Back from Dublin

Yesterday, I got back from Dublin, where I was attending the International Shaw Society's conference on Bernard Shaw's Ireland.

Wednesday morning, I woke up before 5:00 am, jet-lagged, so I walked around a bit before the conference started. That's when I went by the Smock Alley Theatre, the latest in a number of theatres that have been on that street since the 17th century.

The first Theatre Royal on Smock Alley was established by John Ogilby in 1662, not long after the Restoration brought a return of legal drama to Britain and Ireland. The original building was demolished and replaced in 1735.

That second theatre came to be managed by Thomas Sheridan, whose son Richard Brinsley Sheridan later became famous for penning such plays as The School for Scandal. Though the theatre featured such stars as Peg Woffington and Charles Macklin, it eventually closed in 1787.

The building was partially demolished, but some of it got incorporated into a new church beginning in 1811. That church building provides a home for the new Smock Alley Theatre, which opened in 2012. Though quite a long time has passed since the old theatre closed, the new company tries to pay homage to the site's heritage.

Bernard Shaw wasn't born until 1856, so he never attended performances on Smock Alley. Neither did his contemporary, Oscar Wilde, though objects related to both men were on display at the Museum of Literature Ireland, which provided the venue for the conference. It's worth a visit!

Edmund Kean's Shylock

On this day in 1814, Edmund Kean appeared as Shylock on the stage of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

It would launch Kean's career, but it was not the first time he had appeared on a London stage. Writing 72 years later in the October issue of The Theatre, Percy Fitzgerald recalled Kean's "most extraordinary career." According to Fitzgerald, Kean "had been literally reared on the stage" and had "performed the young Arthur to Mrs. Siddon's Constance" in William Shakespeare's King John.

Childhood appearances with Sarah Siddons were not the actor's only experience in London prior to his Drury Lane triumph. Fitzgerald recounts an appearance at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket on 30 July 1806, when Kean appeared as "Clown" in the farce Fortune's Frolic. Playing the role of Dolly in that production was "Mrs. Gibbs" whom I take to be Maria Gibbs, née Logan, who made her London debut at the Haymarket in 1783.

After his appearance as "Clown" Kean returned to touring the provinces, and it was in Dorchester that he was rediscovered. Robert William Elliston invited him back to London to act in one of the "minor theatres." Fitzgerald writes that a certain "Dr. Drury" recommended Drury Lane hire Kean instead, and one "Mr. Arnold" came out to see the actor for himself. On 14 November 1813, Kean acted in The Mountaineers with "few people in the pit and gallery and three persons in the boxes." In spite of the small house, Kean determined to play his best, and his efforts were rewarded. He was given the opportunity to appear at Drury Lane, a pleasure mixed with sorrow, as his son Howard was very ill at the time.

Soon after Kean received news he would have a London engagement, Howard died. "His grief was such that he did not care for the brilliant opening," Fitzgerald writes. Kean had to stay longer in Dorchester than he anticipated in order to attend to the business of his son's death. When he arrived in London, he appeared "defiant, suspicious, jealously independent, very poor, almost to squalor" and the committee at Drury Lane saw him as a "listless, shabby postulant." They apparently rebuked Arnold and tried to use Kean's bargain with Elliston as an excuse to void their own agreement with him. Kean engaged in "desperate exertion" to free himself from his engagement to perform at a minor theatre, and according to Fitzgerald, "it was said Elliston was rather glad to be free."

After a "single rehearsal, it was pronounced that it would be a certain failure," Fitzgerald writes. The day of his performance was "wet and miserable" and Kean that night "arrived soaked through" at his shared dressing room. His fellow performers noticed something curious about the way Kean dressed himself for Shylock: "he was putting on a black wig instead of the traditional red one." In the eighteenth century, Shylock had generally been played as a clown. (After all, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice is in fact a comedy.) The actor Charles Macklin had pushed back against that tradition, but the red wig had remained. What was wrong with this guy? Didn't he even know which costume he was supposed to wear? The stage manager at the performance gave Kean up as "hopeless," Fitzgerald says.

The cast of The Merchant of Venice that night boasted some of the actors who had premiered S.T. Coleridge's drama Remorse the previous year. Alexander Rae, who had played Ordonio in Coleridge's tragedy, appeared as Bassanio, and Sarah Smith, who originated the role of Teresa in Remorse, came on in the choice role of Portia. Smith was once considered the most promising actress in Britain, but by 1814 she had turned out to be a disappointment. Thus, Kean had few fellow actors in the cast who could compete with his performance. After the first act, people began to realize that Kean's Shylock was "a great success." He went home afterward and reportedly said of his son Charles Kean, "Charley, my boy, you shall go to Eton!"

The younger Kean did in fact go to school at Eton, but later fell so far in life he had to resort to acting, just like his father. That, however, is another story.

Kitty Clive

I'm currently in London visiting my sister for the holidays, and today I went to The Foundling Museum, in part to see a small exhibit on the 18th-century actress Kitty Clive.

No, Clive was not a foundling, but the museum also houses a collection related to the composer George Frederick Handel, who was intimately involved with concerts raising money for the Foundling Hospital in London. Clive participated in these concerts, and in fact sang in the first London performance of The Messiah.

Clive was also a playwright, but of short dramatic sketches like Every Woman in Her Humour rather than full-length works. Her acting gained the respect of Horace Walpole, Henry Fielding, and other great writers. She played Portia opposite the Shylock of Charles Macklin, and later acted regularly with David Garrick.

Before she was discovered, Clive was lodging in a house across the street from where the Beefsteak Club, a collection of men involved with the theatre, used to meet. She was supposedly singing a song while washing the steps to the house, and the members of the Beefsteak Club, having their windows open, heard her and were immediately enchanted. In 1728, at the age of 17, she joined the company at Drury Lane, the most prestigious theatre in the country,

Clive did not always get along with management, however. Eventually, she had to defend herself and her right to make a livelihood in a pamphlet called The Case of Mrs. Clive Submitted to the Public. Some scholars have speculated that Fielding might have aided her with the prose, but the general consensus is that the force behind the pamphlet was Clive herself.

The Age of Garrick

Though the Licensing Act of 1737 kept politics off the stage in Britain for much of the eighteenth century, British theatre continued to make tremendous artistic strides, particularly in acting.

The provincial actor David Garrick moved to London the very year the Licensing Act was passed, and had the good fortune to be coached by Charles Macklin, an actor renowned for his performances as Shylock in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. At first, Garrick performed at a theatre of dubious legality known as Goodman's Fields, but in 1742 he made his debut at Drury Lane, one of the two patent theatres with a near monopoly on drama in London.  He soon began a long and productive artistic partnership with Peg Woffington, the leading actress with the Drury Lane company. Such was his success, that in 1747 Garrick took over the management of Drury Lane and instituted a number of reforms.

The most important of these reforms came in 1762, when Garrick banned spectators from the stage. Wealthy patrons had traditionally paid extra to sit on the stage itself and be seen as well as watch the actors. The practice was common before the English Civil War, and while it abated during the Restoration period when expensive new scenery was being introduced, theatres at the beginning of the 18th century placed benches onstage for the audience. Garrick abhorred the practice and eliminated the onstage benches. This allowed for greater realism, both in scenery and in acting. He also raised ticket prices to pay for the fancy new sets he was commissioning.

In 1771, Garrick hired the French-born artist Philippe de Loutherbourg to design sets at Drury Lane. De Loutherbourg also made numerous innovations in lighting, which made his sets even more impressive. His sets moved as well, so clouds could drift across the sky, and miniature ships could appear to sail through the water in the distance. Eventually, de Loutherbourg created a miniature stage he called the Eidophusikon, which controlled the lighting and scenery to an extreme degree, but had no room for actors. People paid money simply to watch the brilliant moving pictures, and the Eidophusikon attempted to compete with the theatre itself. Fortunately, the Eidophusikon never put Drury Lane out of business.

Garrick wasn't satisfied with the new plays being written, however, so he began writing his own. He collaborated with the playwright George Coleman the Elder (best known for his hilarious but misogynistic comedy The Jealous Wife) to write The Clandestine Marriage, which was based loosely on a series of satirical pictures by William Hogarth. Garrick's plays might not have been terribly original, but they were entertaining and remained popular well after his retirement. In 1769, Garrick held a massive celebration of William Shakespeare in the Bard's hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon. Though it was a little late for the bicentennial of Shakespeare's birth five years earlier, Garrick spared no expense in arranging a Jubilee celebration, which featured a pageant of Shakespeare's most popular characters. Unfortunately, heavy rains flooded a special tent for the occasion, and all Stratford was covered with mud. Not to be put out, Garrick wrote a play about the event, called it The Jubilee, and performed it at Drury Lane along with the procession of characters.

Garrick's most important contribution, however, came in raising the standards of acting in the eighteenth century, not just in England, but on the European continent as well. The French philosopher Denis Diderot after seeing Garrick wrote a famous essay called "The Paradox of the Actor" in which he tried to determine what made a great actor's performances so engaging. According to Diderot, great actors like Garrick display the illusion of feeling without feeling strong emotions themselves. The paradox is that the more emotional an actor becomes, the less able he is to convey emotions consistently on stage, while the more rational he is, the better he is to show different emotions night after night. Intelligence was what a great performer needed, not feeling.

Though Drury Lane dominated London's theatre scene under Garrick, the rival theatre at Covent Garden scored a palpable hit in 1773 with a play by Oliver Goldsmith called She Stoops to Conquer. Goldsmith loathed the sentimental comedies that had become popular in the eighteenth century and considered his play a "laughing comedy" since the crazy antics of the characters provoked outright guffaws rather than the knowing smiles of earlier works.

Though not as bawdy as Restoration comedy, She Stoops to Conquer captures much of the energy of earlier comic works, and it helped to pave the way for another playwright, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. In 1775, Covent Garden produced Sheridan's play The Rivals, about a man who creates an alter-ego for himself to be his own rival for the love of the woman he wants to marry. The play features a duel, which had special interest for the audience, since Sheridan himself had fought two widely publicized duels over the honor of his fiancée and later wife, the singer Elizabeth Ann Linley.

In 1776, Garrick retired from the stage, and the newly successful Sheridan bought his stake in Drury Lane. He soon took over the theatre, and tailored his next play, The School for Scandal, to perfectly suit the strengths of the actors in the Drury Lane company. The play was a massive hit, and Sheridan later used his fame to launch a successful bid for parliament. From 1780 onward, he enjoyed a dual career as both a theatre manager and a politician. The mild-mannered Age of Garrick was over, and increasingly the theatre was becoming politically charged.

Macklin's Shylock

The Irish actor Charles Macklin performed at Drury Lane in the eighteenth century and (together with Charles Fleetwood) rose to eventually assume joint control of the theatre. Macklin excelled in a number of roles, but he was most famous for playing Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.

For decades at least, Shylock had always been played as a comic character. George Granville, who adapted the play as The Jew of Venice in 1701, chose the comedian Thomas Doggett to perform the role, and ever since then, the actor who played Shylock was frequently the troupe’s funniest clown.

All that changed when Macklin took to the stage as Shylock on Valentine’s Day, 1741. What made Macklin different was not just his acting, but who he was. Everyone knew that Charles Macklin was more than just a clown. He was someone who very well might take out a knife and demand a pound of flesh in earnest. You see, Charles Macklin was a murderer.

As Emily Hodgson Anderson relates in her article “Celebrity Shylock,” Macklin had famously quarreled with a fellow actor, Thomas Hallam, in 1735. Apparently, Hallam had borrowed Macklin’s favorite wig without asking, and wore it onstage in a new farce called Trick for Trick. When he found out, Macklin reportedly yelled, “Goddamn you for a blackguard, scrub, rascal!” He then thrust his cane into Hallam’s face. The cane went right into the actor’s left eye and even penetrated the brain. Poor Hallam died the next day.

Macklin was charged with murder. Conducting his own defense, he argued that the whole thing had been an accident. He pointed out that he had even arranged for a physician for Hallam after the fatal blow. Ultimately, he was convicted of manslaughter, being sentenced to pay a fine and have his hand branded with the letter “M” for murderer.

Though Macklin had been known for his comic roles in the past, his killing of Hallam left a darkened view of himself in the minds of audience members. When he first came out onstage as Shylock, the crowd might not have been sure what to expect. What they got was a Shylock who was purely terrifying. And they loved it.

Macklin still played Shylock as a villain, but as a villain in earnest, rather than some comedic blocking character. It was not until Edmund Kean took to the role in 1814 that British actors began playing Shylock as truly sympathetic. But that is another story.