Notes from Chuck Berst

Bernard Shaw scholars tend to be a generous lot. When I first went to the Comparative Drama Conference, folks from the International Shaw Society made me feel quite at home, and they have continued to be welcoming as I've met up with them at subsequent conferences.

When the Shaw scholar Chuck Berst passed away in 2019, it was a great loss. His wife Roelina, however, has tried to pass on his large collection of books about Shaw, and generously offered to send me the Constable & Co. collection of the great dramatist's works. One thousand and twenty-five copies of the 32-volume set were printed in 1931, and they are a treasure.

In the past, I have always checked out individual volumes of the Constable & Co. set from the library when I needed them. Unfortunately, libraries have been declared "non-essential" for more than a year now, so I was excited to receive the books. Even better, Roelina left in place the bookmarks where Chuck noted passages of particular interest. I've been going through them, trying to glean what I could from his insights.

One volume of Shaw's writing, Pen Portraits and Reviews, had quite a few passages flagged. The first one was a book review called "The Old Revolutionist and the New Revolution" which Shaw published in The Nation in 1921. Though actually about a book by H.M. Hyndman, the article is more interesting for what it says about the novelist H.G. Wells, a long-time associate of Shaw who had joined him in championing Socialism.

Another book mark, labelled "Terry" in an underlined fashion, marks an interesting comment on the actress Ellen Terry, who "has always been adored by painters." That is certainly true, and John Singer Sargent's 1889 portrait of her as Lady Macbeth has frequently been reproduced in prints and postcards (of few of which I might own). Shaw admits that he wanted Terry to perform his own plays and implies that he wrote Captain Brassbound's Conversion for her. Chuck marked in the margins where Shaw acknowledged that the description of the heroine of The Man of Destiny was "simply a description of Ellen Terry."

Shaw's contribution to a memoir on the journalist H.W. Massingham was also marked, but I was more interested in a flagged article called "Shaming the Devil about Shelley." The first article I published on Shaw had to do with the influence Percy Shelley's play The Cenci had on Shaw's early work. Shelley had anticipated Shaw's vision of the "life force" he worshipped, or at least Shaw thought so when he wrote "there never was a man with so abiding and full a consciousness of the omnipresence of a living force, manifesting itself here in the germination and growth of a tree, there in the organization of a poet's brain."

The final bookmark in the volume is for a published letter Shaw wrote about fellow Irish dramatist Oscar Wilde. Each slip of paper was illuminating for me, and I look forward to exploring some of the other marked passages in the set.

The Divine Sarah Siddons

Last year, I posted an image of Ellen Terry I had bought simply so I could have the rights to reproduce it in the journal SHAW.

Well, I ordered another lovely print, this one of the actress Sarah Siddons. I have no immediate need to reproduce it in a publication, but given my ongoing interest in Siddons, I probably will some day.

As with the Terry print, I am offering this image gratis to anyone who wants to publish it in a journal, book, newspaper, magazine, website, or whatever. If you need a higher quality image, feel free to contact me. You can credit it to the personal collection of James Armstrong.

This print comes from the 1830s, but is based on the 1784 oil painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse. The original is owned by The Huntington in San Marino, California. By the way, the folks at the Huntington were super-helpful when I wanted to reproduce the painting in another journal. Plus their gardens are amazing. If you're in the San Marino area, check them out!

As for Siddons, she was particularly well known for her voice. She came to embody tragic acting, literally taking on the guise of the muse of tragedy in the Reynolds portrait. When she appeared on stage as the tragic muse in a revival of David Garrick's The Jubilee she reportedly took the same pose she had in the painting--art imitating art!

The Rise of the English Actress

I just finished reading Sandra Richards's book The Rise of the English Actress. By its nature, the book is a rather general study, but it gives a wonderful history of women on the British stage.

Women appeared on stage during the middle ages, but by the Renaissance they were official banned from taking part in the public performances of plays in England. There were some exceptions, such as the infamous "Moll Cutpurse" who acted illegally, and the French actresses who were hissed at the Blackfriars Theatre in 1629.

It wasn't until the Restoration that actresses became the norm in England, and they quickly became an attractive novelty. Richards points out that in 1664 Thomas Killigrew staged an all-female performance of his play The Parson's Wedding. All-female casts were still being used a decade later when John Dryden's Secret Love was revived with only women on the stage.

By the early eighteenth century actresses were using playwrights to pen works especially for them. Richards cites Henry Fielding's Deborah and The Intriguing Chambermaid, written for Kitty Clive, and Colley Cibber's The Careless Husband and The Provok'd Husband, both vehicles for Anne Oldfield. Such collaborations did not always go well, though. Samuel Jonson blamed the failure of his play Irene on a sub-standard performance by Hannah Pritchard.

Perhaps the most celebrated eighteenth-century role created for a specific actress was Lady Teazle in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal. According to Richards, Sheridan wrote the part especially for Frances Abington. It was Abington who made the mob cap fashionable after she wore it on stage in James Townley's two-act farce High Life Below Stairs. The role she played, Kitty, was originally played by Kitty Clive, but Abington used it to create a fashion sensation that came to be known as the Abington Cap.

Women were instrumental in the creation of the benefit performance, and their earnings could top those of male actors. Richards notes that in 1792 the top-grossing benefit night belonged to Dora Jordan. That year, Jordan earned 540 pounds, while the tragic actress Sarah Siddons earned 490 pounds, and the leading male actor, John Philip Kemble, earned only 480 pounds. The Jordan-Siddons rivalry mirrored a debate over whether comedy or tragedy was the superior genre. The Dramatic Magazine in 1788 sided with Jordan, declaring she "fairly beat Melpomene out of the field."

The late eighteenth century also saw the remarkable career of Mary Robinson, the actress who in 1775 began publishing her poems under the patronage of the Duchess of Devonshire. Unfortunately, her 1794 play Nobody struck a nerve, and was hissed off the stage when it exposed the gambling habits of a number of prominent society ladies. Robinson allegedly dictated her poem "The Maniac" while under the influence of opium. As one might expect, Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw a kindred spirit in her and in 1800 declared Robinson "a woman of undoubted genius."

Robinson was famously painted by the major artists of the day, and as Richards puts it, it was in the eighteenth century that actresses "now became a means of establishing a painter's reputation when they allowed themselves to be portrayed." Portraits of actresses "were offered to the market by painters satisfying a public demand, and reflected how audiences saw female players." Richards specifically cites Thomas Lawrence, whose 1790 portrait of Elizabeth Farren catapulted the painter into fame and royal favor.

The great tragic actress of the late eighteenth century was of course Sarah Siddons, and Richards devotes an entire chapter to her. Drawing on Siddons's biography by Thomas Campbell, Richards points out that Siddons strove to be "natural" but by "natural" she meant credible for the character, rather than what we today might consider naturalistic. Siddons famously studied Egyptian and Greek sculpture, using it to help her achieve the exact poise and muscle tension she wanted to have.

In spite of her generally acknowledged superiority over her brother, John Philip Kemble, Siddons could not always enjoy her stardom. While Kemble was given a public dinner at the occasion of his farewell performance, Siddons received no such honor. She remarked to Samuel Rogers, "Well, perhaps in the next world women will be more valued than they are in this." Still, she left her mark on plays, and Richards notes that "Siddons's personality and bearing unquestionably informed and determined the role" of Jane de Monfort in Joanna Baillie's play De Monfort, which premiered in 1800.

Eliza O'Neill succeeded Siddons as the great British tragedienne of the early nineteenth century. O'Neill retired from the stage in 1819, though, and in the early Victorian period actresses like Helen Faucit and Siddons's niece Fanny Kemble took the reins. In 1837, Fanny Kemble wrote An English Tragedy, but William Charles Macready refused to stage the play, in spite of recognizing that it was "full of power, poetry and pathos."

The most famous Victorian actress was Ellen Terry, and Richards gives Terry her own chapter. Terry was most renowned for playing Lady Macbeth, wearing "a gown of soft green silk and blue tinsel edged with rubies and diamonds, draped by a heather velvet cape and decorated with flaming griffins and real beetle wings of green to achieve a metallic dazzle.” John Singer Sargent painted a portrait of Terry wearing the dress, helping it to become, in Richards's words, "the most famous costume in stage history."

Sybil Thorndike was one of the great British actresses of the early twentieth century. Richards considers her production of Percy Shelley's The Cenci in 1922 to be one of the most important of the actress's career. According to Richards, "Sybil's Beatrice established her firmly as a great tragic actress and Shelley as a great dramatist." At the time, George Bernard Shaw was trying to determine who should play the title character in his new play Saint Joan. After seeing Thorndike as Beatrice Cenci, Shaw informed his wife, "I have found my Joan." Thorndike later became closely associated with the role of Joan of Arc, which she did indeed originate in Shaw's play.

Richards continues the story of the English actress past Thorndike, writing for instance about Peggy Ashcroft, who played Desdemona opposite Paul Robeson in Othello. She goes right up to the present, discussing Harriet Walter, who I just saw play Prospero in an all-female production of The Tempest. All in all, this is a wonderful book for anyone interested in the history of British acting.

A Christmas Eve Image

When the Society for Theatre Research published my article on Eliza O'Neill in Theatre Notebook I was very grateful to the British Museum for allowing me to use an image from their collection sans royalties.

Their policy made sense. Theatre Notebook is a non-profit journal with a very limited circulation. The image I wanted to reproduce was a cartoon created in the early nineteenth century, so it had long been in the public domain. True, the British Museum had gone to the trouble of photographing it and placing an electronic file in their database, but they are a public institution with taxpayer support.

I was disappointed, however, when I wanted to reproduce some other images from the British Museum in the journal SHAW. It seems the museum's policy has changed. I can't blame them. I'm sure the British Museum has been facing budget cuts from a Tory government intent on a policy of austerity. The museum must be having to look for every crumb of funding they can get now, so they probably had little choice but to monetize their online collection.

As I am not a British taxpayer, I have no right to complain. If the British people want to starve their public institutions, that's their own affair, and as a citizen of a republic that has just elected the least qualified chief magistrate in its history, I certainly should not be throwing stones. Still, it saddens me greatly that the British Museum has been forced into being so parsimonious. We are talking about images in the public domain. The only thing still under copyright is the photograph of the image, not the image itself.

Well, I paid the British Museum (or rather the contractor they hired) for the rights to the images I couldn't get anywhere else. There was one, however, that I was able to secure the rights to permanently. The image in question is of John Singer Sargent's famous painting of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth. The opening stage directions of G.B. Shaw's The Philanderer mentions "theatrical engravings and photographs" of various actors, including Terry. This was one of the images I definitely wanted to include in the article.

Since I wanted to illustrate Shaw's stage directions, I needed an engraving of Sargent's painting, not an image of the painting itself (which is owned by the Tate Gallery in London). The British Museum has such an engraving in their collection, but surely many such engravings exist. Couldn't I find one elsewhere? Well, not at the National Portrait Gallery (though they had an image of John Kemble I needed), and not at the New York Public Library (though I've used their images in the past).

After a search online, I discovered a print dealer selling an actual engraving of the painting for less than the British Museum wanted for the rights to reproduce the image in the journal. To be fair, the price was comparable--the same amount in dollars as the museum wanted in pounds, and I also had to pay for shipping. Still, by purchasing the engraving and scanning the image myself, I secured the rights to use it whenever I wanted.

So in the spirit of Christmas Eve, I am offering this image to anyone who wants it, to publish it in any journal, book, newspaper, or magazine they choose. I didn't paint it--that was Sargent. I didn't engrave it--that was C. Carter. The only value I added was making a digital image of the piece. You can have that for free.

If you want a higher quality image, feel free to contact me. You can credit it to the personal collection of James Armstrong. Enjoy!