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.
