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5 November 1866 the Story of Henry Irving and Dion Boucicault’S Hunted Down, Or, the Two Lives of Mary Leigh

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5 November 1866 the Story of Henry Irving and Dion Boucicault’S Hunted Down, Or, the Two Lives of Mary Leigh Maria Serena Marchesi 5 November 1866 The Story of Henry Irving and Dion Boucicault’s Hunted Down, or, The Two Lives of Mary Leigh Σ Skenè Texts • 1 Skenè Texts • 1 Maria Serena Marchesi 5 November 1866 The Story of Henry Irving and Dion Boucicault’s Hunted Down, or, The Two Lives of Mary Leigh Σ S K E N È Theatre and Drama Studies Executive Editor Guido Avezzù. General Editors Guido Avezzù, Silvia Bigliazzi, Alessandro Serpieri. Editorial Board Simona Brunetti, Lisanna Calvi, Nicola Pasqualicchio, Gherardo Ugolini. Managing Editor Lisanna Calvi. Assistant Managing Editor Francesco Lupi. Copyeditors Marco Duranti, Flavia Palma, Antonietta Provenza. Layout Editor Alex Zanutto. Advisory Board Anna Maria Belardinelli, Anton Bierl, Enoch Brater, Marco De Marinis, Tobias Döring, Pavel Drabek, Paul Edmondson, Keir Douglas Elam, Ewan Fernie, Patrick Finglass, Enrico Giaccherini, Mark Griffith, Stephen Halliwell, Robert Henke, Pierre Judet de la Combe, Russ McDonald, Guido Paduano, Franco Perrelli, Didier Plassard, Donna Shalev, Susanne Wofford. Supplement to SKENÈ Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies Copyright © 2016 S K E N È All rights reserved. ISBN 978-88-96419-82-3 ISSN 2464-9295 Printed in October 2016 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission from the publisher S K E N È Theatre and Drama Studies http://www.skenejournal.it/texts-studies/index.php/TS [email protected] Dir. Resp. (aut. Trib. di Verona): Guido Avezzù P.O. Box 149 c/o Mail Boxes Etc. MBE150) Viale Colonnello Galliano, 51, 37138 Verona (I) Table of contents Chapter 1: 5 November 1866 1.1. Henry Irving and The Two Lives of Mary Leigh 3 1.2. Henry Irving and the St James’s Theatre 5 1.3. Henry Irving and Dion Boucicault 9 Chapter 2: Hunted Down 2.1. The Play 21 2.2. The Promptbook 39 2.3. Note to the Text 42 Hunted Down, or, The Two Lives of Mary Leigh 47 Act 1 49 Act 2 Scene 1 73 Scene 2 83 Scene 3 91 Act 3 96 Chapter 3: Cast and Credits 107 3.1. John Leigh – Walter Lacy 110 3.2. Mary, His Wife – Miss Herbert 116 3.3. Willie and Maud, His Children – Miss Charlton and Miss Lilli Lee 123 3.4. Lady Glencarrig, His Sister – Mademoiselle R. Guillon Le Thière 125 3.5. Mrs Bolton Jones An Acquaintance – Mrs Frank Matthews. 129 3.6. Rawdon Scudamore, A Broken-down Gambler – H. Erving [sic] 133 3.7. Clara (a model) – Miss Ada Dyas 134 3.8. Fanny (Nursery maid) – Miss Marion 139 3.9. Music – Van Hamme 140 3.10. Scenery – John Gray 142 Works Cited 147 Index 153 5 November 1866 3 Chapter 1 5 November 1866 1.1 Henry Irving and The Two Lives of Mary Leigh The night of Monday 5 November 1866 was rather cold and windy in London. The day had been cloudy and overcast, and yet the theatres were full of activity. At Drury Lane, Phelps was playing Faust, at the Olympic Alfred Wigan was acting in Dickens and Collins’s play The Frozen Deep, with Lydia Foote – an actress “known to be apt for serious and earnest parts, who has sometimes mind in her voice and speech in her face” (Morley 1974: 309) and who was also the celebrated playwright Dion Boucicault’s latest romantic interest (Fawkes 2011: 163) – in a supporting role. At the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Boucicault himself was starring in his latest success, The Long Strike, together with his wife, the long-suffering Agnes Robertson. At the Haymarket, Charles Mathews was starring in The Critic.1 1 See “Meteorological Observations” for the preceding week in The Morning Post, 12 November 1866, and the theatrical notices from the contemporary press, e.g. The London Daily News, 5 November 1866. Even setting aside this particular night, the 1866 season highlights are impressive and crowded with names that are now part of theatrical history. Besides Boucicault’s Long Strike, which ran from 15 September with Dion Boucicault, John Emery and John Cooper at the Lyceum Theatre, there was Boucicault’sThe Flying Scud or Four- Legged Fortune at the Holborn Theatre from 6 October, and from 27 October Lydia Foote and Dominic Murray in Wilkie Collins’s The Frozen Deep at the Olympic Theatre. Lastly, on 29 December, the first comedy by W.S. Gilbert, Dulcamara or The Little Duck and the Great Quack, opened at the St James’s Theatre, with Miss McDonnell, Miss Addison and Mr Charles (Tanitch 2010: 206-9). All quotations from and references to British Victorian newspapers are taken 4 Hunted Down, or, The Two Lives of Mary Leigh At the St James’s, a young actor with moderately good looks and already in possession of a certain provincial renown, went on stage to play the part of Rawdon Scudamore, the villain in one of Dion Boucicault’s latest plays, the newly renamed Hunted Down, or, The Two Lives of Mary Leigh. When the curtain fell, the audience knew that something momentous had happened: they had witnessed something unprecedented. As often happens in the wake of such critical moments, there are several anecdotes and famous words by famous people. These are often too good not to be spurious, but one episode that can be found in many sources has a peculiar ring of truth about it, and it may be worth mentioning here: George Henry Lewes, the essayist and critic, visiting the theatre with George Eliot remarked: “In twenty years he’ll be at the head of the English stage.” To which George Eliot replied: “He is there, I think, already”. (Anonymous 1939: 53) Writing many years after he had seen the London première of Hunted Down, Clement Scott, by then a broken man, in exile on the Continent, still remembered that first night and wondered: I suppose that we did not quite know why Henry Irving was so good. I for one felt it was something I had never seen before . I have thought it all over since, and have arrived at the conclusion that it was the early dawn of strong, natural action in drama. Irving was one of the very first to break the captive fetters of the artificial school. It was not only that he looked Rawdon Scudamore so well, or dressed the part so correctly, but he seemed the absolute man that Boucicault described. It was not acting as we knew acting then. (Scott 1986: 2.4) Rawdon Scudamore was not Irving’s first part within the St James’s company. He had been there for some weeks already, and played minor roles, such as Doricourt in The Belle’s Stratagem, and other lesser roles. Neither was it the first time Irving played Scuda- more: the play, with its first titleThe Two Lives of Mary Leigh, had had a provincial début in Manchester, with Irving as Scudamore, from the online British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive. co.uk). 5 November 1866 5 alongside Kate Terry,2 and the aforesaid Lydia Foote, who was also a veteran in Boucicaultian roles.3 But he had come to London to play Scudamore, and maybe he had played Scudamore in Manches- ter with the hope of gaining the influential Irish playwright’s rec- ognition, so that one day he could come to London and play the role that had been such a major success in the provinces. 1.2 Henry Irving and the St James’s Theatre By the time he met Irving, Boucicault was in his forties and already a celebrity. Only a few years before, in 1860-61, he had achieved a resounding success with his play The Colleen Bawn. The play had run at the Adelphi Theatre, London, for nearly a year – the first long run in theatre history – and, due to its unprecedented success, Boucicault had received a share in the management of the theatre from Benjamin Webster (Fawkes 2011: 125-8). Nevertheless, nearly twenty years before, his beginnings had been those of a provincial actor, until 1841, when his comedy London Assurance was accepted by Charles Mathews and Madame Vestris for the Covent Garden Theatre (Rowell 1972: 17-40). The comedy was an instant success, and besides being his first great professional achievement, thanks to Madame Vestris’s stagecraft, with its pioneering realism in stage properties and scenery (Rowell 1972: 35), it also proved to be an 2 Kate Terry was “considered by some, including her father, to be one of the best young actresses on the stage. She appears to have been perfect for playing the pure young heroines of the time. In 1867 she met and married Arthur Lewis in the teeth of his family’s opposition, and was wafted from the background of theatrical digs to the heights of Campden Hill, where she lived in great grandeur with relays of servants. The play Trelawny of the Wells is supposed to have been based on Kate’s romance”. Kate Terry was the grandmother of Sir John Gielgud (Bingham 1978: 65; Holroyd 2008: 49-51). 3 Fawkes 2011: 163-4. According to The Era, 5 August 1866, The Two Lives of Mary Leigh premièred at the Prince’s Theatre, Manchester, on Monday 30 July 1866. Mary Leigh was played by Kate Terry, John Leigh by J.C. Cowper, Clara by Lydia Foote, Lady Glencarrig by Miss Bufton, Mrs Bolton Jones by Mrs Stephens. Still according to the same source, on that occasion “Miss Terry made the ‘hit’ of her career”. Lydia Foote had played Ducie Blennerhasset in the first London run ofThe Colleen Bawn at the Adelphi Theatre in 1860 (Rowell 1972: 176).
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