never replaced, and only once cleaned by Henry's dresser and valet,
Walter Collinson. Walter, I think, replaced "Doody," Henry's first
dresser at the Lyceum, during the run of "The Merchant of Venice."
Walter was a wig-maker by trade--assistant to Clarkson the elder. It was
Doody who, on being asked his opinion of a production, said that it was
fine--"not a _join_[1] to be seen anywhere!" It was Walter who was asked
by Henry to say which he thought his master's best part. Walter could
not be "drawn" for a long time. At last he said Macbeth.
[Footnote 1: A "join" in theatrical wig-makers' parlance is the point
where the front-piece of the wig ends and the actor's forehead begins.]
This pleased Henry immensely, for, as I hope to show later on, he
fancied himself in Macbeth more than in any other part.
"It is generally conceded to be Hamlet," said Henry.
"Oh, no, sir," said Walter, "_Macbeth._ You sweat twice as much in
that."
In appearance Walter was very like Shakespeare's bust in Stratford
Church. He was a most faithful and devoted servant, and was the only
person with Henry Irving when he died. Quiet in his ways, discreet,
gentle, and very quick, he was the ideal dresser.
The Lyceum production of "The Merchant of Venice" was not so strictly
archaeological as the Bancrofts' had been, but it was very gravely
beautiful and effective. If less attention was paid to details of
costumes and scenery, the play itself was arranged and acted very
attractively and always went with a swing. To the end of my partnership
with Henry Irving it was a safe "draw" both in England and America. By
this time I must have played Portia over a thousand times. During the
first run of it the severe attack made on my acting of the part in
_Blackwood's Magazine_ is worth alluding to. The suggestion that I
showed too much of a "coming-on" disposition in the Casket Scene
affected me for years, and made me self-conscious and uncomfortable. At
last I lived it down. Any suggestion of _indelicacy_ in my treatment of
a part always blighted me. Mr. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll, of the immortal
"Alice in Wonderland") once brought a little girl to see me in "Faust."
He wrote and told me that she had said (where Margaret begins to
undress): "Where is it going to stop?" and that perhaps in consideration
of the fact that it could affect a mere child disagreeably, I ought to
alter my business!
I had known dear Mr. Dodgson for years and years. He was as fond of me
as he could be of any one over the age of ten, but I was _furious_. "I
thought you only knew _nice_ children," was all the answer that I gave
him. "It would have seemed to me awful for a _child_ to see harm where
harm is; how much more when she sees it where harm is not."
But I felt ashamed and shy whenever I played that scene. It was the
Casket Scene over again.
The unkind _Blackwood_ article also blamed me for showing too plainly
that Portia loves Bassanio before he has actually won her. This seemed
to me unjust, if only because Shakespeare makes Portia say _before_
Bassanio chooses the right casket:
"One half of me is yours--the other half yours--_All yours!_"
Surely this suggests that she was not concealing her fondness like a
Victorian maiden, and that Bassanio had most surely won her love, though
not yet the right to be her husband.
"There is a soul of goodness in things evil," and the criticism made me
alter the setting of the scene, and so contrive it that Portia was
behind and out of sight of the men who made hazard for her love.
Dr. Furnivall, a great Shakespearean scholar, was so kind as to write me
the following letter about Portia:
"Being founder and director of the New Shakespeare Society, I
venture to thank you most heartily for your most charming and
admirable impersonation of our poet's Portia, which I witnessed
to-night with a real delight. You have given me a new light on the
character, and by your so pretty by-play in the Casket Scene have
made bright in my memory for ever the spot which almost all critics
have felt dull, and I hope to say this in a new edition of
'Shakespeare.'"
(He did say it, in "The Leopold" edition.)
"Again those touches of the wife's love in the advocate when
Bassanio says he'd give up his wife for Antonio, and when you
kissed your hand to him behind his back in the Ring bit--how pretty
and natural they were! Your whole conception and acting of the
character are so true to Shakespeare's lines that one longs he
could be here to see you. A lady gracious and graceful, handsome,
witty, loving and wise, you are his Portia to the life."
That's the best of Shakespeare, _I_ say. His characters can be
interpreted in at least eight different ways, and of each way some one
will say: "That is Shakespeare!" The German actress plays Portia as a
low comedy part. She wears an eighteenth-century law wig, horn
spectacles, a cravat (this last anachronism is not confined to Germans),
and often a mustache! There is something to be said for it all, though I
should not like to play the part that way myself.
Lady Pollock, who first brought me to Henry Irving's notice as a
possible leading lady, thought my Portia better at the Lyceum than it
had been at the Prince of Wales's.
"Thanks, my dear Valentine and enchanting Portia," she writes to me
in response to a photograph that I had sent her, "but the
photographers don't see you as you are, and have not the poetry in
them to do you justice.... You were especially admirable in the
Casket Scene. You kept your by-play quieter, and it gained in
effect from the addition of repose--and I rejoiced that you did not
kneel to Bassanio at 'My Lord, my governor, my King.' I used to
feel that too much like worship from any girl to her affianced, and
Portia's position being one of command, I should doubt the
possibility of such an action...."
I think I received more letters about my Portia than about all my other
parts put together. Many of them came from university men. One old
playgoer wrote to tell me that he liked me better than my former
instructress, Mrs. Charles Kean. "She mouthed it as she did most
things.... She was not real--a staid, sentimental 'Anglaise,' and more
than a little stiffly pokerish."
Henry Irving's Shylock was generally conceded to be full of talent and
reality, but some of his critics could not resist saying that this was
_not_ the Jew that Shakespeare drew! Now, who is in a position to say
what is the Jew that Shakespeare drew? I think Henry Irving knew as
well as most! Nay, I am sure that in his age he was the only person
able to decide.
Some said his Shylock was intellectual, and appealed more to the
intellect of his audiences than to their emotions. Surely this is
talking for the sake of talking. I recall so many things that touched
people to the heart! For absolute pathos, achieved by absolute
simplicity of means, I never saw anything in the theater to compare with
his Shylock's return home over the bridge to his deserted house after
Jessica's flight.
A younger actor, producing "The Merchant of Venice" in recent years,
asked Irving if he might borrow this bit of business. "By all means,"
said Henry. "With great pleasure."
"Then, why didn't you do it?" inquired my daughter bluntly when the
actor was telling us how kind and courteous Henry had been in allowing
him to use his stroke of invention.
"What do you mean?" asked the astonished actor.
My daughter told him that Henry had dropped the curtain on a stage full
of noise, and light, and revelry. When it went up again the stage was
empty, desolate, with no light but a pale moon, and all sounds of life
at a great distance--and then over the bridge came the wearied figure of
the Jew. This marked the passing of the time between Jessica's elopement
and Shylock's return home. It created an atmosphere of silence, and the
middle of the night.
"_You_ came back without dropping the curtain," said my daughter, "and
so it wasn't a bit the same."
"I couldn't risk dropping the curtain for the business," answered the
actor, "_because it needed applause to take it up again_!"
Henry Irving never grew tired of a part, never ceased to work at it,
just as he never gave up the fight against his limitations. His diction,
as the years went on, grew far clearer when he was depicting rage and
passion. His dragging leg dragged no more. To this heroic perseverance
he added an almost childlike eagerness in hearing any suggestion for the
improvement of his interpretations which commended itself to his
imagination and his judgment. From a blind man came the most
illuminating criticism of his Shylock. The sensitive ear of the
sightless hearer detected a fault in Henry Irving's method of delivering
the opening line of his part:
"Three thousand ducats--well!"
"I hear no sound of the usurer in that," the blind man said at the end
of the performance. "It is said with the reflective air of a man to whom
money means very little."
The justice of the criticism appealed strongly to Henry. He revised his
reading not only of the first line, but of many other lines in which he
saw now that he had not been enough of the money-lender.
In more recent years he made one change in his dress. He asked my
daughter--whose cleverness in such things he fully recognized--to put
some stage jewels on to the scarf that he wore round his head when he
supped with the Christians.
"I have an idea that, when he went to that supper, he'd like to flaunt
his wealth in the Christian dogs' faces. It will look well, too--'like
the toad, ugly and venomous,' wearing precious jewels on his head!"
The scarf, witnessing to that untiring love of throwing new light on his
impersonations which distinguished Henry to the last, is now in my
daughter's possession. She values no relic of him more unless it be the
wreath of oak-leaves that she made him for "Coriolanus."
We had a beautiful scene for this play--a garden with a dark pine forest
in the distance. Henry was _not_ good in it. He had a Romeo part which
had not been written by Shakespeare. We played it instead of the last
act of "The Merchant of Venice." I never liked it being left out, but
people used to say, like parrots, that "the interest of the play ended
with the Trial Scene," and Henry believed them--for a time. I never did.
Shakespeare _never_ gives up in the last act like most dramatists.
Twice in "Iolanthe" I forgot that I was blind! The first time was when I
saw old Tom Mead and Henry Irving groping for the amulet, which they had
to put on my breast to heal me of my infirmity. It had slipped on to the
floor, and both of them were too short-sighted to see it! Here was a
predicament! I had to stoop and pick it up for them.
The second time I put out my hand and cried: "Look out for my lilies,"
when Henry nearly stepped on the bunch with which a little girl friend
of mine supplied me every night I played the part.
Iolanthe was one of Helen Faucit's great successes. I never saw this
distinguished actress when she was in her prime. Her Rosalind, when she
came out of her retirement to play a few performances, appeared to me
more like a _lecture_ on Rosalind, than like Rosalind herself: a lecture
all young actresses would have greatly benefited by hearing, for it was
of great beauty. I remember being particularly struck by her treatment
of the lines in the scene where Celia conducts the mock marriage between
Orlando and Ganymede. Another actress, whom I saw as Rosalind, said the
words, "And I do take thee, Orlando, to be my husband," with a comical
grimace to the audience. Helen Faucit flushed up and said the line with
deep and true emotion, suggesting that she was, indeed, giving herself
to Orlando. There was a world of poetry in the way she drooped over his
hand.
Mead distinguished himself in "Iolanthe" by speaking of "that immortal
land where God hath His--His--er--room?--no--lodging?--no--where God
hath His apartments!"
The word he could not hit was, I think, "dwelling." He used often to try
five or six words before he got the right one _or_ the wrong one--it was
generally the wrong one--in full hearing of the audience.
IX
LYCEUM PRODUCTIONS
"THE MERCHANT OF VENICE" TO "ROMEO AND JULIET"
"The Merchant of Venice" was acted two hundred and fifty consecutive
nights on the occasion of the first production. On the hundredth night
every member of the audience was presented with Henry Irving's acting
edition of the play bound in white velum--a solid and permanent
souvenir, paper, print and binding all being of the best. The famous
Chiswick Press did all his work of this kind. On the title page was
printed:
"I count myself in nothing else so happy
As in a soul remembering my good friends."
At the close of the performance which took place on Saturday, February
14, 1880, Henry entertained a party of 350 to supper on the stage. This
was the first of those enormous gatherings which afterwards became an
institution at the Lyceum.
It was at this supper that Lord Houghton surprised us all by making a
very sarcastic speech about the stage and actors generally. It was no
doubt more interesting than the "butter" which is usually applied to the
profession at such functions, but every one felt that it was rather rude
to abuse long runs when the company were met to celebrate a hundredth
performance!
Henry Irving's answer was delightful. He spoke with good sense, good
humour and good breeding, and it was all spontaneous. I wish that a
phonograph had been in existence that night, and that a record had been
taken of the speech. It would be so good for the people who have
asserted that Henry Irving always employed journalists (when he could
not get Poets Laureate!) to write his speeches for him! The voice was
always the voice of Irving, if the hands were sometimes the hands of the
professional writer. When Henry was thrown on his debating resources he
really spoke better than when he prepared a speech, and his letters
prove, if proof were needed, how finely he could write! Those who
represent him as dependent in such matters on the help of literary hacks
are just ignorant of the facts.
During the many years that I played Portia I seldom had a Bassanio to my
mind. It seems to be a most difficult part, to judge by the colorless
and disappointing renderings that are given of it. George Alexander was
far the best of my Bassanio bunch! Mr. Barnes, "handsome Jack Barnes,"
as we called him, was a good actor, is a good actor still, as every one
knows, but his gentility as Bassanio was overwhelming. It was said of
him that he thought more of the rounding of his legs than the charms of
his affianced wife, and that in the love-scenes he appeared to be taking
orders for furniture! This was putting it unkindly, but there was some
truth in it.
He was so very dignified! My sister Floss (Floss was the first Lyceum
Nerissa) and I once tried to make him laugh by substituting two "almond
rings" for the real rings. "Handsome Jack" lost his temper, which made
us laugh the more. He was quite right to be angry. Such fooling on the
stage is very silly. I think it is one of the evils of long runs! When
we had seen "handsome Jack Barnes" imperturbably pompous for two hundred
nights in succession, it became too much for us, and the almond rings
were the result.
Mr. Tyars was the Prince of Morocco. Actors might come, and actors might
go in the Lyceum company, but Tyars went on for ever. He never left
Henry Irving's management, and was with him in that last performance of
"Becket" at Bradford on October 13, 1905--the last performance ever
given by Henry Irving who died the same night.
Tyars was the most useful actor that we ever had in the company. I
should think that the number of parts he has played in the same piece
would constitute a theatrical record.
I don't remember when Tom Mead first played the Duke, but I remember
what happened!
"Shylock, the world thinks, and I think so too."
He began the speech in the Trial Scene very slowly.
Between every word Henry was whispering: "Get on--get on!" Old Mead,
whose memory was never good, became flustered, and at the end of the
line came to a dead stop.
"Get on, get on," said Henry.
Mead looked round with dignity, opened his mouth and shut it, opened it
again, and in his anxiety to oblige Henry, did get on indeed!--to the
last line of the long speech.
"We all expect a gentle answer, Jew."
The first line and the last line were all that we heard of the Duke's
speech that night. It must have been the shortest version of it on
record.
This was the play with which the Lyceum reopened in the autumn of 1880.
I was on the last of my provincial tours with Charles Kelly at the time,
but I must have come up to see the revival, for I remember Henry Irving
in it very distinctly. He had not played the dual r™le of Louis and
Fabien del Franchi before, and he had to compete with old playgoers'
memories of Charles Kean and Fechter. Wisely enough he made of it a
"period" play, emphasizing its old-fashioned atmosphere. In 1891, when
the play was revived, the D'Orsay costumes were noticed and considered
piquant and charming. In 1880 I am afraid they were regarded with
indifference as merely antiquated.
The grace and elegance of Henry as the civilized brother I shall never
forget. There was something in _him_ to which the perfect style of the
D'Orsay period appealed, and he spoke the stilted language with as much
truth as he wore the cravat and the tight-waisted full-breasted coats.
Such lines as--
"'Tis she! Her footstep beats upon my heart!"
were not absurd from his lips.
The sincerity of the period, he felt, lay in its elegance. A rough
movement, a too undeliberate speech, and the absurdity of the thing
might be given away. It was in fact given away by Terriss at
Ch‰teau-Renaud, who was not the smooth, graceful, courteous villain that
Alfred Wigan had been and that Henry wanted. He told me that he paid
Miss Fowler, an actress who in other respects was not very remarkable,
an enormous salary because she could look the high-bred lady of elegant
manners.
It was in "The Corsican Brothers" that tableau curtains were first used
at the Lyceum. They were made of red plush, which suited the old
decoration of the theater. Those who only saw the Lyceum after its
renovation in 1881 do not realize perhaps that before that date it was
decorated in dull gold and dark crimson, and had funny boxes with high
fronts like old-fashioned church pews. One of these boxes was rented
annually by the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. It was rather like the toy
cardboard theater which children used to be able to buy for sixpence.
The effect was somber, but I think I liked it better than the cold,
light, shallow, bastard Pompeian decoration of later days.
In Hallam Tennyson's life of his father, I find that I described "The
Cup" as a "great little play." After thirty years (nearly) I stick to
that. Its chief fault was that it was not long enough, for it involved a
tremendous production, tremendous acting, had all the heroic size of
tragedy, and yet was all over so quickly that we could play a long play
like "The Corsican Brothers" with it in a single evening.
Tennyson read the play to us at Eaton Place. There were present Henry
Irving, Ellen Terry, William Terriss, Mr. Knowles, who had arranged the
reading, my daughter Edy, who was then about nine, Hallam Tennyson,
_and_ a dog--I think Charlie, for the days of Fussie were not yet.
Tennyson, like most poets, read in a monotone, rumbling on a low note
in much the same way that Shelley is said to have screamed in a high
one. For the women's parts he changed his voice suddenly, climbed up
into a key which he could not sustain. In spite of this I was beginning
to think how impressive it all was, when I looked up and saw Edy, who
was sitting on Henry's knee, looking over his shoulder at young Hallam
and laughing, and Henry, instead of reproaching her, on the broad grin.
There was much discussion as to what the play should be called, and as
to whether the names "Synorix" and "Sinnatus" would be confused.
"I don't think they will," I said, for I thought this was a very small
matter for the poet to worry about.
"I do!" said Edy in a loud clear voice, "I haven't known one from the
other all the time!"
"Edy, be good!" I whispered.
Henry, mischievous as usual, was delighted at Edy's independence, but
her mother was unutterably ashamed.
"Leave her alone," said Henry, "she's all right."
Tennyson at first wanted to call the play "The Senator's Wife," then
thought of "Sinnatus and Synorix," and finally agreed with us that "The
Cup" was the best as it was the simplest title.
The production was one of the most beautiful things that Henry Irving
ever accomplished. It has been described again and again, but none of
the descriptions are very successful. There was a vastness, a
spaciousness of proportion about the scene in the Temple of Artemis
which I never saw again upon the stage until my own son attempted
something like it in the Church Scene that he designed for my
production of "Much Ado About Nothing" in 1903.
A great deal of the effect was due to the lighting. The gigantic figure
of the many-breasted Artemis, placed far back in the scene-dock, loomed
through a blue mist, while the foreground of the picture was in yellow
light. The thrilling effect always to be gained on the stage by the
simple expedient of a great number of people doing the same thing in the
same way at the same moment, was seen in "The Cup," when the stage was
covered with a crowd of women who raised their arms above their heads
with a large, rhythmic, sweeping movement and then bowed to the goddess
with the regularity of a regiment saluting.
At rehearsals there was one girl who did this movement with peculiar
grace. She wore a black velveteen dress, although it was very hot
weather, and I called her "Hamlet." I used to chaff her about wearing
such a grand dress at rehearsals, but she was never to be seen in any
other. The girls at the theater told me that she was very poor, and that
underneath her black velveteen dress, which she wore summer and winter,
she had nothing but a pair of stockings and a chemise. Not long after
the first night of "The Cup" she disappeared. I made inquiries about
her, and found that she was dying in hospital. I went several times to
see her. She looked so beautiful in the little white bed. Her great
eyes, black, with weary white lids, used to follow me as I left the
hospital ward, and I could not always tear myself away from their dumb
beseechingness, but would turn back and sit down again by the bed. Once
she asked me if I would leave something belonging to me that she might
look at until I came again. I took off the amber and coral beads that I
was wearing at the time and gave them to her. Two days later I had a
letter from the nurse telling me that poor Hamlet was dead--that just
before she died, with closed eyes, and gasping for breath, she sent her
love to her "dear Miss Terry," and wanted me to know that the tall
lilies I had brought her on my last visit were to be buried with her,
but that she had wiped the coral and amber beads and put them in
cotton-wool, to be returned to me when she was dead. Poor "Hamlet"!
Quite as wonderful as the Temple Scene was the setting of the first act,
which represented the rocky side of a mountain with a glimpse of a
fertile table-land and a pergola with vines growing over it at the top.
The acting in this scene all took place on different levels. The hunt
swept past on one level; the entrance to the temple was on another. A
goatherd played upon a pipe. Scenically speaking, it was not Greece, but
Greece in Sicily, Capri, or some such hilly region.
Henry Irving was not able to look like the full-lipped, full-blooded
Romans such as we see in long lines in marble at the British Museum, so
he conceived his own type of the blend of Roman intellect and sensuality
with barbarian cruelty and lust. Tennyson was not pleased with him as
Synorix! _How_ he failed to delight in it as a picture I can't conceive.
With a pale, pale face, bright red hair, gold armor and a tiger-skin, a
diabolical expression and very thin crimson lips, Henry looked handsome
and sickening at the same time. _Lechery_ was written across his
forehead.
The first act was well within my means; the second was beyond them, but
it was very good for me to try and do it. I had a long apostrophe to the
goddess with my back turned to the audience, and I never tackled
anything more difficult. My dresses, designed by Mr. Godwin, one of them
with the toga made of that wonderful material which Arnott had printed,
were simple, fine and free.