The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage

Transcription

1 The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage

2 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)

3 The Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian Stage Jeffrey Richards

4 Jeffrey Richards 2009 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 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 First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , 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 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 ISBN (ebook) DOI / 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

5 For Anselm Heinrich Kate Newey Peter Yeandle

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7 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 Tree s Ancient World The Toga Play: Climax and Decline 222 Notes 236 Index 252 vii

8 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

9 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 Alma- Tadema 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

10 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.

11 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