Macklin and the Novel

Charles Macklin’s career invites us to think about what happens when the actor steps ‘out’ or ‘off’ the stage into the pages to feature as a character in an extended printed and fictional narrative. What is the role of the actor in the business of novelistic character? And is the representation of a well-known actor in a novel different from that of other non-acting celebrities? The chapter addresses these three questions through three different parts Macklin played in the history of the novel: first, as a walk-on part adding to the realism of a novel in Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington (1817); second, as the subject of (fictionalised) and novelistic pseudo-biography in Edward Kimber’s Juvenile Adventures of David Ranger (1757); third, as an author-actor very aware of the rise of the novel as a challenge to the (classical) authority of stage drama and especially stage satire in his own dramatic works, especially two meta-theatrical pieces, The New Play Criticiz’d (1747) and The Covent Garden Theatre; or, Pasquin turn’d Drawcansir (1752).