Take the current when it serves...

My post last week about the shady goings-on of Mr Walter Bentley ended at the point when a young and relatively inexperienced FRB turned up to the Town Hall, Stirling, to join the Company. It was only twelve weeks after this that Benson stepped in after Bentley's disappearance stranded the company in Cupar.  Bentley's 1915 autobiographical piece gives a characteristically plausible and laudable version of what happened:

"The first thing I did on returning to the footlights was to form what has now for years been known as the F.R. Benson's English Shakespearean Co. (...) Mr Benson came to me as a raw recruit with a letter of introduction from somebody in London.  He didn't know anything.  For twelve years we toured the English provinces and the principle cities of Scotland and Ireland.  Everything we did was of a classical nature: Shakespeare and such plays as Richelieu, The Lady of Lyons and Money.  Wilson Barrett was then in London playing The Silver King.  He asked me to take the name part in a company that was being formed to play it in America.  I closed with the offer.  Mr Benson, who had an income of his own, bought my interest in the Company, in which he had been appearing with me, and since then what was originally my Company has been known as his."

However, we've already learned that Mr Bentley could be economical with the truth. This account manages to give the impression that Bentley taught Benson all he knew, implies that they had toured together for twelve years (rather than just twelve weeks!) and  suggests that the transfer of company ownership was a well-considered business transaction which was conducted in an above-board manner.  Bentley also manages to take all the credit as the Company's founder.

In fact, Bentley's Company were playing relatively little Shakespeare at that point - Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Merchant of Venice appearing only sporadically in the weeks leading up to the change of management.  It would be on stage in Hamlet that Bentley and Benson would initially meet - Bentley as the Danish Prince, Benson as a less-than-word-perfect Rosencrantz in a "hideous, straggly yellow wig" which the young actor had optimistically purchased in London before travelling north.

Benson, in writing his memoirs, never shrinks from telling a humorous story against himself and his description of this performance of Hamlet is amongst his best anecdotes:

' Perhaps Hamlet expected some of the words, Rosencrantz certainly expected some of the cues - but neither were forthcoming on this occasion; at least, not the words of Shakespeare as he is wrote.  The actor-manager, who I had not hitherto seen, looked Rosencrantz up and down, turned his back on the audience and said in a loud aside ,"What the hell have you got on your blasted head?" This, as a first greeting, struck me as a little unfriendly, not to say discourteous.

"What the hell have you got on your -------- head?  You look like a --------! Get off the stage and change it, for God's sake!"

I was dignified, and replied by firing off what lines I remembered of my part, with a mental reservation to have it out with the management at the first opportunity.'

Benson got his chance when Bentley sent for him a day or two later and stated the problem clearly:

' "You must be a little more attentive to your make-up.  It's no use my trying to play Hamlet if Rosencrantz comes on in a wig that makes the audience laugh." '

Benson attempted to defend the wig:

" 'It's a very good wig, Mr Bentley.  I paid three guineas for it, and it was recommended by a thoroughly experienced actor, who sold it to me.'

' "Ah, he would (...) Take my advice and give somebody three bob to burn it. Nothing more certain than it will get you into trouble if you wear it again on my stage." '

Benson's pride wasn't just wounded on account of the wig.  He felt that Bentley's actions on stage had fallen short of his own gentlemanly standards, and he wasn't about to let the insult pass without challenge.

 ' "I object to being addressed on the stage in such language as you used to me on Monday night (...) I never allow anyone to be impertinent, even if he happens to be my manager.  I'm considered rather strong and capable of dealing with your insolence as it deserves. ' 

This impressive warning was received with peels of laughter.  'Well, my boy, I do not see that will do you any good, or me either.  (...) If you wear that yellow wig again, there isn't a management on God's earth that wouldn't insult you.   They'd be neglecting their duty as artists if they didn't." '

Reading between the lines, I sense some grudging admiration here at Bentley's good humoured response to his bumptious tyro and perhaps a foreshadowing of some of the conversations Benson himself would later have as manager. 

However, Benson's apprenticeship was cut short: 

'One Monday evening Bentley failed to put in an appearance and Kilpack, the stage manager deputised as Shylock.  Matters were hastening to a climax. (...) I wrote home a lengthy letter saying that I had the opportunity of starting on my own with a company of exceptional ability; that if my father would advance me a hundred pounds, I had no doubt that I would speedily make the fortunes of myself and the family.'

Benson's father sent the cheque - the first of many - and Benson waited for the right moment.  It wasn't long in coming.

The next venue on the tour was in Cupar.  

Bentley did not make an appearance and the local newspaper reported that the Company "were like the play of Hamlet, with Hamlet left out.  Mr Bentley (...) is suffering from acute catarrh of the stomach (...)

His medical adviser has ordered him to take rest at once in the South of France."

The Company were anxious: rumours abounded.  Benson recalls:

"We played the Merchant of Venice twice, Hamlet twice and The Bells twice; but the attention of the company was more concerned with the future prospects of the coming campaign than with the meagre houses that assembled in the barn-like building (...)  By Wednesday, it was ascertained that Bentley had disappeared entirely from his customary haunts and was reported to have escaped his creditors by taking ship to Australia."

Having not been paid, the owners of the hall impounded the sets and costumes and the actors, left without prospect of that week's wages, were stranded.

Benson seized his chance.  The hundred pounds paid the company's wages and settled the debt with the hall.  The eccentric young man in the yellow wig - who'd arrived in Stirling looking like someone who'd been disowned by his family - became their knight in shining armour.

William Mollison, who would eventually be enshrined in the Memorial Theatre windows as Cassius, sent a letter home to his brother 

" Walter Bentley has put the crowning touch to his villainy and left us stranded here (...) However, a young aristo named F.R. Benson who has done a season with Irving and has plenty of the ready, is going to take over the Company..."

If things were not quite as easily settled as all that, Benson at least had the foundations of a theatre company on which to build.  

Bentley, with Willma, his daughter, and wife Melba.

Bentley, contrary to the belief of Benson and others, does not appear to have gone to Australia at all in 1893, but instead went to America where he toured in several plays, including The Silver King.  He returned to England in 1886, setting up another Company in his own name, before going to Australia again in 1891.  In 1901 he returned to Britain and then finally settled permanently in Australia in 1908. He would make a successful career for himself there, going on to found a school of Acting and Elocution and involving himself in the political and social life of Sydney as a highly respected and respectable citizen.

However, there still remained something of the old Bentley about him.  In 1918, at the age of sixty seven, he became a father, marrying the mother of his child a month after the birth.  On the marriage certificate he claimed to be a widower.  His second wife, Florence Grant, was still living in Britain and Dr Wallace comments in a footnote that she found no record of a divorce during her research...

Tragically, Bentley shot himself in 1927, after a long illness had led to severe depression.  It seems a very sad ending for someone so full of life.  Had he been a more honourable gentleman, the Bensonian story might have been a very different one and, despite all his roguery, I have to admit I've grown rather fond of him!

To seek new friends and stranger companies

I've spent the last few weeks working as an exam invigilator at my previous place of employment, seeing a very familiar world from a slightly different view.  The whole point of exam invigilation is, of course, vigilance, and so I've done a passable impression of a meerkat look-out for several hours at a time, three days a week.

However, the huge advantage of invigilation is that it gives one a great deal of largely uninterrupted thinking time, and one morning this week, as I patrolled and scrutinised,  I found myself also wondering about the nature of the original Benson company. In the light of re-reading Michael R Booth's 'Theatre in the Victorian Age' over the weekend, I wondered to what extent it fitted his definition of a touring theatre company of the late 19th century.   Little did I know what that random passing-thought would lead to...!  

(WARNING: This is  going to be a VERY LONG post.  You might want to go and make a cup of tea/coffee and grab a biscuit to sustain you before continuing...!)

I knew the basic story  - how Walter Bentley had left his Company 'high and dry' in Cupar, Fife, doing a 'moonlight flit' to avoid his creditors, leaving the relatively inexperienced Benson to step in and save the day,  armed with a cheque from his father, but I'd never really given Bentley himself much thought than that.  I also knew that Bentley resurfaced a few years later, running another touring company and that his 'missing years' were spent successfully playing the lead in Henry Arthur Jones's play 'The Silver King'. 

J.C. Trewin  dispatches Bentley abruptly in two pages, effectively paraphrased from FRB's autobiography, and he comes across as an archetypal crooked Actor- Manager.  However, on re-reading 'My Memoirs', Benson's considered character-analysis of Bentley paints a much less stereotypical portrait 

"A clever emotional actor, tall, of good appearance, with an expressive face and telling voice, witty and clever, he made a great success of Clarence in Irving's production of Richard III (...) This success, and the adulation of friends and admirers, especially those of the other sex, led him to neglect his profession and his business.  His art work suffered much in consequence: its drudgery did not have the same attraction for him as the primrose path of dalliance, and in its treading he recked not his own rede. (...) A very sensitive nature, easily moved one way or the other, with strong passions and high spirits, his early training and circumstances had somehow failed to develop the best side of his character.  His various escapades - running away to sea etc - seem to have attached a black mark to his name in the family records..." 

Benson's careful choice of words here does hint at a bit of a "We could an if we would" backstory - that 'etc'! - and having done a bit of digging, I think Bentley's career up to the point where he abandons his company to their own fates is probably worthy of a novel.  

The son of a prominent Free Scottish Church minister, his real name was William Begg. He did run away to sea at seventeen and then (according to his own account at least!) 'jumped ship' in Australia and evaded the authorities by hiding on a stock farm in North Queensland for three years.  Making his way from there to Dunedin in New Zealand, where two of his brothers had already settled, William found himself drawn to amateur theatre through his brother, Frederick and. bitten by the acting bug, joined a professional company in Auckland.  They were looking for a financial 'angel' and offered him the chance of some small roles in return.  From there, having been unable to find further work in Australia, he returned to London in 1874 and took a role for £1 10s a week, playing at the Court Theatre.  The influence of his aunt, Emily Faithfull, a noted campaigner for Women's Rights, appears to have led to his employment with Henry Irving at the Lyceum - a fact which, like Benson, he would use in his own publicity for many subsequent years.

"I was with Irving for three and a half years.  I began by playing all sorts of parts.  After I had been with him a year, I became his juvenile lead. (...) We were doing Richard III at the time we split. I was playing Clarence.  I was credited with making a hit in the recital of the dream.  At any rate, the papers and the public were talking about me.  Irving didn't like it.  He manoeuvred the lights and the scenes(...) in such a way as to kill my scenes. I did not know then what he did.  I merely felt there was something wrong.  Later, I saw quite clearly the precise nature of the trick that had been played on me."

I have to record a debt of gratitude here to the late Dr Sue-Anne Wallace who was Bentley's granddaughter, for the discovery of a three page biographical article in the 1915 Theatre Magazine, published in Australia and available here : Theatre Magazine 1 October 1915 .Wallace's own open access essay makes for fascinating reading Walter Bentley, Scottish Tragedian: Australasia’s Equivocal Theatre Migrant | SpringerLink as does her article on the Australian Theatre Heritage website: Theatrical Portraits of Walter Bentley - Theatre Heritage Australia.  

However, neither Bentley's nor Wallace's account mentions the huge scandal of a court case which was widely reported by the British press in the final weeks of December 1881 and the early part of 1882, a scandal which may partly explain why he found himself so financially embarrassed by 1883 and which might also account for his decision to emigrate to Australia for the second time in his life.

In December 1881, Bentley was embroiled in a paternity suit, pursued by an actress called Josephine Hubert who alleged that he was the father of her daughter born “as a consequence of relations which came to subsist between them in Edinburgh and London” and for whom she was asking a settlement of £25 a year - around £2,600 today.   

In November 1875 Josephine Hubert had been appearing at the Royal Princess Theatre in Nicholson Square and was renting "a large parlour and a nice little room at the front" at 10 Hill Place, from John Inglis, an out-of-work-chairmaker and his wife, Elizabeth.  

Called to give evidence at the trial, six years later, Mrs Inglis commented that Bentley had been a very frequent visitor to her lodger's parlour - Bentley, at that time, was on tour with Irving in Edinburgh. He had visited at least twice a day, for a fortnight, sometimes arriving for breakfast or tea, and always for supper and often leaving after the household had retired to bed.  Mrs Inglis told the court that she had caught the couple in a compromising position on at least one occasion: on opening the door to the parlour one evening around nine, Bentley had shouted at her, “For God’s sake, Mrs Inglis! Don't come in now!”. In the moment before closing the door again, she caught a glimpse of Hubert sitting in an armchair, with Bentley kneeling in front of her, his right hand around her waist and his left “where it should not have been.”

The week after this, Hubert had been unwell and so had not been at the theatre and Bentley had visited her bedroom ' for at least an hour'. Mrs Inglis also stated that he had stayed over night on at least one occasion.  Hubert suggested that Bentley had plied her with brandy and then been 'inappropriately intimate' although he assured her they would be married.

Bentley as Hamlet

Bentley, by the time of the trial, was married to someone else and  had become a well-known actor on the Scottish touring circuit, with a Company of his own.  His response to the allegations was to protest his complete innocence: “I was never alone with her”, “I certainly never used familiarities with her”, “I only saw her twice” and “My behaviour towards her was not beyond the courtesy due to an utter stranger”.  

The dates of the child's birth didn't match up to the alleged affair either, although Hubert protested that they had resumed the relationship later in London when Bentley had taken her to 'a house of dubious repute'. She also alleged that she had contacted Bentley several times in 1876, that he had given her £5 and had visited her lodgings where he had sat with the child on his knee, that he had given her a signed photograph of himself and a ring and told her they would be married.

Bentley denied all of this and said the first he'd known of the child was when he started to get "annoying letters" from Hubert - writing as herself and then, later, with disguised handwriting, in the names of others, acting on her behalf. 

Bentley's defence lawyer then produced another actor -Evelyn Bellew - who stated he had slept with Hubert six months after the events in Edinburgh, but denied Hubert's claim that they were engaged to be married. Hubert had apparently later written to him claiming he was the father of the child - although the baby was born full-term less than eight months after that relationship had ended. 

In summing up, Bentley's counsel pronounced that "A review of the whole story of the pursuer (Hubert) and her self-contradictions showed that this was one of the most trumped-up cases ever brought before the Court." and that Hubert had "absolutely failed to prove that Bentley had anything to do with the paternity of this child."

The implication that Hubert was promiscuous and that she was misrepresenting her child's paternity for gain led to her losing the case.  However, the judge, in passing judgement, refused to award the defendant costs because he felt the testimony of Elizabeth Inglis proved that Bentley had not told the truth about his relationship with Hubert.

The Aberdeen Press and Journal reported that the defence believed that "this action had been brought by an enemy to injure [the] defender."  Initially, however, it would seem that the court case had the opposite effect. On the day after the judgement was delivered, Bentley gave an evening of dramatic readings at the Edinburgh Literary Institute where, according to the Dundee Evening Telegraph, "there was a good attendance, a large proportion of those present being ladies, and Mr Bentley was well-received."  His reception on the following Saturday in Glasgow was reported in the North British Daily Mail  "When he appeared upon the platform, he received quite an ovation, the cheers being continued for about two minutes."  He continued to tour Scotland, with a programme of readings, to largely full audiences.  Some venues, however, were less welcoming and there was a feeling in places like Bonnyrigg, for instance, that Mr Bentley was not the sort of act they should be welcoming as part of their lecture series after all.  

In the meantime, actor Kyrle Bellew - (brother of Evelyn and also a former member of Irving's Company) took to the pages of 'The Era' to protest his own lack of involvement in the case:

and Josephine Hubert submitted a re-claiming note - essentially an appeal against the judgement.

By the end of March, mention was being made of a tour of 'Mr Walter Bentley's Shakespeare Company' with the Stage reporting that engagements had been made for a tour beginning in Reading on April 10th.  

At the beginning of May, the appeal agreed with the original court decision, but Bentley did not emerge well from it.  The panel felt that "there was a melancholy exhibition of falsehood on both sides" with one member going so far as to say that Bentley had told 'disgraceful falsehood' and a downright lie.

By then, Bentley was back on the road, touring Scotland and later England with a range of plays, including Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice, among other popular classics. 

However, a bit of further digging has revealed that Bentley might have been right about the motive behind the case.  When cross-examined about why she had approached an Aberdeen solicitor about the case after such a lapse of time, Hubert said a friend - Mrs Raisbeck Robinson, known professionally as Annie Baldwin  - had told her to do so.  The defence asked Hubert if she knew there had been a quarrel between Mrs Robinson and Mr Bentley, to which she replied 'No'. 

The 'Quarrel' had happened in July 1881, and led to Mr Raisbeck Robinson - theatre lessee and husband Annie Baldwin - suing Bentley for slander,  demanding £500 for the loss of his 'good name' as a result of a comment Bentley had made during a bizarre event at a performance at Her Majesty's Theatre and Opera House, Aberdeen in July 1881.  The event was reported in some detail in several newspapers:

Edinburgh Evening News 1/9/1881

( I love the line about certain ominous sounds...)

Raisbeck Robinson, an amateur performer and a solicitor, claimed that Bentley had actually told the audience that he'd requested a nightly settling of wages because the manager was a lawyer and therefore couldn't be trusted.  

In fact, the Dundee Evening Telegraph reported - five days after the incident in the theatre - that the Robinsons had been taken to court by the Landlord of the Theatre because they owed £189 10s in rent and the Sheriff hearing the case ordered that theatrical property and effects including scenery and costumes should be sequestered and the lease terminated. Perhaps Bentley's comment was more truthful than slanderous.  By August 10th 1881, Robinson's name appeared amongst a published list of bankrupts. Creditors were owed upwards of £1500, amongst them Walter Bentley, still owed £28 in takings from the twelve performance in Aberdeen. The Robinsons were told to surrender the key to both the theatre and their house, so that assets might be seized. They refused and a protracted series of increasingly bizarre court appearances by Robinson and Annie Baldwin ensued, resulting eventually in the Robinsons being prohibited from entering the theatre at all.   

On Saturday the 27th of September, Robinson was arrested, having broken into the theatre shortly before midnight by smashing a window with his walking stick.  He was charged with 'malicious mischief' and ordered to pay a fine of 40s or face seven days in prison.  The Weekly Free Press and Aberdeen Herald reflected that " Darkness has reigned in the Thespian temple at Aberdeen for more than a week, and a solitary watchman keeps his lonely vigils in the silent theatre.  Outside its walls, comedy, tragedy and farce have been on the bills..." (1/10/1881)

It must be wondered whether there was more that a little 'malicious mischief' in Baldwin's advice to Hubert. In any case, Robinson's case against Bentley was dismissed.

The following fulsome advertisement appearing in the Stirling Observer on January 4th  1883:

This would be the week that Benson joined the Company....but that account will have to wait for the next instalment!  We've had QUITE enough drama for the time being!

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.