Henry Irving
Sir Henry Irving, né John Henry Brodribb, was an English actor-manager in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. He established himself at the West End theatre the Lyceum. His long campaign to have theatre recognised as an art of equal importance with music and painting culminated when he was knighted in 1895, the first actor to be thus honoured.
Irving was born in the West Country of England and grew up in straitened circumstances. He was raised by his mother and her sister, who were intensely religious and disapproved of his passion for the theatre. He secured an engagement with a repertory company in Sunderland in 1856 and learned his craft in a succession of provincial theatres, and occasionally in London, over the next fourteen years. In 1870 he established himself as a West End actor with a leading role in a long-running play at the Vaudeville Theatre. The impresario H. L. Bateman, proprietor of the Lyceum, then recruited him and Irving soon made a sensational impression in The Bells which propelled him into the front rank of English actors. After Bateman died in 1875 his widow took over the company, which she handed over to Irving in 1878.
With Ellen Terry as his leading lady, over the next twenty-three years Irving made the Lyceum the most important theatre in London. He became particularly associated with the plays of Shakespeare, although most of his productions were of modern works. He engaged leading designers and composers, and became known for the lavishness of his productions, which he presented not only at the Lyceum but on tour in Britain and North America. Despite mannerisms in speech and sometimes ungainly movement, he was known as an intense, magnetic actor who could hold an audience spellbound. He appeared in roles that displayed nobility and goodness, and others that were malign and evil.
Overwork and financial difficulties undermined Irving's health and led to his leaving the Lyceum in 1902. In his last years his London base was the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and he continued to tour the provinces, dying suddenly after a performance in Bradford in October 1905. His ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey.
Biography
Early years
Henry Irving was born as John Henry Brodribb in a modest house subsequently named Irving House in Keinton Mandeville in Somerset in the west of England on 6 February 1838. He was the only child of Samuel Brodribb, a not very prosperous retailer, and his wife, Mary Behenna. When their son was four years old the Brodribbs' finances had become so poor as to split up the family: the parents moved to Bristol in pursuit of a better income, but his mother insisted that the boy should be brought up in the countryside. He was sent to live in the village of Halsetown, near St Ives in Cornwall, with her sister, Sarah. She and her husband, Isaac Penberthy, a Cornish miner, had three children of their own, with whom the young Brodribb got on well. The household was austerely Methodist but Mrs Penberthy, though stern, was affectionate, and her husband mercurial but good-hearted. He died suddenly in 1849 leaving his widow short of the means to keep Brodribb. The boy, now aged eleven, rejoined his parents, who had moved to London.The boy had developed a stammer, which precluded the career as a Methodist minister that his mother wished for him; his father envisaged a business career, and sent his son to the City Commercial School in Lombard Street. The headmaster of the school, Dr Pinches, placed great emphasis on legible writing, correct grammar, spelling and – to the young Brodribb's pleasure and benefit – good diction: elocution classes were part of the curriculum and the boy slowly mastered his speech impediment.
Pinches encouraged Brodribb senior to take the boy to the theatre; Mrs Brodribb, who disapproved of theatres, reluctantly agreed, provided a respectable play was chosen. Father and son saw Samuel Phelps as Hamlet at Sadler's Wells Theatre. Phelps was regarded as the finest Hamlet of his generation, and the young Brodribb was captivated. In the words of his grandson and biographer, Laurence Irving:
Début
The young Brodribb's schooling ended when he was thirteen. He became a clerk, first in a solicitor's office and then with merchants in the City of London. He hankered after a theatrical career, and among his friends was the actor William Hoskins, a member of Phelps's company, who gave him some tuition in acting and introduced him to Phelps. Learning of the young man's burning ambition, Phelps warned him that acting was "an ill-requited profession", but finding him determined on a stage career he said, "In that case, Sir, you'd better come here and I'll give you two pounds a week to begin with". Brodribb did not take up Phelps's offer: the biographers Laurence Irving and Michael Holroyd offer two possible reasons for this. First, he "knew that London was a prize to be won, that his assault upon the capital was not to be attempted until he had perfected himself in the hard school of the provincial stock company", and secondly, that his becoming an actor would so distress his mother that he needed to be away from London and his parents.Before leaving London, he submitted himself to a final test. At that time it was not uncommon for aspiring actors to have themselves cast in amateur – and sometimes professional – productions upon payment of a fee to the company. In August 1856, helped by a gift of £100 from an uncle, the eighteen-year-old Brodribb bought the role of Romeo in an amateur production of Romeo and Juliet at the Soho Theatre in the West End of London. Either to save his mother the embarrassment of having the family name associated with theatres or because he thought his real name unsuitable for an aspiring actor, he adopted the stage name Henry Irving, which he retained throughout his life and eventually formally took by royal licence. His performance was well received and he was confirmed in his determination to become a professional actor.
Hoskins had extensive contacts in the British theatre, and helped Irving secure an engagement with the actor-manager E. D. Davis, who hired him for his repertory company at the Lyceum Theatre, Sunderland. His début role, in September 1856, was Gaston, Duke of Orleans, in a revival of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Richelieu. Shortly afterwards the inexperienced Irving, either from stage fright or a recurrence of his speech impediment, could not deliver his lines and was hissed off the stage, but Davis, the actor Samuel Johnson and their colleagues supported him with practical advice. Later in life, Irving gave them regular work when he formed his own company in London.
Learning his craft
Irving remained with Davis's company in Sunderland until February 1857 and then moved to the Queen's Theatre in Edinburgh where he stayed for two and a half years. In the two locations he appeared in nearly 400 plays. Most are now forgotten, but among them were several Shakespeare productions: Irving's roles included Orlando in As You Like It, Claudius in Hamlet, Banquo in Macbeth, Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice, Richmond in Richard III, Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. He played Captain Absolute in The Rivals and the title roles in dramatisations of David Copperfield and Nicholas Nickleby as well as appearing in pantomimes and extravaganzas.In September 1859 Irving made his professional début in London, in the first of four consecutive productions at the Princess's Theatre, after which he gave two well-received dramatic readings of scenes from Bulwer-Lytton's The Lady of Lyons at Crosby Hall. The theatrical newspaper, The Era commented:
His biographer Robertson Davies writes that Irving's theatrical apprenticeship was long and demanding. Between 1860 and 1870 he played hundreds of parts in stock companies in Dublin, Birmingham, Liverpool, Oxford, the Isle of Man and Manchester, where he played his first Hamlet, a part he went on to play more than two hundred times in the provinces, London and the US. The Dublin engagement was particularly challenging: he was replacing a popular favourite who had been dismissed, and he was shouted down at every performance until he eventually overcame the hostility of the audience. He made some appearances on the London stage during these years, gaining good notices without achieving any great fame. In 1866 Ruth Herbert engaged him as a leading actor and sometime stage manager at the St James's Theatre. He directed W. S. Gilbert's first successful solo play, Dulcamara, or the Little Duck and the Great Quack, an afterpiece to Dion Boucicault's drama Hunted Down, in which Irving played the villain. His other roles for the St James's company included Joseph Surface in The School for Scandal, Jack Absolute in The Rivals and Young Marlow in She Stoops to Conquer.
In 1867, after a month playing in Our American Cousin in Paris alongside his friend Edward Saker, Irving appeared at the Queen's Theatre in Catherine and Petruchio, David Garrick's much abbreviated version of The Taming of the Shrew, as Petruchio to the Catherine of Ellen Terry; The Times thought much more highly of her performance than of his. According to Davies, neither Irving nor Terry was greatly impressed with the other's performance in this, their first joint appearance. The Queen's company included Charles Wyndham, J. L. Toole, Lionel Brough, John Clayton, Mr and Mrs Alfred Wigan and Nellie Farren. Irving's roles included Young Marlow, Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist, Charles Surface in The School for Scandal and Faulkland in The Rivals. From April to June 1869 he joined his lifelong friend Toole in the West End and on tour in a repertory consisting mainly of comic plays.