Pictorial Shakespeare, 1880-1890 - eTheses Repository - University ...

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iii. Beerbohm Tree and The Merry uives of Windsor. 1689.
Herbert Beerbohm Tree was born in 1653, and made his first
professional appearance on sta^e in 1878: his first management
was thfct of the Comely Theatre, in Panton Street, where
he opened with W.Outram Tristram*s romantic drama The Red Lamp
on April 20,1887. This transferred to the Haymarket in June,
when Tree took over the lease of the larger theatre, and in
1892 the company moved to the newly-built Her Majesty's Theatre
across the way.
By the late eighteen-eighties Tree's style of acting had
acquired its distinctive qualities t which Walbrook, reviewing
his uolsey in 1910, called "that partiality for original and
often rather finicking ana trivial f business 1 " - v.olsoy was an
exceptionally restrained performance, but his Malvolio and
Richard II were distinguished by an overabundance of detail, .•/
so that Shaw was able to write that "the only unforgettable
passages in his Shakespeare acting"werv those "of which Tree
%Q
and not Shakespeare was the author" • The creditable aspect
of this e$!berance can be se^n in a notice, published in The
Illustrated London News, of his performance as Heinrich
Borgfeldt in Partners by Robert Buchanan at the Haymarket in
January 1868. The reviewer v- s especially impressed by one
aspect of Tree's impersonation of a German-born company director:
It v:ts neither his make-up, ..hich .as careful and
charactc istic, nor his accent, v.hich , as notably
and consistently teutonic, nor his adopted mamerisras,
v.hich gave eviaence of some time spent in observing
the ways of Borgfeldt's countrymen, But it w; s the
manner in which, in a situation fairly strong, but by
no means exceptionally so, and v.ith lines allotted
to him of by no means raarMed force or pathos, he yet
managed to concentrate the entire attention of the
audience upon feimself, to reveal to them as plainly as
if he had recitea aloud whole pages, the inner
..orkings of the mind of the unfortunate senior partner,
to enable them to trace clearly for themselves every
detail of the mental struggle waging . ithin him, and to
keep them in hushed suspense and expectation till the
fall of the curtain vdthout a touch of rant or exaggerated
action* This waa fine acting*
(21 January 188t)
The faculty for silent and arresting acting &s similar to
Irving's, and, in a similar manner, it provoked accusations of