Trilby (1895)
George Du Maurier’s Trilby was the best-selling novel of the century. The illustrated
text’s serialization in Harper’s Magazine (1894) sparked “Trilby mania” of astounding
proportions in the United States.1 To capitalise on the fad, American manufacturers
produced Trilby-branded cigars, waltzes, corsets, cocktails, perfumes, sausages, coiffures,
and foot-shaped ice-cream confections. 2 In the spring of 1895, Paul Potter’s stage
adaptation of the novel was taken on a short US tour before opening in New York.3 The
preeminent London character-actor and theatre manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree saw the
show in Buffalo, went backstage, and bought the British rights.4 Tree returned to London
in the summer of 1895 and embarked on rehearsals for what became one of his biggest
hits.5
Tree recognized a great part for himself. Svengali, a lesser character in the novel,
is significantly more prominent in Potter’s play. Recent commentators have recognized
the pejorative depiction of Svengali as a despised Jew, “out of the mysterious East”6 (an
epithet from the novel), and anti-Semitism was evident to playgoers. More notably,
however, Victorian audiences subsumed Svengali’s accent, demeanour, and
musicianship—markers of his Jewishness—to their perception of his ability to fascinate
or, more specifically, to keep Trilby utterly in his thrall, converting her from a tone-deaf
artists’ model to a singer of world renown. It is in the context of persistent interest in
occult possession, spiritualism, ecstatic conversion, and phrenology that Trilby found a
place in nineteenth-century repertoire. A variant on these weird and compelling practices
was mesmerism, as it was called in the nineteenth century, originally given in medical
1
demonstrations but by the mid-century also proliferating in commercial performances
(“grotesque entertainments given in music halls for the delectation of the gaping
multitude”7) and by amateur practitioners.8 The empirical basis of some of Trilby’s plot
points was contentious, but as a stage entertainment its hypnotic pretext was hugely
compelling.9 Trilby marks two important developments in the popular and medical
understanding of hypnosis: a wider knowledge among lay people about how to induce
trance and a concern that a subject placed under hypnotic influence could be
inappropriately manipulated.10 Can a hypnotist exert such powers? The play explores
what would happen if a beautiful young woman was to fall so thoroughly under a
hypnotist’s influence that she abandoned her life and became the automaton of another’s
will.11 Young women were considered particularly susceptible (also soldiers, accustomed
to taking orders). 12 Critics asked, “What if such a power were possessed by an Anarchist
or by a thief? And if by Svengali, why not by either or by both?”13
Genre Issues
Two of Trilby’s great strengths as a play are its crossover between theatrical genres and
utilization of several of the fine arts. Gothicism, horror, and the macabre waft through the
scruffy artists’ studio, invade the gay surroundings of the Cirque des Bashibazouks, and
recur through the eerie power of Svengali’s image, intermixing comedy with melodrama.
Painting occupies the bohemians, they dance in anticipation of Trilby’s wedding, and act
3 is set in an opulent theatre lobby, yet it is music that conveys both affective mood and
narrative developments. Sound is contrasted between artistic arrangements by great
composers and the catchy melodies of popular tunesmiths; between the musically inept
2
grisette and her transformed self on stage; and between the Paris cityscape of church bells
and noëls and the foreground noise of tipsy revellers. All Victorian performance is
multisensory, but Trilby exemplifies how fully this can operate in order for a clichéd
romance plot of claptrap and balderdash to become compelling actable stuff.14
It also represents how a popular vehicle crosses over from the legitimate stage to
music hall and cinema, fulfilling audience demand for a popular story in multiple ways.
Following the 254 performances of the initial London run, the Haymarket company
toured Trilby to suburban theatres, the provinces, and America. Tree briefly revived it
numerous times between 1897 and 1912, made a film version with a happy ending in
1914, and played a severely truncated version in the music halls in 1915.15 By that time,
nine other cinematic treatments had been made in Britain, the United States, Austria, and
Denmark.16 By the end of the twentieth century, the number had doubled.
Trilby begins as a comedy and proceeds as a romance, utilizing the stage
techniques of melodrama. Three British painters (Billee, Laird, and Taffy), all in love
with Trilby, are immersed in the free-and-easy culture of Paris’s Latin Quarter. The
happy union of Trilby and Billee is prevented by two forces: his uptight family (the
Bagots) who object to Trilby’s upbringing in Paris, and Irish orphan fostered by a ragpicker, and her occupation as artists’ model; and the nefarious Svengali, who perceives
Trilby’s potential as a singer and uses his hypnotic power to control her. Their
community of friends, lower-class women and young Frenchmen slumming it among the
bohemians, support the union; but while they can effect subterfuges to thwart Billee’s
family, they are insufficiently aware of Svengali’s villainy to protect Trilby from his
manipulation. A series of sensational moments mark the four-act play—Trilby’s
3
hypnoses, Billee’s departure then reconciliation with Trilby, Mrs. Bagot’s refusal to
permit the marriage, the friends’ discovery that Trilby has disappeared, reunification of
the friends after many years, Svengali’s collapse, and Trilby’s encounter with her
husband’s photograph—to give it a series of strong pictorial moments consonant with Du
Maurier’s illustrations for the novel.17
Aspects of the story have many precursors; however, the Svengali-Trilby dyad
has “slipped free” of the novel and the play to gain allegorical status in its own right.18
Mephistopheles utilized the “mystery and cunning” of black arts to exert demonic power
over Gretchen;19 Ovid’s Pygmalion carved a statue which the gods endowed with life;
Coppelia danced as an automaton, subject to alien will;20 and Sleeping Beauty awoke
from an induced torpor to discover the treachery of her enchantress and the fidelity of her
lover.21 Trilby’s bohemian backdrop and reluctant in-laws were likened to the play La
Dame aux camélias,22 and her trance-state resembles the heroine of the opera La
sonnambula,23 but Svengali too had clearly recognizable nineteenth-century precursors.
As a contemporaneous article points out, “the pushing, speculating Hebrew appears in
Balzac. The pathetic figure of the typical world-wanderer in Eugène Sue. Dickens gave
us Fagin … George Eliot, the profound, presents us with Daniel Deronda and
Mordecai.”24 These various influences coalesce in Trilby into an indelible image of a
male taking control over a female’s creativity. Thus, in an 1895 circus act, Marie Meers
rode bareback dressed as Trilby, with Svengali as the ringmaster; the American
impresarios David Belasco and Augustin Daly were said to control their star actresses
Mrs. Leslie Carter and Ada Rehan like Svengali; George Edwardes held sway over the
Gaiety Girls; and more recently Tommy Mottola was labelled Mariah Carey’s Svengali.25
4
Interpretive Issues
In the nineteenth century, wealthy patrons commissioned portraits and sat for the artists;
anyone else posing for painters was a “body for rent, if not for sale, within the space of
the studio, which is not only a site of artistic creativity, but also of commercial
exchange.”26 The relevance of this taint to Trilby is the topic of the play’s initial
dialogue. Respectable young working-class women in the glove factory across the street
are horrified that Trilby poses in the nude; she is also a thing apart from what Billee’s
middle-class womenfolk hold dearest. Though her three British champions claim there is
nothing untoward in her posing for them, Billee balks at the thought that Trilby poses for
another artist upstairs. What is a twinge in Billee becomes outright revulsion in his
mother. When his uncle, Rev. Bagot—almost reconciled to Trilby’s early life in the Latin
Quarter and her later notoriety throughout Europe—expresses his final desperate
reservation about Trilby’s suitability to join his family, he asks, “Has the lady been
confirmed?” He reverts to true form: unable to impeach her occupation, he must insist
that Trilby is a Christian (and a Church of England member). Her friend the Laird, a
Scotsman, drily answers, “Probably not.” If he was raised in the Church of Scotland, the
Laird would be a Presbyterian (though lapsed, no doubt), who disdains confirmation as
well as English religious intolerance and prejudice disguised as religion. Determined to
settle the issue once and for all, the Laird turns the ultimate weapon upon the clergyman’s
bias: a fistful of calling cards, left by preeminent European heads of state, inquiring into
Trilby’s health. Royalty—but perhaps only royalty—can trump English bigotry and
middle-class moralizing.
5
The Laird’s indifference to religion and Rev. Bagot’s insistence upon it pass as
character-establishing byplay, yet by implication this also complicates the terrain for
depicting Svengali. Whereas Trilby’s presumed atheism is a threat to the Bagots,
Svengali’s brush with apostasy highlights the indispensability of Judaism to his
existence:27 many reviewers remark on some business in act 2—added by Tree to Potter’s
play, with Du Maurier’s permission—in which Svengali triumphantly declares, “I am my
own God,” laughing at religion. He is immediately toppled by a heart spasm. Asking God
to let him live a little longer, he mutters a prayer extolling monotheism.28 Thus,
Svengali’s hubris is answered by a wrathful god, and he reverts to a rote prayer in
Hebrew. Marking Svengali as an impoverished musician, a proficient hypnotist, an
eastern European (possibly from somewhere in the Austro-Hungarian Empire) or Russian
(the postmarks on his portrait point to this), and a Jew makes him the consummate
outsider, yet one who moves effortlessly among the bohemians of the Latin Quarter, a
place almost the antithesis of England.29 His Jewishness is made synonymous with his
lack of conscience towards god and people; contrasted with Trilby’s loving heart,
Svengali becomes a greater threat than atheism per se.
The characters’ vocal bricolage maps Europe from east to west: Svengali and
Trilby represent Europe’s geographic extremes, but the Laird’s Scottish burr, Taffy’s
Welshness (implied by his nickname, but not proclaimed),30 and Zouzou’s comic
protestations that “I no spik Angliche” also make much of Gaelic and Gallic difference in
charting cultural pluralism. This places the Bagots—English, educated, and Anglican—as
the normative centre, yet as a family even they are divided. The moral compass of
chauvinism is skewed though there is never any doubt for an audience where virtue rests,
6
for it is the business of melodrama to render right-thinking unmistakably. Svengali
peppers his speech with German, speaks French Teutonically, and renders English with a
stage-Jew lisp: this cannot be good. Mrs. Bagot acts out of fear for her son, but the
audience is given ample cause to pass judgement on her brother, Rev. Bagot, who shows
his scholar’s knowledge of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman erotica while furtively enjoying
the sensualism that goes with this arcane knowledge. Thus, Potter melds nationality onto
ethnicity and religion onto regionalism to depict English anticosmopolitanism as small
minded and stifling at the same time that he makes Svengali a dangerous foreigner.
Adapted in 1895 but set retrospectively in the 1850s, the height of the Hapsburg
monarchy’s political threat to Britain,31 Trilby allegorizes a more morally rigid time,
when an expansionist enemy lurking to the east seemed as threatening as religious
schisms at home and when continental instability made the importance of concord among
the British peoples—English (the Bagots), Scottish (the Laird), Welsh (Taffy), and Irish
(Trilby)—paramount.
As a young physician, Franz Anton Mesmer observed French priests performing
exorcisms. He rejected the idea of demonical possession and pioneered the use of
magnets to induce trance and then bring about physical and psychological cures. His
extraordinary claims were investigated and discounted by the French government in
1784.32 Mesmer claimed to manipulate electric currents passing between bodies (hence,
the instigation of trance as induction in the practice of “animal magnetism”), but in 1831
the French Academy declared that assertion was the means of producing mesmeric
effects rather than magnetism.33 By the end of the nineteenth century, Mesmer’s electric
techniques were dismissed as “faith cures” though the scientific basis of suggestion as
7
something legitimately efficacious while a subject is in deep relaxation had taken hold.34
James Braid, a Manchester practitioner, coined the term hypnotism in the 1840s. Braid’s
hypnotism had the same applications and efficacy as mesmerism, minus the idea of
magnetic fluids. Braid also desexualized induction by foregoing the physical “passes”
performed by the hypnotist over the patient’s body and made no claim to impinge mind
or will upon another person: a hypnotic patient must be a willing subject.35 Several
aspects of hypnosis were debated for the remainder of the century: whether the inducer
needed to be in proximity to the subject, the extent to which inductees retained volition
and awareness while in trance, and the duration of the hypnotic state.36 Trilby opts for the
most lenient view of all controversies.
Three hypnotic stages were propounded by J.M. Charcot at the Salpêtrière asylum
in the 1880s. In act 1, Svengali uses hypnotism to relieve Trilby’s headache,
demonstrating to her friends the first two stages of hypnosis: drowsiness (reducing the
subject’s ability to resist suggestions) and hypotaxy (the subject is obliged to obey all
suggestions) as a medically documented therapeutic treatment for neuralgia.37 In act 2,
his technique evolves—or rather, it diverges from accepted practice—as one reviewer
noted:
Mr. Tree performs feats which, we suspect, even the ‘Nancy school’38 would repudiate.
He hypnotizes Trilby from behind without her knowledge; in obedience to the wave of
his long, spider-like arm he fetches her from a room, ‘off,’ where, presumably, she can
neither see nor hear him. And most assuredly the stage Svengali theorizes incorrectly as
to the nature of his powers. He believes, what was effectively disproved a hundred years
ago, that a certain virtue, an ‘odic [hypothetical] force’ of some kind, passes from the
hypnotizer to his patient.39
Svengali’s technique was erroneous, but flamboyance characterized the craft of hypnosis.
In contrast to Mesmer’s powers of “fascination”—dramatized in 1788 by Elizabeth
8
Inchbald (Animal Magnetism), illustrating the power of a magnetized wand40—Svengali’s
application of hypnosis had some basis in medical literature. Indeed, Du Maurier’s idea
for training a great singer may have come from a medical case study in Dr. Braid’s
treatise Observations on Trance.41 Braid describes a patient, unknowledgeable about
music and unilingual, who in a hypnotic trance could mimic the great soprano Jenny Lind
note for note, in any language, so precisely that listeners “could not for some times
imagine that there were two voices, so perfectly did they accord, both in musical tone and
vocal pronunciations of Swiss, German, and Italian songs.” Her mirroring of an
extemporized chromatic exercise was equally impressive.42 In 1847, John Newman
reported another case: a flautist who could improvise beautifully but never recall a single
note he played. A sleepwalker, this patient responded to a suggestion when in trance and
then transcribed his impromptus perfectly.43 A third musical case is reported by Dr.
Quackenbos, a distinguished American medical scientist, who treated a pianist. He
instructed the patient under hypnosis “that the subliminal self is now in the ascendancy”
and “that it will utter itself fearlessly, without diffidence, without thought of extraneous
criticism, unerringly, feelingly, triumphantly.” The patient was then able to “read music,
to interpret the contents, and to render the thought of feeling through the medium of
piano tones evoked by dexterous fingers.”44
For one skeptical theatre critic, hypnotism was simply “an easy way of bringing
anything you please to pass without troubling yourself to find an adequate reason for
it.”45 As Gecko (Svengali’s faithful but ambivalent sidekick) explains at the moment that
Svengali’s plot is undone,
GECKO (L.C.). There are two Trilbys. There is the Trilby you know, who cannot sing
one note in tune.… And all at once this Svengali, this magician—
9
(All turn to Svengali, who is listening with a ghastly look on his face).
can with one look of his eye, one wave of his hand, turn her into another Trilby,
and she becomes a mere singing machine, just the unconscious voice that
Svengali sings with, so that when his Trilby is singing our Trilby has ceased to
exist. Our Trilby is fast asleep—our Trilby is dead.
This is expedient, but it also resembles the seeming miracles performed by documented
hypnotic subjects. Setting Trilby four decades in the past—contemporaneous with Braid
and Neuman’s cases—helped to defray critique about the unscientific basis of the
hypnotism. It mattered less that the stage truthfully represented all aspects of the
phenomenon than that empathy was generated for Trilby and those who mourned her.
Performative Issues
W.S. Gilbert, who was present at the London premiere, said, “Svengali’s make-up is
marvelous—we could smell him.”46 Tree based his physicalization on Du Maurier’s
illustrations and the virtuoso violinist Nicolò Paganini (1782-1840).47 Forming a lean
figure, his pallor made more eerie by an oft-stroked beard and long, oily, black, matted
hair streaked with red, Tree’s Svengali suggested something unearthly, like the Flying
Dutchman.48 Putty lent him a hooked nose, and India ink feathered onto his arms, throat,
eyebrows, and the backs of his hands added to his hirsute unwholesomeness.49 Lit in a
“play of grayish light and dark shadow on his features,” he was a stage villain like no
other. He used “his long, octopus-like limbs,” “short mirthless laugh,” and “kick-out of
the leg behind” himself to maximum effect; through repetition of these tics, he fascinated
and repelled.50 His hands were talon-like: the scene with the elder Bagots, “in which the
gesture of the hands by which it was conveyed that Trilby had sat for ‘the altogether’ was
half comic and wholly sinister—a very triumph of expressiveness.”51 The loose beret and
10
shoddy coat worn in the Latin Quarter gave way in act 3 to evening dress. Better
groomed, he still utilized his defiant stare, harshly modulated voice “breaking
occasionally into a shrill treble,” and “horrible little laugh” to convey rascality. Despite a
more laboured gait from five years of exertion in mesmerizing Trilby, his face still
exuded suppressed rage.52
In the novel, Svengali is the least credible character, yet in the stage adaptation,
Tree’s “emotional” acting was proclaimed “amazingly realistic.”53 He “portrayed the
character in its varying moods of tender passion, ghastly humour, and fierce malignity,
dominated always by the ‘uncanny,’ with a vivid and realistic force which held the
audience spellbound until the terrible death scene in the third act.”54 Already “a physical
wreck, his life fast oozing from him,” yet thirsting for more vengeance, at the moment of
death, he fell backward over a gilded table, his head inverted, eyes staring, tongue
protruding, face bloodless, and arms spread as if crucified, forming “surely among the
most creepy [effects] known to our contemporary theatre.”55 This was “no mere ogre of
pantomime, but a living entity.” 56 Therein lay the power of Tree’s creation and the secret
of Svengali’s longevity in the social imaginary. “His death was a most intensely tragic
episode—appalling in its realism.”57
Parodies of Trilby, which are abundant, mimic details of the Haymarket
production and in so doing highlight features that caught the public’s attention.58 Music is
particularly prominent in this regard. In a burlesque at the Prince of Wales’s Theatre,
Arthur Roberts (as Svengali) played a tiny pump organ.59 This poked fun at Tree’s
exhibition of musical passion in performing Schubert’s Rosamunde, then “with a quick
revulsion, when he sees Trilby is dead to such influences, he displays his cynical humour
11
by a sudden lapse into a French popular lilt.”60 Tree’s digital gymnastics on the dummy
keyboard were admired for their felicity amid “wild grandeur,” 61 but Tree no more
played the piano than Dorothea Baird (as Trilby) sang at the Cirque des Bashibazouks.
Svengali’s songs were performed offstage by the musical director, Raymond Roze.62
Seeing the burlesque Svengali sweating and pedalling at the pump organ not only made
him appear less like a concert artist but downgraded him to an accompanist in a parish
church. The parody sends up the whole pretext of musical virtuosity.63
Thrillby, a parody published in 1896, takes a jab at the gothic pretext that Trilby
remains in Svengali’s thrall after his death. Only Svengali can break the hypnotic bond,
so the Laird declares that he will bring him back to life.
LAIRD (producing toy bagpipes). Wi’ these! (plays).
THRILBY (reviving and rising to her feet, à la Jessie Brown in the Relief of Lucknow).64
Hush! hark! Dinna’ ye hear it? It’s the pibroch [bagpipe] o’ the Heelanders—the
Slogan o’ the Campbells—the bonniest lilt o’ ae.65
One ethnic stereotype is indulged while another is lampooned.66 This demonstrates the
endurance of Jessie Brown in cultural circulation at the same time that it points to the
preposterousness of last-minute reprieves as a frequent recourse of melodrama. It is a
form of reprieve that Trilby (novel and play) denies.
An evening at a nineteenth-century theatre was invariably a musical evening. Just
as at the opera and ballet, dramas were preceded by overtures. Usually these were moodsetting classical or popular tunes selected by the conductor. At a melodrama, there may
be specific music composed for the production, and these melodic motifs could be
interwoven with other music. Potter has several characters introduce songs diegetically—
as part of the action—most notably Trilby’s “Ben Bolt” but also the Laird’s “Willie
12
Brew’d a Peck o’ Maut” and Svengali’s “Messieurs les étudiants,” “Annie Laurie,” and
the “Last Rose of Summer,” most of which the musical director also wove into the act 1
overture. Act 2 has its noisy gallop for the entrance of the diners and quadrille for the
dancers, ostensibly played by Svengali and Gecko onstage, and concludes with the strains
of “O Holy Night” wafting in from the church organ across the road. Anticipation for the
appearance of “La Svengali” in act 3 is established by “Hungarian National music played
by [a] Gipsy band.” Trilby’s rendition of “Ben Bolt” is the highlight, but the act closes to
the strains of “‘Au clair de la lune’ played by [an] Hungarian Orchestra during riot”.67
According to a music plot listing the orchestra’s cues, Tree scrupulously crafted the
extradiegetic elements as well—music not called for within the action but supportive of
it—throughout the performance. Certain scenes with Svengali were underscored with
music by Hector Berlioz and Anton Rubinstein.68 The entr’acte between acts 1 and 2
consisted of a Chopin Impromptu, between acts 2 and 3 a fantasia of “Ben Bolt” was
performed, and between acts 3 and 4 a medley of airs was reprised.
This made it all the more significant that act 4 commenced in silence. Later,
hinting at Trilby’s renewed betrothal, an orchestral rendering of Schumann’s “Der
Nussbaum” (“The Walnut-Tree”) underscored the action. This song, given by the
composer to his bride on their wedding day, is about a bridegroom’s deferred arrival,
though love is whispered by the walnut-tree and the bride listens until wafted into
slumber. This is an excellent instance of how, whether played or sung onstage or
provided by the orchestra, music conveys the major arcs of Trilby’s plot as well as the
emotional valences of the play. Schubert’s “Adieu” (with words equally familiar to any
audience member with a parlour piano: “Adieu! ‘tis love’s last greeting,/ The parting
13
hour is come!”) was played during Trilby’s final scene, but this reinforced expectations
hatched during the act 1 overture rather than informing even the densest spectator of a
new plot twist. From the opening strains, it was hinted that someone will die. The lover
of Annie Laurie croons that he would “lay me down and die” for her; the schoolmate in
“Ben Bolt” explains that Alice lies in the churchyard; and in “The Last Rose of Summer”
the companions have parted, and the only remaining rose blooms all alone in the bleak
world. Lyrics were unnecessary accompaniments to such well-known favourites. As long
as the tunes were played, the words resounded without being said.
The actors augmented the musical score with their vocalizations; these, in turn,
were part of the orchestration of sound and silence. Trilby had a distinct voice when
hypnotized, and in act 4, as she convalesced, she could barely raise a sound above a
whisper. When Taffy and the Laird take Rev. Bagot offstage, leaving Trilby and Billee
together, “the voice of Little Billee approaches her, meets it, and there is a kiss, and these
two sit silent a very long while, while the others converse in whispers.” 69 Her voice
resumes a dreamy quality:
TRILBY. Billee, it’s real, is it not? All is going to be as it used to be? (Playfully) I’m
afraid that Barbizon cottage is a tumble-down ruin now; but we’ll live in it, won’t
we—ruin or no ruin? Oh, my love, my love, I’m so happy. And I thought at one
time I was going to die.
He kisses her, and she is left alone. The dreaminess is broken when Svengali reclaims
Trilby from beyond his grave. She screams. “Feet scuffle about, and a soft body drops
lightly to the floor; then silence, as if death were near. The silence seems interminable.
What is happening? Did I hear the faint echo of Svengali’s laugh, or was it imagination?
The silence continues, no one stirs, no one breathes.”70 Trilby, alone with the audience,
14
has expired. The audience see Trilby die, yet also know Billee’s fate.
Editing Issues
Potter adapted the text from Du Maurier’s novel, Tree suggested further changes to
Potter, additional adjustments were incorporated during rehearsals, more amendments
were enacted during Tree’s out-of-town try-outs, and still more changes were made
following the London premiere.71 Kate Terry Gielgud complained that by the time she
saw it in London, Trilby was “a mere patchwork of the book, scraps taken haphazard and
dumped down without any context—taking for granted that everyone has read the book
and will fill up the gaps from memory,” yet the production satisfied critics as well as
playgoers.72 Several typescripts for Trilby have passed from Tree’s possession to the
Bristol Theatre Collection. They show how the patchwork became even more strained as
Tree adapted the text for film and music hall after the turn of the century.
The following edition is based on two manuscripts for acts 1 and 2 and one
version of acts 3 and 4 made for Tree’s company. The typescripts are augmented with
holograph stage directions, alterations, additions, and excisions of dialogue, making this
the most complete and faithful edition yet compiled of the text used in the first English
production. The versions of acts 1 and 2 show evidence of being made one before the
other though holograph changes to the earlier version are not always typed into the later
text; some of the holograph changes are in both texts (in different handwriting), and some
appear only in one or the other. One copy was probably kept by the prompter, the other
for Tree, who directed.73 Additional plots with music and lighting cues (gas, electric, and
limelight) not integrated into the prompt books suggest that though the manuscripts were
15
updated in rehearsal, they are not the stage manager’s prompt book used during the run of
the show.74 As notations of acting, this edition retains the stage manager’s shorthand for
doorways (L.2 E. is stage left second entrance) and scenery (D.L.F. is downstage left flat)
even when the code is obscure.
Trilby was licensed part-way into the provincial try-outs, and the Lord
Chamberlain’s copy closely adheres to the Bristol Theatre Collection manuscripts, minus
the holograph stage directions.75 This complicates dating the Bristol manuscripts. Using a
prompt book fleshes out movements, and sometimes actors’ inflections, but fails to
determine the text’s moment in time relative to the rehearsals.76 Furthermore, notations
made in rehearsal were not necessarily retained for the whole run. Prompt books also call
attention to the problem of attributing authorship over the mise-en-scène. In April 1896,
this came to a head in the lawsuit Tree v. Bowkett which established that a copy-cat
production had stolen the Haymarket’s stage arrangements; as a differentiation between
the playwright’s work and the producing company’s, this is a landmark decision.77 Still,
this is a rare opportunity to publish a working version of a script, reflective of rehearsal
discoveries.
16
Notes
1
Published January-August 1894 in Harper’s. See also Liverpool Post, “Royal Court
Theatre: ‘Trilby,’” 1 October 1895; and Jonathan Freedman, “Mania and the
Middlebrow: The Case of Trilby,” in Lyrical Symbols and Narrative Transformations:
Essays in Honor of Ralph Freedman, edited by Kathleen L. Komar and Ross Shideler
(Columbia SC: Camden, 1998), 149-71.
2
See J.B. Gilder and J.D. Gilder, Trilbyana: The Rise and Progress of a Popular Novel
(New York: The Critic Co., 1895), 25-26; and the Bailie, “Monday Gossip,” 18
September 1895. In Britain, an effusion of Trilby-themed music appeared in 1895-96:
marches, waltzes, polkas, and other dance music, as well as ballads (including “Trilby
Will be True,” “I’m Looking for Trilby!,” “Oh, Trilby, What Have You Done for Me?,”
“Tricky Little Trilby,” “Trilby on the Brain,” and “Trilby, the French-Irish Girl”).
3
Paul Meredith Potter (1853-1921, a.k.a. Walter Arthur Maclean) was English-born but
resided in the United States from 1878. He worked as a journalist for the New York
Herald and the Chicago Tribune and began writing original plays around 1890. Trilby
was his greatest success, but most of his subsequent plays were adapted from French
originals.
4
Philip S. Stetson, “How Mr. Potter Wrote ‘Trilby,’” Metropolitan Magazine 1 (May
1895): 238; and Madeleine Bingham, “The Great Lover”: The Life and Art of Herbert
Beerbohm Tree (London: Hamish Hamilton; 1978), 71.
17
5
Profits from Trilby allowed Tree to renovate His Majesty’s Theatre, where he became
Lessee in 1897. Tracy C. Davis, The Economics of the British Stage, 1800-1914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 225.
6
Neil R. Davison, “‘The Jew’ as Homme/Femme-Fatale: Jewish (Art)ifice, Trilby, and
Dreyfus,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society 8, no. 2-3 (2002): 73-111;
Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web: The Alien Encounter in Modern Culture (New Haven: Yale,
2000); and Dennis Denisoff, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody, 1840-1940 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 83-93.
7
Edinburgh Evening News, “‘Trilby’ at the Lyceum Theatre,” 24 September 1895.
8
John Hughes Bennett, The Mesmeric Mania of 1851, with a Physiological Explanation
of the Phenomena Produced (Edinburgh and London: Sutherland and Knox; and
Simpkin, Marhsall & Co., 1851), 6; and Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in
Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
9
Fred Nadis, Wonder Shows: Performing Science, Magic, and Religion in America (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 100; and Ernesto Laclau, On Populist
Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 40-44.
10
The ethical issue was first raised by J. Liégneois in 1884: anyone could learn the
techniques of invoking hypnotic trance, so what if they abused their power to command
criminal or sexual behavior? See De la suggestion hypnotique dans ses rapports avec le
droit civil et le droit criminal (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1884), quoted in Jean-Roch
Laurence and Campbell Perry, Hypnosis, Will, and Memory: A Psycho-Legal History
(New York: Guildford Press, 1988), 226-27.
18
11
Charles Barney Cory, Hypnotism or Mesmerism (Boston: Alfred Mudge & Son, 1888),
20-21.
12
Ibid., 13-14; and W.H. J. Shaw and William Henry James, How to Hypnotise and
Mesmerise: A Manual of Instruction in the History, Mysteries, Modes of Procedure and
Methods of Mesmerism, or Animal Magnetism, etc. (Chicago: The Authors, 1896), 45.
13
Manchester Courier, “‘Trilby’ at the Theatre Royal,” 9 September 1895.
14
For gothicism in the novel, see Ruth Bienstock Anolik, “The Infamous Svengali:
George Du Maurier’s Satanic Jew,” in The Gothic Other: Racial and Social
Constructions in the Literary Imagination, edited by Ruth Bienstock Anolike and
Douglas L. Howard (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), 163-93.
15
Trilby was revived for short runs in 1897, 1898, 1902, 1903, 1905, 1905, 1907, 1909,
and 1912. The 1914 film was directed by Harold Shaw and distributed by the London
Film Company. Tree’s acting is analyzed in Jon Burrows, Legitimate Cinema: Theatre
Stars in Silent British Films, 1908-1918 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2003), 15862. For the 1915 text, revised by Stanley Bell, see Bristol Theatre Collection
HBT/000238/1.
16
Tree’s version was produced by Harold Shaw and included none of the original cast
apart from Tree. See also the films Trilby and Little Billee (Biography 1896); Etta Lola, à
la Trilby (Edison 1898); Trilby (Nordisk 1908); Trilby (Kinemacolor 1910) Trilby
(Osterreichische-Ungarische Kinoindustri 1912); Trilby (Biography 1912); Trilby
(Standard 1912); Trilby (Famous Players 1913); and Svengali der Hypnotiser (Weiner
1914).
19
17
An exhibition of Du Maurier’s illustrations for Trilby at the Fine Art Society, New
Bond Street, coincided with the Haymarket premiere. Times, “Haymarket Theatre,” 31
October 1895.
18
Pick, Svengali’s Web, 6.
19
Manchester Courier, “‘Trilby’ at the Theatre Royal,” 9 September 1895; Edinburgh
Evening News, “‘Trilby’ at the Lyceum Theatre,” 24 September 1895; and Evening News,
“‘Trilby,’” 31 October 1895.
20
Jane Goodall, Stage Presence (London: Routledge, 2008), 87-88.
21
Carole Silver, “On the Origin of Fairies: Victorians, Romantics, and Folk Belief,”
Browning Institute Studies 14 (1986): 150.
22
Adapted into the opera La traviata, La Dame aux camélias chronicles a demi-mondaine
who succumbs to illness and death after her lover’s father persuades her to renounce the
relationship. Manchester Guardian, “Theatre Royal: Mr. Beerbohm Tree and the
Haymarket Company in ‘Trilby,’” 9 September 1895; and Phyllis Weliver, “Music,
Crowd Control and the Female Performer in Trilby,” in The Idea of Music in Victorian
Fiction, edited by Sophie Fuller and Nicky Loseff (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 69.
23
For a summary of La sonnambula, see the commentary on its burlesque, The Nigger’s
Opera, performed by Christy’s Minstrels.
24
Alex Neuman, “The Significance of Svengali,” Illustrated American, 11 May 1895,
586. See Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (A Harlot High and Low) and
Ursule Mirouët, Sue’s Le Juif errant (The Wandering Jew), Dickens’s Oliver Twist, and
George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.
20
25
Gilder and Gilder, Trilbyana, 20-21; Kim Marra, Strange Duets: Impresarios &
Actresses in the American Theatre, 1865-1914 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,
2005), 178, 203, 47, 56; Peter Bailey, “‘Naughty but Nice’: Musical Comedy and the
Rhetoric of the Girl,” in The Edwardian Theatre, edited by M.R. Booth and J.H. Kaplan,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 39; and Lola Ogunnaike, “A Superstar
Returns with Another New Self,” New York Times, 12 April 2005, B3.
26
Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British
West Indies, 1700-1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 89.
27
Svengali is an exotic on the West End stage, not a Jew reconstituted into Englishness
as Heidi Holder has traced in East End productions. Heidi Holder, “Nation and
Neighbourhood, Jews and Englishmen: Location and Theatrical Ideology in Victorian
London,” in The Performing Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre’s History, edited by
Tracy C. Davis and Peter Holland (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 105-20.
28
Liverpool Courier, “‘Trilby’ at the Court Theatre,” 1 October 1895; and Daily News
(Brighton), “Music and the Drama: Brighton Theatre Royal,” 19 March 1897.
29
Another stage adaptation, licensed for the Theatre Royal Eastbourne in April 1896, hits
up Svengali’s accent (and creepy foreignness) more than Potter’s. It exaggerates
Svengali’s speech while making the Laird’s more phonetic. This is Trilby’s first
mesmeric induction:
SVENGALI. Nein. She has ye Neuralgia. Perhaps I cure He’em. Sit you there
mademoiselle. (She sits on raised seat.) Now you fix your eyes on the whites of
mine. Look hard, intent so yat is well, keep your eyes fixed so.
(Makes passes gently up and down, music. Trilby eyes close gradually, he makes more
passes, & pause).
BILLEE. He’s mesmerising her (aside).
SVENGALI. Was you pitter. Not so mosh pain, hein?
21
TRILBY. None at all now Monsieur. Thank Heaven and you!
SVENGALI. You gust set still, sleep, at my will.
(Trilby’s head sinks back her eyes close Svengali makes passes. Taffy and Laird R.C.
enter).
TAFFY. What are you doing?
SVENGALI. Curing ye Neuralgia. (To Trilby) Wake—ask her now if she sleep or not.
LAIRD. Eh! this is verra strange: do you sleep young lassie?
British Library Add MS 53599, licence no. 501, fols. 25-26.
30
Presumed to derive from the river Taff, which runs through Cardiff. It has pejorative
connotations, as in the verse (sung in the borderlands of England and Wales on St.
David’s Day) that begins:
Taffy was a Welshman,
Taffy was a thief.
Taffy came to my house
And stole a leg of beef.
I went to Taffy’s house,
Taffy was in bed.
I picked up the leg of beef
And hit him on the head.
31
See the discussion of the political background to Ours.
32
James Stanley Grimes, Etherology and the Phreno-Philosophy of Mesmerism and
Magic Eloquence: Including a New Philosophy of Sleep and of Consciousness, with a
Review of the Pretensions of Phreno-Magnetism, Electro-Biology, &c. (Boston,
Cambridge; London: J. Munroe and Company; Edward T. Whitfield, 1850), 45-49.
33
Ernest Hart, Hypnotism, Mermerism and the New Witchcraft (London: Smith, Elder &
Co., 1896), 137-38, 242-43.
34
Cory, Hypnotism or Mesmerism, 8.
35
Winter, Mesmerized, 185.
36
Cory, Hypnotism or Mesmerism, 11; Lew Alexander Harraden, How to Give Hypnotic
Exhibitions: With History of Hypnotism (Jackson, MI: Betts, 1900), 11; Laurence and
22
Perry, Hypnosis, Will, and Memory, 183, in reference to E. Aza, Hypnotisme et double
conscience (Paris: F. Alcan, 1893); and B. Brown Williams, MD, Mental Alchemy: A
Treatise on the Mind, Nervous System, Psychology, Magnetism, Mesmerism, and
Diseases (New York: Fowlers and Wells, 1854), 167.
37
Shaw and James, How to Hypnotise, 13; Cory, Hypnotism or Mesmerism, 20-22; and
Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
311-13.
38
A.A. Liébeault’s practices at the hospital at Nancy became widely known through
Hippolyte Bernheim’s 1884 volume De la suggestions dans l’état hypnotique et dans
l’état de veille. By 1895, Nancy had overtaken Paris’s Salpêtrière asylum in medical
opinion, validating hypnotherapy. Gauld, History of Hypnotism, 319-37.
39
Times, “Haymarket Theatre,” 31 October 1895.
40
The play remained in the English repertoire through the first half of the nineteenth
century and was produced by Charles Dickens in 1857.
41
Paul Potter, who did research for his adaptation at New York’s Mercantile Library,
made this attribution. See Stetson, “How Mr. Potter Wrote Trilby,” 239.
42
James Beard, Observations on Trance; or, Human Hybernation (London: John
Churchill, 1850), 43.
43
John B. Newman, Fascination; or, the Philosophy of Charming, Illustrating the
Principles of Life in Connection with Spirit and Matter (New York: Fowler & Wells,
1847), 153.
44
John Duncan Quackenbos, Hypnotism in Mental and Moral Culture (New York and
London: Harper & Brothers, 1901), 245-46. Another possible antecedent for Trilby is the
23
seduction by the conductor Charles Boscha of Anna Rivere Bishop, with whom he
subsequently travelled the globe. Du Maurier knew of the scandal. Pick, Svengali’s Web,
98.
45
Spectator, “Haymarket Theatre: ‘Trilby,’” Star, 31 October 1895.
46
Hesketh Pearson, Beerbohm Tree: His Life and Laughter (London: Methuen, 1956),
90. For lists of attendees, see Evening News, “‘Trilby,’” 31 October 1895; and Daily
News, “Drama: ‘Trilby’ at the Haymarket,” 31 October 1895.
47
Evening Citizen (Glasgow), “Theatres and Amusements: Mr. Tree at the Theatre-
Royal,” 17 September 1895. Paganini was lanky and spider-like (possibly the result of a
connective tissue disorder), which observers found unnerving.
48
The Flying Dutchman captained a spectral ship generally associated with portents of
doom at sea. Freemans Journal, “‘Trilby’ at the Gaiety,” 8 October 1895. As a “stage
Jew,” Svengali was also modelled on Shylock; however, late-Victorian portrayals of
Shylock, for example Henry Irving’s, were sympathetic. Alan Hughes, “Henry Irving’s
Tragedy of Shylock,” Educational Theatre Journal 24, no. 3 (1972): 248-64.
49
Morning Leader (New York), “A Famous Actor’s Make-up: How Mr. Tree Prepares
for Svengali,” 4 January 1897.
50
Times, “Haymarket Theatre,” 31 October 1895; and Scotsman (Edinburgh),
“Amusements: ‘Trilby’ at the Lyceum Theatre,” 24 September 1895.
51
Manchester Guardian, “Theatre Royal: Mr. Beerbohm Tree and the Haymarket
Company in ‘Trilby,’” 9 September 1895.
52
Birmingham Mail, “Trilby at the Prince of Wales Theatre,” 6 October 1896; and
Yorkshire Post, “‘Trilby’ in Leeds,” 11 September 1895. See also photographs in the
24
Harvard Theatre Collection, Guy Little Photograph Collection at the Victoria and Albert
Museum, and Bristol Theatre Collection.
53
Standard, “Haymarket Theatre,” 31 October 1895.
54
Scotsman (Edinburgh), “Glasgow,” 17 September 1895.
55
Evening Citizen (Glasgow), “Theatres and Amusements: Mr. Tree at the Theatre-
Royal,” 17 September 1895; Scotsman, “Amusements: ‘Trilby’ at the Lyceum Theatre,”
24 September 1895; Dublin Evening Herald, “‘Trilby’ at the Gaiety,” 8 October 1895;
and Kate Terry Gielgud, A Victorian Playgoer (London: Heinemann, 1980), 36.
56
New York Times, “The English Svengali,” 15 December 1896.
57
Freemans Journal, “‘Trilby’ at the Gaiety,” 8 October 1895.
58
Within weeks of the London premiere, Marie Lloyd sang a Trilby parody in the music
halls, and burlesques were staged at the Opera Comique and Prince of Wales’s Theatres.
Others were published.
59
Sketch, 4 December 1895, 295. This was billed as “A Trilby Triflet,” inserted into the
second act of the melodrama Gentleman Joe, “with full organ, bagpipe, and cornet
accompaniment” (Morning Post, 18 November 1895, 4).
60
This is in reference to the 1910 revival; however, when the production toured in 1896,
the provincial press indicated that most of Tree’s business was the same as what was seen
in the 1895 try-outs. Unless contradicted in successive sets of prompt books, it can be
assumed that most business was stable even as casts changed. Dublin Daily Express, “Sir
H. Beerbohm Tree at the Royal,” 14 May 1910.
61
Glasgow Weekly Herald, “‘Trilby’ at the Theatre Royal,” 21 September 1895.
62
Pearson, Beerbohm Tree, 90-91.
25
63
In the 1912 revival, Julia Neilson-Terry performed Trilby; she was the first actress cast
in the role who could tackle “La Svengali’s” repertoire, so the staging was altered to
display her abilities. In the middle of act 3, the stage darkened, and Svengali led Trilby
before the curtain (as if at the Cirque) whereupon she sang the coloratura aria
“Charmante oiseau” (from Félicien David’s La Perle du Brésil) and “Ben Bolt.” Daily
News, “The Real Trilby: Miss Neilson-Terry’s Triumph,” 20 February 1912. Later in the
act, when Trilby sings out of tune, Neilson-Terry was offstage as the 1895 text indicates.
Stage, “His Majesty’s,” 22 February 1912.
64
See discussion of the last moments of Boucicault’s The Relief of Lucknow.
65
William Muskerry, with songs by F. Osmond Carr, Thrillby, a Shocker in One Scene
and Several Spasms (London and New York: Samuel French; [1896]), 14-15.
66
This was not the first time the joke succeeded: in the 1865 Strand burlesque
L’Africaine, Anthropophagian natives enter to the strains of “The Cannibals are
Coming.” Kurt Gänzl, British Musical Theatre vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1986) 5.
67
“Note on Music,” HBT/000054/59-62.
68
Rubinstein was a flamboyant and unpredictable virtuoso pianist. The selected musical
motifs may have been from his opera The Demon. Both Felix Mendelssohn, a particularly
intense conductor, and Rubinstein provide Jewish antecedents for Svengali’s
musicianship. Berlioz was famously moody; his work for orchestra, voices, and chorus
The Damnation of Faust may have been the work excerpted.
69
Woman, “Strange Impressions of ‘Trilby,’” 13 November 1895, 8.
70
Ibid.
26
71
An oil painting was used in the provincial try-outs and perhaps also at the London
premiere, for Kate Terry Gielgud complains that he “put in an appearance as a portrait in
a frame (deluged with limelight, of course), at the sight of which Trilby shrieks and
presumably expires.” This contradicts the manuscript; however, act 4 is the least
amended portion of the text. Gielgud, Victorian Playgoer, 36.
72
Ibid., 35.
73
Bristol Theatre Collection HBT/000030/3 to 000030/6. There may have been a more
complete rehearsal copy for acts 3 and 4, no longer extant. Actor’s part books (each
containing one character’s lines and cues) substantiate that these manuscripts pertain to
the 1895 production. The part books are uncatalogued, in the same collection. Two
modern editions also derive from the Bristol Theatre Collection prompt books; however,
Kilgariff’s is much truncated, and Rowell opted to transcribe the 1915 version (because it
is easiest to read), incorporating aspects of earlier manuscripts unsystematically. Michael
Kilgarrif, ed., The Golden Age of Melodrama: Twelve 19th Century Melodramas
(London: Wolfe, 1974); and George Rowell, ed., Trilby and Other Plays (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996).
74
For information about the technical specifications, see the notes to the play in Rowell,
Trilby and Other Plays, 290-96.
75
British Library Add MS 53582(C) licence no. 241, licensed on 16 September 1895.
76
See Catriona Mills, “Adapting the Familiar: The Penny-Weekly Serials of Eliza
Winstanley on Stage in Suburban Theatres,” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 36,
no. 1 (2009): 38.
77
Bristol Theatre Collection HBT/000021/1-4.
27