The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage

The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage

Also by Jeffrey Richards RUSKIN, THE THEATRE AND VICTORIAN VISUAL CULTURE (edited with Anselm Heinrich and Kate Newey) HOLLYWOOD’S ANCIENT WORLDS SIR HENRY IRVING: A Victorian Actor and his World A NIGHT TO REMEMBER: the Definitive Titanic Film IMPERIALISM AND MUSIC FILMS AND BRITISH NATIONAL IDENTITY SEX, DISSIDENCE AND DAMNATION HAPPIEST DAYS: the Public Schools in English Fiction THOROLD DICKINSON: the Man and his Films BRITAIN CAN TAKE IT: British Films and the Second World War (with Anthony Aldgate) THE RAILWAY STATION: a Social History (with J.M. MacKenzie)

The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage Jeffrey Richards

© Jeffrey Richards 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–22936–5 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Anselm Heinrich Kate Newey Peter Yeandle

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Contents

Foreword

viii

1 The Victorians and the Ancient World

1

2 The Early Victorian Actor-Managers and the Ancient World

26

3 Living Greek Statues

66

4 Wilson Barrett’s Ancient World

99

5 Irving’s Ancient World

152

6 Tree’s Ancient World

169

7 The Toga Play: Climax and Decline

222

Notes

236

Index

252

vii

Foreword This book grew out of a major research project on the influence of John Ruskin and Ruskinian aesthetics on the Victorian theatre. During the course of researching and writing a chapter on John Ruskin and the ‘toga play’ for a book embodying the results of the project, I realized that comparatively little had been written on the depiction of the Ancient World on the nineteenth-century stage by comparison with its depiction in novels and paintings. There are two principal exceptions to this scholarly silence. One is David Mayer’s invaluable Playing Out the Empire (Clarendon Press, 1994) which reprints the texts of five of the so-called ‘toga plays’ with an excellent thirty-page introductory essay on the genre which concentrates on the Roman plays. The other is the admirable, wide-ranging and authoritative Greek Tragedy in the British Theatre (Oxford University Press, 2005) by Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh. In over 600 fascinating pages, the book establishes the British performance history of classical Greek tragedy between 1660 and 1914 and explains how it illuminates the process of social, legislative and political change. I have taken the story further by analysing not only plays set in Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece, but also Egypt, Babylon and the Holy Land, and by exploring the emerging symbiotic relationship between the theatre, the novel and paintings. I approach this subject not from the perspective of Performance Studies, currently favoured by many theatre historians, but from the standpoint of cultural history. This is a holistic approach that I first developed in my book Sir Henry Irving: A Victorian Actor and his World (Hambledon, 2005). It seeks to locate theatre within the wider culture, tracing its links and interaction with literature, painting, history, religion and archaeology, and to ascertain the critical and popular reactions to the aesthetic wedding of the so-called ‘sister arts’ in stagings of the Ancient World. The fact that Sir Henry Irving was short-listed for the Society for Theatre Research Book of the Year Award in 2005 suggests that theatre historians recognized that this is an approach as valid as that of Performance Studies in illuminating the role of the stage in society. The strict word limit now imposed upon most academic monographs means that I perforce confine myself to the study of the British stage, and only touch on the American stage when it generates productions such as Ben-Hur and Quo Vadis that cross the Atlantic to be produced in viii

Foreword ix

Britain. A comparative study of Britain and America, which is desirable, would be possible only when there is a much more extensive literature than currently exists. The present book is a modest attempt to define and outline the Ancient World genre as it developed in Victorian Britain. I do not propose to cover comedy and parody, on which I refer readers to the fine chapters in Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh’s Greek Tragedy in the British Theatre, which it would be otiose for me to duplicate. Although I touch on provincial productions of key works in passing, a sustained study of touring productions, with visiting continental stars such as Adelaide Ristori in productions such as Medea and Mirra, and domestic companies such as Ben Greet’s taking West End successes around the provinces, requires a book-length study of its own, The Ancient World in the Provinces perhaps. The present book has three structuring themes. The first is to examine key Ancient World productions through the prism of the actor-manager regime, the dominant mode of production in the nineteenth century. This approach requires some understanding of the lives, careers, views and values of leading actor-managers. The second is to establish the extent of the interaction of the ‘sister arts’ in Ancient World productions. The third is to establish the reception of the plays within the culture. In a celebrated exchange, architect Alfred Darbyshire reported that sitting next to the painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema at Henry Irving’s production of Lord Tennyson’s classical drama The Cup, he heard AlmaTadema exclaim with a sigh and a shrug of his shoulders, ‘How poor my art is after this.’ Repeating the comment to Irving, he received the sad reply, ‘Ah! Tadema, when I am dead and gone my art is gone, while yours lives for ever.’ The nearest we can come to recapturing the impact of long-gone theatrical productions is to analyse the often very detailed reviews of a wide range of contemporary critics. I draw extensively on these reviews to recapture the look and feel of the stage productions, the colour schemes, the action scenes, the settings and the great setpieces. Critics were the mediators of theatre to the wider culture and their influence should not be underestimated. For example, Clement Scott, theatre critic of the Daily Telegraph from 1871 to 1898, was recalled by his successor, W.L. Courtney as: the most interesting critic in London, and his verdict was of more importance to theatrical managers than that of any other man. The average playgoer accepted Scott’s attitude without question and read his criticisms because they appealed to the great middle class . . . But

x Foreword

the brilliant success of Clement Scott as a critic did not depend wholly on his ability to interpret the voice of the man in the street . . . During his career he was far and away the best judge of acting in London. Often the critics recorded the reactions of the audience to the play. This evidence can be supplemented by the recorded reactions, where they exist, of individual theatregoers. Examples of such works are Richard Dickins, Forty Years of Shakespeare on the English Stage (privately printed, 1907) and Kate Terry Gielgud, A Victorian Playgoer (Heinemann, 1980). There is also the evidence of the box office. Long runs and regular revivals bespeak popularity with the ordinary theatregoing public and not just the critics. It is of course a truism that each performance of a play is an event in itself. Plays are not static, fixed and timeless experiences. As Adrian Poole has written in his book Shakespeare and the Victorians (Thomson Learning, 2004): performance is specific to time and place . . . the experience of Shakespeare in the theatre is always more dependent on where exactly you are sitting than the experience of reading the (same) text . . . So we should acknowledge the importance of stories . . . about the performance of Shakespeare in Birmingham, Glasgow and Dublin, in North America, Australia and India. There is nevertheless a dominant story to be told through the household names of Macready and Irving, the Americans Edwin Forrest, Charlotte Cushman and Edwin Booth, the continental stars Tommaso Salvini and Sarah Bernhardt. To become household names they had to conquer London, but once they had done so, the extent of touring across nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland and North America meant that they became agents and icons of identity, with and against whom spectators could identify themselves. The focus of this study is precisely those dominant figures who not only conquered London but who, touring extensively, thanks to the great railway network and the regular steamship sailings, became key agents in the creation and perpetuation of a national taste and standard in theatre in Victorian Britain. The present book seeks through empirical research to lay the groundwork and indicate the outlines of a significant theatrical genre, groundwork upon which other scholars may build in the future.

Foreword xi

I am grateful for the help and advice of various kinds received from Richard Foulkes, Sir Christopher Frayling, Joel Hockey, David Mayer, Linda Persson, June Rye and Stephen Wildman. I am indebted too to the ever-helpful staff of the British Library; the Theatre Museum, Blythe House; the Newspaper Library, Colindale; Lancaster University Library; the Ruskin Library, Lancaster; the Beerbohm Tree Collection, Bristol University; the Russell-Cotes Museum, Bournemouth; and the Leighton House Museum, London. I am indebted to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin, for permission to reproduce items from the Wilson Barrett Collection and to Lord Cobbold for permission to quote from the letters of the Second Lord Lytton. My greatest debt is to my colleagues on the Ruskinian Theatre project, Kate Newey, Anselm Heinrich and Peter Yeandle, for their assistance in researching the project and developing the ideas. The book is dedicated to them. I am grateful to James Deboo for compiling the index. JEFFREY RICHARDS

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1 The Victorians and the Ancient World

In the nineteenth century both Britain and the United States were obsessed with the Ancient World. For the Victorians on both sides of the Atlantic history held the key to understanding the present and the eternal truths about human nature. The Ancient World could be used to represent an escape from an increasingly urbanized and industrialized present to an idealized golden age. It could constitute a vehicle to critique the present. It fulfilled a continuing nineteenth-century taste for the exotic, for spectacle and for education. It could be used to explore the roots of national, communal, individual and gender identity. The American Founding Fathers consciously saw themselves as the successors of the heroes of the Republic and modelled their institutions, their buildings and their rhetoric on those of Ancient Rome.1 The classical myths, suitably sanitized, were retold for American children by writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Bulfinch. They provided inspiration for painters and sculptors such as Henry Peters Gray and William Page. William Wetmore Story wrote a series of dramatic monologues as delivered by Phidias, Praxiteles, Marcus Aurelius, Cleopatra, Mark Antony and Cassandra, a play Nero and made sculptures of Cleopatra, Medea, Salome, Helen, Alcestis, Clytemnestra, Judith, Electra and Semiramis. American statesmen such as Washington, Jackson and Calhoun were depicted wearing togas. One of the most popular plays on the early American stage was the Englishman Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713), which eulogized one of the greatest heroes of the Republic. Plays by American authors adopted Addison’s approach and attitude. Republican heroes inspired for instance John Howard Payne’s Brutus or the Fall of Tarquin (1818), and Jonas B. Phillips’s Camillus or the Self-Exiled Patriot (1833). But the most celebrated nineteenth-century Ancient World drama was Robert Montgomery Bird’s The Gladiator (1831), which 1

2

The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage

retained its popularity in America for seventy years. It told the story of the rebel gladiator Spartacus and his revolt against Rome. In this context, Rome was seen as the analogue of the British Empire and Spartacus as the counterpart of the American colonists whose rebellion ended imperial rule. The role became particularly associated with the American actor Edwin Forrest and when he played it at Drury Lane in 1836, John Bull (20 November 1836) reported: ‘his fine manly form, great physical force and exceeding energy, were in admirable keeping with our preconceived notions of a Gladiator . . . At times we forgot the actor and fancied that one of the glorious statues of ancient Greece had been suddenly called into life and summoned to the arena.’ However there was a perceived shift in the later nineteenth century from these celebrations of secular democratic republicanism to evocations of Christian resistance to imperial tyranny. This would be directly reflected on the stage. Interestingly the same trajectory occurred in the British theatre. The context in Britain was the political and cultural transformation of the country. The period between the 1770s and the 1830s was one of profound upheaval and disturbance in Britain. When British forces surrendered to the rebel American colonists at Yorktown in 1781, the band played ‘The World Turned Upside Down’. This must have been how many of those living through these decades felt. The American and French revolutions not only overthrew long-established social and political orders, they undermined long-held assumptions and attitudes. In Britain radical and democratic groups began pressing for root and branch reform, a movement leading eventually to the 1832 Reform Act which began the process of opening up parliament, first to middle-class and later to working-class participation in the political process. At the same time the Industrial Revolution was transforming a largely rural society into a mainly urban one, with all the consequent social problems, and the Age of Enlightenment, in which reason and common sense prevailed, when science was believed to provide rational explanations for everything and when an ordered, measured classicism prevailed in the arts, was overthrown by the rise of Romanticism, the intellectual and artistic counterpart of the political and economic upheavals. Romanticism had at its roots a burning desire for freedom from restraint and the unshackling of the imagination. It had certain basic fascinations: the past, especially the medieval past, the cult of naturalism and spontaneity, heroic individualism and the occult. Romanticism had two manifestations, reactionary and radical, but what both had in common was the feeling of being an outsider which led, for reactionaries, to the celebration of the past as a rebuke to the present, and for radicals, to the

The Victorians and the Ancient World

3

desire to overthrow the existing order of things and implement an idealized blueprint for a Utopian society dedicated to liberty, equality and fraternity. However, the Victorian age, which began with the accession of the eighteen-year-old Queen Victoria in 1837, marked a decisive break with the disreputable and discredited Hanoverian monarchs of the previous two decades, and her long reign was to witness the increasing unification of Britain and a moral transformation of society. There remained considerable diversity within the British Isles. Scotland retained its own legal, educational and banking systems, for instance. The Anglican Church was the established Church of England and Wales, though Dissent dominated within Wales; in Scotland, the Presbyterian Church was dominant. Even within England, there was a north-south division, as indeed there still is, and London remained a huge, unique, separate entity, almost another world. Regional dialects were spoken in different parts of the country, so much so, for instance, that Geordie music-hall comedians could not be understood in the south and Cockneys had problems in the north, partly because they spoke too fast and switched their v’s and w’s. Nevertheless, a British unity emerged that was perfectly compatible with diversity. Pride in local dialect literature, in local regiments, in local, regional, civic and provincial identity, not only survived but flourished, and was perfectly consonant with pride in the British nation and empire, because of the Britishness of key elements. The political system was national. The political parties (Liberal and Conservative, later joined by Labour) were specifically constructed and projected as national British parties. Successive Scots led the Liberal Party (Gladstone, Rosebery, Campbell-Bannerman) and the Tories (Balfour, Bonar Law). Wales became a bastion of Liberalism and later Labourism, channelling its sense of identity not into political separation but into official opposition and, indeed, government, when a Welshman, Lloyd George, became Prime Minister. Parliament was the embodiment of the Whig theory of history, of the gradual and inexorable evolution of democracy, the recognition and incorporation of Catholics, Jews, the working classes and women into the body politic and the operation of political parties that were cross-class and transnational. In the nineteenth century the railways unified Britain as never before, imposing a national time standard and making possible a national diet, national newspapers, national sporting leagues. The empire transcended national differences and became supranational, with the English, Irish, Scots and Welsh alike serving in the British Imperial Army, Ireland

4

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providing colonial viceroys and governors, and the empire being seen as distinctively British rather than specifically English. The monarchy came to embody the whole nation. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert shared a well-publicized love for the Highlands, building Balmoral Castle and spending summer holidays there, and the royal princes wore kilts. The eldest son of the monarch was the Prince of Wales, and Lloyd George devised a fake antique ceremony for the installation of the future Edward VIII as Prince of Wales in order to emphasize the Welsh identity within the imperial British context. All the royal princes were given titles that emphasized Britishness – Queen Victoria’s sons were the Prince of Wales, the Dukes of Edinburgh and Albany representing Scotland, and the Duke of Connaught representing Ireland. Regular royal visits to all parts of the British Isles stressed the role of the monarch as a unifying factor. A genuinely British culture emerged. Many of the leading Victorian gurus – Ruskin, Carlyle, Samuel Smiles, Edward Irving – were Scots. Scots were nationally prominent in journalism, publishing, medicine and science. At the same time, all parts of the British Isles revered Dickens, Scott and Shakespeare. Not only did a unified culture emerge but a strongly structured and regulated society – orderly, law-abiding and deferential. There were a number of contributing factors: the growth of the factory system which instilled punctuality, regularity and discipline and of large-scale organizations like the railways and the Post Office which enforced military-style discipline and uniformed their employees; the work of the police force and the courts; a general improvement in the quality of life (health, housing, transport, civic amenities); the socializing effects of schools and Sunday schools on the young and of chapel, trade unions and adult education movements on their elders; and, above all, the pervasive power of the doctrine of respectability at all levels of society. The definition of the national character was completed, in the nineteenth century, by the fusion of two powerful creeds. The first was Evangelical Protestantism, the dominant social ethic of the first half of the nineteenth century. The Evangelicals, characterized by an intense seriousness of purpose, immense industry and enthusiastic missionary spirit, censorious highmindedness and a puritanical abstention from worldly pleasures, mounted a full-scale and successful assault on every level and aspect of society, promoting philanthropy, religion, education, duty and hard work, and attacking cruelty, frivolity and vice in all its forms.

The Victorians and the Ancient World

5

It was Evangelical activists who ensured the civilizing of a violent, disorderly society by banning the slave trade and public executions, outlawing cruel sports such as bull-baiting, cock-fighting and bare-knuckle prizefighting, by restricting gambling and drinking, by abolishing the national lottery, by imposing a puritanical code of sexual conduct and inculcating the ideas of duty, service and conscience, thrift, sobriety and personal restraint. Taught in schools and Sunday schools, promoted in literature and enshrined in law, these ideas became the British national values while the predominant Protestantism of Wales and Scotland ensured that they were accepted there as much as in England. At the same time, there was a revival of chivalry, which became all-pervasive in the nineteenth century. Inspired by Sir Walter Scott’s idealizations of the Middle Ages, chivalry was deliberately promoted by such key figures of the age as Ruskin and Carlyle to provide a code of life for the young, based on the virtues of the gentleman: courtesy, bravery, modesty, purity and compassion, and a sense of responsibility towards women, children, the weak and the helpless. It permeated the literature and painting of the period, was advocated by youth organizations such as the Boy Scouts and Boys’ Brigade, enshrined in the codes and regulations of sports like football and cricket and embodied in the public school ethos (fair play, team spirit, modesty, loyalty) absorbed not just by public schoolboys but by schoolboys everywhere through popular fictions from Tom Brown’s Schooldays to the Greyfriars stories in The Magnet. The idea of the gentleman was an integrative image for the ruling elites of Great Britain, once again transcending the boundaries between England, Scotland and Wales, and percolating down from the elite to the rest of the population through popular culture. It was seen as a counterweight to the selfishness, greed and individualism of raw capitalism, and as a vehicle for service and social concern. Evangelicalism and chivalry thus became the distinctive shaping social and ideological forces of the nineteenth century. Each fed into a political party: Evangelicalism into Liberalism, chivalry into Conservatism. The two ideologies cross-fertilized to provide a justification for an empire that had been acquired for economic, strategic and political reasons. The Evangelical missionary impulse, the desire to bring the heathen to the light of God, and the Calvinist idea of the elect, the British as the greatest nation in the world obliged to provide justice and good government for inferior races, intertwined with a chivalric vision of empire as a vehicle for young Englishmen to demonstrate the virtues that made them gentlemen. This confluence inspired a continuing theme in imperial writing, the idea that the British ran their empire not for their

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The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage

own benefit but for the benefit of those they ruled. What these ideologies had in common was the overwhelming importance of the ideas of personal restraint and concern for others, of duty and service. Merged together, they helped form the national character and national ideology. The two ancient cultures which appealed most to Victorian Britain were Greece and Rome. Antiquity, particularly Ancient Greece, with its classical architecture characterized by rational, balanced and geometric designs, the invention of democracy, a philosophy based on ethics and reason and an aesthetics that celebrated perfect beauty inspired the apostles and exponents of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The cult of Hellenism was central to the intellectual life of Victorian Britain. Writers and thinkers selected from the Greek heritage those elements which most closely conformed to the preoccupations of the age, essentially celebrating the Ancient Greeks as proto-Victorians. What the Victorians highlighted was the Greeks’ development of democracy and the rule of law, at a time when democracy was being extended in Britain, and the Greek appreciation of beauty and celebration of heroism as a contrast to the philistinism and Nonconformist Puritanism associated with the bourgeoisie. They rejoiced in the philosophical humanism which they derived from study of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates and from which they took intellectual justification for collective social responsibility, individual self-sacrifice, devotion to duty and enlightened paternalism which was seen, like chivalry, as a corrective to the materialism and selfishness associated with industrial capitalism. Ancient Greece, in particular Periclean Athens, was idealized and held up as a model of dignity, decency, restraint, moderation, harmony, balance, reason and purity. Homer was studied as a secular equivalent of the Bible. The Iliad and the Odyssey were seen in particular as teaching chivalry, nobility, patriotism, and moral and physical strength as characteristics for which to strive. So the language, literature, history and ideas of the Ancient Greeks were taught to the British elite at school and at university to fit them to cope with the modern world.2 If Ancient Greece appealed to the intellectuals and artists of Victorian Britain, Ancient Rome appealed to its administrators and empirebuilders. For Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, already master of the mightiest empire the world had ever seen, the reference point for comparison, for guidance, for lessons was the Roman Empire. Anthony Trollope observed in 1870 that Rome and the Roman Empire were part of modern history and modern political life in a way that Greece could never be.3 Where Rome had the Pax Romana, Britain had the Pax Britannica with much the same remit. Britain referred to

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7

its imperial viceroys as ‘proconsuls’. The architecture of the empire tended to favour the classical style in its public buildings. The utterances of Britain’s imperial statesmen were steeped in classical allusion, most famously when in a debate about the manhandling of a British subject Don Pacifico, Lord Palmerston proclaimed as a fundamental of British policy, the protection at all costs of British subjects with the ringing statement ‘Civis Romanus sum’. Disraeli, defining his policy, declared it to be imperium et libertas, Empire and Freedom. The British admired the Romans for their stoicism, their courage, their administration and their legal system, their concept of citizenship, their straight roads, bridges and aqueducts, their common currency and common language. In Britain, Hadrian’s Wall, the Roman roads, and the archaeological remains at Bath, Colchester and St Albans were a permanent reminder of Roman architectural achievements. The regular comparisons between the British and Roman empires culminated in detailed comparative studies: Lord Cromer’s Ancient and Modern Imperialism (1910) – significantly Cromer was both Britain’s proconsul in Egypt and later President of the Classical Association, Sir Charles Lucas’s Greater Rome and Greater Britain (1912) and Sir James Bryce’s The Ancient Roman Empire and the British Empire in India (1914). Just as the prospective elite of the empire were taught Greek, they were also taught Latin and provided with inspiring examples of dedication, duty and service from Roman history, notably in Lord Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome (1842), a popular poetic retelling of four episodes from Roman history, regularly learned by heart by Victorian schoolboys of all classes. The Roman poets Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil and Horace were as much a part of nineteenth-century culture as were the Greek poets and philosophers.4 However, Britain did not just look to Rome for laudatory parallels; it looked to Rome also for lessons about what destroys empires and this was a source of much reflection, thought and argument. A classic example of this is to be found in The Roman and the Teuton, a series of inaugural lectures given by the Reverend Charles Kingsley on his appointment as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge and published in 1864. He begins by painting a lurid picture of the Roman Empire in the later fourth century, an empire under the absolute rule of an emperor, whose palace is ‘a sink of corruption’, where the Senate only exists to carry out the orders of the tyrant, where the free middle classes have either disappeared or linger on ‘too proud to labour, fed on government bounty, and amused by government spectacles’, where the arts and science have died, where everything is done by an army of slaves supplied by a cruel and degrading slave trade and where the

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normal condition of the empire is one of ‘revolt, civil war, invasion’. ‘And yet’, says Kingsley, ‘they called themselves Christians – to whom it has been said “Be not deceived, God is not mocked. For these things cometh the wrath of God on the children of disobedience”.’ The wrath did come and the empire fell. So the absence of true spirituality, of real Christianity, is the root cause of the fall of the Roman Empire. This picture, he warned, could be repeated in the British Empire ‘if we are not careful’.5 For Kingsley the key factors in Rome’s decline and the ones to be avoided by the British Empire if it was to escape the same fate were the absence of parliamentary democracy and a responsible aristocracy, the existence of slavery, the decay of public spirit, civic virtue and morality, the dominance of sensuality, the employment of mercenaries, the decline of racial purity and the absence of genuine Christianity. For Kingsley, as for many other commentators from Ruskin to Kipling, the last of these was the most significant. In the nineteenth century, which saw a major revival in Britain of both Evangelicalism and Catholicism, the role of Christianity in the Roman Empire became a major subject of debate. Major religious polemicists took to the novel to work out their debates about the nature of the faith and, writing as they were during the heyday of the British Empire, they often set their debates during the Roman Empire. Of whatever persuasion, they were as one in the belief that the most potent force to deploy against the paganism, slavery, unrestrained sensuality and political despotism of the empire was Christianity. The fashion for Roman novels essentially began with Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and climaxed with General Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur (1880) and Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis? (1896), novels by an Englishman, an American and a Pole respectively, but all hugely popular best-sellers worldwide, endlessly reprinted, translated and adapted for and performed on the stage and, during the twentieth century, in the cinema. An estimated 200 novels on Roman life were written by British and American authors between the 1820s and the First World War.6 In most of these novels, Christianity was seen as the answer to the tyranny and corruption of a pagan empire. In general terms then it was possible to argue that without a genuinely felt and practised Christianity empire will fail. For Christianity is seen here to be synonymous with democracy, humanity and public virtue. But it was on the question of what kind of Christianity – Catholic or Protestant – that the nineteenthcentury novelists crossed swords. Charles Kingsley published his novel Hypatia in 1853. It recounted the religious clashes in fifth-century

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Alexandria, highlighting the theological disputes and divisions weakening the empire. Kingsley lays the blame on hysterical, celibate, neurotic and fanatical monks, who are his analogue of the Catholics, and on scheming politico bishops in a theocratic state; his Bishop Cyril of Alexandria is a thinly-disguised picture of Cardinal Wiseman, leader of the English Catholics. His heroes, the monk Philammon and the Jew Raphael Aben-Ezra, are converted to his preferred model of Christianity, a simple proto-Protestant Christianity, which Kingsley calls ‘the only real democratic creed’. Kingsley was one of the pioneers of ‘muscular Christianity’, was strongly opposed to priestly elitism, celibacy and popery and was an enthusiastic advocate of marriage for members of the clergy. As a direct response to Kingsley’s novel both Cardinal Wiseman and John Henry Newman, later himself a cardinal, also wrote extremely influential novels. Wiseman’s Fabiola was published in 1854 and Newman’s Callista in 1855. The former is set in Rome in 302 and the latter in North Africa in 250, but both commemorate the Christian martyrs of the Roman persecutions of those periods and in particular write up, celebrate and affirm Catholic beliefs and practices, such as the cult of the saints and the papal hierarchy. Kingsley, Newman and Wiseman all see the Roman Empire as synonymous with decay, despotism and sensuality and Christianity as its salvation, but as the cure for sensuality, Newman and Wiseman prescribe celibacy and Kingsley monogamous marriage. Where Newman and Wiseman prescribe a strong hierarchical Catholic Church, Kingsley argues for proto-Protestant individualism. These are only three of the torrent of novels dealing with the conflict of Christianity and Empire in ancient Rome. This conflict and its working out in Christianity’s favour made these novels as appealing to the American audience as to the British.7 Then towards the end of the century other concerns arose to parallel the debate about spirituality in the empire. There was anxiety about manpower shortages and the degeneration of the race when the Boer War revealed a third of all recruits to be physically unfit to serve and there was panic about the decadent movement and in particular the celebrity of Oscar Wilde and Wildeanism. This inspired disapproving descriptions of sensuality in the novels of the time, linked to the gospel of Wildeanism, and visually half-horrified, half-fascinated paintings such as Alma-Tadema’s The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888) in which the debauched emperor Heliogabalus and his decadent companions watch with world-weary amusement while his dinner guests are smothered to death beneath a torrent of rose petals released from a canopy above them.

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There was a widespread sense of crisis in intellectual and elite circles, a crisis which produced such works as Elliot Mills’s best-selling work of ‘future history’, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (1905) which attributed the decline to ‘town life, demoralizing luxury, physical inertia, gradual decline in physique and health and lack of confidence in the imperial mission’.8 Sir Robert Baden-Powell founded the Boy Scouts partly to prevent the British Empire suffering the same decline as the Roman, a decline he attributed in Scouting for Boys (1908) to the abandonment of soldiering, manliness and patriotism. The characteristics of the Ancient World novel were essentially set by its progenitor, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, later the first Lord Lytton, novelist, poet and statesman, in his phenomenally successful The Last Days of Pompeii, which was the product of visits to the ruined city in 1832–33. Pompeii, an otherwise unremarkable Roman provincial town, was made immortal by its destruction along with neighbouring Herculaneum in AD 79 by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius and its rediscovery by archaeologists seventeen centuries later. It was the chance discovery in 1711 of stone fragments by a peasant digging a well that led to systematic excavations on the site of Herculaneum by the kings of the Two Sicilies. The much richer neighbouring site of Pompeii was only identified in 1763 and it was not until 1863 that systematic, scientific excavation began there with the appointment of a trained archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli as Director of the Museum and Excavations. Long before this, however, the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum had become a regular port of call for travellers on the Grand Tour. Goethe, Dickens, Dumas and Mark Twain visited them. But the most productive visit was that of Bulwer-Lytton, for it directly inspired The Last Days of Pompeii. Lady Blessington typically declared of the book: ‘There is more true poetry in your Pompeii than in fifty epics, and it alone would stamp its author as the genius par excellence of our day . . . it is read and praised by all classes alike, each expressing surprise that so powerful an interest can be excited for so remote an age.’9 Lytton’s fictional plot centred on Glaucus, an Athenian resident of Pompeii, and his love for the beautiful Ione. But Ione is also loved by her guardian, Arbaces, the High Priest of Isis. Arbaces murders Ione’s brother, Apaecides, a priest of Isis who has converted to Christianity, and frames Glaucus for the murder. Glaucus is condemned to the arena but as he is facing the lions, another priest, Calenus, reveals that he witnessed the murder and Glaucus is innocent. At this point, Vesuvius erupts. Various characters, among them Arbaces and Calenus, are killed. But Glaucus

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and Ione are saved by the blind slave-girl Nydia, who loves Glaucus. She leads them safely through the smoke and the darkness to a ship which carries them to safety. Having selflessly united the lovers, Nydia drowns herself in the sea. Glaucus and Ione marry and settle in Athens. The action of the novel takes place amid precisely described locations uncovered by archaeologists; the Pompeian amphitheatre, the villa of the tragic poet, the villa of Diomedes and the temple of Isis. Declaring himself with regard to prose fiction ‘thoroughly aware of its power in teaching as well as amusing’, Lytton sought to give a faithful picture of the customs, costume and superstitions of the age, an accurate topography of his setting but also ‘a just representation of the human passions and the human heart, whose elements in all ages are the same’.10 Together with his detailed historical research and his exploration of the secrets of the human heart there was another powerful inspiration – painting. While he was in Italy, Lytton visited a collection of pictures in the Brera Gallery in Milan and wrote in his journal that one picture in particular was making a ‘considerable sensation’. The painting The Last Days of Pompeii was by the Russian artist Karl Pavlovich Bryulov (1799–1852) and set a series of ‘human interest’ stories against an apocalyptic background. Lytton said: This picture is full of genius, imagination and nature. The faces are fine, the conception grand. The statues toppling from a lofty gate have a crashing and awful effect. But the most natural touch is an infant in its mother’s arms – her face impressed with a dismay and terror which partake of the sublime; the child wholly unconscious of the dread event – stretching its arms towards a bird of gay plumage that lies upon the ground struggling in death, and all the child’s gay delighted wonder is pictured in its face. This exception to the general horror of the scene is full of pathos, and in the true contrast of fine thought.11 The impression this picture made upon Bulwer-Lytton was reinforced by another. One of John Martin’s epic canvases, exhibited at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly in 1822, was The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Lytton knew and admired Martin’s work, calling him in 1833 ‘the greatest, the most lofty, the most permanent, the most original genius of his age. I see in him . . . the presence of a . . . great soul lapped in majestic and unearthly dreams.’12 In its turn the novel inspired painters. An estimated thirty-five paintings based on episodes in the novel are recorded in the sixty years

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after its appearance, among them Paul Falconer Poole’s The Destruction of Pompeii (c. 1835) and The Escape of Glaucus and Ione, with the Blind Girl Nydia from Pompeii (1861) and Joseph Severn’s The Witches’ Cavern: Glaucus and Ione (1840). The American sculptor Randolph Rogers sculpted Nydia the Blind Girl of Pompeii.13 The paintings, like the novel, embodied the characteristics which were to become identified with the Ancient World genre: archaeological authenticity, emotional truth, visual power and a desire to educate as well as to entertain. The same characterizations were to be carried over into stage adaptations of the major novels. The nineteenth century was the period in which archaeology emerged as a science – the word only came into common currency in 1851 – and the recovery of the Ancient World proceeded apace in Italy, Greece, Egypt and the Near East. The Elgin Marbles had been sent from Athens to London between 1801 and 1811, creating a sensation. But it was not until the 1860s that digging began at Olympia and Samothrace to recover the remains of Ancient Greece. In 1879 the British School of Archaeology in Athens was established and in 1885 Oxford University established a chair of Classical Archaeology. It was, however, the German Heinrich Schliemann who had made the most sensational discoveries in Greece. Schliemann, fantasist, romantic, self-publicist and pioneering archaeologist, in the twenty years following 1870 astonished the world with his finds at Troy, Mycenae and Tiryns, which appeared to confirm the literal truth of the events related by Homer and the Ancient Greek playwrights. The siege of Troy is one of the great epics of European culture, with its parade of heroes (Hector, Achilles, Odysseus, Ajax, Aeneas and Paris) and its succession of mythic events (the judgement of Paris, the abduction of Helen, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the Wooden Horse). It has inspired great writers and artists down the years from Homer, Aeschylus and Virgil through Chaucer and Shakespeare to Berlioz and Yeats. Caesar and Alexander both visited the putative site of Troy. Fugitive Trojans were said to have founded Rome, France and even Britain. But did the Trojan War actually ever happen? Some of the greatest classical scholars have doubted it. George Grote, premier historian of Ancient Greece in the nineteenth century, dismissed it as a legend in 1846. This view is still held by some today. Sir Moses Finley argued that ‘Homer’s War, the war of the poems and of the tradition, is a timeless event floating in a timeless world.’14 But the search for Troy is one of the great romances of modern archaeology. It was an Englishman Frank Calvert who decisively identified Hisarlik in modern Turkey as the site of Ancient Troy

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and suggested it to Schliemann. Between 1870 and 1890 when he died Schliemann returned regularly to the site, proving beyond doubt the existence of a city of Troy. It was in 1873 that he uncovered what he dubbed ‘the treasure of Priam’ and ‘the jewels of Helen’. But before his death it had become clear that there was not one Troy but seven successive cities built on the same site and his discoveries came from Troy II, whose remains dated from a thousand years before the putative time of Homer’s Trojan War. Schliemann’s assistant Wilhelm Dorpfeld, who continued the excavations after Schliemann’s death, thought that Troy VI was probably Homeric Troy, an identification which still holds true today. Supplementary evidence for a Trojan War emerged later not from Greek sources but from the discovery and decipherment of the diplomatic archive of the Hittite Empire whose documents suggest that Troy may have been a vassal state of the Hittites and that an attack on it in the thirteenth century BC by the Greeks as part of a wider clash of empires over dominance on the coast of Asia Minor is therefore entirely plausible.15 It was Schliemann who also excavated Mycenae, a uniquely preserved example of a Bronze Age fortress city. The walls, the tombs, the Lion Gate and the so-called Treasury of Atreus were all known sites and regularly visited by curious travellers from the eighteenth century onwards when interest in pagan antiquities revived. In 1876 Schliemann uncovered five graves full of treasures, including gold face masks, one of which Schliemann confidently proclaimed to be the mask of Agamemnon. Later this was dated to the sixteenth century BC, long before the age of Agamemnon. The building identified as Agamemnon’s Palace turned out not to be and the Treasury of Atreus was actually a beehive-shaped tomb. Although Mycenae did not yield evidence relating to Troy, Schliemann’s discoveries and his published accounts in the books Mycenae, Ilios and Tiryns enthralled a generation. It was such discoveries that inspired writers with a passion for accurate descriptions of the places, customs, costume and artefacts of the Ancient World. They provided equal inspiration for painters, whose work came first to fix the image of the Ancient World in the popular mind. John Martin (1789–1854) was the master of ‘the apocalyptic sublime’. His huge canvases which combined immensity of scale, intricacy of detail and an overpowering atmosphere appealed powerfully to the nineteenth-century sensibility, a sensibility shaped by the worldchanging experiences of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. He painted visions of cosmic catastrophe drawn both from the Ancient World and the Bible. Among them were The Fall

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of Babylon (1819), Belshazzar’s Feast (1821), The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum (1822), The Seventh Plague of Egypt (1824), The Fall of Nineveh (1829), The Destruction of Pharaoh’s Host (1833), The Deluge (1834) and The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (1852). They were to influence the great epic film-makers of the twentieth century, D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. De Mille. But Martin was not alone. Similar pictures were painted by J.M.W. Turner, David Roberts, Samuel Colman, Francis Danby, George Miller and Thomas Cole. Martin’s influence was at its height in the early 1830s, coinciding exactly with the vogue for Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii. As Martin’s biographer William Feaver puts it: Martin’s special contribution was to popularize and make immediate vanished civilizations. While offering little or nothing in terms of original research, he turned literary references into visual reality . . . he concentrated on architectural heroics – the immense promenades, viaducts, canals, and sewers which had been commonplace, it appeared, in the ancient Egyptian and Babylonian empires . . . There were few precedents in fine art for this brand of panoramic epic painting . . . he made no serious attempt to represent these cities as they had actually appeared, but showed them instead as sublimely inauthentic permanent stage sets . . . the neo-classical taste for accurate reconstruction of an exemplary, awe-inspiring past . . . was propagated by way of theatre design, panoramas, and architecture. These are the frames of reference with which Martin’s epic ‘machines’ truly belong – not among the conventional history paintings of the academy.16 When Martin was painting, Babylon and Nineveh had yet to be excavated and when excavations revealed Martin’s views to be essentially fanciful, he fell out of popularity, following his death in 1854. Accuracy became the watchword for history painting. Typical of the new school of painters of the Ancient World was JeanLéon Gérôme (1824–1904). Gérôme was a leading figure in the group, dubbed by contemporaries Néo-Grecs. Inspired by archaeological excavations at Pompeii and elsewhere, the Néo-Grecs were animated by enthusiasm for depicting scenes of everyday life in accurate antique settings furnished with authentic artefacts. Two of Gérôme’s most enduring and influential pictures were his paintings of the arena, Ave Caesar, Morituri te Salutant (1859) showing a group of gladiators saluting the emperor, and Pollice Verso (1872) showing a gladiator straddling a fallen

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opponent and waiting for the thumbs up or thumbs down sign from the crowd. Feeling that some of the archaeological detail in Ave Caesar was incorrect, he studied costumes on Trajan’s column and had moulds made from gladiators’ helmets, greaves and buckles from Naples. He made several bronze statues of gladiators in 1875 and 1878. Other canvases included Cleopatra before Caesar (1866), Julius Caesar and his Staff (1863) and Death of Caesar (1867), showing Caesar dead beneath Pompey’s statue and the senators fleeing. Later in the century he painted Circus Maximus (1876) showing chariots racing round a central spina and The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer (1883) with a huddled group of Christians in the circus as lions emerge from an underground tunnel. Both were commissioned by wealthy Americans and displayed in America. They look to have directly influenced the visuals in the films Ben-Hur and The Sign of the Cross. Gérôme’s ancient world scenes were familiar through their mass reproduction in engravings both in Britain and America.17 In Britain a classical revival in painting, celebrating the civilizations and values of Greece and Rome, lasted from the 1860s to 1914. According to Christopher Wood in his authoritative Olympian Dreamers, Victorian classicism is not easy to define. ‘Inevitably it meant different things to different people; it was an influence rather than a coherent body of opinion; a catalyst rather than a clearly defined artistic movement.’ In support of this view, he differentiates the characteristics of the leading classical painters: ‘the lofty aspirations of Leighton, the antiquarianism of Alma-Tadema, the aesthetic classicism of Moore and Burne-Jones, the decadence of Simeon Solomon and Aubrey Beardsley, and the high romanticism of Waterhouse’.18 Sir Frederic Leighton painted idealized pictures of a Greek world that was a vision of beauty, order and human perfection. His biographer Mrs Barrington said: ‘Probably no Englishman ever approached the Greek of the Periclean period so nearly as did Leighton.’19 The Olympians mostly steered clear of the Roman Empire, preferring the abstract purity and marmoreal perfection of Ancient Greece. But Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, ‘best known and best paid of all Victorian classical painters’, was celebrated for the fidelity of his genre paintings of everyday life in the Ancient World, particularly Rome. His desire, as he put it in an 1899 interview, echoing Bulwer-Lytton was ‘to express in my pictures that the old Romans were flesh and blood like ourselves, moved by the same passions and emotions’.20 The secret of his success was to portray the rituals, practices and mores of wealthy Romans – their dinner parties, their courtship rites, their shopping expeditions,

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their visits to the baths – so that they appeared to spectators, as one commentator put it like ‘Victorians in togas’. At the same time he drew on archaeology to create as accurate a picture as possible for buildings, furniture and clothing, so that spectators felt they were learning while viewing. Alma-Tadema said: ‘If I am to revive ancient life, if I am to make it relive on canvas, I can do so only by transporting my mind into the far off ages, which deeply interest me, but I must do it with the aid of archaeology. I must not only create a mise-en-scène that is possible but probable.’21 It was his archaeological accuracy and sense of dramatic composition that was to lead to Alma-Tadema becoming the established painter most often employed by the leading actor-managers of the Victorian stage. Besides Greece and Rome, popular interest in the empires of the Near East (Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia) was also stimulated by archaeological discovery. It was Napoleon Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt in 1798 that initiated a new interest in that country and its ancient past. The expedition was accompanied by 151 scientists and artists, charged with documenting all aspects of the country, including its ancient monuments. One of the discoveries during the expedition was the Rosetta Stone which contained an inscription written in both Egyptian and Greek. This enabled Jean-François Champollion to decipher the hitherto incomprehensible Egyptian hieroglyphs, a discovery made public in 1822. This began the process of allowing scholars to read the records of Egyptian history. The first half of the nineteenth century saw a scramble for antiquities to supply the demands of European museums and private collectors. The Moslem rulers of Egypt, incurious about the country’s pre-Islamic past and uninterested in pagan relics and monuments, were perfectly happy to grant concessions to Europeans to investigate, excavate and collect. During this period, Giovanni Batista Belzoni (1778–1823) conducted pioneering excavations at Gizeh, Thebes and Abu Simbel. Systematic archaeological investigations only began after 1850, dominated initially by the French archaeologist Auguste Mariette, who created the first museum of Egyptian antiquities in 1863. Major discoveries were subsequently made by Sir Gaston Maspero and Sir Flinders Petrie, under whom the science of Egyptology developed. In 1866 the British Museum established a separate department of Egyptian and Oriental Antiquities. The Egyptian Exploration Fund was established in 1882 to finance archaeological digs. Academic posts for the study of Egyptology were established at the universities of London (1892), Oxford (1901), Liverpool (1906) and Manchester (1913).

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The discoveries, the archaeological activities and the work of painters in recording the ruins and creating imaginative reconstructions of ancient Egyptian life sparked a craze for all things Egyptian, dubbed ‘Egyptomania’ and lasting throughout the nineteenth century. It received a new stimulus with the opening of the Suez Canal on 17 November 1869 and the premiere soon after at the Cairo Opera House of Verdi’s opera Aida from a story provided by Auguste Mariette. It was given another major boost when Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun, which was opened in 1923 to reveal a fabulous array of treasures and artefacts and created a worldwide sensation known as ‘Tutmania’. The contents of the tomb inspired fashionable new lines in clothing, jewellery, hats, furniture and cosmetics.22 What accounts for this obsession with Egypt rather than other ancient Near Eastern empires, such as Assyria and Babylon, which were also excavated? It was partly a byproduct of Romanticism, with its preoccupation with the past and with the occult. The monumental physical remains (pyramids, obelisks, sarcophagi, the Sphinx) appealed to the cult of the picturesque, which included a fondness for ruins. The customs and practices recorded in such works as Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians (1836), which has been called ‘the most influential book on Ancient Egypt to appear in English during the nineteenth century’,23 catered to a taste for the exotic which represented an escape from the drabness and conformity of modern industrial society (mummification, the animal-headed gods and goddesses, the brother/sister marriage of the monarchs). Ancient Egyptian beliefs and lore informed various esoteric cults such as Theosophy and Freemasonry. There was also an ideological significance in Egyptomania. The nineteenth century was an age of empires. Egypt had been an empire and had lessons to offer on the rise and fall of imperial powers. Professor Fekri Hassan has plausibly argued that the acquisition and transportation of Egyptian monuments, particularly obelisks, recognized as symbols of cosmic power, was a decisive bid to legitimize the rule of modern empires ‘by cannibalizing other civilizations in order to assume a superior position in the order of the world’.24 This practice dated back at least to the Roman Empire which began the process of removing obelisks from Egypt to Rome partly as victory trophies but also partly as symbols of the process by which a new and thriving empire in the West was replacing an old, worn-out, decadent empire in the East. For Britain, there was an additional stimulus to interest. Egypt featured significantly in two of the most important cultural productions

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to the Victorian Age – the Bible and Shakespeare. The Bible included the story of Moses and the exodus of the Jews from their captivity in Egypt to the creation of a new kingdom in the Holy Land. Shakespeare dramatized the story of Antony and Cleopatra with its clash of empires, temperaments and civilizations. Egyptomania had a vast range of cultural expressions. As early as 1812 the showman William Bullock created the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, nominally inspired by the temple of Hathor at Dendera, complete with statues of Isis and Osiris, sphinxes, hieroglyphs and lotus columns. The hall contained galleries furnished with Egyptian décor and a representation of the tomb of Pharaoh Seti I, complete with imitation murals and an original sarcophagus. Among the many exhibitions staged there one of the most successful was a display of the artefacts collected by Belzoni in 1821. The hall survived until 1904 though latterly it was used for musical and magical shows.25 But the Egyptian Hall was not the only manifestation of the craze. The British Museum opened an Egyptian gallery. The Crystal Palace at Sydenham featured an Egyptian Court which from 1854 until it burned down in 1936 combined spectacle and education. The Egyptian architectural style appeared across the globe, applied to such diverse buildings as zoos, factories, cinemas, amusement parks, department stores, suspension bridges and war memorials, symbolizing monumental solidity and permanence but also suggesting a promise of romance, mystery and adventure.26 Besides buildings and exhibitions, the public became familiar with the visual imagery of Egypt, its people, its history and its customs, from paintings, plays, operas and latterly films. There was substantial overlap between these forms, with paintings in particular influencing the settings and stagings of the dramatic retellings of Egyptian life. Massive, teeming, atmospheric canvases by John Martin (The Seventh Plague of Egypt, The Destruction of Pharaoh’s Host), J.M.W. Turner (The Fifth Plague of Egypt) and David Roberts (The Israelites Leaving Egypt) with their hordes of extras, monumental buildings and extreme weather, look like blueprints for theatrical spectacles and later Hollywood epics. Other episodes from Egyptian history that captured the imagination of painters were Joseph’s sojourn in the country and his role at Pharaoh’s court and the death of Cleopatra, which inspired a host of artists to depict her, usually gloriously naked, sprawled amid cushions and draperies.27 The Victorians were fascinated by the idea that the ancients were ‘people like us’ in fancy dress and genre painters responded to this by

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imagining episodes from everyday life, staged amid carefully researched costumes, artefacts, settings, rituals and pursuits. Alma-Tadema painted twenty-five Egyptian genre scenes without ever having been there. Notable among them were Pastimes in Ancient Egypt, An Egyptian Widow and Egyptian Games. In the same vein were Edwin Long’s The Gods and their Makers, Edward John Poynter’s Adoration to Ra and Frederick Bridgman’s Procession of the Sacred Bull Apis. Elsewhere in the Near East, the primary stimulus to archaeological activity was the desire to prove the truth of the Bible stories and to discredit the attacks on the biblical account of the Creation by geologist Charles Lyell and evolutionist Charles Darwin. The first permanent archaeological body to be set up was the Palestine Exploration Society in 1865, ‘for the purpose of investigating the archaeology, geography, geology and natural history of the Holy Land’.28 These excavations identified towns and cities, battles and foreign conquerors mentioned in the Bible. There were spectacular discoveries relating to those powerful empires which regularly reached out to swallow up Israel. In the 1840s Paul Emile Botta excavated Khorsabad uncovering exquisite bas reliefs which detailed everyday life in Ancient Assyria. Austen Henry Layard excavated Nimrud (the biblical Calah) and Nineveh. His 1849 book Nineveh and its Remains became a best-seller, running through four editions immediately. Henry Creswick Rawlinson deciphered cuneiform writing, making the texts discovered by the archaeologist accessible. Layard had discovered the King’s Library at Nineveh with thousands of cuneiform tablets recording the history, mythology, magic, diplomacy, medicine and science of Assyria. In 1853 at Nineveh the palace of King Assurbanipal (known to the Greeks as Sardanapalus) was discovered by Hormuzd Rassam, previously Layard’s assistant. In the 1870s interest turned from the Assyrians to the Sumerians and Babylonians. In 1872 George Smith identified and deciphered a fragmentary Chaldean account of the Deluge, which appeared to confirm the story of Noah’s flood. In 1880 Rassam made the first major find in Babylonia, the site of the biblical Sepharvaim, which contained 50,000 inscribed cylinders and tablets. Sumerian Telloh was excavated by the French who found the Stela of the Vultures with its army of Sumerian warriors advancing in phalanx. In 1887 an American expedition excavated Nippur, finding 30,000 Sumerian tablets. It was a German expedition under Robert Koldewey that excavated Babylon in the period 1899–1913. The Ishtar Gate, with its glazed brickwork, dragons and bulls in relief, was reconstructed in Berlin. In the 1920s Sir Leonard Woolley excavated Ur of the Chaldees. As a result of these excavations, much was discovered about

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the history, religion, life and work of the peoples of Sumeria, Assyria and Babylonia.29 Despite the dominance of religion in nineteenth-century life, the Bible was not for the most part on the agenda of contemporary painters. There were comparatively few new biblical paintings. The Royal Academy catalogues indicate that only an average of 2.5 per cent of the paintings on show annually between 1825 and 1870 had religious subjects.30 Although the Bible was a favoured theme of the Old Masters, their art was deemed to be inherently Catholic in outlook. There was in Britain no established Protestant pictorial tradition. The Protestant Church did not commission art, and painters necessarily catered to the tastes of their patrons and the wider public. Articles in the periodical press regularly called for religious painting to be used as a vehicle to elevate the taste and moral values of the public. Critics such as Mrs Anna Jameson in Sacred and Legendary Art (1848) and John Ruskin in Modern Painters volume 2 (1846) advocated the study of the techniques and approach of early art and combining this with up-to-date realism and the creative use of symbolism and typology to create a truly Protestant art. It was the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who put this recommendation into effect. A recognizable informality and domesticity characterized works such as Ford Madox Brown’s Our Lady of Good Children (1848), which showed Mary washing the fingers of the Baby Jesus, Brown’s Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet (1852–56) and Millais’s Christ in the House of his Parents (1849–50). But it was Holman Hunt who became known as ‘The Painter of Christ’. As Michaela Giebelhausen puts it: ‘Rigorously Protestant in outlook, his work combined an understanding of contemporary Biblical scholarship with naturalist and Orientalist modes of representation. It presented a successful interpretation of scripture that spoke to the age.’31 The mid-nineteenth century was the time when biblical scholarship focused on the historicity of Jesus, a trend which produced such influential works as David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu (1835, revised 1864), Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jesus (1863) and John Seeley’s Ecce Homo (1865). The historicity of Jesus the man was combined with the demand for authenticity in settings and trappings which sent Holman Hunt travelling in the Holy Land and researching the props in his paintings. This combination of historicization, Orientalization and spiritual uplift through the application of symbolism and typology made Holman Hunt’s Jesus pictures, The Light of the World (1851–53), The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1854–60) and The Shadow of Death (1870–73)

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among the most influential and recognizable of all nineteenth-century paintings. There was another and equally influential source of biblical illustration, the pictorial Bible, which became a fixture in many Victorian homes, shaping the popular perception of the Bible stories. Charles Knight, the great advocate of popular education and the diffusion of useful knowledge, transformed the established format of the illustrated Bible with his Pictorial Bible (1836–38) in which, alongside engravings of Old Master paintings, he included new engravings showing the flora and fauna, architecture, customs, dress and landscape of the Bible. During the 1840s the work of contemporary artists also began to be included in illustrated Bibles. For the third edition of his Pictorial Bible (1847–48) Knight eliminated the Old Masters’ pictures because of their inaccuracies of manners and costume and replaced them by modern, archaeologically accurate pictures. The Illustrated Family Bible (1859–63), published by John Cassell, adopted the same approach.32 But it was the work of two contemporary French painters, Gustave Doré (1832–83) and James Tissot (1836–1902), which had the most longlasting influence on the popular imagination of the Victorian public and on the visuals of stage and screen. The 228 illustrations that Doré provided for an edition of the Bible published in 1866 in London and Paris became his most popular work. Doré’s biographer Joanna Richardson thought the Bible peculiarly suited to his powers: It offered him an almost endless series of intensely dramatic events. His visions of the looming tower of Babel, the plague of darkness in Egypt, the death of Samson, Isaiah’s vision of the destruction of Babylon; these vast, forbidding scenes, heavy with doom, remind one of the visions of John Martin. They also reveal many elements by now familiar in Doré’s work: the mountain scenes, the lurid skies, the complicated battles, the almost unremitting brutality. Doré’s illustrations of the Old Testament remind us, above all, of the God of Wrath: of massacres and murders, decapitations and avenging angels. There is too, a period element: the angels are Victorian angels, full of sentiment; the women are, again, keepsake women, the children are Victorian children: sentimental or wise beyond their years.33 In England, Doré was sometimes called ‘the preacher-painter’. Sermons were preached on his work and Cassells reproduced his Bible illustrations in their Daily Devotion for the Household. As Richardson puts it:

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‘The Victorians delighted in Doré’s sentimentality, and in his drama. They were touched, too, by his religious leanings.’34 Tissot, painter of fashionable society ladies and their luxurious lifestyle, underwent a religious conversion in 1885 when he claimed to have had a vision of Christ during Mass at the church of St Sulpice in Paris which he had attended to gather atmosphere for his proposed picture ‘The Choir Singer’. He was inspired to embark on an illustrated version of the New Testament. The so-called Tissot Bible coincided exactly with a Catholic revival in France, under way from the 1880s onwards, which was mystical, visionary and anti-rationalist. In preparation for his work, he visited the Holy Land in 1886–87 and 1889, sketching and photographing dress, faces, architecture and topography. He studied archaeological and theological literature. The result was The Life of Our Saviour Jesus Christ: 365 compositions from the four gospels with notes and explanatory drawings, in which everything was documented and theological doctrine explained. The pictures were shown first in Paris in 1894 and London in 1896 and then on tour in the United States in 1898. Everywhere they were a remarkable success. The pictures were published with the Bible text in a luxury edition in 1896–97, earning Tissot a million francs. The 1897 English edition was dedicated to Mr Gladstone. Tissot’s biographer Michael Wentworth explains the popularity of the Tissot Bible thus: ‘In its blend of discursive erudition, documentary reportage and carefully delineated “inspiration”, the Tissot Bible is a mirror image of the literal-minded faith prevalent at the end of the century.’35 The Bible proved equally acceptable to Catholics and Protestants and became familiar throughout the Anglo-Saxon world. The success of his New Testament inspired Tissot to turn next to the Old Testament. There was a further trip to the Holy Land in 1896, but Tissot died in 1902 with the project uncompleted. Only 200 of the projected 396 pictures had been completed. Other artists finished the project from Tissot’s sketches and they were published in a two-volume edition in 1904. Like Doré’s illustrations Tissot’s were to provide the most familiar visual illustrations of the Old and New Testaments for several decades. Just as in paintings, so too in the Victorian theatre history was a staple subject. As theatre historian Richard Schoch has written: ‘Performance was a powerful agent of historical consciousness in the nineteenth century . . . greater than that of literature, painting or even photography.’36 The visual imagery of these historical plays was often directly inspired by famous paintings and plays were staged, framed and lit like paintings. Performance and visual imagery combined to create a popular memory of history, but one which often looked to romance, myth and melodrama for inspiration rather than to academic research.

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But the theatre operated under certain inescapable constraints. One was censorship. From 1737 to 1968 the stage functioned under the oversight of the Lord Chamberlain’s office and had to conform to a strict set of regulations designed to preserve moral standards and the political, religious and social status quo. All plays had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s office and could not be performed without his official imprimatur. This effectively meant the exclusion from the stage of explicit discussions of politics, religion and sex.37 One particular prohibition in force throughout the century was the ban on the dramatization of Bible stories on the stage which explains why, in marked contrast to twentieth-century Hollywood, biblical stories were absent from the Victorian stage. As the examiner of plays William Bodham Donne said in 1866: ‘both as a matter of morality, and as a matter of taste, I never allow any associations with scripture or theology to be introduced into a play’.38 Works which fell foul of this ban included Racine’s Athalie, Rossini’s opera Moses in Egypt and Wilde’s Salome. The first major West End production to receive a licence was Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s Joseph and his Brethren in 1913. The Lord Chamberlain’s ban was underpinned by the long-running hostility of the church to the stage which began to moderate significantly only in the 1890s. This may explain the relaxation of the censorial ban in 1913, something that was generally welcomed in the press. A second constraint on theatrical producers was the commercial imperative of the box office. Plays would run only as long as the audiences came. Success in any particular genre inspired imitations. The public by their repeated attendance created a repertoire of much-loved favourite plays which leading actors departed from at their peril. Until 1843, three theatres, Covent Garden, Drury Lane and Haymarket, had a monopoly of spoken drama in London, with the so-called ‘minor theatres’ able only to perform burlettas, or musical entertainments. But the monopoly was ended by the 1843 Theatre Regulation Act. Popular throughout the Victorian period was the taste for theatrical spectacle. Spectacle was an integral part of everyday life, from the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace through to the Golden and Diamond Jubilees of Queen Victoria. It was a feature of Victorian painting, of public buildings and shows of all kinds.39 Audiences had a passion both for the visual and for archaeological and historical accuracy and theatres supplied it, happily justifying the expense on the grounds of its educational value, a recurrent refrain from within the theatre world which waged a continuing campaign to raise the social status of the stage. So spectacle and authenticity went hand in hand in the recreation of the Ancient World.

24

The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage

Interestingly each area of the Ancient World could serve as an arena to discuss contemporary problems that Victorian audiences understood and with which they could engage. Plays set in the Roman Empire (Claudian, The Sign of the Cross, Hypatia, Ben-Hur, Quo Vadis) charted the conflict between Christianity and paganism and explored the excesses of Roman tyrants, the absence of democracy and how to remedy it (Junius, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Nero). Power politics and religious superstition featured in plays related to Ancient Egypt (Pharaoh, Nitocris, Antony and Cleopatra, False Gods). The archaeological discoveries in the Near East provided the inspiration for spectacular and educational recreations of ancient civilizations (Sardanapalus, The Daughters of Babylon, Herod). Plays set in Ancient Greece tended to explore the proper gender roles for men and women (Pygmalion and Galatea, The Cup, Clito, Ulysses). But gender roles and the approved definitions of masculinity and femininity figured in most Ancient World dramas. Victorian society was strictly gendered, with men and women expected to fill complementary roles. John Ruskin, citing as his authorities Shakespeare, Scott and Dante, outlined the ideal roles and relationships of men and women in Of Queens’ Gardens. He insisted that the rights and responsibilities were inexorably linked and not to be considered separately. The man’s power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest . . . But the woman’s power is for rule, not for battle – and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision . . . By her office, and place, she is protected from all danger and temptation. The man, in his rough work in open world, must encounter all peril and trial . . . But he guards the woman from all this; within his house, as ruled by her, need enter no danger, no temptation, no cause of error or offence.40 This conventional wisdom of the Victorian age was summed up poetically by Tennyson in The Princess: Man for the field, and woman for the hearth; Man for the sword and for the needle she; Man with the head and woman with the heart; Man to command and woman to obey; All else confusion.41

The Victorians and the Ancient World

25

The dominant views of the age in terms of gender roles were given vivid and powerful expression in popular culture, which in books, plays, pictures and magazines reinforced what was being taught at home, school and church. The popular success of actors and actresses, theatres and plays was directly related to the extent to which they conformed to and expressed the majority views of the age. The enduring popularity of such stars as Helen Faucit, Mary Anderson and Wilson Barrett derived in part from their successful embodiments of the recognized and approved ideals of femininity and masculinity.

2 The Early Victorian Actor-Managers and the Ancient World

The Victorian stage was dominated by the great actor-managers, who matched their talents against each other in the great classical roles but who also sought to make the theatre pay by providing the mass audience with what it wanted, which was more often than not domestic melodrama, spectacle and authenticity. The Ancient World was a setting that could provide all these desirable elements. The early Victorian period was the era of William Charles Macready (1793–1873). Autocratic, egocentric and fiery-tempered, he was a brilliant and powerful actor. Having become a star under other managers, he entered management himself in 1837, first at Covent Garden and later at Drury Lane. He remained the dominant force on the British stage until his retirement in 1851. He was known for encouraging and working with new playwrights, most successfully with Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Thomas Noon Talfourd whose plays for Macready held the stage for the rest of the century. He aimed, he said in 1843, ‘at elevating everything represented on the stage’.1 To this end, he supervised painstaking rehearsals, leading to much-improved ensemble acting, and became celebrated for the splendour and style of his stagings, particularly of Shakespeare. The position as head of the English stage vacated by Macready in 1851 was thereafter contested by two actors, Samuel Phelps (1804–78) and Charles Kean (1811–68). Phelps, who had worked in Macready’s company, established himself at Sadler’s Wells, Islington, and during a regime lasting eighteen years (1844–62) made that theatre, in the words of Charles Pascoe, ‘the home of Shakespearian drama’.2 He produced thirty-one of Shakespeare’s plays at Sadler’s Wells, alongside sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth-century revivals and the most popular of the new plays, in particular the works of Sheridan Knowles, Edward 26

The Early Victorian Actor-Managers and the Ancient World 27

Bulwer-Lytton and Thomas Talfourd. He followed Macready’s lead in developing well-rehearsed ensemble casts, providing tasteful though not over-lavish stagings and in his own acting demonstrating extraordinary versatility and range. Charles Kean was the son of the great Edmund Kean. A much less talented actor than either his father or Phelps, he was an ambitious and painstaking producer and as manager of the Princess’s Theatre, Oxford Street, from 1850 to 1859 staged an unprecedentedly spectacular series of productions of Shakespeare and modern melodrama, striving for a historical authenticity which earned him a prized Fellowship of the Society of Antiquaries. His regime brought him the patronage of the queen and the aristocracy, who rarely made the trip to Islington to see Phelps. The careers of the great actor-managers coincided with the flourishing of Romanticism and its intellectual by-products – antiquarianism, archaeology and a love of spectacle. A passion for history was one of the outcomes of the rise of Romanticism. As Stephen Bann has argued, Romanticism caused ‘an irreversible shift . . . and history from being a localized and specific practice within the cultural topography – became a flood that overrode all disciplinary barriers, and finally, when the barriers were no longer easy to perceive, became a substratum in almost every type of cultural activity’.3 History permeated painting and literature and the representation of history became the function of the new modes of popular visual spectacle such as the panorama and the diorama. The particular form of history dominant in the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s was the antiquarian picturesque. The fusion of the antiquarian and the picturesque had been achieved in the works of Sir Walter Scott, who was both novelist and historian and whose books were regularly adapted for the stage. These works, both on page and stage, highlighted a strong sense of the visual and a concern for the authentic detail of everyday life in the past. There was a mushrooming of antiquarian societies who, stimulated by the destruction wrought by the Industrial Revolution, sought to collect, preserve and transmit the memory of the past. However, a major split developed from the 1850s onwards between historians and antiquarians, between professionals and amateurs. Influenced by intellectual developments in Germany, a class of professional historians emerged in Britain. Their methods were critical, scientific and analytical, their approach professedly objective. They were committed to archival research, increasingly specialized in choice of subject and concentrated in particular on the political and constitutional history of Britain. They disparaged and marginalized the antiquarians, deriding

28

The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage

them as ‘picturesque compilers’. So ‘picturesque’, which had been a term of approbation at the start of the nineteenth century, became in scholarly circles a term of disapproval by the end of the century. After this, there was no going back. Real history was for the specialists and the professionals, for the small circulation scholarly journals and academic monographs, for learned conferences and heavily footnoted articles. Popular history however was to be found elsewhere – in poetry, painting, novels and plays. As Roy Strong has argued, up to the 1950s history meant for most Britons a set of visual images, powerful, romantic, anecdotal.4 This was partly the legacy of the history paintings reproduced in school history textbooks whose keynote was ‘The Romance of History’ and which were characterized by an antiquarian accuracy in costumes and settings, the instilling of moral lessons and the foregrounding of human interest stories to make the past come alive. It was also partly the legacy of plays and later films, which embodied the same characteristics and continually sought intellectual respectability by claiming educational value for their historical productions. In the eighteenth-century theatre David Garrick famously played his historical roles in modern dress and the theatre deployed a stock series of generic scenes, gardens, prisons, temples, tombs, palaces, without much regard for historical period. This began to change at the turn of the century as John Philip Kemble began to pay more attention to the historical accuracy of settings and costumes and in 1791 engaged William Capon as scene painter for Drury Lane. Capon tackled his work ‘with the zeal of an antiquary’ and sought in particular to make his medieval scenery archaeologically accurate.5 By general consent it was J.R. Planché, antiquarian and costume historian, who persuaded John Philip’s brother Charles Kemble to stage his landmark 1823 production of King John with reproductions of authentic costumes from the reign. This was extended to Ancient World scenery in 1827 when the Grieve family, John Henderson Grieve and his sons Thomas and William, painted as scenery for Cymbeline ‘Buildings of the Gaulish and Belgic colonists of the Southern counties of Britain before their subjugation to the Romans’.6 It increasingly became the fashion to boast of historically and archaeologically accurate sets and costumes. This became a selling point for productions and critics looked out for and commented on this aspect. It was coupled with inspiration derived from the work of popular painters of historical and topographical scenes. Such noted artists as David Roberts and Clarkson Stanfield began their careers as scene

The Early Victorian Actor-Managers and the Ancient World 29

painters before transferring their skills to canvas where they applied the dramatic effects they had learned from the theatre. Similarly the architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, another master of the dramatic, began his career as a stage artist.7 Eventually, by the 1880s a fully pictorial stage had emerged. Its holistic philosophy was summed up by leading practitioner Sir Henry Irving who said: ‘To-day we are employing all our resources to heighten the picturesque effects of the drama . . . Music, painting, architecture, the endless variations of costume, have all to be employed with a strict regard to the production of an artistic whole, in which no element shall be unduly obtrusive.’8 But he was only restating what had by now become the conventional wisdom. In 1843 William Charles Macready had said in a speech about his career: ‘I sought to furnish the dramas in which the genius and talents of the players, the painters and the musicians could be combined. I hoped to introduce them successively as illustrators of the poet.’9 At the Princess’s Theatre Charles Kean took stage antiquarianism to new heights. As his biographer J.W. Cole recorded, he believed that: the time had at length arrived when a total purification of Shakespeare, with every accompaniment that refined knowledge, diligent research, and chronological accuracy could supply, was suited to the taste and temper of the age, which had become eminently pictorial and exacting beyond all former precedent. The days had long passed when audiences could believe themselves transported from Italy to Athens by the power of poetical enchantment without the aid of scenic appliances.10 As Richard Schoch puts it, Macready aimed to use history to illustrate Shakespeare whereas Kean sought to use Shakespeare to illustrate history.11 Madame Vestris at the Lyceum and Tom Robertson at the Prince of Wales’s strove for realism of costumes, props, settings and manners whether in historical or contemporary drama. Leading theorist E.W. Godwin wrote thirty-three articles prescribing the precise and accurate costumes and settings for all of Shakespeare’s plays. He became the great prophet of the marriage of archaeological accuracy and artistic effect, which became the watchwords of the productions of the great actor-managers.12

30

The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage

The movement towards historical accuracy was of course a progressive and cumulative development. Godfrey Turner, theatre critic of The Pictorial World, recorded in 1880 its arrival at full fruition: In these days of stage realism, when in order to ensure local accuracy, the artists commissioned to paint the scenes travel half over the world, that they may sketch mountains, meadows, market-places, cathedrals, town-halls, bridges, chambers of justice, ramparts, galleries, battle-fields, and other places associated with dramatic action, the property room of any theatre, in which the spectacular or picturesque element of histrionic art finds place, has quite a South Kensington air of aesthetic archaeology.13 But in a later article he observed that this had not always been so: ‘Excellently mounted as were all Macready’s productions, the appropriateness of scenery, costume, and accessories, though highly lauded by critics of his time, came far short of historical accuracy.’14 However by comparison Charles Kean’s historical productions, particularly Richard II and Henry VIII, were ‘triumphs . . . Nothing could possibly exceed the care lavished on these productions. As far as semblance could be carried to reality, the scenes in both plays certainly went . . . Such multiplied industry of historical detail could never have been seen before, and certainly has not been repeated.’15 In terms of the content of plays, there was an important distinction between the first half of the nineteenth century and the second half. Plays set in republican Rome were much more in evidence in the early nineteenth century than in the later part of the century, which tended to favour the Roman Empire. This directly reflected the political circumstances of the two eras. The early nineteenth-century stage was politically much more radical than the later nineteenth-century stage and the sentiments associated with republican Rome chimed with those aroused by the French and American revolutions and by the domestic reform movement. By the later nineteenth century, with the British Empire at its height, the Roman Empire was used as a vehicle to debate imperial questions. Perhaps the most famous and enduring of the Roman republican dramas was Joseph Addison’s Cato. First performed at Drury Lane in 1713, this tragedy, based on Plutarch’s life of the Roman statesman, was set in Utica and took place entirely on the last day of its hero’s life. The play was made up of equal parts of political drama and domestic melodrama. Cato, the embodiment of stoicism, is the symbol of nobility, patriotism

The Early Victorian Actor-Managers and the Ancient World 31

and resistance to tyranny. He encourages the remnant of the Roman Senate to stand firm in Utica against the conquering armies of Julius Caesar. When his son Marcus dies in battle against Caesar, Cato rejoices in his heroic sacrifice: ‘How beautiful is death when earned by virtue. Who would not be that youth? What pity is it that we can die but once to serve our country.’ Consulting Plato on the immortality of the soul, Cato resolves to die rather than submit to Caesar: ‘A day, an hour of virtuous liberty is worth a whole eternity in bondage.’ He dies, mourned as ‘the greatest soul that ever warmed a Roman breast’. The political plot is balanced by romantic subplots in which Cato’s sons, Marcus and Portius, vie for the hand of senator Lucius’ daughter while Numidian Prince Juba and senator Sempronius court Cato’s daughter Marcia. The play was staged more than 200 times in eighteenth-century England and reprinted twenty times. It was extremely popular in America, where it became George Washington’s favourite play and was paraphrased by the American spy Nathan Hale shortly before he was hanged by the British in 1776: ‘I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.’ Several French plays and paintings during the French Revolution dramatized the death of Cato. In England 138 letters attacking government corruption were published between 1720 and 1723 by a pair of Whig pamphleteers under the name ‘Cato’. Cato became an enduring symbol of radical republicanism and opposition to tyranny. But as Greg Woolf points out: The popularity of Cato in England before the American and French revolutions is a more complex matter. Whigs and Tories both claimed it embodied their core values. It played to a contemporary taste for classical themes, and satisfied a morbid fascination with deathbed scenes and perhaps also a growing interest in exotic non-European characters, of whom Juba and his Numidians are representatives. More importantly it embodied a moral position that did not jar with Christian values, and which cohered with a patriotism already evolving into nationalism. It was (and remains) eminently quotable . . . Cato appealed to all those who wanted citizens to hold governments and tyrannical monarchs to account.16 Macaulay noted that ‘the name of Cato was invoked by everyone, of whatever party, who wished to represent himself as a disinterested patriot’.17 Nevertheless Cato tended to have greater appeal to liberals, radicals and republicans.

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The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage

Cato became a favourite role of the great classical actor John Philip Kemble (1757–1823), an extract from the play being read at his funeral. Kemble was known to his fans as ‘the last of the Romans’ and the critic William Hazlitt said of him ‘He is the only one of the moderns, who both in figure and action approaches the beauty and grandeur of the antique.’18 The play was still being revived as late as 1838 when it was played by William Charles Macready, who was a man of radical sympathies. However it was by then being overtaken by another drama of republican Rome, Sheridan Knowles’s Virginius. The now completely forgotten Irish dramatist James Sheridan Knowles (1784–1862) was, during the nineteenth century, regarded as second only to Shakespeare as a playwright. Fellow playwright Edward Fitzball called him ‘our modern Shakespeare’, and the comparison was regularly drawn.19 Of his eighteen plays, Virginius was the most enduring, holding the stage for the rest of the nineteenth century after it first appeared in 1820. He wrote it in Glasgow where it was performed on alternate nights for four weeks in 1820. It was sent to William Charles Macready who recalled that he read it in a state of excitement: ‘the freshness and simplicity of the dialogue fixed my attention; I read on and on, and was soon absorbed in the interest of the story and the passion of its scenes’. He immediately undertook to produce and star in it at Covent Garden for twenty nights.20 The story, derived from Livy’s Roman history, had already provided the basis of eight plays and would subsequently furnish the basis of one of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome. The play is a classic exposition of paternal love and the preservation of female honour but also has a theme of patrician versus plebeian conflict and the abuse of power by the upper classes. In republican Rome, the noble centurion Virginius promises his daughter Virginia in marriage to Icilius, who loves her. Appius Claudius, one of the corrupt and tyrannical duumvirs who rule Rome, lusts after Virginia and concocts a plot to gain hold of her. His client, Caius Claudius, claims that Virginia is the daughter of one of his slave women and that the baby was sold to Virginius’ barren wife and passed off as her own child. Appius, as magistrate, pronounces in favour of Claudius and orders Virginia seized. Virginius, who has seen through the plot, stabs Virginia to death to preserve her virtue. Driven mad by the act, he kills Appius in revenge. Knowles wrote to Macready ‘Make any alterations you like in any part of the play and I shall be obliged to you.’21 Macready took him at his word. Only six scenes out of the seventeen in the play remained untouched and one-tenth of the lines were cut.22 The result was

The Early Victorian Actor-Managers and the Ancient World 33

pronounced by Hazlitt ‘the best acting play that has been produced on the modern stage’.23 Not surprisingly Knowles dedicated the published version to Macready. Macready’s performance was widely praised. Typically the Morning Herald said: The delineation of this arduous character by Mr Macready will take its place among the first performances of the stage. It is one of the finest specimens of the art which his great and still growing genius has yet produced. Austere, tender, familiar, elevated, mingling at once terror and pathos, he ran over the scale of dramatic expression with the highest degree of what may be called power.24 Following its first performance on 17 May 1820, the play entered Macready’s repertoire and he played Virginius all over the country for the rest of his career. Another play on the same subject by George Soane, commissioned by Edmund Kean and staged by him at Drury Lane, lasted only three nights and then vanished forever. In 1826 Kean starred in Knowles’s version. The play held the stage for the rest of the century, with Samuel Phelps and later Wilson Barrett giving notable performances in the title role. Phelps included the play in twelve of the eighteen seasons he staged at Sadler’s Wells from 1844 to 1862. Virginius was equally popular in America where it was revived as late as 1907 in New York. The play’s populist sympathies attracted criticism at the time. The story, reported by William Archer and repeated by others, that King George IV sent for the manuscript of the play and deleted several speeches is doubted by L.W. Conolly. He has examined the licensing manuscript of the play which shows no erasures. But the printed version of the text indicates that certain passages were omitted in the representation.25 Hazlitt, noting that several speeches about tyranny and the rights of the people were cut in the acting version, asked ‘Is the name of Liberty to be struck out of the English language, and are we not to hate tyrants even in an old Roman play?’26 But the play was attacked by conservative journals. Although the 1820 production reused old sets and costumes from previous productions of Julius Caesar, Cato and Coriolanus (with the exception of Macready’s costume, which he provided at his own expense) critics commented on both the pictorialism and the authenticity of the production. Hazlitt wrote: Besides the merit of Virginius as a literary composition, it is admirably adapted to the stage. It presents a succession of pictures. We might

34

The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage

suppose each scene almost to be copied from a beautiful bas relief, or to have formed a group on some antique vase . . . But it is a speaking, a living picture we are called upon to witness.27 The Morning Herald noted that ‘the Roman manners of the time are preserved with great force and fidelity of touch’.28 But the secret of its longevity was that it was one of the first plays to demonstrate that the Romans were ‘people like us’. As the critic Richard Hengist Horne observed, in one major respect Knowles personified the age: The age is domestic, and so is he . . . All his dramas are domestic and strange to say, those that should be most classic, or most chivalrous, most above and beyond it, are the most imbued with this spirit. In what consists the interest and force of his popular play of ‘Virginius’? The domestic feeling. The costume, the setting, the decorations are heroic. We have Roman tunics, but a modern English heart, – the scene is the Forum, but the sentiments those of the ‘Bedford Arms’. The affection of the father for his daughter – the pride of the daughter in her father, are the main principles of the play, and the pit and galleries and even much of the boxes are only perplexed with the lictors and the Decemviri, and the strange garments of the actors.29 His success with Virginius prompted Macready to turn to an earlier play by Knowles, his ‘first original and mature play’,30 Caius Gracchus, which had been successfully produced in Belfast in 1815. Revised and extended on the basis of suggestions from Macready, it was produced at Drury Lane on 18 November 1823. The plot, derived from Plutarch, reads like a poor man’s Coriolanus. Gracchus, the champion of the plebs, is elected tribune and sets out to curb the powers of the patricians. They use every means in their power to bring him down, including bribing the plebs to desert him. Gracchus, like Coriolanus, refuses to court the people’s favour. Eventually violence breaks out between plebeians and patricians. The patricians win and Gracchus commits suicide. Macready admired the play and the leading role, revelling in both the big speeches about liberty and the more intimate family scenes. He wrote that it: abounds in passages of lofty thought, and is marked by the impress of (Knowles’) genius with that truth of character so constantly observable in his writings . . . in the poet’s conception and draught of Cornelia, we see before us the mother of the Gracchi, the ideal of

The Early Victorian Actor-Managers and the Ancient World 35

the Roman matron. She gazes on her offspring with all a mother’s fondness, but with an unflinching eye looks through the transitory brightness of the present to the darker destiny that awaits the future, and steels her soul to the inevitable sacrifice of her beloved son upon the altar of his country . . . In Caius the passion of the more energetic parts and the tenderness of the domestic interviews laid strong hold on my sympathies, and I gave myself to the study of the part with no ordinary alacrity and ardour. Macready achieved a personal triumph in the role, recalling ‘In few original dramas had my individual success been more decisive.’ But the play was soon withdrawn. Macready blamed this directly on the stage manager at Drury Lane, Alfred Bunn, and attributed it to the fact that Bunn’s wife, ‘an actress of but moderate power’ who was playing Cornelia had failed ‘to grasp a character that required the commanding genius of a Siddons’, and that because of this Bunn insisted on its withdrawal after its seventh performance. But there may have been other reasons. Macready complained that apart from Mr Terry as the plebeian Titus, the supporting cast was wholly inadequate and the play itself was ‘not one of the best from the gifted author’s pen’. He was particularly critical of the prominence of the mob: ‘Whole pages are given to the cavillings of the plebeians, who in their contentions neither sustain the dignity of tragedy nor recall the idea of the Roman people. Indeed the mob, though advancing the action but little, is too prominent an agent, whilst the familiar language of their altercations often descends to vulgarity.’31 Reviewers generally praised Macready’s performance but the Observer (24 November 1823) complained: The manager deserves no credit for the manner in which this Tragedy has been brought forward: old scenery, old dresses, and decorations, brushed up for the occasion, afford a wretched contrast to the glaring expenditure and profusion with which they endeavour to recommend nonsense to the town, and exhibit a true criterion by which we may judge of their own taste, and the taste to which they are anxiously, but vainly, endeavouring to degrade the public. The Examiner (24 November 1823) reported: ‘The daily critics who have preceded us, are unanimous in regard to the absence of all poetry and the presence of very little eloquence in the dialogue of Caius Gracchus, and, what is worse, we unequivocally agree with them.’

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The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage

In addition, the conservative press, ‘vehemently attacked the democratic spirit of the play’.32 Fraser’s Magazine complained ‘War is declared against the very idea of aristocracy; and in favour of whom? A mere herd of men, who, by the showing of the very hero of the play are worthless, most worthless.’33 John Bull (24 November 1823) called it ‘a sort of copy of Virginius, a democratic, ranting, trashy play’. The examiner of plays, John Larpent, had serious concerns about a play whose subjects included the use of violence for political ends, the fickleness of public opinion and the arrogance and machinations of the aristocracy. He wrote to James Winston, the administrator of Drury Lane, to say that ‘the subject and some of the passages of Caius Gracchus was improper’ and the tragedy could not be performed until he had consulted the Lord Chamberlain, who was away in Scotland. But after the removal of several speeches such as ‘if your Liberties and Rights are dear to you, be faithful to them. Fear not the Senate’, a licence was granted. But as L.W. Conolly notes, the acting version submitted to the Lord Chamberlain was already shorter than the published version, with some strong political speeches of Gracchus removed.34 The play was rarely seen after its initial run. The success of Macready with Virginius and his failure with Caius Gracchus were matched when he came to tackle two plays by Thomas Noon Talfourd, Ion and The Athenian Captive, both set in Ancient Greece. In their magisterial survey of Greek tragedy on the British stage, Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh write that: Greek tragedy appears on the British stage as patriotic, emotive fiveact variations on themes dear to Whig sensibilities between the late 1690s until the 1780s. After (largely) retreating from the Romantic stage it re-emerges as Victorian burlesque from the 1840s to 1870s, academic Greek plays in the late nineteenth century, and avant-garde performances in the English language.35 Ancient history plays or Greek mythological dramas were used as vehicles to comment on the English Civil War, the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution, the Hanoverian settlement, the Jacobite rebellions, the French and American revolutions. Notable exceptions to the absence of Ancient Greece from the Romantic stage were the plays of Talfourd, ‘the last significant use of Greek tragedy on the professional stage for a radical political purpose until the Edwardian era’.36 Talfourd’s plays were a direct response to the movement for reform which had led to the Great Reform Act of 1832, the abolition of slavery in 1833 and Catholic emancipation in 1829.

The Early Victorian Actor-Managers and the Ancient World 37

Talfourd was a popular radical MP and barrister who regularly promoted reforming legislation. He had developed an interest in Greek tragedy while a schoolboy at Reading Grammar School where the headmaster Dr Valpy regularly staged Greek plays. But the immediate inspiration for his Ion was Joseph Addison’s Cato, which Talfourd had seen at Covent Garden and which had enthralled him. He later recalled how: visions of Roman constancy and classic grace, which had haunted his mind through all its schoolboy years . . . seemed bodied forth in palpable form, when the poor common-places of an artificial diction flowed ‘mended from the tongue’ of the actor, and the thoughtful words trembling on his lips suggested at once the feeling of earthly weakness and of immortal hope, – and when the old stoic, in his rigid grandeur was reconciled to the human heart by the struggle of paternal love, and became ‘passioned as ourselves’ without losing any portion of that statue-like dignity which made him the representative of a world of heroic dreamings.37 For his tragedy of Ion, Talfourd took the title from a work by Euripides but created a plot that was an amalgam of elements from other Greek tragedies (Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus at Colonus, The Phoenician Women, Hippolytus and Antigone). The title role, the youth Ion, was conceived by Talfourd as being ‘of a nature essentially pure and disinterested, deriving its strength entirely from goodness and thought, not overcoming evil by the force of will, but escaping it by an insensibility to its approach, – vividly conscious of existence and its pleasures, yet ready to lay them down at the call of duty’.38 The play is set in Argos where a plague is raging, but the tyrant king Adrastus spends his time in bacchanalian revels, forbidding anyone to approach the palace. Ion, a foundling raised by the high priest of Apollo, Medon, volunteers to approach Adrastus to persuade him to have a meeting with the sages of the city. He succeeds in his mission but the meeting breaks down when a prophecy arrives from the oracle of Apollo, carried by Phocion, the son of Medon: ‘Argos shall ne’er find release, till her monarch’s race shall cease.’ Ion tries in vain to persuade Adrastus to resign the throne. A group of young nobles plot Adrastus’ assassination and draw lots for the task. Ion’s name is drawn. He is about to kill Adrastus when Medon intervenes with the news that he has just discovered that Ion is Adrastus’ long-lost son, believed murdered in infancy. Ctesiphon, another young noble, stabs Adrastus who dying proclaims Ion his heir. Ion assembles the people in the city square and announces a programme of constitutional reform: the seats of justice are to be filled

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with good men, the army is to be disbanded and monarchy is to be abolished and power transferred to the people, so that ‘sovereign power shall live in the affections of the general heart, and in the wisdom of the best’. Ion then stabs himself to death, allowing the prophecy to be fulfilled and a democratic republic established. Although the words ‘republic’ and ‘democracy’ did not appear in the text, the radical message was clear and appealed to the ardently republican Macready who pronounced it ‘beautiful and noble’.39 He set to work adapting it for performance, ‘considerably quickened the tempo by skilful cutting, simplified and made more direct the frequent obscurities of the plot, and carefully eliminated every reference to the youth of his own character’, a wise precaution given that Macready was then forty-three.40 He chose to stage the play for his benefit on 26 May 1836 at Covent Garden before an audience of luminaries who included Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Richard Hengist Horne, William Wordsworth, Walter Savage Landor, Mary Russell Mitford, John Forster, Lord Melbourne, Lord Chief Justice Denman, Lord Grey and Lady Blessington. Macready wrote in his diary that he acted the character of Ion ‘as well as I have ever played any previous one, with more of inspiration, more complete abandonment, more infusion of myself into another being, than I have been able to attain in my performances for some time’.41 Although some of the critics thought Ion more of a poem than a drama, there was considerable enthusiasm for Macready’s performance, which was acclaimed as a triumph and the play stayed in his repertoire until summer 1837.42 Richard Hengist Horne argued that the appeal of the play was to ‘the conscientiousness of its audience; and it purifies less by pity and terror, than by admiration and exaltation. Its power is less an intellectual and poetical than a moral power; and the peculiarity of its sublime lies significantly in the excellence of its virtue.’43 Other actors took on the part. In 1838 Macready resigned the role of Ion to a younger member of his company, James R. Anderson, who was later to play it all over the country. Anderson recalled in his autobiography his anxiety when following Macready in the role on the London stage: When I played Ion in the provinces, I was received with approbation and applause; but here was a very different state of things. I had now to follow the man who had ‘created the part’, and made it his own. I am happy to say that my rendition of the character at Covent Garden was applauded by the public and praised by the press; but

The Early Victorian Actor-Managers and the Ancient World 39

what gratified me most was the approbation of my manager, who complimented me warmly on my success.44 When Anderson played the part at the Surrey Theatre in 1849, he reported that Talfourd came to see it each night and professed himself ‘delighted’.45 Samuel Phelps included the play in four of the eighteen seasons he put on at Sadler’s Wells, playing the role in his final season there. Its republican sentiments made it a favourite play in the United States where it was performed regularly between 1836 and 1857 and then intermittently until 1910. It became a fashion for actresses to take on the role of the beautiful noble youth; Ellen Tree played it at the Haymarket Theatre in 1836. Macready wrote that Miss Tree’s performance was ‘a very pretty effort, and a very creditable woman’s effort, but it is no more like a young man than a coat and waistcoat are’.46 Charlotte Cushman played it in her 1845–46 season at the Haymarket. Mary Anderson played it in Boston in 1877 and 1881. Talfourd sought to follow up his success in Ion with a new play The Athenian Captive, derived from elements of Sophocles’ Medea and Electra and Euripides’ Orestes. It dealt with many of the same issues as Ion but proposed a different constitutional outcome. The Athenian captive of the title is the warrior Thoas, taken prisoner by the Corinthians in battle and offered the choice of slavery or death. Although Thoas makes a speech denouncing slavery, he is persuaded to live and endure servitude by the noble youth Hyllus, son of the tyrant king of Corinth, Creon. Thoas later saves Hyllus’ life when his chariot runs away. But when Creon proposes the toast ‘Ruin to Athens’ and Thoas dashes the cup from his hand, he is condemned to death. When Hyllus intercedes for him, Creon banishes his son. Ismene, the Athenian wife of Creon who has long hated him, now encourages Thoas to murder Creon. He does so and then takes command of the Athenian army. Ismene surrenders Corinth to him and reveals that he is in fact the son of herself and Creon and he has become an inadvertent parricide. The Athenians and Corinthians join forces to hunt down the murderer of Creon, lest the gods punish Corinth. Ismene declares the banished Hyllus guilty. But Thoas admits his guilt, stabs himself and names Hyllus as the next king of Corinth. As Hall and Macintosh point out: it can hardly be irrelevant that Talfourd’s second and considerably less anti-monarchical ‘Greek’ play was produced . . . in August 1838, a year after the death of William IV and the young Queen Victoria’s

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accession. In The Athenian Captive a corrupt old monarch in Corinth is replaced by a virtuous young one, as if to echo the hopes of the liberal British middle classes in respect to their youthful new queen.47 When Macready read the play he was appalled, confiding to his diary: ‘This was a great disappointment to me; no one could believe it to be by the author of “Ion”; it has nothing of it but its faults of style exaggerated. How I am to tell Talfourd this, I scarcely know.’48 He managed to persuade Talfourd to revise it and found of the revision ‘though not of a high character, it is certainly improved’.49 Eventually he produced it under Benjamin Webster’s management at the Haymarket on 4 August 1838. It ran for seventeen nights with Macready playing Thoas. It was enthusiastically reviewed and a long run was predicted but it was little seen thereafter. Phelps, for example, while he played Ion, never took up The Athenian Captive. Perhaps the Morning Post (6 July 1838) got it right, pronouncing it ‘cold, lifeless and essentially undramatic’. Although from the mid-eighteenth century onwards Shakespeare was feted as the national bard, less than a dozen of the recognized thirtyseven plays in his corpus of work featured regularly on the Victorian stage: Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, Henry VIII, Henry V, King John, As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing and The Merchant of Venice. Other titles were performed irregularly and some not at all. The Victorians were literalists and were particularly offended by those plays, such as the late romances, which played fast and loose with history, chronology and geography. Of Shakespeare’s Ancient World plays, the most popular were Julius Caesar and Coriolanus but their popularity fluctuated over the course of the nineteenth century. Performances of Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline and The Comedy of Errors were comparatively rare. Samuel Phelps was the only actormanager to tackle Timon of Athens and Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Even he baulked at producing Troilus and Cressida and Titus Andronicus. In fact Shakespeare’s original versions of these two plays were not produced in Britain until 1912 and 1923 respectively. For optimistic, sentimental, patriotic Victorian playgoers Troilus and Cressida was too coarse, cynical and bitter and Titus Andronicus too horrific, violent and bloodthirsty. However, the black American tragedian Ira Aldridge toured during the years 1849–60 in a much altered version of Titus Andronicus with Aaron the Moor transformed into a noble hero, played by Aldridge. Shakespeare’s two plays set in republican Rome, Coriolanus and Julius Caesar were much performed in the first half of the nineteenth century before largely disappearing from the repertoire in the second half of the

The Early Victorian Actor-Managers and the Ancient World 41

century. John Ripley, in his definitive studies of the stage histories of the two plays, has calculated that there were 128 productions of Coriolanus in Britain between 1800 and 1850 and only fifteen, mainly provincial, between 1851 and 1900. There were an estimated ninety productions of Julius Caesar between 1800 and 1850 and only nineteen, again chiefly provincial, between 1851 and 1900.50 The two plays went out of fashion partly because Coriolanus centred on class conflict with an arrogant aristocratic hero betraying his country because of his contempt for the plebs, and Julius Caesar debated the ethics of political assassination of an unpopular ruler. It was an axiom of actor-managers that politics should on the whole be avoided on the stage. Also by the second half of the nineteenth century other themes were paramount, notably the importance of Christianity to the proper administration of empire and the appropriate role for women in society. Coriolanus has been interpreted in three ways by the critics. At one level, it is a profoundly political play about the struggle for power between the proud, short-tempered aristocratic general who despises democracy, and the mob, with their elected tribunes who act as demagogues. Menenius represents the voice of moderation advocating compromise, cooperation and an alliance of aristocracy and democracy for the good of the state. On another level it is a psychological study of the leading character whose tragedy is his stiff-necked pride, refusal to bend his principles and refusal to court popularity, a stance which leads him to betray his country and join the enemy, a decision expiated by his death at the end. Third, it is a domestic drama about the relationship between Coriolanus and his mother Volumnia, who denounces the tribunes for their ingratitude to her son but also intercedes with him to spare Rome when he leads the Volscians against the city. Productions of the play between 1681 and 1749 emphasized its political nature, with Nahum Tate and John Dennis both rewriting Shakespeare’s original to give it respectively a Tory and a Whig slant. But the play was politically defused by John Philip Kemble, who Ripley calls: the most influential figure in Coriolanus’ stage history. He singlehandedly canonized the text played in the theatre for a century after his death on both sides of the Atlantic; he created the visual tradition which, with minor variations, accompanied the play until World War I; and in the title role gave birth to a conception which became the stuff of theatrical legend.51

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Kemble staged Coriolanus eleven times between 1789 and 1797 and it was then withdrawn for nine years because of the political situation. War between England and revolutionary France, working-class radicalism in England, the 1798 Irish Rebellion and a succession of bad harvests leading to food riots in 1800 were not considered a safe context for a play about class conflict and aristocratic treachery. But after the euphoria accompanying Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar and the prospect of peace, Kemble revived the play in 1806 and performed it regularly until his retirement in 1817, partnered until her retirement in 1811 by his sister Mrs Siddons as Volumnia. What Kemble achieved was, in Ripley’s words, a ‘radical depoliticization and aestheticization’ of the play.52 The suggestion of a wider class conflict between plebeians and patricians is eliminated; the tribunes become out and out villains, motivated by self-interest. The tragedy of Coriolanus is the extremely personal one of a principled national idol driven to commit treason out of wounded pride but redeemed by his mother’s appeal to his patriotism. Kemble, who was familiar with both the classics and art, was inspired in his staging to achieve a classical ideal and he turned to painting for inspiration, in particular to the works of Jacques-Louis David, such as The Oath of the Horatii, Brutus and The Intervention of the Sabine Women. Ripley argues: Kemble’s revivals of Coriolanus are virtual stage equivalents of the paintings of David. He saw in Coriolanus the kind of severe, antique hero of ancient times who would provide, like David’s classical subjects, a moral example in an era of political or social upheaval . . . Idealized action, grandly and severely heightened through art and craft, was intended to awaken in the theatregoer a sense of the sublime, a kind of cathartic awe at the exploits of the heroes of old.53 Five of the seven battlefield scenes in the play were cut. Kemble’s scenery was grand but anachronistic. Imperial Rome was more picturesque than republican Rome and archaeology was not yet sufficiently advanced as a science to suggest accurate scenery for either the Roman or Volscian scenes. Buildings like the Arch of Constantine and the Pantheon depicted in the play had not been built in Coriolanus’ time. When the historian Francis Douce complained that Kemble was deploying imperial settings in a republican play and urged him to change them, Kemble replied ‘in a tone almost of horror, “why, if I did, sir, they

The Early Victorian Actor-Managers and the Ancient World 43

would call me an antiquary” ’.54 This represents a marked contrast with the attitude of Charles Kean who gloried in his status as an antiquary. In the years between there had been a revolution in attitudes to historical accuracy on the stage. Historians generally date the beginning of this change to 1823 and Charles Kemble’s production of King John, designed for historical accuracy by the antiquarian J.R. Planché. But the costumes of Coriolanus were proclaimed elegant and accurate and a spectacular Ovation scene was added with 240 extras, 100 of them drawn from the Life Guards. This spectacular setting provided the perfect backdrop for Kemble’s performance. John Howard Payne, the actor and playwright, who saw Kemble’s Coriolanus, wrote that he would never forget the performance: His person derived a majesty from a scarlet robe which he managed with inimitable grace. The Roman energy of his deportment, the seraphic grace of his gesture, and the movements of his perfect self-possession displayed the great mind, daring to command and disdaining to solicit admiration.55 The classicism was reinforced by a series of poses struck by Kemble, under the arch for the Ovation, before the statue of Mars at Antium, before the conspirators in the final scene – poses which led several commentators to compare him to an antique statue. The poses were captured in paintings of Kemble as Coriolanus by Sir Francis Bourgeois and Sir Thomas Lawrence. In 1820 Edmund Kean challenged the Kemble interpretation with a Byronically Romantic version of Coriolanus, with the main character depicted as the archetypical outsider. The text, as cut by the manager of Drury Lane, Robert Elliston, reduced the political content, restored the battle of Corioli, inserted several processions, subordinated speech to action and heavily abridged scenes not featuring the star. But it did not appeal and lasted only four nights. The Kemble interpretation remained dominant for the rest of the century, informing the performances of Macready, Phelps, Irving and Benson in the role.56 Macready performed the role in 1819, 1821, 1824 and 1831 before going into management himself, and then he mounted what was by all accounts a spectacular production at Covent Garden, opening on 12 March 1838. Although privately considering the story ‘uninteresting’ and concerned about comparisons with Kemble, it was a role the aspiring actor-manager had to undertake.57 He played down the class conflict

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between plebeians and patricians, which at a time of Chartist riots, bad harvests and depression might have provoked censorial interference. He interpreted the play as the tragedy of a heroic individualist unable to adapt to a world of emerging democracy, ‘a Rousseauesque Noble Savage, a creature of an earlier, more heroic ethos, unable to temporize with ignoble power seekers and consequently destroyed by them’.58 It was a Romantic conception and a departure from the classicism of Kemble. Similarly Macready replaced the anachronistic Augustan setting favoured by Kemble by a more accurately primitive picture of Rome painted by Charles Marshall and Charles Tomkins. The Spectator (17 March 1838) hailed the production as ‘without question the most perfect and impressive classic spectacle ever seen on the stage’, a verdict echoed by many other critics. The review went on: It is a triumph of the art. The true uses and value of costume, scenery, and other aids of dramatic illusion, are demonstrated to the fullest extent in this instance. All that the taste of the most fastidious scholar can require to clothe the play with the external attributes of the early days of Rome – to make palpable the life and spirit of the antique world – is here accomplished . . . a succession of stirring pictures of Roman scenery, life, and manners, are brought before the eye, with an accuracy of detail in the architecture and costume that might instruct the painter. We see a young people, just emerging from obscurity, upon whom the mantle of Greek elegance has scarcely fallen. Rome appears, not in its most high and palmy state, but when its colonnades and temples, emulating the Doric simplicity, rose from amongst rude huts and cumbrous arches of brick. The architectural contrast greatly aids the effect of the sculpturesque draperies; the figures clothed in the toga (which we never saw so classically worn on the stage before) look like animated statues . . . The gorgeousness of the military pomp, too, delights the painter as much as the chaste elegance of the civil array does the sculptor; the predominance of red is relieved by the gold shields and helmets of the chiefs, and the steel caps and spears of the soldiery. The trophies, standards, and other accessories, are not tawdry with tinsel, but subdued to the rich sober tone of the scenic background; producing a chaste and harmonious effect, in keeping with the severe simplicity of that elder age . . . The interiors remind one of the houses of Pompeii, with their open courts, only that the walls are bare; their rude and comfortless grandeur being made more striking by the few scattered elegancies of furniture.

The Early Victorian Actor-Managers and the Ancient World 45

The review singled out three sequences in particular for praise for their visual power: the Roman mob threatening the life of Coriolanus (‘really terrific’), the triumphal entry of Coriolanus into Rome (‘it reminds one of the bas-reliefs on the old triumphal arches’), and the mother and wife of Coriolanus leading a long train of women in mourning weeds and dividing ‘as with a black thread the red masses of the Volscian army’. Two of the qualities which became essential for stage productions in the Victorian era were highlighted: authenticity and painterliness. The Examiner (18 March 1838), declaring the production of Coriolanus, ‘the worthiest tribute to the genius and fame of Shakespeare that has been yet attempted on the English stage’, claimed that it surpassed all Macready’s previous productions ‘in the opportunity it has afforded of presenting together upon the stage those striking characteristics, material no less than intellectual, which render a correct knowledge of great times past superior to every other sort of knowledge’. In the aspect of truthfulness, of evocation of a republican rather than an imperial Rome Macready’s production was seen to surpass that of Kemble: Rome has been presented on the theatrical scene before, but never this Rome; the rude city of the rude age of the Conqueror of Corioli. That is the first distinction which claims notice. The pictures which Kemble gave when he revived the play might be splendid but they were utterly unreal – they clustered fine buildings together with equal disregard to the proprieties of place or time – the arch of Severus or Constantine, the Coliseum, the pillar of Trajan, all the grandeurs of imperial Rome, flaunted away within three hundred years of the first birth of the city – and even men of scholarship could find no bounds to the satisfaction they expressed . . . Nevertheless, truth itself . . . is the best of all truths; and upon this wiser principle Mr Macready has proceeded . . . To what infinitely higher purpose is the moral grandeur of the place and of the men, set off by a comparatively rude and barren city! Praising the scenes as ‘all painted with consummate skill and exactness’, the review went on to describe in detail the view of Rome seen from across a bend in the Tiber; the interior of Coriolanus’ house; the Roman Forum; the interior of the Senate; the city of Antium by starlight (‘a truly grand and imaginative yet real scene’); Aufidius’ house and finally the walls of Rome with the Capitol visible above them and in the distance the siege engines and battering rams of the Volscian army.

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The Morning Chronicle (13 March 1838) praised Macready’s restoration of deleted parts of Shakespeare’s text and the elimination of later accretions and interpolations, but declared even more important the fact that Macready ‘realises for the first time, the pictorial conceptions and imaginings of SHAKESPEARE’S mind . . . The scenery, and the living groups combined with it, of Coriolanus, as last night presented, would be sufficient on canvas to ensure a painter’s immortality, as in conception and arrangement they demonstrate the artist’s power to illustrate the poet’s genius.’ The authentic picture of republican Rome, the management of the mob, the Ovation (‘a grand living picture’), the Senate meeting the Volscian army before the walls of Rome were praised as a ‘splendid . . . series of pictorial effects’. Samuel Phelps staged his first revival of Coriolanus at Sadler’s Wells in the 1848–49 season, bringing it back in the 1850–51, 1856–57, 1859– 60 and 1860–61 seasons. The version of the text he used was Kemble’s adaptation with some of Macready’s additions. He summarized his own conception of the play in his own edition of the complete works of Shakespeare: we have the proud, unbending Roman, whose conduct must command respect, if it does not extort unmingled approbation. We are presented with a succession of grand and animated tableaux, in which the imagination realises, by sculpturesque draperies and picturesque groupings, the scenes which are enacted in the streets of old Rome with patricians and plebeians for performers. The excited populace whirled to and fro by the breath of eloquence . . . – the insurrectionary atoms now raised to a rampant height, and presently scattered abroad passive and harmless – form a spectacle of popular vacillation at once ludicrous and melancholy.59 Like Kemble and Macready he played down the politics and played up the character study aspect of the play. Unlike Macready, he did not use a republican Roman setting. He reverted to an imperial setting but used Etruscan imagery for the Volscians, in order to contrast the cultures. However, German visitor Theodor Fontane was still able to detect the political subtext when he went to a performance of Phelps’s Coriolanus: I could not honestly say that the production of Coriolanus at Sadler’s Wells transported me to Ancient Rome – it was as un-Roman as possible, but it was English. That is the point. It was as thoroughly English as every line of the play is, and although one nowhere encountered

The Early Victorian Actor-Managers and the Ancient World 47

the ancient opposition of patricians and plebeians, at least there was a sense throughout of the opposition between the English aristocracy and the English mob. It was as though these fellows with their cudgels had been taken from the street, and even if the whole picture was not true to history, it was at least true to life. That was the appeal of the performance.60 The Observer (1 October 1848) noted the anachronisms in scenery and costumes but forgave them in the light of the intelligent performances, ensemble playing, fidelity to the text and well-managed action. John Ripley in his study of the stage history of the play concludes: Phelps’ productions were not in themselves landmark events in Coriolanus’ stage history. They were workmanlike rather than inspired, straying only slightly from the example of his immediate predecessors, and modified, one suspects, more out of economic necessity than artistic conviction. His conservative, yet generous, attitude to mise-en-scène, his attention to ensemble performance, and his own thoughtful, if simplistic, interpretation of the role nevertheless kept the play before the public longer than did the more spectacular revivals of Macready.61 During these years, Phelps’s only real rival in the role was James R. Anderson, who played it extensively in the provinces and in London in 1851 during his brief management of Drury Lane. In his autobiography Anderson recalled: The Roman tragedy has always been a great favourite with my Newcastle patrons, who maintain that it is my best part; and I think that they are right, for I love it more than any other I play except Hamlet. I have bestowed more care and study in reading up Plutarch and Shakespeare, to discover the idiosyncrasy of the character than ever I did for any other historical hero.62 His Drury Lane production of Coriolanus, expensively staged with largely new scenery and entirely new classical costumes, brought him good notices but receipts that were less than his expenses. However, when he played it at the Britannia, Hoxton in 1852 ‘the house was crammed and jammed from floor to ceiling with an enthusiastic crew’.63 It remained

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an integral part of his repertoire, with provincial audiences perhaps recognizing and responding to the class tensions identified by Theodore Fontane. What is remarkable about Julius Caesar, which has been perennially popular with theatregoers, is that perhaps the four greatest actors of the last three centuries – David Garrick, Edmund Kean, Henry Irving and Laurence Olivier – all failed to perform it, whereas they all played Coriolanus. The most likely explanation for this is that Julius Caesar contains three leading roles of equal weight, preventing the solo bravura performance that was the hallmark of the actor-manager. It was regularly performed in the first half of the eighteenth century, appealing as it did to the classical sympathies of the age and the fear of tyranny that was part of the political culture. But between 1751 and 1800 there were only twenty-three performances and from 1781 none at all. The political climate of the age of revolutions was not conducive to plays about political assassination.64 John Philip Kemble’s triumphant revival of the play at Covent Garden on 29 February 1812 signalled its restoration to favour and he played it regularly until his retirement in 1817. Kemble cut the play to give it greater unity and coherence, reducing the supernatural references, making Antony entirely noble and chivalrous and foregrounding Brutus as the tragic hero ‘a self-possessed stoic, a magnanimous philosopher and patriot’.65 This reinforced the view of Kemble as the ideal Roman, the perfect patrician and the exemplary stoic. As with Coriolanus, Kemble gave it an imperial Roman rather than a republican Roman setting. But the scenes of the Capitol and the Julian forum earned critical acclaim and were still being used by Macready in 1836. The influence of Kemble’s production cannot be overestimated. Ripley concludes ‘Throughout the next eighty years audiences saw no production which did not owe a direct and profound debt to the 1812 revival.’66 When Macready took on the role of Brutus in a performance praised by the Examiner (20 November 1836) (‘we have rarely seen a more delicate or a more beautiful piece of art than this performance’), he used Kemble’s text and utilized scenery by his regular scene painters Marshall and Tomkins from previous ‘Roman’ productions rather than have new scenery painted.67 But as Ripley points out, where Kemble aimed at a rather static pictorialism in his stagecraft, Macready went for dynamic realism, in particular in his handling of crowds.68 He deployed over a hundred supers and began the process of varying and differentiating their responses later highlighted by the Saxe-Meiningen Company when

The Early Victorian Actor-Managers and the Ancient World 49

they performed Julius Caesar on their visit to London in 1881 which was so influential on British actor-managers. Macready presented Julius Caesar in 1836, 1838, 1839 and 1843. Samuel Phelps, who had played Cassius to Macready’s Brutus, revived the play under his own management at Sadler’s Wells in 1846, 1850, 1856, 1859, 1861 and 1862, a record which Ripley calls ‘the only significant English Julius Caesar revivals to take place in London between the retirement of Macready in 1851 and the Beerbohm Tree spectacular of 1898’. Phelps followed the staging of Macready and in his stoical Brutus provided ‘the last great Brutus of the nineteenth century’.69 Timon of Athens was a distinct rarity on the nineteenth-century stage. Its lack of the obligatory love interest, the unsympathetic nature of its unrelentingly misanthropic leading character and a pervasive note of cynicism combined to make it unpopular. Phelps, in deciding to produce it, sought to sugar the pill with spectacle. He spent £750, the largest sum hitherto expended on production, to provide costumes and sets. The early scenes of luxurious life in Ancient Athens drew on archaeological evidence and a diorama was used in the last act to depict the advance of Alcibiades’ army on Athens. Critics praised the sensitive and persuasive reading by Phelps of the title role.70 Opening on 15 September 1851, it achieved a run of thirty-one performances. Phelps brought it back for ten performances in 1856. John Oxenford in The Times praised the work of scene-painter Frederick Fenton: After a series of Greek interiors, tastefully painted and peopled with personages richly and appropriately attired – after a series of classical landscapes, a moving picture representing the march of Alcibiades to Athens is introduced, and the whole concludes with a beautiful seaside view, where the tomb of Timon is the conspicuous object, before which the army of the invader is drawn up in reverence. These decorations do infinite credit to the painter. However, as the well-informed theatregoer Professor Henry Morley wrote of the 1856 revival: ‘The scenery is always beautiful, but it is not allowed to draw attention from the poet, with whose whole conception it is made to blend in the most perfect harmony. The actors are content also to be subordinated to the play.’71 But neither Phelps nor anyone else revived it after this outing. It was the actor-manager Charles Kean in a remarkable series of Shakespearean revivals at the Princess’s Theatre in Oxford Street during the 1850s who so successfully married spectacle and archaeological

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recreation that this mode of production became dominant for the rest of the century. His principal contribution to the staging of the Ancient World was his revival in 1853 of Lord Byron’s poetic tragedy, Sardanapalus. The play dramatized the fate of the indolent and sybaritic but idealistic Assyrian philosopher-king who tried to create an earthly paradise. But when rebellion breaks out against him, he dies on a massive funeral pyre. Written in 1821, it had been produced at Drury Lane in 1834 with William Charles Macready in the lead. The scenery, painted by Clarkson Stanfield, included as the final scene a reproduction of John Martin’s apocalyptic The Fall of Nineveh. Martin’s view had been purely speculative because at that time no one knew what Nineveh had actually looked like. But when Charles Kean decided to produce it, he did so in part because Austen Henry Layard’s excavations and his best-selling account of them, Nineveh and its Remains, published in 1849, had made an accurate recreation possible. Kean’s playbill proudly proclaimed: In the production of Lord Byron’s tragedy of ‘Sardanapalus’, I have availed myself of the wonderful discoveries made within the last few years by Layard, Botta, and others, on the site of the Ancient Nineveh . . . To render visible to the eye, in connexion with Lord Byron’s drama, the costumes, architecture, and domestic manners of the ancient Assyrian people, verified by the bas-reliefs, which, after having been buried for nearly 3,000 years, have in our own day been brought to light, was an object that might well inspire the enthusiasm of one who has learnt that scenic illustration, if it have the weight of authority, may adorn and add dignity to the noblest works of genius. I have humbly endeavoured to convey to the stage an accurate portraiture and a living picture of an age long since past away, but once as famous as our own country for its civilization and power, . . . No pains have been spared to present to the eye the gorgeous and striking scenery that has been so unexpectedly dug from the very bowels of the earth. The sculptures now in the British Museum have been rigidly followed; and when recent discovery has failed to give authority for minor detail, I have, wherever it has been possible, borrowed designs from surrounding nations flourishing at the same epoch. In decoration of every kind, whether scenic or otherwise, I have diligently sought for truth: and it is with some pride and satisfaction I am enabled to announce that a verdict of approval has been received from the judge (Mr Layard) most competent to speak with decision upon the surpassingly interesting subject with which I have had to deal.72

The Early Victorian Actor-Managers and the Ancient World 51

The production had three visual highlights. There was a diorama painted by William Gordon showing the view of Nineveh across the Tigris from the terrace of the palace. Byron had erroneously placed Nineveh on the Euphrates and Kean corrected this. Frederick Lloyds painted the Great Hall of Nimrud where a lavish banquet was staged. J. Dayes painted the final scene of a roofless room in the palace, winged lions supporting the columns. The scenery fell open to reveal a panorama of Nineveh burning. The vision of the destruction of Nineveh by God on account of its manifold sins had been established in the old testament Book of Nahum. It had been given spectacular visual form in paintings by John Martin (The Fall of Nineveh, 1828) and Eugène Delacroix (The Death of Sardanapalus, 1828). It therefore pointed up the message of the destructive effects of luxury and sensuality on an empire, allowing a moral lesson to be coupled with the educational one. The Illustrated London News (18 June 1853) typified the critical reaction when it reported: It is, verily, the most magnificent piece of stage-mounting that we ever witnessed; nay, we believe that was ever yet attempted. It excels the most gorgeous of Parisian examples and is an honour to the national stage of the country . . . One of the noblest of Byron’s dramas – the fullest of character, and replete with poetic feeling – the tragedy of ‘Sardanapalus’ connects itself with the most astonishing of modern archaeological discoveries. It was a happy conception to make it the medium of placing on the boards the disinterred glories of ancient Nineveh, with the most perfect accuracy of detail, to the full extent of the pictorial and scriptural authorities recently brought to light . . . The costumes and accessories of [the] crowds have been carefully imitated from the friezes, and in their glittering array, more than suggest the wealth of the Queen of Cities, hurried to its fall by the undue prevalence of luxury and splendour. The critic disapproved of Kean’s attempt to emulate the pictures on the monuments to the extent of ‘assuming the angular positions of the limb and the body to which the artist, in the crudeness of his skill was reduced’, arguing that Oriental people had ‘a general sweep and roundness’ in their manner which the ancient artists were incapable of imitating. But that aside, ‘the make-up of Mr Kean was so perfect that the illusion was complete. There were a grace and suavity

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in his delineation and a quietness of elocution that place his performance beyond competition.’ There were similar comments in The Times (14 June 1853). A dissenting voice was provided by George Henry Lewes in the Leader (25 June 1853). He never liked Charles Kean’s acting but also voices what becomes a regular criticism of the spectacular stage, the tendency of the spectacle to smother the drama and eclipse the acting: ‘Got up’ with splendour and with care the piece undoubtedly is. All that archaeology could do has been done. Whether the result was worth the labour may be a question, even among those who think scenery and costume the ‘be-all and the end-all’ of the drama. But I waive that question. I will suppose the spectacle to be as effective as to us it was wearisome; I will suppose the winged bulls (in flats) to have had a truly massive grandiose effect; I will suppose the conflagration at the end to be something more than a rival of the eruptions of Etna and Vesuvius at the Surrey Zoo Gardens . . . and still say cui bono? Is the Drama nothing more than a Magic Lantern on a large scale? Was Byron only a pretext for a panorama? It is a strange state of Art when the mere accessories become the aim and purpose of representation – when truth of archaeology supplants truth of human passion – when ‘winged bulls’ dwarf heroic natures! Charles Kean is so bad an actor, and his troupe is so incompetent, that the policy of subordinating drama to spectacle is undeniable from his point of view; but how about the public? Why not give up the drama altogether, and make the Princess’s Theatre a Gallery of Illustration? Kean spent an estimated £3000 on the production. But it was generally well-received and chalked up ninety-two performances.73 Actor-manager John Coleman recalled: For novelty, beauty, authenticity and splendour, nothing in my time at least, can compare with [Charles Kean’s] ‘Sardanapalus’ and ‘The Winter’s Tale’. I was so struck with the originality and splendour of the former remarkable work, that when, immediately afterwards, I went into management at Sheffield, I inaugurated my campaign with a replica of it, and acted it for a month, a run at that time unheard of in a provincial theatre.74 In Manchester during the 1860s and 1870s Charles Calvert was producing Shakespeare in the spectacular style of Charles Kean. He also tackled

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Sardanapalus, which he reduced from five acts to four and sought to simplify and clarify by judicious cutting. But he saw it primarily as a spectacle, telling his friend Alfred Darbyshire, the architect: ‘the play is a poem over the heads of the people, but the “conflagration” will make it a financial success’. His printed version of the text alluded to Layard’s discoveries as the visual inspiration for the production and he echoed Charles Kean when he wrote: Surely the Theatre is put to no ignoble use, when, in addition to the vivid representation, by accomplished performers, of one of the happier dramatic effects of Byron’s genius, it becomes an arena where its cognate arts – painting, music, history, archaeology – combine harmoniously to show us ‘the very age and body of the time’ coeval with Josiah’s restoration of Solomon’s Temple.75 Opening in Liverpool in 1875, Calvert’s Sardanapalus toured extensively in the provinces, and his widow Adelaide recalled that it was received ‘with great acclamation and considerable enthusiasm in the larger towns, the conflagration being hailed as a wonderful piece of stage mechanism’. But it failed in the smaller towns, where the story did not appeal and as a result Calvert ended up little better off at the end of the tour than when he had started it.76 The production came into London to the Duke’s Theatre, opening on 24 November 1877. It starred the little-known Arthur Darley. The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (1 December 1877) noted that ‘No pains nor expense seems to have been spared’ with scenery painted by William Telbin, Walter Hann, Groom and Flynn from the illustrations to Layard’s Ancient Nineveh, costumes ‘fashioned from authorities in the department of oriental antiquities in the British Museum’ and music composed specially by, among others, Frederick Clay. The critic purred: As a magnificent spectacle, with its numerous imposing and picturesque processions of warriors, musicians and dancing girls; its Assyrian cymbal dance, and ballet; the imposing grandeur of the scenery, the lurid and sensational scenic effects of the darkness, and thunder and lightning, which interrupt the impious festivities in the hall of Nimrud in the third act, and the terrible conflagration of the last scene, this version of Sardanapalus cannot be praised too highly. The Illustrated London News (1 December 1877) agreed about the spectacle but added ominously: ‘in London we require something more. We

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require, in addition, excellent acting, and an impressive and intelligible delivery of the poetic dialogue. We soon discovered that, in regard to these so needful adjuncts, the company was deficient.’ The performers were almost uniformly damned for their stilted acting. The Times (26 November 1877) thought Kean’s production both as a stage play and in preserving the spirit and poetry of Byron ‘a far superior work’ and complained about the introduction of two ballets, ‘most lamentably modern in taste and style, and curiously out of harmony with the careful and intelligent spirit in which the rest of the pageantry has been conceived. They serve no purpose, and they can scarcely . . . please any taste.’ Charles Calvert took the production to America where it ran 113 nights in New York and then toured the country. But Sardanapalus was not seen in London again and only rarely in the provinces thereafter. Layard’s Nineveh discoveries also provided the visual inspiration for Samuel Phelps’s production of Shakespeare’s Pericles, which opened on 14 October 1854, just over a year after Kean’s Sardanapalus. The revival of a play unperformed for two centuries and widely reviled as distasteful and incoherent can only be explained by the opportunities it provided for Phelps to try to match his great rival’s success with Sardanapalus. Although the actual settings of the play (Antioch, Tyre, Pentapolis, Ephesus and Mitylene) were on the Mediterranean coast hundreds of miles from Nineveh, Phelps drew on the plates in Layard’s Nineveh and its Remains as inspiration for the scenes at the court of Simonides and aboard Pericles’ ship at sea. The source of the inspiration was recognized by the critics. Henry Morley reported that the spectator ‘looks into an Assyrian palace and sees figures that have come to life and colour from the stones of Nineveh’.77 The Times (16 October 1854) found in the palace of Pentapolis ‘costumes of a kind with which we have been familiarized by Sardanapalus, at the Princess’s’. Despite heavy bowdlerization of the text by Phelps, critics still did not warm to the story. But they were bowled over by the spectacle. The Times said the spectacle was ‘a marvel’. Morley concluded that it only succeeded ‘because it is a spectacle’.78 But this was enough to ensure it a run of fifty-five performances. Phelps’s biographer Shirley Allen declared: ‘Of all Phelps’s productions, Pericles was the only one presented primarily as a spectacle – an excuse for the display of scenery, costumes, theatrical machinery and even ballet. It was his one venture into direct rivalry with the Princess’s on Kean’s own ground.’79 But significantly Phelps never revived it. The Winter’s Tale is one of those Shakespeare works in which the author plays fast and loose with geography, history and chronology, contriving to include ‘Giulio Romano, a Renaissance artist from Mantua,

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the pre-Christian Delphic Oracle, an Emperor of Russia, Kings of Sicily and Bohemia, and the Warwickshire folk of Elizabethan England’.80 When John Philip Kemble produced the play at Drury Lane in 1802 he duly mingled Greek and Gothic scenery, modelling his prison scene on Piranesi. Macready, who produced the play several times between 1823 and 1843, followed Kemble in his visual design. But Samuel Phelps at Sadler’s Wells in 1845 established a consistent Greek image for decor, settings and costumes. It became the second most popular of all the plays produced during Phelps’s regime at Sadler’s Wells and was revived eight times, chalking up 137 performances. When Charles Kean came to produce the play at the Princess’s Theatre in 1856, he applied his principle of archaeological accuracy to it with pedantic rigour. As he declared in his playbill: I have endeavoured and I hope not altogether in vain, by the united accessories of painting, music, and architecture, in conjunction with the rapid movements and multiplied life which belong to the stage alone, to re-embody the past; trusting that the combination may be considered less an exhibition of pageantry appealing to the eye, than an illustration of history addressed to the understanding.81 So he eliminated all anachronistic references from the dialogue, changed Bohemia into Bithynia and set the whole play in a carefully researched Ancient World of 330 BC, contrasting the heavy Oriental splendour of Bithynia with the classical grace and lightness of Syracuse. The Times (29 April 1856) reported: ‘Every detail, however minute, whether it be the pattern of a drinking cup or the border of a robe, has been a subject of archaeological research; in short the theatre becomes for a time a sort of classical museum, without forfeiting any of its usual attractions.’ The costumes were copied from those on Ancient Greek vases; the scenery and vegetation were based on Georg Scharf’s sketches done in Syracuse and Asia Minor. Dances and music were created to approximate as far as possible to what was known of Greek music and dance. A banquet was staged with musicians playing a Hymn to Apollo and thirty-four girls, dressed as warrior youths, performing a Pyrrhic dance. The later dance of the shepherds and shepherdesses, according to Kean’s biographer J.W. Cole, ‘comes in so naturally, and was performed with such exquisite grace, and in a musical accompaniment so completely in harmony with the scene, that we almost fancied ourselves in Arcadia during the golden age’. This was followed by ‘the boisterous merriment of the Dionysia or grand festival of the vintage, in honour of Bacchus, executed

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by an overpowering mass of satyrs, men, women, and children, in wild disguises, and with frantic energy’.82 The production ran for 102 nights. Like the panoramas creating the illusion of trips to Egypt and the Holy Land, like the courts of the Crystal Palace which evoked the cultures of Eastern lands, like the increasingly large collections of Oriental artefacts in museums and like the paintings of David Roberts, Alma-Tadema and the rest who sought to capture both the modern Egypt of picturesque ruins and the ancient Egypt of epic events, the theatre also turned to Egypt for educational and exotic appeal. Typical of such productions was Bride of the Nile, which was staged in 1845 at Astley’s Amphitheatre, the home of equestrian extravaganzas. The Illustrated London News (6 September 1845) could not quite get to grips with the details of the plot but appreciated the display of Egyptiana: We cannot exactly detail the plot, but it was very wonderful; with the additional advantage of introducing us to several new facts connected with the manners, customs, and idiosyncracies of the ancient Egyptians, of which we were before entirely ignorant. There were banquets, fights and processions; chariot races, tame crocodiles and pyramids; inundations of the Nile and water pageants without end. At the conclusion, Virtue was triumphant and Vice was punished, to the proper delight of all well-regulated minds. The critic of the Era (7 September 1845), who was apparently paying greater attention, made a stab at summarizing the plot: The King of Egypt has a lovely daughter, Nementhia, who is loved by a villainous king of Ethiopia, Almadaric, her affections being fixed on (the Greek Prince) Olyntheus, who returns the passion in all heroic ardour. The High Priest of Isis, Melius, anxious to grasp the Egyptian crown, favours the suit of Almadaric, and carrying Nementhia, by his juggles, to the altar, to be chosen ‘The Bride of the Nile’, offers her an escape from the cold doom, provided she will abjure the Greek, and espouse the black potentate, conceiving that the daughter out of the way, by either nuptials, her sire’s heart will break, and his own occupation of the throne be secured. After an episode of the sentencing to death of Olyntheus, under a false accusation of drugging a goblet to occasion the death of Nementhia, which had been executed by Almadaric, but averted by the lady’s refusing the draught . . . the denouement takes place in the heroine’s receiving a watery grave in

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her bridal with the Nile, and a death plunge after her by her lover, who are justly apotheosised, after the destruction of the city by an earthquake, and the overflow of the fatal river. The staging of the piece was applauded by The Times (2 September 1845): The whole has been got up with great expense and with no want of judgement in the production of scenic effect. It is indeed one of the best things of its kind which has been produced here for several seasons, and is quite full enough of attraction to draw good audiences nightly for some time. The scenery is remarkably good, the dresses splendid and in character, the music appropriate and the minor appliances judicious. Along with the displays of horsemanship for which Astley’s was noted but which the Illustrated London News thought on this occasion rather overdone (‘we fancy that too much time is lost in the marching and countermarching of the processions’), the production boasted ‘a real bull, sundry calves, an actual pelican of the wilderness, and an imitation alligator as natural as the real animal’. With its corrupt pagan priesthood, lustful black potentate, virtuous white lovers, and apocalyptic destruction of a city of sin, it played easily to the prejudices of the time. The indefatigable hack Edward Fitzball, ever alert to current trends, sought to cash in on the Egyptomania craze with two Drury Lane spectaculars, Azael the Prodigal (1851) and Nitocris (1855). James R. Anderson (1811–95) took over at Drury Lane as actor-manager from 1849 to 1851, and his production of Fitzball’s Azael the Prodigal was one of the highlights of his tenure. On 19 February 1851, as he recalled in his autobiography: after great expenditure, much anxiety and six weeks’ laborious rehearsals day and night, I produced the grand spectacular drama called Azael the Prodigal Son with complete success. Nothing could have been more gratifying, or suggestive of a favourable turn in my fortunes, than the verdict of public approval that night, yet the receipts realised only £92.7s. Azael cost a rare lot of money, and, though played for seventy nights, never realised a profit.83 Azael was in fact Eugene Scribe’s libretto for the 1850 French opera L’Enfant Prodigue by Daniel-François-Esprit Auber turned into a play by

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Fitzball, with the Auber score used as incidental music. Although based on the New Testament parable, it contrived to escape the customary censorial ban on biblical subjects. Azael the prodigal is the son of the Hebrew patriarch Reuben. Dazzled by descriptions of life in the Egyptian city of Memphis, he gains permission from his father to travel there. Once in Memphis he gives himself up to a life of luxury and dissipation. Captured while surreptitiously observing the secret orgies in the temple of Isis, he is thrown into the Nile. Rescued thence, he becomes a camel driver and is subjected to insult and indignity. Eventually he leaves Memphis and returns to the tents of his people where he is welcomed joyously by his father and his betrothed, Jephtele, whom he marries in a celebratory finale. Fitzball was in no doubt of the moral value of his drama, writing in his autobiography that: Eventually religious people of almost all denominations came to witness this spectacle, and I am quite sure, from the general burst of tears, into which I have seen, over and over again, the house dissolve at its conclusion, that if religious pieces were allowed to be produced by proper people, at proper seasons, in this country, it would do more to soften humanity, than all the lectures that the finest orator ever yet poured forth from the rostrum.84 The Illustrated London News (22 February 1851) confirms Fitzball’s recollection, reporting that the performances of Anderson and John Vandenhoff as Azael and Reuben respectively ‘achieved the greatest triumph in the mimic art, that of drawing copious tears from the auditory’. But this sentiment was coupled with spectacle. The Illustrated London News, proclaiming it a ‘great and legitimate success’, said it was ‘in some portions one of the most gorgeous spectacles ever witnessed on a London stage’. The Spectator (22 February 1851) used almost identical words to praise it. Both singled out the Egyptian scenes for particular praise. The Illustrated London News, citing comparison with the canvases of John Martin, declared: It is the mise-en-scène of the second act which would alone insure popularity for this spectacle. The interior of the Temple, with a colossal staircase, occupying the entire breadth of the stage, and rising to ‘the slips’ filled with the luxurious priests and dancing almées, is like one of Martin’s monstrous conceptions; and the effect is considerably

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heightened by the groups being first viewed in animated action, in their orgies, and afterwards gazed upon, when, worn out with wine and revel, they are extended in deep sleep on the steps and ground. The Athenaeum (22 February 1851) stressed the archaeological accuracy of sets, costumes and properties: ‘All is correct, even to the most minute particular.’85 However, the expenses of running the enormous theatre proved too much for Anderson, who ended up in debtor’s prison owing more than £5000. He never ventured into management again but spent the rest of his career as a travelling star. Fitzball sought to follow up the success of Azael with an original Egyptian drama, deriving from Herodotus the story of the Egyptian Queen Nitocris who following the murder of her brother ascended the throne. But she avenged his death by inviting his murderers to a banquet in a subterranean chamber and drowning them all by letting in the Nile to flood the room. In his five-act adaptation of this story, Nitocris, Fitzball turned it on its head. His heroine, Nitocris, sister of King Mesphra, falls in love with a young Ethiopian, Tihrak, who seeks revenge for the death of his father at the hands of Mesphra. She manages to deflect Tihrak’s vengeance but Mesphra is killed by Tihrak’s brother Koephed. Nitocris marries Tihrak and when courtiers led by the chief minister Amenophis plot to kill him, it is Tihrak who disposes of them in the flooded underground banquet chamber. Amenophis escapes to the desert and raises a rebel army. He is defeated, captured and stabbed to death by Tihrak. However, Tihrak is wrongly reported to Nitocris to have been killed and she commits suicide out of grief. Tihrak returns to find the people in revolt, blaming him for the death of the queen. He is killed in a duel with Amenophis’ son and dies as the temple collapses around him. Fitzball sold his script to E.T. Smith, the new lessee of Drury Lane, and Smith engaged the popular stars Isabella Glyn and Barry Sullivan to play the leads. Fitzball recalled: Scenery of the most gorgeous description, from the truest and remotest authorities, and properties and costumes, for which the British museum, and every known and available work, had been searched by that celebrated antiquarian, Keen Esq. Those costumes were perfect, the most unique and beautiful, perhaps, ever placed on the English stage. Mr Smith seemed resolved to spare neither trouble nor expense.86

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But Fitzball encountered serious artistic disagreements with the director Charles Mathews, who insisted on a rewrite to provide a happy ending. Fitzball, who had envisaged his work as a grand poetic meditation on the theme of ambition, reluctantly agreed. So the play now ended with Tihrak winning his duel, Nitocris reviving from her suicide attempt and being reunited with Tihrak amid general rejoicing. The play was promoted with posters in hieroglyphs put up all over London, which sufficiently intrigued people to ensure a packed house for the opening night. But to the consternation of Fitzball the performance was terminated after the third act with a procession of statues of the Egyptian gods, ‘accurately modelled after the antique’ which was supposed to follow the coronation in act four. The Times (9 October 1855) complained that this ‘gave the drama the appearance of coming to nothing’ and reported: ‘The audience . . . were moved into loud dissatisfaction by the sudden termination of the evening’s entertainment at 10 o’clock . . . and the sibillation was as vehement as it was general.’ His verdict on the play was that it was ‘an utter failure’. Fitzball believed that The Times’s verdict doomed the play. The responsibility for this opening night debacle seems to lie with Charles Mathews, the director. An accomplished light comedian, he apparently thought the play was ridiculous and deserved to be cut even further. His actions prompted a furious row between Fitzball, Smith, Mathews and Barry Sullivan which resulted in abbreviated versions of the last two acts being restored for the rest of the run. It staggered on for two more months but closed with losses of £2000.87 The spectacle was widely praised. For the Era (14 October 1855): as a vehicle of gorgeous processions, magnificent properties, equally remarkable for their splendour and correctness, and for ‘effects’ peculiarly adapted to a large stage like this, no drama since the days of The Jewess can be mentioned in comparison with it. We lose ourselves in a dream of ancient history . . . and ancient Egypt, with its stately sarcophagi, its mighty mansions, its dreary deserts, and its ingenious inhabitants is brought back to our vision as a reality of yesterday, imbued with all the vivid colouring that romance can throw around it. The scenery, which the Illustrated London News (13 October 1855) called ‘both gorgeous and accurate’ and which had been painted by Messrs Cuthbert, Nicholls, Cooper, Gordon and Aglio, included the grotto of Memnon, where the banquet was held; the desert at night with the Great Pyramid seen by starlight; and the temple of Karnak. The flooding

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of the grotto was, said the Era, ‘admirably managed, and the lurid hue thrown upon the drowned groups by the tinted electric light is a valuable auxiliary to the mechanical agency by which it is accomplished’. There was a much-praised ballet in the banquet scene. But the spectacle was not enough to save it, for as the Era noted, the dramatist could not match the decorator in his endeavours. The Spectator (13 October 1855) complained: ‘for clear prose we have foggy verse, for rapid action we have a continual drag and . . . that excellent actress (Miss Glyn) has literally nothing to do. All sorts of effort have been made to render the drama palatable, but they have been all alike in vain.’88 The Last Days of Pompeii, the great progenitor of the ‘toga novel’, reached the stage three times during the nineteenth century, in 1834, 1835 and 1872. It was snapped up for the stage as soon as it appeared. J.B. Buckstone produced it at the Adelphi Theatre on 15 December 1834, having adapted it himself into a three-act drama. There was general praise for the visual aspects of the production, the reviewers stressing the authenticity of the scenery. The Morning Post (16 December 1834) declared rather convolutedly: Than the scenery none more classically correct, than the dresses none more gorgeous and costly, and than the machinery none more perfect has ever been produced even at this theatre. This is great praise unquestionably, but it is not more than the artists in each of the departments we have named deserve to have recorded. Among the scenes, those of the sea shore, with a view of Mount Vesuvius in the distance, the hall in Arbaces’ house, the street of the Tombs, and, lastly, the Amphitheatre struck us as the best. In the last, the entire proportions of the stage were developed with the best effect, and after being the stage of the gladiator’s fight it becomes the scene of the catastrophe, namely, the complete destruction of the city of Pompeii. The Morning Herald (16 December 1834) declared: ‘We have not seen any thing of the sort better done on any stage in the metropolis. The scenery throughout is admirable, carefully designed, where authority could be consulted, and in its style delicately painted. The hall in the house of Ione, the street of Tombs, and the wine house, were all very creditable indeed to the painter.’89 The eruption was generally praised but the Morning Herald thought the gladiatorial contests ‘might be rendered more distinct and interesting: they make but a poor show at present’.

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The Examiner (21 December 1834) also praised the staging: The scenic arrangements are admirable – the painting of many of the scenes, especially those of Ione’s house, of the house of Burbo and of the street of Tombs, are superior to anything we have ever seen here (they would be striking anywhere) – while the whole general array and splendour and fitting up of the stage, with the triumphant catastrophe at the close, contribute a series of effects of great power and interest. But the critic then added: But having said this we have said all. We wish the book had been left alone. The very beauty of its original construction was against it being dramatized in this way. The Last Days of Pompeii is in itself a noble drama, in which it is difficult to touch a scene without injuring the effect of the whole. Almost every incident contributes to the action . . . so . . . that to set before us merely a few incidents from its plot, disunited from their gorgeous bond of personal sympathy and action, and docked and curtailed of their sweeping train of poetical imagination, is nothing better than to put before us a pantomime of inexpressible dumb show and noise. Others praised Buckstone for his ‘judicious’ adaptation (Morning Herald), ‘the tact and judgement’ of his version (Morning Chronicle) and the faithful rendering of the characters and incidents that he presented, to the extent of utilizing Lytton’s dialogue. Among the actors, Mrs Keeley, best known as a comic actress, was praised for her sensitive portrayal of Nydia, the blind flowerseller. Mrs Keeley had prepared for the role by making several visits to study the inmates of the ‘blind asylum of the Royal Normal College’.90 But there was criticism of Buckstone for casting men in two of the female roles, John Reeve as Stratonice, the virago wife of the tavern-keeper Burbo, and O. Smith as the Witch of Vesuvius, which gave the play something of the aspect of a pantomime. The Morning Post felt that ‘The only fault the piece presents is to be found in its length. It evidently must be curtailed.’ Interestingly when the play was printed as number 829 of Dicks’ Standard Plays the opening sequence of a banquet in the house of Glaucus had been cut, as had two of the roles, Buckstone’s own part of Glaucus’ epicurean friend Sallust and Julia, the patrician woman in love with Glaucus, whose character, according to the Morning Herald,

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was ‘not well developed . . . and . . . in truth, imparts to (the drama) no interest whatsoever’. Such was the popularity of Lytton’s novel that a rival production rapidly followed Buckstone’s on to the London stage, this time in the transpontine theatre, the Royal Victoria (the Old Vic). The Last Days of Pompeii or the Blind Girl of Thessaly was adapted by the inevitable Edward Fitzball. The Times (1 January 1835) called it ‘one of the most splendid and, as it deserves to be, one of the most attractive of the holyday performances’. The story differed little from the version at the Adelphi and held the interest throughout. However, like Buckstone’s version, it was argued that the ‘great attraction of the piece . . . lies more in the department of the scene-painter than of the actors’. The critic praised the scene-painting of Mr Marshall, presumably Macready’s regular scene-painter Charles Marshall, which he thought would do credit to many more distinguished theatres, and singled out the view of Pompeii, another view of the city by moonlight, the arena and the concluding scene of the destruction of Pompeii by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. ‘This last scene was admirably well managed and had a magnificent effect.’ The Last Days of Pompeii returned to the London stage in 1872. The radical MP Henry Labouchere had taken the Queen’s Theatre, Longacre, partly to showcase the talents of his wife, the actress Henrietta Hodson. He sanctioned a lavish production of The Last Days of Pompeii in a new adaptation by the playwright John Oxenford. Unlike the two previous versions it was billed as an ‘authorized’ version, the permission of Lord Lytton to stage it having been obtained. Oxenford duly produced a respectful version of the classic, faithfully following the narrative and focusing on the relationships between Glaucus, Ione, Arbaces and Nydia and only eliminating the plot strand of the development of Christianity in Pompeii. He also utilized as much as possible of Lytton’s original dialogue, but that was now nearly forty years old and the Daily News (10 January 1872), for one, found the adaptation painfully ‘laboured and artificial’. The Daily Telegraph (11 January 1872) thought it wholly lacking in ‘poetry, story, interest and dramatic effect’. As with the previous versions, the visual effect of the production was generally praised. The Times (12 January 1872) typified the comments: It may fairly be said that every one of the many tableaux of which the piece consists, whether we look to the beautiful pictures of Messrs George Gordon and W. Harford or the action of the groups performed under the direction of Mr Ryder, is in itself a spectacle. The

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large view of the Forum; of the temple of the Fates, with the vision and the fall of the head of Isis; the house of Arbaces, with an Egyptian ballet; the banquet of Diomed, with a ballet of bacchantes; the Amphitheatre, with its sports, and the concluding scenes, are naturally prominent; but few can overlook the exquisite intricacies which intervene between the grander displays, and of which everyone is copied from a Pompeian model. Costumes, artefacts and buildings were based on the illustrations in Sir William Gell’s classic 1832 work Pompeiana. But the inclusion of two ballets, an earthquake, a gladiatorial display, a banquet and a volcanic eruption was felt by the Era (14 January 1872) to be too much: ‘The consequence is that the play has been lost in the spectacle. The artists are put on one side, the story is allowed to drop through, the poetry is omitted, and the classicality is lost for the sake of the excessive and occasionally tedious ornamentation.’ Although the critics generally had kind words for the acting, for the delicacy and pathos of Henrietta Hodson’s Nydia, the manly vigour of George Rignold’s Glaucus and the commanding authority of the Arbaces of John Ryder, who was also directing, the production was sunk by a series of catastrophes on opening night. The statue of Isis which was supposed to topple on Arbaces got stuck and failed to topple, leaving Ryder to crawl under it and pretend to be crushed. A tightrope walker, ‘the famous Christoff’, introduced into the banqueting scene, got his pole caught in the scenery and fell off several times, to the amusement of the audience. The arena scenes were fleshed out with fifteen minutes of wrestling and acrobatics by the Sextillian troupe which the critics thought more suited to a circus or a pantomime and which anyway bored the audience, and the actual gladiatorial contests were deemed tame and absurd. The eruption of Vesuvius at the end was pronounced ‘ludicrous’ by the Daily Telegraph (‘the top of Vesuvius is lighted with a flame which resembles most closely the flicker of a London gas-lamp; and . . . the eruption of this diminutive Primrose-hill is represented by a few not very awe-inspiring fireworks’). In addition to this, scenes before the front cloth were regularly drowned out by the hammering and banging backstage as the next elaborate set was put up. The Daily News reported that the progress of the play was ‘marked by frequent signs of impatience and outbursts of unseasonal laughter’. The Daily Telegraph concluded: ‘The defects are so radical that it is to be feared they cannot be remedied’ and the Globe (10 January 1872) concluded its review with the words: ‘We regret that it is impossible to congratulate the adapter, Mr John Oxenford, or the management on a

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piece which ought to have possessed the highest literary and dramatic merit, but which as at present performed exhibits neither.’ This debacle effectively ended the first cycle of toga plays. When the next cycle began Wilson Barrett considered putting on a new version of Lytton’s novel but rejected it in favour of a new melodrama, Claudian, which would foreground the Christianity which would become an increasing feature of the second cycle of toga plays. Dramatizations of Lytton’s novel continued to be seen, not inside theatres but outdoors in pleasure grounds and amusement parks. The Last Days of Pompeii was a staple of James Pain’s pyrodramas from 1886 to 1910. A simplified version of the narrative, which could be understood without the necessity of dialogue, formed the framework for a succession of processions, gladiatorial contests and finally the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of the city, utilizing several hundredweight of fireworks. A cast of three hundred and archaeologically accurate sets and costumes, which were proudly advertised as one of the attractions, completed the transformation of the novel to spectacle pure and simple.91

3 Living Greek Statues

On the Albert Memorial, that repository of enduring Victorian values, Shakespeare and Dante are to be found seated on the steps of a throne occupied by Homer. This symbolizes the dominance of Greek thought and ideas in nineteenth-century Britain. During the course of the century large numbers of classical sculptures appeared in British museums, two of the most popular being the Venus de Milo and the Venus de’Medici. Following the authoritative pronouncements of the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, classical sculpture became synonymous with simplicity, purity and nobility, and not surprisingly the statue metaphor carrying these values came to be applied to the ideal nineteenth-century woman. The classical statues of Venus made her, as Gail Marshall has argued, at the same time ‘sexually available (although not . . . sexually active) and angelically idealised’, an ambivalent response which influenced attitudes to nudity in Victorian art.1 The language of the Venus statue informed descriptions of real-life beauties, such as Lillie Langtry, and the attitude of men to women in fictions, such as in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and George Meredith’s The Egoist. The obsession with statues of women became a classifiable form of erotomania dubbed by Havelock Ellis ‘Pygmalionism’ after the mythical Greek sculptor. This stemmed in part from the view that sculptures should be as lifelike as possible. As John Ruskin put it, ‘It is the function of the best sculptor – the true Daedalus – to make stillness look like breathing, and marble look like flesh.’2 Victorian painters regularly painted nude models being sculpted and the models were frequently living versions of real statues. Alma-Tadema’s A Sculptor’s Model had the sculptor modelling the Esquiline Venus, G.F. Watts’s The Wife of Pygmalion was inspired by the Oxford Sappho and Albert Moore’s A Venus, by the Venus de Milo. In 66

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Leighton’s The Bath of Psyche the girl’s pose was based on the Aphrodite Callipygos.3 Greek sculptors were among the cultural heroes of Victorian Britain, notably the mythical Pygmalion and the historical Phidias. G.F. Watts claimed of his art ‘I learned in one school only: that of Phidias.’4 Pygmalion was a regular subject for painters, with Burne-Jones completing four panels featuring his story. Alma-Tadema painted Phidias and the Parthenon (1868) in which Phidias is showing the Parthenon frieze to Pericles and Aspasia. Poynter created mosaics of the sculptors Phidias and Apelles for the South Kensington Museum. It is not surprising then that Wilson Barrett made a sculptor the hero of one of his toga plays – Clito. The physical perfection of Greek statues of women provided an ideal for the stage and several nineteenth-century actresses achieved stardom in part by embodying this ideal and doing so in a classical setting. Notable among them were Helen Faucit, Mary Anderson and Lillie Langtry. Gail Marshall has thoroughly and persuasively traced the ubiquity of the sculptural metaphor in the attitude to and discussions of actresses in the nineteenth century.5 As early as 1775 acting manuals were recommending the study of antique statuary for both men and women intent on stage careers. Edward Cooke recommended male actors to study the two Antinouses, the Farnese Hercules, the Apollo Belvedere, the Apollo de’Medici, the Caracalla and the Fighting and Dying Gladiators and for females the Venus de’Medici, the Venus de Calipaedia, Diana, Flora and the Graces. Between 1800 and 1817 white muslin dresses, modelled on classical sculptures, were all the rage. Emma Hamilton became famous for her ‘attitudes’ – poses imitating classical sculptures and mythological characters which gave rise to a tradition of tableaux vivants and poses plastiques, scantily clad women in classical poses imitating famous paintings and statues. Classical costume and classical attitudes became even more familiar in the genre of classical burlesques which for nearly fifty years remained popular on the London stage after James Robinson Planché launched them with Olympic Revels (1831). This starred Madame Vestris in the first of a succession of classical roles which captured the imagination of playgoers. Actor-manager John Coleman recalled that ‘she was just the height and build of the Medicean Venus’ and quoted a contemporary observer to stress her impact: when Madame made her first appearance – through a trap on the stage – as Pandora, her youth, her beauty, her superbly symmetrical

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proportions, displayed to the utmost advantage by her classic costume, and possibly by the novelty of her position, procured her a reception so enthusiastic and so overwhelming that she fairly broke down under it, and had to wipe away her tears before she could utter a single word.6 The very fact that a genre of classical burlesques travestying and parodying both myths and legends of the Ancient World flourished alongside serious plays with classical themes for so long confirms the centrality of the Ancient World to Victorian culture.7 The incarnation of classical beauty for the early Victorian stage and one of the leading actresses of her generation was Helen Faucit (1814–98). Born into a theatrical family and making her official stage debut in 1833, she rapidly became the leading lady of the most important actor-manager of the 1830s and 1840s, the powerful, egotistical, irascible but brilliant William Charles Macready. ‘She seemed to countless devotees the incarnation of ideal womanhood’ says her modern biographer Carol Jones Carlisle.8 She seems also to have appeared to her admirers as the archetype of Greek beauty. Actor-manager John Coleman wrote: Beauty of face and form were combined with those rarer gifts – beauty of mind and purity of soul . . . ‘More than common tall’, and perfectly balanced from head to heel, the short waist and long and superbly moulded lower limbs which go with the Grecian type of beauty, harmonised perfectly with the sloping and majestic shoulders, the virginal bust, and the arms lost to the Venus de Milo. Then her face was the face of Artemis, herself, while her eyes of Aphrodisian grey varied in colour and expression with every mood as they glittered through their long dark lashes.9 This was triumphantly affirmed in the play which opened Macready’s period of management at Covent Garden in 1837, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Macready had performed it before with a variety of actresses playing Hermione (Mrs Bunn, Mrs Sloman, Ellen Tree) but none of them as perfectly cast as Helen Faucit turned out to be. Hermione was one of the Victorians’ best-loved Shakespeare characters, the ideal wife and mother, ‘Fortitude and Justice Personified, with unwearying affection’ as Ruskin described her.10 In the climactic scene of the play Hermione, wrongly suspected of adultery by her jealous husband the Sicilian King Leontes and believed to be dead, appears

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apparently as a statue and dramatically comes to life to be reunited with her repentant husband. The critics praised Helen Faucit for combining ‘queenliness and femininity’, and were particularly impressed by her pose as the statue. For example, the Morning Post (3 October 1837) said: Miss Faucit played Hermione with grace and dignity, and went through the trial scene like a queen, conscious of innocence and virtue. She was particularly happy in the last scene; and art could scarcely give to marble a more noble and imposing station than she presented on the pedestal when the curtain was drawn. Even while descending, and advancing forward a few paces, she looked still like marble in motion, like a beautiful piece of statuary that had just received the breath of life. Hermione became one of her most famous roles, and entered her repertoire.11 After she retired from the stage, Helen Faucit wrote a series of highly praised essays on Shakespeare’s heroines and one of them was Hermione. She showed a full awareness of the need for effective staging in terms of sets and costumes as well as performance, writing: The Winter’s Tale makes heavy demands upon the resources of a theatre both in actors and mise-en-scène. It was therefore only in such cities as Dublin, Glasgow, and Edinburgh that I was able to have it acted. But in all these cities, even with such inadequate resources as they supplied, the play used to produce a profound impression. The sympathies of my audience for the suffering Hermione were reflected back upon me so warmly as to make me feel that they entered into my conception of her beautiful nature, such as I have . . . endeavoured to present it. There, as in London, the statue scene always produced a remarkable effect. This I could feel in the intense hush, as though everyone present ‘held his breath for the time’. In Edinburgh, upon one occasion, I have been told by a friend who was present that, as I descended from the pedestal and advanced towards Leontes, the audience simultaneously rose from their seats, as if drawn out of them by surprise and reverential awe at the presence of one who bore more of heaven than of earth about her. I can only account for this by supposing that the soul of Hermione had for the time entered into mine.12

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Since Paulina tells Leontes in the play that the statue has been coloured by the sculptor to give it a more lifelike look, a special costume was devised for Faucit in the statue scene, a dress of soft white cashmere, the ‘draperies and edges bordered with the royal purple enriched with a tracery in gold, and thus harmonising with the colouring of the lips, eyes, hair, etc. of the statue’.13 A major event in Faucit’s career was her performance in an English version of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, which dramatizes the story of Antigone, who buries her dead brother in defiance of the orders of King Creon and later commits suicide to avoid execution. The work of Sophocles had been exalted by the German Romantics, in particular Schlegel, and in 1841 a German translation of the play with music by Mendelssohn had been performed at Potsdam to great acclaim. This version, translated into English by William Bartholomew, was produced at Covent Garden in 1848, complete with the Mendelssohn music. John Vandenhoff played Creon and his daughter Charlotte, Antigone. There was considerable interest in the play – which had not been performed in its original version in either the seventeenth or the eighteenth century – and also in its archaeologically accurate costumes and painted proscenium, designed to resemble the front of an ancient theatre. The Illustrated London News not only reviewed it but ran a separate feature on its historical accuracy, evidence of the growing concern for such matters.14 The Illustrated London News (4 January 1845) declared the production a ‘complete success’, praising the Ancient Greek theatre setting (‘admirably painted by Mr John Macfarren’), the score (‘music of the highest order’) the costumes (‘in keeping, except for the sandals which should have been Greek instead of Roman’) and the acting of Charlotte Vandenhoff: ‘Miss Vandenhoff’s impersonation of Antigone deserves all praise. Throughout the part, which was in every respect a most difficult one, she evinced the highest intelligence.’15 Helen Faucit was in the audience together with John Calcraft, the actor-manager of the Theatre Royal, Dublin. They agreed to stage it in Dublin with Calcraft as Creon and Faucit in the title role. She was already well informed about the cultural importance of the play. She had read Schlegel’s Dramatic Literature in 1840 and had studied ancient Greek statuary while performing in Paris in 1844. She said of the Venus de Milo: ‘Never was anything so simply grand, and quietly yet eloquently graceful. The attitude, if so you may call it, is perfection.’16 She now made a study of Greek tragedy with the help of her devoted admirer, the poet and critic Theodore Martin, whom she was to marry in 1851.

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Her performance as Antigone in Dublin in 1845 on a reproduction of an ancient Greek stage was a sensation. Although she only performed it once in London and for seven nights in Edinburgh and apart from this only in Dublin, the role remained one of those, along with Juliet, Rosalind, Hermione, Lady Macbeth and Pauline, the Lady of Lyons, for which she was enduringly celebrated. According to Carol Jones Carlisle, in her performance she ‘reconciled the formal with the dynamic, the classical ideal with human emotion’.17 Both the Dublin press and the Irish intelligentsia hailed the performance as a supreme example of the art of acting. It was in particular its perfect classicism that captured the imagination. The writer Percy Fitzgerald, who saw it in 1846, wrote in 1902 that ‘the classical vision haunted my boyish dreams for weeks, and still does . . . It seemed some supernatural figure lent temporarily to this base earth.’18 Faucit’s performance, fate-haunted but love-inspired, produced rhapsodic reactions in many of her audience. Notably and influentially Sir Frederic Burton, the Irish painter and later director of the National Gallery, made a series of sketches of her as Antigone and later a celebrated watercolour portrait of her in classical costume as ‘The Greek Muse’. He wrote: To have seen Helen Faucit play the part of Antigone . . . was an experience to leave an ineffaceable impression on the mind. Her interpretation of that character, the capability she showed of throwing herself at once into the spirit of Greek art – so different in many respects from that of the more modern drama – has always seemed to me to afford the most striking proof of her genius . . . We witnessed that reserved force, that restrained passion, which distinguishes the higher productions of Hellenic art in all its forms. No loud voicing or unneeded gesticulation disturbed the rhythmic movement of the action throughout. All the deeper was the pathos. We were elevated into an ideal region. He expatiated on her ‘natural dignity’, ‘inborn grace’, her head ‘nobly balanced on a pillar-like neck’, concluding ‘Seen in profile, the remarkable expanse between the front of the face and the finely set ear, the length from the chin to the throat, the beautiful outward curve of the full and pliant lip, all called vividly to mind the Greek ideal known to us in sculpture and in design on the finer Athenian vases.’19 Thomas de Quincey, who saw Faucit’s Antigone some months later in Edinburgh, was moved to similar raptures:

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Then suddenly – oh heavens! What a revelation of beauty! – forth stepped walking in brightness, the most faultless of Grecian marbles, Miss Helen Faucit as Antigone. What perfection of Athenian sculpture! The noble figure, the lovely arms, the fluent drapery! What an unveiling of the ideal statuesque! Is it Hebe? Is it Aurora? Is it a goddess that moves before us? Perfect she is in form; perfect in attitude.20 Before Helen Faucit left Dublin, she received an address from thirty-five of the leading artists, scientists and intellectuals of the city thanking her for ‘creating a love and admiration of the beauty and grandeur of ancient Greece’ through her performance as Antigone and for materially advancing the cultivation of classic literature and the study of ancient art which they had been promoting. In addition they presented her with a fibula of gold and emeralds, specially designed by Frederic Burton.21 On her single London appearance in the role, The Times (4 August 1846) declaring her ‘attitudes . . . stunningly classical and statuesque’, said: ‘One seldom sees a more beautiful conception more completely embodied.’22 John Calcraft sought to capitalize on the success of Antigone by preparing his own translation of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis and staging it lavishly in Dublin. Helen Faucit played Iphigenia, Calcraft, Agamemnon and Gustavus Vaughan Brooke, Achilles. Faucit gained a personal triumph both in the pathos of her pleas to her father not to be sacrificed to Diana to ensure favourable winds for the fleet and in the patriotic exaltation with which she later accepted her fate as a noble duty. Despite the ecstatic reviews, the excitement of a chariot and four white horses on the stage, the panorama of the Greek fleet under sail, and the happy ending in which after all the drama Iphigenia is spared by Diana, it had only a handful of performances and was not revived after 1848. The statue and the statuesque actress came together in W.S. Gilbert’s Pygmalion and Galatea (1871). Pygmalion and the statue he created and brought to life after praying to Venus is one of the most enduring of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The statue only received the name Galatea in the eighteenth century, when the myth received a major boost in the dramatization by Rousseau, first performed in 1770. It was very popular, widely performed and particularly influential on the English Romantics.23 As Richard Jenkyns puts it, ‘The story of Pygmalion haunted the nineteenth-century imagination.’24 The myth was painted by BurneJones, Watts, Ernest Normand, W.H. Margetson, Jean-Léon Gérôme and Herbert Gustave Schmalz, dramatized in light opera by Victor Massé,

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Ambroise Thomas and Franz von Suppé, and retold in verse by Robert Buchanan, William Morris, James Payn and Ernest Dowson. In an interesting artistic crossover the sculptor Thomas Woolner wrote a poem ‘Pygmalion’.25 In the later nineteenth century it became something of a bone of contention around the question of the propriety of descriptions of the naked female body. Defenders justified the use of nudity as an expression of Hellenism; opponents denounced the use of Hellenism as an excuse for indecency.26 Painter William Bell Scott quoted the Pygmalion story as a demonstration of the argument that there was a danger in making the physical more important than the spiritual.27 Gail Marshall argues that Galatea was a male image of female subjection. She is created by Man, remains only and always the image of his desires, but when liberated from her marble subjection causes chaos and has to be returned to her immobile state on her pedestal. Marshall attributes this to concern about women stepping away from their domestic pedestal to become liberated and has claimed that most nineteenth-century poets deviated from the Ovidian original by having Galatea transformed back into a statue.28 Essaka Joshua has contested this, claiming that the majority of nineteenth-century poets retained a human Galatea at the end of the narrative.29 But she admits that a few dramas featured the altered ending and it is arguable that Gilbert’s play, which was one of them, had more influence on public perception than any other version in the nineteenth century. Billed as ‘an original mythological comedy’, Gilbert’s Pygmalion and Galatea, which takes place in the space of twenty-four hours, is set in Pygmalion’s studio in Athens. In act 1, Pygmalion is happily married to Cynisca, originally ‘a nymph of Artemis pledged to eternal maidenhood’. She had fallen in love with Pygmalion and prayed to the goddess to be released from her vows. The goddess had granted her desire to marry Pygmalion but urged them to preserve ‘a perfect conjugal fidelity’, empowering both partners to strike the other blind if they were unfaithful. In Galatea Pygmalion has created a statue of what he regards as the perfect woman. When Cynisca has to go away, Pygmalion, regretting the lifelessness of his creation, prays to the gods to bring her to life. The gods do bring her to life. Pygmalion proclaims her the perfect woman. She asks him what is a man, and he delivers a properly Ruskinian gender definition: A being strongly framed, To wait on woman, and protect her from All ills that strength and courage can avert;

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To work and toil for her, that she may rest; To weep and mourn for her, that she may laugh; To fight and die for her, that she may live. They express their love for each other, which sets up a conflict in Pygmalion with his love for his wife. He tries to send Galatea away, fails and they fall into each other’s arms. In act 2, Galatea continues to profess her love. But in her innocence and ignorance of life and the world, she proceeds to cause havoc. When Leucippus, a soldier who wishes to marry Pygmalion’s sister Myrine, comes in with a wounded fawn which he has shot, Galatea denounces him as a murderer to Myrine. Misunderstanding, Myrine thinks he has killed a person, quarrels with him and causes him to leave. When Pygmalion’s rich patron Chrysos arrives, Galatea says he cannot be a man because he is little and fat. She invites him to put his arm round her as Pygmalion does. Thinking her to be Pygmalion’s model, he does so just as his wife Daphne arrives. This causes dissention between Chrysos and Daphne. Finally Cynisca returns and believing Pygmalion to be unfaithful, strikes him blind. In act 3, Daphne has evicted Chrysos and Cynisca is leaving Pygmalion. But Chrysos manages to talk Daphne round. Leucippus and Myrine, clearing up their misunderstanding, are reunited and eat the fawn. The blind Pygmalion, mistaking Galatea for his wife, tells her he did not love Galatea. He loved the statue because it was based on his wife but the love for the statue died when it came to life. Overhearing this, Cynisca forgives Pygmalion and restores his sight. Galatea returns to her pedestal and is restored to stone. The play, which starred W.H. Kendal as Pygmalion and his wife, Madge Robertson, as Galatea, boasted a Greek interior ‘realized with archaeological fidelity’ by John O’Connor. It contained a view of ancient Athens seen through the portal. The statue of Galatea was modelled by J.B. Philip RA, sculptor of the Albert Memorial. The play was an instant hit on its premiere at the Haymarket Theatre on 9 December 1871. The usually severe Dutton Cook of the Pall Mall Gazette thought ‘the production merits high praise for its fantastic cleverness and genuine freshness of treatment’, praised the verse (‘terse and bright’) and the dialogue for its ‘quaint humour and vivacity’ and said: ‘the representation owed much to the skill and charm of Miss Robertson’s Galatea. The lady wears her classical drapery most gracefully, and enunciates her speeches with admirable art. In the last act she displayed a command of pathetic expression with which she has not hitherto been credited.’30 The Times

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(12 December 1871) while suggesting that Gilbert had made ‘Galatea start into life with a much larger stock of worldly knowledge than is consistent with this sudden burst into consciousness’ conceded that he has ‘succeeded in placing on the stage two female characters whose effectiveness can scarcely be surpassed’, and that ‘in his two leading actresses Mr Gilbert has been happy. Miss Robertson as the ethereal and naive Galatea and Miss Caroline Hall as the really impassioned Cynisca, seemed to be pitted against each other in a trial of artistic skill, and are well matched.’ Interestingly the critic noted: ‘It has long been a maxim in theatrical circles that the time has passed when the sympathies of an audience could be commanded by persons clad in the ancient costumes of Greece and Rome, and the success of Mr Gilbert in riveting the attention of a crowded house during three long acts, by the clear development of a simple classical story, confining himself, with the vigour of a Corneille, to the artist’s studio as the sole place of action, may be considered a triumph indeed.’ The suggestion is that toga plays are old hat and that Gilbert was attempting something ‘altogether unique on the modern English stage’ and had succeeded in triumphantly revivifying the genre. The Era (10 December 1871), calling it ‘an exceedingly graceful composition’, proclaimed it ‘a success to which it was thoroughly entitled by the novelty of its dramatic construction and the great extent of its literary merits’. But the critic added ‘There is a subtle allegory conveyed in all this which we are not sure the majority of the audience fully grasped.’ The allegorical meaning – that ‘man cannot live with complete truth’ – underpinned a celebration of conjugal fidelity and whichever message the audience took away, the play appealed strongly to the nineteenthcentury audience. It was revived in October 1872 by J.B. Buckstone at the Haymarket but Mrs Kendal was pregnant and was almost immediately replaced by Ada Dyas. By the 1890s it had been played all over the world ‘from Calcutta to St. Petersburg’.31 Audiences became deeply involved in the story. During a performance in Dublin, as Galatea was about to throw herself into Pygmalion’s arms, an old lady shouted from the gallery: ‘Don’t darlint! His wife has just gone out!’32 It was revived at the Haymarket in 1877 with Marion Terry as Galatea and Harriet Hodson as Cynisca. Terry was criticized by some as passionless and praised by others for being statuesque, suggesting the inherent tension in the role.33 Mrs Kendal recorded in her autobiography of her production: ‘Mr John Ruskin liked the play very much and came often to see it.’34 One of the attractions was evidently the nature of the classical drapery. Gail Marshall interprets the use of classical drapery on stage

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as enabling the actress to signal to her audience ‘a chaste permission’ to desire, negotiating the delicate balance between desire and decorum. Ruskin had made clear the role of classical drapery in his lectures on sculpture, Aratra Pentelici. He wrote: One of the essential distinctions between the Athenian and Florentine schools is dependent on their treatment of drapery . . .; an Athenian always sets it to exhibit the action of the body, by flowing with it, or over it, or from it, so as to illustrate both its form and gesture; a Florentine, on the contrary, always uses his drapery to conceal or disguise the forms of the body, and exhibit mental emotion.35 He elaborated on this in a passage he deleted from the final lecture. ‘When a Greek sculptor uses drapery . . . his object in practically dealing with it is nevertheless to show as much of the bodily form as may be naturally (or even sometimes by violent artifice) expressed beneath.’ It is small wonder he was so fascinated by the play. The play achieved even greater success when revived in the 1880s as part of the full blown toga vogue. Mary Anderson, ‘La Belle Americaine’, fondly known in the US as ‘Our Mary’ and who had already played Galatea in New York, negotiated with Gilbert to play it in London and she acted it in London in 1883, 1884 and 1888 to great acclaim. Mary Anderson (1859–1940) was born in Sacramento, California, the daughter of a Confederate army officer. She had no formal stage training but had elocution lessons and a few acting lessons from veteran actor George Vandenhoff before she made her stage debut on 25 November 1875 in Louisville, Kentucky, at the age of sixteen, playing Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. One of her greatest admirers was the American critic William Winter who argued that she combined beauty with charm, sweetness and sincerity and this, together with her uncommon stature and her ‘magnificent voice – copious, melodious, penetrating, loud and clear, yet soft and gentle’ made her an instant star.36 She was not just an actress, but an actor-manager, selecting her own repertoire, preparing the acting versions of the texts, choosing the actors and designers, and supervising the production. In the eight years following her debut she became a favourite all over America and in three seasons (1883–84, 1884–85, 1887–88), she also conquered England. ‘Her success surpassed, in profit, that of any American actor who had appeared in England.’37 She also had several successful tours of the British provinces, establishing herself as a favourite in ‘fastidious Edinburgh, critical Manchester, and impulsive but exacting Dublin’.38

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Her repertory over her career, apart from Shakespeare’s Juliet, Rosalind, Hermione, Perdita and Lady Macbeth and W.S. Gilbert’s Galatea and Clarice in Comedy and Tragedy, was very largely in early nineteenth-century dramas, regarded by the 1880s as antiquated: the male title role in Talfourd’s Ion (1835), Bianca in Milman’s Fazio (1815), Parthenia in Mrs Lovell’s Ingomar the Barbarian (1851), the Countess in Sheridan Knowles’s Love (1839), the Duchess of Torrenueva in Planché’s Faint Heart Ne’er Won Fair Lady (1839), Pauline in Bulwer Lytton’s The Lady of Lyons (1838), Julia in Sheridan Knowles’s The Hunchback (1832), the eponymous heroine of Richard Lalor Sheil’s Evadne (1819). She admitted that critics had greeted her regularly with ‘Give us a new play’ and ‘Why not something modern?’39 But the senior American critic William Winter, who became a friend, declared: ‘Such a presence for the lofty statuesque, passionate heroines of the classic drama has not come upon the stage for many years.’40 He also acknowledged that many critics found her ‘cold’, a charge against which he defends her, defining her qualities rhapsodically. She had, he thought: a sumptuous and supple figure that can realise the ideals of statuary; a mobile countenance that can strongly and unerringly express the feelings of the heart and the workings of the mind; eyes that can awe with majesty or startle with the terror or thrill with the tenderness of their soul-subduing gaze; a voice, deep, clear, resonant, flexible, that can range over the wide compass of emotion and carry its meaning in varying music to every ear and every heart; intellect to shape the purposes and control the means of mimetic art; deep knowledge of human nature; delicate intuitions; the skill to listen as well as the art to speak; imagination to grasp the ideal of a character in all its conditions of experience; the instinct of the sculptor to give it form, of the painter to give it colour, and of the poet to give it movement . . . Her affiliations were all with grandeur, purity and loveliness. An inherent and passionate tendency toward classic stateliness increased in her more and more. Characters of the statuesque order attracted her imagination – Ion, Galatea, Hermione – but she did not leave them soulless.41 The imagery is throughout of statuary. From William Winter’s comments, we can see what the appeal of these key roles was. In the title role of Evadne, her performance was ‘pervaded by pure and sacred womanhood’.42 Talfourd’s Ion, she found ‘so noble in language and pure

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in plot that, although the leading part is that of youth, I could not resist producing it. As a character Ion was more beautiful to me than anything I had yet acted . . . No role has ever given me more pleasure.’43 Winter agreed with her estimation, saying that the value of the play was that it was ‘fruitful of excellent lessons . . . it is instinct with moral purity’. Its object was to present ‘in a grand setting and with splendid emphasis the beauty of self-sacrifice’.44 Of her Parthenia, Winter wrote that it: has the attributes of youth, beauty, innocence, ingenuousness, the warmth of girlish emotion, the prettiness of girlish caprice, the dignity of innate goodness, and the consistency of spontaneous identification . . . Miss Anderson becomes Parthenia by natural sympathy. The simple truthfulness, the unconscious capacity of heroism, and the winning loveliness of this classic maiden of poetry are in the spirit of the woman of actual life.45 So for Winter, Mary embodied an ideal of pure womanhood that vindicated her and her acting career. Although Irving urged her to open with Romeo and Juliet, offering her the use of his fine scenery for her English debut, Mary Anderson chose the role of Parthenia in Ingomar the Barbarian, the English translation by Maria Lovell of an 1846 Viennese play ‘Son of the Wilderness’ by Friedrich Halm. Ingomar had first been produced on Whit Monday, 19 June 1851, by actor-manager James Anderson during his tenure of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Anderson himself played Ingomar and Charlotte Vandenhoff, the heroine Parthenia. The Times (10 June 1851) thought ‘the idea of the piece is pleasing. The effect of love in softening stubborn natures, for good or ill, has been set forth over and over again, but the subject is a tough one, not easily to be worn out.’ But the critic thought the story might have been worked out in two acts and was needlessly prolonged to five, stretching the dramatic material too thin. Nevertheless, ‘Mr Anderson, as the bluff barbarian, and Miss Vandenhoff, as the elegant maiden, did their best with the parts’ and ‘the piece was well put upon the stage’. The Spectator (14 June 1851) took a very similar view of the play. However, the Illustrated London News (10 June 1851) proclaimed it: ‘one of the most delightful pieces we ever witnessed. This drama, for the unity and simplicity of its plot and characters, is eminently classic, both in spirit and in manner . . . The four scenes are beautifully painted and admirably set.’ Of the acting, the critic declared: ‘Miss Vandenhoff, in the heroine, achieved a perfect triumph. Her attitudes were the most

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classical imaginable, they were a series of beautiful sculptures, excelling in grace and propriety even those of Antigone. Mr Anderson was vigorous and characteristic in the barbarian – something exaggerative, perhaps, but not offensively.’ Anderson recalled ruefully in his autobiography: It was as beautifully put upon the stage as any of my former productions with the same result – empty benches. Charlotte Vandenhoff sustained the classical heroine with grace, poetry, and perfection of elocution, and I enjoyed a complete triumph as Ingomar. We played it fourteen nights, and after the first night, which was really good, never to more than £40 or £50 houses. My patience, hopes, and worldly means were now exhausted, and I resolved to close the theatre.46 This he did, with debts of over £5000 from his two-year tenancy of Drury Lane, which resulted in him spending a period in debtor’s prison. When he resumed his career, it was as a visiting star actor rather than an actormanager. Ingomar remained in his repertoire and was enthusiastically received by audiences. In October 1851 he played it in Birmingham (‘a great hit’).47 During a twelve-week season at the Standard Theatre in London’s East End in 1853 he ‘acted Ingomar to a tremendously full house; had a grand reception and three or four calls’.48 He played it again at the Standard in 1860 ‘to a crowded house’.49 Thus despite its inauspicious debut, it became a standard repertoire piece, its enduring popularity perhaps explicable in terms of its classic love story and dramatization of approved and accepted gender roles. It had also been a hit for Mary Anderson in America. She recalled: ‘Ingomar, of all my plays, was for many seasons the public’s favorite. The part of Parthenia was light, and gave me no trouble.’50 But Anderson was warned by several London managers and critics ‘that it could not succeed, that its old-fashioned sentiment would be received with laughter’.51 She ensured that it would be mounted with great artistic taste, and recalled ‘At the dress rehearsals I hardly recognised the old piece with all its new and beautiful surroundings.’52 The play celebrates filial devotion and the ennobling and transforming power of love. Myron the armourer leaves the Greek colony of Massilia in search of work but is captured by the barbarian Alemanni tribe and held for ransom for thirty ounces of silver. His daughter Parthenia, who has previously refused her mother’s demand that she marry the rich old miser Polydor and insisted she would only marry for love, seeks help in raising the ransom. Everyone refuses to help and finally she offers to marry Polydor in return

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for the money. He rejects her, using the same speech she had made to him. So she goes to the barbarian camp to intercede with the tribesmen. Their chief, Ingomar, agrees to take her as hostage and release Myron to seek the ransom. She explains the meaning of love to Ingomar and despite his attempts to resist, he falls in love with her. When the tribesmen seek to sell her to slavers, Ingomar rescues her and returns her to her home in Massilia. But he cannot leave her and to win her love he agrees to settle down in Massilia and become a Greek. He shaves his beard, cuts his hair, surrenders his sword and works for Myron, tripling his income. The citizens of Massilia, including Parthenia’s mother, are suspicious of his motives and fear he may be a spy. When the Alemanni advance on the city, the Timarch, the ruler of the colony, offers Ingomar a house, land and the hand of Parthenia if he will treacherously infiltrate his old tribe, learn their dispositions and lead Massilian forces against them. He indignantly refuses. Polydor appears to say he has bought up all Myron’s debts and intends to enslave him and his family. Ingomar offers to become his slave instead, to save Parthenia. The Timarch, impressed by this noble gesture, pays off the debts and orders Polydor expelled from the city. Parthenia declares her love for Ingomar and they are united. When envoys arrive from the Alemanni, the Timarch concludes a treaty of friendship with them and assigns them land to build a city with Ingomar as their Timarch. Although Mary Anderson noted: ‘it was amusing to tame a barbarian even in play-acting, and to observe how the women in the audience delighted in seeing the humiliating conquest of a great chief by one of their sex’,53 the play was in fact an endorsement of Ruskinian gender roles, with Ingomar ‘active, progressive, defensive . . . the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender’ and Parthenia, the civilizing and domesticating influence, the symbol of Home and Peace. When Parthenia finally declares her love it is in submissive terms: And did I once with foolish tyranny lay on the trials, And with a vain superiority presume upon thy noble nature? Let me pay the penalty of my pride, while thus in love and humbleness, as wife, as servant, slave, I sink down in the dust before thy feet. As had been predicted the critics were withering in their judgement of the play. The Times (8 September, 1883) said: ‘The old-fashioned play . . . no longer appeals to the English public as it did 30 years ago . . . Its lumbering Teutonic sentiment and its stagy effects are now

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employed chiefly by heavy tragedians to demonstrate their soundness of wind and limb’. The Illustrated London News (8 September 1883) called it ‘highly moral but extremely wearisome, artless and nonsensical . . . dreary and imbecile’. The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (8 September 1883) called it ‘essentially the production of a bygone age, and it is this, without being a classic in any sense of the word . . . a singularly unsophisticated audience would be needed to take an interest in the simple story . . . except in the pastoral scenes between the strangely assorted lovers, the play has little real command over the sympathy of its spectators’. Even the Era (8 September 1883) called the story ‘grossly improbable’. This meant that interest focused on Mary Anderson’s performance, and themes began to emerge that would be repeated. The Times declared: To the interpretation of this character Miss Anderson brings natural gifts of rare excellence, gifts of face and form and action which suffice almost themselves to play the part; and the warmth of applause which greeted her as she first tripped upon the stage expressed the admiration no less than the welcome of the house. Her severely simple robe of virgin white, worn with classic grace, revealed a figure as lissom and perfect of contour as a draped Venus of Thorwaldsen; . . . A performance so graced could not fail to be pleasing. And yet it was impossible not to feel, as the play progressed, that to fine embodiment of the romantic heroine art was in some degree wanting. The beautiful Parthenia, like a soulless statue, pleased the eye, but left the heart untouched . . . The elegant artificiality of the American school, a tendency to pose and be self-conscious, to smirk even . . . especially when advancing to the footlights to receive a full measure of applause, were fatal to such effects of sentiment as even so stilted a play could be made to yield. It was but too evident that Parthenia was at all times more concerned with the fall of her drapery than with the effects of her speeches; and that gesture, action, intonation – everything which constitutes a living individuality – were in her case not so much the outcome of the feeling proper to the character as the manifestation of a diligent and painstaking art which had not yet learnt to conceal itself. The gleam of the smallest spark of genius would have been a welcome relief to a monotony of talent. The Illustrated London News and the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News expressed a similar view.

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However, Mary Anderson had her defenders. The Era, guided more by the audience than the critics, declared: A more beautiful and a more perfect impersonation of Parthenia than that given us by Miss Mary Anderson it is not possible to conceive. Between the acts, as well as during the performance, it was easy to test the feeling of the house, and we have no hesitation in saying that what we here express was in the minds of the great majority. All the superlatives of eulogy were brought to bear upon the actress’s beauty of person and charm of manner. Enthusiasm became eloquent in praise of her sweet, persuasive, and sympathetic force . . . In her very first scene . . . Miss Anderson took hold of the sympathy and admiration of the audience, and she never relaxed that hold until the end of the play. The staging, however, came in for unqualified praise. The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News declared that ‘the play . . . is put on the stage as well as it could be under the management of Mr Irving himself. The illustrations of old Massilia by Messrs. Spong and Perkins, and those by Mr Hawes Craven and Mr (W.E.) Ryan of the woods and rocky defiles of southern Gaul and the Cevennes, could not be improved.’ The Era thought that the market-place of Massilia ‘full of life and movement’ reflected great credit on the artists, Messrs. Spong and Perkins. For the forest home of Ingomar Mr Hawes Craven has painted a really beautiful scene, which on Saturday was the theme of general eulogy. The costumes and armour are from designs by the Hon. Lewis Wingfield, whose taste and research contribute not a little to the beauty and completeness of the mounting. Mary Anderson followed Ingomar with The Lady of Lyons, Pygmalion and Galatea and Comedy and Tragedy. The Theatre magazine kept up a sustained attack on her acting, at the same time attesting to her popularity with audiences. In December 1883 the Theatre, confirming that ‘Miss Anderson’s Parthenia has been affirmed by many to be a performance of most exquisite grace and beauty’ and that as Pauline in The Lady of Lyons she ‘highly delighted the majority of her audience’, declared ‘Charming as the lady may be, both in look and gesture, she is certainly wanting in that inexplicable impulsiveness, that absolute abandonment of consciousness and self-possession, without which all acting

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must appear false and untrue’ and damningly pronounced her acting: ‘Faultily faultless – icily regular – splendidly null – dead perfection.’ The journal then printed a lengthy review of Mary Anderson’s acting by ‘a clever lady’ which declared she was ‘wholly wanting in any natural impulse of sentiment and feeling’ and that ‘her popularity is chiefly owing to the immense admiration her looks have excited in the minds of her own sex’.54 Reviewing Gilbert’s Comedy and Tragedy in March 1884 the Theatre returned to the attack ‘Her comedy was laboured; her tragedy artificial . . . Beautiful as she may be as Parthenia, as Pauline, as Galatea, and as Clarice, she is always Miss Anderson in different costumes. She is a very clever actress always . . . but in no performance is there a scintillation of genius, or a suggestion of sensibility.’55 Mary Anderson’s decision to play Galatea in London provoked considerable controversy, as she recalled in her autobiography: During the rehearsals . . . I was frequently told that my reading of the character would not be tolerated by the London public. Galatea, the child of Pygmalion’s art, a statue come to life, could not, it seemed to me, think, look, stand, or speak like an earthly-born maiden; some remnant of the inanimate marble would inevitably linger about her, giving to her movements a plastic grace and to her thoughts and their expression a touch of the ethereal. Mr Gilbert did not agree with my conception of the classical meaning of Galatea’s character – which seemed to me its strongest and most effective side – saying that the play was a nineteenth century comedy dressed in Greek costume, ‘which’ he added, ‘is the only classic thing about it’. I had undertaken the part on condition that I should act it according to my own ideas; and painful and embarrassing as it was for me not to be versatile enough to carry out the brilliant author’s wish that Galatea should speak certain comic speeches with a visible consciousness of their meaning, I felt convinced that my only hope of success was to stamp every word, look, tone, and movement with that ingenuousness which seemed to me the key-note of her nature.56 She adds ruefully: ‘The success I thought was deserved not for any excellence on my part, but because of the suffering I had undergone during the many rehearsals. When driving to and from the theatre I had often envied the old women sweeping the street crossings.’57 J.H. Barnes, who played Pygmalion, gives us a flavour of this suffering, recalling that Mary Anderson had developed her own conception of the part and that

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Gilbert, who was ‘more than ordinarily dogmatic’, ‘objected strongly to some of these effects and points, with the result that the two came to loggerheads one day. The rehearsal was dismissed and things looked black.’ But Michael Gunn, who was managing Mary Anderson’s tour on behalf of impresario Henry Abbey, took Gilbert out to lunch, smoothed him down ‘and when we met next day the clouds had rolled by and the sky was clear again’.58 Evidently word of these disagreements got out and Gilbert was forced to issue a statement to clarify the position: I have never concealed my high opinion of Mrs Kendal’s performance of Galatea, which was of course founded upon my own views, communicated to her at the rehearsal. It may therefore be taken as a fair expression of the intention I had in my mind when I wrote the play. Miss Anderson formed her idea of the character without any assistance from me, and it differs widely from Mrs Kendal’s Galatea. Admitting the correctness of Miss Anderson’s conception of the part . . . I cannot imagine it more beautifully realized. But, while I admit that the difference between the two Galateas is considerable, I wish it to be distinctly understood that it was with my full concurrence that Miss Anderson gave her version of the character . . . On the whole I consider Miss Anderson’s conception of the part to be artistically more beautiful, but dramatically less effective than Mrs Kendal’s.59 Gilbert’s view, outlined in a letter to Clement Scott (10 December 1883), was that ‘When Galatea is a statue, she cannot be too statuelike; when she comes to life, she cannot be too womanly.’60 It was not how Mary Anderson played it. This was not the only row to mar the pre-production period of the play. It is clear that Mary Anderson sought to emphasize the classical and archaeological aspect of the play at the expense of the comedy. For she called in Lawrence Alma-Tadema to advise on her draperies. He suggested she be draped in the manner of the Tanagra figurines but when she appeared in them during the dress rehearsals, Gilbert complained that she looked ‘like a stiff medieval saint’ and demanded their removal. Alma-Tadema, furious, told the Pall Mall Gazette that he considered the play ‘clumsy and silly with no archaeological pretensions at all’.61 The upshot was that Mary and her mother devised a new form of drapery. Mary recalled: ‘In my white Greek clothes, with swollen eyes and tear-stained face, I worked for an hour before the long mirror, when suddenly the statue I wanted

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stood before me. The audience received it with round after round of applause and Mr Gilbert acknowledged himself satisfied.’62 Mary Anderson had already had problems with her Greek costume when she took on the role of Galatea in America and her experience there testifies to a concern for archaeological accuracy. She wrote later: In those days stage costumes told one very little of the period they were meant to represent, while good cut and colour, which give picturesqueness to the simplest garment, were entirely lacking. This was largely due to the fact that stock actors, whose salaries were small, furnished, in most cases, their own wardrobes, and four or five dresses did them service for all the plays of a season . . . I have seen Claude Melnotte, a colonel in the French army under General Bonaparte, appear in the gray uniform of a Confederate soldier . . . medieval Italians strutted the stage in French clothes of the last century . . . I was beginning to despair of ever possessing anything like a real tunica when Mr Frank D. Millet [the American painter who later went down on the Titanic] came to my rescue. From that time my classic wardrobe was entirely satisfactory, for not only did this excellent artist and friend design the most charming and correct costumes for me, but had them cut and made under his own supervision. They were decried at first, as new things generally are, but in a short time even ‘old-stagers’ voted them both beautiful and effective. There was a particular pleasure in merely donning the simple and flowing draperies . . . in freeing one’s self from the iron grip of stays (a Greek dress cannot be worn well with them), the figure became immeasurably more supple and graceful.63 Many of the established British critics were mystified by Mary Anderson’s success and unsparing in their criticism. The critical reactions for and against Mary Anderson both stress her statuesqueness. The Times (10 December 1883) describing her conception of the characters as ‘unimaginative and stony’ observes that in telling the story of Galatea: It is sufficient that the living and breathing Galatea of the play should seem to embody the purity of the classic marble, that she should move about the stage with statuesque grace, and that she should artlessly discuss the relations of the sexes in language of double intent. Miss Anderson’s degree of talent, as shown in the impersonations she has already given us, and her command of classical pose, have already suggested this character as one for which she was eminently fitted. It

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was, therefore, no surprise to those who have been least disposed to admit this lady’s claims to greatness as an actress that her Galatea on Saturday night should have been an ideally beautiful and tolerably complete embodiment of the part. If the heart was not touched, as, indeed, in such a play it scarcely ought to be, the eye was enabled to repose upon the finest tableau vivant that the stage has ever seen. Upon the curtains of the alcove being withdrawn, where that statue, still inanimate, rests upon its pedestal, the admiration of the house was unbounded. Not only was the pose of the figure under the limelight artistic in the highest sense, but the tresses and the drapery was most skilfully arranged to look like the work of the chisel. It is significant of the measure of Miss Anderson’s art that in her animated moments subsequently she should not have excelled the plastic grace of this first picture. At the same time, to her credit it must be said that she never fell much below it. Her movements on the stage, her management of her drapery, her attitudes were full of classic beauty. Actresses there have been who have given us much more than this statuesque posing, who have transformed Galatea into a woman of flesh and blood, animated by true womanly love for Pygmalion as the first man on whom her eyes alight. Evidently a preference for Mrs Kendal and Marion Terry is being expressed here. The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (15 December 1883) echoed these opinions: ‘the embodiment of the statue while it remains a statue has a rare perfection . . . But when the breath of life comes to be breathed into the stone, and the statue steps down from its pedestal a woman, Miss Anderson seems to us to miss one after another of the points of the comedy. Its humour she treats heavily, or, at any rate, coldly.’ Like The Times, the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News much preferred Amy Roselle’s Cynisca to Mary Anderson’s Galatea: ‘emphatically a fine performance, and fully carries out our view of this character as the best acting part in the play’. The Theatre (1 January, 1884) pronounced a decided preference for Mrs Kendal’s performance: I have never seen or hope to see Galatea so well played as by . . . Mrs Kendal . . . in Mrs Kendal’s ‘Galatea’ the effect of her dramatic force never once impaired the beauty of her artistic conception. A more chaste and lovely Galatea than Miss Anderson the stage has never seen . . . But I cannot agree with her . . . that the womanly and pathetic essence of Galatea’s existence should wholly be forgotten. When the

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statue comes to life Galatea is a woman. Into her short life are thrust some of the most beautiful traits of woman’s nature. She must love, and she must long; she must leave the world with regret and a heartbroken sigh. The scheme of the play is valueless unless the finer feelings are instantly and rapidly touched . . . Miss Anderson’s performance I hold to be beautiful, but distinctly not the most beautiful that is possible. If it were mentally as powerful as it is physically chaste, it would indeed be an ideal Galatea. The Era (15 December 1883), once again reflecting the views of the audience more than the critics, reported: The promise of the appearance of Miss Mary Anderson at the Lyceum was accompanied by the prediction that, when that promise was fulfilled, her Galatea . . . would be found one of the most delightful impersonations in her repertoire, the fun, the charm, the artlessness, and the pathos of the author’s conception being heightened by the beauty, the grace, the intelligence, and the rare histrionic power of the actress. The prediction was fulfilled to the letter on the evening of Saturday last, when expectation of a great treat brought together a brilliant audience which completely filled the higher priced parts of the house, while the pit and gallery were fairly crammed by more humble admirers of Miss Anderson, who have been quick to recognise her talent as well as her beauty, and have been neither ashamed nor afraid to show their appreciation by enthusiasm. Evidently Mrs Kendal shared the critical misgivings about Mary Anderson’s performance. Taking care to praise her personally (‘I saw a good deal of her when she first came to London. She was delightful; naïve and a charming companion. She entered the highest society, every member of which fell at her feet’), she writes in her autobiography that Gilbert asked her to attend a rehearsal of the play and she gave Mary advice on how to play the part. But she adds tactfully that she never saw the play during its run and does not know if Mary adopted her suggestions. Later she notes that she received the greatest ovation of her career for her Galatea.64 Although in her memoirs she makes amiable remarks about Mary Anderson and Lillie Langtry, her successors in the role, Mrs Kendal is also careful to reproduce a letter from the playwright Dion Boucicault saying they were both inferior to her and that Mrs Kendal’s performance was a revelation.65

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George Terry, Ellen’s brother, part of the Lyceum management team during the Irving company’s absence in America, kept Bram Stoker the business manager informed by regular letters of Mary Anderson’s progress. He found her personality difficult and dislikeable, was astonished at her box office success and also thought her Galatea inferior to Mrs Kendal’s.66 Mary Anderson performed the role of Galatea 106 times on the play’s initial London run, took it to the provinces and revived it in 1884 and 1888. She became so associated with the part that although she retired from the stage in 1890 after her marriage to barrister Antonio de Navarro, she emerged from that retirement during World War One to play Galatea again in London and the provinces to raise money for war charities.67 What explains her success in the face of critical disdain? One is fashion. She conformed exactly to the current model of ideal feminine beauty and style. From the 1870s onwards the Grecian style of dress, partly inspired by medical arguments for looser garments and an end to tight lacing and partly by the popularity of the paintings of Leighton and the classical school of painters, led to a fashion for Hellenic simplicity of dress, fillets binding the hair and for statuesque beauties like Mrs Lillie Langtry who were approvingly described as ‘Phidian’ and ‘Olympian’. Leading opinion formers advocated a return to Greek styles in dress and beauty. In an essay on women’s dress in the Nineteenth Century, the painter G.F. Watts argued that bad taste was ‘a violation of established principles’ and by ‘established principles’ he meant ‘the Greek canons of human proportion’: ‘the innate taste of the Greeks, their opportunities of studying, and their loving study of the subject, combining to invest their conclusions with an authority which has ever since been questioned’. Attacking the distorting effects of corsets and stays, he declared: ‘the test of beauty of form is the effect of the silhouette and whether it would go well into sculpture’.68 It is no coincidence that Watts painted Mary Anderson in Greek costume, pose and style. Dr George Wilson in Healthy Life and Healthy Dwellings (1880) declared: ‘On physiological grounds, the classic mode was incomparably superior to the modern style of dress, because the whole weight of the garments was borne by the shoulders, and not from a waist constricted by strings and bands, if not by tight-laced stays.’69 By the 1890s Messrs Capper and Co. were promoting their Greek-style Athenian teagown for women, endorsed by both the Gentlewoman and the Queen magazine.70 The combination of health and beauty made the Greek style irresistibly attractive. The clearest evidence of this appeal is the

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appearance of statuesque women in Greek draperies, with their hair in fillets, in advertisements – for Schweitzer’s cocoatina, Beecham’s Pills, Liberty’s art fabrics and Vogeler’s curative compound, among others.71 The second source of Mary Anderson’s success was social approval. Her co-star J.H. Barnes recalled that Mary Anderson’s Lyceum debut in Ingomar, although liked by the audience ‘did not . . . draw much more than working expenses’. But during the run of The Lady of Lyons, the Prince and Princess of Wales came to see the show and when Mary was presented, the Princess handed her the bouquet she was carrying; when word got out: business improved appreciably the next day; and when we, in a short time, produced Pygmalion and Galatea, the success was complete. For weeks and months the Lyceum was scarcely large enough to hold the audiences that worshipped at the shrine of the new star. She certainly did look divine in her white robe as Galatea, her glorious young womanhood was set off thereby to perfection, and each night saw the theatre crowded with ‘fair women and brave men’ and all that was best and brainiest in our land. But he adds an intriguing fact: ‘she was almost more admired by the ladies of England than by the men; but as is always the case, the latter followed where the former led’.72 Significantly, it was at the request of the Princess of Wales that society sculptor Count Gleichen created a bust of Mary.73 A devout Catholic, Mary Anderson evidently saw the value of her stage career in terms of its provision of role models and examples for her audience. She wrote in her autobiography: The chief good my work has accomplished, I felt, was the assurance, verbally and by letter, from many young men and women that the examples of such characters as Parthenia, Ion and Evadne, in particular, had helped them in moments of despondency and temptation. Their gratitude to me, as the humble exponent of these roles, was my most valued applause; for it proved that, in a measure, I had fulfilled the vocation, so long ago dreamed of, in undertaking a dramatic career.74 There would have been more classical plays in her repertoire had she not retired, or had the plays that interested her not proved impracticable. Mrs Craik, author of the celebrated novel John Halifax – Gentleman,

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wrote a drama for her set during the Diocletianic persecutions and featuring a young girl who preferred to suffer martyrdom rather than give up her faith (along lines similar to the later successful toga plays Sign of the Cross and Quo Vadis). But says Mary Anderson: ‘The subject and its treatment were alike charmingly poetical. The arena scene at the end unfortunately made it impracticable for stage purposes. I regretted this deeply.’75 Two plays written for her by W.G. Wills were rejected for different reasons: one, The Young Cleopatra, showed the life of the Egyptian queen until her meeting with Mark Antony, but ‘Unfortunately this was not one of [Wills’s] happiest efforts’. The other, Icenia, for which Wilson Barrett had furnished the plot and Wills the poetic dialogue, centred on a barbarian princess of the blood of Boadicea loved by the Roman general who captures her and contained ‘picturesque contrasts of wild Britain and super-civilised Rome ripening to decay’, ‘the virtues of the barbarian and the cruelty and sensualism of the conqueror’ as well as ‘a study of nature in the inmost windings of a woman’s heart’. Anderson concluded that ‘the first acts . . . were very good. The denouement, however, being commonplace, this was likewise abandoned.’76 She also considered Bulwer-Lytton’s unpublished Tarquin and Lucretia, offered to her by the second Lord Lytton, the son of the author, but she rejected it, wisely, since when Wilson Barrett staged it as Junius it flopped. Lord Lytton himself had suggested dramatizing the story of Hero and Leander for her but nothing came of it.77 In 1887–88 she acquired the rights to Tennyson’s The Cup and there were lengthy negotiations with the poet who wrote four new scenes for the play but her marriage in 1890 prevented its being staged. Another significant theatrical figure attracted to the role of Galatea in Gilbert’s play was Mrs Lillie Langtry. Mrs Langtry, the daughter of the Dean of Jersey, was a ‘P. B.’ (professional beauty), one of a select group of society ladies in the 1870s and 1880s, famous for being famous and painted and photographed extensively because of their classical good looks. She was also known to be the mistress of the Prince of Wales and later Prince Louis of Battenberg, among many others. Lady Wilton said that she looked like ‘the women’s faces in Leighton and Burne-Jones’ pictures’78 and she was indeed painted by Millais, Poynter, Watts, Burne-Jones, Whistler, Frank Miles and Leighton. When Poynter was commissioned in the 1870s by Lord Wharncliffe to produce four large canvases to decorate the billiard room of his stately home, Wortley Hall, he gave three of them classical themes, Perseus and Andromeda, Atalanta’s Race and Nausicaa and her Maidens Playing Ball (the fourth was the local legend The Dragon of Wantley). He invited Lillie

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Langtry to sit for Nausicaa and the resulting painting was displayed in 1879. Lady Poynter, Lady Wharncliffe and Miss Violet Lindsay (later the Duchess of Rutland) sat for the other classical roles.79 Leighton included her in his 1881 painting Idyll as one of two scantily clad nymphs, Lillie with a nipple tantalisingly exposed and reclining languorously while listening to a shepherd playing a pipe. It was the title of Millais’s portrait that enshrined the nickname bestowed on her by Frank Miles ‘The Jersey Lily’. The painter Graham Robertson in Time Was, calling her ‘the Venus Annodomini, the modern Helen’, gives an impression of the impact she made upon contemporaries: Suddenly, as if in reproof of the artificial and unhealthy type then masquerading as beauty, there glided across the social firmament a vision of that divine loveliness dreamed of by painters and sculptors since Art began . . . for the first and only time in my life I beheld perfect beauty. The face was that of the lost Venus of Praxiteles . . . The small head was not reared straight on the white column of the throat as a capital crowns a pillar, but drooped slightly forward like a violet or a snowdrop, the perfect nose was made less perfect and a thousand times more beautiful by a slight tilt at the tip. The wonderful face was pale with the glow of absolute health behind the pallor, the eyes gray beneath dark lashes, the hair brown with glints of gold in it, the figure in its poise and motion conveyed the impression of something wild, eternally young, nymph-like.80 He recalled: ‘The Langtry bonnet, the Langtry shoe, even the Langtry dress-improver, were widely stocked and as widely bought; photographs of Mrs Langtry papered London.’81 Mrs Kendal confirms Robertson’s view. Recalling the first time she saw Mrs Langtry, at a party given by Olive, Lady Sebright, wife of the baronet Sir Guy Sebright, she wrote: ‘She had a complexion like a peach, soft and white with a tiny tinge of pink in it, – real, real! . . . Her figure was tall and graceful, with her head set wonderfully on her shoulders. She had charming manners and was always delightful to talk to. She was an instant success with all the painters.’82 Lillie was seen as an archetype of Greek beauty and began to live up to the image. She allowed Oscar Wilde to tutor her in Latin and Greek, visited the British Museum to view the statuary and attended Sir Charles Newton’s King’s College lectures on Greek art.83 Wilde hailed her in a long poem as ‘the New Helen’. She was the first choice to play Helen of

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Troy in E.W. Godwin’s production of Helena in Troas and featured in the prospectus of the production. But in the event she dropped out, to be replaced by Alma Murray.84 As well as being a fixture on the social scene, Lillie moved easily in London’s artistic circles, counting among her friends not only Wilde but also Whistler, Millais and E.W. Godwin. However by the 1880s, estranged from her cuckolded husband Edward Langtry, by now bankrupt and alcoholic, she was forced to seek a means of earning her living. He refused to give her a divorce and she finally succeeded in obtaining one in America only after several attempts. This was a few months before Edward Langtry died insane in a Chester madhouse in 1897. Having appeared in aristocratic tableaux vivants, she decided to embark on a stage career. She made her professional debut for the Bancrofts at the Haymarket in their 1882 revival of Tom Robertson’s Ours, a play she thought ‘silly and old-fashioned’ casually misremembering the author’s name as Tom Robinson.85 She now developed a repertoire which directly echoed that of fellow beauty Mary Anderson, including as it did the roles of Pauline in The Lady of Lyons, Rosalind in As You Like It, Julia in The Hunchback and Galatea in Pygmalion and Galatea. She assembled a company in 1882, embarked on a provincial tour of ten cities, including Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dublin and Belfast, which saw her ‘splendidly received’ by audiences but receiving distinctly mixed critical notices. She engaged Charles Coghlan, the Irish-born actor and playwright, as her leading man. She described him in her memoirs as intellectual and temperamental but lacking the magnetism for front rank stardom.86 He stayed with her for thirteen years but according to society sculptor Lord Ronald Gower, he detested her.87 She followed her provincial tour with a triumphant American tour and thereafter divided her time between acting in Britain and acting in America. Regular royal patronage and some discreet aristocratic investment ensured London success and her notoriety and her beauty attracted audiences abroad. In April 1883 she made her first appearance as Galatea in New York, recording that Sir Frederic Leighton had designed her costume ‘making the draperies of flesh tint, with blue and gold touches, as he said that all Greek statues had originally been coloured’.88 Leighton had made a speciality of classical drapery, saying: ‘I can paint a figure in two days but it may take me thirty to drape it.’89 Mrs Langtry’s first English appearance as Galatea at the Prince’s Theatre, Manchester, on 14 August 1883 was thought sufficiently significant to attract coverage from the Theatre magazine. W. Davenport

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Adams frankly confessed: ‘Mrs Langtry has not yet made good her claim (if such a claim exists on her part) to be regarded as one of our chief actresses; but her theatrical career has been of such a kind . . . that it is impossible not to feel considerable interest in her artistic progress.’ He conceded the rightness of her choice of role. ‘In some respects . . . Galatea is an easy part to play, and Mrs Langtry, in essaying it, may be said to have displayed much judgment. Given a handsome and graceful woman, who is also a lady, who has intelligence and aptitude for the stage . . . in the hands of such a woman, Galatea can scarcely be a failure. The role acts itself.’ He conceded that her acting had improved during her American tour, that she has a voice ‘which it is always enjoyable to listen to; whilst her enunciation is much superior to that of many actresses of much more experience and power’, that ‘she gives pleasure . . . by the elegance of her posing and the classic contour of her features’ and that she is ‘excellent’ in the comedy sequences. But the passion and the pathos are beyond her. ‘We recognize her inability to sound the required depths of feeling.’90 The Era (18 August, 1883) reviewing the Manchester Pygmalion, had harsh words for Mrs Langtry: Mrs Langtry has much – very much – to learn before she can claim to take up a position of artistic equality with the great actresses of the recent past and of the present whom we have seen playing the characters attempted by her this week. Her elocution, we fear, has not improved in the slightest degree since we last saw her, and she still lacks the art of so modulating her tone as to depict varying phases of feeling. Emotional and pathetic passages are absolutely lost in her hands, for anything more serious than light comedy she appears quite unable to render with even fair effect. Her facial expression is better than her elocution, but even that is limited in capacity, the same expression having frequently to do service for differing emotions. How good an actress was she? Ellen Terry, who had initially sought to discourage her from a stage career, wrote of her in her memoirs: I am aware that the professional critics and the public did not transfer to Mrs Langtry the actress the homage that they had paid to Mrs Langtry the beauty, but I can only speak of the simplicity with which she approached her work, of her industry, and utter lack of vanity about her powers . . . Just at this time there was a great dearth on the

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stage of people with lovely diction, and Lillie Langtry had it. I can imagine that she spoke Rosalind’s lines beautifully, and that her clear grey eyes and frank manner, too well-bred to be hoydenish, must have been of great value.91 The critic William Winter, looking back in 1913, wrote: She was not, in a high sense, a great actress and she did not pretend to greatness, but she was possessed of inherent dramatic faculty, combined with unusual advantages of person, of physical training, and of social culture, and in seeking the Stage she followed her natural bent. She was a born actress. The crudity of her early performances was obvious, but the freshness, charm, and promise of them were equally so. In New York, from the moment when she strolled on the scene, in ‘The Unequal Match’, no experienced observer could entertain distrust of her ability or doubt of her success.92 After a second season consisting of Romeo and Juliet, The Hunchback and revivals of Pygmalion and Galatea and Ingomar, Mary Anderson’s 1887– 88 season at the Lyceum (September 10–March 24) was devoted to her production of The Winter’s Tale in a text that she herself had prepared. All productions of The Winter’s Tale were compared with the spectacular 1856 revival by Charles Kean which had securely established it as a Greek play, setting it in 330 BC, excising any textual references which might clash with that and substituting Bithynia for Shakespeare’s Bohemia. The attractions for Mary Anderson would seem to be the Greek setting, which she retained, and the chance once again to play a statue. With ‘the assistance of books and suggestions given to me by William Black, Henry Irving, Lord Lytton, E.A. Abbey and Thomas Hall’ she prepared a version of the play, in which, according to Stephen Orgel ‘references to sexuality, and to the darker passions generally, including all Leontes’ soliloquies on his jealousy, were omitted, as were even references to Hermione’s pregnancy and Paulina’s recriminations after Hermione’s death – in short most of the drama of the first half of the play was considered tasteless and was cut’.93 Mary Anderson took the unprecedented decision to double the roles of Hermione and Perdita: giving audiences two Greek maidens for the price of one. She noted in her autobiography ‘My surprise and disappointment may be imagined when . . . it was not received with any marked enthusiasm on its first night in London . . . I heard that many

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of the first-nighters voted it dull and heavy, and prophesised that it could not run for more than two weeks.’94 The Era (17 September 1887) noted that ‘a spirit of distaste and hostility pervaded the auditorium during the whole evening’. It was not just that the play was not in itself popular (‘The Winter’s Tale can hardly be called a deeply enthralling piece of dramatic work’) but there was resentment that the pit space had been reduced to make room for an enlargement of the stalls. ‘The cheaper portions of the house’ demonstrated this discontent by ‘guying’ the opening scenes, laughing openly at the appearances of the ‘pretty bairn’ in swaddling clothes and during intervals between the acts greeting ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody, who was there in a private box, with ‘shrill Indian yells’. None of this appeared to diminish popular affection for Mary Anderson, who, recorded the Era, was given ‘a warm reception’ on her first entry, ‘hearty calls’ between the acts and at the conclusion of the performance. The Times (12 September 1887) felt that most people would find the doubling of roles ‘objectionable’. The critic felt that the doubling led to ‘a certain confusion of identity between mother and daughter which detracts from the spectator’s enjoyment of the play as a whole’. He thought her Perdita ‘as near to perfection as one would wish. Youthful, romantic, playful and at the same time proud and dignified.’ But the Hermione was judged ‘unconvincing. There is something of the virago in the deep masculine tones which the actress brings forth from her chest in pathetic moments; there is little to suggest a sweet-natured but deeply-wronged woman.’ Forbes-Robertson’s Leontes was praised but most of the rest of the cast dismissed. This was a view shared by the Era and the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (17 September 1887). The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News found Mary’s Hermione ‘wholly inadequate’ and said: ‘She never for a moment realises either the poetry or the dignified passion of Shakespeare’s Hermione . . . Indeed it is only when for the time Hermione simulates a statue that she is wholly satisfactory; and living statues have nothing to do but pose gracefully and keep still.’ William Archer, claiming to have ‘the warmest respect and admiration for her talent’, did not object to the doubling but found considerable fault with her verse reading as Hermione, and thought she had no sense of metre. He thought her dance as Perdita ‘the most beautiful piece of dancing I ever saw’ and the statue scene ‘strangely poetic and impressive’.95 Johnston Forbes-Robertson, who had been Mary Anderson’s leading man on her 1885–86 American tour, not only played Leontes but designed the dresses for the play. He also painted a portrait of Mary,

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which she presented to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford. He thought her performance as Hermione ‘as noble and imposing as her Perdita was the very embodiment of youth and beauty’.96 After all this, the play ran for 164 nights in London, and could, thought Mary, have run another 100 nights, had her tenancy of the Lyceum not run out. It was the longest running production of The Winter’s Tale in Britain and America in the nineteenth century.97 William Winter, while conceding that most people preferred her Perdita to her Hermione, noted: ‘Mary Anderson, although more fascinating in Perdita, could and did rise, in Hermione, to a noble height of tragic power . . . In Hermione is seen a type of the celestial nature of woman – infinite love, infinite charity, infinite patience . . . That image Mary Anderson embodied, and therefore the ideal of Shakespeare was made a living thing.’98 Most of the reviews concentrated on Mary’s performance, to the exclusion of all else. But the production was evidently beautiful to look at. The scene painting of William Telbin, Walter Hann and Hawes Craven earned the approbation of the Era, the Theatre, The Times and the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News. In 1920 George Odell recalled the sets of The Winter’s Tale with admiration: For her beautiful revival of The Winter’s Tale at the Lyceum, in September, 1887, Miss Anderson engaged the best of Irving’s scenic artists – Hawes Craven, Telbin, Hann. Some of the scenes were of extraordinary charm. The first one – the Palace of King Leontes – by Telbin, was a superb Grecian pillared hall, open the entire back width of the stage; through noble columns, rear, could be seen the garden of the palace, terminated by a view of azure seas and distant hills. The stage was divided midway, for its entire width, by three steps that led to a higher level on which were the columns just mentioned. This upper space or terrace was delimited toward the sea by marble benches, much used in the action. It was a sumptuous setting, assisted by velvet draperies at both sides of the room. The scene of the trial was a severely simple Grecian hall, of solid masonry, with a door, and pilasters, for half the back set; as to the other, through pillars, one looked out into an open court or peristyle. On the auditor’s left, on a high elevation, were Leontes and the judges. Hermione sat on a stone bench, which was partly covered by a tiger’s skin. The next great effect of the play was in the rustic festival, a built-up scene with flowery banks and shady trees; down the incline dashed the dancers,

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led by Miss Anderson as Perdita, for that captivating dance which lives still in the memory of all who saw it. For the statue scene Miss Anderson arranged a high flight of marble steps, at the top of which the statue was placed. As red velvet curtains were drawn, displaying the image, one had an impression of almost illimitable space, white marble steps leading up and up and up, the vista terminated by the statue. And what a statue! Mary Anderson in the prime of her classic beauty, posed as only she could pose! As she slowly came down those steps, she presented a picture given to any generation to behold hardly more than once.99 She returned to America touring The Winter’s Tale but a nervous breakdown during the tour led her to abandon the stage permanently. In her autobiography she simply attributes the breakdown to overwork.100 But there was more to it than this, as veteran English actress Mrs Charles Calvert who was a member of her company recalled in her autobiography: When we reached New York we were amazed and shocked to find that the larger part of the New York Press were publishing articles of the most virulent and abusive nature against Miss Anderson and her company. This lady, with her grace, her beauty, her undoubted gifts, and her blameless life . . . was assailed by her own countrymen with columns of invective and scurrility. Two charges were laid against her. One was, that she had brought over with her an English company . . . The second was that of raising the prices. They hoped for better treatment when they left New York. This hope (in the larger cities) was to a great extent realized. But when we struck some of the smaller places we found the local press following the New York lead, and every term of derision and contempt was hurled at our unoffending heads . . . Miss Anderson was also charged with putting on a cold and dignified manner (supposed to be copied from the British aristocracy) . . . Her highly wrought temperament had writhed under the bitter vulgarities that had been flung at her, and this, with her hard work, and her strict observance of religious duties (for I was told that whenever it was possible she rose at seven to attend early Mass) resulted in a long illness of physical and mental prostration.101

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After she recovered, she married her long-time admirer Antonio de Navarro, returned permanently to England to live and settled down to the life of a leisured country lady. Fittingly her final professional performance on the stage had been as a statue – Hermione coming to life at the end of The Winter’s Tale. The careers of Helen Faucit, Mary Anderson and Lillie Langtry provide abundant evidence of the Victorians’ habit of invoking the classical world to define modern gender roles. The enduring popularity of the three stars with audiences both metropolitan and provincial suggests popular approval of the image of femininity that they were projecting. In the cases of Anderson and Langtry, this survived despite the continuing criticism from the professional theatre reviewers, unimpressed by their acting skills and apparently immune to the beauty, charm and presence that captivated ordinary theatregoers.

4 Wilson Barrett’s Ancient World

The undisputed master of the toga play was Wilson Barrett (1846–1904). Handsome, curly-haired and well-proportioned, vigorous and energetic, but according to his press agent Percy Burton, totally devoid of a sense of humour, Wilson Barrett was the epitome of Victorian masculinity.1 At just five feet six inches he was short for heroic roles but wore elevated boots to increase his height. Theatre historian W. Macqueen-Pope wrote that Barrett had: the most remarkable torso that ever graced the stage, and was magnificently proportioned, was just the man to be an actor-manager in an age which demanded that men should be men, and would have nothing to do with half-measures. His bearing, grace and dignity were amazing. He was the actor to suit the period, a robust one. He believed in acting with a capital A. He had tremendous force and attack, yet he did not rant . . . His voice was perfectly controlled. His face he used to display his emotions, as an artist might draw on canvas. He was the personification of force – and he could command floods of tears.2 The contemporary critic Austin Brereton identified many of these same traits in his acting, which he thought ‘natural, simple and affecting’. He praised Barrett’s ‘handsome and expressive countenance’, his ‘sweet and musical voice’, his graceful movements, his sense of repose and his ‘understanding of the human heart’.3 Pardonably vain about his physique, Barrett delighted in displaying it in decolleté tunics, leading critics to complain that he was too fond of showing off his chest.4 But Clement Scott in the Daily Telegraph (3 May 1886) said of Barrett: ‘No actor on the stage so well bears a toga or is so classical in outline.’ 99

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Critical opinion about Barrett was deeply divided. As journalist J.B. Booth recalled: ‘In spite of his immense following, few stage favourites have suffered so much from the disdainful attitude of critics and “high-brows” of the period as Barrett.’5 Typical of such ‘high-brow’ views is the verdict of American critic John Ranken Towse: He was a shrewd and clever showman, made a great splurge and much money, but as an actor never rose above the second class. He depended chiefly upon sensationalism, spectacle, sentimentalism, and advertisement, and he played his cards very well . . . ‘The Sign of the Cross’ which made his fortune, was gorgeous melodramatic spectacle, seasoned with sentimental claptrap devoid of all sincerity.6 But Barrett had his champions. Austin Brereton said that there were ‘few who have done so much for the good of the stage’ as Barrett, and he placed him in the front rank of his profession.7 J.B. Booth concluded: ‘He was not a great actor in the sense that Irving was . . . but within his limitations he was often interesting, his productions were earnest and ambitious, he was an excellent teacher, and a more generous, kindhearted creature never lived. His little personal vanities hurt no one, and he did much actual good.’8 Percy Burton recalled: ‘Most of the highbrow critics sniffed at Wilson Barrett. But the people, especially in the provinces, had a deep personal affection for him.’9 Barrett returned the people’s devotion and rejected the views of the ‘high-brow critics’. He wrote to journalist and playwright Alex Thompson after the success of The Sign of the Cross denouncing the Ibsenites who preferred ‘wishy-washy translations of Continental mystics and faddists’ to genuinely popular native British drama. ‘Popular?’ Yes indeed that is the trouble. One must write, or translate the rotten so-called plays of ‘life as it is’ (save the mark) or fail year in year out to please the dirty minds of these effete jackasses. Not for me. I have and shall continue to write for this public who not only pay for what they want but after all know far more about the stage as a rule than these male and female old women.10 Barrett suffered from his passionate commitment to melodrama. He undertook only three Shakespearean roles in his heyday (Hamlet, Othello and Mercutio) and as Irving once remarked to Squire Bancroft ‘no actor can be remembered who does not appear in the classical

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drama’.11 But Barrett’s great successes lay in such popular and profitable melodrama hits as George R. Sims’s The Lights o’ London, Henry Arthur Jones and Henry Herman’s The Silver King and Hall Caine’s The Manxman, which he played successfully in London and toured with equal success to the United States, Canada, Australia and South Africa. Two of the biggest influences on Barrett’s career as it unfolded were the art critic and social commentator John Ruskin and the innovative architect and set designer E.W. Godwin. A close personal friendship developed between Barrett and Ruskin. Ruskin later told art critic M.H. Spielmann: ‘I like Wilson Barrett, he flatters me deliciously and in such tactful taste.’12 Barrett assisted Ruskin directly, helping him with the illustrations and visual effects in the first of two lectures to the Royal Institution which formed the basis of his The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884). Ruskin and Barrett debated Barrett’s production of Hamlet, Ruskin actively advised Barrett on developing his repertoire, and Barrett articulated a distinctly Ruskinian philosophy of production. A more direct influence came from Godwin, who Barrett hired in 1881 to design scenery, costumes and properties for his production of W.G. Wills’s Juana, set in fifteenth-century Spain. Although it ran only for a month, its mise-en-scène was highly praised and compared to Irving’s productions at the Lyceum, the acme of artistic excellence on the London stage. Barrett continued his partnership with Godwin who designed his four subsequent productions Claudian (1883), Hamlet (1884), Junius (1885) and Clito (1886), set respectively in the Byzantine Empire, Medieval Denmark, Ancient Rome and Classical Athens. Apart from Hamlet, all were toga plays. It was on one of his antipodean tours, speaking in St Paul’s Cathedral, Dunedin, on 12 January 1902 that Barrett gave the fullest outline of his production philosophy, quoting Ruskin in support of his vision of the stage. Taking as his text St Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians ch. IV verse 8: ‘Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honourable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report – if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things’, and referring to himself and his audience as ‘we Christians’, he sought to reconcile church and stage. Religion is not designed to kill our pleasures, or make them less; it is meant to purify and elevate them; to make them innocent and helpful . . . For the desire of recreation and amusement is God’s gift to us . . . and it is the duty of Christians not to crush this desire (as the

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Puritans vainly taught and teach still) but to regulate and guide it. And, in regard to that desire for recreation which finds its gratification in the theatre – it is impossible to ignore the fact that the Drama is, and always will be a very powerful social instrument for good or for evil, according as it is rightly or wrongly directed. The popularity of the Drama, its vividness, the directness of its appeal to the imagination and to the emotions will always secure for it this influence. The theatre appeals to certain aspects of human nature – to the imagination, to the instinct of curiosity about life, to the desire to have the emotions touched by actual pictures of various situations in life . . . it will always be popular . . . the Drama has under one form or another been an important factor in civilisation and human development, and has played its part in the social evolution of peoples. In a distinctively Ruskinian spirit, he declared: The influence of the drama may and ought to be a moral influence . . . A people’s character depends upon their amusements as well as upon their more serious employments; and what was said of ballads may be said as truly of plays, that they influence people as much as their laws. The stage ought to promote all that is healthiest in morality, as well as that which is inspiriting to the intellect, and pleasurable to the imagination. In short, the true function of theatrical representations should be to purify and elevate . . . The business of the dramatist, and of the actor . . . should be to interest, to uplift, to refine, to touch the heart and open the eyes, to recall, to suggest, to reveal true and lofty ideals . . . He will tell us of the evil, the sordid, the terrible . . . but he will never put evil for good, or mislead our judgement, or confuse our moral sense, pervert our sympathies, make vice attractive. All this is false to what is truly natural, false to truth and beauty. He admitted that there were plays that had a bad influence ‘often clever and brilliant, but . . . frankly cynical and almost contemptuous of virtue, honour and truth’, plays which undermined the ideals of true womanhood and the sanctity of marriage, and he urged his hearers to reject them, quoting Ruskin directly: ‘What John Ruskin said about literature may be applied equally well to the drama: . . . It is of more consequence that plays should be right than clever, not oppressively instructive but that the thoughts they express should be just, and the feelings they excite generous.’ He defended the ‘old-fashioned melodramas, which, though possibly quite despised by the modern critic, do nevertheless

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touch the heart’s truest and most human chords, and appeal to a class of persons to whom the parson would probably talk in vain’. He concluded: The Drama makes for good certainly, it is helpful, not harmful when it presents us with embodied parables of life – with its fair and tragic possibilities; when it enables us to view, as it were from the outside the heights and depths to which we ourselves may rise or fall; when it holds up the contemptible to our contempt, the hateful to our hate, the lovely and the loveable to our love. Barrett was to base his career on writing and starring in plays which took the form of melodrama, and embodied parables of life, and he sought to use his plays to elevate, educate and purify, whether their settings were historical or contemporary.13 Barrett’s mission was widely recognized by liberal clerics. On tour in the provinces, on 27 October 1887, he was entertained to luncheon by the Bristol Arts Club. There were several clergymen among the guests and one of them, Revd Mordaunt Crofton, proposed the health of their guest, saying: he had learned all he knew of speaking from watching the performances of Mr Wilson Barrett, whom he regarded as an actor who earnestly strove to bring religion and the stage into accord. He believed the stage would be of much service to the clergy in their work, . . . He had been a clergyman in Leeds, and he took his young men there to Mr Barrett’s theatre, and in Bristol he advised his young men to go to the theatre when there was a good and true play to be seen. Declaring his love for art and his wish to serve its cause, Barrett praised the ‘eloquence and broad liberality’ of the clergymen present, promised that religion was at the foundation of all the arts (‘it will be a bad day for art if ever it and religion are divorced’) and that his next new role would be as a Church of England clergyman, Revd Frank Thornhill, in The Golden Ladder. He was received with ‘long and loud continued cheering’, as the Era (5 November 1887) reported. Claudian was Barrett’s first toga play. The actor-manager John Coleman, surveying Barrett’s career in 1885, pointed to Claudian as ‘a distinct advance in his position as actor and manager’: ‘As a work of art nothing in our time, at least, has excelled it for taste, splendour, and authenticity.’ He spoke of ‘the gorgeous magnificence of the first

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scene, crystallizing into one focus the erudition of the archaeologist and the glowing sun-steeped canvases of Tadema and Long’. He compared it to Irving’s production of The Cup and to earlier triumphs such as Charles Calvert’s Antony and Cleopatra and Charles Kean’s The Winter’s Tale.14 Clement Scott in the Daily Telegraph (7 December 1883) was also reminded of Alma-Tadema in the opening scene – ‘a city of white marble overlooking a sea of waveless blue. Slaves of every variety of tint and beauty are crouching in the marketplace . . . awaiting the nod of some fantastic or sensual patrician.’ Claudian was written by Henry Herman and W.G. Wills. Herman provided the plot and dramatic construction and Wills the poetic dialogue. But the play evolved in consultation with Barrett at every stage. It was Barrett who asked for an injection of humour to lighten the mood. He engaged E.W. Godwin to design the play, Edward Jones to provide the score, with a song specially composed by Sir Julius Benedict, and the sensation scene – the earthquake – was devised by Herman. The creation of this stage effect had led Barrett initially to consider a new version of The Last Days of Pompeii but eventually he decided to feature it in an entirely new play.15 The scenes were painted by William Telbin, Walter Hann and Stafford Hall. Mary Eastlake played Almida and E.S. Willard, Holy Clement. The story of Claudian was a variation on the ‘Flying Dutchman’ or ‘Wandering Jew’ myths. Claudian, a decadent aristocrat of the fourth century, pursues a young married Christian woman, Serena, fatally injures a cleric, Holy Clement, who intervenes to protect her, and causes the young woman to die of shock. Dying, the holy man curses Claudian with everlasting youth and beauty. A century later, still youthful, he survives an earthquake but is offered an opportunity for expiation. A blind girl, Almida, with whom he has fallen in love, is swept away by the earthquake and he gets the chance to restore her life and sight by sacrificing his own, which he does. This very moral tale unfolded amid spectacular scenes set in Byzantium and Bithynia. The Times (4 January 1884), surveying the drama of the previous year, singled out Claudian as ‘the solitary play of the year for which exceptional merit can be claimed’ and attributed its success to ‘the close connexion now established between art and the stage, the growth of an educated taste, and the diffusion among all classes of a keen interest in the drama and its professors’. Later it declared ‘it is incumbent upon the stage manager to keep abreast of the archaeological, historical, and artistic attainments of the day, and there can be little harm even in his educating the public somewhat in such matters, as may have been the case

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with Claudian at the Princess’s’. Oscar Wilde pronounced the play an aesthetic triumph: The ancient world awakes from its sleep, and history moves as a pageant before our eyes, without obliging us to have recourse to a dictionary or an encyclopaedia for the perfection of our enjoyment . . . Mr E.W. Godwin, one of the most artistic spirits of this century in England, created the marvellous loveliness of the first act of Claudian, and showed us the life of Byzantium in the fourth century, not by a dreary lecture and a set of grimy casts, not by a novel which requires a glossary to explain it, but the visible presentation before us of all the glory of that great town. And while the costumes were true to the smallest points of colour and design, yet the details were not assigned that abnormal importance which they must necessarily be given in a piecemeal lecture, but were subordinated to the rules of lofty composition and the unity of artistic effect . . . Only the foolish called it pedantry, only those who would neither look nor listen spoke of the passion of the play being killed by its paint. It was in reality a scene not merely perfect in its picturesqueness, but absolutely dramatic also, getting rid of any necessity for tedious descriptions, and showing us by the colour and character of Claudian’s dress, and the dress of his attendants, the whole nature and life of the man, from what school of philosophy he affected, down to what horses he backed on the turf. And indeed archaeology is only really delightful when transfused into some form of art.16 The Era (8 December 1883), noting that Wilson Barrett ‘had educated his audience up to the point where they expect at his hands melodrama of a class superior to that which has anywhere before been known’, wondered how the audiences would respond to the ‘prosepoetry and mysticism’ of W.G. Wills. The answer came by the end of the prologue: The eye had been delighted by a scene of surpassing beauty; the imagination had been lifted right away back from the present to the remote past; the ear had listened to lines vigorous yet smooth – to poetry in prose; interest had been awakened, sympathy had been excited, and authors, artists and actors combined to get a dramatic grip which the audience felt and joyfully recognised by applause of the most enthusiastic kind.

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The interest in the story was maintained until the end of the first act but then fell away and the production was only sustained by the ‘really splendid efforts’ of Barrett in the title role, and ‘the wonderful stage pictures made up by the combined skill and taste of Messrs Walter Hann, Stafford Hall and W. Telbin who have furnished the scenery, and Mr E.W. Godwin, who is responsible for the innumerable beauties of architecture, costume and general details’. However, it was felt that Miss Eastlake ‘failed to make her mark as Almida’. But throughout: the staging of the play . . . is splendid beyond comparison, and those who see Claudian are not likely soon to forget the glorious stage pictures presented in the Byzantium of the prologue, in the Vineyard of the first act, and in the Palace of the second. The earthquake effect, which brings that palace to ruins, is perhaps the most marvellous effect ever witnessed behind the footlights. It will be talked of everywhere. Barrett’s performance, the beauty of the stage scenery and the spectacular effectiveness of the earthquake were universally praised.17 The Times considered the production a major event in theatrical life: ‘The production of a play which is wholly English, which is sound, vigorous and elevating in sentiment and dramatic purpose, and which, moreover is written in a vein of poetic diction worthy to rank as literature, is a very considerable event in the life of the English stage. Such a play is Claudian.’ The World declared: ‘Claudian must unquestionably be regarded as a work which will go far to elevate the drama, and convince its detractors that no better channel can be utilised for the intellectual refinement of the people.’ Clement Scott went to see it three times, writing in the Theatre ‘I am bound to confess, few plays have grown on me more than Claudian.’ Calling it a ‘noble sermon’, he declared: ‘We see the sin; we see also its after sorrow. We behold the fault; we witness the atonement.’ He expressed his admiration of Barrett’s performance as the proud, selfish, reckless Roman pagan and the same man later ‘Christianised and chastened by an ever-present sorrow.’ He declared: ‘If we . . . study closely Mr Barrett’s beautiful realisation of a noble theme, we shall see how the dawning of love is the day-star of this poor haunted soul. He leans on love to free him from the dreadful curse. It is woman who must be his salvation . . . Nothing could be more beautiful than

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Mr Barrett’s exposition of this saving power of love and the anguish of its disappointment.’18 Another three-time visitor to Claudian was Revd Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). He wrote to Barrett from Oxford on 15 January 1884 to say: ‘We (I and the young friend I brought) thoroughly enjoyed Claudian: and a good deal more than I had expected, as I thought it would be difficult to give anything like a living interest to such ancient history: but I think Mr Wills and you have done it to a marvellous extent.’ He thought the earthquake ‘One of the most effective things of that kind I had ever seen’ and urged him to publish the text of the play. He wrote again on 12 May 1884, to say he had become ‘a periodical visitant at your delightful play’ and suggested a piece of business to enhance the realism of one of the scenes.19 The young friend Carroll mentioned was Lucy Walters (born 1856), an art student at the Slade and a member of a family with whom Carroll’s family the Dodgsons were friendly. Carroll recorded the visit – a Saturday matinee on 12 January 1884 – in his diary, calling Claudian ‘rather too tragic, perhaps, but a fine play and well acted’. He went again on 3 May (‘Claudian . . . went even better than before’) and on 17 May 1884. He recorded that ‘both my companions enjoyed (it) much’.20 John Ruskin also went to see Claudian three times, taking away the same message as Clement Scott. In an interview with M.H. Spielmann for the Pall Mall Gazette (21 April 1884) Ruskin said: I was immensely pleased with Claudian and Mr Wilson Barrett’s acting of it. Indeed, I admired it so much that I went to see it three times from pure enjoyment of it, though as a rule I cannot sit out a tragic play. It is not only that it is the most beautifully mounted piece I ever saw, but it is that every feeling that is expressed in the play, and every law of morality that is taught in it, is entirely right. What is fascinating here is Ruskin’s delight in both the artistic beauty and the moral message. The play exposes the decadence of the Roman Empire, preaches a tale of individual moral redemption, and sets the whole thing among beautifully realized and archaeologically accurate sets. Its ability to enthral Ruskin, given the importance to him of Rose La Touche (whom he had wished to marry but who had died eight years earlier) may also lie in the theme of a dead young girl being brought back to life by the power of love.

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He expanded on his view in a long and detailed letter written on 16 February 1884 to Wilson Barrett about Claudian: You know perfectly well, as all great artists do, that the thing is beautiful and that you do it perfectly. I regret the extreme terror of it, but the admirable doing of what you intend doing, and the faithful cooperation of all your companions, the extreme beauty and beautiful acting of Serena and Miss Eastlake, and the exquisite scenery gave me not only much more than delight at the time, but are a possession in memory of very great value. What a lovely thing it would be to do the noble parts of Roman and Gothic history in a series of such plays. You could be such a grand Theodoric – or – (By Jupiter, forgot!) Theodelinda’s first husband (he means Autharis the Lombard) – or Clovis – or Aurelian – or Probus – or Roger Guiscard – or what not of heroic and good. And with scene painting like that – this Princess’s theatre might do more for art teaching than all the Galleries and Professors of Christendom.21 This letter evidently did not remain private because the final sentence came to be much quoted.22 Ruskin was both giving his imprimatur and laying out a dramatic prospectus for Barrett. The London production of the play did not make money. It cost Barrett £1200 a week to stage, a total of £47,800 for the whole 39-week run. But the sale of the American rights for £5000 partially compensated.23 The play was still being performed by touring companies in the English provinces the year after Barrett’s death in 1904.24 Barrett followed Claudian with a production of Hamlet which ran for 110 nights. But then he decided to continue with the classical plays. His choice fell on Brutus, an unfinished, unpublished and unacted blank-verse tragedy by Bulwer-Lytton. It was completed and revised by Lytton’s son, the Second Lord Lytton, a published poet under the nom-de-plume ‘Owen Meredith’, under Barrett’s direction. It had previously been offered, apparently as Tarquin and Lucretia, to Henry Irving and Mary Anderson, presumably on the basis of their respective successes with The Cup and Pygmalion and Galatea, but both had declined it. The play, dealing as it did with the rape of Lucretia, was one of the Ancient World subjects Ruskin had recommended in 1883 as suitable for the classical painters of the age. Barrett persuaded Lytton to reduce the politics of the play and foreground the domestic drama. This was perhaps wise as the play dealt with the overthrow of monarchy

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and the establishment of a republic, not a subject particularly congenial to an increasingly monarchist Britain (Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee was only two years away). Barrett, retitling the play Junius or the Household Gods, opened it at the Princess’s Theatre on 26 February 1885. Barrett played Junius, E.S. Willard, Tarquin and Mary Eastlake, Lucretia. The music was by Edward Jones and the production design by E.W. Godwin. Correspondence in the Barrett collection reveals the working relationship of Barrett and Lord Lytton. Lytton is continually responding to detailed suggestions from Barrett for cuts, rewrites and new dialogue. Lytton was for the most part compliant with Barrett’s suggestions, writing for instance on 16 February 1885: ‘All the alterations you were so good as to explain to me today appear to me most excellent – and I feel assured that the effect of the Play will be very greatly improved by them.’ He seeks continually to flatter Barrett, as when Barrett informs him that having mulled over whether to play Tarquin or Junius, he had finally decided on Junius. Lytton applauds his decision, saying that Tarquin required a good actor but Brutus, a great one and he had absolute confidence in Barrett’s ability to handle the required subtle and careful acting of the part: ‘there is no other English actor living who could do it all’ (5 February 1885). But he did venture to oppose, however mildly, some of Barrett’s suggestions. He accepted Barrett’s stipulation that he should strengthen the domestic and reduce the political elements in the play, but suggested that the pathos and dignity of the domestic interest would be assisted if the audience could be inspired by the consciousness of the destiny of Rome, as it moved from a kingly dynasty to ‘the greatest Republic the world has ever known’ (12 July 1884). There is a very long letter from Lytton about Barrett’s desire to have a vaulted roof in the banqueting scene and he demonstrates by quotations from such classical authorities as Cicero, Tibullus and Vitruvius that this would not have been possible at the time of the play. He suggests consulting Alma-Tadema for an authoritative ruling (9 August 1884). Lytton also disagreed with Barrett’s desire to change the title from The Household Gods to Junius, with the resultant compromise in Junius or the Household Gods. Despite Lytton’s generally accommodating and mollifying tone, relations eventually deteriorated. Barrett seems to have been annoyed by the rumour that Irving had turned the play down. Lytton confirmed that Irving had been offered the play, had expressed a high opinion of it, but being detained on his tour of America had agreed it should be passed on to Barrett. Lytton explained this in a letter to The Times and

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when this was not published immediately sent it to the Daily Telegraph and the Standard who did publish it (19 February 1885). This rumour seems to have shaken Barrett’s confidence in the play because Lytton writes: ‘it is so obvious to me that with your altered opinion of the play, and of our relations with regard to it, I cannot at this advanced stage of its preparation offer any suggestions that would not run the chance of being resented, or which would now be practically carried out, that I think my presence at rehearsals would only be an embarrassment to all concerned’ (19 February 1885). Nevertheless Lytton went ahead and arranged for the Prince of Wales to attend the opening night. On 27 February 1885, Lytton was writing to congratulate Barrett on the opening night performance. He praised the staging and the scenery, the acting, especially of Miss Eastlake and of Barrett himself: ‘All that I will ask leave to say at once . . . is that the statuesque beauty of your Brutus – its elastic dignity and strength in repose, appeared to me incomparable.’ But on 16 March 1885 he was writing to express his sincere grief for the failure of the play and indicating that he was ‘fully satisfied that the failure is in no wise due to any want of effort upon your part’. On 30 March, he returned to Barrett all the cheques he had received from him, amounting to £140.8s.10d., saying it was repugnant to him to make any profit when Barrett was suffering such a heavy pecuniary loss.25 Junius’ impressive opening night was attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales and a set of artistic celebrities including Lewis Wingfield, W.S. Gilbert, Frank Holl, G.R. Sims, Comyns Carr, Henry Arthur Jones, Hamilton Aidé and F.C. Burnand, along with assorted aristocrats (Lord Onslow, Baron de Rothschild and the Countess of Lonsdale). It was received with ‘a mighty outburst of acclamation’. This was not taken up by the critics, and the production ran for less than thirty nights, was withdrawn and never revived. It lost £2500.26 The Times (2 March 1885) thought that its resurrection did a disservice to the memory of Bulwer-Lytton: We must confess to having listened to the five acts of Junius with a growing sense of weariness and disappointment, tempered only by wonderment at the significance of the mise-en-scène . . . pompous rhetoric is only tolerable on the stage when it has a strong vein of dramatic interest running through it, and the dramatic interest of Junius is summed up by what can never be more than a dramatic episode . . . the rape of Lucrece . . . No sincere admirer of the late Lord

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Lytton can fail to be struck by the absolute poverty of invention which a mind so fertile as his has here displayed. He had, in essence, dramatized Shakespeare’s poem ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ and ‘while compelled to dispense with what may be called the cardinal situation of the story, has added nothing essential of his own . . . In other words, a meagre legend is beaten out thin enough to cover five acts.’ Act 1 has Sextus Tarquinius wager on the infidelity of Roman wives, including Lucretia. In act 2 he proposes to pay her court. In act 3 he makes advances to her and is repulsed. In act 4, having been raped, Lucretia calls on her relatives to avenge her and kills herself, and in act 5, her relative Lucius Junius Brutus kills Tarquinius. The Times thought that the story proper did not begin until act 3 and was over by act 4. The rest was filled up with a republican conspiracy against Tarquinius, but it was all talk and no action, ‘padding, and padding of the worst kind, is the verdict which must be passed upon the pre-historic politics with which Lord Lytton has sought to eke out the human elements of the legend’. The critic thought Barrett could make little of Junius, ‘a character which seems to be compounded of an imbecile Claudian and a political Hamlet’, though adding ‘There is probably no other actor who could have made as much.’ The best part of all, he thought, was Tarquin, which E.S. Willard treats with ‘fine classical breadth’, Mary Eastlake was ‘a sweet and effective figure of Lucrece, though never quite free from her artificial hysteria’. The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (7 March 1885) took much the same view: too much verbal description and not enough action, too much heavy old-fashioned rhetoric, too much padding. Barrett ‘poses picturesquely enough, but with too consistent a dignity to suit the purpose of the conspirator; and he delivers his orations with a monotony which does little justice to his really fine voice’. However, ‘Of Sextus Tarquinius, Mr. Willard makes a much more interesting figure, although in some respects his manner is decidedly too modern.’ Miss Eastlake’s performance was ‘pleasing’, although she ‘does not exactly realise a Roman matron’. This was very much the critical consensus. One or two critics were out of step with the rest. The Era (28 February 1885) thought that the play was ‘of the expected high literary quality, and the simple story has been set forth with a keen eye to dramatic effect’. Barrett, it thought, ‘scored another splendid success by his fine impersonation of the hero and patriot Lucius Junius Brutus . . . it may with truth be said he looked the noblest Roman of them all’, and Mr Willard ‘secured a large share

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of the honours of the evening with his very able rendering of the part of Sextus Tarquin. All the cunning, all the lasciviousness, all the treachery, and, let us add, all the cowardice of the villain’s nature, were brought into prominence with rare skill’, while Miss Eastlake had ‘never been seen to greater advantage. The beauty, the grace, the tenderness, the love of virtue, the scorn of unholy passion, and the resolve to self-sacrifice . . . were all most beautifully expressed.’ Clement Scott in the Daily Telegraph (27 February 1885) pronounced the play ‘full of dignity, directness, and strong dramatic fibre’, and ‘of all the plays yet written on the subject . . . incomparably the best, the most free from clap-trap, technical surprises, and false effect’. He called its climax ‘as noble a conclusion to a literary play as the modern stage has seen’ and thought ‘the last act of Junius will live long in the memories of the present generation’. Whatever their views on its literary and dramatic qualities, all the critics were agreed upon the visual splendour of the production, once again under the oversight of E.W. Godwin, supervising the scene painting of Messrs Hann, Telbin and Hall, joined now by W.R. Beverley. The Times said: Beyond the literary interest naturally attaching to the posthumous work of a great writer, the attraction of this play will lie in the splendour of its mounting, which may be regarded as le dernier mot of the stage carpenter. That once humble functionary may be said, indeed, to have been supplanted by the stage architect, for the solidly built up palaces, temples, and interiors in which the action passes leave little or nothing to the imagination. The groupings of the dramatis personae, and the wealth of classic detail imported into every scene are also impressive. If the picture cannot be pronounced a dramatic chef-d’oeuvre, it is certainly exhibited in a costly frame. The Era agreed: Each act brings before the spectator a stage picture of wondrous beauty, and all who see Junius; or, the Household Gods, will long remember the marvellous change in the first act from the street in Rome to Tarquin’s Palace; the weird grandeur of the Ruined Temple of Romulus in the second; and, most elaborate and impressive of all, the ‘interior’ at the end, with its throne of gold, its marble columns, its crimson canopy, its well-armed guards, and a host of details that severely tax the eye, that would take them in. Such scenes . . . speak volumes for the archaeological research of Mr E.W. Godwin, for the

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artistic skill of Messrs Beverley, Telbin, Hall, and Hann, and for the liberality of a management that is liberal almost beyond compare. Percy Fitzgerald in the Dramatic Review (22 February 1885) stressed the influence not only of archaeology but of archaeologically-influenced painting on the production: In . . . carrying out a labour of love, nothing has been spared either in the training of the crowds (which in parts recalled certain of the Meiningen efforts) or in the truly sumptuous character of the scenery with which the play was adorned . . . Nothing more stately, imposing, or more in the antique Roman spirit, inspiring with a sense of dread and awe has yet been attempted. The ‘Princess’s’ has now taken first rank in these daring efforts, which are directed by the profound archaeological gifts of Mr Godwin, inspired by the sombre talent of Gérôme. Nor was there any of that petty archaeological detail which your Dry-as-dust conceives, imparts a dramatic flavour borrowing from the Museum; but all was ‘large’ and conceived in a perfect dramatic spirit. Grand, solemn masses of colour and shadow, stately columns, ‘built-up’ pediments, gorgeous, lustrous furniture, succeeded each other, scene after scene, and most effective was the mysterious fashion in which one melted, as it were, into the other, without the discordant groanings, heavings and flappings, and rattlings of wheels and cordage, with which huge masses of scenery have to be hauled away. The change from the first to the second scene, a noble street, dissolving into an interior; was contrived in this tranquil and effective fashion. The last scene of all . . . has certainly not been equalled on the English stage, with its soaring and solid pillars, and circular flight of steps, and its exquisite effects and distance and colour! The dresses, too, and figures of the players were all in keeping, and one actor vividly recalled by the shape of his head and neck the Emperor’s figure in Gérôme’s picture of the ‘Arena’. Jean-Léon Gérôme was one of the so-called Néo-Grecs, French painters who specialized in classical genre scenes. One of his most famous such works, Ave, Caesar Imperator, morituri te salutant, a panoramic view of the Roman arena with a group of gladiators saluting the emperor in his imperial box, had been exhibited in London in 1862. John Coleman, analysing Barrett’s career to date, called Junius ‘a noble folly’ and was baffled that so great a writer as Lytton could write such a bad play, ‘a platitudinized play upon an unsavoury subject’.27 Punch

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(7 March 1885) had thought the subject ‘ “not to put too fine a point on it” – revolting’, though ‘the noble Author had treated it as delicately as possible’. It was not the first play on the subject. It had previously been tackled by Nathaniel Lee, Richard Cumberland and John Howard Payne, though the most notable version was Shakespeare’s poem ‘The Rape of Lucrece’. But the subject of rape was too strong for some Victorian sensibilities, even though Clement Scott in the Daily Telegraph (27 February 1885) praised the handling of the rape itself: ‘This was always the crux of the play. Should Lucretia be heard shrieking behind the scenes; should there be a vulgar struggle; should she depart only to return forlorn and ruined. The result is pure Greek in its simplicity.’ Lucretia retires to her apartment, a fierce thunderstorm breaks out, Tarquin follows her into her apartment, and a thunderbolt strikes and destroys the statues of the household gods – symbolizing the destruction of domestic harmony by the rape. Scott called it ‘a magnificent effect, dramatic in the highest sense of the word and noble in idea’. For some critics, however, nothing could make the theme palatable. Austin Brereton, sympathetic to Barrett, surveyed the wreckage in an article in the Theatre. He conceded the validity of the generally expressed criticisms: ‘its story was too repulsive for one body of playgoers; it was too familiar for the general public. The Play was too dull, it lacked humour and variety.’ The acting ‘fell short’ with Barrett’s ‘resources as an actor not called into great prominence by the part of Lucius Junius Brutus’, though Mr Willard ‘gave a highly intelligent, consistent, and able rendering of an extremely difficult character’ and Miss Eastlake made ‘a vast advance upon her previous performances, and convincingly proved that she had completely conquered, by her earnestness and determination, those mannerisms that had so frequently injured her best efforts’. Also ‘it was handsomely mounted and dressed, and few grander pictures have been seen upon the stage than that of the last act depicting the fall of Tarquin’. But on the other hand, he argues: the play did not get a fair hearing. Produced in mid-Lent, in a season of financial depression, with the nation excited and its feelings carried away by far more important matters than those of the theatre [by which he probably means the Fenian bomb outrages in London; and the siege of General Gordon in Khartoum] the play required every possible aid to obtain for it popular appreciation . . . Whatever its faults – and they were many – it was a work which at least called for special support and earnest encouragement. Instead of this,

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it was received by a powerful press with scorn, contempt, and all uncharitableness. One or two writers ventured to do their best for a play of purpose, passion, or poetry. They were met by sneers and contumely, chaffed as fools, or upbraided as sycophants.28 There was clearly more than just critical disapproval here. There was, it seems, contempt for Barrett’s Ruskinian mission. It reinforces the comments made by Clement Scott on the occasion of the 100th night of Claudian. Writing in the Theatre he denounced the Philistinism of some of the critics: Claudian and such plays were not written with the idea of pleasing the doubtless excellent people who sneer at everything that soars above a commonplace intelligence . . . Such folk may be converted by and by . . . Meanwhile they are amusing, and from their own point of view exceeding honest. They hate imaginative work, and they honestly say so. They state in print that Claudian makes them laugh and only appeals to their sense of the ludicrous; so why should they not pour out the vials of their wrath on the misguided individuals who see in such plays as these a great source of delight and pleasure to countless playgoers and thoughtful men and women.29 Calling the play ‘a poem of the stage’, he argued that: A play that gives rise to thought must be a good play; a performance that dwells on the imagination must be a healthy play. And these recommendations Claudian certainly possesses. No one can give his mind to the study of the last act of Claudian without coming away from the theatre refreshed in intellect and stored with thought . . . No one wants every theatre in London to be devoted to plays like Claudian. It would be ridiculous and absurd to suggest such a thing. But whilst the unintelligent and vulgar and frivolous . . . have dozens of theatres where they can worship at tawdry shrines, why should not their neighbours have one where its ritual is not so meretricious. Undaunted, Barrett pressed ahead with his Ruskinian project, in the form of a new play, Clito, co-written by himself and the experienced playwright Sydney Grundy. Barrett provided the plot, which The Times noted was a variation on the story of Samson and Delilah, and Grundy

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provided the dialogue. In a letter to Barrett, dated 15 March 1886, Grundy set out in detail his understanding of their collaboration. I am not merely willing, but desirous, that your name should appear as part-author, for the simple reason that you are part-author. For future reference . . . I put on record the following facts – 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

The present idea was suggested to me by you The story assumed its present shape in conference between us The general lines of the dialogue were discussed and agreed between us The actual composition is mine The stage-management is yours30

E.W. Godwin provided the production design with Barrett’s usual team of scene painters (Telbin, Hann and Hall) executing his designs. Barrett himself played Clito, with Mary Eastlake as Helle and E.S. Willard as the villain Glaucias. The play opened on 1 May 1886. Set in Athens in 404 BC, it paints the picture of a corrupt and profligate society in which the people groan under the tyranny of the nobles. The hero, Clito, is a sculptor, noted for his patriotism, his devotion to his art and his affection for his adoptive father, Xenocles, and adopted sister Irene. He is regarded as a potential leader of revolt by the nobles and is also hated by the all-powerful courtesan Helle, mistress of the tyrant Critias, whose immorality he has denounced. It is in the interests of both to destroy him and Helle agrees, at the instigation of Glaucias, who has designs on Irene, to ensnare Clito by her charms. She visits his studio posing as a lady of quality who desires to commission him. He is smitten by her charms and promises to visit her in her palace. Discovering her true identity, he turns up with the intention of denouncing her. But she explains that she has been the ‘victim of envious and malicious tongues’ and is in reality pure and virtuous. Clito believes her, stays with her and talks of marriage. But Xenocles comes to tell him he is now despised by his fellow citizens because of his liaison, and that using information gleaned from Clito Helle has betrayed the would-be rebels to the nobles who have had them killed. Helle denounces Clito viciously as a fool and a dupe. A mob invades the palace. Irene is discovered to have killed herself to escape the attentions of Glaucias. Clito kills him. Helle takes flight and her apartments are wrecked. Clito returns to his studio, sadder and wiser, but Helle turns up, seeking refuge from the

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mob. He is about to kill her when she throws herself at his feet, begging for her life. The mob returns, Helle is killed and Clito is mortally wounded. The Times (3 May 1886) paid tribute to the Barrett regime and its mission but warned about its tendency to preach. ‘More than once, a laudable endeavour has been made at the Princess’s to educate popular taste. It has not always been successful, not because the public of that theatre are incapable of appreciating anything beyond the sensationalism of melodrama, but because the lesson taught has too often been in the nature of a homily, very well meant but rather tiresome.’ But this time, thought The Times, ‘the poetic drama happily asserts itself once more, in very moving, very human, and very picturesque guise, to reap the just reward of such qualities in what the playbills call a “triumphant success”. It is long since the public welcomed a new play with such demonstrative and apparently such heartfelt enthusiasm as they did Clito on Saturday night.’ From a literary point of view, it was a ‘worthy achievement, Mr. Sydney Grundy’s blank verse being vigorous and often poetical’. The critic concluded: In this study of human nature there is nothing morbid or unreal, Clito loves Helle, not in her own character but in the character lent to her by his imagination, and his deception is one to which a generous disposition may sometimes conduct the wisest and best of men. Occasionally it may be felt that the rise and progress of Clito’s passion is not indicated with sufficient plausibility, and hypercriticism may suggest that in ancient Athens a young sculptor of renown like Clito was not likely to be ignorant of the identity of the notorious Helle, whose passage through the streets in a magnificent sedan-chair is represented as a triumphal march. These are the only weaknesses in the play. Per contra, we have marvellous scenic representations of the architecture and the picturesque life of ancient Athens, which alone are well worth seeing. The interiors of Helle’s palace convey an air of sensuous luxury such as the art of the metteur-en-scène has never hitherto approached, while the mobs of Athenian citizens whose excited rallies and rushes take the place of mechanical sensation in the play, form stage pictures of surpassing beauty. He praised the acting of Barrett in ‘a character admirably suited to Mr Wilson Barrett’s robust and romantic method, and he plays it with impressive earnestness’ and Mary Eastlake ‘suggests very well the

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heartlessness and viciousness of the courtesan who plays with her victim as a cat plays with a mouse’. But the play was disliked by most other critics. The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (8 May 1886) declared forcefully: Tastes differ, and we cannot pretend that ours lies in the direction of gloomy and repulsive tragedy, such as that with which Mr Wilson Barrett has chosen to vary his melodramatic successes at the Princess’s. Nor can we profess to understand the tremendous cheering which, at the close of the first performance, seemed to indicate the achievement of a huge popular triumph. All we can suppose is that Mr Barrett’s personal popularity, his manifestly ambitious aim, his excellent stage management, and his really admirable scenic art were allowed to compensate for the utter lack of sympathetic interest, of charm, and of dramatic beauty in Clito, the latest production of his enterprising management. Otherwise we should have to conclude that the noisy enthusiasts of Saturday night mistook mere brutality for strength, and thought the frank delineation of uncompromising vice a fitting object for the tragic playwright’s art. The critic clearly detested it. Clito, with all its painful and harrowing passages, its violence of action, and its bloody catastrophe, awakens no fear and moves no pity. There is none of the dramatic personae for whom one is able to care a jot or whose tragic fate can strike awe into the spectator’s soul. For the story of the tragedy sets forth nothing more than the iniquity of an utterly abandoned woman, who has not even the redeeming grace of nature that a courtesan may possess; together with the moral weakness of her chief victim and the degraded viciousness of her male allies. It has been true, no doubt, ever since the days of Samson and Delilah, that the wiles of a wicked woman may ensnare a hero, that patriots . . . are but men, and that whilst art is immortal artists are but mortal . . . But there are plenty of truths that are not suited for stage illustration, and amongst them are the possibilities of a Clito’s intimate association with a Helle. The critic thought that Mary Eastlake’s performance ‘raises her almost into the ranks of great actresses, and its relentless consistency is worthy of all praise. But Mr Barrett can give no similar interest to his

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impersonation of Clito, whose nature has the defect, fatal for a hero, of being utterly contemptible.’ On the other hand: The preparation of the tragedy had evidently been perfect . . . And nothing could well be better of their kind than Mr Hann’s sunny street in Athens, or than Mr Telbin’s illustration of the magnificent palace where Helle . . . presides over the Bacchic revels of her retainers. Mr E.W. Godwin has looked carefully after the archaeology of the dresses, which, however, are not in all cases as becoming as they are correct. The Era (8 May 1886) thought the play ‘powerful’ but ‘The theme selected is not pleasant, and its treatment will by many be considered repulsive’ and: Clito is not a hero; or granting that he is, he is certainly a hero degraded, and, as has been pointed out repeatedly, the author who degrades his hero makes a very great mistake . . . The young sculptor is a fool; he does not even excite our pity; he gets only our contempt, and he merits nothing more . . . Mr Barrett’s acting was admirable as ever, for his heart was in his task, but how was it possible to give an atom of sympathy to Clito, silly plaything in the hands of the artful Helle. But ‘The great triumph of the evening was Miss Eastlake’s. Never has a young actress had a more repulsive part than Helle to play. Miss Eastlake nerved herself for her task, faced it boldly, and in its accomplishment fairly surpassed all her previous efforts.’ Once again, the saving grace was said to be the staging: ‘The mounting of the play is as fine as anything ever seen here, and that is saying much. Those who see Clito will not easily forget the fine stage pictures prepared by Mr Walter Hann in the first act, by Mr Stafford Hall in the second and third, and by Mr William Telbin in the fourth.’ In an editorial in the Theatre, Clement Scott wrote: Human nature is bad and brutal enough outside the walls of a theatre, without dishing it up on stage for our edification. I want to believe that men and women are in reality better than they appear to be, and not more monstrous. I want the stage to teach each successive audience to be purified by hope and by the contemplation of lovely

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natures, not sickened and saddened by opening cesspools under their noses.31 He elaborated on this in his history of the nineteenth-century stage, when admitting that Clito was in effect a sermon: The dramatist, like the preacher, has two distinct methods of conversion. He arrives at the ultimate goal of moral rectitude by opposite paths. He can persuade to repentance by drawing awful pictures of an eternity of sorrow; he can paint life as it is with all its vileness, the bitterness of its disappointments, the shallowness of its love; or, with face serene and voice of touching tenderness, he can by sympathy, by example and by illustration, show that for the most depraved of men there may be forgiveness, for the most degraded woman there may be restoration and love. Clito by Sydney Grundy and Wilson Barrett, was a bold, unconventional, well-written, and powerful play, relentless in its sarcasm, uncompromising in its severity, fancifully clothed with flowers of speech, and superbly decorated with brilliant pictures of ancient Athens steeped in depravity and corruption. The skill of the dramatist, the art of the actor, the taste of the archaeologist, combined to interest and excite the audience. But we rose from the play jaded, harassed, depressed, frightened, and not consoled . . . No one doubted the sincerity of the authors, no one questioned their cleverness; but, in order to enforce the truth of their moral lessons, they cultivated the real and despised the beautiful; they painted human nature in its most repulsive colours . . . they set before us a severe and relentless text, that sin has its punishment, and that for the sinner there is nothing but a degraded and pitiless death.32 He accused the play of Zolaism, saying that ‘so realistic a picture of feminine depravity’ had not been seen since Nana was performed in Paris. ‘Steele Nibs’, the pseudonymous critic of Punch (15 May 1886), suggesting that Clito consisted of characters and situations lifted from Sheridan Knowles’s Virginius and Sardou’s Theodora, also indicates why there should have been such moral disapproval of the play. If it was the intention of the authors . . . to dress up, in the garb of classical Greece, B.C. 404, the kind of shameful story that formed a part of the hideous revelations which the Pall Mall Gazette, last year, deemed necessary to publish for the benefit of society at large and to hasten forward the amendment of the criminal law, – then they could

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not have gone a better way to work than in constructing the plot of Clito, and representing on the stage the characters of the infamous Hellé, the wolfish, unsatiated sensualist Glaucias, and his lamblike, innocent victim, the ‘Maid of Athens’, under seventeen at all events. This is a reference to the sensational series of four articles by W.T. Stead in the Pall Mall Gazette called ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, published in July 1885. They exposed the extent of juvenile prostitution and the white slave trade in London. They resulted in Stead being sentenced to three months in prison for abducting a thirteen-year-old girl, whom he had procured for the purposes of the article. But it also resulted in the passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill and made Stead a hero with the moral reformers of the age. The bill raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen and gave the police greater powers to prosecute streetwalkers and brothel-keepers. But the depiction of a glamorous courtesan on the stage was too much for contemporary critics, who, like Punch, called for Barrett to ‘give us a good wholesome melodrama’. After a short and unprofitable run, the play closed and Barrett embarked on the first of five American tours aimed at recouping his fortunes, closing the Princess’s Theatre on 23 July 1886. While on tour in 1891–92 Barrett wrote a new four-act play Pharaoh, set in Ancient Egypt at the height of the power of the Nineteenth Ramessid dynasty. Since Egyptology was a hobby of his, the subject and the setting came easily enough to him.33 The central figure of the play is Prince Arni, victorious general and apparently loyal to the throne. But as a representative of the previous royal house, he is plotting to regain the throne from Seti I, the Ramessid Pharaoh. He is aided in this scheme by Pennu the Bat, a misshapen dwarf who is the king’s jester but hates Seti for allowing his deformity to be a source of mirth at court. Their plan involves using Princess Latika, who loves Arni, to recruit courtiers to their cause, while Arni marries his cousin, Tuaa, who is also of the blood of the previous dynasty. But Tuaa loves Pharaoh and when her marriage to Seti is announced, Pennu and Latika drug and kidnap Tuaa, spreading the rumour that Seti, jealous of the popularity of Arni and Tuaa with the people, has had her murdered. But when Tuaa rejects Arni’s advances and he asks Latika to help him win her hand, she jealously reveals the plot to Pharaoh. Guards are sent to arrest Arni but he holds them off until Pennu arrives with some of his supporters. They escape but both Arni and Pennu are wounded and Pennu later dies of his wounds. Tuaa intercedes with Pharaoh for Arni’s life and he orders the councillor Narmeni to see that no harm comes to Arni. But Narmeni,

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jealous of Arni, determines to eliminate him before the pardon can take effect. He tracks him to the temple of Apis but is killed in the ensuing fight. When Latika turns up at the temple, Arni furiously raises his dagger but she seizes it and stabs herself to death. Arni’s anger passes and he dies of his wounds with Latika in his arms as Pharaoh arrives with the intention of pardoning him. The play opened at the Grand Theatre, Leeds, on 29 September 1892, with sets by Walter Hann, T.E. Ryan and Bruce Smith, music by Edward Jones, costumes by Madame Bernstein and Barrett’s usual company (Maud Jeffries, Franklyn McLeay and Cooper Cliffe) in the leading roles. Barrett was sufficiently important for the major theatrical papers to cover the opening. The Era (1 October 1892) found the play ‘as a spectacular production . . . magnificent’ and as a drama ‘stirring and exciting’. The scenic artists were singled out as ‘deserving special praise’ and the settings certainly made an impact, in particular the first and last scenes. The play opened in the courtyard of the royal palace in Thebes: The solidly-built set and massive pillars show the entrance to the palace by a broad flight of steps, and at each end the statue of a god. It is an animated scene, with groups of citizens, nobles and soldiers; and prominent are two gigantic Negroes in armour, jealously guarding the portals of the palace. In the middle distance is the River Nile, glittering under the blazing eastern sun, and an invisible chorus sings sweetly. The picture is superb and elicits rounds of hearty applause. It closed in the temple of Apis: ‘The last scene of all, a realistic and wonderfully built set, is the turret of the Temple of Apis, from which is seen the moonlit city of Thebes. The effect of light and distance here is marvellous. A beautiful chant of the priests of Apis is . . . heard.’ The acting received equal praise, with Barrett as Arni providing himself with ‘a part that exactly suits his picturesque style of acting and fine declamatory power’. Maud Jeffries as Latika ‘played with grace and skill throughout, and showed great energy and determination’. Franklyn McLeay as the Bat ‘a Quasimodo role, acted with great judgement and discretion’ and Cooper Cliffe as Seti I ‘displayed his usual appreciation of character, and brought out the prominent points with force and effect’. The Theatre devoted a six-page review to the play, arguing that Barrett had done something remarkable, fusing ‘two elements of drama, hitherto regarded as almost irreconcilable’, romance and realism:

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True, the background is romantic enough. Strangely-clad people flit in and out of the massive palaces of Ancient Thebes. The semibarbaric Egypt of four thousand years ago lives again, in dazzling splendour. The blue waters of the Nile, the sandy stretches of the desert, the raiment and customs and hue of the dusky throng, these are all redolent of romance. Real, however, are the men and women so curiously garbed, and real are their passions, aspirations and ambitions; real with the realism of the present day. And this it is, this grafting of familiar types, human with an everyday humanity, upon an unfamiliar period of the world’s history, which constitutes the play’s chief charm. Quite apart from the spectacle (‘magnificent’) and stagecraft (of which Barrett ‘was long since acknowledged a master’), the critic praised the character-drawing which gave the play ‘a human interest second only to that inspired by Claudian – unquestionably the most engrossing dramatic creation of our time’. No more impressive figure of its kind than the maimed, distorted Bat – not Quasimodo nor Bertuccio – has ever limped or fluttered across the stage. But Arni is the absorbing study – a powerfullyconceived study of a simple nature subjected to the debasing influence of an insatiate ambition. The gradual sapping of the man’s nobility of mind is indicated with much skill . . . Fit mate for Arni, and fit companion picture is the heroine Latika, a passionate woman whose whole ambition is for and through the man she loves . . . When, therefore his falsity stands self-confessed, her world totters and crumbles into dust.34 Despite such glowing reviews and the fact that Barrett included the play in his repertoire for his third American tour, beginning in the winter of 1892, thereafter he dropped it and he never brought it into London. Barrett revived Sheridan Knowles’s Virginius for his fourth US tour in 1893–94, keeping it in his repertoire for the fifth American tour (1894– 95) and for the first Australian tour (1897–98). He updated the script with the aid of Addison Bright, reduced the five acts to four, transposed the dialogue, engaged Alma-Tadema to do the designs and opened it first at the Grand Theatre, Leeds, for a short run on 19 October 1893. The Theatre magazine, edited by the same Addison Bright, reviewed it. The review praised both the spectacle and the human appeal of the production. Virginius was played not as an old man, as was usually the case,

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but as a man in the prime of life, ‘played by Mr Wilson Barrett with remarkable dignity, pathos, and fire, and with plenty of picturesqueness and fervour by his company, who never appear to such advantage as in plays of “classical” times’.35 The fact that the story involves a concerned father killing his daughter to save her from being debauched by a corrupt Roman magistrate, directly recalling the plot of Junius, confirms that one of Barrett’s dramatic preoccupations was the integrity of the family and concern for female honour. Barrett made two major changes in the play. In the original, Virginius seizes a knife from a butcher’s stall to kill Virginia: Barrett has him seize Appius Claudius’ short sword. More significantly he replaced the original finale in which Icilius enters with an urn of ashes, and when Virginius asks what it is, is told ‘Virginia’, by a scene in which Virginius accompanies Virginia’s bier on stage and expires of grief beside it. Barrett revived Virginius in May 1897 as part of his season at the Lyric Theatre, London, in preparation for his Australian tour. The Times (10 May 1897), observing that the play had been a major hit for Macready, noted that it had ‘held the stage in intermittent fashion down to the present time, when rhetorical actors of the older school still find it worth reviving on tour’. The critic paid tribute to Barrett for the latest revival: At a period when the stage is so largely given up to the frivolities of musical comedy, and when the word ‘tragedy’, except in connexion with Shakespeare’s name, is all but banished from the bills, it is a bold step on Mr Wilson Barrett’s part to revive Virginius but certainly there is no actor of the day better qualified than he for such an undertaking. He wears the toga well and is one of the few who can declaim blank verse of the Knowles pattern with an air of conviction . . . It is the simplicity and the force of its one great scene, where the father slays his daughter in preference to seeing her dishonoured, that keep the tragedy alive, for, though the sentiment is turgid . . . it is true enough when skilfully presented to appeal to the heart; and Mr Wilson Barrett makes it so appeal. However, for once, there was criticism of the sets. The noble halls and palaces of the Lyric stage scarcely belong to Republican Rome; at all events, it can scarcely have been in such that the humble centurion Virginius and his daughter lived; but the last

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thing one thinks of in connexion with Sheridan Knowles is realism – the idea was not in his time invented. The likely explanation for this scenic mismatch is that Barrett was using the sets for The Sign of the Cross, set in Neronian Rome and the main attraction of the Lyric season. The Daily Telegraph (10 May 1897) thought that Barrett’s changes to the text had improved the play and praised the performances of Maud Jeffries, who had done ‘nothing better than Virginia, combining grace and tenderness and personal beauty and great refinement’, and Barrett: ‘Always virile, tremendously in earnest – the actor improved as the play went on.’ In 1895 Barrett returned to the form in which he had tried and failed to achieve success ten years before. The result was The Sign of the Cross. This was more than a play, it was a cultural phenomenon, and it marked the dramatic zenith of Ruskinian theatre. It arose from Barrett’s desire to combat what he called ‘the unwholesome tendencies of the so-called “problem play” [he cited in particular The Second Mrs Tanqueray]. These “sex pieces” were frightening family people from the theatre. I wanted to bring wives and daughters to it, and at the same time bridge the gulf dividing regular theatre goers from the class which avoids the playhouse from religious motives.’36 In 1894, having returned from his fourth American tour, he was contemplating the problem and several things coalesced in his mind, as he told Jerome K. Jerome of the Idler magazine: ‘A resolve to simplify the situation by a fervent dramatic appeal to whatever was Christ-like in woman and man, had by a brain wave presented itself as “the sign of the cross”, that the advice of his friend John Ruskin had confirmed him in his choice of a “classic” period, and that the story had, without perceptible effort, already begun to take shape in his thoughts.’ The basic elements of a scenario formed itself in his mind: My heroine was emblematic of Christianity: my hero stands for a worn-out Paganism of decadent Rome. She is strong with the faith of a woman: he, strong in the self-reliance of a man. As I see her, she is beautiful with a half-divine loveliness, and an exquisite soul looks out through a beautiful face. She has given up the world for the sake of her new-found faith, in which and for which she lives, and is resolved, if need be, to die. Nero is on the throne, and has decreed the extermination of the Christians. The execution of this decree is entrusted to my Pagan patrician, and thus he is brought into contact with the Christian girl. In her, he at once recognizes an

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almost sacred beauty, a beauty of holiness; and, voluptuary that he is, he sets himself to win her. Twice he stands between her and death, and she is consequently moved to regard him with tender interest. But his persuasive pleadings and soft arts are of no avail. Steadfast in her faith she resists all temptation and he is driven in spite of himself to seek a reason for her sovereign power and his own crushing defeat. He finds it in the uplifting and ennobling influence of her creed. And, his soul quickened by the breath of her spirit, and kindled into something of a likeness to itself, he flings honours, wealth, all to the winds, and hand in hand with her meets the martyrs’ doom. The play would highlight the ‘vivid contrast through them of sensuality with purity, self-indulgence with self-sacrifice, the fierce glory of dominion with the gentle rapture of faith’. In his normal manner, he approached several established dramatists to collaborate with him on the writing. But they all turned him down, one rejecting the project ‘because of his profound disbelief in any popular acceptance for the theme’.37 So Barrett wrote it himself, determined to try it out on his forthcoming fifth American tour. In essence, it reworked the basic elements of Claudian, without the immortality angle. It premiered in St Louis on 27 March 1895 and was played for the rest of the tour to critical acclaim and box office success. Back in England, Barrett gave the play its British première at the Grand Theatre, Leeds, on 26 August 1895, before transferring it to London, where it opened at the Lyric Theatre on 4 January 1896. It ran for 435 performances initially and later played all over the world. It had been staged an estimated 10,000 times by 1904. Seventy-nine thousand copies of the Christian hymn, ‘Shepherd of Souls’, composed for the play by Edward Jones, were sold. Barrett’s novelization of his script sold out its first print run of 5000 copies and a further 20,000 were immediately printed. Nine touring companies were sent out with productions of the play. The result of all this was that Barrett was able to settle his outstanding debts of £40,000.38 Female members of the cast in costume were photographed against classical backdrops and emerged looking like recreations of the canvases of Albert Moore and Alma-Tadema. By now, E.W. Godwin was dead but the old Barrett regulars Walter Hann and Stafford Hall did the scene-painting. The incarnations of paganism and Christianity in Barrett’s play are Marcus Superbus, the Prefect of Rome (played by Barrett) and the Christian maiden Mercia (played by Maud Jeffries). Marcus first encounters Mercia when she seeks to protect an elderly Christian from the assault of a Christian-baiting mob. Marcus intervenes to protect them

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both and is smitten at once by the beauty of Mercia. Marcus’ archenemy, Tigellinus, arrives with an order from the Emperor Nero to exterminate the Christians. Marcus warns Mercia and the Christians to be careful. The Christian boy Stephanus is captured and tortured by Tigellinus to reveal the meeting place of the Christians. As a result, the soldiers arrest the Christians, including Mercia, during their meeting at the Cestine Bridge. The wealthy and immoral patrician Berenis offers herself to Marcus and when he rejects her, vows to report to Nero his infatuation with Mercia. Marcus has Mercia brought from prison to his house, compelling her to attend an orgiastic feast where an erotic pagan love song is drowned out by the singing of a Christian hymn by Christians imprisoned nearby. Mercia calls upon Marcus’ guests to repent, they mock her and he drives them from the house. He tries to force his attentions on her but the sound of the hymn and the sign of the cross held up by Mercia force him to his knees. Tigellinus arrives to arrest Mercia. Marcus pleads with Nero and his empress Poppaea for Mercia’s life. Poppaea suggests that she could be spared if she renounces her faith. In the dungeon beneath the arena where the Christians are being thrown to the lions, Marcus begs Mercia to renounce her faith. Instead she converts him to hers and hand in hand they go out to face martyrdom together. An unidentified newspaper clipping in the Barrett collection, dated 22 December 1895 and written in anticipation of the London opening of The Sign of the Cross said: Not only has the play drawn enormous houses both in the United States and our own provincial towns, but it has become the most dominant topic of conversation. It is a piece which seems to enjoy the peculiar distinction of appealing to the occupants of the stalls and the gallery alike. Its motives are discussed, and lectures and sermons are founded upon it. In other words, it is an epoch-making play, and if London endorses the verdict of other places it may be hoped that it will help to drive out the sickly suggestiveness of the ‘problem’ play and the more depressing surroundings of what has come to be known as Ibsenism. Jerome K. Jerome of the Idler was at the first night in Leeds: I was quite unprepared for the experience of August 26th when, at the Grand Theatre, Leeds, The Sign of the Cross was played for the first

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time in England. What I then beheld was an audience, notoriously addicted to the frothiest and most frivolous forms of entertainment, hushed in silence, spellbound, and thrilled by dramatic pictures of the gradual purification by love and faith of a licentious Pagan, and the ecstatic exaltation of the early Christian martyrs. The whole house, it was apparent, was unable to resist a certain indefinable but undeniable spiritual charm evolved from an atmosphere of unassailable purity, simplicity, and faith pervading the crucial scenes of the drama. The exquisite language of Holy Writ, frequently pressed into the dramatist’s service, was listened to with a reverence that bordered upon awe. And as for the note of solemn reality struck during the final scene, of the gentle maiden martyr’s last moments upon earth, it affected that vast throng as never in my life had I seen a theatre audience impressed . . . And when the curtain fell, and after a moment’s silence a great roar of cheering went up, I was convinced that Wilson Barrett had that evening rendered the stage a signal service, and given it a memorable play. Jerome concluded: It was an act of splendid daring to endeavour to revivify, by the arts of the theatre, the most dramatic and enthralling moment in the history of the world, the hour of the birth-throes of Christianity. It was an act of splendid daring to put a fortune to the touch, to win or lose it all, and to back the simplest and purest ideals of the civilized race. After Leeds, Barrett performed in Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Bristol, Nottingham, Newcastle and Cardiff (‘Mr Barrett’s tour became a veritable march of triumph’).39 Then came London. The Times (6 January 1896), reporting the enthusiastic reception by the first night audience, declared: Both as a spectacle and as a dramatic story, with its requisite point of sensationalism, The Sign of the Cross contains all the elements that go to the making of a great popular success; and, happily, it comes at a moment when the public, weary of the aridities and the sordid trivialities of realism, are likely to turn with zest to a new dramatic gospel, or rather to the old dramatic gospel here revived. Mr Barrett knows the value of ornate treatment in romance, nobody better; and undeniably the stage pictures of this story . . . are extremely beautiful. Nor can the most cynical deny the fascination of the

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theme of self-sacrifice embodied in the tragic loves of Marcus and Mercia . . . Mounted by a master hand, the play has also the advantage of being most intelligently acted by a company who, for the most part, have played together for many months . . . As Marcus, Mr Barrett sustains the leading part in the masterly and dignified manner characteristic of all his appearances in costume. It is a part that he has moulded to his own personality, and, whether as the haughty patrician, the passionate lover, or the martyr, he carries with him the sympathies of the house. The part of Mercia makes no great demand upon the actress, but it requires of its exponent a grace and spiritualized beauty and an air of youthful innocence which Miss Maud Jeffries very happily supplies . . . A young actress, Miss Haidee Wright, who enacts the boy, adds to the horrors of the torture scene and the amphitheatre by a shriek which makes the blood run cold. Clement Scott in the Daily Telegraph (6 January 1896) calling it ‘a showy, effective, remarkable, and in certain scenes, deeply moving play’, paid tribute to Barrett: If ever a man was entitled to success with his ‘Sign of the Cross’, that man is its author, composer, designer and originator. And that it is a success there is no doubt whatever. It held America by its force, its daring and its earnestness; it pursued its triumphant way through the provinces, uniting for the first time in dramatic history, Catholics, Protestants, Nonconformists, and – mirabile dictu – both Jews and the Salvation Army. It may be the passion and variety of the story; it may be the exquisite germ of the tale that tells how a lustful, sensuous, selfish, and proud pagan is won to God by the innate and flawless purity of an inspired woman; it may be the music and the hymns; it may be the striking contrast with revelry and religion, with things debauched and things divine; it may be this, that or the other, but we cannot get over the fact of a spellbound audience, composed in a great degree of ministers of religion, who held out the hand of charity from the Church to the Stage. But in intellectual quarters it provoked a reaction of withering contempt. In the World, William Archer declared: No, my dear Mr Wilson Barrett, I am not going to play up to you by criticising, discussing, or even ridiculing The Sign of the Cross. It lies quite outside my province. The art critic does not chronicle the

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latest addition to Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors; the musical critic takes no cognisance of a Salvationist orgie (sic): why should the dramatic critic devote a moment’s thought to a combination of the penny dreadful with the Sunday-school picture-book? My business is with the drama as a form of art, and art has nothing to say to this series of tawdry tableaux, with their crude appeal to the shallowest sentiments and lowest instincts of the mob. He denounced the naiveté of those clergymen who had been bamboozled into endorsing the play: Having no reasonable standards of comparison, the simple-minded padres, like children at their first pantomime, do not recognise the pretentious puerility, the hideous vulgarity of the whole thing, and set to work dutifully to beat the ‘pulpit, drum ecclesiastic’ at the door of Mr Barrett’s booth. A Salvationist pantomime – that defines the show . . . I don’t know that I am constitutionally apt to overrate the popular intelligence, but certainly I was taken aback by the frenzied enthusiasm with which the pit and gallery received this farrago of crudities and ineptitudes.40 George Bernard Shaw in the Saturday Review, tongue firmly in cheek, praised Barrett for convincing the London critics that several of the most characteristic passages in The Sign of the Cross were quotations from the Bible, when in fact they were composed by Barrett. With scathing, searching irony, and with resolute courage in the face of the prejudiced British public, he has drawn a terrible contrast between the Romans . . . with their straightforward sensuality, and the strange, perverted voluptuousness of the Christians, with their shuddering exaltations of longing for the whip, the rack, the stake and the lions . . . It is a tremendous moral lesson; and though I am pagan enough to dislike most intensely the flogging and racking and screaming on the stage . . . yet no doubt it helps to drive the irony of the theme home.41 But if intellectual critics scoffed, the Church applauded. The Theatre reported that a Capuchin monk had told his flock that he could see nothing but good in The Sign of the Cross, pointing out that ‘those who cannot be brought to hear the Divine Word spoken in churches can often be reached and stirred to serious thought by plays of so elevating

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a character’, and that the Bishop of Norwich expressed his willingness to dispense his flock from the obligation for Lenten observance ‘to enable them to witness the performance of a play that . . . was not only of value educationally, but was of a distinctly religious character’.42 The Bishop of Truro wrote the preface to Barrett’s novelization of the play, saying: ‘To purify the stage, that the stage might raise men; to go straight to the source of high emotion; to bring together the old and new natures till each told the truth of the other; to bring the nineteenth century face to face with the first – this seemed to me heroic.’43 In America, Cardinal Gibbons, head of the Catholic Church, formally declared his approval of the play, a play of which the Brooklyn Daily Standard Union said ‘Mr Barrett has handled with wonderfully beautiful construction a subject that most playwrights have avoided carefully – that of directly teaching Christians by means of the actor’s art.’44 The Theatre said: It seems to be admitted that a considerable proportion of those who witness it are people to whom the inside of a theatre is entirely unfamiliar – people who would hitherto have regarded the occupants of the pit of a playhouse as qualifying themselves with absolute certainty for that other pit whose bottomless depths are the eternal habitation of lost souls. Now, if the prejudice of such can be broken down a distinct gain will have accrued to the drama.45 The Wilson Barrett papers contain numerous letters of appreciation from clergymen. The Archdeacon of Singapore wrote to Barrett on 14 August 1896 after seeing the play to say ‘you have proved a principle that many have long contended for, viz. – that the Drama can be made to show forth the highest Christian principles along with true artistic beauty and I feel that the whole Christian public owes you a debt of gratitude’. The Vicar of Rochdale preached a sermon on it and wrote to tell Barrett on 4 December 1895. The Vicar of Belchamp St Paul, Clare, Essex, called the play ‘the most wonderful sermon I have ever heard’. The Dean of Rochester, S. Reynolds Hole, compared it to the Oberammergau Passion Play.46 Mr Gladstone, having seen a performance of the play at Chester, wrote to Barrett on 8 August 1896, to say: You seem to me to have rendered, while acting strictly within the lines of the Theatre, a great service to the best and holiest of all causes, the cause of Faith . . . and I rejoice to hear of the wide and

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warm approval which the piece has received most of all because its popularity betokens sound leanings and beliefs in the mass of the people and shows you acted nobly as well as boldly in placing your reliance upon them. The letter would be reproduced in autograph in The Sign of the Cross programme. The Prince of Wales said that it was ‘a remarkable play, wonderfully well acted and splendidly put upon the stage’. J.M. Barrie told Barrett: ‘I believe you have done more for the drama . . . than it is possible at the moment to estimate.’ Mrs Ormiston Chant, the celebrated moral reformer, said that when she had seen it, she went down on her knees in the box and thanked God for it.47 The impact on ordinary theatregoers was immense. The journalist Elizabeth O’Connor said that when she saw Barrett in The Sign of the Cross ‘I actually soaked a handkerchief with tears and as I left the theatre, put the wet little wad in an envelope and wrote “my tribute” upon it, and sent it round to the stage door.’ In response Barrett sent her ‘the loveliest possible Valenciennes pocket handkerchief tied with emerald green ribbons’.48 The novelist Ernest Raymond recalled that at the age of ten he had been taken by his devout churchgoing aunt to see The Sign of the Cross. It had reduced them both to tears and ‘For many weeks afterwards, as I walked homeward from school, I was a Christian martyr walking, head erect, not to Gladstanes Road, but to the Colosseum gates and the waiting lions. Sometimes, I walked hand-in-hand with a Christian girl giving to her, a weaker vessel, something of my strength.’49 There were many letters to Barrett from fans who said that the play had changed their lives. One correspondent had seen the play twenty times and claimed to know the dialogue by heart. Typical is the letter from Harry Oswald Nash RN, written from Bedford on 1 April 1900, asking for an autograph before he sailed for China: I feel I must tell you how your piece (I cannot call it a play as I consider it sacred) has influenced my life, since seeing it I am a changed man. Till then I never knew what Christianity was. Your piece showed me myself in my true colours and saved me from a life of misery and degradation, and now I can truthfully say ‘Christ has triumphed’.50 Lillah McCarthy, who was with Barrett’s company for eight years (1896– 1904), the last four as leading lady, recalled in 1933:

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Barrett . . . helped thousands in their way through life. I know it. For many have told me so. Even to this day I receive letters which show how these plays of his, which the artist in me came to regard with pity, helped people in their lives. Here is one which comes whilst I write this chapter . . . ‘When in my seventeenth year, I was taken by some seniors to my first London theatre – the youth was almost stupidly innocent, idealistic and utterly ingenuous in matters worldly. The play was “The Sign of the Cross”, and you were understudying Miss Maud Jeffries’ Mercia to Mr Wilson Barrett’s lead. Truthfully, I think at the moment of writing these words as vitally as I thought on that memorable evening, that your personal representation of what was most beautiful, the noblest and the sweetest of what one looks for in womanhood, was so inspiring that I can assure you that perhaps you created something which actually proved to be a real influence for the future in at least one obscure life.’51 G.W. Foote, vice-president of the National Secular Society, first lecturing at St James’s Hall and subsequently gathering his thoughts in a sixpenny pamphlet, launched an attack on Barrett and the play. He justified it by saying: Mr. Barrett is not simply a playwright and an actor, with the legitimate ambition of catering to a wide public taste. He sets up as a moral reformer and a spiritual teacher; he poses as a champion of religion; he challenges attention as an apostle of Christianity. And it is because of these pretentions that I feel justified in subjecting his play to a most drastic criticism. He proceeded to give an account of his visit to the theatre. He was struck by the ‘novel character of the audience, which might almost be called a congregation . . . Clericals . . . were present in remarkable abundance’. As to the play: It is a Salvation Army tragedy . . . designed in the interest of that species of Christianity which is generally styled ‘primitive’, and, in my judgement, the play is as primitive as the religion it advocates. It is melodrama from beginning to end. There is plenty of incident but no real plot; much movement, but no real progress; . . . there is absolutely no development of character.

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He even took a swipe at Claudian (‘That was considered a highly moral play, and was even said to have won words of praise from Mr Ruskin. But it was merely a spectacular melodrama, and only the most orthodox Christian could discover its morality’). He thought Marcus’ conversion to Christianity in three minutes flat was ridiculous. He objected to the vilification of paganism and idealization of Christianity, saying Christianity had never been an enemy of cruelty but it was an enemy of free thought and humanitarianism. He even questioned the authenticity of the passage in Tacitus describing the Neronian persecution of the Christians. He concludes that it was under the sign of the cross that atrocities were committed by the crusaders, the conquistadors and the Inquisition: ‘These are not facts to be forgotten. Whoever seeks to hide them is an enemy to civilisation.’52 The Idler quoted Barrett as saying in response: ‘Baffled agnostics cannot hurt; and for the little handful who pant and yearn to oppress our English drama with the perfume of patchouli and stifle it in the reek of the Divorce Court – can they hamper a movement which calls for this?’ He pointed to the great pile of letters of appreciation he had received from the public. The Idler concluded: The pulpit, the press, and the peoples of two great continents it has conquered. Thousands of unbelievers it has converted to faith in the power of the theatre for good. And it has made possible upon the stage the one supreme subject of absorbing interest to the civilised world – the subject of . . . religion . . . In doing this, Mr Barrett’s play has done the stage inestimable service, and has surely set an imperishable seal upon a remarkable career.53 The Daughters of Babylon was intended as a follow-up to The Sign of the Cross. The censors forbade stage representations of actual Bible stories but Barrett got round this by fabricating quasi-biblical stories, using language in the idiom of the Authorized Version of the Bible. Daughters was due to be a collaboration with Louis N. Parker, with Barrett providing the scenario and characters and Parker providing the dialogue.54 But after the work had begun Barrett decided to take over the entire project, causing a temporary rift with Parker. It opened at the Lyric Theatre on 6 February 1897, with scene-painting by Telbin, Hann and Ryan. Like The Sign of the Cross, it was subsequently novelized from Barrett’s script by Robert Hichens, who was offered £500 by Barrett to do the job. Hichens had seen the play once: ‘I remember that the scenery

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of it was remarkable’; and although he liked Barrett as a man, he did not like him as an actor (‘he was too staccato and melodramatic for my taste’). He evidently did not think much of the play: ‘I ought to have refused, but at that time I hadn’t much money and I said I would do it.’ He received a cheque for £500 and wrote it in eight weeks flat.55 It was published in 1899 and credited to Barrett and Hichens. It is a very visual novel with descriptions of buildings, costumes, processions and banquets. It contrasts the luxury, effeminacy and debauchery of Babylon with the simple faith and trust of the captive Israelites. The plot has Jewish maiden Elna betrothed to stern judge Jediah, son of Zoar, but she is in love with his half-brother, simple shepherd Lemuel. Lemuel goes to Babylon to foment revolt among the Jews, followed by Elna, disguised as a boy. Elna is seized by wealthy libertine Alorus but rejects his advances. Lemuel is taken up by courtesan Ishtar, but when she discovers Elna and Lemuel are in love she has them arrested and jailed. They are sold, Lemuel to Ishtar and Elna to Alorus; but Lemuel’s supporters raise revolt and they both flee back to the tribe. Jediah denounces them and urges their deaths by stoning but Ishtar and Alorus turn up, and expose Jediah as having seduced Jewish woman Elicia away from her husband and then abandoned her to become Ishtar. He is thwarted and Lemuel and Elna united. In the Comet, journalist Philip Amory, presumably prompted by Barrett, wrote a hardhitting article complaining that there had been a conspiracy among the critics to condemn the play and the actor. Amory complains that Irving, thanks in part to his ‘bodyguard and Boswell’ Clement Scott, has maintained a stranglehold on popular favour so that ‘very few new advances can be made, seldom can a younger or more promising actor have a real chance’. He says ‘there is not a dramatic critic in the press who presumes to find fault with the Lyceum Theatre or its manager’. A fictional drama critic is asked if he cannot praise Wilson Barrett and is told: Praise Wilson Barrett! Good heavens! I never heard of such a thing! I would get into hot water, and no mistake if I did. Praise Wilson Barrett! What! The man who has the talent to write his own plays as well as act in them, and has made one of the biggest successes ever known with his Sign of the Cross! Why, I’ve got special orders to pitch into him on every possible occasion – turn him into ridicule whenever I can. Why?

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First, because he is too clever, and because he has come to London this time apparently to stay. If he stays . . . you may depend upon it he will secure the leading position . . . He’s got everything in his favour; he’s younger than Irving and better looking, and knows how to mount a play in a more magnificent and artistic style than Irving does . . . The word was passed round among us to ‘go’ for The Daughters of Babylon, and we did it thoroughly; though, of course, if the same play had been acted at the Lyceum, mounted in the same style, with Irving as Lemuel and had Irving written it himself besides, the paper would have hardly held the mad rhapsodies we should have had to write about it. The attacks on Barrett were ‘people said . . . done to keep Irving in a good humour . . . A few were honest enough to feel ashamed of the part they played, and Shaw, among those few, manifested a desire to be friendly to Wilson Barrett.’ When the Referee began a campaign to get a knighthood for Barrett, something he deserved ‘by the whole extent of the good work he has done for the stage, and his own intellectual merit’ and something which the public wanted, his enemies put it about that he had written the piece in the Referee himself, something that was patently untrue. When the Duke of Fife held a dinner party for leading actor-managers to meet the Prince of Wales, Irving, Charles Wyndham, J.L. Toole and George Alexander were invited but not Barrett. Amory then launches into a savage attack on Irving, repeating the familiar stories that he seduces the pressmen with his lavish suppers and bribes them by buying their plays, that he is just a melodrama actor, inadequate in the great roles such as Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Richard III. Further, he alleges that there is an Irvingite press ring who conspire to destroy anyone who emerges to challenge Irving. Thus Richard Mansfield, having made a hit with Richard III, was hounded out of England by them, as was Barrett eleven years ago when he dared to play Hamlet (‘the finest Hamlet ever seen in the present day’). But there are many better actors than Irving. Franklyn McLeay, who played Nero in The Sign of the Cross, and E.S. Willard, who played Jediah in The Daughters of Babylon (both of them significantly members of Barrett’s company), were both better actors than Irving. ‘Wilson Barrett is worth ten Irvings: he speaks like a man, walks like a man, and is a man. Bye-the-bye, the critics find fault with him for that. I wonder why? They object to his manliness. They call it “affectation”.’ But he points out that when Barrett was driven out of the country ‘by the cabal against him and the pressure of misfortune, and overburdened

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with debts amounting to several thousands of pounds’, he swore not to return until he had paid off his debts and thanks to the success of The Sign of the Cross, he achieved this aim. Flailing about in all directions, he denounces the poetry of Clement Scott (‘twaddle’), Tree’s Marc Antony (‘Funniest thing I ever heard of’), George Alexander’s Orlando (‘Very, very funny indeed’). Amory concludes with a denunciation of the royal family for visiting the musical comedy The Geisha four or five times and visiting The Daughters of Babylon only once, and that visit was conspicuously not reported by the Daily Telegraph. ‘The long and short of it is this . . . a great portion of the dramatic press is worked by unscrupulous methods, and plays into the hands of one or two men with a reckless disregard of the commonest fairness and justice.’ He calls for actors to be received at court and hints that they are far more deserving of knighthoods than ‘the illiterate tradesman-mayor of a country town, who is made a knight for presenting some trumpery “Address” or other (even if he is nothing but a grocer or tallow-merchant)’. He ends with a fulminating peroration against the current state of things: The Art of the Drama is a great art – it should be an instructive, noble entertainment and lesson of the time to the world – and in it, as in all other things, we must exercise fairness and truth and right. I will stand no more back stair consultations against the fortune and success of men (and there are several of them) who happen to be superior to Henry Irving. I tell the public plainly that they are being trifled with and led astray by the whole tangle and web of what is called ‘dramatic criticism’ and I trust to their good common-sense to get out of the hole our ‘pretending’ has led them into . . . If you want melodrama . . . fair melodrama, and bad elocution go to the Lyceum. If you want fine acting and clear enunciation, go to the Lyric and see Wilson Barrett in his inimitable creation of ‘Pete’ in The Manxman, or in the powerful role of ‘Virginius’. If you want dancing and costumes, go to the Alhambra and the Empire. If you want sheer affectation, go to Her Majesty’s. If you want nothing at all, there are any amount of theatres who will do that for you. But, whatever you do, be honest. Don’t take ‘crazes’. Don’t pretend. Don’t be led astray by Clement Scott and The Daily Telegraph . . . You are old enough, wise enough and experienced enough to think for yourselves.56 This looks like an outpouring of the pent-up resentments that Barrett has harboured against the theatrical establishment. But it is seriously

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flawed as an analysis. Irving did not get a uniformly excellent press. Indeed, he was consistently and savagely criticized by a portion of it. Further, two of the most dedicated Irvingites, Clement Scott and Austin Brereton, also wrote appreciatively about Barrett. Barrett in fact asked Clement Scott, a devout Catholic, to polish the script of The Sign of the Cross and Scott told him it did not need it and was perfect as it was. Clement Scott was a friend and champion of Barrett and his widow Margaret wrote that: Wilson Barrett was heart and soul in accord with Clement Scott for the clean, human and wholesome school of plays. You could not have found a fiercer opponent in the world of the ‘shady morality drama’. He always tried his best to maintain the dignity of the theatre, and never debased it by resorting to stories of a questionable or ill-tasting character, no matter what their intrinsic value might be. Without a trace of cant or hypocrisy about him, Barrett called things by their right name, and if anyone tried to do him an injury or an act of injustice, woe betide them, for he wouldn’t rest until he had brought the offender to his knees and sifted the matter to the bitter end.57 This characterization certainly suggests he was directly behind Philip Amory’s diatribe. William Archer of the World, who had detested The Sign of the Cross, was notably less harsh about The Daughters of Babylon. He began by reiterating his view of The Sign of the Cross: Before The Sign of the Cross criticism could only stand aghast, and protest that this brutal and vulgar spectacle at no point touched the confines of its province . . . for my part I felt that I had not only no principle but no perception in common with anyone who could tolerate The Sign of the Cross . . . The Sign of the Cross is neither low art nor bad art, but no art at all . . . it remains beyond the range of criticism. Nothing that I have written now or at any time, has affected, or will affect, any one who is capable of admiring this play. Such a person does not know what art is. Daughters of Babylon could, however, properly be criticized, if dismissively. ‘It is an entirely innocent, rather tedious, singularly wellmounted melodrama of a second or third order.’ He thought that the first act of the play, ‘by a long way the best’, developed the conflict of

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passion and law, and was put together ‘with a good deal of skill’. But he thought that in the second and third acts the play fell apart, becoming ‘an arbitrary series of adventures, with no necessary coherence and no effect of climax’. He thought the slave auction scene ‘ludicrous’, and the characters, stock melodramatic types (‘the seraphic hero and angelic heroine, the saturnine villain, and the sentimental courtesan, purified and ennobled through her hopeless passion for the hero’). He characterized the dialogue as a mixture of biblical phrases and modern commonplaces and dismissed the play as ‘dolls and declamation’. But he praised the visuals: ‘The mounting is exceptionally beautiful. The pastoral scenes of the first and last scenes, painted by Telbin and Ryan respectively, are real works of art; and Mr Hann shows a grandiose, Martinesque imagination in his pictures of Babylon.’ Of the acting, he thought Barrett played in ‘that staccato, peremptory style which has won him such hosts of admirers’; Maud Jeffries ‘played Elna very gracefully’; Franklyn McLeay’s Jediah was ‘a remarkably picturesque and forcible piece of acting’.58 The Times (8 February 1897), noting the strong similarity of the plot to The Sign of the Cross, declared: What may certainly be affirmed of The Daughters of Babylon is that it is a very beautiful production in point of scenic effect, the more or less mythical glories of Babylon inspiring the scene-painter, the stage carpenter, and the costumier alike to quite unusual efforts . . . So ornate is the play that as a mere succession of stage pictures and groupings it would command attention. The critic concluded: The Daughters of Babylon is a most worthy play. In mise-en-scène it is magnificent almost to the point of oppressiveness, and it is acted upon what may be called a similarly lavish scale. All the dramatis personae are somewhat larger than life as is, indeed befitting in such a framework as theirs. Whether as shepherd, lover, or revolutionary, Mr Wilson Barrett is always a commanding figure; Miss Maud Jeffries’ sympathetic personality is of much value in the part of Elna; and a magnificent Ish-tah is to hand in Miss Lily Hanbury. The thirty-odd remaining characters are hardly to be distinguished one from another if we except the Alorus of Mr Ambrose Manning and the Jediah of Mr Franklyn McLeay; but they are all in the picture and the picture is one which by itself is well worth seeing.

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The Theatre echoed The Times when it reported: Seldom has a more beautiful series of stage pictures been provided for the delectation of the spectator than that presented by Mr Wilson Barrett’s new play The Daughters of Babylon. By the wonderful magic of the scene-painter, the imagination of the audience is at once captured and held enthralled as picture after picture of unparalleled loveliness unfolds itself. The sweet pastoral simplicity of the first, revealing Naomi’s Well, with its vast expanse of surrounding country, supplies a startling contrast to the exquisite glimpse that follows of Babylon by night, illumined by countless flaring beacons, its massive buildings assuming a softened aspect under the clear light of the moon, while, through the silent city, flows the mighty Euphrates. Take, again, the scene in the public square, with its animated crowd, its richly attired citizens, and picturesque slaves. Or pass to that depicting the Judgment Seat by the City of Zoar, where Lemuel confronts the entire tribe, and is called upon to answer to his brother’s charge of having tempted away and seduced Elna, his betrothed. Others there are of a scarcely less striking nature, the whole constituting a singularly enticing feast for the eye of the onlooker. Judged from the pictorial side alone, the play fulfils, and indeed surpasses, all possible requirements. As a drama, it was deemed inferior to The Sign of the Cross with ‘the plot . . . developed with much less skill’ and the dialogue ‘pretentious and bombastic’. But the performances deserved ‘considerable praise’, Barrett playing ‘with characteristic force’, Maud Jeffries ‘very graceful and tender’, Lily Hanbury ‘handsome and powerful’ and Franklyn McLeay ‘admirable’ though overly melodramatic at times.59 The supposedly sympathetic Shaw was at least as mixed as the other critics in his reaction. In the Saturday Review (13 February 1897) he mocked Barrett for telling the editor of the Academy that his favourite books in 1896 were the Bible and Shakespeare, for actually wanting to play the Messiah (with Lemuel as an unsatisfactory substitute) and for his opinion of Marie Corelli as ‘a genius’. He admits that ‘I hold Wilson Barrett in high esteem as a stage manager and actor’ but not as a writer, denouncing his dialogue as an unsatisfactory mixture of ancient and modern idioms. But: like all plays under Mr Barrett’s management The Daughters of Babylon is excellently produced. The scene painters are the heroes of the

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occasion. Mr Telbin’s grove standing among the cornfields on a hilly plain, and Mr Hann’s view of Babylon at night, in the Doré style, [Doré’s illustrations to the Old Testament, published in London in 1866, had illustrations of Babylon], are specially effective, and the tents of Israel on the hillside make a pretty bit of landscape in Mr Ryan’s Judgment Seat. He praises the acting in general and McLeay’s Jediah in particular.60 The usually sympathetic Clement Scott in the Daily Telegraph (8 February 1897) epitomised the divided critical response. He called it ‘a dramatic cantata illustrated by a superb panorama’ rather than a play. It was beautiful to look at. This exquisitely bound and artistically coloured series of pictures representing the Jews in captivity, the oppressed ones in the villages of the plains, the luxury and riot of ancient Babylon, the feasting and dancing, the courtesans and slave market, the pictorial illustration of old life as recorded in the old tombs and on the Pyramids of Egypt, is as much like a play of convention as an oratorio is like an opera. It is not one chapter from the Bible, or one legend from the Talmud, but a kind of variegated Cruden’s Concordance . . . with its music, its illustration, its glamour for the eye, it becomes at once a cantata and a concordance. But he goes on to damn the rest of the production with faint praise. But though the action of the play moves very slowly, and the dramatic note is very faint indeed, though the dialogue is overburdened with words, and the scheme does not possess the vigour of contrast contained in ‘The Sign of the Cross’, though the acting is weakest where it should be strongest, and the whole thing is hampered by a dead and sometimes oppressive monotony, still the legend is very refined and beautiful, the idea is sweet and wholesome, human nature is placed in the forefront, and purity of life is advocated with a persistency that will delight descendants of the grand old nation, swift to love, keen to hate, bitter to revenge, but consistently constant, and chaste, with faith supreme and laws unchangeable. Of the acting, he declared that ‘The company was not acting up to Wilson Barrett; he was, with his good nature, acting down to them.’ Hence

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‘the monotony and dreariness of tone’, and this he attributed to the inexperience of the two leading ladies. It would be impossible to find two ladies who looked Elna and Ishtar better than Miss Maud Jeffries and Miss Lily Hanbury. They were, as far as the picture was concerned, perfect representatives of the two characters, the one a delicate, fragile, sweet creature; the other a proud, tender-hearted, passionate beauty. But they have had little experience. They love the theatre, but as yet they do not quite understand the art of it. He concluded that it was not the acting that the audiences would be talking about: To-day they will be talking of Telbin, and Walter Hann, and T.E. Ryan. Of those never-to-be-forgotten pictures of the oasis in the desert, and of all the gorgeous panorama of distant Babylon, of the natural arrangements of the crowds, of the dresses of Madame Bernstein, and the armour and jewels of Messrs R. White and Sons, of the wigs of Clarkson, and the wonderful electric lighting of Mr T.J. Digby. But all this is putting the cart before the horse. Both cart and horse are necessary, no doubt, in all plays. But the thing to drag a play to real and abiding success, apart from scenery, decoration, brilliancy, limelight, and the female form divine, is acting, acting, acting! There seems to be something like agreement about the play among both pro- and anti-Barrett critics. But The Times mentions that on the first night there was unrest among a section of the audience and that it was some minutes before Barrett could obtain silence for his curtain speech. The discontent was attributed by the critic to the fact that ‘the author has dwelt too much upon the idyllic and too little upon the dramatic features of the play’. Clement Scott in the Daily Telegraph, reporting that ‘A volley of cries was followed by a cannonading of boos’, expanded on the reasons for the hostility: First, the theme is not so interesting, the dramatic pulse is not so quick, and the power of contrast is not so great as in the former play [The Sign of the Cross]; second the acting is not so bold, so impressive. It is even, quiet, bordering on monotony at times; and it is just in dramas of this pattern that colourless, monotonous acting may

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drag a play down which might be exalted by greater impulse and brighter fire. These comments suggest that it was audience hostility rather than critical conspiracy that doomed the play. It is hard to believe that Barrett was not capitalizing here on the interest in Babylon which had been boosted artistically by the huge success of Edwin Long’s painting The Babylonian Marriage Market (1875), ‘the apogee of the Victorian craze for ancient Mesopotamia’.61 Since substantive excavations of Babylon did not begin until 1899, the vision of Babylon created by Victorian painters tended to be heavily influenced by Austen Henry Layard’s discoveries at Nineveh, which produced the two-volume Nineveh and its Remains, and were the inspiration of the Nineveh Court at the Crystal Palace (1854) after its move to Sydenham, several panoramas and Charles Kean’s spectacular production of Byron’s Sardanapalus (1853). Assyrian sculptures were on view in the British Museum by 1850. Babylon inspired Alma-Tadema, Holman Hunt, G.F. Watts, Ford Madox Brown, Ernest Normand, Frederick Goodall, Edward Poynter and Edwin Long. The Babylonian Marriage Market, based on an account in the Histories of Herodotus, combined high art, archaeological detail and the human interest of genre in a dramatically effective tableau. It made Long’s reputation; he was immediately elected an Associate of the Royal Academy. It attracted the highest price ever paid for a picture by a living artist when it was put on sale in 1882. It drew huge crowds and achieved critical acclaim, including from Ruskin, who called it ‘a painting of great merit’ and ‘unobtrusively powerful’. He praised the variety of different female characters depicted for accuracy and detail, its relation to the Bible where Babylon was the home of abominations, and the drawing of a modern moral – that this sale of women was happening in the nineteenth century.62 Margaret Oliphant took the same message in Blackwood’s Magazine – that it drew attention to the ‘sale’ of beautiful women in the season by high society.63 Although The Babylonian Marriage Market was not directly reproduced in Daughters, there is a slave market in which men and women are purchased by men and women, making a similar point about the upsetting of spiritual and gender norms. The painting had been based on extensive primary research, including a trip to the Near East, the study of exhibits in the British Museum, and consultation of books such as George Rawlinson’s The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World (2nd edn, 1871) on the history,

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geography and antiquities of Chaldaea, Assyria, Babylonia, Media and Persia. The novel Quo Vadis? by the Polish novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916) was published in 1896. It was an instant hit and was eventually translated into forty languages. The author received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905. The only one of his historical novels not set in Poland Quo Vadis? was nonetheless inspired by his experience of the oppression of Poland by the Russians, and his belief that moral strength and sacrifice could triumph over brute force. What is remarkable about it is that its story is virtually identical to that of The Sign of the Cross. Apart from the inclusion of the historical characters of St Peter, St Paul and the cynical and worldly Petronius, Nero’s arbiter elegantiae and the happy ending, which sees the lovers united and surviving rather than going to their deaths in the arena, the narrative centres on the pursuit of the virtuous Christian maiden Lygia by the proud pagan Roman officer Marcus Vinicius, who is eventually converted to her faith; the decadence of the court of Nero who starts the great fire of Rome and then persecutes the Christians; the contests in the arena which lead eventually to Nero’s overthrow. The similarities in the story led some critics to accuse Barrett of plagiarism, which was not possible as Barrett’s play was produced on the stage in the United States twelve months before Sienkiewicz’s novel was published in Warsaw. One baffled critic conceded that it was ‘one of the most remarkable cases of coincident thought on record’ (Sketch, 2 May 1900). Three stage adaptations rapidly appeared in the United States, two of them, by Jeanette Gilder and Charles Chase, adhering faithfully to Sienkiewicz’s narrative, even if Miss Gilder eliminated Peter, Paul and ‘other sacred characters’ to avoid giving offence to the devout. The third by Stanislaus Stange, premiered in Chicago, Illinois, later moving on to New York, and was described by journalist H. Chance Newton as ‘a very free adaptation . . . which uses only those parts of Sienkiewicz’s story that he deemed necessary for dramatic effect’.64 It was this version that was produced in London at the Adelphi Theatre on 5 May 1900, with the American actor Robert Taber as Marcus Vinicius, and a British supporting cast, headed by Lena Ashcroft as Lygia and J.H. Barnes as Petronius. ‘A most sumptuous and artistic production’ according to Barnes, it closed after only four weeks.65 Barnes attributed this to the serious reverses the British were suffering in South Africa, in the Boer War, which adversely affected theatre attendance. But the generally hostile reviews must have had something to do with it. The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (9 June 1900)

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pronounced it ‘not an exciting piece, and lacks interest even of an unemotional kind’. Quo Vadis is not strong either in plot or incident. There are wanting the grasp of treatment and vigour of detail which would have given it force either as a drama of Christian martyrdom, or as a tale of earthly love. The adapter does not appear to have been able to sufficiently emphasise the religious element on the one hand, or to make the human interest sufficiently telling to carry the public with him in another direction. There was opportunity, at least so far as the hero and heroine are concerned, for situations at once powerful and sympathetic. But there is little power, and the sympathy is personal to the performers. The only compensation was the visuals: The mounting of Quo Vadis is very attractive as regards the costumes and the armour and that supported by no less than eight elaborate stage pictures by notable scenic artists, the production is well worth attention as a spectacle. So ambitious, indeed, is the mise-en-scène of Quo Vadis, that the story and its interpreters are practically dwarfed into a very minor place. The Times (7 May 1900) greeted the Adelphi production with a mixture of censoriousness and weary resignation. It deplored the popularity of plays ‘compounded of crude sensationalism and quasi-religious sentiment’: However the judicious may grieve over ‘conversions’ brought about under the influence of sexual passion, of Christian humility, and even the recital of sacred texts employed as mere ingredients in a theatrical hodgepodge, the fact remains that the spectacle excites not disgust but delight among a large section of the public. The critic conceded that Sienkiewicz’s novel may have been a work of art but declared firmly that the stage play, with its dialogue composed of ‘modern journalistic cliché’, certainly was not. ‘It is all very deplorable, very silly, very vulgar, no doubt, but it cannot be helped. The public will have its way. And at any rate it cannot be said to be actively harmful.’

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The Athenaeum (12 May 1900) declared it: an unsatisfactory piece of work. Wherever it is possible to vulgarize the story the adapter has succeeded in so doing. He has converted a powerful and not ungraceful work of fiction into a commonplace spectacular melodrama, and he has by the introduction of his own language, degraded the beauty of the story, and given an air of ignorance to what in the original is a piece of fine scholarship. The only compensation was the excellent acting of the leads: ‘Miss Lena Ashwell presented admirably the Christian heroine . . . Mr Taber acted with sincerity and some passion as the hero, and . . . Mr Barnes played with solid excellence as Petronius Arbiter.’ The Era (12 May 1900) was just as cutting and even more patronizing: It would be absurd, of course, to apply any very elevated standard to the measurement of Quo Vadis. We must regard it simply as an ‘entertainment of the stage’, connected with the intention of appealing to a certain class of playgoer – the class which makes cheap melodrama and cheap art generally profitable and popular. They are neither annoyed by anachronisms, nor irritated by obvious ignorance, nor shocked by the familiar, and, as we should consider it, irreverent handling of serious and sacred questions. If we want to understand this great class of playgoer, we must try and realise the widespread success of the Salvation Army amongst the English lower-middle and lower classes. It is evident that anyone who could read the War Cry without any feelings of indignation, would not be shocked by any of the religious clap-trap in Quo Vadis. Having dismissed it thus out of hand, the critic conceded ‘If there is no deep dramatic interest in the piece, there is plenty of movement and sensation of a sort, and it is elaborately dressed and mounted.’ Like the Athenaeum, the Era praised the acting of the leads with G.W. Anson complimented on his reading of Nero, ‘an ingenious mixture of the grotesque and the repulsive. The serio-comic tyrant, with his amateur poetry and his relentless cruelty, was depicted by Mr Anson in very strong colours.’ The scenery by Messrs Helmsley, Spong, Hicks, Harford and Perkins was ‘superb in its elaboration and effectiveness. From such an embarrassment of scenic riches it is not easy to make choice for special praise, but Mr W. Perkins’ view in the circus in the last act is the most sensational of the sets, all of which are very beautiful, the groupings and costumes being admirable.’

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The advent of the Adelphi production had led to a flurry of writs and injunctions as Wilson Barrett claimed to possess the sole rights to dramatize the novel. This was eventually settled and Barrett’s own adaptation opened at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh on 29 May 1900. It was welcomed much more warmly than the Adelphi production by the Era (2 June 1900). Barrett had cast himself in the role of the cynical and sardonic Petronius, an uncharacteristic part but one which Barrett softened and sentimentalized. This casting meant that the four-act adaptation was structured around the parallel love stories of Marcus Vinicius and Lygia and Petronius and his slave girl Eunice. It ended with Petronius and Eunice facilitating the escape of Marcus and Lygia and then taking poison to avoid arrest, ‘the scene, which is artistically arranged, being deeply pathetic’. The Era delivered an encomium on Barrett’s performance: To Mr Barrett himself fell the chief honours of the evening, for though the part of Petronius is not a particularly strong one, and gives its creator too few opportunities for the display of those admirable qualities which have always distinguished him, yet Mr Barrett invested the character with an innate sense of power, a regality and stately dignity which . . . won the complete sympathies of the audience. He delivered the choice flowers of speech given to Petronius with a richness and sonority of voice which was pleasing to the ear, and one might single out for special praise his recitation of the pros and cons in regard to woman. This he rolled off his tongue with what might be called philosophic gusto well in keeping with the part. It was in the death scene that Mr Barrett had his one really fine opportunity, and, although far too long, he held the audience quite silent and interested by the simple spell of some moving and direct acting, instinct with pathos and the serenity of death . . . Mr Barrett has never looked better than in the several gorgeously ornate Roman costumes he wore, particularly a pale blue dress, which showed off his figure to advantage. Of the rest of the cast, the Era praised Ambrose Manning’s Nero (‘by turns diabolic and comic’), though adding ‘it is a question whether he did not overdo the buffoonery business, and make Nero a bit of a comedian’. As Vinicius, newcomer Basil Gill ‘proved himself an actor well fitted to cope with a part which is no easy one to play. It abounds in passionate speeches, and this young actor seconded his able delivery of these with a well-conceived air of dashing soldierly impetuosity, making the part stand out.’ Maud Jeffries acted Lygia

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‘with quiet intensity, and brought out with dramatic consistence the yearning and spiritual beauty of the lovely Christian maiden. She had, however, no special chance in which to give free play to her abilities as an actress, and the part is at best a shadowy one.’ She was rather outshone by Edyth Latimer who ‘had in Eunice a role full of sweetly sympathetic and winsome qualities, and contrived to make it still more pleasing and distinct in its tender appeal by some natural and unaffected acting. Her portrayal of the devotion of the slave, transformed and transfigured by the wand of love, who adores her princely master, Petronius, was one of the brightest and most human spots of the play.’ The review was full of praise too for the scenery, ‘which is of extraordinary beauty, panoramic largeness of outline being combined with an attention to detail in some of the interiors which gives one a haunting reminiscence of the exquisite art work of Mr Alma-Tadema’. Individual scenes were praised: the gardens of the house of Aulus Plautius by William Telbin (‘exquisite’); a room in the house of Petronius by Walter Hann (‘a richly decorated interior’); the gardens of Nero’s Palace by Hawes Craven (‘a well-designed subject’); the exterior of Nero’s Palace by W. Perkins (‘a striking pictorial achievement’); a street in Rome (‘from the practised brush of Mr T.E. Ryan’); the prison of the arena (‘a characteristic interior by Mr Stafford Hall’); a corridor of the circus (‘skilfully painted by Mr H.P. Hall’). The production was received with cheers and when Barrett in his curtain speech asked if he might telegraph Warsaw to report to Sienkiewicz the success of the piece, there were loud shouts of ‘Yes’! Unable to secure a West End theatre, Barrett was forced to open at the Princess of Wales’s Theatre, Kennington, on 18 June 1900. The Era reviewed the production again (23 June 1900), pronounced it ‘immensely superior in every way to the Adelphi version’, praised the scenery (‘superb’), the dresses both male and female (‘magnificent’) and the acting, but thought it did not have the ‘effective theatricality’ of The Sign of the Cross and had an overlong last act. The Daily Telegraph (19 June 1900), noting that the Stange version had already failed at the Adelphi, observed that Barrett started with certain advantages which the rival version lacked: He knows his public – especially the provincial public of these islands; he knows the ins and outs of stagecraft as well as ever Boucicault did; he knows what is dramatically effective, and is not afraid to employ it . . . Added to these qualifications he has never shown any

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disposition to stint expenditure in the mounting of any piece on which he has set his heart. The critic praised the scenery of Telbin, Hann, Ryan and Hall, ‘an ample supply of sensational incident in a theatrically effective setting’, the acting of Barrett as Petronius and Basil Gill as Vinicius, but noted that several of the supporting performances were inferior to the Adelphi version and, most seriously, pointed to the fact that it had really all been seen before in The Sign of the Cross. The Illustrated London News (23 June 1900) thought Barrett’s version differed from the Adelphi version in ‘the better stage management and greater magnificence of its scenic pictures’, but noted that the dramatic emphasis had been shifted from Vinicius to Petronius, the role Barrett had taken. It observed that there were ‘abundant opportunities for graceful posing and vigorous declamation’. Although Barrett gave touring rights in the production to Ben Greet, the play never achieved the success of The Sign of the Cross which continued to be a mainstay of Barrett’s touring repertoire. Another attempt to cash in on the success of The Sign of the Cross came in 1897 when touring actor-manager Edmund Tearle commissioned an adaptation of Cardinal Wiseman’s 1854 novel Fabiola. The drama, retitled From Cross to Crown, was written by Revd Arthur Whitley but when Tearle required alterations in the text and Whitley refused to make them, Tearle substituted another adaptation made by his wife Kate Clinton and retitled The Christian Cross and the Martyr’s Crown. When it was performed in Birmingham in 1898, the Birmingham Daily Post (22 March 1898), labelling it an imitation of The Sign of the Cross, denounced it as ‘degrading’ and ‘repulsive’. Tearle sued and received £40 in compensation. The play continued successfully in Tearle’s repertoire until 1901.66 Barrett’s toga plays conformed to the recurring main themes of the genre. There is the moral redemption of a dissolute and/or pagan Roman aristocrat (Claudian, The Sign of the Cross, Quo Vadis) by true love and the acceptance of Christianity, personalizing the need for religious faith to underpin empire. There is the exposure of the heartless, manipulative courtesan, governed by the desire for sex and/or power (Helle in Clito, Ishtar in Daughters of Babylon, Berenis in The Sign of the Cross). They are antique versions of the late nineteenth-century ‘New Woman’ who horrified traditionalists. Ishtar, for example, reversed gender norms by buying a man. But there were also themes particular to Barrett and present in many of his works. There is democratic resistance

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to aristocratic tyranny (Clito, Virginius, The Daughters of Babylon, Junius) – Barrett described himself as ‘a bit of a socialist in my own peculiar way’.67 There is the celebration of female honour and the integrity of the family (in Junius Lucretia kills herself following her rape and her relative Junius Brutus kills the rapist; in Virginius the eponymous hero kills his daughter to save her from the lustful attentions of an aristocrat and then kills the aristocrat; in Clito Irene kills herself to escape the attentions of Glaucias, who is then killed by her brother). At the same time by his scrupulous attention to settings and costumes he consistently sought to educate the taste and historical knowledge of his audiences, fulfilling faithfully Ruskin’s injunction. The high-brow disdain which had dogged him all his career pursued him to the grave. When he died on 22 July 1904, at the age of 58 following an operation for cancer, The Times (23 July 1904), while praising him as a ‘man of strong character and untiring energy, (who) did a vast amount of work and supported with patience and courage more professional misfortune and private trouble than falls to most men’, nevertheless disparaged his work. The Lights o’ London committed him ‘to a course of melodrama from which he never afterwards wholly escaped’. His performance as Hamlet was ‘of no importance to the history of the play’. The Sign of the Cross ‘was a sensational and crude exploitation of religious sentiment; but, oddly enough, it succeeded in making theatre-goers of a large number of people who had till then regarded the stage as an immoral and pernicious influence’. His later plays, The Daughters of Babylon, Quo Vadis and The Christian King ‘were all aimed at the same public; but all suffered from the crudity, while lacking the novelty, of his first effort in that direction’. It concluded: ‘Though Mr Barrett was never a great actor – indeed outside certain limits, not even a good one – he was immensely popular with certain audiences, especially in the provinces, the Colonies, and the United States.’ A more generous assessment came from Clement Scott: A management only second in importance to that of Henry Irving was that of Wilson Barrett, actor, dramatist, manager, good fellow and plucky Yorkshireman to the backbone. In early youth he took to the stage as a duck takes to water. Acting was with him a second nature, and in his time he has done everything from Harlequin to Hamlet. All the years I have known him . . . now up, now down . . . I have never ceased to wonder at his exhaustive energy and his marvellous recuperative power. Wilson Barrett throughout his honourable career never knew what defeat was; and though some of his Daedalian

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flights were a little too ambitious and near the sun, his wings were not of wax, and he always . . . fell on his feet. Few managers have done more for young authors than this versatile artist. Many of our most successful dramatists owe their first start in life to him, for he could do more than criticise – he could construct; his was not mere suggestion, it was a practical result of considerable value. A man with quicker brain, and happier dramatic ideas I have seldom met.68

5 Irving’s Ancient World

The twin colossi of the late Victorian and early Edwardian stage were Sir Henry Irving (knighted in 1895) and Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (knighted in 1909). They eyed each other warily from their respective bases, the Lyceum Theatre and Her Majesty’s (later His Majesty’s) Theatre in Haymarket, as each sought to create productions of Shakespeare and newly commissioned poetic dramas in the lavish pictorial style that the age demanded. Irving was the established master, the undisputed and revered head of the profession, with the Lyceum described by one commentator as ‘a national theatre but without a subsidy’, his pre-eminence lasting from 1872 to 1900.1 Tree was the young pretender but eventual successor to the man known to his company as ‘The Guv’nor’, his reign as actor-manager lasting from 1887 to 1917. Both were essentially character actors rather than conventionally heroic leading men and both were talented and visionary directors, but they were from different generations and this was reflected in their repertoires. Irving, born in 1838, had an Evangelical background and his theatrical world was dominated by dramas of conscience and the threat to the political, moral and domestic order. Tree, born in 1852, was a product of the age of empire. His repertoire, unlike Irving’s, included modern imperial melodramas (The Man Who Was, Carnac Sahib) and far more toga plays dealing with the problems of empire in a classical setting than Irving ever tackled. Irving and Tree were masters of the pictorial stage. It was in the 1880s, according to Martin Meisel in his monumental study of the phenomenon, that a fully pictorial stage was achieved, blending actor and crowds in a setting with a sustained atmospheric and compositional unity.2 Controversy raged over the dominance of pictorialism and it centred on the production of Shakespeare, with one faction wanting simple, 152

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undecorated stagings of Shakespeare concentrating on the acting and the text and another faction favouring a fully pictorial realization of the plays. Irving and Tree were both passionate champions of the pictorial approach and what they applied to their Shakespeare productions, they applied also to their non-Shakespeare productions. Irving articulated his holistic philosophy of stagecraft in 1885: To-day we are employing all our resources to heighten the picturesque effects of the drama, and we are still told this is a gross error. It may be admitted that nothing is more objectionable than certain kinds of realism, which are simply vulgar; but harmony of colour and grace of outline have a legitimate sphere in the theatre, and the method which uses them as adjuncts may claim to be ‘as wholesome as sweet, and by very much more handsome than fine’. For the abuse of scenic decoration, the overloading of the stage with ornament, the subordination of the play to a pageant, I have nothing to say. That is all foreign to the artistic purpose which should dominate dramatic work. You perceive that the nicest discretion is needed in the use of the materials which are nowadays at the disposal of the manager. Music, painting, architecture, the endless variations of costume, have all to be employed with strict regard to the production of an artistic whole, in which no element shall be unduly obtrusive.3 Irving was fully aware always of the criticism of overloading the stage with unnecessary decoration and elaborateness. But he defended pictorialism as both necessary and desirable. It was necessary because the public demanded it. In his preface to the Irving Shakespeare, he wrote: Much objection has been made to the employment of the sister arts of music and painting in the stage representation of Shakespeare, and to the elaborate illustrations of the countries in which the various scenes are laid, or of the dress and surroundings of the different characters. I do not contend that a play, fairly acted, cannot be fully effective without any of these aids and adjuncts. But, practically, their value has ceased to be a matter of opinion; they have become necessary. They are dictated by the public taste of the day – not by the desire for mere scenic display, but that demand for finish in detail which has grown with the development of art in all its phases. A painter who should neglect truthful detail, however broad and powerful his method, would nowadays be exposed to severe criticism. This is not a proof of decadence; it is a striving after completeness.4

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It was desirable for educational purposes: Not for a moment is the position to be accepted that the theatre is merely a place of amusement . . . It is a living power, to be used for good, or possibly for evil; and far-seeing men recognise in it, based though it be on the relaxation and pleasures of the people, an educational medium of no mean order. Its progress in the past century has been the means of teaching to millions of people a great number of facts which had perhaps otherwise been lost to them. How many are there who have had brought home to them in an understandable manner by stage-plays the costumes, habits, manners and customs of countries and ages other than their own; what insight have they obtained into facts and vicissitudes of life – of passions and sorrows and ambitions outside the narrow scope of their own lives, and which yet may and do mould the destinies of men. All this is education.5 It was also desirable for artistic purposes: In order to promote and preserve the idea of reality in the minds of the public, it is necessary that the action of the play be set in what the painters call the proper milieu, or atmosphere. To this belongs costume, scenery, and all that tends to set forth time and place other than our own. If this idea be not kept in view, there must be, or at all events there may be, some disturbing cause to the mind of the onlooker. This is all – literally all – that dramatic Art imperatively demands from the paint room, the wardrobe, and the propertyshop.6 He warned that the actor too must be incorporated into this whole: It is most important that an actor should learn that he is a figure in a picture, and that the least exaggeration destroys the harmony of the composition. All the members of the Company should work towards a common end with the nicest subordination of their individuality to the general purpose. Without this method a play when acted is at best a disjointed and incoherent piece of work, instead of being a harmonious whole like the fine performance of an orchestral symphony.7 Irving preferred staging plays with medieval and Renaissance settings to plays set in the Ancient World but when he did venture there he brought his strong visual sense to their staging. One of the first studies

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of aestheticism, Walter Hamilton’s The Aesthetic Movement in England (1882), declared ‘it is at the Lyceum that Aestheticism in all its beauty can be seen’ and this was to be seen fully developed in Irving’s production of Lord Tennyson’s poetic tragedy, The Cup, which Hamilton said was ‘a lovely poem . . . presented to the public in a magnificent setting, as only such a priceless jewel should have’.8 The Cup was the play identified by David Mayer as the first of the late nineteenth-century toga cycle.9 It ran at the Lyceum from January to April 1881 and was part of Irving’s plan to bring the dramas of the poet laureate to the stage in order to revivify the English tradition of poetic tragedy, which was held by the Victorians to be the highest form of dramatic art. The plot of The Cup was taken from Plutarch and recounted the story of a Galatian noblewoman, Camma. Synorix, the former tetrarch of Galatia, ousted by his people for debauching local women, returns to the province, now ruled by the Romans, and is commissioned by the Roman general Antonius to investigate rumours of a conspiracy headed by Sinnatus. Lusting after Sinnatus’ wife Camma, he kills Sinnatus and is subsequently proclaimed king by the Romans. Camma takes refuge in the temple of Artemis and becomes a priestess but Synorix repeatedly requests her hand in marriage. She finally agrees but at the wedding presents him with the cup he had given her. Both drink from it and both die as she has poisoned the wine. Dying she declares that she had intended poisoning Antonius too but if Galatia has to be ruled by the Romans, he is gentle and worthy. Antonius forgives her for poisoning Rome’s nominated king. Irving played Synorix, Ellen Terry, Camma and William Terriss, Sinnatus. The text of the play conformed to the themes of the later toga plays, focusing on the proper role for women, the celebration of marital fidelity, the denunciation of male sensuality and licentiousness and an exploration of the conflict of ethics and political necessity in imperial rule. The play was staged with an archaeologically accurate reconstruction of the temple of Diana at Ephesus. The costumes for Ellen Terry, playing the heroine Camma, and the cup itself were designed by E.W. Godwin. The critics, entranced by the visual splendours of the production, turned to painting to describe the stage effects. The scene painting was by William Telbin, Hawes Craven and William Cuthbert. Among others, Clement Scott of the Daily Telegraph and the critics of Pan and Truth invoked Leighton and Alma-Tadema as the inspiration for the visuals. It was at the first night of The Cup that Alma-Tadema said to Irving with a sigh ‘Ah! how poor is my art after this’, to which Irving replied: ‘Ah! Tadema, when I am dead and gone my art is gone, while yours lives

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for ever.’10 It was a production that the critics long remembered. William Archer, often critical of Irving, said in 1882 that Irving ‘mounted the piece with a taste and lavishness positively unexampled. Each scene was a masterpiece in itself. I doubt if a more elaborate and perfect stage-picture of its kind has ever been seen, and if so, certainly not in England.’11 Percy Fitzgerald recorded in 1906 of The Cup: ‘It still lingers in the memory with an inexpressible charm, breathing poetry and romance. We shall ever look back fondly to The Cup, with its exquisite setting . . . There was something so fascinating about the play, something so refining, and also so “fantastical” that . . . it satisfied the eye and ear.’12 Despite the fact that Irving had at his disposal the most eminent scene-painters in the business, he also saw the publicity value in drawing on the services of established artists who were both revered by the intelligentsia and also had popular appeal. When Irving decided to produce King Lear in 1892 there was only one artist to whom he could turn – Ford Madox Brown (1821–93), who had had a career-long interest in the play. Irving had an engraving of Brown’s painting Cordelia’s Portion (1866) on his dressing-room wall, and, according to the painter Graham Robertson, he ‘admired it immensely’.13 He also acquired sixteen penand-ink drawings of scenes from King Lear that Brown had executed in the 1840s. These, together with the painting Lear and Cordelia (1848–54), set the style of the production.14 In addition, Irving engaged Brown to design the Romano-British interiors of Lear’s palace and Albany’s hall, as well as the exterior of Gloucester’s castle with a Roman temple in the background. Irving attributed to Brown the suggestion that he set the play at ‘a time shortly after the departure of the Romans, when the Britons would naturally inhabit the houses they left vacant’.15 This enabled the production to marry archaeological accuracy and painterly inspiration in the creation of the stage imagery. The result was hailed by Clement Scott: ‘we do not believe that the English stage has ever seen the play of “King Lear” mounted and set in such a splendid frame or coloured with such artistic taste . . . The eye is enchanted with pictures of fascinating and harmonious colour, and the mind is absorbed in countless scenes of rare and imposing magnificence.’16 Irving called on Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912) to design his productions of Cymbeline and Coriolanus. He later wrote to AlmaTadema’s biographer Percy Cross Standing that Alma-Tadema’s designs for the two productions were ‘one and all, exquisite works of the highest art, full of imagination, poetry, and learning and they must all live. In every case they were accurate lessons in archaeology, and in Cymbeline he dealt with a period almost “new” in art – the carved and ornamented

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wood, stone and metal work of the early Britons. No praise could, to my mind, be too great for Sir Lawrence’s work for the stage.’ Ellen Terry also wrote to Standing about the costumes Alma-Tadema designed for her in her roles as Volumnia and Imogen: ‘The costumes were very very beautiful, but I can give you no adequate idea of the colours – the colour could only be expressed by Sir Lawrence himself! He contrived to make me look like a young girl, which was a wizard’s work, for it was not so very long ago that I played Imogen.’ She was actually forty-eight at the time.17 Alma-Tadema, celebrated for his visually stunning, meticulously accurate pictures of everyday life in the Ancient World, was not just an expert on ancient architecture but on statuary, arms and armour, furniture and lighting, the implements of domestic life and the staging of ritual and ceremonial. Bram Stoker, Irving’s business manager, recalled: ‘Irving felt that with such an artist to help – archaeologist, specialist and genius in one – he would be able to put before an audience such work as would not only charm them by its beauty and interest them in its novelty but would convince by its suitability.’18 Cymbeline, a fantastical romance set partly in Ancient Britain and partly in Renaissance Italy, perplexed the literal-minded Victorians. This is not surprising as Shakespeare had taken a story from Boccaccio’s Decameron (husband lays wager with a profligate as to his wife’s fidelity and is tricked into believing her unfaithful) and set it in Ancient Britain at the court of the semi-mythical king Cymbeline, as described in Holinshed’s Chronicles. More than this, it overflowed with contrivances, coincidences, impostures, disguises and a finale so loaded with revelations it risks provoking audience laughter. The reaction to the play of William Archer was typical. He called Cymbeline: ‘anything but a good play . . . it is constructed in plain defiance not merely of any and every set of canons, but of rudimentary common sense’.19 Bernard Shaw went further, dismissing the play as ‘for the most part stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order, in parts abominably written, throughout intellectually vulgar, and judged in point of thought by modern intellectual standards, vulgar, foolish, offensive, indecent, and exasperating beyond all tolerance’.20 But it contained one of the best-loved of Shakespeare’s female roles, Imogen, the model of the perfect faithful wife. It was an ideal role for Ellen Terry. It was the perennial appeal of the character of Imogen that probably accounted for the sporadic revivals of the play. Professor Morley summed up this appeal for the Victorians when he wrote that the part represents ‘the purest and most womanly of Shakespeare’s women; in

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the whole range of poetry the most delicate embodiment of all the qualities that blend to form a womanly perfection – simple piety, wifely devotion, instinctive, unobtrusive modesty, gentle courtesy, moral heroism . . . no thin ideal, but a very woman, who includes among her virtues aptitude for cookery’.21 Macready presented it only six times during his four seasons of management (1837–39, 1841–43) but his Imogen in 1837 was Helen Faucit, one of the nineteenth-century’s exemplars of ideal womanhood. Imogen became one of her favourite roles and she would retain it in her repertoire until she retired. She played it with a variety of co-stars. George Vandenhoff, who played Iachimo to her Imogen in 1838, recorded: ‘She excelled in depictions of the pure, unselfish, self-sacrificing love of a virtuous woman.’22 The most memorable of Macready’s revivals opened on 21 January 1843 at Drury Lane with Helen Faucit as Imogen, James Anderson as Posthumus, Samuel Phelps as Belarius and Macready as Iachimo. Macready sought to make sense of the text by removing as many of the incongruities as possible, eliminating the bawdy and indelicacy and toning down the grotesquerie. He utilized eleven sets, some of them probably the work of his chief scene-painter Charles Marshall. Carol Carlisle, who has studied watercolour paintings of the sets, writes that they were ‘evidently designed for imaginative effect and not historical consistency: the scene in Rome was obviously classical, but the interior views of Cymbeline’s palace predominantly suggested the Romanesque architecture of a later period’. The costumes similarly avoided precise historical recreation. Reviewers agreed that the production was ‘tasteful, elegant and appropriate’. Macready included a spectacular climactic battle and patriotically omitted the submission of the Britons to Caesar, settling instead for a friendly final reunion of Britons and Romans.23 In his regime at Sadler’s Wells, Phelps included Cymbeline in five of his eighteen seasons, chalking up forty-eight performances, the greatest number (nineteen) in the 1847–48 season. Phelps played Posthumus with Laura Addison as Imogen. Charles Dickens wrote a congratulatory letter to Phelps: ‘the excellent sense, taste and feeling manifested throughout; the great beauty of all the stage arrangements; and the respectful consideration . . . shown by everyone concerned for the creation of the poet, gave me extraordinary gratification’. Lloyd’s Weekly (3 November 1850) said that few plays had ever come to the stage in such a handsome setting or with such careful consistency in costuming and decoration.24

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Helen Faucit returned to the West End in the role of Imogen in 1864–65 at Drury Lane. On 17 October 1864, she opened in Cymbeline for eight performances with Samuel Phelps as Posthumus and William Creswick as Iachimo, returning on 6 March 1865 for five performances with Walter Montgomery as Posthumus and James Anderson as Iachimo. Most critics admired the beauty of the production and the subtlety of Helen Faucit’s playing. Several of them noted that it strongly resembled Macready’s 1843 production, which would not have been surprising had they known that the scenery being used was from the 1843 production, brought out of storage and touched up by William Beverley. But the critical approval of the settings is put into context by a review of the 1864 production by E.W. Godwin, scourge of the inauthentic in Shakespearean settings. He thought that only three of the cast (Phelps, Faucit and Mr Rayner as Cymbeline) ‘seemed to have the smallest notion of what they were supposed to be doing’. The rest of the cast were ‘stagy, wearisome, and, at times, offensive’. The scenery, he declared, was ‘disgraceful’. A chamber in the palace was ‘like the octagonal lobby . . . of the present Houses of Parliament’ and the bedstead of a British princess, ‘a modern French-lace bedecked tent-shaped apparatus placed in the middle of the room’. The Romans were dressed ‘à la Octavius Caesar’. The Britons were dressed as Anglo-Saxons and the king’s son in fourteenth-century costume with a chain like the modern collar of the Order of the Garter.25 This perhaps shows how far the theatre yet had to go in terms of historical authenticity. The next major production after Faucit’s Drury Lane revivals was in 1872 at the Queen’s Theatre, Long Acre. Dutton Cook thought it had been produced ‘with considerable painstaking and liberality’. He noted that some attempt at historical authenticity had been made by investing ‘Cymbeline’s palace with the characteristics of Anglo-Saxon architecture; Posthumus assumes a kind of Viking guise, and Iachimo and the French Gentleman wear the dress of Imperial Rome’. Of the production, he noted ‘The play has been greatly condensed . . . although it may be said that the intelligibility of the story is, on the whole, fairly preserved. The conflict between the Roman and British forces in the last act is not very impressively conducted . . . The representation was sufficiently spirited, though lacking in refinement and intellectuality.’ John Ryder played Iachimo (‘he possesses elocutionary skill and plays with a vigour which commends him to the approval of his audience’), George Rignold, Posthumus (‘zealous and energetic’) and Henrietta Hodson, Imogen (‘creditable enough’).26

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When Irving revived the play in 1896, it was the first major production in London since 1872 and would not be done again until 1923. Irving cut about half of the play, minimizing the indecency, eliminating the supernatural elements (Jupiter, the ghosts, the soothsayer), reducing the political dimension (the Rome versus Britain conflict), so that it became primarily an example of that favourite Victorian genre, the domestic drama, albeit in exotic dress. The dominant themes were Imogen’s wifely fidelity, Belarius’ devotion to his supposed sons, the estrangement of father and daughter (the Cymbeline/Imogen relationship recalling that of Lear and Cordelia), and the machinations of the wicked stepmother queen and her idiot son, all culminating in a grand family reunion. Predictably Ellen Terry’s Imogen enchanted the critics. ‘What could be more charming, more captivating, more true than Miss Ellen Terry’s rendering of one of the most beautiful of Shakespeare’s heroines? It was absolutely flawless’ was typical of the critical reactions.27 William Archer said that hers was ‘a delightful performance, certainly one of the most charming things she has ever done’.28 William Winter noted the remarkable fact that although she was forty-eight, Ellen’s Imogen was marked by the pervasive qualities of ‘its girlishness . . . its witchery of personal enchantment, its womanly tenderness, and its eager, if somewhat hoyden-like, glee’.29 Ellen Terry herself thought it her ‘only inspired performance’ in her last ten years at the Lyceum.30 The leading male role had hitherto been considered to be Posthumus, but Irving took on the part of Iachimo and fashioned out of it another of his Machiavellian Italian villains, winning over even his sternest critics. Bernard Shaw, who rarely had a good word to say for him, recorded with evident astonishment that Irving had transformed Iachimo who in Shakespeare’s version was ‘a mere diabolus ex machina’. Irving’s Iachimo is a very different affair. It is a new and independent creation. I knew Shakespear’s [sic] play inside and out before last Tuesday; but this Iachimo was quite fresh and novel to me. I witnessed it with unqualified delight; it was no vulgar bagful of ‘points’, but a true impersonation, unbroken in its life-current from end to end, varied on the surface with the finest comedy, and without a single lapse in the sustained beauty of its execution.31 William Archer declared: Iachimo is quite in Sir Henry Irving’s line, and he makes a striking and memorable figure of him. Shakespeare probably conceived a younger,

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lighter, more irresponsible villain – a stinging gad-fly rather than a rattlesnake. . . . Sir Henry Irving’s Iachimo is not ‘a slight thing’ at all. He is a subtle, tenebrous, deadly creature. His acting is extremely artistic, both in what he does and in what he refrains from doing.32 Having fashioned a role that played to his acting strengths, Irving next sought to make sense of the settings. The Times (23 September 1896) reported: In the qualities requisite to ensure a great popular success this weakest of Shakespeare’s plays is, we fear, deficient, though the best has been done for it in the way of superb mounting . . . undeterred by the fact that Shakespeare has obviously given no thought at all to archaeology, Sir Henry Irving is prepared with a consistent scheme of stage decoration, and appointments, one end of which rests in Ancient Britain during the early period of the Roman occupation, and the other contemporaneously in Imperial Rome. Alma-Tadema provided designs that contrasted Celtic Britain and imperial Rome strikingly and effectively. The designs were executed by scene painters Hawes Craven and Joseph Harker. The Era (26 September 1896) said: Hearty praise is deserved by the mounting. The eighteen scenes into which the play was divided were – both sets and cloths – admirably artistic. There was no attempt to dazzle by mere spectacle, and the scenery was retained in its proper position as background to and accompaniment of the action. For his representation of the Garden of Cymbeline’s Palace in the first act Mr Hawes Craven had evidently searched the archaeological scriptures carefully, and the stage picture was a lesson in Celtic construction and ornament, which must have sent many of the curious to their books for explanation of its odd decorations and mysterious monolith. Mr Joseph Harker’s Triclinium in Philario’s house was classically correct and well stage-managed, and nothing could have given a better idea of the blasé condition of the Roman aristocracy than the complete indifference of the dinersout to the pas seul of the female dancer who appeared before them for a few moments. A cloth which was very illusive was Mr. Harker’s Atrium in Philario’s house, in the third act. Mr Craven also distinguished himself by his landscape views in the vicinity of the Cave in Wales, and near the battle-field in Britain . . . the costumes had

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evidently been designed after careful consultation of the authorities, some of the dyes in Miss Terry’s dress being delightfully modulated. As a result of the staging and the performances it ran for 88 performances. Irving announced his intention of producing Coriolanus at the close of his second season as actor-manager on 25 July 1879. Throughout 1880 and 1881 Alma-Tadema worked on the designs and although he announced it again at the end of the 1881 season, Irving continually postponed the production. Stoker suggests that this was because Ellen Terry was too young to play the leading female role, Coriolanus’ mother Volumnia, and he wanted to put on plays that would showcase her youth and beauty. In fact it was not until 1901 that Irving staged Coriolanus, almost certainly in a bid to emulate Tree’s success with Julius Caesar. But Coriolanus had never been popular. Its central figure was not a hero with whom the Victorian public could identify. The Morning Post (16 April 1901) declared that ‘its weak point . . . for the modern spectator is that the pride and temper of the hero estrange him from that sympathy without which no tragic hero can exist. We do not sympathise except with those whom we recognise as men of like passions with ourselves.’ The Era (20 April 1901) declared the embellishments of mounting and music necessary to the play: for, to speak frankly Coriolanus is not one of the most dramatic and interesting of Shakespeare’s plays. It has never been popular . . . To a modern audience Coriolanus appears to be an egotistical swashbuckler, with no good quality except personal courage, uncivic, unfeeling, with a vanity which is all the more offensive on account of the mock modesty which he assumes to try to conceal it, and with a colossal selfishness which makes him a social outcast. The last major production of the play prior to Irving’s had been in 1860 when Samuel Phelps staged it at Sadler’s Wells. Irving himself had never seen it. So why was he so determined to produce it? The answer perhaps lies in his conception of the play. It has been argued that Irving took neither the political plot (the class conflict between the proud aristocratic general Coriolanus and the proletariat) nor the rivalry between Coriolanus and the Volscian leader Aufidius as the central conflict. Instead, Irving saw it as ‘a tragedy of filial love’, centring on the conflict between Coriolanus and his mother Volumnia about

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duty to Rome. Irving cut and reconstructed the play, reducing it to three acts and eliminating the battles, to emphasize this. His own experience of rejection by his devoutly Methodist mother when he went on the stage might provide the explanation for his determination to put on this production as the dramatic working-out of mother-son conflict in his own life. Although he cut the battles, he provided spectacle in the form of a triumphal procession for Coriolanus’ ovation after his victory over the Volscians.33 The Forum was ‘crowded with girls carrying palms, men with branches of green trees, children scattering flowers, senators in white and purple, and lictors in brown tunics’, and Irving as Coriolanus entered on a chariot drawn by four cream-coloured horses ‘gay with trappings of buff and red’ and followed by uniformed Roman soldiers carrying the eagle standard.34 The production was destined to be remembered more for its sets and costumes than its performances. Bold martial generals were not within Irving’s range nor severe Roman matrons within Ellen Terry’s.35 J.H. Barnes, who played Menenius Agrippa in Irving’s production, recalled the role as ‘one of my best successes in London’ and the reviews of his performance were generally excellent. ‘I enjoyed playing the part immensely; humorous, straightforward, and intensely human, he is a splendid foil to the somewhat gloomy principals, and is always welcome to the audience in scenes that are amongst the most natural in the play.’ But he turned a critical actor’s eye on the performances of the principals: It cannot be said that Irving’s performance in the name part was one of his strongest impersonations. His expression of biting sarcasm and withering contempt for his foes was magnificent; and a thing to be remembered; but he lacked the physique for the warrior scenes of the part, and altogether failed to convey that side of the character. Neither was Miss Ellen Terry happy in Volumnia. Though her old charm was in evidence at every turn, her feeling, as expressed, was rather that of a sweetheart than the love of a Roman mother for a Spartan son, and many of the scenes were unconvincing.36 Given the popular consensus about the merits of the play, why did all the great actors of the nineteenth century feel obliged to undertake it? The answer lies in the audience’s expectations of the star actor. He was expected to test himself in all the Shakespearean roles in which his eminent predecessors had won acclaim. These roles were Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, Lear, Romeo, Iago, Richard III, Shylock, Iachimo and Coriolanus. Coriolanus was there by virtue of Kemble’s conspicuous

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success in the part. No actor who did not undertake these roles could expect to be regarded as great.37 Interviewed by the Daily News (16 April 1901), Alma-Tadema declared that Coriolanus presented particular difficulties that other plays did not. One was the lack of detailed knowledge of the period and another was the need for dramatic contrast in the staging of the play. Early Roman civilization, he had discovered, was largely Etruscan in character. But it was necessary in this play to mark a contrast between the inhabitants and the builders of Rome and Corioli, and to make the Rome of Marcius more distinctively Roman, and I was obliged to avail myself of a little artistic or poetic license. In the Volscian scenes I have made some attempts . . . to reconstruct the known characteristics of Etruscan architecture. In the Roman scenes, while partly preserving the same character, I have allowed myself a little latitude in bringing the date of the play in architecture a little nearer to a period which can be recognised as definitely Roman, while I have sometimes assumed that the earliest forms of furniture and other accessories were not so different in earliest Rome than in earliest Greece. Irving’s condensation of the play into three acts and ten scenes called for sets and backdrops representing the forums in Rome and Antium, the interior of the Senate house in Rome, the interior of Coriolanus’ house, the interior and exterior of Tullus Aufidius’ house and two streets in Rome. For guidance, Alma-Tadema turned to Vitruvius’ description of an Etruscan temple, the design of Etruscan and Lycian tombs and recent archaeological discoveries in Volterra, Vulci and Cerveteri. He also rejected the idea of simulating marble, which, in the period he had chosen, had not been commonly utilized in buildings, preferring wood and brick, which were more authentic. Alma-Tadema’s designs were faithfully executed by Hawes Craven, Joseph Harker and Walter Hann. The results were nothing less than sensational. Standing suggests that Alma-Tadema’s designs for the Forum in Rome and the less elaborate Forum in Antium were ‘among the most effective of his stage pictures’.38 The Era (20 April 1901) declared: ‘A visit to Coriolanus . . . is a liberal education in the attire, the furniture, the weapons and the architecture of Rome five hundred years before Christ.’ Richard Phené Spiers FRIBA, FSA, calling the designs ‘a revelation’, devoted a lengthy article in the Architectural Review to an analysis of them, an article subsequently published as a free-standing pamphlet.39

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Coriolanus was almost foredoomed to failure, despite the splendour of its mounting. Critic after critic lined up to dismiss it. Typical of the comments was: ‘Neither in the study nor on the stage is “Coriolanus” an attractive work . . . For the theatre there has never been “money” in “Coriolanus”; the play is no tragedy; Coriolanus is no hero . . . the whole play shows signs of half hearted and unfinished workmanship . . . Much of the verse is clumsy and careless.’40 But there was general praise for the production: ‘thanks . . . to the valuable artistic help of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema for the designing of the Ancient Roman scenes and dresses, Sir Henry has presented the most marvellous stage picture of masses of moving crowds ever seen on any stage. It is mise-en-scène, indeed, that would make the reputed author of the tragedy rub his eyes and exclaim, “Can such things be” ’; ‘Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s work in relation to the scenery has produced some of the finest scenic effects ever given at the Lyceum, and presents a remarkably interesting series of picture of Roman life.’41 Although Ellen Terry was generally seen as too sympathetic for the role of Volumnia and regular playgoer Richard Dickins dismissed her Volumnia as ‘little more than Ellen Terry in Roman attire’, the attire received detailed attention.42 In one newspaper ‘our lady correspondent’ reviewing the dresses, praised Volumnia’s costumes, the ‘beautiful chiton of pure silk, with the wide full sleeves caught together with gold ornaments’, the tunic of apple green bordered with gold, and ‘a veil of shimmering grey silk’, and later in the play, a flamecoloured chiton, white tunic embroidered with gold and with large uncut rubies in her hair.43 Writing in 1939 Frederick Harker recalled Coriolanus: The production was the finest I had seen at the Lyceum. The scenery, some of the best work of Hawes Craven and Joseph Harker, from the designs of Sir Alma-Tadema, was of rare beauty, using that word in the sense that Keats used it . . . ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’, for the archaeological accuracy of the mounting was a great feature of the revival. One scene I can still visualize, remarkable for its simple grandeur – ‘The Capitol’. Against grey stone walls, with little ornamentation, tier upon tier of seats filled the whole back of the scene, on which were seated the white-robed, grey-bearded senators, whose interest in the proceedings was intense. When at the close of the scene, wishing him good speed, they exclaimed with one voice: ‘To Coriolanus come all joy and honour’, one felt it was no ordinary crowd just speaking in unison, but that

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there was individuality in it, as if each senator was speaking for himself.44 But equally significant is Harker’s statement that in his entire theatregoing experience, he had never seen Coriolanus before or since that Irving production. Its unpopularity as a text doomed it with the public. It flopped and was withdrawn after 36 performances.45 The final expression of the Kemble tradition came not with Irving but with Frank Benson (1858–1939) who had made his stage debut as Paris in Irving’s production of Romeo and Juliet at the Lyceum in 1882 after achieving success as producer and performer (in the role of Clytemnestra) in an amateur production at Oxford of the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, a production which had attracted considerable interest from the quality press and the intelligentsia. Taking over the Walter Bentley Company in 1883 when it went bankrupt, Benson embarked on a career as actor-manager which lasted until 1933. He toured the provinces continuously, bringing Shakespeare to the masses, and from 1886 onwards, he staged 28 spring festivals and half-a-dozen summer festivals at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-uponAvon, during which he staged every Shakespeare play except for Titus Andronicus and Troilus and Cressida. He was knighted in 1916 for services to the theatre while playing the title role in Julius Caesar during the Shakespeare Tercentenary Gala at Drury Lane. He received the accolade from King George V with a property sword in the royal box during the intermission. Benson first presented Coriolanus at Stratford in August 1893. The Theatre, noting the historic association of John Philip Kemble with the role, observed: Given the stateliness of ‘John Philip’, the graceful limbs, the studied poses, the sonorous utterance, and Coriolanus is already three parts played. Now Mr Benson has all this and something more. There is a natural note of aristocratic exclusiveness in him which supplies exactly what is wanted to round off his picture of the man. Noting that Benson brought to the part ‘Those fine Dantesque features of him . . . the long steel-knit frame . . . the measured style . . . the transparent honest nature’, the critic concluded ‘he does almost all that can be done with the part’. The ‘exciting handling’ of the crowds was praised and the scenery and stage-management (‘of surprising elaborateness and excellence’) but Miss Alice Chapin’s Volumnia was deemed ‘far

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too Madonna-like in spirit for the proud Volumnia’.46 He repeated the production in Stratford in 1898, 1907, 1909, 1910, 1912, 1915 and 1919. Benson’s approach was different from that of Irving and closer in spirit to Phelps, whose arrangement of the play he seems to have followed.47 Of Irving he wrote: ‘Consummate master of the actor’s technique, he was sometimes led to overlay or detract from the effects of that technique by the delight he took in putting before the public beautiful pictures, in bringing on to the stage the life and atmosphere of the period represented.’48 Benson’s own method of production involved a series of decorated flats and wings, simple but tastefully painted, and a concentration on performing the text, maintaining narrative drive and ensuring clear and accurate verse-speaking. In 1900 he brought his company into London, embarking on an eight-play season at the Comedy Theatre, which was to run from 19 December 1900 to 9 April 1901. The season included Coriolanus which opened on 13 February 1901. It was staged even more simply than the Stratford production because in a disastrous fire in Newcastle in 1899 the Benson company had lost all its scenery and costumes. The play failed to attract enthusiastic audiences. Lady Benson put this down to the fact that Queen Victoria had died on 22 January 1901 and theatregoing of all kinds had been hit by the widespread national mourning.49 But seasoned Shakespeare-goer Richard Dickins found the play ‘often dull’ and Benson ‘Not big enough, either in personality, in power, or inches’ for Coriolanus. This lack of power may be explained in part by the fact that Benson was suffering from a gastric illness during the run. However this production did have a performance that he was to ‘place amongst my happiest remembrances’, the Volumnia of veteran tragedienne Genevieve Ward, ‘than which I can imagine nothing finer – she was the ideal embodiment of the Roman mother who loved her son beyond everything in the world, except only her country’.50 She was to repeat the performance in every future Benson production in Stratford and London except one (1912). The critics hailed her as the definitive Volumnia and beside her Ellen Terry’s Lyceum version paled.51 There was critical praise for Benson, particularly in the intercession scene but John Ripley concludes that the critical consensus was that Benson’s Coriolanus, ‘although carefully wrought and beautifully spoken, ultimately fell short of tragic sublimity’.52 Nevertheless he revived the role in London in 1907 and 1910. Coriolanus in the twentieth century, like the rest of Shakespeare, was to be a very different proposition from its Victorian incarnations. Financial constraints dictated the end of spectacle and lavish pictorialism.

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Modernism led to a greater interest in the politics and psychology of the play, which had not been of great concern to the nineteenth century. The shift of emphasis initiated a return to popularity of the play which seemed more relevant to modern audiences than it had been to their Victorian counterparts.

6 Tree’s Ancient World

Tree shared Irving’s approach to production. By the end of the century he had become the principal target of the purists and in 1900 he struck back, delivering an address to the Oxford Union entitled ‘The Staging of Shakespeare – a Defence of Public Taste’. He set out to show ‘that the public of to-day demands that, if acted at all, Shakespeare shall be presented with all the resources of the theatre of our time – that he shall be treated, not as a dead author speaking a dead language, but as a living force speaking with the voice of a living humanity’.1 Public taste is to be ascertained not by reading pundits and critics but by counting the people paying to see productions. He cites the evidence of the 632,000 people who had been to see his most recent Shakespeare productions: Julius Caesar (242,000), King John (170,000) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (220,000), concluding ‘I think, therefore, it is not too much to claim that the public taste clearly and undoubtedly lies in the direction of the method in which Shakespeare has been presented of late years by the chief metropolitan managers.’2 He argues for the same holistic view of stage production as was advocated by Irving and Godwin: Worthily to represent Shakespeare, the scenic embellishment should be as beautiful and costly as the subject of the drama being performed seems to demand; that it should not be subordinate to, but rather harmonious with, the dramatic interest, just as every other element of art introduced into the representation should be – whether those arts be of acting, painting, sculpture, music, or what not. 169

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He suggests Wagner as the nearest approach to Shakespeare in dramatic genius: He availed himself of all the effects with which modern art could help him . . . All these he enslaved in the service of the theatre. Wagner’s works are primarily dramas heightened by the aid of music, of scenery, of atmosphere, of costumes, all gorgeous or simple as the situation requires. Stripped of these aids, would Wagner have the deep effect on audiences such as we have witnessed at Bayreuth? No! Every man should avail himself of the aids which his generation affords him. It is only the weakling who harks back echoically to the methods of a bygone generation.3 So he is proclaiming the essential superiority of the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, in which a single controlling mind utilized all the arts to produce a consistent and coherent vision on the stage not just in Shakespeare but in all drama. It was the role which in Britain, Godwin, Irving and Tree conceived for themselves. Tree’s first venture into the toga play genre was his production at the Haymarket Theatre of Hypatia. Charles Kingsley’s novel Hypatia was a best-selling and long-lasting historical novel. Serialized in Fraser’s Magazine in 1852, it had been published in book form by John Parker in 1853. Transferred to Macmillan in 1863, it had run through twentyseven editions by 1906. But it had been highly controversial. It was denounced by the High Church periodical the Guardian as immoral, a view also expressed by Dr Pusey who intervened to block the proposal of an honorary degree for Kingsley at Oxford in 1863 on the grounds of the immorality of the book. Lewis Carroll found it too strong for his stomach, and in particular the anti-Christian comments given to the pagan characters were ‘outrageous’.4 Lord Tennyson, in common with many readers found Hypatia’s end, pursued naked into a church and torn to pieces by the mob, too gruesome, though Kingsley protested its historical accuracy.5 Ruskin similarly detested the novel: ‘his sentiment is false and his tragedy frightful . . . the story of Hypatia is the most ghastly in Christian tradition, and should for ever have been left in silence’.6 The central figure of the novel is the beautiful Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia in ancient Alexandria. She is the object of attention – religious, political and amatory – by various characters. The young monk Philammon from a desert monastery plans to denounce her philosophy but instead is converted by her and falls in love with her. The Roman prefect Orestes, who is planning a bid for imperial power, seeks

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her hand in marriage, as does the Gothic leader Amalric the Amal. She agrees to marry Orestes in return for the restoration of paganism. But when his bid for power fails, she is torn to pieces by the mob. Philammon returns to his Christian faith and retires to the desert. Amalric is killed, Wulf is elected in his place and leads the Goths to Spain. Another of Hypatia’s pupils, the Jew Raphael Aben-Ezra, marries the Christian maiden Victoria and is converted to Christianity after hearing St Augustine preach. Alexandria, riven by theological disputes, falls to the Moslems. Kingsley used the conflicts of the early fifth century to comment on the upheavals of his own time. The principal object of his criticism was John Henry Newman and the Tractarians, whom he identified with celibacy, intellectualism and aristocratic exclusiveness. He signalled his intention clearly by subtitling the novel ‘New Foes with an Old Face’. This was what led him to contrast a simple basic proto-Protestant Christianity, which was democratic and popular, with Neoplatonism, which was aristocratic and elitist, and the celibate monks who were hysterical and fanatical. In the wake of the re-establishment of a Catholic hierarchy in England, he denounces the politically motivated Alexandrian church establishment, especially Bishop Cyril of Alexandria, an ancient analogue of Cardinal Wiseman. Significantly Kingsley’s two heroes, Philammon and Raphael, are converted to his preferred model of Christianity. He also introduces into the story a group of Goths who, although heathen, represent Teutonic vigour and virility and indicate that the future lies with the hardy, manly North rather than the effete and decadent East. One irreverent critic thought that the Goths resembled nothing so much as a Cambridge University boat crew. The theatrical immediacy and visual intensity of Kingsley’s novel inspired two notable and controversial paintings. Charles Mitchell’s Hypatia (1885) caused a sensation when it was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery. In the picture, Hypatia, naked, with her golden tresses wound round her body, is backed up against a church altar, and has her hand raised in supplication to an image of Christ. The unseen mob approach, ready to kill her. In the catalogue Mitchell quoted the description of Hypatia at bay from chapter 29 of Kingsley’s novel. Arthur Hacker’s Pelagia and Philammon (1887), now at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, has a naked Pelagia dying, her hands folded on her breast, watched by a cloaked, hooded Philammon. It too derives from Kingsley. The appearance of Mitchell’s Hypatia at the same time as Waterhouse’s St Eulalia (1885), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1885 and depicting the half-naked body of a martyred female saint, coming only a year after

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Poynter’s Diadumene, also exhibited at the Royal Academy and depicting a naked Roman woman, based on the Esquiline Venus, about to enter her bath, provoked a major controversy about nudity in painting.7 Ruskin’s position on nudity in painting had been made clear in The Eagle’s Nest (1872) where he wrote: ‘The study of the external form of the human body, more exposed than it may be healthily and decently in daily life, has been essentially destructive in every school of art in which it has been practised.’8 The nudity controversy and the theological notoriety of the novel made the play a ‘hot property’ for the stage and gained it a considerable amount of advance publicity. The stage adaptation by G. Stuart Ogilvie, a barrister who aspired to write plays and was one of Tree’s financial backers, was also controversial. For in reducing the novel to a four-act drama, he eliminated many of the most memorable characters in the book (Miriam, Raphael, Pelagia, Amalric and Wulf). Not only this but he invented an entirely new character, Issachar the Jew, to be played by Tree, and described by the Theatre as ‘This Shylock-cum-Mephistopheles-cum-Machiavelli-cum-Virginius, patriot, statesman, demagogue and Roman father rolled into one’, and a new subplot, which involved the seduction of Issachar’s daughter Ruth by Orestes and her father’s subsequent vengeance.9 The drama now revolved around the struggle between pagans and Christians for supremacy, with events being manipulated by Issachar. The play opens with the scheming and manipulative Bishop Cyril of Alexandria in his study bemoaning the advances of paganism. Hypatia the philosopher is attracting all the wealth and culture of Alexandria to her school; Issachar the Jew holds the balance of power between the two sides; and the prefect Orestes is profligate, treacherous and self-seeking. Worst of all, there is news from Rome that the rebel Heraclian and his pagan hordes are threatening the supremacy of the Christian Roman Emperor Honorius. The young Christian fanatic monk Philammon arrives and having heard of Hypatia’s influence, proposes to denounce her publicly. He is encouraged by Cyril (‘The Church hath need of martyrs’). Peter the monk rouses a mob to expel the Jews from the city. In the market place, the mob threaten to wreck Issachar’s house but he buys them off. Hypatia arrives, to be denounced by Philammon. Her supporters plan to kill him but she calms them and Roman soldiers arrive to restore order. In act 2, Issachar, who has funded Heraclian’s revolt, persuades Orestes to marry Hypatia, who has the admiration of the mob, abandon

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Christianity and proclaim himself emperor of Africa. Issachar’s daughter Ruth tells her secret lover Orestes that she is pregnant. In act 3, Philammon and Hypatia fall in love. Issachar’s plan is put to Hypatia and although the idea of marriage to Orestes repels her, she is attracted to the realization of her dream of replacing Christianity with Neoplatonism. She asks for time to think. Issachar’s daughter now reveals she has been debauched by Orestes. In act 4, Issachar learns that Heraclian’s revolt has failed, he informs Cyril and when Orestes is proclaimed emperor by the crowd, Issachar assassinates him to avenge his daughter’s honour. Hypatia and Philammon are murdered by a band of fanatical monks. As reconstructed by Ogilvie, with the assistance of Tree, the play highlights the need of an empire for a proper religious faith (preferably Protestantism) which is neither pagan nor fanatical, it condemns sexual immorality and mob rule, and denounces at the same time scheming clerics and politicians who threaten imperial stability. The adaptation received mixed reviews. The Theatre expressed disappointment with the emasculation of the novel and the dialogue which mixed modern and archaic idioms uneasily.10 Several critics suggested trimming the dialogue, especially in Hypatia’s long philosophical disquisitions, and there was discontent with the long waits necessitated by elaborate scene changes. But some professed satisfaction with the script. The Era (7 January 1893) for instance, called the play ‘a very wellknit, powerful and workmanlike piece, which is interesting throughout, and gives Mr Tree some special opportunities’. But it warned ‘Though Hypatia may appeal, in its entirety, more to the cultured hundreds than to the thoughtless thousands, this beautiful and powerful production will remain as a heavy amount to the credit of Mr Beerbohm Tree as actor, manager.’ Interestingly the Jewish Chronicle (6 January 1893) while declaring Issachar ‘stage Jewish’ rather than authentically Jewish, nevertheless called it one of Tree’s greatest triumphs. The acting was generally praised. The Era was typical. It proclaimed Tree’s Issachar ‘one of those performances which the playgoing public will refuse to forget’, indicating ‘with marvellous subtlety, the craft and cunning of the wily Israelite’. It declared that ‘Miss Julia Neilson, from her first appearance, captured all hearts . . . But it was not in appearance alone that Miss Neilson realised Hypatia. In the noble dignity of her carriage, in the suggestions of womanhood underlying the cold philosophy of the fair Greek, and in her delivery of the long speeches allotted to her, Miss Neilson eminently excelled.’ It thought Fred Terry’s Philammon ‘spirited and powerful’ and likely to satisfy ‘the most

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exacting admirer of Kingsley’. Lewis Waller performed Orestes ‘with care and skill’. The critics also agreed about the production’s visual appeal. The Theatre concluded ‘despite its many failings, (it) is a work that everyone should see’: So exquisitely wrought . . . is the Alma-Tademesque frame of Alexandrian views – reminiscent of Mr Wilson Barrett’s earlier ‘Claudian’ pictures; so noble do many of these royally-garbed players appear; so intoxicating an atmosphere of physical loveliness does Miss Neilson cast over the scene; and with such a mass of intricate detail, studied cleverness, and absorbing mixture of realism and romance does Mr Tree disguise the conventional outlines of Issachar the Jew.11 The Times (3 January 1893), calling the production ‘memorable’ and declaring Beauty ‘the dominant note of the production’, shared the delight of the Theatre in the visual spectacle: For the reopening of the Haymarket Mr Tree has selected a pictorial play in which the art of Mr Alma-Tadema, who has designed the dresses and superintended the general scheme of colour in the decoration, counts for more than that of the dramatist. Such a production carries its penalty with it. Four acts in eight scenes, each scene a beautiful picture, are not to be lightly run through, and had the spectacle presented been designed by a hand less cunning than a Royal Academician’s the four hours’ evolution of the play could hardly have failed to be fatiguing. To Mr Alma-Tadema the theme has been an inspiring one, Alexandria at the beginning of the fifth century, the third city of the world, beautified by Athenian art and swarming with the representatives of every type of contemporary civilization – Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Jewish, Nubian, and even Goth, each in its native garb – such is the scene in which Mr Stuart Ogilvie has worked out his story of the maiden philosopher. That the play should be dramatic in proportion to its artistic beauty was hardly to be hoped. It is as a spectacle that Hypatia must be judged, and as such its equal is certainly not to be found in modern drama. To say this is not to depreciate its acting qualities, which in a less resplendent setting would assuredly rank as fine, but the wealth of colour, the phantasmagoric variety of the spectacle, bewildering in its splendour

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are almost oppressive and distract the attention to some degree from the merits of the drama proper. The role of Alma-Tadema was central to the production. His scene designs were executed by T.W. Hall, Walter Hann, Walter Johnstone and Joseph Harker, and the costumes, made at Nathans, were designed by Tadema and Karl. The Era (7 January 1893) said: we question whether a play of this sort has ever been dressed and mounted more correctly. Every scene is a picture . . . Whether it is the Bishop’s Chamber with its frescoed wall; or the Alexandrian marketplace, with its various types; or the Jew’s Room, with its teraph; or the Caesareum with its cross; or . . . the lovely court of Hypatia’s house, with its semi-circular row of marble seats, its gilded Apollo, its Quoitthrower, and its beautifully grouped audience of Alexandrian idlers, the trace of the master hand is firm and unmistakable. Julia Neilson, who played Hypatia, recalled that she had never played in a more beautiful production: ‘In seven scenes, each of them an unforgettable picture, Tree and Alma Tadema between them produced a spectacle the like of which had surely never been seen before on the stage.’ Of Tadema, she noted that his knowledge of the classics was remarkable and ‘few men had a keener eye for detail. He took the greatest interest in my costumes for Hypatia, and taught me how to wear them. One evening while sitting in the stalls, he noticed that my hymation was wrongly draped; he came round at once to put it right.’12 Joseph Harker, the scene-painter who worked with Alma-Tadema, came to value his friendship. Harker was very touchy about his profession, writing in his autobiography Studio and Stage in reference to Alma-Tadema: ‘he was one of the few artists to whose designs I have painted scenery, a point which I bring out here mainly because so many people think that the scene-painter always works to designs made by others. Only in special circumstances have I done this.’ But he valued his association with both Tree and Alma-Tadema. Tree, he wrote, created ‘a series of brilliant and highly spectacular productions that gave me a scope that can have fallen to the lot of but few stage artists’. On Hypatia, he cemented his ‘long friendship’ with Alma-Tadema. It was the first important production with which he was associated as a designer of stage scenes, his experience up to then having been limited to amateur theatricals at the universities and elsewhere. But

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he very soon acquired the scenic sense, as well as a useful working knowledge of stage technique, and in a little while he was designing scenery with the facility of one who had been steeped in stagecraft all his life. He pays tribute to Alma-Tadema’s helpfulness. ‘From the time when I first met him right up to his death Alma-Tadema took the liveliest interest in my work.’ If he had a problem when he was scene-painting, he would consult Alma-Tadema, who would invite him to his palatial house in St John’s Wood: ‘I would at once be shown into the studio, where he had invariably got together all the books on the subject on which I sought his help, putting himself to no end of trouble to help me.’ He concluded ‘Alma-Tadema endeared himself to those whose good fortune it was to work with him and to know him well not only because of his personal charm, but because, great artist that he was, he was not above taking advice from a fellow-craftsman.’13 William Archer in the World, declaring that he looked forward with fear and trembling to the production of blank verse plays on the English stage since nine out of ten of them were balderdash, pronounced Ogilvie’s script ‘an intelligent, competent piece of work’, with acceptable verse writing but an overcomplicated plot, in which the central love affair of Hypatia and Philammon was made subordinate to the machinations of Issachar. Nevertheless he pronounced the play ‘stirring, picturesque, and not unattractive’. But he was more critical of the scenery than the other critics. The scenery is beautiful in design, but not altogether happy in execution. It lacks solidity; there is too much flapping canvas about it; and the ‘flats’ do not always ‘jine’. In Hypatia’s lecture-theatre, for example, the illusion was sadly marred on the first night by a yawning fissure in the marble gradines. The costumes are splendid, and the stage-pictures, as a whole, are brilliant and animated.14 No doubt these imperfections were eliminated during the run of the play (2 January to 5 April 1893). Joseph Comyns Carr, the writer and critic, who claims that he had persuaded Alma-Tadema to accept Tree’s invitation to design the scenery and costumes for Hypatia confirms Harker’s view: This is the kind of work to which many gifted painters cannot readily adapt themselves. But Tadema’s constructive talent, his rare ingenuity

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in dealing with architectural problems, and, above all, his unrivalled gifts in contriving diversified effects of light and shade, amply fitted him for such a task; and the difficulty which some painters experience of yoking their intended design with the interpretative resources of the scenic artists, proved no difficulty to him. He loved their art with all its infinite devices for the production of illusion, and he knew how to treat them in a spirit of true and loyal comradeship. At the first I had been a little nervous on this score, but, one day, when I asked him how he and the principal scene-painter were progressing, he relieved me of all anxiety upon the matter by the emphatic announcement that he and his associate were in such complete agreement that, as he quaintly phrased it from a peasant formula recalled from the land of his birth, ‘we are like two hands on one stomach’.15

But relations were not as untroubled with the theatre’s head carpenter. There was a spectacular row, recounted in greater detail by Mrs Alice Comyns Carr. Alma-Tadema arrived at rehearsals for Hypatia tired and bad-tempered ‘after a long and uncongenial day’s teaching at the Academy Schools’ and denounced the execution of a marble seat that he had designed. The head carpenter insisted he had followed the design exactly. Alma-Tadema snorted: ‘Do you, then, not know the difference between a curve and a triangle? And as for your background, it seems to me that you do not know aquamarine from Reckitt’s blue.’ To calm the situation down, Comyns Carr hauled Alma-Tadema off to dine and when they returned the marble seat was done to his satisfaction. He then declared: ‘But wait; I will show that fellow, your painter, how to make a leetle more sunshine.’ Taking the scene-painter’s brush he ‘made two or three dashes which certainly changed the whole character of the Mediterranean’.16 This transformation is plausible, given Burne-Jones’s view: ‘No man has ever lived who has interpreted with Tadema’s power the incidence of sunlight on metal and marble.’17 The music by Sir Hubert Parry earned a review in the Musical Times (1 February 1893) which described the score as ‘elaborate, extensive and important’ and said ‘it has about as much matter in it as would make two symphonies’. Parry composed themes for the monks (‘sombre yet striking’), Ruth and Orestes (‘passionate and tender’), and Issachar (‘Oriental and sinister’), combining them in the Overture in E Minor (‘a vigorous and sonorously scored piece of work’). There were processional marches, a Hypatia theme (‘dreamy and mystical’) and an Apotheosis in E Major to round off the play.

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But Parry’s biographer Charles Graves recalled that ‘relations between the actor-manager and the composer were not altogether free from friction’.18 At the last moment Tree suggested he provide music to accompany a particularly long scene, and Parry retorted: ‘Look here, Tree, what you ought to do is go out into the street and hire a damned barrel organ.’ Parry was driven to distraction by Tree’s constant changes of mind about the stage management, which required regular alterations in the score. Parry wrote to his wife on 1 January 1893: ‘We had more rows yesterday. My temper is getting so bad I’m fit to do nothing but shout blasphemies at Tree’s head before all the assembled public. But it’s obvious it’s only his hopeless impractical ignorance of all that concerns music. I daresay he means well enough.’19 But he was able to convert the music into an orchestral suite, which he conducted at a Philharmonic Society concert on 9 March, where it was well received by the audience.20 Many newspapers and journals devoted articles specifically to the costumes. Typical of them was Fashionable London (11 January 1893) which revealed that Julia Neilson wore a Greek dress of soft white clinging silk fringed at the edges, the sleeves caught together with alternating studs of amethysts and turquoises. Her hair was arranged in ‘severely classical’ style and confined by a white fillet wound twice around her head (‘Never have we seen Miss Julia Neilson look more beautiful’). Olga Brandon as Ruth ‘looked extremely handsome in each of her most picturesque costumes’. First there was a sleeveless Eastern garment of dull green silk turned out with pink and worn over a chemisette of dark blue encrusted with jewels and gold embroidery, a red sash of silk encircling her waist. Her second dress, similar in design, was of soft white silk, embroidered with gold and confined at the waist by a sash of black and yellow. Tree’s Issachar wore a sleeveless Jewish tunic, embroidered with the lotus in gold, a sash of red and purple silk around his waist, a vivid crimson turban on his head, large snake earrings hanging from his ears and massive golden snakes encircling his bare arms (‘His weird and picturesque appearance will live in our memory for many a day’). Lewis Waller as Orestes wore robes of scarlet and gold ‘of almost Imperial splendour’. Fred Terry as Philammon was first seen in white goat skin ‘enveloping his athletic and graceful form’ and later in the white robes edged with black of the monk. ‘All the other costumes were equally picturesque and artistic.’ Opening on 22 January 1898, Julius Caesar was the first new Shakespearean production at Tree’s newly-built theatre, Her Majesty’s in the Haymarket. It was the first significant domestic production of

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the play for thirty years, and it was to be revived by him regularly over the next eighteen years. The play had not been popular with Victorian managements partly because there was a lack of female interest, partly because critics complained that the titular character was killed off half way through, the dramatic climax was Antony’s big speech in the forum and the rest tended to anticlimax, but mostly because it had three leading roles, Antony, Brutus and Cassius. This flew in the face of Victorian practice which dictated that the actor-manager remain centrestage throughout. But Irving, who gave serious thought to staging it, and Tree, who did stage it, were aware of the problem. Irving explained to his co-star Ellen Terry why he had decided against staging it. He had intended to play the part of Brutus but said: ‘That’s the part for the actor . . . because it needs acting. But the actor-manager’s part is Antony – Antony scores all along the line. Now when the actor and the actormanager fight in a play, and when there is no part for you in it, I think it’s wiser to leave it alone.’21 Tree when studying the play, noted: ‘For the scholar Brutus, for the actor Cassius, for the public Antony’ and wrote to his wife: ‘I like Brutus best – he is so much deeper – but I still feel that Antony has the colour – the glamour of the play, don’t you?’22 So he settled for the role of Antony. This represented a substantial shift in the balance of the play, as all the great actors of the earlier part of the century, Macready, Phelps and John Philip Kemble had played Brutus. Tree’s choice of role became apparent in his cutting of the text. He reduced it to three acts with the speaking parts cut to fifteen and several of the smaller roles amalgamated. The Era (29 January 1898) defined the play as consisting of the Conspiracy, the Assassination and the Aftermath. John Ripley more insightfully described the three acts as ‘Antony Introduced, Antony Contriving and Antony Triumphant’. Instead of an opportunist who aims to move into the dictatorial role vacated by Julius Caesar, Tree so cut the play as to highlight the transformation of the amiable, easygoing playboy of the opening scene into the full-blown orator and statesman, the avenger of his friend – ‘an avenging angel’ Lady Tree called him23 – an out-and-out hero. He also resolved to stage it with unparalleled magnificence. There were perhaps two reasons for this. One was the impression made upon him by the visit in 1881 of the Saxe-Meiningen Court Theatre which was renowned ‘for the extraordinary accuracy and picturesqueness of stage management, especially in the handling of mobs or other great masses of humanity’.24 It was also notable for the fact that in its production of Julius Caesar its leading actor Ludwig Barnay had taken the role of Mark Antony rather than Brutus.

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The other reason was the temper of the times. This was the heyday of Empire and a time of spectacular public ceremonial (the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897, her funeral in 1901, the coronation of Edward VII, the Delhi durbar). It was also the era of Wilde and fin-de-siècle decadence. The stern lessons of imperial duty needed to be reinforced for today’s audience. These ideas are clearly expressed in the souvenir programme for the play. First of all it emphasizes the importance of the setting and the crowd. Pointing out that the play previously revolved around one or other of the leading characters, the writer goes on: But until Mr Tree approached the play, no manager, it seems, perceived that overshadowing all, and equally prolific of emotion, was the scene of their conflict, the fabulous stake for which they gambled, the heart of an empire, Rome. At Her Majesty’s it is not the historic band of conspirators that strikes the key note of the play. It is not even the mighty figure of Caesar treacherously brought low. It is the feverish, pulsing life of the imperial city. And a depth and reality unusual in tragedy, classic in period and form, is given by this troubled and glowing background to that death struggle between two mighty forces which constitutes the play. The account of the play casts Caesar as a benign and principled reformer whose murder is a tragedy for the empire: Of the traditional austerity and self-restraint of the Romans, indeed, there was little left. From a nation of kings, they were fast becoming a nation of slaves, slaves of their appetites and passions. Rome was a hot-bed of profligacy and corruption. It was Caesar’s aim to reform it altogether. And it is of the essence of the tragedy that a luxurious Rome, fin-de-siècle, over-civilized and decadent, shall be always visible: quickening the nobles to greed of the spoils being hourly wrested from their hands, and deepening the resolution of the great Dictator to rescue from their clutches the soil of Italy and to ensure the happiness of millions of mankind. Tree succeeded in translating this vision into reality with the aid once again of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, undoubtedly the foremost painter of Roman life in Victorian England.25 As Shaw was to write: ‘The real hero of the revival is Mr Alma Tadema.’26 Tree told Percy Cross Standing, Alma-Tadema’s biographer, that:

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Alma-Tadema . . . brought ancient Rome on to the stage, with what grand effect I need not remind you. Here his powerful personality made itself felt, not only in the scenery and the costumes (which often he himself would drape), but in the very atmosphere of the play. Is there not in himself much of the ‘noble Roman’? It was, indeed, always a joy when he appeared on the stage to dominate the scene. It was he who taught us the Roman handshake, the mutual grip of the wrist. The presence of a man is always inspiring.27 Alma-Tadema’s set designs, realized by Joseph Harker and Walter Hann, were lavishly praised. The Daily Telegraph (24 January 1898) said: ‘Rarely has the modern stage presented a more remarkable succession of pictures, each of them of a distinctive kind, with their own harmony of colours, their fine perspectives and distances, their arrangements of striking architectural designs.’ There were five scenes in act 1. The first scene, viewed through a huge red Roman arch, showed the Forum, the temples of Jupiter and Venus, the palaces on the skyline and a bronze statue of Julius Caesar in the foreground. This was succeeded by ‘delightfully vivid and artistic views’ of Brutus’ orchard; the stately interior of Caesar’s house, the atrium with garlanded busts, a view of the dining room and courtyard beyond; a public street with shops on both sides; the Senate house with its green-tinted marble walls, bronze statues of Caesar and Pompey and Venetian red ceiling. The magnificent Forum set, where the whole of act 2 took place, featured temples of Saturn, Jupiter and Concord, a central ramp, flights of steps on either side and the shattered statue of Caesar on the left. Act 3 had Brutus’ tent and the plain of Philippi, a picturesque ravine with a backdrop of the sea. The Daily Telegraph, while praising the artistic effects, complained that the ‘costly and elaborate’ sets reflected the later Augustan Rome rather than ‘the simpler, ruder, more primitive capital’ of the Republic. The souvenir booklet answered this by insisting that the sets symbolized the luxury of the decadent aristocracy that Caesar was determined to reform. Most critics, however, were grateful for what the Daily Mail (24 January 1898) called ‘a spectacle of amazing and exquisite beauty’, arguing that it was ‘less a drama than an immortal page from the world’s history that was on Saturday unrolled in a series of gorgeous Tadema pictures’. The costumes, also designed by Alma-Tadema, similarly provoked raptures from the Daily Telegraph (24 January 1898): Rarely indeed has Miss Lily Hanbury (Calpurnia) looked more beautiful than she does in her clinging gown of pale electric blue ‘soie

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ondulée’. The rich drapery is of sapphire blue, brocaded with upright clusters of gold lilies, rather after the Morris style, and it is fastened at each of the four corners with a dull gold acorn. A large antique ornament studded with precious stones hangs from her neck on a golden chain, and her head is crowned with blush-pink roses. A gorgeous piece of colour is worn by Mr Fulton as Julius Caesar. The robe is claret-red silk, shot with violet, and the long, winding cloak is made of vivid amethyst-hued brocade. The blood-red and white togas of Messrs Tree, Waller and McLeay . . . are very startling in their boldness and originality. Amidst all the prismatic tones adopted by the senators, the citizens, the lictors, the patricians, and the attendants, amidst all the glitter of jewels, the flashing lights, and that marvellously arranged mass of purple, blue, green, mauve, orange, and gold, what a relief it is to gaze on the pure white figure of Miss Evelyn Millard (as Portia)! She is clad from head to foot in pearly white draperies of some soft, cloudy substance, and the only patch of colour is a rare old turquoise and silver clasp, with a pendant attached to it, worn on the left breast. Alma-Tadema not only designed the costumes but made with his own hands the shields, armour and insignia.28 The handling of the crowds earned equal praise. Typical was the verdict of Vanity Fair (24 January 1898): The way in which the ever-difficult crowds are managed is wonderful. Never before have we seen ‘crowds’ such as these – real, living, speaking, sensitive, human crowds, with hearts, and voices and real feeling. They are not a mere collection of heavy-witted supers drilled into a semblance of living personages, but real people, who act, move, speak and feel as people really do. Of the actors, Tree’s Antony was proclaimed ‘singularly impressive’ (Daily Telegraph) and ‘superbly artistic’ (Era, 29 January 1898). Lewis Waller both looked and sounded like a Roman noble. The Era said he was: so good that, looking round the list of available actors, we could not suggest a better selection. In Mr Waller’s style there is a flavour of severity and sternness which is quite in keeping with the character of Brutus, moulded on the old stoic philosophy; and yet there is sufficient humanity in Mr Waller’s reading of the role to account for Brutus’ popularity. In appearance Mr Waller realises very picturesquely the better class of Roman patrician.

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Franklyn McLeay played Cassius as highly strung and nervously intense, ‘remarkably spirited and significant’ thought the Globe (24 January 1898). Charles Fulton’s Caesar was praised for its dignity and authority. The play ran until 10 June and netted Tree £11,000 profit.29 Three of Tree’s greatest successes were the poetic dramas, Herod (1900), Ulysses (1902) and Nero (1906), written specifically for him by Stephen Phillips (1864–1915). Phillips, now totally forgotten, was the literary shooting star of the Edwardian age. The son of the precentor of Peterborough Cathedral, he had early on displayed a gift for poetry. His Orestes and Other Poems was privately printed in 1884. After a failed attempt at an acting career with the company of his cousin Frank Benson and a spell as a history teacher at an army tutor’s, he suddenly found himself famous with the publication of his Poems in 1898. His friend, the actress Constance Collier recalled that the critics said he was ‘Keats, Shelley and Byron rolled into one.’30 Sir George Alexander commissioned a poetic drama from him, Paolo and Francesca in 1898. Delays in staging allowed it to be published in 1900. It was immediately hailed as a masterpiece and extravagant comparisons made between its author and the poetic immortals. William Archer in the Daily Chronicle compared him to Tennyson and Churton Collins in the Saturday Review compared him to Sophocles and Dante. When Paolo and Francesca was actually produced in 1902, he was hailed as the true successor to Shakespeare. Herod, a success on the stage and in print, evoked comparisons between Phillips and Milton, Marlowe and Webster.31 For ten years he could do no wrong, his plays for Tree each ran for more than a hundred performances and he was earning handsome royalties. The journalist J.B. Booth recalled Phillips’s stellar career: Rarely, if ever, has a hitherto unknown poet and dramatist been greeted with such a press chorus of acclamation and, be it noted, the critics and journals represented the best literary criticism of the age. And not only that, men such as the editor of The Spectator, Sidney Colvin, William Archer and James Knowles of The Nineteenth Century went out of their way to make the work of the protégé known. They sincerely regarded Phillips’ poetry as incomparably the best since Tennyson, and for some time the public followed them.32 Phillips was in appearance far removed from the popular idea of a poet. He was tall, handsome, heavily-built and at first meeting displayed ‘an uncouth shyness’. He was an expert cricketer and was fond of practical jokes.

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Phillips’s fall was as dramatic as his rise. There was an inevitable reaction against the hyperbole. There were vindictive attacks on him, for example, in the Saturday Review where an article appeared denouncing a pamphlet promoting him by his publisher John Lane. Phillips was accused of ‘ceaseless industry in promoting himself’. The opposite was in fact the truth. It was his most devoted admirers, such as Sidney Colvin, librarian of the British Museum, who assiduously promoted his genius and this bred jealousy and resentment. But most importantly, once he had achieved success he plunged into a life of serious debauchery, slumming in the East End, associating with disreputable individuals and indulging in lengthy and punishing drinking bouts. Booth comments: ‘He had himself to blame, of course, but the collapse was none the less pitiful . . . The intervals of sheer debauchery into which he had let himself drift became more and more frequent, and the result was inevitable.’33 Constance Benson, the wife of his cousin Frank, described him as a ‘dual personality’. He was ‘full of noble aims and ideals’ but ‘weak, easily led and self-indulgent. These failings grew on him and he lacked the moral stamina to cope with them.’ She concludes ‘He sank lower and lower, lost his looks, his figure, his soul.’34 Hesketh Pearson proposed a psychological problem as the root of his difficulties. He thought the initial cause was an intense but unrequitable love for his sister: this basic frustration making life at times insupportable. He became morbid, morose and melancholic. He lived in a world of childish fantasies and nightmares propagated by a keen perception of horror, which derived from a sense of guilt and a dread of the unknown. He disappeared for long periods, no one knew where; his money vanished, no one knew how. Protracted seasons of inertia followed short phases of activity, the first deadened by drink, the second stimulated by it.35 Interestingly all of Phillips’s plays deal with obsessive, destructive love. Phillips was declared bankrupt in 1909. His plays were now failing as spectacularly as the earlier works had succeeded. Pietro of Siena managed one performance in 1910 and Iole only two in 1913. Friends rallied round to undertake his regeneration and from January 1913 to his death in 1915 he was editor of the Poetry Review, though his own later volumes of poetry in 1908, 1911 and 1913 were indifferently received. He died on 9 December 1915 of cirrhosis of the liver and exhaustion, intestate and worth only a nominal five pounds.

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Stephen Phillips took the story of Herod from the ancient historian Josephus who tells it both in The Jewish War and The Antiquities of the Jews. Phillips and Tree may also have been influenced by J.W. Waterhouse’s 1887 painting Mariamne Leaving the Judgement Seat of Herod, the largest picture he ever painted and one which was extensively shown in England and on the continent where it was awarded a gold medal at the 1897 Brussels Exposition Internationale. The entire play takes place in the same locale as the painting. Tree called the play ‘the best thing, outside Shakespeare, I have ever known’.36 The published version of Herod bore the dedication to Tree: ‘in life a true friend and on the stage the Herod of my dreams’. Act 1 opens with the installation of Aristobulus, brother of Queen Mariamne, as High Priest. Herod, an ally of Mark Antony who needs to make his peace with the victorious Octavius Caesar, takes his leave of his wife Mariamne. He has secretly ordered the murder by drowning of Aristobulus, whose popularity threatens the throne. After her brother’s corpse is carried in and Herod leaves, Mariamne extracts the truth about his murder from the assassin, the Gaul Sohemus, and swears revenge. In act 2, Herod returns in triumph from his meeting with Octavius, acclaimed as the ally of Caesar. Mariamne tells him her love has died with her brother and he begs her for forgiveness. An angry mob is calmed by the news that Herod has secured freedom of worship for the Jews and he promises to build a new temple in Jerusalem. Herod’s mother Cypros and sister Salome suggest that in order to have obtained the information about the murder, Mariamne must have slept with the assassin. Herod orders her death by poison. In act 3, Herod, refusing to believe that Mariamne is dead, makes provision to deal with a famine and to build a new city on the coast. News arrives that Caesar has granted Herod control of Arabia. But when Mariamne’s embalmed body is carried in, Herod is struck with catalepsy and sits rigid on his throne as the court melts away. In executing his holistic philosophy of stage art, Tree drew on the finest talents available. Tree himself played Herod, with Maud Jeffries, hitherto Wilson Barrett’s leading lady, as Mariamne, Eleanor Calhoun as Salome and veteran actress Kate Bateman as Cypros. Hawes Craven designed the set, Percy Anderson the costumes and Samuel Coleridge Taylor composed the music. The result earned from the Daily Chronicle (1 November 1900) an encomium: ‘Not one of the numerous superb spectacles previously provided by Mr Tree has surpassed in beauty the finished art of “Herod”.’ And from the Sketch (7 November 1900)

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came the accolade ‘We have no greater metteur-en-scène than Mr Beerbohm Tree.’ The literary quality of Phillips’s writing was acclaimed. The Standard (1 November 1900) called Herod ‘a work of undoubted power, originality and poetic insight’. The Daily Chronicle (1 November 1900) called the play ‘A gain to the British acting drama, no less than the loftier literature of our time.’ The Daily Telegraph (1 November 1900) called the play ‘simple, magnificent, grandiose; awaking, as Aristotle demanded, our pity and our terror’. The Morning Leader (1 November 1900) said: ‘Splendidly opulent in conception; . . . perfect in construction; far beyond all contemporary English efforts in the aptitude of its verse to its subject and to the stage.’ Several reviewers commented on Phillips’s ability to combine theatrical effects with memorably literary poetry (for example, the Star, Daily Chronicle, Morning Advertiser, all 1 November). In striving to explain the blend of stagecraft and poetry, William Archer said Phillips reminded him of ‘the elder Dumas . . . speaking with the voice of Milton’ (World, 7 November 1900). Hawes Craven designed and painted the single set, a hall in Herod’s palace. It inspired the Daily Express (1 November 1900) to poetic rapture: We are in Herod’s palace, overlooking the panorama of Jerusalem. Golden stairs climb to big private apartments. The great pillars of the barbaric temple stand up like giants, stalwart to the skies, and at the back is the blue vault of the East, the pale azure of the heaven, flecked with blue-red cloud. It also earned an admiring article from Richard Phené Spiers in the Architectural Review, examining its historical accuracy and aesthetic suitability.37 Many newspapers carried detailed articles on the costumes, which were the work of Percy Anderson. Gladys Beattie Crozier, in a profile of Anderson in the Magazine of Art pointing out that the role of costume designer for the stage was a comparatively recent one, declared: as a designer of costume for historical and Shakespearean plays, Mr Percy Anderson, with his wonderful constructive power of colour blending, originality in the treatment of drapery, and accurate knowledge of and attention to detail, together with a peculiar power of stamping with a touch of individuality all work which passes through his hands, has reached the topmost step.38

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The Daily Telegraph (1 November 1900), in a lengthy article on the costumes, observed: The colour-scheme is such as has not before been seen in London. There is one grand, bold, warm hue clashed on to another, here a blaze of red – the deep rich red beloved of the ancients – there a blaze of green, close to it a blue like that of a summer night sky, hard by robes in every tone of gold and copper and ruby, singing girls in a glory of green and red like Eastern foliage and flowers in full sunlight, dancing girls in orange and flame-colour and fire-glow red. All these gorgeous hues are toned by browns and greys and bronzes, enriched by gold and jewels. Herod first appeared in a long loose coat of purple lined with deep green and with a raised design in gold and cream over a breastplate of rubies and gold. In the second act he wears a white tunic with gold-bordered sleeves, a gold breastplate, a red mantle bordered in gold and a helmet of red and gold. In the third act he appears in a long, loose coat of green brocade. Salome appeared in a gown of red velvet embroidered with gold and festooned with precious stones and a headdress of gold and turquoises. Cypros appeared in gowns of yellow and red, gold and white with a gold and jewelled headdress. Mariamne first appeared as ‘a vision of magnificence and beauty’: The under-robes of the Queen are of gold-glittering tissue, into which rich colours are woven in rainbow-like gradations . . . so beautiful is this glow of gold and sunborn tints that no embroidery is used, and the folds float freely . . . A gold cap-shaped crown is worn, with jewelled band above the forehead. From this depends at the back a veil of deepest ivory tint, studded thickly with gold. This falls on a long, trailing regal-looking mantle of crushed dead-gold tissue, finished in deep bright green silk, into which is introduced purple-blue silk, with zig-zag lines of gold between the two, three deep. There is just a touch of azure in this glory of colour, supplied by large turquoise ear ornaments. The black British composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor was selected by Tree to compose the incidental music for Herod and he received almost universal praise for his achievement. The score consisted of a prelude, two interludes, a triumphal march in act 1, two short vocal pieces and a dance in act 3. The Sunday Times (4 November 1900) reported: ‘for

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a first attempt at work of this kind, Mr. Coleridge Taylor had done extraordinarily well’. The Pall Mall Gazette (1 November 1900) agreed: Mr. Tree could have made no better choice of composer for the incidental music of ‘Herod’ than Mr. S. Coleridge Taylor. He possesses the essential spirit of the East in his inspiration . . . Chief to select among all these musical miniatures was the little attendant’s little song . . . this was really beautiful, and rose to a singular level of pathos. For the rest, the orchestration, dealing mostly with military situations . . ., was bound to be a trifle brassy; but Mr. Taylor has so keen an instinct for the value of an instrument that he never permits his brass to be obtrusive or irritating. This, in a word, is the note of all his work. He has well perceived that obtrusive incidental music . . . has become a matter of mockery. So he gives us just large outlines, broad effects of colour, pervasive commentary. Interestingly the veteran critic Clement Scott in the Free Lance (10 November 1900) sought to place Herod into the context of both toga play and history painting when he enthused: I have seen nothing like it in my life! . . . it is a picture of truth, of colour, of light, of atmosphere, of movement, that enchants the eye and almost intoxicates the senses. It is as if such allegorical and decorative painters as John Martin and Gustave Doré and E.J. Poynter . . . and Alma Tadema, master of exquisite detail, had all joined forces; and then the huge dumb canvas begins to move and be endowed with life, and action takes the place of silence. He recalled that he had seen Charles Kean’s production of Lord Byron’s Sardanapalus, Henry Irving’s production of Lord Tennyson’s The Cup and in America the new production of Ben-Hur, but he thought ‘Beerbohm Tree’s “Herod” is head and shoulders better than all the plays of the same type and character that have preceded it.’ This was in part because of the advances in stage art. Everything favours such an enterprise as this. The stage appliances, the architectural advantages, the splendour of textile fabrics, the unspeakable glory of colour, the marvellous methods of modern stage lighting – all favour the ‘Herod’ of to-day. The manager of Her Majesty’s comes in on the crest of a wave, on the full and flowing tide of scientific advance and art education. We are now on the stage,

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reaping the benefit of the art education, started mainly by the Prince Consort over fifty years ago. He was less impressed by Tree himself: ‘Beerbohm Tree was, and ever must be, a picturesque actor . . . he looks Herod to the life. But as Herod when he speaks, he does not inspire us as a factor in great tragedy. He has not the voice, the electric power, or the whirling passion of a tragic actor. Against this splendid background, he is satisfying, but not convincing.’ Maud Jeffries, on the other hand, he thought, ‘was the one strong note of inspiration in the play. She alone gave to the tragedy what the decoration did for the scenes . . . she, by her acting, was in harmony with a most satisfying picture . . . I found her an almost ideal Mariamne, the best thing of the kind since Ellen Terry played Camma in “The Cup”.’ He concluded that ‘ “Herod” is a thing that should not be missed by any playgoer who loves the art in its highest and most poetic phase.’ William Archer in the World (7 November 1900) agreed about the play’s pictorial triumph: For Mr Tree’s insight and public spirit . . . one can have nothing but applause. Moreover, he has mounted the play not only with splendour, but with taste. The stage presents a series of animated pictures, skilful in composition, rich and harmonious in colouring. No manager could have given the poem a more artistic and admirable setting. He finds Tree always ‘picturesque’ but lacking in spontaneity, thoroughly self-conscious and ‘substituting mechanical force for melody and pathos’. He disagreed with Scott about Maud Jeffries. Very remarkable is the plastique of Miss Maud Jeffries’ Mariamne. Again and again she presents a really superb picture . . . For the sake of her pictorial qualities one would forgive much; but truly there is rather too much to forgive. Miss Jeffries’ elocution is almost incredibly defective. I have seen the play twice, once from the stalls, once from the upper circle, and on neither occasion did more than half her dialogue reach my ears. In many lines I could not distinguish one word. The Era (3 November 1900), as ever, seemed to reflect audience opinion. It found the play ‘overpowering. High poetry, impressive acting

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and gorgeous spectacle are poured upon us till we succumb to the combination.’ It thought Tree’s Herod ‘a triumph’: Herod, with his mad uxoriousness, his intense belief in himself, and his underlying insanity, is a character which only a master-actor could undertake with any chance of success. That Mr. Tree was able to impress and overawe the house from first to last, and that, for one whole act, he held his audience ‘wrapt’ by what was practically a monologue, proves more conclusively than ever what a magnificent artist he is, and how powerful is his grip of the character so boldly drawn by the poet-dramatist. His appearance in the gorgeous semiRoman, semi-Eastern habiliments was very striking and picturesque; and the passionate earnestness which he put into his delivery of Herod’s amorous tirades was very fervid and convincing. Maud Jeffries was warmly praised: Miss Maud Jeffries impressed and surprised everyone by her splendid performance as Mariamne. Her appearance with a wealth of hair of ‘Titian’ red quite accounted for Herod’s infatuation; and her depiction of Mariamne’s stony resolution and the terrible intensity of Miss Jeffries’ acting in the scene in which the Queen draws the truth from the trembling murderer, revealed a depth of tragic power of which even her warmest admirers had hardly believed her capable. Given the importance of Homer to Victorian culture, it is not surprising that the Odyssey should have proved a potent source of inspiration to nineteenth-century painters. The story of Odysseus (or Ulysses as he was most often called) was, says Joseph Kestner, ‘one of the most important examples of the classical hero used to model gender in Victorian England’, and ‘an enduring paradigm of masculine behaviour’.39 Significantly, not all aspects of the story were utilized. Most frequently he was seen either seeking to resist the wiles of female temptresses such as Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa and the Sirens or defending Penelope and reasserting his marital role. From William Etty’s The Sirens and Ulysses (1837) to J.W. Waterhouse’s Ulysses and the Sirens (1909), Ulysses was shown strapped to his ship’s mast as voluptuous females sought to lure him to his doom. Circe is shown turning his crew into swine by Briton Riviere (Circe and the Friends of Ulysses, 1871) and Arthur Hacker (Circe, 1893) and tempting Ulysses himself in Waterhouse’s Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses (1891) and Thomas Spence’s The Temptation of Ulysses by

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Circe (1897). There were also many pictures of the sirens and Circe alone at a time when both sirens and Circe were common euphemisms for prostitute. However, there had been comparatively few plays on the subject. The Era (11 December 1901), previewing Tree’s production, could only think of two – a tragedy by Nicholas Rowe from 1706 and an opera by John Christopher Smith Jr from 1733. Ulysses, his version of The Odyssey, was the second Stephen Phillips play to be staged by Tree. It was premiered on 1 February 1902, with Tree as Ulysses, Lily Hanbury as Penelope, and Gerald Lawrence as Telemachus. It begins with a prologue on Olympus where Athene petitions Zeus that Ulysses be freed from the spells of Calypso and allowed to return home to Ithaca and Penelope. This request is opposed by Poseidon because Ulysses had blinded his son Polyphemus. But Zeus grants the request on condition that Ulysses visit Hades to have his fate foretold. Act 1 begins in Ulysses’ Palace where Penelope’s suitors demand that she choose a new husband. She names the next full moon as the date when she will choose her new husband from amongst them. Alone, she prays for the return of Ulysses. Scene 2 takes place in Calypso’s cave where Ulysses remains under her spell. Hermes appears, awakens his memory of Penelope and urges him to return home. Ulysses, resisting all Calypso’s blandishments, gathers together his men and leaves for Ithaca. Act 2 details Ulysses’ descent to Hades, accompanied by Hermes. He encounters Sisyphus, Charon, Prometheus and Phaedra among others. Three shades speak to him: the seer Teiresias warns him of shipwreck, the murdered Agamemnon tells how he was killed by his wife Clytemnestra on his return from Troy and warns of faithless wives, but his mother Anticleia reassures him of Penelope’s fidelity. In act 3, shipwrecked and disguised as an old beggar, Ulysses arrives in Ithaca. He discloses his true identity to his son Telemachus and to Eumaeus the swineherd. Arriving at the palace, he is ill-treated by the suitors but tells Penelope to announce that she will marry whoever can draw Ulysses’ bow. All the suitors fail; the beggar succeeds and is revealed as Ulysses. Ulysses, Telemachus and Eumaeus, aided by Athene, kill or expel the suitors and Ulysses and Penelope are reunited. The play thus focuses positively on Ulysses’ successful emancipation from the thrall of the nymph Calypso and his return to wife and family and defence of hearth and home. Tree described the play as ‘magnificent. The dramatic situations are finely conceived and the characters are well drawn and there is a simplicity and strength in that part of the story of which Mr. Phillips has made use that show his powers of selection.’40

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Stephen Phillips appended a note to the printed text of the play, giving his: warmest thanks . . . to Mr Tree for an enthusiasm and a generosity which have admitted no obstacle in the attempt to realise on the stage the best conjectural picture of the Homeric world which could be devised. The attempt is new, and the result is a spectacle richer, more barbaric, many-coloured, and full of fantasy than could have been obtained by adopting the conventional classical costumes and building styles of later Greece. The architecture and its decoration were designed by Professor W.R. Lethaby and based on recent discoveries from the Mycenaean age. The sets were painted by William Telbin, Joseph Harker and Hawes Craven. Percy Anderson the costume designer found he had little to work with: ‘the only authentic information obtainable was from casts and sketches of remains found during the recent excavations at Knossus, in Crete’. These he was able to consult at the British Museum. The advice of Dr Alexander Murray and Sidney Colvin of the British Museum was sought. My guide as to the colours in use at that remote period of time was merely a small fragment of early Mycenaean mural decoration from Knossus, in which three colours, namely, yellow, blue, and a terracotta red, together with black and white, were the only tones used, and to these three primary colours I accordingly confined myself, but I made one introduction, a bright apple-green dress which served to throw the others into finer relief. From these extremely scanty materials I had to design over two hundred costumes, none of which were exactly alike.41 It took him six months solid work to prepare the costumes for Ulysses. The production was welcomed by lavish praise for the spectacle, the visual composition and for Tree’s artistic genius. The Times (3 February 1902) proclaimed the play ‘a majestic enterprise nobly planned and splendidly carried out. It is something at this time of day to find a great world-story told . . . for the first time on the English stage in the language of true poetry and with the aid of all the resources of this age in the arts of plastic and music.’

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The Daily Telegraph (3 February 1902) called it: a great and striking production, which appeals equally to eye and ear and mind. In retrospect, there are many phases of Mr Stephen Phillips’ Ulysses which strike one – a sense of gloomy magnificence in all that part which deals with the trials of the hero; a lavish use of colour, so far as the riotous wooing of the suitors is concerned; here and again, some haunting lines of beautiful verse which fix themselves on the memory . . . the public owe a debt of gratitude to Mr Tree. He has always had high aims; his ideals are those of the true artist. It is a great thing for all of us that on the boards of Her Majesty’s Theatre there should be produced a drama full of imagination, full also of poetry, aiming always, if it does not always reach, the highest levels of that art work which will redeem our age from the trivial, the vulgar, and the ephemeral. The Morning Post (3 February 1902) declared Tree to be ‘Wagnerian’, suggesting that he had mastered the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk: ‘He has an eye for spectacle, a taste for splendour, and for historic truth in decoration, the appreciation of the value of music as a setting for a play, and a knowledge of the effect of a well-displayed crowd. To these qualities he adds the noble ambition to present a great drama.’ But reservations surfaced about the quality of Phillips’s play. The Times thought the prologue ‘less Homeric than Offenbacchanalian’ and that ‘not until the last act is there anything like real drama’. The Illustrated London News (8 February 1902), while describing it as ‘the most striking of Mr Tree’s many memorable productions’, added that it was ‘no play of compact unity, rather a lovely dramatic poem explanatory of superb Homeric tableaux’. The Daily News (3 February 1902) agreed, calling it ‘a pictorial accompaniment to a series of tableaux rather than a serious essay in poetic drama’. The Daily Mail (3 February 1902), while praising Tree’s ‘laudable attempt to elevate the character and tone of the theatre as an institution’ and declaring the play ‘beautifully mounted’, thought it lacked a strong story (‘the dullness and weariness of much of it cannot be gainsaid’). Many declared their dissatisfaction with the visit to Hades. The Illustrated London News described the Hades episode as ‘profoundly impressive as a stage picture, with its dim mysterious distances and flitting, wailing ghosts, fittingly adorned with sombre and stately verse’ but added that it ‘has nevertheless small dramatic significance’. The Times said the same thing in similar words. The Daily Mail called it ‘utterly

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superfluous’ and the Morning Post, a pointless ‘digression’. The general consensus was that Phillips was a poet rather than a dramatist. It was also felt that the play offered few real acting opportunities. The critics almost all agreed in praising Constance Collier for her stately Athene and veteran actor Lionel Brough earned plaudits for bringing some much-needed humour to the small role of Eumaeus the swineherd, whilst Courtice Pounds was praised for his sweet singing as the minstrel Phemius. But the Globe (3 February 1902) declared Tree’s role ‘principally heroic and declamatory, and no further psychological than that it furnishes opportunity for any amount of disguise and wandering’. But there was unanimous praise for the stage pictures. The Pall Mall Gazette (3 February 1902) thought it ‘out-Heroded Herod’ in magnificence. The Star (3 February 1902) said: ‘I do not think it would be easy to praise the staging too highly. Every scene (except, indeed, the first which was entirely without atmosphere) had its own strange and beautiful effect. Nor could it be said that the staging was too much for the poetry. The staging on the contrary helped out the poetry.’ The Daily News called it ‘a very fine spectacle and the spectacular magnificence and . . . its beauty is very well worth going to see’. The Globe said the ‘scenery and decoration, especially the palace in Ithaca and the isle of Calypso, were marvels’. The Illustrated London News praised the sets for Ithaca: ‘Mycenaean architecture of barbaric gorgeousness and archaic costumes of richly harmonised hues . . . the grandest efforts of spectacle and design.’ The Daily Telegraph praised ‘the rich appeal made to the imagination and the senses – the beauty, for instance, of the island grotto where Calypso lives, and the marvellously effective interior of the great hall of Ulysses’ house’. The accolade of authenticity was bestowed by the Morning Post: ‘The scenes, the dresses and the staging were as good as they could be, and the views of the palace of Ulysses without and within are well worth seeing as concrete embodiments of the results of modern archaeological studies.’ The Graphic (8 February 1902) said that spectators were ‘privileged to see a noble dramatic poem put upon the stage, with a degree of liberality, learning and good taste which entitles Mr Tree’s latest venture to take a high place in the long series of splendid productions for which we are indebted to his spirit and enterprise’. The Pall Mall Gazette and the Westminster Gazette (both 3 February 1902) gave detailed descriptions of sets and costumes. The play opened on Mount Olympus with the gods in conclave in the dawn mist. Day breaks to reveal them in their costumes, Pallas Athene striking in red tunic, gold helmet and breastplate and draped white silk peplum.

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The action moves to the forecourt of Ulysses’ Palace, decorated in: the brilliant barbaric colours of ancient Greece. Pillars and pediments are painted blue and red, decorated with designs (of birds and beasts) in gorgeous yellows, hung with curtains of blue and gold – colours all so glowing that their effect is only subdued by the vine that climbs the pent-house on the left, by the great lemon tree that bears fruit above it, and by the faint line of hills that bound the distance beyond. Penelope (Lily Hanbury) wore a robe of deep orange gauze, with white draperies, edged in gold. The sea-cave on Calypso’s island was ‘one of the most beautiful scenes in the play’, with great red rocks, the purple sea and the seanymphs singing and dancing on the sand in their gauzy sea-green draperies and with long trails of ribbon-seaweed in their hands. Calypso (Nancy Price) appeared, wearing ‘perhaps the loveliest costume in the whole play’: ‘a harmony of shimmering sea-green and palest moonlight blue’, with an underdress of white silk gauze, embroidered round the hem with pale blue and silver and over it a long, close-fitting tunic, glittering with closely-sewn moonlight blue sequins, and wide sleeves embroidered in sea-green and turquoise blue silk and encircled at the waist with a girdle in the form of a pale golden serpent. On her head she wore a fillet of emerald green with long emerald green velvet plaits. Only Samuel Coleridge Taylor’s score failed to impress. It comprised an overture, two interludes, three songs and incidental music. The Times said that only Berlioz could have done justice to the subject, and that ‘Of the workmanship there is nothing to complain, but the themes sound certainly not “pregnant with celestial fire” and make no very deep impression.’ The nymphs’ song was ‘pretty, but was not well sung’ and Phemius’ song, ‘O, set the sails’ was ‘commonplace’. The Pall Mall Gazette thought the score ‘scarcely distinguished’, much of the music ‘characterless’ but ‘O, set the sails’, ‘a miniature masterpiece’. Most reviewers did not mention the music. The production was not without its mishaps. There were supposed to be three tableaux in which Ulysses saw visions. But the play was very long and Tree’s production team tried to persuade him to cut them. They were not necessary to the plot and cost several hundred pounds to stage. But Tree was determined to keep them in. The dress rehearsal arrived and the three tableaux were to be staged in all their splendour.

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Constance Collier, who was playing the goddess Athene, recalled what followed: The first one started. The curtain went up. Tantalus stood there, in a tragic attitude, reaching out for the grapes. He was of course supposed not to catch them, but they descended obligingly into his hands. They were worked by an electric contrivance from the flies, and as the man who worked them could neither see the actor nor hear the cries he just wound them up and down regardless of the action on the stage. Poor Tantalus crouched down to avoid them, and up they were dragged into the flies. He sprang forward to reach them – and they descended again into his hands. This went on for about half an hour, Mr Tree getting livid and abusing the actor, who could not it seemed under any condition avoid the grapes. Tree, in a fury, decided to cut it out and insisted on going on to the next tableau. This was Sisyphus, the gentleman who tried to push the stone up a hill, his punishment being that he could never move it. But, alas, the stone was made of cardboard, and, as the actor was not a very good one, every time he pushed he managed to jerk the stone in his anxiety to please. He got worse and worse every time he tried, and Sir Herbert, by this time, was almost apoplectic with temper, and frightened the poor man so much that his foot caught in a bit of the scenery, and he fell off the rostrum and disappeared from sight on the other side. And so the curtain descended on an empty stage and no Sisyphus at all. Then came the final tableau of Prometheus bound to the rock, and there was his protégé, the young gentleman we all detested, lying on the rock half-naked with one side of his body blood-stained and torn, and the great property bird descending and plucking at his heart. He really looked wonderful, and Tree’s face beamed with delight at the success of the tableau, when suddenly the young gentleman sat up on the rock and said: ‘Pardon me, do I take any notice of the bird?’ Tree dashed out of the theatre. The three tableaux were cut out and never heard of again.42 During rehearsals a quarrel broke out between the beautiful and admired Mrs Brown-Potter, who was playing Calypso, and the author Stephen Phillips, who objected to her reading of the role. She flounced out of the theatre to be replaced by Nancy Price, previously playing Melantho. This caused a press sensation. There was another one when she was persuaded to return to the role later in the run.

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Mrs Tree had hoped to play Athene but Tree, Phillips and Percy Anderson decided, in view of the fact that it was the year of Edward VII’s coronation, that Athene should be played as Britannia and Constance Collier fitted that image better than Mrs Tree.43 There was also a mishap on the opening night when Ulysses failed to string his bow in the last scene and Antinous had to stick the arrow in his own chest.44 The reign of Nero was a popular subject with late Victorian historical novelists, particularly those detailing the persecution of the Christians. It featured, among others, in A.J. Church’s The Burning of Rome (1883), Hugh Westbury’s Acte (1890), Dean Farrar’s Darkness and Dawn (1891) and Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis? (1896). Painters in the nineteenth century when tackling Rome preferred scenes of everyday life to great historical events and personalities. But there were two notable canvases featuring Nero: Benjamin Robert Haydon’s Nero Playing the Lyre (1846), which captured the mythic image of the emperor playing his musical instrument while Rome burned, and J.W. Waterhouse’s The Remorse of Nero after the Murder of his Mother (1878), depicting the emperor lying on his stomach on a couch with his head in his hands. Stephen Phillips’s play Nero (1906) directly addressed the two principal structuring themes of the toga play: the needs of empire and the proper role of women. Act 1 opens with the Emperor Claudius dead, poisoned by his second wife Agrippina to clear the way to the throne for her son by a previous marriage, Nero. She secures the support of the Praetorian Guard and ensures the marriage of Nero to Claudius’ daughter, Octavia, to cut Claudius’ own son, Britannicus, from the succession. Nero is acclaimed emperor and declares his intention to be ‘an Emperor of Peace’, promising freedom of speech and freedom from oppression. Act 2, five years later, finds Nero, flattered and pampered by hangers-on, spending his time singing and reciting, encouraged by his advisers Seneca, Burrus and Tigellinus, who have in the meantime run the empire wisely and efficiently. They also encourage him in his pursuit of Poppaea, the beautiful wife of Otho, partly to distract him from the business of state and partly in the hope of using her to check the influence of Agrippina on her son. Nero returns from a performance, having won a singing prize, and orders the death of Titus Cassius for having fallen asleep during the performance. This is deemed by Nero an insult to the gods who gave him his talent. Nero does not want to be bothered meeting the envoys of Britain and Parthia (‘From art to empire is too swift a drop’). Seneca and Burrus now warn him that his neglect is causing Agrippina to assume his imperial duties (and the empire ‘will not endure to have a woman’s rule’). They hint that she may transfer her

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support to Britannicus and they play on his jealousy of the poetic talent of Britannicus who has been receiving popular acclaim. Nero exerts himself and orders his mother to retire to Actium. She angrily threatens to promote the cause of Britannicus, so Nero cancels his order, invites them both to a feast and has Britannicus poisoned. In act 3, Tigellinus and Burrus warn Nero that his mother is stirring up the legions and the fleet against him and they enlist the aid of Poppaea to check her, promising that Poppaea will become ‘mistress of the world’. Otho is despatched by Nero to be governor of Lusitania. Poppaea, however resists Nero’s advances, saying that Agrippina would never approve of their liaison. So Nero agrees to her murder in a collapsible boat on her way back from a festival at Baiae. She survives the wreck and swims ashore. But Nero’s minister Anicetus sends a troop of soldiers to kill her, fearful that she will take revenge on Nero’s ministers for the murder attempt. In act 4, two years later, the empire is seething with unrest and Nero is haunted by the death of Agrippina. Poppaea dies. News is brought to Nero of the revolt of Boadicea in Britain and the outbreak of the Great Fire of Rome. He refuses to take steps to combat the fire, declaring it to have been caused by his mother’s spirit and after reciting a lengthy poem, he collapses. The Illustrated London News was to complain that the play ‘perversely’ omitted Nero’s death, but his collapse clearly prefigured it as he had earlier used Nero’s authentic last words ‘what an artist perishes in me’ and Acte had hastened to his side, as she promised in the first act to do when he was deserted and dying. Beerbohm Tree saw Nero as a victim of his heredity and the flattery and demoralization characteristic of a corrupt court, writing in the souvenir programme for the play: Uncontrolled elemental passion, unexampled power, close intermarriages, all these forces in his ancestry combined to produce in Nero, the genius, the artist, the tyrant and finally the megalomaniac . . . When Nero came to the throne, he was not devoid of ideals, and strove for the general good . . . but, when we think of a Court steeped in corruption, in materialism, it would be extraordinary indeed if the young Emperor had belied his ancestry by setting up a new civilization and placing himself at the head of those forces which were then budding into being, and which were destined to take the place of paganism, then in its energetic death throes.

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Tree certainly did not play the part for sympathy. The Times (26 January 1906) said: He has already played an artist-monarch, Shakespeare’s Second Richard, but one of the feebler sort. This time he has not to muse and mope and whine, but to rage and rave and half-terrible, all horrible. Horror is the predominant feeling created. One shrinks and sickens at the monster. The actor always goes for this, the right, effect; never for a ‘sympathy’ which in presence of such a character would be outrageous. He has queer little grunts and snorts of rage; in his worst moments his very nostrils twitch, as the nostrils of a beast scenting its prey; sometimes, by contrast, he displays a cold, suave, ‘elegant’ cruelty. Yes, Mr Tree’s Nero is quite Neronian. The play makes it clear that an empire cannot be run by a Wildean aesthete who sees Art as superior to Empire and spends his time chariotracing, singing and declaiming odes to the populace. Stephen Phillips had taken his cue for the character from Nero’s celebrated dying words: ‘what an artist perishes in me’. Seneca prophetically warns of the dangers of putting an aesthete on the throne: He lives but in imagination; yet Suppose this aesthete made omnipotent, Feeling there is no bound he cannot pass; Might he not then despise the written page, A petty music, and a puny scene? Conceive a spectacle not witnessed yet, When he, an artist in omnipotence, Uses for colour this red blood of ours, Composes music out of dreadful cries, His orchestra our human agonies, His rhythms lamentations of the ruined, But now translated into burning cities, His scenes the lives of men, their deaths a drama, His dream the desolation of mankind, And all this pulsing world his theatre.45 Thereafter Nero fulfils these fears. He sees everything in terms of theatricality and of colour schemes. He says he would write a play ‘lived there a single critic fit to judge it’. He views the world through an emerald eye-glass. When he dismisses Agrippina from the reception for the

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ambassadors he does so because ‘You jar the scheme of colour – mar the effect.’ He plans the murder of Britannicus in terms of mise-en-scène: ‘I have conceived . . . the death scene of the boy Britannicus. It shall be performed tonight at supper: get your seats: It shall be something new and wonderful, Done after wine, and under falling roses; and there shall be suspense in it, and thrill.’46 There follows a realization of the celebrated Alma-Tadema painting, The Roses of Heliogabalus in which a decadent emperor (Heliogabalus) smothers his dinner guests under a cloud of falling rose petals. Britannicus, reciting an ode, drinks poisoned wine and falls dead under the shower of roses. Nero approves the scheme of killing his mother in a collapsible boat as ‘a beautiful theatrical act’. ‘Gods! What a scene.’ He declares of his farewell to his mother and then as he waits for the boat to sink: ‘How wonderful this waiting and this pause. Could one convey this in the theatre?’ He proclaims the poisoner Locusta ‘an artist’ who has a poison to extinguish life ‘beautifully’. It is of course art misapplied and perverted to evil ends. Contemporary critics were not slow to pick up on the references to Wildeanism. The Times saw Nero as a Roman anticipation of Huysmans’s prototype aesthete Des Esseintes. It would not have been forgotten that Wilde had his hair cut in the style of Nero and referred to his heyday as his ‘Neronian hours’.47 The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (3 February 1906) may have had Wilde in mind when it took issue with Tree’s description of Nero as ‘a genius’: ‘Mr Tree speaks of Nero as a genius; I can only see an early type of notoriety-seeking mediocrity, striving for public attention with the opportunities of a throne to back him up. He appears not to have done anything in art worth remembering.’ The text of the play would seem to support this view as Phillips has Tigellinus telling Seneca and Burrus that the audience at Nero’s public performance were ‘bursting to laugh and aching but to smile’. The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News dismissed the artistic temperament in automatically philistine terms: ‘Here dies an artist!’ were the last words of Nero; and – most of us have thought – ‘a good job too!’ . . . it is extremely dangerous to begin to make allowances for the ‘artistic temperament’ – it takes too many advantages of us if we do . . . Fortunately art and the artistic temperament are only loosely connected, for the former has too often no reason to be proud of the latter. One means the sterling thing, the other may only signify a velvet jacket and uncut hair. It is to this class that Nero would have belonged, had he been here now, for the

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while that he kept clear of Broadmoor on the one hand and Portland on the other. The female characters embody warnings about the danger posed by liberated women. Agrippina murders her husband and tries to rule through her son before being herself murdered. Poppaea, vain and mercenary, is preoccupied with her appearance and make-up and cheerfully ditches her devoted husband Otho for the emperor. She tells him she is only making up to the emperor to advance Otho’s career. But when her maid says to Poppaea that she would not part from such a man as Otho, even for Nero, Poppaea replies ‘For Caesar! No! but Caesar means the world!’ The positive role model for women is the slave girl Acte, who is selflessly devoted to Nero and stands by him until the end. But she also becomes a Christian and seeks to convert the dying Poppaea, only to be told by Poppaea: ‘I want no spirit kingdom after death. The splendid sun, the purple, and the crown, these I have known, and I am losing them.’48 As with the poetic dramas of W.G. Wills and Alfred Tennyson, there were complaints that Phillips’s play was more of a poem than a drama. The Illustrated London News (3 February 1906) noted that it had long been recognized that Phillips was ‘a dramatic poet more than a playwright, a self-conscious artist who is impatient of impersonal methods, an embroiderer of lyrical verse who is not less the slave of rhetoric than Marlowe and as susceptible to the charms of sensuous verbal beauty as his other model, Keats’, but thought Nero his most impressive work since Paolo and Francesca. The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, while conceding that Phillips’s text was ‘a fine picturesque piece of work’, nevertheless felt it was ‘not essentially dramatic after the manner of great tragedy, either classical or modern. It stirs in us few waves of emotion; it holds us but rarely in any grip of interest.’ But everyone acknowledged the splendour of the spectacle. Tree was aware of its importance and in the preface to the souvenir booklet published on the occasion of the fiftieth performance of Nero, he singled out three of his associates for particular praise: Percy McQuoid, who had overseen the costumes and properties, Samuel Coleridge Taylor who had written the incidental music, and his dramaturgical adviser, Joseph Comyns Carr. Taylor’s music included themes for Nero, Agrippina and Poppaea; a bacchanale, an Eastern dance, a processional march and fire music. The scene-painting had been in the expert hands of Joseph Harker and Harry Emden. There had been three spectacular set-pieces: the feast with the falling rose petals, Nero’s triumphal entry into Rome between acts 3 and 4 with Tree driving a golden chariot pulled by four

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white horses, and the Great Fire of Rome in act 4. However, on the opening night, the fire effect failed as Constance Collier recalled: Sir Herbert had taken months to prepare his great effect, and at the dress rehearsal it was wonderfully successful. The first night went splendidly until the final scene. We, Sir Herbert and myself as Nero and Poppaea, were on a kind of loggia; the panorama of Rome lay in the distance. Here and there little sparks appeared as the fire broke out for the great final effect, which was the Burning of Rome. Gradually the whole city began to burn, bursting into flames which mounted higher and higher as the curtain descended. I lay dead upon a couch; Nero stood watching the licking flames, reciting verses and playing upon his lyre. The moment came for the climax! Nothing happened. Tree began to get nervous, and so anxious was he to keep his eyes on his effect that his fingers never touched the strings of the lyre, but plucked away in mid air. Never a flame appeared – only a few pops and sparks! He grew frantic, twanging wildly at nothing and reciting his verses. I opened my eyes in my anxiety. Although I had been dead for some time this got a titter from the audience. Suddenly there was a loud explosion, and everything went up in soot as the curtain descended. The stage manager lost his head and pulled the curtain up again in response to the sympathetic applause, and there we stood, smothered in blacks, like a couple of nigger minstrels. All went well the second night, and the play was a great success.49 The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News reported of Nero: ‘Its gorgeous mounting and its spectacular effects, its glittering movement, and its exquisite tableaux give to a large section of the public just what it likes best – a feast of colour accompanied by vague rich harmonies of speech and poetic suggestion’, adding ‘Nero will, I think, be remembered as a great production rather than a great play.’ It singled out for praise ‘Mr Percy McQuoid, whose archaeological triumphs in the magnificent production have evidently been achieved by the labour of love.’ This reaction will have pleased Tree, who underlined the educational role of his production in the souvenir programme, which printed a genealogical table of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, authentic Roman coin portraits of the leading characters, an essay by McQuoid on the art, costumes and furniture of the period and an essay by Tree himself on Nero and his ancestry, with acknowledgement to Bernard W. Henderson’s ‘admirable’ The Life and Principate of the Emperor Nero.

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The quality of the production inspired the Star (26 January 1906) to raptures: Even the annals of our spectacular stage discover nothing to rival, let alone excel, Mr Tree’s production of ‘Nero’. All the splendours of an age of unparalleled luxury were set before us with a completeness of detail and emphatic realism which only resurrected Rome itself could excel. It seemed, indeed, Old Rome, with all its colour and its sin, its lust of life, its fearlessness of death. In the Palace of the Caesars, Nero hears the prayers and threats of his tributary kings. Here he holds a feast, terrible in its awful luxury, its ravaging of the world to supply the painted Caesar’s lusts. Storehouses of history have been ransacked to produce these pictures, as Caesar’s slaves ransacked the world for dainties for his banquet. This is Rome in all its fearful glory. Slaves from Nubia, Egyptian dancing girls, Greek physicians, . . . all are here, and Nero, flourishing his whip while the three white horses in his chariot, paw the stage with impatient hoofs of gold. And it is this Rome which we see in flames, purging itself of its sin, while Nero watches in maniacal glee, his artist soul glorying in the supreme spectacle, his prescient eyes fascinated by the vision of a newer, lovelier Rome. If only for the sake of these undeniably beautiful scenes, ‘Nero’ must be favourably remembered by all who see it. The Era (27 January 1906) calling the mounting of the play ‘superb’, said: The beauty and magnificence of the scenes were overpowering, the luxurious life of the Roman Emperors being brought before us in all its lavish splendour. The stately palace, finely painted by Mr Joseph Harker, which formed the background for the first and second acts and Mr Henry Emden’s beautiful sets in the third may be briefly mentioned as examples of what our scenic artists can do when given full scope; and Mr Harker’s Conflagration in the last act could not have been better managed. Archaeological accuracy in the beautiful dresses and accessories was secured by the superintendence of Mr Percy McQuoid, and Mr Louis d’Egville was responsible for the arrangement of a dazzling Oriental dance, introduced in a scene of Roman revelry, which ‘beggared description’ by its elaborate stage management and the sumptuous liberality of its arrangement.

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As always in Tree’s productions, the costumes merited separate articles in the press. The Daily Graphic (26 January 1906) was typical: Beautiful as have been many of Mr Tree’s productions at His Majesty’s Theatre, the dresses in ‘Nero’, designed by Mr Percy McQuoid, and with many of the rich fabrics specially woven at Mr and Mrs Hunter’s Handicraft School, Haslemere, are, perhaps, the most thoroughly artistic and gorgeous ever put on the stage. The perfect harmony of colour even in the most crowded scenes is striking. Subdued art tones of blues, greens, yellows and russet-red predominate, with here and there a bold contrast of vivid colour, and the attire of the leading characters, male and female, always magnificent. Mrs Tree comes on wearing a robe of cloth of silver, softly shining through a loose trelliswork of pearls, finished with tassels. Misty grey draperies, touched with silver, float over this robe, . . . Miss Dorothea Baird, with a wreath of lilac flowers and green leaves in her hair, has a white dress with pale lilac drapery, and Miss Phyllis Embury is in white, with gold embroidery. Dress in the second act is yet more splendid. Here Mr Tree is in richest cloth of gold, heavily jewelled, and with a royal mantle of reddish purple, richly ornamented with gold. All his costumes are in either cloth of gold or rich brocades, his black mantle in the last act being most effectively embroidered and bordered with scarlet and gold. Mrs Tree is entirely in shades of dusky red in the second act, bordered with rubies and gold, and Miss Constance Collier’s dress is in iridescent hues of peacock blues and greens, and she wears a silvered gauze veil. Miss Dorothea Baird’s robe of salmon pink is painted in darker tulips and draped with tender green, matching the fillet of leaves in her hair . . . Mrs Tree’s last dress is a wonderful combination of rich purple and blue diaphanous draperies over a silver robe, across which a thickly embroidered silver scarf makes a bodice and hangs in long end to one side. In one act Miss Constance Collier is simply dressed in white, but an effective touch of colour is imparted by the scarlet poppies wreathing her dark hair . . . Again Miss Collier is in blush-rose pink gauze over a silver and white robe, and Miss Dorothea Baird’s last dress is a charming one of pale hyacinth crepe embroidered in silver, outlined with black. Tree was widely praised for his Nero. The Daily Telegraph (26 January 1906) called Tree’s Nero ‘a part after his own heart, full of malign humour and of artistic diablerie, in which the actor is made up in striking resemblance to the well-known bust of Nero, an eager voluptuary in

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the early portion of the play, a tired voluptuary at its end, Mr Tree holds the play together with quite one of the most successful of his impersonations.’ The Westminster Gazette (26 January 1906) said: ‘Mr Tree’s Nero was a very remarkable piece of work. He . . . gave a very impressive, strange picture of the repulsive creature, showing with vivid power the passage of emotion in his disturbed mind.’ Mrs Tree, cast as Agrippina, also received excellent notices. The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News thought she ‘quite electrified the house by the spirit and dignified force of her Agrippina’; The Times thought hers ‘a fine performance throughout, a thing of impressive presence and splendid elocution’; the Illustrated London News praised her ‘fine frenzy in the role of the passionate queen mother Agrippina’. Lady Tree recalled the four-month run of the play with great pleasure: ‘Oh, the happy days of Nero! How noble, how beautiful the play, how gorgeous the setting, how haunting the music, how full of excitement and glory the traffic of the stage . . . we never had a greater financial success’, although it cost £200 a night to stage.50 But there was praise too for Constance Collier’s Poppaea, Esmé Percy’s Britannicus and Basil Gill’s Otho. It was Constance Collier’s performance as Poppaea that decided Tree to produce Antony and Cleopatra: ‘It was a question of Antony or Macbeth for him and he said he would rather play a man who died for love than for ambition.’51 Antony and Cleopatra was one of the least popular and least performed of Shakespeare’s plays before the twentieth century.52 There are several reasons for this. One is the length and large cast of characters in the play. More serious is the fact that it was originally written for performance without a break on an unlocalized platform, but when the editors of Shakespeare divided the play into scenes based on its different locations, it came out at forty-two scenes, a major deterrent in the age of scenery and literal realization of location. E.W. Godwin thought it could not be done with less than five full sets. But even more than this its content was generally not to the taste of Victorian audiences; as Margaret Lamb puts it, it dealt with and seemed to glorify ‘what used to be called illicit sexual passion – not to mention neglect of duty, betrayal of friends, political and personal double-dealing, and even arguably happy pagan suicides’.53 Between 1660 and 1759 it was not performed at all, as Dryden’s version of the same story, All for Love, held the stage, and Garrick’s 1759 production was not popular. There were three London productions in the first half of the nineteenth century, John Philip Kemble’s 1813 production, Macready’s 1833 production and Phelps’s 1849 production, only the last of which was successful. One of

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the reasons for the 1849 success was Isabella Glyn’s Cleopatra. She made the role acceptable, as Richard Madelaine puts it, because she ‘poeticised passion by articulating it in delivery and gracefully emotive gesture or small-scale action . . . her picturesque “poses” lent classical authority, and thereby assurances of nobility, to “the part” ’.54 This was so successful and she became so associated with the part that she revived the play again in 1855 and 1867. The most sumptuous Victorian productions were in 1873 and 1890 and then at the end of the century, there was a clutch of productions, by Louis Calvert in 1897, by Frank Benson in 1898, 1900 and 1912 and Beerbohm Tree in 1906. There were two non-dramatic reasons for the nineteenth-century interest in the play. One was the continuing phenomenon of Egyptomania, fuelled by the archaeological discoveries from Belzoni (1816–19) onwards, the decipherment of hieroglyphs, and the popularization of Ancient Egypt through panoramas and dioramas, the Egyptian Court at the Crystal Palace, the opening of the Suez Canal and the growth of Egyptian tourism. All of this signalled the possibilities for visual spectacle and archaeological authenticity, which were features of the Kemble, Macready and Phelps productions. They involved Egyptian costumes and artefacts, sea battles, funeral processions, marches and banquets. Such production values had become an article of faith by the second half of the nineteenth century. So F.B. Chatterton at Drury Lane, who in 1873 put on a spectacular production of the play which bankrupted him, was quoted as saying ‘that a play to be acceptable to all classes in a large theatre must appeal to the eye and the senses as well as to the understanding; that the action must be accompanied by spectacle, and the play itself must be adapted to the dramatic fashion of the time in which we live’. Accordingly the text was cut by half and Chatterton introduced Cleopatra’s arrival in her barge, the battle of Actium, Antony and Octavia’s wedding festival, ‘most splendid’ costumes and accessories and evocative scene-painting by William Beverley.55 But this overshadowed the two leading performances which were thought by Dutton Cook to be inadequate: James Anderson’s Antony (‘torpid’) and Ellen Wallis’ Cleopatra (‘she fails to convey a due idea of the Cleopatra of Shakespeare’). In his autobiography, James Anderson gave vent to his disappointment in the production. It began when he received Andrew Halliday’s adaptation of the play: I found it cut down to a mere skeleton; nothing but the bare bones left, through which the ‘lime light’ was to shine on Shakespeare in

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the distance. Nor was this all; the reckless mutilations had involved many gross mistakes and blunders which I lost no time in pointing out, adding suggestions which I thought likely to improve the version. I am pleased to say Halliday received and adopted my suggestions in the frankest spirit, acknowledging his grateful thanks in a courteous note. When the play opened on 20 September 1873, Anderson recalled: The house was crowded, and the play received with more applause than it deserved. The spectacle (it could not be called a tragedy, being all made up of scenery, processions, ballet, gaud and glitter) was accepted with maddening demonstrations of approval by the pit and galleries; but the ‘judicious few’ looked coldly on. He was dissatisfied with his own performance, putting it down to ‘the furious noise of preparation for “heavy sets” behind the scenes that destroyed all power of acting in front’. He thought his co-star Ellen Wallis ‘altogether too juvenile to sustain the part [of Cleopatra] to the satisfaction of the student of history and Shakespeare’. He concluded: ‘The play ran seventy-two nights with varied success; but whether it even realised the money expended on it or not I do not know.’56 It did not. It lost between £4000 and £5000.57 A second reason for the interest in Egypt was that in the imperial atmosphere of late Victorian and Edwardian England, which saw productions of the previously unpopular Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, the play became a lesson for imperialists on what happened when you put private passion ahead of public duty: this may explain the clutch of productions at the end of the century. When Lillie Langtry decided to produce the play in 1890, she followed the dictum of F.B. Chatterton, but in her case, there was an unspoken and subordinate attraction: she was the former mistress of the Prince of Wales, which gave the plot of illicit sexual passion among ancient royalty a contemporary frisson. No expense was spared, thanks to investment in the production by the Rothschilds. The company consisted of four hundred people, ‘gorgeous armour’ was ordered from Paris and Birmingham, prelude, ballets and incidental music were specially composed by Edward Jakobowski with the triumphal march contributed by W. Corri junior. The dances were arranged by leading choreographer John D’Auban.58 The sets were painted by William Perkins, Bruce Smith, Joseph Harker and Edward Banks. The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (22 November 1890) said: ‘Save at the Lyceum, no such rich and

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beautiful scenic rendering of Shakespearian tragedy has for many years been attempted.’ The play, which opened on 18 November 1890, ran for several months until audiences dropped off as the result of a ‘series of pea-soup fogs’ and it was withdrawn at the end of February 1891. The critic A.B. Walkley, lamenting the length of the production and suggesting that judicious cutting of the text could have reduced it by at least an hour, accepted that spectacle was inevitable. ‘A generation that has been educated on Delacroix, Gautier, Gérôme, Constant, the poet of the “Orientales”, and Messrs Liberty’s shop window, would be satisfied with no less.’ Noting that the director Lewis Wingfield had wisely left the battle of Actium off-stage, he admitted that he had given us ‘no less than three great pictorial effects’: the arrival of Cleopatra in her barge, ‘an Alexandrian festival in which there was an interlude representing the conflict between Day and Night’ and the triumphant reception of Antony by Cleopatra. He complained that Charles Coghlan as Antony shouted all his lines and said: Mrs Langtry’s Cleopatra is not to be described as a disappointment, for the judicious can have found nothing in the lady’s previous career to warrant the expectation that she could play the part . . . She is best in her scenes of coquetry, but even that suggests the modern coquetry of Mayfair. One could not help wishing that Mr Wingfield had retained the Queen’s invitation to Charmian: ‘Let us to billiards’; for here was evidently a Cleopatra who had gone the round of the best country houses, and was doubtless an adept with the cue.59 But that it was not in general a play to the taste of Victorian theatregoers is evidenced by the verdict of veteran Shakespeare watcher Richard Dickins, who wrote: Antony and Cleopatra may prove successful on the stage if produced as a series of beautiful pictures, but otherwise I think it unlikely to appeal to an average audience on account of the plot being unsympathetic . . . we cannot take keen interest in characters who have fallen so low as to fill us with feelings akin to disgust. The life depicted in Egypt is bestial in its gross animalism.60 Or as one female theatregoer legendarily said: ‘How unlike the home life of our own dear Queen.’ Tree’s production of Antony and Cleopatra, which premiered at His Majesty’s Theatre on 27 December 1906, seems to have exceeded even

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Lillie Langtry’s. It prompted J.T. Grein in the Ladies’ Field (15 January 1907) to declare: ‘As a pictorial artist, a producer, Mr Tree stands unequalled in the English-speaking world’ and the Athenaeum (5 January 1907) said: ‘As regards the mounting, it is not only the best that has been given to this play – it may also be regarded as the best that has been bestowed upon any work of the author.’ Tree had performed drastic surgery on Shakespeare’s text. He reduced the forty-two scenes of the original to fourteen in four acts, excising about half the play. He largely eliminated the battle scenes, removed six minor characters and bowdlerized some of the dialogue. The keynote of the production was the contrast between ‘the austere grandeur of Rome’ and the ‘gorgeous splendour of the East’ (Stage, 3 January 1907). This was evident in the scene-painting which contrasted Roman austerity with Egyptian opulence (Joseph Harker painted twelve of the scenes and T.E. Ryan two); in the costumes, which had the Romans in armour and the Egyptians in rich multi-coloured robes; and in Raymond Roze’s score which had ‘thrumming, vibrating, aromatic music’ characterizing Cleopatra and ‘austere, strict-marching’ themes accompanying the Romans (Speaker, 2 February 1907). The play opened with a dissolving image of the Sphinx, ‘emblem of eternity, indifferent to human fate and will’, which reappeared at the end to underline the tragedy of the lovers. The production had a succession of memorable set-pieces, which the Daily Telegraph (28 December 1906) described with approval: If for nothing else, the production would be extraordinary because of its stage pictures. The first glimpse of the landing-stage of Cleopatra’s palace, with the barge that draws up to the steps, from which issue the regal pair of lovers; the beautiful gold-bedizened scene, when Cleopatra wreaks her vengeance on the messenger telling her of Antony’s betrothal; the magnificent tableau of the return of Antony to Alexandria; above all, perhaps the scene on Pompey’s galley, where, in the mysterious dark, lit by the fantastically-coloured lamps at the poop, the triumvirs watch the dancing girls, and themselves join in the mad debauch – these and other pictures prove once more that whatever else we may have succeeded or failed in doing on the modern stage, we have advanced the ordinary scenic artifices to a pitch of success which was not dreamed of by our forefathers. In this, above all, lies the triumph of last night’s play, on which Mr Tree is warmly to be congratulated. He had before him the problem how to give us the subtle glamour of the East, and in a series of marvellous

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displays, in which everything is controlled by artistic knowledge and grace, we become conscious to the full of the fatal spell which the conquest of Egypt laid upon its Western invaders. The influence of the new medium of cinema was beginning to be felt upon the stage, as evidenced by The Times’s dismissal of the short military camp scenes as ‘mere kinematographs’ (4 January 1907) and the description by Tree’s biographer Hesketh Pearson of the return of Antony to Alexandria which: dismissed by Shakespeare in a brief speech, gave Tree an excellent opportunity for annoying the pedants. The occasion was illustrated by a superb tableau which a modern film producer could not equal in colour, sound, movement and dramatic suggestion, wherein excited crowds, priestly processions, dancing flower-decked maidens and marching soldiers prelude the arrival of Cleopatra to voluptuous music and Antony to the sterner notes of Rome.61 The costumes, and accessories designed by Percy McQuoid, elicited similar praise. The Daily Telegraph typically said ‘The gradation of colours . . . the glittering robes of the Queen, the pomp and ceremony of her court – all these things, controlled by the practised artistry of Mr Percy McQuoid, add to the pleasure of the eye, and give bodily semblance to the inner meaning of the play.’ The opening scene of the landing-stage with the arrival of Antony and Cleopatra had tall pink oleanders each side of the steps and great pillars painted in typical Egyptian style. There were singing girls in costumes of flame-coloured silk, green and gold, their dark hair bound in gold fillets and their harps decorated with animal heads. Antony arrived in a black and gold tunic and Cleopatra in a close-fitting dress of red silk worked with scales of gold and a long flowing mantle of flame-coloured silk. Her head, neck and arms glowed with rich jewels. Later in her palace apartments, lined with gold, Cleopatra appeared in a dress of dull blue silk, woven with gold, and a scarf of vivid green silk striped with gold wound about her body. Her heavy ornaments were of emerald and gold, matching the cushions she lay on and the dresses of her attendants. For the entrance into Alexandria, the red and gold of the soldiers’ uniforms contrasted with the greens and blues worn by crowds of women, with at the centre of the scene, Cleopatra, robed as Isis in silver and gold, and Antony in purple and gold. For her death scene, Cleopatra was arrayed in a dress of

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vivid crimson, bound with a wide girdle of purple silk, richly worked in gold, and wearing a crown decorated with rubies and carbuncles.62 But the dresses and accoutrements provoked controversy. Several commentators complained that the Egyptian scenes were too Egyptian when they should have been Hellenistic. Edwyn Bevan, in a letter to The Times, said the whole archaeological conception of the play was radically wrong. But Percy McQuoid in reply argued that everything in the play was based on Egyptian originals and that the Ptolemaic dynasty, while in origin Greek, had over the three hundred years since their takeover of the throne become thoroughly Egyptianized in appearance, taste and manners.63 When it came to the performances, the press was generally polite but unenthusiastic. Tree played Antony as a sturdy Roman general seduced from his imperial duty by passion and the subtle lure of the Orient. But two of his greatest fans, Lady Tree and Desmond McCarthy, both thought the part outside his physical and emotional range. McCarthy said; ‘he had not the animal vigour which is necessary to great excellence in violent tragedy’ and thought his Antony in Antony and Cleopatra ‘best forgotten’. Lady Tree pronounced it ‘one of his rare failures’.64 Opinion on Constance Collier’s Cleopatra was divided. A.B. Walkley in The Times (28 December 1906) calling her ‘voluptuous’ and ‘orchidaceous’, said ‘she not only looks but plays the part splendidly . . . now she writhes, clings, caresses, then quivers and flashes with jealous rage, at last to compose herself into a set, marmorean calm. An occasional false intonation . . . is the only blemish in what is on the whole, what Enobarbus says of the Queen, “a wonderful piece of work”.’ William Archer in Tribune (28 December 1906) said ‘the sultry beauty and sinuosity of Miss Constance Collier are eminently suited to the part of Cleopatra and she gives what may be described as a vigorously realistic rendering of the character’. The Daily Telegraph (28 December 1906) said: ‘Miss Constance Collier, handsome, dark-skinned, barbaric, dominates the scene whenever she appears. Nor has she ever had a better chance, or more fully availed herself of it, than when in the second act she has to prove how close the tiger’s cruelty lies under the sleek skin of the cultivated woman.’ The Era (29 December 1906) declared: Miss Constance Collier’s Cleopatra was overpowering in the plenitude of its majesty, in the abandon and energy of its passion, and in the seductive eloquence of its sensuous languor. Every phase of feeling and fancy in the part was treated with marvellous completeness of accomplishment, and in the later acts Miss Collier rose to a

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very high pitch of grandeur and intensity. From a pictorial point of view Miss Collier was most happily chosen. In her splendid attire, and with her fine physique and features she looked every inch an Egyptian Queen. On the other hand, Vanity Fair (2 January 1907) complained that although she looked the part, ‘Miss Collier was not sinuous or passionate enough; not cat-like cruel enough on the one hand, not Queen enough on the other.’ The Evening News (28 December 1907) said ‘Her voice is too restricted in range, her command of expressions too limited, for her to get the full effect out of so magnificent a part.’ Although the adverse critics were in a minority, Constance Collier agreed with them. She explains in her autobiography that the final rehearsals were exhausting, lasting regularly until five and six in the morning, and in addition she had unwisely been on a very strict diet to keep her weight down and was eating very little: The strain was beginning to tell on me; my voice was hoarse and my physical strength was going. For Cleopatra one needed a super-voice. How foolish to go against Nature! I had wrecked my superb strength with the absurd diet I was on . . . It was the first time that nervousness overcame me in the theatre. I generally act the better for it, and am a good ‘first nighter’. It gives me added excitement and vitality, like a race-horse waiting for the start; but that night, because of my depleted strength, it was a wet blanket that descended on me. My limbs felt heavy and my voice thin. I wasn’t at my best . . . The next morning the criticisms were divided about my performance . . . but I knew so well, as every artist knows, that I hadn’t hit the bullseye. If you don’t succeed on a first night, however much your performance may improve, the opportunity is lost and never returns.65 Nevertheless the production ran until 15 March 1907, a total of ninety performances. It was never to be staged in such a spectacular manner again, as production philosophies changed after the Great War.66 Tree was back in Ancient Egypt for False Gods, an English translation by James Bernard Fagan from the French play La Foi by Eugene Brieux. False Gods is the story of a young novice priest Satni who, having travelled abroad for several years, returns to Egypt, believing that the gods are a sham invented by the priests to control the people. He does not believe in the afterlife and the underworld. He has a new religion – humanity – and wishes to replace superstition with rationalism.

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He discovers that Yaouma, the girl to whom he was betrothed, is to be sacrificed to the gods to ensure the flooding of the Nile and fertility for the land. She is joyously willing to go to her death but he denounces the whole process and belief system. Then the barge coming to collect her is wrecked in a thunderstorm and the priests aboard killed. The people come to believe he is more powerful than the gods and begin to worship him. He encourages them to smash the previously revered statues of the gods. But in the next act the slaves run riot, committing pillage and murder. He remonstrates with them in the name of humanity. But they cannot understand morality without the gods or a purpose in the world without the promise of an afterlife. Mieris, the blind wife of Rheou, who had been comforted by her belief in Isis and hope of reunion with her dead child in the next life, finds her life meaningless without the gods and is with difficulty persuaded not to kill herself. Satni’s father Pakh, a potter, is injured in the rioting and when his son can neither cure him nor give him back the old gods, dies cursing him. The last act of the play, which merges acts 4 and 5 of the text, is set in the temple of Isis. Pharaoh and the High Priest sit side by side on thrones. The people pay homage to Pharaoh and he in turn has to pay homage to the High Priest as the representative of the gods. He resents this but the High Priest explains that Pharaoh only exists because he is believed to have been chosen by the gods. Satni is brought in a prisoner and explains his beliefs to the High Priest who tells him that he knows that the images and miracles they use are tricks but ‘The People cannot believe unless they can see. By these images and tricks we give them faith. That faith is their strength and their comfort. Would you rob them of that?’ He convinces Satni to activate the mechanism which causes the statue of Isis to bow before the assembled crowd, confirming the existence of the gods. Yaouma is led away in procession to make her sacrifice. Satni, repenting of his action, leaps on the altar to denounce the procedure and expose the deception but is stabbed to death by a slave who had been one of his earliest disciples. Only Mieris is left to hear the dying man reiterate his humanitarian beliefs. As always, authenticity was the aim of Tree. Percy McQuoid in an article for the Evening Standard (14 September 1909) explained the importance of archaeology to the set and costume designers. They had chosen 1300 BC, believed to be the period of Pharaoh Meneptah, the ruler at the presumed time of the Exodus, as the setting, though the text of the play makes it clear it is set in the aftermath of Akhnaton’s reign. The hall of columns at Karnak, still standing, had provided the model

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for the temple of Isis, statues were copied from originals and artefacts in the British Museum studied to create the necessary accessories. Tree explained in an interview his interest in the play and the approach he intended to adopt to the production: The plays which hold and fill me . . . are those which deal with what one may call a ‘sociological’ aspect of life . . . it tells of the thoughts and aspirations of the people, and the distance which separates them from their temporal and spiritual masters. Its central figure might be the Tolstoy of ancient Egypt. False Gods . . . deals with great issues . . . Its thought is intensely modern, although its setting is placed back 3000 years – before Cleopatra ruled Egypt. M. Brieux shows us how thought – not experience – remains the same. It never changes in essentials. What the old Egyptians thought we think to-day. People believed and doubted then as they believe and doubt to-day. Creed was master, and the rebels rebelled – all was similar. At the end of our play, after all the stress and tumult . . . we find that the images are back on their pedestals again. Nothing changes. The faith survived. The gods remained. As to the style of the production: The note of our production . . . will be found, I hope, in one of splendid simplicity. There will be crowds – never, before, I think have crowds played such an important part in a play – not as decoration, but as an essential part of the progress of the story. Everything is subordinated to that, for M. Brieux has, I think, developed his striking thesis by means of real drama – there are ‘situations’ and ‘curtains’ which, I believe, will fire the emotions of the audience, while the inner meaning of the work will appeal to its intellect. We have striven unceasingly for ‘atmosphere’. You will see the ‘shadak’ or drawer of water, hoisting his bucket by Nile-side as he hoists it to-day. You will see the crowds of the halt and the lame go to the old Egyptian shrine to be healed and cured. The dance of the professional mourners and paid weepers is one of the funeral rites which will be reproduced . . . in the third act the action of the play will be stopped, the stage will be still and empty while an intermezzo by M. Saint-Saens is played. I have done this purposely, for I want the house, while it listens, to think and to assimilate so much of the play as has been seen ere we take up the threads again to show the results of what has gone before.67

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The production was not without its problems. Brieux was infuriated by the splendour of the production which he felt smothered his basic message – a denunciation of the blind faith of Catholics in miracles. The powerful scene in the last act where the sick besiege the temple calling for a miracle was, said Brieux, inspired by a trip to Lourdes.68 The French composer of the score, Camille Saint-Saëns was seriously at odds with the German conductor Adolf Schmid, to the extent of having screaming rows. Mrs Patrick Campbell, playing Mieris, disliked the play, her part and her costume, claiming it made her look like ‘an elderly wasp in an interesting condition’.69 The play opened on 14 September 1909 and received a generally enthusiastic press. The headlines said it all: ‘beautiful play’ (Daily Express, 15 September 1909), ‘brilliant production’ (Morning Leader, 15 September 1909), ‘Egyptian pageantry at His Majesty’s (Daily Mail, 15 September 1909), ‘Wonderful Tragedy of ancient Egypt’ (Daily Mirror, 15 September 1909). The acting was generally praised. Typical are the comments in the Daily Graphic (15 September 1909). Henry Ainley as Satni was ‘excellent . . . Earnest, vigorous and handsome, the weight of the play depends on him, and he never falters nor has he ever done anything better.’ Mrs Patrick Campbell ‘has very little to do as the pathetic blind Mieris, but looks handsome’. Tree himself did not appear until the last act but then ‘as the wily, powerful High Priest he dominates the stage and works up the crowd to a frenzy of exaltation when they come to beseech him to hear them’. The mounting of the play, with scenery painted by Joseph Harker and costumes and accessories designed by Percy McQuoid, also came in for superlatives. Saint-Saëns’s incidental music which included a dance, a sung prayer to Isis, a song for the water drawer at the well, a lamentation over the dead body of Pakh, and a march for the entry of the High Priest into the temple was, thought The Times (15 September 1909), ‘pleasant and appropriate. Both in his orchestration and his use of Oriental scales, M. Saint-Saens has shown the same skilful hand that composed the ballet in the last act of Samson et Delila. The Oriental atmosphere . . . was touched in: the effects were blended, and there was nothing crude or uncompromising in the pictures.’ The Daily Chronicle (15 September 1909), calling the play ‘one of Sir Herbert Tree’s supreme triumphs in splendour and in real beauty’, said that he had been able to recreate ‘with amazing accuracy not only the gorgeous palaces, the stately temples, the luxurious villas, that rose two thousand years ago upon the banks of the Nile, but to revive a whole civilization – to show us the very life of the people, their dances, their dresses, their industries,

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their habit as they lived’. The Pall Mall Gazette (15 September 1909) reported: Since Irving showed us the Temple of Artemis in ‘The Cup’, no such interest has been placed on the London stage as the stupendous hypostyle hall in which the last act of ‘False Gods’ is played. It is a truly superb set. Rows of huge columns, carved with hieroglyphics, soar to the roof overhead; in the far distance is seen a courtyard bathed in moonlight; and the gloom, the silence, the immensity of the hall itself have that awe-inspiring effect which every imaginative traveller feels on stepping for the first time into the great chambers of Karnak and Luxor. It took a long while to prepare this scene last night, but when at last the parted curtains revealed it the audience were well compensated and the house rang with applause. Despite the beauty and power of the play, some critics found its message distinctly disturbing and saw it as an argument in favour of atheism. The Standard (15 September 1909), for example, called it ‘a bitter, biting and beautiful work’: Almost uninterruptedly . . . last night we were enthralled by a great theme and a finely dramatic work. And while we were enthralled, many of us were repelled and distressed. But although the dramatist pained, he did not degrade. ‘La Foi’ is a work of great beauty, but the beauty is demoniacal. There is a subtle poison in it. The faith and the beliefs and the hopes of millions of men and women to-day are attacked ruthlessly and insidiously by this story of Egypt three thousand years ago. But then a little controversy was generally good for the box office. The Evening Standard (16 September 1909) stressed the educational value of the costumes in False Gods: A great deal can be learnt in the matter of dress from the new Egyptian play . . . The women, with their tight draperies, their long tresses tipped with pearls or shells, and their Egyptian fillets, bound with flowers, are intensely interesting to any student of past fashions, while the gorgeous colouring of their gowns, the rich embroideries and the methods of manipulating the filmy folds of the delicate fabrics supply . . . lessons as well.

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Mrs Patrick Campbell’s costume, ‘as complete in every detail as the most earnest student of Egyptology could desire’, consisted of a robe of black gauze over a dress of black and gold. The wide girdle clasping the waist fell in to long stole ends at the front, the under one bordered in pearls and worked in gold, the upper one enriched with red and green embroidery and glittering with jewels. Chains of emeralds hung from her neck and a black scarf, worked in golden lilies was wound round her head. Evelyn D’Alroy as Yaouma was first seen in a gown of pale water-green gauze, accordion-pleated, with a gold border and bands of primrose and green embroidery passing over her shoulders and across the front of the gown. A sash with a long stole falling down the front of the dress was in the same colours. A silver fillet bound her hair with a single lotus flower on each side. Later she appeared in a gown of pale mauve and greenishgrey crepe, draped in the same manner, with a purple clematis flower at each side of her silver fillet. For the last act, as she was borne to sacrifice, she was clad in a glistening silver robe. Tree’s last Ancient World production and his final venture to Egypt was Louis N. Parker’s Joseph and his Brethren in 1913. It received considerable publicity as the newspapers reported that it was the first biblical subject to have been seen on the stage for 400 years. As recently as 1911 Lady Gregory’s play The Birth of Christ – a Nativity Play had been refused a licence by the Lord Chamberlain. But Tree secured the backing of the Bishop of London for his play and the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Sandhurst, agreed to its production, though awarding the licence only for this specific production at Her Majesty’s Theatre. Subsequently he licensed productions of Job at Blackfriars Hall, Norwich, and Joseph in Canaan at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow. What seems to have happened is that while the life of Christ remained taboo, the Old Testament had now been deemed suitable for the stage, so long as it was reverently treated.70 Editorials were written exploring the implications of this epochal event. Murray Roston in his study of biblical drama in England says that Joseph was not in fact the first to break the censorial ban. That was Gwen Lally’s Jezebel which was given a single copyright performance at the Comedy Theatre in March 1912. Roston adds: ‘It is unfortunate that the honour should have been bestowed on so poor a work – dull, conventional, and written in execrable verse. But perhaps these very defects allowed it through the net.’71 However, even in 1913 the claims for Joseph were being challenged. Charles Fry wrote to the Daily Telegraph (18 August 1913) to say that in 1900 he had been given permission to stage Racine’s Athalie, hitherto banned, at St George’s Hall. But Tree’s production would constitute the most splendid and spectacular breach.

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The Era (27 August 1913) among many other papers welcomed both the relaxation of the ban (‘a proof of the decay of foolish prejudices on the part of our Censorship’) and the imminent production of Joseph: Such performances, done in the right spirit, are calculated rather to increase our reverence for Holy Writ than to diminish it . . . the most bigoted opponents of Scriptural plays are persons who by cold temperament and want of culture are incapable of appreciating the noble language and fine dramatic quality of our grand old English Bible. The profession of authorship owes gratitude to SIR HERBERT TREE for breaking . . . one of the most absurd bans that have been maintained by the Censorship. But why now? The Glasgow Herald (6 September 1913) suggested that the censors had been softened up by the success of such quasi-biblical plays as The Sign of the Cross and Quo Vadis and the thinly-veiled Christian allegory of The Passing of the Third Floor Back. The widespread public acceptance of such works had reassured the censors and they had moved to a more positive view of the biblical play. The play was actually produced first in America, opening on 11 January 1913. Louis N. Parker, the author, who had completed the play in 1906, had submitted it to George C. Tyler of the Century Theatre in 1908 and in 1912 reminded him of its existence. It was decided to do it with painted backcloths but no built-up scenery and for costume design Parker suggested the Old Testament illustrations of Tissot. He recalled of the production: Every scene was like a composition by an old master . . . And by relying entirely on artistic painting, fine stage perspective and fine lighting, Gates and Morange (the scene-painters) produced an infinitely more convincing illusion of solidity than any carpentering ever achieved, and at one quarter of the cost. The scenery was all easy to handle, and was changed in seconds instead of minutes.72 It was a hit in America and this success was duplicated in England when it opened on 2 September. But Parker said that he could not help but contrast the slowness of delivery of the English actors with the rapidity of the Americans. For although he made great cuts in the text, the London performance took half an hour longer than New York.73 Tree declared that his intention in producing Joseph was ‘to recreate and vivify those wonderful old pictures with their glowing Eastern

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atmosphere, vivid colours, picturesque environment, shown in Bible history; to breathe into them the life of reality’. In particular there would be a contrast between the pastoral simplicity of the Hebrew dresses and the luxury of the Egyptian. Details would be drawn from hieroglyphics and papyri, information would be taken from Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s ‘Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians’ and the Tissot illustrations would be used for inspiration as they had been in New York. The desired realism was further enforced by the presence on stage of live sheep, horses, donkeys and camels.74 The stress throughout was on the exhaustive research entailed in creating an authentic picture. Newspaper articles detailed the research of Tree’s musical director Adolf Schmid at the British Museum. He uncovered a ‘Penitential Hymn’ supposedly composed by King David, which would be chanted by an invisible choir before each scene. He found ‘an exhilarating dance measure’ in an old Assyrian air. Having identified the kind of musical instruments used in Old Testament times, he proposed to include their nearest modern equivalents in the orchestra to achieve an authentic sound and that meant harps, guitars, dulcimers, flutes and cymbals.75 Also at the British Museum was Edward Espinosa the choreographer, searching out evidence of ancient dance steps for the ‘Betrothal Dance’ and the ‘Dance of Exhortation’. Similarly scene painter Joseph Harker was said to have ‘spent many days at the British Museum studying ancient architecture, which has enabled him to present a series of Eastern pictures of the period which are absolutely accurate and complete – even down to the last minute detail’.76 The result was twelve scenes which were to have the critics reaching once again for superlatives. The Morning Post (3 September 1913), for example, said: ‘As a series of Bible pictures . . . executed on a scale never before approached, “Joseph and his Brethren” marks the high-water mark of Sir Herbert Tree’s achievements as a producer. Scene after scene is strangely superb.’ For act 1 scene 1 at the tents of Shechem, there was a view from a great height over a huge expanse of plain, silvery-grey and green in colour, to contrast with the orange of scene 2, the desert, seen as an equally broad expanse. Scene 3, interior of Jacob’s tent, was entirely ‘moonlight blue serge’. Scene 1 of act 2 was set in Potiphar’s house, done entirely in Tyrian red. Scene 2 was Potiphar’s garden, a moonlit scene, dominated by a huge, Sphinx-like figure and backed by a view of the Nile. Scene 3, Zuleika’s room, was entirely in black polished granite with a large golden-bronze figure. Act 3 scene 1 was the prison, modelled on the façade of the Abu Simbel temple, with figures carved out of the solid

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rock. The shadowy granite was lit by a ray of the setting sun. Scene 2 in Pharaoh’s palace was entirely jade green. Act 4 scene 1 returned to the tents of Shechem twenty years later. Scene 2 was an open space before Joseph’s house with a view of the Nile. Scene 3 featured the Pyramids under a dark blue sky, lit first by the stars and later a moon rising over the desert. Scene 4 was inside Joseph’s house, a bright Egyptian interior, looking onto the garden bathed in sunlight with a view of Memphis at the back.77 Joseph Harker, in an interview, claimed that having each scene dominated by a single or at most two colours was the first example of Post-Impressionism on the English stage.78 The costumes were once again designed by Percy McQuoid, by now well experienced in dealing with the fashions of Ancient Egypt. Parker’s play followed the biblical narrative closely but built up the role of Potiphar’s wife, who is given the name of Zuleika, on the authority of the Koran and the Talmud. It opens at the tents of Shechem at the coming of age of Joseph, the favourite son of Jacob, who gives his son the coat of many colours. His jealous brothers cast him into a pit and later sell him to passing slavers. In Egypt he enters the household of Potiphar, Pharaoh’s general, and there Potiphar’s wife, Zuleika, seeks unsuccessfully to seduce him. She accuses him falsely of making advances to her and has him cast into prison where he successfully explains the dreams of the chief butler and chief baker and later is brought to court to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams. But Zuleika’s vengeance pursues him. She plots with his brother Simeon to assassinate Joseph but Potiphar overhears the plot and hands Zuleika over to the torturers to have her eyes put out. When Joseph’s brothers come to Egypt seeking corn during the famine, Joseph, now chief minister of Egypt, has a silver cup planted on the youngest brother Benjamin to hold them in Egypt before he reveals his identity and is reconciled with them and his father. Tree himself took only the small role of the patriarch Jacob with the American actress Maxine Elliott as Potiphar’s wife. The role of Joseph was played by the youthful George Relph, who forty-six years later would be seen as the Emperor Tiberius in the film of Ben-Hur. It was generally agreed that he had made a hit. J.T. Grein in the Ladies Field (20 September 1913) said that Relph ‘carried his audience away; there was in him the naiveté of a boy bred in the desert tending flocks, the keenness of youth, the reverence for age and military greatness, and yet the budding instinct of the man; as the Diviner of Dreams he had the rapt face of the seer and the simple manner of a benign man who knows his power’. The boy Benjamin was played by Master Alfred Willmore,

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who in later life would reinvent himself as the grand Irish actor Michael McLiammoir. Writing after Tree’s death, Lady Tree recalled the production of Joseph as ‘a delirious success; beyond the wildest dreams of author and producer. And no wonder! All the old Miracle plays and Mystery plays were set before us in this reverent melodrama, this sumptuous setting of a Psalm.’79 Tree died in 1917 and the great days of spectacle theatre died with him. Thereafter it would be cinema which would regularly mount this kind of splendid recreation of the Ancient World.

7 The Toga Play: Climax and Decline

While Beerbohm Tree continued to produce his poetic dramas set in the Ancient World, it would probably be true to say that the toga cycle peaked with the production of the stage version of Ben-Hur which provides a direct bridge from the stage to the screen. It began on the printed page, a blockbusting bestseller written by General Lew Wallace (1827–1905). Wallace, the son of a governor of Indiana, served with distinction in the American Civil War, rising to the rank of major general. From 1878 to 1881 he was the governor of New Mexico Territory and embroiled in the Lincoln County War, which involved such legendary figures as John Chisum, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. It was while in New Mexico that he completed his second novel Ben-Hur: a Tale of the Christ, which he had been working on for seven years. He determined to include Christ as a character in the novel – a daring move at that time – as a result of his debates with the militant agnostic Robert Ingersoll who attacked the idea of Christ’s divinity and the folly of Christian believers. Wallace, himself mildly agnostic when he began writing, found himself increasingly filled with awe and reverence for Christ and his followers as the work unfolded. Interestingly, Wilson Barrett is also said to have been partly inspired to write The Sign of the Cross by Ingersoll’s attacks on Christianity. Wallace did extensive research not only on the history of the period and the topography of the Holy Land but on such practical details as how a trireme operated, how to drive a chariot and ride a camel, and on the costumes, customs and manners of Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and Israelites. When Ben-Hur was published in 1880, the critics were lukewarm, one of them noting ‘the historical novel is rather an anachronism nowadays’. By March 1883 only 16,000 copies had been printed. But Wallace began receiving letters from readers saying that the book had changed their lives and word of mouth spread its fame. By 222

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1886 it was selling 4500 copies a month. By 1912 the publishers Harpers had sold a million copies in the United States alone and it became a bestseller worldwide, never out of print since its first appearance. An Italian translation was sanctioned by the Vatican in 1895 and it was welcomed by Jews for its proud Jewish hero and its respect for Jewish religion and customs. From 1882 onwards, Wallace was regularly pressed to agree to a stage adaptation and equally regularly refused, saying that he felt that putting it on the stage would represent a ‘profanation’ of the sacred characters in the book. Wallace had aspirations to be a playwright himself and composed a five-act tragedy Commodus, on the life and death of the second century Antonine emperor. It was privately printed in 1876 and published in a revised edition in 1897 but it never reached the stage. The life and reign of Commodus were later to be featured in the epic films The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) and Gladiator (2000). Wallace toured America giving dramatized readings from his book in the manner pioneered by Dickens and he produced a script for a series of tableaux based on the book in 1891, but it was not an effective stage adaptation. In 1899 the celebrated New York management of Klaw and Erlanger finally persuaded him to grant permission for a stage version, though he insisted on having script approval and that the character of Christ and the Crucifixion be omitted from the play. Klaw and Erlanger clinched the deal by confirming that the presence of Christ would be represented by a beam of light and insisting ‘the religious atmosphere will be preserved’ and ‘nothing would be done that would in the slightest offend the large element of Christian people whom it is our desire and ambition to attract’. Playwright William Young, the author of verse dramas on King Arthur and Joan of Arc, was selected to write the stage version and after six months succeeded in reducing the novel to six acts and thirteen scenes, retaining much of Wallace’s dialogue. There was a prelude in which the three wise men follow the star. Christ was duly cut but his various appearances in the novel were reported by characters in the play, which ended not with the Crucifixion but with Christ (represented by the beam of light) on the Mount of Olives healing the lepers.1 The play took twelve months and cost $75,000 to prepare, and six weeks of intensive rehearsal to stage. Edgar Stillman Kelley provided the score and Ernest Albert and Ernest Gros the sets. There were two elaborate special effects sequences: the Roman galley breaking up and sinking after being rammed by a pirate ship and the chariot race, using real horses racing on a treadmill with a moving panorama unfolding behind them.2 On one

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famous occasion, Messala’s horses pressed ahead, outpaced Ben-Hur’s and won the treadmill race.3 Klaw and Erlanger utilized Alexander Von Wagner’s thrilling panoramic painting The Chariot Race (1898) for their posters, though the actual stage race was staged at a different angle. Edward J. Morgan played Ben-Hur and William S. Hart, the future star of silent Westerns, Messala. Hart recalled that after the first performance, Lew Wallace said to him ‘Young man, I want to thank you for giving me the Messala that I drew in my book.’4 The play had its premiere on 29 November 1899 at the Broadway Theatre, New York. The critics were unenthusiastic about the drama but admired the spectacle. Impresario Charles Frohman famously said the American public would never stand for a play featuring both Christ and a horse race. But it became one of the greatest hits in the history of Broadway. It ran initially for 194 performances at the Broadway, closing on 10 May 1900, to reopen again in September 1900 with William Farnum taking over the role of Ben-Hur and becoming its most famous stage interpreter. It would return again and again and toured the United States for twenty-one years. It was recommended by the clergy from the pulpit. William Jennings Bryan called it ‘The greatest play on the stage when measured by its religious tone and moral effect.’5 By the time the play closed in 1920 it had been performed 6000 times, had been seen by twenty million people and brought in receipts of over $10 million.6 The New York production was transported to London and opened at Drury Lane on 3 April 1902. Like the New York production it was directed by Ben Teal and utilized the Kelley score, but the producer Arthur Collins had new scenery painted by the expert British scenepainters T.E. Ryan, Bruce Smith, R. and C. Caney and J. McCleery, new costumes by Signor Comelli, new wigs and newly staged dances. Robert Taber and Basil Gill, both veterans of stage productions of Quo Vadis, played Ben-Hur and Messala. Although the Drury Lane programme credited Ernest Albert with the race scene, Bruce Smith’s biographer insists that he assisted Albert in adapting it for Drury Lane – Drury Lane used twenty horses where there had been only twelve on Broadway – and staged the sinking of the galley himself.7 Young’s play opens in Jerusalem where Judah Ben-Hur, scion of a noble Jewish family, meets again his boyhood friend Messala. But he finds that Messala, now a Roman officer, has grown arrogant, profligate and condescending (‘Love is nothing – war is everything’). Messala offers to help Ben-Hur attain preferment if he abandons his Judaism (‘only get rid of thine antiquated notions – the teachings of women and priests – and forget thou art a Jew’), a suggestion Judah indignantly rejects. They

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part, but looking over from the roof at the procession escorting the Procurator Valerius Gratus Ben-Hur dislodges a tile, which hits Gratus. Messala accuses him of attempted assassination and has him arrested, condemning his mother and sister Tirzah to prison when they intercede for him. After three years as a galley slave, Ben-Hur encounters tribune Quintus Arrius who turns out to have been a friend of his father. When the galley is rammed by pirates and sinks Judah rescues Arrius and is later adopted by him and assumes his name. Back in Antioch, he searches for his family and to exact revenge on Messala. Learning that Messala has wagered everything on winning the chariot race, Judah enters the race as the driver of desert sheikh Ilderim. Meantime Judah and Messala become rivals for the favours of the voluptuous Egyptian temptress Iras. Initially she favours Judah, but when he asks her to veil her features to preserve her modesty, she rejects him and transfers her affection to Messala. Judah wins the chariot race and Messala is crippled. Judah raises three legions of Galileans to install Jesus on the throne of Judaea but learns that he preaches love, peace and non-violence. Iras comes to him to ask him to restore Messala’s fortune and he rejects her and realizes he loves Esther, dutiful daughter of Simonides, faithful steward of the house of Hur. Judah discovers that his mother and sister have been released from prison as lepers and are now outcasts. They are cured by Christ and the play ends with Judah and his family reunited and Esther included in the family group. David Mayer has argued that the book addresses specific American issues, notably the depiction of society as a multi-racial melting pot: The Roman Empire of Ben-Hur is not the empire of the British toga dramas. In Wallace’s Roman empire, Romans, Hebrews, Arabs, Egyptians, Cypriots, Cretans and Greeks meet in market-places, on wharves, and in stadia. All cultures, even the Judaeans, are ‘other cultures’. The Romans may be the dominant culture, as the British had been in America, but their hegemonic influence is merely political and military . . . Ben-Hur, play and novel, may therefore be, unintentionally, a further representation of America – as well as of the New Mexican territory – as a land where disparate cultures rub shoulders; it is a new Holy Land where the solution to harmony is not contention and rebellion (another civil war) but tolerance, democracy and Christianity.8 However, the melting pot idea does not come over particularly in Young’s script. Rather, there is a resemblance to the structure and

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ideology of The Sign of the Cross, established by the creation of a series of opposites. Ben-Hur, the noble and proud Jewish prince, is contrasted with the arrogant and cruel Roman Messala. Like Marcus Superbus, Ben-Hur, who was initially planning to install Jesus by force, is won over to his gospel of peace and love. Iras, the liberated ‘New Woman’, who is promiscuous and flagrant, is contrasted with the modest and dutiful Esther. When Ben-Hur asks Iras if he may not combine his love for her with his duty to God and his people, she demands his whole heart or nothing and scorns the idea of duty. Ben-Hur, initially intoxicated by Iras, settles in the end for Esther. The situation recalls the Mercia/Berenis contrast in The Sign of the Cross. There is a deliberate contrast between the pagan revels in honour of Apollo and the crowds of believers singing Hosanna as they accompany Jesus into Jerusalem, just as Ancaria’s pagan dance in The Sign of the Cross was interrupted by the hymn-singing of the Christians. The Era (5 April 1902) duly noted the contrasts: The scene on Mount Olivet, with hundreds of worshippers waving palm-branches, and singing Hosanna, is . . . a most beautiful stage picture; and the suggestion of the supernatural by means of a brilliant ray of light is as effective as it is ingenious and artistic. The exaltant piety of these proselytes is in strong contrast with the Corybantic efforts of the corps de ballet in the third act, in which the Revels of Daphne are indulged in by a number of young women clashing cymbals and wearing leopard skin bodices, and a Masque of Eros is performed, a lover and his lass being conducted to the Temple of Apollo under a canopy carried by bright-haired and buxom damsels. It is thus a play which favours Christian love and devotion to peace over Roman military might and injustice, spiritual faith over erotic paganism, true love over sexual desire, duty over self-indulgence: the recipe for a decent society. The reviews were mixed, ranging from the unqualified enthusiasm of the Daily Telegraph (4 April 1902) to the contempt of The Times. The Telegraph reported: The drama comes to us with the hall-mark of approval set upon it by America, and the judgement passed upon the piece there was last night fully ratified by the immense audience crowding Drury Lane. Success, decisive, emphatic, and undoubted was their verdict, and the verdict is one which the merits of the play thoroughly deserve. But even were the piece itself less attractive and less interesting, it is

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practically certain that the great chariot race, with its amazing effects, would carry the fortunes of ‘Ben-Hur’ shoulder-high for many weeks and months to come. Never has anything so daring in its way been witnessed on the stage; never has realism been carried to so wonderfully high a pitch . . . It must not be supposed, however, that the play depends for its success simply upon the beauty, the splendour, or the startling character of the spectacle provided. It contains also a story of absorbing interest, in which the qualities of love, hatred, jealousy, and revenge are deftly intermingled . . . Exquisitely mounted, superbly played and beautifully costumed, ‘Ben-Hur’ in short merits, and is evidently destined to achieve, no less popularity on this side of the Atlantic than on the other. The Times (4 April 1902) took a diametrically opposite view: It is said that General Lew Wallace, when it was first proposed that his popular novel ‘Ben-Hur’ should be adapted for the stage, expressed the opinion that the task of adaptation would be very difficult. We are inclined to borrow the remark which Dr Johnson made on a celebrated occasion and to say – Would that it had been impossible! The world would have been no loser, for any capable hack playwright could have put together a better setting than is provided by the story for the features of the spectacle produced last night; and we should have been spared the unedifying mixture of religious elements with that particular kind of melodrama which in London has its home at Drury-lane. Ben-Hur is simply a Drury Lane melodrama of the first century. None of the popular features are absent. There is a wrongfully-accused hero. There are the usual two women who dispute his affections . . . there is a villain who . . . is finally crushed under the hero’s heel. The usual complement of aged fathers, faithful nurses, and so on have all been thought of. The only departure from precedent is the omission of comic relief. The critic ridiculed the dialogue: ‘The language which the characters talk is the pseudo-archaic with its thees and thous, and “cometh” and “goeth” and mayhap and peradventure. Yet it contains such flowers of archaism as “Give her my love”, “Mayhap thou art the party”, and “Now then, hortator” to the leader of the galley-slaves.’ He called the adaptation ‘ingenuous, and at times almost infantile’. The critic conceded the effectiveness of the sensation scenes (‘well contrived and well managed’) and praised some of the acting, in particular Robert Taber’s

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Ben-Hur (‘he makes him as attractive as the part permits’), J.E. Dodson’s Simonides (‘a finished and impressive performance’), Sydney Valentine’s Ilderim (‘an Arab sheikh of magnificent energy and sustained enthusiasm’) and Constance Collier’s Iras (‘[she] does all there is to do with sinuous grace and dare-devil manner’). The scenery and staging were said to be ‘effective and elaborate’: The view from the housetops across Jerusalem is striking and beautiful; the grove of Daphne, where there are revels . . . is another good scene; and the Vale of Hinnom where the lepers wander like lost souls, is gloomy and Dantesque. If the piece succeeds, it will succeed by virtue of the scenery and in spite of the tediousness of the drama. The Era (5 April 1902) agreed about the acting, (‘a cast of admirable ability did full justice to the dramatic portion’) saying of Robert Taber: Especially was Mr Taber to be praised for his beautifully modulated delivery of the passages touching upon religious history. He handled these so reverently and so earnestly that the smouldering opposition to what some of the audience evidently considered as irreverence was quickly subdued. In the scenes in which manly vigour and dramatic vehemence were needed, Mr Taber was emphatic and powerful without ever being exaggerated. Basil Gill ‘fortunately gifted in feature and figure, gave to Messala just the necessary touch of aristocratic hauteur and insolence, without forgetting the virile qualities, of the ambitious young Roman’. Constance Collier as Iras was ‘lovely, large and luscious’. She also needed to be fit as while acting in Ben-Hur, she was appearing simultaneously in Beerbohm Tree’s production of Ulysses at His Majesty’s Theatre. She had begun in Ulysses in the role of the goddess Athene several months earlier but Ulysses was still running when Ben-Hur, for which she was also contracted, opened. Tree switched her to the role of Calypso, who only appeared in one scene, so she was able to do her first scenes as Iras at Drury Lane, speed to His Majesty’s to do Calypso and then back to Drury Lane for her last scenes as Iras.9 The Era similarly praised the scenery, reporting that Bruce Smith had given us ‘a fine picture of the “tween decks” of a Roman galley, with the slaves sitting tier above tier plying the great oars which drive the vessel along’. T.E. Ryan was responsible for the exteriors in act 3 and ‘admirably has he realised the loveliness and grace of Greek architecture

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and Syrian scenery’. Ryan is also credited with ‘the star-lit scene in the desert, a fine sample of his art; with the beautiful moonlight view by the lake in the fourth act; and with the Mount Olivet landscape’. Despite the lukewarm nature of many of the reviews, the play ran at Drury Lane from 3 April to 18 July 1902, a total of 122 performances, and was successfully revived in 1912 at Drury Lane, with Bruce Smith taking sole charge of the chariot race sequence and delivering a spectacle that fully lived up to his nickname ‘Sensation’ Smith.10 But the era of the toga play ended with a change in the nature of the audience and a transformation of theatrical taste, both of which occurred at the time of the First World War. The rise of the cinema creamed off the mass working-class audience who now preferred to see realistic versions of their old stage favourites on a screen not limited by the three walls of a stage and a proscenium arch. But with the theatre audience shrinking to a largely middle-class constituency, the nature of theatrical fare changed. Melodrama and poetic drama went out of fashion, and modernity and sophistication were the order of the day, at least in the West End. Sheer economics dictated that few theatres could now afford the lavish stagings and the hordes of extras that had been a feature of the toga play. Symptomatic of the change is the sardonic subversion of previously popular genres by that sly old iconoclast George Bernard Shaw. He provided a modern dress version of Pygmalion (1914), that staple of the toga stage, transposed to Edwardian England and centring on a professor of phonetics who converts a cockney guttersnipe into a lady. But he also provided his own versions of toga plays in Caesar and Cleopatra and Androcles and the Lion. Caesar and Cleopatra was Shaw’s response to Shakespeare’s Roman plays which were enjoying a new popularity at the high noon of British imperialism. Shaw was disdainful of both Antony and Cleopatra (‘I have a technical objection to making infatuation a tragic theme. Experience proves that it is only effective in a comic spirit’) and Julius Caesar (‘Shakespear [sic] who knew human weakness so well, never knew human strength of the Caesarian type. His Caesar is an admitted failure’).11 Utilizing the recognized ingredients of the toga genre (spectacle, lavish sets and costumes, large casts), he created his own version of the story, deliberately intruding anachronisms, inserting a critique of British imperialism and constructing a Caesar who rather than a ruthless dictator enslaved by a grand passion for Cleopatra emerged as a wise and witty analogue of Shaw himself, an intellectually superior being who undertakes to educate the schoolgirl queen for rulership. Cleopatra develops from naive kittenish teenager to mature and worldly political operator (‘what the Romans call a new

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woman’). But there is no love affair with Caesar. Shaw gives Caesar a very correct British secretary Britannus whose disapproving repeated catchphrase is ‘it is not proper’. The conquered Egyptians demonstrate against the Roman occupation (‘Go back to your own country. Egypt for the Egyptians’).12 The immediate stimuli to the writing were Shaw’s admiration for Johnston Forbes-Robertson’s performance as Hamlet and his dismay at Tree’s production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. In a letter to the editor of Play Pictorial (October 1907), Shaw declared: I wrote Caesar and Cleopatra for Forbes Robertson, because he is the classic actor of our day . . . He stands completely aloof in simplicity, dignity, grace, and musical speech from the world of the motor car and the Carlton Hotel, which so many of the others, clever and interesting as they are, very evidently prefer . . . to the Olympian region where the classic actor is at home. Forbes Robertson is the only actor I know who can find out the feeling of a speech from its cadence. His art meets the dramatist’s art directly, picking it up for completion and expression without explanations or imitations.13 In 1898 he had described Julius Caesar as ‘the most splendidly written political melodrama we possess’ but denounced the play’s attitude to Caesar: ‘It is impossible for even the most judicially minded critic to look without a revulsion of indignant contempt at this travestying of a great man as a silly braggart, whilst the pitiful gang of mischief-makers who destroyed him are lauded as statesmen and patriots’.14 The interpretation of Caesar that Shaw favoured was the one advanced by Theodor Mommsen in his Roman History and taken up by Mommsen’s English followers, James Froude and W. Warde-Fowler. They saw the Roman republic not as a bulwark of liberty and democracy but as a corrupt, self-serving oligarchy and Caesar as a political reformer aiming to set the empire on a humane and progressive basis. On one occasion Shaw claimed his play was so historically accurate that a schoolboy only needed to see it to answer an examination paper on the period and in the programme he drew up for the copyright performance of the play in 1899 he grandly declared: The play follows history as closely as stage exigencies permit. Critics should consult Manetho and the Egyptian Monuments, Herodotus, Diodorus, Strabo (Book 17), Plutarch, Pomponius Mela, Pliny, Tacitus, Appian of Alexandria, and, perhaps, Ammianus Marcellinus.

The Toga Play: Climax and Decline 231

Ordinary spectators, if unfamiliar with the ancient tongues, may refer to Mommsen, Warde-Fowler, Mr St George Stock’s introduction to the 1898 Clarendon Press edition of Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and Murray’s Handbook for Egypt. Gale Larson suggests this is pure spoof. Shaw lifted the sources lists from Stock and Murray and he actually utilized half a dozen secondary sources, some of which he omits to mention. Apart from Mommsen and Warde-Fowler, Larson identifies James Froude’s Caesar: a Sketch, Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians and John Pentland Mahaffy’s Empire of the Ptolemies.15 Interviewed by To-Day in 1894, Shaw had been asked if a historical play should be accurate as to facts and had replied: Historical facts are not a bit more sacred than any other class of facts. In making a play out of them you must adapt them to the stage; and that alters them at once, more or less. Why, you cannot even write a history without adapting the facts to the conditions of representation on the stage. Things do not happen in the form of stories or dramas; and since they must be told in some such form, all reports, even by eye witnesses, all histories, all stories, all dramatic representations, are only attempts to arrange the facts in a thinkable, intelligible, interesting form, that is when they are not more or less intentional efforts to hide the truth, as they very often are.16 In other words, Caesar and Cleopatra is a distillation of the Shavian world view on politics, religion and empire. Although Shaw wrote the play in 1898–99, it was not staged properly until 1906 because of the expense entailed – Shaw reckoned it needed £6000 for proper staging.17 It was given a single performance to secure copyright at the Theatre Royal, Newcastle, on 15 March 1899, with Mrs Patrick Campbell as Cleopatra and Nutcombe Gould as Caesar. Audiences did not know what to make of it. Shaw had hoped that the production would star Forbes-Robertson and Mrs Pat, a favourite of his. Forbes-Robertson and Mrs Pat had been lovers and co-stars – playing Romeo and Juliet and Nelson and Lady Hamilton on stage. But there was a rift between them and Forbes-Robertson married Gertrude Elliott, who would be his co-star in Caesar and Cleopatra. The play was first properly staged in 1906 in Berlin by Max Reinhardt, master of theatrical spectacle, where it failed – a failure attributed by Shaw to Reinhardt’s cutting of act 4 scene 1 and the burning of

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the Alexandrian Library, both of which Shaw considered vital to the drama. It was first presented in English in New York by Klaw and Erlanger, opening on 30 October 1906 and starring Forbes-Robertson and Elliott. It ran for forty-nine performances. It was first presented in London by the Vedrenne-Barker management at the Savoy Theatre, opening on 25 November 1907, again with Forbes-Robertson and Elliott. It ran for forty performances. Shaw had agreed to write some extra material in act 2 at Forbes-Robertson’s request to build up to the big scene between Caesar and Septimius in which Caesar denounced the murder of Pompey and he took a keen interest in the sets and costumes. There was general praise for both Forbes-Robertson and Elliott. The Daily Telegraph (26 November 1907), for instance, said of ForbesRobertson ‘Mr Robertson was dignified, incisive, humorous, full of resource and of sonorous – sometimes too sonorous – eloquence’ and of Elliott ‘We have rarely seen her to greater advantage; her Egyptian Queen was to the manner born, formed veritably in the Shavian mould, an admirable impersonation’ (compare The Times, 26 November 1907; Morning Post, 26 November 1907). There was praise too for the staging. The Morning Post (26 November 1907) reported: ‘Mr Shaw’s “Caesar and Cleopatra” was produced last night with all the conventional splendour and more than the conventional beauty of scenery and dresses.’ This is not surprising, given that the management had employed recognized experts in the staging of the toga play, T.E. Ryan, Joseph Harker and J. McCleery (two of whom had done the highly praised scene painting for Ben-Hur) to paint the scenery and Percy Anderson (costume designer on Tree’s toga plays) to do the costumes. But beyond this the critics either did not know what to make of the play or downright disliked it. The Times, pointing out that Shaw’s method was ‘the uttering of modern thoughts, modern slang, and “topical” allusions of our own day by more or less historical personages of a remote age’, suggested it really qualified as burlesque like Orphée aux Enfers and La Belle Hélène and ought to have been set to music by Offenbach. The Morning Post, reporting that ‘It aroused the curiosity of the audience, which was vastly amused, occasionally interested, and scarcely moved’, concluded: ‘It is difficult to believe that a piece like this can hold the stage after the attraction of curiosity has worn away, for it lacks the probability of character, which is more important than the accuracy of detail as regards dates and events.’ The Daily Telegraph thought it an uneasy mixture of melodrama and burlesque, ‘all very clever, of course . . . But it is not a play on the level of “The Devil’s

The Toga Play: Climax and Decline 233

Disciple”, or “Candida”, or “John Bull’s Other Island”.’ The Daily News (26 November 1907) was scathing: Is it possible that anyone can find the tomboyish tricks of Mr Bernard Shaw amusing? Why, three-fourths of ‘Caesar and Cleopatra’ would be voted as dull beyond words if it were the libretto of a comic opera . . . Mr Shaw’s gifts are not plastic enough to fill this vast canvas. He niggles at his ideas with the stale humour of the hustings; he makes play to the gallery with obvious jokes . . . the play ambles along and only occasionally gives us a flash of anything like reality. As an extravaganza it is dull and often downright foolish. Forbes-Robertson recognized that the play was something new and unfamiliar and that it took time for audiences to get used to it: From my experience of the London audiences who witnessed Caesar and Cleopatra, I came to the conclusion that they were clean cut into two opposite camps, those who actually disliked the play and those who admired it, and were enthusiastic in their praise. The camp of the admirers was keenly alive to the brilliant imaginative fancy of the author which brought together Cleopatra, Caesar and the Sphinx; it rejoiced in the quick transition from grave to gay, the tilts at British prejudice, the cunning, wild, and tempestuous character of Cleopatra. The high philosophy of the lines on revenge went home to them, as did the majestic flow of Caesar’s address to the Sphinx, and the investing of Caesar with human feelings, and above all a keen sense of humour. Evidently those who disliked it did so precisely because it was not the traditional toga play with which they were familiar. The other camp neither felt nor saw these things, but indeed declared that Shaw’s Caesar was undignified! Rather, as I gathered from the colour of their criticisms, would they have preferred a solemn, pompous figure declaiming turgid blank verse, robed all in white, continually trying to look like a plaster cast of a spiritless Canova statue. In short, the conventional mind was quite upset.18 Forbes-Robertson kept the play in his repertoire and noticed that attendance always increased on a second visit to a town as if audiences needed more than one visit to understand the play. This was notably

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the case when he included the play in his farewell season at Drury Lane in 1913 and recalled that ‘a far better reception was accorded to it than when first it was given in London’.19 Somehow symbolizing the eclipse of the Victorian toga play, it occupied the same stage that in 1912 had been occupied by a spectacular revival of Ben-Hur, the acme of the genre. Shaw delivered the coup de grace to the toga play in Androcles and the Lion, written in 1912 and first produced at the St James’s Theatre on 1 September 1913 where it ran for fifty-two performances. As Martin Meisel has convincingly demonstrated, Androcles is a precise parody of The Sign of the Cross, with characters, settings and situations directly analogous to those in Wilson Barrett’s play.20 To add insult to injury, Barrett’s erstwhile leading lady Lillah McCarthy played the Christian heroine Lavinia. Shaw had sent up Barrett’s play in his review for the Saturday Review, praising him – tongue firmly in cheek – for drawing ‘a terrible contrast between the Romans . . . with their straightforward sensuality, with the strange perverted voluptuousness of the Christians, with their shuddering exultations of longing for the whip, the rack, the stake and the lions’.21 The characterization of Romans and Christians in Androcles fits this paradigm precisely with the Romans on the whole reasonable, pragmatic and regarding sacrifice to the pagan gods merely as a matter of good manners, and the fundamentalist fanatical Christians, marching along singing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ and longing for martyrdom. Picking up on William Archer’s even more withering dismissal of The Sign of the Cross as ‘a Salvationist pantomime’, Shaw said of his own play: ‘Here I take historical tragedy at its deepest; a point reached only by religious persecution. And the thing is done as if it were . . . a Christmas pantomime, the chief figure being a pantomime lion.’22 Shaw took his basic story from Aulus Gellius, a fable about a runaway slave who encounters a lion, removes a thorn from his paw and when later captured and sent to the arena, encounters the same lion, who spares his life. On to this Shaw grafts his The Sign of the Cross parody, highlighting hypocrisy and paradox. Spintho robs temples, confident that he will be forgiven when he eventually suffers Christian martyrdom. Ferrovius the archetypal ‘muscular Christian’ in the arena abandons his pacifism to kill six gladiators, and as a result joins the Praetorian Guard and returns to the worship of Mars. On the other hand, the emperor, as a result of Ferrovius’ fighting prowess, halts the persecutions and orders his gladiators to convert to Christianity.

The Toga Play: Climax and Decline 235

The Times (2 September 1913) thought the play ‘All good fun . . . simple, straightforward fun.’ The Daily Telegraph (2 September 1913) agreed: Some pantomime fun of the best. Plenty of wit . . . Two, or perhaps, three characters who did not avoid being real. A modicum of rhetoric on the whole duty of man. Some fascinating groups and backgrounds, with the modes and robes of Imperial Rome, much more graceful and harmonious than we have any reason to believe they were. Such is Mr Bernard Shaw’s new play. The critic disliked the ‘quaint post-impressionist forest in which Androcles met his lion’ but thought ‘the arena before and behind was a notable piece of work, and the costumes in design and colour and grouping were delightful. Merely as a spectacle the play was a triumph.’ Of the acting, O.P. Heggie as Androcles ‘while missing none of the fun, contrived to give us a character of delicacy and charm’. Alfred Brydone’s Ferrovius was ‘a sound and robust piece of work, altogether true to life’. Lillah McCarthy ‘looked magnificent as the patrician Christian Lavinia, and spoke the many fine things she had to say with admirable grace’. The Morning Post (2 September 1913), delivering a magisterial putdown, thought it ‘a discursive and ill-knit play, which is, moreover bound to give offence to not a few’. The critic noted that Shaw seemed to be making fun of The Sign of the Cross and wondered if it was worth the effort. ‘It strikes one as all very cheap: like so much of Mr Shaw’s iconoclastic performances, such effect as it has comes of the augustness of the subject and of its degradation by the use of means hardly beyond the reach of a schoolboy.’ The Daily News (2 September 1913) was equally unimpressed. Announcing that Edward Sillward’s lion had stolen the show, the critic nevertheless concluded: ‘Up and down the fable was strewn with many clever lines and amusing ideas, but the fable is one of Mr Bernard Shaw’s mistakes, and it was not surprising that such very heavy fooling mixed with serious ideas did not receive very enthusiastic applause.’ However, the theatrical future lay with Shaw as the toga play vanished from the stage repertoire. But as a genre it survived, translated lock, stock and barrel to the cinema where it was destined to scale greater pictorial heights and reach many more millions of spectators than the theatre had ever dreamed possible.23

Notes

1

The Victorians and the Ancient World

1. William Vance, America’s Rome, vol. 1, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989, p. 2. 2. On the Victorians and Ancient Greece, see Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981; Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, Oxford: Blackwell, 1981; Richard Jenkyns, Dignity and Decadence: Victorian Art and the Classical Inheritance, London: Harper Collins, 1991; G.W. Clarke ed., Rediscovering Hellenism: the Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 3. Norman Vance, The Victorians and Ancient Rome, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, p. 197. 4. On the Victorians and Ancient Rome, see Vance, The Victorians and Ancient Rome; Catharine Edwards ed., Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; R.F. Betts, ‘The allusion to Rome in British imperialist thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’, Victorian Studies 15, 1971, 149–59. 5. Charles Kingsley, The Roman and the Teuton, London: Macmillan, 1906, pp. 17, 18, 19. 6. Frank M. Turner, ‘Christians and Pagans in Victorian Novels’ in Edwards ed., Roman Presences, p. 174. 7. On these novels see Turner, ‘Christians and Pagans in Victorian Novels’ in Edwards ed., Roman Presences, pp. 173–87 and Royal Rhodes, The Lion and the Cross: Early Christianity in Victorian Novels, Columbus, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1995. 8. Richard Hingley, Roman Officers and English Gentlemen, London and New York: Routledge, 2000, pp. 30–2. 9. Lord Lytton, The Life of Edward Bulwer, First Lord Lytton by his Grandson, vol. I, London: Macmillan, 1913, pp. 443–7. 10. Lord Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii, London: Routledge, 1873, pp. v–x. See also Wolfgang Leppmann, Pompeii in Fact and Fiction, London: Elek, 1968. 11. Lord Lytton, The Life of Edward Bulwer, First Lord Lytton, p. 440. 12. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, England and the English, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970, pp. 343–4. 13. Richard Altick, Paintings from Books, Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1985, pp. 461–3; Michael Liversidge and Catharine Edwards eds, Imagining Rome: British Artists and Rome in the Nineteenth Century, London: Merrell Holberton, 1996, pp. 116–17. 236

Notes

237

14. Sir Moses Finley, The World of Odysseus, London: Chatto and Windus, 1977, p. 172. 15. The latest evidence is reviewed in Michael Wood, In Search of the Trojan War, London: BBC Books, 2005 and Bettany Hughes, Helen of Troy, London: Jonathan Cape, 2005. 16. William Feaver, The Art of John Martin, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, pp. 40–1. 17. Gerald M. Ackerman, The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme, London: Philip Wilson, 1986. 18. Christopher Wood, Olympian Dreamers, London: Constable, 1983, p. 16. 19. Mrs Russell Barrington, The Life, Letters and Work of Frederic Leighton, vol. 1, London: George Allen, 1906, p. 24. 20. Frederick Dolman, ‘Illustrated Interviews 68: Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’, Strand Magazine 18, 1899, p. 607. 21. Vern G. Swanson, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, London: Ash and Grant, 1977, p. 44. 22. Christopher Frayling, The Face of Tutankhamun, London: Faber, 1992. 23. David Jeffreys ed., Views of Ancient Egypt since Napoleon Bonaparte, London: UCL Press, 2003, p. 84. 24. Jeffreys ed., Views of Ancient Egypt, p. 19. 25. Richard Altick, The Shows of London, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Belknap Press, 1978, pp. 234–52. 26. James Stevens Curl, The Egyptian Revival, London: Routledge, 2005. 27. Patrick and Viviane Berko eds, Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth Century Painting, Knokke-Zoute: Berko, 1992. 28. Charles Keith Maisels, The Near East: Archaeology in the ‘Cradle of Civilization’, London: Routledge, 1998, p. 6. 29. On Middle Eastern archaeology, see Maisels, The Near East; Seton Lloyd, Foundations in the Dust: the Story of Mesopotamian Exploration, London: Thames and Hudson, 1980; Lesley Adkins, Empires of the Plain, London: Harper Collins, 2003. 30. Michaela Giebelhausen, Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, p. 31. 31. Giebelhausen, Painting the Bible, p. 2. 32. Giebelhausen, Painting the Bible, pp. 189–90. 33. Joanna Richardson, Gustave Doré, London: Cassell, 1980, pp. 72–3. 34. Richardson, Gustave Doré, p. 127. 35. Michael Wentworth, James Tissot, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, p. 191. 36. Richard Schoch, Shakespeare’s Victorian Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 2. 37. On stage censorship, see John Russell Stephens, The Censorship of English Drama 1824–1901, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980 and L.W. Conolly, The Censorship of English Drama 1737–1824, San Marino: Huntington Library, 1976. 38. Stephens, The Censorship of English Drama, p. 93. 39. On spectacle, see Altick, The Shows of London; Michael Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre, London: Routledge, 1981; Martin Meisel, Realizations, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

238

Notes

40. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn eds, The Complete Works of John Ruskin, London: George Allen, 1904, vol. 18, pp. 121–2. 41. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Works, London: Macmillan, 1898, p. 203.

2 The Early Victorian Actor-Managers and the Ancient World 1. Sir Frederick Pollock ed., Macready’s Reminiscences, London: Macmillan, 1876, p. 527. 2. Charles Pascoe, The Dramatic List, London: Temple, n.d., p. 416. 3. Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History, New York: Twayne, 1995, pp. 6–7. See also A. Dwight Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985, and Raymond Chapman, The Sense of the Past in Victorian Literature, Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1986. 4. Roy Strong, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, London: Thames and Hudson, 1978, p. 11. 5. Sybil Rosenfeld, A Short History of Scene Design in Great Britain, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973, p. 97. 6. Rosenfeld, A Short History of Scene Design, p. 102. 7. Alan Marlis, ‘Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin’s Influence in Theatre’, unpublished PhD thesis, City University of New York, 1974. 8. Jeffrey Richards ed., Sir Henry Irving: Theatre, Culture and Society, Keele: Keele University Press, 1974, p. 46. 9. Pollock, Macready’s Reminiscences, p. 527. 10. J.W. Cole, The Life and Theatrical Times of Charles Kean F.S.A., London: Richard Bentley, 1859, vol. 2, p. 26. 11. Richard Schoch, Shakespeare’s Victorian Stage: Performing History in the Theatre of Charles Kean, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 3. 12. On the developments in scenic art, see Rosenfeld, A Short History of Scene Design: Alicia Finkel, Romantic Stages: Set and Costume Design in Victorian England, Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland and Co., 1996; Nancy J. Doran Hazelton, Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth Century Shakespearean Staging, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987. 13. Godfrey Turner, ‘Scenery, Dresses, and Decorations’, The Theatre n.s. vol. 1, June 1880, p. 350. 14. Godfrey Turner, ‘Scenery, Dresses, and Decorations’, The Theatre n.s. vol. 3, March 1884, p. 129. 15. Turner, ‘Scenery, Dresses, and Decorations’, The Theatre n.s. vol. 3, March 1884, p. 134. 16. Greg Woolf, Et Tu, Brute?, London: Profile Books, 2006, pp. 151–2. 17. Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History, p. 11. 18. Duncan Wu ed., Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998, vol. 3, p. 175. 19. Edward Fitzball, 35 Years of a Dramatic Author’s Life, London: T.C. Newby, 1859, vol. 2, p. 104; Christopher Murray, ‘James Sheridan Knowles, the Victorian Shakespeare?’ in Richard Foulkes ed., Shakespeare and the Victorian Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 164–79. 20. Pollock, Macready’s Reminiscences, p. 157.

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239

21. Pollock, Macready’s Reminiscences, p. 158. 22. Leslie Howard Meeks, Sheridan Knowles and the Theatre of his Time, Bloomington: Principia Press, 1933, p. 82. 23. Wu, Selected Writings of Hazlitt, vol. 4, p. 368. 24. Pollock, Macready’s Reminiscences, pp. 159–60. 25. William Archer, William Charles Macready, London: Kegan Paul, 1890, p. 53; L.W. Conolly, The Censorship of English Drama 1737–1824, San Marino: Huntington Library, 1976, pp. 109–10. 26. William Archer and Robert Lowe eds, Dramatic Essays Vol. 2: William Hazlitt, London: Walter Scott, 1895, p. 188. 27. Alan S. Downer, The Eminent Tragedian William Charles Macready, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966, p. 68. 28. Pollock, Macready’s Reminiscences, p. 159. 29. Richard Hengist Horne, A New Spirit of the Age, London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1844, vol. 2, pp. 86–7. 30. Meeks, Sheridan Knowles and the Theatre of his Time, p. 32. 31. Pollock, Macready’s Reminiscences, pp. 220–1. 32. Meeks, Sheridan Knowles and the Theatre of his Time, pp. 140–1. 33. Fraser’s Magazine vol. 13, April 1836, pp. 458–9. 34. Conolly, The Censorship of English Drama, pp. 110–11. 35. Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh, Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660– 1914, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. xviii. 36. Hall and Macintosh, Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre, p. 284. 37. Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, The Dramatic Works, London: Edward Moxon, 1852, preface to Ion, pp. 6–7. 38. Talfourd, Dramatic Works, preface to Ion, p. 2. 39. Pollock, Macready’s Reminiscences, p. 346. 40. Downer, The Eminent Tragedian William Charles Macready, p. 150. 41. Pollock, Macready’s Reminiscences, p. 386. 42. See Morning Chronicle, 27 May 1836; Morning Advertiser, 27 May 1836; Observer, 29 May 1836; Morning Post, 27 May 1836. 43. Horne, A New Spirit of the Age vol. 1, pp. 254–5. 44. James R. Anderson, An Actor’s Life, London: Walter Scott, 1902, p. 83. 45. Anderson, An Actor’s Life, p. 162. 46. Pollock, Macready’s Reminiscences, p. 396. 47. Hall and Macintosh, Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre, p. 303. 48. Pollock, Macready’s Reminiscences, p. 438. 49. Pollock, Macready’s Reminiscences, p. 444. 50. John Ripley, ‘Coriolanus’ on Stage in England and America 1609–1994, London: Associated University Presses, 1998, pp. 343–66; John Ripley, ‘Julius Caesar’ on Stage in England and America 1599–1973, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980, pp. 287–311. 51. Ripley, ‘Coriolanus’ on Stage in England and America 1609–1994, p. 114. 52. Ripley, ‘Coriolanus’ on Stage in England and America 1609–1994, p. 123. 53. Ripley, ‘Coriolanus’ on Stage in England and America 1609–1994, p. 116. 54. J.R. Planché, Recollections and Reflections, London: Tinsley Brothers, 1872, vol. 1, p. 54. 55. William Winter, Shakespeare on Stage, third series, New York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1916, p. 207.

240 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

Notes Ripley, ‘Coriolanus’ on Stage in England and America 1609–1994, p. 145. Pollock, Macready’s Reminiscences, p. 302. Ripley, ‘Coriolanus’ on Stage in England and America 1609–1994, p. 164. Ripley, ‘Coriolanus’ on Stage in England and America 1609–1994, p. 177. Theodor Fontane, Shakespeare in the London Theatre 1855–58, London: STR, 1999, pp. 78–9. Ripley, ‘Coriolanus’ on Stage in England and America 1609–1994, p. 184. Anderson, An Actor’s Life, p. 136. Anderson, An Actor’s Life, pp. 189, 208. Ripley, ‘Julius Caesar’ on Stage in England and America, pp. 23–4. Ripley, ‘Julius Caesar’ on Stage in England and America, p. 53. Ripley, ‘Julius Caesar’ on Stage in England and America, p. 73. For details, see Downer, The Eminent Tragedian, pp. 226–7. Ripley, ‘Julius Caesar’ on Stage in England and America, p. 78. Ripley, ‘Julius Caesar’ on Stage in England and America, pp. 95, 99. Shirley Allen, Samuel Phelps and Sadler’s Wells Theatre, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971, pp. 243–4. W. May Phillips and John Forbes-Robertson, The Life and Life Work of Samuel Phelps, London: Sampson Low, 1886, p. 223; Henry Morley, The Journal of a London Playgoer 1851–1866, London: Routledge, 1891, p. 129. Cole, The Life and Theatrical Times of Charles Kean, vol. 2, pp. 57–8. See the Athenaeum, 18 June 1853 on the costs, and on the production in general see Margaret Howell, Byron Tonight, Windlesham: Springwood Books, 1982, pp. 61–79 and Edward Ziter, The Orient on the Victorian Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 150–60. John Coleman, Players and Playwrights I Have Known, London: Chatto and Windus, 1888, vol. 1, p. 94. Howell, Byron Tonight, p. 81. Mrs Charles Calvert, Sixty-Eight Years on the Stage, London: Mills and Boon, 1911, p. 157. Morley, Journal of a London Playgoer, pp. 83–4. Morley, Journal of a London Playgoer, p. 84. Allen, Samuel Phelps and Sadler’s Wells Theatre, pp. 244–5. For a detailed discussion of this production, see Richard Foulkes, ‘Samuel Phelps’ Pericles and Layard’s Discoveries at Nineveh’, Nineteenth Century Theatre Research 5, Autumn 1977, pp. 85–92. Dennis Bartholomeusz, ‘The Winter’s Tale’ in Performance in England and America, 1611–1976, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 62. Cole, The Life and Theatrical Times of Charles Kean, vol. 2, p. 169. Cole, The Life and Theatrical Times of Charles Kean, vol. 2, p. 173. Anderson, An Actor’s Life, pp. 193–4. Fitzball, 35 Years of a Dramatic Author’s Life vol. 2, p. 275. The production is discussed in Ziter, The Orient on the Victorian Stage, pp. 140–6. Fitzball, 35 Years of a Dramatic Author’s Life, vol. 2, p. 289; ‘that celebrated antiquarian, Keen’ was in fact Richard Wynne Keene, professionally known as Dykwynkyn. He was the famous designer and modeller of masks for Drury Lane.

Notes

241

87. R.M. Sillard, Barry Sullivan and his Contemporaries, London: Fisher Unwin, 1901, vol. 1, p. 265. 88. For a detailed discussion of the play see Peter Winn, ‘Nitocris or The Ethiop’s Revenge: the Fall of a Colossus’, Nineteenth Century Theatre Research 9, Winter 1981, pp. 71–98. 89. See also Morning Chronicle, 17 December; Spectator, 20 December; and John Bull, 21 December. 90. Walter Goodman, The Keeleys on Stage and at Home, London: Richard Bentley, 1895, pp. 76–7. 91. On the pyrodramas see David Mayer, ‘Romans in Britain, 1886–1910: Pain’s “The Last Days of Pompeii” ’, Theatrephile 2, 1984–5, pp. 41–50.

3

Living Greek Statues

1. Gail Marshall, Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 10. 2. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn eds, The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 20, London: George Allen, 1905, p. 282. 3. Richard Jenkyns, Dignity and Decadence: Victorian Art and the Classical Inheritance, London: Harper Collins, 1991, pp. 87–142. 4. Joseph A. Kestner, Mythology and Misogyny: the Social Discourse of Nineteenth Century British Classical Subject Painting, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989, p. 73. 5. Marshall, Actresses on the Victorian Stage. 6. John Coleman, Players and Playwrights I Have Known, vol. I, London: Chatto and Windus, 1888, pp. 245–6, 255. 7. On the classical burlesques, see Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh, Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 350–90. 8. Carol Jones Carlisle, Helen Faucit: Fire and Ice on the Victorian Stage, London: Society for Theatre Research, 2000, p. xiii. 9. John Coleman, Fifty Years of an Actor’s Life, vol. I, London: Hutchinson, 1904, p. 329. 10. Cook and Wedderburn, Works of John Ruskin, vol. 25, p. 418. 11. There is a full account of this and other nineteenth-century productions in Dennis Bartholomeusz, ‘The Winter’s Tale’ in Performance in England and America 1611–1976, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 12. Helen Faucit, Lady Martin, On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters, Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1891, pp. 391–2. 13. Faucit, On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters, p. 385. 14. Illustrated London News, 18 January 1845. 15. According to Hall and Macintosh, Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre, p. 324, the setting was not a Greek theatre at all but the frons scenae of a Roman imperial theatre. The engraving in the Illustrated London News suggests that they are correct. 16. Sir Theodore Martin, Helena Faucit, Lady Martin, Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1900, p. 143. 17. Carlisle, Helen Faucit, p. 146.

242 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 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. 57.

Notes Carlisle, Helen Faucit, p. 147. Martin, Helena Faucit, pp. 150–1. Martin, Helena Faucit, p. 154. Martin, Helena Faucit, pp. 157–8. On Helen Faucit’s Antigone, see Martin, Helena Faucit, pp. 148–58, Carlisle, Helen Faucit, pp. 143–50 and Hall and Macintosh, Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre, pp. 325–32. For a cultural history of the myth see Essaka Joshua, Pygmalion and Galatea: the History of a Narrative in English Literature, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. Jenkyns, Dignity and Decadence, p. 115. Joshua, Pygmalion and Galatea, pp. 93–5. Alison Smith, The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality and Art, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996, pp. 165–239. Joshua, Pygmalion and Galatea, p. 85. Marshall, Actresses on the Victorian Stage, p. 23. Joshua, Pygmalion and Galatea, p. xvii. Dutton Cook, Nights at the Play, London: Chatto and Windus, 1883, p. 138. Jane Stedman, W.S. Gilbert: a Classic Victorian and his Theatre, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 93. T. Edgar Pemberton, The Kendals, London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1900, p. 71. Joshua, Pygmalion and Galatea, p. 168. Madge Kendal, Dame Madge Kendal by Herself, London: John Murray, 1933, p. 169. Cook and Wedderburn, The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 20, pp. 273–4. William Winter, Shadows of the Stage, New York: Macmillan, 1893, p. 91. Winter, Shadows of the Stage, p. 94. Winter, Shadows of the Stage, p. 94. Mary Anderson, A Few Memories, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1896, p. 185. William Winter, The Stage Life of Mary Anderson, New York: George J. Coombes, 1886, p. 19. Winter, The Stage Life of Mary Anderson, pp. 102–3. Winter, The Stage Life of Mary Anderson, p. 20. Anderson, A Few Memories, pp. 113–14. Winter, The Stage Life of Mary Anderson, pp. 39–40. Winter, The Stage Life of Mary Anderson, p. 15. James R. Anderson, An Actor’s Life, London: Walter Scott, 1902, p. 197. Anderson, An Actor’s Life, p. 203. Anderson, An Actor’s Life, p. 216. Anderson, An Actor’s Life, p. 252. Anderson, A Few Memories, p. 116. Anderson, A Few Memories, p. 136. Anderson, A Few Memories, p. 136. Anderson, A Few Memories, p. 116. Theatre n.s., vol. 2, December 1883, pp. 321–4. Theatre n.s., vol. 3, March 1884, pp. 143–4. Anderson, A Few Memories, p. 148. Anderson, A Few Memories, p. 149.

Notes

243

58. J.H. Barnes, Forty Years on the Stage, London: Chapman and Hall, 1914, p. 147. 59. Theatre, n.s., vol. 3, January 1884, p. 53. 60. Joshua, Pygmalion and Galatea, p. 106. 61. Theatre, n.s., vol. 3, January 1884, p. 54. 62. Anderson, A Few Memories, p. 149. 63. Anderson, A Few Memories, pp. 117–19. 64. Kendal, Dame Madge Kendal, pp. 154–5. 65. Kendal, Dame Madge Kendal, p. 171. 66. Russell Jackson, ‘The Lyceum in Irving’s Absence: G.E. Terry’s letters to Bram Stoker’, Nineteenth Century Theatre Research 6, 1978, pp. 25–33. 67. Mary Anderson, A Few More Memories, London: Hutchinson, 1936, pp. 144–66. 68. Nineteenth Century 13, 1883, pp. 45–57. The quotations are from pp. 47 and 55. 69. Stella Mary Newton, Health, Art and Reason: Dress Reformers of the Nineteenth Century, London: John Murray, 1974, p. 97. 70. Newton, Health, Art and Reason, p. 149. 71. Jenkyns, Dignity and Decadence, pp. 308–9. 72. Barnes, Forty Years on the Stage, pp. 146–7. 73. Anderson, A Few Memories, pp. 154–5. 74. Anderson, A Few Memories, p. 127. 75. Anderson, A Few Memories, p. 205. 76. Anderson, A Few Memories, p. 230; Freeman Wills, W.G. Wills, Dramatist and Painter, London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1898, pp. 216–17. 77. Mary Anderson, letter to William Winter, n.d., f52, Folger Library. I owe this reference to Kate Newey. 78. Laura Beatty, Lillie Langtry: Manners, Masks and Morals, London: Chatto and Windus, 1999, p. 36. 79. Lillie Langtry, The Days I Knew, London: Hutchinson, 1925, p. 41. 80. W. Graham Robertson, Time Was, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1931, pp. 68–9. 81. Robertson, Time Was, p. 70. 82. Kendal, Dame Madge Kendal, p. 249. 83. Beatty, Lillie Langtry, p. 138. 84. Hall and Macintosh, Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre, p. 484. 85. Langtry, The Days I Knew, p. 175. 86. Langtry, The Days I Knew, pp. 199–200. 87. Beatty, Lillie Langtry, p. 268. 88. Langtry, The Days I Knew, p. 69. 89. Jenkyns, Dignity and Decadence, p. 214. 90. Theatre n.s., vol. 2, September 1883, pp. 136–8. 91. Ellen Terry, The Story of My Life, London: Hutchinson, 1908, pp. 142–3. 92. William Winter, The Wallet of Time vol. I, Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1969, pp. 576–8. The latest and fullest account of Langtry’s life is Laura Beatty, Lillie Langtry: Manners, Masks and Morals, 1999. But there is more detail on her stage career in Ernest Dudley, The Gilded Lily, London: Odhams, 1958. 93. Stephen Orgel, Imagining Shakespeare, London: Palgrave, 2003, p. 140.

244

Notes

94. Anderson, A Few Memories, pp. 246–7. 95. Theatre n.s., vol. 10, October 1887, p. 215. 96. Johnston Forbes-Robertson, A Player under Three Reigns, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1925, p. 139. 97. For detailed discussion of the production, see Bartholomeusz, ‘The Winter’s Tale’ in Performance in England and America, pp. 116–22. 98. Winter, Shadows of the Stage, p. 108. 99. George C.D. Odell, Shakespeare: from Betterton to Irving, vol. 2, New York: Charles Scribner’s sons, 1920, pp. 437–8. 100. Anderson, A Few Memories, p. 251. 101. Mrs Charles Calvert, Sixty-Eight Years on the Stage, London: Mills and Boon, 1911, pp. 243–9.

4

Wilson Barrett’s Ancient World

1. Percy Burton, Adventures among Immortals, London: Hutchinson, 1938, p. 54. 2. W. Macqueen-Pope, Ghosts and Greasepaint, London: Robert Hale, 1951, p. 53. 3. Austin Brereton, ‘Wilson Barrett’, Theatre, n.s., vol. I, January 1883, pp. 33–41. 4. James Thomas, The Art of the Actor-Manager: Wilson Barrett and the Victorian Theatre, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984, p. 21; Burton, Adventures among Immortals, p. 55. 5. J.B. Booth, Life, Laughter and Brass Hats, London: T. Werner Laurie, 1939, p. 66. 6. John Ranken Towse, Sixty Years of the Theatre, New York: Funk and Wagnalls, p. 426. 7. Theatre n.s., vol. I, January 1883, p. 33. 8. Booth, Life, Laughter and Brass Hats, p. 66. 9. Burton, Adventures among Immortals, p. 53. 10. Alex M. Thompson, Here I Lie, London: Routledge, 1937, p. 287. 11. Squire and Marie Bancroft, Recollections of Sixty Years, London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1911, p. 362. 12. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn eds, The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 34, London: George Allen, 1908, p. 669. 13. Wilson Barrett, ‘The Moral Influence of the Drama’, St Paul’s Cathedral, Dunedin, 12 January 1902, Wilson Barrett Collection, J3, Harry Ransom Centre, Texas University. 14. John Coleman, ‘Wilson Barrett and His Work’, Longman’s Magazine 7, 1885, p. 71. 15. Thomas, The Art of the Actor-Manager, pp. 64–71. 16. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Truth of Masks’, The Works of Oscar Wilde, London: Spring Books, 1963, pp. 905–6. 17. The Era, 15 December 1883, printed a selection of reviews of Claudian. 18. Theatre n.s., vol. 3, January 1884, pp. 43–8. 19. Morton N. Cohen ed., Selected Letters of Lewis Carroll, New York: Pantheon Books, 1982, pp. 132, 133, 135.

Notes

245

20. Edward Wakeling ed., Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, vol. 8, Clifford, Herefordshire: The Lewis Carroll Society, 2004, pp. 80, 103, 108. 21. Letter from John Ruskin to Wilson Barrett, 16 February 1884. The original is in the Wilson Barrett Collection, Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas. It was printed in E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn eds, The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 37, London: George Allen, 1909, p. 474. 22. See, for example, Henry Herman, ‘The Stage as a School of Art and Archaeology’, Magazine of Art 11, 1888, p. 332; John Coleman, ‘The Social Status of the Actor’, National Review 5, 1885, p. 22; G.W. Foote, The Sign of the Cross: a Candid Criticism of Mr. Wilson Barrett’s Play, London: R. Forder, 1896 p. 15; Freeman Wills, W.G. Wills, Dramatist and Painter, London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1898, p. 221; Theatre n.s., vol. 4, April 1884, p. 219 and the Dictionary of National Biography, account of Barrett’s life. 23. Thomas, The Art of the Actor-Manager, pp. 70–1. 24. David Mayer, Playing out the Empire, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, p. 33. 25. Letters from Lord Lytton to Wilson Barrett, 16 February 1885, 5 February 1885, 12 July 1884, 9 August 1884, 19 February 1885, 27 February 1885, 16 March 1885, 30 March 1885, Wilson Barrett Collection, Harry Ransom Centre. 26. Thomas, The Art of the Actor-Manager, p. 80. 27. Coleman, ‘Wilson Barrett and His Work’, p. 75. 28. Theatre, n.s., vol. 5, April 1885, pp. 195–6. 29. Theatre, n.s., vol. 3, April 1884, p. 219. 30. Letter from Sydney Grundy to Wilson Barrett, Wilson Barrett Collection, Harry Ransom Centre. 31. Theatre, n.s., vol. 7, June 1886, p. 339. 32. Clement Scott, The Drama of Yesterday and Today, vol. 2, London: Macmillan, 1899, pp. 334–5. The comments were distilled from his much longer review of the play in the Daily Telegraph, 3 May 1886. 33. Thomas, The Art of the Actor-Manager, p. 115. 34. Theatre, n.s., vol. 20, November 1892, pp. 202–7. 35. Theatre, n.s., vol. 22, December 1893, pp. 339–40. 36. Thomas, The Art of the Actor-Manager, p. 129. 37. Jerome K. Jerome, ‘The History of “The Sign of the Cross” ’, Idler 9, 1896, pp. 263–76. 38. Thomas, The Art of the Actor-Manager, p. 134. 39. Jerome, ‘The History of “The Sign of the Cross” ’. 40. William Archer, The Theatrical ‘World’ of 1896, London: Walter Scott, 1897, pp. 9–11. 41. George Bernard Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties, vol. 2, London: Constable, 1948, pp. 12–13. 42. Theatre, n.s., vol. 27, March 1896, p. 310. 43. Wilson Barrett, The Sign of the Cross, London: Queensway Library, n.d., p. 9. 44. Frank Wilson Barrett, And Give Me Yesterday, unpublished biography of Wilson Barrett by his grandson, c. 1965, Harry Ransom Centre, pp. 211–12. 45. Theatre, n.s., vol. 27, March 1896, p. 129. 46. Letters to Wilson Barrett from the Archdeacon of Singapore, the Vicar of Rochdale and the Vicar of Belchamp St Paul, Wilson Barrett Collection, Box I; Frank Wilson Barrett, And Give Me Yesterday, p. 222.

246

Notes

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

5

Frank Wilson Barrett, And Give Me Yesterday, p. 222. Mrs. T.P. O’Connor, I Myself, London: Methuen, 1920, pp. 310–12. Ernest Raymond, The Story of My Days, London: Cassell, 1968, p. 30. Letter from Harry Oswald Nash to Wilson Barrett,Wilson Barrett Collection Box 1. Lillah McCarthy, Myself and My Friends, London: Thornton Butterworth, 1933, pp. 44–5. G.W. Foote, The Sign of the Cross: a Candid Criticism of Mr. Wilson Barrett’s Play, London. Jerome, ‘The History of “The Sign of the Cross” ’, p. 276. Louis N. Parker, Several of My Lives, London: Chapman and Hall, 1928, p. 184. Robert Hichens, Yesterday, London: Cassell, 1947, p. 107. Philip Amory, ‘Mr and Mrs John Bull Pretend’, Comet, May 1897, pp. 30–43. Margaret Clement Scott, Old Days in Bohemian London, London: Hutchinson, 1919, p. 129. William Archer, The Theatrical ‘World’ of 1897, London: Walter Scott, 1898, pp. 23–30. Theatre, n.s., vol. 29, May 1897, pp. 162–3. Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties, vol. 3, pp. 41–8. Miranda Harrison ed., The Price of Beauty: Edwin Long’s ‘Babylonian Marriage Market (1875)’, Catalogue, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Libraries and Arts Service, p. 47. Cook and Wedderburn eds., Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 14, pp. 274–7. Harrison, The Price of Beauty, p. 23. Sketch, 2 May 1900. J.H. Barnes, Forty Years on the Stage, London: Chapman and Hall, 1914, pp. 241–2. David Mayer, ‘Toga Plays’, in Richard Foulkes ed., British Theatre in the 1890s, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 89–91. Thompson, Here I Lie, p. 288. Scott, The Drama of Yesterday and Today, vol. 2, p. 384.

Irving’s Ancient World

1. Austin Brereton, The Life of Henry Irving, vol. I, London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1908, p. 297. 2. Martin Meisel, Realizations, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, pp. 43–4. 3. Jeffrey Richards ed., Sir Henry Irving: Theatre, Culture and Society, Keele: Keele University Press, 1994, p. 46. 4. Henry Irving and Frank A. Marshall eds, The Henry Irving Shakespeare, vol. I, London: Blackie and Son, 1897, p. lxxxiv. 5. Henry Irving, The Drama, London: Darf, 1989, pp. 150–1. 6. Irving, The Drama, p. 161. 7. Irving, The Drama, pp. 44–5.

Notes

247

8. Walter Hamilton, The Aesthetic Movement in England, New York: Garland, 1986, p. 32. 9. David Mayer, Playing out the Empire, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, p. 20. 10. Alfred Darbyshire, The Art of the Victorian Stage, Manchester: Sheratt and Hughes, 1907, p. 105. 11. William Archer, English Dramatists of To-day, London: Sampson Low and Co., 1882, pp. 150–1. 12. Percy Fitzgerald, Sir Henry Irving, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906, pp. 121–2. For a fuller discussion of the play see Jeffrey Richards, Sir Henry Irving: a Victorian Actor and his World, London: Hambledon, 2005, pp. 202–10. 13. W. Graham Robertson, Time Was, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1931, p. 168. 14. On the visual inspiration of Irving’s King Lear see Meisel, Realizations, pp. 417–32 and Helen Borowitz, ‘King Lear in the Art of Ford Madox Brown’, Victorian Studies 21, 1978, pp. 309–34. 15. Meisel, Realizations, p. 426. 16. Clement Scott, From ‘The Bells’ to ‘King Arthur’, London: John McQueen, 1897, pp. 346–7. 17. Percy Cross Standing, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, London: Cassell, 1905, p. 92. 18. Bram Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, London: Heinemann, 1907, pp. 285–6. 19. William Archer, The Theatrical ‘World’ of 1896, London: Walter Scott, 1897, p. 260. 20. Bernard Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties, vol. 2, London: Constable, p. 195. 21. Henry Morley, The Journal of a London Playgoer 1851–1866, London: Routledge, 1891, p. 293. 22. William Winter, Shakespeare on the Stage, New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1916, third series, p. 105. 23. For a detailed discussion of this production, see Carol Carlisle, ‘Macready’s production of Cymbeline’ in Richard Foulkes ed., Shakespeare and the Victorian Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966, pp. 138–52. 24. On this production see Shirley Allen, Samuel Phelps and Sadler’s Wells Theatre, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971, pp. 107, 208. 25. Western Daily Press, 2 November 1864. 26. Dutton Cook, Nights at the Play, London: Chatto and Windus, 1883, pp. 143–4. 27. Unattributed newspaper cutting, Percy Fitzgerald Collection, Garrick Club, vol. 21, p. 42. 28. Archer, The Theatrical ‘World’ of 1896, p. 273. 29. William Winter, Shakespeare on the Stage, third series, New York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1916, p. 94. 30. Ellen Terry, The Story of My Life, London: Hutchinson, 1908, p. 316. 31. Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties, vol. 2, p. 199. 32. Archer, The Theatrical ‘World’ of 1896, pp. 272–3. 33. Alan Hughes, Henry Irving, Shakespearean, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, pp. 161–72. 34. Westminster Gazette, 16 April 1901. 35. See, for instance, Illustrated London News, 20 April 1901; Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 20 April 1901; Era, 20 April 1901.

248

Notes

36. J.H. Barnes, Forty Years on the Stage, London: Chapman and Hall, 1914, p. 251. 37. Maurice Willson Disher, The Last Romantic, London: Hutchinson 1948, p. 32. 38. Standing, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, p. 97. 39. Richard Phené Spiers, ‘The Architecture of Coriolanus at the Lyceum Theatre’, Architectural Review 10, 1901, pp. 2–21. 40. Fitzgerald Collection, vol. 15, pp. 41–3, 54. 41. Sketch, 17 April 1901; Fitzgerald Collection, vol. 15, p. 54. 42. Richard Dickins, Forty Years of Shakespeare on the English Stage, privately printed, 1907, pp. 99–100. 43. Fitzgerald Collection, vol. 15, p. 54. 44. H.A. Saintsbury and Cecil Palmer eds, We Saw Him Act, London: Hurst and Blackett, 1939, pp. 382–3. 45. For detailed accounts of the production, see Hughes, Henry Irving, Shakespearean, pp. 161–72, and John Ripley, ‘Coriolanus’ on Stage in England and America, 1609–1994, London: Associated University Presses, 1998, pp. 184–98. 46. Theatre, n.s., vol. 22, October 1893, pp. 220–1. 47. Ripley, ‘Coriolanus’ on Stage in England and America, p. 199. 48. Frank Benson, My Memoirs, London: Ernest Benn, 1930, p. 188. 49. Constance, Lady Benson, Mainly Players, London: Thornton Butterworth, 1926, pp. 189–90. 50. Dickins, Forty Years of Shakespeare on the English Stage, p. 99. 51. Ripley, ‘Coriolanus’ on Stage in England and America, pp. 203–4. 52. Ripley, ‘Coriolanus’ on Stage in England and America, p. 203.

6

Tree’s Ancient World

1. Tree’s Oxford address was subsequently published in The Fortnightly Review, vol. 68, 1900, pp. 52–65 and later still included in his volume of collected essays, Thoughts and Afterthoughts, London, Cassell, 1915, where it was retitled ‘The Living Shakespeare: a Defence of Modern Taste’. The quotation comes from Thoughts and Afterthoughts, pp. 40–1. 2. Tree, Thoughts and Afterthoughts, p. 46. 3. Tree, Thoughts and Afterthoughts, pp. 56–7. 4. Susan Chitty, The Beast and the Monk, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974, p. 154. 5. Brenda Colloms, Charles Kingsley, London: Constable, 1975, p. 156; Margaret Farrand Thorp, Charles Kingsley 1819–1875, New York: Octagon Books, 1969, p. 114. 6. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn eds, The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 34, London: George Allen, 1908, p. 586. 7. Alison Smith, The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality and Art, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996, pp. 216–39. 8. Cook and Wedderburn, Works of John Ruskin, vol. 22, p. 222. 9. Theatre, vol. 21, February 1893, p. 105. 10. Theatre, vol. 21, pp. 105–6. 11. Theatre, vol. 21, p. 106. 12. Julia Neilson, This for Remembrance, London: Hurst and Blackett, 1940, pp. 126–7.

Notes

249

13. Joseph Harker, Studio and Stage, London: Nisbet, 1924, pp. 95, 91, 91–2, 93, 95. 14. William Archer, The Theatrical ‘World’ of 1893, London: Walter Scott, 1894, pp. 9–17. 15. Joseph Comyns Carr, Coasting Bohemia, London: Macmillan, 1914, pp. 37–8. 16. Mrs J. Comyns Carr, Reminiscences, London: Hutchinson, 1926, pp. 225–6. 17. Comyns Carr, Coasting Bohemia, p. 33. 18. Charles L. Graves, Hubert Parry: His Life and Works, London: Macmillan, 1926, vol. I, p. 351. 19. Jeremy Dibble, C. Hubert H. Parry: His Life and Music, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992, p. 306. 20. Musical Times, 1 April 1893. 21. Jeffrey Richards, Sir Henry Irving: a Victorian Actor and his World, London: Hambledon, 2005, p. 141. 22. Hesketh Pearson, Beerbohm Tree: His Life and Laughter, London: Columbus Books, 1988, pp. 119, 104. 23. Max Beerbohm ed., Herbert Beerbohm Tree, London: Hutchinson, 1920, p. 108. 24. Richards, Sir Henry Irving, p. 223. 25. On the imperial influence on the late Victorian stage see Ralph Berry, ‘The Imperial Theme’ in Richard Foulkes ed., Shakespeare and the Victorian Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 153–60. 26. George Bernard Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties, London: Constable, 1948, vol. 3, p. 302. 27. Percy Cross Standing, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, London: Cassell, 1905, p. 93. 28. Max Beerbohm, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, p. 107. 29. On Tree’s production of Julius Caesar see John Ripley, ‘Julius Caesar’ on Stage in England and America 1599–1973, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980, pp. 147–75. 30. Constance Collier, Harlequinade, London: John Lane, 1919, p. 106. 31. Reviews printed at the end of the published texts of Stephen Phillips, Paolo and Francesca, London: John Lane, 1900 and Phillips, Herod, London: John Lane, 1900. 32. J.B. Booth, Palmy Days, London: The Richards Press, 1957, p. 94. 33. Booth, Palmy Days, p. 102. 34. Constance, Lady Benson, Mainly Players, London: Thornton Butterworth, 1926, pp. 64–5, 67. 35. Pearson, Beerbohm Tree, p. 135. 36. Pearson, Beerbohm Tree, p. 136. 37. Richard Phené Spiers, ‘ “Herod” at Her Majesty’s Theatre’, Architectural Review 9, 1901, pp. 3–16. 38. There are reviews of the dresses in the Daily Telegraph, Westminster Gazette, Daily Chronicle and Morning Leader, all 1 November 1900. 39. Joseph Kestner, Masculinities in Victorian Painting, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995, pp. 59–65. 40. Daily Telegraph, 6 January 1902. 41. Mrs Alex Tweedie, Behind the Footlights, London: Hutchinson, 1904, pp. 116–17. 42. Collier, Harlequinade, pp. 92–3.

250 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.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

Notes Max Beerbohm, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, p. 125. The Times, 3 February 1902. Stephen Phillips, Nero, London: Macmillan, 1906, pp. 8–9. Phillips, Nero, p. 53. Catharine Edwards ed., Roman Presences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 122–3. Phillips, Nero, p. 115. Collier, Harlequinade, pp. 176–7. Max Beerbohm, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, p. 136. Collier, Harlequinade, p. 177. On the stage history of Antony and Cleopatra see Margaret Lamb, ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ on the English Stage, London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1980, and Richard Madelaine ed., Shakespeare in Performance: Antony and Cleopatra, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Lamb, ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ on the English Stage, p. 24. Madelaine, Shakespeare in Performance: Antony and Cleopatra, p. 47. Dutton Cook, Nights at the Play, London: Chatto and Windus, 1883, pp. 204–5. James Anderson, An Actor’s Life, London: Walter Scott, pp. 314–16. Daniel Barrett, ‘ “Shakespeare Spelt Ruin and Byron Bankruptcy”, Shakespeare at Chatterton’s Drury Lane, 1864–1878’, Theatre Survey 29, 1988, p. 165. Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 22 November 1890. A.B. Walkley, Playhouse Impressions, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892, pp. 45–6. Richard Dickins, Forty Years of Shakespeare on the English Stage, privately printed, 1907, pp. 66–7. For detailed discussion of the play, see Russell Jackson, ‘Cleopatra ‘Lilyised’: Antony and Cleopatra at the Princess’s, 1890’, Theatrephile 2, no. 8, 1985, pp. 37–40. The Times, 4 January 1907; Pearson, Beerbohm Tree, p. 133. Westminster Gazette, 28 December 1906; Collier, Harlequinade, p. 186. Evening Standard, 28 December 1906; Daily News, 12 January 1907. Max Beerbohm, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, pp. 221, 224, 140. Collier, Harlequinade, pp. 184–5. Lamb, ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ on the English Stage, pp. 101–30. Evening Standard, 11 September 1909. Daily Graphic, 15 September 1909. Madeleine Bingham, The Great Lover: the Life and Art of Herbert Beerbohm Tree, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978, pp. 185–7; Pearson, Beerbohm Tree, pp. 157–8; Margot Peters, Mrs Pat, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984, pp. 291–2. Steve Nicholson, The Censorship of British Drama, vol. I, 1900–1932, Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2003, pp. 98–100. Murray Roston, Biblical Drama in England, London: Faber and Faber, 1968, p. 243. Louis N. Parker, Several of My Lives, London: Chapman and Hall, 1928, pp. 245–6. Parker, Several of My Lives, p. 248. Daily Telegraph, 16 August 1913. Standard, 26 August 1913; Pall Mall Gazette, 26 August 1913.

Notes 76. 77. 78. 79.

Modern Society, 30 August 1913. Modern Society, 30 August 1913. Daily Mail, 20 August 1913. Max Beerbohm, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, p. 77.

7

The Toga Play: Climax and Decline

251

1. For a full discussion of the novel, play and films of Ben-Hur see Robert E. and Katharine M. Morsberger, Lew Wallace: Militant Romantic, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980, pp. 291–312, 447–96. 2. The chariot race mechanism is described in David Mayer, Playing out the Empire, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, pp. 194–5. The book contains the full text of William Young’s play of Ben-Hur. 3. William S. Hart, My Life East and West, 1903, Chicago: The Lakeside Press, 1994, pp. 153–4. 4. Hart, My Life East and West, p. 150. 5. The Morsbergers, Lew Wallace: Militant Romantic, p. 265. There is a detailed eye witness account of the New York stage production on pp. 460–4 of this book. 6. The Morsbergers, Lew Wallace: Militant Romantic, p. 466. 7. Dennis Castle, ‘Sensation’ Smith of Drury Lane, London: Charles Skilton, 1984, pp. 134–5. 8. Mayer, Playing out the Empire, p. 190. 9. Constance Collier, Harlequinade, London: John Lane, 1929, p. 110. 10. Castle, ‘Sensation’ Smith of Drury Lane, pp. 183–4. 11. George Bernard Shaw, Prefaces, London: Constable, 1934, p. 717. 12. Matthew H. Wikander, ‘Reinventing the History Play: Caesar and Cleopatra, Saint Joan, ‘In Good King Charles’s Golden Days’, in Christopher Innes ed., The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 195–217. 13. Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson, The Theatrical Companion to Shaw, New York: Pitman, 1955, p. 63. 14. George Bernard Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties, vol. 3, London: Constable, 1948, p. 298. 15. Gale K. Larson, ‘Caesar and Cleopatra: the Making of a History Play’, Shaw Review 14, 1971, pp. 82–4. 16. Larson, ‘Caesar and Cleopatra: the Making of a History Play’, p. 86. 17. Martin Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth Century Theatre, New York: Limelight Editions, 1984, p. 361. 18. Johnston Forbes-Robertson, A Player under Three Reigns, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1925, pp. 244–5. 19. Forbes-Robertson, A Player under Three Reigns, p. 246. 20. Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth Century Theatre, pp. 334–47. 21. Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties, vol. 2, pp. 12–13. 22. Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth Century Theatre, p. 331. 23. The transition of the toga play from stage to screen is covered in detail in Jeffrey Richards, Hollywood’s Ancient Worlds, London: Continuum, 2008.

Index

Achilles 12, 72 actor-managers ix dominate Victorian theatre 26 see also Barrett, Wilson; Irving, Henry; Tree, Herbert Beerbohm Addison, Joseph 1, 30, 37 Addison, Laura 158 Aeneas 12 Aeschylus 12, 166 aesthetics viii, 6, 15, 30, 42, 105, 186 aestheticism 155 Agamemnon 13, 76, 192 Agamemnon (play) 166 Ajax 12 Albert Memorial 66, 74 Alcestis 1 Aldridge, Ira 40 Alexandria 8–9, 170–2, 174–5, 208–10, 230, 232 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence advises on architecture 109 advises on drapery 84 antiquarianism 15–16, 157 central to Hypatia 170 on Coriolanus 164 designs costumes 157 Egyptian paintings 18 friendship with Herbert Tree 175–7 on greatness of theatre ix, 155 and Julius Caesar, Tree’s production of 180–3 Roses of Heliogabalus, The 9, 200 and sculpture 66–7 as set designer 156, 161, 164–5 America see United States Ancient World classicism, opposed to Romanticism 2 as Golden Age 1, 2–3, 15 Victorian obsession with 1, 68

Anderson, James R. 38–9, 47, 57, 78–9 as manager of Drury Lane 47, 57 Anderson, Mary 25, 39, 67, 92, 94–8, 108 as American 76 biography 76–7 bust of 89 compared to Mrs Kendal 86–7 costumes 84, 85 criticism of 81–8 influence on Lillie Langtry 92 in Ingomar the Barbarian 78–82 interpretation of Galatea 83–8 plays written for 90 success of 88–90 retirement 89–90 Androcles and the Lion 229, 234–5 Anglican Church 3, 130–1 Tractarians 170–1 see also religion Antigone 37, 70–2, 79 Antony and Cleopatra 18, 24, 40, 104, 229 Chatterton’s production of 206–7 Langtry’s production of 207–8 Tree’s production of 208–12 unpopularity of 205–6 Antony, Mark 1 Apelles 67 Apollo Belvedere 67 archaeology viii, 10, 27 finds reproduced on stage 28–30 in Greece and Rome 12–16 in the Near East 16–19, 50, 54, 143 and painting 15–16, 17 research into for set design 49–50, 55, 65, 74, 104, 109, 112–13, 155–7, 192, 213–14, 219 ‘theft’ of artefacts 17 see also Egypt 252

Index 253 Archer, William 33, 95, 129, 138, 156–7, 166, 176, 183, 186, 189, 211, 234 architecture British, influenced by Ancient Greek 7, 228 see also archaeology; production Aristotle 6 Army, British 3–4 Ashcroft, Lena 144 Assyria 16–17, 19–20, 50, 53–4, 143–4, 219 Astley’s Amphitheatre 56 As You Like It 40, 92 atheism 133, 212, 216 Athenian Captive, The 36, 39–40 audiences control over Victorian theatre 26 see also box office; spectacle Australia x, 101, 123, 124 Azael the Prodigal 57–9 Babylon paintings of 143 as site of architectural interest 14, 16, 19, 21 drama set in viii Bann, Stephen 27 Baring, Evelyn 7 Barnes, J.H. 83, 89, 144, 146, 163 Barrett, Wilson 25 acting criticized 150 acting praised 106, 117, 150–1 compared to Henry Irving 101 critical opinion of 100 described 99 and Egyptology 121 and E.W. Godwin 101 illustrates The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century 101 and John Ruskin 101, 102, 107–8, 115, 125, 150 masculinity 99 master of the toga play 99, 123 and melodrama 103 and morality 101–2, 106–7 plays Shakespearean characters 100 plays Virginius 33, 123–4

production of Hamlet 101, 108 promotion of religion, recognition of 102–3 toga plays summarized 150 tours in America 121, 123 working relationship with Lytton 109 writes for Mary Anderson 90 see also Claudian; Clito; Daughters of Babylon, The; Junius or the Household Gods; Quo Vadis; scene painting; Sign of the Cross, The Beardsley, Aubrey 15 Belfast 34, 92 Benedict, Julius 104 Ben-Hur (film) 15, 220 Ben-Hur (novel) 8, 222–3 Ben-Hur (stage adaptation) viii–ix, 24, 188, 222–8, 232, 234 budget 223 Christ cut from 223 costumes 224 at Drury Lane 229 plot 224–5 popularity 224 premiere 224 production 223–4 reception 226–9 and Sign of the Cross, The 225–6 transfer to London 224 Wallace’s unwillingness to authorize 223 writing of 223 Benson, Frank 43, 166–7, 183, 206 Berlioz, Hector 12, 109 Bevan, Edwyn 211 Beverley, William Roxby 112–13, 159, 206 Bible and censorship 23, 58, 134, 217–18 centrality to Victorian era 17 pictorial Bibles 21–2 in Victorian art 20–1 see also evolution Bird, Robert Montgomery 1–2 Birmingham x, 79, 128, 149, 207 Boer War 9, 144

254

Index

Bonaparte, Napoleon 17 Boucicault, Dion 87, 148 box office x, 169 commercial imperative of 23 Boys’ Brigade 5 Boy Scouts 5 Brandon, Olga 178 Brereton, Austin 99, 100, 114, 138 Bride of the Nile 56 Bright, Addison 123 Bristol 103, 128 British Museum 16, 18, 50, 53, 59, 91, 143, 184, 192, 214, 219 Brooke, Gustavus Vaughan 72 Brown, Ford Madox 20, 143, 156 Browning, Robert 38 Brutus, or the Fall of Tarquin 1 Bryce, James 7 Buchanan, Robert 73 Buckstone, John Baldwin 61–3, 75 Bulfinch, Thomas 1 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward (first Lord Lytton) 8, 10–12, 15, 26–7, 77, 110–11 and William Charles Macready 25 see also Last Days of Pompeii, The Bulwer-Lytton, Edward Robert Lytton (second Lord Lytton) 90, 108–10, 113 working relationship with Wilson Barrett 109 Bunn, Alfred 35 burlesque 36, 67–8, 232 Burne-Jones, Edward 15, 67, 72, 90, 177 Burton, Percy 99, 100 Byron, George Gordon, Lord influences theatre 43, 54 see also Sardanapalus Byzantium 101, 104–6 Caesar and Cleopatra 229 Calcraft, John 70, 72 Calvert, Charles 52–4, 97, 104 Calvert, Frank 12 Calvert, Louis 206 Calvinism see religion Canada 101 Capon, William 28

Caracalla 67 Cardiff 128 Carlisle, Carol Jones 68, 71 Carnac Sahib 152 Carlyle, Thomas 4 and medievalism 5 Carr, Joseph Comyns 110, 176–7, 201 Carroll, Lewis 107, 170 Cassandra 1 Catholics see Roman Catholics Catullus 7 Cato 1, 30–3, 37 inspired Ion 37 plot 31 popularity 31 Caius Gracchus 36–6 censorship 23, 37, 44, 58, 134, 217–18 Chapin, Alice 166 Chartism 55 Chatterton, Frederic Balsir 206–7 Chaucer, Geoffrey 12 children’s literature 1 chivalry 5–6, 34, 48 Christian King, The 150 Christianity see religion Christoff, John ‘Johan’ 64 Church of England see Anglican Church cinema 8, 18, 210, 221, 229, 235 silent 224 Civil War, English 36 class system 3, 43, 125, 229 middle classes ix–x, 229 upper classes 32 working classes 2, 3, 229 see also Chartism; democracy Claudian 24, 65, 111, 123, 126, 134, 149, 174, 202 as Barrett’s first toga play 103 compared to Junius 115 plot of 104–6 Ruskin on 107–8 success of 104–8 writing of 104 Clay, Frederick 53 Cleopatra 1, 18 Cliffe, Cooper 122

Index 255 Clito 24, 67, 101, 149–50 plot 116–17 reception 117–21 set design 116 writing of 115–16 Clytemnestra 1, 166, 191 Coghlan, Charles 92, 208 Coleman, John 52, 67–8, 103, 113 Cole, Thomas 14 Colman, Samuel 14 comedy ix, 62 see also burlesque Comedy and Tragedy 77, 82, 83 Comedy of Errors, The 40 Commodus 223 Conolly, Leonard W. 33, 36 Conservative Party 3, 5 Cook, Dutton 74, 159, 206 Cooke, Edward 67 cost see production costumes 153 Alma-Tadema designs 217 in Coriolanus 41, 165 in The Cup 155 Edward Godwin designs 29, 101, 119 Frederic Leighton designs 92 in Herod 187 historical accuracy of 28, 29, 41, 55, 64, 70 in Hypatia 178 importance of, decline in 75 in Joseph and his Brethren 220 in Julius Caesar, Tree’s production of 181–2 Mary Anderson and 84, 85 in Nero 204 in Pharaoh 122 in Ulysses 192–3, 195 see also fashion Coriolanus 40–8 , 162–7, 207 Caius Gracchus compared to 34 democracy in 24 Henry Irving’s productions of 162–7 interpretations of 41–4, 157 Macready’s production, reviews of 43–8 Phelps’s revival of 46–7

popularity 40–1, 44 unpopularity 162–5 Courtney, William Leonard ix–x Covent Garden 23, 26, 32, 48, 68 Antigone at 70 Coriolanus at 43 Julius Caesar at 48 luminaries attend 38 Craven, Hawes 82, 96, 148, 155, 161, 164–5, 186, 192 Criminal Law Amendment Bill 121 critics influence of ix–x record reactions of audiences x see also names of individual plays Cromer, Earl of see Baring, Evelyn Crystal Palace 18, 23, 56, 143, 206 Cup, The ix, 24, 155–6 plot 155 reception 155–6 Cuthbert, William 60, 155 Cymbeline 40 Henry Irving’s production 156–61 sets for 28, 156–7, 161–2 Daily Chronicle 183, 185–6, 215 Daily Express 186, 215 Daily Mail 181, 193, 215 Daily News 63, 64, 164, 193, 194, 233, 235 Daily Telegraph ix–x, 63–4, 99, 104, 110, 112, 114, 125, 129, 137, 141, 142, 148, 155, 181–2, 186–7, 193–4, 209–11, 217, 226, 232, 235 see also Courtney, William Leonard; Scott, Clement Danby, Francis 14 Dante 24, 66, 166, 183, 228 Darbyshire, Alfred ix, 53 Darley, Arthur 53 Darwin, Charles 19 Daughters of Babylon, The 24, 149–50 origins of 134 plot 135 production 134 reception 135–43 David, Jacques-Louis 42 De Mille, Cecil B. 14 de Quincey, Thomas 71–2

256

Index

death penalty 5 decadence 180, 200 see also modernism Decline and Fall of the British Empire, The 10 Delacroix, Eugène 51, 208 democracy 2–3, 8–9, 36, 149 in Ancient Greece 6 in Ancient Rome 38, 41, 44, 230 and Christianity 9, 24, 171, 225 Dennis, John 41 Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, The 11 dialect 3 Dickens, Charles popularity of 4 as theatregoer 10, 38, 158, 223 Dickins, Richard x, 165, 167, 208 dioramas 27, 49, 57, 206 Disraeli, Benjamin 7 Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge see Carroll, Lewis Doré, Gustave 21–2, 141, 188 Dowson, Ernest 73 Drury Lane, Theatre Royal 2 Ben-Hur at 229 Caius Gracchus first performed at 34 Cato first performed at 30 closure of 79 James R. Anderson manages 47, 79 Shakespeare Tercentenary Gala at 166 William Charles Macready at 26 Dublin x, 69–72, 75, 76, 92 Duke’s Theatre 53 Dyas, Ada 75 Eastlake, Mary 104, 106, 108–12, 114, 116–19 Edinburgh 69, 71, 76, 92, 147 education 1, 4–5 classical 6, 7, 91 Shakespeare and 154 textbooks, influence of 28 Edwardian period 36, 180, 197 imperialism 207 Edwin, Long 19, 143

Egypt Egyptian Court, Crystal Palace 18 Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly 18 Egyptology 14, 16–18, 56, 121, 213–14, 217, 219, 231 hieroglyphs 16, 18, 60, 206, 216, 219 public familiarity with ancient Egypt 17–19 see also False Gods Electra 1 Electra (play) 39 Elgin Marbles 12 Ellis, Havelock 66 Emden, Harry 201, 203 Enlightenment 2, 6 Era 56, 60–1, 64, 75, 81–2, 87, 93, 95–6, 103, 105, 111–12, 119, 146–8, 161–2, 164, 173, 175, 179, 182, 189, 191, 203, 211, 218, 226, 228 Etty, William 190 Euripides 37, 39, 72 Evadne 77, 89 evolution 19 Examiner 35, 45, 48, 62 Exodus 18 exotic, Victorian fashion for 1, 17, 31, 56, 160 Fagan, James Bernard 212 Faint Heart Ne’er Won Fair Lady 77 Fall of Nineveh, The 14, 50, 51 Fall of the Roman Empire, The 223 False Gods 24, 212–17 and atheism 212, 216 authenticity of 213–14 and Egyptology 213–14, 217 opening of 215 plot 212–13 production 214–16 reception 215–17 Farnese Hercules 67 fashion 88–9 see also costumes Faucit, Helen 25, 67–72, 98, 158–9 as Antigone 70–2 praise of 69, 71–2 Fenton, Frederick 49

Index 257 fiction see novels Fitzball, Edward 32, 57–60, 63 Fitzgerald, Percy 71, 113, 156 flood, biblical 19 Forbes-Robertson, Johnston 95, 230–3 Forrest, Edwin x, 2 Forster, John 38 Fraser’s Magazine 36, 170 Freemasonry 17 French Revolution 2, 13, 30, 31, 36, 42 Froude, James 230, 231 Garrick, David 28, 48, 205 Gell, William 64 gender 1, 24–5, 66–7, 69, 155, 201 see also nudity George IV 3, 33 Gérôme, Jean-Léon 14, 72, 113 Giebelhausen, Michaela 20 Gielgud, Kate Terry x Gilbert, William Schwenck 72–3, 75–7, 83–5, 87, 90, 110 Gill, Basil 142, 149, 205, 224, 228 Gladiator 223 Gladiator, The 1–2 Gladstone, William Ewart 3, 22, 131–2 Glasgow x, 32, 69, 92, 217 Globe 64, 183, 194 Godwin, Edward William 126, 205 as costume designer 29, 119 as designer 92, 104–6, 109, 112–13, 116, 155, 159 influence on Wilson Barrett 101 as theorist 29, 169–70 Greece, Ancient architecture 7, 228 democracy in 6 idealization of 6 as model for Victorian Britain 6, 66 Greek tragedy viii–ix in Britain, history of 36 as commentary on British history 36 Greet, Ben ix, 149 Grieve, John Henderson 28 Griffith, D.W. 14

Hacker, Arthur 171, 190 Hale, Nathan 31 Hall, Caroline 75 Hall, Edith viii–ix, 36, 39 Hall, Stafford 104, 116, 119, 126 praise for 106, 112, 113, 148, 148 Hamilton, Emma 67, 231 Hamilton, Walter 155 Hamlet 40, 100–1, 108, 136 lead character 47, 100, 111, 136, 150, 163, 230 Wilson Barrett’s production 101, 108 Hann, Walter 53, 104, 116, 122, 126, 134 praise of 96, 106, 112–13, 119, 139, 142, 148–9, 164, 175 Hanoverian Settlement 3, 36 Harker, Joseph 161, 165–6, 175–6, 181, 192, 219–20, 232 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 1 Haymarket 23, 39, 40, 74, 75, 92, 152, 170, 174, 178 Hazlitt, William 32–3 health 3, 4, 10, 91, 172 and fashion 88 Helen of Troy 1, 12, 91 Henry V 40 Henry VIII 30, 40 Herculaneum 10 Hercules 67 Her Majesty’s Theatre 137, 152, 178, 180, 188, 193, 217 see also His Majesty’s Theatre Herman, Henry 101, 104 Herod 24, 183, 185–90, 194 cast 185 costumes 187 music 187–8 plot 185 production 185–6, 188–9 reception 183, 185–90 Herodotus 59, 143, 230 Hichins, Robert 135 His Majesty’s Theatre 152, 204, 208, 215, 228 see also Her Majesty’s Theatre

258

Index

history centrality of to Victorian theatre 22, 26–7 historical accuracy, obsession with 28–30, 45, 55, 60, 65, 74, 82, 104, 112–13, 155, 157, 186, 192, 213–14, 219 as profession, development of 27–8 school textbooks influenced study of 28 Hodson, Henrietta 63, 64, 75, 159 Holman Hunt, William 20, 143 Holy Land 19 drama set in viii see also Ben-Hur; censorship Homer 12, 66, 190, 191 lack of drama on 191 writings of as secular Bible 6, 190 see also Ulysses Horace 7 Hormuzd, Rassam 19 Horne, Richard Hengist 34, 38 Hughes, Thomas 5 Hunchback, The 77, 92, 94 Hypatia (novel) 8–9, 120 controversy 170 inspires paintings 171 plot 170–1 Hypatia (play) 8–9, 84, 170–7 Alma-Tadema central to 170 characters 172 costumes 178 music 177 plot 172–3 production 185–6, 188–9 reception 173–7 rows over 177 Idler 125, 127, 134 Illustrated London News 51, 53, 56–8, 60, 70, 78, 81, 149, 193–4, 198, 201, 205 Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News 53, 81–2, 86, 95–6, 111, 118, 144, 200–2, 205, 207 imagination 2

imperialism British Empire, modelled on Roman Empire 2, 6–9, 24, 152–3 British Empire, size of 6 in Edwardian period 201 as moral force 5–7, 152 and national differences 3–4 and religion 8–10 end of, lessons learned from 6–10, 24, 107, 180 Roman, Christian resistance to portrayed 2, 8–9, 31, 126–7, 134 see also United States (US) industrialization 1, 2 and growth of factory system 4 and materialism 6 Ingomar the Barbarian 77–80, 89, 94 plot 79–80 reviews of 80–2 set of 82 Ion 36–40, 77–8, 89 William Charles Macready and 38–9 inspiration for 37 plot 37–8 reception 38–40 Samuel Phelps and 39, 40 touring production 38 Iphigenia in Aulis 72 Ireland x, 3–4, 42, 71 Irving, Edward 4 Irving, Henry vii and aestheticism 155 approach to producing Shakespeare 153 compared to Wilson Barrett 101 edition of Shakespeare 153 influence 152 and Julius Caesar 48 preference for medieval and Renaissance settings 154 productions by ix rejects Junius or the Household Gods 109 religion 152 on set design 29 on the theatre ix

Index 259 tours in America 109 see also Coriolanus; Cup, The; Cymbeline; set design Israel see Holy Land Jacobinism 36 James, Henry 66 Jameson, Anna 20 Jeffries, Maud 122, 125–6, 129, 133, 139–40, 142, 185, 189–90 Jenkyns, Richard 72 Jews 3, 9, 104, 135, 172–3 Jezebel 217 Job 217 John Bull 2, 36 Jones, Edward 104, 109, 122, 126 Jones, Henry Arthur 101, 110 Joseph and his Brethren 23, 217–20 in America 217 and censorship 217–18 costumes 220 music 219 and Orientalism 218–19 sets 219–20 Joseph in Canaan 217 Joshua, Essaka 73 Jubilee celebrations, Victorian 23, 109, 180 Julius Caesar 24, 33, 40, 229 Frank Benson plays title role 166 great actors who have not played title role 48 multiple central characters 179 popularity 40–1, 48, 162, 169, 207 Saxe-Meiningen Company production of 48–9, 179 see also Julius Caesar, Tree’s production of Julius Caesar, Tree’s production of 169, 178–82, 230 and Alma-Tadema 180–3 costumes 181–2 and decadence 180 production 179–81 reception 180–3 as revival 178–9 Saxe-Meiningen Company production influences 179

Junius, or the Household Gods 24, 90, 101 compared to Claudian 115 genesis of 108–9 Irving rejects 109 opening night of 110 plot 111 reception 110–115 staging 110 title of 109 Kean, Charles 26–7 antiquarianism 29–30, 43, 49–51, 55 patronage of Queen Victoria 27 praise of 30 reviews of 52, 54 and Sardanapalus 52, 143, 188 and The Winter’s Tale 94, 104 Kean, Edmund 27, 33, 43, 48 Keeley, Mary Anne (Mrs) 62 Kemble, Charles 28, 43 Kemble, John Philip 28, 32, 41–6, 48, 55, 163, 166, 179, 205–6 acting praised 43 Kendal, Madge Robertson (Mrs) 74, 85, 86–8, 91 compared to Mary Anderson 86–7 Kendal, William Hunter 74 King John 28, 40, 43, 169 King Lear 156 Kingsley, Charles 7–9, 170–1, 174 see also Hypatia Knowles, Sheridan 26, 32–4, 77, 120, 123, 125 Koldewey, Robert 19 Labouchere, Henry 63 Labour Party 3 Lady of Lyons, The 71, 77, 82, 89, 92 Lally, Gwen 217 Landor, Walter Savage 38 Langtry, Lillie 66, 67, 87, 88, 207–9 critics’ view of 92–6 debut 92 as fashion icon 90–1 as Galatea 90, 92–4 influenced by Mary Anderson 92 as model 91

260

Index

Langtry, Lillie – continued personal life 92 quality of acting 92–4 in The Winter’s Tale 94–8 language see dialect Last Days of Pompeii, The 8, 10–11, 14, 61–3, 65, 104 authorized adaptation of 63 popularity 63 Latin see education Layard, Austen Henry 19, 50, 53–4, 143 Leeds 103, 122–3, 126–8 legal system 4 Criminal Law Amendment Bill 121 Leighton, Frederic Lord 15, 67, 88, 90–2, 155 Lewes, George Henry 52 Liberal Party 3, 5 Lights o’ London, The 101, 150 literature see novels Liverpool 16, 53, 128, 171 Livy 32 Lloyd George, David 3, 4 Long, Edwin 19, 143 Love 77 Lovell, Maria 78 Lucas, Charles 7 Lucretius 7 Lyceum 29, 87–9, 94, 101, 147, 152, 160, 165–7, 205 and aestheticism 155 criticism of 137 Mary Anderson at 94, 96 as top London theatre 101, 135–6, 152, 207 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 7, 31, 32 Macbeth 40 Lady Macbeth 71, 77 lead character 136, 163, 205 Macintosh, Fiona viii–ix, 36, 39 Macready, William Charles and antiquarianism 29–30, 33 and Antony and Cleopatra 205–6 and Athenian Captive, The 40–1

and Caius Gracchus 34–6 and Coriolanus 43–6, 48 and Cymbeline 158–9 dominates early Victorian stage 26–7, 68 and Faucit, Helen 68 and Ion 38–9 and Julius Caesar 48–9, 179 radicalism 32, 38 reviews of 33 revivals of 158 and Sardanapalus 50 Shakespeare, relationship with 26, 46 and Virginius 32–4, 36, 124 and The Winter’s Tale 55, 68 Man Who Was, The 152 Manchester 52, 76, 92 Manxman, The 101, 137 Margetson, William Henry 72 Marshall, Charles 44, 48, 63, 158 Marshall, Gail 66–7, 73, 75 Martin, John 11, 13, 18, 21, 50, 51, 58, 188 Martin, Theodore 70 Massé, Victor 72–3 Mathews, Charles 60 Mayer, David viii, xi, 155, 225 McLeay, Franklyn 122, 136, 139–41, 182–3 McQuoid, Percy 201–4, 210–11, 213, 215, 220 Medea ix, 1, 39 medievalism 2, 5 see also chivalry Mendelssohn, Felix 70 Merchant of Venice, The 40 Meredith, George 66 Miles, Frank 90, 91 Millais, John Everett 20, 90, 91, 92 Miller, George 14 Mills, Elliot 10 Milton, John 183, 186 Mirra ix Mitford, Mary Russell 38 modernism 168 see also Shaw, George Bernard Mommsen, Theodore 230–1 monarchy see Victorian period

Index 261 Moore, Albert 15, 66, 126 morality see Victorian period Morley, Henry 49, 54, 157 Morning Chronicle 46, 62 Morning Herald 33–4, 61–2 Morning Post 40, 61–2, 69, 162, 193–4, 219, 232, 235 Morris, William 73, 182 Much Ado About Nothing 40 music 29, 53, 55, 57–8, 70, 104, 109, 122, 126, 129–30, 141, 153, 169, 177–8, 185, 195, 201, 207, 215, 219 Mycenae 12–13, 192, 194 mysticism 22, 100, 105, 177 National Gallery 71 national identity 1, 3 National Secular Society 133–4 Neilson, Julia 173–5, 178 Néo-Grecs 14, 113 Neoplatonism 170, 171, 173 Nero 1, 24, 197–204 costumes 204 music 201 plot 197–8 production 201–3 reception 198–205 Newcastle 47, 128, 167, 231 Newman, John Henry 9, 171 newspapers 3 Nimrud 19, 51, 53 Nineveh 14–19, 50–1, 53–4, 143 Nineveh and its Remains 19, 50, 54, 143 Nitocris 24, 57, 59–60 Normand, Edward 72, 143 Norwich 217 Nottingham 128 novels ancient world in viii, 7–9, 10–12 plays made into 131, 134 relationship with theatre viii nudity 66, 73, 172 O’Connor, Elizabeth 132 O’Connor, John 74 Observer 35, 47

occult 2, 17 Odysseus 12, 190–1 Ogilvie, Stuart 172–4, 176 Olivier, Laurence 48 Olympic Revels 67 opera 17, 23, 57, 72, 191 Orientalism 16, 20, 55–6, 177, 211, 215, 218–19 Othello 40 lead character 100, 163 Ovid 72–3 Oxenford, John 49, 63, 64 Oxford 166, 169 painting ancient world in viii, 1, 11–12, 13–16, 18, 20, 188 Bible in 20–2 of Homer 190–1 Hypatia inspires 171 of Nero 197 relationship with theatre viii, ix, 21–2 and Shakespeare 168 used to record archaeology 17 see also production Pall Mall Gazette 74, 84, 107, 120–1, 188, 194–5, 216 panoramas 14, 56, 143, 206 Paolo and Francesca 183, 201 Paris (France) 22, 51, 70, 120, 166, 207 Paris (son of Priam) 12 parody ix Parry, Sir Hubert 177–8 Pascoe, Charles 26 Payne, John Howard 1, 43, 114 Payn, James 73 Pearson, Hesketh 184, 210 ‘people like us’, ancients as, fascination with 6, 18, 34 performances, as unique events x Pericles, Prince of Tyre 40, 54 Pharaoh 24 costumes 122 plot 121–4 reception 122–3 set 122

262

Index

Phelps, Samuel and Antony and Cleopatra 205, 206 as chief actor on English stage 26, 47 and Coriolanus 43, 46–7, 162, 167 and Cymbeline 158–9 in Ion 39, 40 and Julius Caesar 179 and Pericles 54 and Shakespeare’s ‘difficult’ plays 40, 54 and Timon of Athens 49 in Virginius 33 Phidias 1, 67, 88 Philip, John Birnie 74 Phillips, Stephen 183–6, 191–4, 196–7, 199–201 see also Herod; Nero; Ulysses photography 22, 90, 91, 126 picturesque 17, 27–30 Planché, James Robinson 28, 43, 67, 77 Plato 6 Plutarch 30, 34, 47, 155, 230 see also Cato; Cup, The politics avoidance of in productions 41, 168 in Cato 31 and Greek tragedy 36–8 political system 3 see also democracy Pompeii 10 art inspired by 11–12 fiction inspired by 10–11 see also Last Days of Pompeii, The Poole, Adrian x Poole, Paul Falconer 12 Post Office 4 Poynter, Edward John 19, 67, 90–1, 143, 172, 188 Praxiteles 1, 91 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 20 Prince of Wales’s Theatre 29 Princess’s Theatre 27, 29, 49, 52, 54–5, 105, 108–9, 112, 117–118, 121

production ix of Ben-Hur 223–4 colour schemes ix costs of 49, 52, 57, 60, 108, 110, 205, 207, 231 of Cymbeline 28, 156–7, 161–2 of Daughters of Babylon, The 143 of False Gods 214–16 Gesamtkunstwerk 170, 193 in Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s Julius Caesar 179–83 of Herod 185–6, 188–9 historical accuracy, obsession with 28–30, 45, 55, 60, 65, 74, 82, 104, 112–13, 155, 157, 186, 192, 213–14, 219 of Hypatia 185–6, 188–9 of Joseph and his Brethren 219–20 of Julius Caesar, Tree’s production of 179–81 of Nero 201–3 of Ulysses 24, 183, 191–7, 228 see also scene painting prostitution 121 provincial productions ix, x, 53, 76, 127 see also names of individual towns; touring productions psychology 41, 168, 184, 194 Pugin, Augustus Welby Northmore 29 Punch 113, 120, 121 Pusey, Edward Bouverie 170 Pygmalion 66–7, 72 see also sculpture Pygmalion and Galatea 24, 72–3, 82, 89, 92, 94, 108 Quo Vadis? (novel) 8, 144–50, 197 Quo Vadis (play) viii–ix, 24, 90, 144–50, 197, 218, 228 Barrett’s version of 147–9, 150 legal action over 146 Stanislaus Stange’s adaptation of 144–6 race 8, 57, 202, 225 railways x, 3, 4 Rawlinson, George 143

Index 263 Rawlinson, Henry Creswick 19 reception ix Reform Act (1832) 2, 36 religion viii, 3 in Ancient Rome 8–9, 31, 41, 65, 106–7, 125, 197, 234–5 and democracy 9, 24 Evangelical Protestantism 4–5, 20, 125, 152, 171 missions 4 as moral force 4, 101–3, 106–7, 170 National Secular Society 133–4 and resistance to tyranny 2, 8–9, 31, 126–7, 134 see also Anglican Church; Roman Catholics Restoration 36 reviews ix see also names of individual plays Richard II 30 Richard III 40, 136 lead character 136, 163 Richardson, Joanna 21–2 Rignold, George 64, 159 Ripley, John 41–2, 47–9, 167, 179 Ristori, Adelaide ix Riviere, Briton 190 Roberts, David 14, 18, 28, 56 Robertson, Graham 91, 156 Robertson, Tom 29, 92 Rogers, Randolph 12 Roman Catholics 3, 8–9, 89 and biblical art 20, 22 emancipation 36 Roman Empire 225 British Empire modelled on 2, 6–9, 24, 152–3 drama on favoured in later nineteenth century 24, 30, 107 end of, lessons learned from 6–10, 24, 107, 180 preferable to Roman republic 230 and Roman remains in Britain 7 tyranny of 33 see also religion

Roman republic 181, 230 corruption in 230 democracy in 38, 41, 44, 230 drama set in 30, 45–6, 109 Shakespeare’s plays set in 40–1 United States modelled on 1–2 see also religion Romanticism 2, 27 and actor-managers 27 and Egyptology 17 German 70 and Greek drama 36, 72–3 Romeo and Juliet 40, 76, 78, 94, 166, 211 Juliet 71, 76–8, 231 Romeo 136, 163 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 72 Royal Academy 20, 143, 171–2, 177 Ruskin, John aesthetic theories viii and chivalry 5 and gender 66, 68, 72–3, 172 on Hypatia 170 influence on Victorian theatre viii Modern Painters 20 on nudity 172 on painting 143 Of Queens’ Gardens 24 as Scot 3–4 on sculpture 76 The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century 101 as theatregoer 75 and Wilson Barrett 101, 102, 107–8, 115, 125, 150 Ryder, John 63–4, 159 Sadler’s Wells 26, 33, 39, 46, 49, 55, 158, 162 Saint-Saëns, Camille 215 Salome 1, 185, 187 Salome (play) 23 Sardanapalus 19, 24, 50–4, 143, 188 Saxe-Meiningen Company 48–9, 179 scene painting 96 by Alma-Tadema 156, 161, 164–5 and archaeology 49–50, 55, 65, 74, 104, 109, 112–13, 155–7, 192, 213–14, 219

264

Index

scene painting – continued in early toga plays 44, 48, 49, 53, 63 in Wilson Barrett’s toga plays 104, 106, 112–13, 116, 119, 122, 126, 134, 139, 141–2, 148–9 in Henry Irving’s toga plays 155, 158–9, 161, 165–6 in Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s toga plays 175–6, 181, 192, 206, 209 in late toga plays 224, 228, 229, 232 see also Beverley, William; Craven, Hawes; Fenton, Frederick; Hann, Walter; Harker, Joseph; Marshall, Charles; production; Telbin, William; Tomkins, Charles Scharf, Georg 55 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich 70 Schliemann, Heinrich 12–13 Schmalz, Gustav 72 Schoch, Richard 22, 29 schools see education Scotland 3–5 Scott, Clement ix–x criticism praised x and gender 24 poetry of 137 Scott, Walter and medievalism 5 popularity of 4, 27 sculpture 1, 12, 169 drapery in 76 inspired actors 66–70, 94 of Mary Anderson 89 sculptors, Greek, as Victorian heroes 67 Venus de’ Medici 66–7 Venus de Milo 66, 68, 70 in The Winter’s Tale 70 see also gender sets see production; scene painting; spectacle Severn, Joseph 12 sexuality on stage 23, 125, 149, 155

Shakespeare x debate over style of staging 152–3, 169–70 ‘difficult’ plays 40, 54 and education 154 and gender 24 heroines 77 historical reproduction of 29 Macready’s productions of 26, 43–6, 48–9, 55, 68, 158–9, 179, 205–6 plays set in Roman republic 40–1 popularity of 4, 16–17, 40, 45, 152, 169 at Princess’s Theatre 27 ‘Rape of Lucrece, The’ 111 at Sadler’s Wells 26 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon 166 Shakespeare Tercentenary Gala 166 and Wagner 170 see also names of individual plays Shaw, George Bernard 229–35 Sheffield 52, 128 shipping, growth in x Sienkiewicz, Henryk 8, 144, 197 Sign of the Cross, The 15, 24, 90 Barrett plans 125 and Ben-Hur 225–6 as cultural phenomenon 125, 149 imitations of 149–50 legacy of 132–4 National Secular Society attacks 133–4 novel made of 131 opening night of 126 parodies of 234 plot 126–7 reception 127–34 as Ruskinian theatre 125 success of 100 touring with 128 Silver King, The 101 slavery 5, 36, 121, 180 in Ancient Rome 7 Smiles, Samuel 4 Society of Antiquaries 27

Index 265 Socrates 6 Solomon, Simeon 15 Sophocles ix, 39, 183 South Africa 9, 101, 144 Spartacus 2 spectacle end of 167, 221, 229, 231 excess of 52, 64 in Shakespeare 52 Victorian fashion for 1, 23, 26–7, 49, 54, 60–1, 123, 152–3, 201 Spectator 44, 58, 61, 78, 183 Spence, Thomas 190 Spielmann, Marion Henry 101, 107 sport 3, 5 Stanfield, Clarkson 28, 50 Star 186, 194, 203 Stoker, Bram 88, 157, 162 Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, The 101 Stange, Stanislaus 144 Sullivan, Barry 59, 60 Sumerian culture 19–20 Taber, Robert 144, 146, 224, 227–8 Talfourd, Thomas Noon 36–7, 36–7, 39–40, 77 Tarquin and Lucretia 90, 108 taste, theatre influenced x, 229 Tate, Nahum 41 Taylor, Samuel Coleridge 185, 187, 195, 201 Telbin, William 104, 116, 134, 155, 192 praise of 53, 96, 106, 112–13, 119, 139, 141–2, 148–9 Tennyson, Alfred 170, 183, 201 The Cup ix, 90, 155–7, 188 The Princess 24 Terry, Ellen 93, 155, 157, 160, 162–3, 165, 167, 179, 189 Terry, Marion 75 Theatre (magazine) 82, 83, 86, 92, 106, 114, 115, 119, 130, 131, 140, 166, 172–4 Thebes 16, 122–3 Thomas, Ambroise 73 Thompson, Alex 100

time, standardization of 3, 4 Times, The 49, 52, 54–5, 57, 60, 62–3, 72, 74, 78, 80–1, 85–6, 95–6, 104, 106, 109–12, 115, 117, 124, 128, 139–42, 145, 150, 161, 174, 192–3, 195, 200, 205, 210–11, 215, 226–7, 232, 235 Timon of Athens 40, 49 Tiryns 12–13 Tissot, James 21–2, 218–9 Titus Andronicus 40, 166 toga plays beginnings of 155 end of 229 first cycle, end of 65 John Ruskin and viii literature on viii see also names of individual plays Tom Brown’s Schooldays 5 Tomkins, Charles 44, 48 Towse, John Ranken 100 trade unions 4 Trajan’s column 15 transport 4 see also railways; shipping Tree, Ellen 39, 68, 197, 204–5 Tree, Herbert Beerbohm 23, 49, 173, 198, 206, 222, 228 acting 182, 189, 204, 220 approach to producing Shakespeare 153 and censorship 217–18 death 221 first toga play 170 friendship with Alma-Tadema 175–7 and Henry Irving 152, 169 and Hubert Parry 178 indecisiveness 178 influence 152 popularity of 169 as product of imperialism 152 as purists’ writer-director 169 repertoire 152 see also Antony and Cleopatra; Herod; Hypatia; Joseph and his Brethren; Julius Caesar, Tree’s production of; Nero; scene painting; Ulysses

266

Index

Troilus and Cressida 40, 166 Trollope, Anthony 6 Troy 191 archaeological finds at 12–13 Turner, Godfrey 30 Turner, James Mallord William 14, 18 Ulysses 24, 183, 191–7, 228 cast 191 costumes 192–3, 195 music 195 plot 191–2 premiere 191 problems with 195–6 production 192–3 reception 193–6 uniforms 4 see also costumes unique events, performances as x United Kingdom architecture influenced by Ancient Greece 7, 228 British Empire, modelled on Roman Empire 2, 6–9, 24, 152–3 diversity in 3 empire, size of 6 Roman remains in 7 unity of 4–5 Wilson Barrett tours in 121, 123 United States (US) viii–ix, 2 Ben-Hur transfers from 224 Civil War 222 independence 2, 30–1, 36 modelled on Ancient Rome 1–2 plays from 1 plays in 33, 54, 76, 79, 92–3, 95–7, 217 reception of Roman Empire fiction in 9 see also Anderson, Mary Ur 19 urbanization 1, 2 Vandenhoff, Charlotte 70, 78, 79 Vandenhoff, George 78, 158 Vandenhoff, John 58, 70 Vanity Fair 182, 212 Venus de Calipaedia 67

Venus de’ Medici 66–7 Venus de Milo 66, 68, 70 Vestris, Lucia Elizabeth 29, 67–8 Victorian period ancients as ‘people like us’, fascination with 6, 18, 34 dates of 3, 167, 180 monarchy central to 3–4 as moral age 3–5, 78, 89, 101–3, 152 Virgil 7, 12 Virginius 32–4, 36, 150, 172 in America 33, 123 plot 32 popularity 32, 34 revivals of 120, 123–5 touring production of 33 Wagner, Alexander Von 224 Wagner, Richard 170, 193 Wales 3, 5 Walkley, Arthur Bingham 208, 211 Wallace, Lew 8, 222–7 as playwright 223 see also Ben-Hur Wallis, Ellen 206–207 Walters, Lucy 107 Warde-Fowler, William 230 Ward, Genevieve 167 Washington, George 1, 31 Waterhouse, John William 15, 171, 185, 190, 197 Watts, George Frederick 66–7, 72, 88, 90, 143 Westminster Gazette 194, 205 Whigs 3, 31, 36, 41 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill 90, 92 Wilde, Oscar 9, 23, 91–2, 105, 174, 180, 199–200 Wilkinson, Gardner 17, 219, 231 Willard, Edward Smith 104, 108, 111, 114, 116, 136 Wills, William Gorman 90, 101, 104, 105, 107, 201 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 66 Winter’s Tale, The 40, 52, 64, 68–9, 94–8, 104

Index 267 Winter, William 76–7, 94, 96, 160 Wiseman, Nicholas, Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster 9, 149, 171 Wood, Christopher 15 Woolley, Leonard 19

Woolner, Thomas 73 Wordsworth, William 38 World, The 106, 129, 138, 176, 186, 189 Young, William 223