To Stage a Reading: The Actor in British Modernism Jeffrey M

343 Pages·2013·1.59 MB·English

by  Kori Lisa

To Stage a Reading:
The Actor in British Modernism

Jeffrey M. Brown

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2013
© 2013
Jeffrey M. Brown
All rights reserved
ABSTRACT

To Stage a Reading: The Actor in British Modernism

Jeffrey M. Brown

The popular British theatre of the late nineteenth century has often been regarded as both
aesthetically and politically bankrupt: bombastic and spectacular, it offered a vision of
sensational theatricality lacking both the formal innovation and the intellectual charge of the later
avant-garde stage and of literary modernism. My dissertation, by contrast, argues that one
element of the nineteenth-century stage survived and claimed a place at the heart of British
modernism: the idea of the actor. In successive chapters stretching from 1897 to 1958, I take up
works of fiction and drama by Bram Stoker, Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf,
revealing how various performers of the late-Victorian stage became essential to the formation of
modernist aesthetics. I show that the actor’s significance lay not only in her cultural station but
also in her subversive mediation of artistic convention and self-conscious reenactment of the
past; by returning to the performers of the 1890s, these British and Irish writers reconceived the
terms that are central to our understanding of modernism: personality, history, and tradition. As
the late-Victorian stage passed out of living memory, these writers continued to invoke the actor
in their treatments of the technological proliferation of text, the politics of reading during the
First World War, the authority of obituary in the literary tradition, and the potential for re-writing
historical progress through the lens of community theatre.
Positioned between media—theatre, poetry, and the novel—and also between opposing
visions of creativity and the artistic process, my research intervenes in related discussions in both
theatre studies and the scholarship on modernist literature. By focusing on the art of the actor at
this pivotal moment in both theatrical and literary history, I challenge the dominant assumption
of an abstract anti-theatricality on the modernist stage by discussing the ambivalently
“naturalistic” performance styles of Henry Irving, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Marie Lloyd, and
Ellen Terry. Likewise, I argue that their art of acting reframes the key terms of literary
modernism by reversing the prerogatives of textuality and the cultural practice of reading. The
objective of my dissertation is not simply the excavation of yet another element of mass-cultural
awareness in modern literature, but rather the revelation that the actor provided a means of
continually restaging the advent of modernity (and the death of the past) into the middle of the
twentieth century.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... ii
Dedication ...................................................................................................................................... iv
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1
I. “Made Manifest in the Reading”:
Sir Henry Irving, Bram Stoker, and the Paradox of the Actor ...................................................... 25
Irving’s Masks and Faces: The Abstract and Brief Chronicles of English Theatrical History . 31
Reading Faces, Writing Bodies: Anti-Theatricality in the Staking of Lucy Westenra ............. 70
Hypnotism and Autoperformance: Mina Harker’s Redemptive Re-reading ............................ 83
II. “Imagine that he is the author, and be scornful”:
Bernard Shaw and the Actors ....................................................................................................... 97
Throwing Homer at the Schoolboy’s Head: Literary Authority and Shaw’s Performative
Paratexts .................................................................................................................................. 100
Dignity and Despotism: The Autonomy of the Actor and the Discovery of Eliza ................. 124
Reading Eliza/Eliza Reading: The Recursive Text(s) of Pygmalion and the Impossibility
of Higgins’s Universal Alphabet ............................................................................................. 142
III. T. S. Eliot’s Death of the Actor:
The Statesman, the Saint, and the Misreading of “Marie Lloyd” ............................................... 170
T. S. Eliot’s “Successful Failure”: The Elder Statesman and the Dramatic Tradition ............ 175
The Actor in History: Murder in the Cathedral and the Limits of Critical Reading .............. 205
Sacred Woods: The Eliotic Critical Tradition and the Individual Talent of Marie Lloyd ...... 220
IV. Donkeys at Dimbola, Actors at Pointz Hall:
Virginia Woolf’s Uncommon Readers ....................................................................................... 243
How Should One Read Ellen Terry?: Freshwater, the Monologue, and the Mimic............... 247
The Uncommon Reader: Strange Elizabethans, Stranger Georgians ...................................... 270
Between the Acts: The Idiot and the Actor in English History................................................ 291
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 319
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 325
i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An enormous debt of thanks is owed first and foremost to my advisors on this dissertation: W. B.
Worthen, Sarah Cole, and Katherine Biers. Their helpful advice, thoughtful critique, and
generous support have often far exceeded the bounds of this specific project—for which I cannot
thank them enough—but every page of the dissertation itself bears as well the effects of their
nuanced and specific commentary over the past several years.
I also wish to thank the faculty and graduate student members of the Columbia University
Theater Colloquium, who read several drafts of key chapters with constant sensitivity, and who
responded with a depth of insight into the larger goals and stakes of my work even when such
ideas remained obscure to me.
I am grateful to the editorial board at Modern Drama, as well, who have helped me
prepare a fragment of this work for publication, and who offered suggestions for revision that
allowed me to articulate its intervention in larger concerns.
Several friends and colleagues deserve recognition here for the long discussions of
dissertation work in the fragments of time they had available: Darragh Martin, Jason Fitzgerald,
Minou Arjomand, Joseph Cermatori, Annie Holt, Michelle Shafer, and Tim Youker. A similar
debt is owed to the members of the English department’s job market seminar in the fall of 2011,
who witnessed my first awkward attempts to condense and define this work, and who offered the
clarity of vision I needed as I took the dissertation into its final phases: Anjuli Kolb, Ben Parker,
Sonali Thakkar, and Anne Diebel in particular.
I would also like to thank the staff of the various libraries and institutions where I
conducted research and wrote the majority of this dissertation, both within New York and
beyond.
ii
A different debt entirely—but no less significant—is owed to the extraordinarily talented
and creative members of Extant Arts Company, with whom many of the original ideas for this
project were first conceived, and who have provided constant inspiration ever since, even as my
own work has taken me away from the stage. To Greg Taubman, Paulo Quiros, and Pitr Strait
especially: my admiration and appreciation truly know no bounds.
And finally: my family and friends have continued to share in both the agony and joy of
this process, providing the necessary perspective I have needed to see it through to this stage. I
cannot possibly repay their kindness and support. And for Kori Lisa Yee Litt—who listened to
the earliest formulations of my ideas, who has been a constant source of strength, and whose
influence is felt very literally between every single line of this work—I truly have not the words
to express my profound and overwhelming gratitude.
iii
DEDICATION

For Kori
iv
1
INTRODUCTION
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

- W. B. Yeats, “Among School Children”1

At the end of “Among School Children” (1927), W. B. Yeats poses one of modernist literature’s
most enduring quandaries. At its broadest level, Yeats’s poem probes the autonomy and
endurance of the human soul: looking back upon youth as a “sixty-year-old smiling public man,”
the speaker confronts a Platonic dissonance between “nature” and the “ghostly paradigm of
things,” a problem thrown into stark relief by the alienating pressures of modernity. The poem’s
notorious concluding question—“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”—therefore
seems to speak to modernism’s most immaterial concerns. It invokes the terms of T. S. Eliot’s
“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” using the medium of dance (rather than that of poetry) to
interrogate the ideal of the autonomous artwork and to probe that work’s problematic
relationships to its originating body and to the complex of circumstances—social and historical
as well as psycho-physical—that may have occasioned its production. As a result, the poem
points to the essential position that performance and theatricality occupy in the articulation of
modernist values. It is the project of this dissertation to explore one aspect of this articulation: an
enduring fascination with the performances of iconic late-Victorian actors into and through the
middle of the twentieth century.
“Among School Children” fits easily within the canon of the high-modernist poetry of the

1 Yeats, “Among School Children,” in Selected Poems and Four Plays: 121–23.
2
1920s in part because it balances the problem of artistic media within purely metaphysical terms.
Couched in an amorphous tradition both Christian and Greek, the poem also rests upon a heritage
of lyric conventions that affirm poetry’s uniquely abstract capacities: its metaphors reach swiftly
beyond their immediate referents; its parables are easily altered; and its range of affects—
passion, piety, and affection—are both blended and neatly distinguished. And so that concluding
question is, in this sense, duplicitous: the poem invokes a problem that its own medium seems to
have answered, and the ease with which we—standing at the vantage of a hundred years—can
read this poem outside the strict rubrics of autobiography stands as proof. Shifting that question
into Yeats’s own medium—“How can we know the poet from the poem?”—not only robs it of
its profundity; it also forces us to recognize the easy triumph of New Critical ideals in our
approach to modernism’s interests and accomplishments.
Whatever genuine anxiety or uncertainty the poem generates thus comes out of a tension
between the media of text and those of performance: to “know the dancer from the dance”
requires a set of skills and habits of mind for which reading—or the various interpretive tactics
associated with literature—appear to be a poor analogue. That concluding question cannot easily
stand as an evocative synecdoche for all creative or artistic output; rather, it indicates a problem
unique to dance, to music, and to performance. Here and elsewhere throughout the modernist
canon performance becomes a provocative “other” to literary art, representative of irreducible
paradoxes, sensuous extremes, and irrevocable cultural barriers. The attractions of performance
seem to embody a rejection of modernist literature’s basic preoccupation with the advantages of
textuality; for this reason (among others) major modernist voices—including, quite prominently,
Yeats himself—often express ambivalence or outright disdain for the gross physicality and
pandering immediacy of performance and theatricality. And when—as in “Among School