Jameson, Cowden Clarke, Kemble, Cushman: Great Shakespeareans: Volume VII 9781472554970, 9780826433862, 9781441192332

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Jameson, Cowden Clarke, Kemble, Cushman Great Shakespeareans Volume VII

Great Shakespeareans Each volume in the series provides a critical account and analysis of those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and cultural reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and around the world. General Series Editors: Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame, USA Adrian Poole, Trinity College Cambridge, UK Editorial Advisory Board: David Bevington (University of Chicago, USA), Michael Cordner (University of York, UK), Michael Dobson (Birkbeck College, University of London, UK), Dominique Goy-Blanquet (University of Picardy, France), Barbara Hodgdon (University of Michigan, USA), Andreas Höfele (University of Munich, Germany), Tetsuo Kishi (Kyoto University, Japan), Russ McDonald (Goldsmith’s College, University of London, UK), Ruth Morse (University of Paris 7, Denis Diderot, France), Michael Neill (University of Auckland, New Zealand), Stephen Orgel (Stanford University, USA), Carol Rutter (University of Warwick, UK), Ann Thompson (King’s College, University of London, UK) and Paul Yachnin (McGill University, Canada). Great Shakespeareans: Set I Volume I: Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Malone, edited by Claude Rawson Volume II: Garrick, Kemble, Siddons, Kean, edited by Peter Holland Volume III: Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge, edited by Roger Paulin Volume IV: Hazlitt, Keats, the Lambs, edited by Adrian Poole Great Shakespeareans: Set II Volume V: Scott, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, edited by Adrian Poole Volume VI: Macready, Booth, Irving, Terry, edited by Richard Schoch Volume VII: Jameson, Cowden Clarke, Kemble, Cushman, edited by Gail Marshall Volume VIII: James, Melville, Emerson, Berryman, edited by Peter Rawlings Volume IX: Bradley, Greg, Folger, edited by Cary DiPietro Great Shakespeareans: Set III Volume X: Marx and Freud, Crystal Bartolovich, Jean Howard and David Hillman Volume XI: Berlioz, Verdi, Wagner, Britten, edited by Daniel Albright Volume XII: Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Auden, Beckett, edited by Adrian Poole Volume XIII: Wilson Knight, Empson, Barber, Kott, edited by Hugh Grady Great Shakespeareans: Set IV Volume XIV: Hugo, Pasternak, Brecht, Césaire, edited by Ruth Morse Volume XV: Poel, Granville Barker, Guthrie, Wanamaker, edited by Cary Mazer Volume XVI: Gielgud, Olivier, Ashcroft, Dench, edited by Russell Jackson Volume XVII: Welles, Kozintsev, Kurosawa, Zeffirelli, Mark Thornton Burnett, Kathy Howlett, Courtney Lehmann and Ramona Wray Volume XVIII: Hall, Brook, Ninagawa, Lepage, edited by Peter Holland

Jameson, Cowden Clarke, Kemble, Cushman Great Shakespeareans Volume VII

Edited by Gail Marshall

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704, New York London SE1 7NX NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Gail Marshall and contributors, 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. EISBN: 978-1-4411-9233-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain

Contents

Series Editors’ Preface Peter Holland and Adrian Poole

vii

List of Illustrations

ix

Notes on Contributors

x

Introduction Gail Marshall

1

Chapter 1 Anna Jameson Cheri Lin Larsen Hoeckley

11

Chapter 2 Mary Cowden Clarke Gail Marshall and Ann Thompson

58

Chapter 3 Frances Anne Kemble Jacky Bratton

92

Chapter 4 Charlotte Cushman Lisa Merrill

133

Notes

180

Select Bibliography

195

Index

199

Series Editors’ Preface

What is a ‘Great Shakespearean’? Who are the ‘Great Shakespeareans’? This series is designed to explore those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. Charting the effect of Shakespeare on cultures local, national and international is a never-ending task, as we continually modulate and understand differently the ways in which each culture is formed and altered. Great Shakespeareans uses as its focus individuals whose own cultural impact has been and continues to be powerful. One of its aims is to widen the sense of who constitute the most important figures in our understanding of Shakespeare’s afterlives. The list is therefore not restricted to, say, actors and scholars, as if the performance of and commentary on Shakespeare’s works were the only means by which his impact is remade or extended. There are actors aplenty (like Garrick, Irving and Olivier) and scholars too (Bradley, Greg and Empson) but our list deliberately includes as many novelists (Dickens, Melville, Joyce), poets (Keats, Eliot, Berryman), playwrights (Brecht, Beckett, Césaire) and composers (Berlioz, Verdi and Britten), as well as thinkers whose work seems impossible without Shakespeare and whose influence on our world has been profound, like Marx and Freud. Deciding who to include has been less difficult than deciding who to exclude. We have a long list of individuals for whom we would wish to have found a place but whose inclusion would have meant someone else’s exclusion. We took long and hard looks at the volumes as they were shaped by our own and our volume editors’ perceptions. We have numerous regrets over some outstanding figures who ended up just outside this project. There will, no doubt, be argument on this score. Some may find our choices too Anglophone, insufficiently global. Others may complain of the lack of contemporary scholars and critics. But this is not a project designed to establish a new canon, nor are our volumes intended to be encyclopaedic in scope. The series is not entitled ‘The Greatest Shakespeareans’ nor is it ‘Some Great Shakespeareans’, but it will, we hope, be seen as negotiating and occupying a space mid-way along the spectrum of inclusivity and arbitrariness.

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Series Editor’s Preface

Our contributors have been asked to describe the double impact of Shakespeare on their particular figure and of their figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, as well as providing a sketch of their subject’s intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider context within which her/his work might be understood. This ‘context’ will vary widely from case to case and, at times, a single ‘Great Shakespearean’ is asked to stand as a way of grasping a large domain. In the case of Britten, for example, he is the window through which other composers and works in the English musical tradition like Vaughan Williams, Walton and Tippett have a place. So, too, Dryden has been the means for considering the beginnings of critical analysis of the plays as well as of the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays influenced Dryden’s own practice. To enable our contributors to achieve what we have asked of them, we have taken the unusual step of enabling them to write at length. Our volumes do not contain brief entries of the kind that a Shakespeare Encyclopedia would include nor the standard article length of academic journals and Shakespeare Companions. With no more than four Great Shakespeareans per volume – and as few as two in the case of volume 10 – our contributors have space to present their figures more substantially and, we trust, more engagingly. Each volume has a brief introduction by the volume editor and a section of further reading. We hope the volumes will appeal to those who already know the accomplishment of a particular Great Shakespearean and to those trying to find a way into seeing how Shakespeare has affected a particular poet as well as how that poet has changed forever our appreciation of Shakespeare. Above all, we hope Great Shakespeareans will help our readers to think afresh about what Shakespeare has meant to our cultures, and about how and why, in such differing ways across the globe and across the last four centuries and more, they have changed what his writing has meant. Peter Holland and Adrian Poole

List of Illustrations

Figure 1 Introductory illustration, Anna Jameson, Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical and Historical, 4th edition (London: Saunders and Otley, 1847) (author’s own copy)

19

Figure 2 ‘Historical Characters’ from Anna Jameson, Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical and Historical, 4th edition (London: Saunders and Otley, 1847) (author’s own copy)

49

Figure 3 Margaret Gillies, ‘Charlotte and Susan Cushman as Romeo and Juliet’ (1846) (author’s own copy)

135

Figure 4 Napoleon Sarony, ‘Charlotte Cushman’ (1872) (author’s own copy)

136

Notes on Contributors

Jacky Bratton is Research Professor of Theatre and Cultural History at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her Shakespearean research and publications include a stage history edition of King Lear, and until 2009 she co-edited the series Shakespeare in Production for Cambridge University Press. Her last monograph was New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge University Press, 2003), which examines the formation of the modern historiography of theatre in the 1830s. She has a strong interest in pushing the boundaries of theatre history to include all aspects of performance, and in 2006 published. The Victorian Clown, an edition of manuscripts by two nineteenth-century comics, with Anne Featherstone. She is currently working on the importance of women entrepreneurs in the beginning of London’s West End in the period 1830–60. Cheri Lin Larsen Hoeckley is the editor of the Broadview edition of Shakespeare’s Heroines or Characteristics of Women: Moral, Poetical and Historical (2005). She has written various essays on Victorian women authors and marriage and property law. She is currently working on the imaginative draw of Catholicism for Victorian women writers,. Early portions of that project have appeared in “Poetry, Activism and “Our Lady of the Rosary”: Adelaide Procter’s Catholic Poetics in A Chaplet of Verses,” in Sublimer Aspects: Interfaces Between Literature, Aesthetics and Theology, ed. Natasha Duquette, (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007) and “’Must her own words do all?’ Domesticity, Catholicism and Activism in Adelaide Anne Procter’s Poems.” in Leigh Eicke, Jeana DelRosso, Ana Kothe, eds., The Catholic Church and Unruly Women Writers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Larsen Hoeckley completed her doctorate in English at the University of California, Berkeley and is currently an Associate Professor of English Literature at Westmont College. Gail Marshall is Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Leicester. She is the author of Shakespeare and Victorian Women and Actresses on the Victorian Stage(both Cambridge University Press, 2009 and 1998) and of Victorian Fiction (Edward Arnold, 2002). She has edited The Cambridge

Notes on Contributors

xi

Companion to the fin de siecle (2007) and co-edited Victorian Shakespeare: theatre, drama, performance and Victorian Shakespeare: literature and culture (Palgrave Macmaillan, 2003) with Adrian Poole. She is general editor of the Pickering & Chatto series ‘Lives of Shakespearean Actors’, and is currently editing a volume of essays on Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century for Cambridge University Press. Lisa Merrillis Professor in the Department of Speech Communication, Rhetoric and Performance Studies at Hofstra University, in Hempstead, New York. Her When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators (University of Michigan Press, 2000)was awarded the Joe A. Callaway Prize for Best Book in Theatre or Drama by an American author and is being adapted into a play by the Tectonic Theatre Company. She has published books and articles on gender and communication, popular culture and Shakespearean performance in the Victorian era, and democracy and performance on and offstage. Professor Merrill has been awarded a National Endowment of the Humanities senior scholar grant and the National Communication Association’s Lilla Heston Prize for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies. She is currently completing an edition of selected Charlotte Cushman’s letters, entitled Burn This Letter, University of Michigan Press, forthcoming. Ann Thompson is Professor of English at King’s College London. She is a General Editor of the Arden Shakespeare and has (with Neil Taylor) edited all three texts of Hamlet for Arden (2006). Other publications include an edition of The Taming of the Shrew (1984, updated 2003), Shakespeare’s Chaucer (1978), Shakespeare, Meaning and Metaphor (with John O. Thompson, 1987), Teaching Women: Feminism and English Studies (edited with Helen Wilcox, 1989), Women Reading Shakespeare, 1660–1900 (edited with Sasha Roberts, 1996) and In Arden: Editing Shakespeare (with Gordon McMullan, 2003).

Introduction Gail Marshall

It was not easy to be a female ‘Great Shakespearean’ in the age of Thomas Carlyle’s ‘King Shakespeare’,1 but the women considered in this volume did much between them both to lay claim to this title, and, more importantly, to effect new inflections of the understanding of Shakespeare in the period. As actresses, writers, editors and critics, as feminists, single women, wives both devoted and estranged, as daughters and sisters, the lives and works of Anna Jameson, Mary Cowden Clarke, Fanny Kemble and Charlotte Cushman severally challenged Carlylean simplicities about the person and writings of Shakespeare, and the power, form and political nature of his effect in the Victorian period. Whether through their bodies or their signed writings, whose signatures often proclaimed the awkwardness, compromises and unhappiness of their private lives, these women, like many before and since, proclaimed the fitness of Shakespeare to articulate the particular resonances of the lives of women. It was during the nineteenth century, with its increased publication possibilities, and a theatre system more sophisticated than any seen before, that women came to the fore both as critics and as performers of Shakespeare’s plays. This occurred against the backdrop of an age in which Shakespeare was regularly invoked by male and female writers alike as a measure of what women could be and could achieve, often in the most conservative terms. The most regularly cited writer in this respect is John Ruskin, whose 1864 lecture ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ is cited a number of times in this book. Ruskin’s words speak stirringly of the women of Shakespeare’s plays: Note broadly in the outset, Shakespeare has no heroes; – he has only heroines. There is not one entirely heroic figure in all his plays . . . Whereas there is hardly a play that has not a perfect woman in it, steadfast in grave hope, and errorless purpose: Cordelia, Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen Catherine, Perdita, Sylvia, Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and last, and perhaps loveliest, Virgilia, are all faultless; conceived in the highest heroic type of humanity.2

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Jameson, Cowden Clarke, Kemble, Cushman

Thus is Shakespeare enrolled by Ruskin in his attempts to articulate the ‘guiding function of the woman’ (paragraph 67), a function which would do little to elevate women into some of the leading roles he describes here, but which would rather ideally see them positioned with Virgilia in the home in a state of satisfied and satisfying silence. Later in the century, in 1895, at the height of panic about the New Woman, the writer Kathleen Knox asserted more explicitly to an imaginary, younger correspondent as follows: The nineteenth century has given education, enlightenment, and freedom, the twentieth century will, it is to be hoped, temper these somewhat stormy elements into a serene and harmonious whole, but what is it all without what the sixteenth century has said first? If for no other reason, my dear Dorothy, than your own embellishment, study Shakespeare’s women, and be assured that without the deep heart of Cordelia, the devotion of Imogen, the patience of Hermione, the generosity of Portia, the gentleness of Desdemona, the joyousness of Rosalind, and the grace of Perdita, all the enlightenment and freedom of the nineteenth century will but serve to make you a byword in your generation.3 Shakespeare is, she believes, sufficient to ward off the charms and temptations of the 1890s, and invokes his Renaissance wisdom against the thrill of the new. As Holbrook Jackson puts it: People thought anything might happen; and for the young, any happening sufficiently new was good . . . It was a time of experiment. Dissatisfied with the long ages of convention and action which arose out of precedent, many set about testing life for themselves. The new man wished to be himself, the new woman threatened to live her own life.4 The point about Shakespeare, however, was, and indeed still is, that he can always be made anew, re-configured to match his moment, and that moment’s needs. So that when Knox and Ruskin are invoking him as a monument to timeless feminine virtues, he is simultaneously being re-made in readings and performances determined wholly by contemporary needs, hence the all-female As You Like It seen in London in 1894,5 and the plethora of ‘New’ actresses such as Janet Achurch, Eleanora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt who added Shakespeare to repertoires which in the 1890s were more usually based on the works of Henrik Ibsen and other notorious plays which featured challenging heroines.

Introduction

3

Ruskin and Knox bely the evidence of the enormous variety of ways in which Victorian women read, quoted, responded to, argued with and countered Shakespeare in their work, conversations, letters, education and performances. Far from the inert presence Ruskin would make of Shakespeare in his own attempts to create generations of idealized ‘Shakespeare women’, the playwright inhabits a space in women’s Victorian culture which is characterized by discursiveness, interrogation and energy. Indeed, even when a woman takes on the mantle of the ideal figure that Ruskin and Knox extract from Shakespeare, the resulting figure is far from the simple icon that commentators envisage. The actress Helen Faucit (1817–1898) played up to this ideal on stage, but in doing so she was enabled to support a career, first as an actress and then as an author, which won for her a considerable measure of fame, financial reward and a degree of influence which went far beyond anything Ruskin might have envisaged. Faucit was known primarily for her work on stage, which stretched from her professional debut in 1836 to her final benefit performance in Manchester in 1879, and carried on despite her marriage in 1851 to Theodore Martin, who would become the biographer of the Prince Consort, and Helen Faucit’s means of effecting a relationship with the Royal family. Her own status was augmented when she became Lady Martin following Theodore’s knighthood in 1880. Like Fanny Kemble, she debuted as Juliet in a performance which, like the rest of her career, was an active challenge to the usual assumptions of the impropriety of the Victorian actress. Indeed from the first, her account of her professional career is designed to disarm opposition. Her ‘discovery’ by a friendly manager in the Richmond theatre is carefully constructed so as to ensure connotations of the lack of theatrical self-consciousness, of the ‘naturalness’ for which Faucit would become celebrated. In 1833, Faucit recalls, she and her sister took refuge from the summer heat in a theatre, gave an impromptu rendering of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, and were overheard. Faucit goes on: When our friends arrived some days after, the lessee told them that, having occasion to go from the dwelling-house to his private box, he had heard voices, listened, and remained during the time of our merry rehearsal. He spoke in such warm terms of the Juliet’s voice, its adaptability to the character, her figure, I was tall for my age, and so forth, that in the end he prevailed upon my friends to let me make a trial on his stage . . . Thus did a little frolic prove to be the turning-point of my life.6

4

Jameson, Cowden Clarke, Kemble, Cushman

Faucit’s aesthetic is based in her sense of the ways in which Shakespeare’s women seem to be able to articulate her own situation or her sense of a feminine ideal. She writes that, ‘I tried to give not only [Shakespeare’s] words, but, by a sympathetic interpretation, his deeper meaning – a meaning to be apprehended only by that sympathy which arises in, and is the imagination of, the heart.’7 Her imagination, however, is rather a form of sounding out an instinctive identification with what is already known and desired in Faucit’s own situation as a Victorian woman, than it is an effort to familiarize the unfamiliar. She writes of Shakespeare’s heroines that they are ‘my heroines – for they were mine, a part of me’.8 On stage, Faucit came to epitomize all that was best in Victorian womanhood. Margaret Stokes and Georgina Colmache enthusiastically wrote of her that she ‘opened up a world of poetry undreamed of by [her audiences] – filled their eyes with visions of beauty and grace and dignity, living yet ideal’. She thus, ‘won her way to the hearts of all by a gentleness and sweetness of aspect and demeanour, that spoke of the modesty and absorption of the true artist, who thought only of the work it was given to her to do’.9 This was Faucit’s intention throughout her career: to bring about a recognition of the stage as a place worthy of serious moral effort and attention, and subsequently to build for herself a reputation for an exemplary and inspiring femininity which found its best and most effective advertisement on stage. It is clear that Shakespeare was a crucial part of this project, and Faucit was careful to maintain her relationship with him even after she left the professional stage. In the early 1880s, Faucit published a series of letters on Shakespeare’s female characters in the form of letters to various friends. These appeared first as a serial in the pages of Blackwood’s Magazine between 1881 and 1885, and were collected in the latter year in volume form as On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters. This is an artful production which, under the guise of essays on some of Shakespeare’s best-known characters (the parts in question were: Ophelia, Portia, Desdemona, Juliet, Imogen, Rosalind and Beatrice),10 actually enables Faucit to write her autobiography in terms which establish her as not only a performer and translator of Shakespeare for her Victorian audiences, but which also enables her to claim for herself the identity of a Shakespeare-approved Victorian heroine. In becoming Shakespearean, she claims for herself the cultural authority enjoyed by Shakespeare, yet, by effacing herself beneath the mantle of his heroines, is enabled to do so without violating Victorian codes and proprieties. Through using his name as an enabling device she is also permitted to enter into print, rather assuming the guise of one worshiping Shakespeare than one

Introduction

5

solely concerned to put herself forward. In personal as well as in public terms, the Shakespeare-identification served her well: Theodore Martin is alleged to have fallen in love with her as Rosalind in Edinburgh in 1844, and on her gravestone he had inscribed Leontes’ description of Hermione: ‘The sweet’st companion, that e’er man/ Bred his hopes out of’. Arguably, Faucit bred her own hopes out of Shakespeare and his words, hopes which went far beyond the terms of Ruskin’s celebration of Shakespeare’s heroines. To some extent, this may be said of all the women with whom this book deals, Anna Jameson (1794–1860), Mary Cowden Clarke (1809–1898), Fanny Kemble (1809–1893) and Charlotte Cushman (1816–1876). The place of Shakespeare in each of their lives varies somewhat, but for each of them, their Shakespearean work, whether on page or stage, or both, contributed significantly, if not decisively, to the cultural standing they accrued. As a group, the women straddle the emergence of the Victorian period out of the Romanticism of the early nineteenth century, and may be said variously to be implicated in that movement, and more particularly in the changing reputation of the Shakespearean stage in the first half of the nineteenth century. As actors, spectators and commentators, they participate in a time when the stage evolved into a major national form, and when Shakespeare’s texts, rather than heavily amended versions of them, came to be played. The actor-managers of the period, most specifically William Charles Macready, Charles Kean and Henry Irving are usually deemed most responsible for the return to a form of authentic Shakespearean text in the theatre, but the successful rolling out of such authenticity was significantly aided by the vehicle of accomplished and popular actresses, and by the extent to which they were championed in turn by contemporary commentators. Anna Jameson’s close relationship with Fanny Kemble is a case in point. They are also working at a period in which the transatlanticism which would become a defining part of the cultural, industrial and political character of the nineteenth century was burgeoning: Kemble and Cushman acted and lived on both sides of the Atlantic, and the nature of their lives was in part determined by their responses to their specifically transatlantic experiences. And some of Mary Cowden Clarke’s most significant professional relationships were with her American colleagues and fans. Anna Jameson’s life and work were similarly international in reach and scope. One final point of similarity marks their life and work, in that, to a greater extent than most of their male contemporaries, they are largely not confined to one form of career: Kemble acted, read and later took to writing; Cushman similarly acted and

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Jameson, Cowden Clarke, Kemble, Cushman

gave readings; Jameson explored an enormous number of genres in her writing career; and Cowden Clarke was editor, essayist, compiler of the first significant Shakespeare concordance and, briefly, an amateur actress. In each of these careers, like those of Helen Faucit, Shakespeare played a decisive part and indeed may be said to have enabled such a variety of forms. The essays which follow outline the specific contributions which each woman made to the popularity and understanding of Shakespeare during the nineteenth century, and indeed beyond, and also demonstrate the benefits which accrue to them through their work with Shakespeare. Anna Jameson was already a well-established writer by the time she came to publish Characteristics of Women: Moral, Poetical and Historical (dedicated to Fanny Kemble) in 1833. It was only after Jameson’s death, as Cheri Lin Larsen Hoeckley points out, that the book took the title by which it is best known today, that of Shakespeare’s Heroines. Jameson divides the heroines into ‘Characters of Intellect’, ‘Characters of Passion and Imagination’, ‘Characters of the Affections’ and ‘Historical Characters’. The division is rigid and often contentious, but used to illuminating effect by Jameson, who constructs for her characters lives and import beyond the pages of Shakespeare’s plays, and thus, as Larsen Hoeckley points out, joins with Mary Cowden Clarke and Charles and Mary Lamb, as well as Helen Faucit, in imagining both pre- and post-Shakespearean lives for heroines who come to inhabit realms unimagined by Shakespeare. They can thus be enrolled in contemporary debates and made to resonate within the lives of modern women. Larsen Hoeckley argues that this is enabled by Jameson’s shifting between, and capitalizing upon the gap between, what she terms the categories of ‘woman’ and ‘character’ in Jameson’s analysis. However, she is also at pains to point out not just Jameson’s indebtedness to Shakespeare, and to the performances of Kemble and other members of her famous family, but Jameson’s influence upon subsequent writers. Ruskin, we read, though dismissive of Jameson’s conversation, is nonetheless seen to engage with her readings of Shakespeare in ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’, and to dispute her analysis of the implications of the female capacities which Shakespeare demonstrated. The Preface to George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872), with its engaging and distressing account of St. Theresa of Avila shows her debt to Jameson’s picture of the saint in her Legends of the Monastic Orders (1850), but Larsen Hoeckley argues that similar traits can also be found in Portia, whose capacity to outstrip what her environment can offer her is also the bedrock of Dorothea Brooke’s dilemma. Throughout her published work, Jameson argued for women’s

Introduction

7

rights and potential to be respected, and her writings on Shakespeare are suffused with the example and insight of the actresses whom she knew, whose work was in multiple ways the fullest illustration available of the intellect, emotion and capacity that Shakespeare had seen in women. Jameson’s was a hard-working, peripatetic life, a circumstance forced on her by her unsuccessful marriage and the financial difficulties to which that led. She wrote exhaustively to support herself and a number of dependents, while pursuing independent friendships and travels. Jameson is an extraordinarily driven figure, and it is tempting to see in her frenetic energy and activities a desire to banish a number of demons. Mary Cowden Clarke’s life could scarcely be more different. Brought up in the midst of a loving family with members of whom she continued to live even after her marriage, married to a long-term family friend of her parents, and enjoying that marriage for nearly 50 years, Cowden Clarke’s life is one of love and security, and for her, Shakespeare is part and parcel of the life of the family where she was first introduced to him. Within her homes, Shakespeare’s portrait sits alongside her closest family members, elevated by this position almost to being one of them. Out of this intimacy, Mary and her husband Charles, who was some years her senior, and an intimate of writers including Keats, Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt, carved a joint career in editing Shakespeare, lecturing on him and producing a number of works designed to facilitate further study and knowledge of the playwright. These works included their jointly edited Shakespeare Key, which was seen through to publication by Mary in 1878 following Charles’s death 2 years earlier. However, Mary Cowden Clarke’s greatest contributions to Shakespeare scholarship, and to a more popular understanding of, and fascination with, the playwright, are her Concordance to Shakespeare’s plays, which took 16 years to complete and was published in 1844–1845, and her five-volume Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1850–1852). The former is the first significant concordance to the dramatic writings of Shakespeare, and was suggested to her by her friends Charles and Mary Lamb, themselves also significant propagators of Shakespeare’s renown. The task itself was extremely laborious, and even the editing of the first draft took 2 years. It could only have been carried out in the spirit of love, as could the massive Shakespeare Key, a kind of companion volume, of which Mary wrote that it was intended to unlock, ‘the treasures of [Shakespeare’s] style, elucidating the peculiarities of his construction, and displaying the beauties of his expression’.11 But it was for another audience that Mary wrote her Girlhood stories, carefully constructed tales of the pre-life of Shakespeare’s heroines, and their usually rather ominously hopeless parents. The Girlhood stories

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Jameson, Cowden Clarke, Kemble, Cushman

represent a significant strand within Mary’s writings, that is, her attention to the availability of Shakespeare for young women. Following in the footsteps of her mentors, the Lambs, she wrote throughout her life for an audience whose exposure to Shakespeare demanded careful mediation, but for whom, as for herself, that relationship might be crucial. Mary’s relationship with Shakespeare spanned her whole life, influencing her memorial sonnets for her husband, and enabling her to write even in old age of the inspiration that Shakespeare might be for young women. Hers might be a rather sentimental voice, but it articulates a sentiment grounded in a vocation for enabling the widest possible exposure to, and empowerment by, Shakespeare’s writings. Fanny Kemble’s life was similarly imbued from the beginning with Shakespeare. Born into the Kemble acting dynasty, Shakespeare was a presence in her life, as Jacky Bratton points out, even before she could recognize his name. Her father Charles Kemble, uncle John Philip Kemble and aunt Sarah Siddons had been among the leading actors of Shakespeare in Britain. Fanny’s own relationship with the stage was an anxious one, initially embraced as a means of securing her family against the poverty and disgrace of bankruptcy, but later disavowed as she came in later years to articulate her sense of how far the contemporary stage might actually militate against the successful appreciation of Shakespeare’s plays. She was a literally outspoken critic of modern actors in her retirement, as Henry James ruefully recounts in his obituary tribute to her. But throughout the extensive autobiographical writings that she published between 1882 and 1890, again, like Faucit’s writings, in the form of letters, she maintains an allegiance to the works of Shakespeare which are for her a form of talisman, of a connection with fundamental values, and with her family. Henry James wrote of her that: She was so saturated with Shakespeare that she had made him, as it were, the air she lived in, an air that stirred with his words whenever she herself was moved, whenever she was agitated or impressed, reminded or challenged. He was indeed her utterance, the language she spoke when she spoke most from herself. He had said the things that she would have wished most to say, and it was her greatest happiness, I think, that she could always make him her obeisance by the same borrowed words that expressed her emotion.12 James responds to an intensity in Kemble that found its best expression through the readings that she gave following her decision to leave the professional stage. In them she found a space uncontaminated by the demands

Introduction

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of the theatre and a greater autonomy. She was, of course, also free to take the male parts that, beyond the quite common Victorian tradition of women playing Hamlet, would not have come her way. Kemble appeared in theatres, music halls and working men’s institutes throughout Britain and America, using her readings as she did her writing, as a means of support following her acrimonious divorce from the American slave owner Pierce Butler. Whether on stage or off, Kemble’s was a life lived through Shakespeare and his words. Our final Shakespearean is the American Charlotte Cushman, an admirer and one-time friend of Kemble’s, whose work was similarly transatlantic in import. She was best-known in Britain for her acting in male parts, in particular that of Romeo, which she played to great acclaim opposite her sister Susan’s Juliet in 1845, the year of her London debut. Critics were excited by her virile performances, whether as Romeo or as Lady Macbeth, and were freed both by her choice of parts and by her nationality from having to see in Shakespeare a form of appropriate femininity. Cushman’s nationality liberated audiences and critics to see in her an alliance of intelligence and art which might begin to challenge conventions of staging and onstage femininity. Indeed, the comparison most often drawn in reviews of Cushman was with Macready, with whom she shared some physical features, and a similarly physical, even virile, onstage presence. As Lisa Merrill shows, Cushman also shared with Macready a concern for Shakespeare’s texts, and used a Shakespearean version when acting Romeo and Juliet in London. She too followed Charles and Fanny Kemble onto the reading circuit, but came to take up a more politicized role in fund-raising activities. Underlying the subsequent reception of these women’s work is the perception of how that work can now be seen as part of a nineteenth-century movement to achieve greater autonomy and professional recognition for women and their abilities. Jameson, Cowden Clarke, Kemble and Cushman all engage with the issue of women’s rights and identity throughout, though probably none would have articulated it as their primary function. The use of Shakespeare for women’s ends is not of course confined to them, and indeed other contemporaries were far more explicit in their engagement of Shakespeare for their own radical agenda. In The Woman Question (1884), a pamphlet concerning the prescription of chastity for unmarried women, Eleanor Marx uses Shakespeare to critique society’s views. She, and her partner Edward Aveling, refer to ‘the rigorous rule that from man only must come the first proffer of affection, the proposal for marriage’, and cite Shakespeare to show that ‘this is no natural law’:

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Miranda, untrammelled by society, tenders herself to Ferdinand. ‘I am your wife if you will marry me: if not I’ll die your maid’, and Helena . . . with her love for Bertram, that carried her from Rousillon to Paris and Florence is, as Coleridge has it, ‘Shakespeare’s loveliest character’.13 Marx uses the examples from Shakespeare to demonstrate the fallen state of English culture and society, and enrolls him here and in her teaching to argue that things might be made better in part by learning from him. Marx might seem to have little in common with the ‘Great Shakespeareans’ of this volume (though she did aspire as a young woman to be an actress, and was a great admirer of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry), but all read Shakespeare’s texts as being in some measure the special property of women, available to them in unique ways that enable a mutual recognition of common, often anti-authoritarian, purpose. Shakespeare worked variously to enable bonds of recognition between women, to facilitate women’s entry into previously male circles of criticism and scholarship, and to gain for the actress popular renown, cultural status and financial security. Shakespeare was a weapon of stealth for women in the nineteenth century: the ultimate symbol of national greatness, and yet one available also for more rebellious purposes.

Chapter 1

Anna Jameson Cheri Lin Larsen Hoeckley

In closing her preface to the second edition of Characteristics of Women: Moral, Poetical and Historical (1833), her study of Shakespeare’s heroines, Anna Murphy Jameson makes a cryptic promise to her readers: ‘This little work as it now stands forms only part of a plan which the author hopes, if life be granted her, to accomplish – at all events, life, while it is spared, shall be devoted to its fulfilment’.1 In the preface, Jameson refers to only one other work of her own: an unfinished biography of the actress Sarah Siddons, which Jameson acknowledges she has incorporated into her analysis of Lady Macbeth in the second edition. Though Jameson wrote prolifically, she never returned to Shakespeare as a topic, so readers must look elsewhere for the foundational nature of Characteristics of Women in her authorial ‘plan’. Jameson reads Shakespeare’s female characters with knowledge both of sources and of critical tradition, often creating insightful and sometimes even surprising analyses of previously ignored characters. As her preface hints and her chosen title confirms, though, this collection of studies of dramatic heroines aligns with a larger interest in women’s material conditions in the nineteenth century, as well as with the causes of those conditions and the possibilities for improving them. While Jameson’s exuberant responses to Shakespeare’s genius verge occasionally on the fanatic, throughout Characteristics her commentary also betrays its part in that larger plan that would occupy Jameson through her career. Her combined intellectual interests illuminate Jameson’s life-long belief that improving women’s material condition beyond the sphere of the nineteenth-century’s reigning gender ideology will happen when women and men educate themselves, in part by reading emotionally engaging and intellectually rigorous imaginative literature. Most of Jameson’s work fits the popular nineteenth-century generic category of collected biographies, or prosopography, from her earliest Memoirs of the Loves of the Poets (1829), Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns

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(1831) and Court Beauties (1833) to her much later Sacred and Legendary Art (1848) and Legends of the Monastic Orders (1846), and through various works in between. Alison Booth has vividly established the prominence of prosopographies in nineteenth-century women’s education, arguing for Jameson as a central author of the genre.2 Even Jameson’s journalistic contributions to the Athenaeum on the Parliamentary Reports on the Children’s Employment Commission (1843) reveal her persistent practice of thinking out her argument through the variations and continuities that she explores across a collection of vignettes of female experiences. At the end of her career, Jameson was exploring not so much collections of female histories, as histories of female collectives in her two studies on women’s communities, Communion of Labour (1855) and Sisters of Charity (1856). All of these collections divide their attention between description of the material conditions of their subjects and reflection on how those conditions came into existence. Jameson tenaciously considers causal relations both in terms of the external factors of social codes and the internal factors of women’s habits and temperaments. That dual consideration makes it possible for Jameson to continue to insist on female social agency, even while she examines forces that have (and in Jameson’s view occasionally should have) limited or truncated women’s power. Characteristics of Women differs from Jameson’s other early work, of course, in its focus primarily on fictional figures rather than on historical ones. Throughout Characteristics Jameson dwells on that difference, repeatedly distinguishing in her readings between the ‘woman’ and the ‘character’ or ‘heroine’. Because Shakespeare wrote ‘historical’ plays, and because Jameson sustained an interest in the condition of historical women, one might understand her distinction as a clarifying effort both to consider the female in the dramatist’s sources and to analyse the representation of that historical figure in the play. Jameson however works with less cogent strategies. Indeed, her final section, ‘Historical Characters’ offers analyses of a broad array of historical women rendered dramatic by Shakespeare, including Cleopatra and Octavia from Antony and Cleopatra; Volumnia from Coriolanus; Queen Constance, Elinor of Guienne, and Blanche of Castille from King John; Margaret of Anjou from Henry VI; Katherine of Aragon from Henry VIII, and closing with Lady Macbeth. Even here, Jameson’s ‘historical women’ cross the traditional dramatic categories of tragedies and histories, including Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth from the tragedies even though Jameson groups the similarly ‘historical’ Cordelia from King Lear with ‘Characters of the Affections’. Furthermore, in the ‘historical’ section, Jameson differentiates vociferously between history and ‘fancy’ as modes of

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writing and thinking, yet her distinction between ‘woman’ and ‘character’ cannot be captured clearly in a traditional division of historical figure and fictional representation. Neither does Jameson see all narrative about personalities as belonging to one broad category. Despite the blurriness of her use of these two categories, however, Jameson relies on the differences between imaginative writing and historical representation in her educational project for women. Jameson persists in this distinction when she turns her attention to characters that exist without clear historical referent, and those discussions best illuminate her purposes. In distinguishing between a ‘woman’ and ‘a dramatic character’, Jameson creates opportunities for her two-fold project. Rosalind may be an exemplary woman, one whom Jameson refers to as a model for early nineteenth-century females. But, Juliet (while seen by Jameson as a problematic model for young women) provides the author with richer opportunities for discussions of poetics than Rosalind does. Because Jameson consistently maintains her dual interest in considering female exemplars and in demonstrating female intellectual ability through her own dramatic criticism, she moves between these two categories persistently, but not always fluidly. Occasionally, Jameson exceeds the available literary or historical evidence in her analysis of a female character’s traits. Even when making these tenuous literary claims, though, Jameson serves her own rhetorical purposes as a female critic interested in expanding her readers’ understanding of appropriate femininity. Often, when Jameson compares two female characters, she deigns one superior as a ‘woman’, while she prefers the second as a character. For instance, in the introductory section of ‘Characters of the Intellect’, she asserts that Rosalind’s ‘softness and sensibility, united with equal wit and intellect, give her the superiority as a woman’ to Beatrice but ‘as a dramatic character, she is inferior in force’ (118). These distinctions allow Jameson to praise all characters she gathers together, either because they are virtuous women or because they are brilliantly created, and often for some degree of both attributes. As a result, even while she argues against traditional readings of characters, or faults certain female habits, she maintains a tone of feminine graciousness, always finding grounds for praise along with her criticism. More importantly, this strategy for simultaneously producing moral and literary critique, as we shall see, supplies an air of critical distance as Jameson positively presents female behaviours that would be seen as problematic in traditional nineteenth-century gender ideology. By vacillating between ‘characters’ and ‘women’, Jameson complicates appropriate female behaviour so that it includes acts such as Rosalind’s cross-dressing, Juliet’s

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parental defiance and Lady Macbeth’s murderously ambitious leadership of her husband. While the gap between ‘woman’ and ‘character’ provides political space for Jameson, the distinction is not without intellectual shortcomings. The most logically problematic instance of this distinction between ‘woman’ and ‘character’ occurs when Jameson turns to Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing, and yet her discussion of Beatrice illustrates the usefulness of these categories for Jameson’s goals. As evidence for her delight over Beatrice, Jameson states ‘Beatrice more charms and dazzles us by what she is than by what she says’ (116). In separating Beatrice from the dramatic lines readers know her by, and in insisting that she has a self beyond those words, Jameson inadvertently credits the playwright for Beatrice’s intellect and brilliance. All that Beatrice ‘is’ exists in ‘what she says’, or possibly in what other Much Ado About Nothing characters say about her. Jameson elaborates on that distinction between words and being by adding that it ‘is not merely her sparkling repartees and saucy jests, it is the soul of wit, and the spirit of gaiety in forming the whole character, – looking out from her brilliant eyes, and laughing on her full lips that pout with scorn, – which we have before us, moving and full of life’ (116–17). The distinction Jameson demands misses something beyond a historical/imaginative distinction; Jameson further collapses genre, thinking of drama as she might think of fiction or poetry. Without the body of an actress to represent her, Beatrice has no ‘brilliant eyes’ or ‘full lips that pout with scorn’, such as a heroine of a novel might achieve through narrative description. Shakespeare’s minimal stage directions combine with the absence of a narrative voice to render the existence of his heroines dependent on their words – in lines he wrote. In spite of Jameson’s continued overt insistence on a distinction between the poetic and the historical, she fails to maintain that distinction in her own analyses, imagining these dramatic creations not only as historical, but also as embodied. When dramatic characters take on bodies, they become more human, and Jameson exploits that human quality to engage her readers’ sympathies more fully. Jameson joins a significant company in her insistence that Shakespeare’s heroines live outside the plays. Mary Cowden Clarke and Charles and Mary Lamb are probably the best-known nineteenth-century writers to produce readings of Shakespeare’s female characters that imagine them engaging in activities and living through incidents that the plays never mention, as if they had historical existence.3 For Jameson, this insistence on material beings in dramatic ideas evokes the reader’s recollection of an actress who had delivered the lines with her own sparkling eyes and memorable mouth.

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The apparently unintentional blurring makes the characters from Shakespeare’s dramas powerfully illustrative as exemplars for Jameson’s female readers. Considering Jameson’s text as dramatic criticism, one finds the slide between ‘woman’ and ‘character’ problematically imprecise. Considering the text as a literate treatise in advocacy for Victorian women, one finds the slip between ‘woman’ and ‘character’ slyly effective, creating examples to illustrate her argument both about literary texts and about women’s potential roles. Whether her readers had specific memories of actresses or not, Jameson’s readings of Shakespeare were undoubtedly shaped by her relationships with the women of the Kemble family theatrical dynasty, especially Sarah Siddons and her niece Frances Kemble, but also Frances’s sister Adelaide. Actresses as respected and widely known as the Kemble women provided Jameson with superlative models for explaining and justifying her notions about the need and the possibility to create more opportunities for women’s work. Though the Kemble women’s historicity is undeniable – and Jameson makes no attempt to deny it – they also evoke the imaginary realm of the characters they embody. Jameson insisted on more than one occasion that the acting women of the Kemble family dynasty exemplified virtuous professional women as actresses. When Jameson reads Shakespeare’s heroines through the performances of these actresses, she again blurs the distinction between ‘character’ and ‘woman’, recalling exemplary females who undeniably exist in history, and who embody the traits that Jameson wishes for in more nineteenth-century women, even though her exemplars behave outside the nineteenth century’s more dominant proscriptions for women succeeding on the public stage. Jameson knew the Kemble women well, especially Frances, or Fanny, to whom she dedicated Characteristics. She and Fanny enjoyed a long and mutually supportive literary friendship that crossed the Atlantic and shaped both women’s critical responses to Shakespeare. The influence of the entire Kemble family shows clearly in Characteristics. Jameson wrote about Fanny and her sister Adelaide, and completed a biographical sketch of their Aunt Siddons during the early 1830s, publishing those essays in her collection Visits and Sketches. Her essays on Fanny and Adelaide were written to accompany two series of drawings by the artist John Hayter, showing each of the sisters in their most famous roles. The essays alternate between narratives of the actresses’ lives and digressions on aesthetics, sprinkled with occasional forays into theatre criticism. Throughout both essays she shows some slight anxiety to demonstrate acting women’s respectability. However, Jameson’s professional admiration for the Kembles dominates the tone of

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these collections. A brief description of Fanny at work illuminates Jameson’s sense that these acting women had all the gifts of her own ideal reader. She recognizes the passion that marked Fanny’s acting, but also asserts that she succeeded because of her ‘fine taste and original and powerful mind’.4 Fanny, like Adelaide and Sarah Siddons, combined mental and emotional faculties in her work, moving beyond the traditional emotional labour prescribed for women in her era. Though not precisely prosopographies, these collections of responses to the actresses’ roles share many traits with Jameson’s other writings on women, work and art – exploring similarities and differences across several roles to demarcate variations in female merit. Variants in the title of Jameson’s work further tangle her knotty investment in this distinction between ‘character’ and ‘woman’. Resisting advice from literary and theatrical friends, Jameson chose to publish the book as Characteristics of Women: Moral, Poetical and Historical. Though each chapter focuses on one of twenty-three Shakespearean heroines (with extended reflections on minor characters woven into those chapters), this original title obfuscates its investment in Shakespeare, emphasizing interest in female personality. The book only became known as Shakespeare’s Heroines after Jameson’s death in 1860. Jameson’s attention to the ‘aesthetics’ and ‘drama’ and ‘poetics’ of the characters demonstrates her desire to engage traditional criticism, especially the work of critics she names, including Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, August Wilhelm von Schlegel and William Richardson. Throughout her study, Jameson distanced herself from Richardson’s ‘Essay on Shakespeare’s Imitation of Female Characters,’ in Essays on Shakespeare’s Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff and on his Imitation of Female Characters, to which are added some General Observations of the Study of Shakespeare (1789). Richardson argued that the lack of ‘diversity’ in Shakespeare’s female characters followed the lack of diversity in historical women. Jameson rarely identifies female critics, though she alludes to them. Her reticence suggests a reluctance to invite censure on the entire class of intellectual women by shining the bright light of her disagreement on any woman’s flawed argument. Besides, Jameson’s engagement with the canon of male criticism sufficiently highlights her credentials. Once she has established that authority in the realm of male literary critics, Jameson finds the boldness to move into social criticism, turning her readers’ attention to gendered inequalities. From that point she carries readers beyond enumerating those inequalities to considering their social costs for women and for men.

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By 1832, when Jameson published the first edition of Characteristics, experience combined with study to heighten her awareness of the need for reforming women’s conditions.5 Simultaneously, her acquaintances with educated and professional women demonstrated to her the possibilities for women’s engagement in socially productive labour outside the home. Anna was the oldest of five daughters, born in 1794 in Dublin, and she emigrated with her parents to Cumberland two years later. From an early age, Anna joined her father Denis in supporting the large female family. She accepted her first post as a governess when she was sixteen. Shortly after that engagement finished, she took a second post, travelling with the Rowles family on the Continent, gaining exposure to the public art galleries of Europe – and reading Shakespeare because it was the only English book she carried.6 Returning home after Mrs Rowles hired a French governess in Paris, Anna took a third post with the Littleton family, giving her sufficient variation and duration in that rare middle-class woman’s occupation to know intimately its tedium, loneliness, insecurity and hardship. To supplement her income, Jameson wrote a series of travel essays about her journey with the Rowles, which she would later assemble in the revealingly titled travel memoir, Diary of an Ennuyée (1826). Through her 20s, Jameson continued writing for the periodical press, and she published her first collection on women in literature as The Loves of the Poets (1829). When her father failed to secure a buyer for a series of paintings he had completed without a commission, Anna (then 30 years old) wrote the text for Court Beauties to generate some income from his otherwise fruitless work, marketing them first as a series of articles. While she was living with the Rowles family, she met Robert Jameson, a young civil servant. Anna married Robert in 1825, after a 5-year delay, and the marriage seems to have been unhappy from its earliest days. He departed for Dominica to accept a position as a puisne judge in 1829, and the couple spent most of their married lives on separate continents. Jameson honed her skills as a periodical writer during their first separation. In spite of the technicalities of Victorian marriage law, which rendered all of Anna’s earnings Robert’s property, she fortunately retained all the income from her writing. However, the couple struggled continually over a £300 annual allowance which he had agreed to provide her, and which would have made the support of her parents and three remaining single sisters much more feasible.7 The poet and civil servant, Brian Waller Procter (pseudonym ‘Barry Cornwall’) served as Anna’s legal advisor in her marital property disputes. Anna travelled repeatedly to the Continent through the 1840s,

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continuing research in art history for the Sacred and Legendary Art series, and often taking her niece Gerardine with her. Robert eventually convinced Anna to forego the annual allowance in exchange for inheriting property he purchased in Toronto after he was re-assigned as a Vice-Chancellor in Upper Canada. When Robert died in 1854, Anna was dismayed to learn that he had willed his property to friends. Procter and his wife, the London literary hostess Anne Skepper Procter, had long been friends of Anna’s. In 1828, Anna Jameson met Fanny Kemble at the Procters’ Bedford Place home. Throughout her life, when Jameson returned to England from continental research, she visited regularly at the Procters’ and became acquainted with authors such as Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and Thomas Carlyle. She struck up a friendship with Carlyle’s brilliant and gregarious wife Jane that lasted through letters. Her attachment to Jane Carlyle would prove less passionate than many epistolary female friendships that Jameson sustained when her research travels made proximity impossible. Other women to whom she was deeply attached included Lady Byron, Ottilie von Goethe, Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. At the Procter household, Jameson also took on the status of well informed and adopted ‘aunt’ for the Procters’ daughter, the poet and activist Adelaide, and a circle of her equally energetic and talented friends. These younger women, including Barbara Leigh Smith, Bessie Rayner Parkes and Anna Mary Howitt, eagerly accepted the guidance and encouragement that the older and more experienced Jameson offered them.8 When this younger female group established an office in Langham Place and began to advocate formally for the reform of marriage and property laws, Jameson became their regular advisor.9 After forming the ad hoc Married Women’s Property Committee to lobby Parliament in 1855 and 1856 for marriage law reform, the circle decided to widen their efforts to increase employment opportunities available to women. Those efforts included the establishment of the Society for the Promotion of the Employment of Women, as well as the creation of an all-female press. In 1861, the press released the gift annual Victoria Regia with a dedication attesting to Jameson’s influence, declaring that her ‘name will be always remembered by those interested in the employment and elevation of women, as that of the writer who first pleaded their cause before the public, and the friend whose wise and faithful counsels were only ended by her death’.10 Less flatteringly, but perhaps more indicative of her influence, the infamously misogynist Saturday Review accused Jameson of leading a ‘petticoat rebellion’ of discontented women who stepped out of their proper domestic places and

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into political activism.11 Ample evidence exists within Characteristics of Women, as well as in Jameson’s biography and responses to her writing to suggest that this ‘employment and elevation of women’ was the ‘plan’ that Jameson began with that ‘little work’ of Shakespeare criticism. The imagined dialogue between Jameson’s heroine Alda and a male interlocutor Medon that opens Characteristics of Women conveys this hope of improving women’s education to empower them. These two verbal sparring partners appear in Jameson’s earlier works as well, but here Alda speaks as the author of Characteristics, presenting her book to Medon for the first time, and seeking his response. In the illustration Jameson created for the introduction, Alda stands over an enlarged book while Medon sits, turned towards his female companion.12 (Figure 1) Alda leans in, pointing to the text so that her hands join the book in taking centre stage, and her massive

Figure 1 Introductory illustration, Anna Jameson, Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical and Historical, 4th edition (London: Saunders and Otley, 1847) (author’s own copy)

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copy of the text highlights three of the female characters Jameson writes of as superlative: Portia, Imogen and Juliet. By including one heroine from each of Jameson’s three categories focusing on character traits, the illustration graphically reinforces the book’s structure. This insistence on remembering classification recalls Jameson’s repeated distinction between ‘character’ and ‘woman’. This penchant for classifications carries into Jameson’s later art history. In her introduction to Sacred and Legendary Art (1848), she distinguishes between ‘devotional’ and ‘historical’ subjects, labelling devotional subjects as ‘the objects of our veneration with reference only to their sacred character, whether standing singly or in company with others. They place before us no action or event, real or supposed’, while a subject ‘becomes historical the moment it represents any story, incident, or action, real or imagined’.13 Jameson immediately names the difficulties of holding on to these categories when representing any character known to viewers through biblical stories, as devotional subjects so often are. However, Jameson relies on these categories for stated reasons that also apply to her study of Shakespeare: the need for some ‘leading classification which shall be distinct and intelligible, without being mechanical’.14 In Characteristics, Jameson makes use of ubiquitous and malleable categories for two purposes. First, this system of classification offers both male and female nineteenth-century readers more fertile structures for understanding female virtue. Second, the system also offers female readers particularly a model for more effective thinking, reading and social criticism. Both functions reveal Jameson’s purposes with Characteristics of Women as grounded in, but extending beyond, Shakespeare criticism, and each merits further attention. Her approach to developing categories allows Jameson to collapse the separate spheres ideology which ordained women’s lives to be more appropriately spent in domestic spaces, and men’s in the public world, and to rebuild a new structure from those crumbled pieces. In seeing men’s and women’s roles not as mutually exclusive spheres, but more as a Venn diagram of overlapping circles with many roles shared by all, Jameson brings the public and private spheres together and jostles her era’s gendered understanding of labour. Jameson recognizes these realms as populated by people with all the roundedness one would hope for in a fully developed fictional character, as well as the further complexities of historical figures, interacting with unpredictable agents and forces, and without the structures of a script. Jameson’s original illustrations frequently related only obliquely to the heroine or scene she discusses, augmenting the multiplicities in

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her readings. By the 1830s Jameson was a polymath, and she would continue her multi-disciplinary self-education for the next three decades. Her erratic style – sliding from critical reserve to gasping enthusiasm in a single paragraph – is one shortcoming of her fertile, diligent, but not always self-restrained mind. Her diverse range of illustrations, fields and methods is a product of her intellectual fervour, and a tool that enables her to imagine respectable women in a nearly infinite number of roles. In most of her writing Jameson insists on what might be seen as a correct identification of genre, and further on the understanding that any given entity might simultaneously fall into several different generic categories. So, while a careful reader may need to consider Juliet as both ‘woman’ and as ‘character’ that reader must also determine whether she is a character of ‘fancy’ or of ‘history’. Furthermore, in order fully to understand Juliet’s suicidal love for Romeo, Jameson prompts her readers to consider what it means that she is a Character of Passion and Imagination, rather than a Character of the Affections. Through this multiplicity of possibilities in Shakespeare’s heroines, Jameson resists the binary opposition that drove separate spheres ideology: that is, because men embody traits such as action, courage and public spirit, and because women are not men, then women are not intellectual, morally courageous or public spirited. Happily, Shakespeare’s heroines also provide Jameson with examples of those potentially ‘masculine’ traits. Specific characters, from Beatrice to Imogen to Lady Macbeth to Viola, also illustrate non-traditional feminine qualities. The range of the characteristics the heroines encompass denies the notion of a single virtuous femininity. Patterns of understanding gender through opposition – female equals not male – were the cornerstone of domestic ideology, dispersed through nineteenth-century discourse in artefacts as varied as novels, poetry, conduct books, sermons, advertising, legal texts and paintings.15 Rather than drawing Jameson into such rigidity of gender typing, the four categories by which she chooses to organize Characteristics create complexities in understanding femininity – not simply as ‘intellectual’, ‘affectionate’ or ‘passionate’, but also in various degrees and combinations of those traits, and in categories those traits cannot capture, but that a reader, or a gifted playwright, can illustrate in ‘historical’ women. The combined structure and multiplicity of the collection serve the purposes of Jameson’s larger work precisely because they resist the too narrow and too rigid gender classifications of domestic ideology. As categories, ‘Characters of the Intellect’, ‘Characters of Passion and Imagination’ and ‘Characters of the Affections’ offer Jameson and her readers frameworks for defensible interpretive conclusions, while the

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overlap in the categories encourages intellectual self-correction and refinement of earlier conclusions. While genre matters intensely in Jameson’s thinking, her categories are rarely mutually exclusive. Jameson recognizes these classifying skills as of a higher order than she sees encouraged in most education of young girls in her age. In Characteristics of Women, Portia displays this combination of the categories of ‘Intellect’ and ‘Passion and Imagination’ when Jameson claims the heroine’s intelligence is ‘kindled into romance by a poetical imagination’ (76). Likewise, any historical character embodies the traits of one or more of the author’s earlier three categories. As closer attention to the specifics of Characteristics reveals, Jameson was not immune to the language of absolutes, or of essentialism, in her ideas of femininity. What she resists is static and monolithic notions of femininity that persist through nineteenth-century writing on domesticity during the period. While promulgators of more narrow visions of domestic ideology were publishing around her, Jameson saw Characteristics of Women through five British editions from its original publication in 1832 to just before her death in 1858. During this period, several American editions appeared, many of them quite likely pirated, along with German translations. After Jameson’s death, the book was re-issued under the title Shakespeare’s Heroines at regular intervals into the first decade of the twentieth century. Reviews frequently mentioned Jameson’s capacity as both Shakespeare critic and conduct writer. The Monthly Review, for instance, responded favourably to the first edition, in part because ‘Mrs. Jameson hoped to present a general and pretty correct view of woman as she has been, is, and ever will be’.16 Undeniably, Jameson’s diverse categories of femininity participated in nineteenth-century understandings of gender alongside more narrowly prescriptive texts of domestic ideology. John Ruskin most famously codified domestic ideology’s parameters of separate spheres in his book Sesame and Lilies. In a pair of lectures he delivered in 1864, Ruskin charted the separate social roles that many middle-class Victorians believed ideal for men and women: The man’s power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest wherever war is just, wherever conquest necessary. But the woman’s power is for rule, not for battle – and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement and decision. She sees the qualities of things, their claims and their places. Her great function is Praise: she enters into no contest. By her office, and place, she is

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protected from all danger and temptation. The man, in his rough work in the open world, must encounter all peril and trial;–to him, therefore, must be the failure, the offence, the inevitable error; often he must be wounded, or subdued; often misled; and always hardened. But he guards the woman from all this.17 As Ruskin maps out separate spheres, in a speech which has intriguing echoes of Katharine’s speech in V. ii of The Taming of the Shrew, different character traits, or forms of ‘power’, place men in public and women in private sectors. Both men and women make social contributions, but the active, public roles men engage in can morally compromise them, and Ruskin accepts that hardening. Women, on the other hand, have limited spheres, and limited activities, but they remain ‘guarded’ from the ‘peril and trial’ that the worlds of commerce, politics, law, academia, religion and the military burden men with. Ruskin was not alone in seeing men as carrying greater burdens while women were protected from the taint of ‘contest’ and ‘rough work’. He also had ample company in remaining silent on how that ‘rough work’ endowed men with power to set the terms of women’s lives. As with any ideology, the strategies of the separate spheres doctrine rested as much on its silences as on the points it fully articulated. When Ruskin wrote of his conversations with Jameson, he dismissed her intellectual abilities and her lack of originality. At more than one point in their collected works, however, Ruskin’s commentary on a work of art or literature followed Jameson’s, and traces territory she had already charted. Not the least of these points of contact is his claim in the second 1864 lecture, ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ that ‘Shakespeare has no heroes – he has only heroines’.18 Decades before Ruskin’s eloquently balanced chart of separate spheres, however, Sarah Stickney Ellis’s Women of England conduct book series popularized notions of domestic ideology, first in Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits (1838), then in Daughters of England (1842), Mothers of England (1843), and finally, Wives of England: Their Relative Duties, Domestic Influence, and Social Obligations (1843). In the same year Wives of England was published, gift sets of Ellis’s entire series became available. Aggressive marketing for this series, along with its popularity as presents for young women, makes it a reliable touchstone for the discourse Jameson was participating in with more subtle portraits of women’s character. As Ellis’s titles alone suggest, she focused her prescriptions for English girls and women on their relationships to male relatives, and on mothers’ roles in training daughters to be suitable wives and

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mothers. Jameson’s view of femininity was much larger than the one Ellis made available in these popular texts. As Jameson framed her readings of Shakespeare’s heroines, as she revised and expanded them for later editions, and as Characteristics was reprinted through the 1870s, her words engage with Ruskin and Ellis and their restrictions on female identity. Her categories, for instance, eschew familial or marital distinctions for women, choosing instead to focus on psychological and emotional characteristics that women could display and embody regardless of familial status. Furthermore, her insistence on three categories for female intellectual and psychological types works against the universalizing of Ellis’ titles; for Jameson no single way of describing the ‘women of England’ will suffice for the variations she sees Shakespeare reveal in women’s many virtues. Jameson frequently relies on the language of domestic ideology – not only in Characteristics but also throughout her later work – so readers would be forgiven for seeing her as one more participant in domestic ideology. In fact, Jameson undeniably articulates an ideology of gender that relies on an understanding of ‘essential’ femininity and masculinity as grounds for her readings of Shakespeare and for her later art criticism. However, she differs significantly from most proponents of domestic ideology both in her persistent refusal to accept the barrier to public roles for women and in her tenacious exhortations to rigorous female intellectual development. Her first category is, after all, ‘Women of Intellect’. In Characteristics, Portia demonstrates her nobility by cross-dressing so that she may appear in court, and Isabella reigns justly, not simply as a wife, but with her ‘strong and upright mind’ in ‘a more extended field of action’ (110). Even Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth, according to Jameson, with their unbridled ambition, display female virtues through their adroit leadership alongside their partners (sometimes leading those weaker male partners). Jameson illustrates the permeability of the public/private divide throughout Characteristics, suggesting through fictional accounts the public benefits of the qualities she sees as distinctly feminine.19 In the final work of her career Jameson codifies the benefits of women’s place outside the home. The title of her final lecture, Communion of Labour, defies the gendered separation of work, sanctifying with Christian language women’s place in social institutions outside the home. Jameson maintains an understanding of gendered traits that marks writers like Ruskin and Ellis, and her discussion of male and female roles suggests a template for Ruskin’s later division. She insists, though, on some distinctions in her own understanding of gender: ‘I deem it a fatal error in morals to assume that there are masculine and feminine virtues and vices: there are masculine and

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feminine qualities, wisely and beautifully discriminated, but there are not masculine and feminine virtues’.20 Jameson charts those gendered ‘qualities’, in the first lecture Sisters of Charity, which she paired with Communion of Labour: Domestic life, the acknowledged foundation of all social life, has settled by a natural law the work of the man and the work of the woman. The man governs, sustains, and defends the family; the woman cherishes, regulates, and purifies it; but though distinct, the relative work is inseparable,–and sometimes exchanged, sometimes shared; so that from the beginning, we have, even in the primitive household, not the division, but the communion of labour.21 Though her roles sound much like Ruskin’s, for Jameson both men’s and women’s roles begin in the ‘domestic life’ and separate spheres collapse in interdependence, with both men and women taking active, engaged and public duties, precisely because their different powers address different, and acute, social needs. For instance, as she elaborates, the actual difference between men’s ‘governing’ and women’s ‘regulating’ blurs, especially when both bring independent thinking to institutional management. Jameson makes explicit the need for women, as well as men, to do mental labour: That the expedient of bringing the female mind and temperament to bear on the masculine brain, (and of course vice versa,) as a physical and moral resource, might be worth a thought, being in accordance with that law of nature or Divine ordinance which placed the two sexes under mutual and sympathetic influences; not always, as the stupid and profligate suppose, for evil and temptation, but for good and healing: not in one or two relations of life, but in every possible relation in which they can be approximated.22 Throughout her examination in Communion of Labour of schools, prisons, hospitals, workhouses and reformatories, Jameson sees concrete needs for the characteristics she identifies as female. Though Jameson generally crafts her language not to offend, she reveals her impatience with the status quo in her frank insistence that only the ‘stupid and profligate’ would keep the sexes separate out of fears of promiscuity. Precisely because women’s characteristics differ from men’s, Jameson argues, no organization will function completely without combined leadership to anticipate and respond to all manner of problems. Repeatedly in the lectures, she also

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recognizes the needs for men (and for some women) to imagine the characters and roles of women differently if social institutions are to change so that women can step with authority into influential positions as hospital wardens or prison matrons. In her readings of Shakespeare’s heroines, Jameson begins to prompt that different, fuller imagination of women’s roles. The burst of impatience in her final lecture might have its early cause in Jameson’s career-long resistance to sexualizing ignorant young women (and to ignorantly sexualizing young women) in the middle-class marriage market. Alda repeatedly mentions the need to reform female education, at no point more caustically than when she criticizes middle-class practices of training girls for a single adult role: securing a husband. In one of her lengthiest speeches, Alda rails against the damage done by raising girls not so much to be wives, as to secure husbands: Blame then that forcing system of education, the most pernicious, the most mistaken, the most far-reaching in its miserable and mischievous effects, that ever prevailed in this world. The custom which shut up women in convents till they were married, and then launched them innocent and ignorant on society, was bad enough; but not worse than a system of education which inundates us with hard, clever, sophisticated girls, trained by knowing mothers, and all-accomplished governesses, with whom vanity and expediency take place of conscience and affection – (in other words, of romance) – ‘frutto senile in sul giovenil fiore’;23 with feelings and passions suppressed or contracted, not governed by higher faculties and purer principles; with whom opinion – the same false honour which sends men out to fight duels – stands instead of the strength and the light of virtue within their own souls. Hence the strange anomalies of artificial society – girls of sixteen who are models of manner, miracles of prudence, marvels of learning, who sneer at sentiment, and laugh at the Juliets and the Imogens; and matrons of forty, who, when the passions should be tame and wait upon the judgment, amaze the world and put us to confusion with their doings. (66) Alda verbalizes the criticisms that mark Jameson’s frustration with broad and broadly damaging middle-class practices of offering daughters no genuine education of the sentiment – letting ‘vanity and expediency take the place of conscience and affection’ – let alone intellectual training. That cultural habit robs young women of the discernment necessary to determine generic differences, leaving them unable to appreciate Juliet’s

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or Imogen’s attractions either as passionate and devoted women or as richly developed literary characters. While Jameson grants the damage this system does to girls, she is equally concerned with the way it robs middle-class culture of the contributions young women might make if they thought more precisely, or sympathized more adroitly. With universal images such as ‘knowing mothers’, ‘all-accomplished governesses’ and an analogy to ‘the same false honour which sends men out to fight duels’, Jameson creates a sense that the practice of protecting facile attractiveness in girls contaminates English culture, and is ‘the most pernicious, the most mistaken, the most far-reaching in its miserable and mischievous effects’. Encouraging girls only in shallow and vain considerations denigrates all those who come into contact with the young women, rather than elevating women to elevate others as Jameson hopes to do with more rigorous and serious attention to both ‘romance’ and to the ‘strength and the light of virtue within their own souls’. Jameson realizes that one must believe in the value and possibility of raising the intellectual and moral nature of girls and women before one will earnestly engage in that project. Alda elucidates the particular features that make Shakespeare’s women such appropriately influential reading for women in search of richer vocational guidance. Alda assumes that middle-class readers share a sufficient familiarity with Shakespeare’s plays to provide her with a common catalogue of examples. More particularly, Alda finds the moral complexity of literature helpful, especially in Shakespeare’s supreme moral studies: ‘All I sought, I found there; his characters combine history and real life; they are complete individuals, whose hearts and souls are laid open before us: all may behold, and all judge for themselves’ (55). In fanciful literature, Alda implies, both male and female readers encounter characters’ interiority, emotions and motives, whereas history’s commitments to veracity might hinder the historian from attributing motives or intentions, or even emotional causes for actions. Carrying on from Alda’s words, Jameson claims that dramatic figures offer more complete characterization and training in emotional and intellectual responses than historical figures do, even if history guarantees realistic examples. Furthermore, Jameson sees Shakespeare’s women collapsing another layer of her contemporaries’ binary thinking drawn from domestic ideology: either women are villains or saints. As Julie Hankey has persuasively argued, Jameson was the first critic to speak against the traditional critical understanding of Shakespeare’s women as less interesting and varied than his male characters. Medon effectively plays Alda’s straight

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man when he phrases the challenge: ‘You know the prevalent idea is that Shakespeare’s women are inferior to his men. This assertion is constantly repeated, and has been but tamely refuted’ (56). In Hankey’s words, Jameson aims at ‘giving back to Shakespeare’s women their “characters” and in the process, doing the same for actual women’.24 Jameson’s range of characters illustrates that none of these dramatic figures can be fully understood through the simplistic paradigm that they are not like the male characters in their plays. As both dramatic art and as illustrations of femininity, Jameson sees Beatrice, Hermione, Viola, Imogen and company as exemplary in their varying types and degrees of attractive feminine qualities. Once she has established the range of femininities available in the study of Shakespeare, Jameson turns to the benefits of the interpretive process that Shakespeare’s plays invite. Aligning herself with her female readers, Alda says, ‘we can unfold the whole character before us, stripped of all pretensions of self-love, all disguises of manner’ (55). With that combination of engagement and critical distance, readers ‘can take the leisure to examine, to analyse, to correct [their] own impressions, to watch the rise and progress of various passions – [they] can hate, love, approve, condemn, without offense to others, without pain to’ themselves (56). Alda makes clear that understanding Shakespeare’s characters depends on the sentimental facilities that young women have been encouraged to develop. However, as Jameson outlines her project through Alda, engaging with characters is not simply an emotional activity, drawing on the readers’ sympathies to provoke love, hate, approval or condemnation. Engaging characters also requires intellectual capacity, and skills in analysis, examination and self-correction, which readers practise through careful attention to the pleasures of Shakespeare. While any reader, regardless of gender, can gain this kind of practised insight, Alda asserts that reading develops these skills for women in rare opportunities. Again, speaking in the first-person plural, she adds ‘it is the safer and the better way – for us at least’ (55). Jameson follows the idea of safety with a metaphorical exploration of passion, which might seem a non sequitur: Passion, when we contemplate it through the medium of imagination, is like a ray of light transmitted through a prism; we can calmly, and with undazzled eye, study its complicated nature, and analyse its variety of tints; but passion brought home to us in its reality, through our own feelings and experience, is like the same ray transmitted through a lens, – blinding, burning, consuming where it falls. (56)

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Knowing, as she does, the tendency of her readers to think of women in binary terms, Jameson realizes the need for ‘safer’ methods of giving women the kinds of emotional experience that will lead to the wisdom and insight necessary in moral decision-making. The fragility of any young woman’s reputation under the confines of nineteenth-century gender ideology left her little room for following passion in real life to possible moral missteps, or even perceived impropriety. Because Shakespeare’s heroines explore a full range of passions – erotic desire, ambition, betrayal, vengeance, hatred – as well as affection, loyalty, steadfastness and honour, they offer female readers the safety of vicarious practice in emotions that might not be ‘safe’ if acted on first-hand. Jameson’s model of vicarious learning allows a girl, for instance, sympathetically to defy her selfish and tribal parents and to elope with her young soul mate, while avoiding both the mortal consequences Juliet suffers and the social consequences of offending middle-class propriety. Jameson’s guiding eye for textual detail suggests that careful, practised analysis can teach young female readers, for instance, the importance of speaking against the machinations of a husband’s jealous friend, or a jealous husband, without suffering the real consequences of that powerful figure as they hone their social and intellectual skills. In studying character, as Jameson does for her readers, she points out that the female reader practises wise and sympathetic attachments, without any real risk to physical safety, to relationship or to reputation. Furthermore, as Alda, and similarly Jameson, cannot resist any opportunity to slide from an analysis of female character to a commentary on some other aspect of Shakespeare’s artistry – his adaptation of his source material from Boccaccio or Holinshed, or the importance of understanding Hamlet to know Ophelia, or Shylock to appreciate Portia – the author repeatedly makes clear the mental attractions of Shakespeare, and the increased pleasure of the text for the informed reader. Jameson’s assumptive posture that she and her readers share a deep familiarity with the plays compliments those readers’ intellect. While quoting her chosen texts frequently, and at length, she does so not to inform her readers of the details of the play, but to share their mutual delight in the beauty of Shakespeare’s language. In the preface to her second edition, Jameson explicitly feminizes the response she and her readers share, writing that familiar passages: are always recognized with pleasure – like dear domestic faces; and if the memory fail at the moment to recall the lines or the sentiment to which the attention is directly required, few like to interrupt the course of

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thought, or undertake a journey from the sofa or garden-seat to the library, to hunt out the volume, the play, the passage, for themselves. (ii) While the ‘dear domestic faces’ of these quotations and the thought of reading in a garden-seat or sofa, rather than at a desk, might seem to suggest a diminished seriousness of the reading endeavour, Jameson makes clear her expectations that female readers will engage this text with both sufficient prior knowledge and focused concentration to profit in a continued ‘course of thought’ over the details of Shakespeare’s language. Her female readers bring mental acuity and sympathetic emotional capacity to understand these characters.

Tradition and the Intellectual Woman Jameson’s choice to focus first on ‘Characters of the Intellect’ testifies to the primacy of intellectual faculties in her model, and the details she notices in Portia, Isabella, Beatrice and Rosalind illuminate her understanding of female virtues. Portia – the cross-dressing public orator – illustrates Jameson’s willingness to move outside the limited range of domestic ideology, and on to enumerate variations in femininity. Jameson continually reverts to lists of superlatives in describing the Lady of Belmont. She contains ‘all the noblest and most loveable qualities that ever met together in woman’ (77); and embodies a ‘heavenly compound of talent, feeling, wisdom, beauty, and gentleness’ (78). Portia’s boldness needs no justifying in Jameson’s analysis, but her wealth and privilege do. Jameson considers Portia as superior not because of her rank, but in spite of it. Portia is exemplary because she takes risks powerfully touse her intellect on behalf of others when her rank already offers her all the security and comfort she might desire. Jameson’s combined roles as critic of domesticity and as art historian surface when she cannot resist drawing on the architectural detail of Portia’s home to describe her treading ‘as though her footsteps had been among marble palaces, beneath roofs of fretted gold, o’er cedar floors and pavements of jaspar and porphyry – amid gardens full of statues, and flowers, and fountains, and haunting music’ (79). Imagining Portia’s setting through her trained eye, the critic readily acknowledges that Portia ‘is individualized by qualities peculiar to herself’, and while ‘high mental powers’ are among those ‘innate’ distinctive qualities, others ‘are the result of the circumstances in which she is placed’ (79). Jameson recognizes Portia’s privilege as ‘one to whom splendour had been familiar from her

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very birth’.25 The power of her privilege sets Portia apart from Jameson’s readers, but rather than eradicating her exemplarity as an intelligent and learned woman, Jameson finds an ability to exercise power that might inspire her less privileged readers. After naming Portia’s aristocratic distance, Jameson recognizes other, more debilitating, exceptions in Portia’s example, and asserts the impossibility of the existence of a nineteenth-century woman of Portia’s rare combination of gifts. The barriers Jameson identifies in cultivating middleclass Victorian Portias, though, are not directly barriers of status. Instead, Jameson asserts that a ‘woman constituted like Portia’ in the nineteenth century ‘would find society armed against her’ (92). As a result, even with Portia’s talents, instead of being like Portia, a gracious, happy beloved, and loving creature, [she] would be a victim, immolated in fire to that multitudinous Moloch termed Opinion. With her, the world without would be at war with the world within: in the perpetual strife either her nature would ‘be subdued to the element it worked in’, and, bending to a necessity it could neither escape nor approve, lose at last something of its original brightness, or otherwise – a perpetual spirit of resistance cherished as a safeguard might perhaps in the end destroy the equipoise; firmness would become pride and self assurance, and the soft, sweet, feminine texture of the mind settle into rigidity. Is there no sanctuary for such a mind?–Where shall it find a refuge from the world? – Where seek for strength against itself? Where but in heaven? (92–3) In her metaphor for public opinion, the incendiary, destructive divinity, ‘the multitudinous Moloch’, Jameson identifies the hegemonic force of domestic ideology’s inchoate and often uncodified practices. Jameson realizes that a ‘gracious, happy, beloved and loving’ woman of Portia’s independence and judgement would be a ‘victim’ in the nineteenth century, both of its education system, and of that ‘multitudinous Moloch termed Opinion’ that Jameson sees barricading any alternative path. Left to decode the occasionally mysterious strictures of ‘Opinion’, a bright, generousspirited and imaginative woman could turn proud, as well as intellectually and morally rigid, rather than socially active. This social dynamic that Jameson sees hindering women’s intellectual and moral courage may seem like a case of blaming the victim of misogyny. Jameson’s lament, however, insists on the recognition of women’s moral agency, even if the more intense forces of ‘perpetual strife’ can taint that agency. Jameson implies by

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negation that if women were trained, encouraged and occupied in activities around them, they could use that moral agency for good, and use it beyond the scope of their own domestic sphere. While Jameson asserts that ‘all the finest parts of Portia are brought to bear in the trial scene’ (84), the heroine’s persuasive and logical abilities are not all that capture the critic’s attention. After establishing Portia’s efficacious mental gifts paired with her emotional depth in the release of Antonio from Shylock’s bond, Jameson can turn unapologetically to Portia’s romantic life. Her analysis dwells next on Portia’s anxieties over Bassanio’s choice in the casket scene, reversing the chronology of The Merchant of Venice. Jameson follows praise of Portia’s ‘womanliness’ with an aphoristic analogy: ‘The affections are to the intellect, what the forge is to the metal; it is they which temper and shape it to all good purposes, and soften, strengthen, and purify it’ (84). In Jameson’s more nuanced and expanded femininity, Portia is not cold and heartless as a result of her intellectual interests; on the contrary, Portia’s ‘intellect’ and ‘imagination’ deepen her emotional attachments, promising her a fulfilling marriage. Sliding as Jameson so often does in and out of the norms of domestic ideology, she positions Portia as a virtuous wife and lover whose selfpossession and intellectual abilities deepen, rather than compromise, her spousal devotion. Portia is not opposed to marrying; she feels trapped in a system that will determine her future and that offers luck as her only asset to gain a husband worthy of her gifts – a trap Jameson recognizes as familiar to her female readers. Jameson asserts that in the casket scene, Portia ‘fears indeed the issue of the trial, on which more than her life is hazarded’ (86). Protected from the ills of ‘some miserable and radical error of education’ (which Jameson sees marring so many nineteenth-century young women), and still buoyed by the ‘flush and bloom of her young and prosperous existence’ (86), Portia is indeed fortunate in marriage and gifted in character, a combination Jameson understands as too rare in her own female contemporaries. Jameson elaborates on Portia’s passionate response to Bassanio’s choice, conjecturing in tellingly general statements: It is, in truth, an awful moment, that in which a gifted woman first discovers, that besides talents and powers, she has also passion and affections; when she first begins to suspect their vast importance in the sum of her existence; when she first confesses that her happiness is no longer in her own keeping, but is surrendered for ever and for ever into the dominion of another! The possession of uncommon powers of mind are so far from

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affording relief or resource in the first intoxicating surprise – I had almost said terror – of such a revolution, that they render it more intense. The sources of thought multiply beyond calculation the sources of feeling; and mingled, they rush together, a torrent deep as strong. (88) Surrounded as this critical eruption is by two lengthy quotations of Portia’s poetic speech, nonetheless the general quality of the exclamation suggests its inspiration in Jameson’s own century. While Portia’s love runs deep, her emotions also ‘rush together’ in a ‘torrent as deep as strong’ when she realizes that marriage might jeopardize her well deserved autonomy. The passage’s universal and vehement language speaks to Jameson’s awareness of the perils of Victorian coverture laws. Even as early as 1830, when she was composing Characteristics and living separated from Robert, Anna understood the traps in Victorian marriage law that imperiled women without Portia’s political power. By the 1850s she was dedicating considerable energy to reforming those laws through her contributions to the Langham Place Circle, and particularly to The Married Women’s Property Committee. Among the convoluted marriage laws in nineteenth-century Britain, the one the MWPC saw as most urgently in need of reform was the principle of coverture, the legal principle which made all of a woman’s property automatically the possession of her husband upon marriage.26 Unlike many of the women whom the committee described in their lobbying materials, Anna did not suffer from Robert’s legalized theft of her earnings from her own labour. In gathering support for reform, the women of the MWPC drew sympathy from anecdotal evidence of abusive husbands cajoling or beating working wives and then confiscating their earnings to squander them at a gin mill. While the committee worked carefully to ensure the truth of all their stories, they also wisely drew on other arguments, such as the injustice of a principle that eliminated women’s identity by subsuming it into that of her husband. The Committee was aware that their arguments struck at the core of domestic ideology – the notion that men lived and worked in public spheres, supporting the women who lived in the private realm. When married women earned and kept independent incomes, wives entered a position that some saw as a challenge to that foundational doctrine. Unlike inheritances or gifts, which might give a woman property while still subsuming her under a familial economy, female earnings indicated an economic independence that belied the principles of domestic ideology. Insisting on women’s rights to their earnings meant insisting on their right to inhabit the public sphere, in spite of the fiery disapproval of the Moloch of

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Opinion. Before she joined her committee members in this work of legal reform, Jameson recognized the cyclical effect of limitations on female education and of patriarchal control of marriage and property. In the face of this rationale against broad intellectual training for young women, Jameson analyses another character of intellect – Isabella from Measure for Measure – and reconsiders a system that she had Alda condemn earlier. In the Introduction Alda quips, ‘custom which shut up women in convents till they were married, and then launched them innocent and ignorant on society’ was no worse than what young women face in the nineteenth century (66). Notably, when Alda speaks, she sees convent education of earlier centuries as primarily created to protect young women’s virginity until their families could find them a husband. In relevant ways, then, Alda’s critique of the convent system simply echoes her ensuing critique of the ‘forcing system’ that makes young women inexperienced and superficially attractive. In considering the particular gifts of Isabella, ‘one of a consecrated sisterhood – a novice of St. Clare’ (99), Jameson returns to convent training for women, examining where practices of monastic life might actually prove beneficial, no matter what a family’s marital hopes were for their daughter. With this idiosyncratic reflection, Jameson begins a line of thought on female education that continues through her career. First, Jameson’s carefully pointed contrast between Portia and Isabella sets the stage for her readers’ understanding that no single approach to female education can foster all the desired skills and virtues. Admitting that the characters of Portia and Isabella are so apparently different that ‘we can scarce believe that the same element enters into the composition of each’, Jameson starts by declaring how these two characters of intellect are similar: ‘they are portrayed as equally wise, gracious, virtuous, fair and young; we perceive in both the same exalted principle of firmness of character; the same depth of reflection and persuasive eloquence; the same self-denying generosity and capability of strong affections’ (98). After cataloguing their parallel virtues, Jameson offers one of her occasional paeans to Shakespeare’s genius, this time for recognizing the variety in female virtue and character: ‘we must wonder at that marvellous power by which qualities and endowments, essentially and closely allied, are so combined and modified as to produce a result altogether different. “O Nature! O Shakespeare! Which of ye drew from the other?”’27 ‘Nature’ may create women with these subtle varieties of virtue and intelligence, but only Shakespeare has had the insight and brilliance to represent that full variety of female power. Jameson’s goal is to help readers recognize this variance

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by placing different heroines side by side and expecting intriguing distinctions to arise. In dedicating several pages to the various distinctions between these two heroines, Jameson prepares her reader for accepting that while Portia would never need a convent education, a monastic life prepares a woman of Isabella’s personal timidity and passionate rationality for the splendid and authoritative public presence she finds herself thrust into. Portia clearly wins the award for most attractive female intellectual, but Isabella brings her own striking survival qualities to the match, and her convent education strengthens those attractions while moderating her weaknesses. Demonstrating her own ability to see the forest of women while identifying the trees, Jameson describes Portia as ‘like the orange-tree, hung at once with golden fruit and luxuriant flowers, which has expanded into bloom and fragrance beneath favouring skies’ (99). Isabella, in contrast, is ‘like a stately and graceful cedar, towering on some alpine cliff, unbowed and unscathed amid the storm’ (99). Each character shows the ability to flourish in her given environment, and Portia’s environment has offered more luxuries and developed more attractions than the more desolate series of trials Isabella undergoes. Jameson ends the comparison with an interpolation of the heroines’ individual speeches on mercy, pointing out that ‘Portia’s eulogy on mercy is a piece of heavenly rhetoric . . . If not premeditated, it is at least part of a pre-concerted scheme’ while Isabella’s exhortations to Angelo ‘are poured from the abundance of her heart in broken sentences, and with the artless vehemence of one who feels that life and death hang upon her appeal’ (101). Jameson draws on the two speeches to illustrate Portia’s sympathetic moral courage as she dismantles Shylock’s case. Isabella’s speech, on the other hand, represents ‘a certain moral grandeur, a saintly grace, something of vestal dignity and purity, which render her less attractive and more imposing’ (98). In the end, Isabella and Portia are both characters of intellect and virtue, but Jameson concedes that without Portia’s social advantages, and with greater trials of sexual oppression, Isabella cannot attract the sympathy Portia gains. While Jameson remains perfectly willing to allow for her readers’ taste, the pointed contrasts reveal her reluctance to leave them comfortable with moral judgements based largely on the appeal of beauty, rank and ease of circumstance. Her discussion of Isabella demonstrates Jameson’s belief that the combination of single-sex community, the communal emphasis on contemplation, the focus on internal discipline, and the transcendent ideals of convent life provide temperamentally serious or passionate young women with a

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rare opportunity to nurture gifts and to minimize character flaws. Notably, Characteristics steers clear of the many anti-Catholic themes rampant in England at the time Jameson was writing.28 Furthermore, the gender hierarchy in the Catholic Church leaves her unperturbed. Jameson’s multitudinous interests render it unlikely that she was ignorant of the concerns voiced in anti-Catholic bigotry. She simply seems unwilling to dignify those claims when convents offer women a necessary path to adult intellectual development. Nor is she particularly interested in the content of women’s education in convents. She endorses the transcendent priorities of Christian doctrine in helping women to shape a sense of their own priorities, but she never advocates a strictly Christian education. Rather, she acknowledges that the structure and the practices of monastic life offer ardent young women a venue to reach their mental and emotional potential. Jameson’s lamentations against the relative critical silence on Isabella (finding fault in earlier critics for their unwillingness to recognize the subtleties in the cerebral ‘nun’) attest to her assumptions that, without guidance, readers will fail to see Isabella’s attractions because of her less charming attributes. Her fellow critics, according to Jameson, certainly lack Shakespeare’s genius for discerning degrees of human difference. She draws her evidence from Hazlitt who fails to notice Isabella as anything other than rigidly chaste, and from Charlotte Lennox, who labels the novitiate a ‘coarse vixen’. Jameson only identifies Lennox as a ‘lady critic’, but the detail allows her to further distance herself from Lennox’s ally Samuel Johnson, the Shakespearean Jameson disagrees with most vituperatively (107). Responding to her sense that Isabella’s transformation from novitiate to Duchess raises general scepticism in readers of Measure for Measure, Jameson asserts that the qualities of monastic life prepare a woman of Isabella’s temperament, virtues and shortcomings to take a beneficial public role: Isabella, ‘dedicate to nothing temporal’, might have found resignation through self-government, or have become a religious enthusiast; while ‘place and greatness’ would have appeared to her strong and upright mind, only a more extended field of action, a trust and a trial. The mere trappings of power and state, the gemmed coronal, the ermined robe, she would have regarded as the outward emblems of her earthly profession; and would have worn them with as much simplicity as her novice’s hood and scapular; still, under whatever guise she might tread this thorny world– the same ‘angel of light’. (110)

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Jameson recognizes that, unlike some methods of the education and training of female sentiment, seclusion in a convent gives Isabella the rare female freedom to take herself seriously. Perhaps she takes herself too seriously, Jameson might agree with her readers, but that self-value gives her a dignity that Jameson finds rare among women. In borrowing Shakespeare’s marked locution to highlight Isabella’s devotion, as one who values the prayers of those ‘dedicate to nothing temporal’, Jameson suggests that Isabella might choose distance where readers would hope for some sentimental attachment. Even so, the critic notes that while Isabella’s moral valour may strike others as odd, it grows from her decision-making practice as novitiate and prepares her to temper her sentiments with more appropriate lack of concern in civic arenas when she steps into the aristocracy. At the end of her career, Jameson would return to women’s religious communities and the opportunities they offered for female development, completely independent of the realm of the imaginative literature that she analyses in Characteristics. These communities hold value because they give women distance from the compulsion of bourgeois public opinion about propriety, as well as for their belief in transcendent ideals that Jameson found powerful in strengthening women to live outside public opinion. In Sisters of Charity and again in Communion of Labour, Jameson details the vocational experiences available to women in the schools, hospitals and charitable institutions of convents and beguinages. Jameson maintained throughout her career the ‘impossibility’ of raising Portia in the nineteenth century; a life she can imagine in the early modern countryside at a distance from Venice is not possible in industrial England. Through a historical and fictional comparison, Jameson encourages her readers to begin to imagine how a more engaging Isabella might still be possible with a richer offering of educational programmes. Jameson strengthens this comparison by aligning Isabella with a historical woman. In mentioning convents at the close of her chapter on Isabella, Jameson contrasts her Characters of the Intellect, like Portia and Isabella, with Characters of the Affections such as Desdemona, and Characters of Passion and Imagination, such as Ophelia. Jameson claims that ‘women such as Desdemona and Ophelia would have passed their lives in the seclusion of a nunnery, without wishing, like Isabella, for stricter bonds, or planning, like St. Theresa, the reformation of their order, simply, because any restraint would have been efficient, as far as they were concerned’ (110). Co-opting Hamlet’s term for a convent, Jameson reads tendencies towards compliance and restraint as merely tendencies, not necessarily the virtues

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that Ruskin, Ellis and others might want to make them for women. However, the physical and moral restraint of the cloister, history suggests to Jameson, provide a secure forge for deeply intellectual and passionately courageous women, like Isabella and her historical counterpart Theresa of Avila, whose intellect and passion lead them into the furnace of Opinion’s disapproval. Jameson specifies differences between women of wise moral power on the one hand, and compliant women represented in Desdemona and Ophelia, on the other: In the convent (which may stand here poetically for any narrow and obscure situation in which such a woman might be placed), Isabella would not have been unhappy, but happiness would have been the result of an effort, or of the concentration of her great mental powers to some particular purpose; as St. Theresa’s intellect, enthusiasm, tenderness, restless activity, and burning eloquence, governed by one overpowering sentiment of devotion, rendered her the most extraordinary of saints. Isabella, like St. Theresa, complains that the rules of her order are not sufficiently severe, and from the same cause, – that from the consciousness of strong intellectual and imaginative power, and of overflowing sensibility, she desires a more ‘strict restraint’, or, from the continual, involuntary struggle against the trammels imposed, feels its necessity. (109–10) Jameson is aware that Isabella is a novice of St Clare, and nineteenth-century women who share her passionate nature and native intelligence, can be driven to ill usage through misunderstandings and manipulation, or ‘the continual involuntary struggle against the trammels imposed’ by more powerful people around them. In addition to differences of character between Isabella and Desdemona or Ophelia, Jameson also notes differences of environment or circumstance. Isabella’s combination of ‘strong intellectual and imaginative power’ with ‘overflowing sensibility’ finds happiness in the ‘particular purpose’ of the convent. As Jameson’s discussion of another nun, St Theresa, makes clear, that particular purpose, even when it is restraining, provides young women with a clear channel for energies and characteristics that might otherwise become destructive. An education in which one woman might thrive would thwart or pervert another’s best characteristics; the restraints of a convent life that deepen Isabella’s powerful virtues might dampen Portia’s glowing gifts, and would do nothing for a woman of Desdemona’s self-denial. The author more fully describes St Theresa two decades later in Legends of the Monastic Orders (1850). That description of Theresa of Avila combines traits Jameson admires in Shakespeare’s ‘Characters of the Intellect’, and

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recalls not only Isabella’s training, but also Portia’s historical impossibility in the nineteenth century: But she would have been a remarkable woman in any age and country. Under no circumstances could her path through life have been the highway of commonplace mediocrity; under no circumstances could the stream of her existence have held its course untroubled; for nature had given her great gifts, large faculties of all kinds for good and evil, a fervid temperament, a most poetical and ‘shaping power’ of imagination, a strong will, singular eloquence, an extraordinary power over the minds and feelings of others, – genius, in short, with all its terrible and glorious privileges. Yet what was she to do with these energies – this genius? In Spain, in the sixteenth century, what working sphere existed for such a spirit lodged in a woman’s form?29 Elusive though Jameson is about the conditions of sixteenth-century Spain that make it an especially unlikely place for a woman to flourish, the unlikelihood of a St Theresa harkens back to Jameson’s assertion that there could be no Portia in the nineteenth century. The source of that echo is Theresa’s exceptional and valuable gifts of genius, of fervour, of persuasiveness and of magnanimity. Theresa is not flawed as much as she is stifled, and potentially warped, ‘in a woman’s form’. This historical impossibility of female virtue, when linked to St Theresa, reminds later readers of the extent of Jameson’s influence in the nineteenth century. From the early days of her own career, George Eliot read Jameson avidly.30 Eliot returned to Jameson’s histories of Christian art as she was writing Middlemarch (1871), and the echoes of Jameson’s Theresa in Eliot’s ‘Prelude’ to that novel are unmistakable, even in Eliot’s more lyrical prose: Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur illmatched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion.31 Eliot’s Theresa echoes the plight of Jameson’s Portia – tormented by the Moloch of Opinion, and turning destructive, not merely ineffective, in unsociable conditions. Eliot’s narrative seems to acknowledge her readers’ familiarity with Jameson’s particular choices in representing Theresa, asking the readers of her ‘Prelude’ which of them ‘has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning

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hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors?’ That gentle smile of memory might be prompted by knowledge of Jameson’s earlier text, which shares several details with Eliot’s portrait in the Prelude. Significantly, both Jameson and Eliot note women’s power for destruction in their frustrated aspirations. Failed education, others’ stunted expectations, and the pettiness of middle-class social circles may all share culpability in rendering female heroism impossible in nineteenth-century middle-class culture, but importantly for Jameson (and for Eliot, as we see in Rosamond Vincy), those circumstances cannot render all women powerless. Female power in intellect, in passion, in affection, when undeveloped, channelled or trained in serious education, simply grows destructive. Repeatedly, Jameson emphasizes the social loss in not helping talented women to thrive so that they might use their talents well. She insists on realist understandings of femininity throughout: some women will only manage an idiosyncratic virtue, while other women will remain virtuous in a dutiful fashion, but will lack the moral courage to accomplish the kinds of virtuous acts Jameson sees as possible for active, educated women in the nineteenth century. Eliot’s attention to the details of Jameson’s writing, and her reliance on Jameson’s understanding of Catholic art and Catholic saints attests to the cultural authority Jameson held among her contemporaries. After all, the essayist who penned ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ and who created the naïve Dorothea Brooke did not suffer female fools lightly. Eliot might have disregarded Jameson, even if she did not criticize her; instead, she wrote novels that suggest the continuing, subtle but pervasive influence of Jameson’s work on her own.

Characters of the Passions and Affections in the Mind of an Intellectual Woman After becoming familiar with Alda’s sometimes caustic voice, and reading Jameson’s praise of female intelligence in the first section, Jameson’s opening praise in the second section rings with hyperbole. In approaching the young lovers Juliet, Helena, Perdita, Viola, Ophelia and Miranda, she exclaims: O Love! Thou teacher – O Grief! Thou tamer, and Time – thou healer of human hearts! – bring hither all your deep and serious revelations! – And ye too, rich fancies of unbruised, unbowed youth – ye visions of long

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perished hopes – shadows of unborn joys – gay colourings of the dawn of existence! Whatever memory hath treasured up of bright and beautiful in nature or in art; all soft and delicate images – all lovely forms – divinest voices and entrancing melodies – gleams of sunnier skies and fairer climes – Italian moonlights, and airs that ‘breathe of the sweet south’, – now, if it be possible, revive to my imagination – live once more to my heart! (124–5) Amidst the dashes, the exclamation points, the exotic locales, Jameson preserves herself from charges of excessive stodginess and moral earnestness by turning to these younger, more reckless lovers, her Characters of the Passion and Imagination, after she praises the more reserved women of the intellect (whose passion she passionately defends). These heroines – with their youth, wealth, beauty and romantic adventure – seem most likely to attract Jameson’s novel-reared readership. Like novel heroines, of course, these fictional romantic adventuresses live outside the world of consequences facing Jameson’s flesh and blood readers. The stakes of her project demand both that she admit their attractiveness early on, and that she contain that attractiveness for middle-class women who know their stories too well, but whose own passion-driven and imaginative schemes could lead them to seduction, abandonment, foolish marriage or ostracism. As the effusiveness of her opening to ‘Characters of Passion and Imagination’ indicates, Jameson never denies that these lovers make attractive heroines, but she stresses that they also remind her of the dangers inherent in raising girls under domestic ideology. Jameson implies that any imaginative girl with a modicum of passion risks fleeing from domestic tedium into a wild romance, locking herself into the ‘sacred duty of marriage’ without the intellectual or spiritual resources of a Beatrice or a Hermione, let alone without the economic resources of a Portia. The gasping opening voice of this section – calling in rapid succession on love, grief and time – reminds Jameson’s readers that for all of their attractiveness, these young heroines are most vulnerable, and most difficult to differentiate in personality, because circumstances guide their conclusions. Her opening enthusiasm for Shakespeare’s artistic powers in representing romance has sufficient veracity, but as a writer herself, Jameson is more interested in character than in romantic passion. She makes that distinction in an aside during her discussion of Juliet, whose ‘energy . . . does not remind us of the moral grandeur of Isabel, or the intellectual powers of Portia; – it is founded in the strength of passion, not in the strength of character; – it is accidental rather than inherent, rising with the tide of feeling or temper, and with it

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subsiding’ (128–9). Passion for justice or morality or intellectual engagement – as found in Portia, Isabella or Beatrice– gives women a character worth examining. Jameson licenses a woman for the deepest romantic passion, but fails to find sustained interest in that feminine trait. While Jameson notes that these young heroines are all marked by their imaginative passion, and she sees that capacity as essentially feminine, she cannot resist displaying her own intellectual characteristics repeatedly throughout the section, as if to keep an alternate model of engaging femininity before her readers. This section of Characteristics contains the densest use of explanatory footnotes. Jameson’s discussion of Ophelia also becomes an occasion for her most lengthy and pointed engagement with the work of another critic, the pseudonymous Christopher North of Blackwood’s. While, as a literary scholar, she cannot avoid examining the passion that propels so many tragedies, and that brings comedies to satisfactory resolution, her dual project here leads her to engage that passion through intellectual exercises, as well as through the fervent, unmitigated praise that opens the chapter. Even her choice of Juliet as the central heroine of passion and imagination has its origins in both an intellectual and a sentimental attraction. Juliet was Fanny Kemble’s first stage role in 1829, and one that she played with tremendous success. By the time Jameson composed Characteristics, she had grown deeply attached to Kemble, in part because of their shared intellectual interest in Shakespeare’s plays. In her essay on Kemble, Jameson repeatedly asserts that Kemble’s success as an actress rested not only in her genius, but also in her continual, engaged study of Shakespeare’s plays. Juliet, on the other hand, has no such capacity for intellectual engagement. Passion and imagination rule Juliet’s character: ‘With Juliet, imagination is, in the first instance, if not the source, the medium of passion; and passion again kindles her imagination’ (142). This powerful imagination animates Juliet’s poetic speech, but without the ‘nobler reason’ that blends Portia’s imagination with ‘other intellectual and moral faculties’, Juliet has insufficient power to meet tragedy with redeeming boldness and mercy. As a result, Jameson argues, circumstances shape Juliet’s destiny because, ‘there is a deficiency of reflection and of moral energy arising from previous habit and education; and the action of the drama, while it serves to develop the character, appears but its natural and necessary result’ (107). Though Jameson delights in the passion and imagination of Juliet and her fellow heroines, she is aware that those traits impede, rather than promote, the development of character that she hopes for in her readers as they encounter tragedy vicariously through reading Romeo and Juliet.

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The weight Jameson gives to circumstance recalls her passage declaring the necessity of convent restraints to help Isabella reach her potential. Jameson brings together Desdemona and Ophelia in that passage when she distinguishes women whose grandness of character requires the restraint of a convent education from other, more domestic women like the heroines of Othello and Hamlet. In doing so, she conflates the categories of ‘passion and imagination’ (through Ophelia) with ‘affection’ as it is found in Desdemona. For Jameson, devoted, loyal, submissive women – who might find their literary counterparts in Desdemona, Ophelia or Cordelia – live good lives. Furthermore, they will never cause trouble, because they have no interest in reforms that would offend the status quo. Ophelia and Desdemona, as a daughter and a wife who remain close to domestic centres in their respective plays, fail to inspire Jameson’s more extended commentary in ‘Characters of the Intellect’ or in ‘Historical Characters’. Good women (or even unreserved women who tie themselves emotionally to men) might be admired, but Jameson sees them lacking the moral courage to behave in ways she finds truly admirable. As a result, these women classed purely by affection and passionate devotion captivate Jameson’s interest less than do others. Imogen earns Jameson’s attention as the character of affection highlighted in the introductory illustration of Alda and Medon in the library; the chapter on Cymbeline fills more pages than discussions of Hermione, Cordelia or even Desdemona, her categorical counterparts. Imogen undeniably outranks the others for the freedom of mobility she enjoys, with no cloister to limit her choices. Moreover, she refuses to accept the circumstances her marriage hands her. Hermione merits attention, as one of Shakespeare’s more mature heroines, even while she chooses a cloistered life to escape her tyrannical husband. Contrastingly, nearly half of Ophelia’s chapter is taken up with reflections on Hamlet. Following the pattern she relies on elsewhere, Jameson praises Desdemona as a dramatic construction, even while her silence shines light on the waste of Desdemona’s passivity: ‘In Desdemona we cannot but feel that the slightest manifestation of intellectual power or active will would have injured the dramatic effect. She is a victim consecrated from the first’ (224). Jameson notes the tragedy of these characters’ circumstances, she takes time to distinguish their minor differences, and she insists on some variety even in their forms of passivity. In the end, even her tenacious attention to varieties of femininities can find little to engage with in heroines who do not resist those tragic endings, as the loyal wives Imogen and Hermione both do.

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Hermione stands unique among Shakespeare’s characters as one whom the play transforms into visual art. Statuary’s ability to inspire in both the characters and audience a response that is initially breathtaking, but soon turns reflective, clearly draws Jameson to the play, stirring memories of her own gallery and church explorations. As if prompted by Hermione’s transformation into ‘dead stone’, Jameson finds herself thinking about Hermione’s fellow ‘Characters of the Affection’ in terms of visual art, and enhancing the intellectual interest of Desdemona, Imogen and Cordelia. In spite of her affective response to the final scene of The Winter’s Tale, Jameson frankly positions these Shakespearean domestic angels as potentially less appealing, claiming that characters ‘in which the affections and the moral qualities predominate over fancy and all that bears the name of passion are not, when we meet with them in real life, the most striking and interesting, nor the easiest to be understood and appreciated’ (200). In these obedient, loyal and submissive women, Jameson recognizes the risk of an audience perceiving them as lacking the individuality she lauded in Shakespeare’s Characters of Intellect – who clearly embody difference of both degree and kind. Painters, Jameson concludes, have the advantage over writers in endowing these sweet women with interest. Their beautiful appearance, Jameson suggests, primarily draws readers to these heroines. She notes the problem that physical characteristics are more readily available to spur affect in painters’ models than when they are recalled in dramatic lines. The beauty she recognizes, however, is not merely that of physical beauty, but of ‘feelings and affections . . . upturned from the depths of the heart’ leaving the general reader underwhelmed (200). While even a facile reader might admire physical beauty, Jameson challenges her readers to notice (and to take pleasure in) the complexity of emotional and psychological depth, even when that depth seems absent in a submissive or retiring woman. To make her case for these pliant women, Jameson borrows from Goethe’s analogy for all Shakespeare’s characters, comparing ‘them to the old-fashioned watches in glass cases, which not only showed the index pointing to the house, but the wheels and springs within, which set that index in motion’ (201). Jameson argues for interiority in these ‘gentle, beautiful, and innocent’ heroines, whose actions may make them seem repetitively obedient and submissive. Even in characters who are not ‘the most striking and interesting’, Jameson challenges her readers to attend to detail, and develop the appreciation that comes through fine distinctions. In turning to her knowledge of art history, Jameson declares such ‘characters are not easily exhibited in the colours of poetry, and when we meet with them there, we are reminded of the effect of Raffaelle’s pictures’ (200). In a rare (but not unique) moment of critical humour, Jameson claims

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strong authority for her hunch that ‘Characters of the Affection’ rarely captivate: Sir Joshua Reynolds assures us that it took him three weeks to discover the beauty of the frescoes in the Vatican; and many, if they spoke the truth, would prefer one of Titian’s or Murillo’s Virgins to one of Raffaelle’s heavenly Madonnas. The less there is of marked expression or vivid colour in a countenance or character, the more difficult to delineate it in such a manner as to captivate and interest us: but when this is done, and done to perfection, it is the miracle of poetry in painting, and of painting in poetry. Only Rafaelle and Correggio have achieved it in one case, and only Shakespeare in the other. (200) And, the careful reader sees in the silence, only a Jamesonian reader or viewer can grasp the increments in artistic beauty that exceed the physical attractions of the woman represented, as they exceed Sir Joshua Reynolds’ first (and second) glance. That developed taste in art combined with female experience authorizes Jameson to demarcate increments in female character, and that incremental difference renders these women more intriguing, and more illustrative of the possibilities for a more robust understanding of femininity among those who read Shakespeare well. The challenge of creating interest in a category such as the ‘Characters of the Affections’ testifies to Shakespeare’s skill as a poet. In creating Cordelia, Desdemona, Hermione and Imogen, Shakespeare demonstrates an artistry found elsewhere only in the painters Jameson would explore for the remainder of her writing career, documenting their genius as she documented variations in femininity, and as she demonstrated the insights of a female critic’s well trained and experienced eye. Jameson’s opening comments seem to emphasize the subtle differences in Hermione, Desdemona and Imogen, but she quickly finds herself emphasizing the similarity that they ‘all are victims of the unfounded jealousy of their husbands’ (201). Because the circumstance of each of these three heroines is ‘varied with wonderful skill’, Jameson explores the range of destructiveness of a jealous, or abusive husband, and the equal range of dignity with which women might respond to unjust treatment. Her preparatory remarks for analysing individual ‘Characters of the Affections’ draw both on her intellectual experience as an art historian and her personal experience as an unhappy wife under Victorian marriage law. Both the varied circumstances of these heroines and their varied characters, which Jameson argues, are ‘as different as it is possible to imagine’ illuminate the dangers of structurally unequal marriages as much as they illuminate

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individual tragedies of conjugal submission to violently irrational husbands and fathers. As a result, Jameson turns the section into a meditation on the need for structural equality in marriage, even when wives might survive as Hermione or Imogen do, rather than be sacrificed to a tragic combination of institution and personality, as is Desdemona. Hermione serves another important role for Jameson: she is ‘in the prime of beauty and womanhood’ but ‘not represented in the first bloom of her youth’ (201). The continual reminders in the final scene that 16 years have passed attest that Hermione has survived experiences that most young heroines, or readers, cannot imagine. Indeed, Jameson admits that Hermione’s situation ‘admits but of few general reflections’ on the condition of woman (204). Who else would become a queen, find herself falsely accused of adultery, have her daughter sent into exile to die of exposure while her infant son is taken from her to die in the illness of separation, only to be reunited with her recovered daughter and her husband after 16 years of dignified seclusion? Few of Jameson’s readers would see themselves in Hermione, but some might see aspects of themselves, Jameson senses, and those aspects might be the particular suffering of a middle-aged woman under nineteenth-century marriage, family and property laws that left the abandoned wife or woman particularly vulnerable. Hermione’s story, for all its particularities, takes her beyond the more typical allusive ending of the marriage plot, and well into the trials of a once-happy marriage. That later life story renders Hermione a particular kind of heroine, and a particular kind of cautionary tale. Jameson finds Hermione ‘open to criticism on one point’ and that point is her choice of seclusion (207). Considering Jameson’s longstanding interest in St Theresa, as well as in Isabella’s status as a novitiate, this attention to Hermione’s life as a recluse raises the issue of women’s communal lives in convents once again. Hermione’s already deep experience as wife and mother before she enters seclusion indicates Jameson’s interest in the functions of women’s religious communities beyond educating young women. In raising the critique of female seclusion, Jameson anticipates the later nineteenth-century phobia Charles Kingsley expressed most potently in chapter 10 of his novel Yeast: convents and beguinages pampered girls’ ‘lust for singularity and self-glorification’.32 Jameson’s serious consideration of women’s religious communities as both empowering and properly chastening to intelligent, passionate women, was rarer than comments like Kingsley’s about his fictional heroine. His narrator dismisses her desire to enter religious life by claiming that ‘the thought of menial services towards the poor, however distasteful to her, came in quite

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prettily to fill up the little ideal of a life of romantic asceticisms and mystic contemplation, which gave the true charm in her eyes to her wild project’.33 Not in the least naive, Jameson’s Hermione needs none of Kingsley’s romanticism to fill the blanks in her life. She enters seclusion fully knowing what she sacrifices, and all too aware of her vulnerability under the patriarchal power of a suddenly capricious husband. Jameson, like the heroine she admires, draws on experience to assert the necessary place of women’s religious communities in offering physical safety and possibilities for a life of dignity that few other social institutions in Leontes’ court, or in early nineteenth-century England, offered as an alternative to life on the streets. Jameson might agree with Kingsley that convents offer middleclass women an escape, but she sees that escape as from physical and emotional danger, while he sees it only as from the mundane duties of a wife or daughter. In her defence of Hermione’s decision, Jameson emphasizes depth in Hermione’s femininity. After describing the terms of the queen’s 16-year withdrawal, Jameson writes that her ‘peculiar character’ (as well as the ‘purposes of poetry’) necessitate the long seclusion: In such a mind as hers, the sense of cruel injury, inflicted by one she had loved and trusted, without awakening any violent anger or any desire of vengeance, would sink deep – almost incurably and lastingly deep . . . Can we believe that the mere tardy acknowledgement of her innocence could make amends for wrongs and agonies such as these? or heal a heart which must have bled inwardly, consumed by that untold grief, ‘which burns worse than tears drown?’ (207–8) Rather than insisting on rapid selfless forgetting of injustices – as so much writing on femininity does in her time – Jameson pauses over apparent aberrations in the virtues of her heroine. Hermione’s self-imposed distance from Leontes might not look like affection, or even result from spousal devotion. Jameson repeatedly argues that these forms of mild resistance in Shakespeare’s heroines represent deep virtues and affections, in realistically morally complex situations, such as a wise middle-aged woman’s attempt to combine spousal and maternal affection with self-respect might effect. Responses guided by maternal duty might not look like spousal duty, or vice versa, and those discrepancies fascinate Jameson in her more mature heroines. Recognizing that separation of gendered spheres into ‘public’ and ‘private’ actually robs mothers and wives of privacy as much as it does access to a public sphere, Jameson argues for the usefulness of female religious

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communities. She reads the seclusion that Hermione demands in The Winter’s Tale as allowing her to untangle those conflicting duties, to mend her deeply (and rightly) wounded feelings, and to allow her to wrestle with the moral tangle of her plight so that she might not only return to the court, but also reign again as queen. In Jameson’s words, in ‘a mind like Hermione’s . . . there are but two influences which predominate over the will, – time and religion. And what then remained, but that, wounded in heart and spirit, she should retire from the world? – not to brood over her wrongs, but to study forgiveness, and wait the fulfilment of the oracle which had promised the termination of her sorrows’ (209). Seclusion – even for the time to ‘study’ the undeniably feminine skill of forgiveness – would be a rare gift to an early nineteenth-century middle-class wife. With typical Jamesonian even-handedness, she adds that these communities benefit the society of both genders when they separate women while they recover from the destructive behaviour of others and from their own emotional responses. Separation for the older Hermione functions as it does for the younger Isabella, sending her back into mixed gendered society when she has found both the emotional control to use her passion and the strength to contribute with the best of her virtues. Throughout this section, as she tends with particular interest to the literary genius of Shakespeare’s ‘Characters of the Affections’, Jameson stresses his ability to recognize individuality drawn from particular circumstances, offering shades and shifting colours in femininity and avoiding types even within the categories that Jameson herself continually refers to. Middle-class nineteenth-century English wives, and would-be wives, might not find encouragement in many conduct manuals, sermons or even novels to cultivate this feminine individuality, encountering instead calls for uniform loyalty and submission to husbands and fathers. Jameson, however, cannot miss the opportunity to reflect on possibilities of such intriguing individuality, not only in young and passionate women, but also in submissive, middle-aged women. As she employs all of her own learning and experience to explore the depths of these dramatic characters whose plots are often driven by circumstance, Jameson continually demonstrates the possibilities for developing moral and psychological character in English women.

Historical Characters – A Page of Their Own In the final section of Characteristics, ‘Historical Characters’, Jameson returns explicitly to her pedagogical aim, opening with an assertion of the educational value of these characters’ ambiguous generic status:

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It does not add to the pain, as far as tragedy is a source of emotion, that the wrongs and sufferings represented, the guilt of Lady Macbeth, the despair of Constance, the arts of Cleopatra, and the distresses of Katherine, had a real existence; but it adds infinitely to the moral effect, as a subject of contemplation and a lesson of conduct. (261–2) The ‘real life’ value that Alda had admired in Shakespeare’s characters is amplified in these characters. In the illustration Jameson produced of Alda and Medon looking at Alda’s book, she dropped ‘Historical Characters’ from the open page, but she provides these women with their own book, and a trumpeting cherub at the opening of the final section (Figure 2). In the text just following that trumpeting illustration, Jameson reminds her readers that unlike more fully fictional heroines, these

Figure 2 ‘Historical Characters’ from Anna Jameson, Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical and Historical, 4th edition (London: Saunders and Otley, 1847) (author’s own copy)

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characters had a basis in ‘real existence’. To return to Alda’s words, being able to ‘do with [dramatic characters] what we cannot do with real people’ (55) amplifies through the readers’ sense of these characters’ historical existence to add ‘infinitely to the moral effect, as a subject of contemplation and a lesson of conduct’ (262).The hybrid nature of Shakespeare’s historical characters particularly prepares women readers for challenges they may face, or hear of others facing, in their moral decision making and public behaviour. In Jameson’s readings, these women are not merely negative examples, they display virtue in history’s dynamic setting; because Jameson repeatedly draws on the historical context of these plays, she endows these characters with an element of indeterminacy unavailable to their dramatic counterparts, no matter how richly drawn those literary women are. In all their complex virtues, these historical characters combine the safety of vicarious learning with the frisson of historical life. Jameson maintains her admiration for Shakespeare’s genius in the concluding section while she transitions into analysing characters who share history with her living, active readers. Jameson dives straight into moral complexity by placing Cleopatra on the illustrative title page for the section, and she acknowledges the surprise of her first choice: Cleopatra is a brilliant antithesis, a compound of contradictions, of all that we most hate with what we most admire. The whole character is the triumph of the external over the innate; and yet, like one of her country’s hieroglyphics, though she presents at first view a splendid and perplexing anomaly, there is deep meaning and wondrous skill in the apparent enigma, when we come to analyse and decipher it. But how are we to arrive at the solution of this glorious riddle, whose dazzling complexity continually mocks and eludes us? (262–3) As she did with Portia and Hermione, Jameson uses an analogy to visual art – ‘splendid and perplexing’ hieroglyphics– calling attention to Cleopatra as a dramatic ‘construction’ or a character created with ‘wondrous skill’, while simultaneously invoking the historicity of the Egyptian queen. In the end, Jameson insists that while Shakespeare’s art augmented this complexity, it is grounded in the life of the Ptolemaic ruler: ‘I have not the slightest doubt that Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is the real historical Cleopatra – the “Rare Egyptian” – individualized and placed before us.’ (263) Jameson had analysed ‘the real historical Cleopatra’ the previous year in her prosopography of women rulers, Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns

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(1831). Jameson opens Female Sovereigns with a passage that criticizes reigning habits of historical narrative, asserting, ‘that the moral sense runs some risk of being perverted by the manner in which we misapply habitually and by prescriptive custom certain epithets’.34 With her attention to ‘moral sense’ here she clearly places Female Sovereigns alongside sentimental educational texts such as Characteristics. Jameson continues her introduction to Female Sovereigns with a series of questions that specify her dissatisfaction with history teaching: For why, it may be asked, are victories always glorious, always splendid? Why must our sympathies be always enlisted on the side of successful ambition? Why must criminal or all-grasping power be ever exhibited under an aspect of greatness, when surely there is a reverse of the impression producing a far deeper and more useful lesson? Why (and this is a most serious evil) should the young, the pure, the feminine mind, just expanding to the sense of truth and beauty and goodness, be early polluted by relations of profligacy and cruelty, horrible and physical tortures, such as are too fully and grossly detailed in some of our most esteemed histories?35 Though both her celebrated female sovereigns and her historical characters engage in ‘all-grasping power’ and still earn her praise, Jameson breaks ground here for an edifying emphasis on history beyond the battles and conquests that John Ruskin has claimed for men in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, Jameson asserts that the brutality inherent in these conquests rarely offers ‘feminine minds’ positive teaching. The historical characters to whom she gives prominence – Lady Macbeth, Constance and Cleopatra – participate, often cruelly, in battles. Though Jameson incorporates power struggles in her narratives for both Female Sovereigns and Characteristics, she places those struggles in the larger context of her subjects’ daily lives, collapsing the separate spheres of domestic ideology while expanding the territory of history to include activities such as diplomacy, child-rearing and social justice. Jameson insists on Cleopatra’s ‘womanly feeling’ even while emphasizing characteristics that denizens of domesticity such as Sarah Stickney Ellis found monstrous. Jameson mentions virtues Ellis would have recognized, and puts them in unfamiliar contexts while continuing to insist on ideas of womanly behaviour in Cleopatra, and in other historical characters. For instance, Jameson does not shy away from Cleopatra’s love of power, growing out of ambition, which nineteenth-century gender ideology recognized as a virtue only in men. Furthermore, Jameson foregrounds Cleopatra’s

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sexuality. Undeniably, the literary critic engages in the stereotypes of Orientalism here, assuming a sensuality that she would not as easily mark as central in a British woman, even Lady Macbeth.36 In introducing the couple’s flirtatious banter, for instance, Jameson notes, ‘the woman’s perverseness and the tyrannical waywardness with which she taunts’ Antony (266). However, she distinguishes Cleopatra’s sexuality (or ‘passion’) from Antony’s, and in so doing, aligns her with some of the most central characteristics of femininity. On Cleopatra’s side, the attraction is not merely sexual, but importantly for Jameson also romantic, and a part of her political ambition: ‘the passion is of a mixt nature, made up of real attachment, combined with love of pleasure, the love of power and the love of self’ (276). Antony’s passion, however, is, ‘a species of infatuation, a single and engrossing feeling: it is, in short, the love of a man declined in years for a woman very much younger than himself, and who has subjected him by every species of feminine enchantment’ (276). Jameson can excuse the mix of romantic attachment and ambition she finds in Cleopatra, but she has less patience with Antony’s specific mixture of vanity and ambition in his attraction to Cleopatra. In an even more dexterous critical move, Jameson mentions Cleopatra’s virtues as a mother. Claiming that she has ‘no room left in this amazing picture for the display of that passionate maternal tenderness which was a strong and redeeming feature in Cleopatra’s historical character’ (276), Jameson fills the gap with the play’s one small and ambiguous gesture towards maternal affection. When Cleopatra summons the deities to punish her, she asks that ‘thunder may smite [her son] Caesarion’ (276). Seeing this curse as ‘the last and worst of possible evils’ Cleopatra can suffer, Jameson argues that the queen’s motherly devotion redeems her flaws, even if that feature remains undeveloped in Shakespeare’s treatment of her (276). In arguing throughout Characteristics for the pedagogical efficacy of ‘fancy’, or imaginative literature, Jameson claims that motivation is a peculiarly necessary element in fictional plotting, requiring that a reader determine causal relations between events. Historical episodes, in contrast, happen randomly, and only attain a sense of causality when an author imposes a narrative on them. Therefore, Jameson believes that readers develop the most acute understanding of motivation and interiority from reading imaginative literature, like drama. Her own readings consistently and undeniably demonstrate this refined ability to impute motive and desire. Relying on one phrase in the play, Jameson tenaciously reads Cleopatra’s maternal constancy as a sign of some sustained inherent goodness. Rather than follow a Victorian practice of declaring a mother

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unsuitable after any hint of sexual transgression, Jameson reverses the argument: if Cleopatra can preserve her maternal sensibilities, no transgression can entirely mar her morality. Energetically sensitive attention to character motivation enables Jameson to locate exemplary maternal devotion in a woman whom she must otherwise confess appears as little more than an ‘imperial termagant’ (273). Jameson clearly recognizes ‘a compound of contradictions’ in Cleopatra, but the combination does not eliminate traditional femininity: yet in the midst of all her caprices, follies, and even vices, womanly feeling is still predominant in Cleopatra, and the change which takes place in her deportment towards Antony, when their evil fortune darkens round them, is as beautiful and interesting in itself as it is striking and natural. Instead of the airy caprice and provoking petulance she displays in the first scenes, we have a mixture of tenderness, and artifice, and fear, and submissive blandishment. (276) Even in the woman whom she reminds us earns the title ‘serpent of the Nile’, Jameson can find the attractions Ellis, Ruskin and others designate as womanly: tenderness, submission and cajoling conversation. Cleopatra contains the traits recognizable by Jameson’s readers as undeniably feminine; she also contains much more, and not all of those other traits are vices. Complicating heroines is only half of Jameson’s strategy for expanding femininity in this section. When she turns from Cleopatra to Octavia, she demonstrates the instructional importance of exploring the motives of virtue to make it narratively interesting and compelling as a moral model for young women. Throughout this section, Jameson develops a pattern of linking heroines with their less intriguing narrative counterparts, such as Octavia, who acts with the moral courage that Cleopatra lacks. This attention to minor characters enhances Jameson’s pedagogical capacity with a ‘far deeper and more useful lesson’ available in the positive impression she sees in women who take risks and exert their power and ambition for the good of others. Octavia, as a respected wife and sister of the triumvirate, acts with all the charity, maternal devotion and family loyalty desired in a nineteenth-century woman. Octavia’s specific actions, Jameson asserts, also place her in tension with the respectability of Roman culture, even while she deserves praise as ‘the very beau ideal of a noble Roman lady’ (290). In making this argument, Jameson is aware that she places herself in opposition to other critics who have seen Octavia as ‘only a dull foil to Cleopatra’,

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and in so concluding, have proven their inability to read with the attention to a range of virtues that Jameson practises. By emphasizing Octavia’s moral daring, rather than focusing exclusively on her spousal devotion, Jameson heightens narrative tension around a character who otherwise might seem too complacent to engage a reader’s interest. Jameson also dwelt on Octavia in Female Sovereigns. Jameson’s praise for Octavia in Characteristics recalls the language of domesticity more than any section of the work other than Characters of the Affections, and that language also echoes her earlier discussion in Female Sovereigns, where she identifies Octavia as Cleopatra’s ‘rival’, and melds her sexuality with the language of conduct books: she had a powerful rival in Octavia, whose character is one of the most beautiful recorded in history, uniting all the dignity of a Roman matron in the best days of the republic with all the gentleness and graces of her sex. Though the marriage had been one of policy, she became strongly attached to her husband; and Antony, who was generous as well as facile, could not refuse her his esteem and his love. Octavia became the mediating angel between her fiery husband and her subtle brother; and for four years Antony remained faithful to this admirable woman, and appeared to have forgotten his Egyptian siren.37 Jameson makes no attempt, in other words, to distance herself from much of the discourse of femininity of the time. Yet Jameson makes clear that Octavia brings the ‘dignity of a Roman matron’ to her ‘angelic’ familial role. In highlighting domestic patterns – in mediating between her ‘fiery husband’ and ‘her subtle brother’ – Jameson recalls Octavia’s functions as both wife and sister, two positions explored in depth in Ellis’s Women of England series. Through the study of Octavia in Characteristics, Jameson asserts this traditional femininity, while showing that Octavia’s dignity and moral courage make her a contender for readers’ attention, as those strengths made her a contender for Antony’s interest. Jameson introduces narrative tension to daily domestic charity when she discusses Octavia’s treatment of Cleopatra’s children: Captives, and exposed to the rage of the Roman populace, they owed their existence to the generous, admirable Octavia, in whose mind there entered no particle of littleness. She received into her house the children of Antony and Cleopatra, educated them with her own, treated them with true maternal tenderness, and married them nobly. (291)

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While parade goers mock the children in the street as foreign enemies, Octavia has the moral courage to take them in ‘as her own’. Octavia plays several familial roles virtuously; in this passage Jameson makes clear that Octavia’s sense of justice and mercy support her actions against the triumvirate and the reigning ‘public opinion’ of Rome. Octavia acts in flagrant denial of a public opinion that would hold children prisoners and publicly shame them for their queenly mother’s actions. Instead, Octavia raised them for royal marriages. In Female Sovereigns, Jameson credits Octavia for Cleopatra II’s marriage to Jubal, King of Mauritania. Furthermore, she cites images and inscriptions on Mauritanian medals to claim that ‘though transplanted into a foreign land she still remembered her native language and literature’.38 Through Octavia’s bold moral courage, in other words, Cleopatra’s daughter redeemed the Ptolemy name from any caprices of her mother and went on to become a powerful stateswoman and patroness of literature. When she turns to Constance, Jameson finds a heroine who embodies a combination of Cleopatra’s dazzling pride and Octavia’s maternally driven moral courage. She devotes over half of her section on Constance to historical details of the wrongfully imprisoned wife and mother. In tending to King John, a play much less frequently staged in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries than it was in the nineteenth, Jameson evokes the feminine virtues both of Constance and of Sarah Siddons, the actress early nineteenth-century audiences recognized as linked with the role, and the matriarch of the Kemble family dynasty. Jameson explicitly states her purpose in writing Siddons’ biography, echoing her claims for the exemplars of Shakespeare, and claiming some of that exemplarity for her own age, rather than stating the impossibility of nineteenth-century female heroines, as she does when examining Portia and St Theresa. In a particularly admiring passage on Mrs Siddons, Jameson states that actresses illustrate an ‘important truth’ about women and work: I wished to impress and illustrate that important truth, that a gifted woman may pursue a public vocation, yet preserve the purity and maintain the dignity of her sex – that there is no prejudice which will not shrink away before moral energy, and no profession which may not be made compatible with the respect due to us as women, the cultivation of every feminine virtue, and the practice of every private duty.39 In describing actresses Jameson artfully juxtaposes the virtues (and the language) of domesticity with that of a public career, stressing novel virtues of ‘dignity’ and professionalism for women.

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A lengthy analysis of Lady Macbeth envelops Jameson’s admiring discussion of Siddons, who famously and terrifyingly performed Lady Macbeth. In part through this actor/character connection, and also through the lithe critical skills she uses on Cleopatra and others, Jameson resuscitates some virtues even in the murderous traitor.40 Robyn Asleson has documented Siddons’ ability to cultivate broad fame through her long acting career without inviting infamy.41 Jameson frequently notes that fame, seeing no reason to deny it simply because Siddons is female. Jameson’s interest in Siddons grows from the actress’s intellectual and moral abilities that cast, for Jameson, new light on the social power of female celebrity. Jameson saw Siddons as the ideal female public intellectual. Siddons continued her dignified literary work by giving public readings of Shakespeare scenes when age had diminished her acting powers and by publishing her own abridged version of Paradise Lost for children (1822). Though audience reactions to Siddons make clear that her performances were public spectacles, Jameson understands that spectacle in the context of careful intellectual preparation of the plays and in deeply moral decisions about how to portray tragic heroines as powerfully complex as Lady Macbeth. Jameson’s own nimble textual interpretation of Lady Macbeth as an obedient wife mismatched with a weak husband clearly owes much to Siddons’ art in performing the cruel queen sympathetically. Jameson praises the actress for aspects of an early Victorian female intellect that diverge from the conventional domestic model of improving society through nurturing family relations at home. In a later essay on actresses, Jameson frankly names the familial instabilities under Victorian marriage and divorce laws that can ruin a virtuous woman: such exhibitions are not necessarily or solely confined to the profession of the stage; woman, as a legal property, is subjected to them in her conventional position; a woman may be brought into church against her will, libelled and pilloried in an audacious newspaper; an English matron may be dragged from private life into a court of justice, exposed, guiltless, and helpless, to the public obloquy or the public sympathy, in shame and in despair. If such a scene can by possibility take place, one stage is not worse than another.42 All English women perform; all English women enter into public spaces, sometimes propelled by nefarious judicial conditions. Jameson embraces the actress as the public woman writ large. Therefore, she sees them as the Victorian woman writ large. The Kemble women, she makes clear, have

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permeated all public and private boundaries without any damage to their moral natures. In fact, their dual theatrical and domestic roles enhance each other. The wives, mothers and daughters of England follow the lines scripted for them by writers like John Ruskin and Sarah Stickney Ellis. Jameson makes no implication that women disrespect those conventions, simply that they recognize the role of wife, mother or hostess as no more absolutely defining than the leading role is for any actress. Exactly as the actress disrobes from her theatrical garb to work at home, or takes off her street clothes to prepare for the stage, the wise woman will step out of domestic roles at any point to perform ones more suitable to her individual talents – writing, speaking publicly, administering hospitals, editing journals, lobbying parliament. Throughout Characteristics, Jameson repeatedly engages with both the textual critics of Shakespeare and the actresses whom she recognized as insightful critics in their interpretive choices. That engagement often shows her to be original and insightful in her understanding of the range of femininities Shakespeare represented. The equally persistent engagement of her readings with nineteenth-century texts from cultural critics, art historians, novelists and politicians demonstrates her career-long interest in political reform for women’s rights. While her goals for women are moderate, Jameson makes tenacious use of the tools available to her through literature and art, as well as through the social sciences, to read Shakespeare’s Heroines as an argument for the capabilities of women, if only other readers would appreciate the full range of their characteristics.

Chapter 2

Mary Cowden Clarke Gail Marshall and Ann Thompson

Mary Cowden Clarke was born in London in June 1809 to Mary Sabilla Hehl and her husband, the musician and publisher Vincent Novello. She was brought up in a world of literary and musical figures, among whom were included Charles and Mary Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Keats and the man she describes as the ‘ever-welcome, ever young-hearted Charles Cowden-Clarke’. Even Shelley was glimpsed one particularly fine day. 1 And it is within this domestic setting that she first became acquainted with Shakespeare. It is not too much to say that Shakespeare himself became part of that much valued home circle within which Mary stayed contentedly, despite her fame, work and travels, for the whole of her life. In her 1896 autobiography, My Long Life, Shakespeare is presented to us first as one of the most cherished of the figures to emerge from the books of her childhood, books which her parents were ‘bountiful in providing . . . plain, unornate books – very unlike the present juvenile volumes, full of highly coloured illustrations, often scarcely read by their young recipients’. Chief among these books was Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, introduced to Mary in a warmly informal setting: Often, after a hard day’s teaching, my father used to have his breakfast in bed next morning, when we children were allowed to scramble up to the counterpane and lie around him to see what new book he had bought for us, and listen to his description and explanation of it. Never can I forget the boundless joy and interest with which I heard him tell about the contents of two volumes he had just brought home, and showed me the printed pictures it had. It was an early edition of ‘Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare.’ And what a vast world of new ideas and delights that opened to me – a world in which I have ever since much dwelt, and always with supreme pleasure and admiration.2

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That world of delight, invoked here in Mary’s characteristically open and generous expression, was indeed one in which she continued to dwell, living with her parents for many years even after her marriage to Charles Cowden Clarke, and finding her greatest professional success in her writings on Shakespeare, the author in whom, in so many respects, she finds the emotional loyalties and warmth of that family life best reflected. This is not to suggest, however, that Mary should be regarded as anything other than fully a part of the industry that Shakespeare criticism became in the nineteenth century. As the rest of this essay will demonstrate, Mary was a prolific writer and editor, and one who achieved significant renown both in Britain and in the United States, where her fans were fulsome in their relish of her contribution to their understanding of the playwright. However, that work never quite outgrows its roots in the enthusiasm of her family circle for the world of literature and the arts. Nor does she ever leave behind her sense of the relish which a young woman might feel for the work of Shakespeare, and throughout her working life is ever attuned to the specific benefits which the playwright might bring to women’s lives, whether in the form of what she sees as his celebration of their virtues and potential, or in the intellectual exercise and challenge which his works represent. As we will see, her own writings are characterized by a relish which is both emotional and intellectual, proselytising and critically evaluative, and always carefully calibrated for the particular audience for whom she was writing. In The Ladies’ Companion of 1849 she wrote: In Shakespeare’s page, as in a mental looking-glass, we women may contemplate ourselves. Of all the male writers that ever lived, he has seen most deeply into the female heart; he has most vividly depicted it in its strength, and in its weakness. Of all of them, he has best asserted womanhood’s rights; he has best put forth and maintained its claims; he has best admonished its failings, its errors, its faults, its guilt. Of all of them, he has best produced its capabilities, its magnanimity, its devotion, its enthusiasm, its fortitude, its patience, its endurance, its heroism, its constancy, its fullest worth.3 The term ‘Shakespearean’ seems one eminently suited to her life and work. She was, as Richard D. Altick puts it, ‘reared, of course, on Shakespeare’. However, such a genealogy does not necessarily guarantee subsequent critics’ respect, as Mary found in her own day, and as Altick’s

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mid-twentieth-century response also demonstrates. He writes, somewhat scathingly, and entirely dismissively, that Mary ‘had become a confirmed Shakespearean, so far as that term connotes abandonate sentimental passion for “England’s brightest ornament”. But she was blissfully ignorant of Shakespearean scholarship’.4 Within Altick’s comments lies a form of uneasiness about Mary’s writing which is compounded of disquiet about its amateur status, its unabashed enthusiasm and, very possibly, its author’s gender. Elsewhere, he describes her poetry as facile and commonplace, a poetry that echoes the popularity of contemporary writers. For Altick, Mary can be nothing more than a writer of the second rank, a woman capable of recognizing greatness on the page, or in those among whom she lived, but not one capable of real insight herself. This attitude, as will be seen below, is in marked contrast to that of many of her contemporaries, who accepted Mary as one of the leading Shakespeareans of her day, someone who managed to combine the enthusiasm of a personal and emotional response with the scholarly rigours of one who spent 16 years single-handedly producing her Concordance to Shakespeare’s works. Hers is a body of work which challenges scholarly categories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but which was highly regarded in her own time, and still has powerful insights to offer the modern reader. What exactly did Mary Cowden Clarke contribute to Shakespeare scholarship? In brief, she prepared the first complete concordance to Shakespeare’s plays (1844–1845); she wrote the five-volume Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1850–1852) and a book on World-Noted Women (including some historical Shakespearean characters, 1858); she published an un-annotated edition of the Complete Works (1860) and she made numerous contributions to journals and magazines such as the general periodicals Sharpe’s London Magazine and Shakespeariana, and ones addressed specifically to girls and women such as The Girl’s Own Paper and The Ladies’ Companion. She also collaborated with her husband Charles on an annotated edition of the Complete Works (1865), and on a big book called The Shakespeare Key (1879). Outside Shakespeare studies, she published a biography of her father, The Life and Labours of Vincent Novello (1864), her own autobiography, My Long Life (1896), a volume of letters to an American admirer of her work, Letters to an Enthusiast (1902) and three volumes of fiction and poetry. She also collaborated with Charles on Recollections of Writers (1878), a book containing essays on Keats, Charles and Mary Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Douglas Jerrold and Charles Dickens. The Concordance was path-breaking. Altick patronizes Mary Cowden Clarke as a ‘modest lady’ who ‘spent her best years’ on producing this

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work – ‘a monument of feminine tenacity’.5 The project, conceived ‘at the breakfast table of some friends’ (in fact Charles and Mary Lamb – the latter taught Mary Cowden Clarke Latin) did indeed take ‘sixteen years of assiduous labour’ to complete and was published in 18 monthly instalments in 1844–1845.6 She was fully aware of her anomalous position as a woman in the brotherhood of Victorian scholarship. Thanking John Payne Collier for entrusting her with the unpublished manuscript of the final volume of his edition of the Complete Works, she remarks: Such a mark of confidence was a worthy type of the fraternity of feeling inspired by a close study of our immortal Poet . . . [Compiling the Concordance] has been the means of my receiving generous testimonies of sympathy and encouragement from many of the cleverest men of our age, between whom and myself I could never have hoped for any assimilation, had it not been for the mutual existence of profound veneration and love for the genius of Shakespeare.7 The study of Shakespeare becomes the means of ‘assimilation’ of a relatively young (and of course relatively uneducated) woman into an otherwise exclusive group, ‘the cleverest men of our age’. Throughout her career, Mary Cowden Clarke was to refer regularly to the ‘fraternity’ of Shakespeare scholarship and to acknowledge her special relationship to it: she expresses a similar sentiment 50 years later in her autobiography, My Long Life, when recalling a visit she had made to the Shakespeare Library in Birmingham in 1885: ‘I may here be permitted to mention that I have ever felt grateful for the liberal way in which distinguished Shakespearians have treated me with a cordial fraternity as one of their brotherhood’.8 Nevertheless, at the beginning of her career, she also credits her mother with inspiring her, in a footnote to the Concordance’s Preface: I cannot refuse the pleasure of mentioning that the day which witnessed the conclusion of this task, was the birth-day of the best of mothers – Mary Sabilla Novello; she who forms the glory and happiness of her children; she who first inspired me with a love of all that is good and beautiful, and who therefore may well be said to have originated my devotion to Shakspere [sic].9 The Concordance was extensively and enthusiastically reviewed as a massive contribution to the field and a ‘great national work’. ‘It is a perpetual monument of the mental powers, the taste, skill and indefatigable industry

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of its accomplished author’, wrote the Rev. N. J. Halpin, author of The Dramatic Unities of Shakespeare, concluding that ‘the suitable inscription on its base, DUX FEMINA FACTI, should imperishably record our homage to her genius, and our admiration of her achievement’.10 It inspired the Concordance to Shakespeare’s Poems published by Helen Kate Furness in 1875 with a deferential reference to her predecessor’s work in the Preface: ‘I would not have it thought that any imperfection is hereby imputed to Mrs. Clarke’s invaluable Concordance to the Dramas. The bulk of that work was a sufficient bar to the plan I have been enabled to follow in the lesser task which was before me’.11 Helen Kate Furness was the wife of the Philadelphia-based Shakespeare scholar and Variorum editor Horace Howard Furness and was usually content to ‘assist’ her husband without getting title-page credit; perhaps she was inspired by Mary Cowden Clarke’s example to publish this book under her own name. Richard Altick, in his determination to dismiss the achievement, does not mention that Mary’s Concordance was reprinted in ten editions between 1845 and 1875 or that the Times obituarist of Mary in 1898 remarked that ‘it has not even now been superseded’ (despite the appearance of John Bartlett’s Concordance in 1894). Five years after the Concordance came the only work for which Mary Cowden Clarke is remembered today, her highly successful The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, published serially from 1850 to 1852 and then as a five-volume collection: it consists of 15 long tales or novellas describing the childhood and early life of Shakespeare’s heroines up until the point at which Shakespeare’s play begins. The choice of subjects and their ordering in the volumes is of some interest. Volume I contains the stories of ‘Portia, the Heiress of Belmont’, ‘The Thane’s Daughter’ [Lady Macbeth] and ‘Helena: the Physician’s Daughter’. Volume II has ‘Desdemona, the Magnifico’s Child’, ‘Meg and Alice: the Merry Maids of Windsor’ and ‘Isabella, the Votaress’. Volume III has ‘Katharina and Bianca, the Shrew and the Demure’, ‘Ophelia, the Rose of Elsinore’ and ‘Rosalind and Celia: the Friends’. Volume IV has ‘Juliet, the White Dove of Verona’, ‘Beatrice and Hero: the Cousins’ and ‘Olivia, the Lady of Illyria’. Volume V has ‘Hermione, the Russian Princess’, ‘Viola, the Twin’ and ‘Imogen, the Peerless’. The privileging of Portia and Imogen as the first and last in the collection is indicative of Victorian taste, but the choice of ‘Meg and Alice’, ‘Rosalind and Celia’ and ‘Beatrice and Hero’ allows the author to write about female friendship as well as about individual heroines. The overall ‘design’ of the work, as Mary explained, was ‘to trace the probable antecedents in the history of some of Shakespeare’s women; to imagine the possible circumstances and influences of scene, event, and associate [sic], surrounding the infant life of his heroines’ and to place

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them ‘in such situations as should naturally lead up to, and account for, the known conclusion of their subsequent confirmed character and afterlife’. She also stressed that, All climax in incident and sentiment was to be carefully avoided throughout these stories, – inasmuch as they are merely preliminaries to catastrophes already ordained, – and the obstacles in the way of giving them startling features of romance will be understood.12 In fact, the stories are full of the materials of romance and melodrama: mothers die in childbirth, children witness the deaths of parents, fathers desert their wives and families, men in general frequently lead dissolute lives, including resorting to prostitutes, and kidnappings, abductions and rapes abound. The modern reader may well be surprised that some of the heroines – Ophelia and Gruoch (Lady Macbeth), for example – are still in possession of their senses when their plays begin. The Girlhood is a text which is profoundly interested in family, in the girls’ place within their communities, and in some measure, is written out of a maternal aesthetic. The tales attest both to Cowden Clarke’s intimacy with Shakespeare, and to a form of moral pedagogy, enabled perhaps by the adoption of the form of fiction, which she uses to convey to her juvenile readers the moral of her heroines’ upbringing, more often than not by morally incompetent parents. She would later argue that Shakespeare might make a better parent: ‘To the young girl, emerging from childhood and taking her first steps into the more active and self-dependent career of woman-life, Shakespeare’s vital precepts and models render him essentially a helping friend.’13 In effect, the tales provide a novelistic ‘subtext’ to Shakespeare’s female characters, and, as we have said, contain striking scenes of sex, violence and death. They can be read on two levels: by young readers who have not yet read the plays and by older readers who bring their knowledge of ‘what happened next’ with them. Modern critics have condemned this approach to character as naïve (though modern actors still routinely invent ‘backstories’ for their characters), but contemporary reviewers of the Girlhood were more appreciative, stressing the value of the tales for introducing young people (and especially girls) to Shakespeare. An abridged edition, prepared by Mary’s sister, Sabilla Novello, appeared in three volumes in 1879, with many of the more sensational events omitted, but the full text was re-issued with a new preface in 1892. Like other women writing on Shakespeare in the mid-nineteenth century, such as Anna Brownell Jameson, Mary Cowden Clarke quite consciously used her writing on Shakespeare’s heroines to raise issues of

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particular concern to women in her own time. Both authors address subjects such as women’s education, their role in public life and power relations between the sexes in society and in marriage. The general title under which Anna Jameson’s book first appeared in 1832, Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical, is indicative of her interest in wider issues – only later in the century did it become known as Shakespeare’s Heroines. ‘It appears to me’, Jameson writes in her Introduction, ‘that the condition of women in society, as at present constituted, is false in itself and injurious to them’. Instead of offering conventional ‘essays on morality and treatises on education’, Jameson chose ‘to illustrate certain positions by example’: the examples set by Shakespeare’s heroines of intellectual and affectionate women.14 Similarly, Mary Cowden Clarke uses the stories in the Girlhood to address a number of social topics, but she is especially interested in women’s exclusion from education and consequently from the professions. The story of ‘Katherine and Bianca: the Shrew, and the Demure’, for example, contains a tirade against ‘girls’ schooling’ which is ‘comprised in the teaching of knick-knack making, accomplishments, and housewifery, with but little regard to the heart and mind which may one day be a wife’s, –perhaps a mother’s’.15 By the end of their education, Katherine and Bianca have learnt nothing of any importance: Their brains had remained stunted, while their bodies grew; their characters had been permitted to remain undeveloped; their ideas had been cramped and compressed into shell-baskets and rice-paper boxes; their thoughts had been pinned down to pincushions; their intellects had been put under glass cases with artificial flowers, – dwarfed and confined beneath glass lids with waxen effigies, and gilt filigree; they had never been suffered to entertain an opinion on a subject less flimsy than floss silk, catgut, or gauze; to speculate upon a higher subject than paste, wire and gum; or to exercise their invention upon things of greater weight than feathers, – and of greater moment than spangles, foil, or tinsel.16 The details of the girls’ schooling sound very Victorian and are indeed echoed in the account of the education thought suitable for girls by the heroine’s English aunt in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856): I danced the polka and Cellarius, Spun glass, stuffed birds, and modelled flowers in wax, Because she liked accomplishments in girls.17

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Barrett Browning wholeheartedly rejects this system, but it has to be admitted that Cowden Clarke is at times ambivalent about it. She contrasts the uneducated Juliet (‘The White Dove of Verona’) favourably with Romeo’s former love, the intellectually ambitious Rosaline, who is derided as didactic and cold, ‘quite one of the illuminati in petticoats’18 and she praises a character like Gabrielle (mother of Helena, ‘The Physician’s Daughter’ and future heroine of All’s Well that Ends Well) for her ‘inartificial’ simplicity which has surprisingly remained unsullied by her unusual acquisition of literacy.19 As in the writing of many women in this period, Portia of The Merchant of Venice is something of a test case. Cowden Clarke’s ‘Portia, the heiress of Belmont’, is brought up by her cousin Bellario and shares his enthusiasm for the legal profession: ‘Might not we women make good advocates, then, cugino mio?’ Portia would playfully ask; ‘you know we are apt to speak eloquently when our hearts are in a cause, and when we desire to win favour in its decision.’ ‘It is because your hearts generally take too active a part in any cause you desire to win, that your sex would make but poor lawyers, carina. Besides, women, though shrewd and quick-judging, are apt to jump too readily at conclusions, and mar the power of their understanding by its too vivacious action . . . To skilfully treasure up each point successively gained, and by a tardy unmasking of your own plan of action, to lead your opponent on to other and more sure committals of himself, is more consonant with the operation of a man’s mind, than suited to the eager, impulsive nature of woman.’20 Of course the reader who knows the play recognizes that Bellario’s description of the operation of the ‘man’s mind’ gives us a preview of how Portia will proceed in the trial scene, but for the Victorian reader the poignant truth remained that, some 250 years after Shakespeare imagined this scene, women were still prevented from becoming lawyers.21 A very similar argument can again be found in Aurora Leigh when, during a discussion of his own philanthropic ambitions, Romney criticizes the heroine’s approach as characteristically feminine, impulsive and emotional, fixated on individuals and unable to comprehend larger issues: None of all these things Can women understand. You generalise Oh, nothing, – not even grief! Your quick-breathed hearts,

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Jameson, Cowden Clarke, Kemble, Cushman So sympathetic to the personal pang, Close on each separate knife-stroke, yielding up A whole life at each wound, incapable Of deepening, widening a large lap of life To hold the world-full woe. The human race To you means, such a child, or such a man, You saw one morning waiting in the cold, . . . Why, I call you hard To general suffering . . . You weep for what you know.22

And, as Cheri Larsen Hoeckley notes in her essay on Anna Jameson, the same topic is discussed in Jameson’s Introduction in the fictional conversation she sets up between the female author of the book, Alda, and a sceptical male friend, Medon.23 Clearly, women in the middle of the nineteenth century must have been all too familiar with this justification for their exclusion from the professions and from public life. In the mid-1880s, Mary wrote, specifically to girls: Happy she who at eight or nine years’ old has a copy of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare given to her, opening a vista of even then understandable interest and enjoyment! Happy she who at twelve or thirteen has Shakespeare’s works themselves read to her by her mother, with loving selection of fittest plays and passages! Happy they who in maturer years have the good taste and good sense to read aright the pages of Shakespeare, and gather thence wholesomest lessons and choicest delights!24 It is tempting to insert The Girlhood within this trajectory of increasing maturity at the moment of maternal intervention. The girl in early adolescence would seem to be the reader at whom Cowden Clarke was aiming her fictionalized accounts, and who was perhaps most in need of guidance at that critical stage of life, and hence, Shakespeare and the figure of the mother combine to try to produce the young woman of good taste and good sense of whom Cowden Clarke writes. Some critics, most notably George C. Gross, have found in Cowden Clarke an explicitly moralistic writer, one concerned to use the plays for her own ends: After carefully working in a few names, dates and allusions which are given some sanction in the plays, she allows her imagination free rein in

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developing such incidents as might explain the characters she conceives Shakespeare’s women to be. She goes far beyond the requirements of such a goal to invent other characters and incidents which seem to be included for the express purpose of teaching lessons about the sexual snares that lie along the virginal path to honest wedlock.25 Cowden Clarke is far from being either as prescriptive or as narrow-minded as Gross suggests, though it is obviously possible to perceive a pedagogical imperative in some of her imaginative reconstructions, an imperative which she clearly felt to be present in Shakespeare’s writings themselves. But there persists alongside this sense of variety, and lively moral and intellectual engagement, a strain which seeks to control and harness that reading vitality, whether for domestic, moral or various pedagogic ends. Shakespeare is too potentially explosive – and useful – an author to be left unedited, unmediated, unexplained, as is evidenced in the versions of Shakespeare aimed explicitly at girls which proliferated throughout the century, and which carry their pedagogic and ideological colours in full view. This is well illustrated by Adelaide C. Gordon Sim’s Phoebe’s Shakespeare, arranged for children (1894) and Edith Nesbit’s The Children’s Shakespeare (1897) which both contain versions of The Taming of the Shrew which specifically posit responses to the dangerous anti-marriage tendencies of the contemporary new woman. Sim ends her account by discussing Katherine’s advice to Bianca in 5.2 on the duties of good wives: I don’t know if Bianca and her friends took Katharina’s advice; but if they did not they were very foolish, for if women are gentle, and sweet, and loving, they get all their own way in the world, and men are ready to work and do everything to protect and help them. But if they are rough and ill-tempered, and want what they call their rights, they will always find that men are the stronger, as did Katharina the Shrew.26 Nesbit is even more explicit in extrapolating a coercive message from the play: ‘So Petruchio won his wager, and had in Katharina always a loving wife and a true, and now he had broken her proud and angry spirit he loved her well, and there was nothing ever but love between these two. And so they lived happily ever afterwards’.27 Nothing in Cowden Clarke is either as crude or as constricted as that. From 1849 to 1854 Cowden Clarke had contributed a series on ‘Shakespeare – Studies of Women’ to The Ladies’ Companion in which she made the remark about Shakespeare’s pages being a looking-glass for

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women, full of deep insights into the female heart, as quoted above. In this she was following in the footsteps of numerous earlier women writing on Shakespeare since Margaret Cavendish who claimed in 1664, One would think he had been Metamorphosed from a Man to a Woman, for who could Describe Cleopatra Better than he hath done, and many other Females of his own Creating, as Nan Page, Mrs. Page, Mrs. Ford, the Doctors Maid, Bettrice [Beatrice], Mrs. Quickly, Doll Tearsheet, and others, too many to relate?28 The claim that Shakespeare had a special insight into female psychology is made throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by women writers who sometimes comment on how remarkable this is, given the absence of female performers on his stage. The actress, Helena Faucit, for example, writes in 1885, How mistaken is the opinion of those who maintain that Shakespeare was governed, in drawing his heroines, by the fact that they were played by boys . . . As if Imogen, Viola, and Rosalind were not ‘pure women’ to the very core.29 In 1850 Cowden Clarke published a series on ‘Shakespeare’s Lovers’ (male) in Sharpe’s London Magazine, a periodical aimed at ‘middle and lower walks of society’ and advertised as ‘safe and acceptable reading for the Family Circle’. She also included Shakespearean heroines in her quasihistorical World-Noted Women; or, Types of Womanly Attributes of All Lands and Ages (1858) with chapters on Lucretia, Cleopatra and Margaret of Anjou. (The chapter on Joan of Arc in this volume is by Grace Greenwood, not by Cowden Clarke.) In the case of Lucretia she first tells the story, including its political context, then comments on the literary versions: she finds Livy’s Lucrece too cold and rational, but praises Ovid and Chaucer for depicting her womanly tenderness. Shakespeare ‘transcends them all’ and ‘faintly anticipated some of those exquisite touches which afterwards shone forth with such refulgence in his glorious play of Cymbeline’.30 She proceeds to a comparison between aspects of Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece and his Cymbeline, which was of course one of the Shakespearean plays most admired by Victorian critics, though it was little seen on the stage. With Cleopatra (‘the grandest coquette that ever lived’31), she frankly admits the difficulty of separating ‘the idea of his [i.e. Shakespeare’s] Cleopatra from Cleopatra

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herself’32 and rejects other literary treatments (by Chaucer, Corneille, Fletcher and Dryden) as too simple: Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is ‘a wondrous combination of all that is winning, with so much that is repulsive, – all that is enchanting, with so much that is despicable’.33 For her time, she is remarkably positive on ‘the enthroned enchantress’.34 Struggling to take a similarly positive line on Margaret, she states firmly that ‘the anachronisms and inaccuracies committed in the three parts of Henry VI form one of the testimonies against their being the production of Shakespeare’ who would not have ‘misrepresented and degraded’ Margaret by such inventions as the affair with Suffolk.35 Mary Cowden Clarke’s first edition of Shakespeare’s Works, Edited, with a Scrupulous Revision of the Text could be seen as a landmark in Victorian women’s publication on Shakespeare when it appeared in 1860. ‘I may be allowed to take pride’, she wrote in the Preface, ‘in the thought that I am the first of his female subjects who has been selected to edit his works; and it is one of the myriad delights I owe to him that I should be the woman upon whom so great a distinction is conferred’.36 (Understandably, she was unaware of the work of Henrietta Bowdler, whose expurgated edition of Shakespeare was published under the name of her brother Thomas in 1807). In this edition she eschewed commentary – the characteristic feature of previous Shakespeare editions by male editors – as intrusive, tedious and aggressive in spirit: footnotes, she said, are ‘mere vehicles for abuse, spite and arrogance’. She does not hesitate to attack her male predecessors, commenting on ‘that extraordinary compound of turgid contradictions’ in Johnson’s Preface and even remarking ‘It is lamentable to see a man of Johnson’s undoubted power so mistaken, when writing upon a genius he could not appreciate’.37 Presumably this attitude was enhanced by her awareness of her temerity in competing with such a man. Self-consciously too, she draws attention to the positive images of women to be found in Shakespeare, hopefully attributing this to the influence of Anne Hathaway: From the uniformly noble way in which Shakespeare drew the wifely character, we may feel certain of the esteem as well as affection with which his own wife inspired him; and the advantage in generosity which he always assigned to women over men when drawing them in their mutual relations with regard to love, gives us excellent warrant for supposing that he had reason to know this truth respecting her sex from the mother of his children.38

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She goes on to justify Shakespeare’s business dealings, writing somewhat defensively, All that Shakespeare did in this respect, serves to vindicate the noble privileges attained by well-earned money, and to rescue it from the vulgar supposition of its being a source of low and degrading consideration.39 Turning to the plays themselves, she displays an interest in their conclusions: Many of his closing scenes are long – though never tedious . . . They seem adapted to the contenting of that craving to know all about the personages in whom the spectators have been feeling interested, which grown spectators share with children, who are never contented without explanatory windings-up to the tales they have been listening to. Witness his last scenes of Cymbeline, of As You Like It, of The Merchant of Venice and others; which linger on with the exquisite sense of mutual pleasure in satisfactory explanation in conclusion that subsists between the finest authors and their readers.40 Coming from the author of The Girlhood, such a passage makes one wonder if Cowden Clarke was ever tempted to write a set of sequels for the plays, as at least one nineteenth-century female author did: we have already mentioned Helena Faucit, Lady Martin, a celebrated actress of the midcentury, who published much later in 1885 her book On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters: By One Who Has Personated Them, explaining in her essay on Portia that ‘I could never leave my characters when the curtain fell and the audience departed. As I had lived with them through their early lives, so I also lived into their future’.41 As the ‘first’ woman editor of Shakespeare, Mary Cowden Clarke did indeed face prejudice. Although she never drew attention to sexual discrimination in the reception of her work, her husband Charles did. In a letter to the reviewer of this edition in the Daily News in 1862, he commended the writer for his unbiased approach: That which has mainly gratified us both, and herself especially, is the tone in it taken towards her by the Examiner as well as yourself; – that of ignoring all distinction with regard to sex in a question of literary judicature: – ‘No mere courtesy due to her sex, will avail her here: she is to be estimated on independent grounds’ . . . Your very differences with her in

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her readings of passages furnish a tacit proof that you have deemed her judgement worthy of impugnment. (15 April 1862) But Charles objected to the reviewer’s assumption that part of the scholarly apparatus attached to the edition – the Glossary – was the work of the husband, not the wife. Such an assumption was understandable, given Mary’s comment in the preface that ‘I owe this Glossary to the same otherself; although his unwillingness to diminish the Editor’s credit for the whole work would fain have made him forbid this acknowledgement’. Anxious to stress the insignificance of his contribution to the glossary in the 1860 edition, Charles instructed the reviewer to annotate Mary’s acknowledgement with the remark that ‘if the erecter of the scaffolding can claim to be designated the Architect of a Building, the above statements are correct’. He went on to locate the reviewer’s readiness to accept Mary’s self-effacing comments at face value in the wider context of misogynistic prejudice against her: I have but one objection to make against your ‘review’; and that is, your having named me at all in reference to the ‘Glossary’ . . . I know that the male world will give me credit for being the compiler of the Glossary; as I know of those who said of the ‘Concordance’ – ‘Of course, her husband helped her’. (15 April 1862) The same sort of prejudice was apparent when Mary published her second edition of Shakespeare, this time in collaboration with Charles for Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare in 1865. Designed for ‘family reading’, this annotated, expurgated and illustrated edition sought to provide a serious volume for the popular market and the editors were commended by reviewers for their ‘shrewd insights’ into the plays and their ‘admirable Shakespearean criticism’. But in 1869 one critic of the edition, writing under the pseudonym ‘Jacques’, attributed what he saw as the edition’s faults to Mary: The work . . . is, we are informed, ‘Edited, with Notes, by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke’, who must, of course, take responsibility for the numberless alterations, mutilations, corruptions, or whatever we may choose to call them, which deface these noble dramas. If the lady editor had refrained from thus tampering with our great poet’s language, she would not have marred the praises justly awarded her for the compilation of her excellent ‘Concordance’.42

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‘Jacques’, without any explanation, associates textual ‘tampering’ with ‘the lady editor’, not her male collaborator. Perhaps the most neglected of Mary Cowden Clarke’s contributions to Shakespeare scholarship is The Shakespeare Key, prepared in collaboration with Charles and published as a very substantial volume (over 800 pages) in 1879. This neglect seems particularly poignant because an undated twopage manuscript prospectus for the book, now in the Folger Shakespeare Library, which calls it an ‘Alphabetical Work on Shakespeare’s Style’, explains its proposed utility, both to scholars and to general readers: [We thought] that which was so useful during our joint task of Editorship would naturally prove useful to future editors; and would also prove useful to general students of the great Poet, who might, so to say, become their own editors.43 There follows, in Charles’s handwriting, a ten-page list of headings which are indeed followed in the published version. Charles died in 1877 at the age of 89 and Mary was devastated by the loss. In a letter to Horace and Helen Furness in January 1878 she thanks him for the ‘candour’ of his comments on ‘the work on Shakespeare’s style’ and hopes to see it in print ‘while I am still alive’ (she was then 68 and actually lived another 20 years), expressing her confidence in ‘the value it would be to Shakespearian scholars and future Editors of his writings’.44 The 1879 title page declares the book’s purpose in ‘Unlocking the treasures of [Shakespeare’s] style, elucidating the peculiarities of his construction, and displaying the beauties of his expression; forming a companion to The Complete Concordance of Shakespeare’ (which of course Mary had published in 1844–1845). In the Preface to the published work this connection is again stressed: This book will afford the same clue to the infinite variety of features in Shakespeare’s style that the Concordance affords to his every word and sentence; and thus the two books will, in fact, form companion volumes, the one to the other.45 ‘Style’ is interpreted broadly in the large number of entries from the appropriate first one on ‘Abrupt Commencements’ (scenes which begin with the characters already in the middle of a conversation) to ‘Verbs Peculiarly Used’ (such as when Celia tells Rosalind that ‘thou and I are one’ in As You Like It 1.3). Entries vary in length from a single page to the huge 178 pages on ‘Dramatic Time’. This entry, which could have been a whole

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book in itself, explores the notion of ‘dual dramatic time’ in the plays, including Shakespeare’s manipulation of ‘short time’ and ‘long time’ and the ‘seeming incongruity’ which results from their coexistence in a number of texts including Othello. There is a detailed discussion of time in the History plays (with nearly 2,000 references) and a section on the ‘four Chorus plays’ (The Winter’s Tale, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet and Pericles). An entry on ‘Closing Scenes, Brief Scenes’ is of interest for its focus on ‘apparently slight and insignificant scenes’ featuring citizens and servants such as the scrivener in Richard III 3.6 and the Roman and Volsce who comment on the banishment of Coriolanus (4.3). The Clarkes also, in this entry, defend Shakespeare’s use of comic scenes and characters in tragedy: the porter in Macbeth, Peter in Romeo and Juliet and the gravediggers in Hamlet. While their overall project includes offering help to future editors, the Clarkes frequently defend Shakespeare from past ones: the entry on ‘Alleged Anachronisms’, for example, justifies Shakespeare’s references to such things as cannons and pistols, deplored by Theobald, Johnson and others, on the grounds that he ‘spoke of engines of war in the terms most readily understood by his audience’. The same entry defends the apparent contradiction in the age of Hamlet who needs to be ‘both youthful and mature; both personally young and mentally experienced’. The attitude to editorial footnotes previously evinced in Mary’s preface to her 1860 edition of Shakespeare’s Works, where she wrote of them as ‘mere vehicles for abuse, spite and arrogance’, recurs here in expressions such as ‘Steevens flippantly scoffs’, ‘Johnson is severe’, ‘Malone scoffingly enquires’ and ‘Steevens pertly remarks’. Elsewhere various editorial emendations are rejected and Shakespeare’s ‘Bitter Puns’ are defended from criticism by Johnson as ‘perfectly consistent with human nature’. The close attention to verbal detail required for Mary’s work on the Concordance is demonstrated again in The Shakespeare Key in entries on such topics as ‘Affected Phraseology’ with examples from Osric in Hamlet and the scenes with the Poet and the Painter in Timon, ‘Antithetical Style’, which includes a defence of the Second Folio reading of Ferdinand’s line ‘Most busy, least when I do it’ (The Tempest, 3.1.15) against the First Folio’s ‘Most busy lest’ on the grounds of the antithesis of ‘most’ and least’, ‘Cant Terms’, ‘Coined Words’, ‘Deviating into Various Tenses’, ‘Elliptical Style’ ‘Enigmatical Phraseology’, ‘Parts of Speech Diversely used’, ‘Peculiar Construction’, ‘Repeated Words’ and ‘Unfinished Sentences’. What one might call the proto-feminist line evident throughout Mary’s work on Shakespeare is apparent in an entry such as ‘Power in Writing Silence; and Perfect Impression through Imperfect Expression’, where we

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find praise for Hermione’s silence at the end of The Winter’s Tale, and for the silence of Perdita, both during Polixenes’ rebuke of Florizel in 4.4 and while Florizel lies to Leontes in 5.1 in the same play. There is also praise for Virgilia’s silence in Coriolanus. The entry on ‘Soliloquies’, while being surprisingly short, finds room for an admiring discussion of Imogen’s awakening speech in 4.2 of Cymbeline and, more unusually, praise for Helena’s disturbing lines beginning ‘O strange men / That can such sweet use make of what they hate’ in 4.4 of All’s Well That Ends Well. Not strictly a soliloquy (the Widow and Diana are present, though Helena may indeed turn aside from them for this section of her speech), the lines represent Helena’s reaction to her experience of having sex with her husband who of course thinks in the dark that she is Diana. The Cowden Clarkes comment that ‘the language is veiled – even obscure, as befits the theme reflected upon, and serves to show Shakespeare’s refinement in expression combined with vigour in dealing with the most hallowed as well as the most unhallowed subjects of meditation’. Meanwhile the ‘coarseness’ of such passages as the ‘epilogue’ to Troilus and Cressida and the Fool’s prophecy in King Lear are dismissed as non-Shakespearean. After Charles’s death in 1877, Mary saw The Shakespeare Key through the press and wrote a number of sonnets, mainly on Charles (published in Honey from the Weed, 1881 and A Score of Sonnets to One Object, 1884). Both the Key and her sonnets are a testimony to the nature of their working relationship and the marriage from which it was indivisible. Honey from the Weed contains two sonnets which are close adaptations of Shakespeare’s sonnets 105 and 144 and which speak to her love for Charles and for her parents. ‘Varied from Shakespeare’s 144th Sonnet’ writes of the ‘Three loves I’ve had of comfort through my life / Which like good spirits did suggest me still: / My father, mother, him who called me wife, / Allaying by affection ev’ry ill’.46 The sonnet is important in asserting the continuity of the relationships, affection and loyalties implanted in Mary in her youth into her later life, and confirms the consanguinity of romantic, familial and literary affections. In a period pre-dating the availability of formal education for most girls, it was not unusual that Shakespeare was often introduced to them through the family’s domestic reading. Mary herself asserts her mother’s responsibility for her early love of Shakespeare, with other women, including Eleanor Marx, citing their father’s part in family theatricals as the beginning of their love of Shakespeare.47 In many adult women’s citing of Shakespeare, a nostalgic echo of childhood innocence is often felt amidst the recognition of adult complication, and the conflict that love and affection in adulthood bring. In this poem,

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however, Mary precisely evades that complication, indeed seems explicitly determined to do so. Shakespeare’s sonnet concerns two loves ‘of comfort and despair, / Which like two spirits do suggest me still, / The better angel is a man right fair:/ The worser spirit a woman colour’d ill’. The sonnet concerns the poet’s being torn between the man and woman, between lust and love, and the despair of their ‘being both from me both to each friend’. The inner conflict finds its external form in a fear of lust’s powers and in an anticipation of abandonment and loneliness. Nothing could be further from the spirit of Mary’s poem, which expresses competition only in its participants’ vying ‘with one another who should bless / Me most, evolving all was best within / My nature, teaching it the loveliness / And bliss of virtue, misery of sin’. The relationship with Shakespeare’s words is a curious one here, suggesting in the poem’s form and title an indebtedness that its subject matter would belie, or even more explicitly deny. It even reads as a form of corrective to Shakespeare’s rather lost sense of living ‘in doubt, / Till my bad angel fire my good one out’. In the linguistic playfulness of its puns, its doubling of language as well as lovers, Shakespeare’s sonnet is of a complexity both emotionally and rhetorically beyond that which Mary seeks to achieve. This is the case too in ‘Varied from Shakespeare’s 105th Sonnet’ which is a less ambitious re-writing, in that few words are actually changed, and Mary’s version speaks with relief to the simplicity, the lack of ‘difference’ and dispute in her source text. The poem is instead a simple celebration of her love for Charles, and ends ‘Dear, kind, and true, have often lived alone, / Which three, in mine own Charles, were found in one.’ What is produced is a slightly trite, though touching, response. The same sense of a slightly bland satisfaction is also felt in her more miscellaneous poems on Shakespeare earlier in her life. These most often took the forms of ‘Occasional Addresses’ on the opening of an amateur performance, or on Shakespeare’s birthday. Typical of their mood and mode is the ‘Occasional Address for a Dramatic Evening. April 13 1864’, written in celebration of Shakespeare’s tercentenary, and the events surrounding it in Stratford. It begins ‘This April month, this pleasant month of spring, /With Shakespeare’s ever-honour’d name doth ring!’ and ends ‘For Shakespeare’s Birthday tercentenary / Bestow your plaudits loud and plenary: / For him, for us, his humble fellow-actors in a play,/ Now kindly raise a hearty, English, univoiced Hooray!’48 The poems, all more or less in this vein of simple celebration, add little to our sense of Mary’s understanding of Shakespeare, and rather acknowledge instead her apprehension of the general appreciation of the poet. She writes in ‘Prologue to a Shakespearian

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Acrostic Charade’ that ‘Tis often said, if you’re at a loss to find/A motto for whatever comes to mind,/ You’ve only to look into Shakespeare’s page;/ And there you’ll see all sorts of maxims sage / That suit all subjects, and that illustrate/ (Without concerning your own empty pate) / Their subtlest meanings with much fuller force/ Than you can hope to do by any course / But this’.49 The poetry is undistinguished, even at times rather poor, but it is defined by a consciously democratic impulse which seeks to celebrate Shakespeare’s availability, and to enhance that availability through her poetry’s own active invitation and a simplicity which is beguiling through its enthusiasm, and even arguably through the knowingness with which it invites the reader’s complicity in its often strained rhymes.50 That little of the distinguished scholar intrudes into these verses gives some clue to the nature of the meaning behind them, and even of the way in which Shakespeare infiltrated her leisure time too. One of the most famous of the amateur performances of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century was one in which Mary herself participated. Mary’s account of the performance can be found in Recollections of Writers (1878) in which she and Charles record their memories of some of their distinguished literary friends and collaborators. In a chapter entitled ‘Charles Dickens and His Letters’, Mary tells of how she took part in a production of The Merry Wives of Windsor which was organized by Dickens in 1848 in order to raise funds to support the appointment of a permanent custodian for Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford. (The house itself had recently been purchased for the nation.) In this most revolutionary of European years, it is telling that Mary’s efforts should be expended on this project. Her collaboration with Dickens is framed by her worship of him, and begins with an account of her and Charles’s driving along ‘the New Road’, and, as we drove by one particular house – a tall house, the upper windows of which were visible above the high wall that enclosed its front garden – we always looked at it with affectionate interest as long as it remained in sight. For in that house. No. 1, Devonshire Terrace, we knew lived the young author who had ‘witched the world with noble penmanship’ in those finely original serials that put forth their ‘two green leaves’ month by month. We then knew no more of his personal identity than what we had gathered from the vigorous youthful portrait of him by Samuel Lawrence as “ Boz,” and from having seen him and heard him speak at the “ Farewell dinner ” given to Macready in 1839. We little thought, as we gazed at the house where he dwelt, that we should ever come to sit within

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its walls, palm to palm in greeting, face to face in talk, side by side at table, with its fascinating master, who shone with especial charm of brilliancy and cordiality as host entertaining his guests.51 This is an account which brings the Cowden Clarkes, who often seem to inhabit a rather timeless realm, firmly up-to-date, and puts them fully in line with their contemporaries’ enthusiasm for the increasingly popular Dickens. The Cowden Clarkes were first introduced to Dickens at a party by Leigh Hunt, and the attraction was immediate and lasting: ‘prepossession was confirmed into affectionate admiration and attachment that lasted faithfully strong throughout the happy friendship that ensued, and was not even destroyed by death; for [Mary] cherishes his memory still with as fond an idolatry as she felt during that joyous period of her life when in privileged holiday companionship with him’.52 It was at her own suggestion that Mary took up the part of Mistress Quickly, a suggestion followed up, when not taken sufficiently seriously by Dickens, with a note stressing her earnestness. By her own account, she had ‘long wished’ to play the part, and eagerly took up Dickens’s suggestion to join the rest of the company for a rehearsal at ‘Miss Kelly’s theatre, to-morrow, Saturday week at seven in the evening’.53 Her account of the rehearsal process otherwise makes little mention of Miss Kelly and the other women engaged in the performance, but concentrates rather on the effect and impact of Dickens, and the other literary workers he had gathered around him for this performance.54 Her fellow actors were ‘men whom I had long known by reputation as distinguished artists and journalists. John Forster, Editor of the Examiner; two of the main-stays of Punch, Mark Lemon, its Editor and John Leech, its inimitable illustrator; Augustus Egg and Frank Stone’, G. H. Lewes and George Cruikshank.55 Among the amateurs in the performance, Mary was the only woman, a position she seems rather to have relished, especially as it seems to have given her a particular claim on Dickens’s protective instincts while the production was touring in England and Scotland. Most of Mary’s account of this episode is given over to a minute account of Dickens’s work as a theatrical manager, to his earnest professionalism, and the exacting standards which were always tempered with courtesy and gallant consideration. Most intriguingly, throughout this episode, little mention is made of Shakespeare himself. Rather, Mary’s tendency to hero-worship seems to have been displaced onto Dickens, who can do no wrong in her eyes. Her chapter on Dickens ends with an exhaustive account of his correspondence with the Cowden Clarkes, from brief notes to

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substantial letters, and is followed by the conjuring of this scene: ‘Three of his portraits – the one by Samuel Lawrence, the one by Maclise, and the one published by the “Graphic” in 1870 – together with those of others whom we cherished in lifetime and cherish still in memory – are placed where we see them the last thing before we close our eyes at night and the first thing on awaking in the morning’.56 Dickens enters the privileged space occupied by family members and Shakespeare, and not entirely because of his connection with the latter. Mary’s enthusiasm rather has an all-encompassing quality which allows no wrong-doing within its chosen subject, and which subsequently absorbs him into a cherished personal and domestic space. It is in only one aspect of the production that Mary’s scholarly credentials are utilized, and that is in the matter of Mistress Quickly’s dress, upon which she expended a good deal of her own and others’ time and expertise. This extended quotation gives a flavour of the doggedness with which Mary and her contemporaries were wont minutely to pursue their relationship with Shakespeare, and a sense of the enabling valorization that is accorded by the achievement, however illusory, that comes with authentication: Egg was a careful observer of costume; and expressed his admiration of mine for Dame Quickly, remarking (like a true artist) that it looked ‘more toned down’ than the rest of the company’s, and seemed as if it might have been worn in Windsor streets, during the daily trottings to and fro of the match-making busy-body. It may well have looked thus; for while the other members of the company had their dresses made expressly for the occasion by a stage costume-maker, I had fabricated Dame Quickly’s from materials of my own, previously used, in order that they might not look ‘too new’ and that they might be in strict consonance with my ideas of correct dressing for the part. To this end, I had written to ask the aid of Colonel Hamilton Smith, an authority in costumes of all ages and countries. To my inquiry respecting Dame Quickly’s costume, he replied by sending me two coloured sketches accompanied by a kind letter from which I transcribe this extract, evincing his extreme care to ensure accuracy: – ‘ . . . Shakespeare, I believe, had no image in his view but that of his own times, and I believe also the figures artists have given relating to the play are all, with some licence, of the times of Elizabeth and James I. My own opinion is likewise inclining to that period, because the humorous character of the play becomes more obvious when represented in dresses and scenery which we can better appreciate for that purpose than when we take the more recondite manners of the age when the red rose was in the ascendant. The special character of Mistress Quickly, with

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manners somewhat dashed with Puritanism, dresses admirably in the later period, and is not to be found in the early period of the Lollards. No dress of the time would tell the audience that it is the costume of a Mistress Quickly. It would only show a gentlewoman, a young lady, or a countrywoman. ‘This question being settled, I have now only to offer a dress, and I recommend that of a Dame Bonifant figured on a Devon brass of the year 1614. I think you will find it sufficiently piquant; demure though it be. I think it just the thing, and you may select the colours that will suit you best. The other is Lady Slanning, from her monument dating 1583. If this period will not answer, pray let me know, and I will endeavour to select others of the times of Henry IV. and V’. In making my dress for Dame Quickly, I availed myself of Colonel Hamilton Smith’s suggestions and sketches for some particulars; but also copied trom the effective costume given by Kenny Meadows of her at p. 91, vol i. of his ‘Illustrated Shakespeare’, published by Tyas in 1843. To the very characteristic coit there depicted (which I made in black velvet lined with scarlet silk) I added a pinner and lappet of old point-lace, the latter of which floated from the outside together with long ribbon streamers of scarlet, so as to give an idea of ‘the ship-tire’ mentioned by Falstaff, as one of the fashionable head-gears of the period. William Havell, the artist, a short time afterwards made for my husband a water-coloured sketch of me in my Quickly costume which now hangs in the picture-gallery of our Italian home; and it gave me a strange feeling of suddenly-recalled past times amid the present, when the other day I saw the delicate point lappet and pinner, – worn by Dame Quickly in 1848, and which had been given to my niece Valeria, – figuring round the young throat as a modern lace cravat in 1876.57 The performances themselves are recorded as being successful and enjoyable, and Mary notes a number of details of her friends’ performances, and particularly of Dickens’s Justice Shallow. However, both in London and the cities to which they subsequently toured, there is little sense given in Mary’s account of audiences’ responses to Shakespeare. Rather, she writes of their reception of the illustrious players. This is in line with contempoary reviews of the production which also focus on the celebrity performers, and on their purpose in putting on the play. This purpose mutates in newspaper accounts from a general desire to aid the fund for purchasing Shakespeare’s birthplace, to a desire to find a custodian, until finally there is a settled expectation that the performances are

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intended specifically to support the appointment of Sheridan Knowles to that role. It has to be admitted that reviewers, while generally in favour of the purpose of the performances, are less enamoured of what they actually see on stage. While acknowledging the avowed purpose of the performance, The Era reviewer suggests that the ‘real and predominant motive on the part of the “performers” was to indulge their own vanity’.58 The whole piece is offended by the folly of the amateurish performer, not only in terms of the quality of their acting – only G. H. Lewes comes out of this unscathed – but because of the damage they might do to people’s taste for the theatre generally, and the way they are anyway disrupting the legitimate business of the Haymarket. Only in the provinces do the amateurs achieve any significant warmth of appreciation, and then for their celebrity rather than their acting skills. Mary is written of nowhere, and indeed only one of the professional actresses merits a mention. In financial terms, however, the players did well, raising several hundred pounds. But the muted and even hostile responses of reviewers gives some clue as to the nature of Mary’s very personalized response to her brief experience of being a player. Mary carried on an enthusiastic, rather star-struck, correspondence with Dickens for the rest of his life, and her response to the publication of Great Expectations is revealing of how far Dickens had come to infiltrate a space in her regard once more exclusively occupied by Shakespeare: Never did you write so finely, so tenderly, so truly. Henceforth some of those condensed passages of pathos, – ‘Used not! Oh, Mr Pip, used!’; ‘Ever the best of friends’; ‘I hope I’ve beat out something nigh the rights of this at last’; ‘Dear Mr Pip, old chap’, – will ring in my memory with Cordelia’s ‘No cause, no cause’; Othello’s ‘Not a jot, not a jot’: & Macduff’s ‘I guess at it’: for divine might of simplicity in eloquence.59 She continued to publish essays on Shakespeare such as ‘Shakespeare’s self as revealed in his writings’ and ‘Shakespeare as the Girl’s Friend’, both printed in the Philadelphia-based journal Shakespeariana (3, 1886, 145–57 and 4, 1887, 355–69) though the latter had previously appeared in The Girls’ Own Paper (London, June 1887), which used the article as a pretext for one of its regular essay competitions. The spirit of Mary’s own writing is continuous with a lifetime spent analysing the insight and acuity of Shakespeare, and is written in a spirit of uncritical celebration. What is most interesting here perhaps is the relationship Mary envisages between contemporary women and Shakespeare’s heroines. Throughout the century, the latter

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had variously been used to stimulate women’s aspirations to goodness, and to admonish their deviations. Both tendencies can be found in the most well-known account of Shakespeare’s heroines, John Ruskin’s ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, a lecture he gave in 1864, and which subsequently appeared in Sesame and Lilies in the following year. There he writes: Note broadly in the outset, Shakespeare has no heroes; – he has only heroines. There is not one entirely heroic figure in all his plays . . . Whereas there is hardly a play that has not a perfect woman in it, steadfast in grave hope, and errorless purpose: Cordelia, Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen Catherine, Perdita, Sylvia, Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and last, and perhaps loveliest, Virgilia, are all faultless; conceived in the highest heroic type of humanity . . . Observe, further, among all the principal figures in Shakespeare’s plays, there is only one weak woman – Ophelia; and it is because she fails Hamlet at the critical moment, and is not, and cannot in her nature be, a guide to him when he needs her most, that all the bitter catastrophe follows.60 Ruskin both celebrates contemporary femininity through its approximation to Shakespeare’s heroines, but simultaneously admonishes his readers with a sense of the potentially devastating consequences of their falling short of his standards. He enrolls Shakespeare within a system of admonition and thus to a large extent eliminates the possibility of women’s own utilization of Shakespeare as a fellow-being, a sympathetic articulator both of women’s potential and the obstacles to achieving it. By comparison, Mary’s 1887 essay treats Shakespeare as a ‘friend of woman-kind’, a ‘great poet-teacher’: who has depicted women with full appreciation of their highest qualities, yet with accurate perception of their defects and foibles, who has championed them with potential might by his chivalrous maintenance of their innate purity and devotion, while showing the points wherein their natural moral strength may be warped and weakened by circumstances, who has vindicated their truest rights and celebrated their best virtues.61 There is little here, or elsewhere in the essay, of Ruskin’s rather admonitory tone, but rather a useful insight into how best to succeed as a woman at various stages of life. As the subject moves from girlhood through youth to maturity, Mary posits a shifting relationship with Shakespeare which

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modulates according to need, and to all-important circumstance. Crucially, Mary avoids Ruskinian essentialism by this attention to specificity of need, and by her analysis of the more active relationship between women and Shakespeare than Ruskin allows. The paternalistic friend and teacher is a support rather than a disembodied ideal. And crucially Mary envisages women coming to Shakespeare, taking themselves in hand, actively endeavouring to learn from his women: She can take her own disposition in hand, as it were, and endeavour to mould and form it into the best perfection of which it is capable, by carefully observing the women drawn by Shakespeare. From his youthful women she can gain lessons in artlessness, guilelessness, modesty, sweetness, ingenuousness, and the most winning candour; from his wives and matrons she can derive instruction in moral courage, meekness, magnanimity, firmness, devoted tenderness, high principle, noble conduct, loftiest speech and sentiment.62 The ambience is altogether loftier, and more invigorating, for Mary’s Shakespearean females than it is for Ruskin’s. Inspired by Mary’s writing, The Girls’ Own Paper, in which it appeared in Britain, made ‘My Favourite Heroine from Shakespeare’ the title of its next essay-writing competition, and it is interesting to observe in the essays submitted a vitality and energy of response which perhaps exceeded the expectations of the magazine, but which chime with the spirit of Mary’s response to the heroines. Indeed, some of the authors (many of whom are in their 30s, and are presumably mothers of younger readers), in an act of rebellion against the incredibly hectoring tone of the magazine’s editorial voice, so far contravened the Paper’s expectations as to earn pretty severe reprimands from the judges. Admonitions were handed out to girls who didn’t respond properly to the question set, and who rather wrote paraphrases of the plays, accounts of the life of Shakespeare, or descriptions of Shakespeare’s influence on English literature. However, the greatest disapprobation is reserved for those girls who: wandered from the subject in a curious manner, and made their essays a vehicle for expressing their ideas on some social problem. The vexed question of ‘women’s rights’ was answerable for four of these failures. For instance, one girl who commenced her essay in this way: – ‘My favourite heroine from Shakespeare is the “Lady Lawyer, Portia.” It is superfluous

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to describe her action and speeches in the Merchant of Venice. Far better will it be for me to transport her to the nineteenth century, and show how deeply she would have been interested in the great subject of women’s rights . . . She is evidently Shakespeare’s pet creation, and can we not deduct [sic] from this, that the great writer would give to women a more important position than they hitherto occupied?’ Could anything be more inapropos than this, and yet three other girls wrote in a similar strain! Two girls wrote on the other side, and strongly deprecated ‘a growing tendency of women to usurp the place of men. No wonder chivalry towards our sex is becoming a thing of the past.’ These competitors also chose Portia, from the Merchant of Venice, as their heroine, ‘and for the reason that, notwithstanding her vigorous mind, she is always gentle and womanly, and content to be dependent on her husband, although, I think, he must have been her inferior in many respects . . . My heroine would not support any of those fanciful opinions, advocated by some women of the present day – opinions which, if carried out, would result in our clever girls becoming second-rate men, instead of first-rate women’. How foolish girls are to become so exercised about one idea that they must fain ‘drag it in’, when it has nothing to do with the subject they are writing about.63 It is interesting that in an entry of nearly two hundred essays, these few should merit such attention. Interesting too, that, as the Paper itself notes, Portia should be invoked to precisely such opposing ends. Portia was the most popular heroine in these essays, and was the subject of more than a third of the essays submitted, a fact which goes some way to calling into question the Paper’s implication that ‘women’s rights’ were the obsession of just a few girls, given Portia’s widely acknowledged intelligence, and professional competence, and the centrality of her gender-challenging behaviour to the plot of the play. Indeed the Paper ingenuously quotes one girl who gives as reason for the grounds of Portia’s popularity that ‘she is one of those characters who combine so much that is excellent in man, with the gentle charm which is so essential in a woman’,64 thereby highlighting a degree of gender reconfiguration which would reach its apogee in the next decade. Also noteworthy in these essays is the extent to which the girls themselves repudiated the tragic heroines most often held up for their approval and edification. The Paper notes that, ‘The heroines who successfully overcome their troubles have been just six times more popular than those whose end

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is tragic’.65 In particular Ophelia and Juliet have been neglected, which does not, however, stop the Paper from illustrating their report on the competition with engravings of these two heroines lying dead. The testimony of the Girls’ Own Paper, and accounts of girl-readers themselves, witness the ways in which those readers subverted the punitive aspects of Victorian readings of Shakespeare’s plays, choosing instead those heroines who might provide a better adventure, or, alternatively, attempting sympathetically to re-write the tragic heroines’ stories. The exemplariness of these tragic heroines for Victorian commentators, such as Ruskin, and the Paper’s contributor, is troubling, and it is highly instructive to see Victorian girls’ own active rejection of such figures, and tempting to see behind that rejection, the liberating spirit of Mary Cowden Clarke, her work and indeed her example. Part of that example importantly rests in the work that she carried out with her husband, and it is crucial of course when considering Mary Cowden Clarke as a ‘great Shakespearean’ to remember that she wrote a substantial amount (though by no means all) of her publications in collaboration with her husband. When she published their joint book Recollections of Writers a year after Charles’s death in 1878, she memorialized their joint work in her Preface as a loving, literary partnership: Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke may with truth be held in tender remembrance by their readers as among the happiest of married lovers for more than forty-eight years, writing together, reading together, enjoying together the perfection of loving, literary consociation; and kindly sympathy may well be felt for her who is left singly to subscribe herself, Her readers’ faithful servant, MARY COWDEN CLARKE (Recollections) Charles was 89 when he died and Mary was 67, but the continuing intensity of her grief testifies to the sincerity of these remarks. Three years later she wrote to their friends James and Annie Fields: Oh, my dear friends! I try hard never to break down and utter a syllable that may hurt those who would grieve to see me grieve – but often, often, I feel that I would give all that may remain to me of life to be only one simple quarter of an hour with him again.66

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And in a poignant sonnet called ‘Widowed’ she describes herself as: A torn half-sheet of paper thrown away Disfigur’d, crumpled, meaningless, and blurr’d, With scarce one clear intelligible word …. A script inscrutable, a song unheard.67 (Honey from the Weed, 1881) Here she imagines herself as the very materials of collaboration – paper, script and words – that require the partner to make them meaningful. Both Charles and Mary frequently used expressions like ‘lover-husband’ and ‘lover-wife’, ‘other self’ and ‘second self’ when referring to themselves and each other. The fact that the Cowden Clarkes had no children may have intensified their relationship, though this is never discussed explicitly by either of them. Mary came from a large, happy, talented family, Charles was famous for his love of children and they both enjoyed the company of various nieces and nephews. Writing a memorial essay on them after Mary’s death in 1898 for The Century Magazine, Annie Fields hints at a significant factor in their relationship when she says of their engagement: [Charles] now felt that the moment when he could ask for the young woman of his choice had arrived, although she was still very young. [John] Keats [Charles’s former pupil and protégé] had already died, leaving a gap never to be filled in the loving heart of his friend.68 When they married in 1828, Mary was 19 and Charles was 41; they spent their honeymoon in Enfield, revisiting places Charles had been to with Keats, but Mary herself never gives any indication that she felt herself to be a substitute in her husband’s affections. In her Centennial Biographical Sketch of Charles published in 1887 she constantly stresses his youthfulness, saying with reference to Keats and Edward Holmes, ‘Although in years their senior, in cheer and animation of spirit he was always their co-mate and friend’ and describing visits to Hampstead Heath when Charles entered into children’s games ‘a boy still, though more than “of age”’.69 He does seem to have had a remarkable constitution: in a letter to Samuel Timmins dated 28 February 1873, when he was 85, he records his gratitude for his own health and remembers ‘walking six and thirty miles, at four miles an hour, without resting’ and contributing to victory in a cricket match played ‘in an unflinching rain the whole day’.70

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The actual process and nature of the Cowden Clarkes’ working collaboration are described by Mary in her correspondence with her American ‘fan’, Robert Balmanno, from 1850 to 1861, and published in 1902 as Letters to an Enthusiast. In response to a request from him for information on this point, she details the domestic circumstances of their work at this time in Craven Hill Cottage in Bayswater, London, where they lived with her brother Albert. On 23 April 1851 she writes ‘I am up at six . . . Charles is sitting beside me at the same table, writing away at his new course for the London Institute’.71 It had been Mary’s suggestion that Charles should exploit his good speaking voice by undertaking a career as a public lecturer on literary topics and he rehearsed his lectures by reading them aloud to her.72 She regretted his absences when he was on a lecture tour but revelled in his success,73 and she records that they always wrote to each other at least once and sometimes twice a day.74 During a particularly busy period of work on their first edition of the Complete Works, on 12 July 1852, she writes (again to Robert Balmanno) ‘Charles and I are up at five o’clock, take a shower-bath, and then repair to the den to work together till breakfast-time. So hard do we work just now, that sometimes of an evening he gets through a second day’s labour here, after having done a fair day’s clerkifying at Dean Street’.75 What also becomes clear in these letters is the extent of the worship of Shakespeare that permeates Mary’s life and work. On 4 August 1850 she describes how ‘our own snuggery – our own room, part sleeping-room, part scribbling room – is behung’ with no fewer than 47 paintings, sketches, daguerrotypes, lithographs and miniatures mainly of military figures and including a bust of ‘our Idol’ Shakespeare.76 Even more intimate is her admission in 1852 that ‘Angel Will’ hangs at her bedside, and that his is ‘the first face – together with my mother’s, which hangs close by him – to greet my waking eyes. Did I tell you that underneath his portrait I have written his own words: “A rarer spirit never did steer humanity”?’.77 This is then worship of a curiously intimate kind, bound up in the closeness of her relationship with her geographically distant family, and articulated through conventional religious language: of the face by her bed, she writes that she turns to it ‘whenever anything vexes or perplexes my spirit’, and that its eyes and mouth ‘seem to have a supernatural power of reaching and sympathizing with poor humanity and consoling its struggles, with their divine influence’.78 In this language, the familiar, indeed well-worn, trope of the divinity of Shakespeare is invested with an emotional vitality that reinvigorates the clichéd words. More New Testament Messiah than Old Testament tyrant, this Shakespeare provides succour in moments of despair and confirmation

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of the best aspirations and possibilities of humanity. The letters’ collapsing of Shakespeare into comparisons with geographically distant family members (Mary’s family lived in Nice for much of the period of this correspondence, and indeed her adult life), gives an understanding of the possibilities of this relationship which are not perhaps feasible for a modern reader. The geographical distance of Mary’s mother segues into the temporal distance of Shakespeare, and in a real sense, the two share a similar space in Mary’s emotional life and longings. Distance, absence of any sort, lead, as these letters show, to lives lived in large part through imagined emotional transactions, through the relics of relationship, be those relics images or words. In a very real emotional sense Shakespeare is as near to Mary as are any of her family members, and his mementoes are just as cherished. His temporal distance is felt as keenly as their geographical removal, and the same means are used to overcome both. The letters to and from Balmanno also reveal how for many in the nineteenth century Shakespeare acted as a broker in relationships which would never be consummated by actual physical contact. Mary and Balmanno would never meet, but clearly, the emotional transactions effected by Shakespeare were sufficient foundations for a trusting, respectful and emotionally open relationship. As we have seen, the couple swap details of their domestic lives, involve their spouses in the correspondence, and speak openly of the emotional detail of lives lived in part through the language and metaphors provided by Shakespeare. The writer could though also act as an actual means of introduction too, as is shown when Charles is welcomed among the Nice nobility as ‘the gentleman who gives such interesting lectures on Shakespeare’.79 Contemporary news also finds its meaning in and through Shakespeare, as when Mary comments on the completion of the Atlantic Telegraph line: ‘Is it not a fine realization of our Idol’s idea of “putting a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes”? It makes Master Puck himself slow’.80 These letters show, in a way no other of her writings can, the almost tangible presence of Shakespeare in Mary’s ‘work-a-day world’.81 The reference is of course from As You Like It, and is a muted recognition of Rosalind’s ‘working-day world’ of 1.3. Mary’s habit of quoting Shakespeare throughout these letters is not of course unusual for a literary nineteenth-century woman, as the correspondence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot amply shows. But the extent to which almost everything is filtered through his writings and thought is, and goes hand-in-hand with Mary’s capacity for idolatry and deep feeling. That this extends beyond Shakespeare is shown in her enthusiastic reception of the gift of a basket of flowers – ‘this hallowed basket’ – which Florence Nightingale gives to her sister Clara,82 but arguably

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even this response finds its roots in Shakespeare. What the correspondence as a whole gives us is a tangible sense of how the written word, both of the present and the past, can make a world, most particularly perhaps for a woman who, well-connected though Mary was, still finds her existence, her working-day, as well as her emotional, life, revolving around the home. Mary was very much aware of other collaborating couples, especially Charles and Mary Lamb (who were of course brother and sister) and the married partnerships of Horace Howard Furness with Helen Kate Furness and James Thomas Fields with Annie Adams Fields. The Cowden Clarkes had a long association with the Lambs: as we have already seen, her enthusiasm for Shakespeare began when her father showed her their Tales from Shakespeare. She later wrote of the Lambs that ‘In a more than usual degree was Charles Lamb’s sister, Mary Lamb, blended with his life, with himself – consociated as she was with his every act, word, and thought, through his own noble act of self-consecration to her’.83 Of course she knew the sad story of Mary’s having stabbed their mother to death in a fit of insanity in 1796, but her own parents had shown confidence in her (and in her brother’s care of her) by employing her as a tutor to teach their children Latin and, as mentioned earlier, Mary had the idea for the Concordance at the Lambs’ breakfast table. Recalling their friendship, Mary made an explicit link between the Lambs’ personal and literary partnership and her own: This Victoria Novello was a namesake of the honoured Mary Lamb, having been christened ‘Mary’ Victoria. When she married, she abided by her first and simplest baptismal name, as being more in consonance with the good old English (plain but clerkly) surname of her husband, and became known to her readers as their faithful servant, MARY COWDEN CLARKE.84 Mary corresponded with both Furnesses, and may have inspired Mrs Furness to publish under her own name, as mentioned earlier. The two women never met, but Mary published an elegy for Helen Kate in the first volume of Shakespeariana (1883–1884), hailing her as ‘my sister in concordant deed’ and expressing sympathy for her husband, deprived, like herself, of collaborator as well as spouse. Later in life, Mary’s correspondence with Annie Fields suggests her identification with Annie who (like Mary) was nearly 20 years younger than her husband who (like Charles) had known his wife from her childhood. Annie too had collaborated in her husband’s life of writing and publishing until his death in 1881. Mary singles out for praise a moment in Annie’s

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memoir of her husband when she quotes him as saying ‘I hold that husband and wife should be lovers all their days’, recalling the Cowden Clarkes’ terminology of ‘lover-husband’ and ‘lover-wife’.85 She is generous in her joy when Annie secures what she calls the ‘permanent companionship’ of the writer Sarah Orne Jewett, though she continues to assume that Annie understands her own loneliness in widowhood.86 Mary Cowden Clarke was not an outspoken feminist or suffragist, and in many respects her work attempts to reconcile rather than contest conflicting notions of Victorian womanhood – especially in promoting the education, achievements and status of women while privileging the ‘duties of wife and mother’. Even given such a supportive partner as Charles, she sometimes seems defensive about her own position, anxious to assert that she is a ‘proper wife’ despite her increasingly professional status as a freelance writer. In My Long Life she writes of her pleasure in preparing meals for Charles and in making all her own clothes and his dress waistcoats: ‘I mention these particulars in order to show that a woman who adopts literary work as her profession need not either neglect or be deficient in the more usually feminine accomplishments of cookery and needlework’.87 But in other respects she was not an orthodox Victorian wife: from the beginning of their relationship at the age of nineteen she was determined to contribute to the family income, ‘knowing that my betrothed was not a rich man’88 and, given the success of her publications, she probably earned considerably more than he did. Annie Fields records that, ‘Every guinea that Charles gained he brought to his wife. He confided to her from first to last the entire management of whatever money they earned’.89 Together, the Cowden Clarkes formed one of a number of successful collaborating couples in the nineteenth century and Mary was certainly recognized as the dominant partner in her own day. Although she never went to the United States (she hated sea-voyages so much that crossing the English Channel was always an experience to be dreaded), she had many American admirers who showed their appreciation of her work, in particular the Concordance, by presenting her with a specially carved Testimonial Chair in 1852, made of rosewood and surmounted by a head of Shakespeare. Among the 64 subscribers to this present are listed the actress Charlotte Cushman (famous for her performances as Romeo and Hamlet), the writers Washington Irving and Henry Longfellow, the Secretary of State Daniel Webster, and numerous professors, judges and state officials.90 Charles was characteristically and generously delighted with the gift, writing,

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I am three hundred and sixty degrees – the entire circle – more cordially happy at the honour having been paid to her than if three hundred and sixty times its amount in applause and pecuniary value had been paid to myself.91 Despite her prolific correspondence with Shakespeare scholars, Mary would always be isolated from an increasingly professionalized scholarly world, both by her gender and by her geographical separation from the centres of that world: from 1856 she and Charles lived in Nice, then from 1861 in Genoa. When she began her long career with the publication of the Concordance in 1845 there were very few women writing on Shakespeare; by the time of her last publication on him, ‘Shakespeare as the Girl’s Friend’ in 1887, opportunities for women as critics and editors had opened up dramatically, partly due to her example. In 1845 Anna Jameson’s was the only monograph on Shakespeare to be published by a woman in the nineteenth century; by 1887 there were books by Delia Bacon, Henrietta Palmer, Frances Kemble, Mary Preston, Dorothea Beale, Kate RichmondWest, Helena Faucit and Mrs Elliott. The Philadelphia-based journal Shakespeariana was edited by Charlotte Porter from 1883 to 1887 and numerous women were publishing essays in general periodicals and scholarly journals. Women’s play-reading groups and study clubs flourished in both Britain and North America and women were prominent members of the New Shakespeare Society in London.92 Her legacy today is more problematic. She is patronized as the chief exemplar of a ‘novelistic’ approach to Shakespeare in The Girlhood, while her editing work, like that of most male editors after the end of the eighteenth century, has been superseded and forgotten. The detailed attention she pays to Shakespeare’s language in The Shakespeare Key is out of fashion and her espousal of relatively conservative Victorian values makes it difficult to turn her into a role model for modern female scholars. She may nevertheless be claimed to be the first woman, other than actresses, to make a living out of Shakespeare. The Oxford DNB records that at her death she left £26,479 12s 6d, a considerable sum at the time and, according to the National Archives conversion tool, probably around £1.6 million today.93 This was not just a living but what could reasonably be called a fortune. Of course it is a very crude means whereby to measure the success of Mary’s life which, like those of her more ambitious contemporaries, was deeply concerned both to maintain its emotional and familial loyalties and duties, and to enjoy the intellectual resources and abilities that were hers. It is not

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too much to say that this is, and has for a considerable time been, one of the determining factors of women’s lives. To the extent that she used Shakespeare in helping her to address it, and indeed to overcome the apparent dichotomy of that dilemma by making its parts synonymous rather than oppositional, Mary perhaps adds a new dimension to the qualities of a ‘Great Shakespearean’.

Chapter 3

Frances Anne Kemble Jacky Bratton

In notes addressed, as she claims, to a young actor about to undertake the role of Romeo, Fanny Kemble writes: I am not careless, as I may have appeared to you, of the value of the text of Shakespeare; but, poet, philosopher and playwright as he was, your dealings with him are in the latter capacity only. You need not be afraid of eliminating the two nobler elements of his works; omit what you will, that is impossible. Remember too, that his inspiration – I use the word advisedly – did not protect him from the errors of his time and place. As for occasional breaking of his lines, my excitement the other evening made them more frequent than they really were; and a good musician should know how to redeem a faulty line, in some measure, by his utterance.1 Her response here to the writer who bestowed upon her a ‘kingdom of unbounded delight’2 is typically complicated and multilayered – even contradictory. She has been advising the unnamed young man3 about performing Shakespeare in the theatre, an activity which she normally maintained was doomed to failure and inadequacy; and she refers to a recent occasion, apparently, when she was giving a performance of his work herself. She defines Shakespeare as ‘poet, philosopher and playwright’ with the writing of drama as the least ‘noble’ part of his work, though she undoubtedly found the other functions she lists when they were being expressed through his dramas. She speaks emphatically of the dramatist’s ‘inspiration’ – emphasizing that she is not using a figure of speech or writing loosely, but means the word, and so means, presumably, that what he writes is in some way breathed into him, by his muse or simply by God. She implies therefore that he is not a man earning his living by writing for the stage, but is in some sort a transmitter of wisdom from above. On the other hand, she stresses, he is not perfect, having the ‘errors of his time and place’ – by

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which she means those elements of his plays that she and all her contemporaries insisted upon bowdlerizing. It is therefore the more remarkable that she, alone of her contemporaries, saw fit to deliver a version of Measure for Measure from the public platform, and spoke with some asperity to a friend who questioned whether this was a good idea.4 She finally suggests that the plays’ versification may sometimes leave something to be desired, and that the perfection of Shakespeare’s lines is a matter of collaboration in delivery between the writer and the performer, as in the case of a piece of music. This observation not only seems to undercut her rejection of the stage’s contribution to the drama, but offers us an insight into her as a performer: her style, the formal style that she inherited and to which she always adhered, was to treat the dialogue as music, not simply as conversation. We may read Fanny Kemble’s instructions for the young actor because they form part of her Notes upon Some of Shakespeare’s Plays published by Bentley in 1882 – when she was 73. The book, a somewhat desultory arrangement of papers written at different times, which is very properly described by its title, was a small part of the massive output of writings for publication with which she financed her later years. Among the other consequences of Fanny Kemble’s pragmatic resort to writing for a living in her old age is the useful outcome that she has left us extensive autobiographies.5 It is no doubt the easy profusion of these materials, as well as the interest found by American writers in her remarkable account of life on a slave plantation, that has given rise to so many subsequent studies and biographies of the last of the famous Kembles. For the same reason, this essay will quote liberally from Fanny’s own words on herself and Shakespeare’s work. From her first steps upon a stage in 1829, vividly recounted in Records of a Girlhood (187), to the uncharacteristically laconic account of her career in public readings that she included in the last volume of her Records of a Later Life which appeared in 1882,6 she speaks at length of her enormous admiration for Shakespeare, and her complex, conflicted as well as delighted relationship with his work on stage. Frances Anne was of the last ruling generation in the royal family of the late Georgian stage, but she could not simply accept her position in the Kemble theatrical line; and her attitude to Shakespeare, who is for her simultaneously the justification of the theatre and the only complete exception to its damaging effects, cannot be understood apart from her attitude to that inheritance. She could never satisfactorily resolve the intellectual and emotional difficulties that acting, which she despised, and the plays of Shakespeare, which she worshipped, caused her. Despite the fact that some of her opinions on the topic of the theatre expressed in her

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journal of 1835 seem to reappear, unmodified, no further considered, in her writing 50 years later, her reactions to the stage and her interpretation of Shakespeare’s place on it were constantly shifting, in a subliminal attempt, perhaps, to reconcile this central conflict. Not only was her experience of Shakespeare an important and ever-developing part of her own life, but her presentations of his plays were an influence, for over 50 years, on the views of her contemporaries. From Anna Jameson to Henry James, her writing friends bear witness to the vivid, passionate, many-faceted performances she gave and their impact upon how several generations of Victorian audience received Shakespeare. But there is nothing clear-cut or simple about the relationship between Frances Anne Kemble Butler the writer, Fanny Kemble the performer, her family of eminent actors, and the on- and off-stage dramas in which they all appeared.

The Young Princess i: Accession To be born a Kemble in 1809 was to be born in interesting times. Her family was the quasi-royalty of the English stage – in the time of the rise of republicanism. In October 1782 the previously acknowledged monarch of the London stage, David Garrick, had brought Sarah Siddons (neé Kemble) to star at Drury Lane. This was her second, and this time utterly triumphant, arrival on the London scene, and she rapidly became not only the unrivalled queen of tragedy but also the matriarch of a clan of actors who dominated the legitimate stage for 40 years. The Kembles were, in the words of William Hazlitt, not so much a family of actors as a religion, the religion in which the Romantic generation was brought up.7 Sarah’s triumph immediately brought three younger siblings to Drury Lane in her train, and then in September 1783 John Philip arrived; he was her nearest brother in age and already an established actor in the provinces. His studied and serious performance combined an imposing physical presence, grace and formality, with a shrewdly-publicized erudition in scholarly new readings of the Shakespearean texts he delivered. His London debut, less immediately sensational than his sister’s, was thus nevertheless marked as of the utmost importance, as the recognition of a new master-performer of Shakespeare always is in Britain. The two elder Kembles became an unrivalled acting and managerial alliance. In 1788 the Drury Lane manager Thomas King unexpectedly left the theatre, and J.P. Kemble stepped in as manager. The family dominance of the legitimate stage was established. They opened a rebuilt Drury Lane in March 1784 with their acclaimed Macbeth, dedicating

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the new theatre to the works of Shakespeare; in the early 1790s the youngest brother Charles, Fanny’s future father, and also the actress, singer and dramatist Marie-Thérèse De Camp, who was to be her mother, joined the Drury Lane company. All was by no means easy there, under the proprietorship of the distracted and debt-ridden Richard Sheridan, but the senior Kembles’ performances in Shakespeare and their accumulating reputation in the few (but monumental) new characters they originated were the firmest foundation his theatre had had for a decade. When they eventually lost patience with Sheridan, in 1802, they all walked away together, and in 1803 John Philip bought a one-sixth share in the Covent Garden patent, for the substantial fortune of £22,000, and became manager and star in his own theatre.8 He was also by this date an immense social success, increasingly invited not only to join gentlemen’s drinking sessions but also to make vacation visits to country estates, where he condescended to join in lavishlymounted amateur theatricals.9 The 25-year master of the Shakespearean stage was, however, aging, and his work was going out of fashion, though Sarah was still held in excessively high regard. She had become an unassailable icon, extravagantly extolled in her most stately roles, worshipped for the deep but narrow stream of tragic grandeur flowing from her Lady Macbeth. But in truth, fashionable London was no longer very interested in stately Shakespeareanism. When Covent Garden burnt to the ground at the opening of the 1808 season, closely followed by Drury Lane, the other scene of their earlier triumphs, the Kembles lost their fortune and also the means of repairing it. In 1809, therefore, when Charles Kemble’s daughter was born, Covent Garden had to be rapidly rebuilt by courtesy of the aristocratic patronage John Philip was able to summon up. But when the managerial family attempted to mount their iconic production of Macbeth, the Shakespearean trump card with which they had opened at Drury Lane in 1784, the ill omens attendant upon the play reasserted themselves and the audience rose up vociferously against them. To make financial sense, as well as to please its major stake-holders in other ways, the new, enormous Covent Garden had to satisfy the desires of highly-placed patrons, whose wavering attendance it was essential to retain and capitalize upon if the manager was to meet the expenses of the enlarged playhouse. The rebuilt auditorium had therefore a predominance of more expensive seats and a whole tier of private boxes. By this move Kemble and his backers alienated a vociferous and selfrighteous lobby of middle-class men who, while not necessarily perceiving themselves as radical or revolutionary, were influenced by the new social climate that rejected the dominance of an exclusive elite. It was their

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argument that such public places as the national theatres should be the territory of the educated general public.10 Covent Garden held, at this point, a monopoly of legitimate theatre; Kemble therefore had a public obligation to open it to all that was felt to override any financial argument. Sixty-seven nights of rioting enforced the point – on two of which Fanny was actually present, though as yet unborn.11 From the time of the latter-day princess’s birth, therefore, the Kemble family was engaged upon a rearguard action to maintain its regal position in London culture. Aging and passé, encumbered with management and impossible expenses, only comfortable on stage in tragic roles, John Philip and even Sarah Siddons steadily faded from public acclaim. The younger Charles was only, in the egotistical estimation of the coming man William Charles Macready, ‘a first-rate actor of second-rate roles.’12 A new and much brighter star arose in the acting firmament with the debut of Edmund Kean in 1814. The new Shakespearean thrilled the critical avant-garde without stemming for long the defection of the richest patrons, who could clearly see that this actor, although he preferred the great Shakespearean roles to appearing in suspect melodramas by the radical dramatists such as Thomas Holcroft and Douglas Jerrold, was not one of themselves, nor one of their men. When Macready, who would become the doyen of quite a different theatre lobby, made his Covent Garden debut in 1816, his only serious rival as Shakespeare’s interpreter was Kean. In that same year John Philip cut his losses and retired, and in 1817 left for a permanent home in Lausanne, handing over his entire holdings in Covent Garden to Charles as a gift – very much of the white elephant variety.13 Throughout Fanny’s teenage years, while she attended a variety of schools in England and France, and then spent a year which she greatly enjoyed at the family theatre in Edinburgh, Charles struggled to keep Covent Garden going at the same time as paying for a gentleman’s education for his sons. Easily successful in school theatricals, Fanny was not disappointed in 1828 to hear that despite the family struggle to make ends meet her father did not want her to take to the stage. She conceived a serious ambition to be a writer, and began upon a play – a verse tragedy in five acts, naturally. Then she returned to London to find her father on the brink of ruin. In recalling this crucial moment of her young life, in Records of a Girlhood, she says, Although all my sympathy with the anxieties of my parents tended to make the theatre an object of painful interest to me, and though my own attempts at poetical composition were constantly cast in a dramatic form, in spite of my enthusiastic admiration of Goethe’s and Schiller’s plays

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(which, however, I could only read in French or English translations, for I then knew no German) and my earnest desire to write a good play myself, the idea of making the stage my profession had entirely passed from my mind, which was absorbed with the wish and endeavour to produce a good dramatic composition. The turn I had exhibited for acting at school appeared to have evaporated, and Covent Garden itself never occurred to me as a great institution for purposes of art or enlightened public recreation, but only as my father’s disastrous property, to which his life was being sacrificed; and every thought connected with it gradually became more and more distasteful to me.14 She was at this point quite unfamiliar with Shakespeare on the page, although, as Gail Marshall tellingly points out, his words must have been deeply familiar, almost a family language, in her childhood homes;15 but, she says, she modelled her dramatic writing on Schiller. Reabsorbed into her parental home, and suddenly cast as its support, she discovered Shakespeare’s plays as whole creations by becoming famous for acting in them. She makes quite a good story of her sudden introduction as the rising star of Covent Garden, beginning with her mother coming home in tears on finding the theatre in the hands of the brokers, and all its hundreds of minor people – the Kembles’ retainers – turned out. Fanny, eager to help, was instructed by her mother to learn a Shakespearean role. She chose her personal favourite Portia, which was by no means popular at this time; with little comment her mother told her to go on to learn Juliet. Her ready compliance was again received with little comment, but she was then taken by her father to recite it from the mighty stage: so thither I went. That strange-looking place, the stage, with its racks of pasteboard and canvas – streets, forests, banqueting-halls, and dungeons – drawn apart on either side, was empty and silent; not a soul was stirring in the indistinct recesses of its mysterious depths, which seemed to stretch indefinitely behind me. In front, the great amphitheater, equally empty and silent, wrapped in its grey holland covers, would have been absolutely dark but for a long, sharp, thin shaft of light that darted here and there from some height and distance far above me, and alighted in a sudden, vivid spot of brightness on the stage. Set down in the midst of twilight space, as it were, with only my father’s voice coming to me from where he stood hardly distinguishable in the gloom, in those poetical utterances of pathetic passion I was seized with the spirit of the thing; my voice

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resounded through the great vault above and before me, and, completely carried away by the inspiration of the wonderful play, I acted Juliet as I do not believe I ever acted it again, for I had no visible Romeo, and no audience to thwart my imagination; at least, I had no consciousness of any, though in truth I had one. In the back of one of the private boxes, commanding the stage but perfectly invisible to me, sat an old and warmly attached friend of my father’s, Major D – , a man of the world – of London society – a passionate lover of the stage, an amateur actor of no mean merit, and one of the members of the famous Cheltenham dramatic company, a first-rate critic in all things connected with art and literature, a refined and courtly, courteous gentleman; the best judge, in many respects, that my father could have selected, of my capacity for my profession and my chance of success in it. Not till after the event had justified my kind old friend’s prophecy did I know that he had witnessed that morning’s performance, and joining my father at the end of it had said, ‘Bring her out at once; it will be a great success.’ And so three weeks from that time that I was brought out, and it was a ‘great success.’16 Several things are immediately notable about this audition. With hindsight, the writer offers us a version of the common story of the exhilaration of the newcomer to the stage. She professes that she is enchanted by the mystery of the darkened theatre – where she must in fact have been many times before; but she presents this as a magic moment, spotlit by sunlight, where she is ‘seized by the spirit of the thing’ and by Shakespeare’s conception of the girl poised, doomed, upon the brink of passionate life. She tells us she performed an understanding of the role that she felt she shared only with the author, free of fellow-players or audience, regardless of her father (who was speaking the lover’s lines, from the front), and completely unaware of the significantly anonymized man to whom he is presenting her. This ‘refined and courtly, courteous gentleman’ is an officer and an amateur, and ‘a man of the world’. His connoisseurship in young actresses delivers the vital verdict: not that she is a good actress, but that ‘it will be a success’ to ‘bring her out’. The same might be said of a book, or indeed a race-horse. Fanny’s tone in recounting her audition is easy, grateful for his kindness; but recalling her public debut she shows a different consciousness of the terrors of being thus evaluated, purchased, consumed. She stands quaking in the wings, seeing her mother enter as Lady Capulet, and then, on her cue, my aunt gave me an impulse forward, and I ran straight across the stage, stunned with the tremendous shout that greeted me, my eyes covered with

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mist, and the green baize flooring of the stage feeling as if it rose up against the feet; but I got hold of my mother, and stood like a terrified creature at bay, confronting the huge theatre full of gazing human beings.17 Despite her success this night, she claims to have remained forever dubious about acting, the art in which she knew she had an ‘unusual gift, and many unusual advantages’ but for which she had no love, and undertook no study – even the 3 weeks before her debut, she claims, were not entirely devoted to preparation. She is unsentimental and lucid about the limits this lack of inclination and study set upon her stage work. Her own stage performances were never in any way definitive, in her own eyes; her unevenness and lack of technique was always too obvious to her, whatever others thought, and did not do justice to her exalted conception of Shakespeare. But she became the toast of the town, and for a while her success did support the dying management at Covent Garden. She was brought out in a round of her Aunt Siddons’s roles, some of which, she said, ‘acted themselves’, but others were thin materials supported only by her great predecessor’s presence, which the entirely unskiled 20-year-old obviously lacked. It is not really useful for us to turn elsewhere to check how good the young Fanny Kemble really was, since all witness to her performances is enmeshed not only in the taste of her times, but in its cultural politics. Being who she was, her reception depended upon many things other than anyone’s candid perception of her performance, as was vividly underlined when her father went out and physically beat Westmacott, the editor of the scandal sheet The Age, for referring to her as a ‘doxy.’ Her admirers included both the young bucks and the coming men like Thackeray and his friends who were eager for their very own Kemble,18 and thinking observers like Anna Jameson, who was moved and inspired by Kemble’s youthful interpretations of Shakespeare. Jameson dedicated her book Shakespeare’s Heroines to the actress, beginning it, unusually for the time, with an essay on Portia, who had been Fanny’s first choice of Shakespearean role, and who was not yet a fashionable model of womanhood. The young actress was herself unbearably moved and excited by her reception, and the prominence in certain circles of London Society into which she was catapulted. But she could not rescue Covent Garden with her own efforts, however dazzling. Eventually the slump in attendance on the nights she did not perform dragged the enterprise down once more, and she and her father set out to repair their personal fortunes on an American tour. It is in her journal of this journey that she worries over how to understand her father’s art, and there that she sets out in the most unequivocal

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terms the dichotomy between Shakespeare in her mind and in performance, by herself or anyone else. Recording her performance somewhere in New England in December 1832, she explodes: I acted like a wretch, of course; how could I do otherwise? Oh, Juliet! vision of the south! rose of the garden of the earth! was this the glorious hymn that Shakspeare hallowed to your praise? was this the mingled strain of Love’s sweet going forth, and Death’s dark victory, over which my heart and soul have been poured out in wonder and ecstasy? – How I do loathe the stage ! these wretched, tawdry, glittering rags, flung over the breathing forms of ideal loveliness; these miserable, poor, and pitiful substitutes for the glories with which poetry has invested her magnificent and fair creations – the glories with which our imagination reflects them back again. What a mass of wretched mumming mimicry acting is! Pasteboard and paint, for the thick breathing orange groves of the south; green silk and oiled parchment, for the solemn splendour of her noon of night; wooden platforms and canvass curtains, for the solid marble balconies, and rich dark draperies of Juliet’s sleeping chamber, that shrine of love and beauty; rouge, for the startled life-blood in the cheek of that young passionate woman; an actress, a mimicker, a sham creature, me, in fact, or any other one, for that loveliest and most wonderful conception, in which all that is true in nature, and all that is exquisite in fancy, are moulded into a living form. To act this! to act Romeo and Juliet! Horror! Horror! how I do loathe my most impotent and unpoetical craft!19

The Young Princess ii: Deposition As has often been discussed, Fanny Kemble came of the first Victorian generation of women for whom being an actress was a shocking and undesirable violation of a new gender norm, a norm of retirement and privacy. She said as much herself, in pointing out the difference between her feelings about stage work and those of her parents. In exploring this tension in the past, it has seemed to me that I was dealing with a new middleclass self-definition; but returning to it in the context of Fanny Kemble as Shakespearean, the conflict that appears in her writing between that ideal dramatic spirit and the world of theatrical work, the ‘lamps and orange peel’ and ‘the cant of my own trade’,20 another aspect of her sense of her class position seems at least as obvious: that being an actor, of either gender, was to be a worker – to be in trade. Perhaps a major reason Fanny Kemble

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did not want to be an actress was not because she aspired to the new status of the middle-class wife, withdrawn from the world of work, but because she aspired to the status of a lady. The aristocracy of the stage had potentially, for her, merged with, or at least given her an entrée into, the aristocracy of the nation; and aristocrats did not act on the public stage: they did not work for their living at all. This supposition is suggested by her repeated, defiant statements that her aim in acting, or writing, or giving public readings was to make enough money never to have to work again – not because she was a woman, but because leisure and the concomitant cultivation of taste and intellect were the mark of high gentility, and obviously the best kind of life. Her Covent Garden success in 1829 drew Fanny out into Society, giving her a sudden and prominent place in high places, where her Uncle John had long been a welcome guest, and where her mother had been at home since she was a child petted by the Prince of Wales. These were, for the moment, the very best circles – the Prince was now King. Fanny enjoyed invitations in abundance; she was, for example, included in the distinguished party who took part in the opening journey of Stephenson’s first railway line, headed by the Duke of Wellington; the Kembles went to stay with the Earl of Wilton for the event. Lady Wilton’s mother was the Countess of Derby, who had been the actress Elizabeth Farren and was an old friend of the older Kembles. Another family friend was Lady Belcher, who had been Eliza O’Neill. One might even add to the list of highly-promoted actresses, though not of Kemble friends, the name of Emma Lady Hamilton, one-time wife of the British ambassador to Naples and mistress of Nelson, whose acting career started in a brothel and culminated in home performances of her ‘attitudes’ in diplomatic circles, a kind of posesplastiques illustrating classical statues and refined emotional states which enchanted all her distinguished guests. The stage-peerage exchange was two-way: aristocrats acted, at home but on a grand scale, and had the plays they wrote put on in public at the patent houses. Fanny was so much at home at The Hoo, the seat of Baron Dacre, that she wrote to Lady Dacre – herself an intellectual and a dramatist with work staged at Drury Lane – as ‘Dear Granny;’ they spent much correspondence over the ensuing decades upon the virtues and evils of the stage, until Fanny proposed that they should instead write to each other just about Shakespeare, the only stage-proof dramatist, for whose ‘works my enthusiasm grows every hour of my life into a profounder and more wondering love and admiration’.21 Fanny found her place in this high stratum of intelligence and taste, and relished its social whirl hugely; one of her most-quoted expressions of the glee she felt in these first seasons was that ‘if I am a little tired with acting,

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why, a night’s dancing soon sets me right again’.22 Her copious autobiography is strained through her editorializing in later life, and in Records of a Girlhood she punctures the raptures of the youthful letters she quotes by claiming to doubt whether her parents ‘were judicious in allowing me to be so taken out of my proper social sphere’ to aspire to ‘a mode of life never likely to be mine’, and which ‘undoubtedly increased my distaste for the coarse and common details of my professional duties’. At the time, however, her work appeared much less coarse to her when manifested as aristocratic pastime, and she entered enthusiastically into the amateur theatricals at Bridgewater House, the London home of Lord Francis Leveson Gower, translator of Hugo’s Hernani. And thus she came, for a time in 1831, to regard herself as engaged to Augustus Craven, younger son of Baron Craven, her leading man in the piece.23 Given the moment, and the families, there is no reason to suppose this match failed to come to pass simply because she was an actress. Craven’s uncle was happily married to the ex-actress Louisa Brunton. But the young couple bowed to the inevitable, the unanswerable aristocratic reason why they could not marry: they had not the money. Craven was a younger son and needed to make a good match; her income, though potentially large, would cease when she married and left the stage. But the inevitable parting, and her quest, alongside her father, for an income, did not mean that she would be reconciled to a ‘coarse and common’ life forever; and her attitudes to work were arguably shaped by the social assumptions she developed in these formative years. Foundational to these was the sympathetic understanding, if not exactly the sharing, of a kind of high Toryism, which she expresses interestingly in Notes on Some Plays of Shakespeare in discussing Queen Katherine and Wolsey in Henry VIII. She begins by noting that: the Queen and Wolsey in Henry VIII are both types of pride, and yet there is an essential difference in the pride which they represent. Undoubtedly, the pride of birth and the mere pride of power (whether that pride be derived from wealth, intellect, or the exaltation of station) are very different things.24 She finds in Shakespeare – and finds echoed in herself – sympathy with both these ‘sins’, so-called: Wolsey, she says, has made his own way on the strength of talent, ability and risen to great heights by his own brilliance – which she partly admires, while she also finds him on the whole gross and vulgar. She is then moved (in her own declining years) by the spectacle of his fall from self-assurance and confidence in his own abilities. She quotes

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‘the dying man’s pathetic words’ of appeal for a resting place for his ‘weary bones’, asserting ‘[t]he insertion of this historically true appeal in the description of Wolsey’s last hours seems to me purely Shakespearean, in spite of internal evidence upon the strength of which the authorities pronounce these speeches . . . to have been written by Fletcher’. This is a typical turn in her thinking: the vivid empathy she feels convinces her that this is the work of Shakespeare, but her unsuppressable intellectual sharpness cuts across to register the academic point about authorship too, transforming her contradictory insights into a characteristic paradox. When it comes to the Queen, however, the paradox works the other way: Fanny labels her pride of high birth ‘the noblest species of vice,’ ‘the snare of noble and refined minds’ and asserts Shakespeare’s tolerance and even admiration of it. Tellingly, her evocation of the character brings up her own family in her mind: Henry VIII was the favourite play of Dr Johnson . . . and his admiration of it is characteristic when one considers the great wisdom and fine morality by which the whole composition is pervaded. He told Mrs Siddons that his highest enjoyment would be to see her perform Queen Katherine, for whose character, as delineated by Shakespeare, he had the most unbounded enthusiasm – naturally enough, as it is impossible to conceive a more perfect embodiment of the pure spirit of Toryism. The character is one of great simplicity, and hence in part the impression of grandeur it produces.25 The writer’s sympathy with the picture of ‘Toryism’ that she evokes in Shakespeare’s name is palpable. But elsewhere she shows just as clear a conviction that such a basis for self-value is illusory, and that reliance upon the bourgeois values of work, personal talent and public service makes much more sense in the nineteenth century. In discussing Sir Walter Scott, for example, whom she reveres for his writing – ‘to whom, since Shakespeare, does the reading world owe so many hours of perfect, peaceful pleasure, of blessed forgetfulness of all things miserable and mean in its daily life?’ – she laments his ‘feudal insanity’ that ‘made his wonderful gifts subservient to the most futile object of ambition’, namely ‘his craving to be a Border chieftain of the sixteenth century instead of an Edinburgh lawyer of the nineteenth, and his preference for the distinction of the petty landholder to that of the foremost genius of his age’.26 But perhaps there is still a curl of the lip here that is essentially Tory: Scott’s insane ambition was for the dignities of a border chieftain, not an English duke; and in any case, genius though he might be, there was nothing that personal ambition could

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do to make him genuinely high-born. That is the true meaning of caste: Scott was only a lawyer and a writer. The Kemble princess might have been something more. Throughout her life, extending as it did into high Victorian days and ways, Fanny Kemble retained the aristocratic, Regency attitude of her young stardom to artistic work and its unimportance in self-estimation. Displaying an unbending determination in supporting herself successfully, sometimes opulently, by her own efforts as actress, writer and reader, she simultaneously maintained that she hated such work, only did it for the money, and would choose to be valued on her moral, intellectual and personal qualities manifest as family member and friend – and horsewoman, poet, Shakespearean critic and reader, dancer, theological disputant and conversationalist – rather than as a worker in any field. She acted well if she felt cheerful or moved; she wrote well when she was interested in her subject; she said she had no pride in the product in either case. She was who she was in spite of the need to sell herself in these ways, and she took no responsibility for the quality of what she produced: let the buyer beware. Since she was sharply intelligent and observant, and trained in the ways of the theatre from birth, she had decisive opinions about the trade, but they were entirely unromantic and deliberately businesslike, aimed at deflating any nonsense about her art. She always asserts that if she can help it, she will not discuss acting in general and Shakespeare in particular with the unimaginative masses of ordinary people, who know nothing about it; but she makes no great claims for those who do know, asserting that the theatre is ‘merely a highly rational, interesting and exciting amusement: and I think men may as well, much better, perhaps, spend 3 hours in a theatre, than in a billiard or bar-room, – and this is the extent of my approbation and admiration of my art’.27 She claims she was glad she escaped from the false excitement of stage celebrity in time when she was young, before it became a craving and a need; one had only to contemplate the sad and vacant boredom of her Aunt Siddons in retirement to see what a personal disaster it was to be a great actress for long.

Enter and Exit Mrs Butler There was nothing about their starring tour of American theatres to hold Fanny to the life of the stage. The acting companies and the majority of the audiences she encountered were no better than the average in the British country theatres. The wealthy Mr Pierce Butler appearing at her hotel with

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a nosegay and a great deal of Southern charm persuaded her that true love and a leisured country life, such as had eluded her in England, could be hers in the New World. By 1833 she was writing to Anna Jameson that she would marry him and live in America, saying that her friend was to rejoice with her that she was able to leave the stage now, ‘before its pernicious excitement has been rendered necessary to me’.28 This is not the place to recount the failure of a marriage few people expected to succeed, nor debate again the relative weight of the many causes for that failure. Their generally incompatible personalities and expectations were inevitably brought to crisis by major single factors such as the fury Fanny provoked in Pierce by the publication of her American journal in 1835, and then his inheritance of the slave-worked Butler family estates in Georgia in 1836. They lived peripatetic and often separate lives, since both of them were rarely happy in the same place, repeatedly crossing the Atlantic as well as making homes around Philadelphia, New York and other temporary locations, including the ill-fated Sea Island rice-growing estates. In 1845 Fanny returned to Europe alone, effectively separated from Pierce, leaving behind the two daughters whom she had been progressively debarred from seeing but whose welfare her husband would continue to use to manipulate her, trying to prevent her from publishing adverse comment on himself or on slavery, and from returning to the stage. Back in her father’s home, but not wishing to be dependent on him, Fanny sought first to maintain herself by writing – characteristically not expecting much from Blackwood’s Magazine for the ‘trumpery’ verses she sent them,29 but more pleased with her journal of the year she then spent in Italy staying with her sister Adelaide and her husband, which she published on her return to England in 1847. The sales were improved by the fact that she had, by the time of its publication, also returned to the stage. Her relations with Butler could not be further impaired, and she hoped as always that ‘a few months of hard work at this distasteful trade will furnish me with’30 an independent income that she could later pass on to her girls. She set about rebuilding her stage career as fast as possible, to capitalize as best she could on her novelty value in her first season. She summarizes this move with characteristic clarity: I therefore returned to the stage: under what disadvantageously altered circumstances it is needless to say. A stout, middle-aged, not particularly good-looking woman, such as I then was, is not a very attractive representative of Juliet or Julia; nor had I, in the retirement of nine years of private life, improved by study or

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experience my talent for acting, such as it was. I hardly entered the theatre during all those years, and my thoughts had as seldom reverted to anything connected with my former occupation. While losing, therefore, the few personal qualifications (of which the principal one was youth) I ever possessed for younger heroines of the drama, I had gained none but age as the representative of its weightier female personages Lady Macbeth, Queen Katherine, etc. Thus, even less well fitted than when I first came out from the work I was again undertaking, I had the additional disadvantage of being an extremely incompetent woman of business; and having now to make my own bargains in the market of public exhibition, I did so with total want of knowledge and experience to guide me in my dealings with the persons from whom I had to seek employment. I found it difficult to obtain an engagement in London; but Mr Knowles, of the Manchester Theatre, very liberally offered me such terms as I was thankful to accept; and I there made my first appearance on my return to the stage.31 However incompetent she proclaims herself to be, she had without fuss made an important and sensible move in welcoming the transition to mature roles, a move her mother never felt able to make; and her assertion that she was not a good businesswoman is materially tempered by her sense that, ‘[i]t is an immense thing for me to be to be able to work at all, and keep myself from helpless dependence upon anyone . . . The occupation, the mere business of the business, will, I am persuaded, be good rather than bad for me; for though one may be strong against sorrow, sorrow and inactivity combined are too much for any strength’.32 This prediction seems to have been fulfilled, and earning power obviously did give her a sense of self-determination. Her unsatisfactory initial bargaining with the major London manager, Alfred Bunn, was reported in the press, where Bunn’s expenditure on expensive divas and demanding actors was always followed with a mixture of scorn and relish; they were delighted to report (inaccurately) that the ‘last of the Kembles’, as she was often dubbed, was demanding the exorbitant sum of £100 a night, three times as much as Mrs Siddons had received at her height.33 Both Mrs Butler and Bunn wrote numerous letters to the press explaining their proceedings – and affording her return to the stage useful if somewhat invidious publicity. Public arguments over money were a growing part of the evil of the theatrical life in Fanny’s eyes; but there were compensations in having power over her own price. She records with pleasure, for example, the moments of self-assertion it enabled her to enjoy, when she managed her time, declined bookings she

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did not think worth while or, more idiosyncratically, dictated terms for her engagements that were less good than those proposed to her, because she felt she was being offered too much, or wished to make a gift of her work to a worthy cause.34 One of these causes, for which no one was to be paid, was a big benefit night on 7 December 1847 at Covent Garden, to raise funds to purchase Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon. Like all such events, the occasion was energetically pursued for the aggrandizement of the participants rather than the glory or support of the cause, and she felt deeply impatient with the squabbling actors: whose profession compels them, by the absolute necessity of its conditions, to garble and hack and desecrate works which could not be fit for acting purposes . . . and who now, on this very Shakespearean Memorial night, instead of acting some one of his plays in its integrity, and taking zealously any, the most insignificant part in it, have arranged a series of truncated, isolated scenes, that the actors may each be a hero or heroine of their own bit of Shakespeare.35 The nonsense of the event is compounded in her eyes by being about Shakespeare’s birthplace, which is even less interesting to her, she says, than a house might be in which he had actually written some of his plays. In a striking remark that suggests the modification which her youthful enthusiasms had undergone by the experience of motherhood, she adds ‘He could not have been different from other babies you know; nor indeed, need be, – for a baby – any baby is a more wonderful thing even than Shakespeare.’36 She performed the death of Queen Katherine from Henry VIII, second on the bill after Macready giving the death of Henry IV. The Era proclaimed that ‘the hereditary genius of the Kembles burst forth in her dignified and pathetic representation of the dying Queen’ and regretted that she had retired from the stage. She was actually already appearing all over the country, but the London reporter seems unaware of that; his regret, however, no doubt helped the prospects of her return to London early in 1848. An account of another gratuitous appearance gets closer to the heart of her concerns than this gala night. As she was preparing to undertake paid work, in the spring of 1847, her old friends the aristocratic amateurs got up two plays, first Sheridan Knowles’s The Hunchback, in which she had created the leading role back in 1832, and then Lord Ellesmere’s translation of Hernani. They performed two charity benefits at the St James’s Theatre, and she appeared for them. In Hernani she acted again opposite Augustus

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Craven, a role she had ‘acted sixteen years before under such very different circumstances, as far as I was concerned, at Bridgewater House’. This is all she says, except that she recited a poetical address ‘written by Lady Dufferin for the occasion’ and that Lord Carlisle brought her flowers in the wings, rather than, he said, throwing it at her head from the front of house, and to her amazement he very dexterously spread out her satin train for her entrance. He said that he had learnt the skill ‘at the drawing-rooms, where I have spread out and gathered up oceans of silk and satin, thousands of yards more than a counter gentleman at Swan and Edgar’s’.37 The anecdote is perhaps a substitute for more words on the subject of Craven: but it is laden with significance. Immediately, it shows how concerned she still was to mark the difference between the kind of gentlemen she wished to have attend upon her – the kind who are comfortably, domestically familiar with attending royal receptions – and the fake gentility that is the skill of the tradesman, whether actor or counter-jumper. Equally significantly, the dynamics of the St James’s benefits show how different the England to which Mrs Butler had returned was from the late Georgian world she had left as a Kemble princess. Aristocratic amateur theatricals were now not private, but undertaken on a public stage – a new theatre built in 1835 in the heart of the parish of St James’s, by the leading operatic tenor John Braham and his socially-ambitious second wife Fanny Bolton. Like Swan and Edgar’s drapery store in Piccadilly, it was part of the burgeoning West End, which was no longer simply the address of the best people when they were in Town (the Kemble family were living at Mortimer Street, Cavendish Square), but also a growing commercial quarter devoted to the enjoyment of consumption and to new forms of entertainment. She had left a world in which she would not have appeared on any such stage; but much besides the identity of the monarch had changed in her absence. The money still conspicuously spent on balls, fetes and theatricals was now best not presented as socially exclusive or self-indulgent, but was rather to be justified as virtuously charitable. The Shakespeare Memorial was a good cause, and The Hunchback and Hernani at the St James’s even more so, being in aid of those starving in the Irish potato blight famine. The 1830s and early 40s saw the most acute phase of the cultural transformation subsequently pigeon-holed as ‘Victorianism’. Self-definition among the hegemonic classes shifted the emphasis from pleasure to work, from the appearance of wealth to the parade of duty: the acceptable leaders of society and what was expected of them changed markedly, if, in some cases, in appearance only.

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The National Drama? London theatre was bound to be deeply affected by such a shift, and moreover had its own manifestations of cultural confusion and crisis to deal with. In August 1832 when Fanny and her father had sailed for New York, a Parliamentary Select Committee chaired by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton had reported on the state of the theatre in England, recommending the ending of the patent system of theatrical licensing that had pertained for more than 150 years, in the face of its undeniable breakdown under pressure from dozens of new theatres, and its failure in any case to ensure a high standard of dramatic writing. The only legislation that had come of this immediately was a bill, not particularly successful, to ensure dramatic writers received more for their work; no change in theatre licensing was made. But it was bound to come; so the theatres of England, and especially London, were left in a state throughout the 1830s that we might recognize as planning blight. The old patent houses, Covent Garden and Drury Lane, remained tasked with the upholding of an expensive and not necessarily profitable ‘national drama’, while their audiences drifted away to more modern entertainments. The minor houses experimented with new forms and methods of working, but were still under continual threat of prosecution and closure. The deaths of Sarah Siddons in 1829 and of Edmund Kean in 1833 make appropriate markers of the end of both the classical and the romantic leadership of the legitimate stage. The time had come for its bourgeois reformer to take over, in the person of William Charles Macready. An actor who despised the work even more than Fanny herself did, an intemperately self-righteous man and a snarling martinet, Macready struggled to create a theatre that nobody much really wanted: a theatre of sober seriousness that set an uplifting example to its audiences. Whatever lip-service the public were prepared to pay to the new mood of duty and restraint, they did not on the whole wish to frequent the uncomfortable, cavernous patent theatres in order to hear (poorly) and see (if they had the right seats) the newlyrestored, supposedly full-length texts of Shakespeare and the newly-written sub-Shakespearean five-act verse tragedies that Macready worked so hard to provide. For a time he was convinced that it was his mission to build a new National Drama, and in the management first of Covent Garden (1837–1839), and then of Drury Lane (1841–1843) he gathered a vociferous coterie of literary supporters and mounted what work they could write for him, around a central repertoire of Shakespearean revivals which laid the ground – both good and bad – for the characteristic Shakespeare productions of the

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Victorian era. On one of her trips to England, in 1842, Fanny saw his As You Like It, the opening production of the season. She wrote to Lady Dacre: We went the other night to see ‘As You Like It’ at Drury Lane. It was painfully acted, but the scenery, etc., were charming; and though we had neither the caustic humour or poetical melancholy of Jacques, nor the brilliant wit and despotical fancifulness of the princess shepherd-boy duly given, we had the warbling of birds, and sheep bells tinkling in the distance to comfort us. I hope it is not profanation to say, ‘These should ye have done, and not have left the others undone.’ Nevertheless, and in spite of all, the enchantment of Shakespeare’s inventions is such to me that they cannot be marred, let what will be done to them. As long as those words of profoundest wisdom or those images of exquisite beauty are but uttered, their own perfection swallows up all other considerations and impressions with me, and I bear indifferent and even bad acting in Shakespeare better than most people.38 The unfunny, prosaic Jacques was Macready himself, and he thought he had assembled a good acting company, which included Helen Faucit; the setting was by probably the best Victorian scene-painter of them all, Clarkson Stanfield. Despite her lukewarm response to his efforts in Shakespearean comedy, Fanny had been sufficiently impressed and energized by Macready’s managerial work on her previous visit to try to join his literary mission: she embarked upon An English Tragedy while staying with her father in 1836 and sent the completed draft back to Macready from America. It is her best play, and suggests what she might have done if she could have stepped aside from the manners and customs of her own day – a feat, of course, that she herself recognized to be impossible for any writer, including Shakespeare. In her case the damaging taint of the times was the assumption that no serious play could be written that was not shaped by the example of Shakespeare. Like Macready’s other would-be modern dramatists, Robert Browning and Thomas Noon Talfourd, Fanny wrote an historical verse tragedy; it was in five acts, and set in unspecific doublet-and-hose past times. Her topic is modern, however: the emotional suffering of women in marriage and its side-effects upon men, when women are made the subject of exchange within a patriarchy; in other words, the disastrous effects of the intertwining of money, status and sexuality. Her heroine Ann is a girl brought up in a high social and financial position by a devoted father; their wealth is threatened by a suit from a ‘strange relation’ but defended by a

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lawyer, of her father’s generation, who falls in love with little Ann, marries her and takes her to live deep in the country. There is a point of origin for this character in Julia, Fanny’s role in The Hunchback, and cognate scenes in both first acts contrast the healthy, happy country girl’s life with the dangers of woman’s unbridled enjoyment of the Town; but Knowles’s nineteenthcentury version of the Restoration trope of the country wife is merely formulaic, all its effect, as critics pointed out when Fanny played the role once more in 1847, depending on the actress’s ‘thorough knowledge of her art.’ In her own play Fanny has turned the contrast round – a town-born beauty has been brought to live in the country, and is bewildered and unhappy; the sense of how trapped she is in this marriage is palpable, handled by contrasting her stillness and disengagement from the comfortable but isolated house of her husband with the romping physical enjoyment of springtime in the country felt by her sister-in-law Mary. Knowles has Julia’s confidante Helen simply tease the country girl’s contentment and cry up the town, before the inevitable transition to Julia’s lapse into extravagance and pleasure when she goes there; Fanny’s exposition by means of the same town/country contrast is of a much more difficult vision of the perils of marriage, which leaves Ann nowhere to go. The plot concerns high society gambling and sexual predation and derives from a contemporary story about Baron de Ros, who was prosecuted in 1837 for cheating at whist, while Society ignored his flagrant sexual transgressions. The sub-Shakespearean setting allows for a violent denouement. But Fanny is more interested in exploring the desperation of the woman who has inadvertently stepped into a loveless marriage with an older man, and then rashly stepped aside from it into disaster and humiliation, than she is in the gambling scenes, though these are well carried out. She also creates an unexpectedly complex role for the innocent Mary, who is a romping, physical girl who has no vocabulary or way of responding to the advances of her lover, and seems to suffer tortures of embarrassment where a natural openness is called for. The all-round unnaturalness of the characters’ responses to feeling and sexuality strikes us first; and then comes the chilling recognition that this is probably not the writer’s dramatic ineptitude, but a representation of how the world seemed to her in 1837. Certainly Macready read the play in December that year as ‘one of the most powerful of the modern plays I have seen – most painful, most shocking, but full of power, poetry, and pathos.’39 He did not feel able to risk it at Drury Lane, however; he might well have found it difficult to cast the leading lady from the available pool of actresses, whom Fanny often castigated, in her accounts

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of her distaste for the stage, for their unwillingness to act any role that savoured of impropriety. There would not necessarily have been a problem getting the play past the Lord Chamberlain’s office – since Charles Kemble was currently the Examiner of Plays. This was not a state of affairs of which Macready approved. As the coming man, republican, moralist, would-be representative of the Victorian public, he identified Charles Kemble with Alfred Bunn and all the other old-school theatre men as the profligate and sycophantic servants of an exploded but disgracefully still powerful social elite. Battling with Kemble when Charles was still manager at Covent Garden and Macready a newly prominent actor, he called him a scoundrel in his diary, working himself into a characteristic froth of indignation about the manager’s ‘fraud, treachery, falsehood . . . vileness and profligacy’.40 When Charles returned from the US in 1834 Macready was locked in an even more violent struggle with Alfred Bunn, managing at Drury Lane, which in April 1836 was to result famously in physical assault: he fell upon Bunn and beat and injured him, to the delight of the press and his own deep mortification. Charles Kemble’s reappearance in London can only have seemed to Macready another obstacle to the progress of the Drama, especially when Kemble became Examiner of Plays in 1836. Charles himself, however, was more concerned with the promise of an operatic career for his youngest daughter Adelaide. He took her on a tour of the European operatic heartland for training and experience, before returning to launch her in London, and conclude his own performing career. By 1841 he and Adelaide, and also Fanny and Pierce, were in London, and Adelaide was on the crest of the social wave: she sang for the Queen, and was taken up by high fashion. Her London launch was a benefit concert for Polish refugees at Stafford Society, home of the Duchess of Sutherland, on a bill with Rachel and Liszt. In July the Kembles attended a musical party given by Chorley, the musical editor of Athenaeum, in honour of Felix Mendelssohn, where Adelaide sang and Fanny read from Antony and Cleopatra. Taking to the London stage, Adelaide appeared with great success at Covent Garden under the management of Madame Vestris, and was such a hit that Charles determined that she should appear at the family theatre under Kemble management. This was, inevitably, a disastrously expensive final sortie into managing the white elephant. The monster was finally put out of its pain by the passage of the 1843 Theatres Act which abolished the supposed privileges of the patent theatres, and all reason for the continued operation of the huge and encumbered Covent Garden as a home of the classic drama.

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The Last of the Kembles With the Act came freedom for all theatres to produce Shakespeare. The conviction of the literary middle classes that this freedom would result in a renewed moral and educative dramatic culture free from the objectionable elements of elite debauchery pandered to by theatricals was a driving force in the passage of the new regulations; but the reality of cultural change is never exactly what is envisaged, and the West End sprang into being without very much devotion to that ideal Shakespeareanism. Macready, its in-house champion and in his own eyes its natural leader, was no more able to enforce audience devotion to verse tragedy after 1843 than he had been in the dying patent houses. He did not regard the returned Mrs Butler as a likely ally in the struggle, however highly he had rated her writing, and however much he had enjoyed her conversation when he was her guest in America.41 He saw her act as she embarked on her return to the stage, at the St James’s benefit performance of Hernani in May 1847, and gave a typically withering account of her in his diary: ‘She is ignorant of the first rudiments of her art. She is affected, monotonous, without one real impulse – never in the feeling of her character, never true in look, attitude or tone. She can never be an actress, and this I never ventured to think before.’ His reasons for this judgement seem perhaps more than simply artistic, when he expands upon his evening. He had found all his liberal writerly friends at the St James’s, but he was ‘glad to get away from the theatre and return home’, perhaps chagrined at the presence of these men, his own supporters, at such an event, but certainly infuriated also to see there the fashionable audience he could not secure: After the play, looked into Dickens’s box, which was crowded with himself, M. and Mlle. Regnier, Georgina, Stanfield, Maclise, Jerrold, Ainsworth . . . And our English aristocracy will go to see, and sit through, and applaud, an entertainment like this – of an inferior, a very inferior order, as a drama, and acted by novices – ignoramuses – in art (Forster was an exception). But for Shakespeare, for the illustration of his great works, for skill in representing his characters, they have not one thought nor one farthing to throw away.42 A Kemble was not likely, for him, to be anything but a servant of these anti-Shakespearean forces. Fanny’s judgement on Macready’s acting, on the other hand, and his whole Shakespearean enterprise, is implicit in her dismissive account of his As You Like It quoted above; she explains:

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his want of musical ear made his delivery of Shakespeare’s blank verse defective, and painful to persons better endowed in that respect. It may have been his consciousness of his imperfect declamation of blank verse that induced him to adopt what his admirers called, the natural style of speaking it; which was simply chopping it up into prose – a method easily followed by speakers who have never learned the difference between the two, and that blank verse demands the same care and method that music does, and when not uttered with due regard to its artificial construction, and rules of rhythm and measure, is precisely as faulty as music sung out of time. The school of ‘natural speaking’ reached its climax, I presume, in the performance of a charming young actress, of whose delivery of the poetry of Portia it was said in a high commendation, by her admirers, that she gave the blank verse so naturally, that it was impossible to tell that it was not prose. What she did with Shakespeare’s prose in the part, these judicious critics did not mention.43 Fanny herself was never guilty of neglect of Shakespeare’s verse; it was the foundation of her acting style, an essentially musical delivery taught her by her mother, who had an exquisitely sensitive musical ear and with merciless exactitude trained her daughters to sing, as she trained them to move gracefully and to speak without false emphasis or mawkishness.44 Fanny describes her family acting style as of the idealizing kind: A noble ideal beauty was what we were taught to consider the proper object and result of all art. In their especial vocation this tendency caused my family to be accused of formalism and artificial pedantry; and the so-called ‘classical’ school of acting, to which they belonged, has frequently since their time been unfavourably compared with what, by way of contrast, has been termed the realistic or natural style of art. I do not care to discuss the question, but am thankful that my education preserved me from accepting mere imitation of nature as art, on the stage or in the picture gallery; and that, without destroying my delight in any kind of beauty, it taught me a decided preference for that which was highest and noblest.45 The wider British public were not yet, in 1847, as prejudiced against the Kemble ‘classical’ school as was the impatient reformer Macready. Fanny found a willing audience for her performances at her first reappearances in Manchester. She played there in February 1847, at the newly-refurbished Theatre Royal, between Madame Vestris, who was on a farewell retirement

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tour of England, and yet another group of amateurs who did two reliable war-horses, John Bull and Charles the Second, for the benefit of soup kitchens for local poor relief. The press were enthusiastic about Fanny’s artistry: The Morning Chronicle 18 February 1847 reprints a notice from the Manchester Guardian saying, ‘She has consummate taste, and all the mere artistic qualities. Her elocution is beautiful, her voice light and silvery, fitted more for the expression of the gentler emotions than for deep passion; but she manages that, and certain other physical characteristics, with admirable tact.’ Next day The Manchester Times and Gazette is fulsome about the ‘living fire of genius’ derived from her family: To sum up briefly we may say that Mrs Butler has lost none of her witchery or mastery by her long absence from the stage. Her mind, lessoned in the school of life, and her observation of human nature expanded by travel and foreign scene, she brings a quickened intellect to her aid, and more ‘means and appliances’ to fill up ‘the cunning of this scene’. She is in truth a vigorous and promising shoot from the parent stock, whose blossoms still shed a grateful odour over even the common walks of life. Illustrious descendant of an illustrious family, whose fame is part of the history of the nation! (The Manchester Times and Gazette,19 February 1847) Her list of roles was now a mixture of the expected revivals, especially Knowles’s Julia, Juliana in Telbin’s The Honeymoon and Shakespeare’s Juliet, plus Lady Teazle, and eventually Lady Macbeth and Queen Katherine, and on one occasion Pauline in Lytton’s Lady of Lyons. She went on to play them in a round of engagements that took her to Birmingham, then to Liverpool in March, then to Dublin, and to a London debut at the Princess’s in April, alongside the amateur performances. She then set off on a tour of short engagements in Exeter, Southampton, Glasgow, Dundee, Edinburgh, Leeds, Hull and the old East Anglian circuit, before returning to town to play a season at the Princess’s opposite Macready. The reviews from the country reporters would have given her some confidence for this confrontation, if she read them: the tone of the critical response is set by Manchester, and at its best in the examples just quoted, which are inspired by the idea of the last of the Kembles and careful not to be impolite about her ‘stout’ figure and general air of world-weariness. Their perception of the changes that advancing years and experience have brought to some of her impersonations can be interesting. In what was clearly her most striking scene, the Dublin paper Freeman’s Journal gives her a straightforward puff: she is ‘without a rival on the English stage, and we

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never saw Rachel give anything finer than Mrs Butler’s last scene in the Hunchback’. The Caledonian Mercury, an Edinburgh paper, is also moved by the climax of this performance ‘where she forcibly depicts the fitful bursts of passion arising from injured pride and slighted love, succeeded by the agony of self remorse’. The scene is clearly impressive, if to some rather disconcerting, in the infusion of real anger that she now brought to Knowles’s preposterous version of the wealthy young woman’s predicament. In it Julia repents of her corruption by the Town and begs to be released from her promise of a wealthy but loveless marriage, and return to the protection of her father. The Glasgow Herald of 17 September felt ‘there seemed by far too much anger, and not enough of the softer passion. It was rage, not the despairing effort of a pure-hearted and loving maid’. If her handling of the work which had been hers to interpret from the first could be startling, her new Shakespearean interpretations commanded admiration for her intelligence. The Freeman’s Journal enthusiast said her delivery of Juliet’s lines, ‘How if, when I am laid into the tomb / I wake before the time that Romeo / Comes to redeem me?’46 was ‘one of the most thrilling outbursts, the most complete absorption of the personal in the ideal, we have ever witnessed’. When she essayed new roles in her Princess’s season with Macready, her Ophelia was described in The Era (5 March) as ‘conceived with perfect taste, and a high appreciation of the author’s intention; her delineation of Hamlet’s gentle, uncomplaining mistress, was a sweet and beautiful realization of the ideal character; her musical voice and perfect declamation told admirably.’ Her ‘sonorous, flexible, and most musical voice’ was always admired, but when she returned to London, its contrast to the ‘chopped-up’ prosaic modern style of Macready’s delivery could appear not ideal and classical, but old-fashioned, a making of ‘points’. Lloyds Weekly reported on her Lady Macbeth on 27 February 1848: Some portions of the character are sacrificed for the purpose of ‘point making’ in others. In this she is only adopting the course laid down by her great ancestors, the Kembles, and in their school she is quite proficient. When she does exert herself to make a point, it is done effectually, and becomes a most ‘palpable hit.’ . . . In the chamber scene . . . Mrs Butler’s acting . . . is a piece of studied excellence, perhaps never witnessed in any but a Kemble. (Lloyds Weekly, 27 February 1848) She had a very poor opinion of herself in the role of Lady Macbeth; she did it because Macready insisted, while refusing to appear in the Shakespearean plays that suited her better, though she had done those parts on other

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occasions. The season was a power struggle, and not one in which the last of the Kembles was likely to succeed. But she did not need to. A way out was already at hand, and it was far more modern, an adaptation of the theatrical that was more successfully in tune with the spirit of the times, than what Macready had to offer.

Mrs Fanny Kemble, Shakespearean Reader In March 1848, as the Chartists assembled on Clapham Common, Charles Kemble formally gave up his practise of public reading from Shakespeare, and handed over his texts to his daughter’s use. This was a moment for which she had been consciously waiting, not wishing to enter into competition with him, and, it seems, valuing the task as hieratic, a heritable sacred office, not simply a familial legacy from her father: as if the texts of Shakespeare were Prospero’s staff, handed on instead of broken.47 Charles had recently and reluctantly had to refuse an invitation to read (not Shakespeare but Antigone), at Buckingham Palace, to the accompaniment of Mendelssohn’s music. He had suggested that Fanny should be asked in his stead, but she had refused: Accordingly, I received a message upon the subject, but was obliged to decline the honour of reading at the Palace, for reasons which had not occurred to my father when he answered for my accepting the task he had been unable to undertake. I had never yet read at all in public, and to make the first experiment of my powers before the Queen, and under circumstances calculated to increase my natural nervousness and embarrassment, seemed hardly respectful to her and almost impossible to me. Then, for my first attempt of the kind, to select a play accompanied by Mendelssohn’s music, of which I had not heard one bar since the shock of his death, was to incur the most certain risk of breaking down in uncontrollable paroxysms of distress, and perhaps being unable to finish my performance.48 She writes as if she has a dual concern, a particular kind of personal obligation. She owes it to her social position and her position as an artist to comport herself properly before her sovereign; and to herself to take care of her sensibility, which is both aesthetic and personal. Mendelssohn was an admired friend and fellow-artist who had died unexpectedly, so the sound of his music would affect her even more than it would other people. Artistic

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sensibility, personal standing and position in the hierarchy are all in play. Feeling obliged to refuse this first summons, she had continued with the exhausting round of touring as an actress until her father relinquished to her the greater undertaking of reading Shakespeare. The authorizing volumes that he handed over for her to copy were, she records, a Hanmer edition in six large quartos, borrowed from the artist Lane,49 which Charles had heavily cut and adapted for solo reading. Public reading was a means of earning money which he had still been able to pursue even though his increasing deafness, as well as other infirmities, had made it impossible for him to act. More importantly, it would seem that his role as reader, especially to the private parties of the great and to the Queen herself, tangibly represented his role in the ancient order of things – the fact that he was the senior man among Her Majesty’s Servants. Perhaps that, rather than simply a wish to keep the fee in the family, was why he had tried to hand on the last invitation to his daughter. The romantic vision of supposedly feudal practice, of aristocratic lineage and the concomitant duty of service to the monarch, fostered especially by Sir Walter Scott in his novels, was part of the theatre of greatness and therefore naturally dear to the hierarchy of the acting profession. The modernizers of the theatre resented the appropriation of Shakespeare to this quasi-feudal relationship. Shakespeare was the secular scripture of England, foundational in the imaginary of the nation, and thus the dramatist himself was felt to be a man of the people, not a courtier but a representative and champion of the great British public. Exception was also taken to Queen Victoria’s conspicuous preference for other kinds of entertainment – she enjoyed everything from van Amburgh’s lion-taming to Italian opera, and was drawn in by the early celebrity machines that promoted such star turns as the singer Jenny Lind and the dwarf Tom Thumb. So when the Queen summoned Charles Kemble to Buckingham Palace, on 24 April (the day after Shakespeare’s birthday) 1844, to redress the balance towards the National Drama, Punch, still in its early, radical days and written by Macready’s allies, sneered at both of them. The reading of Cymbeline had been described in the official news from the Court as ‘slightly compressed’, (Fanny says he got through it all in 45 minutes)50 and the official phrase becomes the refrain of the verses in praise of the ‘Great News!’ that: The Court in its splendour assembles, (The play gives its dullness a zest) And the last of the Royal old KEMBLES Reads SHAKESPEARE a little compressed.

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A marginal gloss, in black-letter print and pseudo-archaic spelling, rejoices that the Queen will ‘see Amburgh his beastes never no mo’ and imagines that the efforts of ‘Kemble the Player with his boke’ were punctuated by muffins and crumpets. Queen Victoria’s wide tastes in entertainment do not seem to have been focused by this experience, but the dowager Queen Adelaide called Kemble back to read again, and became extremely useful to him in launching the first of several series of readings that he gave to the fashionable public at large, at the Society venue of Willis’s Rooms. She ‘and a large party of her own visitors’ attended his first reading on 13 May, and also heard several subsequent plays.51 Punch resented this success too, on behalf of the national bard: in praising Mrs Warner and Samuel Phelps for their Shakespearean venture at Sadler’s Wells, the periodical sarcastically suggested they would have greater profits if instead of lurking in the suburbs they were to take the Opera House on its off-nights: rather than trying to make Shakespeare cheap enough for everyone, they should make him expensive enough to be sought after. The article adds: Mr Charles Kemble has been reading Shakespeare to the elite of Ton, at the charge of 10s 6d a head for admission. The same Mr Charles Kemble has played the same Shakespeare to nearly empty benches at Covent Garden. It was long thought that the fashionable world would not have Shakespeare at any price; but the fact is, that they will have him at a certain price; only it must not be under 10s 6d. It is not true that our aristocracy do not care about the Bard of Avon. On the contrary, they are so fond of him that they must have him all to themselves.52 As she later made clear, Fanny did not aspire to be reader only to the great, and her desire to avoid such criticism may account for her attitude to pricing her performances; but she was the natural inheritor of her father’s mantle, and had already taken the role of reader in aristocratic and literary circles among those she counted as her friends. At the Hoo, staying with the Dacres in 1838, she ended a letter to her lifelong correspondent Harriet St Leger with the excuse that she was ‘expected downstairs, to read to them in the drawing-room something from Shakespeare’ before the afternoon cricket match;53 in 1842 she reported an evening party at the Chorleys, where Mendelssohn was among the guests, so that she ‘heard some wonderful music’ and then did her turn by reading ‘[p]art of “Much Ado About Nothing” to them’.54 The transition to making her living by doing this in public was one she was eager to make, since she expected not only to have more artistic autonomy than she had as an actress, but also to take control

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of how her Shakespeare was received and understood. But embarking upon the role was fraught with potential difficulties to be negotiated, if she was to establish her social and artistic standing as she would wish. Her decisions about how to present herself were part of a complex significatory web, intimately connected with how she and her contemporaries saw Shakespeare and understood her role of mediator.

Shakespeare on the Lecture Platform: ‘a benefactor to religion, to his country, and to the world at large’55 Readings, or recitations, from Shakespeare and a few other well-known texts, were a staple of the nineteenth-century entertainment world from top to bottom, and their signification changed radically as the century progressed. From the eighteenth century onwards, those actors who also taught elocution and public speaking sometimes gave public exhibitions of their skills as both a money-making sideline and an advertisement: in 1832, for example, Mr Smart was advertising in the Morning Chronicle that he was about to ‘conclude a season of more than 4 months with a dramatic reading of Hamlet and the comic scene of Slender’s courtship’ ‘at his town residence on the west side of Leicester Square’. He had a textbook as well as tickets to sell, at outlets in Old Bond Street and the Royal Exchange, and announced that ‘a Series of Public Readings would be undertaken in any of the neighbourhoods of London, where an adequate number of Subscribers could be assured’. A step, or several steps, below this were the men with a less secure niche, such as actors between country engagements, who might hire a hall and try to win enough patronage to pay for supper and a bed, and enough notice to impress the manager of a company who might hire them. Reliant upon local patronage, such latter-day solitary strollers increasingly needed to be perceived as respectable, like the Mr Otway who read Othello at the Chichester Assembly Rooms in December 1838 and caused the Hampshire Telegraph reporter to recommend him to play either Othello or Iago, and moreover to rejoice that the Dean of Chichester and other members of the Cathedral clergy were present, and had not succumbed to the fashionable opinion of the learned and orthodox that Shakespeare is ‘unfitted for the recreation of civilized and Christian men’. This concern was still a worry nearly thirty years later for the even humbler correspondent of The Era on 2 April 1865 who signed himself ‘Anti-humbug’ and reported what he considered the ‘truly Evangelical’ behaviour of a Surrey rector, who not only allowed the poor actor to use the National Schools to read, of all things,

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Henry the Sixth, but even offered to sell tickets from the rectory and distribute the programme beforehand. The old pro probably need not have been so surprised: a change in the alignment of anti-theatrical feeling had taken place, and Readings from Shakespeare had been recruited on the side of rational recreation. By the mid-century it had become evident to active and evangelical clergy in the villages, and also to the political economists watching with dismay the concentration of workers and idlers in the expanding industrial towns, that people must be amused. Appropriate, sober but refreshing leisure was a challenge for all classes, whether they were young industrialists seeking rational recreation and incidentally what we might call networking opportunities, or poor men and women tempted to squander their earnings in the public house. The educational objectives of middle-class institutions were being expanded to meet this challenge. The lecture lists of the exclusive Literary and Philosophical Institutions and of the out-reach ventures which from 1862 came under the organizing umbrella of the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union had begun to offer amusement and inspiration through the arts as well as scientific and practical knowledge. By the 1850s the market in wholesome entertainment was thriving at every level from Exeter Hall in the Strand in London, which seated 3,000 in its main hall alone and catered for everything from ecstatic temperance crusades to festivals of massed choirs,56 to the little village rooms where well-meaning philanthropists got up ‘penny readings’. The usual programme for these local events was a series of songs, recitations and pieces of music provided by various volunteers;57 but where a single ambitious amateur, often the vicar himself or a local celebrity of some kind, provided the whole entertainment, a Shakespearean reading was often their improving offering. Such a performance was equally acceptable to more socially ambitious audiences, willing to pay to hear the Bard, especially when presented as a benefit for some good cause; the entertainment combined refinement, education and uplift with the chance to be seen with the best people in the town. From the Queen’s palace to the National Schoolroom, Shakespeare, truncated and cleaned up, came to be read aloud for the benefit of his nineteenth-century compatriots who chose not to enter the theatre.

The Trade of a Wandering Rhapsodist58 When she took up her father’s mantle as Reader, therefore, Fanny Kemble stepped up to head a large body of such performers. The commercial providers of entertainment, just as much as the country vicars, had to deal

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with a body of clients who did not see themselves as theatre-goers. Theatre, through the special case of the works of Shakespeare, had to be made to blend into the culture of the lecture circuit and the scientific or geographical exhibition. Ambitious performers at the very highest levels sought ways of adjusting their offerings to suit the many fashionable and wealthy Victorians who scrupled to attend the theatre. Venturing into this arena, Fanny was in competition with other successful actresses. Fanny Kelly, a once-loved but now fading actress of her own generation, took to Shakespearean reading in October 1848.59 Newcomers also ventured into solo reading. Miss Davenport, for example, who as child star was supposedly Dickens’s inspiration for The Infant Prodigy in Nicholas Nickleby, returned from American successes in 1843 ready for an adult career. She embarked upon management in London, doing the same round of characters as Fanny – Juliet, Julia, Juliana – but she struck out a more successful line when she began to offer Readings early in 1846. The Glasgow Herald, calling this ‘a bold attempt for a lady’, was quite clear about the grounds of her success: ‘She reads as well as Kemble, and then you have youth, beauty and expression, in addition.’60 Similarly, Isabella Glyn, a pupil of Charles’s, a ‘disciple of the Kemble school’, played leading Shakespearean roles, beginning with Lady Macbeth, when she arrived in London at the Olympic in January 1848 and then joined the Sadler’s Wells company. She launched into readings in 1851, filling the Great Room at the Whittington Club and entrusted with the opening of the new theatre at the Marylebone Literary and Scientific Institution in December 1851. The ‘syllabus’ for the season there included three subscription concerts for members and their friends, two readings by Miss Glyn, Alfred Bunn and John Miles giving dramatic entertainments, two lectures by J. H. Pepper, one by Robert Hunt, two by the Rev H. Christmas, two by Dr Henry Noad, one by Mrs Balfour, musical lectures with illustrations by Ellis Roberts and George Buckland, and Thackeray giving his four English Humorists lectures. Fanny Kemble had a clear advantage in celebrity and indeed skill over both Miss Davenport and Miss Glyn, and her proposal to enter the Readings market was eagerly taken up by the rational recreation philanthropists and the commercial caterers alike. John Mitchell, who had managed her father’s commercial Readings, was keen to be her man of business too. Mitchell had the traditional background of the men who catered to the leisure of the Town, running a bookshop-cum-ticket agency in Old Bond Street and branching out into theatre management, as John Ebers had done in running opera seasons at the King’s. Mitchell chose the less risky

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but, by this stage, even more fashionable theatrical venture of the staging of seasons of French and German plays in the original languages for an exclusive audience at the St James’s Theatre. He differed from Ebers, who considered it a privilege to lose his money in running the Opera House, in that however admiring he was of his aristocratic customers and star-struck by his talented clients, Mitchell was a successful Victorian man of business. He made catering for elite leisure, providing unimpeachably respectable as well as fashionable entertainment, bring in a handsome profit, both for himself and for the performers he represented. Fanny’s descriptions of Mitchell and his services to her are characteristically ironic and contradictory. She found that the pressure of negotiating her own acting engagements with the theatre men, the likes of Bunn at Drury Lane and then Maddox at the Princess’s, ‘worries my life out in bargaining.’ Meanwhile the courteous letter from the Secretary of the Collegiate Institute at Liverpool and the personal visit from a director of the Highgate Institute reassured her ‘about the possible success of this reading experiment’. But despite the urging of friends, she was unwilling to involve herself in the risky, time-consuming and mercenary business of setting up her own readings; so she committed herself to the management of others. They took the risk, and got their hands dirty; she could keep herself aloof from, and indeed in tension with, their aims, maintaining her own and Shakespeare’s, superiority to their tradesman’s dealings. Mitchell she declared was ‘a Liberal, and honest man’, an ‘excellent and zealous manager’ who ‘could calculate the money value of my readings to me, [though] their inestimable value he knew nothing of’. She made jokes about his genteel pastel-coloured flyers for her readings: ‘it really almost seems a pity to interfere with the elegancies of poor Mitchell, who is nothing if not elegant’; and mocked his way of referring to the audience he was aiming for, ‘the British aristocracy, whom he idolized, and whom he thought fit . . . to designate, collectively, under the title of my friend, Lord Lansdowne’.61 It was Mitchell, therefore, whom she could hold responsible for turning Shakespeare into a profitable concern. She told Harriet St Leger62 she was only doing this for the money, and so would do exactly as Mitchell suggested, but rapidly contradicted herself and insisted upon doing the business in her own way, and on honouring her sense of what was due to her subject above considerations of large audiences and profitable engagements. The argument in which Mitchell had so amusingly invoked Lord Lansdowne was about pricing – he wanted to set an exclusive fee of 10s, which she said was double what they should charge. Fanny certainly

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protests too much in comically insisting that she is not the one who exploits the snobbery of this market-place: I wonder why poor dear Lord Lansdowne can’t be asked five shillings? I would have charged him, and all the small and greater nobility of the realm, half a crown, and been rather ashamed of the pennyworth they got for it. But a thing is worth what it will fetch, and no one knows that better than Mr Mitchell. I should think any sensible being would prefer paying half a crown to the honour and glory of disbursing twice that sum for a two-hours’ reading – even by me, even of Shakespeare.63 In fact the newspaper advertisements for her first reading at Willis’s Rooms, 8 April 1848, do show 5s as the top seat price, but anyone wanting a reserved place in advance – which was advisable, given the crush that developed at the doors – had to take three seats and pay a guinea. Prices were usually set lower at provincial venues, but everywhere it was in fact the most expensive seats that were best filled. Fanny held her line more successfully over the number of readings she would give, refusing to exhaust herself on the tours, which covered the length and breadth of England and lowland Scotland, by reading more than three or four times at each venue, even though there might be audience enough for six appearances in the week. She maintains that she held the line for Shakespeare’s benefit too, with: my pertinacious determination to read as many of the plays (and I read twenty-five) as could be so given to an audience in regular rotation, so as to avoid becoming hackneyed in my feeling or delivery of them. These insistences, she says, appeared to Mitchell: vexatious particularities highly inimical to my own best interests, which he thought would have been better served by reading ‘Hamlet’, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, and the ‘Merchant of Venice’, three times as often as I did, and ‘Richard II’, ‘Measure for Measure’, and one or two others, three times as seldom, or not at all.64 It is difficult to prove or disprove her assertion about the long list of plays read in strict rotation; but she certainly did not begin upon any such policy at once. It is possibly worth noting that she also asserted that she wore her clothes in strict rotation: she was reported by Elizabeth Barrett Browning to

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have said that ‘nothing ever induced her to put on Monday’s dress on Tuesday’.65 So power over those things she could actually control, or just cussedness, may have had as much to do with such a programme as highminded Shakespeareanism. However, having started her reading career overlappingly with her second period of acting, in late 1847, and launched it fully in London in April 1848, she was only able to read a very few times in England before she had to cross the Atlantic again to be present for the crisis of her marriage and finally for the divorce proceedings. It does not appear that she added more than The Tempest and Macbeth to her initial choice of reading Much Ado About Nothing and The Merchant of Venice before she went. It was certainly not until she returned from America in 1850 that she ventured to add Richard II and Measure for Measure. The later London series in which these plays definitely appear was given not at the high society venue Willis’s Rooms, but at St James’s Theatre, thus already excluding anyone not prepared to enter a playhouse. Even so the Era critic found difficulty collecting enough innocuous expressions to describe Measure for Measure, which had not been seen on the British stage within living memory. He ventured the opinion that ‘as a poem it affords less scope for the display of elocutionary powers than many other of the grander works of the Swan of Avon; still it abounds in characters remarkable for the truthful vigour with which they are drawn’. Mrs Kemble’s Isabella and Angelo were he said ‘perfect gems of art’, the minor figures very like nature, and the whole entertainment was ‘highly intellectual’.66 It is clear that even a hardened theatre man, called upon to describe it for a general audience, found the unaccustomed Shakespearean offering a problem play, difficult in its theme, crude in expression and also possibly boring, and would have preferred something more familiar. It was in America in 1848–1850 that Mrs Kemble (as she became when she was finally divorced in November 1849) found her feet as a Reader, and laid secure hold at last upon Shakespeare as not only her ‘master’ and daily comfort but also as her means of support. There she developed the longer list of plays to read, and found hugely enthusiastic audiences. The respectable public of New England was, however, at least as particular about their entertainments as those of the old country, and as inclined to dress up amusement and display as charity: Furnas quotes as typical a description of a Baltimore Assembly Room reading for the benefit for the ‘Home for the Friendless’, at which ‘sitting palpably before us in laces and crinoline and under the blaze of gaslights’, Mrs Kemble made the ‘Baltimore beauties’ utterly disappear in the imaginary presence of the witches, the blasted heath and Banquo, impressing equally those who remembered Mrs Siddons’s

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Lady Macbeth and those who had never seen any play at all.67 The more intellectual audiences of Cambridge were equally engaged, James Fenimore Cooper was a convert, and Fanny Longfellow recorded Mrs Kemble delighting not only crowded audiences but also her host and hostess, the Longfellows themselves, who presented her with flowers and a sonnet to mark the occasion.68 In the winter of 1848–1849 in New York her readings were as much the talk of the season as her acting debut had been in London in 1829–1830; the Stuyvesant Institute had a special reading desk designed for her use.69 By these means she was able to put herself in a position, at last, to invest substantially and to take her own house in Lenox, realizing a life-long ambition to be wealthy enough to retire into private life.

‘My master’s work’ She did not, however, immediately retire, and indeed continued to read intermittently in America and England until 1869, partly because she had also at last realized the ambition to do justice to Shakespeare in her performances, and was actually enjoying her work as well as the independence it gave: I have wished, and hoped, and prayed, that I might be able to use my small gift dutifully; and to my own profound feeling of the virtue of these noble works, have owed whatever power I found to interpret them. My great reward has been, passing a large portion of my life in familiar intercourse with that greatest and best English mind and heart, and living almost daily in that world above the world, into which he lifted me. One inspiration alone could have been purer or higher; and to that, my master’s work, done as well as it was in me to do it, often helped, and from it, never hindered me.70 The reverential note here is typical of her quasi-religious exaltation of Shakespeare, and accounts, in some sort, for her great joy and relief when she found that she could indeed support herself for the rest of her life by exercise and simultaneous enjoyment of this ‘small gift’. Henry James, who only came to know her in the last decades of her life, expressed it thus: She was so saturated with Shakespeare that she made him, as it were, the air she lived in, an air that stirred with his words whenever she herself

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was moved, whenever she was agitated or impressed, reminded or challenged. He was, indeed, her utterance, the language she spoke when she spoke most from herself. He had said the things that she would have wished most to say, and it was her greatest happiness, I think, that she always made him her obeisance by the same borrowed words that expressed her emotion.71 That saturation in the plays was very well for her own pleasure, but reading them in public made different demands upon them as texts. She had her father’s emendations and cuts, copied out from the Hanmer volumes he had used, for those plays which he had delivered; judging by the published version of his reading text issued by Lane in 1870 his large excisions are clearly such as a man would sensibly make for his own reading: in the famous compressed Cymbeline, for example, which is roughly one-third the length of a modern edition of the play, a great deal of material is cut from Imogen’s speeches which one would imagine Fanny or any actress would have preferred to keep in place. Initially, she says, she wished to read fuller versions than the mutilated stage adaptations, therefore extending each one over two nights, but she was persuaded that no audience could be expected to attend twice for one play. Her desire for authenticity was only slightly assuaged by using her father’s cuts and transpositions, but when she undertook the condensation of plays he had not read she discovered how difficult the task was, and so how skilled he had been. She had clear objectives in her own editing: to clean up for the better taste of modern times the ‘coarse expressions’ that she took for granted were harmful excrescences that Shakespeare would not have used had he lived in the nineteenth century; and to condense the plays without losing their dramatic through line, so: [a]ll that is merely especially beautiful is sedulously cut out in my reading version, in order to preserve the skeleton of the story; because the audiences that I shall address are not familiar with the plays, and what they wanted is as much as possible of the excitement of a dramatic entertainment to be obtained without entering the doors of the theatre.72 As she recognizes, this does not remove her very far from the textual practices of the stage, whether Garrick’s, informed by the early eighteenth-century school of Shakespearean editing, which saw nothing wrong in improving upon the obvious archaisms of the author, but worked from the received texts as handed down by distinguished editors and actors of previous generations; or Macready’s, led by nineteenth-century scholarship to return to

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authentic readings and original texts, but nevertheless drawing the line at anything that interfered with stage effect, or was likely to give offence.73 Professional to her finger-tips, she knew she could not do more, much as she might have wished it. The University of Georgia holds a reading copy that belonged to her,74 and her notes and cuts in, especially, Hamlet and Othello have been studied by Christy Desmet.75 Sadly, the fact that she did not prepare all her own further texts until she returned to London means that others, including Measure for Measure, the most intriguing case, are not annotated. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, however, which she subsequently prepared for reading, is a special case and has survived in print. The Dream was a play Charles had not delivered, and it was not a favourite of the eighteenth- or nineteenthcentury stage. An attempt to revive it in 1816 provided Hazlitt with the occasion for one of the most extreme Romantic attacks upon the staging of Shakespeare: ‘All that was fine in the play was lost in the representation . . . Poetry and the stage do not agree together. The ideal has no place upon the stage which is a picture without perspective . . . That which is merely an airy shape, a dream, a passing thought, immediately becomes an unmanageable reality’, and the scene-shifters, dressmakers, fiddlers and bassoonists had triumphed over Shakespeare and his supporters. 76 No one dared try again until Madame Vestris, celebrating her elevation to management at Drury Lane, mounted a splendid revival in 1840, which had plenty of scenery, dance and costume, but also restored a fuller Shakespearean text, shorn of additions and with 1,700 lines of Shakespearean verse re-instated. She indeed did as Fanny wished when she exclaimed over the excellence of the scenery but loss of the poetry in Macready’s As You Like It. Vestris added Shakespeare to the creative team she had used to such effect in mounting musical, glamorous extravaganzas based on classical fables at her smaller theatre, the Olympic, and the result was a success, though ruinously expensive. But then in 1843 Mendelssohn, who had written his overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1826, produced his famous incidental music for the play, without having a stage production in mind. He was pursuing what Marian Kimber describes as his Romantic visual aesthetic, reinscribing in music impressions derived from visual perception and imagination, in an attempt to tackle what Hazlitt and others had perceived as the play’s ‘visual impossibilities’. If an audience could not cope, as Hazlitt said, with six-foot high fairies in the flesh, such beings could instead be evoked by fairy music, which would give a visualizing aid to the individual audience-member’s own imagination more nearly akin to the poetry itself than any actor or set could be. What more suitable for Fanny Kemble’s new Shakespearean enterprise

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than such an accompaniment to her reading, turning the individual private dream into an enormous public event, supplying ‘visual’ as well as aural delight without the meretricious intervention of the stage? She was the first to undertake the ‘concert reading’ of the play alongside Mendelssohn’s music, in March 1850 at the Astor Place Opera House in New York. In February 1852 she and Mitchell brought it to the St James’s Theatre. Mitchell published her text for the reading in 1855, and collation of a surviving copy77 reveals that she based it upon a scholarly rather than a theatrical edition, not beginning from the received text – the version Vestris used – but making her own choices about what should be cut. She does not bowdlerize the text as much as Vestris felt obliged to do, for example despatching Titiana and Bottom, and later the mortals, to bed, as Shakespeare had it; and she makes fewer transpositions, for example leaving Bottom’s waking in IV.i after the discovery of the lovers in the forest by Theseus and his train, rather than moving it forward as directors like Vestris and then Phelps and Kean were obliged to do, because they set the love-making between Titania and Bottom away from the sleeping mortals, in her bower. Despite needing to make space in the evening for all Mendelssohn’s music, which takes almost an hour to perform, the absence of such scenic shifts and the stage waits that they inevitably required meant that Fanny did not need to compress her text as much as full stagings did. Charles Kean in his 1856 production of the play discarded more than 40 per cent of Shakespeare’s lines. Fanny retains more than 600 of the nearly 700 lines Shakespeare gives to the quartet of lovers, where Phelps, by comparison, cut to fewer than 350. Trevor Griffiths explores the possibility, for modern critical thinking, of seeing the Victorian use of Mendelssohn’s music and visually spectacular staging for the play as a kind of aesthetic substitution, ‘creating a more coherent kind of synaesthesia than any previous versions of the Dream had managed by drawing on intellectual and technical vocabularies of Romantic ballet, music and scenography.’ Cutting out all the cumbrous staged spectacle, but able to rely on Mendelssohn’s music delivered by an often spectacularly large orchestra and chorus to assist her own voice and Shakespeare’s poetry, Fanny might be said to have created a uniquely effective Victorian text for the play.78

‘A being of formidable splendour’ The phrase is Henry James’s impression of Mrs Kemble as a reader, when as a child (some time before 1860) he was taken to hear her at the Eyre Arms

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Tavern and Assembly Rooms in St John’s Wood.79 ‘The reader dressed in black velvet for Lear and in white satin for the comedy ’ [A Midsummer Night’s Dream] he recalled, and the ‘human thunder-roll’ she produced on Lear’s lamentation ‘Howl, howl, howl!’ set for him a standard that no subsequent performance ever matched. James observes, as many auditors did, the sheer strength and amplitude of her reading: ‘the life that Mrs Kemble’s single personality could impart to a Shakespeare multitude’, and repeats the impression it made upon ‘no less energetic a genius than Madame Ristori’, who was moved by her fellow-actress reading to exclaim ‘Che forza, ma che forza, che forza!’ ‘regarding it simply as a feat of power’.80 In the late 1850s Mrs Kemble’s appearances displayed this energy and personal power in old and new settings. After her successful return to St James’s Theatre during the fashionable Season in the summer of 1850 she made tours of Institutes and Assembly Rooms as far flung as Edinburgh, Plymouth and Colchester. In 1852 she returned to the St James’s for her new production: A Midsummer Night’s Dream read with the accompaniment of Mendelssohn’s music – music she had heard played by the composer at home before she was 21, and regarded in some sense as part of the play as she understood it. The largest provincial venues that welcomed her were able to mount this multimedia work, and she had a triumphant return to Manchester with an appearance in March 1853 which, according to the Manchester Times, ‘drew the largest audience to our aristocratic Concert Hall we remember to have seen for many years past’, although the reporter did not think the demand for tickets came from the most discerning of the Manchester public, since the ‘really splendid reading – fine acting it may almost be called – found but meagre recognition; whilst the music appeared in numerous instances as a means of relief, and the signal for a pleasant tête-à-tête’.81 She herself reports this occasion as a triumph, at the end of which six offers of further engagements were put into her hands, and the Committee, having beforehand tried in vain to get her to accept twice her usual fee of £20, afterwards sent a hapless Member to attempt to tip her an extra £5; his deep discomfiture as she fixed him with her most serious and brilliant gaze and politely declined the gratuity dissolved Charles Hallé, the orchestra leader on that occasion, into fits of laughter.82 Local ambition can be seen once again outstripping audience tolerance at the 10th annual Norfolk and Norwich Music Festival, which opened on 21 September with a ‘Grand Miscellaneous Concert’ which lasted until after midnight. Sims Reeves, Madame Viadot Garcia and sundry other important soloists performed, before A Midsummer Night’s Dream read by Fanny and accompanied by an orchestra, of over 100 players, and 300 local singers made up the second half. As the Morning Chronicle reported, ‘country hours

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and country distances could not be reconciled with this arrangement’ and people were leaving from 11 onwards, though most stayed to hear the wedding march. This reporter also felt that ‘Mendelssohn and the band carried off the honours of it. Mrs Kemble’s reading of the text of Midsummer Night’s Dream was, in our judgement, a failure. It was an ambitious attempt to personate a whole corps dramatique – an attempt in which no person living could have succeeded’.83 In February 1855, however, she returned to London with this performance, appearing in the huge central hall of Exeter Hall, with full chorus and orchestra under the celebrity conductor Julius Benedict. The show filled the nearly 3,000 seats to overflowing on two nights. The Lady’s Newspaper crowned her queen of all Shakespearean readers: Mrs Kemble alone seems to possess the power to give all due inspiration, fresh, warm, and unsullied from its vital source. Vivified by her kindred genius his characters live and move as complete and distinct individualities; his glowing pages, pregnant with philosophy, and brimful of sweet and bitter fancies, are rendered clear and perfectly comprehensible, at least to such as are gifted with sympathetic souls . . . This marvellous reading, incomparably great, alike in its expression of the serious comic or strictly imaginative scenes . . . is one of Mrs Kemble’s happiest efforts.84 The Daily News reporter was less impressed, complaining: ‘[s]he is too demonstrative. She will make her “points”. She wants to intrude upon the province of our own imaginations. Her Hermia is an embodied drawl, in order to distinguish it from her Helena, which is a sustained whine . . . She is the embodiment of all the Kemble traditions. She has crystallized all the traditional forms of stage expression’.85 The judgement here depends, of course, upon the writers’ attitude to ‘stage expression’. For Henry James, writing after her death, her ability to act the many parts of any play, and to deliver certain lines so that her voice rang in the memory as a benchmark for any future performance, was the proof of her greatness as a Shakespearean. Less gifted reporters have also left their testimony to her capacity to give certain lines, certain moments, unforgettable form; they quote what the Ipswich Journal reporter dubs Shakespeare’s ‘terrible graces’ as she rendered them, from the song ‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind’ in As You Like It to Macbeth in ‘the dagger scene’, ‘a vivid personation of a great mind irresistibly drawn to the consummation of a deed of guilt’.86 She was as striking in broad comedy as in tragedy, and indeed Ellen Kean, who as Ellen Tree had once played Romeo to her Juliet, and acquitted herself better than all the men who had disgusted Fanny in

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the role, was alarmed when in later life she heard Mrs Kemble read The Merry Wives of Windsor in New York, and found her Falstaff ‘disgusting’, ‘a coarse unsexing’.87 Henry James, less bounded by mid-Victorian convention, was as impressed by her King Lear as by her Portia, and understood why she most enjoyed to read Henry V, a rendition that was ‘gallant and martial and intensely English . . . [h]er splendid tones and her face that lighted like that of a war-goddess seemed to fill the performance with the hurry of armies and the sound of battle . . . the illusion was that of a multitude and a pageant’ and he recalled the ‘tremendous ring of her voice’ in the culminating ‘God for Harry, England and Saint George!’88 No wonder, then, that it was in solo reading – where she could generate a whole army all by herself, as well as evoke forests and fairies and Bottom while surrounded by 300 singers and a full orchestra – that she felt most empowered by Shakespeare; and there she was able, by separating herself from the encumbrances of her trade, at last to act. On the reading platform she was able fully to express her intensely dramatic self, the extra-theatrical actress in her whom she had always known to exist. And in this fuller, more ideal Shakespearean acting, adapted as it was to the anti-theatrical prejudices of her contemporaries, she was paradoxically able to move against, as well as entirely with, the grain of her culture. She was able to make money while maintaining her social superiority, moving the hard-headed and ham-fisted rich men of Manchester to beg her to take their cash, while she maintained the position of bountiful patron, bringing Shakespeare to the grateful multitude. As a solo reader, untrammeled by the ignorance of other players and managerial concerns about everything from scenery to respectability, she could intelligently expand her contemporaries’ ideas, bringing even a play like Measure for Measure to their attention. She shared the sense of her times and her class that the theatre was an inadequate vehicle for poetry and a degrading social context. However, as the divided critical responses suggest, she carried that conviction of what a lady could properly do there in a completely unconventional, even improper, direction. Instead of allowing the anti-theatrical to inhibit or restrain her artistic freedom she seized upon it as a chance to act not less, but more. Sitting sublime in crimson or white robes on the stages of Scientific Institutes and modern public halls, instead of rushing about incongruously costumed behind the dusty footlights, she challenged the gendered limits of her artistic power. From that unassailable position, she could embody not only maidens and queens, but also Shakespeare’s buffoons and simpletons, heroes and kings; not just the finicking permutations on Juliet, but Falstaff and Othello.

Chapter 4

Charlotte Cushman Lisa Merrill

‘She made Shakespeare real, but she never dragged him down to the level of the actual. Her best achievements in the illustration of Shakespeare were accordingly of the highest order of art. They were at once human and poetic. They were white marble suffused with fire.’ William Winter, New York Tribune1 ‘There can be no question that her peculiar intellectualism in art is shown even more in her readings than in her acting, notably so in the Shakespearean readings . . . In the reading-desk, she reigns as the sole magician . . . She has but to wave her wand to unlock from the prison-house of Shakespeare’s pages all the immortal phantoms that brood within them.’ George T. Ferris, Appleton’s Journal2

When American-born actress Charlotte Cushman died in 1876 at the age of 59, after four decades of a spectacularly successful public life, Scribner’s Magazine compared Cushman with George Eliot, George Sand and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But Cushman – unlike her female literary contemporaries – was more famous than them, for, as Scribner’s asserted ‘No other woman of our day – in America at least, was as well known to so many people, for it is probable that . . . in her forty years of professional life, she had been seen by millions.’3 During her lifetime this American-born performer of both Shakespearean and contemporary Victorian melodramas had become a cultural icon who represented complex and contradictory things both for spectators who witnessed her spectacular success onstage as well as for other members of the general public on both sides of the Atlantic. Although Scribner’s critic favourably compared the fame of Charlotte Cushman – the most celebrated female Shakespearean theatrical performer of her day – with that of the most highly acclaimed contemporary women

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literary artists, ironically, Cushman’s renown would prove to be more evanescent than that of the illustrious women to whom she was equated, since none but she was an actress. And as an actress living in the age before performances were recorded, the only traces Cushman left for her posterity (besides her voluminous correspondence) were pictures. Cushman lived at a time when the public fame of a performer increasingly depended upon a perception of her personal attributes and the construction and reproduction of images of her. In the essay which follows, I will examine Cushman as an icon and as a commodity as well as a great Shakespearean performer; focusing on the reception of Cushman and her Shakespearean roles by theatrical audiences and cultural critics in Victorian Britain and the United States: exploring how she was seen, and what constellation of (often contradictory) values she was thought to represent. Throughout this essay, I will be focusing on how pictorial representations of Cushman both reflected and challenged predominant nineteenth-century discourses about gender, nationality and socio-economic class. Two widely reproduced images of Charlotte Cushman as a Shakespearean performer frame this chapter. One, by illustrator Margaret Gillies in 1846 depicts the young Charlotte Cushman as Romeo with her sister Susan as Juliet (Figure 3). The other, a photograph, ca. 1872 by theatrical portraitist Napolean Sarony, portrays the older Cushman as a platform reader of Shakespeare’s plays (Figure 4). Both images have been reproduced in contexts completely outside of Shakespearean performance and ‘read’ as signifiers of female intellect and bourgeois respectability – an unusual distinction for an actress in her era. In order to account for Charlotte Cushman’s extraordinary prominence as a ‘Great Shakespearean’, let us consider some of the factors that coincided with and contributed to her celebrity. First, she was a woman at a time when women’s social roles were in flux offstage as well as on. At the time Cushman first appeared on the dramatic stage, a longstanding anti-theatrical prejudice called into question the respectability of women who pursued careers as actresses. Although women’s occupations were expanding, actresses were regarded less favourably than women literary critics or writers, acts women could perform within their own domestic space. As Dinah Mulock Craik contended in her 1858 volume, A Woman’s Thoughts About Women, unlike other women’s occupations, ‘[the actress] . . . needs to be constantly before the public, not only mentally but physically. The general eye becomes familiar not only with her genius but with her corporeality’.4 In the minds of many Victorians – even those advocating for women’s increased access to other professions – actresses were likened to prostitutes

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Figure 3 Margaret Gillies, ‘Charlotte and Susan Cushman as Romeo and Juliet’ (1846) (author’s own copy)

whose bodies were ‘constantly before the public’ and could be viewed by anyone who paid the price. Yet, as Robyn Asleson has noted, because of such public access, from the time of the Georgian era, actresses were largely the only group of women with ‘both the power and the license to orchestrate public perceptions of themselves – chiefly through carefully contrived stage performances, but also through myriad forms of personal propaganda and self-fashioning’.5 Cushman’s ‘self fashioning’ of her particular public persona and the specific images she orchestrated complicated more than the contemporary views of an actress’ public respectability, however. They

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Figure 4

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Napoleon Sarony, ‘Charlotte Cushman’ (1872) (author’s own copy)

were at the heart of competing notions of women’s power, agency and desire, offstage as well as on. In fact, much of Cushman’s success can be attributed to a peculiarly Victorian paradox: although an actress, because she was a woman who was generally regarded as ‘masculine’ in her demeanour, was not seen as conventionally attractive, and whose emotional life was exclusively centred on other women, in an era when ‘romantic friendships’ between women were generally accepted, Cushman was regarded by many of her contemporaries as a model of chastity and propriety who was perfectly positioned to ‘elevate’ the moral climate of the stage.6 Second, Cushman was an American. Contending that ‘the theatre is a concentrated nation in itself,’ by 1877 (a year after Cushman’s death),

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William Rounseville Alger estimated that ‘scholars and critics of America a hundred or two hundred years hence’ would look to the history of the national stage as a ‘mirror of humanity’.7 A complex debate about Victorian American understandings and constructions of race, gender, socioeconomic class and sexuality was at the heart of the popularity of images of leading performers who represented that ‘concentrated nation’ on the stage and in visual reproductions, etchings and articles in the press. Thus, Cushman’s identity as an American woman Shakespearean performer elicited a range of contradictory responses. For nineteenth-century Americans, striving for cultural parity with British artists, the ability to perform the words of Shakespeare – the greatest poet and dramatist in the English language – was to enter into (and potentially transform) an arena considered by many the exclusive purview of the British. From her first appearance on the dramatic stage Cushman undertook Shakespearean roles (among others), but she soon recognized that it was against interpretations produced by critically acclaimed British actors, such as Frances Anne Kemble and William Charles Macready, and, ultimately, before British audiences, that her skill and artistry definitively would be measured. In the chapter that follows I explore how some of the meanings that adhere to her image are rooted in the political, ideological and aesthetic exigencies of the moment in which she lived.

Prelude: Modelling on Fanny Kemble As a brief prelude to exploring the sources and effects of Cushman’s particular iconicity, however, it is important to acknowledge the visible example set early in Cushman’s life by the appearance and embodied presence of another ‘Great Shakespearean’ – Frances Anne (Fanny) Kemble. In the early 1830s when young American actress Charlotte Cushman was first training to be an opera singer and contemplating appearing onstage, British actress Fanny Kemble first came to Boston – Cushman’s home town – and made a lasting impression on the young Charlotte. Fanny Kemble was not just an actress on her American debut tour when she first appeared on the United States stage. Performing opposite her actor-father, Charles Kemble – brother of beloved British tragedienne, Sarah Kemble Siddons, Fanny was a beautiful descendent of the renowned Kemble theatrical dynasty. As fellow actor, Walter Leman remembered, ‘Fanny Kemble flashed into popular favor at once, and appeared in many of the roles which were made famous by her aunt, Mrs. Siddons’ and ‘all the world’ came ‘from far and

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near to see the Kembles’.8 On 16 April 1833 Fanny Kemble made her first appearance before a Boston audience, in the role of Bianca, in Henry Hart Milman’s play, Fazio: or the Italian Wife.9 Many years later, when describing the early influences on her career in her formative years, Cushman remembered the impact of Kemble’s presence: ‘About this time Fanny Kemble burst like a meteor upon the American public – and having opportunities of seeing her act – produced the second grand impression of my life.’ But Cushman found Kemble more than a professional model to emulate. ‘I had a real hero-worship for her’, Cushman recalled, ‘and would walk for hours in Tremont Street – only to get the opportunity of seeing her pass from the Hotel to the Theatre’. Kemble’s offstage appearance, bearing and social acceptability impressed Cushman immeasurably. The Kembles were feted by Boston’s leading political, literary and social luminaries, among them former United States President John Quincy Adams, Senator Daniel Webster and Harvard professor George Ticknor. Onstage, Fanny Kemble offered a prototype of a decorous, respectable actress Cushman strove to replicate, and late in her life Cushman acknowledged that ‘seeing F[anny] K[emble] act was the foundation of whatever style I may be said to have in acting’.10 In the mid-1840s, for a time Cushman and Kemble both resided in Philadelphia, and Cushman’s idol worship for Kemble was reconfigured into a friendship. Cushman was a working actress, acting and managing Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre, while Kemble – then married and retired – was living in Philadelphia with her American husband Pierce Butler and their two daughters. Cushman was so smitten with Kemble that she recorded in her diary every time she encountered Kemble, and practised drafts of notes she later would send to the older actress. Their extant correspondence reveals that Cushman repeatedly showered Kemble with flowers and books and Kemble responded by donating some of her costumes to Cushman for the wardrobe of the Walnut Street Theatre.11 Before Cushman left for England in November 1844, she strove to help Kemble (who was then deeply unhappy in her marriage) secure a divorce from Butler in a manner that would enable Kemble to keep custody of her daughters. However, Cushman was unsuccessful in her attempts to gain evidence of Butler’s infidelity, and Kemble found Cushman’s efforts on her behalf so distasteful that eventually this led to the dissolution of their friendship. Although she had been a reasonably successful actress in the United States from the start of her career, Cushman’s unpublished private

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correspondence reveals that she had considered travelling to England and trying her hand on the English stage from at least 1842. In that year, British playwright and consul, Thomas Colley Grattan had become a friend and advisor to Cushman after the two met on a railroad while she was on an American tour. Grattan wrote that he was ‘sincerely glad that you have made up your mind to go to England next summer’. Apparently, Cushman had received an offer from a theatre in London, but Grattan warned, ‘It must do you infinite good if you go there . . . not expecting too much, & resolved not to be discouraged if things fall short of your hopes’. Grattan felt that Cushman’s future lay in her reception in America, and cautioned her to ‘Remember that this country [America] must be the field of your permanent exertions. England will only be a training ground.’12 But in 1843, another opportunity closer to home arose to keep Cushman in the United States for a year longer: she was invited to act opposite Britain’s ‘eminent tragedian’ William Charles Macready during his second United States tour. After their first appearance together in Philadelphia in October 1843, Macready noted in his journal, ‘[t]he actress who played Lady Macbeth interested me much’. Macready wrote that the 27-year old American actress ‘has to learn her art, but she showed mind and sympathy with me; a novelty so refreshing to me on the stage’.13 Once again Cushman modelled herself, to some extent, on a prestigious British exemplar. A few years later Cushman’s physical resemblance to Macready (with her somewhat thin lips and square jaw) and her similarity to his performance style, would lead burlesque writer Gilbert Abbott a Beckett in the Almanack of the Month to comment: ‘What figure is that which appears on the scene? ’Tis Madame Macready – Miss Cushman I mean. What wondrous resemblance! The walk on the toes, The eloquent short, intellectual nose – The bend of the knee, the slight sneer of the lip, The frown on the forehead, the hand on the hip; In the chin, in the voice, ’tis the same to a tittle, Miss Cushman is Mr. Macready in little.’14 Performing with Macready only strengthened Cushman’s determination to appear before British audiences. And she left, to pursue that goal, in November 1844, approximately a month after he concluded his American tour. But Cushman was determined to compete on her own terms.

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Transatlantic (and Gender) Crossings: Restoring Shakespeare and Embodying Romeo As Cushman prepared for her first transatlantic voyage, she was armed with dozens of letters of introduction, many attesting to her success as a ‘breeches actress’ specializing in the portrayal of male characters. This practice of a woman playing a male part was a relatively standard feature of the early- to mid-Victorian stage, and one at which Cushman excelled. At the time, her most recognized female parts were generally those of powerful, dominating women characters, such as Lady Macbeth and melodramatic ‘heavy’ characters such as Nancy in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Meg Merrillies in Sir Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering. As it turned out, Cushman’s actual arrival in Britain in late 1844 proved to be timed most fortuitously for her, since the American actress arrived in London within months of the passage of the Theatres Regulation Act of 1843. Under this act, the London patent theatres of Covent Garden, Drury Lane and, in the summer, the Haymarket, lost their monopoly on the production of legitimate drama. So, Charlotte Cushman landed on British soil at the very moment when full Shakespearean productions could be mounted in any theatre and made accessible to a wide range of audiences attending the theatre in disparate types of venues; as well as to the elite champions of accepted theatrical stars. Moreover, although she had had a reasonably profitable career on the American stage for the previous 8 years, Cushman was a novelty to British audiences. In her attempt to embody and garner middle-class respectability, Cushman – an American actress striving for parity with her British competitors – was simultaneously on the fulcrum of and situated well to explode oppositions of ‘high’ and ‘low culture’, American independence and British tradition, ‘feminine’ respectability and ‘masculine’ assertiveness. In her first British season, commencing in February 1845, Charlotte Cushman appeared in a number of roles in both contemporary plays and in Shakespearean offerings. Cushman began her first season as Bianca in Henry Hart Milman’s Fazio; played Meg Merrillies in Scott’s Guy Mannering; and portrayed the Shakespearean roles of Lady Macbeth and Emilia in Othello among other parts, many opposite American tragedian Edwin Forrest. Cushman also appeared in several comedic parts, such as Rosalind in As You Like It and Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing. Overwhelmingly, her reviews were quite positive, particularly when compared with the largely negative reception given to her co-star, Edwin Forrest, by the British press. Cushman continued performing many of these after Forrest’s run

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concluded. Although as T. W. Ball later noted, Cushman’s comedy parts, while well-conceived, bore ‘no comparison to her tragic assumptions’, and ‘her highest achievements and most pronounced success were in Shakespearean tragedy’.15 Thus, by her second season, in late 1845, Cushman’s highly anticipated portrayal was to be her upcoming appearance in a breeches part, as Shakespeare’s ultimate romantic hero, Romeo. From her first performances as Romeo in England, Cushman exercised directorial choices that would influence the way spectators saw Shakespeare on stage. Not only was she appearing as Romeo opposite her younger sister Susan as Juliet, but – in a radical departure from accepted practice – Cushman proposed the use of Shakespeare’s original Romeo and Juliet text, as opposed to the earlier adaptations generally performed. This incurred the wrath of the English stock acting company accompanying the Cushman sisters, as they were accustomed to staging David Garrick’s mid-eighteenthcentury adaptation of Shakespeare’s play. As the Cushman sisters prepared for their Romeo and Juliet opening in December 1845, Charlotte Cushman wrote to Benjamin Webster, manager of the Haymarket theatre, apologizing for ‘annoying’ him, and indicating that the stage manager and others involved with the production expressed to her ‘in no very measured terms their displeasure at the trouble this “original text” was giving them’. Cushman regarded this as a personal slight, claiming the stage manager had asserted disparagingly that her performative choice had been made ‘because one Miss Cushman could not bring another Miss Cushman out of the tomb’. Furthermore, the derision took on a nationalistic tinge, since the Haymarket stock company was said to have referred to the Cushman sisters as ‘American Indians’ because of their adherence to Shakespeare’s older, original text, which they considered ‘primitive’. And there was an implicit class dimension to the Haymarket company’s disdain for Cushman’s efforts as well, since Americans actors were considered by many to be uncouth and not up to the cultural standards of their English competitors. In response, Cushman explained to Brewster that she was ‘quite prepared to act Romeo in any way that shall please you’. However, it was the Shakespearean text rather than the watered-down Garrick version she succeeded in mounting.16 Ironically, to some extent, it was Charlotte Cushman’s innovative choice to perform from Shakespeare’s text – which had not been seen on a British stage for more than a century – that accounted for some of her spectacular success as Romeo. Cushman was not alone in seeing the value of restoring Shakespeare’s original texts and eliminating the adaptations that had held the stage since the Restoration era. In 1838, when Macready was managing London’s

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Covent Garden, he mounted productions that returned Shakespeare’s original texts of King Lear and The Tempest to the boards for the first time in 150 years. Until Macready’s productions, British theatres staged instead Nahum Tate’s extensively revised version of King Lear, complete with a happy ending, and revised versions of the Davenant/ Dryden adaptation of The Tempest.17 But before Cushman’s 1845 Romeo and Juliet, the Garrick adaptation of the play still held sway on the stage. Paradoxically, within the decade following her performance, it would become customary practice for British performers of Shakespeare to stage what they considered to be ‘historically correct’ productions, and to regard these efforts as evidence of the progress of knowledge and culture in the Victorian age. The most notable of those who strove to create what he considered to be historically accurate productions of Shakespeare was actor-manager Charles Kean. As Kean’s biographer, J. W. Cole, described the impetus behind Kean’s endeavour: ‘The time had at length arrived when a total purification of Shakespeare [i.e. by removing the additions of earlier adaptors] with every accompaniment that refined knowledge, diligent research and chronological accuracy could supply, was suited to the taste and temper of the age’.18 Yet the opposition Cushman encountered in her first attempt to perform from Shakespeare’s script of Romeo and Juliet, 15 years prior to the publishing of Cole’s volume, makes it clear that she had been on the cutting edge of such Shakespearean performance practice, although at the time she was considered by some as ‘old fashioned’ and ‘primitive’ for preferring the older ‘outmoded’ text. However, within a few years, this practice would be lauded by English Shakespearean actor-managers as the preferred mode of mounting Shakespearean productions. Fortunately for Cushman, a whole industry honouring Shakespeare had been springing up at roughly the same moment she chose to cross the Atlantic. In 1833, the Westminster Review had critiqued what it referred to as ‘the respectable humbug’ of such ‘Bardolotry’ that lionized Shakespeare as a national hero.19 But by 1847 ‘Shakespeare’ was becoming such a valuable touristic commodity that American circus magnate Phineas T. Barnum tried to purchase Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-on-Avon.20 Horrified by Barnum’s attempt at commercializing ‘Shakespeare’ for his personal profit, in 1848 novelist Charles Dickens and actor William Charles Macready spearheaded a campaign along with other members of the London Shakespeare Commission to purchase Shakespeare’s birthplace by subscription for the British nation. This collective action served to formally acknowledge and institutionalize both perceptions of Shakespeare’s genius and Victorian beliefs about the moral lessons to be derived from his writings, as well as to

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reinforce Shakespeare’s importance to the nation and history of Britain for fellow [British] Victorians – against the image of vulgar, money-hungry Americans from which Cushman was eager to differentiate herself by allying with British models of middle-class respectability. Moreover, the very meanings associated with ‘Shakespeare’ and Shakespearean performance continued to be in flux at this time, as were the class and cultural constructions of ‘American’ and ‘British’ nationhood. As Stanley Wells, Richard Schoch, Paul Schlicke and others have noted, even in Britain, Shakespeare had never been the exclusive property of elitist culture.21 While some were celebrating the textual purity and historical accuracy of returning Shakespeare’s original works to the stage, at the same time adaptations, burlesques and travesties of Shakespeare’s plays continued to be mounted in a range of venues and attended by a wide range of audiences. Although some bourgeois or elite audiences might consider it beneath them to attend such burlesques and patronize such venues, Schoch has documented the attendance of Queen Victoria at a parody entitled Shylock; or the Merchant of Venice Perserved. 22 At virtually the same time as Charles Dickens and William Charles Macready were helping in the attempt to buy Shakespeare’s birthplace on behalf of the nation, Henry Mayhew was chronicling among his survey of the mid-century London Labour and the London Poor, the existence of itinerant street orators, ‘nomads’ who peddled their oratorical skills by offering to declaim for passers-by speeches from Shakespearean plays such as ‘Othello’s apology,’ and Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ in return for spare coins.23 Although familiarity with or allusions to Shakespeare were not necessarily signifiers of high culture, it was in keeping with the ‘bardolotry’ then coming into fashion, that such textual innovations and distinctions as those Charlotte Cushman staged with Romeo and Juliet helped participate in shifting the discourse about the value of performing Shakespeare’s actual words. Rather than being regarded as ‘out of date’ and ‘primitive,’ returning to the original texts came to be seen as advocating a refined ‘purification’ of plays previously distorted, and therefore a practice tailored for and emblematic of cultured, educated Victorian audiences. Not surprisingly, this aesthetic recalibrating coincided with an ongoing attempt to render the ‘legitimate’ theatre increasingly respectable, to encourage the patronage of privileged, ‘respectable’ audiences, particularly women, and so to disassociate the ‘legitimate’ theatre from the taint of associations with burlesques, fairground and other ‘low culture’ performance venues and audiences. Thus, even those like the Shakespearean critic, George Fletcher, who protested vehemently against Cushman’s assumption of the role of Romeo,

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championed the choice to perform from Shakespeare’s rather than Garrick’s version of the play. In an epilogue to his 1847 volume, Studies of Shakespeare, Fletcher critiqued the Cushman sisters’ recent London performance. Rather than attributing the choice of text to Cushman’s efforts, Fletcher stated, writing in the passive voice, that ‘it was thought proper to abandon that Garrick version of this play which had kept the stage unintermittedly [sic] since Garrick’s time, and return to Shakespeare’s text, though still with essential mutilations’. Fletcher remarked upon the success of the production, asserting, ‘For this restoration the critics of the London press gave unqualified credit to the manager and the actors – taking occasion to treat Garrick, and his ‘‘balderdash,’’ with especial contumely.’ But, Fletcher regretted that it was ‘[f]or the special purpose, then, it should seem, of restoring Shakespeare’s work in all its purity . . . that Romeo and Juliet were to be personated by two transatlantic sisters – the she-Romeo being advertised as the peculiar and irresistible attraction’.24 However, Fletcher was not alone in raising questions about the appropriateness of what appeared to be Cushman’s ‘peculiar and irresistible attraction’ as Romeo. A year earlier – when Cushman first arrived in Britain in November 1844 and before she even appeared onstage there – she visited Edinburgh and became acquainted socially with renowned Scottish phrenologist George Combe and his wife Cecelia Siddons Combe, who was the cousin of Fanny Kemble. Several months afterward, Charlotte Cushman’s younger sister Susan arrived in Britain, and accompanied Charlotte to Edinburgh, in preparation for their London appearances as Romeo and Juliet. Combe, a strict moralizer, apparently regarded both Cushman sisters’ behaviour as suspect. In his unpublished letters to Kemble and Cushman, Combe expressed concerns about the respectability of the Cushman sisters. First he demanded written evidence of the moral character and legal marital status of Charlotte’s 23-year old sister, Susan, who in 1845 was a divorced mother with a young son. In addition, as Cushman’s letters in response to Combe’s make evident, apparently Combe found Charlotte Cushman’s flouting of gender categories particularly disturbing. Cushman framed her epistolary response to Combe in terms that reinforced official ideologies of female sexual innocence and familial responsibilities. Immediately prior to opening their London engagement of Romeo and Juliet, Cushman responded to Combe’s objections to her portrayal of Romeo by claiming that his letter raised ideas that were ‘entirely new’ to her, and asserting that her ‘sole motivation’ for undertaking the breeches performance was ‘to giv[e] my sister that support which I knew she required & would never get from any gentleman that could be got to act with her . . . a thought of indelicacy in the assumption never cross’d my mind’.25

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Yet despite Cushman’s strategic protestations and her domestic narrative of providing support for her sister – and thereby protecting Susan from unwanted advances by ‘any gentleman that could be got to act with her’, – Charlotte Cushman had, in fact, portrayed numerous male characters (including Romeo) onstage for almost a decade previously in the United States. In fact, she had frequently performed breeches parts opposite actresses other than her sister, and would continue to portray male characters long after Susan Cushman’s retirement from the stage several years later. The common practice of actresses portraying male characters was beginning to wane at this time, but it was still standard enough to suggest that the spectre of something more explicitly suggestive of the erotic possibilities of gender transgression and same-sex desire was at the core of Combe’s disapproval. Clearly Cushman’s motivations for playing Romeo were more complex than the rationale she privately offered Combe in the letter cited above. Moreover, Cushman’s very denial of ‘gross motives’ and ‘indelicacy’ in her response to Combe pointed to the existence of significant, albeit often unarticulated, belief systems about gender and sexuality that were in transition at this moment. Many Victorians considered women – at least bourgeois women – passionless, and regarded homosocial relationships and intimacies between them, onstage or off – as therefore inherently innocent and chaste (unlike the seductive behaviours women might engage in with men or to tempt male spectators). However, others recognized ways in which women – particularly large, powerful, women considered ‘manly’ – might serve as objects of erotic desire for other women. Perhaps to deflect such interpretations of ‘gross motives,’ however, Cushman also publicly staged, authorized and legitimated her explanation for embodying the role of Romeo in the form of an article authored by her friend, Mary Howitt. On 18 July 1846, Mary Howitt published an article entitled ‘The Miss Cushmans’ in the People’s Journal which Mary Howitt coedited with her husband, William.26 This article was accompanied by an illustration by Howitt’s friend, Margaret Gillies, of the Cushman sisters as Romeo and Juliet. In Gillies’ drawing, Cushman is pictured as an androgynous-looking Romeo, looking off to the left, away from her sister-Juliet, whose head she cradles and whom she literally supports. It is my contention that Gillies’ illustration may be considered a representation that served to both exemplify and personify the claims in Howitt’s – and Cushman’s – narrative. In this way, a particular paradigmatic image of Cushman as Romeo was commodified, mass-produced and put into circulation. For mid-nineteenth-century theatre goers, the iconic image of Shakespeare’s Romeo came to be embodied in depictions of actres

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Charlotte Cushman as the romantic (male) lover of women. The extant drawings, photographs and other visual depictions of Cushman’s performances, when considered alongside the reviews and written accounts of Cushman’s spectators, reflect the tensions between those official discourses, beliefs and values rendered legible and noteworthy at the time, and those alternate possible readings that were omitted, overlooked, or censored in official discourses and representations. A few spectators, like the purist Shakespearean critic George Fletcher, after viewing the Romeo and Juliet Cushman had the temerity to mount ‘on the boards of one of the patent theatres of London’ (the Haymarket), in December 1845, regarded Cushman’s performance as Romeo as an affront to his national pride. ‘For the honour of our country – the country of Shakespeare – we could wish that such an exhibition should be utterly forgotten,’ Fletcher decried.27 But Fletcher’s and Combe’s resistance to Cushman’s ‘indelicacy’ in portraying the prototypical male lover of women was at odds with the larger, widespread acceptance she received in the part. Overwhelmingly, to far more spectators and critics of the age, Cushman was the perfect embodiment of a mass popularized Shakespearean hero – and one uniquely constituted for the Victorian era.

Cushman as a Cultural Icon: Captured in Clay As material evidence of Cushman’s iconic status and prominence as Romeo, shortly after her London debut, recognizable depictions of the Cushman sisters as Romeo and Juliet were widely reproduced in etchings in the press and became the model for a highly collectible ceramic hand-painted Staffordshire figurine that functioned as an example of popular theatrical memorabilia. Staffordshire figurines were mass-produced representations of celebrated historical and contemporary persons such as Shakespeare and Queen Victoria and of fictional literary characters, such as Uncle Tom, Cinderella and the characters in Shakespeare’s plays. At the height of their popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, Staffordshire figurines were turned out by the hundreds of thousands and displayed on the mantelpieces of countless bourgeois homes. Moreover, like widely-collected engravings and prints of Shakespearean characters, many ceramic ‘portraits’ were not only idealized representations of fictional characters, but often were pictorial likenesses of actual performers who were recognized by the popular audiences of the day to embody those roles. Veronica Moriarty has described the strong demand created for these Victorian Staffordshire

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ceramic figures as collectible commodities, and notes the ‘link between the figurative subject matter selected by the potters of West Staffordshire and the popular culture’ of the time.28 Much of the visual imagery of midnineteenth-century actors served the double semiotic purpose of constructing a representation of a representation, attesting to and helping solidify the iconic status of a performer as well as establishing the public importance of the performance. Capturing in clay the likeness of Cushman’s Romeo, English potters transformed a particular identifiable etching, Gillies’ representation of the Cushman sisters as Romeo and Juliet from the cover of The People’s Journal (1847), into a marketable commodity. The popular Staffordshire figurine of Romeo and Juliet is costumed exactly as the Cushman sisters were in Margaret Gillies’ illustration, and moulded in a position identical to that of the Gillies’ drawing, and labelled with their names. Identifiable Staffordshire figurines of other Shakespearean characters modelled after and resembling acclaimed theatrical performers, such as Macready’s Macbeth, Edmund Kean’s Richard III and Sarah Siddons’ Lady Macbeth, were also produced and marketed by Staffordshire potters at the time. Yet the choice of the Cushman sisters as the models for the Romeo and Juliet of the Shakespeare series – rather than other popular male and female actor duos – clearly suggests the extent to which Cushman’s Romeo appealed to the taste of the bourgeois British public to whom such items were marketed. Reflecting popular culture of the time, such a Staffordshire ‘portrait’ was more than a saleable, collectible commodity, however. It was material evidence of Cushman’s iconic status in the role of Shakespeare’s young male lover. As part of a series of such figurines, it served to equate Cushman’s theatrical stardom and charismatic appeal with that of the other respectable political, literary and theatrical figures with whom she was ‘cast’. In authorizing the particular depiction of herself as Romeo which was reflected in the press in Howitt’s article about her, furthered in Gillies’ illustration, and, ultimately, cast in clay in the Staffordshire figurines of the same portrait, Cushman (as Romeo) performed as both ‘the agent and the product of her own ideological design’. As a result, images of her functioned as both descriptive objects and as narrative devices. I believe portraits of Cushman as Romeo in the press and in clay, ‘testify to her skill and that of popular image makers in manipulating conventions for representing gender difference and class status’,29 but also record the ideological complexity of two women performing as opposite- (or same-) sex romantic lovers, as well as the various ways such images were or were not rendered

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legible to different audiences. As I have explored elsewhere, in my examination of Cushman’s unpublished letters, I have come across numerous accounts by female spectators who have found the notion of a woman portraying a lover of other women desirable, and saw, in the exemplar offered by Cushman’s performance, a personification of ways they might either ‘perform’ as such a woman themselves or be desired by such a woman.30 Thus, popular cultural artefacts and pictorial representations of Cushman’s female Romeo offered multiple and contested meanings for spectators. Perhaps what was displayed as well in mass-produced representations of Cushman as Romeo, in any genre, was not only her theatrical mastery and extraordinary success in embodying the prototypical young male romantic lover, or the frisson offered audiences by her particular form of female masculinity, but also her ability to transcend reductive binary gender categories entirely. In order to understand the iconic status Cushman achieved as Romeo, it is necessary to historicize how as well as what nineteenth-century spectators saw; that is, to examine which discourses shaped spectatorship so as to account for the responses Cushman received in the mainstream press, from actual audience members, as well from the consumers of her image as a breeches performer. For example, in keeping with the Victorian notion that passionate acting between men and women would be improper and immoral, after seeing the Cushman sisters as Romeo and Juliet, the theatre critic from the (London) Britannia asserted that: It is open to question whether Romeo may not best be personated by a woman, for it is thus only that in actual representation can we view the passionate love of this play made real and palpable; . . . females may together give us an image of the desire of the lovers of Verona, without suggesting a thought of vice.31 Into the mix of shifting beliefs and perceptions about what constituted sexuality and respectability, ‘naturalness’ or deviance, and how each might best be represented onstage, the American actress appearing as Romeo offered London audiences an intriguing corrective of previous impersonations of the role. Since the predominant nineteenth-century medical discourse held that middle-class women were incapable of feeling sexual desire, the passionate exhibition of love performed by two women on stage was generally perceived to be innocent and pure. In fact, the Britannia’s critic went so far as to state that, ‘To give an adequate embodiment of the true feeling of this play, would certainly outrage the sense of a modern

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audience, were the performers of opposite sex’. And Cushman’s ‘masculine’, powerful demeanour in the role so far removed her from the taint of association with those provocative ‘feminine’ performers who engaged in breeches performances primarily to court the gaze of male spectators, as to render her, to many, a moral paragon. Although Cushman’s interpretation of the part was widely praised in the London press, at least one critic regarded Cushman’s particular assaying of the role of Romeo as ‘monstrous’. At the same time Staffordshire potters were mass-producing figurines of her as Romeo, George Fletcher bemoaned the ‘masculine’ charms ‘of the lady representing the hero’, proclaiming hyperbolically: ‘We will waste no words upon demonstrating the disgustingly monstrous grossness of such a perversion. To any human beings, whether calling themselves men or women, who need such an argument to convince them, the argument itself would be uselessly addressed,’ he claimed.32 By way of explanation for that ‘grossness of perversion’ which could not be named, Fletcher proclaimed, ‘It is idle to talk (as we find certain critics doing at the time) as if there was nothing in the performance itself to remind one’s very physical apprehensions that the soi-disant impassioned hero was a woman. That any male auditors could think so’, Fletcher declaimed, implicating spectators in what they did or did not perceive, ‘would surely prove that we live in a time when there are men with so little manhood as to have almost lost all sense of the essentially different manner in which this passion, especially, manifests itself in the two sexes respectively’. Fletcher was particularly ‘revolted’ by what he described as the ‘unnatural absurdity’ of ‘the most mannish of women’ engaging in expressions of ‘hysterical sobbing and blubbering’ ‘over the seeming corpse of Juliet’.33 Further, as Fletcher noted, disparagingly, many spectators’ laudatory descriptions of Cushman’s Romeo included the assertion that the writer, after seeing the performance, could not tell that a woman had played the part. In fact, no less of an ‘auditor’ than Queen Victoria asserted that when ‘Miss Cushman took the part of Romeo . . . no one would ever have imagined her a woman, her figure and voice being so masculine’.34 But the unsaid, and, by many – unseen – presumed ‘threat’ posed by a spectator’s inability to differentiate between the visibly male or female when a ‘mannish woman’ portrayed a male role was complicated further by what Audrey Jaffee, in another context, refers to as the ‘circular relation’ that exists between ‘spectacular forms of cultural representation’ and ‘persons, objects, or scenes invested with ideological value and thus already surrounded in their cultural contexts with an aura of spectacle’.35 As I have established, the Staffordshire figurine of Romeo and Juliet was certainly an

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‘object invested with ideological value’, and the widespread acceptance and aura of spectacle that surrounded Cushman’s assumption of the role served to reinforce and co-construct its contradictory interpretations. Images have the power to generate as well as to reinforce the ideas and preconceptions about gender and sexuality which shaped the historically contingent discursive frames through which spectators viewed Shakespearean breeches performers. After examining reviews of Cushman’s Romeo and letters by fans who saw her in the role, I have come to believe along with Suren Lalvani, that ‘[c]oncepts of seeing must be viewed as historically specific – not only embedded in particular epistemologies . . . but linked to specific discourses and forms of social power, and consequently a particular matrix for organizing the relations between observer and observed, the visible and the invisible’.36 Material depictions of Cushman as Romeo both reflected and complicated those discourses through which spectators and consumers perceived her. Moreover, a perusal of other drawings and photographs of the buxom Cushman costumed as Romeo may lead contemporary spectators and theorists to speculate as to how our nineteenth-century counterparts could have not seen the visibly female body in male attire. One explanation may lie in the nineteenth-century expectation that actresses dressed in breeches generally were seen as sexually alluring to (heterosexual) male spectators. In tight men’s clothing, women so attired were revealing far more of the shapely contours of their female bodies by exposing their legs, calves and ankles than could be seen in conventional women’s dress. Rather than trying to appear masculine or ‘pass’ as a man, most breeches actresses – although outfitted as male characters – made a point to move and sound like women. Cushman’s fellow actor John Coleman explained how far Cushman departed from this established practice, and commended her for it. Coleman noted that ‘[a]s a rule, actresses of refinement and sensibility, when they assume male attire, betray their female origin by quaint little movements, the lower limbs are apt to cling helplessly together, the knees instinctively bowed inward’, but Coleman claimed, Cushman was different. ‘Her demeanor was distinctly masculine; her limbs straight, and if I may use the term, strident, as those of a youth.’ Although Cushman was large-breasted, and made no attempt to conceal this, Coleman felt that ‘her figure, except in the central region before indicated (her chest), might have been that of a robust man; while her amorous endearments were of so erotic a character that no man would have dared to indulge in them [in public]’.37 In effect, Cushman’s masculine movements and demeanour disguised what is to twenty-first-century viewers Cushman’s clearly female, buxom body.

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In addition, perhaps the largely suggestive, rather than literal, depiction of sexual passion in Shakespeare’s plays contributed to the ambiguous or multivalent readings spectators brought to what they saw on stage. As John Russell Brown reminds readers in his article ‘Representing Sexuality in Shakespeare’s plays’: ‘all good theatre thrives on what happens in the minds of its audience, and not by what happens onstage’.38 And this theatre of the mind served Cushman well. Some spectators clearly perceived Cushman’s/ Romeo’s embodied depiction of ‘amorous endearments’ in keeping with the text’s suggestion of a male character, while others could not get out of their minds the female, but ‘mannish’ Cushman performing her passion for other women onstage in this guise. Moreover, the slippage between Cushman’s on- and offstage performance as Romeo – as a (male) lover of other women – offered to some who knew her an additional frisson (or source of censure) not overtly apparent to all audiences of her Shakespearean performances. After Susan Cushman’s retirement from the stage following her marriage in 1848, two of Charlotte Cushman’s next ‘Juliets’ were women with whom she had passionate offstage erotic relationships. One, Sarah Anderton, was a young actress whom Cushman met in the mid-1840s and encouraged to pursue a career on the stage. For over a decade, Anderton acted, primarily in Liverpool, occasionally appearing opposite Cushman when the starring actress was on tour. During one of their performances together, a member of the audience uttered a derisive sneer. Cushman, still in character as the gallant hero, immediately halted the performance, escorted her Juliet offstage, and called for someone to eject the offender, or else threatened to do it herself. Once the commentator left, Cushman resumed the play. Also in 1848, at the outset of Cushman’s decade-long romantic partnership with feminist novelist and translator Matilda Hays, the two women acted onstage together. Hays’s stage career was extremely short lived. There are notices of fewer than half a dozen of Hays’s performances; all occurring in the first year of her relationship with Cushman. Yet, when the two women separated a decade later and Matilda Hays petitioned for a Civil List pension, one of the grounds Hays enumerated was the strenuous effort of playing Juliet to Miss Cushman’s Romeo – thus dramatizing by analogy the offstage roles they played with each other.39 Charlotte Cushman continued to portray Romeo and be identified with the role of the young male lover of other women for many years. On 16 November 1860, when Cushman was 44-years old, a New York Times reviewer wrote, of Cushman’s Romeo, ‘We know of no one who can play the part but Miss Cushman.’ Rather than offering an excuse for a woman

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assuming this part, the Times critic proclaimed that, ‘there is in the delicacy of Romeo’s character something which requires a woman to represent it, and unfits almost every man for its impersonation’.40 But it was more than ‘delicacy’ that ‘fit’ Cushman for this role and motivated her to continue to embody the character. Offstage, she identified with the part of Romeo in her private correspondence when describing her relationships with other women. Writing of the same performance which the New York Times commended publicly, Cushman reported to Emma Crow, the young woman she then called her ‘little lover’, ‘Darling, I have been acting “Romeo” for the last six nights with such a pretty “Juliet” so sweet & fresh & graceful that I am inclined to think I never acted it so well before & may not again – unless I have the same.’ Teasing Crow, with whom she had a passionate relationship, Cushman wrote: ‘I wonder if you would be very jealous if you were to see the performance. I should not wonder! She acts Juliet charmingly & would delight you in the abstract idea of Juliet; but as your darling’s Juliet, I don’t know. Precious little lover mine! My Romeo has a wee bit touch of jealousy in her composition!’41 Curiously, in this letter, Cushman alternates her point of identification as an offstage lover of another woman, taking on both the Romeo and Juliet roles. She portrays herself simultaneously as ‘Romeo’ to the unnamed ‘pretty’ actress playing Juliet, and presumably also envisions herself as the Juliet/lover to whom Crow is ‘my [jealous] Romeo’.

Filling Other (Shakespearean) Breeches; Dressing as Hamlet As she got older, Cushman undertook other Shakespearean breeches parts as well as Romeo. While touring in the United States in 1860, at the same time as her Romeo performance cited above, Cushman took on new Shakespearean roles, such as Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII and Hamlet. In fact, as a demonstration of her virtuosity, at times Cushman would alternate parts in Henry VIII, playing both Queen Katherine (in which part she had been very successful) and Cardinal Wolsey on different nights. As she fashioned the ways in which she would be seen, in addition to performing, Cushman frequently took an active hand in rehearsals, informally giving direction to those who were playing supporting roles. For example, on 15 November 1860, Cushman apologized to Emma Crow, for not writing sooner, since Cushman reported she had been ‘obliged to go to a rehearsal which I had not expected– in consequence of a new actor in one of the parts to fill a vacancy & as each one has to be taught what I expect of

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him – & no one has the sense to know this but myself’. Cushman complained that ‘notwithstanding manager & prompter have seen me do it a thousand times I must go down & go through the work for one man!’42 It is important to note that the modern notion of a ‘director’ as a person outside of the cast of players, whose point of view unified a production, was not standard theatrical practice at the time. Stage managers frequently arranged the details of a particular theatre season, but not the overall aesthetic vision of an individual production; and prompters only helped actors remember their lines. As starring actors like Cushman toured, they encountered and performed opposite new and different members of the companies attached to each theatre into which they were booked. These local actors took on the minor roles opposite the touring ‘star’, whose personal magnetism drew worshipful fans to fill the theatres. So it often fell to touring leading actors to determine how the different supporting actors with whom they appeared should perform. Fortunately, because of the wealth of personal correspondence Cushman left after her death, there are accounts of the active role she took on in such theatrical practices. For example, in November 1860, Cushman complained to Emma Crow that she ‘had very long & fatiguing rehearsals – brought out two fresh parts besides acting the old ones’. While she was ‘re-study[ing] Cardinal Wolsey’ Cushman, the touring star, found herself required to ‘teach half a hundred stupid but well-meaning actors the parts in the different plays’.43 The most notable of the ‘different plays’ Cushman decided to add to her 1860–1861 season was Hamlet; and she would undertake the starring role. By adding Hamlet to her repertoire of great Shakespearean characters, Cushman put herself in direct competition with both of the leading male American tragedians, Edwin Forrest and Edwin Booth, and at a critical time. The contradictions embodied in interpretations of the role of Hamlet were most evident in the winter 1860–1861 theatrical season in which New York audiences witnessed three very different Hamlets: Edwin Forrest (September 1860), Edwin Booth (November 1860) and Charlotte Cushman (February 1861). Cushman’s rivalry with her male colleagues was audacious and uncharacteristic of women in this age. At a time when both American and British women had few legal and civil rights and were barred from practising many professions and entering educational institutions, Cushman competed openly with male actors for the same parts, for the attention of the same women, and insisted upon being rewarded with the same pay and deference as that afforded the leading male artists of the day. The practically simultaneous appearance of three disparate gendered embodiments of Hamlet coexisted at a moment when a number of sex and

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gender categories were in flux. As the prospect of Civil War loomed, performances of American masculinity were in crisis and Shakespeare’s Hamlet was one site of contestation. It was thus in this most revered Shakespearean tragic role that clashing understandings and embodiments of both femininity and masculinity were mediated.44 Edwin Forrest’s portrayal of Hamlet drew upon his heroic interpretations, his physical prowess and large, muscular body. Forrest’s Hamlet had been described as ‘more like a philosophical Hercules than the sad, unhappy youth of Denmark’. Even those who had admired Forrest in his youth considered him ‘too robust’ for the role.45 The lithe, younger Edwin Booth’s interpretation of the role was, in his own terms – feminine – a melancholic, intellectual characterization that was establishing itself with audiences who associated the graceful, slight actor with this part. And Charlotte Cushman – described by many as a ‘mannish’ woman – was uniquely suited to portray some of the gender ambiguities then considered inherent in the role of the indecisive, youthful, tragic male hero. At the age of 44, Cushman was at the height of her profession and eager to demonstrate her prominence by competing with both actors. In 1837, when Cushman was a utility actress at the Park Theatre in New York, in the first years of her career, she had played Gertrude to the Hamlet of visiting star Edwin Forrest. Now she was challenging Forrest for the leading male role. Edwin Booth, in his 20s, was considerably younger than both Forrest and Cushman, and his brooding, thoughtful interpretation was considered novel and poetic. Two years earlier, Cushman had played Romeo to the Juliet of Edwin Booth’s beautiful wife, Mary Devlin before Devlin’s marriage to Booth. Hamlet was becoming Edwin Booth’s signature role, but as Booth dismissively remarked to his friend, Richard F. Cary, Cushman ‘says I don’t know anything at all about Hamlet, so she is going to play here in February’.46 Cushman took advantage of her prior association with Booth’s wife. While performing in Baltimore, Cushman wrote to Mary Devlin Booth and attempted to get her to persuade Booth to change his performance schedule, so that Cushman and he would not perform the same roles – such as Hamlet – in the same cities simultaneously. Framing her objections as though she had Booth’s interests in mind, and didn’t want to ‘wear out’ the part before Booth had a chance to play it, Cushman claimed: ‘This is generally a proviso . . . to prevent a piece from being worn out before you can come to use it yourself, & in the main it is not a bad proviso – but in this instance, [and in] all things I wish Edwin too entirely well to put any obstacle in his way.’ Moreover, Cushman objected that her engagement had been ‘cut short in New York, because as they told me, Edwin would

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commence there or act otherwheres [sic].’ This was a particular source of frustration to Cushman, because, she complained ‘I was to have acted Hamlet there – but they prevented it because Edwin was going to do it & commence his engagement in it.’ Heightening the rivalry and tension between these two performers competing for prominence in a consummate Shakespearean role, Cushman negotiated with her former Juliet, to borrow Booth’s own Hamlet costume, his ‘drapery’ as she described it. Not only did Cushman openly take issue with Booth about interpretations of the part, she elected to don the breeches of her male competitor – and attempt to best him in his own clothing. Apparently Cushman had the temerity to be rather lax about returning the Hamlet costume which she had borrowed through his wife, as well. When Mary Devlin requested that Cushman return the costume in which the two actors had embodied Hamlet, Cushman explained, ‘About the dress, dear, I sent it address express to Fredericks on Saty [sic] morning – intending to write – but I was prevented by constant occupation during the day.’ Cushman cited her health to excuse her neglect in borrowing Booth’s costume and then not bothering to return it promptly, stating that when she ‘arrived here on Sunday morning. I found myself with acute inflammation of the larynx’. Furthermore, Cushman was extremely proud of her portrayal of Hamlet. She wanted Mary Devlin to visualize her in the role, which is the largest, and in some senses, the most demanding to enact of all Shakespeare’s great tragic characters. Although, as Cushman explained, ‘The exertion in Hamlet was too much coming at the tail of a long engagmt [sic]’, brazenly, Cushman enjoined Mary Devlin Booth to, ‘Tell Edwin with my love that I should never have been able to act Hamlet so well but in his mantle & draperies.’ Furthermore, Cushman decided to model her own future Hamlet costume on his, so she requested of Booth’s wife, Bye the bye dear, will you let the costumer at the theatre have Edwin’s drapery for a pattern to make me one. I looked so splendid in it, you would not have believed it could have been, Your truly affectionate, Charlotte Cushman.47 Appearing as a male character afforded women, among other things, the essential male privilege of erotic object-choice, at least onstage. In this correspondence with her beautiful former Juliet, Cushman underscored both how splendid she felt she appeared as this male character, and how well she felt that she literally and metaphorically filled Booth’s breeches. Given Cushman’s conviction of how well she ‘looked’ as Hamlet, it is frustrating

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that there appear to be no extant images of her in the role. No drawings accompany the press reportage of her few Hamlet performances. Although she posed for studio theatrical portraits in costume as Romeo, Lady Macbeth and Meg Merrillies, and was photographed in her street clothes by such acclaimed photographers as Matthew Brady, Southworth and Hawes, and Napolean Sarony, there appear to be no pictorial renderings of her as either Cardinal Wolsey or Hamlet, so we cannot know what audiences saw. It is interesting to speculate whether the transgressive or erotic charge some audience members detected in Cushman’s Romeo was legible as well to those who also felt that she ‘looked splendid’ in the part of this greatest of male tragic roles, as Hamlet. Psychically as well as sartorially Cushman may have been uniquely fitted to portray Hamlet. In 1881, nineteenth-century American Shakespearean scholar Edward Vining suggested in his volume The Mystery of Hamlet that the indecisive, contemplative character of Hamlet could best be understood as a woman in disguise. Vining – with whose analysis of the play Edwin Booth concurred – contended that an essentially ‘feminine’ Hamlet was, for Shakespeare, the necessary counterpart to his intentionally ‘masculine’ Lady Macbeth, and that ‘each was gifted with a mind naturally noble, but misplaced in the body through which it acts’.48 Cushman, for whom such a notion of a heartrending trans-or intermediately gendered nobility may have animated her own interpretations, had determined to succeed as both ‘misplaced’ but classically tragic characters. As contemporary critic Michael Booth has claimed, for the Victorians, tragedy was regarded as larger than life, and therefore tragic acting was considered as ‘necessarily larger than behaviour in daily living or in any other kind of acting’.49 Although Cushman claimed that she enjoyed playing Hamlet, despite how taxing she found the part, once she returned to Europe, she did not include this role in her set selections of Shakespearean parts after the 1861 season. And while American spectators were attending to the profundity of suffering they witnessed onstage, offstage the drumbeats of war were reverberating. In this ‘theatre of war’ Cushman also had a [Shakespearean] part to play.

Stage Royalty on the Domestic Front in the United States Civil War In 1861, when the United States erupted into a civil war, Charlotte Cushman was an expatriate American, celebrated in the press on both sides

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of the Atlantic. As a native of Boston, Massachusetts, Cushman was a staunch supporter of the Union cause. While she was not an ardent abolitionist, Cushman was an advocate of the Republican Party, and had since 1844 (and for the remainder of her life) included among her household and counted upon the efforts of Sallie Mercer, a free black woman who served as her personal aide, dresser, prompter, maid and manager of household affairs. Although by 1861 Cushman (along with Mercer and Cushman’s partner, Emma Stebbins) had been residing primarily in London and Rome, and Cushman largely considered herself retired from her stage career, the war presented a set of unique on- and off-stage performance demands and opportunities for her. The most public of these was an invitation Cushman accepted in 1863 from her increasingly popular fellow American Shakespearean Edwin Booth to perform with him in several cities. The proceeds of these proposed performances would benefit the Sanitary Commission, the charity which was the predecessor to the American Red Cross. Cushman agreed to a return tour to the United States in June 1863 where she intended to appear as Lady Macbeth – the Shakespearean role that had been her signature part. Lady Macbeth was the first dramatic role Cushman ever played, having first portrayed the character in New Orleans in 1836, when she was just 20-years old. Although Booth attempted to persuade Cushman to offer a series of contemporary characters for the Sanitary Commission benefits, Cushman insisted upon playing Lady Macbeth – the first, last and one of the greatest of her great Shakespearean roles. In September 1863, as Booth attempted to finalize plans for the fundraiser with Cushman, he delineated the arrangements his business partner and brother-in-law John Sleeper Clarke had been able to secure. Booth suggested that if Cushman would be willing to ‘remain in the country longer than you stated to me was your intention’, he would ‘most cordially join [her] in benefit performances in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia’. Booth assured her that ‘Clarke has communicated with the Sanitary Committee – they are in accord and are delighted with our proposition, of course’. While Cushman had determined to appear exclusively as Lady Macbeth for these benefits, Booth originally demurred, asserting that, ‘I fear it will be impossible to get together a company for Macbeth, ours having been disbanded with the exception of those few who are with me now . . . most of whom have consented to assist us’. Instead, he suggested they offer ‘a varied bill’, of contemporary melodramas such as Honeymoon and the Stranger’. These plays would be less expensive to produce, and therefore be more lucrative as fundraisers for the troops: ‘To cast Macbeth we must send to

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N.Y. for people & their expenses & salaries will of course have to be deducted from the receipts, all of which should be given to the soldiers’, Booth explained. Although Booth had expressed concerns that the cost of staging a series of Shakespearean performances would not result in the maximum amount of funds being donated to the cause, nonetheless he anticipated Cushman’s prerogative as the returning ‘star’ and box office draw. Booth recognized that, if he could not persuade her to abandon Macbeth, he had no choice but to accede to her wishes. Deferentially, Booth wrote, ‘In case you decide on Macbeth, Saturday seems to be the best night in the week & I think the bill I propose (if not inconsistent with your views) will be very attractive & satisfactory to the audience. If Macbeth is the only piece we can do please telegraph me & I will at once advise you what can be done . . . If we can do the plays I have named . . . if you can telegraph me say simply yes, if Macbeth is to be the only piece in which we appear say Macbeth & I will reply as promptly and tell you what can be done.’ But in either case, Booth assured Cushman, ‘Mr. Clarke desires me to ask you in what manner he shall advertise the affair & to state also that he is willing & anxious to do all in his power to further the noble cause.’50 Once Booth acquiesced to Cushman’s wishes, the two acclaimed performers were to undertake an extremely lucrative series of benefits for the ‘noble’ cause. The success of the Cushman-Booth benefit productions of Macbeth was considerable. Together Cushman and Booth appeared in a benefit performance in Philadelphia on 12 September, in Boston on 16 September, in Baltimore on 19 October and in New York on 22 October. Audiences in each of the cities in which they performed together poured out to see the then semi-retired ‘queen’ of the American stage return, and act opposite the younger matinee idol, Edwin Booth. The two performers earned a considerable amount of money for the Union cause. On 23 September 1863, following their benefit performance in Boston, Cushman wrote to Horace Bellows, President of the United States Sanitary Commission, sending him a cheque, and a note with which she enclosed [a] ‘receipt for deposit of thirteen hundred & fourteen 27/00 $1314. 27 being the proceeds, after very heavy expenditure of the Benefit given at the Academy of Music’ in Philadelphia ‘in aid of the funds for the U.S. Sanitary Commission’. Cushman asked that Bellows ‘oblige me by placing this to the credit of the ‘Women’s Pennsylvania Branch of the U.S. San. Com’. Cushman wanted to ensure that her specific theatrical efforts would be directed to the cause exactly as she saw fit – reinforcing the philanthropic work of women. As forthright and powerful as she was onstage, offstage

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Cushman drew upon conventional notions about gender to account for her choices and direct others to fulfil her will. Deploying a popular strategy to deflect anxieties about her personal power by denying that, as a woman, she had any power at all, Cushman stated to Bellows: As a woman I can do little for my country but love it, & give my professional services in aid of the charity which has done so much to alleviate the sufferings & meet the needs of those, who have offered their lives their fortunes & their sacred honour to prove its greatness & defend its institutions.51 The total sum Cushman donated to the Sanitary Commission as a result of all of her benefit performances was $8267.00,52 for which she sent Bellows an itemized breakdown of the amount earned in each city in which she performed. After Cushman had returned to Europe, following the receipt of her donations to the Sanitary Commission, Bellows published a public acknowledgement of Cushman’s generous efforts, commending, ‘This magnificent product of the genius of Miss Cushman, devoted to the relief of our suffering soldiers.’ In Bellows’ note of thanks, Cushman’s largesse was gendered. Because she was a celebrated professional person and a woman who had earned the funds she was contributing through her own labour, Bellows described her gift as, ‘the most striking exemplification yet made of woman’s power and will to do her full part in the national struggle’. In fact, Bellows did more than pay ‘compliment to the noble woman whose generous gift I here publicly acknowledge’, he announced publicly that the whole amount ‘be expended’ as she wished. In this way, Bellows claimed, the money donated would thereby ‘be sanctified by the touch only of woman’s hands. It will thus reach our soldiers in battlefields and hospitals charged with the blessings, prayers and tears of American womanhood’.53 As Bellows staged Cushman’s patriotic persona in the press, Cushman’s ‘nobility’ and her ‘genius’ were traits specific to American women, and Cushman’s professional efforts rendered her the metonymic symbol of ‘sanctified’ ‘American womanhood’. Moreover, in addition to the monetary value of the funds secured, Bellows also recognized the symbolic value of Charlotte Cushman’s expressed support for the Union, and the ways in which Cushman’s own iconic stature as an embodiment of uniquely American cultural excellence lent power and inspiration to the Union cause: It is due to Miss Charlotte Cushman to say that this extraordinary gift of money, so magically invoked by her spell, is but the least part of the

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service which, ever since the war began, she has been rendering our cause in Europe. Her earnest faith in the darkest hours, her prophetic confidence in our success, her eloquent patriotism in all presences, have been potent influences abroad, and deserve and command the gratitude of the whole nation.54 As Bellows portrayed it, Cushman’s steadfast influence on behalf of the Union cause extended to those who encountered her offstage. Rather than a manifestation of the dangers of theatricality, the ‘magic’ of Cushman’s ‘spell’ was instead associated with her morally elevated spirit. In fact, Charlotte Cushman had been displaying her ‘eloquent patriotism’ in person and in her correspondence with both friends and associates in England and in Italy for some time in the early years of the Civil War, and would continue to do so for years to come. Perhaps it is as an expatriate in times of national crises that her identity as an icon of American culture was most marked by those whom she encountered. For example, months before crossing the Atlantic and undertaking her series of benefit performances for the Union, Cushman wrote teasingly to her dear friend Jane Carlyle in London, expressing indignation over the widespread expression of British sympathies for the Confederate cause. British dependence on the Southern cotton crop, the product of slave labour, had united many ‘lords of the lash’ with ‘lords of the loom’. Writing from the expatriate Anglo-American community in which she resided in Rome, Cushman informed Carlyle that she was enraged and found ‘my [country] people stirred to their souls, at the evident sympathy with the rebels, which exists among you’. Identifying wholeheartedly with the Union’s prospects in winning the war, Cushman asserted to Carlyle, ‘We are slowly but surely carrying our way – & if England will let us alone, we shall arrive at the goal sooner & the world be spared much bloodshed, but I despair sometimes – & think that England won’t let us alone.’55 Here and elsewhere Cushman bemoaned the sympathy that was expressed in Britain for the Confederate cause. Teasingly, however, Cushman eroticized her political disagreement with Carlyle, announcing that, ‘When we do come to blows, I shall choose my English for fighting with, & you shall be first. I could be content to be whipped by you & kiss your hands.’56 While Cushman was considered by many a paradigm of respectability and decorum because she had no relationships with men, Cushman’s suggestive offer to Carlyle that she might be so ‘content’ to be ‘whipped’ by Carlyle that she would ‘kiss [Carlyle’s] hands’, demonstrates the ways flirtations

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between women escaped the attention of most arbiters of social morality. Despite the light tone in this letter, Cushman’s frustration with European disregard for the plight of the American Union cause continued to be profound, and was exacerbated by her perspective as an expatriate and witness to the Italian nationalist movement, the Risorgimento taking place in her midst, while she experienced the United States Civil War virtually, through letters and the press accounts from across the ocean. Even after the American Civil War ended, Cushman performed her loyalty and patriotism in the micropolitical world of her correspondence where – given her iconic status – a word of endorsement from her would mean much to advocates of a range of political causes. For example, in 1867, when Frances Ternan Trollope, (wife of author Thomas Trollope, and a fellow resident in Rome’s Anglo-American community), requested Cushman’s aid on behalf of Roman soldiers wounded in the Italian Risorgimento, Cushman replied, impudently, that her nephew, Ned Cushman ‘had already himself given $50 to the purpose for which you are soliciting subscriptions’. Moreover, Cushman continued, brusquely prioritizing her own national allegiances, ‘The needs of these poor souls in the hospitals are, I hear from them, well supplied, better than could have been expected.’ What particularly galled Cushman was to note that the wounded Roman soldiers were being treated ‘infinitely better’ by the Anglo-American expatriate community than were our Northern prisoners in Southern hands during our fratricidal war, for whom, little sympathy was shown or expressed by any foreigners. I know comparisons are foolish, but when I see the great sympathy demonstrated for these poor fellows, it makes me almost sick to think of many of our own friends lost or fallen in the war who had no hospital, no beds.57 Cushman’s offstage role as champion of the Union was further reinforced by her long friendship with William Seward, former Governor of New York and Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State during the Civil War. Among members of the Anglo-American community in Rome, Cushman was virtually an unofficial ‘ambassador’ for the United States and so influential that she ultimately persuaded Seward to appoint her nephew and adopted son, Edwin ‘Ned’ Cushman, as the United States Consul to Rome. In fact, Cushman was so close with Seward that when she performed in Washington D.C. she stayed at the Sewards’ home. Thus, she was profoundly affected by Lincoln’s assassination and the simultaneous attack upon the Sewards, as part of the larger assassination plot against Lincoln’s cabinet. Moreover, the

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fact that Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was also personally known to her, and was an actor, rendered the violent act that much more horrific to Cushman. On 28 April 1865 Cushman wrote from Rome to Emma Crow (by then the young wife of Cushman’s nephew) of the ‘suffering & anxiety’ Cushman experienced after hearing about Lincoln’s assassination. Crow had accompanied the actress on her recent performance tour in the United States and had also been a guest along with Cushman at Seward’s Washington D.C. home. Describing her emotional state and narrating her reactions to receiving the news of the assassination in detail, Cushman explained: Yesterday morning Mr. King brought me the telegram which had come from America on the 15th from Secretary Stanton . . . carrying the dreadful intelligence of Mr. Lincoln’s assassination & death, Frederick Seward’s assassination & death, & Mr. Seward’s precarious state from the same dreadful cause . . . When Mr. King told me & there were no particulars given to us but the mere fact of Mr. Lincoln’s assassination & death. Mrs. King said she supposed he must have been stabbed. I replied, no he has been shot by someone going into his box door, shot in the back! . . . Still it seemed to me that it was not the sort of assassination that would happen in our country in these modern days, & I rejected it in these words –‘it is too theatrical a thing to be done by an American’. A few hours later brought us a telegram which said the assassin’s brothers were named Booth. Immediately I thought, ‘The madman John Wilkes Booth.’58 In addition to her disdain for the ‘theatricality’ of Lincoln having been assassinated by an actor, in a theatre, Cushman – who always strove for respectability – felt acutely the disapprobation Lincoln’s assassination brought by association to all members of the theatrical profession. And Cushman had had her own recent encounters with John Wilkes Booth, whom she reviled as ‘a perfectly reckless daredevil’. As Cushman knew, the United States Civil War had divided the sympathies in the Booth family. The four sons and two daughters of the late tragedian, Junius Booth, had been raised in Maryland, at the border of North and South. Edwin vehemently supported the North and had offered his performative talents to benefit the Union along with Cushman, while John Wilkes was an unabashedly rabid Confederate sympathizer. Although better acquainted with Edwin, Cushman had performed briefly opposite his brother John Wilkes Booth when she was in the United States on a return tour during the Civil War. A little more than a year before he

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assassinated Abraham Lincoln, Wilkes Booth had had a small tumour on his neck surgically removed. But before the wound was completely healed, he acted in a violently passionate scene with Cushman. One of John Wilkes Booth’s biographers asserted that Cushman, with her excessive physicality and power ‘threw herself into his arms and clung to him with wild abandon’ and that ‘so much force was thrown into this act[,] the wound on poor John’s back was pulled open and he had to go back for more stitches’. As a result, the Washington D.C. surgeon, Dr. May, noted that Wilkes Booth would have a life-long ugly scar as a result.59 Embarrassed at the source of his wound, Wilkes Booth purportedly wanted it believed that the scar he had received had been the result of a gun shot instead of Charlotte Cushman’s powerful and unbridled physicality. Ironically, it was this very wound that Dr May later used to identify John Wilkes Booth’s corpse when Wilkes Booth was himself killed days after his assassination of Lincoln. Whether or not the account is largely apocryphal, the narrative contains features that would mark and identify Cushman as the excessively powerful, dangerous woman, ‘unnaturally’ strong and cast ‘poor John’ as the misguided romantic figure who unwittingly inspired an excessive women’s uncontrollable passion (even that of a woman who was not emotionally attracted to men whatsoever) when he wanted to be recognized for his clashes with male, rather than female adversaries. Apparently both Booth brothers regarded Cushman’s physical power as ‘excessive’ and expressed unease at contests with her. Edwin Booth recognized the attraction Cushman’s celebrity added to his own professional endeavours when they performed together. But privately, he was said to be somewhat derisive towards the larger, older, powerful female performer who set her own terms and insisted upon being treated like the powerful, often regal, characters she embodied. Years later, friends recalled Edwin Booth remarking that when, as Lady Macbeth, Cushman urged him to murder Duncan, he felt like reproaching her, ‘Why don’t you kill him? You’re a great deal bigger than I am.’60 Cushman’s large physical size was seen as symbolic of her personal forcefulness, and both were denounced as dominating, imposing or ‘unnatural’ to those who expected women to appear submissive and deferential to male authority, on or offstage. It is not surprising then, that, as a Shakespearean actress, Cushman excelled in tragic roles such as Lady Macbeth and Queen Katherine which both conferred upon her and demanded the enactment of aristocratic dominance. In her dealings with both Booth brothers and others, Cushman negotiated from her own assumed position as stage aristocracy. In the press, Cushman was commended, caricatured and, occasionally, denounced for

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her imperious demeanour. For example, George Foster, covering Cushman’s ‘tremendous’ return performances in New York for the New York Tribune, remarked, satirically, that now ‘everything about her is tremendous, terrific, or magnificent’. But Foster raised the spectre that for Americans, allusions to stage royalty had a national as well as a class dimension. Foster particularly derided the fact that, after having ‘received the stamp of foreign approbation’ Cushman returned to her country ‘an empress, nodding but to be obeyed, smiling but to be worshipped’.61

The Queen of the American Stage Retires after ‘clothing Shakespeare’s words in sinews and flesh’ As the reigning queen of the American stage, Cushman had brought a sense of majesty and moral authority to the theatre, and thus filled a particular symbolic function particularly for her fellow Americans. Unlike the European ideal of nobility by birth, Cushman achieved her status as a result of her own hard work, ambition and self reliance; which was a source of pride to her countrymen. One of the greatest of Cushman’s regal Shakespearean roles, and the one with which she was longest associated, was Lady Macbeth. Not surprisingly then, it was this part that Cushman chose to play for her final performances. In this, Cushman’s body would be read as a signifier of her moral authority, her pre-eminence as an artist, and the supremacy of American culture. Although it was not actually the last of her stage performances, Cushman’s farewell appearance as Lady Macbeth in New York in Booth’s Theatre on 7 November 1874 demarcated the beginning of her final, official retirement from the theatrical stage. The festivities which marked this occasion were indicative of how celebrated she had become. For the expectant throng who lined the crowded streets outside Booth’s Theatre, waiting for the fireworks display which was paying homage to Cushman, she was more than an actress. Cushman stood for the ennobling power of tragedy, reserved dignity, American independent spirit and bourgeois respectability. The enthusiastic audience who filled Booth’s Theatre and those who gathered in the vicinity to witness the parade through the streets of New York that would punctuate Cushman’s farewell performance were so numerous and ‘the crush became so great’ that, with the help of the local police, the management of the theatre opened the house an hour earlier than usual. A more appropriate setting could not be imagined for Cushman’s final theatrical engagement as a great Shakespearean in New York City. When

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Booth’s Theatre was completed 5 years earlier in1869, it had been constructed as a ‘sanctuary of high culture’. Outside on 23rd Street, spectators and passers-by saw an elaborate French and Italian Renaissance granite façade adorned with white marble statues of Shakespeare, and symbols of Comedy and Tragedy. Inside, ‘ornamenting the proscenium were marble pillars and another statue of Shakespeare’.62 In addition, on this night, audience members found themselves ushered into a theatre that had been ‘swept, cleansed and garnished for the occasion’. Banners and garlands draped the walls, and hanging from the chandeliers that brilliantly illuminated the theatre were flags representing every state of the Union’.63 As the Tribune reported, a ‘tricolor, spangled with golden stars, was twined about the proscenium columns’. These decorations represented significant components of Cushman’s iconic status, as symbols of Shakespeare and Americana jointly filled the house, figuratively intertwined. The chandeliers were also ‘garlanded with autumn leaves and fruit of the vine’, which the Tribune critic claimed was ‘symbolical of the maturity of genius and the ripeness of that fame in which Miss Cushman retires from the stage’.64 As always, in her portrayal of Lady Macbeth, Cushman’s stage business was emblematic of her interpretation of a dominating, imperious Lady Macbeth. Commenting on the ‘profound and agonizing identification with the character, which has made her Lady Macbeth famous’, the Tribune commended Cushman’s stage business, such as her haughty refusal to take Duncan’s hand, when he offered to lead her into the castle.65 With her expressive body Cushman actualized her understandings of the inner workings of the character. For example, after Cushman’s Lady Macbeth read her husband’s letter in I.v, she placed that missive into her bodice, instead of holding it in her hand, as was the custom. Fellow actor Lawrence Barrett (who had earlier played Laertes to her Hamlet) remembered that, ‘Miss Cushman maintained that, all through the most important scenes of the play, both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were under the influence of wine.’ This interpretation, which Cushman felt was justified in the text, led to what Barrett considered a distinctive, almost reckless, style of performance.66 Unlike countless other productions in which she played this role, however, Cushman’s New York ‘farewell performance’ was mounted exclusively as a showcase for paying homage to her unique talent. At the end of Act Three, George Vandenhoff’s Macbeth and Charlotte Cushman’s Lady Macbeth made separate exits, ‘thus allowing Lady Macbeth a larger opportunity to express the ravages of her remorse’.67 The final curtain fell on the performance after Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene. Cushman had always been noted for the physicality of her performances, and this final exit afforded

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the departing star even further opportunity to portray the paroxysms of emotion she imbued in the role. After a brief interval, at 11 o’clock, the curtain rose again to reveal Cushman, attired in elegant evening clothes, standing amid a stage crowded with leading personages from the worlds of literature, drama and art. The farewell ceremony for the American queen of the stage began with a recitation of a 20 stanza ode entitled Salve Regina, written for Cushman by Richard Henry Stoddard, which contained the lines: Shakespeare! Honor to him, and her Who stands his great interpreter, Stepped out of his broad page Upon the living stage.68 As the New York Tribune reported, ‘the applause at the end of the stanza which couples Cushman and Shakespeare’ was ‘spontaneous and empathic’.69 The following stanza configured Cushman into a work of art herself: The unseen hands that shape our fate Moulded her strongly, made her great, And gave her for her dower Abundant life and power. Cushman’s acting ability was as a gift of God, whose ‘unseen hands’ ‘shaped her fate’ so much that Cushman is herself likened to a statue, ‘moulded strongly’ and so her authoritative demeanor as well as her artistry were cast as God-given. Following Stoddard’s poetic tribute to Cushman, poet and statesman William Cullen Bryant delivered an address in which he complimented Cushman’s ‘genius,’ her estimable ‘personal character’, and her ability to take the words of the greatest dramatic writers which came to her hands ‘in skeleton form’, ‘clothe [them] with sinews and flesh’, and ‘give [them] warm blood and a beating heart’.70 Thus, Cushman’s ability to embody great characters from Shakespeare and bring them to life was linked in Bryant’s allusions with the nobility of Cushman’s own personal character as expressed through her body. Bryant culminated his address by presenting Cushman, on behalf of the Arcadian Club, with a commemorative laurel wreath crown, ‘as a symbol of the regal state you hold in your profession’. After receiving the laurel crown, which, according to Bryant, signified what Bryant referred to as Cushman’s ‘queenly rank’, Charlotte Cushman

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delivered her own curtain speech in which she expressed her gratitude for the honours bestowed upon her. In her address, Cushman responded to the public accolades she had received for living an ‘honourable life’. The then 58-year-old actress asserted that ‘it would have been impossible for me to have led any other’. But rather than attribute her ‘honourable life’ to her private life choices, or personal virtue, Cushman depicted her ‘honorable life’ as a result of her (masculine) bodily appearance, which she thereby recast as an asset, rather than a liability. ‘In this’, Cushman asserted ‘I have perhaps, been mercifully helped more than are many of my more beautiful sisters in art’. As an unconventionally powerful woman, not considered attractive by or attracted to the male suitors whose attentions were the downfall of many other actresses, Cushman represented herself as the powerful and prosperous (spinster) queen of the stage who had, throughout her life, sacrificed her personal domestic happiness for her art. Yet as Cushman framed it, subtly inferring her own affinity for other women: ‘Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.’71 Cushman was thereby fashioning herself as a gallant, noble lover, devoted exclusively to a female-inflected ‘mistress’, for which she was being justly rewarded. At the conclusion of the ceremony, Cushman was escorted from the theatre to the balcony of Fifth Avenue Hotel under a shadow of fireworks. As the Tribune reported: Miss Cushman entered a carriage opposite the stage door, and amidst the cheers of the populace, and a tumult like that of the old fashioned Fourth-of-July, was driven to the Fifth Avenue hotel, where she presently appeared on the balcony and greeted the populace, while the Ninth Regiment Band performed a serenade, and the spaces and vistas of Madison Square were illumined with fireworks.72 Thus, in being feted, like ‘the fourth of July’ – America’s national holiday – and serenaded by a military band, the celebratory apparatus of the state reinscribed the iconic status of Shakespeare’s American Queen as emblematic of the cultural excellence of nation. The New York newspapers were filled with written accounts and figurative illustrations of Cushman’s farewell address and presentation at Booth’s theatre, and the masses in the streets in front of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Cushman continued to offer evidence of her ‘grand triumphs’ in ‘final’ and ‘farewell’ performances in

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numerous cities, along with a series of dramatic readings, but none of these performances had the enormity of public spectacle of the New York celebration, where 25,000 people crammed the streets to view ‘a burst of Roman candles and rockets’ illuminating the procession of their queen of the American stage. At Cushman’s Philadelphia ‘farewell performance’ a week later, on 14 November 1874, she again portrayed Lady Macbeth. Following the tributes afforded to her on this occasion Cushman delivered a short speech emphasizing her work as a Shakespearean performer, and anticipating the direction her work would take in the future. ‘Accustomed as I am to speak before you the impassioned words of genius, to give utterance to the highest ideals of the poet and dramatist’, Cushman announced, ‘I yet feel that my poor tongue must falter when it is called upon to speak for itself so sad a word as farewell.’ But Cushman assured the audience ‘that, though I am taking leave of the stage, I have reserved for myself the right and the pleasant anticipation of appearing before you where you have flattered me that my efforts are not unacceptable to you – at the reading-desk’.73 It was as a Shakespearean actress that theatre critics bade farewell to Cushman as the acknowledged ‘queen’ of the American stage, but her prospects as a platform reader were anticipated and recognized by the many who commended the role Cushman’s voice played in her Shakespearean performances. As William Winter of the New York Tribune described her talents: Those who know Miss Cushman’s acting are aware that her voice is one of extraordinary range and flexibility, combining tones that are as solemn as the organ, as soft as the flute, and as wild as the cry of the storm-wind. This wealth of vocal resource gives a reality to her assumption of the men and women of Shakespeare which is without a parallel in the efforts of this kind, and which are, in action, the perfect embodiment of Shakespeare’s thoughts.74 Similarly, during Cushman’s final Boston theatrical engagement on 4 May 1875, H.A. Clapp, announced in the Boston Advertiser that ‘[a]fter the weak, unintellectual [sic] acting which has lately been inflicted upon us in serious and Shakespearean parts . . . it is indeed a feast to witness Miss Cushman’s finished and discriminating acting’. Clapp claimed that the most significant aspect of her performance was the audience’s ability, ‘above all, to listen to her pure and expressive delivery of the text, in which every one of the master dramatist’s golden words is made to yield its treasure of thought’.75

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But if acting Shakespeare was an enterprise requiring ‘intellectual’ ‘genius’, a public reading of Shakespeare’s texts was even more so. And so, the final image of Cushman I will explore is as a dramatic reader of Shakespeare.

Reading Shakespeare: ‘In the reading-desk, she reigns as the sole magician’ Given the emphasis critics placed upon Cushman’s vocal delivery, it is not surprising that towards the end of her life, when acting became more of a strain than she could bear, Cushman turned to platform readings. In this undertaking also she excelled as a great Shakespearean – now reconfigured as a great ‘reader’ of Shakespeare’s plays. The pictorial image of the older, white-haired Charlotte Cushman at her desk, reading – rather than acting – the words of Shakespeare was memorialized by theatrical portraitist Napolean Sarony, who photographed her in this role. This image of Cushman was mass-produced into thousands of small collectible cartes-devisites, widely reproduced in the press, and served a number of disparate ideological purposes while shoring up and reconfiguring Cushman’s iconic status. When captured and disseminated through the ‘democratic’, affordable, medium of photography, this picture of Cushman as a mature, stout, older woman; attired in modest, elegant street dress; seated at an ornate reading desk, reading the words of Shakespeare, contributed enormously to the shifting popular construction of Cushman. As with Cushman’s earliest theatrical performances, to some extent her success as a platform reader was a feature of prodigious timing. By the 1871 season, when Cushman first assayed to offer dramatic readings of entire Shakespearean plays, the platform performance genre – wherein a solo platform performer read literature to an audience – was coming into the height of popularity, particularly in the United States. As John Gentile has noted, the ‘cultural forces’ that allowed one-person platform performances to become commercially viable converged in the middle of the nineteenth century and ‘reached their ascendancy by the early 1870s’. In fact, Gentile claimed that ‘the last quarter of the nineteenth century was truly a golden age for platform performances’ in the United States.76 Several factors account for this phenomenon. For many Victorians, an anti-theatrical prejudice still led them to regard the theatre as a dangerous place, peopled by actors who were generally considered to be persons of low morals. Even audience members who attended the theatre were

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regarded by some as morally suspect since they risked mingling with the prostitutes known routinely to frequent such places. The reading platform, however, had none of these associations. Readers appeared on a platform in a well-lit auditorium, seated at a desk, clothed in their own modest, dignified clothing, rather than appearing in costumes and make-up, outfitted as a fictional character, in a darkened theatre. Platform dramatic readers provided a flourishing entertainment where audiences were focused on the effects conveyed by a reader’s voice, rather than the visual spectacle of her body. In the United States the popularity of platform readings was coincident with that of both public lecture series and the study of elocution, both of which were seen as vehicles for social mobility and intellectual improvement. The elocutionary movement instructed practitioners to practise and ‘improve’ how they sounded by expressively declaiming the words of great writers. This cultural practice was reinforced and institutionalized within high-brow academic settings, for example, in 1865 when Harvard University added a requirement in ‘reading English aloud’ as a necessary ingredient in a well rounded, first-class education.77 Thus, by extension, platform performances by professional dramatic readers were manifestations, in part, of a movement that associated the reading of literature aloud, particularly Shakespeare, with intellectual betterment as well as entertainment. Cushman was not the first Shakespearean actor to shift her performance venue from the theatrical stage to the reading platform. American actor and elocutionist James Murdoch had taken up dramatic readings during the Civil War, and fellow ‘great Shakespearean’ Fanny Kemble had launched a successful reading career in the 1850s when she returned to the stage after her divorce from Pierce Butler and followed in the steps of her father who was acclaimed for his readings. Kemble continued giving dramatic readings of Shakespeare’s plays in England and in America for 20 years. By the time Cushman ventured to try her hand in this performance setting, Kemble had retired from giving platform readings in the United States in 1868, and a vacuum had opened up in this increasingly popular genre. In an age when reading aloud at home was a common family event, platform readings of literature, whether performed by actors, elocutionists or by acclaimed authors, such as Charles Dickens, were considered wholesome family entertainment.78 Thus, dramatic readings, like the parlour entertainments so popular in bourgeois domestic spaces, were considered appropriate types of performance, particularly for respectable Victorian women, who were seen as embodying middle-class domesticity in public

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venues, rather than plying their trade as public actresses in large, commercial theatres. Such gendered and classed notions of respectability served Cushman well as she expanded her role as the ‘noble’ ‘moralizing ‘queen’ of the American stage into an alternate form of entertainment in which she could exercise her talent as interpreter and performer. Of course, despite claims of being non-theatrical, the public reading and recitation of literature were performative acts. Even more than acting in a full dramatic production, where an actor would be cast in one particular role, readings of plays allowed performers the opportunity to demonstrate their virtuosity. Declaring that ‘Dramatic reading is the art of arts’, Jean Jewel Hotchkiss explained in ‘Dramatic Readers, Past and Present: Personal Recollections of the Greatest Exponents of a Noble Art’, in Town and Country in 1906, that skill in the art of dramatic reading was based upon ‘this insight which enables the reader to gather from the soul of the poet and dramatist their choicest secrets, and reveal them to an audience through voice and expressive action’. Moreover, such ‘insight’ into the ‘soul’ was considered a mark of intellect and spirituality as well as aesthetic talent. Hotchkiss claimed that Cushman, while great as an actress, ‘reached the culmination of her talents through dramatic readings’. In this form, she was seen to demonstrate her interpretative and analytic skills as well as her artistry. As Hotchkiss noted, To read an entire play and act each character, or to read a dramatic poem, changing voice and manner from the descriptive portion to the presentation of the words, of the characters, requires, first, a knowledge and appreciation of English literature, . . . secondly, the aesthetic sense, which is the soul of elocution and includes imagination and temperament, and finally, the technique of characterization and voice placing developed into a fine art.79 By 1874, while Cushman was staging her farewell performances, she was increasingly taking up platform readings. As George T. Ferris described in Appleton’s Journal, ‘Miss Cushman is now mainly confining herself to the reading-desk.’ Ferris felt that ‘There can be no question that her peculiar intellectualism in art is shown even more in her readings than in her acting, notably so in the Shakespearean readings.’80 Whatever Ferris found ‘peculiar’ and unusual about Cushman’s ‘intellectualism’ as an actress, she was apparently afforded even wider room to delineate her intellectual strengths as a reader. Moreover, Ferris explained that, ‘In the dramas of Shakespeare, the characters . . . are so subtile [sic] in their bearings on one another, that,

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unless they are all justly apprehended, the totality of the drama is maimed and marred’. Because Cushman could not play all the parts simultaneously when acting onstage, Ferris felt that, [n]o genius on the part of Charlotte Cushman could prevent this on the stage. In the reading-desk, she reigns as the sole magician, with the perfect opportunity to express the finest attainments of her mind and culture. She has but to wave her wand to unlock from the prison-house of Shakespeare’s pages all the immortal phantoms that brood within them.81 Cushman’s first platform reading in New York was Macbeth. As Hotchkiss attested, Cushman’s ‘long experience in playing Lady Macbeth had made her [Cushman] familiar with every other character in the play, and she read and acted every part equally well’. Hotchkiss felt that ‘no stage representation could have presented such a forcible picture to the mind’. Now, as a dramatic reader, Cushman could throw herself into every part. Cushman’s life partner, Emma Stebbins, concurred, reporting that a friend once said, ‘I much prefer hearing Miss Cushman read to seeing her act, because in the readings she is so well supported.’82 By way of example, Hotchkiss claimed that when reading Macbeth, Cushman ‘made the murder scene so realistic and thrilling that sensitive people could hardly bear the strain of it’.83 Interestingly, Cushman’s depiction of the murder in Macbeth may harken back to one of her earliest stage conceptions – that of Nancy in the first dramatized version of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Lawrence Barrett, who had played Fagin to Cushman’s Nancy, remembered how, in the death scene in Oliver Twist, Cushman had ‘produced a chilly horror by the management of her voice’. Cushman’s ‘superlative effect’ was to make it sound ‘as if she spoke through blood’.84 His contemporaries asserted that Dickens poured so much anguish into the murder of Nancy in the novel, that when he had Bill Sykes cry out ‘So much blood!’ he was echoing Lady Macbeth (Macbeth V.i.44).85 In Cushman’s dramatic readings she could draw upon vocal effects she had developed years earlier in one context and apply them in a range of settings for a remarkable effect. In Cushman’s platform readings of Shakespeare, like Dickens’s own spectacularly successful reading tours, audiences and critics marvelled at the effect of the reader’s ability to assume a multitude of different characters, often in rapid succession. As Emma Stebbins remembered, once Cushman

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seated herself at her reading table, dressed in her street clothes, and without props, she set aside all feeling of personal identity, and lived, and moved and acted the varied personages of the story as they each came upon the scene; and not only in voice and word, but in look and bearing they lived before us, each one distinctly marked as an individual, and never by any chance merging into the others, or losing its clearly marked character.86 Cushman’s second reading in New York was Henry VIII. Perhaps reflecting the fact that breeches performances were increasingly falling into disrepute or considered questionable undertakings, while Hotchkiss noted that Cushman ‘had acted Queen Katherine for many years’, she did not mention that Cushman had also performed as Wolsey in this play as well. For Hotchkiss, Cushman’s platform reading of this play was her greatest achievement. ‘I was never so filled and thrilled with the genius and power of a single individual as I was with Miss Cushman’s reading of that play’, Hotchkiss remembered more than three decades later. Hotchkiss felt that as a reader of Macbeth and Henry VIII, Cushman was incomparable. In fact, although Hotchkiss noted that Fanny Kemble was also an excellent dramatic reader, and had offered a wider repertoire of Shakespearean readings, Hotchkiss asserted that ‘I cannot believe that she ever equaled Charlotte Cushman in the reading of Macbeth and Henry VIII.’ In all, Cushman’s platform performances of Shakespeare included readings from Hamlet, Macbeth, Henry VIII, Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice, As You Like It and Much Ado about Nothing. Generally, she devoted an entire evening to Henry VIII or Macbeth. With other plays, such as Romeo and Juliet, she devoted the first half of her evening’s programme to selections from the play, and the second half to poetic works by Browning, Longfellow, Tennyson and others along with assorted light verse and dialect pieces. Cushman was, in part, motivated to take up dramatic readings due to her failing health as a result of the breast cancer that had been plaguing her for several years. Although this had significantly restricted her work as an actress, she had continued to act sporadically, while reinventing her public persona as a platform reader. In fact, writing in 1906, Jean Hotchkiss remembered a conversation she had with Cushman, in which Cushman, placing her hand upon her breast, told Hotchkiss that Cushman gave her readings ‘at the advice of my physicians, to take my mind from the malady which I ever carry with me’.

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Audiences filled the houses for Cushman’s dramatic readings. Attendees at Cushman’s New York readings, given in Old Steinway Hall and the Academy of Music, found themselves among packed audiences ‘crowded to the doors . . . to hear this plain, elderly but mighty woman read entire plays of Shakespeare’ as well as miscellaneous readings of poetry.87 Reviews of Cushman’s platform performances in the press, accompanied by reproductions of photographic images of ‘plain’ but ‘mighty’ Cushman as a dramatic reader of Shakespeare, contributed to her extraordinary visibility as a public figure and served the changing cultural constructs of female respectability which Cushman was seen to exemplify. By this time, photographic images of actors in a range of roles had become standard fare in the display windows of photographers’ studios, and collecting and owning as well as viewing mass-produced images of theatrical and other public persons rendered their faces and bodies intimately available to spectators and fans and subjected them to an unprecedented close-up scrutiny.88 Celebrated actors, like Charlotte Cushman, functioned as what Joseph Roach terms ‘specially nominated mediums or surrogates’ whose public display ‘provided communities with a method of perpetuating themselves’.89 Cushman’s widely reproduced image as a dramatic reader was engraved from a series of carte-de-visite photographs taken by theatrical portraitist Napoleon Sarony. These pictures were reprinted in a wide range of contexts. For three decades, beginning in the mid-1860s, Sarony was the leading photographer of theatrical personages in New York City. Sarony paid royalties for the exclusive rights to make and market photographs of theatrical personalities, and his photographs furnished stars with further publicity as fans came to his studio to purchase the images of their favourites.90 In fact, Sarony’s images were so popular with viewers that an 1882 issue of The Century Magazine featured a poem titled ‘Ballads of a Coquette’ parodying a male passer-by’s response to the photograph of a woman he saw displayed in Sarony’s gallery.91 Jennifer Green-Lewis has claimed that, ‘the appetite for gathering, collecting, taking, and reading cultural signs has no purer expression in the nineteenth century than photography’, since images taken in one context were ‘exhibited later in the promotion of different realisms and in the service of different narratives’.92 This was certainly the case as images of Cushman became commodities illustrative of different cultural narratives in different settings. Engravings based upon photographs of Cushman as a sedate, platform reader appeared frequently in the press, such as on the cover of Appleton’s Journal, to illustrate George Ferris’ 1874

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article about her. Paradoxically, however, this image was also printed in phrenology and physiognomy texts where it was deployed as tangible physical visual evidence of Cushman’s moral character, as written in her body. While I believe that ‘visual forms have specific vocabularies, codes, conventions, usages’, I contend, along with Patricia Johnston, that ‘the representational capacity of imagery’ is affected by its ‘distribution and reception’.93 And the dissemination of Cushman’s image to phrenology and physiognomy texts dramatized and broadened the meanings viewers brought to what they saw. The mid-nineteenth century pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology (of which George Combe was an internationally acclaimed practitioner) and the new art and technology of photography (invented in 1839) together provided a particular context in which spectators looked for legible markers of ‘normalcy’ or ‘deviance’ on the heads and bodies of others. This practice of regarding the body as a signifier of one’s moral character, had particular resonance when considering spectators’ reactions to nineteenth-century women performers. Ironically, the widespread popularity of phrenology texts, many of them illustrated with drawings of celebrated persons, including Charlotte Cushman – as emblematic of respectability and intellect – confounded some prevailing assumptions about performativity. Implicit appeals to a staged authenticity that had been previously acknowledged as staged (as when an actor was conflated with a part she played), were nonetheless deployed to say something ‘essential’ about the qualities which were depicted, and both existed alongside a ‘science of surfaces’ in which readers looked for meanings in bodies in their pictorial representations. For almost a century, scores of books and magazines on phrenology and physiognomy transformed faces, features and bodies to legible signs, representing assumed character traits and incorporating visual images of specific persons’ bodies and ‘types’ of bodies into ‘texts’ to be read and scrutinized, both on the page, and presumably in the culture at large. For example, in phrenologist Samuel Wells’ volume, New Physiognomy: or Signs of Character, as Manifested through Temperament and External Forms, Wells provided line drawings of recognizable contemporary members of various occupations. Groupings of doctors, lawyers, orators, ministers, statesmen and actors, among others, were used to demonstrate the legibility and commonality presumed evident in their features, as well as to illustrate and highlight their own unique traits. Wells, who was the editor of the Phrenological Journal and Life Illustrated, announced on the title page that his volume contained ‘more than one thousand illustrations.’

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Amalgamating drawings of popular, identifiable public figures into these contexts, handbooks like Wells’ served the performative function of rendering the familiar, strange and implicated reader/spectators in the meanings these public bodies were said to reveal. In the text that accompanied an illustration of popular actors, Wells reflected the predominant anti-theatrical prejudice. He declared that ‘[w]ell-balanced, well-developed’ actors were ‘complete specimens of humanity’ but that ‘most who strut upon the stage’ are ‘miserable abortions of humanity . . . The weakest of sinners, perverting their fine natural talents and living degraded lives’. While not explicitly linking the group of public performers in the accompanying illustration with the qualities of either the ‘well-developed’ or the ‘abortions of humanity’, Wells described them each individually. Edwin Forrest, whose head was observed to be large at the base between his ears, was described as ‘full in intellect, but small in Veneration and Spirituality . . . with little feeling of deference, humility or devotion’. Charlotte Cushman – who had been noted throughout her life for her masculine qualities – was described in print as ‘the intellectual and more masculine of lady actors’ commended for representing ‘those characters which are more striking and masculine and admit of the freest and strongest action’.94 The drawing of Cushman which illustrated these traits featured her in her headdress as Lady Macbeth. By 1889, line drawings of Cushman made from the Sarony photographs of Cushman as a platform reader appeared in such texts as M[ary] O[lmsted] Stanton’s thousand-page tome, The Encyclopedia of Face and Form Reading: Showing Personal Traits, Both Physical and Mental Containing the Master Key to the Study of Character Reading in the Face and Form and Its Value in the Art of Persuasion Through Knowledge of Human Nature. According to Stanton, Charlotte Cushman’s face was emblematic of ‘conscientiousness’, rather than masculinity. Cushman’s face was described as illustrative of her ‘honorable and upright character as well as for the fidelity of her interpretations’ and her chin was particularly believed to be visible evidence of her ‘integrity’.95 Refashioning the stage as a potential venue for bourgeois moral uplift, Stanton’s physiognomy text described the talent for acting as ‘bestowed by the Creator’ to ‘assist in the elevation of humanity’. While Stanton claimed ‘abuse’ had previously ‘brought the drama into disrepute with moral people’, she expressed hope that, in the future, the stage would ‘rise to its highest powers’ as ‘a moral and intellectual power’. Although ‘intellect’ was a necessary trait for a tragic player to possess, Stanton claimed ‘domestic sentiments which lie at the foundation of all great characters’ required a performer with ‘conscientiousness’ to depict ‘noble characteristics’.

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Images of the ‘honest’ ‘moral’ Cushman, like that of the ‘patriotic’, and benevolent’ Edwin Booth, among others, were included to advance these bourgeois, reputable ends.96 Cushman was a believer in these enormously popular pseudosciences. She drew upon phrenological terminology in her personal correspondence, describing her offstage experiences of same-sex passion in terms of the quality of ‘adhesiveness’ – a trait phrenologists naturalized and located on the heads of subjects so constituted. Within the schema of phrenology, adhesiveness, which was generally associated with same-sex attachment and ‘fervid’ companionship, was assumed to be biologically determined. By adopting this discourse, those who experienced same-sex desires found a language within which their passions were marked on their bodies as natural. In earlier years this discourse may have contributed to the general acceptance of Cushman as Romeo. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, images of Cushman as a reader of Shakespeare, and reproductions of that image in texts that presumed to teach viewers how to ‘read’ a physical register which included face, body, manner and clothing, both validated Cushman’s performative efforts and created a physical classification that concretized her respectability.97 Cushman’s iconic image and the qualities spectators saw in her, as an esteemed tragedienne both performing and interpreting Shakespeare’s texts, represented, contained and exploited the contradictory class and gender values and narratives then in flux. Discussing the reception of eighteenth-century actress Sarah Siddons, Joseph Roach has claimed that tragedy served to ‘sacralize’ its ‘objects and its agents’ when the images of tragic actors ‘began to circulate widely in the absence of their persons, a privilege once reserved to duly appointed sovereigns and saints’.98 However, the class dimensions imbricated in the idolization of tragic performers, like the veneration of ‘Shakespeare’, had a particular valence and role to play in the circulation of images of the ‘queen’ of the nineteenth-century American stage. In the antebellum (pre-Civil War) period, Shakespeare, opera, and symphonic music had existed and been enjoyed alongside parodies, burlesques and other artistic expressions of and by the less privileged masses. As historian Lawrence Levine has noted, by the second half of the nineteenth century a bourgeois movement to ‘sacralize culture’ was occurring in the United States, as some artistic expressions and their purveyors were gradually transformed into ‘highbrow’ culture – believed primarily suitable for and markers of refined tastes – and separated from those cultural expressions which increasingly were deemed ‘lowbrow’. In the gradual social construction differentiating such forms, ‘high culture’ came to be

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seen as a means towards aesthetic and spiritual elevation, rather than mere entertainment.99 Shifting interpretations and performances of gender, respectability and same-sex desire, such as those Cushman embodied in her widely circulating images as a celebrated interpreter of Shakespeare, represented and furthered (and sometimes obscured) many of these ends. Punctuating this essay are two of the most popular and widely reproduced images of Charlotte Cushman; one, an engraving of her as Romeo early in her career, and the other, late in her life as a platform reader, at her desk, from a photograph. As I have demonstrated, each of these images reproduces an aspect of Cushman’s Shakespearean performances, but they also function as what Mary Ann Doane has called ‘scenarios’ or ‘constellations of objects charged with cultural significance, they are images of images, displayed to evoke desire in a spectator who recognizes the values embedded in them’.100 These scenarios, and the iconic persona they depict, appealed to a wide range of spectators within and beyond theatrical contexts. The widespread venues in which these images were disseminated are illustrative of how Charlotte Cushman – American Shakespearean actress – came to serve as an effective vehicle for imparting complex and contradictory values. As we have seen of the reproductions of Margaret Gillies’ etching of Cushman as Romeo, this particular image functioned as both a representation in the press of the actress in her most famous breeches part, suggesting and deflecting the open secret of her offstage role as a lover of other women, as well as portraying her familial role as the supporter of her younger sister. Materialized into a commodity as memorabilia collectible by the most mainstream of middle-class Victorians, the Staffordshire figurine modelled upon this image signified its owners’ ability to be bourgeois consumers of Shakespearean culture. Similarly, the wide distribution of Sarony’s photograph of Cushman as a dramatic reader of Shakespeare helped construct her public identity in new ways. Theatrical portraits, like Sarony’s of Cushman, whether exhibited in photographic galleries, outside theatres, held in private albums or reproduced in physiognomy texts, functioned as indexical signs whose purpose, in John Tagg’s terms was ‘both the description of an individual and the inscription of a social identity’.101 While drawings based upon this image were often reproduced in the press alongside articles depicting and venerating Cushman as an interpreter of Shakespeare’s texts, the social function served by deploying this drawing in physiognomy and phrenology texts suggested other uses for it as an instrument of a growing scopic economy, and attested to

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Cushman’s power and significance as a decipherable embodiment of woman’s intellect, forthrightness and middle-class respectability. After Charlotte Cushman’s death, critic William Winter wrote that Cushman had ‘made Shakespeare real, but she never dragged him down to the level of the actual. She knew the heights of that wondrous intuition and potent magnetism, and she lifted herself and her hearers to their grand and beautiful eminence’. Cushman used her body and voice as if they were larger than life vehicles to transport her spectators to Shakespeare’s ‘real’ eminence. Describing Cushman’s characterizations as ‘white marble suffused with fire’, Winter explained that Cushman’s ‘best achievements in the illustration of Shakespeare were . . . at once human and poetic’. With this analogy, Winter reinforced the Victorian notion that actors literally pictorialized themselves, modelling themselves on ancient statuary to represent forceful expressions of passions, as eighteenth-century acting and elocution manuals had suggested.102 But, as Winter claimed, Cushman animated such classical iconographic models, constructing ‘illustrations’ of Shakespeare’s characters with her body, as though they were living, human statuary – ‘white marble suffused with fire’. Picturing Charlotte Cushman’s body, reading images of Cushman, whether as the Shakespearean character of Romeo, or as a reader of Shakespeare texts, offered her spectators an ideal and idealized framework in which to explore contradictory belief systems and cultural agendas about women, about performers, about Americans and about Shakespeare which they mapped onto her body as they grappled with complex and contradictory images of sexuality and respectability, commodity and desire.

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Such is Thomas Carlyle’s description of Shakespeare in ‘The Hero as Poet’, in Michael K. Goldberg, ed., On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (Berkeley CA and Oxford: University of California Press, 1993). John Ruskin, ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’, in Sesame and Lilies (London: George Allen, 1911), paragraph 56. Kathleen Knox, ‘On the Study of Shakespeare for Girls’, The Journal of Education, n.s. 17 (1895), 222–23 (223). Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties (London: Cape, 1913), 30. For an account of this performance, see William Archer, ‘As You Like It – Mrs Dexter’, in The Theatrical ‘World’ for 1894 (London: Scott, 1895), 69–73. Helena Faucit, Lady Martin, On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1885), 90. On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters, 20. On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters, 49. [Margaret Stokes and Georgina Colmache], ‘Helen Faucit’, Blackwood’s, 138, (1885), 741–60 (741). She later added a letter on Hermione, which appeared in Blackwood’s in 1891, and was collected in subsequent editions of On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters. Preface to The Shakespeare Key (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1879), vi Henry James, ‘Frances Anne Kemble’, in Essays from London and Elsewhere (London: Osgood, McIlvaine, 1893), 86–127 (98). Edward and Eleanor Marx Aveling, The Woman Question (London: Swan, Sonnenschein, Le Bas & Lowrey, 1886), 8, 9.

Chapter 1 1

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Anna Murphy Jameson, Shakespeare’s Heroines or Characteristics of Women: Moral, Poetical and Historical, (1833), reprint edn. Cheri Lin Larsen Hoeckley (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2005). All subsequent references to Characteristics are taken from this edition, and appear as parentheses in the text. In Jameson’s later editions, this final paragraph disappears from her Preface. Alison Booth, How to Make It As a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004).

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For a richer discussion of the nineteenth-century tradition of reading Shakespeare’s characters as having a life beyond the text, see Tricia Lootens, Lost Saints: Silence, Gender and Victorian Literary Canonization (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 79–115. Anna Jameson, Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad, (London: Saunders and Otley, 1834), 294. Details of Jameson’s biography are available in Judith Johnston, Anna Jameson: Victorian, Feminist, Woman of Letters (Hants, England: Scolar Press, 1997). For other biographical treatments see Erskine, Macpherson, and Thomas. Mrs. Steuart [Beatrice] Erskine, ed. Anna Jameson: Letters and Friendships (1812– 1860) (London: T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd. n. d.), 67. Jameson’s niece provides a detailed, though clearly one-sided, account of Jameson’s financial tribulations in marriage. See Gerardine Macpherson, Memoirs of the Life of Anna Jameson, ed. Margaret Oliphant (London: Longman, 1878) 283–4. For more extended discussions of the Langham Place Circle, see Candida Ann Lacey, ed. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham Place Group (London: Routledge, 1987). Sharon Marcus has insightfully placed both the activism and the relationships of the Langham Place group in the context of nineteenth-century women’s same-sex desire in Between Women: Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton University Press, 2007), especially 196–206. The Victoria Regia: A Volume of Original Contributions in Poetry and Prose, ed. Adelaide A. Procter (London: Victoria Press, 1861), viii. ‘Law for Ladies’, The Saturday Review (24 May 1857), 77. Jameson created her own illustrations for Characteristics, refining and expanding them through several editions. The illustrations printed here are from the Saunders and Otley 4th edn (1847). Anna Jameson, Sacred and Legendary Art (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1888), 11. Jameson, Sacred and Legendary Art, 11 For extended analyses of the practices and complication of domestic ideology, see Elizabeth Langland, Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995) and Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Victorian England, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). ‘Characteristics of Women’, Monthly Review (November 1832), 601. John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies: Two Lectures Delivered at Manchester in 1864 (New York: John Wiley and Son, 1867), 90. Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, 78. For an artful and thorough exploration of the history of public/private permeability, see Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore; John Hopkins University Press, 2005). Anna Jameson, The Communion of Labor: A Second Lecture on the Social Employments of Women, 2nd edn, privately printed, May 1855, 163. Anna Jameson, Sisters of Charity, Catholic and Protestant, Abroad and at Home, 2nd edn, privately printed, May 1855, 26.

182 22 23 24

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29 30

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33 34

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Jameson, Sisters of Charity, 66. Alda’s phrase can be loosely translated as ‘Aged fruit on young flowers.’ Julia Hankey, ‘Victorian Portias: Shakespeare’s Borderline Heroine,’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (Winter 1994), 426–48 (429). Jameson, Characteristics, 79. Jameson’s sensitivities to class distinctions do not prevent blindness to other kinds of difference, as revealed in her lack of sympathy for Shylock’s plight as a marginalized Jew on the same page where she lauds Portia. For a full account of nineteenth-century reforms of marriage and property laws, see Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). Jameson, Characteristics, 98. As her inverted commas indicate, Jameson also echoes a common praise for the Greek dramatist Menander (4th Century B.C. E.). Maureen Moran has engagingly surveyed nineteenth-century anti-Catholic writing in Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007). Anna Jameson, Legends of the Monastic Orders (London: Longmans, 1850), 415–6. For Eliot’s journal notes on Jameson, see The Journals of George Eliot, ed. by Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 100–1. George Eliot, Middlemarch (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2004), 2. Charles Kingsley, Yeast: A Problem. In Works of Charles Kingsley. (London: MacMillan and Company, 1879), 154. I am grateful to Bethany Marroquin for bringing this passage from Kingsley to my attention. Kingsley, Yeast, 154–5. Anna Jameson, Memoirs of the Celebrated Female Sovereigns, vol 1 (London: Richard Bentley, 1831), xvi. Jameson, Female Sovereigns, xvi. For more on Jameson’s Orientalism, see Joyce Zonana, ‘The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre’, Signs (Spring 1993), 603–4. Jameson, Female Sovereigns, 44. Jameson, Female Sovereigns, 57. Jameson, Visits and Sketches, 271. For more on Jameson’s rendering of Lady Macbeth as an ideal Victorian housewife, see my Introduction to the Broadview edition of Characteristics, 28–30. Robyn Asleson, editor and author of Introduction, A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and her Portraitists (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1999). Anna Jameson, ‘German Actresses’, Sketches and Stories, 16.

Chapter 2 1

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Mary Cowden Clarke, My Long Life: An Autobiographical Sketch (London: T. Fisher and Unwin, 1896), 12, 13. My Long Life, 7, 8.

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‘Shakespeare – Studies of Women’ in The Ladies’ Companion First series I (1849), 25; quoted in Richard D. Altick, The Cowden Clarkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), 137. Altick, 117. Altick, 120–2. See the preface to The Complete Concordance to Shakespeare: Being a Verbal Index to all the Passages in the Dramatic Works of the Poet (London: W. Kent and Co, 1844–5), v–vi. Ibid., vii. My Long Life, 226–7. Preface to the Concordance, v. Review in Dublin Evening Mail, 4 February 1846, in Mary Cowden Clarke’s scrapbook with other favourable reviews, in the Novello-Cowden Clarke Collection, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. Preface, iii. I, iii–iv. Mary Cowden Clarke, ‘Shakespeare as the Girl’s Friend’ in The Girls’ Own Paper, 8 (1886–1887), 562–64 (562). Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical and Historical, 2 vols. (London: Saunders and Otley, 1832), 5. For further details of how Jameson read Shakespeare’s heroines, see Chapter 1 above. The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, 5 vols. (London: W. H. Smith & Son, Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1850–52), III, 64–5. Ibid., 65. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, ed. Cora Kaplan (London: The Women’s Press, 1978), I, 424–6. The Girlhood, IV, 128. Ibid., I, 223. Ibid., I, 67. Something of the ambiguity of Mary’s legacy for modern scholars emerges in Julie Hankey’s essay on ‘Victorian Portias: Shakespeare’s Borderline Heroine’ (Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994), 426–48, in which she describes the Girlhood as ‘laughable’ but nevertheless acknowledges that the story of Portia ‘could be a manifesto for women’s education’ (442). Aurora Leigh, Book II, 182–213. See above 26–7. ‘Shakespeare as the Girl’s Friend’, 564. George C. Gross, ‘Mary Cowden Clarke, “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines”, and the Sex Education of Victorian Women’, Victorian Studies, 16 (1972), 37–58 (43). Phoebe’s Shakespeare, arranged for children by Adelaide C. Gordon Sim (London: Bickers, 1894), 79. E. Nesbit, The Children’s Shakespeare (London: Tuck, 1897), 18. Cavendish, CCXI Sociable Letters, Letter CXXIII, 246. Faucit, On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters: By One Who Has Personated Them, 328. World-Noted Women, 33.

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Ibid., 61. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 85. Ibid., 212–3, 233–4. Preface to Shakespeare’s Works, Edited with a Scrupulous Revision of the Text (London and new York: Trubner, Appleton & Co, 1860), v. Ibid., vii, xiv and xv. Ibid., x. Ibid., x–xi. Ibid., xxi. From Helena Faucit’s chapter on Portia, as quoted in Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts eds, Women Reading Shakespeare, 1660–1900: An Anthology of Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 189. Modern Corruptions of Shakespeare’s Text: A Letter to a Friend on the Subject of ‘Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare’ (London, 1869), 3–4. Folger reference Y.d.559 (1–7). Folger reference Y.c.970, no.23. Preface to The Shakespeare Key (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1879), vi–vii. Mary Cowden Clarke, Honey from the Weed: Verses (London: Kegan Paul, 1881), 342. For further details of Marx and other Victorian women’s childhood experiences of Shakespeare, see Gail Marshall, Shakespeare and Victorian Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 13–44; and Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts, Women Reading Shakespeare, 1660–1900: An Anthology of Criticism (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997). Honey from the Weed: Verses, 196, 197. Honey from the Weed: Verses, 205. One example of such a strain would be the description of Portia in ‘Occasional Address for an Amateur Performance of Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice” Wednesday, 14 December 1864’: ‘She strives to lure the Jew into relenting,/To touch his wolfish heart into repenting’ (Honey from the Weed: Verses, 200). Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers (New York: Scribner’s, 1878), 295. Recollections of Writers, 296. Recollections of Writers, 298. In the same letter in which this invitation is issued, Dickens also stresses the purpose of the production, that is, to ‘[endow] a perpetual curatorship of it [i.e. the birthplace], for some eminent literary veteran. And I think you will recognize in this, even a higher and more gracious object than the securing, even, of the debt incurred for the house itself’ (298–99). In fact the debt for the house would not be paid off for a substantial time to come. Mary had met Miss Kelly at the house of Charles and Mary Lamb when Mary was taking lessons with Miss Lamb (My Long Life, 18). Recollections of Writers, 299. Recollections of Writers, 341. Recollections of Writers, 307–9.

Notes 58 59

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64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

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87 88 89 90

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‘Amateur Performances at the Haymarket Theatre’, The Era, 21 May 1848, 12. Mary Cowden Clarke to Charles Dickens, 7 August 1861, in the Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds. John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (London: George Allan, 1911), 92, 93, 95. ‘Shakespeare as the Girl’s Friend’, 596. ‘Shakespeare as the Girl’s Friend’, 596. ‘Our Prize Competition. Essay Writing on a Great English Author – My Favourite Heroine from Shakespeare’, The Girls’ Own Paper, 10 March 1888, 380–81 (380–81). ‘My Favourite Heroine from Shakespeare’, 381. ‘My Favourite Heroine from Shakespeare’, 380. Letter dated 17 February 1880, in the collection at the Huntington Library. In Honey from the Weed. ‘Two Lovers of Literature and Art: Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke’, 124–5. Centennial Biographical Sketch, 7, 14. Folger reference Y.c.969 (11–19). Letters to an Enthusiast (ed. Anne Upton Nettleton; London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1902), 62–3. My Long Life, 120–6. See Letters to a Enthusiast, 134–6, 192, 196–7, 213–4 and 243. Recollections of Writers, 305. Letters to an Enthusiast, 150. Ibid., 48–50. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 309. Ibid., 276. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 315. Recollections of Writers, 176. Ibid., 189. See Annie Fields letter to ‘Frank’, 7 June 1882, Huntington library collection. On the relationship between Annie Fields and Jewett, see Margaret Roman, Sarah Orne Jewett: Reconstructing Gender (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992), 142–6. My Long Life, 107. Ibid., 47. ‘Two Lovers of Literature’, 125–6. See A Testimonial to Mrs Mary Cowden Clarke, Author of the Concordance to Shakespeare (New York: privately printed, 1852). Quoted by Mary in My Long Life, 135–6. For further evidence of these activities, see Thompson and Roberts, as cited in n. 41 above. Calculations vary: using the retail price index, one authority puts Mary’s wealth at her death at £2.2 million, whereas the use of average earnings to translate values across time would make her fortune £12.1 million.

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Frances Anne Kemble, Notes upon some of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Bentley, 1882), 168–9 (cited here as Notes). Notes, 128. She played opposite a series of unsatisfactory Romeos herself, from her Covent Garden debut, when her father stepped down from the role and played Mercutio while Mr. Abbott, a stock player of his generation, gave a Romeo which she politely said was ‘not below inoffensive mediocrity.’(Girlhood, 197) In a time when personating the passionate Italian lover did not square with notions of contemporary British and American masculinity, the best Romeo Fanny ever found was Ellen Tree, the future Mrs Charles Kean. (Records of a Girlhood, (London: Beccles, 1878), cited here from the American edition, New York: Holt, 1883, as Girlhood), 200. See J. C. Furnas, Fanny Kemble, Leading lady of the Nineteenth-Century Stage (New York: Dial Press, 1982), 330. She achieved successful authorship in her middle and old age by strict time management and self-discipline, writing for set hours with her watch before her; she also took to the typewriter with enthusiasm as a relief from the physical strain of the occupation. The autobiographical volumes are Journal of Frances Ann Butler 2 vols (London: Murray, 1835) (cited here as Journal); A Year of Consolation, 2 vols (London: 1847); Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 1838–9 (New York: Harper, 1863); Records of a Girlhood, Records of a Later Life, 3 vols (London: Bentley, 1882), (cited here as Records); and Further Records 1848–1883, 2 vols (London: Bentley, 1890) (cited here as Further Records). 370–74. William Hazlitt, 1816; quoted in Linda Kelly, The Kemble Era (London: Bodley Head, 1980), 13. Hershel Baker, John Philip Kemble (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), 274. Baker, 290. See Marc Baer, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Furnas, 22. Quoted Furnas, 14–15. Baker, 346. Girlhood, 169. Gail Marshall, Shakespeare and Victorian Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 81–2. Girlhood, 188. Girlhood, 220 Records, 363. Journal, II, 26–7. Journal, II, 27. Letter to Lady Dacre 14 October 1842; Records, II, 271. See Furnas, 68–78, quoting from Girlhood.

Notes 23

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Letters from her younger sister Adelaide have recently come to light which make clear that the engagement was for a time regarded as made. See Ann Blainey: Fanny and Adelaide: the lives of the remarkable Kemble sisters (Chicago: Ivan R Lee, 2001), 63. Blainey also details the sad story of Adelaide’s non-marriage to the love of her life Francis Thun, son of Austrian grandees who eventually decided to allow the match but failed to make clear to the lovers that they would do so; after delaying her debut as a world-class operatic soprano in the hope of his declaration, Adelaide eventually moved on, and in the end made do with a bourgeois match among ‘the rich landed proprietors of England’ who are ‘“full of observances and appearances and conventionalities and etiquettes” – and dull in the extreme.’ She ‘found income was the master key – everyone in this set ‘“has no name and has 30,000 a year”’ (188). Notes, 83. Notes, 92–4. Girlhood, 260, 265. Journal, 85–6. Records, III,109. Furnas, 289. Letter to Sarah Cleveland, quoted Furnas, 302–3. Records, III, 140–41. Records, III, 149. See for example Examiner 16 January 1847. Records, III, 279, 292–3, etc. Records, III, 244. Records, III, 254. Records, III, 180–1. Records, III, 271. Macready’s diary entry for 20 December 1837, J. C. Trewin, The Journal of William Charles Macready (London: Longmans, 1967), 129. Furnas, 311. In September 1843, when he had thought she ‘spoke admirably well, but quite like a man’ (Trewin 204). William Toynbee, ed., The Diaries of William Charles Macready 1833–1851, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1912), II, 366. Records, III, 376–7. Furnas, 32–33. Girlhood, 218. Romeo and Juliet, IV.iii. See Marshall, 82–3 for Fanny’s vision of herself and her father as figures in The Tempest, based on the anecdote of seeing a picture of Prospero and his little daughter in an open boat which she tells in Notes. Records, III, 344. R. J. Lane A. R. A., lithographer to the Queen and friend of the Kembles and also of Macready and Malibran, and himself known for his recitation; Fanny copied her father’s many cuts and other annotations and handed the books back, and they were returned to Lane, who later published the Readings thus left to him.

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Records, III, 401. ‘her Majesty, her Majesty the Queen Dowager, and several distinguished members of the nobility, have expressed their high approbation of the forthcoming entertainments’, Lloyd’s Weekly, 28 April 1844. The information about his recall to Buckingham Palace and Queen Adelaide’s visits to Willis’s Rooms is from R. J. Lane, Charles Kemble’s Shakspere [sic] Readings: being a selection of the plays of Shakspere as read by him in public, 3 vols (London: Bell and Daldy, 1870), I, viii. Punch, 7 (1844), 22. Records, II, 107. Records, II, 291. William Shakespeare as characterized by the Dean of Westminster, preaching at Myddleton Hall, Islington on 8 December 1864, reported in Daily News, 10 December. ‘Exeter Hall and its Associations’, Scottish Review (1857), pp. 225–235 (230–31). The ambitious artisan welcomed Penny Readings – see for example [Thomas Wright], Some Habits and Customs of the Working Classes, by a Journeyman Engineer (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1867), reprinted Augustus M. Kelley, New York 1967, 167–83. For the ground-breaking consideration of the issue of leisure and the Victorians see Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England (London: Routledge, 1987), reprinted Methuen 1987, especially 74–83, 116–32. Records, III, 373. See Gilli Bush-Bailey, Performing Herself: Fanny Kelly’s Dramatic Recollections (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2010). Glasgow Herald, 17 April 1846. Records, III, 415, 345–6, 356. Records, III, 228. Records, III, 414–5. Records of Later Life, III, 228. Letter to George Barrett, quoted Furnas, 359. Era, 11 August 1850. Furnas, 331. Furnas, 332–3. Furnas, 334. Records, III, 373–74. Henry James, ‘Frances Anne Kemble’, Temple Bar (1893), 503–525 (509). Records of Later Life, III, 418. For discussion of the interface between nineteenth-century stage practice and the contemporary transformations in Shakespearean editing, see my New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 87–88. See Gerald Kahane, ‘Fanny Kemble Reads Shakespeare: Her First American Tour, 1849–50’, Theatre Survey, 24 (1983), 77–98. With thanks to Christy Desmet for information about the Kemble reading text of Shakespeare at the University of Georgia, on which she is herself working. William Hazlitt, Examiner, 21 January 1816. Harvard call-mark: Hollis 00345027.

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80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

189

See Trevor Griffiths, ed., A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Marian Wilson Kimber, ‘Reading Shakespeare, Seeing Mendelssohn: Concert readings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ca. 1850–1920’ Musical Quarterly, 89 (2007), 199–236. A famous London place of entertainment, which had hosted the Eglington Tournament and many subsequent indoor and outdoor events. James, 508–9. 9 March 1853. Records, III, 292. Morning Chronicle, 23 September 1853. Lady’s Newspaper, 10 February 1855. Daily News, 6 February 1855. Ipswich Journal, 27 October 1855. Quoted Furnas, 335. James, 512.

Chapter 4 1

2 3

4

5

6

7

8

9

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William Winter, New York Tribune (n.d.), reprinted in William Winter, Brief Chronicles (New York: Dunlap Society, 1889; reprint edn. Burt Franklin, 1970), 70–1. George T. Ferris, Appleton’s Journal, XI (21 March 1874), 353–8 (358). Scribner’s Magazine, Beecher-Stowe Family Papers, 217, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. Dinah Mulock Craik, A Woman’s Thoughts About Women (London: Hurst and Blackett, Publishers, 1858), 58 Notorious Muse: The Actress in British Art and Culture 1776–1812, ed. by Robyn Asleson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2003), 1. I explore this point more fully in Lisa Merrill, When Romeo was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and her Circle of Female Spectators (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). William Rounseville Alger, Life of Edwin Forrest (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1877), 19. Walter M. Leman, Memories of an Old Actor (San Francisco: A. Roman Co, 1886), 104. Following in Kemble’s model, ‘Bianca’ was to be the first role Cushman chose to appear in for her London debut in 1844. ‘Notes and Memda taken from Charlotte Cushman’s own lips during our journies [sic] in 1875’ [handwriting I have identified as belonging to Emma Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (hereafter CCP) vol 15 # 3991–4000. At the end of Cushman’s life, she told anecdotes about her early life to her partner, Emma Stebbins, in the hope that Stebbins would oversee or write a memoir about Cushman’s life. Although the relationship between the Cushman and Kemble ultimately became estranged, late in her life Cushman acknowledged how she initially had idolized Kemble.

190 11

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16

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18

19

20 21

22 23

24

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26 27

28

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Letters from Frances Anne Kemble to Charlotte Cushman are included in the Charlotte Cushman Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Thomas Colley Grattan to Charlotte Cushman, CCP vol 11, number 3349, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Quoted in William Toynbee, ed., The Diaries of William Charles Macready, 2 vols (1912; reprint edn. New York: Blom, 1969), II, 230. Cited in Cuthbert Bede, ‘Miss Cushman: A Reminiscence,’ Belgravia, 29 (May 1876), 338. Cited in Clara Erskine Clement, Charlotte Cushman (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1882), 159. Charlotte Cushman to Benjamin Webster, [n.d. I identified this as shortly before Cushman’s Romeo & Juliet, opened at Haymarket 29 December 1845], Harvard Theater Collection. According to Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: a Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 200. It was not until 1854 that a restored version of Shakespeare’s Tempest, based upon Macready’s own promptbook reached New York, and by the 1870s restored versions of King Lear were appearing on American stages. J. W. Cole, Life and Times of Charles Kean, FSA, 1859, II, 26. Cited in Russell Jackson, Victorian Theatre: The Theatre in its Time (London: A & C Black, 1989), 2. Westminster Review 18 (1833), 35. See Richard Schoch, Not Shakespeare: Bardolotry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002), 3. Taylor, 216. See Stanley Wells, ‘Shakespearian Burlesques’, Shakespeare Quarterly 16 (1963), 49–61; Richard Schoch Not Shakespeare: Bardolotry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002), and Paul Schlicke, ‘Dickens and Shakespeare,’ Japan Branch Bulletin of the Dickens Fellowship, no. 27, October 2004: 84–98. Shortly after Cushman arrived in London, she became personally acquainted with Dickens and with Francis Talfourd, author of several Shakespeare burlesques. Schoch, Bardolatry, 110. Henry Mayhew and William Tuckniss. London Labour and the London Poor (London: Griffin, Bohn, and Company, Stationer’s Hall Court, 1861), 154. George Fletcher, Studies of Shakespeare (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1847), 379. Charlotte Cushman to George Combe, 21 November 1845, ms 7275, 28, National Library of Scotland. Mary Howitt, ‘The Miss Cushmans’, The People’s Journal, 2 (18 July 1846). Fletcher, 378. Although ironically by publishing his detailed reaction to the production, Fletcher assured that it would not be forgotten. Veronica Moriarty, America and the Staffordshire Figure, http://www. staffordshire.org/links/america.html Margaret Homans has said this of widespread, popular images of Queen Victoria produced at the same time in Margaret Homans, ‘Victoria’s Sovereign Obedience: Portraits of the Queen as Wife and Mother’, in Victorian Literature and the Victorian

Notes

30

31 32

33 34 35

36

37 38

39

40 41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

191

Visual Imagination, ed. by Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 169–82 (182). See Lisa Merrill, When Romeo was a Woman. I explore at length how both Cushman’s extraordinary celebrity and the posthumous eclipse of her fame are attributable to shifting definitions of female sexuality, particularly with regard to women who loved other women. Britannia [London], 3 January 1846, Charlotte Cushman Scrapbook, CCP. Fletcher, 379. Fletcher was also a champion of Shakespearean actress Helena Faucit, with whom Cushman was in competition for roles the previous year, and refers to her throughout his volume as an example of appropriately ‘womanly’ performance. Fletcher, 380. George Rowell, Queen Victoria Goes to the Theatre (London: Elek, 1978), 74. Audrey Jaffee, ‘Spectacular Sympathy: Visuality and Ideology in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol,’ in Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, ed. by Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) 327–44 (328). Suren Lalvani, Photography, Vision, and the Production of Modern Bodies (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 2. John Coleman, Fifty Years of an Actor’s Life (NY: James Pott & Co, 1904), 361–3. John Russell Brown., ‘Representing Sexuality in Shakespeare’s plays,’ (1997), in Shakespeare and Sexuality, ed. by Catherine M. S. Alexander and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 168–82 (177). Matilda Mary Hays, Application as Candidate for a Civil List pension from the Government Literary Fund, February, 1865, Public Records Office, London. New York Times, 16 November 1860. ‘Your loving, faithfully loving Ladie’ [Charlotte Cushman] to ‘My sweet bird’ [Emma Crow], 15 Novmeber 1860, New York, CCP vol 1 # 211–14. ‘your loving, faithfully loving Ladie’ [Charlotte Cushman] to ‘My sweet bird’ [Emma Crow], 15 November 1860, New York, CCP vol 1 # 211–14. [Charlotte Cushman] to [Emma Crow], 12 November 1860, NY, CCP vol 1 #209–10. I discuss the homosocial contexts and the competing images of antebellum masculinity offered by each of these interpretations of Hamlet in Lisa Merrill, ‘Acting Like a Man: National Identity, Homoerotics, and Shakespearean Criticism in the Nineteenth Century American Press’, in Victorian Shakespeare, Volume 1, ed. by Adrian Poole and Gail Marshall (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 82–98. Laurence Hutton, Curiosities of the American Stage (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1891), 278. Edwin Booth to Richard F. Cary, 4 December 1860; cited in Edwin Booth: Recollections by his Daughter Edwina Booth Grossman (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1970; 1894), 133–4. Charlotte Cushman to Mary Devlin Booth, [n.d. 1860], (Baltimore, HampdenBooth Library at the Players Club, New York). Edward P. Vining, The Mystery of Hamlet: An Attempt to Solve an Old Problem (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1881), 47.

192 49

50

51

52 53

54 55

56

57

58 59

60

61

62

63 64

65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75

Notes

Michael R. Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 120. Edwin Booth to Charlotte Cushman, 3 September [1863], Philadelphia, Loc CCP vol 9. Booth’s negotiation was complicated by the fact that he was grieving the sudden death of his wife, Mary Devlin. Acknowledging Cushman’s friendship with his late wife, Booth wrote about her tombstone, ‘I am so glad that you like the tablet I have placed over my darling . . . I cannot think of her as being there, she is and always will be alive & ever with me’. Charlotte Cushman to Horace Bellows, Esq, 23 September, 1863, CCP vol 2/583. This is equivalent to approximately $138,000 today. Emma Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman: Her Letters and Memories of Her Life (Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1878), 187. Cited in Erskine Clement, 87–8. Charlotte Cushman to Jane Carlyle, 28 January 1862, National Library of Scotland, ms1774 ff 227. Charlotte Cushman to Jane Carlyle, 28 January 1862. Cushman’s American partner, Emma Stebbins also collaborated on a collective letter asking British feminists to ‘do more’ for the cause. Frances Ternan Trollope to CC, 23 November 1867, [Florence, Italy], CCP, vol 16. Cushman’s response is written on the back of Trollope’s letter asking her for support. [Charlotte Cushman] to [Emma Crow], 28 April, 1865, CCP vol 3 # 781–2. Bernie Babcock, Booth and the Spirit of Lincoln (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1925), 17. Quoted in Richard Lockridge, Darling of Misfortune: Edwin Booth, 1833–1893 (New York: Century, 1932), 96. George G. Foster, New York by Gas-Light an Other Urban Sketches, ed. and intro. by Stuart M. Blumin (Berkeley: University of California, 1990), 150–2. Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 237. New York Times, 8 November 1874. Clara Erskine Clement, Charlotte Cushman (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1882), 113. Cited in Erskine Clement, 114. Cited in Erskine Clement, 173, 82–3. Cited in Erskine Clement, 114. Cited in Erskine Clement, 117. Cited in Erskine Clement, 115. Cited in Stebbins, 259–62. Cited in Stebbins, 263–4. Cited in Erskine Clement, 124. Cited in Stebbins, 266–67. New York Tribune [n.d. before 26 May 1874] (reprinted at bottom of handbill of final performance, Baltimore, May 1874). Cited in Erskine Clement, 97.

Notes 76

193

John Gentile, Cast of One: One-Person Shows From the Chautauqua Platform to the Broadway Stage (University of Illinois Press, 1989), 3, 24. 77 Taylor, 204. 78 Gentile, 8. 79 Jean Jewel Hotchkiss, ‘Dramatic Readers, Past and Present: Personal Recollections of the Greatest Exponents of a Noble Art,’ Town and Country (15 September 1906), 14–17, (14). 80 George T. Ferris, Appleton’s Journal, XI:261 (21 March 1874), pp. 353–38 (358). 81 Ferris, 358. 82 Stebbins, 213. 83 Hotchkiss, 16. 84 Cited in Erskine Clement, 25. 85 Although Cushman is not mentioned, the association between the characters of Nancy and Lady Macbeth was cited in Schlicke, 94 86 Stebbins, 213. 87 Hotchkiss, 15–6. 88 Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 23. 89 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 36. 90 Sarony paid Fanny Kemble $300, soprano Adelina Patti $1,000. Sarah Bernhardt, whom he often photographed in specific dramatic roles, received $1,500. By the 1880s Sarony paid Lillie Langtry, considered the most beautiful woman in the world, $5,000 for the rights to market her image. Ben L. Bassham, The Theatrical Photographs of Napoleon Sarony (Kent State University Press, 1978), 4. 91 She likes to run Papa into debt; She’ll smoke a slender cigarette; Sub rosa with a favoured crony; I know it, though we’ve never met – I’ve seen her picture by Sarony. Frank D. Sherman, ‘Ballads of a Coquette.’ The Century Magazine: A Popular Quarterly, vol 24, issue 4, August 1882, 640. Sarony’s constructions of celebrated women and men included emblematic images of emancipated and often genderambiguous personages, such as Adah Mencken, Sarah Bernhardt, and body builder Eugen Sandow as well as the respectable Cushman. 92 Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 2. 93 Patricia Johnston, Seeing High and Low: Representing Social ConL ict in American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 21. 94 Samuel Wells, New Physiognomy: or Signs of Character as Manifested through Temperament and External Forms, and Especially in ‘the Human Face Divine’ (New York: Fowler and Wells Co., 1894), 521–2. 95 M[ary] O[lmsted] Stanton, The Encyclopedia of Face and Form Reading: Showing Personal Traits, Both Physical and Mental Containing the Master Key to the Study of Character Reading in the Face and Form and Its Value in the Art of Persuasion Through Knowledge of Human Nature (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Company, [1889] 3rd edn, 1913), 305. 96 Stanton, 305, 1127–9.

194 97

98

99

100

101

102

Notes Although she does not discuss Cushman, Lynda Nead suggests ways Victorian women’s bodies were read. Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 172. Joseph Roach, ‘Patina: Mrs. Siddons and the Depth of Surfaces,’ in Notorious Muse: The Actress in British Art and Culture 1776-–812, ed. by Robyn Asleson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2003), 195–209 (195–6). Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 83–168. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 13–4. Cited in Audrey Jaffe, ‘Spectacular Sympathy: Visuality and Ideology in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol’, PMLA, vol 109, no. 2 (March 1994), pp. 254–65. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 36–7. As Michael Booth has observed, ‘pictorial and marmoreal vocabulary recurred in the everyday terminology’ (120).

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Mary Cowden Clarke Altick, Richard D., The Cowden Clarkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948) Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, Aurora Leigh, ed., Cora Caplan (London: The Women’s Press, 1978) Cowden Clarke, Charles and Mary, Recollections of Writers (New York: Scribner’s, 1878) Cowden Clarke, Mary, Honey from the Weed: Verses (London: Kegan Paul, 1881) —. My Long Life: An Autobiographical Sketch (London: T. Fisher and Unwin, 1896) Gross, George C., ‘Mary Cowden Clarke, “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines”, and the Sex Education of Victorian Women’, Victorian Studies, 16 (1972), 37–58 —. ‘Shakespeare as the Girl’s Friend’ in The Girls’ Own Paper, 8 (1886–1887), 562–64 —. ‘Shakespeare – Studies of Women’ in The Ladies’ Companion First series I (1849) —. Shakespeare’s Works, Edited with a Scrupulous Revision of the Text (London and New York: Trubner, Appleton & Co., 1860) —. The Complete Concordance to Shakespeare: Being a Verbal Index to all the Passages in the Dramatic Works of the Poet (London: W. Kent and Co., 1844–1845) —. The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, 5 vols. (London: W. H. Smith & Son, Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1850–1852) —. The Shakespeare Key (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1879) Hankey, Julie, ‘Victorian Portias: Shakespeare’s Borderline Heroine’ (Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994), 426–48 Letters to an Enthusiast, ed., Anne Upton Nettleton (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1902) Marshall, Gail, Shakespeare and Victorian Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) Roman, Margaret, Sarah Orne Jewett: Reconstructing Gender (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992) Thompson, Ann and Sasha Roberts eds., Women Reading Shakespeare, 1660–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) A Testimonial to Mrs Mary Cowden Clarke, Author of the Concordance to Shakespeare (New York: privately printed, 1852)

Frances Anne Kamble Baer, Marc, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) Bailey, Peter, Leisure and Class in Victorian England (London: Routledge, 1987) Baker, Hershel, John Philip Kemble (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942) Blainey, Ann, Fanny and Adelaide: The lives of the remarkable Kemble sisters (Chicago: Ivan R Lee, 2001) Bush-Bailey, Gilli, Performing HerSelf: Fanny Kelly’s Dramatic Recollections (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2010)

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‘Exeter Hall and its Associations’, Scottish Review, (1857), 225–35 Fanny Kemble, A Year of Consolation, 2 vols (London: E. Moxon, 1847) —. Further Records 1848–1883, 2 vols (London: Bentley, 1890) —. Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 1838–1839 (New York: Harper, 1863) —. Journal of Frances Anne Butler, 2 vols (London: Murray, 1835) —. Notes upon some of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Bentley, 1882) —. Records of a Girlhood (London: Beccles, 1878) —. Records of a Later Life, 3 vols (London: Bentley, 1882) Furnas, Joseph, Chamberlain, Fanny Kemble, Leading lady of the Nineteenth-Century Stage (New York: Dial Press, 1982) Griffiths, Trevor, ed., A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Cambridge University Press, 1996) Jacky Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) James, Henry, ‘Frances Anne Kemble’, Temple Bar, (1893), 97, 503–25 Kahane, Gerald, ‘Fanny Kemble Reads Shakespeare: Her First American Tour, 1849–50’, Theatre Survey, 24 (1983), 77–98 Kelly, Linda, The Kemble Era (London: Bodley Head, 1980) Kimber, Marian Wilson, ‘Reading Shakespeare, Seeing Mendelssohn: Concert readings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ca. 1850–1920’, Musical Quarterly, 89 (2007), 199–236 Lane, R. J., Charles Kemble’s Shakspere [sic] Readings: Being a selection of the plays of Shakspere as read by him in public, 3 vols (London: Bell and Daldy, 1870) Marshall, Gail, Shakespeare and Victorian Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) Thomas Wright, Some Habits and Customs of the Working Classes, by a Journeyman Engineer (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1867) Toynbee, William ed., The Diaries of William Charles Macready 1833–1851, 2 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1912) Trewin, J. C. ed., The Journal of William Charles Macready (London: Longmans, 1967)

Charlotte Cushman Asleson, Robyn, ed., Notorious Muse: The Actress in British Art and Culture 1776–1812 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2003) Bassham, Ben L., The Theatrical Photographs of Napoleon Sarony (Kent State University Press, 1978) Clement, Clara Erskine, Charlotte Cushman (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1882) Coleman, John, Fifty Years of an Actor’s Life (New York: James Pott & Co., 1904) Cushman, Charlotte Papers, 21 vols, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Fletcher, George, Studies of Shakespeare (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1847) Edwina, Booth Grossman, Edwin Booth: Recollections by his Daughter Edwina Booth Grossman (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1970; 1894)

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Gentile, John, Cast of One: One-Person Shows From the Chautauqua Platform to the Broadway Stage (University of Illinois Press, 1989) Hotchkiss, Jean Jewel, ‘Dramatic Readers, Past and Present: Personal Recollections of the Greatest Exponents of a Noble Art,’ Town and Country. (15 September 1906) Howitt, Mary, ‘The Miss Cushmans’, The People’s Journal, 2 (18 July 1846) Hutton, Laurence, Curiosities of the American Stage) New York: Harper and Brothers, 1891) Johnston, Patricia, Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) Lalvani, Suren, Photography, Vision, and the Production of Modern Bodies (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1996) McConachie, Bruce A., Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820– 1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992) Merrill, Lisa, ‘Acting Like a Man: National Identity, Homoerotics, and Shakespearean Criticism in the Nineteenth Century American Press’ in Victorian Shakespeare, vol 1, ed., by Adrian Poole and Gail Marshall (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 82–98 —. When Romeo was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and her Circle of Female Spectators (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999) Schoch, Richard, Not Shakespeare: Bardolotry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) Stebbins, Emma, Charlotte Cushman: Her Letters and Memories of Her Life (Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1878) Taylor, Gary, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (London: Oxford University Press, 1989) Vining, Edward P., The Mystery of Hamlet: An Attempt to Solve an Old Problem (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1881) Winter, William, Brief Chronicles (New York: Dunlap Society, 1889; reprint Burt Franklin, 1970)

Index

Abbott, Gilbert 139 Alger, William Rounseville 137 Altick, Richard D. 59–60, 62 amalgamating drawings 176 Anderton, Sarah 151 Asleson, Robyn 56, 135 Ball, T. W. 141 Barnum, Phineas T. 142 Barrett, Lawrence 165, 172 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Aurora Leigh 64–5 Bartlett, John 62 Bellows, Horace 158–9, 160 Bolton, Fanny 108 Booth, Alison 12 Booth, Edwin 153, 154, 157–8, 163 Booth, John Wilkes 162–3 Booth, Mary Devlin 154, 155 Booth, Michael 156 Bowdler, Henrietta 69 Braham, John 108 Brown, John Russell 151 Browning, Robert 110 Bryant, William Cullen 166–7 Bunn, Alfred 106, 112 Butler, Pierce 104–5, 170 Carlyle, Jane 18, 160–1 Cavendish, Margaret 68 Clapp, H.A. 168 Clarke, John Sleeper 157 Cole, J. W. 142 Coleman, John 150 Collier, John Payne 61 Combe, Cecelia Siddons 144 Combe, George 144 concentrated nation 137

Cooper, James Fenimore 126 Covent Garden 95–7, 99, 101, 107, 109, 112, 119, 140 Cowden Clarke, Charles 59, 71–2, 84–6, 89 Cowden Clarke, Mary 58 Richard D. Altick’s comments on 59–60 approach towards male predecessors 69 and Robert Balmanno 86, 87 bibliographic data 58 and Charles Cowden Clarke 59, 71–2, 84–6, 89 Complete Works 60, 61 contemporary femininity 81–2 contribution to Shakespeare’s scholarship 60–1 contribution to Shakespeariana 60, 80, 88 contribution to Sharpe’s London Magazine 60, 68 and Charles Dickens 76–8, 79, 80 and Annie Fields 88–9 and Furnesses 64, 88 George C. Gross’s comments on 66–7 on girls’ schooling 64–5 isolation from professionalized scholarly world 90 justifying Shakespeare’s actions/ characterisations 69–70, 73 and Lambs 88 participation in The Merry Wives of Windsor 76 performer 78–80 prejudice 70–2 proto-feminism 73–4

200

Index

Cowden Clarke, Mary (Cont’d) sonnets 74–6, 85 Shakespearean characters Cleopatra 68–9 Hermione 74 Juliet 65, 84 Lucretia 68 Ophelia 84 Perdita 74 Portia 65, 83 Virgilia 74 works Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare 71 Centennial Biographical Sketch 85 Concordance 60, 61–2, 72, 89–90 The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines 60, 62–3, 66, 90 The Girls’ Own Paper 60, 82–4 Great Expectations 80 Honey from the Weed 74 The Ladies’ Companion 59, 60, 67–8 Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare 58 Letters to an Enthusiast 60, 86–7 The Life and Labours of Vincent Novello 60 My Long Life 58, 60, 61, 89 Recollections of Writers 60, 76, 84 Shakespeare’s Works, Edited, with a Scrupulous Revision of the Text 69, 73 A Score of Sonnets to One Object 74 The Shakespeare Key 60, 72, 73–4, 90 World-Noted Women 60, 68 Craik, Dinah Mulock A Woman’s Thoughts About Women 134 Craven, Augustus 102 Crow, Emma 152, 153, 162 Cushman, Charlotte and Sarah Anderton 151 and Horace Bellows’ comments on 158–9, 160 and Edwin Booth 153, 154, 157–8, 163 and John Wilkes Booth 162–3

in Britain 140–6 William Cullen Bryant’s comments on 166–7 letter to Jane Carlyle 160–1 and Combes 144 and Emma Crow 152, 153, 162 dressing 150–6 George T. Ferris’ comments on 171–2 and George Fletcher 143–4, 146, 149 and Thomas Colley Grattan 139 and Matilda Hays 151 and Mary Howitt 145 iconic status 146–52 identity as an American 136–7 and Frances Anne Kemble 137–9 and Sallie Mercer 157 portraying male characters 141, 144–6, 155–6 power struggle 158–9 press critics 133–4, 148–9, 151–2 Queen Victoria comments on 149 performance in As You Like It 140 in Fazio 140 in Guy Mannering 140 as Hamlet 152–6 as Lady Macbeth 164–5 in Much Ado about Nothing 140 in Othello 140 as Queen Katherine 173 as Romeo 141, 144, 145–6, 147–8, 151–2 reaction to Lincoln’s assassination 162–3 reading Shakespeare 169–79 retirement 164–9 ‘self fashioning’ of public persona 135–6 and William Seward 161 Staffordshire figurines 146–7, 149 and Emma Stebbins 172 Richard Henry Stoddard’s poetic tribute to 166 during U.S. civil war 156–64

Index letter to Benjamin Webster 141 William Winter’s comments on 179 Cushman, Ned 161–2 Cushman, Susan 9, 134, 141, 144, 145, 151 Miss Davenport 122 Dickens, Charles 76–8, 79, 80, 142, 170 Doane, Mary Ann 178 Drury Lane 94–5, 101, 109, 111, 112, 123, 128, 140 Ebers, John 122 Eliot, George 39, 40 Middlemarch 39 Ellesmere, Lord Hernani 107–8 Ellis, Sarah Stickney 51 Women of England 23, 54 Faucit, Helena 68, 70, 110 On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters 70 Ferris, George T. 171–2, 174–5 Fields, Annie 85, 88 Fletcher, George 143–4, 146, 149 Studies of Shakespeare 144 Forrest, Edwin 140, 153, 154, 176 Foster, George 164 Furnas, J. C. 125 Furness, Helen Kate 64, 88 Concordance to Shakespeare’s Poems 62 Furness, Horace Howard 62, 64, 88 Garrick, David 94, 141 Gentile, John 169 Gillies, Margaret 134, 145, 178 Glyn, Isobella 122 Grattan, Thomas Colley 139 Green-Lewis, Jennifer 174 Griffiths, Trevor 129 Gross, George C. 66–7 Hallé, Charles 130 Halpin, Rev. N. J. 62 The Dramatic Unities of Shakespeare 62

201

Hankey, Julie 27, 28 Hathaway, Anne 69 Hays, Matilda 151 Hayter, John 15 Hazlitt, William 94, 128 Hehl, Mary Sabilla 58 Hoeckley, Cheri Larsen 66 Holcroft, Thomas 96 Hotchkiss, Jean Jewel 172–3 Howitt, Mary 145 Jaffee, Audrey 149 James, Henry 126–7, 129–30 Jameson, Anna on affection 43–5 all-female press creation 18 attractiveness of heroines 41 bibliographic data 17–18 biography on Sarah Siddons 11, 15, 55–7 and Jane Carlyle 18 Christian education structure 36 on circumstances 42–3, 45–6 contributions to the Athenaeum 12 contributions to the Langham Place Circle 33 contributions to The Married Women’s Property Committee 33–4 on convents 36–8, 46, 47 as critic 15, 30 on destructiveness of jealous/abusive husband 45–6 devotional and historical subjects, distinguishing 20 domestic ideology 24, 27–8, 31–2, 41 dramatical character and historical character, distinguishing 27 emphasis on female education 26, 34–5, 48–9 on female power 40 on female religious communities 46, 47–8 on female seclusion 46–8 feminist ideas 21–2, 24 gender ideology 24–5

202 Jameson, Anna (Cont’d) on historic characters 49–51 on history and fancy modes of writing 12–13 on imagination 41–2 imaginative passion 42 imagining dramatic creations as embodied 14 and Kemble family 15–16, 42, 56–7 marriage with Robert Jameson 17 Married Women’s Property Committee 18 on middle-class women 26–7 on monastic life 36 on passion 28–9, 41–2 pedagogical capacity 48–57 on power struggle 51–2 primacy of intellectual faculties 30, 34, 39–40 and Brian Waller Procter 17, 18 and Anne Skepper Procter 18 public opinion metaphor 31 separate spheres ideology 20–1 Society for the Promotion of the Employment of Women 18 on St. Theresa 38–9 on Victorian marriage law 33, 45–6 woman and dramatic character, distinguishing 13–15 women’s moral agency 31–2 Shakespearean characters Antony 52 Beatrice 13, 14 Cleopatra 24, 50, 51–3 Constance 55–6 Cordelia 44 Desdemona 37, 38, 43, 44 Hermione 43, 44, 46, 47 Imogen 43, 44 Isabella 24, 34–7, 38, 43, 48 Juliet 13, 41, 42 Lady Macbeth 14, 24, 56 Lady of Belmont 30 Octavia 53–5 Ophelia 37, 38, 42, 43

Index Portia 24, 30–5, 37 Rosalind 13 works Characteristics of Women: Moral, Poetical and Historical (Shakespeare’s Heroines) 11, 12, 16, 17, 19–20, 21, 36, 42, 51, 52, 57, 64 Communion of Labour 12, 24, 25 Court Beauties 12, 17 Diary of an Ennuyee 17 Legends of the Monastic Orders 12, 38–9 The Loves of the Poets 17 Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns 11, 50, 54 Memoirs of the Loves of the Poets 11 Sacred and Legendary Art 12, 18, 20 Sisters of Charity 12, 25 Victoria Regia 18 Visits and Sketches 15 Jerrold, Douglas 96 Johnston, Patricia 175 Kean, Charles 129, 142 Kean, Edmund 96 Kelly, Fanny 122 Kemble, Adelaide 15, 112 Kemble, Charles 95, 96, 112 Kemble, Frances Anne (Fanny) 15, 16, 42, 92 aristocracy 101, 104 audition 97–9 and Alfred Bunn 106 business engagement 121–6 and Pierce Butler 104–5 and Augustus Craven 102 and Charlotte Cushman 137–9 in Covent Garden 97, 99, 107 description of Kemble family acting style 114 and Henry James 126–7 and Anne Jameson 99 judgement on Macready’s acting 113–14 and Lord Lansdowne 123–4

Index letter to Lady Dacre 110 and William Charles Macready 96, 109, 111 and John Mitchell 122–3, 124, 129 as performer 93, 99–100, 114–15 in Hernani 107–8, 113 in Charles the Second 115 in John Bull 115 in The Hunchback 107, 111 press reviews 107, 115–17, 130–1 prominent place in high places 101 public reading 117–18 on Queen Katherine 102, 103 and Sir Walter Scott 103, 117 Shakespearean editing 127–8 Shakespearean reader 117–21, 125, 129–32, 170 stage career 97, 99–100, 105–6 on theatrical life 104, 106–7 Toryism 102, 103 on Wolsey 102–3 young life 96 works Notes on Some Plays of Shakespeare 102 Notes upon Some of Shakespeare’s Plays 93 Records of a Girlhood 93, 96–7, 102 Records of a Later Life 93 Kemble, J.P. 94 King, Thomas 94 Kingsley, Charles 46–7 Yeast 46 Knowles, Sheridan The Hunchback 107 Leigh, Romney 65–6 Lalvani, Suren 150 Leman, Walter 137 Levine, Lawrence 177 London theatres 109 Longfellow, Fanny 126 Macready, William Charles 96, 109, 111, 113, 137, 141–2 assault on Bunn 112

203

Married Women’s Property Committee 18, 33 Marshall, Gail 97 Marx, Eleanor 74 Mayhew, Henry London Labour and the London Poor 143 Mendelssohn, Felix 112, 117, 119, 128–9, 130–1 Milman, Henry Hart Fazio: or the Italian Wife 138, 140 Mitchell, John 122–3, 124, 129 Moriarty, Veronica 146–7 Murdoch, James 170 National Drama 109–10 Nesbit, Edith The Children’s Shakespeare 67 Noon, Thomas 110 North, Christopher 42 Novello, Sabilla 63 Novello, Vincent 58 Philip, John 94, 95, 96 phrenology texts 175 physiognomy text 175, 176 platform readings 169–72 Porter, Charlotte 90 Procter, Anne Skepper 18 Procter, Brian Waller 17 public reading 117–21 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 45 Richardson, William 15 Roach, Joseph 177 Ruskin, John 22–3, 51, 81 Sesame and Lilies 22–3 separate spheres 22–3 on Jameson 23 Sarony, Napolean 134, 136, 156, 169, 174, 176, 178 Saturday Review on Jameson 18–19 Schoch, Richard 143 Shylock; or the Merchant of Venice Perserved 143

204 Scott, Sir Walter 103, 117 in Guy Mannering 140 Seward, William 161 Shakespearean reading 117–21, 169–79 Sheridan, Richard 95 Siddons, Sarah 11, 15, 55–6, 94, 95, 96 Sim, Adelaide C. Gordon Phoebe’s Shakespeare, arranged for children 67 Staffordshire figurines 146–7 Stanfield, Clarkson 110 Stanton, M. O. 176 Stebbins, Emma 172

Index St James’s Theatre 107, 108, 113, 123, 125, 129, 130 Stoddard, Richard Henry 166 Tagg, John 178 Tate, Nahum 142 Trollope, Frances Ternan 161 Vestris, Lucia Elizabeth (Madame) 112, 114, 128–9 Vining, Edward The Mystery of Hamlet 156 Wells, Samuel 175–6 Winter, William 168, 179