Who Was Dracula? by Jim Steinmeyer

mistress and later his wife.
    Labouchère was an unabashed admirer of Irving and courted him for his Queen’s Theatre. Labby (as his friends called him) realized that the Batemans of the Lyceum Theatre were holding Irving back, and he would produce better work without them. Labby wrote to Irving in 1878, first praising and then condemning his latest play,
Louis XI
: “Your acting is perfect. I never saw a more complete realization of an historical personage as set forth in a play. . . . The play has not taken because it is one of the worst and most undramatic plays ever written and because your company is below criticism. . . . Depend on it, no actor in the world can carry a bad play and a bad company. The better you act, all the worse do the duffers appear—there is a perpetual jarring contrast all through.”
    Irving resisted Labby’s offer, but his fame presented an opportunity later that year. Irving had starred in a number of roles with Isabel Bateman, including Hamlet to her Ophelia, and Othello to her Desdemona. But, like Labouchère, he realized her limitations as a leading lady. After Colonel Bateman’s death, Bateman’s wife, Sidney, assumed management of the Lyceum. Irving petitioned for changes, including a new leading lady. Mrs. Bateman and her daughter, frustrated by Irving as well as their changed finances, finally gave up the lease on the theater in 1878 and moved their operations to Drury Lane.
    Irving’s instincts about Isabel Bateman were right. Although she had grown up in a theatrical family, she had very little taste for acting and later became a nun. Henry Irving secured the lease on the Lyceum Theatre and wired Bram Stoker to join him. Although Stoker suggested that he left Dublin to serve Irving’s work at the Lyceum, his recent biographer, Paul Murray, has pointed out evidence of Stoker’s ambition. Contemplating a writing career, Stoker had already been calculating a move to London.
    Stoker and Irving began their furious preparations when they met in Dublin during Irving’s next tour, and Stoker even moved up his marriage date so that he could bring his wife when he moved to London. He hadn’t told Irving about his fiancée. When he arrived in Birmingham five days after the wedding, to meet Irving and return with his touring company to London, Stoker surprised his new boss by introducing a wife.
    â€”
    Florence Irving, Henry’s wife, never discussed divorce. For many years, the couple communicated through chilly, restrained letters. She accepted money for her lifestyle, support for their sons, and tickets for Lyceum premieres, where she made polite appearances, seated in Irving’s box, and then sneered about her husband’s career to her friends. When he took those opening-night bows, he glanced up to see her, but they never met again. Henry Irving solved both of his problems—Isabel Bateman and Florence Irving—when he hired the respected Ellen Terry as his Lyceum leading lady.
    Terry was an experienced theater professional, having been born into a theatrical family. She appeared with Charles Kean in Shakespeare when she was a child star in the 1850s. Like Irving, she had been unlucky in love, but it was not for a lack of trying. When she was seventeen she left the stage and married George Frederic Watts, a much older portrait artist who celebrated her beauty on canvas. They separated after only months. She then had a long affair with the architect and designer Edwin Godwin, which produced two children—Edith Craig, who became an actress, and Edward Gordon Craig, who became famous as a theatrical producer and designer.
    These relationships inspired London gossip, but the public loved her too much to truly scorn her. After her affair with Godwin ended, she returned to the stage triumphantly as Portia in
The Merchant of Venice
and Olivia in
The Vicar of Wakefield
. She received a divorce from Watts and