Perhaps Richard III. remained Garrick’s best Shakesperean character.  Of course he played Cibber’s version and not Shakespeare’s.  In fact, many of the Shakesperean parts were not played from the poet’s own text, but Garrick might have doubted whether even his popularity would have reconciled his audiences to the unadulterated poetry of our greatest dramatist.

Next to Richard, Lear would seem to have been his best Shakesperean performance.  In Hamlet and Othello he did not equal Betterton; and in the latter, certainly from all one can discover, he was infinitely surpassed by Edmund Kean.  In fact Othello was not one of his great parts.  But in the wide range of characters which he undertook, Garrick was probably never equalled.  A poor actor named Everard, who was first brought out as a boy by Garrick, says:  “Such or such an actor in their respective fortes have been allowed to play such or such a part equally well as him; but could they perform Archer and Scrub like him? and Abel Drugger, Ranger, and Bayes, and Benedick; speak his own prologue to Barbarossa, in the character of a country-boy, and in a few minutes transform himself in the same play to Selim?  Nay, in the same night he has played Sir John Brute and the Guardian, Romeo and Lord Chalkstone, Hamlet and Sharp, King Lear and Fribble, King Richard and the Schoolboy!  Could anyone but himself attempt such a wonderful variety, such an amazing contrast of character, and be equally great in all?  No, no, no!  Garrick, take the chair.”

Garrick was, without doubt, a very intense actor; he threw himself most thoroughly into any part that he was playing.  Certainly we know that he was not wanting in reverence for Shakespeare; in spite of the liberties which he ventured to take with the poet’s text, he loved and worshipped him.  To Powell, who threatened to be at one time a formidable rival, his advice was, “Never let your Shakespeare be out of your hands; keep him about you as a charm; the more you read him, the more you will like him, and the better you will act.”  As to his yielding to the popular taste for pantomime and spectacle, he may plead a justification in the words which his friend Johnson put into his mouth in the Prologue that he wrote for the inauguration of his management at Drury Lane:—­

    “The Drama’s laws the Drama’s patrons give,
    And we, who live to please, must please to live.”

We must remember how much he did for the stage.  Though his alterations of Shakespeare shock us, they are nothing to those outrages committed by others, who deformed the poet beyond recognition.  Garrick made Shakespeare’s plays once more popular.  He purged the actors, for a time at least, of faults that were fatal to any high class of drama, and, above all, he gradually got rid of those abominable nuisances (to which we have already alluded), the people who came and took their seats at the wings, on the stage itself, while the performance was going on, hampering the efforts of the actors and actresses.  The stage would have had much to thank Garrick for if he had done nothing more than this—­if only that he was the first manager who kept the audience where they ought to be, on the other side of the footlights.