Murphy vs. Cumberland

Arthur Murphy does not seem to be a fan of David Garrick's. In his parody of Hamlet, he replaces King Hamlet's ghost with the ghost of Shakespeare, and Hamlet with Garrick. Shakespeare haunts Garrick's peers and brother for a few days before he finally gets Garrick's attention. He whisks Garrick away and basically tells him that he is sick of him and all the other playwrights making fortunes off of bastardizing his plays. He calls Garricks revisions the "juice of cursed nonsense" and says that it "annihilates the sense" and instills a numb stupor into his words, "like sheets of water on a fire" extinguishing them. He leaves Garrick to the revenge of the critics who will inflict their vengeance upon his adaptation of Hamlet. Garrick incredulously misunderstood the entire event- he believes " this Ghost is pleas'd with this my alteration, and now he bids me alter all his Plays. His plays are out of joint".

Based on what we've read and learned about David Garrick, I feel like Murphy's parody is pretty accurate and warranted. Though Garrick claims to adore Shakespeare beyond all else, lauds him as a genius and attempts to almost become him as much as possible, Garrick doesn't seem to quite get it. He simply cannot place Shakespeare's works above all else, and then just change them! Either he doesn't truly celebrate Shakespeare as much as he claims, or he is so innately arrogant that he believes he can "fix" the bard's words. I thought the parody was really great because it seems almost possible- Garrick seems so obliviously arrogant, that I would not be surprised if Shakespeare's ghost really had visited him and he completely misconstrued his words.

Richard Cumberland has quite a different take on Garrick- though at first he seemed to be making fun of Garrick in his mention of the gravediggers and the letter f/s thing, he ends it with an approval. He has Shakespeare come out of his grave and thank Garrick for improving his plays (telling him, "Freely correct my page"), since he wrote them "to please a rude unpolisht age". Richard Cumberland obviously takes Garrick's view that he is only improving Shakespeare's words and somehow simultaneously remaining loyal to them.