Theatre, Celebrity, and Contagion: David Garrick's 1742 Dublin Visit and James R. Planche's Garrick Fever
Garrick, the rising star of the London stage, tread the boards of Dublin's Theatre Royal in Smock Alley. On his way to becoming the most famous actor of his century, Garrick treated his audience to a new role that he would play to packed audiences for decades to come, Shakespeare's Prince Hamlet. In return, Dublin gave him both his permanent moniker of the "English Roscius" and a potent anecdote that mythologised his impact on theatrical audiences: Garrick fever.1 by all accounts, Dublin society's unbridled enthusiasm for the young English thespian transformed his first visit to Ireland into a significant medical as well as cultural event. Garrick's popularity apparently hastened the spread of "an epidemic fever in Dublin on account of the crowded audiences at the theatre" (Murphy 1: 34) This temporally and geographically specific illness, also dubbed Garrick fever, was conflated with the fervour stirred by Garrick's reputation and presence. The phenomenon of Garrick fever, part of the episodic narrative of the Georgian actor celebrity's meteoric rise, was used to signal that Garrick himself was a phenomenon. The actor's early biographers beginning with Arthur Murphy and Thomas Davies repeated the tantalising story of Dublin's infection, as did a bevy of late eighteenth and nineteenth century theatre historians. What is more, the prolific victorian playwright James Robinson Planche went so far as to compose Garrick Fever (1839) a one act farce inspired by this anecdote. 78 THEATRE NOTEbOOK