Cymbeline - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

158.
Miss Hodson completed her engagement at the Queen's
Theatre in August, 1870, and played in a variety of pieces,
mainly burlesque, at the Royalty Theatre; she returned to
the Queen's on January 8, 1872, as Nydia the blind girl in
Oxenford's adaptation of The Last Days of Pompeii.3 This
production was a financial failure, and, by Labourchere's
own account, a dramatic disaster (although, as he later
wrote, it gave his wife a chance to show "what she could
do in pathetic parts as well as in the role of 'principal
boy' in burlesque or any other 'breeches' part" - Truth,
August 16, 1877). Labouchere had bought out his partners
in 1871, after a dispute about his wife's position in the
company, and had run the Queen's himself with John Ryder
(who had acted with Macroady in the 1840s) as his producer.
He presented a revival of A Midsummer Might*s Dream, with
Phelps as Bottom, The Tempest, with Henrietta as Ariel, and
Virginius, in which she played Virginia. It was at the end
of this season, during which his wife played Imogen, that
Labouchere tired of running the theatre "solely for the
gratification of his wife, at great personal expense",'* and
it was let to a number of managements, whilst Ryder remained
to appear in several plays.
In his article in the Dictionary of National Biography.
W.J. Lawrence summarized Henrietta Hodson's range as an
actress:
An actress of individuality and high technical
accomplishment, Henrietta Hodson was seen at
her best in characters where she could mingle
demureness with an underlying sense of fun and
mischief. vhen pathos or sentimentality was
demanded she was found wanting. Her art was
somewhat too delicate and refined for burlesque,
in which she showed a lack of animal spirits.5
The parts in which she appeared when the Queen's was being
run for her benefit shov her ambitions of succeeding in the
pathetic, to which she seems to have aspired since the time
when she "had earned some repute in the provinces, chiefly