See the new display in the Shakespeare Gallery adjacent to the theater and the Exhibition Hall—with facsimiles of material from the Folger collection , including the playbill and watercolor set designs for Charles Kean’s 1856 production of The Winter’s Tale.
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On April 28, 1856, Charles Kean opened his splendid production of The Winter’s Tale at the Princess’s Theatre in London. Eight-year-old Ellen Terry remembered the occasion vividly, as it was her first appearance in a long career of Shakespearean acting. Decked out in hot pink tights (which were too loose) and a red tunic trimmed with silver, she played Mamillius to Kean’s Leontes. As the play was set in ancient Greece, Terry had a little toy wagon copied from one on a Greek vase. First-night excitement took hold, and when Leontes told her to “go play,” she tripped over the wagon and fell on her back, in front of an audience that included Queen Victoria and her family. Everyone was very kind, but she says, “I felt that my career as an actress was ruined for ever.” For her part, Queen Victoria went home and noted in her diary that although the performance lasted from 8pm until 12:30am, “we hardly noticed the length of time, for the interest never flagged one moment, & one was led from one more splendid scene to another, really bewildering, from its wonderful beauty” (RA QVJ April 28, 1856).
Kean was known for his spectacular productions with many set changes, beautiful costumes, and attempts at historical accuracy. This latter aspect worked very well for his productions of Shakespeare’s history plays, but not as well for The Winter’s Tale which is a romance set in an indeterminate place. Kean’s insistance on regularizing the play by focusing on ancient Greece, because of the Delphic oracle, also led him to change Bohemia to Bithynia, causing one contemporary reviewer to sneer that the production “reduced to absurdity the principle of spectacular archaeology.”
Nevertheless, those like the Queen, who largely went to the theater for the spectacle, were delighted. Who would pass up the festival of Bacchus introduced at the sheep-shearing scene? Or who could resist the arrival of Time, before the second part of the play, with a tableau of the Moon and stars sinking before the image of Phoebus the sun, rising in his cart over the stage? Not twenty-four year old Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, who saw the play in June of 1856. While noting in his diary that he did not like it as much as Kean’s Henry VIII, still he wrote, “the visions were gorgeous,” and “the concluding scene, of the statue of Hermione, was the most beautiful. I especially admired the acting of little Mamillius, Ellen Terry, a beautiful little creature, who played with remarkable ease and spirit.” She may have tripped up on her first night, but little Ellen was obviously well on her way to a fabulous career!
Read More:
Ellen Terry, The Story of My Life (Dodo Press, 2008 – new pb illustrated ed.)
Richard Foulkes, Lewis Carroll and the Victorian Stage (Ashgate, 2005)
Richard Schoch, Shakespeare’s Victorian Stage: performing history in the theatre of Charles Kean (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Georgianna Ziegler
Louis B. Thalheimer Head of Reference
Folger Shakespeare Library
