Beatrice Ferrar made her stage debut and played her first part in a Shakespeare play simultaneously in 1887 when she debuted in Eastbourne at the Theatre Royale as Peaseblossom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She was only a child when she joined Sir Frank Benson‘s company in 1888 and played the children’s parts in all his Shakespeare plays until 1890.

She first appeared in the London theatre in 1890 and in 1905 played Puck with Walter Hampden as Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Carrington made his first stage appearance in 1904, and the next year, he played his first part in Shakespeare in Cymbeline at the Queen’s Theatre, Manchester. He spent eight years with Frank Benson‘s company and played many major roles in Shakespeare. After leaving the military in 1919 he revived his career at Stratford where, eventually, he played in over 140 productions. Among his parts were Caliban, Mark Antony (Julius Caesar), Oberon, Ford (Merry Wives of Windsor), Leontes, and Mercutio (1919). Other parts in various venues included Bassanio, Othello, Shylock, Richard II, Hamlet, Benedick, Gioachino (Cymbeline), Orsino, Orlando, Henry V, Macbeth, and Cassius (Julius Caesar).

After 1922, he broadened his repertoire and acted in a number of contemporary plays. When he returned to Shakespeare he was the first actor to play the role of Hamlet for a radio audience in 1928. He also appeared in three Shakespeare films in 1911, but his career was on the stage.

Henry Baynton first appeared on stage in 1910 and almost immediately began a long career during which he performed in almost every important part in Shakespeare’s plays. In 1911, he joined the company of Oscar Asche and then in the same year moved to Frank Benson‘s company. He worked with Benson for several years and played, among other parts, Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet (1915). Then in the summer of 1916 he played Shakespeare at the Stratford Festival. In 1917 he joined the company of H. B. Irving where he played Laertes.

That same year he struck out and formed his own company, playing Hamlet, Orlando (in As You Like It), Romeo, Henry V, Shylock, Brutus, King Lear, Othello, Falstaff and Petruchio. Then between 1926 and 1930 (when he disbanded his company) he toured the provinces playing Shakespeare regularly. His last role in Shakespeare came in 1934 when he played Lord Capulet in Romeo & Juliet.

In Shakespeare on the English Stage 1900-1964, J. C. Trewin comments on Baynton’s energy and his stage presence, both of which made him quite popular, a “lion,” all over Great Britain—except, unhappily, in London where he was not so well received. One critic noted that on the stage he had “stature but little depth” (Trewin 100); the reason for his never quite making his mark was probably due less to a lack of talent than to the winding-down of the theatrical era of the actor-manager that was close to its end. Baynton was the among the last of the actor-managers when he dissolved his own company in 1930; only Frank Benson still kept his “Bensonians” together regularly playing Shakespeare, but not without real difficulty.

The career of Cora Urquhart Brown-Potter, born in New Orleans, is fascinating. She married a New York City socialite, James Brown-Potter in 1877 and immediately became one of the most popular and active members of the New York “set.” She often was invited to parties because she was accomplished at recitation and would entertain after dinner with her declamations. She decided that perhaps her real vocation was on the stage, but that was certainly not a profession for a woman of her social status and wealth. The stage still had something of the stigma of “looseness” about it.

Cora left her husband and children, all of them disapproving of her decision to enter acting, and moved to London in 1886; her husband divorced her in 1903. Meanwhile, she embarked on her career and was no less social and popular than she was in New York. She associated with a crowd that included the Prince of Wales, and she dedicated a book of her poetry, My Recitations, to her friend Robert Browning. The Brown-Potters were instrumental in naming and accidentally creating the fashion we now know as the American tuxedo. In 1898, she joined the company of Herbert Beerbohm Tree where she was given a number of important roles. Her two best received parts in Shakespeare were as Juliet and as Cleopatra. Oscar Wilde, impressed with her talent, offered her the leading role in his 1894 play Salome, but she turned it down; she said she had little sympathy for the character. For a brief time, she went into theatre management at The Savoy in London in 1904, but the venture left her bankrupt a year later.

She retired from the stage in 1912, and gave one last charity performance in 1919. The final assessment of her career and her ability as an actress was that she was certainly competent at her craft and willing to sacrifice everything for it, but was never truly outstanding on the stage.

Miss Clements made her stage debut in 1893 in Dion Boucicault’s The Octaroon at the Theatre Royal in Margate, England. In that same venue she played Juliet in 1893. Her next Shakespeare part was in London at Beerbohm Tree’s Her Majesty’s Theatre where she played Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1900. Her last recorded performance in a play by Shakespeare is as Hero in Much Ado About Nothing at His Majesty’s Theatre, London, in 1905.

Born in England in 1875, Dorothea Forster Baird made her first stage appearance with the Oxford Union Dramatic Society (OUDS) in 1894 as Iris in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She then married friend and former OUDS player Henry B. Irving, the son of Sir Henry, in 1896, so her career was quite naturally entwined with that of her husband. They seldom appeared separately on stage. In 1894, Baird joined Ben Greet’s company where she played many Shakespeare roles, among them Hippolyta and Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, and Rosalind in As You Like It. Her first appearance on the London stage was as Hippolyta. She got her big break when Beerbohm Tree chose Baird to play Trilby opposite his Svengali in his 1895 production of Trilby at the Haymarket Theatre. This play, and Baird’s portrayal, made it fashionable for women to smoke cigarettes in private and was the source of the Trilby hat for men.

In 1904, Baird created the role of Mrs. Darling in the first-ever production of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan after being considered for the role of what became Captain Hook. H. B. Irving began to revive many of his father’s plays and most famous parts, so Baird had an opportunity to play in The Bells, The Lyons Mail, and numerous Shakespeare plays. Between 1895 and 1913 she played the major female roles in As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet. Both Baird and H. B. Irving had long successful careers and Shakespeare was no small part of their repertory. Her last role in London was as Portia in a 1910 run of The Merchant of Venice at His Majesty’s Theatre.

In 1913, Baird retired from the stage and spent most of her time in charitable causes, primarily those that benefited infant welfare. She died in Kent in 1933 regarded as an outstanding performer, even more so than her husband who was never quite able to step from beneath the shadow of his legendary father.

(1877-1946)

Harley Granville-Barker was born at London in 1877. He appears to have begun his stage career at an early age, when he became an actor in a provincial company. His first London appearance was in 1892. He subsequently acted with Lewis Waller, Ben Greet, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and participated in the productions of the Elizabethan Stage Society. Becoming identified later with the Stage Society, he produced and acted in a number of Bernard Shaw’s early plays. In 1904, he undertook, together with J. E. Vedrenne, the management of the Court Theater, where he successfully experimented in a repertory scheme, producing many new plays by Shaw, St. John Hankin, Barrie and Galsworthy. He continued his managerial activities at the Duke of York’s Theater, the Savoy—where his Shakespearian revivals were produced—the St. James, and the Kingsway. His career boomed as a result of producing Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Winter’s Tale, from 1912 to 1914 at the Savoy. These productions famously replaced the typical classical scenery for symbolic scenery on stage.

Granville Barker’s plays are, in the best sense of the word, experiments in form. They are a good deal more than technical feats, to be sure, but one feels that they are primarily quests after a newer and more flexible medium than that which the workers in the traditional form habitually use. The Madras House, for example, judged by the standards of Pinero, is hardly a play at all; its artistic unity lies rather in the theme than in the actual plot. In Waste, the theme again—more concrete than in The Madras House—dominates the form. The Voysey Inheritance, a study of upper middle-class English life, comes nearer to the traditional dramatic form (Clark, 197-8).

Notably, Granville-Barker spent the last twenty years of his life writing the twelve-volume prose work Prefaces to Shakespeare, which was the first major Shakespeare study to attend to theoretical and practical matters of staging and performance.

Also, his name was not originally hyphenated. He chose the punctuation so after WWI due to a decision to live a life of leisure and luxury rather than relive the horrors and brutality of war. He married twice, and after the outbreak of WWII, he fled to the US and for a time was lecturer at Harvard University. He eventually moved to Paris, after the war ended, where he died in 1946.