Update aside, I've been tempted back to this blog today by a photograph shared on Facebook and Twitter by the 'Everything to Everybody' project - a collaboration between the University of Birmingham and Birmingham City Council - which is raising the profile of the incredible Shakespeare Library in Birmingham. This untapped resource is calling like a siren for me to visit it - and maybe that will be possible at some point next year. They have posted several interesting photos connected to Stratford and Benson, but yesterday's was a real find.
I have copies of several of the photos which were taken beside this 'sweet and lovely wall' but I've never seen these before!
Their digitisation officer, Richard, picked it as his favourite image from the collection and added this comment " I keep coming back to this photograph. He/she (we don’t have a name) is obviously a much loved cast member where time has been taken to set up a professional photograph outside of the theatre. I wish I had seen this production. Just looking at this dog obediently posing somehow draws you back over a century to the moment it was taken."
(Richard is clearly a Merry Shrew, even if he doesn't know it yet!)
So with an unexpectedly free evening at my disposal, I've been digging to try and find out more, and I THINK I might have an identity for this delightful doggie!
Although I can't find any reference to the dog appearing in this production, I'm wondering if this might be the actor Murray Carrington's dog, 'Dick', who had appeared in Two Gentlemen of Verona in Stratford in 1910 and created something of a sensation.
J.C. Trewin mentions him in 'Benson and the Bensonians', seemingly taking his information from Constance Benson's Memoirs. Apparently, during Lance's sad speech in Act 2 to Crab the dog, Dick 'looked steadily into the audience as if counting the house' but when Launce (played by Bensonian stalwart H.O. Nicholson) 'broke into sobs, he turned and sympathetically licked his face. This little bit of realistic acting so enchanted the audience they greeted it with a tremendous round of applause. The next morning Dick found himself famous. He received the "star" notices.'
Murray Carrington played Oberon in both the 1911 and 1912 performances of Midsummer Night's Dream. He was one of the Benson Company for eight years and returned to Stratford after the First World War. He was apparently the first actor to play Hamlet on the radio! H. O Nicholson played Starveling (who becomes Moonshine), in 1911, but he had left the Bensons' Company by 1912. Nicholson, a Cambridge Classics graduate and former school master, joined Benson in 1896 and was a long-standing member of the Company as well as being one of the Bensonians who ended up with Granville Barker's Company at the Savoy in 1912-13... where he played Starveling again, only this time without a real dog!
I've no idea if this is actually Dick - the name on the collar is too indistinct to read - or whether I'm just 'barking up the wrong tree', (sorry) but it is a nice thought! And I've loved doing the searching!
