Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 2.djvu/369

 as Othello in London only the year before, and Irving's very different reading of the character was even more hotly attacked than his Macbeth, while with this play his mannerisms of voice and movement probably reached their worst. In Tennyson's ‘Queen Mary,’ which followed in April 1876, they were less obvious; but the part of Philip of Spain was, by comparison, a small one, and the play, as staged, uninteresting, and in June ‘The Bells’ was revived, together with ‘The Belle's Stratagem,’ in which Irving played Doricourt. The autumn was spent in a tour, during which the graduates and undergraduates of Trinity College, Dublin, presented him in the dining-hall of the university with an address. On 29 January 1877 Irving appeared at the Lyceum as Richard III in Shakespeare's play, which then for the first time ousted Colley Cibber's version from the stage. In the following May came ‘The Lyons Mail,’ Irving taking the two parts of Lesurques and Dubosc; and this play, which ran till the end of July, remained in his repertory till the end of his career. His next appearance in a new part was in May 1878, when he played the King in Boucicault's ‘Louis XI,’ and enthralled his audiences in the death scene. In June came the unsuccessful production of ‘Vanderdecken,’ by Wills and Percy Fitzgerald, to be followed in July by ‘The Bells’ and ‘Jingle,’ the latter being a new version by Albery of his ‘Pickwick.’ Bateman had died in June 1875; and the theatre had since been managed, not illiberally, by his widow, who naturally desired that her daughters should have good opportunities, and retained Miss Isabel Bateman as leading lady. The time had now come when Irving felt the necessity of choosing his own company and conducting his own management. On his proposing to leave the Lyceum, Mrs. Bateman resigned in August 1878, and the theatre passed into Irving's hands. He was then a few months over forty years old.

During his autumn tour in 1878 the theatre was altered and improved. For his leading lady he engaged Miss Ellen Terry, who began a famous association of twenty-four years when she appeared as Ophelia to his Hamlet on the opening night of his management, 30 Dec. 1878. Joseph Knight summed up in the ‘Athenæum’ (4 Jan. 1879) the aims of the new manager: ‘Scenic accessories are explanatory without being cumbersome, the costumes are picturesque and striking and show no needless affectation of archæological accuracy, and the interpretation has an ensemble rarely found in any performance, and never during recent years in a representation of tragedy.’ Irving's second production was ‘The Lady of Lyons’ (27 April 1879), of which only forty performances were given, and which he never afterwards played. His summer holiday he spent cruising with the Baroness Burdett-Coutts in the Mediterranean, where he gathered some ideas for a production of ‘The Merchant of Venice.’ In the season of 1879–80 a short run of ‘The Iron Chest,’ by George Colman the younger, was followed by a hurried (, chap. 9) but brilliant production of that play, in which Irving showed a new Shylock, the grandest and most sympathetic figure in the play. The season of 1880–1 was opened with ‘The Corsican Brothers’; and on 3 Jan. 1881 came Tennyson's ‘The Cup,’ one of the most beautiful stage productions that Irving achieved. In May began a series of twenty-two performances of ‘Othello,’ in which Irving and the American actor, Edwin Booth (who had just before been playing with ill-success at the Princess's Theatre, and who came to the Lyceum on Irving's invitation), alternated weekly the parts of Othello and Iago. During Irving's autumn tour the theatre was once more altered and improved; and in March 1882 came the production of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ to which Irving restored the love of Romeo for Rosaline. This play was even more finely mounted than ‘The Merchant of Venice’; it was Irving's first really elaborate production, and here for the first time he showed his ability in handling a stage crowd, having possibly taken some hints from the visit to London in the previous year of the Meiningen company. Though Romeo was not a part in which Irving excelled, the play ran till the end of the season and opened the season of 1882–3. In Oct. 1882 he produced ‘Much Ado about Nothing,’ playing Benedick to the Beatrice of Miss Terry, and the comedy was at the height of its success when it was withdrawn in June 1883.

In Oct. 1883 Irving and his company set sail for the first of his eight tours in America. The tour lasted till March 1884, and included New York and fifteen other towns, the repertory containing eight plays. Everywhere he was received with enthusiasm by press and public. At the end of May 1884 he was back at the Lyceum, where in July he produced ‘Twelfth Night.’ His Malvolio was not generally liked, and the