2 - Harley Granville Barker

Summary

Harley Granville Barker and Nugent Monck were almost exact contemporaries. Barker was born on 25 November 1877, and Monck less than three months later on 4 February 1878. Their lives, however, ended very differently. Barker died on 31 August 1946. By this time, he had long retired from active work in the theater. According to his biographer C. B. Purdom, when Barker “deserted” the stage he “lost his vocation, and died as an artist” (285). At the end of his life, Barker suffered from delusions and was extremely unhappy. During his final days he reportedly exclaimed, “I feel my life is useless” (quoted in Purdom 277). Monck, on the other hand, survived until 21 October 1958. Shortly before, in June of that year, he staged Elizabethan Patchwork, a performance comprised of scenes from John Lyly's Campapse and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. This was Monck's last production in a career that lasted fifty-eight years. Throughout this long span, he never lost faith in theater's ability to reach a broad audience through the simple staging of early modern plays. The forces that shaped the lives of Monck and Barker to such different ends also determined their distinct contributions to the Elizabethan movement.

William Poel directly influenced both Barker and Monck. Barker's performance as Richard II for The Elizabethan Stage Society in 1899 was his first major success as an actor. Nugent Monck played Fellowship in the Society's 1902 revival of Everyman and went on to stage manage many of Poel's productions including, probably, a 1903 Edward II in which Barker played the lead. In contrasting ways, these two younger practitioners advanced Poel's ideas during the first half of the twentieth century. Barker's Shakespeare productions at the Savoy between 1912 and 1914 were highly influential although, as I will argue, they had only a tangential relationship to the ideals of Elizabethanism. After his retirement from the stage, Barker advocated early modern staging practices in his Prefaces to Shakespeare. These writings, rather than Barker's practical example, helped inspire later Elizabethanists. Monck built a playhouse on a modified Elizabethan model in Norwich, with no proscenium and limited seating right and left of the stage. There he mounted all of Shakespeare's plays (the first modern producer/director to do so), along with hundreds of other classical and contemporary works.