Queen Victoria and the Theatre

QUEEN VICTORIA AND THE THEATRE MICHAEL R. BOOTH Of English monarchs since the Restoration, few have been genuinely interested in the theatre or regarded attendance at the playhouse as SOmething other than a royal duty. George II, it is true, was passionately devoted to Handel, and the elevated social status of opera, in the periods when opera flourished in England, traditionally invited royal attention. Queen Victoria was the first nineteenth-century ruler concerned with the stage, the first really since Charles II, and if a history of royal patronage of the theatre were to be written, she would rank in importance with the first Elizabeth and the second Charles. It is the purpose of this article to show what Victoria's interest in the theatre was and how she influenced its course. There is no continuous published record of the Queen's dramatic reading or attendance at the theatre, but evidence can be obtained from those parts of her journals and correspondence that have been printed. Unfortunately some of her editors were little interested in the seeming trivia of play-going, and too often omitted any reference to it. The fact is that Victoria was an ardent lover of theatre, went frequently both before and after she was married,' was Widely acquainted with modern drama as well as Shakespeare, was catholic in her taste and enjoyed all types of drama, went to many theatres, and was a keen student of acting. Her interest was an early one. When she was fourteen she praised the acting of Macready in King John at Drury Lane; the melodramatic afterpiece of The Innkeeper's Daughter she found "very horrible, but extremely interesting," and announced in her journal that she was "VERY MUCH AMusEn."2 In 1835 she was reading Racine and asking her uncle Leopold for Racine's signature if he could find it for her.' The Queen's view of Shakespeare was sometimes her own and sometimes another's. Lord Melbourne gave his opinions of Hamlet (to her "a very hard play to understand" and Hamlet "a very difficult and I may almost say incomprehensible character")' and Richard III, which she faithfully transcribed in her journal and which turned up later as her own. Although willing to give Princess Alice a treat and take her to King Lear in 1858, she Vol1,me XXXVI, Number 3, April, 1967 250 MICHAEL R. BOOTH privately expressed doubts about the play, "which I own I don't much like as it is such a very horrid play to see.'" When Lear (Charles Kean) entered bearing the dead Cordelia (Kate Terry) in his arms, Victoria described it as "too sad" and characteristically was reminded of personal grief: "the way in which her head fell back and her long hair Bowed reminded us painfully of the last and never to be forgotten sight of dearest Aunt Victoire.'" She confessed to the Princess Royal that she never had the courage to see The Merry Wives of Windsor because she had often been told how coarse the play was, "for your adored Shakespeare is dreadful in that respect and many things have to be left out in many of his plays.'" At her own theatre in Windsor Castle and at command performances years later, Shakespeare was regularly produced. Victoria's interest in the drama was naturally bound up with what she saw on the stage, and there is far more comment in her journals and letters on plays seen than on plays read. When she liked something very much, no critical rapture was too unrestrained for the pages of her diary, but in spite of over-enthusiasm and an aesthetically vague terminology she could be critically perceptive and witheringly hostile to bad acting. Overacting displeased her and, in an age that saw the older style of histrionics gradually displaced by restraint and naturalistic effects, it is interesting to see the Queen slightly ahead of contemporary taste in this matter. In 1836 Charles Mathews, Jr., was praised for being "so natural and amusing;"· in the same year Victoria saw Helen Faucit in Joanna Baillie's The Separation at Covent Garden and thought that "her voice is much against her, but when...