John Reeve (actor)

John Reeve (1799–1838) was an English comic actor. His early career was based on mimicry: he became a popular favourite, able to continue in highly-paid work, despite drinking heavily and not learning his parts.

The son of Thomas Reeve, a hosier and common councillor, and nephew of William Reeve and Robert Waithman, he was born at his father's shop on Ludgate Hill, on 2 February 1799. At school at Winchmore Hill under a Mr. Thompson, he had for companion Frederick Henry Yates. From age 14 behind his father's counter for two years, when his father retired, he was placed with a firm of wholesale hosiers named Nevill or Neville in Maiden Lane, Wood Street, lasting three years there.

As a clerk in Gosling's Bank on Fleet Street, Reeve with colleagues hired every two weeks Pym's Theatre, Wilson Street, off Gray's Inn Road. Pym was an ex-actor, who had fitted up an assembly room as an upmarket "private theatre", a place for well-supported amateur theatricals. Finding himself in obscure parts, Reeve hired the house on his own account for £10, and played Othello, with his friend George Herbert Bonaparte Rodwell as Roderigo, and Sylvester Daggerwood, an actor, in a farce based on New Hay at the Old Market George Colman the younger. He repeated "Sylvester Daggerwood" on 8 and 9 June 1819 at Drury Lane, in benefits for Thomas Rodwell and Gesualdo Lanza; and then played it for a few nights at the Haymarket Theatre.

Reeve was offered an engagement by Samuel James Arnold at the Lyceum Theatre. He appeared there on 17 July 1819, under the name of Mr. *****, as Harry Alias in One, Two, Three, Four, Five by Advertisement, by John Hamilton Reynolds; the cast included William Farren, John Pritt Harley, Charles Mathews, and Joseph Munden. He resigned his post at the bank, and he played two other characters, Pedrillo and Crack, at the Lyceum, but the press only gave him credit as a mimic. The Rodwells with Willis Jones took the Sans-Pareil Theatre in the Strand, and opened it on 18 October 1819 as the Adelphi Theatre. Reeve appeared there as Squire Rattlepate in William Thomas Moncrieff's burletta, The Green Dragon, or I've quite forgot, and Lord Grizzle in a burlesque of Tom Thumb.

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