Foote, Samuel

Foote, Samuel (1720–77), British actor and dramatist, well born and well educated, but so extravagant that in 1744 lack of money drove him to adopt the stage as a profession. In 1747 he took over the Haymarket Theatre where, with great ingenuity, he evaded the Licensing Act of 1737 by inviting his friends to a dish of tea or chocolate, their invitation card giving them admittance to an entertainment in which Foote mimicked his fellow actors and other public figures. In 1749, having inherited a second fortune, he went to Paris, spent it, and returned to London to take up a life of hard work as actor-manager and playwright. He had already written a few farces but his first successful play was The Englishman in Paris (1753), with its sequel The Englishman Returned from Paris (1756). He then took over the Haymarket again and staged there his best play, The Minor (1760), a satire on the Methodists in which he himself played Shift, a character intended to ridicule Tate Wilkinson. In 1766 while at the still unlicensed Haymarket he lost a leg through some ducal horseplay and the Duke of York, who was present at the accident, procured him a royal patent for the Haymarket in compensation. He was then able to present summer seasons of ‘legitimate’ plays, the first in 1767. He finally disposed of his patent to the elder Colman, dying shortly afterwards on his way to France. Foote had a bitter wit, and his plays were mainly devised to caricature people he disliked, particularly Garrick and Walpole, but he had such wonderful powers of mimicry and repartee that even his victims found themselves laughing. Although he had a keen eye for character, and wrote brilliant sketches of contemporary manners which caused him to be nicknamed ‘the English Aristophanes’, his plays were successful only through their topicality and have not survived. Short, fat, flabby, with an ugly but intelligent face, he was at once feared and admired by his contemporaries.