Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence (Dramatic Lives)

218 Pages·2011·1.15 MB·English

by  Katharine Cockin

ELLEN TERRY, SPHERES OF INFLUENCE
Dramatic Lives
Series Editor: Katharine Cockin
www.pickeringchatto.com/dramatic
ELLEN TERRY, SPHERES OF INFLUENCE
edited by
Katharine Cockin
london
PICKERING & CHATTO
2011
Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited
21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH
2252 Ridge Road, Brookf eld, Vermont 05036-9704, USA
www.pickeringchatto.com
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise
without prior permission of the publisher.
© Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Ltd 2011
© Katharine Cockin 2011
british library cataloguing in publication data
Ellen Terry, spheres of inf uence. – (Dramatic lives)
1. Terry, Ellen, Dame, 1847–1928 – Inf uence. 2. Craig, Edith, 1869–1947. 3.
Craig, Edward Gordon, 1872–1966. 4. T eater – England – History – 19th
century.
I. Series II. Cockin, Katharine, 1963–
792’.028’092-dc22
ISBN-13: 9781848931121
e: 9781848931138
∞

T is publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American
National Standard for the Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited
Printed in the United Kingdom at MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn
CONTENTS
List of Contributors vii
List of Figures and Tables xi
Introduction: Ellen Terry and Her Circle – Formal Introductions
and Informal Encounters – Katharine Cockin 1
Part I: Ellen Terry’s Inf uences on Others
1 Introduction: Elen Tery’s Lost Lives – Nina Auerbach 13
2 Ellen Terry, Bram Stoker and the Lyceum’s Vampires
– Catherine Wynne 17
3 Ellen Terry and G. F. Watts: ‘Blasted with Ecstasy’
– Veronica Franklin Gould 3
4 T e Burden of Eternal Youth: Ellen Terry and T e Mistress
of the Robes – Jeny Blodworth 49
5 T e Af er Voice of Ellen Terry – Katherine E. Kelly 65
Part: II Family Inf uences
6 Introduction: Edward Gordon Craig – Prophet or Charlatan?
– Michael Holroyd 7
7 E. W. G. and E. G. C.: Father and Son – J. Michael Walton 81
8 Lewis Carroll, Ellen Terry and the Stage Career of Menella
‘Minna’ Quin: ‘A Very Kind and Christian Deed’
– Richard Foulkes 93
9 Edith Craig as Director: Staging Claudel in the War Years
– Roberta Gandolf 107
10 Velona Pilcher and Dame Ellen Terry (1926) – Charlotte Purkis 119
11 Ellen Terry: Preserving the Relics and Creating the Brand
– Katharine Cockin 133
12 Describing the Ellen Terry and Edith Craig Archive
– Julian Haliwel and Katharine Cockin 149
Notes 161
Works Cited 189
Index 19
CONTRIBUTORS
Professor Nina Auerbach is the John Welsh Centennial professor of English.
Her special area of concentration is nineteenth-century England. She has pub-
lished, lectured and reviewed widely in the f elds of Victorian literature, theatre,
cultural history and horror f ction and f lm. Her books include Our Vampires,
Ourselves (University of Chicago Press, 1995); Private T eatricals: T e Lives of
the Victorians (Harvard University Press, 1990); Ellen Terry, Player in Her Time
(Norton, 1987); Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorif ed Outcasts
(Columbia University Press, 1985); Woman and the Demon: T e Life of a Vic-
torian Myth (Harvard University Press, 1982); and Communities of Women: An
Idea in Fiction (Harvard University Press, 1978). Her most recent book, Daphne
du Maurier, Haunted Heiress (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), inaugu-
rates the series Personal Takes. Her current project is Lost Lives, a study of ghosts
and their purposes. Professor Auerbach has been awarded a Guggenheim Fel-
lowship and a Ford Foundation Fellowship as well as the Lindback Award for
Distinguished Teaching. In 2000, she received the annual Distinguished Schol-
arship Award from the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts.
Jenny Bloodworth, Leicester University, is a doctoral student working on the
drama of Clotilde Graves.
Dr Katharine Cockin, University of Hull, is reader in English. Her publications
include the biography of Edith Craig (Cassell, 1998), a monograph on the Pio-
neer Players (Palgrave, 2001) and essay and articles on women’s suf rage literature,
literature and law, contemporary f ction and poetry. She has edited two volumes
of women’s suf rage literature (Routledge, 2007), T e Collected Letters of Ellen
Terry (8 vols; Pickering & Chatto, 2010–) as well as the Ellen Terry volume in
Lives of Shakespearean Actors Part V (Pickering & Chatto, forthcoming, 2012).
Professor Emeritus Richard Foulkes, University of Leicester, professor of thea-
tre history and chair of the Society for T eatre Research, specializes in drama
and theatre history, concentrating on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
He has published most extensively on the Victorian theatre, with three recent
monographs: Church and Stage in Victorian England (Cambridge University
Press, 1997); Performing Shakespeare in the Age of Empire (Cambridge Uni-
– vii –
viii Ellen Terry, Spheres of Inf uence
versity Press, 2002) and Lewis Carroll and the Victorian Stage: T eatricals in a
Quiet Life (Ashgate, 2005). He has contributed to Shakespeare Survey and other
leading journals, was an associate editor for the New Dictionary of National
Biography and is general editor of publications for the Society for T eatre
Research. He is editor of a collection of essays on Sir Henry Irving (Henry Irving
A Re-evaluation (Ashgate, 2008) and has edited the William Charles Macready
volume in Lives of Shakespearean Actors Part III (Pickering & Chatto, 2010).
Professor Foulkes has published on twentieth-century dramatists including Rat-
tigan, Wesker, Nichols and Stoppard.
Veronica Franklin Gould, author of G. F. Watts: T e Last Great Victorian (Yale
University Press, 2004) and ‘G. F. Watts in Freshwater’, PhotoHistorian (April
2006), is writing a book on Watts and Ellen Terry. T e curator of the Watts Gal-
lery centenary exhibitions and editor of T e Vision of G. F. Watts (Watts Gallery,
2004) and Mary Seton Watts (1849–1938): Unsung Heroine of the Art Nouveau
(Watts Gallery, 1998), she examined a newly discovered Julia Margaret Cam-
eron image of Ellen Terry in Tennyson at Farringford (Farringford House, 2009).
Her exhibition of Ellen Terry will be shown at the Watts Gallery in 2013.
Dr Roberta Gandolf , University of Parma, is lecturer on the history of con-
temporary theatre and the theory and history of directing. She is the author
of a monograph on Edith Craig, La prima regista: Edith Craig, f a rivoluzione
della scena e cultura delle donne (Bulzoni, 2003) and has edited special issues
of European Journal of Women Studies (2004) and Teatro e Storia (2007), and
contributed an essay ‘Giving Back to Judith: Laura Curino’s Una stanza tutta per
me’ to Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case (eds), Staging International Feminisms
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Julian Halliwell, of SimplicityWeb.co.uk, has been involved in web develop-
ment since 1996. With a background in modern languages and linguistics,
he developed an interest in technology through computer-assisted language
learning and spent a number of years at the University of Hull developing its
award-winning web-based learning environment Merlin.
Sir Michael Holroyd, president of the Royal Society for Literature, is an inter-
nationally acclaimed biographer, author of the def nitive biographies of George
Bernard Shaw (4 vols; Chatto & Windus, 1988–92), Lytton Strachey (Chatto
& Windus, 1994) and most recently author of the innovative group biogra-
phy of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their families, A Strange Eventful History
(Chatto & Windus, 2008).
Professor Katherine E. Kelly, Texas A&M University. Her areas of interests
include modern drama and performance, modernist studies, f lm and Irish stud-
ies. She has published widely in theatre studies, including articles on women’s
suf rage theatre, and she is the author of T e Cambridge Companion to Tom Stop-
Contributors ix
pard (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Modern Drama by Women 1880s
to 1930s (Routledge, 1996).
Charlotte Purkiss, University of Winchester, is a lecturer in drama. Her
research interests include criticism and performative writing; European Mod-
ernism and performance, especially British–German cultural connections.
She has published articles on turn-of-the-century music, arts and ideas and on
Austro-German opera. She is currently researching the life and works of Velona
Pilcher.
Professor Emeritus J. Michael Walton, University of Hull, is the author of
Craig on T eatre (Methuen, 1983). He has published and/or edited seven books
on classical theatre history and thirteen volumes of the whole Greek drama in
translation which he edited, introduced and for which he supplied eight trans-
lations. Professor Walton has worked in the professional theatre as a director
and actor and f rst joined the Drama Department at the University of Hull in
1965 and was appointed to the Chair of Drama in 1992. In 1997 he became f rst
director of T e Performance Translation Centre.
Dr Catherine Wynne, University of Hull, is lecturer in English. Her research
and publications lie in the f eld of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British
and Irish writing with a particular emphasis on the examination of colony and
empire. She is author of T e Colonial Conan Doyle: British Imperialism, Irish
Nationalism, and the Gothic (Greenwood, 2002), co-editor with Martin Wil-
lis of Victorian Literary Mesmerism (Rodopi, 2006), and has published articles
and book chapters on nineteenth-century f ction, photography and f lm. She is
currently completing a monograph on Bram Stoker and the Victorian theatre,
a project supported by a British Academy Small Research Grant. She has pub-
lished an edition of Bram Stoker’s T e Watter’s Mou’ (1894) and Arthur Conan
Doyle’s T e Parasite (1895) for Valancourt Press.