William Charles Macready

English actor and dramatist

• Born: March 3, 1793
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: April 27, 1873
• Place of death: Cheltenham, England

The mid-nineteenth century’s most influential actor-manager, Macready laid the foundations for reforms that helped to forge the modern theater, restored uncorrupted Shakespeare texts to the stage, and gave solid encouragement to the contemporary “new drama.”

Early Life

The mother of William Charles Macready was an actor and the daughter of a respectable surgeon. His father was an improvident, womanizing actor-manager and son of a Dublin upholsterer, whose personal and theatrical tastes and notorious example were to influence his son profoundly: The seeds were sown early of Macready’s lifelong professional caution and private propriety.

The delusions of genteel grandeur of the elder Macready led to his son’s entering Rugby school in 1803. There Macready gained both a liking of his own for polite society and a taste for the classics. By 1808, stimulated by the intellectual rigor of his studies, he had formed hopes of going to Oxford and preparing for the bar, but these were forever and bitterly dashed when his father’s near-bankruptcy forced the sixteen-year-old Macready to undertake the comanagement of his company. This baptism of fire in theatrical business was supplemented by a visit to London in 1809 to learn fencing and study the reigning stars of his profession.

On June 7, 1810, Macready made his first stage appearance, playing Romeo in white silk stockings and dancing pumps, a costume not calculated to flatter an actor of only medium height and rather heavy on his feet, who possessed (in addition to a noble brow) not only the large blue eyes but also the flat face and irregular features of the Irish. Nevertheless, his success was considerable, and continued so for six prosperous provincial years.

Life’s Work

On September 16, 1816, Macready finally stepped onto the stage of a London theater. His Covent Garden debut, delayed by his caution, occasioned many favorable and some perceptive reviews:

Mr. Macready strikes us as having a better conception of his Author’s meaning [than Kean]. He trusts more to plain delivery and proper emphasis—and consequently has less occasion for starting—pointing—and slapping his forehead.

The instant comparison to Edmund Kean, the great and well-established romantic actor of the age, anticipated the jealous rivalry that swiftly developed. Also of interest is the immediate critical recognition of the more natural style of acting that Macready brought to the stage. There are indications, too, of why the more intellectual Macready would become the preeminent actor-collaborator of the 1830’s and 1840’s, working directly and with success with authors.

For three years after this auspicious beginning, however, to his own disgust, Macready was relegated to playing a selection of gothic and melodramatic “heavies.” His luck turned in 1819, when his Richard III caught the public’s fancy. Then, in 1820, a poverty-stricken and eccentric first-time playwright named Sheridan Knowles sent Macready a manuscript. He decided at once to stage it. Virginius, with its combination of sensibility with a plea for the rights of man, caught the spirit of its age, and eminently suited the talents of its star. Macready’s success as the noble centurion raised him to the top of his profession.

In a few short years, however, his relationship with the Covent Garden management had soured sufficiently for his contract to be canceled. Thus, on October 13, 1823, he made his first appearance at Drury Lane, where he was to stay for thirteen years that did little to enhance his reputation, and during which Kean refused to act with him. His unhappiness was somewhat mitigated in 1823 by his marriage (prudently later in life), in 1826 by the first of several trips to the United States.

In 1835 occurred a famous incident. Macready’s sense of angry frustration at the low status of tragedy in the theater (reduced to a mere part of a miscellaneous entertainment) boiled over. On April 29, focusing this anger on the figure of the Drury Lane manager, money-minded Alfred Bunn, he called him a “damned scoundrel” and knocked him down. It says much for the nature of the audiences of the period that Macready’s popularity increased after this outrageous assault.

The later 1830’s saw Macready premiering several of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s highly acclaimed historical dramas, Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd’s Ion (1836), another influential major play of the “new drama,” and Robert Browning’s Strafford (1837), written for Macready at his own request. As often in Macready’s career, this last was a critical rather than a popular success, and yet another factor in the cementing of his friendships with these eminent literary figures, as well as John Forster and Charles Dickens (who dedicated to Macready his Nicholas Nickleby, 1838-1839).

On September 20, 1837, Macready opened the Covent Garden season (1837-1838) for the first time as manager, himself playing Leontes in a restored text of The Winter’s Tale. He gathered about him a powerful company, together with a troupe of pantomimists—crucial in the recouping of the three thousand pounds he was said to have lost by Christmas. In February, he had a remunerative hit with Bulwer-Lytton’s The Lady of Lyons: Or, Love and Pride (1838). In his second season as manager (1838-1839), the most notable performances were of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (originally produced in 1611; an elaborate revival); of Bulwer-Lytton’s Richelieu: Or, The Conspiracy (1839), which took the town by storm; and of Shakespeare’s Henry V (pr. c. 1598-1599; with staging supervised by Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens, Forster, W. J. Fox, and the artists Daniel Maclise and Clarkson Stanfield)—another resounding success.

The next highlight in Macready’s career was his second period of management, again for two seasons, this time at Drury Lane. The hit of the 1841-1842 season was Acis and Galatea (1842), a pantomime by W. H. Oxberry, with Stanfield’s scenery and George Frideric Handel’s music. Macready himself scored a great personal success in the title role in another restored “problem” Shakespeare play, King John (pr. c. 1596-1597), on October 24, 1842. On June 14, 1843, he appeared for the last time as manager, in his “keynote” role of Macbeth. After this high point, remunerative and well-received trips to the United States and Paris aside, he played mostly in the provinces, returning to London on November 22 to play his last new part, Philip Van Artevelde, in his own somewhat botched adaptation of Henry Taylor’s play, regarded by contemporaries as a species of nineteenth century Hamlet (pr. c. 1600-1601).

At the end of 1848, however, came the low point of his career, in one sense, when his last trip to the United States ended in tragedy. Poor reception of the highly popular American actor Edwin Forrest in England, and American discontent with recent unflattering portraits of the country by Mrs. Frances Trollope and Dickens, erupted into a full-scale riot at the Astor Place Opera House in New York during a Macready performance as Macbeth on May 10, 1849. Troops were called in, and twenty-two people were left dead. Macready himself, whose characteristic lack of tact had not helped the situation, was ignominiously smuggled away and sent back to England.

Macready’s farewell to the stage came in 1851, shortly after the death of a daughter, the first of many domestic tragedies: Only three of his twelve children outlived him. He left the stage, by choice, while he was still near the height of his powers and resisted the temptation of a comeback. On February 28, he played Macbeth for the last time, at Drury Lane. On March 1, a public dinner for six hundred, hosted by Bulwer-Lytton, with speeches by Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, paid him the tribute his age believed was his due. He withdrew to the gentleman’s residence he had purchased in Dorset, and later to Cheltenham (with a second wife, married 1860), where he died at the age of eighty-one, on Sunday, April 27, 1873.

Significance

In his farewell address, William Charles Macready asked his last theater audience to give him credit for two things: his efforts “to establish a theatre, in regard to decorum and taste, worthy of our country, and to have in it the plays of our divine Shakespeare fitly illustrated.” He succeeded. In the words of the sonnet Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote for his farewell dinner: “Thine is it that our drama did not die,/ Nor flicker down to brainless pantomime.”

Macready by no means banished money-spinning pantomime from the theater (although he did draw the line at trained lions and prostitutes); what he did was disentangle it from serious drama. Other aspects of his management similarly combined practicality with principle: Preeminent among his reforms, crucial to the development of modern theater, was his insistence on regular full rehearsals. Also influential was his concept of the play as a coherent artistic whole.

Macready’s other great achievement lies in the support he gave the legitimate theater of his time. Bulwer-Lytton declared of him: “He has identified himself with the living drama of his period, and by so doing he has half created it.” The playwrights wrote for him, visualizing Macready as their Virginius, Ion, Richelieu, or Strafford: What Tennyson called his “moral, grave, sublime” stage persona was the heroic type of the period.

Indeed, even in his limitations, the essence of Macready’s era was distilled. His popularity is evidence of a public preference for the domestic over the sublime. He was a self-made businessperson with social ambitions, an “eminent Victorian” before his time. For William Hazlitt, even his Macbeth was “a mere modern, agitated by common means and intelligible motives.” For Leigh Hunt, Macready was proto-Victorian respectability itself: “Violent or criminal pains he makes simply violent and criminal. Nothing remains to him, if his self-respect, in the ordinary sense of the word, is lost.”

Macready’s limitations are insignificant compared with his personal failings. Had he not been humorless and prone to ungovernable and childish rages and sulks, less egocentric, and better able to attract the loyalty and best efforts of his companies, there is no doubt that his periods of management would have been longer, more successful, and more influential in reviving a degraded theater. As it was, company members were treated with a snobbish and haughty contempt that can be traced to Macready’s fundamental dislike of what he saw, in quintessentially Victorian terms, as his dirty trade, as such diary entries as this, for April 26, 1843, testify:

[My] darling children acted Comus in the drawing room after dinner, interesting and amusing me very much; they recited the poetry very well indeed, and only gave me a fear lest they should imbibe a liking for the wretched art which I have been wasting my life upon. God forbid!

Bibliography

Agate, James Evershed, ed. These Were Actors: Extracts from a Newspaper Cutting Book, 1811-1833. London: Hutchison, 1943. Reprint. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969. This absorbing collection of contemporary reviews gives pride of place to Macready’s great rival, Kean, and bitingly witty short shrift to the “eminent tragedian” himself. Well worth reading for context, balance, and sheer enjoyment.

Archer, William. William Charles Macready. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1890. Reprint. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1971. Still brilliantly readable and reliable. Focuses on the four crucial seasons of management.

Baker, Kevin. “The Riot that Remade a City.” American Heritage 50, no. 7 (November, 1999): 20. Describes the aftermath of the Astor Place riot, which resulted in social reform activities and the construction of Central Park. Also describes the rivalry between Macready and actor Edwin Forrest and the social conditions in New York City that sparked the riot.

Donohue, Joseph, ed. 1660 to 1895. Vol. 2 in The Cambridge History of British Theatre. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Includes information about Macready’s roles and repertoire, his Shakespearean productions, and his establishment of a “respectable” theater.

Downer, Alan S. The Eminent Tragedian: William Charles Macready. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966. Lively and well documented. Locates Macready in his theatrical context; analyzes the “Macready style” and contribution to the stage. Final chapter is an “ideal” reconstruction of Macready’s famed Macbeth in performance, drawing on his heavily annotated prompt books, reminiscences, and reviews.

Macready, William Charles. Macready’s Reminiscences, and Selections from His Diaries and Letters. Edited by Sir Frederick Pollock. New York: Macmillan, 1875. Macready’s autobiographical account of his life until 1826, followed by a slightly circumspect but nevertheless fascinating selection from the actor’s diaries. Alternately frankly self-lacerating and pompously self-centered.

Rowell, George. The Victorian Theatre: A Survey. London: Oxford University Press, 1956. The standard work on the theater from 1792 to 1914, with solid but never stolid coverage of the “new drama” of the 1830’s and 1840’s. Invaluable thirty-page bibliography.

Shattuck, Charles H., ed. Bulwer and Macready: A Chronicle of the Early Victorian Theatre. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1958. Correspondence covering the years of collaboration between the actor-manager and the lionized author. Excellent sixteen-page introduction.

Southern, Richard. The Victorian Theatre: A Pictorial Survey. Newton Abbot, England: David and Charles, 1970. Concise information on theatrical scenery, staging and architecture, Victorian audiences, and Victorian “stars” and shows; supplements a wealth of photographs, drawings, paintings, and diagrams.

Trewin, J. C. Mr. Macready: A Nineteenth Century Tragedian and His Theatre. London: George G. Harrap, 1955. A more personal, psychological account; thorough, with illustrations and a helpful bibliography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. The Pomping Folk in the Nineteenth Century Theatre. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1968. A survey in the words of actors Macready, Helen Faucit, and Fanny Kemble; dramatist Bulwer-Lytton and authors Thackeray and Dickens; managers Edward Stirling and Alfred Bunn (from The Stage: Both Before and Behind the Curtain, 1840); drama critics Clement Scott and Henry Morley (from The Journal of a London Playgoer); and others.