making changes: victorians channeling shakespeare.

The nineteenth century was a time of expansion and development. It was also a time when poets and artists revived medieval and Renaissance ideals. They turned to Arthurian legends, tales of chivalry, and Renaissance masters for inspiration. There were even circles of Victorians who sought through spiritualism to revive ancient rituals and mysticism. In addition to all of these explorations of past cultural ideals and societies, the Victorians also turned to Shakespeare. Shakespeare's works never required a revival because they had never died out since the Elizabethan era, but the Victorians thought that they could raise the Bard to the level of success they thought he had desired during his own time. Because of the many artistic liberties the Victorians took with Shakespeare's work, and because of the ever-changing ideals and inventions of the nineteenth century, they created several interesting interpretations of Shakespeare's plays. The Victorians saw Shakespeare as a conduit for transmitting the new ideals of the upcoming twentieth century. They also saw him as a way to voice drastic changes in society and in the world. 

Through the actress Sarah Bernhardt, Victorian ideals on womanhood were explored and challenged. Because of Shakespeare's unorthodox gender roles in his works, Berhardt was able to channel male characters, her most famous role being that of Hamlet. This unconventional representation of actresses taking on the roles of male characters helped the society of the time see that women's roles inside and outside the home were changing, and that women were capable of all that men were capable of. Shakespeare's works helped promote the New Woman of the Victorian era, and aided in feminism at the turn of the twentieth century. 

Ellen Terry's passion for Shakespeare created a fan following through her many discourses and lectures of her beloved Bard. Terry had a romance with Shakespeare and his works, and encouraged others to have a similar relationship with him. Terry became so involved as a Shakespearean actress that she lived her parts, and got so deep into the characters and the stories that she knew she was serving her lover's cause by playing the parts of such strong female characters.

Charles Kean was a different sort of a Shakespearean actor. He not only played the most prime Shakespearean roles, but he produced the most spectacular of the Bard's plays by creating the scenery, and re-creating the history of the tales. Kean, as the actor-manager of the Princess's Theatre, supplemented Shakespeare's plays with all the missing historical facts that he felt Shakespeare left out due to time restraints. Kean felt that he was fulfilling Shakespeare's mission through this re-creation of history, and through his elaborate, and thoroughly produced, productions of the Elizabethan playwright. 


For the Victorians, Shakespeare proved to be the perfect way to express all the new ideals and the new directions that society was headed at the turn of the twentieth century.

pre-hub.

Over the past few weeks, I have had the chance to research how Shakespeare's works were received and adapted on the Victorian stage. This particular era holds a lot of interest for me as far as literature and art go, so I thought it would be worthwhile to research Shakespeare during the evolving time of the Victorian period.
There were several items of interest I found out while reading up on the actresses Ellen Terry and Sarah Bernhardt, and the actor/manager Charles Kean. I think that I will continue to research Shakespeare appropriations in the Victorian era as I hope to conclude that Shakespeare's works acted as a perfect conduit for the changing social structure as well as the Victorian values. Although I had initially hoped to focus on Victorian revival of ritualism through Shakespeare, I soon realized that I was falling flat with that particular route. So I will pick up where I left off last week with my research this upcoming weekend. I intend to focus on Shakespeare themes in Victorian art, as I think this will give me a good background on Victorian values.

miss terry.

As promised in my last post that was on the"new woman"of the Victorian era , I will be going over some things I found out this week about Ellen Terry, one of the famed Shakespearean actresses of the Victorian stage.

Ellen Terry, circa 1880.

Ellen Terry's first experience acting out Shakespeare on stage was when she was nine years old, playing that part of Mamillius from The Winter's Tale (victorianweb). Perhaps it was at that time, or even earlier, that Terry fell in love with the Bard, and she consistently, throughout her acting career, played many of Shakespeare's leading ladies. She began a life-long engagement with all things Shakespeare, and wrote about his works in letters and even presented many lectures on Shakespeare. In one of her letters to Henry Irving, an actor-manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, Terry states that

Shakespeare was the only man she had ever really loved. 'When I was about siteen or seventeen, and very unhappy, I foreswore the society of men...Yet I was lonley all the same. I wanted a sweetheart! I read everything I could get hold of about my beloved one. I lived with him in his plays.' (Marshall, 155)

But this "romance" with Shakespeare was not particular to Terry. Many women of the Victorian era used "images of domestic or sentimental attraction[...]in relation to Shakespeare (Marshall, 155)." This, in some ways, makes me think of the trouble that Jane Austin (and Stephenie Meyer, I suppose...) caused in setting too high of standards for men, so much that women wouldn't even look at a man if he was not a "Mr. Darcy," and, well, the Victorian men must've felt some sort of anguish that they couldn't be like the Bard in wooing women. But because of Terry's infatuation with Shakespeare, she was able to become a most sincere and engaging Shakespearean actress: it was as if it was her duty and obligation to show audiences how powerful Shakespeare wrote his female characters, and Terry did a bang-up job at that. Many reviewers responded quite favorably to Terry's role as Imogen in the 1896 production of Cymbeline:

Miss Terry plays the part with a radiance and a charm all her own, with a pathos and a grace of which she, among modern actresses, seems to possess the unique secret...It is long since we have seen such girlish abandon, such womanly tenderness [...]. Time seemed suddenly to be effaced, the years to roll back, and before us stood Miss Terry as young, as fragrant, and as bewitching as ever she was in the seventies. (Marshall, 156)