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