{"id":215,"date":"2020-01-09T14:47:07","date_gmt":"2020-01-09T19:47:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/victorian-passions\/?page_id=215"},"modified":"2020-04-21T14:43:18","modified_gmt":"2020-04-21T19:43:18","slug":"a-passion-for-the-stage","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/victorian-passions\/home\/a-passion-for-the-stage\/","title":{"rendered":"A Passion for the Stage"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

[UD_EXHIBITION_ITEM]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Late-nineteenth-century Britain saw the rise of cults for Zola\u2019s fiction and Wagner\u2019s operas, but no group was more passionate about importing new Continental art than the Ibsenites. Leading the efforts to revolutionalize English theatre by staging Ibsen\u2019s dramas were critics such as Edmund Gosse (1849\u20131928) and William Archer (1856\u20131927), as well as performers such as Marion Lea (1864\u20131924) and especially Elizabeth Robins (1862\u20131952). The American-born Robins\u2014who was also a playwright, a novelist, and later a women\u2019s suffrage supporter\u2014was the force behind the first London production in 1891of Hedda Gabler<\/em>, in which she starred and which she also helped to translate. Ibsen\u2019s account of a restless woman who finds no outlet for her energies in domesticity, and who chooses suicide over control by a man wishing to blackmail her, was the perfect vehicle for Robins, whose own life was filled with scandal and unconventional relationships. This copy of Hedda Gabler<\/em> with photographs from the first production belonged to Robins herself and is accompanied by her letter to the British playwright T. Malcolm Watson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bernard Shaw, 1856\u20131950. <\/strong>Mrs. Warren\u2019s Profession: A Play in Four Acts<\/strong><\/em>. London: Grant Richards, 1902. Author\u2019s presentation copy, inscribed \u201cTo Max Beerbohm from G. Bernard Shaw. 10th June 1902.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sir Max Beerbohm, 1872\u20131956. <\/strong>George Bernard Shaw,<\/strong><\/em> ink and wash on paper, 1909.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What so shocked contemporary sensibilities about Mrs. Warren\u2019s Profession<\/em> was its central character\u2019s lack of passion. The Victorians were used to literary representations of so-called \u201cfallen women\u201d as sad creatures, who had foolishly succumbed to ungoverned desires. G. B. Shaw\u2019s Mrs. Warren was instead a cool-headed ex-prostitute and current brothel owner for whom sex-for-money was strictly business, and a business she was proud of managing well. An ardent Socialist, Shaw indicted the capitalist system at every level for having turned British society into a giant whorehouse, with a madam as its true queen. As a result, this drama, although written in 1893, did not receive its first performance until 1902, through the members-only Stage Society. The Irish-born Shaw\u2019s fierce jabbing at English audiences, as with a pitchfork, was frankly devilish, as this caricature by Max Beerbohm suggested. Plus, in 1897 Shaw had written a play about the American Revolution titled The Devil\u2019s Disciple<\/em>, cementing for Beerbohm the satanic connection. The copy of Mrs Warren\u2019s Profession<\/em> shown here was presented by Shaw to Max Beerbohm. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sir Max Beerbohm, 1872\u20131956. Max Beerbohm\u2019s walking stick, ebony, ivory handle with silver band, [ca. late 1890s].<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As drama critic for the Saturday Review<\/em> from 1898 to 1910, Max Beerbohm had a professional excuse to indulge his love of the theatre. The stage was a passion, too, of the translator Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (1865\u20131921), who in the 1890s worked for fellow Dutchman J. T. Grein (1862\u20131935) at the Independent Theatre Society, which produced plays by Henrik Ibsen, G. B. Shaw, and \u201cMichael Field\u201d (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper). But more than anything, Beerbohm loved an inside joke. He presented to Teixeira de Mattos\u2014who married the widow of Oscar Wilde\u2019s brother, William, in 1900\u2014this walking stick, the bulbous head of which was carved to look like Beerbohm\u2019s caricature of his friend\u2019s head. After Teixeira de Mattos\u2019s death, the stick was returned to him. Beerbohm\u2019s widow later gave it to the publisher Sir Rupert Hart-Davis (1907\u20131999), who edited Beerbohm\u2019s letters. Hart-Davis, in turn, gave it in 1987 to Mark Samuels Lasner. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[UD_EXHIBITION_ITEM]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

G. F. (George Frederick) Scotson-Clark (1872\u20131927)\u2014an artist who in 1899 would produce The \u201cHalls<\/em>,\u201d his volume of images of music hall stars\u2014loved the theatre. So, too, did his school friend Aubrey Beardsley. In later years, Beardsley would draw actresses. His Portrait of Mrs. Patrick Campbell<\/em> appeared in the first issue of the Yellow Book <\/em>in April 1894, and his famous illustrations for Oscar Wilde\u2019s Salome<\/em> (1894) were, of course, also images of a performer\u2014a dancer. But in this tour de force<\/em> from 1891, Beardsley stages a kind of one-man show with his own face. His letter includes multiple self-portraits, and in one he substitutes himself for the figure of the mother in J. M. Whistler\u2019s celebrated Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1<\/em>  (1871). Commenting on Whistler\u2019s work, Beardsley singled out for praise the curtain as \u201cmarvellously [sic] painted, the border shining with wonderful silver notes.\u201d Beardsley often was, so to speak, drawn to curtains. They turned up frequently in his work as signifiers of theatricality, even when no one was actually onstage. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[UD_EXHIBITION_ITEM]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is one of only a few surviving examples of the poster that Aubrey Beardsley designed for a theatrical double bill, commissioned to do so by the author and actress Florence Farr (1860\u20131917). Farr\u2019s passion for the stage was something she shared with her friend Annie Horniman (1860\u20131937), who took up management of the Avenue Theatre and engaged playwrights to create new work for it. Today, audiences might expect the order of these advertised plays to be reversed. The one-act fantasy is famous now as the first play by William Butler Yeats (1865\u20131939) to be performed in public; the drawing-room comedy by John Todhunter (1839\u20131916) has sunk into oblivion. Beardsley\u2019s image appears to allude to the role performed by Farr in Todhunter\u2019s four-acter\u2014a character named \u201cCarmen,\u201d described by the critic for the Speaker<\/em> (7 April 1894) as \u201can exotic, out of her element in a commonplace English household\u201d and likened to the \u201cnow notorious lady in the first story of Keynotes<\/em>\u201d (the 1893 New Woman-ish volume by \u201cGeorge Egerton\u201d for which Beardsley had designed the covers and title page).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[UD_EXHIBITION_ITEM]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The passion for just causes that animated Mabel Dearmer\u2019s life also led to her premature death. In the midst of the First World War, she succumbed to typhoid while doing volunteer work with a women\u2019s medical unit at the battlefront in Serbia. With that, the London theatre world lost an important and versatile figure. She was a playwright, specializing in works for young audiences and in new versions of the Christian Mystery plays. (Her husband, the writer Percy Dearmer [1867\u20131936] was an Anglican priest.) As this 1895 poster for her one-woman show records, she was also an artist and a seasoned stage performer, and she would later put her many talents to use in supporting Socialism and women\u2019s suffrage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

William Nicholson, 1872\u20131949. <\/strong>Souvenir Scroll for the Ellen Terry Commemoration Banquet,<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0color lithograph, [1906].<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The preservation of this fragile memento was due entirely to the passionate fandom of the actress May Ward (1888\u20131958), who adored her friend, Dame Ellen Terry (1847\u20131928). Terry, whose wildly successful theatrical career began when she was a child, celebrated her fiftieth year on the British stage in 1906. Like the reigning figure she was, Terry was f\u00eated with a gala event at the Drury Lane Theatre Royal to commemorate her \u201cGolden Jubilee.\u201d Guests at the 12 June celebration, which included performances and a grand banquet, received this beautiful but rather unwieldy scroll, designed by the artist William Nicholson (who had depicted that \u201cother\u201d queen, Victoria, much less flatteringly as a boneless black blob, in an 1897 woodcut for the New Review<\/em>). Carefully spreading the paper, they could see Terry in all her most famous roles and appreciate a woman who was continually embraced by the public, despite her non-conformity to the rules of Victorian morality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[UD_EXHIBITION_ITEM] Late-nineteenth-century Britain saw the rise of cults for Zola\u2019s fiction and Wagner\u2019s operas, but no group was more passionate about importing new Continental art than the Ibsenites. Leading the efforts to revolutionalize English theatre by staging Ibsen\u2019s dramas were critics such as Edmund Gosse (1849\u20131928) and William Archer (1856\u20131927), as well as performers such […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"parent":167,"menu_order":11,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-exhibition.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-215","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/victorian-passions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/215"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/victorian-passions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/victorian-passions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/victorian-passions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/victorian-passions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/victorian-passions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":340,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/victorian-passions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/215\/revisions\/340"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/victorian-passions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhibitions.lib.udel.edu\/victorian-passions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}