Garrick’s Flattery
Yesterday in Intro to Theatre class we reviewed the quote by David Garrick that too few were able to decipher last Monday. Garrick was a middle-class man who knew how to flatter his audience, So when he wrote, “we who live to please must please to live,” there was no small amount of self deprecation, but also a certain repositioning of the audience to see itself as the moral authority able to dictate taste. The middle-class at this time were filling up the ever growing theatre buildings and it was a sober realization by Garrick in his entertainment economy that he needed to position the audience as central to his theatre of taste and refinement.
Garrick’s view is in contrast to Jeremy Collier’s tract a century earlier where he lambasted the theatre for not achieving the lofty goals of Neoclassicsm set down by Horace and Aristotle. Garrick did not end Neoclassicism with his celebration of the middle-class taste. His position was that the audience had already internalized the Neoclassical ideas and that they already were civil and good people who did not need to be taught how to “recommend virtue [and] discountenance vice.” It is an opening in the changes that would slowly introduce the idea that ordinary people were the arbiters of taste. By doing this he also introduced the idea that the Neoclassical ideals were not immutable rules set down for all posterity and that they were possibly open to change. These were the very ideas that would eventually support the rebellion called Romaticism, which would bring an end to the Neoclassical traditions.
