Charles Macklin - Shylock and Other Roles

Shylock and Other Roles

Macklin’s most important role, the one that catapulted him to stardom in eighteenth century London, was Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. For several decades, the popular version of the play was a “fixed” text by George Granville, titled The Jew of Venice. In it, many roles were expanded, while Shylock and others were dramatically shortened. The eighteenth century audiences were used to seeing a comic Shylock, often dressing him in a red wig and a large nose, resembling the commedia dell’arte character Pantalone.

Macklin wanted a different path to playing this character. While Macklin didn’t return to the Bard’s script exactly as it was written, he did make his own edits to Shakespeare’s script that were much closer than Granville’s text. Instead of portraying Shylock as the usual comic pantolone, he played him as darkly villainous, serious, and highly satirical. Next, rather than dress Shylock as a clown, Macklin researched his role. He studied Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews, and observed Jewish people in London. He learned that Italian Jews, especially from Venice, were known to wear red hats, so he took that as a basis for his costume. In seeking to portray Jews exactly how they looked, Macklin emphasized the notion of historical accuracy in costuming, which would later become and inherent feature of realism in the 19th century. What’s even more interesting is that Macklin did not merely “study” the Jews. According to William Appleton, in An Actor's Life, "he actually interacted with them in marketplaces and learned to gradually adapt their way of speech".

Finally, opening night came. This faithfulness to Shakespeare’s original intent for the character, combined with Macklin’s revolutionary method of attempting some semblance of realism in his performance, resulted in uproarious applause. Macklin himself confesses, “On my return to the green-room, after the play was over, it was crowded with nobility and critics, who all complimented me in the warmest and most unbounded manner”. King George II saw the production and was so moved he could not fall asleep that night. A bystander in the audience of the show admitted famously, “This is the Jew / That Shakespeare drew”.

Many tried to replicate Macklin’s performance of Shylock, but none of the six actors that attempted the role at the rival Covent Garden theatre from 1744 to 1746 were able to match nearly the acclaim that Macklin had received for his Shylock. Even Macklin was unable to match his performance. He did have a varied career, filled with at least 490 roles, but none of them were anywhere near the uproar his Shylock caused. Even his two closest in hype, roles from The Confederacy and Love for Love, were roles designed to emulate Shylock. He played Shylock for nearly the next fifty years, as well as Iago in Othello and the Ghost in Hamlet. In Ben Jonson's Volpone, he played the part of Mosca. He was the creator of Sir Pertinax Macsycophant, a famous burlesque character, and he was Macbeth at Covent Garden in 1772, in a production with authentic Scottish costumes.

Together with David Garrick, his student, friend, and partner, Macklin revolutionized acting in the 18th century. Garrick and Macklin eventually had a falling out in the mid 1740s, which derailed Macklin's rise whilst propelling Garrick's own career. Macklin, then the stage manager at Drury Lane, participated in an actor walkout. When the actors, led by Garrick, were forced to accept the owner's terms, they had to abandon Macklin, who, as the stage manager, should have quelled the actors' strike, rather than participated in it. Macklin felt betrayed by Garrick and the other actors.

Macklin retired from the stage in 1753, then opened a tavern at which he gave a nightly lecture followed by a debate, which Macklin called the British Inquisition. The evening began with a lecture by Macklin. According to some histories, Macklin claimed at one of these shows to have such a good memory that he could recite any speech after reading through it once. As a challenge, Samuel Foote allegedly wrote The Great Panjandrum, a nonsense poem designed to be particularly difficult to memorize. The word Panjandrum has since passed into the English language.

Macklin returned to the stage, but finally retired in 1789, when he found he was no longer able to recall the entire part of Shylock. He lived another eight years, supported by the income from a subscription edition of two of his best plays, The Man of the World and Love in a Maze.