Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence (Dramatic Lives)

ELLEN TERRY, SPHERES OF INFLUENCE

Dramatic Lives Series Editor:

Katharine Cockin

www.pickeringchatto.com/dramatic

ELLEN TERRY, SPHERES OF INFLUENCE

edited by Katharine Cockin

london PICKERING & CHATTO 2011

Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH 2252 Ridge Road, Brookfield, Vermont 05036-9704, USA www.pickeringchatto.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the publisher. © Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Ltd 2011 © Katharine Cockin 2011 british library cataloguing in publication data Ellen Terry, spheres of influence. – (Dramatic lives) 1. Terry, Ellen, Dame, 1847–1928 – Influence. 2. Craig, Edith, 1869–1947. 3. Craig, Edward Gordon, 1872–1966. 4. Theater – England – History – 19th century. I. Series II. Cockin, Katharine, 1963– 792’.028’092-dc22 ISBN-13: 9781848931121 e: 9781848931138

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This publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American National Standard for the Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited Printed in the United Kingdom at MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn

CONTENTS

List of Contributors List of Figures and Tables Introduction: Ellen Terry and Her Circle – Formal Introductions and Informal Encounters – Katharine Cockin Part I: Ellen Terry’s Influences on Others 1 Introduction: Ellen Terry’s Lost Lives – Nina Auerbach 2 Ellen Terry, Bram Stoker and the Lyceum’s Vampires – Catherine Wynne 3 Ellen Terry and G. F. Watts: ‘Blasted with Ecstasy’ – Veronica Franklin Gould 4 The Burden of Eternal Youth: Ellen Terry and The Mistress of the Robes – Jenny Bloodworth 5 The After Voice of Ellen Terry – Katherine E. Kelly Part: II Family Influences 6 Introduction: Edward Gordon Craig – Prophet or Charlatan? – Michael Holroyd 7 E. W. G. and E. G. C.: Father and Son – J. Michael Walton 8 Lewis Carroll, Ellen Terry and the Stage Career of Menella ‘Minna’ Quin: ‘A Very Kind and Christian Deed’ – Richard Foulkes 9 Edith Craig as Director: Staging Claudel in the War Years – Roberta Gandolfi 10 Velona Pilcher and Dame Ellen Terry (1926) – Charlotte Purkis 11 Ellen Terry: Preserving the Relics and Creating the Brand – Katharine Cockin 12 Describing the Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Archive – Julian Halliwell and Katharine Cockin Notes Works Cited Index

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1 13 17 33 49 65

77 81

93 107 119 133 149 161 189 199

CONTRIBUTORS

Professor Nina Auerbach is the John Welsh Centennial professor of English. Her special area of concentration is nineteenth-century England. She has published, lectured and reviewed widely in the fields of Victorian literature, theatre, cultural history and horror fiction and film. Her books include Our Vampires, Ourselves (University of Chicago Press, 1995); Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians (Harvard University Press, 1990); Ellen Terry, Player in Her Time (Norton, 1987); Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts (Columbia University Press, 1985); Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Harvard University Press, 1982); and Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Harvard University Press, 1978). Her most recent book, Daphne du Maurier, Haunted Heiress (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), inaugurates the series Personal Takes. Her current project is Lost Lives, a study of ghosts and their purposes. Professor Auerbach has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Fellowship as well as the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. In 2000, she received the annual Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts. Jenny Bloodworth, Leicester University, is a doctoral student working on the drama of Clotilde Graves. Dr Katharine Cockin, University of Hull, is reader in English. Her publications include the biography of Edith Craig (Cassell, 1998), a monograph on the Pioneer Players (Palgrave, 2001) and essay and articles on women’s suffrage literature, literature and law, contemporary fiction and poetry. She has edited two volumes of women’s suffrage literature (Routledge, 2007), The Collected Letters of Ellen Terry (8 vols; Pickering & Chatto, 2010–) as well as the Ellen Terry volume in Lives of Shakespearean Actors Part V (Pickering & Chatto, forthcoming, 2012). Professor Emeritus Richard Foulkes, University of Leicester, professor of theatre history and chair of the Society for Theatre Research, specializes in drama and theatre history, concentrating on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has published most extensively on the Victorian theatre, with three recent monographs: Church and Stage in Victorian England (Cambridge University Press, 1997); Performing Shakespeare in the Age of Empire (Cambridge Uni-

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versity Press, 2002) and Lewis Carroll and the Victorian Stage: Theatricals in a Quiet Life (Ashgate, 2005). He has contributed to Shakespeare Survey and other leading journals, was an associate editor for the New Dictionary of National Biography and is general editor of publications for the Society for Theatre Research. He is editor of a collection of essays on Sir Henry Irving (Henry Irving A Re-evaluation (Ashgate, 2008) and has edited the William Charles Macready volume in Lives of Shakespearean Actors Part III (Pickering & Chatto, 2010). Professor Foulkes has published on twentieth-century dramatists including Rattigan, Wesker, Nichols and Stoppard. Veronica Franklin Gould, author of G. F. Watts: The Last Great Victorian (Yale University Press, 2004) and ‘G. F. Watts in Freshwater’, PhotoHistorian (April 2006), is writing a book on Watts and Ellen Terry. The curator of the Watts Gallery centenary exhibitions and editor of The Vision of G. F. Watts (Watts Gallery, 2004) and Mary Seton Watts (1849–1938): Unsung Heroine of the Art Nouveau (Watts Gallery, 1998), she examined a newly discovered Julia Margaret Cameron image of Ellen Terry in Tennyson at Farringford (Farringford House, 2009). Her exhibition of Ellen Terry will be shown at the Watts Gallery in 2013. Dr Roberta Gandolfi, University of Parma, is lecturer on the history of contemporary theatre and the theory and history of directing. She is the author of a monograph on Edith Craig, La prima regista: Edith Craig, fra rivoluzione della scena e cultura delle donne (Bulzoni, 2003) and has edited special issues of European Journal of Women Studies (2004) and Teatro e Storia (2007), and contributed an essay ‘Giving Back to Judith: Laura Curino’s Una stanza tutta per me’ to Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case (eds), Staging International Feminisms (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Julian Halliwell, of SimplicityWeb.co.uk, has been involved in web development since 1996. With a background in modern languages and linguistics, he developed an interest in technology through computer-assisted language learning and spent a number of years at the University of Hull developing its award-winning web-based learning environment Merlin. Sir Michael Holroyd, president of the Royal Society for Literature, is an internationally acclaimed biographer, author of the definitive biographies of George Bernard Shaw (4 vols; Chatto & Windus, 1988–92), Lytton Strachey (Chatto & Windus, 1994) and most recently author of the innovative group biography of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their families, A Strange Eventful History (Chatto & Windus, 2008). Professor Katherine E. Kelly, Texas A&M University. Her areas of interests include modern drama and performance, modernist studies, film and Irish studies. She has published widely in theatre studies, including articles on women’s suffrage theatre, and she is the author of The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stop-

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pard (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Modern Drama by Women 1880s to 1930s (Routledge, 1996). Charlotte Purkiss, University of Winchester, is a lecturer in drama. Her research interests include criticism and performative writing; European Modernism and performance, especially British–German cultural connections. She has published articles on turn-of-the-century music, arts and ideas and on Austro-German opera. She is currently researching the life and works of Velona Pilcher. Professor Emeritus J. Michael Walton, University of Hull, is the author of Craig on Theatre (Methuen, 1983). He has published and/or edited seven books on classical theatre history and thirteen volumes of the whole Greek drama in translation which he edited, introduced and for which he supplied eight translations. Professor Walton has worked in the professional theatre as a director and actor and first joined the Drama Department at the University of Hull in 1965 and was appointed to the Chair of Drama in 1992. In 1997 he became first director of The Performance Translation Centre. Dr Catherine Wynne, University of Hull, is lecturer in English. Her research and publications lie in the field of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and Irish writing with a particular emphasis on the examination of colony and empire. She is author of The Colonial Conan Doyle: British Imperialism, Irish Nationalism, and the Gothic (Greenwood, 2002), co-editor with Martin Willis of Victorian Literary Mesmerism (Rodopi, 2006), and has published articles and book chapters on nineteenth-century fiction, photography and film. She is currently completing a monograph on Bram Stoker and the Victorian theatre, a project supported by a British Academy Small Research Grant. She has published an edition of Bram Stoker’s The Watter’s Mou’ (1894) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Parasite (1895) for Valancourt Press.

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

Figure 2.1: Pamela Colman Smith, Cartoon ‘The Bramy Joker’ Figure 3.1: G. F. Watts, Love and Life (1882–93), oil on canvas Figure 4.1: Photograph of Ellen Terry in costume as Countess Glicka in The Mistress of the Robes Figure 9.1: Pioneer Players’ Playbill Figure 11.1: Unpublished letter from Edward Gordon Craig to Elizabeth Rumball, n.d. Figure 11.2: Photograph of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving in costume in Olivia, annotated by Ellen Terry Table 9.1: Claudel Productions in European Venues: The First Ten Years (1912–21)

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31 46 51 113 140 142

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INTRODUCTION: ELLEN TERRY AND HER CIRCLE – FORMAL INTRODUCTIONS AND INFORMAL ENCOUNTERS Katharine Cockin

Ellen Terry (1847–1928) is familiar to many in the mind’s eye, even when her name or specific achievements remain on the tip of the tongue. As the object of the admiring gaze of artists and photographers – G. F. Watts, John Singer Sargent and Julia Margaret Cameron – she materializes before us typically in solo form rather than in the midst of a group. Like many of her peers on the stage, she was widely reproduced in photographic portraits, marketing her image far and wide and feeding the appetite of hungry fans. Consequently, the value of her visual image was appreciated by the commercial world. She has been particularly known for her own supporting role in relation to powerful and famous men, the principal achievements of her working life associating her with Henry Irving.1 It was a long-lasting bond. According to Lynn Voskuil, the ‘power of personality’ characterized both Irving and Terry, known for personalities which were respectively ‘magnetic’ and ‘mesmeric’ and ‘charming’ and ‘effusive’.2 Voskuil claims for Irving and Terry a significant influence on theatre practice: The ascendancy of these two performers contributed to an important shift in the concept of natural acting at the end of the nineteenth century, a shift that rewarded the performance of one’s own personality more than the effective impersonation of character.3

In the 1890s Terry attracted the adoration of Oscar Wilde and found an intimate correspondent in a young George Bernard Shaw.4 At once idolized and cajoled, Terry found her epistolary role in the Shaw–Terry correspondence as subordinated to that great man. She was well versed in the silvery feminine role, designed to reflect and magnify the male, and described so memorably by Virginia Woolf: ‘Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its

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natural size’.5 Could Woolf have had Terry in mind? The lectures which made up A Room of One’s Own were delivered in the year of Terry’s death. Any diminutive or trembling male may have drawn strength from Terry’s benevolent aura, enhancing himself (in his own imagination) to twice the natural size. Woolf saw this aspect of Terry in appropriately modernist terms in her essay ‘Ellen Terry’, published in the year of Woolf ’s death. Faced with a Manly Man in the era of the Womanly Woman, Terry would be irresistibly drawn to him but would also be tempted to refract his image, sometimes hinting at the comic side of any assumed grandiosity. As one of those young women who found herself on the other side of Lewis Carroll’s lens, she gave an insight in later years for many others into that world which might lie on the other side of the mirror. Other dimensions of Terry have become more visible in recent years. These have begun to place her in a more material and complex social setting, typically one which is gendered. Nina Auerbach has seen her as a multi-faceted player in – but perhaps also ahead of – her time.6 It was a part in which she was ultimately sustained by a community of supportive women, both from her immediate family, those in her employ and others drawn devotedly to her side. Terry was one of a number of stage stars in a period when their celebrity was aligned with the rise of the theatre as a profession and its increasing attraction as a pastime of the middle classes. Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody explain in their study of theatrical celebrity that Much of the scholarship done by theatre historians in this area has been concerned with fame (the nature of the exceptional life) rather than with celebrity (a concept which focuses attention on the interplay between individuals and institutions, markets and media).7

Terry has a significant role in the rise of the theatre as a profession in Britain. Irving was the first actor to be knighted in 1895, while Terry received an honorary degree in 1922 and became a Dame in 1925. The movement of the cultural capital embodied by actors was apparent in the formation and reconfiguration of a social circle and its events, as well as the booking of tours at home and abroad. The transatlantic tours of British stars appear to have exploited what Leigh Woods has called the Americans’ sense of cultural deficiency in this period.8 How did the influence of celebrity work behind the scenes? The increasing popularity of the theatre as a pastime of the wealthy middle classes found the audience demographic including such employment groups as politicians, lawyers, artists and writers. Terry numbered some of the most influential lawyers and politicians of the day among her fans. Gladstone watched her from the wings. She was a regular correspondent with the family of Sir George Lewis,9 steely adversary in the divorce cases of the elite. Systems of patronage operated both formally and informally. Commercial advertising thrived in the available spaces of many play

Introduction

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programmes bought by theatregoers and treasured as souvenirs. Securing work on the stage for actors was a fraught affair, making any sign of ill-health a threat to future casting. Terry never forgot the rigours of the world for those looking on from the margins, so when she achieved the means of exerting her influence on behalf of others, she frequently did so. The extension of a helping hand to others was for her a reflex, such that she maintained her charitable acts when she could least afford it herself. Any reader of her letters today occasionally feels an urge to reproduce the pantomime warning, ‘behind you!’ Her discreet financial support of one unidentified woman in difficulty led to personal losses which she was lucky to recoup by means of a serendipitously timed benefit performance.10 The precise mechanisms at work in the informal networks of public and powerful contacts operating in the theatre are not always clear. Any available evidence tends to emerge from private correspondence; the new guide to her own archive and publication of her letters will provide a rich source of material for future research. The essays in this collection begin to ask questions about Terry’s spheres of influence, placing her at the centre of what became an influential circle or network. She is placed at the centre, not with a view to limiting this to biographical concerns, although the life and the work are inevitably imbricated for Terry, but to explore actual and potential relationships she had with those in her circle by attending to the discursive interplay of influence. Thus Moody and Luckhurst refer to Michael Quinn’s approach to celebrity: ‘his insistence that celebrity is the discourse through which the dynamics of acting are revealed. It is only by investigating these transactions between individuals, audiences and institutions, he suggests, that performance can be fully understood.’11 Further work is welcomed on how Terry influenced the next generation, handing on a particular attitude towards theatre work, an appreciation of the theatre as a social force and, more ephemerally, the physical characteristics of her performance style. Fans and intimates wrote of their memories of her performances, leaving their various impressions of her voice, her demeanour, a gesture; an emphasis here rather than there. The significance of Terry’s performances was widely valued and debated. As for other celebrated performers, Terry acquired a mythical status during her lifetime which has endured in recent times. The recording and sharing of the memory of having seen Terry perform itself acquired cultural significance which influenced others. Rebecca West wrote about an encounter in a hotel with someone who recalled Terry. West regarded Terry as unique in that her words survived, even in some ways reviving her for later generations: ‘She continually made remarks that, recollected, bring back the very essence of her’.12 Laura Marcus has demonstrated how Virginia Woolf ’s interest in Terry (explored most obviously in Freshwater) also featured in a draft of ‘A Scene from the Past’ in the idea that memories may be transferred from one person

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to another.13 It may well be that the influence exerted by these shared memories served a social function, associating Terry with a bygone age so that her citation became a short form for Englishness and Empire. Lisa Kazmier’s analysis of the response to Terry’s death includes the proposition that ‘Ellen Terry symbolized the endurance of British values and institutions’.14 For theatre practitioners she embodied the respect which the theatre could command. There were examples of an attempt to recreate or revive Terry’s performance style, through the delivery of Terry’s Shakespeare lectures by Florence Locke. In 1933 she performed at the Shakespeare Memorial Library at Stratford on the occasion of the presentation to Lady Flower of artefacts relating to Irving and Terry.15 An annual memorial Shakespeare performance was held from 1929 at the Barn Theatre in the grounds of Terry’s house to mark her death. The configuration of time, place and production produced an act of remembrance and an opportunity for those who survived her to pass on any specific theatrical knowledge as such. But the gathering of family, colleagues and those who knew her, together with a younger generation of aspiring and established thespians, such as John Gielgud, Robert Donat and Sybil Thorndike, also provided a suitable environment for what would now be known as networking. As one of several children born to acting parents, Terry naturally associated the theatre with her own family from the earliest age. The idea of a theatrical dynasty, of nurturing and inheriting knowledge and skill, rendered family relations influential. In 1937 when the Eugenics Society made an educational film about heredity, they included members of Terry’s family: Edith Craig, Val Gielgud and Hazel Terry.16 Michael Holroyd’s recent book, A Strange Eventful History (2008), puts Terry in her own and closely associated family settings. Actors have seemed to form a separate group, even creating a closed community. Perhaps to some extent this familial discourse provided a perspective from which child actors were regarded differently from those in other fields of employment. With this familial discourse in mind, it is likely that assistance was associated with gender; for Terry, the protective impulse was exerted along with a self-sacrifice bound together with absolute commitment to theatre work and devotion to the maternal. This maternal modality afforded her the leeway to express herself to others in an emotional and intimate way,17 which tended to be accepted in the context of theatrical flamboyance but it sometimes cloaked a more complex gradation of emotional and sexual feelings. Terry seemed to love everyone. She was generous and giving in an apparently indiscriminate manner. While this love was framed within a maternal discourse it was extremely powerful and productive for her, both literally and aesthetically. The other side of the mirror may have revealed a desperate pursuit of attention, in a displacement of tremendously powerful feelings which never found a lasting realization in any of

Introduction

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her relationships with men. A sense of if-only hung over the premature death of Godwin and the oppressive control of Irving by his wife. Influence may be exerted in both subtle and more explicit ways. Perhaps the more intriguing aspects of influence relate to the ephemeral, unrecorded and unofficial nature of its deployment. Influence is felt; it operates in a subjective realm. But its effects may be powerful and, in more interventionist forms, it becomes registered as nepotism or patronage. Organizations, theatrical or otherwise, publicly declare their official patrons; they acknowledge their work under the auspices of a particular organization. An endorsement appears with the citation of a name, the supply of funding and the carrying of adverts in theatre programmes. The theatre has long been supported by such ‘angels’, in mutually beneficial arrangements. Influence may be registered simply by means of physical presence. Patronage may be signalled by means of attendance at a play; being seen and recorded in theatre reviews; lending one’s name to something; sending flowers; a letter of appreciation; a fan letter; a gift. Such activities are much in evidence in Terry’s career and most visible, perhaps, on the occasion of her stage jubilee in 1906, covered extensively in the illustrated press. Terry is one of the most memorable performers on the British stage in the nineteenth century. She inspired some of the greatest artists of her day and her portraits have located her in popular memory. The celebrity of Terry in the world of the nineteenth-century theatre may to some extent have obscured some of the more contradictory and apparently modern aspects of her approach to her work and her life. The archival repositories on Terry are numerous and widespread. This physical obstacle, together with the fact of her prolific epistolary output and the hitherto uncatalogued state of her own archive, has rendered many questions frustratingly unanswered. This collection of essays tackles some of these challenges and explores the spheres of influence of Terry. These thirteen essays, from established experts and new researchers drawn from an international field, reassess some of the performances and cultural significance of Terry, her daughter Edith Craig (1869–1947) and her son Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966), as well as Bram Stoker, Lewis Carroll and some less familiar figures such as Velona Pilcher and Clotilde Graves. This collection of essays marks the beginnings of a new era in research on Terry and her family. The contributors include international experts on Terry: her biographer Nina Auerbach and Sir Michael Holroyd, whose group biography of Terry, Irving and their family was published in 2008. In the same year, the AHRC-funded project was completed, resulting in the online catalogue of the National Trust’s vast collection of papers of Terry and Edith Craig: www.ellenterryarchive.hull.ac.uk. This database was officially launched on Saturday, 6 June 2009 at the University of Hull at the Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Conference. Most of the essays collected here have developed from papers delivered at that

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conference, which was sponsored by the Society for Theatre Research and the University of Hull. This archive of over 20,000 documents is now searchable by means of the online catalogue. Several chapters of this book, especially Chapters 11 and 12 and this introduction, provide some insights into the richness of this archive. This chapter provides an introduction to Terry’s career on the British stage, examining the relationships she established at work and at home in relation to the influence she exerted, which had far-reaching effects. It outlines some of the promising new research questions which are beginning to emerge.

Part I: Ellen Terry’s Influences on Others Nina Auerbach, author of the influential biography of Terry, introduces Part I with an essay on ‘Ellen Terry’s Lost Lives’. This reflects on the Terry we have not known. Edward Gordon Craig claimed that no one other than he and his father could know her. Auerbach’s essay invites us to consider the blank spaces which Terry left behind, and those with which she played and cultivated. A sense of loss attaches to Terry in many ways. She experienced loss in her relationships – lost husbands and lovers – and experienced more material losses which severely affected her later years. Terry lost money and lost control in various ways. The lives she could have had are worth thinking about. Their potential was limited by unexpected and sometimes unfortunate circumstances. The pursuit of lost or imagined letters, those which we imagine may provide the keys to her most intimate stories, has captivated many. Her success and fame, to some extent, have concealed the difficulties she faced. Bram Stoker, Irving’s business manager at the Lyceum Theatre, receives new consideration here from Catherine Wynne in Chapter 2. This chapter traces a relationship with melodrama and the Gothic and examines the influence of Stoker’s fiction on the work of the Lyceum Theatre. Terry is named in Dracula as the reference point in a quoted extract from a newspaper report of the ‘bloofer lady’.18 Edith Craig’s involvement in the stage reading (for copyright purposes) of Stoker’s dramatization of Dracula and the association of Irving with Dracula demand further consideration of Terry and her circle as an influence on Stoker’s work and the parts they played in the nineteenth-century Gothic. Terry’s autobiography has many Gothic episodes; a cast of strong, brooding men, fantastical children, large country houses; her life story, drawn from a range of sources, features elopement, the threatened kidnap of children; adventures abroad; train travel in wild weather; misery, tenacity and belated revelation. For Terry and Irving, highly visible players on the Victorian stage, gender was very much their business. But in their circle, gender was often troubled as well as a source of mirth. Stoker was the vampire figure, on the fringes of the theatre. He was also the object of banter. Terry joked with Florence Stoker, referring

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to him in familial and feminized terms as ‘Bram-mama’.19 For Pamela Colman Smith, he was ‘the Bramy Joker’.20 There was some humorous potential in Faust and the abject figure bestowed on Terry. In this circle it would be known that Terry hated playing the part of Margaret. Is she infantilized or does she perform this role in a knowing way? Wynne argues persuasively that Terry’s portrayal of female suffering should be situated in the context of melodrama and the Gothic. Veronica Franklin Gould demonstrates in Chapter 3 that, although together for a short time, Terry and the artist G. F. Watts transformed each other and their mutual influence continued for long after they had parted. Gould’s analyses of Watts’s artwork identify details of Terry’s expression and deportment which caught the painter’s imagination. Terry was clearly a painterly performer. In his art, Watts appeared to achieve a satisfactory union in the physical and spiritual realms which he failed to realize with Terry during their marriage. Terry appeared to draw some amusement from the roles she could adopt, interacting in a self-conscious way with Stoker and Irving, with whom she may have been triangulated in their homosocial relationship.21 Humour is also apparent in The Mistress of the Robes, as Jenny Bloodworth demonstrates in Chapter 4. Terry’s long career brought her into contact with many writers and theatre practitioners. One little-known but illuminating example is Clotilde Graves, author of this play. Bloodworth explores Terry’s involvement with Graves in 1903 in The Mistress of the Robes, which brings into sharp focus the increasingly difficult relationship Terry had with age and performance. Since Terry, as an older woman, was obliged to carry on working, the suitability of roles and their scarcity became a pressing concern. Terry solicited work, exerting her influence on others, including J. M. Barrie. To what extent did the expectations of her performance as a youthful beauty become a burden for Terry in her later years? Perhaps she continued to be drawn to such roles in order to work through her acceptance of increasing age. Her letters demonstrate her awareness of the bodily signs of ageing and her sense of dismay at its relentless progress. However, Terry’s association with Shakespeare provided opportunities to be lifted out of time – an eternal Portia or Beatrice – whereas other women, whose acting roles tended to be in naturalist drama, may have found themselves time-bound to a greater extent. Terry placed great store by the power of imagination in acting, as Voskuil demonstrates: ‘She downplayed the role of personality in the acting process in favour of an emphasis on craft, hard work, and the actor’s own imaginative interpretation of the character and situation’.22 Thus Terry’s approach to the performance of a much younger character would have little to do with her belief in the power of her own physical properties and everything to do with the power of her imagination to create the character. Terry had performed in Shakespeare for the Lyceum Company in Britain and abroad but in the period from 1910 she toured with her lectures on Shake-

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speare’s women, producing a new range of associations. In Chapter 5 Katherine Kelly explores what these lectures promised for the women’s suffrage movement as a model of public speaking. The power of Terry’s voice and the impression she left on others are all explored here in light of Kelly’s new research on the manuscripts of the Shakespeare lectures held in the National Trust’s Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Archive. How Terry regarded the women of Shakespeare and how they were treated in the lectures are fascinating questions.23 Given the process of their production, the answers may not necessarily be identical. The extent to which Terry endorsed women’s suffrage activism is questioned by the agitation which it produced in her and is evident in some of her correspondence.24 This episode in Terry’s career draws attention to the potential conflicts arising from the different perceptions the performer and author may have had of each other’s roles in this period. Terry and her ‘ghost’, Christopher St John, were in dispute over the production of the lectures.25 Although Terry laid the ghosts of past quarrels to rest, annotating the papers with instructions for destruction (‘1921 Disagreement with Chris – long ago – why not burn? these papers? E.T.’),26 these were ignored and the correspondence was carefully preserved. Terry’s words were highly prized commodities. In times of cash drought she found that her own words were thin on the ground. However, repetition is not always a good thing. She and her ghost had found themselves a whisker away from selfplagiarism in 1907 in their dealings with McClure’s Magazine. Terry enjoyed the public image of commanding speaker, as Kelly demonstrates. How did Terry reconcile this expectation of being someone in command of her own voice when it was often on the run? Her experience of losing her voice is revealed in some of her private correspondence.27 This disjuncture between public image and private reality appeared to agitate her and provided a source of anxiety which would be likely to ensure that the symptoms recurred. She also experienced difficulties in remembering her lines, a phenomenon which became associated with Terry’s performances later in life. The loss of memory features in Virginia Woolf ’s essay on Terry while, curiously, the strength of her public speaking does not.

Part II: Family Influences With Chapter 6, ‘Edward Gordon Craig – Prophet or Charlatan?’, Sir Michael Holroyd introduces the second part of the collection. He explores the characters of Edward Gordon Craig – his personality as well as the role he played – in his family and intimate relationships and in his interactions in the world of work. Gordon Craig’s influence has extended to world theatre and to the new medium of film. Addressing the harsh judgements and great expectations placed upon Gordon Craig by others, this essay engages with the extremes of Craig’s project,

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his brutal impact on others and the crises which befell him. He created prolific personae as fearless avatars while he became increasingly fixed in solitude and silence. Terry expected to exert influence over her children and her correspondence with them is predicated on this assumption. The absence of her children’s father is to some extent the unstated element in these interactions and possibly sometimes prompted Terry to overzealous guidance. Terry’s expectations of the role of the mother as distinct from the father would have been influenced by her own family experience, and demonstrated by her own parents as well as by her sister Kate and her husband. Terry’s children had the experience of various father figures but had only distant, probably troubling, first-hand memories of their biological father. Both children were born just the other side of the mid-nineteenth century (in 1869 and 1872), when ideas about fathers and fatherhood dominated concerns about the family and its function in the social fabric. As Valerie Sanders explains, ‘Fathering’ is not the same as being a father in that a childless man can assume paternal responsibilities for children who are not his own, while a biological father remains a father even if he ignores his offspring, and plays no part in raising them.28

Terry may have tried to make some sense of her own unconventional family relationships. She was an avid reader of Dickens, whose fictional father characters varied but ideally assumed a strong and powerful role, while the families he depicted tended to be other than ideal. Sanders concludes: ‘Ultimately Dickens’s experience of fatherhood permeated his entire writing life. All his novels are about families, most of them fragmented by a parent’s absence, or distorted by the father’s heavy-handed presence.’29 Edith Craig and Edward Gordon Craig had two step-fathers, Charles (Kelly) Wardell and James Carew. The latter married Terry in 1907 and was younger than both of his step-children. Close father figures included Henry Irving, Bram Stoker and Stephen Coleridge. Edward Gordon Craig’s experience of his biological father was largely mediated at a distance through print. The influence of father on son was exerted through more than the passing on of a name. J. Michael Walton’s chapter considers the significance of Edward Gordon Craig’s reprinting of many of his father’s articles in The Mask (1908–29), beginning with a son’s dream about his father. To what extent was this an act of revival, for Gordon Craig, a communing with the lost father rather than driven by an intellectual and aesthetic interest in the articles themselves? They present themselves as curiously displaced alongside The Mask’s other items. Terry seems rarely to mention Godwin, but in one touching letter to her son she gives him information about his father’s career with a view to making him proud of his father.30

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Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence

In Chapter 8, Professor Richard Foulkes examines the influence which Lewis Carroll exerted on Terry in order to advance the career of Menella Quin. He situates this in the context of Carroll’s befriending of young women with theatrical leanings. Terry’s function as role model and mentor is evident from her private correspondence. She went to great lengths to support others and provide practical advice. Edith Craig’s place in theatre history should be more firmly fixed than it is.31 Training alongside her mother at the Lyceum Theatre and on tour in the United Kingdom and United States, Craig learnt her skills as costumier and performer before finding her vocation as a director. Supported and inspired by the women’s suffrage movement, she produced many plays associated with this and other political movements, including socialism and even vegetarianism. Her principal achievement was the founding of the Pioneer Players theatre society in 1911. This was London’s forgotten art theatre.32 A complex figure, Edith Craig has been overshadowed by her mother and her brother and also likely to have been marginalized in this period as a woman, a feminist and a lesbian. She received international acclaim for her productions in the interwar period. Her productions of Claudel were groundbreaking and align her, as Roberta Gandolfi shows in Chapter 9, with many innovative productions in Europe. Gandolfi analyses the productions, focusing especially on the interpretation of the physical aspects of performance, demonstrating the significance of Craig’s production of Claudel’s plays with the Pioneer Players at this time and their context in international theatre history. The association with Claudel, Catholicism and the female abject also situates Edith Craig’s work in a lesbian aesthetic context.33 In the era of the ‘invert’, it is hard to avoid a lesbian reading of Djuna Barnes in a nun’s habit or of the female martyr figure as a role model for agency. Gandolfi’s illuminating research on prompt books and reviews provides a fascinating analysis of the pace of Edith Craig’s production of the last scene of The Hostage, with its suggestion of cruelty, excess and possibly deviance. It seems that in this production of Claudel’s play, dramatic form and performance style, drawn from the developing expressionism in international art theatre, lent itself to the dramatization of a dissident female subjectivity. This provided some continuity with the Pioneer Players’ earlier work. Terry’s influence extended unexpectedly to the art theatres of London in the interwar period. Terry danced into the life of Velona Pilcher very briefly in 1925 before she danced out of life itself. In Chapter 10, Charlotte Purkis examines how Pilcher’s involvement with Edith Craig and her circle provided her with a supportive network in her activities in theatre. Edith Craig went to great lengths to ensure that her mother was remembered. In Chapter 11, ‘Ellen Terry: Preserving the Relics and Creating the Brand’, I outline the history of the National Trust’s archive of more than 20,000 papers belonging to Terry and Edith Craig

Introduction

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at Smallhythe Place, Tenterden, Kent. This is one of the UK’s most significant theatre archives, and is the result of active collection of ‘Ellen Terry’s relics’ by her daughter after Terry’s death and Terry’s own selection of material for preservation during her lifetime. Some examples of Terry’s marginalia demonstrate her conscious decision to record her opinions for posterity. She cultivated her own image in the press, responded imaginatively to her fans and, indeed, created the Ellen Terry brand at a time in her life when she was in financial difficulty. This essay provides new insights into the details of Terry’s financial demise as they have become apparent from the newly catalogued archive. The AHRC Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Database project 2006–8 resulted in the online guide to this major archive. The final chapter in this volume highlights some of the significant features of the project, the development and design of the database and its web interface, as well as an enhanced descriptive summary of the archive.

PART I: ELLEN TERRY’S INFLUENCES ON OTHERS 1 INTRODUCTION: ELLEN TERRY’S LOST LIVES Nina Auerbach

Ellen Terry lured me into her sphere before I knew what she played. I glimpsed a funny tragedienne; I dipped into the wealth of her letters, which dithered with apologies at their own excess; and before I knew who she was, I was hers. Like many audiences, in her lifetime and beyond it, I was enthralled by a woman who was not. The official Ellen Terry played a repertoire of noble women – under the guidance of her stately stage partner, the actor-manager Henry Irving, she was a girlish Olivia in The Vicar of Wakefield, a pathetic Ophelia, a high-minded Portia – but alone, in the margins of her scripts, she played roles Irving forbade: sensuous Gertrude, Hamlet himself, Macbeth, Rosalind in the As You Like It Irving refused to stage, Shaw’s Candida and his Strange Lady (in The Man of Destiny), Ibsen’s Hedda and his Lady From the Sea, De La Motte Fouqué’s water sprite Undine, and Peter Pan. It was Terry’s unacted parts that lured me as they lured the women in her audience and her two children, Edy and Ted (Gordon Craig), whose careers exuded promise but scarcely tangible performance. Mrs Pat Campbell, the next generation’s star, a more outspoken one than Terry, remembered Terry’s performance, not as Shakespeare’s virtuous Imogen, but as an extraterrestrial messenger repudiating virtuous wives in all scripts: When she entered I felt she had come from the moon: when she left the stage I was sure the stars were greeting her. No one has ever had her magical step – that extraordinary happy haste, that made you feel she must presently arrive at the gates of Paradise. The evening I saw her as ‘Imogen,’ she forgot her words, and – giving a delicious look at the audience and then towards heaven – spoke three times in a voice that melted your bosom, this word: ‘Beyond – beyond – beyond –’ There was no ‘beyond’ in the text, but it was the loveliest word I ever heard, and described her ‘Imogen.’1

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Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence

That unwritten ‘beyond’ was Terry’s sphere. From her day to our own, Terry’s Lorelei-like influence beckoned beyond her assigned roles. Even offstage, her performance as model was a whisper of a life beyond any artist’s subject. The actress is lost, but the extraordinary model lives on in all her guises. The actress froze into a few signature roles, but the model is a shape-shifter. Terry’s brief, odd marriage to G. F. Watts produced a medley of Ellen Terrys, none of which she would play on stage. Most of us know Choosing, in which a radiant girl vainly inhales ‘the showy, scentless camellia’, as Veronica Franklin Gould puts it in Chapter 3 below. But this mournful pastoral, an emblem of romantic renunciation, is not the only Ellen Terry in Watts’s paintings. There are startlingly sexual nude nymphs like The Wife of Pluto; ardent boyish girls (Watchman, What of the Night? and Joan of Arc, Mounted on an Armour-Clad Horse), looking back to the acrobatic boys Terry played as a child, and forward to her boyish daughter Edith Craig. Above all, there are Watts’s chilling Ophelia paintings, whose Ellen Terry is neither beautiful nor spry, but eerie and witch-like. Her madness is not a stage turn, but a confusion that eats her from within. Watts’s final Ophelia’s Madness is all madness and no girl, a distorted face swelling into a personification of torment. Later painters realize a similarly varied model. Sargent’s famous Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth gives us an Ellen Terry Watts never saw. Her frenzied expression, the upward swoop of the composition, the ferocity with which she raises a crown that seems hers alone, embody an energy rare in Sargent’s work, and in Terry’s as well. Just a few years later, William Rothenstein created an Ellen Terry the opposite of Sargent’s: static, huddled into herself, without motion or ardor. Either or neither might be the ‘real’ Ellen Terry, but this consummate player had, I suspect, no one real self: she was any and all creations men saw. Her spell was her mutability. Terry was not a perfect performer. She was skittish, often even silly, onstage, especially when she did not like the virtuous roles which tumbled out of her head. Her silliness was her charm for many women who also did not like their roles. Striking as she was, she enticed audiences to look less at her than beyond her, to a realm where even forbidden roles could be played. Her two theatrical children inherited her promise of stages beyond the stage. Edith and Teddy Craig were reversals of each others’ unacted parts. They had no visible father: according to Terry, her daughter took the name ‘Craig’ from a craggy Scottish island. Lacking the stately continuity that would exalt the Barrymores and Redgraves, Teddy aggrandized himself into the superb ‘Edward Gordon Craig’, while Edith squeezed herself into the ‘Edy’ by which she became famous in her circle. Unlike his mother’s, Gordon’s Craig’s stage life was meagre, but like her, he promised unseen theatrical realizations. More beautiful even than Ellen Terry, he was a sometime actor, sometime director (who managed to alienate most of

Introduction: Ellen Terry’s Lost Lives

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the theatres he might have worked for), sometime designer, but above all he was a theatrical writer. His copious charismatic books, full of drawings for productions that were never staged, carry us beyond material theatres, flesh-and-blood actors, to a vast, inhuman realm where gods stalk. As his visionary work lived beyond theatrical realization, so did he live beyond any recognizable country: from 1903 to his death in 1966, he exiled himself from England. Terry beckoned her audiences beyond; Gordon Craig lived there. Edy Craig seemed to beckon nowhere and go nowhere; for most of her adult life, beginning with her mother’s long decline, she stayed in England with her partner the self-named Christopher St John (who was born Christabel Marshall), her theatres and her thoughts. Unlike the others, Edy made no pronouncements of her many identities. In her letters and drawings, she tended to refer to herself in faint pencil. If she spoke out more boldly, we will never hear it: Christopher burned her significant papers after her death. Yet this reticent, dutiful, prickly woman may be the most magnetic character in the family, perhaps because she embodied an unacted part. Edy Craig was as obscure in her lifetime as she is today. She was famous only to her company, but after a floundering girlhood, suppressed perhaps by her mother’s ambition for her, she worked all the time. She was the only member of her family to bridge Irving’s grand Lyceum and the New Drama that encroached on it: in 1898 and 1899, she both played small parts and designed costumes at the Lyceum, and also played character roles in new plays by Pinero, Shaw and Ibsen. Her idiom got more political as she grew older and bolder. From the 1880s, before it was fashionable, she directed suffrage drama and feminist pageants; from 1911 to 1920, she headed the Pioneer Players, a theatre society whose politics were more inclusive than suffrage theatre. Compared to her mother’s glamour and her brother’s grandiosity, Edy’s theatre may have looked shabby and even amateurish, but unlike theirs it had the pulse of lived experience. This understated pioneer earned Bernard Shaw’s famous compliment: ‘Gordon Craig had made himself the most famous producer in Europe by dint of never producing anything, while Edith Craig remains the most obscure by dint of producing everything’.2 For those of us who write about Terry’s family, Edy’s obscurity is usually deplored, but she is all the more compelling for being half-submerged. She lived a vivid, versatile life in the shadows, where she almost steals the show. Unlike her brother, she cared more about her work than herself, but like him she was bossy – her company affectionately called her ‘Boney’ – with none of her compliant mother’s subversive indirection. Then as now, bossy women rarely reach stellar heights. Like her mother, Edy was where her times put her, but unlike her frac-

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tious mother and her endlessly complaining brother, she belonged in the scarcely visible life she led. After the Pioneer Players dissolved, her home and her material became the English countryside. By the twentieth century, the mainstream theatre had settled in London; the Lyceum’s long provincial tours were rituals of the Victorian past. But Edy became a country girl. Her medium evolved from politics to pageants, in which she often commandeered local farmers; as the mainstream theatrical idiom became increasingly sophisticated and self-consciously modern, Edy turned back to the silent styles of the rural past. Her most successful pageant was her mother’s funeral, in which a colorfully dressed crowd paraded, singing, to the local church. Her most lasting work of art was her home, The Farm at Smallythe. When Terry died, leaving The Farm and its adjacent cottages to Edy, Edy indulged in a quiet act of transfiguration: Smallythe, still almost exactly as it was, now belongs to the National Trust. During Edy’s lifetime, annual Shakespeare productions were staged at the barn in memory of Terry. Now The Farm houses the Ellen Terry and Edith Craig archive, the heart of the family’s continuing life. Roles, played and unplayed, are perishable, but shadowy Edy has kept her theatrical family performing to this day.

2 ELLEN TERRY, BRAM STOKER AND THE LYCEUM’S VAMPIRES Catherine Wynne

On 16 June 1897 the artist Philip Burne-Jones wrote to Bram Stoker to thank him for sending him the recently published Dracula, noting that he will read it with interest and promising that as soon as he has ‘a copy I shall beg your acceptance of a photograph of my Vampire, a woman this time, so as to make the balance fair!’1 The artist claims to redress the gender imbalance by revealing his vampire to the writer. In Dracula, the vampire Lucy is associated with, though not identified as, Ellen Terry. Although Terry is the only actor mentioned in the text, in twentieth- and twenty-first-century biographical criticism Henry Irving becomes entwined with the figure of the vampire for draining his employee of his creative vitality by imposing onerous administrative duties on him during Stoker’s tenure as the Lyceum’s acting or business manager.2 In what has now become the defining relationship between Stoker and Irving, Stoker’s relationship with Terry and her centrality to the cultivation of the writer’s work has largely been overlooked. Indeed, Terry’s association with Lucy has been interpreted as a ‘hostile reference’ to her.3 Crucially, this tendency to identify the actors with vampires has drained attention from the writer’s complex engagement with the Lyceum’s supernatural and melodramatic productions and the theatre’s role in shaping Stoker’s Gothic fiction has, as a consequence, been neglected. As actor-manager, Irving had creative control at the Lyceum but Terry enhanced the Lyceum’s Gothic culture. Of central concern in this essay is the relationship between Terry’s Lyceum roles and the configuration of females in Stoker’s fiction. Burne-Jones’s letter to Stoker is also tied to the artist’s most famous and controversial painting, The Vampire. It was exhibited at London’s New Gallery on 24 April 1897, two months before the publication of Dracula. The Athenaeum describes the now lost painting as a scene in which a stalwart young man, who is either dead or dying, or in a trance of terror, lies supine on his bed; upon his uncovered breast is the mark of the monster’s fatal caress, and she,

– 17 –

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Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence in the shape of a wan, demon-like woman, sits at his side and looks as if her lips had just parted from their horrid work.4

By fixing on the figure of woman as demon Burne-Jones encapsulates the period’s misogyny, a feature underscored by Rudyard Kipling’s poem that accompanied the painting, in which the female is described ‘as a rag and a bone and a hank of hair’.5 The vampire in Burne-Jones’s painting was allegedly modelled on the actress Stella (Mrs Pat) Campbell. When Burne-Jones promises Stoker a ‘photograph of my Vampire’, he initiates an artistic pact between men in which vampires become the period’s Other. Indeed, Jonathan Harker’s encounter with the vampire women in Castle Dracula recalls the scene in Burne-Jones’s painting, although writer and artist produced their respective works independently. Certainly, Dracula yields to an interpretation that locates the text and, by implication, the writer into a framework complicit with Burne-Jones’s vision. Yet the tendency to stake Stoker’s vampiric influences has overshadowed his complex engagement with Victorian theatrical culture which began in Dublin in the 1870s where he worked as a theatre reviewer. He moved to London in 1878 to fill the role as the Lyceum’s business manager, a post he held until 1902 and he continued to work for Irving until the actor’s death in 1905. Unlike the dilettante Burne-Jones, Stoker worked in the theatre for a living alongside actors who also were working for a living. Neither actor nor playwright (although he did attempt to write for the stage), but administrator, public relations figure and part-time writer, Stoker assumed, like the working actor, a variety of roles: he greeted patrons in the theatre foyer, looked on from the wings and worked behind the stage.6 He was very much part of the quotidian functioning of the Lyceum and, although little of his fiction uses the theatrical world as a setting, the Lyceum’s productions shape and inform his work. Through an examination of some of Terry’s most important roles at the Lyceum and their relationship with Stoker’s fiction, this essay redresses the long-standing critical disjunction between Stoker’s work in the theatre and his writing. It argues that Stoker’s fiction needs to be located within the environment of production at the Lyceum in which melodrama is paramount. Although Christopher St John argues that for Terry’s sake ‘it may be wished that Sir Henry Irving had not been so fond of horrors’, some of Terry’s most successful roles involved playing tortured or sacrificial females.7 Irving’s and Terry’s supernatural melodramas and the Lyceum’s Gothic climate deeply influenced Stoker’s productions. This essay discusses the Lyceum’s Faust (1885) and Ravenswood (1890) and Stoker’s fictional and non-fictional writings, particularly Snowbound: The Record of a Theatrical Company (1908), to explore the relationships between stage and text and the fiction’s incorporation of Gothic and melodramatic performance, with particular focus on the representation of women on stage and in fiction.

Ellen Terry, Bram Stoker and the Lyceum’s Vampires

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Beginnings: Melodrama and the Gothic Stoker’s Gothic predilection emerges before his arrival at the Lyceum in 1878 and his early work responds to Ireland’s socio-political and theatrical climate. Gothic was the key mode of expression for nineteenth-century Irish fiction; the country immersed in social distress and political unrest was, Julian Moynahan argues, ‘sometimes seen as a living Gothic’.8 At the same time, as theatrical reviewer Stoker was nightly exposed to melodrama and Shakespearean revivals, brought to Dublin by touring companies, and the melodramatic climate of Victorian theatre in the 1870s can be traced back to his early publications. ‘The Chain of Destiny’ (1875), for instance, is both Gothic and melodramatic. In this story, set in England, the narrator Frank has a ghastly experience when he visits the home of friends. He dreams that outside his bedroom window three children assume the form of witches accompanied by a ‘Fiend’, uttering ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. The fairest and the best.’9 In the nightmare he also sees a girl witness the vision from her bed before she collapses in terrorstricken death. Later, discovering that the vision relates to a long-standing feud and a curse on the first Fothering who should stay at the house, he warns Diana Fothering who has come to visit. When she dismisses his fears, he makes the sign of the cross over her handkerchief, a symbol of protection that prefigures the crucifix given to Harker by a Transylvanian woman.10 Subsequently, when Frank hears Diana’s cry in the night, he bursts into her room and, realizing that she is transfixed by the horrible vision, he jumps through the window in order to break her trance. With its religious symbols, three witches ruled by a fiend, and smashed windows, the story invokes themes developed in the vampire novel. Its theatrical associations emerge in its tribute to Macbeth, which Stoker reviewed in Dublin. Furthermore its focus on supernatural visions, the tortured female and the suffering body of the male who triumphantly saves her from evil, places the text within a melodramatic vein. Melodrama was the dominant theatrical mode of the nineteenth century and, alongside Shakespearean revivals, Irving and Terry worked extensively within it. With its focus on moral polarities, excesses of emotion, and spectacle, melodrama was frequently underrated by critics. For instance, Oscar Wilde’s sonnet dedicated to Irving on his revival of The Corsican Brothers is indicative: The silent room, the heavy creeping shade, The dead that travel fast, the opening door, The murdered brother rising through the floor, The ghost’s white fingers on thy shoulders laid … These things are well enough – but thou wert made For more august creation!11

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Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence

Irving, the sonnet suggests, should reject popular drama in favour of Shakespeare’s ‘august’ works. At the same time, its powerful description of The Corsican Brothers unwittingly betrays the appeal of Irving’s supernatural melodrama. In another sonnet, Terry as Queen Henrietta Maria from the Lyceum’s Charles I is inscribed in Pre-Raphaelite terms as a ‘lily overdrenched with rain’ but with a face ‘[m]ade for the luring and love of man’.12 Power and pathos define the melodramatic partnership of Terry and Irving. Modern critical interpretations of melodrama have led to its reappraisal, with Peter Brooks’s seminal work exploring its centrality to modernity.13 Subsequently, Simon Shepherd locates a ‘serious public role for melodrama’s interest in tales of personal truth’ while Daniel Gerould argues that it ‘favour[s] the cause of the dispossessed’.14 Furthermore melodrama often licenses transgression even though it ends in a return to conventional order and mores. Stage melodrama works on the senses; as Wilde’s sonnet to Irving suggests, it is a highly visual, indeed, a spectacular medium. For Brooks it articulates psychic states which are expressed through the body; ‘the melodramatic body is a body seized by meaning … bodies of victims and villains must unambiguously signify their status’.15 Melodrama shares the characteristics of the Gothic novel in its preoccupation with ‘nightmare states’ and ‘innocence buried alive’ and the exploration of ‘evil as a real, irreducible force in the world’.16 Maurice Willson Disher dates the ‘vogue for supernatural melodrama’ from 1820, just as the first wave of Gothic fiction was ending.17 Gothic fiction’s re-emergence at the end of nineteenth century is paralleled, then, by the Lyceum’s Gothic climate.

Gothic and Melodramatic Performers Stoker’s arrival at the Lyceum to take up his post as acting manager in December 1878 coincided with Terry’s arrival shortly before the inaugural performance of Hamlet in which she played Ophelia. Stoker describes in Personal Reminiscences how he first met the actress on 23 December emerging from the somewhat dark passage under the staircase leading to the two ‘star’ dressing rooms … But not even the darkness of that December day could shut out the radiant beauty of the woman … Her face was full of colour and animation.18

Such a description places Terry within a melodramatic framework of light emerging from darkness and thus associates her with the roles she played on the Lyceum stage. The manner in which melodramatic modes are deployed beyond the boundaries of the stage is also crucial to an understanding of the complexity of Stoker’s engagement with the Lyceum demonstrated in his fictional and nonfictional writings. In stage memoirs, such as Personal Reminiscences and Terry’s

Ellen Terry, Bram Stoker and the Lyceum’s Vampires

21

The Story of My Life (1908), lives are often articulated within melodramatic frameworks. Stoker also projects a melodramatic self in Personal Reminiscences. For instance, during Irving’s Dublin tour in 1876, he provides an account of how after a private dinner with friends Irving recited Thomas Hood’s poem of the murderer Eugene Aram. Stoker records that he was ‘spellbound’ seeing the murderer with his ‘soul aflame in the light of his abiding horror’.19 He describes how Irving concluded the performance by almost fainting while he responded by ‘burst[ing] out into something like a violent fit of hysterics’ and thus ‘began a friendship as profound, as close, as lasting as can be between men’.20 Traditionally read in homoerotic terms, the description of this relationship can also be examined in the context of the power of melodrama with which, through its bodily effects, relations between men are transformed. In her memoir Terry also harnessed the transformative power of melodrama. Divorced from W. G. Watts, lover of William Godwin and mother of two children outside marriage, Terry was a Victorian fallen woman. Her memoir, however, restages her private life. For instance, she describes her six years with Godwin and their children in the country as domestic bliss where she studied ‘Mrs. Beeton instead of Shakespeare!’21 One of Terry’s most successful preLyceum roles was playing the titular part in W. G. Wills’s Olivia, an adaptation of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) which was staged at London’s Court Theatre in March 1878. The play incorporates the financial ruination of the vicar and his family but focuses on one aspect of the plight of the vicar, the dishonour of his daughter. Olivia runs away from a happy home to contract what she believes is a legitimate marriage, but when her husband tells her that the marriage is fake, she flees, believing herself to be a fallen woman, until she is rescued by her father (played by Irving at the Lyceum).22 Olivia’s degradation is emphasized in the play as it focuses on the notion of fallenness. Finally, it is revealed that the marriage was genuine after all and Olivia is reconciled with her husband. A standard melodrama, this story of suffering explores transgressive desires but, through punishment and rehabilitation, returns to conventional mores. One of Terry’s most remarkable biographical and melodramatic descriptions of her disappearance to the countryside with Godwin is her record of an incident involving a drowned woman. When this body was recovered her parents believed that it might be her: My own father identified the corpse … Then mother went. She kept her head under the shock of the likeness, and bethought her of ‘a strawberry mark upon my left arm.’ (Really I had one over my left knee.) That settled it, there was no such mark to be found on the poor corpse. It was just at this moment that the news came to me in my country retreat that I had been found dead, and I flew up to London to give ocular proof to my poor distracted parents that I was alive. Mother, who had been the only

22

Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence one not to identify the drowned girl, confessed to me that she was so like me that just for a second she, too, was deceived … [W]hen I went away without a word, they were terribly anxious, and prepared to believe the first bad tidings that came to hand. It came in the shape of that most extraordinary likeness between me and that poor soul who threw herself in the river.23

Katharine Cockin describes this as one of Terry’s ‘Gothic moments’ in which her ‘guilt became uncannily embodied’.24 Michael Holroyd notes that Terry had disappeared from the stage on 10 October 1868 and that her family did not know where she was. She had left a message, ‘Found Drowned’, on a photograph of her first husband, G. F. Watts.25 The message alluded to Watts’s painting Found Drowned (1848–50), which depicts a dead woman on the banks of the Thames. In her memoir Terry claims that she left without a word, but Holroyd notes that she was ‘forgetting the two dreadful words they had read in her message’.26 Terry’s account of the drowned woman simultaneously aligns her with but distances her from the pictorial and often factual ending of the fallen woman: death by drowning. In Terry’s account the unnamed woman has assumed the role and the suffering. Like Olivia, Terry is found when she comes forward to relieve her parents’ anxiety. By the time Stoker met Terry at the Lyceum she had remarried and relaunched a successful stage career. At the Lyceum she specialized in portraying victims, from Ophelia in Hamlet to Margaret in Faust, just as Irving specialized in what Denis Salter describes as the ‘character type of the fated man’.27 In their supernatural and Gothic roles Terry’s and Irving’s performances were attuned to the late-century Gothic renaissance in fiction. Furthermore Terry’s story of the drowned girl adds to the period’s fascination with public and private selves and in the theatrical realm the division between the public role and the private life becomes further confused by performances and by biographical narratives that manifest the private life in melodramatic terms. Stoker’s fiction equally responds to this multiplicity of melodramatic selves, both on and off the stage.

Dramatic and Fictional Convergences Stoker’s fiction, intensely associated with notions of gender and sexuality, responds to the Lyceum’s engagement with melodramatic themes of dishonour and degradation. Faust (1885), adapted by Wills, in which Irving plays the tempter and Terry assumes the role of Margaret, explores notions of fallenness. The most extravagant of the Lyceum’s productions, its spectacular staging and supernatural underpinnings coupled with domestic concerns deeply influenced Dracula. Personal Reminiscences reveals a connection between the texts. Here Stoker records how he expressed concerns to Irving about the dull green scenery of the supernatural Brocken set. Irving reassured him that he needed to see

Ellen Terry, Bram Stoker and the Lyceum’s Vampires

23

Mephistopheles’s red cloak contrasted with ‘Ellen Terry’s white dress’, noting that ‘even that red scar across her throat will stand out in the midst of that turmoil of lightning’.28 Stoker’s theatrical training in Dublin had alerted him to the importance of dress and colour on stage. In Dublin’s Evening Mail he notes: ‘The value of dress in producing stage effect is enormous’ and ‘on the stage everything must be coloured’.29 On the Lyceum stage, Margaret, Ophelia and Desdemona wear white, while in Dracula Stoker clothes Lucy in white. Another point of comparison arises with scars. While Margaret exhibits a scar on her throat in Faust, in Dracula, Lucy’s neck is pierced by the vampire as she sits on the seat looking over the harbour and when Mina discovers Lucy in her nightdress she falsely believes that the prick is caused by the pin that she uses to fasten her cloak around Lucy when she comes to find her. Mina fears that they will be spotted abroad in their nightclothes and thus compromise their reputations. The threat of fallenness hangs over women who are walking at night and Mina’s attempts to muddy her bare feet to provide the illusion of footwear merely underlines how the friends are already dangerously compromised through Lucy’s somnambulist encounter with the Count. In terms of staging, Faust draws a sharp contrast between the excesses of the supernatural scenes and the simplicity of Margaret’s bedroom. A contemporary reviewer noted that Terry’s ‘utter absence of self-consciousness robs the scene in the “neat” little bed-chamber of all possible offence; and the climax of Margaret’s anguish in her dungeon-cell recalls Miss Terry’s touching treatment of Ophelia’s madness’.30 As if following the critic’s association between melodrama and Shakespeare, Stoker in Dracula places most of Lucy’s scenes in her bedchamber. Lucy even compares herself explicitly to Ophelia, ‘hoping for sleep, and lying like Ophelia in the play, with “virgin crants and maiden strewments”’.31 The American critic William Winter links Ophelia and Margaret as Terry’s defining roles and describes how Terry was ‘bewitching and pathetic beyond description as Goethe’s Margaret’.32 The depiction of Margaret’s fall and redemption combines torture with pathos. Mephistopheles derides her resort to religious symbols for protection: ‘You think you may be fenced round by-and-by with sprinkled holy water, lifted cross – while you and your pale saint might hold a siege against the scape-goat – ’gainst the devil here’.33 In Dracula the fencing out of the malign supernatural succeeds with Mina when Van Helsing draws a circle protected by communion wafers around them to shield them from the female vampires in Transylvania. The vampire Lucy is repelled by a crucifix when she attempts to seduce her fiancé. Interestingly, Michael Booth notes that, in order to tempt Faust, early stagings of the play had Mephistopheles conjure a vision of Margaret at her spinning wheel but this was replaced ‘by a more immediately sensual vision of voluptuous and scantily dressed young women’.34

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Faust, though a play that deals with a pact with the devil, is more interesting in terms of its preoccupation with the suffering woman, partly due to Terry’s excellence in the role of Margaret. In The Story of My Life Terry notes that she ‘never cared much for Henry’s Mephistopheles – a two-pence coloured part’ but that Margaret was the part that she ‘liked better than any other – outside Shakespeare’.35 St John ‘doubt[s] whether [Terry] has ever come nearer to the soul of tragic passion’ than in Faust.36 Margaret’s degradation is brought about through Mephistopheles’s machinations; like Lucy in Dracula, she is the victim of supernatural forces. She must suffer but she is redeemed in death through divine intervention. In the play’s final scene her prison fades away and Stoker’s Personal Reminiscences describes how she lies at the foot of the cross with a line of angels comprising young women and children who ‘seemed to float ethereally’.37 The scene demonstrates suffering and salvation. Lucy’s redemption is far more violent but her final rest from a state of undeath is also articulated in religious terms as Seward describes how after Lucy is staked in her coffin ‘that the holy calm that lay like sunshine over [her] wasted face and form was only an earthly token and symbol of the calm that was to reign for ever’.38 Van Helsing confirms that she is ‘God’s true dead, whose soul is with Him!’39 Not all of Terry’s females are fallen but most of them suffer. Lucy Ashton from Ravenswood, adapted by Herman Merivale from Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, was produced at the Lyceum on 20 September 1890. Set in Scotland in Queen Anne’s reign, it charts the fatal relationship between Edgar Ravenswood and Lucy Ashton. Ashton’s father has tricked the Ravenswoods of their land so the couple’s relationship is cursed. A crone, reminiscent of Macbeth’s witches, prophesies that ‘the last Lord of Ravenswood’ will ride to ‘woo a dead maiden to be his bride’ and will ‘stable his steed i’ the Kelpie’s flow’.40 Edgar departs for France but gains a promise from Lucy that she will remain faithful to him until his return. Ailsie Gourlay, however, warns that the relationship transgresses family loyalty as Edgar is ‘kissing lips, which, vampire-like’ drew his father’s ‘life-blood’.41 Lucy is framed as ‘vampire-like’ but she is in fact merely a victim of family machinations. Tricked by her mother into contracting a union with another man when she is convinced that Edgar has been unfaithful to her, she discovers too late that Edgar has returned to fulfil his pledge. She collapses in madness and death and Edgar, on discovering this, rides his horse into the quicksand, the Kelpie’s Flow. Graham Robertson argues that Lucy’s mad scene prior to her death was excellent and that she ‘died distraught, to the keen distress of the audience and [Terry’s] own complete satisfaction’.42 The intensity of female suffering in Faust, Ravenswood and Olivia can be read in the context of what Ellen Bayuk Rosenman in her study of the sensation novels defines as ‘melodramatic masochism’ in which melodrama’s heightened emotional state is coupled with a masochistic pursuit of a ‘forbidden pleasure

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or agency’ [which] the character ‘arranges to suffer for … and therefore maintain moral credibility’. It is ‘designed to convince the audience that the sufferer deserves sympathy, however deeply he or she has sinned’. In an age which repressed certain aspects of an emotional life, such as sexual passion, ‘suffering provided a useful way of concealing undesirable, ego-oriented emotions’.43 Olivia, Margaret and Lucy, in their different ways, transgress moral or familial codes. All are, in one way or another, defined by sexual passion but all become suffering females whose sexuality is redirected into pain and passivity. The inert, suffering female is entirely compatible with the acceptable face of Victorian womanhood. Stoker’s fiction of the 1890s responds to this aspect of female suffering, which Terry portrayed on stage. The Watter’s Mou’ (1895) is a simple story of smuggling on the east coast of Scotland. Willy Barrow, a coastguard, is informed that an illicit cargo is due to arrive onshore. His fiancée, Maggie MacWhirter, deduces that her father and brothers have been forced into the smuggling ring. Torn between loyalty to her family and love for her fiancé, she uses her sexuality to sway Willy from his duties. Initially distracted by her voluptuousness, Willy rejects her advances and reprimands her. The shamed Maggie sets sail in a small boat in order to warn her father and brothers, who duly throw their contraband overboard. Maggie attempts her return in a storm and when she fails to arrive on shore the soldiers who were sent to arrest the smugglers are redeployed scouring the coast for the brave girl who sacrificed herself for her family. The distraught Willy, waiting at the mouth of the water of Cruden, sees the boat’s broken wreckage washed into the bay with Maggie’s body surrounded by a floating aureole of her brown hair, reminiscent of Millais’s Ophelia. In the final scene, the villagers congregate at the site to behold the dead Willy floating in the bay with Maggie in his arms. The female’s suffering body achieves its rewards – Maggie is simultaneously absolved and rewarded. With its dramatic scenery and tragic dénouement in the watery mouth of the bay, the story’s sensational elements evoke mid-Victorian sensation melodrama. Indeed, the Athenaeum’s reviewer noted the connection between Stoker’s writing and his work at the Lyceum. Although not complimentary towards Stoker’s ‘tendency to melodramatic and stagey writing’, the reviewer notes that such a tendency is ‘inevitable perhaps from the author’s associations’.44 This connection between Stoker’s fiction and his theatre work highlights how Stoker’s contemporaries associated aspects of his writing with the Lyceum stage. While The Watter’s Mou’ shares Ravenswood’s nihilistic vision, in other Gothically themed Stoker narratives, such as The Snake’s Pass (1890), The Mystery of the Sea (1902) and The Lady of the Shroud (1909), the imperilled female escapes melodramatic villainy and achieves a happy union. In these texts heroines exhibit self-reliant qualities as Stoker’s fictions engage in an appreciation of changing gender roles. Such possibilities for females are inspired by Stoker’s

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work in the theatre alongside actresses who derived economic power from acting. Power and passivity are intertwined in Dracula, in which Mina, the capable female, functions as passive Lucy’s double. On stage, Terry often performed passive roles but such passivity is enabled by the power of Terry’s acting. In Personal Reminiscences, for instance, Stoker admires Terry’s interpretation of Ophelia’s mad scene, describing it as ‘most sad and pathetic’.45 As acting manager he is also very aware that Terry is a professional figure performing a role. He recalls how in his first few weeks at the theatre, he prevented an accident occurring which would have compromised Terry’s performance of the scene. In Stoker’s account, the Chinese ambassador, after visiting Irving backstage during the play, had wandered dangerously close to the stage. Stoker claims that he caught him just before he passed into the limelight. Hamlet was the ‘holy of holies’ to Irving, ‘to whom full measure of loyalty was due; and beyond all it was Ellen Terry who would suffer’.46 For Stoker, loyalty to his chief is superseded by his attention to ensuring that Terry’s acting is not compromised. Stoker’s account provides an insight into his interpretation of his role at the theatre; for Stoker the performance must be protected. His use of the verb ‘suffer’ is an interesting one in the manner in which the verb draws professional standards into an association with the expression of suffering which the role requires. Ophelia was the iconic suffering female of the Victorian period, and while Terry specialized in the performance of suffering, Stoker saw his role as ensuring that Terry’s performance did not suffer. However, performing pathos was demanding on the resources of the actress. Interestingly, Terry notes that her ‘appearance was right’ for Desdemona: ‘I was a poor, wraith of a thing. But let there be no mistake – it took strength to act this weakness and passiveness of Desdemona.’47 Terry’s comment seems to disassociate the demonstration of passivity on stage from the power needed to portray it. Terry’s name, of course, appears in Dracula in association with the children on Hampstead Heath who re-enact the activities of the vampire Lucy, ‘the bloofer lady’ who lures them away to suck their blood.48 Terry is not identified with Lucy and the distinction is a crucial one. In the narrative a story appears from the fictional Westminster Gazette regarding children’s claims of a lady on the heath. The newspaper reports a ‘naïve’ correspondent who observes that ‘even Ellen Terry could not be so winningly attractive as some of these grubby faced little children pretend, or even imagine themselves to be’.49 Here Terry is associated with children performing the role of the beautiful temptress – a role whose significance they do not understand. On one level children’s role-playing opens an imaginative framework that licenses fantasy. The association of the children with Terry can be read in the way in which the stage allows the performance of other roles. At the same time, this beautiful lady’s reality is fatal. In the dream in ‘The Chain of Destiny’ the children turn into witches.

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Gail Marshall argues that the allusion to Terry in Dracula is a response to her challenging her role in the theatre. She locates this argument in Stoker’s descriptions of how he assisted Terry in adapting Nance Oldfield, Charles Reade’s play, remarking that Stoker’s focus on her laughing and dancing infantilizes her.50 This infantilization could be read as an attempt to distance the sexual implications of performance and working relations. It also suggests that just as the children in Dracula ignorantly perform the role of the blood-sucking vampire on Hampstead Heath, Terry may be equally unconscious of her seductive powers on the stage. The report describes how the ‘favourite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles’ and that ‘a correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the “bloofer lady” is extremely funny’.51 The report suggests that the children’s game extends only to luring their friends and not to the act of biting. Terry’s acting is then associated with this childish play, yet at the same time these acting children, if not yet objects of the bloofer lady’s wiles, are complicit in and tainted by her strategies of seduction. Sin and guilt, Terry’s specialisms at the Lyceum, are performed on stage in a space that distances them from the real world. Stoker’s allusion to Terry then in association with role-playing children can be tied to the creativity of melodramatic performance. Terry’s regular portrayals of fallenness on the stage (and Lucy in Dracula is a fallen woman), opens a space to explore sexual desires, but Terry’s cultivation of pathos and suffering re-establishes moral rectitude. Indeed, no Victorian melodramatic heroine suffers more than Lucy. With Nance Oldfield Terry portrayed the power of the actress to instil admiration. The play is based on a real eighteenth-century actress, Ann Oldfield. In the play the actress’ ‘mission is to cure the love that a romantic man has conceived for her through seeing her on the stage’ and she does this by ‘convert[ing] herself from the most charming of women into a veritable “tom-boyish” hoyden’.52 Terry plays an actress who plays a role to dissuade a potential lover. Stoker notes: [S]he conveyed her idea to me that Alexander must not be left with a serious personal passion for Mrs Oldfield and that yet she should not sink in his esteem. Finally I wrote a line which had the reward of her approbation. The actress was explaining to Mr. Alworthy how his son did not really love her: ‘It was the actress he loved and not the woman!’53

Stoker could also distinguish between the actress and the woman, the performance and the performer. Stoker is not hostile to Terry; on the contrary Personal Reminiscences describes how ‘it was a pleasure to all to carry out her wishes’ and that ‘she encouraged the young, helped everyone, and was not only a “fair” but a “generous” actor’.54 He also reveals that Irving often ‘descant[ed] on her power. It was a favourite theme of his. He said that her pathos was “nature helped by genius”, and that she had the “gift of pathos”.’55 Indeed, Nina Auerbach

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interprets Lucy’s somnambulism as a tribute to ‘his adored Ellen Terry’s most audacious performance’ as Lady Macbeth.56 Stoker’s writing, of course, reveals the difficulties of processing the sexual implications of performance and Terry’s roles certainly exhibited alluring characteristics; for Winter Terry’s Margaret is ‘bewitching’ while Stella Campbell describes Terry’s ‘magical step’ as Imogen in Cymbeline.57 Furthermore, the living Lucy is charming – an adjective that was often used to describe Terry both on and off the stage.

Endings: Snowbound Central to an appreciation of Stoker’s engagement with melodrama and Victorian theatre is Snowbound, in which members of a touring company amuse each other by relating stories while stuck on a snowbound train in Scotland. The stories are variously set from the mid-Victorian period to the early years of the twentieth century. The series of tales draws on Stoker’s Lyceum experiences. In the first story the actor-manager describes how he thwarted his touring company’s transportation of pets on tour by bringing a boa constrictor on board the train which so disturbed the company that they agreed to desist from carrying animals. His leading lady, however, was an exception to the injunction: Miss Flora Montressor, who had been with me on seven tours and was an established favourite all over the Provinces, had a little toy wheaten terrier that she had taken with her everywhere since ever she had been with me. Often other members had asked my Acting Manager if they too might bring dogs; but he had always put them off … and that it would be better not to press the matter, as Miss Montressor from her position was a privileged person.58

The description recalls the Lyceum hierarchy and Stoker’s role in organizing the tours, just as the reference to dogs provokes associations with both Irving and Terry who possessed terriers. Indeed, Personal Reminiscences reproduces Henry A. Ward’s painting of Irving with a terrier. Terry had given him her dog Fussie.59 Stoker’s text also features a photograph of Terry with Drummie and Fussie. Beneath the photograph is inscribed: ‘To my “Ma”’! – I am her dutiful child’.60 The ‘Ma’, as Stoker explains, was Terry’s ‘playful pet name’ for him.61 In unpublished correspondence Stoker is often referred to in maternal or avuncular terms and is thus safely desexualized for women who make their livings in the theatre. Indeed, the artist Pamela Colman Smith refers to Stoker in unpublished correspondence as ‘Uncle Bram’. Smith also provided illustrations for Stoker’s final novel, The Lair of the White Worm (1911), and, in a letter to Stoker dated 9 August 1911, she complains that having to deal with various instructions from the publishing company with regard to the illustrations was like ‘having to deal with three stage managers’.62 Smith spent a good deal of time at the Lyceum through her friendship with Terry’s daughter, Edith Craig, and

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knew that Stoker would appreciate the association she makes between publishing and stage management. Intriguingly, Smith produced a cartoon, reproduced in Terry’s The Story of My Life, which features the Lyceum Company stranded after their train breaks down on a provincial tour.63 In Snowbound, the leading lady’s narrative reveals the class and sexual dynamics of the stage. Montressor describes how as a young actress she played the small part of the queen in a fictional play, Her Grace the Blanchisseuse. The reference to this play is a tribute here to the Lyceum’s Madame Sans-Gêne in which Terry played Napoleon’s washerwoman. Montressor describes her role: the audience was to see a ‘dim sleeping chamber’ and ‘a white hand with a letter emerge from the bed curtains’.64 She used to arrive on the bed moments before her cue, was covered with a quilt and tucked in by one of the stage hands or property men, called Coggins. She never spoke to Coggins but, impressed by the gentleness with which he performed his task, she sometimes gave him a shilling as she passed him on the stage. One evening, however, she appeared late for her cue and when Coggins arrived to tuck her up, he wondered why his ‘Property’ was missing, believing that he was the subject of a prank.65 Coggins had no idea that the ‘Property’ he tucked up every night on stage was in fact ‘one of the young ladies’.66 When stage hand and actress become the objects of fun he resigns his position, and when Montressor, realizing that he has a wife and children to support, tries to intervene, he explains to her that if his wife heard that he was ‘every night a-tuckin’ up a beautiful young lady’ she would become jealous.67 Furthermore, he points out: I was in the Dook o’ York’s Theatre when they had a ply what showed us how in high society if a man gets a girl into any trouble, no matter how innocent, but so as how she’s chaffed by her pals he’s got to marry her to put it right. An’, ye see, Miss, as how bein’ married already I couldn’t do the right thing … so I’ve resigned.68

Coggins’s naive response to plays and performers actually probes the anxieties of men working alongside single women. In class terms the anxiety is displaced since it emerges from a working-class man who takes his moral codes from ‘high society’ plays. The reality, of course, for the middle-class workers in the theatre like Terry and Stoker is that women worked alongside men. This also raises issues about changes in gender roles. Katharine Cockin argues that women like Terry ‘empowered to bring about change through economic independence or social class were becoming involved in organizations’ but when ‘enfranchisement came [Terry] was not sure what to do with it’.69 In Dracula, Stoker celebrates Mina as a working woman but is careful to have her acknowledge that her typewriting and shorthand skills will be ‘useful’ for her future husband’s profession.70 The story of the leading lady in Snowbound recalls a Stoker story published during the writer’s Dublin years. Stoker’s ‘The Primrose Path’ (1875), whose title

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draws on Ophelia’s warning to her brother Laertes not to take the ‘primrose path of dalliance’,71 is a theatrical story. Here a carpenter who chooses an easy path brings about his own destruction. He leaves a comfortable living in Ireland to work as a stage carpenter in London but succumbs to drink and finally murders his innocent wife through jealousy. The sexual anxieties of theatrical life expressed in ‘The Primrose Path’ and hinted at in Montressor’s story are violently explored in ‘A Star Trap’ from Snowbound. Here the company’s master machinist tells what he alleges is a true story about his apprenticing days. He worked for a carpenter who, realizing that his wife, a chorus girl, is having an affair with a handsome Harlequin, tampers with the star trap so that when his wife’s lover is shot up onto the stage, the trap, failing to open, mangles his body. A handsome man is not only killed but his body is mutilated. The carpenter’s assistant and story’s narrator hides the evidence. In this shocking and spectacular story, Stoker excites the reader with his shocking narrative but then releases the tension with comments from the wardrobe mistress who reveals that there was not a ‘bally word of truth’ in the story as the accident involved a clown and ‘there wasn’t no lovemakin’ as she claims that she was the carpenter’s wife.72 Although she asserts that the story is fictional, the reader is left disturbed by the notion of the Harlequin’s mangled body on stage. Interestingly, the trap door on stage, also known in theatre as the ‘vampire trap’, invokes an association with Stoker.73 In a Pamela Colman Smith illustration, drawn on board ship en route to the Lyceum’s 1899 North American tour, Stoker emerges from what Barbara Belford describes as the ship’s ‘engine room’, which on stage would have been called a ‘vampire trap’.74 Stoker wears a hat inscribed with the words ‘HMS DRACULA’. On the ship’s stage are cartoons of Irving, Smith and Edith Craig. Smith playfully associates Stoker with his novel and with the figure of the vampire. Dracula after all lands at Whitby on a ship. In another, separate and more striking illustration by Smith, Stoker’s bearded head appears on the body of bat-like figure. With outstretched wings and miniature legs and feet, and dressed in evening wear, the figure is a hybrid of human and bat. Its identification as Stoker is underscored by the caption, ‘The Bramy Joker’ (Figure 2.1).75 Dracula, of course, can mutate from human to vampire bat. In one of the text’s iconic and uncanny moments, Harker is horrified when he sees Dracula emanating from a window in his castle, and ‘crawl down the castle wall … face down, with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings’.76 This essay commenced with Burne-Jones promising to fix the identity of his female vampire with a photograph after he receives a copy of Dracula, but late Victorian vampires, it seems, cannot be so easily fixed with one particular figure or identity. Although Terry is the only actor mentioned in association with a vampire in Stoker’s work, Irving has now become identified with the figure of the vampire. However, Smith’s illustrations playfully associate Stoker with his

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Figure 2.1: Pamela Colman Smith, Cartoon ‘The Bramy Joker’; reproduced with permission of the National Trust.

vampire. This can be seen as a tribute to the writer while at the same time the illustrations place Stoker very firmly within a theatrical context. Finally, the vampire is a malleable, mutable and, of course, a melodramatic figure. From Stoker’s earliest writings on the Dublin theatres which inspired his first fictions to his late work Snowbound and Personal Reminiscences, his preoccupation with the thematics of melodrama, where good and evil as well as suffering and redemption are spectacularly played out, is a constant. Central to Stoker’s development of a melodramatic Gothic is the influence of the Lyceum. Irving’s Gothic productions and Terry’s Gothic roles are transformed and restaged in the melodrama of Lucy and the Count. In his writings Stoker translated the transformational power of melodrama from the stage into narrative forms.

3 ELLEN TERRY AND G. F. WATTS: ‘BLASTED WITH ECSTASY’1 Veronica Franklin Gould

‘Pluto saw her, and loved her, and bore her off – so swift is love.’2 The young Greek goddess Persephone was gathering violets and lilies in a meadow when she was abducted by the god of the underworld and giver of riches. Like Pluto, or so he later tormented himself, the Victorian artist George Frederic Watts (1817– 1904) lured the ingénue Ellen Terry from ‘the temptations and abominations’ of the London stage3 and in 1864 made her his wife. Unhappy at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, the actress marvelled at the beauty of Watts’s studios in the exotic Anglo-Indian home of Thoby and Sara Prinsep (née Pattle). Little Holland House in Kensington seemed to Terry ‘a paradise … where all the women were graceful, and all the men were gifted’.4 Her hormones aflame, the teenager left the stage for immortality in paint. As her biographer Nina Auerbach writes, ‘She found herself as an artist when she flowered as an artist’s model; in pictures she was most mercurially and suggestively alive’.5 Terry inspired and reacted to Watts’s brush more than any other sitter. Together they sparked a visionary intensity never before realized in their art. Such was their creative power that, with her high spirits and his household constraints, the Watts marriage would explode within months. Separately, their art and life transformed, each went on to achieve phenomenal international fame. Watts would become a Royal Academician, the subject of unprecedented retrospective exhibitions, the first living painter to be celebrated at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and an inaugural recipient of King Edward VII’s Order of Merit. In the 1890s, he donated his portrait series of the Victorian elite to the opening of the National Portrait Gallery, and his major Symbolist paintings – their metamorphic drama inspired by his teenage wife – to launch the National Gallery of British Art (Tate Britain) in 1897 and found modern art galleries around the world.

– 33 –

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Terry, swathed in aesthetic clothes, her pose and movement heightened with harmonious beauty learned in Watts’s studio, rose to become the transcendent Shakespearean actress, upon whom Henry Irving, her manager and co-star at the Lyceum Theatre, relied for artistic guidance. Terry, wrote the artist Walford Graham Robertson, was ‘par excellence the Painter’s Actress … her gesture and pose were eloquence itself ’.6 The glory and terror of her first memory, recreated for her memoir, The Story of My Life, has the polarity of Watts’s paintings, which spring from darkness towards visions of a brighter future, suggestive ideas in deep, glowing colour. Terry embroidered hers till they sparkled. Her recollection of being left as a child in theatre lodgings, clambering on to a bureau to see ‘the glories of the sunset’ through her attic window, presents a painterly expression of her fiery thrill: the smoke of a thousand chimneys hung like a grey veil between me and the fires in the sky. When the sun had set, and the scarlet and gold, violet and primrose, and all those magic colours that have no names, had faded into the dark, there were other fires for me to see. The flaming forges came out and terrified while they fascinated my childish imagination. What did it matter to me that I was locked in, and that my father and mother, with my elder sister Kate, were all at the theatre? I had the sunset, the forges, and the oak bureau7

The actress treasured the Romantic-style portrait of her mother Sarah Ballard drawn by the president of the Royal Academy Sir Martin Archer Shee.8 Terry’s great-great-great uncle John Singleton Copley had been an Academician. His son, the former Lord Chancellor Lord Lyndhurst, sat to Watts for two portraits the year before Terry met him, in 1862,9 when, under the wing of the architect Edward William Godwin, she first learned to appreciate beauty, ‘to observe, to feel the splendour of things, to aspire!’10 But it was the diction instilled by her parents Benjamin and Sarah Terry that won nine-year-old Ellen her first Shakespearean role, at the Princess’s Theatre in London. Charles Kean’s magnificent classical productions united the arts of painting, sculpture, music and architecture with the drama and movement of life. Watts, too, urged the Royal Academy Schools to teach the unity of arts.11 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert attended Ellen’s opening night as Prince Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale on 28 April 1856. The youngster, conscious of her pictorial impression, posed for theatre photographs beside Kean as Leontes, King of Sicily. Her back is straight, her head to one side with sausage curls styled by her mother, as she stands in a red coat ornamented with silver, holding a gocart copied from a classical Greek vase.12 Kean’s wife, the actress Ellen Tree, was the first of a series of forceful women to command Terry’s respect for their productive power. They stormed at her to ignite a sense of real pain and distress on stage, performances of emotional depth

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remarkable for her years. As well as her ‘heart-touching pathos’ as Prince Arthur in King John, critics noted artistic contrasts in her acting: ‘great sweetness, clearness of enunciation, and delicate light and shade … the pride, the terror, and the love’.13 These the young actress learned to imagine and magnify. Imagination, industry and intelligence – ‘the three I’s’ – are all indispensable to the actress, Terry later wrote, ‘but’ – and here she was a true partner of Watts – ‘of these three the greatest is, without any doubt, imagination’.14 While she was performing in James Henry Chute’s stock company in Bristol, Terry met Godwin. He designed and helped her to make ‘the first lovely dress I ever wore’, a Greek-style chiton to wear as Titania for the opening of the Theatre Royal in Bath, on 4 March 1863. So sensual were its figure-hugging folds that she was not allowed to wear the chiton, but she had learned to value the historicity of costume and its beauty of line.15 Three weeks later, at the Haymarket Theatre Royal in London, Terry was seen to have matured into ‘one of the happiest specimens of … the ingénue’, neither conventional nor affected, performing opposite the veteran comedian Edward Askew Sothern in The Little Treasure, as a boisterous, kindly, impulsive young girl – almost herself, in fact. Her first Shakespearean starring role as Desdemona in Othello at the Princess’s on 20 June marked ‘an important step in her upward progress’.16 Her elder sister Kate Terry’s love scenes as leading lady to Charles Fechter at the Lyceum were the talk of the town. Watts, keen to paint Kate, was also intrigued by reports of Ellen. Their mutual friend Tom Taylor – the playwright, critic, editor and civil servant – effected the introduction, taking Kate, with Ellen as chaperone, to Little Holland House, probably in late October 1863. Neither Watts nor Terry attended school. They had trained for their art from childhood, striving to perfect gesture and expression. Young Watts had honed his skills, from the age of ten, in the studio of William Behnes, the future Sculptor-in-Ordinary to the Queen. Deserting the Royal Academy Schools to learn directly from old-master paintings at the National Gallery and the Elgin Marbles, he had travelled to Italy to study the art of fresco.17 Although he had achieved fame in the Palace of Westminster competitions of 1843 and 1847 – the year Terry was born – Watts’s career had been controversial. His portraits were highly valued, leaders of the era sat for his historic series, but his vision to inspire the people with metaphysical frescoes, a major cosmic scheme, had been too avant-garde for British taste. His star was now rising; and the Royal Academy was looking to Watts for advice. Little Holland House was not unlike a stage, with frescoes featuring Sara Prinsep and her sisters in Elgin Marbles poses. Sensationally exotic, the women seemed to materialize out of the backdrop, dressed in loose velvet robes, long pearl necklaces and golden bangles, a combination of modern Parisian art,

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Renaissance draperies and Oriental spice quite unlike the corsets and crinolines worn in fashionable society. ‘Signor’, as they called the artist, appeared in crimson robes in his 1853 self-portrait, A Venetian Senator, which hung outside his studio.18 Entranced by Watts and the strange beauty of his home and coterie, Terry would roam about the studio, her wide, curvaceous mouth on the brink of a smile; if something particularly lovely attracted her, she would murmur ‘Oh!’ and reach out, her arms longing to touch. Watts captured the pose in a drawing.19 He painted a double portrait of The Sisters and made Ellen the star. Honoured to pose for Signor, she became absorbed in her role for Art; her eyes and mouth express the intensity she brought to the stage; her golden hair, magnificent Titianesque costume and paisley shawl dominate the picture, which Watts set in a poetic Leonardoesque landscape to reflect the sisters’ journeys as strolling players. Rumour has it that Sara saw Kate as a potential wife and muse for Signor, though Kate had little artistic interest and her portrait is unfinished. She appears as a Madonna figure inclining her head with her arm around Ellen, who nestles in her shoulder. ‘To me the stage seemed a poor place when compared with the wonderful studio where Kate and I were painted as The Sisters’, wrote Terry and handcoloured the picture in her copy of her memoir, noting costume details.20 Her overdress was of dull white satin, its slashed sleeves edged with brown fur. The sisters’ pose recalls their theatre photograph in Taylor’s comedietta Nine Points of the Law. Deeply affectionate, it is more sensually charged than Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s frontispiece Golden Head by Golden Head for his sister Christina’s Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862).21 Ellen posed alone as Joan of Arc, standing in armour, whose heroic quality fascinated Watts. Utterly absorbed, both were surprised when she ‘fell all of a heap, nearly fainting’22 against his painting arm. Their effort to portray heroic vitality unleashed Ellen’s mystical qualities. Her illuminated face, liquid blue eyes, breastplate and the strands of her hair suggest an inner vision. Watts renamed the picture Watchman, What of the Night? So it is as Isaiah’s watchman in his vision of the fall of Babylon that her hands almost wilt with earnestness against her breastplate to express an ambiguous response – ‘The morning cometh, and also the night: if ye will enquire, enquire ye: return, come’. 23 Watts’s later assistant and biographer Emilie Barrington insisted that ‘it was not Isaiah, but the dramatic genius of his sitter influencing the artist’s imagination in a psychic manner, which made the work … a quite inspired creation’.24 Surely, too, Watts had Shakespeare in mind, the prophetic warning of Laertes to Ophelia against losing her heart to Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, to which his sister, as young and sexually naive as Terry, replies, ‘I shall the effect of this good lesson keep / As watchman to my heart’.25 This most direct visionary painting of

Ellen Terry and G. F. Watts

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Terry exemplifies the imaginative artistic charge between her and Watts, and the excitement each aroused in the other. Terry, who had been besieged by admirers, told the playwright George Bernard Shaw in 1896 that Watts was the first to kiss her, in the studio ‘sweetly and gently, all tenderness and kindness’.26 Whether she believed his subsequent more sensual kiss meant that she was pregnant, she insisted, to her parents’ distress, that she must now marry Signor. Watts’s story is that their great regard for each other moved him to propose marriage. Blinded by love to possibly the greater difficulty of living without her audience, he determined to remove Terry from backstage ‘abominations’ and to guide and cultivate her mind for a nobler life in art and society. A drawing in his sketchbook shows the actress bowing deeply to her audience, as though bidding farewell. ‘I was just dreaming of and aspiring after another world, a world full of pictures and music and gentle, artistic people with quiet voices and elegant manners’.27 In January 1864 Terry left the stage to devote her life to Watts. How wondrous, she thought, to live at Little Holland House as his wife and inspire him to create art. ‘I was in Heaven for I knew I was to live with those pictures. “Always,” I thought, and to sit to that gentle Mr W. and clean his brushes, and play my idiotic piano to him’.28 Imagine Terry as the sitter energizing his sumptuous 1860 portrait of Sara’s teenage daughter Alice posing at the piano in gorgeous, deep blue velvet and orange satin with a glowing symbolic fresco as backdrop!29 Their engagement ruffled more feathers than Terry’s memoirs suggest. The couple’s thirty-year age difference, if disconcerting, was not unusual in the Victorian era, but Little Holland House, apart from the studio, could never be their own home; and there was the stigma of the stage. A theatrical career offered women the rare opportunity to earn their own living, on a par with, or if she were the major attraction, more than men, but Victorians looked down on professional actors; and the tragedian William Charles Macready, who strove to elevate the theatre, made his wife give up acting. Socially, the artist and actress were well matched, neither quite acceptable enough for his flirtatious aristocratic sitters, whom he now asked to help prepare her for her role in society.30 It was glorious madness to marry. Two geniuses of the Victorian era on their climb to fame, both seasoned to observe human nature and with imagination bursting from their souls, would create compelling pictures. But could the teenager suppress her exuberance for a quieter role as his wife? If Terry did not baulk at joining a household where her husband’s needs were cared for by the dominating Sara Prinsep, this was because powerful women had trained her to grow on stage, triggered her imagination to produce remarkable performances. Long-limbed, with fair hair and sparkling eyes, Terry rode life like a wild Amazon, her son recalled, ‘always taking leaps in the dark’.31 Her performances had audiences at her feet. Terry had no doubt about marrying Watts, putting the

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taunts of E. A. Sothern behind her. Not a wise career move, as she later realized, but she longed for her new role as Mrs G. F. Watts. The artist William Holman Hunt, her fiancé’s friend and neighbour, was designing her bridal gown.32 Tom Taylor reported that ‘Watts is disturbed and anxious at the great leap he is taking, but very loving and happy’ and that Terry was ‘over head and ears in love with him and quite content, she says, to spend the rest of her life in his studio’.33 On 20 February 1864, shortly before her seventeenth and his forty-seventh birthdays, Terry, dressed in a Renaissance-style gown of grey-brown silk, the sleeves latticed with black velvet, a quilted white bonnet decorated with orange blossom and ‘a beautiful Indian shawl’, danced on winged feet up the aisle of St Barnabas Church, Kensington, to marry Watts. Her tears of joy spoiled the picture for her bridegroom. ‘Don’t cry. It makes your nose swell.’34 His depictions of her nose present a perfect line. On honeymoon in Hendon, at the home of Sara’s younger sister, Maria Jackson (grandmother of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf ), Watts made delicate drawings of his bride, lying in bed asleep, reading, relaxed, intent – possibly sewing – and playing the piano. Sara’s elder sister Julia Margaret Cameron brought her new large camera and an album of experimental soft-focus photographs. She was looking to Watts for artistic guidance. While Terry posed in her bridal gown, she became the first sitter to be photographed by Mrs Cameron as Watts painted. In this rare informal photograph, Terry has lowered one hand to the other, revealing their largeness, which the actress preferred to conceal. She is looking away from the camera, as though the photographer has caught her unawares. Her expression is wary and the pose – if pose it be – is similar to the artist’s portrait of his wife at the stage curtain (see below). In the darkroom, Mrs Cameron has tried to emulate his shading to refine the profile of Terry’s jaw, not yet achieving the poetry or pathos of his bridal portrait Choosing (National Portrait Gallery)35 or of Sadness, the famous photograph she would take of Terry a week after their marriage. The actress recorded on her cabinet card that this was taken on her birthday. If so, the gift was mutual.36 In over seven years on stage, Terry had posed for hundreds of theatre photographs. The combination of both women’s passion for art, the dramatic sensibility of the actress, her photographic experience and poignant emotional transformation on marriage to Watts, resulted in one of ‘the most beautiful and remarkable pictures in the history of photography’.37 Mrs Cameron photographed Terry in a deeply reflective pose, dressed in a loose Grecian robe, fingering her necklace – a device to show her wedding rings and suppress her instinct to fidget – and exhibited the image as Sadness at medal-winning international displays. To the writer J. B. Priestley, it encapsulated ‘Woman herself, her soul withdrawn behind those heavy eyelids, the mystery, the challenge, the torment, the solace’.38 The studio was the Wattses’ true marital home, where the artist made love to his wife in pigment and on paper, tenderly directing her to shape herself into

Ellen Terry and G. F. Watts

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line. Terry’s charisma spurred him to produce outstanding work. Unlike most of his portraits, Emilie Barrington observed, his pictures of Terry seem instinctive, not overworked. ‘I doubt whether he ever realized whence came the inspiration which resulted in his most glorious visions on canvass’.39 As Watts painted his bride, he taught her to infuse beauty of line with harmony and rhythm. Critics had long marvelled at her grace onstage. Now there would be harmony in each pose and gesture. In the portrait of Terry at the stage curtain, she is seen in profile, her clasped hands pressed to her blue shawl, her mouth parted in a more anxious expression than in Mrs Cameron’s bridal photograph (National Portrait Gallery). Here she is truly acting. Tender in spirit, such is the flow of the picture, her ‘eager impulsive throat’ extended here, we can sense her vibrant nature, the nervous athleticism that powered her ‘slightly veiled voice’ to reach the remotest audiences, created marital challenge and would transform Watts’s imaginative subject painting.40 The artist lived for sunrise, for the daylight that enabled him to paint, whereas Terry used to perform long after sundown. Absorbed as she was holding a pose for hours on end to create art, she could not resist teasing, even irritating the artist. Constrained by Sara to keep quiet, she often fled to her family, arousing gossip. On her return, Watts wanted to keep his wilful wife to himself, to break down her ‘most unhealthy’ theatrical behaviour. ‘I find I have to reconstruct Nelly’s mind, character & habits … No excitement of any kind must be allowed when there is a common habit of hysteria, & a pulse at a 108! Fancy what a change for me!’41 Meanwhile, Terry continued to feel that he was glorifying her to artistic stardom. ‘I was happy, because my face was the type which the great artist who had married me loved to paint’.42 Drawing on her theatrical skills, she was an inspired model. His sanguine study of her head and neck stretched still further (Watts Gallery), as she gazed up in wonder, leaving further evidence of their harmony in art, would be taken up decades later for his seminal universal subject, Love and Life (Figure 3.1 below).43 At the Royal Academy exhibition that spring, Choosing was a triumph. Never before or since, in an oeuvre of several thousand, did Watts paint a portrait so exquisite, a jewel-like Pre-Raphaelite picture, radiating tenderness. His enchantment is palpable. Terry holds tiny, fragrant violets at her heart to represent Love. But at her nose is the showy, scentless camellia, to symbolize the theatre. Camellias bloom all about her. Did the artist add more, doubting that life without performance could satisfy Terry? The violets, a possible allusion to Hamlet, may question the durability of his love: For Hamlet, and the trifling of his favour, Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood; A violet in the youth of primy nature,

40

Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting, The perfume and suppliance of a minute; No more.44

Taylor, reviewing the Academy exhibition for The Times, hailed Choosing as ‘the loveliest example of colour and the most delicate piece of fancy in the exhibition’, an exceptional example of the poetry of painting; likewise the Athenaeum critic, but both baulked at Time and Oblivion, Watts’s vast picture of 1848, a scene for his cosmic fresco scheme.45 Its visionary quality had been admired by the critic John Ruskin, but the idea had puzzled reviewers then and now again as the artist tested the subject as a design for sculpture. It must have been a measure of his despair that he agreed to sell Time and Oblivion, albeit to Sara’s brother-in-law Earl Somers, ‘the only picture I have painted which represents what I might do or would have done had there been any sympathy with effort in that direction’.46 Julia Margaret Cameron registered five photographs of Watts and six of Terry.47 He is seen arranging the folds of his sleeve as Titian would have done, and Terry’s photograph in the shadows as the South West Wind has the diagonal structure of Time and Oblivion. Mrs Cameron invited the Wattses and Prinseps to stay in her guest cottage near the Tennysons at Freshwater. Here she took monumental photographs of the actress in The Opera Box with a young man, and posing as the Greek slave Medora, while Watts painted the photographer’s parlourmaid ‘Madonna’, Mary Hillier, as Charity. He was also finishing a national portrait of the poet laureate.48 Like the artist, Tennyson loved opening the eyes of young female visitors. He gave Terry private readings of his poetry, walked with her over the downs, identifying the varying flight paths of the birds, and she happily frolicked in the fields with the younger Tennyson and Cameron boys.49 A drawing by Watts of Terry rising up from the ground has come to light, with colour notes ‘black’ and ‘purple’ for her ample dress.50 After their return to Little Holland House, in April, Giuseppe Garibaldi, then visiting England to raise support for the unification of Italy, and the nurse Florence Nightingale sat to Watts.51 Ruskin spotted two new pictures in his studio in May. And All the Air a Solemn Stillness Holds (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) shows a knight on horseback merging with nature as he approaches two sunlit haystacks. The other was of the Angel of Death, a subject he had begun in 1853 to dignify a pauper’s mortuary chapel and would rename The Court of Death (Tate Britain). The final version was his largest and most grave subject for the nation.52 Too mirthful for such gravity, Terry was scolded by her husband for ‘extraordinary and indeed outrageous conduct’.53 The occasion cannot have been the time she let down her hair, shocking polite company, because he celebrated its full length in paint. His anger must have been at his long-limbed wife bounding into the drawing-room in her above-the-knee Cupid costume. ‘No doubt

Ellen Terry and G. F. Watts

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she is exactly fitted for the stage, but not for domestic life.’ He could not work. If the stage were ‘less repugnant to my taste’ he would allow her to return, for the excitement.54 Repugnant? Two days later her demure sister Kate opened as Ophelia to Fechter’s Hamlet at the Lyceum. The best Watts could do, to give utmost support and love to his much-wronged wife was to paint her as Ophelia.55 It was Terry’s creation of the part, Emilie Barrington believed, that gave life to the ‘exquisitely tender pathos’56 her husband depicted. X-rays of the developed canvas show her hair and eyes originally alert with madness, her fingers splayed, in the branches of the willow growing ‘aslant a brook’57 from which she falls to her death. Terry had no regrets about leaving the stage. She adored her husband, but the obligation to remain silent inhibited her rightful role as Mrs Watts. If she could no longer aspire to or respect the Little Holland House coterie, she observed how the statesman Benjamin Disraeli’s daringly bright blue tie and straggly curls shook as he walked, and that William Gladstone, ‘like a volcano at rest’, had a calm, pale face, calm as the grey crust of Etna. ‘You looked into piercing dark eyes and caught a glimpse of the red-hot crater beneath the crust’.58 She preferred the poet laureate’s rough simplicity to the society coat and manners of Robert Browning. Her views reflect Watts’s ambition for portraiture – to depict the mind of the sitter – as well as her own instinct for texture and movement, at times, volcanic. Frederic Leighton, her husband’s friend and colleague, was by nature a bon viveur. Ellen refused to sit for him. By August Watts dined out without her, nor was she with him in October at Freshwater, where he painted a luscious head of Sara Prinsep against an autumnal marine landscape.59 Finally, in November, when Terry, now hauntingly slender, triggering real-life comparisons with Hamlet’s Ophelia deranged by ill-fated love, ran away again, neither her husband nor Sara would allow her back. She took refuge with the Taylors, who were surprised by the strength of her love for Watts.60 Neither wished to separate and both were distraught, but the deed was formalized on 26 January 1865. They met once by accident in the street. After Terry’s elopement and break-up with Godwin – by whom she had two children (named after the volcanic Scottish island Ailsa Craig): the actress, costumier and theatre director Edith Craig and Edward Gordon Craig, the leader of modernist theatre – shortly before her brief marriage to the lesser actor Charles ‘Kelly’ Wardell, Terry and Watts were divorced on 6 November 1877. They were reunited in warm correspondence in the 1880s.61 The partnership of G. F. Watts and Ellen Terry – two artists seeking their ideal – collapsed, but its legacy would endure and magnify. Terry’s emotional impulse transformed Watts’s imaginative art, giving it a theatrical metamorphic power. Despite personal difficulties at Little Holland House, Terry had met men of taste and learning, leading artists and poets, who contributed to her apprecia-

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tion of art and beauty. Posing as Watts’s muse unleashed her mystical spirit and imbued her with a sense of harmony that would enchant audiences throughout her stellar career. Riddled with guilt, angst and shame, Watts began to destroy portraits of his wife. The shipping magnate Eustace Smith MP galloped over to Little Holland House and secured Choosing, to inaugurate his avant-garde collection. The actress’ favourite painting of herself, it is now the National Portrait Gallery’s most popular Victorian portrait. Furious at her ejection by Watts, Terry had returned to the family home in Stanhope Street, Euston, where in July 1865 she posed defiantly in her wedding dress for a photograph by ‘Lewis Carroll’, Rev. Charles Ludwidge Dodgson, just as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published. Cynically she signed the image caption ‘Truly Yours, Ellen Alice Watts’.62 ‘I hate the word Artist’, she wrote to a friend.63 Watts drew a private image of himself seated, cross-legged, bent double in despair, with a prayer, which he sent to Terry. That pose, in final female form, would be developed into his iconic Symbolist picture, Hope (1886; private collection and Tate Britain). In the meantime, shutting himself away from society, he made monumental nude studies from Mary Bartley, a housemaid as admirably tall as Terry. Mostly in chalk, these studies would serve as reference for Watts’s idealized art for the rest of his life. One oil study of Long Mary, cross-legged, her head in her angled arms, is regarded as the first painted sketch for Hope – the artist’s idea being that any advance from the depths of despair offers hope.64 Love and Life, exhibited at the Academy in 1865, marked the dynamic new direction in his imaginative work. ‘There is such a flush of colour and so wealthy an idea of chiaroscuro that all must wish to see it fully developed’, declared the Athenaeum.65 It showed Love with wings of fire dragging a strong man along Life’s thorny path. Decades later, he would develop the picture in reverse, giving the fragile figure of Love the face from his sanguine drawing of Terry. Meanwhile, he depicted Terry and himself as Dante’s forbidden lovers Paolo and Francesca enfolded in each other’s arms in the everlasting winds of Hell.66 Variants of this erotic subject show Francesca with the face of the unattainable women he loved. Uniquely, Terry was portrayed in the nude.67 Watts painted sensual half-length nude pictures on literary and classical themes of unfulfilled longing, the tragic figures surely informed by the Shakespearean training of his wife and the passion of artist and actress. In The Wife of Pygmalion (1865–8, The Faringdon Collection, Buscot Park), he painted Galatea coming to life, as he might have wished to cultivate and elevate his own wife. While Fata Morgana shows the unattainable temptress fleeing from the knight, The Wife of Pluto (1865–89, Walker Art Gallery) is the antithesis of Choosing. Persephone, ravished yet unsatisfied, appears to have the face of Terry as she thrusts her nose towards luxuriant silk drapery shaped like a giant scentless

Ellen Terry and G. F. Watts

43

carnation, fingering jewels added later to reinforce the artist’s protest against ‘the dis-ease of wealth’.68 The Royal Academy changed its rules to elect Watts both an Associate and a full Academician in the same year, 1867. In Orpheus and Eurydice (first version 1867–8), Watts depicted the moment, full of hope, but fatal, when the poet Orpheus, attempting to rescue his wife from the underworld, gazes back at her too soon; he clasps her breast, she falls away, her arms lose their grip, her flesh pales, her head becomes limp and she slips back to oblivion. Her transparent mouvementé drapery contrasting with his vigorous, ruddy body heightens the sense of desire and the impotence of love in the face of death.69 His seminal marble bust of Clytie (1867–8, Guildhall Art Gallery), ‘palpitating under vehement emotion’70 and epitomizing the drama of Terry, caused a stir at the Academy the following year. Executed later in paint (c. 1868–9, Watts Gallery), the wood nymph spurned by Apollo twists back to face the sun god and begins to metamorphose into ‘a flower like a violet’. The poet Algernon Swinburne, reviewing the 1868 exhibition, marvelled: Never was a divine legend translated into diviner likeness … yearning with all the life of her lips and breasts after the receding light and the removing love – this is the Clytie indeed whom sculptors loved for her love of the Sun their God … the splendour of her sorrow is divine.

Breaking away from the repose of classical sculpture, Clytie was hailed as the forerunner of the New Sculpture movement.71 Terry, dissatisfied after her return to the stage, vanished on 10 October 1868. Michael Holroyd relates that she had left in her room a photo of her husband’s painting Found Drowned (1848–50, Watts Gallery) of a woman who had leaped to her death in the Thames. Hearing that her parents had been to identify a drowned woman, Terry flew home to reassure them before returning to Godwin, now a leading architect and art-furniture designer, with whom she had eloped to Hertfordshire.72 Her estranged husband was painting a visionary picture, admired by the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, of Endymion (1869, private collection), who lies asleep as the moon goddess Diana swoops down to embrace him, but he cannot wake to receive her love – like the artist, perhaps, forced to part from his moon goddess, Terry?73 Taking studies from Long Mary, he would add Terry’s hair and outstretched jaw. She is clearly the inspiration for his key universal series on Eve, as the newly awakened woman, the mother of mankind, symbolizing the mind of modern times. (Major versions of these and all others in this paragraph were given to the Tate in 1897.) In She Shall be Called Woman (1867, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool), or as the picture was first called, Eve in the Glory of her Innocence, she is seen as the central figure of the universe, newly created, emitting light –

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the Greek vision of ‘A line of light … a column extending through the whole heaven and through the earth, in colour resembling the rainbow, only brighter and purer’.74 In contrast, her upturned face is dark, to suggest areas of the human mind, quoting Milton’s Paradise Lost, ‘dark with excessive bright’.75 In the large version presented to the Tate (c. 1875–92), light is concentrated over her heart and breast, the seat of love and tenderness, her lower limbs wreathed with clouds and bird life. Eve Tempted (various versions, first mentioned in 1871) in the Garden of Eden has the energy of Terry’s portrait at the theatre curtain. The tender Angel of Death in Time, Death and Judgment (various versions from 1865) was worked up from a drawing of his bride in delicately arranged robe (1864, private collection).76 Terry, having furthered her artistic education with Godwin, had made a triumphant return to the stage when Irving invited her to star with him as Ophelia to his Hamlet, inaugurating their legendary partnership at the Lyceum Theatre, on 31 December 1878. That year, within months of their divorce and her remarriage, Watts had developed his painting of Terry as Ophelia into an idealized figure for exhibition at the Grosvenor – where the Academician and actress were both stars – he as an exhibitor, she as the Aesthetic woman of the period. The haunting symbolic image shows how radically he thinned the face, hand and hair, eliminating the charm of his young wife to intensify the pathos and sense of foreboding. Could the anonymous bunch of violets sent to Ellen on the opening night have been from Watts? He enlivened her theatre photographs by Window and Grove into compelling life-size drawings. Her experience as his wife surely informed her subsequent lecture on Ophelia: The whole tragedy of her life is that she is afraid … Shakespeare’s only timid heroine. She is scared of Hamlet when trouble changes him … into a strange moody creature, careless of his appearance, bitter in his speech, scornful of society … She is scared of life itself when things go wrong … It is not surprising that she should think Hamlet mad, for all he says in the scene in which she returns his presents is completely beyond her. If this scene is rightly acted, we feel a great compassion for the poor girl, whom Hamlet at once loves and hates.77

As Irving had had little training in colour, costume and lighting, he valued Terry’s guidance because ‘I had learned from Mr Watts, from Mr Godwin, and from other artists, until a sense of decorative effect had become second nature to me’.78 Her artistic appearance as Portia in a golden dress the following year sent the young Robertson into raptures – ‘Her Portia … is like a dream of beautiful pictures’ – and moved Oscar Wilde to compare her to a Venetian painting. For in that gorgeous dress of beaten gold Which is more golden than the golden sun No woman Veronese looked upon Was half so fair as thou whom I behold.79

Ellen Terry and G. F. Watts

45

In 1882 Watts caught sight of Terry through his neighbour’s hedge, and began a loving correspondence with her, secretly, lest this damage her reputation. ‘Will you shake hands with me (in spirit?)’, he asked. She answered simply ‘Yes’. He rejoiced in her success and agreed to regard their marriage as a story both had read, though As Artists we can still wander hand in hand through the images of the beautiful, & if it can be an encouragement to you & a help to you in striving after real greatness as distinct from mere success, to know that your efforts will be appreciated & honoured by me do believe that no one has a more intense interest in them.80

His words made her ‘dizzy with exquisite waves of feeling’.81 Watts would never forgive himself for having spoiled her life. Her response encouraged him to suggest a meeting. ‘Let my profound sympathy poor Nelly, break down constraint on yours as much as if we two stood face to face on the brink of a universal Grave’.82 Moved, she resisted temptation. As Terry embarked on her first American tour in 1883, Watts, having heard she wanted something of his work, sent her the theatre curtain portrait. He rejoiced at her artistic eminence, that ‘your genius found its higher sphere & scope’,83 and he sent a ‘phosphoric flicker of aspiration’.84 Watts’s supreme atmospheric experiment at this time, an opalescent painting of the Scandinavian mythological spirit fairy Uldra,85 glimpsed through the rainbow mist, having the radiance of the young Terry, mesmerized critics at the Grosvenor Gallery and in America. ‘Uldra, the genius of the painter is prismatic, many coloured, sounding the depths of human thought, rising to the heights of human aspiration, and holding the experience of the ages in the hollow of its hand.’86 This poetic ethereal quality would be embraced by the European Symbolists. ‘I wish I could have made his sun – shine’, Terry wrote to her confidant Stephen Coleridge.87 By now, Watts’s huge bronze equestrian statue Hugh Lupus was sailing up the River Dee for delivery to the Duke of Westminster, and the cream of his paintings were en route for his epoch-making exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Terry asked Coleridge for ‘the paper that tells of the plans of our great painter, sculptor’.88 Watts arranged for her to have photographs of all his pictures; her response to Hope before the Grosvenor Gallery exhibition of 1886, he wrote, was ‘a picture of your own painting’.89 Terry was tempted to visit, but never came. On his engagement to Mary Fraser Tytler in 1886, Watts sent ‘all good wishes now for ever more’.90 Terry kept his letters. Discretion forced him to burn hers. In 1893, as the actress was about to sail for America, convinced she might never return, she tried to get a message to ‘the dear Signor’ to ‘present my devotion & say, he, from first to last has been a beautiful influence in my life & that I pray God bless him’.91 Mary declined access, in view of the Wattses’ pact never to mention his first marriage. While Terry transfixed her Chicago audience, her regal portrait by John Singer

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Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence

Sargent was on display at the World’s Fair, where the actress’s teenage face and aspiration was the focus of Watts’s Love and Life (Figure 3.1). Soon to be presented to the people of America, to found a national gallery of art, the picture represents ‘Naked, bare life sustained and helped up the steeps of human conditions, the path from the baser existence to the nobler region of thought and character’ – this universal subject might be said to show Terry’s frailty at Little Holland House and her rise to fame. Two variants of this, Watts’s most important message to the era, would go to the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris and the opening of the Tate.92

Figure 3.1: G. F. Watts, Love and Life (1882–93), oil on canvas, detail; reproduced with permission of Nevill Keating Pictures.

Apart from Sargent’s Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (1889, Tate), the finest portraits of the actress were by Watts, who played a key part in her artistic development. Modelling for him influenced her artistic taste and helped her to refine her harmony of line in the studio and theatre. ‘She added what she learned in the studio to what she had already learned on the stage so successfully’, wrote Shaw, ‘that when I first saw her in Hamlet, it was exactly as if the powers of a beautiful picture of Ophelia had been extended to speaking and singing’.93 Much as her son Edward Gordon Craig might wish to deny Watts’s influence, his art was imbued with the rare visionary breadth that inspired Terry. Her months with Watts, their combined imaginative power and passion, triggered an extraordi-

Ellen Terry and G. F. Watts

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nary momentum in his art, yielding a greater legacy than has been realized. To Ellen Terry, Watts, who twice refused a baronetcy, was ‘Artist and Poet’, whereas his friend Lord Leighton, President of the Royal Academy, was ‘Only a Gentleman’, still meaning ‘the highest and the best’, to which Shaw replied ‘Watts was – is – an idealist of the finest as well as a gentleman and artist. Well, why did he not hold you?’ Gordon Craig answers best, ‘Genius has to fly free’.94

4 THE BURDEN OF ETERNAL YOUTH: ELLEN TERRY AND THE MISTRESS OF THE ROBES Jenny Bloodworth

Our heavens hold their shining galaxies, And there were never greater days than these, Nor greater names, deny it an [sic] you will. What! Does not Ellen Terry rule us still By that resistless charm that grows with years1 Clotilde Graves, from a speech given at The International Congress of Women, St Martin’s Hall, London, 29 June 18992

In this extract from a rhymed polemic, in support of the theatre as a suitable, professional space for women of the late Victorian period, the dramatist Clotilde Graves reaffirmed the enduring popularity of an actress who, it seemed, had already been accorded an almost otherworldly, iconic status in the eyes of an adoring public. Graves’s poetic accolade to Ellen Terry, delivered at the International Congress of Women in 1899 to a sympathetic and predominately female audience, was neatly sandwiched between United States and German responses to the same topic. Graves’s tribute, generously laced with metaphorical drawings of imperial female majesty – no doubt intended to reflect the golden age of Victoria, aged Queen Empress and embodiment of female power – drew in this stanza on the symbolism of a heavenly realm, an enchanted galaxy which situated Terry in the ascendency of a quintet of illustrious Victorian actresses including: Margaret Kendal, ‘the queen of smiles and tears’; Ada Rehan, purveyor of a ‘peerless Katherine’; and the ‘magic spell’ of both Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse.3 The previous speaker at the symposium, the American-born actress Genevieve Ward,4 also referenced Terry in her lecture entitled ‘The Drama as a Field for Women’, which ruminated over the extent to which an author’s success was ‘due to the imperious inspiration which [led] the artist to step beyond allotted bounds’.5 Ward identified those from within the profession who, she argued, could – 49 –

50

Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence find representation so striking, so apt, as to touch with a fellow-feeling the whole world of playgoers, and invest the man or woman who gives it with personality as distinct as if it were their own … of a living picture, memorable, startling, and vivid in its truth and force6

She closed her argument with the claim that ‘the art of the dramatic artist begins when the illusions are created that change the actors’ personality to one of quite a different type’. To illustrate her point, Ward duly invoked ‘Henry Irving’s Lesurques and Dubosc in the “Lyons Mail” … and in the difference as strikingly maintained by Ellen Terry between Marguerite and Beatrice’.7 These passing tributes from both Graves and Ward underline the two elemental, albeit fairly intangible, features which would continue to be the basis for Terry’s continued success. She was perceived as the seemingly ‘perfect’ actress; a woman who combined an intrinsic dramatic genius with the capacity to elevate any play beyond its expected reach. Accounts of Terry’s sustained popularity during her lifetime are numerous. Michael Holroyd reminds us that ‘everyone liked to cast Ellen Terry as part of his, or her, private world’8 and Clotilde Graves, journalist, novelist and playwright, was no exception. As a determined dramatist and member of that adoring public too, she had already instituted several approaches to engage with Terry, on a professional basis, in the hope of securing the legendary actress for a part in one of her own plays. Like most ‘jobbing’ women playwrights of the period, Graves’s tenacity in exploiting opportunities to publicize her work continued throughout her lengthy career.9 It is therefore no exaggeration to suggest that in contracting an actress of Terry’s calibre, Graves expected to enhance her own credibility as a dramatist and to improve the prospects of success for her play and any future work. Within only a handful of years, following her speech at the International Congress, Graves achieved her ambition, creating a play for Terry, albeit a somewhat unsuitable anachronistic piece entitled The Mistress of the Robes,10 with Terry portraying the eponymous heroine (see Figure 4.1). The comedy, written in rhyme, was included in the repertoire of plays selected for Terry’s provincial tour, following the final demise of her management of the Imperial Theatre. As a vehicle for Terry’s undoubted comedic talent it failed to deliver any great acclaim for the ageing actress or to offer the personal success Graves hoped for and had enjoyed earlier on in her career. Despite its limited exposure (it appeared in just seven of the provincial theatres on the tour) The Mistress of the Robes is worthy of discussion, not least because it lies outside of the usual canon of Terry’s work, and provides an opportunity to explore her decision to embrace a character which, though suitable to her temperament and easily within the scope of her considerable talent as a comedienne, was arguably ill-suited aesthetically to her physical appearance and age. Moreover, the critical

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Figure 4.1: Photograph of Ellen Terry in costume as Countess Glicka in The Mistress of the Robes; reproduced with permission of the National Trust.

reception her portrayal received offers further evidence, if any were needed, of her elevated stature as both woman and actress in the eyes of an adoring public. Born in 1863, Clotilde Graves was the third daughter of Major William Graves of the 18th Royal Irish regiment. Although her family tree included the Bishop of Limerick, Dean of Armagh and a wide range of academics and writers,11 she had little fortune to sustain her. Described by the writer and editor Leonard Raven-Hill as the first female journalist, Graves worked tirelessly from the age of sixteen, producing articles and short stories for a wide range of weekly papers and monthly magazines including Judy, the World and the Illustrated London News. Following the death of her father when she was only nineteen she set about establishing an independent living for herself, as an artist and writer, in order to support both herself and her family. To subsidize the meagre income she scraped from a somewhat precarious journalistic career, she toured the country with a number of acting companies including Willie Edouin’s ‘Babe’s Troope’ and Sarah Thorne’s stock company from Margate. After five years, realizing her theatrical knowledge and skills would be better applied in a dramatic, literary capacity, she secured a matinee commission with Sir Augustus Harris at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Although still aged only twenty-four, Graves’s Egyptian drama Nitocris,12 starring Sophie Eyre and John Barnes, produced several favour-

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able reviews, with Barnes later recalling, ‘it was a very fine piece which would have benefitted much by being played by a more skilful actress’.13 He acknowledged Graves’s dexterity as a playwright, recounting her difficulties in securing the artists she wanted for what was ‘a most ambitious play’ and suggesting, even as late as 1914, that ‘if that play were taken in hand by some brilliant producing manager at a good theatre, and her [Graves’s] very fine ideas carried out, it wouldn’t surprise me if it were a great success, even now’.14 This notion was similarly adopted at the time by the Judy magazine critic, who mused ‘what would have been said of Nitocris if Ellen Terry and Henry Irving had played in it at the Lyceum!’15 Fanciful though it may seem, this comment may have sown an inspirational seed for Graves’s later dogged attempts to entice the illustrious Lyceum duo to consider one of her play manuscripts.16 At the time of her address to the International Congress of Women in 1899, Graves was easily identified as a ‘New Woman’ of the period, being a paid-up member of several associations, including the Pioneer Club, the Ladies Athenaeum Club and the Society for Women Journalists. She proudly exhibited the marks of her emancipated lifestyle; she was single, had limited independent means, lived alone in a bohemian studio flat in Primrose Hill, smoked cigarettes and adopted male attire from an early age, declaring it to be far more convenient for the journalistic profession. Given the nature of Victorian society with its specific gender boundaries that were reinforced by precise notions of dress, vestments served as an ideological apparatus in the production of those gender identities. Any inversion of that code was often seen as either immoral or unnatural.17 Graves had herself assumed the opposite image to that of her given biological sex, in order to succeed, as she saw it, in a man’s world.18 Indeed, in a letter to the American theatre manager and playwright Augustin Daly, she wrote of having been advised early in her career to employ the abbreviation of Clo, rather than Clotilde, in order to suggest a male writer, acknowledging that ‘women writers, sadly, were then much frowned upon’.19 Graves’s undoubted high esteem for Terry arguably situates her as one of the many women who, as Nina Auerbach testifies, ‘saw in Ellen Terry the glorification they dreamt of for themselves’.20 It is pertinent to suggest that the playwright determined to institute a professional link, not only to help promote her dramatic work but for the pecuniary advantages that it might also provide. This is an assertion not without substance when one considers evidence of the financial problems Graves faced throughout her career,21 constraints which she attempted to alleviate through the creative manipulation and reworking of many of her texts.22 Her correspondence also includes letters to a range of luminaries from the arts world, soliciting their opinion of her work. It is unsurprising, therefore, to discover that from the mid-1890s Graves made a number of episto-

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lary approaches toward Terry’s inner circle. On 25 March 1895 a hastily written letter, addressed to Edith Craig, Terry’s daughter, ran thus: Primrose Hill Studios Dear Miss Wardell You said you thought you could get your friend Miss Terry to read the enclosed little play. I think she would be a splendid [writing illegible]. The part of the Duchess was written for you. I hope you will not disdain it. Sincerely yours Clo. Graves23

Auerbach reminds us that increasingly during the 1890s: ‘Edy began to manage Ellen Terry … she wrote her letters, escorted her to theatres, dinners, and parties … handled insistent fans’24 or, as in this case, one might add the persistent playwright. The note itself is typical of Graves’s charming, succinct style, incorporating her generous proposal of a specially conceived part for Edith. Although the letter indicates that an earlier conversation had taken place, further evidence of either the identity of ‘the enclosed little play’ or Edith’s proposed role is undocumented. Nonetheless, the memo remains intriguing due to the indecipherable character anticipated for Terry, combined with Graves’s rather unexpected reference to the actress as Edith’s ‘friend’, rather than ‘mother’. It is plausible to suppose, given Graves’s ensuing correspondence with both Henry Irving and his business manager Bram Stoker, that one play was common to all. Within six weeks of the above note, Graves inscribed a letter to the soon-to-be-knighted Irving requesting a ‘few minutes interview upon a matter of business’, excusing her unsolicited request, having been ‘emboldened’, she informs Irving, by ‘[his] kindly reception some months ago’. A persistent name dropper, and no doubt anticipating the benefits it might possibly provide, Graves’s postscript expresses her good wishes for Irving’s success with ‘[her] old friend’s play on Saturday!’25 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is the ‘old friend’ to whom she refers, and author of the play Waterloo. Within only a matter of days, Graves sent a further dispatch to Stoker, urging the manager to exert his influence in helping to arrange an appointment between Irving and this obviously most determined of New Women playwrights.26 The following day, in the absence of any immediate response, Graves issued her final communiqué to Irving, reminding him of a play he had read (several years previously) and which had ‘afterwards been added to Ada Rehan’s repertoire’. A gentle allusion, perhaps, to impress upon him both her dramatic prowess and his missed opportunity. The letter continues:

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Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence I left yesterday, with Mr. Bram Stoker a new drama in one scene, entitled A Turlupinade [sic] and [sic] being a dramatic version of an episode in the life of the first French actor of impromptu comedy. Mr Stoker promised to ask you to read it, and in case it has slipped his memory I write to put in a good word for myself. The little piece is not unworthy your perusal, I really believe; and if you would look through it and let me know whether you could ever give it a chance at the Lyceum, I should be deeply indebted to your kindness ... the little piece has not been submitted to any other manager, having just been completed.27

Despite her diligence, the letter is briefly annotated that a reply was issued a week later, but there is no record of this response or of any production – it would therefore seem that Graves’s appeals came to naught at that time. A further seven years would elapse before a typed manuscript of Graves’s play The Mistress of the Robes, listed as a romantic comedy in five acts, was submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office in November 1902, with Terry’s memoirs verifying that in the December she ‘read several plays, including a comedy by Clo Graves’.28 Although the memoir fails to name the piece, the Penny Illustrated later informed its readers that ‘the new play in verse, which Miss Clo Graves has written for Miss Ellen Terry called The Mistress of the Robes’, would be included in her repertoire of plays for the actress’ imminent provincial tour.29 It would seem that Irving’s earlier indifference to the playwright’s entreaties had at last borne fruit through Terry. The play, set in the present in a royal court of a fictitious Eastern European principality – Pannyria, reflected and parodied elements of the earlier ‘Ruritanian novels’30 with its autocratic setting and various plot conventions of adventure, romance and intrigue. The philandering monarch of Graves’s realm, King Rodelph II, is constantly harangued by his discarded lover Evodia (otherwise known as the Countess Glicka, Mistress of the Robes), with whom he has sworn a pledge of devotion on a garland of heliotrope,31 and who retains an incriminating letter which the King is most anxious to reclaim. Through his subsequent marriage to Queen Gisela, a source of extreme pique to Evodia, the King has been blessed with a desired male heir. The romantic overtures of the play are fully served through the developing romance between Evodia and the handsome young Master of the Horse, Captain Geza. The comic business and farcical tone is supplied variously by a librarian who bears a striking resemblance to the poet Keats; a Queen who has a private shrine to this aforementioned wordsmith; and the King’s duplicity in arranging to have the Countess banished from his kingdom. Evodia, in her determination to remind the King of his broken promise, lays siege to her erstwhile lover, scattering prodigious amounts of the aforementioned heliotrope plant on and around his person. In his reminiscences, Stoker

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recollected Terry’s fondness for real flowers and her desire to use them on stage whenever possible; even, he advises, when the rule was carried through with extreme difficulty.32 It would seem that in this instance she had her way, with the Dundee Courier confirming that ‘the odour of heliotrope – haunting, old world and elusive – seemed somehow, metaphorically as well as literally, to haunt the whole piece’.33 Ultimately presented in four acts and written in rhyme, the play was good humoured, witty and occasionally, for the period, a little risqué. The heroine, played by Terry, unsurprisingly fulfils Graves’s customary depiction of a confident, self-determined and lively female protagonist. The comedy is a further example of the playwright’s use of the genre to confront often contentious issues surrounding gender types, marriage and women’s perceived roles within society. Through the pretext of humour Graves tackled the anxieties around women who were not in their place, using strong female characters to challenge Victorian conventions. In this instance, Terry’s character (a merry young widow, independent and outspoken) flaunts expected codes of feminine behaviour. Conversely, Graves’s male characters are consistently flawed, depicted as less than ideal specimens of the masculine sex, and frequently expose a somewhat laissez-faire attitude towards conjugal fidelity. Under the guise of comedy drama, Graves’s plays offered a disturbing glimpse of the realities of domestic life and the double standard prevalent within Victorian marriage. The Mistress of the Robes was no exception to this rule; numerous vignettes of the royal domestic hearth stress King Rodelph’s seeming inability to remain loyal. One details the cuckolded husband, who knowingly turns a blind eye while accepting a decoration from his King or, as Graves describes it, ‘to “clasp” the husband having kissed the wife’.34 Although most of Graves’s heroines fulfilled the Victorian physical and cultural expectations of a corporeal image that was overtly feminine, she underscored the power of women’s sexuality, acknowledging its tremendous capacity as part of female weaponry. Despite requiring a performance which positively encourages the male gaze, the character of the Mistress of the Robes remains a dominant personality conflicting with the perceived stereotype of Victorian womanhood. Yet Terry’s character is depicted as resolute in her determination not to become the mistress of any man, which is especially fascinating (having ostensibly been written specifically for the actress) when juxtaposed against certain unconventional aspects within Terry’s own personal life; not least her unmarried union with the architect Edward Godwin.35

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As Evodia, Terry proclaims: I ranked not high enough your Queen to be the part of mistress is too base for me the bare idea is degradation … Never! Never! Never! Could I endure such shame – such ignominy!36

The casting of a fifty-six-year-old woman to play a character almost twenty years younger, particularly if the audience were to accept that she was the romantic focus for both of the leading male roles, although certainly a test of her acting skills, might be considered at best misguided and at worst foolhardy. It should be remembered that Terry was not alone in adopting this practice; other actresses, before and after her, would continue to accept unsuitable roles in their attempts to hold back the tide of time. Marguerite Steen reports that Terry’s sister-in-law, Julia Nielson, the actress wife of Fred Terry, ‘gleefully picked up a part written for a girl of eighteen, and played it with aplomb at the age of forty-five’.37 Despite Nielson’s apparent self-assurance, the play was not a success. Similarly, Alice Comyns-Carr also detailed a conversation over supper between a group of theatrical colleagues which turned to the subject of age and its effect, if any, upon acting. In response to Irving’s wistful comment that ‘age must come to them all’, Comyns-Carr related that Sarah Bernhardt was seen to lean across the table to Terry to remark, ‘my darling, there are two people who shall never be old – you and I’.38 Although one might view Bernhardt’s assertion as the bravado of an ageing actress, with its empathetic reassurance to a kindred spirit, it crucially underlines the perception that Terry’s qualities were deemed eternal. It is pertinent to question Terry’s initial attraction to the piece, particularly as at the age of fifty-six she was to undertake the role of a coquettish, thirtytwo-year-old playing rival to a young queen. Graves’s original manuscript for The Mistress of the Robes includes guidance on the character of Queen Gisela, which stipulates that ‘the Queen is haughty but beautiful, twenty-five and blonde, dressed in white with an antique girdle and chatelaine in silver, set with turquoise’.39 Later, Graves’s narrative discloses Evodia’s age to be thirty-two. Somewhat tellingly, Terry’s own copy has been amended to thirty-seven years, signifying, perhaps, the actress’s own conviction that it was stretching credulity just too far for her to portray someone quite so young, but that she could manage with the additional five years. In her portrayal of Evodia, she shared scenes with a considerably younger actress in the Queen’s role which, despite Terry’s still handsome countenance, can only have served to emphasize the substantial age difference. Likewise, the newly married actress Hutin Britton as Queen Gisela (a lithe twenty-seven-year-old beauty) might just as easily have passed herself off as a young girl. Moreover, the audience’s acceptance of the age discrepancy might seem incredible, to a modern spectator, given their need also to accept the

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actor Matheson Lang (Britton’s real-life husband) as Terry’s love interest in the play. Lang, who was his wife’s junior by three years, was almost young enough to be Evodia’s grandson, as was the twenty-five-year-old Julian L’Estrange playing the part of King Rodelph. However, it was certainly not unusual for actors to perform roles outside of their actual age, the aforementioned Julia Nielson being one case in point, as well as Terry’s own continued, successful portrayals of Beatrice, in Much Ado About Nothing, over a twenty-five-year period. Indeed, Graves appeared to have no such misgivings in writing such a part for her. However, a letter written by Terry during the tour creates an added dimension to the age imbalance: I have a very nice clever company of young people (no one so old or so ugly as myself ) the man who acts with me looks much older than he really is, & I am looking much younger lately than I have looked for many years40

Stoker records, somewhat paradoxically given the actress’ previous comment, that in the course of Terry’s long artistic pairing with Irving, of the twenty-seven plays in which they acted together nineteen were ‘young parts’ which, naturally, he concurs, over the course of many years became unsuitable. He concedes, somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, that the first person to find fault with this was Ellen Terry herself, who, with her keen uncompromising critical faculty always awake to the purpose of her work, realized the wisdom of abandonment long before the public had such a thought.41

A letter to Mrs Bertha Jennings Bramley, dated c. December 1898, in which Terry discusses the many people who have seen her on the stage or in the street and believe they know her well; well enough in fact, she asserts, that they write things she can scarcely conceive of, includes the following admission: a letter signing herself ‘an American gentleman’ telling me I am far too old and fat to be acting, & that no one wants to see me anymore on the stage, & warning me not to go to America or I shall be shot! – I am fat – & old? (-er than I was yesterday) but surely neither of these are good reasons for shooting me! … your old & fat Nell42

Although Terry has no qualms in adopting the ‘fat’ label, her seeming unwillingness to affirm the aged marker is highly evident, both in her use of the punctuation to question it, and her subsequent suffix to create an alternative meaning. With Terry’s popularity encapsulated by a seemingly ageless beauty and charm, one might suppose that she was keen to maintain this reputation for any number of reasons, not least that of pecuniary advantage and personal vanity.

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One might well question, therefore, Terry’s decision to execute the femme fatale, a part for which by 1903 she was arguably long past her prime. An untitled sepia photograph of Terry included in a tour programme could reasonably be attributed to any of the characters of Beatrice, Nance Oldfield or Evodia.43 In it Terry is wearing a closely fitted, deep décolletage velvet gown replete with lace cuffs and heavily encrusted embroidery. From the collection of photographs lodged in the National Trust’s Ellen Terry and Edith Craig archive is a confirmed image of Terry as Evodia, the Mistress of the Robes.44 While both representations confirm a still-handsome visage, it is difficult to accept the notion of a young coquette. Instead, in contrast to some of the vibrant images produced earlier in her career, a somewhat reflective, and matronly, figure gazes wistfully away into the distance. However captivating Terry’s acting skills may have been it is arguable that she fails to impress visually as a young adventuress. She had, ‘at the end of the century’, as Marguerite Steen recalls, ‘passed her own half century; her hair was greying; her once sylph-like form had thickened; there was a shadow on the “fabulous face”’45 and, although Steen concedes to her ‘ageless beauty and charm’, she acknowledges that, for many of Terry’s associates, the idea that ‘an ageing actress, heavy and grey-haired, could attract a man young enough to be her son, seemed to some ludicrous, and to others indecent’.46 She was, of course, in this instance referring to James Carew, the young man rumoured to be Terry’s lover; as with George Frederic Watts and Edward Godwin years before, she ignored her associates’ evident disapproval and made him her third husband. According to Steen, nobody in their right mind that year would have cast Terry as either Hiordis in Ibsen’s Vikings or as the Dutch fisherwoman Kniertje in The Good Hope. The actress, according to Steen, took the former role to please her son and the latter, which had been translated by Christopher St John, to please her daughter.47 However, although Michael Holroyd also confirms Terry’s evident willingness to accommodate the wishes of her children,48 it should be acknowledged that there may have been other, more artistic, motives behind her decision to play Kniertje. Not least when one considers that for the first time in her career, in St John’s version of The Good Hope, Terry played the part of an old woman. Although the tour had aimed to recoup some of the losses from her Imperial venture, it should also perhaps be seen as confirmation of Terry’s continued enthusiasm to engage with new productions and roles, demonstrating her ‘god-sent genius’49 to play a wide range of parts. The Mistress of the Robes was eventually replaced on the programme by The Good Hope. Only two years later, following her performance in Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Conversion as Lady Cicely Waynflete, a character described as ‘between thirty and forty, very good looking … of great vitality’, Terry confessed herself too old for the part, admitting to Shaw that she was ‘a mighty tame cat nowadays’.50 Yet we are reminded by Holroyd of her unshakeable belief ‘that given

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the right parts she could, if only for a time, turn back the clock and regain her beauty’.51 Although such self-confidence was perhaps justified, the Mistress of the Robes, it might be reasoned, was no such part. Although it allowed Terry another opportunity to showcase her skills as the consummate comedienne; certainly various reviews suggest that she excelled with some clever ‘comic business’ in a part which had been ‘calculated to display [her] varied gifts to highest advantage’,52 it was arguably at least a decade too late to create the impact Terry might have hoped for. It is feasible to speculate that had she performed the part in her prime, the play might have created a furore, particularly if we accept Nina Auerbach’s premise that ‘comedy was regarded as more dangerous in women than sexuality was’.53 For in this role Terry could have undoubtedly combined an intoxicating mix of both elements. The company visited theatres in Blackpool, Manchester and Hull before the play was premiered at the Royal Court and Opera House in Liverpool, on 2 November 1903. The repertoire for the tour was headed by the enduringly popular Much Ado About Nothing, with a triple billing on either a Wednesday or Friday evening which consisted, in most instances, of Hubert Carter’s Punchinello; the trial scene from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Terry’s much admired Nance Oldfield. Before its eventual debut on the Wednesday evening, the local newspapers trumpeted the arrival of this ‘Fantastic-Rhymed comedy in 4 Acts’54 – The Mistress of the Robes – which would, it announced, be seen ‘for the first time on any stage’. Equally, the Liverpool Entertainment Programme had, in its previous edition, advised readers that ‘the chief interest of the week will indubitably centre on the new play from the pen of Miss Clotilde Graves of which Miss Terry expects great things’.55 On the contrary, despite Terry’s ‘great expectations’, a first press review of the play the following day appears to have been somewhat eclipsed by reports of the Benson Company’s production of Richard II at Liverpool’s Shakespeare theatre and Her Royal Highness Princess Louise’s opening of a new housing centre.56 Fortunately, a critic from the Liverpool Evening Express provides a more detailed assessment of the actress’ new role, in which he allows that it was ‘excellently presented and mounted and in parts clever’, but, he perceives, somewhat prophetically, ‘that it is on no account worthy of unstinting praise and certainly not destined to have a long, or a successful life’. Throughout this lengthy critique any criticism is reserved entirely for the play itself in terms of its construction or authorship; there is no rebuke for Terry: ‘there were recalls after each act, and the audience were most cordial in their appreciation’.57 While reviewers might censure the playwright or the production, Terry appeared to be unequivocally above reproach, except for one whispering dissenter in this crowd of ardent devotees who, in a pithy round-up of the week’s theatrical offerings wrote, in a one-line critique of the play: ‘On Wednesday night Miss Graves’ fantastic rhymed com-

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edy was duly produced for the first time on any stage with Miss Terry as the Countess Glicka’58 and said more, perhaps, by saying so little. The article is lacking further description, explanation or comment on The Mistress of the Robes, but more revealing is its appraisal of Terry’s Beatrice role which, although acknowledging it as one of her best parts, the reviewer suggests ‘was almost, if not quite as notable as of yore’. While this opening remark might be taken as only an implicit slight, it is surely underscored with its ensuing reflection – a wounding reminder to both the readers and Terry maybe – that ‘it is interesting to remember that Miss Terry played the part for the first time at Leeds in 1880. Twenty three years ago!’59 His juxtaposition of the elapsed time span and his view that Terry’s Beatrice was less satisfactory makes his meaning as clear as it is deadly. Research has yet to uncover Graves’s own thoughts on the play, with an undated apology from the playwright advising that she was unable to accept an invitation to see the opening production.60 Likewise, Terry makes no reference to the play in her own memoir published only five years afterwards. Further, the company’s own reaction to these judgements is unrecorded. However, in what might be taken as an indicator of their concern, the play which had initially been destined to appear as the closing matinee and evening performance that week, was replaced on the Saturday by further appearances of the Shakespearean stalwart Much Ado About Nothing. Subsequent performances of the play, as it continued its tour of the provinces, gleaned similarly polite and rather hackneyed compliments regarding Terry’s ‘scope for the exercise of her finished art in this lighter phase’,61 preferring to focus in most instances on the visual impact of Terry’s wardrobe. Minutely detailed descriptions provide evidence of the beautiful costumes used to adorn Evodia’s character.62 The Newcastle Daily Journal reported ‘Miss Ellen Terry wore an exquisite costume composed of pleated biscuit chiffon voile, trimmed with bands of real ermine, finished with ornaments in suede and chenille to match the chiffon’.63 Likewise, the Dundee Courier columnist, ‘Annette’, gave an eloquent depiction of the ‘brilliant scene’ and the stunning toilette of the actress: a wonderful creation of pale pink silk covered with net. The skirt was flounced from waist to hem and the bodice was daintily made in coffee-coat style. Miss Terry’s second toilette was a still more handsome one. Made of the richest ivory satin, it was exquisite in make and cut, the long sweeping skirt being closely tucked, while the low cut bodice had a berthe [sic] of filmy chiffon embroidered with jewels. In her hair Miss Terry wore a beautiful star and coronet of diamonds.64

There is no doubt, from the reviews, that audiences were eager to see this beloved actress, with greater emphasis placed on her visual display than the impact of the play itself. Many of the accounts are similar to that in the Portsmouth Times, which reports audiences being large and enthusiastic: ‘On making her first entry

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[as Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing] Miss Terry was the recipient of a tempestuous round of cheers, and these were repeated at the close of each act’.65 Likewise, the Dundee Courier reported that ‘last night attracted perhaps the largest, certainly the most fashionable, audience of the week … when a triple bill was presented and Miss Ellen Terry was seen to the greatest possible advantage’.66 Of the play itself, one reviewer gave a rather bemused appraisal of a piece, which ‘left the audience too dazed to express an opinion’, followed by the assertion that although the story might be the basis for a good play, ‘as it stands, The Mistress of the Robes cannot be entertained seriously being an admixture of poetry, tragedy, farce, burlesque and melodrama which evades anything like concrete criticism’.67 The critic’s assessment of the play, as a medley of mixed genres, is certainly well founded, with a dialogue which at times veers wildly between pathos and, indeed, farce. The reviewer might also have acknowledged the text’s implicit homage to pantomime, particularly given the play is written in verse. Although the reviewer admits to its ‘rhymed dexterity’ in the first half, he finds that by the second ‘it maddens like the constant drop of water in oriental torture’.68 Other recognizable motifs of the Victorian pantomime genre, with which Graves was very familiar,69 include the play’s implicit reference to contemporary popular culture and Terry’s character, at times, crossing the footlights. For example, lines aimed directly at the audience, and delivered rather knowingly by the actress, included: ‘they say I have some talent for the stage’ and ‘you who know me so should tell / whatever part I play, I play it well!’70 It is tempting to apply a Bakhtinian71 perspective to Graves’s script with its apparent Carnivalesque inversions which mock the institution of marriage, subvert gender issues and upset areas of prescribed behaviour, including female sexual conduct; in Act I, the Queen makes the accusation that Evodia ‘manages indiscretion, indiscreetly’. As a response to the charge that she is a rival to the Queen for the King’s affections Evodia clarifies her position thus: I am the refrain without which the ballad Scans badly, and the pepper in the salad; The coffee ’n chicory, the sauce’s sorrel The peg on which Gisela hangs her quarrel, The tinsel doll topping the Christmas tree That little Rodelph cries for naughtily72

In her stage notes, Terry cannot resist adding the pencilled postscript, ‘(loftily) Because he cannot get it. There!’ Certainly Evodia is endowed with an explicit sexuality, which Graves combined with what would have been perceived as distinctive male attributes – she smokes cigarettes, she deals cards with herself as the stake and, in the final act, to secure her escape she appropriates a male disguise. Her accoutrements for the escapade are notably the King’s own hat and

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cloak, but also, significantly, his signet ring (the symbol of his authority) and his revolver (in Freudian terms a signifier of the phallus).73 By modifying concepts of accepted female behaviour in this way, Graves offered alternatives that disturbed, as well as amused, the audience. The ambivalent laughter of carnival, which allegedly mocks and rejuvenates, is certainly in evidence here. However, those other models representative of Bakhtin’s notion of Carnivalesque within popular culture – i.e. the grotesque and the vulgar – which Graves invokes, Terry is less able to accept, as her annotated notes reveal. In Act I, for example, the innuendo within sections of dialogue referencing the secret marriage of two royal retainers and their subsequent nocturnal visits has been deleted, with Terry’s postscript – ‘not plain – where it is plain, not nice. Horrid all this – vulgar’.74 Or another scoring through later in Act II, the King’s speech: ‘the platonic role I played at first / One night in May I found the body getting in the way’ reveals Terry’s aside ‘common – something else’.75 Indeed the word ‘vulgar’ recurs frequently in her notes, especially those which make reference to tobacco. During an intimate scene between Evodia and Captain Geza they are directed to share a cigarette, which Terry again views as ‘common’.76 For Christopher St John, Terry had ‘a mind that was clean, innocent and almost childlike in its simplicity … she simply could not see the point of a subtly improper story, or else she ignored it deliberately’.77 Yet despite Terry’s apparent aversion to the coarser aspects of the play, she clearly glimpsed an opportunity not only to play the hoyden once more, as in her younger days, but to defy the advancing years and ‘thumb her nose’ at any detractors. Irving, a decade earlier in The Amber Heart, had rather cruelly cast Terry as a mother to her own son and in doing so, Auerbach asserts, bestowed on her ‘the actress’s kiss of death’.78 The actress was conceivably anticipating turning the tables in style in The Mistress of the Robes, by hoping to play lover to both of Irving’s sons. Although the play failed to reach either of its anticipated London or American audiences, Terry’s original manuscript details proposed cast lists for those locations; with thirtythree-year-old Harry Irving scheduled for the London cast as Captain Geza, and his younger brother Laurence for the same role in the American production.79 The following section of dialogue and stage direction is drawn from Act IV of Graves’s original manuscript: Glicka: (Stooping over him) Shut your eyes! (Imperiously) Shut your mouth! (Glicka kisses Geza upon the mouth) Geza: (Opens eyes and mouth in rapture) Oh!80

On Terry’s own copy, the dialogue has been scored through with the additional, pencilled exclamation – ‘whew!’81 Suggesting that she was aware of her limita-

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tions in this role with regard to what she could, or indeed should, do and the limits as to what might be viewed as acceptable. Using a little-known play, The Mistress of the Robes, written by a long-forgotten playwright and enjoyed by a provincial audience on only a handful of occasions, illustrates both Terry’s willingness to try out new material82 and her confidence in accepting roles for which she was no longer necessarily aesthetically suited. And while it could be supposed that a provincial audience might be less discerning in its praise,83 and therefore more accepting of Terry in an unsuitable part, there is no doubt that they were bewitched by her, as were London theatregoers. The reviews are fairly consistent in their praise of this ‘Queen of every Woman’84 with ‘her sunshiney [sic] presence, gay movement, sparkling utterance and bewitching moods’.85 The magical lexicon was evoked repeatedly in order to illustrate her innate ability to charm, enchant and captivate her audience, although for one, at least, the spell did not hold and he conceded that ‘cool reason reverses the judgement which glamour has dictated’.86 The reference to ‘glamour’ is particularly telling as an acknowledgement of Terry’s capacity to ‘capture the gaze’ through her visual iconography. As Auerbach notes, ‘Ellen Terry slid into others’ visions of her life, but that life was neither orthodox nor conventional: the different messages it transmitted to disparate observers endow it with maddeningly rich and distinctive meanings’.87 Clotilde Graves’s own life was also neither orthodox nor conventional – she shunned the fripperies of her sex and enthusiastically assumed the motifs of a New Woman of the period. Yet, her personality was framed by a myriad of conflicting features in her work; the feminist approach suggested by her rejection of marriage was countered by her abhorrence of the childless woman as unnatural. A strong thread of idealized heterosexual love imbues her writing, though Graves’s demeanour points to lesbian inclinations. Perhaps it was Terry’s own unorthodoxy, combined with the actress’ ethereal genius as a performer, which was the key to Graves’s attraction to her. A final letter sent to Edith Craig by Clotilde Graves in 1929 affords some entertaining anecdotes regarding Terry’s tricycling exploits but, sadly, makes no direct reference to the play which connects them, being simply yet one more epistolary accolade, to the late, great actress to add to the many dozens already received by Edith. Included in Graves’s homage is her acknowledgement that ‘a mildy baddish play with a Terry acting in the cast is converted to an almost good one – while a good one draws a crowded house’.88 Whether or not Graves realized the irony of her remark or intended it to be a thinly veiled acknowledgement to The Mistress of the Robes is purely speculative. The letter concludes with Graves urging Edith to engage somebody to write a book about the art of the Terrys to seek to explain the uniqueness of their dramatic talents. She concludes her eulogy with a somewhat hallowed, but most apt

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and prescient note for today’s renewed interest in the bewitching actress ‘with her resistless charm’: A great woman, my dear Miss Craig, and an artist of supreme greatness, and yours is the task of keeping the shrine, and guarding the sacred lamp in preserving the memorials of our much-loved Ellen Terry not only for those who loved her, but for generations of playgoers and lovers yet to be born.89

As a representative view, the thirty years which had elapsed between Graves’s poetic testimonial to Terry at the International Women’s conference and this later tribute had certainly not dimmed the playwright’s belief in the eternal nature of Terry’s theatrical brilliance. Whether or not the actress was ever too old for a part was immaterial to an audience who saw only that ageless beauty and charm of which so much has been written; and for that, of course, we must acknowledge Terry’s undoubted dramatic genius.

5 THE AFTER VOICE OF ELLEN TERRY Katherine E. Kelly

When she spoke it was as if someone drew a bow over a ripe, richly seasoned ’cello; it grated, it glowed, and it growled. Virginia Woolf, ‘Ellen Terry’1

Looking back over her long professional life as a Shakespearean actress, Ellen Terry regretted that she had never played the part of Rosalind, a character she described as ‘high-spirited’, ‘well-bred’, and ‘thoughtful’.2 And while it is true that, during her successful collaboration with Henry Irving, she did not perform the part of Rosalind, she did manage to speak for (and as) Rosalind in her Shakespeare Lectures delivered between 1910 and 1921 in England, the United States, Australia and Canada. These lectures gave her the freedom to speak on behalf of a modern womanhood she could not, in her Lyceum roles, perform, nor in her life fully inhabit. Further, the delivery of Terry’s lectures – her conflating of elocutionary skill and theatrical delivery before largely female audiences – dignified women’s public speaking at the height of the suffrage campaign, when women were mounting public platforms by the hundreds to speak on their own behalf. The lectures, that is, not only recorded retrospectively the subtext of Terry’s principal Shakespeare roles but modelled women speaking on behalf of women at the threshold of the modern era. I would like to argue that the voicing of her Shakespeare lectures – both the use of her celebrated speaking voice ventriloquizing the women in Shakespeare’s plays and her dedication of that voice to women – created a Shakespearean after voice in service to the feminist movement.

The Lectures: Between Past and Future Terry’s self-understanding and public image straddled Victorian and modern womanhood.3 But her lectures, delivered between her 53rd and 74th years, began to close the gap between her Victorian role of serving the vision of male artists and her modern role of serving her own vision as a writer and critic. Begun by dictating notes to her ‘literary henchman’, Christopher St John, Terry com– 65 –

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posed and revised four lectures – a first on the letters in Shakespeare’s plays, a second on the children in his plays, and a third and fourth, the most successful of them all, on the triumphant and pathetic women in his plays – between roughly 1903 and 1915. Three years after Terry’s death, in 1931, St John composed a preface and published an edited, collated version of their texts.4 Terry’s diffidence vanishes from both the spoken and published versions of the lectures and in the place of the accommodating leading lady of the Irving Lyceum appears an advocate not only for the Shakespeare heroine as mindful and gifted but also for the women’s movement, which had, by 1910, the year of her first lecture-recital, become regular front-page fare in the London dailies. The audience for the first lecture at London’s Kingsway Theatre, the Pioneer Players, had been organized by Edith Craig and Christopher St John in May of that same year on the heels of the nationwide success of their drama, A Pageant of Great Women, which assigned Terry the privileged role of actress Nance Oldfield, the sole speaking part among the Great Women. Terry wanted to connect with this ‘adoring’ audience of feminists and to move them closer to her subject even as she was moved closer to their politics. ‘The assumption that “the womans’ movement” is of very recent date … is not warranted by history’, she declaimed in her lecture on ‘Shakespeare’s Triumphant Women’; ‘There is evidence of its existence in the fifteenth century’.5 Here Terry both corrects her auditors, who might imagine themselves the sole authors of feminism, and simultaneously channels Shakespeare’s feminist views on women. Positioned between Shakespeare and contemporary feminist activists like her daughter, Edy, gave Terry some discomfort. She was, for example, inconsistent in her support of the suffrage cause. In August of 1910, she drafted a correction to be printed in an unnamed newspaper, to the effect that her forthcoming lecture tour of America and Canada was not associated with women’s suffrage.6 But she would later delight in announcing to an Australian journalist, ‘You all know I’m a suffragette’.7 Her slip here – describing herself as a suffragette rather than a suffragist, and therefore a supporter of the militant wing whose tactics she clearly condemned – was either an error of ignorance or a deliberate blurring of the distinction. In either case, it suggests she found herself in a gap between Victorian and modern, unwilling or unable to belong fully to one period or the other. In her lectures as in her life, she claimed the modernity of Shakespeare and the traditionalism of present-day feminists and, in this way, attempted to bridge her era and that of her daughter’s. Her lectures in New York followed the Kingsway Theatre ‘dress rehearsal’, running from the autumn of 1910 to early spring of 1911, and secured Terry a tour in England upon her return, followed by a three-week engagement at London’s Savoy Theatre, where her lecture appeared between two short plays, one by suffrage supporter and long-time friend J. M. Barrie.

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The Lectures in Speech and in Print But exactly what are these lectures? Essays? Performance pieces? Scripts? Improvisations? They are all of these but none of them exclusively. Terry held off their publication, wanting to secure audiences for her lecture-recitals. St John knitted together four of the primary versions of the texts Terry used most frequently during her tours to constitute the final published text.8 The spoken versions were also shifting and various, as live audiences ranging from the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants to the British Empire Shakespeare Society influenced Terry’s choice of impromptu recitations and commentary. In a strict sense, then, no definitive ‘text’ of the spoken or written lectures exists, and the authorship of both spoken and published lectures was influenced by St John, as the playbills at the time announced.9 The length of the printed lectures nearly halves that of the spoken ones, but, as Terry’s editor, St John appears to have taken great care to preserve Terry’s major interpretive points in cutting from the longer, spoken versions. A look at the two versions of the ‘Shakespeare’s Heroines’ lecture – the spoken and the published – shows the influence of the women’s movement on its composition and delivery together with Terry’s shifting sympathies towards ‘modern’ feminism. In her introduction to her manuscript of the ‘Heroines’ lecture, Terry wrote: Many people seem to think that the early Victorian woman … has always been good enough for the world and would be good enough now, if a few violent spirits had not in recent days started a revolution. If you ask people with these views how they account for Shakespeare’s heroines, who certainly have more in common with our modern revolutionaries than with the fragile domestic ornaments of the thirties and forties, you will probably be told that Shakespeare had to make his heroine like that, because the women’s parts in plays were always played by young men! I hope to be able to show that … these (parts) have a much deeper significance.10

The later, printed version shortens this to: Wonderful women! Have you ever thought how much we all, and women especially, owe to Shakespeare for his vindication of woman in (his) fearless, high-spirited, resolute and intelligent heroines? Don’t believe the anti-feminists if they tell you … that Shakespeare had to endow his women with virile qualities because in his theatre they were always impersonated by men.11

In all of their versions available for reading, the lectures have left a valuable record of what Terry herself thought and felt about the Shakespeare parts she played across from her performing partner, Henry Irving. She took the occasion of writing them to create a new reputation for herself as distinct from her reputation as Irving’s female lead. Terry ruled the lecture stage for the first time in her

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performing life as a kind of actor-manager, selecting, collaborating and approving of the entire production – helping to design the props and using her singular talent (together with St John’s editorial aid) to express in language her profound understanding of Shakespeare’s plays. Together with her daughter, Edy, she assembled a simple set, a flowing cape and a large book containing the printed lecture, relying on her deep performance history to reach an audience composed largely of women, many of whom (the ‘revolutionaries’ she had contradictorily disavowed to the editor of the Australian newspaper) were performing as marchers, paper sellers or platform speakers in the suffrage movement for the first time in their lives. She spoke her own words, selected her persona, used her movement and speaking skills, and built her audiences from fans who either saw themselves or had been told about her performances in the Lyceum Shakespeare seasons. Where Irving had reinvented the Lyceum Terry as what Max Beerbohm called, a ‘genial Brittania’,12 Edith, Christopher and Terry herself invented her lecturing persona as a Shakespearean high priestess, initiated into knowledge of the Shakespeare mysteries by years of devoted memorization and critical labour. For the 1910 London performance, Edith created what became the touring set and costumes. She wore ‘flowing robes of crimson, or white or grey’, matched to the mood of the ‘discourses’, as she preferred to call them, while the platform was backed by deep green curtains, decorated with fresh flowers, and lit atmospherically. In the place of a lectern, she used a desk made for the 1889 Macbeth readings with Irving, and read the lectures from large print folio pages bound in attractive covers.13 A New York Times review of a November 1910 lecture performance reports: ‘She was greeted with sincere warmth by a packed house of women, who had braved torrents of rain in order to see and hear her … When … Miss Terry appeared, the enthusiasm was enormous’.14 Following the performance, the organizers presented her with a Book of Welcome from a private group of ‘loyal admirers’ and Percy Mackaye read a poem, ‘Ellen Terry On her Return to America’. Part celebrity fandom, part Bardolatry, Terry’s reception became an occasion for the audience and introducers to bask in their collective identification with England’s national poet. But Terry’s lectures were not mere exercises in cultural self-congratulation or nostalgic reminiscence but a ground on which Terry salvaged, examined and remade her Lyceum past, offering Shakespeare’s heroines as models for the political present and future.15 Terry composed her lectures by interlacing passages of Shakespearean dialogue with paraphrase and interpretation, blending her own commentary with Shakespeare’s lines, and thereby creating the impression that they thought and felt alike, as in the following selection from ‘The Children in Shakespeare’s Plays’, describing the child Mamillius, Terry’s first role as a nine-year-old actress. Mamillius’s father, falsely believing his wife adulterous, has banished her, and Terry here calls attention to the boy’s response:

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An observant and wise babe! We may assume that when his mother was barred from his presence ‘like one infectious’ it was impossible to throw dust in his eyes … He may be too young to realize the nature of the charge his madly jealous father … has brought against his mother, but he knows that she is in disgrace and he takes it terribly to heart.

Terry then quotes a witness’ description of Mamillius’s reaction to his mother’s banishment: ‘He straight declined, drooped, took it deeply. Fastened and fixed the shame on’t in himself, Threw off his spirit, his appetite, his sleep, And downright languished.’16 Terry’s strategy in much of her lecturing aims to animate the play’s hidden and thought-to-be expendable parts. She takes the reader/spectator to places in the text they might otherwise sidestep or underestimate, recalling at least one event in her own acting past when she was underestimated by her partner, Irving. Irving’s stage manager ordered her to speak a ‘gag line’ at the close of the church scene between Beatrice and Benedick of Much Ado About Nothing. Following Benedick’s ‘I will kiss your hand and so leave you’, etc., ‘and so farewell’, the manager and then Irving himself insisted that Terry as Beatrice speak a line traditionally added by earlier performers for a laugh, ‘Kiss my hand again’, which Terry recognized undercuts Beatrice’s dignity for the sake of a weak joke. Faced with the choice of speaking the line or quitting, she decided pragmatically, ‘for one thing I did not like doing at the Lyceum, there would probably be a hundred things I should dislike doing in another theatre’, so she agreed. But she pursues the point in her lecture, noting she had never played Beatrice ‘as I know she ought to be played’, as ‘I had a too deliberate, though polished and thoughtful Benedick in Henry Irving’.17 In publicly annotating her performing past, she regrets that Irving’s ponderous style of playing checked her own instincts as a performer and curbed the roles she might have played but that they lacked a major part for him or contradicted his style. Terry anatomizes each of the triumphant heroines, describing them in terms suited to the present day. Beatrice, the first of the three, is ‘proud, but not vain’,18 while Rosalind, the second, shows keen intellect. The banished Rosalind became Terry’s symbol of the artistic independence she had sacrificed for her lucrative and affectionate, but finally limiting, partnership with Irving. Portia, the third ‘triumphant heroine’, is – like herself – an aesthete: ‘the fruit of the Renaissance, the child of a period of beautiful clothes, beautiful cities, beautiful houses, beautiful ideas’. But she also resembles contemporary activists: ‘in spite of her self-surrender in love there is something independent, almost masculine in her attitude towards life’. And in another revision of her own artistic past, she continues,

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Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence It makes me rather impatient when I am told that it is strange that a woman … in the habit of directing herself and … others, should be willing to be directed by a man so manifestly inferior to her as Bassanio … Portia’s gracious surrender is a ‘beau geste’ … She retains her independence of thought and action.19

If Terry’s ‘gracious surrender’ to Irving also amounted to a ‘beau geste’, then in the lectures she retracts that surrender by mastering the plays’ subtext as a transcript of Shakespeare’s feminist intentions. A sly, ambiguous, and sometimes reluctant feminist, Terry’s alliance with ‘beauty’ not only prevented her from openly disagreeing with gender traditionalists but also prevented her from taking sides in disagreements in the suffrage battle, except in a general and imprecise way. But she stands out as one of the most celebrated of speakers to harness Shakespeare to the women’s movement, and in this sense established a precedent for reading Shakespeare as feminist that would catch on with movement supporters. In 1911, G. E. O’Dell, co-author of The Ethical Movement: Its Principles and Aims (1911), spoke before the suffragist Women’s Freedom League on the subject of ‘Shakespeare’s Women’. He, too, divides the women into two groups – those like the women in Richard III, unable to do more than bemoan their lot, and those like Portia, who followed the example of Queen Elizabeth by acting – as suffragists act – to change her fate.20 One year later, the Women Writers’ Suffrage League staged a matinee of suffrage dramas featuring plays and scenes by Cicely Hamilton, Elizabeth Baker, Elizabeth Robins and Shakespeare. In what the suffrage newspaper The Vote described as ‘the most daring part of the programme’, entitled ‘Shakespeare’s Dream’, suffrage author-actresses Beatrice Harraden and Bessie Hatton ‘appeared before the sleeping poet, saluting and offering flowers’, while his female characters approached singly, speaking lines from famous speeches. Marion Terry, sister to Ellen, performed Portia’s ‘mercy speech’ as well as lines of both triumphant and pathetic heroines. Puck performed along with a fairy troupe, while Adeline Bourne as Cleopatra spoke the climactic lines, ‘O women, women! Come, we have no friend but resolution!’ This performatively recontextualized Shakespeare – the utterance of whose lines announced the material condition of enfranchisement – operated as a second mode of Shakespearean appropriation opposite to that of Terry’s. Where Terry’s subtextual readings ‘discovered’ through laborious study over time a Shakespeare that celebrated the feminine and the feminist, suffrage actresses’ Shakespeare adaptations undertook an instantaneous turn in meaning by displaying particular lines and characters in the context of their suffrage goal. Terry revealed while the suffragists declared their kinship with Shakespeare. But Terry’s influence as both celebrity Shakespeare actress and seasoned interpreter gave suffrage performers a foundation from which to declare their alliance to the poet, which may explain why the Leeds Society of Women’s Suffrage invited her to give her ‘Shakespeare’s Heroines’ lecture in 1912.

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Reception of the Lectures Reviews of Terry’s lectures – those delivered occasionally and on her national and international tours – frequently mention her extraordinarily expressive voice as one of the remarkable qualities of her performances. A reviewer in Dunedin, New Zealand, wrote that Terry’s ‘voice that has tones of rare beauty … which every would-be elocutionist should hear – cast a spell over her audience from the outset’. The Argus in Melbourne, Australia, hails Terry’s voice as a standout among actresses, ‘As one looked at her declaiming the great lines, the mind went back to the actresses of the immediate past. Not one of them was as impressive as Irving’s leading lady’. ‘Her voice’, wrote a critic for Melbourne’s the Age, ‘its changes, its modulations, to varied harmonies, which have illustrated every mood that Shakespeare knew, stands to its owner still’. The Sydney Morning Herald commented that Miss Terry ‘delighted everyone by the sustained and magnetic declamation of the ‘Quality of Mercy’ speech’, while the Auckland Star praised ‘Her remarkable voice, her wonderfully modulated intonation, her superb gestures’. A New Zealand arts journal, the Triad, remarks, ‘First of all the wonderful, superb, alluring, exquisite, grave, endearing, Ellen Terry voice we must all remember while we live … [it is] surely one of the most beautiful in the world’.21 In 1914, the year of this tour, Terry was sixty-seven years old. By this point, her voice would have shown the effects of age, but clearly continued to inspire her audiences with its power or, perhaps, with the memory of its power. The praise of these critics carries with it more than a touch of nostalgia and gallantry akin to that expressed in Virginia Woolf ’s tribute. Terry’s voice evokes not only a memory of the greatness of the Lyceum seasons – an anachronistic, imperial greatness – but also an earlier era of the great declamatory actors, planting their feet, inflating their lungs, posing their bodies and delivering set speeches with a repertoire of emphatic gesture and verbal emphasis that newer Ibsenite actors were replacing with a relatively understated ‘inwardness’. But Terry’s service to the women’s movement, easily overlooked by critical gallantry, lay both in her theatrical fame as an English genius and in her power as a speaker. That power was being harnessed by women throughout England and the United States.

Terry’s Eloquence Near the close of her lecture on Shakespeare’s ‘Triumphant Women’, Terry considers Portia’s mercy speech, which anatomizes the power of benign eloquence, the same eloquence taught her by her actor father and at that moment being studied by would-be suffrage Rosalinds, enrolled in elocution classes across the nation in preparation for platform speaking. Terry had mastered and rendered artistic the skill being taught to suffrage speakers. Elocution, the term used by Terry and her contemporaries to refer to the teaching of voice production and

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body movement, often also referred, by a kind of shorthand, to acting in general. ‘By a natural instinct’, Terry wrote in her Memoirs, ‘I had produced my voice scientifically almost from the first, and I had found out for myself many things, which in these days of Delsarte systems and the science of voice production, are taught’.22 Her ‘natural instinct’ she attributes elsewhere to the influence of her actor father, who ‘was a beautiful elocutionist, and if I now speak my language well it is in no small degree due to my early training’.23 The suffrage movement had begun by 1909 to develop a series of elocution classes through which to produce the army of speakers required during mass meetings and election seasons. Actors were the masters of elocution, required to observe, study and practice not just voice production but also gesture, pace, bodily movement and stage business. When elocution teachers came into demand, not only by suffragists but also by lawyers and politicians, and then by aspiring professionals during the teens, they tended to be drawn from the ranks of actors or those who trained actors. A famous actress like Terry would have offered younger activists and proto-activists not only a model of a mature, successful and impassioned public speaker but one who was addressing a subject – Shakespeare’s heroines – of direct and intense interest to them. Terry’s old style of declamatory speaking, being quietly superseded by newer, less emphatic style, nevertheless demonstrated the muscular vitality of an embodied voice that could grab and hold the public’s attention. This skill was being widely sought after by suffrage activists. Advertisements for speaking classes in suffrage newspapers describe the skills on offer to those seeking to develop a public voice: Elocution – Miss Greta Garnier teaches thorough Voice Culture, and strengthening for public speaking; Gesture; Physical Culture; Recitation. Speech defects cured. Amateurs and Professionals (privately) coached. – 32 Wigmore Street, W.24

Some elocution teachers were affiliated with particular branches of the movement and would advertize in their newspapers. Thus, the following advertisement appears only in the pages of the militant paper Votes for Women: To Suffragist Speakers. – Miss Rosa Leo, Honorary Instructor in Voice Production and Public Speaking to the W.S.P.U. Speakers’ Class, requests those desirous of joining her private classes or taking private lessons will communicate with her by letter at 45 Ashworth Mansions, Elgin Ave. W. Separate classes for men.25

A skill that middle-class men were seeking to further their professional careers and that poets like T. S. Eliot would cultivate to orient modern poetry towards speech was simultaneously sought by suffragists to further their political goals. As Mark Morrisson has noted, later Victorian and Edwardian elocution manuals charted a shift from technical, narrowly targeted instruction for the upper-

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middle and middle classes to a more democratically directed pedagogy aimed at producing ‘natural’ speech.26 Terry’s fame as a reciter of Shakespearean verse cited her naturalness as a speaker and performer. In this sense, her lack of formal education worked to create her persona as a natural English genius who learned speech, dance and musical skills from performing adults rather than from unskilled tutors or teachers in institutionalized schoolrooms. She was positioned well by virtue of her gifts, her history, her training and her (admittedly ambivalent) sympathy with feminist activism to serve it as an icon, model and source of inspiration. Much attention has been paid to Terry as the subject of painters. Her material presence in the English theatre has been splendidly captured by Sargent’s 1889 painting Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth and by her cousin Margaret Cameron’s photograph of her in partial silhouette as a young, artistically dressed woman, among other pictorial representations. The National Trust is now attempting to save and restore the dress painted by Sargent. But more ephemeral and subject to technological distortion are the recordings of Terry’s voice.27 To an ear accustomed to twenty-first century, western-style stage speech, she spoke Shakespeare’s lines with melodramatic flourish, rolling her ‘r’s’ as was the fashion, and drawing out particular words for emphasis. The values prized in her voice – its range and control of pitch, modulation, flexibility and its relaxed enunciation of verse – are more difficult for us to recover and imagine in historical context than the twists of soft green silk, blue tinsel and beetle wings that made up the fabric of her Macbeth dress. What audiences claim to have heard in Terry’s voice would seem to be the gendered qualities praised in the singing voices of Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland and Edith Piaf – not only idiosyncratic phrasing but also a sense of humane tolerance, wisdom and understanding borne by a voice emerging from deep within the performer’s body. In her lectures, Terry transferred her own sense of intimacy with these characters, developed over years of textual study and bodily performance, in two primary ways – through her subtextual gloss on the lines she discusses, and through the medium of her reciting voice, closely blended with her lecturer’s ‘voice’ to create the impression that she did not so much perform Shakespeare’s lines as deliver them from a place within her body where they had penetrated her blood and bones. In one of the printed manuscripts of her spoken lectures in the ‘Pathetic Heroines’ group, Terry wrote on the subject of Twelfth Night’s Viola, ‘Viola,’ says her brother Sebastian, ‘bore a mind that envy could not but call fair,’ and it is this fair mind, like a clear well in which it is sweet to bathe one’s hands and lips, that attracts us to her rather than her intelligence. She has less spirit=wit than Rosalind … But if she is not so verbally brilliant as Rosalind, she often speaks with a beautiful sincerity which goes straight to the heart: – It stings her when, under a misapprehension, she is accused of being ungrateful –

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Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence ‘I hate ingratitude more in a man Than lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness, Or any taint of vice whose strong corruption Inhabits our frail blood.’ And into Viola’s mouth Shakespeare has put some of the most incomparable words of love, that even he, master of passionate phrases, ever penned:– ‘How does thou like this tune?’ the Duke asks, and Viola replies: ‘It gives a very echo to the seat Where love is throned.’28

Terry tacks effortlessly back and forth between the role of analyst and that of reciter. Her understanding of Shakespeare is all of a piece, so that even as the analyst recognizes the superiority of Rosalind’s wit over Viola’s, the performer knows to endow Viola’s love poetry with more intensity than Rosalind’s. St John’s edition of the published lectures attempts slightly to mitigate the reader’s disadvantage by giving her an occasional sense of the embodied Terry who delivered them. In that section of the ‘Pathetic Heroines’ lecture devoted to Ophelia, Terry describes Laertes’s grief on returning to find his sister destroyed by madness: And I think there is no ‘sane’ scene in Shakespeare which moves us as much as this ‘mad’ one, this beautiful painful scene in which Ophelia prattles and sings, making one think, as the observant courtier says, ‘there might be thought, though nothing sure’

St John here adds a footnote, ‘When Ellen Terry delivered this lecture she usually left her reading-desk at this point, and acted the scene. She judged it impossible to read it. She ended the lecture with Ophelia’s last words.’29 At moments like these, even as a lecturer, Terry enlists her body to give her voice the material grounding the scene demands; when the voice approaches the silence of madness, the body must stand in as a supplement. All of Terry’s forms of speaking and acting were, of course, performances of various kinds. None of them was a naive snapshot of an essential Ellen Terry. The most important performances for her legacy as an after voice for women activists began with her Terry-Irving Shakespeare seasons at the Lyceum, but ended with her lectures, which revised those seasons by registering her reservations and resentments as a performer, by acknowledging Irving’s sometimes flawed realization of the male characters, by exposing the richness of Shakespeare’s female parts, and by drawing Shakespeare’s characters into the orbit of the women’s ‘revolution’ taking place offstage. In becoming identified, during her Lyceum years, with the part of the quintessential Englishwoman, ‘naturally’ allied through a long apprenticeship, unusual talent and desire with the quintessential Englishman, Irving; and in establishing the greatness of the national poet, Shakespeare, Irving and Terry donned (unwittingly perhaps) the mantle of Englishness that Coppelia Kahn, in discussing the usefulness of Shakespeare to empire, has called ‘self-authorized and racially pure’.30 Terry’s Lyceum past gave her the cultural

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authority to intervene in the present, especially on behalf of a mythical English womanhood she had herself helped to construct. But this same authority also appears to have constrained her from throwing herself fully into the woman’s movement to which her daughter, Edy, and Edy’s partner, Christopher St John, had dedicated themselves. Since the nineteenth century, the texts of Terry’s beloved Shakespeare had been pulled left and right as radicals and conservatives each struggled to define the national poet through their political prism. As Antony Taylor has demonstrated, the Chartist leader Ernest Jones requested a wide variety of reading materials be provided him in prison, including Shakespeare tragedies (none of which was given him). Nineteenth-century radicals worked to create a ‘people’s canon’ that would link romanticism, national traditions and a ‘plebian communitarianism located on the land’,31 and Shakespeare was assigned a place of honour in that canon. Tom Mann, organizer of mining workers in the mid-1800s, established ‘The Shakespeare Mutual Improvement Society’ when he moved to London in the 1870s. The Agricultural Labourers’ Union leader, Joseph Arch, found a special appeal in Shakespeare’s town of Stratford-upon-Avon and began many of his speeches with a quote from Shakespeare’s plays. Closer to Terry’s experience growing up modestly as the child of performing parents, ‘Chartists and reformers felt at home with the semi-underground theatrical tradition in Britain. They were acutely aware of its innate unrespectability, and many were drawn to the theatres as meeting places and sites for popular demonstrations’.32 The struggle to affiliate Shakespeare with one or another political faction played itself out through Terry’s own performing life as well. The Lyceum Terry played the part of Irving’s compliant (albeit resentful) handmaiden, representative of the pure Englishwoman linked through Bardolatry to the pure Englishman. This was no radical or plebian performance of Shakespeare but high theatricality in full regalia, speaking the most perfect English, in a lavishly equipped theatre, and attended to by the nation’s elite. Off the professional stage, Shakespeare was put to work for the British empire just as earlier in the nineteenth century he had been appropriated by reformers. While Terry travelled and lectured on behalf of Shakespeare’s women, amateur performers throughout the empire were being encouraged to form reading circles to study and speak Shakespeare’s plays ‘as often as possible’. BESS, the British Empire Shakespeare Society, founded in 1901 by Greta Morritt with help from Irving and Mr Acton Bond, promoted Shakespeare’s works throughout the empire by coordinating reading circles and costume recitals. Open to both adults and children ‘among all classes throughout the British Empire’, BESS declared as its object ‘to organize Dramatic Readings and acted scenes from Shakespeare’s plays … and lectures on his life and works’. Elevating Shakespeare to a national religion of Englishness, the Society described a second object as:

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Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence To help the rising generation not only to study Shakespeare’s works, but to love them. It is proposed to institute special classes for children, with a view to making their early acquaintance with our greatest poet’s work as pleasant as possible.

The Society also encouraged the study of Shakespeare by ‘Prizes given yearly for the best reading, recitation, acted scene from his plays, or essay on Shakespeare, by Members or Associates of the Society’. Finally, it offered to ‘give private Dramatic Readings of any Shakespearean play at colleges, institutions, or private houses, by arrangement’.33 Terry acted as judge for the BESS elocution contests, and, after her death, Edy took over that task.34 Terry’s public lectures, that is, represented at a professional level an activity being undertaken by amateurs throughout the empire – but to a very different end. Terry’s special care to present the voices of Shakespeare’s women (and children) allies her with the radical tradition of plebian Shakespeare. This tradition, as noted by Susan Carlson, was intensely alive in 1910, when Annie Horniman, a suffrage activist, supporter of the Abbey Theatre and leader of the repertory movement, delivered a speech condemning the commercially inspired, Edwardian ‘elevating’ of Shakespeare, which she claimed revealed a conspiracy of ‘destructive capitalist interests’ and a nationally ‘deteriorated’ taste. In Horniman’s view, Shakespeare productions supporting the current state of national affairs betrayed the theatre, the poet and the spectator.35 Terry’s lectures would not venture so sharply into political commentary; she would instead claim Shakespeare to be ‘one of the pioneers of women’s emancipation’ and would point to Katherine the Shrew as a clever pretender to reform by the play’s close.36 Terry felt a comradeship with more sly versions of feminist opposition, the very methods she had had to employ in her own professional lifetime.

Conclusion Terry’s eloquence came to her after decades of on-the-job training by her father and other theatre professionals. By the time she delivered her lectures, her voice had weakened, but her sense of purpose had strengthened. She would deliver Shakespeare to younger women as a gift of beauty and inspiration for their cause. She used her voice and her history in the theatre to create a bridge to the future for herself and her daughter’s generation of women.

PART II: FAMILY INFLUENCES 6 INTRODUCTION: EDWARD GORDON CRAIG – PROPHET OR CHARLATAN? Michael Holroyd

Edward Gordon Craig has been the object of much criticism, not least in the furore over the publication of Ellen Terry’s correspondence with Bernard Shaw. Craig is, in some ways, an easy target. He seems to invite censure. But perhaps now is the time for a reassessment. The idea that he deserved punishment, even in a legal setting, seems to be widely welcomed, as I have indicated elsewhere.1 His treatment of women, in particular, his one-sided commitment to free love and the casual way he ignored some of the inevitable and unfortunate outcomes, challenge the modern reader in various ways. However, many of his family, friends and lovers made allowances for him. For his lovers, especially, he had illuminated their lives with such vivid intensity, such irresistible fun and magical happiness for a time that they could endure the appalling pain and disappointment that followed without our schoolmasterly interference: and besides they had his children. It was wrong, Craig liked to believe, to allow one’s mind to dwell on misconduct – indeed it could be ruinous. He was fond of quoting R. L. Stevenson to this effect: The conscience has morbid sensibilities; it must be employed, not indulged, like the imagination or the stomach. Shut your eyes against the recollection of your sins. Do not be afraid, you will not be able to forget them. You will always do wrong, you must get used to that.2

Craig accepted this as sound advice. There were mitigating circumstances too. Craig’s children were brought up in conditions in some ways very similar to his own. It was as if he felt compelled to inflict his early experiences on his sons and daughters. He had been born in 1872 – 77 –

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and was an illegitimate son of the famous actress Ellen Terry. To what extent is Edward Gordon Craig being too easily blamed? To what extent does his life overshadow his achievements? Any judgements (whether or not appropriate or deserved) are now retrospective and perhaps irrelevant. A glance at his mother’s correspondence will demonstrate her relentless pursuit of him. To what extent is Terry responsible for some of her son’s pattern of behaviour? Her unavoidable absence (alongside her formidable epistolary presence) undoubtedly took its toll on him. The complex threads of expectation and behaviour, the range of possible influences on an individual, are all brought into question when considering the lives of Terry and Edward Gordon Craig. Also, as indicated in Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History, Craig grew up within a circle which extended beyond the biological family, incorporating as it did the father figures of Henry Irving (and even Bram Stoker) as well as Stephen Coleridge and Charles Kelly (Wardell). Terry’s persistent letters attempted to guide her son, at a distance, along the right path. Her desperation in this matter was excessive and became a burden on him. His exile may have been determined by the heavy presence of Irving, his godfather, too. Craig admired Irving as a powerful actor-manager, but knew he would never be able to out-perform him. To establish a non-realistic theatre, a visionary dramatic experience of the future through which he could gain an independent reputation and establish a new identity, he left England in his early thirties and, much to his mother’s distress, lived the rest of his life in exile. If the work of extraordinary men and women were to be judged by conventional domestic standards, few of them (scientists as well as artists and writers) would ‘’scape a whipping’.3 Like others, such as Lawrence of Arabia, who became myths in their own lifetime, Craig was both hailed as a prophet and dismissed as a charlatan. How may we judge his authenticity or credibility? What evidence is there? Bernard Shaw referred to Edward Gordon Craig and Edith Craig with reference to the number of their productions, Edith having put many more on the stage. But she was held back from writing, while Edward Gordon wrote extensively and enigmatically. How original were his ideas? What impact have they had and how far has his influence extended? Peter Brook has praised his work, explaining that it has been absorbed into theatre and film to such an extent that most people would be unable to trace it back to him. He has become part of the fabric of contemporary performance. Yet his ideas seldom appeared to reach beyond possibilities into the practicalities of the living theatre. Over sixty years he produced only three plays while in Europe: a brilliantly original version of Rosmersholm for Eleonora Duse in Florence in 1906; the famous production of Hamlet for Stanislavski in Moscow in 1912; and a controversial presentation of Ibsen’s The Pretenders with Johannes Poulsen in Copenhagen in 1926. To these might be added some striking designs

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he drew in 1928 for a production of Macbeth in New York – though he did not go to New York and, having plagiarized his own work, signed his sketches ‘C.pb’ meaning Craig-potboiler.4 But if some dedicated scholar and a courageous director could work together and reproduce, for example, Craig’s Rosmersholm, perhaps we might feel today the same wonder and excitement his audience experienced over a hundred years ago. On the whole Craig was more at ease working alone. His aim was to embrace all art forms and artists in the art of the theatre in order to invigorate it. But at the Arena Goldoni in Florence where he set up a school of theatre, he became the sole pupil. The short Socratic dialogue he wrote between an omniscient stage director and a naive playgoer which he called The Art of the Theatre and published in 1905 was his early manifesto. It shows him, in the words of T. S. Eliot, ‘wading through seas of theatrical blood to grasp his own crown’.5 ‘Craig preached simplicity’, Peter Brook has written, ‘the beauty of harmonious form, the suggestive power of lighting’.6 At his workshop in Florence he experimented with screens that could be imperceptibly moved to reveal a landscape, an adjoining room, a castle courtyard. He grew ingenious at conjuring forth strange shadows and at producing a magic spectacle of masks, mime and abstract movement, and he advocated the power of silence – to all of which he gave priority over the spoken word. He had been influenced by the French symbolist theatre, but for the most part the theatre of the western world during the twentieth century was to be in the hands of realist playwrights for whose work directors were content with conventional decorative sets. What puzzles he set them! What a game it was! His extraordinary theatre journal, The Mask, which ran (with an interval in the First World War) from 1908 until 1929 and contained contributions by Craig using more than sixty pseudonyms (as well as some for his stalwart assistant Dorothy Nevile Lees) was a substitute for an actual theatre of his own. But by this time his life was taking a different direction both in his new relationship with Daphne Woodward and in his writing projects.7 Over the last thirty years of his life Craig became something of an antiquarian – a tendency he shared with his father, who was much given to archaeological pedantry and who seemed to haunt him like the Ghost in Hamlet. But look at Craig’s splendid series of Black Figures; look at some of his sets for The Pretenders, his astonishing Hamlet and his early designs while working with the musician Martin Shaw in England – especially Acis and Galatea and The Masque of Love; look also at his scenes and costumes for Max Reinhardt’s production of Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and his sets for Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra (neither of which were staged): look at these and you may see something of the invigorating beauty that so excited his contemporaries. At his best he had the ability to carry the significance of dramatic situations beyond the actors’ words into the scenes where they moved. Johannes Poulsen, the chief actor of the Royal Danish Theatre,

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described him as having ‘a sixth sense for that which is true, genuine and beautiful in art which is given to only a few persons in each century’.8 But his work was uneven and his judgement erratic. Reading his books is an infuriating business. He is pretentious, stimulating, tedious, charming, oppressive – sometimes all these on a single page. He was a man divided against himself: a natural actor who remorselessly attacked the acting profession. He wanted to see them eliminated from the stage and replaced by the ‘Uber-Marionnette’, a Utopian construct, free from human vanity, commercialism and infiltration by his enemies, which would obey his will. Yet, as the drama critic Kenneth Tynan observed, Craig was a born actor.9 When the talk turned to acting, he would forget his lethal theories and with huge enjoyment tell stories of the actors he had known, bringing them alive again. Stanislavski too remembered him jumping for joy at the least sign of talent in his cast. Though they are psychologically revealing, his pages heralding the death of the actor should not be taken too literally – as he himself sometimes indicated. Writing of Duse, he described her as ‘a good comrade’ to her fellow actors even if occasionally, as a pick-me-up, she would ask them all to ‘die of the plague’.10 Craig himself became increasingly addicted to such pick-me-ups and had castigated Duse herself in this style. What influence has Craig exercised over the contemporary theatre? There are those who argue that the coming of film had a similar effect on the theatre as the advent of photography on painting during the previous century, and that Craig’s ideas are now largely obsolete. It is true that Craig himself disliked films, the only good effect of bad films being, he argued, to keep people away from bad theatre – a hostility that was somewhat modified after he met Eisenstein in 1935.11 But the ironic truth seems to be that film directors, who match sound to image as a matter of course, are realizing Craig’s ideals whether or not they are familiar with his work. It is possible that he ‘over-estimated the power of the spotlight’ which, as Peter Brook has acknowledged,12 is capable of less flexibility and variation than the painter’s brush. He eliminated the superfluous detail engulfing Victorian melodrama, yet the aggressive and overpowering architecture of some of his scenes, dwarfing the players (like the engravings of Piranesi or the paintings of James Pryde), draws attention to itself at the expense of the play as did the archaeological flimflam (what he called ‘the umbrellas and hats’)13 of nineteenthcentury stage-design. Craig’s name has been obscured by the paranoid secrecy in which he worked. Yet his influence, Peter Brook believes, has been immense. ‘The ideas that Craig stated, shouted, loaded into blunderbusses and shot into the air’, Brook wrote, ‘ideas that went to Russia, then to Germany, and eventually reached England and America with Craig’s name no longer attached, these revolutionary concepts are now everyday axioms in the designer’s language’.14 Separating the man from his work, the contemporary visual arts have a great deal for which to thank Edward Gordon Craig.

7 E. W. G. AND E. G. C.: FATHER AND SON J. Michael Walton

One night I thought I saw and spoke with my father. Although I had never seen him whilst he lived I fancied in my dream that his face was as familiar to me as Mother’s – But it was terribly sad. We sat on boxes that floated on a calm sea. At times he would rise from a sitting position and standing on his floating box would pour out a torrent of praise and love addressed to his lost lady, my mother … All the time his eyes would rain tears which ran down into the salt water and spread round him in rings of crimson, purple and black which with the green of the sea combined to make a most pleasing effect that delighted us (my father and myself ) exceedingly. We were both astonished at the colours for after all, said he ‘they cannot be tears of blood’ – and laughed – And I replied ‘nor coloured tears, father.’ And he said – ‘I think not.’ And by and by as we sat without speaking, the sky grew darker and darker – and from the three circles of colour came thousands of voices all like drowned voices – a mixture of sobbing and laughter flung up from the deep. All the while I remained wonderstruck and a feeling of deep sorrow took hold of me. My father remained seated, his head leaning on the palms of his hands, and the curve of his back seemed in some way to be the side of a hill. I cannot tell how long it was that this singing lasted – it seemed like an age, and all the while I sat and looked and looked, first at the circles of moving colour and then at my father. He did nothing, but it seemed as though he wanted something to take place and I could feel the appeal of his averted eyes. And I rose to my feet and took in one long breath, then I stepped into the first circle of black drops – and grew deathly cold, for they clustered round my feet like mussels that cling to a rock and seemed to suck the life from my limbs – they stuck to me like a nation of bees. Then I moved forward to the second ring, which rose like a fiend and bound itself onto my hips and breast and grew ever tighter and tighter till I thought my head would burst. I saw there remained but one ring – that of crimson tears – and my heart seemed to extricate itself without a struggle from my breast, and I moved forward till I reached the last circle. As I came near to this I heard strange old fashioned tunes around me. Old English airs, madrigals and glees – all of which sounded familiar to me – then I heard the prattling of babies, and last of all, four childrens’ [sic] voices rose and fell singing ‘The Silver Swan.’ And on the last note I stepped on to the rim of the crimson circle – and it rose and smote me in the face and twined itself round and round my throat till only my eyes remained uncovered.

– 81 –

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Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence I looked around me. The sea, the boxes, my father – all had disappeared – and there in front of me sat thousands and thousands of gods and goddesses as in a huge theatre … All the walls were made of white wood and everyone was dressed in white, and a white crystal bunch hung from the centre of the place and contained a thousand lamps which gave a soft light to the whole scene. From the centre of this bunch of light floated the sound of instruments – flutes and harps and violins – and again the song was ‘The Silver Swan.’ And I looked into the great audience once more in search of something ... and there I found a smile for which I had waited, it seemed ten thousand years – Into it I fell and knew nothing more but heard two voices whisper ‘My Son – and felt four arms laid over my shoulders –’1

This ‘Recollection’ from Edward Gordon Craig of a dream about his father, Edward William Godwin, was included in one of his own notebooks and dated by his son and biographer, Edward Craig (the film designer known as Edward Carrick), to the year 1901. E. G. C., as he frequently chose to style himself, was coming up to thirty at the time. His career had included periods as an actor, initially a comedian, with Henry Irving’s company at the Lyceum where his mother, Ellen Terry, was Irving’s leading lady. By this time he was making what money he could from work as a graphic and portrait artist, mainly in the medium of the woodcut, and from editing a journal, The Page, a precursor to The Mask which he would edit between 1908 and 1929, interrupted only by the First World War. In his ‘dream’ he talks of the father ‘he had never seen’, not unreasonably perhaps, but not strictly accurately. He had seen his father, but was too young to remember; his father had certainly seen him and was not over-impressed by what he saw. Edward William Godwin was never married to Terry, the mother of his two children, and could not have been even had he wanted to, because she was still married to the painter George Frederick Watts when she lived with Godwin. Craig was only three when Godwin walked out in 1875. In 1901, the date of this strange and graphic vision, dominated as it is by vivid colour and a desperate sense of yearning, Godwin had already been dead for fifteen years, interred in an unmarked grave in Oxfordshire.2 My aim here is not to deal with the detail of this dream, still less to try to offer an interpretation, though Freud, whose Interpretation of Dreams had been published the previous year, might well have had a field day with it. It was, in fact, a prelude to a spell of fever and delirium. The incident marks a starting point for considering Craig’s unhappy search for a father. Edward Craig records that the incident, and the fever, coincided with thoughts of his father ‘who failed so much when he had the gifts to succeed – he is remembered as a failure – and they say ‘see his son – another failure – like father like son … This won’t do’.3 Craig made the curious decision to reproduce some of Godwin’s thoughts on staging and costuming the plays of Shakespeare in the historical period in which they were set in the first volumes of The Mask, Craig’s theatrical journal apparently

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dedicated to consigning any such antiquarian ideas to the dustbin. This article is not literary criticism, nor is it strictly theatre history, but a footnote to the saga that was the Terry theatrical dynasty and, in particular, to the sometimes turbulent career of Ellen Terry, the family’s prominent and beloved figurehead, and her own family relationships. Terry was twenty-two when her daughter Edith (Edy) was born, twenty-five when she had Ted, as the family knew him. She would not be divorced from George Frederick Watts until 1877 though the marriage in 1864, when Terry was sixteen and Watts forty-six, had lasted barely eighteen months. When Terry set up house with Godwin her family proved more censorious than society in general. Her mother refused to visit her until after she had married Charles Kelly in 1878. Ted was critical for different reasons. Terry was frequently absent during his and Edy’s childhood because of stage commitments and Ted felt she should have put her children first. In his unflattering portrait of her in Ellen Terry and her Secret Self, published in 1931 soon after her death, he suggested that she had two entirely different and warring personalities, concluding that ‘No one is less suited than a busy actress to cope with her children properly’.4 Godwin, a widower since 1865, was cited as co-respondent in the Watts divorce, but by that time he had already left Terry for Beatrice Philip, whom he married in 1876. Such complicated marital and extra-marital arrangements were to form the backdrop to the upbringing of the two Terry children and Ted was always to hold his mother largely responsible for the instability he would demonstrate in his own complex relationships with a variety of women. How fair this may be remains the subject of debate. Craig had more recollection of Terry’s second husband, Charles Wardell (stage name Kelly), than of his biological father, but not much more. Edward Craig suggested that the children were fond of Wardell because Wardell was fond of them.5 At least he taught Ted to read the clock. But the children’s enthusiasm for him as a father was to be as short-lived as was Terry’s for him as a husband. He quickly dropped out of their lives, dying addicted to the bottle at the age of forty-six, eighteen months before the death of Godwin.6 It was probably just as well that Ted was too young to remember his father when he lived with Terry (sporadically enough, at the best of times). Michael Holroyd records that when Godwin and Terry split up she offered him Ted as long as she could keep Edy. He too thought that Edy was the better part of the bargain. Terry ended up with both children.7 Godwin, meanwhile, was becoming a prominent figure in theatrical circles. Born in Bristol, he had originally been articled as an architect and civil engineer, making a reputation as a restorer of churches and building three new ones in Ireland by the time he was thirty as well as winning a competition to design Northampton Town Hall. In his spare time, such as it was, he started to review

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productions at Bristol Theatre Royal and write ‘Theatrical Jottings’ for the Western Daily Press, with occasional articles on theatre architecture for the Architect. More, it would appear, because of his contacts than any background in theatre James Henry Chute, manager of the new Theatre Royal in Bath, invited Godwin to design costumes for A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1863. Terry was to play Titania. Two years later Godwin’s wife died and three years after that he and Terry set up house together in Hertfordshire, where Edy and Ted were born. Terry and Godwin worked together intermittently up to the production in 1875 of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice by the Bancroft management at the Prince of Wales, with Terry as Portia and Godwin ‘advising’ until their final split only weeks before the production was to open. It was not until he was fourteen that Ted would have the nearest he would ever get to direct contact with his real father. Now an established figure in artistic circles, Godwin had extended his interest in costume design to stage decor, producing plays and managing in the theatre. In May 1886 the fourteen-year-old Ted was taken to see his father’s production of Helena in Troas by Dr John Todhunter. Time has not been kind to this dramatic farrago, but it has a small place in theatre history and was greeted with considerable enthusiasm in its day. Here, it was felt, was something closer to a new Greek tragedy on the public stage than anything that had gone before.8 There had been no dearth of translations of Greek tragedy into English, at least from the early eighteenth century onwards, but only one attempt to stage any of these at a major theatre. This exception was Hecuba, translated by Richard West from the Euripides, though with some embellishment of the text. West decided to present it at Drury Lane in 1726, but with apprehension: ‘I foresaw that there would be some difficulty in making it agreeable in its original Purity to the Taste of an English audience’. How right he was. The single performance lasted only until ‘a Rout of vandals in the Galleries’.9 Since the Renaissance plays had abounded with plots taken from Greek mythology and claiming, with little justification, the influence of Sophocles, Euripides or Seneca. Most were barely recognizable as having roots in fifthcentury bc Athens or imperial Rome; but in 1880 Frank Benson, an Oxford undergraduate who would eventually be knighted for his services to the acting profession, presented a celebrated production of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon in Balliol College Hall, which ranks as the first serious attempt to stage any play of Aeschylus in England.10 It was in ancient Greek and many of the most celebrated classicists and artists of that generation found themselves involved in one capacity or another – Benjamin Jowett, Walter Parratt, Andrew Bradley, Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Edward Burne-Jones. Benson himself played Clytemnestra – this, inevitably in an Oxford college at the time, was an exclusively male enterprise. Even more illustrious was the list of those who saw Agamemnon, either in Oxford or in three subsequent performances in London – Gladstone, installed

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in office as Prime Minister for the second time only two months earlier, Alfred Lord Tennyson, George Eliot (her last public appearance before her death), Robert Browning and the American actor Edwin Booth (brother of the infamous John Wilkes Booth who shot Abraham Lincoln). Irving and Terry were also in attendance. They may not have understood much of what they heard of Aeschylus in ancient Greek, but were sufficiently impressed by what they saw to invite Benson to join the Lyceum company a couple of years later. Todhunter’s Helena in Troas in 1886 was something very different from the Benson Agamemnon. Here was a new play intended to recreate Greek tragedy, rather than replicate it. It was performed in a semi-professional production at Hengler’s Circus in Soho, converted for the occasion to imitate the stage arrangement of a Greek theatre space, with a full chorus and a cast of characters that included Helena, Hecuba, Priam and Paris; and it was in English verse, the opening lines giving a fair impression of how tortuous the language: Wail, Ilion, wail for the day of thy desolation! Wail with thy breezy towers! To thy shuddering gates we throng, Desperate drops of life to the heart of a dying nation Menacing woe, singing a terrible song!11

Godwin both directed and designed the play and, following Richard West’s enthusiasm for what he considered to be the ‘original Purity’ of Euripides, presented it with an antiquarian flourish that had already become his signature. Despite its success at the time the young Ted was less than impressed, at least retrospectively. This description of what he saw is from Index to the Story of My Days, the erratic and eclectic memoir that he did not publish until he was eighty-five: 1886. May 17th … E. W. G. produced Todhunter’s Helena in Troas. The Prince of Wales was present. It was no ‘success’, but a lasting victory for years after. The producer of this Helena in Troas was like a one-legged soldier fighting against ‘a sea of troubles’, and overwhelmed by one thing only, ‘outrageous fortune’ … Dr Todhunter, the only begetter of the play, was overwhelmed by everything, poor fellow. He doesn’t know how to construct a play, and he is an awful vile poet, if poet at all. Had he asked E. W. G.’s friend Wills to rewrite the piece, and had E. W. G. called in a good stage-manager, the thing might have run 250 performances. If only E. W. G. had locked the play up in a cupboard and taken out Dido and Aeneas and its music … This he did not realize12

Craig then starts to speculate on whether Godwin knew Irving, and suggests that there was a ‘lack of strength’ in Terry and Godwin, a curiously dispassionate view of his parents even from a man heading towards his nineties, meaning, perhaps, that neither was sufficiently resolute to place an artistic vision above the need for celebrity approval. Godwin was not present at the performance of Helena in Troas attended by his son, or, if he was, remained tactfully in the background. Within six months

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of the production he was dead, aged fifty-three, and after suffering the torments of kidney-stones. Craig seems at that point to have begun to discover all sorts of things about his father and his father’s friends, who must have seemed to be relics of the nineteenth-century approaches to staging from which Craig would soon lead the British theatre. In reality, I would suggest, Godwin’s death triggered a search for his father which culminated in his Ellen Terry and her Secret Self – ‘I had not wished to write this book’ – but which he dedicated to ‘My Father’.13 There is more to it than that. The feelings that Ted (from his teens Gordon Craig, or E. G. C.) entertained about this father he never knew were clearly ambivalent. On his mother’s side, he had the genes of a theatrical dynasty, the Terrys, whose work ranged through design, management and performance of everything from burlesque to pageant. Craig was not the dilettante detractors have maintained, but someone who was steeped in theatre; who first performed professionally with his mother at the age of six; and was for ten years a reasonably successful actor in the provinces, as well as in Irving’s company at the Lyceum where Terry was by then leading lady. The newly remarried Godwin became prominent in the Arts and Crafts movement; built the White House in Chelsea for the painter James McNeill Whistler; and was closely associated as a costume designer with Liberty’s. The most common condemnation of Craig as both stage director and stage designer is that he was impractical, but from both his mother and his father he inherited a strong awareness of the practicalities of stage performance, though this was married to a stern belief in artistic ideals.14 Of her children Terry wrote ‘They were allowed no rubbishy picture-books ... If injudicious friends gave them the wrong sort of present, it was promptly burned! A mechanical mouse … was taken away as being “realistic and common”’.15 Here lies an unusual paradox which relates not to Godwin’s career as an architect but to his work in the theatre. Godwin’s preference as a stage designer was for historical authenticity in setting and in costume, about which he wrote at great and sometimes comical length. In 1874 he began publication in the Architect of a series of thirty-three articles on the historical background to several of the plays of Shakespeare. Most were published in the following year, 1875, when he was involved with The Merchant of Venice for the Bancrofts. Though the cup-and-saucer drama of Tom Robertson and the Bancrofts was enjoying its vogue by this time, Godwin looked back much more to the extreme antiquarianism of Charles Kean, who had died in 1868.16 Under the blanket title ‘Architecture and Costume in Shakespeare’s Plays’ he unearthed what he considered to be the precise historical background, social and cultural, necessary in setting and costuming As You Like It (the time of Louis XI), All’s Well that Ends Well (the Florentine War of 1555), Othello (the Cyprus of 1577), Measure for Measure, Henry the Eighth, Love’s Labours’ Lost, The Tempest, Richard III and

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various Roman or Italian plays, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra (where he can at least make a decent stab at the historical dates), Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew. On top of these he identified six ‘Greek’ plays by Shakespeare, namely A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Troilus and Cressida, The Winter’s Tale, Timon of Athens, Pericles and The Comedy of Errors. These six he dated chronologically admitting, grudgingly, that some of them, notably A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Winter’s Tale, could be considered to belong less to a specific date than to their author’s time. He proceeded to pinpoint all the Greek elements and to outline, by reference to anyone from Hesiod to Heinrich Schliemann, what a room in Theseus’s palace would have looked like in 900 bc; reasons for believing that Timon was a contemporary of Alcibiades; differences in the use of curtains in the houses of Leontes, as a king, and Paulina, ‘very inferior to the royal palace but … a place of refinement, a house where art was honoured’.17 That he encountered resistance from within the profession for such an oldfashioned approach could hardly be denied. Godwin was all too aware of it: Among English artists, tradesfolk, and mechanics there are probably none so profoundly intelligent as those who are chiefly concerned in theatrical matters. And as a sure consequence of this profundity of intelligence, the beings so blessed are naturally enough apt to resent interference from any outsider. This feeling permeates the stage from one end to the other.18

It is all too easy today to make fun of the intricacy of detail which Godwin claims for his ‘authentic’ settings and costumes: more, for the implication that they offer a proper guide to the presentation of Shakespeare’s plays even in the 1870s. It seems that Godwin was not even aware that Shakespeare’s use of historical settings had nothing to do with history and everything to do with a convenient theatrical context. He was to reinforce his credo in one of his last articles, for the Dramatic Review in 1885, where he maintains that ‘Stage pictures of the past times should be treated pari passu, as life itself is treated by the dramatist’.19 Craig records in Index to the Story of My Days that he first discovered these articles from the Architect in 1897 when he was living at Thames Ditton. He had them bound, for his personal use, in a single volume. At the time he still knew very little about Godwin, whom Terry seemed to have wiped clean from her life despite the tangible evidence of his undoubted one-time presence. In her The Story of My Life, published in 1908 and dedicated to Edy, Terry mentions Godwin only four times, and then as Mr Godwin, her dress designer. Even for 1908 that is a touch over-discreet, or, perhaps, an indication of an abiding hurt over the manner of their parting.20 In the same year as Terry’s The Story of My Life, Craig published the first volume of The Mask. In the twenty-two years since Godwin’s death, Craig had

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grown up, if only in years. The theatre had grown up too. The last decades of the nineteenth century and first of the twentieth saw drama move on. Ibsen died in 1906 but his last plays move into the realms of mysticism. Strindberg too eschewed dramatic naturalism for the expressionistic A Dream Play (1902) and The Ghost Sonata (1907). Directors such as Otto Brahm in Berlin, André Antoine in Paris and Konstantin Stanislavski in Moscow made their names with productions defined by the principles of stage naturalism, but here too a search for new forms began with the work of Max Reinhardt and, more especially, by 1908, the young Vsevolod Meierhold. Craig, through his writings, notably The Art of the Theatre published in 1905, and in a series of productions including his opera seasons at the Hampstead Conservatoire, the Coronet and the Great Queen Street Theatre, was emerging as someone for whom not only was antiquarianism dead, but so was naturalism, in favour of a new and modernist approach to all aspects of staging.21 He was already on the way to becoming a rallying-point throughout Europe for the anti-naturalists. The Mask proved the perfect vehicle for his ideas. Craig edited The Mask from 1908 until the First World War and subsequently until 1929. Here, particularly in the first five volumes, can be found some of what still read as the most innovative and challenging documents of modern theatre practice: articles by Craig himself on a variety of theatrical matters: ‘Some Evil Tendencies of the Modern Theatre’ (1908); ‘The Actor and the Über-Marionette’ (1908); ‘The Artists of the Theatre of the Future’ (1908); ‘The Art of the Theatre: The Second Dialogue’ (1910); ‘Symbolism’ (1911); ‘Gentlemen, the Marionette’ (1912); and ‘The Painter in the Theatre’ (1912). There are numerous others, by John Balance ‘A Note on Masks’ (1908) and ‘Jean-Jacques Dalcroze’ (1912); Allen Carric about ‘Jack Yeats’ (1912); Edward Furst on ‘Applause’ (1909); Louis Madrid with the case for ‘A National Memorial Theatre’ (1910); Felix Urban identifying ‘Fake Folk Art’ (1911); and fourteen more authors, all of whom, he was later to confess, were pseudonyms for Craig himself, though few as exotic as his subsequent Lilian Antler, Scotson Umbridge and Hadrian Jazz Gavotte.22 There, interspersed, or sandwiched, between all these innovatory pieces, major sections of the first five volumes of The Mask are devoted to a series of reprints of the Godwin articles first published over thirty years before in 1875. The sixth volume has Godwin’s ‘A Lecture on Dress’ from 1868.23 Why such articles, a product of the Victorian theatre at its least imaginative, should find any place in an avant-garde periodical which represented precisely the sort of approach against which Craig was now the standard-bearer demands some explanation. The opening essay in the first volume of The Mask in 1908 is by Craig under his own name. It is entitled ‘The Artists of the Theatre of the Future’ and is a

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polemic against the ‘wretched state’ of the modern theatre – this, in the face of the apparent success of the Vedrenne-Barker management at the Court Theatre and also of Henry Irving whom Craig knew so well and so admired. The first of the Godwin reprints, on ‘The Architecture and Costume of The Merchant of Venice’, is introduced by the ‘Editor’ of The Mask who praises Godwin as ‘practically the founder of a very successful period in theatrical production’, as well as for his long-standing influence on Irving, Beerbohm Tree and Augustus Daly. The article is signed by J. Semar, which was, of course, another of Craig’s pseudonyms.24 Three years later, as John Semar, Craig published a more extended eulogy of Godwin which begins: Very often in art, as in life itself, it happens that, while one sows another reaps, and that not only the reapers themselves, but those onlookers who see their well-stored barns, forget the man to whom they owe their harvest, whether of grain or gold. This is especially so in the theatre, which has a short memory for those who have assisted it in the past as it has short sight for those who are best serving it in the present … It may be trite to repeat that ‘the world knows nothing of its greatest men’ but it is certainly true that the Theatre does not, probably because it has shaped and accepted so false an ideal of what qualifies as ‘great’. It assumes its greatest men to be the most popular actors, the most successful managers, the most expert financiers, the most brilliant playwrights; whereas they are rather those who have rendered the most valuable services to the Art of the Theatre as a whole, not only by the talents they have devoted to it, but by the love they have felt for it and the consequent thoroughness with which they studied and performed every smallest detail of their work. One of the most remarkable among these ‘great men’ of the modern theatre was E. W. Godwin.25

Godwin, Semar continues, was a pioneer of theatrical reform – this is 1910 – through ‘decorative accuracy’ rather than ‘by seeking the imaginative expression’. He outlines Godwin’s career with Squire Bancroft at the Prince of Wales Theatre and, more significantly, with Wilson Barrett at Hengler’s Circus when ‘a Greek play was given’ (the Helena at Troas of which he was later to be so scathing), concluding that: His work was the natural realistic link between the unimaginative and the imaginative. In the immediate tomorrow comes the next link in which the accessories shall not be correct in date but correct in spirit; when we shall not realise but suggest. The day after that we shall move further forward, from suggestion to symbolism, until, in time, by taking step after step, we restore to the Art of the Theatre its liberty and its royalty. On that day there is no doubt we shall remember the debt we owe to E. W. Godwin.26

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None of this would have been of much consolation to Godwin, already twenty-four years in his grave. The subtext gives the personal and the historical perspective to Semar’s (or Craig’s) schizophrenic account. This was Craig writing about the father he had never known who can declare: ‘He it was, in a sense not as yet fully realised, fathered the new movement in the European theatre, and founded that race of theatrical artists of whom the Theatre of the Future shall be born’.27 There is something sad here, the great theatrical pioneer, at the age of almost forty, trying to rehabilitate the memory of the only man whom, Craig himself asserted, his mother had truly loved. Perhaps at this time Craig was trying to justify his own failure in the English theatre by pointing in retrospect to his own father as similarly misunderstood and ignored. Most of The Mask, the Godwin aberrations apart, was devoted, over a period of almost twenty years, to the theatre of the past as it points to the theatre of the future. Craig’s approach is anything but academic. The breadth of his sensibility came more from his eye than from any analytical or critical standpoint. He anticipated a theatre of the future which would take its inspiration from the theatre of past ages and undervalued forms – puppets, masks, dance, music, the actors of the commedia dell’arte, the theatre design and notions of light and perspective propounded by Peruzzi, Serlio and Sabattinni. Nothing, it would seem, could resist such a tide of opinion, all heading in more or less the same direction, into the twentieth century and away from the nineteenth. Craig was also, like many an artistic pioneer, an oddball. Craig was as unfortunate in his surrogate fathers as with his biological one: the temporary Charles Kelly (Wardell, 1877–81), the young Stephen Coleridge (his one-time guardian), several of Terry’s admirers, or even James Carew. Terry married Carew in 1907 when Craig, in his mid-thirties and already a multiple father himself, might have felt less in need of a father of his own. John Gielgud, a later member of the Terry clan through his mother Kate, thought otherwise and summed up the hole in his second cousin’s life in his own immaculate waspish way. Introducing the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition of Craig’s work in 1967, he told his assembled audience that Craig had never quite forgiven his mother for his not having had Irving as his father. But then what else could Ted feel when Terry told him nothing about that real father he could not even remember? The Mask articles were, surely, less a homage to a theatrical pioneer than a bid to lay claim to the father whom he had never known, and who had never wanted to know him. A majority of the essays, notes and book reviews within The Mask are by Craig himself. He wrote responses to his own articles and even reviewed his own books. Most of it was quite blatant, much tongue in cheek, but it has brought him into question as any kind of serious critic. This is unfortunate. Terry, though his contact with his mother seemed restricted to the occasions when he was most

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in need of financial support, was a source of constant admiration. Amongst all the erratic and fevered prose heralding a new era in the arts, Craig still sends out blazing messages to a theatre that today is as much the slave of the lowest common denominator as it was when he was writing. Craig’s case was not helped by a tendency to exaggerate and a refusal to compromise. That, principally, is why his practical collaborations so seldom bore fruit. People got fed up with him. There were plans to work with Reinhardt, Tree, Duse, W. B. Yeats, Stanislavski. With the exception of the Moscow Hamlet in 1912, they all fell through. Craig had ten years or so as an actor, another ten as a designer and director. From the Moscow Hamlet with Stanislavski until his death in 1966 he was seriously involved in only one production, Ibsen’s The Pretenders which he designed for Adam and Johannes Poulsen in Copenhagen in 1926. To many theatre historians Craig remains both prophet and crank. It was to the mother who bequeathed him some of the charm that gave her such a hugely successful career that he wrote on one occasion ‘I have arranged to dispense with actors – and am not using marionettes. The marionette is only a doll – the actor, for me, an insuperable difficulty.’28 This may seem less than tactful to a celebrated actress, even if she was his mother, but then he also quoted Eleanora Duse, in Europe a more famous actress than Terry: ‘To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air. They make art impossible.’29 It was from the father who is now little more than a fringe figure in the history of Victorian aesthetics that Craig acquired what Olga Taxidou perceptively described as ‘a complete architectural and functional view of scenic space, creating an area that belongs only to the theatre’.30 Godwin may have had little to do with his son in life, but the emotional and artistic legacy he handed down was every bit as great as the legacy of his more famous mother, eventually to be Dame Ellen Terry. The last word belongs to Craig after Terry’s jubilee matinee at Drury Lane in the summer of 1906 which he missed – he was in Berlin – but which upset him because Godwin was ‘forgot’. The entry for 12 June in Index to the Story of My Days reads: ‘My father, my master [Irving] and I, all loved the same woman – and we all left her for the same reason – a commonplace one: our work called to us and we went. But we did love her.’31

8 LEWIS CARROLL, ELLEN TERRY AND THE STAGE CAREER OF MENELLA ‘MINNA’ QUIN: ‘A VERY KIND AND CHRISTIAN DEED’ Richard Foulkes

Best known as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), Lewis Carroll (born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was a man of many interests and accomplishments: a mathematics don at Christ Church, Oxford, a Church of England priest, a pioneer photographer and an ardent theatregoer.1 It was not until he was twenty-four that Carroll ventured inside a professional theatre, the Princess’s in London’s Oxford Street where the manager, Charles Kean, was succeeding in attracting the respectable middle-classes to a form of entertainment that they had long regarded as morally suspect. Lavish Shakespeare revivals painstakingly researched for historical accuracy in sets, costumes, etc. were the hallmark of Kean’s productions, but he also engaged a strong acting company of which juvenile performers were a particular feature, most notably the precocious talent of the Terry sisters, Kate and Ellen. Carroll’s connection with Ellen Terry stretched over four decades from 16 June 1856,2 when in Kean’s revival of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale he ‘especially admired the acting of little Mamillius, Ellen Terry, a beautiful little creature, who played with remarkable ease and spirit’,3 to 26 August 1897, within a few months of his death at the age of sixty-six on 14 January 1898, when, whilst on his annual summer holiday in Eastbourne, he ‘Went to the Albion, where Ellen Terry is now staying’,4 the reason being that her daughter Edith Craig was appearing there on tour with Janet Achurch (Mrs Charrington). Carroll regularly visited the two Eastbourne theatres, but does not seem to have attended either A Doll’s House or Candida,5 avoiding them as he did all plays by Ibsen and Shaw. These two bookends in 1856 and 1897 graphically illustrate what had happened to the theatre over those forty-one years during which Carroll, ‘a splendid theatre-goer’ in Terry’s view, attended the theatre at least 479 times recorded in – 93 –

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his diaries and letters.6 Sumptuous pictorial Shakespeare could still be found in the revivals of Irving and Tree, but the ‘New Drama’ of Ibsen and Shaw attracted a rather different clientele and gave opportunities to a new generation of actresses. It is worth noting the huge expansion in the profession during this period especially of actresses, from 643 in 1851 to 6,443 in 1901.7 The social composition of the expansion is significant, as Tracy C. Davis points out.8 Whereas only 5.8 per cent of actresses making their debut pre-1880 had parents in the professions, from 1880–9 it had risen to 34 per cent and in 1890–1913 to 46 per cent. The position of the Terry family as a whole and Ellen in particular provides useful context for this process. Marguerite Steen titled her book on the Terry family A Pride of Terrys: Family Saga, chronicling their origins in Portsmouth as respectable publicans to the young Ben’s (Ellen’s father) attraction to the theatre, his marriage in 1838 to the socially superior Sarah Ballard and their ensuing progeny of eleven offspring, six of the surviving nine of whom not only entered the theatrical profession themselves, but married into it and produced further generations for it.9 The continuing dynastic fortunes of the Terrys intertwining with the Irvings are the subject of Michael Holroyd’s A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families, in which he quotes Ellen Terry wondering ‘were we all people of the stage?’10 Of the four Terry sisters, Kate, born in 1844, enjoyed tremendous success as a child and young adult, but was clearly only too ready to abandon her career at the age of twenty-three for marriage to the wealthy and respectable Arthur Lewis; Ellen, born in 1847, was similarly successful in her early years, but aged sixteen married the forty-six-year-old painter G. F. Watts and subsequently produced two children (Edward and Edith) out of wedlock with architect E. W. Godwin before being lured back to the stage by Charles Reade; Marion, born in 1853, and Florence, born in 1855, were much later entrants to the stage, in the former case for a sustained career, in the latter only briefly before marrying outside the profession. Thus although all four Terry sisters took up the family calling, they seem to have done so with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Other actresses contemporary with the Terry sisters who came from theatrical families and went on to professional success and personal respectability were Helen Faucit, born in 1814, who virtually forswore the stage after her marriage in 1851 to Theodore Martin, biographer of the Prince Consort in which capacity he was knighted in 1880, his wife duly becoming Lady Martin; Marie Bancoft, born Wilton in 1839, who became Lady Bancroft on her husband’s knighthood in 1897; and Madge Kendal, born Robertson in 1848, who was created Dame in 1927. Another contemporary, Adelaide Biddles, born in 1836, encouraged by her often indigent father pursued a theatrical career from an early age, married Charles Calvert, an incomer to the profession, produced several actor-sons (notably Louis) and sustained her career long into widowhood to

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achieve sixty-eight years on the stage. Whereas dynastic actresses who rose on their own merits to the top of their profession, as Ellen Terry like Helen Faucit, Marie Bancoft and Madge Kendal did, seemed to be generally welcoming to incomers from well-to-do families with whom they probably saw an opportunity to cement a social bond, actresses whose careers had perhaps been more of a struggle understandably probably felt somewhat ambivalent about the influx of what amounted to competition in an already crowded profession. Adelaide Calvert’s observations on the changing composition of the theatrical profession can therefore be usefully read in that light: About forty-five years ago [mid-1860s], the Touring Companies began (I think Boucicault’s Colleen Bawn initiated them); and then actors found that one part lasted for many weeks, no study, no rehearsals, their lives comparatively easy. The stage then became very attractive to young ladies and gentlemen, not only those who were anxious to do something for a living, but to many who simply desired to while away the time, so dramatic schools came into existence, of which they became dramatic pupils. And they came in shoals – with their refinement, their education and, very often, their indifference to remuneration. The bonds of caste were thereby loosened.11

In Carroll’s case the bonds of family were resolutely strong, as was evidenced when – amongst ‘the shoals’ referred to by Adelaide Calvert – a distant cousin of his emerged in search of his help. Soliciting favours for relatives and friends was common practice in the nineteenth century and Lewis Carroll was certainly no exception, especially when it came to aspiring actresses. As the century advanced Carroll’s own celebrity as the author of the Alice books meant that he was well known and respected amongst his readership and their parents, as of course he was in theatrical circles in which some of his long-standing acquaintances (foremost Terry) had achieved positions of considerable eminence. In the four decades of his theatre-going Carroll had witnessed and reflected many changes. The stigma attached for so long to actresses had been replaced by a strong predilection towards the stage amongst many young women of good families who wanted and in some cases needed to pursue a career. With seven sisters none of whom at the behest of their father ever set foot in a professional theatre as a member of the audience let alone as a performer Carroll had first-hand experience of the depth of anti-theatrical prejudice. As his niece Violet Dodgson recalled, her grandfather, ‘though allowing private theatricals and charades, set his face against theatre-going and none of his 7 daughters ever went inside a real theatre’.12 Carroll and his siblings grew up under the strict supervision of their clergyman father first at Daresbury in Cheshire then at Croft near to Darlington. A scholarly man with a double first in classics and mathematics at Oxford, like many a Victorian cleric Dodgson devoted much of his time and energy to his studies, in particular in his case translating Tertullian’s De Spectaculis in

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Edward Bouverie Pusey’s ‘The Library of the Masters’ series. Indeed in the opinion of Lewis Carroll’s biographer Morton N. Cohen: ‘This volume established Dodgson’s reputation in the Church’ and led to preferment as canon of Ripon Cathedral and later archdeacon of Richmond.13 Whether or not Dodgson actually chose Tertullian as his contribution to Pusey’s series of forty-eight volumes, he undoubtedly laboured long on what Jonas Barish has described as ‘a more systematic [than Tatian] onslaught … against the frequenting of the shows by Christians’.14 Certainly the tone of the translation (when compared with others) and of the footnotes (‘the phrenzied pleasures of the theatre’),15 which were of course all Dodgson’s work, support the view that he identified with Tertullian. Of all anti-theatrical prejudices, that against actresses as little more than prostitutes had been particularly persistent. However, drawing no doubt on his knowledge of the theatrical profession and his long-standing acquaintance with the Terry family, especially Ellen, whose conduct he defended, Carroll felt no compunction in encouraging (as Ellen Terry had done) the theatrical aspirations of the Vanbrugh sisters, the assumed stage name of Irene – later Dame – and Violet, daughters of his Oxford contemporary the Rev. Reginald Barnes, Prebendary of Exeter cathedral; the future Lady Benson; the future Lady Martin-Harvey and the daughter-in-law of the first actor-knight Sir Henry Irving, whose elder son Harry Dorothea Baird married. Carroll and through him Ellen Terry contributed to the success of these women in their chosen calling, success that is of course reflected in their titles and in a couple of cases by their autobiographies, but of course only a very small proportion of the young women swelling the ranks of actresses in successive censuses saw their names boldly printed on posters or in electric light outside their place of work. It is the ‘other ranks’ that elude us but, happily for us, though maybe not for her, Carroll had a kinswoman who belonged to those ranks and never, despite her efforts and his, rose above them, but whose attempts to do so were chronicled for posterity in the pages of his diaries and in numerous letters. This was Elizabeth Menella ‘Minna’ Quin (1868–1942), one of five sisters (four of them living together on scanty means), about whom Carroll wrote to Mary Manners on 7 February 1892 encouraging her to visit the pantomime in which Menella was appearing. Carroll described Menella as the daughter of Menella Wilcox, ‘a sort of cousin of ours (second cousin I think)’, who had married Francis Stranistrate Smythe Quin and produced five daughters who were brought up in Ireland.16 Morton N. Cohen has identified the five sisters, who following the death of their mother in 1886 were left in very impecunious circumstances, their father having died several years earlier.17 More recent investigation by Terence Killeen has revealed that Francis Quin was a professor of music and prominent Freemason (grand organist of Dublin Masons). Whilst her father’s musical profession may have contributed to Minna’s inclination to perform, she and her sisters do not

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seem to have derived material sustenance from his Masonic affiliation. The only sister to marry was Marion (in London on 22 August 1899) to Alfred Henry Hunter. Of them Killeen writes: Alfred Henry Hunter and Leopold Bloom [in J. Joyce’s Ulysses] have the same occupation [advertising canvasser] and their wives have the same first name [Marion/ Molly]. This can scarcely be due to coincidence. I am convinced that Joyce possessed at least enough awareness of the Hunters’ reality, as well as their notoriety, to have forged these links between them and the Blooms, thereby providing further testimony to the interweaving of the fictive and the factual that is one of the most fascinating aspects of his 20th century epic.18

It was not until five years after her mother’s death that Menella contacted Carroll. His diary entry for 9 September 1891 shows that Carroll responded promptly and positively: ‘Heard again from Minna Quin, in answer to my letter about her idea of trying for the stage. I am going to find out some details, for her, about Miss S. Thorne’s company of pupils.’19 Given the distance of their relationship and the fact that they had never met Carroll was being exceptionally obliging, his innate good nature perhaps being stimulated by the prospect of personal involvement in what might develop into a successful stage career for his kinswoman. Carroll’s choice of Sarah Thorne’s establishment as the best way into the profession for Menella was well founded on its reputation and the experience of other protégées of his (the Vanbrugh sisters) who had attended. By the early 1890s Miss Thorne’s School of Acting was well established in Margate, where it had moved to The Towers in 1885 from its modest beginnings at 5 Hawley Square.20 With fees of £20 for three months and £30 for six Miss Thorne’s clientele required not inconsiderable means, as Irene Vanbrugh who followed her sister Violet there in 1888 recalled.21 As was the case with Minna, who believed ‘from long experience in amateur acting … that she had a talent for the stage’,22 many middle-class girls had gained a taste for acting in drawing-room entertainments which had been so popular in the 1870s and 1880s, though Carroll astutely counselled: ‘I thought that … she ought … not rest only on the untrustworthy evidence of acting in drawing-rooms among admiring friends’.23 Carroll must have expedited Minna’s registration as she evidently trained for six months and by February 1892 had progressed to Miss Thorne’s stock company and was appearing in their pantomime on tour. Alongside her School of Acting Miss Thorne also ran a stock company at Margate’s Theatre Royal where promising trainees had the opportunity to appear alongside the likes of George Arliss and Terry’s son Edward Gordon Craig, in whose opinion Miss Thorne did not reveal ‘any remarkable qualities whenever I saw her act, but she liked to run the company’; Craig, whose involvement with Miss Thorne like Minna’s spread over

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1891–2, relished his superior status: ‘Several of the company paid her to act in it and to attend her “classes.” I did not, for I was now a professional.’24 As for Minna, Carroll rightly judged that she ‘would be very glad to get taken on (no doubt it would have to be as an unpaid “super”, at first) in some respectable theatre’.25 The pantomime in which Minna Quin made her public debut was a touring production of Mother Goose, ‘several innovations’ in which attracted the attention of the Era in February 1892 during its week at the Public Hall (no doubt a considerably less prestigious venue than the Theatre Royal) in Croydon: ‘an entire absence of both fairies and ballet, in the ordinary light-skirted sense of the latter word’, indeed the entertainment, which included Edgar Stuart appearing in Robert Macaire and ‘the transference of the harlequinade from the end of the evening to an earlier scene’26 was varied and decorous. The extract from Charles Selby’s melodrama Robert Macaire evidently afforded Minna her best opportunity as Carroll later explained in a letter to Mrs Beerbohm Tree from his sisters’ house in Guildford on 9 June 1892: When the company came to Banbury, with a pantomime, I went over from Oxford to see it. The only chance Minna got, in it, was in a dumb-show piece (a la L’Enfant Prodigue [by Michel Carre fils]), made out of Robert Macaire, in which she was the wife. It seemed to me, though of course an amateur’s opinion is worth very little, that she had some power of pathos, that she was in her part, and that she showed no consciousness of there being an audience … Also, what is surely an advantage over a very large number of would-be actresses, she is a lady: can look like a lady, walk like a lady, and, above all, talk like a lady. One sometimes sees a play, otherwise well acted, almost spoiled by the ‘lady’ of the piece, who seems to be the kitchen-maid dressed-up in her mistress’s clothes. Also (I have kept the best for the last, almost!) she is most distinctly pretty. I’m afraid that weighs, with a large number of play-goers, quite as much as good acting.27

Not only did Mother Goose satisfy Carroll’s rather prudish standards for entertainment, but he was also greatly reassured by the social composition of Miss Thorne’s company. When on 18 March 1892 Carroll made his way over from Oxford to Banbury ‘to see Minna Quin, as Miss S. Thorne’s Company are now there, playing Mother Goose’, she met him at the station and accompanied him to his hotel, The White Lion, where they took tea with two other members of the company. At twenty-four, Minna was no ingénue compared with her companions, whom Carroll described as ‘Miss Temple and Miss Ellen Thorne [Sarah’s niece]: both were very pleasant and ladylike: the latter is only 16, and looks hardly out of childhood’.28 The difference in age between Minna and Misses Temple and Thorne reflects the conclusion drawn by Michael Baker that ‘The average actress is now [from 1860s] correspondingly older when she makes her stage debut’.29 Actresses from theatrical families were likely to have been inducted

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into the profession if not in childhood then after a fairly rudimentary education whereas actresses from middle-class non-theatre backgrounds were likely to have benefited from the spread of women’s education and have attended school well into their teens. This was certainly the case with the Vanbrugh sisters, who were ‘e[ducated] at High School, Exeter, France, and Germany, and for the stage by the late Sarah Thorne’.30 In Minna’s case her entry to a stage career had evidently been further delayed by her own hesitation. Carroll enjoyed the pantomime, which he proclaimed inoffensive, and the next morning he and Minna strolled around the town before she saw him off on the 10.45 a.m. train to Oxford. Carroll and Minna evidently struck up an immediate rapport: ‘we seemed to become intimate friends at once’,31 which would account in some measure for his continuing involvement with her career for the remaining six years of his life. Minna clearly needed to get her career under way without delay, to which end on 30 April Carroll took her to two theatrical agents (Mr A. Hart and Mr G. Tate) to enter her name and on 3 May to a third agent prior to lunch at Moray Lodge, the grand home of Ellen Terry’s eldest sister Kate Lewis. On 3 April he wrote to another Terry sister – Marion – asking her to mention Minna to George Alexander and on 14 May he talked to dramatist Augustus Dubourg with a view to ‘mentioning Norah to managers he knows, e.g. Mr. Benson, and Mr. Compton’.32 Minna had now adopted the ‘nom de theatre’ of Norah O’Neill. Carroll winged off further letters to Clement Scott (15 May 1892), Sallie Sinclair (25 May 1892) and Mrs Beerbohm Tree (9 June 1892), exhorting her to ‘remember … the name of “Miss Norah O’Neill”’.33 On 20 February 1893 Carroll took Minna to two further agents: Charles Terry (Ellen’s younger brother) and Blackwood’s. Of the agents with whom Minna registered Mr Gilbert Tate and Mr Arthur Hart were both situated in Wellington Street at numbers 28 and 22 respectively and were therefore of course conveniently placed for the Lyceum Theatre, though whether Irving availed himself of their services (both proclaimed ‘Every Description of Theatrical Business Transacted’)34 is another matter. All this effort bore some fruit, for in August 1893 Minna was touring in a musical drama, Devil May Care, by Henry Bisley, which Carroll saw in Brighton (19 August) and thought ‘(spite of its name [that of a circus artist character]) is good’. Norah had ‘a fairly good part, an inn-keeper’s wife’,35 but writing to Francis Home Atkinson Carroll’s motive was not so much to encourage her to see the play when it reached Jersey, where she lived, as to show kindness to Minna: ‘Hers is a hard and a lonely life, and she has had a great sorrow lately, in the death of a sister’.36 An inn-keeper’s wife must have fallen short of the social status that Carroll, who frequently stressed Minna’s gentility, would have wished for his kinswoman. It amounted to a reversed application of the ‘the kitchenmaid dressed-up in her mistress’s clothes’ method of casting. The play opens in

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the Holly Tree Inn where Minna’s character Keziah Saunders is cutting cards and absorbing information about a murder that took place at the inn two years earlier. One Charles Drayton has been wrongfully convicted and coincidentally the two actual murderers revisit the scene of their crime to rob the till only to be ejected by Keziah in no uncertain terms: ‘How dare you – you four cornered slab of conglomeration of ugliness and monstrosity – Get out! Clear out!’37 With scenes at Training Stables with offstage races and at the Frivolity Music Hall Carroll might have found himself recalling a favourite book of his youth, Henry Cockton’s The Life and Adventures of Valentine Vox the Ventriloquist, which transports its reader from one form of popular entertainment to another. Though her casting as the inn-keeper’s wife remains rather puzzling Minna – or Norah O’Neill as she now was – evidently entered into the spirit of the occasion and the Era considered that ‘A good word was deserved by Miss Norah O’Neill for her impersonation of Keziah’.38 Norah surfaces next on 24 February 1894 when Carroll took her and two of her sisters to see Ada Rehan in Twelfth Night at Daly’s Theatre, which was run on American lines, ‘making the whole place … pitch dark’39 during scene changes. Afterwards he saw the Quin sisters off to Camberwell, one of their frequently changing addresses. It was not until 4 April 1894, over two years after he first met Minna, that Carroll approached Ellen Terry directly, writing a brief covering letter to one from Minna herself: ‘Even if it is impossible to find anything for her to do at the Lyceum, you might be able to make some helpful suggestion’.40 Minna received a letter from Ellen Terry, appointing a meeting at the Lyceum; so we went, and waited an hour or more, and saw Edith Wardell [Edy Craig], and Clara Earle, who staid some time with us. At last Norah was sent for, and returned with Miss Ellen Terry, who has taken her on for a month, as a ‘super’. She will ‘walk on’ in the Cathedral scene in Faust, which opens in a week.41

Quite why Carroll had delayed soliciting Terry’s help for Minna is something of a mystery. He recorded several visits to the Lyceum during the period and in a letter to his cousin Dorothea Wilcox on 27 June 1893 dismissed gossip about ‘the (alleged) immoral life of Miss E. T. and Mr. Irving’, adding: I know all Miss Ellen Terry’s history, and knowing it, am proud to still regard her as my friend. I have introduced to her several girl-friends –always first telling the mother of the girl the whole history, and asking leave to introduce the daughter; and, in every case, leave was given.42

Introduced into the Lyceum Theatre repertoire on 19 December 1885, Faust by W. G. Wills, in which Irving played Mephistopheles and Terry Margaret, remained a lavish attraction with a total of 792 performances, exceeded only by

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The Bells. This spectacular piece of theatre included several crowd scenes, notably that in St Lorenz Platz, which depicted the complete social spectrum from great ladies in shining brocades to peasant women, and the sensational Brocken scene with its chorus numbering forty-three. Engaged specifically for the ‘Cathedral scene’ Minna presumably took her place amongst the soldiers returning from war, their wives, sweethearts and children. Each ‘separate group is a study in itself ’43 wrote one observer, implicitly suggesting skilful management of crowd scenes as practised by the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen’s Company which had made a hugely influential visit to London in 1881. With supers allocated to a particular crowd scene the cumulative total mounted up, with Irving accounting for 350 on stage and backstage of whom a mere twenty were named characters. The number of extras clearly ran into hundreds, but the weekly statement for 28 January 1887 recorded expenditure on Supers at £27 6s. for six performances.44 Minna’s share would have been pitifully small or, as Carroll expressed it to Terry, ‘only a trifle’,45 but nevertheless ‘it is such a comfort to be taken on at such a theatre as the Lyceum’. Not surprisingly rates for supers varied between theatres as Tracy C. Davis has noted: they were ‘paid between 1s.6d. and 2s. a night in first-rate theatres, and 1s. to 1s.6d. in most minors’.46 Using Laurence Irving’s figures David Mayer puts the Lyceum rate for supers in 1887 at ‘1s. per performance’,47 but according to Bram Stoker, Irving increased the rate for supers by ‘300 per cent. in his own time’48 (i.e. during his Lyceum management) eventually up to 2s. so it had almost certainly increased from 1s. by the time Minna was engaged. Stoker considered that ‘they [supers] never had such a friend’ as Irving, but pointed out ‘that supers are not supposed to live on their pay… [but] simply add to their living wage by work at night’.49 In Minna’s case there was no other job (though perhaps some small private income), but she was available for matinees. Indeed for her being a super meant securing a place on the lowest rung of the professional ladder. On 11 April 1894 Carroll wrote a suitably appreciative letter to Terry: ‘You did a very kind and Christian deed on Friday, in inventing a vacancy (as I feel pretty sure you did) for my cousin’50 who cannot have been helped by having to take a new stage name (Desmond O’Neill), having discovered (rather belatedly) that there was already a Norah O’Neill. Further letters flowed on 24 April, 26 April and 7 June. By 7 June Minna’s original month-long engagement had evidently been extended, for which Carroll expressed gratitude not only to Terry but also to Irving: Also, thank you, thank you, with all my heart, for all your great and constant kindness to Norah [Minna]. She does write so brightly and gratefully about all you do for her and say to her! I was very nearly writing a line to Mr. Irving, to thank him for his welcome proposal that Norah should stay on: but on second thoughts, never having

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It is slightly surprising that Irving, albeit ‘such a friend’ of supers, should have actually proposed an extension of Minna’s contract unless prompted to do so by Terry, who having secured a place at the Lyceum for her protégée had evidently made a point of maintaining friendly contact with her. When on 26 May he attended a matinee performance of Faust Carroll took along another aspiring actress, Dorothea Baird, ‘with a vague hope of being able to introduce … Dolly to Miss Ellen Terry’ and though unsuccessful in that goal ‘saw Norah for a minute’.52 The appearance of Dorothea Baird introduces another aspirant to the stage who also sought Carroll’s assistance and through him that of Terry, resulting in her case in overnight fame in the title role of Trilby to Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s Svengali and marriage to Henry Irving’s elder son Harry. Although Dolly Baird was eventually only too glad to leave the stage, her career stands in marked contrast to Minna’s. It was to Mrs Baird, Dolly’s widowed mother, that, a few weeks earlier (12 April 1894), Carroll had written his now well-known account of Terry’s personal life. He referred to Terry as ‘that friend of mine to whom Dolly wishes to be introduced’, continuing I have now introduced to her four of the daughters of my friends of ages between 18 and 25; but in every case, before doing so, I told the mother the history of my friend and asked her whether, now that she knew all the circumstances, she still wished her daughter to be introduced. In each case the answer was ‘Yes’.

Carroll then goes on to relay anonymously Terry’s relationships with artist G. F. Watts (‘a man nearly three times her age’), E. W. Godwin (‘married in God’s sight though not man’s’) and Charles Kelly/Wardell (‘The man drank’) before concluding with some relief: ‘So she is now a widow’.53 Although in Nina Auerbach’s view this was ‘not the story Ellen Terry wanted her life to tell … The avid child becomes the victim of circumstances’54 it was no doubt what Mrs Baird and her daughter wanted to hear and were certainly willing to accept as a means of securing the good will of the leading actress of the day, ‘Our Lady of the Lyceum’ as Oscar Wilde dubbed her.55 Ever attentive to Minna’s prospects, that summer at Eastbourne Carroll spoke about her to Frank A. Scudamore, Michael Redgrave’s maternal grandfather, currently presenting La Cigale, the comic opera by F. C. Burnand, who professed to be ‘quite willing to engage [Minna] in one of the companies under him … the actresses in his company seem very nice, quiet and ladylike girls’.56 There is no evidence that anything came of this and when Carroll next refers to Minna on 22 June 1895 she was still at the Lyceum as a super in The Merchant

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of Venice, the matinee of which he attended on 29 June, prior to which he met Minna at the Royal Academy Later that year, on 9 December, Carroll recorded that he had ‘heard from Minna Quin that she has to be in Bristol, to begin rehearsing for the Pantomime on the 16th, and could come and see me from 12th to 15th’,57 staying in Oxford. Typically the pantomime provided work for those who struggled to find it during the rest of the year, though Minna may well not have received any payment for rehearsals as according to Tracy C. Davis ‘rehearsals were unpaid everywhere until very late in the century’58 and would of course have required lodgings. Before her departure for Bristol there was time on Saturday, 14 December to accompany Carroll to London and the Haymarket Theatre ‘to see him [Tree] during matinee of Trilby’ where in his dressing room costumed and made up for Svengali ‘I should not have in the least recognized him’. After the performance We returned [to Oxford] by the 4.50, and dined with the Prices [Professor Bartholomew] … and met their Bursar, and an undergraduate named Playfair, who was asked because he has a great deal to do with the University amateur theatricals, in which it seems possible that Minna may get opportunities of acting.59

Playfair was the future Sir Nigel, who had staged his own version of the Alice books in Worcester College gardens the previous year and went on to run the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, with great distinction for fourteen years (1918– 32). The prospect of Minna appearing in an Oxford University Drama Society production is a reminder that as late as the 1930s, when female undergraduates were more numerous, it was still customary to engage professional actresses, and that over the years this had proved to be a successful career track as it had for Dorothea Baird, who as Playfair himself observed ‘had played with us in the O.U.D.S., and one or two other performances, and thereby was fired with ambition to become a professional actress’.60 Miss Baird had certainly seized such acting opportunities as Oxford afforded her. On 12 January 1894 Carroll attended the performance of The Taming of the Shrew by the Christmas Dramatic Wanderers at the Hollywell Music Room and pronounced ‘Miss Dolly Baird … a spirited “Petruchio”’61 and later that month, still in her teens, she was Iris in the O.U.D.S. production of The Tempest in which Fagan played Stephano.62 Within a few months (on 30 October) she caused a sensation as Trilby in Paul Potter’s adaptation of George Du Maurier’s novel Trilby starring Tree at the Haymarket Theatre. The closest Minna got to the Haymarket stage was as a member of the audience and a visitor to Tree’s dressing room. The meeting with Playfair proved to be unproductive, leaving only the Bristol pantomime Cinderella. Cinderella was the twenty-ninth pantomime staged at the Prince’s Theatre under the proprietor James Macready Chute and, in the opinion of the Era on 28 December 1895, was ‘charmingly chaste and refined’. It is clear from the

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review that large numbers of (young) women were engaged in the production from the leads (Miss Frances Earle as Cinderella and Miss Katie Barry as Dandini) to ‘a large contingent of well-dressed extra ladies’ and at least there was the consolation for Minna that she was no longer amongst the latter, but merited a mention in her own right at the very end of the notice: ‘small parts were capably filled by Misses Lillie Fergusson, Rita Russell, Phyllis Rogers, Fannie Fancourt, and Desmond O’Neill’.63 The next year Carroll took up his pen on Minna’s behalf, writing on 24 August 1896 to actor-manager Wilson Barrett, extolling her ladylike qualities, but apparently to no avail. The following summer (10 June 1897) Carroll and Minna called on Mrs Tree and her daughter Viola, then: ‘Lunch with Miss Ellen Terry and Edith. Left Minna to read, as usual, to Miss Terry.’64 This tantalizingly brief reference does suggest that some sort of bond had been created and maintained between Terry and Minna in which the (deteriorating) condition of Terry’s eyesight and her philanthropic nature (the pretext to afford Minna some remuneration) may well have been factors. Whatever the nature of her relationship with Terry, Minna had clearly failed to establish herself as anything more than ‘a super’ and it is by no means certain that she was able to get regular work even at that lowly level. On 24 August ‘Minna came with me to see Marion Terry, who gave us tea’,65 but one senses, as with the lunch with Ellen Terry, that the expectations for the visit did not really extend beyond social intercourse. Carroll made his last reference to Minna in October 1897 as a ‘super’ in ‘a fairy play’, The Children of the Forest at the Court Theatre, the matinee of which he attended with Beatrice Hatch and Margaret Mayhew on 30 October 1897.66 Minna died in 1942, outliving her kinsman by some forty-four years. After Carroll’s death she slips back into the anonymity and obscurity that is the fate of the overwhelming majority of even the theatrical profession. What can be concluded from the evidence that we can glean from Carroll’s diaries and letters? He certainly emerges as highly supportive towards his young(-ish), quite distant relative. Undeniably he may have relished the opportunity to cultivate his theatrical connections, gratifying himself and impressing her in the process, but it seems that he deserves credit for his considerable efforts on her behalf, introducing her to Ellen, Marion and Kate Terry; Herbert, Maud and Viola Tree; Nigel Playfair; helping her enrol with Miss Thorne at Margate and perhaps assisting her with the fees ; putting her name down with at least five agents; writing to Augustus Dubourg, Sallie Sinclair and Clement Scott; soliciting introductions to George Alexander, Frank Benson and Edward Compton. As Carroll himself put it in his letter to Maud Tree (9 June 1892), ‘I have utilised (in the same reckless way as I am now doing your kind reception of me) my limited acquaintance among actors, managers, and dramatic critics’.67

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Minna was one of five sisters. This in itself reflected improved survival rates which in turn presented a dilemma when the source of their livelihood came to an end. Their mother died in 1886, several years after their father, but Menella did not feel the urge/need to launch herself into a career until 1891 by which time her good looks may have lost something of their bloom in a profession where as Carroll recognized they could count for so much and where younger beauties such as Dolly Baird were amongst her rivals. From the boy actors of Shakespeare’s day and the actresses of the Restoration period plays have always offered more opportunities for young women than for those of mature years and the situation was certainly no different in Victorian times when in addition to named characters the ranks of the chorus and supers were the preserve of the young and – preferably – pretty. Carroll’s concern for Minna was no doubt influenced by his own experience with his seven sisters, all but one of whom relied on him after their father’s death, though in their case the indulgence in home entertainments that their father tolerated certainly did not lead to any disposition towards a theatrical career. That it had done so with many young women of that and later generations provided Miss Thorne with an opportunity that she recognized and exploited with the establishment of her school at Margate in 1885, thereby availing Minna of her first opportunity to perform in public in that quintessentially Victorian entertainment, pantomime. Such was the popularity of pantomime that it provided jobs even for the likes of Minna, as did such large-scale productions as Faust at the Lyceum. Although she was the social equal of the stage-struck undergraduates at Oxford, Minna, unlike Dorothea Baird, evidently did not have the talent or other attractions to exploit that connection or those that Carroll contrived for her amongst his well-known friends such as Ellen Terry. Her performance in larger roles such as in Devil May Care were in second- and third-rate companies which did not consist of her social equals and did not result in improved opportunities. As Michael Baker has observed, the composition of the acting profession is characterized by ‘its lack of exclusiveness … anyone could become an actor’.68 This meant that the social mix was much greater than in any other career, particularly as recruitment increased. Undoubtedly talent counted, especially in the top companies, but in others a self-selecting process based to a considerable degree on class evidently operated. The anxiety of middle-class parents would have been somewhat assuaged by the knowledge that their daughter was acting with her social equals, particularly if the prospect of marriage opened up. Another factor was the social composition of audiences. Second and third-rank companies played at less salubrious theatres where admission prices were lower and the audience less refined. The prospect of one’s daughter performing before the lower orders was a very different proposition from an engagement at a fashionable London theatre. Indeed being a super at the Lyceum was considerably preferable to an indifferent touring company, as

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Carroll illustrated to Terry in an anecdote about Minna’s experience: ‘one of the girls of the Company, who was bowed to by some friends across the road; and she drew Minna’s attention to it by this elegant speech “I say! Did you see that gent, what rose his hat at me?!”’69 Attractive looks, a pleasant voice and ladylike manners were not enough in an increasingly overcrowded profession even when you were fortunate enough to have Lewis Carroll as a relative and intermediary. Given Minna’s lack of progress over nearly seven years during which she had the advantage of Carroll’s good offices it seems unlikely that she fared better or even survived long in the profession after his death with her own years inexorably advancing. The materials of theatre history such as memoirs, biographies, reviews, press interviews, photographs, programme notes and so on are invariably more informative about leading players than they are about the supporting ranks, who rarely get more than a mention. However, thanks to that family connection Minna Quin has achieved a measure of immortality that makes it possible to piece together something of a type of life and career which is usually almost completely elusive, but in her case was captured by Lewis Carroll in his diaries and letters. As for Terry’s role, she used her limited patronage at the Lyceum to secure modest employment for Minna as a super, which, though it did not lead to any better professional opportunities, continued beyond the original arrangement for Faust and evidently developed into some kind of personal relationship which might have involved some much-needed remuneration for Minna, possibly as some sort of companion. The terms in which Carroll expressed his appreciation to Terry indicate how far he had travelled from the prejudices of his father the Archdeacon and how far Terry had travelled from the stigma so long attached to her profession and her own distinctly unconventional early life: ‘You did a very kind and Christian deed on Friday’. It was a measure of the advances in attitudes towards the theatre that in 1894 Carroll, Terry and presumably Minna herself could regard advancing a young woman’s stage career as a ‘Christian deed’.

9 EDITH CRAIG AS DIRECTOR: STAGING CLAUDEL IN THE WAR YEARS1 Roberta Gandolfi

We celebrate and remember Ellen Terry as a great actress of the Victorian period, but we need also to ascribe to her records the promotion of early twentieth-century modernist theatre: she indeed financed and supported the bold innovative enterprises of her son Edward Gordon Craig, The Purcell Operatic Society (1901–4) and of her daughter Edith Craig and the Pioneer Players (1911–25).2 Both enterprises, different as they were, paved the way for the modernist shift towards a director’s theatre in England. In this chapter I wish to contribute to the evaluation and discussion of Edith Craig as director, through the reconstruction and analysis of one of her most relevant achievements: a trilogy by Paul Claudel staged for the Pioneer Players during the war years. Unlike other aspects of the story of Edith Craig’s play-producing society, the staging of this trilogy has been little investigated; however it is most useful in my opinion for arguing her directorial skills and authorship in theatre.3 It helps indeed to position Terry’s daughter within the pioneer practices of other first-generation, twentieth-century directors: Granville Barker, Copeau, Lugné-Poe, her brother Edward Gordon Craig, and significant Russian, German and Eastern European colleagues. The Claudel plays were premières for the English stage and opened in London between 1915 and 1919; the first one, Exchange (L’Echange), was staged during the Pioneer Players’ fourth season (Little Theatre, 2 May 1915); the second, The Tidings Brought to Mary (L’Annonce faite à Marie), appeared in their sixth season (Strand Theatre, 10 June 1917), and the last, The Hostage (L’Otage), in their eighth season (Scala Theatre, 23 March 1919). They proved outstanding productions that contributed to reshaping a new profile for this feminist theatre; until then it had worked as a markedly politicized group. It now turned into an experimental art theatre of international standing.4

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The Context: The War Years and the European Network of Art Theatres It was not incidental that this sea change occurred in the period of the First World War. The Pioneer Players did not give in to the logic of that ‘inside warfare’ which fiercely criticized modernism, the artistic avant-garde and culture in general.5 Instead they set up a project and developed an attitude of cultural resistance, as can be read in their annual reports: Literature, art, music and the drama all appear to be submerged by the high tide of that most violent of human activities which men call war. When your committee decided to post-pone the opening of the season until the spring of 1915, it was in the hope that by then they would know whether there was room for the Society’s activities in a khaki-clad and khaki-minded world.6 [Our survival] is determined by the number of people who believe that art is necessary to life at its fullest, that there is an art of the theatre, and that the worthy experiments in it which have taken root should be jealously protected, since they are rare and slow-growing plants not easily cultivated in this country.7

This attitude led to some unusual decisions. First, the Pioneer Players was the only London play-producing society, together with the Stage Society, which did not close down during the First World War and continued subscription performances.8 Second, faced with the brutalizing discourse of war, cultural decline and the closed-mindedness this brought about, the Pioneer Players determinedly devised a fascinating repertoire of plays never before staged in Britain, thereby adhering to the historical role of art theatres in the modernist period: support of new, cutting-edge plays. Claudel’s trilogy is part of an international programme which ran during their last five theatre seasons. The productions were staged together with an important series of European realist plays (Echegaray to Heijermans), Russian drama (ranging from the realist populism of Tolstoy and Chekhov, to the avant-garde work of Evreinov and Andreev) and the work of American writer Susan Glaspell whom the Pioneer Players held in high esteem.9 Most of these plays relate closely to the European and American panorama of modernist staging in the second decade of the twentieth century. The strategies practised by the vast and scattered archipelago of art theatres and small theatre venues envisioned the selection of plays previously staged by similar enterprises; they looked at each other when choosing their repertory, and created de facto an international circuit for experimental contemporary dramaturgy. Although many of them (like the Pioneer Players) acted on a small scale, they soon got to be perceived as part of a new European field of artistic and cultural production; such terms as ‘other theatre’, ‘progressive movement’ and ‘little theatres movement’ became part of the theatrical discourse. Theatrical modernism and the revolution in stage directing, of which the art theatre movement is a reflection,

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came into being due to a vibrant network of cosmopolitan exchange.10 The Pioneer Players became part of it during the war years, thanks to a strategy entailing the translation of plays staged by other European art theatres and even the exchange of costumes and settings with other foreign small theatre venues. Edith Craig and her partner and main collaborator Christopher St John were keenly interested in the work of like-minded directors outside the United Kingdom, in particular French, German and Russian colleagues. It is probable that they discovered Claudel thanks to their awareness of the productions of Copeau’s Vieux Colombier and Lugné-Poe’s Théâtre de l’Oeuvre; in this decade indeed St John with her translations contributed to the circulation of French repertory for London-based play-producing societies, since she translated into English for the Stage Society a dramatization of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov signed by Copeau and Croué and staged at Théâtre de l’Art in 1912, and for the Pioneer Players the play of St G. de Bouhélier’s The Children’s Carnival, which had been previously staged by the Comédie Française. The two women looked also east, towards Russia, the most exciting place of theatrical modernism: the Pioneer Players’ discovery of Andreev and Evreinov led one of their productions, Evreinov’s The Merry Death, to be restaged in New York by the Washington Square Players.11 Edith Craig’s authority and knowledge of French and Russian contemporary experimental stages was acknowledged in London at that time: William Archer suggested to Alexander Bakshy, the author of Path of the Modern Russian Stage, to seek her help for clarification of the book and its themes;12 the cosmopolitan background of Edith Craig’s work on the London stage in the war years led to her appointment as foreign drama manager in the British Drama League, of which she was co-founder in 1919, alongside Granville Barker, Geoffrey Whitworth and many others.13 As for the great French poet Paul Claudel, his full recognition as a playwright in mainstream European theatre came only during the 1940s, with Barrault’s prestigious production of his Les Souliers de satin (1943), but it is important to remember that the story of his fortune on stage is close to that of Ibsen and Shaw. As a dramaturg indeed at the beginning he was ignored by the official stage but was adopted by the non-commercial theatres and the Other Theatre Movement. As can be seen in Table 9.1, between 1912 and 1921 (the first decade of the productions of plays by the French poet) his works were staged mostly by art theatres: in Paris, Lugné-Poe’s Theatre de l’Oeuvre, Copeau’s Vieux Colombier and Lara and Autant’s Laboratorie Art et Action; in Moscow, Tairov’s Kamerni; and in London, Edith Craig’s Pioneer Players, which significantly boasts the highest number of Claudel productions in the decade. (In the wake of these European experiments, in 1922 L’Annonce faite à Marie was staged also in New York, by the Theatre Guild, as a Christmas play starring the poet Djuna Barnes).14

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Table 9.1: Claudel Productions in European Venues: The First Ten Years (1912–21)15 Date 22 December 1912 5 October 1913

Play Company and place Director L’Annonce faite à Marie Théâtre de L’Oeuvre, Paris Lugné-Poe

L’Annonce faite à Marie Théâtre Dalcroze, Hellerau, Germany 22 January 1914 L’Échange Vieux Colombier, Paris 6 February 1914 L’Annonce faite à Marie National Theatre, Prague 26 May 1914 L’Annonce faite à Marie Grand Théâtre, Lyon 5 June 1914 1914 2 May 1915 1916

L’Otage Protée L’Échange Partage de Midi (fragments) 10 June 1917 L’Annonce faite à Marie 3 December 1917 L’Échange 20 February 1918 L’Échange 23 March 1919 L’Otage 1 June 1919 L’Annonce faite à Marie 1919 1920 1920 2 May 1921 June 1921 12 November 1921 24 December 1922

Von Solzmann (decor Appia) Copeau Jaroslav Kvapil Baty (decor Lugné-Poe) Théâtre de L’Oeuvre, Paris Lugné-Poe Project by Max Reinhardt; unfinished Pioneer Players, London Edith Craig Théâtre de Gymnasie, Paris Copeau

Pioneer Players, London Edith Craig Geneva Georges Pitoëff Kamerny, Moscow A. J. Tairov Pioneer Players, London Edith Craig Grande tournée d’art Arsene Durec française Durec et sa compagnie, Stockholm Tête d’or Project by Copeau for the Comédie Francaise, with Edward Gordon Craig as director and Copeau and Lara as actors; unfinished L’Annonce faite à Marie Kamerny Theatre, Moscow Alexander J. Tairov Protée Project by the Pioneer Players; unfinished L’Annonce faite à Marie Comédie-Montaigne, Paris Baty and Gémier L’Homme et son désir Swedish Ballets, Théâtre de Choreography: Champs Elyseés, Paris Borlin; music: Milhaud Partage de Midi Laboratorie Art et Action, Louise Lara Paris L’Annonce faite à Marie Theatre Guild, New York

When the plays opened in France, England and elsewhere they engendered a lively debate and derogatory comparisons concerning the worth and anomaly of Claudel’s theatrical style. As Jacques Copeau underlined, ‘Today only Claudel’s art is sufficiently total, sufficiently synthetic and, at the same time, sufficiently eternal to form a basis, a platform for new avenues of work’.16 From the outset Claudel’s plays, imbued by ‘catholic exoticism’,17 appeared anomalous; they were solemn, monumental and at the same time alienating; they appeared as non-theatre, poetry in the form of drama. This is exactly why they attracted the attention of early twentieth-century experimental directors: they were looking

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for unconventional playwriting, of high artistic value, which asked for new ways of staging.

The Productions: An Analysis I wish to pinpoint the distinctive characteristics of Edith Craig’s Claudel productions, which critics have deemed among her best works for the Pioneer Players. I shall also attempt a brief comparison with other European productions. I intend to focus mainly on The Tidings Brought to Mary, the most expensive production, which enjoyed a longer rehearsal period than most of the other plays produced by the Pioneer Players. I will, however, make some reference to the third and last show, The Hostage. This brought Sybil Thorndike’s talent to the attention of British audiences and provoked fierce controversy, since many considered Craig’s reading of the play to be both disturbing and provocative. L’Annonce faite à Marie is a ‘mystery play in four acts, with a prologue’,18 the action of which covers eight years. It is a ritual drama whose sacred time span is punctuated by the changing seasons and religious holidays; a musical soundscape contains numerous prayers, hymns and sacred songs. The various scenes, with their distinct settings, suggest the paratactic display of playing areas of Medieval religious drama. The play takes place in the Middle Ages, against a backdrop of wars waged to defend the Papacy and Joan of Arc, while we find a family of peasants from the French countryside and a conflict between two sisters, Violaine and Mara, central to the action. The sisters love the same man but face a very different destiny. Violaine is struck down by leprosy caught after an innocent embrace with an architect, a builder of churches. Subsequently she leads a hermit’s life. So Mara is able to rob her sister of the man she loves, but later goes to her for help when her small son dies. The Tidings is a rewrite of the Virgin Mary’s conception; in the scene when the miracle takes place, pure, generous Violaine, who is burdened by the spiritual upheaval of the age and resigned to being a leper and a martyr, takes her sister’s son and restores him to her, alive and well. This narrative sets up a series of equivalences and echoes connecting Violaine, Joan of Arc and the Allegory of Justice, all of which spoke powerfully to the Pioneer Players, steeped as they were in suffragist culture. We need to consider the heroic figure of Violaine and the two protagonists of the other Claudel productions staged by the Pioneers if we wish to understand the reason why this strongly feminist play-producing society, upholder of women’s emancipation, embraced Claudel’s dogmatic work. Indeed the Pioneer Players’ productions coloured the stories of sacrifice and martyrdom of Marthe (Exchange), Violaine (Tidings) and Synge (The Hostage) with a touch of ethical and spiritual opposition to the war period and its discourse; an attitude which nowadays we would probably understand through the contemporary motto, ‘Not in my name’. Fol-

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lowing the early seasons devoted to the sociological appraisal of female lead roles (triple bills devoted to plays written by British women playwrights), through their innovative international repertoire the Pioneer Players switched from militant work to more symbolic plays, inventing, during the war years, a complex representation of female ‘otherness’.19 Their work on the theatre of Claudel helped them to create onstage what might be termed a ‘mysticism of feminist opposition’ that was spiritually and politically connoted in the period of the First World War. In 1916 American writer Louise Morgan Sill published an English translation of L’Annonce faite à Marie and immediately the Pioneer Players optioned the performance rights (see Figure 9.1). Their staging of The Tidings, the first ever in English, was described in their Sixth Annual Report as follows, ‘the most adventurous enterprise which we have yet undertaken’.20 The size of the cast and budget were definitely unusual: sixteen actors and expenditure ‘which drained the company’s finances’: the Pioneer Players had never before spent £110 on a show. Four hours long, The Tidings Brought to Mary targeted a small select audience from the British intelligentsia; W. B. Yeats, Ellen Terry and Thomas Beecham attended the opening.21 Following two plays by Echegaray and Heijermans, the production brought a successful season to a close. Two celebrated critics wrote glowing reports: an elderly William Archer, the champion of realist theatre, and a young Desmond McCarthy, the brilliant member of the Bloomsbury Group and theatre columnist of the New Statesman. This is the season that brought Edith Craig, the director, into the limelight; what drew the attention of critics who covered the production in London newspapers and periodicals was Craig’s directorial talent: So far as London is concerned, it still leaves unsettled whether Claudel is a dramatist; but even if feeling a little impatient at times, I was deeply impressed by [The Tidings Brought to Mary’s] beauty, which was greatly enhanced by Miss Edith Craig’s fine achievement in the way of a setting22 Of all the beautiful things that Miss Craig has done, this was the most beautiful that we have seen; not only in such effects as the double lighting but in the whole spirit and atmosphere of the play23 The simple scenes, devised as one supposes by Miss Edith Craig, were most charming and impressive, and the best features of last night’s production at the Strand Theatre24 Next to the words, Miss Craig’s setting of the poem was the feature of the productions25

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Figure 9.1: Pioneer Players’ Playbill, ETEC ETMM, SMA; reproduced with permission of the National Trust.

By reading the voice of critics together with the production promptbook and other unpublished production-related material, it is possible to focus on Edith Craig’s directorial style. I wish to highlight three aspects, which I believe to be central to the production: medievalism/pictorialism, the spiritual key and the search for a poor but evocative theatre. I shall also explain how the production relates stylistically to a blend of symbolist and expressionist registers. Medievalism/Pictorialism The entire play unfolds at the end of a conventional Middle Ages according to the idea Medieval poets might have had concerning antiquity.26

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Edy Craig was in no doubt that the ‘conventional Middle Ages’ created by Claudel was a spiritual category, rather than a historical one. The director created a number of evocative scenes, built along ‘changing colour schemes’27 which carried spectators into a faraway spatial and temporal realm: No brief account can do justice to the quality of the play, in which at one moment we seem to be in Reims Cathedral and at another in the rich cornfields and vineyards of rural France28 Miss Craig … achieves the imaginative in her simple settings – she has the sense of the medieval.29

Craig achieved something more and different from the usual decorative theatre settings. The scenes were actually infused by an alienating spirit, because time evolved according to an anti-naturalistic logic. It is worth looking at the promptbook’s instructions for the tableau which opened Act III, the one with the most characters and set on a road works site.30 In Craig’s production, the eleven walkons, who fill the stage space, are each engaged in some kind of work – it is a scene played chorally and naturalistically. The head of the village walks through the group, and suddenly when different characters begin telling a story about Joan of Arc, the group stops work and stands motionless. This halt in the chorus and action turns the atmosphere onstage into a non-mimetic one. In this frozen scene, resonant of voices, Mara enters quietly and carrying her dead child. Once she has passed the woodcutters’ brazier, Violaine in the guise of a beggar puts in an appearance, accompanied by the lepers’ bell. Thanks to this directorial choice, masterfully alternating movement with alienating immobility, the stage picture was no longer simply figurative, and the appearance of the two sisters took on a dimension of spiritual evocation and revelation: The production by the Pioneer Players … is a timely enterprise. It recovers from the Middle Ages secrets towards which many in these days have again begun to turn, prompting us intimately to feel the nearness of things invisible and the joy and honor which reside in work well done31

The Spiritual Key The Sixth Annual Report of the Pioneer Players stresses that Tidings is not just a ‘poetic play’ but a ‘religious play’. Edith Craig adheres to this reading in order to capture the play’s spiritual key. ‘The genius of Claudel’, Barjon writes, lies in his having written on two levels, like the Renaissance painters, who in their frescos propose a reading on two levels of the same mystery; the one of the earth and the other of the sky, the one of mankind and the other of God.32

Edith Craig’s directorial skills allowed her to render perfectly this ‘writing on two levels’ in her production and in so doing she brought Claudel’s ‘théâtre de

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l’âme’33 to life. In my opinion she was seeking something similar to Claudel, by using staging techniques which were both realistic and alienating. Craig’s directorial style won critical praise, but proved difficult to interpret because it mixed symbolist and expressionist elements. I will now consider a few scenes in depth: 1. For the opening scene, the meeting between Violaine and Pierre in the hayloft at Comberon, Craig came up with an original solution. She used two different lights for Violaine, placing her, on the one side, in the darkness of the hayloft, under a big candle and near a heavy door: a real, living body compared to Pierre’s emaciated leper’s body. Meanwhile the director projected Violaine’s enlarged shadow onstage, obtaining the effect of placing her on a superior and more elevated plane in the eyes of Pierre and audience members: the woman looked simultaneously real, and a hallucination, a revelation. In other words, by using lighting expressionistically, the director managed to superimpose a visionary image to a realist rendition.34 2. The central scene of the miracle in the cave exploits ritualism to achieve a spiritual dimension. William Archer wrote in the Star: ‘I felt as if I was watching the ritual belonging to a strange religion rather than watching a play’,35 while in private he apologized to the director: Dear Miss Craig, I am disgusted to see that the wretched Star people have cut out of my notice of last night’s performance what I said about your production. I thought the cave scene one of the most ingenious and beautiful things I had ever seen on the stage.36

Let us now consider at length McCarthy’s reconstruction: The next scene is laid in the leper’s cave. Violaine is seated; Mara is huddled at her feet. ‘You are a saint; give me my child’. Violaine is horrified. ‘I am no saint. In asking this you are judging God.’ Mara implores, begs, curses and blasphemes. She is a wave of blind human passion, dashing up and falling back again, in fury. Then the leper takes the body of the child under her cloak. She asks her sister (for she is blind now) to read the office of the day. Mara, quieter now, begins to read the Gospel and passages from the Prophets beside the brazier that lights both figures. Singing voices are heard softly chanting, though Mara does not hear them. Day begins to show in the sky, and suddenly Violaine stands up with a cry, she has felt the child stir against her breast. The miracle has happened … An act of grace … The scene is long; that it is extremely beautiful I may have failed to suggest; but it is. It must be long, or the moment of the miracle would have failed in its effect.37

The promptbook also indicates that the two interpreters switched between an emotional intensity, with a hint of expressionism, and a score of tightly controlled stage movements (audience members actually perceived a ‘restfulness’ and ‘the absence of unnecessary movements, which seem so popular nowadays’).38 The actorial interpretation of emotional identification was inserted into a sym-

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bolic and evocative setting and a carefully patterned soundscape, intermingling sounds and songs, which were performed live. The director’s objective, as in the previous scene, appears to have been to make the miracle happen onstage; since she wished audience members/witnesses to experience the miracle as a revelation, she created a carefully designed stage ritualism; her mise en scène turned to expressionist emphasis in the acting style, slow motion, spatial-temporal dilation (the transition from night to morning), and carefully planned sound and lighting effects, to attain spiritual evocation. The creation of this scene amounted to a clever fusion of diverse stylistic, directorial registers; a realist style blended with symbolic and expressionist solutions. Subdued lighting and voices conjured up a sense of sacredness, characterized by the intimacy of a chamber theatre. A kind of spiritual communion was thus achieved between stage and audience. The show rose to what a non-believer like McCarthy described very definitely as something ‘religiously beautiful’. 3. The ritualism Craig opted for grew stronger in the disturbing final scene of the Pioneers’ next Claudel’s production, The Hostage.39 From the two endings Claudel penned for L’Otage, Edith Craig chose the first. This was controversial and open to criticism, focusing as it did on the heroine’s death onstage. Sybil Thorndike played the lead, with great tragic presence. On her deathbed Synge refuses to forgive her husband, despite the priest’s insistence.40 The director invented a death scene that proved extremely disturbing for both spectators and critics: it harked back to the ritualism of her preceding Claudel production and gave life to a complex ceremonial of the Last Rights, with realistic visuals including the fundamental elements of a Catholic funeral. Spectators witnessed the lighting of candles, the sprinkling of water and the closing of the dead person’s eyes. Such actions contextualized Synge’s dying moments and, dramatically speaking, slowed it down, in order to underline the moral torture inflicted by the clergyman. Until the very last he urges Synge to forgive her husband but she silently refuses. This ritual theatre was not descriptive, it rather carried realism too far: the action was painfully overdone and resulted in a kind of expressionist cruelty.41 Such a disturbing final scene rendered the theme of sacrifice more complex; it exalted and, at the same time, questioned whether the woman’s martyrdom is justifiable. It allowed the Pioneer Players to carry out a provocative, even subtly anti-Claudelien reading of the play, making it controversial and almost immoral.42 I will now return to The Tidings Brought to Mary in order to explore another important stylistic register. Poor and Evocative Theatre The props list alludes to those materials which were actually used to create the evocative stage pictures.43 Wood, stone, metals of different kinds were all

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employed: the large kitchen table, the bench and the open fire, with stacked wood waiting to be burnt; the stone seat and the garden ladder; bundles of sticks and enormous wooden trunks from the building site in the middle of the wood. Moreover, among the personal props (which I have not listed in my note), there are tools of daily use for masculine and feminine work – spades, shovels and cutlery – and metal objects characterizing each character – Jacques’s dagger, Violaine’s ring, the key hanging from her girdle, and the bell that accompanies and points to her life as a leper. Metal also appears in the soundscape, with bells, trumpets and horns. As far as lighting, the blazing fire illuminates many scenes, together with, or in alternative to, electric lighting: the burning wall torch in the barn, the flames of the open fire, the bonfire of the building site, the brazier in the cave, the lighted candles when Violaine dies. Critics confirm that Edith Craig’s production created extremely evocative results using simple solutions: ‘She achieves the imaginative in her simple settings’, ‘She sees complete pictures in a few strokes of the brush’:44 many pointed to this style characterizing her directorial, authorial work.

A European Comparison We may briefly compare Edith Craig’s work with other European productions of L’Annonce fait à Marie.45 The search for a ritual dimension can be found in many of them: at the Dalcroze Theatre in Hellerau, for example, in 1913, the ritualism was translated into Adolphe Appia’s abstract, monumental scenery, a space inhabited by a rhythmic choreography, while later in Moscow, in the 1920 production, Tairov’s vertical, stylized setting was matched by a very slow, grotesque and avant-garde acting style. Edith Craig’s solution differed from both: in London in 1917 she searched for a more intimate rituality, reminiscent of a chamber theatre.46 In my opinion Craig’s production shared several aspects with Lugné-Poe’s 1912 production in Paris: a poor but evocative staging, pictorically inspired. Even so Lugné-Poe staged Claudel’s work as a parable: his production aimed at formal stylization, geared to capture the conventional nature of the play.47 The Pioneer Players, instead, interpreted The Tidings as a mystery play: beneath the vibrant, dark stage pictures imagined by Craig there was a hint of expressionism exalting Claudel’s mysticism. Expressionist realism dominated the Pioneers’ acting style too, with an evident gap regarding the stylized and ultra-realist logic of the characters. This was certainly closer to the playwright’s intentions,48 according to which several productions of his plays were being produced in Europe at the time.

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Gordon Craigesque? Spurred by a wish to capture Edith Craig’s directorial style in words, reviewers of The Tidings defined it as follows: ‘Reminiscent of Gordon Craig in its simplicity and effects’.49 This definition masks the kind of condescending, male attitudes that this first woman director experienced throughout her working life.50 For this reason one should read the reviews both critically and between the lines. The ‘Gordon Craigesque’ style that Archer, among others, refers to, was certainly not Gordon Craig’s style in 1917. At the time he was the editor of The Mask, he had directed the Moscow Hamlet and was internationally known as the inventor of the screens. He had theorized an evocative, abstract, monumental kind of staging, very far from the figurative style of Edith’s The Tidings production. But British critics presumably had in mind Gordon Craig’s ‘poor’ productions for the Purcell Operatic Society, the only ones he worked on in England. His sister made a significant contribution to these, even if theatre historians have never given her credit for her efforts.51 In order to compare the different directorial approaches that brother and sister developed in the twentieth century, it is worthwhile considering a point made in a review of Dido and Aeneas, the Purcell Operatic Society’s 1902 production: The main principles acted on by Mr Craig can be applied to work on a scale as big as the Covent Garden, or as small as that of the amateur stage, but it does demand one thing – it demands a director such as this performance had, a man who is at once an artist and a stage manager.52

Those splendid symbolist productions, based on harmony, stylization and simplification, led to two very different developments. While Gordon Craig went on to develop symbolist staging ‘on a big scale’, tending towards a moving set that was visionary, gigantic and based on rich materials, his sister managed to develop a kind of symbolist staging on a ‘small scale’. Her poor aesthetic had the power, as critics wrote, to ‘conjure up an entire picture with a few brush strokes’.53 Edith Craig thus paved the way, along with other small art theatre venues, for a different modernist directorial method. Gordon’s dream of art for art’s sake (the modernist canon) and Edith’s vibrant, poor and militant theatre (the modernist alternative) are two opposing polarities, but they may also be seen as offshoots of the same root.

10 VELONA PILCHER AND DAME ELLEN TERRY (1926) Charlotte Purkis

Ellen Terry’s Memoirs invoke the presence of the American thespian Velona Pilcher in her sphere during her later years. They recall the same scene on the evening of Christmas day 1925 that Pilcher herself was to capture in the article ‘Dame Ellen Terry’ published in 1926 in Theatre Arts Monthly, the influential American arts magazine to which she was a regular and valued contributor.1 The commentary added to the Memoirs for their publication after Terry’s death by Christopher St John and Edith Craig described Pilcher as a ‘young writer’ and one of those ‘lonely people who wouldn’t otherwise see a turkey or a pudding’ whom Terry had urged her daughter Edith Craig to invite.2 The letter inviting her had come from St John: ‘If you are not otherwise engaged we hope you will come here on Christmas Day about 6.30 to 7, and have some din-din and dindon [turkey]. No-one will be here except Ellen T. Edy, Tony and self.’ The intertwining of experiences of that ‘merry little gathering’ in the upstairs flat at 31 Bedford Street within the Memoirs captures one of several known historical points of contact between these two theatrical women.3 Connections are also traceable through evidence of Pilcher’s contacts with Terry’s two children, Edith and Gordon Craig. Although the quotation from the end of Pilcher’s article describing the actress dancing was added subsequently by St John, it is very likely that Terry would have known of the original article because as well as her contact with Pilcher, in the same issue there was a letter from Gordon Craig.4 In examining Pilcher’s place in Terry’s circle, this essay offers some new insights into women’s contributions to avant-gardism in the performing arts in Britain, notably in the period of Terry’s final five years. In her 1926 article Pilcher revelled in making a claim for her place within Terry’s sphere. Her account is written from inside knowledge, strongly implying that she was ‘one of those intimates who often see’ Terry.5 Pilcher drew in readers through a confessional style: ‘And I think this is how we playgoers of today feel

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in the presence of this high and gracious player of the past; before Her Highness we are all grateful guests. We adore.’6 The article also presented a strong sense of living history and permanence with the sentiments expressed about the regal nature of ‘our queen-mother of the theatre’: That Dame Ellen Terry still walks above the earth with us, enters our playhouses, bows to our salutations, is part of us the public, sits with us as audience, sees what we see upon the stage, shares our aspirations for the life of the theatre, and is, along with us, a living London playgoer … this is our proud inheritance, a splendid privilege that is ours by right of birth.7

Thus Pilcher connected herself to this heritage. Although outwardly American by virtue of her upbringing, her accent, her experiences of life and the theatre, she was in fact born a Londoner to an English father.8 The article begins by establishing that Pilcher was the guest at Smallhythe in the moment in 1926 which set the scene: Early one March morning Spring stepped into the garden of a cottage in Kent and performed a wonder for a guest who stood upon the threshold looking along a lane of six little cherry trees standing barely root deep in shallow snow. Behind one’s back shouted and spluttered a fresh fire noisily greeting its daily ration of young tree’s trunk.9

Pilcher goes on to evoke the path along which Terry would walk in precious and religious overtones: A shaft of strong sun came down from heaven like an annunciation … and lo! living pearls poured upon the ground … all the trees dropped jewels into the earth’s lap. And nearly every evening when warm weather has come to this countryside to stay, Dame Ellen Terry – just such a lovely lady – does walk along this path … It is pleasant to be meekened, and made a worshiper, before some exquisite accident in the life of the earth; to be so grateful for a wonder performed that we want to say grace.10

Nina Auerbach has commented on St John’s evocation of Terry’s ‘mystic presence in terms of worship’.11 The latter’s description of Terry’s last stage appearance in Walter De La Mare’s Crossings, reported in the Memoirs a few years after Pilcher’s article, sought to capture Terry’s ‘earthliness purged away by time’ with ‘the spirit of beauty’ filling the audience ‘with a strange awe’; ‘A long sighing “Oh!” arose from them all, and the sound was a more wonderful tribute than any applause I have ever heard’.12 Pilcher’s article is significant for two further reasons which link to the celebrity status conveyed on Terry. Firstly, it foreshadowed aspects of the public response which greeted Terry’s demise in 1928. Secondly, it highlighted those depictions of her charm dominant in the culture of the day. The operation of Terry’s status and image in Pilcher’s tribute resonated with the press atten-

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tion which met her death.13 A key aspect was the emphasis on her continuing girlishness. Such commentary as that of the well-known critic St John Ervine established her image in gendered terms as he recalled the last time he saw her act, at a charity matinee at the Palace Theatre in Cambridge Circus: She had promised to ‘do something’ that afternoon, but as she entered the theatre, I felt certain that she would not be able to keep her word … But when the time for her ‘turn’ came, she went through the pass-door on to the stage, and as she emerged from the wings, she was transformed. Her fragility and old age dropped like a shawl from her shoulders, and she tripped lightly on to the centre of the stage, as lightly as if she were a girl again, and an extraordinary air of youth and vivacity invested her … After she had finished the speech she must have spoken hundreds of times, she gave a deliciously funny imitation of a stupid young man dancing with a girl. That was the end of her ‘turn,’ and she tripped into the wings, still young, still gay, brought back to life by the very odour of the stage.14

In defiance of outward signs of deterioration, Terry’s youthfulness became a defining commonplace in verbal depictions of her old age which lent her image a sense of immortality.15 Pilcher also depicted Terry as a ‘player of the past’, but one who can still come to life in the present as described in the final dancing scene: Dame Ellen Terry began to dance; silently once around the table she danced – slowly, stately, delicately, pouring beauty from her bones, bearing her years like a burden of long-stemmed lilies, moving like a blossom of snow blown down to its rest on the ground – and then silently passed again out of the door.16

Although Terry was still alive, the ending of the article is valedictory. Terry’s presence is revived in a flash through this dream-like moment experienced by the group late at night which depicted her as a ‘pre-Raphaelite figure drawn back into life by music and mirth’.17 Another defining notion was her association with the beauties and glories of nature. Pilcher, following Matthew Arnold, declared how her ‘love of fun … is of the spirit’ and a ‘radiant response to all that touch her is the miracle of her personality today’.18 Both of these aspects are tied together in this passage: ‘Yes, but, my dears, don’t be too solemn!’ – Dame Ellen would say if she should overhear us, and she’d prick the black bubble of our melancholy with some sunny thrust of wit, and laugh merrily to see it melt. For if the shadow of age comes fearfully into the vision of the young who watch, freezing the heart, freezing young blood, making the heart heavy with icicles … it comes to her majesty with the sweet naturalness of all things in nature, and it is only a change into another sort of lovely life … Or if now and then by chance you should happen to say something sensible, and say it simply, she will open her eyes wide to look at you, as a child looks at something for the first time, and you will receive an understanding that passes understanding.19

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There is a religious dimension to the way that Pilcher presents her interaction with Terry, as if some kind of wordless benediction is being bequeathed.20 The hint at her imminent passing, her change into ‘another sort of lovely life’, that is her movement towards Heaven, or beyond, reinforces this sense. Moreover the association of an instinctive connection between Terry as creature of nature and the frozen, melancholy young, with whom Pilcher identifies herself, also suggests the possibility, even necessity, of salvation for those who like Pilcher had seen active service in the First World War and remained war-wounded. Perhaps her reinforcement of pervasive notions of the dominant Victorian ideologies associating nature and femininity earlier in the article when she depicts Terry suffused onto the outdoor stage of her home territory is also a seeking after older certainties and traditions. Theatrical interactions between Terry and her children, and thus between Pilcher and the family, are present within this article, through the device of incorporating recollection of a prominent moment in each of the Craigs’ careers. The reporting of these moments reflects the role that Terry played in supporting her children’s contemporaneous interventions into the world of theatre in their different ways. Concerning the occasion of Gordon Craig’s speech at the opening of the International Theatre Exhibition, 1922, Pilcher commented upon how Terry and G. B. Shaw, who had been ‘sitting chair to chair on a platform and whispering and giggling, and nodding their heads with mirth, like two ancient jesters shaking clown sticks at each other’, fell quiet when Gordon Craig began to speak.21 The impact of this remark is strengthened by Pilcher’s confirmation that she had been at the event too, and that she had felt overwhelmed in the presence of ‘[t]hese two we know we love’. She reports how when they came into the public place, the audience for the event rose to their feet to ‘applaud in a sort of frenzy of thanksgiving. (How one’s heart thumps against the ribs even in the solitude of the study, remembering such entrances)’. Pilcher, by using ‘we’, put her readers with her in the moment and went on to construct a greater intimacy with them by stating twice: ‘what is more, we saw them together. Yes. We saw them both.’22 Recalling Terry’s presence in the audience for Edith Craig’s production of The Verge, Pilcher coins the phrase ‘acting as audience’ to describe Terry’s behaviour.23 Not only had Terry accepted the applause from the crowd, ‘our long tribute’, but she ‘begged us with wide gestures please to watch what the others were going to do, and attend only to the play’.24 By means of this recollection Pilcher here elevates her status to that of a family insider, manifesting her unique position in bearing witness to these events. Her depiction of Terry’s actions constructs a spiritual as well as physical incarnation of the old actress’ honoured ‘greatness’; as she acknowledged the crowd they were in a state of quasi-religious awe. Pilcher’s partner from 1944 until her death, the writer Elizabeth Sprigge, recorded in her unpublished biography ‘L’Idiote Illuminee: The Life and Writ-

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ing of Velona Pilcher’, how it was through Christopher St John that Pilcher had, by 1923, come to know Edith Craig, and then Terry. This biography, written in the years after Velona’s death in 1952, utilized Pilcher’s journals, correspondence, other remaining papers, memories from conversations and her library of published works, all of which Sprigge had access to but which now are mostly lost. Even without Sprigge’s interpretation of events, based on then surviving correspondence between the two, it is apparent from the juxtaposition of St John’s and Pilcher’s writings in the new weekly review Time and Tide that they were associates.25 Time and Tide was established in 1920 in the drive for progress following the First World War.26 Its political engagement was expressed in the emphasis placed on the social function of culture. This question from the founder Lady Rhondda’s autobiography would likely have struck a chord with Pilcher: ‘The old ideas had failed us, but what exactly were the new ones that were to save us?’27 Pilcher’s first article in October 1921 was of the Grand Guignol London season, and this linked her context again to that of Edith Craig because of the involvement of Craig’s friends Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson, whose achievements are highly complimented by Pilcher.28 According to Sprigge, St John and Pilcher met at a party given by Lady Rhondda at the end of 1922. By this time ‘Velona’s original outlook and provocative style had brought her to the centre of London’s theatre life’.29 She was also travelling all over Europe in these years, and presenting insights from these experiences to the public through her many articles for a range of journals and papers. St John was very supportive of her younger colleague and wrote to her on 20 April 1923: ‘I am writing to one of the directors to ask her to use her influences to keep you permanently. You are too good to be lost. If I only could retire (commerce forbids) I would beg for you to be my successor.’30 Although Pilcher and St John sometimes ‘fiercely differed’, Pilcher ‘never failed to appreciate [her] scholarly mind’. Sprigge’s account based on Pilcher’s memories is that the two debated their conflicting views with huge enjoyment, both in person and in writing.31 ‘Dear Pilcher’ was accused teasingly by St John as being unable to lose her ‘anti-English snobbery’. This must be a reference to her enthusiasm for wider European innovations as far as theatre was concerned. Pilcher is also presented as having frequently challenged Craig on production issues, and this is likely to have been due to her vast knowledge of avant-garde European production ideas and techniques developed from personal experience on her many travels at this time. A play – Henri Gheon’s Le Debat de Nicolazic (1922) in French – inscribed ‘Velona Pilcher’ is in the Smallhythe library. It may be that Pilcher lent it to Craig, or St John, or that she simply left it there on one of her visits.32 Pilcher and Craig would seem to have had much in common. Discussions of lighting particularly fascinated Pilcher, and she would also have been interested

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in the community and little theatre movement which absorbed Craig, since these were strongly represented in Theatre Arts Monthly. In particular, Craig must have relished Pilcher’s accounts of her life as a theatre director during the time of her association at the Gate, 1927–8.33 They would undoubtedly have exchanged notes since Craig had been a successful director of Leeds Art Theatre in the mid-1920s.34 Pilcher thus became a frequent visitor to Smallhythe, one of those who ‘motored from London’ adding to the lively atmosphere recollected by Eleanor Adlard.35 By this date Pilcher may have been a cross-dresser. Passenger lists of a voyage on 2 June 1923 from Liverpool to Boston describe her as: ‘Sex male (not accompanied by husband or wife)’.36 She seems then to fit into extant accounts of the Barn theatre parties and events of the early 1930s as an established part of Craig’s circle of female and lesbian friends.37 Sprigge summed up this period of Pilcher’s growing friendship with the circle at Smallhythe: All the American in her responded to the agedness of the Tudor cottages, as her loneliness to the teeming life of relatives and friends gathered round Ellen Terry, and her artistry to the genius of the old actress and that of Gordon Craig whom she met from time to time at his mother’s.38

On one of her journeys in 1926, Pilcher travelled with her American friend Hallie Flanagan, keeping her company in Moscow in October 1926, a sojurn which formed part of Flanagan’s Fulbright scholarship tour. Pilcher is described by Joanne Bentley, Flanagan’s step-daughter and biographer, as the ‘amusing and easygoing Velona’ who had ‘made a good traveling companion’.39 It is a pity that Pilcher’s presence is not even implied anywhere in Flanagan’s published account, Shifting Scenes of the Modern European Theatre.40 But nor is Flanagan mentioned within Pilcher’s articles based on that visit.41 Flanagan had earlier met Gordon Craig in Copenhagen and he had suggested the sort of book she should write about her experiences, and even a title, A Passionate Playgoer.42 It is likely she would have discussed this when she subsequently met up with her friend. According to Bentley, Craig thought she should aim for ‘impressionistic sketches of people, places, and theatres, and Flanagan took his advice’.43 But when she had finished the Copenhagen chapter and sent it off to Craig, she became ‘distraught when he replied that her words about him were sentimental and untrue’. Craig’s opinion was that in striving, apparently, to emulate his own literary style, Flanagan’s communication had become muddled. Whether this was the case or not, Bentley’s account is that Flanagan took his remarks very much to heart and confided in her friend Pilcher. Pilcher’s reply, in Flanagan’s papers, exhorted her not to mind too much what Craig thought and to go ahead and publish because many others would benefit from the insights in the book.44 But Flanagan did revise, apparently to Craig’s satisfaction.

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Pilcher’s 1926 article confirmed the presence of the group of women at Craig’s final Pioneer Players production of Susan Glaspell’s The Verge, at the Regent Theatre, 29 March 1925. Earlier in their history, the Pioneer Players had been at the forefront of avant-garde experimentation with their 1916 production of Glaspell’s Trifles. The Verge had first been performed by the Provincetown Players, of which Glaspell had been co-founder in Massachusetts in 1921. It is interesting to note that there had been plans for the company to come on tour to London at this point. Pilcher’s knowledge and experiences of American theatre, captured in several of her journalistic outputs which reached beyond the scope of the Theatre Arts Monthly readership, was one of few conduits building English understanding of American modernism on the stage in the 1920s. Although Glaspell, in particular, was appreciated in England, many reviewers struggled with the intellectual challenge of her works.45 The association with the Pioneer Players would also have reinforced the fact that here there were new political ideologies for audiences to confront.46 Pilcher wrote in the Daily Telegraph on 29 March 1923 about the Provincetown Players in previewing the O’Neill cycle coming to the Strand Theatre recalling her season’s subscription to the company back in 1917. ‘Almost always there was something by Susan Glaspell’, she wrote, and then in brackets reminded readers: ‘Her “Trifles” by the way, was produced in London by the Pioneer Players several years ago’.47 In a preview interview about The Verge in the Yorkshire Post, 3 March 1925, Edith Craig may have been referring to conversations had with Pilcher when she expressed ‘the opinion of many Americans [that] Susan Glaspell is one of the most important of contemporary American dramatists’ and ‘in the opinion of almost all she vies for first place with Eugene O’Neill’.48 Pilcher became a director of the Gate for its third season, having hitherto been a follower of the experimental taste of the Gate ‘salon’, which had opened in 1925 with another Glaspell play, Berenice, first on the bill.49 Glaspell’s Trifles was also produced at the Gate on 12 April 1926, ten years after the Pioneer Players’ production, but just before Pilcher was involved with the programming. But the Gate’s new production of Evreinov’s The Theatre of the Soul, which opened on 19 October 1927, definitely lay within the period of Pilcher’s directorship. Edith Craig’s 1919 production by the Pioneer Players of this play is mentioned on the programme note written by Pilcher.50 Maggie Gale has noted how the Gate and the Pioneer Players were highly significant examples of the type of theatreproducing societies and small private theatres which blossomed in the inter-war period and which shared the ‘ideological premise … to keep theatre fresh and new, to provide a platform for experiment and to combat the monopoly of the West End managements’.51 In writing of the popularity of Glaspell in England, Barbara Ozieblo has commented how at that time ‘prestigious avant-garde institutions such as … the Gate Theatre performed Glaspell’s plays’.52

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On 22 November 1927 the renamed Gate Theatre Studio opened in its new building at 16a Villiers Street. This was subsidized by the whole of Pilcher’s existing capital. In her desire to go into an equal partnership with Godfrey, whom she hugely admired, calling him the Gate’s Stanislavski, Pilcher even loaned him his half of the finance.53 Maya, by Simon Gantillon, produced by Godfrey, ran to 53 performances and was a major success for the new venture. The production starred Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies in the lead.54 She was also a friend of Edith Craig.55 A ticket for the performance on 22 November 1927 annotated ‘St John’ was found at Smallhythe as well as a programme, suggesting that she actually attended.56 Another member of the Maya cast was Margaret (‘Peggy’) Webster, the daughter of Ben and Mary Webster, junior members of Irving’s Lyceum Theatre company, and an American family. Margaret’s mother May had been one of Terry’s young protégées; and ‘Peggy’ was one of Edith Craig’s, having been brought up in the flat above St John and Craig in Bedford Street.57 Margaret played the part of a fruit seller.58 In her family history she recalled the atmosphere at the Gate’s tiny auditorium underneath the arches at Charing Cross Station and in particular the ‘coffee and wonderful oatmeal biscuits’ alongside its dedication to experimental Continental dramas.59 The picture drawn from documentary evidence and autobiographical testimonies by Katharine Cockin of London theatre clubs in the 1920s and ’30s is of their identity as alternative even ‘oppositional spaces’ which Edith Craig and other friends would have relished.60 Under Pilcher’s influence the Gate as a ‘studio’ rather than ‘salon’ shifted its focus to that of a cultural centre and became a social space to meet, talk and read, with journals and refreshments on offer.61 Gordon Craig’s The Mask was on the list of publications available for perusal by members.62 The artist Paul Nash provides another point of contact between Pilcher, Edith and Gordon Craig during the 1920s. Nash, initially an acquaintance of Gordon Craig,63 had joined Edith Craig in the League of Arts Dramatic Circle in October 1922. Nash had already been praised publicly by Gordon Craig in The Times for his design work on display at the 1922 International Theatre Exhibition: ‘The best model is by an Englishman, Paul Nash’.64 In 1925 Nash moved from Dymchurch, between Folkestone and Rye, where he had been based since 1921, to live near Smallhythe, at Oxenbridge cottage, Iden, near Rye. When Pilcher did not stay at the Priest’s House, Smallhythe, Sprigge recounted, she lodged at The Bell in Iden. Some correspondence between Nash and Pilcher has survived.65 One letter, dated 13 February 1928, concerns Nash’s support for Mary Eversley, whom he wrote was temporarily assisting Edith Craig, and thanking Pilcher for his request to find her some further work.66 This resulted in Eversley working as the assistant stage manager to Joan Mowbray on the pro-

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duction of Six Stokers who Won the Bloomin’ Earth by Elmer L. Greensfelder, produced by Peter Godfrey on 5–28 July 1928.67 Evidence of other connections between Nash and Pilcher exist which consolidate links to both of the Craigs. In January 1926 a woodcut by Nash was printed in Theatre Arts Monthly.68 The illustration to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung Act III was the only print he ever had reproduced in that publication and the timing coincides with when he is known to have had contact with Pilcher. This journal, which Pilcher was strongly connected to throughout the 1920s and in which she regularly published, also carried an article by Gordon Bottomley on ‘The Theatre Work of Paul Nash’ in January 1924. Furthermore, an article by Nash himself came out in December 1930, ‘I Look at the Theatre’, which referred to Edith Craig. The establishment of a ‘Gate Theatre Press’, noted on the playbills of the 1927–8 season, was another of Pilcher’s innovations. Her enthusiasm for woodcuts stemmed from the art sessions she had enrolled in at Leon Underwood’s studio in the early 1920s, and were fuelled by her continuing friendships with artists whom she had met there: Blair Stanton-Hughes, Gertrude Hermes and Henry Moore. Pilcher’s championing of the form and its application to illustrate theatre programmes and publicity also links her to Gordon Craig’s practices. The press operated from Old Cheyne Cottage in Eastcote, Pinner, which Pilcher purchased using the inheritance from her godmother, Mary May Emery, who had died earlier in 1927, and here she printed the last seven of the nine playbills for the 1927–8 season. The first two had been from the Golden Cockerel Press, for which Nash had illustrated a book in 1928.69 In the same period, Nash was considering setting up his own textile printing workshop at Iden.70 And also at this time one of Nash’s pattern papers was used for the cover of the deluxe reading version of The Searcher.71 Pilcher writes about her time at the Gate in her article ‘All Work and No Play’, published after Terry’s death in Theatre Arts Monthly in 1929.72 This is an important article for a number of reasons. Having worked at the Gate for over a year, Pilcher argued from experience that playwrights were not writing for the theatre. Declaring herself not only as an ‘unsuccessful playwright’ but also ‘an unsuccessful play-reader’, her self-deprecating tone was ironic but would have stemmed from some lack of confidence since she was encountering difficulties in her association with Godfrey: ‘for of course if I weren’t also one of the shipwrecked wheelwrights I should also be composing plays instead of criticising them’, precisely what she was doing.73 Pilcher’s desire for a playwright’s theatre brings back to mind the ambitions of the early days of the Provincetown Players. Their building on Macdougal Street, New York, which Pilcher had frequented, was called the Playwright’s Theatre.74 She wrote as follows about what she calls her ‘adventure’ at the Gate:

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Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence It became my adventure last year – for a year – to help direct an ambitious small theatre in London, and to choose the season’s plays. As we happened to open with a little piece called Maya, kindly lent us by Monsieur Gantillon, we became so immediately famous that before many months were over nearly all the plays ever written came posting to that playhouse to be read with a view to production, and were regretfully returned … ninety per cent of the plays submitted belonged … forlornly to the past… All playwriting, but no play … modelled on the well-made manner from which the rest of the theatre world is trying to get away.75

She spoke of ‘the four prison walls that the ungrateful writer set up for himself all over again’ – this is even when there is a flash of inspiration in the text. In this article Pilcher drew up two lists, one of the sort of plays which were not wanted and another of those which were. Her words are almost like poems dancing on the page: One Drawing room dramas Slices of society scandal Problem plays of provincial proportions Family affairs of domestic dimensions One-act precious pieces Plots about Who has been sleeping with Whom Poetry plays, good or bad, by poets too proud to be theatrical Novels (usually called A Drama in Three Acts) Tea-party pieces all talk, talk, talk And Talk, Talk, TALK by students of Shaw. Two Four years of World War Fraser’s Golden Bough Epstein’s bronze Madonna The Prose of D. H. Lawrence The Thought, as far as it could reach, of Back to Methuselah The Mask of Gordon Craig Einstein and the scientists The Union of Socialist Soviet Republics The dramatic dancing of the Diaghilev Company The Outbreak of Peace.76

This 1929 article related to the content of a broadcast that Pilcher had given on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) third programme on 21 November 1928, concerning the future of theatre as she saw it, in a prestigious series entitled ‘Aims and Ideals of the Theatre’.77 Theatre Arts Monthly carried a report about the programme in June 1929 saying that Pilcher had ‘said some extraordinarily invigorating things’, and included extensive quotation:

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The newest and youngest aim in theatre is to be theatrical. We who belong to the fellowship of theatre that is called The New Movement wish to be theatre-goers, not playgoers. We ask to be called theatremen – not players, playwrights, painters or producers. Our ideal is the theatrical theatre78

Sprigge reported that Pilcher had advised listeners to ‘be guided by Theatre Arts Monthly and The Mask’ and to support ‘the little experimental theatres’, home of ‘theatrical theatre’.79 That Pilcher’s influence on the Gate continued into its fourth season, the period when considerable professional difficulties prevented her from continuing to work alongside Godfrey, is revealed in an interview he gave to A. T. K. Grant published in the magazine Drama in July 1928. The attitudes and expressions in Godfrey’s responses recalled Pilcher’s phrases, almost as if she had been there in the interview. Equally though, Pilcher’s analysis in ‘All Work and No Play’ could also have resulted from conversations she had had with Godfrey as his colleague. Highlighting European and American experimentalism, Godfrey criticized the English theatre as ‘behind the times’, saying: ‘It is different in the States. There the theatre is much more alive; they are … anxious to do something new and not content with the old derivative stuff … The theatre should never be merely drawing-room life’. Finally, he talked about the future: about the essential role film would play and the composite art form that theatre should become.80 Pilcher’s journalism in the 1920s extended to writing film reviews, and her own interest in film shows in some of the experimental techniques she was exploring as she wrote The Searcher. Godfrey went on to make a name for himself in Hollywood. Smallhythe provided Pilcher with solace in the difficult years of 1928 when ‘Velona had seen the rise and fall of her ambitions as a theatre director and was in the throes of litigation with her one-time partner’.81 The latter years of Terry’s life were incredibly productive ones for Pilcher, in spite of the issues emerging at the Gate. Although Pilcher determined to achieve success with her creative writing, completing The Searcher, arranging for its publication and securing arrangements for its premiere at Yale University, she continued with her established work as a critic and reviewer, affecting reputations and influencing what was being produced. Susan Bennett has recently reminded theatre historians of the formative role of this discourse, saying that such ‘knowledge and perception’ as Pilcher expressed ‘plays a significant role in what becomes theatre history’. The work of female writers, in particular, has been overlooked: Notwithstanding the predominance of male reviewers and critics, women have written extensively on the theatre – often with a significant audience for their writing – and a more thorough knowledge of their commentary on the theatrical productions of their own historical moments would open up our histories to a wider range of

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A further significance was that Pilcher’s journalism was moving into a different realm from that of many other contemporary commentators, and was itself creative writing. Edith Isaacs, previewing the 1926 volume of Theatre Arts Monthly in which the Terry article appeared, had declaimed passionately about Pilcher’s talent. Indeed, the way that Pilcher approached and interpreted life events as theatre and wrote herself openly into her texts made her writing itself ‘performative’, and thus her readers potentially also players. Sprigge’s narrative of Pilcher’s domestic contributions to Terry’s last years at Smallhythe refers rather to some rather haphazard, but green-fingered gardening which was much appreciated by St John and to regular tennis matches between the two: she would read and write, walk, talk and garden, enjoying the busy dedicated lives of this circle and most of all the unfailing inspiration of Ellen Terry. It was rather as if, having joined some small esoteric group, Velona still returned from time to time to the cathedral to worship.83

The archive from Smallhythe documents evidence of Pilcher’s friendship and involvement. In an undated letter, probably from 1927,84 ‘Barney’ – Hilda Barnes, Terry’s carer – wrote to Edith Craig about her mother’s agitation from no longer owning a car,85 saying that she wished to learn to drive so that she (Barney) could drive Miss Pilcher’s car.86 Sprigge has recorded Pilcher’s recollections, drawn from memories still cherished twenty years later, of driving Terry up to town, and how Queen Mary had even waved at them from her garden in the Mall!87 She sums up the strong attachment of her motherless friend as follows: All Velona’s memories of Ellen Terry were magical and poetic. She saw her not only as a goddess of the Temple where she herself so devoutly worhipped, but also as a spirit of the English countryside which had won her heart. And in some way too this wise and wonderful old English actress took the place of her godmother, the wise and wonderful old American philanthropist. Velona was romantic about these two rare beings, and when a few years later they died within twelve months of one another, she mourned the two of them together.88

In 1928, Pilcher, whom St John recorded had turned up by chance on 19 July, remained present for the duration of Terry’s death and aftermath.89 She then stayed behind at Smallhythe after the funeral cortege left for London. Sprigge’s biography offers further text than has hitherto been accessible in retellings from Pilcher’s ‘The Marvellous Death of Ellen Terry’ (the ‘Chronicle’ as St John termed it in the Memoirs):

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‘Smaller than ever was Small Hythe as I stole back into the deserted garden. So small. Dead quiet. Quiet as the grave.’ Left alone, with her old yellow dog, to think not only of Ellen Terry but of ‘a great old lady of my own who died in the distance,’ and to look at her own small life of the theatre and dedicate herself again to truth, admonishing herself in Ellen Terry’s voice, ‘don’t be too solemn, child,’ and to realise that she had ‘learned more of the great nature of the theatre from the marvellous death of Ellen Terry even than from her own life’.90

In the aftermath of The Searcher Pilcher, in some distress following the 1930 London production, returned to her grieving process to complete and seek publication of her account. St John referred to it in the Memoirs as unlikely ever to be published, ‘I fear, for the reasons that it abounds in allusions meaningless to a reader unacquainted with what took place at Smallhythe in these days’.91 St John must then have known of the reaction and rejection of Isaacs for Theatre Arts Monthly which Sprigge recorded as having been in 1931, three years after the funeral, because of the reference to its embellished literary style: ‘She thought parts of the article were better than anything Velona had written but deplored “that trick of assonance which is becoming a mannerism, and the rhapsodic exaggeration of simple things whose rhapsody is their own simplicity”’.92 But St John’s verification of the value of the piece in the Memoirs has assured it, and Pilcher, a permanent association with Terry, because it was ‘a precious record to us who were there. We recognise its truth.’93 Pilcher’s friendship with Terry continued to impact on her life even after death. Not only did she spend several years mulling over this second article, she was also influenced by the atmosphere of the buildings and nature at Smallhythe in the choices she made about where and how she lived. Later, in the 1940s, she even considered turning the barn at her own farm, Shotters, into a theatre.94 And after her first bout of cancer treatment in 1946, when she was in a happy phase believing herself cured, Sprigge has recounted Pilcher having had a startling dream in which, she recalled, ‘I was in the theatre and joined others calling for stars … Ellen Terry came and kissed me!’95 Perhaps this was the prompt for Pilcher to resume contact with the Smallhythe community? Pilcher was reunited with Edith Craig, St John and their partner Tony Atwood on 27 February 1947 at the ‘Actor’s Church’ in Covent Garden on the occasion of Terry’s centenary memorial. She then continued to attend this event on an annual basis for the rest of her life.96 Sprigge, present on that occasion, recalled how Pilcher ‘was welcomed by them as a kind of prodigal son’ and how her response became ‘tremulous with so many old memories revived, so many old contacts renewed’.97 These remarks suggest that something could have occurred in the relationship between Pilcher and this group and that this may have contributed to her breakdown and withdrawal from the world of the theatre between the early 1930s and this later point of reconnection.98 Fortunately

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Edith Craig, who was to die soon after, had made it, against some odds, to what seems to have been an unanticipated and joyful reunion. Sprigge also recalled how on a European tour in 1950 Pilcher additionally re-met Gordon Craig, apparently by chance as he sat with their friend Marc Chagall outside a café in Vence. Sprigge described how they joined the men at their table: ‘and how then we all talked!’99 This may have been welcome respite for Craig who was leading a solitary life in Vence, claiming not to like visitors, according to Michael Holroyd’s retelling, yet aware he was very much alone.100 It can only be speculation as to whether Terry and Pilcher conversed often, what might have been said and how they expressed themselves. But it is clear that Terry was present on occasions when Pilcher would have been in animated discussions with both St John and Craig: certainly at Christmas 1925 and probably also before and after, during Terry’s last five years. The range of their points of contact seem to indicate the relationship was two-way, with Pilcher likely to have fulfilled more than the role of a merely obliging driver, and Terry likely to have been, on occasions, more than a distant icon. At opposite ends of their careers, Ellen Terry, as Edwardian ‘grande dame’, and Velona Pilcher, as modernist ‘theatre man’,101 inhabited and embodied distinctive theatre worlds. Nearly half a century apart in age, both were strong believers in the contemporary world. Pilcher’s anecdote of Terry’s attachment to the Christmas present from Edith Craig and St John of Stanislavski’s My Life in Art – ‘she is seldom to be seen alone or abroad without that big book under her arm’ – confirmed her enthusiasm for remaining current.102 Terry’s role with the Pioneer Players and her designation as a ‘freewoman’ are frequently cited as examples of her advocacy for new developments in the theatre. Pilcher had emphasized in 1926 how Terry ‘shares our aspirations for the life of the theatre’.103 This is in keeping with Terry’s own words on the last page of her autobiography: ‘I am afraid that I think as little of the future as I do of the past. The present for me!’104

11 ELLEN TERRY: PRESERVING THE RELICS AND CREATING THE BRAND Katharine Cockin

While the details of Ellen Terry’s sixty-year career on the stage might be little known to the general public, many will recognize her from one or two portraits which are today on show at the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate. Perhaps most famous is John Singer Sargent’s portrait (1889), catching her in the act of self-coronation in her role as Lady Macbeth, glittering in her insect-encrusted gown. Julia Margaret Cameron (1864) captured Terry’s seventeen years of youth at the fateful moment when she married England’s Michelangelo, G. F. Watts, and for whom she was restricted to the role of muse. His portrait entitled Choosing (1864) characterizes her, not having resolved on her choice in the face of the object of her desire, but, typically, in the act. She could not settle; she was always on the move. In Virginia Woolf ’s curious comic play, Freshwater, Watts constantly reprimands Terry for fidgeting. After her first very wrong choice (the brief marriage to Watts from whom she was divorced in 1877), she was set on a path of ‘choosing’ which never became satisfactorily resolved. Once she made a choice based on her heart’s desire, Edward Godwin, (her lover for seven years, the father of her children and designer of her Portia costume), she had to deal with the consequences of society’s judgement: that the right choice for her was otherwise deemed to be wrong. In settling for the morally compromised position of fallen woman, she made her beloved role of mother forever vexed. These images form part of a cultural circuit, described by Penny Summerfield as involving the retelling of an individual’s life story in public forms (e.g. newspapers), such that ‘It becomes difficult to speak outside it’.1 In Terry’s case, aspects of her life story were retold and fed back into correspondence, theatrical memoirs, theatre history and in her own life-writing, proliferating provisional selves which seem to evade any fixed point, creating meanings about her public and more intimate ways of being.

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The photographic portrait became part of the commercial interaction with the audience and the trade in memorabilia took on an industrial scale. In 1893 Terry raised funds for the Queen’s Jubilee Hospital by selling her autograph to fans by means of a printed form.2 Over many years, Terry cultivated her own public image and enlisted Christopher St John to write her life story.3 In this chapter I will explore Terry’s active part in the impression she would leave for posterity, in the steps she took to preserve her own relics and how her public profile both required her and enabled her to create a brand on which both she and her many dependants came to rely in her later years. One of the most difficult tasks to be managed in the published version of her life story was the appearance of two children outside marriage. In The Story of My Life (1908) she conveys this in a chapter entitled ‘A Six-Year Vacation 1869–1874’, the years of her absence from the stage, her motherhood simply being implied: ‘My children were left in the country at first, but they came up and joined me [in London]’.4 In the period in which Terry vanished, her family were subjected to the greatest shock. Terry was missing presumed dead when a woman had been found drowned. Terry’s father mistakenly identified the body as hers but luckily her mother remembered a birthmark. Such a mistake seems outlandish but her life story is not of the usual kind. Even Terry herself was unreliable about the year of her birth, which was thought to be 1848 for most of her life and was revealed, only later after her death, to have been 1847. Whether or not she was alive or dead; how old she was; the basic data of autobiography were obscured. Terry is silent in print on the most intriguing aspects of her life and carefully shapes the narrative to negotiate the morally compromising episodes which concern the circumstances of her children’s parentage and her relationships with men. These episodes raise significant questions about the reliability of her narrative. But the mode of its delivery to some extent encourages the reader to accept the fictional and especially the dramatic nature of her life story. Her life was always a drama, without the need for much embellishment. Even the acquisition of the principal family home at Smallhythe, Tenterden, Kent, materialized as if an episode in a fairy tale. Riding past the property with Henry Irving, she spoke to the owner, asking him to let her know if it ever came up for sale, and consequently she obtained it after receiving a postcard addressed simply to Ellen Terry, London.5 Few property purchases can ever have been so easily brought about. Known during her lifetime simply as The Farm, the property was both her major investment and a burden, offered for rent to appropriate paying guests while an elderly Terry did the rounds of friends willing to accommodate her. After Terry’s death in 1928, her daughter Edith Craig set about establishing her mother’s home in Kent as a memorial. To that end she advertised in the national press for donations of ‘Ellen Terry relics’, namely letters. The devel-

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opment of the archive, now belonging to the National Trust and described in the AHRC Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Database online (at http://www. ellenterryarchive.hull.ac.uk), provides a curious history of selective destruction, interventionist marginalia and strategic filing. This chapter derives from my work as principal investigator of the AHRC Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Database project 2006–8. It considers Terry’s part in the management of her secrets in her literary remains.6 Terry and Irving served as unofficial ambassadors to America in their transatlantic tours with the Lyceum Theatre in the late nineteenth century and during the First World War Terry toured Australia. Family correspondence provides insights, for instance, into Edward Gordon Craig’s life in Italy during this period and Edith Craig’s work with the Pioneer Players (1911–25), the Leeds Art Theatre and Everyman Theatre, Hampstead, in the 1920s and other little theatres including the production of plays in translation by such dramatists as Nikolai Evreinov, Saint Georges de Bouhelier, Paul Claudel and Jose Echegeray. Terry’s house was given to the National Trust in 1939 by which time Edith Craig had finally accepted that she could not run it on her own. From 1929 it had been established as a memorial to the great actress. In the brochure which publicized the museum, an extract from E. V. Lucas’s article from the Sunday Times (10 May 1936) asserted that the place was ‘pulsating with the life of Ellen Terry … she is indeed omnipresent’.7 It seemed to embody her. Thanks to Edith Craig and her partners, it housed the ever-expanding collection of her archival remains. After Terry’s death, Edith Craig put out a call for her mother’s correspondence; in the terms of the advertisements, Terry’s relics were sought. It is unusual as an archive since it includes over 700 letters written by Terry. The route of the ‘pilgrim’ was publicized to visitors in two separate modes: the ‘quickest’ and the ‘most rural’ route. How Terry was mourned, the particular rituals and dramatic production of her funeral, the elegies published widely and authored by amateurs and artists alike, warrant further scrutiny. After her death, there were attempts by family members and others to harness and exploit the dancing spirit. The memorialization of Terry served various interests.8 The poem by William Allingham which Terry had kept inside her copy of Thomas à Kempis was quoted extensively after her death: No funeral gloom, my dears, when I am gone, Corpse-gazings, tears, black raiment, graveyard grimness; Think of me as withdrawn into the dimness, Yours still, you mine; remember all the best Of our past moments, and forget the rest; And so, to where I wait, come gently on.9

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Death awaits us all; those taken first are pioneers. The spatial emphasis in Allingham’s poem is also dramatically staged. Death is a poorly lit waiting room for many of us; for Terry, rather, it was a darkened Green Room, somewhere offstage. What was Terry’s part in constructing her own elegy? The injunction ‘no funeral gloom’ was the watchword. But ‘remember me’ was the loudest voice to be heard from the grave. A special necklace has survived to tell the story of her circle of support. Comprised of friendship beads, each one donated by someone dear to her, the necklace kept these symbols of her friends close to her heart. Edith Craig had intended her mother’s house to become a museum and study centre. The nature of some of the contents of the archive reflects this plan. Cuttings from newspapers and magazines include the obvious – reviews of performance and biographical coverage – and the apparently ephemeral, obscure tiny clippings of images of actors, theatres, costumes, furniture. The latter provide rich data for the director and designer in researching ideas for a production. Terry was herself a collector, especially of autographs and letters. In January 1891 she sent the American drama critic William Winter a letter with Charlotte Brontë’s autograph.10 A postcard from General Gordon of Khartoum was permanently kept in her handbag,11 obviously not complying with modern archival standards. It revealed, however, her appreciation of the value she placed on the documentation of public figures and political events. She used them like a talisman, proving to herself perhaps that she walked close with the great and the good. She solicited the company of the leading figures of her day and incidentally elicited confidences and tokens of their esteem. A letter sent on Downing Street notepaper commiserated with her on her forthcoming trip to Australia in 1914.12 On the event of her stage jubilee in 1906, she received a brooch from the royal family. She was concerned to ascertain the protocol for her public acknowledgement of the gift. D. W. Probyn from the palace wrote to reassure her that she may publicly refer to it.13 By asking for such confirmation and preserving the letter, she seems to have had the documentation she felt she needed of her own changed social status, that past misdemeanours were officially now spent. These ‘relics’ certainly demonstrate the awareness Terry had of her public standing and the way in which the Ellen Terry brand was being created. Adoring Ellen Terry became a national pastime. No metaphor was sufficient to signify her value, as Oscar Wilde’s letter of thanks to her demonstrated. He had been delighted by her invitation to watch her performance from a private box in the theatre: ‘it will be the sweetest of pleasures to be the guests of the goddess – and oh! Dear Ellen, look sometimes in our direction, and let us come and pay due homage afterwards to the gracious lady and great artist we adore’.14 Fans pursued her for photographs and signatures. The publicity machinery moved into an industrial scale when a form was printed, offering Terry’s signature in exchange for an appropriate donation to charity. Everything has its price. Terry

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and her peers Eleanora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt received the adoration of their audiences and the attention of the press. Terry’s reference to Bernhardt as ‘Queen Sarah’15 was in tune with the marketing of Bernhardt’s image on the programmes for vaudeville theatres in America, where she appeared, according to Leigh Woods, as ‘faux royalty’.16 Terry was aware of the production and consumption of theatre stars by the media, and an appreciation that she had the power over what she decided to give them and what to withhold. What was at stake was the need to retain dignity, privacy and integrity. The management of her public image had driven her for a long time. The failure of her first marriage to the artist G. F. Watts placed her in a socially precarious position. Her relationship with Watts, what it meant and what it failed to become, in many ways came to define her life, setting in train the construction of an outlaw self, always the understudy in the wings when she was performing, on her best behaviour, the principal part. The following letter to Watts reveals fear: of interception and disclosure; her fear prevented her from expressing herself directly. It is also about desires, thwarted, forestalled, repressed. It is impossible for me to stay away since you say you desire me to come. For what can I see in your request but an expression of your life, of beautiful gentle goodness. // When you wrote to me last Easter twelvemonth you forbade me saying anything in answer only ‘yes’, but in truth your words made me dizzy with exquisite waves of feeling & gratitude & joy. It is impossible for me to get a spare quarter of an hour in the days until July 29 is over my work being incessant May I come directly after? Enclosed is the name & address for you may send the picture & I am vexed and perplexed to think I can say nothing while the whole wish is so great to desire some words that could thank you & bless you. Nelly. Read between the lines of mine how sacredly I shall hold your letter.17

Reading between the lines is what she made everyone do; the more she wrote (and her extant correspondence exceeds 3,000 letters), the more there is left unsaid. Virginia Woolf remarked of Terry that ‘There was a self she did not know, a gap she could not fill’.18 The injunction to read between the lines expressed to Watts resonates beyond the relevance to their relationship but hangs over the rest of her life and especially to the archive of her own papers. Henry Irving’s role in her life and career has occupied the interest of her biographers, especially the extent of her intimacy with him.19 Terry was constructing her own archive long before the ‘funeral gloom’ had a chance to fall. What can be stated with greater certainty often comes from the margins, from passing references in letters to others, from annotations and marginalia. When her finances dictated that her property be put up for public sale, the sale catalogues for Christies were annotated by Terry, her daughter and others and faithfully added to the archive, with observations recording (for private perusal or posterity) who bought what. Edward Gordon Craig, after all, referred to the dismantling of his

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mother’s household after her death. Terry’s copy of the catalogue bears some of the more poignant records of the sale. Against a vase, she wrote ‘Henry gave it to me’.20 Accepting the loss but trying to keep him near had been a long-standing habit. While on the Lyceum American tour she was distressed by their billeting in different hotels. She had spent holidays with him and entrusted her young son to his care at one point. As I have argued elsewhere, it seems less important to ascertain whether they had sex than that they were each other’s centre of gravity for a number of years.21 She was devastated by his death in October 1905 in Bradford, where he was performing in Becket. Seeing things suddenly through the unbearable new lens of raw grief, she responded to Stoker’s devastating news plainly, with the full weight of the facts of death: ‘I will not come. He is not there.’22 The fact of Irving’s life, his presence, was so much part of hers, that even when apart she puzzled over his quirks. A photograph of Irving ‘at 67’ is annotated on the reverse with her appreciation of the man and a summary of what she regarded as his very visible weaknesses: ‘Pride – I cannot understand it – but I do sympathise – Pride & jealousy must pain much – but it seems to dent the face into great beauty’.23 If, as Terry implied, humility was the antithesis of Irving’s character, what had led him to pride? In performing the Vicar in Olivia, based on Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, he was revisiting a family expectation that he would become a minister. Proving himself was a major drive for Irving, in his theatrical career, his public standing, his freemasonry, his historic role as first Knight of the English stage. If Terry had believed that one’s true character (an essential self ) is imprinted on the face, what implications would this have for the talents of the actor? Might this have been a greater motivation for both of them to cultivate the skills of the performer in order to conceal their true feelings for one another? Naturally industrious (learnt as child-worker from the age of nine) and driven by the need to support herself and two children above all, Terry urged devotion to hard work in others, not least her son, the recipient of letters while they were parted which ritualistically chastised him: to do or be something else; occasionally explicitly, to be more like Henry. However, while Terry was prepared to urge Edward Gordon Craig to work indefatigably she was brought to a moment of conflict with Henry Irving when his demands became unacceptable to her. Conveyed to Gordon Craig in January 1888, this letter serves several purposes, not least to elicit sympathy from her absent son during a time of fatigue. It also demonstrates Terry’s determination, ultimately, to resist the pressures imposed on her by Irving:

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I’ve had crowds of people calling on me here but altho’ I’ve been in Boston now nearly a week I’ve seen nobody for Chicago gave me such a cold & I’ve been terribly hoarse for the last fortnight not ill, but hoarse & not allowed to talk during the day time. It was quite killing about Henry. Knowing this was a terrific big Theatre I begged & prayed that I might be ‘let off ’ the first night in Boston because of my voice & that Miss Emery might play Margaret – no – he was like iron – like a rock about it, & I got mad & said ‘I do think that if your son, or your mother, your wife the idol of your heart were to die on the stage making the effort to do the work you wd let it happen’! ‘Certainly I would,’ said he to my amazement! I expected he wd say ‘Oh, come now, you exaggerate’ – so now I know what to expect[.] He certainly wd drop himself, before he’d give in, & there my Ted is the simple secret of his great success in every-thing he undertakes. He is most extraordinary of course now that I am better in health I can laugh, but at the time I was suffering so, I thought him brutal & said so – Poor Henry a man an inch less strong wd break down under such responsibility as he has.24

While Terry was ideologically committed to hard work, her letters reveal the physical (and psychological) strains she endured which frequently took her voice away. However, even in the process of her diminishing voice she expressed – in her writing – the determination to speak out against the extreme demands imposed on her in the workplace. The end of their working partnership came in July 1902. In this period Terry went on tour, which brought her daughter to the fore in management and she took on the lease of the Imperial Theatre, a venture which, although it gave opportunities to her son, incurred losses and set her on a precarious path. She needed to promote herself in this period. As early as 1897 advertisers exploited images of the famous to sell their products; Sara Bernhardt endorsed various toiletries.25 A photograph of Terry as washerwoman in Madame Sans Gene had been used to sell Nixey’s blue washing powder. The Ellen Terry brand became allied to various products.26 Terry’s public profile increased and enabled her to be useful to charities, especially for the blind. Her profile was such that she was, in her own right, an internationally known public figure, challenging expectations of women in the public sphere. As a philanthropist, her charitable works were constructed as acts of public service, in her work for the Servers of the Blind League and the League of Service for Motherhood. She became the public face of the St Pancras School for Mothers. Her charitable work was not therefore incompatible with femininity. It complemented her strong work ethic, expressed regularly and ritualistically in her injunctions to her indolent son. Terry’s letters to her children kept her in touch with them while she was on tour and they detail her concerns about their behaviour and development. Reading the visual as well as the verbal – her son’s illustrated letter – says much about their relationship. In a letter to Boo, Mrs Rumball, Terry’s housekeeper and com-

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panion, Edward Gordon Craig complained, with detailed illustrations (Figure 11.1), that he was in need of new boots, having only four, with pair number four being ‘more of a ghost of a boot’, signing off, ‘your bootiful boy’.27 Gordon Craig demonstrates what was to become a long-standing approach to life in which he not only advocates an art of the theatre but makes an aesthetic out of financial dependency. Teddy’s worn out boots, even the ghostly pair, become works of art in a demand for more; so beautifully expressed that it can hardly be refused.

Figure 11.1: Unpublished letter from Edward Gordon Craig to Elizabeth Rumball, n.d., ETEC ET-4,162, BL, first page; reproduced with permission of the Edward Gordon Craig estate.

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Terry’s financial responsibilities as single parent were great, extending for longer and wider than anyone had a right to expect. It became a lifelong problem, as she took on responsibility for her dependants. She financially supported her daughter in her costume business and various other women and children arising from her son’s relationships (Holroyd provides a detailed account of these). The relative significance of these women in the archive has been implied by the filing in recent years: May Craig is filed under her own name while Elena Meo and her children have a separate section under ‘Family’. Terry had paid Gordon Craig’s alimony to his first wife, May,28 who approached Terry for further financial help during the First World War. May’s costume business, Mary Grey Ltd, was in difficulty supposedly because a clerk had not checked the accounts properly having been called away to fight in the war.29 The support Terry gave to the women with whom Gordon Craig had relationships outside marriage was emotional as well as financial. The actress Jess Dorynne wrote a long letter to Terry complaining that her son had chosen to spend what very little money they had on books for his work instead of a much-needed pushchair for the new baby. Isadora Duncan wrote with news from her tour, clearly longing for contact with Gordon Craig. Both women were performers whose work earned them an income and they seemed to have expected some understanding from Terry of their predicament. Although Gordon Craig and his dependants had cause to be grateful for his mother’s successful career, in 1907 he expressed reservation about the principle of equality in the workplace. He is clearly provoked by the challenge to the gender equilibrium and uses a biblical analogy to recast the current climate into a narrative which guarantees male supremacy: I notice that in England all the women are going in for men’s work. That’s good or bad as one likes. But this is certain. When women become men & do men’s work it only remains for men to become gods.// & they will.// Until Delila became a man, Sampson had no need to prove his strength. It was only when she began to play the man, that he got up & proved himself a god – eh?30

Meanwhile Terry’s daughter was publicly involved in the gender revolution and involved her mother, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, in women’s suffrage activities. In August 1910 she sent a press release to correct the impression that her forthcoming tour of Shakespeare lectures in American and Canada was related to women’s suffrage.31 Terry was claimed as the first free woman in Britain by the editorial in the first issue of the radical magazine The Freewoman, but her relationship to gender was not entirely straightforward. In many ways, Terry worked femininity. She made a living out of theatrical roles which exploited her beauty and created a public image which was supportive of conventional gender roles. She complained about some of the expectations Irving had that she work like him to a punishing schedule and she lacked the

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opportunity under his management to choose the roles she wanted to play to test her skills. Kerry Powell has said that ‘[Terry] was trapped within roles that stunted her potential as a commanding presence on stage’.32 However in the image here (Figure 11.2), Terry is seen in costume, in role, performing submission. She is before Irving, being admonished. Through her active part in the construction of these images, enhanced by her self-inscription as the ‘naughty girl!’ she is not entirely disempowered.

Figure 11.2: Photograph of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving in costume in Olivia, annotated by Ellen Terry; reproduced with permission of the National Trust.

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Although associated with liberation – a symbol of the free woman – and having had two children outside marriage, Terry valued marriage. With this history, she had the experience to enable her to compare different ways of life. In a letter to her friend Albert Fleming, with reference to his forthcoming marriage, she advised that ‘married love is best’.33 The reasons for her three marriages were probably very different. Her third and final marriage was short-lived and difficult and seems to have had a place in the construction of the Terry brand. It is about this marriage that the archive has revealed some new insights. As Mrs James Carew, Terry returned from America in 1907 with her new husband (1876–1938), the American actor with whom she had performed in George Bernard Shaw’s play Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. She was met at the port by inquisitive press not least because of the significant age difference. Carew was four years younger than her son; he was thirty-one to her fifty-nine years. The commercial portrait shows them together with the official caption, as Mr and Mrs James Carew, renaming Terry with her new wifely identity. The published story of Terry’s marriages has hitherto lacked many details. Terry is said to have reiterated, and probably preferred to perpetuate, this vagueness towards the end of her life: ‘Tell me Jim, I can’t quite remember – did I kick you out or did you kick me out?’ ‘Well, dear,’ he replied, ‘I think we arranged it between us, didn’t we?’ ‘Yes, we did,’ she agreed. Then after a pause she added: ‘Dam’ fools, weren’t we?’34 Was this a reconciliation? Was theirs a story of sadly recognizable familiarity: a simple drifting apart? A different story has emerged from the archive. If Carew thought that he would be welcomed onto the stage in Britain he was mistaken. Terry certainly expected that he would find work and she did what she could to suggest his name to others. The exertion of influence in the theatre operated in different ways. This sort of recommendation surfaces in private correspondence although more formal letters were exchanged too between referees and managers, providing an official paper trail. During Pauline Chase’s long run as Peter Pan, her friend Terry suggested, in passing, that Carew would make a fine Captain Hook.35 The roles that actors never played provide fascinating material for a counter-factual theatre history. If Carew had been the Captain Hook of his day, Terry might not have travelled to Australia. She could have resumed the role of Wendy in a neverland of peaceful retirement. It is well known that Terry’s vast wealth dwindled such that she needed to work, often involving gruelling international tours. Terry was one of the highest paid women of her day but in later years was in financial difficulty. The details emerge from her archive. It is little known that she lost a great deal of money to the extent that plans were afoot to bring about bankruptcy proceedings just under two weeks before her death. Deborah Pye argues that actresses such as Terry achieved a sense of respectability through publishing an autobiography

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and by representing their work in the context of the acquisition of skills.36 The trade, the craft and, later, the art of acting were to become widely acknowledged and even formally honoured. But Terry’s roles extended beyond the stage and presented her with other opportunities to acquire status and power. In 1894 she generously acknowledged the kindness of Elizabeth Rumball by spending £55 on property in Brancaster for Rumball’s niece, Bo. The loan was to be repaid in annual instalments. As a landlord Terry was entitled to scrutinize the characters of her tenants. She was in receipt of references, one of which from a previous landlord reports favourably on ‘nice people’,37 and another from the agent confirming that a certain lady is ‘respectable’.38 The idea of Terry, as perceived by some of her contemporaries, as fallen woman and outcast exile, securing tolerance and sympathy from artistic and theatre folk, needs to be qualified. The visibility of such ‘fallen women’ on the stage, making a living for themselves and receiving the admiration of the public, to some extent undermined the power of the category ‘fallen woman’.39 Terry also operated in the business world as someone in a position to expect to judge the respectability of others. As a working woman her income enabled her to be a property owner and landlord. Regrettably, some of her properties were not well maintained and she held out for the highest possible price on several business transactions. She was an investor, a patron and an employer of staff. A collection of letters in the archive at Smallhythe Place relating to her financial matters provides evidence that Terry was both subject to unfortunate disasters with regard to investments beyond her control and suffered from the management of her finances in a disadvantageous way. Rather than being victimized by these difficulties, she took steps to investigate and take action when a crisis appeared imminent. What can an artist’s business dealings tell us? Is this peripheral or marginal material? Terry’s career was significantly affected by the way in which she managed her finances. Over-generous to friends and family, and with unfortunate investments in shares, Terry found herself in need of work at a time when she should have been resting. The general impression has been that her outgoings were centred on her children and that Terry had little to do with business matters. I question the inference of Terry’s passivity and lack of control, since the archival evidence suggests otherwise. After her marriage in 1907 to James Carew, her third husband, brought back from her American tour apparently to the dismay of her family, Terry made some changes. During 1908–11 Carew was clearly taking control of her business matters (principally the sale of Vine Cottage) and appears to have taken over the general role of financial mentor from Stephen Coleridge.40 Carew sought information about her shares and securities. Correspondence between these two men ensued over the criminal loss of capital from a business in which Terry had invested and there are details of the subsequent loss of shareholders’ investments. Her investments were generally not entirely

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successful. In 1905 capital had been stolen from the London Super Aeration business and shareholders lost out, and four years later legal action was being pursued by some of them, including Lord Burton and Sir Frederick Saunders. There is a lack of clarity regarding her accounts, which is evident from the correspondence as well as explicitly featuring in the letters themselves. Various queries emerge. Some of this correspondence yields signs capable of interpretation: the letter informing her of a prospective buyer of 16 Battersea Rise refusing to increase his offer or, as the agent frankly puts it, refusing to ‘spring the £10’, is torn in two pieces. Was this the action of Terry, the frustrated vendor? Some correspondence has damaged edges, suggesting an attempt to dispose of them and lending some support to the suggestion that the surviving correspondence forms a deliberate, constructed archive for posterity, saved from the flames. Within this financial correspondence the material had been roughly sorted by property but it seems striking that the more general information, notably her accounts, was salvaged for the specific period during which Carew was taking charge of her money. Terry’s portfolio of investments extended to railways overseas, in California, the Argentine and telephone companies, Marconi and New York. In 1908 Carew wrote to Stephen Coleridge to ask him about consols (consolidated shares). A reply does not appear to be extant but Coleridge wrote to Terry directly more than eighteen months later to inform her that she owed £500 on consols. It is not clear whether these are the same investments. Overall, it seems that she had not been kept informed that her investments had been suffering so that she was deprived of the opportunity to reorganize her finances in order to avoid significant losses. In December 1908 an annotation suggests that Terry may have been unhappy about Carew’s dealings in the attempt to sell Tower Cottage, Winchelsea. The determination to obtain the highest possible (unrealistic) price runs through the correspondence and is exposed by the agents, Wilson & Gray, who mischievously quote Carew in their letter to Terry. They ask disingenuously for clarification about the precise meaning of Carew’s demand for a ‘fancy price’ for the property. In quoting Carew’s instructions to them in these terms this letter may convey the anti-American prejudice of the agent; but it also records Carew’s financial motivation and conveys it to Terry, in the event that she was unaware of it.41 The Tower Cottage problem rumbled on for a couple of years and various agents tried their best, including one in 1912 who took pains to explain the procedure for the creation of inventories of rented properties and their function, especially where different agents are involved and are required to check them.42 Obviously without an inventory it would be difficult to prove what items owned by the landlord had been present at any given time. By 1913 her property at 16 Battersea Rise was falling into disrepair and she wanted to ‘get rid of it’ as soon as possible,43 but this was not achieved until January 1914. It must have been especially difficult for her to have accepted that

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The Farm would need to be rented and in 1914 a letter indicates her insistence on retaining her servants there while it was rented out, possibly to provide some sense of her continued presence there.44 In March 1914 when the idea of selling The Farm was being debated, one agent sent his, unintentionally insulting advice, which underlined a question about her enduring public appeal and categorized it in the realm of the ‘sentimental’: It might be possible to get a little more for your property for the reason that it belongs to a lady so universally well known as yourself, but in order to reap the benefit of this sentimental advantage it would be necessary to submit the place to auction or advertise it, in order to publish the information to possible purchasers, otherwise, it would be quite a chance whether a purchaser was met with who would appreciate the fact that you had resided there.45

In 1915 Terry was approached by May, Gordon Craig’s first wife, to help in the circumstances of her failing business, Mary Grey Ltd. By 1917 things were getting desperate. This was the year Terry performed at the Coliseum, London.46 She would have recalled Irving’s poor opinion of the halls, although may have felt easier about the Coliseum since both of his sons had already performed there.47 The precise billing in the music hall or vaudeville programme was a matter of great importance for a performer’s status. Performers who were used to commanding the entire stage for the duration of the production would find such restrictions and lack of control threatening: Stars knew full well that whatever money they made had to come with strings attached. Stationed in featured slots toward the end of the bill, stars expected control over what they showed so long as they kept it short. They faced a disadvantage in being shown together with other acts with interests of their own to protect. Star power could be dimmed again, in relative terms, by the singular appeal of any noteworthy act before or after theirs, or by the impact of the other turns in aggregate.48

Terry’s financial situation is likely to have led to her acceptance of work at the Coliseum. She may have needed to recover her strength. In January 1917 Terry appears to have been living in Shepton Mallett and advertising for a live-in companion.49 In February 1917 A. C. Peach, managing director of a chemical company based in the East End of London, sent her a frank and helpful letter, suggesting that she change her war loan and going into explicit detail about her financial situation. The contents of the letter should reasonably have been expected to have come from those nearer to her, although Peach signs it intimately, ‘with much love’: I understand that Mr Carew looks after your Income Tax and I suppose he gets the refunds to which you are entitled but I cannot trace any amounts from this source in your Pass book. You certainly ought not to be paying the full rates of 5/- in £1 which of course is the amount deducted from your dividends. About your expendi-

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ture, I can only once more call your attention to the large amounts £370-18-0 paid in allowances which are out of all proportion to your Income and which you are utterly unable to afford. You have only a Balance of £19-1-3 and I do not see how you can go on without selling more stock which will again reduce your Income in the future.50

If Margaret Steen is correct in her claim that the marriage to Carew was effectively over after two years,51 this locates the breach during the period when he was dealing with her financial matters. It must have been hard for Terry to ignore the financial advice above, which sets out quite unambiguously the grave situation she faced (living beyond her means) and broaches a delicate matter that would be sufficient to create a breach in many marriages. Although Steen suggests that Terry had blamed Carew’s cruelty to her dog as a reason for her change in feelings,52 it seems more likely that it developed from her discovery that he had financially exploited and deceived her. Carew was in charge of her payment of taxes. A long-standing overpayment should have been reimbursed but this was not visible in her bank accounts. Meanwhile in 1909 there had been a problem, exposed by Stephen Coleridge, with ‘Edie’ (presumably Edith Craig) not having paid rates.53 There are a number of curious features in this section of correspondence. Carew appears to have continued his involvement with Terry’s finances as late as 1917. A decade later, during the period of Terry’s decline in health, Ben Webster, husband of May Whitty and lifelong friend of Terry and her family, took on power of attorney. In September 1926 a plan seemed to propose offshore banking to avoid death duties when Terry inherited £1,200 from Margaret Palgrave on the basis that ‘Dame Ellen is domiciled in America’.54 Whether this claim would be tenable on the basis that she was married to an American is unclear. Terry’s travelling days seem to have been over for some time. There is a great deal of evidence of Terry’s sympathetic treatment of employees and servants, as well as a fastidious attitude towards their execution of her instructions. Although supportive of both children and their dependants she herself became dependent in the final stages of her life on her own employee. Hilda Barnes (‘Barney’) was instructed by the solicitor Walter D’Arcy Hart to serve the papers on Dame Ellen Terry which would officially make her bankrupt only twelve days before she died. He was careful to explain that Terry must, legally, take receipt of the paper but that he believed she would not be aware of its significance.55 D’Arcy Hart and Ben Webster had taken charge of her finances, with separate accounts being set up, and Barney instructed to manage her daily needs. Hart was dismayed by the high charges for medical advice from Sir Maurice Craig (the leading expert of his day in the field of mental health).56 Craig had visited Terry twice, once in March at the Red House, Wateringbury, Kent, where at the time of her eightieth birthday she was a guest of Lady Mabel Egerton.57 In this period all transactions were closely scrutinized on Terry’s behalf. In 1927 Christopher St John sought, through Edith Craig, rights to half of the profits

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in the future publications of Terry’s autobiography. Hart expressed his relief to hand over this responsibility to Alex Drummond, the named receiver and husband of Terry’s long-term friend Pauline Chase, to be involved in the proposal to serve bankruptcy. Presumably some consideration had been made to secure a legacy for her family. Thus the account provided by Edward Craig refers to Terry’s ‘wise’ investments in trust for her children and a ‘lump sum’ to Edith Craig.58 At different points Terry had attempted to deal with the pressures on her finances by selling properties, leases for properties and her possessions. Numerous annotated copies of the sale catalogues are extant, bearing the names of purchasers and the amounts paid as well as an attempt to encourage friends and family, implicitly rather than strangers, to buy something. The house sale in 1921 at 215 Kings Road appears to have been the most distressing. The marginalia resonate with her shame. Lists were made during the process of valuation, one of which Terry has annotated herself, addressed to her daughter: ‘Please darling keep this private & don’t tell the Palgraves – your maids or a soul my money difficulties oh please don’t –’.59 One catalogue bears the distress and anger of the dispossessed; that her jewellery was being incorrectly described and therefore unlikely to achieve a correct price. A newspaper article, in 1921, ‘The Ghosts of Ellen Terry’, criticizes the sale in colonial terms: Surely civilisation was never responsible for the invention of the auction sale. It is such a heartless proceeding. Even a barbarian chief, waving a fierce spear, could not look more relentless than the auctioneer with the dull thud of his cruel little hammer. And surely no barbaric women with palm-leaves and fuzzed hair ever wore harder expressions than the crowd of modern sisters gathered yesterday in Ellen Terry’s old home in Chelsea, as they watched the exquisite china and other mementos of a great artist whisked off by sharp bidders for ridiculously small sums.60

While the sale of Terry’s effects became associated with the end of the world, or figured by the end of civilization or end of empire, the creation of The Farm as the Ellen Terry Museum as a memorial had a restorative function, returning Terry to the heart of the nation.

12 DESCRIBING THE ELLEN TERRY AND EDITH CRAIG ARCHIVE Julian Halliwell and Katharine Cockin

The AHRC Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Database Project 2006–8: Descriptive Guide to Contents by Katharine Cockin Marguerite Steen describes the creation of the Ellen Terry Museum as ‘the most permanent of Edy’s works’: the natural outcome of her industry, her historical scholarship, her endless patience and perseverance in the classification of material and facts. All her life she had kept up the Victorian ritual of the scrapbook, and had jealously preserved all her mother’s possessions, which, of latter years, Ellen Terry had been inclined too freely to give away.1

The place changed after Edith Craig’s death in 1947, after which it was run by her cousin Olive Chaplin who, according to Steen, even came to resemble Terry. The kind of memorialization which Lisa Kazmier has discussed in her article2 is alluded to by Steen in her description of the transformation of The Farm into ‘a kind of theatrical Lourdes’.3 The cultural and social significance placed on the artefacts and documents in the Ellen Terry Memorial Museum from the outset naturally tended to inform the approach to their organization and presentation. The principal focus of the Museum was Terry and therefore the letters and books of Terry were indexed first,4 followed by other letters. As the interests of researchers and visitors changed, a new perspective developed on the significance of Edith Craig and the other women of Smallhythe Place. Consequently they were regarded as more than custodians of the memory of Terry. The documents and books of Edith Craig, a collection of several thousand items, were those which originally drew me to the Museum. They came to absorb my research energies for longer than I had anticipated and after having numbered the Edith Craig papers I took on the task of recording the Ellen Terry papers. With minimal funding from the University of Hull and Society for Theatre Research and the support – 149 –

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of the National Trust, a database was created and over 7,000 items recorded. This seed-corn funding provided the basis from which a credible application for major funding could be made. This chapter provides an account of the project funded by the AHRC in 2006–8 to complete the online database guide to the National Trust’s Ellen Terry and Edith Craig archive. The archive comprises some 20,000 items, donated by Edith Craig to the National Trust in 1939, and consists of correspondence, manuscripts, press cuttings, programmes, publicity material, photographs, artwork, journals and books. Most of the items were moved to the British Library (Manuscripts Dept), London, in 2008. The others are held at the National Trust’s Smallhythe Place (formerly Ellen Terry Memorial Museum), Tenterden, Kent. The online database provides a description of each item, as well as an indication of its location. The first section of this chapter provides an enhanced description of the archive as described in the online database, with an outline of its scope and content. The second section, by the IT consultant on the project, Julian Halliwell of SimplicityWeb.co.uk, summarizes the approach to the design, construction and functionality of the online database. The archive consists of material belonging to Ellen Terry, Edith Craig, family and associates spanning the period of 1847 to the 1960s and comprising 110 boxes, of which 86 boxes had for some considerable time been designated ‘The Ellen Terry papers’ (prefixed ET-) and 22 boxes designated ‘The Edith Craig papers’ (prefixed EC-). The retention of this categorization preserves the sorting which had been carried out in the past by previous custodians of the archive, the earliest of which were family members. Inevitably there is a great deal of material in each of these categories which is interrelated. The data recorded in the online guide is sufficiently flexible to allow searches of all of the items, something which was not possible using any of the existing card indexes. These exist for: Ellen Terry incoming and outgoing correspondence; Edith Craig outgoing correspondence; Edith Craig incoming condolences (1928); Edward Gordon Craig outgoing correspondence; and the Polling Collection. Unusually, the data collection for the online database has been carried out at item level, with brief descriptions of the content of letters and supplementary information recorded in a ‘general notes’ field. Further details on the data recorded will be discussed towards the end of this essay. A third section of documents should be identified within the Ellen Terry papers. This consists of four boxes relating to Edward Gordon Craig (c. 200 items) and comprises correspondence, bookplates, press cuttings, programmes and journals, including The Mask with some annotated issues. Correspondence includes that from Edward Gordon Craig, his wife Elena Meo and their children Edward Craig (Teddie) and Nellie Craig; from May Craig (née Gibson) to Ellen Terry in a personal capacity and in relation to her costume business Mary Grey

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Ltd; and correspondence from Edward Gordon Craig to Ellen Terry, Elizabeth Rumball (Boo), James Carew and others. This material is particularly rich in its coverage of Edward Gordon Craig’s time in Italy and delightful illustrated correspondence to Terry from her grandchildren. It is unusual for an archive to include such a large number of letters written by the subject of the archive. Such letters are usually in the hands of the addressee and therefore held in many geographically separated archives. As a result of Edith Craig’s call for her mother’s ‘relics’, many letters were donated and they make up this collection. The online database categorizes the correspondence by distinguishing between letters from Ellen Terry, Edith Craig or a family member or representative (for example where letters have been dictated) and those written to any of these individuals. Of the correspondence written by Ellen Terry, Edith Craig or a family member (or representative), there are approximately 450 letters from Terry, including 27 letters to Albert Fleming, spanning the period 28 December 1885 to 23 March 1923 and undated; 63 letters to Edith Craig, 1885–1914 but mostly covering 1908–13; 5 letters relating to Terry’s jubilee on 12 June 1906 to Acton Bond, A. W. Pinero and Kate Terry; 3 menus and recipes, 1895 and undated; a small series of letters to Lady Jeune, 1888–93, to Dr Alexander Mackenzie, c. 1890, and to May Whitty (Mrs Ben Webster), c. 1897–1912; letters in the Queen Palmer Collection (1 box), the Polling Collection (2 boxes), the Methven Collection (one box) and the Ladd Collection. In total there are over 700 letters from Terry. There is a significant number of documents donated by relatives of Mrs Elizabeth Rumball (known as Boo), including letters from Terry, Henry Irving, James Carew, Edith Craig, Edward Gordon Craig, his son Edward (Teddie) Craig and other members of the extended Craig family and relatives of Mrs Rumball. This collection also includes press cuttings. It was donated in the early 1990s and was subsequently sorted and catalogued by a National Trust volunteer who also produced detailed family trees for the Rumball, Powell and Bocking families (in addition to the card index for this collection and that of Albert Fleming).5 Principal correspondents and addressees in this collection are: Elizabeth Rumball, née Bocking (1823–1913), wife of James Quilter Rumball, surgeon of Harpenden, aka Boo and housekeeper to Terry; and Catherine Elizabeth Powell (1849–1936), aka Bo or Kitty, Boo’s niece. Other subjects include: Joe ( Joseph) Powell (1850–1927), husband of Bo and blacksmith at Brancaster, Norfolk, and their children Kittie (Pussie), Ellen E. (Nellie), Edie (married Gascoigne) and Joe ( J. E. C.) Powell. Other individuals, not related to Elizabeth Rumball, included in the collection are: Edie Gwynne (née Lane) a great friend of Terry, married in 1907 to Howell Arthur Gwynne, known as Taff y (1865–1950), journalist

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and editor of the Standard, the Morning Post and the Telegraph and living at Dunmow; Amy Ward and her daughter May Ward; Connie Hoster, née Kalisch (1864–1939), wife of Albert Hoster and co-author with Ellen, Countess Desart, of Style and Title. The collection includes details about: the plans and building of The Limes, Brancaster, property and land bought by Terry for Elizabeth Rumball who gave it solely to her niece Bo; Joseph Powell’s business collaboration with Robert Crossman in the invention of a bicycle saddle in 1897, which was endorsed by Terry who recommended it to others. The correspondence written to Terry, Edith Craig, family members or representatives includes two files of letters comprising correspondence, c. 1843–1943. The letters from family include 99 items from Elena Meo and family, 1906–21; 127 items from Edward Craig (Teddie) and Nellie Craig to 1924 with drawings; 23 items from May Craig, 1894–1924; 2 items from Rosie Craig and children, 1917; 2 items from Philip Craig, 1923–4; 1 item from Robin Craig, 1919; 31 items from Christopher St John, 1899–1915 and undated. These letters may be of interest to those working on Anglo-Italian relations or those studying children’s letters, as well as the obvious group of researchers of Terry, Edward Gordon Craig and their family circle. Other letters include those from writers and artists: 25 items from Pearl Craigie ( John Oliver Hobbes), 1864–1905; 26 items from G. F. Watts, 1882–6 and undated; 10 items from Charles Reade; 23 items from Tom Taylor, 1864–79 and undated. Approximately half of the Edith Craig papers are letters. The Edith Craig correspondence, for which a card index has existed for several decades, consists of about 1,100 items, 1 file, with two sub-series: 36 items from Joe Evans, 1888–96 including some artwork; 20 items from Dame Ethel Smyth, 1911–32 and undated. Joe Evans was a very close friend of Terry and her daughter, giving Edith Craig art lessons. Consequently some of his letters to her are illustrated. The exact nature of their relationship (or that between Evans and Terry) is not known, although his letters to Edith Craig are extremely affectionate.6 Some letters have been collected at particular moments in the life (and death) of Terry. They provide a snapshot of her relationships with others and what kind of impression she made upon them. Letters written to Terry and others concerning her stage jubilee in 1906 include the following: 66 items on Terry’s jubilee mostly from Acton Bond; 87 items of autographs; 12 items from royalty, including Queen Alexandra, D. W. Probyn, Princess Mary of Cambridge, the Duchess of Teck, 1892. These letters provide an insight into the contributors to the event and those who paid their respects to her in other ways. Just over twenty years later, the letters of condolence sent to Edith Craig on the occasion of her mother’s death in 1928 are moving and provide an opportunity for various tributes to Terry. As a group of condolence letters they may be of interest to researchers

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interested in attitudes towards death in this period from a socio-historical perspective. There are some 282 items. Terry’s household relied on long-standing and devoted retainers. The correspondence from and to servants and employees provides an insight into how the life at The Farm was managed, the maintenance and refurbishment of the buildings, charging changes to the garden, management of the outlying land and care of animals. Researchers working on the history of gardening or household management may well find valuable material in the collection of letters, some 74 items, from Terry, Edith Craig, Christopher St John to Mr Cole (gardener) and Mrs Clara Cole (servant), 1905–6 with photographs. This collection (1 folder, 21 items, 1 photograph, 7 postcards) includes correspondence from Terry to Edward Ladd, gardener at Smallhythe Place c. 1917–20. The Powell Collection (2 boxes, c. 200 items) consists of correspondence from relatives of Mrs Elizabeth Rumball, press cuttings, miscellaneous, production-related material and artwork. There are also letters from and to Hilda Barnes, the companion who cared for Terry at the end of her life. Terry’s travels abroad brought her new friends with whom she maintained a correspondence. Two collections are relevant: that relating to the Bankarts (4 items and 2 photographs) to Lady Alice Bankart, née Sally Gillett, of New Zealand, married to Sir Alfred Bankart; and Queen Palmer of the United States. Third-party correspondence includes the James Carew collection (1 box, c. 280 items) from and to James Carew and others relating to Terry’s finances and property, August 1895–March 1943. A box of financial correspondence relating to Terry in the period 1907–27 includes 467 miscellaneous items, mostly receipts and invoices. Other business correspondence is included in the D’Arcy Hart Collection (1 box), relating to Terry and her estate, from her solicitor, Walter D’Arcy Hart. Terry’s performances and productions are referred to throughout the archive in different types of document. These are locatable by means of the online database, searchable by keywords such as title of play or role. However, some correspondence relating to The Vikings, Imperial Theatre, 1903, and other offers of works and contracts was collected separately. There are also two folders of items on her publications, with correspondence between publishers, literary agents, Terry, Christopher St John and Pamela Colman Smith on the publication of The Russian Ballet, 1913, and various autobiographical writings of Terry. The vast collection of programmes for plays, films and other events covers most of Terry’s own productions and those she attended as an audience member, running from 1860 to 1923. These seven boxes include her American tours and lecture tours. There are also programmes relating to Henry Irving and his sons and those featuring Edward Gordon Craig, James Carew and Ellen Terry Memorial productions. The value of such material for the researcher extends beyond

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the details of cast and venue. The programmes often carry advertisements, decorative covers and some are annotated, identifiably by Ellen Terry. There are four boxes of programmes in the Edith Craig collection relating to plays with which she was professionally involved, those which she attended and including some which have annotated cast lists. A box of just over 200 programmes for the Gaiety Theatre, Hastings, spanning the period 1915–32, include some related to the Terry family. The vast collection of photographs in the archive provides an extremely valuable resource, for theatre historians in particular. Many of these relate to theatrical productions, depicting performers in costume, and were used for publicity. Others are personal photographs depicting individuals at leisure. Those of greatest relevance to the archive as a whole are those relating to Terry, Irving and family, but there are many other theatre practitioners depicted in the photographs. There are photographs of individuals related to or associated with Mrs Rumball at Brancaster, including images of workers at the blacksmith works (probably Joseph Powell’s forge at Brancaster). Photographs are found throughout the collection. There are also groups of photographs. These include three boxes relating to Edith Craig, which comprise portraits of performers in costume in specific roles, often commercially produced as postcards; film stills relating to a film about Austrian history; personal photographs taken in an informal setting; professional photographers’ studio portraits. There are also at least four boxes of photographs relating to Terry, comprising portraits of performers in costume in specific roles, often commercially produced as postcards; personal photographs taken in an informal setting; professional photographers’ studio portraits. Press cuttings, often fragile and apparently ephemeral, provide researchers with the detailed fabric of the historical context. There are several thousand press cuttings in this archive, including reviews, announcements (or notices) of plays, articles, reproductions of photographs. Of particular interest is: the collection of over 600 cuttings relating to Irving’s centenary in 1938 (in MHF2); Edith Craig press cuttings relating to specific productions such as The Merry Wives of Windsor, Nativity Play, The Great World Theatre (RB1–RB6; REVIEW A2; EC PHOTOS 1–2); the press cuttings relating to the Terry family, including those relating to Marion Terry, Fred Terry, Charles Terry, Kate Terry, Florence Terry’s children Jack, June and Martha, Dennis Neilson-Terry’s death (MHF1 and MHF2); and a smaller collection relating to J. L. Toole, c. 1892–1906 (ET M1-17). Plays and other works are found throughout the collection. Some of these are published. These will be included in the library of Terry and in the collection of books formerly belonging to Edith Craig. There are also manuscripts, such as: typescripts and prompt copies of various plays performed by Terry (9 boxes); typescripts and prompt copies of plays produced by Edith Craig (various);

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manuscripts of autobiographical material by C. Ellicombe and Gladys Bowen (in SC12); drafts and various versions of Terry’s lectures on Shakespeare (SC10; SC12); and poems (1 box) written by various authors on the occasion of Terry’s jubilee 1906 and her death in 1928 (SC11). A wide range of material relating to specific theatrical productions (programmes, press cuttings, photographs, flyers, posters; lists relating to casting, costume, props and prompt copies of plays) is found throughout the collection. Some highlights include: a model of proposed designs by Charles Kean for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (SC2); a lighting plot for Nance Oldfield (SC12); a scene plot for The Mistress of the Robes and Much Ado About Nothing (SC12); itineraries for lecture tours (SC12). There are various items relating to Leeds Art Theatre, Leeds Civic Playhouse, Women’s Institute Drama Festivals, Elocution Festival for the British Empire Shakespeare Society, Mount Grace Pageant, English Folk Dance Society, performances of Robinetta Craig (EC-PAG); Upton Sinclair’s Singing Jailbirds for the Masses’ Stage and Film Guild; Wuthering Heights for the New Shop Window Players; St Christopher Theatre, Letchworth; The Shoe, devised by Edith Craig, 1922–43; Pygmalion and Galatea; Through the Crack; The Liars; Ambush; The Bend in the Road; Pageant of the Stage; The Merry Wives of Windsor; The Beggar Prince (MERRY). Although periodicals may exist in libraries and archives elsewhere, this collection has been given special treatment. Some of them have been annotated by Terry or Edith Craig, giving them more value to the researcher. In the Edith Craig collection there are 18 boxes of periodicals: Drama (SCB20); McClure’s (SCB17); Play Pictorial, incomplete set 1902–22 (SCB19); Le Theatre; La Comedia Illustre; The Shakespeare Pictorial (SCB34); Theatre Arts Monthly (SCB22). The collection includes some significant artwork (both original and reproduced). There is a small collection of bookplates designed by Edward Gordon Craig for Terry at Winchelsea, Oliver Bath, Edith Craig, J. D. and C. M. (Christabel Marshall) (SCB3); and a notebook listing his bookplates. Various sketches and cartoons are found throughout the collection. Some of the most fascinating are by Pamela Colman Smith. There is a pen-and-ink sketch which may be attributed to Edward Godwin. Document Descriptions Each document has been classified according to the following system. In many cases the principal code for the document is visible, used within the unique identification number. For example, EC-G567 will be a cutting (G), from the Edith Craig (EC-) collection. Some documents are hybrids, having more than one code, e.g. a photograph which has a letter written on the reverse would be

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coded as K (photograph) and A (letter from) or B (letter to). See the list below for detailed examples of each category: A. CORRESPONDENCE FROM Ellen Terry, Edith Craig, their family or their representatives, including correspondence in any format; e.g. letter, postcard, greetings card, telegram. B. CORRESPONDENCE TO Ellen Terry, Edith Craig, their family or their representatives, including correspondence in any format; e.g. letter, postcard, greetings card, telegram. C. LEAFLETS printed, often folded, stapled or bound; e.g. booklet, leaflet, pamphlet, prospectus, catalogue including those advertising theatre societies, organizations and businesses. D. PROGRAMMES for a particular performance or event including lists of performers, participants and patrons, often with advertisements; e.g. programme for play, concert, film. E. MANUSCRIPT authored by Ellen Terry, Edith Craig or Henry Irving; e.g. draft or script of lectures, notes or other narrative. G. CUTTINGS any material removed from a publication, including pages taken from books; usually press cuttings consisting of announcements about or reviews of performances, articles and images. H. WORKS published and unpublished, text from single sheet to a book, for performance; e.g. script for performance, including lectures, monologues and speeches; play, pageant, opera, libretto, prompt copy. J. JOURNALS published in a series or parts, including a special issue of a newspaper. K. PHOTOGRAPHS including studio portrait by professional photographers; photograph of actors or other individuals, printed on to postcards; photograph taken by amateurs. L. ARTWORK of any kind which appears to be original, rather than reproduced; e.g. sketch, greetings card, calligraphy, cartoon, map, doodle, diagram, bookplate. M. MISCELLANEOUS e.g. accounts, address book, annual report, autograph, bill, bookmark, calendar, cigarette card, compliments slip, contract, deeds, despatch note, envelope (in isolation), exam certificate, form, inventory, invitation, legal document, list, menu, note, proof, subscription form, table plan, ticket, timetable, visitor’s card. N. PRODUCTION-RELATED material, including any item relating to a specific theatrical production or event; e.g. accounts, cast list, dress list, estimate, expenses, floor plan, lighting plot, notes, props list, receipts, rehearsals list, salary list, ticket. O. ARTWORK of any kind which is reproduced; e.g. postcard which is decorative or depicting a place, reproduction of a painting or a sketch.

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PUBLICITY material used to advertise a theatrical production or event; e.g. flyer, handbill, poster. MUSIC published or unpublished, including musical scores and hymn books. ALBUM including collection of photographs or quotations. is not used. BOOKS including volumes of poetry but excluding plays or other works for performance (coded as H above). AUTOBIOGRAPHY including manuscript of autobiography or reminiscences. POEM including manuscript and published poetry from press cuttings or quoted at length in correspondence (but excluding poetry published in book form).

Database Field Descriptions In the database the fields include: • ARCHIVE LOCATION 1 this refers to the storage of the item. • ARCHIVE LOCATION 2 as above. • DOCUMENT ID unique identifier assigned to each document recorded in the database. • DOCUMENT DESCRIPTION brief description of document, referring to its physical status or its content; e.g. letter, telegram, calendar, sketch, photograph, book, poster. • DOCUMENT FORM a letter code (as described above) is assigned to each document; a document may have more than one document form; e.g. a photograph which has a letter written on the reverse would be coded as K (photograph) and A (letter from) or B (letter to). • NO OF LEAVES the number of sheets which comprise the document. Where a letter has an envelope, the envelope is included. • DATE/NO DATE the date inscribed on the document is entered as it appears on the document. If only a partial date is given but no year, it is recorded as ‘NO DATE’. • DAY/MONTH/YEAR in this numerical, searchable field, the date for the document is recorded whether it is available as inscribed on the document or is inferred. • ANNOTATED a box is ticked to indicate when a document is annotated. Annotations may range from a number or scribble to marginalia or systematic notation; e.g. on a play programme. Where a document is heavily annotated, this is recorded in the General Notes field. • LANGUAGE most documents are in English but where other languages are presented, it will be recorded here.

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The description of letters includes a note of whether or not headed notepaper has been used. In this period, the lists of committee members are sometimes incorporated into the headed notepaper providing useful information about a theatrical, political or charitable organization.

The Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Database: Design, Construction and Functionality by Julian Halliwell The most important consideration when developing a web database, or indeed any web-based application or resource, is the primary use to which it will be put and the priorities of those who will be using it. This may seem obvious, but all too often it is the data itself which ends up dictating how a system is designed and constructed. The aim of the online version of the Ellen Terry and Edith Craig database was, according to the technical consultant’s brief, to give the research community and the wider public direct access via the internet to the extensive catalogue of papers created by Dr Cockin. Although the catalogue was already in digital form (with over 7,000 records already input) as the result of the first stage of the project, it was important not to allow the form of the existing database, intended primarily for cataloguing, unduly to influence the design of the proposed system. The process therefore ‘began at the end’, as it were. Rather than starting with the data model (i.e. which objects, tables and fields should be created, what relationships and so on), the first task was to design the interface: the actual web pages that people would see and use. This approach, sometimes known as interface-driven development, begins with the creation of a prototype. A non-functional, but visually realistic set of web pages representing the final envisaged interface is created using sample data and shown to stakeholders and potential users. They are directed to a website where the prototype was posted, therefore removing the need for face-to-face meetings and allowing participants from across the world. They are then able to see and ‘touch’ the end-product and imagine how it might work much more easily than if the proposed functionality had been presented as a written specification. Immediate suggestions for changes are invariably forthcoming, and since no commitment has yet been made to programming or database structures, these can normally be incorporated easily into the design. The process is repeated over a number of iterations until an agreed design and functional specification emerges. The suggestions and responses are posted on a discussion board attached to the prototype. Allowing sufficient time for consultation with a representative user group is a valuable part of this type of project. Throughout this phase, the balance between simplicity and complexity needs to be weighed carefully. The result of many years’ work and detailed deci-

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sion-making, the organizational structure of the collected data had inevitably developed a degree of complexity. To those close to the project this would present little difficulty, but for the target audience unfamiliar with the catalogue it was important to provide as simple a ‘way in’ to the data as possible. The final design therefore centred around a ‘Google-style’ keyword search box, with additional filtering options (on the date, type and other attributes of the documents) initially collapsed, so as to remain available but unobtrusive. A further example of where this critical balance required careful consideration was the design of the results listings which appear when a search is carried out. Typically web search engine results provide a list of links using the titles of found pages, followed by a short extract from each. Descriptive ‘General Notes’ had been added to most of the individual catalogue records and the initial assumption was that these would be used for the result extracts. However for certain types of document these notes alone would not always have provided meaningful summaries, or, as an information architect might put it: sufficient information scent. By prototyping the exact form of each different type of document result, more relevant summary forms were arrived at for each. So when correspondence documents are returned, for example, the extracts are prefixed with the names of both correspondent and addressee, while published works refer to the author wherever possible, regardless of whether the name appears in the description field. Technically this was more complex to implement, but the researcher’s task in identifying relevant results is thereby made simpler. Once the visual design was established, and detailed issues such as these fully worked through, the prototype was then ready to be used to inform the ‘back-end’ system design and construction. A major part of this phase of the process was to migrate the existing catalogue data from a desktop database file (Microsoft Access) to a platform more appropriate for deployment on the internet. Software such as Microsoft Access is widely used and perfectly suitable as a database in projects where only a small number of people need access. However, exposure over a larger network such as the internet requires a more complex technical architecture hosted on a computer built to act as a ‘server’. Three connected server software components were therefore used to construct the new web-based system: a relational database server (MySQL) to hold the full data records; a search engine (Verity) to index the data for optimized keyword searching; and an application server (Adobe ColdFusion) to allow the overall system to be programmed and deliver the results to the web. In addition to the public catalogue website, a private administration web application was also developed to allow the principal investigator of the project, Katharine Cockin, and her assistant to continue their work adding, checking and updating records. Since the database was now hosted on a central server, issues surrounding access to and versioning of the old database file disappeared,

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and editorial work could be carried out independently and from any location. Care was taken to ensure the administration user interface was sufficiently transparent and straightforward that no training in its operation was required. As well as allowing editing of individual records, the administrative system also provides for changes to the location of the physical archive boxes (currently shared between Smallhythe Place and the British Library) to be registered, and each record on the public website clearly displays where the original papers are currently held. Finally, one specially designed feature of the system as a whole is worthy of particular note. An issue common to retrieval systems with keyword-search interfaces is that of matching queries where a number of variations of a name or term may exist, not all of which may be present in all relevant records. For example, Terry’s third husband James Carew is often recorded as Jim Carew, and the main subjects themselves are referred to using a variety of pseudonyms and terms of endearment. Much work has been done in compiling the catalogue to expand abbreviations and infer dates and other elided details to enhance discoverability, but it is clearly not feasible to scan for and include all possible term equivalents within every record. To attempt to address this problem, library and other cataloguing systems routinely provide authority files: a centrally maintained reference which links preferred or authorized forms of a name or term with known equivalents. In the Ellen Terry and Edith Craig database a form of authority file system has been introduced which allows sets of equivalent terms, such as James Carew/Jim Carew, to be created and maintained via the administration system. These associations are passed to the live search mechanism which is then able to ensure that queries for just one of the terms also match records with any of the equivalents. Clearly these additional operations increase the complexity and processing time of each search handled by the system, but again the technical cost is worth bearing to ensure the database content is discoverable and the interface remains as simple and effective as possible for the end-user.

NOTES

The following abbreviations are used throughout the notes: BL British Library, London ETEC Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Archive SMA Ellen Terry Memorial Museum, Smallhythe Place (National Trust), Tenterden, Kent

Cockin, ‘Introduction: Ellen Terry and Her Circle’ 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

R. Foulkes (ed.), Henry Irving: A Re-evaluation of the Pre-eminent Victorian Actor-Manager (London: Ashgate 2008). L. Voskuil, Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2004), p. 183. Ibid., p. 185. Ellen Terry’s correspondence with George Bernard Shaw was published after her death. See G. G. Longstreth, ‘Epistolary Follies, Identity, Conversation and Performance in the Correspondence of Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw’, Shaw, 21 (2001), pp. 27–40. The ongoing eight-volume publication of her correspondence draws on all of the major holdings; see The Collected Letters of Ellen Terry, ed. K. Cockin, 8 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010–). V. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929), p. 53. N. Auerbach, Ellen Terry: Player in Her Time (London: Phoenix, 1987). M. Luckhurst and J. Moody, ‘Introduction: The Singularity of Theatrical Celebrity’, in M. Luckhurst and J. Moody (eds), Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000 (London: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 1–11, on p. 1. L. Woods, Transatlantic Stage Stars in Vaudeville and Variety: Celebrity Turns (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 3. Sir George Lewis (1833–1911) and his second wife, Lady Elizabeth Lewis, née Eberstadt; see Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. See Terry to Amy Ward, 19 June 1890, in The Collected Letters of Ellen Terry, vol. 2, letter 377. M. L. Quinn, ‘Celebrity and the Semiotics of Acting’, New Theatre Quarterly, 22: (May 1990), pp. 154–61, cited in Luckhurst and Moody, ‘Introduction’, p. 2. Rebecca West, ‘New Light on Ellen Terry’; ETEC SC9-G330, BL. L. Marcus, ‘In the Circle of the Lens’, Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 (Spring 2008), at http://jsse.revues.org/index702.html [accessed 30 September 2010].

– 161 –

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Notes to pages 4–10

14. L. Kazmier, ‘Her Final Performance: British Culture, Mourning and the Memorialization of Ellen Terry’, Mortality, 6:2 (2001), pp. 167–90, on p. 167. 15. ETEC EC-G1858, BL. 16. ETEC EC-G100, BL. 17. Terry’s physical intimacy in her performances was criticized by such critics as Henry James. 18. B. Stoker, Dracula (1897; Harmondsworth: Penguin 1993), p. 229. 19. Terry to Mrs Hill, January 1889, in The Collected Letters of Ellen Terry, vol. 2, letter 298. 20. See Chapter 2, p. 30, and Figure 2.1. 21. See E. K. Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 22. Voskuil, Acting Naturally, p. 206. 23. See G. Marshall, ‘Ellen Terry: Shakespearean Actress and Critic’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 11:3 (August 2004), pp. 355–64. 24. K. Cockin, ‘Slinging the Ink About: Ellen Terry and Women’s Suffrage Agitation’, in C. Bland and M. Cross (eds), Gender and Politics in the Age of Letter-Writing 1750–2000 (London: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 201–12, on p. 206. 25. K. Cockin, ‘Ellen Terry, the Ghost Writer and the Laughing Statue: The Victorian Actress, Letters and Life-Writing’, Journal of European Studies, 32 (2003), pp. 151–63. 26. Terry’s annotation; ETEC ET-D2218, BL. 27. See K. Cockin, ‘Ellen Terry and Henry Irving: A Working Partnership’, in Foulkes (ed.), Henry Irving, pp. 37–48. 28. V. Sanders, The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 16. 29. Ibid., p. 81. 30. Terry to Edward Gordon Craig, July 1890, in The Collected Letters of Ellen Terry, vol. 2, letter 384. 31. Edith Craig was the subject of a festschrift published two years after her death, E. Adlard (ed.), Edy: Recollections of Edith Craig (London: Frederick Muller, 1949); and she appears in M. Webster, The Same Only Different: Five Generations of a Great Theatre Family (London: Victor Gollancz, 1969). Craig’s work for women’s suffrage with the Pioneer Players drew the attention of feminist theatre critics and historians and featured notably in the unpublished theses of Mary Jane Watson (1970), Julie Holledge (1985), Laurie Wolf (1989), Katharine Cockin (1994) and Roberta Gandolfi (1995). Published work followed with: J. Holledge, Innocent Flowers: Actresses in the Edwardian Theatre (London: Virago, 1981); essays such as K. Cockin, ‘New Light on Edith Craig’, Theatre Notebook, 45:3 (1991), pp. 132–43; C. Dymkowski, ‘Entertaining Ideas: Edy Craig and the Pioneer Players’, in V. Gardner and S. Rutherford (eds), The New Woman and her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre 1850–1914 (London: Harvester, 1992), pp. 221–33; K. Cockin, ‘The Pioneer Players: Plays of/with Identity’, in G. Griffin (ed.), Difference in View: Women and Modernism (London: Taylor & Francis, 1994), pp. 142–54; J. Fisher, ‘Edy Craig and the Pioneer Players’ Production of Mrs Warren’s Profession’, Shaw, 15 (1995), pp. 37–56; L. Ferris, ‘The Female Self and Performance: The Case of The First Actress’, in K. Laughlin and C. Schuler (eds), Theatre and Feminist Aesthetics (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1995), pp. 242–57; Y. Chiba, ‘Kori Torahiko and Edith Craig: A Japanese Playwright in London and Toronto’, Comparative Drama, 30:4 (1996), pp. 431–51; K. Cockin, ‘Women’s Suffrage Drama’, in M. Joannou and J. Purvis (eds), The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives (Manchester:

Notes to pages 10–17

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Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 127–39; N. Hallett, Lesbian Lives: Identity and Auto/biography in the Twentieth Century (London: Pluto, 1999); K. Cockin, ‘Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Three Women: Work, Marriage and the Old(er) Woman’, in J. Rudd and V. Gough (eds), Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2000), pp. 74–92; and the monograph K. Cockin, Women and Theatre in the Age of Suffrage: The Pioneer Players 1911–25 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). Craig appears also in biographies of Ellen Terry, including J. Melville, Ellen and Edy: A Biography of Ellen Terry and her Daughter, Edith Craig, 1847–1947 (London: Pandora Press, 1987); and Auerbach, Ellen Terry. Craig’s biography was published by K. Cockin, Edith Craig (1869–1947): Dramatic Lives (London: Cassell, 1998). See also the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography essays by Katharine Cockin on Edith Craig, Christopher St John, Clare Atwood and Laurence Housman. More recently, see Roberta Gandolfi’s study of Edith Craig as a director, La prima regista: Edith Craig, fra rivoluzioni della scena e cultura delle donne (Rome: Bulzoni, 2003); P. Farfan, Women, Modernism and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); K. Cockin, ‘Cicely Hamilton’s Warriors: Dramatic Reinventions of Militancy in the British Women’s Suffrage Movement’, Women’s History Review, 14:3 (2005), pp. 527–42. Craig also appears in more recent biographies, notably J. Melville, Ellen Terry (London: Haus, 2006); and M. Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families (London: Chatto & Windus, 2008). 32. Cockin, Women and Theatre in the Age of Suffrage, ch. 8: ‘Towards an Art Theatre’, pp. 166–87. 33. The rationale for the production of plays, such as those by Paul Claudel, which foreground a female abject seems perplexing, given the Pioneer Players’ earlier commitment to women’s empowerment; see Cockin, Women and Theatre in the Age of Suffrage, pp. 226–7; and J. Glasgow, ‘What’s a Nice Lesbian Like You Doing in the Church of Torquemada? Raclyffe Hall and Other Catholic Converts’, in K. Jay and J. Glasgow (eds), Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions (New York: New York University Press, 1990; 1992), pp. 242–54.

1 Auerbach, ‘Ellen Terry’s Lost Lives’ 1. 2.

Quoted in M. Peters, Mrs. Pat: The Life of Mrs. Patrick Campbell (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), p. 138. Quoted in Holledge, Innocent Flowers, p. 162.

2 Wynne, ‘Ellen Terry, Bram Stoker and The Lyceum’s Vampires’ 1.

2.

Quoted in B. Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula (1996; London: Phoenix, 1997), p. 275. The letter is located in the Brotherton Library of the University of Leeds in the Correspondence and Literary Manuscripts of Bram Stoker. See Belford, Bram Stoker, p. 5. Although Auerbach notes the link she reads it more in terms of performance. Ellen Terry: Player in Her Time (London: W. W. Norton, 1987), pp. 199–201. See also N. Auerbach, Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 79–80. Jeffrey Richards notes how the actor is associated with Dracula in Sir Henry Irving: A Victorian Actor and His World (London: Hambledon & London, 2005), p. 158. My consideration of the relationship between Stoker and Irving will be fully examined in future work.

164 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Notes to pages 17–23 G. Marshall, Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 181. Quoted in D. J. Skal, ‘Fatal Image: The Artist, the Actress, and “The Vampire”’, in D. J. Skal (ed.), Vampires: Encounters with the Undead (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2001), pp. 223–57, on p. 239. R. Kipling, ‘The Vampire’, in Recessional and Other Poems (New York and Boston, MA: T. Y. Crowell, [1919]), pp. 3–5, on p. 3. See D. Glover, Vampires, Mummies and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 7. C. St. John, Ellen Terry (London: John Lane and Bodley Head, 1907), p. 44. J. Moynahan, Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 111. B. Stoker, ‘The Chain of Destiny’, in B. Stoker, Dracula’s Guest and Other Stories (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2006), pp. 159–96, on p. 165. B. Stoker, Dracula (1897), ed. N. Auerbach and D. J. Skal, Norton Critical Editions (New York and London: Norton, 1997), p. 13. O. Wilde, ‘Fabien dei Franchi’, ll. 1–9, in Poems (Boston, MA: Roberts Brothers, 1881), p. 165. Wilde, ‘Queen Henrietta Maria’, ll. 3, 10, in Poems, p. 168. P. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). S. Shepherd, ‘Pauses of Mutual Agitation’, in J. Bratton, J. Cook and C. Gledhill (eds), Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen (London: British Film Institute, 1994), pp. 25–37, on p. 25; D. Gerould, ‘Melodrama and Revolution’, in ibid., pp. 185–98, on p. 185. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 18. Ibid., p. 20. M. W. Disher, Blood and Thunder: Mid-Victorian Melodrama and Its Origins (London: Frederick Muller, 1949), p. 95. B. Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving 2 vols (London: William Heinemann, 1906), vol. 2, p. 190. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 30. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 31, 33. E. Terry, The Story of My Life (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1908), p. 79. See W. G. Wills, ‘Olivia: Drama in Four Acts’, Lord Chamberlain’s Collection of Plays, BL. Terry, The Story of My Life, pp. 76–7. Cockin, Edith Craig, p. 51. Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History, p. 1. Ibid., p. 2. D. Salter, ‘Henry Irving, the “Dr Freud” of Melodrama’, in J. Redmond (ed.), Melodrama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 161–82, on pp. 161–2. Stoker, Personal Reminiscences, vol. 1, p. 147. B. Stoker, ‘The Theatre Royal – The Pantomime, Dresses, &c’, [Dublin] Evening Mail, 6 January 1872, p. 4. ‘The Lyceum Faust’, 21 September 1885, Percy Fitzgerald Collection, Garrick Club, vol. 6, p. 375. Stoker, Dracula, p. 122. W. Winter, Shakespeare on the Stage (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912), p. 223.

Notes to pages 23–9

165

33. W. G. Wills, Faust in Prologue and Five Acts: Adapted and Arranged for the Theatre (London, 1886), p. 40. 34. M. R. Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre, 1850–1910 (Boston, MA, and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 104. 35. Terry, The Story of My Life, pp. 243, 239. 36. St John, Ellen Terry, p. 62. 37. Stoker, Personal Reminiscences, vol. 1, p. 181. 38. Stoker, Dracula, p. 192. 39. Ibid., p. 193. 40. Herman Merivale, ‘Ravenswood: A Drama in Four Acts’, p. 9, MS Lord Chamberlain’s Collection of Plays, BL. 41. Ibid., p. 35. 42. W. G. Robertson, Time Was: The Reminiscences of W. Graham Robertson (1931; London: Hamish Hamilton, 1945), p. 155. 43. E. B. Rosenman, ‘“Mimic Sorrows”: Masochism and the Gendering of Pain in Victorian Melodrama’, Studies in the Novel, 35 (Spring 2003), pp. 22–43, on pp. 23–4. 44. See C. Wynne, ‘Introduction’, in C. Wynne (ed.), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Parasite and Bram Stoker’s The Watter’s Mou’ (Kansas City, KS: Valancourt, 2009), pp. viii–xxxviii, on p. xxxvi. 45. Stoker, Personal Reminiscences, vol. 2, p. 79. 46. Ibid. 47. Terry, The Story of My Life, p. 207. 48. Stoker, Dracula, p. 159. 49. Ibid., p. 160. 50. Marshall, Actresses on the Victorian Stage, p. 181. 51. Stoker, Dracula, p. 160. 52. T. E. Pemberton, Ellen Terry and Her Sisters (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1902), p. 280. 53. Stoker, Personal Reminiscences, vol. 1, p. 195. 54. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 193–4. 55. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 191. 56. Auerbach, Ellen Terry, p. 254. 57. Mrs P. Campbell, My Life and Some Letters (London: Hutchinson, [1922]), p. 345. 58. B. Stoker, Snowbound: The Record of a Theatrical Company (1908), ed. B. Wightman (Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex: Desert Island Books, 2000), p. 23. 59. Melville, Ellen Terry, p. 118. 60. Stoker, Personal Reminiscences, vol. 2, op. p. 206. 61. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 206. Katharine Cockin examines Lyceum relationships in familial terms. See, for instance, Cockin, ‘Ellen Terry and Henry Irving’. 62. Pamela Colman Smith to Bram Stoker, 9 August 1911, Correspondence and Literary Manuscripts of Bram Stoker, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. In this collection there are several letters from other women associated with the theatre who address Stoker in avuncular terms. See, for instance, the playwright Lucy Clifford’s unpublished letters to Stoker, dated 16 July 1897 and 15 November 1911; the actress Maude Fealy’s letter, dated 18 January 1905; and Violet Hunt’s letter, dated 19 July 1902. With thanks to the British Academy for funding this research. 63. For a discussion of this, see Cockin, Edith Craig, p. 38. Cockin notes that the friendship between Craig and Smith ‘cemented’ during the Lyceum’s 1895 North American tour

166

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76.

Notes to pages 29–36 (ibid.). For the illustration, see Terry, The Story of My Life, pp. 318–19. The illustration is entitled ‘Sir Henry Irving and Miss Ellen Terry on one of their last provincial tours’. Stoker, Snowbound, pp. 32–3. Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 37. Cockin, Edith Craig, p. 56. Stoker, Dracula, p. 55. Shakespeare, Hamlet, I.iii.50. Stoker, Snowbound, p. 145. For a description of ‘star traps’ and ‘vampire traps’, see P. Fitzgerald, The World Behind the Scenes (London: Chatto & Windus, 1881), p. 58. Belford, Bram Stoker, p. 285. With many thanks to Katharine Cockin for alerting me to Smith’s illustration of the ‘Bramy Joker’. See also Cockin, Edith Craig, pp. 52–3. The illustration is located in the Edith Craig Archive, Smallhythe Place, Kent. Stoker, Dracula, p. 39.

3 Gould, ‘Ellen Terry and G. F. Watts’ 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

Shakespeare, Hamlet, III.i.160. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. M. M. Innes (London: Penguin, 1955), p. 126. Letters from G. F. Watts to Lady Constance Leslie, 1864, Leslie Papers K/6/1, Castle Leslie; to J. P. Martineau, 13 December 1876, Watts Gallery. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, ed. E. Craig and C. St John (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933), p. 43. N. Auerbach, Ellen Terry: Player in Her Time (London: Dent, 1987), p. 17. Robertson Time Was (1931; London: Quartet, 1981), p. 54. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, pp. 7–8. D-7, SMA. Manuscript Catalogue of Watts Portraits, Watts Gallery, 101a. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, p. 38. M. S. Watts, George Frederic Watts: The Annals of an Artist’s Life, 3 vols (London: Macmillan, 1912), vol. 3, pp. 99–146. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, p. 16. Unnamed news cuttings, Kate Terry album, fol. 27. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, p. 34. D. Harbron, The Conscious Stone (London: Latimer House, 1949), pp. 37–8; Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, p. 38. The Times, 22 June 1863. Watts, George Frederic Watts, vol. 1, pp. 20, 26, 41, 45. E. Barrington, Reminiscences of G. F. Watts (London: George Allen, 1905), pp. 100–1; Manuscript Catalogue of Watts Portraits, 167b; V. F. Gould, G. F. Watts: The Last Great Victorian (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 37, pl. 6. E. A. Craig, Gordon Craig: The Story of his Life (London: Victor Gollancz, 1968), p. 36; COMWG.284, Watts Gallery. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, pp. 39–40.

Notes to pages 36–40

167

21. The Sisters (1863–4), Eastnor Castle Collection; Manuscript Catalogue of Watts Portraits, 153a; B. Bryant, G. F. Watts Portraits: Fame and Beauty in Victorian Society (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2004), pp. 132–3; Gould, G. F. Watts, p. 64. 22. Terry’s amended copy of The Story of My Life, p. 53. 23. Isaiah 21:11–12. 24. Barrington, Reminiscences of G. F. Watts, p. 35. 25. Shakespeare, Hamlet, I.iii.45–6; Manuscript Catalogue of Watts Subject Pictures, Watts Gallery, 159a; V. F. Gould (ed.), The Vision of G. F. Watts (Compton: Watts Gallery, 2004), pp. 12, 60. 26. Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence, ed. C. St John (1931; London: Reinhardt, 1949), p. 111; R. Manvell, Ellen Terry (London: William Heinemann, 1968), pp. 46–7. 27. Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw, p. xv; G. F. Watts to Martineau, 13 December 1876, sketchbook COMWG200.213, Watts Gallery; Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, p. 40. 28. Terry to G. B. Shaw, 7 November 1896, in Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw, p. 111; Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, p. 40; Craig, Gordon Craig, p. 34. 29. Manuscript Catalogue of Watts Portraits, 127c; Bryant, G. F. Watts, pp. 116–17, cat. 37; Gould, G. F. Watts, p. 57. 30. G. F. Watts to Lady Constance Leslie, 1864, Castle Leslie. 31. E. G. Craig, Ellen Terry and Her Secret Self (London: Sampson, Low, Marston & Co., 1931), p. 22. 32. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, p. 42. 33. T. Taylor to G. Weldon, 13 February [1864], courtesy of the Treherne family. 34. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, pp. 43, 51. 35. Manuscript Catalogue of Watts Portraits, 27c. 36. V. F. Gould, Tennyson at Farringford (Freshwater: Farringford House Press, 2009), pp. 55–6, cat. 69; NT/SMA/PH/2260–1, SMA. 37. H. Gernsheim, Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work (London: Gordon Fraser, 1975), p. 79. 38. Quoted in ibid., pp. 173–4; J. Cox and C. Ford, Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003), pp. 267–9, cats 496–7. 39. Barrington, Reminiscences of G. F. Watts, p. 35. 40. G. B. Shaw, in Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw, p. xi; Manuscript Catalogue of Watts Portraits, 155b. 41. M. Hughes to J. E. Senior, March 1864, Milne Collier Papers, private collection; G. F. Watts to J. E. Senior, n.d., private collection. 42. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, p. 42. 43. COMWG2007.697; Manuscript Catalogue of Watts Subject Pictures, 92–4. 44. Laertes to Ophelia in Hamlet, I.iii.5–10. 45. The Times, 30 April 1864, p. 14; Athenaeum, 7 May 1864, p. 651. 46. Manuscript Catalogue of Watts Subject Pictures, 145a–b. 47. Public Record Office, COPY 1/6/941, 30 June 1864. Cox and Ford, Julia Margaret Cameron, pp. 267–9, cats 496–9. 48. Manuscript Catalogue of Watts Portraits, 158a; Manuscript Catalogue of Watts Subject Pictures, 26b. 49. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, pp. 44–5. 50. Held in a private collection. 51. Watts, George Frederic Watts, vol. 2, p. 100; Gould, G. F. Watts, pp. 72–3.

168

Notes to pages 40–5

52. J. Ruskin to G. F. Watts, 14 May 1864, MS Eng.lett.c.50, f. 191, Bodleian Library. Manuscript Catalogue of Watts Subject Pictures, 3a, 29–31; Watts, George Frederic Watts, vol. 2, p. 219. 53. G. F. Watts to J. E. Senior, Monday, private collection. 54. Ibid. 55. Watts Gallery. 56. Barrington, Reminiscences of G. F. Watts, p. 36. 57. Shakespeare, Hamlet, IV.vii.166. 58. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, p. 41. 59. Later Letters of Edward Lear to Chichester Fortescue (Lord Carlingford), Frances Countess Waldegrave and others, ed. Lady Strachey (London: Unwin, 1911), p. 47. 60. T. Taylor to S. Terry, 25 November 1864, ETEC ET-Z1,479, BL. 61. Deed of Separation, 26 January 1865, Watts Gallery; Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, pp. 44, 114–15. 62. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 63. Terry to Mary-Anne Hall, 3 February [1865], in The Collected Letters of Ellen Terry, vol. 1, letter 1. 64. Manuscript Catalogue of Watts Subject Pictures, 71–3. 65. Athenaeum, 6 May 1865. 66. Watts Gallery. 67. D. Loshak, ‘G. F. Watts and Ellen Terry’, Burlington Magazine, 728:105 (November 1863), pp. 376–86, 484–5. 68. Manuscript Catalogue of Watts Subject Pictures, 54c, 160b–c; WAG 2135, Watts Gallery; Gould, The Vision of G. F. Watts, pp. 22–3, 73, cat. 68. 69. Ovid, Metamorphoses, p. 226; Manuscript Catalogue of Watts Subject Pictures, 111–13; Athenaeum, 28 December 1867, p. 899. 70. Art-Journal (1868), p. 110. 71. Gould, G. F. Watts, pp. 90–1; Gould, The Vision of G. F. Watts, pp. 42–3, 58. 72. Manuscript Catalogue of Watts Subject Pictures, 58a; Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History, pp. 1–2. 73. Manuscript Catalogue of Watts Subject Pictures, 42; Gould, The Vision of G. F. Watts, pp. 14–15, 55. 74. Plato’s Republic, ed. B. Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), book X, p. 273. 75. Milton, Paradise Lost, III.380. 76. Manuscript Catalogue of Watts Subject Pictures, 46–9, 145–7. 77. E. Terry, Four Lectures on Shakespeare, ed C. St John (New York and London: Benjamin Blom, 1932), p. 165. 78. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, pp. 120–1. 79. Robertson, Time Was, p. 55; ‘Portia’, ll. 5–8, in Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays including De Profundis (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1997), p. 840. 80. G. F. Watts to Terry, Monday (n.d), ETEC ET-Z1,574, BL. 81. Terry to G. F. Watts, 1 July 1883, in The Collected Letters of Ellen Terry, vol. 1, letter 90. 82. G. F. Watts to Terry, 19 July 1883, ETEC ET-Z1,557, BL. 83. G. F. Watts to Terry, 10 July 1883, ETEC ET-Z1,556, BL. 84. G. F. Watts to Terry (fragment), n.d., ETEC ET-Z1,573, BL. 85. Watts Gallery. 86. Gould, The Vision of G. F. Watts, p. 65, cat. 52.

Notes to pages 45–52

169

87. Terry to Stephen Coleridge, [October 1884?], in The Collected Letters of Ellen Terry, vol. 1, letter 106. 88. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of The Loan Collection of Paintings by George Frederick Watts RA of London (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1884); Terry to Coleridge, [October 1884?]. 89. G. F. Watts to Terry, 26 April 1886, ETEC ET-Z1,568, BL. 90. G. F. Watts to Terry, envelope postmarked 6 July 1886, ETEC ET-Z1,579, BL. 91. Terry to Lady Constance Leslie, 1893, Castle Leslie. 92. Manuscript Catalogue of Watts Subject Pictures, 92a; Gould, The Vision of G. F. Watts, pp. 18–19, 82, cat. 96. 93. Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw, p. 213. 94. Ibid., pp. 152–5; Craig, Ellen Terry and Her Secret Self, p. 24.

4 Bloodworth, ‘The Burden of Eternal Youth’ 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

The International Congress of Women (London: Fisher Unwin, 1900), p. 194. Clotilde Graves (1863–1932) replaced the intended speaker Mrs Beerbohm Tree in the professional section of the International Congress: ‘Women in Professions’. The section ‘The Drama as a Field for Women’ was chaired by the actress Margaret Kendal, more commonly known as ‘Madge’. The International Congress of Women, p. 195. In 1921 Genevieve Ward (1837–1922) became the first actress to become a Dame of the British Empire (DBE). The International Congress of Women, p. 191. Ibid., p. 195. Ibid., pp. 191–3. Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History, p. 344. In Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan 2005), p. 100, Kate Newey discusses those, including Clotilde Graves and Lucette Ryley, who were representative of many women writing for the stage at that time. C. Graves, Mistress of the Robes (1902), Lord Chamberlain’s Collection of Plays, BL. Who Was Who in Theatre: 1912–1976, 4 vols (Detroit, MI: Gale Research Co., 1978), vol. 2, p. 985. Alfred Perceval Graves and Robert Graves were also second cousins. C. Graves, Nitocris (Drury Lane, 2 November 1887), Lord Chamberlain’s Collection of Plays, Add. MS 53386E. J. H. Barnes, Forty Years on the Stage: Others (Principally) and Myself (London: Chapman Hall, 1914), p. 152. Ibid., p. 152. Ironically, Graves offered £100 of her own money to the actor William Terris to accept the role of Phedaspes, which he declined, before Barnes accepted the role. Judy: The Only Jones (16 November 1887), p. 232, Newspaper Collections, Colindale, BL. Clotilde Graves’s dramatic output continued unabated, across several genres, during the 1890s and early 1900s, concluding with the publication of her most successful novel, The Dop Doctor (1910), under the pseudonym Richard Dehan. Despite continuing to publish other novels and volumes of short stories up until her death, she would never replicate the phenomenal success of the South African masterpiece. The last twenty years of her life were spent, through ill-health, as a resident invalid at a Catholic convent in Middlesex, where she subsequently died in December 1932.

170

Notes to pages 52–7

17. J. Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids (London: HarperCollins 1989). 18. Graves’s work is littered with examples of cross-dressed women, notably Mrs Murgatroyd in A Mother of Three (1896). There is no evidence to suggest that Graves was connected in any way with either Christopher St John or other cross-dressers in her circle. 19. Clotilde Graves to Augustin Daly, 17 January 1893, YC4345 (14), Folger Shakespeare Library. 20. Auerbach, Ellen Terry (Norton), p. 5. 21. See Clotilde Graves to Mr H. F. C. Marshall, 18 March 1930 and 2 April 1930, Harry Ransom Research Centre, University of Texas. 22. One example is the short story A Well-Meaning Woman, which was adapted as a comedy in collaboration with Gertrude Kingston and staged as A Matchmaker (1896). In 1916, the play had become a novel entitled A Gilded Vanity. 23. Clotilde Graves to Edith Craig, 25 March 1895, ETEC EC-Z3,292, BL Loan MS 125/2/1. 24. Auerbach, Ellen Terry, p. 381. 25. Clotilde Graves to Henry Irving, 2 May 1895, Special Collections, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. Letters from Clotilde Graves to Henry Irving and Bram Stoker are quoted with kind permission of the University of Leeds, Brotherton collection, MS 19C Stoker. 26. Clotilde Graves to Bram Stoker, 7 May 1895, Brotherton Library. 27. Clotilde Graves to Henry Irving, 9 May 1895, Brotherton Library. 28. Terry, The Story of My Life, p. 325. 29. Penny Illustrated, 24 October 1903, p. 270. This is the only evidence of Graves having written the play specifically for Terry. 30. Ruritania is a fictional country in central Europe and the location for Anthony Hope’s trilogy, which included The Prisoner of Zenda (1894). It lent its name to a genre of romantic novels set in small, imagined kingdoms, including the Graustark novels by George Barr McCutcheon. 31. Heliotrope is a plant (from helios: Greek for sun; and tropein: to turn) and a colour traditionally worn by the Victorians as half-mourning during the last stage of mourning etiquette. In Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, Act I, Mrs Cheveley is described by Lord Goring as ‘that woman in heliotrope’. 32. Stoker, Personal Reminiscences, vol. 2, p. 195. 33. Dundee Courier, 5 February 1904. 34. Graves, Mistress of the Robes, Act II, p. 2; ETEC, SCB15/H6, BL Loan MS 125/67/1. 35. See The Letters of Lewis Carroll, ed. M. N. Cohen with R. L. Green, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1979), vol. 2, pp. 1014–16. 36. Graves, Mistress of the Robes, Act IV, p. 5. 37. M. Steen, A Pride of Terrys: Family Saga (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1962), p. 257. The play, Mistress Wilful, had been purchased for their daughter, Phyllis, but instead she left to complete an American tour, providing opportunity for her mother to adopt the part. 38. Quoted in Manvell, Ellen Terry, p. 225. 39. Graves, Mistress of the Robes, Act II, p. 13. 40. Quoted in Auerbach, Ellen Terry, p. 441. 41. Stoker, Personal Reminiscences, vol. 2, p. 204. 42. Quoted in Manvell, Ellen Terry, pp. 229–30.

Notes to pages 58–62

171

43. Grand Theatre Swansea Programme, 10–15 October 1903, Craig/Terry archive, D258– 283, Loan MS 125/22/2, BL. 44. Photograph dated 1903, ETEC, NT/SMA/PH/2881, SMA. 45. Steen, A Pride of Terrys, p. 261. 46. Ibid., p. 308. 47. Ibid., p. 291. 48. Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History, p. 352. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., p. 413. 51. Ibid., p. 300. 52. Liverpool Evening Express 3 November 1903, p. 6. 53. Auerbach, Ellen Terry, p. 233. 54. 6 November 1903, Loan MS 125/22/2 & 3, BL. 55. The Liverpool Entertainment and Pleasure Programme, 30 October 1903, vol. 1, Ed. No. 9, p. 2, Newspaper Collections, Colindale, BL. 56. There is nothing to suggest that HRH Princess Louise attended the play. 57. Liverpool Evening Express 5 November 1903, p. 6. 58. The Liverpool Entertainment and Pleasure Programme, 6 November 1903, vol. 1, Ed. No. 10, p. 2. 59. Ibid. 60. Clotilde Graves to Edith Craig, n.d., ETEC, EC-Z3-293, Loan MS 125/2/1, BL. Somewhat surprisingly Graves declines, advising Edith that she is moving house. 61. Newcastle Daily Journal 26 March 1904, p. 6. 62. There is very little information regarding the design or production of Terry’s wardrobe. However, the Newcastle Daily Journal, 26 March 1904, reported a costume produced by Fenwick of Newcastle which, ‘was often referred to by the society papers when worn in London. Fenwick without exception has always made some unique garment for Miss Ellen Terry when she has visited the north’ (p. 6). 63. Ibid. 64. Dundee Courier, 5 February 1904, p. 4. 65. Portsmouth Times, 23 January 1904, p. 5. 66. Dundee Courier, 6 February 1904, p. 6. 67. Dundee Advertiser, 5 February 1904, p. 2. 68. Ibid. 69. In 1887 Graves wrote Puss In Boots for Sir Augustus Harris at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. It was attributed to E. L. Blanchard. 70. Graves, Mistress of the Robes, Act I, p. 2. 71. Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), in his study of folk culture and popular humour, coined the phrase Carnivalesque; the world turnedupside-down. 72. Graves, Mistress of the Robes, Act I, p. 19; ETEC, SCB15-H2/4, Loan MS 125/67/1, BL. 73. Graves, Mistress of the Robes, Act IV, p. 12. 74. Ibid., Act I, p. 17; ETEC, SCB15-H1, Loan MS 125/67/1, BL. 75. ETEC, SCB15-H6, p. 8, BL. 76. ETEC, SCB15-H8, p. 6, BL. 77. Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History, p. 330. 78. Auerbach, Ellen Terry, p. 276.

172

Notes to pages 62–9

79. Graves, Mistress of the Robes, Act I, p. 1; ETEC, SCB15-H5, Loan MS 125/67/1, BL. The script has been written in red and lists full cast suggestions. 80. Graves, Mistress of the Robes, Act IV, p. 13. 81. Ibid., Act IV, p. 21; ETEC, SCB15/H8, Loan MS 125/67/1, BL. 82. The Mistress of the Robes was eventually replaced on the programme by another new play, Christopher St John’s The Good Hope. 83. The Nottingham critic advised that some of ‘the allusions in it are too recondite for a provincial audience, but, take it on the whole, there is much … to provide a pleasant evening’s entertainment’. ‘Miss Ellen Terry’s Visit. “The Mistress of the Robes”’, Nottingham Evening News, 16 April 1904, n.p., Local Studies Library, Nottingham Central Library. 84. Henry Irving, quoted in Manvell, Ellen Terry, p. 247. 85. Dundee Advertiser, 5 February 1904, p. 2. 86. Ibid. 87. Auerbach, Ellen Terry, p. 25. 88. Clotilde Graves to Edith Craig, 31 January 1929, ETEC, (A) Z3,102/1, Loan MS 125/2/1, BL. 89. Ibid.

5 Kelly, ‘The After Voice of Ellen Terry’ 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

V. Woolf, ‘Ellen Terry’ (8 February 1941), in Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, 4 vols (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), vol. 4, pp. 67–72, on p. 67. Terry, Four Lectures, pp. 81, 97–8. In her book Women, Modernism, and Performance, Farfan argues that Woolf ’s only play, Freshwater, uses Ellen Terry as the historical model for its fictional heroine, whose flight from Victorian Freshwater to Bloomsbury in the play represents Terry’s rejection of Victorian convention and ‘the promise of the birth of modernism’, p. 53. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs with a Preface, Notes, and Additional Biographical Chapters, ed. E. Craig and C. St John (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1932), p. 293. Terry, Four Lectures, p. 81. See ETEC ET-SC22, BL. Quoted in Melville, Ellen Terry, p. 209. C. St John, ‘Introduction’, in Terry, Four Lectures, pp. 7–24, on p. 11. Terry’s pride in her writing is evident in the case of an article, ‘American Impressions’, she authored for McClure’s Magazine and to which unwelcome editorial changes had been made. She insisted that the editors restore her original words. See A. P. Watt to Terry, 6 July 1908, ETEC ET PROGS ET-D2000-2381, 6, BL. E. Terry, MS copy of ‘The Women of Shakespeare’, ET-Z2,004/1, p. 2 of 15 (handwritten fragment), BL. Terry, Four Lectures, p. 81. Quoted in Auerbach, Ellen Terry (Norton), p. 177. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs with a Preface, pp. 295–6. ‘Warm Welcome for Miss Ellen Terry’, New York Times, 4 November 1910, n.p. Farfan, Women, Modernism, and Performance, p. 7, has made a similar argument about Terry’s lectures as embodying a contradiction between her ‘utopian’ anti-realist vision of theatre as ‘larger-than-life’, and her ‘own lived experience as the … leading lady of … Henry Irving’. Terry, Four Lectures, pp. 28–9.

Notes to pages 69–79 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

173

Ibid., pp. 96–7. Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., pp. 16–18. The Vote, 25 February 1911, p. 217. These and the following quotes from critics appear to have been hand copied on the back of printed paper in Christopher St John’s hand. No date or page numbers are provided. See Box ET-SC9, BL (SC9-M1). Ellen Terry’s Memoirs with a Preface, p. 78. François Alexandre Nicolas Chéri Delsarte created a style of acting attempting to connect the actor’s inner feeling with gestures based upon his or her observation of human interaction. It was eventually supplanted by the method of Constantin Stanislavski. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs with a Preface, p. 12. Mrs Charles Kean also instructed Terry in elocution while she performed as a very young girl at the Princess’s Theatre. See ibid., p. 13. The Vote, 30 October 1909, n.p. Votes for Women, 25 November 1910, p. 135. M. Morrison, ‘Performing the Pure Voice: Elocution, Verse Recitation, and Modernist Poetry in Prewar London’, Modernism/Modernity, 13:3 (1996), pp. 25–50, on p. 25. Historical recordings of Terry reciting lines from Shakespeare are available on the worldwide web. One such recording has been posted to youtube synchronized with a silent short Pathé documentary of Terry made in tribute to her being named a Dame of the British Empire. ‘Lecture II Some of Shakespeare’s Heroines’, ‘2. The Pathetic Women’. ET SC10-H2, BL. Terry, Four Lectures, p. 167. C. Kahn, ‘Remembering Shakespeare Imperially: The 1916 Tercentenary’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 52:4 (Winter 2001), pp. 456–78. Antony Taylor here summarizes Anne Janowitz’s argument. See A. Taylor, ‘Shakespeare and Radicalism: the Uses and Abuses of Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century Popular Politics’, Historical Journal, 45:2 (2002), pp. 357–79, on p. 358. Ibid., p. 371. British Empire Shakespeare Society, Official Report, 1910 (London, 1910), p. 4. Reference to Edith Craig as adjudicator of the BESS elocution contest can be found in ETEC EC-G1400, EC-G1399, and EC-G1394, BL. S. Carlson, ‘The Suffrage Shrew: The Shakespeare Festival, “A Man’s Play, and New Women”’, in J. Bate, J. L. Levenson and D. Mehl (eds), Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century, the Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Los Angeles, 1996 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1998), pp. 85–102, on p. 94. Quoted in ibid., p. 94.

6 Holroyd, ‘Introduction: Edward Gordon Craig’ 1. 2. 3. 4.

M. Holroyd, Guardian, 7 March 2009. ‘Reflections and Remarks on Human Life’, XIV, in The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, 25 vols (London: Chatto & Windus, 1911–12), vol. 16, p. 363. Shakespeare, Hamlet , II.ii.530. Craig, Gordon Craig, p. 330.

174 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Notes to pages 79–86 T. S. Eliot, ‘Gordon Craig’s Socratic Dialogues’, Drama, n.s. 36 (Spring 1955), pp. 16–21, on p. 18. M. Kustow, Peter Brook: A Biography (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), p. 56. Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History, p. 520. Johannes Poulsen, quoted in J. Leeper, Edward Gordon Craig: Designs for the Theatre (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948), p. 30. K. Tynan, ‘Gordon Craig’, in Profiles (1989; London: Nick Hern Books, 1990), p. 105. Edward Gordon Craig to Terry, 1908, quoted in Craig on Theatre, ed. J. M. Walton (1983; London: Methuen, 1999), p. 80. Craig, Gordon Craig, p. 339. P. Brook, ‘The Influence of Gordon Craig in Theory and Practice’, Drama, n.s. 36 (Summer 1955), pp. 32–6, on p. 34. Craig, Gordon Craig, p. 220. Brook, ‘The Influence of Gordon Craig’, p. 33.

7 Walton, ‘E. W. G. and E. G. C.’ 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

From Edward Gordon Craig’s notebook entitled ‘Confessions 1901–2–3’ and first published in Craig, Gordon Craig, pp. 141–2. Publication of this quotation is with permission of the Edward Gordon Craig Estate. ‘The Silver Swan’ was a song by Orlando Gibbons with which his mother Ellen Terry would sometimes sing her son to sleep. Edward William Godwin was not related to the earlier William Godwin, philosopher, novelist and father of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Craig, Gordon Craig, p. 142. Craig, Ellen Terry and her Secret Self, p. 56. Craig, Gordon Craig, p. 50. It was Edy who first picked on the surname ‘Craig’ for the two siblings, after the Scottish island Ailsa Craig, and in protest at being known as Wardell. She was christened Edith Geraldine Craig in 1887, her brother Edward Henry Gordon Craig (E. G. C.) the following year when he was sixteen. See Craig, Gordon Craig, pp. 57–8, 77. Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History, p. 79. There had been a celebrated production of Sophocles’s Antigone staged in Potsdam in 1841 which subsequently toured the world, ending up at Covent Garden in an English translation, in 1845. See E. Hall and F. Macintosh, Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 317–21, 575–6. From West’s introduction to the manuscript; see J. M. Walton, Found in Translation: Greek Drama in English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 242. For the history of Greek and Greek-influenced drama on the British stage, see Hall and Macintosh, Greek Tragedy, who suggest that this was the first serious attempt to stage Greek drama in Greek since the Renaissance (p. 453). For the history of Greek drama translated into English, see Walton, Found in Translation. J. Todhunter, Helena in Troas (London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1886), ll. 1–4. E. G. Craig, Index to the Story of My Days (New York: Viking Press Inc., 1957), pp. 72–3. Craig was himself to direct and design Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at Hampstead Conservatoire in 1900. Craig, Ellen Terry and her Secret Self, p. vii.

Notes to pages 86–93

175

14. See, in particular, O. Taxidou, The Mask: A Periodical Performance by Edward Gordon Craig (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998), ch. 2, pp. 23–48. 15. Terry, The Story of My Life, p. 79. 16. Charles Kean, Eton-educated and a stickler for historical accuracy, was far less influential in Victorian theatre than his father, the actor Edmund Kean, famously praised by Coleridge: ‘To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning’ (E. T. Coleridge, Table Talk, 2nd edn (London: John Murray, 1836), 27 April 1823, p. 13). 17. The Mask, 1:8 (1908), p. 158. These reprints were variously published in the following editions of The Mask: (from 1875) vol. 1:3–4, pp. 75–80; vol. 1:6, pp. 112–15; vol. 1:7, pp. 134–9; vol. 1:8, pp. 156–8; vol. 1:10, pp. 192–9; vol. 1:11, pp. 216–18; vol. 2:4–6, pp. 77–81; vol. 2:7–9, pp. 127–30; vol. 2:10–12, pp. 165–70; vol. 3:1–3, pp. 18–21, 73–6; vol. 4:2, pp. 102–6; vol. 4:3, pp. 191–6; vol. 4:4, pp. 286–8; vol. 5:2, pp. 163–6; vol. 5:3, pp. 199–204; vol. 5:4, pp. 353–60; (from 1868) vol. 6:4, pp. 335–53. 18. From the Architect, 30 September 1876, reprinted in Is Mr Ruskin Living Too Long?: Selected Writings of E. W. Godwin on Victorian Architecture, Design and Culture, ed. J. Kinchin and P. Stirton (Oxford: White Cockade, 2005), p. 332. 19. E. W. Godwin, ‘Archaeology on the Stage: Part I’, Dramatic Review, 8 February 1885, pp. 19–20. The whole article is reprinted in Is Mr Ruskin Living Too Long?, pp. 335–6. 20. Terry, The Story of My Life, pp. 45–6, 102, 150, 198. Nor do any personal letters between them survive. 21. See L. Senelick, Gordon Craig’s Moscow Hamlet (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982) for the fraught collaboration between Craig and Stanislavski which culminated in the production of Hamlet at the Moscow Art Theatre in January 1912. 22. Sixty-six pseudonyms, discounting variant spelling, were listed in his distinctive handwriting in his own copy of volume 1 of The Mask. The list is reproduced in I. K. Fletcher and A. Rood, Edward Gordon Craig: A Bibliography (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1967), p. 62. 23. The Mask, 6 (April 1914), with illustrations, pp. 335–53. 24. The Mask, 1:3–4 (May–June 1908), p. 75. 25. The Mask, 3:4–6 (October 1910), p. 53. 26. Ibid., p. 56. 27. Ibid., p. 53. 28. From a letter of 1908, published in Craig on Theatre, p. 80. 29. From Craig’s essay ‘The Actor and the Über-Marionette’, The Mask, 1:2 (1907), p. 3; reprinted in Craig on Theatre, p. 82. 30. Taxidou, The Mask, p. 34. 31. Craig, Index, 12 June 1906, p. 287.

8 Foulkes, ‘Lewis Carroll, Ellen Terry and the Stage Career of Menella “Minna” Quinn’ 1. 2. 3.

R. Foulkes, Lewis Carroll and the Victorian Stage Theatricals in a Quiet Life (Basingstoke: Ashgate, 2005). M. N. Cohen, ‘The Actress and the Don’, in E. Guiliano (ed.), Lewis Carroll: A Celebration (New York: Clarkson & Potter, 1982), pp. 1–14. Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, ed. E. Wakeling, 10 vols (London: Lewis Carroll Society, 1993– 2007), vol. 2, p. 83.

176 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Notes to pages 93–100 Ibid., vol. 9, p. 335. Cockin, Edith Craig, p. 43. Terry, The Story of My Life, p. 357; Foulkes, Lewis Carroll and the Victorian Stage, pp. 138–97. T. C. Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 10–11. Ibid. Steen, A Pride of Terrys, pp. 402–3. Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History, p. 7. Mrs C. Calvert, Sixty-Eight Years on the Stage (London: Mills & Boon, 1911), pp. 269– 70. See also R Foulkes, The Calverts: Actors of Some Importance (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1992). Foulkes, Lewis Carroll and the Victorian Stage, p. 8. M. N. Cohen, Lewis Carroll: A Biography (Basingstoke: Papermac, 1995), p. 324. J. Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, and London: 1981), p. 44. Foulkes, Lewis Carroll and the Victorian Stage, p. 7. The Letters of Lewis Carroll, vol. 2, p. 892. Ibid. vol. 2, p. 892, n. 1. T. Killeen, ‘Marion Hunter Revisited: Further Light on a Dublin Enigma’, Dublin James Joyce Journal (forthcoming). I am also indebted to Mr Killeen for information about a portrait of Quin in Freemasons’ Hall, Dublin, and the sale of a copy of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (a facsimile of the original manuscript), inscribed by Carroll to Marion Quin ‘with the author’s love, 13 July, 1897’, at Christies for £1,920 in 2006. Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, vol. 8, p. 579. M. Morley, Margate and its Theatres 1730–1965 (London: Museum Press, 1966), pp. 108–22. I. Vanbrugh, To Tell My Story (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1949), p. 16. The Letters of Lewis Carroll, vol. 2, p. 898. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 908. E. G. Craig, Index to the Story of My Days (London: Hulton Press, 1957), p. 134. The Letters of Lewis Carroll, vol. 2, p. 898. Era, 13 February 1892, p. 14. The Letters of Lewis Carroll, vol. 2, p. 908. Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, vol. 8, p. 609. M. Baker, The Rise of the Victorian Actor (London: Croom Helm, 1978), p. 107. B. Hunt (ed.), The Green Room Book or Who’s Who on the Stage (London: T. Sealey Clark, 1906), pp. 343–4. Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, vol. 8, p. 610. The Letters of Lewis Carroll, vol. 2, p. 898. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 909. Era, 12 March 1892, p. 7. Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, vol. 9, p. 87. Ibid. Henry Bisley, Devil May Care, Act I, p. 14, Lord Chamberlain’s Collection of Plays, Add. MS 53532, BL. Era, 9 August 1893, p. 8. Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, vol. 9, p. 132.

Notes to pages 100–7 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

177

The Letters of Lewis Carroll, vol. 2, p. 1011. Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, vol. 9, pp. 6–7. The Letters of Lewis Carroll, vol. 2, p. 960. Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre, p. 115. L. Irving, Henry Irving: The Actor and His World (London: Faber & Faber, 1951), pp. 464–5. The Letters of Lewis Carroll, vol. 2, p. 1013. Davis, Actresses as Working Women, p. 28. D. Mayer, ‘Supernumeraries: Decorating the Late-Victorian Stage with Lots (& Lots & Lots) of Live Bodies’, in A. Heinrich, K. Newey and J. Richards (eds), Ruskin, the Theatre and Victorian Visual Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 154–68, on p. 159. Stoker, Personal Reminiscences, vol. 1, p. 158. Ibid. The Letters of Lewis Carroll, vol. 2, p. 1013. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 1025. Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, vol. 9, pp. 146–7. The Letters of Lewis Carroll, vol. 2, pp. 1014–16. Auerbach, Ellen Terry (Dent), p. 126. R. Foulkes, Church and Stage in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 151. Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, vol. 9, pp. 167–8. Ibid., vol. 9, p. 231. Davis, Actresses as Working Women, p. 31. Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, vol. 9, p. 233. N. Playfair, Hammersmith Hoy: A Book of Minor Revelations (London: Faber & Faber, 1930), pp. 76–7. Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, vol. 9, p. 121. A. Mackinnon, The Oxford Amateurs: A Short History of Theatricals at the University (London: Chapman & Hall, 1910), pp. 195–6. Era, 28 December 1895, p. 17. Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, vol. 9, p. 316. Ibid., vol. 9, p. 335. Ibid., vol. 9, p. 347; and The Letters of Lewis Carroll, vol. 2, pp. 1139–40. The Letters of Lewis Carroll, vol. 2, p. 908. Baker, The Rise of the Victorian Actor, p. 26. Ibid.; The Letters of Lewis Carroll, vol. 2, p. 1014.

9 Gandolfi, ‘Edith Craig as Director’ 1. 2.

This chapter was translated by Prof. Maggie Rose. Terry supported the Pioneer Players in multiple ways: she was the society’s honorary president and a member of its advisory committee; she appeared in some of the productions, arousing the interest of public and critics; and she brought to the Pioneer Players the social capital of her distinguished relations, Lady Gabrielle Enthoven, Lady Maud Warrender and Lady Randolph Churchill among others. See Cockin, Edith Craig, p. 110; Cockin, Women and Theatre in the Age of Suffrage, pp. 27–8; Gandolfi, La prima regista, pp. 214–19. Other literature on Edith Craig and the Pioneer Players includes:

178

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

Notes to pages 107–9 Adlard (ed.), Edy; Auerbach, Ellen Terry; Dymkowski, ‘Entertaining Ideas’; Holledge, Innocent Flowers, ‘Edy and her Pioneers’, pp. 103–66; Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History; Melville, Ellen and Edy. The Pioneer Players’ staging of Claudel’s trilogy is addressed by Cockin, Women and Theatre in the Age of Suffrage, pp. 126–7 and ch. 8: ‘Towards an Art Theatre’, pp. 169, 171, 177, 181, 186; Gandolfi, La prima regista, ch. 6: ‘Sperimentazioni: le regie moderniste’, pp. 327–58; Holledge, Innocent Flowers, ch. 7: ‘Breaking the Mould: The Pioneer Players 1914–25’, pp. 141–4. Other literature on the Pioneer Players listed in note 2 contains but very short mention of Claudel’s plays. This paper draws on sources investigated when researching for my book but addresses Claudel’s trilogy from a different perspective; while the book reconstructs the story of the three productions one by one, through a long and detailed narrative. Here I write more analytically, taking my examples mainly from the second and third production, in an effort to address the question of the stylistic registers at stake in these mises en scènes, and to define the characteristics of Edith Craig as director. See Cockin, Women and Theatre in the Age of Suffrage, ch. 8: ‘Towards an Art Theatre’, pp. 166–87. Cf. S. Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Pimlico, 1990). Pioneer Players, Fourth Annual Report, 1914–15 (privately printed), pp. 8–9, ETEC, SMA. Pioneer Players, Sixth Annual Report, 1916–17 (privately printed), p. 12, ETEC, SMA. Ibid., p. 7. The wartime continuity of the Pioneer Players is discussed in Cockin, Women and Theatre in the Age of Suffrage, ch. 7: ‘The Luck of War’, pp. 135–65. For a detailed reconstruction of all of these plays, see Gandolfi, La prima regista, ch. 6: ‘Sperimentazioni: le regie moderniste’, pp. 327–402. On internationalization of art theatres at the beginning of the twentieth century, see M. I. Aliverti, ‘L’internationalisation du theatre d’art’, in G. Banu (ed.), Les Cités du Théâtre d’art, de Stanislavski à Strehler (Paris: Editions Théâtrales, 2000), pp. 212–27; R. Gandolfi, ‘L’arcipelago europeo (e americano) dei piccoli teatri e la cultura nuova della regia come arte’, in R. Alonge (ed.), La regia teatrale: Specchio delle brame della modernità (Bari: Pagina, 2007), pp. 215–35. The Pioneer Players produced Evreinov’s The Merry Death in London on 2 April 1916. A few months later, on 30 October 1916, the play moved to New York, staged by the Washington Square Players, with the same scenery designed by Robert Edmond Jones, the same translation and the same costumes by George Plank used in London by the Pioneer Players. For this and the other examples quoted, cf. Gandolfi, La prima regista, ch. 6: ‘Sperimentazioni: le regie moderniste’, pp. 327–402. A. Bakshy to Edith Craig, 12 August 1917, ETEC EC-Z3,021, BL. Bakshy’s Path of the Modern Russian Stage appeared in London in 1916, printed by Cecil Palmer and Hayward. See British Drama League, ‘Annual Report’, Drama, 10 (1921), pp. 71–6; and E. Salmon (ed.), Granville Barker and his Correspondents (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1986), pp. 555–6. See A. Field, Djuna: Vita e tempi di Djuna Barnes (Milan: Frassinelli, 1984), p. 152; this text was published in English as Formidable Miss Barnes: Life of Djuna Barnes (London: Secker & Warburg, 1983).

Notes to pages 110–15

179

15. This chart expands the one proposed by R. Farabet, Le Jeux de l’acteur dans le théatre de Claudel (Paris: Minard, 1960), p. 124. I wish to thank M. Blomkvist, of the Stockholm Teatermuseet, for information concerning the 1919 Stockholm performance. 16. J. Copeau, in F. Lefèvre, ‘Une heure avec Monsieur Jaques Copeau’, Nouvelles Littéraires, 19 February 1927, quoted in F. Cruciani, Jaques Copeau o le aporie del teatro moderno (Rome: Bulzoni, 1971), p. 92. The translation is mine. 17. G. Macchia, Ritratti, personaggi, fantasmi (Milan: Mondadori, 1997), ‘Un mostro cattolico’, pp. 667–73. 18. P. Claudel, L’Annonce fait à Marie, mystere en quatre actes et un prologue (1911 version), in P. Claudel, Oeuvres Complètes, 29 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1950–86), vol. 9. The translation is mine. 19. For the treatment of gender in the Pioneer Players’ wartime production, see Cockin, Women and Theatre in the Age of Suffrage, ch. 7: ‘The Luck of War’, pp. 135–65. According to E. Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), motifs of apartness and isolation are typical of female-authored British literature of that period; for an analysis connecting the Pioneer Players’ treatment of gender on stage (from wartime onwards) to these motifs, see Gandolfi, La prima regista, ch. 6.3: ‘Susan Glaspell e l’alterità femminile: il testamento delle artiste associate’, pp. 385–402. 20. Pioneer Players, Sixth Annual Report, 1916–17, p. 9. 21. Mrs Gossip, ‘The Tidings Brought to Mary’, Daily Sketch, 12 June 1917, news cutting, ETEC, SMA. 22. William Archer, Sketch, 20 June 1917. 23. Observer, 17 June 1917. 24. Morning Post, 11 June 1917. 25. Sunday Times, 14 June 1917. This is a sample from 12 news cuttings about The Tidings Brought to Mary, held in the ETEC, SMA. Reviews appeared in the Daily Chronicle, Evening Standard, Morning Post, Pall Mall Gazette, Times and Star (11 June 1917; the review in the Star is by W. Archer), Daily Sketch (12 June 1917), Sunday Times (14 June 1917), New Statesman (16 June 1917, by D. MacCarthy), Observer (17 June 1917), Sketch (20 June 1917), while another article entitled ‘Art or Orthodoxy?’ is undated and the place of publication unspecified. 26. Claudel, L’Annonce fait à Marie, p. 10. The translation is mine. 27. D. McCarthy, ‘A Religious Play’, New Statesman, news cutting, ETEC, SMA. 28. The Times, 11 June 1917. 29. Sunday Times, 14 June 1917. 30. P. Claudel, The Tidings Brought to Mary, prompt copy bound in two volumes, with cast list and prop list, ETEC, SMA. 31. Evening Standard, 11 June 1917. 32. L. Barjon, Paul Claudel (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1953), p. 68. The translation is mine. 33. Pioneer Players, Fourth Annual Report, 1914–15, p. 10. 34. ‘The double lighting in the first scene now drew our little Saint (a Saint not yet but a happy, generous girl) into this world, and now set her hovering on the confines of the next’. Observer, 17 June 1917, news cutting, ETEC, SMA. 35. The Star, 11 June 1917. 36. W. Archer to Edith Craig, 11 June 1917, ETEC EC-Z3,008, BL. 37. D. McCarthy, ‘A Miracle Play’, New Statesman, 16 June 1917, ETEC, SMA.

180

Notes to pages 115–17

38. The remark was made by the impresario Bertram Forsyth, who wrote to Edith thanking her for The Tidings Brought to Mary: Forsyth to Edith Craig, 19 June 1917, ETEC EC-Z3,263, BL. 39. Also L’Otage takes place in France, but in Napoleonic times. The main character, Synge de Coûfontaine, a proud Catholic noblewoman, gives in to blackmail and marries the arrogant Turelure (her former subordinate, now converted to the Revolutionary credo), in the hope of saving the Pope, who is the hostage of Napoleon’s civic powers. Indeed Synge holds out as long as she can against Turelure and against the psychological pressure of her confessor (who suggests she marries Turelure for the sake of the Papacy and the Church). The main scenes of the play set up Synge in an all-male world, making space for an interpretation that emphasizes the conflict of gender as the one proposed by the Pioneer Players. 40. In the second version, instead, Synge has no time to receive the visit of the priest and the Extreme Unction. Her death happens unobserved while the King of France appears on the foreground of the stage. Cf. P. Claudel, L’Otage, in Claudel, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 10, p. 95 (first version) and p. 107 (second version). 41. Realism ‘carried too far’, powerful melodrama and decadence were all evoked by critics describing the final scene: see related news cuttings in The Pioneer Players Scrapbook, 1917–20, pp. 14, 18, 21, British Theatre Association Collection, Theatre Museum, London. 42. The critic of Sunday Times (30 March 1919) protested against the unpleasantness of the play and against the mock sprinkling of Holy Water, sarcastically remarking: ‘The play aroused such bitter antagonism in me that I longed to kill both Pope and priest; and I hate to feel like that on a Sunday’. Some days after, D. McCarthy resumed the public debate as follows (New Statesman, 5 April 1919): ‘By this time the public, having read the daily papers, are aware that the Pioneer Players performed a memorable play last week. The critics of the Times even cried touché; and those critics who imposed a censure on Claudel did so, it was clear, not because The Hostage failed to move them, but because they were frightened by it. The sudden appearance on stage of “The Scarlet Woman”, with her singing robes about her, with her sceptre of severity and her crown of tears, might well disturb good Protestants, who had forgotten that her throne is not entirely composed of priestcraft’s rubble, but built up also, stone by stone through ages, out of human ideals, which still have only to find a voice to wake an answer. Religious sacrifice is the ideal which finds a voice in this play; it is beautiful, like an angel’s, though to me has the voice of an exterminating angel’ (news cuttings, The Pioneer Players Scrapbook, 1917–20, pp. 15, 19). 43. The production’s list of props gives: ‘prologue – on: candle in socket on wall, steps to door; off: Bells (Angelus). Act I (Comberon;s kitchen) – on: long table; wooden bench, two big chairs; fire place; chest, linen (in chest); table cloth (in chest), stocks for fire; off: Plates, mugs, pottery dishes; flags; food; 3 knives, one spoon. Act II (Comberon’s garden – on: stone garden seat, low treads, two low walls; off: horn. Act III, 1 (road works site) – on: campfire, faggots, snow bank. Logs; off: clapper. Act III, 2 (cave) – on: snow bank with a cross over it, set high treads, little rostrum, torch, book; off: two set bells, trumpets. Act IV, 1: (empty room) – on: long table, wooden bench, long table; wooden bench, two big chairs; fire place; chest. Act IV, 2 (garden scene) – on: stone bench, low treads, low walls; off: hammer, two sets bells’. Claudel, The Tidings Brought to Mary, prompt copy, ETEC, SMA. 44. Sunday Times, 14 June 1917. 45. Cf. A. Berretta, Claudel et la mise en scène: autour de ‘L’Annonce faite à Marie’ (Paris: Presses Universitaires Franc-Comtoises, 2000).

Notes to pages 117–20

181

46. I refer here to staging and playwriting practices spread in early twentieth-century European theatre, stemming from Strindberg’s Intima Teatern in Stockholm and the kammerspiele movement in Germany: ‘a form of representation and playwriting which restricts the forms of expression allowed, the number of actors and the audience, the amplitude of themes’: see the voice ‘théâtre de chambre’, in P. Pavis, Dictionnaire du théâtre: termes et concepts de l’analyse théâtrale (Paris: Editions sociales, 1980). The translation is mine. 47. ‘We tried to give certain scenes the quality of a sacred picture, and we surrounded the space of the performance with a golden frame, in order to highlight the convention necessary to this play’ ( J. Variot, ‘Les décors de L’Annonce faite à Marie’, in Claudel, Oeuvres Completes, vol. 9, pp. 265–8, on p. 226; the translation is mine). In the 1912 French production, the scenic pictures were framed also through the movement of the lateral canopies, which enlarged or reduced the performing space according to the various scenes. 48. P. Claudel, ‘How My Plays Should Be Acted’, Theatre Arts Magazine, 1:3 (May 1917), pp. 117–18. 49. W. Archer, Star, 11 June 1917; he returned to this idea some days later in Sketch: ‘The lepers’ cave was a great piece of work, exhibiting, no doubt, the influence of Gordon Craig’ (W. Archer, Sketch, 20 June 1917). 50. See Cockin, Edith Craig, ‘The Long Shadow or Ellen Terry had a Daughter’, pp. 6–27. 51. Gandolfi, La prima regista, ‘Con la Purcell Operatic Society: protagonista assente’, pp. 65–71. 52. From Review of the Week, quoted in Craig, Gordon Craig, p. 124; the italics are mine. 53. Sunday Times, 14 June 1917.

10 Purkis, ‘Velona Pilcher and Dame Ellen Terry’ 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

Theatre Arts Monthly had been founded in 1916 and was renowned in the first half of the twentieth century for introducing its readership ‘to modernist ideas and practices in European and American drama and the theatre’. F. H. Londre and D. J. Watermeier, The History of North American Theatre (New York: Continuum, 1998), p. 300. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, p. 324. E. Sprigge, ‘L’Idiote Illuminee (The Life and Writing of Velona Pilcher)’ (unpublished MS, n.d.), p. 34. The manuscript was completed after December 1957 when her daughter moved into a house in Blisland, in which location Sprigge commented that she was writing part of this book. Permission to quote from this source has been kindly granted by Elizabeth Lumley-Smith, granddaughter of Elizabeth and goddaughter of Velona, and also sanctioned by Adrian Yardley, on behalf of the Edmund Rubbra archive at the Guildhall School of Music, London, where a copy survives. I am grateful to Drs Ewan Jeffrey and Steve Nicholson for their help in locating this invaluable text. E. G. Craig, ‘A Letter from Genova’, Theatre Arts Monthly, 10:10 (October 1926), pp. 712–15. The letter concerns a Shakespeare issue that Theatre Arts Monthly had published and proposes a Goethe issue, an American issue and a dance issue. Copies of various issues of Theatre Arts Monthly remain in the library at SMA. V. Pilcher, ‘Dame Ellen Terry’, Theatre Arts Monthly, 10:10 (October 1926), pp. 674–9, on p. 678. The article was later republished in R. Gilder, H. R. Isaacs, R. M. MacGregor and E. Reed (eds), Theatre Arts Anthology: A Record and a Prophecy (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1950), pp. 261–5. Pilcher, ‘Dame Ellen Terry’, p. 675. Ibid., pp. 675–6.

182 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

Notes to pages 120–3 Velona Bissell Pilcher was born in 1894 in London to an American mother – Julia Velona Bissell – and an English father – William Pilcher. After the early deaths of both parents, in separate incidents, she was returned at age six to the United States where she was brought up by her aunt alongside two cousins. After the First World War when she served at the Front with the Stanford University Women’s Unit, Velona travelled in Europe and then re-settled in England. Pilcher, ‘Dame Ellen Terry’, p. 674. Ibid., pp. 674–5. N. Auerbach, Ellen Terry: Player in Her Time (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 195. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, p. 308. See Kazmier, ‘Her Final Performance’, which provides an extensive discussion of the media aftermath in 1928 and the ways it reinforced dominant Victorian ideologies of gender and nature. St J. Ervine, The Theatre In My Time (London: Rich & Cowan, 1933), pp. 92–3. Interestingly, Pilcher incorporates reference to Ervine into her article (‘Dame Ellen Terry’, p. 675). An example of this is in St John Ervine’s accounts of meeting Terry ‘I have a happy recollection of the only time I met Miss Terry. She was old and blind and near her death, but her heart was as young as ever … her lovely eyes were dim, but I didn’t cry because her lovely heart was still bright’ (The Theatre In My Time, p. 91). Pilcher, ‘Dame Ellen Terry’, p. 678. Ibid. Ibid., p. 677. Ibid., pp. 676–7. Sprigge has commented that whenever Pilcher ‘wrote of Ellen Terry she painted a religious portrait, though not a solemn one, and always set it in a background of that Kentish countryside’ (‘L’Idiote Illuminee’, p. 66). It is interesting that Christopher St John reviewed this exhibition in ‘The International Theatre Exhibition’, Time and Tide, 3:27 (7 July 1922), pp. 642–3. In that article she is a strong advocate of Gordon Craig: ‘It is impossible to over-estimate his influence. If Craig had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him. Someone had to begin. Something had to happen before the desire for a change in the theatre became conscious … I know that Gordon Craig can handle the human element in theatre design; other artists lack the faculty or the opportunity.’ She also quotes Craig’s introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition: ‘It is ideas which we have brought to the theatres, not merely sceneries and pictures’ (pp. 642–3). Pilcher, ‘Dame Ellen Terry’, p. 675. Pilcher also went on to discuss Terry acting in the audience on one of the Duse’s last appearances. Pilcher, ‘Dame Ellen Terry’, p. 676. Indeed, the ‘we’ may even refer to Pilcher and St John among the audience members. J. Dowson, ‘Interventions in the Public Sphere: Time and Tide (1920–1930) and The Bermondsey Book (1923–30)’, in P. Brooker and A. Thacker (eds), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Vol 1: Britain and Ireland 1880–1955 (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 530–51, on p. 531. Viscountess Rhondda, This Was My World (London: Macmillan, 1933), p. 301. V. Pilcher, ‘The Grand Guignol’, Time and Tide, 2:43 (28 October 1921), pp. 1031–2.

Notes to pages 123–6 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56.

183

Sprigge, ‘L’Idiote Illuminee’, p. 31. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 33. ETEC EC-H403 play, SMA. The ETEC Gate Theatre file contains a leaflet about the Gate Theatre Studio with Pilcher’s name printed on it about the 1927 season and suggests plays to be chosen from certain authors, including Gheon and Glaspell. EC-PAG 125/06/8, C63, BL. Management roles building on this experience in commercial London theatres, however, were not forthcoming for Craig, who was working as a freelance director at this time. See Cockin, Edith Craig, p. 160; and also Holledge, Innocent Flowers, p. 156. Adlard (ed.), Edy, p. 145. Passenger lists accessible from the National Archives, Kew, and available at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/passenger-lists.htm. Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History, pp. 532–4. See also A. Thomas, The Story of the Barn Theatre 1929–1989 (Stone-in-Oxney: for the author, 1989). Sprigge, ‘L’Idiote Illuminee’, p. 33. J. Bentley, Hallie Flanagan: A Life in the American Theatre (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), p. 76. H. Flanagan, Shifting Scenes of the Modern European Theatre (London, Bombay and Sydney: George G. Harrap & Co., 1929). V. Pilcher, ‘The Theatre of the Revolution’, Theatre Arts Monthly, 11:4 (April 1927), pp. 258–72; and V. Pilcher, ‘Red Square’, Theatre Arts Monthly, 11:11 (November 1927), pp. 837–41. Chapter 4 of Sprigge’s biography is entitled ‘A Passionate Playgoer’. It incorporates discussion of the trip to Moscow. Bentley, Hallie Flanagan, p. 79. Ibid., p. 94. B. Ozieblo and J. Dickey, Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell, Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 80–1. M. B. Gale, West End Women: Women and the London Stage 1918–1962 (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 49. Daily Telegraph, 29 March 1923, p. 13. Holledge, Innocent Flowers, p. 147. A flyer for this production is in ETEC 125/04/2, C 14/2, SMA, as well as a brochure about the Gate salon 1925–6 season: ETEC 125/04/2, C 14/1, SMA. See A. Smith, ‘Nikolai Evreinov and Edith Craig as Mediums of Modernist Sensibility’, New Theatre Quarterly, 26:3 (August 2010), pp. 203–16. Gale, West End Women, p. 48. Ozieblo and Dickey, Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell, p. 80. Sprigge, ‘L’Idiote Illuminee’, pp. 53–4. See H. Grime, ‘Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies: Twentieth-Century Shakespearean Actress’ (PhD thesis, University of Winchester, 2008); and also H. Grime, ‘Ethereal from the Waist Up and all Welsh Pony Down Below: Re-examining the Ethereal Body of Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies’, New Theatre Quarterly (forthcoming, 2011). Some correspondence from Edith Craig is in the Ffrangcon-Davies archive currently on loan to the University of Winchester. ETEC EC-D342, BL.

184

Notes to pages 126–9

57. R. A. Schanke and K. Marra discuss the links with Edy and her bohemian companions: ‘During Peggy’s early years, three strong-willed, accomplished women emerged as role models for the young girl: May Whitty, Edith Craig, and Sybil Thorndike … May Whitty had little personal time for her daughter. Her mothering was sandwiched between professional engagements and her many committees for the war effort during World War I. Edith Craig played an enormous role in the young woman’s development, since she and her bohemian companions … lived in the redbrick Victorian multidwelling at 31 Bedford Place [sic] near Covent Garden where the Websters resided on the top.’ Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theatre (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 221. See also M. Barranger, Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theatre (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 58. The Stage Year Book (London: Carson & Comerford, 1928), p. 232. 59. Webster, The Same only Different, p. 305. 60. Cockin, Edith Craig, p. 154. 61. The Grafton Theatre, managed by Judith Wogan, of which Pilcher was also listed as a director in 1930, took a similar approach, as did the Watergate Theatre Club which she opened with Elizabeth Sprigge in 1949, and which even had a restaurant. 62. Similarly in 1930 the Grafton Theatre, where The Searcher was performed, offered access to The Mask. 63. Nash attended the ‘Dinner to Mr. Edward Gordon Craig’ at the Café Royal Sunday, 16 July 1911, chaired by William Rothenstein, and Terry was also present; see Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History, p. 458. Causey puts the first meeting between Craig and Nash as 1913; see A. Causey, Paul Nash (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 120. 64. ‘Theatre Craft: The Exhibition at Amsterdam. Example For Great Britain’, The Times, issue 42942, 30 January 1922, p. 8, col. A. 65. Later Eversley assisted Edith Craig at the Barn Theatre Memorial Festival, Smallhythe, 1934. For further details, see Cockin, Edith Craig, pp. 159, 173. 66. Transcribed by Anthony Bertram in October 1976 for Tate archive; originals held at the Victoria and Albert National Art Library, Ref. 86.x.27 35/7. 67. Gate Theatre Studio playbill, ‘Six Stokers Who Own the Bloomin’ Earth’, by Elmer L Greensfelder, Victoria and Albert Theatre Museum. 68. On p. 65; reprinted in J. Greenwood, The Wood-Engravings of Paul Nash (Woodbridge: Wood Lea Press, 1997), p. 97. 69. J. Tellier, Abd-er-Rhaman in Paradise (Waltham St Lawrence: Golden Cockerel Press, 1928). 70. Undated letter in Victoria and Albert Museum, cited in S. Lambert, Paul Nash as Designer (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1975), p. 7. 71. Curwen’s specimen book of pattern papers had four contributions by Nash. I am grateful to Susan Doncaster for her attentiveness and experience in identifying this link to Nash. 72. V. Pilcher, ‘All Work and No Play’, Theatre Arts Monthly, 13:7 ( July 1929), pp. 506–16. 73. Ibid., p. 509. 74. E. Aston, An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (London and New York, Routledge, 1995), ch. 8: ‘The “Prisonhouse of Criticism”: Susan Glaspell’, p. 109. 75. Pilcher, ‘All Work and No Play’, p. 510. 76. Ibid., p. 516. 77. No script seems to have survived of Pilcher’s broadcast in this series in the BBC written archives. 78. Editorial, Theatre Arts Monthly, 13:6 ( June 1929), p. 396. 79. Sprigge, ‘L’Idiote Illuminee’, p. 72.

Notes to pages 129–32

185

80. A. T. K. Grant, ‘The Gate Theatre Studio: An Interview with Mr. Peter Godfrey’, Drama, n.s. 7 (1928–9), pp. 38–9, on p. 38. 81. Sprigge, ‘L’Idiote Illuminee’, p. 67. 82. S. Bennett, ‘Decomposing History (Why Are There So Few Women in Theater History?)’, in W. B. Worthen and P. Holland (eds), Theorizing Practice: Redefining Theatre History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 71–87, on p. 78. 83. Sprigge, ‘L’Idiote Illuminee’, p. 66. 84. The letter, filed in sequence after the two referenced below, which is dated 20 August, seems to imply that she had by then succeeded in learning. 85. ETEC EC-Z3,057a, BL. 86. ETEC EC-Z3,054, p. 4, BL. 87. Sprigge, ‘L’Idiote Illuminee’, p. 34. 88. Ibid., p. 36. 89. This may or may not be the correct version of events, since Edith Craig was recalled on 17 July from her work in London. If Pilcher had also known Ellen was ill and had come especially, rather than by chance, this reveals that the relationship was very close and that she would have been welcomed. 90. Sprigge, ‘L’Idiote Illuminee’, pp. 70–1. 91. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, p. 336. 92. Sprigge, ‘L’Idiote Illuminee’, p. 68. 93. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, p. 336. 94. Sprigge, ‘L’Idiote Illuminee’, p. 174. 95. Ibid., p. 149. 96. No record has been found of any involvement in either the Terry fellowship meetings or memorial dinners. I am very grateful to Susannah Mayor and Paul Meredith at Smallhythe for their extensive searches for traces of Velona Pilcher. 97. Sprigge, ‘L’Idiote Illuminee’, p. 164. 98. No programme or text of the Grafton Theatre London production of The Searcher has been found at Smallhythe, nor any brochures about that theatre. There were friendship and professional links between some of the management and cast and both the Pioneer Players and the Arts League of Service but there remains no evidence of Craig or St John’s attendance or interest. Eleanor Elder is the main link person between all these groups, and there is connection through Edmund Rubbra, the composer of the music to the play, and through the involvement of Margaret Morris. 99. Sprigge, ‘L’Idiote Illuminee’, p. 194. 100. Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History, p. 564. 101. The term Pilcher had used in the 1928 BBC broadcast. 102. Pilcher ‘Dame Ellen Terry’, p. 678. This copy of My Life in Art published 1924 is preserved in the museum at Smallhythe. 103. Ibid., p. 675. 104. Terry The Story of My Life, p. 372.

186

Notes to pages 133–42

11 Cockin, ‘Ellen Terry: Preserving the Relics and Creating the Brand’ 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

P. Summerfield, ‘Oral History as a Research Method for English Studies’, in G. Griffin (ed.), Research Methods for English Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 47–66, on p. 59. Terry’s autograph was sold to raise funds for the ‘autograph cot’, a bed in this hospital; ETEC SC9-G6, BL. See Cockin, ‘Ellen Terry, the Ghost Writer and Laughing Statue’. Terry, The Story of My Life, p. 53. Melville, Ellen Terry, p. 174. This archive is of interest to researchers in many disciplines, not least theatre studies, but including also comparative literature, history and art history. Pamphlet, ETEC SC3-C5, BL. See Kazmier, ‘Her Final Performance’. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, p. 337. Terry to William Winter, ETEC ET-Z1,607, BL. General Gordon to Rev. R. Barnes, February 1844, ETEC ET-Z1,195, BL. H. Asquith to Terry, 17 March 1914, ETEC ET-Z1,024, BL. D. W. Probyn to Terry, 3 April 1906, ETEC ET-Z1,3,66, BL. Oscar Wilde to Terry, n.d., ETEC ET-Z1,588, BL; reproduced in The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. M. Holland and R. Hart-Davis (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), p. 310. Quoted with kind permission of Merlin Holland. Woods, Transatlantic Stage Stars, p. 92. Ibid., p. 115. Terry to G. F. Watts, 11 July 1883; ETEC ET-Z1,498, BL. Woolf, ‘Ellen Terry’, p. 71. See also P. Farfan, ‘Freshwater Revisited: Virginia Woolf on Ellen Terry and the Art of Acting’, Woolf Studies Annual, 4 (1998), pp. 3–17. Ellen Terry archival material (c. 1,000 items) deposited recently at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and expected to be available to researchers in 2011, may well be illuminating in this regard. See Cockin, ‘Ellen Terry and Henry Irving’, p. 48. Ibid. Telegram to Bram Stoker; ETEC POW-A23, BL. ETEC HIP-K2637, BL. Terry to Edward Gordon Craig, 26 January 1888, in The Collected Letters of Ellen Terry, vol. 1, letter 196. Woods, Transatlantic Stage Stars, p. 83. Ellen Terry endorsed various other products: Odol toothpaste; Hinde’s Ellen Terry hair pins; Symington’s soups; Milward’s needles; W. H. K. & S. corsets. Unpublished letter from ‘Ed’ard’ [Edward Gordon Craig] to ‘dearest Booie’ [Elizabeth Rumball], n.d., ETEC ET-4,162, BL. Edward Craig seems to imply that Gordon Craig discovered this on his mother’s death; Craig, Gordon Craig, p. 329. ETEC SC22-B157, BL. Ted [Edward Gordon Craig] to ‘exceptional Booie’ [Elizabeth Rumball], postmarked 18 January 1907; ETEC ET-4,178, BL. ETEC SC22-A4, BL.

Notes to pages 142–9

187

32. K. Powell, Women and Victorian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 54. 33. Terry to Albert Fleming, 24 April 1894; ETEC ET-Z2,307, BL. 34. Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History, p. 503. 35. Terry to Pauline Chase, 15 June, ETEC ET-Z2,113, BL. 36. D. Pye, ‘“Irreproachable Women and Patient Workers”: The Memoirs of Victorian Leading Ladies’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 45:1 (Spring 2003), pp. 73–91. 37. G. A. Patten to Sirs, 28 June 1913, ETEC SC22-B120, BL. 38. Geering & Collyer to Terry, 30 June 1913, ETEC SC22-B121, BL. 39. See Woods, Transatlantic Stage Stars, ch. 3. 40. Stephen Coleridge was a barrister, the second son of Lord Chief Justice Coleridge and long-standing fan of Ellen Terry and subsequently her adviser. Their correspondence is held at the Garrick Club. 41. ETEC SC22-B28, BL. 42. ETEC SC22-B96, BL. 43. ETEC SC22-A6, BL. 44. ETEC SC22-B143, BL. 45. ETEC SC22-B159, BL. 46. Woods, Transatlantic Stage Stars, p. 197. 47. Ibid., pp. 171–2. 48. Ibid., p. 82. 49. ETEC SC22-A9, BL. 50. A. C. Peach to Terry, ETEC SC22-B160, BL. 51. Steen, A Pride of Terrys, p. 309. 52. Ibid. 53. ETEC SC22-B31, BL. 54. In a letter from Walter D’Arcy Hart to Ben Webster, 20 September 1926, the proposed plan was to invest it in a New York bank on this basis; ETEC SC22-B169, BL. 55. W. D’Arcy Hart to Miss [Hilda] Barnes, 10 July 1928, ETEC SC22-B193, BL. 56. Sir Maurice Craig (1866–1935) was a physician whose posts included senior assistant medical officer at Bethlehem Hospital and physician for psychological medicine at Guy’s Hospital. He was involved in the debates on shell shock and later founded the National Council for Mental Hygiene; see British Medical Journal, 1:87 (1935). 57. ETEC SC22-B190, BL. 58. Craig, Gordon Craig, p. 329. 59. ETEC SC23A-C14, SMA. 60. ‘The Ghosts of Ellen Terry’, 31 May 1921, ETEC SC22-G1, BL. A different report is given in another newspaper, indicating that ‘They bid high and earnestly, and for more sentimental than practical reasons’; ETEC SC22-G2, BL.

12 Halliwell and Cockin, ‘Describing the Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Archive’ 1. 2. 3.

Steen, A Pride of Terrys, p. 386. Kazmier, ‘Her Final Performance’. Ibid.

188 4. 5. 6.

Notes to pages 149–52 See Catalogue of the Working Library of Ellen Terry at Smallhythe Place, foreword F. T. Bowyer (National Trust, 1977). John Boyes Watson’s detailed notes accompanying this collection are invaluable. Intriguingly, a collection of letters from Ellen Terry to Joe Evans held in the New York Players’ Club has been subjected to censorship, with some parts of letters having been excised. Further research may establish more about Evans’s place in the Terry family.

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Londre, F. H., and D. J. Watermeier, The History of North American Theatre (New York: Continuum, 1998), p. 300. Longstreth, G. G., ‘Epistolary Follies, Identity, Conversation and Performance in the Correspondence of Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw’, Shaw, 21 (2001), pp. 27–40. Loshak, D., ‘G. F. Watts and Ellen Terry’, Burlington Magazine, 728:105 (November 1863), pp. 376–86, 484–5. Luckhurst, M., and J. Moody, ‘Introduction: The Singularity of Theatrical Celebrity’, in M. Luckhurst and J. Moody (eds), Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000 (London: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 1–11. Macchia, G., Ritratti, personaggi, fantasmi (Milan: Mondadori, 1997). Mackinnon, A., The Oxford Amateurs: A Short History of Theatricals at the University (London: Chapman & Hall, 1910). Manvell, R., Ellen Terry (London: William Heinemann, 1968). Marcus, L., ‘In the Circle of the Lens’, Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 (Spring 2008), at http://jsse.revues.org/index702.html. Marshall, G., Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). —, ‘Ellen Terry: Shakespearean Actress and Critic’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 11:3 (August 2004), pp. 355–64. Mayer, D., ‘Supernumeraries: Decorating the Late-Victorian Stage with Lots (& Lots & Lots) of Live Bodies’, in A. Heinrich, K. Newey and J. Richards (eds), Ruskin, the Theatre and Victorian Visual Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 154–68. Melville, J., Ellen and Edy: A Biography of Ellen Terry and her Daughter, Edith Craig, 1847– 1947 (London: Pandora Press, 1987). —, Ellen Terry (London: Haus, 2006). Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of The Loan Collection of Paintings by George Frederick Watts RA of London (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1884). Morley, M., Margate and its Theatres 1730–1965 (London: Museum Press, 1966). Morrison, M., ‘Performing the Pure Voice: Elocution, Verse Recitation, and Modernist Poetry in Prewar London’, Modernism/Modernity, 13:3 (1996), pp. 25–50. Moynahan, J., Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). Newey, K., Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan 2005). Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. M. M. Innes (London: Penguin, 1955). Ozieblo, B., and J. Dickey, Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell, Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2008). Pavis, P., Dictionnaire du théâtre: termes et concepts de l’analyse théâtrale (Paris: Editions sociales, 1980).

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Pemberton, T. E., Ellen Terry and Her Sisters (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1902). Peters, M., Mrs. Pat: The Life of Mrs. Patrick Campbell (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984). Pilcher V., ‘The Grand Guignol’, Time and Tide, 2:43 (28 October 1921), pp. 1031–2. —, ‘Dame Ellen Terry’, Theatre Arts Monthly, 10:10 (October 1926), pp. 674–9. —, ‘The Theatre of the Revolution’, Theatre Arts Monthly, 11:4 (April 1927), pp. 258–72. —, ‘Red Square’, Theatre Arts Monthly, 11:11 (November 1927), pp. 837–41. —, ‘All Work and No Play’, Theatre Arts Monthly, 13:7 ( July 1929), pp. 506–16. Plato, Plato’s Republic, ed. B. Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894). Playfair, N., Hammersmith Hoy: A Book of Minor Revelations (London: Faber & Faber, 1930). Powell, K., Women and Victorian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Pye, D., ‘“Irreproachable Women and Patient Workers”: The Memoirs of Victorian Leading Ladies’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 45:1 (Spring 2003), pp. 73–91. Quinn, M. L., ‘Celebrity and the Semiotics of Acting’, New Theatre Quarterly, 22:6 (May 1990), pp. 154–61. Rhondda, Viscountess, This Was My World (London: Macmillan, 1933). Richards, J., Sir Henry Irving: A Victorian Actor and His World (London: Hambledon & London, 2005). Robertson, W. G., Time Was: The Reminiscences of W. Graham Robertson (1931; London: Hamish Hamilton, 1945; Quartet, 1981). Rosenman, E. B., ‘“Mimic Sorrows”: Masochism and the Gendering of Pain in Victorian Melodrama’, Studies in the Novel, 35 (Spring 2003), pp. 22–43. St John, C., Ellen Terry (London: John Lane and Bodley Head, 1907). —, ‘The International Theatre Exhibition’, Time and Tide, 3:27 (7 July 1922), pp. 642–3. —, ‘Introduction’, in Terry, Four Lectures, pp. 7–24. Salmon, E. (ed.), Granville Barker and his Correspondents (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1986). Salter, D., ‘Henry Irving, the “Dr Freud” of Melodrama’, in J. Redmond (ed.), Melodrama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 161–82. Sanders, V., The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Schanke, R. A., and K. Marra, Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theatre (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998). Sedgwick, E. K., Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Senelick, L., Gordon Craig’s Moscow Hamlet (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982). Shepherd, S., ‘Pauses of Mutual Agitation’, in Bratton et al. (eds), Melodrama, pp. 25–37.

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Showalter, E., A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). Skal, D. J., ‘Fatal Image: The Artist, the Actress, and “The Vampire”’, in D. J. Skal (ed.), Vampires: Encounters with the Undead (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2001), pp. 223–57. Smith, A., ‘Nikolai Evreinov and Edith Craig as Mediums of Modernist Sensibility’, New Theatre Quarterly, 26:3 (August 2010), pp. 203–16. Sprigge, E., ‘‘L’Idiote Illuminee (The Life and Writing of Velona Pilcher)’ (unpublished MS, n.d.), Guildhall School of Music, London. The Stage Year Book (London: Carson & Comerford, 1928). Steen, M., A Pride of Terrys: Family Saga (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1962). Stevenson, R. L., The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, 25 vols (London: Chatto & Windus, 1911–12). Stoker, B., ‘The Theatre Royal – The Pantomime, Dresses, &c’, [Dublin] Evening Mail, 6 January 1872, p. 4. —, Dracula (1897; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993). —, Dracula (1897), ed. N. Auerbach and D. J. Skal, Norton Critical Editions (New York and London: Norton, 1997). —, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving 2 vols (London: William Heinemann, 1906). —, Snowbound: The Record of a Theatrical Company (1908), ed. B. Wightman (Westcliff-onSea, Essex: Desert Island Books, 2000). —, ‘The Chain of Destiny’, in B. Stoker, Dracula’s Guest and Other Stories (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2006), pp. 159–96. Summerfield, P., ‘Oral History as a Research Method for English Studies’, in G. Griffin (ed.), Research Methods for English Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 47–66. Taxidou, O., The Mask: A Periodical Performance by Edward Gordon Craig (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998). Taylor A., ‘Shakespeare and Radicalism: The Uses and Abuses of Shakespeare in NineteenthCentury Popular Politics’, Historical Journal, 45:2 (2002), pp. 357–79. Tellier, J., Abd-er-Rhaman in Paradise (Waltham St Lawrence: Golden Cockerel Press, 1928). Terry, E., The Story of My Life (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1908). Terry, E., Four Lectures on Shakespeare, ed C. St John (New York and London: Benjamin Blom, 1932). —, Ellen Terry’s Memoirs with a Preface, Notes, and Additional Biographical Chapters, ed. E. Craig and C. St John (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1932). —, Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, ed. E. Craig and C. St John (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933). —, The Collected Letters of Ellen Terry, ed. K. Cockin, 8 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010–).

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Terry, E., and B. Shaw, Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence, ed. C. St John (1931; London: Reinhardt, 1949). Thomas, A., The Story of The Barn Theatre 1929–1989 (Stone-in-Oxney: for the author, 1989). Todhunter, J., Helena in Troas (London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1886). Tynan, K., ‘Gordon Craig’, in Profiles (1989; London: Nick Hern Books, 1990), p. 105. Vanbrugh I., To Tell My Story (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1949). Variot, J., ‘Les décors de L’Annonce faite à Marie’, in Claudel, Oeuvres Completes, vol. 9, pp. 265–8. Voskuil, L., Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2004). Walton, J. M., Found in Translation: Greek Drama in English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Watts, M. S. George Frederic Watts: The Annals of an Artist’s Life, 3 vols (London: Macmillan, 1912). Webster, M. The Same only Different: Five Generations of a Great Theatre Family (London: Victor Gollancz, 1969). Wheelwright, J., Amazons and Military Maids (London: HarperCollins 1989). Who Was Who in Theatre: 1912–1976, 4 vols (Detroit, MI: Gale Research Co., 1978). Wilde, O., Poems (Boston, MA: Roberts Brothers, 1881). —, Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays including De Profundis (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1997). —, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. M. Holland and R. Hart-Davis (London: Fourth Estate, 2000). Wills, W. G., Faust in Prologue and Five Acts: Adapted and Arranged for the Theatre (London, 1886). Winter, W., Shakespeare on the Stage (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912). Woods, L., Transatlantic Stage Stars in Vaudeville and Variety: Celebrity Turns (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Woolf, V., A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929). —, ‘Ellen Terry’ (8 February 1941), in Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, 4 vols (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), vol. 4, pp. 67–72. Wynne, C., ‘Introduction’, in C. Wynne (ed.), Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Parasite and Bram Stoker’s The Watter’s Mou’ (Kansas City, KS: Valancourt, 2009), pp. viii–xxxviii.

INDEX

Titles of works of art and literature are listed in the index under the names of their authors, if known. Page references in italics refer to illustrations. Achurch, Janet, 93 Adlard, Eleanor, 124 Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 84–5 Age (Melbourne), 71 Alexander, George, 99 Alexandra, Queen, 152 Allingham, William, ‘No funeral gloom’, 135–6 Andreev, Leonid, 108, 109 Antoine, André, 88 Appia, Adolphe, 117 Arch, Joseph, 75 Archer, William, 109, 112, 115 Architect, 84, 86, 87 Arena Goldoni, Florence, 79 Argus (Melbourne), 71 Arliss, George, 97 Arnold, Matthew, 121 Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), 5, 11, 150 Athenaeum, 17–18, 25, 40, 42 Atkinson, Francis Home, 99 Atwood, Tony, 131 Auckland Star, 71 Auerbach, Nina, vii, 2, 5, 6, 27–8, 33, 52, 53, 59, 62, 63, 102, 120 Australia, 71, 135, 136 Babe’s Troops, 51 Baird, Dorothea, 96, 102, 103, 105 Baker, Elizabeth, 70 Baker, Michael, 98, 105

Bakshy, Alexander, 109 Balance, John, 88 Ballard, Sarah see Terry, Sarah Bancroft, Marie, 94, 95 Bancroft management, 84, 86, 89 Bankart, Alice, Lady, 153 Barish, Jonas, 96 Barjon, L., 114 Barnes, Djuna, 109 Barnes, Hilda, 130, 147, 153 Barnes, John, 51–2 Barnes, Reginald, 96 Barrault, Jean-Louis, 109 Barrett, Wilson, 89, 104 Barrie, J. M., 7, 66 Barrington, Emilie, 36, 39, 41 Bartley, Mary, 42 Battersea Rise, 145 Beecham, Sir Thomas, 112 Beerbohm, Max, 68 Behnes, William, 35 Belford, Barbara, 30 Bennett, Susan, 129–30 Benson, Frank, 84–5 Benson Company, 59 Bentley, Joanne, 124 Bernhardt, Sarah, 49, 56, 137, 139 Biddles, Adelaide (later Calvert), 94–5 Bisley, Henry, Devil May Care, 99–100 Bloodworth, Jenny, vii, 7 Bond, Acton, 75, 151, 152 Booth, Edwin, 85

– 199 –

200

Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence

Booth, Michael, 23 Bottomley, Gordon, 127 Boucicault, Dion Colleen Bawn, 95 The Corsican Brothers, 19–20 Bourne, Adeline, 70 Bowen, Gladys, 155 Brahm, Otto, 88 Bramley, Bertha Jennings, 57 Brancaster, 144, 152, 154 British Drama League, 109 British Empire Shakespeare Society (BESS), 67, 75–6 Britton, Hutin, 56–7 Brook, Peter, 78, 79, 80 Brooks, Peter, 20 Browning, Robert, 41, 85 Burnand, F. C., La Cigale, 102 Burne-Jones, Philip, 17, 30 The Vampire, 17–18, 30 Calmour, A. C., The Amber Heart, 62 Calvert, Charles, 94 Calvert, Louis, 94 Cameron, Julia Margaret, 1, 38, 40, 73, 133 Charity, 40 Medora, 40 The Opera Box, 40 Sadness, 38 South West Wind, 40 Campbell, Stella (Mrs Pat), 13, 18, 28 Carew, James, 9, 58, 90, 143, 144, 145, 146–7 name, 160 papers, 153 Carlson, Susan, 76 Carnivalesque, 61, 62 Carre, Michel, L’Enfant Prodigue, 98 Carric, Allen, 88 Carroll, Lewis, 2, 10, 42, 93–106 Carter, Hubert, Punchinello, 59 Casson, Sir Lewis, 123 Chagall, Marc, 132 Chaplin, Olive, 149 Chartists, 75 Chase, Pauline, 143, 148 Christmas Dramatic Wanderers, 103

Chute, James Henry, 35, 84, 103 Cinderella, 103–4 Claudel, Paul, 10, 107–8, 109–18 productions listed, 110 Exchange, 107 The Hostage, 10, 107, 111, 116 Les Souliers de satin, 109 The Tidings Brought to Mary, 107, 109, 111, 112–18 playbill, 113 Cockin, Katharine, vii, 22, 29, 126, 158, 159 Cockton, Henry, 100 Cohen, Morton N., 96 Cole, Clara, 153 Coleridge, Stephen, 45, 90, 144, 145, 147 Coliseum, 146 Comyns-Carr, Alice, 56 Copeau, Jacques, 107, 109 Copley, John Singleton, 34 Coronet, 88 Court Theatre, 21, 89, 104 Craig, Edith (Wardell; Edy), 6, 14, 15–16, 41, 53, 63–4, 75, 76, 93 childhood, 9, 13, 78, 83, 86, 134 as director, 107–18, 139 and Pilcher, 119, 123–4, 126–7, 131–2 and Shakespeare lectures, 66, 68 after Terry’s death, 10–11, 16, 134–5, 136, 151 books and papers, 149, 150, 151, 152–3, 154, 155 The Shoe, 155 Craig, Edward (Carrick), 77, 82, 83 Craig, Edward Gordon, 5, 8–9, 14–15, 41, 46, 47, 77–80, 97–8, 119, 127, 132, 135, 137–8 childhood, 9, 13, 83, 84, 134, 138 as director, 78–9, 91, 118 and his father, 9, 81–91 and Flanagan, 124 International Theatre Exhibition, 122, 126 letter about boots, 139–40, 140 letter from Terry, 139 letter to Terry, 141 relationships with women, 77, 141 papers, 150–1

Index ‘Architecture and Costume in Shakespeare’s Plays’, 86–7 The Art of the Theatre, 79, 88 ‘The Artists of the Theatre of the Future’, 88–9 Ellen Terry and her Secret Self, 86 Index to the Story of My Days, 85, 87, 91 The Mask, 9, 79, 82–3, 87–91, 118, 126, 129, 150 ‘Recollection’, 81–2 Craig, Sir Maurice, 147 Craig, May, 141, 146, 150, 152 Craig, Philip, 152 Craig, Robin, 152 Craig, Rosie, 152 Craigie, Pearl, 152 Daly, Augustin, 52, 89 Davis, Tracy C., 94, 101, 103 De La Mare, Walter, Crossings, 120 Delsarte, François, 72 Dickens, Charles, 9 Dido and Aeneas, 118 Disher, Maurice Willson, 20 Disraeli, Benjamin, 41 Dodgson, Charles Ludwidge see Carroll, Lewis Dodgson, Violet, 95 dogs, 28 Donat, Robert, 4 Dorynne, Jess, 141 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 53 Drama, 129, 155 Dramatic Review, 87 Drummond, Alex, 148 Dublin, 18, 21, 23 Dubourg, Augustus, 99 Duncan, Isadora, 141 Dundee Courier, 55, 60, 61 Duse, Eleanora, 49, 78, 80, 91, 137 Earle, Clara, 100 Echegaray, Jose, 108, 112, 135 Edouin, William, 51 Eliot, George, 85 Eliot, T. S., 72, 79 Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Archive, 8, 10–11, 16, 58, 149–58

201

Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Conference, 5–6 Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Database, 5, 6, 11, 149, 158–60 Ellen Terry Memorial Museum, 11, 134–6, 148, 149, 150 elocution, 71–3, 76 Emery, Mary May, 127 Era, 98, 103 Ervine, St John, 121 Eugenics Society, 4 Evans, Joe, 152 Eversley, Mary, 126 Everyman Theatre, 135 Evreinov, Nikolai, 108, 135 The Merry Death, 109 The Theatre of the Soul, 125 Eyre, Sophie, 51 Faucit, Helen, 94, 95 feminism, 65–76, 104, 111 Ffrangcon-Davies, Gwen, 126 Flanagan, Hallie, 124 Fleming, Albert, 143, 151 Franklin Gould, Veronica, viii, 7, 14 Freewoman, The, 141 Freshwater, Isle of Wight, 40, 41 Furst, Edward, 88 Gaiety Theatre, 154 Gale, Maggie, 125 Gandolfi, Roberta, viii, 10 Gantillon, Simon, Maya, 126, 128 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 40 Gate Theatre, 124, 125–6, 127–8, 129 gender, 6–7, 52, 70, 141 in Stoker’s works, 22–3, 25–6, 29 see also feminism Gerould, Daniel, 20 Gheon, Henri, Le Debat de Nicolazic, 123 ‘Ghosts of Ellen Terry, The’, 148 Gielgud, Sir John, 4, 90 Gielgud, Val, 4 Gladstone, William Ewart, 2, 41, 84–5 Glaspell, Susan, 108 Berenice, 125 Trifles, 125 The Verge, 122, 125

202

Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence

Godfrey, Peter, 126, 127, 129 Godwin, Edward William, 5, 9, 21, 34, 35, 41, 43, 44, 55, 82, 83–91, 133 Edward Gordon Craig’s dream of, 81–2 ‘Architecture and Costume in Shakespeare’s Plays’, 86–7 of The Merchant of Venice, 89 ‘A Lecture on Dress’, 88 Goldsmith, Oliver, The Vicar of Wakefield, 13, 21 Gothic, 6, 17, 18–22, 25–6, 31 Grant, A. T. K., 129 Granville Barker, Harley, 107 Graves, Clothilde, 7, 49–64 The Mistress of the Robes, 7, 50–1, 51, 54–64, 155 Nitocris, 51–2 Graves, William, 51 Great Queen Street Theatre, 88 Greensfelder, Elmer L., Six Stokers, 127 Grosvenor Gallery, 44, 45 Gwynne, Edie, 151 Gwynne, Howell Arthur, 151–2 Halliwell, Julian, viii, 150 Hamilton, Cicely, 70 Hampstead Conservatoire, 88 Harraden, Beatrice, 70 Harris, Sir Augustus, 51 Hart, Arthur, 99 Hart, Walter D’Arcy, 147, 148, 153 Hatton, Bessie, 70 Heijermans, Herman, 108, 112 Hengler’s Circus, 89 Hermes, Gertrude, 127 Hillier, Mary, 40 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, Elektra, 79 Holman Hunt, William, 38 Holroyd, Sir Michael, viii, 4, 5, 8, 22, 43, 50, 58–9, 83 A Strange Eventful History, 78, 94, 132 Hood, Thomas, 21 Horniman, Annie, 76 Hoster, Connie, 152 Hunter, Alfred Henry, 97 Ibsen, Henrik, 15, 88, 93, 94, 109 Hedda Gabler, 13

The Lady from the Sea, 13 The Pretenders, 78, 79, 91 Rosmersholm, 78, 79 The Vikings, 58, 153 Illustrated London News, 51 Imperial Theatre, 50, 139, 153 International Congress of Women, 49–50, 52, 64 International Theatre Exhibition, 122, 126 Ireland, 19 Dublin, 18, 21, 23 Irving, Harry, 62, 96, 102 Irving, Sir Henry, 2, 5, 7, 9, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22–3, 26, 31, 34, 44, 53–4, 62, 69, 75, 100–1, 102, 135, 137–9, 141 and Edward Gordon Craig, 78, 89 death, 138 in Olivia, 142 staging The Bells, 101 Irving, Laurence, 62, 101 Isaacs, Edith, 130, 131 Jackson, Maria, 38 Jones, Ernest, 75 Judy, 51, 52 Kahn, Coppelia, 74 Kazmier, Lisa, 4, 149 Kean, Charles, 34, 86, 93, 155 Kelly, Charles see Wardell, Charles Kendal, Margaret, 49, 94, 95 Killeen, Terence, 96 Kingsway Theatre, 66 Kipling, Rudyard, 18 Ladd, Edward, 153 Lang, Matheson, 57 League of Arts Dramatic Circle, 126 Leeds Arts Theatre, 124, 135 Leeds Society of Women’s Suffrage, 70 Lees, Dorothy Nevile, 79 Leighton, Frederic, 41, 47 L’Estrange, Julian, 57 Lewis, Arthur, 94 Lewis, Sir George, 2 Lewis, Leopold, The Bells, 101 Little Holland House, Kensington, 33, 35–6, 37, 40, 41, 46

Index Little Treasure, The, 35 Liverpool Entertainment Programme, 59 Liverpool Evening Express, 59–60 Locke, Florence, 4 London Super Aeration, 145 Lucas, E. V., 135 Luckhurst, Mary, 2, 3 Lugné-Poe, Aurélien, 107, 109, 117 Lyceum Theatre, 7, 10, 15, 35, 41, 44, 52, 69, 74, 75, 82, 100–1, 102–3, 105, 106 Company tours, 7, 16, 28–9, 30, 135, 138, 139 and Stoker, 17–31 Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, 103 McCarthy, Desmond, 112, 115–16 McClure’s Magazine, 8, 155 Mackaye, Percy, 68 Macready, William Charles, 37 Madrid, Louis, 88 Mann, Tom, 75 Manners, Mary, 96 Marcus, Laura, 3 Marshall, Gail, 27 Martin, Theodore, 94 Mary, Queen, 130 Mask, The, 9, 79, 82–3, 87–91, 118, 126, 129 Mayer, David, 101 Meierhold, Vsevolod, 88 melodrama, 19–22, 24–5, 27, 30–1 Meo, Elena, 150, 152 Merivale, Herman, Ravenswood, 18, 24–5 Moody, Jane, 2, 3 Moore, Henry, 127 Morrisson, Mark, 72 Morritt, Greta, 75 Mother Goose, 98 Mowbray, Joan, 126 Moynahan, Julian, 19 Nash, Paul, 126–7 National Portrait Gallery, 33, 39, 42, 133 National Trust, 5, 8, 10–11, 16, 58, 73, 135, 150, 151 Newcastle Daily Journal, 60 New Drama, 15, 94 New Statesman, 112

203

New Woman, 52, 53, 63 New York Times, 68 New Zealand, 71 Nielson, Julia, 56, 57 Nightingale, Florence, 40 O’Dell, G. E., 70 O’Neill Norah (Desmond) see Quin, Elizabeth Menella Other Theatre Movement, 109 Oxford University Drama Society, 103 Ozieblo, Barbara, 125 Page, The, 82 Pageant of Great Women, A, 66 Palace Theatre, 121 Palgrave, Margaret, 147, 148 Peach, A. C., 146–7 Penny Illustrated, 54 Pilcher, Velona, 10, 119–32 ‘Aims and Ideals of the Theatre’, 128–9 ‘All Work and No Play’, 127–8, 129 ‘Dame Ellen Terry’, 119–22 ‘The Marvellous Death of Ellen Terry’, 130–1 The Searcher, 129, 131 Pioneer Players, 10, 15, 16, 66, 107, 108–9, 110, 111–17, 125, 132, 135 playbill, 113 Playfair, Sir Nigel, 103 Play Pictorial, 155 Portsmouth Times, 60–1 Potter, Paul, Trilby, 102, 103 Poulsen, Johannes, 78, 79–80, 91 Powell, Catherine Elizabeth, 151 Powell, Joseph, 151, 152, 154 Powell, Kerry, 142 Priestley, J. B., 38 Prince of Wales Theatre, 84, 89 Princess’s Theatre, 34, 35, 93 Prinsep, Alice, 37 Prinsep, Sara, 33, 35–6, 37, 39, 41 Probyn, D. W., 136, 152 Provincetown Players, 125, 127 Pryde, James, 80 Purcell Operatic Society, 107, 118 Purkis, Charlotte, ix, 10 Pye, Deborah, 143–4

204

Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence

Quin, Elizabeth Menella (‘Minna’; Norah/ Desmond O’Neill), 10, 96–106 Quin, Francis, 96 Quin, Marion, 97 Quinn, Michael, 3 Raven-Hill, Leonard, 51 Reade, Charles, 94, 152 Nance Oldfield, 27, 59, 155 Rehan, Ada, 49, 53, 100 Reinhardt, Max, 79, 88, 91 Robertson, Tom, 86 Robertson, Walford Graham, 24, 34, 44 Robinetta Craig, 155 Robins, Elizabeth, 70 Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk, 24 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 43 Golden Head by Golden Head, 36 Rothenstein, William, 14 Royal Academy, 33, 35, 39, 42, 43, 47 Schools, 34, 35 Royal Court and Opera House, Liverpool, 59 Rumball, Elizabeth, 139–40, 144, 151, 152, 153, 154 Ruskin, John, 40 St John, Christopher (Christabel Marshall), 15, 18, 24, 62, 75, 109, 119, 123, 130, 133, 147–8 and Shakespeare lectures, 8, 66, 67, 68, 74 Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, 130–1 The Good Hope, 58 Salter, Denis, 22 Sanders, Valerie, 9, Sardou, Victorien, Madame Sans-Gêne, 29, 139 Sargent, John Singer, Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, 1, 14, 45–6, 73, 133 Savoy Theatre, 66 Scott, Clement, 99 Scudamore, Frank A., 102 Selby, Charles, Robert Macaire, 98 Shakespeare, William, 13, 94 Terry’s lectures on, 7–8, 65–76 As You Like It, 13, 65 Cymbeline, 13, 28

Hamlet, 13, 39–40, 41 in Moscow, 78, 79, 91, 118 Ophelia, 13, 20, 22, 26, 36, 41, 46 in Terry’s lectures, 44, 74 Watts’s Ophelia portrait, 14, 41, 44 King John, 35 Macbeth, 19, 79 The Merchant of Venice, 59, 69–70, 84, 86, 102–3 The Merry Wives of Windsor, 154, 155 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 84, 155 Much Ado About Nothing, 57, 59, 60, 61, 69, 155 Othello, 26, 35 Richard II, 59 Richard III, 70 The Taming of the Shrew, 76, 103 The Tempest, 103 Twelfth Night, 73–4, 100 The Winter’s Tale, 34, 68–9, 93 Shakespeare Mutual Improvement Society, The, 75 Shaw, George Bernard, 15, 37, 46, 47, 78, 94, 109, 122 correspondence with Terry, 1, 77 Caesar and Cleopatra, 79 Candida, 13, 93 Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, 58, 143 The Man of Destiny, 13 Shaw, Martin, 79 Shee, Sir Martin Archer, 34 Shepherd, Simon, 20 Sill, Louise Morgan, 112 Sinclair, Sallie, 99 Sinclair, Upton, Singing Jailbirds, 155 Smallhythe Place, Kent, 120, 124, 126, 129, 130–1 Barn Theatre, 4, 16, 131 Ellen Terry Memorial Museum, 11, 134–6, 148, 149, 150 ‘The Farm’, 16, 146, 148, 149, 153 Terry acquires, 134 Smith, Eustace, 42 Smith, Pamela Colman, 7, 28–9, 31, 153, 155 ‘The Bramy Joker’, 30, 31 Society for Theatre Research, 6, 149 Sothern, Edward Askew, 35, 38

Index Sprigge, Elizabeth, 122–3, 124, 129, 130, 131–2 Stage Society, 108, 109 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 78, 80, 88, 91 My Life in Art, 132 Stanton-Hughes, Blair, 127 Star, 115 Steen, Marguerite, 56, 58, 94, 147, 149 Stevenson, R. L., 77 Stoker, Bram, 6, 17, 18–19, 20–1, 22–31, 53, 54, 101 ‘The Chain of Destiny’, 19, 26 Dracula, 6, 17, 18, 22, 24, 26, 27–8, 30–1 dramatization, 6, 23 The Lady of the Shroud, 25 The Lair of the White Worm, 28 The Mystery of the Sea, 25 Personal Reminiscences, 20–1, 22, 24, 26, 27, 28, 31, 54–5 ‘The Primrose Path’, 29–30 The Snake’s Pass, 25 Snowbound, 18, 28–31 ‘A Star Trap’, 30 The Watter’s Mou’, 25 Stoker, Florence, 6 Strindberg, August A Dream Play, 88 The Ghost Sonata, 88 Stuart, Edgar, 98 suffrage, women’s, 66, 68, 70, 71–2, 76, 111, 141 Summerfield, Penny, 133 Swinburne, Algernon, 43 Sydney Morning Herald, 71 Tairov, Alexander, 117 Tate, Gilbert, 99 Tate Britain Gallery, 33, 42, 43, 44, 46, 133 Taxidou, Olga, 91 Taylor, Anthony, 75 Taylor, Tom, 35, 38, 40, 41, 152 Nine Points of the Law, 36 Tennyson, Alfred, 40, 85 Terry, Benjamin (father of Ellen), 21, 34, 71–2, 94, 133

205

Terry, Charles, 99 Terry, Dame Ellen lectures on Shakespeare, 7–8, 65–76 Children, 68–9 Pathetic Heroines, 44, 67, 69–70, 73–4 Triumphant Women, 66, 71 Memoirs, 45, 72, 119, 120 The Story of My Life, 21–2, 24, 29, 34, 87, 134 in The Mistress of the Robes, 51 in Olivia, 142 Terry, Florence, 94 Terry, Fred, 56 Terry, Hazel, 4 Terry, Kate (later Lewis), 9, 35, 36, 41, 90, 93, 94, 99 Terry, Marion, 70, 94, 99, 104 Terry, Sarah (née Ballard; mother of Ellen), 21–2, 34, 83, 94, 133 funeral, 15 Tertullian, De Spectaculis, 95 Theatre Arts Monthly, 119, 124, 125, 127, 128–9, 130, 131, 155 Theatre Guild, 109 Theatre Royal, Bath, 35, 84 Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, 51, 84, 91 Theatre Royal, Haymarket, 33, 35, 103 Theatre Royal, Margate, 97 Thorndike, Dame Sybil, 4, 111, 116, 123 Thorne, Ellen, 98, 99 Thorne, Sarah, 51 School of Acting, 97, 98, 105 Time and Tide, 123 Todhunter, John, Helena in Troas, 84, 85 Tower Cottage, Winchelsea, 145 Tree, Beerbohm, 89, 91, 94, 102 Tree, Ellen, 34, 98 Tree, Maud, 104 Tree, Viola, 104 Triad (New Zealand), 71 Tynan, Kenneth, 80 Tytler, Mary Fraser, 45 Underwood, Leon, 127 University of Hull, 5, 16, 149 Urban, Felix, 88

206

Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence

‘vampire trap’, 30 vampires, 6, 17–19, 23–4, 26–7, 30–1 Vanbrugh, Dame Irene, 96, 97, 99 Vanbrugh, Violet, 96, 97, 99 Voskuil, Lynn, 1, 7 Vote, The, 70 Votes for Women, 72 Walton, J. Michael, ix, 9 Ward, Amy, 152 Ward, Genevieve, 49–50 Ward, Henry A., 28 Wardell, Charles (Kelly), 9, 41, 83, 90 Watts, George Frederic, 1, 7, 14, 33–47, 82, 83, 133, 137 letter from Terry, 137 And All the Air a Solemn Stillness Holds, 40 Angel of Death (The Court of Death), 40 Choosing, 14, 38, 39–40, 42, 133 Clytie, 43 Endymion, 43 Eve Tempted, 44 Fata Morgana, 42 Found Drowned, 22, 43 Hope, 42, 45 Hugh Lupus, 45 Joan of Arc, 14 Love and Life, 39, 42, 46, 46 Ophelia’s Madness, 14, 41, 44 Orpheus and Eurydice, 43 Paolo and Francesca, 42 She Shall be Called Woman, 43–4 The Sisters, 36 Time, Death and Judgment, 44 Time and Oblivion, 40 Uldra, 45 A Venetian Senator, 36 Watchman, What of the Night?, 14, 36–7

The Wife of Pluto, 14, 42–3 The Wife of Pygmalion, 42 Webster, Ben, 147 Webster, Margaret, 126 Webster, Mary, 126 West, Rebecca, 3 West, Richard, 85 Hecuba, 84 Western Daily Press, 84 Whitworth, Geoffrey, 109 Wilcox, Dorothea, 100 Wilcox, Menella, 96 Wilde, Oscar, 1, 102 letter to Terry, 136 ‘Portia’, 44 ‘The Silent Room’, 19 Wills, W. G. Charles I, 20 Faust, 7, 18, 25, 100–1, 102, 105, 106 and Dracula, 22–4 Olivia, 21, 24–5, 138, 142 Wilson & Gray, 145 Winter, William, 23, 27, 136 Women Writers’ Suffrage League, 70 Women’s Freedom League, 70 Woods, Leigh, 2, 137 Woodward, Daphne, 79 Woolf, Virginia, 71 ‘Ellen Terry’, 2, 8, 65, 137 Freshwater, 3, 133 A Room of One’s Own, 1–2 ‘A Scene from the Past’, 3 World, 51 World War I, 108, 109, 112, 135 Wynne, Catherine, ix, 6, 7 Yeats, W. B., 91, 112 Yorkshire Post, 125