John Reeve (actor)
British 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.
Early life
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.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17010203. VIAF identifies the subject as 38942140. The Library of Congress control number is no92010830. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1799, 1838 and 1819.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Reeve (actor)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.