David Garrick (play)

The play premiered at the Prince of Wales Theater in Birmingham, where it was successful enough to be moved to the Haymarket Theatre in London, on 30 April 1864.

Several silent films were made based on David Garrick, including versions in 1913 (starring Seymour Hicks and Ellaline Terriss), 1914 and 1916.

A 1923 book, Public Speaking Today, recommends it for performance by high school students alongside The Importance of Being Earnest and The Rivals.

But when he came to the party scene, in which David acts like a madman, Sothern became so excited that he began to smash the glasses and upset the furniture.

Robertson was quoted as saying, in response to critics of this historical inaccuracy, "The real, actual Mr. David Garrick was not married until the year 1749.

He then suggests that Ada and Garrick could have been prevented from marrying by death, break-up or other external factors, and thus his story would not be contradictory to history.

The story is, according to the title page of most printed versions, "Adapted from the French of Sullivan, which was founded on a German Dramatization of a pretended Incident in Garrick's Life."

Sullivan was a French comic play of 1852 by Anne-Honoré-Joseph Duveyrier de Mélésville, which Adams' Dictionary of Drama claims to have been based on Joseph Bouchardy's 1836 short story Garrick Médecin.

A young woman, Ada, has developed a crush on the actor David Garrick so strong that she refuses to accept a marriage arranged by her father, Mr. Ingot.

Garrick is invited to a dinner party at Ingot's house, where he is stunned and horrified to realise that Ada is the very girl he had been admiring from afar, but because of his promise, he goes through with his plan.

Her fiancé Richard Chivy arrives, actually as drunk as Garrick was just pretending to be, and he tells the Ingots about how he just met David Garrick at his club and listened to him tell a story of how he had spent an evening pretending to be a scoundrel so as to cure a girl of her attraction to him.

Garrick learns that Ada is hiding in the room, but he plays dumb and offers to help Chivy look for her, until the two men leave together for the duel.

One of the play's defining moments is the point when Garrick's feigned drunkenness appears to work, and Ada forces him to leave the party.

"You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize As the dead carcasses of unburied men That do corrupt my air, I banish you; And here remain with your uncertainty!

In the play, however, the wedding between Ada and Chivy is called off after Chivy openly races off in pursuit of Garrick's housemaid and carelessly leaves out embarrassing love letters sent between himself and other women, the novel shows the wedding cancelled when it is revealed that Chivy (called Raubreyne in the book) has an illegitimate child with a woman he has falsely promised to marry; and even then, Ada is only permitted to marry Garrick after "dying of love" leaves her otherwise incurably bedridden for several months.

In the introduction to the 2009 reprint, it is speculated that the "less farcical tone" may have more closely resembled Robertson's early drafts of the play, before Sothern's contributions.

[9] While much of the humour was removed in the novelisation, a great deal of exposition was added, and the story begins on the day Garrick and Ada first meet.