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AP Wolf
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Apwolf
Post Number: 1259
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Monday, August 16, 2004 - 2:04 pm: | 
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I've always enjoyed the darker connections to this den of Victorian vice, so here is one of suitable connexion:
As George R. Sims wrote in The Referee in October 1888:
‘How many among you, my dear readers, would have hit upon the idea of “The Central News” as a receptacle for your confidence? You might have sent your joke to the Telegraph, The Times, any morning or evening paper, but I will lay long odds that it would never have occurred to you to communicate with a Press agency. Curious, is it not, that this maniac makes his communication to an agency which serves the entire press?’
As a Master Mason Henry Irving elected, then and for the rest of his life, to keep any secrets he may have learned ‘secure within his breast’. It is, however, likely that the turmoil over the Whitechapel killings lay behind his unexpected decision to drop the still-popular Faust from the Lyceum programme, and instead open his tenth season with Macbeth, a play in whose title role he had previously enjoyed only modest success. The timing, with the production opening on 29th December, 1888, was surely deliberate. One can readily imagine the frisson in the Lyceum when Irving’s Macbeth, gaunt, with straggling moustache and looking, as Ellen Terry commented, ‘like a great famished wolf’, padded across the shadowy hall in Dunsinane, thrust aloft the glittering blood-stained daggers and hissed triumphantly to his fellow-conspirator, ‘I have done the deed!’.
Stoker, too, attempted to shut out the secret nightmares, but his was a more volatile nature. He was a far less committed Freemason than Irving7, and after the Ripper killings confined his activities to occasional visits to the Masonic literary society, The Golden Dawn. But the ritualistic horrors of the Whitechapel murders were later to erupt onto the pages of his most famous novel. For Dracula is a gothic fantasy whose imagery derives in large part from the gruesome particulars of ‘Jack’s’ reign. Indeed, in an introduction to a 1901 edition8, Stoker says as much. Dracula’s crimes, he says, ‘originated from the same source, and...at the same time created as much repugnance in people everywhere as the notorious murders of Jack the Ripper...’
From: 'The Ripper & The Lyceum by J. Pick & R. Protherough'. |
AP Wolf
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Apwolf
Post Number: 1279
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Friday, August 20, 2004 - 4:35 pm: |
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Quote from a review of a Sullivan production at the Lyceum:
'A series of sensational and grisly London murders gripped the attention of newspapers and the nation the autumn of 1888. The assailant, known as Jack the Ripper, was never found. Amid Sullivan's usual diary entries relating to his progress of composition and rehearsals, a reference to those murders (in Whitechapel) stands out at the end of September.
(Diary, 29th September): Wrote new song 'Is Life a boon?' Scored it, and took it to the theatre to Baird. Last night of The Mikado. Great excitement, and tremendous enthusiasm for Barrington. Speeches before and behind the curtain. Left at 12. Very wet night. Portland.
(Diary, 30th September): Pounds came at 3 and rehearsed the new setting of 'Is life a boon?' I went to the theatre at 4.30 to arrange seats in orchestra. Four stalls taken off. Heard at the theatre of the double murder at Whitechapel the previous night.'
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AP Wolf
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Apwolf
Post Number: 1280
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Friday, August 20, 2004 - 4:51 pm: |
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More from the Lyceum:
IRVING’S AUDIENCE
Annual Lecture by John Pick
Let me focus just on one event in Irving’s stewardship when, in the early autumn of 1888. he surprisingly announced that he intended to discontinue the run of Faust, which was still doing good box office. At that time Irving will have looked like what he undoubtedly was - a well-established and successful London theatre manager, making plenty of money from a well-established and long-running production, and mixing easily with Britain’s literary and artistic élite. There was little outward sign remaining of the cagey young political animal who had turned down Phelps offer of work twenty-two years before.
An invitation to supper in the Beefsteak Room was still eagerly sought by London’s great and good. There they would meet leading artists, politicians and thinkers, probably Freemasons like Irving himself. A year previously, Irving had helped found the Savage Club Lodge, composed virtually exclusively of literary and theatrical leaders. They might even meet the Prince of Wales, who was not only a patron of the Lyceum but who had, for fifteen years, been Chief Mason, the Most Worshipful Grand Master of England.
With a commercial and critically acclaimed success on his hands, it seems the more surprising that Irving should have announced that he was replacing Faust with the Scottish play. Macbeth was to open on 29th December with Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth and Irving repeating a role in which he had hitherto been only partially successful. Had he been concerned simply with commercial success, it would have seemed strange at the least. Had he been concerned only with artistic quality - if such a thing were possible - it would have been an unnecessary risk. Considered as a piece of political theatre, it was a masterstroke.
As always, look at the context. Revolution was still bubbling beneath London’s surface - the previous autumn a hundred thousand unemployed had clashed with the army in Trafalgar Square in what was being called Bloody Sunday. London’s Masonic Lodges, far from being secure dining clubs for the privileged, had been buzzing again with rumours of the imminent collapse of the established order, and they had sent to their own Worshipful Grand Master a series of letters imploring him to behave as might become a future monarch worthy of the title.That summer there were new and terrifying rumours. A series of killings in the East End of London, seemingly at random, of poor, down-and-out young women in the Whitechapel district were being linked with one apparently deranged killer called Jack the Ripper. Worse, the killer was being linked by rumour to the Freemasons - another popular name for him was Old Leather Apron. Worse still, rumours about the murders also implicated the Royal Family, specifically the Prince of Wales. It was even said that the Worshipful Grand Master had ordered the killing because the girls had all at some time been engaged as staff to the prince’s son, Prince Eddy, after he had, illegally, married a Catholic girl and had a child by her. The girls, it was rumoured, had made a clumsy attempt at blackmail and now had to be silenced.
Whatever the truth, if any, of such stories, there is no doubt that the mood in London late that summer was one of near hysteria. And there can be no doubt that the significance of ‘the Ripper’ was debated in every salon in London, in every Masonic Lodge and of course in the Beefsteak Room at the Lyceum. There is no doubt that Irving heard much speculation about it and, perhaps, something of the truth behind the murders. Rumours about ‘the Ripper’ began to circulate early in summer, following the murder of Emma Elizabeth Smith on 3rd April. On the last night of his twelfth season, which was 7th July, Irving announced to a surprised audience that he would be discontinuing the run of Faust. Between 31st August and the 9th November the five undisputed victims of ‘the Ripper’ went to their deaths. Irving, on holiday in Paris, surprised his friends by the morbid pleasure he took in visiting the Paris morgue. He returned to rehearsals and on Saturday 29th December 1888, with the rumours of treachery in high places, Royal duplicity and bloody murder still bubbling in every pub in London, Irving opened Macbeth.
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Robert Ebert
Unregistered guest
| | Posted on Saturday, April 23, 2005 - 9:20 pm: |
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Regarding Henry Irving's decision to run Macbeth...The discussions about Macbeth actually began in the summer of 1887, when Irving was holidaying in Scotland. A number of castles were toured to gain ideas for scenery. The decision itself was made probably no later than April 1888, well before the Ripper scare was in full roar. At around that time Keeley Halsewell, the Scottish Academician, was engaged to paint the back drops and Sir Arthur Sullivan agreed to do the music.
Faust was dropped in mid-May 1888. Robert Macaire, by Robert Louis Stevenson, replaced it untill July, when Madame Bernhardt took possession of the theatre.
I hope this was of some interest to you.
-RLE |
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