The Actress in Her Time

Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 THE ACTRESS IN HER TIME John Stokes, Michael R. Booth, and Susan Bassnett. Bernhardt, Terry, Duse: The Actress in Her Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. $34.50 THE UNSIGNED INTRODUCTION to this collection of three long essays by three noted theatre scholars on three noted international star actresses ends with an apology: "Theatre scholarship, helpful, important and wide-ranging though it may be, has no language with which to define that relationship between an actress and her audiences " (12). Disingenuousness aside, this statement does confirm the essays' shared purpose, as articulated in the volume's subtitle: to examine "the Actress in her Time." As such, the volume joins several other recent books that recognize the centrality of theatre as an expression of a culture, and the performer as a conspicuous vehicle of the culture's definitions of personality, emotion, individuality, morality , and gender. All three authors are concerned with the broader definitions of the actress's art, extending beyond the actual stage performance (though several performances by each actress are described in detail) to the ways in which the audience and the performer collaborate in the performance's "meaning" through a shared theatrical sign system and a common set of cultural assumptions. All three actresses under consideration seized control of the new mechanisms of publicity as a means of achieving their status as stars, and of shaping the public perception of their personae, both onstage and off. And, the authors demonstrate, all three consciously played into, or against, the prevailing images of femaleness and femininity. For these reasons, the volume will prove particularly useful to students of English literature and culture in the period. As Michael R. Booth shows, and as Nina Auerbach has argued more elaborately in Ellen Terry, Player in Her Time (1987), Ellen Terry drew upon the style and iconography of the aestheticist movement in shaping her performances. And the London appearances of Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse established the conceptual polarities for the English debate about acting, art, artifice, and nature. John Stokes's essay on Bernhardt is the least useful of the three in this regard, partly because of his professed goal, in the first part of his essay, to consider the French actress, most known for her international touring, in the narrower context of her career as an actressmanager , speculator, and landlord, in the world of the Parisian theatres. As though to compensate, Stokes concludes his contribution with a sketchy catalogue of the actress's reception in the English 355 Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 critical establishment, with her supporters and detractors leapfrogging through the decades, coopting her aesthetic to suit their own notions of Romanticism, decadence, morbidity, and thaumaturgy. Booth's contribution on Terry is the most comprehensive and systematic, particularly as a guide to decoding the available evidence of the actress's performances and working methods: eyewitness accounts, the later sound recordings, Terry's own lectures and essays on dramatic characters, her extensively annotated preparation scripts, and, most significantly, the enormous number of surviving visual documents. Here Booth recapitulates the argument from his earlier essay, "Pictorial Acting and Ellen Terry" (in Shakespeare and the Victorian Stage, Richard Foulkes, ed. [1986]), arguing that "there was a continued correspondence in critical and artistic opinion between actress and painting, between Ellen Terry playing a character in a painting, between the performer on stage and a central female character in a painting incarnated as an actress, as Ellen Terry" (79). Booth makes a convincing effort to locate Terry in the iconography of Victorian womanhood. For example, he quotes a long description of a heroine in a story by Mrs. Braddon, not because it had the actress in mind, but because it appeared in a periodical in which, the critic Clement Scott noted, "we seemed to see Ellen Terry's face, or something like it, on almost every page" (68). And he notes G. F. Watts's transformation of Terry's image in his paintings of his child bride. The reader is better served by Auerbach's fuller—and more culturally and historically sophisticated—discussion of Terry and Victorian iconography. But Booth, like Auerbach, writes eloquently on the distance...