“‘Where have you been all these years?’ he said.
“‘I have been having a very happy time,’ I answered.
“‘Well, you’ve had it long enough. Come back to the stage!’
“‘No, never!’
“‘You’re a fool! You ought to come back.’
“Suddenly I remembered the bailiff in the house a few miles away, and I said laughingly: ‘Well, perhaps I would think of it if someone would give me forty pounds a week!’
“‘Done!’ said Charles Reade. ‘I’ll give you that, and more, if you’ll come and play Philippa Chester in The Wandering Heir.’”
Thus it was “dear, lovable, aggravating, childlike, crafty, gentle, obstinate, and entirely delightful and interesting Charles Reade,” to use Ellen Terry’s own characterization, who in 1874 induced her to return to the stage. He was then managing the Queen’s. Since 1868 she had not acted at all, but she was well remembered, and her reappearance was cordially welcomed. The play was one of Reade’s own, The Wandering Heir, and in course of it Miss Terry appeared in male attire—one of the few times she had what old timers used to know as “breeches parts.” From all accounts it was a buoyant, charming impersonation. The author complimented her on her self-denial in making what he called “some sacrifice of beauty to pass for a boy, so that the audience can’t say: ‘Why, James must be a fool not to see she is a girl.’”
From this time, in 1874, until more than thirty years later, Ellen Terry was continuously before the public. In 1875, S. B. Bancroft (later Sir Squire)—one of the ablest actor-managers of the day—determined upon a daring experiment at his little Prince of Wales’s Theatre, a bandbox of a theatre hitherto dedicated to the “teacup and saucer drama.” This was his production of The Merchant of Venice. The play has never been set more beautifully, and as we shall see, it was in one part acted to perfection. But it failed through the failure of Charles Coghlan as Shylock. For Ellen Terry, however, it was really the first great triumph of her career. For her Portia on this occasion was a real triumph. She was twenty-seven, in the very perfection of her youth and beauty, and it was her first important venture with a Shakespearean part. Her success was immediate, and Portia, in the minds of many, always remained her most charming and characteristic impersonation.[78] “Success I had had of a kind, and I had tasted the delight of knowing that audiences liked me, and had liked them back again! But never until I appeared as Portia at the Prince of Wales’s had I experienced that awe-struck feeling which comes, I suppose, to no actress more than once in a lifetime—the feeling of the conqueror. In homely parlance, I knew that I had ‘got them’ at the moment when I spoke the speech beginning: ‘You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand.’ ‘What can this be?’ I thought. ‘Quite this thing has never come to me before.’ It was never to be quite the same again. Elation, triumph, being lifted on high by a single stroke of the mighty wing of glory—call it by any name—it was as Portia that I had my first and last sense of it.”
In spite of Miss Terry’s personal success, the Bancrofts’ splendid revival of The Merchant of Venice was short lived. Its thirty-six performances served, however, to lay firmly the foundations of Ellen Terry’s fame. Only three years were to elapse before she made her epoch-making association with Henry Irving. She spent first a year with the Bancrofts, helping them give life to a group of already old-fashioned dramas, Money, The Lady of Lyons, Masks and Faces, and Ours. “She enacted Clara Douglas and Pauline as well as they have been ever played in our time, and showed us that the staginess of the stagiest of old plays can be eliminated by acting so sincere and natural as that of Ellen Terry.”[79]