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!