successful production of Shakespeare’s play at Sadler’s Wells in London in 1849. It was praised for its realistic sets:
To produce a visible picture consistent with the poetical one drawn by the dramatist has been the great object of Mr Phelps. His Egyptian views, decorated with all those formal phantasies with which we have been familiarized through modern research, give a strange reality to the scenes in which Cleopatra exercises her fascinations or endures her woes. 7
But it was the performance of Isabella Glyn that made the show:
The very superior acting of Miss Glyn, as Cleopatra, is of itself enough to create an interest for this revival…The wiles and coquetries which the Egyptian Queen employs to hold more firmly the heart of her lover are represented not only with quick intelligence, but with every appearance of spontaneity. 8
Phelps’s Antony was “less delicately shaded” and also “less effective” but played with “great spirit, and is most successful in giving thenotion of the half-conscious recklessness with which the infatuated man rushes to his destruction.” 9
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the play had some international exposure. Edward Eddy’s 1859 production at the Bowery Theater, New York, with himself as Antony and Elizabeth Ponisi as Cleopatra, was an amalgam of Shakespeare’s and Dryden’s texts. The last production at this old theater on Broadway, it ran for three weeks. Charles Calvert’s 1866 production at the Prince’s Theatre, Manchester, went on tour and took the play to Australia (Theatre Royal, Melbourne) for the first time.
Subsequent productions cut Shakespeare’s text in the interest of decorum and reduced the number of scenes drastically. In productions such as Frederick Chatterton’s in 1873 at Drury Lane, Lewis Wingfield’s at the Princess’s in 1890 with Lily Langtry as Cleopatra, and Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s at His Majesty’s Theatre in 1906, archaeological spectacle—elaborate scenic reconstruction of Egyptian antiquity—was the keynote and successfully upstaged individual performances. Chatterton reduced the text to twelve scenes and included Cleopatra’s barge and her first meeting with Antony as well as an Egyptian ballet, thirty choirboys, a procession of Amazons, and the Battle of Actium. Critics complained about the mix of Shakespeare and spectacle:
During the first three acts, in which there is “one halfpenny worth” of Shakespearean “bread” to “an intolerable deal of” scenic “sack,” the delight of the audience with everything set before it was unbounded. In the concluding act, which was wholly Shakespearean, there was a gradual cooling, and the verdict at the end, though favourable, was far less enthusiastic than it would have been could the play have ended with the fight at Actium…the most dramatic scenes, and the most sublime poetry that the stage has known, proved not only ineffective but wearisome. 10
Beerbohm Tree’s production cut the text by a third and focused on the lovers. Most critics again thought the lavish sets overblown—it opened and closed with a “projected dissolving Sphinx” 11 —but were impressed by his Cleopatra:
1. Archaeological spectacle: Beerbohm Tree’s 1906 production.
Miss Constance Collier, handsome, dark-skinned, barbaric, dominates the scene wherever she appears. Nor has she ever had a better chance, or more fully availed herself of it, than when in the second act she has to prove how close the tiger’s cruelty lies under the sleek skin of the cultivated woman. 12
The theater historian Richard Madeleine suggests that the number of productions and interest in all things Egyptian may have been sparked by the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 and Egypt’s subsequent financial and political crisis which resulted in British military intervention and the death of General Gordon in Khartoum in 1885. 13 One of the anachronistically named “Cleopatra’s needles” had
To produce a visible picture consistent with the poetical one drawn by the dramatist has been the great object of Mr Phelps. His Egyptian views, decorated with all those formal phantasies with which we have been familiarized through modern research, give a strange reality to the scenes in which Cleopatra exercises her fascinations or endures her woes. 7
But it was the performance of Isabella Glyn that made the show:
The very superior acting of Miss Glyn, as Cleopatra, is of itself enough to create an interest for this revival…The wiles and coquetries which the Egyptian Queen employs to hold more firmly the heart of her lover are represented not only with quick intelligence, but with every appearance of spontaneity. 8
Phelps’s Antony was “less delicately shaded” and also “less effective” but played with “great spirit, and is most successful in giving thenotion of the half-conscious recklessness with which the infatuated man rushes to his destruction.” 9
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the play had some international exposure. Edward Eddy’s 1859 production at the Bowery Theater, New York, with himself as Antony and Elizabeth Ponisi as Cleopatra, was an amalgam of Shakespeare’s and Dryden’s texts. The last production at this old theater on Broadway, it ran for three weeks. Charles Calvert’s 1866 production at the Prince’s Theatre, Manchester, went on tour and took the play to Australia (Theatre Royal, Melbourne) for the first time.
Subsequent productions cut Shakespeare’s text in the interest of decorum and reduced the number of scenes drastically. In productions such as Frederick Chatterton’s in 1873 at Drury Lane, Lewis Wingfield’s at the Princess’s in 1890 with Lily Langtry as Cleopatra, and Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s at His Majesty’s Theatre in 1906, archaeological spectacle—elaborate scenic reconstruction of Egyptian antiquity—was the keynote and successfully upstaged individual performances. Chatterton reduced the text to twelve scenes and included Cleopatra’s barge and her first meeting with Antony as well as an Egyptian ballet, thirty choirboys, a procession of Amazons, and the Battle of Actium. Critics complained about the mix of Shakespeare and spectacle:
During the first three acts, in which there is “one halfpenny worth” of Shakespearean “bread” to “an intolerable deal of” scenic “sack,” the delight of the audience with everything set before it was unbounded. In the concluding act, which was wholly Shakespearean, there was a gradual cooling, and the verdict at the end, though favourable, was far less enthusiastic than it would have been could the play have ended with the fight at Actium…the most dramatic scenes, and the most sublime poetry that the stage has known, proved not only ineffective but wearisome. 10
Beerbohm Tree’s production cut the text by a third and focused on the lovers. Most critics again thought the lavish sets overblown—it opened and closed with a “projected dissolving Sphinx” 11 —but were impressed by his Cleopatra:
1. Archaeological spectacle: Beerbohm Tree’s 1906 production.
Miss Constance Collier, handsome, dark-skinned, barbaric, dominates the scene wherever she appears. Nor has she ever had a better chance, or more fully availed herself of it, than when in the second act she has to prove how close the tiger’s cruelty lies under the sleek skin of the cultivated woman. 12
The theater historian Richard Madeleine suggests that the number of productions and interest in all things Egyptian may have been sparked by the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 and Egypt’s subsequent financial and political crisis which resulted in British military intervention and the death of General Gordon in Khartoum in 1885. 13 One of the anachronistically named “Cleopatra’s needles” had
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