“Fashioned by Sargent” installation view. Far left, ‘‘Beetle Wing Dress’’ for Lady Macbeth. Sargent’s painting of the actress Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, in the shimmering gown (which boasts actual beetle wing cases affixed to its surface), hangs nearby. The dress was created by Alice Laura Comyns-Carr. Credit...Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
If his portraiture approached theater, Sargent also had a way of turning moments from the stage into images richly steeped in the history of painting. His painting of the actress Ellen Terry in the role of Lady Macbeth, which she played to great acclaim at London’s Lyceum Theatre in 1888, recasts her as a Pre-Raphaelite heroine with long red plaits and a shimmering blue and green gown known as the “Beetle Wing Dress” (which boasts elaborate draped sleeves and actual beetle wing cases affixed to its surface). The costume, made by the designer Alice Comyns-Carr in collaboration with Terry and the dressmaker Ada Nettleship, is exhibited alongside the painting and may be the show’s most spectacular garment.
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I am delighted--as always--by the breadth of readings that have emerged regarding Jack's gangrenous-wound-sucking past with Van Helsing. I think it's worth noting that an episode of blood infection may have been one of the few fictionalized medical events in Dracula where Bram drew his inspiration from his brother George (a military doctor) instead of his brother Thornley (a brain surgeon whose medical writings are pretty firmly established as having contributed to depictions of Renfield and who consulted with Bram in the novel's drafting process). There's a mention in Ellen Terry's biography as to George Stoker assisting her following an injury to her thumb that resulted in "blood-poisoning" and could have progressed to something necessitating amputation.
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“New Women” and Stoker’s Theatre Job
Given Bram’s “New Woman” rant at the end of Mina’s 10 August diary entry, now seems like a good time to discuss two of the great actresses of the Fin de Siècle stage!
First of all, we have Ellen Terry -- onstage partner to (you guessed it) our pal Henry Irving, and probably most widely recognizable in this John Singer Sargent painting of her as Lady Macbeth.
While the beetle-wing green dress deserved to be immortalized in all its stately glory, the tone of the portrait is actually very different from that of Terry’s Lady M -- she never crowned herself onstage, and the character was played with a much more “fragile” brand of late-Victorian femininity. Despite a scandalous private life (including two children born out of wedlock, gasp!) Terry’s public persona was aligned with a series of “virtuous” Shakespeare heroines (Ophelia, Cordelia, Desdemona, Portia, Beatrice, Imogen).
In 1878, when Henry Irving became manager of the Lyceum theatre (where Bram Stoker soon became business manager), he convinced Ellen Terry to join the company as his leading lady. Both actors were separated from their spouses (Terry from her second husband) at this point, so their partnership publicly mirrored that of earlier husband-wife leading pairs. At least officially, Irving dictated the company’s artistic choices, the casting, and Terry’s (record breaking) salary, and onstage, Lady M may have been evil, but she was also Macbeth’s perfectly loyal wife.
Ellen Terry’s Imogen (see the colorized edit of a publicity photograph above), opposite Henry Irving’s villainous Iachimo in 1896 is regarded by some as a key inspiration for Lucy Westenra (interesting article/abstract here and book chapter/summary here, apologies for the paywalls). Given that Iachimo creeps on Imogen while she’s asleep and then uses this encounter to threaten her life / accuse her of promiscuity, there are certainly some parallels to be had if you go looking for them.
Interestingly enough, however, when Stoker produced a staged reading of Dracula at the Lyceum in 1897 (in order to claim copyright over any future stage adaptation), Ellen Terry’s daughter, Edith Craig, played Mina. And Edith was very definitely a card-carrying, suffrage-supporting, queer and polyamorous New Woman. Fun fact: in the post-Lyceum phase of her career, Ellen Terry was actually a pretty active suffrage campaigner / fundraiser too. (And I suspect, if we were to carry Mina and Lucy forward to their hypothetical Dracula-free, untouched by Bram Stoker’s authorial misogyny futures, both of our heroines eventually would be too).
While we’re on the subject of the scandalous New Woman, however, the other late Victorian actress I cannot go without mentioning is the French sensation Sarah Bernhardt (who by the time Dracula was published had a substantial performance history in England and the US as well). A rough contemporary of Ellen Terry, Bernhardt, by contrast, cultivated her own reputation for the scandalous. Bernhardt quite intentionally broke gendered boundaries left right and center.
Visually, Bernhardt is perhaps most strongly associated with the art nouveau posters she commissioned (from artist Alphonse Mucha) for her theatre company in Paris - examples of 1899′s Hamlet and La Tosca are above. While there are also plenty of photographs of her as Hamlet (although far from the first woman to play the role, Bernhardt’s performance is one of the most famous) and in other promotional images, the photo I’d rather draw your attention to is this one:
Yes, that is a young Sarah Bernhardt lying asleep in a coffin -- a coffin which she is said to have traveled with and claimed to sleep in regularly. Quite the publicity stunt (and pre-Dracula too)! Other features of her eccentric public persona included traveling with a menagerie of wild animals -- including an alligator, at least one variety of big cat, and a number of lizards and/or chameleons.
Bernhardt was also a sculptor, and her Self-Portrait as a Chimera (circa 1880, below) notably features bat-like wings, instead of more traditionally feathered, bird-like ones.
Which is to say, I think we’ve found another vampire!
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Our correspondent naïvely says that even Ellen Terry could not be so winningly attractive as some of these grubby-faced little children pretend—and even imagine themselves—to be.
Ellen Terry and Stoker were working together at Irving's Lyceum Theater at the time. Iriving was several years their senior, Terry and Stoker were around the same age. Terry would call Stoker "Ma" (mom) as a nickname as friends.
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happy Ellen Terry namedrop day!!! just a reminder that she was the UK's best paid woman (other than queen Victoria). She loved cats and she jokingly called Bram Stoker mum (because they were co-workers). leading lady of the lyceum, my beloved
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Today I learned about a painting from the 19th century of an actress named Ellen Terry portraying Lady Macbeth in a dress she wore on stage that was made with a thousand beetle wings (seriously) and I think more people should see it. The dress sill exists and is on display in Ellen's house in Kent.
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