Afore Michaelmas...

I've been missing in action from this blog for the last few months but work has been going on in the background and although Michaelmas Term is now well and truely begun, I thought I'd do a quick update of what happened 'afore Michaelmas'.  

The main thing I've had to contend with this summer has been the complete 're-vamp' of the British Newspaper Archive website - replete with teething troubles - and I can't say I find it particularly improved.  The new 'name search' in particular is really unhelpful: I've found I get better results using a name as a 'phrase' because then the site searches for words together.  There is no longer the facility to save a search to return to - apparently it is quicker to re-search (quicker for who exactly?)  The  page view no longer allows you to jump to a specific page of a newspaper either - you now have to scroll from where you are through every page. Anyway, with some cursing and one notable moment when they told me I had exceeded my monthly allowance of page views - there's a monthly ALLOWANCE??? - I think I've managed to get it back to more or less doing what I wanted it to do. 

I've spent the last couple of weeks trying to find out more about some of the other companies that were touring in the 1880s and 1890s.  I've become particularly interested in George Lawrence Smythe who has proved to be pretty elusive to pin down.  During the late 1870s and early 1880s, he toured a company of around twenty actors with a fit-up theatre to Corn Exchanges, Town Halls and Assembly Rooms around the country.  His activity was not significant enough to warrant much mention in The Stage or The Era so I've had to hunt around provincial newspapers to find details of his itinerary and rep and I've still got rather a lot of gaps in it. 

Smythe may have been born in Newcastle upon Tyne - the 1881 census  gives this as his place of birth, but there are no other records I've been able to find, suggesting that Smythe may well have been a nom-de-theatre. He started out in stock companies, ran a couple of provincial theatres as Lessee and then embarked on a touring career in 1878, initially building a company to support Mr W.H. Pennington - an actor who had been involved the Charge of the Light Brigade and who appears to have recited Tennyson's poem after performances as a 'extra' turn - and then going on to feature several other 'leading' performers, some of whom were not as starry as their billing might suggest. 

Not himself a leading man, Smythe appears to have played roles such as Claudius, Iago and Mercutio and his repertory consisted of the 'big' tragedies - Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo & Juliet and sometimes As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing. His company would generally spend three days in a location and tended to stick to the old 'stock circuits' with a particular focus on the home counties and East Anglia.

Reviews of the company are few and far between.  Those I've been able to find generally find the company in its earlier days to be professional, adaptable and well-appointed in terms of scenery, costumes and props.  Smythe's intentions for the company are clear from the wording of his advertisements:

Smythe also makes an appearance in an number of other newspaper reports, which give more of an impression of the company than reviews do.  There are several county court cases reported - two from people who are dismissed by Smythe and feel they have wages owing and one, brought by Smythe against a stage hand who threatened him over wages. One particular report, concerning an unpaid billposter from Weymouth who went backstage to demand his money, descended into farce as one of the actors, already costumed and made-up as Shylock pursued the threatening man through the waiting audience and into the hands of the police.  Another report concerns Smythe coming out of character as Claudius in  Act IV of Hamlet to berate the management of the hall in which the company was performing for a clash of bookings. 

The company appears to have fallen on hard times by 1884 and Smythe attempted to reinvent it by moving away from Shakespeare, but without much success.  A later review of the company performing at St Neots in 1884 describes them as 'exceedingly weak' with acting which 'would do discredit to a third-rate amateur company' and relates an altercation between the company's ticket checker and the audience which led to a local policeman removing the ticket checker.

Smythe and his company seemingly vanish after April 1885 and although he did advertise in The Era for new company members, I've been unable to find any further record of him.  He's of interest because of the type of 'fit-up' touring he was doing and the fact that he took on pupils, as Benson would do later, to work and train with the company.  He's a forgotten name - and face, since there are no portraits of him, but nevertheless, someone who - for a while at least - lived and worked by Shakespeare touring.

A brief visit to Stratford at the start of September was lovely - nothing on at the theatre, sadly, but I did get to the cinema! - a couple of days in the SBT archive and library and a very productive morning in the SI Library.  I looked at some prompt books from Osmond Tearle's two season at Stratford and some really interesting ephemera around the publicity of Tearle's touring.  

And now we're back to 'real work' and I am trying to grapple with writing stuff that makes sense again! 

The Memory be Green...

I missed out May and almost missed June as well! I'm so sorry.  I started writing something and then it got left behind when the world took over, as it so often does.  

I'm struggling to comprehend the fact that the first year of my PhD has almost officially finished.  It seems no time at all that I was in Stratford in September feeling excited and out of my depth.  Still excited, still out of my depth... However, I seem to have been successful enough to be allowed to continue into Year 2.  The Progress Panel meeting I was dreading was actually really supportive and the chance to talk about my project was really helpful.  Sometimes I feel as if I'm just stumbling around in the dark, making up a route as I go along, so getting feedback on my work in progress from an outside eye was very useful.

A couple of serendipitous things happened in June.  I regularly do an ebay search for anything Benson or Greet related, and most of the time the same few items reappear.  However, in June, on two separate occasions, I struck gold.

The first was a very unassuming piece of paper, which had obviously been kept and treasured by someone for a very long time.  It refers to performances in Bristol in June 1888 at the Clifton Zoological Gardens, later better known as Bristol Zoo and contains a wealth of information about the productions - staging and effects, prices of admission and a full cast list.

It had to be mine!!! I love the fact that the AYLI side contains a synopsis of Act 1 for those unfamiliar with the play, as Greet's outdoor version only included the scenes which take place out of doors, a practice that Harcourt Williams and Garnet Holme also adhered to in their productions around the turn of the century.  

However, the excitement did not stop there.  A few days later, I found the most incredible publicity postcards for the Benson production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, from a postcard dealer in Boston, Massachusetts.  Not only have I never seen anything similar before, but the detail of the overprinting of the venue gave me goosebumps, because they are advertising performances in my home town 3,165 miles away from where they ended up:

They must date from 1907 because of the performance dates and are in wonderful condition.  The perforated edge suggests that they were printed as a booklet or part of a larger sheet and then separated.  Were there just these two designs, or were they part of a set?  

The choice of characters seems unusual - Puck and Starveling as Moon, rather than Titania or Bottom.  The Puck illustration seems to have a quite generic Art Nouveau inspired setting, although the texture of the upper part of the costume and the horned headdress is similar to the costume shown in photographs of Nora Nicholson seen here.  The 'Moon' postcard is unmistakably H.O. Nicholson, accompanied by... the dog! 

Sadly, there's no printer credited anywhere on the card - the back is just a standard divided back postcard - but there is a name, presumably of the artist 'Montravel' . Although I've not found evidence to  confirm this,  I did wonder if they might have been painted by May de Montravel Edwardes, a young watercolour artist studying at a private art school in South Kensington in 1906-7, prior to her acceptance to the Royal Academy.  There are very few examples of her work available on-line but the background blues and the shadows in the 'Starveling' one and clear, almost illustrative outline seems very similar. Benson's art-world connections are well documented through his brother, William and it is possible that this commission came about through that connection.   

Whether or not these are May Edwardes's works, they are absolutely delightful and I can't believe that I have managed to bring them all the way back home to where they started from!  Like the Greet flyer, someone has treasured these as souvenirs, perhaps keeping the memory green of a particularly happy theatre visit.

"and the weather, and the wars, and the King..."

Easter holidays and so back in Stratford very briefly this week to see Henry V  and check out the changes to the Swan gallery exhibition, which reopened a couple of weeks ago.  

There'd been several major changes of costume since my last visit and I was eager to see if they'd changed the contents of the Benson cabinet. Delighted to see this dress, which is also mentioned in M.R. Holmes' catalogue:

Dress of grey velvet powdered with small stars and with extensions of black velvet on border of skirt and  ends of hanging sleeves. Close set-in sleeves of black velvet with white cuffs. Applique girdle of bright steel beads with effect of ends hanging down the front,  Hanging sleeves lined with silver, and applique ornaments of purple and green velvet on silver on hanging sleeves and low on front and back of skirt.

(M.R. Holmes, London Museum Stage Costumes and Accessories, HMSO, 1968)

My photographs were taken on a very sunny day so there's lots of glare from the Benson window and from a video screen directly opposite the cabinet.  In the lighting of the gallery, the black velvet elements had a blue tone.

This is probably the only extant Benson costume that can actually be seen 'in action' - the BFI website has the 1912 Richard III film available for free viewing Watch Richard III online - BFI Player  Lady Anne appears from around 4:14  in what is clearly the same costume.  Its different elements work better on stage than in the static case, where it is difficult to see details of the hanging sleeves and the train.  The steel beads clearly provided weight which allows the sleeves and hem to move in a specific way, and Constance makes the most of the that movement in the film.  The volume of fabric is also noticeable.

One thing that struck me with this costume was the element of make do and mend: the cuffs, for example, appear to have been loosely tacked on to the sleeves and the appliqued decoration is clumsily done. It is also a very recognisable Art Nouveau motif, reminiscent of embroideries from the Glasgow School of Art, rather than being something of the period.

As can be seen from the film and in the screenshot below, there would have been a collar, probably of the same fabric as the sleeves, covering over the bodice of the dress as well as a wide headdress.  The label dated this as 1901 - post-fire.  I did wonder whether it had been altered and pressed into action as a replacement.

The sheer volume of fabric in these costumes and the weight of them makes me think again of the issues involved in transporting these baskets of costumes across the country. 

Stratford was basking in summer temperatures on Wednesday and was crammed with visitors enjoying the unseasonable weather.  By Thursday it was back to grey skies and, when I got to Birmingham, something rather like a mini cyclone in New Street.  By the time I reached Newcastle last night the temperature had dropped considerably.  

I spent Thursday morning in the Shakespeare Institute Library, making notes from several books I'd earmarked before going down, and managed a quick visit to the Shakespeare Hospice Bookshop where one of the two books I'd not bought in February was still there - the better of the two, I think, with lots of images from the Mander and Mitchinson collection. 

I greatly enjoyed Henry V although I did feel the lack of Henry IV parts 1 and 2 to establish some of the impact of the minor characters. The extrapolated opening scene - Hal's taking of the crown from the death bed of his father from H IV pt 2 - was entirely missing the heart it ought to have and was played almost flippantly, although it was made clear by the ending why it had been used.  Alfred Enoch was excellent as was the ensembles use of the set, which was reminiscent  of the ESC's scaffolding for The Henries in 1985 crossed with the Barricades in Les Miserables. The battle scenes were choreographic and the speed and precision of their execution was impressive.  No one, perhaps needless to say, pole-vaulted into Harfleur... but there was a goodly cast of local supernumeries!

I don't have tickets to see Kenneth Branagh in The Tempest, having refused to jump on that particular 'membership' bandwagon when the booking opened last year, and the RSC seems to be boycotting Shakespeare in favour of Game of Thrones this summer, and, inexplicably,  has nothing at all scheduled for September so I don't know when I'll next be back.  I miss the 'good old days' of the extended repertory season - I'd have liked to seen how this Henry developed after four or five months, not after a couple of weeks.  I understand the reasons behind it, but the theatre was not full on Wednesday - and Stratford had been packed all day.  How do you get some of those people through the theatre doors and into the vacant seats?  Just by short runs, 'star casting' and TV tie-ins? 

I hope there's a longer term plan for the company which addresses the potential of the visiting audience. Three years ago. I was able to see four productions in four days... An extended rep has its own issues, but surely if you can entice people to stay and see more than one play that has to be useful and not including any Shakespeare apart from a cut-down version of Midsummer Nights Dream for the full summer seems to be a real mistake.  There's a reason why 'Shakespeare' is in the title of the Company, after all.  I can't help feeling the Flowers would be rather disappointed.

New Friends and Stranger Companies...2!

I've spent much of the last six weeks either fretting about my new found status as a driver, fretting about the purchase of a car or fretting about an impending PhD deadline.  The solution, I have found, has been to retreat to 1881 and read old newspaper reviews of Shakespeare productions.

A crash course in Shakespearean touring companies of the 1880s has left me realising that I really don't know very much at all.   I've thoroughly enjoyed reading about George Rignold, for example, whose production of Henry V gave star billing to his white charger 'Crispin'.  I have also enjoyed discovering that Ellen Wallis wasn't above falsifying some of the glowing reviews she used in publicity.  I've felt sad for Charles Dillon, former London star, who died on the High Street in Hawick where he was playing Othello at the Corn Exchange - rather a come-down for a man who once ran the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane - and I've marvelled at the extent of Henry Irving's tour of just about every bit of Lyceum scenery, drapery and property that could be crammed onto a specially chartered train by the redoubtable Messrs Loveday and Stoker.  

There are some things I've been unable to find a home for as yet, including a fabulous story about Barry Sullivan losing his temper over a prie-dieu which Charles Flower had purchased for the new Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. Sullivan had it banished from the stage on the grounds that it would distract the audience from his rendition of 'To be or not be'.  

But my favourite story concerns an American actor, a certain Daniel Howard Harkins, who toured through the UK from 1879 to 1881.  D.H. Harkins billed himself as a great star - one of the foremost tragedians of the age - although one of the Belfast newspapers, reviewing his performance as Othello, confessed that they had been unable to cope with his bizarre methods of emphasising apparently random words in his speeches.  

Advert from The Era 16/4/81

As well as acting, Harkins had been a soldier in the American Civil War, rising to the rank of Major in the Unionist Army as part of the 1st New York Volunteer Cavalry.  His career on stage seems to have had its fair share of disputes and fallings out, and in 1868 he was involved in a wrangle over royalty payments which had a bizarre and rather terrifying outcome.

The Daily Alta California for 11th September 1868 relates the entire event with evident relish, quoting the New York Times at length.  Complications over the royalty payments owed for a production of  Foul Play seem to have led to the closure of the theatre and the sacking of Harkins, who then decamped to another theatre and staged the exact same play there.  The owner of the rights to the play then took out a warrant for Harkins' arrest.  

That evening, the first and second acts of the performance ran smoothly, but just before the start of Act 3 a series of pistol shots  and the sound of one of the actresses shouting 'Oh my husband!' alerted the audience to the fact that a full scale drama was unfolding behind the scenes.  Around 9pm, six men - 'ruffians' in the paper's words, although they were actually working for the Sheriff - had gathered at the stage door and demanded admittance in order to confront and arrest Harkins.  On being denied admission, they had barged through the door, injuring the stage door man and run up the steps into the wings, looking for Harkins. Not finding him they then went through the Green Room, disturbing the ladies of the Company  who were dressing there, and then seem to have rampaged through the dressing rooms, before heading back to the stage.  

Harkins, realising what was happening, had slipped under the stage, through the orchestra and escaped through the auditorium into the street.  The men - who were armed with revolvers - tried to follow him but found themselves surrounded by the backstage crew and performers who would not allow them to pass.  Shots rang out and the elderly theatre nightwatchman and one of the gas-lighters were both badly injured. By this time, reinforcements had arrived and five of the six men - one had managed to escape.

Incredibly, the performance continued with an understudy stepping into Harkins' role. The whole production was apparently later closed down by a high court injunction.  

Now, none of that is of the slightest use to me really.  But I  thoroughly enjoyed reading about it!

Like a tangled chain

(Warning - this post is rather a ramble!  There's a lot going on in my brain at the moment!)

Apologies for the radio silence. What a few weeks it has been since Christmas...

I've spent the last six weeks giving myself a crash course in the state of touring Shakespeare in 1881 and I'm finally about to try and bring it all together to create some sort of comprehensible document.  I have so much I want to say about this topic that leaving any of it out is going to be hard,  

I've also managed the 'untangling' of Winifred Isaac's book about Ben Greet - a fascinating task, not least because I've had to ask myself the question, 'Why does the structure of this book annoy me so much?' 

Isaac had clearly done a huge amount of research and had gathered together a vast number of (mainly uncredited) sources.  Pulling it all together into one volume would have been a complex task - and I don't understand why she made it more complicated by arranging the material in themes rather than chronologically, allowing us to see the development of each of the elements of Greet's work. Why couldn't she just be a bit more 'J.C. Trewin' about the whole thing and structure all that disparate material into a coherent narrative?

It was the word 'narrative' that made me stop and think.  As a former English teacher, amateur crime-writer and self-confessed book addict, I'm aware I think primarily in terms of building narratives whenever I write something.  I want there to be a 'story' of sorts and I'm sure this love of narrative is  the thing that draws me to history as well. 

But I'm aware that any history worth its salt has to be more than just a narrative, that any 'story' we construct from the facts is very much dependent on our overview - the distance between then and now allowing us to see a pattern or structure emerge from the events of someone's life is not the way they experienced it.  This distance is both illuminating and distorting.  For example, when I read about Benson being knighted at the Tercentenary performance in May 1916, I already know what follows - the loss of Stratford upon Avon, the death of Eric Benson, the break-up of the company, the collapse of a marriage and the years ahead of touring in a world that had shifted away from his type of theatre towards the 'realism' of cinema and Hollywood.  I have the advantage of being able to construct a narrative from the facts. 

Isaac's book is, in some ways, a good example of how not to do something - the traps that lie in wait for those who think writing history is a doddle - but it has also been something of a wake-up call.  I've noticed my own total lack of academic confidence can often be masked by an approach which comes across as the exact opposite: a confident arrogance bordering on the smug. I have absolutely no right to have any sense of superiority: I've yet to prove myself capable of anything.  It is always easy to be critical of the players from the bench...

Whatever its flaws, Isaac's book has proved an absolute gold mine of information and my research would have been much more difficult without it. In some ways, the fact that it is arranged in the way it is means it AVOIDS narrative: the facts presented without any attempt at making them tell a story, leaving me free to weave my own narrative from what it suggests.  

I'm not sure where I'm going with this just at the moment, but I do know that as a direct result of reading Isaacs' book, my own research has taken me along a different road to the one I thought I was on in December.  It has shifted something in my thinking and that can't be a bad thing at all.

We will GREET the time.

Until two days ago, the only 'Greeters' I knew of were those irritating employees that used to lurk at the entrances of ASDA supermarkets, dishing out shopping baskets with enforced bonhomie and a kind of manically frozen grin, no doubt brought on by standing for hours in the draught of an automatic door.

I am now aware, however, that the term also refers to those performers who worked with Sir Philip Ben Greet, the actor and theatre entrepreneur who was a direct contemporary of the Bensons and, arguably, the closest thing to a rival to the Benson tradition in the provinces.  As a purveyor of Shakespeare in the era I'm researching he is a  significant character. Although his activities were not confined to Shakespeare touring, his 'Woodland Players' (also sometimes referred to as 'Pastoral Players') were influential in bringing 'outdoor' Shakespeare to Edwardian Britain, followed by other companies such as Benson's and the Williams/Holme Summer touring company.

I knew a little about Ben Greet, mainly in connection with Granville Barker, Lillah McCarthy, H.B. Irving and Sybil Thorndike.  I'd also read Don-John Dugas's book 'Shakespeare for Everyman' when it first came out which deals specifically with Greet's activities in America and Canada.  

There is only one other book about Greet - a self-published volume from 1964 called 'Ben Greet and the Old Vic: a biography of Ben Greet' by Winifred Isaac, which landed on my desk on Thursday of last week and has proved to be fascinating and frustrating in equal measures. 

I should've been warned, really.  Dugas summarises Isaac's book in one sentence: 'More interested in programme transcription than analysis, unedited, often failing to specify(let alone cite) its sources, lacking an index and self-published, it is as frustrating as it is scarce.'  Actually, I think he may have been understating some of the issues. And yet... there's gold hidden in there.

Although the title itself is completely misleading, the biggest problem with it is with the arrangement of material.  Having appealed for information from former Greeters (as Trewin also did with Bensonians) Isaac seems to have been completely overwhelmed by what she was given and has tried to impose some kind of order onto it.  Instead of treating the topic chronologically, she divides her book up into chapters on various aspects of Greet's career - as actor, actor-manager, in Stratford, at the Old Vic, in America, at Regent's Park. The result is like an overfilled tumble-drier muddle of unconnected garments that have somehow become tangled together.

Having tried to 'read' the book conventionally, I found it impossible to keep track of what was going on as Isaac jumps from 1887 to 1891 to 1916 and then back to 1901 listing performance after performance, with cast list after cast list. The only way of dealing with it has been to make copious notes as I'm going along and then start to collate them into some sort of chronological order so that I can see where the gaps are and start to plug them from the British Library Newspaper archive.

So that is how the Christmas holiday is shaping up for this Merry Shrew: armed with highlighters and a stack of coloured paper, I'm going to try and 'sort out' the career of Ben Greet in analogue form by the New Year into something I can actually use as part of my research.  

I suspect I may need a lot of chocolate...

Volumes that I prize...

I'm loving reading new things and  also revisiting some old favourites for the PhD work.  I was reading  J.C. Trewin's book again a couple of weeks ago, when I happened to look at the date inside the front cover.  I used to have the habit of putting the date and my name on the flyleaf whenever I bought a book, although I stopped doing it a while ago. This particular book is dated October 1994 and I can pinpoint the exact time and place where I bought it. 

There used to be an excellent (if rather expensive) second hand and antiquarian bookshop in Stratford, a couple of doors down from New Place, called David Vaughan Books.  We were in Stratford to see A Midsummer Night's Dream directed by Adrian Noble - a starry cast including Alex Jennings, Stella Gonet, Barry (now better known as Finbar) Lynch, Toby Stephens, Emma Fielding, Desmond Barrett and Philip Voss.  It was a magical production.  The trip was also memorable as the first time I visited the Shakespeare Centre reading rooms and spent a day looking for information about Henry Ainley.  The book was purchased with birthday money and, at that time, it was the most I'd ever spent on a book - £18.  

Another book I'm going back to this week is the one that started off this madness in the first place.  The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre by Ruth Ellis was bought in a second hand book shop in Harrogate in July of 1986, shortly before my first visit to Stratford.  It was here I first read about the Bensons.  

That first book led to years of hunting through second hand bookshops for hidden treasure, wherever we went, and then, much later, using ebay and Abe books trying to track down specific and sometime elusive titles. The magic of second hand books, bookshops and websites is in the serendipity of it, finding hidden and often unprepossessing gems in the most unlikely of places.  (I once bought a book by H.B. Irving that had definitely been gnawed by something rotent-y! There are clear teeth marks on the cover...) 

In Stratford, two weeks ago, I read a fabulous Post Graduate diploma dissertation by Mary Rose Allen, in which she had compared one of the prompt books to the Memorial Theatre edition of Hamlet and made some really interesting points about the performance texts the Bensons used. She included some information about the Memorial Editions - the fact that they were edited by Charles Flower, published by Jarrold and sold in the 'Reading Room' of the theatre (now the room off the Swan bar). I suddenly realised that the accounts entry - 'Dream books' - for one of the visits to Sunderland would have been for sales of the single play edition. 

I hadn't really thought about Flower's texts being a basis for Benson productions.  However, for some plays, added to the repertory after being 'The Birthday Play' in Stratford, it was the most likely blueprint for the cuts and rearrangements which were made.

On the journey home, pondering over this, I remembered that I'd seen several volumes on ebay, ages ago, part of a collected edition.  A quick hunt through the listings and I found they were still there - five volumes out of the eight which formed the 'Collected Edition', half-bound in leather, at (incredibly) £6.99 each.  I  ordered three of them, which covered many of the plays I'm most interested in, although I felt bad about leaving the other two behind and almost immediately wished I'd bought all five.  By the next morning, I was on the verge of adding the other two to the order, when I had a message from the seller who said he was having difficulty locating them in his recently-renovated house.

My heart sank - I've had a couple of disappointments with ebay purchases which have started out with such a message, only for it to transpire that the article in question has already been sold or has been 'lost in the post'... However, after a day or two a further message arrived, headed 'Success!'  (The seller had, apparently, asked his wife to search for them and she'd found them within an hour... I have no comment to make on this!!!)  and the seller very kindly offered to send the remaining two volumes free of charge to make up for the delay. 

So I now have all five, in really excellent condition: they look virtually unread. They are going to be useful in the next couple of years, but they are fascinating in their own right, to see what was considered appropriate or inappropriate on stage in 1898.  

And, of course, I now have a new second hand book quest - to try and find a copy of volumes 3, 7 and 8 from somewhere...!