Charles Calvert’s Henry V

Summary

It is an orthodoxy of theatre history that from the termination of Charles Kean’s management at the Princess’s Theatre in 1859 and that of Samuel Phelps at Sadler’s Wells in 1862 the English classical theatre endured an interregnum until Henry Irving established his own regime at the Lyceum in 1878. Exceptions are admitted: Charles Fechter’s romantic Hamlet (1861 and 1864) and the Bancrofts’ meticulously researched Merchant of Venice (1875), but for sustained continuity in Shakespearian revivals it is necessary to look north to Manchester, where the principles of Free Trade went hand in hand with the flowering of civic pride, creating, in Asa Briggs’s words, the ‘Symbol of a New Age’. There, in ‘Cottonopolis’, between 1864 and 1874, Charles Calvert mounted a sequence of twelve Shakespearian revivals, which his friend and coadjutant, the architect Alfred Darbyshire, described, in the language of his profession, as ‘the cope-stone of effort . . . placed upon the beautiful edifice raised by the metropolitan managers’.