Margaret Somerville Bunn

The actress Margaret Somerville made her debut at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane playing the female lead in Charles Robert Maturin's play Bertram opposite none other than Edmund Kean.

At the time, she was only 16 years old, at least if we can rely on The Biography of the British Stage, published by Sherwood, Jones, & Co. in 1824. That source gives Somerville's birth as being in Lanark, Scotland, on October 26, 1799.

Young Margaret, at the age of 10, began performing in private theatricals, taking on the role of Marcia in Joseph Addison's Cato in a performance of juveniles. Apparently, she grew into an impressive actress, and in 1815 Douglas Kinnaird, a member of the sub-committee running Drury Lane, managed to get her into rehearsal at the theatre in the starring role of Belvidera in Thomas Otway's Venice Preserved.

Alas, poor Margaret Somerville was dismissed from those rehearsals, being informed she was simply not up to the role. Undeterred, she appealed to John Kemble, then manager of the rival patent theatre at Covent Garden, but he declined to help her. She then returned to Kinnaird and performed some passages from Venice Preserved in an attempt to win a second chance. It so happened that Lord Byron, who was also on the sub-committee, was present, and he and Kinnaird both agreed that the young woman should make her debut immediately.

Bertram opened on May 9, 1816, with Somerville in the role of Imogine. The show was a success, and the actress was offered a three-year contract on "very advantageous terms" according to The Biography of the British Stage. In 1817, she obtained permission to perform in Bath for a engagement of ten weeks, lasting into the new year. It was there that she played the role of Bianca in H.H. Milman's tragedy Fazio. In 1818, she left Drury Lane and defected to Covent Garden, where she played Bianca again. That role had already been made famous in London by Eliza O'Neill, who subsequently appeared with Somerville in Jane Shore by Nicholas Rowe.

Somerville was frustrated with a lack of choice parts for her in London, though, and she left Covent Garden to tour the provinces. It was while performing in Birmingham that she met Alfred Bunn, whom she married in 1819. Bunn became part of the inner circle of Robert William Elliston who then took over Drury Lane, allowing Margaret, now Mrs. Bunn, to appear in London as Bianca again, as well as Hermione in William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and Cornelia in Sheridan Knowles's Caius Gracchus.

Perhaps Margaret Bunn's most famous role, however, was Queen Elizabeth in an adaptation of the Walter Scott novel Kenilworth. According to The Biography of the British Stage, she was applauded "to the very echo" in the role.

According to a local newspaper in south-central Minnesota, the Bunns' second daughter Helen immigrated to the United States, and Margaret, then widowed, joined her. She died in 1882 and is buried in Blue Earth, MN.

Samuel Phelps

The Victorian actor Samuel Phelps was described by his biographer Richard Lee as "the last typical classic actor of the English theatre." Lee knew Phelps, and shortly before the great actor died, he had agreed to perform in a comedy Lee had written called Cent per Cent. Alas, he never performed that play, but he appeared in so many other great shows!

Born in 1806, Phelps was the son of a wine merchant. His family valued education, and his younger brother Robert eventually led Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge, and at one point even served as Vice-Chancellor of the university there.

Arriving in London as a young man, Phelps took a job in a printing office, where his foreman was Douglas Jerrold, who had not yet risen to fame writing such plays as Black-Eyed Susan and The Rent-Day. Phelps invited Jerrold to watch him act in an amateur production of The Castle Spectre by Matthew G. Lewis. According to Phelps, after the performance "Jerrold told me that by dent of hard study, luck, and patience I might in time act well enough to get thirty shillings a week."

Well, Phelps later made far more than that! His professional debut occurred in 1827 at the Queen's Theatre off of Tottenham Court Road, which later came to be know as the Prince of Wales's Royal Theatre. Phelps, then 21 years old, appeared as Captain Galliard in the farce XYZ. He then joined a company performing in the northern circuit, and according to Lee, Phelps "rapidly became a recognized stage favorite throughout the North of England, in Scotland, and, across St. George's Channel, at Belfast and Londonderry."

Ten years later, in 1837, Phelps made his debut at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden in Thomas Otway's tragedy Venice Preserved. Phelps played Jaffier opposite the Pierre of William Charles Macready, an actor who would be both his colleague and his rival for many years to come. Phelps accompanied Macready when the star actor took over the management of the rival Theatre Royal at Drury Lane. It was there that Macready staged Robert Browning's tragedy A Blot in the 'Scutcheon with Phelps as the lead, and then abruptly cancelled it.

"Though its success was undoubted," Lee writes, the play "for reasons never publicly stated, disappeared from the bills after the third representation." Macready was jealous of Phelps's success, but he also had bigger things to worry about as manager of Drury Lane. In 1843, the theatre's owners declined to give him a decrease in rent, and Macready responded by petitioning parliament to end the monopoly the two patent theatres had on performing spoken-word drama. The result was the Theatres Act, which paved the way for the so-called minor theatres like Sadler's Wells to perform more serious fare than melodrama and burletta.

Phelps, together with Thomas L. Greenwood and the actress Mary Warner, took over the management of Sadler's Wells. At first, they planned to stage melodramas, as the house always had, and they even determined to get a fresh one written by Zachary Barnett to inaugurate their new management. When Barnett's melodrama was not forthcoming, however, and with the opening date of Sadler's Wells already advertised, the experienced, classical actors decided to begin with what they knew best. Instead of using a melodrama, they opened with Macbeth. Phelps and Warner played the two leads, and according to Lee, who was there that night, the audience "was hushed by its attention to the action of the tragedy to such perfect stillness as quickened the sense to hear the faintest whisper from the stage."

The trio of managers quickly abandoned their plans to produce melodramas. The Theatres Act now allowed Sadler's Wells to produce any type of show it liked without having to split legal hairs over exactly how many songs were needed to qualify a piece as melodrama or burletta. For a while, they did try to produce new works, but after three new plays in a row failed, and a fourth was not likely to be ready for production, they went back to the classics.

Phelps was particularly known for his stagings of works by William Shakespeare. Of the plays accepted to be in the Shakespeare canon at the time, Phelps staged all of them at Sadler's Wells except the Henry VI trilogy, Troilus and Cressida, and Richard II. Was he the last typical classic actor of the English theatre? I don't know, but he was probably one of the best.

Battle of the Juliets

In 1750, the patent theatres at Drury Lane and Covent Garden went head-to-head, producing rival productions of Romeo and Juliet in what came to be known as the Battle of the Romeos. According to Chelsea Phillips' article in the latest issue of Theatre Survey, however, perhaps the incident should be known as the Battle of the Juliets instead.

David Garrick had adapted Shakespeare's play for performances at Drury Lane with Spranger Barry playing Romeo and Susannah Cibber as Juliet. Cibber left the company in 1749, however, giving birth to her last child. When she returned to the stage the next year, it was not to Drury Lane, but to the rival company at Covent Garden, and joining her was none other than Barry.

What made Cibber switch houses? We can't be sure, but Phillips points out that in the spring of 1749 Cibber became ill, possibly as a result of her pregnancy or possibly due to a persistent stomach problem that plagued her until her death in 1766. The playwright Aaron Hill wanted Cibber to play the lead in his new play Merope, and she was a natural choice, since Cibber had launched her career as a tragic actress with Hill's previous play Zara in 1736. Cibber said she wanted the role, but didn't want to perform it until the following season. Garrick, however, scoffed at the idea of a delay, and Hannah Pritchard went on in the title role instead.

Cibber's move to Covent Garden led Garrick to poach another tragic actress from that theatre to join his own company at Drury Lane. George Ann Bellamy had been the leading tragic actress at Covent Garden. In 1749, Bellamy gained notoriety when she left in the middle of a performance to run off to Yorkshire with her lover, George Montgomery Metham. The reason for the flight north might have been Bellamy's own pregnancy, for after her child was born, she returned to Covent Garden, where she played many of the same roles Cibber was known for, including the heroines in Thomas Otway's tragedies Venice Preserved and The Orphan.

With Cibber now at Covent Garden, Bellamy was looking at the prospect of losing some of her choicest roles. She had also recently expanded her repertoire, taking on the role of Juliet at Covent Garden opposite Henry Lee. She had previously played the role in Dublin, but this was the first time the Covent Garden company had mounted Romeo and Juliet, and Bellamy had shined in the play. Now she was facing losing that role to Cibber, too. By July of 1750, both Cibber and Barry were contracted to appear at Covent Garden and Garrick had managed to snag Bellamy for Drury Lane. The two leading ladies had effectively swapped companies, and Cibber had taken her Romeo with her.

Garrick himself took on the role of Romeo opposite Bellamy's Juliet. Though he was considered too short to play such a romantic leading role, he was determined to go head-to-head against the new Romeo and Juliet at Covent Garden, which Garrick saw as for all intents and purposes his play. It was his adaptation of Shakespeare's text that they used, and he had personally coached both Cibber and Barry in their roles. Garrick made further revisions to the play, including adding an elaborate funeral procession for Juliet that became a staple well into the nineteenth century. Perhaps the most important addition to Drury Lane's new Romeo and Juliet, though, was Bellamy, who like Juliet had herself precipitously forsaken everything for her lover, as audiences well knew.

After twelve nights of both patent theatres producing rival productions of the same play, Cibber announced she was ill and would not be able to continue as Juliet. Most audiences had already concluded that Drury Lane had the better production, anyway. History has recorded the event as a victory for Garrick, but Phillips hints that the credit might belong more to Bellamy.

Notes on Restoration Drama

With the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642, dramatic production in Britain came to a virtual standstill. Drama was seen as royalist, and the members of parliament taking up arms against the king viewed it with deep suspicion. Not only that, but the parliamentary forces tended to belong the religious movement known as puritanism. Puritans wanted to "purify" the Church of England of any remnants of Catholicism, and their proposed moral reforms reached into all aspects of life. They hated the theatre not just for its association with royalty, but also for its alleged immorality.

An ordinance of parliament passed in 1642 suppressed all theatre in Britain not just due to the civil unrest, but to "avert the Wrath of God." Rather than attending plays, parliament suggested that people engage in "profitable and seasonable Considerations of Repentance, Reconciliation, and peace with God." A few plays were put on during this period, but the government tore down the Globe and other public playhouses. Companies of players were disbanded, and many acting traditions either went underground or simply disappeared. Shakespeare's old company, the King's Men, was no more, as soon the king would be, too.

In 1649, parliament charged King Charles I with treason and executed him outside the famed Banqueting House designed by Inigo Jones. A consummate actor, the king upheld his dignity on the way to the execution block. The crowd watched in silence as he was beheaded. Oliver Cromwell, a leader of the puritan faction in parliament, became known as Lord Protector of the Realm, but Britain had no king. With the king dead and the rulers of the country decidedly opposed to theatre, the drama, too, seemed to have died.

In defiance, though, a few brave groups staged private theatricals. The most famous of these was a play written by William Davenant called The Siege of Rhodes. The play utilized music and spectacle, and the producers even managed to get government permission to stage the piece as a musical performance rather than as a play. Elaborate sets and costumes proved this was a legal fiction, though. The Siege of Rhodes was clearly a play, and it was being performed right under the nose of authorities. Its success was a sign that things were about to change.

The Restoration

After Oliver Cromwell died, his son Richard became Lord Protector, but he lacked the confidence of the army. Within months, he was deposed, and Charles I's son living in exile in France made overtures of peace, offering to pardon those who had opposed the monarchy so long as they recognized him as king. Eventually, parliament invited the executed king's son to return. After years in France, he arrived back in London on his 30th birthday, May 29, 1660, and was proclaimed King Charles II. The monarchy had been restored, and soon the theatre would be as well.

Though Charles did not make good on his promises of pardon, and in fact executed those responsible for his father's death, he cultivated a much more agreeable public persona than the former king. While Charles I had seemed cold and aloof, Charles II paraded about with his pet dogs and his favorite mistresses, chatting light-heartedly with whomever he met. Some people were scandalized by the king's seemingly insatiable sexual appetite, but others were relieved that after years of civil war and puritanism, the world seemed to be getting back to normal. As part of that return to normalcy, Charles II decreed that the public theatres could be opened again. The golden age of English drama was gone, however, and when the theatres did reopen, they were quite different from what they had been before two decades of civil strife.

Within months of taking the throne, Charles II issued two royal patents granting a duopoly to a pair of companies with the exclusive right to perform plays in London. The two patent companies continued to dominate the British stage into the reign of Queen Victoria. The first patent was given to Thomas Killigrew, who had joined Charles II on the ship back from France. His troupe, known as the King's Company, set up shop in an indoor tennis court, a practice common to many French theatre companies of the time. The second patent went to Davenant, who had already made a name for himself with The Siege of Rhodes. Davenant found his own indoor tennis court in the neighborhood of Lincoln's Inn Fields. The open-air playhouses so popular with Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences were destined to become a thing of the past.

Indoor Jacobean theatres had utilized chandeliers to light the stage, but Restoration theatres also placed candles right on the edge of the stage as footlights to illuminate the action. The sophisticated stage machinery of France began to appear on the English stage, and lavish backdrops previously only been seen in masques became more common. To change the scenery, Restoration stages used a shutter-and-groove system in which two halves of the scenery slid through grooves in the floor of the stage and met in the middle. The two halves (or "shutters") could then be pulled apart again, revealing a new scene behind them. To help hide scenery not being used at the moment, the new theatres utilized a proscenium that created a frame around the stage. The proscenium had been used in Italy since the Renaissance, but British actors did not quite know what to make of this illusory staging technique. Instead of using the theatre architecture as a frame separating the audience from the action, the British put doors in the side of the proscenium and tended to act on the forestage near the audience, leaving the scenery far in the background.

The physical theatre was not the only thing to change during the Restoration. Charles II had gotten used to watching actresses in France, and though a few male actors continued to perform female roles, he let it be known that he preferred the real thing. Actresses such as Margaret Hughes and Mary Saunderson became stars, much to the amusement of the King. The actress who amused him the most, however, was Nell Gwyn. Gwyn got her start selling concessions at the theatre for Mary Megs, who was known as "Orange Moll" since oranges were one of the favorite snacks of Restoration audiences. She caught Killigrew's eye, and he gave her a chance to act on stage. Gwyn soon became one of the king's mistresses, baring two sons he acknowledged as his own.

In 1674, the King's Company moved to a new theatre on Drury Lane. Though that theatre was demolished in 1791 and its successor burned down in 1809, one theatre or another has occupied that spot since the seventeenth century, and today the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane still entertains theatre goers. The original Drury Lane theatre had an area in front of the stage known as the "pit" in which audience members who paid three shillings sat on benches to watch the show. Upper-class theatre goers could pay a couple shillings more to sit in lavish boxes, while those of lesser means could pay two shillings to sit in the elevated gallery. Above the gallery was an upper gallery available to poorer audience members for just a single shilling.

The audience for the Restoration stage was considerably smaller than that for the Globe and other outdoor theatres of Shakespeare's day. Also, the more expensive ticket prices meant the very poor were shut out entirely, and only the wealthy had the money and spare time to attend plays regularly. Consequentially, playwrights aimed at a more aristocratic audience, and aristocrats themselves began dabbling in writing plays for the stage. The styles, manners, and ethos of Charles and his court were reflected onstage at Drury Lane and at the rival playhouse in Lincoln's Inn Fields. The peculiar preferences of a select group had a profound impact not just on the theatre of the 1660s and 1670s, but on British plays for a long time to come.

Restoration Comedy

After the closure of the public theatres, acting companies needed short works that could be performed on small, clandestine stages without drawing the attention of authorities. They frequently turned to short sketches borrowed from popular plays of the past. These sketches, known as drolls, continued to be performed after the Restoration, and many were collected together in a book called The Wits, or Sport upon Sport, edited by Francis Kirkman. These influenced the early full-length comedies of the Restoration period, which emphasized witty dialogue and stock characters already familiar to the audience. As the stock characters developed, however, they began to reflect the tastes and prejudices of the court.

The typical Restoration comedy has as its hero a rake, a lascivious young man who--like the king at the time--was more interested in getting into the good graces of pretty women than in tending to his own business affairs. The rakish hero might be interested in one particular woman, or like the king he might be pursuing multiple women at the same time. In spite of his actions, he had a good heart. The audience could overlook his flaws because he was emotionally sympathetic. He respected those who deserved respect and disdained those who deserved disdain.

Chief among those who deserved his disdain was the fop. A fop was fashionable to a fault, caring so much about clothes, fads, and reputations as to become ridiculous. In Thomas Shadwell's 1668 play The Sullen Lovers, the protagonist is so beset with fops he longs to retire from the world and be free from those who foolishly pursue fashion and nothing else. Fortunately, he finds his soul-mate in a melancholy woman who hates such fools as much as he does. The archetypal fop is Sir Fopling Flutter, who appears in The Man of Mode, a 1676 comedy by George Etherege. So entertaining is Sir Fopling that he overshadows the rakish protagonist in the play.

If the hero's emotional sensibilities were to protect him from becoming a modish fop, his refinement was supposed to protect him from being a bumpkin, a character from the country with little idea about how the court and high society functioned. William Wycherley provided examples of rude country innocence in his comedy The Country Wife. One of the bawdiest plays to be performed during the Restoration, The Country Wife involves a naive young woman who is easily seduced in spite of the efforts of her appropriately named husband Mr. Pinchwife. One of Pinchwife's strategies to protect the innocence of his new bride is to dress her up as a man so no one will seduce her. The disguise, however, fools nobody, including the audience, which delighted in seeing actresses cross-dress in tightly fitted breeches and stockings, displaying their shapely legs.

The appearance of women on the Restoration stage was accompanied by women writing for the stage as well. While a number of women became playwrights during the reign of Charles II, the most famous was Aphra Behn. By producing plays, poems, novellas, and other writings, Behn was able to support herself financially with her writing, and is likely the first Englishwoman in history to do so. Her most famous play, The Rover, deals with English aristocrats living in exile in Italy during the period of puritan rule. The play was so popular she wrote a sequel to it (with the same name) several years later. Behn was on good terms with the actress and royal mistress Nell Gwyn and dedicated to Gwyn her 1679 comedy The Feigned Courtesans. Her last play, The Emperor of the Moon, was largely sung and showed Behn reaching out toward opera, which was a new form for her.

The Emperor of the Moon self-consciously uses theatricality, as do many of the plays of the period. Meta-theatricality probably reached its apex for the Restoration in 1671 with the staging of an anonymous play called The Rehearsal, probably written by George Villiers (who was the Duke of Buckingham) along with a group of his well-connected friends. Like Moliere's comedy The Rehearsal at Versailles, the play makes fun of the theatre of its time, but without the good humor employed by Moliere. The play was a biting criticism of Restoration drama, and many people joined the piece in rushing to critical judgment against any play they deemed inferior. After his comedy The Country Wife received multiple attacks, Wycherley employed a meta-theatrical device to defend his work. In The Plain Dealer, a comedy that appeared three years after The Country Wife, Wycherley has some particularly detestable characters attack the earlier play, showing his critics to be nothing but hypocritical snobs.

Though Charles II was not overly tolerant of his political enemies, he wanted the nation to be tolerant of own flaws and foibles as a leader, to view him as the rakish hero with a heart of gold. Excessive criticism, whether of a play or of a protagonist, could be seen as going against the lenient attitude advanced by the court. Truly bombastic plays and outrageous fops were fair game, but writers were not supposed to attack heroes who were genuine in their affections, even if they weren't always faithful in them. How then could a rakish hero be distinguished from both an insincere fop and an ignorant country bumpkin? The answer was that an audience had to see into their hearts, and conclude that like the king, the proper heroes had right sentiments and intentions. While the protagonists of Jacobean revenge tragedies employed devious stratagems to achieve their ends, the heroes of Restoration comedies simply had to employ the correct outlook on life, and fate would guarantee for them a happy ending.

Heroic Tragedy

While happy endings were not in store for the heroes of Restoration tragedies, sentiment likewise played a key element in these dramas as well. The tragedies of the period focused on protagonists with keen senses of honor, frequently having multiple duties which contradicted one another. John Dryden, though he is better known today for his comedy Marriage a la Mode, helped to set the standard for Restoration tragedy. While comedies of the period were written mostly in prose, Dryden wrote his two-part tragedy The Conquest of Granada not just in verse, but in a series of rhyming couplets. When couplets are written in iambic pentameter (as is the case with The Conquest of Granada) they are known as heroic couplets. Thus, serious Restoration dramas became known as heroic tragedies.

Of course, rhyming couplets can sound rather ridiculous in English, which has more word endings than other languages, making rhymes sound less natural than they do in Italian, Spanish, or French. What worked for Moliere's comedies sounded absurd in some of Dryden's tragedies. For instance, Dryden wrote in the second part of The Conquest of Granada:

  So two kind turtles, when a storm is nigh,
  Look up, and see it gath'ring in the sky;
  Each calls his mate to shelter in the groves,
  Leaving in murmurs, their unfinished loves;
  Perched on some drooping branch, they sit alone,
  And coo, and hearken to each other's moan.

The anonymous play The Rehearsal picked up on the unintentional comedy of passages like this, and made Dryden a laughingstock. The Dryden-like playwright in The Rehearsal recites:

  So boar and sow, when any storm is nigh,
  Snuff up, and smell it gath'ring in the sky;
  Boar beckons sow to trot in chestnut groves,
  And there consummate their unfinished loves.
  Pensive, in mud, they wallow all alone,
  And snore and gruntle to each other's moan.

After the success of The Rehearsal, heroic couplets became difficult to recite without causing snickering, so later tragedies tended to use different verse forms.

Dryden's more mature tragedy All For Love opted for unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse, instead of couplets. The play reworks Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra, changing the play from a wide-ranging adventure taking place all across the Mediterranean world to a neoclassical model of restraint written in five stately acts, all taking place on a single day in the same temple. Unfortunately for Dryden, it pales in comparison to Shakespeare's original. The tragedies of Thomas Otway proved to have much greater staying power. Otway wrote his first play Alcibiades in heroic couplets, but like Dryden he later switched to blank verse. Otway's The Orphan contains some lovely passages, but its central scene, with a man sneaking into bed with his brother's wife on the couple's wedding night, has proved too revolting for many audiences. Perhaps most surprisingly, The Orphan still seeks to hew close to the heroic ideals of Restoration tragedy by having the villainous brother express remorse and die with tragic dignity.

The one tragedy from the Restoration period to most successfully work its way into the standard repertoire was Otway's Venice Preserved. First staged in 1682, it featured Elizabeth Barry, the leading tragic actress of her day, as Belvidera, a Venetian noblewoman whose father has disinherited her. Belvidera's husband Jaffeir, fed up with the corrupt aristocratic Senate that rules Venice, decides to take part in the overthrow of the government. When he tells his wife, however, Belvidera talks him out of treason and convinces him to betray his conspirators to the Senate. Jaffeir is placed in an impossible position, having saved his honor by preserving Venice, but stained it by turning on his friends. The play ends in madness and death, providing great opportunities for its leading actors to show off their talents. Venice Preserved displays tragic figures who--like Charles II--appear to be well-intentioned even if their actions are sometimes questionable. Just as importantly, it argues forcefully against the overthrow of a government, no matter how debauched and decadent its leaders might be. After the bloody English Civil War, this message must have resonated with a number of people.

Drama After the Restoration Period

Charles II died in 1685, and his brother James succeeded him as King James II. However, James was a Roman Catholic, and the protestant ruling class had no intention of seeing Britain go back to its previous religion. The king proclaimed he wanted to extend freedom of religion to all, not just to Catholics and members of the state-sanctioned Anglican Church, but to protestants who did not conform to the official church. This included the puritans who had overthrown his father, Charles I. Rather than calming fears, the king's tolerant views on religion made many people uneasy.

After two unsuccessful rebellions against his rule, James II enlarged the country's army, stoking concerns that he might resort to the strong-handed rule of Charles I. The king's relationship with parliament was strained at best, but those who opposed him could take comfort in the fact that his heir was a protestant daughter, Mary, who was married to an even more staunchly protestant Dutch prince known as William of Orange. In 1688, however, when the king and his catholic wife had a son, protestants panicked. A group of nobles invited William of Orange to invade and claim the throne for himself. When William's forces landed, much of the king's army defected to the invaders' side. The king tried to flee. Dutch forces captured him but then released him so he could travel to France.

Parliament declared that by leaving the country and abandoning his responsibilities, James II had abdicated the throne. They declared William and Mary co-rulers and the political sea-change that happened without bloodshed came to be known as the Glorious Revolution. A wave of optimism swept over the country, and this was reflected in the theatre as well. Drama flourished, but in spite of the comparatively low-key couple that had taken over the throne, it was the rake-hero given birth under the reign of the flamboyant Charles II that still held the stage.

At the end of the seventeenth century, the playwright William Congreve took the elements of Restoration comedy and wove them together into plays that surpassed most of the work by playwrights who were active during the reign of Charles II. His 1695 play Love for Love presents a lovable rake-hero who has fallen into debt, in part due to his having an illegitimate child. The heiress Angelica sees he has a heart of gold, however, and marries him anyway. An even bigger hit with modern audiences is Congreve's masterpiece The Way of the World. The play's brilliant wit and charming characters delight theatre-goers to this day.

Yet The Way of the World was a flop when it was first produced in 1700. Two years earlier, the clergyman Jeremy Collier had published a pamphlet called A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage. Though certainly no puritan (he in fact still supported the exiled James II), Collier railed against what he saw as the excesses of the British theatre. He attacked the leading playwrights of the day, including John Vanbrugh, whose play The Relapse acted as a sequel to a previous play that had a happy ending. The Relapse shows a rake who had once given up his sinful ways then return to them once more. This was too much for Collier. Unlike the puritans, Collier did not attack the theatre itself, which he acknowledged was a useful tool for transmitting values. However, he found the present stage so deprived it was "but one Remove from worshipping the Devil."

At first playwrights fought back, with Vanbrugh and other dramatists publishing responses. Gradually, though, Collier's inappropriately titled 288-page Short View won over the public. After the failure of The Way of the World, plays tended to reign in their heroes. In the early eighteenth century George Farquhar gave the protagonists of plays like The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux' Stratagem rakish qualities but pulled back from making them truly sinful. Susanna Centlivre produced similarly cleaned-up comedies with The Busie Body, The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret, and her 1718 masterpiece A Bold Stroke for a Wife.

At the same time, tragic writers were coming up with new ways to portray heroics that met the standards of the new morality sweeping the country. The dramatist Nicholas Rowe focused on the good deeds of unfortunate women, creating a genre that he dubbed "she-tragedy" as if women hadn't been the protagonists of tragedies before his innovations. Rowe reworked an older play called The Fatal Dowry into a modern tragedy he titled The Fair Penitent. The play's villain, Lothario, has all of the characteristics of a rake, but remains unambiguously despicable. Rowe's best play, Jane Shore, imitates Shakespeare, but takes a minor character in Richard III who doesn't even have lines and literally gives her a voice. The next year, Rowe wrote Lady Jane Grey, another she-tragedy that did not do well with audiences but solidified the author's reputation for respectability and refinement.

In 1715, the same year he staged Lady Jane Grey, Rowe became Poet Laureate to the new King George I. No longer was it acceptable to have rake-heroes whose heart was in the right place. The public expected new standards of morality, and older dramas were either rewritten to comply with the times or dropped from the repertoire. Still, the emphasis on feeling and sentiment continued. Protagonists were expected to inherently intuit good from bad. What was different was that now they had to be purely good, or suffer consequences for any sins they might commit.

Almeyda, Queen of Granada

Sophia Lee's tragedy Almeyda, Queen of Granada ran for five nights at Drury Lane in 1796. That might not seem like a long time, but plenty of tragedies had shorter runs in the preceding decades, and the London stage hadn't seen a truly remarkable tragedy since Hannah More's Percy in 1777.

The success of Almeyda (such as it was) came largely from its leading lady, Sarah Siddons, who played the titular queen. Lee dedicated the printed version of the play to Siddons, and said she never would have written a second play (after her 1780 foray into comedy The Chapter of Accidents) if it hadn't been for the great actress.

"Not all the various charms you dignify the Drama with, can equal those of your sympathizing mind, and unassuming manners," Lee wrote in her dedication to Siddons. In a special advertisement to the reader, Lee went on to say that one "must have wanted taste and feeling, not to have been animated, by the exquisite talents of Mrs. Siddons" and that she was proud to have been "the means of displaying, in a new point of view, her various powers."

Though Lee created an original story for Almeyda, she acknowledged a debt to the Caroline playwright James Shirley. The play's prologue, written by Lee's sister Harriet, plays homage to other tragic writers as well, including William Shakespeare, Nicholas Rowe, and Thomas Otway. It urges the audience to cherish the "spark divine" of tragedy which had been all but extinguished in recent years:

                    Ah! gently fan the flame! lest fashion's breath
                    O'er the pale promise send the blast of death;
                    Nor let the wreath Thalia only wear,
                    Her sister muse deserves so well to share.

Thalia is the muse of comedy, and the comic works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, and John Gay continued to hold the stage even as tragedy had languished. However, according to Harriet Lee, tragedy "mends the morals while it fills the heart." Using strikingly gendered terms, the prologue urges the audience to not just enjoy making fun of folly and vice in comedy, but to "own the manly privilege to feel."

The title character in Almeyda is a Moorish princess who was raised in the court of Castile after the Spanish conquest of Granada. She converts to Christianity and falls in love with Alonzo, son of the King of Castile. However, at the start of the play, international politics call for Granada to be returned to the Moors, and for Almeyda to be installed as queen there. She remains devoted to Alonzo, but wonders if he will continue to love her, or if his patriotic duty to Castile will triumph:

                    Ah, no! For nature here makes distinction;
                    Forms man's large heart for many a various duty,
                    And blends his passions into a republic--
                    While woman, born for love and softness only,
                    Delights to feel love's absolute dominion!

This may sound sexist, and indeed it is, but perhaps not in the way it first appears. Remember, this was first performed in 1796, when the British monarchy was at war with Republican France. Patriotic audiences in London might well have cheered on the "absolute dominion" of woman while scorning the "republic" that represents the fickle heart of man.

Almeyda's uncle Abdallah seeks to control the throne of Granada by marrying her to his son, Orasmyn. Though Orasmyn is in love with his cousin Almeyda, he is too honorable to accept a forced marriage and hopes to truly win her heart. She, however, does not trust the policy of men. She recognizes that her honesty is not prudent, but she gains strength from the seeming foolishness of straight-forward sincerity:

                    --I would like you be guarded, prudent, selfish;
                    Preserve a silence might ensure my safety,
                    And rest upon the future.--But my soul
                    Disdains the mean, the temporising wisdom,
                    Nor knows to tremble in the cause of truth.

In Act III, we meet Alonzo, who was originally played by John Philip Kemble, the younger brother of Siddons. Like Almeyda, he is more passionate than judicious, and sneaks into the enemy palace at Granada in order to see his love. As he explains:

                    In vain would time, or distance, wrest her from me,
                    She, she alone, can shield me in the war,
                    Or nerve my arm at the fierce battle's onset.

Abdallah catches him though, and secure in the knowledge that no one knows Alonzo snuck into Grenada, imprisons him in a dungeon without fearing retribution from the Castilians. Orasmyn, out of both his own sense of honor and the love he has for Almeyda, rescues his rival Alonzo. Unfortunately, when Almeyda descends into the dungeon with her own rescue plan, she finds it empty and concludes that Alonzo has been cast into a gaping chasm. Her uncle appears, and she again uses honesty as her weapon against him, claiming:

                    I will have such revenge!--From thy black heart,
                    At once I'll pluck away its worldly veil,
                    And punish thee in mere sincerity.

In the final act, Abdallah realizes he will never get Almeyda to marry his son. He tries to get her to abdicate, and when that fails, he poisons her and then himself. As she is dying, Almeyda reconciles Alonzo and Orasmyn:

                    Orasmyn's gen'rous heart is virtue's temple!
                    Alonzo, dear Alonzo! honour--love him...
                    --And now, indeed, farewel!--A hand for each.
                    This gives away my crown; and this, oh! this,
                    The faithful heart that's in it!--I am cold;
                    And these dim eyes seek vainly for Alonzo!

Though Almeyda did not make its way into the permanent repertoire of Drury Lane, the performance of Siddons drew positive reviews. Lee's tragedy, even if it never became famous, added to the fame of Siddons by giving her acting a chance to shine.

The Orphan

Thomas Otway is perhaps most famous for his 1682 tragedy Venice Preserv'd, but he had already gained considerable fame two years earlier with a peculiar little play called The Orphan.

Like Venice Preserv'd, Otway's The Orphan depicts flawed yet noble characters vacillating back and forth between incredible heroics and despicable villainies. In the first act, we meet the two sons of Acasto, Castalio and Polydore. Both of them are in love with the titular orphan, Monimia. She is the daughter of their father's dead friend, and Acasto has welcomed her into his household and continued to raise her as his own. So, yes, it's creepy and quasi-incestuous.

Castalio and Polydore were just out hunting (where both were performing feats of bravery) when they disclose their loves to one another. Castalio, the elder, loved Monimia first, and he claims her as his right. (Umm... I'm not sure that's how love works.) Polydore objects to his brother's love. Surely Castalio would not marry the love of his own dear brother? At the mention of marriage, Castalio changes his tune:

                                                                                Wed her!
                    No! were she all desire could wish, as fair 
                    As would the vainest of her Sex be thought,
                    With Wealth beyond what Woman pride could waste,
                    She should not cheat me of my Freedom. Marry?

Castalio agrees to step aside and allow his brother to court Monimia, so long as he does nothing dishonorable. Castalio's own honor, however, might be called into question when he introduces Polydore to Monimia and then promptly disappears. Monimia rejects Polydore's suit in no uncertain terms, and Polydore responds with a long, misogynist rant. At this point, neither one of the brothers is likely to have our respect.

In the second act, however, we learn that Castalio plans to marry Monimia after all, though he's more than a little embarrassed by the strength of his love for her. He also recognizes that he should not have played a trick on his brother by getting him to profess love to an already engaged woman. No one, Castalio claims, could love Monimia the way he does:

                    I am a doating honest Slave, design'd
                    For Bondage, Marriage bonds, which I've sworn 
                    To wear: It is the onely thing I e're
                    Hid from his knowledge; and he'l sure forgive
                    The first Transgression of a wretched Friend
                    Betray'd to Love and all its little follies.

Castalio makes up with Monimia and promises to marry her. When they meet again in Act III, it is to plan the consummation of their secret marriage. She gives him a signal with specific instructions so as not to wake his father who sleeps in the next chamber:

                    Just three soft stroakes upon the Chamber door.
                    And at that Signal you shall gain Admittance:
                    But speak not the least word; for if you should, 
                    'Tis surely heard and all will be betrayed.

Polydore, not knowing the two lovebirds are married, overhears this bit of information. Incensed that his brother has betrayed him and the woman he loves has rejected him--presumably for the illicit pleasures of a false brother--he comes up with a plan. He will get his page to distract Castalio, then he himself will approach in the dead of night, giving three soft knocks on her door. Since all lights will be out and Monimia has already specified that there can be no talking, she will welcome him into her bed thinking he is his brother Castalio!

The old bed trick appears in earlier plays, such as Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure, but in those cases it is virtuous women tricking scoundrels into sleeping with their own jilted brides. In The Orphan, the bed trick becomes a scene of horrifying rape. What is more, when Castalio shows up just as Monimia is getting busy with his brother, her maid sends him away, thinking he is Polydore come to hopelessly plead his case once again.

In the fourth act, Castalio and Monimia both ignorantly accuse each other of breaking faith. He wonders why she locked him out in the cold after their wedding ceremony, and she wonders why he left so hurriedly after sex. Polydore, the cause of all this trouble, feels guilty, but sees no way out of his crimes other than despair. At the close of the act he laments:

                    That's well contriv'd! then thus let's go together
                    Full of guilt, distracted where to roam,
                    Like the first Wretched Pair expell'd their Paradise.
                    Let's find some place where Adders nest in Winter,
                    Loathsome and Venemous; Where poisons hang
                    Like Gums against the Walls; where Witches meet
                    By night and feed upon some pamper'd Imp,
                    Fat with the Blood of Babes: There we'll inhabit,
                    And live up to the height of desperation.

In the final act, people run upon swords, take poison, stab themselves, and generally come to bad ends. We are inclined to agree with Polydore when he complains to his brother:

                    Hadst thou, Castalio, us'd me like a Friend,
                    This ne're had happen'd; hadst thou let me know 
                    Thy Marriage, we had all now met in joy....

Sad.

Mary Warner

The eminent tragedian of the Victorian era, William Charles Macready, was often paired with an equally skilled leading lady, Helen Faucit. After Faucit went her own way, however, another actress stepped up to Macready's side. She was Mary Warner, and also an important performer of note.

Born Mary Amelia Huddart, she came from a family of thespians and began acting when she was around 15 years old. By 1829, she was making appearances in Dublin, and the following year Macready discovered her talents and began casting her whenever possible. She made her Drury Lane debut on November 22, 1830 in Thomas Otway's Venice Preserved playing Belvidera opposite Macready's Pierre.

Initially, there seems to have been some romantic attraction between the two. Macready, however, was married, and a devoted husband and father. While he and Miss Huddart were performing together in Manchester, the actors were fortunately able to fall into a purely professional relationship, with Macready recording in his diary that he was relieved to be set free from a temptation.

As Miss Huddart, she frequently played secondary female roles to Macready's regular leading lady, Helen Faucit. For instance, she took the role of Paulina to Faucit's Hermione in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Around 1836 or 1837 (it's unclear which) she married the tavern keeper Robert Warner, and as Mrs. Warner she took on increasingly strong roles, such Regan in Macready's production of King Lear.

When Macready took over the management of Covent Garden in 1837, Warner joined his company, and she followed him when he moved to the Haymarket Theatre two years later. It was at the Haymarket that Warner originated the role of Lady Arundel in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's play The Sea Captain.

Eventually, Warner rose to performing Lady Macbeth with Macready. In 1844, she took on the management of Sadler's Wells, along with Samuel Phelps and T.L. Greenwood. Her final performance in England came in 1851 at Sadler's Well, acting the title role of Mrs. Oakley in George Colman the Elder's The Jealous Wife. After that, she departed for America, where British actors frequently thought they could make their fortunes.

Unfortunately, Warner had developed cancer, and she eventually returned to London, where the retired Macready kindly gave her some financial assistance. In 1853, she filed for bankruptcy, and the following year she died. Macready saw to the upbringing of her son, while the wealthy philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts took charge of her daughter.

Throughout her career, many actors and critics paid tribute to Warner's considerable talents.  One appreciation came in the form of this anonymous acrostic, which appeared in the Theatrical Journal of 1839:

M ild in your natural character, thou art
A n able actress of the fiery mood;
R ebundant action, frequent strut and start,
Y our judgement wisely tells should be subdued.

W ell do your death-black eyes their part fulfill,
A nd flash to fury, or in scorn strike awe;
R ich in Evadne's portraiture of ill.
N o critic e'er condemned it; all who saw
E steemed it noble, thrilling, awful, grand.
R evived and cleansed by great Macready's hand!

Did Macready REALLY try to revive the drama?

The Victorian actor William Charles Macready often spoke of "reviving the drama." To him, this meant one thing: the return of verse tragedy. Far from reviving the drama, however, Macready did his part to crush it.

Shirley S. Allen might have been a little biased. She was a biographer of one of Macready's rivals, Samuel Phelps. However, in her book Samuel Phelps and Sadler's Wells Theatre, Allen makes a strong case for Macready acting like the villain in one of the melodramas he claimed to have despised.

When he first saw Phelps act in 1837, Macready wrote that he "displayed intelligence, occasionally great energy, some imagination--not much." Rather ominously, he added, "His best scene decidedly was his death." Macready planned to take over Covent Garden, and in spite of his lukewarm opinion of Phelps, he arranged to hire him.

First, however, Phelps had to make his debut at the Haymarket in the role of Shylock. He was an unqualified success, but his strength as an actor scared Macready more than excited him. The great tragedian recorded in his diary that "an actor's fame and his dependent income is so precious, that we start at every shadow of an actor."

Once Phelps joined Macready's company at Covent Garden, Macready made sure this upstart actor would never upstage him. Phelps made his debut as Jaffier in Venice Preserved by Thomas Otway, opposite Macready's own Pierre. Though the production was a success, Macready gave up the role of Pierre rather than appear with another actor who had garnered greater acclaim from the audience.

Phelps then appeared as Othello opposite Macready's Iago. Again, Phelps won the laurels, and again Macready was petty. He made Phelps act the part of Macduff to his own Macbeth, and aside from that, gave him only one other role (in Rob Roy) for a considerable time. Though Macready was paying Phelps handsomely, he would rather the actor not play at all than become a rival for his own glory.

Macready did make some progress toward reviving the drama with a production of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Lady of Lyons in 1838. Phelps was not allowed to perform in that piece, and most critics credited its success not to Macready, but to Helen Faucit, who played Pauline, the titular heroine. The following year, Macready premiered another Bulwer-Lytton play, Richelieu, with a title role written expressly for Macready.

Unfortunately, Macready quarreled with the owners of Covent Garden, and he and Phelps both ended up at the Haymarket during the summer of 1839, alternating in the two leading roles in Othello. Much to Macready's pain, Phelps received the better reviews. Macready demanded that the play be withdrawn, despite the fact it was attracting full houses. He set about looking for a new piece, and approached Robert Browning. Surely, if anyone could revive poetic drama in England, Browning could.

But Macready did not think highly of Browning's play King Victor. Taking over the management of Drury Lane, Macready looked for other playwrights to produce. He decided to stage Gerald Griffin's tragedy Gisippus, but he made a bad play even worse, revising it to divide one character into two different parts, just so no one would have a chance to challenge his own preeminence as the lead. 

In was in October of 1842 that Macready introduced his famous production of King John. Later that year, he staged the premiere of another new play, Westland Marston's The Patrician's Daughter, with Helen Faucit in the title role. The reviewers praised Faucit, Phelps, everyone but Macready. The play only lasted 11 performances. Macready turned down another tragedy, William Smith's Athelwold, because he felt there was not a sufficient leading role for himself.

Then, Macready finally turned to Browning, who more than a year before had given him the script to A Blot in the 'Scutcheon. Macready treated the play with contempt, though. In the past, he had invited authors to read their plays aloud to the cast. In this case, he assigned that duty to the prompter and left the room. Though he hadn't been present for the reading, Macready told the author that it had been a disaster and demanded a revised second act. Browning complied.

Macready eventually divorced himself from having anything to do with A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, assigning Phelps to take his place. Toward the end of the rehearsal process, Macready inserted himself again, suggesting Browning change the ending so that Phelps would be deprived of a dramatic death scene. Browning declined, and in his diary, Macready called the author "a very disagreeable and offensively mannered person." For his part, Browning saw the suggestion for what it was, a plot to avoid giving Phelps the opportunity of acting in a true tragedy.

According to Allen, the play premiered to "tumultuous applause." Phelps called for the author to come take a bow, but Browning declined. Macready was not called to the curtain, a fact that made him angry. Reviewer after reviewer, even those hostile to Macready, praised the play. Audiences flocked to see it, packing Drury Lane. Yet Macready pulled the play at the height of its popularity, never allowing it to be performed again under his management. Writing in his diary after the whole affair was over, Macready called Browning a "wretched insect."

The year 1843 saw the end of the monopoly Drury Lane and Covent Garden had enjoyed on "legitimate" drama in London. Macready had always argued that the monopoly was necessary, but in 1843, he asked the owners of Drury Lane for a decrease in rent. (He was also asking each actor to accept a one-third reduction in pay.) The owners declined.

After that, Macready drafted a petition to end the monopoly for which he had fought, and within weeks, the monopoly was gone. Macready, who was so intent on reviving the drama by bringing in talented new playwrights not only marred the works of playwrights (as with Griffin), belittled playwrights (as with Jerrold), and insulted playwrights (as with Browning), he seemed not to even know what a playwright was. He had suggested some revisions for Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy, which eventually became an adaptation called The Bridal. Macready then claimed ownership of the piece as if he had written it.

Phelps successfully revived the adaptation at Sadler's Wells, presenting the play 30 times in his first season of managing the theatre. In 1848, however, Macready wrote to Phelps about the play, saying, "as I intend to act it myself during my present engagement, I do not consider it right to extend the permission for performance at present." Phelps must have been confused. Since when did he need Macready's permission to perform a play the actor had not written?

Perhaps trying to save face, Macready then magnanimously granted Phelps a permission he had not asked for nor required. "You will therefore receive this note, if you please, as the requisite permission to perform the play of the Bridal at Sadler's Wells," Macready wrote a few days later.

When Macready finally retired in 1851, he did give Phelps some credit, praising the "learned and tasteful spirit of his productions." According to Allen's account, Phelps, not Macready, had actually done the most to revive the drama.

At the end of the 1856-57 season, Phelps chaired the Theatrical Fund Dinner. Charles Dickens gave a tribute to the actor, praising his "sensible subservience of the scene-painter and the mechanist to the real meaning of the play."

Dickens was a good friend of Macready, but he, too, saw the value of what Phelps had done.

Helen Faucit

The famed Shakespearian actress Helen Faucit was born in 1814, during the Regency, and died in 1898, at the end of the Victorian era. In many ways, her life reflects the tremendous social changes at work during that period.

I recently finished Carol Jones Carlisle's biography, Helen Faucit: Fire and Ice on the Victorian Stage. She corrects some of the errors made by Faucit's original biographer, her husband, Sir Theodore Martin. Sir Theodore made his wife younger than she really was, claiming she was born in 1817, a year after him. He also glossed over some rather unpleasant business with her family.

Faucit (who was baptized Helena, but always went by Helen) came from a family of actors, a profession not generally known for their chaste sensibilities (especially during a time when the Prince Regent was running around with assorted mistresses, including the actress and poet Mary Robinson). Her mother, Harriet Diddear, eloped with John Faucit when she was only 16, a fact she would use later on when she tried to sue her husband for an annulment.

John Faucit took to theater management while his wife took to the stage, famously playing Gertrude in Hamlet. She could not compete, however, with the brightest star of the Regency stage, Eliza O'Neill. After a couple of years, the talented but impetuous woman took up with a new man, William Farren, who already had a wife of his own. This was the Regency, though, so that mattered very little. The two set up house, undeterred by Mrs. Faucit's unsuccessful attempt in 1821 to terminate her first marriage.

Young Helen stayed with her mother, and Farren became a stepfather to her, in spite of the fact he was still married to another woman. While he might not have been a paragon of family values, he did have a keen business sense, and he helped Helen successfully navigate her early career on the stage. According to legend, the family was at the King's Theatre in Richmond when Helen and her elder sister Harriet decided to act out the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet upon an empty stage. The new manager, Willis Jones, overheard them, and decided to put the young Juliet in front of a live audience.

On September 30, 1833, Helen Faucit made her debut as Juliet, listed in the program simply as "A Young Lady". She was so nervous that she crushed the glass vial holding Juliet's potion, slicing open her hand and fainting in earnest. Still, she went on with the show, and the audience applauded her heartily. She repeated the performance the next night, this time using a wooden vial. The following month, she went on as Julia in James Sheridan Knowles' play The Hunchback, a part made famous by Fanny Kemble. In November, she appeared as Mrs. Haller in The Stranger, Benjamin Thompson's adaptation of a play by August von Kotzebue.

At the end of 1835, Faucit was given an opportunity to make her London debut on the stage at Covent Garden. Originally, she was supposed to play Juliet, but George Bennett, her prospective Romeo, was deemed too old for her, and Knowles himself was available to play the title role in The Hunchback. At the last minute, the play was switched, and Faucit found herself making her debut as Julia, not Juliet. On January 5, Twelfth Night, Faucit made her London debut. After a rocky start, she was a smash in the role, writing afterward in her diary, "Again and again, thank God it is over!"

Faucit later appeared as Belvidera in Thomas Otway's Venice Preserved, but predictably she suffered in comparisons to Eliza O'Neill, the standard in that role ever since the Regency. A few nights later she appeared on stage as Mrs. Haller in The Stranger, another role played by O'Neill. This time, however, she did something remarkable that set her apart. Instead of allowing the adulterous Mrs. Haller to be reconciled to her estranged husband at the end, she had the unfortunate woman embrace her children, then fall to the feet of her husband, spurned and rejected to the end.

Such a change, just a year before Queen Victoria's ascension to the throne, marks a shift in attitudes toward women, marriage, and sexual morality. During the Regency, Mrs. Haller could do her penance and reunite with her husband. In Victorian England, that would no longer be possible. Faucit, painfully aware of her own family's history, might have had personal reasons for making the change as well. After her mother's scandalous behavior, she herself wanted to be beyond reproach, and that meant no apologies for fallen women.

Faucit appeared as Lady Margaret in Joanna Baillie's The Separation. Then in March, she was at last allowed to go on as Juliet in London. The performance attracted some attention, and Faucit later found herself being invited to act with her hero, William Charles Macready in Thomas Noon Talfourd's tragedy Ion. Faucit worshipped Macready, but he remained cold toward her throughout their professional relationship. Still, she acted opposite him in a number of Shakespeare productions, including Othello, and Macready's landmark King John.

Amazing to me, Faucit originally did not want to play Cordelia in Macready's 1838 production of King Lear. She felt the part had too few lines and not enough opportunities for making a grand effect. Macready's production revolutionized the play, however, getting rid of the silly love story and happy ending introduced during the Restoration, and bringing back the part of the Fool. Critics rewarded Faucit for taking the role, praising her sweetness in the part. They complained, however, that she spoke too softly, perhaps another effect of her Victorian worldview.

Faucit had to play her fair share of unsuitable roles, including Mrs. Oakley in George Coleman the Elder's The Jealous Wife. However, the same year as Macready's Lear, she was given the part that would grant her the most fame, Pauline in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Lady of Lyons. The same author who had once begun a novel with the infamous line "It was a dark and stormy night" this time hit pay dirt for Faucit, and she would perform the part of Pauline over and over again for the rest of her career.

Later, Faucit appeared opposite Macready in Bulwer's play Richelieu, but that play was more of a vehicle for her costar. She found more success in Shakespearean roles, playing Rosalind in As You Like It, Miranda in The Tempest, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, as well as a formidable Lady Macbeth opposite Macready. Faucit's Lady Macbeth was not power mad, though, but rather ambitious only for her husband's sake. Victorianism strikes again.

When Macready left to tour America, the 28-year-old Faucit was left to develop her craft on her own. She toured the provinces, becoming a success in Dublin, Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. In 1844, she reunited with Macready in Paris, playing Desdemona to his Othello. Returning to Dublin, she appeared as Antigone, and was later painted as "The Greek Muse" by Sir Frederick William Burton.

In 1851 Faucit married Theodore Martin, whom Queen Victoria later knighted for completing a grand biography of Prince Albert. They set up house in London, neighbors to the Thackerays, and had a second home in Wales to boot. Still, Faucit didn't give up acting, and she kept her maiden name for billing purposes.

She did not perform as frequently after marriage, but Faucit kept acting until 1879, and even after her retirement from the stage, she took part in numerous fundraisers and public readings, often reading aloud multiple parts in scenes from Shakespeare.

At the instigation of her friend Geraldine Jewsbury, she began a series of published "letters" on characters she had played. These were later collected under the title: On Some of Shakespeare's Female Characters. A typical passage on Desdemona goes like this:

Making so small a part of her father's life, and missing the love, or the display of it, which would have been so precious to her, she finds her happiness in dreams of worth more exalted than any she has known, but which she has heard and read of in the poets and romancers...

So, too, did Helen Faucit, a child of a broken home from an earlier, more permissive era, dream of happiness. Only her happiness was one bound up in the stability and tranquility of wedded life. And fortunately for her, she found it.

Richard III, Villain

As crowds throng to Leicester, England to mark the re-burial of what might be the remains of Richard III, defenders of that monarch often complain bitterly about how Shakespeare maligned the poor man. The murderous king didn't kill nearly as many people as the Bard said he did, they argue, or at least no one can prove it! And besides, usurpation and bloodshed were common in the Middle Ages, sort of like Napster in the early 2000s. Yeah, it might have been wrong, but almost everyone else was doing it, so what's the problem?

In many ways, however, the villainous reputation of Richard III came not so much from Shakespeare's play, but from a later adaptation of that play done by the actor Colley Cibber. In addition to reducing the number of characters and focusing more on Richard himself, Cibber brought offstage acts of violence right before the audience's eyes. While Shakespeare seems to show some sympathy for Richard, particularly toward the end of the play, Cibber never lets us forget he is a villain.

I had always assumed that Cibber wrote the adaptation with himself in mind for Richard, but as Riki Miyoshi points out in a recent article in Theatre Notebook, Cibber originally wrote the part for another actor, Samuel Sandford. Known as the best villain of the Restoration stage, Sandford excelled as the title character in Thomas Porter's 1662 play The Villain. He went on to play more villains in Thomas Otway's Alcibiades and Nathaniel Lee's Caesar Borgia. Sandford became so linked to villainous roles, that when he played an honest man in Aphra Behn's The Widdow Ranter, the audience was furious.

Cibber, by contrast, was known for playing comical fops. Miyoshi notes Cibber scored a great success in 1693 as Fondlewife in William Congreve's The Old Batchelor. Cibber later wrote the fop part of Sir Novelty Fashion for himself in Love's Last Shift. By the time he adapted Richard III, Cibber was firmly ensconced in the minds of audiences as a comedic actor, and one specializing in parts nothing like Richard.

Miyoshi argues that Cibber tailored the role of Richard to suit Sandford's strengths as a stage villain. Unfortunately, by the time Cibber wrote his play, Sandford's health had failed, plus he had signed a contract with a rival company, anyway. Without Sandford available to play the role, Cibber decided to act it himself.

The result was a disaster. Cibber tried to copy Sandford's voice and mannerisms, but the audience hated him in the role. One observer noted that:

...when he was kill'd by Richmond, one might plainly perceive that the good People were not better pleas'd that so execrable an Tyrant was destroy'd, than that so execrable an Actor was silent.

Ouch. Cibber's failure in the role did not prevent the adaptation from being performed throughout the eighteenth century, and in fact even some modern productions make use of a few of Cibber's additions. Those changes to Shakespeare's play seem to have stemmed not just from Cibber himself, though, but from Sandford's reputation as an excellent stage villain.