though Macklin would nor or could not acknowledge the precise date). In 1699, a son was born to Alice O'Flanagan (or Agnes Flanagan) and William McLoughlin (or Terence Melaghlin), either of which last name their son Cathal (Charles) anglicized to Macklin. It is generally believed that he was born and lived through his early teens in Culdaff, CountyDonegal, in northwestern Ireland. He grew up speaking Irish, and he was instructed by a stern Scots schoolmaster in his early years, a fact which may account for his unsympathetic depiction of the people of that country, notably as Macsarcasm and as Macsycophant. Through participation in a school play in which he took the role of Monimia in Thomas Otway's The Orphan, Macklin was introduced to the world of theater. Leaving home at an early age (probably at fourteen), he worked as a scout (also known as a badgeman or "page") at TrinityCollege before embarking for London. Macklin would not return to his native country until he was an established writer and actor.
The events and experiences of a number of Macklin's early years are lost to us, and one can only surmise what a young man of his age and ambitions might have done to keep body and soul together. Success did not come easy to Macklin in either his literary or his theatrical career. Some accounts report that he was in England as early as 1717, working as an actor in touring companies outside of London in such places as Bristol and Bath. As an apprentice for a number of years in the provinces, Macklin would have had a chance not only to perfect his technique but, more important, to cultivate an acceptable English accent, a requisite if he had any serious intentions about a career on the London stage. Macklin secured a position at Lincoln's Inn Fields in approximately 1730, where he most likely worked as a waiter at the coffeehouse and served as a jack-of-all-trades in the theater. Three years later, in 1733, Macklin's theatrical career began in earnest. Because of a walkout by a number of actors (among them Theophilus Cibber) Macklin was hired for an engagement in Drury Lane.
A second important event of 1733 was the birth the Macklin's first child, a daughter, Maria, born to Macklin and his common-law wife, Ann Grace Purvor. The couple finally married in late November or early December 1739. Mrs. Macklin was an actress of considerable comic talents and was a loyal companion to Charles throughout her life, both on and off the stage. They often performed together in such roles as those of Mr. and Mrs. Peachum in Gay's The Beggar's Opera. The daughter, Maria, became a formidable actress in her own right and performed many times with her father both in parts that he had created, as well as in common repertory roles. She died at the height of her career because of a tumor allegedly sustained by wearing a garter that was buckled too tightly. After an unsuccessful operation she died at the age of forty-eight.
In the years immediately following the fortuitous 1733 engagement, Macklin established himself as a leading actor at Drury Lane. Like many of his fellow actors, he lived in close proximity to Covent Garden, where he stayed throughout his career in order, he said, "to save coach hire."
A significant event of Macklin's life occurred in this early part of his career when he was arrested for involuntary manslaughter. Backstage at Drury Lane on 10 May 1735, Macklin got into an argument with another actor, Thomas Hallam, who had taken his wig before a performance. Angered because Hallam continued to bicker with him even after handing over the wig, Macklin swung around to point accusedly with a cane. By accident he jabbed Hallam's eye, causing an injury which resulted in death within a day. It is a testament to Macklin's popularity that, although he was found guilty, he served no time in prison. Fellow actors rallied to testify on his behalf, including his rival James Quin, and although Macklin was ordered to be branded, the brand was given as a formality with a cold iron.
Macklin continued to work at Drury lane under the manager John Highmore and, after him, Charles Fleetwood. Having garnered much favor with Fleetwood, Macklin was promoted to deputy manager. Macklin's first initiative in this position proved to be both highly successful and historically significant. It was in his capacity as deputy manager that he, in 1741, revived the original version of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. For many years a bastardized version of the play, George Granville's The Jew of Venice (1701), had been performed. As deputy manager, Macklin was given the responsibility of casting the play. With less talent at his disposal than he might have wished, he continued to press for high production standards, requiring the actors to appear promptly for rehearsals and to memorize lines faithfully and scrupulously. In addition, Macklin worked assiduously on the directorial concept of the production. He also developed a striking interpretation of Shylock, which he tempered while still in rehearsal lest the manager and the other actors revolt against his conception. When the opening night arrived, he released himself from his self-imposed constraints and offered an unprecedented interpretation of Shylock, showing the character in all of his humanity, both good and bad, both comic and tragic. For this work he is hailed as one of the greatest Shylocks in the history of the theater. His calculated performances rocked Drury Lane and prompted vast critical acclaim, the most famous of which is attributed to Alexander Pope: "This is the Jew / That Shakespeare drew." Apart from the realistic emotional portrayal Macklin offered, the role was also played in authentic dress, Macklin's costume thus making sense of the lines in the play referring to Shylock's "Jewish gabardine." He also wore a red hat which, in researching the part, he found to be a characteristic element of the dress of Jewish men in the time the play was set. Hereafter and, until he acted in the great parts he wrote, he was known to his colleagues and the public as Shylock. Scholars and theater professionals alike are indebted to him for reviving the original version of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. The strength of the image created by his performance in this role is the depiction of Macklin immortalized in Maria Edgeworth's nineteenth-century novel Harrington (1817), in which the young protagonist is taken by his friend to see "the most celebrated Jew in all England, in all Christendom, in all the world ...," who is, of course, Macklin's Shylock.
The actors' strike of 1743 prompted the great split between Macklin and David Garrick, a rift that would last through most of their careers. Both had vowed to maintain solidarity with the strikers until their demands were met by the management at Drury Lane. Garrick, however, broke the strike and went back to work, thus initiating the feud between the two men. Whereas Garrick went to work at Drury Lane. Macklin, never one to compromise his integrity nor to miss a fresh chance, took advantage of another opportunity. He joined Henry Fielding's company at the Haymarket with the young Samuel Foote as his assistant. This engagement kept him employed until later in the year when Garrick went to tour in Ireland, and Macklin left the Haymarket for a suitable arrangement at Drury Lane, once again securing a job because of the untimely departure of another actor. During this period he wrote many songs for plays, prologues and epilogues, and he was involved in nearly every aspect of each production, but he himself was yet to write an entire play.
Finally, the first of Macklin's plays, King Henry VII. Or the Popish Impostor, debuted at Drury Lane on 18 January 1746. Based on John Ford's Perkin Warbeck (1634), the play was written as a patriotic piece in response to the threat of a Jacobite invasion. Little is known about this work except for the fact that it was an utter failure. As a first effort it offers hints of Macklin's gift for satire, but its principal result was to make Macklin the object of ridicule. However, though the play was defeated, the author was not. Indeed Macklin satirized himself with references to the failure of that play in the prologue to his next--A Will and No Will: Or a Bone for the Lawyers (one of the characters referring to his previous work as a "merry tragedy").
Macklin's second play was not a great success, but it received more critical acclaim than his first. A Will and No Will: Or a Bone for the Lawyers opened at Drury Lane on 23 April 1746. Based on Jean-François Regnard's Le Legitaire universel (1708) and Ben Jonson's Volpone (1606), the plot of this two-act farce is told in the prologue (spoken by actors pretending they are members of the pit). The play concerns the efforts of a nephew, Bellair, who, with the help of a few servants, sets out to secure an inheritance from his decrepit uncle, Sir Isaac Skinflint, a grotesque part played by Macklin himself. The desired ends are achieved through the use of a series of absurd disguises and manipulative conversations designed to prey upon certain peoples' basic avarice and insecurity. Lawyers are tricked into making a false will with the servant dressed as Skinflint (who has supposedly died, a fact of which the lawyers are unaware). However, Old Skinflint comes back to life and tries to put a wrench in their plans. Thanks to the unbending stubbornness of the lawyers, the first will cannot be dissolved. The aged man is left in confusion and vows to prove that he was insane when the will was drawn.
This play expresses some of Macklin's dark attitudes toward human nature, attitudes which are further explored in his later plays. Some of the subjects the play treats are greed and parsimony, marriages of convenience, and the hideous injustice of the legal profession, all of which are cast in bold relief by the antics of Macklin's shrewd characters. However, the servant Shark's final words present Macklin's personal judgment: "For should our Will in Westminster be tried / The Right, I fear, would fall on t'other side. / Here you are absolute; confirm my Cause. / If you approve--a Figg for Courts and Laws!" Macklin characteristically underlines his plays' themes, leaving no doubt concerning the lesson one should glean from what has been offered in apparent jest.
The critical reception and popular response to Benjamin Hoadly's The Suspicious Husband helped inspire Macklin to write his third play, The New Play Critiz'd: or the Plague of Envy, which opened at Drury Lane on 24 March 1747. The play offers much insight into whether public opinion or critical exactitude should define the success or failure of a new play. It also demonstrates, in miniature, the integral part that the theater played in eighteenth-century London society. The play calls into question the true sources of a play's success: whether it be a "good play" because it entertains people or whether it must be capable of simultaneously exemplifying a certain number of Aristotelian principles or some other abstract gauge of "correct" art. The main character of the piece is a critic called "Canker." Played as an afterpiece at Covent Garden while Hoadly's The Suspicious Husband (featuring Garrick) played at Covent Garden, it is an interesting look at what Macklin himself may have felt as a writer in competition with other writers. The critic Canker says of envy, "All Mankind had some, but Authors most; and we can better brook a rival in our Love than in our Fame." The personal feelings of a man in competition with the likes of Quin and Garrick and not far from the surface.
The Fortune Hunters, Macklin's fourth play, made its first appearance at Drury lane on 28 April 1748. In this play some young Irishmen go in search of wives (that is, their fortunes) in London. William W. Appleton notes in his biography of Macklin that "the farce merits its total neglect." There has been speculation concerning whether the play is actually Macklin's, since he was in Dublin for the years 1747-1749, but Macklin traveled with great frequency, and it is likely that in between engagements in Dublin he sought to further his London interests. Macklin had gone to Dublin to work with Thomas Sheridan at the Smock Alley Theatre, where he formally agreed to take the great comic roles while Sheridan would play the tragic ones. Always one to follow opportunity, Macklin would spend the better part of the next four decades shuttling between jobs in England and Ireland.
Macklin was back in London and at the height of his career in 1750, when his son, John, was born. Unlike his sister, he did not pursue a life in the theater, choosing instead a vagabond's existence. Macklin attempted to give him a proper education, and at one time John attempted to carve out a living in the military in India, but he never found a suitable profession. His life was one of excess, and it ended early.
The fifth of Macklin's dramatic endeavors is Covent Garden Theatre; or Pasquin Turn's Drawcansir, which played on 8 April 1752. Macklin wrote this play in response to criticism of Fielding's role as a magistrate involved in issues of social reform. An afterpiece, it was performed at Covent Garden. The title comes from two names associated with Fielding: Pasquin was a character he had played in his own play of the same name, and Sir Alexander Drawcansir (from Buckingham's Rehearsal) was the assumed name he used in the Covent Garden Journal, the serial in which he often explored his experiences as a magistrate. The play has little plot. It two acts the follies and vices of society are paraded by a character who represents Fielding. This mini-pageant highlights once again the hypocrisy of Macklin's society. Though notable for its political passion, like his first play, it was not a theatrical success. The extent to which the play is designed to mock or defend Fielding is not entirely clear. Some have even argued that Fielding might have had a hand in the writing of the play, and, in fact, he advertised it in the Covent Garden Journal. Because of Macklin's penchant for reform in all aspects of the theater and the incisiveness of his wit regarding his society, it seems likely that he supported Fieldings's views. Moreover, the two men had been colleagues at the Haymarket theater and they had parted on the most amicable of terms.