THE MANCHESTER STAGE

In other things the knowing artist may

Judge better than the people; but a play

(Made for delight, and for no other use)

If you approve it not, has no excuse.

Waller: “Prologue to the Maid’s Tragedy.”

A good history of the Manchester stage remains to be written. Theatrically, the city has a very noble past, and there are many signs that its future may be equally illustrious. Probably the red-letter day in the annals of the Manchester stage is October 15, 1864, when Charles Calvert, with a performance of “The Tempest,” started those ten years of Shakespearean revivals which are now noteworthy in the wider history of the drama of England. I once heard a lover of art, who was also a banker, say that Manchester had but three things to her credit, the Rylands Library, Ford Madox Brown’s frescoes in the Town Hall, and Charles Calvert’s Shakespearean revivals. I told him that he did not know the water-colours in the Whitworth Gallery or the old-world romance of the Chetham Hospital, and he was bound to admit, after inspection of these securities, that he would have to increase our artistic overdraft.

The drama owes many debts to Charles Calvert. He was the first to recognise the merit of Henry Irving, and engaged him for the stock company at the Theatre Royal in 1860.

“Why on earth did you engage that raw fellow?” asked an influential friend of Calvert at a rehearsal. Calvert looked at Irving, and theatrically touched his own forehead, intimating that he considered that Irving had brains, and that that was the reason of the engagement. Those five years which Irving spent in the company under Charles Calvert must have had a deep influence in moulding his ambitions and educating his ideals.

But in 1886, when I came to Manchester, the old stock companies were gone and forgotten. The days of the touring companies were in their prime, and the cognoscenti—​they would not like to be called merely the “knowing ones”—​deplored in eloquent prose the splendours of the theatrical past. Had they aspired to verse they would have sung with Wordsworth:—