More matter for a May morning...

May seems to have rocketed by and we're almost at June already.  I'm working this month - invigilating exams at the school where I used to teach - and so I've had very little time to do any serious Benson-ing apart from reading and re-reading things with a view to finding out more about rehearsals.  

I've also been hunting this week for something I was sure I'd read earlier in the year relating to the seriousness with which the Benson Company approached their rehearsals. And it took some finding.  {Keeping better track of what I'm reading is one of the things I am trying to work on. An excellent  workshop with Oskar Jensen, as part of the Hexham Book Festival, served as a reminder recently that I am not always organised enough when it comes to noting down references!) The 'half-remembered' anecdote eluded me for quite some time but I finally tracked it down to the biographical writing of Arthur Machen - 'Things Near and Far' (1923)

Machen is probably best known today as a writer of supernatural, fantasy and horror fiction.  Among his writings are 'The Great God Pan' which  Stephen King rated as one of the best horror stories written in the English language.  Machen is not, at first sight at least, a very obvious 'Merry Shrew'. However, after the death of his wife in 1899, Machen made an unexpected leap from decadent fin-de-siecle novelist to Shakespearean actor, joining Benson's company in 1901 as they were coming to the end of their season in London.  

Machen's account of his theatrical career is particularly interesting because he joins the lowest ranks of the company as a mature man - nearly forty - rather than someone fresh from school, and his inherent literary skill enables him to really give a flavour of the way the company worked on a day to day basis. His description of  being taken through hurried rehearsals for that evening's Merry Wives of WIndsor by an assistant stage manager (possibly Garnet Holme?) is a perfect example.  Having been cast as Nym on Saturday, he found himself having to learn the lines on the train from Stratford to Worcester on Sunday.

(...)the next morning [I] came to the one and only rehearsal.  It was not on the stage, more important things were happening there, but in the travellers’ samples rooms of one of the Worcester inns. Of course, there was no scenery, no costumes, no “props” of any kind.  A few chairs indicated the set, quite sufficiently, I may say, to a man of experience, but dubiously enough to a man of next to no experience.  Thus when it came to my last exit, the Assistant Stage-Manager gave his instructions somewhat as follows:

“After you have said the last words to Page, turn round and go up the flight of steps LC here, between these chairs.  When you have got to the top, turn again and say to Page over his shoulder, “My name is Nym and Falstaff loves your wife.” Then exit left, along the terrace.”  (...)

“Mr Rodney will come on on that cue from the Upper entrance, where the table is, and you go up to him and meet him Centre, and say so-and-so and then he speaks the line so-and-so and you cross to the Right…” with much more to the same effect. 

As an example of a scratch rehearsal of an existing play in the repertoire, it gives a sense of how newcomers were taken through their roles.  However,  Machen is also at pains to point out that, in the case of a newer production, things were not set in stone and that, in fact, Benson remained open to other peoples' ideas about how scenes might be played.

(...)[Benson's] way was not to come down to the theatre with things cut and dried in his head, with every intonation, every bit of business and every position settled immutably beforehand, but rather to approach the play, scene by scene, with a liberal and open spirit.  The main conception he doubtless brought with him, but any light he could find in the process of rehearsal he would welcome heartily, no matter whether it came from one of the older brethren or from the newest member of the company.  (pg 164)

Interestingly, Machen was in the Company at the same time as Walter Shaw Sparrow - both write about the Stratford performance of King John which was staged in 1901, and the anecdote I'd half-remembered - and have now  concerns a rehearsal of the play on the Memorial Theatre Stage and a discussion about possible 'business' :

The scene was the discovery of the dead body of Prince Arthur.  I had to say “What wilt thou…” whereon Hubert furiously interposed “ My Lord Essex” And then I had to draw away the cloak away from the corpse and exclaim, “Who killed this Prince?”

And thereupon, a debate arose.  Should the words be spoke before the removal of the cloak? Should the cloak be removed before the uttering of the line? Should word and action be simultaneous? The point was discussed with the utmost earnestness, as a matter of vital importance, and I. feeling that I was in mighty deep waters, suggested in all humility that I should speak the line with an indicative gesture and that Hubert should step forward, appalled, and remove the cloak and discover the body of the Prince.   

But this started another subsidiary debate and the rehearsal breaking off at this point, Brydone (Hubert) and Frank Rodney (Falconbridge) were left on the Stratford stage, wandering up and down, and wondering in muttered undertones, whether it would be within the limits of stage propriety for Hubert to snatch that cloak away.  Their faces were grave, earnest and perplexed.  

Outside in the sunshine by the Avon, I encountered ‘Pa’ ,  He looked at me with a certain waggishness in his eye, as if he suspected bewilderment on my part, and said, “Well, Mr Machen, what do you think about it yourself?”

Machen also appears in an episode in Matheson Lang's autobiography 'Mr Woo Looks Back'.

My first real part with Benson was Bolingbroke in Henry VI part 3*  For this I had to learn a long incantation by which the old charlatan was supposed to raise spirits from the dead. (...)  Another member of the company was Arthur Machen (...). Benson, knowing Machen’s interest in magic, black and white, asked him to give me a form of incantation that would be suitable.  This Machen taught me: a long, Latin invocation which took me a terrible time to learn.

When we came to the first night, Machen wished me luck.“But be careful of that invocation,” he said.  “It’s a real one, you know.  Goodness knows what may rise when you speak it.”

I went on stage rather taken aback by this, I must confess, what with the spooky nature of the scene and its weird setting, I was quite prepared for anything horrible to happen.   Nothing did, however, but for nights after we got the play started. Machen used to come into the wings and watch.  I think he firmly believed that at any moment I might raise the devil.

(*actually HVI part 2)

Machen would later write the short story which inadvertently inspired the 'Angel of Mons' myth during World War I at around the time that Benson became fascinated with the ideas of Spiritualism, fervently believing he had seen his son Eric at the Western Front on the day the young man was killed.  

Machen remarried in 1903, having met his second wife Dorothie Purefoy Huddleston whilst they were both on tour with the Benson Company.

April updates

After a couple of days of marathon gap-filling, I now have just 13.4 % left to find across all companies.  That's 87% complete - and a whole 6% better than this time last week.  Scouring the pages of The Stage on the British Newspaper Archive has really filled in a lot of gaps, although, frustratingly, some of it is really badly scanned and in places it is illegible.

A pretty good week new book-wise as well, as I've finally managed to track down a copy of Walter Shaw Sparrow's 'Memories of Life and Art' which has a couple of chapters concerning  his time with the Benson Company in the 1880s and 90s.   Sparrow married actress Ada Ferrar, who was also a member of the Company, playing leading roles, and his chapters emphasise some of the specific difficulties and extra expenses facing touring actresses at that time.  He also makes some interesting points about the London critical reception of the Globe season of A Midsummer Night's Dream and some insights into the problems of 'fit-up' touring, including collapsing scenery!  

The following story (mentioned briefly by Trewin, who used Sparrow as a source) seems particularly appropriate for the week following the Shakespeare Birthday commemorations in Stratford:

" It was during a Birthday Celebration at Stratford-on-Avon. (Beerbohm) Tree had come down in state to be a planet. On the morning of the great day, after breakfast, he and Mrs Benson stood together outside the Shakespeare Hotel.  The town was festooned and beflagged. Tree gazed at the decorations, waved a long right arm with elegant approval and in a voice modulating from a coo into a caressing purr, said: "Ah! is all of this ...for... me?"   "A little of it is intended for Shakespeare, I think," said Mrs Benson.  And Tree stared hard at a Union Jack; but no inspiration came to him. His impromptus needed hours of patient cogitation."

Finally, my trip to see the Durham First Folio was amazing.  Because of its damaged condition, the decision has been made not to rebind it for the time being and so, as well as the main book block, several loose pages are on display in double sided Perspex cases, allowing visitors to see far more of the 'real' book than is usually the case.  I must admit to goosebumps, looking at the page that listed the actors in the Company.  The exhibition is on until November and is completely free to visit: I will definitely be back - probably more than once!

Discover secrets of stolen Shakespeare First Folio - Durham University

Rehearse your parts...

I've been thinking a lot about rehearsal this week - specifically the 're' bit - because I've been re-reading 'The Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory Machine" by Marvin A Carlson, which is a fascinating exploration of the (if you think about it!) utterly bizarre act of memory that is theatre performance.  It is one of several books which have some relevance to my current thoughts about the Benson company and their repertoire and this week I've been trying to pull it all into some coherent form that might actually make sense to someone else.

I keep coming back to the fact that so little has been recorded about the day-to-day business of being in a company.  Piecing it together often comes down to sifting though various autobiographical accounts and trying to pick meat from bones.  Almost every Merry Shrew wants to tell their funny story of a performance when something went hysterically wrong but very few give more than a scrap or two about how life went on day to day.  

O.B. Clarence at least intersperses his anecdotes with a few little nuggets in No Complaints:

"Benson himself, of course, rigidly attended and supervised all rehearsals.  At midday Charles Richmond, his dresser and factotum, would appear with a large bag of buns for a short lunch interval.  It was an established practise that anyone who was late for rehearsal had to subscribe a shilling to the 'Bun Fund." (pg41)

"No one could be of the Benson company for a day without feeling the urge to 'mark, read and learn'.  We were constantly rehearsing, parts were constantly changed round, we were always under observation and supervision.  When one got a better part it was a pat on the back, an encouragement to learn and strive more." (pg 51)

I suspect a closer 'mining' of my bookshelf might uncover a few more.

In an attempt to plug more gaps, (with 16% still left to find...) I've started to use an alternative newspaper archive - newspapers.com - partly because it has access to the Manchester Guardian. I managed to fill in around thirty gaps, including some which had eluded me for a long time. (Canterbury and Kettering proving particularly stubborn)   Inevitably, most April and May references to Benson focus on Stratford and whilst hunting in vain for some signs of the South Company, I found this gem in the Daily Mail for 26th April 1911:

1911 is an excellent year for Bensonian photographs - most of the 'outside the theatre' photos from Stratford date from 1911, and the Festival had a full, illustrated write-up in the Windsor magazine.  But this one is a gem.  It is difficult to surmise exactly WHAT is being rehearsed here - I suspect it might be little more than a bit of theatrical posturing! Dorothy Green's fashionable ensemble and hat also somewhat limits her movements, although I confess to some envy of those lovely shoes! However, it was lovely to find because of its incongruity - 'Shakespeare' poses, in day-clothes, surrounded by the flotsam and jetsam of what I assume to be the yard of the Shakespeare Hotel?

Tomorrow is 23rd April.  Celebrating by visiting the newly opened Shakespeare First Folio exhibition in Durham and then on Friday I'm 'zooming'  in on the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust 'Performing Shakespeare's Women' one day conference.  A former colleague of mine is in Stratford this week on holiday and, knowing how much I love it, is keeping me furnished with photographs - it looks as lovely as it always is in the spring, (although the slightly soggy Morris dancers outside the Birthplace looked a little unimpressed with the April showers...!)

Dukedom enough...

The RSC are currently on tour with their shortened version of The Tempest, which is coming to Newcastle's Northern Stage (formerly The Playhouse) next week and I've bought a ticket for the Wednesday matinee, partly out of loyalty to the RSC visiting Newcastle, and partly in hope that this might be the Tempest I'll love.  I've yet to see a version of this play which really thrilled me - which is strange, because I adore it on the page.  I've seen wonderful performances - notably Simon Russell Beale as first Ariel to Alec Mc Cowan's Prospero in 1993 and then, more than twenty years later as Prospero,  David Calder in 1998 and Philip Voss on tour in 2001. I've also seen an incredible ballet version, staged by Birmingham Royal Ballet as part of the Shakespeare Celebrations in 2016.  (I missed out on both Patrick Stewart and Alex Kingston. Stewart's fame caused the production sell out in minutes when it came to Newcastle and Alex Kingston was post Covid anxiety and inability to travel.)  

Benson, as far as I can tell, didn't ever play Prospero, Caliban being considered the better (shorter?) role.  Sadly, there isn't an extant Tempest prompt book, just that interesting picture with the fish...

Prospero's famous quote about his library has been on my mind all week, partly because I've had occasion to go back through my MA files from ten years ago and I've been astounded at the volume of reading I must've done over the three years. I've unearthed several there's lever arch files stuffed with material, some of which, if has to be said,  I no longer even understand!  And I've also recognised that although I already have a lot of books about theatre - some of them popular, some academic - I'll never have all that I want or need...

There's been a bit of a buying frenzy this week - and a bit of a reading frenzy too - in an attempt to bring myself up to date a bit more with the world of theatre research.  I'm hampered by the lack of a university library to access documents and journals and I'm also aware that I'm rapidly running out of shelf space - there's a lot of stuff piled up at the bottom of bookcases awaiting some rationalisation and there's at least four more books on their way here, ordered since yesterday! The rabbit holes of Victorian portable theatres and English Theatre in Wales are beckoning...

And in the midst of searching down another rabbit hole - Railway development and theatrical touring - I suddenly found myself reading my own words: Dr Hannah Manktellow's PhD thesis on Provincial Shakespeare cites ME in her chapter on Shakespeare touring, from my Theatre Notebook Essay!!!! To say I was flabbergasted would be an understatement.  I'm listed in footnotes along with some of my research/theatre history heroes - something I wrote, sitting at this desk, never imagining for a minute I'd be considered to be knowledgeable enough to be considered as a citation!

It felt like a bit of a message, to be honest.  I'm not usually one for horoscopes ("the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves...") but my horoscope last Sunday in that oh so erudite organ, The Sunday Post, suggested that this was the time to start doing 'that thing you know you are meant to do.'  

There's just the small matter of tidying up and re-organising my dukedom first...

UPDATE: The Tempest was a bit of a 'curate's egg', to be honest. Loved Ariel and Caliban, Prospero and Miranda were good, but there was rather too much 'shouting the words very quickly' for my liking and some bizarre pronoun/gender mangling : King/mother? Why not change it to Queen - they'd changed 'brother' for 'sister' to make Antonio female...although she was still called Antonio?? The most interesting part was watching the doubling costume changes - costumes and set were excellent and it was great to see how the ship-hat was used -  I'd seen it being made in Stratford on the Costume Tour. However, dashed home in time to catch the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust research conversation - an interview with Dame Judi Dench - and to hear her utterly sublime rendition of Viola's speech 'I left no ring with her...' Every word  meant something. An absolute privilege to witness.  A great reminder that not all new things are good things!

Oh Brave New World!

Somehow, remarkably, it is already two weeks since I arrived back from Stratford.  I'm not sure why time is rushing past so quickly - I naively thought it would slow down once I'd left work, but instead it seems to be galloping onwards and incredibly, we're already into March. 

This week I've been working thorough the events of the 1913/14 Canadian and American tour by Benson and the 'Stratford upon Avon Players' .  Expecting to have to try and recreate the tour from scratch, I was astounded to see that someone had beaten me to it and - in the process- saved me a lot of hard work! Marcia Jesson hosts a website dedicated to the actor Basil Rathbone - of Sherlock Holmes fame, among many other film roles. Basil Rathbone: Master of Stage and Screen 

Basil Rathbone c.1920 - NPG

Frank Benson c.1900 - post card image

Rathbone was actually a distant cousin of Benson's - they shared a great great grandfather - and Benson gave him his first acting role. Rathbone was also one of the twenty five actors of the Stratford upon Avon Players Company who set sail for Canada and North America in October 1913, touring 14 plays to 52 different venues in 40 weeks.  He was later to recall in his autobiography "In all I have played fifty-two roles in twenty-three plays of Shakespeare, some forty of these in about twenty of his plays in my first three years in the theater."  The two were also strikingly similar in appearance.

Jesson has produced a comprehensive account of this tour, including venues and performances given, along with selections from newspaper reviews of the time, many of which are far more complimentary than received history would have one believe.  However, the fact remains that the tour was not the success Benson and the Memorial Theatre Board had intended it to be.  

Benson had left Avonport on September 20th, admirably supported by William Savery as his business manager, with Randle Ayrton and Harry Stafford as stage manger and assistant.  Constance Benson, unhappy with the rather limited roles she had been offered, did not accompany her husband on the tour, choosing instead to tour a variety circuit with a play she'd written with H. O. Nicholson.  

The minutes of a Board meeting in early December make it clear that the tour was haemorrhaging money and an overdraft had to be arranged with the bank to keep the Company on the road.  Their initial success in Canada quickly evaporated as they reached Chicago. Newspaper reviews ranged from scathing to downright hostile. 

The reasons for this hostility appears to have initially resulted from a newspaper article in the New York Times, suggesting that the Board of the Memorial Theatre had instructed Benson NOT to appear in New York because 'the general tenor of plays that seems to engross the metropolis at this time (...) It has become a "show town" instead of a theatrical centre for things worthwhile."  This, purportedly, had been communicated as an official announcement, made by Benson himself.

This was 'repudiated entirely' on behalf of the Governors in the American Register, the following Sunday as 'the product of the fertile imagination of an American Press Agent' and (reported The Era) 'entirely without foundation. The Stratford upon Avon Players would, it was claimed, 'have been very pleased to visit New York had a theatre been available at the time they wanted it.'  However, the damage had already been done.  Many reviews in Chicago were brutal, often singling out Benson as a poor actor, too old for the roles he was playing.

J.C.Trewin (regrettably if characteristically not citing his source) relates how Benson addressed his company on stage on November 4th - his 54th birthday - after the disastrous notices: ' They don't like us.  They have every right to their opinion, and I have no doubt it is all my fault, but I beg you not to lose heart, and to continue playing as if the notices had been splendid.'  

By December, Bill Savery was cabling Archibald Flower, chairman of the Board of Directors, to say that the profits they had made in Canada had been wiped out by lacklustre houses in the US.  The Company were initially bailed out by Herbert Clark Hoover - the mining engineer and financier who was later to become the 31st President of the United States - who as a shareholder in the Stratford upon Avon Players sent £200 to Columbus and then contributed a further £200 in return for further shares to keep the Company afloat. Savery was instructed to cable weekly reports to the Company's Henrietta Street offices in order to keep a closer eye on what was happening.

The tour continued until June 1914.  Reviews improved in some cities but audiences were generally small as the account book for 1913/14 bears witness.  All told, the company had travelled just under 12,000 miles in forty weeks (an average tour might see them do 2-4,000 miles), most of it by train, lugging scenery and costumes with them.  Overall, losses topped £1000 - around £150,000 in today's money.

The North American tour would prove to be the final nail in the coffin for Benson and Stratford.  Although he would return to Stratford for the Summer Festival of 1914, it would quickly be overshadowed by the outbreak of war on August 4th.  

I'll take the ghost's word...

Stratford is always full of ghosts.  You can't move for them.  (The RSC have now started running 'Ghost tours' on Sunday afternoons - predictably all fully booked when I tried to get on one.  Probably just as well - who knows who'd pop up to greet me?)

I'm just back from a more spring-like Stratford - my second visit since Christmas - drawn back by the need to see 'Hamlet' - or perhaps more accurately,  Anton Lesser as the Ghost. Lesser is one of the last links with 'my' RSC of the 1980s, of those glorious Newcastle seasons and the golden lads and lasses who would come and make our streets glitter with Shakespeare.  And he was wonderful: mercurial, sharp, ageless, restless and oh so clear.  His 'First Player' was like his Feste, only 40 years on.  

It was a unique production - not least because they'd set it on a sinking ship - and there were some things I disliked about it - not least the addition of lines from RIII for Gertrude and the 'dancing' (pointless?) extras.  However, Luke Thallon's Hamlet was excellent: his somewhat halting delivery of those (oh so familiar!) lines made them seem fresh and newly coined and  I got some sense again of just how powerful and devastating Hamlet can be when you don't know it like the back of your hand... and there was a sense of theatrical tradition in at least one bit of business which was taken straight from Mark Rylance's performance in 1989.

There are so many ghosts in the walls of that theatre and, of course, up in the old Memorial Library where the shells of performances hang, pretending they're just costumes.  The RSC again posted the 'Merry Wives' dress for Constance's birthday on Wednesday and I'd already visited it - and the windows - and indulged in a bit of birthday cake! That the Bensons and Bensonians are still commemorated in the theatre is reassuring, although I still don't think the RSC currently make the most of their history or heritage. I've really loved the productions I've seen there in the last two years but I worry that the short run system they are currently working to isn't really helpful for Stratford's survival. More shops and cafes had gone, even since I was there six weeks ago. Guest houses have disappeared from Rother Street and there's still no sign of life at the Shakespeare Hotel. I know February is 'out of season' - and that's always been why I've loved going there at this time of year, but I worry that so much of what made Stratford Stratford is dwindling.  Like so many other towns, it is becoming a ghost of its former self - and if Stratford's cafes and shops can't survive, what hope is there for the rest of the country?

Stratford was sunny on Tuesday and drizzly on Wednesday.  I was booked into the Birthplace Reading Room on Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning - not, of course, anything like the amount of time I'd want to be in there, but I do seem to be getting better at working out how long things will take me to look at.  This time I was exploring the minutes of the board of the 'Stratford upon Avon Players' - the Company that replaced 'F. R. Benson and Co Ltd' from 1913 and dwindled on into the 1920s.  It made for sad, if fascinating reading - the disastrous American tour, the winding up of the company and the  wrangling over who actually owned the costumes, sets and properties that had stood FRB in such good stead for twenty years.  For a while, Stratford and Benson had been synonymous, but by this point his star had waned and Stratford was pulling in a different direction.  (I think the Board had Stratford's best interests at heart - the theatre had to outlive Benson if it was to survive. In today's current economic climate, with COVID era loans to repay and years of dwindling support for the arts in the UK, running a financially successful company whilst staying true to an ideal must be an equal challenge.)

I'd also reserved Matheson Lang's autobiography 'Mr Wu Looks Back'. Lang's photograph was next to Henry Ainley's in Ruth Ellis's book about the Memorial Theatre and their careers ran roughly parallel, although Lang had notably more success as an actor-manager. Over the years, a copy of his book has eluded me - about the only theatrical memoir from the time I've been unable to buy.  Although I'd looked at it before - many many years ago when I was just starting at this and the Reading Room was in its original setting - I'd been preoccupied with just looking for information about Ainley and had not really focused on the other Benson bits. 

Written with intelligence and humour, Lang spins a good yarn: Benson comes across in the stories as a character of wit and some wisdom and Lang's love and respect for both Bensons is clear.  Several of the stories he tells were repeated by J.C. Trewin but there were a few that were new to me: I particularly liked the story of  Oscar Asche daring Lang to perform his small part in 'Twelfth Night' in broad Scots and Lang then having to talk his way out of being sacked in Benson's room immediately afterwards, Benson sending up a cup of tea to George Weir who had dried on stage as the Fool in King Lear, partly a result of the amount of alcohol he'd consumed before going on stage, and Benson attempting to get away with supering in King John at Stratford, only to be recognised by the audience.

Matheson Lang died in Barbados in 1948 and was then buried in Inverness, but I'd wager his ghost was definitely sitting at my elbow on Wednesday morning!

And so home, with the thought that, like Hamlet, I sometimes need a good ghost or two to spur me into action...

A history in all men's lives

I had an unexpected day to myself last week, and I spent part of it printing off all the cuttings I'd saved this month from the American Newspaper Archive and starting to organise my thoughts.

I've mined a rich seam of information about Garnet Holme, memorialised in the Benson windows as 'Stage Master' but who took stage mastery to a whole different level as he masterminded pageants across California and the National Parks of America.  Piecing together a life story from newspapers leaves a lot to be desired, of course, and there are so many things I would love to know which will remain shrouded in history.  I can surmise, I can guess, but I can never know more than those facts and opinions which people bothered to write down.  However, gaps aside, I do feel I am almost ready to put pen to paper and write what I've learned so far, once I've done a final bit of digging around. 

In the rabbit warren that is the Benson company research, there are many side scrapes and another one opened up this week as a result of what I'd found out about Holme. An early part of his career saw him working closely with Harcourt Williams on a series of summer 'pastoral' performances, and this fact has led me to look at Williams in more detail.  A clearly identifiable Merry Shrew on the Benjamin Stone 1900 photograph, he also appears next to  Holme in the photograph of the Shakespeare Memorial Statue.  

Although he did not leave an autobiography (for which I am now quite angry with him!), he did write two books about his experiences as producer at the Old Vic - today he probably would be considered as its 'Artistic Director'.   'Four Years at the Old Vic' and 'Old Vic Saga'  the first of which has been sitting on my bookshelf for around twenty years, just waiting for the right moment to be read. In both books he refers several times to his experiences as a young man beginning his career with Benson.  He writes candidly. tells a good anecdote (even if some of his language is not always politically correct enough for a modern audience!) and I've really enjoyed 'hearing' his 'voice'.   Ironically, the post at the Old Vic was offered just a month after Holmes' untimely death and I'm sure this must have been something that he was thinking about when he accepted it. 

As someone who had one foot in the theatrical past - he writes about seeing Irving at the age of seventeen about a job and his admiration for Benson is clear - he was also clear sighted about the future - a champion of Gielgud. Richardson and Ashcroft, closely following the lead of Harley Granville Barker and interested in the staging ideas of Edward Gordon Craig.  

He went on to have a successful career in films which took him through to his seventies.  As such I've always thought of him as a rather elderly character actor - the fussy diplomat in 'Roman Holiday' for example - and to have him restored to youth through his books has been really refreshing.  

I particularly like this photograph with Margaret Halstan in 'As You Like It' at the Queens Theatre in Manchester, in 1908.  Halstan is also a Merry Shrew: she joined Benson in 1900 and then acted with Alexander and Tree. She and Williams worked together in several plays at the Queens and this is one of several photos of them.   The production featured a running brook, two fountains and three live deer who are memorialised in Harcourt Williams' book:

"The deer used to make their appearance at the beginning of the act when Orlando enters to hang his verse upon a tree.  The herd was in charge of a sinister looking [stage-hand] who would lure them on stage with a paper bag of bread and then, as soon as he had left, the curtain would rise to rapturous applause from the audience who felt they were getting a circus thrown in gratis.  [Richard] Flanagan [the director] one afternoon conceived the notion that Orlando would look well along the deer and asked me to be discovered with them.  The [stage hand]left me in their midst and stood discreetly in the wings,  The curtain rose, but unfortunately the beasts took my crackly paper of verses for another paper bag of bread and  began to chase Orlando, looking as heroic as he could in the circumstances, around the stage.  His heroism was further strained when a stentorian voice reached him from the wings: 'Mind the big beggar don't bit ye'.  And the word was not 'beggar'..."   ('Four Years at the Old Vic' pg 191/2 edited )

At least the deer in the Benson production was a stuffed one!

This time last year, I was heading to Stratford with a heavy cold and chest infection to cough my way through a couple of days of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Winter School.  Having seen the newly announced 25-26 RSC season, it seems unlikely that I will be heading back there at all this year.  Timings and performances do not lend themselves to my usual week in early September and so I'm having to accept that I won't be getting back into the SBT archives any time soon.  I can't complain really, but I will miss my summer-holiday extension and, of course, my lovely cottage!  I've been on this journey for so long now - I first 'discovered' Benson's existence in 1986! - and I'm so grateful for the chance to still be digging in the dust to find such golden moments.

There'll be more from Harcourt Williams, I hope!

EDITED: After writing this, I MAY have just booked a couple of nights in Stratford to see 'Hamlet'... carpe diem!