Palmer, John

1744?

1798

Born in 1744, or perhaps 1742, in the parish of St Luke, Old Street, John ‘Plausible Jack’ Palmer was the son of the Drury Lane house servant Robert Palmer (1699-1787). Our subject is not to be confused with a second actor named John Palmer (1728-1768), not related, who was nicknamed ‘Gentleman Palmer.’ Our Palmer made his stage debut at the Haymarket Theatre on 28 April 1762 as the Oxford scholar in Samuel Foote’s farce “The Orators”. Then Palmer acted, for his father’s shared benefit at Drury Lane, Buck in “The Englishman in Paris” on 20 May at the very same time he was scheduled to perform in “The Orators” at the Haymarket. That was not the way to begin an acting career, but it was an indication of Palmer’s eagerness to play any role, large or small, anywhere, without seriously considering what he was doing. In this case, Foote sacked Palmer from the Haymarket, and the boy went off to Portsmouth. When he returned in the autumn of 1762 he was hired by Garrick at Drury Lane and spent the season acting mostly bit parts, but at his father’s benefit in May 1763 Palmer played George Barnwell in “The London Merchant”. When he was not given a raise in salary for 1764-65 Palmer quit and joined the company at Norwich. There he married Frances Berroughs but quickly deserted her for a Yarmouth mistress, incurring the ire of his wife’s family and friends and forcing him back to his bride, with whom he returned to London expecting but not finding employment. The rest of his life was not exactly patterned after those early years of witless behaviour, but John Palmer managed in time to get himself into a variety of awkward and sometimes even dangerous situations. He supported himself and his wife by delivering Stevens’s “Lecture on Heads” at a variety of London and provincial venues, and during the rest of the 1760s, still trying to find himself but not looking very hard, Palmer busied himself at a variety of theatres acting such roles as Harcourt in “The Country Girl”, Faulconbridge in “King John”, Edmund in “King Lear”, Young Wilding in “The Lyar”, Kastril in “The Alchemist”, Cassio in “Othello”, Launcelot in “The Merchant of Venice”, Iachimo in “Cymbeline” (G0651), Chamont in “The Orphan” and the character that gave Palmer his nickname, the coxcomb Lord Plausible in “The Plain Dealer”. Most of those roles he played at Drury Lane, where Garrick hired him for 1766-67. But in addition to acting at Drury Lane and gaining popularity with audiences, restless Palmer worked in the summers at Liverpool, Birmingham, Dublin, and, beginning in 1776, the Haymarket in London. Among his most popular roles was one for which he was particularly well-suited: the smooth, hypocritical Joseph Surface in “The School for Scandal” (G0003). But Palmer, restive this time because he wanted a company of his own, thought he saw a chance to get around the Licensing Act of 1737, which restricted straight plays to Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and, in the summers, the Haymarket. Courageous but foolhardy, he joined with his friend the Reverend William Jackson and laid plans to build a new playhouse in the vicinity of the Tower. Jack supposed that, with the reverend’s help in getting the support of the magistrates in the Tower Hamlets district and the Lieutenant of the Tower, he should be able to erect a theatre and produce plays there without running foul of the Licensing Act. He sold shares under false pretences to prospective renters, put up his own money and negotiated bank loans. By 20 June 1787 the Royalty Theatre in Wellclose Square was ready to open, offering “As You Like It” (with Palmer playing Jaques) and “Miss in Her Teens”. The opening went off well enough and the theatre actually remained open until April 1788, but the entertainments had to be mostly variety shows, not plays, and the company members were officially branded vagabonds, as in olden times. The venture ultimately failed, Palmer lost his shirt, and the managers of the three patent houses, who ha