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.

A Legend of Florence

The poet Leigh Hunt was not known for his business acumen. In fact, Charles Dickens famously satirized Hunt's impecuniousness with the character of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House.

However, in 1840, Hunt finally met with some success. After several abortive attempts at drama, Hunt had his play A Legend of Florence premiered at the Theatre Royal at Covent Garden. Ten years later, Samuel Phelps revived the piece at Sadler's Wells, and Queen Victoria later ordered a command performance of the piece at Windsor Castle.

Hunt's one big theatrical hit starred Ellen Tree at Covent Garden. Tree would later marry Charles Kean, but in 1840 she was famous in her own right, and A Legend of Florence gave her a star vehicle in which to shine. The play, as its name indicates, comes from a Florentine legend of a woman who wandered the streets in her grave clothes after awaking in a tomb, having been mistaken for dead. (Edgar Allan Poe would have loved it.)

The play begins with a light-hearted conversation of a poet and a papal official, in which they recount the sorrows of Ginevra, a noblewoman in a miserable marriage. Though the noble Florentine Antonio Rondinelli loved her, Ginevra was instead married off to Francesco Agolanti, a bitter and jealous man who treats her horribly. Pope Leo X is returning to his hometown of Florence with much festivity, but Ginevra must stay inside. Still, she accepts her fate with equanimity, saying:

Well, dear Diana, should my husband's judgement
Encourage me to think my health would bear it,
I would fain venture, but—I hear him coming.
At all events, the windows will be gladly
Filled with your pleasures; the report of which
Will afterwards make them mine.

Agolanti is incensed when he learns that Rondinelli has sent letters to Ginevra, even though she has refused to open them. Ginevra has been weakened by a "late sharp illness." Still, her husband continues to torment her. Hunt prepares the audience for Ginevra's physical collapse, having her complain to her husband:

You make the blood at last mount to my brain,
And tax me past endurance. What have I done,
Good God! what have I done, that I am thus
At the mercy of a mystery of tyranny,
Which from its victim demands every virtue,
And brings it none?

Rondinelli, concerned that the woman he adores is being hounded to death by her husband, arranges a meeting with Agolanti to try to talk some sense into him, but as the two men argue, the passing bell marks Ginevra's death. All who hear it remove their caps, except for her hard-hearted husband, who only takes off his hat when he is chastised. The Act III curtain falls on a scene of gloom and despair.

In Act IV, Ginevra, having awakened in her tomb and walked through the city streets, piteously entreats entrance into her own home, but Agolanti, filled with guilt, orders the doors shut against what he takes to be a ghost. She then goes to Rondinelli's, having nowhere else to turn. When he suggests returning her to her husband, her answer is firm:

Never. The grave itself has been between us;
The hand of Heaven has parted us, acknowledged
By his own driving me from his shrieking doors:
And none but thy door, and a convent's now,
To which thy honourable haste will guide me,
Shall open to me in this world again.

Agolanti eventually hears of what has occurred and goes to Rondinelli, demanding the return of his wife. At one point, Ginevra starts to go with him, but when he triumphs in his mastery over her, it is too much for her to bear. Bravely standing up to him, she cries:

Madness will crush my senses in, or speak:
The fire of the heavenward sense of my wrongs crowns me;
The voice of the patience of a life cries out of me;
Every thing warns me. I will not return.
I claim the judgement of most holy church.
I'll not go back to that unsacred house,
Where heavenly ties restrain not hellish discord,
Loveless, remorseless, never to be taught.

Agolanti draws his sword, and when he threatens others, they decide he must be killed before he can harm anyone else. The death of the villain is not exactly tragedy, but it is satisfying.

Romanticism (It's All in the Name...)

Three books, all with the same title, Romanticism, deal with the same topic. Indeed, all employ the same key word in discussing the art and philosophy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet each of the books' three authors, Aiden Day, David Blayney Brown, and Michael Ferber, understand the term "Romanticism" in slightly different ways.

Day's work, published as a part of the New Critical Idiom series by Routledge, begins its introduction by quoting heavily from M.H. Abrams, whose book The Mirror and the Lamp helped to illuminate Romanticism for the 20th century. In his first chapter, "Enlightenment or Romantic?", Day then sets up the dichotomy between Enlightenment thinking and Romanticism that is often rehearsed by scholars. On the Enlightenment side are figures like William Godwin, who "argued that human beings act in line with reason and that it is impossible for them to be rationally persuaded by an argument without their conduct being regulated accordingly." Romanticism, by contrast, in the works of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is a "celebration of subjectivity."

The second chapter looks at constructions of the term "Romantic" which first appeared in the 17th century. Thomas Shadwell wrote disapprovingly of all things "Romantick" in the preface to his 1668 play The Sullen Lovers. By 1820, debates over Romantic literature raged on the European Continent, but Lord Byron declared he saw no conflict between the "Classical" and the "Romantic" among English writers. Later critics latched on to the term "Romantic" to describe a variety of authors in Britain, but Day warns against dubbing movements in retrospect. "Literature is not" he contends "something which can be regarded as occupying a 'trans-historical' space, but something which must be read as subject to the discourses and ideologies of a particular time and place."

Day's project is best summed up by the title of his third chapter: "Enlightenment AND Romantic." For Day, these two movements are inextricably linked. On the one hand, writers of the Romantic era continued to work towards the progressive social justice championed by Enlightenment figures like Godwin, while at the same time their focus did shift to that of the interior rather than the external world. A key figure here is Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose commitment to social change informed his "study of solitary imagination." Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein can even be read as a defense of Day's "and" proposition, since the broodingly interior Frankenstein must ultimately face the consequences of the creature he has unleashed onto the world. As Day puts it, "the writings of those who have formerly been defined as Romantic are not necessarily anti-Enlightenment in any simple sense."

Though that might seem a fitting conclusion, Day includes a final chapter on "Gender and the Sublime" analyzing some of the consequences of Romantic theory first postulated in the eighteenth century by Edmund Burke. Certainly, Burke genders the sublime as masculine and its companion "beautiful" as feminine. Day's point, however, is that this gendering continued to influence Romantic poets. For instance, Wordsworth gendered Nature as feminine, but the female Nature only aided him in apprehending a higher "invisible world." This higher world, Day argues, is associated with the interior mind of the poet, and is thus gendered as masculine. Such arguments break down when the author is a woman, but Day contends that female writers of the period were skeptical of feelings of the sublime and instead focused on nature herself.

David Blayney Brown takes a different approach to Romanticism. While Day focuses on poets and novelists, Brown is interested in painters. He begins his introduction with an examination of Eugène Delacroix's painting The Death of Sardanapalus. He claims the "moral vacuum" at the heart of the piece is "all the more shocking for ignoring the message of the play by the English poet Lord Byron from which he had taken his subject." Notice that Day, discussing literature, ignores drama, while Brown, examining the visual arts, pays close attention to the theatre.

Brown finds a literary parallel for Delacroix's Romanticism in Victor Hugo, whose 1827 preface to his play Cromwell "advocated a rich variety of expression and experience to reflect the complexity of the world and the self, rather than the cold formalism of classical drama, and recognized the value of the ugly or grotesque in engaging the senses, rather than beauty in winning only admiration." For Brown, The Death of Sardanapalus is a "pictorial equivalent" to Hugo's theoretical preface.

Day emphasizes the continuity between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, but Brown stresses how revolutionary the new movement was. He claims: "Not since the Renaissance had such a profound change come over the Western consciousness." Instead of incorporating a collective ideal, the Romantic artists "emphasized individual experience, feeling, and expression." This, of course, came from the French Revolution, which Day emphasizes, but also from the rise and fall of Napoleon. As Brown puts it: "Romanticism was born in opposition and sorrow, in social or national crisis and in individual trauma."

Brown traces the term "Romantic" to Friedrich Schlegel, who in the first issue of the journal Athenaeum in 1798, identified the Romantic with "progressive universal poetry" not based on "inherited and culturally specific forms." Schlegel was writing in the German university town of Jena, which became a hotbed of Romanticism. Though not in Jena, the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe contributed greatly to the movement as well, and Brown cites Goethe's 1789 play Torquato Tasso as an inspiration for Delacroix's Tasso in the Madhouse, painted fifty years later.

Tasso was a Renaissance poet and playwright, but more modern poets also provided inspiration to Romantic artists. Brown cites Thomas Chatterton, a poet whose suicide in 1770 inspired Henry Wallis (painting in the 1850s) to create the magnificent Death of Chatterton, now hanging in the Tate Gallery in London. The cult of Chatterton was not confined to England, either, as Brown observes that the French writer Alfred de Vigny turned the poet's story into the play Chatterton, which "was a hit in Paris in 1835."

So while Day is interested in Romanticism as a philosophical movement in dialogue with the Enlightenment, Brown sees it as an artistic movement born of political turmoil. Michael Ferber wrestles with both of these concepts in his Romanticism, which bears the subtitle A Very Short Introduction. For him, Romanticism is both an intellectual movement and an artistic movement, and while he sees both sides as distinct, he does not seem to emphasize one over the other. Both of these elements, the philosophical and the aesthetic, are present in the pre-Romantic movement Ferber identifies as Sensibility.

Sensibility is a term that was much more in use in the eighteenth century than "Romantic" or "Romantick." It was associated with such works of "storm and stress" as Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and with Gothic writers, including Horace Walpole and Matthew G. Lewis. Ferber also connects it to poets like Mary Robinson, as well as the hugely influential critic and novelist Madame de Staël.

While Ferber successfully traces elements of Sensibility into Romanticism, he definitely seems to be coming at Romanticism from a position of greatly misunderstanding the period's drama. I can overlook his calling Shelley's Prometheus Unbound the poet's "greatest work" as that is a matter of taste. Downright strange, however, is Ferber's comment that Byron's Manfred is "unperformable." Is Ferber really unaware of the many, many successful performances there have been of Manfred? Samuel Phelps was probably the most famous actor to produce the play, but Manfred became so popular that toy theatre versions were made.

For all its faults, though, Ferber's book does give a decent introduction to Romanticism. It attempts to be more balanced than either Day or Brown, gazing into the philosophical and the aesthetic alike. In the end, as Ferber suggests, neither side can be fully understood without the other.

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!

Shakespeare's Victorian Stage

Charles Kean never had the ability to enthrall an audience as an actor--like his father, Edmund Kean, certainly could. Still, he had a profound impact on the Victorian stage. Even if the younger Kean has unfairly eclipsed other great revivers of Shakespeare (like Samuel Phelps) Charles Kean has gone down in history as one of the greatest producers of "antiquarian" productions of Shakespeare, those using historically accurate sets and costumes.

Richard W. Schoch's book Shakespeare's Victorian Stage analyses a number of Kean's productions, speculating on what they might tell us about the Victorians and how they viewed history. In his introduction, Schoch notes the nineteenth century's obsession with history, comparing Kean's project in the theater to similar attempts to understand history by Leopold von Ranke, Thomas Macaulay, and Karl Marx. Kean brought ancient Assyria to life in Sardanapalus by Lord Byron, examined Peru at the time of the conquest with Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Pizarro, and explored medieval France with Louis XI by Dion Boucicault. Schoch's focus, however, is on Kean's productions of Shakespeare's history plays.

The first chapter gives an overview of Kean's productions of the history plays, including his antiquarian production of King John. Kean was much indebted to the historicized King John of William Macready. However, Kean made the historical accuracy of the play the key marketing feature of his production. Advertising his 1846 production of the play in New York City, Kean boasted that "no labour or expense has been spared in endeavouring to attain the utmost fidelity of historic illustration."

In chapter two, Schoch delves into the significance of the public's desire to have historical accuracy. He argues that Kean saw himself and was seen as a historian as much as an actor, albeit a historian who embodied the past rather than merely writing about it. In 1857, Kean was even elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. This was the highest public honor a British actor had ever received, and it would remain so until Queen Victoria knighted Henry Irving in 1895.

Schoch's third chapter views Kean's historical productions as emblematic of a crisis in Victorian culture. Looking specifically at Kean's production of Richard II, he sees a patriotic purpose in the revivals, as Britons tried to relate to a past from which industrialization and modernization had profoundly alienated them. He points out that the bedroom of John of Gaunt contained (according to a playbill) "paintings, selected from the very beautifully illuminated manuscripts in the British Museum, containing 120 miniature representations of scenes from the legendary lives of St. Edmond and St. Fremond." The actor playing Gaunt was thus literally surrounded by images of England's history when he intoned the patriotic lines:

               This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
               This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
               Fear'd by their breed and famous by their birth...

Chapter four takes a look at the role of medievalism in Victorian Britain. Schoch notes that Kean's 1853 production of Macbeth strove to recreate medieval Scotland by looking at the Nordic world. Kean hypothesized that the Scots (who left little evidence of their clothes and manners during this time) might have imitated the style of their enemies during the middle ages. Though this might seem odd to us, Schoch observes that other amateur scholars of the 1850s frequently looked to such places as Scandinavian poetry to recreate Britain's past. This placed Britain in stark contrast to the Latin heritage of Italy and France, thus promoting English nationalism.

The fifth and final chapter delves even deeper into the problems of history, noting that in Kean's production of Henry V in 1859, his wife Ellen played the Chorus in the guise of the Greek Muse of History, Clio. Critics objected to this move, claiming that it "somewhat jars at first with the Medieval character of the play." One critic went so far as to compare Ellen Kean with a "pantomimic fairy." The mixing of history and the supernatural apparently disturbed audiences in a history play in a way it did not bother them in a play like The Tempest.

Schoch closes his book with an envoi looking forward to the future of Shakespearian performance. Today, audiences not only don't need historical accuracy, they often want such antiquarianism done away with so they can concentrate on the characters as poetic fictions rather than real people. Schoch wonders if this might be in part because we have given up on establishing an objective version of history anyway.

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.

Macready's King John

On October 29, 1842, the London newspaper The Examiner carried a review by John Forster of William Charles Macready's latest triumph, a magnificent revival of Shakespeare's King John at Drury Lane. Forster wrote:

It is six years since we saw King John, with some seven ragged supernumeraries for the power of England, while that of France, headed by a king in boots a la Louis Quatorze, crawled about the stage with three. What a picture has taken the place of this! ... The accoutrements are complete, from the helmet to the spur of each mailed warrior. Not a distinction is missed in the appointments. From citizen to baron, gentleman to knight, herald to man-at-arms, soldier to servant, priest to king, gradations are marked with picturesque exactness, to the eye and to the mind.

These comments might be overlooked by some as the effusions of an admiring theatre fanatic with no real sense of historic costuming. However, we know that Macready's production did employ costumes that sought to reproduce the period with meticulous accuracy. In the twentieth century, Macready's granddaughter discovered 39 sheets of watercolor costume designs. Of these, 12 were for King John, showing a total of 15 figures, all with a reasonable degree of historical accuracy.

According to the theatre historian Charles Shattuck, the watercolors are probably the work of Col. Charles Hamilton Smith, a noted antiquarian of the time. Most interesting to me is the fact that the watercolors seem to strive not just for historical accuracy, but for an audience's idea of what the period should look like. For instance, the image of Cardinal Pandulph shows him in a wide-brimmed cardinal's hat. However, notes on the back of the image indicate that such hats were not actually worn until 1245, decades after the death of King John.

The designer seems to have realized that in some cases, historical accuracy can get in the way of a production. We all picture cardinals in big hats, so to have Pandulph without the traditional cardinal hat would have gotten in the way of the audience's understanding of the play. Whether the costumers ultimately followed through on Smith's suggestions (as Shattuck believes they did) the images show Macready was interested in creating the most historically accurate costumes he could, provided they truly served the play.

Scenery was also important to the production, and again, historical accuracy (within reason) seemed to reign. Forester noted in his review:

The scenery has had the same attention. The council room, the field before and after battle, the fortifications of Angiers, the moated and embattled fortress of Northampton, the glitter of the Royal tent, the gloom of Swinstead Abbey; they have all the air of truth, the character of simple and strong fidelity. And above all, in every movement of the tragedy, there is Mind at work, without which wealth of material is nothing.

William Telbin was in charge of painting the backdrops. Though he had been working on scenery for a while, this was Telbin's first really big job for a major London theatre, and he received a whopping 250 pounds for his work. For the first several performances, Telbin was not credited, but by mid-November his name was being recorded in the playbills.

Telbin based his designs on real places, but he modified them to create his stage pictures. For instance, in depicting Angiers, he left out the moat, reduced the number of towers, and placed the entrance in the foreground to be more dramatically effective. He also got rid of the black and white bands that make the castle distinctive, but not like the average audience member's idea of what a castle should look like. He also exaggerated the mountains in the background for a heightened effect.

Macready directed the cast with extraordinary skill. He himself played the title role, something he had previously done for Charles Kemble's company at Covent Garden. According to Shattuck, Macready had played the king a total of 25 times in London before his own 1842 revival, but not to the meticulous actor's own satisfaction. The reviewers were kind, but Macready was not satisfied with his performances until he had helmed his own production of King John.

This was not merely a star-focused production, however. Macready's King John was noted for the power of its ensemble cast, and for the skill with which Macready handled the crowd scenes. As Forester wrote:

The crowds on the stage are instinct with life and passion. Yielding to the impulse of their leaders, they rise to fierce activity or sink into grim repose. These sudden changes are the very picture of that age: its selfish insincerity, its rude devotion, its servile slavery. Men they are not, though with those gallant forms of men, they are machines of war.

Samuel Phelps played Hubert, and reviewers praised his acting as second only to Macready's. Critics singled out as particularly masterful the temptation scene, where King John tells Hubert to kill the young Prince Arthur. Certainly, Macready and Phelps acting out such a splendid Shakespearean duet must have produced fireworks. Also, Phelps was particularly affecting in his interactions with Arthur. He generated intense pathos with his struggle between obeying his monarch and doing what was right.

The part of Arthur was taken by a child actress, initially one Miss Newcombe. One reviewer found her performance "overtrained," but that is perhaps a danger for child roles in general. The part also requires a bit of acrobatics, as Arthur must leap down from a tower in the fourth act. Apparently, some men were waiting below to catch the actress in a carpet. They would then tumble her through a gateway and down some steps. Some critics felt rolling down stairs after the fall was just a tad too much. (Critics....)

James Anderson played the bastard Faulconbridge with all the cynicism that we associate with the role today. For Macready's audience, this was a tremendous departure from the standard heroic portrayal of the character. Most reviewers hated this new interpretation, though a writer for the Atlas praised it as "more true to Shakespeare than Charles Kemble's more smiling and polished effort." Obviously, the play's subsequent stage history has vindicated Anderson's acting choice.

The incomparable Helen Faucit played Lady Constance, one of Shakespeare's more memorable heroines from the history plays. She had played the part opposite Macready at Covent Garden when she was only 19, but now at 25 she had acquired greater skill as a performer without having lost the charm of her youth. Unfortunately, she was still overcoming an illness when the revival opened at Drury Lane, so her initial notices were not good.

Her later performances, however, helped to change people's idea of the character. Previously, tragic actresses like Sarah Siddons had portrayed Constance as prideful and self-willed. They filled the character with ambition and delivered their lines with bitter sarcasm. Faucit emphasized Constance's tenderness and maternal affection. While still scornful of her enemies, Faucit's Constance rose to a noble grandeur that contemporaries felt was superior to the Constance of Siddons.

The costumes, scenery designs, and acting choices of Macready's King John all had a tremendous impact on later productions of the play (especially Charles Kean's production which later toured America, bringing British stage traditions to the U.S.). Perhaps the most significant choices Macready made, however, were in how he chose to cut the text.

And how did Macready manage to trim back the monster of King John into a concise, effective piece of theatre? I'll be writing about that on the blog tomorrow.