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ROBERT SPEAIGHT 

WILLIAM FOEL 

AND THE ELIZABETHAN 
REVIVAL 

IT is to William Poel thai contemporary Shake 
spearean production certainly owes more than 
to any other mab. Yet his name is probably 
unknown to most modern play-goers* It is 
to establish his true position once and for all 
in the history of the English Theatre that this 
biography* has been written. 

The author, Robert Spfcaight, with many 
other outstanding actors of our time^ worked 
with Poel; they wore inspired by Ms vision, 
Ms methods and Ms picturesque personality, 
and in the brilliance of their work they 
demonstrate Bod s lasting if$bence. 

Here is die first authentic biography of this 
remarikable pioneer written by one of our 
leading Actors who is also an author and a 
jaan of Jetters. 

This important wprk has been written and 
published in the closest collaboration with The 
Society for Theatre Research wMct initiated 
the project in ordbr to commemorate the 
Centenary of the birth of William Poel 



& mfo m the awiior m focwk flop of wrapper 



792*09 
Speaight 
William Poel and 
Revival 



the Elizabethan 





WILLIAM POEL 
AND THE 

ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 



OCt 1964 

MAT JUL 1 9 1988 




, \"(ilinnett Portrait 

WILLIAM POEL 

as Peter Kecgan in John Butt s Other hland 
Painted by Henry Tonks 



WILLIAM POEL 

AND THE 

ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 



by 
ROBERT SPEAIGHT 



FOR THE SOCIETY FOR THEATRE RESEARCH 




WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD 
MELBOURNE LONDON TORONTO 



FIRST PUBLISHED 1 954 



The William Poel Centenary Volume, published 
in July 1954 as the Annual Publication of 
The Society for Theatre Research for 



PUBLISHED BY: 
WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD. 

99 GREAT RUSSELL STREET, LONDON, W.C.I 

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN FOR THE PUBLISHERS 

BY MORRISON AND GIBB LTD., EDINBURGH 



FOR 

ERNEST MILTON 

IN MEMORY OF MANY CONVERSATIONS 



6404901 

/* ; j 
u 



It is the business of life to make the thoughts and teaching of a 
great man understanded of the people. William Poel 

You alone (so far as I know) are the right Shakespearian. 
Sir Walter Raleigh to William Poel 

Old men ought to be explorers 

7". S. Eliot 

I carry from my mother s womb 
A fanatic heart! 

W. B. Teats 



CONTENTS 



FOREWORD 
AUTHOR S PREFACE 
CHAPTER I 
CHAPTER II 
CHAPTER III 
CHAPTER IV 
CHAPTER V 
CHAPTER VI 
CHAPTER VII 
CHAPTER VIII .. 
CHAPTER IX 



THE FORMATIVE YEARS 
THE CHALLENGE 
THE FIRST EXPERIMENTS 
SHYLOCK AND SAMSON 
EVERYMAN AND EURIPIDES 
MACBETH AND TROILUS 
CAUSES AND CONTROVERSIES . . 
THE PLATFORM STAGE 
THE LAST PHASE 

APPENDICES 

By ALLAN GOMME 

APPENDIX I CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF PRODUCTIONS . . 279 
APPENDIX II SOME ARTICLES ABOUT POEL AND His WORK 286 
APPENDIX III SELECT LIST OF WILLIAM POEL S WRITINGS . . 288 
INDEX 291 



Page 
9 

ii 

15 

. 43 

. 90 
132 
. 161 

i?9 

. 203 

. 222 

253 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

WILLIAM POEL as Peter Keegan in John Bull s Other Island Frontispiece 

Painted by HENRY TONKS 

Facing page 
L ECUYER -Poel as a boy of about twelve years old 30 

Painted by Sir F. W. BURTON 

WILLIAM POEL in Early Manhood 31 

WILLIAM POEL in Old Age 31 

HAMLET (FIRST QUARTO) 1881 Maud Holt as Ofelia 96 

FRATRICIDE PUNISHED 1924 Esme* Percy as Hamlet 

Orlando Barnett as Horatio 

THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA 1896 in Merchant Taylors Hall 97 
THE COMEDY OF ERRORS 1895 in Gray s Inn Hall .. ..128 

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS 1895 129 

MEASURE FOR MEASURE 1893 at the Royalty Theatre .. ..192 
DOCTOR FAUSTUS 1896 in St. George s Hall 193 

EVERYMAN 1907 F. W. G. Gilly as Death 224 

William Poel as Adonai 

EVERYMAN (i) The Summoning of Everyman 225 

(ii) The Death of Everyman 
(m) Everyman and his Friends 



Foreword 

IN 1948 the first long-term project which the newly-founded 
Society for Theatre Research proposed to itself was the 
commemoration in 1952 of the centenary of the birth of William 
Poel. A critical and biographical study and some kind of 
public celebration, preferably theatrical, were the ideas then 
envisaged by the Committee. On n July 1952 a centenary- 
matinee was presented at the Old Vic, thanks primarily to 
nine guarantors who agreed to cover the risk of loss, and then 
to the generous collaboration of eminent members of the 
theatrical profession and the Governors of the Old Vic and to 
the work of Mr. Robert Atkins and the special organizing 
committee set up under the chairmanship of Dame Edith 
Evans, the Society s Vice-President. Now, as the annual 
publication for 1951-52, the critical biography upon which 
Robert Speaight has been engaged since 1950 appears under 
the auspices of the Society over the imprint of Messrs. William 
Heinemann ; and thanks to this welcome association with a 
famous publishing firm it can be made available to the general 
public. It inaugurates a series of books which the Society hopes 
to publish from time to time, which will have a wider interest 
than the more specialized works issued for members only. 
Mr. Speaight s study is at once his own and the Society s 
centenary tribute to the importance of Poel s work and to his 
influence on Shakespearian production in the English theatre. 
The Society is greatly indebted to Mr. Speaight for his 
response to the invitation to undertake what proved to be the 
extremely arduous task of authorship. The project had Mrs. 
Poel s* approval shortly before her death in 1950, and the 
work was made possible by the help and co-operation of three 
friends of William Poel and his wife, Mr. Allan Gomme, 
Mr. Oliver D. Savage and Mr. Arthur G. Jennings, to whom 

*Mrs. Poel always called herself Mrs. William Pole, and Poel himself often 
used the correct form of his name on occasions unconnected with the theatre. 



10 FOREWORD 



the Society offers its most grateful thanks. Mr. Gomme, who 
joined the Society at its start, was closely associated with 
PoePs activities and productions from 1906 until 1933. In 
1935-36 he put together a fully-annotated bibliography of PoePs 
writings and a chronological list of his stage-productions, 
compiled from newspapers, periodicals and the various sources 
available in the British Museum and other libraries. This 
account he collated with the papers and material in Mrs. 
PoePs possession; and fortunately for the present study he also 
made a transcript of PoePs early diary upon which Mr. 
Speaight has drawn freely in his first chapter. The original, 
apparently, has not been preserved. 

It had been Mrs. PoePs intention to publish this record of 
her husband s life-work, together with a brief personal memoir, 
and to this end she asked Mr. Savage to abridge Mr. Gomme s 
original compilation. On her death all the Poel papers, etc., 
passed to Mr. Savage; and as publication had by then proved 
impracticable Mr. Gomme placed his own MSS. unreservedly 
at the Society s disposal and put our intentions before Mr. 
Savage. Under the provisions of Mrs. PoePs will Mr. Savage 
was able to entrust to the Society in the same way all the 
letters, prompt-books and other relevant material and to secure 
for the projected work the approval of her solicitor and 
executor, Mr. Jennings, whose father had been associated 
with Poel as Honorary Treasurer of the Elizabethan Stage 
Society. For the inestimable advantage of the unrestricted 
use of all this basic MSS. material the Society remains deeply 
grateful. Thanks to the generosity of Mr. Savage the prompt 
books and many photographs of PoePs productions are now 
in the Enthoven Collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum. 
Mr. Gomme compiled the three Appendices and the Index 
to the present volume and has crowned his many kindnesses 
by giving his MSS. to the Society. My personal thanks as 
editor are due to Miss Phyllis Hartnoll and Sir St. Vincent 
Troubridge for their invaluable help with proof correction. 

M. ST. CLARE BYRNE, 
General Editor for The Society for Theatre Research. 



Author s Preface 

HAVE been indebted to many people in the writing of this 
book, and my thanks must go, first, to the officers of the 
ociety for Theatre Research who have sustained me with 
leir encouragement and criticism during the time too long, 
fear that I have been at work. I am very conscious of the 
igh trust they reposed in me. Then I must express my 
articular gratitude to Mr. Savage and Mr. Gomme, for without 
leir preliminary work a work of piety and personal devotion 
-my task would have been incalculably more difficult. I 
en under a deep obligation to Mr. Gomme for compiling the 
adex and Appendices, and for giving me his advice whenever 
have asked for it 

But there still remained many gaps to be filled in before a 
itisfactory book could be written about William Poel. There 
r ere virtually no press cuttings after 1905, and those preserved 
efore that date were sadly incomplete. There were very few 
itters. I am grateful, therefore, to all those who have allowed 
le to see and to use the letters from Poel still in their possession, 
ad who have helped me from their own knowledge to attempt 

portrait of his personality. I must acknowledge a special 
ebt to Mr. Robert Atkins, Mr. W. Bridges-Adams, Sir Lewis 
lasson, Mr. Alan Edmiston, Dame Edith Evans, Sir John 
rielgud, Sir Denis Grayson, Sir Barry Jackson, Lady Keeble 
VKss Lillah McCarthy), Miss Winifred Oughton, Mr. B. 
ien Payne, Mr. Reginald Pole (nephew), Dr. A. W. Reed, 
Ir. G. O. Sharman, Dr. Percy Simpson, Professor A. C. 
prague, Dr. Marie Stopes, Mr. Allan Wade and Mr. Donald 
folfit. 

When Sir Barry Jackson took over the direction "of the 
hakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon, in 1945, 
e invited a number of actors and actresses who had known 
nd worked with Poel to contribute their impressions to a 
jssier which is now in the Memorial Theatre library. I have 



12 AUTHORS PREFACE 



drawn liberally upon this, and I am grateful to all those 
who have allowed me to quote from them. 

Poel s prompt-books are less illuminating than I had hoped, 
except where they show his abridgement and rearrangement 
of a text. Together with his programmes and numerous 
photographs of his productions, they now form part of the 
Gabrielle Enthoven collection at the Victoria and Albert 
Museum. 

Poel frequently produced the same play more than once, 
each production separated by an interval of years. I have 
generally found it best to discuss his treatment of each play 
in a single, consecutive survey, even when this meant retracing 
my steps to pick up the narrative. 

On several occasions during the past two years the question 
has been put to me, "Who was William Poel?" It is not easy 
to write a biography without telling people whom you are 
writing about, and at last, to anticipate this query and the 
blank look which accompanied it, I would add a few words in 
explanation of who, in fact, Poel was. The necessity for doing 
this reminded me how largely he had been forgotten, and of 
how little he had ever been known. If I had been writing a 
book about Gordon Craig or Granville-Barker, I should not 
have been required to explain who they were; yet Poel s 
influence on the contemporary theatre has not been less than 
theirs. And so far from being discouraged by the general 
ignorance about his work, I was braced by what I interpreted 
as a challenge to set this in its true perspective. 

"Poel was a dear old man," a famous and successful novelist 
remarked to me, "but who will want to read a book about 
him?" I do not share this pessimism. The study and pro 
duction of Shakespeare, and others of our less familiar classics, 
is part of our prime business as Englishmen. It is as important, 
in its way, as the maintenance of the Queen s ships at sea! 
The record of the Old Vic and Stratford show what vast 
numbers of people are nourished by the performance of 
Shakespeare s plays. I do not think it can be a matter of 
public indifference how they are put upon the stage. Some 
of what follows in these pages may seem to be addressed to the 
scholar and the specialist, but I hope that enough will remain 
to interest the ordinary spectator. 



AUTHOR S PREFACE 13 

I worked a good deal with Poel in his later years, and I 
therefore make no apology for writing, on occasion, more 
personally than I should have judged proper if I had been 
treating someone I had never known. Poel was certainly "a dear 
old man" at the time I first came in contact with him; but he 
was a great deal more than this, and I shall hope to demonstrate 
the steel as well as the sweetness of his character. He was 
important not only for what he taught but for what he was; 
his disinterested devotion to the first principles of his art was 
unique in my experience of the stage. It contained not the 
faintest alloy of egoism. Some people regarded him as a 
genius and others would always tend to dismiss him as a 
crank. In reality he was both. But let no one pretend that 
in a theatre tainted by commerce and trimmed by com 
promise there was no place for his "fanatic heart." 

BENENDEN R-S. 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

THE Society for Theatre Research and the Publishers wish 
to acknowledge their grateful thanks to the following for 
permission to reprint copyright material in this book : 

Messrs. Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., for an extract from 
Shakespeare in the Theatre. Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd., for 
an extract from Shakespeare s Comic Characters by John Palmer, 
Messrs. George Allen & Unwin for quotations from What s 
Wrong with the Stage. Mrs. C. E. Montague and Messrs. T. 
Werner Laurie, Ltd., and Messrs. Chatto & Windus for extracts 
from Dramatic Values. Theatre Arts Magazine for an extract 
from November 1916 issue. The Public Trustee and the 
Society of Authors for extracts from the writings of G. Bernard 
Shaw. To the following national newspapers and journals: 
The Times; The Daily Telegraph and Morning Post; The Evening 
News; The News Chronicle; The Sunday Times; The New Statesman 
and Nation. And to the many individuals who so willingly 
offered letters and other material to the author. 



CHAPTER I 

The Formative Years 

ON 22 July 1852 at 3 Storey s Gate, in the City of 
Westminster, a son was born to William Pole and Matilda 
his wife. The Poles had been settled in the West Country for 
several generations and traced a collateral descent from Regi 
nald, Cardinal Pole, the counsellor of Mary Tudor. It was 
only recently that some of them had moved to London. Storey s 
Gate was a row of eight houses at the Parliament Square end 
of Birdcage Walk, just at the corner of Princes Street. It was 
pulled down in 1890 and the site is now occupied by the 
Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the Treasury 
Solicitor s offices, William was the fourth child of his parents; 
they already had two sons and a daughter. William Pole, 
senior, was an eminent civil engineer, with a gift for music 
and mathematics. He was also an authority on whist. From 
1844 until 1847 he had held the post of Professor of Engineering 
at Elphinstone College, Bombay, and at the time of William s 
birth he was assisting J. Meadows Rendel, principally in the 
construction of railways. Five years later he became assistant 
to Sir John Fowler, and afterwards consulting engineer at 
Westminster and secretary to the Royal Commission on the 
London water supply. From 1859 to 18*67 he was Professor 
of Civil Engineering at University College, London, and from 
1878 to 1891 examiner for musical degrees at London Uni 
versity. He was a Fellow and Vice-President of the Royal 
Society, and Vice-President of the Royal College of Organists. 
It was a versatile, distinguished and characteristically Victorian 
career. 

Mrs. Pole was the daughter of the Revd. Henry Gauntlett, 
Vicar of Olney, a close friend of Rowland Hill, and author of 
a commentary on the Book of Revelation. Her brother, 
Henry John, was a famous organist. He had played in the 
church at Olney as a child, and was subsequently organist 
at St. Olave s, Southwark, the United Church, Islington, and 

15 



1 6 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

St. Bartholomew s, Smithfield. He patented a new electrical 
organ, based on the Haarlem model; edited the Musical 
World; composed several hymn-tunes; and was the chief 
author of the Encyclopaedia of the Chant, published in 1885. 
From both sides of his family, therefore, the young William 
Poel inherited a fine artistic sensibility, a deep intellectual 
seriousness, and a delicate ear for music. His father was 
logical, industrious, and determined to the point of obstinacy; 
his mother was intensely religious in the evangelical tradition. 
They handed on to their son a care for detail, an incapacity 
for compromise, and a reverence, which was in itself a form 
of piety, for whatever work he had in hand. 

William Poel breathed from his earliest years all that was 
most high-minded in mid- Victorian culture, and he retained 
to the end the temperament and, to some degree, the tastes 
of a pre-Raphaelite. The very beautiful cast of his features 
caught the eye of Holman Hunt, who was a frequent visitor 
to the house, and who chose him as a model for the Divine 
Child in "The Discovery of Christ in the Temple. 55 This 
painting hangs now in the Birmingham Art Gallery. About 
the same time he was singled out by Sir Frederick Burton to 
serve as model for "The Knight s Esquire, 55 a water-colour 
which can be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum. These 
are, in effect, the earliest portraits we possess of William Poel. 
But it was music which played the largest part in his forma 
tion. He was taught to play the 5 cello, which he mastered 
well enough, though not always to his father s satisfaction; 
and there was an echo of this intransigence in his own teaching 
when he sought to awaken, in ears less sensitive than his own, 
a response to the rhythms of Elizabethan verse. 

Poel was born into the heyday of scientific optimism. He 
would always incline to the radical and even the revolutionary 
solution; it was no part of his nature or his upbringing to 
assume that what was established was true. He was a sceptic 
in the sense that he was a questioner. We lack information 
about his schooling, except that he was a bad subject for 
conventional education; and that, when he was already 
seventeen, his tutor expressed the hope that he would never 
read Measure for Measure, or Troilus and Cressida. At the age 
of twelve he fell on to a railway line and this affected his health 



THE FORMATIVE YEARS 1 7 

for some years to come. It certainly imposed on him a large 
measure of solitude and threw him, at a perilously early age, 
upon the resources of his own thoughts. At fourteen he was 
described as "dreamy and restless" (Letter from G. B. Stuart to 
Mrs. Pole, 10 Jan. 1935). His natural tastes developed 
unhindered, and also unhelped, by academic discipline. He 
was judged too delicate to be sent to the University, where 
his two brothers had been sent before him the one to Oxford 
with a scholarship at Christ Church and the other to Cam 
bridge with a scholarship at Queen s and he was apprenticed 
instead to a firm of building contractors, Messrs. Lucas Bros., 
when he was still only seventeen. 

This choice of occupation may have seemed to him as good 
as any other. London was being transformed (from one of the 
most beautiful cities in Europe to one of the ugliest) before 
his eyes. It must have been interesting, at the least, to have a 
hand in the business; and he was first set to work on the window 
frames of the Albert Hall. Lucas had the contract for these 
and the Hall was then nearing completion. Poel enjoyed the 
crafts and companionship of the joiner s shop, but in the office 
he was less at home. The plans for the Albert Hall were not 
in themselves inspiring; moreover, he had not been responsible 
for drawing them up. And what Poel craved, in however 
modest a degree, was responsibility. Instead, he was drawn 
deeper into the machinations of "real estate/ predatory in 
intent and hideously inartistic in execution. He acquired an 
early distaste for the "City" and a permanent disapproval of 
commercial values. Remembering the pre-Raphaelite con 
tacts of his boyhood, we might suppose that these would have 
led him straight to William Morris and the neo-medievalism 
of the seventies. Poel, as Edward Garnett pointed out, had in 
many respects the character of a medieval craftsman, and his 
rediscovery and presentation of Everyman was to be his most 
faffioxss sinarle achievement. But Poel was never at ease with 
the theology of the Middle Ages. Nor had they possessed the 
kind of theatre that was closest to his dreams; a theatre con 
secrated to the secular passions of mankind. 

Nothing is more difficult to capture in the life of a creative 
artist than the moment when he says, with a final certitude: 
"This is what I want to do, and nothing else." Or perhaps, 



1 8 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

with a tinge of presumption : "This is what I was sent into the 
world to do, and nothing else/ It is not possible to say at 
what point the vocation of William Poel took definite shape in 
his mind. We know that he had always enjoyed reciting and 
dressing up, but he did not go to the theatre until he was 
twenty, when his father took him to see Ryder in The Merchant 
of Venice. In fact, he had little opportunity for theatre-going, 
for he left London soon after entering on his apprenticeship 
and worked in Lucas s office at Warnham, a small village near 
Horsham, in Sussex. Poel had no taste for country life, 
and was inclined afterwards to regret the years he had 
spent away from London. What troubled him most, he 
writes four years later in his diary,* was 

the loss I felt of means for self-improvement. Shut up in that 
little village there were no classes to be attended, no libraries, 
no reading-rooms, no people, no competition, no excitement, 
no variety. I love being alone. I am always happy then, 
but I mean alone inwardly, not outwardly, that is to say I 
like to be so situated as to feel that my thoughts may wander 
where they will and my actions may be sufficiently free to 
follow the bent of those thoughts. 

He had returned to London at Christmas 1873, a year before 
these lines were written (i February 1874), and was able to 
compare the advantages, for a natural solitary, of life in the 
town and the country. 

Now when I am alone in London my loneliness consists in 
my feeling myself to be a very small object in an extraordin 
arily large circulation of activity where my eyes can for ever 
feast oa what is well suited for the digestion of my mind. 
Whether I am walking in the streets, or sitting in a theatre 
or office there is always before me a panorama for ever moving 
of human life and yet never the same, for the scenes are a 
mixture and revelation of the sublime and the ridiculous. 
So my mind no longer hungers. 

Nevertheless, during his residence at Warnham, he had met 
someone who was to have a considerable influence on his life 
and work, and who was perhaps to determine his career. 
Rather curiously he does not mention this person s name in 

*Poel kept a diary between i Feb. 1874 an< * 6 Aug. 1878, and all the 
quotations in this chapter, unless otherwise stated, are taken from it. 



THE FORMATIVE YEARS 1 9 

his diary, and research has not established his identity. But 
Poel generously acknowledged his debt. 

My Friday evenings shut up with him in his library were 
happy hours for me. His conversation, his books, were my 
delight. In him I saw how a man of knowledge, though 
solitary, can be happy when surrounded by his books 
treasures that he well knew how to value and enjoy. He was 
very liberal in lending me his books and in giving me informa 
tion and encouragement towards self-improvement. From 
his acquaintance I may date a change in my mind s desires 
which may have no little effect on my future career. 

Once re-established in London, and living with his family, 
who had now moved to Stanhope Place, Poel hopes that his 
"sluggish nature may be roused to exertion by the activity 
with which it must necessarily be surrounded in this great 
city." To anyone who remembers PoePs energy at the 
age of eighty this self-reproach will sound surprising. But he 
may still have been suffering from the ill-health which had 
prevented him from going to Oxford ; or, at the least, this may 
have left him more or less chronically fatigued. "I want," he 
writes," to increase my energy of which I fear I have no large 
supply, that I may find out what is in me and how best to use it. 
To know if I have got a THAT within me and what that THAT is. 
To let no gifts that nature may have given me slumber and 
decay." Here was the crux of the matter; but it was some 
time before Peel s THAT revealed itself with the precision 
which was to give shape and direction to his whole life. 

Meanwhile he was beginning to feel the gaps in his education. 
<C I want to learn Latin; I want to read all the English versions 
of the Classics, I want to write my own language correctly 
and fluently." He took some part in social life, but was 
humiliated by not being able to dance properly. "No man 
likes to be held in contempt by a woman and I don t. For a 
man six feet high to be looked down upon by the fair sex with 
indifference, even with ridicule, is most disagreeable . . ." 
(12 Feb. 1874). He read avidly; John Forster s Life of Charles 
Dickens and Tom Moore s Life of Byron are among the books 
mentioned about this time. He also quotes with approval the 
following passage from Tom Jones: 

I hastened therefore back to London, the best retirement 
of either grief or shame, unless the person is of a very public 



20 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

character; for here you have the advantage of solitude without 
its disadvantage, since you may be alone and in company 
at the same time (17 March 1874). 

Poel had neither grief nor shame to contend with; but this 
solitary was also an inveterate spectator and his theatrical 
judgments would always be checked by his observation of the 
world. It was, however, in the theatre itself that he found 
his deepest recreation. In this same spring of 1874 he saw 
Philip and The Bells at the Lyceum, and we get his first opinions 
on the art of Henry Irving. His views were not yet formulated, 
either on acting or production; he was simply taking stock of 
the English stage as he then found it. He did not think 
Philip a good play; it seemed to him "too much of a comedy 
to suit Henry Irving. His acting towards the end of the first 
act is, no doubt, well finished; but considered throughout it 
seems to me too forced in some parts and I should be inclined 
to call him pedantic, carrying on his psychological movements 
to a needless extent" (24 May 1874). The Bells he found 
unwholesome in its blatant sensationalism, although he was 
charmed by the first two acts, and thought "the climax at the 
second act when Mathias jumps up from his chair and franti 
cally joins the dance ... the finest conceived and best rendered 
piece of acting" he had ever seen. "Talking guess work," 
he continues, "I should say Irving had spent an unusual 
amount of labour and pains on this play, perhaps studying it 
for jears." But the third act disgusted him; he found 
it "false to art and to good sense." What was the 
point or the profit, he asked, in "learning the particulars 
of a murder and the contortions of a dying man?" Even 
at the early age of twenty-one Poel had set his face against the 
seductions of realism, as he was to set it against the inflations 
of rhetoric; and it was not Irving but Charles Mathews who 
really excited his enthusiasm. He went to see him in The 
Critic, and wrote afterwards : 

Charles Mathews is the man to see for acting. I never saw 
anything like it before in anybody else. His short, quick way 
of speaking, giving his own particular emphasis to every little 
sentence. His brisk movements-so natural and graceful 
While you are hearing him, you seem to forget you are in a 
theatre, and during the representation of The Critic you 



THE FORMATIVE YEARS 21 

imagine yourself to be watching some persons amusing them 
selves with a rehearsal, not acting a studied play, and you felt 
inclined to jump on to the stage and join in the fun. 

Did he suspect already that what he had enjoyed was an 
Elizabethan intimacy? In any case it is interesting to recall 
that Charles Mathews had also been the idol of Henry Irving. 
He must have been an incomparable comedian, and those 
who have studied the series of coloured drawings in the 
Billiard Room at the Garrick Club, depicting him in an aston 
ishing range of parts from plays long since forgotten, will be 
able to recapture, in some faint degree, his ease, agility and 
charm. For the student of costume these drawings have a 
unique interest; each dress or uniform seems to fit the actor 
like a glove, clothing his entire personality. Poel also saw 
Mathews as Charles Surface in The School for Scandal, sur 
rounded by a glittering cast Helen Faucit, Mrs. Stirling, 
Samuel Phelps, Compton, Toole, and many others, all 
assembled for the benefit of Benjamin Webster on his retirement 
from the management of the Adelphi. Poel greatly admired 
Mathews acting in the Picture Gallery Scene: 

the way in which he approached his uncle s picture and swept 
his handkerchief down it, carelessly, not pathetically as I 
expected so well suiting himself to the character. His boyish 
movements, too it was all very good (2 March 1874). 

But what impressed him even more than Charles Mathews 
were the visits of two French companies to the Princess s 
Theatre in the spring and summer of 1874. The first of these 
produced de Musset s On ne badine pas avec V amour, and Balzac s 
Mercadet le Faiseur. It was characteristic of Poel to note that 
in de Musset s comedy there was 

nothing whatever harsh or obtrusive, no series of climaxes 
to cloud the general effect. . . . Every scene and every speech 
has its purpose and meaning, and while the intention in the 
grand climax is dexterously hid from the audience, their feelings 
are being prepared and worked up to that point of interest 
and sympathy which causes the climax, when it does burst, 
to have a terrible but truly grand effect (27 Dec. 1874). 

A few days later he saw Got in Mercadet le Faiseur, and he was 



22 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

able to compare him with Charles Mathews in an English 
version of the same play (A Game of Speculation). 

Charles Mathews acting had none of the fire and go in it 
of M. Got s, but then C. Mathews was so villainously supported 
and the whole piece so carelessly got up. M. Got s interpreta 
tion of the character was so intense that in the last Act when 
all his creditors come in clamouring for their money my 
feelings were raised to a pitch of excitement that I felt to be 
produced much more by the acting of the man than by the 
actual plot. 

Later in the year the Vaudeville from Paris gave the reper 
tory of their plays at the Queen s. Poel saw them in Sardou s 
Nos Intimes, and here again he was able to compare a French 
and English treatment of the same part, for he had seen Mile. 
Beatrice s production at the Haymarket (Friends and Foes). 
He thought the French production, in its ensemble, "the best 
bit of acting I have yet seen." His Victorian sensibility 
was slightly shocked by the big scene in the fourth act; it 
needed 

a great artist to interpret [this] without giving offence to our 
English audience. Mile. Beatrice was unable to do this and 
the scene went off flat to the audience, not to say disagreeably. 
Quite the contrary was the case with Mile. FargueiPs inter 
pretation. So vigorously did she act her part that the interest 
created in the minds of the audience for the welfare of C6cile 
causes the indelicacy of the situation to be in a measure over 
looked. I shall never forget the horror depicted on Mile. 
FargueiFs face at the advances of the young man and the 
intense anxiety she showed to get rid of him. So much did 
she exert herself that she all but fainted afterwards and I 
noticed that one of the actors had to hand her some smelling 
salts she turned so pale. 

These performances gave Poel a permanent standard of 
acting values; what he liked particularly about the French 
method was its willing obedience to rhythm. English acting, 
by comparison, seemed stilted and staccato. Poel s taste was 
classical; he had no appreciation of the romantic hit-or-miss. 

During the rest of 1874 Poel remained in a state of chronic 
unrest, enlarging in every way possible the horizons of his 
mind. He paid three visits to the Bethnal Green Museum 
where he was struck by the Greuze heads and by two portraits 



THE FORMATIVE YEARS 23 

by Van Dyck. If he journeyed as far as Bethnal Green, we 
may assume that he was a fairly frequent visitor to the National 
Gallery. When he had the house to himself, he returned to the 
playing of his cello. I do not think that Poel played much 
in later life, but it is not fanciful to suggest that his productions 
had the deep tone the tone of reverie which it is the property 
of the cello to suggest. Any good production of a play is 
musical, and Poel s productions were marked by an unerring 
rhythm and a tranquil, meditative tone. This sense of har 
mony was already in his blood, and it became the basis of all 
his teaching. 

He continued his reading with a life of Goethe, which 
suggested to him why the marriages of genius are so frequently 
unhappy. 

See how these great men burn to be alone, to rush into the 
fields or streets, to revel with their imaginations. Surely a 
married life must be burdensome to them. 

PoePs own married life was to be anything but a burden to 
him, but he, too, liked to rush into the streets, if not into the 
fields, and be alone with his fancy. The office hours grew 
irksome. 

Somehow I seem to do nothing well. I was sent this after 
noon to square up some dimensions with a young fellow who 
I know had not had more experience in the matter than 
myself yet if he did not beat me out of countenance in 
quickness (28 September 1874). 

When he had the opportunity to observe, his artist s eye was 
quick to seize the significant and moving detail. One day 
towards the end of October he went to Charing Gross station 
to see his parents and sister off to the continent. 

There was a lady standing on the platform opposite the 
windows of one of the carriages, waiting there to see the train 
start that was to carry away from her her child, a little girl 
about seven or eight years old, going off, I believe, under the 
care of strangers. She kept talking to her child till the last 
moment and it was touching to hear the effort made to disguise 
her feelings and her thoughts in playful chit-chat. But the 
train moved away and the pang came with all its severity. 
I remember two years ago while waiting at St. Catherine s 
wharf for a steamer to take me to France a scene equally 



24 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

touching. A passenger steamer from Hamburg had just 
arrived with a large cargo at the wharf after a very rough 
passage, everyone on board looking miserable. There were 
some anxious friends on shore waiting and the meeting was a 
true heartfelt one. One person, a girl about fifteen, lost all 
control over her feeling. Coming foremost from the crowd on 
deck she saw standing on the wharf her two sisters, or friends, 
girls of about the same age, when rushing wildly down the 
gangway she threw herself in their arms and sobbed aloud. It 
was "her better self," or what I should call her spirit, freeing 
itself from bodily restraint that trials made too severe for the 
body to bear, and expressing itself in a language of its own. 
I admit it is weak to commit yourself to the world in scenes 
like these. The feelings enveloped in a human body, its 
intelligence confined to the small limits of utterance that 
human language gives it, should not manifest itself to the 
world except through the mediums common to mankind. 
Otherwise no sympathy can be obtained from mankind 
(24 October 1874). 

This philosophical understanding of emotion was to give a 
new dimension to Poel s productions in the theatre, and even 
now, before he had ever set foot on the stage, he turns to the 
theatre for an illustration of what he is trying to say. 

A powerful actor can move his audience to tears at a striking 
incident towards the middle or close of the play, because he has 
been careful from the commencement of the play to represent 
the feelings as affected by the various minor incidents leading 
up to the great one. Thus a corresponding feeling has been 
awakened in us and we sympathise with the character repre 
sented. But if the same actor was to come forward and give 
us the striking incident without the previous preparation, 
we should laugh and not cry. It is so in life. We cannot 
sympathise with the sudden outbursts of another person s 
feelings, because we do not know or have not seen their origin. 

Here is mature criticism indeed for a man of twenty-two, 
and the strength of Poel s convictions will give him increasing 
courage. He is quite unmoved by Gilbert s Sweethearts or 
Robertson s Society; he goes to see Irving s Hamlet at the 
Lyceum and then to know the worst sits through an old- 
style production of the same play at Drury Lane with Creswick 
as the Prince. His description gives us a good idea of what 
even London playgoers had occasionally to endure. He found 
the whole thing "damnable." 



THE FORMATIVE YEARS 25 

Stagey to a degree that reduces to a minirnuin any interest 
in the characters or their fates. When individuals walk about 
the stage with measured steps, stand in symmetrical positions, 
raising their hands first to their breasts, then towards the 
heavens, then towards the earth, making recitals of every 
speech they utter, I feel sure it is fatal to all interpretation of 
character. I am glad a revolution has come to pass. A good 
actor will now, I believe, make it his business to abstain as 
much as possible from this sort of business, as I believe the 
great actors and actresses, like Mrs. Siddons, Miss O Neill and 
others must more or less have done in order to make the 
impression they did on their audiences. A man, when he 
tells his friends he hopes to go to heaven, does not point 
towards the sky to demonstrate his meaning. Why, then, 
should it be done on the stage? (18 Dec. 1874). 

Poel, we observe, admits that "a revolution has come to 
pass"; he may have felt that Lyceum Shakespeare, for all its 
defects, was in a different category to this. We have no record, 
unfortunately, of what he thought of living s Hamlet. But 
there was always Charles Mathews to quicken his playgoer s 
pulse with some inimitable stroke of nature; and soon he was 
to receive a major revelation of what personal genius could 
bring to the art of acting. In the matter of his own vocation 
this revelation was decisive. 



II 

At the beginning of 1875 Poel felt himself to be at the parting 
of the ways. On i January there is the following entry in 
his diary: 

No one can tell where I may be by the end of this year. But 
I write under the feeling that this may be the last New Year s 
Day for many years, if not for ever, that I shall be writing under 
this roof. It is my wish and the bent of my mind that I take 
this year a new step in life of a most serious nature, one that 
will considerably affect my future position in life, one that may 
lead me into many hardships and trouble and poverty. I 
only want pluck and I shall do it, but it is a most bold step, 
a sort of leap into darkness in which may be hid some fearful 
consequences. It wants a clear head and energy (that^ is 
health and strength) and I fear I am not well provided with 
either. May God in His great mercy preserve me in this year 
or through such a part of it as He may think best. 



26 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

The weeks and months go by and the diary is blank. Then, 
on Sunday n April, there is the brief entry: 

I seem to get no nearer to the change I long for and this 
makes me sad. I am still under the bondage of Hell (the City). 
I saw Salvini in Othello the other day, a great treat. 

"What went you out into the wilderness to see?" was the 
phrase perpetually dinned into his ears by those who did not 
understand why he went so often to the theatre. "No one 
then knew," he wrote, on the morrow of Salvini s death, "with 
what awe I approached the shrine where Salvini stood in the 
likeness of a superhuman. ... It was the genius of the poet- 
dramatist Shakespeare, and of the actor Salvini who so finely 
interpreted some of his characters, which urged me to labour 
in the cause of the theatre." 

In fact, the night on which Poel first saw Salvini was the 
turning-point in his whole life. He was never to forget it. 
Fifty-six years later, when I was playing Coriolanus for him 
at the Chelsea Palace, he met me as I entered my dressing- 
room with the gentle reproach: "Salvini used to be in the 
theatre two hours before the performance." We have no 
detailed account of what Poel thought of his Othello, but it is 
interesting to note how he described his Hamlet nine years 
later. Salvini s Othello had astonished by its primitive 
ferocity; his Hamlet had other qualities which Poel found 
even more congenial. 

Perhaps the Hamlet of Signer Salvini cannot appear a 
striking performance to the English Playgoer who has been 
accustomed to see the melodramatic side of the character 
emphasised and the intellectual and poetical side suppressed. 
The artistic instinct so predominates in Salvini that to violate 
nature in voice or gesture is an impossible offence; yet in the 
interpretation of a character like Hamlet, in which, under 
the excuse of madness, feigned or real, the actor is given so 
much opportunity to be noisy, a rendering as undemonstrative 
as Salvini s may appear to many unintelligible. Moreover, 
Salvini s conscientiousness as an artist induces him to sacrifice 
both dramatic effect and traditional usage to be true to his 
author, so that his Shakespearian performances have probably 
given the most pleasure to those most intimately acquainted 
with the plays. To me Salvini s Hamlet had a charm as great 



THE FORMATIVE YEARS 27 

as, if not greater than, his Othello. He acted Hamlet as I 
never saw it done before, and probably never shall again. 
There was a prince in manner as well as birth; and the fact 
of the part having been studied, not from the play as known 
through its acting edition but from the original text, rendered 
the interpretation free from many inconsistencies that displease 
the Shakespearian student. His Hamlet did not, in the scene 
with Ophelia, fitfully rush on and off the stage, nor show an 
undignified irritability in his remarks to Polonius, nor sprawl 
on the ground in the presence of ladies, nor whine in monotones 
at each appearance of the Ghost. He was content with natural 
gestures, a variety of delicate intonations, and very graceful 
and expressive movements, for his interpretation of the char 
acter. The dismissal of Ophelia was given with exquisite 
feeling. ... In the closet scene, it was evident that Salvini had 
formed his conception from the original text. The latter half 
of this scene being omitted from our acting edition, it is usual 
for the Queen to show a degree of repentance, and Hamlet, 
therefore, a show of tenderness that would make nonsense of 
the omitted lines if they were spoken. The Queen s grief and 
compunction are transient, and she leaves the scene and returns 
direct to the King. May this be my justification for urging 
all coming Hamlets to banish from their minds not only our 
present acting edition of the play, but also the traditional 
business connected with it, and to found their conception of 
this complex character on a careful study of the text alone 
(Letter in The Era, 26 April 1884). 

There was one particular touch in Salvini s Hamlet, which 
Poel was never to forget and which may have helped to 
develop his ideas of economy in movement. When Salvini 
threw off Horatio and Marcellus during his first encounter 
with the Ghost, he was seized with a tremendous paroxysm of 
anger and then stood in rigid stillness for a long pause, holding 
his audience, as he so well knew how. At last he just moved 
the little finger of his right hand to indicate his decision, and 
then came the words : "Go on; I ll follow thee." Poel described 
this effect to his nephew, Reginald Pole, who was playing the 
Ghost with John Barrymore in New York, and Barrymore 
adopted it in his own performance. This is a good example 
of how stage tradition is created; of how one actor may help 
another in the same part. Poel saw Barrymore twice when 
he brought his production to London in 1926, and thought it 
the most interesting English-speaking Hamlet he had seen, 
superior to Irving or Forbes Robertson. He admired the way 



28 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

Barrymore "talked his part all the way through and got the 
other actors to do the same" (Letter to Reginald Pole, 1925}. 
But he thought him quite deficient in emotional power, and 
found that the famous pauses grew tiresome from repetition 
and exaggeration. "Of course/ he said, "it was not a bit 
equal to Salvini, and never dignified or pathetic, and the 
version he acts should not be called Shakespeare s Hamlet, but 
scenes from Hamlet 1 (Ibid.}. 

What Poel had admired in Salvini was the testing of every 
effect by reference to the text. Here was his gospel of a new 
start which was nothing more than the original point of 
departure, and we shall discuss it later on. It was certainly 
not yet formulated in his mind when he saw Salvini as Othello 
in April 1875. . Yet by realizing the essential lightness of 
Salvini s approach to acting and the consummate ease of his 
technique, Poel came to see more clearly what was wrong with 
the stage around him. He became impatient and where a 
revolution in art is in question, both patience and impatience 
are necessary. 

There are no entries in the diary between n April and 

3 October, and the problem arises what did Poel do in 

the intervening months? All we know is that he made an 

attempt to go on the stage, and returned, discouraged and 

disconsolate, to London. In Ris Memoir of William Poel in 

the Dictionary of National Biography, Mr. S. R. Littlewood states 

that he went to Italy with Salvini; but no date is given for this 

visit. Poel once told me that he "walked on" as a super with 

the great Italian actor in order to study his method more 

closely. Salvini was only in London during the springs of 

l8 75> J 876 and 1884, ar *d PoePs known activities forbid the 

hypothesis that he joined Salvini s company in 1876 or 1884; 

it is still possible, however, that he did so in 1875. Salvini 

would have needed English "supers" and may gladly have 

engaged Poel; but it is much less likely that he would have 

taJcen him back to Italy, where he could have found all the 

actors he wanted and where an Englishman who spoke no 

Italian might well have been an embarrassment. If Poel 

had spent six months in Italy, he could hardly have returned 

in October with a humiliating sense of failure. He would 

have had no opportunity seriously to test his talents. I think 



THE FORMATIVE YEARS 2 9 

it much more possible that he appeared with Salvini in London 
during the spring of 1875; that he gained admission to his 
company while he was still under the spell of his Othello; and 
that he did this shortly after 1 1 April. 

This theory still leaves unexplained the details of PoePs 
disappointment. All he tells us is that it was "a very painful 
one." He had had no encouragement, needless to say, from 
his family. The stage is so unsettling and precarious a career 
that it is the first duty of any father to prevent his son from 
courting its hazards. In the case of Poel there was no evidence 
that he had a serious talent for acting; he was, to all appearance, 
a mere stage-struck youth. What possible future could be 
foreseen in the theatre of that time for a young man of high 
personal ideals, great strength and purity of character, 
unless he had gifts of a quite exceptional kind ? And even if 
he had, what chance had he of exercising his gifts and still 
preserving his integrity? William Pole senior may well have 
asked how the fastidious taste and critical intelligence of his 
son would obtain a hearing. If he could have foreseen the 
sublime failure of Poel s theatrical career, he would hardly 
have been more encouraging. 

Poel returned to his father s house, mortified but unrepen 
tant. "The battle had been lost," he wrote on 3 October, 

and a retreat becomes necessary. Friends will now crowd 
round the winning side and the loser, unable to prove his 
cause and his honour, must suffer double ignominy for having 
made the attack. But whatever slanders be heaped on my 
name I swear my intentions were honest to free myself from 
an unlucky bondage that I had crept into unawares. But a 
man cannot leap from one side of the river to another without 
due preparation, and I know I formed my plans rashly. What 
I had hoped to gain in a single struggle, I must now leave to 
time and labour to win in the long run. The result of course 
will not be the same, as the yellow leaf must lack vital growth. 
. . . But the sacrifice must be made. No friends, no means, no 
strength, no health, he is a madman who fights with such 
weapons. So after five days sea breathing at Margate I make 
a fresh start in the old direction, running with the stream and 
not against it, trusting that Providence will guide me into 
smooth waters. 

He went back to Lucas s for a few months. The firm were 



30 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

just completing Liverpool Street Station, and whatever 
nostalgia this sprawling edifice may now evoke in a generation 
which has been educated by Mr. John Betjeman, it cannot 
have filled the young Poel with a burning faith in the future 
of British architecture. His faith, we have seen, was elsewhere; 
and it is not possible to read the passage just quoted from his 
diary without realising that no force on earth could have 
deflected him from his ambition. The cynic may reflect that 
all stage careers begin like this; only time can show whether 
these tremendous imperatives are the voice of vanity or 
vocation. One thing is sure; any man resolving to try his 
luck on the stage is, in a measure, a man obsessed. But when 
Liverpool Street Station at last stood forth in all its glory, 
and William Poel packed his bags for Bristol, there is no reason 
to doubt the truth of his explanation. 

, I was not blind when I took the step; it was not ambition 
to emerge from obscurity; such stuff was never in my thoughts. 
I wanted to be in a position where I could see much of life 
and get much change of scene. In an office this was not to be 
had. The study of men and women and their passions was 
my earnest, my only desire. The stage offered the best facilities 
for it. Success had no weight in the matter; I found out what 
I wanted and accepted the bargain, cost what it might. 

The date was 26 February 1876. 



Ill 

What had brought Poel to Bristol was his old idol, Charles 
Mathews, who was starting a provincial tour with a play 
called My Awful Dad. Poel joined his company, and by a 
printing mistake in the programme Pole became Poel over 
night. It has been suggested that he kept this change of name 
in order to spare the feelings of his father who had been so 
strongly opposed to his going on the stage. Mathews was 
now in his seventies, but the great comedians do not age ; 
their high spirits preserve them in a gay, perpetual maturity, 
and Poel, watching eagerly from the wings, was able to study 
the technique that kept Mathews young. He saw how he 
achieved an illusion of rapidity, while actually speaking very 




Victoria and Albert Museum 



L ECUYER 

("The Knight s Esquire 53 ) 
Painted by Sir F. W. Burton 

This water-colour sketch, first exhibited in 1864, 
shows Poel as a boy of about twelve years old 




WILLIAM POEL 
in early manhood 



WILLIAM POEL 
in old age 




THE FORMATIVE YEARS 3! 

slowly. Mathews acted in two pieces every night, but he 
would not rehearse them beforehand, sending his stage- 
manager to go through his part with the company. When the 
evening came, the younger actors found it difficult to resist 
laughing out loud, as they watched the old man s comic 
expression and by-play. He could always predict at what 
point the audience would laugh, and he cautioned the actors 
against spoiling this by laughing prematurely themselves. 
Poel himself was rarely a good actor. His appearance and 
personality were both impressive, and I should judge that 
they became more impressive as he grew older. But the 
actor s flair for self-communication, his essential spontaneity, 
was generally lacking. Whether Poel harboured any illusions 
on this score or, if so, for how long is doubtful. It would 
seem that his approach to the theatre was, at first, critical 
rather than creative; the mode of his own creativeness would 
declare itself later on. He wanted to find out what this place, 
the theatre, was really like; he wanted to discover all he could 
about the science of acting; he wanted, above all, to study 
Shakespeare. And so he settled down, for two and a half 
years, to the routine of provincial touring; mixing with all 
manner of people; doing every sort of odd job behind the 
curtain; acting a wide variety of parts; and getting paid a 
guinea a week if he was lucky. 

When he left Mathews he became a general utility man at 
a theatre in Dublin and afterwards in Liverpool. Here he 
saw the famous Lydia Thompson Burlesque Troupe, but 
discovered "no atom of merit" in their performance. The 
burlesque was, however, preceded by a comedy by Tom 
Taylor and here he admired the acting of Lionel Brough. 
He thought this "the best bit of artistic acting" he had seen, 
after Charles Mathews and Jefferson. When his engagement 
at Liverpool was over, he went on tour with Osmund Tearle. 
He was in London during the first six months of 1877, and 
took the opportunity of going to the theatre whenever he 
could. He was able to compare Mrs. KendaPs acting in 
Nos Intimes (produced under the title of Peril at the Prince of 
Wales Theatre) with Mile. Fargueil s performance in the same 
part. Mrs. Kendal, he found, missed all the "fine points" in 
which the French actress had so excelled. Where Mile. Fargueil 



32 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

had turned pale, bitten her lips, and quivered from head 
to foot, Mrs. Kendal did nothing to indicate the struggle that 
was going on inside her. And Squire Bancroft as her husband 
seemed "rather tame." Poel also saw Irving as Richard III 
at the Lyceum and came to a general conclusion about his 
powers. 

Of all the plays produced by him I like it the best, as also 
do I like his performance of Richard better than his acting of 
any other character. There is less exaggeration and the 
comedy touches are good, but his last scenes exhibit all his 
old weaknesses. This last representation of Mr. Irving has 
pretty well satisfied my mind as to the extent of his power. 
He has a true artistic mind, a great love for completeness in 
details of scenery and costume and correctness in the small 
parts. In his own acting he is most successful in the comedy 
element and seems to me unable to rise to greatness in a 
pathetic or passionate situation. He appears to aim at creating 
an effect by working his scene up to a striking picture upon 
which the curtain may fall. This is a modern practice that I 
much dislike as it is sensational and stagey (23 February 1877). 

Poel had not yet realised that the rhythm he craved for in 
Shakespearian production could only be captured on a stage 
similar to the stage for which Shakespeare wrote. 

After a short tour in Scotland he joined Clifford Cooper s 
.company at the Theatre Royal, Oxford, for the summer 
vacation through August and September; and in October 
obtained an engagement with James Scott s company at 
Rosedale in the North Riding of Yorkshire, on the edge of the 
Whitby moors. 

He arrived at Pickering late on a Saturday evening and 
slept at the inn. The next morning he set out to walk the ten 
miles to Rosedale, leaving his luggage to be sent on later. It 
was a sunny autumnal day, and Vernon Vole Cockburn, 
Scott s leading man, came half way to meet him. Poel had 
already made friends with him during his Oxford season and 
described him as "a very intelligent fellow and most fascinating 
in conversation" (Letter to Harriet Pole, March 1878). Poel 
himself had been engaged to play secondary but important 
parts lago or Laertes and it was on Cockburn s advice that 
he had offered his services to the management. As the two 



THE FORMATIVE YEARS 33 

friends walked through the lush meadowlands of the Vale of 
Pickering and then climbed up through the dale, Cockburn 
explained, as gently as he could, that Scott had no capital 
and hardly any wardrobe or properties, and that the payment 
of salary depended on how much was taken at the doors. He 
was relieved to hear that Poel still had sixteen shillings in his 
pocket, saved from his previous engagement. The summer 
season had been extremely difficult owing to the depression 
in the iron trade, but when Poel arrived at Rosedale he can 
hardly have been prepared for the situation which confronted 
him. He described this in a letter to his sister six months 
later: 

A shilling, a pole with a torn red curtain and a scene were 
all the exacting time had left to them. When I look back and 
think of the cold shudder that came over me as I entered the 
Rosedale schoolroom, and saw this wretched stage delusion, this 
miserable eyesore, to which my winter s livelihood was linked, 
and now look at the neat little fit-up we carry about with us, 
with its respectable company and attractive powers, so success 
ful that last night more than a hundred persons were turned 
away from the doors unable to procure admission, I am bound 
to admire the indomitable pluck and perseverance with which 
the Manager, though in the yellow leaf of life, faced the 
difficulties before him. 

It is worth looking at the repertory of this plucky little 
troupe. The opening play was Nobody s Child, a romantic 
drama in three acts by W. Phillips, with twenty characters 
acted by a company of six. It was followed by Catherine 
Howard, another romantic drama in three acts from the play of 
Dumas by W. E. Suter; The Lady of Lyons; East Lynne; George 
Colman s The Iron Chest; Eugene Aram and Hamlet, in which 
Poel himself played three parts. He played a fourth in the 
farce which followed it; for each performance concluded with 
a farce and a dance by the manager s daughter. The shows 
appear to have been reasonably good, so long as the manager 
could be kept out of the cast and his daughter prevented 
from playing tragedy. All the actors savings were pooled 
and when the last performance in a place was over, everyone 
was still loading up the waggon at five o clock in the morning. 
This company was not above soliciting patronage, and Poel 
would take his turn in going up to the big house, showing the 



34 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

playbill, and waiting in the kitchen until the chatelaine 
would consent to receive him. Both off the stage and on it 
improvisation was always necessary. "I was forced to laugh" 
(writes Poel to his sister) "when the manager, who was playing 
Pettibone in Kiss in the Dark, had to light his candle. He lifted 
it from the table, walked to the edge of the stage, extended 
his body to the fiillest, and lit it from a suspended gas burner, 
more to my amazement than that of the audience." 

They went from Rosedale to Kirby Moorside, loading the 
donkey cart with such properties as they possessed and sending 
it by road, while Poel, with Scott and Cockburn, walked over 
the hills. He described the scenery as equal to any that he had 
seen in Scotland. His luggage had been forwarded from 
Pickering, and it was welcomed as a valuable acquisition to 
the chattels of the troupe. The hat-box was just the thing 
for the block on which Catherine Howard would lose her 
head the following evening; the two black trunks were easily 
transformed into a tomb; and PoePs property sword, at grips 
with the manager s cutlass, would permit them at last to play 
the fencing scene from The Lady of Lyons. The stage at Kirby 
Moorside was even smaller than the stage at Rosedale; it 
had only five feet in depth and the roof of the building was 
so constructed that whenever Poel appeared, his head was 
hidden by a beam. When he complained that the roof 
was too low, he invited the retort that he was too tall. 
At the end of the first week he had received i os. lod. in 
salary. 

After a disastrous week at Driffield they had barely enough 
money to get themselves to Easingwold where they survived 
the competition of a circus; and from there they proceeded 
to Knaresborough on the western side of the Vale of York. 
The ladies of the company rode on top of the luggage cart 
while the gentlemen walked beside. Scott was in "gushing" 
high spirits, since he was entering a new town with at least 
2 in his pocket. Poel was now being paid one to three 
shillings arrears of salary, every night, as the money came in. 
They went from Knaresborough to Keighley, where Scott 
had hired the Drill Hall and an orchestra at thirty shillings a 
night. By eight o clock only eighteen shillings had been taken 
at the door, and this did not even cover the rent of the hall, 



THE FORMATIVE YEARS 35 

let alone the salaries of the actors. Next morning they all 
invited themselves to breakfast with the manager. This was 
no concerted plan; each had acted on a spontaneous impulse 
of despair. Scott regaled them with tea and bread and butter, 
and then ordered two thousand handbills to be printed, which 
the company later distributed from the corners of the streets. 
Poel stood in the neighbourhood of a factory, and gave five 
or six leaflets to each workman as he passed on his way home. 
This eagerness did much to restore the morale of the company; 
surely there would be an improvement in the takings for the 
second performance. In fact, they took only fifteen shillings. 
It was discovered afterwards that the male population of 
Keighley had seized on the leaflets because they made such 
excellent spills ! 

On the Friday morning two thousand more were printed, 
advertising the performance of Eugene Aram; but by now other 
handbills were in the streets announcing a music-hall pro 
gramme, at which twelve prizes would be given away, these 
to consist of bottles of whisky, gin and sherry. The battle 
seemed irretrievably lost, and on Friday night Scott took less 
than i. But there was 4 in the house on the Saturday, and 
by the end of the week he was able to pay for the hall and give 
six shillings a head to the company. He hoped to make good 
on the second week by offering i worth of prizes on the 
Friday night; this, it was thought, would ensure him a house 
of 15. The prizes were advertised tea, coffee, an umbrella, 
a teapot but Scott s fortunes seemed at their nadir when he 
discovered, two hours before the show was to begin, that the 
competing manager was wheeling a nine-gallon barrel of 
beer round the town, with a large placard announcing the 
following bribe: "This will be given away tonight at the 
Music Hall." Scott s 15 house dwindled to 243., and when 
the week was over the local proprietor took possession of his 
curtain, scene and frame to meet the rental of the hall. Poel 
himself was forced to part with a pair of trousers to pay his 
landlady, and Scott had to leave behind the Duke of North 
umberland s and Henry VIIFs costumes. Even so, there was 
not enough money to pay the railway fares to Malton. These 
were only raised through the sale of Poel s watch, and from 
this moment on the fortunes of the company improved. 



36 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

Poel says little about his own performances and progress, 
but as one reads his diary and the few letters that survive from 
this period, one becomes aware of a secret purpose. This 
drudgery was no aimless drifting from one engagement to 
another. Poel knew what he wanted to do and was 
doing it. He was not only discovering the stage in its most 
picturesque and precarious aspects; he was discovering a 
great deal about himself. While he was still with Scott, he 
writes, again to his sister: 

If I have persuaded you ever so little that my motive for 
adopting the stage as a profession is an honest one and that I 
am sincere in my determination to succeed, a great step has 
been gained. I myself feel no regret for the drudgery I have 
or may have to undergo. I feel that it is giving me a spirit 
of self-possession, independence and power, that will be of use 
to me through life, and throughout our troubles the love of 
my art and the sympathy with all that is noble and good have 
not once deserted me. The breaking of my connection with 
the two best provincial managers [Mathews and TearleJ was 
my own doing. I had seen all I wanted to see, and was getting 
sadly tired of playing quite small parts. 

To anyone who knew Poel in his maturity, "self-possession, 
independence and power" will recur as his most characteristic 
qualities. But it would be a mistake to imagine him as a 
proud intellectual, condescending to the theatre from a cloud- 
cuckoo land of theory. He never fell into the flagrant heresy 
of despising actors; here the comparison with other producers 
of genius is wholly in his favour. He believed, in his serious 
Victorian way, that the theatre could be an elevating force. 
He believed in the stage before he believed in the Elizabethan 
stage. When he was in Ireland he dropped into the Protestant 
Cathedral at Waterford. 

The Bishop was preaching and in his sermon he made the 
remark that he could not see with what satisfaction a man 
could look back at having spent his time at a theatre. As we 
were the first dramatic company that had entered the town for 
some time, I could not help feeling that the remark applied 
particularly to our entertainment and I was very sorry to 
hear it. ... Why will the votaries of religion and morals 
despise and denounce the stage as they do? Where would 
those large numbers that never enter a church get their 



THE FORMATIVE YEARS 37 

instruction of what is right and wrong, of the misery of crime 
and the blessings of virtue if not from the stage? (123 July 1876). 

Although Poel held various and extreme theological views at 
different times, he was by nature a profoundly religious man. 
The sense of Divine Providence was always with him. We 
get the impression, during these early years, that he is examin 
ing one by one the competing forms of Christian belief and 
withholding, in each case, any complete personal assent. In 
August 1874 he goes with his brother to hear Archbishop 
Manning preach in the pro-Cathedral at Kensington, 

I was disappointed. He divides our history into three 
periods. The period of Popular Liberty, the period of Despot 
ism beginning from the reign of Henry VIII, and the period 
of the return to Popular Liberty, that is the present day. He 
cried shame on those who attempted to separate the civil and 
religious powers from under the control of the Church, and he 
called upon all Englishmen to struggle to regain their popular 
liberty. Popular fiddlesticks! A most vague expression. 
He said nothing about the popular liberty of Bloody Mary s 
reign. I think it is weak to hold forth on such tract-beaten 
subjects. Everyone knows there is as much to be said on one 
side as the other and about as much to prove. Why, then, 
speak upon it in a pulpit when no one can rise and say Nay/ 
and to a congregation more than half of whom are Church 
of England come to hear out of curiosity. The Archbishop 
went on to say that the Pope has not fallen, and acknowledged 
his infallibility by the argument that so many learned divines, 
that is Cardinals and Bishops, having met together and agreed 
thereto, it must be right, for surely they know much better 
than we do (25 Aug. 1874). 

Manning was an unusual mixture of the political radical 
md the ecclesiastical ultramontane; Poel would always have 
ipplauded the one and detested the other. Three weeks later 
le went to hear Charles Kingsley preach in Westminster 
Vbbey, and this was much more to his taste. 

His sermon seemed chiefly to point out that no nation, 
people or individual could exist in a prosperous, happy or 
civilised condition that did not acknowledge God. And he 
spoke warmly of the importance of self-communion with God 
through His Son Jesus, and not through priests and con 
fessors (14 Sept. 1874). 



38 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

Whenever Poel arrived in a new town he went first to the 
Parish Church, if possible during service time, and then to 
the cemetery and the High Street. In this way the "mind" 
of a place became clear to him. 



IV 

Poel had remained for nine months with James Scott. He 
had "met with real hardships and real hard work" and hoped 
that both had done him good. "My great ambition," he had 
told his sister, "is to become the pupil of nature" (March 1878). 
He had "thoroughly enjoyed the engagement, for the manager, 
wife and daughters were homely, earnest people and quite 
unprofessional in appearance and conduct. I have had some 
good practice in juvenile, heavy, leading and comedy parts 
which I feel have given me a large amount of confidence and 
repose." He was now returning home "to recruit my severely 
tried strength and also to carefully consider my next move 
ments . . . perhaps by getting an engagement in some first-class 
theatre with a good salary but small business, or by preparing 
myself to play good business in small theatres" (25 June 

Actors commonly talk little else but "shop," and there is 
no need to underline further Poel s devotion to his craft. He 
might well have had little time to think about anything else. 
But although he was in every way a man of the theatre, he had 
a mind singularly free from greasepaint, and when he dis 
covered the true sense of his vocation he brought to his 
productions a wide culture as well as a dramatic sensibility. 
Culture is of little use to an actor, but it is a valuable, if not an 
essential, asset to the stage director. It is interesting, therefore, 
to know what had been happening to Poel s mind during the 
first, tentative years of his professional career. He was to 
stand, later, before the world as a man with a single fixed idea 
many would have called it an obsession but behind the 
fanatical adherence to principle there was a much broader 
formation than may have at first appeared. 

His travels had taken him to Oxford and Cambridge, and 
he must have regretted sometimes that he had not been sent 



THE FORMATIVE YEARS 39 

to the University; he would have profited more from a course 
of humane studies than from fitting the windows into the 
Albert Hall and making a minute, anonymous contribution 
to the amenities of Liverpool Street Station. At Oxford he 
walked with delight round New College garden and paid 
several visits to the Ashmolean. Here he made the acquaint 
ance of an eccentric and appealing character, Mr. Rowell, the 
Assistant Keeper. 

As a neglected pot-boy serving his time in noisy ale-houses, 
a thirst for science seized him and an ardent desire to discover 
the nature and course of rain, wind and storm. He is now of 
advanced age and complains of his wasted exertions and the 
neglect and contempt with which the University Authorities 
have treated his experiments and explorations. He at present 
is absorbed in an elaborate, descriptive catalogue of the 
Museum, but the subject of rain accidentally cropping up, 
and seeing that I became interested in his remarks thereon, 
his face brightened up and he burst eagerly into descriptions 
of his various observations. Seeing that I noticed his enthusi 
asm he remarked sadly, C I burnt all my papers and tried to 
forget the subject by burying my thoughts in this catalogue, 
but with the first mention of the subject all the old love and 
excitement come back to me (30 December 1877). 

Mr. Rowell lent Poel a pamphlet on "the beneficent distri 
bution of the sense of pain." It is difficult to believe that this 
was a work of great profundity, but it confirmed Poel s opinions 
on the "inability of our intellects to fathom the workings of 
Divine intelligence." At the same time he found in his lodgings 
a copy of George Lewes Philosophy of the Ancients, and this, he 
tells us, "had an important influence on my mind in giving 
a wholesome stability to my thoughts." 

In March 1877 he visited his brother at Cambridge, where 
he was properly impressed by the grandeur of King s, and the 
gateway of Trinity. He liked especially "the old red wall 
abutting the water of Queen s College with the dilapidated 
stone windows, the bay window and the wooden bridge then 
the side gateway of Caius College, the market fountain." 
In the Fitzwilliam he admired the statuette of "part of a 
woman in draperies," and the "shoulder and chest of a man" 
by Phidias, and the little clay models in the glass case of the 



40 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

first Archaic period. "They almost seem to breathe, and 
beneath every fold of drapery one feels the presence of flesh 
and blood/ In London, during July, he went to the 
Grosvenor Gallery with his sister and had some interesting 
comments on Watts s "Love and Death." 

I can t help thinking that a striking picture . . . would 
and should be imperative to an observer who nevertheless 
may be unaware of the cause of the impressiveness, and in this 
case I felt that unless I looked at the picture with the artist s 
conception in my mind the picture failed utterly to be attrac 
tive or impressive (16 July 1877). 

He also criticised the neutral tint of the draperies, and com 
plained that the idea of "resistless motion" was not sustained 
in Watts treatment of the folds. Raphael would have done 
it better. 

Poel was an avid reader. He found in Lord Byron s Occasional 
Pieces "a plaintive music that I can compare with nothing 
earthly/ and then adds, a shade sententiously, "What a pity 
it was he lacked that spirit of calm, religious philosophy that 
has so enhanced the value of Shakespeare s and Wordsworth s 
genius" (i July 1877). But the book which most delighted 
him was Hazlitt s Table Talk. 

The charm in the reading of his essays springs from the 
impression given that the writer is writing from a conviction 
of the truth and for no other purpose than to declare the truth. 
What a pleasure does this give to one searching for truth! 
Here is an author not trying to please you, to flatter you, or 
to convince you, to fill space, time, paper or make money, 
or with a view to being malicious and disagreeable, but only 
anxious to speak straight from the heart. . . . How keenly I 
felt these words, While a man is contented with himself and 
his own resources all is well. When he undertakes to play 
a part on the stage and to persuade the world to think more 
about him than they do about themselves, he has got into a 
track where he will find nothing but briars and thorns, vexa 
tion and disappointment 5 (28 March 1877). 

Poel was still "searching for truth" when he returned to 
Stanhope Place in June 1878, and he now decided to take 
lessons in acting. It will always be matter for debate how far 
acting can be taught; in this respect the English tradition is 
empirical where the French is academic. Poel certainly 



THE FORMATIVE YEARS 4 1 

believed that the English theatre suffered from a lack of 
preliminary grounding the kind of tuition that only a 
conservatoire could supply. And he became, in his day, a very 
great teacher indeed. But when he first took lessons himself, 
he seems to have been sceptical of their value. Within a week 
or two of returning home he called on Edward Terry, who 
shared his doubts, but it was agreed that he should go one 
night and read to him. The result of this audition was that 
two days later he took his first lesson, not from Edward Terry 
himself, but from Mr. Stirling, at Drury Lane, to whom Terry 
had probably recommended him. Stirling took him through 
the part of Romeo, but Poel felt that he "wanted more self- 
abandonment, more throwing myself into the part, real love, 
variety of expression. It is a part that does not come easy to 
me" (12 July 1878). A week later they were studying Shylock 
together. Poel was already in reaction against the sympathetic 
Shylock popularised by Irving. He had been to hear a reading 
of The Merchant of Venice by Miss Glyn, and had much liked 
her conception of the part. He found it similar to his own : 
"not feeble and sympathetic but vigorous and implacable, 
the most impenetrable cur that ever lived" (13 July 1878). 
Stirling was evidently unprepared for PoePs treatment of the 
character, but Poel felt that his intensity had impressed him. 
In his account of the interview he seems to foreshadow, for an 
instant, the long loneliness of his career. 

At any rate the truth was forced upon me that it is useless 
to communicate one s ideas to professionals, but that one must 
fight resolutely against their sneers and trust alone to the 
decision of the public. 

Poel studied two other parts with Stirling Mercutio and 
Charles Surface. At the end of the final lesson Stirling told 
him to tell his father that in his, Stirling s, opinion, he should 
certainly continue his stage career. This may be regarded 
as a partial judgment; it is the business of teachers to believe 
in their pupils. But when, the same evening, he read Mercutio 
to Edward Terry, the celebrated actor told him that he had 
"improved wonderfully." It is possible, all the same, that 
PoeFs critical faculties were now directed upon himself more 
severely than hitherto and that he began to doubt whether he 
had the talent to justify his perseverance. He had, no doubt, 



42 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

picked up some valuable advice from Stirling and Terry, but 
it would be mainly useful to him in his direction of other 
people. Increasingly, from now onward, it is the critic and 
the reformer, even the iconoclast, that speaks in him: He sees 
Irving in Vanderdecken and finds him "more mannered and 
faulty than ever." He seemed to "lose more and more the 
power of characterization," and the day was to come when, 
in answer to the question, "What do you think of Irving?" 
Poel would reply, "I wouldn t give him five pounds a week," 
then adding, with more justice, "He is wonderful in his way, 
but it is not my way." He was not much more favourably 
disposed to Ellen Terry whom he went to see in Olivia at the 
Court Theatre. "Miss Terry s acting is graceful, but she quite 
failed through lack of voice to make her part impressive" 
(5 August 1878). Poel s favourite English actress was Marie 
Wilton (Mrs. Bancroft). Already, at the age of twenty-six, 
he looked at the tradition of Lyceum Shakespeare, enthroned 
and sacrosanct, and in company with another rebel a red 
headed Irishman called Bernard Shaw prepared, in his own 
good time, to challenge it. 



CHAPTER II 

The Challenge 

IT is in many ways a misfortune for the biographer that 
PoePs diary stops at this point the point where Edward 
Ferry tells him that he has "wonderfully improved" and was 
aever afterwards, so far as we know, renewed. We would give 
much to overhear his secret thoughts on the people he met and 
worked with, and the controversies in which he was engaged. 
But the fact that the diary stops is in itself significant. It 
marks the point at which Poel gave up wondering what he had 
to do and began assiduously to do it. The nature of this 
decision can be guessed when we realise that he never after 
wards sought another acting engagement; that was the result 
of Edward Stirling s tuition and Edward Terry s encourage 
ment. He had learnt from them a thing or two about acting 
and these he would pass on. But his mind and purpose were 
now set elsewhere. 

In the winter of 1878 he went on tour in the provinces, 
picking up an audience wherever he could, and giving recitals 
from Shakespeare, Sheridan, and other classical playwrights. 
This was all in tune with his intention to start again at the 
beginning. He was convinced that Shakespeare and his 
fellow-Elizabethans could not adequately be contained within 
the limits of the proscenium stage; that they were harmed by 
realistic scenery; and that the rhythm of the plays was destroyed 
by the intervals that these accessories- imposed. He had come 
to see, and was now incessantly to preach, that Shakespeare the 
poet was his own scene painter and electrician. He believed 
that although Shakespeare had indeed written for all time, he 
had not written out of time; that as he had seen the world 
through Elizabethan eyes, so we must recover that vision if we 
wished to do him justice. In brief, he believed that the 
methods of Shakespearian production then triumphantly in 

43 



44 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

vogue were totally and radically wrong. And since he was 
himself a radical in the deepest fibre of his being, he would set 
about, all by himself, to put them right. 

A decision of this kind is always heroic. The artist must 
turn his back on the easy accommodations of compromise. He 
must resist the temptation to say: "I will go quietly, step by 
step, so as not to upset people. I will introduce this or that 
reform so that they won t notice it. I will make what use I can 
of existing conditions. I can only take people as far as they 
are willing to be led. There is no value in a voice crying in 
the wilderness where no one will listen to you. A surgical 
operation often does more harm than good; a slow, curative 
treatment may well have a more permanent effect." It is 
thus that nine people out of ten, holding the views that Poel 
held, would plausibly argue. No one can say what would 
have happened if he had been a man of this facile stamp. He 
might still have taught some important lessons to the English 
theatre. He might have achieved some memorable produc 
tions, and held positions of high influence on the stage. He 
would certainly have died, or retired, crowned with public 
honours and secure in private fortune. When it is said that 
Poel was his own worst enemy, that is what is meant. But 
there is no sense in saying it, because it was the essence of 
Peel s achievement that he remained, intransigently, the man 
he was. His work, though it was based on a theory, was far 
more than theoretical. It was the effect, highly practical 
within its limits, of a total, an integrated personality. It was 
an achievement of character, even of difficult character, before 
it was an achievement of intelligence. 

^ In other words, Pod s genius was prophetic, and it was 
inseparable from the purity of his gospel. How far this gospel 
was true will always be argued about; how far his preaching 
of it was marred by wilfal eccentricity will be discussed in 
these pages. But you only had to work with Poel for ten 
minutes to realise that his eccentricity was not to be corrected 
by criticism And the reason was clear. Poel was a man with 
a vision. He was to walk through all his life holding fixed 
before his inward eye something that no one else saw quite 

^ ! ?t ^ WaS n0t an idea that could be trimmed and 
adapted by discussion; it was a view of art, which was funda- 



THE CHALLENGE 45 

mentally a view of life, and it had to be accepted or rejected 
as a whole. 

There was never any point in objecting that this or that thing 
that he wanted you to do was manifestly absurd. If it was not 
absurd to him, he would not mind he would not see the 
absurdity. If you got a good notice for a performance, he was 
equally indifferent. "They would never have said you were 
good/ he once told an actor, "if you had done what I told 
you." He would rather you did imperfectly what he wanted 
you to do, than carry off successfully some quite other effect. 
This complete indifference to ridicule may be merely the mark 
of the eccentric; but it may also be the signature of the saint. 
The saints have always seemed absurd to the sensible and 
the worldly-wise. And Poel had in him I cannot insist 
upon this too strongly a stuff analogous to sanctity. I mean 
that his entire action was founded on the belief that what other 
people accepted as normal was nonsense, and that what they 
rejected as ridiculous was true. 

The more recent history of the theatre suggests an interesting 
parallel to Poel. When Jacques Copeau abandoned his work 
at the Vieux Colombier and retired with a handful of adherents 
to a small village in Burgundy, his warmest admirers thought 
that he had gone mad. Why had he neglected his productions 
in Paris in order to found a school of innocents among the 
vineyards of the Cote d Or? What value could these un 
sophisticated jongleurs possess beside the Jouvets, the Dullins, 
the Valentine Tessiers, who had made the Vieux Colombier 
the darling of intellectual Paris ? At the time when Poel set 
out on his mission there was nothing comparable to the Vieux 
Colombier in the London theatre; there has been nothing 
comparable to it since. But at the back of his mind there was 
an instinct similar to Copeau s decision for flight. There was 
the same desire to recover an ancient purity for the stage, even 
if this involved some loss of present accomplishment. There 
was the same belief that the commercialism of the modern 
theatre forbade the kind of work he wanted to do. There 
was the same readiness to cut loose, once and for all, and to 
accept the consequences without complaint or cavil. When I 
visited Copeau in his retreat near Beaune during the summer 
of 1945, I was powerfully struck by the resemblance between 



46 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

the ideas and the destinies of these two men. And when I 
called to mind the freedom of Poel s platform-stage, I under 
stood the point of Copeau s famous exclamation : Donnez-moi 
un plateau nu." 

Poel s life is so completely of a piece, it is so dominated by an 
overmastering vision, that it is not easy to reconstruct in 
chronological terms. He went on to the end saying exactly the 
same things, often in the very same words. He was patient 
and tireless in controversy, scrupulous in scholarship, unshakable 
in purpose, and quite empty of personal ambition. We have 
the impression that once he had decided what he wanted to 
do, he never gave another thought to himself. And if the 
keeping of a diary generally indicates a certain degree of 
self-regard, the silence of Poel about his inmost thoughts may 
be read as a sharp alteration of perspective. Nevertheless, 
those passages of early introspection are valuable for a study 
of his character. They show him more soberly, though not 
less fundamentally, critical, than he was sometimes afterwards 
to appear. 

It is the definition of a radical as distinct, very often, from 
a revolutionary that he goes down to the roots of things, not 
that he pulls them up. Poel s work in the theatre may be 
compared to a drastic pruning; the rose-bush was stripped 
bare and cut short in order that it might produce, in time, more 
splendid blooms. And so, having familiarised himself with 
the plays he intended one day to produce for I think we can 
take his winter tour of recitals in 1878 as an exercise in self- 
education he proceeded in June 1879 to form a small 
company of "professional ladies and gentlemen whose efforts 
are specially directed towards creating a more general taste 
for the study of Shakespeare." He called these "The Eliza 
bethans" and they toured the country during the summer 
months giving costume recitals from the plays. No doubt 
Poel had prepared his audiences for this during the preceding 
winter, and it was with "The Elizabethans" in mind that he 
had made the preliminary tour alone. 

"The Elizabethans" described themselves as "Shakesperian 
Students," and among the towns they visited, playing in 
rooms and small halls, were Newport, Buxton, Derby, 
Oswestry, Shrewsbury, Burton, and Rotherham. They gave 



THE CHALLENGE 47 

scenes from Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, 
The Merchant of Venice, The Hunchback, The Iron Chest, The Rivals, 
and Eugene Aram. It was, in fact, quite a Lyceum repertoire. 
Poel won praise from the local critics, whose taste is not 
usually very exacting, for his performance of Bob Acres and 
Romeo, and for his rendering of The Dream of Eugene Aram. 
The evening concluded, after the fashion of those days, with 
"a humourous Sketch, arranged from Cervantes celebrated 
novel, DON QUIXOTE, when will be shown the Extraordinary 
Flight of the Knight and his Squire upon a WOODEN HORSE." 
In Derby those wishing for reserved seats (accurately described 
as chairs) were requested to apply to the Schoolmaster. This 
suggests that the performances were often given in schools. 
Foci s company cannot have been a very large one, since we 
are informed in his circular that "with the assistance of a 
gentleman and a lady, Mr. Poel can give, in appropriate 
Costume, the following Dramatic entertainment." 

The very simple conditions of these performances threw the 
actors back upon the text, and Poel himself was forced to 
compare the acting editions of Shakespeare then in use with 
the original versions of the plays. He was made to realise 
how much had intervened since these had left the hands of 
the stage manager in the Globe or Blackfriars Theatre. It 
was not merely a question of cuts or traditional "business"; 
it was a question of literary editors preparing a text for publica 
tion, setting up their own system of punctuation and arranging 
their own division of the play into acts and scenes. The 
Shakespeare who met the student in 1879 was a Shakespeare 
trimmed for the study; he bore little trace of the swift, con 
tinuous rhythm, and the boisterous hurly-burly of the Eliza 
bethan stage. If a performance was to be given as Shakespeare 
might have seen it, it was essential, first, to establish an 
authentic text; to go back as close as possible to the original 
representation 

With this in mind Poel wrote the following autumn (23 
October 1880) to Dr. F. J. Furnivall, the President of the New 
Shakspere Society, offering to deliver a paper on the Acting 
Editions of Shakespeare. He was only twenty-eight years old 
and he was as little known in the world of scholarship as he 
was in the world of the stage. But those who knew him then 



48 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

have described him as, already, a man "possessed." His 
family, too, as we have seen, moved in cultivated circles and 
this would have helped to ensure that his initiative was not 
ignored. He wrote with some experience of provincial custom, 
pointing out to Furnivall that one of the editions then in 
common use retained David Garrick s version of Romeo and 
Juliet, which had "no right to be called Shakespeare s tragedy 
at all." Furnivall accepted Poel s offer and the paper was 
given the following June. But at the time he proposed it Poel 
can hardly have realised how fortunate a moment he had 
chosen. For only a few months earlier William Griggs had 
published his facsimile editions of the first and second Quartos 
of Hamlet (1603 and 1604 respectively) with forewords by 
Furnivall himself. The hour had indeed struck for the 
Elizabethan revival. 

Poel naturally pounced upon these while he was preparing 
his lecture, and so stirred was he by his study of them that he 
wrote the following letter to Furnivall on the i February 1881 : 

I need hardly say how delighted I was to be able to read 
these first two editions of the play. If to the literary student 
the Quarto of 1604 has the chief interest, I feel sure that to an 
actor the Quarto of 1603 has an equal interest, because 
however misrepresented the text may be, the actor cannot help 
recognising that the Editor has endeavoured to reproduce the 
play as he saw it represented and therefore in the arrangement 
of the scenes, the stage directions, the omissions, and the altera 
tions, there is much to guide and instruct him in the stage 
representation of the play as it appeared in Shakespeare s time. 
There was so much that was new and interesting to me, from 
a dramatic point of view, in the first Quarto, that I could not 
help thinking, if the printer s blunders could be corrected, a 
performance of the Quarto might be of some interest to 
students. I have spoken to many of my friends about it and 
also to Miss Phipson who suggested my writing to you and 
asking if you thought the first Quarto as a literary composition 
too imperfect for a stage representation, My idea would be 
to have it played by amateurs so as to avoid much expense, 
and if it was thought the performance would excite any 
interest to make it a public one. 

Poel was to amplify these arguments in a programme note 
to his second production of the First Quarto version (Carpen 
ters Hall, 21 February 1900). 



THE CHALLENGE 49 

Presuming that the First Folio version was the Globe 
Playhouse acting edition of the play, and that the Second 
Quarto (allowing for printer s omissions) is Shakespeare s 
perfect work printed from his own manuscript, we have in the 
First Quarto a deliberate tampered version of the Globe 
Playhouse copy, reconstructed and compressed with consider 
able practical knowledge of stage requirements, a knowledge 
that shows the skill of the actor or stage manager, and not that 
of the poet or dramatist. Improved as the version of the 
First Quarto undoubtedly is in dramatic construction of a 
practical kind, it cannot be believed that the "improvements" 
were sanctioned by Shakespeare or appealed to his sympathies. 
Still, it is probable that a shorter version of so popular a play 
as Hamlet (shorter than that of the First Folio), was needed 
by Shakespeare s actors for representation in the provinces, 
or the Palace, and further research may prove that it is this 
shorter, reconstructed version which the compiler of the First 
Quarto saw. For as regards the first Quarto in its relation to 
the Second Quarto, while there is no indication in the former 
of any knowledge of the additional lines which are to be found 
in the latter, there is evidence that the compiler of the First 
Quarto had an intimate knowledge of the First Folio Hamlet, 
without the help of which it is to be doubted if the com 
pression of Act IV, so skilfully contrived in the First Quarto 
could have been done. 

Poel argued that the language of the First Quarto had 
all the marks of being Shakespeare s language imperfectly 
reported : 

that the very errors due to the actor s delivery or to the 
reporter s notes, are in themselves instructive. For there 
are many sins of commission which were apparently made by 
the speaker of Shakespeare s lines, those actors liberties which 
are so often taken with the author s language; such as the 
interpolation of exclamations, the "Ay, father," "Oh, I have it," 
"the better the better" and the repetition of sentences such as 
"to a nunnery go, to a nunnery go." Again we have the 
transposition of the text occurring just where the actor would 
be likely to misplace his words, as of Hamlet s lines with the 
Ghost and again in the play scenes, and the interpolation of 
lines in a later scene that should have been spoken in an 
earlier one, or the introduction of a line from another play 
where the actor s memory has failed to retain any of the 
words, an illustration of which occurs in the speech of Corambis 
(Polonius) : 

Such men often prove 
Great in their words, but little in their love, 



50 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

when the actor may have been thinking of Viola s words: 

For still we prove 

Much in our vows but little in our love. 
All actors who have served in a stock company, where the 
playbill has been changed nightly, know how easily these 
mistakes are made. 

Another instructive feature of the First Quarto was the stage 
directions. The reporter would obviously put down what he 
had seen in performance rather than what may have been 
indicated in the author s script. If the Ghost entered Gertrude s 
bedchamber "in his nightgown," this would explain Hamlet s 
remark that he was "in his habit as he lived." If the King, 
Queen, Laertes and the other lords followed Ophelia s corpse 
"with a Priest after the coffin," who refused to approach the 
grave, this would show to what extent the rites were "maimed." 
It was also suggestive that only in the Play scene was the 
King s entrance accompanied by a "flourish." The play had 
evidently been produced as a domestic rather than a historical 
tragedy. 

Furnivall accepted Poel s suggestion, and on the afternoon 
of 1 6 April 1 88 1 his first Elizabethan production was given on 
a bare, draped platform at St. George s Hall. On any reckon 
ing this was a historic date in the annals of the English theatre, 
but it was at the same time obscure to the point of clandestinity. 
This was the way with many of Poel s productions; they 
seemed contrived to make as little noise as possible. When 
we read of an historic theatrical occasion we think of Kean as 
Shylock and Irving in The Bells , we think of Mrs. Patrick 
Campbell in The Second Mrs. Tanquerqy. We expect to hear 
of a great artist arrived at the zenith of his powers and exploding 
into public fame. There was nothing of all this in Poel s 
production of the First Quarto Hamlet. We have no reason 
to suppose that the performance was even a tolerably good one. 
Poel himself played Hamlet, and though he must have looked 
the part to perfection, he simply had not the power to interpret 
it. The Academy, which had shown itself well disposed to the 
performance in general, put the matter kindly in the course 
of a scholarly review : 

He looked the pale and thoughtful student to the life, and 
in some passages moved his audience to warm applause; but 



THE CHALLENGE 5! 

his voice and he were hardly up to the requirements of the 
part who indeed is? and his emphasis was sometimes 
faulty (23 April 1881). 

Ophelia was played by Maud Holt, afterwards Lady Tree, 
and those who remember her acting in later years will easily 
reconstruct the mindless beauty and vacant pathos of her 
performance. But the other members of the cast were all 
amateurs Bernard Partridge, the celebrated cartoonist of 
Punchy played Laertes and the critic of the Saturday Review 
stated that, as a whole, they "displayed the airy confidence of 
ineptitude/ Button Cook was interested by the appearance of 
Fortinbras, "a character usually omitted from ordinary acting 
editions of the tragedy," but went on to say: 

the attitude of the general audience was one of apathy tinc 
tured by a disposition to deride. ... To many the performance 
was very wearisome and depressing; while a strong feeling 
prevailed that, upon the whole, the experiment was of an 
absurd and reprehensible sort, involving, as it did necessarily, 
some degradation of the poet in whose honour it purported 
to be undertaken (Nights at the Play II, 314-16: 1883). 

In a word, the note of theatrical triumph was conspicuously 
absent. A friendly writer remarked that "the critics had no 
sympathy with an experiment the nature of which they did not 
understand." But the full brunt of their ridicule fell on 
Dr. Furnivall, whose emendations of the text, and in particular 
of the famous soliloquy, were thus parodied in Punch . 

To be, or not to be? There you are, don tcherknow ! 

To die, to sleep! Is that all? Forty winks? 

To sleep, to dream! Ah, that s about the size of it! 

For from that forty winks when we awake 

In the undiscovered cotton-night-cap country 

From which no passenger ever took a return ticket 

Why ah, yes humphexactly very much so ! 

Nevertheless the performance was historical, not because it 
announced the maturity of a new artist but because it an 
nounced the birth of a new idea. Writing many years later, 
Poel claimed that it was "the first revival of the draped stage 
in this country or elsewhere." This is not quite accurate; 



52 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

there had been a quasi-Elizabethan production of The Taming 
of the Shrew, given by Benjamin Webster at the Haymarket in 
1844 and again in 1847. This had been played without 
scenery in the sense that the play proper had been acted in 
Christopher Sly s chamber, and Sly himself had remained on 
the stage throughout. But the Induction had been played 
with full scenic accessories. 

For all intents and purposes, however, Poel s claim was 
justified. There was no vestige of scenery, not even placards 
telling the audience where they were supposed to be. There 
was no interval, and played thus, the performance lasted for 
two hours. The "dumb-show," acted on a raised platform, 
was included another daring innovation; the Player Queen 
was taken by a boy; and Ophelia, in her mad scene, carried a 
lute instead of the customary flowers. We do not know if Poel 
had yet had the inspired notion of her finding a feather on the 
ground and presenting it as rosemary and rue. He maintained 
that the Queen would not have so elaborately described 
Ophelia s floral weeds, a few minutes later, if the audience had 
already seen them. 

Ten years after, in one of many letters to The Era, Poel gave 
his ideas on the interpretation of Hamlet, and it is at least 
reasonable to suppose that some of these were illustrated by 
the performance of the First Quarto. Hamlet s familiar talk, 
he maintained, was the tersest and raciest in the English 
language," but he complained that this side of his character 
was never shown on the stage. His badinage was delivered 
with a tragic solemnity that bordered on the ridiculous. 

He should not rail at Ophelia in the "nunnery" scene; he 
should not be tender with his mother in the "closet" scene; in 
the churchyard scene he should appear in sailor s dress; the 
King should himself break off the play-scene in confusion, and 
not be driven off by Hamlet; Polonius is the essence of genteel 
foppishness, ceaselessly chattering. In the mad scene, Ophelia 
should move from one person to another, unconscious of what 
she was saying, where she was going or to whom she was 
speaking. The introduction of Fortinbras at the end is essential. 
The distant sound of drums, the tramp of soldiers, the gradual 
filling of the stage with them, the shouts of the crowd outside 
and the entrance of Fortinbras are materials for a fine stage 
picture, a strong dramatic contrast. Life in the midst of death. 



THE CHALLENGE 53 

Was not this Shakespeare s conception? The play of Hamlet 
has not yet been done justice to on the English stage (30 April 
1892). 

This famous production at St. George s Hall was of course 
designed to illustrate, in advance, the lecture which Poel was 
to deliver in June. Replying to his critics (the first of how 
many replies) he writes to The Era as follows, only a week after 
the performance: 

The question, as it appears to me, is not so much a com 
parison of Quarto I with the play made familiar to the public 
through our stage version, as with Quarto II, which shows us 
Hamlet as it finally left Shakespeare s hand. . . . Quarto I 
represents more truly his dramatic conception than either Quarto 
II or our stage version. Accepting Quarto I as Shakespeare s 
first draft of the play (though clumsily pirated as to language) 
I think one ought to arrange a stage version from the authentic 
text upon the lines laid down in Quarto I rather than sacrifice 
dramatic coherence for the sake of bringing in all the beautiful 
passages. 

Here Poel was on very controversial ground. If it was 
thought necessary to reduce the play to two or even three 
hours playing time, then cuts were of course essential, and it 
was reasonable that they should be made with the First 
Quarto in mind. It was better to have a carefully edited 
version of the First Quarto than the average stage version 
trimmed to suit the vanity of the leading actor and the senti 
mentality of the Victorian audience. But it was quite another 
thing to suggest that the final text of the play, as it has come 
down to us in the Folio and Second Quarto versions, is un- 
dramatic and that some of the "beautiful" speeches had better 
be left out. It was specious to make this arbitrary distinction 
between a literary and philosophic, and a theatrical Shake 
speare. No one who has seen the unabridged Hamlet at the 
Old Vic will agree that it is undramatic. On the contrary, 
much that is confused in the play becomes clear; and although 
the performance is in fact longer by about three quarters of an 
hour than the normal playing version, it does not seem so. 
The complexity of the play demands this tempo and this 
elbowroom; they give us that sense of life s ebb and flow of 
which Poel himself was afterwards to speak. Both for the 



54 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

audience who watch, and for the actor who plays the leading 
part and here I can speak in both capacities the unabridged 
Hamlet is at once more intelligible and less tiring. 

But on the main issue Quarto II versus the usual acting 
editions Poel s position was unassailable. The acting versions 
cut anything up to a thousand lines and more, and omitted 
the characters of Voltimand, Cornelius, Reynaldo, a gentle 
man, and even Fortinbras. "In Quarto II," said Poel in his 
lecture, 

I see a play constructed for the purpose of showing us 
types of character contrasted one with the other. Strong men, 
weak men, old men, fond women, all living and moving under 
the influence of a destiny that is above them. I see also a 
Danish Court in which a terrible crime has been committed, 
and because the influence of good in this Court is too weak to 
conquer the evil, the sword falls on the good as well as on the 
evil, on the weak as well as on the strong. It is the play as 
the epitome of life, as the history of mankind that you feel is 
interesting the mind of Shakespeare, and not the career of one 
individual, even though the whole play be influenced by the 
actions of that individual. Look at the first Quarto and we 
have a proof of this. Mutilated as that version is, care has 
been taken to keep the story of the play complete (Poel MSS. 
Collection). 

In the usual acting version Poel especially criticised the 
cutting out of the ends of the scenes in order that the actor 
might get a "hand" on his exit. This encouraged him to 
make his points with exaggerated emphasis, thus distorting 
the play and delaying its progress. Poel pointed out the value 
of Hamlet s earlier entrance in Act II, Scene 2 ; if he caught 
sight of Polonius hurrying the King and Queen off the stage, 
this would account for his suspicions. An Elizabethan Hamlet 
is now quite usual, but it was a shock for people accustomed to 
Nordic decor and costumes to be told that "Shakespeare s 
thoughts were not in Denmark when he wrote this play." 
It is customary today for Hamlet to suspect, from a movement 
of the arras, that he is being spied upon during the scene with 
Ophelia and this is taken to justify the violence with which 
most actors bid her go her ways to a nunnery. Poel did 
not approve of the violence, and he showed that the movement 



THE CHALLENGE 55 

of the arras was unnecessary if the direction of the Second 
Quarto were followed and Hamlet actually saw the King and 
Polonius concealing themselves. He maintained, too, that the 
reproach, "I have heard of your paintings, too," might have 
been directed generally against those married women who 
conducted themselves like the Queen, not against Ophelia at 
all. If the Dumb-Show were retained, as we know it was 
retained at the performance at St. George s Hall, it would 
prevent the actor rising to his climax at the lines: "He poisons 
him in the garden for his estate, etc." These should be spoken 
to the Court and not to the King; the last thing Hamlet would 
want was to drive Claudius prematurely from the play. It 
was when the King heard him explain to the other spectators 
that presently they would see how the murderer got the love 
of Gonzago s wife it was then that he broke up the assembly, 
not wishing them on any account to see it. Again it was 
senseless to keep in "O my offence is rank . . ." and to cut 
"Now might I do it pat, now he is praying." In the church 
yard scene Hamlet should appear, not in his recognisable 
sable black, but in the disguise of a common sailor. The 
absence of religious ceremony at Ophelia s funeral should be 
sufficiently evident to warrant his reference to "maimed rites," 
and Poel suggested that her coffin should be borne by soldiers 
and not by monks. When he produced the Second Quarto 
in 1914, it was, in fact, borne by waiting gentlewomen. To 
the hackneyed question whether Hamlet was mad, Poel was 
to reply in 1912, in a letter to The Westminster Gazette (6 Feb.) 
but his thought had such a close consistency that the-following 
probably represents the intention of his own performance 
in 1881. 

If Hamlet is mad, who in the play is saner? Certainly not 
the King who is a murderer; nor the Queen who is an adulteress 
in intention if not in deed; nor the senile Polonius; nor the 
brainless Ophelia; nor her boastful brother! There is only 
left Horatio who, not being passion s slave, looked on life 
calmly and probably with indifference. Every honest soul 
who is as sensitive and as emotional as Hamlet is liable to be 
considered mad. 

In discussing W. F. Trench s Shakespeare s Hamlet, a New 
Commentary (1913), Poel developed this idea that there would 



56 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

have been nothing mysterious about Hamlet to the Elizabethan 
mind, because he could have been "seen daily at Elizabeth s 
Court." He would have been "no enigma to those who knew 
how brilliant and how ready for good or for evil were the talents 
of those rival noblemen whose fame and use in life were 
dependent on the Queen s capricious favour" (Athenaum, 
21 June 1913). Poel believed that criticism had gone astray 
in concentrating too exclusively on the character of Hamlet 
himself, to the neglect of his environment. He rather cavalierly 
brushed aside the Ghost s "thy almost blunted purpose" as 
evidence of chronic procrastination, and held that Hamlet s 
inaction was due to a genuine doubt in reason and conscience 
as to whether the King s death would be in accordance with 
the Divine Will. He based this belief on Act V, Scene 2, 63-70. 

Does it not, thinks t thee, stand me now upon 
He that hath kill d my king and whor d my mother, 
Popped in between the election and my hopes, 
Thrown out his angle for my proper life, 
And with such cozenage is t not perfect conscience 
To quit him with this arm? And is t not to be damn d 
To let this canker of our nature come 
In further evil ? 

Here Poel was arguing from the question-marks; but the 
argument invited the reply. "What about the confirmation 
sought and obtained in the Play Scene? What about the 
casuistry of Now might I do it pat? How could the determination 
to send Claudius 5 soul to hell be squared with a doubt as to 
whether his death would be agreeable to Divine Providence ? 
What is How all occasions, admitted by Poel himself to be the 
key speech of the play, but an examination of conscience, 
because Hamlet had not done what he deeply believed to be 
his duty?" For Poel, however, Hamlet was a drama of revenge 
before it was a puzzle in psychology. He saw it as a parallel 
play to Richard II, with a similar opposition between a sensitive 
prince and an unscrupulous usurper. "Until," he argued, "we 
can trace back to the King the many tragic misfortunes of the 
play, commentators will fail to show us the true meaning of 
Shakespeare s Hamlet: A new Claudius rather than a new 
Hamlet would be the keynote of Poel s production of the 
Second Quarto in 1914, and I shall discuss this in its place. 



THE CHALLENGE 57 

Many, but not all, of Poel s ideas on Hamlet have now been 
adopted by theatrical custom; it is important, however, to see 
how he arrived at them. He arrived at them, not in the way 
that many modern producers arrive at their novelties; not by 
saying "What can we do with this scene that has never been 
done before?", not by thinking up some bizarre explanation 
for perfectly explicable behaviour. He arrived at them by the 
simple expedient of reading the play. Instead of saying: 
"This is where we want a big effect," he sat down and tried 
to find out what effect a literal fidelity to Shakespeare would 
produce. He was not interested in big effects; he was only 
interested in effects that were significant. 

It will now be clear in what sense the performance at St. 
George s Hall was historic. It was historic in the sense that it 
was seminal. There is nothing new today in Hamlet being 
performed in curtains; there is nothing sensational in the 
appearance of Fortinbras. No one will raise an eyebrow if 
you suggest that Hamlet is a play drenched in Renaissance 
thought, or that while Hamlet should never behave like an 
actor, there is every reason why he should, on occasion, 
behave like a cad. The romantic Hamlet is now the reaction 
ary Hamlet, and the sentimental Hamlet is obsolete. These 
changes might never have come about if William Poel 
had not had the startlingly original idea of reading the play 
as if he had just borrowed the prompter s copy from the 
Globe Theatre. He was on the side of logic against prejudice, 
of common sense against theatrical convention. But his 
arguments were little noted at the time. During this same 
spring of 1 88 1 Irving and Booth were alternating Othello 
and lago at the Lyceum, and all London was flocking to see 
two consummate lagos defeat, in each case, their Moorish 
opponent. lago was probably Irving s finest performance 
and one guesses that even Poel might have approved of it. 
But it was at St. George s Hall that a first blow had been 
struck for Shakespeare s integrity. No modern producer 
pays any attention to the old acting versions in vogue when 
Poel started his reforms; but we who have seen a far more 
flagrant travesty of Shakespeare s play exhibited on the screen 
have no right to conclude that, even now, the battle has 
decisively been won. 



58 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

II 

The First Quarto performance had little immediate effect; 
and the following years must have sorely tried the patience 
of this intrepid reformer. Only an unshakable inner certitude 
sustained him. He set about, first, to elaborate and define 
his doctrine; to test it, not as yet by experiment, but 
by comparing the Shakespearian performance of his 
vision with those he saw, or suffered, on the London stage. 
They were so manifestly wrong that some other way must 
surely be right. In 1884, however, he records with pleasure 
a visit to the Princess s Theatre where Wilson Barrett was 
giving a better acting version of Hamlet than had hitherto been 
seen, and where many of the suggestions Poel had made in his 
lecture to the New Shakspere Society had been adopted* 
Meanwhile he never lost sight of the theatre as a whole; of its 
present degradation and its possible dignity. Here he was not 
without practical experience, for in October 1881 Miss Emma 
Cons appointed him manager of the Royal Victoria Coffee 
Hall (now the Old Vic ) which had been opened in the 
previous December "with the view of providing amusement 
free from the temptation of drink and other evils by which 
ordinary Music Halls do so much mischief (Circular issued 
by the Guarantee Committee, early 1882). Poel held this 
appointment till Christmas 1883. During these two years he 
reduced the expenses of management, raised the tone of 
the entertainments, and attracted larger audiences to the Hall. 
The programmes included Variety Shows, a Ballad Concert 
on Thursdays, a Penny Reading every Friday, and an enter 
tainment for children on Saturday afternoons. It is an 
extraordinary comment on theatrical affairs that Poel should 
never have directed a production at the Old Vic when it had 
ceased to be a house of Variety and had become a home for 
Shakespeare. 

But these two years left a permanent mark upon his charac 
ter. "I remember how it came to me," he told Harold Begbie 
many years later 

entering my father s house late at night and sometimes early 
in the morning, fresh from contact with poverty and want and 
suffering all those things which disfigure life and make 



THE CHALLENGE 59 

existence so ugly and so terrible how it came home to me, 
the frightful contrast, the awful difference, between the lives 
of the rich and the lives of the poor. I was haunted by that 
feeling, ridden by it, and could not be easy under it. And ever 
since those days I have striven to change the dramatic world, 
to alter life on the stage as we know it, to make it what obviously 
it should be, and what plainly it must one day become, an 
experience of the spirit of man evolving through beauty and 
knowledge towards the fullness and perfection of existence 
(Interview in The Daily Chronicle; 3 Sept. 1913). 

He left the Royal Victoria Hall at Christmas 1883 an d for 
the next six months worked as Stage Manager with F. R. 
Benson. Here, no doubt, he found much to criticise but much 
also to admire, for Benson was not only himself an actor of 
remarkable quality an inspired amateur, he has sometimes 
been called but he was a born leader of men and he had 
gathered round him, already, a brilliant company of actors. 
For a man like Poel, who was dominated by a single idea, 
practical experience was an essential, a saving grace. It was 
important for him to realise what actors were like; how far 
they were malleable; where, in any particular case, the Kne 
had to be drawn between personality and impersonation. He 
had to learn what could or could not be done for Shakespeare 
within the limits of the proscenium arch; he had to guess how 
far you could induce in a modern audience an Elizabethan 
frame of mind. He had never before worked with actors as 
good as the Benson company, and they helped to keep him 
in touch with the hard, capable, often unimaginative core 
of the profession. 

Many years later, in a speech which he was too indisposed 
to deliver, he recalled his days with Benson. 

It was a delightful experience, if not a long one, for the 
atmosphere was not in the least Elizabethan. The Benson 
Worthies lived in the open air. They were frank and gay by 
temperament. Of princely intrigues and prelatical inquisitions 
they knew nothing and cared less. For their arduous duties 
on the stage they prepared themselves by severe exercises in 
the playing-fields. The leader himself of this happy band of 
Arcadians was a typical Greek in nobility of thought, in 
seriousness of purpose, in physical fitness and energy, a worthy 
model for the chisel of a Phidias. At the age of twenty-three, 



60 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

as a young graduate fresh from college, his costume consisted 
of a flannel shirt, a grey pea-jacket, cricketing trousers, no cap 
and a red necktie. That necktie proclaimed his political 
opinions. He was a disciple of William Morris. He followed 
in the footsteps of that apostle of radicalism, who believed 
that it was Greek civilisation and its democratic form of 
government which enabled art to flourish at Athens. It was 
in the early eighties that I first heard spoken by Benson those 
memorable words of Morris, Commercialism and competi 
tion have sown the wind recklessly, and must reap the whirl 
wind (Poel MSS. Collection). 

Poel was not without influence on his fellow Bensonians. 
He gave Henry Herbert, who was a member of the company, 
the idea of playing front scenes in front of green velvet 
curtains instead of painted front-cloths, and Herbert restored 
much that was normally cut out of the plays by Benson himself. 
At the same time Poel was writing plays of his own. They 
were not good plays, but they probably taught him something 
about stagecraft. Most of them were one-act comediettas and 
adaptations, and two of these he had produced himself at the 
King s Cross Theatre on 29 June 1880. But he wrote a number 
of longer ones; Priest or Painter, adapted from W. D. Howells 
novel "A Foregone Conclusion," which Benson took on tour, 
and Equality Jack, a musical play adapted from a story by 
Captain Marryat and produced with music by W. S. Vinning 
on 28 Feb. 1891. In 1885 Poel formed the "Little Comedies" 
company, afterwards to be known as "Poel and Berlyn s 
Drawing-Room Comedy Company/ which gave recitals and 
performances of one-act plays at private "At Homes" and 
"Charities." This company, which at one time included 
Kate Rorke, Rosina Filippi, and Elizabeth Robins all 
extremely fine actresses continued to give entertainments of 
the same kind for years. There is nothing, we note, remotely 
highbrow about this marginal activity of Poel s. His plays, 
which have no kind of literary distinction, were designed in * 
their very modest way merely to edify and to entertain. 

The affairs of the Royal Victoria Coffee Hall had not 
prospered since he left, and in October 1884 he gave a lecture 
before the Church and Stage Guild, in which he claimed that 
"religious people had neglected their duty in this matter. 
The present theatres and music halls in the East End and 



THE CHALLENGE 6 1 

transpontine districts of London were little better than public 
houses. . . . The Victoria Coffee Hall had failed because it 
aimed too high and had drawn in a different audience, glad 
to get for 3d. in the New Gut what would cost them one 
shilling in St. James s Hall." And in a lecture given in January 
1885 before the Liberal Social Union, Poel stated that "thous 
ands of pounds had been lost in the Victoria Coffee Hall 
because the Committee thought first of providing entertain 
ment of an educational character and ignored the wishes of 
the audience. The advantages of any scheme were doubtful 
in which not the people themselves but the charitably inclined 
were the prime movers." The very naivete of PoePs own 
dramatic works may have sprung from this desire not to talk 
above the heads of his audience. 

When the serious business of Elizabethan reform was in 
question, Poel never lacked a pulpit. He assisted regularly at 
the discussions of the New Shakspere Society, sometimes 
reading a paper himself. He wrote to the newspapers. He 
lectured wherever anyone would offer him a platform. Nothing 
escaped his criticism or his comment. Slowly, in the face of 
mounting incredulity, his views became known. Since these 
never changed throughout his working lifetime, it would seem 
better to discuss them as a whole as an integral body of 
theatrical dogma and then see how they were applied to the 
plays he chose to interpret. They are conveniently sum 
marised in his two volumes of collected papers, Shakespeare in 
the Theatre (1913), and in Monthly Letters* (1929), and elabor 
ated in the personal correspondence and journalistic activity 
of a lifetime. 

Poel, we have seen, had begun by going back to the text 
and his primary concern was always how the text should be 
spoken. If we could recover the secret of Elizabethan speech, 
we should have a clearer idea of how a play by Shakespeare 
was meant to sound. And his purpose in going back to the 
First Quarto was to get as near as he could to the Prompt 

*Poel edited a series of single-sheet leaflets which were distributed monthly 
between 1916 and 1919, first to members of the London Shakespeare League 
(see p. 288) and then to selected persons. There were 52 letters in all. Extracts 
from these were published, with later material, under the same title, Monthly Letters, 
by T. Werner Laurie in 1929. Further selections from the original leaflets may 
be found in the Poel MSS. collection. 



62 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

Book. He had proved, by experiment, that if you acted a 
Shakespeare play without intervals and no intervals or act 
divisions were indicated either in the First or Second Quarto 
Texts it was no mere figure of speech to talk about the "two 
hours traffic of our stage." But the Elizabethan actor 
must have possessed, besides, a secret of rapid and natural 
delivery which had now been lost. In an argument with 
Sydney Carroll, Poel quoted the old Elizabethan actor 
who had exclaimed, "Oh, the times when my tongue hath 
run as fast upon the scene as a Windebankis from over the 
ocean!" He reminded Mr. Carroll that " German actors in 
those days complained that Englishmen on the stage did not 
declaim but merely prattled " (Letter to The Sunday Times; 
14 Oct. 1920). Poel was concerned to find this via media between 
the slavish following of the iambic te-tum-te-tum and the heresy 
that if you wanted Shakespeare s poetry to sound natural, all 
you had to do was to treat it as if it were prose. Poel s method 
was much simpler than he made it appear and it can be 
defined in two of his own phrases exaggerated naturalness" 
and "tuned tones." By this he meant that just as Shakespeare s 
characters themselves talked with an "exaggerated natural 
ness," so the actor should do likewise; and by "tuned tones" 
he merely meant that any speech which was to carry and have 
significance must be inflected. 

The flat tones of normal English conversation make this 
difficult for the average English actor. His speech is not 
naturally vivacious and coloured. The Elizabethans must have 
spoken with a variety of rhythm and emphasis much more 
characteristic of the best French or Italian actors than of their 
own Victorian posterity. Moreover, it was easy for them to 
do this without offending the modesty of nature, since no 
member of an audience at the Globe Theatre was more than 
about thirty feet from the actor speaking from the front of 
the main platform. The modern theatre, by contrast, imposes 
the necessity of projection. Yet the three-storeyed horseshoe, 
to which the Victorian audience was accustomed, was intimacy 
itself compared to the New Theatre at Oxford or the latest 
Sadlers Wells. A wise decision has reserved c The Wells for 
Ballet and Opera, but it is difficult to understand how the 
governors of the Old Vic, not to mention Miss Baylis herself, 



THE CHALLENGE 63 

who had imbibed, mainly through Robert Atkins, the essentials 
of Poel s teaching, could have sanctioned a building so inimical 
to speech of any kind whatever. 

At the time when Poel was beginning his reforms, most 
actors not only spoke slowly but gave the effect of slowness. 
Poel had learnt from Charles Mathews that it was possible to 
speak slowly and yet give the effect of speed. He put his 
point of view very clearly in a letter to The Saturday Review 
(31 July 1909). 

As with all the other arts, so it is with good acting, its 
excellence lies in restraint and in knowing what to surrender. 
If elocution is to imitate nature, a dozen or more words must 
be sacrificed so that one word may predominate and thus give 
the keynote to the tune of the whole sentence. In this way 
only can the sound be made to echo the sense. But the last 
thing, apparently, the actor cares to do is to give up making 
every word tell. Redundancy of emphasis is his besetting sin, 
especially in the speaking of verse. Thus Shakespeare, without 
elaborate scenic accessories, is unattractive on our stage, 
because our actors rarely bring intelligence to what they are 
saying. . . . Only recently at a West End theatre, a leading 
actor of repute spoke the following words of Macbeth thus : 

or why 

Upon this BLASTED heath you stop our way 
With such prophetic greeting? 

All these words in italics were inflected besides a double 
emphasis on the word blasted. . . . The speech as spoken 
conveyed no sense to the listener. . . . There are three words 
only that need inflecting in the sentence ( why, stop and 
prophetic ) with the emphasis either on stop or prophetic. 
If these three words are rapped out and heard distinctly, the 
listener knows what the rest of the sentence means, and the 
whole can be said very quickly. Of course to speak rapidly 
on the stage and clearly at the same time requires not only a 
flexible voice but severe training in exercises. . . . Compared 
to the French or the Germans the English are bad listeners 
when they get inside a theatre. 

It is often said that Shakespeare was an actor and that his 
plays were written to be performed. But what does this mean ? 
It means that Shakespeare must have had a profound under 
standing of the actor s art. He must have known that a large 
part of his skill consisted not merely in expressing what had 
been put down but in supplying what had been left out. The 



64 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

actor often had a choice, and to choose he must exercise 
his instinct and his intelligence. PoeFs argument can be 
followed in his Monthly Letters (1929, p. 20). He would quote 
the example of Talma who had said "The hunting for the 
key-word gives you the eyes of a lynx in searching all the 
corners of a sentence, and compels you to study closely the 
thought of an author and to weigh all his words. " Or again 
Goquelin: "When I have to create a part, I begin reading the 
play with the greatest attention five or six times." In this 
matter of leaving out there was a lesson for the literary drama 
tist who, like the over-emphatic actor, was fond of putting 
everything in. Poel took the ordinary sentence "Are you 
going out today?" and pointed out that, as it appears, its 
meaning is obscure. It was for the actor to clarify it by laying 
his stress on you or out or today, according to the dramatic 
context. When a manager told an aspiring dramatist that his 
words "won t speak," he usually meant that there were too 
many of them. 

But had Shakespeare left the actor a clue? By going back, 
not this time to the Quartos but to the First Folio, Poel thought 
he had discovered one. He found that here certain words 
were printed with a capital letter which, even in Elizabethan 
days, were not spelt in this way. Lines such as Hamlet s 
"But I have that Within which passeth show," and Malvolio s 
"seated in my branched Velvet gown," and Macbeth s "That 
but this blow might be the be-all and the end-all Here" 
indicated clearly an actor s emphasis. In each case the word 
with the capital letter is manifestly the key- word; and in the 
line from Macbeth the compositor had put a full-stop before 
the word "Here". This might of course have been a printer s 
error, but it was more likely to have been the effect of an 
actor s pause. Poel was to give great attention to Shakespeare s 
punctuation, and he took part in an interesting correspondence 
on the subject in The Times Literary Supplement, which arose in 
consequence of Dr. Percy Simpson s essay, Shakespeare s 
Punctuation (Oxford 19212). 

Dr. Simpson maintained a distinction between a punctuation 
which was oral or dramatic, and one which was primarily 
grammatical. After quoting an actor who had written, 
"earless and unabashed/ to The Times to explain that in 



THE CHALLENGE 65 

delivering a verse speech from Julius Caesar he had "deliber 
ately followed the modern stopping to enable him to over-ride 
the rhythm and turn poetry into prose/ Dr. Simpson suggested 
that the punctuation of the Quarto text would have been more 
helpful to the Elizabethan actor than the punctuation of a 
modern edition of Shakespeare was to the actor to-day. He 
compared four lines from the Quarto Hamlet: 

My father s spirit (in armes) all is not well, 
I doubt some foul play, would the night were come, 
Till then set still my soul, foul deeds will rise, 
Though all the earth o erwhelm them to men s eyes. 

with the same lines printed in the Cambridge Shakespeare: 

My father s spirit in arms! all is not well: 
I doubt some foul play : would the night were come ! 
Till then set still, my soul: foul deeds will rise, 
Though all the earth o erwhelm them, to men s eyes. 

Here was all the difference between an Elizabethan and a 
modern delivery, and Dr. Simpson continued, "Note in the 
early text the quick, unpausing utterance of these lightly 
punctuated lines; thought follows thought in flashes. But the 
crucial point is the use of the parenthesis : why are the words 
c in armes enclosed in brackets? Because Shakespeare is here 
giving the actor his key- word." Mulcaster, in his Elementarie 
of 1582, had written on the effect of parenthesis. "It warneth 
us that the words enclosed are to be pronounced with a lower 
or quicker voice than the words either before or after them." 
Dr. Simpson suggested that "theoretically an actor of the part 
might make father or spirit the key-word. The Quarto 
expressly warns him against that. The significant point is, 
not that a ghost has appeared, nor even that it is the ghost of 
Hamlet s father; it is Hamlet s father armed, and armed too in 
a suit he wore on an historic occasion" (Times Literary Supple 
ment, 17 Feb. 1921). 

Poel, rather surprisingly, would not go as far as Dr. Simpson; 
he did not believe that the punctuation of the Quartos was 
inserted for the benefit of the actors "even when it was apt." 
He believed that it had been made with reading aloud rather 
than with acting in mind. To this objection Dr. Simpson 
had the convincing reply that "as Shakespeare s MSS. were 
3 



66 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

written exclusively for the theatre, and used as prompt-copies 
when they got there, Mr. Poel convicts him of a very un 
practical, not to say unprofessional course" (Ibid., 3 March 
1921). He went on to point out that the old system not only 
marked the pauses but suggested the intonations, quoting 
Pompey s line from Antony and Cleopatra, Act II, Scene vi : 

Pompey: I have heard that Julius Caesar, grew fat with feasting 

there. 
Antony: You have heard much. 

The irony of this exchange was immensely reinforced by the 
emphasis indicated by the comma. Later, Bernard Shaw joined 
in the controversy to suggest that no authenticity should be 
accorded to the Quarto and Folio punctuations, since in these 
matters the actor would always have it his own way. He cited 
Barry Sullivan in Macbeth: 

Hang out your banners. On the outer walls 
The cry is still they come. 

and again in Hamlet: 

I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is 
Southerly, I know a hawk from a heron. Pshaw ! 

These emendations were daring, to be sure; but they were 
theatrically justified. The lesson that Poel drew from all this, 
though he admitted many points in Dr. Simpson s argument, 
was that in any attempt to set up a new standard text for 
Shakespeare, the actor should be represented. Here he was 
supported by Granville-Barker who wrote that "it is unwise 
to decide upon any disputed passage without seeing it in 
action, without canvassing all its dramatic possibilities. For a 
definitive text, we need first a Shakespeare Theatre in which a 
generation of scholars may be as used to seeing as to reading 
the play" (Times Literary Supplement, 17 Feb. 1921). 

The key- word, then, was the principle of PoePs elocutionary 
technique. He exacted the "natural intonation which would 
give to every sentence the same tune that a sentence of 
identical meaning" would have in modern conversation. 
"Hail, Mark Antony!" must be said in the same way as 
"Hullo, Billy!" There must be an equal regard for the 



THE CHALLENGE 67 

context and the meaning of the words, and for their rhyth 
mical and poetic value. Shakespeare had attached great 
importance to the sound of words; he had known how to 
adapt them to the mood and action of the scene. We think 
of Antony s "I am dying, Egypt, dying/ and Othello s "It is 
the cause, my soul, it is the cause," and Lear s "Never, never, 
never, never, never" moments where music and meaning are 
one. Poel reminded his listeners that when Hamlet bade the 
player "Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to 
you, trippingly on the tongue," he was thinking of the rhymed 
verse that he had just composed. In rhymed or blank verse, 
each syllable must have a definite sound. "We can t," said 
Poel, "say the word roses* as we speak it to-day. Olivia must 
say, Cesario, by the Ro-ses of the Spring. And we cannot 
in verse say the word Beautiful as we pronounce it today. 
Olivia must say, "Oh what a deal of scorn looks Beau-ti-ful" 
(Monthly Letters; 1929., p. 18). Poel s aim was always a "reason 
able imitation" of nature, and this was to be carefully dis 
tinguished from realism. 

The uses of prose are different, and they impose another 
discipline on the speaker. But it is not enough to mark the 
transition from iambic metre to a rhythm more obviously conver 
sational, or vice versa; these must be related to characterisation 
and dramatic necessity. Examples are easy to find in Shake 
speare. They mark a lowering of atmosphere and change 
of key, as when Hamlet drops into prose with his assumption 
of lunacy. They differentiate a single character from everyone 
else, as with the Porter in Macbeth or the Clown in Antony and 
Cleopatra. They distinguish between one set of characters and 
another, as in Twelfth Night where the comedians speak in 
prose, only Malvolio breaking into verse when he returns 
Viola her ring and when he interrupts the allegro of the final 
scene with the bitter discord of his reproach. They distin 
guish between the several facets of a character, as with lago 
who soliloquises in verse and rises to it again with the mounting 
rhythm of the jealousy scene. He himself is conceived in 
realistic terms and it is therefore fitting that when he speaks 
to Roderigo he should speak in the idiom of realism. But 
Othello is created in a poetic and metaphysical dimension, 
and when Shakespeare wants to focus our attention not on 



68 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

lago s machinations or their imagined motive, but on the swift 
havoc they work in Othello s soul, then lago must borrow, 
momentarily, the music of his victim; and we in the audience 
who are used to the tune of "Virtue a fig! Tis in ourselves 
that we are thus or thus" are ready to accept "Witness, you 
ever-burning lights above/ because at that moment of crisis 
lago does not matter. 

There was nothing esoteric about PoePs technique of 
speech. But what the average actor found disconcerting 
was his method of instruction. For Poel a play was primarily 
a thing heard, although, as I shall hope to make clear, he was 
careful of pictorial effect. He heard it as precisely as a com 
poser hears the symphony he has just put down on paper. 
But Poel was a poor executant. When it came to illustrating 
what he had picked up from a page of Marlowe or Shakespeare, 
the result was a crude recording. The actor had to hear 
through, so to speak, to what he imagined that Poel himself 
had heard, and then render it, as best he could, on his own 
instrument. He had to assimilate, not slavishly copy. Poel, 
we must remember, was not always dealing with highly trained 
actors; he was dealing for the most part with actors, many of 
them amateur, whom he was in the process of training himself. 
It is understandable that he should sometimes have preferred 
amateurs to professionals; these were less fixed in what he 
regarded as pernicious habits. But they were much less 
accomplished and their most faithful efforts left a tentative 
impression on the spectator. At times PoePs idea, oral as well 
as pictorial, of a play came through with a blazing clarity; at 
other times it was wilfully or involuntarily blurred. * 

I remember rehearsing Coriolanus with him in a bus; there 
was nothing unusual in this. As we jolted up the Charing 
Cross Road, I was trying to master, by docile imitation, the 
steep arpeggios of his intonations. He then turned to me and 
remarked gently, "You won t really say it like that, will you ? 
If you do, your sister will think you are mad." But it was only 
rarely that he achieved this saving sense of the ridiculous. I 
recall a recital of Marlowe that he had organised in celebration 
of the Marlowe centenary. There were moments during the 

*Miss Winifred Oughton has told me that in dealing with rather raw material 
at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art she often has recourse to Poel s tunes. 



THE CHALLENGE 6g 

afternoon when the sounds that came to one from the stage 
seemed equally remote from nature, poetry, or realism. They 
resembled the bestial agonies of the slaughter-house. Poel 
was generally hampered by insufficient rehearsal. He could 
pay his actors little or nothing for their pains, and they could 
only work with him at odd times. This did not make him less 
exacting, or them less grateful. But it did mean that when 
they came to performance, they were still, so to speak, dragging 
the chains of their novitiate. They had not attained the 
liberty which the patient endurance of his discipline could 
ultimately give. They were still automata, repeating, im 
perfectly, his tones and gestures, not fully understanding why 
they must speak and act in a way that would make their sisters 
ashamed of them. If Poel had been able, or had wanted, to 
retire, like Copeau, into a rural retreat and work for six 
months with a few chosen actors, the results would have been 
far more persuasive. 

As it was, the most valuable part of his tuition was given in 
private. When Robert Atkins was preparing the part of Basilio 
in Life s a Dream, Poel invited him to rehearse in the Browning 
Rooms in the Adelphi. When they got there, it was discovered 
that Poel had forgotten to book a room. Nothing daunted, 
he took Mr. Atkins along to Charing Cross Station, sat him 
down on a bench in the waiting-room and proceeded to instruct 
him in the "tunes" of an almost interminable soliloquy. . . ."A 
couple of madmen," remarked one exasperated passenger to 
another as the noise went on. Later, as the weather improved, 
the rendezvous shifted to Kensington Gardens. When he 
expressed the wish to hear Winifred Oughton read the part of 
Viola, she invited him to her flat which then adjoined the 
Old Vic. "This will do splendidly for my rehearsals," remarked 
Poel, looking around, and without more ado summoned the 
actors to meet him there. Towards the end of the afternoon 
Miss Oughton s mother returned home from her duties as 
housekeeper to Miss Baylis at the Vic. "Go away," shouted 
Poel, waving a blue knitted glove in her face, "we re busy 
rehearsing." And Mrs. Oughton meekly withdrew to Waterloo 
Station, where she spent most of her leisure hours for the next 
fortnight. 

To rehearse with Poel was always an arduous and sometimes 



70 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

a painful experience. Granville-Barker has recalled the 
occasion during the rehearsals for Richard II when the Duchess 
of Gloucester was pleading for her son s life. Poel was lying 
back in a deck-chair, his eyes shut, his hands crossed on his 
chest, and his feet spread out. "More hysteria," he was 
saying, "more hysteria," and then, a moment later, "That s 
the tone, keep it up." But Barker had to remind him gently 
that the lady was sobbing on the floor, and the hysteria was 
real (Letter from Dr. Percy Simpson to the author, 13 July 1952). 
For some reason Poel did not think that actors could begin to 
perform until they were prostrate with hunger. Once he 
suspected Miss Oughton of having eaten before rehearsal ; and 
when she explained that she had only just risen from a bed 
of flu and had drunk a glass of Burgundy on doctor s orders, 
Poel was so enraged by this avowal that he slapped her face. 
But Poel s slaps really did hurt him more than they hurt his 
actors; all they remembered of them afterwards was the 
exquisite grace of his apology. 

In later years you went down to his house in Putney and in a 
setting of some domestic disorder you read over the part with 
him. Subsequently, you met him at the Emerson Club in 
Whitehall and this address suggests the climate of high- 
mindedness in which, he naturally moved. Occasionally a 
fellow-member would glance up, incredulous, from his arm 
chair., Poel continued his instruction, energetic and un 
dismayed. After about six weeks, you began to rehearse with 
other members of the cast, generally in a vegetarian restaurant. 
Only at the last moment were you able to get your Elizabethan 
legs on the platform-stage which he had built out over the 
stalls of some house of variety the Holborn Empire or the 
Chelsea Palace. The moment has not come yet to discuss 
Poel s theory and practice of staging. He began, as we have 
seen, with the text and the proper speaking of the text. He 
began with the actor, and here his views were as carefully 
formulated in 1881 as they were in 19123, when I first came 
into close personal contact with him. 

There will always be roughly two views of acting. According 
to the first, acting is an expression, an interpretation of per 
sonality. The actor bends, or twists, the part to suit his own 
temperament. The acting of Henry Irving or Sarah Bernhardt 



THE CHALLENGE 7 1 

is said to have been of this kind. But according to the second 
view, the actor s primary business is to impersonate. He 
cannot, of course, de-personalise himself entirely; his own 
stamp will remain upon all his work; the audience will be in 
no doubt that it is seeing this particular actor and no other. 
But it will be aware of the part at least as strongly as it will 
be aware of the performer. Coquelin was an actor of this 
kind; and Coquelin, with Salvini, was Poel s great exemplar. 
Too often, he felt, in the English theatre personality was 
substituted for technique, and for the mental and physical 
conformity to the role. He wrote me a letter while I was 
rehearsing Chapman s Biron, which illustrates very well 
his idea. I was enjoying this part enjoying it far too 
much. 

I want to make a final criticism about the character of 
Biron so that I need not worry you with my remarks at the 
last moment. I notice that more and more you are sacrificing 
the creative art to the personal self-personating method. 
More and more is Biron becoming R.S. But be careful: 
Yourself in costume and modern methods may not be accepted 
as an impersonation of Biron! Mere emotion and force and 
intensity will not, I think, in the opinion of the critical be 
enough to give you that success in the part which I hoped you 
would get. Without restraint and the greatest care in your 
movements I do not think you will fill the picture the audience 
will realise is appropriate to the period. I am not saying this 
to depress you. Your personality will be a great help to you, but 
the play may suffer ! This does not matter to me if it does not 
injure you. Here are a few points. 

Keep as still as you can, listen while others are talking, 
keep your arms full-length by your side and move as little as 
possible, take very SHORT steps, keep the hands off the face. 
You show too much physical anger and bitterness which leads 
to repetition both of gesture and tune. You have so much 
opportunity of letting yourself go at the end of the play, that 
the quieter you are in the earlier scenes the better it will be for 
you, for the part and the play. 

Please don t interpret this remark in the light of complaints. 
I am most grateful to you for attempting such an arduous part 
which at any rate will not be without animation. All I am 
anxious about is that you should not, when it is too late, be 
sorry that you did what we call c let yourselves go, which an 
experienced actor not only never dares do, but never tries to 
do (Undated, July 1929). 



72 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

All the wisdom and kindliness of Poel are here and the 
letter illustrates very clearly his philosophy of art. He was 
suggesting to me what he had stated explicitly to his nephew, 
Reginald Pole, many years before, that all art was founded 
on repose. If one objected that Beethoven, Michaelangelo, 
and the Shakespeare of King Lear were hardly examples of 
repose, he would reply that even here the art itself was balanced, 
and held together by an interior stillness. "All my work in the 
theatre/ he would say, "is founded on that idea." We shall 
see many other examples of his dealings with actors, but I 
have quoted this letter (scribbled in pencil from Miles s res 
taurant in Chandos Street) to show his attitude to the actor as 
a man and as an artist. This most exacting of directors never 
forgot that it was upon the actor that, in the last analysis, 
everything depended. 



Ill 

In 1887 Poel took his next step towards experiment. He 
was invited to become instructor for the Shakespeare 
Reading Society, and in the recitals and productions he 
directed for them he adopted many of the principles which he 
was to illustrate more fully with the Elizabethan Stage Society 
later on. The Shakespeare Reading Society had been founded 
by students of University College, London, and Henry Irving 
was its president. At first the actors sat round on a platform 
and read the plays without act or scene divisions, and with the 
minimum of cuts (Victorian taste would have imposed certain 
omissions). These recitals attracted the attention of George 
Bernard Shaw, who was by now established as a journalist in 
London and tilting against all the windmills of established 
custom. He wrote in The Star on 20 February 1890: 

From these simple recitals, without cuts, waits or scenery, 
and therefore without those departures from the conditions 
contemplated by the poet which are inevitable in a modern 
theatre, I learn a good deal about the plays which I could 
learn in no other way. What is more, I enjoy myself. 

That was written apropos of Much Ado about Nothing, given at 
the London Institution, in which (we are delighted to learn) 



THE CHALLENGE 73 

a gentleman called Samuel Johnson read the part of Dogberry. 
The first of the series directed by Poel was The Merchant of 
Venice, given in the Botanical Theatre of University College, 
and this was followed by Romeo and Juliet (May 1888 at the 
London Institution), Twelfth Night (Feb. and Mar. 1889 at the 
London Institution), Much Ado about Nothing (Feb. 1890 at the 
London Institution) ; and The King and the Countess, an episode 
from King Edward III (May 1890 at the Steinway Hall), and 
Henry V (April 1891 at the Royal Academy of Music). Intense 
preparation was given to these readings; Poel rehearsed the 
actors for three months, sometimes three or four times a week. 
In 1891 it was decided to do Measure for Measure in costume, 
but without scenery, at Ladbroke Hall, Notting Hill Gate. 
The next year the Society gave a recital of The Two Gentlemen 
of Verona in the St. James s Banqueting Hall and repeated it in 
costume before the members of the Albany Club at Kingston. 
In the autumn of the same year he revived The Duchess ofMalfi, 
in a new acting version, at the Opera Comique. In this he was 
helped by the Independent Theatre Society. The play was 
given with scenery, since Poel felt that the plot was too in 
coherent for pure Elizabethan treatment. Very properly, he 
invited Swinburne to attend the performance, for Swinburne s 
enthusiasm for the Jacobean dramatists was well known, and 
a few days later Poel had the following letter from him: 

I must send you a word of thanks for the honour done me 
as a Websterian by your gift of a box on the 25th and for the 
great pleasure I had in seeing that transcendent masterpiece 
of tragedy restored to the stage under such favourable auspices. 
How great the pleasure was you may judge when I tell you 
that I was just 12 years old when I first read so much of The 
Duchess 9 as is given in Campbell s Specimens, 5 and was as 
much entranced and fascinated at that not very mature age 
as I am now and have been ever since by its unique beauty and 
power. I congratulate you most cordially on the benefits 
you have conferred on all lovers of English dramatic poetry at 
its best and highest in other words, upon all lovers of what is 
best and highest in the literature, or rather in the creative 
work of all countries and all ages. And I most earnestly hope 
that you may see your way to doing as much for other great 
works of the same great age especially, I need not say, of the 
same great hand. I think I must have been the only person 
present on Tuesday who had brought with him a copy of the 

3* 



74 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

Author s edition 1623. I wish I had had the privilege of 
showing you the beautiful little quarto which I had slipped 
into an inside breast pocket. But I hope you will allow me an 
opportunity of showing you my little collection of such rarities 
(Undated, October 1892). 

Love s Labours Lost followed in the spring of 1893, performed 
in the Steinway Hall. The effect of one of these readings 
The Tempest, given also in the Steinway Hall with Hermann 
Vezin as Prospero, in June 1897 may be guessed from the 
following review in The Daily Chronicle. 

In front of dark drapery, forming a species of screen, sat 
about a dozen ladies and gentlemen in nineteenth century 
evening attire, who, representing the characters in the play, 
rose at their respective cues and delivered the lines allotted 
them, the majority with books in their hands. Below the 
platform sat Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch and three lady assistants, 
who played the incidental music upon instruments of Shake 
speare s time. To a treble viol was added a tenor viol, a viol 
da gamba, and virginals. ... It was delightful to hear the 
ancient instruments again giving life to the music composed 
for them, the Shapes who offer the banquet to the King and 
his companions dancing (in weird costumes) to a pavane and 
galliard composed by William Byrd (5 June 1897). 

The addresses chosen for these readings do not immediately 
suggest the theatre; PoePs addresses rarely did. They strike 
a note of adult education and sober self-improvement, equally 
remote from the modern or the Elizabethan playhouse. In 
spite of his preaching, Poel, in whose temperament there was 
a mingling of the Pre-Raphaelite and the Puritan, would 
always remain at a certain distance from the rhetoric and 
rough-and-tumble of the Globe. 

He had come to feel that it was impossible to test his theories 
of Elizabethan acting and speech in the conditions of the 
contemporary theatre, and all the time he was directing these 
recitals he was trying to recreate in his own mind the stage 
for which the plays had been written. Now in this matter of 
Shakespeare and the greater Elizabethans two attitudes are 
possible. It is both easier and more convenient to say 
Shakespeare was so transcendent a genius that he wrote for all 
time and all peoples. His genius is universal. He speaks in one 



THE CHALLENGE 75 

way to the Elizabethans and in another way to us. There are 
as many different ways of interpreting Shakespeare as there 
are imaginations capable of putting him on the stage. If he 
had been alive today, he would have been grateful for modern 
theatrical techniques. He would have been quite content 
to retire behind the footlights. He would have been prepared 
to sacrifice what was inessential in the plays in order that what 
was essential in them should reach the greatest number of 
people. He was a democratic dramatist, depending on a 
mass-appeal. And so the absurdities multiply. They have 
led to a screen version of Hamlet in which the play is solemnly 
described in captions as the story of a man "who could not 
make up his mind." Or again, they have led to a Henry VIII 
where the crowning expression of Shakespeare s regalism 
Cranmer s speech at the christening of the Princess Elizabeth 
is treated as comic, anti-clerical relief. They have led in 
New York to a modern-dress Julius Caesar, where a play 
designed to show the havoc wrought by high-minded liberals, 
caught in the toils of their own demagogy, is treated as anti- 
Fascist propaganda. Thanks to the virtual elimination of 
the Fifth Act, this treatment was reasonably successful. 

These and similar "bold experiments" quickly recoil upon 
their perpetrators. By trying to make Hamlet easy you only 
make it unintelligible, and when you shorten it for the wrong 
reasons it seems to go on for ever. And a man who maintains 
that Julius Caesar is a play about the wickedness of dictators 
will maintain anything. Modernism on the Shakespearian 
stage can easily become an excuse for saying anything you 
like on any subject whatever by the simple expedient of 
pretending that Shakespeare said it first. Compared to these 
heresies, the deficiences of Lyceum Shakespeare were venial. 

It was enormously to PoePs credit that he revived the 
historical Shakespeare, quoting Ruskin s opinion that "it is 
a constant law that the greatest poets and historians live 
entirely in their own age, and the greatest fruits of their 
work are gathered out of their own age." He went on to 
say that "Shakespeare and his companions were inspired 
by the prolific energies of their day. Their material was 
their own and their neighbours experiences, and their 
plays were shaped to suit the theatre of the day and no 



76 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

other." He then corrected the notion that the Elizabethan 
Theatre was a drab and primitive structure, all rashes and 
groundlings. He quoted the Englishman visiting Venice in 
1605 and commenting: "I was at one of their playhouses 
where I saw a comedy acted. The house is very beggarly and 
base in comparison with our stately playhouses in England, 
neither can the actors compare with us for apparel, shows and 
music." The idea that an Elizabethan performance, as 
distinct from an Elizabethan play, was a clownish pantomine, 
relieved by crude and tasteless rhetoric, was contradicted by 
Busoni who wrote of a performance at the Fortune in 1617 
that the nobility were "listening as silently and soberly as 
possible." The effect of Julius Caesar on a contemporary 
audience was described by Leonard Digges: 

So I have seen when Caesar would appear, 
And on the stage at half-sword parley were 
Brutus and Gassius. Oh ! how the audience 
Were ravished, with what wonder they went thence ! 

In a discussion arising out of an article in The Nineteenth 
Century Poel vigorously contested Arthur Bourchier s view that 
impersonation, as distinct from the mere recitation of lines, 
was forbidden by the conditions of the Elizabethan stage. 
(Letter to The Stage, 23 August 1906). Impersonation had been 
essential for the reason that the same actor had to appear so 
often before the same audience. Thomas Heywood had told 
the actor "to qualify everything according to the nature of the 
person personated." The great Burbage had been so eager to 
sustain his part "unto the height" that he kept up his imper 
sonation in the Tiring House, or dressing-room. And we know 
from Ben Jonson that Dick Robinson, a famous actor of 
women s parts, could pass himself off as a lady at a supper- 
party. Elizabethan acting, at its best, had followed Hamlet s 
advice to the players; it had striven not to "o erstep the 
modesty of nature." In The Return from Parnassus, published 
in 1 60 1, Kempe, the celebrated clown, is made to remark to 
Burbage in a discussion on the acting merits of the Cambridge 
undergraduates : 

It is a good sport, in a part, to see them never speak but at 
the end of the stage, just as though in walking with a fellow, 



THE CHALLENGE 77 

we should never speak but at a stile, a gate, or a ditch, where 
a man can go no further. 

Anyone who has tried to act knows that nothing is more 
difficult than to walk and talk naturally at the same time. 
What, then, was the secret of these productions, of their pro 
found popular appeal? Surely, argued Poel, it must have 
lain in the perfect adaptability of the plays to the theatres in 
which they were performed. If you regarded the Elizabethan 
playhouse as a primitive sheep-pen from which the proscenium 
was shortly to emancipate us, of course it was easy to argue 
that if Shakespeare had been alive today he would have been 
delighted. We have not, in fact, the faintest idea whether 
Shakespeare would be delighted or not. Such assertions are 
pure hypothesis. What is quite certain is that, if he had 
been alive today or any day since the advent of the picture 
stage he would have written quite different plays. His plays 
are what they are, not because he was a universal genius 
writing for all time, but because he was a particular Elizabethan 
Englishman writing for a particular Elizabethan stage and 
public. This is the starting-point for any intelligent Shake 
spearian discussion; if we want freshness as distinct from 
modernism in our Shakespearian productions, this is where 
we must begin. 

No one in his senses will set about producing Greek tragedy 
without acquainting himself with the structure of the Attic 
stage. It is no accident that Greek drama performed in a 
modern theatre never quite comes off and that probably the 
most convincing presentation of these plays now to be seen in 
England are the performances given annually, under Mr. 
Cecil Bellamy s direction, in the Greek theatre at Bradfield. 
In the Greek theatre there was a different, a stricter unity. 
But here, as in the Elizabethan playhouse, there was a per 
manent scene instead of a shifting d6cor. In a very real 
sense the vast audience at Epidaurus was closer to the actors, 
speaking through their masks and moving on their stilts, than 
is the modern spectator looking beyond the footlights from 
the darkened stalls. They were enjoying a more intimate 
experience, nourished by profound communities of belief. 
To have assisted at a performance of a comedy by Aristophanes 
must have been much more like an evening at the Palladium 



78 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

than an evening at the Haymarket. These conditions are no 
more easily recovered than are the conditions of Shakespeare s 
playhouse. But it is not thought an impossible pedantry if the 
producer takes them into account. 

Poel saw that what the Elizabethan stage, with its daylight, 
its multiple planes, and its wide projecting platform made 
possible, was a special kind of realism. The audience was in 
the play, not in front of it; the action of the play was not in 
Rome or Alexandria; it was here and now; it was Elizabethan, 
and immediate. An Elizabethan performance was essentially 
an experiment with time. The eyes of the audience were 
never invited to desert the solid octagonal walls of the play 
house, but their imaginations were asked to superimpose upon 
them the visible universe of the dramatist. It seems very ques 
tionable whether in fact a boy came on with a placard stating 
where the audience was supposed to be. In any case 
the dramatist who knew his business was quick to indicate 
the locality in question, and thenceforward he and the audience 
between them did the scene-shifting. There was no effort to 
create illusion that is the prerogative of the picture stage 
but there was a mutual imaginative effort which secured that 
these actors should be Romeo and Juliet and also Elizabethan 
Englishmen; that this balcony should be in London by day 
and also in Verona by night. For the architecture of the 
Globe provided Juliet s balcony and Juliet s bedroom and 
Juliet s tomb with no more trouble than was required for the 
drawing of a curtain; just as it provided Cleopatra s monument 
and the battlements of Elsinore, Ophelia s grave (which was 
below the trap) and Orlando s tree (which was one of the 
forward pillars). The Elizabethan stage was a map of any 
where, and when a landscape was required, the poet was at 
hand to paint it. 

It is a matter for discussion whether Lorenzo and Jessica 
are helped or hindered by a simulation of moonlight and moss 
a great deal depends upon Lorenzo and Jessica. But it is 
not contestable that they make poetry of the moonlight and 
the moss, because at the first performance of The Merchant of 
Venice both had to be imagined. They were not the less real 
for that. A great deal of Shakespeare s finest poetry is the 
fruit of theatrical necessity. We watch Ophelia drown with 



THE CHALLENGE 79 

our imaginations because we may not watch her drown with our 
eyes. We listen to Burgundy telling us about the devastated 
fields of France because we cannot see them for ourselves. 
But what happens when the much-vaunted resources of the 
modern theatre come to Shakespeare s aid? In the film of 
Hamlet Gertrude s great speech, one of Shakespeare s classical 
appeals to the imagination and successful, as such, with any 
audience at any time, was destroyed by cheap visual dis 
tractions. The same thing happened with Burgundy in 
Henry V. Scarcely had Mr. Valentine Dyall begun, very 
nobly, to deliver the lines, when the shots mercilessly inter 
vened. We were only able to listen to Mr. Dyall while we 
were looking at him. Either the poetry or the picture became 
irrelevant. 

I shall not go so far as to say that poetry is always destroyed by 
scenery, for in the theatre the actor, however much he may be 
supplemented by decor, is always there for one to look at. 
But what scenery does destroy is the poetic realism which was 
the secret of the Elizabethan achievement. The neutral, 
non-localised, immobile platform-stage, beautiful and satis 
fying as architecture, acts as a screen on which the poet may 
paint at will. "Crowflowers, nettles, and long purples . . her 
pendant weeds ... an envious sliver broke" one by one, with 
matchless clarity, the images rise before us and then sink back 
to merge gradually with our composite picture ours, remem 
ber, not Shakespeare s alone, still less the scenic artist s of 
Ophelia dying. It is not such a poor arena after all, this 
wooden O, since it gives us the freedom to imagine; or rather 
gives it back to us enriched. 

In 1950 I was producing Pierre-Jean Jouve s translation of 
Romeo and Juliet at the Theatre des Gompagnons in Montreal. 
My two lovers, Jean Goutu and Helene Loiselle, gave as good 
performances of the two parts as I have seen. But they 
never seemed to me to act so well as on a certain morning when 
we were unable to rehearse on the stage and had to betake 
ourselves, as so often happens, to the vestibule. As vestibules 
go, the vestibule of the Theatre des Compagnons is quite 
agreeable; long, low, and spacious; hung with interesting 
photographs. But at eleven o clock in the morning even the 
most elegant vestibule is brutally unromantic. We were 



80 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

working on the Balcony scene. Mile. Loiselle placed herself 
on a chair and M. Coutu was still encumbered with his script. 
I sat, a good distance away, at the further end of the room. 
As the scene proceeded, I felt the tears come into my eyes; 
and this rarely happens to me, in the theatre or out of it. At 
last, I said to myself, I have seen, I have experienced, the 
Balcony scene. And yet what had moved me was, in many 
ways, only a sketch of what, at the first public performance, 
left me cold. 

I have always been interested to discover why. It is alto 
gether too easy to say that M. Coutu and Mile. Loiselle acted 
better at rehearsal than they did on the opening night. I have 
no reason to suppose that this was the case. It is true that my 
Balcony set an uneasy compromise between flats and curtains 
was not successful; the lighting, for want of sufficient 
rehearsal, was nothing to write home about. But I do not 
think the answer to my question was here. I think the reason 
why I was less moved was because poetic realism had gone by 
the board, and psychological realism had gone with it. Down 
below, in the vestibule, I was no nearer to my two actors than 
I was in the auditorium. But we were under the same roof; 
we were on the same stage. I was in Romeo and Juliet, not 
outside it. I was no longer an eavesdropper; I had entered, 
respectfully, the room. 

I am not suggesting, for a moment, that if M. Coutu and 
Mile. Loiselle had given their vestibule performance on the 
stage, they would have had the same effect on me. I should 
have been much more conscious, I am sure, of its incom 
pleteness. And the reason for this is clear. On the picture 
stage, the eye demands a picture. Poel himself would have 
been the first to admit this. The only point of constructing 
a frame is that you put a picture inside it. Poel admired the 
rich pictorial effects achieved by Irving at the Lyceum and 
by Tree at His Majesty s. All he maintained was that they 
were irrelevant to the imagery of Shakespeare s plays and 
destructive of their rhythm. If you objected that when the 
curtain goes up, the audience expect to see a picture, he would 
have said that the audience was right. It is the first rule of 
entertainment not to disappoint your audience. But the 
point about an Elizabethan performance was that there 



THE CHALLENGE 8 1 

was no curtain and that the audience did not expect to see a 
picture. They expected to assist at a spectacle, which is not 
the same thing. 

Nowhere was Poel more revolutionary than in his attitude 
to stage lighting. Here, at least, one might have thought that 
the technical facilities of the modern stage came to the rescue 
of the actor. But no ; it was here that 

the picture stage most loses the resemblance to reality. The 
lighting of the picture is considered to be of great importance 
to the lighting of the characters, and in some theatres, it is 
regarded as of more importance; and although the lights in 
the battens and wings illuminate the stage, they give no 
appreciable light to the faces, which have to be independently 
lit in a very artificial way, one which not only distorts the 
countenance, but often interferes with the lighting of the 
picture. Unfortunately, the construction of the modern stage 
allows of no top light reaching the faces [this is not true when 
the stage is lit from the front of the house} as is the case in day 
light, and limelight thrown on from the perches lights the 
figures only from the side or from the back. . . . The only other 
light which can reach the faces is that from the footlights, 
which is an upside down method of illumination, causing 
seven parts of the whole light which reaches the face, to come 
from the ground instead of from the sky; hence the need for 
the actor to "make-up/ which further destroys any approach 
to realism; while the necessity for two different and indepen 
dent schemes of lighting to be used at the same time, one to 
light the scene and the other the characters, brings into the 
universe of stageland two suns, a phenomenon that no man, 
dead or alive, ever saw outside of the theatre. No favourable 
comparison, therefore, is possible in the matter of realism 
between modern stage-lighting and the daylight that fell on 
the actors from the open roof of the Globe playhouse. [Here 
Poel seems to ignore the fact that the greater part of the stage, as 
distinct from the auditorium, was probably roofed.} Of course, this 
light could not be varied, when the action of the play was 
supposed to take place at night, or in twilight, or during 
thunder and rain, but here the art of the dramatist came to 
the rescue, and it was his business to indicate during the 
progress of the play the varying conditions of the environment 
(The Mew Age, 2 June 1910). 

This is a good example of Poel s implacable logic; but he 
was right in seeing that you cannot ask audiences, or actors, 
to do without scenery and lighting unless you give them 
another kind of theatre. A performance of Shakespeare, 



82 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

spoken rapidly and flowing smoothly in curtains behind a 
proscenium, is certainly better than a spasmodic performance 
of the same play truncated to make room for scenery. But 
it is not an ideal performance; and it is not remotely an 
Elizabethan performance. There is a total absence of per 
spective in the flat, monotonous line of the traverse curtain 
and a fatal lack of space in front of it. And if you try to con 
struct an Elizabethan set behind the proscenium, with upper 
and lower levels and a staircase, perhaps, connecting them, 
you are liable to run into difficulties. When Mr. Glen Byam 
Shaw, who is one of our best directors of Shakespeare, pro 
duced Antony and Cleopatra at the Piccadilly Theatre in 1946, 
he was obliged to place his permanent Elizabethan* set so 
close to the proscenium that there was very little room to 
manoeuvre in front of it. But if he had not so placed it, the 
actors performing on the upper levels would have been in 
visible from the upper tiers of the auditorium. When I was 
producing the same play at the Opera House in Geneva, a 
year later, I tried a similar solution. Here the theatre was so 
built that I could place my permanent set at a reasonable 
distance from the proscenium arch, and I was able to build 
out an c apron j over the wide well of the orchestra, still leaving 
room for the musicians in the uncovered portion of the well 
on the right, and still having space for a staircase leading up 
to the apron from the left. In both Mr. Byam Shaw s pro 
duction and my own the permanent set did well enough for 
Rome and Athens, for Pompey s galley and Cleopatra s 
monument. But in neither case was the central opening 
below (at the Piccadilly this was slightly to one side) more 
than an opening. If one had been able to build an inner 
stage, it would have been too far from the audience for anyone 
to act on it. And if my memory serves me right, we were both 
equally defeated by the battle scenes, though here, perhaps, I 
had the greater space for deployment a space which I do not 
think I used to the best advantage. In each case we achieved 
something of the suppleness and unlocalised character of the 
Elizabethan stage, but very little of its intimacy and dimension. 
The best solution we have seen in recent years was Miss 
Tanya Moisewitch s set for the Histories at Stratford in 1951. 
This was ludicrously underestimated by the critics; for it had 



THE CHALLENGE 83 

the sovereign merit of being architecture rather than decor. 
It was brilliantly used by Mr. Quayle and his co-producers. 
But it was a particular solution, shining brightly for all that, 
compared to the submarine and operatic Tempest which 
followed it. Here was the total sacrifice of poetry to picture, 
and the subsequent performance of the same play at the little 
Mermaid (although there is no record of any production of 
The Tempest at the Globe and although the Mermaid does not 
really reproduce Elizabethan conditions) was far more satis 
fying. But the problem is strictly insoluble, and the intransi 
gent genius of Poel saw it to be so. That is why he worked in 
the wilderness. That is why he only succeeded when he took 
his audience as well as his actors away from the proscenium; 
when, as in his later platform-stage productions, he turned 
his proscenium into the framework of an inner stage. For you 
cannot have even an approximately Elizabethan performance 
before a public which rejects your premises, for the good 
reason, as Poel never tired of pointing out, that in the Eliza 
bethan playhouse audience and actors were one. The most 
successful Elizabethan productions of our time have un 
doubtedly been those, like Mr. Ronald Watkins s at Harrow 
and Mr. Nugent Monck s at the Maddermarket, where the 
audience get what they are expecting; where actors and 
audience are physically and therefore psychologically under 
the same roof, or, as in certain pastoral performances, under 
the same sky. 

These are highly disputable matters, but there is no disputing 
the passage quoted by Poel from Richard Flecknoe s Discourse 
of the English Stage written no more than forty years after 
Shakespeare s death. 

Now for the difference between our Theatres and those of 
former times; they were but plain and simple, with no other 
scenes or decorations of the stage, but only old Tapestry, and 
the Stage strewn with Rushes, Whereas ours for cost and 
ornament are arrived at the height of magnificence, but that 
which makes our Stage the better, makes our plays the worse, 
perhaps through striving now to make them more for sight 
than hearing, whence that solid joy of the interior is lost, 
and that benefit which were formerly received from Plays, 
from which they seldom or never went away but far better 
and wiser than when they came. 



84 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

At the same time Poel was careful not to be dogmatic where 
the evidence was insufficient. He maintained over many years 
a correspondence with W. J. Lawrence, and to read this 
unfortunately most of Lawrence s letters are lost is to see how 
two scrupulous scholars reached and tested their conclusions. 
They also became close friends, although their friendship was 
clouded at the end by Poel s treatment of Coriolanus. I shall 
relate this episode in its proper place; but in the meantime 
it may be interesting to see how Poel elaborated in his letters 
to Lawrence the ideas which he concurrently put into practice. 

I am particularly glad [he writes on the 26 April 1909] to 
see you lay emphasis on the fact that it is almost impossible 
to insist on any rules for Elizabethan staging, beyond the need 
for great adaptability according to what theatre was being 
used or Hall, and what play was being acted. And the 
dramatists knowing that their plays would not always be 
acted in the same building would be careful not to be too 
dogmatic in stage directions, excepting the inferior writers. 

I forget what is your idea about the Traverse. I mean the 
lower one, nearest the audience, that might have gone between 
the two pillars; not that I think they did go there, but probably 
obliquely across the rear of the stage. It was at best but a 
temporary arrangement, and probably only used for some 
plays. I am quite against William Archer s emphatic declaration 
that there was no second Traverse at all. 

Poel never forgot that the Elizabethan theatres differed 
considerably in shape, and on this point he would go to 
Lawrence for advice. 

Can you tell me if the Blackfriars Hall (when James Burbage 
converted it into the Playhouse in 1596 and the Hall was 66 
feet long and 40 feet wide) had for its stage the total width 
of the Hall? That is to say, did the width of the stage extend 
forty feet that is from wall to wall? I rather expect it did 
because I think somewhere you have written that the side 
boxes in the Hall did not extend over the stage! Are the 
dimensions of the stage at the Blackfriars known as to depth, 
and the position of the doors? I so often find myself in diffi 
culties whenever I allude to performances at the Blackfriars 9 
because I have no means of visualizing the size and appearance 
of the stage. I am inclined to think that the stage was not 
much smaller than that at the Globe, that is to say 43 x 40. 
Can one speak with any certainty as to the exact position of 
the alcove and two doors? (July 1926). 



THE CHALLENGE 85 

In answer to Lawrence he wrote again, a few days later: 

You were quite right to point out my error of forty feet deep 
for the Globe stage, because that is a misleading statement 
and I knew it was at the time I wrote it. But no one seems to 
grasp the idea that both at the Globe and at the FortuncAe, 
platform began, so to speak, at the middle of the Arena and 
extended to the tiring house, and further still into the alcove. 

The great width of the stage Drury Lane is only 36 feet 
wide in the proscenium opening served as you say at the 
Blackfriars 5 and afterwards at the Globe for spectators to sit 
at the sides. Also it allowed all the actors in the play to be 
seen when they were speaking, and since the dramas were 
regarded as largely rhetorical this was an advantage. ... I 
am glad to hear from you as an authority that we cannot be 
sure of details about doors and windows at the Blackfriars 
and I suppose not at the Globe either?* 

In the following year Poel explained the purpose of his 
platform-stage productions. 

The Platform performance simply means this, that I want 
to show that there was a possible movement on the Elizabethan 
stage not possible on the proscenium stage! G. B. Shaw 
noticed this the first time he saw one of my Elizabethan 
performances on my miniature model stage. He said, this 
stage can show people walking about from one house and 
street to another. . . . For a Shakespearian representation, I am 
myself content with a balcony, a recess, two doors and the 
forward platform which must be the same size as that in use 
in the Fortune theatre I And I think that Shakespeare re 
garded a good deal of the crude paraphernalia still in use in 
his day as out of date and therefore as mere comic imitations 
of realities that were better dispensed with. Often must he 
have wished to say to the actors, "A little more invention please, 
gentlemen, and less powder." By the way, how was it that the 
Globe playhouse existed for 14 years without being burnt 
down, unless we may presume that some definite provision 
had been made to prevent any offchance of a flaming wad 
lodging in the thatched roof? Perhaps some day evidence 
will be forthcoming to show that in 1613 the Globe was burnt 
down by an incendiary who was bribed by some hot-headed 
Puritans who wished to remind King James that no more 
Spanish marriages with the English Court would be tolerated! 

An authoritative comment on the dimensions of the Elizabethan stage can 
be found in E. K. Chambers magisterial survey (The Elizabethan Stage, 1923). 
The proscenium opening at Drury Lane is considerably wider than Poel here 
makes out. 



86 



WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 



Poel went on to illustrate, by argument and diagram 
(reproduced below) how the movement, of which the possi 
bilities had been seen by Shaw, could be effected. 

I am under the impression that the vogue for gallants to sit 
on stools on the public stage did not begin much before 1600. 
But in what way did this custom modify the movement of the 
actors, and more especially as it affected their entrances? 
There are instances in the First Folio, and elsewhere, I believe, 
where either actors are shown, in the stage-directions, to enter 
some lines before they speak, or to be given two entrances, 
one, let us say, in the rear of the stage, and the other from the 
side where the gallants are seated, and the actor is waiting 
for his cue to take up the dialogue within the ring. There is 
an illustration of what I mean in the First Folio Facsimile, 
Stanton s edition page 69, where the Nurse enters Friar 
Lawrence s cell in the Banishment scene. Here the first 
stage-direction is "Enter Nurse and knocks" which to me 
means that the Nurse comes on to the stage at the back and 
knocks with her crutch on the floor. She then comes down 
the stage among the gallants giving three other knocks on the 
floor to three different cues, then at another cue, but appar 
ently the wrong cue, we have the stage-direction "Enter 
Nurse" and here I take it she enters the ring, down stage, and 
takes up the dialogue. I try in the illustration on the following 
page to draw a plan of the action as I have described it (14 
May 1927). 



Cnfcer tlum 



u 



gallants 
>o o 



o 
o 



IRotneo 



Triar 



oo 
6ntcr Uut5e 



flutsc 
Blocks 



fee 



It is a matter of history that the poetic drama declined in 
England from the development of the picture stage, and if it 
was in a manner reborn with Eliot s Murder in the Cathedral, 
it is significant that this was written for performance in the 
Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral where there was 



THE CHALLENGE 87 

only a formal setting, no lighting to speak of, and where the 
actors and the audience were in a kind of Elizabethan contact. 
A great part of the play the Choruses, the Sermon and the 
Knights apologia was spoken directly to the public; and the 
play was never afterwards so successful as in the little Mercury 
Theatre at Notting Hill Gate, where there is a wide apron 
and where an easy intimacy is possible. It is worth remarking 
that many of the more interesting poetic plays written during 
the past twenty years were composed for performance in the 
same conditions at Canterbury. These included Charles 
Williams Cranmer, Dorothy L. Sayers The %eal of Thy House, 
Christopher HassalPs Christ s Comet, Laurie Lee s Peasant Poet, 
Christopher Fry s Thor, with Angels, and Robert Gittings* 
The Makers of Violence. 

Poel, writing in The Manchester Playgoer (1912), was conscious 
of the tyranny of the visual arts. This was not in the least, as 
I have said, because he had an insensitive eye. He was, in 
fact, to prove himself a master of stage grouping. But he 
feared that the imaginative faculties of modern man faculties 
essential for the enjoyment of Shakespeare were being 
smothered by the insistent appeal to the eye, which at every 
turn was recklessly flattered. 

It can no longer be said that an interest in pictures lessens 
with the close of childhood. The taste continues and gathers 
new strength from habitual indulgence until it threatens the 
adult with paralysis of the imagination . . . more and more do 
men and women distrust their own intuitions. They turn to 
pictures for the realisation of what they themselves hesitate to 
visualise. They fancy that their own perceptions do not 
disclose the author s meaning without the help of the illus 
trations. They forget that in most cases it is the illustrator, 
and not the author, who determines how much the reader 
shall know. . . . Poetry takes precedence of history in its power 
to illuminate the past. It mellows the pictures of memory 
with a special beauty, and has a more lasting and subtle 
influence over the mind than has either music or painting. 
In fact the art of the poet presupposes and comprehends all 
the other arts. Not a few of the most beautiful descriptions 
of Homer furnish no pictures for the artist. Poetry in fact 
makes her own pictures as she makes her own music. 

It is the consciousness of this greater freedom that language 
gives which makes the poet often impatient of the limitations of 
the painter s art. ... To what end does the present popularity 



88 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

of the pictured page lead ? Is it man s destiny to regard life 
as if it were a vast kaleidoscope, existing for the sole purpose 
of being looked at, until his brain, wearied by watching the 
ever-revolving machine, becomes incapable of concentrated 
and continuous thought? Let it be remembered that it is 
only thinking that makes thinkers. 

There is perhaps a touch of the puritan in all this, and the 
important distinction which Poel illustrated through all his 
work is the distinction between the pictorial and the plastic. 
All producers, and all designers, too, should take to heart 
Ulysses* warning to Achilles that "things in motion sooner 
catch the eye than what not stirs." Poel was to quote Lessing 
in support of his theory "that if we are witnesses of an important 
and touching event, and another event of less importance 
traverses it, we resent the distraction" (Letter to The Nation, 
23 August 1919). We know from experience that we cannot 
look indefinitely at a picture, and the most ravishing stage 
decor only holds us for a few minutes. It is the actor who by 
his movements, attitudes, and gestures creates the picture, 
just as by his words if these be Shakespeare s or another 
poet s he suggests it. The case for the Elizabethans is just 
this; that the picture they were able to compose on a stage 
which was architectural rather than decorative, and to suggest 
with a poetry to which the public was eager to respond, was 
more seductive and more dramatic than any creation of the 
artist s studio. We misunderstand Poel if we imagine that the 
Elizabethans were not visual people; their palaces and gardens, 
their fertile elaboration of costume, prove the contrary. But 
they were visual in a very different way from the modern spec 
tator, glued to his cinema screen and satisfied with the conjuring 
tricks of realism. They were athletes, not eunuchs, of the 
imagination and when they went to the theatre they demanded 
the opportunity for exercise. But they were also mortal 
men, and by the time Shakespeare was thinking of retire 
ment, the decadence had begun to set in. The age of illusion 
was already implicit in the masques of Ben Jonson and the 
ceremonial baroque of Inigo Jones. These were splendid 
spectacles, to be sure, but the fancy was less free to move in 
them. 

But Poel was quick to remind those who wanted, at that 



THE CHALLENGE 80 

^7 

prosaic close of the nineteenth century when the new drama 
was a drama of ideas, to revive a theatre of poetry, that 

never can lyricism on the stage usurp the place of drama . . . 
it would be both ungenerous and inaccurate to contend that 
there are no verse plays of merit written today, and if they 
do not find their way on to the stage, perhaps it is because 
the conditions there are not, at the present time, favourable 
for their presentation. At the same time poets who wish to 
write plays to be acted too often forget how severely practical 
are the needs of the theatre. . . . 

Even the man of genius 

must to some extent conform to the dictionary meaning of 
the word drama, which is a "stage play," and that this involves 
something more on the part of a writer than to express himself 
in images or allegories. . . . The bringing together of so large 
a number of composite minds under one roof to witness an 
imitation imposes restraint upon the dramatist out of which 
has grown the art of the theatre. A poet, therefore, who 
wishes to write plays for the stage, cannot be indifferent as to 
what he has to do to make his work suitable for the theatre. 
Poetry in drama must be subservient to incident and char 
acter (The Contemporary Review; Nov. 1913). 

Here, then, were the principles which animated Poel s 
recovery of Elizabethan values. Even at their most austere, 
they had no purpose that, properly interpreted, would not 
quicken and illustrate dramatic conflict. Poel made himself 
into a considerable scholar, holding his own with the most 
learned opinions of his day; but his scholarship was the 
by-product of his theatrical research. No one would have 
described him as a man of letters. He was a man of the 
theatre who never really had a stage; that was his paradox 
and his problem. We shall now see how he proceeded to 
resolve it. 



CHAPTER III 

The First Experiments 

Elizabethan Stage Society, whose long list of per- 
JL formances gives Poel his title to fame, was born naturally 
out of the recitals he had organised for the Shakespeare 
Reading Society. When he was asked by a representative of 
The Daily Chronicle in 1913 why he had founded it, he replied: 
It was just for acting s sake that the Elizabethan Stage 
Society was born. Some people have called me an archaeologist, 
but I am not. I am really a modernist. My original aim was 
just to find out some means of acting Shakespeare naturally 
and appealingly from the full text as in a modern drama. I 
found that for this the platform stage was necessary and also 
some suggestion of the spirit and manners of the time (3 Sep 
tember 1913). 

In the autumn of 1893 the interior of the Royalty Theatre 
was converted into as near a likeness of the old Fortune 
Playhouse as was possible in a roofed building. The Fortune 
was easy to reproduce correctly because it is almost the only 
Elizabethan theatre for which we have the text of the builder s 
contract and the exact details of the construction. We even 
know how the roof was tiled and guttered to prevent the rain 
water spilling over on to the heads of the pit. 

Poel s sole financial backing was one hundred pounds from 
Mr. Arthur Dillon and twenty-five pounds from the members 
of the Shakespeare Reading Society. The play chosen to 
inaugurate the experiment was Measure for Measure, a work 
practically unknown to Victorian playgoers. Poel himself 
played the part of Angelo. 

He would quote the Duke s lines: 

O what may man within him hide, 
Though angel on the outward side, 

to show that Angelo must not appear a reprobate; he had 
after all, gained the affection of Mariana. Among Shake 
speare s portraits he stood "alone as an instance of one who 
fell while contemplating virtue 1 (Letter to W. Bridges- Adams; 
7 September 1931). And Poel insisted that Isabella, not being 

90 



FIRST EXPERIMENTS r 

yet professed in the religious life, must not wear the habit of a 
nun. In a later discussion on this play he cited Claudio s 
" This day my sister should the cloister enter" and the Provosts 
"And to be shortly of a sisterhood" to prove that, at the moment 
when the play begins, she was only on the point of entering 
the convent. She asks Francesca what are the duties of a nun 
and is told them, obviously for the first time. Against this 
argument there was Lucio s line describing her as a novice/ 
and Lucio s visit to the convent where she has apparently 
just gone to live; but she is still free to go to and fro with the 
outside world. Lucio of course might easily have got muddled 
over a detail of this kind; and so, for the matter of that, might 
Shakespeare. Poel was perhaps stretching his case a little 
when he claimed that Lucio could never have said the lines, 
"Hail, virgin, if you be as these cheek-roses proclaim you are 
no less" to a woman wearing the habit of a religious order. 
Lucio could have said anything to anyone. But he was surely 
right in arguing that the Duke "could not and would not have 
asked her to be his wife if to consent meant breaking a religious 
vow." He was less certainly right in thinking that Angelo 
would never have "dared to tempt a woman already set apart 
to the service of God." He interpreted the passage: 

I will about it straight, 
No longer staying but to give the Mother 
Notice of my affair, 

as showing that her brother s affair had for the time being 
delayed her joining the order, and the only lines he would 
admit as evidence for her status were those in the scene at 
the convent where she is first introduced to the audience. 
All the other references were gossip, and did not "pretend 
to accuracy." Her sole object, he maintained, was "to escape 
from an uncongenial marriage, the youths of Vienna being 
notoriously corrupt" (Letter to W. Bridges- Adams; 7 September 
1931). What he required, in sum, was "a charming Angelo, 
a boisterous Lucio, a lively Duke, a passionate Isabel" (Ibid.}. 
When this play was given many years later by the Fellowship 
of Players an interesting controversy arose on the question of 
Isabella s costume between the producer, Andrew Leigh, and 
Hubert Griffith, who was then assistant dramatic critic on 
The Observer. Mr. Leigh maintained that Isabella was clearly 



Q2 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

a novice and must be dressed as one; Mr. Griffith objected 
that not even so good an actress as Miss Grizelda Hervey 
could play the part with her face imprisoned in a coif. No 
one, however, seems to have considered that Isabella might 
have been a. postulant; for no woman is admitted to the novitiate 
of the Poor Clares, the order to which Isabella is said to aspire, 
without a period of probation. When she speaks of herself as 
a probationer, this is surely what she means. But even as a 
postulant she would still have worn a simplified habit, or dark 
costume, and she would certainly not have maintained her 
contacts with the outside world, except by special dispensation. 
It is arguable that, since her brother s life was at stake, this 
dispensation would have been given her, especially in the lax 
conditions of late mediaeval times. But the fact that she was 
living at the convent would indicate that she had taken some 
preliminary step towards joining the order. The only reason 
for her not wearing some kind of religious habit would be that 
she had only just joined the community, and that no postu 
lant s or novice s garb had as yet been prepared for her. It is 
quite possible that she would have worn a postulant s dress 
within the enclosure, and a secular attire when she was visiting 
the prison or the deputy s house. Her opening sentence, 
"And have you nuns no further privileges?" indicates that the 
discipline of the order may have been more severe than she 
expected, and the ease with which she later withdraws into 
the world may be taken as evidence that her vocation was at 
no time more than skin-deep. 

Poel maintained that the Duke, not Isabella, should be the 
centre of the play. Here he envisaged no elderly wiseacre, but 

an actor of flexibility seldom to be found in this country. 
He must be the life and soul of the play. He should be able 
to show the Duke delighting in freedom from irksome duties. 
He should impersonate him as a man of about forty, alert, 
full of resource and energy, adored by all for his easy-going 
and kindly ways; always helpful, never willing to hurt, and 
far too witty and wise for anyone to be dull in his company. 
To the spectator the righteous indignation of Isabella, the 
tears of Mariana, or the fears of Claudio do not arouse painful 
emotions since the Duke watches over them and will not let 
them be injured through the shortcomings of his deputy. 

He insisted that the great speech "Be absolute for death" 



FIRST EXPERIMENTS 93 

should be given "with ease and spirit, for the Duke here 
ironically proclaims the triumph of death over life, laughing 
to himself while he says the words, for he is not a religious man 
in the conventional sense" (Letter to W. Bridges- Adams; 7 
September 1931). This argument is typical of Poel s rational 
approach. He did not see that Shakespeare s imagination was 
working at such heat in the Claudio, Isabella and Angelo 
scenes that the spectator is moved and painfully in spite of 
all he may know or guess about the Duke s beneficent designs. 
The Duke is a much more complex character than Flecker s 
Caliph strolling incognito through the Bazaars, or Schnitzler s 
Anatol sniffing adventure in the Ring. The Vienna he evokes 
for us is the Vienna of the Stefanskirche, not the Vienna of 
Sacher s nor even of Schonnbrunn. His observation of Angelo 
has the desperate seriousness of a practical joke; and although 
he may be quizzical on the surface, we must be made to feel 
the philosopher-statesman underneath. Just as Poel himself 
would sometimes conceive one production and execute 
another, so Shakespeare was capable of setting out with one 
play in his mind and finishing up with a different one. This 
explains why Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and 
even, pace Poel, The Merchant of Venice, have the character of 
tragi-comedy. The creative imagination has intervened. 

The critic of The Times admitted that the experiment at the 
Royalty had "proved at least that scenic accessories are by no 
means as indispensable to the enjoyment of a play as the 
manager supposes"; and a professor of literature from London 
University wrote that he had "never been more fascinated by 
a play upon the stage, and now I shall ever think the cutting 
up into scenes and acts a useless cruelty and an utter spoiling 
of the story." Poel would have been especially pleased with 
this tribute because the continuity of action in Shakespeare was 
one of his chief tenets. It was for this reason, he maintained, 
that so many Elizabethan plays had a double plot to avoid, 
even for a moment, an empty stage. It was noticeable, too, 
that the same character never ended and began consecutive 
scenes. The only exception to this was in The Tempest, which 
had evidently been written as a Court entertainment. Yet, 
from an aesthetic point of view, it is disastrous to interrupt 
The Tempest for a single instant. How, otherwise, is the 



94 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

audience to be brought a second time under the spell of 
Prospero s Island ? In A Midsummer Night s Dream no interval 
is conceivable once the lovers have left for the wood; the only 
really legitimate breaks are after Act One and before Act Five, 
and it may well be objected that the first of these is too early 
and the second too late. In Hamlet the curtain should never 
fall between the end of the second Ghost scene and Hamlet s 
departure for England, and never in Macbeth before "To be 
thus is nothing but to be safely thus." I confess that, as a 
spectator, I am generally maddened by intervals, and I think 
there are very few plays of Shakespeare that do not gain by 
being acted at a stretch. 

But there are two issues here; what ought to be done now, 
and what was in fact done in Shakespeare s day. Poel admitted 
that in some theatres musical interludes had been creeping in, 
but he believed that at the Globe Shakespeare had maintained, 
or ^restored, a strict continuity. There were no indications of 
act or scene division in the Quarto texts; and Burbage had 
referred in the introduction to The Malcontent to the "not 
received custom of music in our theatre." William Archer 
argued that the Chorus in Henry V proved the existence of 
act divisions ; but Poel replied by asking why Shakespeare had 
omitted to write one to mark the beginning of the Fourth Act, 
and why in the three Quartos of the play published between 
1600 and 1608 no Chorus appeared at all. Did not this suggest 
that the Chorus had been found ineffective and unnecessary 
in performance, and that when it was dropped the man 
employed by the printer to take notes for publication had no 
chance of hearing the words ? The five-act division had of 
course been adopted, but this was due to the influence of Ben 
Jonson at a time when Shakespeare was retiring more and 
more from active theatrical management. 

Poel always had a great liking for Measure for Measure and it 
may be useful to consider here his subsequent production of 
it, fifteen years later, at the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester. 
His own powers and method had ripened in the meantime, 
and this later performance came to be regarded as a classic 
example of his art. The Gaiety was then under the direction 
of Miss Horniman. Iden Payne was her stage director and 
she had gathered round her a group of actors, many of whom 



FIRST EXPERIMENTS 95 

were to become famous in the English theatre. It was probably 
the best team that Poel ever had to work with. But it was only 
with the greatest difficulty that Iden Payne persuaded Poel 
to accept Miss Horniman s offer. , He said that the actors 
would be too fixed in their ways to accept his teaching. He 
knew many of them and shook his head at every name. At 
last he discovered a very minor performer, rather stuffy in 
style, who was employed in smaller parts and whom, it was 
said, Iden Payne only kept in the company because he amused 
him personally. Poel, however, sat up as soon as his name 
was mentioned. "What," he exclaimed, "have you really 
got So-and-So in your company? That makes a difference. 
He can take the tones." 

Poel at first tried Lewis Casson in the part of the Duke, but 
after three weeks rehearsal decided that he was not sprightly 
enough and cast him for the Provost instead. The Duke was 
eventually played by James Hearne, who gave a fine per 
formance but was not too adaptable at "taking the tones." 
Basil Dean was the Claudio, Ada King the Mistress Overdone, 
and Iden Payne himself played Lucio. Although Sybil 
Thorndike was a member of the company, Poel would not 
accept her as Isabella. He had a great desire to see Sara 
Allgood in the part and persuaded Miss Horniman to engage 
her specially. Poel himself again played Angelo. Some of 
the rehearsals took place in Dublin, where the company were 
playing on tour, and this gave Poel the opportunity of meeting 
Yeats, Synge, and Edward Dowden. Yeats told me many 
years later that he had never agreed with PoePs method of 
verse-speaking. This is not surprising since for Yeats, when 
his poet s blood was really up, every syllable was a key-word 
and every tune was an incantation. 

The impact of Poel on this celebrated and slightly com 
placent repertory company the first of its kind in England 
has been vividly described by Mr. Basil Dean. 

I well recall the announcement that Mr. William Poel was 
coming down to produce the company in Measure for Measure. 
All sorts of rumours about his eccentric methods preceded his 
arrival; and his peculiarities of speech and manner were 
mercilessly burlesqued in the dressing room by us youngsters. 

In appearance at that time William Poel was tall and thin, 



96 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

and had a pronounced stoop. He strode about the stage like 
some great black bird, with flapping arms protruding from a 
black cape and hands usually encased in black woollen gloves. 
His beautiful aquiline features shone with ascetic zeal as he 
expounded his views on the rendering of the part to each 
individual player. His method of production was in marked 
contrast to anything known hitherto in the theatre of that day; 
it was the method of the scholar and the student, sometimes 
of the pedagogue. Many of the Horniman players resented 
his close teaching. As I had been given the part of Claudio, 
it behoved me to listen carefully to what I was told. I soon 
discovered there was method in the apparent madness of 
incantation of the Shakespearian line upon which Poel insisted. 
I spent long hours in solitary instruction with him, saying the 
lines over and over until my head was in a whirl. In the end 
I found Poel had taught me the secret of rhythmic speech, 
the value of the operative word, and the magic of Shakespeare 
when it is spoken both musically and intelligently. Those 
lessons for that is what they were I have never forgotten. 
The impact of Pod s ideas upon the Horniman company 
was like a fresh sea breeze in a rather self-satisfied atmosphere. 
In the end, despite some rather over-accentuated moments, 
he achieved a total effect of surge and sweep quite unlike 
anything I had heard before, the exhilaration of which remains 
still in my memory (Stratford Dossier] , 

Sir Barry Jackson saw this production when it was subse 
quently given at Stratford (21 and 22 April 1908) and admits 
that it completely swept him off his feet. 

Even before PoePs day [he writes], I experienced an in 
stinctive feeling that something was wrong. Irving s twenty 
minute interval whilst an elaborate garden scene was set for 
the short fifth act in The Merchant of Venice; and a very popular 
production of The Shrew by Oscar Asche and Lily Brayton 
when I had a sensation that the audience spent as much time 
looking at the tableau curtain as the comedy itself; such and 
other similar experiences account for the tremendous impact 
of Peel s Measure for Measure with its directness, its impetus 
and simplicity (Letter to the Author; 15 May 1951). 

It was fortunate for Poel s fame that G. E. Montague was 
at this time dramatic critic of The Manchester Guardian, and 
we can obtain a good idea of what this production really felt 
like from his review of it, reprinted in Dramatic Values (1911). 
The whole of this essay, entitled The Art of Mr. Poel, is Mon 
tague at his best; that is to say, it is in the first rank of English 



HAMLET 
(First Quarto) 1881 

Maud Holt (Lady Tree) 
as Ofelia 

" Enter Ofelia playing on a lute 
and her haire downe singing " 

(See page j/) 





Enthoven Colhdio 



FRATRICIDE PUNISHED 
1924 

(R) Hamlet: Esme Percy 

(L) Horatio : Orlando Barnet. 

(See page 240} 



Enthoven Collection 



Photograph : Arthur Hands 



FIRST EXPERIMENTS 97 

dramatic criticism. There was a limit, of course, to the degree 
to which the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, or the old Memorial 
Theatre at Stratford could be turned to Elizabethan uses. 

Mr. Poel did wonders, but he could not get rid of the 
proscenium arch. What he gave us was not an Elizabethan 
stage as it was to Elizabethan playgoers, but a picture of an 
Elizabethan stage seen through the frame of a modern pro 
scenium. So we gained a good visual idea of a Shakespearian 
stage, but not the Elizabethan sensation of having an actor 
come forward to the edge of a platform in the midst of our 
selves and deliver speeches from a position almost like that of a 
speaker from a pulpit or from a front bench in Parliament, 
with only the narrowest scope for theatrical illusion, with no 
incentive to naturalism, and with every motive for putting his 
strength into sheer energy and beauty of declamation, giving 
his performance the special qualities of fine recitation as 
distinct from those of realistic acting. But, without that, we 
got a good deal. We saw better than ever the needlessness, 
as well as the destructiveness, of the quite modern method of 
taking Shakespeare s shortest scenes. They are usually 
scurried through by actors who maintain a precarious footing 
on a strip of boarding between the footlights in front and a 
bellying sail painted with landscape, which swells out at them 
from behind. In Mr. "PoeFs Elizabethan arrangement a 
roomy front portion of the stage is divisible from the rest by a 
curtain which can be either passed through at its middle or 
walked round at its ends; the rear portion of the stage is in 
turn divisible into two or more planes of distances as it retreats 
into the "tiring house" at the very back. With this arrange 
ment those short scenes and the long ones flow into one another 
without the slightest jolt or scrappiness. The use of the upper 
stage, too, was surprisingly effective and undisturbing; it 
made you see why Shakespeare s stage directions so often 
bring in people "above," "on the walls," or otherwise aloft. 
But in fact the whole performance threw "sidelights on 
Shakespeare" by the dozen, while -just cause for thanksgiving 
it never froze up the imagination of us ordinary, half- 
instructed persons, as reconstructive scholarship often does. 
As for scenery, one did not think about it, either in the way of 
missing it, or of being glad it was away. But if any people did 
imperatively need to be distracted from the play, they could 
look at the dresses, which were quaint and rich to admiration, 
and, we understood, prodigies of historical accuracy only 
another Mr. Poel should venture to speak more dogmatically. 

Last, and very large, there was the pleasure of the acting 
of Angelo by Mr. Poel himself, an actor who did not wait for 
Irish amateurs or Sicilian peasants to teach him to act as if he 

4 



98 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

meant it. Whatever he may be doing at the moment, the 
consuming energy with which he conceives a part communi 
cates itself to the spectator; the character is so vehemently 
imagined by the artist that its expression seems almost inde 
pendent of the ordinary symbolism of tones and looks. Or, 
rather, while he uses just the means which other actors use, 
they mean more to him; they stand for a more ardent realisation, 
by him, of the idea, say, of an Angelo. When once the specta 
tor is caught up into itself by this authentic heat of passionate 
imagination in an actor, the actor can then do nothing wrong; 
thenceforth his technics seem scarcely to matter; you feel as if 
you had got past all that, as you get past any little inexpressive- 
ness in a friend. So Mr. Peel s acting seizes you up and makes 
you more intimate with the character than its own speeches 
are (pp. 244-6). 

Here, for once, Poel seems to have realised his own teaching 
by an effect of sheer intensity, and one is glad to print Mon 
tague s tribute against the general view that he was at all times 
a bad actor. 

Poel was so commonly regarded as an apostle of textual 
integrity that it may be useful to examine how far this reputa 
tion was justified. Measure for Measure is an interesting test 
case. It is a fairly long play, and it is a play generally con 
sidered as painful and unpleasant and improbable, redeemed 
by many incidental splendours. It was certainly not a play 
suited to the popular taste of 1893 or even of 1908. Poel had 
two choices open to him in preparing his acting version. He 
could have said, "I want to woo the public into liking this 
play, and I shall therefore excise whatever might wantonly 
offend them." Or he could have said, " No audience can enjoy 
this play unless they can be persuaded into an Elizabethan 
frame of mind. They must accept the realism as well as the 
poetry." As far as the staging of the play was concerned, he 
was, as we have seen, true to his principles, and there can be 
no doubt that as a spectacle the performance made sense. 
But where the text was concerned he surrendered on every 
count to the Puritanism still in vogue. If he had been pro 
ducing the play for a commercial c run, there might have been 
some excuse for this. He could have argued that some sacrifice 
of realism, some failure of fidelity, was pardonable, so long as 
the core of the play was communicated effectively. But his* 
treatment of the text could not be justified by this plea. 



FIRST EXPERIMENTS 99 

You cannot separate the sordid realism of Measure for 
Measure from the purity of Isabella and the philosophy of the 
Duke without damage to the total structure of the play. 
Unless we are made to feel the unbridled sexuality of the city, 
with its pimps and bawds and brothels, its aphrodisiac incite 
ment to lust, Isabella s vocation and Angelo s villainy lose their 
full significance. It was the genius of Peter Brook s production 
at Stratford in 1950 to have realised just this; for it is the whole 
point of the play that it unashamedly calls a spade a spade. 
Some of Lucio s pornographic prattle is hardly intelligible and 
may judiciously be cut; but Poel did not scruple to amputate so 
Shakespearian a jewel as "Why, what a ruthless thing is this 
in him, for the rebellion of a cod-piece to take away the life 
of a man" ; or Mistress Overdone s accusation of Lucio to the 
Provost, "Mistress Kate Keepdown was with child by him 
in the Duke s time; he promised her marriage; his child is a 
year and a quarter old, come Philip and Jacob; I have kept 
it myself." Here, in four lines, is a whole short story by de 
Maupassant; the passage is a small miracle of human sympathy 
and observation. But this was a side of Shakespeare s genius 
a dimension of his poetry to which Poel was quite un 
responsive. He would have cut c old Double, if he felt that 
old Double was holding up the story. 

He could not prevent the audience from suspecting that 
Measure for Measure is a play about a young man getting a 
girl into trouble, but he did his best to conceal the fact. "He 
has got a wench with child," became, incredibly, "He will 
shortly be a father." Again, it is very difficult to play Measure 
for Measure without mentioning the word c bawd ; but Poel 
did so fairly successfully, except at one point where c bawd 
had perforce to do service for e whoremaster. More significant 
still was an alteration in Angelo s speech to Isabella at the end 
of Act II Scene 4. The lines run as follows: 

Fit thy consent to my sharp appetite, 

Lay by all nicety and prolixious blushes 

That banish what they sue for, redeem thy brother 

By yielding up thy body to my will; 

Or else he must not only die the death, 

But thy unkindness shall his death draw out 

To lingering sufferance. 



IOO WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

Here the world self 3 was substituted for body/ to the total 
destruction of the rhythm, which should match the precipitancy 
of Angelo s unfettered impulse. Up to this point the two 
characters have dexterously fenced with each other, Isabella 
not able or willing to understand, Angelo not daring to reveal 
his naked thought. But at the end of the scene the verse 
suddenly begins to flow with the momentum of a passion and 
a purpose which can no longer be held in check. I defy any 
actor to say self instead of body without finding a large 
stone unexpectedly placed in his path. The iambic metre is 
here given its head, and all he needs to do is to follow it. If 
Poel thought his audience could not stomach body , he 
could have substituted person/ which is feeble enough by 
comparison but would at least have preserved the rhythm. 
Poel, for all his concern for accurate and musical speech, had 
little ear for metrical values or their reinforcement of dramatic 
meaning. 

These scruples would not have been remarkable if Poel had 
been an untroubled nineteenth-century Englishman, like 
Henry Irving, satisfying the highest common factor of con 
temporary taste. But Poel set out to be a reformer, and even 
a revolutionary. In fact, he remained to the end a high- 
minded Victorian, and he deluded himself that Shakespeare, 
in spite of occasional concessions to the groundlings, was high- 
minded in the same way. He would have been surprised if 
you had suggested to him that the most Shakespearian of 
modern writers was James Joyce. Yet his excisions from 
Measure for Measure were rather like depriving Marion Bloom 
of her last soliloquy. Poel had historic imagination of a high 
order, but there were limits to his penetration of, the Eliza 
bethan mind. If he had occasionally frequented a public 
house, and chosen the right one, he could have heard people 
talk like Lucio and Mistress Overdone any evening of his life. 
But the conversation at the Emerson Club ran on different 
lines. Henry Irving would probably have cut Measure for 
Measure in much the same way as William Poel; but he would 
have done so with a sly twinkle in one eye, and in the other a 
shrewd glance at his receipts. His natural Bohemianism and 
bonhomie kept him close to Shakespeare s heart and enabled 
him, no doubt, to overcome in a large degree the deficiencies 



FIRST EXPERIMENTS IOI 

of the Lyceum way. Poel s Elizabethanism, by contrast, was 
puritan and refined. 

II 

The Elizabethan Stage Society became formally established 
in 1894 and among the first to subscribe to it were Mr. and 
Mrs. Edmund Gosse, Sir Walter Besant, the Rev. Stopford 
A. Brooke, Professor Israel Gollancz, and Sir Sidney Lee. In 
the same year Poel married Ella Constance Locock, daughter 
of the Rev. Alfred Locock, of Putney Heath, and grand 
daughter of Sir Charles Locock, M.D., F.R.S., physician- 
accoucheur to Queen Victoria. The marriage was an extremely 
happy one. Mrs. Poel was a woman of considerable intel 
lectual powers and an accomplished musician. Although 
for many years an invalid, she was well qualified to assist and 
encourage him in his work. 

There was no production, properly speaking, in 1894, but 
Poel organised a recital of Richard II in April, and another of 
Romeo and Juliet in March 1895. Here Romeo was read by 
Lilian McCarthy and Mercutio by Leah Bateman; this was 
the first sign of PoeFs eccentricity of putting women in men s 
parts. No convincing explanation of this disconcerting practice 
was ever given; but at least he never claimed that it was 
Elizabethan. Probably he found women s voices easier to 
modulate; and actresses were generally more willing to give 
him the time he needed for rehearsal. He was indifferent to 
the sex of the performer and the sense of the play provided 
that the actor or the actress spoke in tune. 

Miss McCarthy, whose family had newly settled in London, 
came to know Poel through her brother. He was an ardent 
amateur actor and had already taken part in the Shakespeare 
Readings. He introduced his sister to Poel who gave her an 
audition and then asked her to read Romeo. This was the 
beginning of a long and important association; Poel never 
found a better actress or a more faithful friend. This is how 
she describes their first meeting. 

When I got there I knew it was heaven because I saw 
William Shakespeare. There he was with his handsome, 
gentle face with resolution glancing from behind a gracious 
smile. Dan nudged me and said : "Don t stare, that s William 



102 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

Poel, the Dramatic Director." "No!" I whispered, "it s 
Shakespeare!" I was right, for the more I came to know 
William Poel the more clearly I saw in him Shakespeare come 
to life again, and that being so it seemed simple and natural 
that Poel should give new life to Shakespeare s dramas : that 
he should do easily what others had so often found impossible : 
reconcile the poetic and the dramatic in Shakespeare s plays by 
showing that they are not contradictory but complementary 
to one another (Myself and my Friends; 1933, p. 28). 

Miss McCarthy, would now listen to him on the lecture 
platform "speaking excitedly, passionately and even violently/ 
and endure "days and days of scolding" before she stepped on 
to the platform of the Steinway Hall to "read" Romeo. In 
fact, the actors were required to know their parts by heart, 
but they carried books because the occasion was technically a 
reading. She had her reward when Henry Irving, who was 
in front, came over to her afterwards, "took my hand, bent 
over it, and in that voice which none who has heard it can 
forget began to praise me "(Ibid.} 

In May 1895 Miss McCarthy played Lady Macbeth for 
Poel in a production by the Shakespeare Reading Society at 
the St. George s Hall. Bernard Shaw wrote of her performance 
as follows: 

She . . . can hold an audience whilst she is doing everything 
wrongly. . . . The banquet scene and the sleep-walking scene 
. . . were quite successful; and if the earlier scenes were im 
mature, unskilful and entirely artificial and rhetorical in their 
conception, still, they were very nearly thrilling. In short I 
should like to see Miss Lillah McCarthy play again (Our Theatres 
in the Nineties; 1932, Vol. I, pp. 131-3). 

The first production of the Elizabethan Stage Society, as 
finally constituted, was Twelfth Night, given in Burlington Hall, 
Savile Row, and for a second performance in St. George s 
Hall, in June 1895. A valuable wardrobe of Elizabethan 
costumes had been purchased, and the stage fittings prepared 
for Measure for Measure were used in this and many subsequent 
productions. Poel had made the acquaintance of Arnold 
Dolmetsch, who superintended the music for all the Society s 
revivals until 1905. Sometimes Dolmetsch would join in the 
action of the play and on these occasions Charlotte Wilberforce 
compared him to an "attractive Veronese dwarf." His wife 



FIRST EXPERIMENTS 1 03 

recalls "the glee with which, while accompanying a clown s 
song in The Spanish Gypsy, he interpolated ribald rejoinders 
between the stanzas" (Mrs. Arnold Dolmetsch in Personal Recol 
lections of Arnold Dolmetsch: The Corisort No. 8; 1951). Captain 
Hutton, F.S.A., was at hand to advise on swordsmanship. 
Hutton was the author of a book on this subject, and as a 
conscientious antiquarian he was shocked by the defective 
swordsmanship on the London stage. The duel in the last 
act of Hamlet was still fought with modern foils instead of 
with rapier and dagger, as the text demanded. 

As a result of this performance of Twelfth Night Poel was to 
encounter the most formidable critic of his work. William 
Archer was then writing for The World. A dour and rational 
Scot, he* proclaimed himself "a Prohibitionist as regards 
alcohol, but not as regards reason" (Letter to The Nation; 23 
August 1919). But in some pigeon-hole of his orderly mind he 
kept a tame romantic daemon which was later to escape and 
become known as The Green Goddess. He was no reactionary. 
On the contrary, he had already proved himself the pioneer of 
the new drama with his translations of Ibsen and his support 
of Shaw. He was quite free from the current idolatry of Irving, 
although he admired him in certain parts. He had been as 
impressed as Poel himself by the Saxe-Meiningen Julius Caesar 
which had been seen at Drury Lane in the eighties, and he was 
in sympathy with many of Poel s aims. But he never ceased 
to maintain that Poel defeated his own objects. The case 
against Poel, as it was always felt by many intelligent play 
goers, has never been put more clearly than in Archer s well- 
knit and logical prose. Archer unkindly commented that 
Twelfth Night, which was described on the programme as 
"Acted after the manner of the Sixteenth Century" was, in 
fact, "Staged (more or less) after the manner of the sixteenth 
century and acted after the manner of the Nineteenth Century 
Amateur." He went on to say that "the true end to be aimed 
at is to make Shakespeare, and some twelve or fifteen plays 
of his contemporaries, really live for the modern playgoer; and 
this end can never be attained by a form of representation which 
appeals only to the dilettante and the enthusiast." He ad 
mitted that Elizabethan costume was permissible for Twelfth 
Night, but then argued: "Let the Elizabethan] S[tage] 



IO4 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

S[ociety] act Julius Caesar in Elizabethan dress and tell me 
that the effect is not ludicrous ! Let them put As You Like It on 
their arras-hung platform and tell me that the lack of the 
woodland setting matters nothing!" (New Budget; 27 June 1895: 
Reprinted in The Theatrical World, 1895-96, p. 219). Poel 
would always have the answer that at the Globe Julius Caesar 
was in fact played in Elizabethan costume with minor classical 
accessories. Lines such as "pluck d me ope his doublet" 
or "half their faces buried in their cloaks" were evidence of 
this. The notion of Julius Caesar in Elizabethan dress is not 
so bizarre now as it was then. Some of those concerned with 
the production of the play at Stratford in 1950 confessed to 
me that they wished they had produced it in this way. And all 
Mr. Ronald Watkins s arguments for "Moonlight at the Globe" 
might be applied to As Tou Like It. But in 1895 ey en a man so 
intelligent as Archer could only reply, with some truth, to be 
sure, that an Elizabethan audience heard a play differently. 
They did not expect scenery. But it would not be long before 
the members of the Elizabethan Stage Society ceased to expect 
it either. And how many members of the Old Vic audience 
would complain of the simple curtains which enabled Robert 
Atkins s productions to flow so freely ? All that Archer would 
allow was the utility of a reconstructed Globe, set up alongside 
a permanent National Repertory Theatre, where the student 
might see how the plays were originally staged* Poel himself 
did not ask for more; but their wish has not yet been 
realised. 

When Poel produced Twelfth Night in 1897 (10 and 12 
February at the Middle Temple Hall), practically nothing was 
cut except the greater part of Sebastian s important soliloquy 
in Act IV Scene 3. But in the 1895 production Archer 
reproaches him with the omission of two hundred and fifty- 
one lines, very few of which were either improper or obscure. 
For the rest he says that the "Viola [Elsie Fogerty] was intelli 
gent and pleasant, the Olivia [Lillah McCarthy in a high red 
wig] had a handsome and expressive stage face," the Malvolio 
was "sprightly," the Antonio "spoke well," and the Aguecheek 
was "really excellent." Ben Greet was present at this per 
formance and immediately engaged Miss McCarthy to play 
leading parts in a tour of Shakespeare s plays. She replaced 



FIRST EXPERIMENTS 105 

Dorothea Baird who had joined Beerbohm Tree at His 
Majesty s. 

Archer showed himself an implacable critic to the end. 
When PoePs collected papers, entitled Shakespeare in the Theatre, 
were published in 1913, Archer reviewed the book for The 
Nation. Most of this article was devoted to the old controversy 
about act divisions, but in the opening paragraph he summar 
ised his view on PoePs twenty-five-odd years work in the 
theatre. 

If Mr. William PoePs judgment had been equal to his 
enthusiasm, his energy, his disinterested devotion to his ideal 
of dramatic art, he might have done signal service to the 
English theatre. Some service he has done he has helped 
onward a reaction against the subordination of Shakespeare 
to scenery and spectacle. He had the root of the matter in 
him; of that there is no doubt; but both his theories and his 
practice as Director of the Elizabethan Stage Society were 
marred by such eccentricities as to deprive them of all per 
suasiveness either to managers or to the public. In these 
latter days, no doubt, he has had some influence on such 
managers as Mr. Granville-Barker and Mr. Martin Harvey: 
but the movement they represent would certainly have come 
without him, and it may be questioned whether, in detail, 
his influence has been altogether for good. 

Having challenged Poel on his own ground, Archer continued : 

If we want to act a scene as Shakespeare meant it to be 
acted, we must place it on a stage as like his own as we can 
make it, must seriously study the evidence as to his method of 
presentation, and must put a strict curb upon our private 
inspirations and fancies. This Mr. Poel was very far from 
doing. He was a non-scenic Beerbohm Tree (5 July 1913). 

This last was a shrewd thrust and we shall see how far it 
was justified. In fact, Archer claimed to be as good an 
Elizabethan as Poel, but he impugned PoePs scholarship. 
In answer to another article by Archer in The Quarterly Review 
(April 1908) Poel prepared a long and interesting reply which 
for some reason was never published. Here he accuses Archer 
of a want of historic imagination; of using expressions like 
"visible," "tableau," and "ineffective entrance" in a way that 
would have had no meaning for the Elizabethan playgoer. 
He then goes on to develop an argument which seems to me 
4* 



IO6 WILLIAM* POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

extremely dangerous for any defender of the Elizabethan 
method. Indeed, I wonder if Poel himself realised how 
double-edged it was and refrained from publishing it for this 
reason. Archer had maintained that "the middle-stage thus 
curtained-in would be wholly invisible to everyone who sat, 
or stood, further back than the two pillars." I confess that this 
same objection in fact the relative remoteness of anyone 
acting in the upper or inner chamber occurred to me when I 
was reading Mr. Ronald Watkins s fascinating book on the 
production of Shakespeare. Poel replied by blandly admitting 
that one- third of the audience at the Globe of those seated in 
the galleries would have seen little more than the backs of 
the actors heads; and that a third of those in the twopenny 
seats "would have seen nothing at all but the backs of the 
noblemen seated on the corners of the stage." He was in no 
way daunted by this admission, but went on to argue, "The 
real object in going to the theatre in those days was not to see, 
but to hear. It was as if a man invited an author to his room 
in order to read his play or novel to some couple of dozen 
friends, when the reader is put into the middle of the room and 
the listeners sit round him, some of them with their backs to 
him, and some with eyes half closed, all too intent on listening 
to the words to care for any distractions intended to please the 
eye." If the "main object of the entertainment that drew 
people to the Globe playhouse was not to look at a play but 
to hear a good story well told," then these performances can 
have had little in common with anything that has ever been 
understood by theatrical entertainment. And it becomes mere 
whimsical folly to plead for the reconstruction on the South 
Bank, or anywhere else, of a theatre where one-third of the 
audience is unable to see the stage. Poel took up these points 
in his correspondence with Lawrence, whom he thought paid 
too much attention to Archer s reasoning. Lawrence had 
argued that there must have been something like a bay window 
on the Elizabethan stage because a character in Shakespeare 
refers to them. To this Poel replied by asking why he should 
accept this as evidence 

when I am confident that when Romeo says : 
Lady by yonder blessed moon I swear 
That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops, 



FIRST EXPERIMENTS 1 07 

there were no fruit-trees on the stage ? Here lies my quarrel 
with William Archer whose opinions you trust much more than 
you should, for you have double his knowledge and insight, 
only I think that like him you sometimes lack the power of 
visualising a period that is not our present one. Your scien 
tific mind objects to imagine anything. Now I took objection 
to Archer s fanciful reconstruction of the Fortune Theatre 
because it is built up from arguments which, in my 
opinion, are not legitimate evidence. When he con 
tends that the side doors must be at a certain angle because 
in a play a character comes into the doorway and talks with 
somebody on the balcony, or says that he can see somebody 
on the balcony, and therefore contends that we must admit that 
the balcony can be seen from the doorway, he is simply in my 
opinion talking nonsense. It does not in the least follow. All 
that is really necessary is that the audience shall be able to see the 
speaker and the person on the balcony at the same moment. 
This I know by actual experiment, which he himself (Archer) 
has never taken the trouble to make. What I insist so strongly 
upon and therefore fall out with the experts over is this: that 
there was no finality in the form of the Elizabethan Stage 
which dramatists like Shakespeare would or could accept, 
because they knew that the play must be acted one day in 
their own theatre, another day in the palace, and, when they 
were travelling, in town halls where there must always be 
slight differences in the positions of the doors and the balconies; 
so that Shakespeare must have known that many lines, describ 
ing scenes or "stage business" or "exits and entrances," must 
have been spoken on the stage which were not suitable for 
actual realisation on the stage, so that the audiences got used 
to the discrepancies and accepted them (15 January 1914). 

Poel contested Archer s statement that there cannot have 
been traverse curtains between the two forward pillars because 
"it is quite inconceivable that a playwright should never have 
discovered the convenience of the tableau ending to an act or 
scene the ending which leaves a group of characters on the 
stage and simply draws the curtains on them." (The Quarterly 
Review; April 1908). He challenged Archer to name a single 
good play which had been written with the object of bringing 
down the curtain on a group of characters. No such play 
existed in the classical drama of Greece or of seventeenth- 
century France. If the author had got his characters into a 
situation, it was his business to get them out of it in full view 
of the audience. Again, Archer had argued that if there had 
been a traverse curtain, there was no reason why Silence, in 



I08 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

the orchard scene from Henry IV, Part Two, should not 
have been left sleeping in his chair. "But why?" replies Poel. 

Carrying off a drunken man is good business on the stage. 
But the traverse was not required to shut off anything from 
the eye. If Silence had got up and walked out at the end oi 
the scene, I don t believe the audience would have noticed it 
or minded. A scene is always over on the Elizabethan stage 
when the speaking ends; what the actors did afterwards was 
done simply to suit their own convenience. If they were in 
sight of the audience, they were no longer looked upon as the 
characters but as the actors. 

Poel quoted the stage direction from the first Quarto of 
Romeo and Juliet, which showed that Romeo never in fact 
left the stage during the Balcony scene, but that Juliet simply 
called him back from the side. Again, in the scene where 
the Nurse goes to find Romeo in Friar Laurence s cell, she 
would have first stood at the side of the stage, knocking on 
the floor three times with her crutch. Here one is tempted 
to object that if the actors stood about at the side of the stage 
chatting on occasions to the gallants, the performance must have 
been even more generally invisible than Poel had suggested. 
Poel believed that the traverse, which has now become a 
common convenience for all Elizabethan productions attempted 
inside the proscenium arch, was used 

to differentiate a street from a hall, or a hall from a bedroom: 
or a person walking from his own house to his neighbour s 
which could be shown by drawing the traverse, showing the 
character moving across the street in front of the traverse and 
then on opening the traverse again, with a slight change of 
furniture having taken place, show him in his neighbour s 
house. But even this was not always necessary to illustrate 
movement though I believe it was often done. In Measure 
for Measure the Duke is seen leaving the prison for the street 
by simply crossing the stage where he is met by other characters 
who enter from the back (Poel MSS. Collection). 

And so the controversy went on, between two mentalities, 
mutually incompatible, but with a common overriding 
interest. Archer never took kindly to what he called "starved 
Shakespeare," and when in later years he was persuaded to 
attend a performance at the Old Vic, he was disgusted, but 
not perhaps greatly surprised, to feel a voracious rat gnawing 



FIRST EXPERIMENTS 

away at his square-toed boots. What emerges from his 
debate with Poel is the very conjectural nature of the Eliza 
bethan stage itself. Within certain agreed limits one scholar s 
guess is as good as another s. But Poel was certainly more 
widely informed in these matters than Archer had allowed. 

Twelfth Night was played with a single interval often minutes, 
and a feature of the performance was that all the members of 
Olivia s household were dressed in black. "Nobody can 
pretend/ wrote Bernard Shaw in The Saturday Review (20 July 
1895), 

that the Society had any advantage over Mr. Daly or Sii 
Henry Irving in the histrionic talent at its disposal. But 
what it had went so much further under the Elizabethan 
conditions that everyone present took the acting to be much 
better than it really was; whereas at Daly s or the Lyceum, 
only the most gifted players can make any considerable effect, 
the other parts invariably seeming colourless and unduly 
subordinate. . . . On the whole though I will not urge Sir Henry 
Irving to rebuild the Lyceum on the old inn yard model, I do 
seriously suggest that our leading actors might occasionally 
come down and take a turn on the stage of the Elizabethan 
Stage Society at Gray s Inn Hall or elsewhere, just to show 
us what they could do on the sort of stage which helped 
Burbage to become famous. (Reprinted in Our Theatres in the 
Nineties, 1932: Vol. I, pp. 188-191.) 

There was a project to repeat the performance in December 
of the same year, 1895, in the hall of Gray s Inn, but The 
Comedy of Errors was substituted. The stage, as erected here 
and elsewhere, required a floor space of thirty feet in width, 
twenty-four feet in depth, and a height of not less than twenty- 
three feet. 

The whole evening was designed to recall the first per 
formance of The Comedy of Errors as an after-supper interlude 
in the same place. On the evening of Holy Innocents Day, 
28 December 1594, the students of the Inner Temple had been 
invited to dinner at Gray s Inn; but the hall was already 
crowded and there was barely standing room for the c Templar- 
ians, who took considerable offence at what they regarded 
(with some reason) as a gross breach of hospitality. By way 
of appeasement, therefore, an entertainment was improvised 
of which Shakespeare s comedy was the chief item "so that 



IIO WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

night was begun and continued to the end in nothing but 
confusion and errors, whereupon it was ever afterwards called 
The Might of Errors." On the tercentenary of this occasion the 
Benchers and their guests sat in their usual places at the long 
tables, and the actors appeared through the Tudor doors at 
the lower end of the hall and played on the same level as their 
audience. -The play was given without an interval. The 
costume of the Dromios reproduced exactly the dress and 
equipment of an Elizabethan serving man, whose duty it was 
to accompany his master when he left the house and to carry 
his sword. A Dutch form of dress was affected by the Anti- 
pholi; this was a popular fashion of the period. The Duke 
and his entourage were dressed in imitation of the Elizabethan 
court, and the Halberdiers were played as servants of Gray s 
Inn, wearing the Griffin on their sleeves. The Queen s 
Prayer, taken from Ralph Roister Doister, was recited by the 
actors at the conclusion of the play, and this was followed by a 
programme of Elizabethan music given by the Dolmetsch 
ensemble, while the company were having supper. This was 
described by Shaw as "a delectable entertainment which 
defies all description by the pen"; and in the same article he 
awarded the Elizabethan Stage Society the season s palm 
"for a delightful, as distinguished from a commercially 
promising first night. ... I have never, I hope, underrated the 
importance of the amateur ; but I am now beginning to cling 
to him as the saviour of theatrical art." (The Saturday Review; 
14 December 1895; reprinted in Our Theatres in the Nineties; 
1932, Vol. I, pp. 269 seq.} 

In February 1897 Poel made a similar experiment in the 
Hall of the Middle Temple with a revival of Twelfth Mght. 
It was here that the play had been given in 1601, and a very 
distinguished audience gathered to see Pod s production. 
Among them were the Prince of Wales, sitting as a Bencher of 
the Inn, Princess Louise and the Duke of Teck, the Bishop of 
London and Mrs. Mandell Creighton, the Lord Chancellor 
and Lady Halsbury, the President of the Royal Academy and 
Lady Poynter, with many others. For this performance Poel 
had erected a raised platform and proscenium with carved 
columns and an architrave and high-pitched roof, with a 
raised gallery at the back. A brass rod, heavy with tapestry 



FIRST EXPERIMENTS III 

curtains, was run from column to column, and these shut out 
the farther part of the stage where necessary. This arrange 
ment had been copied from the drawing of the Swan Theatre 
at Bankside, generally attributed to the Dutchman, de Witt, 
who had visited London in 1596. A row of shaded lamps 
swung from the ceiling concentrated the light on the stage. 
The performance seems to have been a little slow it needed 
considerable experience to capture PoeFs inflections at the 
speed required to give animation to the play and one or two 
of the actors were inaudible. 

He had tried to orchestrate his voices in the following way; 
Viola (Mezzo Soprano), Olivia (Contralto), Sebastian (Alto), 
Antonio (Basso Profundo), Sir Toby (Bass), Sir Andrew 
(Falsetto), Malvolio (Baritone), Maria (High Soprano), Orsino 
(Tenor), Clown (Tenor). He maintained that neither Olivia 
nor Orsino was more than seventeen, and that Viola and 
Sebastian were about sixteen. His first idea for Viola was Mrs. 
Gabrielle Enthoven. This lady was a friend of Irving s and 
she relates how he coached her for the part. After she had been 
to Grafton Street three or four times, he professed himself well 
pleased. But Poel would have none of it. "The bit that 
wrecked my chances was the scene where Olivia lifts her veil 
and says Is t well done? Irving told me to look at Olivia. 
Remember you are a woman, you want to see if she is made 
up or not. A man would just say you are wonderful but a 
woman wants to know." This reading was too modern for 
Poel, but it is difficult to imagine where he wanted Viola to 
look if not at Olivia. The upper stage was apparently not 
used at all, the one scene which clearly demanded it 
Malvolio s prison being cut. The Duke s household were 
dressed in two shades of crimson and Olivia, as before, in 
black. Halberdiers stood at the side of the stage throughout 
the performance, and also on the stage and in the corridors 
outside the Hall. The music was composed by the Dolmetschs 
in skilful imitation of Elizabethan settings, and it was played on 
an Italian virginal of 1550, a treble and a bass viol, and a lute 
made in Venice about 1560. Indeed the whole occasion was a 
splendid one and brought the Society both publicity and prestige. 

In the spring of 1903 Poel revived Twelfth Night, first at the 
Lecture Theatre, Burlington Gardens (23 April), and then at 



112 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

the Court Theatre (16 June), with himself in the part of 
Malvolio. But although he was in the play, he was not in the 
programme. According to the critic of The Morning Post, Poel 
was 

a very good Malvolio, in some ways the soundest Malvolio 
we have seen. At the outset he lacked weight and sonority; 
self-satisfaction was there, but it was not the ponderous, deep- 
rooted self-satisfaction that is not only Malvolio s dominant 
trait but the petard by which the conspirators^ hoist him into 
fatuity. Still Mr. Poel preserved, as not all actors have, the 
contrast between Malvolio when left to himself and the fan 
tastic impertinent that his enemies make of him. He does 
not start frivolous, and the change they work is a good deal 
more than a change of clothes. And in the scenes in which 
Malvolio is befooled Mr. Poel played with rich and admirable 
comedy (17 June 1903). 

By 1903 PoeFs method had matured; so had his actors and 
audience. The effect of his finished Twelfth Might was described 
by the same critic as 

peculiar and remarkable. The want of scenery does not affect 
the spectators nor diminish the reality of the action; the words 
receive full justice except in a few passages where the delivery 
is too slow and formal. We incline to the opinion that Mr. 
Poel has done a, service to the drama and the stage by his 
efforts, and that the managers of the principal theatres have 
something to learn from him, not by way of copying any 
details but by observing how much effect he produces by 
simple means, and how great is the spell laid on the audience 
by the silent and even solemn stillness of the mutes on his stage 
(24 April 1903). 

Edmund Gosse described the performance as 

one of the most inspiring and most poetical at which I have 
ever been present. There is perhaps no other product of the 
human intellect so pervaded by the sunshine of imagination as 
Twelfth Night, none as completely harmonious. You have 
trained your actors to treat it with the maximum of respect. 
I felt myself carried away this afternoon far out of all common 
conditions into the very Elysium of Illyria. Malvolio was 
splendid (Letter to William Poel; 23 April 1903). 

And the following vindication of PoeFs method by Byam Shaw 
must have been all the more gratifying since it came from a 
distinguished painter. 



FIRST EXPERIMENTS 113 

I told several of my artist friends to go and see it and they 
were all simply delighted. I only wish that others would 
follow your noble example and allow us to listen to Shakespeare 
instead of looking at what Mr. So-and-So thinks is like a 
sunset or a cherry tree (Letter to William Poet; 19 June 1903). 

Among the first recognitions that the Elizabethan Stage 
Society was doing something of importance was an invitation 
to Poel from Sir Walter Raleigh to address the students of 
Liverpool University. When this lecture had been given, in 
June 1896, Raleigh wrote, "I am sure the only thing for 
Shakespeare critics is to go back to the Globe and Fortune and 
understand them" (Letter to William Poel; 8 June 1896). 

Ill 

In his next production Poel broke entirely new ground. 
Marlowe s Faustus had not been seen within living memory 
although it had been popular in its own day. It had been 
acted probably at the Curtain Theatre by the Earl of 
Nottingham s servants, with Alleyn in the chief part. The 
Quarto text had been published in 1604, but the date of the 
first performance was very uncertain. It could hardly have 
been later than 1590. The play had an obvious appeal for a 
public which remembered the Morality plays of its youth and 
whose more instructed members were still fascinated by the 
niceties of classical learning and theological debate. The 
mind of Marlowe, for all its professed atheism, moved in a 
metaphysical dimension, and Faustus is the only example of 
purely religious drama to have found its way into the Eliza 
bethan theatre. 

Little as Poel sympathised with the theology of the play, 
he saw that it differed radically from anything he had handled 
up till then, and he understood its essential seriousness. He 
was quick to seize on its anti-papal tendencies, and he claimed 
in his programme note that "the greater seriousness which 
marked the age of the Reformation gives a tragic dignity to 
the conception of the revolt of a human being against his god, 
and invests the spirit of such a defiance with what has been 
truly called a titanic character." Anyone who undertakes 
the production of Faustus is disconcerted by the intractable 
stuff which makes up the middle portion of the play. Poel 



114 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

maintained that this was not by Marlowe s hand and he .did 
not hesitate to cut and rearrange it, leaving the central 
structure of Faustus fatal compact unencumbered and drama 
tically clear. At the same time he sought to strengthen the 
play with whatever pictorial aid he could bring to it, and his 
production was conceived, very exactly, in a spirit of "tragical 
sport." 

The play was given in St. George s Hall on a stage which 
reproduced, as far as possible, the stage of the Fortune Theatre. 
But the tapestried hangings were replaced by red curtains 
similar to those with which the travelling cars of the Mystery 
Plays had been draped. The dress worn by Faustus in the 
invocation scene was inspired by the following verse from a 
contemporary ballad. 

The gull gets on a surplice 
With a cross upon his breast, 
Like Alleyn playing Faustus 
In that manner was he dressed. 

On the title page of the 1616 edition of the play there is a 
woodcut of Alleyn s Faustus invoking a devil with a pug-nose. 
Here he is shown wearing a ruff and long academic robe, lined 
with white fur, with puffed-out, episcopal sleeves. For some 
unexplained reason, Poel did not follow this description in his 
dressing of the part during the rest of the play. The business 
designed for the summoning of the demons was taken from 
Reginald Scot s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), which had 
certainly influenced Shakespeare in the writing of Macbeth. 
This had the deliberate effect of pantomime and comic relief; 
an Elizabethan audience would have laughed at it with less 
hesitation than its Victorian successor. Poel s use of his stage 
is well illustrated in the course of a favourable review by the 
critic of The Morning Post (3 July 1896) : 

The two pillars between which the curtain hangs stand 
about six feet away from the footlights, and a little further 
away from each side of the stage. This enables the performers 
to appear at the side of or in front of the curtain, whether it 
is drawn or not. The curtain open reveals a room of which 
the back is in two storeys, each with its own curtains. The 
Chorus . . . came from behind a subsidiary small curtain on 
the (stage) right of the central structure, and having finished 



FIRST EXPERIMENTS 115 

her verses walked back behind the same curtain. Then the 
principal curtain was drawn, and disclosed Dr. Faustus in his 
study. . . . Mephistopheles, in traditional fiendish shape, 
appeared on the . . . balcony at the back. When ordered to 
come again as a friar, he came out through the curtains of the 
lower storey. The farcical and other interludes . . . took place 
in front of the stage with the principal curtains closed. When 
Lucifer appeared it was on the balcony behind, the apparition 
being rendered more demoniacal by the addition of one or 
two attendant devils and by red fire and smoke. The lower 
curtains at the back when opened revealed a great dragon s 
mouth wide open, representing the mouth of hell. Out of this 
came Mephistopheles, and under his escort the Seven Deadly 
Sins, Alexander and his paramour, and Helen. The good angel 
always came from the curtains on the right-hand side, and stood 
in front of the stage; the bad angel came from her own special 
door at the back of the room. The important scenes, the 
conjuration, the appearance of the deadly sins, of Alexander 
to Charles V and of Helen to the students and to Faustus, the 
Pope s dinner, and the appearance of Faustus and Mephisto 
pheles on Olympus all took place in the room revealed when 
the chief curtain was opened; most of the other performers 
appearing from one or the other wing and coming in front of 
the curtain. 

The religious character of the play was emphasised by the 
intonation of the supernatural characters, and from the 
moment of Mephistopheles reappearance in Franciscan guise 
Mr. Dennis Eadie, who played the part, spoke with his face 
entirely masked by a cowl. This was to impose a perhaps 
unnecessary handicap on the actor. There were the customary 
complaints that the speech, generally, was too slow the 
players were, no doubt, still consciously clinging to their tunes 
and not even at the climax of Helen s entrance was Faustus 
allowed the precipitancy called for by his lines. Helen kissed 
his forehead and he kissed her hand! Here, if anywhere, 
Darby and Joan were an anachronism. But the entrance 
itself was splendidly contrived. The actress was given a long 
walk up stage, with her face three-quarters turned away from 
the audience; all her beauty could be read in the rapt expres 
sion on Faustus face, and there was no risk of rhetoric being 
contradicted by reality. Any full-blooded Marlovian in 
St. George s Hall would have found compensation in the 
prologue specially written for the occasion by Algernon 



Il6 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

Charles Swinburne. Edmund Gosse had interested Swinburne 
in the production, and the poet had intended to speak his own 
lines. But Swinburne s declamation never matched the fervour 
of his fancy, and in the end it was Gosse who recited them. 
His elocution, we are told, was "not that of a practised actor," 
and it is difficult to imagine any reader less likely to have 
written his own script. But PoePs Faustus was the first of many 
revivals of plays by the other Elizabethans, and in the cir 
cumstances Swinburne s hyperbole had some excuse. 

But song might bid not heaven and earth be one 
Till Marlowe s voice gave warning of the sun. 
Thought quailed and fluttered as a frightened bird 
Till passion fledged the wing of Marlowe s word. 
Faith born of fear bade hope and doubt be dumb 
Till Marlowe s pride bade light or darkness come. 
Then first our speech was thunder: then our song 
Shot lightning through the clouds that brought us wrong. 
Blind fear, whose faith feeds hell with fire, became 
A moth self-shrivelled in its own blind flame. 

The poem printed in the programme closed with these lines: 

And for his tomb, though there no point may stand 
The flower it shows was laid by Shakespeare s hand. 

Shaw wrote a long and provocative article on the pro 
duction for The Saturday Review (n July 1896). Marlowe, for 
him, was the "true Elizabethan blank- verse beast" who, "the 
moment the exhaustion of the imaginative fit deprives him of 
the power of raving, becomes childish in thought, vulgar and 
wooden in humour, and stupid in his attempts at invention." 
With rare prescience Shaw looked forward to the Arena 
Theatre of fifty years later. "The more I see of these per 
formances by the Elizabethan Stage Society, the more I am 
convinced that their method of presenting an Elizabethan 
play is not only the right method for that particular sort of 
play, but that any play performed on a platform amidst the 
audience gets closer home to its hearers than when it is pre 
sented as a picture framed by a proscenium." Having de 
scribed the Botticellian angels and Schongauer devils and 
Beardsleyan c Sins, he concluded that Poel had given his 
audience "an artistic rather than a literal presentation of 
Elizabethan conditions, the result being, as always happens 



FIRST EXPERIMENTS 117 

in such cases, that the picture of the past was really a picture 
of the future. For which result he is, in my judgment, to be 
highly praised. The performance was a wonder of artistic 
discipline in this lawless age" (Reprinted in Our Theatres in the 
Nineties; Vol. II: pp. 181-186). 

Poel revived Faustus in the autumn of 1904 with two 
performances at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane 
Square, followed by a provincial tour. The company 
visited Bedford, Cambridge, Leamington, Nottingham, 
Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, St. Andrews, 
Newcastle, Durham, Leeds, Liverpool, Birmingham, 
Chester, Rugby and Oxford. Everywhere they played 
in large halls. The production was the same, although 
Faustus was now permitted lightly to brush Helen s cheek, and 
there were changes in the cast. Faustus was played by Hubert 
Carter, whose performance was variously appreciated. Accord 
ing to J. T. Grein, writing in The Sunday Times, he was 

an actor of many but uneven qualities. He has a fine voice 
which he does not always rightly govern. He has great 
emotional powers, which he does not always use judiciously. 
Thus in the first part Faust making his compact his musings 
and lamentations failed to impress. He discoursed in one key 
and became monotonous. But later, after the transformation 
of Faust s being, he very often rose to the occasion. More 
than that, he gave a somewhat startling reading of the char 
acter. He strove to make Faustus a modern man swayed by 
feelings to which he gave a wholly unstilted expression. That 
was an audacious but a happy feat, and when the climax 
came, the terrible effusion of self-accusation, he displayed fine 
tragic force. . . . Nothing could be more powerful, more 
thrilling, actually more discomforting, than the supreme 
moments before, during, and after the striking of the clock 
which indicates that Faustus must fulfil his contract. It was 
I speak for one only as if I saw that great abstract power 
which we call conscience materialised before my eyes. Not 
for many a day has the psychical side of a drama impressed 
me so deeply as the effusions, mostly in monologue, of the 
wretched Faustus. 

Carter was severely criticised, however, in The Daily Chronicle 
for his inaudible diction and "cogitative style" (3 July 1896). 
On no one, however, did the production have a greater effect 
than upon its Faustus. Many years afterwards a visitor called 



Il8 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

to see Hubert Carter in his flat. The actor was in bed, and in 
the course of conversation he remarked : "Would you like to 
know what Hell is like? Well, it s like this." And thereupon 
he uttered a shriek which curdled the blood of his visitor, and 
caused the neighbours to conclude that some violent crime 
had been committed on the premises. The Daily Telegraph 
did not like the "slow, woebegone, sepulchral delivery" 
affected by the new Mephistopheles, and he felt that "nothing 
was gained by making the good and bad angels chant their 
speeches, which would come home more poignantly if spoken" 
(3 July 1896), Grein had "one serious fault" to find with Poel, 
and this was on the score of the "would-be comical ladies" 
who impersonated the Seven Deadly Sins. This, he felt, was 
"to heap ridicule on an august fantasy," and even if Poel had 
contemporary warrant for his conception, here was a case 
where "extreme fidelity was an error." 

The best account of the production was by Montague, who 
saw it at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester and reported on 
it afterwards in The Manchester Guardian (8 Nov. 1904). He 
began by comparing the play with Everyman; PoePs production 
of the mediaeval classic, which I shall discuss in due course, had 
intervened between the first revival of Faustus and the second. 

Everyman on revival was found to be a good play in the same 
sense strange as it sounds in which Sudermann s Heimat or 
Mr. Pinero s Iris is a good play. It kept you always wanting 
to know what would come next. Many of us who for the first 
time saw Doctor Faustus acted last night must have felt that, 
with all its magnificence, it is not in this sense a good 
play, at least not to us. One felt that as compared with 
Everyman time had clawed Faustus uncommonly severely in his 
clutch. The Morality, though perhaps two centuries older, 
recurred to the mind last night as having been really much 
the more modern of the two modern in the vital sense in 
which The Pilgrim s Progress is more exciting to a modern than 
Sir Charles Grandison, though Bunyan wrote so long before 
Richardson. The older play, like the older story, goes much 
straighter to feelings that do not change from age to age; 
whereas, in spite of all its imperishable single lines, whole 
tracts and aspects of Doctor Faustus, the playgoer grieves to 
confess, were of their own time solely, and now are dead as 
doornails the keen Renaissance relish, for example, for a 
certain kind of bookishness. And yet the performance does 
give a rare and curious pleasure or blend of pleasures. 



FIRST EXPERIMENTS 1 19 

There is the pleasure of judging the effect of the Elizabethan 
platform stage, when the actors stood out "in the round" 
like statues and the public could see between them and the 
back cloth or curtains with all its differences from our 
modern picture stage, where the actor is seen in the flat, 
framed in a recess, and planted on a background. Last night 
the contrast was not brought out quite completely; for that, 
we spectators would have had to be sitting on three sides of 
the stage, which should have jutted out to just the middle of 
the pit. No doubt this was not physically possible in the Free 
Trade Hall, and even as it was, and with actors who could not 
quite disengage themselves of modern methods, one was 
helped to feel the tremendous difference between the influence 
of the two forms of stage upon the drama that used them. 
The platform stage obviously made naturalism in acting 
impossible and declamation essential. The fact "jumped 
into your eye" that on such a stage Elizabethan drama had 
to be a drama of harangues, as on our own stage an illusive 
hole in the wall drama is almost bound over to be realistic. . . . 

Like all the Society s work, the performance of Faustus 
keeps you, at any rate while it lasts, in that state of grave and 
childlike absorption and of freedom from our modern affliction 
of knowingness that simple and enthusiastic souls can achieve 
while looking at Giotto s tower with an unclouded faith in 
Ruskin. Last night the Pope at dinner was a masterpiece of 
well conceived ndiveti\ the bell, book, and candle business was 
in deliciously effective contrast with a recent commination 
service at Drury Lane, and the set, mortified countenance of 
the Duchess s one waiting- woman was worth whole retinues of 
the wheeling and countermarching Abigails of our age. The 
Botticellian angels, the M6ryon devil from Notre Dame, the 
quaintly trapesing and trolloping Seven Deadly Sins, the 
Michelangelesquely sinewy Lucifer were all delectable inven 
tions in a very difficult kind, for the least slip in judgment would 
have raised a laugh, and yet nobody laughed. Everybody s 
mind was for the moment simplified not, indeed, to the point 
of sharing Elizabethan joy in such a play, but to the point of 
genuine interest in that joy and partial comprehension of it.* 

Throughout this tour performances of The Comedy of Errors 
were given alternately with Faustus. 

IV 

For his next production. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Poel 
borrowed the Merchant Taylors Hall. There was no built-up 

*The substance of this notice, partially rewritten, was incorporated in Dramatic 
Values, pp. 237-41; 1911- 



ISO WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

stage, but the audience was raised on tiers. The design for 
the costume of the two gentlemen was taken from some 
frescoes painted about the middle of the sixteenth century on 
the walls of the Carpenters Hall. The outlaws were 
dressed as Halberdiers, after a design used in the Fishmongers 
Pageant of 1609, and they made their entrance through the 
audience to the accompaniment of flag and drum. Schubert s 
setting for "Who is Sylvia ?" seemed an evident anachronism 
and a new melody was composed by Arnold Dolmetsch. 

Poel had invited Lugne-Poe, the celebrated director of the 
Theatre de FCEuvre in Paris, to come over for the performance, 
and Lugne-Poe afterwards described his impressions in 
La Nouvelle Revue (i March .1897). We learn from him that the 
minstrels gallery of the Hall served, naturally enough, for 
Sylvia s balcony, and that when Valentine went into exile he 
passed through the middle of the audience, acting his part all 
the time. Hardly had he left by the door through which the 
audience had come in, than the noise of the outlaws attack 
was heard in the vestibule. Sylvia escaped in the same way, 
running after her lover, and accompanied by a servant. And 
then came the Duke in chase of his daughter, turning round 
when he had almost reached the exit to give a last instruction 
to the servants who were still on the stage. A moment later 
he, too, was attacked in the vestibule. At the end everyone 
returned through the audience to the rolling of a drum, and 
it was on the stage proper that Valentine persuaded the 
outlaws to submit to the Duke who had been their prisoner. 
"Everything combined," wrote Lugn6-Poe, "to make us relive 
naively and sincerely the glorious flowering of English dramatic 
art." 

The production, however, was not a success. The speaking 
was monotonous and inaudible, and once again, in reading the 
criticisms, one has the impression of half-trained actors strug 
gling to acquire a technique of elocution which they could not 
master and did not understand. In the process all spontaneity 
was lost. The play was given on the 30 November 1896, 
and repeated in the Great Hall of the Charterhouse on 18 
January 1897. 

Poel s second production of this play was one of his most 
important contributions to the * Elizabethan Revival. In 



FIRST EXPERIMENTS 121 

1910 Beerbohm Tree, who had an impresario s nose for novelty, 
invited him to present The Two Gentlemen of Verona during the 
Shakespeare Festival at His Majesty s. This was to ask the 
wolf to step into the sheep-fold, for Tree s way with Shake 
speare was the popular illustration of everything Poel con 
demned. But he was in no mood for compromise when he 
led his half-trained troupe of semi-amateurs within those 
sumptuous and slightly vulgar precincts. The young Bridges- 
Adams, only recently down from Oxford, was his Assistant 
Stage Manager, under Nugent Monck, and he has described 
to me his first meeting with the great reformer. 

He found Poel wrapped in a grey muffler, nibbling at a 
biscuit and sipping a glass of milk. In front of him a lady, 
shimmering with sequins and no longer in her first youth, was 
in an attitude of visible distress. Poel s voice was raised in 
querulous criticism: "I am disappointed," he said, "very- 
disappointed indeed. Of all Shakespeare s heroes Valentine 
is one of the most romantic, one of the most virile. I have 
chosen you out of all London for this part, but so far you have 
shown me no virility whatsoever." 

Yet the production had beauties which lingered in the mem 
ory; among them, Nugent Monck s inn-keeper nodding to 
sleep over his lantern. For the first time an apron was 
built out over the orchestra pit of His Majesty s and front 
lighting installed in the balconies. Beerbohm Tree may have 
smiled at the austerity of Poel s Elizabethan way, but the 
apron and the front lighting were retained for his own Henry 
VIII two years later. And they have now become a common 
place of Shakespearian production. It was the thin edge of 
the Elizabethan wedge and no one has since dislodged it. 

The production was described by A. B. Walkley as "an 
entertainment of absorbing interest. The literary quality of 
the play, the verve of its dialogue, the lyric beauty of many of 
its passages came out with unusual freshness and clear-cut 
relief." He thought that the Elizabethan convention, for all 
its stiff archaic quaintness, gave one far more of the play s 
atmosphere its "romantic amorism" than could ever have 
been conveyed by a modern setting. And it brought to mind 
a number of more recent analogies some "trifle of de Musset," 
some "marivaudage of Marivaux/ or the "fervour of Cyrano 



122 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

deBergerac serenading his precieuse" (The Times; 21 April 1910). 
This production was to be remembered. Six years later, in 
a letter to Poel, Prince Antoine Bibesco paid him the following 
tribute : 

Having been present at a Shakespearian performance 
given by you a few years ago at His Majesty s I realise that you 
are really the only man that has given an adequate idea of the 
way Shakespeare should be played (18 April 1916). 

Meanwhile Poel had been encouraged by the success of 
Faustus to explore further into the lumber room of Elizabethan 
drama. He chose the anonymous Arden of Feversham as the 
subject of his next experiment (9 July 1897). Swinburne had 
already urged him to revive this play, and with it he planned 
to produce the opening half of Edward III also an anonymous 
work although he believed that the passages he had picked 
were by Shakespeare. 

Here, not for the first time, Poel underestimated his public. 
People who went to see Arden of Feversham wanted the whole 
play, not a precis prepared by Poel. The play is an admirably 
constructed domestic tragedy, or melodrama, and PoePs 
surgery robbed it of its cumulative effect. Nor was the per 
formance *a good one. It suffered, according to the critic of 
The Morning Post (10 July 1897), from the "unhappy tradition 
of the Society to drawl or deliver slowly all their sentences 
and words, even in passages that ought to be full of fire." 
This tradition seemed "to be against by-play or any effective 
expression in the silent passages . . . there is a tendency to 
move about rather like pot-dolls without joints, and to speak 
with the deliberation of Dutch clocks." The critic ended by 
hoping that Poel would "remove the fetters in which his players 
have been hampered." Poel revived the play at the Scala, for 
the Renaissance Theatre, on the 6 December 1925, with a 
much stronger cast. Ernest Milton appeared as Arden, 
D. A. Clarke-Smith as Franklin, D. L. Mannering (the original 
Faustus) as Mosbie, Hubert Carter as Cheiny, and Miriam 
Lewes as Alice. A wide interest had by then been excited in the 
minor Elizabethans and a more or less complete version of the 
play was given. It was acted on a multiple stage with three 
fixed localities; the parlour of Arden s house, the high road, 



FIRST EXPERIMENTS 123 

and a street in London. The effect of playing on this was 
described by Ernest Milton. 

I was amazed at the elasticity, and the wide and varied 
terrain offered by his stage. Three or four things, and as many 
personalities, could be, or occur, at one and the same time. 
There was a constant lapping over of times and places which 
provided continual movement and excitement, without 
slurring or distraction or overbrusqueness. I ve seen this 
imitated in a play like, shall we say, Late Night Final, with good 
effect, but not nearly so thrilling and dependent upon elaborate 
devices, such as floor upon floor rising to the top of the pro 
scenium. 

Mr. Milton recalls a further interesting detail: 

He had the strange idea of putting the weak, sad, doomed, 
unpopular Thomas Arden into pink tights, and it had the 
strange effect of showing perhaps what the man, Arden, might 
have been, as of some hidden frivolity in his nature, or some 
exquisite suppressed libido (Stratford Dossier) . 

It is worth remarking that on this occasion Poel was working 
with highly skilled actors, who could make his method their 
own, and Mr. Milton adds, rather surprisingly, that "in 
interpretation he seemed to guide or imperceptibly influence, 
never dictate." 

In the 1897 production the scenes from Edward III, perhaps 
because they were played in their original sequence, carried 
a good deal more conviction than Arden of Feversham. They 
describe how the king, arrived at Roxburgh Castle, which 
had been successfully defended by the Countess of Salisbury, 
makes love to the Countess and is by her restored to his sense 
of duty. These passages were performed at the Poel Cen 
tenary Matinee at the Old Vic in 1952, and although their 
authorship cannot be affirmed with certainty, they powerfully 
suggested the flow and idiom of Shakespeare s earlier style. 
Poel had pointed out the discrepancy between the first and 
second parts of the play, and it is difficult for the sensitive 
reader to believe that they are by the same hand. 

On 5 November of the same year (1897) The Tempest was 
produced before the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress in the 
Egyptian Hall of the Mansion House. An Elizabethan stage 
was erected for the occasion. The music was arranged from 
composers of the period and Mrs. Dolmetsch now for the first 



124 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

time joined the instrumental ensemble. The play was given 
without an interval. The dresses worn by Ariel and the 
Shapes were taken from prints of a Masque found in the 
British Museum, and when they brought in the banquet they 
danced a Masque by Giles Farnaby and went out to a Coranto. 
The Nymphs and Reapers performed La Volta, a graceful 
movement, to the music of Thomas Morley. For Prospero s 
magic robe Poel claimed, once again, the authority of The 
Discoverie of Witchcraft. The part of Prospero was spoken, 
very nobly, by Paget Bowman, a London solicitor, who was 
by far the most accomplished of the amateurs Poel had gathered 
round him. Very few professional actors of the time could 
speak with his distinction and grace. The Tempest was repeated 
shortly afterwards at the St. George s and Goldsmiths Halls. 
The play with its magical poetry and clear opportunity for 
spectacle was a challenge to Poel s doctrine as well as to his 
rather inexperienced performers. The acoustics of City Halls, 
with their high absorbent roofs, are not easy, and the actors 
had not caught the orator s trick of always addressing them 
selves, at the Mansion House, to the second pillar on the right 
of the door. To those who argued that here, if anywhere, 
scenery was essential, Shaw replied in The Saturday Review 
(5 November 1897) that it required 

the nicest judgment to know exactly how much help the 
imagination wants. . . . You can do best without scenery in 
The Tempest and A Midsummer Night s Dream, because the best 
scenery you can get will only destroy the illusion created by 
the poetry; but it does not at all follow that scenery will not 
improve a representation of Othello. 

A Lyceum production of the play would have substituted 
the "screaming violin" for the "harmonious viol"; "charac 
teristic" music "scored for wood-wind and percussion by 
Mr. German" for Mr. Dolmetsch s pipe and tabor; and 
"an expensive and absurd stage ship" for the Musicians 
Gallery of the Mansion House. Poel said frankly, "See that 
singers gallery up there? Well, let s pretend that it s the 
ship," and for Shaw, at least, the trick was done. "But how," 
he asked, 

could we agree to such a pretence with a stage ship ? Before 
it we should say, Take that thing away: if our imagination 



FIRST EXPERIMENTS 125 

is to create a ship, it must not be contradicted by something 
that apes a ship so vilely as to fill us with denial and repudia 
tion of its imposture. The singing gallery makes no attempt 
to impose on us; it disarms criticism by unaffected submission 
to the facts of the case, and throws itself honestly on our 
fancy, with instant success. In the same way a rag doll is 
fondly nursed by a child who can only stare at a waxen 
simulacrum of infancy (Reprinted in Our Theatres in the Nineties; 
1932, Vol. Ill, pp. 241-244). 

This was PoePs doctrine argued by a master of polemical 
prose; the truth of it could be tested by those who were able 
to compare Michael BenthalPs production of The Tempest at 
Stratford in 1951 and Bernard Miles s production of the same 
play at the Mermaid. The poetry which had been drowned 
by Mr. BenthalFs pantomime survived on the platform in St. 
John s Wood. The first time I met Poel was at a performance 
of The Tempest at Angmering-on-Sea in 1926. Most of those 
taking part in the production were amateurs, although some 
of us, including the Prospero and co-producer, Martin Browne, 
were to work professionally in the theatre later on. It is 
piquant to recall that Antonio was played by Mr. John van 
Druten and Ferdinand by Mr. Godfrey Winn. The per 
formances were given in a Y.M.C.A. hut; Poel was present 
and gave a lecture there in the evening. Afterwards he wrote 
an article on the production in Monthly Letters (1929, pp. 25-26), 
and since I was only playing the relatively small part of 
Alonso, I may without immodesty quote what he said. It is 
impossible to imagine that this lovely and elaborate play can 
ever have been given under more primitive conditions. 

In a wooden shanty by the sea, playgoers were brought 
close up to the poetic work, and this was mainly due to the 
skill and intelligence of the performers. The quality of the 
representations was on a high level because the company 
realised that their business was not to act the stage was too 
small for that but to speak the words Shakespeare had 
written for them to say, in the way he wanted them said, and 
thus to allow the author to tell his own story as he wished it to be 
told, without the modifications so often made by actor and 
scene painter and the use of limelight. 

All this sustained activity and splendour of costuming had 
cost money, most of it from PoePs private purse. On 30 
March 1898 Bernard Shaw wrote to him as follows: 



126 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

I am perfectly paralysed by your balance sheet. I have 
myself just had to fork out more than 50 to wind up the 
Independent Theatre solvently, but your 917 16s. 7d. takes 
my breath away. I have often wondered at the recklessly 
handsome way in which the E.S.S. dressed its performances, 
and where you had discovered the munificent patrons at whose 
expense I concluded it was being done. If I had thought 
that you were standing the racket yourself, I should certainly 
have remonstrated with you like a father. All I can do is to 
seize the occasion of the forthcoming performance to do what 
I can through the Saturday Review to let people know what you 
have done and what they must do if you are to go on. 

The following year (1898) was one of great activity. On n 
February Beaumont and Fletcher s The Coxcomb was given at 
the Inner Temple Hall, Poel himself as the coxcomb, Michael 
Sherbrooke, a very powerful character actor, as Mercury, and 
Bowman as Valerio. The Irishman s dress worn by Antonio 
in disguise was taken from a woodcut of Derricke s Image of 
Ireland (1581), reprinted in Scott s edition of Somers* Tracts. 
"It was not unusual," Poel pointed out in his programme note, 
"for the gentlemen of that day to employ the Irish wood- 
kerns as running footmen. These men wore their native dress, 
as the Highlanders still do." 

Shaw described the performance as one of the best the 
Society had achieved. Certain concessions had been made to 
the modesty of the Inner Temple. "Mercury s relations with 
Maria," he wrote, 

stop short of exacting her husband s crowning sacrifice to 
friendship; and when the three merry gentlemen make 
Riccardo too drunk to keep his appointment to elope with 
Viola, the purpose with which the four roysterers sally out 
into the street, much insisted on by Beaumont and Fletcher, 
is discreetly left to the guilty imagination of the more sophisti 
cated spectators. 

Shaw confessed to a "condescending tolerance for Beaumont 
and Fletcher"; they seemed to him "dainty romantic poets," 
who "had no depth, no conviction, no religious or philosophic 
basis, no real power or seriousness . . . they neither knew nor 
cared anything about human psychology, but they could 
mimic the tricks and manners of their neighbours, especially 
the vulgarer ones, in a highly entertaining way." He did not 
criticise Poel for putting a woman into the part of Riccardo; 



FIRST EXPERIMENTS 



indeed he thought the anonymous lady (Alice Arden) who 
played it "hit the part off to perfection, having, by a happy 
temperamental accident, the musical root of the poetic 
passion in her. 1 She reminded him of Calve. (The Saturday 
Review; 10 Feb. 1898; reprinted in Our Theatres in the Nineties; 
1932; Vol. Ill, pp. 317-320.) 

On 5 April, Middleton and Rowley s The Spanish Gypsy 
was produced at St. George s Hall, with Michael Sherbrooke 
in the part of Alvarez. This play had won the esteem of 
Swinburne, and he composed a prologue in heroic couplets for 
the occasion of its first revival after two hundred and fifty 
years. In his introduction to the Mermaid edition of Middle- 
ton s plays he had claimed that he was "worthy to hold his own 
beside all but the greatest of his age; and that age was the age 
of Shakespeare." The first act of The Spanish Gypsy is indeed a 
consummate piece of work; Walter Scott had called it "horribly 
striking." The hero, Roderigo, kidnaps and rapes a beautiful 
young woman whom he meets by chance on the highway, but 
this violent beginning is tempered by Roderigo s remorse and 
Clara s reasonable reproaches. Mr. T. S. Eliot, following 
Dugdale Sykes, has argued that The Spanish Gypsy is patently 
by another hand, but Middleton was always ready to admit 
collaboration generally by Dekker or Rowley. One may 
recognise Rowley s conventional hack-work in a good deal of 
The Spanish Gypsy the sub-plot is notably less interesting than 
the Roderigo-Clara episode and still catch the authentic 
accent of Middleton in such lines as these : 

Instead of feeding 

Too wantonly upon so rich a banquet 
I found, even in that beauty that invited me 
Such a commanding majesty of chaste 
And humbly glorious virtue, that it did not 
More check my rash attempt than draw to ebb 
The float of those desires which in an instant 
Were cooled in their own streams of shame and folly. 

Middleton, as Mr. Eliot has said, had a noble, not merely a 
nobly conventional, view of women, and this is shown in his 
treatment of Clara, as it was shown supremely in The Changeling. 
Poel did not burke the implications of the first act, although 
he eliminated the bed which is plainly calle d for by the text. 
After describing the performance as a "tolerably good one," 



128 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

Shaw drew up a critical balance sheet of the Society s achieve 
ments to date. Poel, he said, had 

unquestionably made a contribution to theatrical art . . . the 
truth is that nothing like the dressing of his productions has 
been seen by the present generation: our ordinary managers 
have simply been patronising the conventional costumier s 
business in a very expensive way, whilst Mr. Poel has achieved 
artistic originality, beauty, and novelty of effect, as well as the 
fullest attainable measure of historical conviction. Further, 
he has gained the assistance of Mr. Dolmetsch, and so brought 
the most remarkable musical revival of our time to bear on 
his enterprise. . . . He has done extraordinary things with the 
amateur talent at his disposal, the last few performances 
showing not only that he has at last succeeded in forming a 
company of very considerable promise, but that something 
like a tradition of Elizabethan playing is beginning to form 
itself in the Society. 

Shaw went on to draw attention to the Society s financial 
plight. Poel could 

hardly be expected to continue to endow the public at this rate 
in return for the enthusiast s usual tribute of misunderstanding 
and ridicule. It seems a pity that the Society should succumb 
just as it is getting into shape, and beginning to understand 
its business thoroughly (The Saturday Review; 16 April 1898; 
reprinted in Our Theatres in the Nineties; 1932; Vol. Ill; pp. 



About the same time Shaw wrote to Poel with the news that 
he was giving up his job as critic on The Saturday Review and 
recommending him to invite his successor, Max Beerbohm, 
to attend the Society s productions. But Max seldom risked 
the ruffling of his urbanity by such unconventional goings-on. 
It is a melancholy fact that among the more influential critics 
of the Edwardian decade, only Montague and, later, the young 
Desmond MacCarthy and Herbert Farjeon grasped the im 
portance of what Poel was trying to do, 

Two months later The Broken Heart was produced in St. 
George s Hall ( 1 1 June 1 898) . In a very interesting programme 
note, which deserves quotation because I do not know that it 
has been reproduced elsewhere, Edmund Gosse suggested the 
reason for the difference of mood separating Ford from the 
other Jacobean dramatists. This was something more than a 
distinction of style, that sustained adagio which is Ford s 




1 






O 

u 



g.g 2 

TJ 



fl 

s 

I 



FIRST EXPERIMENTS 1 29 

personal contribution to the sum of English dramatic verse. 
It was a kind of classical coherence, appearing in clear contrast 
to the weakness and confusion of so much contemporary 
writing. It reminded Gosse 

less of the more flowing characteristics of the English school 
than of other dramatic literatures that of Greece in the past, 
that of France in the immediate future. The performance 
tonight can scarcely fail to emphasise that severity, we might 
almost say that rigidity, which distinguishes Ford from all other 
English playwrights, and draws him nearer to Gorneille and 
to Rotrou in their devotion to dramatic discipline. 

There is no play in the English language which gives the 
impression of a fine French tragedy so completely as The 
Broken Heart, with its exact preservation of the unities its 
serried action, its observance of the point of honour, its rapid 
and ingenious evolution of exalted intrigue. Were it not for 
the dates, we could hardly account this accidental, but the 
latest possible year of composition for Ford s play is 1633, 
when Corneille had not finished composing Clitandre, the 
earliest of his tragedies. Yet the spectator should none the 
less be prepared for a performance more in the French than 
in the English taste, and for a piece perhaps the most classic 
in our repertory. Individual beauties, gushes of exquisite 
lyrical extravagance, are not in Ford s way. The construction 
with him is not less solid than it is subtle, and it is the con 
centrated subtlety on which the solidity is built. Racine 
might have envied the skill with which, from the very first, 
the fate of Ithocles and Calantha, apparently so secure and 
so fortunate, flutters in the closed hand of Orgilus. His 
revenge has a quiet resolution which is absolutely demoniac, 
and it moves, as a stage passion should, in full sight of the 
audience, although unsuspected by the other characters. 

Gosse was immensely impressed by the whole rendering of 
the play. For the military characters Poel chose semi-classical 
costumes; Ithocles was dressed after Veronese s picture of 
Alexander the Great in the National Gallery. The King and 
his nobles wore peers robes, and the ladies of the court cos 
tumes of early seventeenth-century design. Calantha, the 
heroine, was in a classical gown of English sixteenth-century 
style. We can detect here a new freedom in PoePs approach 
to costume; a freedom which saved him from pedantry, but 
was carried in later years to ludicrous extremes. John 
Dowland s Lacryma Pavan was performed during the Revels 
5 



130 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

in the fifth act, and the "more sprightly" dance which followed 
it was Byrd s Canaries. This music was played on a lute, a 
"chest" of five viols, and the virginals. The performance as a 
whole was greatly helped by Eleanor Calhoun s Calantha; she 
brought to it a ripe professional experience, and this was not 
outweighed by occasional touches of disconcerting modernism. 
(She had recently sought to galvanise the sleep-walking scene 
in Macbeth by tumbling over a table.) All the principal parts 
seem to have been well played; Paget Bowman again acting 
with high distinction as Ithocles, and Michael Sherbrooke 
really coming into his own as Bassanes, the nightmare husband 
of the play. Poel pared down the text considerably, cutting 
the whole scene of Orgilus suicide and Bassanes magnificent 
comment: "He has shook hands with time." He would always 
justify these liberties by the plea that he was afraid of losing 
the attention of the audience. Yet he was strangely insensitive 
to the kind of thing which so often made his productions seem 
like an academic exercise and restricted their appeal to the 
scholarly. One critic, * in the course of a most discerning and 
generally favourable review of The Broken Heart, referred to the 
care which had been taken "to bring the atmosphere of the 
museum across the footlights," adding, "unfortunately, that 
is precisely the atmosphere in which the poet cannot live." 

The last production of the season was Ben Jonson s Masque, 
The Sad Shepherd, which was performed on the 23 July in the 
courtyard of Fulham Palace. It was the first time the Society 
had attempted a Pastoral. Poel was by now indulging his 
weakness for putting women into men s parts; a practice which 
may on occasion have been justified by its vocal effect, but 
which quite lacked Elizabethan precedent. The critic of 
The Morning Post, always sympathetic to the Society s work, 
remarked that "Miss Arden was dressed in a skin or fur, and 
nothing but the fact that she answered to the name of Lionel 
revealed the secret that she was pretending to be a man." 
Poel had invited Edward Dowden to write a foreword to the 
programme. In discussing the date of the play, about which 
there is no clear evidence, Dowden put forward the following 
ingenious theory. 

* Neither the identity of the critic nor the name of the newspaper can be traced 
from Poel s press-cutting book. 



FIRST EXPERIMENTS 13! 

The scene of The Sad Shepherd is Sherwood Forest; the 
shepherds invited by Robin Hood are of the vale of Belvoir. 
From 1612 to 1620 Francis Manners, sixth Earl of Rutland, 
was keeper of Sherwood Forest. In The May Lord the Countess 
of Rutland probably Sir Philip Sidney s daughter, wife of 
the fifth Earl appeared under a pastoral disguise. It has not 
been noticed in connection with The Sad Shepherd that Belvoir 
Castle was painfully connected with the subject of witchcraft 
in 1618-19. The Earl of Rutland s two sons died in infancy. 
Joan Flower and her two daughters, servants at Belvoir 
Castle, were dismissed for neglect of duty. In 1618, five years 
after the loss of the elder son, they were accused of causing his 
death by witchcraft; Joan Flower died upon wishing that the 
bread she ate might choke her if she were guilty; her daughters 
confessed the crime, and were executed while Jonson was in 
Scotland. Is it altogether a fanciful conjecture that Jonson 
may have written the fragment of The Sad Shepherd before this 
discovery of witchcraft; may have laid his work aside as having 
distressing suggestions for the Earl and Countess of Rutland, 
and towards the close of his life, after the death of the Earl 
(December 1632) may have decided to complete the play, 
but with his enfeebled hand may have failed to accomplish 
his design? 

The production gave special opportunities to the Dolmetsch 
emble. The song "Though I am young" was given in its 
ginal setting by Nicholas Lanearn; Maudlin, Lozel and 
nee danced to William Byrd s La Volta, which according 
Scot s Discoverie of Witchcraft was the measure affected by 
i "night-dancing witches/ Another piece by Byrd, "The 
int s Up," and "The King s Hunt" were introduced in the 
mting Scene, and the performance concluded with "The 
ines Morris/ where the very accurate description of the 
ps given in the first edition of The Dancing Master (1650) 
is scrupulously followed. 

The quadrangle of the Palace was a suitable, though it was 
t a sylvan setting. The witch-hunt, with its meute of dogs 
d men, and the capture of the Sorceress in the shape of a 
.re, were especially effective. 



CHAPTER IV 

Shylock and Samson 

THE Elizabethan Stage Society had now been before the 
public for three years, and PoePs theories had been seen 
in practice for a good deal longer than that. At the close of 
the season 1897-8 he took stock of the situation in a short 
pamphlet (An Account of the Elizabethan Stage Society: printed for 
the Society: June 1898; 12 pp.)* where he answered a number of 
criticisms which had been directed against his work. To those 
who objected to artificial lighting as inconsistent with Eliza 
bethan principles he replied that 

the Elizabethan playhouse was open to the sky, and the 
performance began at three o clock. On winter afternoons, 
when the play was acted in the palace or in the private 
theatre, candles were used as footlights, or torches were held 
by servants. In the Society s Revivals, the object has been 
to give a diffused and subdued light, somewhat equivalent 
to the candle-power light of the olden times, and thus to avoid 
that glare and distortion of feature that comes from the 
modern method of illumination. Whether this be done by 
candle or electric light is not much to the moment, if the 
visible effect is the same. 

Others had objected that, in logic, he should have put 
boys into his women s parts, and here he pointed out that 
boy actors were simply not available "because neither the 
schoolmaster nor the choirmaster will give the necessary 
permission." He defended his occasional reconstruction of a 
play on the ground that 

the Elizabethan dramatists, with the exception of Shakespeare, 
were bad constructors of plots. They could conceive fine 
dramatic situations and write powerful scenes, but there is 
often no method, no sequence, no directness of purpose, in 
the arrangement of the scenes, so that interest aroused in one 
scene is often dissipated in the next. . . . The effect of such 
drama upon a modern audience is wearying and disappointing, 
nor can actors be found of sufficient ability to sustain the 
spectator s attention in scenes that have no connection with 
the main issue. But where rearrangement of scenes is neces 
sary, the utmost precaution must be taken. 

132 



SHYLOGK AND SAMSON 133 

He quoted Stevenson s remark that "to read a play is a knack, 
the fruit of much knowledge and some imagination, compar 
able to that of reading a score/ and he revealed that, in order 
to guard against mishap, it had 

always been a rule of the Society to rehearse the whole play as 
it was originally written, and only when the author s point of 
view is realised to make such omissions and revisions as are 
absolutely essential. To give more perfect form to a play is 
to increase its vitality; and every work the Society revives is 
given in the hope of its becoming part of a repertory for 
future use. 

Such argument was not inherently unreasonable, but 
Poel s rational and classical mind exaggerated the extent to 
which the Elizabethan drama could be tidied up. Its splen 
dours were often incidental to a dull plot and an incoherent 
design. They were not worth losing for the sake of shortening 
a scene or simplifying a story. Here it was less a question of 
principle than of discretion and Poel could be very indiscreet 
indeed. The pamphlet ended with a review of the Society s 
finances which were fairly satisfactory, but he appealed to his 
supporters for a sum of 300 to be held in reserve against 
future loss. 

In deciding to produce The Merchant of Venice Poel was 
plunging into the heat of Shakespearian controversy. For a 
long time argument had raged around the character of Shylock. 
There was no doubt that the Elizabethan audience had 
regarded him as a comic figure, whether or not he had been 
conceived in contrast to Barabbas, Marlowe s colossal carica 
ture. Anti-semitism was a recognized sport and in June 1594 
Doctor Roderigo Lopez, a Jew of Portuguese descent, had been 
hanged at Tyburn on the suspicion of plotting to poison the 
Queen. The case was so doubtful that for some time Elizabeth 
hesitated to sign the death warrant. Lopez had been personal 
physician to the Earl of Leicester and Shakespeare may have 
been acquainted with him. He had possibly witnessed his 
last agony at Tyburn, and he would have certainly recognised, 
even if he did not share, the revulsion caused in a minority of 
sensitive minds by the barbarous lengths to which Jew-baiting 
was then carried by the mob. Two years after the execution 
of Lopez a book called The Orator, translated from the French, 



134 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

was published in London, consisting of model speeches on 
matters of historical or present interest. One of these showed 
a clear division of opinion on the treatment of the Jews. It 
was, as Mr. John Palmer argues in his brilliant essay on the 
character of Shylock (Shakespeare s Comic Characters; 1 946) 9 just 
such a speech as Shylock might have made before the Doge s 
court. What right had the Christians to deny him his pound 
of flesh ? Did they not themselves condemn their debtors to 
worse forfeits, "binding all the body into a most loathsome 
prison or into an intolerable slavery?" Had not the Romans 
regarded it as "lawful for debt to imprison, beat and afflict 
with torments the free citizens ?" There was certainly enough 
evidence, outside the evidence of the play itself, to suggest 
that Shakespeare would have been capable of imagining a 
Shylock who was comic and sinister, to be sure, but who 
was also human and real within the conventions of the 
story. 

We do not know how much humanity the genius of Burbage 
infused into this part; we only know that he played it in a 
red wig. He thus established a tradition which lasted until 
1741 when Macklin, although still conceiving the character 
in comic terms, "made some tender impressions on the 
audience" (Thomas Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies; 1783; Vol. II, 
p. 394). Macklin had at least discarded the red wig, but his 
successors in the part continued to build up the figure described 
and denounced by Hazlitt, "a decrepit old man, bent with 
age and ugly with mental deformity, with the venom in his 
heart congealed in the expression of his countenance, sullen, 
morose, glaring, inflexible, brooding over one idea, that of his 
hatred, and fixed on one unalterable purpose, that of his 
revenge." This Shylock was shattered by Edmund Kean on 
27 January 1814, and Kean s tragic genius was responsible 
for Hazlitt s judgment, which no one seriously questioned until 
Poel revived the play in November 1898. The new legend had 
received its latest confirmation from Henry Irving, whose 
pathetic and offended patriarch was by common acknow 
ledgment among his greatest parts. The character who for 
Hazlitt had become "a depository of the vengeance of his 
race" was for Heine and his romantic posterity "the most 
respectable person in the play." 



SHYLOGK AND SAMSON 135 

The dispute about Shylock, like the dispute about the 
rejection of Falstaff, will always arise from a failure to remem 
ber that these people, who are more real to us than our neigh 
bours, are nevertheless characters in a play. Their fortunes 
are bound to the wheel of dramatic necessity. If you forget 
that The Merchant of Venice is a skilful combination of two 
serio-comic fairy-tales, it is easy to maintain that Shylock is as 
respectable as any contemporary usurer in Threadneedle 
Street; that Antonio is a pompous and gullible prig; that 
Bassanio is a profligate and conscienceless adventurer; and 
that Portia s play-acting is so thorough that Antonio might 
well have died from a heart-attack before he was saved from 
the knife. But all this is to forget the theatre; and especially 
the Shakespearian theatre where the meaning, the significance, 
is not to be separated from the conventions and the exigencies 
of entertainment, or from the dispassionate ironies of the truly 
observant mind. Translate Bassanio into real life and he 
becomes a calculating cad ; but in Belmont he can still be the 
gilded hero of an impossible romance. Translate Shylock 
into Whitechapel and we quickly sympathise with him as the 
victim of Fascist beasts; but place him in a court of law, whose 
procedures have no precedent outside Nicaragua in the early 
days of the Spanish conquest, and our sympathies, though they 
may be momentarily quickened by his fall, can still respond to 
the music and the moonlight of the final act. 

It was not difficult for a powerful actor to alter the per 
spective of the part, and therefore of the play. The famous 
duologue with Tubal, where Shylock laments the loss of his 
daughter and his ducats, is satiric comedy as Moliere would 
have understood that term. But an Irving or a Kean could 
easily wrench it to pathos. Indeed the most memorable 
moment of living s Shylock was when he returned after 
Jessica s flight and stood with his lantern, knocking on the 
door; an entrance which is not indicated in the text for the 
very good reason that it depends for its effect upon a tableau 
curtain; and in the Elizabethan theatre a tableau curtain was 
impossible. Irving s was the reigning Shylock when Poel 
started his reforms, and it was against this sort of sentimental 
deformation that he set his face. Twelve years earlier, in 
1887, he had lectured on the character to the Church and 



136 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

Stage Guild. The Chairman was a devoted follower of 
Irving, and as Poel developed his argument, he rose in protest. 
But Poel was not the sort of speaker to be silenced from the 
chair, and as he continued unabashed, the Chairman left 
the meeting. 

Shakespeare s Jew [Poel wrote later], is the Elizabethan 
Christian s notion of the infidel in much the same way as the 
modern stage Paddy is the Englishman s idea of the Irishman. 
. . . Shylock is an isolated figure, unsociable, parsimonious, and 
relentless, who tries to inflict harm on those who envy him his 
wealth and hate him for his avarice. Perhaps it is this marked 
isolation in which the dramatist has placed Shylock, that 
tempts our modern actors to uphold him as the victim of 
religious persecution, and therefore as one that does not merit 
the misfortune that falls upon him. In this way the figure 
becomes tragic, and, contrary to the dramatist s intention, 
is made the leading part; so that when the Jew finally leaves 
the stage the interest of the audience goes with him. But if 
Shakespeare intended his comedy to produce this impression, 
he was at fault in writing a last act in which every character 
that appears is evidently not aware that Shylock s defeat was 
undeserved. 

In the same article, published in The Westminster Review 
(Vol. 171; Jan. 1909; pp. 54-64) and afterwards reprinted as 
a pamphlet, Poel admitted that 

in so far as Shylock resents the want of tolerance shown him 
by the Christians, he is in the right and Shakespeare is with 
him; but when he tries to justify his method of retaliation and 
schemes to take Antonio s life, not simply in order to revenge 
the indignities thrust upon him, but also that he may put more 
money into his purse, Shylock is in the wrong and Shakespeare 
is against him. For it is obvious that Shylock does not seek 
the life of Gratiano, or that of Salanio or Salarino, the man 
who caUed him the "dog Jew," or that of the man who ran 
away with his daughter, but of the merchant who lends out 
money gratis, who helps the unfortunate debtors, and who 
exercises charity and generosity. 

Poel took this argument from Ulrici (Shakespeare s Dramatic 
Art, 1876). Shylock s dominating passion was neither racial 
pride nor paternal love; it was avarice. And to those who 
held that the character was a relatively humane reply to 
Marlowe s Barabbas, Poel retorted that Shakespeare was 



SHYLOGK AND SAMSON 137 

concerned, in so far as he was concerned at all, not with 
Marlowe s attack upon the Jews but with his attack upon the 
Christians. 

He pointed out that Marlowe named his play after the Jew 
who owned the argosies, Shakespeare after the Christian who 
apparently had lost them; that in Marlowe s play the Christians 
took forcible possession of the Jew s wealth, but that in 
Shakespeare s they asked for a loan on business terms; that 
Barabbas upbraids the Christians for quoting Scripture to 
defend their roguery, while Antonio upbraids Shylock for 
quoting Scripture in defence of his; that Marlowe s Christians 
break faith with Turk and Jew alike, but that the Venetian 
court upholds Shylock s claim; that Barabbas s daughter 
rescues her father s money from the Christians where Jessica 
steals Shylock s treasure and gives it away to them; that 
Barabbas s servant helps his master to cheat the Christians, 
where Launcelot Gobbo deserts Shylock to join them; that 
two of Marlowe s Christians try to cajole Barabbas s daughter 
away from him and die the victims of his treachery, while 
Lorenzo elopes with Jessica and inherits Shylock s wealth; 
that Abigail becomes a Christian and is poisoned by her 
father, while Jessica becomes a Christian and lives happily 
ever afterwards; that Barabbas saves the Christians from the 
Turk, while Portia saves the Christians from the Jew; that 
Marlowe s Christians are treacherous accessories to Barabbas s 
death, where Shakespeare s save Shylock s life by extending to 
him the mercy he had refused to Antonio. 

Poel strangely brushed aside the evidence for Marlowe s 
atheism evidence which was a powerful reinforcement of 
his own argument. But he made it clear how Marlowe had 
been able to capture the public taste with his portrait of 
Barabbas, and yet indulge his own anti-Christian bias. By 
making Barabbas so monstrous, he excused, in eyes other than 
his own, the moral obliquity of his Christian characters. No 
one, of course, is quite human in The Jew of Malta; but then 
Marlowe was a very inhuman writer. His genius was for 
melodrama, rhetoric, and farce. It is the overpowering 
humanity of Shakespeare, breaking through the stiffness of 
his material, that makes The Merchant of Venice so difficult a 
play to interpret. Can a middle way be found between 
5* 



138 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

Burbage s red wig and Heine s view that Antonio was unworthy 
to tie Shylock s shoelaces? 

But Poel was never a man for middle ways, and in reacting 
against one extreme he ran to another. It was one thing 
to insist that "the language that Shakespeare has put into the 
mouth of Shylock does not impress one as being that of a man 
whose physical and mental faculties are in the least impaired 
by age/ But he did not ask himself how far Heine had 
been right in maintaining that Shakespeare intended to write 
a comedy but was too great an artist to succeed ; how far "the 
genius of humanity that reigned in him stood ever above his 
private will." He did not see that The Merchant was, in John 
Palmer s valuable definition, "a comedy in which ridicule 
does not exclude compassion, in which sympathy and detach 
ment are reconciled in the irony which is necessarily achieved 
by the comic spirit in a serene presentation of things as they 
are." He played Shylock himself, and resorted to Burbage s 
red wig; this was to desert art for archaeology and comedy for 
caricature. "Only by Shylock in the Trial scene being in a 
great rage and rushing out in a great rage can the audience 
be greatly pleased and in a fit humour to be interested in the 
further doings of Portia." So he reasoned, in contradiction 
to Shylock s own "I pray you give me leave to go from hence; 
I am not well." He was blind to Shakespeare s power of 
seeing all round a situation or a character, of writing on more 
than one level, of giving to his comedies the quality of chequered 
sunshine. Malvolio is punished for his vanity and there is no 
need to play him like an hidalgo; but his reproaches momen 
tarily darken the espousals at the end of Twelfth Might and 
mingle with the sadness of Feste s final song. The melancholy 
Jaques deserts the fraternity of Arden to learn from some 
distant anchorite the wisdom which is not even of Shakespeare s 
world. Falstaff has been the joy and scandal of Bolingbroke s 
England with his defiance of virtue and mockery of honour, 
but he is eternally unregenerate and our reason tells us that 
it is time for him to go. But our thrill in Harry s coronation is 
damped by the knowledge that he is temporarily under lock 
and key. It is the same with The Merchant: the poetry and 
persiflage of the fifth act are given a deeper tone by our memory 
of Shylock s fall. Poel would have us rejoice that avarice and 



SHYLOGK AND SAMSON 139 

cruelty had met their due reward; and this is what the bulk 
of Burbage s audience may well have felt. It is what we should 
feel ourselves if The Merchant had been written by Ben Jonson; 
it is what we feel about Arpagon in Moliere s L Avare. But 
a modern audience is moved by the end of The Merchant, as 
only the rare, sensitive spectator would have been moved if 
he had seen the play acted at the Globe; it knows that the 
"lacrimse rerum" lie close to the surface of Lorenzo s love- 
making and that even in Belmont it is still "a naughty world." 
PoePs performance was not only without pathos, but it was 
largely deficient in dignity; yet for George Wyndham "this 
was the Jew that Shakespeare drew" (Letter to W. Poel; 27 June 
1898). And it elicited high professional praise from Frank 
Fay, the Irish actor and producer, whose letter deserves to 
be quoted in full: 

I cannot refrain from writing to thank you for the unique 
experience of seeing a performance of a Shakespearian play 
to which I can apply the word convincing. Of all the Shylocks 
I have seen, yours, with the possible exception of the late 
Osmond Tearle s, is the most real; I do not put Irving s above 
it and I am not sure whether you may not have effaced Tearle s ; 
you certainly do in simplicity. I noticed and liked your 
tendency to use an upward tone of the voice where the official 
stage tone (English) seems to be a downward tone. With 
many foreign actors I have noticed this upward tone and the 
curiously natural effect it gives to the diction. Our actors 
all use it, because it is a part of Irish intonation, but very few 
English actors do so. It was a delight to have part of an actor s 
face in the shadow and part in the light, instead of the arid 
modern stage lighting which chases the shadow. I liked, too, 
to see the people standing in a circle talking, and the absence 
of the absurd "dressing the stage" and "crossing" as is custom 
ary. The stage was nevertheless full of beautiful and seemingly 
unprepared pictures. You have also, thank goodness, got rid 
of the practice of people standing several feet away and 
declaiming at each other when commonsense directs the 
opposite. I cannot say I thought your Shylock comic, but he 
was a man and won one s sympathy because of his flesh and 
blood; he was not a monster. He was doubtless comic to the 
crowd in the court, as he would be in life. Your Portia did a 
wonderful thing, behind which I think I see your brain. 
Instead of a calm elocutionist, the woman Portia, mixed up 
in the trial because of her husband s indebtedness to Antonio, 
burst forth and the petulance of a woman pleading to a stone 



I4O WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

was unerringly expressed; all the time you saw Portia unable 
to act the advocate, and when I think of one woman who plays 
and has been praised highly for her acting in this part, and 
remember all the stage tricks of the actress, I am amazed at 
the critics who write such foolish things merely because a 
performer is a great popular favourite (Undated}. 

Against PoePs Shylock Eleanor Calhoun s Portia stood out 
with regal grace; her costume was taken from a portrait 
of Queen Elizabeth. Not since the Bancrofts 1875 production 
had all three casket scenes been played, and this gave due 
dramatic emphasis to Bassanio s choice. The religious character 
of Portia s obligation to respect the terms of her father s will was 
underlined by the introduction of a priest and four acolytes, 
who stood by while the suitors were making up their minds. 
The songs were sung by a choir to the accompaniment of an 
organ and for some curious reason a hermit was dis 
covered with two soldiers when the curtains opened on the 
scene. But The Merchant of Venice is so packed with improba 
bilities that one hermit more or less in a country house was 
unlikely to have troubled the spectators. It would not have 
been until the final act that they would have learnt from 
Stephano that a hermit had accompanied her on her return 
home. In no other respect does her conduct or conversation 
display a penchant for the contemplative life. Paget Bowman 
excelled in the ungrateful part of Antonio, and the speaking of 
the company had generally improved. The Merchant of Venice 
is less popular today than it was then, but it is now produced, 
when it is produced at all, with a truer emphasis. Nothing 
can rob Shylock of his eminence, but he is not generally per 
mitted to steal the play. He is seen in focus. And Poel s 
interpretation, harsh as it undoubtedly was, had helped to 
restore the balance. To Frederic Harrison, at least, it was 
quite certain now "that The- Merchant is not a tragedy, but a 
romantic comedy, and I think the Elizabethan Stage Society 
has done a great work in proving that once for all" (Letter to 
W. Poel; undated). Edward Dowden was in entire agreement 
with PoeFs conception of Shylock and also with his view of the 
relation of Shakespeare s play to Marlowe s. But no argu 
ment or demonstration can alter the fact that Shylock has more 
life in him than all the other characters put together. Is it a 



SHYLOGK AND SAMSON 14! 

perception of this dilemma either to let Shylock have his 
head and make the play exciting, or to keep him in his place 
and risk making it dull which has made our modern 
producers rather reluctant to tackle The Merchant at all? 
Komisarjevsky s brilliant extravaganza at Stratford (1933), 
balanced by the enchanting sanity of Fabia Drake s Portia, 
was an exception to this defeatism. 



II 

On 24 February 1899 Poel produced The Alchemist in 
the Apothecaries Hall and the critic of The Morning Post 
observed that "whereas The Merchant of Venice is estranged from 
us by being represented after the manner of the time when it 
was written, such a play as The Alchemist can only be efficiently 
rendered in some such fashion as that adopted last night at 
Apothecaries Hall/ In so far as there was reason in this 
distinction it lay in th*e fact that Jonson was a much more 
"contemporary" dramatist than Shakespeare. He breathes 
the humours of Elizabethan London, and he is helped, as 
The Morning Post pointed out, by "having his characters 
bound down to their time and place, and reproduced in the 
manner present to his mind." But if he was less universal than 
Shakespeare, in the sense that his appeal is more restricted, 
he is at the same time a more properly classical writer. His 
characters are types, though they are none the less lively for 
that. But Jonson is not content, as Shakespeare had been 
content, to rest in their humanity; he is always seeing through 
to the social or psychological principles which they illustrate. 
And this bold definition was congenial to Poel s dogmatic 
style. His production was a clear success, and the text 
perhaps because The Alchemist is a fast-moving, firmly con 
structed play was treated generally with respect. 

It was about this time that Lewis Casson first became 
acquainted with Poel. He played the small part of "a neigh 
bour" in The Alchemist. This was the beginning of a long 
association. No one has done more to illustrate, both in 
teaching and practice, Poel s principles of rapid, musically 
inflected speech; Sir Lewis is not a Welshman for nothing. 
This is how he describes Poel at the time of their first meeting : 



142 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

He was then, I suppose, in the middle forties, but as a 
young actor I looked on him as old, and all the years I knew 
him he seemed to look the same, and I should think he never 
looked young. He was tall and well-built, but with the stoop 
of a scholar. Longish grey hair brushed back from a high 
forehead going bald. The head thrust forward enquiringly, 
little twinkling eyes half hidden by steel spectacles set well 
down his nose, over which he peered at you. An air of vague 
eagerness and the general aspect of a kindly old don. His 
speech hesitant and almost stammering, interrupted at inter 
vals by the queer interjection "Ah rumtarrah." At work he 
wore a long floppy grey alpaca coat and on our long walks on 
Wimbledon Common I remember a dilapidated green hat 
and an Inverness cape ( Talk given for the Third Programme,, 
.C., 31 December 1951). 



The Alchemist was revived in 1902, first at the Imperial 
Theatre, London, in July, and then at the New Theatre, 
Cambridge, in August. Peel s programme note for these 
occasions revealed the bias of his mind. Although Jonson had 
"abstained from moralising sentiment or conscious pathos," 
he had aimed at "scotching, if not killing, one of the most 
monstrous, iniquitous, and pernicious follies of his age by the 
sole weapon of ridicule/ and "this folly was the offspring of 
the accursed thirst for gold." 

On 20 March 1899 Poel for the first time produced a 
play by a living poet. His choice fell on Swinburne s Locrine. 
"It said much," observed Edmund Gosse in his programme 
note, "for the divorce which exists in England between poetic 
drama and the stage, that the most eminent of our living poets 
should have published ten plays, or poems in dramatic form, 
not one of which has been seen on the boards until to-night." 
But Swinburne, as we have shown, had already demonstrated 
his goodwill towards Poel s work by the composition of two 
prologues, and he was on terms of close friendship with Gosse, 
who was one of the Society s chief supporters. It was natural 
that if modern poetic drama were to be attempted, Swinburne s 
plays should be considered. 

The fable from which Locrine is taken dates back to the 
mythical origins of English history. Locrine, son of Brutus, 
the first King of Britain, is in love with Estrild, the widow of a 
captured invader; he keeps her in a bower in Essex, and they 
have a child, Sabrina. Gwendolen, Locrine s wife, incites 



SHYLOCK AND SAMSON 143 

heir son, Madan, to take up arms against his father. Locrine 
s wounded in battle and creeps to Estrild s bower, where he 
lies. Estrild commits suicide and Sabrina drowns herself in 
he river to escape Gwendolen s wrath. Gwendolen, having 
pared nobody, can afford to be magnanimous at a moment 
vhen forgiveness costs her nothing. 

The gods are wise who lead us now to smite. 
And now to spare: we dwell but in their sight, 
And work but what their will is. What hath been 
Is past. But these that once were king and queen, 
The sun, that feeds on death, shall not consume 
Naked. Not I would sunder tomb from tomb 
Of those twain foes of mine, in death made one 
I, that when darkness hides me from the sun 
Shall sleep alone, with none to rest by me. 

This is grave and beautiful writing, free from the Swin- 
mrnian excess. The play which begins with heroic couplets 
s in rhyme throughout, the rhythm changing after the opening 
cene and developing less strictly. The action is extremely 
imple, more reminiscent of French than Jacobean tragedy. 
There is nothing but the play of character and the inexorable 
>rocess of fate. For Gosse, writing his foreword to the pro- 
pramme, Gwendolen was a Cornelienne heroine illustre, 
xtraordinaire, serieuse. Locrine himself was modern in his 
;omplexity "sensitive, high-strung, and unstable" opposed 
o Gwendolen s simplicity. Gosse did not discuss the central 
ault of the play which is the absence of real motive in 
VEadan s turning against his father. We are asked to take his 
:ruel and decadent nature on trust. It was enough that 
^ocrine himself should "give to this savage tragedy a tenderness 
vhich relaxes its archaic severity and teaches it to move our 
learts with a human paroxysm of pathos." 

There is no evidence that the performance by the Elizabethan 
>tage Society did any such thing. 

Instead of letting the characters speak for themselves, [wrote 
the critic of The Morning Post,] and doing his best to see that 
they have every opportunity of making themselves understood, 
Mr. Swinburne has forced them into speaking his language 
and speaking it in the complicated arrangements of which he 
is a master. The greater part of the play is in rhymed couplets 
and in more than one duologue, meant to be passionate, the 
characters speak alternate lines for pages together. To an 



144 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

English audience what seems to be going on on the stage is not 
a dramatic scene, but a contest at capping verses. And what 
is to be said of the occasional use of the sonnet series of rhymes ? 
The sonnet is a difficult form of verse to handle in a lyric, 
when one is speaking for oneself. It handicaps a dramatist 
still more when his characters instead of expressing themselves 
with that spontaneity which is the mark of good blank verse, 
have to make their way, at all hazards, to a rhyme, it may be 
to a second or third one where rhymes are few. The restraint 
of rhyme makes the characters artificial in their talk, and as, 
except at a few violent moments, they never do anything but 
talk, their want of nature comes home the more keenly. 
On a celebrated occasion Jonson answered Sylvester s objection 
But that s not rhyme with No, but it s truth. Conversely 
last night one heard much that was certainly rhyme, but was 
as certainly not truth (21 March 1899). 

The most interesting criticism of the performance came, 
however, from The Weekly Sun (26 March 1899). Here the 
writer recognised that the passion of the play was something 
more than hysteria, and that it was a solidly constructed work. 
But it was still overladen with parenthesis and smothered by 
Swinburne s favourite symbolism of fire and flame. "Such 
dialogue," he maintained, required a classical elocution. 

It must not be gabbled over as our Elizabethans did it the 
other night, with the result that during the greater portion of 
the evening it was frequently not possible to hear what was 
being said, far less to make sense of it. Whether Mr. Poel 
learnt his idea of swift speaking in France or Italy, I do not 
know. You can speak Italian more quickly than French 
[is this true?] and French more quickly than English. It is a 
question of whether vowels or consonants predominate in the 
languages. Rhymed lines, like those in Locrine, should be 
spoken decoratively, that is for their beauty of music, of 
sentiment, and description rather than enunciatively, as 
expressing dramatic ideas. The slightest realism is out of 
place in a work which goes to the extreme of imaginative 
romance. 

This was enlightened comment from a man who believed 
that Poel was "thoroughly at home in the Renaissance," and 
compared him, rather curiously, with Antoine in France, He 
did not complain of the absence of scenery, only pointing out 
that if you bring on a sofa strewn with a tiger skin to illustrate 
the outdoor feeling of Estrild s bower, "your tiger-skin shall be 



SHYLOCK AND SAMSON 145 

handsome in colour and your sofa of a fine design." Was he 
right in saying that Locrine left the problem of poetic drama 
where it was ? Not altogether. Swinburne had failed to write 
a successful play, to be sure; but his introduction of rhyme, 
monotonous though it may have been, had at least challenged 
the doctrine that poetic plays could only be written in un- 
rhymed iambips. Mr. Eliot was to issue the same challenge, 
more judiciously, in Murder in the Cathedral; here the rhymed 
ending was only used to bring certain scenes to their climax. 
Furthermore, Locrine, for all the remoteness of its setting, was 
modern in much of its feeling. Gwendolen herself was far from 
being the virago of conventional romantic tragedy; her wrongs 
were real and recognisable, even though her revenge was 
archaic. The critic of The Weekly Sun would have welcomed "a 
Locrine in a frock-coat, a Gwendolen in furs, and a Sabrina in 
short frocks." He was convinced that "Mr. Burbage and his 
friends, if they lived among us, would not have formed an 
Elizabethan Stage Society, but a Victorian Stage Society. 
And when we are looking for simplicity, would it not be wise 
to try if it is not to be found in the trousers, waistcoats, collars 
and boots, which after all we work, play, and get married in?" 
This was to anticipate the experiments of twenty-five years 
later experiments which have served a purpose without 
establishing a rule. By 1950 modernity had lost its glamour; 
it no longer surprises or shocks. And we should now find a 
genuinely Elizabethan production of Hamlet much more 
exciting than the same play performed in modern dress. 

Frederic Harrison, the philosopher of Positivism, wrote 
to Poel congratulating him on the performance. He thought 
the poetry "fine and romantic" and Gwendolen "a real 
triumph." He expressed himself "quite a convert to the rule 
of no stage scenery," and concluded, "If the tragedy is cold, 
that is because Algernon Charles is not William. Your part 
of it was as good as can be." 

Poel s production of Locrine was distinguished by the per 
formance of Lillah McCarthy as Gwendolen; she brought to 
the part, which is one of the longest ever written for a 
woman, great beauty of voice and person and considerable 
tragic power. Poel had escorted her to "The Pines," where 
Swinburne was then living with Watts-Dunton. He had 



146 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

warned her not to be afraid; Mr. Swinburne was "of a highly 
excitable and nervous disposition." 

When we came into the room oh! the Victorian mustiness 
of it Swinburne stood up and was very charming. He was 
dressed in shiny black from head to foot. His frock-coat 
fitted badly, his trousers were pulled up so high that they 
showed the tops of his elastic-sided boots. His arms hung so 
limp at his sides that they might have been boneless; but his 
head was astonishing, and his eyes seemed to betray the 
struggle which I came to see in his poetry the struggle of the 
image to keep afloat in the mighty tide of his words. He said : 
"You cannot be this part you are too young." Then he 
read, with a voice like a choric chant. The voice sounded 
strange and wonderful to me. . . . Swinburne handed me the 
manuscript, after choosing a difficult passage for me to read. 
My ear had caught the cadence of the lines and I chanted as he 
had done. Imagine my delight when I heard Swinburne 
exclaim: "That is right, you have a fine vibrating voice; 
appealing in its heroic quality." (Myself and my Friends; p. 
35)- 

In spite of this, however, he did not attend the performance; 
perhaps because he knew himself to be too deaf, or because 
Watts-Dunton knew him to be too excitable. 

Estrild was played by Elsie Fogerty, who learned from Poel 
some of the secrets of her elocutionary technique. She was to 
pass these on, through the Central School of Speech Training 
and Dramatic Art, to several generations of English actors, 
and it was in such indirect ways, by the fidelity of his more 
intelligent disciples, that Poel came to influence people who 
hardly even knew his name. Laurence Olivier s Romeo, for 
example, owed a great deal to notes taken by Miss Fogerty 
while Poel was rehearsing Lilian McCarthy in the same 
part. 

If Locrine had been criticised as a literary rather than a 
dramatic exercise, the same complaint was made about 
Edward Fitzgerald s translation of Calderon s La Vida es Sueno, 
which foUowed on 15 May 1899 at St. George s Hall. 
The^greatness of the play quite failed to come through. But 
Poel s audacity in putting a young actress Margaret Halstan 

into the part of Sigismund was apparently justified. She 
had caught, and assimilated, Poel s trick of declamation and 



SHYLOCK AND SAMSON 147 

carried herself bravely. For the last production of the season, 
Sakuntald, Kalidasa s sixth century Hindu classic, was 
produced on 3 July in the Conservatory of the Botanical 
Gardens in Regent s Park. The play had been given, some 
years earlier, in Parsee by an Indian company at the Gaiety. 
Poel s actors, among whom were several Indians, moved 
among tropical foliage, and the illusion of an Indian forest 
was happily procured; but the horses of the car of India, the 
stuffed tiger and antelope provoked the hilarity of the audience. 
The play itself, rich even in Sir William Jones s prose translation 
and accompanied by Dolmetsch music, which never quite lost 
its Elizabethan idiom, made a profound effect. All the 
musicians were Indian, with the exception of Arnold and 
Elodie Dolmetsch. Both of these were in appropriate costume, 
and their oriental colleagues declared Arnold to be indistin 
guishable from a Moslem musician from Kashmir. He did 
not hesitate to accompany, from ear, on his viola tfamore, an 
Indian singing in the original language. "The Hindu poet/ 
remarked the critic of The Referee, "has not much to learn, and 
has something to teach, the later masters of his craft. Where 
will they be, the best of them, I should like to know, in thirteen 
hundred years to come?" 

Sakuntald was revived on i August 1912 in the Examina 
tion Hall of Cambridge University. It was acted on a mul 
tiple stage which showed, simultaneously, the forest jungle, the 
King s palace and the Elysian fields. The King s Jester was 
played by Nigel Playfair, and for the small part of Gautami 
Poel chose a young milliner, whom he had seen acting with 
some amateurs in London. Poel, for all his rationalism, had 
far more flair than judgment, and there were times when his 
flair was unerring. The name of this young milliner, still in 
her early twenties, was Edith Evans. 

The season of 1899 recorded a loss of 276, and this was 
borne, once again, by Poel himself. In presiding at the 
Annual Meeting of the Society, Mr. (later Sir) Sidney Lee 
appealed to those who had enjoyed the Society s work to 
guarantee what would probably be a yearly deficit of 300. 
In a letter to The Morning Post (i August 1899) he quoted 
Frederic Harrison s words that "an intellectual theatre can 
never be maintained by the money taken at the doors till the 



148 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

culture and habits of our people are entirely transformed. 
And the only way in which it can be maintained is by the 
munificence of some citizen of great wealth, high culture, and 
ardent public spirit." There was no doubt of Poel s culture 
and public spirit, but was it fair that he should continue to 
bear the financial burden alone? 

Ill 

Those who like to uncover the tradition, the handing 
down, of truth in any sphere of human experiment will 
appreciate the following passage from Dr. J. Dover Wilson s 
Inaugural Lecture as Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English 
Literature at Edinburgh (University of Edinburgh Journal; 
Summer 1936). 

It is one of the most important literary discoveries of our 
age that Shakespeare wrote, not to be read, but to be acted; 
that his plays are not books, but as it were libretti for stage 
performance. It is amazing that so obvious a fact should so 
late have come to recognition. The truth is that critics 
writing when the English theatre was at its nadir could not 
bring themselves to believe that Shakespeare had ever served 
so shabby an art. The classical example of this is Lamb s 
condemnation of the stage King Lear . . . "the Lear of Shake 
speare cannot be acted. 33 No one attempted to reply to this 
until 1927, when an actor and a dramatist took up the cudgels 
in defence of Shakespeare s quality, and began in his modestly 
entitled Prefaces to Shakespeare a fresh epoch in Shakespearian 
criticism. 

The new criticism has been made possible by two distinct, 
though not unrelated, developments of modern times the 
renaissance of the English theatre, and the virtual rediscovery 
at the hands of William Poel, W. J. Lawrence, Sir Edmund 
Chambers, and many others, of the character and methods of 
the Elizabethan stage. And it is just because Mr. Granville- 
Barker is himself a brilliant representative of both tendencies 
that he has become the first of the new critics. He has shown 
us that no school of dramatic criticism is I will not say 
valueless but safe, which is divorced from theatrical ex 
perience. 

On 3 September 1913 Barker gave Poel an introduction 
to Max Reinhardt. In the enclosed letter he wrote that Poel 
had "taught us all (by his great devotion) more about the 



SHYLOGK AND SAMSON 149 

staging of Shakespeare and the spirit of playing in it, I think, 
than anyone else in Europe." Barker s Prefaces are a brilliant 
application of PoePs principles. They have in fact influenced, 
far more profoundly than the fading memory of Poel, the 
whole modern experiment with Shakespeare in the theatre. 
Mr. Harcourt Williams and Sir John Gielgud, in particular, 
have generously acknowledged their debt. Barker had 
qualities that Poel had not; his mind was more balanced 
and flexible; and his grasp of principle was not stiffened by 
fanaticism. He talked the language of the twentieth century, 
and his ideas were correspondingly more accessible to it. 
It was both curious and characteristic that Poel himself failed 
to appreciate the Prefaces. He did not think Barker understood 
the Elizabethans; he was "out and out of the Victorian plus 
Georgian age" (Letter to W. J. Lawrence, 24 January 1931). 
Barker, in sending him the book, had foreseen this reaction. 
"You won t agree with much of it," he wrote, on the 14 Jan. 
1930. "Never mind. A dull world it would be in which we 
all found ourselves in agreement. But such light as has shone 
for me on W. S. dates from an earlier day on which you came 
to York Buildings to see me and shook all my previous con 
victions by showing me how you wanted the first lines of 
Richard II spoken." 

On that "earlier day" a Sunday morning in the autumn 
of 1899 Barker was 22 years old. As an actor he was quite 
unknown, having played only a small part with Cyril Maude 
in Under the Red Robe, served a short apprenticeship under 
Sarah Thorne at Margate, and toured with Ben Greet. Like 
Poel himself, he was that rather rare person an intellectual 
in theatreland, but we do not know whether Poel had seen 
him act. Later he became the first husband of Lillah 
McCarthy. The rehearsals for Richard II took place in an 
empty house in Harrington Road. They were unusually 
arduous. On one occasion Poel locked his actors in a room 
and declared that he would keep them there until they had 
mastered his inflections. They remained incarcerated for 
most of the night. The performance was given in the Lecture 
Room of London University in Burlington Gardens at four 
o clock in the afternoon on n November 1899. Many of 
the entrances were made through the audience and Richard 



150 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

confronted Bolingbroke at Ravensburgh from the gallery. 
The Duchess of Gloucester was dressed as a nun of Barking 
Abbey, as represented on her monumental brass at West 
minster, and in Act III Richard appeared in the disguise of a 
friar; for this Poel had historical, if not Shakespearian, warrant. 
The play had not yet won its way to popularity; the last pro 
duction of any note had been Charles Kean s sumptuous 
revival in 1857, although the title part was already a favourite 
of Benson s and Tree was shortly to make it very much his own 
at His Majesty s. If Granville-Barker had written a preface 
to Richard II, we should certainly have a clearer notion of what 
PoePs production was like. But in his lecture at the Sheldonian 
Theatre, Oxford, in 1952, Sir John Gielgud read passages 
from two letters Barker had written him while he was himself 
playing Richard II at the Queen s in 1937. I quote these from 
the lecture. Obviously Barker had by then formed his own 
conception as "to how Richard should be acted, but it is not 
fanciful to suppose that in some respects he had followed, 
and even bettered, the instruction he had received from 
Poel. 

Everything the actor does [he had written to Sir John 
Gielgud] must be done within the frame of the verse. Whatever 
impression of action or thought he can get within this frame, 
without disturbance of cadence or flow, he may. But there 
must be nothing, no trick, no check, beyond an honest pause 
or so at the end of a sentence or speech. And I believe you ll 
seldom find that the cadence and emphasis, the mere right 
scansion of the verse, does not give you the meaning without 
much of any further effort on the actor s part. The pace you 
may vary all you like. Clarity there nrnst be, of course. But 
here it is really the breaking of the verse which destroys it, 
for as I said Shakespeare has written one tune and his words 
are playing that in the treble (I say); if one tries to play 
another tune with them in the bass naturally we can t under 
stand the thing. Variety of pace tone colour of speech; 
oh, yes, as much as possible, but within the frame. You must 
not turn W. S. s quavers into crotchets or semi-breves or 
semi-quavers for that matter. And I think each character 
ought to have his own speech. 

Richard II is a long play, and Poel permitted an interval 
at the close of Act III, Scene 3. His cuts were reasonable, 



SHYLOGK AND SAMSON 15! 

until he came to the scene of Richard s murder. Here the 
great soliloquy, where Richard plays the artist with his own 
misfortune, was torn to shreds. It ran as follows: 

I have been studying how I may compare 
This prison where I live unto the world; 
And for because the world is populous. 
And here is not a creature but myself, 
I cannot do it. (Music). Music do I hear? 

No less than 37 lines of priceless introspection had been 
taken out; lines of capital importance for an understanding of 
Richard s psychology. Later in the same speech Poel did not 
scruple to sacrifice "For now hath time made me his numbering 
clock" and the ten superb lines which follow it. It is strange 
indeed that a man capable of these amputations should have 
been both admired and derided as a purist of textual integrity. 
No doubt Poel would have argued that Richard s speech was 
not dramatic; but to argue thus was to apply to tragedy the 
canons of melodrama. In fact, of course, the crude and sense 
less horror of Richard s end is at once magnified and redeemed 
by the touching and subtle disquisition which has preceded it. 
Furthermore, it was just the kind of speech in which an 
intellectual actor like Barker would have excelled. Poel 
received a warm letter from Sir Sidney Lee who had seen the 
production. "Let me congratulate you on the very satis 
factory performance of Richard II. It was admirable. Mr. 
Granville-Barker as the King was first-rate" (13 November 

1899). 

The next production was an English version of Moliere s 
Don Juan given in the hall of Lincoln s Inn (15 Dec. 1899). 
The play had never before been produced in English, and it 
had not been seen in France for twenty years. It is rarely 
played there, even now; Jouvet s production at the Athenee 
in 1948 was a novelty to Parisian playgoers. The translation 
of Moliere is a perilous, an almost impossible business, and the 
quick, light seriousness of the original came through very 
stodgily in the version used by Poel. Poel wrote, through 
Eleanor Calhoun, to the Administrator of the Comedie 
Frangaise, asking him for information about the traditional 
way of acting Moliere in France. He also enquired about the 



152 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

possibility of hiring the costumes from Paris. Only the 
volatility of Michael Sherbrooke as Sganarelle seems to have 
given some life to the proceedings. In fact, however, Don 
Juan required a good deal more accomplishment than the 
Elizabethan Stage Society could provide; and after a revival 
of the First Quarto Hamlet at the Carpenters Hall, which we 
have already discussed (pp. 48-49), Poel turned to more 
promising matter. 

There was no record of Milton s Samson Agonistes ever 
having been performed on the stage, except for a single per 
formance in Dublin. Indeed it was unlikely that Milton had 
himself thought of it in terms of theatrical presentation. 
It had probably been written between 1666 and 1670; that is 
to say, it was a post-Restoration work. If Milton had con 
ceived it at a time when the theatres were still closed, he had 
composed it at a moment when the public mood was far too 
frivolous to accept his austere utterance. It was a dramatic 
poem rather than a play, with little characterisation or humour 
and little action of one character upon another. Some of the 
speeches were 100 lines in length, and the movement was slow. 
But the play was alive because it was personal. Milton s 
Samson was much closer to Milton than he was to his biblical 
prototype. In his blindness and bitterness and solitude, in 
his domestic misery, this Samson was born of an English 
poet s experience and contemplation. 

But if the play had not been written to be acted, the poetry 
clamoured to be heard, and Poel s production was justified 
by its own success. He took the work out of its Biblical context 
and placed it firmly where it belonged among the passions 
and controversies of the seventeenth century. The characters 
were dressed in the conventional classical costumes of the 
time; and these were designed from a tapestry made by Dr. 
Clyne, under the direction of Sir Francis Crane, director of 
the Royal Mortlake Factory, which was founded by James I 
in 1619. Poel said afterwards that he wished he had dressed 
the whole play in seventeenth-century costume. "I feel we 
wanted the cavaliers on the stage" (Letter to Mrs. C. C. Stopes; 
28 December 1908). The music, too, was as nearly contempor 
ary as possible. Dalila and her train entered to an air by 
Lawes, printed in 1669, and the accompaniment to the semi- 



SHYLOGK AND SAMSON 153 

choruses "While their hearts were jocund and sublime" and 
"But he, though blind of sight" was an early work by Purcell. 
It seems curious, however, that Poel, who had used an organ 
in The Merchant of Venice, did not use one here. The per 
formance had, quite rightly, the effect of recitation rather than 
acting. The choruses, which are the greatest thing in Samson 
Agonistes, were generally spoken or intoned; but occasionally 
they were chanted to a very simple sequence of notes which 
Poel believed had been in use for thousands of years. Some 
times they were declaimed in unison and sometimes they were 
broken up into short phrases and given to individual voices. 
As generally happens with choral speaking, the parts spoken 
in unison were the least impressive. 

The play was presented on 7 April 1900 in the Lecture 
Theatre of the South Kensington Museum before a large 
audience, which was rather more Philistine in its composition 
than the public which usually assembled, at such odd times 
and places, to see the productions of William Poel. Certain 
gentlemen of military appearance were seen to leave in the 
middle, and certain ladies also went before the end, reluctant 
to miss their tea. Others, who sat the performance out, were 
heard to remark that they had not understood the play, and 
others, again, wondered how the actors had managed to 
memorise such long parts. But the performance made a deep 
impression. 

There were a few [said the critic of The Morning Post] who 
as they left the Lecture Theatre, found the ranged and dated 
exhibits of the South Kensington Museum, even the most 
august and venerable of them, strangely unimpressive. The 
sense of time had been obliterated, and for a cabinet to boast 
of being Fifteenth Century was the merest impertinence. To 
these it was as though they had listened to a nobler Burial 
Service than ours, performed more nobly than it could be by 
any priest, over not a friend or an acquaintance, but over a 
stranger that was yet themselves. And for some time after 
they carried about with them, in cab, train, or bus, hearts 
larger than they had ever known them to be, all filled with 
tears that trembled with excess of joy (9 April 1900). 

Poel never earned a finer tribute than this. The same 
writer held the production to be one "of the most important 



154 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

that it lies in the power of our times to give." His opinion was 
endorsed by other critics, even by the facetious representative 
of The Referee. The production was repeated soon afterwards 
at St. George s Hall, and on 15 December 1908 Poel revived 
it for the Milton Tercentenary in the Lecture Theatre 
at Burlington Gardens, at the request of the Tercentenary 
Committee. On this occasion Samson was played by Ian 
Maclaren; Poel considered his voice the finest he had heard 
on the stage since Salvini. This opinion was not shared by 
Max Beerbohm, who thought it an ineffective baritone 
issuing from an inadequate physique. The part, he said, 
clamoured for Hubert Carter, who was apparently not avail 
able. In an article entitled "Agonising Samson" Max com 
plained of "downright boredom, mingled with acute irritation" 
(The Saturday Review; 19 December 1908). But then Max had 
never begun to come to terms with Poel. He was still at the 
stage of complaining that the entrance of the Chorus down 
the gangways of the Lecture Theatre in Burlington Gardens 
spoiled the illusion of the play. Such a contravention of estab 
lished custom within a stone s throw of Albany must have 
seemed to him an insufferable breach of taste. Performances 
were afterwards given at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon 
Street, the Whitworth Hall of Manchester University, the 
Bedford Corn Exchange, and the New Theatre, Cambridge. 
Cambridge was a disappointment. Most of the Dons stayed 
away, except for the Master of Christ s Milton s college 
who wasted twenty minutes of valuable time in explaining 
from the platform that Milton had written the play to demon 
strate his belief in God. In the evening Poel met several of 
the Dons wives at Peterhouse, where he was the guest of the 
Principal, Dr. Ward. He found them "lifeless and almost 
idiotic." It was in the course of this same tour that the pro 
duction was seen and reviewed by Montague. 

Hearing Samson Agonistes played in the new great hall of the 
University of Manchester, in the twilight and first darkness of 
a December evening, a new pleasure possessed you. One 
seemed to be in at the birth of a thing that some day might be 
valued for ancientry. Great buildings are furnished in that 
way, in youth, with treasures for their old age: the resonance 
does not die out; and today, in the Hall of the Middle Temple, it 
is part of a diner s pleasure that Twelfth Night was first acted 



SHYLOGK AND SAMSON 155 

there, and Shakespeare s voice, it may well be, rang in the 
rafters you sit under (Dramatic Values, p. 225). 

After comparing Samson with a Greek tragedy, Montague 
went on: 

An apt ear, of course, is kept happy, merely by the august 
loveliness of the verse; a reader s mind may find intrinsic 
poignancy in the poem as a "last sunset cry" of Milton s 
wounded spirit; but the eye, the playgoer s change-seeking 
and incident-loving eye, is apt to have poor sport of it among 
these wide expanses of still rhetoric, in which the one shrewd 
touch of stage-craft, the finely announced entry of Dalila, 
shines like a good deed in a naughty world. Here, to the 
vacant eye s rescue, came in the genius of Mr. William Poel, 
the master of this revel. 

Mr. Poel began by planting the whole visible action of the 
play not on the horizontal plane the floor of the stage but 
on the vertical plane its back wall. He built up this back 
wall into something like the semi-circular tribuna at the east 
end of an early Christian basilica; travellers in Italy will 
remember one in the cathedral at Torcello, with the priests 
seats rising in steps, tier above tier, culminating in the bishop s 
throne at the top in the middle. In the seat corresponding to 
this episcopal throne Mr. Poel planted Samson for almost the 
whole time that he was on the stage. The remaining char 
acters were repeatedly grouped and regrouped so as, in the 
aggregate, to present a triangular mass of colour, receding and 
tapering as it rose, like one side of a pyramid. Thus, in an 
early group, Samson was at the apex of this pyramid, one of 
its bounding lines was formed by the Chorus, and the other 
marked out by Dalila in the middle of the line and by her 
attendants at its base. At her exit the composition of the 
picture dissolved for a few moments; the Chorus gesticulated, 
huddled, swarmed, and then, like swallows re-perching after 
a moment s scare, resumed their place in the pyramidal 
formation, Harapha and his followers now forming the other 
side of the triangle, precisely as Dalila and hers had done. 
Again the composition melted away for some minutes; the 
Chorus declaimed and pattered, twittered and crooned and 
keened, and then it settled again as before, with the Public 
Officers in Harapha s and Dalila s place, and his guard of 
soldiers in that of their attendants. 

In each of these groupings Samson was seen full length, 
his feet higher than the head of the person next below, and 
this person in turn was seen, clear from head to foot, above 
the group below; and this mode of presentation was singularly 
pleasing to the eye, for reasons not explicable here, but good 



156 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

enough, as it would seem, to have made Raphael adopt it 
almost exactly, steps and all a in the so-called School of Athens, 
and in the Incendio del Borgo at the Vatican. And not Raphael 
only; the pyramidal formation is perhaps the most familiar 
of all beautiful patterns of pictorial grouping; it is the pattern 
of the Ansidei Madonna in the National Gallery, and of the 
Giorgione altar-piece at Castelfranco ; and two or three times 
in the playing of Samson the design of this last painting was 
recalled by a grouping of the three persons forming for the 
moment the apex of the larger pyramid Samson at the top, 
his green-clad attendant below him on his right, where 
St. Liberalis is in the piature, and Manoa or Dalila in the 
place of St. Francis. We are not in Mr. PoePs secrets, but to 
an uninformed spectator it looked as if he had had every one 
of his groupings painted to a finish in his mind and then 
transferred it, touch by touch, to its place on the purple back 
ground, all under the strong influence of Italian medieval and 
Renaissance theories of pictorial design. Whatever the words 
that were spoken, it would have been good to sit for two hours 
and stare at the spectacles painted upon the end wall of the 
hall. Their colour was choice; they had line and structure 
enough for cathedrals. Not strict playgoing, perhaps, all this, 
but quite strict pleasure; the playgoing eye was at least 
triumphantly pacified (Dramatic Values; pp. 227-30, 1911). 

Here was a brilliant vindication of PoePs pictorial sense, 
and Montague s conjecture about the way his eye worked 
in building up a production is borne out by a glance at his 
scrap-books. These are filled with articles on painting and 
reproductions of old masters. He would pay Jennie Moore* 
thirty shillings a time to make exact copies of dresses from 
pictures in the National Gallery. In one production he 
instructed Nugent Monck to kneel in a particular attitude, 
holding a candle. This pose made no kind of pictorial or 
dramatic sense, until it was discovered, long afterwards, that 
Poel had taken it from a design in an ancient Missal. I shall 
relate in due course how his whole conception of the way 
Coriolanus should be dressed was altered by a visit to the 
Italian Exhibition; and a letter to Mrs. Pole from an artist 



*Jennie Moore, who died on 22 June 1924, designed and made all the costumes 
for Poel s productions from The Duchess ofMalfiin 1893 until Fratricide Punished in 
1924. The Stage commented, "Among the most successful of her colour schemes 
were those painted for Marlowe s Doctor Faustus and for Everyman. Miss Moore, 
in her sketches, anticipated the brilliant combinations of elemental colouring 
which later became best known through the Russian ballet in this country " 
(10 July 1924). y 



SHYLOCK AND SAMSON 157 

friend, Paul Urikson, is further evidence of his painter s 

eye. 

His insistence on an artist eliminating everything in a picture 
that hindered the dramatic effect, made an impression on me 
the first time we went to a picture gallery together, and I feel 
that much of the success I have had as a painter of subject 
pictures is the result of my association with him. He is prob 
ably in my mind when I am in my studio more than any other 
man I have known (20 October 1913). 

In the case of Samson Agonistes there was an affinity between 
his own mind, which was both ethical and prophetic, and the 
mind of the great Puritan poet whom he served ; and he was 
seen at his best in a work where the problems of human 
destiny had received a classical, rather than a romantic, 
exposition. This had already been the case with Faustus and 
it would presently be the case with Everyman. His tireless 
scholarship and incalculable invention would always illumin 
ate the Elizabethan theatre; but it was not with the Eliza 
bethans it was not even with Shakespeare that he was most 
naturally at home. A Victorian radical to the core, he was in 
closest sympathy with those writers in whom the radical and 
the religious impulses went hand in hand, reinforcing and 
correcting one another. He asked of the drama that it should 
elevate; he was not content that it should merely entertain. 
In forming our estimate of a man, it is sometimes useful to 
enquire on which side he would have been found in the English 
Civil War. In the case of William Poel there was no doubt 
of the answer; he would have stood where Milton stood. 

The season concluded with a production of Schiller s 
Wallenstein, in the translation by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 
Coleridge had seen Wallenstein produced on the German stage 
in the winter of 1798-99, and on returning to London had 
selected it for translation as a typical example of the new roman 
tic drama in Germany. He had completed his task in six weeks, 
and Schiller remarked, on seeing the English version, that in 
spite of some ridiculous mistakes the translator was evidently 
a man of genius. In fact, Coleridge s genius is not very 
apparent in this work; he is more impressive when he is 
being plain than when he is being poetical. Here there are 
hints as to how the poetic drama was going to develop a hun 
dred years later; a conversational tone which is in sharp 



158 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

contrast to the tired iambic prosody. It was not possible, in 
a single evening, to present the two five-act dramas which 
comprise Schiller s Wallenstein trilogy; so Poel chose to give a 
shortened version of The Death of Wallenstein (a glance at his 
prompt book reveals how very shortened this was), preceded 
by a selection of scenes from the Piccolomini. Macready, 
writing in his diary on 15 August 1836, had wondered whether 
it was possible to turn Coleridge s translation "to account in 
representation; but, though abounding with noble passages 
and great scenes, it is spread over too much space to be con 
tracted within reasonable dimensions." Poel concentrated, 
as far as possible, on the love relationship between Piccolomini 
and Wallenstein s daughter, Thekla, and neglected the humours 
of the camp. It was an immense task of simplification, and it 
raised once more the question of how far it is profitable to 
abbreviate a work which has been composed to a particular 
imaginative rhythm, and transpose it into another key. There 
is plenty of padding in Schiller s Wallenstein and this is not made 
any more digestible by translation; but if you suddenly turn 
it into a slim play, you find that you have sapped its strength 
and radically changed its character. If we are to get the best 
out of certain great works, we have to put up with being bored. 
But boredom is more tolerable in print than in performance. 
The reader can lay his book aside and resume it when he 
chooses; the spectator can walk out. But for so long as the 
young Lillah McCarthy was on the stage as Thekla, it is most 
unlikely that he did so. 

The play was given first in the Lecture Theatre at Burlington 

Gardens on the 22 June 1900, and revived for the University 

Extension Delegacy s Summer School at Oxford on 1 1 August 

1911. It was played in the New Theatre. For this performance 

Poel adopted a modified Elizabethan technique, which enabled 

the immensely complicated drama to flow easily between two 

scenes. An oak-panelled room with three steps in the middle 

led to a second room at the back with a balcony in the centre, 

just large enough to contain a canopied bed. The room below 

was hung with tapestries and had a window looking out on to 

the walls of the castle. The outer room served equally well for 

Piccolomini s castle and Wallenstein s palace. Uniformed 

pages would enter and change the position of the furniture to 



SHYLOCK AND SAMSON 159 

indicate in which of these two places the action was supposed 
to be taking place. The castle was suggested by a straight- 
backed wooden settee in the middle of the stage, and the 
palace by an oak table, with papers laid out upon it and a 
helmet. Curtains could be drawn between the two rooms, 
if necessary. The key to the production, however, was the 
terrace of three broad steps dividing one part of the stage 
from the other. This permitted a great variety of grouping, 
and avoided the restlessness of actors crossing and recrossing 
the stage. The picture at the climax of the second act was 
deeply impressive. While Wallenstein and his generals 
received the news that one regiment after another had revolted, 
a servant stood impassively leaning against the wall at the top 
of the steps, looking down with indifference and contempt at 
the panic and horror of the scene. So placed at that particular 
moment, he had the power to suggest the immovable Destiny 
of whom Wallenstein spoke so often. 

In this revival Poel himself played a small part, which he 
filled, according to The Manchester Guardian (12 August 1900), 
with an "energy of attack," an "almost rioting invention in 
details," and a "real joy of creation," which "made everybody 
else seem colourless and cold and precise." Frank Cellier 
added to his growing reputation as Wallenstein and Katharine 
Pole replaced Lillah McCarthy as Thekla. 

The last production of 1900 was one of the most singular 
that Poel presented on any stage. Sir Walter Scott s Marmion 
was then on the syllabus for the Cambridge Local Examina 
tions, and Poel had invited a certain Mr. Alick Bayley to 
turn the poem into a play. This was performed on 
i December, again in the Lecture Theatre at Burlington 
Gardens, before the young girls who were studying the poem for 
the Local . During the first hour or so, they desperately 
tried to follow the proceedings from their text-books. This 
was not easy, since the adapting dramatist had arranged his 
material to meet the minimum requirements of the stage. 
Between the second and third acts the girls were taken off 
by their governesses in search of tea. They wandered through 
circuitous stone passages, illuminated by a single flickering 
gas jet, and some of the more persevering at last reached the 
refreshment room. We are not told what they found when 



l6o WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

they got there. Those who had the courage to return enjoyed 
a magic lantern display between Acts III and IV, which 
illustrated the scenes and characters of the play. Their 
reactions to the performance seem to have been typically 
juvenile. They laughed loudly in the wrong places, and 
particularly at the costume affected by the gentlemen of the 
Society, which reminded them of their own hoisted skirts when 
they were paddling at the seaside. 

The adapter had done his best to give a coherent dramatic 
shape to what was then a very popular poem; but Scott s 
octosyllabic jingle defeated all attempts to relieve its monotony 
by emphasis on the key words. 



CHAPTER V 

Everyman and Euripides 

IN 1901 Poel suffered a great loss in the death of his mother. 
He had always been a devoted son and he spent nine days 
and nights of growing anxiety and dwindling hope at her 
bedside. Her death preyed upon his mind and dictated the 
choice of his next production. He consulted Dr. Ward, who 
had helped him with Faustus, and Ward replied "Do Everyman." 
Poel read the play, which deeply affected him, and discussed 
its dramatic possibilities. The story of Everyman was to be 
found in the romance of Barbaam and Jehoshaphat, ascribed 
to John of Damascus, Patriarch of Antioch, who died in 1090. 
It reappeared in a Dutch version, Elckerlijk, probably the work 
of a priest, in the fifteenth century, and a Latin translation 
of this, entitled Homulus y was published in 1536. The English 
version had been reprinted three times in the sixteenth century 
and had later been included in Hawkins English Drama. 
The text used by Poel was taken from the manuscript in the 
library of Lincoln Cathedral. 

Having rediscovered the old morality, he wished to present 
it in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey, but the Dean and 
Chapter refused their permission for this. Then he wrote to 
Dean Farrar at Canterbury. The author of Eric, or Little by 
Little agreed to his request but was overruled by his Chapter. 
Eventually it was arranged to present the play on three 
successive Saturdays in July 1901 in the Master s Court of the 
Charterhouse. These surroundings had a powerful effect 

The old quadrangle, grey and prayerful, the sundial to 
which the sun gave a holiday as if to let it look on its old 
acquaintance in peace, the thin and fervent tones of a neigh 
bouring clock not so pledged to the pageant, yet concurring 
in its general purport, the Sittings to and fro of sparrows of 
old the authorised remembrances of a heavenly care made 
a setting that it is not in the power of man to repeat (The 
Morning Post; 10 March 19012). 

Poel found himself famous overnight. The performance 
6 *6i 



1 62 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

was repeated in August 1901 in the quadrangle of University 
College, Oxford, before a packed audience and in the following 
May (1902) at St. George s Hall. This and all subsequent 
performances were given in partnership with Philip Ben Greet. 
The play ran for, a month at the Imperial Theatre, London, 
in July 1902 and was taken to many important provincial 
cities in England and also to Dublin and Edinburgh.. Every 
where it was received with the same hushed enthusiasm, and 
everywhere except in Dublin it drew large audiences. 

It was probably never so effective as in its original setting, 
or one like it, but Montague s review indicated its power to 
transform the customary associations of the Free Trade Hall, 
Manchester. 

It was presented with what seemed to us amazing in 
genuity, judgment and care. We are not prepared to define 
the medieval spirit, but the performance had not lasted 
five minutes before one felt that the mind was being adroitly 
filled with reminiscences of everything that before had brought 
it nearest to late mediaeval ways of looking at life and death. 
Mainly, it must be confessed, they were Italian reminiscences, 
not English. The "Messenger" who spoke the prologue was a 
study in the ascetic s wax-like anticipation, in living flesh, 
of that fine austerity of death which is fully expressed in art 
nowhere but on the sculptured tombs on the floor of the 
Florentine church of Santa Groce; the decoration of the 
canopied recess from which God spoke the opening lines was a 
typical landscape background of Bellini, with topped trees 
and a distance of mountains; the angel sitting on the steps was 
in every detail, if we remember rightly, the angel of Botticelli s 
"Tobit"; Everyman in his grave clothes came straight from 
the "Last Judgment" of Orcagna, where the grave is giving 
up its dead ; the figure of Confession was, to the life, one of the 
blithe angelic monks who look so like happy, serious, pretty 
and good children, with tonsures, on the tombs sculptured by 
Mino da Fiesole. All very much out of place, a captious 
spectator might say, in a reproduction of an English play 
ascribed by some to the early fifteenth century, and placed 
later than the end of the fifteenth century by no good authority. 
In a narrow sense that may be true, but not in a sense that is 
more important. Most Englishmen whose imaginations have 
conceived in the slightest the frame of mind most characteristic 
of the Middle Ages have got at it through Italy at Florence, 
Assisi, and Venice and an anachronism or a dozen anachron 
isms are nothing so long as you are helped to make the nearest 



EVERYMAN AND EURIPIDES 163 

approach which your ignorance renders possible to the right 
mood for listening to the play. 

Another thing that was beyond praise in the performance 
was the severe seriousness and simplicity of method which 
the whole company achieved. We have never seen actors 
grimace less, or stand so still. This simplicity and reticence 
never lapsed into insipidity or lifelessness. It nearly always 
gave the right tragic effect of outward expression purged and 
refined down to its pure essentials by the stress of intense 
feeling. The set and immobile face, level delivery, and almost 
unchanged position of Death were curiously effective in 
enhancing the solemnity of his first message to Everyman; 
they affected you like so many symbols of an inexorable fixity 
in the sentence. There was the same excellent discretion in 
the gait of Death when he did walk or run. A little more would 
have made it ridiculous. As it was, it was unexpected and 
disquieting. About the wisdom of the extent to which the 
dialogue was intoned we are not quite sure. Much of it 
undoubtedly was extremely effective; but in one case, that of 
Good Deeds, there was a rather overdone plaintiveness, and 
the words of a few of the speeches were not clearly audible. 
There can be no such doubts about the stage management, 
which was masterly; nothing could have been better arranged 
to give the effect intended than the half-heard Mass behind 
the scenes, and the ingenious naivete no mere affectation or 
infanticism of the burial of Everyman and of the ensconcing 
of Goods behind a curtain was admirably conceived, as was 
everything in the scenery, the dresses, and all the accessories 
(Manchester Guardian; i November 1902).* 

Some critics (but not Montague) objected to Everyman 
being played by a woman. No one, however, denied the beauty 
of May Douglas Reynolds s performance, or that of Edith 
Wynne Matthison when she took over the part. The opening 
passages of the play were read at the Poel Centenary Matinee 
in 1952, and here Everyman was taken by Margaret Halstan 
with Robert Atkins as the Messenger, Russell Thorndike as 
Death, and Lewis Gasson as Adonai. The effect of the single 
woman s voice against the massed brass, so to speak, of the 
three men was certainly impressive. Miss Matthison main 
tained that it was this musical effect at which Poel was aiming. 
"At the entrance of Everyman/ she relates, "he wanted him 
to be light and gay and unreflective until the very moment 

* The substance of this notice was reprinted in Montague s Dramatic Values 
PP- 233-37: 1911. 



164 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

when Death strikes him to the heart. Another wonderful 
suggestion was concerning Everyman s great prayer at the 
crisis of the play. Most directors would suggest a gradual 
working up to an emotional climax, but he told me to start 
the speech at the highest point of feeling and go on from 
there" (Letter to Alan Edmiston: 26 June 1951). 

Adonai was played by Poel himself as an elderly man with 
a curling grey beard, and Death carried no scythe but had a 
drum and a trumpet. He was made up to look like a skeleton 
and spoke with a strong Scots accent. This conception was 
varied for a single performance at the Ethical Church, Bays- 
water, when he was draped in grey, after Watts picture 
"Love and Death," and Adonai was heard but not seen. 
When Martin Harvey produced the play he adopted this 
emasculation of Poel s original idea. The effect of that idea, 
as it was first realised, is conveyed by some verses by Ernest 
Marriott,* contributed to Poel s fifteenth "Monthly Letter" 
in September 1916. It is sub-titled "in memory of Mr. 
William Poel s production of Everyman in October 1902." 

" Scritch, scritch, scratch, scritch, 
In the distance that quick sinister noise. 

Then, near at hand, 
Scritch, scritch the sound 

Of skeleton feet 
Fleet, horribly fleet, 

As if on parched ground 
Running; 

And then, suddenly, Death scattering drily, 
His wryneck all be-ruffed with fur 

Against the cold; 
His velvet cap, monstrous small, perked 

With a side-tilt on clean-picked skull, 
And one long, ridiculous, draggled feather, 

A- top of it a-joggeting as he runs . . . 
. . . O horrid scraping Form of Fate 

Each bare old bone articulate 
Of channel cold. 

. . . How the grisly ghostly figure 
Grides and scrattens on the bare boards 

Of the Morality. 5 

* Ernest Marriott (b. 1882, d. 1918) was an artist and author who studied under 
Walter Crane, a keen supporter of Poel 3 at the Manchester Municipal School of 
Art and was later assistant to Gordon Craig at the School for the Art of the 
Theatre in Florence. 



EVERYMAN AND EURIPIDES 165 

As a crow, gliding to earth, takes, 

Just as it settles, 
A solemn swirl or turn, 

So Death, on creaking joints 
Swoops round 

To a full stop- 
He raises his tall trumpet 

That tapers like a metal lily slender 
And from its pallid throat 

Flows out a rare thin note, 
Rare and high 

Shrill-sweet, yet piercing tender . . . 
.... Higher and yet higher 

The sweet, pale, fierce sound flows 
Until it seems to stretch 

Like a tense silver wire 
From stage to sky." 

Everyman was the only one of PoePs productions to make 
money. It attracted a public which would never have been 
touched by his Elizabethan revivals. He received 1000 in 
royalties from America and sold the American rights for 500. 
In the autumn of 1903 Ben Greet and Charles Frohman sent it 
out on two extensive tours of the eastern and western states. 
The religious communities supported it, and those who have 
since admired the Salzburg Jedermann may like to know that 
Max Reinhardt was among the audience at the Charterhouse. 
It was unquestionably one of the most beautiful and original 
productions that have been staged in England during the 
present century. It brought back the mediaeval drama into 
limited circulation, so that we can trace a whole cycle of 
public taste from the rediscovery of Everyman by Poel in 1901 
to the revival of the York Mystery plays by Martin Browne 
fifty years later. 

Yet there was a subtle and disquieting irony for Poel in 
this popular success of Everyman. It was not only that he had 
set out to popularise the Elizabethans by methods which were 
anything but popular, and that, in the event, he had brought 
the ages of Chaucer and Milton, not the age of Shakespeare, 
back to life. It was rather that his own deepest convictions 
were disturbed by the play whose success he had assured. 
"I hated the play," wrote Gordon Craig to him, "because it 
was so against all I believe, but people loved it and it was 



1 66 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

mighty powerful" (Letter undated}. It was against much that 
Poel believed also. He was to express his mind to Harold 
Begbie in an interview for The Daily Chronicle many years 
later (3 September 1913). 

I do not believe in the future of religious plays. I have come 
to see that their tendency is dangerous. Religion can never 
be acted. It is too real and personal a thing. It is too precious, 
too sacred. A player may act another man s ambition, cupidity, 
passion or what you will, but he cannot act another man s 
religion. An acted religion is of all insincere and odious 
things the most insincere, the most odious. And the tendency 
of such plays is towards sentimentalism and claptrap, which 
are blasphemous in conjunction with religion. Since the 
first production of Everyman there have been many religious 
plays, and all of them, I think, have been hateful and false. 
I did not myself produce Everyman as a religious play. As a 
religious play, it is bad. Its theology is indefensible. One 
can very easily tear it to pieces in that respect. But the whole 
story, Eastern and not Catholic in its origin, is beautiful as a 
piece of art; it offers a hundred opportunities from the point 
of view of beauty, and it leaves an impression that is fine 
and chaste. I rejoiced to find it, I have loved producing it 
but I am now moving away from it. 

In fact, Poel parted with the good- will of the production to 
Ben Greet and disposed of its costumes and properties : and 
in 1922 he declined an invitation from Miss Baylis to produce 
the play at the Old Vic. 

Poel s dilemma was the dilemma of a man who was naturally 
both radical and religious, coming to maturity in the heyday 
of rationalism. He distrusted the alliance between the Church 
and the stage, on the grounds that the frame of mind of an 
audience is very different from that of a congregation. The 
audience comes to criticise, to discuss, and to applaud; the 
congregation comes to listen and to obey. The stage could 
edify, to be sure, but it might well do so in a sense opposed to 
the teachings of orthodoxy. Unless the functions of each were 
kept carefully distinct, the stage might come to think it was its 
business to preach and the Church that it was its business to 
entertain. And this confusion of functions might lead to the 
censorship of the theatre by the Church. Such a censorship 
exists in Ireland today, although it is nominally exercised by 
a lay-appointed body. Its decisions have resulted in the 



EVERYMAN AND EURIPIDES 167 

prohibition of much serious and important literature and have 
brought the Catholic Church into contempt among men of 
intelligence and good-will. Poel was writing before the 
foundation of the Irish Free State, but the experience of the 
Irish censorship has justified all his fears. 

His anticlericalism, however, went deeper than this. He 
was a man of overpowering energy and will, and what he ob 
jected to in the religious attitude was a certain shiftless passivity. 
He was not impressed by the piety, still less by the super 
stitions, of the ignorant and the poor. He would go at least 
half-way with Marx in maintaining that religion was the 
opium of the people, and that it derived from economic 
causes which it was the business of the theatre to point out, and 
the business of politics to remove. His spirituality was severely 
ethical, and although there was much that he adhered to in 
the teachings of Christ and St. Francis, he held that these had 
been muddled by theology and sterilised by sacerdotalism. It 
was natural that the brunt of his prejudice should have fallen 
on the Catholic Church. He protested vigorously against the 
modifications in the King s oath, when George V ascended 
the throne. "Read in conjunction with the old Declaration 
and as a successor to it," he wrote in The New Age, 21 July 
1910, "the new form means in effect, that the King is to say 
that though he believes as a Protestant that twelve million of 
his subjects are taught erroneous doctrines he dare not say so." 
Protestantism, he argued, had but one object, and "that was to 
dethrone Catholicism, the one religion that had been man s 
life-long foe, because it was a religion not intended to establish 
citizenship, but to destroy it." 

From this point of view he never wavered, although his 
Protestantism was mainly negative. For a time, at least, he 
became a vocal rationalist, pleading for the abolition of the 
Christian calendar, and for the initiation of the Year One in 
1918. "It has now become an absurdity," he wrote to Mr. 
George Sharman, 30 August 1919, "to talk about one man 
having died to save the world, since five million men have 
laid down their lives for that purpose." There is a note of 
crankiness in all this, which should not lead us to disparage 
PoePs sincerity. And for all his hatred of clerical complacency, 
his attitude to life remained a profoundly religious one. "I 



1 68 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

hope you say your prayers, Willie ?" his wife remarked to him 
once. "I am always praying/ he replied simply. 



II 

Essentially Poel was a prophet as well as a pioneer, and it 
was the prophet, and even the preacher, that he admired in 
Milton, or, on an inferior plane, in Bernard Shaw. His mind 
craved for a message which would match his own intuitions of 
reality; a message quite free from the formulas of the Christian 
creed. It was at this point of emancipation that Euripides 
came to his rescue. 

Poel did not know Greek and therefore his acquaintance 
with the classics was confined to more or less inadequate 
translations. He had, however, read the versions of Euripides 
made by Professor Gilbert Murray, although he found them, 
with the exception of the Hippolytus, deficient in dramatic 
power. He had seen the Medea produced by Barker at the 
Savoy, and thought it "the most appallingly dull performance" 
he had ever sat through. "It drove you out of the place in 
despair! There was no life or variety or emotion in the voices 
to give the thing a lift anywhere. It was nothing but whining 
all the way through" (Letter to Professor A. W. Gomme; 8 January 
1909). In 1908 Lillah McCarthy, who was then married to 
Granville-Barker, invited him to produce the Baccha in 
Murray s translation for two special matinees at the Court. 
Barker was away on tour and could not, therefore, take on 
the production himself. The play had not the human appeal 
of The Trojan Women or the Medea, but its interest for a modern 
audience was suggested in a letter written by Gilbert Murray 
to Lillah McCarthy on 10 October 1908: 

Try to imagine what the story of some persecuted Christian 
saint or missionary would be, if it were continued into the next 
world and we saw the persecutors in a mediaeval hall being 
torn by devils with red-hot pincers while the saint, with a 
seraphic smile, stood by saying :"I told you so." Think even 
of the Crucifixion story as treated with Pontius Pilate in hell 
suffering ghastly tortures while Jesus stood by making com 
ments. That gives one almost exactly the point of the Baccha. 
It is exactly the criticism that Euripides would have made on 
an ordinary mediaeval mystery play. "You say that bias- 



EVERYMAN AND EURIPIDES 1 69 

phemous people suffer in hell? Very well, I represent them 
doing so: now see if you admire your God who has made a hell. 
Pentheus is a tyrant and a persecutor, Dionysus a holy and 
sanctified being; but when this holy being has his will, his full 
revenge, he seems infinitely worse than his persecutor (Myself 
and my Friends; p. 293-4). 

This was certainly the criticism that Poel would have made 
of Everyman, although Everyman is saved from hell. It 
was the doctrine of eternal punishment, without which the 
Christian theology of salvation is meaningless, that his mind 
would always have abhorred. In fact, his point of view was 
very similar to Murray s. 

Euripides [he wrote to Professor Gomme 8 January 1909] 
seems to me to have been much like Marlowe. A man who 
thought that all religions evolved from the inner consciousness 
of mankind, and that we make our gods into petty tyrants 
to scourge and mock us quite unnecessarily. Like Marlowe, 
too, his contemporaries and especially the common folk could 
not understand his subtle irony and resented his levity. But 
Euripides face seems to tell me, in his bust, that he is a great 
thinker, like Browning was, and that Aeschylus and Sophocles 
had nothing like the same powers of observation or originality 
of thought. And once accept Euripides* point of view and 
he is a great teacher besides. He is not a pessimist to the 
same extent that Tolstoy is. The Baccha to me means nothing 
more or less than this: Euripides 5 satire on the absurdity of 
the notion that a person who is worshipped for his beauty and 
his gentleness and his humility shall be called a god, who at 
the same time is so cruel and relentless that he can bring about 
the death of a youth by the hands of his own mother as a 
punishment to this youth for not believing in the divinity 
of this god. The play to me is either a satire or it is nothing. 
To believe, as some do, that it is old Euripides repenting of 
the heresies of his earlier days seems to me absurd. He would 
not have chosen so revolting a story to propitiate the gods 
unless he was laughing at them while he wrote it. Of course 
the extraordinary part of the play is the parallelism of the 
scenes with some of the incidents in Christ s life. If the play 
had been written [in] A.D. 400 a spectator of the play would 
have been bound to notice the similarity. 

Having read the play. Pod expressed himself as "very 
struck with its stage possibilities/ but stipulated that he must 
have a "free hand" in its production. He therefore accom 
panied Lilian McCarthy to Oxford and spent the better part 
6* 



I7O WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

of a day explaining to Gilbert Murray how he wished to treat 
the play and where he intended to strengthen its construction. 
He argued that Euripides, like Shaw, had often spoiled his 
effects by anti-climaxes which were irritating to a modern 
audience. He believed, but did not say, that Murray s trans 
lation was "particularly bad and undramatic," and stated 
quite frankly "that if I were Murray and Murray Poel, and 
Murray proposed taking the liberties with my translations 
that Poel does, then I should tell Poel that I will see him 
damned before I would give him permission" (Letter to Professor 
Gomme; 8 January 1909). After this Poel returned to London 
thinking that they had all heard the last of the Bacchce. To 
his great surprise, however, a letter arrived from Murray the 
next morning, giving him the liberty he had asked for. 

The play was rehearsed in a fortnight. The Chorus was 
taken by four women, two sitting at the sides of the proscenium 
arch facing inwards, two facing outwards on either side of the 
flight of steps. These ladies were dressed in lavender 
muslin and each carried a thyrsus. It was intended that they 
should remain in these positions throughout the play and then 
make a dignified exit. One of them, however (Mrs. Ernest 
Thesiger) reminded Poel that they "could only hope to be able 
to crawl off, using the thyrsus as a crutch, after sitting for 
several hours in one position, and so we got leave at a given 
cue to turn and face in the opposite direction for one act, and 
then, for the last, to resume our first position. We hobbled 
off creaking, even so" (Stratford Dossier). It was not in PoePs 
nature, once he was launched on a production, to set any 
limits to the powers of human endurance. 

The choruses were muttered, moaned, chanted and occasion 
ally spoken, sometimes by one or two voices and sometimes in 
unison. "If any one of us lapsed," Mrs. Thesiger recalls, 
"he stopped us and said c No, no, I must have my TREMULO. " 
Poel himself conducted them from the orchestra pit. So 
placed, he could gauge the effect of the performance as a 
whole, which he summarised as follows: "As a production in 
costume .and background, it was a thing of beauty. For two 
hours it kept the house spellbound. But unfortunately, owing 
to the abominable acoustics of the place, the quiet passages 
were not heard beyond the stalls" (Letter to Professor Gomme}. 



EVERYMAN AND EURIPIDES 

His rapture was not shared by Max Beerbohm, who pointed 
out that Greek tragedy demanded above all things light and 
space and air: it was ill at ease in any modern playhouse, but 
if it were going to be produced at all, it should have been 
given in the largest and not the smallest theatre in London. 
Poel had made matters worse by shrouding the stage in purple 
hangings which gave it "the appearance of a chapelle ardente 
without candles." The effect of this confinement on the 
Chorus was described by Max as follows: 

In the middle of the stage, as set, there was just room for 
three young ladies to revolve, by dint of taking great care and 
keeping very close together. And these were the wild maidens 
of Dionysus retinue maidens filled with a mystic ecstasy 
that causes them to rush headlong down pine-clad slopes and 
tear fauns and such-like creatures limb from limb in honour 
of their inspiring master. And to add to the discomfort of 
their effect, the front of the stage was occupied by four other 
cramped young ladies, immobile in attitudes of the deepest 
dejection, and looking like nothing so much as drawings by 
some not at all gifted imitator of Simeon Solomon. These, 
too, were Maenads and were singing songs of the wildest 
lyric passion. Singing? It was not that. I hardly know what 
it was. Imagine a sound midway between the howling of 
dogs locked out in a yard by night and the intoning of the 
Commination Service by curates with very bad colds in the 
head, and you will have some notion of the noises made by 
these Maenads. ... I possess a book of the words. Few of 
these words could be distinguished: I was conscious only of 
the dismal, penitential, intolerable drone (The Saturday Review; 
14 November 1908). 

The only thing Max admired was Lilian McCarthy as 
Dionysus, because she was dignified where the others were 
Lugubrious, and because she was the "only one to whom her 
part was a living thing, and not just a difficult and depressing 
experiment." She conveyed a sense of the supernatural, and 
spoke the verse with a beautiful precision. The scene which 
especially excited Max s wrath was the scene of frenzy where 
Agave enters, imagining that the head she bears in her arms 
is the head of a lion slain to the glory of the god. Poel pre- 
jented a young lady "clad in a grass-green dress that strikes 
the most fearsome discord against the purple curtains, executing 
i very tame little skirt-dance and twittering her triumph, 



172 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

while she timidly waggles in the air the head of a white 
plaster cast from the antique." These may have been the 
intentions of satire, but the author ofSavanarola Brown was not 
amused. 

Murray felt strongly the mystical element in the Baccha, 
which Poel had rationalised away into a light and cheerful 
satire. The two men had not only imagined but had heard 
the play differently. There was one particular chorus where 
Murray had taken great pains to keep the original rhythm. 
It runs as follows : 

For his kingdom it is th6re 
In the ddncing and the prdyer 
In the mrisic and the Idughter . . . 

Here the natural stress reinforced the meaning. But for some 
reason Poel made it trip along to a pointless jingle, which 
exasperated the translator. He made it run like this : 

F6r his kingdom it is there 
In the dancing dnd the prayer 
In the music dnd the laughter . . . 

The second performance went better than the first and on 
each occasion the house was crammed. It was intended to 
give four more matinees, but, according to Poel (Letter to Pro 
fessor Gomme: above) these were vetoed by Gilbert Murray, 
who did not approve of the way he had treated the play. 
Murray s attitude was hotly resented by Poel. He claimed 
that Murray had attended the rehearsals and only made his 
objections known when the success of the play was assured 
and there was a question of it being revived by Tree at His 
Majesty s with scenery by Gordon Craig (Letter to Professor 
Gomme: above). Apart from a rather drastic abridgement of 
the Choruses, Poel had respected the text, and the disagree 
ment between the two men was essentially the difference 
between a theatrical and a literary or philosophical approach. 
Murray thought that Euripides should be left to speak for 
himself; Poel wanted to speak for him. He thought that 
Murray had accentuated "all Euripides weaknesses" and 
gloried in them, as Shaw gloried "in some of his unnecessary 



EVERYMAN AND EURIPIDES 173 

digressions." He maintained that neither Shaw, Euripides 
nor Murray cared "a scrap for the art of the theatre as an art 
for compelling and sustaining attention by arousing human 
emotions which, when once aroused, resent the introduction 
of superfluous conversation which is not in harmony with the 
emotions that have been aroused" (Letter to Professor Gomme; 
above). Even in Shakespeare Poel had no scruples about 
discarding as "superfluous conversation" the most subtle or 
sublime poetry on the ground that no one would listen to 
it. He did not seem to ask himself what was the point in 
going back to Elizabethan conditions of performance, if he 
could not persuade his audience to listen as an Elizabethan 
audience listened, at the same time as he persuaded his actors 
to speak as an Elizabethan actor spoke. 



Ill 

There was a difference, nevertheless, between PoePs approach 
to Elizabethan and Euripidean tragedy. He did not pretend to 
discover a gospel in Shakespeare; there was no party line to be 
traced in The Duchess of Malfi, and the satire of The Alchemist 
was compatible with any theology or none. Only the voice 
of Marlowe, solitary and sometimes shrill, echoed the ancient 
protest against the Gods. Poel s work on the Elizabethans was 
a work of technical reconstruction, interesting and debatable 
always, pursued with a scholarship which was disinterested 
but rarely quite dispassionate. In the case of Euripides he 
was not interested in recovering a classical mode of presenta 
tion. He never made a profound study of the Attic stage. 
It was the thinker in Euripides, not the dramatist or the poet, 
whom he now wanted to reveal. 

The success of the Baccha encouraged him to further experi 
ment and in February 1909 he began a long correspondence 
with Professor A. W. Gomme, who was then a post-graduate 
student of Trinity, Cambridge, and later became Professor of 
Greek at Glasgow University. Poel s interest had been 
stimulated by the publication of VerralFs book on Euripides, 
which he found "altogether free from sentimentality." He 
was not insensitive to the grandeur of the other Greek drama- 



174 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

tists; he even wanted to believe that "Aeschylus the idealist 
was the best man, but in these immoral days when all our gods 
get shattered one after another, it is some comfort to know 
that the same thing took place in Greece so long ago" (13 Feb 
ruary 1 909) . The more he studied VerralPs work on Euripides, 
the more sure he became that 

Euripides was a greater thinker than Aeschylus or Sophocles 
in the same way that Browning was greater than Tennyson. 
Socrates and Euripides I think are the two most truthful and 
profound students and interpreters of human motive and con 
duct the world has ever produced. In my belief a society 
should be formed for reviving Euripides plays in English on 
the lines explained by Dr. Verrall. It would be an ethical 
education of some value now that the fallacies of our own re 
ligions are being seriously questioned. I have a longing to 
produce the Alcestis and to stage-manage the play so as to 
accentuate the absurdity of the girl s return to life being taken 
seriously as a miracle in a way that Dr. Verrall contends 
Euripides never intended. Our Ethical Societies ought to 
form a Dramatic Society for the propagation of Ethics through 
Drama, and Euripides should be their chief asset. English 
stage versions should be arranged so as to illustrate Euripides 
ethical views without wearying the attention of the audience 
with the presentation of those parts of the play which Dr. 
Verrall contends were merely inserted by Euripides so as to 
conform to the stage conventions of the theatre of his time 
(25 November 1909). 

Poel turned his back upon Gilbert Murray s translations, 
for Murray, he knew and admitted, would never sanction the 
liberties he proposed to take; the "omission of everything 
extraneous to the plot of the story as Euripides wished us to 
understand it/ This suggestion was too radical even for so 
tried a friend and ally as Professor Gomme. He replied to 
Poel, demurring at what classical scholars would say to so 
drastic a mutilation of the text. Poel was unconvinced. 

If Euripides, like Shakespeare, had lived 300 years ago, 
you could insist that those who wish to understand his writings 
should take the trouble to become familiar with the times in 
which he wrote and the theatre for which he wrote. But you 
can t call upon playgoers to become familiar with an age that 
existed 500 years before the Christian era. To make Euripides 
alive today what is wanted is to show the modern rationalist 



EVERYMAN AND EURIPIDES 175 

that Euripides is the great model for all those who today want 
to show the immorality and irreligion of the Christian religion 
as it is used by the Church for her own interests today. . . . 
This I contend can only be accomplished by removing every 
thing from the play that does not directly bear upon the 
intention. . . . What Greek scholars personally would think 
of any liberties we took with the text is not to the point. The 
scholar cannot monopolise what is vital in a man s work and 
never will. It is the business of life to make the great thoughts 
and teachings of a great mind understanded of the people 
(9 December 1909). 

This last sentence which I have already quoted as an 
epigraph to this book, is the justification of all Poel s endeavour. 
However controversial his methods may have been, this was 
the plea that he would always adduce in their defence. Very 
often, in my submission, it was a specious, an invalid defence. 
Very often it involved him in flagrant contradictions of prin 
ciple. But although it was opportunist, it was not for that 
reason insincere. 

Everything now turned on finding an actable translation 
of the Alcestis, and Professor Gomme started work on a version 
in prose. Poel was anxious that Alcestis herself should appear 
hysterical rather than heroic. He came up to Cambridge to 
see his nephew Reginald play Richard II for the Marlowe 
Society in February 1910. The Marlowe had recently been 
founded by Rupert Brooke, and its productions were in 
fluenced from the first by Poel s ideas. He profited from his 
visit to meet Verrall and to have further talks with Gomme. 
The following week he saw the Alcestis acted in London by 
amateurs in a version by Dr. Warre-Cornish, the Vice- Provost 
of Eton. The production seems to have had a satiric intention. 
The Alcestis and Heracles scenes were taken seriously, but the 
scene between the father and son "soon created considerable 
merriment and it became really impossible to take anything 
seriously afterwards, but this was not what the performers 
intended. The end was unconvincing because of course the 
audience were . . . instinctively sceptical about the coming 
back to life" (21 February 1910). 

What interested Poel were the liberties Warre-Cornish 
had taken with the text the boy s speech at the death of the 
mother was spoken by the father instead and the fact that 



176 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

much of the translation, though it was spoken prosaically, 
seemed to be in verse. Poel came to the conclusion that without 
tampering with Euripides text, it would still be possible to 
treat the play throughout as an amusing satire. And for this 
purpose he felt that a rhymed version, reminiscent of Moliere 
or Pope, would be best. He asked Gomme, therefore, whether 
there was any student at Trinity capable of turning his prose 
version into rhymed verse. 

This was the solution finally adopted; a translation was 
made by Francis Hubback, a fellow-student of Gomme s at 
Trinity. Hubback was a brilliant Greek scholar who was 
subsequently killed in the first World War. How this trans 
lation worked out can be seen by comparing the literal and 
the rhymed versions. Here is Death s opening speech: 

Ha! Why are you here! Why do you haunt these halls, 
Apollo ? You are wronging me again, confining and checking 
the honours of the dead. Are you not content to save Admetus 
from his doom, deceiving the Fates with your crafty lies ? Are 
you going to guard her, too, with your bow in your hand the 
daughter of Pelias who promised to save her lord by her own 
death ? (Gomme) 

What are you doing? Why do you remain 

Here by this house? Ah! would you again 

Baulk the Infernals of honour that s due ? 

Was it not amply sufficient for you 

Your tricks to be trying 

In stopping the death of Admetus, frustrating 

And cheating the Fates, that you now must be waiting 

Ready on guard with your bow in your hand 

To shield her who freely consented to stand 

For her husband and save him by dying? (Hubback) 

The difficulties of translation were acutely analysed by Poel 
in a further letter to Gomme. There was a difference, he said, 
between a translation and dramatisation of Euripides. 

In the latter case the dramatist abandons textual accuracy 
for clearness, knowing that it is more important to interpret 
the spirit of the poet s ideas and dramatic intentions than to 
correctly reproduce the verbal phraseology; and that you 
must take it for granted that many people among the audience 
(the women for instance) must be considered in the light of 
having no previous knowledge of Greek history. Another 



EVERYMAN AND EURIPIDES 177 

matter of great difficulty, when one is thinking too much about 
verbal accuracy, is characterisation. Death talks a little too 
much like Apollo and uses the same kind of words and sen 
tences. He should talk more like the Death in Everyman, 
even if Euripides himself does not make him do so in as marked 
a contrast (21 October 1910). 

Through this exchange of views with a fine scholar Poel 
came to see that Euripides knew his business, and that the 
reason why the amateur production of the play in London had 
fallen comparatively flat was that all the lines which seemed 
most likely to get laughs had been omitted. He came also 
to see that although the play was satirical, it was subtly so; 
that because Alcestis was not heroic, she need not therefore 
be hysterical; that she was just an ordinary woman, a martyr 
malgre elle* 

What I mean about Alcestis 3 unwillingness is this. When 
a husband tells his wife to black his boots, she does so; but it 
can hardly be said that she does so willingly. When there is 
a tussle between the sexes, the woman generally expects to 
have to give way. Admetus never says to his wife "You 
shan t die for me," and as the woman thinks her husband 
expects it of her, she does it, but if there was any way of getting 
out, she would only be too glad to escape (Ibid.) f 

The play was at last produced on the Grand Staircase of 
London University in December 1911. Esme Percy played 
Admetus and Lucy Wilson Alcestis. It was not easy in practice 
to balance the component elements of the play. Those who 
were glad that the Chorus was not treated in the conventional 
way in the way, *that is, that middle-class English ladies 
imagine that a Greek chorus behaved still felt that the play 
would have been more impressive, if it had been acted as it 
was acted in 400 B.C. Those who read their Euripides in the 
way that Poel read him complained that the burial should 
have been a much more hurried affair. To this Poel replied 
that, even with the excision of several lyrics, he could not 
bury Alcestis faster than Euripides text would let him. It was 
also very difficult to suggest, simultaneously, the idea that 
Alcestis does not die and the idea that the superstitious might 
have believed a miracle to have taken place. In general, 
Poel was satisfied that the "gentle and acid" quality of the 
original had been conveyed. The production was revived at 



178 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

the Little Theatre in the following January and again 
in April 1914, under the auspices of the Religious Drama 
Society, at the Ethical Church, Bayswater. This building, 
with its slightly raised tiers of seats round a semi-circular floor, 
was excellently suited to the performance of Greek tragedy, 
and Poel s beautiful groupings stood out with particular 
effect against the bare background. But the production was 
spoiled by the Admetus. Esme Percy was not available and 
Poel had put a woman in the part. Whatever excuse he might 
have had at other times for indulging this perversity, he had 
none here. "In Admetus," argued the critic of The New 
Weekly, "Euripides offers us a study in masculine egoism 
incarnate his lack of personal touch, his impervious tone, his 
note of aggressive self-complacency, all are designed to make 
the audience open their eyes and cry c Oh, what a man! " 
By putting a woman in his place, Poel had destroyed the con 
trast of the play. 

At the Little Theatre the production was marred by another 
minor eccentricity. What was the point of Poel stationing 
himself at the head of a long flight of steps in the costume of a 
Roman Centurion, and remaining there, immobile, throughout 
the performance, with everything except his long and hirsute 
legs cut off from sight by the borders ? Was it that he could 
not afford a super? But why, in any case, should a Roman 
centurion mount guard over a Greek tragedy? 

This was the last time that Poel was to produce a Greek 
play. He may have felt that Euripides 5 message, for all its 
seeming immediacy, was too remote in expression to be 
"understanded of the people" ? 



CHAPTER VI 

Macbeth and Troilus 

WE must now pick up the sequence of the Elizabethan 
Stage Society productions in the years that followed 
the success of Everyman. On 10 August 1903 Marlowe s 
Edward II was produced for the first time, it was believed, 
since the author s death at the New Theatre, Oxford, for the 
University Extension Delegacy. Granville-Barker played the 
leading part. His performance was subtle, scholarly and 
sensitive, though inaudible in the final scenes. A fully Eliza 
bethan production was not possible at the New Theatre; so 
Poel replaced his balcony by a raised platform which could be 
screened off, when required, from the forestage. The text 
was treated with reasonable respect, although the current 
conventions of propriety robbed Gaveston of the last ten lines 
of his great speech: "I must have wanton poets, pleasant 
wits." In fact the play s homosexual theme seems to have been 
considerably softened. In a correspondence with Sir Adolphus 
Ward, Poel had written that "Gaveston ought to be made a 
quite delightful stage character of sublime impudence and 
attractive likeness," but the effect in performance was purely 
comic and this reduced the force of Isabella s protests. The 
murder of the King was splendidly contrived. As Edward 
fell asleep, Lightborn worked his way round to the back of 
the bench and seated himself by the King s head. Presently 
he awoke, and while he was speaking the lines 

Something still buzzeth in mine ears, 

And tells me if I sleep I never wake; 

This fear is that which makes me tremble thus; 

And therefore tell me, wherefore art thou come? 

Lightborn s right hand came up slowly behind him, and on the 
reply "To rid thee of thy life," closed over his head, touching 
the spot between the brows which hypnotists touch in order to 
produce rigidity. Edward became petrified, as if he were 
now in a cataleptic state, and the eyeballs rolled upward 

179 



l8o WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

showing the whites of the eyes in a ghastly stare. The traverse 
curtains closed and a wild prolonged shriek was heard from 
behind them. Then Matrevis and Gurney entered from in 
front with Lightborn drawing on his gloves a macabre, 
imaginative touch. A moment later he was stabbed by his 
two accomplices. 

When the head of Young Mortimer was brought to the new 
King as he was following his father s funeral, he seized it, 
stopped the procession, knelt, and held it forth as an oblation 
to the coffin. On the words "I offer up this wicked traitor s 
head," he threw it from him in disgust and it was caught by 
Leicester. Poel had the great producer s genius for keeping 
his stage tinglingly alive. 

In February and March of the following year (1904), he 
gave performances of Much Ado About Nothing throughout the 
London suburbs, at the invitation of the London School 
Board, and the production was seen later at the Lecture 
Theatre, Burlington Gardens and at the Court Theatre, 
Sloane Square. Lewis Casson played the part of Don Pedro, 
and Nugent Monck, who was now stage-managing regularly 
for Poel, was also in the cast. He played Giovanni in a revival 
of Poel s own play, The First Franciscans, at St. George s Hall 
in April 1905. Here Dorothy Minto made her first appearance 
with the Society as a peasant girl, and Poel chose her to play 
Juliet in the production of Romeo and Juliet that he was planning 
for the following month. 

This was the last production of the Elizabethan Stage 
Society as an organised body. Poel s supporters could no 
longer face the burden of financial failure, and on 5 June Mr. 
and Mrs. Edmund Gosse wrote to him as follows : 

I hope that you will not look upon it that your efforts have 
failed. They have come to an end, partly because so much is 
now comprehended and accepted which you began your 
labours in order to explain and to recommend. When the 
literary history of our age is written, your energetic work must, 
of necessity, have a niche in it, and what you have accom 
plished will not be forgotten. 

To assume that Poel s labours had come to an end was to 
show a singular ignorance of Poel. In fact he took the sole 
responsibility of his productions from this time onward. 



MACBETH AND TROILUS l8l 

Much of his most important work was still before him, and he 
accomplished it at the price of a growing personal impoverish 
ment. The name of the Society remained, however, as a 
guarantee of continuity and goodwill. 

Romeo and Juliet was produced, as it should always be 
produced, with two master ideas in mind; first, that the play 
is a contrast between love and hate, and that the death of the 
two lovers is a senseless sacrifice unless we have been allowed 
to feel the ferocity of the feud which is healed over their bodies; 
and second, that Romeo and Juliet are a boy and girl. The 
first of these conditions is generally fulfilled if the play is given 
with the minimum of cuts, and in particular if the last scene 
is not too severely curtailed. But the second difficulty is not 
necessarily resolved by casting a Romeo and Juliet in their 
teens, for the reason that both parts are intensely difficult and 
require players of considerable technique. Either you must 
have a boy and girl of precocious accomplishment, or mature 
actors who have the power to suggest extreme youth. Neither 
of these combinations is at all easy to come by. Furthermore, 
the action of the play is at once so complicated and so swift, 
the scenes are so short and so closely dovetailed, that each 
episode must be allowed its natural rhythm; any interruption 
for the sake of putting Verona on the scenic map is disastrous 
to the total effect. Verona is a very beautiful city and the 
scenic artist generally likes to linger there. But not even 
the deftest drawing of curtains or dropping of backcloths will 
save the play from scrappiness. Either you must have a 
multiple stage, such as Georges PitoefF designed with great 
ingenuity for his production at the Vieux Golombier in Paris, 
and Mr. Roger Furse for the Old Vic production in 1952; or 
you must boldly conceive your production on Elizabethan 
lines and banish any ideas of realistic locality. But your 
multiple stage, though it will give you swiftness, will not as a 
rule give you space. Mr. Furse, however, was successful in 
designing, and Mr. Hugh Hunt in using, a decor that gave 
both. Their only mistake was to trundle on an absurd art 
nouveau contraption from the wings, which was supposed to 
give one the illusion of Friar Laurence s cell. The illusion, of 
course, in so far as it had ever existed, was destroyed as soon 
as the actors began to take the full stage. And this was the 



1 82 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

sovereign merit of the set, that any part of it could be used 
at any time. 

Poel gave a very fair version of the play. It was produced 
at the Royalty and on the kind of stage for which it had been 
written, in so far as such a stage can be reconstructed in a 
modern theatre and the qualification is important. In 
Esme Percy and Dorothy Minto, Poel had a Romeo and Juliet 
still in their teens, each having the temperament, if not the 
experience, for their parts. Many years later, returning from 
a performance of the play at Stratford, Poel saw his ideal 
Juliet in the railway carriage. 

She was travelling with her father and mother and two 
younger sisters. In appearance she was a miniature copy of 
the famous Venus of Milo. She had the same supple grace. 
Love was to her as the very health of her being. Old and 
young, rich and poor, would be impressed by her youth, her 
beauty and her soft confidings. . . . And there were in this 
counterfeit of a Juliet glimpses of gloom, latent in the utmost 
depth of her eyes, as we see when peering into a clear bottom 
less pool a gloom revealing the soul s steadfastness, an untold 
excellence for which the mocking gods exact from its possessors 
a penalty often paid in terms of precious sorrow, or by even 
costlier anguish one which finds relief only in the loving and 
last sigh, "O happy dagger, this is thy sheath, there rest and 
let me die." Here, then, was a possible Juliet (Monthly Letters 3 
1929; pp. 412-43). 

Harold Child described PoePs Romeo and Juliet as the only 
performance of the play he had ever been able to believe in 
(Letter to Poel, 9 November 1933), and the credibility, apart 
from the competence, of the production was unquestionably due 
to the youth of the lovers, which conferred on them a pathos 
they might never have attained by histrionic means; and to 
the self-evident suitability of the stage. 

II 

From the day when Poel penned the last page of his diary 
and opened his heart to his sister from the Yorkshire fit-up, 
the secret of his spiritual growth and the stress of his essential 
solitude had been closely guarded. Only his wife was the 
partner of an anxiety, which. was far more prophetic than 
personal. He had been schooled in reticence and he was 



MACBETH AND TROILUS 183 

never tempted to betray the teaching and traditions of his 
home. But early in 1906 he lifted the curtain, a little shyly, 
in an article which appeared anonymously in The Westminster 
Review (12 January 1906). 

He had just spent Christmas at sea on his way to the United 
States. It was his first visit to America and the object of his 
voyage was to launch the tours of Everyman which were being 
undertaken by Philip Ben Greet. 

On Christmas night the ship was swept by a storm of unusual 
severity, even for the time of year, and the effect of this was 
vividly described by Poel. He was not a natural writer. 
His arguments, however forcible, were marshalled in foot- 
slogging prose; his tactics were the tactics of attrition. But 
in this article more than one memorable phrase escaped him, 
and he successfully conveyed three things. First, the impression 
of the storm itself "the sea is black as ink, on which the foam 
lies scattered like patches of snow, and the sound of the wind 
is like the fluttering of a million fans." Second, the mortal 
struggle of the crew "with the thunder of a Niagara comes 
down a wave upon the seamen s deck, sweeping a sailor off 
his feet and hurling him into the darkness; others run to his 
rescue; presently a group of men move hurriedly across the 
track of light with something in their arms and pass out by 
the cabin door." Thirdly, the careless contrasting gaiety and 
inconsequent conversation of the passengers, mostly American. 
And fourthly, the lonely brooding figure of Poel himself, 
here styled "the Anglo-Saxon. " "At midnight on the day 
following the gale is the Anglo-Saxon again pacing the prom 
enade deck; not once has he closed his eyes during the last 
forty-eight hours." He watches the silent funeral of the 
seaman who has been struck down by the gale, and then 
goes to the Doctor s cabin "and begs for a narcotic to compel 
sleep." 

The article is not only curious and interesting in itself, but 
it is a parable of Poel s vocation. Observant of men and 
sensitive to nature, solitary but sympathetic, speculative but 
engaged, he was to walk through life very much as he paced 
the deck through the darkness of the Atlantic night. To those 
who crossed his path he would always appear something of a 
stranger; a remnant from some world, far more remote than 



184 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

Burbage s London, whose mystery he wore like a cloak but 
was never quite able to communicate. 

Ill 

A production of Goldsmith s The Good-natured Man followed 
on 9 August 19065 first at the New Theatre, Cambridge, 
and then at the Coronet Theatre, London. Lewis Casson, 
Ben Field and Clare Greet were in the cast. The play went 
on a short tour afterwards, but at Tunbridge Wells the bookings 
were so poor that a concert had to be improvised at the last 
moment. This was enlivened by a whistling solo by Mr. 
Casson. Poel s next important Shakespearian venture was 
Macbeth. 

None of Shakespeare s tragedies is more Elizabethan in 
feeling than this one; the blood-guiltiness of Holyrood and 
Fotheringay darkens the corridors of Dunsinane. Yet the 
play is rarely satisfactory, and rarely successful, in the theatre. 
Is this because the tow-coloured wigs and customary cross- 
gartering, the clanking brass jewellery and horned head-gear, 
evoke irresistibly a time which is too remote to touch us ? There 
is barbarism in Macbeth, to be sure, but it is the barbarism of 
Bothwell, not of Boadicea. English audiences cannot take the 
Anglo-Saxons seriously, and it is time that stage directors 
gave up asking them to. In any case the blood-shot meta 
physical complexity of Macbeth gives them no excuse. "If it 
were done when tis done" John Donne might have turned 
this soliloquy into a sermon and delivered it from the pulpit 
of St. Paul s. 

Poel saw this, of course, from the start. The recent accession 
of James I in part explained Shakespeare s choice of a Scottish 
subject, and Poel may have believed with Dover Wilson that 
the dramatist had himself been in Scotland for a time after 
the fall of Essex. King James believed that he had the healing 
touch, and the references in the play to Edward the Confessor, 
though they serve a dramatic purpose which in performance 
is often ignored, show that Shakespeare was not above paying 
a timely compliment by the way. Poel certainly held that the 
details of the murder of Darnley in 1567 had, by the end of 
the century, become fairly generally known, and that they 
were much in Shakespeare s mind. The wife of the murdered 



MACBETH AND TROILUS 185 

King in Hamlet marries his assassin; and perhaps Professor 
Moberley was right in suggesting that when Macbeth protests 
that the dead have the power to push him from his stool, 
Shakespeare was thinking of Mary and Bothwell who had found 
that Darnley dead had more power to overthrow them than 
when he was alive. The Scottish Confederates had carried 
into battle against Mary a banner painted with the image of a 
murdered man, and kneeling beside it was a child uttering the 
words "Judge and avenge my cause, O Lord!" In Macbeth 
the idea of Divine judgment was represented by the image of a 
"naked new-born babe." 

To those who argued that the witches removed the play 
into the twilight of history, Poel could quote once again 
from Scot s Discoverie of Witchcraft. Here there was a descrip 
tion of the old women who passed for witches in the 
England of Shakespeare s time. "An old weather-beaten 
crone, having her chin and her knees meeting for age, walking 
like a bow, leaning on a staff, hollow-eyed, untoothed, furrowed, 
having her lips trembling with the palsy, going mumbling 
in the streets." This is how the witches in Macbeth have 
generally been shown on the stage. James I had himself 
been a believer in witchcraft, and had had a witch tried for 
raising a tempest at sea while the Queen was crossing the 
channel. In 1565 a witch was burnt who confessed to having 
caused all the tempests during that year. Poel produced the 
three witches in Act I of Macbeth as Scot had described them, 
but in the cauldron-scene he surrounded Hecate with three 
attendants, all four being dressed in masque costumes. These 
three attendants were a kind of superior Fates and they spoke 
for the silent apparitions, thus giving to their utterances an 
effect of sinister ventriloquy. When Michael Redgrave pro 
duced Macbeth at the Aldwych in 1948, his three crones of 
the blasted heath were shadowed, from the beginning, by 
three stately counterparts; the metaphysical figurae, so to speak, 
of their prophecy and equivocation. 

Where Poel challenged tradition most deliberately was in 
his conception of Lady Macbeth. He took his text from 
Mrs. Siddons, who had seen her as "a character which I believe 
is generally allowed to be most captivating to the other sex, 
fair, feminine, nay, perhaps even fragile. Such a combination 



1 86 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

only, respectable in energy and strength of mind and capti 
vating in feminine loveliness, could have composed a charm 
of such potency as to fascinate the mind of a hero so dauntless 
as Macbeth." There were certain indications in the text to 
support this view: 

O gentle lady 
3 Tis not for yo u to hear what I can speak, 

and again 

All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. 

Poel maintained that the deepest impulse behind the murder 
of Duncan came from Macbeth s own fantasy and ambition, 
the persuasions of his wife only helping forward a design 
already more than half formed. The play was his tragedy, 
not hers, because he had a conscience where she had none. 
For Poel, Macbeth represented the new awareness of personal 
responsibility, which he believed had been the gift of the 
Reformation; Lady Macbeth, by contrast, represented the 
amoralism of the Renaissance. He argued these points in an 
article for The Nation (23 March 1912; reprinted in Shakespeare 
in the Theatre, 1913, pp. 61-69). 

She was to the last unconscious of being criminal or sinful. 
Her life was the playing of a red-handed game by one who 
thought herself innocent. Unlike her husband, her face 
betrayed no moral conflict; the puritan spirit had never 
penetrated her own nature. Whatever her outward religion 
might be, she was at least a materialist, not from conviction 
but from shallowness, due to the absence of all the higher 
powers of reflection and imagination. So that her husband s 
talk about conscience and retribution is unintelligible to her. 
. . . If we turn to her own reflections, it is always her woman s 
weakness which she dreads may defeat her purpose. Murder 
is foreign to her temperament; the details are ugly and revolt 
ing; the sight of blood may unnerve her. But she evidently 
imagines that her husband, who has killed men in battle, can 
do it better. When the fatal moment arrives she cannot meet 
her husband in her normal mood, but has recourse to the 
wine-cup, not because she shrinks from the notion of murder, 
but from dislike of the details of the operation. . . . Then the 
thought of being a Queen and wearing a real crown is an 
intense delight to her. Macbeth knew of her weakness for 
finery when he sought her approval of the deed, and women 
of Lady Macbeth s temperament do not care to be disappointed 



MACBETH AND TROILUS 187 

of their pleasures. . . . But no sooner is the crime committed 
than her optimism fails her, for her husband seems no nearer 
to "masterdom" than he was before. After the coronation 
there comes her tragic reflection that the murder was a mistake. 
Unfortunately for her it was worse than a mistake; it was a 
blunder for which her husband deposes her authority. 

This view that Lady Macbeth was a woman and not a 
virago was borne out by her passivity and gradual break 
down from the discovery of the murder onwards. The initiative 
now came entirely from Macbeth, and his agonies were due to 
remorse and fear, not to irresolution. If Lady Macbeth 
seemed at moments to be stronger than he was, that was not 
because she was made of steel, but because she was morally 
insensitive. And the reason why Poel insisted on keeping in 
the scene with Lady Macduff was not in order to point the 
contrast between a woman and an Amazon; it was to stress 
the more subtle comparison between two women who were 
alike in their domestic affections, and possibly in their physical 
habit, but who differed completely in their degree of moral 
sensibility. Phelps had restored Lady Macduff (but not her 
children) in his productions of 1847 and 1850. The effect of 
keeping in the scene was suggested by Shaw, writing to Poel 
after the performance. "I never before had realised with 
absolute certainty that Macbeth was a doomed man if ever 
he let Macduff catch him." 

Archer entered the lists against these ideas. He quoted 
the invocation to the "spirits that tend on mortal thoughts" 
to prove that Lady Macbeth knew perfectly well the atrocity 
of the crime she was instigating. If she did not, he claimed, 
there was no meaning in words; and if the sleep-walking 
scene did not show her that her prayer to escape the "compunc 
tious visitings of nature" had gone unanswered, then it was a 
purposeless and not a pathetic episode. But this was not the 
woman whom Poel invited Lilian McCarthy and Evelyn 
Weeden to portray, alternately, for a week s performances at 
the Fulham Theatre (22-26 June 1909). Miss McCarthy 
describes the rehearsals as the most tremendous experience of 
her career. PoePs energy was tigerish; his face would become 
taut with the intensity of the truth he was striving to com 
municate and then relax into the sweetest and most disarming 



1 88 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

of smiles. He had seen Lady Macbeth down to the smallest 
detail of her appearance and make-up. Her hair was bright 
red and her complexion flushed pink. Her eyelids were painted 
a light green and there were flecks of gold under her eyes. 
Her mouth was very clear and carmined. Her neck and hands 
were white tinted with a pale blue. She carried her head high, 
with straightened back and squared shoulders, and moved 
with a slight swing. She should suggest a woman of thirty-five 
(Lillah McCarthy; Stratford Dossier}. 

When it came to interpretation, every problem was referred 
to the kind of woman she was. How, for example, should she 
speak the line "Give me the daggers" ? Here there were three 
possible emphases, either on give or on me or on daggers . 
Poel argued that to a woman of her practical disposition the 
question of who returned the daggers to Duncan s death- 
chamber was secondary to the immediate necessity of their 
being replaced. This meaning was enforced if she put the 
emphasis on give . In the sleep-walking scene he had the 
brilliant idea of showing her at her dressing-table, playing 
mechanically with her brushes and comb and going through 
the motions of doing her hair. This presumably took place 
in the inner chamber while the doctor and waiting woman 
watched and commented from outside. Later, she rose and 
began to walk about. Poel held that the effect of the scene 
would be far more impressive if the audience could see her 
moving gradually into the rhythm of her sleep-walking 
instead of being already fixed in it at the moment of her fiisl 
appearance. 

Another daring innovation was in the Banquet scene. 
Charles Knight, in his edition of the play, had asked what 
exactly was the significance of the original stage direction 
"Enter Ghost," after the line "Give me some wine, fill full." 
Banquo s spectre had already appeared once and vanished. 
Was it good stage-craft to repeat so tremendous an effect? 
Was it dramatic to bring on Banquo a second time just when 
Macbeth had expressed the wish that he could be there? 
The stage direction had not said "re-enter Ghost," nor had it 
specified whose Ghost it was. Furthermore, the second 
apparition was evidently more terrifying than the first. When 
Banquo had appeared, Macbeth had replied to the question 



MACBETH AND TROILUS 189 

"Are you a man?" with "Ay, and a bold one that dare look on 
what might appal the devil." But when the Ghost appears 
the second time, his language is stronger. "Avaunt and quit 
my sight," "Take any shape but that" "Hence, horrible 
shadow." He now speaks in the plural; "Can such things be ?" 
"When now I think you can behold such sights }" Had there 
in fact been two separate apparitions? And was the second 
and more frightening the ghost of Duncan? Could the 
description "Thy bones are marrowless" be properly applied 
to someone who had only been dead an hour? This reasoning 
was plausible, though not conclusive; but it justified Poel in 
bringing on the ghost of Duncan, when the audience expected 
to see the ghost of Banquo. It is interesting to note that in 
Mr. Bridges-Adams later productions of Macbeth at Stratford 
this interpretation of the second Ghost was followed. Another 
powerful effect was secured at the end of the Banquet scene, 
where Poel brought on Hecate sharp on the top of Macbeth s 
last line "We are yet but young in deed." This entrance, 
Poel argued in a letter to W. J. Lawrence (14 December 1920), 
"was most dramatic and a fitting climax to the Banquet scene. 
It was as if the Fates themselves had taken fright at the thought 
of their own mischief and the awful tragic developments that 
were threatening in consequence." 

Macbeth was played by Hubert Carter, a young actor of 
taurine physique with a strong and flexible voice. "I think 
he has genius," wrote Gordon Craig to Poel a few years later. 
Carter, like Esme Percy, became one of Poel s favourite 
actors. The witches of the first act were kept in the Fay 
family; they were played by W. G. Fay, his wife and his 
brother Frank. Here the Irish bjogue must have been very 
effective, setting them, as it were, apart in a preternatural 
element of their own, Hecate and her attendants were all 
taken by women. 

IV 

On i November 1904 Bernard Shaw s John Bull s Other 
Island had been produced by Granville-Barker under the 
Vedrenne-Barker management at the Royal Court Theatre. 
The play was given for six matinees, and it was revived for 
six further performances, also matinees, from 7 February 1905. 



190 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

On i May it was put into the evening bill for three weeks and 
again in the September following for a fortnight. At all of 
these performances the part of Keegan, the poet, priest and 
visionary, was played by Granville-Barker. 

When the play was again revived at the same theatre on 
17 September 1906, Barker was not available and Shaw 
suggested Poel for the part. His "quaintness his very un- 
professionalism," Shaw wrote to Vedrenne, "will give the 
performance . . . just the sort of unusual touch that the pro 
vinces will be looking for in the V-B management 1 (Letter in 
Enthoven Collection). "Yes, I admit that I was Keegan," 
Poel wrote to Shaw many years later (i August 1932), "and 
needed no make-up to publish the fact. Yet I found the part 
not by any means easy to play, for I was always in terror 
lest I should be acting Keegan as someone else. The danger 
of my doing so was due to my unusual stage experience. I 
never had any ambition to act, only to stage-manage." Poel 
played the part for six weeks in the autumn of 1906; again for 
two weeks at the Coronet Theatre, Netting Hill; in September 
1909, followed by a provincial tour; and lastly for a series of 
matinees during Granville-Barker and Lillah McCarthy s 
season at the Kingsway in the winter of 1912-13. He acted 
it nearly 100 times in all and his performance, though it seems 
to have been uneven in execution, made a deep impression 
nevertheless. 

The next two years were mainly directed to revivals of 
previous productions, and to the preparations for the Alcestis; 
these I have already discussed (cf. pp. 173-178). The only 
new play to be presented was an old sixteenth-century morality, 
Jacob and Esau. This was given at the Little Theatre on the 
6 and 12 March 1911, with Cathleen Nesbitt as Rebecca and 
Reginald Owen as Esau. In the same programme were 
included the "Shakespearian" scenes from Edward III, which 
Poel had first produced in 1890, under the title of The King 
and the Countess. Arthur Wontner now played the King and 
Helen Haye the Countess. 

On Sunday evening i December 1912, a dinner was organised 
in PoeFs honour at the Trocadero restaurant. This was the 
most imposing public tribute he was ever to receive, and a 
list of those present shows to what extent he had converted the 



MACBETH AND TROILTJS 

world of scholarship and taste. Granville-Barker was in the 
chair and among those sitting at the long tables stretching 
down the room were Miss Lilian Braithwaite, Mr. D. Clayton 
Calthrop, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Casson, Mr. and Mrs. Hayden 
Coffin, Mr. and Mrs. A. E. Drinkwater, Miss Edith Evans, 
Miss Rosina Filippi, Mr. and Mrs. Archibald Flower, Mr. 
Edward Garnett, Sir Laurence and Lady Gomme, Mr. and 
Mrs. Edmund Gosse, Miss Clare Greet, Mr. Edmund Gwenn, 
Mr. Martin Harvey, the Rev. Stewart Headlam, Mr. Carl 
Hentschel, Miss A. E. Horniman, Mr. and Mrs. Selwyn 
Image, Miss Gertrude Kingston, Sir Sidney Lee, Mr. and Mrs. 
Sidney Low, Mr. Seymour Lucas, R.A., Miss Lilian McCarthy, 
Mr. Edward Marsh, Mr. H. W. Massingham, Mr. George 
Moore, Mr. B. Iden Payne, Mr. Esme Percy, Mr. and Mrs. 
Nigel Playfair, Mr. Byam Shaw, Mr. G. Bernard Shaw, 
Mr. and Mrs. Clement Shorter, Miss Laura Smithson, Mr. 
William Strang, A.R.A., Mr. Montague Summers, Miss 
Ellen Terry, Lady Tree, Sir Frederick Wedmore, Mr. and 
Mrs. F. Whelen, and Mrs. and Mrs. Israel Zangwill. The 
arrangements for the evening were in the hands of Allan 
Gomme. A "consomme Sarah Bernhardt" followed the 
hors d ceuvre, and a vegetarian menu was provided for those 
who had given- notice in time. There is no mention of drink, 
though it may have been served and must have been available. 
In those high-minded days of theatrical reform even Granville- 
Barker habitually drank ginger-wine. 

All the guests signed their names in an autograph book 
which was afterwards presented to Poel. In proposing his 
toast Barker referred to the Sunday morning in 1899 when 
Poel had called at his lodgings, and to the rehearsals of 
Richard II which had shaken his self-complacency. Poel, he 
said, was "one of the greatest and finest influences in the 
English Theatre." He had begun his work when the genius 
of Irving was supreme in Shakespearian matters, and when it 
was blasphemy to say anything against it. But Poel had had 
the courage to commit that blasphemy, and in time that 
heresy would become an accepted creed. Edmund Gosse, 
who followed Barker, praised Poel for having "defended the 
sanctity of our national dramatic documents." Martin 
Harvey and Stewart Headlam also spoke. 



WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

The speech of the evening, however, came from Shaw. 
"Mr. Poel and myself/ he said, "happened not only to have 
read the works of Shakespeare, but we rather liked them." 
In the matter of Romeo and Juliet,, he went on, Poel had 

the ridiculous habit of going to see what Shakespeare said. 
When he found that a child of fourteen was wanted, his critics 
exclaimed, c Ah but she was an Italian child, and an Italian 
child of fourteen looks exactly the same as an Englishwoman 
of forty-five. 3 Mr. Poel did not believe it. He said, C I will 
get a child of fourteen and accordingly he performed Romeo 
and Juliet in that way and for the first time it became endurable. 
I sat at it with Mr. Granville-Barker. I forget who else was 
in the house. I think there were about six people. 

Shaw went on to recall Poel s production of The Comedy of 
Errors, in which "a tremendous procession of a most striking 
kind" had walked in from the far end of the hall. 

The effect was magnificent, unforgettable, and the moment 
I saw it, I said, C I will steal that some day/ No one took the 
slightest notice of it; or if anyone did, it was only to say, c ls it 
not a pity that Mr. Poel did not learn something about the 
theatre, and know at which end of the hall the stage was ? . . . 
When years and years afterwards, Reinhardt came along, 
they cried Magnificent and fell down at his feet. And yet 
Reinhardt never produced the marvellous effect that Poel 
did on that occasion. If Poel had been a German, they would 
probably have believed there was something in him; they 
never believe that art can come out of England. In all the 
text books he will probably be described as a disciple of 
Reinhardt (Pall Mall Gazette; 2 December 1912). 

In his reply Poel characteristically looked forward and not 
back. He was interested, just then, in his new production, 
which he admitted might also be his last. 

I remember my literary instructor I am speaking of when 
I was 17 or 1 8 years of age telling me that there were two 
pieces written by Shakespeare which he hoped I should never 
read because they were not proper ones. One was Measure 
for Measure and the other was Troilus and Cressida. It is a 
peculiar coincidence that although these words had gone 
out of my memory at the time of doing it, Measure for Measure 
was the first work that I did for the Elizabethan Stage Society. 
. . . Troilus and Cressida is going to be the last one that I shall 
present to a London public on my own responsibility. 




S;* 



MACBETH AND TROILUS 193 

He went on to speak of the neglect into which the play had 
fallen, maintaining that 

it is the most ethical thing that Shakespeare ever wrote, and 
in this respect it is to be classed with the productions of Zola 
and Ibsen, of Bernard Shaw and of Granville-Barker. Shake 
speare knew that he wrote romances, and he knew that Ay 
You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing told his neighbours 
nothing about their real selves. And he comes down from the 
clouds and says to his friends, Now I will tell you something 
about your fellow creatures as they are in Elizabethan London. 

In Edwardian London they were not very different, and 
just then, in the first years of the new reign, Troilus and Cressida 
had an ironic actuality. Although Poel was to set it firmly in 
an Elizabethan context, we can detect in his liking for the play 
a tinge of that anti-militarism which was then blowing through 
the English intelligentsia. This was the period of The Riddle of 
the Sands, of the Parliament Act and Mr. Lloyd George s 
Budget; and William Poel was not a radical for nothing. 



V 

Troilus and Cressida is now regarded as one of Shakespeare s 
problem plays and it has been given a good deal of attention 
by Professor Tillyard and others. It has also been performed 
with success by the Cambridge Marlowe Society; at the 
Old Vic; and at the Westminster Theatre, under Mr. Michael 
MacOwan s skilful direction, in modern dress. But in 1912 
the play was little known outside a small circle of students. 
Poel had been drawn to it for a long time, perhaps because it 
set him so many problems. 

First of all, there was the difficulty of the date. The play 
had been entered on The Stationers 3 Register on 7 February 
1603, as "The Book of Troilus and Cressida as it is acted by 
my Lord Chamberlain s men." Never before had a play of 
Shakespeare s been entered on the Register as being per 
formed at the time of its publication. In fact, this particular 
play, though registered, did not get printed, and Dr. A. W. 
Pollard had pointed out that the managers of the Globe often 
persuaded a publisher to enter a play on the Stationers Register 
to protect their own copies from piracy. However, on 
7 



WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

28 January 1609, another firm of publishers entered on the 
Register a book which was subsequently published as "The 
Historic of Troylus and Cresseida. As it was acted by the 
Kings Majesties servants at the Globe/ Soon afterwards this 
title-page was suppressed and another one inserted with no 
mention of the Globe performances, thus denying to the Globe 
managers any rights in the play. On the back of the new 
title-page there also appeared a new preface. In the First 
Folio it appears, unpaged, between the Histories and the 
Tragedies, with additions and corrections from the 1609 
Quarto. It does not appear at all among the contents of the 
volume. It is, however, still described as a tragedy, although it 
was not given this title in the 1609 Quarto. The problem is 
therefore; when was the play written and when was it per 
formed? Why was it such an evident cause of embarrassment? 
Poel s answer to these questions is given fully in his Shake 
speare in the Theatre (pp. 98-116). It may be summarised 
as follows. He believed that although the play was inspired 
by the bitterness and disillusionment which we find in the later 
tragedies, it cannot possibly have been a late composition. Its 
loose construction and excessive verbalism, the large number 
of rhymed endings, forbid this hypothesis. He maintained 
that the whole play, except perhaps the prologue, was written 
some time between the autumn of 1598 and the spring of 1599, 
and that the displeasing play referred to in the Epilogue to 
Henry IV, Part 2 was in fact Troilus and Cressida; that it was 
composed in reaction to Chapman s translation of the Iliad, 
with its eulogy of the Homeric heroes; and that the 
character of Achilles is a reflection of certain incidents in the 
life of Essex before he left for Ireland in 1599. Essex, like 
Achilles, had been sulking in his tent; one of his friends had 
urged him to return to the Queen s service in terms that recall 
very closely Ulysses famous remonstrance. "The greatest 
subject that ever is, or was, greatest in the prince s favour in 
his absence is not missed/ The Elizabethan audience would 
not forget, either, that in 1591 Essex had sent to the Governor 
of Rouen a challenge almost identical with Hector s challenge 
to the Greeks. "Si vous voulez combattre vous meme a cheval 
ou a pied, je maintiendrai que la querelle du roi est plus juste que 
celle de la ligue, et que ma maitresse est plus belle que la votre." 



MACBETH AND TROILUS 1 95 

It was inevitable that the political unrest at the turn of the 
century should have been reflected on the stage, and Troilus 
and Cressida may well have suffered from the decision of the 
Privy Council in the summer of 1599 that "no plays be printed 
except they be allowed by such as have an authoritie." This 
would explain why the play had not been printed after it had 
been registered in 1603. The fall of Essex was still too recent 
in the public mind. There was no force in the argument that 
the wisdom of the play was too precocious for Shakespeare to 
have written it as early as 1598, since he had already expressed 
the same sentiments in The Rape of Lucrece. Poel believed that 
the play might have been acted at the Curtain late in 1598, 
or at the Globe in the spring of 1599, or privately at the house 
of some nobleman who might have been one of the Essex 
faction; that it was not liked; that Shakespeare suffered in 
consequence his first and most serious rebuff on the stage. 
The play was withdrawn, and it was only in 1603, two years 
after Ben Jonson, in The Poetaster, had defended his younger 
friend from the earlier attacks, that a revival and publication 
of the play was contemplated. But this was not yet possible 
and it may never have been given again; since in 1609, the 
date of its eventual publication, Shakespeare was getting 
ready to retire. 

W. J. Lawrence agreed with PoePs early dating of the 
play, but another scholarly friend, Dr. A. W. Ward, writing 
from King s College, London, while seeing many points in 
his theory, "was not yet converted from a traditional opinion 
to which the peculiar character of the play lends colour/ 
Poel would have agreed, however, that Troilus and Cressida was 
essentially a tragi-comedy. Cressida is introduced as a 
frivolous coquette, but here the emotional experience of the 
Dark Lady comes into play and from the moment when 
Troilus discovers her with Diomed the tragic note predomin 
ates. Poel argued in a letter to Mrs. C. C, Stopes (December 
1912) that Shakespeare s Cressida was founded on Chaucer s 
who made her a widow, "and one cannot read the part carefully 
without realising that Shakespeare also had in his mind a 
woman who is not a girl but a woman who has had consider 
able experience of the world, and the fact that Pandaras tells 
her that Troilus is not yet 23 is a meaningless remark if she 



196 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

is young as he is. She is about 28, I take it." The play was 
perfectly suited to Elizabethan production; indeed it is hard 
to see how it can be done otherwise. The continual passage 
from Troy to the Grecian camp demands a spacious, unlocalised 
stage, and Poel went far towards achieving this with his two 
Houses on the right and left of the proscenium opening. 
Troilus and Cressida is reduced to nonsense by scenery; at the 
same time, the upper level of the Elizabethan stage is im 
peratively called for only in the scene where Gressida watches 
the Trojan warriors return from the battlefield. There is no 
indication of a balcony in Poel s prompt book; only a centre 
opening is suggested. Since "there was nothing in the text 
... to justify its production as a picture of Greek or Trojan 
life of the Homeric period/ the Greeks were dressed as 
Elizabethan soldiers, smoking the tobacco which Raleigh had 
just introduced from Virginia, and the Trojans wore masque 
costumes of Elizabethan design. (Programme Note.) Their 
flamboyance emphasised the sophistication of a court which 
thought Helen worth a war, but it would have matched oddly 
with the stiff sense of honour which made Hector pursue it 
against his better judgment. 

Thersites was played as the camp jester, dressed as a clown 
and speaking with a Scots accent, and the Prologue appeared 
in full armour a satirical device adopted by Marston and 
Ben Jonson to ward off the attacks of hostile critics. When the 
production was given at Stratford-on-Avon, Thersites was 
played by a woman, Mrs. Robertson Scott, who had formerly 
been Secretary of the London Shakespeare League. Poel 
entrusted her with the part, because "a man would be sure to 
over-act." Mrs. Scott had a liking for odd characters and was 
an excellent mimic; she had no difficulty in affecting a queru 
lous male voice. During one of the performances her husband, 
J. W. Robertson Scott, was sitting in the stalls with 
Israel Zangwill. "How good that man is," exclaimed Zangwill 
"who is playing Thersites!" He was incredulous when Scott 
informed him that the man in question was his wife, and was 
only convinced when he was taken round and introduced to 
her afterwards. 

There is nothing in all this, except possibly the pipes and the 
male impersonation, that a modern audience would find 



MACBETH AND TROILUS IQJ 

difficult to accept, but in his treatment of the text Poel was on 
much more controversial ground. Troilus and Cressida is a very- 
wordy play; there was substance in PoePs criticism that the 
dialogue continually held up the drama. No play of Shake 
speare s more clearly calls for cutting. But in his cutting of it 
Poel, once again, was strangely insensitive. Four examples 
will show his defective ear for poetry; his inability, despite all 
his preaching, to enter into the lyrical experience of an Eliza 
bethan play. In Act III Scene 2 Gressida plights her troth; 

If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth, 
When time is old and hath forgot itself, 
When water drops have worn the stones of Troy, 
And blind oblivion swallowed cities up, 
And mighty states characterless are grated 
To dusty nothing; yet let memory. 
From false to false, among false maids in love, 
Upbraid my falsehood! 

It is almost incredible that the lines here printed in italics 
should have been omitted. In the following scene where 
Ulysses goes to Achilles 5 tent the great speech "Time hath, my 
lord, a wallet at his back" was unbearably truncated and 
quite senselessly transposed. Poel argued that here Shake 
speare was letting the Essex motif run away with him and that 
neither Ulysses nor Achilles are speaking in character. But 
this was to talk like Bernard Shaw. Shakespeare s characters 
exist in different dimensions and the experience they transmit 
is poetic. It cannot be discussed in terms of psychological 
realism, or not in these terms alone. Many years earlier Poel 
had even argued that the lines 

Give me my Romeo; and when he shall die, 
Take him and cut him out in little stars, 
And he will make the face of heaven so fine 
That all the world will be in love with night, 
And pay no worship to the garish sun, 

proved that Juliet must have been a girl since no "full-grown 
woman" could "talk like that about her young man" ! Poel 
did not see that Ulysses has the character of a Chorus; his 
speech to Achilles is one of the greatest passages of reasoning 
in the whole of dramatic literature, and it was a sacrilege to 



WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

maltreat it. Again, in Act IV Scene 4, where Troilus is taking 
leave of Cressida, the first nine lines of the speech beginning 
"And suddenly; where injury of chance" are cut altogether, 
and it continues as follows: 

Injurious time now with a robber s haste 

Grams his rich thievery up he knows not how: 

As many farewells as be stars in heaven, 

With distinct breath and consigned kisses to them. 

He fumbles up into a loose adieu; 

And scants us with a single famished kiss, 

Distasted with the salt of broken tears. 

This was the climax of perversity. "He fumbles up into a 
loose adieu" is of the deep Shakespearian essence; it is not only 
one of his most perfect lines, but it is a line that very few other 
poets could have written. Poel was quite insensitive to the 
melodic line of a speech; he did not see that he was sacrificing 
not only a particular jewel, but the proportion and symmetry 
of the whole. 

Worse, however, was to come. The play ends with Troilus s 
frenzied challenge to the Greeks, expressing all the Trojan 
despair at the death of Hector. 

Hector is gone ! 

Who shall tell Priam, so, or Hecuba ? 
Let him that will a screech-owl aye be called 
Go into Troy, and say there Hector s dead : 
There is a word will Priam turn to stone, 
Make wells and Niobes of the maids and wives, 
Gold statues of the youth; and, in a word, 
Scare Troy out of itself. But march, away : 
Hector is dead; there is no more to say. 

Anyone who heard Ion Swinley or Robert Harris deliver 
these lines will remember their thrilling effect. But Poel 
cut them entirely, with the speech of which they are a part. 
Ahd I believe the reason was this. He had a rooted distaste 
for invective, and their temper jarred against his pacifism. 
In the name of what principle, we may ask, did he censure 
Sir Henry Irving for cutting Shakespeare when he himself 
took such liberties with the text ? 

Troilus and Cressida was first performed at the King s Hall, 
Govent Garden on 10 December 1912 and on 12 May 1913 



MACBETH AND TROILXJS 1 99 

at Stratford-on-Avon. At the first performance Troilus was 
played by Esme Percy and at the second by Ion Swinley. Poel 
himself played Pandarus. But the production will- always be 
remembered for its Cressida. On the fly-leaf of PoeFs prompt 
book a name now famous is scribbled in hardly legible pencil : 
"Miss Edith Evans." Miss Evans was not yet a professional 
actress, and when the performance was over, she wrote to 
Poel as follows: 

I should have written to you long ago to thank you for 
allowing me to play Cressida for you. ... I thank you now 
and say everything is dull and uninteresting to me since the 
play is over. I can t make ray hats, and although I try hard, 
my thoughts seem to wander and I m afraid I shall have to 
give them up ... I have not heard anything further from 
Mr. George Moore, so I expect he is too busy to write 
(29 December 1912). 

In fact, George Moore was hunting high and low for Miss 
Evans s address, and when he had found it he wrote her several 
letters of warm admiration. He had seen the production and 
been thrilled by her performance. Besides, the idea of a 
milliner who was also an actress must have greatly appealed 
to the author of A Mummer s Wife. An unconsidered judgment 
might wonder, even now, whether Miss Evans can ever have 
been nature s Cressida; but Dame Edith has always had 
genius s power of infinite surprise, and we owe it largely to 
William Poel that the greatest English comedienne of the 
twentieth century finally gave up her hats. 

Poel was only modest in claiming in a letter to W. J. Lawrence 
that his production had "set people thinking." Mr. Bridges- 
Adams, who was later to take over the direction of the New 
Shakespeare Company at Stratford, wrote in a transport of 
enthusiasm. 

I wish I could put into words all I thought about it 
especially the love scene which caught in perfection everything 
that the Savoy Twelfth Night hungers for, and the Cressida! 
I wish I knew how you contrived to teach an amateur to give 
such a perfect and such a classic performance: it seemed to 
create Cressida once and for all for this generation, I thought. 
And I can hardly remember a single paper that had the good 
sense to compliment you on what was the masterpiece of the 
production (December 1912). 



2OO WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

This letter raises the fascinating question; what exactly was 
it that the Savoy Twelfth Night called out for and failed to 
get ? Barker s production has become a legend, like Copeau s 
production of the same play at the Vieux CoJombier which 
Barker so ardently admired. And Mr. Bridges-Adams himself, 
though he may have felt that Barker was reaping where Poel 
had sown, would always maintain that Barker s was the 
more finished, the more effective, product. Was this just the 
difference between the two? The difference between tidiness 
and disorder, clarity and chiaroscuro, reason and something 
which often looked like madness. Barker s defects were defects 
of temperament; and they were the defects of a man who had 
too little temperament rather than too much. One remembers 
his hygienic d6cor for the fourth act of The Winters Tale all 
hurdles and huts in a scene which, if it were going to be painted 
at all, called out for Gamille Pissaro. The defects of Poel, 
on the other hand, were the aberrations of genius; they reflected 
the deep interior divisions of a man who was a rationalist on top 
and a mystic underneath. The magnificent thing about Barker 
was his mind an,d his power of expressing it on paper. His 
monument is the Prefaces, and any producer will always 
break his teeth against them in vain. The magnificent thing 
about Poel was a vision, which you caught from his eyes as 
you passed him in the street, but which he never began to 
express on paper and only expressed in flashes on the stage. 
In a letter, from which he has kindly allowed me to quote, 
Mr. Bridges-Adams suggests the difference between the 
master and the disciple. 

Actually I think Poel was more nearly akin to Irving his 
adversary, than Barker, his disciple, was to him. They were 
of two generations, Poel s the sterner. Poel was in his way as 
tough as Irving and battered his head against the granite of 
the Lyceum, compared to which His Majesty s was as soap- 
stone. Poel, like Irving, addressed himself to an audience 
preponderantly male; Barker s style appealed strongly to 
women, who liked things clean and neat no boot and saddle 
about the place. Poel, like Irving, was fond of chiaroscuro; 
all the hygienist in Barker hated a sticky light. While Irving 
drew pictorial inspiration from Gustave Dore and the French 
romantics, Poel drew on the Italians in their prime. But 
Barker chose for his Shakespeare the hard, unmodulable tints 
of enamel, or sent Rutherston and Wilkinson in search of 



MACBETH AND TROILUS 2O1 

"new" colour and tailoring of a cut that had never been seen. 
Irving loved the macabre, and Poel was on easy terms with 
the Totentanz. The Barker of the Prefaces had enough of this 
to serve but I am glad the Barker of the Savoy didn t try his 
hand at Everyman or Faustus. Both Irving and Poel delighted, 
in their different ways, in stage-magic, whether in the form of 
a Witches Sabbath or of a bloody Duncan coming up with a 
bump through the supper-table. Barker, I believe, had some 
brilliantly thought-out Witches at the blue-print stage when 
the war cut him short but they might have proved to be the 
Witches of a man who didn t hold with Witches (Letter to the 
Author; 25 September 1952). 

In fact, the critics proved unusually cantankerous over 
Troilus and Cressida. Few of them showed any understanding 
of the play. The Times complained that it was decadent, and 
bristled with disgust at the "moping, degenerate Troilus" and 
the "mincing, detestable Cressida." But Mr. S. R. Littlewood, 
writing in The Daily Chronicle, paid a proper tribute to the 
atmospheric staging. 

a sort of dark seance, with all sorts of lighting experiments 
against an enormous spread of black and purple draperies; 
now Rembrandtesque effects of warm glow and shadow, now 
cold streaks of limelight, footfalls deadened upon a carpeted 
floor, curtains gliding across the whole thing designed in the 
most modern of modernist ways, to work upon the nerves 
instead of upon the pure imagination. 

In fact, Poel had seen that Troilus and Cressida is a play of 
nerves, and his pictorial treatment of it was yet another 
example of his ability to desert the letter of his doctrine. This 
ability could illuminate as well as disconcert. 

Edward Garnett replied to the critics in an article published 
in The Contemporary Review; February 1913. 

the teeming vitality of the piece, the richness and spontaneity 
of the interpretations, the beauty, both noble and artful, of its 
stage pictures, its flowing and running ease in action, gesture, 
delivery and grouping, ^compensated for any flaws or eccentri 
cities of taste. The resourceful genius of the producer was 
shown by his matching each of Shakespeare s character 
studies with an original manner, air and breeding in the 
actor. . . . The infinite variety of the great poet . . . came 
springing fresh to life in this production, fluid as the passage 
of a brimming river. 
7* 



2O2 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

Garnett went on to defend PoePs and Miss Evans s inter 
pretation of Cressida. 

Nothing showed the justness and fineness of Mr. PoePs con 
ception better than his rendering of the scene (Act IV Scene 4) 
of the Lady Cressida s leave-taking of her sorrowful lover. 
She is shown us as pinning on her hat, visibly intent on looks 
and on her change of fortune, while Troilus is boring her with his 
repeated e But yet be true. *Oh, heavens! be true again/ 
retorts the lady in her impatience to get his entreaties done 
with. . . . The exquisite by-play of this woman of quick sense, 
and later her sprightly response to the kisses of the Greek lords, 
was beautifully natural. . . . Mr. PoePs conception of Gressida 
as a fashionable Elizabethan lady, with the languid airs and 
affected graces of a Gourt beauty, had the positive merit of 
creating, with cunning artistic detail, a real woman. . . . Mr. 
Percy s Troilus, a study of absorbed, brooding passion, was 
also one of many possible readings. 

Garnett ended his defence with a tribute to PoePs own im 
personation of Pandarus, "exquisite in its breadth, naturalness 
and fineness of touch/ 



CHAPTER VII 

Causes and Controversies 

IN the famous cartoon by Max Beerbohm, where Granville- 
Barker prescribes a strong dose of municipal pills to cure 
the pernicious anaemia of the British Theatre, William Poel 
is not shown at the bedside, Craig is there, and Bennett and 
Masefield and even George Moore, with averted gaze, com 
plaining or boasting that he had once been the lover of the 
invalid. But with the exception of Barker the dispassionate 
physician who thought too fondly that the theatre could be 
cured from Harley Street none of these men had given such 
thought to the patient as PoeL Throughout his active lifetime 
he kept up a running diagnosis of its disease. But the British 
Theatre was in no mind to subject herself to the shock treat 
ment or the surgical operation he proposed. 

PoePs criticism was implicit in the principles of his own 
experiment, and they were formulated in a spate of articles 
and letters to the Press. At last, in 1920, he condensed his 
argument into a pamphlet, Whafs Wrong with the Stage? 
published by George Allen & Unwin. Here he had collected 
a great deal of evidence, which had already been published in 
his Monthly Letters, the miscellany which he began to edit for 
his friends and supporters in July 1915, PoePs case was 
essentially this; that "the theatre today is controlled by those 
who keep from the public the representation of what is best in 
life, or at least of what is most appropriate, solely for considera 
tions of personal gain." He asked for popular instead of 
private control, and compared the orderly system of manage 
ment which he had seen and admired in Germany with the 
scrambles and speculations of the London Stock Exchange, 
under which any work of superior intelligence was placed at a 
mortal disadvantage. He believed that everyone, except the 
pure, innocent public, was a partner in the sordid conspiracy; 
he had the Fabian hatred of anarchy and the Fabian hatred 
of avarice; and at the end of his life he could write as follows 
to his friend G. O. Sharman: 

203 



2O4 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

I am glad to know that you are interested in setting up a 
practical fight against the commercial stage. The only way 
to do this and produce good results is to cut yourself off entirely 
from all borrowed help of any kind which has a theatrical 
source. You must not act in its theatres, or borrow its actors 
or use its plays, and you must let everyone know that you 
exist as a protest to the present state of things. You may not 
be able to give good performances. You cannot give good 
performances without plenty of money and help. But you 
can produce a play in order to tell people that this play ought 
to be produced and that the professional stage does not want 
it to be produced. It wants the people to live on sawdust. 
Above all things, you must not let a press man into your 
building. He is the tool of the syndicate and used by them to 
suppress every intellectual effort (Undated). 

There was, of course, a large grain of truth in PoePs fana 
ticism; how large can be measured by comparing his accusa 
tions with Mr. Findlater s account of The Unholy Trade 
(1952). Popular entertainment for that is what the theatre, 
at any level, must always be will inevitably contain a large 
element of unholiness, for whatever any Fabian may once 
have thought, you cannot change human nature by Acts of 
Parliament. What you can do, and what has since been done 
by the Arts Council and remission of Entertainment Tax, is 
to help quality to survive. And you may describe this as trust 
or distrust of democracy, according to your political pre 
dilections. In any case there is no reason to doubt that Poel 
would have approved of these remedies, as far as they went, 
although he would not have thought they went far enough. 
His case was, basically, a familiar one, and it was interesting 
less for the charges he brought forward than for the reforms 
which he proposed. 

He first of all considered the question of the Lord Chamber 
lain s licence. It was obviously intolerable that a play like 
Dear Old Charlie, by C. H. Brookfield, himself an official of the 
Lord Chamberlain s Office, should be permitted, while Barker s 
Waste was banned. The censor had to consider the state of 
public feeling which varied from one generation to another, 
the subject of the play, and its treatment by the dramatist 
and the stage director. In 1911 W. L. Courtney s version of 
Oedipus Rex had been refused a licence. Poel argued that if the 
story of Oedipus were a contemporary event, every newspaper 



CAUSES AND CONTROVERSIES 2O5 

would be full of it and the legislature would not interfere. 
Why should a similar liberty be denied to the theatre? He 
welcomed the newly- won permission to perform sacred drama, 
but not even Shakespeare, he claimed, had written a play 
with a nobler purpose than Shaw s The Sheuring-Up of Blanco 
Posnet. "I am sorry for those men who have the easy con 
science to sit down and eat their meals in peace while they 
deny their fellow-men the opportunity of hearing so wholesome 
and inspiring a play as God put it into the heart and brain of 
this man to write for us" (Contribution to a symposium of 
opinions organised by The Morning Leader; 6 December 1911). 
Poel was sceptical of the judgment of any mari who would con 
sent, for the sake of three hundred a year, to spend the greater 
part of his time reading plays and pantomimes and libretti 
which were for the most part valueless in themselves and incom 
prehensible apart from their performance. Furthermore, the 
dice were weighted against the play which broke new ground 
and treated an unconventional theme, in favour of the heavily- 
capitalised commercial entertainment. It caused less fuss, 
in the end, to try the patience of Granville-Barker or to excite 
the wrath of Bernard Shaw than to challenge the vested 
interests of the popular stage. Not even the Lord Chamberlain, 
Poel thought, would care to offend the City, though he might 
have more humane motives for declining to censor a play 
which he knew to be pernicious in morals. For it was only 
after a theatre had been taken, a company engaged, space for 
advertisement bought, and printing put in hand it was only 
then that the MS. of the play reached his office. If he refused 
to license it, the management would face a heavy loss, and 
the actors be thrown out of work. Either, therefore, the Lord 
Chamberlain s licence should be abolished altogether, and the 
managers take full responsibility for what they put before the 
public; or "the Government should forbid any play being 
capitalised and put into rehearsal until it is licensed." What 
Poel wanted was an alert and sensitive public opinion which 
would exert its own censorship on what the financiers imagined 
it wanted. A glance at the audiences which flocked to No 
Orchids for Miss Blandish and embarrassed the serious intentions 
of A Streetcar Named Desire might have cured him of his optimism. 
He next attacked the cancer of theatre rents. Already, 



2O6 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

in 1915, he could cite the case of a small theatre paying a 
basic rent of 80 a week. Then it was bought by a theatrical 
firm who raised the rent to 110 for the next incomer. He, 
in his turn, could sublet it at 150 a week, and the new 
tenant sublet it again at 200. Furthermore every tenant of 
a West End theatre had to reserve a certain number of seats 
for the intermediate lessees, to be disposed of in any way they 
saw fit. In one case these had amounted to seventy. Here the 
yearly rental of the theatre was 1 1,500, of which only 7,500 
went into the pocket of the owner, the rest being taken by the 
sub-tenants. To prevent this abuse Poel would have forbidden 
the sub-letting of theatres altogether. He would also have 
limited a manager s interests in the acting rights of a play to 
the theatres that he personally rented. Poel did not specify 
what would happen when the play went on tour or was 
performed in repertory. At what point did the manager s 
responsibility cease? At what point was it divided? Poel 
wanted plays to be capitalised by public subscription, like other 
commercial enterprises, not by private individuals. Would 
he have made it unlawful for more than one man to hold more 
than so many shares? Or would he have been content to 
invite public investment and if this was not forthcoming after 
a certain time, to allow private subsidy even if this meant 
a monopoly of interest or control? 

Poel was sensible to the peril of long runs. These meant 
that actors were kept too long in the same part and that 
theatres were occupied for too long by the same play. He 
proposed that when a play had run for a year in a particular 
theatre, it should then be compelled to vacate its original 
home, and if it were still decided to continue the run, then 
new actors should be engaged. He also proposed that no 
actor should be given a contract for more, or less, than three 
months; he did not say whether the management or the actor, 
or both, should have the option of renewal. In November 
1915 he had founded the Theatre Reform Association, a 
mixed body of professionals and playgoers, to Urge the adoption 
of these ideas. In the leaflet announcing the formation of this 
society (which was neither long-lived nor efficacious) he had 
even proposed that the run of any play should be limited 
to one hundred performances at any one theatre. He did not 



CAUSES AND CONTROVERSIES 2O7 

see that this limitation would hurt the popularity of the rare 
good play as well as of the many bad ones. 

Finally he attacked the power of advertising. He believed 
that this was responsible for attracting large audiences to 
listen to rubbish, and he suggested that the cost of advertising 
a play in the newspaper should never exceed five shillings a 
day, and that no theatre should have a space for daily adver 
tisement of more than five lines. He suggested, further, that 
all theatrical news, other than criticisms of performances, 
should be paid for by managers and marked e Advt. 5 ; and he 
would place a Government tax of one shilling on every free 
ticket issued in a theatre, to be paid for by the manager. This 
would help, he thought, to cure the abuse by which a manage 
ment filled its house with paper in order to foster the illusion 
of success, and to secure thereby that the provincial and touring 
rights of the play were disposed of. There was evidence to 
show that in a single week before the outbreak of the first 
World War there had been ten thousand free admissions to 
five West End theatres. 

Poel did not delude himself that these drastic and Utopian 
proposals stood the slightest chance of acceptance by anybody. 
Nor did he reckon how far his argument cut both ways. In a 
theatre run on these lines the successful play of quality would 
be handicapped equally with the vulgar farce. Here I can speak 
from some personal experience. My professional career has 
been almost monotonously confined to plays that nobody 
ever imagined could possibly have a successful run. To take 
three examples; Journey s End, a war play without women, 
was turned into a popular success overnight by the unanimous 
praise accorded it by the critics when it was produced by the 
Stage Society; Murder in the Cathedral was enormously helped 
by a single sentence from The Times review, of which we took 
full advantage "the one great play by a contemporary 
dramatist now to be seen in London"; and the success of 
This Way to the Tomb, Ronald Duncan s beautiful and exacting 
verse drama, which ran for 300 performances, was assured by 
Mr. Beverley Baxter s notice in The Evening Standard. Within an 
hour of the edition containing this being on sale, our un 
frequented Box Office was besieged. In each case a play, 
exceptional in its way, and challenging the conventions of 



20)8 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

public taste, was decisively helped by those methods of publi 
city which Poel condemned. 

It must be remembered, however, that Poel formulated his 
indictment at a moment when the standards of the English 
theatre had touched their nadir. The sufferings and uncer 
tainties of the first World War had not stimulated any demand 
for entertainment to match the agonies of the hour. The 
public taste oscillated between melodrama and frivolity. 
The ordinary civilian did not brace himself against disaster 
by invoking the aid of music or painting or poetry. The 
National Gallery concerts, the Old Vic tours through the 
industrial areas, the Henry V film, the sudden and salutary 
decentralisation of dramatic art during the second World War 
these were developments that Poel could not have foreseen 
and they were the reflections of a more reasonable and a more 
exalted mood. By 1940 the acquisitive society was in dis 
solution and in the theatre, as elsewhere, the War was hastening 
its collapse. The Arts Council was soon to be at work on the 
sound principle of assistance without interference, and already, 
in a few daring minds, the Edinburgh Festival had been born. 

Poel saw that the chronic malady of the theatre was due to 
the immense, inhuman size of the metropolis where most of 
its activity was concentrated. He would gladly have signed 
Barker s prescription for municipal pills. The suburban theatres 
were only ports of call; until they could be provided with stock 
companies and, if posssible, local dramatists until they could 
be nourished by local loyalties there would be no improve 
ment. This improvement presently came to pass and Poel 
lived to see Repertory Theatres flourishing up and down the 
country. But in the second decade of the century he looked 
in vain for the theatre to bring its anodyne to industrial unrest. 
He would cite the People s Theatre in Berlin, with its member 
ship of 5,000 workers, as an example of how the protest of the 
depressed proletariat could be ennobled not stifled by 
communion with the greatest minds. "Lacking the advan 
tages of a college education," he argued in the course of two 
articles for The Evening Mews (12 and 13 December 1913), 

a workman can yet obtain through his theatre a knowledge of 
the best minds from Aeschylus to Ibsen. But in this country 
no theatre exists which provides classics as well as modern 



CAUSES AND CONTROVERSIES 2OQ 

drama acted as repertory. For a sum of 5,000 three com 
panies of players could be organised and maintained for 
three years to visit the town halls twice a week in some parts 
of the populous neighbourhoods of London during eight 
months of each year. In every hall once a week there could be 
presented a Shakespearian play and a modern play, alter 
nately with an English version of a foreign play, modern or 
classical. 

Poel also put forward the idea of theatres run by committees 
of workers and financed out of the workers savings. 

When he looked back on his forty years of struggle in 
the theatre he could only see a succession of splendid dis 
appointments. Barker s pre-war season at the Savoy had 
failed to repay its investment, or even to cover its costs; so had 
his season in partnership with Vedrenne at the Court a few 
years earlier; so had PoePs own gallant and sustained experi 
ment. This had cost him 5,000 out of his own pocket. He 
was angered, though he was not embittered, by the chaos 
of vulgarity that surrounded him. In 1917, the climax of 
national misfortune, he could read that in The Tiger Woman 
Miss Theda Bara had worn a pair of Chantilly lace stockings 
costing 50 and that a popular young actress had secured a 
seven years lease of a London theatre at a rental of 13,000 
per annum. Where Shakespeare was concerned, he had to 
console himself with the news that, at the invitation of Sir 
Oswald Stoll, Miss Mary Anderson would emerge from her 
retirement among the timber and whitewash of Broadway to 
play the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet for a week at the 
Coliseum. Even at the Old Vic, Poel complained, the caskets 
in a production of The Merchant of Venice looked like cigar- 
boxes and were handled with a levity which told the audience 
they were made of cardboard. He was forced to conclude 
that in "the present condition of the professional stage 3 
Shakespeare was sometimes better served by the amateur. 
(Monthly Letters^ 1929; pp. 86-89.) 



II 

If Shakespeare were to be restored to his proper dignity 
then it was essential that a norm of good manners should be 
established, and the setting up of certain standards of respect 



2IO WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

would be the work of a National Theatre. Racine and 
Molire, Schiller and Lessing, had been protected some 
people would say they had been petrified by the state theatres 
of France and Germany. It was inevitable that at the time 
when Poel was reaching maturity, the question of a national 
theatre for Great Britain should have begun to agitate pro 
gressive minds; and that this should have been linked to the 
idea of a national memorial to Shakespeare. 

Poel himself played an important and combative part in 
these discussions. In 1900 he proposed to present a petition 
to the L.C.C., asking for the grant of a site on which a replica 
of the old Globe Playhouse should be erected. This would 
perpetuate for posterity the kind of stage for which Shakespeare 
had written his plays. The proposal remained in abeyance 
during the South African War, but was revived at a meeting 
held in the hall of Clifford s Inn on 23 April 1902. The chair 
was taken by Frederic Harrison. Two resolutions resulted 
from this meeting. The first established the London Shake 
speare Commemoration League; the second recommended 
that the memorial proposed by Poel should be considered by 
the Committee of the League. It soon transpired that the 
building restrictions of the L.C.C. would forbid the erection 
in central London of the kind of building that Poel had in 
mind. In 1903 Mr. Richard Badger presented the League 
with a gift of 2,500 towards a fund to be directed to the 
erection, not of a theatre but of a statue, if the L.C.C. could 
be persuaded to offer a site. The L.C.C. agreed to offer the 
site, if sufficient public money were forthcoming. This in 
nocuous and purposeless proposal was fathered by a Provisional 
Committee, which presently added to it a further scheme 
hardly less ridiculous. Eight members of the Council, includ 
ing its President, Dr. Furnivall, served on the Committee and 
they now proposed the building of a "Shakespeare Temple" 
which should "serve the purpose of humane learning much in 
the same way as Burlington House has served those of natural 
science." 

This suggestion aroused considerable protest, and on 
27 February 1905 a letter appeared in The Times over the 
signatures of Mr. J. M. Barrie, Professor A. C. Bradley, the 
Earl of Carlisle, Sir W. S. Gilbert, Mr. Edmund Gosse, Mr. 



CAUSES AND CONTROVERSIES 211 

Maurice Hewlett, the Earl of Lytton, Dr. Gilbert Murray, the 
Earl of Onslow, Sir A. W. Pinero, Sir Frederick Pollock, 
Mr. A. B. Walkley, and Professor W. Aldis Wright. These 
gentlemen tersely pointed out that "any museum which could 
be formed in London would be a rubbish heap of trivialities." 
On the following day a public meeting was held at the Mansion 
House with the Lord Mayor presiding. No reference was made 
to the Statue or the Temple, and Bram Stoker, with the 
balance sheets of the Lyceum still bitterly in mind, pointed 
out that a National Theatre would be both difficult and 
expensive to run. On a motion proposed by Dr. Furnivall 
and seconded by Sir H. Beerbohm Tree, the following resolu 
tion was carried : 

"That the meeting approves of the proposal for a Shakespeare 
Memorial in London and appoints a General Committee, to 
be further added to, for the purpose of organising the move 
ment and determining the form of the memorial." 

Poel was invited to serve on this Committee and was duly 
elected. It comprised, in the end, 250 persons and was 
therefore not of a size to favour punctual performance or 
precise deliberations. It was the third Committee to have 
been set up since Poel made his original proposal in 1900. 
Five years had passed. 

An Executive Committee was next formed to draw up a 
Report and to decide for what exactly the subscriptions of 
the public should be asked. It was agreed that a National 
Theatre should be built and endowed; but Poel, who was not a 
member of the Executive, was insistent on asking a number of 
pertinent questions. What part of the subscribers 9 money 
would be set apart for the endowment fond ? Would the director 
also be the producer; if not, to what extent would he control 
the producer? If Shakespeare s plays were acted once a 
week, in what way would they be produced ? If other classical 
plays were given, by what standard of criticism would they be 
chosen? The Committee had been meeting for four years, 
and still no answer was forthcoming to these questions when 
Poel formulated them on 3 November 1909. Meanwhile the 
Organising Secretary was waiting for his subscription, "so 
that we may have the assistance of including your name in 
the first published list/ 



212 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

Early in 1910 Poel was again asked for his annual sub 
scription. He replied this time that he could not send it until 
he had seen a balance sheet for the preceding year. He also 
asked when there would be another meeting of the General 
Committee. To this letter he received no reply, but five 
months later he was asked if he would be willing to address 
the "drawing-room meetings" then being organised in support 
of the scheme. He said that he would gladly do so, if he were 
free to criticise the rulings of the Executive where he disagreed 
with them, and he again asked when it was proposed to con 
vene the General Committee. On 2 June Mr. (later Sir) 
Israel Gollancz wrote enjoining him to be patient, and explain 
ing that, owing to the death of the King, it had been found 
necessary to postpone the meeting of the General Committee 
till the autumn; and in December he wrote again to say that 
there would probably be a meeting in the following May "as 
at present there is very little to put before the general body." 
By the middle of June 1911 no meeting of the General Com 
mittee had been held since March 1909. In the meantime 
Poel did not question that the Executive had been busy, but 
he wondered whether it had been wise. 

He maintained that instead of concentrating all its resources 
on the building of a theatre, which might be out of date 
to-morrow, the Executive should give priority to the endow 
ment fond. There was no point in having a theatre until the 
actors and actresses were ready to perform in it, and until 
there were "at least six Repertory Theatres in the provinces 
which may serve as the training ground for actors and for the 
experiments of dramatists" (The New Age; 22 June 1911). He 
thought the Executive would do better to spend the interest 
of its capital on helping these local theatres than to erect a 
costly and luxurious playhouse, only to find that they had "no 
idea strong enough to fill it" (Ibid.) The sum of 80,000 had 
been collected in two years, and the cost of the site, building 
and equipment of the theatre was estimated at 250,000. 
What was to happen, Poel asked (Letter to The Times, 26 June 
1911) if the building were begun and there were no endowment ? 
He was not opposed to a National Theatre of bricks and mortar; 
he only held that this must grow from the soil, like the Comedie 
Frangaise which "never obtained a building of its own until 



CAUSES AND CONTROVERSIES 213 

it had proved its right to one by its own sturdy growth. " In 
1911 there was small evidence that the seed of a flourishing 
National Theatre in Britain had even germinated in the 
ground. 

Poel further criticised the composition of the Executive 
Committee. It was a "self-constituted body, as arbitrary in 
its proceedings as the Pope, and as narrow in policy." 
He believed that its deliberations should be open to the Press 
and that it should co-opt a number of actor-managers "in the 
hope that they would associate themselves with those parts 
and plays of more than ordinary merit which undoubtedly 
have a claim to be admitted into the repertory of a National 
Theatre, and with which they individually were specially 
identified." He had complained in a previous letter to The 
Times (14 March 1908) that there was not a single poet or 
dramatist on the Committee, and he believed, in general, that 
in a matter so closely concerning the theatrical profession, the 
profession should be encouraged to take the lead. 

It was not only for the performance of Shakespeare that 
a National Theatre was necessary. It was necessary for the 
contemporary dramatist. There was a growing "inclination 
on the part of the public to see the economic, social and 
religious conditions of our life discussed on the stage" (Lecture 
at the London Institution; 4 February 1909). But the drama 
tist who depended on a long run for his play would always be 
tempted to make concessions incompatible with the dignity 
of his subject. Was it conceivable, Poel asked, that two 
such masterpieces as John Bull s Other Island and The Playboy 
of the Western World could have reached the stage through the 
normal commercial channels? The production had been a 
matter of chance; in a National Theatre it would have been 
a matter of course. 

Poel saw that the central problem in the constitution of a 
National Theatre was the problem of defining and separating 
the powers to be possessed respectively by the Director and the 
Standing Committee. 

If the Director is not good at all points in choosing plays, 
in casting them, in producing them, both classical and modern 
then the Committee cannot deal with the shortcomings 
without more freedom than it at present possesses. Let the 



214 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

Director be Chairman of the Standing Committee; let him 
have power to engage the producers, for more than one will 
be wanted; and let the producer have sole control over the 
cast and the staging of the play for which he is specially en 
gaged. Then, when there is a failure, there is also a remedy. 
The plan, as now proposed, allows of no elasticity. There is 
no choice for the Standing Committee between dismissing its 
Director and tolerating his defects for the sake of what he 
does well (Letter to The Daily News; 31 March 1909). 

Poel maintained that while the Director of the Theatre should 
be the only one to recommend appointments or dismissals, 
the power of appointment should rest with the Standing 
Committee. 

It would be tedious to relate (except for purposes of satire) 
the subsequent activities of the National Theatre Committee. 
Two World Wars have now intervened since Poel was enjoined 
to patience by Sir Israel Gollancz; two sites for a building 
have been secured and sold, each in close proximity to one of 
our national museums. Finally a site on the South Bank was 
promised by the L.C.C. in 1946, and it was announced that 
the organisation of the Old Vic would run it. The Old Vic 
had profited by Sir Laurence Olivier s blaze of genius in a 
succession of great parts to get itself accepted as the de facto 
National Theatre of Great Britain; but the dissensions which 
later confused its policy suggested that the acceptance was 
premature. Already, when Robert Atkins ceased to direct 
its productions in 1926, Poel discerned the signs of retrogression 
and declared himself opposed to the handing over of any 
National Theatre funds to the managements either of the Old 
Vic or of the Memorial Theatre at Stratford. His views 
were finally crystallised in a letter to Allan Wade, 28 March 
1927. 

I contend that if there is not enough money to build and 
endow a N.T., then what money is available, the interest of it, 
should be spent on endowing something of a lasting nature, 
that is (1) a Training School for elocution, especially for Verse 
speaking, and (2) the use and control of a critical audience. 
. . . To lay the foundations of a theatre for dramatic art we 
first need a school where actors are not being trained for the 
commercial stage; then the use of a theatre for occasional 
matin6es. Added to this the financing of the Stage Society 
and the Phoenix Society that these may continue their per- 



CAUSES AND CONTROVERSIES 215 

formances of exceptional plays which attract a cultured and 
critical audience. This plan has elasticity because it can be 
controlled within the available funds, without pledging a 
three years outlay for an uncertain result, and because it 
localises the work on one spot so as to ensure that permanency, 
as regards methods and principles, which belongs to the 
necessary conditions of dramatic art and which does not 
depend for its existence on the initiative of one mind or the 
caprice of an audience. 

Meanwhile his modest, original proposal had lapsed from 
the agenda. The Globe Theatre could have been recon 
structed at any time before 1914 for the small expenditure of 
5,000. The idea of rebuilding it, both on the South Bank 
and at Stratford, was revived, without public encouragement 
or debate, in connection with the Festival of Britain. It was 
squashed by considerations of economy. In London a skylon 
was thought to be more important than a stage, and at Strat 
ford objections of a purely practical kind proved insuperable. 
Here Mr. Quayle and Miss Moisewitch made some amends 
by building their stage inside the Memorial Theatre, instead 
of in its grounds. The use of this in the production of Shake 
speare s historical tetralogy was a brilliant vindication of PoePs 
teaching. The same lesson had been illustrated by Mr. 
Guthrie in the Assembly Hall at Edinburgh and by Mr. 
Watkins in the Speech Room at Harrow, by Mr. Monck at 
Norwich and by Mr. Miles in St. John s Wood. But still, 
more than half a century after Poel made his proposal, the 
Globe Theatre remains a blue-print. Is it too much to hope 
that by the time the quater-centenary of Shakespeare s birth 
is celebrated in 1964, the blue-print may have been converted 
into a building? Somewhere, surely, on the former site of 
the South Bank Exhibition there should be room for the 
wooden cockpit, from which poet and player may conjure 
up for us the kingdoms of infinite space. 

Ill 

In the summer of 1914 preparations were set on foot to 
celebrate the tercentenary of Shakespeare s death, which was 
due to fall two years later. Poel had hoped that the lead in 
this matter would be taken by the National Theatre Memorial 
Committee, but it was taken instead by men of letters. He 



2l6 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

did not claim to be a man of letters himself, but he was invited 
to the meeting summoned by The British Academy at Burling 
ton House on 4 July. It would have been difficult, and even 
dangerous, to exclude him. The previous day he had written 
to The Daily Chronicle, urging that the following resolution be 
considered : 

"That Shakespeare s vocation being that of an actor and 
a theatrical manager, the British Academy should recognise 
the right of the dramatic profession to arrange the programme 
of the Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebration." 

It is not clear whether this motion was ever put to the 
meeting, but Poel had shown a rather characteristic want of 
tact in bringing it forward through the columns of a newspaper. 
He spoke lengthily and forcibly at the meeting, and he 
regretted, two days later, in a letter to The Times, that "no 
anxiety was shown to connect Shakespeare s name with the 
profession to which he belonged." It may be suggested that 
he rode this particular horse a shade too hard. Fifteen letters 
on the subject appeared in the Press under his signature during 
the next four weeks, and on 19 July he convened a meeting of 
protest at the London Opera House, Kingsway. In the event, 
a gala matinee of Julius Caesar was given at Drury Lane on 
23 April 1916, during which the King knighted F. R. Benson, 
who was playing Caesar, in the Royal Box. Poel believed that 
this honour was thoroughly deserved; and a few months later 
he advocated a national testimonial to Benson for the work 
he had done in bringing the plays of Shakespeare before so 
wide a public. In comparing him with Irving, Poel held that 
he "had a far larger and healthier grasp of his responsibility 
as a manager towards his author. The actors who worked 
with him were encouraged and expected to do their utmost 
to give individuality and prominence to their parts. Nor 
would Benson tolerate the long run of a play which turned 
both actors and authors into mere machines." This suggested 
tribute was realised through the London Shakespeare League; 
8,000 signatures and a substantial sum of money were collected 
in little more than twelve months. A remarkable result for 
war-time! An album containing the signatures and a cheque 
for the money which had been raised were presented to 
Benson at the Holborn Restaurant on 21 May 1919. 



CAUSES AND CONTROVERSIES 

For many years Poel was associated with the work of the 
London Shakespeare League, which had been founded by 
the Rev. Stewart Headlam (an Anglican clergyman of remark 
able character) in support of Poel s ideas. His aims included 
an annual production of a Shakespeare play in the Elizabethan 
manner; the discussion of a current Shakespeare production 
or work of Shakespearian criticism; and the publication of 
Shakespeare s plays without act or scene divisions. Later, the 
League split into two parties; an academic party led by its 
successive Presidents Dr. Furnivall, Sir Israel Gollancz and 
Sir Edward Braybrook, and a stage party led by Poel, who 
wanted the League to protest against extravagant spectacle 
and mutilation of the texts. The definite split came at a 
meeting at King s College in November 1913; the academic 
party was defeated and left the room. Gloomily Headlam and 
Poel walked home together. "Well, Poel, what are you going 
to do now?" asked Headlam abruptly. "We are going to 
make you President," replied Poel. And they did. Headlam 
remained President until his death in 1914, when Poel suc 
ceeded him (Stewart Headlam, by F. G. Beltany; 1926). 

Poel and Headlam were immediately successful in a modest 
but moving project. They secured that a Memorial tablet to 
Richard Burbage should be placed, in the name of the London 
Shakespeare League, on the walls of, St. Leonard s Church, 
Shoreditch. This was unveiled by Sir George Alexander on 
1 6 March 1914. It was noticed that Arthur Bourchier and 
Beerbohm Tree were among the distinguished absentees; and 
Otis Skinner, sending his subscription from America, asked 
why neither Forbes Robertson nor the Terrys were on the list 
(Letter from Hart Conway to William Poel; I May 1914). The 
inscription ran as follows: 

This stone is placed here to the Glory of God and in 
acknowledgment of the work done for the English drama by 
the players, musicians, and other men of the theatre, who 
are buried within the precincts of this Church. And in par 
ticular to the memory of those who are named below : 

James Burbage (died 1597), a joiner by trade and head of 
Lord Leicester s players, who in 1576 built in Shoreditch the 
first English playhouse. Cuthbert Burbage (died 1636), his 
son, who in 1599 built in Southwark the famous Globe play 
house. Richard Burbage (died 1639), also his son, the great 



2l8 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

tragedian, and the first actor to play the parts of Richard III 
and Hamlet. William Somers (died 1560), Court Jester to 
Henry VIII. Richard Tarleton (died 1588), one of ^ Queen 
Elizabeth s players, and the foremost comic actor of his time. 
Gabriel Spencer (died 1598), a player at the Rose Theatre. 
William Sly (died 1608), and Richard Cowley (died 1619), 
players at the Globe Theatre. Erected by subscription in 1 9 1 4. 

So, in the windy chill of the afternoon, the ghosts gathered; 
so they were decked with their last garlands, and received 
from William Poel and his friends the mute applause of piety. 



IV 

In the years immediately preceding and following the first 
World War Poel travelled in Germany and Austria, Holland 
and France, to observe theatrical conditions. He found in 
Germany no company to compare with the Saxe-Meiningen 
troupe which had astonished him with its Julius Caesar many 
years before. In Dresden and Berlin the producer, rather 
than the actor, was the object of curiosity and applause. 
Reinhardt had set the pace, and Poel saw his production of 
Schiller s William Tell at the Art Theatre in Berlin. Here the 
walls of the theatre disappeared and the spectator was con 
fronted on every side by a panorama of mists and mountains. 
This virtuosity of scenic illusion effectively prevented either 
the poet or the actor from making themselves heard. Most 
of the theatres were experimenting with revolving stages, 
although curtains and an c apron were sometimes used for 
Shakespeare. It is not fanciful to suppose that Poel s own 
experiments had had some influence here. He had become 
close friends with Herr Savits, Director of the Royal Theatre 
at Munich, and it was at Munich that Savits had given his 
first Elizabethan production, with King Lear, in 1890. He had 
been urged to this by Baron Perfall, Intendant of the Royal 
Theatre, who regretted that the more spectacular productions 
of Saxe-Meiningen should be over-shadowing the prestige of 
Munich. Savits then suggested, by way of complete contrast, 
a return to Elizabethan methods. He received permission for 
this and adapted his stage for the purpose. Poel saw the 
production of Lear, and although he was not entirely satisfied 



CAUSES AND CONTROVERSIES 2ig 

with the setting, he thought it the most stimulating performance 
of the tragedy he had seen. 

He began to correspond with Savits in 1908, and the two 
producers met twice; once in 1909 when Savits came over to 
England and once at Stuttgart in 1913 when Frau Savits was 
dying. On the former occasion Poel took his friend to see 
some productions of Shakespeare in London and at Stratford. 
After each performance Savits had the same comment: "How 
tired your actors voices are!" His own energy was tireless. 
Where Beerbohm Tree had produced Hamlet or Julius Caesar 
and run it for 200 nights, Savits in the same length of time had 
given 12 different plays of Shakespeare, and 125 other plays, 
mostly classics. He died in 1915 just when the new perfecting 
of mechanical techniques was coming to challenge the simpli 
city for which he had fought (Monthly Letters; 1929, pp. 91-94). 

Already, in 1911, Poel found the German actors nervous 
and restless; they were becoming puppets in the hands of an 
omnicompetent regisseur, and their stages were being con 
verted into ingenious toys. The Court and municipal theatres 
were now having to compete with the private impresario, and 
were finding it difficult to maintain their standards. In Vienna 
the Burg and Volks theatres still showed a supremacy of style. 
The productions were at once spontaneous and controlled; 
the actors were natural and inventive. They were especially 
skilful in the suggestion of atmosphere. "Whether the environ 
ment be the palace, the monastery, or the office, the characters 
give the impression of being born and bred in their surround 
ing" (Article by Poel in The New Weekly, 25 April 1914). In 
1920 he gave a lecture in Cologne, comparing English and 
German methods of Shakespearian production. He questioned 
whether it was legitimate to use the theatre "as if it existed 
merely to imitate the art of the picture book." He also 
pointed out that the art of the theatre was always changing 
and that the German theatre had reached the highest possible 
point of scenic excellence. What would be the next stage of 
development? Acting in Germany had stood still for a long 
time, and it showed no successor to Herr Barnay, the romantic 
and well-graced leader of the Saxe-Meiningen troupe 
(Letter to W. Bridges-Adams; 6 October 1920). 

Poel was the kindest of men, but controversy was the breath 



22O WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

of his being. He could never resist the temptation to intervene 
on any question that touched him at all closely. He objected 
equally to theatre queues and the raising of Cabinet salaries; 
to house-to-house canvassing at election times and the transport 
of voters by Parliamentary candidates on polling day; to the 
establishment of the Church of England and the publication 
of Charlotte Bronte s memoirs; to the absence of Protestant 
and Roundhead heroes from the London pageant and the 
proposed carrying of the Host through the streets at the 
Eucharistic Congress. He was strongly anti-militarist, holding 
the curious view that "the soldier is as much a minor as the 
child with regard to his responsibilities to his fellow-men" 
(Article in The Arbitrator, August 1911). He particularly disliked 
the military display at the funeral of King Edward VII, 
and held that it would have been more in keeping with 
democratic sentiment if General Booth, Mr. John Burns, 
Mr. Bernard Shaw, Dr. Clifford, the Rev. R. J. Campbell, 
and Father Bernard Vaughan had walked beside the coffin. 
Little as he sympathised with the Prussian temperament, he 
had too many links with Germany not to hold aloof from the 
national hysteria of hate. He preached that the conscientious 
objector deserved the respect and not the obloquy of his 
fellow-citizens; and he hoped, in common with many others, 
that out of the sacrifice of war, a new and better society would 
be born. These hopes were largely disappointed, and Poel 
grew more and more disgusted with the chicanery of party 
politics, believing, in a rather vague way, that the people had 
once more been betrayed by their leaders. But he did not 
allow the war to distract him from his dramatic business. 
When he claimed in a public lecture that the theatre was 
more intelligently and more artistically organised in Germany 
than it was in England, Sir Squire Bancroft, who was in the 
chair, was careful to dissociate himself from this seditious 
utterance. 

Poel was a man for whom all points are points of principle, 
and for whom there are never two sides to any question. 
When he was engaged in controversy, he was at war. I have 
already referred (pp. 64-66) to the discussion* between Poel, 
Dr. Percy Simpson, and others, on the problem of Shakespeare s 
punctuation. This was hardly an inflammatory topic; and 



CAUSES AND CONTROVERSIES 221 

although Poel had disagreed with some of Dr. Simpson s 
conclusions. Dr. Simpson greeted him, when they next met, 
with the cordiality natural between two scholars working in 
the same field. Poel held his hand for nearly five minutes 
and seemed much moved. Dr. Simpson could not understand 
the reason for this, and it was only later that he had the 
explanation from a mutual friend. "Simpson is a noble fellow/ 
Poel had said, "I insulted him in The Times Literary Supplement 
and he came up to me the other day in the friendliest fashion/ 
Literary feuds are not fashionable in England and they 
receive no encouragement from The Times Literary Supplement; 
but Poel would have gone to the stake for the interpretation of 
a comma or the significance of a semi-colon. 



CHAPTER VIII 

The Platform Stage 

DURING the early spring of 1913 Poel approached his 
friend Edward Garnett with the proposal to stage 
certain passages from The Trial of Jeanne dArc. This was 
given in October at the Ethical Church, Bayswater, with 
Edith Evans, most surprisingly, as the Bishop of Beauvais! 
In July of the same year she had taken over the part of Know 
ledge in Everyman for performances at the Ethical Church and 
Crosby Hall 

In January of the following year Poel produced a version 
of the Second Quarto Hamlet at the Little Theatre with Esme 
Percy as the Prince and Miss Evans as the Queen (27-30 
January 1914). Poel believed that the Second Quarto text 
had been acted as early as the autumn of 1599, or not later 
than the autumn of 1600; and that it had probably been 
printed from Shakespeare s original MS. as a protest against 
a pirated version of the same play which had been published 
in the previous year. The sense of political intrigue and 
personal insecurity broods heavily over Elsinore, and this 
may well have reflected the atmosphere at Elizabeth s court 
when the Queen s health was failing. Poel thought and the 
idea seems a trifle far-fetched that the play might appropri 
ately have been called The Revolt of Youth, since the young 
Hamlet, the young Laertes, and the pretty Ophelia were all 
shown as the catspaws of unscrupulous forces. And what did 
he mean by the strange suggestion that the hopes of the 
younger generation were defeated when Fortinbras ascended 
the throne, since the "influence of the new King is entirely 
reactionary" ? The last entrance of Fortinbras has no signi 
ficance unless it is seen as the assertion of life in the midst of 
death, and of purity in the midst of corruption. Fortinbras 
is a symbol of political virginity, and when Georges Pitoeff 
produced Hamlet in Paris, he had the inspired notion of 
dressing him in white. 

222 



THE PLATFORM STAGE 223 

In any case, Poel saw Hamlet as a political rather than a 
psychological play, and the intention of the 1914 revival 
was to emphasise the character of the King. He therefore 
edited the play with this idea in mind, not pretending that 
his version was Hamlet as Shakespeare could, or should, have 
written it. It was a deliberate choice of certain passages, very 
much as a photographer might reproduce certain details of 
an old master in order to illustrate, by his selection, the pro 
portions and significance of the whole, Poel believed that 
only when Claudius s part in the drama had been so stressed 
would Hamlet himself be seen in a true perspective. The 
ghost therefore did not appear until he entered Gertrude s 
bed-chamber; and, among other favourite passages, both 
"To be or not to be" and the Gravediggers 3 scene were omitted. 
The curtain rose upon an elderly lady pompously enthroned, 
and below her at a table Claudius sat among the gallants. 
"In a flash," as Mr. S. R. Littlewood described it, the Eliza 
bethan context was brought before the spectator s eye. They 
were all there Burleigh and Raleigh and Essex and above 
them loomed the upholstered Queen. Claudius was presented 
as a "pale and neat young man," still in his thirties, and so 
the theme of rivalry was introduced prior even to the motive 
3f revenge. It is interesting to recall that Poel admired Sir 
Barry Jackson s production of Hamlet at the Kingsway in 1924 
not because it was in modern dress (though he did not object 
to this) but because the play was presented as a tragedy of 
revenge. "I would like you now to print your stage version," 
tie wrote to Sir Barry (25 September 1925), "that it may become 
the standard one." He was particularly impressed by Frank 
Vosper s performance of the King. Vosper suggested the 
same kind of cool and calculating despot, the same smiling 
md not snarling villain, as Desmond Brannigan had portrayed 
a shade less brilliantly, one guesses in 1914. 

The production itself was not in the least Elizabethan. 
Mr. Littlewood tells us that it was "nervously evolved in front 
)f a darkened auditorium, upon a purple-carpeted, soft-trod 
itair and scene, with heavy velvet curtains and Gordon Craig 
suggestions of vast rectangularities for the Elsinore battlements, 
ind the modernist limelight effects against dim backgrounds, 
md all the ceremonial circumstances of the latest type of 



224 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

Poel seance" (The Daily Chronicle; 28 January 1914). Poel had 
the mad Ophelia, who had fled the palace in her imaginary 
coach, brought back by the insurrectionary rabble. His 
researches had also uncovered the following interesting detail. 
He had noticed that in the first Quarto Polonius s advice to 
Laertes appeared within inverted commas, and he next 
discovered that the lines in question were inspired from a 
passage in Greene s romance The Mourning Garment. They 
were presumably the stock in trade of any Elizabethan father; 
and Poel, who played Polonius, rattled them off as if they 
were platitudes he had got by heart. He was just then recover 
ing from a long illness, but his fatigue, according to Edward 
Garnett, did no injury to his performance. "It brought out 
that ancient querulousness" (Letter to W. Poel; 4 February 1914). 

He was always perplexed by the problem of "Look here 
upon this picture and on this." Either the two portraits 
could be shown in miniature; or hanging on the walls (most 
unlikely on the Elizabethan stage, in spite of W. J. Lawrence s 
assertion to the contrary) ; or in the mind s eye, in which case, 
Poel maintained, in an argument I cannot follow, that Hamlet s 
description would have been unconvincing to the Queen; or 
Hamlet might have waved to a corridor where the pictures 
were visible to the Queen but not to himself or to the audience. 
This was the reading that Poel perversely preferred. For it is 
impossible for the actor speaking the lines "See what a grace 
was seated on this brow" not to be looking with a loving 
intentness at the image of his father, whether that image is a 
miniature or a portrait or a picture in his mind s eye. No man 
would talk like that about a portrait hanging in the next room. 
On another point of interpretation in the same scene Poel was 
more plausible. He believed that Polonius should stagger 
through the arras and fall dead at the extreme front of the 
stage. In this way a natural grouping was formed and the 
movement of Hamlet s thought in the later passages of the 
scene was made much less abrupt. 

The outbreak of war in August naturally put a curb 
upon Poel s activities; it was not until two years later that he 
gave a new production. His energies were absorbed, and 
his temper exasperated, by the controversies discussed in the 
last chapter. In April 1916, however, he produced Ben 




)EL as ADONAI 

(See page 161} 



EVERYMAN 

Produced in the Quadrangle 

of the Charterhouse, London, 

and University College, Oxford, 

1901 



DEATH (F. W. G. Gilly) 




Enihwm Collection 



Photographs: Arthur Hands 





Mander, Mitchenson Collection 



Arthur 



EVERYMAN 
1901 

1. The Summoning of Everyman 

2. The Death of Everyman 

3. Everyman and his Friends 

(L R : Knowledge, Discretion, Beauty, Five Wits, 

Strength, Good Deeds, down right of Everyman) 



(Set pag 



THE PLATFORM STAGE 2 25 

Jonson s Poetaster at the Apothecaries Hall. He had become 
interested in the play when he was producing Troilus and Ores- 
sida, interpreting its central episode as a defence of Shakespeare 
against the partisans of Chapman. The principal characters 
of the satire, though they were ostensibly Roman, were all 
relevant to the London of 1600. Shakespeare could be 
identified under the bay leaves of Nigel; Dekker was Demetrius 
and Marston Grispinus. Histrio was any bombastic tragedian 
of the late Elizabethan stage. The costuming varied from the 
Elizabethan to the Caroline, with an occasional classical 
reminiscence. Ovid the elder wore a Cavalier s hat and 
Van Dyck beard; Ovid the younger had a toga, which seems 
to have resembled a Burberry, draped over his doublet and 
hose. Tucca s two pages were dressed and made up as blacka 
moors, with turban, sash and sandals. If Jonson had been 
siding with Shakespeare against Chapman s glorification of 
the Homeric heroes, as Poel believed, then the production of 
the play was all in tune with Poel s dislike of the tub-thumping 
patriotism in vogue. The Poetaster was repeated in the Small 
Theatre at the Albert Hall. 

II 

In the same spring of 1916 Poel received an invitation from 
Thomas Wood Stevens, Director of the Drama Department at 
the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburg. He 
was asked to visit the Institute and work with the students. 
He arrived in June and stayed for three weeks. Scenes from 
Macbeth and Hamlet were privately rehearsed, and when the 
students had grown to some degree accustomed to PoeFs 
methods, a public reading of Life s a Dream was given. Poel 
liked the Americans he met; he was refreshed by their absence 
of prejudice and their receptiveness to new ideas. He spoke 
his mind to them with great freedom about the commercial 
theatre and the "Tercentenary humbug." On 8 June he gave 
the "Commencement" address at the Institute of Technology. 
The Director had asked for "a message from Shakespeare," 
but Poel spent the greater part of his lecture in demolishing 
Shakespeare the Wisest Man, Shakespeare the Greatest English 
man, Shakespeare the Fervent Patriot, and Shakespeare the 
delineator of exquisite and refined femininity. He reminded 
8 



226 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

his listeners that Shakespeare was primarily a workman, and 
that the best tribute one could pay him was to talk about him 
rather less and to act him rather more. 

As a result of his visit Poel was asked to come back in the 
autumn and produce any play he liked. He returned in 
October with the costumes of The Poetaster, and produced 
Ben Jonson s play for three performances. American students, 
though they are docile to ideas, are not amenable to discipline; 
and they began to tell gloomy stories about rehearsals from 
ten to five without a break for luncheon. At five they were 
dismissed for a cup of tea, with instructions to return at five 
thirty. Poel held that nobody could begin to act until they 
were on the point of collapse, and he himself had a fakir s 
capacity for going without food. The performances were a 
notable success and they were repeated at the University of 
Detroit. Poel s personality everywhere made a deep impression 
and the students of Carnegie Tec. presented him with a pair 
of silver candlesticks in appreciation of his visit. Character 
istically, he asked that these should remain in the possession 
of the Institute. He gave a number of lectures in Chicago 
and California before returning to England. 

His effect on American opinion was described by Stephen 
Allard for Theatre Arts Magazine (November 1916; pp. 24-26). 

William PoeFs conception of an Elizabethan theatre per 
formance differs radically from that of certain dry-brained 
professors who have made "Elizabethan revival" a byword at 
the colleges. Instead of trying to reconstruct the outward 
semblance, the archaeological detail, he set himself the task 
of finding what it was in the Elizabethan drama that could 
hold a crowd of "groundlings" absorbed for two solid hours. 
He had long ago mastered the scholarly side of the subject, 
and he knew that mere fidelity to detail would not hold either 
a seventeenth-century or a twentieth-century audience. He 
sought the solution in the manner of performance, in the spirit 
with which the director "put over" the play. 

The production of [The] Poetaster was pitched in the highest 
possible key. The costumes were gorgeous, the dialogue was 
spirited, the characterizations were pushed to a point approach 
ing caricature. No stage trick was overlooked if it would help 
to make the play "move." The tension thus produced was 
such that the audience was kept continuously absorbed. 
Sometimes it was chuckling over a comedy bit, again it was 
delighting in a colorful stage picture, or again it was dreaming 



THE PLATFORM STAGE 22 J 

under the spell of an old song; but always its attention was 
riveted on the stage. 

When the success of the production is analyzed, it seems to 
He in a tour-de-force of stage management. No one remembers 
the story if indeed any connected plot could be recognised 
during the action and there is no recollection of lines 
beautiful in themselves. The method of production was every 
thing. In William Poel s revival of [The] Poetaster there is a 
real contribution to the history of theatre art; and many a 
student in the audience has begun to see the whole Elizabethan 
drama in a new light. 

. . . And William Poel playing upon the voices of American 
students wrought a miracle. . . . Those who have worried 
much over the horrors of the American s acting voice, found in 
the production relief from their pessimism over the future of 
American acting. If William Poel can do so much with raw 
material in a few weeks, there is still hope for some of the 
professionals. 

While he was in California Poel met his nephew Reginald 
Pole, who had become a professional actor sifter playing 
Richard II for the Marlowe Society at Cambridge. In 1922 
Reginald asked him to consider returning to the United 
States and producing a Passion Play in Los Angeles. His 
production of Everyman had become widely known in America 
through the tours undertaken by Philip Ben Greet, and his 
name was associated with this type of religious and ritual 
drama. But his mind had travelled a long way from its first 
Evangelical moorings. He replied to his nephew as follows: 

As I am not interested in any religion that ignores the ethical 
and economic conditions of life which create so much injustice 
and unhappiness in this world, you can understand that I 
could not willingly assist in a religious performance which has 
ceased to have any practical influence for good in the world 
in my opinion (Letter to Reginald Pole). 

He never went to America again. 

Ill 

It was sometimes regretted that Poel did not apply himself 
more often to the greater Shakespearian classics; that he 
showed an increasing tendency to leave these to actors and 
producers with whom he did not wish to compete. Yet occas 
ionally he would let it be known how he would treat a particular 
play, or passage; and his illumination was then so brilliant 



228 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

that anyone producing that play today would be grateful to 
walk with the lamp of Poel s insight in his mind. 

Take the supreme challenge of Lear. This was his "favourite 
play" and he had devoted many years to the study of it (Letter 
to W. Bridges- Adams; 6 October 1926). He would of course 
have dressed it in Elizabethan costume, and the effect of this 
was superbly shown at the Vic in 1940 and at Stratford in 
1950. Lear is not a play about ancient Britons in a setting of 
Stonehenge. It is a play about Elizabethans in a setting of 
Hampton Court and Hardwicke. But between the palace and 
the great country houses of Goneril and Gloster lie the untamed 
countryside, the madmen and outlaws, the dangerous, deserted 
heaths. The fathomless corruption which Shakespeare exposes 
in Lear festers beneath a sophisticated facade. If in one sense 
the play is a fairy tale, it is a fairy tale in which the wicked 
sisters should walk in farthingales and talk in the cruel accents 
of an Elizabethan Mayfair. It is in contrast to the over- 
civilised interior, to man s denial of nature, that nature replies 
with the thunderbolt. This idea of the play was implicit 
in Sir John Gielgud s Elizabethan costuming at Stratford, 
although it was seriously confused by Leslie Hurry s decor. 

Poel saw the play not as grand, but as domestic, tragedy. 
The crux of the interpretation was in the difficult opening 
scene. Here there would be no crowd or ceremony; the 
atmosphere would be that of a Privy Council. The chief 
characters would be discovered standing behind their chairs 
waiting for the King s arrival. Lear would burst into the 
room, bringing Cordelia with him. He is burly in physique, 
with close-cropped, white hair. His face is purple with long 
exposure to the air in the hunting-field and from generous 
drinking when the chase is over. 

On no account should his figure stoop until he is broken 
down with grief. His manners are brusque, impulsive, and 
domineering. When moved, his outburst of passion is titanic 
and uncontrollable causing him to form decisions opposed 
to his own interest and even to his own safety. But underneath 
an exterior and behaviour which are unsympathetic, if not actu 
ally repulsive, exists a large generous heart, and an open hand 
from which even the least deserving in his court have benefited 
(Monthly Letters; No. 44; February 1919). 

Lear would give his peremptory order to Gloster the first 



THE PLATFORM STAGE 

line of blank verse to be spoken in the play and this abrupt 
passage from prose to poetry would stress the importance 
of his entrance. We should imagine him in the centre of the 
stage, holding Cordelia by the hand and never relinquishing 
his grasp until he flings her into the arms of France. When 
Kent protests Lear rushes at him, as if he will strike him to the 
ground. Goneril and Regan will deliver their set flatteries 
"with mock irony in falsetto tones and with theatrical gestures. 
. . . Cordelia should speak in tones choking with emotion, not 
in the least defiant." 

The Fool [Poel continued] is a foil to the King, physically 
as well as mentally very young and frail. He might even 
be lame or a dwarf, but the face should be beautiful and 
infinitely sad to look upon. He is very keen-witted, while the 
King is obtuse, a creature of habit, not one that can reason. 
Every word the Fool utters should be lightly and quietly spoken, 
and yet finely inflected. . . . His songs are not sung but intoned 
in a light musical cadence, as if improvised at the moment 
and the words should stand out just as forcibly as they would 
if spoken. He moans them as if to himself, and when the 
King challenges their purport the lad makes a quick witty 
reply with a good-natured but sad laugh. He is never in 
manner bitter or sardonic. The King has a deep affection 
for him, which is shown every moment they are on the stage 
together (Ibid.). 

If Poel had written his own "Prefaces" to Shakespeare, as 
Barker did, what a grammar of interpretation we should 
possess ! 

IV 

Six months after the ending of the war, Poel was again at 
work; not on a Shakespearian classic but on an Elizabethan 
curiosity. The trilogy of plays making up The Return from 
Parnassus had been acted in St. John s College, Cambridge, 
by the university students between 1598-1602. Its purpose 
had been to air the grievances of the "poor scholars" who 
came down from the University without finding the employ 
ment to which their studies entitled them. 

What, I travel to Parnassus? [exclaims Ingenioso]. Why, 
I have burned my books, splitted my pen, rent my papers, and 
cursed the cozening harts that brought me up to no better 



230 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

fortune. I, after many years study, having almost brought 
my brain into a consumption looking still when I should 
meet with some good Maecenas that liberally would reward my 
deserts, I fed so long upon hope, till I had almost starved. 
Why, our empty-haunched satin suits do make more account 
of some foggy faulkner than of a witty scholar, had rather 
reward a man for setting of a hare than a man of wit for making 
of a poem; each long-eared ass rides on his trappings, and 
thinks it sufficient to give a scholar a majestic nod with his rude 
noodle. Go to Parnassus? Alas, Apollo is bankrupt, there is 
nothing but silver words and golden phrases for a man; his 
followers want the gold, while tapsters, ostlers, carters, and 
cobblers have a foaming pouch, a belching bag, . . . Seest thou 
not my host John of the Grown, who lately lived like a mole 
six years under the ground in a cellar, and cried Anon, Anon, 
Sir; now is mounted upon a horse of twenty marks, and thinks 
the earth too base to bear the weight of his refined body. . . . 
Why, Newman the cobbler will leave large legacies to his heirs 
while the posterity of humanissimi auditores . . . must be fain to 
be kept by the parish. Turn home again, unless you mean 
to be viatores nateres, and to curse your witless heads in your old 
age for taking themselves to no better trades in their youth. 

Such direct, vigorous, satirical writing was no mere under 
graduate fireworks. It had serious intention and mature 
style. The frequent alternations of verse and prose indicated 
at least a dual authorship; there were plenty of classical 
allusions; and references to Shakespeare, Spenser, Chaucer 
and other literary figures suggested the back-chat of the 
lecture halls. Burbage and Kempe were introduced as dramatis 
persona to coach the amateur actors on their return from 
Parnassus, very much as Sir John Gielgud might give his advice 
today to a tyro of the Marlowe Society or the A.D.G. Kempe 
remarks that the young men are rather conceited, and then 
Burbage hands Studioso a copy of The Spanish Tragedy, asking 
him to read a speech of Hieronimo s. When he has proceeded 
for several lines from 

Who calls Hieronimo from his naked bed ? 

Burbage judiciously comments, "You will do well after a 
while" that is to say, when he has learnt his business playing 
small parts in stock. On looking at Philomersus, Burbage 
observes, "I like your face, and the proportions of your body 
for Richard III. ... Let me see you act a little of it." After 



THE PLATFORM STAGE 231 

listening to the first two lines of Richard s opening soliloquy, 
he invites both young men to meet the other members of his 
company, with the customary managerial intimation that they 
will "agree [upon terms] presently." 

The Parnassus plays, though they are episodic in form and 
lack dramatic momentum, are richly entertaining and they 
compose a social document of considerable value. Poel 
believed that three or four hands might have been at work on 
them, and he even conjectured that Ben Jonson had helped to 
put them into theatrical shape. Tradition had associated his 
name with St. John s College, Cambridge, where he may 
have matriculated and resided for some terms. His Poetaster 
had been the talk of London in 1601, and his satirical portraits 
of lawyers, fops, soldiers and actors were found drawn 
with a characteristic verve in the Parnassus plays. The 
same pleas for the honouring of scholarship were heard in 
The Poetaster, and there was no doubt that Jonson s sym 
pathies would have been with the protesting students against 
the parasites and place-hunters who barred their way to 
employment. 

But if Jonson had a hand in the business, it was no more 
than a word or two of timely professional advice : we know 
that the author of the first part of the Parnassus trilogy was 
severely reprimanded and nearly lost his degree; he may or 
may not have collaborated in the rest. It was clear that the 
second and third prologues were by the same hand, and these 
were increasingly outspoken. There was evidence from the 
spelling that this author might have been a North countryman, 
possibly from Cheshire. The first two comedies were re 
discovered by W. D. Machray from one of Thomas Beattie s 
volumes of miscellaneous MSS. in the Bodleian. The MS. of 
the third had come into the possession of Mr. Halliwell- 
Phillips from a library in the north of England, and this had 
already been printed in 1606. Machray collated all these 
MSS. and published a carefully edited version of the Trilogy 
with the Clarendon Press in 1916. This was the form in which 
Poel had first come across it, and when he produced it at the 
Apothecaries Hall in June 1919, it was still an important 
literary event. Miss Edith Evans, mirabile dictu, played the 
raffish Knight, Sir Randall. Was it in the tones of Millamant 



232 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

or Lady Bracknell that she prescribed the following duties 
for a wife? 

It was the wisest saying that my father ever uttered, that a 
wife was the name of necessity, not of pleasure : for what do 
men marry for, but to stock their ground, and to have one to 
look to the linen, sit at the upper end of the table and carve 
up a capon; one to wear a hood like a hawk and cover her 
foul face with a fan; but there s no pleasure always to be tied 
to a piece of mutton. 

The plays were perfectly to Poel s taste because they pre 
sented him with a problem and invited just the kind of pruning 
in which he excelled. No one would object that this or that 
purple passage had been omitted, because no one would 
know. He was free to pursue, unmolested, his career of 
medicine man to the poets corner. His discussion of the 
trilogy can be read in Monthly Letters (1929; pp. 100-113), but 
the following portrait of an intellectual humbug is too good 
not to be reprinted here. It illustrates the manner, at once 
pointed and relaxed, in which the plays were written. 

Presently this great linguist will march through Paul s 
Churchyard. Come to a bookbinder s shop and with a big 
Italian look and a Spanish face ask for three books in Spanish 
and Italian, then turning, through his ignorance, the wrong 
end of the book upward, use action on this unknown tongue 
after this sort first look on the title and wrinkle his brow, 
next make as though he had read the first page and bites a 
lip, then with his nail score the margent as there were some 
notable conceit, and lastly, when he thinks he has gulled the 
standers-by sufficiently, throws his book away in a rage, 
swearing that he could never find books of a true print since 
he was last in Padua, enquires after the next market, and so 
departs. 

Congreve would not have been ashamed to put his name 
to this passage. In many respects the writer responsible 
for the prose portions of the Parnassus plays looks forward 
to the Restoration dramatists. 

In the same bill as The Return from Parnassus, The Comedy of 
Errors was acted by L.C.C. school children. 



THE PLATFORM STAGE 233 

V 

After a revival of Calderon s Such Stuff as Dreams are Made Of 
at the Ethical Church, Bayswater, Poel turned his attention 
to what is generally considered the first of Shakespeare s 
Problem Plays, All s Well that Ends Well. Just as he had 
detected a plea for pacifism in Troilus and Cressida, so in All s 
Well he saw a plea for the removal of class barriers where the 
affections between men and women were in question. He 
believed that the play might have been inspired by the im 
prisonment of Shakespeare s patron, Southampton, in 1598, 
for having secretly married Elizabeth Vernon, one of the 
Queen s Maids of Honour. Helena s wooing of Bertram was 
free from any restraint of code; it was the expression of a love, 
religious in impulse, which no convention could repress. 
For Poel the play had an ethical significance which gave it 
a place in the history of woman s emancipation; in 1919 this 
freedom had at last been won and the exploits of Miss Sylvia 
Pankhurst were a recent memory. The production was given 
at the Ethical Church with Miss Evans, still pursuing her 
career of male impersonation, in the part of Captain Dumain. 
The other French lord was played by Winifred Oughton. 
She and Miss Evans played one of their scenes in the dark to 
give the impression that they were sleepily talking together 
after lights out. Robert Atkins was the stage manager. At 
one point in the rehearsals Poel demanded a bath chair, and 
on being asked for what purpose this unusual property was 
required, he replied: "I want the King to be wheeled on to the 
stage by a nurse in V.A.D. uniform in order that the audience 
may be in no doubt about the condition of his health." 

For the part of Parolles Poel tried to secure the services of 
Clare Greet. Miss Greet was a delightful character actress 
who had endeared herself to a large public by her performances 
of Cockney landladies, charwomen, and mothers-in-law. 
What possessed Poel to imagine that she could play Parolles 
is beyond the boundaries of surmise. However, she duly 
turned up to rehearse, but was not unnaturally dismayed by 
the character she was expected to interpret and the language 
she was called upon to speak. She had not read the play 
and for once Poel s blue pencil had remained in his pocket. 
8* 



234 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

She quickly burbled her excuses and left him to his fantasy. 
Frustrated and chagrined, he eventually played Parolles 
himself, 

William Morris s Love is Enough, coupled with an arrange 
ment of scenes from Henry VI called The Wars of the Roses, 
was given at the same place in July, and after that Poel offered 
no further productions for four years. 

There were several reasons for this abstention from active 
work. In the first place Poel was now a poor man. His 
father-in-law had lost a very large fortune and he had ex 
hausted his own personal means. Thanks, however, to the 
generosity and initiative of his friends a little money was 
raised from time to time which enabled him to present a new 
play to the public. He was over seventy and had reached 
the age when another man would have looked forward to 
comfortable retirement. But he had nothing but the devotion 
of his wife and the amenities of his home to fall back upon. 
Physically, he was tired but indomitable; his life was his work 
and he could not relax from it. His rare intervals of leisure 
were spent in gardening. But he was still in wide demand as 
a lecturer, often travelling long distances and receiving a 
guinea and expenses for his pains. He would still spend long 
days of research in the British Museum, and his appearance, 
when you met him in the street, always suggested a hunter 
on the trail. His eyes were fixed on what he hoped he would 
find around the corner. He was arduously engaged about 
this time in his campaign for establishing a National Text for 
Shakespeare (see p. 285), and this culminated in a large 
meeting at the Mansion House on 12 June 1922. He also 
advocated the placing of a tablet on Shakespeare s monument 
in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-on-Avon, to indicate that 
Shakespeare was an actor and a playwright. Nothing came of 
these projects, but they absorbed a great deal of PoePs time 
and energy. 

He rose early, and often, at about 8.30, having come up 
from Putney, he would ring the bell of Robert Atkins s flat and 
ask, humbly and smilingly, for a glass of milk. A discussion 
of the play he had in prospect, however remote, would then 
follow, and Mr. Atkins would go off to his rehearsals at the 
Old Vic nourished by some valuable insight into character or 



THE PLATFORM STAGE 235 

interpretation. He followed Miss Evans s career with interest, 
expressing, very chivalrously, his gratitude for what she had 
done for him in the past. After seeing her as Cleopatra in 
Dryden s All for Love, he wrote (22 March 1927), 

Your facial play and poses were always in keeping with the 
character you portrayed and the audiences were always 
pleased by your presence. All the characters were talking at 
each other and not to each other, and holding arguments 
with each other instead of doing anything, and always in a self- 
conscious way. One wanted to stick pins into them all, in 
the hope that they would jump, or do something to show they 
were alive. 

He admired Lewis Gasson s production of The Cenci (13 Novem 
ber 1922), and the Phoenix Society s production of The Jew of 
Malta (5 November 1922) ; he greatly liked, also, C. K. Munro s 
The Rumour (3 December 1922), presented by the Stage Society 
"a splendid satire to show how war can be organised by 
profiteers" (Letter to Reginald Pole; 1925). He had no more 
faithful disciple than Nugent Monck and he appreciated both 
the difficulties and the achievements of the Maddermarket. 
He always approved of Mr. Atkins s work at the Old Vic, and 
thought the standard of work at that theatre declined after 
he left it. In the first years of the New Shakespeare Company 
he went fairly regularly to Stratford and confessed to a wicked 
pleasure in the stage pictures devised by Mr. Bridges-Adams 
behind the proscenium of the old Memorial Theatre. 

When Mr. Bridges-Adams brought his production of 
Henry 7 to the Strand, Pod wrote to him as follows (6 October 
1920): "I think your . . . show is the high-water mark of 
efficiency for scenic representation; nothing else that has 
been done on our stage comes near it." He regretted, however, 
the lack of front lighting at the Strand "to pick out the figures 
on the stage and bring them out of the background. It is the 
same in Germany when the town authorities forbid the top- 
lights. As a consequence one hardly ever sees the faces of the 
actors abroad and in many cases the stage is so dark that one 
hears the voices and yet does not know where they come from." 
He thought, too, that there was too much music and that the 
producer had "not taken into account the dramatic value of 
dead silence simply as a contrast to sound. As an illustration 



236 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

the pause of silence that took place at the end of the ist and 
opening Chorus, before the curtains opened over the first 
scene was most effective. . . . And the IV Act, which is wholly 
tragic, could well open after a dead pause/ 

In spite of his friendship and admiration for Shaw, he did 
not like Saint Joan; his passionately Protestant mind rejected 
the idea that a Grand Inquisitor could be a nice man. 

Nothing, however, enraged him so much as Clemence 
Dane s fantasy in verse, Will Shakespeare, produced at the 
St. Martin s in 1922. He urged the National Theatre Com 
mittee to protest against this implausible fiction; and when it 
was unwilling to act in the matter, he was only with great 
difficulty dissuaded from going to the theatre and making 
a personal demonstration when the curtain rose. He gave 
vent to his indigation in a letter to his nephew. 

Shakespeare is held up as a mean and contemptible profligate 
wasting his time, neglecting his wife and children, that he 
may hang about the tavern in jealous rivalry with Kit Marlowe 
who shares with Shakespeare the amours of Mary Fitton. 
And would you believe it, ten thousand pounds has been 
spent on the staging of this miserable travesty, and the news 
papers and many Shakespearians who thrive on exploiting 
the plays of the world s greatest dramatist are silent in face 
of this humiliation simply because the Editors know that if 
they opened their newspapers to a discussion on the question, 
managers would penalise them for doing so (Letter to Reginald 
Pole; 2 January 1922). 

These editorial terrors were largely imaginary and, in fact, 
letters of protest from Poel appeared in The Nation, The Man 
chester Guardian and The Saturday Review. His indignation had 
cooled sufficiently for him to meet Miss Dane at the Angmering 
Festival in 1924; but had we, who were then organising this 
event, realised the strength of his feelings, we should have 
thought it tactless to ask him to stand at her side in an act of 
Shakespearian homage. 

On 10 April 1923 he was saddened by the death of his 
father-in-law. "I have seen death closely lately," he wrote 
to Mrs. Stopes, "my wife s father has but recently died, and 
only last week a very dear friend was knocked down in the 
Earls Court Road and run over by a trolley, and died in the 
Infirmary a few hours afterwards. This sudden disappearance 



THE PLATFORM STAGE 237 

of life has to me an awe and a terror unspeakable, and leaves 
a lasting bruise on the mind and the affections/ 

The political situation disturbed and disappointed him. 
He had witnessed the Victory Parade in 1919, and although 
he was no militarist he was moved by the sobriety and pre 
cision of the march. "Throughout," he wrote, "the stage 
management of the pageant was excellent, there was no con 
fusion, no sense of hurry; no obvious mistakes were made, all 
knew their several duties and did them easily; no shouting, 
no talking except in whispers, no words of command were 
heard." He was particularly impressed by the appearance of 
Marshal Foch. "On a tall charger sat a short man, slight in 
build but straight in the back and firmly seated in the saddle, 
wearing a grey-blue tunic and red-peak cap, heavily braided 
with gold. His features clean-cut, hands small, the right one 
holding a marshal s baton. His head erect and immovable, 
eyes downcast, complexion pale, countenance very grave; 
over it passed a slight quiver of sensibility as the only apparent 
recognition of the great demonstration made by the public, 
when he rode from under the shadow of the tree to take position 
at the head of his soldiers" (Monthly Letters; 1929; pp. 1 13-1 14). 
But Poel could not help comparing the British contingents in 
the procession with the politicians who misled them. "In 
stature and stamina, in apparent frankness, love of fair play, 
generosity, good humour, cleanliness, godliness, these men 
seemed to excel." Yet these same men had "become the 
tools of those who think that nothing matters in the life of a 
nation but what is of gross and material advantage." 
Poel was a radical, but he was not an extremist. Extremists 
"whether they are to be found in Carlton House Terrace or in 
the public house . . . bind and gag themselves with their own 
hands; not conscious of their own limitations they are con 
fused with imaginary bugbears and illusive schemes." 
But in the setting of the coupon election, the second Coalition 
Government, the traffic in Honours and the scandal of the 
Black and Tans, an extremity of cynicism on one hand might 
breed, he thought, an extremity of violence on the other. 

Poel s refined sensibility warned him that the quality of life 
was slipping away. "In some ways, perhaps," he wrote to his 
nephew in California on 14 October 1921, 



238 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

English people are more alive than they were before the 
war. There has been more levelling up and levelling down 
among the classes. But to one like myself with exclusive tastes 
and notions, the wear and tear of life has become accentuated 
justly perhaps and there is no repose to be got out of life, 
and no feeling of security as to ways and means, and no art 
life either in music, drama or painting that touches any 
thing like high-water mark to compensate one for the penalty 
of existing. 

Although he would occasionally take the chair at Fabian 
meetings he did so for Shaw at Putney Poel was 
disappointed by the showing of the Labour Party. It 
seemed to him to have "no principles and no policy beyond 
the question of wages. It has made many mistakes, showing 
that its leaders are without vision or imagination" and "behind 
the flashy outside of educational appearances and legislation" 
of the existing government Poel could only see corruption and 
extravagance. Like any other radical of his generation, he 
had once placed his hopes in Mr. Lloyd George; but Poel 
combined an aristocratic temperament with his radical 
convictions and the Prime Minister s bustling superficiality 
filled him with a mounting disgust. He had become the tool 
of "the press, the publican and the tradesman," and England 
seemed "to be further away from democracy than ever" 
(Letter to W. J. Lawrence; 14 December 1920). He remembered 
Hyde Park in the eighties when he had walked daily from his 
parents house near Marble Arch to the slums of the New Gut. 
He remembered the stream of splendid carriages and "won 
dered how long it would be before the Avenging Angel would 
send his sword to destroy that fashionable but heartless 
throng" (Letter to The Westminster Gazette; 10 June 1921). But 
although he was depressed, it was not in his nature to despair. 
"The future," he wrote to Lawrence on 13 September 1925, 

is in the hands of the young and to be with the young is to be 
with life at its best. Our existence over here must either be 
entirely reconstructed on new economic lines that will create 
more industry and better feeling among the masses, or the 
country will rapidly decay and all that is civilising in it cease 
to be. 

In politics, as in the theatre, the future has not altogether 
disappointed his hopes. To those of us who were young in 



THE PLATFORM STAGE 239 

the decade following the first World War Poel seemed a pre 
occupied but not an unhappy man. It is gratifying to think 
that he enjoyed working with people who were ignorant and 
inexperienced, no doubt, but who were capable of a disinter 
ested enthusiasm and were not fixed in obsolete ideas. 

His passion in public controversy was combined with an 
extreme reticence about his own personal feelings. Only to 
his closest relations did he betray an inward bitterness. 

My own profession over here would hang me if they could, 
and nobody likes me because I am so uncompromising. This 
does not mean that I am a soured man, or a cynic, or an ill- 
natured critic. But I was not born to live in a corrupt age, 
and when I see all those about me selling their immortal souls 
for the pure love of silver, I suppose I cannot conceal my 
disgust and that makes me unpopular (Letter to Reginald Pole}. 

He was mistaken in thinking that he was unpopular, though 
so noisy a fighter may sometimes have been regarded as a 
nuisance, or even, occasionally, as a bore. His stooping 
figure, prophetic mien, and deceptively gentle address would 
inspire any committee meeting with dismay. But the truth 
was more subtle and less flattering. Poel was becoming 
unknown. He was no longer in the vanguard of a revolu 
tionary (or, as some felt, a reactionary) movement. His chief 
ally, Granville-Barker, had retired from the theatre to prepare 
his Prefaces and translate the works of a minor and sentimental 
Spanish dramatist. Such of PoeFs principles as could be 
accommodated to the proscenium theatre had been fairly 
widely accepted. The plays that he had brought back into 
circulation were now being performed by the Phoenix Society 
or the Renaissance Theatre. There was a great hum of 
marginal activity on the London stage, much of which he had 
inspired but from most of which he was excluded. He was 
lonely; he was neglected; he was old. His voice had the 
faraway sound of forgotten battles, and the angry radical of 
the Edwardian decade seemed suddenly to have become out 
of date. He did not talk the language of the twenties, and you 
had continually to be explaining to people who he was. Poel 
had never sought publicity, but at the Trocadero dinner he had 
stood out as a picturesque, an important personality. He was 
still picturesque but had he ceased to be important? 



240 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

There were a few people who did not think so. In 1924 
Sir Edmund Gosse, supported by Sir James Barrie, secured 
for him a grant of 300 from the Royal Society of Literature 
the largest sum it was in the power of the Society to bestow. 
He received, about the same time, a gift of 100 from Mrs. 
Ludwig Mond, and he was awarded a Civil List pension of 
100 a year by the government of Mr. Ramsay Macdonald. 
An impressive tribute was paid to him during this same year, 
at the Haymarket Theatre. Two hundred and fifty people 
were invited to be present in the stalls, and John Drinkwater, 
whose play on Abraham Lincoln Poel had admired, was in 
the chair. "Barker and Poel," he said, "are the two lost sheep. 
Poel is the only man who would be accepted as a master of 
the art of producing Shakespeare s work on the stage in 
continental towns, yet his own profession in England can find 
nothing for him to do." Ninety slides illustrating Shakespeare s 
characters were then shown on the screen, while Poel made his 
comments on them; and three scenes were acted to demonstrate 
Poel s method of speech. These were given in quasi-modern 
dress. Olivia in Twelfth Might wore the black costume made 
for Doris Keane in Romance, seasoned with an Elizabethan 
head-dress, and Viola appeared in the uniform of the Bluecoat 
School. Taken all together, these recognitions may have 
convinced Poel that there was still an audience for his work. 

VI 

When he resumed operations in the summer of 1924, he 
had an entertaining surprise up his sleeve. Of all Elizabethan 
curiosities Fratricide Punished is by far the most amusing. In 
1592 Thomas Nashe had referred to the "players abroad" 
and for a time this was taken as referring to foreign actors. 
Later it was realised that Nashe was speaking of English 
players (and their wives) who were known to have been acting 
in Germany during the last two decades of the sixteenth 
century. Fratricide Punished was the fruit of one of these 
continental tours. How it came to be written is anybody s 
guess; but something like this may have happened. 

A company of actors were playing in Germany at a time 
when Kyd s tragedy on the Hamlet story and Shakespeare s 
First Quarto were still the talk of the town. Arriving in 



THE PLATFORM STAGE 241 

Wittenberg (let us suppose) they were asked to give perform 
ances of it during their stay. But the play was not in their 
repertoire and they had no copy of the text. "Never mind," said 
the Germans, "you must know the story. Make up a text of 
your own." It is easy to imagine them, huddled together in a 
rickety attic over large jugs of Liebfraumilch, trying to make a 
patchwork script of the current London success. One or two 
of them had a taste for poetry; all of them had an eye to the 
big effect. Since their audience would have, at the best, a 
smattering of English, the long speeches must be cut. We have 
only to picture the repertory company from High Wycombe 
or Henley-on-Thames trying to reconstruct The Cocktail Party 
for an- audience in Heidelberg to get a rough idea of how they 
set to work. "They won t understand that, darling," thus we 
can overhear the producer robbing Celia Coplestone of her 
best lines. After the performance was over the professors 
would have asked them for a script; this would in due course 
have been translated into German; and there it would have 
remained in the archives Der Bestrafte Brudermord until at 
some later period it was retranslated back into English. At 
least three different English versions were in existence when 
Poel decided to put one of them on the stage. A comparison 
between these and the printed edition of Shakespeare s First 
Quarto left him in no doubt that the German play was 
primarily indebted to Kyd and not to Shakespeare. It 
appealed to him, however, for the same reasons as the First 
and Second Quartos; because it showed the revenge motive 
of the play unencumbered by poetry or philosophising. 

Poel knew that he was presenting a play which would please 
by its quaint reminiscence of a supreme masterpiece. He 
did not realise that he was presenting a side-splitting burlesque. 
Let us return, therefore, to the rickety attic in Wittenberg and 
see how these very average actors set to work; remembering, 
of course, that the humour of the play for an English audience 
in 1924 depended on then- close acquaintance with Shake 
speare s tragedy. They began, oddly enough, by spilling all 
the beans. The figure of Night informs us that "During this 
night and the coming morrow must ye stand by me, for it is 
the King of this land who burns with love for the wife of his 
brother, whom for her sake he has murdered, that he may 



242 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

possess both her and the Kingdom. Now is the hour at 
hand when they lie together." We are next taken to the 
battlements where the Ghost, having frightened one of the 
Sentinels into dropping his musket and hastily invoking the 
aid of St. Anthony of Padua, gives him a sharp box on the ear 
and abruptly exits. When Horatio enters a moment later, 
he is told, "O sir, there s a ghost here which appears every 
quarter of an hour" ; on this he judiciously comments, "There 
is some mystery in this." Hamlet himself then joins them and 
on the reappearance of the Ghost the dialogue proceeds 
as follows: 

Second Sentinel; Oh, dear! Here s the ghost again. 

Horatio: Does your highness see now? 

Francisco: Your highness, don t be frightened. 

Hamlet: The Ghost beckons me. Gentlemen, stand 

aside a little, I beg you. Horatio, do not go 
too far away. I will follow the Ghost and see 
what he wants. (Exit.) 

Horatio: Come, let us follow to see that he takes no 

harm. (Exeunt. Ghost beckons Hamlet to the 
middle of the stage 3 and opens his jaw several times). 

After the Ghost has told his story, Hamlet repeats it at once 
to Horatio and the subterranean "Swear, swear . . ." is inter- 
terpreted as a sign of spectral displeasure. By the end of this 
scene the audience has already heard the main outlines of 
the story three times first from Night, then from the Ghost, 
and thirdly from Hamlet. These amateur dramatists were 
taking no chances. 

The assumption of madness quickly follows, and before we 
know where we are Hamlet is bidding Ophelia "Go to a 
nunnery, but not to a nunnery where two pairs of slippers lie 
at the bedside." The soliloquy "Oh what a rogue and peasant 
slave am I !" is sensibly reduced to three lines "I have seen a 
tragedy acted wherein one brother kills another in a garden, 
and this they shall now act. If the King changes colour, he 
has done what the ghost has told me." At this point the actors 
enter, and when Hamlet has given them a word or two of 
advice not to swagger when they are playing a king and 
not to leer when they are speaking to a lady their leader, 
Carl, remarks: "Your highness, I accept this correction with 



THE PLATFORM STAGE 243 

humble respect, and we will try to do better for the future/ 
Then follows a long duologue with Horatio in which Hamlet 
tells him the story of a shoemaker s wife in Strasbourg who 
stabbed her husband with an awl, and was brought many 
years afterwards to confess her crime by seeing it enacted on 
the stage. After the play-scene there is a very curtailed, 
prosaic version of "O my offence is rank" and "Now might I 
do it pat/ and Hamlet plunges brusquely into the Closet scene 
with "Lady mother, did you really know your first husband?" 

When Hamlet has been packed off to England, Pantaloon, 
Harlequin and Columbine are introduced; it was presumably 
thought that the audience needed cheering up. Columbine is 
Ophelia and Harlequin Osric; Pantaloon has no obvious 
Shakespearian parallel. Ophelia s derangement is shown by 
the fact that she importunes Osric with amorous proposals 
until he is forced to exclaim "that darned girl, that Ophelia, 
runs after me out of every corner. I can get no peace along 
of her. . . ." Meanwhile Hamlet encounters two bandits and 
inviting them to shoot him, one from either side, deftly drops 
to the ground while his assailants only succeed in neatly 
killing each other. Ophelia is not drowned but "went up a 
high hill, threw herself down and killed herself," and the 
poisoned cup of the final scene contains not wine but "warm 
beer." 

Such, in bold outline, was Fratricide Punished; a jewel of 
unconscious comedy. It was given for two performances at 
the Playhouse, Oxford, in August; and a few months later at 
the New Oxford and Little Theatres in London; and it was 
revived in April 1926 for a Sunday evening performance under 
the auspices of the Fellowship of Players, At all these per 
formances Esme Percy played Hamlet and Margaret Scuda- 
more the Queen. Leonhardus, alias Laertes, was taken by 
Andrew Leigh, who was engaged, he tells us, because Poel 
thought that Ophelia s brother should be played like Sir 
Andrew Aguecheek. 

In that production he did many things in all seriousness 
which were received with laughter by the audience. The 
Queen was made to put her wig and false teeth through the 
bed curtains where they remained to give point to Hamlet s 
lines about "God has given you one face and you make 



244 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

yourselves another." . . . Ophelia, when mad, was played as 
Columbine (dressed in a Victorian ballet skirt at first, until 
someone devised a less definite attire), the character corre 
sponding to Osric as Harlequin and another small part (not 
Polonius) as Pantaloon. All three were acted by young ladies 
in their teens from an academy of stage dancing. Poel spent 
a lot of time in coaching the girl who played Harlequin how 
to give the exact intonation to the line "Here is the warm 
beer" . . . going up the scale on the first four words, with a 
drop of several semi-tones on the word "beer" (Stratford Dossier). 

Mr. Leigh goes on to remind us that Poel did not always 
play fair. It was only when he learnt that, as a matter of 
historical fact, there had been women actors on the continent 
in Shakespeare s day it was only then that he would admit 
Hamlet s question to the first player as to "what had become 
of the women of their company." 

Fratricide Punished was an immediate popular success. 
Hardened critics, schooled to sit rigid and unsmiling through 
the most uproarious farce, rocked about in their stalls. Ex 
tracts from the play were given at the Poel Centenary Matinee 
in X 95 2 > an d it was on this occasion that Mr. W. A. Darlington, 
recalling the earlier performance, described it as one of the 
funniest things he had ever seen on the stage. 

VII 

In July 1925 Poel organised a matinee at the Haymarket 
Theatre in aid of the Marlowe Memorial Fund, at which a 
number of distinguished players read or recited passages from 
the plays. One remembers Henry Ainley s golden delivery of 
"Come live with me and be my love." In the following year 
PoeFs own play, The First Franciscans, was given at St. George s 
Hall in connection with the Sexcentenary of the death of 
St. Francis. This was his own personal interpretation of the 
Franciscan theme, and it had been written in reaction to the 
stern theology of Everyman. Barker had once intended to 
produce it, but the success of Fanny s First Play interrupted the 
plan. For Poel, Francis was the first Protestant. He saw in 
him the image of those qualities gentleness, humility, poverty 
of spirit and purity of heart which he most admired. But 
he distinguished between Francis and the Franciscan move 
ment. In Francis the religious impulse was liberated from the 



THE PLATFORM STAGE 245 

motives of self-interest and servile fear; it was an expression 
of perfect love, embracing all creation. But it was too perfect 
to be organised, and the followers of Francis had been captured 
by the ecclesiastical machine. This was the familiar humani 
tarian thesis and it would be inappropriate to argue its validity 
here. It was not presented by Poel with any great literary 
or dramatic skill, but Courtenay Thorpe gave a moving per 
formance ofthepoverello. In 1926 Poel confessed that he was far 
away from the spirit in which the play had been conceived. Sir 
Barry Jackson had sent him a copy of The Marvellous History 
of St. Bernard, and he had written in reply (24 September 1925) : 

What chills me in the St. Bernard play is just what the 
play does not allow to be altered. Had I been the Archdeacon, 
and the nine pilgrims had come home and told me they had 
left the tenth behind to the tender mercies of Satan, I should 
have sent them back to the statue and told them to stand 
shoulder to shoulder and either all be killed or all live. This 
is to me the notion of what a Christian spirit of self-reliance 
should mean which the Saint Bernard play does not seem to 
me to show. 

Self-reliance is a civic, but it is not a supernatural, virtue. 
Nothing could be further from St. Francis. 

Poel was now seventy-three years old, but he knew that in 
one important particular his demonstration was incomplete. 
He had never produced a play on an open platform-stage 
within the four walls of a theatre. All he had been able to 
do, when he worked in a theatre at all, was to build an Eliza 
bethan stage behind the proscenium arch; and, as Montague 
had pointed out in his review of Measure for Measure, this was 
not the same thing as presenting a play under Elizabethan 
conditions. The audience was still looking through the key 
hole; they were not inside the room. So he now set about 
appealing for money in order that this last experiment should 
be made. He refounded the Elizabethan Stage Society as 
The Elizabethan Stage Circle, and when he had collected 
300, he found that there was no building in London licensed 
for public performances which would allow him to erect the 
platform he required. At last, after many applications, 
permission was obtained for a single private performance, but 
then he could not find a theatre large enough to accommodate 



246 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

the stage he had in mind. This must be built to the size of 
the Globe platform; it must be forty-three feet in width and 
not less than thirty feet in depth from the Proscenium arch. 
He was on the point of looking for a more suitable theatre 
in the provinces, when he found the management of the 
Holborn Empire willing to let him build out his platform over 
the stalls for a Sunday evening performance in July. This 
meant that the audience must be limited to those who could 
sit in the pit or the first two rows of the dress-circle. The 
platform-stage of his dreams would have "around it a tiered 
semi-circular auditorium, the seats rising a few inches for each 
row and topped by a tier of private boxes. This arrangement 
would give facilities for concerts, ballets, and the presentation 
of classic drama which, together, should ensure its usefulness 
in the metropolis and repay the cost of the building" (Letter 
to The Saturday Review; 23 July 1927). But Poel, as usual, 
had to be content with an approximate solution. His plat 
form gave one an Elizabethan openness and intimacy, a sense 
of habitation and a liberty of movement, a feeling of personal 
responsibility for the play, which were a new and precious 
experience for those who acted on it for the first time. The 
proscenium opening took the place of the Elizabethan recess ; 
and beyond it there was room for the balcony. 

But here the play mattered much less than the method. By 
a minor miracle the stage was set up on Sunday morning, the 
actors rehearsed on it in their costumes during the afternoon, 
and in the evening the performance went without a hitch. Mr. 
Ivor Brown, who was always conspicuous among the dramatic 
critics for his understanding of what Poel was about, described 
the effect of the new stage in his article for The Saturday Review. 
It was fitting that the same journal in which Bernard Shaw 
had recognised the importance of PoePs first experiment 
should now salute the importance of his last. Mr. Brown 
wrote as follows: 

. . . the fiill platform does more than assist; it entirely alters 
and recreates. It enables you to understand the processional 
values of the Elizabethan stage and the welcome which it 
gave to the invasive masque. It enables you, further, to realise 
directly the stage-tactics of the time in which actors were often 
visible to the audience without being visible to one another. 



THE PLATFORM STAGE 247 

The apron-stage opened the door of that cage in which 
Elizabethan drama had been pent up; the platform-stage 
removes all the four walls of the prison. 

The platform also offers a multiple stage. Mr. Poel had 
pavilions at each side of the platform; there was the raised 
stage for indoor scenes behind the platform, and on the 
gallery above it he could show tableaux vivants. Thus one could 
understand the plasticity and variety of the Elizabethan 
stage-method. There could be much and intricate movement 
since the platform was bigger than the stage of Drury Lane. 
There could also be a to-and-fro technique like that used by 
the cinema (The Saturday Review; 23 July 1927). 

It was characteristic of Poel that he should have chosen to 
inaugurate his experiment with a play of no particular interest 
Samuel Rowley s When you see me, you know me. He revived 
it, not on account of its dramatic merits, such as they were, 
but because it seemed to him relevant to the current contro 
versy over the revision of the Prayer Book. 

History repeats itself [he wrote in his programme note] 
and consciences are stirred today as they were by Luther and 
his so-called heresies. 3 What is noticeable in this play is that 
the English people were, more than three centuries ago, as 
much disinclined to be dominated by Luther s teachings as 
by those of the papacy. Will Summers, who represents the 
opinions of the audience on the subject, tells the King, on 
whom the Pope has conferred the title of Defender of the Faith, 
that the people can defend their own Faith and do not wish 
anyone else to do it for them. 

The play that followed in February 1928, Ben Jonson s 
Sejanus his Fall, was even better calculated to illustrate the 
possibilities of the platform-stage. It had been written, probably 
with the help of Chapman, in reference to Essex who was 
lately dead. It had failed, for political reasons, at the Globe 
in 1603, and Jonson re-wrote it for publication in 1605. Poel 
was concerned to disinter the original acted play from the 
more literary composition that followed it. "This" he told 
the British Drama League in a lecture on 4 February 1928, 
was "very much like looking for a needle in a bundle of hay. 
The plot is there and can be taken out of the book and will, I 
hope, be seen and heard on 12 February. But if it can be 
truthfully said that nothing will then be added to Jonson s 
text, it cannot be said that nothing will be omitted from it." 
PoePs was a very effective version, and his production, swift 



248 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

in movement and elaborate in design, gave a rich, satiric 
picture of the Roman decadence. Roy Byford, as Tiberius, 
was attended by two Maharajahs. At the beginning of the 
play the crowd swarmed up on to the stage from the right and 
left of the stalls; the front curtains opened to reveal as much of 
the interior stage as was required for any given scene; and be 
hind the proscenium the palace steps led up to a balcony. 
This, too, had curtains in front of it. The Elizabethan pattern 
was complete, and the general effect of the production was 
again described by Ivor Brown. "The case for the platform 
is proved. And now, I suppose, they will build the new 
theatre at Stratford without it. 1 * They did. "In that case 
we shall have the old, stiff, constricted productions over again 
and the crowds tumbling over each other and dodging a 
descending curtain which breaks the action even if it does not 
break the actor s neck. Dare they do it?" They did and 
repented when it was too late. All the work done by Iden 
Payne and Anthony Quayle has been an attempt to rescue 
the Memorial Theatre from an initial error of design. 

Sejanus was the first production in which I worked with 
PoeL He cast me for the c choric 3 part of Arruntius and I was 
made up to resemble Ben Jonson himself. The play was 
variously costumed in classical and Elizabethan dress. There 
is mention of a c dog 5 among the dramatis personae, but I 
cannot remember who played this or what functions it per 
formed. Dr. Percy Simpson, writing to Poel afterwards, said 
that never before had he "seen an Elizabethan play done with 
so serene, effortless and pure a beauty, and with such a sense 
of quiet, spacious grandeur" (13 February 1928). 

A year later, in January 1929, Poel produced Fletcher s 
Bonduca> renamed Britain, at the King s Hall, Covent Garden, 
also on a platform stage. The Anglo-Saxon war of indepen 
dence has only a remote appeal for the contemporary mind 
and Poel sought to bring it nearer by introducing a Victorian 
graduate in academic dress, who spoke some verses by Tenny 
son before the play began. 

Out of evil evil flourishes, out of tyranny tyranny buds, 
Ran the land with Roman slaughter, multitudinous agonies 
Perish d many a maid and matron, many a valorous legionary, 
Fell the colony, city, and citadel, London, Verulam, Camulodune. 



THE PLATFORM STAGE 249 

Tennyson could do better than this, and to conclude the 
play the graduate reappeared with some lines from Cowper 
as epilogue to the defeat of Caractacus. 

Other Romans shall arise, 
Heedless of a soldier s name; 
Sounds, not arms, shall win the prize 
Harmony the path to fame. 

Bonduca (Boadicea) was played by Margaret Scudamore, a 
majestic and Amazonian heroine, who towered over her 
adversaries. This was not difficult, since the Roman soldiers 
were all played by children! The idea was a brilliant one 
and no one but Poel would have thought of it. 

Both in Sejanus and Britain the theme of conspiracy was 
strong, and Poel was much preoccupied, during these last 
years of his activity, in tracing it through the work of the 
later Elizabethans. In July 1929 he condensed Chapman s 
two plays on the Due de Biron and gave them on a tableau 
stage at the Royalty. He agreed with Dr. Parrott in thinking 
that "Act IV of Chapman s tragedy has evidently been cut 
to pieces by the censor and patched up in the best way possible 
for the press." Chapman had himself referred to "these poor 
dismembered poems," and he had no doubt paid the usual 
penalty in letting the glamour of Essex s rise and fall take 
possession of him. Poel also agreed with Parrott "that Chap 
man is more intent upon the expression of sentiments suitable 
for the occasion, than on the harmonious development of 
character." His own version of the plays was intensely drama 
tic, and he was not afraid, for once, to give the rhetoric its 
head. The scene of Biron s trial and execution was one of the 
most exciting in which I have ever appeared. The ceremony 
of the scaffold was reproduced down to its last detail. Both 
the opening and close of the play were extremely effective. 
The Prologue entered to a solemn chant and was accompanied 
by four choristers; at the end, as the curtain fell on the upper 
stage, the thud of the axe was heard, and then, abruptly, the 
mood changed. The lower curtains opened on the King 
enthroned and the Court in festive attire. Music was played 
and two child dancers entered, with Cupid between them, 
and began to dance to a slow and stately melody. During 



250 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

this, the curtains were drawn above, showing the body of 
Biron, covered with a cloak, on the scaffold. 

In October a recital of the Biron plays was given at the 
Little Theatre, with an interlude specially written by Poel, 
referring to the dialogue, relative to Biron s visit to England, 
which had been cut by the Lord Chamberlain in 1610. In 
this Felix Aylmer represented the views of the Lord Chamber 
lain s Office. A luncheon was arranged afterwards at Frascati s, 
followed by a discussion on how Elizabethan plays should be 
produced. At this Mr. Aylmer and Mr. Atkins crossed swords 
over the merits of the Elizabethan method. 

PoePs last conspiracy 9 play was given at the Globe Theatre 
in July 1930. This was called Julius Caesar the Dictator; it was 
an ingenious hotch-potch designed as a kind of prelude to 
Shakespeare s play. The first four episodes were taken from 
Chapman s Caesar and Pompey; the fifth, describing Caesar s 
visit to Cicero, was adapted from Cicero s letters to Atticus; 
the sixth, culminating in the death of Caesar, was in Shake 
speare s own words. Some verses from Keats to his friend 
Charles Cowden Clarke were spoken as a prologue and the 
performance concluded with a passage from Macaulay. 
D. A. Clarke-Smith, who had given such a vivid and clear-cut 
performance as Sejanus, was the Caesar and Sara Allgood 
the Calpurnia. Donald Wolfit played Cato. "I spent many 
days at Putney," he writes, "and always took any new part 
there to solicit his (Poel s) help in the phrasing of it. His 
knowledge of the true stress on any line was uncanny and 
invariably true" (Stratford Dossier). 

When Mr. Wolfit was playing Lear, Lillah McCarthy came 
round to see him after a performance. "You were so magni 
ficent/ she said, "that I thought you must have been a pupil 
of William Poel." "I am," he was able to reply. Poel himself 
had been grateful for his Cato, and, as usual, was as generous 
in praise as he was exacting in criticism, 

I always contend [he wrote to Mr. Wolfit] that the English 
actor can t impersonate, and I expect that you have not exactly 
what we call the English temperament. When I put the part 
in your hands I shuddered at the idea of giving it to a boy to 
act. But the impersonation was masterly. Because it was 
Cato with Cato s idiosyncracies. The play was worth producing 



THE PLATFORM STAGE 25! 

simply that we might for the first time realise Cato in the 
flesh ( io July 1930). 

These doctorings of Elizabethan texts reflected an adven- 
trous and sometimes erratic judgment. Where dramatic 
dues were in question PoeFs instinct was generally sure, and 
e had a considerable, though specialised, erudition. He did 
ot think that Shakespeare had any hand in the writing of 
lenry VIII, except possibly in the last act. The text was taken, 
retty literally, from Holinshed, without any of the liberties 
aat Shakespeare generally allowed himself. The elaborate 
;age-directions were quite untypical and those, too, had been 
dthfully copied from the Chronicles. Poel was not alone in 
hinking Fletcher to have been the chief author, and he 
>elieved him to have been assisted by Massinger. The fact 
hat the play had been produced at the Globe in 1613 by the 
Cing s Players; that it glorified a Spanish Queen; that it 
hould have been acted on St. Peter s Day; and that the 
jlobe should have been burnt to the ground during the 
performance all this indicated a Catholic bias. It was known 
,hat the play had angered the Puritan citizens of London and 
;hey insisted that the fire was a Divine judgment "no man 
perceiving" how it had come about. It was clear, however, 
that it was due to a discharge of cannon which set fire to the 
thatched roof, and Poel wondered whether this might not have 
been the work of a Puritan incendiary. Certainly the pro 
duction of the play "had been initiated by James for reasons 
with which Londoners were not in sympathy namely, in 
order to establish friendly relations between England and 
Spain" (Article in The Bookman s Journal; Vol. io; August 1924, 
pp. 149-152). Poel explained its inclusion in the First Folio by 
the fact that in 1623 none of the poets were willing to put their 
names to it because its regalism was so unpopular, and because 
the King, who was still alive, would expect to find it in a 
volume of plays, all of which had been acted by the King s 
Players. 

Poel also placed Pericles among the apochryphal plays, 
claiming only the character of Cerimon as exhibiting the true 
Shakespearian touch. He agreed with Dugdale Sykes, who 
had suggested in his Sidelights on Shakespeare that Cerimon 
might have been a portrait of Shakespeare s son-in-law, 



252 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

Dr. John Hall. The question therefore was why had 
Shakespeare inserted this scene and a few other odd lines into 
a play which otherwise bore no trace of his mastery, and which 
was clearly no more than Wilkins s adaptation of his prose 
novel, The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre? Poel 
believed that since Shakespeare was drawing a considerable 
share of the Globe profits, and since he had given up acting 
in 1603, he was compelled to lend his name to plays with 
which he had had, in fact, very little to do. Otherwise he 
would not have earned his income. Here Poel was on more 
debatable ground. The character of Marina, her loss, re 
covery and symbolic innocence, have too much in common 
with the later Shakespearian heroines for us to place her 
confidently outside the canon. The whole play is pregnant 
with the contrasts and reconciliations of the Shakespearian 
close, and it is difficult to believe that, however casually 
Shakespeare went to work on an existing model, the brothel 
scenes were by any hand but his. "The poor Transylvanian 
is dead that lay with the little baggage" no single line in all 
the forty-odd plays demonstrates more surely the miraculous 
Shakespearian ear. Why Transylvanian ? This is one of 
those cases where either you feel Shakespeare, or you don t. 
PoePs intuitions about poetry were much less certain than his 
intuitions about drama. He strangely believed that nothing 
in The Winter s Tale was by Shakespeare until the sheep- 
shearing, and that all the best lines in Coriolanus were by 
Chapman. These hallucinations would work havoc when he 
came to put Coriolanus on the stage. But it was greatly to the 
credit of his common sense that he never flirted with the 
Baconian, Oxonian or any similar heresy. Here, if nowhere 
else, he was on the side of orthodoxy. He believed in the 
Stratford man who came to London; formed part of South 
ampton s entourage; acted and wrote plays for his living; and 
retired prosperously when he had made his pile. He did not 
think that Shakespeare had need of either Universities or Dons 
to have acquired such culture as he possessed. And where 
else but in the theatre, he asked, could he have learnt so 
consummate a mastery of stage-craft? 



CHAPTER IX 

The Last Phase 

IN the autumn of 1929 Miss Margaret Scudamore and 
myself invited a number of distinguished persons in the 
theatre to sign the following letter to the Right Hon. J. Ramsay 
Macdonald, Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury: 

Sir, 

It is the earnest wish of a large number of people, whom 
in some measure we represent, that a mark of distinction 
should be conferred on Mr. William Poel for his services to the 
English theatre. Mr. Poel founded the Elizabethan Stage 
Society in 1894, and since then he has laboured with un 
remitting zeal, and frequently at great personal cost, in the 
cause of scholarship and art; and all those who have been 
brought under his influence have been quick to acknowledge 
the inspiration they derived from his productions. Since, 
therefore, his active life is now of necessity drawing to a close, 
we should like, on behalf of his colleagues, his pupils, and that 
wider public to whom his work has revealed afresh the beauties 
of our national drama, to assure you of our deepest gratitude 
if you, Sir, would recommend His Majesty graciously to 
bestow upon him some honour in recognition of his great 
services. 

We have the honour to remain, Sir, 
Yours obediently. 

Bernard Shaw and Granville-Barker were among those who 
supported this initiative. Just before Christmas Poel received 
a letter from the Prime Minister offering him a Knighthood 
and requesting him to telegraph his reply. He gratefully and 
humbly declined. On 10 January 1930 he wrote to me as 
follows : 

As I am getting more busy daily, I ought not longer to put 
off writing to you about the Prime Minister s letter which I 
received just before Christmas. Bernard Shaw had written 
to me shortly before saying that some time ago the Prime 
Minister had asked him whether I ought not to come into the 
Honours List, and that as he, Shaw, had been requested to 
sign a petition to ask the King to make me a Knight, would I 
be prepared to accept? Shaw then pointed out some of the 

253 



254 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

disadvantages of Knighthood which made no impression on 
me. My reply was that I had already received from the 
Government a Civil List Pension in acknowledgment of my 
theatrical work, and that with this recognition I was fully 
satisfied. Of course I did not forget that when I was lecturing 
in America on "The Elizabethan Shakespeare," I had there 
pointed out how fortunate the poet was to have escaped being 
dubbed a Knight which in my opinion would have been an 
absurd distinction to give a stage player. 

But I have still to tell you why I could not avail myself 
of the title that Miss Scudamore and yourself and other kind 
friends so kindly and generously wished to obtain for me. 
Unfortunately I was too painfully conscious that my labour 
to secure recognition for the Elizabethan stage as a proper 
method for presenting Shakespeare s plays was not approved 
of among those who control our public stage. It was incon 
ceivable to me that my name could be added to the long list 
of theatrical Knights not one of whom was in sympathy with 
an Elizabethan method of presentation. Surely I am justified 
in thinking that X and myself are at variance in our views 
as to how Shakespeare s plays should be acted. How, then, 
could we both be entitled to receive Government honour? 
. . . No! for me I have no other way of protesting against the 
perpetration of false art, except by disassociating myself from 
those who were content to regard the building of a Shake 
speare playhouse as being solely a business proposition. 

Having then been constant for so long a time to my Eliza 
bethan convictions, and having more especially received some 
compensation from the Government for the heavy expenses 
involved in defending these convictions by practical illus 
trations of Elizabethan methods on an Elizabethan stage, I am 
thankful to think that I can yet continue my Elizabethan 
productions without being involved in serious financial 
difficulties. 

On the other hand please do not think that I fail to realise 
what is the cost of my refusal of the Prime Minister s offer ! 
As Mr. Allan Gomme has told me, my acceptance might have 
done much for the cause of the Elizabethan Stage Circle. 
But I think his statement needs qualifying by what I have 
already said. 

More, perhaps, of Poel s gospel had been accepted than he 
was willing to admit. But he was a man for whom battles are 
never won, because the victory that he strove for was absolute, 
never to be gained in an imperfect world. In the theatre, 
more particularly than elsewhere, greed would always be at 
grips with idealism, ignorance with knowledge, vulgarity with 



THE LAST PHASE 255 

taste. The virtue was in the challenge and the struggle. 
And thus, although he refused the titular Knighthood, it is still 
as "a very parfit gentle knight" that we remember him. He 
had proved, in every word and gesture of a lifetime, the title 
he declined. And if there was something of Don Quixote in 
his disposition the absurdity as well as the splendour of an 
antique grace that is only to say that he was obstinate as 
well as persevering, brave as well as lovable, wilful as well as 
wise. 

II 

Certainly the wilfulness of Poel was exhibited in his pro 
duction of Coriolanus in May 1931. In this he asked me to 
play the title part and I tried to persuade him that Ralph 
Richardson would be the best possible choice for Menenius. 
He had seen Richardson s performance of Kent in King Lear 
with John Gielgud at the Old Vic, and had greatly admired 
it. But at last he wrote to me: 

I am not sending you the part of Menenius for Mr. Richard 
son to read because I feel certain that one who has made such 
a deep impression on the audience with his fine performance 
of Kent would be making a mistake to act a part that is very 
inferior in characterisation to Kent (8 April 1931)- 

This was one of the occasions when Pod s reasoning was 
unfathomable. He had at first the interesting idea of dressing 
the whole play in the costume of the Directoire; this would 
emphasise, he thought, both its military and its revolutionary 
character. He believed, with good reason, that audiences are 
bored by togas, which tend to look like towels when they do 
not look like dressing-gowns. The Directoire idea was quite 
at variance with his Elizabethanism, and in particular with 
his idea that the play was inspired by the fall of Essex, for Poel 
had now reached the point where practically everyone was 
Essex. But the idea was consistent with itself. Then, however, 
he paid a visit to the Exhibition of Italian Painting at Burling 
ton House, where he was struck by the portrait of a young man 
in a leopard skin. He returned firmly persuaded that this was 
how I must make my first appearance. 

"The more I think about your first costume, he wrote to 
me on 20 April, 



256 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

the more anxious I am to have as a start something that is an 
emblem more than a personage or portrait of yourself. And 
I think the intelligent part of the audience would realise that 
there was something bold and original in the idea of youth 
and strength, while at the same time the dress is not un 
becoming. Remember that the sword is not in a sheath; the 
two-handed swords had none and it must be twice the size 
of the ordinary Elizabethan sword. 

As far as I remember, it was several sizes bigger than myself. 
And whether or not Poel imagined that this apparition would 
exhaust the audience s capacity for surprise, I think, never 
theless, they were surprised to see me return from the wars in 
the full-dress uniform of a Colonel of the Hussars ! Here Poel 
had first thought of putting me into an eighteenth-century 
uniform with powdered wig. "I don t want you to be seen 
dressed as the others," he wrote, "it is part of your character 
not to imitate others/ I finished up in the helmet and breast 
plate of a Roman general, but that was only permissible 
because Volumnia was dressed as an imperious Gainsborough 
in hat and plumes and Virgilia was a pure Pre-Raphaelite. 
Poel had copied her dress from the photograph of a fashionable 
beauty at a fancy dress ball, which he had seen in a society 
journal. The tribunes were dressed in cap and gown and the 
citizens as French railway-porters. My own changes of 
costume had to be made very quickly, and John Drinkwater 
told me afterwards that by the end of the performance my 
braces were hanging down my back. 

But these eccentricities were balanced by a number of 
brilliant ideas; the idea of getting Sara Allgood to sweep the 
stage as Volumnia, and Barry Fitzgerald and Harry Hutchinson 
to suggest, with their sly brogue, the cunning of the plebs. I 
take some credit for introducing Poel to Veronica Turleigh, 
whose performance of Virgilia delighted him. Never was 
silence more gracious than here. Miss Turleigh gives a 
vivid description of our rehearsals in Miles s Restaurant. 

Poel was already a very old man, nearly 80 years of age. 
He was stooped and frail. His hair was long and white and 
framed a mediaeval face which, when his eyes were shut, 
looked like the death mask of some philosopher or saint. His 
voice was husky, weak and far away. When his dim eye 



THE LAST PHASE 357 

looked at one, one felt, in the arrogance of vigorous youth, 
that he did not see what his eye rested on. 

During rehearsals he was always surprised when the actors 
grew hungry at lunch-time. Every day he had to be asked if 
time might be given for this purpose. When the actors had 
gone, he sat down enveloped in quietude and withdrew into 
another world. He took out a small envelope from which he 
ate some nuts or seeds, and that was all. He waited patiently 
till his actors returned and then began again from where he 
left off. 

During the first day or two, actors, inexperienced in his 
ways, or knowing nothing about Poel, used to think, "Oh, 
this is child s play, acting for this dear old man." They were 
soon enlightened. The "dear old man" had an acuteness of 
perception and a power of absorbed concentration which soon 
brought the "free and easy" actor to his toes. "Not that way 
do not look like that you look like a sheep." He would 
say this sort of thing one day, very sincerely and quietly and 
without anymalice. That brought a hush among the actors and 
the care-free atmosphere was dispelled at once. 

His method of suggesting the roles to the actors was first of 
all to introduce each one to the costume he was to wear, or 
to a picture of the costume. He took his whole cast to the 
costumiers on the first day of rehearsal and there, laid out, 
were the clothes already chosen by Poel. These garments 
were often surprising. But to accept the idea of the garment 
was the quickest way to getting hold of the part as Poel wanted 
it played. "I am always anxious that my artists try on their 
costumes as soon as they can, because the costume helps the 
character to look like the part." . . . Having shown the actor 
what he looked like, he then tried to make him hear what he 
should sound like. The old broken voice was not much good 
for this but he beat out the force or temperament of the part 
and suggested somehow the colour,, high, dim or fierce, ordinary 
or weak, which he wanted reproduced. 

He had an uncanny power for suggesting to an actor the 
quality in a role which might have the greatest power in 
influencing that particular artist. When I appeared to play 
Virgilia for him in Coriolanus he said: "She sits like this she 
sounds like this and she moves gendy like this in her sorrow." 
It was impossible not to become Virgilia after that (Stratford 
Dossier) . 

When it came to questions of interpretation, Poel was in 

a difficulty. Having chosen, out of all others, a play which is 

not exactly a treatise in defence of democracy, he tried to 

suppress every word, tone, or gesture which could give offence 

9 



258 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

to Mr. Ramsay MacdonalcL This may have been because he 
was embarrassed by the offer of a Knighthood which he had 
just declined, or it may have been because his sympathies 
would generally be with the people against the patricians, or 
because he was temperamentally opposed to violence in any 
form. On the other hand he did nothing to sentimentalise 
the plebs. Brutus and Sicinius were as unpleasant a pair of 
demagogues as you could hope to avoid in the corridors of the 
DaiL It was in any case most unlikely that Mr. Macdonald 
or any member of his cabinet would be present at a perform 
ance at the Chelsea Palace at eleven o clock in the morning. 
And on the capital significance of the play Poel was certainly 
in the right. He insisted all the time that Coriolanus was not 
a play about politics but a play about pride. The politics were 
quite secondary to Goriolanus s surrender to his mother; all 
his other conflicts, political or military, were incidental to this 
defeat. 

In a charming letter which I received a few days after the 
performance, Poel said, "You dropped the scolding note (to 
my surprise) entirely. Your first entrance was made in an 
easy, pleasant jaunt that made the audience feel comfortable 
at once. One of the audience told me that to bring you on in a 
leopard skin, etc., was a stroke of genius?" Nevertheless, not 
everyone present on that occasion felt comfortable. John 
Masefield, Lascelles Abercrombie, John Drinkwater and others 
were there in the Dress Circle, and they were not alone in 
having some knowledge of the play and in being able, therefore, 
to compare the original text with the version offered by Poel. 
It was one thing to take the Biron plays of Chapman and sew 
them together into an acceptable dramatic shape; but it was 
quite a different matter to hack about, alter and shamelessly 
transpose a masterpiece of Shakespeare s maturity. Coriolanus 
is a long play, to be sure; but if the audience at the Old Vic 
or Stratford thought nothing of sitting for three hours or 
more, listening in rapt attention to the Shakespearian texts 
in their integrity, why should Poel have imagined that the 
faithful enthusiasts of the Elizabethan Stage Circle were 
incapable of a similar effort? An honest version of Coriolanus 
could hardly have played for less than two hours and three 
quarters, with a single interval; the performance at the 



THE LAST PHASE 359 

Chelsea Palace certainly lasted for no more than an hour and 
a half. This indicates to what extent the play had been 
telescoped. 

A good example of Peel s telescoping can be found in 
Act III Scene 2. I leave the reader to compare Shakespeare s 
version with Poel s. Here is Shakespeare s: 

Cor. Let them pull all about mine ears; present me 

Death on the wheel, or at wild horses heels; 
Or pile ten hills on the Tarpeian rock, 
That the precipitation might down stretch 
Below the beam of sight, yet will I still 
Be thus to them. 

A Patrician You do the nobler. 

Cor. I muse my mother 

Does not approve me further, who was wont 
To call them woollen vassals, things created 
To buy and sell with groats, to show bare heads 
In congregations, to yawn, be still and wonder. 
When one but of my ordinance stood up 
To speak of peace or war, 

Enter Volumnia. 

I talk of you: 

Why did you wish me milder? Would you have me 
False to my nature? Rather say I play 
The man I am. 

Vol. O sir, sir, sir, 

I would have had you put your power well on, 
Before you had worn it out. 

Cor. Let go. 

Vol. You might have been enough the man you are, 

With striving less to be so. 

Here is Poel s version: 

Cor. Let them present me death upon the wheel 

Yet will I still be thus to them. 

A Captain Tis not the nobler way. 

Cor. I muse my mother 

Does not approve me further 

When I stand up to speak of peace or war. 

Enter Votumnia. 
I talk of you. 

Why did you wish me milder? Would you have me 
False to my nature? Rather say I play 
The man I am. 



260 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

VoL O, sir, sir, sir, 

I would have had you put your power well on, 
Ere they had power to cross you. 

Cor. Let go. 

VoL For you had been enough the man you are 

With striving less to be so. 

This was typical of Peel s method throughout the play, and 
at least it can be said that it made dramatic sense. But it was 
good-bye to poetry and all that. Coriolanus is not a very 
"poetical 3 play, and there were not many purple passages to 
be missed. But certain things left one gasping, such as the 
following lines where the words printed in italics were omitted. 

The noble sister of Publicola, 
The moon of Rome; chaste as the icicle 
That s curdied by the frost from purest snow 
And hangs on Dian s temple: dear Valeria ! 

Or, again, in the same scene, when Volumnia kneels to her 
son, the cutting of: 

Then let the pebbles on the hungry beach 
Fillip the stars; then let the mutinous winds 
Strike the proud cedars gainst the fiery sun, 
Murdering impossibility, to make 
What cannot be, slight work. 

Poel rearranged and drastically abridged the first sequence 
of battle scenes, but otherwise the first three acts were played 
more or less in their Shakespearian order. It was in the 
fourth and fifth acts that any semblance of fidelity was for 
saken. The intensely dramatic moment where Coriolanus, 
disguised, unmasks himself to Aufidius; was cut altogether and 
the climax of audacity came in his meeting with the three 
women. Volumnia s two long speeches, Act V. Scene 3 
92-125 and 131-182, were run together, which meant sacri 
ficing the exquisite dignity and pathos of: 

Fir. Aye, and mine, 

That brought you forth this boy, to keep your name 

Living to time. 
Boy A shall not tread on me; 

1*11 run away till I am bigger, but then I ll fight. 
Cor. Not of a woman s tenderness to be, 

Requires nor child nor woman s face to see. 



THE LAST PHASE 

And worse, the greater part of Volumnia s speeches were 
here turned into prose! Shakespeare opens as follows: 

Should we be silent and not speak, our raiment 

And state of bodies would bewray what life 

We have led since thy exile. Think with thyself 

How more unfortunate than all living women 

Are we come hither; since that thy sight, which should 

Make our eyes flow with joy, hearts dance with comforts, 

Constrains them weep and shake with fear and sorrow. 

Miss Allgood had to be content with the following: 

You see, my son, by our attire to what condition your 
banishment has reduced us. Think with yourself whether 
we are not the most unhappy of women when fortune has 
changed the spectacle that should have been the most pleasing 
in the world, into the most dreadful; camped in a hostile 
manner before the walls of his native city. 

And so on in the same Plutarchian vein until line 155 of the 
original text, at which point Shakespeare was allowed to 
resume possession of his own play. But not for long. The 
lines which close the scene: 

Ladies, you deserve 

To have a temple built you: all the swords 
In Italy, and her confederate arms, 
Could not have made this peace, 

were spoken immediately after Volumnia had finished her 
appeal, and the scene ended with the lines which had been 
thus displaced: 

O mother, mother! 

You have won a happy victory to Rome; 
But, for your son, believe it, O believe it, 
Most dangerously you have with him prevail d, 
If not most mortal to him. But let it come. 

Poel added a second "O mother, wife!"; then Coriolanus 
buried his face in his hands, walked towards the doors of 
Corioli, and knocked upon them twice. They opened to 
admit him, and we heard presently from within the tumult of 
his death. That was the end of the play; it may have been 
magnificent, but it was not Shakespeare. Poel had sacrificed 
225 lines of the original text, and there were some among that 



262 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

audience who would gladly have stayed longer to hear Corio- 
lanus s dying boast: 

Cut me to pieces, Volsces; men and lads, 
Stain all your edges on me. Boy! false hound! 
If you have writ your annals true, tis there. 
That, like an eagle in a dove-cote, I 
Flutter d your Volscians in Corioll : 
Alone I did it. Boy! 

and the metallic poetry of the close : 

Take him up : 

Help, three o* the chiefest soldiers : I ll be one. 
Beat thou the drum, that it speak mournfully: 
Trail your steel pikes. Though in this city he 
Hath widow d and unchilded many a one, 
Which to this hour bewail the injury, 
Yet he shall have a noble memory. 
Assist. 

In a letter* written shortly afterwards Poel attempted to 
justify these insensitive procedures. 

I have consistently throughout my productions made 
alterations and reconstructions when the plays are considered 
to be unactable or are not being acted, and when it seemed to 
me that the success of the performance needed some alteration 
in the play. For a satisfactory ending, Goriolanus must be 
shown as a sympathetic figure. . . . The words at the end that 
are called magnificent have all been heard already on the 
stage. Twice is Coriolanus called a traitor and twice does he 
make a spirited rejoinder. Twice does the general publicly 
call attention to Coriolanus being alone in Corioli. In fact 
Coriolanus last speech is harsh and leaves a bad impression. 
It is not a moment for a man to boast of what he had done. 

It was in fact all in the character of Coriolanus that he 
should have made before the Volscians the boasts that he would 
have been too proud to make before the plebs, and PoePs 
argument did nothing but justify Archer s accusation that he 
was "a non-scenic Beerbohm Tree." W. J. Lawrence, who 
had always believed there was something to be said for Archer, 
was in front. When Poel invited his friends to hear a talk 
about the play, Lawrence spoke his mind. Poel, he declared, 

*An incomplete draft of this letter was found among PoeFs papers, but there is 
no record of the date on which it was written or of the person to whom it 
was addressed. 



THE LAST PHASE 263 

had gone back on all his principles This episode, where 
Lawrence was undoubtedly in the right, cast a cloud over a 
friendship between two scholars who had always held fast 
to the same standards, however much they may have differed 
on points of detail. But Poel was impervious to argument. 
I had a further letter from him on 17 May. 

The reception of the play surprised me. The audience, 
in their attention, never flagged and became keen listeners, 
and the applause seemed more genuine than on any former 
occasion. ... It seems to me as if the press resented my note 
in the programme and also my cuts in the play, quite over 
looking the fact that this and this alone made the play actable. 

Poel s whole case against Lawrence was built up on this 
unblushing petitio principi. If he had lived to see Laurence 
Olivier s electrifying performance of the chief part with 
Sybil Thorndike as Volumnia, in Lewis Casson s production 
of the play at the Old Vic in 1938, he would have realised 
how a modern audience can be riveted by Coriolanus when it 
is played as Shakespeare wrote it. As it was, the most accurate 
comment on the performance at the Chelsea Palace was made 
by a gentleman an educationalist, I believe whose letter 
Poel naively quoted to me: "Let me send a line of cordial 
thanks for a pleasant morning and an interesting experiment. 
You have sent me back to Coriolanus with some new problems." 
In effect, Poel had already been answered out of his own mouth. 
To an American who was complaining that a certain per 
formance of Cymbeline was too long, he had replied, "That is 
because they ve cut so much." 

Ill 

Poel was now close upon his eightieth birthday, and a 
number of his friends wished to present him with his portrait, 
as a mark of their affection and esteem. A Committee was 
formed under the chairmanship of Geoffrey Whitworth, and a 
letter of appeal was published in The Times on Poel s birthday, 
22 July 1932, over the signature of Whitworth and Allan 
Gomme. On the same day The Times published a leader in 
tribute to his work. He belonged, it said, to the class of men 
who "made little splash but great effect." What he had taught 



264 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

was sometimes a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. . . . 
Some people laughed at Mr. Poel and his Elizabethan Stage 
Society. Some were very angry. The most part tried not to 
take any notice. But the essential truth was too strong to 
be held back by opposition, or neglect, or even by any un 
certainty or mistakes in detail. The leaven worked. And in 
the end Mr. Poel brought the Elizabethan Shakespeare back 
to the English stage after three centuries; and although the 
strictest of his archaism is not in general favour, the complete 
and continuous performance of Shakespeare s play is now the 
rule and not the exception. 

At first Poel flatly refused to entertain the idea of having 
his portrait painted. He pointed out that his features were 
too insignificant, his nose too prominent, and his eyes too 
deeply set for a successful portrait to be made of him. It 
was only when the Committee agreed that the painting 
should be a picture and not merely a portrait, that he un 
willingly succumbed to their importunity. The first sug 
gestion was that Frank Salisbury should be invited to undertake 
the work, but at Dr. Reed s insistence Henry Tonks was 
approached. Tonks replied that he did not normally do 
portraits, but he at last agreed to accompany Dr. Reed and 
Mr. Allan Gomme to Putney. The door was opened by Poel 
himself and in that moment Tonks s hesitation vanished. 

In a description, which I quote from the Stratford Dossier, 
Ernest Milton suggests what it was that appealed to the 
painter s eye. 

The man himself remains in my memory as of something 
silvern. There was a silveriness of hair, voice and smile, and 
a long spareness of line which had infinitely more length and 
greatly more gentleness than one associated with the macabre 
silhouette generally attributed to Irving. Underneath the 
grace and the picturesqueness, and the willowy yet virile 
outline, was the steel of authority. He knew what he wanted, 
he could rap it out and he got it. This was accompanied 
by the most caressing and radiant smile when he was pleased. 

Mr. Milton goes on to describe his last encounter with Poel, 
when he passed him in the street. "We just recognised each 
other and smiled. I shall never forget his wise, enigmatic, 
personal, and yet very much within, from within deep within, 
hardly expressed, but very real, and in no sense a surface thing." 
It was this "long, royal figure" of Mr. Milton s description, 



THE LAST PHASE 265 

whose "kingdom was not of this world (nor did he get its 
rewards)" and this "Leonardo smile/ that met Tonks in the 
doorway with the afternoon light full upon them. The two 
men went inside and talked, and Poel said that, if he were 
going to be painted at all, he would like to be painted in the 
part of Keegan from John Bull s Other Island. Later he wrote 
to Bernard Shaw, asking him if he had any objection to this. 
Shaw replied from Malvern on 25 July. 

My dear Poel, 

How absurdly old we are both getting! I was touched 
home by your choosing Keegan as the character in which you 
are to be painted; yet my first impulse was to protest that the 
only character in which you should be painted is your own. 
But on thinking it over I remembered that I insisted on your 
playing Keegan because I knew it would be more a "straight 
part" for you than for anyone else within reach, and that 
Peter Keegan would mask your good soul no more than the 
celebrated William Poel, perhaps even less. 

So, as there is no make-up involved, the sittings may go 
ahead with my blessing. 

Ever your 

G. Bernard Shaw. 

The extent of Tonks s enthusiasm may be gauged by the 
following letter to Dr. Reed, written immediately after the 
visit to Putney (28 March 1932). 

I have got the idea, beyond a doubt. The first entrance, 
grasshopper scene. Alone, without a hat (or hat in hand), 
mountain scenery, mystic, smiling (he has a beautiful smile 
that reminds me of something, I don t quite know what), 
sunset he facing it in "sunshine." So rub that in firmly and 
in a kindly way. ... I have an idea of the man and shall, 
having the general meaning of his face, work it out here. 
He pleased me very much very modest but with iron views 
of his right thing to do. 

Three days later (31 March^ he wrote to Poel: 

I am quite satisfied with the idea of Keegan, because I 
have found the moment in the play when he seems to sum up 
his essentials and if I may venture to say so, some of yours 
that is when he is talking to the grasshopper. 

Poel noted, in pencil, on this letter, "With you all the way." 



2 66 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

Meanwhile Tonks worked slowly on the portrait, making 
first of all, a small sketch and then going down to Putney 
for an occasional sitting. It was the light on the head which 
gave him the most thought; he may have discerned in this a 
profound symbolism. 

You must remember [he wrote on 14 August] that you are 
illuminated by a setting sun: therefore your face must be 
represented as more glowing than it would be in the ordinary- 
light of a room. 

And again, on October 25th : 

You must not think that I have been neglecting your 
portrait. I have been doing it exactly as I intended to do it, 
developing it slowly. I assure you I have given it a great 
deal of thought, helped out often by consultation with my friend 
Wilson Steer. I am almost afraid of further sittings, not be 
cause with fortune I might not improve it, but for fear this 
fortune might,,not be kind. I feel it is very like you and I 
shall test this soon by asking Reed to come and see it. The 
landscape is slowly developing and I think you are gradually 
becoming part of it. I must have another sitting and even 
another after that, but I must work more at the sky and land 
scape, as until I get these more or less right, I should not 
exactly know what to do with the head, so please don t hesitate 
to deal with your hair as you would wish. ... It is curious that 
an important work like yours has to give way to so much that 
is quite ordinary. But [it] is always so. Wren would have 
made London one of the most beautiful cities in the world, 
but the quite ordinary mind said no, and there never again 
will be a Wren and the occasion. It is great luck if genius 
leaves anything behind. 

The portrait was finished in November and "passed" at 
once by Dn Reed. Poel wrote to Tonks : 

As to the portrait I am glad when you are glad, and if I 
stand dumb before it, it is because I still hold to my opinion 
that my features are too insignificant to give the face character 
and I think that your patience and courage are wonderful. 

Tonks replied: 

If anything is wrong with the face in my picture, it is my 
fault, not yours. I have told everyone what a good head you 
have to paint, so that I feel justified in saying it direct to you. 

Poel was then at work on a new production, George Peele s 



THE LAST PHASE 267 

David and Bethsabe, and on the same postcard this man of 
eighty could write to his friend, "You must not expect too 
much from the play, for we are like children playing with a 
new toy and don t know what to make of it." 

Edward Garnett had suggested to him, many years before, 
that he should revive this beautiful tragedy of Peele s, for it 
was in every respect suited to his style. Had he done so then, 
he might have been more content to let it speak for itself, with 
no more than a minimum of pruning. But he had grown 
obsessed with the idea that the Elizabethan drama was un 
playable in its original form and he was too old and, let it be 
said, too obstinate to listen to advice. The criticisms provoked 
by Coriolanus had left him quite unshaken, and he thought 
nothing of paring down David and Bethsabe to little more 
than half its normal length. 

It would be monotonous to condemn in detail the cuts and 
transpositions that he made. But why should he have cut the 
exquisite first stanza of Bethsabe s opening song? 

Hot sun, cool fire, temper d with sweet air, 
Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair: 
Shine sun, burn fire, breathe air, and ease me; 
Black shade, fair nurse, shroud me and please me: 
Shadow, my sweet nurse, keep me from burning, 
Make not my glad cause cause of mourning. 

Why should he have sacrificed two-thirds of David s soliloquy 
including: 

And, for the pebble, let the silver streams 
That pierce earth s bowels to maintain the source, 
Play upon rubies, sapphires, chrysolites, 
The brims let be embrac d with golden curls 
Of moss that sleeps with sound the waters make, 
For joy to feed the fount with their recourse. 

What possessed him to change the lovely invocation "Bright 
Bethsabe shall wash in David s bower" to "This fair woman 
shall wash in David s bower," or to rob Absalom of two of the 
greatest lines in English verse: 

His thunder is entangled in my hair 

And with my beauty is his lightning quenched. 

How could he lose the profound couplet: 



2 68 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

To sin our feet are washed with milk of roes, 
And dried again with coals of lightning. 

And if he thought these things were poetry and therefore out 
of place, why did he throw overboard such significant drama 
as Nathan s parable of reproach? Peele s play is neither over- 
long nor overcomplicated; in spite of a certain monotony, it 
did not call for the surgeon s knife. But even in PoePs version 
its grave, still beauty came through. 

The performance was given in November at the Mary 
Ward Settlement on a platform-stage, with Hubert Carter 
as Nathan and Veronica Turleigh as Bethsabe. It had 
great beauty of design and many imaginative moments. 
David was dressed as the Duke of Monmouth, a daring idea 
which was completely justified in its effect. Miss Turleigh 
recalls that Poel handed her a "holy picture" in passe-partout 
showing one of the Marys greeting our Lord. It was called 
"Easter Morning/* 

That is Bethsabe, 5 he said. The whole attitude of the 
kneeling woman in flowing veils gave me what he wanted at 
once. You enter singing/ he said, f and please compose your 
own song. I composed the simple air and the only time I was 
uncomfortable acting for Poel was when I had to walk from a 
long distance round to the front of the platform-stage and 
mount it from the front among the public, singing my own 
home-made song. He never told me whether it was good or 
bad. Singing and songs were out of his element (Stratford 
Dossier). 

The portrait was formally presented to Poel by Lady 
Keeble at the Middle Temple Hall on 26 April 1933. The 
feelings of all those present were expressed in a letter from 
Gordon Bottomley, who was unable to be there himself. 

Mr. Poel s genius has never been given the fall opportunities 
it might have had. In spite of this he has through two or 
three generations demonstrated repeatedly and convincingly 
his insight and mastery of theatre-craft, his deep knowledge of 
our greatest drama, his passionate and sustained vision of a 
rare and supreme beauty; he has done this often under con 
ditions of self-sacrifice as well as devotion to a great ideal: 
and in doing it he has trained many of the finest of our younger- 
workers in the theatre (To Allan Gomme; 16 April 1933). 



THE LAST PHASE 269 

Poel and Tonks both made short speeches. In a letter 
written shortly afterwards Tonks tried to put into words 
what their association had meant to him (17 May 1933). 

You are the kindest of men. You have no idea how much 
of the pleasant side of life you have left in my mind. You have 
the true religious spirit, rare I can tell you. You have an 
ideal for which you have worked all your life. When I used 
to see your name years before I knew you, I had a feeling of a 
being remote from ordinary people then I met you. There is 
another man of the same kind for whom I have something of 
the same feeling. I used to know him at University College, 
then he left for Cambridge. When I left the Slade School, he 
wrote to me and I was much moved. A. E. Housman. The 
greatest Latin Scholar, perhaps, who has ever been, and 
better still, a Poet. I read his lecture in The Times, the one on 
Poetry at Cambridge and wrote him a short note of admiration 
and received a characteristic reply. Outwardly he is cold and 
reserved, inwardly a furnace of spiritual feeling, and that is 
what you are. 

The letter finished on a characteristically combative note, 
showing how the friendship between these two men sprang 
from a similar attitude to life, which was translated into a 
similar view of art. "When the Art Critic of The Times says 
we are about to give up Nature in Art, everyone who can lift 
any kind of fighting instrument must be up and doing." 
Henry Tonks had striven as steadfastly as William Poel to 
become "a pupil of nature/ 

Mr. and Mrs. Poel twice had tea with Tonks in Chelsea. 
Under the stimulus of PoeFs friendship he had returned to 
the study of Shakespeare, who stood out for him as the "supreme 
being" (2 1 June 1 933) . He was puzzled by the style of Cjmbeline 
and suggested to Poel that Shakespeare might have been 
imitating the style of some other writer who was in his mind 
at the time. He also found in a number of La Nouvelle Revue 
Frangaise a translation of de Quincey s tribute to Shakespeare, 
and this he copied out and passed on to Poel. When Poel 
died in December of the following year, he wrote as follows 
to his widow: 

I have been thinking a good deal of him lately became I 
came upon Monthly Letters and hoped by writing to him to get 
some more light from him. I was going to tell him that my 
meeting with him was one of the great events of my lite. 



2 JO WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

Before I met him I loved Shakespeare but since, he has become 
to me the greatest mind that ever tried to teach mankind, and 
yet one that I did not fear to approach. ... I am grateful that 
Fate allowed me to have the honour of leaving at least a record 
of such a wonderful man (7 December 1934). 

Tonks s portrait of Poel hung for a time in the Tate 
Gallery, and was then transferred to the National Portrait 
Gallery. It was a rare exception to the rule which requires an 
interval of ten years from the death of the sitter to elapse 
before the portrait can be shown there. It was chiefly due 
to the tactful persistence of Dr. Reed that this exception was 
made. Tonks s preliminary sketch was given to Mrs. Poel, 
and on her death it passed to Dr. Reed 



IV 

David and Bethsabe was PoePs last production. In the 
winter of 1933 he had two minor accidents which confined 
him to his room. He was disappointed in the hope of hearing 
Lady Keeble s Lectures at the Royal Institution, but he 
learnt with much pleasure of the tribute she had paid him. 
He also took a natural pride in the success of his former pupil. 
Her kindness to him was unfailing, and in March 1934 she 
presented him with a wireless set. "Sir John Reith s man" 
called at Howard s Lane, and with exquisite modesty Poel 
asked him for a second-hand set, since he knew that "some 
were to be had in Putney." However, a new set duly arrived 
and was installed, not without difficulty, by a "painstaking 
engineer from Croydon." This gave immense pleasure to 
Poel and his wife during the following months. They rejoiced 
in the opportunity to hear good music, and one evening, when 
Lady Keeble was there, they all listened to Macbeth. 

Meanwhile PoeTs heart was set on producing a new version 
of Wallenstein to celebrate the Coleridge centenary, and he 
had the text privately printed under the title of Schiller and War. 
He did not put his name to it. "Now that the secret is out," 
he wrote to Lady Keeble., "... I cannot sufficiently thank 
you for expressing a wish to act in it. It is not the same play 
in which you acted the part of the Countess, although written 
by Schiller and founded on the Piccolomini story. You also 



THE LAST PHASE 

mentioned Mr. Charles Laughton who would find in the part 
of Wallenstein one worthy of a great actor." But the project 
did not materialise. PoePs energies were now failing; many of 
his letters were dictated, and Mrs. Poel would sometimes 
write on his behalf. 

He is asleep while I write. I wish you could see him. 
When all strain is off him, his expression Tike his character 
is beautiful beyond words. Some days he is more ill than 
others in heart and head especially (To Lady Keeble; 7 August 
1934). 

Gordon Bottomley came down to Putney and read poetry 
with him during August, and in November he was well enough 
to go in to London and see John Gielgud s Hamlet. But 
towards the end of the month he fell seriously ill with bron 
chitis. Through fourteen days of suffering he never uttered 
a complaining word, only saying that he had "never felt God 
so near," and that he was "ready to go or stay, as God willed/ 1 
His wife would sometimes play the piano to him and on one 
of these occasions he whispered to the nurse that "no one ever 
played like her." Hearing at last that he was sinking. Lady 
Keeble came down to say good-bye; scarcely a day passed 
without her paying a visit to the room where the spirit of this 
indomitable man struggled on the frontiers of death. On 
6 December he grew unconscious; but even when coma had 
set in, he still resisted for several days, and his mind flickered 
back to consciousness for a few moments at the end. Only 
his wife was at his bedside, but in these last instants of lucidity 
he seemed also to be aware of his mother whom he had loved 
so well and nursed so patiently. He died on 13 December 

1934- 
His body was cremated at Golders Green two days later. 

Jacques Arcadelt s "Ave Maria" was played on the organ and 
an address was given by Professor Reed, who spoke of Poel as 
a "restorer" and said that he would always be remembered 
for "his strange and beautiful smile." But those who had 
gathered to honour his passing were reminded, even in death, 
of his sternly independent mind. He had requested that the 
following words be read over his body before it was com 
mitted to the flames. 



272 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

I do seriously think that orthodox Christianity has a lot to 
answer for in substituting valueless figments for vital realities, 
and encouraging rather than entrenching (sic ) victoriously the 
manifold weaknessess and causes for fear which belong to 
earthly life; in other words, making an elaborate structure of 
artificial doctrines and institutions usurp the place of Christ s 
original concept of Faith as a SPIRITUAL trust rather than an 
intellectual proposition a trust in the Invincible Power, 
Love, Goodness and Nearness of God. 

Many tributes were paid to William Poel in the Press and 
on the air, but he had written his own epitaph on a scrap of 
paper found afterwards in his desk. 

As a house can only be built by laying one brick upon 
another, so intimately dependent are all our lives upon the 
labours of those who have gone before. . . . 

V 

And those who come after? How far are they following in 
the footsteps of William Poel? It has been among the objects 
of this book to suggest an answer to that question. Is the 
current tendency in the direction of his teaching, or are we 
moving away from it? Certain conquests are firm. In any 
serious production of Shakespeare the integrity of the text 
is respected in a way that Poel himself, at least in his later 
years, would have considered quite unnecessary. Continuity 
of action is now the rule, with formal, simplified settings 
easily varied from one scene to another. But Poel would still 
have found our approach too visual, he would have searched 
in vain for vocal flexibility. It may be that this modulation 
is not easily compassed by the English voice, or that, when it 
is, the effect tends to be unnatural. This was noticeable in 
certain of Elsie Fogerty s pupils, as it was noticeable in certain 
of PoeFs productions, and the teaching of both was based on 
a continental technique. Where Poel was aiming at spon 
taneity he would sometimes produce a sense of strain, and a 
sense of slowness when he was aiming at an effect of speed. 

Nevertheless, I think it is true to say that in the best 
Shakespearian productions of today you find an intelligent 
reading of the play, *a beautiful and significant pattern of 
movement, clear and fluent speaking, fine individual per 
formances and a balanced ensemble but that if you are 



THE LAST PHASE 273 

looking for sheer vocal splendour, you will generally be dis 
appointed. Poel was never satisfied with a merely mellifluous 
voice; what he wanted was the "tuned tongue." And here 
I do not think that we are making very substantial progress. 
There is still a reluctance on the part of actors and producers 
alike to let Shakespeare do hk own work; a straining itch to be 
original; a tendency to fidget. Poel himself, we have seen, 
could be startlingly original; but his productions, even at 
their most wilful, always left an impression of repose. 

For so long as one can foresee, Shakespeare will usually 
be acted behind a proscenium, for the simple reason that the 
proscenium is there and the Elizabethan platform is not. But 
the vital movement of the contemporary theatre is away from 
the proscenium arch. It is towards a liberty, economic as well 
as plastic, which it is not in the power or the nature of the 
Commercial theatre to allow. One after another, the modern 
producers have attempted to break free. Reinhardt in 
Germany, Gopeau in Burgundy, Vilar at Avignon the pattern 
is everywhere the same. Stanislavsky was the last pedagogue 
of realism, and now it is the disciplined freedom of pastoral 
or arena, the turning of a natural or an architectural setting 
to theatrical account, which attract the pioneer. The theatre 
of tomorrow will be at once more simple and more cere 
monious than the theatre of the bourgeois centuries. And in 
this context the multiple stage of the Elizabethans becomes 
an actuality instead of an anachronism. 

In Britain the producer of Shakespeare faces in two direc 
tions. On the one hand is the revolving stage and the electric 
panel, the temptations of the ingenious and the picturesque. 
He may decorate the surface of his play with a variety of 
seductive patterns and these will sometimes be mistaken for a 
new approach. But his stage will remain essentially unlit 
and unalive, because the heart of the play is in darkness. 
The discovery of this interior fire is the chief business of 
production. The difference between Mr. Brook s production 
of Measure for Measure and Mr. BenthaU s production of The 
Tempest was the difference between a play lit from within and 
a play lit from without JFhere are now signs that our most 
talented directors, having tasted the sweets of mechanical 
facility, are turning their eyes another way. The suspicion 
10 



274 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

is dawning upon them that the Elizabethan method, broadly 
and reasonably interpreted, may not only be right but fashion 
able. 

It was to the credit of William Poel that he never tried to be 
fashionable; he would not have understood the meaning of 
the word. Between him and Mr. Guthrie or Sir John Gielgud 
there is a gap of more than a single generation, and his mind 
would not very easily, perhaps, have been on speaking terms 
with their s. In any case, Poel did not possess in a high 
degree the gift of communication. What he possessed was 
the gift of prophecy; the stark unbending truth proclaimed 
to the people that comprehended it not. William Archer 
maintained that the reforms which Poel advocated would in 
any case have been adopted; that by the end of the nineteenth 
century they were already in the air. He believed that Poel 
had confused rather than instructed the opinion that was 
prepared to welcome them. It is true, no doubt, that any 
man who exercises a powerful influence on his time is the 
agent of collective and unspoken instincts, that he draws out 
from his audience the unpopular truths that he announces 
to them. But the fact remains that in the matter of Shake 
spearian interpretation in the theatre, it was Poel who set this 
work afoot. Whether another would have done it better is 
beside the point. Lonely, intransigent, courageous, and 
occasionally misguided, he died with no other reward than 
the satisfactions of a rigorous artistic conscience. But if he 
had lived a further twenty years he would have seen to what 
extent the best theatrical opinion had caught up with him. 
In the course of an address to the Shakespeare Stage Society 
on 24 March 1952, Tyrone Guthrie spoke as follows: 

There will be no drastic improvement in staging Shakespeare 
until there is a return to certain basic conditions of the 
Shakespeare stage. There is no need for an exact replica 
of the Globe Theatre, but it is essential to make the contact 
between players and audience as intimate as possible. The 
Elizabethan theatre I have in mind would be large enough 
to pay its way, but small enough for the actors to be heard 
without speaking too loudly and slowing down their delivery. 
Since William Poel, producers have been grappling with this 
problem and have resorted to the enlarged forestage as at 
Stratford and the Old Vic. But this does not alter the fact 



THE LAST PHASE 

that the stage is isolated at one end of a large hall. As a 
result, even with the enlarged fore-stage, the declamatory 
method is still necessary for the sake of audibility and con 
sequent variety in tone and tempo in the verse speaking is 
lost. In the Elizabethan theatre, with its stage projecting into 
the auditorium, the audience surrounded and hung over the 
cockpit when the play took place. Today there is confusion 
about the next step. Naturalistic methods of presenting 
Shakespeare have been given up and it is not clear yet where 
to go from this point. The aim in Shakespearian production 
should be to give something larger than life and yet to provide 
a comment on life. 

And in April 1952, Sir John Gielgud, in the course of a lecture 
in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, spoke in a similar strain. 
The Stratford stage, he said, was not helpful for concentration 
in acting or for the speaking of poetry. The apron was too 
wide and shallow to thrust the action really well forward, and 
if the actors advanced beyond a few feet to the front of the apron 
they could not be seen from the balconies. The lines of sight 
were extremely narrow and sharp, and consequently long 
entrances and exits had to be created towards the centre so 
that the actors might be seen from all parts of the house. 
The acoustics were good but the shape of the auditorium as 
well as of the stage was most ill-suited to establish the necessary 
contact between actors and audience. This contact could 
only be made in a theatre more or less Elizabethan in design. 

What could be more worth while [he continued] than to 
study and rehearse the plays under the new conditions which 
such a background imposed; to know that once the playhouse 
had been seen and accepted for the first time, neither critics 
nor public would expect anything except the play. All the 
hectic research for novelty the atmospheric heights and 
depths and ingenuities of designers, their suggestively-angled 
scenes, with the action cunningly distributed off-centre to 
vary the supposed monotony of centre-stage arrangements of 
entrances or furniture all this would no longer be possible, 
nor even matter any more. Once the essential working of a 
smooth flow of action had been accepted, and worked out, 
using fore and back stage, apron and upper balcony all the 
players would need to be given would be handsome costumes 
and properties and, I think, artificial light, though probably 
in a simpler form with many less subtleties than in the average 
picture-stage productions for I have found myself that too 



276 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

many changes of lighting can be as distracting to the text 
as changes of scenery and the play would speak and speak 
well, one hopes for itself. 

If Poel had been able to listen to these two masters of the 
contemporary theatre, he would have known that the builders 
were at work, and that some of them, at least, were following 
the design that he had so patiently, so importunately, laid 
down. 



APPENDICES 

compiled by 

ALLAN GOMME 



ABBREVIATIONS 

= Out of print. 
(E) = Available in the Enthoven Collection. 
* = Copies available from W. J. BRYGE, 
41 Museum Street, London, W.C.i. 



APPENDIX I 

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST 

OF 

THE STAGE PRODUCTIONS AND OTHER STAGE 
ACTIVITIES OF WILLIAM POEL, 1878-1934 

1878 Nov. October 1879. On tour giving recitals from the plays of Shakespeare, 
Sheridan, and other authors, and readings of The Merchant of Venice. 

In June 1879 formed "The Elizabethans", a company "of professional 
ladies and gentlemen whose efforts are specially directed towards creating 
a more general taste for the study of Shakespeare", which toured the country 
during June 1879 in costume scenes from Shakespeare, the entertainment 
concluding with his sketch Don Quixote de la Mancha arranged from the 
novel of Cervantes. 

1880 First public appearance as a producer in London when were presented 
his two one-act plays Don Quixote and The Man of Forty (adapted from 
Mrs. Layard s translation of one of Kotzebue s farces) and Cut off with a 
shilling, comedietta by S. Theyre Smith. King s Cross Theatre, 29 June 
1880. 

1881 Production of Hamlet (First Quarto). St. George s Hall, 16 April 1881. 

1 88 1 Directed the summer season at the Bijou Theatre, Rosherville Gardens, 
Gravesend. 

1881-1883. Manager (for Miss Emma Cons) of the Royal Victoria Coffee Hall 
(The Old Vic). From October i88i-December 1883. 

1882 Produced The Girdle Duellists* a military spectacle illustrating Molin s 
Baltesplannarne. The Royal Victoria Coffee Hall (The Old Vic). 23 De 
cember 1882. 

1884 Stage-manager for Mr. F. R. Benson s Company. January-August 1884. 
1884 Produced Priest or Painter, his adaptation from W. D. Howell s novel "A 

foregone Conclusion", and Absence of Mind, his comic drama in one act. 

Royal Olympic Theatre, n July 1884. [The play Priest or Painter was 

subsequently purchased and taken on tour by F. R. Benson, who produced 

it at his first season at Stratford-on-Avon (1886).] 

1884 Directed dramatic recitals of selections from Shakespeare, Sheridan, 
Goldsmith, Holcroft, etc., for "At homes," etc. 

1885 Formed "Little Comedies" Company, for the presentation of a new 
drawing-room entertainment at Soirees, At Homes, and for charities. 
From April 1888 to 1891 the company was run in partnership with Mr. 
Frederick Berlyn, and was known as "Poel and Berlyn s Drawing Room 
Comedy Company". Miss Mary Rorke joined the company in 1888 and 
Miss Elizabeth Robins and Miss Rosina FiEppi in February 1890. The 
repertoire of the company comprised a large number of one-act plays, 
among which the following were written or adapted by himself. He 
continued to revive one or more of these as occasion demanded for special 
matinees or charities up to 1906 when he gave a week s season at the 
Pavilion Theatre, St. Leonards (29 October-3 November). (The dates 
given are those of the first performances.) . 

Absence of Mind. Comedietta (n July 1884). Printed in French s Acting 

Edition. . 

Adelaide. An incident in the life of Beethoven. Dramatic fragment 

(29 December 1885). MS. prompt copy. (E.). 

Called to the Bar (also called Incognito). An absurdity (3 February 1891). 

(typescript) . (E.) . 

Chiromancy. Comedietta. (18 April 1888.) 

279 



WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

The Coquette. Comedietta. (12 May 1892.) 

Don Quixote de la Mancha. An episode from the novel of Cervantes, 

(9 February 1880). (MS.). 2 MS. parts. (E.). 

Incognito. See Called to the Bar. 

Lady Jane Grey. A fragment. (18 December 1883.) 

The Lost Bag. A charade. (18 December 1883). (MS.E.). 

Love and Halfpence. Comedietta. (31 January 1888.) 

Mamma s Opinions. Comedietta. (30 January 1893.) 

The Man of Forty. Adapted from the German of Kotzebue. (29 June 

1880.) [1883] (French s Acting Edition, 1883). 

The Wayside Cottage. Adapted from the German. (26 February 1881.) 

(French s Acting Edition.) 

Mrs. Weakly s Difficulty. Adapted from the German. (20 February 1886.) 

Yes or No. Comedietta, adapted from the French. (16 May 1892.) 

1886 Produced Mekalah, adaptation by W. Poel and W. H. G. Palmer of Baring 
Gould s novel. Gaiety Theatre, n June 1886. 

1887-1897. Instructor to the Shakespeare Reading Society. 

1887 Directed dramatic reading of The Merchant of Venice, University College, 
Gower Street, February 1887. (For the Shakespeare Reading Society.) 

1888 Directed dramatic reading of Romeo and Juliet. London Institution, 
Finsbury Circus, 8 May 1888. (For the Shakespeare Reading Society.) 

1888 Produced his three-act comedy The Faithful Heart and Edith CuthelTs 
Wrong Envelope. Novelty Theatre, Great Queen Street, 20 June 1888. 
(The Faithful Heart was also known under the titles of The Faithful Lover; 
Laura; and The Queen s Lieutenant.) 

1889 Directed dramatic reading of Twelfth Night. London Institution, Finsbury 
Circus, 20 February 1889; St. Mark s Vestry Room, Battersea Rise, 
25 February; People s Palace, Mile End Road, 25 March. 

i8oyO Directed reading of Much Ado about Nothing. London Institution, Finsbury 
Circus, 26 February 1890. (For Shakespeare Reading Society). 

1890 Produced The King and the Countess. (Episode from The Raigne of King 
Edward IIL Steinway Hall, * May 1890. (For Mr. J. H. Leigh.) 

1891 Produced his two-act Comic Nautical Opera Equality Jack, with music 
by W. S. Vinning. Ladbroke Hall, Notting Hill, 28 February 1891. 

1891 Directed reading of King Henry V. Royal Academy of Music, Tenterden 
Street, April 1891. (For Shakespeare Reading Society.) 

1891 Directed costume recital of Measure for Measure. St. Mark s Vestry Room, 
Battersea Rise, 16 November 1891; Ladbroke Hall, Notting Hill, 
1 8 November. (For Shakespeare Reading Society.) 

1892 Directed recital of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. St. James s Hall, Regent 
Street, 24 March 1892. (For Shakespeare Reading Society.) 

1892 Directed open-air performance of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Albany 
Club, Kingston, 27 August 1892. 

1892 Produced Webster s The Duchess of Malfi. Opera Comique, Strand, 
21 and 25 October 1892. (For the Independent Theatre Society.) 

1893 Directed reading of Love s Labour s Lost. Steinway Hall, 24 February 1893. 
(For the Shakespeare Reading Society.) 

1893 Directed illustrated recital of D. G. Rossetti s The King s Tragedy. Queen s 

Gate Hall, South Kensington, i and 2 June 1893. 
1893 Produced his four-act comedy Debts of Honour. Bijou Theatre, Bayswater, 

21 July 1893. 

1893 Produced Measure for Measure. Royalty Theatre, 9, 10 and 1 1 November 
1893. (For the Shakespeare Reading Society. The theatre was converted 
into a replica of the Old Fortune Theatre for the occasion.) 

1894 Directed reading of King Richard II. Steinway Hall, 20 April 1894. (For 
Shakespeare Reading Society.) 



APPENDIX I 28l 

1 894 Founded the Elizabethan Stage Society, which gave productions 1 895- 1 905 . 

1895 Directed reading of Romeo and Juliet. Steinway Hall, 29 March 1895. 
(For Shakespeare Reading Society.) 

1895 Produced Twelfth Night. Burlington Hall, Savile Row, 21 and 22 June 
1895; St. George s Hall, 29 June. (First production of the Elizabethan 
Stage Society.) 

1895 Directed dramatic recital of comedies from Jane Austen. For the Oxford 
University Extension Delegacy s seventh summer season, 12 August 1895. 

1895 Produced The Comedy of Errors. Gray s Inn Hall, 6 December 1895; 
St. George s Hall ? 21 December. (For the Elizabethan Stage Society.) 

1896 Directed reading of Julius Caesar. Steinway Hall, 15 and 16 May 1896. 
(For Shakespeare Reading Society.) 

1896 Produced Marlowe s Doctor Faustus. St. George s Hall, 2 and 4 July 1896. 
(For the Elizabethan Stage Society.) [A prologue was specially written 
for the occasion by Algernon Charles Swinburne and was read at the 
performance by Edmund Gosse. The prologue was in part printed in 
The Daily Chronicle notice of the production in the issue for Friday, 3 July 

1896. It is printed in full in Swinburne s A Channel Passage 1904, pp. 
180-182.] 

1896 Produced The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Merchant Taylor s Hall, 28 and 
30 November 1896; The Great Hall, The Charterhouse, 1 8 January 1897. 
(For the Elizabethan Stage Society.) 

1897 Produced Twelfth Night. The Hall of the Middle Temple, 12 February 

1897. (For the Elizabethan Stage Society.) 

1897 Directed reading of The Merchant of Venice. Steinway Hall, 26 March 1897. 

(For Shakespeare Reading Society.) 
1897 Directed reading of The Tempest. Steinway Hall, 4 June 1897. (For the 

Shakespeare Reading Society.) 
1897 Produced Arden of Feuersham and The King and ike Countess, an episode from 

the play The Raigne of King Edward III. The Matinee Theatre [St. George s 

Hall], 9 July 1897. (For the Elizabethan Stage Society.) 

1897 Produced The Tempest, in the Egyptian Hall of the Mansion House, 
5 November 1897; Goldsmiths Hall, 13 November; and the Matinee 
Theatre [St. George s Hall], 20 November. (For the Elizabethan Stage 
Society.) 

1898 Produced Beaumont and Fletcher s comedy The Coxcomb. The Hall of 
the Inner Temple, 1 1 February 1898. (For the Elizabethan Stage Society.) 

1898 Produced Middleton and Rowley s comedy The Spanish Gipsy, with a 
prologue specially written for the occasion by Algernon Charles Swinburne 
and read at the performance by Edmund Gosse. St. George s Hall, 
5 April 1898. (For the Elizabethan Stage Society,) [The prologue is 
printed in full in the programme. It was printed by Swinburne in his 
A Channel Passage, 1904, pp. 197-9.] 

1898 Produced Ford s tragedy The Broken Heart. St. George s Hall, n June 

1898. (For the Elizabethan Stage Society.) 

1898 Produced Jonson s The Sad Shepherd. The Courtyard of Fulham Palace, 
23 July 1898. (For the Elizabethan Stage Society.) 

1898 Produced The Merchant of Venice. St. George s HaU, 29 November 1898, 
3 and 10 December. (For the Elizabethan Stage Society.) 

1899 Produced Jonson s comedy The Alchemist. Apothecaries Hall, 24 and 25 
February 1899. (For the Elizabethan Stage Society.) 

1899 Gave a course of three lectures on "English playhouses in the i6th, I7th, 
and 1 8th centuries" at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 9, 16 and 23 
March 1899. 

1899 Produced Swinburne s tragedy Locrine. St. George s Hall, 20 March 1899. 
(For the Elizabethan Stage Society.) 



282 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

1899 A committee sponsored by the Elizabethan Stage Society and the London 
Topographical Society was formed to secure the building of an Elizabethan 
theatre in London. The London County Council was approached for 
the grant of a site in Battersea Park. March 1899. (Further proceedings 
stopped by the outbreak of the South African War.) (See p. 210.) 

1899 Produced Suck Stuff as Dreams are made of, Edward Fitzgerald s translation 

of Calderon s La Vida es Sueno. St. George s Hall, 15 May 1899. (For the 

Elizabethan Stage Society.) , 
1899 Production of Kalidasa s Sakuntald. The Conservatory of the Royal 

Botanic Society, Regent s Park, 3 July 1899. (For the Elizabethan Stage 

Society.) 
1899 Produced Richard the Second. Lecture Theatre of the University of London, 

Burlington Gardens, n November 1899. (For the Elizabethan Stage 

Society.) 

1899 Produced Moliere s comedy Don Juan. Lincoln s Inn Hall, 15 December 
1899. (For the Elizabethan Stage Society.) 

1900 Produced Hamlet (First Quarto). Carpenters Hall, 21 February 1900. 
(For the Elizabethan Stage Society.) 

1900 Produced Milton s Samson Agonistes. Lecture Theatre of the Victoria 
and Albert Museum, 7 April 1900; St. George s Hall, n April. (For the 
Elizabethan Stage Society.) 

1900 Produced Coleridge s translation of Schiller s tragedy The Death of Wallen- 
stein and scenes from The Piccolomini. Lecture Theatre, Burlington 
Gardens, 22 June 1900. (For the Elizabethan Stage Society.) 

1900 Produced Sir Walter Scott s poem Marmwn> dramatised in four acts by 
Alick Bayley. Lecture Theatre, Burlington Gardens, i December 1900. 
(For the Elizabethan Stage Society.) 

1901 Produced Everyman and the Chester Plays version of The Sacrifice of Isaac. 
The Master s Court of the Charterhouse, 13 and 20 July 1901. (For the 
Elizabethan Stage Society.) The play was given again in the Quadrangle 
of University College, Oxford, on August 9; in the Dome, Royal Pavilion, 
Brighton, on 30 October; at St. George s Hall, 26 May 1902, and for a 
short run at the Imperial Theatre, Westminster, in July 1902, and was 
frequently revived in partnership with the late (Sir) Philip Ben Greet. 

1901 Produced King Henry the Fifth. Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford- 
upon-Avon, 23 October 1901; Lecture Theatre, Burlington Gardens, 
21 November. (For the Elizabethan Stage Society.) 

1902 With the late T. F. Ordish, founded the London Shakespeare (Commemor 
ation) League, which had for its objects (i) the public recognition of 
Shakespeare s work in London, and (2) the erection of a platform stage 
theatre for the presentation of Shakespeare s plays. The League was 
formed at a meeting held in Clifford s Inn Hall, 23 April 1902, and was 
dissolved in 1936. 

1902 Produced Ben Jonson s The Alchemist. The Imperial Theatre, Westminster, 
ii and 12 July 1902, (for the Elizabethan Stage Society); The New 
Theatre, Cambridge, 4 August. (For the University Extension Students.) 

1903 Produced Twelfth Night. Lecture Hall, Burlington Gardens, 23 April 1903, 
(For the Elizabethan Stage Society and the London Shakespeare League) ; 
Court Theatre, 1 6 June-20 June. 

1903 Produced Marlowe s King Edward the Second. New Theatre, Oxford, 
10 August, 1903. (For the Elizabethan Stage Society and the University 
Extension Delegacy.) 

1904 Produced Much Ado about Nothing. For London School Board s Evening 
Continuation Schools, in Town Halls pf Shoreditch (23 February) ; Bow 
and Bromley (25 February); New Cross (26 February); Hammersmith 
(i March); St. Pancras (2 March); Battersea (3 March), and Bennondsey 
(4 March). The production was also shown at The Court Theatre on 



APPENDIX I 283 

19 March, for the Elizabethan Stage Society; and in the Lecture Theatre, 
Burlington Gardens on 22 April, for the London Shakespeare League. 
1904 Arranged Tableaux Vivants "The Last Crusade, A.D. 13712" and "The 
interview of LTsle Adam with King Henry VIII at St. John s Gate, 
Clerkenwell, A.D. 1526" for An Entertainment hi aid of the British 
Ophthalmic Hospital at Jerusalem. His Majesty s Theatre, 5 July 1904. 

1904 Produced Marlowe s Doctor Faustus, Court Theatre, 29 October 1904. 
The production was taken on tour 31 October to 10 December, with The 
Comedy of Errors, the two plays being acted alternately; winding up at 
Terry s Theatre, Strand. 

1905 Produced his religious drama, The First Franciscans. St. George s Hall, 
6, 7, 13 and 14 April 1905. (For the Elizabethan Stage Society.) 

1905 Produced Romeo and Juliet. Royalty Theatre, 5, 6, 9 and n May 1905. 
(For the Elizabethan Stage Society and the London Shakespeare League. 
This was the last production of the Elizabethan Stage Society as an organ 
ised body.) 

1905 Sale by auction of the collection of antique, historical, and allegorical, 
theatrical costumes, armour, swords and other weapons, and furniture, 
used for the Elizabethan Stage Society s productions, including the 
full-size model of the platform-stage of the old Fortune Playhouse, with its 
working equipment, balcony, curtains, etc., as used in the Society s 
performances. No. 90 College Street, Chelsea, 5 July 1905. 

1905 Initiated a public discussion on "The best method of presenting Shake- 
* speare s plays." Guildhall School of Music on 24 October 1905 (Henry 

Arthur Jones hi the chair). Report of the speeches was published by the 
London Shakespeare League. 

1906 Directed Dramatic Recital given for the benefit of Samuel Arthur King. 
St. George s Hall, 3 July 1906. 

1906 Produced Goldsmith s comedy The Good-natured Man. New Theatre. 
Cambridge, 9 and 10 August 1906. (For the Summer students of Cam 
bridge University); Coronet Theatre, Netting Hill, n October. 

1906 Played the part of Keegan in G. B. Shaw s John Butt s Other Island during, 
season of six weeks at The Court Theatre commencing 17 September 1906 

1907 Produced his three-act play The Redemption of Agnes. Coronet Theatre, 
Netting Hill, 30 March 1907. [The play was printed in 1908 under the 
title of The Temptation of Agnes .] 

1907 Produced The Merchant of Venice. Fulham Theatre, njune-i 5 June 1907. 
(Six performances.) 

1908 Produced Measure for Measure. Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, n April to 
1 8 April 1908; Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 21 and 22 April 
(For Miss A. E. F. Horniman.) 

1908 Produced Gilbert Murray s translation of Euripides The Bacchae. Court 
Theatre, 10 and 17 November 1908. (For Miss Lillah McCarthy.) 

1908 Produced Milton s Samson Agomstes. New Theatre, Cambridge, 10 and n 
December 1908; Lecture Theatre, Burlington Gardens, 14 and 15 December 
(for the British Academy) ; Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, 16 December; 
Whitworth Hall, Manchester University, 19 December. (For the Milton 
Tercentenary Celebrations.) 

1909 Produced Everyman. Coronet Theatre, Netting Hill, 24 and 25 March 
and 7 and 8 April 1909; Fulham Theatre, 26 and 27 March; Kennington 
Theatre, 31 March. 

1909 Produced Macbeth. Fulham Theatre, 22-26 June 1909 (six performances). 

1909 Played the part of Keegan in G. B. Shaw s John Bull s Other Island at the 
Coronet Theatre, Notting Hill, and on a provincial tour. 27 September- 
4 December 1909. 

1910 Produced The Two Gentlemen of Verona. His Majesty s Theatre, 20 April 
1910 (for Sir Herbert Tree s Annual Shakespeare Festival); Gaiety Theatre, 
Manchester, 25, 26 and 30 ApriL 



284 WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

1910 Produced Everyman. Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, 27, 28 and 29 April 1910. 

1910 Played the part of Don Balthazar in The Cloister, play in 4 acts by Emile 
Verhaeren, translated by Qsman Edwards, Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, 
3-8 October 1910. 

1911 Produced sixteenth-century Interlude Jacob and Esau and The King and 
the Countess, episode from the play The Raigne of King Edward III. Little 
Theatre, 6 March and 12 March 1911. 

1911 Produced Coleridge s translation of Schiller s tragedy The Death of Wallen- 
stein and scenes from The Piccolomini. New Theatre, Oxford, 1 1 August 1911. 

1911 Produced Francis W. Hubback s translation of Euripides* Alcestis. Marble 
Hall, University of London (Imperial Institute), South Kensington, 15 
December 1911; Little Theatre, 3-9 January 1912. 

1912 Produced Buddha, dramatic version of Sir Edwin Arnold s Light of Asia, 
by S. C. Bose. Court Theatre, 22-24 February 1912. (For K. N. Das 
Gupta.) 

1912 Produced the 16th-century interlude Jacob and Esau and the Brome play 
I Abraham and Isaac. New Masonic Hall, Oxford, 28 February 1912. 

1912 Produced Kalidasa s Sakuntald. Examination Hall, University of Gam- 
bridge, i August 1912. (Acted on a multiple stage showing the Forest 
Temple, the King s Palace, and the Elysian Fields.) 

1912 Produced, with Mr. Bridges-Adams, the Hon. Sybil Amherst s arrangement 
of The Book of Job. King s Hall, Covent Garden, 28 November 1912. 

1912 Produced Troilus and Cressida. King s Hall, Covent Garden, 10, 15 and 
1 8 December 1912; Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 12 May 1913. 

1912 Played the part of Keegan in G. B. Shaw s play John Bull s Other Island. 
Kingsway Theatre, 26 December 1912-25 March 1913. 

1913 Produced Edward Garnett s The Trial of Jeanne d Arc. Ethical Church, 
Bayswater, 26 October 1913. 

1914 Produced Hamlet. Little Theatre, 27, 29 and 30 January 1914. 

1914 Moved the London Shakespeare League to erect a memorial in St. Leonard s 
Church, Shoreditch, to James and Richard Burbage and other Elizabethan 
actors who are buried there. The Memorial was erected, and was un 
veiled by Sir George Alexander on 16 March 1914. (See p. 217.) 

1914 Produced F. W. Hubback s translation of Euripides Alcestis. Ethical 
Church, Bayswater, 26 April 1914. 

1916 Convened a meeting at the Apothecaries* Hall to discuss "the present 
state of the theatrical profession and to express regret that so few of Shake 
speare s plays are produced on the London stage." 23 April 1916. 

1916 Produced Ben Jonson s comical satire The Poetaster. Apothecaries Hall, 
26 April 1916; Small Theatre, Royal Albert Hall, 27 April. (For the 
Shakespeare Tercentenary.) 

1916-17. Autumn lecture tour in the United States. In December he produced 
Jonson s The Poetaster at Pittsburgh and Detroit, acted by college students. 

1919 Moved the London Shakespeare League to arrange for a public testimonial 
to be given to Mr. (afterwards Sir) Frank R. Benson in recognition of his 
long and devoted services in the cause of dramatic art. The appeal was 
widely supported, and a book of signatures and a money gift were pre 
sented to Sir Frank Benson at the Holborn Restaurant on 21 May 1919. 

1919 Produced The Return from Parnassus and The Comedy of Errors. Apothecaries* 
Hall, 3 June 1919. 

1920 Moved ^the London Shakespeare League to approach the authorities for 
permission to put up a bronze tablet in the church at Stratford-uppn-Avon 
stating Shakespeare s connexion with the theatre and with his plays, 
13 February 1920. Suggested wording for the tablet was: 

HERE LIES WELLIAM SHAKESPEARE 
Poet, Player, Playmaker 
BORN 1564, DIED 1616. 

[Permission was not obtained and subsequent efforts were equally un 
availing.] 



APPENDIX I 285 

920 Directed a Vocal Recital of Such Stuff as Dreams are Made of, Fitzgerald s 
translation of Calderon s La Vida es Sueno. Ethical Church, Bayswater, 
14, 21 and 28 March and 4 April 1920. 

920 Directed Vocal Recital of All s Well that Ends Well Ethical Church 
Bayswater, 20 and 29 May 1920. 

920 Produced the Hon. Sybil Amherst s stage version of William Morris s 
Love is Enough and scenes from Act I of Henry VI 3 Part 3. Ethical Church, 
Bayswater, 8 July 1920. 

922 Moved the London Shakespeare League to make an appeal for the publi 
cation of a National Text of Shakespeare s plays. A meeting was 
held to discuss the matter at the County Hall, Spring Gardens, on 3 
February 1922. A public meeting to further the idea was held at the 
Mansion House on 12 June 1922. 

924 Produced Fratricide Punished. The Playhouse, Oxford, August Bank 
Holiday 1924; the New Oxford Theatre, London, n October; Little 
Theatre, 16, 17 and 19 December. 

925-1926 President of the London Shakespeare League. 

925 Arranged and directed special Matinee in aid of the Marlowe Memorial 
fund. Haymarket Theatre, 24 July 1925. 

925 Directed an open discussion on the reading of Shakespeare s verse. London 
Day Training College, 16 November 1925. 

925 Produced Arden of Feversham. Scala Theatre, 6 and 7 December 1925. 
(For the Renaissance Theatre. Acted on a multiple stage representing 
Arden s parlour; the high road near Rainham Down; and a street in 
London with an entrance to Franklyn s house.) 

926 Produced Fratricide Punished and The King and the Countess (episode from the 
play The Raigne of King Edward III). Apollo Theatre, 18 April 1926. 
(For the Fellowship of Players.) 

926 Produced his religious drama The First Franciscans. St. George s Hall, 
October 30 1 926. (For the Seventh Centenary of the death of St. Francis.) 

927 Formed the Elizabethan Stage Circle, an informal association of the 
supporters of the platform-stage method of Shakespearian production, 
March 1927. 

[927 Produced Samuel Rowley s interlude When you see me., you know me. Holborn 
Empire, 10 July 1927. (For the Elizabethan Stage Circle. Acted on a 
full-size platform stage constructed over the stalls.) 

[928 Produced Ben Jonson s tragedy Sejanus his FalL Holborn Empire, 12 
February 1928. (For the Elizabethan Stage Circle. Acted on a platform- 
stage.) 

[929 Produced Fletcher s Bonduca. King s Hall, Covent Garden, 3 January 
1929. (For the Elizabethan Stage Circle. A platform-stage production.) 

[929 Produced Chapman s The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron. 
Royalty Theatre, 15 July 1929. A recital of the plays was also given at 
the Little Theatre on 15 October, including an interlude specially written 
by Poel, referring to the dialogue which was cut from "The Tragedy" 
by the Censor in 1 6 1 o. The recital was followed by a luncheon at Frascati s 
Restaurant at which the continuance of representations of Elizabethan 
drama was discussed. 

1930 Produced Julius Caesar the Dictator. Six episodes arranged as a prelude to 
Shakespeare s play Julius Caesar. Globe Theatre, 20 July 1920. (For 
the Elizabethan Stage Circle.) 

1931 Produced Coriolanus. Chelsea Palace Theatre, n May 1931. (For the 
Elizabethan Stage Circle. A platform-stage production.) 

1932 Produced George Peele s David and Bethsabe. Mary Ward Settlement, 
Tavistock Place, 29 November 1932. (For the Elizabethan Stage Circle.) 



APPENDIX II 
SOME ARTICLES ABOUT WILLIAM POEL AND HIS WORK . 

Some of the most important notices of the work of William Poel appear 
in the criticisms of his books and of his various stage-productions which 
appeared in the daily and weekly press on the morrow of the first perform 
ances. These can easily be found from the dates of these performances 
given in Appendix I and are not included below. (Notices in The Times ; 
The Manchester Guardian; The Morning Post; The Saturday Review, and The 
Nation are important.) 
1894 William Poel The Stage, 18 January 1894. 

1910 Shakespeare himself again. Evening Star and St. James s Gazette, 21 April 1910 
(three-quarter column). 

1911 The art of Mr. Poel. By C. E. Montague. In his Dramatic Values (Methuen 
1911), pp. 225-246. 

1912 Bringing the theatre to the countryman. A dramatic pioneer; his career and opinions. 
By "Home Counties" (J. W. Robertson Scott). The World s Work. 
November 1912, pp. 608-615 (illustrated). 

1912 Reports in the daily press 2 December 1912, of the speeches made at the 
dinner given in PoeTs honour on i December at the Criterion Restaurant. 

1913 "Troilus and Cressida" and the critics. By Edward Garnett Contemporary 
Review, February 1913, pp. 184-190. 

1913 A New way with Shakespeare. The work of Mr. William Poel. The Times, 
30 May 1913. 

1913 Mr. Poel and the Theatre, By Edward Garnett The English Review, July 

I 9i$> PP- 589-595- 
1913 William Poel: Reformer. A character sketch. By Harold Begbie The Daily 

Chronicle, 3 September 1913 (2 cols.). 
1916 William Poel in America. By Stephen Allard. Theatre Arts Magazine, 

November 1916, pp. 24-26. 

1916 Poel, "Pittsburgh" and "The Poetaster" Boston Evening Transcript, 4 November, 
1916. 

1927 Die Elisabeihanische Buehnengesellschaft. von Karl Arns. Dar Prisma- 
Blaetter der Vereinigten Stadttheater Bochum-Duisburg, Jg. 3. Heft 10-14, 1927, 
pp. 112-114. 

1927 An Elizabethan Stage. Mr. Poet s New Production. The Daily Telegraph, 
7 July 1927. 

1927 Salute to William Poel. By Ivor Brown. The Saturday Review, 16 July 1927. 
pp. 90-91- 

1928 Speeches at dinner at the Criterion Restaurant, i April 1928, given to 
commemorate the platform productions of Rowley s When you see me, you 
know me, and Jonson s Sejanus. Reported in The Morning Post, and other 
papers, 2 April 1928. 

1929 Mr. William Poel and his Work. The Observer, 20 October 1929 (i column). 

1931 William Poel and the Shakespearian Revolution. By Florence May Warner. 
Vassar Quarterly, February 1931, pp. 19-28. 

1932 Mr. William Poel: A tribute on his 8oth birthday. The Times, 22 July 1922. 
Leader and letter. 

1932 A Great Shakespearian. Honouring William Poel. By Raymond Marriott. 

The Era, 20 July 1932, p. 3. 

1932 William Poel. [A tribute on his 8oth birthday.] By von Karl Arns. Die 
Neueren Sjrachen Bd 40, Heft 7, 1932, pp. 416-418. 

286 



APPENDIX H 287 

1933 Reports of proceedings at presentation of his portrait in the Middle 
Temple Hall. In the daily press of 27 April 1933, 

1933 William Poel and his Stage Productions, 1880-1932. [Compiled by Allan Gomme] 
14 pp., with reproduction of the Tonks* portrait. June 1933. [Prepared for 
the Portrait Committee for issue to subscribers to the Fund.] 

1933 Honour to William Poel. By Allan Gomme. Drama (Journal of British 
Drama League), Vol. II, No. 9, June 1933, pp. 147-148.) 

1934 Obituary notices in The Times and other papers, 14 December 1934. 
1939 Acting. By Robert Speaight. (Cassell.) Cf. pp. 89-93 which incorporate 

an article on Poel from The Catholic Herald, Dec, 1934. 

1946 Poetic Drama. Robert Speaight s debt to William Poel. By Glyn Kelsall [in 
an interview with Robert Speaight] The Stage, 14 March 1946, p. 4 
(two-thirds column). 

1947 Shakespeare and William Poel. By A. C. Sprague University of Toronto 
Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. i, October 1947, pp. 29-37. 

1949 Biographical notice by S. R. Littlewood Dictionary of National Biography, 

I93I-I940 (1949) PP- 708-709 (2 cols.). 
1952 William Poel and the Modem Theatre. By Sir Lewis Casson The Listener, 

Vol. 47, 1952, 10 January, pp. 56-58. 
1952 On the Elizabethan experiments of William Poel. By Robert Speaight. Theatre, 

Vol. 6, 1952, 26 April, p. 3. 
1952 William Poel. Leading article in The Times Literary Supplement, n July 

1952, P- 453 (2 cols.). 
1954 Shakespearian Players ard Performances. By A. C. Sprague (A. & C. Black). 

Cf. chapter 9 Enter William Poel. 



APPENDIX III 

SELECT LIST OF WILLIAM POEL S WRITINGS 

(Entries are in chronological order) 

i. BOOKS AND MONOGRAPHS 

An Account of the Elizabethan Stage Society. Printed for the Society, June 1898 
12 pp. (O.P.) 

The playhouse of the i6tk century. Printed for the Elizabethan Stage Society. 
I9<>5 3<> pp. (O.P.) 

Shakespeare s Jew and Marlowe 9 s Christians. Bedford, privately printed. 1909. 
12 pp. (Reprint of article in Westminster Review, Jan. 1909, pp. 54-64). (O.P.). 

Shakespeare in the Theatre. London. Sidgwick and Jackson, 1913. viii-f-248 pp. 
(Reprints of papers in various periodicals). (O.P.). 

* Shakespeare s Profession. A paper read before the Royal Society of Arts. Ed. 
Stewart D. Headlam. Pamphlet No. 2, London Shakespeare League, 1915! 
20 pp. 

Monthly Letter written by William Poel. Single leaves, Nos. 1-52, July 1915- 
October 1919. Privately printed, 1915-19. 52 11. (Nos. 1-25 were written for 
The Shakespeare League Journal, and were issued as insertions in the monthly issues 
of that journal; Nos. 26-52 were issued separately to a restricted circle). (O.P.). 
This is an important series for the understanding of Poel and his work. 

*The Stage version of Romeo and Juliet. Pamphlet No. 3 London Shakespeare 
League, 1915. 28 pp. (Reprint from Trans. New Shakspere Society, 1887-1800, 
pp. 227-46.) 

Some notes on Shakespeare s stage and plays. Manchester University Press ; London 
Longmans Green, 1917. 10 pp. 3 pi. and table. (Reprint from Bulletin of the 
John Rylands Library, April-Dec., 1916, pp. 215-228.) (O.P.). 

Prominent points in the life and writings of Shakespeare arranged in four tables. Man 
chester University Press; London, Longmans, Green, 1919. 12 pp.+4 tables. 
(Reprint from Bulletin of the John Rylands library with corrections and additions) 
(a few copies still available.) 

*What is wrong with the stage. Some notes on the English theatre from the earliest 
times to the present day. London: Allen and Unwin, 1920. (4) 68 pp. 

Monthly Letters of William Poel. Selected and arranged by A. M. T(rethewy) 
London : Werner Laurie, 1929. (iv) + 148 pp. (A reprint of some of the Monthly 
Letter series entered above and other papers.) (O.P.). 

Noteon some of William Peel s stage productions. With photographs and illustrations 
Privately printed, 1933. (Only 25 copies printed). (O.P.). 

2. ARTICLES AND LETTERS FROM PERIODICALS. 

(It may be assumed that Poel made his own selection of his periodical articles 
prior to 1913. in his volume Shakespeare in the Theatre (1913) and of the Monthly 
Letter articles in his volume Monthly Letters (1929). The list below therefore starts 
with the year 1913 and excludes all Monthly Letter articles. Even so it is but a 
smau selection of the many remaining contributions by Poel to the periodical 

Hindu drama on the English stage. The Asiatic Quarterly Review, N.S., Vol. i 
I9I3 ^V PP- 3I9-3L (Neglect of study of Hindu drama in England is to be 
re^etted,^pecially as there is a similarity in the dramatic art of the two countries 
at their best, though widely different, periods.) uuuic* 

a^S^Cf* T^ Pdl MaU Gazette, 3 May and 5 May 



1913. (ij and 

S99-W 7 k drama * ^ Qaam * m ^ Z*" VoL I0 4> November 1913, pp. 
Hamlet retold. The Saturday Review, 17 Jan. 1914, pp. 73,74. 

288 



APPENDIX il 289 

Shakespeare himself. Letter The Saturday Review, 27 June 1914, pp. 830-831. 
(On whether the dramatist s personal convictions are reflected in parts of the plays.) 

A disclaimer. Letter Shakespeare League Journal, Vol. 3, July 1917, p. 39. 
(20 lines.) (The stress on Hamlet s line "I shall in all my best obey you, Madam" 
should be on the word best.) 

On the speaking of poetry. Shakespeare League Journal, Vol. 4, April 1918. p. 15 
(half col.). 

The playing of Shakespeare. Letter Shakespeare League Journal, Vol. 4, July 
1918, p. 27 (three-quarters col.) (Whether an Elizabethan play should be short 
ened or not in presentation must be determined by its dramatic, not its literary 
merits.) 

On cutting Shakespeare. Letter Fortnightly Review, Sept. 1919, pp. 479-80. 

How to study drama. Shakespeare League Journal, VoL 6, Dec. 1920, pp. 33-34. 

Shakespeare s prompt copies. A plea for the early texts. Letter The Times 
Literary Supplement, 3 Feb. 1921, p. 75 (3 cols.). 

Shakespeare: a standard text. Two letters The Times Literary Supplement, 
24 Feb. 1921, p. 127, and 14 April, p. 244. (half and third cols.) (Part of corre 
spondence in which A. W. Pollard, Bernard Shaw, Prof. Dover Wilson and others 
took part.) 

The doubtful plays. Shakespeare League Journal, Vol. 7, June 1921, pp. 13-14. 
(A Yorkshire Tragedy, Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, Henry VIII.) 

Shakespeare and the Davenants. Letters The Times Literary Supplement, 
2 June 1921, p. 356 (ij cols.). Also June 23, p. 403, and 30 June, p. 420. 

Shakespeare s Versification. Shakespeare League Journal, Vol. 7, July 1921, 
pp. 17-19. (On M. A. Bayfield s book of the same title published in 1920.) 

Shakespeare s prompt books. Three letters The Times Literary Supplement, 
4 Aug. 1921, p. 500; 18 Aug. p. 532; and 8 Sept., p. 580 (31 lines, 87 lines, 
and i col. respectively). (Stage management in Shakespeare s day and play- 
structure.) 

Authorised text of Shakespeare s plays. Draft of an appeal to petition Parliament 
to arrange for the production and publication of an authorised text The Times 
Literary Supplement, 26 Jan. 1922, p. 60. (ij- cols.). 

Othello. Shakespeare League Journal, Vol. 7, 1921-22, March 1922, p. 48. (On 
the character of lago.) 

The Shakespeare Canon. Three letters TTte Times Literary Supplement, 13 
April 1922, p. 244; 27 April, p. 276; n May, p. 308 (one-third, four-fifths, 
one-third cols, respectively). (On J. M. Robertson s book of the same title 
published 1922.) 

Timon of Athens. Shakespeare League Journal, Vol. 8, 1922-23, June 1922, pp. 
10-11. 

Hamlet s delay. Shakespeare (League) Journal, Vol. 8, 1922-23, July 1922, 
pp. 15-16; Sept. pp. 21-22; Oct., pp. 29-30; and Nov., pp. 37~3 8 - 

The First Quarto Hamlet. Notes and Queries, I2th. S., Vol. XI, 14 Oct, 1922, 
pp. 301-3. (A later not an earlier version than that in the FoEo.) 

The Heminge and Gondell celebration: the nation s debt to actors. Old Vic 
Magazine, Sept.-Oct. 1923, pp. 3, 5, 8. 

The poet s literary apprenticeship. Bookman s Journal, Vol. 9, First Folio 
Tercentenary No., Nov. 1923, pp. 39-46. 

Who wrote the play of Henry VIII? Bookman s Journal, Vol. 10, August 1924, 
pp. 149-152. 

Fratricide* Punished. Address given before the performance of the play at the 
New Oxford Theatre, London. The Shakespeare Journal, Vol. 10, 1924, 25-Nov. 
1924, pp. 52~53 

Hamlet the avenger: the discovery of Fratricide Punished. Bookman s Journal, 
VoL 12, April 1925, pp. 3-4. 7-9. 

History in drama. Three letters The Manchester Guardian, 30 Sept., 5 Oct., 
and 10 Oct. 1925 (two-thirds col., 23 lines, 53 lines respectively). (On Bernard 
Shaw s Saint Joan.} 

Who wrote Pericles? The Shakespeare Journal, Vol. 1 1, 1925-26, May 1926, pp. 
64-65; July, pp. 82-83. 



2QO WILLIAM POEL AND THE ELIZABETHAN REVIVAL 

The Universities and the stage. A criticism of the report of the Adult Education 
Committee entitled "The drama in adult education" The Stage, 17 June, 8 
July and 15 July 1926. (Each 2 cols.). 

The Elizabethan stage. Two letters The Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 19 Nov. 
and 3 Dec. 1926 (J col. each). 

Poetry in drama. The Mask, Jan. 1927, pp. 7-9. 

Shakespeare s experience. Letter The Times Literary Supplement, 13 Jan. 1927, 
p. 28 (quarter col.). (On Cleopatra s speeches at the end of Antony and Cleopatra). 

Ben Jonson s Sejanus: why the play was written. The Manchester Guardian, 
30 Jan. 1928 (two-thirds col.). 

In Shakespeare s church. Letter The Stage, 26 April 1928, p. 6. (two-thirds 
col.). (No tablet yet placed in Stratford-on-Avon church to identify the poet 
with the actor and playwright.) 

The portraits in Hamlet. Letter The Times Literary Supplement, 20 Sept. 1928, 
p. 667 (one-third col.). (Management of the closet scene.) 

Lessing as a critic. Letter The Times Literary Supplement, 31 Jan. 1929, p. 80 
(29 lines). (Lessing s criticisms are masterly but are seldom read.) 

Is Isabella a Novice? Letter The Times Literary Supplement, 16 July 1931, 
p. 564 (one-third col.). 

Shakespeare the dramatist. Letter The Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 19 Feb. 
1932 (i col.). (Examples of his stagecraft from various plays.) 

3. PLAYS AND ADAPTATIONS FOR THE STAGE, OTHER THAN THE 
"LITTLE COMEDIES" FOR WHICH SEE APPENDIX I, 1885 

(N.B. The dates following the titles are those of the first performances, full 
particulars of which can be found in Appendix I under the respective dates.) 

Debts of Honour. Comedy in four acts. (21 July 1893.) 

Equality Jack. Comic nautical operetta in two acts, suggested by Capt. Marryat s 
celebrated novels. Libretto by W.P. Music by W. S. Vinning. (28 February 
1891.) (MS.E.). 

The Faithful Heart. Comedy in three acts. (Originally called The Faithful 
Lover; afterwards Laura and The Queen s Lieutenant.} (20 June 1888.) (MSS. E.). 

The First Franciscans. Being two episodes in the life of St. Francis. (6 April 
1905.) (Printed copy and typescript. E.). 

The King and the Countess. Episode from the play Edward HI. (May 1890.) 
Printed under the title of Love s Constancy, London, A. H. Bullen, The Playhouse 
Series. (1906.) 

Laura. See The Faithful Heart above. 

Life in the Camp. See War below. 

*Lilies that Fester. A tragedy in one act adapted from the old play Arden of 
Feversham. Printed London, A. H. Bullen. The Playhouse Series. (1906.) 

Love s Constancy. See The King and ike Countess above. 

Mehalah. A romantic drama in five acts adapted from Baring Gould s novel 
by W. P. and W. H. G. Palmer, (i i June 1886.) (Typescripts and MS. parts, E.) 

Priest or Painter. A comedy-drama in three acts adapted from W. D. HowelTs 
novel A Foregone Conclusion, (u July 1884.) (MS. "author s copy"; also MSS. 
and typescript. E.). 

The Queerfs Lieutenant, See The Faithful Heart above. 




War. As shown by scenes from Coleridge s translation of Schiller s Piccolomini 
and The Death of Wallenstein. (22 June 1900). Performed under the title Life in 
the Camp. Privately printed, 1934. (O.P.). (Typescript prompt copy, E.). 



Index 

All productions are PoeVs unless otherwise stated, and are indexed under the names of the plays * 



Abercrombie, Lascelles, 258 
Abraham and Isaac, Brome play, pro 
duced, 284 
Academy, review, 50 
Act and scene divisions in Shakespeare, 

^2,94 

Actors 

amateur v. professional, 68 

art of, 71-72 

dignity of profession, 59 

discussions on Shakespeare texts, 
should be heard in, 66 

old-style, 25 

Actors, Elizabethan, 62, 63-66, 76-77 

Adams, W. Bridges-, 90, 93, 189, 199, 
219, 228 

Foci s assistant stage manager, 121 

on Poel, Irving and Granville- 
Barker, 200-201 

his productions at Stratford, 235-236 

Aeschylus, 174 

Ainley, Henry, in Marlowe Memorial 
Matinee, 244 

Akestis of Euripides, play and produc 
tions of, 173-178, 190 

Alchemist, The, production of, 141, 142, 

173 
Allgood, Sara, in Poel productions, 95, 

250, 256 
All s Well that Ends Well, production of, 

233-234 

Anderson, Mary, 217 
Angmering Players, The, 125, 236 
Antony and Cleopatra, 67 

Glen Byam Shaw s production at 
Stratford, 82 

Robert Speaight s production at 
Geneva, 82 

Archer. William, arguments with Pod, 
94, 103-109, 187, 262 

The Green Goddess, 103 

Arden, Alice, in Poel productions, 127, 

130 
Arden of Feversham, productions of, 

122-123 

Arts Council, 204, 208 
As Tou Like It, 193 
Ashmolean Museum, Pod s meeting 

with Assistant Keeper, 39 



Atkins, Robert, 233, 234, 235, 250 

in Poel productions, 69 

at William Poel Matinee, 163 

his *Old Vic productions, 235 
Atlantic storm, impressions of, 183-184 
Audience, Elizabethan, 88 

its view of stage, 106 

Aylmer, Felix, in Poel production, 250 

Bacchae, The, production of, 169-173 
Baird, Dorothea, 105 
Bancroft, Squire, 140, 220 

as actor, 32 

Barker, H. GranviUe-, 189-190, 

in Poel productions, 149, 179 

his Prefaces to Shakespeare noted, 149, 
200, 209 

methods contrasted with Pod s, 
200-20 1 

on a standard Shakespeare text, 66 

tributes to Poel, 148-149 

at Trocadero dinner, 191 

Waste banned, 204 
Barnay, Herr, 219 
Barrett, Wilson, 58 

Barrie, Sir J. M., signatory to The 

Times letter, 210 

Barrymore, John, as Hamlet, 27-28 
Bateman, Leah, in Pod production, 101 
Bayley, Alick, 159 
Baylis, Lilian, 62, 166 
Beattie, Thomas, 231 
Beaumont and Fletcher s The Coxcomb, 

production of, 126-127 
Beerbohm, Max, 128, 154, 171, 203 
Begbie, Harold, 58, 166 
Bellamy, Cecil, Bradfidd productions, 

Betts, The, Henry Irving in, 20 
Bennett, Arnold, 203 
Benson, F. R. 

Pod, stage manager for 59-60 

knighted, 216 

national testimonial to, 216 
Besant, Sir Walter, member, Eliza 
bethan Stage Society, 101 

Bibesco, Prince Antoine, on Two 
Gentlemen of Verona production, 122 

Biron, Charles, Duke of, productions o 
71, 249-250 



291 



292 



INDEX 



Blackfriars playhouse, stage of, 84 
Bonduca, production of, 1248-249 
Book of Job, The, production of drama 
tic version, 284 
Bookman" s Journal. The, 251 
Bottomley, Gordon 

reads poetry to Poel, 271 

tribute to Poel, 268 
Bourchier, Arthur, 217 

on Elizabethan acting, 76 
Bowman, Paget, amateur actor, in 

Poel productions, 124, 126, 130, 

140 

Boy actors, in women s parts, 132 
Bradley, Prof. A. G., signatory to The 

Times letter, 210 
Brannigan, Desmond, 223 
Braithwaite, Lilian., present at Troca- 

dero dinner, 191 
Braybrook, Sir Edward, 217 
Britain (Fletcher s Bonduca), production 

of, 248-249 

British Broadcasting Corporation, 142 
British Drama League, 247 
Broken Heart, The, 

Edmund Gosse on, 128-129 

production of, 128-130 
Brook, Peter, 273 
Brooke, Rupert, 175 

Brooke, The Rev. Stopford A., member 
Elizabethan Stage Society, 101 

Brookfield, G. H., 204 

Brough, Lionel, as actor, 31 

Brown, Ivor, on PoeTs platform-stage 
productions, 246-247, 248 

Browne, Martin 

produces The Tempest at Angmering, 
125 

producer York Mystery plays, 165 
Buddha, from Sir Edwin Arnold s Ugfo 

of Asia, production of, 284 
Burbage, Richard, 76, 94, 217, 230 
Burbage Memorial Tablet, 217-218 
Burton, Sir Frederick, chooses Poel 

as model for te The Knight s Esquire", 

16 
Byford, Roy, in Poel production, 248 

Caesar and Pompey, episodes from, 250 
Calderon s La Vida es Sttefio produced, 

*46, 233 
Calhoun, Eleanor, 151 

in Poel productions, 130, 140 
Calthrop, D. Clayton, present at 

Trocadero dinner, 191 
Cambridge 

Marlowe Society, 193 

PoeTs visit to, 39, 175 
Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, 50 
Canterbury Plays, 87 



Carlisle, Earl of, signatory to The Times 

letter, 210 

Carnegie Institute, Pittsburg, 225 
Carter, Hubert, in Poel productions, 

117-118, 122, 154, 189, 268 
Casson, Sir Lewis 

in Poel productions, 95, 141, 180, 
184 

on their first meeting, 141-142 

in the William Poel Matine e, 163 

present at Trocadero dinner, 191 
Cellier, Frank, in Poel production, 159 
Cenci, The, Lewis Casson s production 

referred to, 235 
Censorship, Stage, 204-205 
Chamberlain, The Lord, 204-205, 250 
Chapman, George, 71, 194 

his Charles, Duke of Biron plays and 
their productions, 249-250 

his part in writing Coriolanus, 252 
Charles, Duke of Biron, productions of, 

71, 249-250 
Child actors, 

boys in women s parts, 132 

Peel s use of, 232, 249 
Child, Harold, 182 

Chronicle, The Daily, 59, 74, 90, 166, 201 

2 1 6, 224 

Church and stage, 36-38, 166-167 
Cockburn, V. V., in touring company, 

32 
Coffin, Mr. and Mrs. Hayden, present 

at Trocadero dinner, 191 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 157 
Comedy of Errors, The 

Poel s production of, 109, no, 119, 
232 

G. B. Shaw s comments on, 192 
Cons, Emma, her appointment of Poel 

as manager of R.V.C.H., 58 
Conscientious objectors, 220 
Conspiracy plays, 249-251 
Contemporary Review, The, 89, 201 
Conway, Hart, 217 
Cook, Dutton, 51 
Copeau, Jacques, referred to, 45, 69, 

200, 273 
Goquelin, 64, 71 
Coriolanus, 68 

Chapman s part in writing, 252 

the play and its production, 255-263 
Costuming Elizabethan plays, no, in, 

114, 120, 129, 140, 152, 156, 225, 

255-256 

Courtney, W. L., 204 
Coutu, Jean, 79-80 
Coxcomb, The, production of) 126-127 
Craig, Gordon, 164, 165, 172, 189, 203, 

223 
Creswick as Hamlet, 24-25 



INDEX 



Critic, The, Charles Mathews in, 20 
Critics and the theatre, 207-208 
Curtain, dropping on "stage pictures" 
condemned, 32, 

not so used in Elizabethan theatre, 
107-108 

Cutting original texts, 98- 10 1, 104, 114, 
130, 132-133, 150-151, 197-198, 
258-263, 267-268 

Cymbeline referred to, 263 

Dane, Clemence, her Will Shakespeare 

criticised, 236 
Darlington, W. A., 244 
David and Bethsabe, production of, 

266-268 
Dean, Basil 

in Poel production, 95 

on Poel at rehearsals and as teacher, 
95-96 

Digges, Leonard, 76 

Dillon, Arthur, 90 

Discoverie of Witchcraft, 114, 124, 185 

Doctor Faustus, production of, 113-119 

Dolmetsch, Arnold, his association with 

Poel, 74, 102-103, in, 1120, 124, 131, 

147 
Dolmetsch, Mrs. Arnold, 103 

joins the music group, 124 
Don Juan, production of, 151-152 
Don Quixote, sketch from, 47 
Dowden, Edward, 95 

on The Merchant of Venice, 140 

onjonson s The Sad Shepherd, 130-131 
Drake, Fabia, 141 

Dramatic Values, see Montague, C. E. 
Drinkwater, Mr. and Mrs. A. E., 

present at Trocadero dinner, 191 
Drinkwater, John, 256, 258 

tribute to Poel, 240 
Dryden s All for Love, 235 

Duchess ofMalfi, The, production of, 73, 

173 

Duncan, Ronald, his This Way to the 
Tomb referred to, 206 

Eadie, Dennis, in Poel production, 115 
Edinburgh University Journal, 148 
Edmiston, Alan, 164 
Edward II, production of, 179-180 
Edward III, "King and Countess" 

scenes, production of, 73, 122, 123, 

190 

Eliot, T. S., 86, 127, 145 
Elizabethan Stage Circle formed, 245, 

258 
Elizabethan Stage Society, 72, 132 

formed, 90, 101 

first members, 101 

its finances, 125-126, 128, 133, 
147-148 



293 

Elizabethan Stage Society contd. 

G. B. Shaw on its contribution to 
theatrical art, 128 

its first production, 102, 192 

its last production, 179 

sale of its furniture, costumes, etc.. 
283 

"Elizabethans, The", touring company, 

46-47 
Emotion, expressing on and off the 

stage, 23-24 
Enthoven, Gabrielle, suggested for 

Viola in Twelfth, Night, 1 1 1 
Equality Jack, musical play by Poel, 60 

production date, 280 
Era, The, 52-53 
Euripides 

Alcestis, play and production of, 
173-178 

The Bacchae, production of, 169-173 

as dramatist, 168, 169-178 
Evans, Dame Edith 

in Poel productions, 147, 199, 202, 
222, 231-232, 233, 235 

present at Trocadero dinner, 191 
Everyman 

the play and its productions, 17, 
161-168, 5222 

effect of its production, 165 

Fabian Society, The, 238 

Fargueil, Mile., French actress, 22, 

3*-32 

Farjeon, Herbert, 128 
Farnaby, Giles, 124 
Faustus, Doctor, production o 118-119 
Fay, Frank 

as a witch in Macbeth, 189 

on production of The Merchant of 
Venice, 139-140 

Fay, W. G., as a witch m 

189 
Fay, Mrs. W. G., 

189 

Field, Ben, in Pod prodoctioo, 184 
Filippi, Rosana 

in **Little Comedies" Company, 60 

present at Trocadero dinner, 191 
Findlater, Richard 

The Unholy Trade, 204 
First Folio, 194 

capital initials to words requiring 
emphasis, 64 

punctuation in, 64-66 

First Franciscans, The, the play and its 

productions, 180, 244-245 
Fitzgerald, Barry, in Poel production, 

256 
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 

Poel s visit to, 39-40 



294 INDEX 

Flecknoe, Richard, on advantage of 
Elizabethan over scenic stage, quoted, 

83 
Fletcher, John, 251 

his Bonduca produced, 248-249 
Flower, Mr. and Mrs. Archibald, 

present at Trocadero dinner, 191 
Fogerty, Elsie, 

in Poel productions, 104, 146 

on PoeFs elocution technique, 146 

her pupils, 272 
Ford, John 

bisTheBrokenHeartproduced, 128-130 

discussed by Edmund Gosse, 128-129 
Fratricide Punished, the play and its pro 
duction, 240-244 

French acting compared with English, 

21-22, 31-32 
Furnivall, Dr. F. J., 210, 21 1, 217 

on acting editions of Shakespeare, 

47-48 

on Hamlet y Quarto I, 48, 51 
Furse, Roger, 181 

Garnett, Edward 

his The Trial of Jeanne d?Arc, pro 
duction of, 222 

on production of Troilus and Cressida, 

201-202 

present at Trocadero dinner, 191 
Garrick, David, version of Romeo and 

Juliet, 48 
Germany, Theatre in, 208-209, 218-219, 

220, 235 
Gielgud, Sir John, 149, 150 

his production of Lear, 228 

compared to Burbage in "The 
Return from Parnassus**, 230 

Poel sees his Hamlet, 271 

on the Shakespeare stage, 275-276 
Gilbert, Sir W. S., signatory to The 

Times letter, 210 
Globe Playhouse, 193-194, 247 

the stage, 85 

destruction by fire, 85, 251 

Globe Playhouse, proposed replica for 

London, 210, 215, 274 
Glyn, Miss, her reading of The Merchant 

of Venice, 41 
Goldsmith s The Good-natured Man, 

production of, 184 
Gollancz, Prof. Israel, 212, 217 

member of Elizabethan Stage 
Society, 101 

Gomme, Allan, 254, 263 

organised Trocadero dinner, 191 
Gomme, Prof. A. W., on Poel s pro 
ductions of Euripides, 168-177 

Gomme, Sir Laurence and Lady, 
present at Trocadero dinner, 191 



Good-natured Man, The, production of, 1 84 
Gosse, Edmund 

on The Broken Heart, 128-129 

recites Swinburne s prologue for 
Doctor Faustus, 116 

on Pod s work, 180, 191 

on Swinburne s Locrine, 142 

on the production of Twelfth Night, 112 

member of The Elizabethan Stage 
Society, 101 

signatory to The Times letter, 210 

present at Trocadero dinner, 191 
Gosse, Mrs. Edmund, member of The 

Elizabethan Stage Society, 101, 180 

Got, M., French actor, 21-22 

Greek plays, 168-178 

Greek theatres compared with Eliza 
bethan, 77-78 

Greet, Clare 

in Poel production, 184 

rehearsed for part of Parolles, 233- 

234 

present at Trocadero dinner, 191 
Greet, Philip Ben, 104 

on Everyman, 162, 165, 166, 183 
Grein, J. T., on production of Doctor 

Faustus, 117-118 

Griffith, Hubert, 91-92 

Griggs, William, editions of Hamlet, 48 

Guthrie, Tyrone, on adapting Eliza 
bethan stage, 215, 274-275 

Gwenn, Edmund, present at Trocadero 
dinner, 191 

Hall, Dr., John, 252 
Halliwell-Phillips, Mr. 231 
Halstan, Margaret 

in Poel production, 146 

in William. Poel Matinee, 163 
Hamlet, 57, 65, 67, 94 

Barrymore s Hamlet, 27-28 

Creswick*s Hamlet contrasted with 
living s, 24-25 

Salvini s Hamlet, 26-28 

the First Quarto and its productions, 
48, 49-52, 53, 57 

the two Quartos and the usual 
acting edition, 52-56 

production of Second Quarto, 55, 
56, 222-224 

Ophelia carries lute in mad scene, 52 

her coffin not to be borne by monks, 
55 

was Hamlet mad ?, 55 

Hamlet s delay, 56 

Wilson Barrett s production, 58 

film version referred to, 75, 79 

Sir Barry Jackson s modern-dress 
production, 223 

character of Claudius, 223 



INDEX 



295 



Hamlet contd. 

Polonius s advice to Laertes, 224 

his death, 224 

the portraits in closet scene, 224 
Harris, Robert, 198 

Harrison, Frederic, 147, 210 

on Locrine, 145 

on The Merchant of Venice, 140 
Harvey, Martin, 164 

spoke at Trocadero dinner, 191 
Haye, Helen, in Poel production, 190 
Hazlitt, William, influence of his Table 

Talk on Poel, 40 
Headlam, Stewart 

work for the London Shakespeare 
League, 217 

spoke at Trocadero dinner, 191 
Hearne, James, in Poel production, 95 
Henry IV, 194 

Henry V 

productions of, 73, 282 

Bridges-Adams production, 235-236 

chorus and act and scene divisions, 

film version referred to, 79, 208 
Henry VI, three scenes called "Wars of 

the Roses" produced, 234 
Henry VIU 9 authorship of, 251 
Hentschel, Carl, present at Trocadero 

dinner, 191 
Herbert, Henry, and Shakespearian 

production, 60 
Hervey, Grizelda, 92 
Hewlett, Maurice, signatory to The 

Times letter, 21 1 
Holinshed, 251 
Horniman, Miss A. E. 

invites Poel to produce Measure for 
Measure at the Gaiety, Manchester, 

94 

present at Trocadero dinner, 191 

Hubback, Francis, 176 

Hunt, Holman, chooses Poel as model 
for Christ, 1 6 

Hunt, Hugh, his production of Romeo 
and Juliet, 181 

Hurry, Leslie, 228 

Hutchinson, Harry, in Poel produc 
tion, 256 

Illustrations, Book, and the imagina 
tion, 87-88 

Image, Mr. and Mrs. Selwyn, present 
at Trocadero dinner, 191 

Independent Theatre Society, 78 

Intervals in Shakespearian production, 
62 

Irving, Henry, 50, 57, 100, 102, i34> 

135, 136, I 39>f9^J^ 

in Philip and The Bells, 20, 50 



Irving, Henry contd. 

as Hamlet, 25 

as Richard III, 32 

as Shylock, 134-135 

in Vanderdecken, 42 

contrasted with Poel, 200-201 

President of Shakespeare Reading 
Society, 72 

Jackson, Sir Barry, 

quoted on Poel s production of 
Measure for Measure, 96 

his modern-dress Hamlet, 223 
Jacob and Esau, production of, 190 
Jew of ^ Malta, The, and The Merchant of 

Venice, 136-137 

Phoenix Society s production men 
tioned, 235 

Jews, Treatment of in Elizabethan days, 

133-134 
John Bull s Other Island, 189, 213 

Poel plays Father Keegan in, 190, 
265 

Granville-Barker s part in and pro 
duction of; 189-190 

Jones, Inigo, 88 

Jonson, Ben, 76, 88, 196, 225, 
231 

The Alchemist, productions of, 141, 
142 

The Poetaster, production of, 225 
in the United states, 226-227 

The Sad Shepherd, Edward Dowden 
on, 130-131 

Sejanushis Fall, production of, 
247-248 

Jouve, Pierre-Jean, his translation of 

Romeo and JuUet, 79, 151 
Julius Caesar, 65, 75, ?6 

Drury Lane Matinee, 216 

Julius Caesar the Dictator, production o 
250-251 

Kalidasa s Sakuntala, productions of, 
147 

Kean, Charles, 150 

Kean, Edmund, 50, 134, 135 

Kendal, Mrs., acting compared with 
that of French actress, 31-32 

King, Ada, in Pod production, 95 

"The King and the Countess 9 *, scenes 
from Edward III produced, 73, 122, 
123, 190 

Kingston, Gertrude, present at Troca 
dero dinner, 191 

Knight, Charles, 188 

Komisarjevsky, production of The 
Merchant of Venice, 141 

Laughton, Charles, 271 



296 INDEX 

Lawrence, W. J., 189, 195, 199, 224, 



238 

Peel s correspondence with, on the 
Elizabethan Stage, 84-85, 106-107 

disagreement with over production 
of Coriolanus, 262-263 

Lear? King 

how it should be played, 228-229 

Savits production of, 218-219 
Lee, Sir Sidney, 101, 147, 151 

member of Elizabethan Stage 
Society, 101 

present at Trocadero dinner, 191 
Leigh, Andrew 

on dressing of Isabella in Measure for 
Measure, 91 

in Fratricide Punished, 243-244 
Lewes, George, influence of his Philo 
sophy of the Ancients on Poel, 39 

Lewes, Miriam, in Poel production, 122 
Life s a Dream, 69, 225. See also 

Calderon s La Vida es Sueno. 
Lighting, Stage, 81, 132 
"Little Comedies" Company, 60, 279- 

280 
Litdewood, S.R. 

on Hamlet, 223 

on Poel and Salvini, 28 

on PoeFs production of Troilus and 
Cressida, 201 

Locrine and its production, 142-146 
Loiselle, H&ene, 79-80 
London County Council 

Site for replica of Elizabethan 
Theatre, 210 

London Pageant, criticism of, 220 
London Shakespeare League, 210, 

216-217, 282 
Love is Enough, 234 
Love s Labour Lost, recital of, 74 
Low, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney, present at 

Trocadero dinner, 191 
Lucas Bros., building contractors, 

Poel apprenticed to, 17, 1 8 
Lucas, Seymour, R.A,, present at 

Trocadero dinner, 191 
Lugne*-Poe", on Poel s production of 

The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 120 
Lytton, Earl of, signatory to The Times 

letter, 211 

Macbeth, 66, 67, 94, 130 

productions of, 102, 184-189 

banquet scene and the second* 
ghost, 188-189 

Lady Macbeth, 185-189 

Lady Macduff, 187 

the witches, 185, 189 
MacGarthy, Desmond, 128 



McCarthy, Lillah (Lady Keeble), 190, 
250 

first meeting with Poel, 101-102 

in Peel s productions, 101, 102, 104, 
145-146, 158, 168-170, 171, 187-188 

at Trocadero dinner, 191 

presentation of portrait, 268 

during PoeTs last years, 270, 271 
Macdonald, J. Ramsay, 253, 258 
Machray, W. D., 231 

Maclaren, Ian, in Poel production, 154 
MacOwan, Michael, 193 
Maddermarket Theatre, Norwich, 83, 

Manchester Guardian, The, 96, 1 1 8, 159, 236 
Mannering, D. L., in Poel productions, 

122 

Manning, Archbishop, Poel disap 
pointed in his sermon, 37 
Marlowe, Christopher 

Doctor Faustus produced, 113-119 

Edward II produced, 1 79- 1 80 

The Jew of Malta and The Merchant 
of Venice compared, 136-137 

Phoenix Society s production of The 
Jew of Malta referred to, 235 

Marlowe Memorial Fund Matinee, 244 
Marlowe Society, Cambridge, 193 
Marmion, production of, 159-160 
Marriott, Ernest, on production of 

Everyman, 164-165 
Marsh, Edward, present at Trocadero 

dinner, 191 
Marvellous History of St. Bernard, The, 

note on, 245 
Marx, Karl, 167 
Masefield, John, 203, 258 
Massingham, H. W., present at 

Trocadero dinner, 191 
Mathews, Charles J. 

his acting and its influence on Poel, 

20-21, 22, 30-3*9 63 

coloured drawings of him at Garrick 
Club, 21 

Matthison, Edith Wynne, as Everyman, 

163 
Measure for Measure, 192, 245, 273 

Costume recital of, 73 

productions of, 90-93, 94-101 

Angelo s character, 90 

the Duke, 92-93 

Isabella s status and dress, 90-92 
Meiningen Players referred to, 103, 218, 

219 
Merchant of^ Venice, The, 18, 78, 93 

productions of, 73, 133, 138, 139-140 

the play and Shylock s character, 41, 
133-141 

and Marlowe s Jew of Malta, 

136-137 



INDEX 



Merchant of Venice, The contd. 

actor s interpretations of Shylock, 



I34> 135 
Mermaid Theatre, London, referred to, 

Middleton and Rowley s The Spanish 

Gypsy, production of, 127 
Midsummer Might s Dream, A, 94 
Miles, Bernard, 125, 215 
Miles s Restaurant, rehearsals in, 72, 

256 
Military parades, opinions of, 220, 

237 
Milton, Ernest, in Poel production, 

122-123 

his description of Poel, 264 
Milton s Samson Agonistes, productions 

of, 152-157 
Minto, Dorothy, in Poel productions, 

1 80, 182 

Moberley, Prof., 185 
Moisewitch, Tanya, designs, 82, 215 
Moliere, 139 

Don Juan, production of, 151 
Monck, Nugent, 

his work at Norwich referred to, 83, 
215* 235 

in Poel productions, 156, 180 

stage manager for Poel, 12 1, 180 
Mond, Mrs. Ludwig, supports Poel, 240 
Montague, G. E. 

quoted on production of 
-- Doctor Faustus, 1 18-1 19 
-- Everyman, 162-163 

-- Measure for Measure, 96-97, 245 
-- Samson Agonistes, 154-156 
Monthly Letters, 61, 64, 67, 125, 182, 203, 

209, 219, 228, 232, 237, 269 
Moore, George, 203 

present at Trocadero dinner, 191 
-- Troilus and Cressida, 199 
Moore, Jennie, designs costumes for 

Poel, is6n 

Morley, Thomas, 124 
Morning Leader, The, 205 
Morning Post, The, 112, 114, 122, 130, 

141, 143, 147, 153, 161, 163 
Morris, William, his Love is Enough 

produced, 234 
Much Ado About Nothing, 193 

productions of, 72, 73, 180 
Muicaster s Elementarie, 65 
Mummer s Wife, A, 199 

Munro, G. K., his The Rumour referred 

to, 235 

Murder in the Cathedral, 86, 145, 207 
Murray, Gilbert 

translations, 168, 170 

on The Bacchae, 172-173 

signatory to The Times letter, 211 



297 

Music in Poel s life, 16, 23 

rhythm and harmony in his pro 
ductions, 23 

Nation, The, 105, 186, 236 
"National Text" campaign, 234 
National Theatre, 210-215 

provincial repertory theatres as 
accessories to, 212 

National Theatre Committee, 21 1-214 
Nesbitt, Gathleen, in Poel production, 

190 

New Age, The, 81, 167 
New Weekly, The, 178, 219 
New Shakespeare Society, 47 
News, The Daily, 214 
News, The Evening, 208 
Nineteenth Century, The, 76 
Nouvelle Revue Francaise, La, 120, 269 

Old Vic, 123, 214 

Royal Victoria Coffee Hall, Pod s 
management of, 58-59 

reasons for its failure, 60-6 1 

recent productions referred to, 181, 
193, 228, 263 

Olivier, Sir Laurence, 147, 154 
Onslow, Earl of, signatory to The Times 

letter, 211 
Othello 

prose and verse in, 67-68 

Salvini as Othello 
Oughton, Winifred 

in Poel production, 233 

rehearsing with Poel, 69-70 

on Poel s teaching technique, 68n 
Our Theatres in the Nineties, 102, 110, 

117, 125, 127, 128 
Owen, Reginald, in Poel production, 

190 
Oxford 

Edward II performed at, 179 

Everyman performed at, 162 

Fratricide Punished, performed at, 243 

Poel s visits to, 38-39, 169 

Painting, the art of, 156-157 

Pall Mall Gazette, The, 192 

Palmer, John, his Shakespeare s Comic 

Characters quoted, 134 
Parnassus, TheReturnJrom(pub. 1601), 76 
Parnassus trilogy, the plays and their 

production, 229-232 
Parrott, Dr., 249 
Partridge, Bernard, in Poel production, 

5 1 
Payne, B. Iden 

on the production of Measure for 
Measure, 94-95 

present at Trocadero dinner, 191 

work at Stratford, 248 



298 INDEX 

Peele, George, his David and Betksabe 

produced, 266-268 
Percy, Esm 

in Poel productions, 177, 182, 189, 

199, 202, 222, 243 

present at Trocadero dinner, 191 
Pendes, authorship of, 251-252 
Phelps, 187 

Philip, Henry Irving in, 20 

Piccolomm f 158, 270 

Pinero, Sir A. W., signatory to The 

Times letter, 211 
Pitoeff, Georges, 222 
Platform stage. See Stage, *open j and 

platform 
Playfair, Nigel 

in Poel production, 147 

present at Trocadero dinner, 191 
Poel, William 

Birth and parentage, 15-16 

early days, 16 

chosen as model for paintings by 
Holman Hunt and Frederick Burton, 
16 

health affected by fall when a boy, 
16-17 

apprenticed to Lucas Bros., building 
contractors, 17 

reaction to office work, 17 

first visit to theatre, 18 

at Lucas s office in Sussex, 18-19 

place of music in his life, 16, 23 

his character, 12-13, 16, 44-46, 
183-184, 239 

self-criticisms, 19 

efiect of sudden death on him, 236- 
237 

his religious faith, 37-38, 167-168, 
220 

his political sympathies, 220, 237- 
239, 247 

his wide culture, 38-40 

drawn towards theatre, 20 

decides to adopt stage career, 25- 
26 

influence of Salvini, 26 

first attempt fails, 28, 29-30 

reported visit to Italy with Salvini 
discussed, 28 

possibly acts as super for Salvini in 
London, 28-29 

first stage engagement, 30 

with provincial and touring com 
panies, 31-35, 38 

reasons for going on stage, 30, 31, 36 

takes lessons in acting, 40-42 

recital tour in provinces, 43, 46-47 

first production in London, 50 

Manager of Royal Victoria Coffee 
Hall, 58-59 



Poel, William flmfc/. 

stage manager for F. R. Benson, 
59-60 

visits to Continental theatres, 218 

as actor, 31, 97-98, 112, 139, 159, 
190 

rehearsal methods, 68-72, 95-96, 121 
149, 187-188, 226, 256-257 

as teacher, 41, 68n, 96 

finance of his productions, 125-126, 
128, 165 

his "platform-stage" productions, 
85-86, 245-250 

contrasted with Granville-Barker 
and Irving, 200-201 

Marriage, 101 

dinner given in his honour, 190- 

193 . 

receives grant from Royal Literary 
Fund, 240 

awarded Civil List Pension, 240 

declines offer of knighthood, 253- 

255 

tribute on his 8oth birthday, 263- 
264 

his portrait painted by Henry Tonks, 
263-266 

presentation of portrait, 268-270 

last days, 271 

death and funeral ceremony, 271 

Results of his life s work, 272-276 

chronological list of stage activities, 
279-285 

select bibliography, 288-290 

his plays, 60, 279-280, 290 

biographical notices, 286-287 
Poel Centenary Matinee, 123, 244 
Poel, Mrs. William, 15, 101, 156, 269, 

270, 271 
Poetaster, The, 195, 231 

production of, 225 

in the United States, 226-227 

Poetic drama, 86-89, I 45- I 46, 157 
Poetry, influence on imagination of, 

87-88 

Pole, Reginald, nephew, 27, 175, 227 
Pole, Dr. William, father, his career in 

brief^ 15 

Pollard, Dr. A. W., 193 
Pollock, Sir Frederick, signatory to 

The Times letter, 211 
Priest or Painter, play by Poel, 60 

production date of, 279 
Proscenium stage 

destroys poetic realism and is un 
suitable for Shakespeare, 79-80, 97 

compromise with is ineffective, 
82-83 

curtain and "stage pictures", 32, 
107-108 



INDEX 



299 



Quarterly Review, The, 105-107 
Quayle, Anthony, 83, 215, 248 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 113 
Rape of Lucrece, The, 195 
Redgrave, Michael, 185 
Referee, The, 147, 154 
Rehearsal 

Poel s methods at, 68-72, 95-96, 121, 
149, 187^188, 226, 256-257 

Reinhardt, Max, 148, 273 

sees the Charterhouse production of 
Everyman, 165 

Religious drama, 166, 227 

Reynolds, M. Douglas,as Everyman, 163 

Richard II, 70, 191 

productions of, 101, 149-151 

Granville-Barker on play, 150 
Richardson, Sir Ralph, as Kent in Old 

Vic King Lear, 255 
Robertson, Forbes, 217 
Robins, Elizabeth, in "Little Comedies" 

Company, 60 
Romeo and Juliet 

productions of, 73, 101, 180, 181-182 

G. B. Shaw s comment on, 192 

stage directions in, 86, 108 

Juliet, 182 

Rorke, Kate, in "Little Comedies" 

Company, 60 
Rosherville Gardens, Gravesend, Poel 

manager at, 279 
Rossetti s The King s Tragedy, dramatic 

recital of, 280 
Rowell, Mr., Assistant Keeper of the 

Ashmolean, 39 
Rowley, Samuel, his When you see me, 

you know me, produced, 247 
Rowley, William, as part author of The 

Spanish Gypsy, 127 
Royal Society of Literature. s grant to 

Poel, 240 
Royal Victoria Coffee Hall 

Poel s management of, 58-59 

reasons for lack of success, 60-6 1 
Ruskin, John, quoted, 75 

Sacrifice of Isaac, The, from the Chester 

Plays, produced, 282 
Sad Shepherd, The 

production of, 130-131 

Edward Dowden on, 130-131 
Sadlers Wells Theatre, acoustics of, 

62-63 

St. Francis, Poel s views on, 244-1245 
ISakuntala, productions of, 147 
Salvini, influence of his acting on Poel, 

26, 71 

his Hamlet, 26-28, 154 
Othello, 26, 28 



Samson Agonistes, 152 

productions of, 152-157 

Saturday Review, The, 51, 63, no, 116, 

124, 127, 128, 154, 171, 236, 247 
Savits, productions at Munich, 218-219 
Scenery 

destroys poetic realism, 79-80, 112, 

113 

not indispensable, 93, 124-125 

Richard Flecknoe quoted on, 83 
Schiller s Wallenstein 

Coleridge s translation of, 157 

productions of, 157-159 

Poel s version of printed, 270 
Schiller s William Tell, 217 

School for Scandal, The, Charles Mathews 
in, 21 

Scott, Mrs. J. W. Robertson, in Poel 
production, 196 

Scott, James, his touring company of 
1877-1878, 32-35, 38 

Scott, Sir Walter, his Marmwn pro 
duced, 159-160 

Scudamore, Margaret 

in Poel productions, 243, 249 

efforts to obtain a kni^itbood for 
Poel, 253 

Sejanus fas Fall, production of, 247 
Shakespeare, William 

a man of the theatre, 525-226, 234, 
252 

a tablet should be placed on Strat 
ford Church Monument indicating 
his connection with theatre, 234, 
284 

Tercentenary celebrations 1 9 1 6, 2 1 5- 
216 

Shakespeare s Plays 

written for particular stage and 
particular audience, 77 

ethical approach to, 233 

National Standard Text advocated, 

234 

actors should be consulted alxwit 
emendations of text, 66 

capital initial .letters * in original 
texts, 64 

punctuation in, 64-66 

act and scene divisions in, 62, 94 

acting editions o 47-43 
Shakespearean Stage production 

should be based on original text, 27 
28,47 

and on original method of represent 
ation, 47, 74-75 

scenic stage methods wrong, 43-45 

continuity of action essential, 93-94, 

97 _ . 

intervals, 62, 94 

speaking on the stage, 62-68, in 



3OO INDEX 

Shakespearean Stage production contd . 

cutting the text, 104, 150-151, 197- 
198, 258-263 

Shakespeare in the Theatre, 61, 105, 186, 

194 
Shakespeare Memorial 

proposed statue, 210 

"Shakespeare Temple", 210 

Memorial Committee, 211 
Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, 214, 

215 
Shakespeare Reading Society, and its 

readings, 72-74 
Sharman, George, 167, 203 
Shaw, Byam 

quoted on Poel s production of 
Twelfth Night, 112-113 

present at Trocadero dinner, 191 
Shaw, G. Bernard, 42, 66, 72, 189, 190 

on the Elizabethan stage, 85, 1 16 

on the Elizabethan Stage Society, 
125-126, 128 

on the use of scenery, 124-125 

on the production of The Comedy of 
Errors, no 

on Twelfth Night, 109 

on PoeFs work, 191-192 

on Poel as Father Keegan, 265 

his Blanco Posnet admired, 205 

his Saint Joan criticised 

at Trocadero dinner, 191-192 
Shaw, Glen Byam, his production of 

Antony and Cleopatra, 82 

Shelley s The Cenci, Lewis Gasson s 
production referred to, 235 

Sherbrpoke, Michael, in Poel pro 
ductions, 126, 127, 130, 152 

Shoreditch Church, Burbage memorial 
in, 217 

Shorter, Mr. and Mrs. Clement, present 
at Trocadero dinner, 191 

Siddons, Mrs., 185 

Simpson, Percy 

on punctuation in Shakespeare s 
texts, 64-66 

on argument with Poel, 220-221 

on Poel s platform-stage produc 
tions, 248 

Skinner, Otis, 217 

Smith, D. A. Clarke-, in Poel produc 
tions, 122, 150 

Smithson, Laura, present at Trocadero 
dinner, 191 

Solitude, views on, 18, 19, 23 

Sophocles, 174 

Spanish Gypsy, The, production of, 127 

Speaight, Robert 

first meeting with Poel, 125 

in Poel productions, 68, 71, 248, 
255. 258 



Speaight, Robert -contd. 

efforts to obtain a knighthood for 
Poel, 253 

Speaking Shakespeare on the stage, 
62-68 

the Elizabethan actor s methods, 62, 
63-66 

key-word, 66 

orchestral effects of voices, in, 

163 

tendency to overstress, 63 

tuned tones, 62 
Stage, Elizabethan, 77-79 

audience view of, 106 

doors and windows on, 107 

form of only conjectural, 107, 109 

imagination stimulated by, 88 

movement on, 85-86, 108 

spectators sitting on, 85-86 

traverses, 107-108 

"upper" stage, 97 

Stage, Elizabethan model, used by 
Poel for his Elizabethan Stage 
Society productions, 109, 114-115 
Stage, Multiple, 122, 147, 181 
Stage, open* and platform, 79-80, 83, 
85-87, 116, 119, 123, 125 

actors impressions of, 246 

Poel s " platform-stage" productions, 
85-86, 245-250 

present-day movement towards, 215, 
273, 274-276 

Stage directions, 86, 108 

Stage groupings, 155-156, 159 

Stage lighting, 81, 132 

Stage Society, 235 

Stage, The, 76, ison 

Standard, The Evening, 207 

Stanislavsky, referred to, 273 

Star, The, 72 

Stationers Register, The, 193 

Stirling, Edward, gives Poel lessons, 

Stoll, Sir Oswald, 209 

Stopes, Mrs. C. C., 195, 236 

Strange, William, A.R.A., present at 

Trocadero dinner, 191 
Stratford Dossier, 96, 188, 245, 257, 264, 

268 
Stratford, New Shakespeare Company, 

o 199,235 
Stuart, G. B., 17 

Such Stuff as Dreams are Made of, 233 
Sullivan, Barry, 66 

Summers, Montague, present at Troca 
dero dinner, 191 
Sim, The Weekly, 144-145 
Sunday Times, The, 62, 117 
Swinburne, A. C., 122 
on The Duchess of Malfi, 73-74 



INDEX 



Swinburne, A. C. contd. 

his Locrine and its production, 
142-146 

writes prologue for production of: 

Doctor Faustus, 115-116 

The Spanish Gypsy 9 127 
Swinley, Ion, in Poel production, 

198-199 
Sykes, Dugdale, 127 

his Sidelights on Shakespeare, 251 
Synge, J. M., 94 

Talma, 64 

Tearle, Osmond, 139 
Telegraph, The Daily, 118 
Tempest, The, 83, 93 

productions of, 74, 123-125 

Angmering Players production, 125 

Mermaid production, 83 

Stratford production, 83 

Terry, Edward, gives Poel lessons, 

41-42, 43 
Terry, Ellen 

as Olivia, 42 

present at Trocadero dinner, 191 
Theatre 

commercialism in, 203-209 

should elevate as well as entertain, 157 

free admission tickets should be 
taxed, 207 

long runs, 206-207 

queues, 220 

stage and church, 36-38, 106-107 
Theatre Reform Association, 206 
Theatres, Elizabethan, 76-78 

audience s view of stage in, 106 

Blackfriars, 84 

compared with Greek, 77-78 

Globe, 85, 251 

proposal to erect replica in London, 
210, 215 

Theatrical World, The, 104 

Thesiger, Mrs. Ernest, on the chorus in 

The Bacchae, 1 70 
Thorndike, Russell, in Everyman at 

William Poel Matinee, 163 
Thorndike, Sybil, as Volumnia in 

Coriolanus, 263 

present at Trocadero dinner, 191 
Thorpe, Courtenay, in Poel produc 
tion, 245 

TiUyard, Prof., 193 

Times, The, 93, 122, 201, 210, 216, 263 

Times Literary Supplement, The, 64, 65, 

221 

Tom Jones, Poel quotes from, on the 

solitary, 19-20 
Tonks, Henry _ 

paints the Poel portrait, 264-260 

tribute to Poel, 269-270 



301 

Touring companies, Poel s experiences 

with, 32-35, 38 
Traverses on Elizabethan stage, 84, 

107-108 
Tree, Sir H. Beerbohm, 211, 217, 219 

invites Poel to give a production at 
His Majesty s, 121, 172 

Tree, Lady 

in Hamlet, Q.I., 51 

present at Trocadero dinner, 191 
Trench, W. F., 55 

Trial of Jeanne a" Arc, production oij 

222 

Troilus and Cressida, 93, 192 

the play, 193-196 

productions of, 196-201 
Turleigh, Veronica 

in Poel productions, 256, 268 

on Poel at rehearsals, 256-257 
Twelfth Night, 67, 199, 200 

productions of, 73, 102, 103, 104, 
109, 110-113 

distinguished audience present at 
Middle Temple Hall production in 
1897, no 

Two Gentlemen of Verona, The, produc 
tions of, 73, 119-122 

Urikson, Paul, 157 

Van Druten, John, in The Tempest at 

Angmering, 125 
Vedrenne, 189, 192, 209 
Verrall, Dr., i74- J 75 
Verse speaking on the stage, 62-68* 95 

key-word, 66 

tendency to over-emphasise, 63 

by the Elizabethan actor, 62, 63-64 
Vezin, Hermann, in Poel production, 74 
Vienna, Theatre in, 93, 21-9 

Vieux Golombier Theatre, referred to, 

45, 181 
Vilar, 273 
Vinning, W. S., composes music for 

Equality Jack, 60 
Vosper, Frank, 223 

Wade, Alan, 214 
Walkley, A. B. 

on Poel s The Two Gentlemen of 

Verona, 121-122 

signatory to The Times letter, 2 1 1 
Ward, Sir Alexander, 179 

Ward, Dr. A. W., 195 
Warnham, Sussex, Poel at, 18-19 
Warre-Gornish, Dr., 175 
"Wars of the Roses", 234 
Watkins, Ronald, 215 
Harrow School Shakespeare pro 
duction referred to, 83 



3O2 INDEX 

Watkins, Ronald contd. 

his On Producing Shakespeare referred 

to, 1 06 
Watts, G. F., his "Love and Death" 

criticised, 40 
Watts-Dunton, 146 
Webster, Benjamin, his The Taming of 

the Shrew, 52 

Webster s The Duchess of Malfi, pro 
duced, 73 
Wedmore, Sir Frederick, present at 

Trocadero dinner, 191 
Weeden, Evelyn, in Poel production, 

187 

Weekly Sun., The, see Sun 
Westminster Gazette, The, 55, 238 
Westminster Review, The, 136, 183 
Wkafs Wrong with the Stage?, 203 
Whelan, Mr. and Mrs. F., present at 

Trocadero dinner, 191 
Wkenyou see me, you know me, production 

of, 247 

Whitworth, Geoffrey, 263 
Wilberforce, Charlotte, 102 
Williams, Harcourt, 149 



Wilson, J. Dover, quoted on Shake 
speare and the theatre, 148, 184 

Wilson, Lucy, in Poel production, 177 

Wilton, Marie, 42 

Winn, Godfrey, in The Tempest at 
Angmering, 125 

Winter s Tale, The, 200 

Shakespeare s authorship of, 252 
Wolfit, Donald 

in Poel production, 250-251 

on Poel s methods, 250 

Women in men s parts, 101, 126-127, 
130, 146-147, 163, 178, 196, 233 

Wontner, Arthur, in Poel production, 
190 

Wright, Prof. W. Aldis, signatory to 
The Times letter, 211 

Wyndham, George, 139 

Yeats, W. B., quoted on verse-speaking, 

95 
York Mystery Plays, 165 

Zangwill, Mr. and Mrs. Israel, present 
at Trocadero dinner, 191 



THE AUTHOR 
ROBERT SPEAIGHT 



ROBERT SPEAIGHT began his distinguished 
stage career at Oxford wfere te played Pteer 
Gynt and Fabtaff for the O JJ J>JS* Late; at 
the Old Vic, he gave notable perfom^uices of 
Hamlet, Cassius and FlUidleQ, aad so became 
established as one of our foremost actors. 

He played in four productions for Pod aad 
is therefore well suited to write "from the 
inside " on Pod s methods. 

His most famous part was Bucket la Mwtbr m 
the Cathedral, whldi he played oa both sides of 
the Atlantic for paore tfcaJa sooo perfwiawces, 
His contribution to tfae revival dT podfc 
drama hi tids conBI^F b& been 



He is also well bwwn as a producer airi 
lecturer on the Drama ia iaiay parts f the 
world. 

He is the author of four pdbHshed novels, a 
book on Acting, a biography on Tfeouaas Bedfcet, 
and a study of George E&O& He is ww at 
work on the official bk^a^by of ISlaire Bettoe* 
and a volume of his 
will be published sluwtif . 



From? Mxms 




100595 



OD< 

IS