Foote:
Source: Douglas Howard. ‘Samuel Foote: January, 1721-October 21, 1777’. Literature Resource Center. [ accessed 26 May 2008]
Samuel Foote was a mimic and playwright whose caricatures of London life gained him a reputation as the English Aristophanes and the Hogarth of the stage. Sometimes writing two or three parts for himself in a single comedy, Foote regularly played the predatory wit opposite the sorts of dullards he must have despised in real life. A modern purveyor of "old comedy," he mimicked friend and foe alike, and his contemporaries seem to have longed for him to imitate them, even though they feared the result. Acting in his own plays at the theater in the Haymarket, Foote successfully competed with the Drury Lane and Covent Garden patent houses for nearly thirty years. His antics were immensely popular, and many greater literary voices testified to his brilliance. When James Boswell argued that Foote would seem merely foolish in the company of Thomas Betterton, Samuel Johnson disagreed: "Foote, Sir, quatenus Foote," he said,"has powers superior to them all." Even Edward Gibbon considered him a worthy diversion. On being urged by his sister to flee London's tedious and stultifying summer, Gibbon refused, observing that "when I am tired of the Roman Empire I can laugh away the Evening at Foote's Theatre."
Born in Truro, Cornwall, in 1721, Foote was named for his father, an apparently genial man who held several public offices, including Member of Parliament for Tiverton and mayor of Truro. Foote's mother, Eleanor, was the daughter of a baronet, Edward Goodere of Hereford. Like her son, she was short and plump, and even in her seventy-ninth year was said to possess the sharp tongue and quick wit that Foote seems to have inherited. Early biographers emphasized the eccentricity of the Goodere family, whose peculiarities ranged from the harmless to the malevolent. Indeed, Foote's first published work was a pamphlet describing the murder of one of his maternal uncles by another. At Oxford, Foote seems to have been an irrepressible prankster, and he left WorcesterCollege in 1740 without taking a degree. He dabbled in law at the InnerTemple, but as was his habit, he never applied himself seriously so long as he had ready cash to spend on the more pleasurable pursuit of being a bon vivant.
Soon weighed down by debt, Foote took the expedient of marriage to Mary Hickes, a former neighbor from Truro, on 10 January 1741. She came to him with a dowry that he promptly squandered. Contemporary accounts suggest that he treated his wife badly, even deserting her when his financial situation became less precarious. Mary Hickes appears to have died prematurely, and though she and Foote had no children, he did have two natural sons by a mistress, both of whom were provided for in his will. On the whole, however, his reactions to women were characterized by extremes of effusiveness and debasement, a fact which later helped fuel allegations that Foote was homosexual. In any case, Foote's marriage kept him out of debt only temporarily, and he eventually resorted to acting as a means of support. His wit had made him numerous wealthy and aristocratic friends who encouraged him to turn his talents in the direction of the theater.
Foote's initial appearance on the London stage was an unlikely one. He played Othello to Charles Macklin's Iago at the Haymarket, and Macklin himself observed that "neither his figure, voice, nor manners, corresponded with the character." Critics and biographers are no doubt correct in asserting that tragedy was simply an inappropriate vehicle for Foote's gift of mimicry. It is worth remembering, however, that this Othello was Foote's acting debut, and as a novice he might have stumbled even in comedy. Furthermore, given the vanity of Macklin, who was Foote's tutor as well as fellow actor, it is possible that Macklin's assessment of Foote's performance was less than generous. In any case Foote did act the part several more times, including a benefit at Drury Lane.
More significant than Foote's actual performance in Othello was the fact that Macklin's production, like Foote's later managerial efforts, was intended to evade the Licensing Act. Advertisements maintained that tickets were available gratis and that Shakespeare's play would be performed "by a set of Gentlemen for their own Diversion." This attempt to justify unauthorized competition with the patent houses anticipated Foote's similar ruse, beginning with The Diversions of the Morning in 1747. Macklin's lessons in oratory and elocution may have been superfluous in light of Foote's natural gifts, but this initial experience at the Haymarket clearly prepared Foote to follow in the steps of Theophilus Cibber and William Gifford as a successful evader of the Licensing Act and a plague upon the managers of Covent Garden and Drury Lane.
Foote's career as a comic actor seems to have been launched at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin during the 1744-1745 season. Upon his return to Drury Lane, on 1 November 1745, he played a series of comic parts, the majority of which he must have acted during the previous season in Dublin. These included Sir Harry Wildair in George Farquhar's The Constant Couple, Lord Foppington in Sir John Vanbrugh's The Relapse, and most significant, Bayes in George Villiers, duke of Buckingham's popular burlesque, The Rehearsal. This last part, in which Foote continued David Garrick's tradition of improvisation and mimicry, proved an enduring vehicle for the future playwright. He appears to have delighted audiences by his mocking portrayal, or "taking off," of his contemporaries. The part was suggestive of the direction Foote's own dramatic efforts would take, and it was one to which he returned in the final years of his career, playing it to great acclaim at the Haymarket from 1772 to 1776.
In spite of his inroads at Drury Lane, Foote was not in demand as an actor during these early years, and it is doubtful that any amount of work could have financed his ostentatious life-style. Whether the mercurial Foote despaired over his lack of success is uncertain, but a letter from Garrick, dated 18 August 1746, says, perhaps in jest, that Foote "has renounced the Stage for Ever." In any case the nascent dramatist momentarily turned his attention to theatrical criticism, producing two unremarkable essays, A Treatise on the Passions and The Roman and English Comedy Consider'd and Compar'd, both published early in 1747. Although these offer nothing new in a scholarly vein, the latter is of interest to theater historians because of Foote's extended, if irrelevant, comparison of the acting styles of Garrick and Colley Cibber.
By December 1746 Foote was again acting at the Haymarket, but this time he followed Macklin's example by renting the house and organizing his own theatrical troupe. In defiance of the patent theaters, he not only performed Othello once more, but on 22 April 1747, offered the first entertainment of his own devising, The Diversions of the Morning; or, A Dish of Chocolate . In a variation on the transparent ruse of advertising a musical concert with a play included gratis, Foote proceeded to advertise his new entertainment along with a farce called The Credulous Husband, which consisted of scenes from Congreve's The Old Bachelor. On the day after his Diversions of the Morning opened, however, the authorities locked the theater and turned the audience away, probably at the instigation of one of the owners of Drury Lane.
Having sampled Foote's abilities as a mimic in his Drury Lane stint as Bayes in The Rehearsal, actors at the patent houses had reason to fear his satiric jabs. Whether they dreaded ridicule or were merely annoyed at Foote's pilfering from the standard repertoire, the actors at the patent theaters were undoubtedly behind the effort to stop Foote's Haymarket venture. Foote was equally determined to stay open, and apparently with the help of well-placed friends (who would have occasion to rescue him more than once), the fledgling playwright was allowed to continue his Diversions of the Morning, so long as no direct infringement on the rights of the patent theaters was observable. The compromise, as Foote's notice in The Daily Advertiser for 24 April made clear, was to move his Diversions of the Morning to midday, on pretense of his audience's drinking "a dish of chocolate" with the author. No such dish was ever served, of course, nor was the similarly fictitious "dish of tea" offered by Foote on 1 June 1747, when he once more risked treading on the wary toes of the patent houses by moving his entertainment to half-past-six in the evening.
Foote's Cup of Tea continued his unparalleled success in drawing audiences to the Haymarket. His own makeshift company had given thirty-five performances by 6 June 1747, and Foote took his entertainment to Drury Lane at the end of the year. The precise content of these early performances is impossible to discern, even though two versions of the second act of Foote's Diversions are extant. The first of these was printed by Tate Wilkinson in The Wandering Patentee and represents the second act as performed at Drury Lane in 1758-1759. The second version of act 2 of Diversions, also printed by Wilkinson, was called Tragedy a-la-Mode; or Lindamira in Tears and was acted at the Haymarket in 1763. Foote's medium was a fluid one and his jests highly topical, but these two printed texts give a general idea of Foote's early technique. Each is a variation on the Rehearsal format, and each was probably accompanied in performance by a more topical piece in which Foote satirized contemporary events and individuals.
Foote celebrated his success by disappearing from the theatrical scene, probably to spend his profits vacationing in France. He did not return until 4 November 1747, when he again performed his Cup of Tea at the Haymarket and then as an afterpiece at Covent Garden. Interest in his satiric jabs had begun to wane, however, and early 1748 found Foote in Dublin once more. His next appearance at the Haymarket was on 18 April 1748 with An Auction of Pictures, in which he offered a satiric portrait of Henry Fielding, among others. The result was a small theatrical war in which Foote and Fielding fought skirmishes in print as well as on the stage. In addition to offering a puppet show in regular competition with Foote's Haymarket fare, Fielding lambasted him in The Jacobite's Journal, entering the judgment that "you Samuel Fut be p-ssed upon, with Scorn and Contempt, as a low Buffoon; and I do, with the utmost Scorn and Contempt, p-ss upon you accordingly."
The quarrel with Fielding was followed the next year by an even more heated one with the actor Henry Woodward, which resulted in a small riot that seriously damaged the Haymarket. Foote's attention was eventually deflected by his work on The Knights, his first real play. Unlike his earlier mixtures of adaptation and mimicry, The Knights was a comic love intrigue with a country setting. It was still the occasion for satire, however, including targets so unlikely as Italian opera and the gentry of Cornwall. Foote opened The Knights at the Haymarket on 3 April 1749, and by 1 June it had received twenty performances.
With the end of the Haymarket season, Foote again left the stage, apparently to spend money he had recently inherited. He did not return until his production of Taste, which was first performed at Drury Lane on 11 January 1752. Continuing the direction toward full-blown comedy that he had begun with The Knights, Foote wrote Taste as a satire on the burgeoning antiquarian trade. The play ridicules those who unthinkingly prefer the ancient and exotic over the modern and familiar. The frontispiece to the first edition illustrates the range of "ancient" artifacts by means of which would-be connoisseurs were duped. Chief among the gullible collectors is Lady Pentweazel, whose nouveau-riche pretensions were acted to great acclaim by the comedian Jeremy Worsdale. Only the first act of Taste seems to have had enduring appeal, however, and later performances often substituted a burlesque ultimately deriving from Foote's successful formula in Diversions of the Morning.
After the production of Taste , Foote again took to travel and did not return to the stage until 24 March 1753, for the opening of The Englishman in Paris at Covent Garden. Having mocked the aesthetic pretensions of his countrymen in Taste, Foote turned in his new play to the doltishness they exhibited in travels abroad. Although the play remained in the Drury Lane and Covent Garden repertoires for more than two decades, its satire is weighty and didactic compared with Foote's more mature efforts. Foote himself, who followed Macklin in the role of Buck, seems to have tired of the part by the end of the next season and rarely performed it afterward. Perhaps Foote saw the inadequate characterization of his rowdy Englishman. The title role of Buck presents an oddly contradictory individual, at once generous and gullible, courageous and rash. To link these opposites required deftness and range of the sort that Farquhar and Richard Brinsley Sheridan possessed but that Foote did not. As Simon Trefman observes, "Foote was a master of the many tongues of roguery, but knew only one heavy monotone for virtue."
The 1753-1754 season found Foote back at Drury Lane acting a variety of parts, including numerous, widely acclaimed performances as Buck in The Englishman in Paris. By February, however, he was back at Covent Garden, where he also returned for the next season. Foote acted few parts and offered no new plays in the 1754-1755 season, and by 12 November 1754 he was out of work. Never at a loss for ingenious ways to lure the public, however, Foote rented the Haymarket in order to give mock lectures ridiculing Macklin's recently opened school of oratory. The result was just the sort of theatrical war that seems to have bolstered Foote's career whenever its demise seemed imminent. Audiences for Foote's "lectures" were large, and Macklin himself added to their success by appearing in person and being subjected to further ridicule.
During the summer of 1755, Foote encouraged Arthur Murphy in the latter's plan to write a sequel to The Englishman in Paris. Inspired by Murphy's idea, however, Foote secretly wrote his own sequel, The Englishman Returned from Paris, which opened at Covent Garden on 3 February 1756, two months before Murphy's play. Early biographers insisted that Foote plagiarized wholesale from Murphy's work, but the discovery of Murphy's Englishman from Paris in the Newberry Library, and its publication in 1969 by the Augustan Reprint Society, put such accusations to rest. Foote was certainly duplicitous in simultaneously encouraging and competing with Murphy, but he did not steal Murphy's material, and his own play is clearly superior. In fact, Foote's foppish Buck and wily Lucinda were more successful in this play than in the original. The Englishman Returned saw nineteen performances by the end of its first season, and it was acted regularly at Covent Garden until 1760.
Foote occupied himself during the summer of 1756 by dramatizing a widely publicized feud between Peg Woffington and George Anne Bellamy. The two actresses had apparently taken to heart their competing roles in Nathaniel Lee's The Rival Queens, and a quarrel over one of Bellamy's sumptuous Parisian gowns ended with Woffington driving her from the stage with a wooden dagger. The text of Foote's Haymarket farce on the subject does not survive, but he called it The Green-Room Squabble or a Battle Royal between the Queen of Babylon and the Daughter of Darius.
On 5 February 1757, Foote's new play The Author opened at Drury Lane and was widely praised. The plot, one Sheridan was to adapt in School for Scandal (1777), involves a father who is presumed dead and who disguises himself in order to spy on his son, the impoverished author of the play's title. In addition to having a thoroughly worked out comic plot, The Author provided an appealing vehicle for Foote's own talents as a mimic. The ostensibly secondary part of Cadwallader was a satiric portrait of the boisterous John Apreece (or ApRice), whose vanity had led him to encourage Foote to portray him on the stage. Foote drew large audiences as Cadwallader, even though some critics objected to the blatantly and hominem attack on Apreece. Although Foote's talent for mimicry insured the success of The Author, the play also showed that Foote could build character and sustain plot, skills that he had begun to manifest in his previous play, The Englishman Returned.
Foote began the 1757-1758 season at Drury Lane, but the terms of his agreement with Garrick included plans for a two-month stint in Dublin with Thomas Sheridan's company. In October, therefore, Foote set sail for Dublin with the young Tate Wilkinson, whose talents as a mimic Foote promoted, only to have Wilkinson win acclaim in a devastatingly accurate imitation of Foote himself. Upon his return to London in January, Foote took up the part of Cadwallader again, but Apreece objected so vociferously that Garrick did not offer the play after the 1 February performance. Foote was thus out of work at mid season again, though he seems to have had the financial resources to survive until the beginning of the 1758-1759 season. By autumn, however, he still had no regular contract with either patent house and no new play to offer. Wilkinson, whose career was temporarily linked to Foote's, found himself in similar straits, and the two were rescued only by the unexpected departure of Woodward and several of his friends for Ireland. Woodward had quarreled with Garrick, and Foote used the breach to negotiate an agreement that stipulated employment for Wilkinson as well.