Cliffe first appeared on stage in 1879 in the chorus of a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The H. M. S. Pinafore. His roles in Shakespeare began in 1886 when he joined the company of Wilson Barrett; he remained with Barrett’s company until 1894. In 1896, he went to Sir Henry Irving‘s Lyceum where he played both Iachimo and Caius Lucius in Cymbeline, Clarence in Richard III, and Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice. During his time with Irving he also played once with Johnston Forbes-Robertson in his production of Hamlet; Cliffe played Claudius.

In 1900, during the Manchester theatre season he took starring roles as Benedick, Shylock, Richard III and Wolsey (Henry VIII). In 1907, he joined Robert Mantell‘s company and then played Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, Claudius and Iago. After that he played no more Shakespeare and last appeared on stage in 1934, five years before his death. But the stage was not his only career; between 1915 and 1924 he appeared in twenty films.

Born in 1853, Tree’s real name was Herbert Draper Beerbohm. He assumed his famous stage name in the 1870s. After a string of performances, he joined Frank Benson’s company in 1886, where he played Iago before going on to London and the Haymarket Theatre where he eventually became the manager. “He elevated the Haymarket’s status as a Shakespearian playhouse, and his productions of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1889), Hamlet (1892), and Henry IV, Part 1 (1896) earned him recognition not only as an accomplished actor–manager capable of producing a wide range of genres but also as a solid competitor to Henry Irving and the Lyceum Theatre.

“While Tree built Her Majesty’s Theatre’s (opened in 1897) solid reputation on the successful productions of a variety of dramas, he earned his theater the international reputation as the premier playhouse for Shakespeare in Britain during the Edwardian era, and it is for this dedication to the production of Shakespeare that his career was most celebrated. During his twenty-year tenure at Her Majesty’s, he worked indefatigably to popularize Shakespeare with the general theater-going public, and his success is evinced by an impressive production record unmatched by any West End manager: he put on sixteen Shakespeare plays which averaged initial three-month runs, many of them successful enough for periodic revivals during subsequent seasons, and he instituted an annual Shakespeare festival which featured more than two hundred performances by Her Majesty’s Theatre company and other acting corps during its nine-year existence (1905–13). At a time when most theater managers believed that Shakespeare’s plays lacked commercial viability and spelt financial ruin, Tree proved that Shakespeare could be made accessible and appealing to large numbers of patrons.

“Fittingly, his initial Shakespearian production, Julius Caesar, was his first commercial success at Her Majesty’s, and during its six-month run (January 22 to June 10, 1898) it enjoyed 165 consecutive performances and attracted 242,000 spectators.” His next revivals, King John (1899 -1900), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1900), and Henry VIII (1910-11) were also record breakers in their own right. “Most of the Shakespeare revivals at Her Majesty’s enjoyed equally unprecedented runs. Tree succeeded in popularizing Shakespeare with his audiences because he staged the plays in ways that appealed to spectators’ taste for elaborate spectacle and realistic scenery and scenic effects. Working in the tradition of pictorial realism which dominated the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theater, Tree brought this scenographic method to its apogee, staging the most spectacular Shakespearian revivals in British stage history. […]” Tree’s work with Shakespeare also involved four film projects that spanned his career at Her Majesty’s: the opening shipwreck from his 1904-5 revival of The Tempest; a five-scene version of Henry VIII, based on his 1910-11 production featuring himself as Cardinal Wolsey; a 1916 Macbeth, bearing no direct resemblance to his 1911 stage version; and, though not as extensive as the others but certainly the most important historically, three brief segments from his King John revival filmed in 1899—Tree’s initial cinematographic venture and the very first record of Shakespeare on film. His eldest daughter, Viola Tree, was born in 1884.

“Tree excelled in character roles, and was considered by many to be the best character actor of his day. He possessed an exceptional mimetic genius that enabled him to enact a wide range of roles in which he gave each a unique and differing individuality, and he excelled especially in those characters with idiosyncratic and eccentric natures on which he could build strong, vivid parts.” He died in London in 1917 (Oxford Dictionary of National Bibliography).

Here are some audio and video clips of Sir Beerbohm Tree performing Shakespeare.

Sir Henry Irving was the stage name of John Henry Brodribb, who was born in 1838 and raised in a working-class family. He was one of the most famous British actor-managers and dominated the late Victorian Stage (along with Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree). He was born in Somerset but lived in London from the age of ten. It was seeing Samuel Phelps (also a mentor to Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson) playing Hamlet that inspired Irving to take to the stage, and he joined the Lyceum Theatre, Sunderland, in 1856. Irving serves as somewhat of a common ancestor of the majority of the players in our collection and on the site, having mentored Forbes-Robertson and Sir Frank Benson, who himself mentored Beerbohm Tree.

Irving’s breakthrough came with the success of The Bells in 1871, produced at the Lyceum in London. From then on, his personal life took second place to his professional life. On opening night of The Bells, November 25, 1871, Irving’s wife, Florence criticized his profession: “Are you going on making a fool of yourself like this all your life?” Irving got out from their carriage at Hyde Park Corner, walked off into the night and chose never to see her again. Though they never formally divorced, he never married again after this. Their two children were Henry Brodribb, born in 1870, and Laurence, born in 1871. Henry “H. B.” Irving became an accomplished actor-manager in his own right and later a lawyer and writer.

It was after this that Irving took over the lease for this theater, the Lyceum, from Hezekiah Bateman, and Ellen Terry became his leading lady. She was the Ophelia to his Hamlet, the Juliet to his Romeo, the Beatrice to his Benedick, the Portia to his Shylock, the Lady Macbeth to his Macbeth. Together, they were an international sensation, the gold standard of Shakespeare-in-performance, a tour de force. Their air-tight performing relationship reportedly made Bernard Shaw, then a theater critic, jealous. They went into joint management of the Lyceum in 1878. During this period, Irving’s Shylock (shown here) became as renowned as his Hamlet and became the new standard for the Jew’s stage portrayal. He also famously played Iago opposite Edwin Booth’s Othello. In 1892, he memorably played Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII. With the Lyceum company, he and Terry made several hugely successful tours in the US and Canada. As Terry aged, she moved on to solo performances and eventually left the company.

In 1898, he was appointed Rede Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, a position previously held by the likes of Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, J. J. Thompson, and others. His lecturer was called, “The Theater in Relation to the State.”

Irving was the first actor ever to be appointed to knighthood, which he received in 1895. His final Shakespeare performance in London was of Coriolanus, in 1901. He died in Bradford after having a stroke during his final provincial tour in 1905 where he played crowd favorite, Tennyson’s Becket. The chair in which he sat when he died is now on display at the Garrick Club, of which he was a member. He enjoys the distinction of being the first person to ever be cremated prior to internment at Westminster Abbey.

Irving produced his own critical edition of Shakespeare’s works, from a performer’s lens, published as The Henry Irving Shakespeare by Cambridge University Press in 1906. He wrote, in an 1893 issue of The English Illustrated Magazine, that his four favorite parts were Hamlet, Richard III, Iago, and Lear. That same year, Bram Stoker, Irving’s manager and friend, published a two-volume biography titled, Personal Reminisces of Henry Irving. William Archer published a study (1885) of Irving during his lifetime, but the rest came posthumously. There have been many books published about the monumental Sir Irving and his work, even to this day.