cut the characters out of cardboard—would that some of the live actors could be cut out of their cardboard!—that I should some day produce a real piece of my own in a real theatre, but I had waited so long about it that really the ambition had nigh gone to rest. It was Louis Calvert who aroused it when he was staying with me at Nevin, in North Wales, in 1900. “Why not write a play?” he asked, and, of course, I responded too readily to the suggestion, and no sooner was his back turned than I was astride my hobby-horse and galloping round the history of the world in search of a subject.
I reined up in the paddock of her gracious Majesty Queen Elizabeth, where I had always felt at home since I failed to gain a prize for her biography at the early age of nine. I wrote a splendid play about Queen Elizabeth. It was quite modern in its construction. Everyone sat down and talked as long as he or she wanted to, and went in and out without any dramatic reason. There were very many acts, and as many scenes to the acts as Shakespeare himself could have supplied, and there was a lot of real history in it lifted from Froude. It was a valuable human document, and from the standpoint of the elect of to-day it was a play. I doubt, however, if in its original form it would ever have been produced. The supply of that kind of thing seems far larger than the demand, and my ugly duckling got turned into a really well-behaved swan through Louis Calvert’s collaboration.
“Collaboration” is a form of literary wrestling that
is delightful exercise, but can only be indulged in with advantage by good-tempered friends. My partnership with Calvert began in this way. I took the script of my play up to London, and read it to him. I did not read all of it, for it was a warm summer afternoon, and he fell asleep before I was a quarter through with it—somewhere about Act ii., scene 7, if I remember right. In the end he dismissed it with costs—the costs taking the form of breakfasting with me the next morning at my hotel. I remember we had curried chicken for breakfast, and I have mentally associated curried chicken and dramatic construction ever since.
It was during his second helping of chicken that Calvert suddenly announced that there was an “idea” in my play. The words, the history, the construction, and everything else were useless, but the “idea” was there. At the time I thought this estimate unduly pessimistic, now I regard it as glowing with the warmth of friendship or curry or both. Louis Calvert reduced the “idea” to its lowest common denominator of four scenes. With easy hand he unbarred the gates of light and extinguished by the brilliancy of a few suggestions the petty historical sequences that I had borrowed from Froude, and within a few months out of the ashes of my old play arose “England’s Elizabeth,” which was produced at the Theatre Royal on Monday, April 29, 1901.
I remember that first night very well indeed. There was a crowded house, and I was eager to see how far the play was going to interest the public. At the same time I had some doubt how far I was
entitled to take a prominent part in the proceedings as half the author of a play on its first-night production. I felt rather like a father at a christening, proud and happy, but ready to give the real credit of the affair to my partner.
I happened to find myself in a box with my back more or less to the stage, and I found that I could best measure the way the piece was going, as I used to do speeches to the jury in the old days, by fixing on the most unpromising face in the jury and watching it closely to see if it developed any interest in the proceedings. I chose an old gentleman in the third row of the stalls, who turned out to have a very kindly nature, for he began to enjoy himself in the first scene, and refused his wife’s entreaties to come away and catch his train in the middle of the last act.
One performance among many good ones stands out in my memory. It was that of Mr. Edmond Gwenn as an old gardener. During the rehearsals Mr. Gwenn, no doubt in the interests of the piece, had uttered sentiments of his own, which in my conceited way I thought inferior to the words I had written. Diffidently I approached him on the subject, and suggested that beautiful as his words were mine had a sort of first mortgage on his attention, as being prior in date if not in relevance. With great charm of manner Mr. Gwenn assured me that on the first night I should have every word as written, and I shall never forget not only hearing the words, such as they were, but having contributed to the success of one of the most perfect pieces
of character acting I ever witnessed. Some day “England’s Elizabeth” will be discovered. I know it is a good play, for many years afterwards a scene-shifter in London asked me after it, and assured me that he had seen “a good deal of it” when he was at the Theatre Royal. Moreover, the lady who took the coats and hats told me that she had seen it several times, and always went in at the end of the last act to cry. These testimonials are unanswerable. Anyhow, the play is worth reviving if only for its first gardener.