Early years , Somerset|thumb|upright|alt=1906 photograph of a village high street showing a two-storey stone house Henry Irving was born as John Henry Brodribb in a modest house subsequently named
Irving House in
Keinton Mandeville in Somerset in the west of England on 6 February 1838. He was the only child of Samuel Brodribb, a not very prosperous retailer, and his wife, Mary Behenna. She and her husband, Isaac Penberthy, a Cornish miner, had three children of their own, with whom the young Brodribb got on well. The household was austerely
Methodist but Mrs Penberthy, though stern, was affectionate, and her husband mercurial but good-hearted. He died suddenly in 1849 leaving his widow short of the means to keep Brodribb. The boy, now aged eleven, rejoined his parents, who had moved to London. as Hamlet: an inspiration for the young Irving The boy had developed a
stammer, which precluded the career as a Methodist minister that his mother wished for him; his father envisaged a business career, and sent his son to the City Commercial School in
Lombard Street. The headmaster of the school, Dr Pinches, placed great emphasis on legible writing, correct grammar, spelling and – to the young Brodribb's pleasure and benefit – good diction: elocution classes were part of the curriculum and the boy slowly mastered his speech impediment. Pinches encouraged Brodribb senior to take the boy to the theatre; Mrs Brodribb, who disapproved of theatres, reluctantly agreed, provided a respectable play was chosen. Father and son saw
Samuel Phelps as
Hamlet at
Sadler's Wells Theatre. Phelps was regarded as the finest Hamlet of his generation, and the young Brodribb was captivated. In the words of his grandson and biographer,
Laurence Irving:
Début The young Brodribb's schooling ended when he was thirteen. He became a clerk, first in a solicitor's office and then with merchants in the
City of London. and introduced him to Phelps. Learning of the young man's burning ambition, Phelps warned him that acting was "an ill-requited profession", but finding him determined on a stage career he said, "In that case, Sir, you'd better come here and I'll give you two pounds a week to begin with". Brodribb did not take up Phelps's offer: the biographers Laurence Irving (1951) and
Michael Holroyd (2008) offer two possible reasons for this. First, he "knew that London was a prize to be won, that his assault upon the capital was not to be attempted until he had perfected himself in the hard school of the provincial
stock company", and secondly, that his becoming an actor would so distress his mother that he needed to be away from London and his parents. Before leaving London, he submitted himself to a final test. At that time it was not uncommon for aspiring actors to have themselves cast in amateur – and sometimes professional – productions upon payment of a fee to the company. In August 1856, helped by a gift of £100 from an uncle, the eighteen-year-old Brodribb bought the role of
Romeo in an amateur production of
Romeo and Juliet at the
Soho Theatre in the
West End of London. Either to save his mother the embarrassment of having the family name associated with theatres or because he thought his real name unsuitable for an aspiring actor, His performance was well received and he was confirmed in his determination to become a professional actor. Hoskins had extensive contacts in the British theatre, and helped Irving secure an engagement with the
actor-manager E. D. Davis, who hired him for his repertory company at the
Lyceum Theatre,
Sunderland. His début role, in September 1856, was Gaston, Duke of Orleans, in a revival of
Edward Bulwer-Lytton's
Richelieu. Shortly afterwards the inexperienced Irving, either from
stage fright or a recurrence of his speech impediment, could not deliver his lines and was hissed off the stage, but Davis, the actor
Samuel Johnson and their colleagues supported him with practical advice. Later in life, Irving gave them regular work when he formed his own company in London.
Learning his craft Irving remained with Davis's company in Sunderland until February 1857 and then moved to the Queen's Theatre in Edinburgh where he stayed for two and a half years. In the two locations he appeared in nearly 400 plays. Most are now forgotten, but among them were several Shakespeare productions: Irving's roles included
Orlando in
As You Like It,
Claudius in
Hamlet,
Banquo in
Macbeth,
Bassanio in
The Merchant of Venice, Richmond in
Richard III,
Tybalt in
Romeo and Juliet and
Petruchio in
The Taming of the Shrew. He played Captain Absolute in
The Rivals and the title roles in dramatisations of
David Copperfield and
Nicholas Nickleby as well as appearing in
pantomimes and
extravaganzas. In September 1859 Irving made his professional début in London, in the first of four consecutive productions at the
Princess's Theatre, after which he gave two well-received dramatic readings of scenes from Bulwer-Lytton's
The Lady of Lyons at
Crosby Hall. The theatrical newspaper,
The Era commented: , 1864|alt=clean-shaven white man in black Renaissance costume, holding a skull His biographer
Robertson Davies writes that Irving's theatrical apprenticeship was long and demanding. Between 1860 and 1870 he played hundreds of parts in stock companies in Dublin,
Birmingham,
Liverpool,
Oxford, the
Isle of Man and
Manchester, The Dublin engagement was particularly challenging: he was replacing a popular favourite who had been dismissed, and he was shouted down at every performance until he eventually overcame the hostility of the audience. His other roles for the St James's company included Joseph Surface in
The School for Scandal, Jack Absolute in
The Rivals and Young Marlow in
She Stoops to Conquer. Irving appeared at the
Queen's Theatre in
Catherine and Petruchio,
David Garrick's much abbreviated version of
The Taming of the Shrew, as Petruchio to the Catherine of
Ellen Terry;
The Times thought much more highly of her performance than of his. According to Davies, neither Irving nor Terry was greatly impressed with the other's performance in this, their first joint appearance.
Success Irving finally made his West End breakthrough as Digby Grant in
James Albery's
Two Roses, which was produced at the
Vaudeville Theatre on 4 June 1870 and ran for 294 performances. This solid success secured Irving's place as a leading London actor. '', 1872|alt=middle aged, clean-shaven white man with collar-length hair slumped in a chair The production did not attract the public. It was Bateman's second successive failure, and his finances were in some difficulty. Irving persuaded him to mount an adaptation of a play he had found,
Erckmann-Chatrian's in an English version by
Leopold Lewis titled
The Bells. In the original French version,
Constant Coquelin had played the central role of Mathias as an outright villain, whereas, according to the playwright
Henry Arthur Jones, reported by Holroyd, "Irving was any one of us, an innocent man who, of a sudden, gives in to temptation". In Holroyd's words, "what Irving achieved ... was to raise a mediocre historical drama to the status of a dramatic masterpiece": For Bateman, Irving appeared in six further productions at the Lyceum, ending with
Hamlet, which played for more than two hundred nights, an unprecedented run for a Shakespeare play. On the day after the hundredth performance Bateman died of a heart attack, and
his widow took over the management of the theatre. For her, Irving played in ten productions between September 1875 and July 1878, including
Macbeth and
Othello, in which his performances in the title roles were not highly praised, and
Richard III, described as "magnificent". According to Michael R. Booth in
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance (2005), "Irving's Hamlet ... noble and injured, was a revelation: rejecting all tradition and conventional 'points', and combining psychological insights with modern domesticity, it was a new, contemporary Hamlet, one of the finest Victorian stage performances". Together with Terry they made a team associated with Irving for the rest of his life. He directed the Lyceum's productions, controlling and supervising all aspects of the theatre's operations: employment of actors, wages, music, repertory, rehearsals and stage lighting. In Booth's view, "The stage lighting system was his personal creation, and his productions were pictorially beautiful in the best Victorian tradition". The Lyceum staged popular
melodrama,
farce and comedy as well as classic plays. Among the new pieces that Irving presented at the theatre were two comedies written by an actor in his company,
Arthur Wing Pinero. In November 1879 Irving was an "old, haggard, halting and sordid"
Shylock He and
Edwin Booth alternated as Othello and
Iago; his Romeo to Terry's Juliet was one of his less successful roles. The play ran for eight months. He and the Lyceum company played a repertory of eight plays. His
Broadway début was at the
Star Theater on 29 October, when he played Mathias in
The Bells. The other plays in the tour included
The Merchant of Venice,
Hamlet and
Much Ado About Nothing. Irving and his company were much acclaimed;
Twelfth Night followed at the Lyceum in 1884, succeeded by adaptations by Wills of
Goldsmith's
The Vicar of Wakefield and
Goethe's Faust (both 1885). The last of these ran for 388 performances and was Irving's greatest box-office success at the Lyceum. In 1888 Irving returned to the role of Macbeth. His attempt on the part in 1875 had not been among his better-received performances, and for his second production of the play he gave the two central roles greater prominence by cutting some twenty per cent of Shakespeare's text, removing several entire scenes in which Macbeth or Lady Macbeth (Terry) did not appear. He split the fifth, final act into two, believing that this would prolong tension. New incidental music was written by
Arthur Sullivan, the scenery was by
Hawes Craven and
Joseph Harker, and
Alice Comyns Carr designed the costume for Terry's Lady Macbeth in which
John Singer Sargent painted her (
pictured). The production and Irving's performance were well received by the press and public. After
a disastrous fire at the
Theatre Royal, Exeter in 1887 killed 186 people, Irving strove for better safety in theatres. Working with the architect
Alfred Darbyshire he developed the "Irving Safety Theatre" principles, including a
safety curtain between stage and auditorium. The last Lyceum production of the 1880s was
The Dead Heart, by
Watts Phillips (1889). During the decade Irving had established his theatre's reputation: then and later he commissioned incidental music from leading British composers including Sullivan,
Julius Benedict,
Alexander Mackenzie,
C. V. Stanford and
Edward German, and designs by artists including
Lawrence Alma Tadema,
Edward Burne-Jones,
John Tenniel and
Ford Madox Brown. The critic
William Archer wrote, "It is scarcely too much to say that the Lyceum is as prominent an element in the social life of London as the in that of Paris".
1890s At the Lyceum in January 1892 Irving mounted a production of
Henry VIII in which he played
Cardinal Wolsey to the King of
William Terriss, the
Queen Catherine of Terry and the
Anne Boleyn of
Violet Vanbrugh.
The Times commented: The reviewer was correct about the cost of the production, and although it ran for six months the box-office receipts fell far short of covering the outlay. In November 1892 Irving played
King Lear, and in the following February he made a great success of Tennyson's
Becket, alongside Terry and Terriss. He presented a
command performance of the play at
Windsor Castle in March before sailing for another American tour. On 8 November 1893 his company presented
Becket at the opening of
Abbey's Theatre on Broadway.
The New-York Tribune reported, "It was very brilliantly played; and every appreciative spectator of it must have been pleasurably excited, exalted and deeply impressed. The manifestations of public delight were numerous and emphatic". but did not pursue it because he thought Irving's rumoured liaison with Ellen Terry might provoke objections from
Queen Victoria. Gladstone had been wrong about the Queen's potential opposition: as she touched Irving's shoulder with the sword she told him, "I am very, very pleased". After returning to London, Irving staged one of the less popular Shakespeare plays,
Cymbeline, in mid-1896; he played Iachimo. In December of that year he injured his knee and was off the stage for two months. This cost him a considerable amount at the box office, but he made a profitable provincial tour the following year. The following month Irving's scenery warehouse caught fire: more than £30,000 worth of property was destroyed. It was impossible to replicate quickly, and his repertoire at the Lyceum was severely limited. Later in the year Irving made another financially rewarding provincial tour, but then he contracted pneumonia and
pleurisy and was unable to appear for months. In the hope of sorting out his finances he gave up sole ownership of the Lyceum and turned it into a
limited company in April 1899.
Last years , 1901|alt=drawing of white middle-aged man with thin moustache, wearing Ancient Roman military costume, including breastplate, gesturing with hand splayed over his chest In 1901 Irving presented another Shakespeare play of limited box-office potential:
Coriolanus. It lost money, but he recouped some in a twenty-nine week American tour. According to Booth, "Years of overwork and financial difficulties combined to push Irving out of the Lyceum in 1902". In July of that year Terry again played Portia to Irving's Shylock, but this was his last production at the Lyceum. The
London County Council in a drive to enforce safety regulations in West End theatres stipulated that considerable structural work must be carried out if the building was to continue as a theatre. Neither Irving nor the company could afford to do it, and the Lyceum closed, was sold, and after rebuilding became a
music hall. That autumn Irving went on another provincial tour and gave a command performance of
The Story of Waterloo at
Sandringham for King Edward VII. In April 1903
Dante, written for Irving by
Victorien Sardou, opened at the
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane but was not a success.
The Times observed that it "did neither author nor actor any credit", Irving resumed his tour of the provinces. At
Bradford on 3 October 1905, after a performance of
Becket, he collapsed and died at his hotel, aged 67. His ashes were buried in
Poets' Corner in
Westminster Abbey on 20 October. ==Personal life==