I

In 1880 the stage of the Haymarket Theatre in London was enclosed by a proscenium formed of a large-scale picture frame, moulded and gilded in the manner of a contemporary wood and plaster frame used for a portrait or landscape painting, not unlike that surrounding many large-scale Victorian paintings. Its existence is recorded in the frontispiece to ‘The New Haymarket Polka’, composed by the Haymarket's musical director, J. Meredith (Figure 81). The surrounding detail, including the front row of the orchestra stalls, and the image at the centre of the drop curtain, showing a scene from The School for Scandal, painted by D. T. White and John O’Connor, adds a further level of richness to the image. In 1893, when Augustin Daly opened his theatre in Leicester Square, its act-drop featured a painting that showed Ada Rehan in the role of Comedy, attended by Cupids. That the drop was in use when Rehan acted two of her best-known roles, Katherina and Rosalind, offered what Hugh Maguire has called ‘a nice overlap between the unreal world of the stage and the “tangible” auditorium space’: but it also did more. In revealing the performer in two different roles with near simultaneity, it reminded the audience of the difference between actor and role, painting and performance, stillness and dynamic action.

Taken together, these two act-drops offer a valuable introduction to an issue much debated towards the end of the century, and one central to the presentation of the plays of Shakespeare through various temporal registers: the relationship between stage performance and painterly representation. Both images embody issues central to this relationship, the discussion of which occupied a central position in the Magazine of Art, Art Journal and other journals. The formal debate in its turn has been part of a more recent scholarly discussion. The relation has been explored by Martin Meisel in Realizations; Shearer West in an essay examining the form at the end of the century; and Michael Booth in terms of styles of acting. To this exchange should be added discussions of the contributions of individual artists to stage design, a related but rather different topic, and one to which a later section of this chapter will return.