This is the lively first in a proposed series of Dramatic Lives. It is not, despite the promise of the series title, a biography. On the contrary, it is a collection of unexpectedly provocative essays, most of them about members of Ellen Terry's charmed circle. Some of them are well known: Lewis Carroll, Bram Stoker, G. F. Watts, E. W. Godwin and, of course, her children Gordon and Edith Craig. Two are largely forgotten: Clotilde Graves and Verona Pilcher. One, Menella Quinn (who was rarely much more than an extra, despite Lewis Carroll's theatrical mentoring and Terry's occasional interventions), passed unremarkably through her own life. Katharine Cockin has given the contributors uncommon licence to speculate, and speculations add spice to biography. Did Terry's enhancement of ‘the Lyceum's Gothic culture’ (p. 17) focus Bram Stoker's imagination? Catherine Wynne thinks it may have. Veronica Franklin Gould has no doubt that ‘Terry's emotional impulse transformed Watts's imaginative art’ (p. 41). Gould's essay, aptly responsive to the breathless striving of Watts's work, cries out for more illustrations than the single dim detail provided, and this is not the only essay that would have benefited from more generous visual aids. J. Michael Walton's wonderfully wise exploration of Gordon Craig's ‘unhappy search for a father’ (p. 82), a rare piece of utterly compelling academic writing, can probably manage without, but its lack of illustration denies us access to Godwin. Pickering & Chatto are doing bold work in theatre publishing: it will be a pity if they let this series sink for want of a ha'porth of tar.
Cockin has cleverly shaped this book, whose point of departure was a conference at the University of Hull. She provides its Introduction and a final essay which neatly summarizes what other contributors have observed: that Terry's life has to be read between the lines of what she wrote and what has been written about her. Terry was, and to some extent still is, irresistible. As Nina Auerbach shrewdly observes (p. 14), even her ‘silliness was her charm for many women who also did not like their roles’. How great her achievement genuinely was, though, remains in question. Katherine E. Kelly's investigation of her lectures on Shakespeare's heroines accepts that she ‘modelled women speaking on behalf of women at the threshold of the modern era’ (p. 65), but her comradeship was with ‘more sly versions of feminist opposition’ (p. 76) than the suffragettes. And there is no towering performance, nothing like the Lady Macbeth of Sarah Siddons, to affirm the greatness of her acting. Her son's influence on theatre was more seminal (see Michael Holroyd's brief intervention at this book's midpoint), and her daughter's pioneering more radical (see Roberta Gandolfi's assertive essay, which groups her with all the major modernist directors of the European stage). What remains tangible is the archive, now available on the database, which Cockin describes in this book's final chapter.
