Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-8mjnm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T19:28:02.367Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Alfred Dampier's ‘Shakespearean Fridays’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 August 2019

Abstract

Throughout the British Empire, visiting and immigrating professional actors ‘from the old country’ realized and reinforced for settler cultures a dominant imperial identity. In Australia, Alfred Dampier (1843–1908) and his company exploited the opportunities that this cultural milieu offered by staging austere, ‘reverential’, well-elocuted Shakespearean productions which raised their artistic status and asserted their respectability while enabling Dampier to offer as well, without censorship or public condemnation, dramatizations of sensational and controversial bushranger and convict narratives.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 Fotheringham, Richard, ‘Introduction’, in Dampier, Alfred and Walch, Garnet, Robbery under Arms (Sydney: Currency, 1985), pp. xiiilxxviiiGoogle Scholar.

2 In Australia and New Zealand, Dampier only performed Shakespeare on Friday nights. Dampier did once offer a longer season of Hamlet in the USA, and on at least once occasion performed on both Thursday and Friday of the same week.

3 Thomas Walker, For the Term of His Natural Life (play, 1886), in Fotheringham, Richard, ed., Australian Plays for the Colonial Stage (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2006), pp. 455548Google Scholar. For Robbery under Arms, see n. 1 above.

4 Bill Dunstone makes the claim that this was the first-ever full-length performance of Shakespeare in Perth in Dinkum Shakespeare? Perth, Empire and the Bard’, in Golder, John and Madelaine, Richard, eds., O Brave New World: Two Centuries of Shakespeare on the Australian Stage (Sydney: Currency, 2001), pp. 163–79, here p. 168Google Scholar; however, the West Australian newspapers at the time did not comment on this: West Australian (Perth), 24 April 1897, p. 3; Daily News (Perth), 24 April 1897, p. 5.

5 Mercury (Hobart), 6 January 1900, p. 4.

6 Golder and Madelaine, O Brave New World, p. 14.

7 Flaherty, Kathryn, Ours as We Play It: Australia Plays Shakespeare (Crawley, WA: UWA Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

8 ‘A Popular Player: Alfred Dampier, Actor’, Coolgardie Miner, 28 April 1897, p. 6.

9 Fotheringham, ‘Introduction’, passim.

10 Douglas McDermott, ‘“This Isle Is Full of Noises”: American Players of Shakespeare in Australia, 1879–89’, in Golder and Madelaine, O Brave New World, pp. 87–102, here p. 88. See also Richardson, Paul, ‘G. V. Brooke’, in Companion to Theatre in Australia, gen. ed. Parsons, Philip with Chance, Victoria (Sydney: Currency, 1995), p. 106Google Scholar.

11 Richardson, ‘G. V. Brooke’, p. 106.

12 Richard Fotheringham, ‘Acting 1788–1930', in Companion to Theatre in Australia, pp. 17–19, here p. 17. See also Fotheringham, ‘General Introduction', in Australian Plays for the Colonial Stage, pp. xxi–lxxxvi, esp. xxiii, xxviii–ix, xxxv–xlii; Fotheringham, ‘Theatre from the 1780s to the 1960s', in Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature, ed. Webby, Elizabeth (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 134–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar, passim.

13 Richard Fotheringham, ‘William Creswick’, in Companion to Theatre in Australia, p. 167.

14 The Era (London), 29 October 1865, p. 12.

15 See Ward, Adolphus William, ‘Calvert, Charles Alexander’, Dictionary of National Biography (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1885–1900), vol. 8, pp. 266–7Google Scholar.

16 The Era (London), 8 September 1867, p. 13, 29 September 1867, p. 14.

17 Ward, ‘Calvert, Charles Alexander’, p. 267.

18 Nigel Pearn undertook, on the present author's behalf, a comprehensive survey of relevant English theatrical newspapers for the years 1865–73 when Dampier worked there but failed to find any evidence that Irving and Dampier ever acted together. A copy of this survey is held by the Fryer Library, University of Queensland.

19 Mercer, Leah, ‘“A Worthy Scaffold”: George Rignold's Rewriting and Staging of Henry V’, Australasian Drama Studies, 23 (1993), pp. 6581Google Scholar.

20 Kelly, Veronica, ‘Alfred Dampier as Performer of Late Colonial Australian Masculinities’, Modern Drama, 43, 3 (2000), pp. 469–95, here p. 470CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Australasian Sketcher, 1 November 1873, p. 139.

22 See e.g. the poster advertisement for the Hobart performance of Hamlet on Friday, 5 January 1900, reproduced in Golder and Madelaine, O Brave New World, p. 221.

23 Mercer, ‘A worthy scaffold’, p. 68.

24 Richard Fotheringham, ‘Essie Jenyns’, in Companion to Theatre in Australia, p. 307.

25 Golder and Madelaine, O Brave New World, p. 85.

26 Cited in Fotheringham, ‘Essie Jenyns’, p. 307.

27 Lorgnette (Melbourne), December 1894, reproduced in Fotheringham, ‘Introduction’, p. xliii.

28 Mercury (Hobart), 13 January 1900, p. 3.

29 Sydney Morning Herald, 30 June 1900, p. 10.

30 Janette Gordon-Clark, ‘From Leading Lady to Female Star: Women and Shakespeare 1855–88’, in Golder and Madelaine, O Brave New World, pp. 81–5, here p. 84; see also Flaherty, Ours as We Play It, pp. 132–37.

31 Richard Fotheringham, ‘Lily Dampier’, Companion to Theatre in Australia, p. 181.

32 Birmingham Daily Post, 17 July 1866, p. 5.

33 Postlewait, Thomas, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 1Google Scholar. A basic problem in studying the Dampier company is that there are no surviving personal papers and only a few scripts, all but one seriously imperfect.

34 ‘Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years. Lady Dumbleton is an instance in point. To my own knowledge she has been thirty-five ever since she arrived at the age of forty, which was many years ago now.’ Wilde, Oscar, The Importance of Being Earnest (London: Penguin, 2001), Act IIIGoogle Scholar.

35 Fotheringham, ‘Introduction’, p. xiii.

36 E.g. ‘Mr. Alfred Dampier. A well-known actor’, Daily News (Perth), 17 April 1897, p. 5. He was in fact born as Damper: John Rickard, ‘Dampier, Alfred (1843–1908)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, at http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/dampier-alfred-3360/text5067, published first in hardcopy 1972, accessed online 20 September 2018.

37 ‘Lily Dampier was twenty years of age on Friday 11 inst.’, Lorgnette, 19 January 1889, p. 4.

38 Fotheringham, ‘Introduction’, p. xl.

39 Lorgnette, 28 December 1889, p. 6.

40 Fotheringham, ‘Introduction’, pp. xiii–xiv.

41 The Era (London), 10 June 1866, p. 12, 1 July 1866, p. 12.

42 Birmingham Daily Post, 17 July 1866, p. 5, 7 August 1866, p. 4.

43 The Era, 7 April 1867, p. 13, 5 May 1867, p. 13.

44 The Era, 7 June 1869, p. 9, 28 November 1869, p. 13, 11 February 1872, p. 5, 28 July 1872, p. 5.

45 Appendix 3, Robbery under Arms, pp. 126–7.

46 Pearn, unpublished survey.

47 Lyttleton Times (Christchurch), 28 November 1876, p. 2.

48 The Press (Christchurch), 28 November, 1876, p. 3.

49 There was an actor F. W. Parsons at this time; possibly the writer was the same person and a member of Dampier's cast but he does not identify himself as such.

50 The Press (Christchurch), 29 November 1876, p. 3.

51 Lyttleton Times (Christchurch), 30 November 1876, p. 2.

52 Lyttleton Times, 14 December 1876, p. 2. See also The Press (Christchurch), 1 December 1876, p. 2: ‘deserved a far greater amount of support than that accorded to him [Dampier, as Belphegor the Mountebank, with Lily Dampier as his infant son] by playgoers’; Lyttleton Times (Christchurch), 30 November 1876, p. 2: ‘There was by no means so large an attendance at the Theatre Royal last evening as either the nature of the play [As You Like It, with Dampier as Jaques] or the character of the performance deserved’.

53 Mercury (Hobart), 6 January 1900, p. 4.

54 Mercury (Hobart), 5 January 1900, p. 2 (original emphasis).

55 George Buller, Account Book, MS B755, Mitchell Library, Sydney.

56 Brisbane Courier, 26 August 1904, p.4.

57 Mercury (Hobart), 4 January 1900, p. 2.

58 W. J. Holloway (1843–1913), Hamlet's Soliloquy on Death/End of Act. 3/O what a rogue and peasant slave am I/recited by Mr. W. J. Holloway/London, Odeon Record No. 44150, remastered by Chris Long, at youtube.com/watch?v=L3p6VFAgquU, uploaded 14 October 2011, accessed 9 May 2017.

59 Printed programme, Opera House, Sydney, n.d. (October 1890). Prof. Douglas Archibald, MA, Part II, ‘Loud Records through the Funnel’. Author's collection.

60 See, e.g., Tulloch, John, ‘1919, A Sentimental Bloke and a Picture Show’, in Tulloch, Legends on the Screen: The Narrative Film in Australia 1919–1929 (Sydney: Currency/AFI, 1981), pp. 2577Google Scholar. Wright, Andree, Brilliant Careers (Sydney: Pan, 1986)Google Scholar, passim, makes the important point that Lyell was co-director as well as star.

61 There are several YouTube recordings of this, although the quality of each is poor.

62 Kelly, ‘Alfred Dampier’, pp. 471–3, considers this at length, pointing out, however, that sometimes reviewers reported significant cross-class appeal.