Periodic Reporting for period 1 - LISHCCAD (The Living Image of Sherlock Holmes: The Cult of Celebrity in the Age of Disenchantment)
Berichtszeitraum: 2020-01-27 bis 2022-01-26
The initial project aimed to recast understandings of 19th-c ideas and practices of celebrity, expertise and truth by way of William Gillette’s immensely successful production and performance of Sherlock Holmes at the turn of the 20th c. As my research progressed, however, it became clear that his creation of Holmes was in fact part of a larger story, one of influence and presence that could best be told by way of five star performers of the period. The major intended output of my project has remained a monograph, along with other smaller outputs and forms of general dissemination, but the scope has widened from Gillette and Sherlock Holmes to the story of influence more generally. Retitled Presence: Theatre of Influence in the Fin-de-Siècle, the book examines how the theatre world’s fascination with “influence” in the late nineteenth century created new forms of stage presence, from the performance of the mesmerist to the creation of the modern “public personality,” from hypnotizing magic tricks to the craze of the first blockbusters. The work is organized around five performers – Wilson Barrett, Mrs Patrick Campbell, William Gillette, Henry Irving and Herbert Beerbohm Tree – drawing on their own theories and practices of performance alongside the views of their critics and commentators. By understanding the staging of worries about “insidious” influence – of the aesthete, of the Other – as well as the staging of fantasies of “controlled” influence upon the world – the merging of actor and role, of actor and manager, of the life and afterlife of performance – the book unlocks new genealogies of theatrical presence grounded in the materiality of the performing body. Theatre and the Presence of Influence argues that the late nineteenth-century/fin-de-siècle theatre holds the key to understanding late Victorian and early modern practices of influence. By examining five significant performers – the extraordinary roles they played and theories they espoused as well as the ways in which they conducted the business of doing theatre – the book enables us to understand contemporaneous concerns about identity, susceptibility, presence and influence. Grounded in archival material – from promptbooks and press cuttings to diaries and private letters – the book explores anxieties circulating around literal hypnotism, stage magic, “alien” influence and “viral” success, ultimately establishing how performance in the late nineteenth century repackaged the idea of presence and grappled with the elusive power of influence. This project is particularly important for society today because while the book is historical in nature, the issues it illuminates, including fears about the Other, the influence of celebrities and the question of “going viral” remain especially pertinent today.
I began this research by visiting the relevant US archives (Billy Rose Theatre Division; Harriet Beecher Stowe Center). I had intended to then visit the Theatre and Performance Archives (V&A) as well as a number of smaller collections. However, due to the covid pandemic, I had to curtail the research phase of my project as the archives I had intended to consult were closed, some remained closed for the entire remainder of my grant period. Nevertheless, the materials I had consulted were able to form the basis of my work on Gillette and this, supplemented with further research at the Theatre Collection at the University of Bristol provided ample material from which to work. The pandemic and resulting closures may have changed the ultimate trajectory and extent of the project but I am happy that the resulting work has proved as important and field-defining as the originally intended project. The ultimate aim is to publish a monograph with OUP and I am in the process of putting together a final book proposal for them. I have, to date, published a number of pieces of work related to the final project in both academic journals (see publications) and more popular formats, including a program essay for the International Shaw Festival, Canada, 2021. My work was also presented at international conferences and by invited talks. In addition, my work was featured at numerous events specifically geared toward public engagement. Specifically, I contributed to the University of Bristol South FUTURES Festival of Discovery events, where I contributed to online resources and created materials for local schools on the nature of melodramatic acting. In addition, I began consulting work for Leeds Northern Opera about their original Sherlock Holmes opera.
Presence: Theatre of Influence in the Fin-de-Siècle will be the first book to examine the theatre world’s fascination with the concept of “influence” in the fin-de-siècle. More specifically, the book will be the first to explore how this obsession helped to create new forms of stage presence at the turn of the twentieth century. Anchored in the lives and careers of five principal players in the theatre world, the book furthers our knowledge of some of the most influential theatre-makers of the period but does so with a fresh perspective, linking their work with developing ideas about influence and inviolability, personality and power. There is existing work on ideas of influence in the fin-de-siècle as well as mesmerism and hypnotism but the focus is typically not the world of theatre. Most of the work that does more directly link the concepts of theatre and influence is scattered through increasingly dated articles and chapters. Additionally, much of the scholarship that touches upon the ideas of influence and theatre does so via the figure of Oscar Wilde while my book moves beyond his towering presence to examine the phenomenon more broadly. The work sits at an important hinge point between existing scholarship on theatrical celebrity, much of which clusters around the Georgian and earlier Victorian periods and work on the emergence of the modern “personality” and the body on stage in the twentieth century. The book contributes more broadly to the recent resurgence in celebrity studies, however, while the concept of celebrity underpins the work it is not the primary focus of the book which instead seeks to explore the ramifications of personal and dramatic influence and presence more broadly. The book will build on this important work, joining recent publications such as Joseph Bristow’s collection Extraordinary Aesthetes: Decadents, New Women, and Fin-de-Siècle Cutlure (2023) and Sos Eltis’s Acts of Desire: Women and Sex Onstage, 1800-1930 (2013), intent on revisiting the period in new and interesting ways. Presence: Theatre of Influence in the Fin-de-Siècle should be of interest to a broad spectrum of readers. Its unique combination of theatre history, nineteenth-century cultural history, and performance and dramatic theory with the five popular personalities of the period means that it will have a strong interdisciplinary and popular appeal. The book will also prove useful to anyone teaching both undergraduate introductions to drama which typically include a component on nineteenth-century British drama and courses on acting and performance theory. The book’s organization around well-known personalities and blockbuster productions means the book will provide a useful and appealing text by which to teach the drama of the period.