Abstract
Of all late Victorian actresses, it was Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923) who embraced celebrity with the greatest enthusiasm. Building her career on a reputation both on and off stage for illicit and unbridled passion, power and danger, Bernhardt had, as Henry James observed, ‘in a supreme degree what the French call the genie de la réclame — the advertising genius; she may, indeed, be called the muse of the newspaper’.1 Though she had begun her career under the auspices of the Comédie Française, performing in classical plays by Victor Hugo and Jean Racine, she broke free to control her own career and repertoire, soon displaying a marked preference for scandalous roles as courtesans, adulteresses and murderers in contemporary boulevard dramas by Victorien Sardou and Alexandre Dumas fils. The 156 performances she gave in her 1880 tour of the United States, for example, included 65 of La Dame aux Camélias, 41 of Frou-frou, 17 of Adrienne Lecouvreur and 6 of Phèdre. As William Archer was moved to observe in 1895, ‘Someone to cajole and someone to murder are the two necessities of artistic existence for Madame Sarah Bernhardt’, accompanying his comment with an explanatory table, listing the victims and lovers in each of her recent plays.2
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Notes
Henry James, ‘The Comédie Francaise in London’, The Nation, 31 July 1879, quoted in Susan A. Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 9.
William Archer, ‘Fedora’, The Theatrical World of 1895 (London: Walter Scott, 1896), 29 May 1895, p. 184.
Marie Columbier, for example, entitled her scurrilous fictional biography of Bernhardt The Life and Memoirs of Sarah Barnum (London: Crown Publishing, 1884).
Sarah Bemhardt, My Double Life: The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt, translated by Victoria Tietze Larson (Albany, NY: State of New York Press, 1999), p. 271.
See, for example, William Archer, ‘The Rival Queens’, The New Budget, 20 June 1895, reprinted in Archer, The Theatrical World of 1895, pp. 205–6; George Bernard Shaw, ‘Duse and Bernhardt’, Saturday Review, 1 June 1895 and 15 June 1895, reprinted in Bernard Shaw, The Drama Observed, 4 vols, ed. Bernard F. Dukore (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), II, pp. 357, 367–8; A. B. Walkley, ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ (July 1889), in Playhouse Impressions (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892), pp. 239–44.
See, for example, Raymond Blathwayt, “Does the Theatre Make for Good?”: An Interview with Mr Clement Scott’, reprinted from Great Thoughts (London: A. W. Hall, 1898); Tracy C. Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1991).
For examples of such tactics, see Mary Jean Corbett, Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women’s Autobiographies (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), chapters 4 and 5.
Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), p. 11.
Laura Beatty, Lillie Langtry: Manners, Masks and Morals (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 138. ‘The New Helen’ was first published in Time in July 1879.
Quoted in Ernest Dudley, The Gilded Lily: The Life and Loves of the Fabulous Lillie Langtry (London: Oldhams Press, 1958), pp. 64, 67.
Henry Austin Clapp, Reminiscences of a Drama Critic (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1902), p. 77, reprinted in Victorian Actors and Actresses in Review: A Dictionary of Contemporary Views of Representative British and American Actors and Actresses, 1837–1901, ed. by Donald Mullin (London: Greenwood Press, 1983), p. 298.
Lillie Langtry, The Days I Knew (London: Hutchinson, 1925), pp. 229–31. Ellen Terry had given a series of lectures on Shakespeare’s heroines, and Helen Faucit published her study On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters in 1885.
Lena Ashwell, Myself a Player (London: Michael Joseph, 1936), p. 44.
See, for example, Joel H. Kaplan and Sheila Stowell, Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), chapter 2; Mrs Patrick Campbell, My Life and Some Letters (London: Hutchinson, 1922), chapter 5.
Letter to Charles Charrington, quoted in Margot Peters, Mrs Pat: The Life of Mrs Patrick Campbell (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984), p. 107.
The Philharmonic, p. 38, n.d. (but mention of Beyond Human Power and The Joy of Living places it as c.1903), Harvard University, Houghton Library, Mrs Patrick Campbell Collection.
Peters, Mrs Pat, pp. 375–8. For Shaw’s self-scripted interviews see, for example, The Star and The New Budget, reprinted in The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with their Prefaces, 7 vols (London: Bodley Head, 1979), I, pp. 122–32, 473–80, 595–9.
The Illustrated London News, 13 September 1913, p. 412. See also The Graphic, 13 September 1913, p. 496; The Bookman, December 1918, pp. 103–6.
The Adored One, first performed at the Duke of York’s Theatre, London, 4 September 1913. British Library, Lord Chamberlain’s Collection 1913/28. Act III, pp. 27–8. Only the first act was ever published, under the title Seven Women.
A. B. Walkley in The Star, for example, described her Lady Teazle as ‘wholly modern, neurotic, Pinero-ish’, quoted in Alan Dent, Mrs Patrick Campbell (London: Museum Press, 1961), p. 133.
Walter Pritchard Eaton, ‘Maude Adams as a Murderess’, reprinted in Carl Markgraf, J. M. Barrie: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 1989), p. 99.
Dublin DailyExpress, 24 March 1906, Times, 13 June 1906, quoted in Nina Auerbach, Ellen Terry, Player in Her Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), pp. 5, 342.
Max Beerbohm, ‘A Great Dear’, Saturday Review, 24 March 1906, p. 360.
Noted by Susan Torrey Barstow in ‘Ellen Terry and the Revolt of the Daughters’, Nineteenth Century Theatre, 25:1 (Summer 1997), 5–32.
Henry James, ‘The London Theatres’, Scribner’s Monthly, 21 (January 1881), reprinted in Henry James: Essays on Art and Drama, ed. Peter Rawlings (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), p. 335; Christopher St John, Ellen Terry (London: John Lane, 1907), p. 51. For Terry’s own account of her performances, including her defence of her interpretation of Portia, see Ellen Terry, Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, with Preface, Notes and Additional Biographical Chapters by Edith Craig and Christopher St John (London: Gollancz, 1933), pp. 90–1, 141–6, and passim.
Sandra Richards, The Rise of the English Actress (London: Macmillan, 1993), p. 131.
Richards, The Rise of the English Actress, p.127; Laurence Irving, Henry Irving: The Actor and His World (London: Columbus Books, 1989), pp. 501–2.
Ellen Terry, The Story of My Life (London: Hutchinson, 1908), pp. 82–3. As Thomas Postlewait has observed, Terry is here also offering a common self-effacing trope of nineteenth-century actresses’ autobiographies in crediting a man with a pivotal role in making her career. See Postlewait, ‘Autobiography and Theatre History’, in Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, ed. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce McConachie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), pp. 259–64.
See, for example, Margaret Steen, A Pride of Tenys: Family Saga (London: Longmans, 1962), p. 135; Irving, Henry Irving, p. 255.
Walter Calvert, Souvenir of Miss Ellen Terry (London: Henry J. Drane, 1897), p. 14.
Charles Hiatt, Ellen Terry and Her Impersonations: An Appreciation (London: George Bell, 1898), pp. 60–1.
‘Preface’, in Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence, ed. Christopher St John (London: Constable, 1931), p. xix.
See, for example, Clement Scott, From ‘The Bells’ to ‘King Arthur’: A Critical Record of the First-NightProductions at the Lyceum Theatre from 1871 to 1895 (London: John Macqueen, 1896), pp. 148, 168, 271.
Review of Faust by W. G. Wills, 19 December 1885, reprinted in Scott, From ‘The Bells’ to ‘King Arthur’, p. 288.
Edward Gordon Craig, Ellen Terry and her Secret Self (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1931), p. 51.
Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907–14 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1987).
Julie Holledge, Innocent Flowers: Women in the Edwardian Theatre (London: Virago, 1981), pp. 69–71.
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Eltis, S. (2005). Private Lives and Public Spaces: Reputation, Celebrity and the Late Victorian Actress. In: Luckhurst, M., Moody, J. (eds) Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523845_10
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