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The Voice Teacher as Shakespearean Collaborator: Margaret Carrington and John Barrymore
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2009
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In the annals of staged Shakespeare, John Barrymore, Arthur Hopkins, and Robert Edmond Jones have been much honored for their landmark productions of Richard III and Hamlet, first seen in New York during the 1919– 20 and 1922–23 seasons. Another collaborator in these revivals, however, has received little scholarly attention: Margaret Carrington, a Canadian-born voice teacher who contributed significantly to the success of these productions by “remaking” Barrymore's voice. Although reviews of Barrymore's performances in the years preceding his Shakespearean debut often mentioned his “monotonous” vocal quality, the result of his studies with Carrington was a vocal instrument of extraordinary range and flexibility. As Heywood Broun remarked in 1923: “Someone ought to write a tale about Barrymore called ‘The Story of a Voice.’ It is one of the most amazing adventures in our theatre. Here was a particularly pinched utterance distinctly marred by slipshod diction. Today it is among the finest voices in the American theatre.”
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References
1. The only article about Carrington published to date is Acker's, Barbara F. “‘I Charge Thee Speak’: John Barrymore and His Voice Coach, Margaret Carrington,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre (Fall 1995), 43—57Google Scholar. Acker's article is marred, however, by numerous incorrect suppositions and errors of fact and transcription. Acker, for example, accepts as fact Anthony Quinn's account from The Original Sin (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), 206Google Scholar, that, in preparing for Richard III, Barrymore's speech lessons “for the first two or three weeks consisted of making [an] apple sound like the juiciest, reddest apple in the world”; this, like many of Barrymore's bibulous comments in his later years, should be taken with a grain of salt. She reports that “Carrington did not begin lessons with breathing or vowel exercises,” when in fact the reverse was often true; she also states, incorrectly, that Barrymore was already rehearsing for Richard III when he began studying with Carrington and claims that “In his memoirs [Barrymore] does not credit Carrington for his amazing new voice,” when in fact he acknowledged her contributions generously in We Three (New York: Saalfield, 1935)Google Scholar, no pagination. In addition. Acker was apparently unaware of much important primary and secondary source material concerning Carrington, her methods, and her work with Barrymore. She also made no effort to view the Barrymore-Carrington collaborations in their cultural context or within the context of other nineteenth- and twentieth-century Shakespearean interpreters. The standard biography of Barrymore and his family, Peters's, MargotThe House of Barrymore (New York: Knopf, 1990)Google Scholar, although a valuable reference, mentions Carrington and her collaborations with Barrymore only briefly; Peters drew her information about Carrington mainly from earlier biographies, and she does not loom particularly large among a cast of hundreds of characters.
In focusing on Barrymore's collaborations with Carrington I have deliberately excluded other facets of his performances such as his psychological approach to character and his repressed physicaulity. The contributions of Hopkins and Jones also lie beyond the scope of this essay. For a more detailed account see Morrison, Michael A., John Barrymore, Shakespearean Actor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
2. Broun, Heywood, “Mr. Shakespeare, Meet Mr. Tyson,” Vanity Fair, February 1923, 33Google Scholar.
3. Young, Stark, “Distinction and Theatre,” New Republic, 24 August 1942, 227Google Scholar.
4. Information on the Huston family and Margaret Carrington's background was provided in part during a series of in-person and telephone interviews with Margaret Carrington's niece, the late Margaret Huston Walters, between January 1990 and June 1992. I am grateful to Margaret Walters, as well, for her many letters about her aunt and her methods of voice training, and for providing me with two unpublished essays about her aunt and Barrymore. I am also indebted to articles and obituaries at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and the Metro Toronto Central Reference Library; to articles in the New York Times, the Toronto Globe, and the Toronto Sun; to the Manhattan Municipal Archives and the Greenwich, Connecticut Town Clerk for providing me with copies of Carrington's marriage and death certificates; and to the University of Colorado at Boulder Special Collections for Robert Edmond Jones's 29 December 1942 letter to Gene Fowler, which contains valuable biographical information about Margaret Carrington. A minor mystery surrounds Carrington's date and place of birth. No birth registration was available in Ontario Provincial Birth Records; her death certificate lists her birthdate as 20 August 1877; the family genealogy— compiled much after the fact and containing a number of errors—lists her birth as occurring on 30 August of that year. Her memorial plaque at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx lists her birth year as 1878, and she gave her age at the time of her marriage to William Carrington in June 1915 as 37, in accordance with the latter year. The family genealogy lists her birthplace as Orangeville, Ontario, about sixty miles north of Toronto, yet Carrington listed her birthplace on her marriage certificates as Toronto (perhaps because it was more “socially acceptable”); Toronto is also the place of birth listed on her death certificate. The 20 August 1877 birthdate, provided by Robert Edmond Jones (to whom she was married for nearly a decade) and the Orangeville birthplace seem likely.
The benefit concert at Pavilion Music Hall took place on 15 October 1896. For information on this concert see the 13 June 1896, 10 October 1896, and 24 October 1896 editions of Toronto Saturday Night. According to the 10 October edition, Huston was scheduled to depart for Europe in November.
5. For additional representative reviews of Margaret Huston's North American recitals, see, for example, the Toronto Globe, 27 November 1903, 7 November 1907, 9 December 1910, and 31 October 1912; Musical America, 9 December 1911; and the New York Times, 16 January 1914 and 16 April 1915 editions. A local history scrapbook at the Metro Toronto Central Reference Library contains a lengthy interview with Huston. It is dated 26 October 1912 and is identified as from the Globe, yet it was not included in the microfilm edition I consulted for that date; it is probably from another Toronto newspaper of the period. In addition to the lieder of Debussy and Hugo Wolf, her wide-ranging concert repertory included music by Fauré, Bizet, Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss, and Irish, English and Scots folk songs. Details of Margaret Huston's career as a concert singer in Europe lie beyond the scope of this article. Her London debut took place in 1909. An article in the 2 November 1907 Toronto Globe stated that she was scheduled to make her grand opera debut at the royal theatre at the Court of Saxe-Coburg in December, singing the title role in Carmen and other leading parts, and she included a number of arias and duets in her repertory from Faust, Romeo and Juliet, and other operatic works; however, most of her career between 1903 and 1915 was devoted to solo recitals and a modem “art song” repertory.
6. For many years, the myth has been perpetuated that Margaret Carrington abandoned her career as a recitalist after choking on a fish bone that damaged her vocal cords, after which she could “not sing again except at rare intervals and then only with severe difficulty.” The source of this myth is John Kobler's biography of Barrymore, Damned in Paradise (New York: Atheneum, 1977), 135Google Scholar; it is repeated in Grobel, Lawrence, The Hustons (New York: Scribner's, 1989), 96Google Scholar. Kobler misread Jones's 29 December 1942 letter to Gene Fowler, however, in which Jones clearly states that he had heard Carrington sing many times, as did her niece. This incident probably occurred during the mid-to-late 1920s and thus was not the cause of Carrington's abandonment of her career as a recitalist. Jones, in his letter to Fowler, stated that “she gave up her career to be [William Carrington's] wife.”
7. Jones, letter to Fowler, 29 December 1942.
8. For comments on Barrymore's vocal limitations before he turned to serious roles see. for example, Theatre Magazine, November 1912, x. There are a number of comments on Barrymore's lack of vocal range and flexibility during the period between April 1917 and March 1919 when he was performing in Peter Ibbetson and Redemption. See, for example, Charles Damton's review of Peter Ibbetson in the Evening World, 19 April 1917; for Redemption, see John Corbin's 4 October 1918 review and 6 October 1918 column in the Times. “Creative imagination” is from Corbin's 6 October column. An unidentified review of Redemption from a New York daily in a John Barrymore scrapbook at Lincoln Center [call # MWEZ n.c. 23,125] complains of “an irritating monotony to his speech at times” and “a lack of flexibility and variety in his acting.”
9. Letter to Robert Hosea, n. d. [1919], Lincoln Center.
10. See also Francis Hackett's comments in the New Republic (10 May 1919), 55.
11. Barrymore, We Three, no pagination.
12. Quoted in Fowler, Gene, Good Night, Sweet Prince (New York: Viking, 1944), 190Google Scholar.
13. Arthur William Row, “Barrymore Legend,” unpublished essay, NYPL Manuscript Division, 21. The production, with a text arranged by Edward Sheldon, featured five scenes from 3 Henry VI as prologue to the eleven scenes retained from Richard III.
14. Row, “Barrymore Legend,” 21.
15. The Wesleyan drafts are among the papers gathered by Ralph Pendleton in preparing his book, The Theatre of Robert Edmond Jones (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1958)Google Scholar. These drafts are eleven typewritten pages in length, but since they are near-duplicates and it is difficult to differentiate here between drafts, I refer to them subsequently simply as “Wesleyan drafts.” The fragments of Carrington's essay in this collection range from a paragraph to three pages; three bear the titles “John Barrymore” or “The John Barrymore I Know.” A number of these fragments are entirely in Jones's hand. As the partial drafts and fragments are similar to the complete drafts, I have not quoted from them here. When a quotation is from one of Jones's many notes about Barrymore in this collection (in all of which he is clearly the sole author), I have so indicated. A few similar fragments of Carrington's essay are among the Robert Edmond Jones papers in the Harvard Theatre Collection.
16. The Fowler ms., eight typewritten pages in length and entitled “The John Barrymore I Knew,” is reprinted in Norden, Martin F., John Barrymore: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1995), 293–296Google Scholar. Norden errs, however, in identifying this manuscript as “an early draft” (it is, in fact, of later date than the Wesleyan drafts), and he was apparently unaware of the existence of the additional manuscripts at Wesleyan and Harvard, or of the collaborative nature of these essays. In addition to omitting Carrington's account of working with Barrymore on Romeo and Juliet, the Fowler ms, also excludes much of the discussion of her methods present in earlier drafts. A reference to Barrymore's film The Great Profile, in the Fowler ms, makes it possible to date this version after October 1940, when that film was released.
17. Wesleyan drafts.
18. Barrymore. We Three, no pagination.
19. Wesleyan drafts.
20. “It is common knowledge”: Wesleyan drafts; “I had hoped”: Fowler ms., 2–3.
21. “Humility, patience and concentration”: Fowler ms., 3; “five or six hours” and “learned to speak”: Barrymore, We Three, no pagination.
22. Wesleyan drafts.
23. “Dynamo energy” and “worked incessantly”: Fowler ms., 1, 3; “every nuance in sound”: Wesleyan drafts.
24. Wesleyan drafts.
25. Wesleyan drafts.
26. See, for example, the review of Barker's, GranvilleA Midsummer Night's Dream in the New York Times, 17 February 1915Google Scholar, in which Barker's production is praised as “an open and welcome rebellion against all the pomposities of Shakespearean declamation” and Alexander Woollcott's “This Is a Generation in Which Theatre Audiences Have Been Carefully Trained Away From Him” in the 12 March 1916 edition of the Times.
27. Barrymore, John, Confessions of an Actor (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1926)Google Scholar, no pagination.
28. The beginning of rehearsals was announced in the 3 February 1920 New York Sun and other newspapers. “Before he attempted Richard”: Row, Arthur, review of Good Night, Sweet Prince, Sign Post, 24 February 1944Google Scholar. “One day at rehearsal”: Row, “Barrymore Legend,” 28.
29. “Conspicuous place”: Evening World, 8 March 1920; “ Intellectual, stealthy”: World, 8 March 1920: “Storming the fortresses”: Morning Telegraph, 8 March 1920.
30. “Personal sound”: Wesleyan drafts. See also the Post, 8 March 1920, and Theatre Arts 4, April 1920, 104Google Scholar; Variety, 12 March 1920, praised Barrymore for bringing to Broadway an impersonation that had “less a sense of stage and more of reality than at any Shakespearean performance of recent years.” “Stronger, deeper”: interview with Alexander Clark, 28 February 1990.
31. “Sang a great deal”: Barrymore, Confessions, no pagination; “The thing I was proudest of”: Barrymore, We Three, no pagination. For additional comments on Barrymore's vocal transformation as Richard III, see. for example, the 15 March 1920 Drama Calendar (“His voice has developed almost miraculously into a fitting vehicle for the expression of Shakespeare's dramatic poetry”), the Sun-Herald, 8 March 1920, the World, 14 March 1920, the Times, 21 March 1920, the New Republic, 24 March 1920, 122, and Mantle's, Bums remarks in The Best Plays of 1919–20, reprint (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1968), 9Google Scholar.
32. Fowler ms., 3. Carrington states that Barrymore “came out to our farm in Connecticut about the end of June.” Michael Strange departed for Europe on the Mauritania on 26 June with Barrymore on the dock to bid her farewell; it is likely that Barrymore arrived at Denbigh a day or two later.
33. Margaret Walters's recollections of her aunt's work with Barrymore during the summer of 1922, unless otherwise specified, are drawn from the series of interviews referred to in note 4.
34. Fowler ms., 4.
35. Fowler ms., 4, 6. Among the visitors that summer, Margaret Walters recalled, were Arthur Hopkins, Ethel Barrymore, and the actress Peggy Wood—at the time a candidate for Ophelia. See Woollcott's, Alexander column in the Herald, 17 December 1922Google Scholar, and Barrymore's 17 October 1922 letter to Michael Strange, Lincoln Center.
36. Margaret Huston Walters, “My Aunt Margaret,” unpublished essay, author's collection.
37. Fowler ms., 4–5.
38. The date rehearsals began is specified in the unpaginated early pages of Lark Taylor's first season Hamlet studybook, Vanderbilt University Special Collections, and in Barrymore's 18 October 1922 letter to Michael Strange, Lincoln Center. The quotations from Taylor in this paragraph are from “With Hey Ho!” unpublished autobiography, Vanderbilt Special Collections, 333, and “My Season With John Barrymore in Hamlet,” unpublished essay, Vanderbilt Special Collections, 2–3. Carrington also assisted in the casting of the play. On 17 October, Barrymore wrote to Michael Strange: “Yesterday Hopkins and Margaret and I tried out people in the theatre … Miss [Rosalinde] Fuller who is a folksong singer went through the part [of Ophelia]. She is a strange unprepossessing little English woman but has a detached rather zany quality—which Margaret says might be developed.” Fuller was awarded the role. See also Barrymore's 9 October letter to Michael Strange, Lincoln Center.
39. Taylor, “With Hey Ho!” 333, and “My Season,” 2.
40. Jones, Wesleyan notes.
41. New York Times, 17 November 1922; see also Shadowland, February 1923, 38; Christian Science Monitor, 21 November 1922; Drama Calendar, 27 November 1922; New Republic, 6 December 1922, 45; and The Nation, 6 December 1922, 648.
42. Theatre Magazine, January 1923, 21.
43. New Republic, 6 December 1922, 45; see also Eaton's, Walter Prichard comments in Freeman, 10 January 1923, 424Google Scholar. For additional negative criticism see the 18 November 1922 New York Call and The Drama, March 1923, 211.
44. Taylor, “My Season,” 6–7.
45. For a more detailed account of this production see Morrison, Michael A., “John Barrymore's ‘Hamlet’ at the Haymarket Theatre, 1925,” New Theatre Quarterly 27, 1991, 246—260CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Morrison, John Barrymore, Shakespearean Actor, 240—58.
46. Williams, E. Harcourt, Four Years at the Old Vic: 1929–1933 (London: Putnam, 1935), 20–21Google Scholar.
47. Pearson, Hesketh, “Hamlet,” Theatre World, March 1925, 33Google Scholar.
48. Speaight, Robert, William Poel and the Elizabethan Revival (London: Heinemann, 1954), 27–28Google Scholar.
49. Olivier, Laurence, On Acting (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 60—62, 98Google Scholar.
50. “Fatigue of acting” and “I went to Hollywood,” Fowler ms., 6.
51. For an account of Barrymore's collaborations with Carrington during his Hollywood years and his successful and unsuccessful attempts at Shakespeare during this same period see Morrison, John Barrymore, Shakespearean Actor, 261–97.
52. Wesleyan drafts.
53. Wesleyan drafts.
54. Jones, Wesleyan notes.
55. New York Times, 8 March 1920.
56. “She knew more”: Barrymore, We Three, no pagination; “I see now”: letter to Michael Strange, n. d. [October 1923], Lincoln Center.
57. In examining the Shakespearean delivery of Victorian and Edwardian actors I have relied upon more than fifty recordings of Edwin Booth, Henry Irving, Johnston Forbes-Robertson, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Ben Greet, Lewis Waller, Ada Rehan, E. H. Sothem and Julia Marlowe, and other, lesser interpreters of the period from my personal collection. Many of these, released originally as Edison cylinders or 78 rpm records, are available on 33 rpm albums. Great Actors of the Past (Argo; 2 vols.) and Great Shakespearean Actors (Gryphon 900) are in the Hammerstein Collection of Recorded Sound, Lincoln Center; Great Shakespeareans (Pearl Pavilion/Gemm 9465) is available as a commercially released CD; Traditions of Acting (Crest; 5 vols.) is available as a series of commercially released cassettes. For Barrymore's Shakespearean recordings and filmed excerpts, see Morrison, John Barrymore, Shakespearean Actor, 88—89 and 145—46; a partial listing of these recordings is in Norden, John Barrymore: A Bio-Bibliography, 157—59. Forbes-Robertson's Shakespearean recordings were made in 1928 but reflect the style and aesthetics of an earlier day; the others were made primarily between 1890 and 1920. Even in Booth's rendition of Othello's address to the senate one can hear a formal quality and the elocutionary use of “me” for “my.” Most of Barrymore's recordings were made a decade or more after his Shakespearean stage appearances. In these, his voice is darker and capable of fewer subtleties than in earlier recordings, yet his speech, except in a few instances where he self-consciously “hams” for the microphone, is unfailingly “modem,” thus lending credence to the comments of contemporary critics who praised his more “natural” approach. See also Heywood Broun's remarks on Julia Marlowe's Shakespearean delivery in the Toledo Times, 15 October 1923, and the reference to John Martin-Harvey's “oratorical method” as Hamlet in the New York Tribune, 20 November 1923.
58. Poel, William, Shakespeare in the Theatre (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1913), 57–58Google Scholar.
59. Williams, Four Years at the Old Vic, 17. As an example of the older method, Williams cited specifically the Victorian practice of substituting “me” and “min” for “my” and “mine”—which Barrymore was praised in London for eliminating.
60. See, for example, reviews of the Hamlets of Raymond Massey and John Gielgud in the Sun, 6 November 1931, and New York Times, 9 October 1936; Massey seemed to be “thinking and speaking in prose” and Gielgud was praised for speaking verse “with the quick spontaneity of a modem man.” Both Massey and Gielgud saw and admired Barrymore's London Hamlet in 1925. Shakespearean recordings of Gielgud. Olivier, Maurice Evans, and subsequent interpreters reveal that their speech, like Barrymore's, is unfailingly “modem.” See also Teague, Francis, “Hamlet in the Thirties.” Theatre Survey 26 (May 1985), 63—79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
61. New York Review, 18 November 1922.