Colley Cibber was not well received. In the middle of the play, he whispered to fellow actor Benjamin Victor that he wanted to go home, perhaps realising he was too old for the part and its physical demands. Cibber also essayed tragic parts in plays by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Dryden and others, but with less success. By the end of his acting career, audiences were being entranced by the innovatively naturalistic acting of the rising star David Garrick, who made his London debut in the title part in a production of Cibber's adaptation of "Richard III" in 1741. He returned to
Scottish literature in the eighteenth century in Scotland. The government granted the first licence to a Scottish theatre under the act in 1767. In the later eighteenth century, many plays were written for and performed by small amateur companies and were not published and so most have been lost. Towards the end of the century there were "closet dramas", primarily designed to be read. Important Scottish playwrights included Henry Mackenzie, John Logan's, Archibald Maclaren and Joanna Baillie. In this century the novel emerged as a major element of Scottish literary and critical life. Tobias Smollett's picaresque novels, such as "The Adventures of Roderick Random" and "The