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An American Actress at Balmoral

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Michael Jamieson
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Extract

On the afternoon of Wednesday, 25 October 1893, a well-dressed young woman alighted at the terminal station of the Great North of Scotland Railway line to Ballater. A discerning London playgoer, seeing her in the unlikely setting of this remote Scots village, would have recognised the stranger as Elizabeth Robins, one of the three most ‘interesting’ and advanced actresses of the day. American by birth and early stage training, she had passed through London in the summer of 1888 on her way to and from a Norwegian holiday and, encouraged by Oscar Wilde, she had remained to try her luck in the English theatre. Her moment had come in April 1891 when she had triumphantly created Hedda Gabler on the British stage, and early in 1893 – a year she afterwards referred to as ‘outstanding’ – she had won a still greater triumph when she acted Hilda Wangel in her own presentation of The Master Builder. Pioneering matinées, however, could not in themselves support an independent, impecunious and expatriate actress, and Miss Robins, who was now thirty-one, had appeared in two Adelphi melodramas as well as for fashionable actor–managers. In May of this very year she had magnanimously yielded the dazzling part of Paula in Pinero's new and adult drama The Second Mrs Tanqueray to her friend Mrs Patrick Campbell and so had lost, perhaps for ever, the chance of becoming a celebrated and modish actress.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , February 1977 , pp. 117 - 131
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1977

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References

Notes

1. At Queen Victoria's wish the line ended at Ballater to protect her privacy, according to Farr, A. D., The Royal Deeside Line (Newton Abbott, 1968), p. 44.Google Scholar

2. The Theatrical ‘World’ for 1893 (London, 1894), p. 54.

3. Mr and Airs Bancroft: On and off the stage, written by themselves (London, 1888), II, p. 133

4. ibid., p. 127.

5. Pemberton, T. Edgar, John Hare, Comedian (London, 1895), pp. 137–8.Google Scholar

6. The Bancrofts: Recollections of Sixty Years (London, n.d. [1911]), p. 335.

7. Pemberton, , pp. 178–9.Google Scholar

8. The Letters and Journal of Queen Victoria, Third Series, II (London, 1931), p. 17.

9. Mallet, Victor (ed.), Life with Queen Victoria: Marie Mallet's Letters from Court (London, 1968), p. xviGoogle Scholar; Trevelyan, Raleigh, Princes under the Volcano (London, 1972), pp. 359 and 508.Google Scholar

10. The architectural and decorative details are from Humphrey, Frank Pope, The Queen at Balmoral (London, 1893), pp. 14–21.Google Scholar

11. The dimensions were kindly supplied by the present Factor of Balmoral Estate, Colonel W. G. McHardy, M.V.O., M.B.E., M.C.

12. Recollections of Sixty Years, p. 339.

13. op. cit., p. 317.

14. Recollections of Sixty Years, p. 251 and pp. 341–2.

15. op. cit., p. 317.

16. The Drama of Yesterday and Today (London, 1899), I, p. 593.

17. The script referred to is the Chamberlain, Lord's copy, licensed 10 01 1878 (B.M. 43198.4).Google Scholar

18. op. cit., pp. 260–1.

19. During the State Visit to London of Napoleon III in 1855 the tall, elegant Empress had worn the first crinoline seen in England. At a gala performance of Fidelio at Her Majesty's Theatre on 19 April the Empress ‘with a graceful movement looked round for her chair’ whereas ‘the chubby little red-faced Victoria’ (in Mitford, Nancy's retelling of the anecdote) ‘…dumped straight down, thus proving that she was of Royal birth and upbringing.’ The Water Beetle (London, 1962), pp. 103–4.Google Scholar

20. What is clearly the little birthday book rather than the big two-volume one is in the Royal Archives at Windsor.

21. Trevelyan, , pp. 300–1Google Scholar and Mallet, p. xiii.Google Scholar

22. Recollections of Sixty Years, pp. 340–3.

23. ibid., p. 343.

24. Pemberton, , p. 181.Google Scholar

25. See Stokes, John in The Resistible Theatre (London, 1972), plate 24.Google Scholar

26. It is reproduced in The Drama of Yesterday and Today, I, pp. 594–5.

27. RA Queen Victoria's Journals, 17, 24 and 30 October.

28. Irving, Laurence, Henry Irving, the Actor and his World (London, 1951), pp. 410–12.Google Scholar

29. ‘Henry Irving and Ellen Terry’ in Pen Portraits and Reviews (London, 1932), p. 161.Google Scholar