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Garrick's Temple to Shakespeare
An 18th-century riverside ‘folly’ built by actor-manager David Garrick as a private temple to Shakespeare and to his own theatrical ideals. The small Palladian building centres on a statue of Shakespeare after Roubiliac and hosts displays about Garrick’s career, celebrity and Georgian theatre culture.
Opening Hours
Daily: 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM
What's not to miss inside?
Shakespeare Statue Niche
Garrick commissioned a life-size Shakespeare for the focal niche, making the dramatist an object of neoclassical veneration.Roubiliac’s widely copied image frames Shakespeare as inspired author, not mere playwright-for-hire—key to the 18th-century ‘bardolatry’ Garrick helped launch.
📍 Rotunda interior
Garrick’s Theatre World
Prints, playbills and portraits sketch Garrick’s rise from provincial actor to national celebrity and Drury Lane impresario.Benefit nights, advertising and portrait engravings reveal how the Georgian stage invented modern fame.
📍 Display cases inside the temple
Palladian Design in Miniature
Ionic portico, central cella and balanced proportions translate grand villa language into a garden-scale building.It’s architecture as argument: classical form for ‘classical’ drama.
📍 Exterior and portico
Inspire your Friends
- Garrick linked house and temple with an underground passage beneath the Hampton Court Road so guests could process to the riverside ‘sanctum’ without crossing traffic at ground level.
- The temple was part theatre-museum, part set piece: Garrick staged readings and entertainments here, using the building itself as a prop for Shakespearean celebration.
- Roubiliac’s Shakespeare for Garrick became one of the era’s defining images of the Bard; later copies and variants helped standardise the sculptural iconography you still see today.
