Through the Looking Glass

I've spent all weekend buried in a biography of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving (A Strange Eventful History, The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families by Michael Holroyd.) On impulse, I grabbed it off the library shelf without knowing much about who they were, though I'd vaguely heard of Ellen Terry. I knew she was a 19th century English actress. Henry Irving was her acting partner, sometimes lover and owner of the Lyceum Theater. They did Shakespeare, mostly, and portraits of famous historical figures like Beckett and Wolsey, interspersed with Victorian melodrama and comedy. Henry Irving was one for pageantry: luxurious stage sets and elaborate costumes that reflected the taste of the times. That taste was nostalgic for romantic visions of bygone days, Knights of the Round Table and so on. The public wanted their history mirrored back to them as heroic and noble, an England that deserved its empire. Irving's pageantry and dramatic sense gave them that. His productions were front-runners for the historical extravaganzas that came later in the films of Cecil B. De Mille and D.W.Griffith.

But oh, those two were a world-famous acting couple and they knew everybody that was anybody. Lewis Carroll, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Edwin Booth (famous American actor and brother of the infamous John Wilkes Booth), Dickens, Disraeli, Gladstone, The Prince of Wales, the painter John Singer Sargent, Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw wander in and out of their lives. (Bernard Shaw, who worshipped Ellen Terry for fifteen years through letters and detested her acting partner Henry Irving, seems particularly obnoxious.)  Bram Stoker worked for Irving for twenty years as his devoted dogsbody. He wanted Irving to produce Dracula on stage, but Irving refused. 

The couple had messed-up home lives, love affairs that didn't last and marriages that didn't work out. Henry Irving left his wife and more or less abandoned his children though he later took them under his wing. They became actors, like him, and carried on his theatrical tradition. Ellen Terry alternately ignored or smothered her children with mother love. Her daughter lived with her in a love-hate power struggle and later became a suffragette. Her son wandered all over Europe to get away from her. He had an affair (and a child) with Isadora Duncan and worked with Stanislavsky as a set designer in turn-of-the-century Russian experimental theater. The list of famous names changes with the generations: Lady Gregory, W. B. Yeats and Virginia Woolf make their appearances. John Gielgud, by the way, was the great-nephew of Ellen Terry.