Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction: Ellen Terry and Her Circle – Formal Introductions and Informal Encounters
- Part I Ellen Terry's Influences on Others
- 1 Introduction: Ellen Terry's Lost Lives
- 2 Ellen Terry, Bram Stoker and the Lyceum's Vampires
- 3 Ellen Terry and G. F. Watts: ‘Blasted with Ecstasy’
- 4 The Burden of Eternal Youth: Ellen Terry and The Mistress of the Robes
- 5 The After Voice of Ellen Terry
- Part II Family Influences
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
5 - The After Voice of Ellen Terry
from Part I - Ellen Terry's Influences on Others
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction: Ellen Terry and Her Circle – Formal Introductions and Informal Encounters
- Part I Ellen Terry's Influences on Others
- 1 Introduction: Ellen Terry's Lost Lives
- 2 Ellen Terry, Bram Stoker and the Lyceum's Vampires
- 3 Ellen Terry and G. F. Watts: ‘Blasted with Ecstasy’
- 4 The Burden of Eternal Youth: Ellen Terry and The Mistress of the Robes
- 5 The After Voice of Ellen Terry
- Part II Family Influences
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
When she spoke it was as if someone drew a bow over a ripe, richly seasoned ’cello; it grated, it glowed, and it growled.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Ellen Terry’Looking back over her long professional life as a Shakespearean actress, Ellen Terry regretted that she had never played the part of Rosalind, a character she described as ‘high-spirited’, ‘well-bred’, and ‘thoughtful’. And while it is true that, during her successful collaboration with Henry Irving, she did not perform the part of Rosalind, she did manage to speak for (and as) Rosalind in her Shakespeare Lectures delivered between 1910 and 1921 in England, the United States, Australia and Canada. These lectures gave her the freedom to speak on behalf of a modern womanhood she could not, in her Lyceum roles, perform, nor in her life fully inhabit. Further, the delivery of Terry's lectures – her conflating of elocutionary skill and theatrical delivery before largely female audiences – dignified women's public speaking at the height of the suffrage campaign, when women were mounting public platforms by the hundreds to speak on their own behalf. The lectures, that is, not only recorded retrospectively the subtext of Terry's principal Shakespeare roles but modelled women speaking on behalf of women at the threshold of the modern era.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ellen Terry, Spheres of Influence , pp. 65 - 76Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014