Henry Irving

English actor

• Born: February 6, 1838
• Birthplace: Keinton Mandeville, Somerset, England
• Died: October 13, 1905
• Place of death: Bradford, Yorkshire, England

Breaking with the conventions of acting and staging current in Victorian England during his time, Irving introduced a more natural acting style, greater reliance on authentic texts, and more realistic production values for the staging of William Shakespeare’s plays.

Early Life

The actor-manager who would become known to Victorian England as Henry Irving was born John Henry Brodribb, the only child of Samuel and Mary Behenna Brodribb. His father was a struggling shopkeeper, and he lived from the ages of four to eleven with his mother’s sister Sarah and her husband, Isaac Penberthy, a mine manager, at Haseltown, Cornwall. In 1849, he joined his parents in London, where until 1851 he attended Dr. Pinches’s City Commercial School. He entered the law firm of Patterson and Longman as a clerk, but in 1852, he became a clerk in a firm of East India merchants. Irving did not have his sights set on a business career. Ever since his school days, he had been attracted to the theater. Despite the opposition of his mother, a Methodist who objected to Irving’s choice on religious grounds, his goal was a life on the stage.

There was no institution in Victorian England to provide young people with theatrical training, but Irving set out to prepare himself for a stage career. He took elocution lessons, studied acting privately with William Hoskins, and observed the performances of Samuel Phelps, London’s leading Shakespearean actor. Irving turned down an offer to work with Phelps; in 1856, however, he joined the stock company of E. D. Davis, whom he had met through Hoskins, at the Lyceum Theatre in Sunderland. He gave his first public performance using the stage name Henry Irving in the role of the duke of Orleans in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Richelieu: Or, The Conspiracy on September 18, 1856. During the next ten years, Irving learned his craft in provincial theaters throughout Great Britain. He worked with R. H. Wyndham for two and a half years in Edinburgh, with Charles Calvert in Manchester for nearly five years, and briefly in Dublin, Glasgow, and Liverpool. There were occasional London engagements during these years, but Irving was still mastering his craft and did not make strongly favorable impressions on audiences.

Irving struggled to overcome his Cornish accent and to control the lurching gait that gave him “the Crab” as a nickname. In time, he gained mastery over his tall, spare figure, and Ellen Terry, his most famous leading lady, thought his thin, pale face with its large nose and piercing eyes attractive. Those who saw him perform in his maturity commented on Irving’s ability to convey a series of emotions using only facial expressions. His eyes were often called mesmeric. In 1866, Irving joined a company at the St. James’s Theatre and had his first taste of London success that November as the villainous Rawdon Scudamore in Dion Boucicault’s Hunted Down (pr. 1866). Work in the provinces and on tour, including an engagement in Paris, followed, however, and not until June, 1870, when he appeared as Digby Grant in James Albery’s Two Roses, a new play at the Vaudeville that ran until March, 1871, did Irving have another solid success in London.

When Irving married Florence O’Callaghan on July 15, 1869, he used the name Brodribb when taking out the license. His sons Henry and Lawrence, born in 1870 and 1871, used that name until, as adults, they joined their father in the theater. Irving and his wife stopped living together in 1872, and in 1879 they effected a legal separation.

Life’s Work

Irving’s break with his wife was prompted, it is said, by a disparaging remark that Florence made after his opening-night performance of The Bells. Adapted by Leopold Lewis from Émile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian’s The Polish Jew (1871), a vehicle for such famous French actors as Coquelin Aîné, The Bells was Irving’s first solid success in London, running from November, 1871, to May, 1872, and it became a permanent fixture in the actor’s repertoire. Indeed, Irving performed Mathias, the central character in The Bells, the evening before his death in 1905.

Irving achieved this success under the management of “Colonel” Hezekiah Bateman, an American who had taken over the Lyceum Theatre in 1871 and hired Irving to play opposite his daughter Isabel. Audiences and critics liked the comparative realism of Irving’s performance in The Bells, and with Bateman, he embarked on a series of melodramas that were popular successes. Irving played the title characters in the premiers of William Gorman Wills’s Charles I (1872) and Eugene Aram (1873), and in September, 1873, he took on the role of the cardinal in Bulwer-Lytton’s Richelieu. His performance earned favorable comparisons with the acting of Phelps and William Macready, the critics finding impressive Irving’s attention to authentic costuming, telling stage movements, and psychological motivation.

The same qualities marked Irving’s performances in a series of plays by Shakespeare, the first a production of Hamlet (pr. c. 1600-1601) that ran two hundred nights following its opening on October 31, 1874. Irving went back to the original text of the play to construct an acting version that was tighter and more dramatic than the ones used by earlier performers. He invented new stage business, abandoning many of the conventions for staging the play, and presented a characterization of Hamlet decidedly more romantic than that of many of his Victorian contemporaries. Something of the sort happened every time Irving undertook a new production of a play by Shakespeare. By meticulous attention to detail, he gave audiences performances more unified in conception than other actors of his time. They were also productions that were more beautifully staged and lighted than those to which his audiences had been accustomed.

While working with the Batemans, Irving staged Macbeth (pr. 1606) in 1875, Othello (pr. 1604) in 1876, and Richard III (pr. c. 1592-1593) in 1877. He came up with an entirely new text for the latter, rejecting the version by Colley Cibber that had prevailed since the eighteenth century. At the same time that he was working on these plays, Irving continued to add to his repertoire of non-Shakespearean kings. He appeared in 1876 as Philip II of Spain in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Queen Mary (pb. 1875), and in 1878, he performed the title role in Boucicault’s Louis XI.

After “Colonel” Bateman’s death, Irving took over the management of the Lyceum from his widow in 1878, and he marked the occasion with a revival of Hamlet with Ellen Terry as Ophelia. The association of Irving and Terry continued until 1902, both at the Lyceum and on tour in England and the United States. Irving continued to provide audiences with new readings of the plays of Shakespeare, as he did with a sympathetic characterization of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (pr. c. 1596-1597) in 1879, at the same time that he personally supervised every aspect of the staging of the plays in which Terry and he appeared.

In time, the company at the Lyceum comprised more than six hundred actors, technicians, and staff. Irving installed Henry Loveday and Bram Stoker as his lieutenants in management; he commissioned costume and set designs from artists as famous as Edward Burne-Jones and music from Sir Arthur Sullivan. The quality of the lighting and special effects at the Lyceum were noted by many critics, and Irving’s ability to handle crowd scenes, as in the successful production of Romeo and Juliet (pr. c. 1595-1596) in 1882, was a striking feature of his direction. Although Ellen Terry was more successful as Juliet than Irving as Romeo, both were applauded in the roles of Beatrice and Benedick in the production of Much Ado About Nothing (pr. c. 1598-1599) later the same year. Irving staged a brief run of Shakespeare’s Othello in 1882 as well, alternating in the roles of Othello and Iago with the American actor Edwin Booth.

For most of the rest of his professional career, Irving was the acknowledged head of the British theater. From October, 1883, to March, 1884, he took his company to the United States, the first of eight commercially successful tours. He continued to mount productions of new plays, such as Wills’s version of Faust that ran from December, 1885, to April, 1887, in which Irving played the role of Mephistopheles, and productions of Shakespeare, such as the 1888 staging of Macbeth, for which Terry wore a green dress covered with iridescent beetles. Irving’s conception of Macbeth as unheroic, even neurotic, did not please all audiences; it was an interpretation decades ahead of its time.

Meanwhile, Irving himself was increasingly a success with the upper and middle classes. He hosted lavish receptions on the stage of the Lyceum after important first nights or milestone performances of particular plays, receptions attended on occasion by the Prince of Wales. In April, 1889, Irving and Terry gave a command performance before Queen Victoria at Sandringham, enacting the entirety of The Bells and the trial scene from The Merchant of Venice. In 1893, there was a performance at Windsor Castle of Tennyson’s Becket , itself a great commercial and critical success. Irving received a knighthood from the queen in 1895, the first actor to be so honored, and Her Majesty was pleased to bestow it.

The new productions of Shakespeare’s plays that Irving mounted toward the end of his career, such as his Henry VIII (pr. 1613) and King Lear (pr. c. 1605-1606) in 1892, were less successful than the run of Tennyson’s Becket (pb. 1884) the following year. Having given Henry VIII so lavish a staging that it became more historical pageant than dramatic vehicle, Irving turned to a series of plays set in historical times. He played Corporal Gregory Brewster in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Waterloo in 1894, Napoleon in 1897 in an adaptation of Victorien Sardou’s Madame Sans-Gêne (pr. 1893) by Comyns Carr, and in 1898 the title role in his son Lawrence Irving’s new play, Peter the Great.

Irving had always given attention to costuming and stage sets, but with these plays, he was in danger of staging nothing but costume drama. In 1898, a fire destroyed the warehouse in which the Lyceum stored the settings for Irving’s plays, and the ensuing financial crisis caused Irving to turn over the theater to others. Under these circumstances, in 1899 he mounted a production of Lawrence Irving’s translation of Sardou’s new play Robespierre (1899), and in 1901 he did Coriolanus (pr. c. 1607-1608), his last new production of a Shakespeare play. Terry left the Irving company in 1902, and the new management of the Lyceum lost the lease on the building.

Nevertheless, Irving struggled to mount new productions. Tours in the British provinces and the United States offset the lack of financial success of his Dante, written by Victorien Sardou and produced in 1903 from a translation by his son Lawrence. In his final appearance in London, Irving revived Tennyson’s Becket, and he was on tour with the play when he collapsed and died in Bradford on October 13, 1905.

Irving was buried in Westminster Abbey. It was the last in a series of public honors, including honorary degrees from universities in Dublin (1892), Cambridge (1898), and Glasgow (1899). The coffin was covered with a pall of laurel leaves. They turned gold in the light coming through the Abbey windows. Irving would have appreciated the theatricality of the effect.

Significance

Henry Irving was the leading British actor-manager of the Victorian period. He wanted the middle and upper classes to accept theatrical work as genuine art, and he knew that would occur only if the public saw actors as respectable members of society. Irving worked consciously for social acceptance for himself and other members of his profession. He also worked hard to succeed as an actor. By supervising every element in the plays he staged at the Lyceum, Irving achieved greater stylistic and dramatic unity than had his Victorian predecessors.

Admittedly, many of the plays that Irving chose were sentimental and melodramatic. With the questionable exception of Tennyson, Irving worked with no first-rate contemporary dramatist. Both Henry Arthur Jones and Arthur Wing Pinero, successful as writers of an English drama more realistic than Irving usually selected, worked for a time in the Lyceum company, but Irving was comfortable with the romantic costume dramas of Sardou, Wills, and Carr. In his capacity as a drama critic, George Bernard Shaw argued that both Terry and Irving were wasted as actors in much of the material that they staged. He attempted, perhaps sincerely, to persuade both to appear in the sort of realistic play that he himself was starting to write.

Because so much of the quality of an actor’s work lies in details of actual performances, it is hard to assess Irving’s importance. Recordings of his voice exist, but contemporary reviews and memoirs are the chief evidence of the fact that Irving was a magnetic performer. The notes that he made for his productions of Shakespeare, however, do give a sense of Irving’s originality. He sought, in every play in which he appeared, a unified characterization of the man he played. Like the Russian director Konstantin Stanislavsky, Irving saw each character as a unique human individual, and he looked constantly for the detail of phrasing, movement, or gesture that would convey that character’s nature to an audience. Although later actor-managers such as Herbert Beerbohm Tree and John Martin Harvey followed Irving’s lead in staging lavish productions of Shakespeare, they did not focus the details of a production toward the single, central effect characteristic of Irving. In a sense, Irving’s heir as stage director was Terry’s son, Edward Gordon Craig, and not Beerbohm Tree or Harvey.

Irving’s real legacy to the English theater may lie less in his own acting than in his scholarly approach to the production of Shakespeare and his sensitivity to production values. His acting would perhaps not seem realistic to a twentieth century audience. Less mannered and stagey than the styles of his predecessors, Irving’s acting was romantic in its emphasis on the individuality of the character and in its intuitive, rather than intellectual, approach to a role.

Bibliography

Baker, Michael. The Rise of the Victorian Actor. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1978. This study focuses on the development of acting as a profession in Victorian England.

Bingham, Madeleine. Henry Irving: The Greatest Victorian Actor. Foreword by John Gielgud. New York: Stein & Day, 1978. An excellent account of Irving’s life, but the book fails to provide enough analysis of his work as actor and theatrical manager.

Darbyshire, Alfred. The Art of the Victorian Stage: Notes and Recollections. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969. This chatty and anecdotal memoir, originally published in 1907, gives a theatrical associate’s perspective on Irving.

Hughes, Alan. Henry Irving, Shakespearean. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Using prompt books and production notes, Hughes gives an invaluable scene-by-scene reconstruction of Irving’s Shakespearean productions.

Joseph, Bertram. The Tragic Actor. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959. By placing Irving in the context of male tragic actors from the age of Elizabeth I to that of Victoria, Joseph makes it clear how Irving developed out of a long stage tradition.

King, W. D. Henry Irving’s Waterloo: Theatrical Engagements with Arthur Conan Doyle, George Barnard Shaw, Ellen Terry, Edward Gordon Craig: Late-Victorian Culture, Assorted Ghosts, Old Men, War, and History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Recounts how late in the nineteenth century, critic George Barnard Shaw panned Irving’s performance in A Story of Waterloo, a popular play by Arthur Conan Doyle. Shaw’s attack was the first volley in a battle against the old guard of the Victorian stage.

Rowell, George. The Victorian Theatre: A Survey. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1956. This book is especially useful in providing a sense of the technical and literary resources available to Irving at the start of his career as a stage manager.

Rozmovits, Linda. Shakespeare and the Politics of Culture in Late Victorian England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. The Merchant of Venice was Shakespeare’s most popular play in nineteenth century England, where the drama was part of the school curriculum, discussed in the press, and a big hit on the London stage. Rozmovits examines how and why this play was so meaningful to Victorian audiences. Includes information about Irving and his portrayal of Shylock.

Terry, Ellen, with additional chapters by Edith Craig and Christopher St. John. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970. The first half of the volume, written by Terry herself and published as The Story of My Life in 1908, contains a detailed account of her association with Irving at the Lyceum.

Wagenknecht, Edward. Merely Playing. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966. The chapter on Irving focuses on him as a performer, particularly in the romantic melodramas that sustained his career.