Samuel Phelps (13 February 1804 – 6 November 1878) was an Englishactor-manager. He is known for reviving the fortunes of the neglectedSadler's Wells Theatre and for his productions ofShakespeare's plays which were presented with attention to period detail and dramatic veracity, and used texts purged of 18th-century alterations and additions.
Stage-struck from an early age, Phelps performed as an amateur before becoming a professional actor in 1826. Working his way up in provincial companies he graduated from small supporting parts to leading roles, making his London début asShylock inThe Merchant of Venice in 1839. From 1844 to 1862 he ran Sadler's Wells, presenting all but four of Shakespeare's plays as well as those of dramatists from theRenaissance to the current period.
As an actor, Phelps was widely seen as a good, but not a great, tragedian; his performances in comic roles includingFalstaff inHenry IV, Part 1 andPart 2 andThe Merry Wives of Windsor, andBottom inA Midsummer Night's Dream received widespread praise.
Samuel Phelps was the seventh child and second son of Robert Phelps and his wife Ann, daughter of Captain Mark Turner. Phelps was born on 13 February 1804, in what is now calledDevonport, but was then known as Plymouth Dock. He was educated at a local school and then at aclassical school atSaltash, Cornwall.[1] Unlike his younger brotherRobert – a fine mathematician who became master ofSidney Sussex College, Cambridge – Phelps was not academically inclined and he developed a strong desire to go on the stage.[2] The family was well connected and prosperous,[3] and Phelps's father provided him with opportunities to visit London, where a cousin who was a dramatic critic frequently took him to the theatre. During the season of 1814–15 the family spent several months in London, and Phelps saw celebrated actors includingJohn Philip Kemble,Charles Kemble,Charles Young andEdmund Kean.[4]
Orphaned at the age of sixteen, Phelps became a juniorproofreader on a local newspaper, and acted in amateur productions in the evenings.[4] A year later he moved to London, hoping to find work in a theatre.[5] Failing to do so, he worked as a proofreader forThe Globe,[5] and thenThe Sun.[1] WithDouglas Jerrold andW. E. Love, two colleagues from the papers, he formed an amateur theatrical group, performing at a small theatre inIslington, giving up to three performances a week.[6]
Phelps turned professional in 1826, in which year he married the sixteen-year-old Sarah Cooper. It was a happy, lifelong marriage; they had three sons and three daughters. From 1826 to 1837 Phelps built up a career in the provinces, beginning with small, meagrely-paid parts and gradually moving up to leading roles.[1][n 1] His biographerJ. P. Wearing comments, "his early career was a catalogue of numerous towns and of roles growing gradually in importance". Among the towns where Phelps played, Wearing listsHull,Sheffield,Leeds,Preston,Perth,Dundee,Aberdeen,Inverness andBelfast, and his roles asMalcolm (Macbeth),Benvolio (Romeo and Juliet), theGhost (Hamlet),Macduff (Macbeth),Claudius (Hamlet), and the title role inJulius Caesar.[1] From these, he moved up to the leading roles inKing Lear,Macbeth,Othello andThe Merchant of Venice, playing in theatres in southern England. In 1836 a London critic wrote:
In 1837 Phelps received offers ofWest End engagements from two rivalactor-managers: Benjamin Webster at theTheatre Royal Haymarket andWilliam Macready at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden.The Western Times reported:
This turned out to be an overestimate of Macready's magnanimity. After Phelps made a successful London début, starring asShylock in Webster's production ofThe Merchant of Venice, and then playingHamlet,Othello andRichard III at the Haymarket, he moved to Covent Garden, where he remained from 1837 to 1839.[11] Macready, finding himself equalled and even outshone by Phelps, soon restricted him to secondary supporting roles such as Antonio inThe Tempest, and theConstable of France inHenry V.[1][n 3] After his contract with Macready expired, Phelps played at the Haymarket and theTheatre Royal, Drury Lane between 1840 and 1843.[11]
In 1843 a change in English law relaxed the restrictions on London theatres that had been in force since theRestoration. Before theTheatres Act 1843, only the officially licensedPatent Theatre companies were allowed to stage serious, spoken drama. Other theatre companies were restricted to opera, comedy,pantomime andmelodrama.[13]
Phelps became the first to take advantage of the change in the law.[11] Thomas Greenwood, the lessee ofSadler's Wells Theatre inIslington, approached him with a proposal to run the theatre, staging serious drama. Together with a leading actress,Mary Warner, Phelps took on the management of the house. According to a historian writing forty years later, Sadler's Wells was then "dilapidated and almost forgotten".[14] It had the advantages of a large capacity (2,500) and a low rent, and the disadvantages of a location far away from the West End, and a local Islington audience, largely working class and poorly educated.[1] Phelps's biographer Joseph Knight writes, "while the poetical drama was at its lowest ebb in the theatres of the west end [Phelps] succeeded in ... 'making Shakespeare pay' for nearly twenty years". Knight adds that Phelps was an intelligent and spirited manager, and that Sadler's Wells became "a recognised home of the higher drama, and, to some extent, a training school for actors".[2] Among the players in Phelps's company wereLaura Addison,George Bennett,Fanny Cooper andIsabella Glyn.[15]
The new management opened on 27 May 1844, with a production ofMacbeth, with Phelps in the title role and Warner as Lady Macbeth. In the programme for the opening night, Phelps wrote:
During his eighteen years in charge of Sadler's Wells – fifteen in sole charge, after Warner left at the end of the third season – Phelps produced more than 1,600 performances of thirty-one of Shakespeare's plays, as well as many plays dating from theRenaissance to the mid-nineteenth century.[1][n 4] By the standards of the time, Phelps was rigorous in his approach to Shakespeare's texts. He cut all the textual accretions, byColly Cibber and others, to which the theatregoing public had been accustomed for more than a century. Although, as was then customary – and has to some extent remained so[n 5] – he cut many of Shakespeare's lines, he cut those of his own characters as readily as he cut those of others', and unlike other actor-managers (then and later) he did not build up the star parts at the expense of the supporting ones.[19][20] Care was taken to ensure that scenery and costuming were historically accurate and enhanced the play rather than being merely spectacular.[1]
After he playedBottom inA Midsummer Night's Dream,The Athenaeum said of him, "We have been sometimes tempted to think that if Mr Phelps had early taken to comedy, and particularly to what are technically termed character parts, he would have accomplished a more profitable reputation than that he now enjoys as a tragedian."[21] And of his performance inTwelfth Night the same journal said, "TheMalvolio of Mr Phelps is a part by which he will be remembered. The making up is so complete that the actor's person cannot be identified until he speaks. The execution of the part is equally complete; elaborately finished – thoroughly carried out to the minutest particular."[21]
In the spring of 1859 Phelps and his Sadler's Wells company played a series of engagements in Berlin,Leipzig, andHamburg. This was the first English touring company to appear in Germany since the seventeenth century.[22] British critics had long observed that one of the characteristics of Phelps's acting style – contrasting with those of Kean and Macready – was his ability to express intensity and depth of emotion without resorting to unnatural vehemence and overt theatricality. The German critics were similarly impressed – one praised his "psychological truthfulness" as Macbeth – but they were at least as impressed by Phelps as a director and the unobtrusive naturalness of his productions.[23]
Greenwood retired as the company's business manager in 1861; Phelps found the strain of running the theatre single-handed, at a time when his wife was gravely ill, too much, and in March 1862 he resigned.[1]
Phelps accepted an offer fromCharles Fechter to join the latter's company at theLyceum Theatre, but the collaboration was an unhappy one, and in 1863 he joinedF. B. Chatterton andEdmund Falconer at Drury Lane, where he remained for seven years, successfully reprising many of his old parts and adding the title role inByron'sManfred (1863), Mephistopheles inFaust (1866), and the Doge inBayle Bernard'sThe Doge of Venice (1867).[1]
Phelps's wife and eldest son both died in 1867, and his actor son, Edmund, died in 1870 at the age of thirty-two. Phelps continued to act, touring in the provinces and playing in the West End. In 1874 the impresarioJohn Hollingshead invited Phelps to play Falstaff in a rare revival ofThe Merry Wives of Windsor at the Gaiety Theatre, heading a starry cast that includedRose Leclercq andMrs John Wood as the merry wives,Teresa Furtado as Anne,Hermann Vezin as Ford andArthur Cecil as Dr Caius. The notices were excellent;The Illustrated London News commented, "His Falstaff is a thoroughly original performance, possessed of life and individuality, and presenting throughout an exhibition of dry humour that irresistibly excites the risible faculties of the audience. The identity of the actor is entirely lost in the impersonation, and we have before us the real living Falstaff as Shakspeare [sic] drew him, and not merely an ingenious counterfeit in the person of a well-known popular comedian".[24]
A succession of colds weakened Phelps and he died at a sanatorium nearEpping on 6 November 1878, aged 74. He was buried, alongside his wife, atHighgate Cemetery on 13 November 1878.[1]
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