John Quick (actor)

John Quick (1748 – 4 April 1831) was an English actor, known for comic parts.

The son of a brewer, he was born in Whitechapel, London. At age 13 he left his home and joined a theatrical company at Fulham, where he played Altamont in the Fair Penitent, receiving three shillings as a share in the profits. For some years, in Kent and Surrey, he played Romeo, George Barnewell, Hamlet, Jaffier, Tancred, and other tragic characters, and in 1767 was at the Haymarket Theatre under the management of Samuel Foote, with Edward Shuter, John Bannister, and John Palmer. His performance, for Shuter's benefit, of Mordecai in Love à la Mode commended him to Covent Garden, where, on 7 November 1767, he was the original Postboy in Colman's Oxonian in Town; on 14 December the First Ferret in the Royal Merchant, an operatic version of the Beggar's Bush; and on 29 January 1768 the original Postboy in Oliver Goldsmith's Good-natured Man. At Covent Garden, with occasional visits to Liverpool, Portsmouth, and other towns, and to Bristol, where he was for a time manager of the King Street Theatre, Quick remained during most of his career.

Quick's performances were at first as clowns, rustics, or comic servants. He was seen as Peter in Romeo and Juliet, Simon Pure in A Bold Stroke for a Wife, Third Witch in Macbeth, Gripe in the Cheats of Scapin, the First Gravedigger in Hamlet, and many similar characters. His original parts at this period included Ostler in Colman's Man and Wife, or the Shakespeare Jubilee, Skiff in Richard Cumberland's Brothers on 2 December 1769, and clown to the harlequin of Charles Lee Lewes in the pantomime of Mother Shipton on 26 December 1770. On 5 June 1772 Quick was playing a theatre in Liverpool as Prattle in The Deuce is in him. At Covent Garden he was, on 8 December 1772, the original Consol in O'Brien's Cross Purposes, and on 6 February 1773 the original Momus in O'Hara's Golden Pippin.

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