DOCSLIB.ORG

Michael Field and Fin De Siecle Culture and Society

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Michael Field and Fin De Siecle Culture and Society Michael Field and Fin de Siecle Culture and Society MICHAEL FIELD AND FIN-DE-SIECLE CULTURE & SOCIETY The Journals, 1868-1914, and Correspondence of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper from the British Library, London Contents listing PUBLISHER'S NOTE EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION BY DR MARION THAIN CONTENTS OF REELS DETAILED LISTING BRIEF CHRONOLOGY Michael Field and Fin de Siecle Culture and Society Publisher's Note The “binary star” – as Browning called them - that was ‘Michael Field’, shone brightly from the first appearance of their play Callirrhoe in 1884 to their deaths in 1913/14. Katharine Harris Bradley (1846-1914) and her niece, Edith Emma Cooper (1862-1913), collaborated in writing verse and drama and were “closer married” than many of their heterosexual friends. They were familiar figures in the art world and were close friends with Berenson and Ruskin. Robert Browning was the first to acclaim their “genius” in poetry and they were widely published in periodicals. Collected volumes of poetry included Bellerophon, Underneath the Bough, Long Ago, Sight and Song, Poems of Adoration and Mystic Trees. They also wrote 27 dramas, mainly based on legends and historical figures, many of which explore the relationship between love and death. Given the range of their interests and the wealth of their connections, they are ideally situated to illuminate many aspects of late Victorian and early Modernist culture. Their diaries and letters are both voluminous and clearly written – yet they have remained inaccessible to most scholars until now. There is much on: Death – which assumed a central role in Victorian culture following the death of Prince Albert in 1861 – is a recurring theme in their diaries and their works. They do not merely note the passing of Arnold, Browning, Whitman and Tennyson – they describe ritual and remembrance with descriptions of funerals, clippings from the press and poems written for the occasion. They explore their feelings and record the reactions of others. The same attention is provided for the deaths of family members and favourite dogs. The death of Queen Victoria provokes an outpouring of reflections on the importance of the Queen and the character of the Victorian Age. Sex – the 1880s and 1890s were a time of sexual experimentation and scandal. Their own same-sex relationship changed over time from that of artistic collaborators in the style of Beaumont of Fletcher, to that of soul mates and lovers, and is beautifully described in the diaries and letters. There is also much on their homosexual and bisexual friends and acquaintances such as Ricketts and Shannon, J A Symonds, Oscar Wilde and Alfred Douglas. Religion – there is much on spirituality in the diaries, from accounts of dreams featuring the deceased, to contemplation of the importance of mystery. Their own conversion from Paganism to Catholicism is described and their correspondence with John Gray and Ruskin explores the importance of vows, the attraction of mystery, and the role of religion in human life. Art – there are many first-hand accounts of galleries visited and exhibitions attended in Britain, France and Italy. There are anecdotes of Millais and Rossetti, Walter Pater and Vernon Lee, and discussions of aestheticism. Correspondence with Bernard Berenson in London, Florence and America explores issues of taste and value. Literature – French and English writing is examined in detail, from George Meredith to Paul Verlaine. They list the books they read and give their reactions. There is a wonderful description of their visit to the bookseller to purchase a Yellow Book which “is full of cleverness such as one expects to find in those who dwell below light + hope + love + aspiration”. Contemporary theatre is well documented, including the reception of their works. Early correspondence with Browning discusses their identity and the evolution of their writing, giving a fascinating glimpse into the role of a literary mentor. There are also subversive ideas about the “great illusion” of the Victorian age and issues such as education, the franchise, free trade unions, class, science and imperialism. Dr Marion Thain provides a detailed introduction to the diaries and letters, setting these in context. A brief listing of the key subjects and events covered by the diaries has also been supplied to help readers. <back Michael Field and Fin de Siecle Culture and Society Editorial Introduction by Dr Marion Thain This microfilm facsimile copy includes the 30 volumes of diary material of ‘Michael Field’, together with 8 bound volumes of correspondence between Michael Field and others, held in the British Library.1 Michael Field was an aunt and niece couple who not only published poetry and drama under the single male pseudonym, but who also lived their lives through that name, among other sobriquets. Katharine Bradley, the aunt (1846-1914), was known primarily as ‘Michael’ to her friends, but was also commonly called Sim by her lifelong companion and niece, Edith Cooper (1862-1913). Cooper was known primarily as ‘Henry’ or ‘Field’, but other names proliferate in the diaries. The name ‘Michael Field’ is therefore a bipartite name, signifying the assumed names of two separate women, as well as appearing to signify one single male identity: Bradley and Cooper used the composite single name ‘Michael Field’ to represent their unity in both literary and personal arenas. The two women were everything to each other. When Cooper’s mother was invalided after the birth of her younger sister, Bradley stepped in and took on the role not only of aunt but also of guardian and teacher; soon the two women were also filling the roles of mother and daughter, sisters, literary collaborators, and, eventually, lovers. In 1884 (when Cooper was 22, and Bradley 38) they published their first work in the name of Michael Field - the verse-drama Callirrhoë. From then on their lives became intertwined in the identity of Michael Field. Bradley and Cooper’s life-narrative, recounted in both letters and diaries, is split along some very dramatic fault-lines. The early conversion to Paganism (on the acquisition of a pet Skye Terrier) was mirrored by an equally cataclysmic conversion to Catholicism (on the death of a pet Chow dog, much later on in their lives). It is a life-story with a dramatic tripartite structure in which the protagonists are involved in key moments of transition. The story of Michael Field is based around a complex and compelling personal mythology, but there is a danger of only ever labelling Bradley and Cooper as eccentric, and seeing the madness of their personal symbolism, and never seeing their story as engaged fully with the major issues of the period. Rather, their lives display a thorough engagement with the late-Victorian and early twentieth-century world, both in terms of the people with whom they associate, the issues with which they are concerned, and also in the manner in which they choose to construct their narrative. In their work we often see ingenious and unusual approaches to paradigmatic turn-of-the- century concerns. The Diaries There is no autobiography of ‘Michael Field’ as such, but the life-story of the two women is represented in the 28 large volumes of diaries which they co-wrote. The diary is (except for an anomalous first volume) specifically the diary of Michael Field, not that of Edith Cooper and Katharine Bradley, and begins in 1888 when Edith was 26 and Katharine 42, after they had established their dual identity. The first volume of the diaries is an exception, written by Bradley on her own during an extended trip to Paris in 1868-9. This narrative is dominated by the death of Alfred Gérente, the brother of her friend, to whom she had formed a passionate romantic attachment. Volumes 2 to 29 cover the years from 1888 to Katharine’s death in 1914, and bear the title ‘Works and Days’, inscribed in the front of volume 2. Volume 30 contains miscellaneous, loose material collected from vols. 1-28 into two separate folders. In Bradley and Cooper’s published drama and poetry, the pseudonym can be understood, at least initially, as a deliberate ploy to persuade the general public that they are receiving work from a single male author (and the function of the pseudonym in the published work is much discussed by critics2), but in the diaries that are reproduced here, the name has no such function. In their life-writing, the women’s self-creation through this sobriquet expresses their unity, but it does not efface their distinctness: the diaries do not pretend to record the life of a single male, as two different hands record the experience of two clearly differentiated personas. Clearly the name ‘Michael Field’ was much more than a literary pseudonym: it was an expression of their actual, lived, identity. The diaries are hardbound, scrapbook-size volumes, bound with dark blue board or vellum. Even after disregarding the typed indexes and the pencil-marked editorial comments left by Thomas Sturge Moore (Michael Field’s literary executor) when he edited the text into the selected published volume, Works and Days3, one is left with a carefully constructed set of diaries which were clearly conceived of by the authors as constituting a book rather than simply a repository for odds and ends and personal reminders. The first volume of the Michael Field diary proper (1888-89) has the title of the whole work – Works and Days – added retrospectively, squeezed in at the top of the first page, above the first line of text which had been written on the top printed line of the page. At some point the women have gone back with a red pen and used it to organise the volume, adding other subtitles to the volume in the same red ink – such as ‘French Books’ heading a list at the back of this volume of French titles.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Charles Ricketts' Illustrations for Two of Oscar Wilde's Poems in Prose
    3 FAITHFUL INFIDELITY: CHARLES RICKETTS' ILLUSTRATIONS FOR TWO OF OSCAR WILDE'S POEMS IN PROSE Jeremiah Romano Mercurio (University of St Andrews) Abstract The artist, collector, and critic Charles Ricketts (1866–1931) has often been characterised as a reactionary voice in early-twentieth-century debates about modern art. Although he responded conservatively to modern-art developments such as those embodied by the term 'Post-Impressionism', his work in book design and illustration exemplifies progressive strategies of decoration that reconfigure the relationship between author and illustrator as one of collaborative authorship. Ricketts' illustrations are autonomous narratives that not only reproduce the meanings of the texts they represent, but also parody and elaborate on them. Moreover, Ricketts' book designs and illustrations represent a complex resistance to and working out of Oscar Wilde's views on art, language, and orality. Wilde regarded visual art as inferior to language because the latter can embody the graphic and is free from the former's fixity in time and materiality. Ricketts' illustrational strategies are designed, not only to reinforce his own autonomy, but also to disprove Wilde's description of visual art as limited compared with language. Ricketts' progressive strategies of design are epitomized by his unpublished illustrations for Wilde's Poems in Prose (1894), a text which dramatises the centrality of voice to Wilde's poetic endeavour and allows Ricketts directly to challenge Wilde's denigration of the visual arts. By focusing on two representative examples, Ricketts' drawings for 'The Disciple' and 'The House of Judgment', and by providing close readings of both image and text, this piece traces Ricketts' illustrational methods and reveals their debts to Wilde's own theories of orality, language, and visual arts, charting Ricketts' divergences from Wilde's texts and highlighting the critical dialogue implicit in the illustrations.
    [Show full text]
  • Modernist Ekphrasis and Museum Politics
    1 BEYOND THE FRAME: MODERNIST EKPHRASIS AND MUSEUM POLITICS A dissertation presented By Frank Robert Capogna to The Department of English In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the field of English Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts April 2017 2 BEYOND THE FRAME: MODERNIST EKPHRASIS AND MUSEUM POLITICS A dissertation presented By Frank Robert Capogna ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities of Northeastern University April 2017 3 ABSTRACT This dissertation argues that the public art museum and its practices of collecting, organizing, and defining cultures at once enabled and constrained the poetic forms and subjects available to American and British poets of a transatlantic long modernist period. I trace these lines of influence particularly as they shape modernist engagements with ekphrasis, the historical genre of poetry that describes, contemplates, or interrogates a visual art object. Drawing on a range of materials and theoretical formations—from archival documents that attest to modernist poets’ lived experiences in museums and galleries to Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of art and critical scholarship in the field of Museum Studies—I situate modernist ekphrastic poetry in relation to developments in twentieth-century museology and to the revolutionary literary and visual aesthetics of early twentieth-century modernism. This juxtaposition reveals how modern poets revised the conventions of, and recalibrated the expectations for, ekphrastic poetry to evaluate the museum’s cultural capital and its then common marginalization of the art and experiences of female subjects, queer subjects, and subjects of color.
    [Show full text]
  • Critical Introduction to Volume 1 of the Dial (1889)
    Critical Introduction to Volume 1 of The Dial (1889) The unsigned “Apology” located on the final page of the first Dial brought out Figure 1. Pictorial Initial "U" Designed by Charles Ricketts for John Gray’s “The Great Worm” by Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon in August 1889 outlined the editorial defense (apologia) for the eccentric publication: “The sole aim of this magazine is to gain sympathy with its views” (36). The views expressed in this first number were those of a very limited group indeed: four young men based in central London. In addition to co-editors Ricketts and Shannon, who between them produced most of the magazine’s contents, Reginald Savage contributed a single artwork and a series of brief “Notes” on current exhibitions and John Gray provided a fairy tale and a critical essay. Like its Pre-Raphaelite predecessor the Germ (1850), the Dial sought to set the visual and verbal arts in dialogue with each other. Artists illustrated the literary efforts of their colleagues, Ricketts designed textual ornaments for specific pieces of writing (fig. 1), and the magazine as whole engaged with ideas of design. While the Dial might have shared the Germ’s subtitle, “Thoughts Towards Nature in Art and Literature,” its approach is more fantastic, mythical, and decorative. Indeed, the magazine’s artistic vision extends 1 beyond the English Pre-Raphaelites to include the art and literature of the Continent, particularly that of France. The “Apology” concludes with the acknowledgement that “we are out of date in our belief that the artist’s conscientiousness cannot be controlled by the paying public” (36).
    [Show full text]
  • Charles Ricketts & Charles Shannon
    0 More Next Blog» Create Blog Sign In Charles Ricketts & Charles Shannon Wednesday, June 11, 2014 Search This Blog 150. Who must I copy to be original? Search Blog 150 is a contribution by Philip R. Bishop, connoisseur of the work of Thomas Bird Mosher, who has been the subject of some recent blogs. Who must I copy to be original? This question from François Coppée’s Le Trésor, ‘Qui pourrais-je imiter pour être original?’, has always seemed appropriate when discussing Thomas Bird Mosher and the preparation of his Mosher Press books. The literature and designs of the Kelmscott, Eragny, the Daniel presses and the Bodley Head were all copied and Ricketts and the Vale Press were likewise included in Mosher’s arsenal. Charles Ricketts (1866-1931), artist, book designer, collector, art critic, set and costume designer & Charles Shannon (1863-1937), lithographer, painter and art collector : a weekly blog written by Paul van Capelleveen With contributions by Paul Delaney (no. 11, no. 100), Barbara Pezzini (no. 39, no. 40), Paul Durham (no. 136), Thomas Bird Mosher at age 49 (circa 1901) Philip R. Bishop (no. 150), and with texts by Charles Ricketts To be sure, Mosher admired the Vale Press and it’s publisher-designer. In (no. 16, no. 31, no. 46, no. 61, the Gordon Bottomley correspondence at the British Library there are two no. 111, no. 138, no. 149) key letters in which Mosher professes his admiration. Thanks are due to Marja In the Mosher-to-Bottomley letter of May 10, 1910 Mosher discusses Smolenaars. Ricketts’s book on Titian with its excellent half-tone illustrations.
    [Show full text]
  • Michael Field and the Gaze
    Victorian Literature and Culture (2006), 34, 553–571. Printed in the United States of America. Copyright C 2006 Cambridge University Press. 1060-1503/06 $9.50 A VISUAL FIELD: MICHAEL FIELD AND THE GAZE By Hilary Fraser In 1892, Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913) published a volume of poetry with the title Sight and Song based on their response to a series of paintings in British and Continental public galleries. Bradley and Cooper, aunt and niece, devoted lovers, who over the three decades of their writing lives produced numerous volumes of poetry and plays collaboratively under the authorial signature “Michael Field,” had already made their name with a volume published in 1889 entitled Long Ago, comprising translations and elaborations of the Sapphic fragments, which has been read as an intriguing and (for the times) audaciously explicit celebration of love between women. The concept of “translation” was as fundamental to the project of Sight and Song as it had been to Long Ago; however, in the later volume it refers not to the literal translation of poetic fragments written in an ancient and other language (as Long Ago ostensibly did) but to the rhetorical act of interpreting visual images. The aim of their new collection of ekphrastic poems was, as they explained in the Preface to Sight and Song, “to translate into verse what the lines and colours of certain chosen pictures sing in themselves” (Michael Field, Sight and Song v). The synaesthetic complexity of Michael Field’s language here suggests the multidimensional sensory experience of looking at and responding to visual art works, something the women try to capture in the various kinds of writing they undertake around the production of this volume – their journal and their letters, as well as the poems themselves – in their attempt to provide such a translation.
    [Show full text]
  • HELEN RITCHIE Jewellery Studies — the Journal of the Society of Jewellery Historians 2020/3
    Jewellery Studies The Journal of The Society of Jewellery Historians 2020/3 HELEN RITCHIE Jewellery Studies — the Journal of The Society of Jewellery Historians 2020/3. Ritchie Published by the Society of Jewellery Historians The Society of J E W ELL ERY HISTORIANS The Society of Jewellery Historians is a Registered Charity: No.1151393, and a company limited by guarantee, No. 7032947, registered in England. The logo of the Society is the copyright of the Society and shall not be used if the Work is republished in any way other than as an unaltered pdf of the Work in this Publication. The Society was formed in 1977 with the aim of stimulating the growing international interest in jewellery of all ages and cultures by publishing new research and by bringing together those interested in the subject, whether in a professional or private capacity. The membership includes archaeologists, museum specialists, collectors, art historians, dealers, gemmologists, practising jewellers and designers, scientists and conservators. The Society runs a programme of lectures from September to June, inviting speakers from different disciplines and many parts of the world. The lectures are usually held in London at the Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1V OHS, and are made available afterwards on the Society’s website. In addition, the Society arranges a variety of other occasional events including international symposia on aspects of the history and technology of jewellery, study visits to museums, and private views of special exhibitions. For full details visit the Society’s website at: www.societyofjewelleryhistorians.ac.uk or write to: The Membership Secretary, The Society of Jewellery Historians, Scientific Research, The British Museum, London WC1B 3DG 1 Jewellery Studies — the Journal of The Society of Jewellery Historians 2020/3.
    [Show full text]
  • Decadence, Homosexuality and Catholicism in the Life of John Gray
    Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University English Dissertations Department of English Fall 12-16-2019 "Enough of the World is Mine": Decadence, Homosexuality and Catholicism in the Life of John Gray Lewis Whitaker Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss Recommended Citation Whitaker, Lewis, ""Enough of the World is Mine": Decadence, Homosexuality and Catholicism in the Life of John Gray." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2019. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss/229 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “ENOUGH OF THE WORLD IS MINE”: DECADENCE, HOMOSEXUALITY AND CATHOLICISM IN THE LIFE OF JOHN GRAY by LEWIS H. WHITAKER Under the Direction of LeeAnne Richardson, PhD ABSTRACT This project follows the life of the late-Victorian poet John Gray, who was born into lower- middle class poverty in London. Gray educated himself, rising from clerical positions with the Post Office and the Foreign Office, before meeting Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, who published his early work, and designed the seminal book of fin de siècle verse Silverpoints, for which Gray earned the epithet le plus decadent des decadents. This project considers the ways in which Gray’s associations with Ricketts and Shannon, along with Oscar Wilde, André Raffalovich and the aunt and niece couple writing as Michael Field impacted his life, from the publication of his early decadent poetry, to his renunciation of the London demimonde, to eventual ordination in the Roman Catholic Church.
    [Show full text]
  • Charles Ricketts Was One of the Most Significant Figures of the Victorian Fin
    CHARLES DE SOUSY RICKETTS (1866-1931) Charles Ricketts has been called the quintessence of the nineties. In his life as much as his work, he embodied not merely an “aesthetic” devotion to art and beauty but also many of the fin de siècle’s finest creative energies. While still a young man, Ricketts established himself as an innovator in book design, illustration, publishing, and printing, quickly earning the admiration of leading figures in the literary and art worlds. Frederick Leighton commissioned an important early pen-and-ink drawing. Samuel Bing, Camille Pissarro and Henri Toulouse- Lautrec numbered among Ricketts’s admirers on the William Rothenstein. Charles Continent (where Ricketts’s influence upon Art Nouveau Ricketts and Charles Shannon. is still underrated). In London, the writers Oscar Wilde, Drawing, c. 1897, Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, Michael Field, John Gray, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press. and Thomas Sturge-Moore were all eager for Ricketts to decorate their books or design stagings for their plays. Wilde especially was proud of Ricketts’s involvement in his own work: he once called Ricketts “the subtle and fantastic decorator” of his books. In some respects, Ricketts was Wilde’s collaborator or kindred spirit. His sympathies with Wilde were profound. His 1 designs for Wilde’s The Sphinx mark one of the high points, if not the high point, of late- Victorian book design. Ricketts was born in 1866 in Geneva to a French mother and an English father, the latter of whom harboured serious ambitions of becoming a painter of seascapes and marine subjects.
    [Show full text]
  • Michael Field, German Philosophy and Sapphic Identity: Towards Martin Heidegger Dr
    Michael Field, German Philosophy and Sapphic Identity: Towards Martin Heidegger Dr. Mayron E. Cantillo Lucuara. Universitat de València Recibido 9/11/2020 Michael Field, filosofía alemana e Michael Field, German Philosophy and Sapphic identidad sáfica: hacia Martin Identity: Towards Martin Heidegger Heidegger Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, also known Katharine Bradley y Edith Cooper, también jointly as Michael Field, took a special and enduring conocidas conjuntamente como Michael Field, interest in philosophy, chiefly in its Germanic cultivaron un interés especial y duradero por la branch, but this aspect of their highly intellectualised filosofía, principalmente por su rama germánica, si lives has received no systematic inquiry to date. In bien este aspecto de sus vidas altamente this article, I propose to offer an integrative three- intelectualizadas no ha sido objeto de ningún estudio fold account of (1) how contemporary critics have sistemático hasta la fecha. En este artículo, approached the Fields mostly from gender-based ofrecemos un triple comentario integrador de (1) philosophical viewpoints, (2) how the couple cómo los críticos contemporáneos han abordado a engaged with prominent German thinkers such as las Fields principalmente desde puntos de vista Hegel and Nietzsche, and lastly (3) how their ahead- filosóficos basados en el género, (2) cómo la pareja of-time poetics can be fruitfully associated with se desenvolvía con pensadores alemanes tan Martin Heidegger’s deconstructive ontology as prominentes como Hegel y Nietzsche y, por último, 213 expounded in Being and Time. The conclusions I (3) cómo su adelantada visión poética puede reach, reinforced by a brief comparative study of vincularse fructíferamente a la ontología Nº 98 Michael Field’s Long Ago (1889), are audacious yet deconstructiva de Martin Heidegger tal y como se marzo 2021 promising: the Fields and Heidegger seem to expone en Ser y Tiempo.
    [Show full text]
  • Fine Printing & Illustration
    Fine Printing & Illustration ¶ Item 68. Jones (David). Coleridge (Samuel Taylor). The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Modern Fine Printing & Illustration Catalogue 1484. Maggs Bros Ltd 48 Bedford Square London 2018 Wood-engraving by Simon Brett of the keystone above the front door at 48 Bedford Square, reproduced here in memory of Cobden-Sanderson’s sacrifice of his type to theThames. Front endpapers: Item 64. Henry (Avril K.). Toys. Back endpapers: Item 3.The endpapers for Donald Glaister's binding of the Ashendene Boccaccio. Maggs Bros Ltd., 48 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DR Contents of Catalogue The William Lang Doves Press collection. 1. Margaret Adams calligraphic album. 2. Art Workers’ Guild. Sketches made on Lithography Night. 1905. 3–7. Ashendene Press. 8. Edward Bawden. How to Make Money. c. 1929. 9. Aubrey Beardsley. The Pierrot of the Minute. 1897 10 & 11. Ian Beck. Fugitive Lyrics. 2013. 12. Edward Burne-Jones. Mezzotint, signed, of Pan and Psyche. 1887. 13. Michael Caine. Lament for Ignacio Sanchez mejias. 1995. 14–16. Corvinus Press. Three rare T.E. Lawrence books. 17–19. Cresset Press. 20. Nancy Cunard, John Banting, John Piper, Ithell Colquhoun and others. Salvo for Russia. 1942. 21–22. Doves Press. 23. Eragny Press. Les Ballades de Villon. 1900. 24–26. Essex House Press. 27. Fleece Press. To the War with Paper & Brush. 2007. 28–30. Robert Gibbings. 31–36. Eric Gill. 37–54. Golden Cockerel Press. 55–61. Gregynog Press. 63. Temporary Culture. Forever Peace: To Stop War. 64. Avril Henry. Original illustrated manuscript of Toys. 65. High House Press. A Marriage Triumph.
    [Show full text]
  • (1899±1901) Cre- Was Small, with a Shallow Stage Which Dictated Ated by W.B
    A Abbey Theatre The opening of the Abbey from a conversion of the Mechanics' Hall in Theatre on 27 December 1904 followed from Lower Abbey Street and a disused morgue, the Irish Literary Theatre (1899±1901) cre- was small, with a shallow stage which dictated ated by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, with simple sets. But though poorly equipped, the Edward Martyn and George Moore, to pro- early Abbey was aesthetically innovative. duce a `school of Celtic and Irish dramatic Robert Gregory and Charles Ricketts literature'. When Yeats joined forces with the designed for it, Gordon Craig's screens were self-trained Fay brothers ± William the stage first used on its stage, and Ninette de Valois manager and comedian, and Frank the verse- set up a ballet school for theatre use. In 1905 a speaker ± their company (augmented import- permanent salaried company was established antly by Synge and the talented Allgood and controlling powers were given to the sisters) had the potential to create an entirely directors (some actors seceded, thinking the new kind of Irish theatre, one which aimed, changes contrary to nationalist principles). as a later Abbey playwright, Thomas Kilroy, The Abbey's claim to be a national theatre put it, to `weld the fracture between the was aggressively tested by Catholics and Anglo-Irish and Gaelic Ireland'. The Irish nationalists in their audiences. The peasant National Theatre Society became in 1904 drama was the field where cultural interests the National Theatre Society (NTS) Ltd, clashed most spectacularly. Lady Gregory familiarly known from its inception as the popularized the genre with one-act comedies Abbey Theatre.
    [Show full text]
  • Set and Costume Design by Kieron Devlin
    Set and Costume Design by Kieron Devlin Encyclopedia Copyright © 2015, glbtq, Inc. Entry Copyright © 2002, glbtq, Inc. Reprinted from http://www.glbtq.com Set and costume design and properties for stage and film are fields that have attracted many talented people, a large percentage of whom have been gay men. In fact, this field in the entertainment industry has often been identified specifically as "queer work." While many heterosexuals have also been successful in the area of art direction, set design and decoration for stage and film have a distinctly gay cachet. Perhaps an even "gayer" field is that of costume design. As William Mann has recently documented, even during the worst periods of repression, Hollywood offered opportunities of creative expression for gay men and lesbians, many of whom were open about their sexual orientation. Opera and ballet also offered opportunities for gifted homosexuals. The trend here has been for painters to cross over from the fine arts to the applied arts, adding stage design to their range. For many notable stage designers working in this field, their sexual orientation was never an issue in their professional lives. Among the most significant gay and lesbian artists who are distinguished for their work as set designers are Charles Ricketts, Duncan Grant, Erté (Romain de Tirtoff), Pavel Tchelitchew, Oliver Messel, Cecil Beaton, Léonor Fini, George James Hopkins, Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde, Franco Zeffirelli, David Hockney, Derek Jarman, and Keith Haring. Many gay artists of Hollywood's golden age were extremely versatile, but openly gay men became especially associated with costume design. In some cases, Hollywood costume designers were considered on a par with world class couturiers and fashion designers and had a palpable influence on public taste.
    [Show full text]