Julia Marlowe's Imogen: Modern Identity, Victorian Style

{ 90 } \ Julia Marlowe’s Imogen Modern Identity, Victorian Style —PATTY S. DERRICK On October 2, 1923, at Jolson’s Fifty-ninth Street Theatre, Julia Marlowe and E. H. Sothern staged an expensive, visually beautiful production of Cymbeline. After spending sixty thousand dollars to mount the play with specially designed costumes from London and simple but beautiful set designs, they withdrew it from their season’s repertory after only one week, and at the end of the season, Marlowe, a wealthy and established star, retired from acting.1 Marlowe had first staged Cymbeline early in her career, in 1892–93, and yearned to return to the role of Imogen, but by 1923 much had changed in the American theatre. Even though the play had not been seen in New York since 1906 and would have seemed like a new play to audiences, Marlowe and Sothern’s production failed soundly. Cymbeline had never been an easy play to stage and certainly had never attained the popularity of As You Like It, Twelfth Night, or Merchant of Venice, but several well-known nineteenth-century stars in the United States and in England staged it. Despite the play’s odd incongruities of time and place, its occasional inconsistencies of plot, and its nearly endless conclusion crammed with startling revelations, the character of Imogen appealed to many actresses: Helen Faucit, Helena Modjeska, Adelaide Neilson, Ellen Terry, and Viola Allen, along with Julia Marlowe. While Faucit viewed Imogen as the “woman of women,” she readily admitted the difficulty of the role: “she taxed largely my powers of impersonation.”2 Indeed, the character of Imogen is a complex one, with several facets to her identity and several distinct roles to play within her world. As she was preparing to play Imogen in 1896, George Bernard Shaw commented to Ellen Terry that the heroine is two entirely different people: a real woman and “an idiotic paragon of virtue.”3 Of course, Shaw’s feminism prevented his joining { 91 } JULIA MARLOwE’S IMOgEN the nineteenth-century cult of Imogen with its idealized conception of womanhood , yet he astutely pointed to the same problem Faucit suggested: How does an actress portray this woman of women, this universal type of womanliness, when Shakespeare’s text produces a character of seemingly irregular subjectivities ? Reviewers of Julia Marlowe’s 1892–93 Imogen noted her shortcomings in portraying “strong, even violent emotions,” suggesting that the role required a more textured and less essentialist conception.4 However, by 1923 Marlowe had studied the role for thirty additional years, preparing several acting versions, and her final promptbook reveals that she was comfortable with portraying the conflicting facets of Imogen’s identity, refusing to eliminate through textual cutting what could be called shifting or unconnected subjectivities. While her choice of play and increasingly outdated vocal style failed to appeal to the particular tastes of many audiences and critics in 1923, her own interpretive practices were more progressive than her detractors realized. In order to understand Marlowe’s 1923 approach to portraying Imogen’s Figure 1. Julia Marlowe as Imogen in Cymbeline, 1892, by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. { 92 } PATTY S. DERRICK complexities, it is necessary first to examine Imogen’s reception by nineteenthcentury commentators. Throughout the century, critics celebrated Imogen as the epitome of idealized womanhood, the “perfection of woman,”5 or, as a Bos­ ton Daily Advertiser reviewer asked, “What element in woman is there that is worth the having, which she does not possess?”6 Henry Austin Clapp called her “the most wifely of wives,”7 suggesting that Imogen’s behavior exemplified that vague cultural ideal of womanliness, what Anne E. Russell described as consisting of “modesty, innocence, self-restraint, refinement and respect for hierarchy,” with an emphasis on restraint.8 William Winter, echoing the conventional view of Imogen, wrote, “she resents no injury, harbours no resentment , feels no spite, murmurs at no misfortune.”9 Perceiving in Imogen endless patience and restraint, Winter elsewhere chronicled his view of her with such descriptors as “sweetness of temperament; purity of life; the dignity of virtue; the noble passion of vilified honor; . . . wistful, childlike, winning simplicity.”10 David E. Shi writes that among the nineteenth-century...