00001.tif

PDF

Download

Open document

Transcript (if available)

Content THE THEATRE AS A SOCIAL INSTITUTION
A STUDY OF HARLEY GRANVILLE-BARKER'
THEORIES OF THEATRICAL ART
by
William Robert Kershner
A Dissertation Presented to the
.FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Communication-Drama)
December 1981
UMI Number: DP22931
All rights reserved
IN FO R M A TIO N TO ALL U SERS
The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted.
In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript
and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed,
a note will indicate the deletion.
Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author.
Dissertation P tbi shing
UMI DP22931
Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC.
All rights reserved. This work is protected against
unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code
ProQuest LLC.
789 East Eisenhower Parkway
P.O. Box 1346
Ann Arbor, Ml 4 8 1 0 6 - 1346
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
T H E G R A D U A T E S C H O O L.
U N IV E R S IT Y P A R K
L O S A N G E L E S , C A L IF O R N IA 9 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, written by
William R. Kershner
under the direction of h.i-.s... Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by The Graduate
School, in partial fulfillm ent of requirements of
the degree of
Ph>b,
t >
K 4 f
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
Dean
Decembe r 3, 1981
N /COMMITTEE
Chairman
DEDICATION
To Nancy
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are many people to whom I am indebted for
help on various phases of this work, especially Dr. Oscar
Brockett, who has helped to shape the study and has given
much valuable advice, Dr. Richard Toscan and Dr. Janet
Boltan who have helped me to refine what began as a series
of rather vague ideas.
I also wish to thank Virginia Renner,, of the Henry
E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California, for her
help in guiding me to some of Granville-Barker's letters;
Dr. Gerald Kahan, who has helped me to procure some books
and playbills; and to Virginia Carlson for typing a
difficult manuscript.
Most of all, I am indebted to my wife Nancy for
her constant support and her skill as editor and proof
reader .
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION............................................. ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...................................... iii
Chapter
I. INTRODUCTION ..................................... 1
Limitation of the S t u d y ..................... 4
Review of the Literature ..................... 4
Hypothesis ............................ 5
Definition of Terms .......................... 6
Statement of Purpose .......................... 7
Plan of the S t u d y ............................ 7
II. THE ESTABLISHED THEATRE IN EDWARDIAN ENGLAND . . 12
Organization of the Theatre................. 12
Actors and Theatres.......................... 15
Theatre and Society........................ 22
The Critics.................................. 24
The Dramatists................................ 27
Establishment and Progressive Theatre .... 32
III. THE PROGRESSIVE THEATRE........................ 36
Progressive Theatre Societies................. 41
Granville-Barker's Career ................... 49
Granville-Barker as Director ................ 60
Granville-Barker as a Writer ................ 87
IV. SCHEME FOR A NATIONAL THEATRE . . •............. 95
Scheme and Estimates for a National Theatre . 100
The Theatre— The Next P h a s e ....................126
iv
Chapter Page
The School of "The Only Possible Theatre" . 133
A National Theatre .......................... 143
V. GRANVILLE-BARKER'S DRAMATIC THEORY ............ 158
Acting...................................... 158
The Director................................ 166
The Exemplary Theatre ..................... 174
VI. SUMMARY, CONCLUSIONS, AND SUGGESTIONS
FOR FURTHER S T U D Y .......................... 190
Summary.................................... 190
Conclusions................................. 196
Suggestions for Further Study .............. 198
APPENDIX: THE HISTORY OF THE NATIONAL THEATRE
MOVEMENT FROM 1946
TO THE PRESENT D A Y ................... 200
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY................................ 206
V
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946) was an actor,
director, Shakespearean critic and theorist. He is perhaps
most famous for being the artistic director at the Court
Theatre during the 1904-1907 seasons, an enterprise which
established George Bernard Shaw as a major dramatist and
proved that there was an audience in England for
progressive dr^ma. His Shakespearean productions and his
series of prefaces to Shakespeare revolutionized
Shakespearean production in England.
His theoretical work, the subject of this study, is
the centerpiece of his life's work. It was his conviction
that the commercial theatre was detrimental to the art of
the theatre, because its major aim is to make the most
money with the least capital. He wanted a subsidized
theatre, the major goals of which would be high quality and
the good of society. Like Shaw, he was a Fabian, and he
was deeply committed to changing the existing structure of
society through socialism. It was his belief that the
1
theatre could be the central expression of its society,
both to itself and to others. A theatre which was
subsidized by the government would have this as its central
function to the great benefit of the theatre, the govern
ment, and the people. Granville-Barker made a strong
artistic contribution to the theatre, but the theatre is a
social institution as well as an art form, and he worked to
make an even stronger contribution to the way the
institution of the theatre is organized.
There are several reasons why this study is
significant. The first is that at the time his theoretical
work was written his theories had wide circulation among a
public that was interested in the theatre. Since he was
one of Britain's foremost actors and directors, his ideas
were taken very seriously. A second is that his view of
the theatre had much influence on professional theatre
people even after World War I when his stage work had
ended, notably Harcourt Williams and John Gielgud. Gielgud
Writes, in his autobiography Early Stages, that
"[Granville-Barker's] example was so powerful that I
unhesitatingly consider him the strongest influence I have
known in the theatre."^ This was not simply because of his
accomplishments as an actor and director, but also because
2
he considered the theatre to be a serious art form with
serious responsibilities, rather than a mere diversion.
This study is also significant because of the fact
that the National Theatre of Great Britain,’ when it finally
opened its doors in 1976, had come into being in great part
because of the persuasiveness of Granville-Barker’s
arguments. His published writings provided the plan for
the organization of this theatre, and the existence of such
a plan made it possible for the idea to gain public support.
Studies of Granville-Barker's work have up to now,
concentrated on his practical stage work, plays, and the
prefaces to Shakespeare, but his theoretical work may well
prove to be his deepest and most lasting contribution.
David Cheshire, after noting such theorists as Craig,
Appia, and Artaud, writes of Granville-Barker:
It may well be that his prefaces, his pleas for the
recognition of the theatre as an educational force, and
his arguments and concrete plans for a . national theatre
will mean that his influence on the British theatre at
least will be more profound than that of any of the
other theorists mentioned above.^
This study proposes to examine these pleas, arguments, and
plans.
Limitation of the Study
The study is limited to the published theoretical
writings of Harley Granville-Barker. He published three
books on the subject of the theatre's function in society:
3
A National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates (written in
collaboration with William Archer), The Exemplary Theatre,4
and A National Theatre.^ He also published three short
books on dramatic theory: The Study of Drama,0 On Dramatic
7 s
Method, and The Use of the Drama. Throughout his career
he contributed articles to journals, newspapers, and
magazines. Those most important to this study include:
9
"Notes Upon the Prize Design for a National Theatre," "The
School of 'The Only Possible Theatre',"10 "The Theatre:
The Next Phase,1,11 "Two German Theatres,"1^ "Notes on
Rehearsing a Play,"1" * and "A National Theatre,"14
Granville-Barker's plays, translations, Shakespear
ean criticism and stage work will be mentioned only to the
extent that they throw light on his theoretical work.
Review of the Literature
There is not a large body of scholarship dealing
specifically with the work of Granville-Barker. The most
4
important is C. B. Purdom's Harley Granville-Barker: A Man
15
of the Theatre, Dramatist and Scholar. It is valuable as
a biography and it sheds light on his work. Purdom saw him
act and saw many of the shows he directed and wrote. He had
access to Granville-Barker*s letters to Gilbert Murray,
many of which he includes in the book. Purdom has also
edited an important volume of letters, Bernard Shaw1s
Letters to Granville Barker.^ Marjorie Morgan is the
author of the only book-length study of Granville-Barker's
work as a playwright, A Drama of Political Man: A Study in
the Plays of Harley Granville-Barker.-*-^ It is a fine work
and has value to this study because it links his theory to
his practice as a playwright. Desmond MacCarthy, drama
critic for The Speaker, wrote an account of Granville-
Barker 's repertory seasons at the Court Theatre in The
1 f t
Court Theatre 1904-1907. This book is valuable
especially because it gives a contemporary evaluation of
Granville-Barker's work as a director.
Hypothesis
In this study it is hypothesized that Harley
Granville-Barker's ideas about the theatre's function in
society grew out of a general trend of rebellion and reform
5
that was characteristic of Edwardian society. It is
further hypothesized that his theory was central to the
rest of his work in the theatre, and important to the
subsequent development of British theatrical organization.
Definition of Terms
"Dramatic theory" is defined for the purposes of
this study as theoretical work on the art of the theatre,
including acting, directing, playwriting, and design.
The phrase "theatre as a social institution" is
used in this study to refer to his ideas on the subject of
the purpose and function of the theatre, as well as to how
the theatre might be organized to achieve these purposes.
"The Edwardian period" is defined for the purposes
of this study as the years 1890-1914. These dates are
chosen because they embrace Granville-Barker's active stage
career in Britain and because these years saw the emergence
of the movements and individuals most influential to his
outlook.
Harley Granville-Barker is the form of his name
used throughout this study. He was born Harley Granville
Barker and when he began his acting career he took the
6
stage name Granville Barker. After his second marriage in
1918 he adopted the hyphenated form used here.
Statement of Purpose
The purpose of this study is to examine in detail
Harley Granville-Barker's theoretical writings on the
theatre, both as an art form and a social institution. In
order to do this, the following secondary questions will be
answered:
1. What was the state of the British theatre
during the Edwardian period?
2. How was Granville-Barker associated with
reform movements in the theatre of this time?
3. What were Granville-Barker1s theories on the
theatre's function in society?
4. What were Granville-Barker's theories on the
art of the theatre?
5. What is the relationship between Granville-
Barker* s theoretical work and modern stage practice?
Plan of the Study
The remainder of this study consists of five
chapters, each addressed to one of the secondary questions.
7
Chapter II is a brief, general overview of the
conditions of the British theatre of the Edwardian period.
It is important as a context for Granville-Barker*s
theoretical work because his ideas were developed in
opposition to the established conditions of the theatre.
Chapter III discusses the various opposition or
"progressive" theatre movements with which Granville-Barker
was associated. These include the Independent Theatre, the
Stage Society, the Elizabethan Stage Society, the Court
seasons of 1904-1907, the repertory season at the Duke of
York's Theatre, and the Savoy Shakespeare productions of
1912-1914. It will also explore Granville-Barker1s
connection with the Fabian Society.
Chapter IV discusses the theoretical work of
Granville-Barker on the theatre as a social institution.
This includes both his specific proposals for the
organization and running of a national theatre as well as
his more abstract notion of an exemplary theatre.
Chapter V discusses Granville-Barker's dramatic
theory on aspects of theatrical art such as acting,
directing play writing, and design. The study then seeks to
find those ideas which form his aesthetic of theatrical
art.
8
Chapter VI summarizes the findings of the study
draws some conclusions, and suggests some areas for future
study.
Footnotes to Chapter I
-^-John Gielgud, Early Stages (New York: Taplinger
Publishing Co., 1974), pp. 183-184.
2 . . . .
David Cheshire, Theatre: History, Criticism and
Reference (London: Clive Bingley, 1967), p. 106.
William Archer and Harley Granville-Barker, Scheme
and Estimates for a National Theatre (New York: Duffield
and Co., 1908).
“ ^Harley Granville-Barker, The Exemplary Theatre
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1922).
c
Harley Granville-Barker, A National Theatre
(London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1930).
^Harley Granville-Barker, The Study of Drama
(Cambridge: At the University Press, 1934).
7
Harley Granville-Barker, On Dramatic Method
(London: 1931; rpt. New York: Hill and Wang, 1956).
O
Harley Granville-Barker, The Use of the Drama
(London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1946).
^Harley Granville-Barker, "Notes Upon the Prize
Design for a National Theatre," Drama, N.S., No. 40 (July
1924), pp. 229-233.
•^Harley Granville-Barker, "The School of 'The Only
Possible Theatre'," The Drama (May, June, July 1920).
■'"^'Harley Granville-Barker, , "The Theatre: The Next
Phase," The English Review V (April-July, 1910), pp.
631-648.
1 2
Harley Granville-Barker, "Two German Theatres,"
Fortnightly Review, N.S. LXXXIX (January 1911), pp. 60-70.
l^Harley Granville-Barker, "Notes on Rehearsing a
Play," Drama, I, No. 1 (July 1919), pp. 2-5.
10
■^Harley Granville-Barker, "A National Theatre,"
The Times, February 10, 1930, pp. 13-14, and February 11,
1930, pp. 15-16.
1 R
C. B. Purdom, Harley Granville-Barker: Man of
the Theatre, Dramatist and Scholar (London: Rockliff
Publishing Co„, 1955).
1 € s
C. B. Purdom, ed., Bernard Shaw's Letters to
Granville-Barker (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1957).
1 7
x Margery M. Morgan, A Drama of Political Man: A
Study in the Plays of Harley Granville-Barker (London:
Sidgwick and Jackson, 1961).
1 f t
Desmond MacCart'hy, The Court Theatre 1904-1907
(London; 1907; rpt. Stanley Weintraub ed., Coral Gables,
Florida: University of Miami Press, 1966).
11
CHAPTER II
THE ESTABLISHED THEATRE IN EDWARDIAN ENGLAND
Harley Granville-Barker associated himself early in
his career with progressive theatre movements. These
theatres were against the established system of actor-
managers, the long-run and shallow but commercial drama.
Opposition to the established theatre was the impetus of
these groups; they were especially opposed to the tendency
of commercial theatre to avoid plays which might offend any
segment of the audience. Bridges-Adams has written of
Granville-Barker, "He was the child of his age in the
theatre, quite as much as he was the father of the age that
followed."1 What follows is the system that Granville-
Barker spent his career trying to change.
Organization of the Theatre
The most important man in the Edwardian theatre was
the actor-manager. The actor-manager controlled nearly all
aspects of the operation. He rented the theatre, or in
some cases owned it. He paid the other actors a salary,
12
bought the rights to a play, cast the parts, directed the
action and collaborated with the scenic artists. He also
performed a part, usually, but not always, the leading
part. Each actor-manager tended to specialize in certain
types of roles that their audiences came to associate them
with. The most successful actor-managers had large and
loyal personal followings. The actor-manager needed no out
side financial backing because it was inexpensive to mount
and run a typical play. As long as the play could draw well
enough to fill half the house, it could pay for itself.
William Bridges-Adams, himself an actor-manager,
gives these figures for a typical drawing room comedy:
the average theatre had a potential revenue of about E>200
a night when full. Expenditures would include £>100 a week
for rent, £>100 a week, for advertising, and £>100 a week
would cover the salaries of the theatre staff and a small
orchestra. With £>800 a week revenue from half houses in
eight performances, a manager could cover the salaries of
the actors, his own salary, the author's percentage,
the lighting and heating bill and might have something
left over to recoup his production cost which would
2
usually be between £>100 and £>200. The manager could also
count on revenue from the bar, program sales, and the
13
cloakroom. Because of this, the actor-manager could keep a
partial success on long enough to rehearse another play
without losing much and with a genuine success he stood to
make quite a bit. An example of the profit that could be
made from a real success can be seen from His House in Order
commissioned by George Alexander from Arthur Wing Pinero.
It ran for 57 weeks and earned a net profit of £>23,000.
From the standpoint of the actor-managers and the
great majority of the public, the long-run system worked
very well. Risk was kept small so prices stayed low. At
the Criterion Theatre the most expensive seat was 10s_ 6d,
the least was only ls_ with a variety of prices in between.^
Once the popularity of a success had been exhausted
in London, the play could be toured lucratively in the
provinces or America. The desire to see London productions
was fed in large part by the creation of national news
papers which carried criticism of the plays and gossip of
the players. In the 1890's, provincial stock companies
began to disappear and London companies on tour became
common. The railway system was growing rapidly, making it
possible for the actor-manager to bring the same settings
and cast seen in London. Ideally, the actor-manager tried
to secure a long lease to one of the West End theatres so
14
that the public would identify the man with the theatre.
Not only did this relieve the actor-manager of having to
advertise to his public where they could go to see him, but
it lent respectability to the enterprise. The Lyceum was
as much the seat of English drama, as the Bank of England
was of English finance.
Actors and Theatres
Much of this new found respect for actors was due
to Henry Irving, who was actor-manager at the Lyceum from
1878-1898. Irving was the first actor to be knighted,
becoming Sir Henry in 1895; by 1914 it was common for the
major actors to receive this distinction. Until his death
in 1905, Irving was considered to be the foremost actor in
England. Irving was not as much an Edwardian actor-manager
as he was a Victorian "star" who happened to manage. As
Shaw wrote,
He composed his acting with extraordinary industry
and minuteness. . . . But he composed his parts not
only without the least consideration of the play as a
whole . . . but without any for the unfortunate actors
whom he employed to support him.5
Most of his productions were vehicles for his acting, which
was the real draw to the Lyceum. Irving mainly performed
melodramas, costume dramas and lavish productions of
15
Shakespeare. He rarely appeared in modern dress or parlor
comedy. Irving put most of his earnings back into the
theatre. He spent a great deal of money on the sets of his
Shakespearean productions, in an attempt to make them as
realistic as possible. This style of production, called
pictorial realism, reflected the assumptions widely held
that Shakespeare's theatre was crude and that the realistic
details were improvements made possible by superior theat
rical technology. The cost of these productions, though
maintaining the Lyceum's reputation, made it necessary for
Irving to tour the provinces and America regularly. In
1898, a fire caused him to give up managing the Lyceum, and
in 1902 he stopped producing any new plays, and took his
old roles on a series of tours. By the time of Irving's
death in 1905, the most prestigious theatre operation was
that of Beerbohm Tree. Tree was in many respects like
Irving. His reputation rested on romantic-realistic pro
ductions of Shakespeare and impressive acting in character
parts. But unlike Irving he experimented with all sorts of
drama. After the success of Trilby, in which he played
Svengali, Tree invested his profits in the building of a
new theatre which he named Her Majesty's Theatre (on
Edward's accession it was changed to His Majesty's Theatre).
16
After the opening of Her Majesty's Theatre, Tree never had
financial worries, so he experimented in a variety of ways
that the other actor-managers could not. Some critics
complained that he attempted roles beyond his talents out
of enthusiasm rather than an objective eye. In fact, he
genuinely enjoyed acting, often performing matinees of
different plays when he had a long running success playing
in the evening.
Tree continued Irving's tradition of presenting
Shakespeare in the style of pictorial realism. Audiences
thrilled to his lavish settings. For Antony and Cleopatra,
he recreated Cleopatra's barge according to Enobarbus's
description. In Richard II, he added a scene that is only
spoken of in the text because it had such pictorial possi
bilities (this is the procession of Richard into London).
The addition of scenes and the complexity of scene changes
added a great deal of time to the performances so that the
scripts were cut severely, and the scenes were often
rearranged so that there would be fewer changes. Tree
often produced plays in which he played only minor parts.
He was not the kind of "star" that Irving had been, and
did not confine his efforts to plays that had little value,
as Irving tended to. In addition to Shakespeare,
17
Tree produced plays by Jones and Pinero, and was also
Higgins in the first production of Shaw's Pygma1ion.
The third major actor-manager of the Edwardian
period was George Alexander. Throughout this period he
held the lease of the St. James's Theatre. Alexander was a
handsome leading man, the epitome of a gentleman. After an
apprenticeship at the Lyceum, Alexander played leading
roles in romantic costume drama and drawing room comedy; as
he got older he excelled as the raissoneur, the
sophisticated diplomatic gentleman who disentangles the
plot. Alexander was the main draw to the St. James. He
did not play character roles as Tree did, but was usually
an impeccably dressed English gentleman. A. E. Wilson, who
saw him act many times, describes him in this way:
Handsome Sir George was in all truth the glass of
fashion and the mould of form. He wore his clothes
with a grace and an air of distinction that delighted
his women admirers and caused despair among the men.
He was quite the best dressed actor on the stage.
Young men-about-town tried their best to copy his style
and fashions in tailoring.®
It was this aspect of Alexander, the gentleman's gentleman,
that made him the perfect actor for the drawing room
comedies of Pinero and it is for these that he is chiefly
remembered.
18
Charles Wyndham of the Criterion Theatre also
played the older but wiser raissoneur, although unlike
Alexander he first made, his name in farce.
Wyndham started out as a physician; as a young man
he enlisted as a surgeon in the Union Army during the
American Civil War. During this period, he twice resigned
his commission to act on the professional stage, once
appearing as Osric to John Wilkes Booth's Hamlet. From
1870-1873 he lead a group of English actors on an extended
American tour in the mid-West, calling themselves Wyndham's
Comedy Company. Through this tough apprenticeship he
emerged a good comedian. When he returned, he took the
lease of the Criterion Theatre; his good business sense
enabled him to erect Wyndham's Theatre in 1900, and the New
Theatre in 1903 while he still kept the lease of the
Criterion.^ As he grew older (he was 60 in 1897), Wyndham
turned increasingly from farce to the slower paced drawing
room comedies of Henry Arthur Jones. He produced five of
Jones's plays, three of them major successes; The Case of
Rebellious Susan, The Liar, and Mrs. Dane's Defence.
There were many other popular actor-managers in the
Edwardian theatre, though none were able to hold a lease
quite as long as Irving, Tree, Alexander, or Wyndham.
19
There was a large audience for romantic costume drama, or
g
"tushery" as it was sometimes called. The term tushery
comes from the language used in these plays; words like
"zounds," "egad," and "tush." These plays were romantic,
chivalric and always set in a period. Irving had
occasionally played romantic costume drama, The Lyons Mail,
for example, and Alexander sometimes abandoned his
perfectly pressed modern dress for plays like Old
Heidelberg, and there were many others who did little else.
The major actors of this genre include Lewis Waller, who
had his own fan club that showed up to the theatre wearing
buttons reading K.O.W. (for Keen On Waller); Fred Terry,
best known as the Scarlet Pimpernel; Martin Harvey, who
spent most of his career playing Sidney Carton in a stage
adaptation of Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities, and Johnston
Forbes-Robertson, who specialized in romantic versions of
Shakespeare.
After Alexander and Wyndham, the major actor of
drawing room comedy was Cyril Maude; Maude also starred in
the kinds of French farces that the critics deplored and
the public loved. Maude took over the lease of the
Haymarket in 1897. Wilson remembers the Haymarket under
Maude to be a theatre "to which you could take your maiden
20
aunt without a fear."9 Not the sort of statement which
would recommend it to the drama of ideas, but one which
certainly would have met with approval from most of
Edwardian society. H. B. Irving also occasionally did
drawing room comedy in the West End, though he made his
living primarily by touring his father's old roles in the
provinces to audiences that never seemed to tire of them.
Probably the most important play in which he acted was The
Admirable Crichton by J. M. Barrie about the reversal of
the servant master relationship. It was a daring play for
its time and most of the critics deplored it for showing
"how aristocrats debase themselves and their rank by
toadying to their servants.Even so, it was a great suc
cess and the audience apparently was in closer agreement
with Beerbohm's minority viewpoint: "I think The Admirable
Crichton is quite the best thing that has happened, in my
time, to the British stage.
Not all managers were actors, for instance Drury
Lane was managed by Arthur Collins. Under his management,
Drury Lane specialized in melodrama and pantomime, both
were large scale and spectacular. Each year one melodrama
and one pantomime were produced. Musical comedy too was
popular, in fact, in terms of length of run musical comedy
21
was consistently the most popular theatrical form of the
period.- 1 - 2 George Edwardes was the most successful manager
of musical comedy. The chorus of girls at his Gaiety
Theatre were famous for their beauty, and several of them
married into the aristocracy that began courting them at
the stage door. There was a great variety of theatrical
entertainment available, all of it popular and profitable,
but little of it aspired to anything other than entertain
ment.
Theatre and Society
In the nineteenth century, the middle and upper
classes returned to the theatre in large numbers. The most
successful actor-managers ran their theatres to appeal to
this audience. By taking long leases on one theatre they
created the impression that the theatre was their home, and
that going to the theatre was like paying a call on a
friend. After the audience had paid for their ticket, the
actor-manager was their host.
The theatre catered to the upward mobility of the
middle class; one did not have to be an aristocrat to be a
gentleman. In drawing room comedy, the lead actor was the
model of the gentleman. The style for gentlemanly behavior
and deportment was set in the theatre, even fashions for
22
the proper way to press one's trousers were set there.
Actresses popularized the current fashions in garments and
the sets were models for furnishing and arranging homes,
often they were designed by interior decorators. The plays
were full of characters with titles and generally servants
were necessary extra roles, not for dramatic purposes as
much as to establish the upper class setting. The feeling
of paying a call on a gentleman was enhanced for the
audience by the dressing of the ushers and usherettes in a
uniform similar to that of liveried servants.
Artistic reasons were sometimes given for the
emphasis on aristocratic life in drama. Pinero himself
felt that the drama was not as powerful unless it was about
the aristocracy. In an interview with William Archer in
1904, Pinero said:
I think you would find, if you tried to write
drama, not only that wealth and leisure are more
productive of dramatic complications than poverty and
hard work, but that if you want to get a certain order
of ideas expressed or questions discussed, you must go
pretty well up in the social scale. I assure you that
I have often tried to keep my characters down, as it
were, and found I could not.^-3
Dress was extremely important in attending the
theatre, for it denoted class. Evening dress was always
worn in the stalls and dress circle. Alexander is said to
23
have rebuked actors for wearing casual dress on the
streets, as they were to represent the St. James's Theatre
at all times.^
Perhaps the best organization was that of Tree's
theatre, His Majesty's. Tree always wanted the audience to
feel as if they were his guests. He always came before the
curtain when the play was over and gave a warm speech to
the audience. He eliminated some of the petty reminders
that this was a commercial operation? at His Majesty's
there were no charges for the program, and no advertise
ments in it, and there was no charge in the cloak room. At
His Majesty's Theatre it was possible to dislike the play
but still come away feeling that Tree was a wonderful man
who had done his best in an effort that you both regretted.
The Critics
The most noteworthy fact about the Edwardian
theatre was the slow change from an actor's theatre to the
author's theatre. The critics were instrumental in that
change. The critics were popular and had their own
followings. The Edwardians were very interested in reading
about the theatre, newspapers and periodicals devoted a lot
24
of space to reviews, and there were several periodicals
that covered nothing but the theatre.
The development of national newspapers in the
1890's extended the influence of the critic to the entire
nation. Critics such as William Archer, J. T. Grein, and
Bernard Shaw were aware of the new theatrical movements on
the continent and tried very hard to educate their readers
and to instill a desire for a more challenging drama.
William Archer, primarily the drama critic of the
World, was perhaps the most respected of the Edwardian
drama critics. Archer was in the habit of writing very
long and erudite treatises that explored a new play for its
literary merits. Archer was the first person to translate
the plays of Henrik Ibsen into English and helped Shaw to
secure his first job as a music critic. One of Archer's
great dreams was the establishment of a national theatre; a
dream that he passed on to Granville-Barker.
J. T. Grein was a naturalized English citizen born
in Holland who was drama critic for Life from 1889 to
1893. He was also the drama critic for the Sunday Times
until 1918 and contributed reviews and articles to the
Illustrated London News as well. Like Archer, Grein was a
great admirer of Ibsen, and like Shaw, he disliked the
25
imitations of French farce which were so popular. Shaw's
remark that such a play is Sardoodledura is famous, but
Grein had a word for them as well. He called them
1 s
"sardines.
Bernard Shaw began writing dramatic criticism in
1895 for the Saturday Review and continued until 1898. In
that short time, his effect on dramatic criticism was
tremendous. When he began writing reviews, he already had a
reputation as a speaker on social issues and an author of
unproduceable but interesting plays. Perhaps more than
anyone else, Shaw helped to change the expectations of the
theatre-going public by taking aim at the two most sacred
theatrical figures— Shakespeare and Irving.
Max Beerbohm, who succeeded Shaw at the Saturday
Review in 1898 was the most popular critic. Although he
was just as committed to the raising of artistic standards
as Archer, Grein, and Shaw, Beerbohm's writing style was
not as stuffy as Archer's or as judgemental as Shaw's.
There were many other drama critics, the most
important include A. B. Walkley of the Times, W. L.
Courtney of the Daily Telegraph, E. F. Spence of the
Westminster Gazette, E. A. Baughan of the Daily News, and
Desmond MacCarthy of The Speaker. The amount of coverage
26
that the theatre received in the various periodicals was a
tremendous asset to the theatre managers even when the
reviews were poor. Consequently the actor-managers stayed,
for the most part, on good terms with the critics. Hugh
Hunt believes that the managers of the Edwardian period
were not as good actors as their Victorian predecessors;
that they were unable to "transform indifferent dramatic
material into a histrionic work of art" as Irving could,
partly because they could depend on heavy promotion to
bring in audiences. It is true that the Edwardian critics
began paying more attention to the play rather than the
acting and this interest gradually transferred itself to the
general public.
The Dramatists
In the 1890's, the status of the dramatist was also
rising. In part, this was because the dramatists began to
publish their plays. In this way, they could create
characters and situations without having to submit to the
demands of specific actors and could present their own
artistic vision in front of the public rather than the
actor-manager1s. Publication became possible because in
1887 the International Copyright agreement was reached
27
protecting the author from unauthorized productions in most
of Europe, and in 1891 the American Copyright Bill was
passed. After this time, publication became common both
for plays which had had successful London runs, and for
plays which were not produced.
Publishing a play was important if the playwright
was interested in dealing with social change, because there
was little interest either on the part of the audience or
the profession in such plays, the exhortations of Archer,
Grein, and Shaw notwithstanding.
By the end of the Edwardian period, the dramatist
was beginning to be considered the primary artist in the
theatre and several were more of a draw at the box-office
than the actors. Their status raised, some were being
granted greater say in productions of their work. Pinero
was always present at rehearsals and would not allow the
slightest cutting or changing of the script and Shaw cast
and directed his plays himself.
The plays of Ibsen were never popular during the
Edwardian period but the influence of Ibsen was felt
indirectly in the work of Pinero and Jones.
Arthur Wing Pinero was the master of drawing room
comedy. Most of his plays were written for Alexander at
the St. James Theatre. They were set for the most part in
drawing rooms, played by actors in very correct clothes who
spoke their lines with perfect upper class diction. Pinero
shocked, but only within the limits of contemporary
standards. He used the immensely popular fallen woman
character from melodrama but made her an individual, not a
type. The Second Mrs. Tanqueray shocked the public in 1893
(George Alexander and Mrs. Patrick Campbell) and they loved
it. Paula Tanqueray could not be dismissed as easily by a
righteous society. Trelawney of the Wells and The Gay Lord
Quex followed, both very successful.
Pinero's most famous play was His House in Order
(1906); it was a perfect vehicle for George Alexander.
This play capped the careers of both Pinero and Alexander.
These plays do not seem in the least shocking now
and they were shocking but safe even then. Still, they led
the audience slowly toward Ibsen and Shaw.
Henry Arthur Jones began as a writer of melodrama
and his later plays still show that influence. He did not
start out as the strong upholder of the moral code until
after Wyndham refused to produce Jones's first draft of
The Case of Rebellious Susan because Lady Susan's adultery
went unpunished. They compromised on an ambiguous ending
29
but after that, "Jones embraced Victorian convention with
17
the fervor of a convert." Probably his greatest triumph
was Mrs. Dane's Defence (1900) with its third act cross-
examination of Mrs. Dane by Sir Daniel Ridgeway, the
raissoneur part played by Wyndham. The suspense and
dramatic tension of that cross-examination made the show a
runaway success for Wyndham and Jones.
Unlike Pinero, Jones never followed up his success
ful trailblazing in the 90's although he wrote fourteen
plays after 1900. He prided himself on being an
intellectual and a playwright of ideas, but Wilson felt
that "he was not a thinker of very great profundity or
originality, and with his conservative outlook he failed to
keep abreast of the times and the vast social changes
18
around him." Still, it was in plays such as Mrs. Dane's
Defence that helped to make the stronger drama of ideas
more palatable to a public that was consistently hostile to
Ibsen and Chekhov.
The most important playwright of this period was
George Bernard Shaw. Before the Vedrenne-Barker season at
the Court Theatre established him as a successful play
wright, he was already a well known public figure. He was
well known as a music and dramatic critic, an apostle of
30
Ibsen and Wagner, a pamphleteer, and a fiery speaker for
socialist causes. His battle of words against Irving was a
symbol for the drama of ideas fighting for space on a stage
devoted mostly to pure entertainment. The Vedrenne-Barker
seasons established him as a playwright whose work was
commercial and ideas exciting. His most famous plays of
this period are Candida, Arms and the Man, Man and
Superman, Captain Brassbound's Conversion, Mrs. Warren1s
Profession, Misalliance, Major Barbara, and Pygmalion.
Most of his plays strike a modern reader as far
ahead of their time; he created strong women's roles, wrote
without any class snobbery and stressed characters that
thought for themselves in spite of society's views. Shaw
was critical of his society, but he was an optimistic man
who believed that things could and would change.
J. M. Barrie's range exceeded that of the other
*
playwrights of the period. In the 1890's, his work was
undistinguished, consisting mostly of little drawing room
comedies of no particular account. Then as the century
opened, he wrote The Wedding Guest (1900) which was a drama
about the woman with a past along the lines of Paula
Tanqueray or Mrs. Dane. This was followed by Quality
Street (1902), a romantic comedy; The Admirable Crichton
31
(1902), a social satire; Peter Pan (1904), a children's
fantasy that never seems to lose its appeal to audiences;
Alice Sit by the Fire (1905); and What Every Woman Knows, a
comedy.
The most important of these is The Admirable
Crichton, in which Barrie explores the class system. In
this play the roles of servant and master are reversed by
virtue of a ship wreck. The butler, Crichton, emerges as
the dominant figure. When they are rescued, they all
revert back to their previous station. Barrie called it a
fantasy, but with the Labour Party on the verge of
achieving power (in 1906, Labour led Parliament for the
first time) others may have seen it as a nightmare. At any
rate, Grein was not amused. "Liberty, equality, fraternity
are all very well, but there is a limit. And I for one do
not relish the fantasy of an earl's daughter hero-
19
worshipping the butler!" Perhaps Grein was getting a
little behind the times himself, for the play was a great
success and had a long run.
Establishment and Progressive Theatre
The Edwardian period was characterized by strong
established, set institutions and impassioned, idealistic
32
people who wanted very much to change those institutions.
From the vantage point of history, the Edwardian theatre
appears to be a long, drawn out war between the partisans
of "progressive theatre" and those of the "establishment
theatre," but by the end of the period that war was won by
no side, instead the establishment simply made room for
some of the rebels.
Footnotes to Chapter II
^w[illiam] Bridges-Adams , A Bridges-Adams
Letterbook. Robert Speaight, ed. (London: The Society for
Theatre Research, 1971), p. 38.
^w[illiam] Bridges-Adams, "Theatre", in The
Victorians, ed. Simon Nowell-Smith (London: Oxford
University Press, 1964), pp. 370-373.
^Bridges-Adams, "Theatre", p. 383.
^J. C. Trewin, The Edwardian Theatre (Totowa, New
Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1976), p. 9.
5
George Bernard Shaw, "Preface", in Ellen Terry
and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence, ed. Christopher St.
John (London: Max Reinhardt, 1946), p. xxvii.
A. E. Wilson, Edwardian Theatre (London: Arthur
Barker Ltd., 1951), p. 86.
7
George Rowell, "Wyndham of Wyndan's", m The
Theatrical Manager in England and America., ed. Joseph
Donahue (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971),
pp. 192-196. This gives an interesting account of
Wyndham*s experiences in America.
®Bridges-Adams, "Theatre", p. 385.
^Wilson, p. 97.
^J. T. Grein, Dramatic Criticism: 1902-1903
(London: 1904? reprint ed., New York: Benjamin Blom,
1904), p. 180.
■^Max Beerbohm, Around Theatres (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1954), p. 231. Reprinted from the Saturday
Review, November 15, 1902.
34
■ L2A list provided by Trewin, The Edwardian
Theatre, pp. 155-160, shows that of forty-nine productions
which had performances of three hundred fifty or more,
twenty-two were musicals, six were variety shows, three
were translations of French farce, and one was a melo
drama. Only ten were original comedies and seven were
original dramas.
■^Trewin, p. 31.
14
Trewxn, p. 43.
^Grein, p. 34.
16
Hugh Hunt, "The Social and Literary Context", in
The 'Revels' History of Drama in English, ed. T. W. Craik
(London: Methuen and Co., 1978), p. 19.
■^Rowell, "Wyndham of Wyndham's", p. 205.
I O
Wilson, p. 136.
19
Grein, p. 181.
35
CHAPTER III
THE PROGRESSIVE THEATRE
J. W. Marriott wrote, "The most adventurous epoch
of recent theatrical history is comprised into the life of
one man."'*' That man was Harley Granville-Barker. This
was an exciting period for the theatre, the last years of
the 1890's until the beginning of World War I. These
years saw the emergence of George Bernard Shaw as a play
wright, the grudging acceptance of continental playwrights
such as Ibsen and Chekhov, the development of a new school
of socially conscious drama in England, the development of
the director (called "producer" in Britain) as the man in
charge of all production details, the abandonment of
pictorial realism in favor of a free stage, and the
beginnings of the repertory movement which sought to treat
drama seriously as works of art rather than a commercial
enterprise designed solely to enterta Unhand make money.
Granville-Barker was director involved in each of these
developments.
36
England during the Edwardian age was characterized
by two outlooks. One was national insularity; the dis
trust of all things foreign and the glorification of the
Empire and its traditional social institutions. This was
by far the most commonly held view. In the theatre, this
viewpoint meant strong support for the established
theatres and top actor-managers along with an antipathy to
any changes, especially if the changes were foreign in
origin.
In the 1890's, feeling slowly began to build among
a small minority for the second outlook, reform of those
institutions. Although there were not as many people who
wished to reform, they believed in the cause of reform with
passion. J. B. Priestly notes that these two outlooks were
strongest in the middle class. "It is this class that
produces the ideas, and it is this class that denounces
them, with the upper and lower classes staying largely
2
apathetic."
This is also the contention of Samuel Hynes, who
makes the point that while the Edwardian period is often
thought of as a long peaceful period just before World War
I, it was actually characterized by this gradual
polarization of the middle classes. "The Edwardian period
37
was a time of undifferentiated rebellion, when many-
rebellious minds seem to have regarded all new ideas as
n . j
adaptable, if only they were contrary to the old order.-3
This made for some strange bedfellows. Many reform groups
found themselves working in alliance with each other when
the only thing that they had in common was that they
disliked the old order.
There was also a connection between the expansion
of the British Empire, which was at its height, and the
tendency toward national insularity. "As the British
Empire expanded, England withdrew from political and
cultural contact with other European nations."^ This
insularity was certainly true of the theatre. England had
at that time many accomplished actors, a large number of
theatres and an extremely enthusiastic audience who loved
to go to the theatre and who loved to talk and write about
it, but at the same time there was practically no interest
in the new artistic movements coming from the rest of
Europe.
This insularity was not limited to drama. For
instance, in the 1890's, it was not possible in London to
buy a translation of Zola's La Terre, Dostoevski's The
Idiot, or The Possessed or The Brothers Karamozov, nor was
38
it possible to see any of the French Impressionist
paintings. "The new thoughts of Europe had been kept out
of England, as if by quarantine."
Those few who were interested in change were well
organized, and often became associated with political
reform groups. The major liberating movement of the
Edwardian period in politics and in social theory was
socialism. Under the banner of socialism, almost every
progressive and reform movement could be found. The most
important group of socialists, both in the society at
large and to the theatre, was the Fabian Society.
The Fabian Society was a very eclectic group, held
together by little more than its leadership of George
Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb. Its success was partly
attributable to its policy of avoiding particular stands.
This helped it to survive the infighting that such groups
are prone to, so that all those interested in reform could
make common cause. As Priestly notes, "It offered a plat
form to anyone against the existing system.The Fabian
Society had decided early in its formation that it would
not come up with manifestos or specific programs as they
felt that in a movement of intellectuals this tends to
fragment the society. Because the society as a whole did
39
not advocate specific programs, other than the general one
of promoting socialism, most of its publications and
pamphlets were signed by the individual member who wrote
them; it was understood that it represented only the
opinion of the writer and that it was not to be construed
that the entire society was in full agreement. The Fabian
Society was, therefore, a loose coalition of individuals,
not a political party. Priestly has described them as
"what might be considered now a research and pressure
group."7
Those who wished to reform the theatre were also a
diverse group. Certainly not all were enamored of
socialism or the drama of ideas, but they did agree that
the theatre is more than a business, it is an art form.
Edward Gordon Craig was not concerned at all with the
theatre as a means of political reform. He and his
followers took as their main concern that the theatre
should be a place of beauty and imagination, and his book
The Art of the Theatre.published in 1905, did a great deal
to popularize the concept of an art theatre as opposed to
the commercial theatre. Men like Shaw and Granville-
Barker saw the theatre as an instrument for social change.
They were less concerned with visual beauty and more
40
concerned with communicating ideas. To Granville-Barker
and Shaw, reforming the theatre meant reforming the drama
first and foremost, they believed that until a body of
drama has been created that deals with issues of social
import, there is. no art form at all. This drama was to be
judged, not by how many people went to see it, but by how
significant its ideas were.
What characterized the drama of the new century
was, indeed, the new moral fervor with which those who
were engaged in it were imbued. To them, the theatre
was much more than a place of entertainment. For this
conception, the plays of Ibsen, strongly assailed on
moral grounds, were directly responsible. Those who
attacked them, as well as those who defended them, did
so on moral principles. To those who admired them, the
theatre had become a school of morality.®
Ibsen showed that the theatre could be used as a place to
introduce moral issues in the modern theatre. Most of the
dramatists who wrote for the progressive theatre were from
outside the theatre. They were people who wanted to •
introduce these issues and were looking for a forum,
including Shaw, Galsworthy, Hankin, Masefield, and Murray.
Granville-Barker was the only exception.
Progressive Theatre Societies
The progressive theatre societies were private
organizations which produced plays at their meetings which
41
were generally held on Sunday evenings and Monday
afternoons so that professional actors could attend or
participate. Because these performances were not public,
plays banned by the Lord Chamberlin could be produced.
The first progressive theatre society was formed
in 1891 by J. T. Grein. Grein was a drama critic, and, as
a Dutch-born naturalized English citizen, he was familiar
with the radical work going on in Europe and he wanted to
expose English audiences to continental drama. So he
formed the Independent Theatre on the model of Antoine's
Theatre Libre (which had opened in 188 7).
Grein was able to finance this operation not
because there was demand for continental drama in England,
but because there was a demand for English drama on the
continent. He had translated some plays by Pinero and
Jones that were to be introduced in Amsterdam. Grein later
wrote:
So great was the success of these English plays in
Amsterdam, the managers of the Royal Subsidized
Theatre sent me a check for £>50 to be used in the
interest of art in England. At the same time, I had
received another cheque for E>30 for the translation of
an English play. With these gigantic sums, in the
wake of Antoine in Paris, I founded the Independent
Theatre.^
42
The Independent Thestre opened with a performance of
Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts at the Royalty Theatre in March 1891.
Although Grein had some defenders in the press, most
vilified Ghosts. In The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Shaw
reprints some of the attacks made on the Independent
Theatre production of Ghosts: "An open drain, a loathsome
sore unbandaged, a dirty act done publicly . . . literary
carrion," Daily Telegraph; "Unutterably offensive . . .
abominable piece," Standard? "Naked loathsomeness . . .
most dismal and repulsive production," Daily News,
"Revolting suggestive and blasphemous," Daily Chronicle?
and many more in the same vein.-*-^
Shaw saw in the uproar over Ibsen an opportunity to
spread his own philosophy. He revised a Fabian lecture
and published it as The Quintessence of Ibsenism in
October of 1891. For Shaw's purpose, it did not matter
whether the public was attracted to Ibsen's plays or not?
what did matter was that they were talked and written
about. "Shaw was using the interest in Ibsen to elaborate
his own philosophy, the similarity being sufficiently close
to carry off the substitution of anyone except Archer being
really aware of what he had done.
43
The second production of the Independent Theatre,
Zola's Therese Raquin, was attacked almost as virurently
as Ghosts, but Grein continued on. Not content with
producing continental experimental drama, Grein decided
next to find and produce a play by an unknown English
dramatist. Accordingly, in 1892, Widower's Houses by
George Bernard Shaw was presented. At this time, Shaw was
unknown. He had no connection with the theatre except a
friendship with William Archer. He had written five or
six novels that no one had published, had been delivering
street corner harangues on socialism for years, and had up
to then no thought of becoming a playwright. Shaw later
described the producing of his play in this way:
. . . . I proposed to Grein that he should boldly
announce a new play by me. Being an extraordinarily
sanguine and enterprising man, he took this step
without hesitation. I then raked out from my dustiest
pile of discarded and rejected manuscripts two acts of
a play I had begun in 1885, shortly after the close of
my novel writing period, in collaboration with my
friend William Archer.
. . . . Exhuming this as aforesaid seven years
later, I saw that the very qualities which made it
impossible for ordinary commercial purposes in 1885
might be exactly those needed by the Independent
Theatre in 1892. So I completed it by a third act:
gave it the farfetched scriptural title of Widower's
Houses; and handed it over to Mr. Grein ,who launched it
at the public in the Royal Theatre with all its
original tomfooleries on its head. It made a sensation
out of all proportion to its merits or even its demerits
and I at once became infamous as a playwright.12
44
Considering the experiment a success, Shaw wrote The
Philanderers for the Independent Theatre, but it was never
performed. The Independent Theatre was always a marginal
enterprise financially, but Grein kept it going until 1897,
when after having produced twenty-six plays, it ended.
Its membership at its best was never more than one hundred
seventy-five.
The next progressive theatre movement to be
started was the Elizabethan Stage Society formed by
William Poel in 1895. Its goal was not to found a new
drama, but instead to restore an old. Poel felt that
Shakespeare's plays performed better and made a greater
impact when they were performed as closely as possible to
the conditions of the time in which they were written. He
felt that pictorial realism, with its opulant sets and
restructured acts put the emphasis on the setting and the
spectacle instead of the acting and the poetry. Poel
wanted to abolish the procenium. He wanted to have the
verse spoken quickly and lively, he wanted continuous
13
action and he wanted the freedom of the open stage.
Poel first tried out these ideas in 1881 when he
performed Hamlet with no scenery and no breaks in the
action. In 1893 he converted the stage of the Royalty
45
Theatre in Soho to resemble an Elizabethan stage and he
performed Measure for Measure there. The success of this
play enabled Poel to form the Elizabethan Stage Society,
which remained under his personal direction for over 25
years.
The Elizabethan Stage Society did not confine
themselves simply to performing Shakespeare. By 1919 they
had performed forty plays, only twelve of which were
Shakespeare's. Their other credits included the medieval
morality play Everyman, Calderone's Life is a Dream,
Kalidasa's Sakuntala, and the Bacchae and Alcestis by
Euripides.
The most influential of the progressive theatre
societies was the Stage Society. The Stage Society was
formed in 1899 when Frederick Whelan sent a letter to 150
people that he knew were interested in the drama. He
invited them to a meeting on July 19, 1899. Of those, 50
showed up and the Stage Society was born. From the
beginning, the Stage Society had strong connections to the
Fabian Society. There was no official link between the
two, but several of the founders were Fabians, including
Frederick Whelan, Bernard Shaw, Charles Charrington and
Janet Achurch. The first two plays produced by the Stage
46
Society were by Fabians, Shaw and Sidney Olivier. The
Stage Society's stated goals were very much in accord with
William Archer's idea of a national repertory theatre, an
idea which most Fabians supported. They’ were:
To promote and encourage Dramatic Art; to serve as
an Experimental Theatre; to provide such an
organization as shall be capable of dealing with any
opportunities that may present themselves or be
created, for the permanent establishment in London of
a Repertory Theatre; and to establish and undertake
the management and control of such a theatre.15
The Stage Society never did become the nucleus for
the national theatre company, but it did continue the same
kind of work the Independent Theatre had done. It produced
on Sunday evenings and Monday afternoons plays that were
good but were not considered to be commercial. The Stage
Society produced their plays simply, in costume but with
no scenery, usually in rented halls. Members, at first,
were limited to 300, although later it was increased until
1914 it reached 1,500. The plays were financed by the
•
dues of one pound each year and an entrance fee, charged
at each performance, which was another pound. The Stage
Society produced plays, often for the first time, of many
important British dramatists, including Shaw, Somerset
Maugham, St. John Hankin and Granville-Barker; it also
performed advanced drama from Russia, France, Germany,
Beligium, Italy and Norway. 47
At first, the Stage Society had intended to
produce its plays with amateurs, but they discovered that
there were a . number of young idealistic actors who were
willing to perform in Stage Society productions for free
because they believed in its goals and knew that it would
increase their reputation; one of these was Granville-
Barker. Bringing the new dramatists into contact with
theatre professionals was one of the most important
accomplishments of the Stage Society.
The success of the Stage Society encouraged a
number of new groups structured along the same lines. The
first was the New Century Theatre which was formed by
Archer in 1897, although no productions were done until
1904. It is probably best known for the productions which
Granville-Barker staged of Gilbert Murray's translations
of Hippolytus, The Troian Women, Electra, and Medea.
Granville-Barker also was associated with the Pioneers,
when, in 1908 he directed John Masefield's The Tragedy of
Nan. Another progressive theatre society, the Play
Actor's Society, was founded in May of 1907, with J. M.
Barrie as its first president. Its main concern was on
developing new dramatists, which they did with some
success. By 1931 they had produced 100 plays, 25 of which
48
had moved to the commercial theatres. Other progressive
theatre societies include the English Drama Society which
did three Chester cycle plays in 1906 and 1907, The New
Stage Club, noted for producing two Strindberg plays in
1906 and a host of others including: the Drama Society,
the Morality Play Society, The New Plays, the Ibsen Club,
the Adelphi Play Society and the Oncomer Society. In
1919 the British Drama League was founded to coordinate
the different groups. Geoffrey Whitworth was Secretary,
Lord Howard de Walden was President and Granville-Barker
became Chairman of :the Council. They stated their goals
in this way:
The League seeks to affiliate acting groups of
non-professionals and thus form channels of
intercommunication for advancing the drama as an art
and a social f o r c e .
The League listed over 400 dramatic clubs and societies,
clearly, the progressive drama had by then developed a
large following.
Granville-Barker*s Career
Harley Granville-Barker was born in 1877 to a
minor show business family. His mother mimicked bird
calls and recited poetry for a living and his father
49
managed his mother's tours. When Granville-Barker was old
enough, he also recited poetry and speeches from
Shakespeare. He had his first appearance in a play in the
spring of 1891 when he was 13 years old, and one year later
Granville-Barker made his London stage debut. For a time
he played in Lewis Waller's company, then he joined Ben
Greete's Shakespeare and Old English Comedy Company in
1895. He was at that time 17. Lillah McCarthy, who
later became his first wife, was also a member of that
c ompany.
Granville-Barker became an actor because he had to '
make his living at a young age. As he was brought up in a
theatrical family, this path was a natural one. However,
from the beginning he showed signs of wanting to be a
writer. The first play he is known to have written was
Comedy of Fools which he wrote in 1895 along with Bert
Thomas. This was submitted to various managers but it
was not taken. In 1896, also collaborating with Thomas,
he wrote The Family of the Oldroyds which was also never
produced. Meanwhile, Granville-Barker continued to scratch
out a living with small engagements in the commercial
theatre. In 1896 he joined Charles Hawtrey's company in
Under the Red Robe. And in a few years, he joined Mrs.
Patrick Campbell's company. 50
In 1899 Granville-Barker began to establish some
of the friendships that would transform his conceptions of
the theatre and lead him away from the established
theatre. In June, Mrs. Campbell's company performed
Carlyon Sahib by Gilbert Murray. The play was a failure,
but Granville-Barker became friends with Murray. Murray
introduced him to Archer and both men encouraged him to
continue writing. A few months later, Granville-Barker's
first play was produced in London, The Weather Hen. The
Weather Hen was also written in collaboration with Thomas,
and A. B. Walkley of the influential Times gave it a good J
i
review. St. John Hankin also favorably reviewed the play,
and he and Granville-Barker became friends.
In November, Granville-Barker was cast as Richard
II in a production by William Poel for the Elizabethan
Stage Society. Granville-Barker was greatly impressed
with Poel's methods of producing Shakespeare, especially
his emphasis on the poetry and the use of an open stage.
This production brought him to the attention of the
critics. Walkley reviewed his performance in this way:
A few months ago that oddly named piece, The
Weather Hen showed Mr. Granville Barker in the light of
a promising dramatist. Richard II proved him also to
51
be a well graced and intelligent actor, with gifts
especially fitting him for romantic d r a m a .17
Richard II was produced the same month as the
Stage Society's first production, Shaw's You Never Can
Tell, and Granville-Barker soon became involved in Stage
Society productions. Murray had introduced Granville-
Barker to Charles Charrington and Janet Achurch and they
introduced him to socialism. Charrington and Achurch had
a great deal to do with the early Stage Society
productions, Charrington as director and Achurch often
played the female leads. In February of 1900, Charrington
cast Granville-Barker in the Stage Society's third
production, Ibsen's The League of Youth. There was a
great difference between the Stage Society's productions
and those of the commercial theatre which Granville-Barker
had been used to, for the people involved in the Stage
Society felt that they were doing important work, making a
real contribution to society. Purdom writes:
Here in the Stage Society, he entered a circle of
enthusiasts after his own heart, for their interest in
the theatre was in its social significance: to them
the drama was an art of high social significance,
which is what Barker himself t h o u g h t .
Granville-Barker still had his living to earn, and
it was only the commercial theatre that paid actors, so
52
throughout the season of 1899-1900 he remained with Mrs.
Patrick Campbell's company, but he began to take an
increasingly active role in the Stage Society. In April of
1900 he directed three short plays for the Society:
Maeterlinck's Interior and The Death of Tintaqiles and
Fiona McCloud's House of Usna. In June he acted in their
production of Hauptmann's The Coming of Peace, and in July
he appeared in the Stage Society's production of Shaw's new
play, Candida. It seems strange that Shaw and Granville-
Barker had not met up to this time, as they had for the
last year been traveling in the same theatrical circles.
Shaw describes their meeting in this way:
Meanwhile, in looking about for an actor suitable
for the part of the poet in Candida at a Stage Society
performance, I had found my man in a very remarkable
person named Harley Granville-Barker.
He was at that time 23 years of age and had been
on the stage since he was fourteen. He had a strong
strain of Italian blood in him, and looked as if he
had stepped out of a picture by Benozzo Gozzoli. He
had a wide literary culture and a fastidiously
delicate taste in every branch of art. He could write
in a difficult and too precious but exquisitely fine
style. He was self-willed, restlessly industrious,
sober, and quite sane. He had Shakespeare and Dickens
at his finger-ends. Altogether the most distinguished
and incomparably the most cultivated person whom
circumstances had driven into the theatre at that time.
I saw him play in Hauptmann's Friedenfest and
immediately jumped at him for the poet in Candida.
His performance— a difficult one to cast— was, humanly
speaking, perfect.
53
Granville-Barker was a success in the part of
Marchbanks. Walkley praised his p e r f o r m a n c e ^ ® and even
more importantly, Shaw was impressed with him. In a letter
to William Archer on the 8th of July 1900, he wrote that
Granville-Barker "was the success of the piece. It was an
astonishing piece of luck to hit on him. He is a very
c l e v e r f e l l o w . " Six months later he mentioned in a 1
letter to Janet Achurch that "Barker was very good. We
must stick to Barker."
Granville-Barker was making a very important circle
of friends and gradually acquiring a reputation, but at
this point, he still had to make his money in the
commercial theatre. Beginning in August, he was engaged
for the production of English Nell. In December he was cast
by Shaw as Captain Kearney in Captain Brassbound's
Conversion, another Stage Society production.
In 1901 Granville-Barker quit performing in the
commercial theatre to develop his new interests. He
became very close to the Shaws and visited them regularly.
It was at this time that he joined the Fabian Society and
in July he was elected to the managing committee of the
Stage Society. He was also at work on a new play, The
Marrying of Ann Leete, which the Stage Society produced in
54
January of 1902, just a few weeks after they produced
Shaw's banned play, Mrs. Warren's Profession (Granville-
Barker played Frank).
Granville-Barker's work for the Stage Society
continued in 1903 when he directed Shaw's The Admirable
Bashville, the first time he had ever directed a play by
Shaw.
In August, Granville-Barker appeared once more in
a play directed by William Poel for the Elizabethan Stage
Society, this time as the lead in Marlowe's Edward II. He
then continued his work with the Stage Society in 1904 by
producing The Philanthropist by Brieux and Where There is
Nothing by Yeats. In May he directed Hippolytus in
Murray's translation from Euripedes for the New Century
Theatre and in April he directed Two Gentlemen of Verona
for J. H. Leigh. Granville-Barker made his engagement
conditional on being able to produce six matinees of
Candida at the same time. Shaw was luke-warm to the idea
though not against it, but Granville-Barker believed
firmly in the play and wanted to perform it to a larger
public than the Stage Society. The role of the poet
Marchbanks in Candida showed his acting ability to its
fullest advantage. Purdom believes that this role, along
55
with the Messenger in Hippolytus was the best of his
career, even though he still had most of his major roles
ahead of him, writing that "nothing he afterwards did
2 3
surpassed his playing in these two plays." The success
of the matinees of Candida enabled Granville-Barker to
lease the Court Theatre for the next three seasons? an
enterprise which was to establish Shaw as the major play
wright of the period and Granville-Barker as the foremost
director and actor of the progressive theatre.
For the next seven years, Granville-Barker and
Shaw were inextricably linked both personally and
professionally, Shaw having a strong, perhaps overwhelming
influence on his colleague and friend. Shaw was a
reformer first, and a writer of drama second. He described
himself as a playwright in this way:
I am not an ordinary dramatist in general
practice. I am a specialist in immoral and heretical
plays. My reputation has been gained by my persistent
struggle to force the public to reconsider its morals.
In particular, I regard much current morality as to
economic and sexual relations as disastrously wrong; I
regard certain doctrines of the Christian religion as
understood in England today with abhorrence. I write
plays with the deliberate object of converting the
nation to my opinions in these m a t t e r s . 24
Ashley Dukes writes that Shaw "stripped militarism of its
glamour, history of its pomp, sex of its romance, science
56
of its magic, and religion of its sorcery," and, of course,
that is exactly what he intended to do.
Granville-Barker and Shaw developed a close working
relationship and a strong friendship. Shaw was twenty-one
years older than Granville Barker, he was forty-eight in
1904 and Granville-Barker was twenty—seven. Both believed
strongly that the theatre was a force for social change.
When Granville-Barker was converted to socialism it was the
turning point in his life. "His whole attitude toward
theatre," writes Archibald Henderson, "underwent a change
l i n / *
that can be described as nothing less than revolutionary.^0
Once he had joined the Fabian Society in 1901, Granville-
Barker became a popular lecturer, in front of groups of all
kinds, usually speaking on social aspects of the theatre.
He became friends with Beatrice and Sidney Webb and
occasionally made up a dinner party at the Webb's house.
Granville-Barker was elected to the Executive
Committee of the Fabian Society on February 22, 1907, and
according to Edward Pease, the society's secretary and
historian "took a large share in the detailed work of the
Committees besides giving many lectures and assisting in
social functions. When Granville-Barker resigned from
The Executive in 1911, he did so at the same time as Shaw.
57
Although he was no longer active in the Fabian Society-
work, his resignation does not appear to indicate that he
had changed his political views, only that both he and
Shaw wanted to give opportunities for newer members to
serve on the Executive.
In keeping with his socialist views, Granville-
Barker was also active in the organization of the acting
profession. He was a member of the Actor's Association
which was formed in the '90's. In 1904, at the annual
meeting, he proposed that the Association should insist
that salaries be paid weekly on a basis of six
performances. Since Wednesday and Saturday often had
matinee performances scheduled, many actors had to perform
eight times a week. Granville-Barker proposed that actors
be paid one-sixth extra for each performance beyond the
sixth in one week. He also proposed that rehearsals
should be salaried, though less than performances and that
no actor should be hired for a speaking role, except
understudies, who was not a member of the Actor's
Association. His proposals were debated, but they were
not adopted.
In June of 1904, Granville-Barker was elected to
the Council of the Actor's Association. At this time his
58
position was compromised because he believed that managers
should be excluded from membership of the Actor's
Association and he was just about to enter into managing
the Court Theatre, so he did not try to push any reform
though.
However, in February of 1907, he was elected to
the council again, this time he ran on a reform ticket
which included a proposal for a fe2 a week minimum wage.
When he formally proposed that managers be excluded from
membership, the managers responded by quitting the
association, in an attempt to weaken it so much that it
would not be able to continue. Granville-Barker stayed in
the association until it had become stronger and then he
resigned on the basis that he was now management rather
than labor.
Granville-Barker's political views represented his
belief that the theatre was an industry that could be
profitably nationalized. He was associated all of his
life with the idea of a national theatre, which he felt
would be more efficient, of better quality, and of more
importance to the society than the commercial theatre.
Granville-Barker as Director
When Granville-Barker took over the Court Theatre
in 1904, his goal was to train an ensemble company in
repertory practice in preparation for the National
Theatre. In a letter to William Archer he wrote, "Without
a doubt, the National Theatre will come, so we ought to be
2o
getting . . . ready . . . for it when it does come." It
was Archer who had first given him the vision of a
national theatre. In 1900, the same year that Murray had
introduced him to Archer, they began collaborating on a
book that would outline the organization of such a theatre.
It was printed privately in 1904 and distributed mostly to
theatre professionals. In 1907, after the success of the
Court seasons had indicated some public support, it was
published as Scheme and Estimates for a National Theatre
for general circulation.
Basic to their idea of a National Theatre, as the
repertory concept. Archer defined his idea of a repertory
theatre in this way:
. . . . When-we speak of a repertory, we mean a
number of plays always ready for performance, with
nothing more than a "run-through" rehearsal, which,
therefore, can be, and are, acted in such alternation
that three, four, or five different plays may be given
in the course of a week. New plays are from time to
60
time added to the repertory, and those of them which
succeed may be performed fifty, seventy, a hundred
times, or even more, in the course of one season; but
no play is ever performed more than two or three times
in uninterrupted s u c c e s s i o n . 29
The repertory idea was not new, but what was new
was the idea of using repertory to circumvent the
necessity of attracting a mass audience, which they felt
lowers the quality of the play. They were interested in
doing plays for a . minority audience, a minority who was
interested in drama that dealt with significant social
ideas. They also felt that repertory was better for the
growth of the actor's art because in repertory he would be
able to perform many roles within a short time. Although
F. R. Benson presented a classical repertory at the
Lyceum during the season of 1899 to 1900, the first season
of new plays performed in repertory was Granville-Barker1s
venture at the Court Theatre which began in 1904.
The Court Theatre was to be no less than a full
dress rehearsal for the National Theatre;
Barker's principle passion, like that of many
young men with less staying power, was for the
uncommercial theatre, the National Theatre of the
future, and as early as 1903 he had made tentative
suggestions for a venture at the Court.30
The Court seasons were unlike anything else in the
commercial theatre at that time. Macqueen-Pope gives an
61
idea of how the Court seasons were thought of by the rest
of the professional actors and managers:
. . . . This was indeed a daring venture into the
conventional theatre of a conventional time. . . .
They were regarded as adventurous, which they were.
They were regarded as high-brow moderns, which, in a
sense, they were also. They were regarded as entirely
uncommercial and doomed to failure, and this they most
definitely were not.^l
The Court Theatre seasons were certainly success
ful. MacCarthy calls it "the most interesting chapter in
the history of the development of the contemporary English
32
drama." Wilson calls it "the most momentous event of
the period (and possibly . . . the most important
happening in the history of the modern British Theatre)." ^
The Royal Court Theatre was a small, rather run
down theatre far from the theatre district. It was built
in 1888 and was situated next to the Sloan Square Station
on the Underground. It seated 614, of which 206 were in
the stalls, 64 in the pit, 113 in the dress circle, 65 in
the upper circle, 150 in the gallery, and 16 could be
seated in its four private boxes. From 1904 to 1907,
Granville-Barker and Shaw made it the most talked about
theatre in London.
After the success of the Candida matinees in 1904,
Granville-Barker suggested a season of matinees to be
62
produced at the Court on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
J. E. Vedrenne, a theatrical business manager, and
Granville-Barker split the management duties, Vedrenne
took charge of the contracts and accounts and Granville-
Barker was in charge of the productions. The visual style
of the plays was to be the same as in the Stage Society,
with simple scenery, no emphasis on detail, but relying
instead on harmony and suggestion.
The first season opened in October of 1904 with
six matinees of Hippolytus, Granville-Barker both
directing the play and playing the part of the Messenger,
just as he had done in the Stage Society production. In
November, they produced their first new play, John Bull's
Other Island by Bernard Shaw,scheduled for six matinees
over two weeks. Shaw directed this play and Granville-
Barker played Keegan. The play was a great success. The
Prime Minister, A. J. Balfour, went to see it at Beatrice
Webb's invitation. He liked it so much that he came later
with Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman who was leader of the
opposition, came again with H. H. Asquith and came once
more by himself. After producing six matinees of
Aglavaine and Selysette by Maeterlinck, which were not
successful and lost money, they opened again with Candida.
63
This time Candida was such a success that they added two
extra matinees and performed it twice in the evening as
well.
The theatre then closed to remodel the heating
system and when it reopened on December 23, 1904, it
presented Prunella by Granville-Barker in collaboration
with Laurence Houseman. This play was a fantasy and they
were hoping to attract the Christmas pantomime audience,
but the play was not really for children and besides, they
had some pretty stiff competition; four days after the
opening of Prunella, J. M. Barrie's play Peter Pan
premiered.
In 1905, they presented John Bull's Other Island
for nine matinees. Interest was so keen in this play that
when they took it out of the bill, Edward VII ordered a
Command Performance of John Bull's Other Island. This was
important to the success of the enterprise, it conferred a
legitimacy on it beyond the Stage Society productions
which appealed to a narrow progressive audience. Shaw and
the Court were now fashionable among the aristocracy, the
middle class who went where the aristocracy went and the
lower classes who went to watch the aristocracy as much as
the play. With the Command Performance, Shaw and
64
Granville-Barker had arrived.
In April, Granville-Barker produced Gilbert M
Murray's translation of the Troian Women for six matinees
and in May they put John Bull's Other Island back into the
bill, this time for eighteen evening performances and
three matinee performances.
The enterprise was now on a sound financial
footing, so they engaged a stock company, each actor being
paid L3 a week. There were many fine actors in this
company, including LillahMcCarthy (who was to be Granville-
Barker's first wife).
On the first of May, Granville-Barker and Vedrenne
drew up a partnership contract which stated that each were
to contribute equally for capital and both were to draw
twenty pounds a week in anticipation of profit.
Granville-Barker also collected a fee each time he acted
in or directed a play.
After a revival of Shaw's You Never Can Tell.
performed for nine matinees, Candida was put in the
evening bill and Man and Superman was introduced in the
afternoon bill for twelve matinees. Man and Superman,
with Lillah as Ann Whitefield and Granville-Barker as John
Tanner, made up to look like a young Shaw was an
65
immediate hit, and remained one of the most popular Court
plays.
In September of 1905 the second season began with
John Bull playing in the evenings for six weeks. This
time Granville-Barker did not play Keegan. Instead, he
had cast his old mentor, William Poel in the part. This
was astute casting for it suited Poel very well and added
another- dimension of interest to the play. The matinees
resumed in September when The Return of the Prodigal by St.
John Hankin opened for six matinees and was followed by
Ibsen's The Wild Duck, both directed by Granville-Barker.
The financial success of the Court season's had
not changed his firm ideals. An entry from Beatrice
Webb's diary from about this time gives an idea of what
Granville-Barker and Shaw were like:
. . . . On Sunday afternoon G. B. S’ , and Granville-
Barker dropped in and spread out before us the
difficulties, hopes, the ridiculous aspects of the
really arduous efforts to create an intellectual
drama. Granville-Barker has suddenly filled out— he
looks even physically larger than a year ago— he has
grown extraordinarily in dignity and knowledge of
human nature. But he dislikes the absorption in mere
acting and longs to mix with persons actually in
affairs or intellectually producing.^4
It seems clear that Granville-Barker preferred not to act
whenever he could, although Shaw almost invariably
66
insisted that he take a part in his plays. Granville-
Barker was very serious about writing, and in spite of the
large amount of work involved in acting and directing at
the Court, he finished a new play, The Voysey Inheritance.
The season continued as Man and Superman was put into the
evening bill with Granville-Barker and Lillah McCarthy
again playing the lead roles, and beginning on November 11,
The Voysey Inheritance was given six matinee performances.
It was very successful with the critics, many of whom
classed him as one of the times foremost playwrights.^
His reputation has diminished through the years, but The
i
Voysey Inheritance is still his most popular play.
Max Beerbohm, who had on many occasions given his
opinion in the Saturday Review, that actors, or mimes as
he called them, were incapable of writing a good play,
wrote in his review:
Mssrs. Vedrenne and Barker have made no more signal
discovery than Mr. Barker's new play; and I hasten to
offer my congratulations. I have often inveighed
against the plays written by mimes, and have even
asserted that no mime could possibly write a good play.
Mr. Barker is an exceptional person, in whose presence
I bow, corrected. On him, somehow, the blight of the
theatre has not fallen. He has continued to keep him
self less interested in the theatre than in life. He
is not, and may never become, "one o' the boys." May
he ever continue to be their antithesis, letting his
mind range actively over the actual world, not wallow
in that one little weed-covered pond, the theatre,
which reflects nothing.36
67
As the season continued, they produced Major
Barbara with Granville-Barker playing Adolphus Cusins
(modeled after Gilbert Murray), and in. January 1906 they
produced Murray's translation of Electra. Following
performances of a disastrous double bill, they substituted
Major Barbara for the remaining matinees. In the evening
bill for February, The Voysey Inheritance had a four week
run with Granville-Barker playing Edward. Next they tried
two short plays by Hewitt, Pan and the Young Shepherd and
The Youngest of the Ancrels; this was a failure.
On March 24, 1906, Harley Granville-Barker and
Lillah McCarthy were married. While they traveled on their
honeymoon, the Court Theatre remained open with revivals
of Hippolytus, Electra, Captain Brassbound's Conversion,
Prunella (this time a success), and through the summer, You
Never Can tell.
In September, the third season opened with John
Bull's Other Island for six weeks. The matinees began
with A Silver Box by John Galsworthy followed by The
Charity that Began at Home by St. John Hankin. Hankin's
play was not a success but fortunately they could always
count on Shaw's plays. In October, Man and Superman was
put back into the evening bill and in November
68
The Doctor's Dilemma, Shaw's new play, opened in the
afternoon. It was successful, so in December it took over
the evening bill for six weeks.
As 1907 began, two short plays, The Reformer by
Robert Harcourt and The Campden Wonder by John Masefield
were presented in the afternoon. They failed to generate
much interest so they were never put in the evening bill.
In February, they put on The Philanderer, the play that
Shaw had written fifteen years earlier for the Independent
Theatre. This play was one of the few Shaw plays that did
not prove a success at the Court, partly because it seemed
old fashioned to the Court audience, and partly because
Lillah, who was to play the leading female role, had had a
miscarriage and the role was played by her understudy.
When it proved to be too weak to be moved to the evening
bill, they revived You Never Can Tell, always a sure draw.
In March, Hedda Gabler by Ibsen was performed with
Mrs. Patrick Campbell as the lead and in April
Galsworthy's A Silver Box moved into the evening bill for
three weeks while Votes For Women by Eleanor Robbins took
over the matinees. At the end of April, Return of the
Prodigal was put into the evening bill scheduled for four
weeks, but it was a failure, and was removed after two
69
weeks with Votes for Women taking the remaining two weeks.
In May there were eight matinees of Prunella, while Man
and Superman took over the evening bill for the last five
weeks. The Court seasons wound up with eight matinees of
Don Juan in Hell, the third act from Man and Superman, , and
The Man of Destiny, a one-act by Shaw.
Granville-Barker had set out to perform modern
repertory. Although he never achieved repertory,
employing instead a short-run system that was a compromise
between his ideal repertory and the commercial long-run,
his accomplishments at the Court were considerable. In
three years, the Vedrenne-Barker management produced
thirty-two plays by seventeen authors with Shaw dominating.
Though several of these plays had been known to a reading
public before the Court seasons, Shaw's plays were
consistently the most popular, so they were performed more
often. Out of 988 separate performances (counting double
bills as two performances), 701 were plays by Shaw, and
only 287 by others.
One of the major marks of distinction of the Court
Theatre productions was the care taken to be faithful to
the dramatist's intentions. Shaw and Granville-Barker
directed their own plays and Granville-Barker's style as a
70
director when working on scripts other than his own was to
take great pains in discovering exactly what the author
intended and to be true to that intent.
The collaboration between Shaw and Granville-
Barker was symbolic of the larger collaboration between
the playwright and the actor that distinguished the
progressive theatre. It was a true collaboration. Shaw's
plays needed the careful acting, ensemble and sense of
style that Granville-Barker and his company gave them.
This fortunate collaboration was made possible
partly because they had the same social and political
views on the theatre and partly because they had such a
close personal relationship. Purdom writes that the
"relations between the two were as intimate as between
3 7
father and son. ..." They were oddly complementary,
because their styles were so different. Shaw encouraged
overplaying, while Granville-Barker tended towards under
playing. Granville-Barker was often accused of playing for
moments so subtle that they could not be heard or under
stood by the audience. One apocryphal story has him
sending a note backstage to the cast during a performance
giving them his compliments, but regretting to say that
several of them could be distinctly overheard in the
stalls.38 7i
A good example of the difference in style between
Granville-Barker and Shaw is shown by a story told by
Hesketh Pearson who played Metellus in Shaw's Androcles and
the Lion:
Barker drilled us through August and Shaw entered
like an avalanche when we were all standing about in
our costumes and make-up before the curtain went up on
the final dress rehearsal. At its conclusion, he
reappeared and began to go through the notes he had
made, upsetting Barker's instructions in a manner that
can only be described as outrageously light
hearted. . . . In the course of four hours, Shaw
transformed the play from a comedy to an
extravaganza.39
The Vedrenne-Barker management of the Court
Theatre accomplished several important things. First, it
introduced new dramatists, such as John Galsworthy, St.
John Hankin, Laurence Houseman, John Masefield, and
Granville-Barker himself. Second, it performed classical
Greek drama as a regular item in Gilbert Murray’s trans
lations. Third, it produced foreign drama including the
work of Maeterlinck, Ibsen, Schnitzler and Hauptmann. And
finally, it established Shaw as a successful playwright
who was a box office attraction in his own right.
The Court Theatre seasons are also important for
providing, in Granville-Barker, one of the earliest English
examples of a director, in the sense of one man having
72
artistic control over a production. It provided a
rallying point for those people who believed in the idea
of a National Theatre by providing a working model of a
repertory theatre. This model was quickly copied in
Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Birmingham as the
repertory movement spread.
The spotlight at the Court was not just on the
dramatists, for it was widely held to contain the best
acting in England. Desmond MacCarthy wrote, "At the Court
the acting pleased from the first. People began to say
that the English could act after all, and that London must
be full of intelligent actors, of whom nobody had ever
h e a r d . "40 Max Beerbohm, trying to decide why it was that
the acting at the Court Theatre was so much better than
anywhere else, came up with two reasons: one, because it
was a strict ensemble so nobody stole scenes and two,
because it only produced good plays with characters of
depth so that good acting showed up better.41 Ensemble
acting was a new experience for audiences used to having to
concentrate on one star actor surrounded by poorly played
supporting roles, and the actors enjoyed performing in
Court Theatre productions despite low pay because it added
to their reputation. Even in very small parts, they could
73
attract favorable notice and make an artistic contribution.
Lillah McCarthy wrote, "We were members of a theatrical
42
House of Lords; all equal and all Lords."
Granville-Barker was not a success in the
commercial theatre but his major goal was still the
establishment of a National Theatre. Since he had not
only written a theoretical scheme for a National Theatre
but had run a repertory theatre for two years and nine
months with great success, Granville-Barker was now
considered to be the man to run a National Theatre. His
experience at the Court convinced him that if a theatre
building could be built and equipped, the repertory
theatre would be able to pay for itself. At the
complimentary dinner that was held at the conclusion of
the Court seasons, Granville-Barker gave a speech in which
he said: "I feel very strongly, as I think everyone must,
the necessity for a change in the English theatrical
system. To my mind, no drama, no school of acting can
long survive the strangling effects of that boa
constricter, the long run." He added, "As a good
socialist, I am glad to be able to sum up the chief of
43
those difficulties in the one word rent."
74
The Court seasons demonstrated that repertory had
another advantage over the long-run that had nothing to do
with artistic ideals, and that was publicity value.
Producing a new play every other week meant that his
productions were reviewed much more often than the others,
keeping the Court Theatre constantly in the minds of
London playgoers. At the same time they were limiting the
performances which kept the demand high for revivals. The
attention given to Court plays by the critics gave the
Court, Granville-Barker and Shaw prominence far beyond
their still limited audience.
In September of 1907 Barker and Vedrenne opened
another repertory season, this one at the Savoy Theatre.
They felt that by moving to a bigger, more centrally
located theatre the audience would increase. The short-
runs would be scheduled in the same way that had proved
successful at the Court; they would begin new plays by
giving them three matinees a week on Tuesdays, Thursdays
and Fridays for two weeks. If the play was judged a .
success, they would move it to the evening bill.
They opened with You Never Can Tell with Harcourt
Williams as Valentine in the evening and gave Galsworthy's
new play, Joy, , in the afternoon. Joy turned out to be a
75
failure, it was a fairly normal West End comedy and the
audience expected more from Granville-Barker and
Galsworthy. They next revived Shaw's play The Devil1s
Disciple, but it was also a failure. It was a poor
production, without humour and life, and Granville-Barker
as Gen. Burgoyne was particularly disappointing.
Beerbohm with tongue in cheek suggested that since the
play was so bad, and since he had never seen Granville-
Barker do anything bad, perhaps Vedrenne was impersonating
Granville-Barker on the staged Vedrenne wanted to sue but
Shaw restrained him.
During the Savoy season, the partnership between
Vedrenne and Granville-Barker began to split. Part of the
reason was that Vedrenne was hostile to the idea of
casting Granville-Barker's wife as the lead role in Medea
and partly because they differed on the question of
censorship.
The censorship question was a vital one to
Granville-Barker. His newest play. Waste.which was
scheduled to go into matinee performances in November was
cancelled when the Lord Chamberlain refused to license the
play. The feeling about censorship ran very high and
divided the theatrical community as a whole. The
76
dramatists and the critics were fairly solidly against
censorship and wished to have the office of the Lord
Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays abolished. But theatre
managers for the most part were for the censorship because
they felt that once it had been passed by the Lord
Chamberlain it was given a mark of approval which the
theatre managers considered valuable. Since Waste had been
rehearsed and was ready for production, but was not
allowed to be produced, they went ahead and produced it
for the Stage Society with Granville-Barker taking over
the leading part.
The Savoy season, badly crippled by the failure of
Joy and the censorship of Waste, continued with two
revivals of Shaw's plays, Caesar and Cleopatra and Arms
and the Man. Both were fairly successful but because they
were both plays that had been seen before in London, they
did not attract the kind of attention that the new Shaw
plays produced at the Court.
The Savoy season ended as a failure for several
reasons. There was no new play from Shaw, there was no
new play from Granville-Barker and there was no new play
from Masefield, even though he had a new play ready,
because Vedrenne would not allow the production of any play
by Masefield. 77
They did have a new translation from Euripedes by
Gilbert Murray, Medea, but it was badly cast, partly
because Vedrenne would not allow Lillah McCarthy to play
the lead and it was a failure as well. With the
disappointing Galsworthy play and Granville-Barker1s poor
production of The Devil's Disciple, the season at the
Savoy was considerably less successful than the Court
season had been, both critically and financially.
Although the Savoy season had not added to
Granville-Barker's reputation as a producer, oddly enough,
he emerged at the end of the season with a heightened
reputation as a playwright. Henderson writes that the
"banning of Waste by the King's Reader of Plays created a
tremendous sensation" and that it "focused public
attention upon Mr. Barker and thrust him forward
decisively as a most conspicuous exemplar of the 'new'
4 S
school of dramatists in England." No reason was given
for the banning of Waste and Granville-Barker later
testified to the Joint Committee on the Censorship that he
was not told what changes to make in the script, only that
the references to sexual relations should be moderated and
all references to a criminal operation should be
eliminated. Trewin thinks that the. banning of Waste was
78
not just because of the sexual references, but "there were
probably complex political reasons as well."^ And Purdom
goes even further, "There can be little doubt, however,
that the play's political setting was the fundamental
a n
reason for objection to it."^'
Bridges-Adams has suggested that Waste was written
as a test case in order to cause an uproar over the
question of censorship. This does not seem to be true, as
it was a great blow both personally and professionally to
have to cancel Waste from the Savoy season.
Intentional or not, an uproar was caused when
Waste was banned. Soon after, seventy-one literary
figures signed their names to a letter to the Times that
demanded an inquiry into dramatic censorship, with John
Galsworthy as the initiator and prime mover. Subsequently
a Committee for the Abolition of the Office of Dramatic
Censorship was formed with both Granville-Barker and
George Bernard Shaw active members. Nothing happened, and
eventually the issue died down.
It flared up again in 1909 when Shaw's play, The
Showincf up of Blanco Posnett was banned by the censor. It
is certainly possible that Shaw may have written this one
with the purpose of getting it banned in order to renew
79
the censorship debate. A Parliamentary Committee was
subsequently formed to hold hearings on the censorship
from July 29 to November 22, 1909. Forty-nine witnesses
were called to testify, including actors, managers,
dramatists and critics. Nearly every major theatrical
figure was called, including Shaw and Granville-Barker.
The Parliamentary Committee issued its report on
November 11, 1909 containing the recommendation that plays
should still be submitted for a license to the Examiner of
Plays, but that it would be legal to perform a play with
out one. The recommendation was an anticlimax, for in
attempting to make a compromise between the two sides, the
Committee ended up causing no effective change at all.
As A. E. Wilson says, "Never did a mountain in labor
A O
produce so small a mouse."
In 1909 Charles Frohman, the American producer who
had extended his operations to include the Duke of York's
Theatre in London was convinced by his friend J. M. Barrie
to engage Granville-Barker as director for the new
Galsworthy play, Strife. It was a great•success so
then Frohman announced that he would underwrite a new
repertory season for early 1910 with Granville-Barker
directing the plays. In announcing the project, Frohman
said: 80
Repertory companies are usually associated in the
public mind with the revival of masterpieces, but if
you want to know the character of my repertory project
at the Duke of York's, I should describe it as the
production of new plays by living authors. Whatever
it accomplishes, it will represent the combined
resources of actor and playwright working with each
other, a combination that seems to me to represent the
most necessary foundation of any theatrical success.49
The repertory season at the Duke of York1s Theatre
produced seventeen plays in seventeen weeks. These
included a new play by Galsworthy, Justice, a new play by
Shaw, Misalliance, and a new play by Granville-Barker, The
Madras House. Unlike the Court seasons and the Savoy
seasons which produced plays for a short-run, the Duke of
York's season was a true repertory, with no play being
performed more than twice in a row and all the plays being
constantly shifted in and out of the bill. The greatest
success of the season was Justice which caused a great
sensation. Winston Churchill, who was at that time Home
Secretary, went to see it and was impressed enough to
50
initiate reforms xn solxtary confxnement.
Misalliance and The Madras House, however, were
both failures,and,taken as a whole, and the season lost a
great deal of money. There were several reasons why, but
one of them certainly seems to be Granville-Barker1s fault.
The plays were directed without the usual unity of style
81
and ensemble, with the exception of Justice. Another
problem was that there was more cost this season than the
others. As a true repertory, the sets had to be changed
more often, resulting in a higher labor cost and higher
storage costs. Even worse, the Duke of York's had no
room to store the scenery, so it either had to be left
outside or taken across the river to be stored.
The season was also hurt by the death of Edward
VII on May 6th which caused a general theatrical slump
throughout the city. Although Frohman lost a good deal of
money on the venture, he was always proud of it. His
biographers say that "had he done nothing else than the
repertory theatre, he would have left for himself an
51
imperishable monument of artistic endeavor."
After the Duke of York's season ended, Granville-
Barker and Lillah McCarthy produced plays together for
several years. The most important of their work were the
Savoy Shakespeare productions of 1912 to 1914. These
productions came about when Lord Lucas gave Granville-
Barker fc5,000 and invested another L5,000 after selling
his pig farm. Purdom quotes Lucas as saying, "Here's the
money for Shakespeare. . . . I like his pearls better
than my pigs."-^ Granville-Barker then took the lease of
82
the Savoy Theatre and began rehearsing A Winter's Tale.
Granville-Barker believed very strongly in William
Poel's methods, but Poel had never produced Shakespeare in
a large West End theatre for a commercial run, and the
general public was used to the pictorial realism of Tree.
Nearly the entire play was performed, and there were no
stops in the action. A platform stage was used with very
little scenery. The play opened in September of 1912 and
caused controversy immediately. The critics were divided
between loving and hating it, nobody was neutral.
In order to focus the attention on the actor
instead of the scenery, Granville-Barker built a platform
over the orchestra pit and kept the actors downstage.
There was an emphasis on the poetry and the verse was
spoken very quickly. This extremely unconventional
approach to Shakespeare greatly increased Granville-
Barker ' s reputation as a director because up until this
point he had always been connected in the mind of the
public with realistic social drama; he was now proving to
be in the vanguard of stylistic production. A Winter1s
Tale was not, however, a popular success and after six
weeks it was taken off. However, this was all forgotten
when Twelfth Nicrht opened on November 5, 1912, for it was
83
received by the critics with universal raves and it was a
great popular success. One of the most notable aspects of
this production was the set by Norman Wilkinson which was
a stylized formal garden. He used the same platform from
A Winter's Tale over the orchestra pit which created three
basic playing areas. Unlike William Poel, Granville-
Barker did not believe Shakespearean drama needed to be
performed on a replica of the Elizabethan stage, but that
it was only necessary to create three levels, with the
lowest one being large, open and close to the audience.
Within these limits, the stylistic setting worked very
well, and has continued to be the dominant tradition in
Shakespearean stage design to the present day. With these
two Shakespearean productions, Granville-Barker established
himself as a modern director, a man who can impose a
stylistic unity on all aspects of production.
In February of 1914, the third Savoy Shakespeare
production opened, A Midsummer Night's Dream. This play
had been burdened by a great deal of traditional stage
business, so, in order to breathe fresh air into this play
Granville-Barker threw out all of the traditionaal comic
business, and encouraged each actor to look at his part as
if it were a new play which had never been performed
84
before, rather than one of the most commonly produced of
Shakespeare's plays. This play also caused a great deal
of controversy, it was not universally praised as Twelfth
Night had been. One of the biggest points of contention
was the appearance of the fairies in this production.
They were all gilded. There was so much talk about these
golden fairies that there probably was not a soul in
London who did not know about them, even if he knew
nothing else about the theatre. The fairies became a
symbol for the reasons that playgoers and critics were
divided about A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Granville-Barker intended to continue producing
Shakespeare, preparations had already been made for
Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra but the outbreak of World
War I ended them.
Although it is true that much of what was original
in these productions had been done before by Poel, few
other than Poel's followers were aware of his work. As
Bridges-Adams wrote, "His daring notion was to thrust the
Poel doctrine down the throats of a West End public that
5 3
had been nourished on the splendor of His Majesty’s."
Granville-Barker's Shakespearean productions did one thing
that Poel never dreamed of. They incorporated the newest
85
idea that was sweeping Europe, the excitement of stylized
visual design. Stylized design was first seen on the
English stage when the Russian Imperial Ballet toured and
was seen also in the productions that Max Reinhardt brought
from Germany, Sumurun, The Miracle, and Oedipus Rex.
Granville-Barker was familiar with Reinhardt's work and had
written about it in the Times and the Fortnightly Review.54
By incorporating design and visual style into his
Shakespearean productions, along with Poel's doctrine
developed from historical research, Granville-Barker was
reconciling two theatrical reform movements into one; the j
I
followers of Gordon Craig had said all along that beauty
and fantasy needed to be added to the theatre. They had
never felt comfortable with the progressive theatre move
ment led by Shaw and Granville-Barker which up to now had
been concerned almost completely with the script and the
acting, and was largely apathetic to any particular visual
style. The Savoy Shakespeare plays were Granville-Barker's
greatest contribution as a director, but they came at the
very end of his career, for he retired from the stage when
war broke out and concerned himself almost entirely with
writing. Many people wondered at his decision, for he was
at the top of his profession, but he had always wanted to
be a writer.
Granville-Barker as a Writer
Granville-Barker's reputation as a playwright has
suffered in the intervening years, although The Voysey
Inheritance is still played fairly regularly and the Royal
Shakespeare Company revived The Marrying of Ann Leete as
recently as 1975. The main reason is that his plays show
a greater concern for subtle details of character than
they do for strong dramatic plot. Those plays that he
wrote with the strongest plots, The Voysey Inheritance,
Waste, and The Madras House are held in higher esteem than
the others. In their own day, these plays were
considered masterpieces. Archer wrote of them, "I do not
hesitate to say that I consider these three plays the
5 5
biggest things our modern movement has produced." These
plays show his major interest to be a comparison between
the appearance of rationalism and inner irrational forces.
In Waste, it is the outward political strategy which is
ruined by the uncontrolled inner emotions of the
politician. In The Voysey Inheritance, it is the
appearance of an upright and honest firm of lawyers con
trasted with the criminal behavior that keeps the firm
going.
87
Although Granville-Barker was a good socialist,
and politics were never far out of sight in his thinking,
it is interesting that he never wrote a play that could be
considered to work strongly in favor of socialist goals as
did Shaw sometimes and Galsworthy often. Beatrice Webb
once wrote to Granville-Barker asking him if he could
write a play along the lines of the Minority Report on the
Poor Law, which she had published in January 1909 with her
husband, Sidney. Granville-Barker wrote back that he was
unable to work in that fashion, that "these things come as
God decides. ..." and that even if he started out with
the intention of writing a play on that subject, he
couldn't guarantee that it wouldn't turn out to be some
thing entirely different.^6
Although the reputation of his plays has
diminished with time, the reputation of his Prefaces to
Shakespeare have increased with time. The prefaces began
when a publisher brought out new additions of The Winter's
Tale, Twelfth Night, and A Midsummer Night's Dream and
commissioned him to write prefaces for these plays in
which he would look at the plays from the standpoint of a
director mounting them for the stage. When Granville-
Barker retired from the stage, he continued to write these
88
prefaces, which he developed as scholarly studies of the
plays considered as material for performance rather than
literature. These prefaces, which he continued to write
and publish throughout his life had a lasting effect on
the English theatre. The next generation of actors and
directors in many cases looked to them as a basis of their
own productions. In this way, Granville-Barker's
influence has spread to the Stratford Shakespeare
Festival which was directed ,for several years by William
Bridges-Adams and to the Old Vic which was directed for
many years by Harcourt Williams. Williams encouraged his
leading actor, John Gielgud to study the prefaces and this
led to a correspondence between the two men, and eventually
to a production of King Lear, acted by Gielgud and
coached by Granville-Barker.
Bridges-Adams says this about the prefaces:
They spring not from the study but from the boards
of the theatre; there is an eager life in them that
you do not as a rule find in commentaries. . . .
They are a positively triumphal record of everything
he would have liked to do; and it is an ironic
thought that already they are a legacy more worth
having than our pieced together memories of what he
did.57
In 1918, Granville-Barker divorced Lillah
McCarthy and married Helen Huntington. At this point, he
89
ended his active stage career to spend the remainder of
his life writing and lecturing. His new wife was not
comfortable with his acquaintances from the theatre, nor
did she approve of socialism. But Granville-Barker was
apparently very deeply in love. He withdrew from contact
with the Shaws which Shaw never forgave her for.
Granville-Barker also stopped being an active member of
the Fabian Society, although he apparently still held the
same political views as before, and he never stopped
agitating on behalf of the National Theatre.
The remaining years of his life were spent writing
and lecturing. His theories were all formed by this time,
but he now had the leisure to develop them. He was the
acknowledged authority on the National Theatre, and those
who wished to create it looked to him for inspiration and
leadership. Though he abandoned his former hope of
someday directing it, he used the influence of his
position and the eloquence of his pen to continue what was
to be a long fight to make it possible.
90
Footnotes to Chapter III
^J. W. Marriott, Modern Drama (London: Thomas
Nelson and Sons, n.d.), P- 133.
2
J. B. Priestly, The Edwardians (New York: Harper
and Row, 1970), p. 91.
3
Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1968),
p. 9.
^Hynes, p. 307.
^Hynes, p. 308.
£
Norman MacKenzie and Jean MacKenzie, The Fabians
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977), p. 71.
^Priestly, p. 120.
Q
Purdom, Harley Granville-Barker: Man of the
Theatre, Dramatist and Scholar, pp. 12-13.
9
Anna Irene Miller, The Independent Theatre m
Europe: 1887 to the Present (1931: rpt. New York:
Benjamin Blom, 1966), p. 169.
■*-®George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism,
3rd ed. (London: 1922; rpt.; New York: Hill and Wang,
1957), pp. 91-92.
■^MacKenzie and MacKenzie, p. 172.
12
George Bernard Shaw, Plays Unpleasant (London:
1898; rpt.; Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1961), pp. 12-13.
"I O
William Poel, Shakespeare in the Theatre (London:
1913; rpt.; New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968), p. 200.
14
Purdom, p. 13.
15Miller, p. 177.
91
16Miller, p. 194.
^ Purdom, p. 8.
*L8
Purdom, p. 8.
19
George Bernard Shaw, Shaw on Theatre, E. J.
West, ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1958), p. 260.
2 n
A. B. Walkley, Drama and Life (London: Methuen
and Co., 1907), p. 217.
21
MacKenzie and MacKenzie, p. 305.
22
Archibald Henderson, George Bernard Shaw: Man
of the Century (New York: Appleton Century Crofts),
p. 459.
2 ^
JPurdom, p. 11.
24Purdom, p. 21.
2^Shaw, Shaw on Theatre, pp. 74-75.
2®Trewin, The Edwardian Theatre, p. 77.
2^J. W. Marriott, The Theatre (London: George C.
Harrup and Co., 1931), pp. 388-389.
^Edward R. Pease, The History of the Fabian
Society (New York: E. P. Dutton [1916], pp. 186-187.
2^Miller, p. 195.
^^Trewin, p. 73.
^w[alter] Macqueen-Pope, Carriages at Eleven:
The Story of the Edwardian Theatre (London: Hutchinson
and Co., 1947), p. 193.
3 2
Desmond MacCarthy, quoted in Miller, p. 199.
3 3
Wilson, Edwardian Theatre, p. 171.
24Beatrice Webb, Our Partnership (New York:
Longmans, Green and Co., 1948), p. 310.
92
•^Purdom, p. 47.
"^Beerbohm, Around Theatres, p. 406. Originally
published in the Saturday Review, November 11, 1905.
^Purdom, p. 65.
^®w[illiam] Bridges-Adams, "A Lost Leader," in
A Bridges-Adams Letterbook, Robert Speaight, ed. (London:
The Society for Theatre Research, 1971), p. 88.
3 9
Hesketh Pearson, Bernard Shaw: Hxs Life and
Personality (London: Methuen and Co., 1961), pp. 283-284.
40McCarthy, The Court Theatre 1904-1907, p. 12.
4^Beerbohm, pp. 403-404.
4?
Quoted xn Purdom, p. 67.
43
McCarthy, p. 162.
44
Beerbohm, pp. 481-484. Originally published in
the Saturday Review, October 26, 1907.
^Archibald Henderson, European Dramatists
(Cincinnati: Stewart and Kidd, 1916), p. 389.
46Trewin, p. 92.
47Purdom, pp. 73-74.
48
Wilson, p. 208.
4^Macqueen-Pope, pp. 143-144.
50
Wilson, p. 174.
51
Isaac F. Marcossan and Danxel Frohman, Charles
Frohman: Manager and Man (New York: Harper and Brothers,
1916), p. 248.
5?
Purdom, p. 139.
93
53
Brldges-Adams, "A Lost Leader," in A Bridges-
Adarns Letterbook, p. 89.
^[Harley Granville-Barker] From a correspondent,
The Times, November 19, 1910, p. 6; and November 21, 1910,
p. 12. Harley Granville-Barker, "Two German Theatres,"
Fortnightly Review, N.S., No. 89 (January 1911), pp. 60-70.
^William Archer, The Old Drama and the New
(Boston: Small Maynard and Co., 1923), p. 358.
^Hynes, p. 127.
c 7
Brldges-Adams, "A Lost Leader," in A Bridges-
Adams Letterbook, p. 93.
94
CHAPTER IV
SCHEME FOR A NATIONAL THEATRE
By the time Granville-Barker was introduced to the
concept of a National Theatre by William Archer in 1900,
the idea had already been around for a long time. France’s
%
National Theatre, the Comedie Frangaise had been in
existence since 1680, and there were many state supported
theatres in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
In England the call for a National Theatre was
made sporadically through the nineteenth century, though
there was little interest on the part of the greater public.
The earliest advocate of a subsidized theatre in England
was made by Effingham William Wilson in an article printed
in Hood's Magazine dated September 1848.^ Encouraged by
the reception given to the appeal for funds by the
Shakespeare Committee which had raised L60,000 in order to
purchase Shakespeare's birthplace in 1847, Wilson
suggested that the Shakespeare Committee should remain
active and raise funds to purchase a theatre in which
Shakespeare's plays would constantly be performed for the
95
benefit of the public. According to his plan, the
government was to hold the theatre in trust for the people
and appoint a committee to run it. This committee would
engage a director and a company on a long-term basis.
Wilson felt that all admission charges should be kept low
so that anyone could attend.
Nothing much came of this plan and during the next
twenty years very little was heard on the subject.
In 1878, the movement was boosted by Henry Irving,
at that time England's foremost actor. Irving gave a
speech in which he brought out some new arguments in its
favor. In his speech, he noted that making money and
making art are two different things and he allowed that
there might be some professional actors who would lower
their standards in order to ensure a success. Irving went
on to say that he did not believe that the government would
ever subsidize a theatre, but he did think that private
subsidy might be found. He identified three things that he
thought imperative if the theatre was to succeed: (1) that
the subsidy be large enough that the theatre could compete
with the commercial theatres; (2) that the organization be
elastic so that its operations could be expanded or cut
back as demand and talent changes; and (3) that once
96
established it should be left alone by the government.
The call for a National Theatre was taken up next
by Matthew Arnold in 1882 when he published an essay
written on the recent visit of the Comedie Francaise to
L o n d o n.3 in this essay, he developed the idea that the
French company was successful greatly due to its
organization. He advocated an English theatre organized
along the same lines as the French. Arnold argued that the
theatre is such a powerful force— an irresistible force—
that the obvious thing to do with it is to make sure that
it does the most good. Arnold believed that could be
accomplished best if a theatrical society was formed and
given a grant by the government on the condition that they
would perform classics. Implicit in this agreement is that
the government would not interfere with the society in
artistic matters.
To Arnold it was simple logic, the theatre was
becoming more and more popular as prejudice against it was
disappearing. As it became more popular, its power to
influence the public was becoming more obvious. He
predicted that it could only increase in power and
popularity. The logical thing to do would be to harness
the theatre for the good of the public— to organize it.
97
This became the battle cry of all who wished to reform the
theatre; "The theatre is irresistible; organise the
4
theatre."
The most influential man in the late nineteenth
century to the National Theatre movement was William
Archer- Archer was born September 23, 1856 in Perth,
Scotland. He traveled widely as a young man, learning
several languages, including Norwegian, which enabled him
to be the first English translator of Ibsen, and to become
familiar with the progressive European theatre. In 1873,
he was so taken with the State Theatre in Vienna that he
wrote, "When shall we in England have a National
5
Theatre"?
As Archer grew older, he came to the conclusion
that the wide difference between the theatre of the
Continent and that of Britain lay in the lack of State
subsidy. In 1877, during Henry Irving's tour to Edinburgh,
Archer and a friend, R. W. Lowe anonymously wrote a
pamphlet making fun of Irving called The Fashionable
Tragedian. This pamphlet concludes with a paragraph
advocating a National Theatre;
Where lies the remedy for all this?— it will be
asked. Will not other actors of Mr. Irving's talent
meet with the same fate? All who have thought over
98
these matters will have long come to the conclusion
that the only remedy lies in a national theatre, with
good endowment, good traditions, good government. So
long as actors have to trust to their own haphazard
acquirements; so long as the one condition of their
very existence is that they shall please a tasteless
gallery, and still more tasteless stalls; so long as
every artistic instinct in their nature is liable to be
ruined by a two-hundred or even a thousand night's run;
so long will histrionic talent, especially of the
loftier orders, be unavoidably doomed to the same
destiny which has destroyed the unquestionable gifts of
Mr. Henry Irving.6
When Archer became a dramatic critic, he continued
to press for a National Theatre, and wrote many articles
stating his case. As the progressive theatre societies
began to operate in the 1890's, the possibility for a
National Theatre began to look better. Consequently in
1900 Archer formed a committee to explore what practical
steps could be taken to further the cause of the National
Theatre. Among others, the young actor Harley Granville-
Barker was asked to join the committee. Granville-Barker
subscribed totally to the cause; he was as passionate, if
not more so, than Archer himself. The committee came to
the decision that what was needed was a practical model.
Many people were in favor of a National Theatre as a
general concept, but there was no specific plan for one.
The committee felt that as matters presently stood, even if
a philanthropist should come forward and offer to fund a
99
National Theatre, they would be unable to go forward until
some detailed plan could be worked out. They also felt
that it would be much more likely to attract a donor if
the plan was ready. Accordingly, Archer and Granville-
Barker set out to invent the National Theatre on paper.
When they were finished, they printed it privately in 1904
as A National Theatre; Scheme and Estimates. Known as the
Blue Book, copies were given to theatre people, politicians
and potential donors.
Scheme and Estimates for
a National Theatre.
The combination of Granville-Barker and Archer was
to give this book a strength that it would not have had if
either had written it alone. In order to do the job that
it needed to do, the book had to be very specific about
each detail of its operation. The careful statistics are
characteristic of Archer, but it was Granville-Barker's
practical knowledge of casting, and producing that made
those statistics meaningful. Both were idealistic, but in
complementary ways. Archer was writing down the results of
years of thinking and writing about the drama; Granville-
Barker was preparing a plan that might be translated to
100
reality immediately. There was purposely little feeling of
building castles in the air, although that is exactly what
it was. Every effort was made to make the National
Theatre look as though it was ready to open its doors. A
season was carefully worked out, with classics mixed in
with imaginary new plays, each of which was cast with
imaginary actors. They included forms for buying tickets
by mail, and even worked out a system for ending the
« 7
theatre xf xt were a total failure.
There was no pleading for the cause, it was
assumed that the readers would be fully in agreement with
their aims. They did not argue why there should be a
National Theatre, they only stated what the National
Theatre could be, and how much it would cost, ". . . . we
believe that, in merely outlining the organisation, and
suggesting the natural interplay of its parts, we have made
an essential step in advance. We have substituted clear
and definite for vague and formless ideas" (Scheme.p. xvi).
The aim was to attract a donor or donors, so in
many ways the book reads like a prospectus. The government
was excluded from their plan, not because they did not
think that the government should have a role in the funding
of the theatre, but "simply that we believe it would be a
101
waste of time" (Scheme, p. xix). The tone of the book is
as if they wish to reassure a philanthropic man who wants
to found an institution, but who also wants to be sure of
exactly what he is giving his money to.
The National Theatre was planned on a large scale.
Archer and Granville-Barker argued that it must be so to be
successful. It must be done in a big way, or not done at
all, otherwise it would be nothing more than just another
theatre, competing with the same product. This attitude was
important in the subsequent history of the National Theatre
movement, when the question arose as to whether they should
wait until the entire plan could be put into operation or
to begin in a small way. Granville-Barker steadfastly held
to the entire plan, feeling that half a National Theatre
would be none at all.
The practicality of their plan hinged on whether it
would be possible to run such a large enterprise on such a
comparatively small amount of money, for they were
proposing that the theatre could make its own running costs
and would not need an annual subsidy. To this end, they
had in mind productions mounted inexpensively. To some
critics this did not seem right for a National Theatre.
Bram Stoker, who had been Irving's secretary, knew what it
102
cost to run a truly big theatre, and thought that the
figures supplied by Archer and Granville-Barker were
O
naively underestimated. When Granville-Barker finished
the Court seasons in 1907, this criticism had largely
disappeared, because he had proved that it could be done,
and done with distinction.
They did not consider any system other than
repertory as worthy of a National Theatre. The National
Theatre was envisioned as doing a service both to the
audience and the profession as only repertory can do. In
repertory, a good play would be seen at intervals over a
long period, which they considered better for all
concerned; the playwright gets longer exposure; the actor
is not tied up in one role; and the audience has a greater
choice.
Perhaps the most important philosophic issue that
the book settles is that of which audience the National
Theatre is for. Archer and Granville-Barker, who were so
much identified with the progressive theatre, in this book
made it clear that it would be inappropriate for the
National Theatre to be a progressive theatre: "A theatre
which appeals to no public, or to a very narrow one, cannot
be a National Theatre in any true sense of the word"
103
(Scheme, p. 2). The theatre should not be ahead of its
time, but securely in it, with a repertory that is not
adventurous, but "national, representative, and popular"
(Scheme, p. 37). They wished to avoid any misapprehension
about their aims; they did not want it to look as if they
were pushing their taste onto the public. When they drew
up the imaginary season's repertory, none of the
controversial authors were included. This was a wise
course, even though it did provoke some criticism that the
National Theatre would be too tame. Their repertory was
ambitious even if it was not controversial. They wanted to
make it general policy that six new productions of
Shakespeare would be mounted each year. Since they were
assuming that each production would be carried in the
repertory for four years, this would mean that in any given
year, twenty-four Shakespearean plays could be seen. They
also would include in the repertory revivals of plays which
had appeared in the commercial theatre during the last ten
years, so that the best modern plays would not disappear.
And, of course, they also would include classical and
modern foreign drama, although this was not to be a large
proportion, since they envision the National Theatre to
serve national interests primarily.
104
Very little of the hook is given over to general
statements of principle, by far the bulk of the book is
detailed description of the theatre and its running. As
one critic notes, "whatever one may think of the wisdom of
[their scheme] it is impossible to complain of its
9
vagueness." They wanted to make it very easy for a
potential donor, so they presented their case in such a way
as to show the possible donors exactly what their money
would be used for.
The donation "package" was divided into three
parts: the site, the building, and the Guarantee Fund.
They hoped that one man would donate all three, but they
also wanted to make it easier for several people to under
write the cost. It is interesting that they did not
advocate government subsidy. This was not because they do
not want the government to be involved but because they
thought it useless to ask. They envisioned one person giving
the building, another donating the site, and the Guarantee
Fund being donated through many fairly small contributions.
The site, they felt, must be a large one, large
enough so that the building can stand free of any other
buildings. The National Theatre would have to be an
imposing architectural monument, it would be its own
105
advertisement. They did not think that it would be
necessary for the site to be located in the theatre
district, as long as it is "reasonably central and
accessible" (Scheme, p. 5). They estimated the value of
such a site at £50,000 to £1,000,000.
The building and the site were kept as separate
donations for a very shrewd reason. They thought it more
likely that a very rich man would give the money to build
the theatre, but they hoped also that the site might be
donated by the government. The London County Council had
several sites that it was considering for development and
they thought that it was at least possible that the
government might put one of those sites at the disposal of
the National Theatre or sell it for reduced price. This
would be more useful than just the money that it saved, for
it would also get the government involved in the project,
and with the government involved, they thought that it
might be more likely to attract further donors. Though
their timing was premature, the idea was sound, for it was
not until the London County Council made a site available
after World War II that the National Theatre really did
begin to be built.
106
They were very concerned with the design of the
theatre building. They did not think that the National
Theatre could be put in any existing London theatre
because they wanted the theatre to be completely self-
sufficient. The National Theatre would need rehearsal
rooms, a large storage area for costumes, property and
scenery storerooms and workshops. Everything that the
theatre would need would have to be made and have to be
stored there so that the repertory could be economically
feasible. They also wanted the auditorium to be very large
so that the prices could be kept low and this meant that
they would need refreshment rooms, lobbies, and other
facilities for the audience to a greater degree than
existing theatres.
To entice a donor, they mentioned that the building
would have an inscription, "Donated by _________, " which
could itself be a work of art and pointed out that many
Roman public buildings were built in this way. In
estimating the cost of such a building to the donor they
added the cost of the first year's scenery, costumes and
properties, because the first year would cost so much more
than subsequent years when they could depend on stock. So,
though they estimated the cost of the building at between
107
£50,000 and £80,000 plus another £10,000 for stage
equipment, when the first year production cost included the
total cost to the donor would then amount to £105,000.
The Guarantee Fund was to be £150,000. The purpose
of this fund was to make sure that the theatre would be
able to survive for years at a deficit until it had built a
regular audience. This would relieve the theatre from
having to make a profit the very first year or go under.
Their suggestion was that there be a great number of
people contributing small sums to make up the Guarantee
Fund rather than looking for cne donor to give the entire
amount. This was partly out of practical consideration.
According to their plan, when the theatre did make a profit,
it would go toward another fund that they called the
Sinking Fund. When the Sinking Fund reached £150,000, all
profits would then go toward repaying the contributors of
the Guarantee Fund. Therefore, the people who had put up
the Guarantee Fund would have something to gain if the
enterprise was successful, so a large number of contributors
would mean more people who had an interest in the success
of the theatre. The donors of the site and the building
stood to gain only if the enterprise would go under, for
they would then get the building and site back. This is
108
one reason why Archer and Granville-Barker wanted those to
be contributed by one man only.
Their bottom line estimate came out to be 3=380,000
to establish the National Theatre. They estimated £75,000
for the site, £105,000 for the building, £150,000 for the
Guarantee Fund, and another £50,"000 just in case (Scheme,
pp. 8-9).
Archer and Granville-Barker were very concerned
about setting up the governing body of the National
Theatre so that it would be essentially under the leader
ship of one person. They felt this would keep it from
getting to be dull and institutionalized. This person, the
Director, would be chosen by a Board of Trustees who would
have no other function than to hire or fire the General
Staff. They would not run the theatre. In their words,
"The function of the board is merely to serve as a safe
guard against abuses" (Scheme, p. 12). The theatre would
be run by the Director, who was to have "absolute control
of everything in and about the theatre. . ." (Scheme, p.
12). The other General Staff positions were: (1) the
literary manager, whose job would be to read new plays, to
suggest plays for revival and to follow the dramatic
movements around the world; (2) the business manager, who
109
would control all the financial aspects; (3) the
solicitor, who would give legal advice and investment
advice; and (4) the reading committee man, who would be
someone who would have no other connection with the
National Theatre. The other two members of the reading
committee would be the Director and the literary manager.
The whole idea of the reading committee man would be to
have somebody to give input on the choices and selections
of the season who was not himself a part of the National
Theatre.
Besides the General Staff, the theatre would need
two staff producers, one who would primarily direct
classical plays and one who would primarily direct modern
plays. Once the reading committee decided to produce a
play, the Director would then select a producer. This
would either be one of the two staff producers, the author,
one of the actors, or even someone brought in from outside.
Once the producer was chosen, he would have artistic
control of the production, though they reserved the right
of the Director to give criticism and comments. The
Director would be heavily involved only until the shows
went into rehearsal. He would cast all the shows and
participate in all the production meetings; in case of any
110
dispute, his decision would be final. Once rehearsals
began, however, the producer would have full control and
the Director would come to dress rehearsals only. An
important function of the producer would be to make a
prompt book of each new production and have it deposited in
the library of the theatre. The company would be made up
of sixty-six actors, forty-two men, and twenty-four women.
Of those, they felt that thirty of the men and sixteen of
the women should be of established reputation. They felt
that twelve men and eight women could be young unknowns.
Archer and Granville-Barker went to a great deal of
trouble in drawing up their specimen repertory. In order
to get some idea how these actors would be used, they chose
actors and actresses that they knew and had worked with and
cast them in each play (although they changed their names).
They felt that this way they could more accurately
determine how each actor in the company would be used.
This was also important in figuring out the actor's income,
because it was to be determined by adding a fee for each
performance to each actor's base salary. They chose this
method because of the flexibility it would give the
Director in casting. The base salary would continue to
increase with seniority and the pension would be based on
111
it. The importance of the actor to the company might not
always increase each year. In this way, actors who were
used more would make more money, although an actor's base
salary would never be reduced. In addition, the fee
system would limit the ability of the Director to abuse his
highest paid actors, for if a particular actor of high
reputation got a high fee for each performance the Director
would be unlikely to cast him as an extra since an actor
who received a low fee would do just as well.
They rejected the Comedie Frangaise system of
making actors permanent members of the company, choosing
instead to engage them for three years at a time. At the
end of each period, fees and salaries would be renegotiated
or an actor could leave it if he wished. They wanted the
actors to feel that the job was secure without being
completely rigid. Some roles could be filled by students
because they did feel that some sort of dramatic training
school would be an important addition to the National
Theatre, though they went into very little detail of how
the school would fit into the theatre's structure.
They included detailed descriptions of each
expense and an estimate of what it was likely to be. One
example is the scenery. Calculating from their specimen
112
year, they indicated that eighty-six full sets and thirty
front cloths would be needed. Figuring that an average set
would cost them £60 and an average cloth £5, they reached a
total of £5,310. This they divided by four because they
intended each production to last for four years, which
comes to a total of £1,328 (Scheme, p. 38).
They wanted to beep ticket prices considerably
lower than those in the West End. They made their revenue
calculations based on 1,500 paid seats. They anticipated
full capacity to £345, although they admitted that that
would be achieved rarely. For one thing, the subscription
seats would be discounted, therefore, they calculated a
full house at about £300. The subscription system they
based on the German Abonnement system which was simply a
discount if one bought ten seats. Patrons would get
coupons and could turn them in for any performance they
wished. Of the receipts, ten percent would go immediately
to the pension fund and approximately ten percent to the
authors for royalities. They proposed to pay an author
lower royalities than he would ordinarily get on the West
End stage. They felt that this would be counterbalanced by
the prestige that he would get by being produced at the
National Theatre; and also by the fact that the play would
113
be in repertory for four years so it would play before an
audience longer, which might be more valuable in the long
run to the playwright.
When they finished listing all the expenses, they
came out to just over fe64,982 for one year. In order to
break even, they would need average receipts of over &196
for each performance. This was a very high average figure,
for £.110 was more like the average figure for the
commercial stage. They were hoping that the National
Theatre would draw much higher and more regularly because
of the quality and the repertory and noted that the
Comedie Francaise averaged fel98 per performance.
Archer and Granville-Barker mext listed a step by
step proposal for how the National Theatre could come about.
The first step would be for a donor to come forward for the
building. Once having the donor for the building, they
hoped that a donor would step forward for the site. Step
three was that the donors would then nominate the first
Trustees who would then appoint the Director. The
Trustees and the Director would then confer and draw up
statutes for the running of the theatre. The fifth step
would be to raise the Guarantee Fund. At the same time,
the donor of the building would initiate a design
114
competition and, along with the Director, choose a winner.
The seventh step would be for construction to begin on the
building while the Guarantee Fund was raised. The eighth
step would be for the Director to choose a company and to
rehearse the first season. The final step would be the
first performance which would mark the beginning of all the
actor's salaries and the end of the donor's control.
Before publication, the book was submitted to
several prominent actors and dramatists. They were asked
to react to the manuscript, and when they got the reactions
back, Archer and Granville-Barker made a number of changes
according to the suggestions that had been given to them.
After all the revisions were made, the manuscript was
submitted again to several actors and dramatists who were
asked to sign their names to a statement saying that they
endorsed and improved of the scheme set out along the lines
of the book. There were seven prominent names who
endorsed this book: Henry Irving, Squire Bancroft, J. M.
Barrie, Helen D'Oyley Carte, John Hare, Henry Arthur Jones,
and Arthur Wing Pinero. This list of names gave the
enterprise the weight of added approval, for these seven
agreed that not only should the National Theatre be created,
but that it could be created along the lines indicated in
their book. 115
The book was not intended to be for the general
public. The book's primary objective was to convince a
donor that he could give his money to this "scheme," which
would be both worthwhile and workable.
Although the book failed to convince anyone to
donate the theatre or the site, the book was a success
because it gave to the National Theatre movement exactly
what it needed at the time, some substance to go with the
ideal. After the publication of this book, the National
Theatre was constantly referred to as the National Theatre
Scheme and when the National Theatre was referred to, it
was assumed that they were referring to the National
Theatre as proposed by Archer and Granville-Barker.
The book had two great strengths. One was that the
writers went into such great detail which was clearly based
on an abundant knowledge of the actual conditions of the
working theatre. This love of detail certainly showed the
influence of Archer, who was a very deliberate man. The
other strength it had was from its enthusiasm. As one
reviewer said, "It is clear enough that they have enjoyed
their task, and that their enjoyment communicates itself
straightway to the reader, who follows with delight where-
ever the delighted authors choose to lead him."-*-^ This
116
enthusiasm, plus the intimate knowledge of the working
conditions of the theatre involved in the choosing of the
repertory and the casting was probably the main contribu
tion of Granville-Barker to the work.
The book was published for the general public in
1907. By then, Harley Granville-Barker's Court Theatre
experiments had drawn wide publicity both for himself and
for the repertory movement and therefore there was greater
public interest in the idea. Once the book was published
for the general public, the book "immediately became the
recognized handbook of the movement^^ Consequently,
1907 is often considered to be the year that the National
Theatre movement began. Take, for example, this quotation
from The Complete Guide to Britain*s National Theatre;
When [Scheme and Estimates for] A National Theatre
was published in 1907, the campaign began in earnest;
the vision of Archer and Granville-Barker, who saw the
National not as a museum or a movement or an elitist
luxury, but as "visibly and unmistakably a popular
institution, making a large appeal to the whole
community," has persisted in the design that made their
dream come true seventy years l a t e r .
By 1907 there was a great deal of optimism about
the National Theatre with Archer and Granville-Barker
clearly at the head of the movement. Granville-Barker was
even more so than Archer at that point because the Court
117
Theatre had proved that he could do in practice what he
said could be done in theory. The expectation was that at
any time the National Theatre might be formed and it was
privately felt by many that Granville-Barker would be the
man to run it. Lord Lytton, at the Complimentary Dinner
for Granville-Barker and Vedrenne held at the completion of
the Court Theatre seasons, said this, "I cannot believe
that it will be long before the next step is taken and we
will meet together again to congratulate our two guests of
tonight in the completion of their experiment in the
establishment of a real National Repertory Theatre."^3
In 1908, a new edition of Scheme and Estimates for
a National Theatre was brought out in America and Harley
Granville-Barker wrote a new preface for this edition in
which he explained how his experience with the Court
Theatre had changed his thoughts on the National Theatre.
His answer was that essentially it had not done ao except in
minor ways. He did say that he thought they should have
allowed more money and importance to the artistic designer
and he also said that the specimen repertory could now
include more daring plays. ^ Originally they were afraid
to include works of Ibsen and Shaw in the repertory for
fear that they would discourage a potential donor. In the
118
1908 edition, however, he wrote that he would now include
such playwrights as Ibsen, Hauptmann, and Shaw. He also
included another thought in the preface, one that was to
occupy him more and more as his career progressed. This
was that in running a National Theatre, the Director should
take care that he does not overwork the actors, for if it
was to be a social institution then the actors "must be
left opportunities to retain that social citizenship which
formerly they altogether renounced. . . ."15
Meanwhile, an official organization sponsoring the
National Theatre had sprung up. This organization traced
its beginnings to May 28, 1903, when Mr. Richard Badger
wrote a letter to The Times pointing out that there was no
statue of Shakespeare in London. Badger was born in
Stratford, was educated at Stratford Grammar School and he
had a great love for Shakespeare. In his letter he stated
that he would donate LI,000 toward a statue if others
would join. Nothing came of this offer, so on August 12,
1904, Badger wrote another letter to The Times. This time
he offered to give L500 to start the appeal and offered to
give L2,000 to the fund. Israel Gollancz, who was head of
the London Shakespeare League, wrote to Badger and
offered to organize the appeal through his organization.
119
Badger accepted the offer and wrote out a check for B500,
and the appeal was launched.
In 1905, a public meeting was held in which
various ideas for the Shakespeare Memorial were put forth.
Gollancz wanted a museum and library to further the
scholarship on Shakespeare but this idea was heavily
opposed. The Times printed a letter signed by, among
others, J. M. Barrie, A. C. Bradley, W. S. Gilbert, Dr.
Gilbert Murray, A. W. Pinero, and A. B. Walkley, which
called the idea of a library a "rubbish heap of
trivialities."16 Since there was no disagreement that
there should be a Shakespeare Memorial, but there was
considerable disagreement as to what form a memorial might
take, another committee was formed to explore the
possibility. This committee made six suggestions: (1) a
statue? (2) an architectural monument; (3) a theatre; (4) a
National Theatre; (5) a Shakespeare House; and (6) a
Shakespeare Fund.
Badger, meanwhile, had died, leaving in his will
fc3,500 to the committee to be used for a memorial for
Shakespeare. The Shakespeare Memorial Committee, as they
were now called, came to the decision that because Badger
had given so much clearly on the idea of some architectural
120
memorial that included a statue, even though most members
of the committee thought that was inadequate.
In 1908, the Shakespeare Memorial Committee decided
to hold a competition for the design of the monument. In
the meantime, the National Theatre movement was growing, in
great part because of the publication of Scheme and
Estimates for a National Theatre in 1907. Geoffrey
Whitworth, who later became president of the British Drama
League, and who wrote a history of the National Theatre
movement, wrote that the publication of Archer and
Granville-Barker's book "did more than anything else to
enlarge the circle of National Theatre devotees, and to
provide them with power and shot for the assault."-^ Many
people saw the setting up of a Shakespeare Memorial
Committee as an opportunity to get a National Theatre
started:'in London, arguing that a statue was a completely
inappropriate monument to a dramatist when what was really
important was his plays. They felt that a National
Theatre would include as one of its duties keeping the
plays of Shakespeare in front of the public and that this
was a far more appropriate monument than any statue could
be.
121
At the same time, another committee, the National
Theatre Committee, was circulating Scheme and Estimates for
a National Theatre, hoping to attract a donor. Archer felt
from the beginning that Granville-Barker would be the best
man to be the Director of the theatre and he wrote in a
letter to Herbert Trench, "Granville-Barker is quite
clearly the indispensable man to such an undertaking.
. . ."I8 in fact, Archer's insistence on Granville-Barker
was one reason that a donor had not stepped forward. In
December of 1907, Lord Howard de Walden let it be known
that he was willing to get the National Theatre started,
but he objected to Granville-Barker on the grounds that he
had a reputation that was rather too progressive for his
taste. This can be seen from a letter written by Herbert
Trench to William Archer:
One difficulty is this: My friends do not exactly
like the "tone" of some of the pieces which have been
done at the Court. You understand, they have no
objection to freedom of thought, either in the morals
of the plays produced or adventurous innovation in the
theatrical management [Granville-Barker] at the head
of the Savoy movement. Still, what these persons say
(mind, 1^ do not share their position), is that the men
guiding the Savoy movement are rather too
"intellectualist."I9
In 1908 when the Shakespeare Memorial Committee
published its view that the Memorial should be an
122
architectural one in Portland Place, protest was great
against the idea of a "dead" memorial instead of a "living"
theatre. The newspapers helped to turn the balance of
public sentiment in the direction of the National Theatre.
For instance, John Hare wrote a letter to The Times, March
10, 1908, decrying the idea of a monument and advocating a
National Theatre. The Daily News was favorable to the
idea of a National Theatre, and the Daily Chronicle
actively pushed the National Theatre. They went so far as
to publish a special pamphlet which put forth the merits of
the National Theatre and the demerits of the statue. The
Daily Chronicle also helped to organize a meeting held at
the Lyceum Theatre to press the Shakespeare Memorial
Committee to adopt a National Theatre plan. So many
prominent people supported the National Theatre that the
Shakespeare Memorial Committee merged with the National
Theatre Committee and became the Shakespeare Memorial
National Theatre Committee, hereafter referred to as
S.M.N.T.C.
It seemed as if the National Theatre might come
about at any moment. All they were waiting for was for
one very rich man to step forward. Archer, Shaw, Granville-
Barker and the members of the S.M.N.T.C. began speaking to
123
potential donors about the possibility of starting the
National Theatre. In 1908, the same year that the
S.M.N.T.C. was set up, Lillah McCarthy spoke discreately to
Carl Meyer about donating money toward the National
Theatre. Meyer let it be known that he was interested in a
title, so Lillah apparently assured him that such a thing
could be worked out. Subsequently, Meyer gave L70,000 to
the S.M.N.T.C. and soon after he was awarded with a
baronetcy. Victory was in the air, but no further
donations were forthcoming.
In 1909, the S M.N.T.C. initiated an appeal to the
general public for funds. Along with the appeal, they
issued a prospectus which amounted to little more than an
abridged version of Archer and Granville-Barker1s book.
One thing that was different in the prospectus was the
amount of money needed. It had already increased. The
prospectus estimated that L500,000 would be needed to start
such a theatre.
The theatrical community was not entirely for the
idea. There were many actor-mahagers who were against a
National Theatre on the grounds that it would be much more
expensive than anticipated. A letter denouncing it was
circulated and signed by Charles Wyndham, Charles Hawtrey,
124
Cyril Maude, Fred Terry, Lewis Waller, Arthur Bourchier,
20
H. B. Irving, and Seymour Hicks, among others. Max
Beerbohm also thought that the idea was not workable. He
considered it ridiculous that they were planning on such a
grand scale. He felt that the National Theatre should be
21
a small theatre, like the Court under Granville-Barker.
Nevertheless, most people who cared about the
theatre were for the idea, and the appeal continued,
headed by Philip Carr. His strategy was to arrange a
series of events which would involve the society world.
i
In 1910, the Lord Mayor's Show was held with the ^
i
Elizabethan Stage as its theme. A Shakespeare Pageant was ;
held and later a Shakespeare Ball was held at the Royal
Albert Hall. In 1911, a Shakespeare Exhibition was held
at Earl's Court with a replica of the Globe Theatre
erected inside.
Granville-Barker was also doing his part to push
the National Theatre movement. In 1910 he published an
article, "The Theatre— The Next Phase" in The English
Review in which he describes what he thinks is in the
22
future for the English Theatre.
125
The Theatre— The Next Phase
Granville-Barker's basic thesis was that the
professional theatre was becoming increasingly less
important in England and the non-professional theatre was
becoming increasingly more important. He noted that these
amateur companies were becoming more and more serious in
their study of drama. He thought this was an important
trend because it meant that there was likely to be a more
educated and serious audience. Granville-Barker also
thought that amateur companies were often in the position
to explore more progressive and unusual plays than
professional companies could. "But there is evidently a
growing feeling that the development of such an art as the
Theatre cannot be left solely to its professional exponents,
strangled as they are apt to be in the net of speculation
and competition" ("Next Phase," pp. 632-633). Granville-
Barker was firmly on the side of those who wanted the
Shakespeare Memorial to be a National Theatre. He felt
that Shakespeare was a "National Responsibility" ("Next
Phase," p. 636). Granville-Barker took the position that
there was no question that the Shakespeare Memorial
National Theatre should be built and thought that it should
126
be built as soon as possible. He even went as far as to
say that performances of Shakespeare might even be offered
free to the public and made a lighthearted reference to the
fact that it should be offered as a public service like a
drinking fountain in a public park. Now, of course,
Shakespeare is performed free in Regent's Park every
summer.
Interestingly enough, Granville-Barker no longer
thought that the theatre could be started by the gift of a
rich man. He thought that it should be provided by the
government and should be a government responsibility. He
also made it clear once again that he did not believe that
the National Theatre should be an "advanced theatre" or an
"intellectual theatre." He said that the first sounded
lonely and the second gave him a headache. Granville-
Barker preferred that the theatre have no name at all, but
if it must have a name, he would call it "normal theatre"
("Next Phase," p. 638).
Granville-Barker had changed his position very
little from the original writing of Scheme and Estimates,
but he did make one change, and, considering that he was
just coming off the very unsuccessful Duke of York's
repertory season, it is perhaps not surprising. "I have
127
come to the conclusion that a Repertory Theatre cannot be
made to pay in the commercial sense of the word" ("Next
Phase," p. 638).
Granville-Barker pointed out that the social
changes, specifically the lessening of the work day for the
average worker in England meant change and opportunity for
the theatre, for, as he put it, "The theatre a man would
choose after eight hours work is often not the theatre he
chooses after ten hours work. . . ("Next Phase," p.
641). He hoped that the increase in popularity of serious
drama would cut along all class lines and hot just be a
middle and upper class phenomenon.
The most interesting point made in this article is
that Granville-Barker was aware that the real problem with
the National Theatre movement was its lack of popular
support. Most people in the theatre supported the National
Theatre movement, as did many intellectuals and
progressive thinkers in London. There was little
opposition to the idea of a National Theatre, but other
than its few adherents, the National Theatre did not have a
broad base of support in the country. Most people were
frankly apathetic to the idea.
128
Granville-Barker later used another tack for
pushing along the National Theatre movement. This was to
compare the English theatre with the German theatre. In
1910, he made a trip to Berlin and sent back an article to
The Times describing the German theatre.22 jn this article
he related that Berlin had nine repertory theatres
performing thirty-one different plays in one week,
including plays by Shakespeare, Shaw, Moliere, Goethe,
Schiller, and Ibsen. He was especially impressed with the
Kammerspielhaus and the Deutches Theatre, both run by
Reinhart. When he returned, he wrote a longer article
published in the Fortnightly Review about these two
24
theatres— "Two German Theatres."
Granville-Barker made every attempt to link the
work of the Deutches Theatre and the Kammerspielhaus with
the intended work of the National Theatre. Since England
was less than four years away from war with Germany, it was
with great irony that he pointed out the greater attention
given in German theatres to Shakespeare and Shaw than
those two authors received in the English Theatre.
Granville-Barker was very impressed by the use of the two
theatres, the large Deutches Theatre and the smaller
Kammerspielhaus. In his subsequent revisions of the plan
129
of the National Theatre, the idea of two theatres for the
same company would be included. "Running two theatres
instead of one, makes, I am convinced, for economy too,
since it saves the management having to keep its actors
standing idle" ("Two German Theatres," p. 66). He was also
impressed by the seriousness with which German actors
approached their art. They were in good physical shape and
their training included fencing, acrobatics, diction,
philosophy, language, and literature. He also had a chance
to see the Dusseldorfer Schauspielhaus and was impressed
with its facilities. It had that self-sufficiency which he
and Archer had proposed in Scheme and Estimates for a
National Theatre. All of their costumes, scenery and props
were made in the theatre and all of their actors were
trained by the theatre. The unity that this gave to their
productions, he felt, was especially valuable ("Two German
Theatres," p. 70).
Shaw's contribution to the National Theatre
movement was The Dark Lady of the Sonnets which was thinly
disguised propaganda for the National Theatre. It was
performed first at the Haymarket Theatre in November of
1910 in order to raise money for the S.M.N.T.C. and it was
later produced widely across England. This play did a
130
great deal to make the public aware of the issue of the
National Theatre, for in it he had Shakespeare explaining
to Queen Elizabeth why the State should support the
Theatre:
Wherefore I humbly beg Your Majesty to give order
that a theatre be endowed out of the public revenue for
the playing of those pieces of mine which no merchant
will touch, seeing that his gain is so much greater
with the worse than with the better. Thereby you shall
also encourage other men to undertake the writing of
plays who do now despise it and leave it wholly to
those whose counsels will work little good to your
realm. For this writing of plays is a great matter,
forming as it does the minds and affections of men in
such sort that whatsoever they see done in show on the
stage, they will presently be doing in earnest in the
world, which is but a larger stage.25
It was clear by 1913 that a public appeal had
failed to bring forward the necessary funds for the
launching of the National Theatre. The S.M.N.T.C. decided
at that time to test to see how much support they could
garner in Parliament for the National Theatre.
Accordingly, on April 23, 1913, the resolution was moved in
the Commons for a National Theatre. The debate was opened
by H. J. McKinder who moved the resolution by taking
Granville-Barker's tactic of comparing the theatre in
England with the theatre in Germany. He started by
comparing the number of public performances of Shakespeare
in Germany to the number of performances in England. The
131
Germans with their state supported repertory theatres
performed Shakespeare much more often and in a greater
variety than it was done in England. Since there was so
great an anti-German feeling in the country, this was an
effective way of putting his countrymen to shame.
McKinder also made the point that one cannot entirely know
Shakespeare's dramas by reading the scripts. He compared
the necessity of laboratory work in learning science to the
necessity of seeing the play in the theatre to learning
Shakespeare.
Ellis Griffith made the point that only A100,000 or
one-fifth of the subsidy had been found. He took this as a
sign that the public was not yet ready and offered his
opinion that the government's role should be an annual
subsidy after private donations had proved that the time
was right. When the question was called, their resolution
was not passed although it received 162 ayes to 32 noes.
In 1913, the S.M.N.T.C. bought a one-acre site in
Bloomsbury for 1550,000. Although the appeal had ended
without enough money being found to actually build and
equip a theatre on the site, they felt that they ought to
at least buy a site so that they would be able to move on
the project when and if the money was found. However, in
132
1914, the outbreak of war suspended all of their
operations. During that time the site was leased to the
YMCA.
During World War I, the S.M.N.T.C. could have
bought one of the major theatres with their fel00,00 and
started a National Theatre on a limited scale, but,
according to Bridges-Adams, "The Shakespeareans on the
Committee, William Poel among then, would as soon have come
to terms with the devil as with Sir Herbert Tree.The
Committee had chosen its position. It was to be the full
scheme or nothing, so for many years it was nothing.
The School of "The Only Possible Theatre"
In 1920, Harley Granville-Barker published a series
of three articles going into detail about what he believed
should be the relation of the drama school to the National
Theatre. In these articles he developed the idea that the
school should not just serve the needs of the professional
theatre, but that it should serve a wider purpose in the
society. He thought that the school should welcome
students who did not intend to end up making their career
in the professional theatre because he felt that both the
theatre and society would benefit. The society would
133
benefit because there are a number of professions in which
training in acting could be helpful; law, for instance, or
education, or even sales. On the other hand, the
profession of acting would benefit because in drawing
students who have no intention of making the theatre their
career, some might find that they have an aptitude for it.
Therefore, the profession of acting would gain some people
who otherwise never would have thought of making the
theatre their career.^
Granville-Barker was very wary of the idea of
teaching acting, for he felt that no one could teach
another person an art. But he did think that the component
parts of acting could be taught. Granville-Barker defined
component parts as widely as possible. He wanted actors
who not only were skilled in all of the physical techniques
of acting, such as voice, movement, combat and fencing, and
acrobatics, but who were also educated as widely as
possible in the liberal arts. "The technique of acting is
best learnt not directly but through the separate studying
of its component parts. And, granted the temperament,
granted the technique, the most intelligent actor is the
most intelligent man, the man, at least, of deepest knowl
edge and the widest interest in his work" ("School," pp.
348-349). 134
Perhaps his most controversial idea was that
Granville-Barker did not want his students to act at all
until the very end of their study. He wanted to be sure
that they had all the resources at their command by the
time they started acting. "For, once the plunge is taken,
they must swim unaided" ("School," p. 302) Although he
felt that many students would get discouraged, Granville-
Barker thought that they would likely be those who were the
least serious and dedicated. He expected that by the last
year of their study there would be a "small surviving band"
looking on the "promised land of their art" ("School," p.
302). He envisioned the final year to be constant
rehearsal and performance. After that year, they would be
ready to graduate. The final year he wanted to be kept
free from other study. He felt that they should be free
to act the plays that they wanted to act, not necessarily
the classics, and Granville-Barker hoped that they would
be encouraged to be experimental in their work.
In this series of articles, Granville-Barker
developed a concept of theatre which would be educational
both to the actors and the audience. According to him, the
theatre's role in society was to be a broadly educational
one. This plan was most highly developed in his book,
135
The Exemplary Theatre, published in 1922. In this book,
Granville-Barker developed completely his version of the
ideal theatre and what its relationship to society should
be, but, as it is primarily a theoretical exploration into
what purpose the theatre can serve in a social sense,
rather than a specific plan for the National Theatre, it
did not have any influence on the National Theatre move
ment, though some of these ideas appear in some of his
later publications which do deal specifically with the
National Theatre. A closer examination of this book can
be found in Chapter V'of this dissertation.
In the meantime, the S.M.N.T.C. had continued to
lease the Bloomsbury site to the YMCA and the income was
used to subsidize William Bridges-Adams who mounted
seasons of Shakespeare in Stratford during the summers of
1919, 1920, and 1921. In 1923, the Bloomsbury site was
sold for a small profit— S>52,000. The Committee had been
coming to the realization that they could not wait until
the National Theatre could be built in its entirety, so
they started talking to the Old Vic Company about
subsidizing their seasons of the classics for about fel,000
per year. However, in 1923, the Charity Commissioners
made a determination that the S.M.N.T.C. could not
136
disperse any funds except towards the National Theatre.
This ruling meant that they could no longer underwrite the
Stratford Festival and ended the plan for subsidizing the
Old Vic.
In January of 1924, the political situation
changed. The Labour Party, which was expected to be more
in favor of the National Theatre was voted in to form a
government. In an attempt to take advantage of the new
political climate, Granville-Barker wrote a letter to The
Times which was published on March 2nd. In his letter, he
suggested that instead of abolishing the entertainment tax
that had been levied in World War I (which the Labour
Party had made a campaign promise to do), it should be
continued for another year. Ten percent of it could be
used to build and endow the National Theatre which he now
figured at costing one million pounds. For the next
several days, The Times printed correspondence on the
subject both pro and con. A few days later, Granville-
Barker wrote a second letter to The Times in which he
pointed out that the real problem was that the majority of
the people were not convinced that the National Theatre
was necessary. Politicians, academics, and professional
people were for the most part for the National Theatre,
137
but the average person was apathetic.^9 Nevertheless, the
British Drama League felt that the opportunity for
establishing the National Theatre was better than ever, so
they launched another promotional campaign for the National
Theatre.
This campaign included a design competition for the
National Theatre building to be judged by Granville-Barker.
Granville-Barker wrote up specifications that the
designers of the theatre had to adhere to. There were
several changes from the type of theatre building that he
and Archer had advocated in Scheme and Estimates for a
National Theatre. The most notable change was the
addition of another smaller theatre. Granville-Barker had
been in favor of this idea ever since seeing the
Kammerspielhaus and the Deutches Theatre in Berlin. In a
letter to William Archer in 1923, he had written, ". . . .
the double theatre makes for actual economy in running a
repertory— say one-and-a-half times the receipts at one-
and-a-quarter to one-and-a-third times the cost."30
Some of the conditions laid down for those who
entered the design competition were the following: (1) it
must be a large site, large enough to stand free of other
buildings; (2) there must be two theatres— one to seat
138
1,800 to 2,000 and the other to seat 800 to 1,000; (3) the
large house must be capable of converting to a Greek stage,
and also have the ability to have an apron added on to it;
(4) the small theatre must also be able to convert to an
apron; (5) there must be space for five rehearsal rooms,
full shop space, full storage space, and there must be the
ability to store ten productions; (6) there must be dressing
rooms for five hundred actors; (7) there must be a library
for one hundred readers (this was another new condition
that shows that Granville-Barker's interest had increased
in the educational uses of the National Theatre); and (8)
there must be room for offices, rooms for refreshments,
lounges, and lobbies for the audience.
Several architectural firms from all over the world
were invited to submit proposals. The winner was W. L.
Somerville of Toronto. He was awarded a prize of B250 at
the British Exhibition. They also exhibited his plans and
drawings. All of this was good publicity for the National
Theatre. In addition, Drama Magazine, which was published
by the British Drama League, put out a special National
Theatre issue in July of 1924. On the cover was the
architect's drawing of the large auditorium interior. In
this issue they printed all of Somerville's designs and
139
they included Granville-Barker's comments on each part of
the winning design.-*1
The S.M.N.T.C. decided that with Ramsey MacDonald
in office as a Labour Prime Minister, they should take
advantage; consequently, they requested an audience with
the Prime Minister in order to discuss the idea of the
National Theatre. However, MacDonald's government was
never firmly in power and it lasted only nine months. By
the end of 1924, the Tories were in power again and
Stanley Baldwin was Prime Minister. The S.M.N.T.C.
decided to continue to pursue the audience with the Prime
Minister, but Baldwin refused to meet with them. In 1925
they met with Lord Peel who was Commissioner of Works and
discussed with him the idea of getting a site from the
government. They asked for three-quarters of an acre and
stated that they were ready to build, even though their
capital remained only L100,000. In April of 1925, Peel
wrote then to say that the government could not make a site
for their disposal and once more the S.M.N.T.C. put off
their plans for building the National Theatre.
In 1929 the Wall Street crash reverberated in
London and brought down the government of Baldwin and the
Tories. With MacDonald and the Labour Party in control of
140
the government, prospects once again looked brighter for
the National Theatre. This time the interest in the
National Theatre was prodded by the government itself. In
the House of Commons, MacDonald was asked if he was aware
that there were various schemes for a National Theatre. He
answered that he was aware of it and that if they could get
together on one scheme the government would be willing to
listen to it. The S.M.N.T.C. took the hint and once more
launched a publicity drive for the National Theatre. Their
plan was, of course, still based on Archer and Granville-
Barker 's work Scheme and Estimates for a National Theatre,
which Granville-Barker set out to revise and bring up to
date. In 1929 the Drama League in their magazine Drama put
out another National Theatre issue. Geoffrey Whitworth,
who was head of the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre
Committee as well as the Drama League, wrote of the
necessity of everyone agreeing to one plan for a National
Theatre, "Luckily, there exists a statement of the general
standard which we should desire to see maintained in the
book A National Theatre by William Archer and Harley
Granville-Barker, a revised addition of which is shortly to
be p u b l i s h e d ."32 Whitworth also stated the Drama League's
policy of,no compromise. "In other words, we, as a League
141
would rather see the fruition of the plan delayed yet
longer than be content with anything unworthy of the hopes
3 3
of the past or the claims of the future." In this issue
they republished Somerville's drawings and plans along with
Granville-Barker1s comments on them. They also published
a series of statements by a cross section of the public
giving their support for the National Theatre scheme,
including Granville-Barker. They also published an
article by a commercial manager, C. B. Cochran who
welcomed the National Theatre as stimulating in competition
to the professional theatre already in London.
One year after MacDonald had intimated that the
time for government action might be near, Granville-Barker
published A National Theatre. Though it was the same
basic plan he and Archer had drawn up in 1904, the book
was completely rewritten. All of the financial estimates
were updated, and the book reflected Granville-Barker's
own concern with the educational value of such a theatre.
It was distributed even more widely than the earlier book,
and it was also published in abridged form in The Times in
February of 1930."^
142
A National Theatre
Unlike Scheme and Estimates for a National Theatre,
A National Theatre included a discussion of why there
should be a National Theatre at all.^ It would be a place
of serious study of the drama both for professional actors
and for the public, and it would be a library of living
drama. Granville-Barker felt that these were things that
the commercial theatre cannot do. Even the National
Theatre cannot keep all worthwhile plays alive at all
times:
Fifty theatres, working at full pressure, could not
encompass the whole canon of the plays old and new,
that might claim a place. But a repertory theatre
containing two houses, one large and one small, and
with an adequate company, could stage from forty to
fifty different plays in a year, and not one of them
need be a poor one. It would, as a National Theatre,
make all that is authentically Shakespeare its concern,
not the easily popular plays only, but the greater
ones and the neglected ones. Eight or ten would be
acted during the year, and each week should see at
least two of them in the bill. The other Elizabethans
would have an occasional place, eighteenth century
comedy a more constant one. It would be easy enough
to find every year a dozen or more plays between 1880
and today, acclaimed in their time, acclaimed since,
some of them as having come before their time— the
generation that saw them would be glad to see them
again, the generation that did not might find them
worth seeing. . . . And if such a theatre could not
find eight or ten new plays a year to produce— plays,
whether farce or tragedy, written with integrity of
purpose . . . — the contemporary drama would be in a
bad way indeed. (National Theatre, pp. 9-10)
143
Granville-Barker envisioned the National Theatre as
being the "cathedral" of the drama. It would be a symbol
of the high honor in which the society can hold the drama
and would be a source of encouragement for the art of the
theatre (National Theatre/ pp. 1-2).
The profession of acting would gain by the National
Theatre, too, for in the commercial theatre the actor is
rewarded for continuing in roles similar to ones he has
always played with success. The National Theatre, with its
repertory system, would encourage the actors to tackle new
and more difficult roles. "A National Theatre would have
its duty to the art of acting, and no casual one. It would
give good actors great parts to play in surroundings that
would enhance them; and we might— who knows?— see a little
great acting again" (National Theatre, p. 19).
In this book, Granville-Barker no longer calls for
the National Theatre to be built by private endowment. He
wanted it to be a public institution held in public trust
and he felt that the government must be involved. He did
think, though, that there was no reason that the National
Theatre could not balance its budget, assuming that
equipment and upkeep would be taken care of by the
government.
144
Granville-Barker reiterated what had been implied
in earlier works, "A National Theatre cannot be begun in a
small way" (National Theatre, p. 25). He did not want
anyone to try to skimp on the plan. He felt that if a
theatre building could not be built with all of the
facilities that he was asking for, or if the theatre did
not have the capability to produce repertory, then it
isn't really a National Theatre. All that they would be
doing would be to build another theatre, not so different
from other theatres. The National Theatre was to be a big
enterprise done in a big way. If it could not be done like
that, it would not be a National Theatre.
A National Theatre must command attention, not
apologetically beg for it. Adequately endowed and run
upon generous lines, it can probably pay its way in a
duly limited sense while it fulfills its task.
Tinkered at, it will do neither. It will be a poor
half-starved thing, shunned by the best dramatists and
actors, and by the best of the public? or to sustain
it in respect, it will need extravagant subsidies.
(National Theatre, p. 27)
Granville-Barker changed very little of the
original plan. The major changes consisted of updating and
modernizing all the estimates of cost. He also definitely
called for two theatres to be built under one roof, and
implied that a third would be useful as well. The new
estimates for the cost of this theatre were dramatically
145
higher. He estimated that the building and its equipment
would run between £500,000 and £750,000 and he guessed that
it would be closer to the larger figure. He calculated
that £200,000 would be needed to make the theatre secure
for its first several years. Assuming that the site would
be made available to them by the government at little or no
cost, the estimate came up to £950,000, so just to be
safe, he rounded it off to an even £1,000,000 (National
Theatre, pp. 28-30). Granville-Barker then suggested that
it might not be so difficult to find the financing for this
amount. He pointed out that the government was likely to
make £400,000 from licensing radios (there was at that time
a ten shilling tax per year for a radio license). He
suggested that if that revenue was set aside for a National
Theatre, in three years the one million pounds would be
made at very little inconvenience to the tax payer.
Probably the biggest change in A National Theatre
from the earlier book is his insistence on two theatres.
"The need for the two auditoria— or 'houses' as it will be
more convenient to call them— is fundamental, artistically
and economically, too" (National Theatre, p. 45). His
point was that artistically it would be a compromise to
have only one theatre, because some plays play better in
146
smaller theatres than they do in larger ones and some just
the opposite. His view was that a repertory company can he
most economically used in two theatres. With one theatre,
if a play is being done that has a small cast, then the
rest of the company stands idle. "One house, in fact,
would artistically give no play its best chance and
economically it would mean waste both ways, in the paying
of actors for doing nothing and in the waste of empty seats
which might be filled" (National Theatre, p. 45).
Granville-Barker liked Somerville's plans and
reproduced them in this book. The two theatres were kept
as far apart as possible on different sides of the building
so that no sound from one theatre could be heard in the
other. In between were found rehearsal rooms, offices and
the library, and the foyer was common to both theatres so
that the refreshment rooms, smoking rooms, cloak rooms,
and even a restaurant would serve productions in both
houses.
Granville-Barker increased the size of the company
since two houses meant twice as many performances. He
envisioned a company of one hundred and one, seventy-one
actors, and thirty actresses. He explained the larger
number of men by the fact that so much of the company's
147
business would involve producing Shakespeare. Granville-
Barker thought that with the two theatres the company
ought to be able to perform 880 times a year, never
performing fewer than eight times in a week and never more
than twelve (National Theatre, p. 54). He retained the
salary and fee system for paying the actors, as well as the
pension, but added the idea that an actor could be granted
a furlough of a year's time away from the theatre every
three or four years without being rendered ineligible for
the pension. He felt that the actors would benefit from
it, and the theatre would benefit from the actor's
experience at other theatres when he returned.
As in Scheme and Estimates for a National Theatre,
Granville-Barker included a specimen repertory, although
not an entire year as had been done in the earlier book.
In his repertory, he planned that the National Theatre
should offer forty-eight every year. Of those, about ten
would be new productions each year, with the others being
hold-overs from previous years. He estimated that each
new production would cost £2,500 in the large house and
£1,500 in the small house. In his specimen repertory he
planned twenty-three productions for the large and twenty-
five for the small house. Therefore, the cost of
148
production for the large house productions would be
£.57,500 and for the small house £37,500, for a total of
£95,000, He then divided this by four, since each
production was supposed to last for four years, coming up
with a production cost.of £23,750. To this he added
£9,500 (ten percent) for upkeep. His total estimate for
the production of plays was £33,250 (National Theatre, pp.
80-82) .
For possible revenue, he calculated on two-thirds
of a full house, which he worked out to be £293. In the
small house, Granville-Barker figured that average
capacity would be £172. Since he intended to have
performances in both houses 440 times a year, he came up
with a revenue from the large house of £128,920 and in the
small house of £75,680 for a total of £204,600 (National
Theatre, p. 98). He also added another £5,000 because the
theatre had a potential of taking in that figure from its
refreshment room profits making a grand total of £209,600
(National Theatre, p. 106).
In order to show that the theatre could make near
its running cost, he tabulated all of the expenses
including all of the salaries, production expenses, all of
the authors' fees, the pension fund, and general expenses.
149
This came to a total of £>209,657, although he went to a
great deal of trouble to explain how much each particular
item would cost and why. This balances very neatly with
his estimate of potential revenue of £>209,600.
Granville-Barker no longer saw any need for the
National Theatre having its own training school for the
drama, since several had been established in London since
the publication of Scheme and Estimates for a National
Theatre. He felt that instead, the wisest course would be
to enter into some relationship with the Royal Academy of
Dramatic Art and the Central School of Speech Training, so
that some of its students could be used as apprentices and
walk-ons in the theatre.
On the whole, there was very little change from the
earlier book to the later book. Twenty-six years of
failure to find the money for the enterprise had not caused
Granville-Barker to back down on his attitude that the
National Theatre should be done in the largest possible
way. If anything, he was now calling for a larger
enterprise with more people in the company, more
performances being done and more theatres, and certainly it
would cost more money.
150
The book was reviewed favorably in The Times
Literary Supplement. The reviewer noted that there was a
rising public sentiment in favor of the National Theatre:
"There is a great force of public opinion behind the
British Drama League; and it is not by mere caprice that
Mr. Granville-Barker has of late been revising the old
scheme and now puts out a book which creates on paper the
very thing which public opinion seems to be more and more
desirous of having. "'36
The book had an important effect on the National
Theatre movement. As Whitworth wrote, Granville-Barker1s
book was important "for its effect on opinion was prompt
and permanent.The S.M.N.T.C. adopted the book as
being the plan which they would submit to the Prime
Minister.
In the meantime, the S.M.N.T.C. looked for a site,
hoping to find one large enough for Somerville's design.
Whitworth noted that, "The Granville-Barker twin stage
theatre was freely acknowledged to be the ideal. . . ,"
but most of the sites the Committee looked at and could
afford were not large enough to accommodate such an
O Q
arrangement. The S.M.N.T.C. was under increasing
pressure to compromise their plan. At the same time, they
^ 1
were slowly losing the important and prestigious backing of
Granville-Barker. Granville-Barker was becoming
uncomfortable with the idea that so much influence had to
be placed on Shakespeare in the National Theatre. In an
article published in 1934, Granville-Barker wrote, "We
want a theatre (and more than one) in which Shakespeare
merely has the place that is his in the whole rich land
scape of English drama . . . for drama itself, not for any
reputations made in it, even the greatest."^9 Granville-
Barker was beginning to feel that the S.M.N.T.C. might be
more handicapped than helped by Shakespeare’s name, for he
was concerned that the National Theatre should not be
narrowing its scope.
In 1934 yet another public appeal was launched.
By this time their capital had increased to 3=150,000,
chiefly by good investments. Once more, they held fund
raising events, such as a Shakespeare matinee in 1935 and a
coronation ball for George VI in 1937, but the appeal was
incurring heavy expenses and by 1937 it was only breaking
even. Since the appeal was stalling, the S.M.N.T.C. felt
heavy pressure to do something, so in 1937 they bought a
site in Kensington for B75,000 just across from the
Victoria and Albert Museum. This site was too small for
152
Granville-Barker's double stage theatre and possibly not
even big enough for a true repertory theatre. Granville-
Barker was not in favor of building on that site, although
surprisingly enough, Bernard Shaw was highly in favor of
it. He liked the idea that the theatre would be in the
museum district. Of course, the S.M.N.T.C. did not have
the money to build on the site, but they felt that if the
appeal was to succeed, they must move forward. An
architect was selected to draw up plans for the National
Theatre on that site— Sir Edward Luytons. Also for
publicity purposes and to make it look as if things were
going forward, the S.M.N.T.C. wanted to name the Director
of the National Theatre. Their first choice was Granville-
Barker. "Everyone agreed that Granville-Barker was the
man, and steps were taken to discover whether he would look
with favor on such an invitation."^0
Granville-Barker, who was now sixty years old and
living in Paris, declined. This was partly because he felt
that they were proceeding on too small a scale and he felt
very strongly about that. But it was also because he felt
that a younger man would be more suited to the job.
In another attempt at garnering publicity, on April
22, 1938 they held a ceremony in which a twig and a piece
153
of sod from the ground were handed over from the old
owners to the new owners, represented by Bernard Shaw and
Geoffrey Whitworth. However, once again, just as the
appeal was looking promising, it had to close down in 1939
upon the outbreak of World War II. Harley Granville-Barker
was never to see the National Theatre get any farther than
this, for he died in 1946. Ironically, when the National
Theatre was built, it was built to an even larger scale
than Granville-Barker had envisioned and it was built not
on the Kensington site but on the South Bank of the Thames
on a site that Granville-Barker had indicated in A National
Theatre would be an ideal spot to build the National
Theatre.
154
Footnotes to Chapter IV
William Wilson, "A House for Shakespeare. {A
Proposition for the Consideration of the Nation.)"
Hood's Maqazine, X (September 1848), pp. 209-216.
^Henry Irving in a paper read to the Social
Science Congress, October 1878, quoted in Geoffrey
Whitworth, The Making of a National Theatre (London: Faber
and Faber, 1951), pp. 31-33.
•^Matthew Arnold, "The French Play in London," in
The Complete Works of Matthew Arnold, Volume IX (Ann Arbor,
Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1973), pp. 65-85.
4Arnold, p. 82 (see also p. 85).
5Lieut.-Colonel C. Archer, William Archer: Life,
Work and Friendships (London: George Allen and Unwin,
1931), p. 43.
^[William Archer], The Fashionable Tragedian: A
Criticism, 2nd ed. (London: George Taylor, 1977), pp.
23-24.
7
William Archer and Harley Granville-Barker,
Scheme and Estimates for a National Theatre (New York:
Duffield and Co., 1908). Hereafter referred to as Scheme.
O
°Bram Stoker, "The Question of a National Theatre,"
The Nineteenth Century and After, LXIII (May 1908), pp.
734-742.
^"A National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates," The
Spectator. LXXXXIX (December 28, 1907), p. 1094.
■ L0,,A National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates," The
Spectator, p. 1093.
-^The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, 3rd ed;
Phyllis Hartnell, ed. (London: Oxford University Press,
1 9 6 6 ) , p. 6 6 9 .
155
* 1 p
The Complete Guide to Britain's National Theatre
(London: Heinemann for the National Theatre, 1377), p. 42.
"^McCarthy, The Court Theatre 1904-1907, p. 160.
■^Archer and Granville-Barker, Scheme, pp. ix-x.
15
Archer and Granville-Barker, Scheme, p. xii.
■^Quoted in Whitworth, p. 44. I follow Whitworth's
account closely for the early history of the National
Theatre movement.
^Whitworth, p. 59.
18
Whitworth, pp. 61-62.
19
Quoted m Whitworth, p. 63.
^Whitworth, pp. 93-94.
21
W. Bridges-Adams, "Theatre," m Edwardian
England 1901-1914, Simon Noel-Smith, ed. (London: Oxford
University Press, 1964), p. 39.
O p
Harley Granville-Barker, "The Theatre: The Next
Phase," The English Review, V (April-July 1910), pp. 631-
648. Hereafter referred to as "Next Phase."
p o
[Harley Granville-Barker] "The Theatre in
Berlin," The Times, November 23, 1910, p. 12.
24
Harley Granville-Barker, "Two German Theatres,"
Fortnightly Review, N.S. LXXXIX (January 1911), pp. 60-70.
Hereafter referred to as "Two German Theatres."
25
Bernard Shaw, "The Dark Lady of the Sonnets," in
Selected One Act Plays Volume Two (Harmendsworth,
Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 51.
2 6
Whitworth, pp. 100-102. The account of the
debate in the House of Commons is drawn from this source.
^Br idges-Adams, p. 399.
156
28
Harley Granville-Barker, "The School of 'The
Only Possible Theatre'," The Drama (May, June, July 1920).
Hereafter referred to as "School."
29
Whitworth, pp. 127-128.
30
Letter to William Archer from Herbert Trench,
dated September 9, 1923, quoted in Lieut.-Colonel C.
Archer, William Archer, p. 395.
■^Granville-Barker, "Notes Upon the Prize Design
for a National Theatre," Drama, pp. 229-233.
3 2
Drama-, Special National Theatre Number (December
1929), p. 33.
3 3
Drama, Special National Theatre Number (December
1 9 2 9 ) , p. 33.
34
Harley Granville-Barker, "A National Theatre,"
The Times, February 10, 1930, pp. 13-14; and February 11,
1930, pp. 15-16.
35
Harley Granville-Barker, A National Theatre
(London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1930). Hereafter referred
to as National Theatre.
^^"A National Theatre," The Times Literary
Supplement, XXIX (June 5, 1930), p. 475.
37Whitworth, p. 181.
■^Whitworth, p. 192.
39
Granville-Barker, The Study of Drama, p. 41.
40
Whitworth, p. 203.
157
CHAPTER V
GRANVILLE-BARKER'S DRAMATIC THEORY
Harley Granville-Barker never wrote a book
detailing his critical theories as a whole. Instead, his
theory is embedded into a variety of articles, speeches,
and short books. His theories remained pretty constant
throughout his career, and they were inextricably linked
to his conviction that the theatre played an important,
educative function in society.
Acting
In Granville-Barker's view, the actor was the
center of theatrical art; "The art of the theatre is the
art of acting, first, last, and all the time."'*" In his
varied endeavors in the theatre, Granville-Barker always
brought the viewpoint of the actor. As a director, play
wright and critic, his work assumed a central position for
the actor. The actor is the one thing that the theatre
cannot do without; none of the other aspects of the
theatre is as essential as the actor. "Before ever the
158
the literary man and his manuscript appeared, acting was
there, and it remains the foundation to the whole a f f a i r ."2
Granville-Barker does not think that the written script is
the essential thing in drama. In fact, he defines a play
in terms of performance. "A play is anything that can be
made effective upon the stage of the theatre by human
agency," and he notes that even that might be too narrow a
... * 3
definition.J
Granville-Barker absolutely denies that the actors
do not add something to the script by their art, but
equally denies that they do not take from the playwright's
art the outline for their work. He feels that the actors
and the author are both collaborators and rivals in
creation of character.^
Granville-Barker believed that the actor
contributes not only part, but the crucial part of the
dramatic creation. This put him totally at odds with the
literary men of his time who considered the acting and
production as merely the physical realization of the text.
He felt that this literary approach was not only unfruit
ful to understanding drama, but believed that it was not
really an approach to drama at all. While he admitted
that the script may be an aesthetic object in itself, he
159
thought that this was unintentional, for the script was
not written to be a piece of literature, but to be an
outline of a dramatic performance. Therefore, the proper
critical approach to a play is as a performance, not as
literature.
Since the play only exists in performance, the
actor would be a full collaborator with the author in
creating character. Only the actor can recreate the
5
character in terms of hxs own personality. Because the
character does not exist except when it is being recreated
by the actor, the play is unfinished both before the
production and after it as well; the character has to be
created anew by each actor who plays the role. The better
a play is, the more it demands good acting. The actors
need to bring to the play something of themselves. The
danger in this collaboration is that the two artists, the
actor and the dramatist, could be working against each
other. To avoid this, Granville-Barker felt that the
actor should recognize that there are certain fixed points
in part that cannot be tampered with. These fixed points
are defined as any actions in the main structure of the
play. These are never altered for they are as much a part
of the play as the dialogue. However, the subconscious
160
action can be done in any of a hundred ways and the actor
must find the right way to do these for his gifts and his
personality. It is unnecessary, in fact a waste of time
for the dramatist to give the actor complete details as to
the character. Much of this is the actor's work and he
must be allowed to do it or the play will suffer. A few
hints are all the dramatist needs to supply, for if he
draws the character too fully, the actor will get lazy.
It is equally wrong for the playwright to draw a character
too sketchily, because the actor will fill in the gaps
with tricks of technique. True emotion becomes sentiment
and the play becomes a mere vehicle for the actor. If
either partner in the collaboration becomes dominant, the
whole suffers.^
Nor did Granville-Barker think that the playwright
should develop character fully through dialogue alone.
This does not mean that details of characterization that
are not in the dialogue belong just to the actor, for the
author has to know when to allow them and when to
indicate that development, but the dramatist should not
indicate how to convey emotion. The actor must also
continue to change and discover in his part, "Finality in
acting is death. A book must be finished with, or a
161
picture, but the moment an actor ceases to vary his part,
he should stop playing it; he has in fact stopped playing
it. Repetition is not acting."
Granville-Barker considers the creation o f
characters in action to be the center of the art of the
theatre, and it is this creation that is shared by both
playwright and actor; "The matured art of the playwright
lies in giving life to characters in action, and the
secret of it is giving each character a due chance in the
battle, the action of a play being literally the fighting
of a battle of character."®
Since Granville-Barker's point of view strongly
favors acting, it is not surprising that he was attracted
to Shakespeare. Since little or no localized scenery was
used on the Elizabethan stage, the actors had the added
burden of telling the audience where they are and what the
time relation is to previous scenes. Granville-Barker did
not find this restricting to the actor, but quite the
opposite. For in Shakespeare the actors "carry place and
Q
time with them as they move." In his view, it was not
only unnecessary but wrong to play Shakespeare in sets
that give the exposition to the audience, for the actor
can create his time and place more quickly and more
162
effectively than a set can. Shakespeare thus turned a
limitation of his stage into an asset, giving the actors
yet another tool in the interpretation of character, for
the way the character conveys this information tells the
audience something about him.
To Granville-Barker, the essence of the author—
actor collaboration can be found in the Shakespearean
solliloquy. The actor, alone on stage with his talents
and the playwright's words, speaking his thoughts directly
to the audience; "There is no illusion, so there is every
illusion."10
i
I
Granville-Barker feels that the actor must master
technique and must be able to identify with his part, but
in order to act properly he must be detached from both.
The actor must detach from technique by constant practice
until it is no longer done consciously. The study of the
part must be thorough, but then the actor must detach
himself in order to find meaning. If he does this, his
performances will always be valid and always be a little
different. He came to the conclusion that the realistic
theatre was beginning to demand that the actor identify
too much with his role and this was beginning to lower the
artistic value of the whole. In the non-realistic or
163
presentational theatre, the actor does not so much realize
the part as he realizes himself in the part- In his view,
the effect is always more sincere and the performance more
effective in this way.
Granville-Barker placed a great deal of emphasis
on acting technique. Acting is done with an instrument,
the actor's body, voice, and personality. Since we are
always practicing this instrument in daily life, many
actors, and most members of an audience assume that the
playing of it is easier than it really is. "The human
personality is doubtless in terms of nature the easiest of ,
I
instruments to play upon, but, in terms of art, it can be j
the most difficult," for there are no mechanical limits to
what can be expressed with the personality.^
Interestingly enough, Granville-Barker believed
that the only way to improve the level of acting is to
improve the audience's knowledge of the art of acting. As
their knowledge improves, so does' their taste, and as
their taste improves they begin to demand that the actor
detach from technique. This has the added virtue of
bringing up the quality of the script because poor scripts
simply cannot stand up to good acting. Because of this,
he includes the audience in the actor-author
164
collaboration. He makes the audience ultimately
responsible for poor acting and poor drama in general. In
his view, the audience always gets the acting they deserve.
"Plays may not always get the acting they deserve, but
audiences invariably do. In The Exemplary Theatre,
Granville-Barker opens with a dialogue between two
characters, the Minister of Education and the Man of the
Theatre. In this dialogue, he has the Minister of
Education put forth all of the objections to Granville-
Barker 1 s theories so that the Man of the Theatre can, in
Socratic dialogue fashion, demolish his arguments. When
the Man of the Theatre suggests that education should be
the function of the theatre rather than merely entertain
ment, the Minister of Education is not sure that he wants
to be uplifted in his evening's entertainment unless the
process is concealed from him. The Man of the Theatre
answers in this way:
I will tell you what best can conceal it. A
thorough education in dramatic art. By the aid of
that, you would make the remarkable discovery that
good plays are better than bad, and that there are
many more sorts of good plays than you imagine. You
would find, also, that acting is very subtle and
sensitive art which demands trained appreciation.- * - 4
He even likes the idea of an audience being involved
enough in the production to hiss a poor play or a poor
165
actor off the stage. He feels that if the audience has
good taste and has been educated about the drama, the
acting profession would not object to this either, for at
least they will have been given a fair test. Building
taste in the audience is an upward spiral that feeds on
itself. If an audience is given enough good acting and
enough good drama, they begin to appreciate it and demand
better acting and better drama. As the drama and the
acting get better, it in turn teaches the audience to
appreciate even better work.
Although Granville-Barker starts by emphasizing
the actor, he ends up by involving all of society. He
wanted the gap between the artist and the audience to be
narrowed. This can be done if the actors broaden them
selves by studying every conceivable subject and if the
audience becomes more educated about the drama. In this
way, going to a play would be a kind of mutual exploration
of a play by both audience and actor.
The Director
Granville-Barker thought that the director's job
was to see that there was a stylistic unity to the play.
This does not mean that the director should impose this
166
stylistic unity. Quite the contrary, Granville-Barker
felt that this unity should come about by mutual study by
the cast. To this end, he finds it very important that
the casting be done from a company of actors who are used
to working together. He did not like the process in which
a wholly new cast is put together for each play.
Although he recognized that a director can impose
this artisitic unity, he felt that it is never as good as
when the unity comes from a group of actors who are used
to working together.^ He felt that the shape and style
of the production should come about in rehearsals, never
decided ahead of time. In order to achieve this, the
rehearsals should begin with the study of the script, a
seminar, with the director as seminar leader. The study
should always be in a group. He did not want the actors
to study the script alone for the process is not for the
actor to understand his part, but rather "to arrive at a
common understanding and a unity of intention about the
play. "-*-6 This means argument, discussion, criticism,
interpretation, and most of all, study. If the play
involves conflict, the actors must study it, discover its
sources and the relationships of the characters.
167
The director will know when the play is understood
sufficiently when the actors begin'to get impatient just
reading the play. They will want to act. At this time,
the director's role changes and he becomes the ideal
audience (whose good taste and knowledge of acting demands
the best from the actors). In this stage, he thinks that
any technique is fair to use in order to stimulate the
actors, except telling the cast what to do, including
flattering, hinting, cajoling, suggesting and vetoing. The
actors must collaborate with each other and the text in
making the dramatic creation, but the director must let
the actors know when it is working and when it is not
working.
Granville-Barker likens the text to a musical score
which exists as music only when being performed. He down
plays the role of the director in the creation of the art.
Although he feels that the director might talk in the early
rehearsals in general terms along the lines of his
Prefaces to Shakespeare, the bulk of the study should be
done by actors who must study and talk and work out the
problems of the script among themselves. - * - 7
Granville-Barker's conception of a play is not
limited to theme and characters in action. He also sees it
168
as something abstract, a composition in color, movement
and sound. "All plays exist as schemes of sound, as
shifting pictures, in decoration of thought and phrase,
and the less their dependence on plot or conflict of
character, the more they must depend on such means to
18
beauty and charm." Granville-Barker is referring here
to Love's Labour's Lost, the argument being that a play
which is less impressive when seen through literary
criticism is not necessarily any less enjoyable in per
formance, if a director knows what to emphasize. The form |
of drama must be studied in motion, the patterns of
variation in acting, light, set, tempo, the music of the
dialogue. There is a harmony among these elements which
is created when the production has artistic unity.
Granville-Barker did not think that the director
should be afraid to break existing conventions. He does
not think the conventions of the theatre should ever be
treated as dogma. Conventions are convenient, but
convenient only, and the playwright, director, and actor
can change them to suit his need. They should not,
however, be changed just to change, but because a better
convention is needed to suit the conditions of a particular
play, actor, and audience.^
169
Granville-Barker also felt that all parts are
important parts of the whole creation: the costumes, set
design and music not only create the fundamental mood of
the play, but they also assist the contrast and context of
the character. The scenic design should come from the
movement and rhythm of the play, not a realistic imitation.
He believed that it is wrong for the director and scene
designer to bring in a modern theory and force a classic
into that mold. Although he felt that this is fine for a
modern work written with that style in mind, he does not
think that the classics should be treated that way. In
this case, he is looking from a playwright's point of view
rather than the actor's or the director's. They must be
honest in their collaboration with the author who is no
longer able to defend himself. He feels that the correct
view is to find the interpretation in the text, not to
on
bring a preconceived notion to it.
The director's position, in Granville-Barker's
actor-author-audience collaboration seems to be as mediator
between the parties involved. The director represents the
author at early rehearsals, is firm about protecting the
actor's part in the collaboration and operates as the
ideal audience to keep the acting and playwrighting honest.
170
Of contemporary directors, Granville-Barker thought that
Stanislavski comes closest to his idea of a director. He
felt that the Moscow Art Theatre's production methods are
right and he also thinks that Chekhov is the kind of play
wright who is best suited for this kind of approach,
because Chekhov leaves so much of the interpretation for
the actor to convey outside of the dialogue, ^
The most striking aspects of Granville-Barker’s
aesthetic theory is his inclusion of the audience in the
creation, and the inclusion of the creation in the lives
of the audience. Just as an actor gains more insight into
himself by recreating a character in his own terms, drama
helps the entire society gain more insight into itself:
"Dramatic art, fully developed in the form of the acted
play, is the working out . . . not the self-realization of
2 2
the individual, but of society itself." Granville-Barker
felt that this is more than coincidence. Individuals come
to their deepest and most sincere convictions in a process
that is parallel to that of making good drama? that is,
identification, backing away, and recreating in our own
terms. In this way, he feels that the theatre can be
enormously influential. If a society is continually
exposed to great plays well acted, our discernment of
171
truth sharpens and in turn we demand better acting that
leads to more understanding and everybody, audience,
actors, and playwrights benefit. This power cuts both
ways, the chance of misleading is also great, the artist
can lead the public to accept fiction as fact. But
Granville-Barker did not believe that this makes the
educative value of the theatre invalid, because the artist
cannot lead an audience against its will. Since the
theatre helps us to recognize experiences outside our own,
bad drama can mislead the audience by causing them to
experience feelings that are not genuine. However,
experience can help the audience tell the genuine from the
false. This is because the process of arriving at a
genuine conviction is always the same: "It is quite
possible to acquire enough general knowledge of the
workings of interpretive consciousness to be able to apply
test after test of the genuineness— and thus inferentially
of the objective truth— of a story every circumstance of
2 3 •
which may be unfamiliar." In this way we see that
although the convictions of different people will be
different, they are arrived at in the same way that ours
are. Recognizing this helps us to see the commonality of
man.
172
Granville-Barker demanded a great deal from the
drama. He believes that, in the social sense, the drama's
purpose is to continually educate people. The theatre can
then be a public service helping to keep the minds of the
citizenry keen, not in a solitary sense like reading, but
in a social sense.^
Granville-Barker felt that a society that demands
good drama as a staple can easily be created, partly in
school by discussion and study similar to that done in
rehearsal, but mostly from being around good drama, for
unlike Gresham's law, Granville-Barker's law is that the
bad is driven out by the good. Once an audience is
created that knows good acting and drama, they will not
settle for less.
On the subject of the study of drama, he is
ambivalent. Though he thinks that much good can come of
it, he holds that drama is best experienced in live
performance by a cast that has studied it. In reaction to
critics taking the position that in performance an
audience member cannot possibly get all of the subtleties
out of a great play, he writes this: "We may abandon our
selves to the emotions raised by a performance, confident
that the complete and final effect produced on us will be
173
fruitful and equable enough and that, though what we may
lose at the time in fullness of understanding, we shall
9 5
gain in conviction" Although he admits the fact that
artistic decisions have been made limits the possibilities
that we see, it also frees us to identify fully with the
choices that are made, since we are not under the burden
of making those choices when we see the play. There is a
very important difference between reading a play and
seeing a play. When we read a play, we are investigating
the causes and effects, but in experiencing the play, we
simply get effects, one after the other to respond to. In
performance the actors, director, and playwright, force
the audience to proceed at their speed and on their terms.
The Exemplary Theatre
Granville-Barker thought that The Exemplary
Theatre*^ was his most important work. It is about the
function and organization of the theatre and its place in
society. It is the most comprehensive work of his dealing
with the theatre as a social institution. It is much more
than his previous works on the National Theatre, which
were very much tied to a specific theatre that might be
possible to build in England. The exemplary theatre was
174
Granville-Barker's ideal theatre. It was not intended, as
the National Theatre was, to be a blueprint for a theatre
actually to be built. It was more of a philosophical
statement about what the function of the theatre could be
under, what to him, would be ideal circumstances. One
reviewer connected it to his earlier work on the National
Theatre and said, "The plan is here elucidated and
expanded and apparently unbound by the hope that it may
2 7
make immediate appeal to some millionaire." The book was
completely different from Scheme and Estimates for a .
National Theatre because it did not have any concrete
proposals, did not suggest a way that this theatre might be
built. It was indeed "unbound" from any practical
considerations.
Granville-Barker felt that the theatre was not just
another industry turning out another commodity like any
other. He was totally opposed to the idea that success or
failure in the theatre was predicated by how much money it
made and that success concerned only those who had
invested time or money into it, for he thought that the
society at large and the government of that society must
take some responsibility for the theatre (Exemplary, p.
29). He thought that the government should recognize that
175
providing the theatre would be a social service similar to
art museums and public libraries- These institutions also
have strong educative value and are therefore worth being
subsidized? the theatre should be treated no differently.
After the opening dialogue in which Granville-Barker raises
and disposes of all of the objections to this idea, he
never again brings up any objections to it. From that
point on, the idea of the theatre as a public service and
an educative force is assumed to be one in which we are in
full agreement.
i
The exemplary theatre differs from a normal theatre
in seriousness of purpose. It is not primarily a place of
entertainment that produces plays. Instead, it is "an
institution where they are kept alive— a library of drama"
(Exemplary, p. 76). Because the theatre is to be a center
for the serious study of plays, producing plays will be
only one of its functions. It will also be a place where
dramatic art is studied for its own sake and disseminated
in every way, not just in the form of the acted play.
"The true theatre, then, is to be a placerfor the study
and development of dramatic art, and it must have no more
limited function" (Exemplary, p. 77).
176
Granville-Barker is very much against the idea
that the theatre should be only for a small part of the
community. He felt that everyone could and should get
involved. If the audience goes to the play for the purpose
of exploring the meaning of the play, the collaboration
between the actors and the audience is an even fuller one
because each is related to each other during the
I
performance by their interest in the play. This
strengthens the community and is educative for both actors
and audience. Ideally, every community should have a
theatre like this that serves local interests. The
National Theatre serves the entire nation and would
provoke a sense of nationalism in the same way that the
smaller theatres would promote local unity.
Since Granville-Barker envisions the exemplary
theatre as being both a place where plays are produced and
a place where plays are studied and where acting,
directing, scene design, dance and all the other arts
involved in the theatre are studied, it is both a play
house and a school. In writing of the exemplary theatre
as a school, he makes it clear that he wishes the
education of the actors to be as broad as possible. He
notes that at the time he writes, nobody attends a school
of drama unless he wants to be an actor, and therefore,
the study of acting is "pitifully narrowed" (Exemplary, p.
78). He would like to attract students of all types who
are heading to all different kinds of professions because
he thinks that it will widen the experience of those
attending the school who do want to make acting their
profession. Granville-Barker deplores the fact that most
students of acting have little experience in anything else
other than the theatre. This makes an actor's usefulness
to the community much less because he does not have as
much in common with the rest of the community. It is
Granville-Barker's greatest hope that the gulf that
separates actors from other citizens be narrowed as much
as possible. To this end he does not like glorification
of actors and thinks that this is done mostly for
publicity purposes in the commercial theatre. In his
exemplary theatre the actors will be treated no
differently than other public servants and he thinks that
this can best be done if more people in the community are
trained in the school and more people in the school have a
broader base of education about things outside the
theatrical world.
178
Granville-Barker wants very much to break the
tradition of actors training from childhood, as he himself
was. He does not think that the school should attract
students younger than university age and that the school
should be fully capable of giving a broad general
education to all students: "the curriculum must
deliberately discourage any neglect of general education"
(Exemplary, p. 104).
His school begins to sound something like a modern
university education with a Bachelor of Arts, and in fact,
he is impressed with the drama programs in some American
universities because there is an interest in studying
theatre with more in mind than acting. He feels that at
the time he writes, the average stage-struck young man in
England sees himself as Romeo, but in American schools
they are turning out people for whom "a career in the
theatre will be a thing of much wider comprehension"
(Exemplary, p. 98).
Granville-Barker lays out five general policies of
the school: (1) the studies must be as comprehensive as
possible; (2) the school must restrain those bound for the
profession of acting and teach them the art as a whole
before it teaches them acting; (3) it must include high
179
standards for specialized students; (4) it must give
opportunity for research; and (5) it must make sure that
its study is always generally educational and useful to
non-professionals (Exemplary, p. 107).
Granville-Barker reiterates his earlier position
that acting students not be allowed to act until the final
year. This was probably the most controversial idea that
he proposed for the school, but he was quite firm on it.
He wanted acting students to be taught everything but
acting: voice, elocution, dialects, play structure, and
analytical criticism, theatre history, costuming, scene
design, fencing, dancing, singing, plus a broad education
in liberal arts. Only when all of this has been learned
will the actor be allowed to go on stage in public
performance. This will be a great advantage for acting
students because of their early discipline. Students of
this school will be greater masters of their art than
those "whose too continued practice of it made them rather
its servants" (Exemplary, p. 113).
Granville-Barker thinks that playwrighting can be
taught in a school such as this in a seminar method like
the one developed by George Pierce Baker. Students bring
their plays in progress, perhaps anonymously so that there
180
will be no holding back of criticism, and the entire class
discusses and criticizes the play. He thinks that play-
wrighting can be taught through this kind of committee
criticism more than any other kind of literature because
so much of the playwright's work is craft; he likens the
playwright to an architect. Since craft and technique is
such a large part of the work, it is therefore more
discussable. However, it is only the craft that can be
taught. He agrees that the inspiration part of play-
wrighting does not benefit by discussion at all (Exemplary,
p. 116).
The major business of the school is the same as
that of rehearsals. It is the cooperative study of plays.
All students involved in all phases of theatrical art must
get used to interpreting plays for this is the crux of the
i
l
art. This is done in the same kind of seminar that is
!
done in rehearsals, with one exception. In the school, i
the study of plays is detached. No one can do this if he
is involved in a production "for his artistic life is at
stake" (Exemplary, p. 125).
Granville-Barker thinks that the most important
thing that happens in the seminar is the discovery for
each individual play of how much interpretation the play
181
needs and will allow. Not only is this vitally important
for any actor, but he also thinks that it is as generally
educational as the study of other forms of literature or
liberal arts.
The boundary between the school portion of the
theatre and the playhouse portion is only a tenuous one.
He wants all members of the cast, crew and staff of the
theatre to have educational duties, both as teachers and
as students. "For our playhouse is still part of the
theatre’s school, part of an institution intended for the
study of dramatic art and only incidentally for its
exhibition— an exemplary theatre" (Exemplary, p. 154).
The theatre itself must have a company of
professional actors. Granville-Barker thinks that actors
have been cut off from the rest of society primarily
because of their generally low status and because the
profession of acting traditionally pays poorly and rarely
allows them to settle down in one place. He thinks that
the establishment of these kinds of theatres in many
communities will help to change that. The job will be
more secure, there will be closer ties to the community,
and the actors will begin to realize their importance to
the community at large.
182
The structure of the theatre would be similar in
many respects to that laid out in Scheme and Estimates for
a National Theatre. There should be a Committee that
chooses the Director but they would have no power in the
running of the theatre. The Director should be an
autocrat, within limits. The company should be composed of
actors and actresses who are "a homogenous body of men and
women of the theatre, perfected as much in the broad under
standing as in the narrower accomplishment of their work"
(Exemplary, p. 167). Another staff member would be the
librarian. His function in the theatre would be to
conserve its tradition and to head the staff of prompters.
They would preserve the designs and keep an ongoing history
but their main task would be to keep the prompt books.
Granville-Barker summarizes the possibilities of
the exemplary theatre in this way:
The ideal theatre, playhouse and school, fount of
the city, sounding board of its emotion and its
thought, is neither to be built with hands nor planned
on paper. It will be so intimate a part of the
people's life— they or their teachers will have studied
in the school; the playhouse as much their own as their
church or their club— that no one will mark the
boundaries of its influence. Press, pulpit, politics—
there are powers these lack that the theatre can well
wield; there are things they fail in now, because,
perhaps, the theatre does not take its share in the
doing. Neither topically, nor in terms of direct
reason, nor of pure faith, but by the subtler way of
183
art the drama works, to evolve from the sentient mass
a finer mind, responding to the fine fellow mind of
the poet, expressed in terms of a common experience
through the medium of human beings, whose art has that
deeper significance we find in the faces and voices of
friends with whom we have come through the gates of
understanding. This is the ideal, and towards it the
paths are many. (Exemplary, p. 288)
The Exemplary Theatre was reviewed widely, for the
most part very favorably. One reviewer found it ". . . .
the most thorough, far visioned, yet practical discussion
of the culture and social values of the modern theatre
2 8
that has been written in English."
However, Max Beerbohm thought it was quite wrong
for Granville-Barker to retire from the stage and to write
books such as this on the theatre. He thought that books
like The Exemplary Theatre were wrong-headed. After being
sent a copy of the book before it was published by
Granville-Barker and asked for his comments, Beerbohm
replied with five drawings. The first he entitled
"Managing Director Addressing the Cast on the Prime
Importance of Civic Conscience." It pictured a man who
looked to be about 85 years old with a very long white
beard but who had Granville-Barker's features and wore
three pairs of glasses, one on the end of his nose, one
before his eyes and one on the top of his forehead. The
184
second drawing was entitled "The House" and it was a
drawing of a couple of equally ancient looking ushers, both
of whom had Granville-Barker's features. The third drawing
was entitled "The Call Boy" who was a lad with a large
brain, looking very undernourished and anemic and had
Granville-Barker's features. The fourth drawing was
entitled "Ex-Seminarist Smith and Ex-Seminarist Robinson
in a Production of As You Like It." Both of these actors
looked to be in their sixties, looked very anemic and
undernourished, both wore glasses, both looked as if they
i
i
had not been out of a library in weeks, and both had
Granville-Barker1s features. The fifth drawing was
entitled "The Public" and it was a blank page. Granville-
Barker appears not to have been bothered in the least by
this criticism for he had the drawings bound into his own
private copy of The Exemplary Theatre.
An interesting review appeared in the Quarterly
Journal of Speech Education by E. C. Mabie. He was in
agreement with the idea that the theatre should be a force
for education and he noted that Granville-Barker was
describing an education in his theatre very similar to a
Bachelor of Arts in an American university. "At the
present moment in America, the universities offer the
185
O Q
happiest locations for such exemplary theatres.
Over twenty years later, in one of his last
published articles, Granville-Barker expanded on the
possibility of the exemplary theatre being established in
a university. He wrote that the serious study of drama in
the universities was greatly overdue, and, although he
likes America's lead in the matter, he does not entirely
agree with their approach. For one thing, he was afraid
that too much participation in theatrical activities would
!
keep the students away from the other studies; general J
i
studies that he considered so important and wondered if
specialization should not be left until a graduate school.
He definitely felt that any university with a drama
program must have a theatre building, but he did not think
that the theatre building should be staffed by students.
He thought they should be staffed by professionals.
Granville-Barker did not want students to be performing
before they had learned their craft and their art
completely and he wanted to make sure that when they saw
theatre they saw excellent theatre. Student performances,
he thought, should be confined to an experimental studio
theatre, perhaps like an Elizabethan theatre, for
186
Granville-Barker felt that the students should be as
experimental as possible at this stage in their
development.
i
187
Footnotes to Chapter V
^Harley Granville-Barker, "A Letter to Jacques
Copeau," Theatre Arts Monthly, XIII (October 1929), p.
754.
2
Granville-Barker, The Exemplary Theatre, p. 89.
•^Granville-Barker, "The Theatre: The Next Phase,"
The English Review, p. 648.
4
Harley Granville-Barker, "The Heritage of the
Actor," The Quarterly Review, CCIV (July 1923), p. 53.
5
Granville-Barker, On Dramatic Method, p. 24.
6
Granville-Barker, Exemplary, pp. 137-138.
7
Granville-Barker, "Notes on Rehearsing a Play,"
Drama, p. 4.
8
Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare,
Vol. I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946),
p. 5 .
9
Granville-Barker, Prefaces, Vol. I, p. 11.
10Granville-Barker, Prefaces, Vol. I, p. 16.
•^Granville-Barker, Exemplary, pp. 227-230-
12
Granville-Barker, The Use of the Drama.
13
Granville-Barker, Exemplary, p. 71.
14Granville-Barker, Exemplary, p. 37.
^Granville-Barker, "Notes on Rehearsing," Drama,
p. 3
16
Granville-Barker, "Notes on Rehearsing," Drama,
17
Granville-Barker, Prefaces, Vol. I, p. 5.
188
l^Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare,
Vol. II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947),
p. 442.
'^'^Granville-Barker, Dramatic Method, p. 158.
20Granville-Barker, The Study of Drama.
21,
'Granville-Barker, Exemplary, p. 280. See also
140,
Granville-Barker, Exemplary, pp. 60-62.
23
Granville-Barker, Study, pp. 70-74.
24
Granville-Barker, Exemplary, p. 280.
25
Granville-Barker, Prefaces, Vol. I, p. 263.
26All further references will be in the text as
Exemplary.
27Raymond A. Preston, "A Plea for the Drama," The
Freeman, VI (December 13, 1922), p. 333.
9 Q
Theodore Ballow Hinckley, "'The Theatre of
Tomorrow' and 'The Exemplary Theatre'," The Drama, XIII
(December 1922), p. 99.
29
E. C. Mabie, "The Exemplary Theatre," Quarterly
Journal of Speech Education, VIII (November 1922), p. 395.
30
Harley Granville-Barker, "University Drama,"
Drama, N.S., No. 1 (Autumn 1946), pp. 11-15.
189
CHAPTER VI
SUMMARY, CONCLUSIONS, AND SUGGESTIONS
FOR FURTHER STUDY
Summary
Harley Granville-Barker1s conception of the
theatre was as political as it was aesthetic. The place
that the theatre filled in society was as important in his j
work as what went on inside it. His books make an appeal
to politicians as much as to artists; perhaps more because
he believed that if things were to change, the general
public must first demand change. His ideals were strong
in his youth— when idealism is common— but he had greater
staying power than most. Working in the commercial
theatre, he compromised with commerce and tried to make
his ideal of a repertory company work in that setting.
His ideals were born in the late-Victorian and
Edwardian eras, when intellectual and social revolt
against the established institutions was common in
"progressive" circles. One of the institutions that came
190
under attack was the theatre. During this time, the
theatre was strictly a commercial enterprise, and a
lucrative one at that. The theatre was dominated by the
actor-managers; men such as Henry Irving, George Alexander,
Charles Wyndham, and Herbert Beerbohm Tree. The theatre
was extremely popular but tended to avoid controversy.
The intellectuals who backed the progressive
movement were often associated with socialism; they were
as interested in reforming the institution of the theatre
as they were in reforming artistic goals of the theatre.
George Bernard Shaw, one of the major popularize's of the
socialist cause saw the theatre as a means of getting his
message across, and other social reformers such as John
Galsworthy, St. John Hankin, and John Masefield followed
his lead.
At the same time, William Archer and J. T. Grein,
drama critics who were familiar with the new drama in
Europe which was also aimed at social reform, Ibsen,
Hauptmann, etc., formed theatrical societies for producing
such plays. Harley Granville-Barker joined in these
enterprises at the beginning of his career, and through
his successful productions brought the progressive authors
and himself into the limelight. He became the major actor
191
and producer of progressive drama. Granville-Barker also
became a socialist and joined the Fabian Society.
It was Granville-Barker's belief that the
commercial theatre was best suited to providing only what
the audience wants— that if the theatre was to take its
rightful place in society, that of articulating ideas, it
must be subsidized.
To that end, Granville-Barker wrote, with William
Archer, a plan for a subsidized theatre, Scheme and
Estimates for a National Theatre. Immediately after the
publication of the book, Granville-Barker entered into
management of the Court Theatre in order to prove that a
repertory season of progressive drama could be done. The
Court, with Granville-Barker as its leading actor and
director, and Shaw as its major playwright was a great
success which made both men famous, and securing for them
a reputation unequaled in their time.
The high esteem in which Granville-Barker's work
was held helped him gain a hearing on his views of the
National Theatre.
During this time, his theatre had an impact on
the country, and when the period was over, Granville-
Barker surrendered to the idea that the theatre could not
192
always be a leader, follower, and mirror of its society's
concerns.
The theatre had become significant because people
with significant ideas brought them to the theatre; men
such as Shaw, Galsworthy, Hankin, and Masefield. So
Granville-Barker became sure that the theatre can only be
like this when its artists are men of broad understanding
of the world outside the theatre.
Granville-Barker was convinced that the commercial
theatre had encouraged popular plays with little
artistic merit, and popular actors who learned all the
wrong things about their art simply because it was geared
to no end other than to sell the most tickets at the least
capital cost.
Granville-Barker was more concerned both about
changing the institution of theatre and raising its
artistic standards, because he felt that the two went hand
in hand. If the government can be made to subsidize the
theatre, then it is admitting that the theatre is in some
way a public responsibility, with good results to the
people. If not, the implication is that it is merely
another industry with a commodity to sell, affecting the
welfare of the people not at all.
193
Granville-Barker's ideas of the theatre's function
in society was two-fold. It was to be educational first,
and entertaining when it aided the educational function.
This does not mean that Beerbohm’s charicatures of
Granville-Barker's theatre are correct; the plays were not
to be reduced to public lectures by learned but weary old
men. The theatre uses everything at its command, passion,
humor, action, sentiment, but it uses it to enlighten and
not merely to entertain. The educational function was not
at all to be in one direction only, he did not envision a
theatre in which the public was enlightened by actors and
authors; his idea was that actors, author, and audience
are in the process at discovering meaning together. Each
performance would discover something different, as it is
made up of different people.
The other function that the theatre would serve is
a physical, vital embodiment of a community or nation. It
would promote a sense of national pride, and would present
the language, characters and concerns of the nation.
Nowhere in England or America has a theatre quite
like this been established, but both have elaborate
versions of theatres that serve one of the two functions.
America showed little interest in a subsidized National
194
Theatre on a large scale (excepting the ill-fated Federal
Theatre project? perhaps), but the serious study of theatre
as an art form is well established. Nearly every university
and college in the United States has a formal curriculum of
study in theatre, and must have self-sufficient theatre
buildings that can produce and store the sets, costumes and
props, and many even have the multiple stages that to him
was just a dream. Most of these institutions perform the
functions he had set out, mixing classics, recent plays and
new plays. They train actors in the various parts of their \
discipline as well as broadly educational subjects. Most,
though, do not have a professional repertory attached, and \
none held to his idea of not allowing the student to per
form until his final year, although in practical terms it
is often difficult for a student actor to be cast until the
last two years. In England, few universities have drama
programs and those that do are modeled after American
programs. However, the second function found fertile ground
and the country now boast several renowed subsidized
theatres, including the National Theatre, the Royal
Shakespeare Company and the Chichester Festival Theatre.
They have become sources of national pride, and living
embodiments of English tradition and culture, just as he
predicted. 105
Conclusions
Granville-Barker's accomplishments as a director
are important, but they cannot be fully understood without
taking his depth of social commitment into account. His
insistence on working in repertory and with a stable
company had an important effect on his accomplishments.
He never had a glamorous view of the actor or playwright,
even when "stars" and "bardolatry" were at their height.
He wanted to improve the actor's lot, but wanted them to
take on a more active role in their community.
It is the audience that is at the heart of
Granville-Barker's linkage of social to aesthetic theory.
The audience is part creator, and the performance is a
mutual exploration of the script, by actors and audience.
A play only exists in performance; the essentials of the
art of theatre are the actor, the author, and the audience.
The author can even be the actor. That a theatre is better
off artistically and financially if it is self-sufficient
is widely accepted, as is the idea that large and small
theatres are essential in giving each play its best
presentation.
There are some problems with some aspects of his
theory. Granville-Barker assumes the popularity of
196
theatre and is trying to promote seriousness of purpose.
At this point, the theatre is in no danger of not being
serious, it is, however, in danger of not being popular.
And what of Granville-Barker's idea to keep students from
the stage until they have completed their studies? Where
does that leave a young man like Granville-Barker, who
made his mark on the stage very young?
The non-commercial theatre has come to play an
important role, perhaps the most important role in the
theatre. The commercial theatre is a more precarious
investment than ever, which has tended to make it more
dependent on spectacle. The non-commercial (partially or
wholly subsidized) regional theatres have become sources
of community pride and centers of downtown redevelopment.
Many of them have developed significant playwrights who
write on regional themes; the best are finding and
developing better plays than are to be seen on Broadway.
Increasingly, the Broadway theatres are dependent on the
regional theatres, as backers are reluctant to put their
money into anything but a proven success. Both university
and regional theatres mount challenging seasons, including
the classics, revivals of recent plays, and new plays. The
regional theatres are for the most part wholly
197
professional, and the general level of theatre is usually
higher than the best student plays. Granville-Barker was,
I think, right about that. Not everything that he wanted
has come to pass, but it is remarkable how much of his
radical ideas have now become commonplace.
Suggestions for Further Study
There are several fruitful areas of study that
might be pursued. The present policy of the National
Theatre could be checked to see how closely it conforms to
the original scheme. Differences could be reconciled, for ^
t
example, when and why was a four year repertory abandoned?
Another study could be made of Granville-Barker's
influence in the development of university theatre in both
England and America.
Another question raised is that of the electronic
media; does its pervasiveness undermine Granville-Barker's
contention that the theatre is the natural center of a
community's expression, or does it make it even more
important that there be theatre where members of society
physically come together for a common experience.
Perhaps an experimental study would be valuable
using Granville-Barker's theory of everything but acting
198
for acting students. This idea has been universally
ignored, but as far as I know, no one has tried this
method to see what merit it might have; the assumption
always having been that it has none.
I
APPENDIX
THE HISTORY OF THE NATIONAL THEATRE
MOVEMENT FROM 1946
TO THE PRESENT DAY
200
THE HISTORY OF THE NATIONAL THEATRE MOVEMENT
FROM 1946 TO THE PRESENT DAY
After Granville-Barker's death, events moved more
swiftly, although the opening of the National Theatre was
still thirty years away.1 In 1946, the S.M.N.T.C. merged
with the Old Vic company. The Old Vic company had been
performing the classics with distinction for over thirty
years and had a good reputation.
On the other hand, their theatre, the Old Vic, had |
been damaged, so there were advantages to both sides if
the S.M.N.T.C. could succeed in getting a site and
raising the money for a building. Although it was not
past the talking stage, this now looked more likely than
ever, for in 1942 the London County Council made it known
that if the S.M.N.T.C. could raise the money to build the
theatre, they would trade a large site on the South Bank
near Waterloo Bridge for their small site in Kensington.
The S.M.N.T.C. was embullient, for it gave them the size
and place to build a truly grand National Theatre with
more than one theatre, instead of the cramped and possibly
201
unworkable one that Granville-Barker had refused to be
associated with. In addition, the government was now
involved, for the South Bank site was to be part of an
arts center that would also house a National Opera and a
National Cinema building.
The government had changed its position on the
subsidizing of theatre partly because during World War II
theatre performances were heavily subsidized to entertain
the troops, with great success. Therefore, the issue was
no longer controversial.
Since the S.M.N.T.C. had a remaining capital at
only L70,000, but the London County Council required proof
that they could build the building before trading the site
to them, the House of Commons voted on January 21, 1949 to
guarantee L one million towards building and equipping the
theatre at the discretion of the Chancellor of the
Exchequer. The government at this time was still
rebuilding from the devastation of war, and did not have
the money, so it was not actually a grant of funds but
really an intention to grant funds.
On June 13, 1951 Queen Elizabeth (wife of George VI
and now the Queen Mother) laid the foundation stone.
However, the money was still not available, and the stone
202
remained alone for another eighteen years. In 1961, the
estimated costs for building the National Theatre had
increased so much— to £> seven million that the government
concluded they could not afford it. The London County
Council at that point offered to contribute L3.5 million,
half of the construction cost, so the government decided to
press on. On July 3, 1962 the House of Commons announced
a Board of Trustees for the National Theatre, and Sir
Laurence Olivier was named as Director. The decision was 1
i
made to begin the National Theatre company while the I
!
theatre was building, so the National Theatre was installed'
I
at the Old Vic. On October 22, 1963, the National Theatre
company opened with Hamlet.
In the meantime, planning continued on the
building. In November of 1963, Denis Lasdun was appointed
architect. He worked on the building for two years, and
presented his plan in 1966. It had not been as easy task,
the government had at first wanted the Opera House to be
connected, then decided against it, and did not decide on
the exact site until 1967, when the 4.7 acre Prince's
Meadow site on King's Reach was decided upon (just down
stream from Waterloo Bridge on the South Bank of the
Thames). The Queen Mother was said to have remarked that
203
the foundation stone should have been mounted on castors,
2
since they had moved it so much.
Work was begun on the site in 1969, in 1973 it was
topped out in yet another ceremony, with Olivier and Lord
Cottlesloe (one of the government's chief defenders of the
National Theatre) wielding shovels. Olivier then resigned
as Director, and Peter Hall took over. Inflation
continued to increase the cost of the building and delaying
the project. The government was committed to & three and
one-half million, as was the L.C.C. In 1973, the
government limit was raised to £>9.8 million and the
eventual cost was nearly £>17 million.
The National Theatre was opened in three phases.
On March 16, 1976 the Lyttleton theatre was opened with a
production of Beckett's Happy Days transferred from the Old
Vic. In October, the Olivier theatre (the large
auditorium) opened with Albert Finney in Marlowe's
Tamburlaine. The experimental theatre, the Cottlesloe
opened in March 1977, presenting a traveling company in
Illuminatus.
204
Footnotes to Appendix
■*"This section is drawn from Geoffrey Whitworth,
The Making of the National Theatre (London: Faber and
Faber, 1951), pp. 222-293. Also The Complete Guide to
Britain's National Theatre (London: Heinemann for the
National Theatre, 1977).
2
The Complete Guide, p. 44.
205
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources
Books by Harley Granville-Barker
Granville-Barker, Harley. The Collected Plays of Harley
Granville-Barker, Vol. I. London: Sidgwick and
Jackson, 1967.
Granville-Barker, Harley. On Dramatic Method. London:
1931; rpt.; New York: Hill and Wang, 1956.
Granville-Barker, Harley. The Exemplary Theatre, London:
Chatto and Windus, 1922.
Granville-Barker, Harley. From Henry V to Hamlet. London:
Humphrey Milford for the British Academy, 1925.
Granville-Barker, Harley. A National Theatre. London:
Sidgwick and Jackson, 1930.
Granville-Barker, Harley. Prefaces to Shakespeare, Vol. I.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946.
Granville-Barker, Harley. Prefaces to Shakespeare,
Vol. II. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1947.
Granville-Barker, Harley. More Prefaces to Shakespeare,
ed. Edward M. Moore. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton
University Press, 1974.
Archer, William and Granville-Barker, Harley. Scheme and
Estimates for a National Theatre. New York:
Duffield and Co., 1908.
207
Granville-Barker, Harley. "Shakespeares Dramatic Art," in
A Companion to Shakespeare Studies, eds. Harley
Granville-Barker and G. B. Harrison. Cambridge:
At the University Press, 1934.
Granville-Barker, Harley. The Study of Drama. Cambridge:
At the University Press, 1934.
Granville-Barker, Harley. The Use of the Drama. London:
Sidgwick and Jackson, 1946.
Articles by Harley Granville-Barker
Granville-Barker, Harley. "The Casting of 'Hamlet1. A
Fragment," London Mercury, XXXV (November, 1936),
pp. 10-17.
Granville-Barker, Harley. "The Heritage of the Actor,"
The Quarterly Review, CCXXXX (July 1923), pp.
53-73.
Granville-Barker, Harley. "A Letter to Jacques Copeau,"
Theatre Arts Monthly, XIII (October 1929), pp.
753-759.
Granville-Barker, Harley. "A National Theatre," The Times,
February 10, 1930, pp. 13-14; and February 11,
1930, pp. 15-16.
Granville-Barker, Harley. "Notes on Rehearsing a Play,"
Drama, I, No. 1 (July 1919), pp. 2-5.
Granville-Barker, Harley. "Notes upon the Prize Design
for a National Theatre," Drama, N.S., No. 40 (July
1924), pp. 229-233.
[Granville-Barker, Harley], "Reconstruction in the
Theatre," From a Correspondent, The Times,
February 20, 1919, p. 11.
Granville-Barker, Harley. "The School of 'The Only
Possible Theatre'", The Drama (Magazine of the
Drama League of America, Chicago, May, June, July,
1920).
208
Granville-Barker, Harley. "Shakespeare and Modern
Stagecraft," Yale Review, XV (New Haven, July
1926), pp. 703-724.
[Granville-Barker, Harley], "The Theatre Exhibition in
Berlin," From Our Special Correspondent, The
Times, November 7, 1910, p. 16.
[Granville-Barker, Harley], "The Theatre in Berlin," From
a Correspondent, The Times, November 19, 1910,
p. 6? and November 21, 1910, p. 12.
Granville-Barker, Harley. “The Theatre: the Next Phase,"
The English Review, V (April-July 1910), pp.
631-648.
Granville-Barker, Harley. "Two German Theatres,"
Fortnightly Review, N.S. LXXXIX (January 1911),
pp. 60-70.
Granville-Barker, Harley. "University Drama," Drama,
N.S., No. 1 (Autumn, 1946), pp. 11-16.
Granville-Barker, Harley. "Verse and Speech in
Coriolanus," Review of English Studies, XXIII,
No. 89 (January 1947), pp. 1-15.
Dramatic Criticism
Archer, William. The Theatrical "World" for 1893. London:
1894; rpt.; New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969.
Archer, William. The Theatrical "World" of 1897. London:
1898; rpt.; New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969.
Beerbohm, Max. Around Theatres. London: 1924; rpt.:
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954.
Grein, J. T. Dramatic Criticism: 1902-1903. London:
1904; rpt.; New York: Benjamin Blom, 1971.
Walkley, A. B. Drama and Life. London: Methuen and Co.,
1907.
209
Miscellaneous Sources
[Archer, Willaim] and Lowe, R. W. The Fashionable
Tragedian: A Criticism, 2nd ed. London: George
Taylor, 1877.
Arnold, Matthew. "The French Play in London," in The
Complete Works of Matthew Arnold, Vol. IX. Ann
Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press,
1973, pp. 65-85. (Originally published in Irish
Essays and Others, 1882.)
Bridges-Adams, William. A Bridges-Adams Letterbook, ed.
Robert Speaight. London: The Society for Theatre
Research, 1971.
Drama, Special National Theatre Number (December 1929).
Gielgud, John. Early States. New York: Taplinger
Publishing Co., 1974.
Moore, George. "On the Necessity of an English Theatre
Libre," in Impressions and Opinions. London: T.
Werner Laurie, 1913, pp. 176-182.
Poel, William. Shakespeare in the Theatre. London: 1913;
rpt.; New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968.
Purdom, C. B., ed. Bernard Shaw's Letters to Granville-
Barker . New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1957.
Shaw [George], Bernard. Plays Unpleasant. London: 1898;
rpt.; Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1961.
Shaw [George], Bernard. The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 3rd
ed. London: 1922; rpt.; New York: Hill and
Wang, 1957.
Shaw, George Bernard. Shaw on Theatre, ed. E. J. West.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1958.
Webb, Beatrice. Our Partnership. New York: Longmans,
Green and Co., 1948.
210
Wilson, William. "A House for Shakespeare (A Proposition
for the Consideration of the Nation)," Hood1s
Magazine, X (September 1848), pp. 209-216.
Secondary Sources
General References
American Dissertations on the Drama and the Theatre.
Litto, Fredric M. , Kent State University Press,
1969.
Baedeker, Karl. London and Its Environs; Handbook for
Travellers, 13th rev. ed. Leipsic: Karl
Baedeker, 1902.
Cheshire, David. Theatre: History, Criticism and
Reference. London: Clive Bingley, 1967.
The Complete Guide to Britain’s National Theatre. London:
Heinemann for the National Theatre, [1977].
Ensor, Robert Charles Kirkwood. England, 1870-1914.
Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1936.
James, D. G., ed. The Universities and the Theatre.
London: George Allen and Unwin, 1952.
The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, 3rd. ed., ed. Phyllis
Hartnell. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.
The Shifting Balance of World Forces: 1898-1945, Vol. XIX
of The New Cambridge Modern History, ed. C. L.
Mowat. Cambridge: At the University Press, 1968.
Wearing, J. P. The London Stage 1890-1899: A Calendar of
Plays and Players, 2 Vols. Metuchen, N. J.: The
Scarecrow Press, 1976.
Wearing, J. P. The London Stage 1900-1909: A Calendar of
Plays and Players, 2 Vols. Metuchen, N. J.: The
Scarecrow Press, 1981.
211
Histories and Biographies
Archer, Lieut.-Colonel C. [Charles]. William Archer;
Life, Work, and Friendships. London: George
Allen and Unwin, 1931.
Archer, William. The Old Drama and the New. Boston:
Small, Maynard and Co., 1923.
Behrman, S. N. Portrait of Max: An Intimate Memoir of
Sir Max Beerbohm. New York: Random House, 1960.
Bridges-Adams, w[illiam]. "Theatre." In Edwardian
England 1901-1914, ed. Simon Nowel1-Smith.
London: Oxford University Press, 1964, pp. 367-
409.
Cherey, Sheldon. The New Movement in the Theatre. New
York: Mitchell Kennerly, 1914.
Donaldson, Frances. The Actor-Managers. London:
Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1970.
Dukore, Bernard F. Bernard Shaw, Director. Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1971.
Henderson, Archibald. European Dramatists. Cincinnati:
Stewart and Kidd, 1916.
Henderson, Archibald. George Bernard Shaw: Man of the
Century. New York: Appleton Century Crofts,
Inc., n.d.
Hunt, Hugh, Kenneth Richards, and John Russell Taylor.
1880 to the Present Day, Vol. VII of The 'Revels*
History of Drama in English, gen. ed. T. W. Craik.
London: Methuen and Co., 1978.
Hynes, Samuel. The Edwardian Turn of Mind. Princeton,
N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1968.
Jones, Henry Arthur. The Foundations of a National Drama.
London: 1913; rpt.; Freeport, N. Y.: Books for
Libraries Press, 1967.
212
MacCarthy, Desmond. The Court Theatre 1904-1907.
London: 19077 rpt. Stanley Weintraub ed., Coral
Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press, 1966.
MacKenzie, Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie. The Fabians. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1977.
Macqueen-Pope, w[alter]. Carriages at Eleven: The Story
of the Edwardian Theatre. London: Hutchinson and
Co., 1947.
Marcossan, Isaac F., and Daniel Frohman. Charles Frohman:
Manager and Man. New York: Harper and Brothers,
1916.
Marriott, J. W. Modern Drama. London: Thomas Nelson and
Sons, [1934].
Marriott, J. W. The Theatre. London: George C. Harrap
and Co., 1931; new revised edition, 1945.
Miller, Anna Irene. The Independent Theatre in Europe:
1887 to the Present. 1931; rpt.; New York:
Benjamin Blom, 1966.
Morgan, Margery M. A Drama of Political Man: A Study in
the Plays of Harley Granville-Barker. London:
Sidgwick and Jackson, 1961.
Pearson, Hesketh. Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality.
London: Methuen and Co., 1961.
Pease, Edward R. The History of the Fabian Society. New
York: E. P. Dutton, [1916].
Priestly, J. B. The Edwardians. New York: Harper and
Row, 1970.
Purdom, C. B. Harley Granville Barker: Man of the
Theatre, Dramatist, and Scholar. London:
Rockliff Publishing Co., 1955.
Rowell, George, ed. Late Victorian Plays: 1890-1914.
London: Oxford University Press, 1968.
213
Rowell, George. The Victorian Theatre: A Survey. Oxford:
At the Clarendon Press, 1967.
Rowell, George. "Wyndham of Wyndham’s." In The Theatrical
Manacrer in England and America, ed. Joseph W.
Donahue, Jr. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton
University Press, 1971, pp. 189-213.
Schmid, Hans. The Dramatic Criticism of William Archer.
Solothurn, Switzerland: Buchdruckerei Gassman,
1964.
Trewin, J. C. The Edwardian Theatre. Totowa, N. J.:
Rowman and Littlefield, 1976.
Whitworth, Geoffrey. The Making of a National Theatre.
London: Faber and Faber, [1951].
Wilson, A. E. Edwardian Theatre. London: Arthur Barker,
1951. i
Book Reviews of Harley Granville-Barker
Arns, K. "A National Theatre,*' Encrlische Studien, LIVI
(April 1932), pp. 443-445.
Arns, K. "The Study of Drama," Encrlische Studien, LIII
(1936), p. 288.
Cazamian, L. "On Poetry in Drama," Etudes Ancrlaises
(April 1938), pp. 175-177.
"The Drama's Laws," The Times Literary Supplement, XXX
(May 21, 1931), p. 405.
"Mr. Granville Barker on the Theatre," The Spectator,
CXXVIII (April 8, 1922), pp. 432-433.
"The Exemplary Theatre," Theatre Arts Magazine, VI
(October 1922), pp. 346-347.
Hinckley, Theodore Ballow, "'The Theatre of Tomorrow' and
'The Exemplary Theatre'," The Drama, XIII (December
1922), p. 99.
214
J
Jennings, Richard. "Dramatic Method," The Spectator,
CXXXXVI (June 20, 1931), pp. 974-975.
Mabie, E. C. "The Exemplary Theatre," Quarterly Journal of
Speech Education, VIII (November 1922), pp. 391-
395.
"The Many-Sided Theatre," Theatre Arts Monthly, XVIX
(April 1935), p. 309.
"Modern Poetic Drama," The Times Literary Supplement,
XXXVI (August 7, 1937), pp. 565-566.
"A National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates," The Spectator,
LXXXXIX (December 28, 1907), pp. 1093-1095.
"A National Theatre," The Times Literary Supplement, XXIX
(June 5, 1930), p. 475.
Poel, William. "Correspondence on the Exemplary Theatre,"
The Times Literary Supplement, XXI (April 6,
1922), p. 228. I
i
Preston, Raymond A. "A Plea for the Drama," The Freeman,
VI (December 13, 1922), pp. 333-334.
Shipp, Horace, "Theories and the Theatre," The English
Review, XXXIV (June 1922), pp. 559-561.
Stoker, Bram. "The Question of a National Theatre," The
Nineteenth Century and After, LIIII (May 1908),
pp. 734-742.
"The Study of Drama," Notes and Queries, CLXVII (December
15, 1934), p. 432.
"The Study of Drama," The Times Literary Supplement,
XXXIII (December 20, 1934), p. 907.
"The Theatre and Its Needs," The Times Literary Supplement,
XXI (March 23, 1922), PP. 177-178.
Whitworth, Geoffrey. "The Study of Drama," London Mercury,
XXXI (February 1935), p. 393.
215
Young, Stark. "A Page of- the Drama," The New Republic,
XXXI (August 2, 1922), p. 284.
Unpublished Dissertations
Elberson, Stanley Denton. "The Nature of Harley Granville-
Barker ' s Productions in America in 1915," Doctoral
dissertation, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon,
1966.
Kelly, Helen M. "The Granville-Barker Shakespeare
Productions: A Study Based on the Promptbooks,"
Doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor, Michigan, 1965.
i
i
Reisman, Leon. "Harley Granville-Barker: A Man of the
Theatre," Masters thesis, University of Southern
California, Los Angeles, California, 1944. j
216

Linked assets