Thomas William Robertson His Plays And Stagecraft

THOMAS

WILLIAM

ROBERTSON

His Plays and Stagecraft

MAYNARD SAVIN

BROWN UNIVERSITY

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

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BROWN UNIVERSITY STUDIES

VOLUME XIII

THOMAS WILLIAM ROBERTSON:
His Plays and Stagecraft

DATE DUE

THOMAS WILLIAM
ROBERTSON:

HIS PLAYS AND STAGECRAFT

By
MAYNARD SAVIN

TRINITY COLLEGE

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

BROWN UNIVERSITY

1950

Copyright 1950 by
Brown University

PRINTED BY THE WILLIAM BYRD PRESS, INC.
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

TO MY

MOTHER AND FATHER

661 1083

PREFACE

A LL that a fellow student of mine, specializing in Anglo-American
JLJL literary relations during the Colonial period, recalls from a one-
time exposure to Caste is that Thomas William Robertson is the man
who put locks on doors. As labels go, this one passes muster, for if
having expanded our definitions, made our qualifications and reserva-
tions, and drawn our conclusions, we compress our expenditure of
research into a portable, mnemonic unit, we shall come back to some-
thing rather close to my friend's epithet.

To stop short with such tags, however, will prevent us from learning
what we can of the development of the theater. We may, of course,
reduce the dramatic output of the Victorians to barren waste and move
on to the playwrights of the eighties and nineties, with whose aims and
techniques twentieth-century readers feel a more congenial, if patroniz-
ing, kinship. If we disdain the much-maligned early and mid-Vic-
torians, it may be because we think that we have, dramatically speaking,
arrived, that we have found the magic formula for creating lasting
theater. Yet while the shifting emphases of the twentieth century, its
faddism, its periodic lamentations, its critic-writer tilts give healthy
signs of life, they lend credence to the picture of our running like chil-
dren at a fair from booth to booth, stopping before each only long
enough to yell louder "ooh's" and "ah's."

The half-way mark of the twentieth century finds us groping. We
have not solved the problem of the theater's being throttled by the
economics of real estate. Dramatic arts have entered the media of film,
radio, and television and function rambunctiously but confusedly and
disappointingly. We have not been able to award satisfactorily the
custody of the problem children of art and propaganda. The clock, to
which Henry Arthur Jones in 1906 compared Anglo-American drama,
still does not go. 1 We still theorize about why great tragedy is not being
written. I point out these aspects of the contemporary dilemma in an
attempt to discourage a mind-set which refuses a survey of the road
we have come.

1 Foundations of a National Drama, London, 1913, p. 45.

vii

viii Preface

The questions I raise in regard to Robertson's contribution are ap-
plicable to that of every pioneering practitioner in the theater. A con-
sideration of the particular dramatic cycle of which Robertson was
primum mobile may help us gain necessary perspective in our own
confusing times. It would be profitable to sum up the elements of
Victorian dramaturgy against which Robertson rebelled. What was
the extent of his rebellion? What were the limitations? Can we ac-
count for such limitations?

Contemporary critics hailed Robertson as revolutionary. With the
inauguration of the cup-and-saucer school of drama, he was the first to
have created a tempest with a teapot. In the eyes of excited reviewers,
Robertson was wiping the stage clear of early Victorian debris and
constructing sets and plays which belonged to a new realism:

"Society" and "Ours" prepared the way for a complete reformation of the
modern drama, and until the curtain fell on Saturday night it remained a
question whether Mr. Robertson would be able to hold the great reputation
which those pieces conferred upon him. The production of "Caste" has
thrown aside all doubt. The reformation is complete, and Mr. Robertson
stands preeminent as the dramatist of this generation. The scene-painter, the
carpenter, and the costumier no longer usurp the place of the author and
actor. With the aid of only two simple scenes a boudoir in Mayfair and
a humble lodging in Lambeth Mr. Robertson has succeeded in concentrat-
ing an accumulation of incident and satire more interesting and more
poignant than might be found in all the sensational dramas of the last half
century. The whole secret of his success is truth! 2

By the nineties, however, the ardor which had greeted his coup had
subsided. Latter-day critics reduced his stature to that of a transitional
figure linking the theatrical claptrap of the first half of the century
with the drama of the eighties and nineties, which was grappling with
idea and psychology. The value of practicable doors was very mean-
ingful where there had been no attempt at realism, but with the further
evolution o dramatic truth, practicable doors came to be seen in the
light of surface realism, and critics sobered as they saw from new
vantage grounds the survival in Robertson's plays of what was patently
false. Typical of such reassessments is the following by William Archer:

2 From a review following the opening of Caste, quoted by Ashley Thorndike,
English Comedy, New York, 1929, p. 535.

Preface ix

Not long ago "Society" was revived at the Haymarket, and the per-
formance was altogether melancholy. It confirmed the observation that it is
not always pleasant to meet an old friend after a lapse of years. Time has
probably changed both him and you, and pleasant recollections are apt to be
rudely effaced. There was still much to be amused at in "Society," but
there was more to be wondered at, if not mourned over. There were touches
of dialogue and character still fresh and true, but it was quite evident that
the play as a whole was to be regarded mainly as a curiosity. It is at least
half-way on its journey towards that haven of rest for theatrical invalids $,
Mr. Hollingshead's "educational" repertory. Anything more threadbare in
the matter of construction it is hard to conceive. 3

In accounting for shortcomings in Robertson's art, I have attempted
to analyze the particular ingredients of the man and his milieu which
precluded a thorough-going break with the past. In spite of the fact
that I have focused attention on his limitations, I have neither desired
nor have been led to detract from his achievements. For when we have
come to understand the reasons underlying Robertson's limitations and
his reduction from revolutionary to transitional significance, we shall
still be left to marvel at the eternally mysterious emergence of creative
leadership.

I wish to express my gratitude to Professor Robert Gale Noyes for
the stimulating and painstaking direction he has given me in my re-
search. I have benefited from Professor Benjamin W. Brown's ever-
illuminating comments on the nineteenth century theater. I am grateful
to Professor Leicester Bradner and to Professor Albert Jacques Salvan
for their encouraging and helpful suggestions. To Dr. William Van
Lennep, Curator, and his assistant, Miss Barbara Jones Casey, go my
thanks for facilitating my way among the rich treasures of the Harvard
Theatre Collection. I am greatly indebted to Miss Angela Dolores
Hughes for her kind and critical comments on my presentation. I must
assume final responsibility, however, for reprehensible acts of omission
and commission*

3 English Dramatists of To-day, London, 1882, pp. 22-23. See also C. Penley
Newton, "Frivolous Comedy", The Theatre, vol. IV New Series, November i,
1881, p. 269.

CONTENTS

PAGE

CHAPTER ONE
BEFORE THE TEMPEST The State of the mid-Victorian Theater 3

CHAPTER TWO
ROBERTSON'S LIFE ............. 20

CHAPTER THREE
THE POTBOILERS Translations and Adaptations .... 45

CHAPTER FOUR

THE TEMPEST The Six Successes Produced at the Prince of

Wales' s .... .......... 58

CHAPTER FIVE
ROBERTSON, THE SOCIAL THINKER ... ..... 104

APPENDICES

I IMPORTANT DATES IN THE LIFE OF THOMAS WILLIAM

ROBERTSON ....... ..... 119

II UNDATED PLAYS BY ROBERTSON ........ 120

III CHRONOLOGY OF ROBERTSON'S PLAYS ...... 121

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"Throughout the act the autumn leaves fall from
the trees,"

a stage direction in a promptbook of
Ours, quoted by William Archer in The Old
Drama and the New, New York, 1929, p. 260.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Courtesy of Harvard Theatre Collection

FACING PAGE

Thomas William Robertson 34

Manuscript page of David Garric\ 50

Squire Bancroft 60

Program for Society 72

THOMAS WILLIAM ROBERTSON:
His Plays and Stagecraft

CHAPTER ONE

BEFORE THE TEMPEST

A FAVORITE device in Robertson's plays is the inclusion of a
./jL struggling writer, whose bitter invective against the old order of
dramaturgy affords Robertson a mouthpiece. We shall later see how
his own painful struggle to gain recognition made the writer's problem
of breaking into the theater an obsession, but for the moment we are
less concerned with biography than we are with dramatic theory. In
tone and import, a typical outburst is Jack's soliloquy in Birth:

Comedy! It is a domestic drama, (rises and tears notes, throwing them
into the old-fashioned fireplace) It will never do. I must give it up. If I am
to write for the stage, I won't attempt anything new. I will write in the
good old conventional groove in which my good old great-grandfathers
wrote before me. (as if inspired) I know what I'll do! I'll write a good old
legitimate comedy on the good old legitimate principles. I'll crush these mod-
ern imposters ! It is so pleasant to crush a modern imposter. It's an odd thing,
now; but why should it be more pleasant to crush a modern imposter than
an old one? Let me see. In my new comedy, that is, in my new old comedy,
there must be a baronet and, of course, being a baronet, he must be an old
man. In old comedies baronets are always old men a young baronet would
have smashed any old comedy and he must have a son who is old enough
to get married. Let me see shall the baronet be bluff and hearty, or shall
he be senile and tottering? I'll have him bluff and hearty, (imitating the
bluff and hearty in the old conventional comedy} "Blood and thunder, sir!
You shall marry her don't talk to me! Capons and flagons! Don't talk to
me; you shall marry her to-morrow to-morrow, sir! Do you hear me?
And by gad, sir, if I wish it, you shall trundle her from church in a wheel-
barrow. You dog! you rascal! you puppy! you-you-you-you-you-wagh!
wooh! booh! bash! bosh!" That's the sort of thing. Yes, very good
very good, indeed. I must pepper it with impropriety, and make it hot and
strong with Holy well Street wit. Then the baronet's son: because he is five
and twenty he must flourish his pocket-handkerchief, talk in a high falsetto
voice, show his teeth, and wag his head, (imitating light comedian of the
past age) " 'Fore Heaven, if my old dad and her guardian cannot agree

4 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

rope ladders and Gretna Green! by Cupid and Hymen! by Mercury and
Mars! I'll order a post-coach, and with Sacharissa by my side, and my man
in the rumble, ride, at the rate of fifteen miles an hour to endless happiness.
Ha! ha! ha!" (crosses the stage, laughing) Then the guardian, who has the
care of the young lady, and who is in love with her himself a young rascal
about ninety. (Imitating a tottering old man) "Aye, aye, aye, aye, aye, but
it is a pretty one, and its guardy will make it happy, and it won't think of
the young men. It shan't think of the young men. Adad! If it does I'll lock
it up, and give it bread and water; I'll sta-a-a-a-rve its pretty flesh, and when
and when it's cured of love, I'll take it to the church and marry it. Adad!
I feel as young as any wanton boy of fifty of them all." La! la! la! la!
{dancing') Oh, yes, I'll go in for a new-old comedy; it's very easy, and one
likes to be a bulwark against modern innovation. I'll make out a list o
characters. Sir Furious Fiftybottle yes, good, (taking notes) That's the
baronet. Sir Skeleton Skagglemaggle that's the miser and the guardian.
Then a virtuous farmer um! Pleasant Weathers, a shepherd. 1

"The good old conventional groove", the tried even if not true, con-
stituted the magic key to early and mid- Victorian drama: stereotyped
characters in situations so exhaustively worked over that they could no
longer evoke surprise. Jack's soliloquy shows how easily the formula
might be mastered. Stock types, such as the heavy old man, the young
hero, and the ingenue, were brought into the same play as inevitably
as the line-up of tenor, soprano, and bass in grand opera.

Theater managers encouraged the deepening of established grooves
by maintaining small companies of actors whose specialties were typed
and on tap. Thus the policy of the managers and the hack work of
the playwrights followed each other in a vicious cycle of economics,
the managers demanding and the playwrights supplying plays con-
structed to order, and both intent on exploiting the acting range of a
particular company.

The policy could only stifle creative energy. Actors went on year
after year, playing the same kinds of roles, falling deeper and deeper
into the sin of relying on external tricks of characterization, of reducing
characterization to a system of humors crude enough to constitute the
lowest common denominator of immediate audience recognition.
Edmund Yates, for example, commenting on stereotyped interpretation,
says: "In former years, the actor personifying them [stage dandies]
would have put on a palpably false moustache, would have worn spurs,

1 Thomas William Shafto Robertson, The Principal Dramatic Worlds of Thomas
William Robertson, London, 1889, 1, 33-34.

Before the Tempest 5

carried a riding whip everywhere the whole personation representing
a creature such as had never been seen by mortal man off the stage." 2

It was Eugene Scribe who more than any other single person strait-
jacketed the English theater. His conspicuous success, based on a ratio-
cinative technique allied to bourgeois themes, convinced every dramatist
that la piece bien faite contained the secret of playwriting. Scribe's
enviable mastery of technique produced an eager school of followers,
ready to turn the Scribian formula to their own advantage. His nugatory
influence, however, cannot be made out to detract from Scribe's native
genius. As is so often the case, the disciples belied the teacher. Thus
Gallic example encouraged reliance on stock types and the mechanical
manipulation of action to produce suspense. The resulting blight on
the English stage lasted long. Translations and adaptations followed
pell mell.

In the watered-down English versions of Scribe we find artifice and
theatrical expediency to an extreme. Victorian adaptors went about their
business with the mechanical proficiency of a Hollywood studio con-
ference. Describing the complications surrounding the transportation
of French plays to England, Squire Bancroft pauses to observe:

Though the press was almost unanimous in praising the skill with which
a French play had been transformed into an English one, there was naturally
some repining that we had not been able to find an original English comedy
to our liking. Of course it was a matter for serious concern that while a
management existed which was on the look-out for novelty, and prepared
to pay a price for it which a few years before would have been pronounced
fabulous, no dramatist had arisen to supply work of a kind that justified
the speculators in the preliminary outlay. But so it was.

It was during this successful run [Peril] that I heard Sardou was about
to produce a new play at the Theatre du Vaudeville called Dora, and made
plans to be en rapport with the premiere. My part in Peril was too impor-
tant to allow me to give it up so early in the run, but I was represented in
Paris by B. C. Stephenson. He returned extremely nervous as to the new
play's chance of success in England, although much impressed by one or
two of its scenes, an incomprehensible timidity which in these days would
have cost me the play. I pursued the matter further, on the strength of a
criticism I read in a French newspaper, and found that the author had
already sold the English and American rights to a theatrical agent. With
him I proceeded to treat, inducing him to give me the refusal of the play

2 As quoted in Squire and Marie Bancroft, The Bancrofts: Recollections of
Sixty Years, London, 1909, p. 194.

6 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

until the approaching Ash Wednesday a day on which London theatres
were then closed by order of the Lord Chamberlain. This was arranged. I
went over on Ash Wednesday and saw the play. At the end of the famous
scene des trois hommes I told the agent I had seen quite enough, whatever
the rest of the play might prove to be, to determine me to write him a
cheque at the end of the performance.

Another fine scene followed in a subsequent act, and I felt assured there
was ample material for a play in England, whatever the difficulties of trans-
planting it from Gallic soil might be. I gladly gave him fifteen hundred
pounds, then by far the largest sum ever paid for a foreign work, for his
rights, and was quite content with my bargain.

Soon afterwards we placed the manuscript in the hands of Clement Scott
and B. C. Stephenson for consideration as to the line to be taken in its
adaptation; with them, as was our custom with all French plays, we worked
in concert. A long time was spent in considering the plan of action before
the work was begun. Happily the chief solution of many difficulties came to
me in suggesting the diplomatic world as the main scheme; I took the
adaptors again to Paris, and on the return journey, in a coupe to Calais,
the whole subject of the new play was well threshed out between myself and
my fellow workers, and we saw our way to what eventually became
Diplomacy?

Bancroft's account continues, but the above self-congratulatory pas-
sage illustrates sufficiently the emphasis on business acumen and ef-
ficiency and this on the part of the management which had first
recognized Robertson's worth and whose little theater on Tottenham
Road was the acknowledged leader in artistic integrity!

French models dominated the English stage during Robertson's
entire career; they were not to be scrapped until the last decade of the
century. It is no wonder, then, that stereotyped plots and characters
held sway, French influence continued even after Robertson passed
from the scene. He himself was caught up in it. He, too, was forced to
adapt and translate. He witnessed London newspapers advertising as
a matter of course his Ours as L'Ours. He learned to capitalize on the
fashion. He finally rebelled and attempted to fight its hold.

The absence of copyright laws at once encouraged the wholesale
importation of French plays and discouraged native writers from the
profitless pursuit of playwriting. A ready-made French play, tested at
the Comedie Franchise could be had for the few pounds it cost for the
services of a translator. Managers could pick among a variety of cur-

8 The Bancrofts, pp. 217-19.

Before the Tempest 7

rent offerings in Paris and cart home with them whatever they liked,
much in a manner of a merchant shopping for gowns to retail to
home consumption.
Boucicault put the case graphically:

The usual price received by Sheridan Knowles, Bulwer, and Talfourd at
that time for their plays was ^500. I was a beginner in 1841, and received
for my comedy 'London Assurance/ ^300. For that amount the manager
bought the privilege of playing the work for his season. Three years later
I offered a new play to a principal London theatre. The manager offered
me ;ioo for it. In reply to my objection to the smallness of the sum he
remarked, "I can go to Paris and select a first-class comedy; having seen it
performed, I feel certain of its effect. To get this comedy translated will
cost me ^25. Why should I give you ^300 or ^500 for your comedy of
the success of which I cannot feel so assured?" The argument was un-
answerable and the result inevitable. I sold a work for ^100 that took me
six months' hard work to compose, and accepted a commission to translate
three French plays at ^50 apiece. This work afforded me child's play for
a fortnight. Thus the English dramatist was obliged either to relinquish
the stage altogether or to become a French copyist. 4

Methods of acting and staging reflected the moribund state of play-
writing. Repertory companies, unforgettably caricatured in the Vincent
Crummies chapters in Nicholas Nictyeby, encouraged actors to emote
by conditioned reflex. One role was very much like another. There
might be variation in lines and the characters' names would be different,
but the interpretation was a constant. "Each artist's line was so defined
that at the reading of a new piece each individual could tell what part
was allotted to him before the characters were given out." 5 Such con-
ditions led to stylized acting, with emphasis on elocutionary power and
gesture. The set speech and special business were ripped untimely from
an organic piece.

Ensemble playing, which insists on the subordination o every actor
to the totality of the play, was a conception which was to make its way
painfully into the theater. The star system minimized rehearsals, the
sine qua non of ensemble playing. Members of a company took it for
granted that they were not to interfere with the virtuoso display of the
leading performer. The star "painted his own picture" and expected

4 Brander Matthews and Laurence Hutton, edd., Actors and Actresses of Great
Britain and the United States, New York, 1886, V, 89-90.

5 Scott, The Drama of Yesterday and To-day, 1, 73.

8 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

the rest of the cast to remain at arm's length. Costume, scenery, and the
blocking out o action were given scant attention. The star held the
show together; the play limped along between the big moments when
he dominated the stage.

The attitude of actors trained in the star system persisted in Robert-
son's day. Robertson's first dramatic success, David Garric\, was a
vehicle for Sothern, and in Society, which he designed as a second
vehicle for Sothern, Robertson was careful to include another drunk
scene. Fortunately, as we shall see, Robertson was not subjected to the
necessity of catering to the system. If he were, such demands as the
following from Sothern in regard to Birth would have frustrated his
efforts to secure ensemble playing: "If I might suggest, I would say,
give me a few more of your telling lines through others' conversation.
If you can, don't let me, whilst I'm on the stage, be much of a listener." 6

An evening's entertainment in the early Victorian playhouse was a
pot pourri, commingling the stock in trade, the hastily-got-up, and the
impromptu, the whole served up to the accompaniment of music to
uninhibited patrons. Mrs. Bancroft, who in her role as Maud Hether-
iagton in Society evoked delighted surprise by her change of costume
between acts, speaks of the visit of a former manager of the Prince of
Wales's Theatre to a Bancroft rehearsal:

Dear, dear, what trouble you give yourselves ! In my tin-pot days we were
less particular. When in doubt as to how to end an act, I sent two men on
in a boat, dressed as sailors, with a couple of flags. They waved their Union
Jacks, I lit a pan of blue fire at the wings, the band played "Rule Britannia,"
and down came the curtain! 7

Charles Reade, who at least in theory joined Robertson in condemn-
ing the old order of acting, includes in his historical novel Peg Wof-
fington some local color of the Green Room. In one episode 8 , Reade
makes a significant analysis of acting style, which, as far as he was
concerned, had prevailed until the middle of the nineteenth century:
acting was stilted, declamatory, heroic in short, completely stylized.

In the complete absence of ensemble playing, rehearsals were casual

6 From a letter quoted by T. Edgar Pemberton, Life and Writings of T. W.
Robertson, London, 1893, P- 2 ^9-

7 The Bancrofts, p. 67.

8 Library edition, London: Chatto and Windus, 1906, p. 28. The passage does
not occur in the dramatized version, Masfa and Paces, which Reade wrote in
collaboration with Tom Taylor.

Before the Tempest 9

affairs. The director simply assigned roles, without discussing the rela-
tion of one part to the total play. Although actors might be instructed
in the broad effects sought, they studied their parts independently. 9
Theatricality was thus crowding drama of? the boards.

Clement Scott, who in his recoil from Ibsenism, tended to be nostalgic
over early Victorian drama, somewhat reluctantly confessed the short-
comings of leading houses. 10 Managers such as Buckstone and Webster
held no brief for aesthetics; interested solely in reaching audiences via
the most inexpensive and immediately accessible means, they maintained
slipshod standards of costuming, staging, and acting.

Hardly conducive to dramatic subtlety were the size and atmosphere
of the playhouses. Catcalls, hisses, and verbal exchanges between mem-
bers of the audience and the actors were the accepted handicap. The
"Old Price" riots and the Forrest-Macready riots, which had roots in
economic and national pressure, were simply more spectacular than
the usual, unrestrained participation of spectators. So far this side
idolatry of the theater were actors, that professional jealousies were apt
to explode on the stage in asides not contained in the play. Samuel
Phelps relates how he and Macready, who brooked upstaging from
no one, crossed swords in Macbeth:

As to Macduff, I don't know how often I played him; I think every
Monday night during the season. Of course you've heard of the row during
the fight. "Mac" let fly at me, nearly giving me a crack on the head, as he
growled

"D-n your eyes! Take that!"

For the moment I was flabbergasted, but when he returned to the charge
I gave him a dose of his own physic (adding to the oath not only his eyes,
but his limbs too!) He returned the compliment by heaping maledictions on
my seed, breed, and generation. Then he "went" for me, and I "went" for
him, and there we were growling at each other like a pair of wild beasts,
until I finished him, amidst a furore of applause.

The audience were quite carried away by the "cunning of the scene," and
shouted themselves hoarse, roaring on the one side "Well done, 'Mac!' on
the other "Let him have it, Phelps! 5 ' 11

Before the Victorian theater won its hard-fought battle for respect-
ability, the social standing of actors was on a par with that of prosti-

9 Scott, The Drama of Yesterday and To-day, I, 72.

10 Pages 359-60.

11 John Coleman, ed., Memoirs of Samuel Phelps, London, 1886, pp. 164-65.

io Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

tutes, and the atmosphere of the theater was more closely akin to the
Elizabethan than to our own. Frequenters of the pit sat on benches,
badgered by the entr'acte screams of hawkers, and for programs fingered
broadsides whose printer's ink was still wet.

Managerial cupidity frustrated any advance. The rant-and-rave level
of acting, the low quality of plays, and the disreputable aura attached
to the theater 12 are in large part traceable to the strangle-hold of theater-
lessees. The fight between the so-called majors and minors is indicative
of the shortsighted commercialism from which the drama to this day
has not succeeded in freeing itself. Before the Theatre Regulation Act
of 1843 legitimized the minors, Drury Lane, Co vent Garden, and the
Haymarket jealously guarded their exclusive prerogative. Their man-
agers maintained a scrutiny over the activities of the minors, ready to
report to the Lord Chamberlain any encroachment on legitimate drama.
At the same time that the patent houses were prohibiting the minors
from performing the function of theaters, they themselves were moving
further and further away from legitimate drama. They rebuilt their
houses larger and larger, until the seating capacity of each hovered
about three thousand.

Covent Garden, for example, rebuilt in 1809 after a fire the year
before, boasted an auditorium fifty-one feet by fifty-two; four tiers, each
with twenty-six boxes; a proscenium arch forty-two feet wide and
thirty-six feet high; a stage sixty-eight feet by eighty-two, and a seating
capacity from 2800 to 3000.

Such barns were hopelessly unfit for drawing-room subtlety, psy-
chological nuance, or the play of discussion. They encouraged the de-
velopment of melodramatic plots, spectacle, a declamatory style, and
sweeping gesture. The reactionary spirit of the managers endured even

12 The following is Charles Dickens* description of Sadler's Wells before Sam-
uel Phelps took over its management: "Seven or eight years ago, this theatre was
in the condition of being entirely delivered over to as ruffianly an audience as
London could shake together. Without, the theatre by night was like the worst of
the worst kind of fair in the worst kind of town. Within, it was a bear-garden,
resounding with foul language, oaths, cat-call shrieks, yells, blasphemy, obscenity
a truly diabolical clamour. Fights took place anywhere, at any period of the
performance. The audience were, of course, directly addressed in the entertain-
ments ... It was in the contemplation of the management to add the physical
stimulus of a pint of porter to the moral refreshment offered to every purchaser
of a pit ticket, when the management collapsed, and the theatre shut up."
Quoted by Coleman in Memoirs of Samuel Phelps, pp. 201-2.

Before the Tempest n

after the Regulation Act made the direction o the theater movement
perfectly clear. They retreated without grace, playing dog in the manger
with any kind of house unprotected by the Act.

The minor houses were given to spectacle, ranging from aquatic and
equestrian displays to the ambiguous burletta, a form which, not always
successfully, skirted the legal definitions of the Lord Chamberlain, by
restricting itself to less than five acts and including at least five songs
in each act. Planche's vogue with the extravaganza during the thirties
and forties can be understood as an ingenious adjustment to theatrical
conditions. Bringing together fairy-tale material, song, ballet, and dis-
play, Planche managed to keep dramatic appetite at starvation level.

In addition to these repressive elements was the matter of censorship,
an office performed by the Lord Chamberlain, from whose decrees
there was no appeal. Arbitrary and capricious as they might be, he was
under no necessity to justify his decisions. He communicated directly
with the manager, and the playwright often went in ignorance of the
exact nature of his offense.

The Lord Chamberlain's supervision of the drama's morality was
notoriously narrow-minded and gnat-straining. 13 Playwrights were dis-

13 "23rd January, 1832.

"Please to omit the following underlined words in the representation of the
drama called

THE RENT DAY

ACT I.

SCENE I. 'The blessed little babes, God bless 'em!'
SCENE III. 'Heaven be kind to us, for I've almost lost all other hope/
DITTO. 'Damn him.'

SCENE IV. 'Damn business.' *No, don't damn business. I'm very drunk, but I
can't damn business it's profane!

DITTO. Isn't that an angel?' 7 can't tell; I've not been used to such company!
SCENE V. 'Oh, Martin, husband, for the love of heaven!'
DITTO. 'Heaven help us, heaven help us!'

ACT II.

SCENE III. 'Heaven forgive you, can you speak it?' 'I leave you, and may
heaven pardon and protect you!'

SCENE last. 'Farmer, neighbours, heaven bless you let the landlord take all
the rest/

DITTO. 'They have now the money, and heaven prosper it with them/

"G. Colman."

"To the Manager, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane."
W. Blanchard Jerrold, The Life of Douglas Jerrold, London, n. d., p. 108.

Jack Randall, the would-be playwright in Robertson's Birth, in a fit of inventive

12 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

couraged from facing up to any significant truth in human relations
and fell more and more to relying on the accepted variations of viola-
tions of the criminal code. The overt cruelties of man to man, of course,
could mean only the constant reworking of a melodramatic vein.

As we read the careers of Victorian playwrights, we discover that
only those who understood theatrical conditions at first hand, who were
willing to work within the limitations imposed upon them, and who
were prepared to accept miserable financial rewards stood any chance
of seeing their work produced. As we shall see, only the propitiously
timed advent of the Bancroft management made Robertson's success
possible.

Dion Boucicault is one of those who by their willingness to jump on
the bandwagon gained tremendous popularity. He possessed sure-fire
inventiveness and sure-fire theatrics. His famous London Assurance,
performed at Covent Garden in 1841, scintillates superficially in the
Restoration tradition, but the sophisticated flare is carefully guarded
by a Victorian screen. Such familiar types as the squire tally ho-ing
after the fountain of youth, the pettifogging lawyer, and the social
parasite only remind us that Boucicault was scraping the pot, while
the moral seasoning sprinkled over the characters makes them ludicrous
by contrast with their prototypes in Restoration comedy.

Lady Gay Spanker, carrying on a flirtation with Sir Harcourt Courtly,
acts the typical faithless wife of stage convention, but at the crucial
moment she reneges on her characterization, apologizing limply: "J ust
to show my husband how inconvenient it is to hold the ribands some-
times, I made him send a challenge to the old fellow, and he, to my
surprise, accepted it, and is going to blow my Dolly's brains out in the
billiard room." 14 And the play ends on the following out-of -character
speech by Sir Courtly, the roue:

musing, reminds himself of a theatrical taboo: "Lord Ravendevil meets Peter
Fryingirons at a public dinner, and the noble lord pulls Peter Toastingfork's nose
because Peter began his soup before the Archbishop o Evenysee had said grace.
Good! That's social and fashionable. Peter retorts with a butter-bowl full of lob-
ster-sauce, misses Lord Bantampoodle, and hits the Archbishop, (pausing) No.
You couldn't have an Archbishop on the stage, except in an historical play. The
Lord Chamberlain wouldn't license an Archbishop. It won't do. (tears leaves out
of booty. Principal Dramatic Works, I, 12.

Standard Drama, No. 27, p, 65.

Before the Tempest 13

Charles, permit me, as your father, and you, sir, as his friend, to correct
you on one point. Barefaced assurance is the vulgar substitute for gentle-
manly ease; and there are many, who, by aping the vices of the great,
imagine that they elevate themselves to the rank of those, whose faults
alone they copy. No! sir. The title of gentleman is the only one out of any
monarch's gift, yet within the reach of every peasant. It should be engrossed
by Truth stamped with Honor sealed with goo d-je ding signed Man
and enrolled in every true young English heart. 15

Sophisticated, fast-paced, epigrammatic, the play withal is a lifeless
thing, for the locus of the satirical spirit is confused. Restoration comedy
in the hands of Victorians is like Eliot's sterile hollow men, form with-
out substance, shape without manner.

His melodramas, such as the Octoroon (1859) and The Colleen Bawn
(1860) rely on stage property, elaborate scenery, and physical action.
The dialogue, containing new incursions into dialect, has a more real-
istic flair than anything previous in the century to Society, although
at emotional moments it assumes an elocutionary turn. 16

It is not difficult to conceive how Victorian attitudes towards the
theater and drama were being conditioned. Both majors and minors
were cheapening taste; the minors, because of their fight for survival,
associated theater with a Roman holiday atmosphere; the majors, be-
cause of their physical giantism, associated drama with the grotesque
and the declamatory. Spectacle, whether superimposed on extravaganza,
melodrama, or Shakespeare, held sway. The antiquarian passion for
historicity in the staging of Shakespeare, set by Macready and the
Keans, conditioned spectators to expect the grandiose in scenic design.
Ingenuity in melodramas was taxed to provide thrilling escapes. The
extravaganza, like the seventeenth century masque before it, exhausted
its physical resources. Meanwhile the top-heavy growth of spectacle
could only dwarf the actor.

Thus far we have seen how economics played the major part in
inhibiting the growth of dramatic art. We have seen how styles of

15 Page 71.

16 It is difficult to gauge elocutionary flavor in Victorian drama, for Victorians
in the drawing room as well as on the stage were elegant and perfectionist in
style. The affected balanced constructions, piled up laborious series, and strained
at circumlocutions. And the style seemingly stiffened in ratio to emotional in-
tensity. Diarists and letter writers afford about the most faithful reproduction we
have of Victorian speech patterns.

14 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

acting depended upon the physical demands of the houses and how the
types of plays produced were dependent upon the war between the
majors and minors.

An important aspect of the old order was the Victorian veneration
of Shakespeare, fertilized and watered by the romantic stream of poetic
drama. The romantics, writer and critic alike, persisted in seeing Shakes-
peare apart from the stage and apart from his historical background*
Leaders of the movement were most deeply struck by Shakespeare's
probing of the emotional, intuitive, and psychological faculties of man*
Critics stimulated the Victorian penchant for recreating entire personal-
ities from the shades and shadows which flitted across the stage.

Imitating playwrights overlooked the bustling mugging of clowns,
the intermingling of the portentous and the prosaic. They felt they had
captured the essence of Shakespearian style in the impassioned, climactic
speeches. They assimilated Shakespeare's stylistic trick of injecting
references to minute, everyday detail in speeches of emotional intensity,
and they exploited the monosyllabic. Shakespearian style as adapted
by the romanticists and their followers emerges, utterly deficient in
pacing, as a sustained scream.

James Sheridan Knowles' Vtrginius, performed at the huge Covent
Garden Theatre in 1820, typifies the kind of melodrama which was
patterned after Shakespeare. Its theatricality proved so effective that it
remained a star vehicle for James O'Neill in the early twentieth cen-
tury. The blank verse bears a heavy freight of moralizing and Shake-
spearian fireworks. A sample of self-conscious Victorian didacticism at
its worst is the following:

Remember, girl,

The first and foremost debt a Roman owes
Is to his country; and it must be paid,
If need be, with his life. 17

Essaying to capture the incoherent flavor of Lear's inflections,
Knowles places the following highly derivative declamation into the
mouth of Virginius:

Patience! Patience!

Nay, prudence, but no patience. Come! A slave
Dragg'd through the streets in open day! My child!

17 The Dramatic Worlds, London, n. d., p. 74.

Before the Tempest 15

My daughter! my fair daughter, in the eyes
Of Rome! O, 111 be patient! Come! The essence
Of my best blood in the free common ear
Condemn'd as vile! O, 111 be patient! Come!
O, they shall wonder I will be so patient! 18

William Archer 19 has effectively demonstrated the pretension and
pious morality which informs Knowles's poetry, by juxtaposing a
speech of Virginius and one of Lady Macbeth:

At the generous

And sympathetic fount, that, at her cry,
Sent forth a stream of liquid living pearl
To cherish her enamelPd veins.

I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me.

In William Tell, produced at Drury Lane five years later, Republican
sentiment struggles vainly against the repressive artificiality of the
verse. Characterizations remain as indistinguishable as the free moun-
tain tops which Tell romantically apostrophizes. Morality, melo-
dramatics, and rant win the day. Staging taxes the designers; a direction
In act three reads: "It grows darker and darker the rain pours down
in torrents, and a furious wind arises the mountain streams begin to
swell and roar" In the face of such exacting demands, audiences,
incidentally, might be justifiably vexed to discover that in the apple-
shooting scene, Albert, the son, takes up his position off stage!

Archaisms, puns, and stichomythia continued to mark Knowles's
style as he happily held up the flashcards of Victorian morality. In
1832, the year of the great Reform Bill, Knowles voiced in the Drury
Lane premiere of The Hunchbac\ the kind of bourgeois sentiment
which was to dominate the theater to the end of the century, which
was to set the pattern for theatrical apologetics in behalf of the nascent
ruling class, and which was oriented in a direction most apt to woo
middle classes to the theaters:

18 Page 93.

19 William Charles Macready, London, 1890, pp. 53-54.

20 The Dramatic Wor\$, London, n. d., p. 141.

16 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

Walter: You were trained to knowledge, industry,
Frugality and honesty, the sinews
That surest help the climber to the top,
And then will keep him there.

Walter: . . . Your fortune, I have heard, I think, is ample!

And doubtless you live up to't?
Clifford: 'Twas my rule,

And is so still, to keep my outlay, sir,

A span within my means.
Walter: A prudent rule!

The turf is a seductive pastime?
Clifford: Yes.

Walter: You keep a racing stud? You bet?
Clifford: No, neither.

'Twas still my father's precept "Better owe

A yard of land to labour, than to chance

Be debtor for a rood!" 21

In plays such as Ion, first produced in 1836; The Athenian Captive,
and Glencoe; or. The Fate of the Macdonalds, first performed in 1840,
T. N. Talfourd affected the Shakespearean manner, but his imagery
is faded. No soaring imagination came to assist what remained preten-
tious, sentimental dramas. Cardboard men and women move about in
an operatic atmosphere. It is as though the Knowleses and the Talfourds
of the time had just discovered the instrument of the speaking voice
and were afire with its possibilities. Imagine opera without music, a
play designed to exploit an actor's range of elocutionary art, replete
with spoken arias, and you have poetic drama at its Victorian nadir.

Bulwer Lytton, who captured the laurels from Talfourd, significantly
dedicated The Lady of Lyons (1838) to "The author of 'Ion,' whose
genius and example have alike contributed towards the regeneration of
The National Drama!' Lytton worked within the flamboyant, reck-
lessly theatrical heroics of the tradition, succeeding in winning favor
by his richer psychology and his surer instinct for what communicates
rapidly over the footlights.

His Lady of Lyons illustrates strikingly the way in which the Vic-
torians handled the theme of love and the class struggle. Lytton reflects
Victorian paternalism with regard to the working class. He allows the

21 Pages 236-37.

Before the Tempest 17

Republican and sentimental values inherent in a love between members
of two classes to receive its full dramatic exploitation; then, Lytton
smothers the democratic implications of the play by awarding the
badge of class to his low-born hero.

The plot tells how Melnotte, a peasant, poses as a foreign prince in
order to win Pauline. When she learns of his poverty, she is aghast.
Melnotte's remorse at his deception, however, extends to his treating
his bride as a guest on their wedding night; and his ridiculous nobility
of character leads Pauline to recognize her false values and to love him
for himself. The unnecessary final act, however, obscures the democratic
vista thus disclosed, for Melnotte, grieved at having concealed his true
station and filled with the desire to do penance, joins the army. Winning
rank and fame, he finally returns to Pauline as her social equal. Thus
Lytton flirts with the princess and the beggar theme without removing
the portcullis.

A word must be said for the progress towards realism before the
advent of Robertson; for before the tempest he stirred, there had been
some anticipatory waving of trees. Foremost among the progressive
elements in the English theater stood the versatile Madame Vestris,
aided by her husband Charles Matthews. While her efforts towards
natural staging were limited, she set a new tone for beauty in the
theater. Insisting on suitable costume and settings, the Matthewses
made inroads on the threadbare, lacklustre spectacles to which London
audiences had been subjected. Unfortunately Madame Vestris' reforms
did not extend to the point where she consented to subordinate her
own physical charms to the demands of a role, with the result that her
own costume as a soubrette might outshine that of her mistress.

Regardless of the misplaced fidelity to antiquarianism, the Shakes-
pearean managers contributed considerably to the expectation of specta-
tors of enjoying elaborate pageantry and detail. Playbills boasted of
research at the British Museum for authentic costume and setting.
Scholars were consulted and lavish sums spent to merge instruction
and delight. 22

Finally in the evolution of theatrical realism should be mentioned
the influence of the novelists. The angling for idiosyncracy, and the

22 See George C. D. Odell, Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, New York,
1920, II.

i8 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

objective and painstaking photographic quality in Thackeray, Dickens,
and Reade had their impact on the stage. Reade himself was both
novelist and playwright, and his modus operandi was contagious.

Because Tom Robinson, in Never too Late to Mend, was to be a gaol-bird,
he visited the prisons at Durham, Oxford, and Reading in search of local
colour. Another character, Geroge Fielding, had to make a voyage to
Australia.

*I know next to nothing about a ship, but my brother Bill is a sailor. I
have commissioned him to describe, as he would to an intelligent child, a
ship sailing, with the wind on her beam, then a lull a change of wind
to dead aft, and the process of making all sail upon a ship under that
favourable circumstance. 5

This he intended to use for Chapter XXXVI of the novel; probably it
was used, but in the process of revision it was ruthlessly deleted as un-
necessary to the story. In Chapter XXII of A Terrible Temptation, where
he describes himself in Rolfe, 'the writer of romances founded on facts,*
he mentions the presence upon the table of the fair copy of a MS. 'half
margin, and so provided for additions and improvements, but for one addi-
tion there were ten excisions, great and small/ When he drew in outline
the character of Isaac Levi, he declared 'it will be my business to show
what is in the head and in the heart of a modern Jew. This entails reading
of at least eight considerable volumes; but those eight volumes will make
my Jew a Truth, please God, instead of a life.* He then adds:

'My story must cross the water to Australia, and plunge after that into a
gold mine. To be consistent with myself, I ought to cross-examine at the
very least a dozen men that have formed, dug, or robbed in that land. If
I can get hold of two or three that have really been in it, I think I could
win the public ear by these means. Failing these I must read books and
letters, and do the best I can. Such is the mechanism of a novel by Charles
Reade. If I can work the above great system, there is enough of me to make
on of the writers of the day; without it, No, No.'

It was towards the perfection of this 'system' that he began that amazing
collection of notebooks and scrap-books, which accumulated so rapidly with
the passing years that the indexes to the notebooks, as he described in A
Terrible Temptation in 1871, had themselves to be indexed in 'a fat folio
leger entitled Index ad Indices! From the earliest of these books which
have survived, showing that he began to collect newspaper cuttings in 1848,
it is clear that his 'system' was not a sudden inspiration or eccentric idea; it
was a scheme suggested by conviction and carried out by conscience, at first

Before the Tempest 19

spasmodically and unsystematically, as if shirking the drudgery of the
formidable task, then with regularity and method as he settled to his work. 23

The impulses towards realism, however, were sporadic and never
completely realized. Such tendencies required a synthesis of dramatic
arts, a guiding principle behind the efforts of playwright, director,
actor, and stage designer a theater united in aim. The mid-Victorian
theater suffered from accumulated clutter and debris. Its moribund
state rested on managerial monopoly, commercialization of playwriting,
the grip of convention and censorship, and the decadent resurgence of
the poetic tradition. Let us now learn something about the man who,
by brewing a tempest in a teapot, scalded many of the idols of the old
order.

23 Malcolm Elwin, Charles Reade, London, 1931, pp. 86-88.

CHAPTER TWO
ROBERTSON'S LIFE

THOMAS WILLIAM ROBERTSON, born January 9, 1829,
at Newark-on-Trent, belongs to that group o nineteenth-century
mad folk of the theater, nursed in dressing rooms and cradled in
costume trunks. Hence Robertson, like Ellen Terry, grew up thoroughly
at home in the theatrical tradition and atmosphere. His youth witnessed
the declining era of theater circuits, traveling repertory immortalized
by Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nictyeby. Show business was dynami-
cally alive, with all the disarrangement of personal lives, the emergency
patching, and resourceful make-it-do that touring stock connotes. Until
Robertson turned his talent to playwriting, he toyed with the idea of
becoming a teacher, a soldier, a tobacconist, but always returned to his
native element. By turn actor, stage-carpenter, painter, scene-shifter,
prompter, stage-manager, writer, he knew from first-hand experience
with the exigencies of stagecraft what "goes."

Tom's grandfather, James Robertson (1713-1795)? had been of the
stage. Admired by Tate Wilkinson, he handled leading comedy parts
in the York circuit until he retired at the age of sixty-six.

Tom's two uncles, Thomas and James, were of the stage. Uncle
Thomas, manager of the Lincoln circuit, was later to come to the aid of
his famous nephew by offering him a job in his company. Uncle James
was to carry on his father's fame as comedian in the York circuit.

Tom's father, William Robertson, was of the stage. More than once,
he evidently resolved to have done with its hectic existence. His
daughter, the future Dame Madge Kendal, refers to an unpublished
article he once wrote on "The Actor's Social Position," in which he
laments that "The most painful penalty of an actor's social position
results in its isolation from every community of interest with others
that form and cement the elements of mutual protection." 1 His grand-

1 Dame Madge Kendal by Herself, London, 1933, p. 7.

Robertson's Life 21

son, Thomas William Shafto Robertson, tells us he once apprenticed
himself to a Derby lawyer. But William Robertson succumbed to the
family tradition, joined brother Thomas's company, married an actress,
Margaret Elizabeth Marinus, and begat the most famous members of
the Robertson theatrical family tree, Tom and Madge.

Thus we are dealing with the product of an acting family, one whose
associations and traditions are engrained in the very fibers of his being.

In a scrambling, caravansary existence 2 , we would not expect to
discover a placid boyhood. Attic, backyard, and magic cave; the rhythm
of school and play and bed; the devotion and attachment to household
gods are not in the picture. Since his parents were constantly on the
move, Thomas was placed in the care of his Aunt Fanny Maria, who
in spite of a doting, sentimental nature, was able, with the help of
Tom's father, to assume the management of the Lincoln circuit when
she was widowed the last day of August, 1831, by Thomas Robertson.
Apparently childless, she lavished affection on her nephew:

How I anticipated seeing pretty little Thomas with his golden curls, on
my arrival. How I reckoned on his little feet pattering about my large
room and his fine eyes looking up to me for approval, assistance, or joy.
Alas! he was ill, very ill, all the time. We were laying plans how we were
first to see him and if he would recognize us; what a change did reality
produce in the mind, to see the sweet child in one short week of absence
so reduced, his eyes heavy and clouded, fretful at being out of his mother's
arms a moment; but he is better, thank God! he is better, and I pray
humbly that he may be spared, for I truly love him! 3

On June 13, 1834, at the age of five, Thomas made his debut in one
of the inevitable Victorian benefit performances. The play was Rob
Roy, and Thomas played Hamish, the hero's son. Launched as a
juvenile, he was shipped through the Lincoln circuit.

His first direct exposure to the theater lasted about two years. When
he was seven, his sporadic formal education began. Aunt Fanny sent
him to Henry Young's Academy at Spaulding. Robertson's first biog-

2 See Percy Fitzgerald, The Romance of the English Stage, London, 1874, *>
56-103, and Coleman, Memoirs of Samuel Phelps. Phelps played the York circuit
from 1827 to 1829.

3 From the diary of Fanny Maria Robertson, as quoted by Thomas W. Robert-
son in the "Memoir" prefacing The Principal Dramatic Wor\s of Thomas Wil-
liam Robertson, I, xix.

22 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

rapher, his own son, describes the high-spirits and high-jinks of a
youngster who could command hero-worship by spouting lines from
thrillers in which he had acted.

At the age of twelve, Tom moved to Moore's school in Whittlesea.
But the unpredictable ledger of the Lincoln troupe made short work
of his schooling. Book learning was postponed. It was time to push
the fledgling out of the nest. For a while, Tom had played roles during
school holidays 4 ; now he had to become a regular, dependable part of
the company.

There is no reason to suppose that young Tom left Whittlesea in
1843 with regret. He seems to have plunged with zest into the alluring
chaos of the Robertson traveling menage. From fourteen until nine-
teen, he served his apprenticeship. In a shoestring venture, everyone
had to lend both hands. Madge Robertson describes her assignments
as a young actress in Macbeth:

My duties were strange and numerous. After tinkling the bell and draw-
Ing up the curtain, I went on the stage as one of the witches; then, removing
my rags and wig, I spoke Donalbain's lines in the next scene and became
a guest at the banquet of the Macbeths until I heard Lady Macbeth say,
"Feed and regard him not," when I had to leave suddenly to become a
witch again. In the dark during the cauldron scene I left the stage to appear-
as the child who speaks the lines beginning, "Be bloody, bold and resolute,"
after which I made another quick change to become the ghost of one of
the eight kings who appear to Macbeth.

Finally, in the battle scene my duty was to clash two rapiers to help
suggest the conflict between the two armies. 5

In Fifty Years of an Actors Life, John Coleman takes us back stage
to a rehearsal of Robertson's Lincoln troupe:

The Farmer's Story was what is called a "stock piece;" consequendy my
scenes were the only ones rehearsed, and it was quite evident that the com-
pany, who knew their parts backwards, and had played them over and
over again, wished the newcomer at Hong-Kong or anywhere but Horse-
Fair Street. The rehearsal was so slipshod and perfunctory that it was
enough to have upset an old stager, let alone a novice.

"Mrs. Robertson!" called die Prompter.

4 Once, in Stamford, during a provincial tour of Macready, Tom played Fran-
C.ois to his Richelieu.

5 Dame Madge Kendal, p. 38.

Robertson's Life 23

"Mrs. Robertson is looking out the checks. Read for her," grimly re-
marked Mr. Robertson.

"Gabble-gabble," commenced the Prompter "gabble! Now, sir, that's
your cue: on you come from behind the centre arch."

"Where will the arch be?"

"Where will the arch be, Casson?" inquired the Prompter.

"Second grooves," replied the master-carpenter.

"It will be a drawing-room. Here is a chair; there is a table," continued
the Prompter.

"But I don't see either the one or the other," I replied.

"No, but you will at night."

"Shall I?"

"Oh, yes! it will be all right at night"

Oh that "all right at night"! From that day to this I've been fighting
against it. I've killed it a million times, but it always comes to life again. . .

"Gabble gabble squeak. Cross to right, then to left and up centre. Mind
you give Mrs. Robertson the stage: she wants plenty of elbow-room. Now,
Mr. Rogers, if you please."

Mr. Rogers, a short, thick-set man of fifty, with an enormous head and
a huge bull-neck, who was known for many years after that at the Hay-
market as a sound sensible actor of old men and character parts, is the in-
teresting hero, Stephen Lockwood. This gentleman sits upon me, warns me
to give him the stage and to keep my eye on him, and begins to gabble
and growl. I respond to the best of my ability, and am about to make my
exit on the left-hand side.

"No, my good young man, not that way," interposes the adipose tragedian
with dignity.

The "good young man" is intended to be patronizing, but it is reassuring,
for he calls me a man, at any rate.

"Which side is it, Norman?" inquires the great Rogers.

"Right hup-her hentrance."

"Then I will cross in front to the left, and you, sir, go up to the right.
No, no, not that way! Don't turn your back to the audience. Whatever you
do, don't turn your back to the audience." 6

It was inevitable that the manager's son be made to feel his especial
responsibilities. One minute he painted scenery; the next he might be
pounding nails; and all the while, he was conning parts or maybe com-
posing a song to be used in a play. Come curtain time, if he was not
performing, he was prompting or lending a hand backstage. Mean-
while, under his father's encouragement, Tom kept up his studies, in-

6 London, 1904, pp. 146-48.

24 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft
eluding French. Did he or his father at this early period see the com-
mercial possibilities of adapting French plays? At any rate, Tom's
knowledge of French was a peculiarly appropriate tool in the equip-
ment of a theater-apprentice.

We are indebted to Edward Stirling for recording the following off-
stage incident in Tom's boyhood. Made to feel a man's estate in the
company, at home he was still a boy with a boy's bag of tricks, pitting
his resourcefulness against the greater resourcefulness of his elders.

Gainsborough, Lincolnshire. Acting with Robertson, father of Tom
Robertson, afterwards the distinguished author of 'Caste' etc. On the
arrival of Robertson and his company about once in two years, it was cus-
tomary for the landlord of the 'Bull Hotel' to present him and his numerous
family with a large cask of home-brewed ale for their Christmas enjoyment.
Old Mrs. Robertson, noticing that the ale disappeared uncommonly fast,
resolved to watch Master Tom at the barrel (it was his office to draw the
ale for dinner and supper). She found him drinking heartily. An ingenious
invention of the old lady's stopped Master Tom's indulgence. She always
waited at the top of the cellar-stairs, and if she heard a pause, called out:

Whistle, Tommy, whistle!'

The poor lad was done. Many a mournful ditty answered grandmother's
'Whistle!' 7

Traveling the circuit was an exciting life, even though the Robertsons
were finding it hard to keep the show on the road. Edward Stirling
on one occasion lent them eighteen pounds ten shillings to enable them
to produce a benefit. Tom's father was unable to pay his debt and Tom,
the factotum, addressed the following letter to their creditor:

Sheffield, October 2nd, 1846.

Dear Sir,

My father regrets that he could not keep his promise, but his benefit did
not turn out as well as he anticipated. His friend the sergeant-major brought
the soldiers, but he was obliged to trust them for admission. He now finds
great difficulty in getting the money. In a few days father will send it. With
grateful thanks, mother's best regards, and all.

Yours, etc.,

Tom Robertson.

E. Stirling, Esq.

Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. 8

7 Stirling, Old Drury "Lane, I, 100.

8 Pages 144-45-

Robertson's Life 25

Several weeks later, Stirling again asked for his money, and once again,
Tom dropped a paint brush to pick up a pen :

Sheffield, Nov. zoth, 1846.
Dear Sir,

Father desires me to say, that he is in so much distress that he cannot at
present send you a shilling in fact he is giving up management to take a
situation. The sergeant-major never paid the soldiers' money! Mother is
greatly grieved about it, and wishes to know if you will take the money
out in knives and spoons ? A friend of hers would send them to you.

Yours obediently, sir,

Tom Robertson.
E. Stirling, Esq.

T. R. C. Garden. 9

The second letter sounds the senior Robertson's chronic rebellion.
Actually the circuit struggled on for two more years. By the time it
finally disbanded in 1848, Tom saw performed in Boston his adaptations
of two of Dickens's short stories, "The Battle of Life" and "The
Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain" and had held everything from
a spear to Yorick's skull.

In 1848, the family plans were in the air and Robertson, yearning to
strike out on his own, came up to London. He made the rounds of
theaters, but managers were unimpressed by his Green Room pedigree.
The fact of the matter is that Tom was not a spectacular actor. 10 Dis-
couraged, he muddled through, supporting himself on scattered engage-
ments. All the while, as was his father's experience, the decision to
escape the insecurity of the theater grew stronger.

Respect for letters had been as deeply engrafted as acting on the
Robertson family tree. Grandfather Robertson had published a volume
of Poems. Tom's father had wrestled briefly with the law and, according
to his grandson's memoir, was "an exceedingly well-educated and
learned man . . . literary in his tastes" who "had he not been tied
down by the fact of an ever increasing family there is little doubt . . .

9 Pages 145-46.

10 Page 42.

William Frith, the artist-friend of Robertson, declares that Robertson confessed
to him his lack of acting ability. See My Autobiography and Reminiscences, New
York, 1888. II, 309.

Godfrey Turner speaks of Robertson as "an indifferent actor." "Robertsoniana,"
The Theatre, New Series, Vol. XIV (Dec. i, 1889), 285.

26 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

would have broken away from the toilsome trials of theatrical life to
the more self-reliant work of literature," 11 And we have already stolen
a glimpse into Aunt Fanny's diary.

Accordingly, Torn decided that travel and study might open new
doors. The advertisement in 1848 for an English-speaking teacher in
Utrecht looked like the ideal opportunity. The fact that he left England
without telling his family, however, suggests that he was a little fright-
ened at his initial defeat in London and unsure of the wisdom of exiling
himself as an usher in Holland. The experiment was a sharp break
with Robertsonian tradition.

His academic invasion of the Continent failed miserably. His role as
teacher lasted six weeks, leaving him bitter recollections o a Squeers-
like establishment. The other usher was a sniveling brute, whom Robert-
son never forgot. When he wrote School in 1869 he incorporated his
colleague as Krux, painting him as a mealy-mouthed, pushing rascal
who deserves and receives a thrashing. The following excerpt illustrates
Robertson's belated retaliation:

Krux: Upstarts! I hate those people; but then I hate most people. I think
I hate most things, except Bella, and when I look at her I feel that I
could bite her. Here she is.
Enter Bella, i E. L., she crosses to R., reading a boo\.

Krux: Bella, where are you going?

Bel: Mrs. Sutcliffe has sent me to fetch her goloshes.

Krux: Stay one moment. Sit down, (sits on bench t L. C.)

Bel: Mrs. Sutcliffe told me I was not to loiter.

Krux: What are you reading?

Bel: A fairy tale. What are you reading?

Krux: Hervey's Meditations. A different sort of literature. E>o sit down.
(Bella sits on branch, R. of Krux.)

Bel: (reads} "The king's son, the handsome young prince, was con-
tinually by her side, and said to her the most obliging things
imaginable."

Krux: What a beastly world this is, Bella, isn't it? Attend to me for a short
time, I want to speak to you particularly.

Bel: Be quick then.

Krux: Dr. and Mrs. Sutcliffe are getting very old.

Bel: They are not getting old, they are old.

Krux: And, therefore, must soon die.

11 Robertson, Principal Dramatic Wor%s, I, p. xviii.

Robertson's Life 27

Bel: Oh, Mr. Krux, what a dreadful notion.

Krux:Wt are all worms, particularly the Doctor and Mrs. Sutcliffe. All

men must die sometimes, Doctor and Mrs. Sutcliffe included.
Bel: Mrs. Sutcliffe isn't a man.
Krux: She ought to have been. But as I was saying, Bella, when they are

dead and buried
Bel: Mr. Krux!
Krux: They will no longer be able to keep on the school, will they? Then

who is to keep on the school, eh?

Bel: I don't know. I don't like to think of such things.
Krux: I do. I repeat, who is to keep on the school? I am the only resident

master. I am known to all the pupils.
Bel: Alas, yes!

Krux: I am known, and, I hope, loved.
Bel: No, feared.

Krux: It's the same thing in a school. Bella, you're a very good scholar
Bel: No, I'm not.
&zr;Yes, you are, and you understand all about the kitchen-pies, and

coals, and vegetables, and the like. You're an orphan.
Bel: Yes. (sighing)
Krux: So am I. You have no relations.
Bel: No.
Krux: Nor friends.
Bel: Oh, yes, Dr. and Mrs. Sutcliffe, and the school and the people in the

village.

Krux: I don't count them I have no friends.
Bel: No, not one.

Krux: When the Sutcliffes go why shouldn't we keep on the school?
Bel: (astonished) We?
Krux: "Yes, you and I; we are quite capable. I am clever, so are you we

could enlarge the connection. You could manage the girls, I would

manage the boys. Think how pleasant to make money, take in

pupils, teach them and correct them; I should like to correct them

particularly the boys. We should get on, Bella, if we got married.
Bel: Got married! Who got married?
Krux: You to me, me to you. Mr. and Mrs. Krux, of Cedar Grove House.

I love you, Bella.
Bel: (jumps up, dropping her boo\ and going to C.) Oh, don't on such

a nice day as this too.
Krux: Eh?
Bel: Poor dear Dr. and Mrs. Sutcliffe, to think of their dying! it makes

me cry. (crying) So kind as they've been to me.
Krux: She's a fool, (rises) Bella.

28 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

Eel: Go away, you bad man, do, to think of death and marriage and such

dreadful things, (picfa up booty
Krux: You won't tell the Sutcliffes, Bella, will you? I proposed it all for your

good, and because I love you. You won't tell 'em, will you, dear,

and get me into trouble? Promise me you won't tell 'em. (carneying)

Promise me, do do.
Ed: I won't tell 'em if you'll promise me never to mention such subjects

again.
Krux: I won't, 111 take my oath I won't. Take your oath you won't tell

them of me. Bella, take your oath, dear, will you? 12

This chance to even the score, however, did not arrive until later.
Meanwhile, stranded in Utrecht, he had to nurse his resentment and
disappointment. Then, finally, at the end of a miserable six weeks the
British Consulate rescued the dampened actor and he reappeared in
the wings of Newark theater, startling the wits out of his sister Fanny,
who was in the midst of a performance.

There was no place for Tom in the throes of provincial stock, then
being strangled out of existence by the spread of railways. Again he
turned to London, resuming the day-to-day grubbing. This time, how-
ever, he felt a little more anchored, for his friendship with Henry J.
Byron, whom he met at an acting agency, must have consoled him
that genius unwanted was not a unique phenomenon in the big city.
Robertson was about twenty-two; Byron was slightly younger. Robert-
son had just seen another opportunity disappear before his eyes. His
first play, A Night's Adventure, was produced by William Farren at
the Olympic August 8, 1851. The playwright was sure that he had
found his proper metier and that his fortune was secured. A Night's
Adventure proved only a four-night adventure. Robertson did not ac-
cept his defeat gracefully. He antagonized Farren, blaming the
Olympic's production for the play's failure. 13

The resourcefulness which comes from theatrical training and the

12 Trench's Standard Drama, No. 381, pp. 10-11.

13 Erroll Sherson in his nostalgically biased and undocumented London's Lost
Theatres mentions on page 216 Robertson as a member of Copeland's company at
the Strand in 1851, along with Edward Stirling and Charlotte Saunders. I find
no support for Sherson's reference to Robertson in the capacity either of actor or
writer. Robertson's first play at the Strand was Peace at Any Price in 1856. Ed-
ward Stirling, who was affectionately disposed to Tom, makes no mention of his
association with Punch's Play House. See Old Drury Lane, I, 195-96.

Robertson's Life 29

elasticity of youth must be combined to account for the madcap pitch-
man episode in the Gallery of Illustration on Regent Street. The two
irrepressibles hired a hall in the Gallery in order to present a week's
series of monologues. They were to exchange stations between box-
office and platform. On opening night, looking for some Chinese
jugglers who were billed elsewhere in the Gallery, one customer wan-
dered into the Byron-Robertson enterprise. The verbal exchange between
Byron and his single auditor sounds too good to be true; as Robertson's
son wrote it up, Byron started on a monologue called "The Origin of
Man" with the sentence "In the beginning there was only one man."

"Yes, and I'm the damned fool," was the magnificent ad lib of the
customer in the front seat. 14

Robertson dwindled into the status of a Lacy menial, turning out
translations and adaptations of French pieces. In 1854, he added to his
hackwork the job of prompter at the Lyceum a comedown for the
youth who had watched from the wings his own first play. The cur-
rent managers were Charles Matthews and Madame Vestris, and the
pay, when it was irregularly doled out, came to three pounds a week.
Greater reward came in his opportunity to study at close quarters the
realistic techniques of the Matthews.

His hackwork at Lacy's and his nightly stint in the Lyceum
prompter's box gave Robertson excellent schooling in the manufacture
of Gallic bonbons. He concocted a series of original farces 15 , a few of
which eventually saw the light of the stage, most of which Robertson
sold to Lacy. In April of 1854, ^ managers of the City Theatre, John-
son and Nelson Lee, produced his Castles in the Air.

Rebuffs and set-backs engendered cynicism. We can get a glimpse
of his war against London in a speech he puts into the mouth of
Rudolph in the play Dreams, written after he had finally battered his
way into the inner circle:

Rudolph: In England, yesterday is always considered so much better than
to-day last week so superior to this week and this week so
superior to the week after next thirty years ago so much more
brilliant an era than the present! the moon that shone over the

14 Principal Dramatic Worlds, I, xxvi.

15 Photographs and Ices, My Wife's Diary, and A Row in the House belong to
this period.

30 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

earth last century so much brighter, and more grand than the
paltry planet that lit up the night last past.

Clara: I don't quite understand you!

Rudolph: I shall explain myself better if I give my own personal reasons
for making a crusade against age. In this country I find age so
respected so run after so courted so worshipped, that it be-
comes intolerable. I compose music I wish to sell it I go to a
purchaser and tell him so he looks at me, and says, "You look
very young," in the same tone that he would say "You look like
an imposter or a pickpocket." I am thirty years of age so I think
I am old enough to be trusted with pen, ink, and music paper,
but I apologize, as humbly as I can, for not having been born
fifty years earlier; and the publisher, struck by my contrition,
thinks to himself: "Poor young man, after all he cannot help
it;" and addressing me, as if I were a baby, says, "My dear sir,
very likely your compositions may have merit I don't dispute
it but you see, Mr. So-and-So, aged sixty and Mr. Such-a-
One, aged seventy and Mr. T'other, aged eighty- and Mr. Some-
body else, aged ninety, write for us; and the public are accustomed
to their productions, and we make it a rule never to give the
world anything written by a man under fifty-five years old. Go
away now, keep to your work for the next thirty years, during
that time exert yourself to grow older you'll succeed if you
try hard turn grey if you can't turn grey, be bald it's not a
bad substitute lose your teeth, your health, your vigour, your
fire, your freshness, your genius in one short word, your terrible,
abominable youth; and some day or other if you don't die in
the interim you may have the chance of being a great man." 16

Both young men were in a mood to junk the unending drudgery.
They presented themselves before the enlistment office of the Horse
Guards. Because of heart trouble, Robertson was rejected, and Byron
refused to join without his friend.

It was back again to the theater. Robertson's first substantial acting
engagement since he had struck out on his own in London was ironi-
cally due to family connections. William Robertson and J. W. Wallack
in 1855 were managing the Marylebone Theatre. Robertson's brother
Craven and his sister Madge were playing juveniles. Tom rejoined the
family. They played a season. Then, whether it was because the touring
instinct was overpowering or the Marylebone vein had been exhausted,

16 Principal Dramatic Worlds, 1, 197-98.

Robertson's Life 31

the Robertsons were off on another fantastic gamble a visit to Paris
to produce Macbeth at the Theatre des Italiens. The company was im-
pressive, including the Wallacks, the William Robertsons, Mrs. Arthur
Stirling, and George Honey, but the name of the angel was prophetic:
Monsieur Ruin de Fee. The foreign tour lasted less than three weeks;
the company received one week's salary, and the actors straggled back
to London as best they could.

During the same year, Robertson, taking part in a benefit per-
formance, made his first acquaintance with the Prince of Wales
Theatre. In 1855, it was called the Queen's Theatre. It had under-
gone a variety of christenings (the King's Concert Rooms, The Regency,
The Tottenham Street Theatre, The West London Theatre, The
Fitzroy), but until the Bancrofts took over the Tottenham Street
Theater, it was unofficially known as the "Dusthole." Playing a bit part
was Elizabeth Burton, a beautiful, nineteen-year old actress, who had
been at the Queen's for three years. The two fell in love and were
married August 27, 1856, at Christ Church.

The new Robertson team started a theatrical trek through Dublin,
Belfast, and Dundalk, Mrs. Robertson taking the acting honors and
her husband assuming the chores of stage manager. In 1857, they were
back in London, filling engagements first at the Surrey and then at the
Marylebone. On December 2, 1857, Robertson's son, Thomas William
Shafto, was born. The next year, a daughter, Betty, was born to them,
but died shortly after. Engagements followed; Robertson was enjoying
for the first time a fairly steady income.

The old resentment at uncertain returns and the hardships of tour-
ing, aggravated by the loss of his daughter, nevertheless revived
Robertson's determination to leave the stage. He remembered his facility
at concocting English versions of French pieces. He had energy and
ability. He felt the confidence that came from his steady acting engage-
ments available to him since his marriage. Surely this was the time to
make the break.

Accordingly, the Robertsons forsook the provinces and returned to
London. His wife continued to act while he, using Lacy as the hub of
his projected literary activities, attempted to crash the periodicals. Ap-
plying the same made-to-order techniques to articles and stories, he
was able to branch out. Among the periodicals to which he contributed

32 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

are Fun, Sala's Welcome Guest, the Porcupine, the Comic News,
London Society, and the Illustrated Times. In the last, Robertson fol-
lowed Edmund Yates as drama critic. On February 14, 1861, his one
act farce, The Cantab, which he had written back during his prompting
days at the Lyceum, saw production at the Strand. In 1863, Robertson
wrote his first novel, David Garric\.

Free-lance writing proved as insecure and distasteful as free-lance
acting; again Robertson wistfully eyed non-theatrical life, this time
flirting with the idea of becoming a tobacconist. What more appro-
priate pipe-dream, for Robertson later told Squire Bancroft that during
these days, "I often dined on my pipe!"

His writing brought him into the circle of London hack-writers
the clubmen who made up the bulk of membership of the Arundel and
the Savage. 17 The set, including such men as the younger Tom Hood,
W. S. Gilbert, George Augustus Sala, and Joseph Knight, constituted
the closest approximation to university life Robertson experienced. The
Bohemians afforded camaraderie and exchange of ideas. Robertson
took to them with a heart. He incorporated the spirit of the group in
Society. The old tricks by which he had assumed leadership at boys'
school stood him in good stead. He could slap a back with the best of
them and then dominate a gathering with a spontaneous overflow of
theatrics. Writers are at their articulate best in print; an actor-playwright
has an electric magnetism which draws the spotlight. No wonder, then,
that Robertson loved his new-won friends and was, in turn, welcomed
by them. "Indeed, Robertson was always the life and soul of every
circle in which he moved, and in all wit competitions invariably carne
of? best, and this saying a great deal when Henry J. Byron, in his best
form, and Henry S. Leigh 18 , in his most satirical mood, happened to
be present." 19

The novel David Garric\ held the greatest promise for the develop-
ing playwright. In play form 20 , it so attracted Lacy that he took an
option on it for ten pounds. Sothern heard of the play, advanced Robert-

17 Robertson joined the Savage in 1861.

18 Henry S. Leigh (1837-1883) was a prolific adaptor of French pieces, specializ-
ing in comic operas.

19 Principal Dramatic Wor\$, I, xxiv-xxxv.

20 The novel was published in March, 1865, after the successful stage version
had been launched.

Robertson's Life 33

son the money to get the manuscript out of pawn, and arranged for a
reading in his Regent Street rooms. Charles Millwood, the actor's friend,
who had brought the two together, describes the evening:

Robertson was a punctual guest that night for when Sothern got home
from the theatre he found him pacing the drawing-room with the precious
manuscript under his arm. Tom looked hugely delighted over what was
for him a golden opportunity. The supper party numbered five Sothern,
Buckstone (his manager), John Hollingshead, Robertson, and myself. When
the meal was disposed of, our host produced cigars and no man kept
better and drinkables, and then proceeded to read David Garric\.

Long before he had got through the first Act, I could see that Sothern
was favourably impressed. He frequently interrupted himself with such
remarks as "Capital!" "First-rate!" "Strong situation!" and "I like that!"
But when he came to the party scene, in which David acts like a madman,
Sothern became so excited that he began to smash the glasses and upset the
furniture. "I think that will do, Bucky?" he said to his manager. "Yes, it
will do," replied Buckstone, "and I rather like that fellow Chevy." Before
our party broke up David Garric\ was accepted, and every playgoer knows
how immensely successful it proved wherever it was performed. 21

David Garric\ had its premiere at the Prince of Wales's in Birming-
ham, April, 1864 and then moved to the Haymarket in London. Two
months later, a new Dundreary farce, Lord Dundreary Married and
Done For, was added to the bill. 22 Now when Robertson and Byron
walked on Regent Street they could afford to grin at the Gallery of
Illustration. The incident of a decade ago was evidently still fresh in
Robertson's mind, but he now joyfully capitalized on the nightmarish
experience by turning it into a short story. In "Our Entertainment,"
which he contributed to the April, 1864, issue of London Society 23 , two
amateur actors storm an Irish provincial outpost called Shandranaghan,
hire the dilapidated hall of the Mechanics' Institute, and after a hectic
trial procuring a piano and posting bills, succeed in luring an audience
of one.

The success of David Garric\ marked the beginning of Robertson's
path to glory, for elated over the idea of providing Sothern with another
vehicle, he started Society. Written to order, the part of Sidney Daryl

21 Page xxxviii.

22 Henry Morley, The Journal of a London Playgoer, London, 1891, pp. 281-82.
V, 304-17.

34 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft
was designed for Sothern and that of Chodd Senior, for Buckstone.

The early history of the play was inauspicious. Buckstone who typified
the crass, materialistic approach to the theater flatly rejected it, with
the curt comment "Rubbish." Sothern took an option for thirty pounds
to play Daryl but left Robertson to find a producer. The play made
the rounds of London managers- Miss Herbert, Benjamin Webster,
Alfred Wigan but did not find a roost. When we come to analyze
Society, we shall see the significance of the chorus of "no's" with which
the traditionalists greeted the play. It was an unwanted child and had
to be farmed out.

Byron deserves the credit for finally connecting the playwright with
a manager. His first stroke was to interest Alexander Henderson of the
Liverpool Prince of Wales. Clement Scott recapitulates the delightful
Henderson episode in the history of Society:

Was there ever such pathetic ill luck as waited on poor Robertson? He
suddenly got a message from the faithful Byron to say that Henderson
would be in town from Saturday to Monday, and would be glad to hear
the play read at Byron's house on Sunday evening.

But where was the play?

Robertson clutched at his red beard and danced about the room like a
maniac. The only manuscript had been lent to his friends the Billingtons,
who lived miles away at Highgate. There was no time to be lost, so Robert-
son took a cab, rushed into the room, and asked John Billington for his
precious "scrip."

"Oh, I remember, Tom, that play 'Society,' Mrs. Billington will know

where it is."

Luckily for Tom Robertson he did not see the wife's frightened glance
over his shoulder to her husband.

She had not the slightest idea where the manuscript was, or what she had
done with it.

"Oh! yes! She would go upstairs and fetch it!"

Then followed an awful half hour. Robertson, the most excitable of men,
fumed and fretted; and "John" contrived to keep him amused with some
of his Yorkshire stories, all of which he had heard before.

At last came a mysterious call from upstairs.

"John!"

"Yes, my dear."

Then a whisper over the banisters.

"John, I cannot find the play anywhere. I have hunted high and low.
I think I must have lost it."

Tilt: I AIL >JiJ T, W,

Robertson's Life 35

"Lost it! Nonsense! I tell you you must find it. The man will go roaring
mad."

So back went John Billington to try and appease the infuriated dramatist.

Another awful half hour. The Yorkshire stories were almost exhausted.
The situation was becoming dangerous. At last Mrs. Billington reappeared,
beaming, with the manuscript in her hand. She had found the manuscript,
saved the situation, and made the play.

"Society" was read to Henderson, who was delighted with it, and prom-
ised to produce it at Liverpool. But the career of ill luck was not over yet.
Bohemia, in one of its brightest ornaments, had to come to the rescue. It
was not a case this time of "lend me five shillings," but lend me ^30,
which was a very different thing in Bohemia-Land.

Robertson was ever the most scrupulous and honourable of men. The
play was accepted, a production had been promised; but Robertson declared
it would be impossible that any further steps could be taken in the matter
until he had repaid to Sothern the ^30 for which "Society" had been
pawned.

Could Byron lend him the money?

Byron, with a rueful countenance, pulled his moustache, and frankly
admitted he was terribly hard up at the time.

Back went Robertson in despair to the Arundel Club, where he found,
as good luck would have it, William Belford, the actor. When he had
related his misfortune to his old friend, cursing the demon of ill luck, who
pursued him so relentlessly, his brave heart was comforted with these cheer-
ing words from a true "pal":

"Tom, my boy, cheer up! I'll get the money for you. I don't know where,
or from whom, for the life of me. But, trust me, I'll get it. I've heard about
the play, and how in the 'Owls Roost' you have hit us all off to the life,
you satirical dog! The critics will be down on you; but never mind, you'll
win yet."

Robertson received the ^30 next day. Sothern was repaid. "Society" was
free; and dear old Belford got his money back out of Robertson's first
receipts for his successful play. 24

Society was first performed May 8, 1865. The punster Byron might
have been able to say that as far as dramatic history was concerned
there was a whale of a difference between the Prince of Wales's in
Liverpool and the Prince of Wales's in London. Society's transportation
to the Bancrofts' Theater marks the beginning of the tempest Robertson
was to start in dramaturgy.

Before tracing the course of the tempest from Liverpool to London,

24 Scott, The Drama of Yesterday and To-day, I, 496-98.

36 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

we must record the loss of Robertson's wife on August 14 of that year.
She had continued to act in spite of ill health. Now at twenty-nine, she
died, leaving two children, Tom and Maud. Thus Robertson's first
taste of fame was accompanied by a severe shock.

Byron had accomplished a great deal for Robertson by recommend-
ing Society to Henderson. His second and incalculably important con-
tribution to Robertson's fame was his interesting Marie Wilton in the
play. His career hung in the balance. Squire Bancroft describes the state
to which the writer had come:

He was of a highly nervous temperament, and he had a great habit of
biting his moustache and caressing his beard indeed, his hands were rarely
still. He was at that time thirty-six, above medium height and rather stoutly
built, with a pale skin and reddish beard, and small piercing red-brown
eyes which were ever restless. 25

In order better to appreciate the inestimably fortunate coincidence
of the Bancroft management and Robertson, we must devote attention
to the aims and methods of the new lessees of the Dusthole. The Ban-
crofts were set upon establishing a bandbox of gentility. Das Weibliche
entered theatrical management by way of Marie Wilton. Marie Wilton,
whose hand is clearly discernible in the interior decoration of the
Bancroft theater, went all out for curtains, hangings, and statuary.
Carpets and antimacassars decked the stalls, whose price was raised to
ten shillings. Thus she encouraged the growth of stalls at the expense
of the pit a move which enhanced the dignity and profit of the house.

An evening's performance was no longer to contain a medley of offer-
ings. The management advertised a single offering and moved up cur-
tain time. It pioneered in establishing regular matinee performances.
The quiet calm which pervaded the front of the house was reflected
in the new atmosphere backstage. The Bancrofts, models of Victorian
dignity in their personal lives, spread an aura of respectability over the
Green Room. For example, Squire Bancroft inaugurated the practice of
having the treasurer pay members of the cast individually instead of
forcing them to congregate on the stage at a stipulated time.

The small theater and the loving attention the Bancrofts expended on
detail combined to favor the meticulous staging Robertson wished for

25 Squire and Marie Bancroft, The Bancrofts on and off the Stage, p. 81.

Robertson's Life 37

his plays. Equally important, the Bancrofts had arrived at a distaste for
the star system. No less an actress than Ellen Terry, who knew the star
system only too well in her association with Kean and later with Henry
Irving, attests to this fact:

I have never, even in Paris, seen anything more admirable than the
ensemble playing of the Bancroft productions. Every part in the domestic
comedies, the presentation of which, up to 1875, they had made their
policy, was played with such point and finish that the more rough, uneven,
and emotional acting of the present day has not produced anything so good
in the same line. The Prince of Wales's Theater was the most fashionable
in London, and there seemed no reason why the triumph of Robertson
should not go on for ever. 26

Liberated from the shackles of a star-dominated company, the casts
at the Prince of Wales's were able to perform full-bodied plays, bestow-
ing nuance on what was conventionally dismissed as adjunct or sub-
ordinate. For fully conceived presentation, Robertson's plays demanded
actors who were not only free from theatrical feudal barons but who
were free from a mind-set conditioned by the star system. The com-
pany was blessed with fresh, eager talent, untrammeled by experience in
London theaters; thus a slow and painful conversion to ensemble play-
ing was made unnecessary.

Everything about the Bancroft management was conducive to domes-
tic comedy, and Tom Robertson's forte was domestic comedy. Byron
asked Marie Wilton to read Society. She was immediately won.

The play was given the best production possible at the time in Lon-
don. It opened November n, 1865, with Squire Bancroft in the leading
role, originally designed for Sothern; Marie Wilton as Maud Hether-
ington; and John Hare as Lord Ptarmigant. Hare had seen Lord
Ptarmigant performed in Liverpool, little thinking he himself would
leap to fame with the part. The run lasted one hundred and fifty nights.
Poetic justice smiled sweetly. The companion piece of the evening was
Byron's burlesque Don Giovanni, The fellow dramatists shared billing.
On the hundredth night of the run, Robertson took pleasure in sending
Buckstone a private box.

Thus was initiated the Robertsonian reign in theater annals. Five
plays, cast in the same mold, followed in swift succession : Ours, Caste,

26 The Story of My Life, p. 109.

38 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

Play, Home, School Playwright and managers shared in the glory.
More than half the profits accruing to the Bancrofts came from Robert-
son's plays. Squire Bancroft testifies that his acting fame rested on his
interpretation of Captain Hawtree. Critics argued about the Robert-
sonian role Marie Wilton best interpreted. Robertson was through with
acting; he had found his niche. His study of French, his translations,
his adaptations, his composing, his work for Lacy had led to this. He
could look back at the days when he made the rounds of agents and
stage-doors. Then he had one meal a day and three parts a night to
play. "Now," he could say, "I have three meals a day and no part to
play, and for this relief Providence has my most heartfelt thanks." 27

Robertson's share in the financial glory, however, was never com-
mensurate with that of the management. Once having achieved recogni-
tion, he remained content with a royalty of five pounds a performance,
even going so far as to turn down the Bancroft's proposal to increase
his share in the profit. Robertson wrote the following letter during the
first revival of Ours:

Wednesday Morning, December 7, 1870
Dear B.,

Don't be offended that I return your checque. I recognize your kindness
and intention to the full; but having thought the matter over, I cannot
reconcile it to my sense of justice and probity to take more than I bar-
gained for. An arrangement is an arrangement, and cannot be played fast
and loose with. If a man say an author goes in for a certain sum, he
must be content with it, and "seek no new"; if he goes in for a share, he
must take good and bad luck too. So please let Ours be paid for at the sum
originally agreed upon. With kind love to Marie, and many thanks,

I am, yours always,

T. W. Robertson. 28

Ours saw production on August 23, 1866, at Alexander Henderson's
theater in Liverpool; the Bancrofts brought their own company for the
try-out. Robertson was anxious about the outcome. His luck with
Society had been phenomenal. Would his dramatic recipe hold out?

27 The Bancrofts, p. 118.

28 The Bancrofts, p. 90. The arrangements spelled a new dawn in profits to
playwrights. As an indication of the changing times, we need only compare
Robertson's royalty of five pounds a performance with the lump sum of fifty
pounds the prolific Tom Taylor received for each act when he turned over a play
to a manager.

Robertson's Life 39

Charles Millwood describes the strain Robertson underwent on the
opening night; the nervous reaction attending the opening of all his
plays was, in his few remaining years, to tax his weak heart:

The theatre was crowded in every part, but Robertson positively refused
to occupy the box the manager had reserved for him. He would first take
a smart walk, he said, to enable him to "blow the steam off/' He must have
accumulated a large quantity of superfluous steam, for he was nan est dur-
ing the performance of the first and second Acts, and, although he had
been vociferously called for by the audience, he was nowhere to be found.
When the third Act commenced every soul in the theatre save the author
knew that Ours was a thumping success. But where was Tom Robertson?
Surely not still blowing the steam off? As we knew there would be a tre-
mendous call for him when the curtain fell, we were bound to find the
missing author dead or alive.

Messengers were despatched in all directions in search of him, and as I
had frequently seen him during his nervous attacks, I joined in the pursuit.
I dreaded the prospect of the play terminating before the author turned
up, so I sought for him in the streets around the theatre. Ultimately I
encountered him in Bold-street, walking at a furious pace, mopping the
perspiration from his brow, in evening dress, and bareheaded. He had been
pacing the streets, "blowing off," more than two hours. With great dif-
ficulty I induced him to return with me to the theatre, where we found the
last scene on. When the curtain fell a tremendous shout arose for the author,
and Marie Wilton dragged him across the stage, pale as a ghost, as limp and
flabby a specimen of a successful dramatist as one could wish to see. 29

On September 16, Ours moved to Tottenham Street. The following
year, Caste removed any lingering doubts of a flash-in-the-pan success.
Robertson sent out a second company to tour the provinces, an his-
torically inevitable theatrical practice, but one for which Robertson
deserves credit for implementing. He knew the catch-all shortcomings
of broken down traveling units. Here was an opportunity to set up a
touring company from London, provide it with first-rate talent, sets,
and costumes, and thus initiate the provinces to London standards. The
eminence of the dramatist also served to help focus attention on the
notorious absence of international copyright laws. When in the same
year Caste was breaking records in London, a pirated version by an
American, W. J. Florence, given wide circulation by the de Witt pub-
lishers, sent the play barnstorming all over the United States.

29 Principal Dramatic Worlds, I, li.

40 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

Robertson's second Continental trip occurred after Caste was set in
motion. The Bancrofts presented Boucicault's How She Loves Him,
thus freeing Robertson from the necessity of furnishing a follow-up to
Caste. The fact, incidentally, that the Boucicault piece failed must have
reinforced Robertson's confidence that he had arrived. The safely-
enthroned domesticator of drama who crossed the Channel in 1867 was
a far cry from the frightened, whipped adolescent who in 1848 had
answered an advertisement for an English-speaking usher in Utrecht.

The present trip wound up his courtship of Rosetta Feist, o Frank-
fort-on-Maine, whom he had met the previous year at the home of her
uncle, Joseph M. Levy, of the Daily Telegraph. 30 A quip which Robert-
son relished, a propos of the matter of foreign adaptations, was that he
was marrying Miss Feist because she could translate from German.
The wedding took place at the English Consulate in Frankfort on
October 17. After honeymooning in Paris, the Robertsons settled at
number 6, Eton Road, Haverstock Hill, South Hampstead.

And now Robertson concentrated on playwriting. While the tempest
was brewing in the Bancroft teapot, Robertson was purveying to the
tastes of other London managers. He turned out farces and melodramas
galore, potboilers all, which partook but slightly of the ingredients of the
"big six." For example, while Caste was endearing Robertson to theatre-
goers at the Prince of Wales's, he provided the Princess's in February
with Shadow Tree Shaft and the St. James's in March with A Rapid
Thaw.

In 1868, he provided the Bancrofts with Play and the Theatre Royal in
Hull with Passion Flowers, an adaptation from the French, with his
sister Madge in the leading role. His fever-pitched activity, in fact, re-
sulted in W. S. Gilbert's first crack at playwriting. Unable to furnish
Miss Herbert of the St. James's with a Christmas extravaganza, Robert-
son won a commission for Gilbert, who came through with Dulcamara.

In 1869, Robertson wrote another vehicle for Sothern, Home. Two
nights after Home opened at the Haymarket, the Bancrofts were re-
galing first nighters with School.

Brother and sister crossed paths again in March of that year, for
Madge Robertson played the leading role in the Gaiety's production

30 Robertson dedicated Ours to Mr. Levy.

Robertson's Life 41

of her brother's Dreams. The next month, his Breach of Promise
opened at the Globe.

Robertson's early disillusionment with the theater provoked in him
a cynical temperament which rose quickly to the surface in acid
streaks. When success finally arrived, "it came to a soured man in ill
health, and addicted to cynicism bred of long-continued suffering and
disappointment. This created a manner somewhat abrupt and un-
pleasant; but the manner was only skin-deep, and beneath it lay a good
heart and a generous and sympathetic nature." 31

In the theater, in his relations with actors and managers alike, his
brusqueness disappeared. Nowhere do the Bancrofts hint at difficulty
with him. John Hare, the actor 32 , Gilbert 33 , and Pinero 34 give unstint-
ing praise for his directing ability without mention of their having
encountered temper. John Hollingshead, who produced Dreams at the
Gaiety in 1869, wrote glowingly of his association with Robertson:

He was a most delightful author to deal with kind, considerate, and
liberal. I had known him in the days of his poverty, and found no change
in him in the days of his prosperity. It was a pleasure to watch him at
rehearsals. He was not the swearing, blustering stage-manager. When a
stupid mistake occurred, he did not stamp and tear his hair; he quietly
and effectively put the matter right. The little school-children in the piece
Dreams loved him. He took them, one after the other, tenderly by the
hand and led them to their places on the stage. He bore his reverse like an
amiable philosopher; and when I proposed to revive die piece, he tried to
dissuade me, but gave me full liberty to make any alterations I thought
advisable.

I made a few, to the best of my ability, and he was kind enough to say
they were manifest improvements and had enabled him to sell the piece
for the country. 35

In 1869, the long-standing pique Robertson with some justice felt for
the conservative Buckstone came to another head. Having adapted

31 Frith, My Autobiography and Reminiscences, II, 309.

32 See below, page 68. , . L u

33 "I look upon stage management, as now understood, as having been abso-
lutely invented by him." As quoted in Ashley Thorndike, English Comedy, New

York, 1929, p. 537. . 1 , i

34 Trelawney of the "Wells" a period piece recapturing Robertson s struggle

to introduce realism, pays tribute to a warm personality.
35 My Lifetime, London, 1895, II, 13.

42 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

Sardou's Les Ganaches as Progress for the Haymarket, Robertson
listened to Buckstone lament, "My God, they are all old people in it?"

"Why not? I've written a play for your company,'* Robertson came
back. 36 Needless to say, Buckstone rejected Progress, but at this point
Robertson did not have to go begging for a theater.

It might have been better, on die other hand, if the theaters had been
obliged to go begging for Robertson's plays. Nervous strain and a weak
heart were taking their measure of the man. He was an indefatigable
worker, approaching his craft with the calculating objectivity of an
impressario:

He always sat in the same box on first nights of his comedies at the
Prince of Wales's Theatre, and during their progress rarely looked at the
stage, but keenly watched the audience, glancing rapidly from one part of
the theatre to another, to gather the different effects the same point or speech
might produce on various people; while, between the acts, he would often
push his way into parts of the theatre where he would not be recognized,
and listen to the opinions he could overhear. He also made a point of
having some one entirely unconnected with theatrical life in each part
of the theatre, whom he would see on the following day and hold conversa-
tions with, carefully comparing the impressions and the remarks he drew
from these different witnesses generally, he said, with valuable results. 37

Friends and associates urged him to take a much-needed rest. F. C.
Burnand, editor of Punch, wrote:

I am sorry to hear such bad accounts of you, the only bad accounts you
have, judging by your success, and I only hope that it's nothing more than
what by care and rest may be entirely got rid of. You can afford to rest, and
a six months' tour would set you up again and make you hurl comedies
by cart-loads at us on your return. Come and take a house near here; there's
a cottage near a plantation twixt this Edgeware and Hendon, with stables
(no horses), a well, and lots o' things better! within easy distance of town,
about seven miles' drive to Regent-street, and 20 minutes by rail. There's an
idea for you and Mrs. Robertson 'cum multis chickibus.'

Hoping to hear of you as soon as "little all right" I am yours,

F. C. Burnand. 38

His last Bancroft comedy, the last scenes of which he dictated from

36 Page Ixv.

37 The Bancrofts, pp. 118-19.

38 Principal Dramatic Wor\s, I, Ixvi-lxvii.

Robertson's Lije 43

a sick bed, was M. P., which opened April 23, 1870. Because he was un-
able to attend rehearsals, the Bancrofts conducted them at his home.
These last few months, he waited at home for messengers to report the
progress of opening nights of his plays, act by act. Continuing to haunt
the theater when strength permitted, he refused to admit that ill health
could stand between him and the fame for which he had so long fought.

Through the summer and autumn of that year (1870) Robertson con-
tinued to grow worse. His sufferings were very great indeed, as he once
said to us, the pain was so acute that, when it had for the moment passed,
it seemed to leave an echo in his bones. We were all the more horrified,
therefore, one morning in November when a cold white fog had pene-
trated into the theatre to hear the hall-keeper announce to us, with a
frightened look upon his face, that Mr. Robertson was at the stage door.
We were terror-stricken, knowing him to be in an unfit state to leave his
house, even in fine weather. In a piteous plight he came for the last time
among us; many of the company then spoke their farewell word to him.
He stayed for half an hour in dreadful suffering, tortured by a cough which
told what he endured. In an agony of pain, caused by a violent paroxysm,
he stooped down and knocked with a hollow sound upon the stage, saying,
in a voice made terribly painful by its tone of sad reproach, to imaginary
phantoms, "Oh, don't be in such a hurry!" When he recovered, we with
difficulty persuaded him not to stay, for he persisted in the thought that
the mere sight of the familiar stage and of the theatre which he loved and
always called "home" would alone do him good. 39

Birth, written for Sothern, opened in Bristol, October 5. The play
required doctoring, but Robertson was too ill to ready it for the Hay-
market. Sothern was quick to withdraw his urging of alterations:

Dear Tom, So very sorry you're ill again. D n the alterations. Don't
worry about them till you're better, and when you are, write me another
piece, and after that another and another. Ever yours, S. 40

By December, Robertson had to submit to a rest-cure in Torquay,
G. B. Shaw's residence during World War I. The Devonshire weather,
however, proved as bad as London's, and after a miserable, lonely two
weeks, he returned to London. His son describes his state:

How altered he was! His kind face bore the traces of mental worry and
want of rest though the eyes sparkled as of yore. He could hardly walk

39 The Bancrofts, p. 116.

40 Principal Dramatic Wor\s, I, Ixx.

44 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

up the steps to the front door, so difficult was his breathing having to stay
on each step for a while, at the same time doing his utmost to pass it all
off with jokes at Tommy's expense. There were some dozen steps to mount,
and it was fully fifteen minutes ere he entered the house for the last time! 41

Robertson's last month was filled with anxiety attending the opening
of War at the St. James's. On January 16, 1871, Robertson, too ill to be
at the theater, awaited reports after each act. The play, turning on the
Franco-Prussian War, naturally aroused controversy; Robertson inter-
preted hostile reactions as evidence that the play had failed.

There is hardly a more pathetic scene in all literary history than the one
enacted at the dying Robertson's bedside. He had sent his little son to oc-
cupy his box at the theatre while his last play, War . . . was given its only
hearing. A more brutal and disheartening condemnation of a play is not
recorded in the century. Robertson drew from the reluctant lips of the little
fellow the whole sad tale. His reply is memorable: "Ah, Tommy, my boy,
they wouldn't be so hard if they could see me now. I shan't trouble them
again." 42

On February i, the Bancrofts called at Eton Road for the last time. He
talked about a new play, boasting of notes he had written.

He died in his chair February 3, 1871, having told his boy the previous
day, "Good-bye, my son, and God bless you. Come and see me to-
morrow. If I don't speak to you, don't be frightened, and don't forget
to kiss your father." 43 He was buried beside his first wife at Abney Park
Cemetery.

Thomas William Robertson burned himself out at the age of forty-
two. He died at the height of fame. The impetus and direction of his
work might have carried him to a more stable place in dramatic annals.
He was germinating naturalistic tendencies which as yet had not been
felt in the English theater. It is our job, however, to evaluate the work
he did accomplish; and to that end, Chapter Four will analyze the "big
six," into which Robertson poured his best talent. First, however, we
shall consider the drama of his apprenticeship and his potboilers.

41 Page Ixxiii.

42 Watson, Sheridan to Robertson, pp. no-ii.

43 Principal Dramatic Worlds, I, Ixxv.

CHAPTER THREE
THE POTBOILERS

ROBERTSON was not the Scandinavian glacier of the eighties,
overtoppling earlier forms of dramatic life. Although his best work
represents a formidable native groundswell before the Ibsenite invasion,
we must still reckon with the farces and melodramas he wrote before
and during his association with the Bancrofts. For these, hastily-com-
posed in the hackneyed and outworn Victorian tradition, thoroughly
accommodating to managerial taste, and only fleetingly hinting at the
delicate flavor of the "big six," constitute the bulk of his work.

The Robertsonian formula for realism never, as we shall see, achieved
a clearcut break with sentimentalism. Even the best of Robertson does
not escape the charge of contrivance and artificiality. How much more,
then, must these qualities belong to his juvenilia, his apprenticeship,
and his potboilers ?

Unlike the vast number of his contemporaries, however, Robertson
did develop from sheer acceptance of convention to original experi-
mentation. As Pinero and Ibsen, after him, were to master current
models before evolving unique styles, Robertson began by writing
within the framework of the dominating tradition which in his time
happened to consist of la piece bien faite. Although he never abandoned
the Scribian framework, from total subservience to foreign influence,
he developed into a writer of native comedies through which ran a
fragile vein of naturalness. The instance of path-breaking in a Victorian
playwright is in itself a remarkable phenomenon; for reasons described
in Chapter One, playwrights were all too prone to stick to the well-
traveled highway. Whenever we encounter development in a writer,
our curiosity is naturally stirred to search for the early manifestation of
later strength and the pattern its emergence assumes.

Robertson's indenture to Lacy was not completely pernicious. Beyond
the obvious schooling in dramaturgy, Robertson appreciated and as-

46 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft
similated the most valuable gift French plays had to offer restraint.

Robertson's juvenilia, The Battle of Life and The Haunted Man, are
not extant. The fact that they were adaptations of Dickens' short stories,
however, is interesting, for it shows Robertson at the outset embarking
on the accepted practice of appropriating for theatrical effect what was
already successful.

His Chevalier de St. George, adapted from the French of Melesville
and Beauvoir, was performed at the Princess's on May 20, 1845. A
typically tightly-woven fabric, it shows us Robertson's thorough school-
ing in the well-made play.

Melodramatic, cloyingly sentimental, totally deficient in characteriza-
tion, the play nevertheless marches. Scenes effectively theatrical succeed
each other too rapidly to permit the audience to engage in fatal analysis.
The plot combines the standard motif of the last-minute discovery of a
blood relationship and, interestingly enough from the point of view of
what was to be Robertson's stock in trade, the motif of mesalliance. The
device of having the plot turn on a stage property, in this instance a
miniature of the hero's mother; the device of planting early in the play
evidence at once provocative and inconclusive, which seen in retrospect
falls patly into place; and the device of sudden shifts of mastery be-
tween antagonist and protagonist are all clearly Scribian.

Exposition is handled in the conventional, forthright manner, with
one significant qualification : Robertson already demonstrates an aware-
ness of natural inflection. The expository speeches, like a side of beef,
had to be plunked down on the counter in a solid chunk of interchange,
but the speeches themselves are short and humanly rhythmic. Moreover,
they cap one another, and in view of the considerable past history of the
principal characters which must be presented to the audience, they
achieve a seemingly casual coherence.

While the pace of the dialogue throughout the play is generally nat-
ural, in scenes of emotional intensity, the playwright shuts his ear to
human speech and indulges in the conventional literary language. Such
scenes are replete with attitudinizing. One inevitably stumbles on them
in Victorian drama. Seemingly they are mandatory show pieces in
which the stage self-consciously assumes the office of the pulpit.
Declamatory speeches in no uncertain terms reassure audiences that the
theater is a moral force.

The Potboilers 47

Noemie, which underwent several changes of title 1 , shows no increase
of power over The Chevalier. Robertson made his translation from the
French play of the same name by Dennery and Clement, performed
for the first time at the Theatre du Gymnase, October 31, 1845. The
original, billed as a come die-vaudeville, contains frequent songs, en-
tirely omitted in the adaptation. Otherwise Robertson makes no altera-
tion in structure. The translation is loose; English adaptors felt no com-
punction with regard to emendations. Emendations purported to elevate
the language, but succeeded only in channeling emotional passages into
rhythmic, elocutionary flights. French idiom is apt to be rendered
literally. This practice, universally followed by adaptors, helped condi-
tion Victorian audiences to speech patterns which had no natural
habitat. Typically a compound in the English replaces a single word in
the original. With a bow to the Lord Chamberlain, strong words, such
as Dieu f had burial at sea in the English Channel

Save for realistic dashes of dialogue, the play contains no forward-
looking devices. To the stock motifs of mesalliance, and withheld
identity, Robertson in this play discovered the device of two contrast-
ing feminine roles, the one sentimental; the other, pert. The emphasis,
however, remains on plot. Leniency must be accorded the well-made
play in the matter of artificial construction, but in NoSmie, the long
arm of coincidence, in being forced to encircle eight remarkable postu-
lates, sticks grotesquely out of its sleeve. Valentine, Count D'Avigny's
ward, is a foster sister to Anette. Anette, in turn, is a foster sister to
Noemie. Noemie, we learn, is the natural daughter of Count D'Avigny.
Jules is a cousin to Valentine and happens to have fallen in love with
Noemie through a chance meeting in a village sixty-five leagues away
from the scene of the play. Jules and Noemie arrive at the scene of
action almost simultaneously. Eleonore assumes that his uncle, the
Count, plans for him to marry Valentine. And finally, Noemie's letter
(the pivotal prop) happens to get into Eleonore's hands instead of the
Count's.

At times, the dialogue gains strength through understatement,
through the subtle, intimate, half-spoken line, and we hear a faint pre-

1 First performed as Ernestine at the Princess's, April 14, 1846; as Clarisse or
The Foster Sister at the St. James's, February 17, 1855; and as The Foster Sisters
at the Grecian Saloon, 1855.

48 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

lude of the kind of dialogue Robertson was to fashion for use in his
original plays. Unfortunately the flavor of the French-English dictionary
vitiates such vitality as is scored by short, broken speeches. The play,
too, without warning, is apt to lapse into bursts of rhetoric.

It is as though Robertson is able to realize psychological truth in
isolated passages, without being able to sustain his art throughout the
play. The disappointing fact in Robertson's plays is that natural speech
continually reverts to rhetoric. The danger spots are the moments of
crisis, at which times the more intense the emotion, the more florid the
language. Robertson was alive to human speech patterns; he consciously
attempted, for example, to capture the inarticulate. Why in his big
scenes, he sacrificed realism to rodomontade, can be partly explained
by theatrical formula, which in turn was an echo of the poetic tradition,
the declamatory tradition of the major theaters. Still a third reason for
what we might term the dramaturgidity of set speeches lies in the
watered-down romantic idealization of woman. The pervasive and
persistent Victorian myth distorted realistic portraiture. The following
scene, in which Noemie explains to Anette why she has come to the
chateau of Count D'Avigny, illustrates this sentimental intrusion:

Noemle: . . . This letter was written by my dying mother; it contains her
last adieu to my father.

Anette: To your father!

Noemie: Listen. On the day on which my poor mother died, she called me
to her bedside, and said to me, 'Noemie, you must summon all
your fortitude, all your courage, to hear with calmness what I am
about to tell you.' For the first time she spoke to me of my father.
For eighteen years she had been separated from him. She had re-
mained poor and struggling he was rich, honoured and happy.
He loved her truly, but his family, who were proud and ambi-
tious, had found means to separate them; they had menaced him
with misery and exile if he dared to dishonour the name of his
noble ancestors by a degrading marriage; and to save him, my
mother sacrificed herself to save him she left her native village,
while he embarked for some foreign land; years after, when he
returned to France, his family told him that my mother was
no more.

Anette: Your mother told you all this?

Noemie: And more. She said, 'At first I was proud of the devotion I had
shown; but, too late, I felt that I had not only sacrificed my own

The Potboilers 49

happiness but the happiness and prospects of my child. I was a
mother; I sought him far and near; I used every exertion made
every inquiry to find him, but in vain. You, my child, may perhaps
be more fortunate. Heaven will assist an innocent child who seeks
her only natural protector! Heaven will restore to you a father;
when you find him, give him this letter, tell him that my last
words were of him; my last sigh for him; and you, our child, tell
him that I blessed you and prayed for him, and that he might
treasure you in his soul as I had treasured the love I bore him.'
And so, Anette, with one hand clasped in mine, her other pressing
me close close to her heart a prayer upon her lips a kiss upon
my forehead my mother died. 2

Here the adaptation, by an unnecessary elegance of phrase, a studied
rhythm, and the actual introduction of new ideas, violates the original.
I shall quote the original of Noemie's last speech in the above:

Oh! bien malheureuse . . . et bien desesperee, me dit-clle; car, apres quelque
temps, lorsque je trompais ma douleur par le souvenir de mon sacrifice,
lorsque j'etais fiere de Favoir sauve en me perdant, je sentis avec epouvante
que ce n'etait pas seulement mon bonheur et ma vie que j'avais donnes, mais
aussi le bonheur et la vie de mon enfant. . . Je sentis enfin que j'allais etre
mere. . . Oh! alors je mis a rechercher celui dont on m'avait separce, toute
Fardeur, toute la perseverance que j'avais mise a le fuir . . . mais toujours
. . . toujours inutilement. . . Toi, ma fille, tu seras peut-etre plus heureuse. . .
Dieu secondera les efforts de Fenfant innocente et pure, il te rendra ton
pere . . . et quand tu 1'auras retrouve, remets-lui cette lettre, Noemie, il te
donnera un appui plus ferme que celui que tu perds aujourd'hui, une
tendresse egale a celle que j'ai toujours eue pour toi. 3

The final touch about the hand, the prayer, and the kiss does not exist
in the French.

Robertson's translations continued with a version of La Bataille de
Dames by Scribe and Legouve. A translation of the play by Charles
Reade had been produced at the Lyceum on May 7, 1851. On November
18 of the same year, the Haymarket produced Robertson's translation.
The subsequent confusion in attributing the translation variously to
Reade and Robertson serves as a commentary on the scant attention the
Victorian theater paid to authorship.

As for the play itself, The Ladies Battle furnishes little for the de-

2 Lacy's Acting Plays, XXIII, No. 343, p. 12.

3 Theatre, No. 35, p. 8.

50 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

velopment of the playwright. In the eccentric, senile lover, de Grignon,
however, Robertson had an opportunity to study closely the manner in
which the characterization of a minor role might be built up. He re-
membered the trick when he came to create Eccles in Caste.

The Cloc\ma\er's Hat, produced at the Adelphi, March 7, 1855, is a
tight one-act farce Robertson translated from Madame fimile de Girar-
din's Le Chapeau d'un Horloger. The complication depends on the fact
that Betty Martin, a maid in the household of Major Miltiades Mo-
hawk, damages a clock while dusting and attempts to cover up her
crime. In his adaptation, Robertson works for the strictest economy,
discarding speeches which do not directly forward the action. One of
the best scenes in the original, in which the jealous husband is assured
by his cousin that infidelity of wives is the way of the world, Robert-
son deletes wholesale.

Robertson's first original play is the one-act farce The Cantab, pro-
duced at the Strand, February 2, 1861. There was nothing in this lack-
lustre tour de force which hinted that its concocter had anything
original to offer, and, indeed, critics dismissed the piece as an "old Joe
Miller/ 54

Tackling Melesville's Sullivan with considerable leeway, Robertson
dispensed with his practice of close translation, using the original as he
would a plat, improvising new dialogue as he went along. His casting
aside the narrow role of translator for that of the adapter was an im-
portant step, for the play, performed as David Garric^ at the Prince
of Wales's in Birmingham, April, 1864, and subsequently at the Hay-
market, April 30, was a pronounced success.

For the first time, Robertson heard his own lines being applauded,
and having provided Sothern with a free-wheeling, stellar vehicle 5 , he

4 The Athenaeum, February 23, 1861, p. 268.

5 "The events of this little comedy are neatly produced, and exhibit Mr. Soth-
ern's capacity for serious acting. His physique, though small, permits a telling
modulation of pathetic passages, and they fall upon the ear with a charming effect.
His action was everywhere elegant and unobtrusive, and the fashionable costume
of the eighteenth century became him remarkably well. We were glad to find
that there was no exaggeration in his style, but that all was genuine acting. Even
in the drunken scenes he was moderate; while the delineation was complete: a
certain boundary was not overstepped. His acting was a perfect bit of art ...
Altogether, the performance left a pleasing impression, and has a Mr chance of
becoming popular. It will raise Mr. Sothern as an actor in the estimation of the
judicious." From a review in The Athenaeum, May 7, 1864, p. 654.

*

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The Potboilers 51

was encouraged to trust to his own creative ability. It is no accident that
following the triumph of David Garrick came the succession of the
"big six." Simon Ingot, a well-to-do business man, is distressed by his
daughter's infatuation with the great actor. With typical directness,
Ingot summons Garrick to his home and proposes to pay him to give
up acting. Garrick, of course, refuses, but with apocryphal generosity
consents to disenchant Ada Ingot by pretending to be drunk at a dinner
party Ingot will throw. Garrick, however, is unaware that Ada is the
strange woman in the theater box whose warm response to his acting
has deeply moved him. When he meets Ada at the party, he is taken
aback but carries out his promise to Ingot. His sacrifice is rewarded, for
in the end Garrick heals the rupture between father and daughter,
and exposes the dolt Ingot has intended Ada to marry. Ingot comes to
drop his contempt of the acting profession and willingly gives his
daughter's hand to Garrick.

In its enthusiastic review, The Theatrical Journal for May 4, 1864,
noted Robertson's scenic art:

On Saturday night a new play was produced entitled "David Garrick,"
[sic] Mr. T. W. Robertson, an author by no means unknown to fame, has
adapted the play for our stage, and deserves every credit not only for the
admirable manner in which he has executed his task, but more especially
for being the means of making us acquainted with a very capital piece. . .
One word of commendation before we stop, which we cannot fail to
accord the admirable manner in which the comedy is mounted and dressed.
Every now and then the eye lighted upon a tableau calling up vividly some
of Hogarth's best pictures. In a word, then, the new play was, as it deserved
to be, a genuine success. After Mr. Buckstone announced that "David
Garrick" would be played until further notice, loud cries were raised for
the author, to which, however, he did not respond. 6

In reworking the French piece, Robertson introduced broader effects,
discarding Gallic restraint. The most glaring example is his introduc-
tion of an expository scene at the start of the play, in which the audience
is carefully prepared for Ada's infatuation for Garrick. While there is
no diminution of the conventional baggage of asides and soliloquies,
there is in Robertson's style no foreshadowing of delicacy and natural-
ness. Broadsides of bravado and heroics litter the play. Not yet was
Robertson to temper his conventionalism with original subtlety.

6 Pages 138-39.

52 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

The importance, then, of David Garric\ lies not in its intrinsic value
or in its hint of things to come from Robertson's pen, but in the facts
that it marks his departure from slavish translation and that its success
gave him the impulse to strike out on his own as an original play-
wright.

Following "David GarricJ^ came Society and Ours, whose impact and
significance I shall attempt to present in Chapter Four. Meanwhile,
pursuing the story of Robertson's adaptations and potboilers, we come
to Shadow Tree Shaft, produced at the Princess's on February 6 and
A Rapid Thaw, produced at the St. James's on March 2, 1867. The
plays were evidently not published, but from reviews of their perform-
ances, they were obviously sops thrown to the groundlings. Critics
were quick to point out Robertson's defection. Although The Theatrical
Journal for February 13 acknowledged "almost unprecedented" re-
sponse, it took the playwright sharply to task for betraying his promise
in Society and Ours. The Athenaeum for March 9, 1867, similarly dis-
missed A Rapid Thaw as an uninspired piece.

Home 7 ,, is the first of the major adaptations Robertson produced fol-
lowing his installment in the Prince of Wales's. The freedom with
which he transformed Augier's U Ai/enturiere reflects the independence
and assurance of his original successes. Augier's play is a rhymed, tight
series of confrontations; Robertson expands it into a rollicking affair,
adding characters, complications, and typical bits of business. He injects
action: entrances are made through the window almost as frequently
as through the door. He completely revamps the opening of the play,
substituting for the formal exposition offered by Monte-Prade and
Dario a lively scene in which Lucy admits Bertie through the window
for a despairing inventory of their plight, and in which Alfred Dorrison
suddenly arrives from America. Robertson's treatment allows for move-
ment and suspense.

On the framework of the original, Robertson superimposes the tech-
niques on display at Tottenham Road. Lucy Dorrison, a counterpart
of the gamin roles undertaken by Marie Wilton, possesses a resourceful-
ness and verve unsuspected in the French. Robertson furnishes a love
interest for the prodigal son, and the two engage in a shy flirtation.

7 Haymarket, January 14, 1869.

The Potboilers 53

The love scene between Alfred Dorrison and Dora, a friend of Lucy, is
poured from the same teapot doing service at the Prince of Wales's,
though to suit the taste of the Haymarket, Robertson uses a stronger
brew. Replacing the subtleties he was trusting his audiences at the
smaller house on Tottenham Road to catch, he strives for broader comic
effects.

Evidently planned as part of the monosyllabically titled sequence of
plays at the Prince of Wales's, Dreams, or, My Lady Clara as it was
offered first in Liverpool, is original in plot. The play opened in Lon-
don at the Gaiety on March 27, 1869, competing with School, currently
playing to packed houses at the Bancrofts' theater. Aware that he was
entrusting his play to a different company, Robertson took pains to re-
quest "that this Drama may be played after the style and manner of
Comedy, and not after the manner of Melodrama." 8

In spite of his injunction, Robertson did not supply material which
lent itself to a subdued style of acting. Dreams falls far short of domestic
comedy. Its plot is heady stuff; its exposition, obvious and transparent.
The hero, of poetic temperament, is forced to speak in stilted, un-
natural phrasing. The tour de force of having one actor portray both
Rudolf Harfthal and his father, Rittmeister Harfthal, results in creaky
manipulation. Dreams, in short, is a rusty excrescence scraped up from
the bottom of the pot.

Sandwiched between School and M. P. is one full-blown farce, A
Breach of Promise, which opened at the Globe on April 10, 1869, and
one unabashed melodrama, The Nightingale, which appropriately came
to roost at the Adelphi, January 15, 1870.

In the latter, Robertson had a field day, heaping melodramatic de-
vices. 9 While purveying to the "Adelphi guests," he was inserting into
one play all the elements he was combating as a mainstay of domestic
comedy at the Prince of Wales's. The action covers six years and moves
from a cottage in England to an Italian inn, to a lodging in Portsmouth,
to a London street corner, and finally to a country churchyard.

The villain in the piece is Ismael-al-Moolah, a sinister Turk, who con-
stantly invokes Allah, and then quickly bethinking himself, swears by

8 Principal Dramatic Wor\s, I, 189.

9 In spite of Robertson's enthusiastic entry into out-and-out melodrama, the
London Times for January 17, 1870, attests that public response was lukewarm.

54 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

things Christian. He perpetrates forgery, kidnaping, and murder; dur-
ing time that elapses between two acts, as Bahander Khan, "who gave
the orders for the massacre of prisoners, women, and children," 10 he
leads a mutiny of "heathens in India.* 5

The heroine is reduced to street-singing in order to raise money to
hire detectives to recover her kidnapped child. Her artificiality registers
resoundingly when she first penetrates Ismael's deception:

And is it when a husband lies dying, that you dare ask his wife to forget
her vows, and plight herself to you? Coward! I see through you now! 11

Staging calls for elaborate scenic effects, the most spectacular of which
comes at the close of act three :

She steps into the boat. TaJ^es up the chain. The chain falls into the boat,
and the boat floats away. Mechanical change and effect. The flats, &c., run
forward. Music forte. When the flats are drawn off, the river is discovered
at night, during a fog. Nothing seen but the water and gauzes. Mary stand-
ing in the boat, the stem to the audience, lighted up by the green moon-
light. The boat and her figure reflected in the moonlight. (This must be
done by means of looking-glass let into the sea-cloth near the boat.} All
round Mary is dar\ her figure is light and bright. Mary's eyes fixed in
madness. She sings the song of the first Act. A shadowy boat, supposed to
contain Ismael and the child, glides by the bac\, as the drop descends* 2

In all this bouillabaisse there is one interesting refinement, and that
consists of Robertson's direction for the interpretation of Ismael: "no
I ago -glances at the pit, and private information to the audience, that he
is a villain, and that they shall see what they shall see". 13 The direction,
indeed, is what we might expect from an avant garde playwright-
regisseur, and yet one which is rather ludicrous, considering the arrant
nonsense to which it is attached.

Progress, a reworking of Sardou's Les Ganaches, holds closely to the
original action, expanding, contracting, or deleting speeches at will.
Since the basic motif of Les Ganaches is the losing rear guard resistance
of the old regime against the encroachments of science and commercial
expansion, an important task for Robertson lay in substituting English

10 Principal Dramatic Worlds, II, p. 414.

11 Page 395.

12 Page 407.

13 Page 385.

The Potboilers 55

allusions for French. While Robertson appreciates the fun Sardou ex-
tracts from his breast-beating aristocrates, he blue-pencils freely scenes
which veer towards the play of discussion, choosing to focus interest on
the love story. In the original, the romantic heroine does not make her
entrance until the very end of the first act; Sardou prefers to introduce
leisurely the fantastic members who compose the menage of Quim-
perle, les ganaches or the boobies. Robertson amends the play so that
the heroine has joined her relatives before the action begins and moves
economically to the complication set into motion by her romance with
the engineer who has come to plan a railroad through the Mompesson
estate. For Sardou, the boobies remain the focal interest; for Robertson,
they become theatrically-effective obstacles in the course of true love.

Birth, presented in Bristol, October 5, 1870, continues the therne of
class struggle between rising industrialism and the landed aristocracy,
and as in Progress the struggle is resolved by love's leaping the barrier of
caste lines. Paul's factory, planked down in proximity to an old castle,
has transformed "rock, and moss, and trees" to "smoke, fire, cinder, and
ashes." 14

One brother and sister operate the factory; the other brother and
sister occupy the castle. The castle dwellers are bankrupt, and the factory
owners take over the castle. The first encounter of the foursome, how-
ever, sows the seeds of eventual harmony, for Paul Hewitt falls in love
with Lady Adeliza and Sarah Hewitt falls in love with the Earl of
Eagleclyffe.

Subsisting on his own inventiveness, and tossing characterization and
style to the winds, Robertson is unable to furbish Birth with any of the
richness and spontaneity he derived from Sardou in his adaptation of
Les Ganaches. To disguise the palpably obvious situation in Birth,
Robertson introduces Jack Randall, a would-be playwright, who is bent
on putting everything he sees into a play. The use of a raisonneur to
call attention to the very artificiality of the plot serves to anticipate and
thus forestall the condemnation of the audience. Jack omnivorously
takes notes on the action going on about him and cries exultingly,
"Just as in a work of fiction," "Just like on the stage." 15

Robertson's often mis-directed but ineradicable urge for reform ex-

14 Principal Dramatic Worlds, I, 6.

15 Page 17.

56 Thomas William Robertson: His Flays and Stagecraft

presses itself here incongruously in his insistence on careful mounting.
Birth came in the vanguard of Robertson's successes at the Prince of
Wales's, and the playwright was bound to sustain the illusion of realism.
Thus the stage direction for act three, scene one reads :

Ivy-covered Ruins and grass plot, supposed to have -formed the old court
yard of the castle; the chapel at the bac\. The tower . . . to be new (L e. }
restored}, and to loo\ habitable. The door practicable. No moon in the
cloth. The moonlight to be on the grass. The ivy to be real ivy, and the grass
to be grass matting not painted^

Robertson attempted to observe strict neutrality in War, but the
audience at the St. James's found the Franco-Prussian war too contro-
versial a subject to view his dramatic attempt with impartial objectivity;
and the play failed. In this last of Robertson's plays there is nothing
notable in plot, characterization, or dialogue. The story tells of a couple
wrenched apart by the war between France and Germany, the man's
supposed death on the battlefield, and his joyful return after the war is
over. The characters are no more than mouthpieces for patriotic senti-
ments. And the sentiments themselves are oratorical flourishes, im-
munized from anything suggesting natural promptings.

Only four stage directions give significant evidence of atmosphere
transported from the Prince of Wales's. The first three deal with the
interpretation of roles:

The author requests this part [Colonel de Roche vannes] may be played
with a slight French accent. He is not to pronounce his words absurdly,
or shrug his shoulders, or duck his head towards his stomach, like the con-
ventional stage Frenchman. COLONEL DE ROCHEVANNES is to be
played with the old pre-Revolutionary politeness knightly courtesy, with
a mixture of ceremony and bonhommie. 17

This part [Herr Karl Hartmann] to be played with a slight German
accent, and not to be made wilfully comic. HERR KARL HARTMANN
is to be played a perfect gentleman, with a touch of the scholar and pedant
in his manner but always a gentleman. 18

CAPTAIN SOUND is not to be dressed in uniform, but in the morning
dress of a gentleman. His manner is to be hearty, but not rough; in every

16 Page 38.

17 Principal Dramatic Wor\s, II, 755.

18 Page 756.

The Potboilers 57

respect that of a captain of a man-of-war, and not of the master of a half-
penny steamboat. 19

It is to be noticed that the three roles thus outlined represent Eng-
land, France, and Germany, and Robertson would naturally take every
precaution against outraging his audience. Nevertheless, the dramatic
principle favoring naturalness gained thereby some recognition. In ap-
proaching verisimilitude, they harmonize with Robertson's injunction
regarding the scene behind the front in act two:

Anything like uniform or accoutrement seen in this Act must be stained,
muddy, and exhibit the signs of severe use. Nothing sparkling, tinselly, or
patent-leathered. 20

In War, then, we have the unhappy spectacle of surface realism ex-
pended on bathos and oratory.

The plays which Robertson fed to theaters other than the Prince of
Wales's show a deliberate concession to traditionalism. In his me-
chanical adaptation of French plays, he foreswore originality. In the
original farces and melodramas which he concocted, Robertson wrote in
the prevailing vogue. Were it not for the "big six," Society, Ours, Caste t
Play, School, and M. P., Robertson would have remained a nondescript
contributor to the standardized trifles in the vast mid- Victorian dramatic
repertoire.

19 Page 757.

20 Page 766.

CHAPTER FOUR
THE TEMPEST

IN the previous chapter I examined Robertson's adaptations o
French pieces. In this group, theatricality reigns supreme. Com-
pletely ensnared by the economics of an unimaginative managerial
monopoly, Robertson cynically carried out his assignments. Had it not
been for the happy conjunction of his friend Henry Byron with Marie
Wilton, he would probably have continued turning out utterly worth-
less fillers, to be played and immediately forgotten.

Intimates would have been aware of his restiveness, his protest against
a dictatorial commercialism; for his fiery temper was not one to
smoulder in secret. But there would have been no particular reason for
Victorian memoirists to hasten to affirm their friendship with Robertson
or to describe their association with him. He would have remained,
after all, simply another Lacy menial, along with scores of others,
busily purveying to the meticulously prescribed diet of the theater
public.

Several things, however, combined to save Robertson from being
relegated to oblivion in the Lord Chamberlain's catalogue of manu-
scripts in the St. James's Palace. For one, there was the growing hold of
the middle classes as the dominating force in Victorian culture. For
another, there was Robertson's accurate gauging of the growing appeal
of realism on the stage. Capitalizing on bourgeois value judgments and
the bourgeois predilection for material objects, he was in a fair way to
set a new style. With an array of domestic properties, he would provide
audiences the thrill of recognition, thus satisfying the acquisitive, pos-
sessive instincts of the middle classes, which was finding expression
elsewhere in cluttered interior decoration, what-nots, and ginger-bread
friezes. The themes of his plays, meanwhile, would flatter the class
consciousness of the bourgeoisie by suggesting that individual worth
might leap caste lines.

The Tempest 59

Finally., there was the fortuitous advent of the Bancrofts among the
ranks of London managers. Their genteel, intime jewel box of a theater
was the perfect setting for Robertson's plays. The gentility of the Ban-
crofts was, in fact, symptomatic of the bourgeois spirit in theatrical
life. The modern student can enter the elegantly respectable atmosphere
which pervaded the Tottenham Road Theatre via the prolific memoirs
of actors and managers, such as those of the Bancrofts themselves,
George Augustus Sala, Ellen Terry, and Dame Madge Kendal. Such
autobiographies possess in common a self-conscious preoccupation with
the respectability of the theater. In so doing, they form an interesting
chapter in the social history of England, for they attest to the belated
appearance of a submerged group.

Bitterly aware of age-old prejudices against the stage, Victorian actors
were particularly anxious to dispel popular illusions of loose-living in
the wings. The prejudice, alienating the middle class, made for bad box-
office. But beyond the question of receipts, there was the question of
respectability. The prejudice constituted a libel against a group of peo-
ple who saw no reason why they should remain outside the pale.

Had not the actor come into his own? Had not the Queen herself
set her official stamp of approval on the theater? Was it not possible for
actors to be knighted? What the acting profession needed more than
anything else was a public-relations service to maintain and extend its
hard-won respect, and this office actors hastened to fill by presenting
their life-stories to the reading public. A heavily moral tone informs
memoir after memoir, suggesting the protestations of the parvenu :

Mummers interrupt our path in life their virtue, their beauty, their suc-
cesses, their books for lately they have taken to writing books; books about
what? about themselves. There is but one subject of interest to the mum-
mer, and, like his clothes, his talk, and his virtue, his books excite the curios-
ity of the public. We have had five editions of the Bancroft Memoirs two
bulky volumes of five hundred pages each. Mr. Toole's Memoirs are prom-
ised, Mr. Grossmith's have appeared, and Mr. Corney Grain's are announced
. . . And when not engaged in compiling the stories of their virtuous and
successful lives, the mummers discuss their social grievances in the evening
papers. What is the social status of the actor? is argued as passionately as a
frontier question of European importance. Mr. Grossmith writes to the duke,
before he consents to accept two pounds to sing a couple of songs, to ask if
he will be received as a guest. ... Or was it that the duke wrote to Mr.

60 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

Grossmith and asked how he would like to be received? Be this as it may,
something went wrong, and Mr, Grossmith declares that he scored over the
duke by taking a countess down to supper. Neither doctors, lawyers, nor
dentists stipulate how they are to be received when they attend. And it will
seem to many that when a gentleman accepts a fee for singing in a drawing-
room he would prove his blue blood better by declining to consider him-
self in the light of an ordinary guest than by afterwards discussing his claim
to be received on an equal footing with those whose presence was not paid
for. It would also be well if, on retiring from the stage and entering society,
actresses would refrain a little, not criticize too severely the morals of the
ladies around them, and not wonder in stage whispers why Mrs. So-and-so
is received. 1

The unbending solemnity of Squire Bancroft's portraits, his ever-
present monocle, and his evident pride in knighthood afford a clue as to
why his theater was receptive to Robertson's gifts. The Bancrofts were
shrewd business people and brilliant actor-managers, but they were also
middle-class Englishmen bent on sounding their respectability. As Rob-
ertson himself observed, "The actor's mind is impressionable and plastic,
and they [sic] often illustrate their era without knowing it." 2

In his lavender-scented comedies, Robertson successfully caught the
aspirations of the Bancrofts and helped woo a new audience to the
theater.

Society, the comedy which first merged the talents of Robertson and
the Bancrofts, opened at the Prince of Wales's, November u, 1865.
With George Bancroft as Sidney Daryl and Marie Wilton as Maud
Hetherington, the play had an outstanding run of one hundred and
fifty nights. 3

John Chodd, Junior and John Chodd, Senior have amassed a fortune
and are attempting to crash society. In order to get his son into Parlia-
ment, Chodd, Senior hires the services of Sidney Daryl., a "literary bar-
rister," to edit a newspaper in support of the campaign of John Chodd,
Junior. John Chodd, Junior then proceeds to pay court to Daryl's sweet-
heart, Maud Hetherington. Her aunt> Lady Ptarmigant, enchanted with

1 George Moore, Impressions and Opinions, London, 1914, pp. 122-24.

2 "The Queens of Comedy," London Society, VIII, (September, 1865), 277.

3 Its first revival, in the fall of 1868, rolled up one hundred performances, with
George Bancroft as Tom Stylus. In tie fall of 1874, Society ran for five months.
In 1 88 1, Society was performed fifty times at the Haymarket, then under the
Bancroft management.

The Tempest 61

Chodd's fortune and disgusted with Daryl's poverty, encourages the
former's attentions to Maud. Maud is passively led by her aunt, for she
wrongly assumes that DaryFs ward is his daughter. Actually, as it
comes out at the end, Daryl has been caring for Lady Ptarmigant's
grand-daughter, orphaned by Lady Ptarmigant's run-away son. Daryl,
thinking Maud has thrown him over for Chodd's money, creates a
scene at Lady Ptarmigant's ball. Then he bestirs himself and competes
with Chodd for the same borough election. Finally, the lovers settle
their misunderstanding. Daryl wins the election from Chodd. A last
minute legacy raises Daryl to eligibility in the marriage mart, while his
nobility in having assumed the guardianship of Lady Ptarmigant's
grand-daughter more than vindicates him.

The play employs all the Scribian tactics observable in Robertson's
adaptions. Climactic curtains, stereotyped characters, the last minute
legacy, and even the frayed soliloquies and asides of his apprenticeship
are in evidence, but something has transformed sheer hackwork into
fresh, delightful comedy. That something which masks the creaky
machinery is the naturalness of dialogue. 4 Freed from the confining
channels of close adaptation, Robertson was able to introduce original
pace to his scenes. Furthermore, a free hand to apply local color afforded
new impetus to the playwright. Society, as did the comedies which
followed it, abounds in native connotations.

Persona non grata at the Ptarrnigant residence, Sidney Daryl in act
one steals a few moments with Maud in the garden. Their love scene,
played by the Bancrofts, provides the first real hint of Robertson's new
power. Understatement, indirection, and the intrusion of everyday
practicality into a traditional, sentimentally-soaked situation give a new
lease to comedy. As Pinero put it, "The aim of Robertson and his fol-
lowers was to amuse with conversation by creating the impression that
the audience was eavesdropping." 5 Since this type of dialogue was to
stamp the cup-and-saucer school, I shall quote the bulk of the duet:

Maud: (starting,) Oh! is that you? Who would have thought of seeing
you here!

4 The Athenaeum for November 18, 1865, reported, "The dialogue of this piece
is above the ordinary level; it is smart and lively, and will, no doubt, prove at-
tractive." p. 697.

5 Wilbur Dwight Dunkel, Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, Chicago, 1941, page 21.

62 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

Sidney: Oh come don't I know that you walk here after dinner? and all
day long I've been wishing it was half-past eight.

Maud: (coquetting.) I wonder, now, how often you've said that this last
week?

Sidney: Don't pretend to doubt me, that's unworthy of you. (A pause.)
Maud?

Maud: Yes?

Sidney: Are you not going to speak?

Maud: (dreamily.} I don't know what to say.

Sidney: That's just my case. When I'm away from you I feel I could talk
to you for hours; but when I'm with you, somehow or other, it
seems ail to go away. (Getting closer to her and taking her hand.}
It is such happiness to be with you, that it makes me forget every-
thing else. (Tafcs off Ms gloves and puts them on seat.} Ever since
I was that high, in the jolly old days down at Springmead, my
greatest pleasure has been to be near you. (Loo fa & watch.}
Twenty to nine. When must you return?

Maud: At nine.

Sidney: Twenty minutes. How's your aunt?

Maud: As cross as ever.

Sidney: And Lord Ptarmigant?

Maud: As usual asleep.

Sidney: Dear old man! how he does doze away his time. (Another
pause.} Anything else to tell me?

Maud: We had such a stupid dinner; such odd people.

Sidney: Who?

Maud: Two men by the name of Chodd.

Sidney: (uneasily} Chodd?

Maud: Isn't it a funny name Chodd ?

Sidney: Yes, it's a Chodd name I mean an odd name. Where were they
picked up?

Maud: I don't know. Aunty says they are both very rich.

Sidney: (uneasily.) She thinks of nothing but money. (Loofa at watch.}
Fifteen to nine. (Stage has grown gradually darfa) Maud!

Maud: (in a whisper.} Yes?

Sidney: If I were rich if you were rich if we were rich.

Maud: Sidney ! Drawing closer to him.

Sidney: As it is, I almost feel it's a crime to love you.

Maud: Oh, Sidney.

Sidney: You, who might make such a splendid marriage.

Maud: If you had money I couldn't care for you any more than I do now.

Sidney: My darling! (Loofa at watch.) Ten minutes. I know you wouldn't.

The Tempest 63

Sometimes I feel mad about you, mad when I know you are out a
smiling upon others and and waltzing.
Maud: I can't help waltzing when I'm asked.

Sidney: No, dear, no; but when I fancy you are spinning round with
another's arm about your waist (his arm round her waist.) Oh!
I feel

Maud: Why, Sidney (smiling), you are jealous !
Sidney: Yes, I am.
Maud: Can't you trust me?

Sidney: Implicitly. But I like to be with you all the same.
Maud: (whispering.) So do I with you.

Sidney: My love! (Kisses her, and loo\s at watch.) Five minutes.
Maud: Time to go ?
Sidney: No! (Maud, in taking out her handkerchief, ta\es out a \not of

ribbons.) What's that?

Maud: Some trimmings I'm making for our fancy fair.
Sidney: What colour is it? Scarlet?
Maud: Magenta.
Sidney: Give it to me?
Maud: What nonsense!
Sidney: Won't you?
Maud: I've brought something else.
Sidney: Forme?
Maud: Yes.
Sidney: What?

Maud: These. Producing small case which Sidney opens.
Sidney: Sleeve-links !

Maud: Now, which will you have, the links or the ribbon?
Sidney: (after reflection.) Both.
Maud: You avaricious creature!
Sidney: (putting the ribbons near his heart.) It's not in the power of words

to tell you how I love you. Do you care for me enough to trust your

future with me will you be mine?
Maud: Sidney?
Sidney: Mine, and none other's; no matter how brilliant the offer how

dazzling the position ?
Maud: (in a whisper } leaning towards him.) Yours and yours only! Cloc^

strides nine.
Sidney: (with watch.) Nine! Why doesn't time stop, and big Ben refuse to

toll the hour?

Lady and Lord Ptarmigant appear and open gate at right.
Maud: (frightened.) My aunt! 6

6 T. Edgar Pemberton, ed., Society and Caste, Boston, 1905, pp. 21-25.

64 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

A second device which Robertson incorporates in the dialogue of
Society and which was to identify the teacup-and saucer as unmistakably
as a chip is the contrapuntal effect he achieves by having two con-
versations going on simultaneously. In the third scene of act three,
John Chodd, Jun. is proposing to Maud while his rival in love and
politics, Sidney Daryl, is just off-stage electioneering. Robertson's first
use of the device is blatantly farcical, for the speeches of the two groups
dove-tail with absurd neatness :

Maud: (struggling with herself.) I was saying that the affection

which a wife should bring the man she has elected as
Cheers without.

Sidney: (speaking without.) Electors of Springmead

Maud: We hardly know sufficient of each other to warrant

Sidney: (without.) I need not tell you who I am.

Cheers. Maud trembles.

Maud: We are almost strangers.

Sidney: Nor what principles I have been reared in.

Chodd, Jun: The name of Chodd, if humble, is at least wealthy.

Sidney: I am a Daryl; and my politics those of the Daryls.

Cheers.

Chodd, Jun: (aside.) This is awkward! (To Maud.) As to our being
strangers

Sidney: I am no stranger here. (Cheers.) I have grown up to be a

man among you. There are faces I see in the crowd I am ad-
dressing, men of my own age, whom I remember children.
(Cheers.) There are faces among you who remember me
when I was a boy. (Cheers.) In the political union between
my family and Springmead, there is more than respect and
sympathy, there is sentiment.
(Cheers.)

Chodd, Jun: Confound the fellow! Dearest Miss Hetherington -Dearest
Maud you have deigned to say you will be mine.

Sidney: Why, if we continue to deserve your trust, plight your poli-

tical faith to another?

Maud: (overcome.)M.r. Chodd, I

Chodd, Jun: My own bright, particular Maud!

Sidney: Who is my opponent?

Tom: (without.) Nobody.

A loud laugh.

Sidney: What is he?

Tom: Not much.

A roar of laughter.

The Tempest 65

Sidney: I have no doubt he is honest and trustworthy, but why turn

away an old servant to hire one you don't know? (Cheers.)
Why turn off an old love that you have tried and proved for
a new one? (Cheers.) I don't know what the gentleman's
politics may be, (laugh) or those of his family. (Roar of
laughter.) I've tried to find out, but I can't . . 7

The same radical transformation from the heavy strokes of melo-
drama to softened naturalness occurs at the curtain to act II, scene i.
The scene is the famous Owls' Roost, which London managers con-
sidered such a daring lampoon on the bohemian set that they shud-
dered at the thought of the antagonism the play might arouse. They
need not have feared. As far as critics were concerned, the scene made
the play; it captured the essence of camaraderie, casting a sentimental
aura over the jolly spirit and generosity of impecunious free-lance
writers.

The dramatic library of the nineteenth century is a large one; it is
dangerous to state that a particular effect is to be found for the first
time in a given play. I shall content myself by saying that this is the
first instance I have come across demanding ensemble playing on such
a natural level. At least contemporary audiences felt they were respond-
ing to something new. 8

Although the play as a whole was not carefully mounted 9 , the scene
at the Owls' Roost was realistic to an unprecedented degree:

Parlour at the "Owl's Roost." Public house. Cushioned seats all round the:
apartment; gas lighted on each side over tables; splint boxes, pipes, news-

7 Pages 87-89.

8 "There is more than one wholesome sign in the present appearance of the
theatrical world. Very few years ago it seemed impossible to attract people to the
playhouses, save by means of extraordinary excitement. Either the senses were to
be dazzled by gorgeous decorations, or an interest was to be created of a harrow-
ing kind, approaching that which is awakened by a real calamity, and distinct
from the emotion produced by the poetical tragedy. Not something amusing, but
something thrilling has long been demanded by the patrons of the drama, and
while tragedy has been banished from the stage as too ideal, comedy has sunk
into obscurity as too weak in its appeal to general sympathy. With a world that
will not recognize any interest in a story that does not involve some infraction
of the criminal code it is obvious that a tale of ordinary society, in which an
arrest for debt or a quarrel with one's sweetheart is regarded as the worst calam-
ity "on the cards," will meet but Lenten welcome." London Times, November
14, 1865, p. 7.

9 See Pemberton, Life and Writings of Thomas William Robertson, p. 179;
Watson, Sheridan to Robertson, pp. 399-400.

66 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

papers, etc., on table; writing materials on table (near door); gong bell on
another table; door of entrance near centre; cloc\ above door (hands set to
half-past nine); hat pegs and coats on watts. 10

In her autobiography, Dame Madge Kendal speaks of her brother's
eagerness to secure realistic detail:

When Tom planned this play, he confided to my father that in the club
scene, the Owl's Nest, he intended when the play was produced, to have
real hooks screwed into the walls of the room so that the actors could hang
their real coats on them. f

Our father, vivid as was his imagination, was by no means impressed. I
think, Tom," he said, "You'd better try something more romantic than hats
and coats on pegs in which to interest the public."

The scene made an instant success by its realism. 11

The scene in the club room builds effectively. Its climax is wrought
by a twist of traditional technique. Amid the rollicking confusion of
mock speeches, toasts, and songs, Daryl inadvertently learns that Maud
is engaged to John Chodd, Junior. Instead of topping his scene by
calling for heroics from the defeated lover, Robertson has him merely
start. His friend Tom asks him what the matter is. Daryl says, "Noth-
ing." Then as the clubmen continue a song with a stanza about the
fickleness of women, Daryl, who is seated at a table, buries his head in
him arms, and the curtain falls.

Again we can observe the direction in which Robertson is moving.
He attempts dramatic effect by quiet means. In this particular instance,
maximum contrast is achieved between the cheerful Bohemians and the
sad Daryl, but the contrast is achieved by paradox. By such a stroke
Robertson at once forsook the fustian of mid-Victorian melodrama and
employed the quiet irony of domestic comedy and tragedy.

Realistic detail at times freshens up the soliloquy which Robertson
never came to discard. In spite of his unwillingness to challenge the
conventions of aside and soliloquy, it is interesting to see the way in
which he domesticated them. For example, when Daryl crashes the
Ptarmigant ball in act II, scene 2, he is having trouble with the cuff
links Maud has given him:

I have seen her she was smiling, dancing, but not with him. She looked

10 Pemberton, Society and Caste, p. 28.

II Pages 46-47.

The Tempest 67

so bright and happy. I won't think of her. How quiet it is here; so dif-
ferent to that hot room, with the crowd of fools and coquettes whirling
round each other. I like to be alone alone! I am now thoroughly and to
think it was but a week ago one little week I'll forget her forget, and
hate her. Hate her Oh, Maud, Maud, till now I never knew how much I
loved you; loved you loved you gone; shattered; shivered; and for whom.
For one of my own birth? For one of my own rank? No! for a common
clown, who confound this link! but he is rich and it won't hold. (Try-
ing to -fasten It, his fingers trembling?) I've heard it all always with her, at
the Opera and the Park, attentive and obedient and she accepts him. My
head aches. (Louder.) Ill try a glass of champagne. 12

The language here has moved definitely from the literary swell which
dominates the melodramas of the period. The speech, of course, can be
mouthed. Without the director's careful regard, an actor trained in the
elocutionary approach, would fall naturally into stylized delivery. He
might be surprised at the short phrases. The absence of a marked
melodic flow would stump him for a little, but he would try to force
the speech into periods. The challenge of every-day speech to actors
trained in the poetic tradition can be adduced from such first-hand
accounts as Lester Wallack's :

I always found Sheridan a very easy study; but I have had more diffi-
culty, curious to say (and I think many of my profession, at least the best of
them, will bear me out in this), in studying the extremely modern school
of writers than I ever had with the older ones. In speaking Tom Robertson's
lines, for instance, one is talking "every-day talk." It looks very easy, but it is
most difficult, for if you are illustrating Sheridan or Shakspere you are speak-
ing in a language that is new to you; which on that account impresses you
all the more; whereas if you have a speech from Tom Robertson or Bouci-
cault you can give it just as well in two or three different ways. You cannot
in Shakspere find any words to improve the text, but if you say: "How do
you do this morning?" or "How are you this morning?" one is just as good
as the other; and yet, as a rule, to give the author's text is usually both proper
and just. 13

As far as the cast at the Prince of Wales's was concerned, there was
no doubt as to the manner in which lines were to be delivered. Robert-
son did his own directing; the Bancrofts were entirely in sympathy
with his ideas and gave him every support. John Hare, whose meteoric

12 Pemberton, Society and Caste, pp. 52-53.

13 Lester Wallack, Memories of Fifty Years, New York, 1889, pp. 169-70.

68 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

rise to fame in Robertsonian roles started with Lord Ptarmigant in

Society, testified:

My opinion of Robertson as a stage-manager is of the very ^highest. He
had a gift peculiar to himself, and which I have never seen in any other
author, of conveying by some rapid and almost electrical suggestion to the
actor an insight into the character assigned to him. As nature was the basis
of his own work, so he sought to make actors understand it should be theirs.
He thus founded a school of natural acting which completely revolutionized
the then existing methods, and by so doing did incalculable good to the

stage. 14

The Prince of Wales's, on November 11, 1865, caught critics and aud-
ience by surprise. The subdued acting and quiet naturalness of dialogue
threw the operatic bravura at the Haymarket, Adelphi, and Lyceum
into ridiculous light. The English had been used to seeing the grand
style taken off in burlesque; here, for once, the grand style was not
burlesqued but replaced. And what came in its stead was a new sense
of intimacy in the theatre. Audiences found themselves bending for-
ward to catch what was relevant in seeming irrelevance.

Looking back, as my wife and I often do, through the long vista of more
than forty years, it is still easy to understand the great success of this comedy.
In those now far-off days there had been little attempt to follow Nature,
either in the plays or in the manner of producing them. With every justice
was it argued that it had become a subject of reasonable complaint with
reflective playgoers, that the pieces they were invited to see rarely afforded
a glimpse of the world in which they lived; "the characters were, for the
most part, pale reflections of once substantial shapes belonging to a former
state of theatrical existence, whilst the surroundings were often as much^ in
harmony with the days of Queen Anne as with those of Queen Victoria." I
do but echo unbiassed opinions in adding that many so-called pictures of
life presented on the stage were as false as they were conventional. The
characters lived in an unreal world, and the code of ethics on the stage was
the result of warped traditions. The inevitable reaction at length made it-
self apparent; the author of Society it was truly said, rendered a public serv-
ice by proving that the refined and educated classes were as ready as ever to
crowd the playhouses, provided only that the entertainment given there
was suited to their sympathies and tastes.

The Robertson comedies appeared upon the scene just when they were
needed to revive and renew intelligent interest in the drama. Nature was
Robertson's goddess, and he looked upon the bright young management

14 Pemberton, Society and Caste, p. xxxi.

The Tempest 69

as the high-priest of the natural school of acting. The return to Nature was
the great need of the stage, and happily he came to help supply it at the
right moment. 15

15 The Bancrofts, p. 83. T. E. Pemberton quotes Clement Scott's recollections
of first-night reaction to Society: "There was a great gathering of the light
literary division at the little Theatre in Tottenham Court Road on the first night
of Tom Robertson's new play. It was our dear old Tom Hood, who was our
leader then, who sounded the bugle, and the boys of the light brigade cheerfully
answered the call of their chief. I remember that on that memorable night I stood
for there was no sitting room for us on such an occasion by the side of Tom
Hood at the back of the dress circle. The days of stalls had not then arrived for
me. Suddenly there appeared on the stage what was then an apparition. Ban-
croft had delighted us with his cheery enthusiasm and boyish manner, for he was
the lover in this simple little play, well dressed and, for a wonder, natural
Think what it was to see a bright, cheery, pleasant young fellow playing the lover
to a pretty girl at the time when stage-lovers were nearly all sixty, and dressed
like waiters at a penny ice-shop! Conceive a Bancroft as Sidney Daryl in the days
when W. H. Eburne played young sparks at the Adelphi, and old Braid was the
dashing military officer at the Haymarket! But what astonished us even more
than the success of young Bancroft was the apparition that I have spoken of
just now. A little delightful old gentleman came upon the stage, dressed in a long,
beautifully cut frock coat, bright-eyed, intelligent, with white hair that seemed to
grow naturally on the head no common clumsy wig with a black forehead-line
and with a voice so refined, so aristocratic, that it was music to our ears. The
part played by Mr. Hare was, as we all know, insignificant. All he had to do
was to say nothing, and to go perpetually to sleep. But how well he did nothing!
How naturally he went to sleep! We could not analyse our youthful impression
at the time, but we knew instinctively that John Hare was an artist. Had Society
been accepted at the Haymarket which luckily for Tom Robertson, it was not
the part of Lord Ptarmigant would have been played by old Rogers, or Braid, or
Cullenford, Chippendale and Howe would certainly have refused it as a very
bad old man. No; Tom Robertson's lucky star was in the ascendant when
Society was refused by the Haymarket management with scorn. Had it failed
there, I believe my old friend would have 'thrown up the sponge* and never
worked for the stage any more. The refusal of Society by Buckstone, and the
keen and penetrating intelligence of Marie Wilton, who was determined that
Tom Robertson should succeed and that his plays should be acted, were the turn-
ing-points in the doubtful career of a broken-hearted and disappointed man. I
don't think I ever remember a success to have been made with slighter material
than that given to Mr. Hare. And it was a genuine success. We of the light
brigade could not work miracles. We might have written our heads off, and ^ still
have done no good for the new school. Luckily there was at that time as critic to
the Times a man of keen and penetrating judgment. John Oxenford knew what
was good as well as any man, and he knew how to say it into the bargain. He
was not a slave to old tradition, and when he had a good text what a wonderful
dramatic sermon he could preach! Luckily, also, the new school had the constant
support and encouragement of the Daily Telegraph, whose leading proprietor
and director, Mr. J. M. Levy, never missed a first night in the company of his
artistic and accomplished family. All that was liberal and just and far-seeing was
in favour of the new Robertsonian departure of a dramatist who was not old-
fashioned and dull, and of actors so new, so fresh, so talented, as Bancroft, Hare,

yo Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

It is interesting to observe how the words nature and natural figure
In the criticisms o Society and Its successors at the Prince of Wales's.
The words indicate the size of the tempest Robertson had raised.

In spite of the chorus of approval which greeted this fresh, spon-
taneous comedy, the carry-over of stock conventions could hardly fail
to have passed discerning critics unnoticed. Robertson's men and women,
as befitting a teacup-and saucer school of drama, are cambric dilutions of
the stronger brew of Dickens and Thackeray. Idealization, sentimental-
ity, idiosyncrasy, and a pinch of cynicism are the ingredients of a super-
ficially differentiated dramatis personae. Sidney Daryl is the noble, self-
sacrificing aristocrat; Maud Hetherington, the idealized, fragile in-
genue. Dickens was standing not too far from the baptismal font when
Lady Ptarmigant, the snob, was christened. Lord Ptarmigant, whose
principal duty is to fall asleep wherever he may be and trip people
with his sprawling legs, likewise suggests a Dickensian humor char-
acter. Add John Chodd, Jun., the social climbing boor; Moses Aaron,
the traditional stage Jew; and Tom Stylus, the kind, blundering con-
fidant, and we have an array of conceptions which offered nothing
new or challenging to the audience gathered in the Prince of Wales's
on November n, 1865. All were types immediately recognized; specta-
tors knew what conduct to expect of them, and Robertson did not dash
those expectations.

A scribbled synopsis found amongst his papers reveals his method of
character-drawing. He struck down three words, one after another a name,
a profession, a ruling passion, such as love, ambition, cupidity, pride. With
these words he thought he had summed up the ordinary conventional man,
as nature had formed him, and society had reformed or deformed him: a
very elemental but very sane psychology, which he enriched, embellished,
elaborated, with the flowers of his fancy and the fruits of his observation. 16

Whether or not, as according to Filon, this be sane psychology, we can-

and their companions. The heavy brigade of influential writers, led by John
Oxenford, patted the new movement on the back; the light division, led by Tom
Hood and others, lent their enthusiasm to the good cause. Gilbert, Prowse, Leigh,
Millward, Archer, all of us, in fact, who knew Robertson and appreciated his
talent were the first to step forward and back up our friend's success in every
way that was possible. Pemberton, pp. xxv-xxvii.
16 Augustin Filon, The English Stage, London, 1897, p. 127.

The Tempest 71

not deny that it is sane theatrical psychology. The salient fact is that
once we recognize Robertson's characters for the stereotypes they are,
we can experience anew something of the surprising revelation which
hit contemporary audiences when those stereotypes opened their mouths.

I have already pointed out the undiminished use of asides and soli-
loquies, even though Robertson consciously attenuated their theatrical-
ity. Besides these, we must reckon with puns. It was perhaps inevitable
that a close friend of Byron would catch something of his mania.
Byron's ambition, it will be remembered, was to write a play in which
every word turned on pun. Plays on words, however, were still very
much part of a playwright's baggage. For example, in the scene between
Sidney and Maud quoted above (page 62), there is the intrusive pun
on Chodd.

Robertson scores a big curtain at the end of act two by reverting to
melodrama: Sidney, who has crashed the Ptarrnigant ball, is alone with
Maud, who, he thinks, has thrown him over for Chodd:

Sidney: Listen to me for the last time. My life and being were centered in
you. You have abandoned rne for money! You accepted me; you
now throw me off, for money! You gave your hand, you now re-
tract, for money! You are about to wed a knave, a brute, a fool,
whom in your own heart you despise, for money!

Maud: How dare you!

Sidney: Where falsehood is, shame cannot be. The last time we met (pro-
ducing ribbon) you gave me this. See, 'tis the colour of a man's
heart's blood. (Curtains or doors at bac\ draw apart.') I give it back
to you.

Casting bunch of ribbon at her "feet.

Lord Cloudwrays, "Sir Farifttosh, Colonel Browser" Tom, Lord
Ptarmigant, and Lady Ptarmigant, Chodd Jun, and Chodd Sen.
appear at bac\. Guests seen in ball-room.

And tell you, shameless girl, much as I once loved, and adored, I
now despise and hate you.

Lady P: (advancing, in a whisper to Sidney.) Leave the house, sir! How
dare you go!

Sidney: Yes; anywhere.

Crash of music. Maud is nearly falling, when Chodd Jun. appears
near her; she is about to lean on his arm, but recognizing him, re-
treats and staggers. Sidney is seen to reel through ball-room "full of
dancers. Drop, 1 - 1

17 Principal Dramatic Wor\$, II, 61-62.

72 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

Besides the return to bombast, we meet with another of Robertson's
favorite resources, by no means original with him, the tableau, in
which the audience was permitted to feel the full impact of the dramatic
situation before the curtain fell. If necessary, the curtain was again
raised, as a kind of encore, while the characters, adopting slightly dif-
ferent positions, reinforced the emotional impact of the scene. As I
discuss the other plays in the "big six," I shall point out other tableaux.

It remains to be pointed out that the resolution of the play depends
upon a deus ex machina wearily dispensing legacies since the days of
Charles II, and we have sufficient material before us to recognize in
Robertson's first success a blending of the old and new, which places
him in the middle of the 'sixties as a theatrical Janus, a transitional
figure, cautiously retaining as well as daringly innovating.

In 1854, the poet laureate had glorified English militarism, then on
test in the Crimean War, by writing "The Charge of the Light Brig-
ade." In less vigorously masculine accents, Robertson sounded the
chauvinistic temper of his countrymen in Ours. Although the lion that
roars in Ours is a household pet, it roars with the same inspiration as
Tennyson's.

Robertson was sincerely addicted to soldierdom:

Robertson's love of soldiers first shows itself in Ours, for nearly all his
pieces contain something of a military element in the form of incident or
character. To him the romance of love and honour was seen at its best when
associated with a soldier's uniform; and when otherwise "there may be al-
ways traced the flutter of the cavalier's feather"! 18

It will be remembered that during the dark, rootless days in London
he and Henry Byron had presented themselves before the recruiting of-
ficer of the Horse Guards. Robertson's own brother Harry had run
away from home to fight in the Crimean War. 19 Throughout his plays,

18 1, Hi.

19 In this connection, Dame Madge Kendal relates an amazing family story:
Years later, when I was in my teens and had returned to the stage after my
career as a child actress, Colonel Castle, an amateur actor who lived in Worcester
got up a performance of "Ours" I was engaged to play Mary Netley, the part
originally acted by Miss Marie Wilton (Lady Bancroft), while Blanche Haye was
played by Louise Moore, a sister of Nellie Moore, the Heroine of a popular song
at that time . . .

Worcester being a garrison town and Colonel Castle being in command of the
regiment, privates in the regiment acted as scene shifters. The stalls and dress

PRINCE OF

WALES' S

RE-NAMED BY SPECIAL PERMISSION.

[Tottnliam8t % TottnliamCoiirtd.,]

tJNBEB THE MAHAGElttNT OF

'Mi x s s IM:

i IB

o

Hi* Prforman<x* wU

wjtfe a Xw od Origin*! OmwJy, I

SOCIETY !

Ixml Ptannigant ........ ..... ... ........................ Mr HAEE

Lord Cioudwraro ' ....... ......... - .............. Mr TEAFFORD

Sydney Daiyl, Esq ......... Barrister at Law ........ Mr SYDNEY BANCROFT

5irJoimChodd t Scn. .... ............ . ............... Mr J. W, KAY

Mr John Chodd, Jua ...................... , ................ Mr J. CLARKE

Tom Stvius .. ................ ........ ........ Mr K TKWAU

Oliathus O'StilliTan, Esq., B.C.L ............. .... Mr H. W. MONTGO.MERY

I)esmoad Me Usquebaugh ........ " ........ ........ Mr HILL

Mr COOKE

Bradley
Trodnou

3>r Sc
Hie Smiffel Lamb
Waiter .

Moses Aaron
Ladv Ptarmi^unt .... ...

'Maud Hetheringtoii
Little Maud ?. ......

Mr STAIN KS

Mr MACAETE
....... . Mr PERDUE

Mr TISDALE
. ..,. Mr REPMOXI)

Mr BENNETT
........ Miss S. LABKXN

Miss MARIE WILTON

Miss LUCY GEORGE

ACT L-DARYL'S CHAMBBES IN LINCOLN'S

-A.

M3SBEU&

HOT WELLS AT SfBl

THE NEW SCIKESY H

" <'.f;

The Tempest 73

Robertson idealizes militarism, following unquestioningly the current
cliches of British supremacy and destiny.

Following a try-out at the Prince of Wales's in Liverpool on August
23, 1866, Ours opened at the Prince of Wales's in London on November
15, where it met with instant acclaim. Including a series of successful
revivals, the play under the Bancroft aegis ran up a total of seven hun-
dred performances. The Bancrofts listed it next to Caste as the most
profitable Robertson comedy in their repertoire. 20

The play opens just before Sir Alexander Shendryn's regiment "Ours"
is summoned to the Crimea. The departure leaves relations troubled and
unsettled between the men and the women they leave behind them.
Sir Alexander is saddled with a jealous wife who nurses the delusion
that her husband is unfaithful. Lady Shendryn is attempting to arrange
a marriage between Blanche Haye, her ward, and Prince Petrovsky, a
fabulously wealthy Russian. Blanche Have, however, is in love with
the timid Angus MacAlister. Her volatile companion, Mary Netley,
irritates and enchants Hugh Chalcot, a world-weary chap. General
resolution ensues when the ladies descend en masse in the Crimea. Sir
Alexander's fidelity is vindicated. Prince Petrovsky stands aside for
Angus. Hugh Chalcot's ennui disappears in the conflict and he now
behaves towards Mary with winning boyishness.

I should like to defer until the final chapter consideration of the place

circle were reserved for the wives and guests of the officers and the upper part of
the house was given over to the men of the regiment and their wives.

It will be remembered that the second act [sic] of the play takes place in the
Crimea. As the curtain fell on it, a soldier in the gallery fainted.

Somehow, without knowing why, I was quite interested in the incident, and,
next day, I asked Captain McAdam, who had taken part in the performance, who
the man was.

Captain McAdam replied, "He's Corporal Ashton."

"Ashton," I repeated. "Can I see him."

"Certainly. He's a corporal in my company; I'll send for him."

When he arrived and I went into the room in which he had been shown, I
asked, as I looked at him, "Is your name Ashton?"

"Yes, miss," he replied, saluting me.

"Your name is not Ashton," I replied, "It's Robertson. I'm your sister. You
must go and see mother."

"Never," he answered, "till I'm a commissioned officer."

"What does that matter to her. [sic] Your first duty is to your mother."

Later I took him home and I shall never forget the scene when my mother
took him into her arms. Dame Madge Kendal, pp. 54-55.

20 The Bancrofts, p. 881.

74 Thomas William 'Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

of militarism in Robertson's thinking. At this point I am concerned
with the dramatic treatment and effectiveness of the motif. To this end,
several telling illustrations will suffice to show why the play was a sure-
fire hit. Continuing in Society's appealing tone, Robertson introduced
a patriotic motif which rose to a climax described by Squire Bancroft
as "almost hysterical." 21 This is the scene in which the ladies watch
from a window Sir Alexander Shendryn's Regiment, "Ours," march
off to war :

Music jorte. Band plays "God save the Queen" Cheers. Tramp of soldiers.
Excitement. Picture. Chalcot and Mary waving handler chiefs, and cheering
at window . . . "Blanche totters down and jails 'fainting?' 2 '

Earlier in the act there is a significant dialogue between Mary Netley
and Hugh Chalcot, who play a Beatrice-Benedick team. Up to this
point in act two, Chalcot has been shown to us as a cynical, bored chap,
with several fleeting glimpses of a sentimental streak.

Mary: (up, C. Excitedly.} Oh, when I hear the clatter of their horses* hoofs,

and see the gleam of the helmets, I I wish I were a man!
Choi: I wish you were! (standing, C., his glass in his eye.)
Mary: (opening window at bac^.} We can see them from the balcony.

Music ceases. When she opens window, the moonlight, trees, gas r

&c., are seen at bac\. Distant bugle.
Mary: There's Sir Alick on horseback, (distant cheers. On balcony?) Do you

hear the shouts?
Chal: Yes. (up at window?)
Mary: And the bands?

Chal: (on balcony?) And the chargers prancing.
Mary: And the bayonets gleaming.
Chal: And the troops forming.
Mary: And the colours flying. Oh, if I were not a woman, Fd be a soldier!

(going down a little?)
Chal: So would I. (coming down, L.)
Mary: Why are you not?
Chal: What! a woman!
Mary: No a soldier. Better be anything than nothing. Better be a soldier

than anything.

Goes up again. Tramp of troops marching heard in the distance.

Cheers.

21 The Bancrofts, p. 87.

22 Principal Dramatic Wor\s, II, 460.

The Tempest 75

Choi: (catching MARY'S enthusiasm, and sitting on ottoman.} She's right!
She's right! Why should a great hulking fellow like me skulk be-
hind, lapped in comfort, ungrateful, uncomfortable, and inglorious?
Fighting would be something to live for. I've served in the militia
I know my drill 111 buy a commission I'll go!

Mary: (meeting him, as he goes up.) That's right. I like you for that. 23

The whole of the third act takes place during the war, somewhere
behind the front lines (not too far from Balaklava) in a hut. The
ladies arrive all the way from England in a picnic spirit. Mary Netley
and her friend, Blanche Haye, play at being men, recoil with girlish
fear from the sight of weapons, and Mary Netley makes a pudding
using an improvised rolling pin. The only casualties observable In the
Crimean campaign are Hugh Chalcot's bandaged leg inflicted by the
playwright to permit Chalcot to remain behind in the hut so that he
can help Mary Netley make her pudding and a staggering entrance
by Alexander Shendryn followed by "It's only a scratch." A more
sentimentalized treatment of the Crimean campaign would be difficult
to imagine. The only oath Chalcot utters is "damn," and he putters
about the hut as chatty and kittenish as an old woman in a kitchen:

What a jolly good sleep I have had, to be sure! (ta\es flas^ from under
pillow, and drin\s.) Ah! What a comfort it is that in the Crimea you can
drink as much as you like without its hurting you! The doctor says it's the
rarefaction of the atmosphere. Bravo, the rarefaction of the atmosphere!
whatever it may be. I must turn out. (ta^es pillow, and addresses it in song.)

"Kathleen Mavourneen, arouse from thy slumbers."

(hits pillow, and gets out of bed) Gardez vous the poor dumb leg. It's jolly
cold! (goes to fireplace and warms his hands, then turns and holds them
round the candle, whilst so doing sees letters.) Oh, Gus has left his love-
traps to my keeping in case he should be potted, (puts letters in cupboard,
L.) Now for my toilette. Where's the water? (goes across stage, finds bucket
against barrel up stage, R.) Ice, as usual! Where's the hammer? . . , 24

The portrayal of the softened rigors of war; the women's cheering
their men off to battle, wishing only they could be men; the reassuring
platitudes about the duty and prowess of Englishmen evoked tre-
mendous response. Robertson had domesticated war, reducing it to a
lawn party in the Crimea.

23 Pages 458-59-

24 Page 463.

76 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

Meanwhile Robertson was moving forward in his attempt to capture
everyday reality in dialogue and staging. Stage directions for act one,
which occurs in the private park o Alexander Shendryn, call for the
trees to shed leaves through the act. Angus, the disconsolate lover of
Blanche Haye, plucks them or cuts at them with his cane. Elaborate
directions for the stage-setting for act three foreshadow the meticulous
attention to details of a Shavian mise-en-scene:

Interior of a hut, built of boulders and mud, the roof built out, showing
the snow and sty outside. The walls bare and rude, pistols, swords^ guns,
maps, newspapers, &c., suspended on them. Door; R. 2 E. Window in -flat,
R. C., showing snow-covered country beyond; rude fireplace, L., wood fire
burning; over-hanging chimney and shelf; small stove, R.,, very rude, with
chimney going through roof f which is covered with snow and icicles; straw
and rags stuffed in crevices and littered about floor; a rope stretched across
bac\ of hut, with fur rugs and horse-cloths hanging up to divide the beds
off; camp and rough ma\e-shtft furniture; camp cooking utensils, &c.; arm-
chair, made of tub, &c. Cupboards round L., containing properties; hanging
lamp, a rude piece of planning before fireplace, stool, tubs, pail, &c. Port-
manteau, L. table, L. C., rough chair, broken gun-barrel near fireplace, for
po\er, and stac\ of wood. Stage half dar\, music, "Chanson," distant bugle
and answer, as curtain rises. ^

Striving for stage pictures tableaux persists. On page 74, I have
quoted the rousing curtain to act two. The highly artificial is carried
to ridiculous lengths earlier in the act when:

Bugle without, at distance. Roll on side drum, jour beats on big drum,
then military band play "Annie Laurie" the whole to be as if in the dis-
tance. Angus starts up, and goes to window. Blanche springs up, and stands
before door, L. Angus goes to door, embracing Blanche. They form Millais'
picture of the "Black Brans wicker." 26

Characterization, however, remains stereotyped, although Robertson's

25 Page 461.

26 Page 455. The ascent of Marguerite in the last act of Faust and Marguerite,
according to a review of the play in the London Times , April 20, 1854,^ p. 12,
is "after a well-known picture of St. Catherine." Similarly, the Times' critic
guesses that the auction scene in M. P. "may have been suggested by ^the late R.
Martineau's impressive picture of The Last Day in the Old House.' " See issue
for April 25, 1870, p. 10. .

The stage directions for act two of War (principal Dramatic Worths, II, 766)
call for the Colonel and Oscar to form "the picture from Horace Vernet's 'Re-
treat from Moscow.* "

The Tempest 77

theatrical inventiveness provides an illusive freshness to the types. For
example, he applies the lesson he learned in Noemie of contrasting two
leading feminine roles. Blanche Haye is the completely soft, Victorian
ideal, whereas Mary Netley is the outspoken gamin, a role ideally
suited to the talent of Marie Wilton, trained in burlesque. 27 Starting
with Ours, the first play he wrote especially for the Bancrofts, Robertson
created a series of vehicles designed to exploit the impish quality in
Lady Bancroft's acting.

As for Marie Wilton, with what wonderful insight Robertson had made
out the real genius of this little woman, whose talents were so real, if all her
ambitions were not attainable! She looked back with horror at her successes
at the Strand; she wanted never again to play a gamin s part ... or to ap-
pear in burlesque. Robertson wrote her a succession of gamin's parts and
burlesque scenes. But the gamin was petticoated and the burlesque scenes
set in a comedy. I am not referring to Society, which was not written for
the 'Prince of Wales's. 5 But what is it she has to do in the three other pieces?
In School she climbs a wall. In Ours she takes part in a game of bowls,
mimics the affectations of the swells of '65, plays at being a soldier, bastes a
leg of mutton from a watering pot, and as a climax makes roley-poley
pudding, adapting military implements to culinary uses for the purpose. In
Caste her operations are still more varied she sings, dances, boxes people's
ears, plays the piano, pretends to blow a trumpet, puts on a forge cap, and
imitates a squadron of cavalry. If this is not burlesque, what is it? 28

Realising that the role must stand or fall with Marie Wilton, Robertson
encouraged her to make it her own, and she went to it with the zest of
a Bernhardt or a Mrs. Campbell:

When the play was originally read to us, the author begged me to do all
I could in the scenes which chiefly concerned myself in the last act, for some-
how, he said, he felt unable to make Mary as prominent as he wished. So
at the rehearsals I set to work, and invented business and dialogue, which,
happily, met with his approval. He always declared I greatly helped the act,

27 The Robertsonian formula included two heroines in each comedy: one ideal,
the other practical; one sentimental, the other humorous. The practical-humorous
heroineMary Netley, Polly Eccles, Naomi Tighe always fell to the lot of Mrs.
Bancroft, whose alert and expressive face, humid-sparkling eye, and small com-
pact figure seemed to have been expressly designed for these characters. She pos-
sessed, too, the faculty of approaching the borderline of vulgarity without over-
stepping it an essential gift for the actress who has to deal with Robertsonian
pertness and wherever feeling was called for she proved a mistress of tears as
well as of laughter. Matthews and Hutton, edd., Actors and Actresses, V, 31.

28 Filon, The English Stage, p. 121.

78 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

which was in parts very weak. The audiences always laughed heartily at the
fun and frolic which in the days o high spirits I adopted. I remember with
what care I made the famous roly-poly pudding during the first run. 29

So lively was the business Marie Wilton worked out for act three
that she once inadvertently became the heaviest casualty in Robertson's
version of the Crimean War:

When I was playing Blanche Haye in 'Ours/ I nearly killed Mrs. Ban-
croft with the bayonet which it was part of the business of the play for me
to 'fool' with. I charged as usual; either she made a mistake and moved to
the right instead of to the left, or / made a mistake. Anyhow, I wounded
her in the arm. She had to wear it in a sling, and I felt very badly about it,
all the more because of the ill-natured stories of its being no accident. 30

Among the theatrical types Robertson, as the "Theatrical Lounger"
in the Illustrated Times, describes, appears the burlesque actress, a
composite idealization of charm, beauty, and versatility. Here is the
prototype for Polly Eccles; here are the gifts Robertson recognized in
Marie Wilton:

The Burlesque Actress is young, elegant, and accomplished in more than
the usual sense of the word. She is generally handsome, and when her fea-
tures are irregular she more than atones for them by expression expression
that combines good humour, malice, intensity of feeling, Bacchante-like
enjoyment, and devotion. She can sing the most difficult of Donizetti's
languid, loving melodies, as well as the inimitable Mackney's "Oh, Rosa,
how I lub you! Goodie cum!" She can warble a drawing-room ballad of the
"Daylight of the Soul" or "Eyes Melting in Gloom" school, or whisde
"When I was a-walking in Wiggleton Wale" with the shrillness and cor-
rectness of a Whitechapel birdcatcher. She is as faultless on the piano as on
the bones. She can waltz, polk, dance a pas seul or a sailor's hornpipe, La
Sylphide, or the Germ-wine Transatlantic Cape Cod Skedaddle, with equal
grace and spirit; and as for acting, she can declaim a la Phelps or Fechter;
is serious, droll; and must play farce, tragedy, opera, comedy, melodrama,
pantomime, ballet, change her costume, fight a combat, make love, poison
herself, die, and take one encore for a song and another for a dance, in the
short space of ten minutes.

The young actress in possession of all these abilities wakes up in the morn-
ing after her appearance in London to find herself famous. The men at the
clubs go mad about her. She is almost pelted with bouquets and billet-doux;

29 The Bancrofts, pp. 318-19.

so Terry, The Story of My Life, p. 132.

The Tempest 79

enthusiasts crowd round her cab to see her alight or waylay her in omni-
buses; old gentlemen send her flowers, scent-bottles, ivory-backed hair-
brushes, cambric pocket-handkerchiefs, and parasols; matter-of-fact barristers
compose verses in her honour; and photographers lay their cameras at her
feet. Half Aldershot comes nightly up by train. She is a power in London,
and theatrical managers drive up to her door and bid against each other for
her services. Fortunate folks who see her in the daytime complain "that she
dresses plainly" "almost shabbily"; but, then, they are not aware that she
has to keep half a dozen fatherless brothers and sisters and an invalid mother
out of her salary which intelligence, when known to the two or three men
who really care for her, sends them sleepless with admiration. Here is a
household fairy who can polk, paint, make puddings, sew on buttons, turn
heads and old bonnets, wear cleaned gloves, whistle, weep, laugh, and per-
haps love. 31

Hugh Chalcot, first played by J. Clarke, and subsequently taken
over by Squire Bancroft, is as typically a Squire Bancroft role as Mary
Netley is Marie Wilton's. Chalcot is sophisticated, slightly world-weary,
yet withal worshipful at the feet of his adored one.

Mr. Bancroft is an actor of limited range, but, within that range, of re-
markable intelligence, refinement and power. His face is not very mobile
and his features are so marked that the most elaborate make-up is powerless
to disguise them, while his voice, though strong and resonant, is of a some-
what harsh and croaking quality. These peculiarities, combined with his tall
and spare figure, were of the greatest service to him in embodying the lan-
guid, cynico-sentimental, military heroes of Robertson. The playwright no
doubt indicated, but the actor may fairly be said to have created, this original
and essentially modern, if not altogether pleasing type. 32

Chalcot's sudden conversion to the military life and his subsequent
mawkish volubility in the third act are inconsistent with his earlier
cynicism and reserve, but such was the alchemical power of Victorian
love.

The Lady Ptarmigant of Society releases her stays slightly to become
Lady Shendryn. Still the snob and nag, she continues to pop up under
different names in the rest of Robertson's comedies.

With regard to dialogue, Robertson refined the hesitant, hovering
effect in his love scenes and scored a bright success with the con-

31 As quoted in Pemberton, Life and Writings of Thomas William Robertson,
pp. 120-21.

32 Matthews and Hutton, Actors and Actresses, V, 31-32.

8o Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

trapuntal effect he attempted awkwardly in Society. Blanche and
Angus, after exchanging timid vows in London, meet in the Crimea.
With his own gentle tongue in cheek, Robertson awards theirs to the
cat:

Angus: (conscious that Lady Shendryn's eyes are upon him. To Blanche,)
I hope I have the pleasure of seeing you quite well!

Blanche: Quite well; and you?

Angus: Quite well.

Mary: I want a spoon.

(Chalcot gives her the wooden one.)

Chal: Our family plate, (a pause. They sigh.)

Angus: Any news in London, when you left it?

Blanche: No; none (pause.)

Angus: No news?

Blanche: None; none whatever.

Mary: It's so hot.

Chal: Have some ice in?

Blanche: (pauses.) You remember Miss Featherstonhaugh?

Angus: No yes. Oh yes.

Blanche: The Admiral's second daughter, the one with the nice eyes; used
to wear her hair in bands. Her favourite colour was pink?
(Angus puts cup to his lips, but does not dnn\.)

Angus: Yes.

Blanche: She always wears green now.

Angus: Good gracious!

Chal: Can I offer your ladyship the spoon?

Angus: (not Rowing what to say.) I heard that London has been very
dull

Blanche: Oh! very dull.

Angus: Seen anything of our friends, the Fanshawes ?

Blanche: No.

Angus: Not of Mr. Fanshawe?

Blanche: Oh Dick! He's married!

Angus: Married ?

Blanche: Yes; one of Sir George Trawley's girls. 33

Robertson's more striking orchestration of two sets of speakers occurs
at the end of act one. The Shendryn Park is empty for a moment. It
has begun to rain, and Blanche and Angus enter, seeking shelter under
a tree, Blanche covering her head with her skirt. Soon the Shendryns

33 Principal Dramatic Wor\s, II, 473-74.

The Tempest 81

enter and take up a position on the other side of the stage. The con-
versation of the lovers and that of the testy married couple "are to be
taken up as if they were continuous." 34 The resulting scene is rich in
its unfolding layers of dramatic contrast.

Ours, with its patriotic appeal and colloquial flavor, scored a sudden
triumph. For reviewers, Robertson overnight became the touchstone of
what was realistic.

The most endearing and enduring of Robertson's domestic comedies
was Caste, dedicated to Marie Wilton, who had made its success pos-
sible. Caste opened at the Tottenham Road theater April 6, 1867, and
saw revivals in 1871, 1879, anc ^ ^^ tallying 650 performances under
the Bancroft management. Of Robertson's plays, Caste has been the
most frequently reprinted.

It is not difficult to find the reason for the play's contemporary
appeal. Robertson's theme that "what brains can break through love
may leap over" 35 and his theatrical formula for realistic setting and
subdued acting are here best realized in an economic plot and a small,
well-balanced, vehicular cast of characters. George d'Alroy marries
Esther Eccles, an actress, goes of? to war, and is reported killed in
action. Esther, burdened by a drunken father, bravely struggles to
support her child, refusing to surrender it to the Marquise de St. Maure,
d'Alroy's mother, who despises the girl. D'Alroy, unhurt, reappears
at the end, and amid the joyful reunion, the Marquise is reconciled to
her daughter-in-law.

The balance of characters is so pat that it can be diagrammed on an
isosceles triangle. At the respective angles at its base, can be set the two
most sharply contrasted characters, sniveling, drink-sodden Eccles,
ranting about the rights of labor and the snobbish Marquise de St. Maur,
quoting Froissart on the glories of her ancestors. Halfway up the sides
of the triangle, we can place the opposing characters of Sam Gerridge
and Captain Hawtree 36 ; the one contemptuous of "swells," the other
repelled by proletariat egalite. The partners of the mesalliance, Esther
and George D'Alroy., hands clasped reassuringly, stand at the apex.

34 Page 441.

35 Pemberton, ed., Society and Caste, p. 211.

36 "The partj perhaps, which first made me known to London playgoers of
those days.'* The Bancrofts, p. 26.

82 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

Within this pyramiding group, Robertson sustains the now familiar
pattern of feminine foils, in the roles of the two Eccles sisters, Polly
and Esther. Nowhere else did Robertson demonstrate to such an extent
the dramatic efficacy of contrast.

Dialogue, realistic stage-setting, and telling business disguised the
mechanics of contrast. Fresh mounting obscured for contemporary
audiences the thread-bare theatrics of story and characterization. The
artful blending of traditional rnelodramatics and surface realism cheated
current opinion into thinking that a mirror had been held up to nature.
No more revealing appraisal of what transpired on the Prince of
Wales's stage on April 6, 1867, can be found than George Bernard
Shaw's dicta, occasioned by the revival of Caste at the Court Theatre,
June 10, 1897. Because of their immense value, I venture to quote them
in full:

The revival of 'Caste' at the Court Theatre is the revival of an epoch-
making play after thirty years. A very little epoch and a very little play, cer-
tainly, but none the less interesting on that account to mortal critics whose
own epochs, after full deductions for nonage and dotage, do not outlast more
than two such plays. The Robertsonian movement caught me as a boy; the
Ibsen movement caught me as a man; and the next one will catch me as a
fossil.

It happens that I did not see Mr. Hare's revival of 'Caste' at the Garrick,
nor was I at his leave-taking at the Lyceum before his trip to America; so
that until last week I had not seen 'Caste' since the old times when the Hare-
Kendal management was still in futurity and the Bancrofts had not left
Tottenham Court Road. During that interval a great many things have hap-
pened, some of which have changed our minds and morals more than many
of the famous Revolutions and Reformations of the historians. For instance,
there was supernatural religion then; and eminent physicists, biologists and
their disciples were 'infidels/ There was a population question then; and
what men and women knew about one another was either a family secret
or the recollection of a harvest of wild oats. There was no social question
only a 'social evil*; and the educated classes knew the working classes
through novels written by men who had gathered their notions of the sub-
ject either from a squalid familiarity with general servants in Pentonville
kitchens, or from no familiarity at all with the agricultural laborer and the
retinues of the country house and West End mansion. To-day the 'infidels'
are bishops and church wardens, without change of view on their part. There
is no population question; and the young lions and lionesses of Chronicle
and Star, Keynote and Pseudonym, without suspicion of debauchery, seem

The Tempest 83

to know as much of erotic psychology as the most liberally educated Peri-
clean Athenians. The real working classes loom hugely in middle-class con-
sciousness, and have pressed into their service the whole public energy of the
time; so that now even a Conservative Government has nothing for the
classes but 'doles/ extracted with difficulty from its preoccupation with in-
stalments of Utopian Socialism. The extreme reluctance of Englishmen to
maintain these changes is the measure of their dread of a reaction to the
older order which they still instinctively connect with strict application of
religion and respectability.

Since 'Caste' has managed to survive all this, it need not be altogether
despised by the young champions who are staring contemptuously at it, and
asking what heed they can be expected to give to the opinions of critics who
think such stuff worth five minutes' serious consideration. For my part,
though I enjoy it more than I enjoyed 'The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith,* I do
not defend it. I see now clearly enough that the eagerness with which it was
swallowed long ago was the eagerness with which an ocean castaway, suck-
ing his bootlaces in an agony of thirst in a sublime desert of salt water,
would pounce on a spoonful of flat salutaris and think it nectar. After years
of sham heroics and superhuman balderdash, 'Caste* delighted everyone by
its freshness, its nature, its humanity. You will shriek and snort, O scornful
young men, at this monstrous assertion. 'Nature! Freshness!' you will ex-
claim, 'In Heaven's name (if you are not too modern to have heard of
Heaven) where is there a touch of nature in 'Caste*?' I reply, 'In the win-
dows, in the doors, in the walls, in the carpet, in the ceiling, in the kettle,
in the fireplace, in the ham, in the tea, in the bread and butter, in the bassi-
net, in the hats and sticks and clothes, in the familiar phrases, the quiet, un-
pumped, everyday utterance: in short, the commonplaces that are now
spurned because they are commonplaces, and were then inexpressibly wel-
come because they were the most unexpected novelties.'

And yet I dare not submit even this excuse to a detailed examination.
Charles Matthews was in the field long before Robertson and Mr. Ban-
croft with the art of behaving like an ordinary gentleman in what looked
like a real drawing-room. The characters are very old stagers, very thinly
'humanized.' Captain Hawtrey [sic} may look natural in the hands of Mr.
Fred Kerr; but he began being a very near relation of the old stage 'swell,*
who pulled his moustache, held a single eyeglass between his brow and cheek-
bone, said, 'Haw, haw' and 'By Jove, 9 and appeared in every harlequinade
in a pair of white trousers which were blacked by the clown instead of his
boots. Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, defending his idealized early impressions as
Berlioz defended the forgotten Dalayrac, pleads for Eccles as 'a great and
vital tragi-comic figure.' But the fond plea cannot be allowed. Eccles is
caricatured in the vein and by the methods which Dickens had made ob-
vious; and the implied moral view of his case is the common Pharisaic one

84 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

of his day. Eccles and Gerridge together epitomize mid-Victorian shabby-
genteel ignorance of the working classes. Polly is comic relief pure and
simple; George and Esther have nothing but a milkcan to differentiate them
from the heroes and heroines of a thousand sentimental dramas; and
though Robertson happens to be quite right contrary to the prevailing opin-
ion among critics whose conception of the aristocracy is a theoretic one in
representing the 'Marquizzy' as insisting openly and jealously on her rank,
and, in fact, having an impenitent and resolute flunkeyism as her class
characteristic, yet it is quite evident that she is not an original study from
life, but simply a ladyfication of the conventional haughty mother whom
we lately saw revived in all her original vulgarity and absurdity at the
Adelphi in Madison Morton's 'All that Glitters is not Gold/ and who was
generally associated on the stage with the swell from whom Captain Haw-
trey is evolved. Only, let it not be forgotten that in both there really is a
humanization, as humanization was understood in the 'sixties: that is, a
discovery of saving sympathetic qualities in personages hitherto deemed be-
yond redemption. Even theology had to be humanized then by the rejection
of the old doctrine of eternal punishment. Hawtrey is a good fellow, which
the earlier 'swell' never was; the Marquise is dignified and affectionate at
heart, and is neither made ridiculous by a grotesque headdress nor em-
braced by the drunken Eccles; and neither of them is attended by a super-
cilious footman in plush whose head is finally punched powderless by Sam
Gerridge. And if from these hints you cannot gather the real nature and
limits of the tiny theatrical revolution of which Robertson was the hero, I
must leave you in your perplexity for want of time and space for further
exposition. 37

By the time of Caste, Robertson had perfected his brand of dialogue.
Pert, lively, often elliptic, expanding at times into his favorite con-
trapuntal device, it has a pace and naturalness simply not to be felt in
pre-Robertsonian drama. A good example of a fresh quality of writing
can be found in the opening expository scene of the play, from which
I should like to quote. Notice that with the very first speech Robertson
suggests, as was his wont, the illusion of action just off-stage.

George D'Alroy: Told you so; the key was left under the mat in case I
came. They're not back from rehearsal. (Hangs up hat on
peg near door as Hawtree enters.) Confound rehearsal!
Crosses to fireplace.

Hawtree: (bac\ to audience, looking round.) And this is the fairy's

bower!

37 Dramatic Opinions and Essays, II, 281-85.

The Tempest 85

Geo: Yes; and this is the fairy's fireplace; the fire is laid. I'll

light it.

Lights fire with lucifer -from mantel-piece.
Haw: (turning to George.) And this is the abode rendered

blessed by her abiding. It is here that she dwells, walks,

talks, eats and drinks. Does she eat and drink?
Geo: Yes, heartily. I've seen her.

Haw: And you are really spoons! case of true love hit dead.

Geo: Right through. Can't live away from her.

With elbow on end of mantel-piece, down stage.

Haw: Poor old Dal! and you've brought me over the water to

Geo: Stangate.

Haw: Stangate to see her for the same sort of reason that

when a patient is in a dangerous state one doctor calls in

another for a consultation.
Geo: Yes. Then the patient dies.

Haw: Tell us all about it you know I've been away. Sits at

table, leg on chair.

Geo: Well then, eighteen months ago

Haw: Oh cut that! You told me all about that. You went to a

theatre, and saw a girl in a ballet, and you fell in love.
Geo: Yes. I found out that she was an amiable, good girl.

Haw: Of course; cut that. We'll credit her with all the virtues

and accomplishments. 38

The tone of the above passage is anti-heroic. In Hawtree's mock
extravagance, Robertson indeed neatly calls attention to the fact that
he has deliberately left the traditional mode behind him. And this tone
pervades the entire play. A significant stage direction, for example,
follows Esther's recital of her trials as a young girl:

You see this little house is on my shoulders. Polly only earns eighteen
shillings a week, and father has been out of work a long, long time. I make
the bread here, and it's hard to make sometimes. I've been mistress of this
place, and forced to think ever since my mother died, and I was eight years
old. Four pounds a week is a large sum, and I can save out of it. (This
speech is not to be spoken in a tone implying hardship^

It is unthinkable that a modern actor would be directed in this man-
ner. Robertson's prohibition indicates clearly the hold of stylized acting
on the mid-Victorian stage and his conscious fight to stamp it out.

38 Pemberton, Society and Caste, pp. 109-11.

39 pp. 125-26.

86 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

Act one ends with another of Robertson's skillful dual conversations.
While Sam and Polly are engaging in a mock quarrel, George and
Esther desperately argue their chance for happiness together. This effect
implicitly renounces the Meccan lure of centerstage. It was Robertson's
eschewal of broad, heightened effects which tagged his plays as "teacup
and saucer" or "milk and water," or "bread and butter." By these
epithets, critics meant to convey the absence of melodramatic sweep in
his plays. An actor cannot vibrate with emotion while balancing a tea-
cup on his knee. At the same time, it came as a thrilling discovery to
Robertson's audiences that untold suggestion might be conveyed in. the
very serving of a cup of tea. Robertson saw through the sham posturing
of mid-Victorian actors; "It seems a simple thing," he observed, "for a
young lady to hand a young gentleman a cup of tea, but all depends
upon the manner." 40 From the tone of dialogue and scattered stage
directions, we can arrive but imperfectly at a conception of the kind of
acting that was done in his plays. The direction acting style was taking
is unmistakable, but we cannot measure its actual attainment.

There is sufficient evidence, however, to assure us that understatement
in speech had its parallel in movement. Alfred Darbyshire, in his Art
of the Victorian Stage, recorded several very revealing bits of business:

Robertson had a peculiar way occasionally of relying upon action only,
accompanied by no vocal efforts. Some playgoers now living will not have
forgotten some scenes of this description. I shall always remember the scene
where George D'Alroy endeavoured to cheer his wife, and encourage her
to bear the pain of his departure for the war, by asking her to buckle on his
sword and belt. I recollect the last time I saw this scene the wife was played
by my dear old friend Ada Dyas . . . Those who saw Ada Dyas try to
buckle on that sword and belt will never forget the force of expression con-
veyed by action and facial working. The effort was made with a breaking
heart, and with the fearful thought she might never see her husband again.
The effort left her a sad [sic] a grief-laden woman. The audience saw and
understood this and, as Esther fell fainting into the arms of those who loved
her, rose to the situation with prolonged applause. Another instance of this
peculiar trait in the Robertsonian drama may be cited. On D'Alroy's return
he finds that those near and dear to him have been cared for in their poverty
and distress, and that various household comforts have been provided. On
asking how this had happened all heads are turned to the man who believed
in caste and who, in a conceited aristocratic style, had ridiculed his friend's

40 "The Queens of Comedy," London Society, VIII, (September, 1865), 280.

The Tempest 87

affection for the daughter of a plebeian drunken reprobate. D'Alroy walked
up to his friend, Captain Hawtrey [$ic\ 9 and in dead silence grasped him by
the hand. If any words were spoken they were drowned in applause. From
that moment the audience loved the man on whom they had looked as a con-
ceited nincompoop. 41

It is a significant sign of the growth of realism on the stage, that
audiences who had once watched for and vociferously applauded melo-
dramatic points scored by a playwright (such as big confrontation
scenes, denunciations, pietisric avowals, and the like) now greeted with
equal enthusiasm these quieter points.

The spell over Robertson of the picture-frame stage stimulated him
to realistic detail; it also accounts for his persistent use of tableaux. Each
curtain falls on a significant grouping of characters; and as though this
artificial clinching of the action were insufficient, the curtain rises on
a regrouping:

At the end of each act the curtain was raised in response to the genuine
acclamations of the house, when the tableau was ingeniously changed to
mark the natural progress of the story. This novelty, indeed, proved very
successful, and has been imitated often since. 42

I have already remarked on the effective contrast of characters in
Caste. While we may regard such balance as blatantly theatrical, we
are not giving Robertson his due unless we make ourselves aware of
how his characters stand several steps removed from the stereotyped
puppets of burlesque. Victorian characters were as definitely distin-
guished by prescribed costume and mannerism as clown and aerialist
in the big top.

Robertson's inroads on the obvious outlines of fop, dowager, and
ingenue may be anticipated by the preceding analysis of dialogue and
setting. Squire Bancroft who played Hawtree relates how he won the
fight to dissociate in the minds of audiences the connection between
flaxen hair and a dandy:

At dinner I found myself seated next to a soldier whose appearance
faintly lent itself to a make-up for Hawtree. With some diplomacy I after-
wards went to Younge and suggested, if it would suit his views, that he

41 'London, 1907, pp. 140-41.

42 The Bancrofts, p. 96.

88 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

should be the fair man. He asked how on earth he could do such a thing.
Being the sentimental hero, he of course was intended to be dark; while I
was equally compelled to be fair, and wear long flaxen whiskers in what he
called the dandy or fop, a conventional stage outrage of those days, for
whose death I think I must hold myself responsible. I eventually succeeded
in touching a very pardonable vanity the only drawback to his ever-to-be
remembered performance being that he had already partly lost his premiere
jeunesseby suggesting that a chestnut-coloured wig would give him youth.
At any rate, I got my way; but I believe, at the time, I was by more than one
actor thought to be mad for venturing to clothe what was supposed to be,
more or less, a comic part, in the quietest of fashionable clothes, and to
appear as a pale-faced man with short, straight black hair. The innovation
proved to be as successful as it was daring. 43

Caste is a dramatization of the short story, "The Poor Rate Unfolds
a Tale," which Robertson had written for Tom Hood's Rates and
Taxes (1866). There is nothing remarkable to be gathered by com-
paring the two versions, beyond the fact that the short story ends
tragically: George D'Alroy (Daubray) falls on the field of battle.
Behind the short story lay an experience in the Robertson family
annals, recounted by Dame Madge Kendal:

My sister was a very pretty girl and was filling an engagement in a
provincial town in which we were living and in which a regiment was
quartered.

One of the officers fell in love with her, as officers had fallen in love with
beautiful actresses for hundreds of years before, and as they will, no doubt,
be doing hundreds of years hence.

So enamoured was the young man that, in order to get the chance of see-
ing and talking to her, he actually called on our father and arranged to have
lessons in elocution.

The young officer's mother, a typical grande dame of the old regime, very
proud of her family, very proud of her social position, very proud of her son,
was horrified at the possibility of what she regarded as a mesalliance.

She furnished the idea which my brother elaborated into the Marquise de
Saint Maur, who has a long speech in which she describes her ancestry and
her pride that it is mentioned in the famous "Chronicles of Froissart."

I don't know whether the real old lady had ever heard of Froissart or his
Chronicles, but one day, as in the play, in order to find out all she could
about my sister and our family, she called on my father, who, on hearing
her story, assured her that he not only disapproved as highly as she did of

^The Bancrofts, p. 95.

The Tempest 89

the possibility of such a marriage but also that he found her son incapable
of learning anything that he could teach.

In the end, an engagement in the theatre of another town was secured for
my sister and the incipient romance was nipped in the bud. 44

More important, however, than the remembered episode is the in-
fluence of Thackeray. The mesalliance in Caste between an actress and
a scion of the upper class has a close parallel in the "Fotheringay"
episode in Pendennis; and there is, indeed, more than a casual similarity
between Eccles and Captain Costigan. Ernest Reynolds has remarked
an original for Eccles in Dickens* Parlour Orator. 45 Whether or not
Robertson borrowed the plot directly from Thackeray, he certainly in-
vested his dramatization with Thackerayan restraint and irony.

The influence was well recognized at the start. "Zounds!" thundered
Charles Reade, "the brutes yelled at my poor bairn, but I believe the
idiots would have encored that horse-marine caricature of Rawdon
Crawley if he had given the little beast the pop-bottle coram papula"***
Reade nevertheless executed an interesting about face, for in 1871 when
he came to plan A Simpleton, we find him dipping back to Caste for
a character: "For the second woman use Boucicault's second character
in Hunted Down; and perhaps the little actress in Caste with par-
ticulars of class." 47 Clement Scott, the staunch propagandist of the
Robertsonian school, was prepared to discover a Thackerayan stratum
out of all proportion:

He gave us 'Caste,' where we have shadows at least of George and Amelia
in George d'Alroy and Esther, a very respectable echo of Dobbin in Captain
Hawtree, and, throughout, the tender tone and cynicism of Thackeray,
which were very dear to Robertson. . . . His master was Thackeray. 48

Play showed no advance over Robertson's previous work, and, in fact,
was conceded by the Bancrofts to be the least successful of his produc-

44 Pages 10-11.

45 Early Victorian Drama, Cambridge, 1936, p. 89,

46 John Coleman, Players and Playwrights, Philadelphia, 1890, II, 61.

47 The character in A Simpleton Reade modeled after Polly Eccles is Phoebe
Dale. Reade's memorandum is quoted in Malcolm Elwin's Charles Reade. Lon-
don, 1934, p. 250.

48 The Drama of Yesterday and To-day, I, 515.

90 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

tions at the Prince of Wales's. 49 It opened February 15, 1868, played
only about a hundred nights, and was never revived.

The title connotes the background of the gambling resort in Germany
against which the action unfolds. Here gather the Hon. Bruce Fanque-
here and his ward, Rosie; the Chevalier Browne, an adventurer;
Amanda, the wife Browne has deserted; and Frank Price, in love with
Rosie and personally detestable to Rosie's guardian. Browne learns that
Rosie is about to come into an independent legacy and plans a con-
quest. Amanda has followed her husband to the gambling resort and
sees him pursuing Rosie. Despairing of her own happiness she warns
Rosie of Browne's character. Rosie, however, assumes that Amanda is
exposing Frank Price; and to his dismay, she cuts him dead on their
next meeting. When she discovers her error, she begs his forgiveness,
and the two recommence their idyl. Browne becomes thoroughly dis-
credited when Fanquehere discovers that he had kept secret the news
of Rosie's legacy. His nefarious intrigue having collapsed, Browne
affirms his moral conversion and effects a reconciliation with Amanda.
And Fanquehere relents towards Frank Price.

Play failed because it ventured too far into the atmosphere of the
Adelphi, with a massive outdoor set, farcical comic relief, and melo-
dramatic peripetiae. Its unsophisticated appeal was at sharp variance
with the tone Robertson, the Bancrofts and company had labored hard
to establish.

Here was a lapse in Robertson's groping for reform. Here was a
reversion complacent, well-nigh entire to the threadbare non-descript
dramaturgy of the past. Asides, soliloquies, pietism, gags stand unre-
lieved by the introduction of any dynamic qualities. It remains a credit
to critics and audiences that they discriminatingly rejected Play.

In order to involve the hero, Frank Price, in a duel in act four, Robert-
son introduces in act one a character who does not speak English. Two
low-comedy characters, shoddy Sheridanian caricatures, Mrs. Kinpeck
and Benjamin Todder, society-crashing nouveaux-riches, sustain a bar-
rage of insults and in an absurd bid for attention announce that the
hero has been shot. Thus Robertson stoops to a cheap dodge to secure
another sudden reversal.

Theatrical effects are woefully stale. The high society villain, the

49 The Bancrofts, p. 102.

The Tempest 91

Chevalier Browne, reels off nefarious asides to the oblivious accom-
paniment o Mrs. Kinpeck's calculations to break the bank :

Mrs. K: I think this is certain, or at least certain three times out of seven,
19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24. The other numbers n, 17, 30, 32 and 29.
The basis of the calculation is that those numbers the sequences
are all mathematical, and therefore to be calculated, 28 repeats
itself after 28, 7 on fourth, so after 23 and 24, 6 after n, 3, after
17,4.

Enter Browne and leans on colonnade R.

Bro: Off in three days! So, in three days I shall have Rosie all to my-
self, away from Mr. Frank Price. Was it seeing Frank at my wife's
feet that has discomposed her! I'll send Amanda off, perhaps to
America. This old scamp knows nothing of Rosie's good fortune.
Besides I really like the girl, and with her first year's money

Mrs. K: After 17, 4.

Bro: If my first marriage should be blown, old Fan would shut his
mouth for a share.

Mrs. K: One fourth again; always divide by four!

Bro: His influence and mine would win over the girl!

Mrs. K: The same combinations apply to colours

Bro: As for Price, he'll soon be out of the way.

Mrs. K: Stake accordingly.

Bro: Odd that Stockstadt should come to me. I saw the advantage at
once.

Mrs. K: And stake accordingly. 50

Amanda, the faithful, neglected wife who supports her husband by
her earnings as an actress, is an impossible force for good in the world.
As stereotyped as the other characters in the play are, Amanda outdoes
them in sheer, unrelieved artificiality. The following is her awakening
to her husband's deceit:

Lost to me! lost, as the gold, unlucky gamesters stake upon a colour. I
was worthy of his love, and I deserved it. My dream is over, (wiping her
eyes) I know his reason now for keeping me away from him. It was not
shame for my calling! He loved another. Oh! how blind I have been; but
my eyes are opened now. Let me dry them and look at my future face to
face. Poor girl! Poor girl! I fancy I can see myself in her. As she is, I was,
when he wooed and won me! (loo\s off R.) She's coming back, and with
his bouquet in her hand! (goes up) Should I not warn her? Should I not

50 Principal Dramatic Worfys, II, 521.

92 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

show her the pitfall he is preparing for her? He is my husband. It is my
duty to speak to her, and I will. 51

Amid this rank growth of traditionalism, the Robertsonian delicacy
is choked. There is a disarming display of naturalness in opening the
expository scene between Browne and Fanquehere; here the under-
statement which came to the fore in Society and Caste seems to get off
to a fine start :

Bra: Apropos, how is mademoiselle?

(reads paper carefully)

Fan: Quite well she only got a wetting.

Bro: How was it?

Fan: She was fishing. A carp tickled her hook, she got excited, put one foot
on the gunwale of the boat, so she tells me, and over she went, (rising)
I'm glad I wasn't there. I should have gone cranky. Poor Fred's only
legacy, that dear little Rosie! All he left behind him, except debts.
(sits again) You know the story? How father went to the bad, the
same year that I did 'Diadasti's" year: the family wouldn't stand it
any longer. Poor Fred went to the worse, died at Boulogne, where
he was staying under a temporary cloud, (in jerfo) Just before he
went, he said, "Uncle Bruce, there's the baby don't let those damned
people" he meant the family, he always called them the damned
people "don't let them get hold of her, or they'll teach her family
prayers, and to forget her father." Well, I went tick with the under-
taker, and gave Fred a handsome funeraltook Rosie and reared her
from a foal I mean from a baby. By gad! that child, Browne (with
enthusiasm) is the most wonderful child that ever I dry-nursed her.

Bro: But how came young Price to fish her out?

Fan: He was on the island saw her fall in and dived after her like an
otter. Ever been otter hunting? Splendid sport! He brought her to the
shore, and carried her to the Teich haus. 52

The love scene between Rosie, played by Marie Wilton, and Frank
Price 53 sustains, though with less concealed sentimentality, the tech-
nique in the preceding Bancroft productions. Among the ruins of a
castle and to the accompaniment of an Aeolian harp, the timid lovers
convey in halting speeches the suggestion of inhibition which surrounds
love-making in the teacup-and-saucer school of drama. In Play, unfor-

51 Pages 518-19.

52 Page 492.

53 Pages 5 1 1-15.

The Tempest 93

tunately, the inhibition becomes a mannerism. So far does Robertson
veer from original design that he introduces a song in which the two
join their voices.

In his third Bancroft production, Robertson fell from grace. Whether
he was resting on his laurels or whether he had exhausted his resources,
Play exhibits a sudden decline into decadence. Box office receipts drew
him up sharply, and it remains for us to see whether he was able to
redeem himself with his next offering.

School is the most tenuous of Robertson's plays. What were the
ingredients which assured the Bancrofts of its success ? The plot taken
alone is bare-faced: Dr. and Mrs. Sutcliffe run a girls' school, at which
Bella and Naomi teach. Percy Farintosh, Lord Beaufoy, his nephew,
and Jack Poyntz, Beaufoy's friend, overrun the school grounds. Naomi
is an heiress, and Farintosh hopes that his nephew will become in-
terested in her. When Beaufoy, however, falls in love with Bella, Farin-
tosh is furious. Krug, a jealous tutor at the school, tells Mrs. Sutcliffe
that Bella is carrying on a flirtation with Beaufoy, and Mrs. Sutcliffe
sends the girl packing. Beaufoy searches for her in London and brings
her back his bride. Luckily, Farintosh, by this time, has discovered that
Bella is his long-lost granddaughter.

Robertson bathed the gossamer reality of School in an idyllic, pastoral
setting exploiting the fairy-tale atmosphere of his source, Roderick
Benedix's Aschenbrodd^ According to Clement Scott, it is School
which first occasioned the epithet "teacup and saucer":

The milk-jug scene in 'School' has been frequently discussed. The Robert-
sonians think it tender and pretty enough; the anti-Robertsonians vote it to
be bathos. Who shall decide? ... It gave rise to the taunt of the "teacup
and saucer, or milk and water, or bread and butter school" of comedy. 55

References to Cinderella run like a leitmotif throughout the play. The
curtain rises on Bella's reading the tale to a bevy of girls. Lord Beaufoy
and Bella meet because he retrieves the shoe she loses. The play ends
with her putting on the glass slipper her Prince Charming presents
to her.
Robertson considerably revamped Benedix's play. Benedix treated

54 Gesammelte Dramatische Wer\e, Leipzig, 1876, Vol. 21-22.

55 The Drama of Yesterday and To-day, I, 530.

94 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft
the Cinderella motif with naive concentration. We see the Griselda-like
Elfriede doing menial tasks at the girls' school. We see her insulted
by Stichling, a vindictive usher, and unfairly scolded and finally cast
out by Ursula, the headmistress, who is obsessed by the idea that her
husband, Doctor Veltenius, is overly fond of Elfriede. We see her with
her foster mother, Gertrud, who lives in a humble cottage an hour's
walk from the school. Here Elfriede meets Graf Albrecht von Eich-
enow, who is searching for a woman who will love him for himself.
He loses his heart to her simple honesty, they exchange rings, but he
withholds his identity. The following day, he pays a visit to the school.
Elfriede distinguishes herself in a recitation on Columbus but is hurt
by her betrothed's seeming indifference to her. Because of her chores,
Elfriede has access at certain times to the school garden. Kunigunde,
a fellow student, enlists Elfriede's aid in arranging a rendezvous with
a sweetheart. Stichling spies Elfriede in the garden, and reports to
Ursula, who sends the girl away in disgrace. Out of a sense of shame
and humiliation Elfriede nearly collapses at Gertrud's but Albrecht's
reassurances soothe her to sleep. He then tells Gertrud he has been
able to trace Elfriede's parentage from the ring she gave him. It turns
out that she is of noble birth. While she is asleep Albrecht transports
her to his nearby castle, where she awakens to the delicious problem
of gradual adjustment. The play ends with her introduction to an
amazed assembly of invited students and faculty of the school as
Albrecht's betrothed.

Robertson made use of the basic framework of the original but
changed the tone and characterization. He enlarged the role of the
miserable usher, reduced the headmistress from an ogre to a gentle nag,
introduced the senile Beau Farintosh, and, in Naomi Tighe, provided
his heroine with a foil.

He kept the action on the school grounds and emphasized the pastoral
element. He enlivened the fairy-tale atmosphere by introducing the
contrasting, quasi-cynical repartee of the invading nobility. The Benedix
fairy-tale is heavy; the paraphernalia of folk tale is unceremoniously
lugged in. Robertson deftly rewove his source into a delicate lawn and
fixed to it an applique of what currently passed as virile club talk
on women.

There was no doubt that School would be a hit, though some four-

The Tempest 95

score years after its premiere, audiences would be hard-pressed to regard
the play as anything but a cloying, saccharine concoction. Before its
production. Squire Bancroft wrote to a friend: "We are on the eve of
the greatest success we have yet enjoyed." 56 The Bancrofts proudly
presented School on January 16, 1869. It easily wiped out Robertson's
previous failure in Play, for School outnumbered by one hundred per-
formances its closest rival, Ours. Its first run was well over a year
(January 16, 1869, to April, 1870), and it went through generous revivals
in 1873, 1880, and 1882.

Theatrical annals furnish, we believe, no record of a triumph such as
Mr. T. W. Robertson has recently won. On Thursday, in last week, his
comedy of 'Home/ obtained a favourable reception at the Haymarket
Theatre, and, on the following Saturday, a second comedy, entitled 'School,'
was equally successful at the Prince of Wales's. These works are thoroughly
characteristic of Mr. Robertson's method in art. They are simple almost to
baldness in plot, and altogether free from improbable incident or melo-
dramatic situation. Their hold upon an audience is due to three gifts which
Mr. Robertson possesses in a remarkable degree, power of characterization,
smartness of dialogue, and a cleverness in investing with romantic associa-
tions commonplace details of life. Mr. Robertson's plays are brilliant,
epigrammatic, and amusing. They fall short of greatness, but their clever-
ness is remarkable. The one feature they ail possess in common offers a key
to Mr. Robertson's art. In all there is a scene of lovemaking, the effect of
which is heightened by surrounding selfishness and cynicism. Love is the
diamond in the play, worldliness its setting. To youth, Mr. Robertson, copy-
ing Nature pretty closely, gives the interest and romance of life; to maturity
and age he assigns its worldliness and cares. His plays form one sustained
apotheosis of youth. He shows generous instincts and high feeling hiding
under our conventional bearing and garb, but represents both as soon
spoiled by contact with the world. He gives us pretty and romantic idyls and
then bids us laugh at them. His own laughter is always ready, sometimes it is
kindly as the laughter of Thackeray, at others bitter as that of Swift. The
great charm of his works is the atmosphere he throws around the scenes of
lovemaking, which is entirely his own . . .

'School' is in four acts, or one more than 'Home.' It is a fanciful and
graceful work, which, as regards dialogue and situation, is its author's
masterpiece. It has scarcely more pretensions, however, to rank as a comedy
than The Gentle Shepherd' of Allan Ramsay. It resembles a series of town
eclogues, united by the thread of a fairy tale. Two youths, one a lord, the
second an ex-officer of cavalry, fall in love with two school-girls. The noble-

56 The Bancrofts, p. 105.

96 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

man chooses a rich and pretty heiress. After experiencing some slight vicis-
situdes of fortune the two couples are left in a fair way to be married. This
is very nearly all the plot which 'School* possesses. One entire act might be
omitted without any disadvantage or loss to the action. 'Comus* or 'The
Faithful Shepherdess' is scarcely less devoid of sustained dramatic interest
than 'School.' Yet the piece is fresh and charming, and stimulates an aud-
ience more than any work recently produced. Its complete realism, so far
as regards the characters, conduces greatly to this result. But its sentiment,
especially its tenderness, has a singular charm. The scene with which the
first act ends is as dainty as anything in modern literature. The lovers have
met, and have already felt the promptings of love. With half-averted eyes the
maidens disappear in a forest glade watched longingly by their lovers,
while across the back of the stage the school-girls walk in disorderly proces-
sion, singing a pleasant carol, and swinging the wreaths of wild flowers they
have made in the wood. Hardly less effective is the concluding scene of the
third act. That of the fourth drags a little, while the close of the second is
unnatural and farcical. Mr. Robertson has done so much towards reforming
old and irreverent dramatic superstitions, that he might with advantage go
a step further. His pieces are so simple in all respects, that a set scene at the
end of each act is unnecessary. Where the action leads up to it a scene of this
description is tolerable, and is sometimes even advantageous; but if forced it
does more harm than good. Most of Mr. Robertson's scenes are introduced
naturally enough. Sometimes, however, as at the end of the second act, the
writer sacrifices both art and probability to obtain a situation which is out
of keeping with the rest of the play, to which it adds no single element of
strength. Mr. Robertson will do well to discard all search after scenes of
this class. The manner in which the fairy tale of 'Cinderella' is made to
form a framework to the play gives it a particularly pleasant character.
'School' is acted as well as any piece on the English stage. Miss Wilton as
a young heiress, girlish, impulsive and full of kindheartedness and love of
mischief, is admirable. Her archness and mutinerie are charming, and the
entire impersonation is highly artistic. Miss Carlotta Addison is pleasing
and natural, though a little too subdued in manner, as the pupil-governess.
Mr. Montague presented without a shade of exaggeration or caricature a
young nobleman. Mr. Bancroft gives in a manner which, without being
quite finished, is broadly effective, a fashionable young man of the day. As an
old dandy belonging to the period of the Regency, Mr. Hare is finely made
up. His acting is clever and artistic. A little more superbness of bearing, and
at times more deliberateness of movement, would, however, improve the
impersonation. Mr. Addison plays the schoolmaster in good style, but is
over-animated in the examination scene, in which he walks backwards and
forwards with unnecessary vehemence. Mr. Robertson will do well to
excise much of the second act of this piece. He may also with advantage

The Tempest 97

make the behaviour of his hero to his uncle in the last act a little less gratui-
tously insulting. When these alterations are made, his play will be worthy
of the immense favour with which it was received. 57

Tricks and effects, which were by now sure-fire mannerisms, guar-
anteed a warm response. Robertson incorporated contrasting heroines,
Bella and Naomi, the latter, one of Marie Wilton's made-to-order
gamin roles. Squire Bancroft was equipped with the part of the cynical
man of the world (naturally with a military past) who seems "to tell
truths as if they were not true and fibs as if they were truth," 58 and
who surrenders to the weakness of falling in love. And instead of one
Robertsonian love scene, we have two, in which the participants spout
evasive lines, playing the titillating cat and mouse game Robertson had
endeared to audiences.

Robertson shook out his bag of familiar foibles and eccentricities
and came up with a new set of variations: Mr. Sutcliffe, headmaster of
Cedar Grove House, reminiscent of Dr. Strong in David Copperfield,
discourses pedantically on the etymology of love and quotes Latin
verse. Mrs. Sutcliffe, like Lady Shendryn in Ours, cannot put out of
her mind an imagined transgression on the part of her husband thirty-
five years before :

Mrs.S: Do you not remember five and thirty years ago?

Dr. S: Amanthis, to recall that error of my youth

Mrs. S: It is always present to my mind.

Dr.S: My love, I only danced with her three times, and it is five and
thirty years ago.

Mrs.S: I remember we had been scarcely married seven years.

Dr. S: Since then you have been constantly reproaching me.

Mrs. S: It seems but as yesterday.

Dr. S: It seems to me much longer.

Mrs.S: Ah, Theodore, unfeeling

Dr.S: No, no Amanthis, I did not mean that. I meant that five and
thirty years' conjugal serenity ought to compensate for dancing with
a young lady three times at a ball, where from the fault of hosts
too hospitable, the negus had been made too strong. Come,
Amanthis, don't be hard on Theodore. Think what Jason says,
"Credula res amor est 59

57 The Athenaeum, January 23, 1869, pp. 136-137.

58 The Bancrofts, p. 30.

59 Principal Dramatic Worlds, II, 632.

98 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft
Lord Farintosh, enacted by the specialist in old man parts, John Hare,
has poor eyesight and is constantly addressing the wrong person.
"Farintosh is a thin old man of seventy, dressed in the latest fashion,
tvigged, dyed, padded, eye-glassed, a would-be young man, blind as a
batpeering into everything." Thus he joins his eccentric compeers:
Lord Ptarmigant in Society, who falls asleep and trips up people with
his sprawling legs, and Sam Eccles in Caste, who drinks and rants.

The comedy was staged with all the suave finesse and restraint the
play requires. Costumes, properties, and settings contributed to a
unified effect o gentle, yet convincing idealism. One French critic
vowed he could see "a cow in the distance cropping the grass," and
wished he could "get on the stage and roll on the sward." 61

When Farintosh, Beaufoy, and Poyntz assemble for lunch on the
grounds of Cedar Grove House, their food is real. In his World
Behind the Scenes, Percy Fitzgerald celebrated the evolution in stage
realism by calling attention to "the shooting lunch in 'School/ where
liveried servants lay the table, and we see pdte de fois gras and other
dainties in use in average society." 62

It is interesting to observe that the fragile quality of School, and
doubtlessly the paradoxes in the speeches of Poyntz, evoked a tribute
from the young Oscar Wilde:

Dear Mrs. Bancroft,

I am charmed with the photography and with your kindness in sending
it to me; it has given me more pleasure than any quill penman possibly
express, and will be a delightful souvenir of one whose brilliant genius I
have always admired. Dramatic art in England owes you and your husband
a great debt.

Since Tuesday I have had a feeling that I have never rightly appreciated
the treasures hidden in a girls' school. I don't know what I shall do, but
I think I must hold you responsible.

Believe me, sincerely yours,

Oscar Wilde. 63

School captures the essence of the Robertsonian advance. Its tenuous
charm dispenses with melodramatic embroilment, relying in its stead

60 Page 636.

61 The Bancrofts, p, no,

62 London, 1881, p. 84.

63 The Bancrofts, p. 409.

The Tempest 99

on the nostalgic appeal of budding love, exploiting wherever possible
the little, the tender in word and gesture. To derive the maximum
concentration, Robertson reduced his mise en scene to cameo propor-
tions. He raised to new importance the matter o intonation and re-
placed the operatic sawing of arms with the flicker of eyelids.

With M. P., which opened April 23, 1870, we come to the last of the
plays Robertson wrote for the Bancrofts. The Robertson formula was
running thin, for he was a dying man (he dictated the last scenes
from his sick bed), and the Bancrofts produced the play with some
misgivings.

Anxious to secure its success, the Bancrofts expended an unprec-
edented six weeks of rehearsal, bringing the cast to Robertson's home
where he could supervise. The results were gratifying; the public took
to the play and the critics sounded warm praise.

It was at his point in his career at the Prince of Wales's that the
London Times, which previously had contented itself with synopses
and praise, paused to synthesize the Robertsonian reforms and place
them in a historical perspective:

Mr. Robertson depends for the pleasure he gives his audience on other
means than action or story. Give him the smallest material in this kind that
will carry the due amount of character, cohesion, and climax for the capacities
of his actors and the character of his audience, and he will use it so adroitly,
disguise its tenderness by such pleasant artifice of nicely managed situations
and such embroidery of sparkling and vivacious dialogue, he will spice it
with such short and sharp dashes of pleasant cynicism and witty worldli-
ness, the pungency of whose pepper never rises to pain, that in the hands
of the very competent and well-trained company of his own peculiar
theatre he can make certain, humanly speaking, of his effect upon his
public. In the way of light comedy there is nothing in London approaching
the pieces and the troupe of the Prince of Wales', taken together. In a more
spacious theatre, and by an audience more largely leavened with the usual
pit and gallery public, these light and sparkling pieces would probably be
voted slow in movement, slight in texture, and weak in interest. But in
this pretty little bandbox of a house, with such artists as Marie Wilton,
Hare, Bancroft, and their associates to interpret them, almost at arm's
length of an audknce who sit, as in a drawing-roorn, to hear drawing-room
pleasantries, interchanged by drawing-room personages, nothing can be
better fitted to amuse. Author, actor, and theatre seem perfectly fitted for
each other. It shows rare intelligence in all concerned that they have so

ioo Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

quickly discovered this, and so consistently acted on the discovery. The
result is that we have at least one theatre in London to which we need not
be ashamed to take an intelligent foreigner in order to convince him that
the lighter comedy, at least, of our own time can still be written and acted
in England with more finish and truth to nature, perhaps, than in that
earlier time, when weightier stage work was better done than now. 64

Dunscombe Dunscombe, a member o the landed gentry is being
pushed off his ancestral estate by Isaac Skoome, an obnoxious, self-
made bourgeois. To cap Dunscombe's sorrow, he must cooperate in
Skoome's political aspirations in order to stave off bankruptcy. Dun-
scombe hopes that his son, Chudleigh, will marry his niece Cecilia, but
Skoome has a ward, Ruth, a charming Quaker, with whom Chudleigh
falls in love. Cecilia gives her heart to Talbot Piers, who is competing
with Skoome in a parliamentary election. Knowing Piers' adamant
stand against paying the bribe necessary to secure his election, Cecilia,
being a resourceful woman, secretly meets and delivers money of her
own to the political henchmen. Piers learns that Cecilia's bank account
has dwindled by ^2,000 and assumes that her uncle has appropriated
the money to pay for Skoome's election. In anger that Talbot is capable
of believing that either she or her uncle would aid his political opponent,
Cecilia breaks off her engagement. The two, however, patch up their
quarrel; Chudleigh elopes with Ruth, whom Skoome has been planning
to marry, and Talbot wins his seat in Parliament.

M. P. sustains the mood and theme of its predecessors; it makes
neither advance nor retreat. The static sameness of the piece, however,
reveals a very real limitation in the playwright's resources. In the span
of six plays, we can discern freshness falling into mannerism, experi-
ment falling into formula. M. P. contains no hint that Robertson
beheld new vistas of dramatic accomplishment.

The mold of characterization when relinquished was as solidified as
when first formed. Marie Wilton, as Cecilia Dunscombe, independent,
resourceful, volatile, has her usual foil, this time in Ruth Deybrooke, a
soft, idealized creation in Quaker dress. Cecilia has an opportunity to
shock and delight. She makes her first entrance, to the nonplussed
reaction of her fiance, wheeling a perambulator. Subsequently she
breezily advocates equality of man and wife, engineers a midnight

64 April 25, 1870, p. 10.

The Tempest 101

rendezvous with three political henchmen to bribe them to support
Piers's candidacy for Parliament, and extricates herself from an embar-
rassing situation by disguising herself as Ruth and by encouraging
Chudleigh to make love to her.

Isaac Skoome, the vulgar bourgeois, who is after the country seat
of Dunscombe Dunscombe and the Parliamentary seat of Talbot Piers,
is cut from the same mold as the Chodds in Society.

The most valuable creation in the piece is Dunscombe Dunscombe,
played by John Hare. For the first time Hare had a chance to play an
old man who is not farcical. Dunscombe is the model of British labial
rigidity. With dignity, quiet self-mocking, and polished manners, he
constitutes one of Robertson's most telling strokes of naturalness. When
the third act curtain falls to the accompaniment of the auctioneer's
hammer, Robertson specifies:

The actor playing Dunscombe is requested not to make too much of this
situation. All that is required is a momentary memory of childhood
succeeded by the external phlegm of the man of the world. No tragedy, no
tears, or pocket handkerchief. 65

In M. P., Robertson elaborates his lovers' duets into a fugue, with his
two couples wandering on and off the stage, the marivaudage of Cecilia
and Piers contrasting with the mutual discovery of Ruth and Chud-
leigh.

In this play, which marks his involuntary leave-taking of the Prince
of Wales's, Robertson inserts a passing jibe at the current low state of
dramatic activity. Chudleigh, having resolved to become a playwright,
explains to his uncle that burlesque now dominates the stage and that
"Shakespeare is abolished." 66 Burlesque he defines as "an entertain-
ment crammed full of fun and singing, and dancing, and tumbling,
and parodies on popular songs, and it is written in verse." The quality
of the last, he proceeds to illustrate :

She is a blonde most beautiful to see,
I only wish that she belonged to me. 6T

How did Arthur Wing Pinero, who attributed his own inspiration

65 Principal Dramatic Wor%$, I, 365.

66 Page 325.

67 Pages 325-26.

102 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

to Robertson and the Bancrofts, appraise the teacup and saucer school?
In Trelawny of the "Wells' (1898), he attempted to immortalize
Robertson's achievement. Incidentally, one of the striking qualities of
this play is the fact that Pinero surpassed Robertson in blending the
themes of mesalliance and artistic rebellion. As we have seen, Robertson
had frequently included actors or would-be playwrights in his dramatis
personae. In Caste, he had corne closest to a backstage atmosphere. Here,
however, Robertson scarcely exploited local color, concentrating, as he
did, on the mesalliance. And in other plays, such as Birth, M. P., and
Dreams, the theatrical-mindedness of characters has no direct bearing
on the outcome of the plot.

Tom Wench, in Trelawny, represents Tom Robertson just at the
period before he burst into fame. Wench, caught in the toils of "general
utility," currently rehearsing in a play by Sheridan Knowles, chafes at
his limited wardrobe : three wigs, one of which "accomodates itself to
so many periods," 68 a gray felt hat with a broad brim and "imitation
wool feathers," 69 yellow boots and spurs, and red worsted tights which
have become "a little thinner, a little more faded and discolored, a little
more darned. 9 ' 70

In rebellion against the theatrical status quo, Wench would like to
write plays in a realistic vein :

I strive to make my people talk and behave like live people, don't I ?

To fashion heroes out of actual, dull, every-day men the sort of men you
see smoking cheroots in the club windows in St. James's street; and heroines
from simple maidens in muslin frocks. Naturally, the managers won't
stand that 71

When Torn Wench visits a mansion in the West End, he delightedly
considers the possibilities of the drawing-room as a stage setting:

This is the kind of chamber I want for the first act of my comedy .

I tell you, I won't have doors stuck here, there, and everywhere; no, nor
windows in all sorts of impossible places.

68 Chicago, n. d, p. 16.

69 Page 17.

70 Page 1 8.

T1 Pages 20-21.

The Tempest 103

{Pointing to the left.] Windows on the one side [pointing to the right],
doors on the other just where they should be, architecturally. And locks
on the doors, real loc\$, to work; and handles to turn! [Rubbing his hands
together gleefully.] Ha, ha! you wait! wait ! 72

Meanwhile Rose Trelawny's brief recess from the "Wells" gives her
a chance to evaluate the acting style which she has hitherto taken for
granted. After being with "real" people, she discovers that "she can
no longer spout, she can no longer ladle, the vapish trash, the the
the turgid rodomontade." 73 Only as the heroine in Tom's own play will
she be able to rediscover herself. In the brief episode in which that play
is being rehearsed, we hear an echo of Robertson's natural, elliptical
dialogue, and we see Wench directing his actors with meticulous at-
tention to life-like detail.

In conjunction with the Bancrofts,, Robertson had striven to create
an antidote to the obvious artificiality of burlesque, farce, and melo-
drama. His goal was to tap the resources of the stage in the realm of
suggestion, to transform audiences from passive gapers to alert par-
ticipants. As for method, Robertson veered away from the tortuous
intricacies of Scribe; he chose rather to catch the gleanings of per-
sonality revealed by gesture, facial expression, and intonation. The
truths which came to light in this new atmosphere had been so by-
passed that they dazzled an enraptured public. And yet, from this
analysis of his plays we see that his reach was limited. He was content
to abide by many set traditions, and within the compass of his best
work the reforms he initiated became an old refrain. In the concluding
chapter, I shall attempt to analyze the reasons for his limitations.

72 Pages 95-96.

73 Page 117.

CHAPTER FIVE
ROBERTSON, THE SOCIAL THINKER

UP to this point, we have concerned ourselves in the main with
the reforms in playwriting and staging instituted by Robertson
and abetted by the sympathetic Bancroft management. That his innova-
tions were limited is, I think, a fact manifest even in terms of Vic-
torian drama. Contemporary Continental drama had certainly gone far
beyond Robertson in facing up to the truths of society. Within a few
short years, English dramatists, such as Pinero and Jones, were to
take the Robertsonian advances very much for granted, and move on
to richer pastures. In taking leave of Robertson, then, I wish to pay
particular attention to the cause of the abortive nature of the so-called
Robertsonian revolution. Why was his work so quickly eclipsed, even
though the realistic elements he released fed the atmosphere of all
subsequent drama?

The reason is fairly simple. Robertson hit upon some interesting
ways of saying things (ways, it is true, which were not new and
mysterious to the drama, but which playwrights had lost sight of) , but
unfortunately he had nothing very much to say.

His period was one of tremendous conflict in which the artists of
the first rank were forced to define their position. It was an era chal-
lenged by the onslaughts of science, by a militant bourgeoisie seeking
wider political expression, by the disruptions of a sprawling indus-
trialism. It was a world through which the intellectual elite walked,
menaced on the one side by crass materialism and on the other by the
specters of Jacobinism.

The leading writers of the century fell athwart the compelling issues
of the times. They took sides, of course, becoming apologists of the
old order or prophets of a new. But the literature of the age, regard-
less of particular partisan approach, is remarkable for its penetrating
recognition of the issues at stake so penetrating, in fact, that the stu-

Robertson, the Social Thinker 105

dent must marvel at how Victorians have crystallized for him the
disturbances implicit in capitalism of the twentieth century. Victorian
writers explored the implications of factory life, class conflict, and
suburbanism, tracing their influence on the thinking and behavior
of society.

To move from the poets, novelists, and essayists of the Victorian
period to the playwrights is to move from the complex to the simple,
from analysis to shibboleth. It is fascinating to watch the intellectual
conflicts of the age filter down to the level of the footlights, where they
resolve into large, bold patterns.

To catch this process, we have merely to visualize for ourselves the
vast numbers of Englishmen whose insight into their environment was
no deeper than that they received from over the footlights. The drama
insists on direct and immediate communication of ideas. If a society
responds enthusiastically to the plays of its day, we can take those plays
as a reasonably safe gauge of its thinking. The drama corrals the at-
titudes and aspirations of its audience. It reaches out for the common
denominator; it epitomizes the social philosophy of a period.

A great measure of Robertson's success lay in his putting contem-
porary life on the stage. At least he deluded himself and his audience
into thinking that he had. Actually, Robertson fell prey to the pervasive
myths and wishful thinking of his era he fell prey to what we have
come to designate as the smug, complacent aspect of Victorianism. It
is his unquestioning acceptance of the dominant modes of thinking
which accounts for the limited extent of his pioneering, for the same-
ness of his plays, and for the short duration of his place on the playbill.

I should like to take up the points of view to which he subscribed.
We shall discover them checking at every point his dramatic inventive-
ness. They lie at the root of his failure to invest his plots and characters
with honesty. Prominent among these guiding ideas appears the ac-
ceptance of the frailty of woman, a conception which led to her ideal-
ization. Her apotheosis was a heritage from the romantic revival at the
beginning of the century. But the original flowering of the ideal,
emerging from a romantic matrix of platonism, humanitarianism, and
the exciting discovery of intuition, wilted into a fainting, helpless crea-
ture. The decadent residue of romanticism, of course, harmonized
readily with bourgeois values; the rising nation of shopkeepers, keen

io6 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

on respectability and quick to capitalize on a marriageable commodity,
took to its collective heart the sentimental heroine whose reputation
must at all costs be sheltered.

The fact that audiences instinctively preferred the vivacious roles of
Marie Wilton, which hinted audaciously at independence, suggests that
below the surface forces were gathering for the overthrow of an im-
possible enslavement. For the time being, however, the Noras, the Mrs.
Tanquerays and Ebbsmiths were unheard from, and playwrights led
the nation's anthem to an idealized conception.

In the following description of Mademoiselle Favart of the Comedie
Fran^aise Robertson gives explicit expression to his embodiment of the
feminine ideal:

She seems to be exactly the sort of woman who would take a delight in
sacrificing herself for somebody a lover, a brother, a husband, a child, or
a father and make no sign. If the world knew of her sacrifice, or even
guessed at it, she would feel robbed of half her sentimental pleasure. To
charm her thoroughly, there must be something stealthy in her goodness
and her love. She takes delight in being an anonymous benefactor. She is
too high-minded to advance a step. She conceals emotion, but not under a
smile. She is the antagonistic thing to a coquette. The heart of the man she
loves must be as keen and prescient as her own, and must guess at her
affection. Their love must be too high and holy to be spoken of. Always
ready to perform her share of the duties of the household, her love is a
thing apart from contact with the world. 1

And this ideal lies behind his tender characterizations: Blanche Haye
in Ours, Esther Eccles in Caste, Rosie in Play, Bella Marks in School,
Ruth Deybrooke in M. P. Where society transforms woman into a
passive, delicate ideal, we encounter on the stage an even more height-
ened stereotype, from which there is no deviating species.

A second guiding idea in Robertson's plays is the acceptance as in-
evitable and desirable of the division of society into social classes. In
truth, his ideology summarizes, only more bluntly, the cautious rational-
ization of the liberal humanitarians of the age. We can bring to mind
Tennyson's distrust of the masses and Arnold's implicit retreat from
the full implications of democracy. The Chartist novelists, Kingsley,
Disraeli, Dickens, voluntary spokesmen for the oppressed, after de-

1 "The Queen of Society," London Society, VIII (September, 1865), 278-79.

Robertson, the Social Thinker 107

livering themselves of diatribes against capitalist exploitation, stop
short with a word to the wise and a plea for paternalism.

The fears o the French Revolution had not played themselves out.
Social thinkers still looked to the aristocracy as a wholesome check on
excessive inroads of the proletariat. The middle classes, persistent
enough in their struggle with the lords of the realm on the economic
and political fronts, eyed wistfully the scutcheons of established, stable
position. Throughout his plays, Robertson shows a sentimental attach-
ment to noblesse oblige and the other romantic qualities of a decaying
class. While touched by the currents of democratic feeling, he remains
aloof from the proletariat. Caught between humanitarian sympathy
and distruust of the masses, his position is thus basically akin to that
of the Chartist novelists. Because he made no incursions into the prob-
lems of the dispossessed, his work does not even display the lively
understanding and sympathy of the Chartists.

Robertson's one representative of a militant proletariat, Eccles in
Caste, is a distasteful caricature. I find it impossible to agree with
Ernest Reynolds when he says that Caste "succeeded admirably in
describing social conditions as they were, without prejudice and with-
out propaganda." 2 Robertson, in creating Eccles, was allying himself
with those who deplored the thrust of the working class towards suf-
frage and unionism. Robertson makes Eccles detestable, but does not
so much as hint that his environment has produced his deficiencies.
The following, by Bulwer-Lytton, strikes the dominant chord in Vic-
torian social thinking with regard to the working class. The important
element to be noticed in such statements is the emphasis, which is not
one of vigorous progressivism, but a tacit, defeatist acceptance of an
inevitable condition:

The working class have virtues singularly noble and generous, but they
are obviously more exposed than the other classes to poverty and passion.
Thus in quiet times their poverty subjects them to the corruption of the

2 Early Victorian Drama, p. 89.

A contemporary review in the London Times shows an immediate appreciation
of the fact that Robertson had stacked the cards in favor of the status quo:

"Mr. Robertson, while impelled by the theatrical Parcae towards a democratic
goal, which he is likewise forced to reach, provides himself with a good con-
servative snaffle, and is scrupulously careful that his audience shall not mistake
a sentiment for a principle." April n, 1867, p. n.

io8 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

rich; and in stormy times, when the State requires the most sober judg-
ment, their passion subjects them to the ambition of the demagogue. 3

The same contemptuous note is taken up by Charles Reader

And here, gentlemen of the lower classes, a word with you. How can
you, with your small incomes, hope to be well off, if you are more extrava-
gant than those who have large ones ?

"Us extravagant?" you reply.

"Yes! your income is ten shillings a-week; out of that you spend three
shillings in drink; ay! you the sober ones. You can't afford it, my boys.
Find me a man whose income is a thousand a-year; well, if he imitates you,
and spends three hundred upon sensuality, I bet you the odd seven hundred,
he does not make both ends meet; the proportion is too great. And two-
thirds of the distress of the lower orders is owing to this that they are more
madly prodigal than the rich; in the worst, lowest, and most dangerous item
of all human -prodigality!*

In keeping with this point of view, Robertson puts into the mouth
of a sniveling, hypocritical parasite distorted catchwords of reform:

Poor Esther! Nice market she's brought her pigs to ugh! Mind the baby
indeed! What good is he to me? That fool of a girl to throw away all her
chances! a honourable-hess and her father not to have on him the price
of a pint of early beer or a quartern of cool, refreshing gin! Stopping in
here to rock a young honourable! Cuss him! (business, puffs smo\e in baby's
face, L. H. of cradle, rocking it) Are we slaves, we working men? (sings
savagely)

"Britons never, never, never shall be "

(nodding his head sagaciously, sits R. of table L.) I won't stand this, I've
writ to the old catI mean to the Marquissy to tell her that her daughter-
in-law and her grandson is almost starving. That fool Esther's too proud to
write to her for money. I hate pride it's beastly! (rising) There's no
beastly pride about me. (goes up L. of table, smacking his lips) I'm as dry
as a lime-kill, [sic] (ta\es up jug) Milk! (with disgust) for this young
aristocratic pauper. Everybody in the house is sacrificed for him! (at foot
of cradle, R. C., with arms on chair bacJ() And to think that a wording
man, and a member of the committee of the Banded Brothers for the
Regeneration of Human Kind, by means of equal diffusion of intelligence
and equal division of property, should be thusty, while this cub (draws
aside curtain, and loo^s at child. After a pause) That there coral he's got

3 The Earl of Lytton, The Life of Edward Bulwer First Lord Lytton, London,
1913, II, 316.

4 Christie Johnstone, London, 1900, p. 191.

Robertson, the Social Thinker 109

round his neck Is gold, real gold! (with hand on \nob at end of cradle,
R. C.) Oh, Society! Oh, Governments! Oh, Class Legislation!/* this right?
Shall this mindless wretch enjoy himself, while sleeping, with a jewelled
gawd, and his poor old grandfather want the price of half a pint? No! it
shall not be! Rather than see it, I will myself resent this outrage on the rights
of man! And in this holy crusade of class against class, of the weak and
lowly against the powerful and strong (fainting to child) I will strike
one blow for freedom! (goes to bac\ of cradle) He's asleep. It will fetch
ten bob round the corner; and if the Marquissy gives us anything it can be
got out with some o' that, (steals coral) Lie still, my darling! it's grand-
father's a-watching over you. 5

Robertson zealously patrols class lines, 6 allowing an occasional break-
through because of superlative worth.

His creed Is essentially Victorian; he never tires of informing us that East
is East and West is West, that classes should never mingle, that the working
man should learn to stay in his appointed place and the bourgeoisie have
no yearnings to intrude into the often impoverished drawing-rooms and
libraries of Aristocratic Castle. In this way, Robertson's teaching must have
been entirely in accord with the sentiments of the larger moiety of his
audience. 7

Two statements in Caste, taken in conjunction, express the theme of
that play and the sentiment behind all of Robertson's plays. Sam
Gerridge, with characteristic directness, supplies one half of the formula:

People should stick to their own class. Life's a railway journey, and
Mankind's a passenger first class, second class, third class. Any person
found riding in a superior class to that for which he has taken his ticket
will be removed at the first station stopped at, according to the bye-laws of
the company. 8

George D'Alroy, quoting from Tennyson's "Lady Clara Vere de Vere,"
supplies the other half:

"True hearts are more than coronets,
And simple faith than Norman blood." 9

5 Principal Dramatic Worlds, pp. 120-21.

6 It is an Ironic commentary on the ideology of Caste t that news about the
Reform Bill of 1867 crowded a review of the play off the pages of the London
Times until April n.

7 Allardyce Nicoll, British Drama, New York, 1925, p. 348.

8 Principal Dramatic Worlds, pp. 93-94.

9 Page 84. "Lady Clara Vere de Vere" also furnished the inspiration for
Robertson's Dreams,

no Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

The arbitrary representatives of the class in Caste are permitted a lesson
in mutual understanding. There is a general awakening to the universal
qualities o goodness; class lines, yes, but not barbed-wire fences,
bristling with ugly hostility. Rather useful, protective lines tying the
nation into one benevolent, peaceful entity. Hawtree, after his exposure
to the Eccles family, confesses in an aside: "Ton my word, these are
very good sort of people. I'd no idea" 10 Sam, the belligerent gas-fitter*
after being forced to observe Hawtree at close quarters, grudgingly
admits in an aside: "Now who'd ha' thought that long swell 'ad it in
'im?" n The reconciliation between Hawtree and Sam is handsomely
democratic:

Haw: . . . Mr. Gerridge, I fear I have often made myself very offensive to

you.

Sam: Well, sir, yer 'ave!
Haw: ... I feared so. I didn't know you then. I beg your pardon. Let me ask

you to shake hands to forgive me, and forget it. (offering his hand)
Sam: (taking it) Say no more, sir; and if ever I've made myself offensive to

you, I ask your pardon; forget it, and forgive me. 12

In spite of this outburst of brotherhood, the play ends on a more
sober, practical note:

Haw: ... A gentleman should hardly ally himself to a nobody.

Geo: My dear fella, Nobody's a mistake he don't exist. Nobody's nobody!

Everybody's somebody.
Haw: Yes. But still Caste.
Geo: Oh, Caste's all right. Caste is a good thing if it's not carried too far.

It shuts the door on the pretentious and the vulgar; but it should open

the door very wide for exceptional merit. 13

In this proposition Robertson finds the material for his drama. Henry
Arthur Jones was later to decry the falsehood and abortive nature of
such a starting point in dramatic art:

The question has an aspect of expediency that it may be well to deal with
first. Obviously as a matter of expediency and worldly prudence, a dramatist
will do wisely to avoid giving offence to the prejudices and susceptibilities
of any great portion of his possible audiences. Indeed, so perfectly has this

10 Page 130.

11 Page 134.

12 Pages 135-36.

13 Pages 43-44.

Robertson, the Social Thinker in

rule been understood upon the recent English stage, so eager have we been
to exclude everything that might be offensive or tedious or incomprehensible
to any possible spectator, that by a process of continual exhaustion and
humble * deference to everybody's prejudices we have banished from the
stage all treatment of grave subjects but what is commonplace and cursory
and conventional. The course of the drama has been diverted and hope-
lessly cut off from the main current of modern intellectual life. While the
companion arts painting, poetry, and music are allowed to present every
aspect of human life, on the stage only the narrow, ordinary, convenient,
respectable, superficial contemplation and presentation of human affairs is
allowed. Though off the stage the gravest matters have been in heated
prominence, on the stage nothing of much greater importance has been
bruited than how a tradesman's family may prepare itself for alliance with
the aristocracy. And such tradesmen! And such aristocrats! 14

The aristocracy comes in for a good deal of sympathy. Traditions
harking back to the Restoration stage, of course, afforded stock comic
types: those who failed to carry the mantle of their class gracefully
invited ridicule: the snobbish dowager (Lady Ptarmigant in Society,
Lady Shendryn in Ours, and Marquise de St. Maur in Caste), the
eccentric, doddering old man (Lord Ptarmigant in Society and Beau
Farintosh in School). But such are the obvious deviations from the
norm, recognized and tagged in the canons of Restoration drama and
bequeathed as fair game.

Thus it was according to Hoyle that Lady Ptarmigant so betray
her class as to pander to the Chodds. Since she was an accepted thea-
trical type, anything might be expected from her.

As the "owls" were so much diverted by the faithful portrayal of their
resorts and of their customs, thus presented for the first time upon the stage,
there was no reason that Society would take offence over the extraordinary
and incongruous proceedings at the establishment of Lord and Lady
Ptarmigant. This kind of comic libel was not unknown; Bulwer, for in-
stance, had set himself to depict the union of the old aristocracy with the
new, the naive veneration displayed by Riches for Rank, and on the other
hand, the prostration of Rank before Riches. No one showed astonishment
at seeing Lady Ptarmigant smilingly take the arm of old Chodd, though his
language and his manners were those of a costermonger, and though his
lordship's valet would probably have hesitated about letting himself be seen
with him in a public-house. 15

14 The Renascence of the English Drama, London, 1895, pp. 28-29.

15 Filon, The English Stage, p. 116.

ii2 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

From the school of early and mid-Victorian melodrama comes the
slippery-tongued villain of Bond Street. The progenitor of Raffles,
though at this point in his evolution unredeemed by altruism, the
villain of birth afforded a titillating variation in melodrama. Enjoying
entree everywhere and possessed of devilishly good manners, he dis-
mayed audiences by his apparently undetectable villainy. Robertson
utilized the type in the Chevalier Browne in Play, but at the final cur-
tain, it will be remembered :

My repentance is sincere. Indeed I meant to seek you at your hotel, confess
all, and implore your pardon. It is now too late. I have been dazzled, but
I am not bad at heart. 16

With the exception of these smoothed theatrical coins, Robertson
treats the upper class with respect tantamount to reverence. They be-
come the responsible guardians of all that is noble and pure in the
stream of English tradition, protecting their charge against the vulgar,
elbowing encroachments of the middle class. At the final curtain of
Progress, the characters suddenly assume symbolic garb. Eva becomes
England; Feme, the bourgoisie; Lord Mompesson, the aristocracy:

Eva: A few more minutes to thank you so much for all your goodness
to me. I shall get better; I feel I shall! When the snow melts from
the grass, I shall be stronger; and when the summer covers those
black branches with green leaves, I shall be able to walk down the
avenue.

Per: With me by your side?

Lor dM: You, on one side me on the other. Left to yourself your pace
would be too fast, and mine would be too slow. You have youth,
strength, and speed; I have age, judgment, and experience. Let Eva
walk between us.

Eva: (as they are going round door R.) My path must lead to happi-
ness when love and hope conduct me, and affection and experience
guide me (smiling) That's Progress! 17

Those in the plays on whom Robertson heaps ridicule are the upstart
bourgeois, those who have made their money in trade and manufactur-
ing and now expect to buy their way into society.
The class types which emerged from the Industrial Revolution pro-

1S Principal Dramatic Wor^s, II, 539.
17 Pages 600-01.

Robertson, the Social Thinker 113

vided Robertson with material for writing Victorian comedies of
manners. Robertson did focus his attention, albeit superficially, on the
special foibles of the nouveaux riches, their faux pas, vaulting ambi-
tion, and crass values. Certainly, one would say, abundant riches for
a revitalized comedy of manners. He took seriously, however, the defen-
sive disdain of the rich; he sentimentalized conservatism. In his depic-
tion of the social-climbing parvenu, he introduced an acrid note. Thus
Robertson was incapable of assuming the disinterest necessary to the
genre. Sentimentality strained to the breaking point the thin strand
of objectivity, and objectivity is a prime requisite for the creation of a
comedy of manners.

In Society, the ogres begot by the Industrial Revolution are the Messrs.
Chodd, Junior and Senior. With unblinking arrogance they set out
to buy their way into polite circles. Equipped with cash, their first step
is to pave the way of John Chodd, Junior, into Parliament by investing
in a newspaper. And with this aim they approach Sidney Daryl, a
writer in straitened circumstances. The chrysalid socialite unloads his
philosophy on Daryl:

Chodd, Jun: . . . The present age is, as you are aware a practical age. I
come to the point it's my way. Capital commands the world.
The capitalist commands capital, therefore the capitalist com-
mands the world.

Sidney: . . . But you don't quite command the world, do you?

Chodd, Jun: Practically, I do. I wish for the highest honours I bring out
my cheque-book. I want to go into the House of Commons
cheque-book. I want the best legal opinion in the House of
Lords cheque-book. The best turn out cheque-book. The
best friends, the best wife, the best trained children cheque-
book, cheque-book, and cheque-book.

Sidney: You mean to say with money you can purchase anything.

Chodd, Jun: Exactly. This life is a matter of bargain.

Sidney: But "honour, love, obedience, troops of friends"?

Chodd, Jun: Can buy 'em all, sir, in lots, as at an auction.

Sidney: Love, too?

Chodd, Jun: Marriage means a union mutually advantageous. It is a civil
contract, like a partnership.

Sidney: And the old-fashioned virtues of honour and chivalry?

Chodd, Jun: Honour means not being a bankrupt. I know nothing at all
about chivalry, and I don't want to.

ii4 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft
Sidney: Well, yours is quite a new creed to me, and I confess I don't

like it. .

Chodd, ]un: The currency, sir, converts the most hardened sceptic.

In Ours, Hugh Chalcot, genteel, indifferent to the commercial suc-
cess which has made possible his moving in aristocratic circles, corn-
merits cynically on the manage de convenance. The institution domi-
nated bourgeois thinking, reducing the training and indoctrination of
a daughter to something like the promotion of a saleable commodity.
The institution likewise took hold of aristocratic families, as a desperate
measure to uphold fast-fading grandeur. Accordingly Sir Alexander
Shendryn had smiled on the possible union of his daughter Blanche
with Chalcot.

Choi: . . . You know that I proposed to her?

Angus: Yes.

CM: But I'm proud to say that she wouldn't have me. Ah! she's a sensible
girl; and her spirited conduct in saying "No!" on that occasion
laid me under an obligation to her for life.

Angus: She declined?

Chtd: She declined very much. I only did it to please Sir Alick, who thought
the two properties would go well together never ^ mind the two
humans. Marriage means to sit opposite at table, and be civil to
each other before company. Blanche Haye and Hugh Chalcot.
Pooh! the service should have run: "I, Brewhouses, Malt-kilns,
Public-houses, and Premises, take thee, Landed Property, grass and
arable, farm-houses, tenements, and Salmon Fisheries, to my wedded
wife, to have and to hold for dinners and evening parties, for car-
riage and horseback, for balls and presentations, to bore and to
tolerate, till mutual aversion do us part"; but Land, grass and arable,
farm-houses, tenements, and Salmon Fisheries said "No"; and
Brewhouses is free. 19

Chalcot is a rare specimen of a sympathetically-drawn bourgeois.
Disillusioned by match-making matrons and sensitive about his income,
he effects a mocking, cynical air. Wishing to give a poor sergeant, who
has become the father of twins, fifty pounds, he hesitates before a dis-
play of conspicuous consumption:

There's the sergeant. I must tip him something in consideration of his
18 II, 691-92.

19 n, 434-

Robertson, the Social Thinker 115

recent domestic affliction, (takes out poc%et-boo\) I'll give him a fiver
eh? Here's Angus's fifty, I'll give him that, (pausing) No; he'll go men-
tioning it, and it will get into the papers, and there'll be a paragraph about
the singular munificence of Hugh Chalcot, Esq., the eminent brewer!
eminent! as if a brewer could be eminent! No; I daren't give him the
fifty. 20

Philistinism in Play finds its prototype in Mr. Benjamin Todder.
Having made his fortune in starch, he buzzes and beats his wings
against the bright lights of society. Mrs. Kinpeck, a widow who presses
her unwelcome adulation on him, introduces Todder to Sir Bruce
Fanquehere, M. P.:

Mrs. K: Dear Mr. Bruce, you have seen his name in the advertisements
in the newspapers. "Use only Bodmin Tedder's Original Patent
Starch." "Do you like a stiff, clean collar? Use Bodmin Tod"

Tod: (wincing) Um! Yes, Mr. Bruce Fanquehere, as my dear friend,
Mrs. Kinpeck (aside) curse her! (aloud) says, I have made
my fortune by starch. I'm not ashamed of it. I am proud of it.
(goes up.)

Mrs.K: Stuff! (smelling bottle)

Fan: Sir! It is a stuff to be proud of, (declaiming) The British mer-
chant who founds a colossal fortune, forwards his country's in-
terests, and benefits his fellow man by means of

Mrs. K: The wash-tub.

Tod: Starch!

Fan: Starch is one of the noblest exemplars of a commerce na-
tionality, and national commerce (aside) Confound it! Those are
the sort of lies I don't tell well.

Tod: My dear Mr. Bruce. Yes; I worked hard. I made my fortune, but
I lost my stomach. It's gone!

Fan: Gone? God heavens! Where?

Tod: I mean my digestion. I worked too hard. Business is incompatible
with good digestion. My doctor told me so. I resolved to sacrifice
myself on the altar of commerce. I grew rich and dyspeptic. I am
proud of it! Proud of both, sir; proud of both. 21

Sir Bruce Fanquehere, contemptuous of Todder's social-climbing, is
not above capitalizing on him:

I wonder if old Todder is good for that amount paying interest, of

20 Page 438.
21

n6 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

course. I could pay him the interest. He seems toadyish to what he calls
rank! He's an amusing scoundrel. Title dazzles him, and makes him feel
like a child at its first exhibition of fireworks. My Lord-Fizz! Sir Some-
bodyWhiz! My Lady Fizzle-Fozzle! (imitating fireworks, by twisting
his stick and going towards R. I E) I'll try it on you, my dear Mr. Bodmin
Todder. I'll call him Boddy, or Toddy. Stupid old Noddy. 22

In M. P. the fate of a borough lies in a campaign between the bank-
rupt Dunscombe Dunscombe and the detestable, pushing Isaac Skoome.
Skoome holds a mortgage over Dunscombe and uses his strategic advan-
tage to force Dunscombe to aid him in his political aspirations. Asked
to describe Skoome, Dunscombe replies:

He is hardly a man. He is a money-bag with a dialect one of those rough
brutes who pleases plebeians because he talks to them in their own bad
English. An old ruffian, who, because he is rich, people persist in calling
a rough diamond. Diamond! It is but a lump of the commonest clay who
has never been moulded or burnt into a brick. 23

And to his niece's query as to why Dunscombe receives Skoome at
his home, he relies:

Policy, my child. It is sometimes necessary to hold the candle to a capital-
ist. If he forces a sale, the property will go for less than it's worth, and that
would be a robbery of my creditors. 24

Skoome is Eccles all over again an Ecclcs, that is, who saw his chance
and made good. The broad strokes of the caricaturist make him a
travesty of the enfranchised bourgeois. Employing the oratory on which
he counts to sweep him into Parliament, Skoome acknowledges his
welcome:

Mester Dunscombe (holding out a large coarse hand}, that is the hand
of a honest man, as has worked his way up from the lowest round of the
social ladder to modest competence and honourable independence. It is
rough, but it is clean; it is hard, but it is manly. It never closed, save in the
grip of friendship, or to cement a good bargain. It never opened but to
melting charity. 25

Robertson, then, stacked the cards in favor of the old order. The

22 Page 511.

23 1, 329-

24 Page 329.

25 Page 332,

Robertson, the Social Thinker 117

working man drank and grumbled. The bourgeoisie pushed and
elbowed. The landed aristocracy, alone, had a sense of responsibility.
A third restricting point of view to which Robertson subscribed is the
glory of militarism. He joined his voice to the hosannas which were
swelling in intensity to greet the fin de siecle revival of imperialism.
Sidney Daryl has been a lancer, Chalcot wins glory in the Crimea,
George D'Alroy and Harold Fane become heroes in India. Frank
Price is tricked into a duel with a Prussian officer because the villain
in the piece is able to appeal to Price's patriotism: "Do not be under
the least misapprehension nor fear that the reputation of England,
Ireland, and Scotland, or of Englishmen abroad, will suffer at my
hands." 26 Before the duel, Price reassures himself that "military rank,
wrinkles, medals, and all told, he is only a foreigner." 27 Jack Poyntz
finds it "hardly worth while" 28 to mention his service at the Battle
of Inkerman. Talbot Piers has been an army officer. 29 The whole of
Ours is drenched in a romantic glow of militarism. Rittmeister Harfthal
in Dreams rises to a rhapsodic outburst:

There is no finer art than fighting than the habit of obedience and com-
mand. What melody like a gallop? What harmony like a charge? What
music like a trumpet or a drum? 30

In The Nightingale, Keziah holds Mary's baby to the window: "Look
at the pretty soldiers, dear, who go out to fight and die in cold weather
and hot weather, that pretty babies like you may lie soft and warm,
and have no fear of nasty foreigners." 31

War makes no inquiry into the right and wrong in the Franco-
Prussian war, resting with praise for the patriotic mobilization in both
countries. Captain Sound, the Englishman, encourages his Continental
friends, "I say I hate war; but when once you begin to fight, fight it
out you're better friends after." 32 There is sentimental pathos over
the forced separation of lovers, but after all, Oscar's supposed death
proves a mistake, and he returns to Lotte, wearing a medal and re-

26 II, 525.
27 Page 530.
28 Page66i.
I, 336.
30 1, 190.
31 II, 401.
32 Page 764.

n8 Thomas William Robertson: His Plays and Stagecraft

inforced in his conviction that "the truest glory is the glory o war." 33
This enchantment, unrelieved and unreserved, precluded the slightest
inquiry into the march o historical events. It constituted the acceptance
o and contribution to the growth of chauvinism at its uncritical worst.

Thus three stifling currents of Victorian orthodoxy the glorification
of woman, caste, and war combined to smother the creative energy
of Robertson. The limitation of his intellectual grasp on his milieu
forced him to fall back on melodrama and on a conventional, sentimen-
talized treatment of love. Robertson was a rebel against theatrical con-
vention, not against Victorianism. The only instrument he provided
for arbitration in the class struggle was the love seat.

Where his advance lay was in the transformation of stagnant bombast
into delicate, lyric-tinged dialogue, of shabby staging into a realistic,
intimate mise en scene. Through his direction, the solo performance
yielded to the ensemble. 34 Under the combined aegis of Robertson
and the Bancrofts, dramatic presentation attained a new unity, with
the proper subordination of the parts to the whole.

This new unity, in turn, generated new impulse. His domestication
of drama quickened the evolution of both actor and audience towards
the play of discussion. Having rid the stage of rant and rave, he facili-
tated the approach of his immediate followers towards the problem
play. He died, unmindful of the ultimate consequences of the tempest
he had raised; had he lived out his four score, he would have witnessed
the naturalness he introduced evolve into naturalism.

33 Page 757.

34 See Watson, Sheridan to "Robertson, p. 411.

APPENDIX I

IMPORTANT DATES IN THE LIFE OF T. W. ROBERTSON
(Unless otherwise indicated, theaters are in London.)

1829 Jan. 9 Born at Newark-on-Trent.

1834 June 13 Debut as Hamish in Rob Roy.
1836 Attends Henry Young's Academy.

1841 Attends Moore's School.

1843 Factotum in Lincoln company.

1848 Goes to London.

Usher in Utrecht.

1851 Aug. 25 A Night's Adventure, Olympic.

1854 Prompter at the Lyceum.
April 29 Castles in the Air, City Theatre.

1855 Rejoins family at Marylebone Theatre.
Robertsons play Macbeth in Paris.
Meets Elizabeth Taylor.

1856 Aug. 27 Marries Elizabeth Taylor.

Irish tour.

1857 Fills engagements at the Surrey and the Marylebone.
Dec. 2 Thomas William Shafto Robertson born.

1858 Birth and death o Betty Robertson.
1861 Feb. 14 The Cantab, Strand.

1863 Writes the novel David Garric\.

1864 April David Garric\, Prince of Wales's, Birmingham.

David Garric\, Haymarket.

120 Important Dates in the Life of Robertson

1865 May 8 Society, Prince of Wales's, Liverpool.
Aug. 14 Elizabeth Robertson dies.

Nov. ii Society, Prince of Wales's.

1866 Aug. 23 Ours, Alexander Henderson's theater, Liverpool.
Sept. 15 Ours, Prince of Wales's.

Meets Rosetta Feist.

1867 Feb. 6 Shadow Tree Shaft, Princess.
Mar. 2 A Rapid Thaw, St. James.
Ap. 6 Caste, Prince of Wales's.
Oct. 5 For L*ove, Holborn.

Oct. 17 Marries Rosetta Feist in Frankfort-on-Maine.

1868 Play, Prince of Wales's.

Passion Flowers, Theatre Royal, Hull.

186*9 Jan. 14 Home, Haymarket.

School, Prince of Wales's.

Feb. 22 My Lady Clara, Alexander Theatre, Liverpool.

Mar, 27 Dreams, Gaiety.

Ap. 10 A Breach of Promise, Globe.

May 1 8 Dublin Bay, Theatre Royal, Manchester.

Sept. 1 8 Progress, Globe.

1870 Jan. 15 The Nightingale, Adelphi.
Ap. 23 M. P., Prince of Wales's.
Oct. 5 Birth.

Dec. Attempts to recuperate at Torquay.

1871 Jan. 1 6 War, St. James.
Feb. 3 Dies.

Feb. 9 Buried in Abney Park Cemetery.

APPENDIX II

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ROBERTSON'S PLAYS WITHOUT DATE.
UNPUBLISHED PLAYS ARE so INDICATED.

Birds of Prey

Post Haste; unpublished

Two Gay Deceivers

Up in a Balloon; unpublished

APPENDIX III
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF ROBERTSON'S PLAYS

(Including wherever possible: theaters, length of runs, casts, and

source. Unpublished plays are so indicated. L. C. refers to the

Lord Chamberlain s record of Mss.)

1843-1847 The Battle of Life; performed in Boston by Robertson

company; Theatre Royal, Norwich, Jan, 23, 1847;
adapted from Dickens; L. C.; unpublished.

1843-1849 The Haunted Man; performed in Boston by Robertson

company; Queen's Theatre, Jan. i, 1849; adapted from
Dickens; L. C.; unpublished.

1845 May 20 The Chevalier de St. George: Princess's; adapted from

Melesville and Roger de Beauvoir.

Monsieur de Boulogne Granby

Baron de Tourvel (his son) Heild

Chevalier de St. George Wallack

Viscount de la Morliere Ranoe
Marquis de Langeac

Platon (servant to Courtney

St. George)

Julien (master of the Oxberry

Posthouse)

An Exempt Honnor

Joseph {servant to Henry

De Boulogne)

First Huntsman T. Hill

The Countess de Presle Mrs. Stirling

(a rich young Creole)

Fanchette (wife to Julien) Miss K Honnor

An attendant Miss Mott

1846 Apr. 14 Noemie; Princess's (presented as Ernestine) adapted

from the French by Dennery and Clement.
Count d'Avrigny Cooper

Eleonore d'Avrigny V. Wallack

Jules de Mornas Leigh Murray

Valentine de Quercy Miss May

122 Chronology of Robertsons Plays

Noemie Mrs. Stirling

Anette Emma Stanley

Marguerite Mrs. Fosbroke

February 17, 1855; St. James's (presented as Clarisse or

The Foster Sister)

Count d'Avrigny Herbert

Eleonore d'Avrigny Sidney

Jules de Mornas Leigh Murray

Valentine de Quercy Miss Burton

Noemie Miss Bulmer

Anette Miss Elsworthy

Marguerite Miss St. Glair

1855; Grecian Saloon (presented as The Foster Sisters)

Count d'Avrigny B. Potter

Eleonore d'Avrigny R. Phillips

Jules de Mornas F. Charles

Servant Hamilton

Valentine de Quercy Mrs. C. Montgomery

Noemie Jane Coreney

Anette Miss H. Coreney

Marguerite Miss Johnstone

1851 Aug. 25 A Nighfs Adventure or Highways and Byways;
Lyceum; four nights; based on Lytton's Paul Clifford;
L. C.; unpublished.

1851 Nov. 18 The Ladies' Battle; Haymarket; translated from Bataille
de Dames by Scribe and Legouve.

1854 Apr. 19 Faust and Marguerite; Princess's; translated from the
French of Michel Carre.

Faust David Fisher

Mephistopheles Charles Kean

Valentine J. F. Cathcart

Brander Raymond

Siebel H. Saker

Anselme J. Collect

Fritz Daly

Peters Cormack

Wagner Collis

Chronology of Robertsons Plays 123

Marguerite Carlotta Leclercq

Marthe Mrs. Winstanley

Genevieve Miss Vivash

Madeleine Miss Hastings

Helene Maria Ternan

Berthe

Gertrude Miss Hughes

1854 Apr. 29 Castles in the Air; City of London Theatre; L. C.; un-
published.

c. 1854 Photographs and Ices.

1854 Dec. 1 8 My Wife's Diary; Lyceum; from Les Memoir es de Deux

Jeunes Mariees by Dennery and Clairville.
Monsieur Dumontel (a Emery

Merchant)
Monsieur Deligny Leslie

(a Barrister)
Servant
Madame Dumontel (newly Miss Maskell

married to Dumontel)

c. 1854 A Row in the House; Toole's Theatre, Aug. 30, 1883.

1855 Mar. 5 The Star of the North; Sadler's Wells; from the French

of Scribe.

1855 Mar. 7 The Cloc\ma%ers Hat; Adelphi; adapted from Le

Chapeau d'un Horloger by Madame fonile de Girardin.

Betty Martin Mrs. Keeley

Major Miltiades Mohawk Selby

performed as Betty Martin at the St. James's, July 3,

1865.

1856 Feb. 13 Peace at Any Price; Strand

1856 May 6 Muleteer of Toledo; Grecian Saloon; L. C.

1856 Sept. 8 The Half Caste or The Poisoned Pearl; Surrey; L. C.

Sebastian Cabrera (a Creole, Creswick

or Half Caste)
Lord Falconer of Flacon- Shepherd

wood (an English Noble)

124

Chronology of Robertson's Plays

i8 5 7

1861 Feb. 14

1861 Apr. i

Monsieur de Grandet (a

ruined planter)
Oscar {an artist of unknown

parentage)
Monsieur de Beuval (a

magistrate)
Hon. Augustus Fitznoddle-

ton
Auguste de Villarceaul

Basil Potter

F. Hustleby

Butler

Ei. Widdicombe

[Oliver
^Parisians*
Eugene de Bellot J [Phelps

Dr. Bernard (a mulatto) A. Tapping

Jerome (a domestic) Raymond

T f , , Daughters of ( Miss Marriot

Isabel de > . * , W

., , \ de Grandet \ Kate Percy

Grandet J v

Down in Our Village; unproduced; MS.; translation
of Le Sang Mele by E. Plouvier.
Fifine Fadette (a florist) Miss F. Bland

Mrs. Matchemall Mrs. M. Brooks

Miss Mary Jane (ladies on Miss J. Lascelles

Matchemall their travels)

The Cantab; Strand; L. C.

Charles Cheddar

Brutus Boodle, Esq. (a coun-
try gentleman)

Sergeant Berlinns (of the
rural police)

Mrs. Boodle

Hannah

W. H. Swanborough
J. Bland

E. Danvers

Kate Carson
Miss Lavine

Jocrisse the Juggler; Adelphi; L. C.; (performed as

Magloire the Prestigiator)', adapted from L'Escamoteur

by Dennery and Jules Bresil.

Count de Lespierre Billington

Le Vernay (his nephew) D. Fisher

Adolph de Mereno (attached W. H. Eburne

to the Neapolitan em-

bassy)

Chronology of Robertsons Plays 125

Jocrisse B. Webster

Tobie Touraloulalou (his Toole

JacJ^-pudding)

Fran^oise (servant to the Page

Count)

Countess de Lespierre Mrs. Billington

Julie (daughter of the Jug- Miss H. Simms

1864 April David Garric\; Prince of Wales's, Birmingham; April

30, 1864, Haymarket; L. C.; adapted from Sullivan by
Melesville.

David Garrick Sothern

Mr. Simon Ingot Chippendale

Squire Chivy Buckstone

Smith Rogers
Mr. Browne

Mr. Jones Clark
Thomas

George (Carriers valet)
Servant

Ada Ingot Nellie Moore

Mrs. Smith Miss Snowden

(Mrs. Chippendale)

Miss Araminta Brown Mrs. E. Fitzwilliam

March 19, 1873, Wallack's Theatre, New York

David Garrick Sothern

Mr. Simon Ingot John Gilbert

Squire Chivy J. B. Polk

Mr. Smith G. F. Browne

Mr. Browne W. J. Leonard

Mr. Jones E. M. Holland

Thomas J. Curran

George J. Peck

Servant Harris

Ada Ingot Katherine Rogers

Mrs. Smith Madame Ponisi

Miss Araminta Brown Mrs. Sefton

February 29, 1889; Criterion.

126

Chronology of Robertson's Plays

July 10, 1889; Criterion
David Garrick

March 22, 1890; Criterion
David Garrick
Mr. Simon Ingot
Ada Ingot

Charles Wyndham

Charles Wyndham
William Farren
Mary Moore

1865 Jan. 23 Constance; Covent Garden; music by F. Clay; L. C.

Constance Mdlle. Martorelle

Rat-ta-taf Miss Thirlwall

Stanislas Henry Corri

Commandant Aynsley Cooke

Carlitz C. Lyall

Count Madelinski Henry Haigh

1865 May 8 Society; Prince of Wales's, Liverpool.

Lord Ptarmigant

Lord Cloudwrays M. P.

Sidney Daryl

Mr. John Chodd, Sen.

Mr. John Chodd, Jun.

Torn Stylus

O'Sullivan

MacUsquebaugh

Doctor Makvicz

Bradley

Scargil

Sam Stunner, P. R.

(alias the Smiffel Lamb)
Shamheart
Doddles

Moses Aaron {a bailiff)
Sheridan Trodnon
Lady Ptarmigant
Maud Hetherington
Little Maud
Mrs. Churton

Blakely

F. Cameron
Edward Price

G. P. Grainger
L. Brough

E. Saker

C. Swan

Chater

Smith

W. Grainger

Waller

Hill

Davidge
Brace well
Miss Larkin
Miss T. Furtado
Miss F. Smithers
Miss Procter

November u, 1865; Prince of Wales's, London;

150 performances.

Lord Ptarmigant John Hare

Chronology of Robertson's

Lord Cloudwrays M. P.

Sidney Daryl

Mr. John Chodd, Sen.

Mr. John Chodd, Jun.

Tom Stylus

O'Sullivan

MacUsquebaugh

Doctor Makvicz

Bradley

Scargil

Sam Stunner P. R.

Shamheart

Doddles

Moses Aaron

Sheridan Trodnon

Lady Ptarmigant

Maud Hetherington

Little Maud

Mrs. Churton

Servant

Plays

Trafiord

Squire Bancroft

Ray

F. Clarke

F. Dewar

H. W. Montgomery

Hill

Bennett

Parker

Lawson

F. Tindale

G. Odell
Burnett
G. Atkins
Macart
Miss Larkin
Marie Wilton
Miss George
Miss Merton
Miss Thompson

127

September 21, 1868; Prince of Wales's; 100

performances.

Sidney Daryl Harry Montague

Tom Stylus Squire Bancroft

Autumn, 1874; Prince of Wales's; five months.
1875; Prince of Wales's; 131 performances.

Lord Ptarmigant
Sidney Daryl
Mr. John Chodd, Sen.
Mr. John Chodd, Jun.
Tom Stylus
O'Sullivan
Lady Ptarmigant
Maud Hetherington

Archer
Coghlan
Arthur Wood
F. Glover
Squire Bancroft
Collette

Mrs. Leigh Murray
Fanny Josephs

June ii, 1881; Haymarket; 50 performances.
Lord Ptarmigant Arthur Cecil

Sidney Daryl H. B. Conway

Mr. John Chodd, Sen. Kemble

128 Chronology of Robertson's Plays

Mr. John Chodd, Jun. Charles Brookfield

Tom Stylus Squire Bancroft

Lady Ptarmigant Mrs. Channinge

Maud Hetherington Miss Cavalier

total number of performances under the Bancroft man-
agement: nearly 500.

1866 Aug. 23 Ours; Prince of Wales's, Liverpool; L. C.

Prince Perovsky John Hare

Sir Alexander Shendryn J. W. Ray
Captain Samprey

Angus MacAHster Squire Bancroft

Hugh Chalcot J. Clarke

Sergeant Jones F. Dewar

Houghton Tindale

Lady Shendryn Miss Larkin

Blanche Haye Miss L. Moore

Mary Netley Marie Wilton

November 15, 1866; Prince of Wales's, London.

Prince Perovsky John Hare

Sir Alexander Shendryn J. W. Ray

Captain Sarnprey Trafford

Angus MacAHster Squire Bancroft

Hugh Chalcot J. Clarke

Sergeant Jones F. Younge

Houghton Tindale

Lady Shendryn Miss Larkin

Blanche Haye Miss L. Moore and

Miss Lydia Foote

Mary Netley Marie Wilton

November 26, iSyo-August, 1871 (230 nights); Prince

of Wales's.

Prince Perovsky John Hare

Sir Alexander Shendryn Addison

Captain Samprey Herbert

Angus MacAHster Coghlan

Hugh Chalcot Squire Bancroft

Sergeant Jones Collette

Houghton

Chronology of Robertsons Plays 129

Lady Shendryn Miss Le Thiere

Blanche Haye Fanny Josephs

Mary Netley Marie Wilton

May 6, i876-June 19 (?); Prince of Wales's.

Prince Perovsky Archer

Sir Alexander Shendryn Flockton

Captain Samprey Denison

Angus MacAlister Coghlan

Hugh Chalcot Squire Bancroft

Sergeant Jones Collette

Houghton

Lady Shendryn Mrs. Leigh Murray

Blanche Haye Ellen Terry

Mary Netley Marie Wilton

1879; farewell performance at Prince of Wales's; eight

weeks.

Prince Perovsky Arthur Cecil

Sir Alexander Shendryn Kemble

Angus MacAlister H. B. Con way

Hugh Chalcot Squire Bancroft

Sergeant Jones Forbes-Robertson

Lady Shendryn Miss Le Thiere

Blanche Haye Marion Terry

Mary Netley Marie Wilton

January 19, 1882; Haymarket.

Prince Perovsky Arthur Cecil

Sir Alexander Shendryn Pinero

Angus MacAlister H. B. Conway

Hugh Chalcot Squire Bancroft

Sergeant Jones Charles Brookfield

Lady Shendryn Miss Le Thiere

Blanche Haye Mrs. Lillie Langtry

Mary Netley Marie Wilton

1885; Haymarket.

Prince Perovsky C. Brookfield

Sir Alexander Shendryn Kemble

Angus MacAlister Barrymore

Hugh Chalcot Squire Bancroft

130 Chronology of Robertson's Plays

Sergeant Jones E. Maurice

Lady Shendryn Miss Victor

Blanche Haye Miss Calhoun

Mary Netley Marie Wilton

May 12, 1896; Haymarket; farewell performance; second

act performed.

Hugh Chalcot Bancroft

Prince Perovsky Tree

Sir Alexander Shendryn E. S. Willard

Sergeant Jones Forbes-Robertson

Servant Frederick Kerr

Lady Shendryn Rose Leclercq

Blanche Haye Mrs. Tree

Mary Netley Mrs. Bancroft

total number of performances under Bancroft manage-
ment: 700.

1867 Feb. 6 Shadow-tree Shaft; Princess's; L. C.; unpublished.

Sir Walter Kenyon Charles Vining

Michael Woodyatt H. Forrester

Richard Darkys F. Villiers

Katie Katherine Rodgers

Captain Mildmay J. G. Shore

Lady Kenyon Miss Montague

1867 Mar. 2 A Rapid Thaw; St. James's; L. C.; unpublished; adapted

from Sardou's Le Degel.

Frank Matthews

G. Murray

K. Dyas

Burleigh

H. Irving

Mrs. Frank Matthews

Carlotta Addison

Eleanor Bufton

Miss M. Donnell

Miss Jones

Ada Cavendish

Miss Herbert

Chronology of Robertson's Plays 131

1867 Mar. 1 8 A Dream in Venice; Royal Gallery of Illustration; L. C.;
unpublished.

Miss German Reed
Mrs. German Reed
Parry

1867 Apr. 6 Caste; Prince of Wales's; L. C.; Apr. 6-July 6; based on

Robertson's short story "The Poor Rate Unfolds a Tale."
George D'Alroy Fred Younge

Captain Hawtree Squire Bancroft

Eccles George Honey

Samuel Gerridge John Hare

Marquise de St. Maur Sophia Larkin

Polly Eccles Marie Wilton

Esther Eccles Lydia Foote

September 16, iSyi-May 3, 1872; Prince of Wales's; 195

performances.

George D'Alroy Charles Coghlan

August 4, 1873; Standard Theatre, Shoreditch; four
weeks. The first two weeks the leads were played by the
Bancrofts; the second two weeks, by Denison and Au-
gusta Wilton.

January n, i879-May 30; Prince of Wales's.
George D'Alroy John Clayton

Captain Hawtree Squire Bancroft

Eccles George Honey and

Henry Kemble

Samuel Gerridge Arthur Cecil

Marquise de St. Maur Miss Le Thiere

Polly Eccles Marie Wilton

Esther Eccles Amy Roselle

January 20, 1883- April 13; Hayrnarket.

George D'Alroy Harry B. Conway

Captain Hawtree Squire Bancroft

Eccles David James

Samuel Gerridge Charles Brookfield

Marquise de St. Maur Mrs. Stirling

Polly Eccles Marie Wilton

Esther Eccles Florence Gerard

132 Chronology of Robertson's Plays

total number of performances under Bancroft manage-
ment: 650.

October 5, 1889; Criterion.

George D'Alroy Leonard Boyne

Captain Hawtree Arthur Elwood

Eccles David James

Samuel Gerridge Charles Brookfield

Marquise de St. Maur Mrs. Charles Poole

Polly Eccles Lottie Venne

Esther Eccles Olga Brandon

1867 Oct. 5 For Love; Holborn; L. C.; unpublished.

Mrs. Mountflatherault Miss Stephens

Mabel Hardyn Miss Hardyn

Dawk Miss J. Willmore

Biddy Miss C. Saunders

Lieutenant Tarne H. J. Montague

Finnigan Garden

Dr. Wyse Price

Ship's steward H. Widdicomb

1867 Nov. 28 The Sea of he or The Prayer of the Wrecked; Colos-

seum ( ?), Glasgow.

1868 Feb. 15 Play; Prince of Wales's; L. C.; 106 performances.

Graf von Staufenberg H. W. Montgomery

The Hon. Bruce Fanquehere John Hare

Captain Stockstadt Sidney

Mr. Benjamin Todder Blakeley

The Chevalier Browne Squire Bancroft

Frank Price H. J. Montague

a croupier Silveyra

a waiter

Rosie Marie Wilton

Amanda Lydia Foote

Mrs. Kinpeck Mrs. Leigh Murray

1868 Oct. 28 Passion Flowers; Theatre Royal, Hull; unpublished.

1869 Jan. 14 Home; Haymarket; L. C.; adapted from M. Augier's

L'Aventurtere.

Alfred Dorrison E. A. Sothern

Captain Mountraffe Compton

Chronology of Robertsons Plays 133

Mr. Dorrison Chippendale

Bertie Thompson Robert Astley

Mrs. Pinchbeck Ada Cavendish

Lucy Dorrison lone Burke

Dora Thornhaugh Caroline Hill

June 13, 1870, revival at Haymarket.

October 27, 1881, revival at St. James's.

Captain Mountraffe John Hare

Mr. Dorrison T. N. Wenman

Bertie Thompson T. W. S. Robertson

Mrs. Pinchbeck Mrs. Kendal

Lucy Dorrison Maud Cathcart

Dora Thornhaugh Kate Bishop

Colonel White W. H. Kendal

a servant De Verney

November, 1881, revival at Haymarket.

Alfred Dorrison W. H. Kendal

Captain Mountraffe John Hare

Bertie Thompson T. W. S. Robertson

Mrs. Pinchbeck Mrs. Kendal

1869 Jan. 16 School; Prince o Wales's; L. C.; January 16, i869-April

22, 1870; 381 performances; adapted from Roderick
Benedix's Aschenbrodel.

Lord Beaufoy H. J. Montague

Dr. Sutcliffe Addison

Beau Farintosh John Hare

Jack Poyntz Squire Bancroft

Mr. Krux F. Glover

Vaughan Hill

Mrs. Sutdiffe Mrs. B. White

Bella Carlotta Addison

Naomi Tighe Marie Wilton

Tilly Augusta Wilton

Milly Miss George

Laura Miss Phillips

Clara Miss Unah

Kitty Miss Hutton

Hetty Miss Atkins

134 Chronology of Robertson's Plays

September 20, 1873; Prince of Wales's; seven months.

Lord Beaufoy Coghlan

Dr. Sutdiffe Collette

Beau Farintosh John Hare

Jack Poyntz Squire Bancroft

Mr. Krux F. Glover

Mrs. Sutdiffe Mrs. Leigh Murray

Bella Fanny Josephs

Naomi Tighe Marie Wilton

May i, 1880; Haymarket; May i-August (?).

Lord Beaufoy Harry B. Conway

Dr. Sutdiffe Kemble

Beau Farintosh Arthur Cecil

Jack Poyntz Squire Bancroft

Mr. Krux Forbes-Robertson

Mrs. Sutcliffe Mrs. Canninge

Bella Marion Terry

Naomi Tighe Marie Wilton

Vaughan Heneage

Clara Ida Hertz

Laura Miss Bruce

Hetty Miss Gozna

Grace Miss Otway

Milly Miss Lambert

Tilly Miss L. Lambert

Effie Miss Reynolds

Fanny Miss Leslie

Kate Miss Montague

Ethel Miss Reed

Sybil Kate Rorke

Nina Miss St. George

November 27, 1880; Haymarket; same cast with the
exception of Charles Brookfield as Mr. Krux.

1882; Haymarket; seven months.

April (?), 1883; Haymarket; three weeks.

total number of performances under the Bancroft man-
agement: 800.

Chronology of Robertsons Plays 135

1869 Feb. 22 My Lady Clara; Alexandra Theatre, Liverpool; L. C.;
inspired by Tennyson's "Lady Clara Vere de Vere."
Duke of Loamshire J. Chester

Earl of Mount-Forestcourt A. Glover
Rittmeister Harfthal Bandmann

Rudolf Harfthal Bandmann

Mr. John Hibbs E. Saker

Old Gray A. Sanger

Lady Clara Vere de Vere Milly Palmer

Lina Miss R. Sanger

Frau Harthal Mrs. Stammers

as Dreams; March 27, 1869; Gaiety.

Duke of Loamshire MacLean

Earl of Mount-Forestcourt John Clayton

Rittmeister Harfthal Alfred Wigan

Rudolf Harfthal Alfred Wigan

Mr. John Hibbs Robert Soutar

Old Gray Joseph Eldred

Lady Clara Vere de Vere Madge Robertson

Lina Richel Sanger

Frau Harfthal Mrs. Henry Leigh

1869 Apr. 10 A "Breach of Promise; Globe; L. C.

Mr. Ponticopp David Fisher

Philip J. Clarke

Achates Croople E. Marshall

Mr. Fullawords H. Andrews

David J. Paulo

Clementina Ponticopp Rose Behrend

Honor Molloy Maggie Brennan

1869 May 1 8 Dublin Bay; Theatre Royal, Manchester; L. C.; Decem-
ber 1 8, 1875, Folly; unpublished.

1869 Sept. 1 8 Progress; Globe; L. C.; adapted from Sardou's Les
Ganaches.

Lord Mompesson Collette

Hon. Arthur Mompesson H. Neville

Dr. Brown J. Clarke

Mr. Bunnythorne Parselle

136 Chronology of Robertson's Plays

Bob Bunnythorne E. Marshall

John Feme J. Billington

Mr. Danby Westland

Wykeham

Eva Lydia Foote

Miss Myrnie Mrs. Stephens

1870 Jan. 15 The Nightingale; Adelphi; L. C.

Harold Fane Arthur Stirling

Ismael-al-Moolah Ben Webster

Chepstowe Mrs. Alfred Mellon

William Waye J. D. Beveridge
Major Pomeroy
Joe

Willie Master Blanchard

Mary Miss Furtado

Kesiah Eliza Johnstone

Mrs. Minns Mrs. Cautfield

1870 Apr. 23 The M. P.; Prince of Wales's; L. C.; April 23-August
12, September i7-November 26; 156 performances.

Dimscombe Dunscombe John Hare

Chudleigh Dunscombe Coghlan

Talbot Piers Squire Bancroft

Isaac Skoome Addison

Cecilia Dunscombe Marie Wilton

Mr. Bran Charles Collette

Mr. Bray F. Glover

Mr. Mulhowther Montgomery

Ruth Deybrooke Carlotta Addison

1870 Oct. 5 Birth; Theatre Royal, Bristol.

Earl of Eagleclyffe H. Vincent

Paul Hewitt J. H. Slater

Jack Randall E. A. Sothern

The Duke T. A. Palmer

Stanton Brooks

Dick Stanley

Tom Hosegood

Harry Thomas

Lady Adeliza Louise Willes

Sarah Hewitt Amy Roselle

Chronology of Robertson's Plays 137

1871 Jan. 16 War; St. James's; L. C.

Colonel de Rochevannes Henri Nertann

Oscar de Rochevannes Fred Mervin

Herr Karl Hartmann A. W. Young

Captain Sound, R. N. L. Brough

Lotte Fanny Brough

Blanche Alice Barrie

Jessie Jenny Mori

Agnes Marian Inch

Katie Lilian Adair

1871 Feb. 13 Policy; Theatre Royal, Glasgow; unpublished.

1871 May 29 Not at All Jealous; Court; L. C.; unpublished.

1 88 1 July 27 Which is it?; Drury Lane (?); L. C. (?) unpublished.

1883 Apr. 12 Other Days; Theatre Royal, Hull; L. C.; unpublished.

1883 Aug. 30 A Row in the House; Toole's; L. C.

Mr. Scorpion A. Chevalier

Tom J. H. Darnley

Mr. Goodman , F. Irving

Jemmy A. D. Adams

Mrs. Scorpion Maud Robertson

Kate Miss L. Walker

Mary Florence Rayburn

1892 Aug. 15 Cinderella; Theatre Royal, Newcastle-upon-Tyne; Octo-

ber 3, 1892, Grand; unpublished.

1893 Jan. 20 Over the Way; Court; L. C.; unpublished.

Mr. Elliott
Mr. Draycott
Ellaline Terriss

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