Figure 1 shows the first two pages of a ‘Dialogue’ between Heartly and Wormwood written by eighteenth-century actor, playwright, and stage manager David Garrick.¹ Heartly is an actor who is about to start performing in Garrick’s operatic version of The Tempest, which opened at Drury Lane on 11 February 1756. Wormwood is a critic who loves Shakespeare but dislikes opera because he believes that music enervates and emasculates the listener. ‘What! are we to be quiver’d & quaver’d out of our Senses?’, he exclaims. And then he adds, ‘Give me Shakespear in all his force, rigor & spirit! – what! would you make an Eunuch of him? – no[,] Shakespear is for my Money – ’ (i^r–i^v). Later in the ‘Dialogue’, Wormwood reiterates his love for Shakespeare and his hatred for ‘capering, & quavering’, which he finds ‘Unnatural, & abominable’ (iii^r). When challenged by Heartly – ‘But English music, Mr. Wormwood? … would you chuse that your Country shou’d be excell’d in any thing by your Neighbours?’ – he concedes: ‘In manufactures? – no – from the casting of Cannon, to the making of Pins, … but your capering & quavering, only spoil us, & make us the Jests, who shou’d be the Terrors of Europe’ (iv^r).

Figure 1 David Garrick, opening pages of the ‘Dialogue’, performed as prologue to Garrick’s The Tempest (1756)

(LA 123 Larpent Collection, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California).

The military language deployed by Wormwood and his belligerent stance against Britain’s neighbouring nations on the Continent establish a link between Garrick’s operatic adaptation of The Tempest and the imminent escalation of the French and Indian War (1754–63), which was fought against the British in the North American colonies, into the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), the first conflict that had Europe as its epicentre while involving an unprecedented number of global ‘theatres of war’. In this essay I argue that Garrick’s operatic Tempest, generally dismissed as a flop and as an embarrassing misjudgement on Garrick’s part, in fact takes on greater topical significance and political resonance when reconsidered in its wartime context and alongside its original prologue.² Garrick’s opera and ‘Dialogue’ are representative examples of wartime appropriations of Shakespeare, which, as this collection shows, often served as important platforms for the fashioning of current attitudes towards military conflict. In the second of the two pages of the ‘Dialogue’ reproduced in Figure 1, Heartly captures this very specific purpose of (re)playing Shakespeare at times of war when he urges Wormwood (and his audience) to ‘hear [him], or’, he warns, ‘the truth for which we are, or ought [to] be so warmly fighting, will slip thro’ our fingers’ (i^v). What is remarkable about this short dialogue (twelve pages in all) is that this rousing call to arms comes from a dubious, foppish character, whose notion of ‘truth’ is swayed, as Heartly points out, by ‘Paragraphs in Newspapers and insinuations in Coffee houses’ (i^v). As this essay goes on to show, the ‘Dialogue’ sounds a note of caution that invites reflection and possibly reconsideration of the motives for going to war. It also provides an important perspective on the opera, which would otherwise seem consistently aligned with Wormwood’s aggressive and exclusive nationalism.³

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Garrick pared down Shakespeare’s play quite radically by cutting the number of its original characters and the lines they speak in order to make space for thirty-two songs. It is therefore surprising to find as many as four named sailors in it, since there are none in the original: Trinculo and Stephano, who are described as ‘a Iester’ and ‘a drunken Butler’ in the list of dramatis personae appended to the earliest printed edition of Shakespeare’s play in the First Folio of 1623, are joined by Mustacho and Ventoso in the opera, where they are respectively listed as ‘Boatswain’, ‘Master of the ship’, ‘Mariner’, and ‘Mate’.⁴ Also noteworthy is that Garrick did not invent Mustacho and Ventoso. He borrowed them from an earlier adaptation of The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island by William Davenant and John Dryden, which had premiered at the Duke of York’s House on 7 November 1667. Along with Stephano and ‘Trincalo’ (sic) (A4^v), these two new characters play a significant part not only on the island, as reimagined by Dryden and Davenant, but also in the opening scene.⁵

In Shakespeare, the play opens with ‘A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning’. ‘[A] shipmaster, and a boatswain [and mariners]’ then enter, as they try and save the ship from splitting or running aground. Instead of keeping below deck, Alonso, the King of Naples, his brother Sebastian, his son Ferdinand, his councillor Gonzalo, and Prospero’s brother, Antonio, disrupt the crew as they go about doing their jobs as best as they can. ‘You mar our labour … You do assist the storm’, complains the boatswain, as he overrules his social superior, Antonio. When Gonzalo urges him to be patient, the boatswain retorts, ‘What cares these roarers for the name of king?’ (1.1.0.1–16). The dramatic shift from the crew’s insubordination, which mirrors the fury of the elements, to the peaceful setting of Prospero’s long narrative account of how he has in fact caused the storm to bring his enemies under his control acquires topical significance when read in relation to changing British policy for control over the sea. According to Paul Franssen, its main extra-dramatic purpose was to signal a break away from Elizabeth I’s policy of ‘open seas’ to the establishment of ‘sovereignty of the seas’ under James I.⁶ In the Dryden–Davenant play, the sailors and their officers’ drunken brawling and their greater prominence have instead been linked to charges brought against the British Navy following the Dutch invasion of the Medway during the Second Anglo–Dutch War (1665–67).⁷

By the time we get to Garrick’s opera, the four sea-faring characters had acquired an established presence on the English stage, where the Dryden–Davenant play had displaced the Shakespearean original for nearly a century. But their significance shifted once again. Relative to the overall brevity of the text, these characters are even more prominent in Garrick’s opera than in the Dryden–Davenant play. Compared to their Restoration predecessors, they are also significantly rehabilitated, mostly as a result of Garrick’s omission of Shakespeare’s opening scene. The beginning of Garrick’s opera is significantly different from both its Shakespearean and its Restoration antecedents in being remarkably quieter and orderly. The opening stage direction – ‘The Stage darkened – represents a cloudy sky, a very rocky coast, and a ship on a tempestuous sea.’ (B1^r) – suggests the use of a painted backdrop. Ariel is the first character to enter, singing a song borrowed from the Dryden–Davenant Tempest: ‘Arise, arise, ye subterranean winds’ (B1^r). Then Prospero enters with Miranda to claim complete control over the elements and all the other characters on the island. When Garrick’s Boatswain, Master of the ship, Mariner, and Mate are reunited and meet Caliban at the end of Act 1, they still fall out over who should be in charge of the island, but their exchange is much shorter than in the Dryden–Davenant adaptation, where it would have stirred uncomfortable memories of the English Civil War and Interregnum (1642–60). In Garrick, the four seafaring companions are garrulous rather than seditious. Trincalo (sic) ends up leading the others because he had the good fortune of getting to shore ‘on a butt of sack’ (C3^v) and wine is their most treasured possession on the island. As in William Hogarth’s contemporary print The Invasion, Plate 2: England, conviviality is not juxtaposed but rather conducive to comradeship and valour. In Hogarth, the English love for ‘Beef and Beer’ animates the revellers outside a country tavern in the foreground and sustains the well-disciplined soldiers training in the background. In his twin print, The Invasion, Plate 1: France, the French, by contrast, look bedraggled and malnourished, huddling anxiously underneath a sign that advertises ‘Soup Meagre a la Sabot Royal’.⁸ Overall, the prominence and rehabilitation of the four seafaring companions in Garrick register a renewed optimism in the strength of the nation’s naval power. It is significant in this context that, despite crushing land battles in the American colonies in the early stages of the French and Indian War, the British Navy had avoided defeat for Britain by taking hundreds of French vessels, thus cutting off reinforcement of enemy troops and ammunition.

In this respect, the ‘Dialogue’ would seem to bolster this nationalist element in Garrick’s opera. When trying to persuade Wormwood about the stirring power of ‘English music’, Heartly asks him to consider how, if ‘sounded in the Ears of five thousand brave Englishmen, with a Protestant Prince at the Head of ’em’, it would rouse them into action. Heartly, whose ‘good nature’ Wormwood often praises (and patronizes), uncharacteristically encourages the music-hating critic to imagine how the roused soldiers would ‘drive every Monsieur into the sea, & make ’em food for sprats and Mackrell’ (v^r). It is perhaps the culinary appeal of ‘sprats and Mackrell’ that contributes to changing Wormwood’s appreciation of music so quickly, as suggested by his sudden and cordial admission of defeat: ‘I see my Error – but I’ll make amends – let us meet after it [the opera] is over, & take a Bottle to Sprats & Mackrell’ (vi^r). Conviviality, fuelled by ‘sack’ in the ‘low’ plot of Garrick’s opera and by ‘Sprats and Mackrell’ in the ‘Dialogue’, produces the necessary optimism and fellow feeling required to repel foreign invaders. However, the next section of this essay shows how both Garrick’s opera and his ‘Dialogue’ register current anxieties about Britain’s ability to retain control over the fast-expanding frontiers of the Empire, which in turn qualify this optimistic outlook about the imminent outbreak of a new war in Europe.

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Caliban is one of Shakespeare’s most prominent and vocal outsiders. Both Prospero and Miranda call him ‘savage’ (1.2.355), ‘thing most brutish’ (1.2.357), and ‘slave’ – ‘poisonous slave’, ‘most lying slave’, and ‘Abhorrèd slave’ (1.2.320, 345, 351).⁹ Caliban disputes their account of how he came to be enslaved and reclaims ownership over the island: ‘This island’s mine by Syrcorax my mother, / Which thou tak’st from me’ (1.2.332–33). Even more crucially, his language sounds quite the opposite of ‘savage’ or ‘brutish’. This is most memorably the case when he reassures Trinculo and Stephano that ‘the isle is full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not’ (3.2.127–28). It seems especially strange that Garrick, who champions the power of music to move the heart and rouse the spirit in the ‘Dialogue’, should cut these lines from his opera, since Caliban goes on to recall how ‘Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments / Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices, / That if I then had waked after long sleep, / Will make me sleep again’ (3.2.129–32). Caliban’s character is in fact the most drastically abridged role in the opera as a whole: he does not feature in the first act, as he does in Shakespeare; he speaks just a handful of his original lines when he stumbles on Trincalo and his other seafaring companions in the second act; and he does not return in the third and final act. Caliban is not even mentioned in the Argument prefaced to Garrick’s opera.

The extent to which Garrick cut Caliban’s role is even more remarkable when his opera is compared to the Dryden–Davenant adaptation, where Caliban not only speaks most of his original lines but has also acquired a sister, named Sycorax after their mother. Also worth noting is the increased threat posed by Caliban and Sycorax to the European visitors. As in Shakespeare (but not in Garrick), Caliban admits that, had Prospero not ‘prevent[ed]’ him, he would have ‘peopled else / This isle with Calibans’ by sleeping with Miranda (1.2.350). The risk of miscegenation is higher in the Dryden–Davenant play, because Caliban’s sister displays a similarly active and unruly sexuality: first she throws herself at a reluctant but ultimately acquiescing Trincalo, who wants to inherit the island by marrying her; and then she offers to ‘marry that other King and his two subjects [Stephano, Mustacho and Ventoso] to help [him] anights’ (G1^v). Despite these notable expansions of the ‘low’ plot, Dryden and Davenant also cut Caliban’s most poetical lines quoted above (‘This isle is full of noises …’). In Garrick, Caliban becomes a minor role: his sensitivity has all but disappeared, along with his subversive resistance and most of his original lines.

The fact that Caliban becomes increasingly unthreatening by the Restoration and increasingly marginal by the mid-eighteenth century is symptomatic of growing (rather than abating) anxieties generated by the expansion of Britain’s colonial territories. According to Linda Colley, the territorial gains secured by the end of the Seven Years’ War left Britons ‘in the grip of collective agoraphobia, captivated by, but also adrift … in a vast empire’ that both fascinated and challenged them with its riches and its strangeness.¹⁰ Telling in this respect is a related adjustment to the way in which the island is represented. In Shakespeare, the island is often a projection of the emotions experienced by its inhabitants. The noises that ‘give delight’ to Caliban and ‘hurt [him] not’ drive the king and his party frantic with fear. Similarly, the island seems in turn ‘barren’ or ‘fertile’, and has ‘fresh springs’ but also noxious ‘brine-pits’ (1.2.339) and ‘unwholesome fen’ (1.2.322–23), whose ‘wicked dew’ Caliban threatens to use to poison Prospero and Miranda. Similarly, in the Dryden–Davenant adaptation the riches that the island can yield – ‘Every dainty you can think of, / Ev’ry Wine which you would drink of’ (F3^r) – are offset by hidden and nightmare-like dangers. Alonso tells his party how ‘he pull’d a Tree, and Blood pursu’d [his] hand’ (C4^r). He then urges them to ‘Beware all fruit but what the birds have peid [pecked]’ (D1^r) and warns them that even the ‘shadows of the Trees are poisonous’ because ‘A secret venom slides from every branch’ (D1^r). In Garrick’s opera, all hidden dangers have disappeared. The island is neatly divided into ‘Prospero’s cell’ (B1^v ff.) and ‘the wild part’ (C2^v ff.), and the characters who inhabit these spaces never get to mix or interact with each other.

The island’s ‘wild part’ would therefore seem to be fully contained in Garrick. However, the ‘Dialogue’ strikes a very different note from the opera by offering an interesting corrective to the marginalization of Caliban. When Heartly urges the audience to ‘protect her [English music]’ because it is ‘distress’d’ by the common view that it is a minor art, he extends his appeal to encompass all other kinds of oppression: ‘’Tis the known principle of a Brittish [sic] Breast, / Those to befriend the most, Who’re most opprest’ (vi^v). One could argue that Garrick’s Caliban does not evidently fall into the category of the oppressed, since his character is so thoroughly sanitized, and its significance so drastically reduced. In fact, I would argue that the extent to which Caliban’s ‘distress’ is removed from, or rather repressed in, Garrick’s opera is symptomatic of the systematic denial that was proving necessary to make the colonial enterprise seem compatible with ‘the known principle of a Brittish Breast’.

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The war-related resonance and colonial anxieties that this essay has identified in Garrick’s Tempest and in his ‘Dialogue’ take on additional significance when considering that Garrick’s paternal grandfather was a French émigré Huguenot. David de la Garrique left France to resettle in London after the revocation of the edict of Nantes in 1685, which had granted limited rights to French Protestants since the end of the French Wars of Religion in 1598. Garrick’s career was punctuated by repeated attacks from critics who targeted both his lack of professional training as an actor and his French descent. As early as 1742, in a tract called ‘A Clear Stage, and no favour: Or, Tragedy and Comedy at War’, its anonymous writer claimed that advertising ‘Puffs’ should Garrick’s ‘way precede, / [so] England may his foreign Actions read’ (10). In a similar vein, in 1755, Theophilus Cibber, the son of classically trained, ‘old school’ actor and theatre manager Colley Cibber, who was following in his father’s footsteps, complained ‘that an Englishman, the Son of an Englishman, who … has been judged one of the greatest Ornaments of the English Stage … should be obstructed … by the Son of a Frenchman’ (‘An Epistle from Mr. Theophilus Cibber to David Garrick, Esq.’, 1755).

Given Garrick’s background, one might assume that the tension this essay has highlighted in his Tempest and accompanying ‘Dialogue’ between supporting the war effort and cautioning against oppressing those that are distressed stemmed from personal circumstances. However, a quick glance at news stories published by the press in early 1756 suggests that public opinion was similarly divided. On 1 January 1756, for example, none other than Colley Cibber, Garrick’s rival, had his ‘Ode for the New Year’ published in The Whitehall Evening Post. In it, he compares the fast-expanding British Empire to the imperial power of ancient Rome by referring to the reigning King George II as a Caesar: ‘Hail! Hail! Auspicious Day, / Advancing to prolong / The years of CAESAR’s Sway.’ Cibber’s poem shared the front page with a lengthy ‘Description of the Azores.’¹¹ A woodcut showing a ship, anchored just off a rocky coastline, surmounted by a fortified citadel opens this feature, where the islands are described as ‘very fertile in Corn, Wine, Variety of Fruits’ and ‘breed[ing] great Quantities of Cattle’. The syntax attributes active agency to the islands, suggesting that they offer an endless supply of labour-free goods:

The article goes on to mention a quasi-magical crop unique to these islands, ‘an extraordinary Root, … as big as a Man’s two Fists, cover’d with long, and small Fibres, of a Gold Colour, not unlike Silk’. Predictably a distinction is then drawn between the naivete of the inhabitants, who ‘only use [it] to stuff their Beds’, and what an ‘Ingenious Hand’ could do with it.

The combined effect on the reader of this front page is comparable to a reading of Garrick’s opera and ‘Dialogue’ that singles out its nationalist emphasis on the role of the arts (and of English music more specifically) to rouse the British to repel a potential French invasion on the home front and to continue to pursue colonial ambitions overseas. However, on the same day, the same reader might have read another article about the ‘State of Europe’ in The London Evening Post, which advocated for peace and power-sharing among all European nations: reflecting on the fact that ‘France has no Quarrel, no Shadow of a Quarrel with the Germanick Body’, its author regards the possibility of hostilities breaking out between these two countries as ‘the greatest of Absurdities’. The same article then goes on to report the unconfirmed news that the devastating earthquake that destroyed Lisbon on 1 November 1755 had also impacted the Azores. After inviting its readers to reflect on ‘the prodigious Loss the Portugueze Monarchy has suffered … by these tremendous Convulsions of the Elements’, this article reprints the same description of the Azores that the Whitehall Evening Post had published on its front page.

Reading these two newspapers on the same day would have had a comparable impact to heeding to the qualified, more inclusive nationalism that emerges from Garrick’s ‘Dialogue’ and opera. Garrick’s wartime appropriation of The Tempest and news stories published at the time suggest that both the London stage and the London press shared divided views about the ongoing colonial war overseas and the potential outbreak of another war in Europe. In the next essay, building on his earlier study of Garrick’s Harlequin’s Invasion (1759), Jonathan Crimmins shows that Garrick continued to uphold ‘a cosmopolitan stance of neighbourly reconciliation’ in a farce that, while drawing on nationalist sentiments, abounds in ironic qualifiers that ultimately undermine them.¹² His neglected operatic Tempest and even less well known ‘Dialogue’ represent a similarly complex appropriation of Shakespeare, which, as this essay has shown, initiated a tendency, still popular today, to turn to Shakespeare to process conflicting attitudes to war and to negotiate divided allegiances exacerbated by it.