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Ellen Terry's Foul Papers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2010
Extract
William Winter, that arbiter of affairs dramatic during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, after paying high tribute in Shakespeare on the Stage to the greatness of Ellen Terry as an actress, dismisses her as a lecturer on Shakespeare with a few lines. Declaring that she would have been well advised to follow in the footsteps of Fanny Kemble and Charlotte Cushman by giving Shakespearean “readings” rather than lectures, he concludes that “Her views…were often incorrect, generally commonplace, and, in the matter of thought, superficial.” (p. 225)
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- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1969
References
NOTES
1 In 1925, when Ellen Terry was seventy-eight, she was created Dame Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. It is as Dame Ellen that she deserves to be styled, but it was as Ellen Terry that she won her great fame and made her enduring contributions to the interpretation and indeed creation of several of Shakespeare's finest characters. Bernard Shaw says (Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: a Correspondence, edited by Christopher St. John, New York, 1932, p. 48) that it is “the most beautiful name in the world: it rings like a chime through the last quarter of the 19th century.” In this essay Ellen Terry will be named as the theatre-going public named her for all but three of her eighty-one years.
2 Shakespeare on the Stage (New York, 1911), pp. 222–31.
3 The fact that one of Terry's four lectures was on Shakespeare's use of letters as a dramatic device says much regarding the originality of her thinking about the plays. In 1911, when the lectures were first given, this discussion was breaking what was almost virgin ground in the field of Shakespearean criticism.
4 The handwritten pages, which include much of the material given in the lecture on “Triumphant Women” and that on “Pathetic Women,” are numbered 1, la, lb, Ic-42 (43 missing), 44–59. A seven-page conclusion is not numbered except for a ringed 73 on the first page. The fragment from the lecture on the children in Shakespeare's plays begins with p. 35 and ends with p. 39.
5 Shattuck's, Charles H.The Shakespeare Promptbooks (Urbana and London, 1965)Google Scholar lists thirty-four promptbooks of thirteen plays at Smallhythe. I am very grateful to the National Trust and to Mrs. Thomas for having made it possible for me to examine thirty of these books in the spring of 1967, when a portion of the library was packed away during re-cataloguing and re-shelving. Since certain of the books which I examined do not correspond with any listed by Shattuck, it is likely that when the rearrangement of the library is completed the total number of promptbooks at Smallhythe will be found to exceed the thirty-four in the Shattuck catalogue.
Quotations made herein from the Terry manuscript of the Four Lectures are given with the kind permission of Mr. W. D'Arcy Hart of London, as trustee of the Ellen Terry Estate.
6 “Ellen Terry's Lady Macbeth,” The Listener, 2 February 1967, pp. 159–61.
7 See especially Letter 23 in Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: a Correspondence, and its headnote regarding Shaw's reaction to Terry's annotations of the Henry Irving acting version of Cymbeline.
8 Ellen Terry was a friend and admirer of Furness. She tells an amusing story in her autobiography, The Story of My Life: Recollections and Reflections (New York, 1908), of being so carried away at a lecture which Furness gave in 1901 in Boston that she borrowed a copy of the play being discussed, As You Like It, from a little girl sitting just in front of her, and, forgetting that she had a borrowed book in her hand, began scribbling notes in the margins, until an outraged howl from the book's owner stopped her.
In “Some Letters from Actors and Actresses to Dr. Horace Howard Furness,” Library Chronicle, XXIX (1963), 105–15, Matthew W. Black and William E. Miller describe six letters from Terry to Furness which are now in the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library at the University of Pennsylvania. All of these bear evidence of her admiration for Furness's scholarship and her appreciation of the ways in which the scholar can aid the actor.
9 Portions of this material, with much else, also appear in “More Reminiscences by Ellen Terry: Some Reflections on Shakespeare's Heroines,” published in the United States by McClure's Magazine, XXXVI (1910), 95–106.
10 Quoted by St. John in note on p. 90 of Four Lectures.
11 Four Lectures, p. 9.
12 Her quotation here is, as she tells us in an earlier paragraph, from Erasmus.
13 Many of the deletions which are made in the printed version of the lectures seem to have been made in order to allow the actress to read longer excerpts from the plays than she could have done if she had stuck to her original lecture-plan. When one remembers that Shaw says (Plays and Players, edited by A. C. Ward, London, 1952, p. 182) that she could make an audience “positively howl with anguish” over such a play as Olivia (W. G. Wills' sentimental dramatization of The Vicar of Wakefield) one finds it not surprising that she wished to read the great Shakespearean roles. As she asserts the roles are their own best explanation.
14 Conceptions of Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), p. 42.