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Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-60854-1 - The Cambridge Companion to the Actress Edited by Maggie B. Gale and John Stokes Frontmatter More information

the cambridge companion to the actress

This Companion brings together sixteen new essays which examine, from various perspectives, the social and cultural role of the actress throughout history and across continents. Each essay focuses on a particular stage in her develop- ment, for example professionalism in the seventeenth century; the emergence of the actress / critic during the Romantic period and, later on, of the actress as best-selling autobiographer; and the coming of the drama schools which led to today’s emphasis on the actress as a highly trained working woman. Chapters consider the image of the actress as a courtesan, as a ‘muse’, as a representative of the ‘ordinary’ housewife, and as a political activist. The collection also contains essays on forms, genres and traditions – on cross-dressing, solo performance, racial constraints and recent Shakespeare – as well as on the actress in early photography and on ﬁlm. Its unique range will fascinate, surprise and instruct theatre-goers and students alike.

© Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-60854-1 - The Cambridge Companion to the Actress Edited by Maggie B. Gale and John Stokes Frontmatter More information

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO THE ACTRESS

EDITED BY MAGGIE B. GALE AND JOHN STOKES

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao˜ Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru,UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521608541

C Cambridge University Press 2007

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2007

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

isbn-13 978-0-521-84606-6 hardback isbn-10 0-521-84606-4 hardback isbn-13 978-0-521-60854-1 paperback isbn-10 0-521-60854-6 paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

CONTENTS

List of illustrations page vii Notes on contributors ix Acknowledgements xii

Introduction 1 MAGGIE B. GALE AND JOHN STOKES

Part I: Turning points

1 Revolution, legislation and autonomy 15 GILLI BUSH-BAILEY

2 Spectacle, intellect and authority: the actress in the eighteenth century 33 ELIZABETH EGER

3 Cultural formations: the nineteenth-century touring actress and her international audiences 52 GAIL MARSHALL

4 The actress as photographic icon: from early photography to early ﬁlm 74 DAVID MAYER

5 The actress and the profession: training in England in the twentieth century 95 LUCIE SUTHERLAND

6 Out of the ordinary: exercising restraint in the post-war years 116 JOHN STOKES

contents

7 Icons and labourers: some political actresses 134 TONY HOWARD

Part II: Professional opportunities

8 The actress as manager 157 JO ROBINSON

9 By herself: the actress and autobiography, 1755–1939 173 VIV GARDNER

10 The screen actress from silence to sound 193 CHRISTINE GLEDHILL

11 Side doors and service elevators: racial constraints for actresses of colour 215 LYNETTE GODDARD

Part III: Genre, form and tradition

12 Mirroring men: the actress in drag 235 JACKY BRATTON

13 ‘Studies in hysteria’: actress and courtesan, Sarah Bernhardt and Mrs Patrick Campbell 253 ELAINE ASTON

14 Beyond the muse: the Spanish actress as collaborator 272 MARIA M. DELGADO

15 Going solo: an historical perspective on the actress and the monologue 291 MAGGIE B. GALE

16 Changing Shakespeare: new possibilities for the modern actress 314 PENNY GAY

General reading 327 Index 330

ILLUSTRATIONS

1 The Actresses’ Franchise League, assembled for the Women’s Coronation Procession, 17 June 1911 page 6 2 Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs Pankhurst in the film of Oh! What a Lovely War (1969) 7 3 Portrait of Elizabeth Griffith in the pose of confident author and actress, surrounded by visual icons of her stage and literary careers 45 4 Miss Cushman as Lady Macbeth 58 5 Miss Cushman as Romeo, and Miss Susan Cushman as Juliet, at the Haymarket Theatre 59 6 Eleonora Duse on her last visit to London, 1923 69 7 Miss Glyn as Constance in King John 78 8 Theatrical photograph of Mrs John Wood, b. 1845,nee´ Vining 82 9 Mary Anderson – a ‘Paris panel’ ca. 1895 87 10 Training not finishing: a mid-twentieth-century photograph showing RADA’s first Principal, Kenneth Barnes, addressing some of the academy’s students 105 11 Peggy Ashcroft with Kenneth Moore in The Deep Blue Sea, 1952 122 12 Yvonne Mitchell in The Divided Heart, 1954 124 13 Jane Fonda speaking to a rally of 2,000 students at the University of South Carolina in 1970 145 14 Dame Madge Kendal at her desk 174 15 ‘The return from America’: caricature by Paprocki soon after Modjeska’s first appearance in America, 1876 180 16 Alma Taylor, Miss Gladys Cooper, Florence E. Turner, Miss Violet Hopson and Miss Betty Balfour – the last in Squibs 196 17 Madeleine Carroll 208 18 Sophie Okonedo as Cressida in Troilus and Cressida, The National Theatre, 1999 222 19 Madame Vestris, ‘The Green Room at Drury Lane Theatre: Tom and Jerry Introduced to the Characters in Don Giovanni’ 239

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illustrations

20 Vesta Tilley: a handbill advertising Vesta Tilley’s music hall act ca. 1894–5 249 21 A Punch cartoon (15 April 1882) showing Sarah Bernhardt at the time of her marriage to Jacques Damala as a shooting star captured in a wedding ring 256 22 Julia Varley as Dona˜ Musica in Dona˜ Musica’s Butterﬂies, Odinteatret, 1997 292 23 Miss Kelly in the character of Mrs Parthian, by F. W. Wilkin 296 24 May Isabel Fisk 299 25 Ruth Draper as ‘The American Tourist’ in In a Church in Italy 308

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CONTRIBUTORS

elaine aston is Professor of Contemporary Performance at Lancaster University, where she researches and teaches feminist theory, theatre and performance. Her authored studies include Sarah Bernhardt: A French Actress on the English Stage (1989), Theatre as Sign-System, with George Savona (1991), An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (1995), Caryl Churchill (1997; 2001), Feminist Theatre Practice (1999) and Feminist Views on the English Stage (2003).

jacky bratton is Professor of Theatre and Cultural History at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has written about music hall and other aspects of Romantic and Victorian theatre; her latest publications are New Readings in Theatre History (2003) and The Victorian Clown (with Ann Featherstone, 2006).

gilli bush-bailey is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published articles on practice- based research in early nineteenth-century theatre and her monograph Treading the Bawds: Actresses and Playwrights on the Late-Stuart Stage (2006) offers a revisionist history of writing and performing women on the seventeenth-century stage.

maria m. delgado is Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Queen Mary, University of London and co-editor of Contemporary Theatre Review. Her publications include co-edited volumes for Manchester University Press: In Contact with the Gods? Directors Talk Theatre (1996), The Paris Jigsaw: Internationalism and the Paris Stages (2002) and Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century (2002). Her studies of the Spanish actresses Maria Casares,` Margarita Xirgu and Nuria Espert are included in ‘Other’ Spanish Theatres: Erasure and Inscription on the Twentieth-Century Spanish Stage (2003).

elizabeth eger is Lecturer in the Department of English at King’s College London and is currently completing a book entitled Living Muses: Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism. Previous publications include, as co-editor and contributor, Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires

contributors

and Delectable Goods (2003) and Women, Writing and the Public Sphere: 1700– 1830 (2001).

maggie b. gale is Chair in Drama at the University of Manchester. Author of West End Women: Women on the London Stage 1918–1962 (1996), she is co- editor with Viv Gardner of Women, Theatre and Performance: New Histories, New Historiographies (2000) and Auto/biography and Identity: Women, Theatre and Performance (2004), and, with Clive Barker, of British Theatre Between the Wars 1918–1939 (2000). She is currently working on a monograph on J. B. Priestley for the Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists series (2007).

viv gardner is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Manchester. She is co-editor with Maggie B. Gale of Women, Theatre and Performance: New Histories, New Historiographies (2000) and Auto/biography and Identity: Women, Theatre and Performance (2004). Her recent research is on Gertie Millar, Florence Farr and the 5th Marquis of Anglesey, and on British provincial theatre 1900–1939.

penny gay is Professor in English Literature and Drama at the University of Sydney. She is the author of As She Likes It: Shakespeare’s Unruly Women (1994), William Shakespeare: As You Like It (1999), Jane Austen and the Theatre (2002) and numerous essays on Shakespeare’s female roles.

christine gledhill is currently part-time Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Sunderland. She has published extensively on feminist ﬁlm criticism, melodrama and ﬁlm and British cinema. Her most recent publications include Reinventing Film Studies (co-edited with Linda Williams, 2003) and Reframing British Cinema 1918–1928: Between Restraint and Passion (2003).

lynette goddard is Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published articles on British black women’s theatre in Alternatives Within the Mainstream II: British Postwar Queer Theatres (2007), The Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture (2002) and Contemporary Theatre Review. Her monograph Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance will be published in 2007.

tony howard is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Warwick. Publications include Women as Hamlet (2007), Reading the Apocalypse in Bed: Selected Plays of Tadeusz Rozewicz (1998) and Acts of War (co-edited with John Stokes, 1996). He translates Polish poetry and drama with Barbara Bogoczek.

gail marshall is Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Oxford Brookes University. She is the author and editor of books on Victorian theatre, literature and culture and is currently editing the Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siecle` and writing a monograph on Victorian women and Shakespeare.

contributors

david mayer is Emeritus Professor and Research Professor at the University of Manchester. His recent writing explores the interstices between late-Victorian stages and early motion pictures and he is currently completing a study of D. W. Grifﬁth and the American theatre. Founder of the Victorian and Edwardian Stage on Film Project, he is also a contributing member of the Grifﬁth Project.

jo robinson teaches nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theatre and theatre history in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham. She has published in Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, Performance Research and Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

john stokes is Professor of Modern British Literature in the Department of English, King’s College London. His most recent book is The French Actress and her English Audience (2005) and he is a regular theatre reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement.

lucie sutherland is a Research Fellow in Theatre and Performance History at the University of Nottingham. She has written on aspects of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century British theatre, including the career of the actor-manager George Alexander. She is currently researching the performance culture of Nottingham in the mid-nineteenth century.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors and publishers have made every attempt to trace copyright holders: sub- sequent reprints of this volume will include any alterations to copyright acknowledgements of which the publishers are made aware. The editors would particularly like to thank Victoria Cooper and Rebecca Jones at Cambridge University Press for their enthusiasm and encouragement. Thanks are also due to Richard Mangan at the Mander and Mitchenson Theatre Collection, to Sarah Williams at the Museum of London, to Liz and Tony Gale and to Dame Eileen Atkins, Eve Best, Cordelia Monsey, Gillian Raine and Harriet Walter. Maggie B. Gale and John Stokes are grateful for the support of their respective institutions, Manchester University and King’s College London, and of their partners Ben Partridge and Faith Evans.

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