the last year of the last century”. His early life may remain a mystery, but we can be certain of his age at death. His family's surname was McLaughlin, but "seeming somewhat uncouth to the pronunciation of an English tongue,” he changed it for the English stage. He found various jobs as an actor in London, but, apparently, his Ulster accent was an obstacle to success and he could not find a steady theatre home until he was noticed in a small character role in Henry Fielding's Coffee-House Politician at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1725. It was after that fine performance, that would go unnoticed by a lesser actor, that he was snatched up by the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane as an actor and a resident acting manager, serving with James Quin. Their relationship was professional, but full of plenty of animosity. Macklin devotes a lengthy section of his memoirs to Quin, giving examples of their disagreements. Macklin admits that "nothing but the necessity of business could ever make them associate together". Even the necessity of business sometimes dissolved; however, after some contract and pay disagreements in the 1741–42 season, Macklin and nearly the entire Drury Lane resident company left and attempted to find work elsewhere. Shylock and other roles Macklin's most important role, the one that catapulted him to stardom in eighteenth-century London, was Shylock in The Merchant of Venice on 14 February 1741. For several decades, the popular version of the play was a "fixed" text by George Granville, titled The Jew of Venice. In it, many roles were expanded, while Shylock and others were dramatically shortened. The eighteenth-century audiences were used to seeing a comic Shylock. Macklin wanted a different path to playing this character. While Macklin did not return to Shakespeare's script exactly as it was written, he did make his own edits to his script that were much closer than Granville's text. Instead of portraying Shylock as the usual comic pantolone, he played him as darkly villainous, serious, and highly satirical. Next, rather than dress Shylock as a clown, Macklin researched his role. He studied Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews, and in the old testament. He learned that Italian Jews, especially from Venice, were known to wear red hats, so he took that as a basis for his costume. In seeking to portray Jews exactly how they looked, Macklin emphasised the notion of historical