In her book, Vanessa Cunningham assumes the task of rescuing David Garrick from his current reputation as “a marginal figure in the scholarly world of Shakespeare studies” (5). Her approach is both refreshing and informative. She neither idolizes Garrick as a restorer nor criticizes him for his alterations “of some twenty-two plays by Shakespeare over the course of his professional career” (1) but, rather, examines the reasons for his actions. She makes an excellent case for her claim that Garrick's “alterations” should be viewed in the context of his position as actor-playwright-manager of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, summing up the theatrical and dramatic requirements of the period while emphasizing that Garrick's efforts were steeped in a tradition of “rescuing” Shakespeare's work “from oblivion” (79). Cunningham uses the texts edited by Harry William Pedicord and Fredrick Louis Bergmann, acknowledging that the easy accessibility of their “modernised spelling and punctuation … is at the expense of the sense of immediacy generated by the excited punctuation and lavish capitalization of the eighteenth-century editions” (2); however, she includes a sufficient number of quotations from letters and other sources with original punctuation to convey what the play texts lack. The six plays she examines in detail—Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Florizel and Perdita, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, and Hamlet— are arranged in chronological order of alteration with accompanying explanations of the various political and theatrical changes over the course of Garrick's career (1741–76).

In chapter 2, Cunningham briefly analyzes his revival of Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour, for which Garrick reworked the character Kitely as a starring role for himself. This is the main thrust of her argument throughout the book—that Garrick knew what had to be done to the texts in order to create viable leading parts in commercial productions that would engage and entertain audiences while satisfying their sense of morality and propriety. As Cunningham states, Garrick “needed to be alive to the prejudices and preferences of a volatile and voluble audience” (28); he also had to attend to the problems of censorship inflicted by the Licensing Act of 1737, an issue she deals with in her examination of Garrick's relationship with Edward Capell, deputy examiner of plays (see chap. 4). Cunningham lists “four main tasks” confronting Garrick when he produced any older text: main-piece plays needed to be two hours or less in playing time; the original language and staging needed to be adjusted to suit contemporary palates; each play needed a starring role; and a play's “moral message” needed to be appropriate for both patrons and the Lord Chamberlain's office (31).

Her analyses of the selected alterations by Garrick are astute, replete with textual and production detail. She consistently unites stage with page, dexterously changing direction between them. For instance, in her examination of Macbeth, Cunningham reproduces Garrick's eight-line speech for the dying Macbeth, using Jean Georges Noverre's eyewitness account of Garrick's performance as visual commentary, which situates the reader as a spectator in the theater; all that is missing is the sound of Garrick's voice. She then traces the speech to anonymous publications of the play (Edinburgh, 1758; Dublin, 1761), which closely resemble William Davenant's version but include Garrick's lines. Cunningham concludes that John Lee, a disgruntled actor who left Drury Lane for Covent Garden and later played Macbeth with his own company in Edinburgh and Dublin, is the link; he “would have known the lines by heart from hearing them in the wings at Drury Lane as he waited for his final entrance as Rosse” (61), providing, she adds, “a textbook example of memorial reconstruction” (61). Cunningham uses the death scene in Romeo and Juliet as an example of eighteenth-century sensibility and stage tradition when she compares Garrick's version with those of earlier and contemporary authors (see chap. 3). In chapter 4, Cunningham examines The Winter's Tale, demonstrating not only the force of theatrical competition but also the popularity of all things pastoral and sentimental that drove several authors to produce alterations of this play; she then discusses play licensing, moving seamlessly from Capell's work on the catalog of Garrick's large collection of early plays to his collaboration with Garrick on Antony and Cleopatra. In the “entr'acte,” chapter 5 on Garrick's piece The Jubilee, Cunningham paints a picture of Garrick scribbling hurriedly and rushing the manuscript to his prompter at Drury Lane “to set copyists to work on scripts for actors and singers” (115) in order to keep his place as forerunner and originator of the idea of celebrating Shakespeare amid the intense competition of several published versions and a production at Covent Garden. Cunningham suggests that, later in his career, Garrick tampered less with the scripts traditionally performed; she offers Nahum Tate's King Lear and John Hughes and Robert Wilks's Hamlet as examples, with the severely altered final act of the former retained but that of the latter tailored to suit Garrick's ailing physicality but unfaltering ability to move his audiences to tears. Each play is viewed within a particular historical context, sometimes political, sometimes social (such as Garrick's complicated relationship with Samuel Johnson), but always theatrical. Cunningham also emphasizes the importance of Garrick's play collection, bequeathed to the British Library, ensuring his place “within the world of English letters” (168).

Cunningham's close reading of all the available versions published, combined with her understanding of the theatrical world in which most were produced and the criticism and scholarship of both Shakespeare's and Garrick's work, makes worthwhile and entertaining reading; her analysis is delivered in a style that is often akin to a good detective story. She does not “redo” the work of previous scholars on Garrick's alterations but, rather, analyzes and employs their scholarship. This method makes Cunningham's book an excellent additional resource for studies in both Shakespeare and eighteenth-century drama and theater history. As she says, “It is time to recognise that caricatures of Garrick either as rescuer or as false priest of Shakespeare are equally distorted. The reality is both more complicated and more interesting” (10).