This paper examines how David Garrick in the eighteenth century and Edmund Kean in the early nineteenth century each built their reputations on performing the title role in Colley Cibber's adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard III. Drawing on contemporary biographical and critical sources — including accounts by Arthur Murphy, William Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt — the paper contrasts the two actors' approaches to key scenes, particularly the Bosworth Field battle sequence and the dismissal of Buckingham. Where Garrick brought an easy, familiar, yet forceful naturalism to the role, Kean projected a darker, more reflective villainy, illustrating the broader shift in theatrical sensibility between the two eras.
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David Garrick in the eighteenth century and Edmund Kean in the early nineteenth would both make their reputations performing the title role in Shakespeare's Richard III. As with the stage history of King Lear in the same period, however, neither was performing Shakespeare's text unaltered; both worked from the adaptation by former poet laureate Colley Cibber — the same writer Alexander Pope immortalized as King of the Dunces. Nicoll relates that Garrick became an overnight sensation playing the crook-backed usurper: the morning after his debut, Garrick wrote to his brother, "Last Night I play'd Richard ye Third to ye Surprize of Every Body & as I shall make very near 300 pounds p Annum by It & as it is really what I doat upon I am resolv'd to pursue it" (Nicoll 1). Meanwhile, Green notes that "Richard III was Kean's most popular role, and he played it more than any other, using it to open many of his London seasons and virtually every new engagement in England and also in America during his tours there in 1820 and 1825" (510).
Colley Cibber's adaptation of Richard III dominated the English stage for well over a century, and it is this version — not Shakespeare's original — that both Garrick and Kean performed. This shared textual foundation is important when comparing the two actors, since certain celebrated moments, including the dismissal of Buckingham examined below, were Cibber's own additions rather than anything found in Shakespeare. Understanding this context allows for a fairer assessment of what each actor brought to the role through his interpretive choices rather than through the playwright's words.
As a way of contrasting their styles, we may look at differing accounts of how each actor played the scene containing the play's most famous line. Garrick's biographer of 1801, Arthur Murphy, describes how Garrick performed the battlefield scene:
"The audience saw an exact imitation of nature… He was then on the eve of a battle, and in spite of all the terror of conscience, his courage mounted to a blaze. When in Bosworth field he roared out 'A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!' All was rage, fury, and almost reality." (Murphy 17)
William Hazlitt — who was a great admirer of Kean — described his performance in the final act while conveying the extraordinary popular acclaim the actor was receiving for the role: "If you had not been to see the little man twenty times in Richard, and did not deny his being hoarse in the last act, or admire him for being so, you were looked on as a lukewarm devotee, or half an infidel!" Kean played the final act with mounting energy, but overall Hazlitt's fellow critic Leigh Hunt would describe Kean's Richard as a "gloomy and reflective villain, rendered so by the united effect of his deformity and his subtle-mindedness" (Wood 122).
"Davies and sources describe the Buckingham moment"
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