Wilkinson, Tate

1739

1803

The peripatetic actor-manager Tate Wilkinson was born on 27 October 1739 in London, the son of a clergyman. According to Tate’s own “Memoir” of 1790 his education was irregular. His father died while being transported to America for performing illegal marriages, and Tate turned his back on a life in the clergy in favour of a career on the stage. He tried Covent Garden Theatre, but he failed to impress the manager John Rich and antagonized Peg Woffington, the company’s leading actress. His problems with people of importance were usually caused by his natural talent for mimicry. Peg was infuriated when she thought Tate mimicked her from a box while she was acting. On the other hand, he impressed David Garrick at Drury Lane when Wilkinson gave his impersonation of the actor-manager Samuel Foote, Garrick’s antagonist. Over the years he was in and out of favour with those he aped. Tate’s career, which took him all over the three kingdoms again and again, was a series of successes and failures, and his memoir records many of them frankly and with equanimity; he was at heart an honest (though windy) man in a tumultuous profession. Because Wilkinson acted so regularly at provincial theatres he had the opportunity to build a repertoire of important roles, among them Aimwell in “The Beaux’ Stratagem”, Hastings in “Jane Shore”, Horatio, Hamlet, and the Ghost in “Hamlet”, Petruchio in “The Taming of the Shrew”, Lord Chalkstone in “Lethe”, King Lear, Richard III, Cadwallader in “The Author”, Coriolanus, Shylock, Othello, Mrs Amlet in “The Confederacy”, Bayes in “The Rehearsal” and Romeo. But acting was not really his forte, and when he performed from time to time in London he was rarely seen in leading roles. In the first part of his career – from about 1757, when he was taken on at Drury Lane by Garrick, to 1766, when he joined Joseph Baker in the management of the York circuit – he attracted audiences and enemies with his mimicry, which he frequently displayed within characters he played – as in “Puzzle” in Foote’s farcical “Tea”. Then Wilkinson visited York and was enticed into helping Baker salvage the foundering York circuit, which consisted in 1766 of York and Hull plus a changeable assortment of other towns in central England. Wilkinson had seen many good and bad companies during his wanderings, though he was still only 26 years old, and he proved an ideal partner for Baker. Tate, using much of his own savings, established the circuit as York, Hull, Leeds, Wakefield, Doncaster and Pontefract, set up the best wardrobe outside London, refurbished old playhouses and built new ones. He ended the practice of actors going door to door, hat in hand, soliciting benefit patrons, began offering, as in London, spring oratorios, and stopped filling out playbills with ‘preludes, interludes, or afterludes.’ He gained the respect of local burghers and married a York native, Jane Doughty, with whom he started a family. All this activity did not prevent him from making regular visits to other provincial theatres and to London to recruit actors and keep up his many contacts with fellow stage professionals. Nor did he settle for managing just the York circuit: he leased the Edinburgh Theatre Royal in 1779. Tate Wilkinson was also a theatre historian; in 1795 he published “The Wandering Patentee” which, along with his “Memoir” details his remarkably active career and gives a vivid picture of provincial theatres in eighteenth-century Britain. Wilkinson nurtured a great number of important players who performed for him: John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, Dorothy Jordan, Thomas King, Charles Mathews, Elizabeth Farren, the Fawcetts and many less experienced players (‘Blooms from my garden,’ he called them). He was probably better known by audiences all over the country than any other actor of the period, and he must have known more theatre folk than anyone else of his time. Tate Wilkinson died on 16 November 1803, leaving the management of the York ci