The drama and stage in the period before Garrick.
During the 18th century the productions of dramatic literature were still as a rule legitimately designed to meet the demands of the stage, from which its higher efforts afterwards to so large an extent became dissociated. The goodwill of most sections of the public continued to be steadily accorded to a theatre which had ceased to defy the accepted laws and traditions of morality; and the opposition still aroused by it was confined to a small minority of thinkers, though these included some who were far from being puritans. John Dennis was not thought to have the worst of the controversy, when he defended the stage against the attack of an opponent far above him in stature--the great mystic William Law[235]--and to John Wesley himself it seemed that "a great deal more might be said in defence of seeing a serious tragedy" than of taking part in the amusements of bear-baiting and cock-fighting. On the other hand, the demands of the stage and those of its patrons and of the public of the "Augustan" age, and of that which succeeded it, were, in general, fast bound by the trammels of a taste with which a revival of the poetic drama long remained irreconcilable. There is every reason to conclude that the art of acting progressed in the same direction of artificiality, and became stereotyped in forms corresponding to the "chant" which represented tragic declamation in a series of actors ending with Quin and Macklin. In the latter must be recognized features of a precursor, but it was reserved to the genius of Garrick, whose theatrical career extended from 1741 to 1776, to open a new era in his art. His unparalleled success was due in the first instance to his incomparable natural gifts; yet these were indisputably enhanced by a careful and continued literary training, and ennobled by a purpose which prompted him to essay the noblest, as he was capable of performing the most various, range of English theatrical characters. By devoting himself as actor and manager with special zeal to the production of Shakespeare, Garrick permanently popularized on the national stage the greatest creations of English drama, and indirectly helped to seal the doom of what survived of the tendency to maintain in the most ambitious walks of dramatic literature the nerveless traditions of the pseudo-classical school. A generation of celebrated actors and actresses, many of whom live for us in the drastic epigrams of Churchill's _Rosciad_ (1761), were his helpmates or his rivals; but their fame has paled, while his is destined to endure as that of one of the typical masters of his art.