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Home , Charles Kean, Queen Victoria, Royal Archives

Queen and the Theatre of her Age By the Same Author NOT SHAKESPEARE SHAKESPEARE’S VICTORIAN STAGE VICTORIAN THEATRICAL BURLESQUES and the Theatre of her Age

Richard W. Schoch Reader in Drama and Theatre History School of English and Drama Queen Mary, University of London © Richard W. Schoch 2004 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2004 978-1-4039-3297-6 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New , N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-51634-6 ISBN 978-0-230-28891-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230288911 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schoch, Richard W. Queen Victoria and the theatre of her age / Richard W. Schoch. p. cm. Includes bibliographical reference (p. ) and index.

1. Victoria, Queen of , 1819–1901 – Knowledge – Performing arts. 2. Performing arts – Great Britain – History – . 3. Theater – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 4. Queens – Great Britain – Biography. I. Title. DA555.S36 2004 941.081092 – dc22 2003055850 10987654321 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 For Annabel and Richard Cellini This page intentionally left blank Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgements xi

Prologue xiii

Part I At Home 1

1 Paying a Visit to the 3 2 En Amateur 16 3 Our Little Theatre 37 4 Hush Money 61 5 Suspended, not Destroyed 70 6 For One Night Only 89

Part II In London 103

7 At the Play 105 8 The Repaid All 117 9 Royally to Play a Native Part 126 10 Little People (Good and Bad) 136 11 Vulgar Victorian Trash 146

Part III The Queen’s Example 159

12 The Queen is Alarmed 161 13 Arise, Sir——! 173 14 Refuge at the Foot of the Throne 185

Epilogue: A Giddy Whirl of Theatre-going 195

Notes 203

Bibliography 222

Index 227

vii This page intentionally left blank List of Illustrations

1. Watercolour of Apollo in his Chariot, from Charles Kean’s production of The Winter’s Tale, ’s Theatre, London, 1856 (Egron Lundgren). The © 2003, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. xv 2. Helena and Louise in Les Deux Petits Savoyards, performed at , 1854. The Royal Collection © 2003, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 17 3. Sketch of the royal children in a tableau inspired by John Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, presented at , 1852 (E.H. Corbould). The Royal Collection © 2003, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 21 4. The royal children in the tableau ‘Spirit of the Empress Helena’, presented at Windsor Castle, 1854. The Royal Collection © 2003, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 23 5. Tableau ‘Homage to Queen Victoria’, presented at Osborne House, 1888. The Royal Collection © 2003, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 27 6. Tableau of ‘India’, presented at , 1888. The Royal Collection © 2003, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 28 7. Princess Victoria of and Hon. Alexander Yorke in Caught at Last, performed at Balmoral Castle, 1889. The Royal Collection © 2003, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 33 8. Programme for , performed in the Rubens Room at Windsor Castle, 1853. The Royal Collection © 2003, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 39 9. Painting of a scene from Macbeth, performed in the Rubens Room at Windsor Castle, 1853 (Louis Haghe). The Royal Collection © 2003, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 41 10. Queen Victoria’s sketch of a scene from , performed in the Rubens Room at Windsor Castle, 1852. The Royal Collection © 2003, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 54 11. The Waterloo Chamber, Windsor Castle, set up for a command performance, c. 1891. The Royal Collection © 2003, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 76 12. Programme for Macbeth, Her Majesty’s Theatre, London, 19 January 1858. The Royal Collection © 2003, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 143

ix x List of Illustrations

13. Queen Victoria’s sketch of the tableau of ‘The ’ from Charles Kean’s production of The Corsican Brothers, Princess’s Theatre, London, 1852. The Royal Collection © 2003, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 155 14. Watercolour of a scene from ’s The Colleen Bawn, Adelphi Theatre, London, 1861 (Egron Lundgren). The Royal Collection © 2003, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 156 15. The ’s watercolour of ‘The Entry of Bolingbroke into London’ from Charles Kean’s production of Richard II, Princess’s Theatre, London, 1857. The Royal Collection © 2003, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 188 16. Queen Victoria’s Table, Windsor Castle, 1857. The Royal Collection © 2003, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 189 17. Drury Lane Theatre’s page in the ‘Address from the Theatrical Profession on Queen Victoria’s ’, 1887. The Royal Collection © 2003, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 197 Acknowledgements

My greatest debt of thanks is to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for her gracious permission to quote from materials in the and to obtain photographic reproductions of items from the Royal Collection. Without such permission this book could not have been written. I am espe- cially grateful for the assistance I received from the curators, archivists and librarians at Windsor Castle. The Hon. Lady Roberts, Curator of the Print Room, offered a warm welcome and provided expert guidance, most especially on artworks created by Queen Victoria and the Princess Royal. Owens, the Assistant Curator, helpfully pointed me toward materials that I would otherwise not have consulted. She was ably assisted by Rhian Glover. Frances Dimond, Curator of the Royal Photographic Collection, generously produced a wealth of material on private theatricals and tableaux vivants staged at Balmoral and Osborne. At a crucial juncture in my research she found – with amazing speed – just the right images. Lisa Heighway, the Assistant Curator, also provided invaluable help. Pamela Clark, Registrar of the Royal Archives, put at my disposal an abundance of manuscript materials, including the many volumes of Queen Victoria’s journal. She also read the entire typescript and offered several needed corrections. I am also grateful to Jill Kelsey, Deputy Registrar, for her kind and generous help, particularly at a moment when many items had to be consulted in a short period of time. Further archival research for this book was conducted at The British Library, The Folger Shakespeare Library, The Harvard Theatre Collection, The , The Shakespeare Centre and The Theatre Museum (London). I remain grateful to the staff of these institutions for their expert assistance, most espe- cially Annette Fern, formerly of the Harvard Theatre Collection. Permission to quote from unpublished manuscripts has been granted by The Harvard Theatre Collection, The Houghton Library. Research for this project began at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where I held an NEH Fellowship during the 2000–1 academic year. Much of the book was written during the 2001–2 academic year, when I was granted teaching release through a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for the luxury of extended time to read, to think and to write. My colleagues in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London, have been unfail- ingly supportive. Lisa Jardine, most especially, encouraged this project from the outset. I remain thankful for her vote of confidence.

xi xii Acknowledgements

At Palgrave Macmillan, Emily Rosser has been an enthusiastic and enterpris- ing commissioning editor. Stanley Wells and Joseph Bristow, who read an early draft, offered timely and valuable advice which improved the book immeasurably. All their suggestions have been silently adopted. For any errors or omissions that remain, the author bears sole responsibility. Among the friends and colleagues, in both the United Kingdom and the United States, who offered moral support – and canny appraisals of my work – are Cynthia Burns, James Daybell, James Greenfield, Jeremy Gross, Russell Hitchings, Steve Holman, Ari Lipman, George Marcotte, Kirk Melnikoff, Tony Morris, Bill Patterson, Daniel Pick, Peter Robinson, Christine Smith and Michael Waring. Luciano Rila, another semi-permanent fixture in Senate House, insisted upon much-needed coffee breaks when writing fatigue began to set in. Alan Stewart patiently listened as I talked my way through every research and narrative crux. Annabel and Richard Cellini, to whom this book is dedicated, have been the most wonderful friends. The warmth of their affection has sustained me from first to last. Prologue

The Queen … likes farce and rubbish better than the high class drama! – The actor Charles Kean to Queen Victoria’s dresser, Mary Anne Skerret, 18551

In 1837, when an eighteen-year-old girl who liked going to see plays became Queen of , both royalty and actors were held in low repute. When Victoria died sixty-four years later, the monarchy was revered and the theatre was respectable. These dramatic changes in public attitudes were not coinci- dental, but strategically linked: without the Queen, the stage would have remained morally suspect; without the stage, the Queen would have seemed more distant and remote. The theatre welcomed royal patronage as the proud sign of its elitism; Victoria went to the theatre not simply for enjoyment, but because it made her visible and accessible to her subjects. How did the theatre use Victoria’s patronage to assert its moral fitness? How did Victoria use the theatre to enhance her public image? This book seeks out answers as it tells the story of the most enduring alliance in British history between the stage and the throne. Victoria found theatre-going immensely exciting. In this, she was no differ- ent from millions of her subjects. From girlhood in the late 1820s to the death of her beloved Prince Albert in 1861, Victoria was a prominent fixture on the London theatrical scene. A regular occupant of the royal box at the city’s prin- cipal playhouses – , Drury Lane, the Haymarket, Her Majesty’s, the St James’s, the Princess’s and, less frequently, the Adelphi, the Lyceum and the Olympic – she enjoyed an astonishing range of popular performances by such leading actors as J.B. Buckstone, Helen Faucit, Charles and Ellen Kean, Robert and Mary Anne Keeley, W.C. Macready, Charles Mathews, Samuel Phelps, , and Alfred and Leonore Wigan. Far from limiting herself to Shakespearean tragedy and grand opera – the kind of stuffy ‘high culture’ now associated with royalty – Victoria shamelessly delighted in gory melodramas, historical romances, pantomimes, farces and even circus acts. As an exuberant teenager she was thrilled by the tamer Isaac Van Amburgh; as a young mother she invited Tom Thumb to ; as an elderly widow she was charmed by ‘Buffalo’ Bill Cody, who performed for her grandchildren at Windsor Castle. At nearly every stage in her long life Victoria was part of the theatrical scene. She began attending theatre, opera and ballet as a young girl, chaper- oned by her domineering widowed mother, the . Her first

xiii xiv Prologue recorded visit to the theatre, in 1829, was to see the historical drama Charles XII at Drury Lane. (The princess did not stay for the pantomime The Queen Bee; or, Harlequin and the Fairy Hive.) Upon her accession to the throne in 1837 the Queen was free to decide for herself which theatres she would visit, whether privately or ‘in state’. The young balanced her new responsi- bilities with an innocent and unembarrassed desire for pleasure. Early in her , John Cam Hobhouse (later Lord Broughton) inquired if she was ‘annoyed by going to a play’ on the nights when she was not required to attend formal dinners.2 He thought – mistakenly, it turned out – that Victoria would welcome an evening of domestic tranquility. ‘Oh no, not at all,’ the Queen replied; ‘I like a play very much.’ Hobhouse, taken aback by this unchecked enthusiasm for the stage, likened Victoria to ‘an emancipated schoolgirl’. And in many respects she was indeed just that. Others shared the belief that it was unseemly for the Queen of England to like the theatre so much. During her first decade on the throne Victoria favoured French and Italian opera, and only occasionally visited Drury Lane and Covent Garden – the elite ‘patent’ houses – when their repertoires were dominated by the works of Shakespeare, Sheridan Knowles and Edward Bulwer-Lyttton. For this neglect of ‘native’ drama she endured increas- ingly hostile criticism from the theatrical press. Neither her marriage to Albert in 1840 nor the birth of their nine children (the eldest, the Princess Royal, was born in 1840; the youngest, , in 1857) prevented Victoria from spending many more nights at the theatre. For the next two decades her husband nearly always accompanied her on such occasions, especially when French plays were staged at the St James’s Theatre. By the 1850s their eldest children – the Princess Royal, the , Princess Alice and Prince Alfred – frequently joined them. At Albert’s urging, Victoria instituted command performances of English plays at Windsor Castle in 1848, reviving the Tudor office of ‘Master of the Revels’. These performances, staged by leading London actors, continued until Albert’s death thirteen years later. In Victoria’s newly acquired fondness for ‘native’ drama, her consort’s influence was both beneficial and decisive. During the 1850s the Princess’s Theatre on Oxford Street (now the site of an HMV music store) was Victoria’s favourite playhouse, where she enjoyed Charles Kean’s acclaimed productions of Shakespeare and melodrama. ‘What a noble, splendid Play it is,’ she exclaimed of King John in 1852; ‘and what a man Shakespeare was!’3 Victoria, like her contemporaries, was captivated by the visual aspects of theatre. The more spectacular a play, the more she loved it. The poetry mattered less. In a lavish revival of Byron’s Sardanapalus (1853), she was struck by the ‘square shaped garments’ worn by actors who became living versions of ‘Assyrian bas reliefs’.4 The siege of Harfleur from (1859) was ‘wonderfully done, the guns, smoke, flames, storm, repulse, and final success [were] beyond everything fine and exciting’.5 And in The Winter’s Prologue xv

Tale (1856) she admired the ‘beautiful and numerous changes of scenery’ and ‘the splendid and strictly correct antique costumes’.6 Well past midnight, she and Prince Albert returned to Buckingham Palace ‘deeply impressed and enchanted’. The Queen’s German-born dresser, Frieda Arnold, liked the scenery just as much as her royal mistress, praising a tableau of Apollo in his chariot that ‘imprint[ed] itself indelibly on the mind’.7 That scene also imprinted itself on the monarch’s mind, for Victoria commissioned Egron Lundgren to paint a watercolour version (Illustration 1) for her private ‘Theatrical Album’, a cherished gift from Prince Albert to preserve souvenirs of plays they had seen together. Bound in blue morocco leather and embossed in gold, the album is preserved intact in the Print Room at Windsor Castle. Liberal in her patronage, the Queen visited other major theatres, such as the Haymarket, and ‘specialty’ houses like the Adelphi (for melodrama) and the Olympic (for burlesque). At the Haymarket she delighted in J.R. Planché’s topical extravaganza Mr. Buckstone’s Voyage Round the Globe (in Square) (1854), inspired by Wyld’s Great Globe, a scale model of the earth then on dis- play in . At the Olympic, a dingy little theatre off the Strand that constantly stank of fish, she gleefully watched Frederick Robson, playing the elf Gam Bogie, dance a Lancashire clog hornpipe in Planché’s The Yellow Dwarf (1854). ‘He sings and dances delightfully,’ she recalled, ‘contriving to

Illustration 1 Tableau from Charles Kean’s production of The Winter’s Tale (Princess’s Theatre, London, 1856), showing the Ascent of Apollo in his Chariot of the Sun, over Bithynia. Watercolour by Egron Lundgren in Queen Victoria’s Theatrical Album. xvi Prologue have the most crooked legs imagineable.’8 The following season she was enchanted by the same low comedian in Planché’s The Discreet Princess, also performed at the Olympic. ‘[Robson’s] song, terminating with the refrain “Diddle doo, diddle dum,” quite haunts us,’ she confessed.9 This from a woman taught to sing by . Her journal does not, alas, tell us whether the Queen crooned such doggerel in the privacy of her boudoir. Victoria’s last appearance at a public playhouse, in March 1861, was at the Adelphi, where she enjoyed Dion Boucicault’s wildly popular melodrama The Colleen Bawn. From the day she became a widow, on 14 December 1861, Victoria could not bear going to London or being seen in public. Yet even in her obsessively mournful and secluded widowhood, Victoria still retained her love for the stage. But now that love was more guardedly expressed. Never again would the set foot in a public theatre. No wanton display of self- indulgence, the Queen insisted, could be tolerated. Just as she refused to undertake such official duties as the opening of Parliament (which she did not perform until 1866, although even then the Lord Chamberlain read out her speech) Victoria denied herself the intimate pleasures of the stage. But she still derived vicarious pleasure in hearing about plays and players from her daughters and her Ladies-in-Waiting, who enjoyed a social life outside the court. In 1881, after much coaxing from the Prince of Wales, she allowed herself to attend a theatrical performance at Abergeldie Castle. (The Prince and Princess of Wales, married in 1863, were themselves great patrons of the stage.) This resumption of private theatre-going led to command performances at Windsor, Osborne and Balmoral. It was at these court theatricals, held in the last two decades of her life, that Victoria saw Henry Irving and in Tennyson’s Becket and enjoyed ’s . All these activities – and more – were widely reported (and sometimes illus- trated) in the newspaper and periodical press. Yet some aspects of the Queen’s devotion to the stage were little known at the time, and came to light only as biographers and historians pored over material in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. Here are some things that most of Victoria’s subjects never knew about their stage-struck sovereign. As a child in Palace, she drew detailed sketches of favourite performers, including the bass-baritone Luigi Lablache, the ballerina Marie Taglioni and the actress Frances Anne (‘Fanny’) Kemble. Princess Victoria delighted in dressing up her wooden dolls in miniature versions of theatrical costumes sewn principally by her gov- erness, Louise Lehzen, thus recreating in private the performances she had enjoyed in public. In the first few years of her reign she regularly discussed Shakespeare with her Prime Minister, Lord – ‘Lord M.’, as the young Queen fondly termed her devoted mentor. Sitting at her writing table late at night, Victoria wrote in her journals and letters about plays she had seen. Her writings are crammed with comments on Prologue xvii famous actors and actresses. A gifted artist, who received her first drawing lesson at age nine, she frequently sketched scenes that had captured her imagination. She kept up with greenroom gossip by subscribing to the Theatrical Journal, read the scripts of popular new plays, purchased orchestral scores for various dramas (in the nineteenth century music was played under the dialogue of all serious dramas, including those by Shakespeare), collected hundreds of photographs of theatrical celebrities, pasted playbills and pro- grammes into scrapbooks, commissioned paintings of scenes from favourite productions, and invited such star performers as to inscribe their names in her ‘Birthday Book’.10 At the Queen’s command, members of the royal and courtiers appeared – often unwillingly – in tableaux vivants and private theatricals. These domestic entertainments, in the and 1890s, appealed chiefly to younger royals and courtiers, most especially Princess Beatrice and her husband, Prince Henry of Battenberg. The Queen oversaw (but never performed in) these productions, happily immersing herself in the details of rehearsals, scene painting and costume fittings. For nineteenth-century social reformers eager to educate mass audiences through popular culture, Victoria’s theatre-going was of unparalleled impor- tance. As clergymen thundered about the immorality of the stage and the mid- dle class fretted over intricate rituals of respectability, the theatrical profession took heart from the Queen’s bold example. If theatre was good enough for the highest family in the land it was good enough for any family in the land. Just as theatre managers exploited royal patronage for their own advantage, Victoria exploited the theatre as an instrument of royal propaganda. Going to see plays allowed her to share a common experience with her subjects. Indeed, more people saw their sovereign ‘at the play’ than at any other regular public event. Even in secluded widowhood, the Queen maintained her canny under- standing of popular culture’s powerful appeal. For in 1895 she made Henry Irving, the most esteemed actor of his day, the first theatrical knight. Although Victoria’s theatrical patronage was widely known in her own day, the shadow of conventionality which has fallen over her long reign has obscured the Queen’s taste for popular – even lowbrow – entertainment. Her enduring passion for the stage has thus received scant attention in royal biographies, including ’s monumental Victoria R.I. (1964). Even works that have tried to humanise their regal subject – ’s Queen Victoria (1921), Stanley Weintraub’s Victoria: an Intimate Biography (1987), Christopher Hibbert’s Victoria: a Personal History (2000) and Walter Arnstein’s Queen Victoria (2003) – display only a passing interest in her theatre- going. Just once has the subject been treated: in George Rowell’s chronicle Queen Victoria Goes to the Theatre (1978). Several books published in the years leading up to the centenary of Queen Victoria’s death in 2001 have successfully revised the lingering image xviii Prologue of a staid, implacable empress who spent the last forty years of her life con- sumed by the rituals of . Adapting the insights of ‘new historicist’ studies from the 1980s and 1990s on the Tudor and Stuart monarchy, some of these works – Adrienne Munich’s Queen Victoria’s Secrets (1996), Margaret Homans’ Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837–1876 (1998) and Lynne Vallone’s Becoming Victoria (2001) – claim that ‘acting’, ‘seeming’, ‘scripting’ and ‘performance’ lie at the heart of royal behaviour and, indeed, royal identity. Put simply, monarchy works like theatre. Kings and queens ‘act’ before the audience that is the public. No one can deny the truth of this claim. But, equally, no one can say that it is new. James I and VI, a sovereign unusually protective of his privacy, ruefully acknowledged nearly four hundred years ago that ‘[a] King is as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures, all the people gazingly doe behold’.11 In 1836, Leopold, King of the Belgians, advised his adored niece, Princess Victoria, that ‘high personages are a little like stage actors – they must always make efforts to please their public’.12 Leopold’s niece would have done well to recall that theatrical simile when, the following year, she assumed the commanding regal role that would be hers alone to play night after night for the next sixty-four years. In The English Constitution (1867), Walter Bagheot explained that the ‘theatrical’ aspects of monarchy – ‘that which is brilliant to the eye’ – hide the secret workings of Parliament by giving the public an entertaining and accessible alternative.13 Royalty is the amusing diversion that seduces us into forgetting the hard reality of politics. In their essay ‘The Character of Queen Victoria’ (1901), Edmund Gosse and Mary Ponsonby (widow of Sir , who had been the Queen’s Private Secretary) singled out the late monarch’s ‘strongly defined dramatic instinct’ as the ‘most salient of all her native, as distinguished from her acquired, characteristics’.14 Victoria, they were con- vinced, was a born performer. But ‘dramatic instinct’ may not explain every- thing. Perhaps the Queen’s histrionic skills, apparent even in her precocious childhood, owe something to the carefully stage-managed ‘royal progresses’ organized by the Duchess of Kent to ensure her daughter’s visibility – and popularity – among her future subjects. However much insight they afford, observations about Victoria’s ‘dramatic instincts’ or her talent for ‘performance’ are entirely figurative. That is, they tell us only that the Queen was like an actress; that being a monarch is like appearing on a stage. Such comments do not, however, tell us anything about Victoria’s own passion for theatre. It is precisely that fervent passion which this book seeks to evoke. Taking a more grounded approach than some recent highly theoretical studies, it delves into Victoria’s actual involvement – and influence – within theatrical culture, whether as enraptured spectator, bountiful patron, or tyrannical and exacting director of private theatricals. Prologue xix

Victoria, for all her kinship with actors, was no mimic or impersonator. She was always her own self. This book is part cultural biography (although highly selective in its mater- ial) and part cultural history. It aims to produce a fresh and intimate portrait of Queen Victoria ‘at the play’. At times she appears formidable and control- ling, just as we would expect. Far more frequently, however, she is impudent, high-spirited and unruly. By relying on Victoria’s journals, artwork and private correspondence, I hope to give readers a deeply personal account of her life- long devotion to the stage. Since I am mostly concerned with Victoria’s patronage of lowbrow and middlebrow entertainment – circus acts, melo- drama and spectacular Shakespeare – I make only occasional reference to the Queen’s strong interest in French and Italian opera and ballet. Moving beyond a purely narrative account of her theatre-going, I examine the contra- dictory ways in which the Queen’s contemporaries responded – approvingly, reproachfully, or even contemptuously – to her patronage of the stage. At heart, this book is less about Victoria’s theatrical opinions and judgements (although it repeatedly refers to them) than about the relationship between theatre and monarchy. It tells the story of how the Queen manipulated the theatre for the purposes of royal propaganda and, correspondingly, how the theatre exploited royal patronage (not always successfully) to enhance its own moral status. This story cannot be told chronologically. It must be told thematically. There is little danger, I think, in departing from a strict chronology because so many books written about Queen Victoria divide her life into the familiar categories of sheltered child and adolescent (1819–37), maiden queen (1837–40), dutiful wife and mother (1840–61) and obsessively grieving widow (1861–1901). A sequential account of Victoria’s theatre-going does carry its own logic, given that the Queen ceased to visit public theatres after Prince Albert’s death in 1861 and refused to witness private theatricals or command performances for another twenty years. Indeed, this is precisely the ‘year-by-year’ structure that George Rowell adopted in his informative book. Because such a rigorously narrative account already exists I have felt free to give this book a more supple shape. For the sake of convenience this Prologue Provides an overview of Victoria’s many engagements with the theatre. The chapters that follow are divided into three parts, corresponding to Victoria’s private interest in the theatre (‘At Home’), her visits to London theatres (‘In Public’), and her decisive role in shaping public opinion about the theatre (‘The Queen’s Example’). Events recounted in the opening chapters include private audiences granted to actors, amateur theatricals produced at court, and command performances by profes- sional London theatre companies, of which Henry Irving’s troupe from the Lyceum was the most famous. Part II examines the Queen’s visits to West End xx Prologue theatres, including her controversial patronage of the lion tamer Isaac Van Amburgh, her visits to theatres ‘in state’ at the height of revolutionary fervour in 1848, and the disastrous performances organized to celebrate the marriage of the Princess Royal in 1858. Taking a more sociological view, the final chap- ters assess the Queen’s relationship to the theatrical profession, looking at such topics as censorship, knighthoods for actors, and the role played by royal patronage in the theatre’s protracted campaign to win respectability. The nar- rative thrust is thus outwardly expansive, moving from the domestic confines of Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and Balmoral to the major London the- atres, and, finally, to the wider realm of Victorian society. Within each part most chapters are arranged in roughly chronological order, thus enabling readers to put theatrical events and personalities in the context of other aspects of her reign. This book is scholarly, but not academic. Its narrative is grounded in traditional archival research, but the work aims at a readership well beyond professional historians. It has ideas to put across, yet does not hammer away at them or express them in opaque prose of the kind tolerated only within universities. I hope that Queen Victoria and the Theatre of her Age will appeal to anyone concerned about the monarchy’s place – then or now – in popular culture and, indeed, in popular consciousness.