The Dynasts Adapted: London, Dorset and Oxford

Abstract

At the beginning of June 1910, one of Hardy’s London friends, Blanche Crackanthorpe, a society hostess with gushing literary and theatrical enthusiasms, arranged a meeting between Hardy and Harley Granville Barker’s wife, the actress Lillah McCarthy: ‘She is keen, keen, keen to play Tess — your Tess, the Tess you keep in that drawer — and, when she comes in you will, I think, say “Here is Tess” — somehow it’s her part — she feels it — & I know it.’¹ The attempt at theatrical matchmaking was advanced by a letter in similar vein to Lillah McCarthy:

He is keen, keen on the theatre, and everything connected with it … I believe the secret wish of his heart is to see scenes from ‘The Dynasts’ staged before he ‘passes on.’ But that’s not what I wanted to tell you! This is it. He has got, actually finished, ready, his own dramatised version of Tess. (Not the American version, which is still being played all over the States, he told me but his own.) He has promised to send me this, his own Drama of Tess, as quick as he can.²