The Victorian Era

Who Was the Most Popular Victorian Actor?

Article · Literature & Theatre · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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Henry Irving (1838-1905) was the most popular Victorian actor and the first of his profession to be knighted, when he received the honour from Queen Victoria in 1895. From 1878 to 1902 he was the principal actor-manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, where his leading lady, Ellen Terry (1847-1928), became the most famous actress of the period and the partner of one of the most celebrated stage partnerships in English theatrical history. The wider history of the stage on which Irving and Terry worked is examined in Victorian Theatre and Drama, and the literary context is set out in Victorian Literature, Theatre, and the Written Word.

The Early Life of Henry Irving

Irving was born John Henry Brodribb on 6 February 1838 in Keinton Mandeville, Somerset, the son of Samuel Brodribb, a corn merchant, and Mary Baker. He was educated at local schools, was apprenticed briefly to a firm of East London solicitors, and began his stage career in the provinces. He made his professional debut at the Sunderland Theatre in 1856, played the stock repertoire in the towns of the north of England and the midlands for the next fifteen years, and adopted the stage name Henry Irving in 1858.

Irving’s London debut came in 1859, at the Royal Lyceum, as Gaston, Duke of Orleans, in Bulwer-Lytton’s Richelieu. He was not an immediate London success. The breakthrough came on 25 November 1871, when he played the burgher Mathias in W. G. Wills’s adaptation of Le Juif Polonais under the English title The Bells. The production ran for a then-record 151 nights at the Lyceum, and Irving’s performance — long, slow, shuddering pauses broken by sudden explosive energy — became the talk of London. He was engaged as the resident leading man of the Lyceum, and in December 1878 he took over the management of the theatre from H. L. Bateman.

Irving and the Lyceum

Irving’s reign at the Lyceum lasted twenty-four years, from 1878 to 1902, and it became the model for the late-Victorian commercial stage. The Lyceum under Irving was a producer’s theatre: a working staff of scene painters, costumiers, armourers, and property makers, a resident company of leading players, and a regular audience of subscribers who paid annually in advance for priority booking. Irving’s Shakespearean productions, which were the core of the repertoire, were the most ambitious in the English theatre of the period: Hamlet (1874, then revived), Richard III (1877), The Merchant of Venice (1879), Othello (1881), Much Ado About Nothing (1882), Twelfth Night (1884), King Lear (1892), Henry VIII (1892), and Macbeth (1895).

Outside the Shakespearean repertoire, Irving’s Lyceum mounted a series of spectacular melodramas and romantic plays, including W. G. Wills’s Charles I (1872), Bulwer-Lytton’s Richelieu (1873), Wills’s Eugene Aram (1873), Herman Merivale’s Philip (1874), Boucicault’s The Lyons Mail (1877), Wills’s Olivia (1878, an adaptation of Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield), Wills and Palgrave Simpson’s The Dead Heart (1859, revived), and, most famously, Tennyson’s Becket (1893), written for Irving in the poet’s old age. The plays of Irving’s Lyceum were mounted for a long run — Becket ran for 217 performances — and they toured the principal provincial theatres in the spring and summer recess.

Ellen Terry and the Irving-Terry Partnership

Irving’s partnership with Ellen Terry, who joined the Lyceum in 1878 and remained his leading lady until 1902, was the most famous in the English theatre. Terry was the daughter of Benjamin Terry, a comic actor, and the sister of Fred, Kate, and Marion Terry, all of whom were on the stage. She had begun as a child actress in 1856, had been the leading lady of Charles Kean’s Princess’s Theatre in the 1850s and of the Wills and Bateman management of the Lyceum in the 1860s, and was already a famous figure in her own right when she came to work with Irving.

The Irving-Terry partnership, in plays that included The Merchant of Venice (Portia), Hamlet (Ophelia), Much Ado About Nothing (Beatrice), Olivia (Olivia), The Cup (Camma), Twelfth Night (Viola), King Lear (Cordelia), Becket (Rosamund), and Peter the Great (Catherine), set a new standard for the actor-actress relationship in English. Terry’s farewell as Irving’s leading lady was in 1902, the year Irving left the Lyceum. The wider history of her career is examined in Victorian Theatre and Drama.

The Knighthood

In May 1895, on the recommendation of the Prime Minister Lord Rosebery, Irving was knighted, becoming the first actor to receive the honour. The knighthood was the public seal on the social rehabilitation of the actor that the late-Victorian stage had been quietly working towards for a generation. The Times wrote that Irving had “raised the stage from a by-word of reproach into a teacher of morals and a minister to the higher intellectual pleasures”, and the Saturday Review called the knighthood a fitting recognition of the standing of the English stage. The event is examined in The Victorian Era: A Complete Historical Overview.

Irving’s Later Years and the End of the Lyceum

Irving’s last years at the Lyceum were marked by a serious fire in February 1830, which gutted the theatre, by the long American tours he undertook in 1883-84 and again in 1895-96, by the increasing length of his own parts, and by the financial strain of mounting large-scale productions on a regular basis. He left the Lyceum in 1902, after a row with the new management, and continued to tour the principal provincial theatres with a reduced company until shortly before his death. He was taken ill in 1905, received a knighthood’s farewell at the Lyceum from a stage company that included his old partner Terry, and died on 13 October 1905 at his home in Bradford. He was given a public funeral and buried in Westminster Abbey.

The Other Leading Victorian Actors

Irving was the unrivalled leading actor of the late Victorian period, but the stage also supported a number of major figures. The principal late-Victorian actor-managers were Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who managed the Haymarket from 1887 to 1896 and then Her Majesty’s Theatre from 1897 to 1917; Squire Bancroft and his wife Marie Bancroft, who managed the Haymarket from 1880 to 1885; John Hare, who managed the St James’s from 1889 and the Garrick from 1889 to 1895; Charles Wyndham, who managed the Criterion from 1876 to 1899 and the New Theatre from 1903; and Mrs Patrick Campbell (1865-1940), the principal tragic actress of the 1890s, who became Irving’s leading lady in 1896 and who would later play the première run of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler in London.

The earlier Victorian stage was dominated by Edmund Kean (1787-1833), Charles Kemble (1775-1854), William Charles Macready (1793-1873), Charles Kean (1811-1868), and Samuel Phelps (1804-1878), whose careers and repertoires are examined in Victorian Theatre and Drama.