Daniel Gleeson: Welcome to the National Library of Australia and to this wonderful event, Shakespeare on the Move. Gold rush to Great War. Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge and pay my respects to the traditional owners and custodians of this land and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. My name is Daniel Gleeson. I'm the Director of Community Engagement here at the National Library. It's a fantastic job. A quick reminder from me, please check that your mobile phone is on silent or switched off. I'm sure if Shakespeare was still around, there'd be nothing more that he would not like than someone's mobile phone ringing out in the middle of a performance. We are really thrilled to have you all here for this very special event which has presented in partnership with the Australian National University Centre for Early Modern Studies and Bell Shakespeare.

Tonight, our talented panel of experts and performers will explore and uncover the objects and stories that reveal how Shakespeare made landfall in Australia. You will learn how the discovery of gold in the 1850s and the subsequent flurry of fortune seekers and travellers not only introduced Shakespeare to Australian culture, but by the outbreak of the Great War theatrical talent was both embraced and celebrated. Here the Library's collection preserves an extraordinary array of the physical remnants of Shakespeare performances. In Australia, we have playbills, broadsides, portraits, photographs, manuscripts, music, and much, much more, and one of the most prized examples of Shakespeare's work in our collection is a fragment from the landmark first folio of 1623, which is a collection of Shakespeare's plays published seven years after his death. Our fragment contains the text to Merchant of Venice. You'll be able to view that in our revamped Treasures Gallery when it reopens to the public on Saturday the 13th of December.

But if you can't wait that long, you can look at it online straight after this event because it's available on Trove. Let me introduce our presenters for tonight. With us today is Dr. Kate Flaherty. Kate is senior lecturer in English and drama at the Australian National University. She researches how Shakespeare's works play on the stage of public culture. Her insights have been published in Contemporary Theatre Review, New Theatre Quarterly, Australian Studies and Shakespeare Survey. She's also the author of the book, Ours As We Play It, Australia Plays Shakespeare, and of the latest volume of the Cambridge Element series. Ellen Terry, Shakespeare and suffrage in Australia and New Zealand. Joining Kate are two wonderful performers from the esteemed Bell Shakespeare Company. Joe Turner is an actor, stage and screen director, writer, teacher, communications coach and facilitator, a graduate of Melbourne University and the Jacques Lecoq International Theatre School.

He has worked nationally and internationally in the performing arts industry for 30 years. His credits for Bell Shakespeare include directing Macbeth Undone and performing roles in the Merchant of Venice, Anthony and Cleopatra and Twelfth Knight. Larissa Turtin is a Sydney-based actor teaching artist, disability support practitioner, and an all round lover of the arts. After graduating from the Actors Centre Australia in 2023, Larissa spent 2024 touring with Bell Shakespeare's Learning Ensemble, the Players. Since then, Larissa has appeared in Present Laughter. She Threaded Dangerously the Frogs and the Lotto Line all in 2025. Tonight's event is a collaboration between the Library, the ANU and Bell Shakespeare, and of course we have two National Library staff members, Dr. Susannah Helman and Linda Bull from our Curatorial and Collection Research section in the Library's Collection Branch, working with Kate, Larissa, and Joe to bring these stories to life. Susanna and Linda's focus will be on the objects that underpin and have inspired tonight's programme. We look forward to seeing how Kate, Joe and Larissa explore tonight's topic through inquiry and performance. But first I'm pleased to introduce Susanna Helman, Senior Advisor in Collection Research here at the Library to expand on what Shakespeare materials we hold within the Library's collection. Please join with me in welcoming Susanna Helman.

Susannah Helman: Thank you very much, Dan. Good evening and thank you for your acknowledgement of country. Tonight we're exploring stories that the National Library of Australia's collections can tell about the performance of Shakespeare in Australia. Our stories have been inspired by and revolve around the objects we hold at the Library. This year we are moving beyond the Library's rare books, collections and moving forward in time. First to some background, the National Library of Australia is Australia's oldest national collecting institution with origins in the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library, which served federal parliament and the nation from 1901, first in Melbourne and then in Canberra, from 1927. The National Library Act of 1960 formalised the separation of the National Library and Parliamentary Library, and in August, 1968, the Library opened its current purpose-built building. The Library has very large performing arts collections that give a sense of what it was like to attend live performance as well as what went into making one happen. When it comes to William Shakespeare, English playwright and poet, the Library's collections are best on how his plays have been performed in Australia from the late 18th century to the present. Playbills, programmes, posters, costume designs, photographs, manuscripts and oral histories. And here we are talking about them. Finally, Kate.

Kate Flaherty: Susanna, thank you. It's such a delight to be here again in what I dare to start calling a series of illustrated Shakespeare lectures. The first person I have to think is thank is all of you for being here. How many of you came to a previous lecture of this kind? Yes, that's the feeling we're getting in the room. Joe is a veteran and so is Susanna, so thank you for your warm and enthusiastic company for these lectures. It's always such a delight. Now the topic today primarily focusing on 19th century Shakespeare in Australia is a topic very close to my heart for a very immature reason. When I was working on my PhD thesis, I really wanted to work on contemporary Shakespeare in Australia and I did, and I did a lot of work on contemporary Shakespeare, but it was so hard to get the rights to write about living actors and living theatre companies and get good pictures.

So I thought, I know I'll move back in time, and I became so entranced with the wonders of 19th century Shakespeare, particularly in Australia. There's a kind of perception I suppose, that for Australia, Shakespeare is a cultural import of some kind, and so it is and that Shakespeare shapes Australia. But what I've learned through now about 20 years of focusing on Shakespeare performance in Australia is that Australia has shaped Shakespeare in really significant ways and we're going to be exploring a kind of story of that today. So we wanted to begin today a little the way we did last year by drawing your knowledge into play and testing some of our assumptions about the way that Shakespeare made landfall in Australia in the 19th century. So we have a quiz for you, a true and oh, isn't that great? They really want it. Okay, so we're going to ask you 10 questions and you need to decide whether the statement that our actors will speak so convincingly is true or false. So I think I'm going to just hand it over to you, Larissa. Cool.

Larissa Turtin: So for this true or false round, hands on your hips so we can get a bit of a verdict out there. Okay, so number one, the earliest surviving document printed in Australia is a playbill, true or false head for true hips for false.

Joe Turner: Oh, lots of heads, lots of thruth.

Kate Flaherty: I think that's a true, oh, have you read this already? It's a very well

Larissa Turtin: John Meredith threw an intruding audience member off the stage in Sydney, the victim was injured on the spikes, but Meredith stayed in character as Richard III yelling Damn Him in the Spikes. True or false?

Kate Flaherty: Heads for true. Swoorrr.

Joe Turner: I don't think they believe it.

Kate Flaherty: They don't quite believe it. Maybe half and half again. It is indeed true and it's such a great story that I wrote an article about it, but it's not this article, but you can read that one as well. It's in a list coming, so if you want to read about dad, you'll have to wait a little bit longer. It is indeed true.

Joe Turner: In January, 1866, actor Gustavus Vaughn Brook was drowned en route to Australia when his ship the London sank in the bay of Bisque. True or false, he didn't get very far true or false?

Kate Flaherty: Heads for true.

Joe Turner: Does anyone care?

Kate Flaherty: I think there's more scepticism coming, isn't there as we go? Okay. It is indeed true. It is indeed true. Let's move on to the next one

Larissa Turtin: And on March 15th, 1866, a wine bottle washed up on the shore at Brighton Beach, England. Inside was a message from Gustavus Vaughn Brook, which read 11th of January onboard the London. We are just going down. True or false?

Kate Flaherty: Who thinks that's true? Not very many people. It is true.

Joe Turner: Oh, Kate,

Kate Flaherty: It's true, and you can read all about it in the article by my wonderful colleague at Sydney University, Laura Ginters. She published a chapter in a book that I edited that was the right one. I think it is the right one, so you can read all about it. There he put two messages in two bottles and they both washed up. Isn't that fantastic? Okay, over to you.

Joe Turner: In the late 1800s in Australia, women were permitted to act, but theatres were managed by men. True or false? True. True. Women were permitted to act, but theatres were managed by men.

Kate Flaherty: It's not entirely true, it's

Joe Turner: Women weren't permitted to act

Kate Flaherty: Women. I worded it badly, didn't I? Right. Okay. Women were of course permitted to act, but theatres were managed by women quite frequently and most spectacularly by Anne Clarke at the Hobart Theatre Royal from 1840 to 1847 until George Coppin pushed her out of that role. So we'll have some other examples tonight of female theatre managers, but indeed women managed theatres fairly frequently in the 19th century, both in London and in Australia. Thanks for picking up on my bad wording there, Jo.

Joe Turner: I didn't to you

Larissa Turtin: In Melbourne and Sydney in the 1880s in his hip production of Henry V actor George Rignold entered the stage on a real horse. True or false?

Kate Flaherty: True? Oh, you liked that idea, don't you?

Joe Turner: Okay, I'll tell Bell Shakespeare.

Kate Flaherty: Yes, he did indeed and we'll be hearing more about George Rignold later. That is true.

Joe Turner: Australian colonial audiences missed home and welcomed anything that came from London. True or false?

Kate Flaherty: Oh, lots of people think that's true. It's not true. It's not true at all. It's false and we will convince you by the end of the evening.

Larissa Turtin: Shakespeare's descendant, Mary Asquith Nee Collins was transported to New South Wales in 1792 for stealing clothes. True or false?

Kate Flaherty: Make your decision.

Joe Turner: No one wants to besmirch the Shakespeare family name.

Kate Flaherty: I'm just so thrilled We've got so many takers. I invented that it's completely false.

Joe Turner: In April, 1875, Ned Kelly and his gang held up George Coppin's English stage company on route from Geelong to Ballarat. Legend has it that Ned left the company unrobbed on condition that he be omitted free to next night's performance of All's Well that Ends Well. Coppin Agreed. True or false?

Kate Flaherty: True it's false, but it could be true. It really could be true. I wish it was true. Should be true. Great, thank you.

Joe Turner: Well done.

Kate Flaherty: In my theatre history research, I'm often surprised by what I find before we take a look at some of the wonderful items from the NLA collection that show Shakespeare on the move. I want to set the scene a bit. You've heard the term surely strolling players. Before the first public playhouses were established in London in the late 1500s, all players were strolling players stages were whatever could be made to serve street squares inn yards or the backs of waggons, and the entertainments were very diverse. From mediaeval mystery plays to puppet shows, juggling acrobatic acts, and of course magic. The reign of Elizabeth first from 1588 saw increased regulation of entertainers and the construction of purpose-built venues like the Globe Theatre. The Lord Chamberlain's Men was the company that built and owned the Globe and Shakespeare was its chief playwright, but the Globe was only their summer house.

They performed command performances for the Queen's palaces and aristocratic homes in plague time and in winter, London open air theatres were closed, so they were forced to go on the move to find audiences where they could. That was before they secured the indoor theatre of Blackfriars. Set and staging requirements for Shakespeare's plays had to be simple and flexible so that the plays could be mounted anywhere at any moment. Now let's fast forward to the 19th century. Many theatres have been established, but mobility is still the norm for the vast number of players. First by sail and then by a combination of steam and sail actors and performing companies crisscrossed the Atlantic and pushed on to India, South Africa, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Newspapers, a communication technology that was also accelerated by steam fueled an appetite for entertainment on an international scale. In the middle of the century, gold was discovered in California, New South Wales, Victoria and New Zealand.

So theatre sprung up and lucrative business opportunities awaited the adventurous artist. The economic centre of balance interestingly shifted. It was no longer Europe, but the anglophone nations that rimmed the Pacific, the stakes were high and the risks were dire touring the Antipodes as it was called, the odds were pretty much all or nothing. To recoup the massive expense of the journey for example, a company would need to begin performing the moment they set foot on land and sustain a punishing schedule to keep the receipts rolling in. Shakespeare was the centrepiece of every repertoire, and as we shall see, it was not unusual for lead actors of a company to play the lead parts of six to eight Shakespeare plays as well as popular historical dramas, melodramas and farces. The night's entertainment was much longer than it is today. So you mustn't complain if we go over 90 minutes tonight and a serious drama like Shakespeare would almost always be followed by a farce. Now I thought it might be fun to get a feel for this form of farce. So let's hear some popular farce titles from the era.

Joe Turner: 20 minutes With a Tiger,

Larissa Turtin: An Englishman's house is his castle.

Joe Turner: The Wonder a woman kept a secret

Larissa Turtin: Rendezvous or love in all corners

Joe Turner: Trying it on

Larissa Turtin: Flasher and crasher

Joe Turner: Cool as a cucumber.

Kate Flaherty: It's a bit of a theme there isn't there? So if you follow the date to date programme of any major theatre enterprise through Trove newspaper database, which is what I spend a fair bit of my time doing, you will see that they almost never rested. Their memories must have been as prejudice as that of Richard Burbage, the great star of Shakespeare's own company. But unlike him, they had to traverse treacherous distances by sea and land courting illness, misadventure because the show must go on. Their personal correspondence reveals attitudes of contempt, greed, entitlement, gratitude, delight, and fluctuating hope and despair. Some fared well and they made Australia or New Zealand or Australia and New Zealand quite frequently, their artistic home. Others left, broken and embittered as the century wore on. Australian-born artists whole families of them like the Holloways, which we'll hear about soon and some very enterprising women began to make their mark.

Although Shakespeare's plays had always existed on the move, there was one major difference between the 16th and 19th century. Shakespeare wrote his plays to be performed in gorgeous costumes, but on a fairly empty stage in the 19th century, Shakespeare was staged in gorgeous costumes with spectacular scenery and props. This was the great age of archaeological discoveries and Charles Kean and George Rignald, both actor managers who we'll talk about tonight, crowded their stages, with historically accurate artefacts. While Shakespeare's globe had no painted backdrops to indicate scene shifts by the 19th century, movable scenery could represent exquisite built structures and landscapes. For example, from a 1909 production of As You Like It, we read about real trees, real moss, real grass, and ferns. Moss. Really before it was eclipsed by film in 20th century, Shakespeare was synonymous with thrilling stage spectacle. It must have been an amazing time to go to the theatre but now has it all as Prospero says, vanished into air theatre, unlike books, unlike other forms of literature is there and then it's gone. It's what we call ephemeral, but is it, are there ways that the National Library of Australia can help us to step back in time and learn about the theatrical past? Over to you, Susanna.

Susannah Helman: Thanks Kate. I'm glad you asked. Glad you said that. This evening we're going to explore a wide range of what we call in Library land formats. What we mean by that is while the Library obviously has books both physical and digital, the Library holds much more than that. In general, we hold everything from paintings, posters, photographs, maps, manuscripts, objects, ephemera, things like advertising leaflets and junk mail and programmes you might buy at the theatre, oral histories and folklore and much more. Our collection ranges in date from ancient times to yesterday. Our strengths are in our Australian collections. The bulk of our collections are, however, usually on paper and documentary of some kind we collect for the nation today. What will be important tomorrow? When you think of the history of performing Shakespeare, what are the kinds of things that either lead up to a performance or are left behind? The archives of people and companies involved in a production? The papers of creators, performers, producers, playwrights, things used to advertise a production, costume designs, music scores or things that were handed out or available for sale on the day. Costumes themselves are more frequently found at museums and galleries, though we do have at least a couple.

I'm going to move to the first object, which we mentioned earlier, a playbill. So in the mid 2000s, librarian Elaine Hogue found this printed playbill in the collections of libraries and archives Canada. She recognised its importance. It was a playbill, an advertisement for an evening's entertainment at Sydney's first purpose-built theatre, and this is as far as we know, the earliest printed document so far found to have been printed in Sydney. It was presented to the people of Australia by the Canadian government and its on the UNESCO memory of the world, Australian Memory of the World Register. We know that the first fleet carried a printing press with it to Port Jackson when they embarked in 1787, but they didn't use it for some years. In format, it's what we call a playbill. It's quite small, humble, unassuming, and it aligns in size to what we'd call a DL flyer. It says a lot in little space. It tells you the time, place, cost, the actors, which people in the know would realise were mostly convicts and that it would be a very long night.

It wasn't just the play, it was a farce and a dance. Also, you'd be there almost all night. What interests us tonight in tonight's context is that on the back in an inscription by Philip Gidley King, who was the Lieutenant Governor of Norfolk Island between November, 1791 and October, 1796, and he was also the Governor of New South Wales between 1800 and 1806. What he says is that the first play performed on Norfolk Island was Richard III and then Poor Soldier, and that was in December, 1793. There has been some discussion in the literature about exactly when anything was performed on Norfolk Island and the date isn't thought to be correct, but does it matter? We do hold Gidley King's manuscript journal from that time and it's a little fuzzy with certain details, not very helpful. Here's an image from our collections of Norfolk Island by George Kate and the actors.

I just wanted to show you one of Kate and my favourite items, which we just wanted to talk to you about. It's an album by Charles Edwards Stanley. It's a collection of watercolours and they're really stunning. It's unclear whether it was done on the voyage he made to Tasmania or whether he did it later. There is a draught version at the Cheshire Record Office. It's not really very helpful, nor is his diary about exactly the origins of this or when it was done exactly what, but we have some lovely images of a voyage out to Tasmania. He was coming out to Tasmania to take up an appointment as private secretary to Sir William Denison, the lieutenant governor of Van Diemonds land. He was 27 and recently married. He was the youngest brother of the more famous Owen Stanley who sailed on the voyage of the Rattlesnake. He was travelling with his wife on the ship and the ship was called the Windermere. These watercolours and his on the left, there's an image of the animals including his dog.

These images suggest that a performance of Hamlet was made on the voyage, but it's very hard to get to the details of what is this symbolic. Perhaps it is of all the other people who were aboard. We do know that it was very, very choppy and most of the people on board spent most of the time sick. And you can see the draught things through the Australian joint copying project, which is available through our catalogue. So we just wanted to show you this because we loved it so much and here we see the ghost with a seagull on his head. Unfortunately, Stanley died of gastroenteritis in August, 1849 and his wife survived him for 52 years. And now back to the playbill. So who was Jane Shaw, Kate, and what was the play?

Kate Flaherty: I'm glad you asked Susannah. I was so tantalised by that shipboard Hamlet and Susannah just kept saying, Kate, we dunno anything about it, but we can just dream can't. We can just imagine. Yes, but Jane Shaw, why Jane Shaw in a penal settlement? Jane Shaw, the historical Jane Shaw was the mistress of King Edward IV, but she fell out of favour with Edward's brother Richard of Gloucester who knew might recognise as Richard III. She's famous for being forced into public penance for her intrigues at court. She's mentioned in Shakespeare's play, Richard III, but in Nicholas Rowe. But Nicholas Rowe in 1714 wrote play that depicted her in a sympathetic light. This is a Shakespeare spinoff that remained popular right into the 19th century. In the early penal colony context, we might be tempted to ask, did Jane's plight resonate with the plight of women who were transported to New South Wales? Well, let's test the idea by watching a scene in which Jane defends King Edward's sons, the young princes. The princes in the tower and Richard of Gloucester explains exactly how he will silence her.

Larissa Turtin: No, though the royal Edward has undone me, he was my king, my gracious master. Still he loved me too, though it was a guilty flame. And can I oh my heart a bores the thought, stand by and see his children robbed of right

Joe Turner: Ha, dost thou brave me, Minion? Dost thou know how vile, how very a wretch my power can make thee? That I can place thee in such abject state as help shall never find thee. Where, repining thou shall sit down and gnaw the earth for anguish, groan to the pitiless winds without return. Howl like the midnight wolf amidst the desert and curse thy life in bitterness and misery.

Larissa Turtin: Let me be branded for the public scorn, turn forth and driven to wander like a vagabond. Be friendless and forsaken. Seek my bread upon the barren, wild and desolate waste. E're I consent to teach my lips injustice or wrong, the orphan who has none to save him.

Joe Turner: Go some of you and turn this strumpet forth. Spurn her into the street there, let her perish and rot upon a dunghill.

Kate Flaherty: I wonder if New South Wales felt like a state in which no help would find you for some of the people living there at that time. So from a general snapshot of some of the repertoire of very early settler theatre in New South Wales, let's turn to some of the particular visitors who began to come in greater volumes when the Gold Rush made Australia and New Zealand lucrative venues for theatrical touring. Let's meet Charles and Ellen Kean.

Susannah Helman: Thanks Kate. In 1863 and 1864 British actors, Charles and Ellen Kean, a married couple toured Australia. Charles was the son of the renowned actor, Edmond Kean. He had never quite equaled his father's talent and Ellen Kean was a great actor in her own right. They had a daughter who stayed behind in England. This is their niece, Miss Chapman, who's in the photograph. This tour to Australia was actually a very much a moneymaking venture and work they did. As we will explore, they had a hectic schedule performing in Melbourne, Sydney, Ballarat, Melbourne, again, Sandhurst, Geelong, Melbourne again, and then Sydney again. Both were however beset by illness, but they kept going. In 2022, the Library acquired a bound volume of Broadsides posters from their Australian and American tour. They went to America to North America after being in Australia. In total there are 32 Australian ones and 52 American ones.

The Australian Broadsides, however, are definitely more colourful and arguably better at catching the eye. We were keen to acquire it as the posters are all so early, they're Australian and they're really stunning and they fill a gap in the Library's collections. We hold early earlier British broadsides of people who later performed in Australia, but this is actually for an Australian tour and having such a concentrated volume such as this gives us an amazing depth in what it was like to tour Australia in the early to mid 1860s. At the time of acquisition, there were no posters from this tour in Australian public collections. What is fantastic is that some of them are also annotated and initialled. You'll see them in a minute. The initials are actually JFC, which must be James Faucett Cathcart, who was one of the actors in these productions. Cathcart spent the last 20 years of his career in Australia.

Well, after this tour, Kate and the actors will talk more about these annotations and what they mean. The tour was organised by George Selth Coppin, who today is often called the father of Australian Theatre. George Coppin arrived in Sydney in 1843 and it was Coppin who footed the bill for their medical expenses, which were considerable. We don't hold Coppins papers here at the Library, but they're held at the State Library of Victoria. But we do have copies of them and we have one of the papers of one of his great friends and colleagues, Bland Holt. See I got him in. Yeah, I love Bland Holt. But next to, yes, but we have a series of photographs of Coppin. So as we can see, Shakespeare was a substantial part of their repertoire. They were classical actors, but they were also versatile. Most of the Australian broad sides are all printed in one colour except for the one you can see on the screen. But they give a good lesson on what makes a successful advertisement. Some are more successful than others. I like this one in particular. There's no doubt about what you're going to see.

They're packed with information about not only that evening's performance, but future performances. And you see all the tricks of the trade. Different fonts, manacles, which is a hangover from mediaeval manuscripts. See the hand on the left and this points to important information. Ballarat was arguably their most successful venue and we have this lovely lithograph of the theatre that they performed in. After their performance of the play. King Louis the 11th, Charles Kean was presented with a nugget of gold as a souvenir and it's on this poster, Kate.

Kate Flaherty: So the Keans worked very hard and that's something that we can actually see from these wonderful broad sides as well. This broad side, like many others, shows the intensity of their repertoire and the centrality of Shakespeare.

Joe Turner: Royal Haymarket Theatre the last night that Mr. And Mrs. Kean will ever perform in Melbourne Wednesday, April 27, Henry the eighth, Cardinal Walsely, Mr. C Kean, Queen Catherine, Mrs. C Kean, Thursday, April 28th, Hamlet, Hamlet, Mr. C, Kean, Queen, Mrs. C Kean, Friday, April 29th, King Lear, King Lear, Mr. C Kean, the fool Mrs. C Kean, Saturday, April 30th, Macbeth, Macbeth, Mr. C, Kean, Lady Macbeth, Mrs. C Kean, Mr. And Mrs. Kean's farewell his excellently the Governor and Lady Darling will attend.

Kate Flaherty: It's a busy week for the Keans. So this annotation that you can see on the next slide I think really caught my attention. So I had to zoom in and take a close look at it. Joe's going to read it for us.

Joe Turner: Wednesday, January 6th, 1864. Mr. Kean not well enough to play King Lear tonight. He acted Hamlet instead.

Kate Flaherty: Joe, I have to ask Joe this, is that practically a night off?

Joe Turner: No, but I do think if I'm sick, I don't want to be in a storm scene or wet and yelling for a long time, so I'm going to go Hamlet it any day of the week.

Kate Flaherty: Hamlet's a safer bet,

Joe Turner: He's low energy, a bit miserable. I could play that with a cold for sure.

Kate Flaherty: Okay, so here's another handwritten annotation that I think shows remarkable versatility.

Joe Turner: Saturday, April 30th, 1864, Mr. And Mrs. Kean at the request of Sir Charles and Lady Darling added a Richard II and jealous wife in lieu of Macbeth announced for tonight.

Kate Flaherty: So last minute change, which we've had to do by the way. So Larissa only found out that she was doing this yesterday morning. Round of applause. Actually the conditions, the conditions of live theatre go on, don't they? So the Keans expected success in Australia and they were looking for money and we may think that colonial audiences would lap up anything from the London stage. You all seem to think so when we did the quiz, but a review of Charles Keans Richard for Melbourne paper the Age on November, 1863 suggests otherwise

Joe Turner: The Richard of Mr. Kean is highly esteemed by the English admirers and has been regarded as in the first rank of his Shakespearean performances. We cannot concur.

Kate Flaherty: Yes, go Melbourne. In fact, fiercely opposing opinions about the Keans stirred the Australian theatre scene into a controversy which I've called the Melbourne Shakespeare War in an article with my colleague Adele Lamp, which you can read at your own pleasure later. Their local competitor, Barry Sullivan, had a mole in Kean's company and I've done some sleuthing and I think I know for sure that it was the sister of the person who hand wrote on those broad sides. Ask me about it later if you want. Her name was Mary Francis Cathcart. I know a great deal about her. The conservative newspaper The Argus chastised the Melbourne public for their lack of respect for the Keans and Sullivan for this nasty trick of anticipating the Kean's repertoire one night ahead of the Keans.

Larissa Turtin: The Argus 23rd of October, 1863. Why have not the Keans received among us the recognition to which they have an indisputable right? It would indeed be ludicrous if it were not very sad that talent which has in entranced the most fastidious in England and America should in Melbourne have been given to it. Only the comparatively cold reception it has yet received. The Argus 2nd of November, 1863. Prudence and modesty might alike have advised the management of the royal to play away from the round of characters certain to be produced at the Haymarket during the brief season of the Keans. Mr. Sullivan has preferred, however, to throw down the gauge of battle and to claim judgement on the instant.

Kate Flaherty: However, the satirical paper, the Melbourne Punch seemed to say that Melbourne could judge for itself. It mocked the flattery of the Argus

Joe Turner: Melbourne punch 19th November, 1863. Not only is Kean the greatest actor who ever trod this or any other stage, he's the only one. The art of acting is born and will die with him. He's the Alpha and the Omega of his profession. He's a histrionic colossus, a thespian prodigy, a theatrical miracle and interpreter of Shakespeare who dwarfs the poet he condescends to illustrate. Shakespeare is the pedestal, but keen is the statue on the pedestal.

Kate Flaherty: Thank you, ARG. Thank you Punch and thank you Joe. Needless to say the Keans were pretty glad to go home. In a letter from St. Kilda in May of 1864, Charles writes,

Joe Turner:
I shall be very glad to get away from these colonies. I've had enough of them, I'm pleased to have seen them, but never desire to see them again. As a general rule, the people here are a very second and third rate lot.

Kate Flaherty: Ellen Kean was just as keen to leave.

Larissa Turtin: This is our last whole day in Australia and I never left any place with so little regret. Ellen Kean, Sydney 3rd of July, 1864.

Kate Flaherty: So, farewell the Keans, but wait, there's more. The Library holds one strange remnant of their time in Australia that we could not resist showing you. Mrs. Kean received a gift from Sydney. It wasn't quite as precious as the gold nugget gift that Mr. Kean received in Ballarat, but it reveals something of the affection in which some of the audience members held these touring stars. Susanna, tell us about the bonus item.

Susannah Helman: We have this album of plants, weeds, grasses, and ferns, which was presented to Mrs. Kean during their first run in Sydney. They have been gathered from Cockatoo Island and the album has been bound and embossed by an inmate of the Darlinghurst jail. What is very interesting to me is that the Keans clearly retained it in their collection and you can see it just I found a few auction and sales catalogues from the 19th century. I think you can see that it has a number on the top left hand corner of the front end paper. Did they treasure it? Well, they certainly kept it, but it's so beautiful and the plants are really well preserved. It came to the Library as part of the Rex Nan Kivell collection. The New Zealand born London art dealer whose collection of staggering proportions came to the Library between the late forties and the seventies. And he's put his book plate in it. You can see on the right. Within it is this dedicatory letter. It's in the hand of the Reverend Philip Agnew, who was Church of England minister. He was the chaplain of the penal settlement at Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour. But he'd previously been chaplain at Sydney Jail. I'm not quite sure whether those were concurrent appointments. Joe

Joe Turner: Lower Fort Street, December 29th, 1863. Dear Mrs. Kean, I have had much pleasure in attending to my promise and I hope the result will be acceptable. The book was bound and lettered by a prisoner in Darlinghurst Jail, Sydney, so that the whole is in keeping. Yours, Dear Mrs. Kean, most respectfully, PP Agnew.

Susannah Helman: As discussed, the Library has very rich performing arts collections in very good timing for this event. The Library recently acquired a large collection of material dating from the late 19th century to the 1930s. I would like to introduce my fellow curator, Linda Bull, who worked with the donors to bring this wonderful collection into the Library and is now our in-house expert. Welcome, Linda.

Linda Bull: Thank you so much. It's a delight to be here this evening. And yes, I do feel like I've spent a lot of my last year in doing research on the Holloway family and this collection and I feel very privileged to have been able to be involved with that. It's such a delight. I like you Daniel, also enjoy my job very much. So thank you for the introduction, Susanna, and thank you all of you for coming this evening. It really is a pleasure to introduce you to the Holloways. So the Holloways were an Australian performing arts family active around the late 19th century and into the early 20th who actually had two prominent early Australian touring theatre companies, mostly going by the name the Holloway Touring Theatre Company and also Charles Holloway's Dramatic Company, although there were various other formations as well. The Holloway Touring Theatre Company was well-known and respected predominantly for its Shakespearean plays and it is said to have reintroduced Shakespeare to Australia. They were one of the most successful Australian theatre troops to present Shakespeare in Asia and India in the early 20th century, as well as mounting many successful tours to South Africa between 1895 and 1905.

The company was founded by English born actor manager, William John, known as WJ Holloway, who began his career with the Redfern amateur dramatic club in Sydney. His brother Charles was for many years a prominent member of Bland Holt. There's that name again, company at the theatre Royal. She didn't pay me to do that either. Kate, who was a member of Bland Holt's company, the theatre Royal in Sydney, and he went on to found his own company. These companies included numerous members of the Holloway family. They were a veritable theatrical dynasty. And you'll see in a moment what I mean, perhaps the most famous of them was WJ's stepdaughter, EsEssie Jenyns, who was considered the finest Shakespearean actress of her day in Australia and was also well known in England. And we'll see quite a few photos of her later on. We have a fantastic collection already at the Library of Essie Jenyn's portraits and the wonderful material donated to us recently really enriches those collections.

So I went to the trouble with help from the donors of creating a very condensed family tree because the family tree of the Holloways is immense and so I do apologise for leaving out several spouses, many children and lots of other information. But this diagram just gives you an idea. We have at the top the father and mother of the two main players. So the main players, William John, and Charles Edward. WJ's family while she was married twice, the first wife's not featured here. And there's a lot of story that we could go into about that, but I'm just going to focus on mainly the theatre aspects of the family. So WJ's family included three children with his second wife, whose name was Emily Ann Jennings nee Morse, also known as Kate Arden because she was an actress. Their children Theodora, known as Dora, whose stage name was Cecil Arden.

Juliette who went by the name Juliet Sydney. And WE, he's got a mouthful of a name William Edwyn Crowther Holloway, also known as John, which is very confusing. But he also had a stage name, many of them, one of which was J Vine Edwyn, his stepdaughter here, Elizabeth Esther Helen or Ellen Jennings, known as Essie Jenyns, perhaps did she changed her name because it was easier to fit on the playbills. And she was a stepdaughter and half sibling to stepdaughter and was of Emily's first marriage. There was another sibling as well who was not in the theatre. Charles on the right, his family was a little bit slimmer, his wife included Alice Victoria Hayward was Alice Victoria Hayward, who was known as Alice Deowyn. And they had one child, Beatrice, Beatrice, Denver, Holloway. There's another side of the Deowyn family as well. Alice had a sister, Constance, you'll see her name on many of the playlist cast sheets and also their father was a well-known English actor. So that just gives you a bit of a, just to say, because you're going to be seeing some photos now of the collection, this beautiful amount of material, a lot of beautiful portraits that are in the collection. And this will give you a bit of an idea of where the connections are.

So on the left here we have a scrapbook, one of a few scrapbook albums that were part of this donation, and it's just one of the things that are included in this collection, which includes an extensive number of photographs including family portraits as well as advertising shots, things that were used for advertising, promoting different shows. These were often in cabinet card format, which were a type of postcard. There are prompt rehearsal books, which I'm sure that our actors here would know well. And these often featured pasted in cast lists of the various performances. And the scrapbooks are filled with newspaper clippings of different performances, reviews and all sorts of other information. There's also a record that you can see here on the screen. It's a recording of WJ Holloway's, recital of Hamlet's soliloquy on Death. And there's a few of these, actually, this is just one of a number I've discovered of records, but we just have this one. We don't normally collect audio visual material that is usually the national Film and sound archive that does so, but we just couldn't pass up having this as part of the collection.

There are also a number of, you've seen these before broadside type of show posters. There's lots of playbills, programmes, postcards, and much, much more. This material really beautifully compliments the Library's existing collections, which include a number of ephemera collections of the Holloway family as well as the papers of Essie Jenyns, which we already hold. This new collection really enriches the Library's holdings of Australian theatre company, ephemera of the era, and represents an aspect of Australian social and cultural life of the late 1800s, which documents the working life of an Australian travelling theatre company. And here we can see a few of the Macbeth posters featuring Mr. WJ Holloway and Mrs. Scott-Siddons, who Kate will introduce you to a little bit later. Absolutely beautiful. Again, like it is a real treasure to be able to have these items available for viewing. In this next scrapbook page, you really get a sense of just how many Holloways were involved in this enterprise.

The productions have these caste lists, and I'll explain that. It's actually WJ and Charles's brother, Jesse George, who we'll see a little bit later, who went to the trouble of creating these scrapbooks with all sorts of material in them. And he meticulously saved all of these cast lists. And you can see here this one, I just happened to pick the Merchant of Venice again, Mrs Scott-Siddons pride of place. But under that we have Ms. Alice Deowyn and Ms. Constance Deowyn and Mr. WJ Holloway a little further down, Mr. Chaz Charles Holloway, and also Mr. JH Deowyn, who was the father of Alice and Constance. So that's just one example. Again, it was a family affair.

We also have some absolutely gorgeous portraits of all of the family. And I'm just featuring here a couple of WJ. One is a younger man on the left and one slightly older or a beautiful outfit. These are two of the many, many pictures that are in this collection. And not only studio portraits, but there are also a couple of really gorgeous pictures. This one here of WJ performing in full theatrical garb as Anthony in Antony and Cleopatra. And on the left there is actually a type of press review, sort of a summary of all of the review of this particular performance that was done in 1881 in the Theatre Royal in Melbourne.

Here we have King Lear in an amazing outfit, I have to say, incredible beard. And this is WJ gain. And the clippings on the right are really quite fascinating. Talking about how WJ slipped into the role after the illness of Mr. Henry Irving, who was to play King Lear. And he just managed to change roles. He was playing another role. And then the very next time he was playing King Lear. And this is a selection of snippets of cuttings, explaining what a miracle this was. And here we have the family WJ with his wife, actress Kate Arden, also known as Emily Morse and daughter, Essie Jenyns, Elizabeth Jennings, and it's a beautiful family portrait.

Now onto a little bit more about the, I think this is quite lovely, the connection. You can see so many Shakespearean productions that they were involved in. And we have some of these cabinet cards, some of these pictures that were most likely used to advertise the performances. On the left, we have Essie as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet in the middle, her mother Kate Arden as the nurse. And then a really lovely candid shot of them together, Essie and her mother Kate, dressed up in their costumes. Essie was actually born in Brisbane, which I feel very proud of being born in Brisbane as well in 1864. And her father died in 1871. And to support the family, her mother, Emily became an actress in WJ Holloway's company. She ended up marrying him in 1877. And Jenyns, the stepdaughter became very well known for her performances of Shakespearean heroines and other characters.

Juliet and Romeo and Juliet pictured here, Viola in Twelfth Knight Portia in the Merchant of Venice and in other Shakespearean roles such as Rosalind. Here we have an interesting combination. This picture on the left is from our collection already from a collection of portraits of Essie Jennings. And then I discovered this one on the right, which came from the Holloway family's donation. And I was like, that looks like there might be a little plant in the background of that right hand. If you can just make out, while there's a little bit of damage on the photo, you can see the same plant is in the background. So actually that would've been taken at the same time. In the same studio in Sydney, Charles Holloway WJs brother started his own company. He married the actress Alice Victoria Hayward and their daughter Beatrice, went on to play many juvenile leads with the company before marrying an Australian American actor called Robert Grieg, whom some of you may know from the Marx Brothers film animal crackers.

And Beatrice moved to Hollywood with him and she continued to act in Hollywood. Here we have Alice Deowyn in a gorgeous portrait on the left and then the happy couple. Alice and Charles, this absolutely gorgeous picture that I found. This one on the left, it's a little bit damaged, but it is absolutely gorgeous picture of the three. And that's young Beatrice. She looks like Shirley Temple in this photo, and that's her as a young woman instead on the right. So she was born into this family, just like so many of the others in the Holloways, the three children of WJ as well, often were performing in his productions. And all of this is due to this gentleman here, Jesse George Holloway brother of WJ, and Charles, who was the man who kept a record of his siblings theatre goings. He was quite obviously very proud of what his family were doing, and this material was collected over time and through Jesse's descendants, we were able to collect this beautiful amount of material. And I would like to thank personally the two people who are from Canberra, who are here tonight and who are both descendants of the Holloways. And I would like to say a very big thank you to Barbara Holloway and also to Margaret Ros [unclear]. Thank you so much for donations. The Library is incredibly honoured to be the custodian of this incredible material. And I'm very happy for you being here tonight.

And I want to thank all of you for listening to me talk to you about the Holloways. And if you've got any questions, now's your time to ask. Well, not right now, maybe later, but yeah, I'd love to answer some more questions. And of course, you've got some live Holloways here tonight as well. So now I'll hand over to you, Kate.

Kate Flaherty: Thank you Linda. So in the Holloway dynasty, we see something quite different from the Keans. William J was claimed by Australia as their own when throughout life he returned to work in England. His success was monitored by the Australian press. And I think we might move to the second review, if that's okay, Joe of Mr. Holloway in London. So in the Argus reports, thus

Joe Turner: There is a tide in the affairs of man, and certainly Mr. WJ Holloway seems to have taken it at the flood. We are all still talking of his achievement in supplying Mr Irving's place as King Lear. The word achievement is not at all too strong. Called on at 3:00 PM on Thursday week to read the part owing to Mr Irving's sudden Indisposition. Mr. Holloway learned the whole and played Lear a letter perfect and with vigour and effect.

Kate Flaherty: So rather like what Larissa's had to do today, really Australia's very proud of William J. But as Linda explained, he was not the only Holloway. The family were multi-generation, spanning multinational Shakespeare Enterprise who called Australia home. Women played a huge part in the success of the company. And one Mrs. Scott-Siddons is an excellent example. Her name pops up again and again in broad sides and play bills and all sorts of ephemera. And her partnership with the Holloway family is an example of the opportunities offered A talented, enterprising artist who is a woman in this new era of international touring. Born in Bengal, British India, 1844. Mary Francis Siddons was a descendant on her father's side of the British tragedian Sarah Siddons. In 1876, she's praised by the Australian Town and Country Journal as having a considerable portion of the transcendent genius of the magical Sarah Siddons.

Scott-Siddons seems to have traded on this famous name fairly effectively and on the assertive female Shakespeare characters that her great great aunt played. Despite being married at the age of 18, she continued to form in Scotland Island English provinces, India, east America, Canada, Australia, and in 1867, her readings at Hannover Square rooms in London and performing the characters of Rosalind, Juliet, and Catherine in the taming of the Shrew seemed to be her big break. She played before Queen Victoria herself, and she managed tours of her own and eventually managed the Haymarket Theatre itself. She spent her life on the move with engagements to play female lead roles in full productions with companies like The Holloways. But she also did these wonderful shows where she personate all sorts of characters from Shakespeare's place, a kind of a solo show where she played all the parts. This 1876 review of a Melbourne recital gives a snapshot of how loved she was in Australia.

Larissa Turtin: Mrs. Scott-Siddons had a grand ovation at the Theatre Royal last night, A dress circle far fuller than generally stalls completely filled, and a respectable attendance in the pit, bore testimony to the impression her talents made upon her auditory. At the end of the first part of the programme, she was called before the curtain and had bouquets thrown in her honour at the close. She was again called before the curtain and made a short, graceful address. Her programme last night opened with scenes from as You Like it, in which Rosalind, one of her best parts appears after her banishment from her uncle's palace.

Kate Flaherty: Thanks Larissa. Rosalind is of course, the wordy heroine from, as You Like It, a play that we discovered was very popular in Australia in this era. So Susanna, tell us what else the Library can show us about As You Like It in Australia in the late 18th and early 19th century.

Susannah Helman: Thanks, Kate. Here we go. Yes, this one on the left, this poster, we have quite a good range of material, which I'll just go through quickly now. The poster on the left is one of my favourite posters in the Library's collections, and we do keep finding more relating to As You Like It though the top has hopefully long since been separated from it. We know that it was for the Melbourne run of a play from the 1st of June, 1903. When you look at it, really, it's even more beautiful. It has a velvety quality. It's beautifully laid out. There's no question about the title of the play. It's the work of Tridel and Co. A Melbourne company, which made great posters. The producer of the play was George Musgrove. Musgrove, who lived 1854 to 1916. His sister was married to WS Lister, who ran Australia's first opera company in the 1860s and 1870s.

Musgrove was for a short time in partnership with JC Williamson, who we'll talk a little bit further about. He was the American born impresario, but he had quite an antagonistic relationship with Williamson. And here we have images of him, we've got a portrait, he's looking a little grumpy in a bowler hat, and we've got this image of him at work, actually at a theatre that he ran. Dame Nelly Melba actually chose Musgrove over JC Williamson and to manage her Australian tour in 1902. For example, Musgrove had a long relationship with another person involved in, As You Like It, Nelly Stewart, who's often called Australia's idol. And she was amazing. We have a good range of material relating to her today at the Library.

And we have this portrait of her. And then to the right we have, I mean, I should say just about Nelly Stewart. So she was incredibly popular and I suppose best known, I suppose, for working for JC Williamson. She originated the role of Yum Yum in the Mercado in Australia in Sydney in 1885. JC Williamson had the rights to perform Gilbert and Sullivan in Australia, which was really the making of the company, but she strained her voice. So she sort of turned to comedic roles. And you can imagine that Rosalind might've been a good thing for her. Who we have on the right is Lily Brayton, and we'll just return to her shortly.

I've mentioned JC Williamson, and here he is, this portrait that's been annotated by him and signed by him. Oh, for Bland Holt. Yes. One thing that was a great discovery, what I got very excited about was that within the many, many boxes of things relating to JC Williamson, we have the production boxes basically of this Sydney archive of JC Williamson. And they came to the Library. They're really wonderful. They're basically the whole Sydney office packed up into boxes. We've got, well, it's actually a plastic sleeve with its own call number for As You Like It. We have another box called Music from Shakespeare's Plays. What does that contain? But what I found really quite wonderful was this. So this is in beautiful blue pencil. It's been annotated, it's manuscript, it's also the collection also has some printed music scores. But what really caught my eye was this.

So this is a song that was set to music by Linley, the British composer. But what we've got here is an annotation, and I'll read it out. It says Conductor score missing before the second Melbourne season began January the 20th, 1904 A Zelman. Now we know who that was. That was Alberto Zelman Jr. And he actually featured on that beautiful velvety poster. He worked from Musgrove, he worked, and others, he was well known. We have some of the works he composed in our collection, but it's quite exciting because we can actually pinpoint, we know who he was. So it's these wonderful treasures that are in our JC Williamson collection that always sort of surprise and amaze me. There are wonderful doodles as well. Caricatures as well. So Joe, over to Joe who is going to, sorry, have I, we have this music, which is Who Doth Ambition Shun, or is that Larissa? Tonight

Kate Flaherty: We have a review of,

Susannah Helman: Okay. Okay.

Joe Turner: Do you want me to, I'll read the review.

Kate Flaherty: Yeah.

Joe Turner: On Monday and Tuesday evenings last when the ever welcome, as You Like It, comedy was staged, the fine orchestra, which by the way is practically constituted of the same members as during the late grand opera season at this theatre. Discoursed, in addition to a number of the most melodic curtain raises with motive, a fine general programme of music under the able baton of Mr. A Zelman

Larissa Turtin: In the second act. In addition to the two glee who first will strike the dear bishop and who Duff ambition shun Linley the sympathetic amens with vocalisation most capable acquitted himself admirably.

Kate Flaherty: So before we actually get a taste of this music, a little introduction to the plot As You Like It, we have a classic Shakespeare comedy plot. The Good Duke Senior is usurped by the Bad Duke. Usurp is such a Shakespeare word, isn't it? He's sent off then decides to go and live in the forest of Arden as you do. And this seems like a perfect ideal to, in a sense, capture perhaps the Australian experience going off to live somewhere far away in an ideal setting. But the play has this character called Jaqui who is very cynical about this whole ideal. And he criticises good Duke senior and says that by hunting the deer in the forest, he usurps more than his brother does. So it's actually in a song that two conflicting ideas that in a sense play out the weird fantasy of Australia, a dream of liberty and return to the plentitude of nature, but also balanced by greed, destruction and self delusion. So let's listen to how these contrasting ideas play out in the song. In the play. Larissa's going to play the Duke's songmaker Amiens and Joe will play the melancholy Jaques.

Larissa Turtin: Who doth ambition, shun and love to live in the sun. Loves, loves, loves to live in the sun. Seeking the food he eats. And pleased with what he gets, that's good. Come hither, come hither, come hither, come hither. Come hither. Here shall he see no enemy but winter and rough weather.

Joe Turner: I'll give you a verse. I'll give you a verse to this note that I made yesterday and despite of my invention,

Larissa Turtin: And I'll sing it.

Joe Turner: Thus it goes, if it do come to pass, that any man turns arse. Leaving his wealth and ease a stubborn will to please. Ducdame ducdame ducdame. Here shall he see gross fools as he and if he will come to me.

Larissa Turtin: What is that? Ducdame?

Joe Turner: Tis a Greek invocation to call fools into a circle. I'll go sleep if I can. If I cannot, I'll rail against all the firstborn of Egypt.

Kate Flaherty: So we can see that what we might think of as the oh, we should have thought the, sorry, the academic jumps in with the commentary. The Sylvan ideal doesn't match the Australian experience or not. Well Shakespeare holds these two ideas, in tension, but almost as exciting to me. Perhaps more exciting is the way that this character Rosalind provides a character who celebrates the itinerancy and unconventional lives of actresses in this period. They're shape shifting. Her defiant spirit converts banishment into liberty and it seems to have captivated. 19th century Australian audiences and actresses of the era really worked to build Rosalind into their own branding. Mrs. Scott Siddons, as we've already seen, seemed to belong nowhere precisely and made it her mission to succeed everywhere. And we can see here in the Rosalind Waltz and the Sarah Siddons Gallup that she used merchandise to bind her own name to that of Shakespeare's a decade or so later.

So we've heard Essie Jenyns with credited with causing a Shakespeare revival in Australia and her publicity also had a merchandise dimension. Actress postcards or cabinet cards offered a new way for fans to engage by swapping and collecting. Tens of thousands of postcards were retailed of Jenyns dressed as various Shakespeare characters from 1885 to 1888. Linda has already shown us some of her as Juliet, and here we have two scenes from As You Like It, where she plays Rosalind, the first alludes to Rosalind's adoption of male disguise when her uncle remember the bad Duke ejects her from the court. So now we're going to see that scene where Larissa plays Rosalind and Joe, her loyal cousin Celia,

Larissa Turtin: Why wither shall we go

Joe Turner: Just see my uncle in the forest of Arden

Larissa Turtin: Alas what danger will it be to us maids as we are to travel forth so far? Beauty, provoketh thieves sooner than gold

Joe Turner: I'll put myself in poor and mean attire and with a kind of umber smirch, my face, the like, do you so shall we pass along and never stir assailant?

Larissa Turtin: Were it not better because that I'm more than common tall that I did suit me all parts like a man, a gallant axe upon my thigh, a bore spear in my hand and in my heart. Lie there. What hidden woman's fear their will. We'll have a swashing and a marshal outside as many other manish cowards have that do out face it with their semblances.

Joe Turner: Now go in content to liberty and not to banishment.

Larissa Turtin: Yeah,

Kate Flaherty: So other hugely successful Australian actresses traded on the name and qualities of Rosalind to establish their professional profiles. Here we have a beautiful portrait of Nelly Stewart, one of the best loved homegrown Australian actresses, the turn of the century. If Shakespeare was established as a cultural gold standard, Stewart in this reviewer's opinion certainly matched up

Joe Turner: Last night. She was speaking with the tongue that Shakespeare spake and giving life and warmth to one of the lovely creations of the master who called Rosalind into existence as a type for all time of love and loyalty. A crowded house sat in judgement and the verdict registered in the ringing applause was that Nelly Stewart, the Australian native here and to the manor born, had established her right to touch hands with the great and gentle Shakespeare,

Kate Flaherty: The reviewers of this period.

Joe Turner: They're great reviews.

Kate Flaherty: Have you ever had one like that?

Joe Turner: I got a review recently in Melbourne where it says I was the perfect example of a Shakespearean actor. I dunno what that means. It may be insulting somehow.

Kate Flaherty: It means that you touched hands with the great and gentle Shakespeare.

Joe Turner: Hi Bill.

Kate Flaherty: So in 1909 an addition of the Perth paper, the Mirror we read another Rosalind Lily Brayton, possibly the most popular Rosalind of the era has also appeared on the Australian stage.

Larissa Turtin: Additional interest is added to the appearance of Ms. Lily Brayton as Rosalind in As You Like it by the fact that when the late Clement Scott in his newspaper, the Freelance took a plebiscite as to who was considered the best Rosalind ever seen on the English stage. Lily Brayton was selected by a majority of over 35,000 votes.

Kate Flaherty: So the English Lily Brayton was the real Rosalind according to the London poll. But if you want to understand her as a touring performer, we need to understand her partnership with the Australian born Oscar Ash. Susanna, help us out here.

Susannah Helman: Thanks Kate. The Library holds a range of material relating to Oscar Ash and Lily Brayton. Oscar was born in Geelong. He became a Shakespearean actor in London with his wife Lily Brayton. He produced and wrote highly successful plays such as Kismet and Chu Chin Chow of 1916. Chu Chin Chow was extremely successful. It was a musical comedy based on the folk tale of Alibaba and the 40 Thieves. It ran for 2,238 performances in London, making it the greatest success on the British stage during the First World War. Ash brought it to Australia in 1920. We have original material relating both to their work in London and Australia. Costume designs, scrapbooks which are digitised and you can look at them through our catalogue and a strong collection of ephemera. Tonight I want to mention in particular the material we have relating to The Taming of the Shrew. We have these caricatures by Will Donald and a kind of souvenir portfolio. We wish they were facing each other, but unfortunately they're just both facing the same way. Kate.

Kate Flaherty: So the arrival of Ash and Brayton in 1909 was a source of great excitement in Australia. They were part of a story that Australia was beginning to understand about itself as placing its stars on the international stage, but also as demanding a higher quality of spectacle on the Australian stage. So let's hear from the Melbourne magazine Table Talk on the 8th of July, 1909,

Joe Turner: Oscar Ash, Lily Brayton and their complete London company open at the Theatre Royal on Saturday July 17. The difficulties of transporting a complete company with all scenery, costumes, properties and accessories over 14,000 miles have been successfully overcome. And the results should be that other London stars will be encouraged to visit us in time. Play goers in Melbourne will be able to witness the productions exactly as presented in London and by the original company. Is that good for Australian actors? I don't know about that.

Kate Flaherty: Well, they just have to go to London and have success there. Fair enough. But despite the height that Ash seems to have reached his intriguing little anecdote from the Oscar Ash ephemera file reveals that Australians loved this myth that a Bush upbringing was actually the best training for a Shakespeare actor.

Larissa Turtin: His childhood had been a rough and tumble affair and he spent some of his early years in the Australian bush killing and cooking his own food and reciting Shakespeare's verse to his pet Greyhound when he was a top star. Audiences were stunned by his booming voice and great diction, which probably owed much to those months in the Australian bush,

Kate Flaherty: Probably the rugged Australian Oscar Ash who killed and cooked his own food and the refined English creation made an exquisite celebrity couple. The frission of their difference served them particularly well when they played opposite each other as Katarina and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. So let's hear how their 1909 performance was received by a reviewer from the Melbourne's Leader Saturday 24th of July.

Joe Turner: The Petruchio of Mr. Oscar Ash is one instinct with manly vigour but also inspired with rare intelligence. He does not make him a mere swashbuckler or boisterous bully. He has a keen enjoyment in the methods whereby he transforms a proud imperious scold into a loving and obedient wife. His wooing of Katerina in the opening act where he treats her frowns as smiles, her cuffs as caresses and her solemness as piercing eloquence was admirably conceived.

Larissa Turtin: The Katerina of Ms. Lily Brayton has many admirable points. She's really at her best in the most shrewish scenes, which she presents with an intensity almost equaling the overbearing aggressiveness of her wooer and husband.

Kate Flaherty: I just love that photo. I can see it here of Lily Brighton's facial expression as Katerina. So let's do it. Let's take a look at that opening scene where Catherine and Petruchio first encounter each other. Joe will play Petruchio and Larissa will play Catherine.

Joe Turner: Good morro Kate for that's your name I hear

Larissa Turtin: Well have you heard but something hard of hearing they call me Katerina that do talk of me.

Joe Turner:  You lie in faith for you are called plain Kate, and Bonnie, Kate, sometimes Kate the cursed, but Kate the prettiest Kate in Christendom, Kate of Kate Hall, my super dainty Kate for dainty are all Kates and therefore Kate myself are moved to woo thee for my wife,

Larissa Turtin: Moved in good time. Let him that moved you hither remove you. Hence I knew you at the first you were immovable.

Joe Turner: Why? What's immovable

Larissa Turtin: A joined stool?

Joe Turner: Thou hasted come sit on me.

Larissa Turtin: Asses are made to bear and so are you.

Joe Turner: Women are made to bear and so are you.

Larissa Turtin: No such jade as you If me you mean

Joe Turner: Come, come you wasp. But faith, you are too angry.

Larissa Turtin: If I be waspish best beware my sting,

Joe Turner: My remedy is then to pluck it out.

Larissa Turtin: I if the fool could find it where it lies,

Joe Turner: Who knows? Not where a wasp does wear his sting in his tail,

Larissa Turtin: In his tongue.

Joe Turner: Whose tongue

Larissa Turtin: Yours if you talk of tails and so farewell

Joe Turner: What with my tongue in your tail. Nay, come again. Good Kate, I am a gentleman

Larissa Turtin: That I'll try.

Kate Flaherty: It was fantastic. Where is your And then Lily Brayton and Ash go home and have a quiet night together. Kate is certainly a match for Petruchio and Lily was a match for Oscar. Not only was she highly talented actress, but she was a producer and a costume designer. So let's hear her own voice in an interview with the evening journal in Adelaide from 1910. The title of the article is How I Dress Our Plays, and in it we get a sense of her creative force.

Larissa Turtin: I'm very fond of many evil clothes, although for modern dress, I don't care Toppin except of course that I like my own to be nice. Indeed so strong is this predilection for dress of a bygone day that I don't think it would interest me in the least little bit to play in a modern piece, nor do I think with favour on the modern tendency, especially in the attire of a mere man towards sombre colours and subdued harmonies. Colour affects one so much that I feel we should have everything around us as bright as possible.

Kate Flaherty: So I think we need to redress this condescending tone towards men by adjusting the balance a little and turning to a kingly figure who would look very out of place in sombre colours and subdued tones. Let's learn some more about George Rignold.

Susannah Helman: Thanks Kate. In the late 19th century English actor George Rignold, born Rignal, he lived between 1839 and 1912. He regularly visited and later settled in Australia. He performed Henry V in 1876 and also in the 1880s. Henry V was one of his signature roles. His home at Middle Harbour flew Henry the V standard whenever he was there.

Kate Flaherty: Didn't know that.

Susannah Helman: We hold a series of material relating to this and these are some of my favourites. So you've got on the screen a portrait of George Rignold. We'll see him transform. This is one of my favourite photos of the theatre Royal in Sydney, which was on Castleray Street and it went through to King Street. You can see the George Rignolds poster is on the box just on almost in the gutter, and he was performing in the Lights of London. So yes, here we have the play script for Henry V, sold as a souvenir that you could probably get at the theatre. And then we have him in costume. It's been a little bit touched up, so someone's put a little bit of liner on his nose and his moustache. One of the great things that I've found, I thought anyway, was we have a few boxes of contracts that were in the JC Williamson papers and we do have a contract for George Rignold among them nearby Anna Pavllova's contract. We've got one for George Rignold and it dates from 1876 and it was signed in San Francisco. Joe is going to give you a taste of what it says. It's very long

Joe Turner: George Rignold contract agreement made at San Francisco on the eighth day of June, 1876. By and between Frederick w Bert and George w Rignold. Witness said Bert and Reig Bolt hereby from former co-partnership to be known as the George Rignold Henry the fifth combination company for the purpose of producing and playing in the Australian colonies, the spectacle of Henry the v Bert to provide all scenery, dresses, painting properties, written and printed music, et cetera as it present provided and in use in Wade's Opera House in said San Francisco and a business manager for the combination who shall have charge of its business. Bert also to pay the passages from San Francisco to Australia of said Rigal Melli and actor f Thorn if possible to play the part of flu. Ellen and a French actress to play the part of Catherine in said spectacle and of said business manager, said Ald to play his part of Henry five in said spectacle at such times and places as maybe arranged for and designated by said business manager and at no other places or times during this agreement.

Kate Flaherty: Thank you Joe. Ash and Brayton, though were not the first to bring a fully imported Shakespeare spectacle to Australia. So here we have George Rignold back in the 1870s bringing Henry the V and it was a hit on the Australian stage right through till 1910. So people just never got sick of it seemingly. This review is from 1908. So just before stage spectacle was eclipsed by the entertainment of film. He had reviewers in ecstasies over the detailed pictorial scenery. And this coup de théâtre, which was reported on the 31st of October, 1908 in Sydney Morning Herald,

Larissa Turtin: The success with which the Shakespearean revival of Henry V was received at her Majesty's Theatre on Monday last continues unabated the magnificent tableau, notably the representation of the Battle of Agincourt and the triumphal entry into London with Mr. Rignold seated on his white charger as the central figure stirred the vast audience to enthusiasm, the members of the Australasian Home Reading Union will attend the theatre this evening to witness the performance.

Kate Flaherty: So yes, he came onto stage on a horse. Rignold's success reflects a pattern of Shakespeare branding that we've already seen at work. Physical commodities like the Holloway records, Scott-Sidden's Rosalind Waltz, Essie Jenyns photo postcards. They held out to audience members the promise of taking home a piece of theatrical history. And lucky for us, many of them did, and then their descendants donated them to the National Library. The souvenir edition of Henry V from George Rignold's production works in a similar way. Before the era of cinema or television. You can just imagine a group of Shakespeare enthusiasts, perhaps the members of the Australian Home Reading Union gathered in a parlour to replay that magnificent moment from last weekend when Mr. Rignald entered the stage on a real horse crying

Joe Turner: Once more unto the breach. Dear friends, once more or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace, there's nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility. But when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger. Stiffen the sinew summon up the blood disguise fair nature with hard favoured rage, then lend the eye a terrible aspect. Let it pry through the portage of the head like the brass cannon. Let the brow o'whelm it as fearfully as doth a gorded rock. Oh hang and jutti his confounded base swirled with the wild and wasteful ocean. Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide. Hold hard, the breath and bend up every spirit to his full height. I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips straining upon the start the games afoot. Follow your spirit and upon discharge, cry God for Harry, England and St. George.

Kate Flaherty: He's good, isn't he? His home reading society to keep going. So from imagined battles, we move now to the outbreak of real war. From an international touring production of Henry the V, we moved to conflict on an international scale. The last of our visitors, Ellen Terry, arrived in Australia on the eve of the Great War. She was a Shakespeare star of the London stage, making her first venture to Australia and New Zealand at the age of 66. And not to perform in productions, but to give Shakespeare lectures. These lectures or discourses were kind of like what we're doing here tonight. She would intersperse flashes of performance as characters with stories of her own life on stage. The Christchurch paper, the star quotes from an interview she gave before she left London.

Larissa Turtin: How do I feel about going so far away? Why? As happy as possible for I know that I will return full of renewed life and energy like the captain of the pinafore. I am never, never sick at sea and weather fine or dirt as the sailors call it invigorates me. And I feel well a good deal younger than I ought to feel. I shall not act in Australia. I shall just give my little comments on Shakespeare's heroines interspersed with some of their most notable speeches that misguided people will insist on calling my lectures.

Kate Flaherty: Terry claimed in one interview that while in Australia, although a woman I am permitted to be a person. By 1914, women in Australia have possessed the right to vote for 12 years. And yes, in New Zealand for 21 years. In England, where Terry had been actively involved in the fight, full equal suffrage was not achieved till 1928. In her four lectures on Shakespeare, which I think of as a kind of Trojan horse, she uses Shakespeare and her own career experience to express her belief in gender equity and to advocate to changes in industry and legislation to better recognise the rights and capacities of women. So Larissa's going to read to us, she's going to lecture to us from one of Ellen Terry's lectures called Shakespeare's triumphant women.

Larissa Turtin: Wonderful women. Have you ever thought how much we all and women especially owe to Shakespeare for his vindication of women in these fearless, high spirited, resolute and intelligent heroines? Don't believe that anti-feminist, if they tell you, as I was once told, that Shakespeare had to endow his women with virile qualities. Because in his theatre they were always impersonated by men. They owe far more to the liberal ideas about the sex that were fermenting in Shakespeare's age. The assumption that the woman's movement is of a very recent date is not warranted by history. There is evidence of its existence in the 15th century.

Kate Flaherty: Thank you Larissa. Unfortunately, though Terry's tour got off to a shaky start. She first appeared in Australia in Melbourne Town Hall on 7th, 8th and 9th of May. The Melbourne magazine Table Talk tells us

Joe Turner: Ms Ellen Terry was scarcely heard to advantage in Melbourne. Ms. Terry too had been out of health ever since the journey through the Red Sea, which proved most trying to her. And naturally this fact handicapped her to a certain extent, tending to make her nervy and anxious.

Kate Flaherty: So the never, never sick at sea was not accurate. Things grew worse when the outbreak of war closed. The theatres made it hard for Terry to communicate with her family at home or to secure her passage back. She seemed to draw strength. However, from Australia's natural beauty and from friendship, Nellie Melba extended hospitality and Terry's letters home speak a deepening bond between them during several visits to Melba's property in the Yarra Valley.

Larissa Turtin: I have heard Nelly Melba sing the Blackbird just to me alone. And so come Death dies to slow music, no lives to joyous music.

Kate Flaherty: So this is one of Ellen Terry's letters and they're just exquisite to read because of her strange punctuation, which Larissa has done a great job of interpreting. Terry's intrepid adventure to Australia. And her creative partnership with Melba captivated my imagination this year. And I couldn't resist reconstructing the kinds of conversation that these two most famous women in the world at the time might've had as they were stranded together in middle age in the Australian bush. You can imagine how delighted I was then when Susanna told me that the National Library held materials from Terry's 1914 tour.

Susannah Helman: Thanks, Kate. I'm just going to show you the items from our ephemera folder for Ellen Terry that relate to her 1914 visit. So what we have here is this programme for her 9th of May, 1914 lecture three discourses on the heroines of Shakespeare with illustrative acting. We've also got this from Her Majesty's Theatre, which was leased to JC Williamson and she was performing in Sydney on the 28th of July, 1914. This is the souvenir programme for the Actors Association of Australasia. It's quite beautiful. It sort of feels like an exercise book. And then the pièce de résistance was this letter, which is also in the ephemera collection. It's not so usual that we have manuscript items, but then in the ephemera collection, but they must have all come in together. So kept together, which is nice. Kate.

Kate Flaherty: So the idea of a lecture with illustrative acting is of course the inspiration for this event that I've been running with for the last three years. So thank you to Ellen Terry. You might've heard Essie Jenyns mentioned there. So if we can go back to the programme for the Actors Association event. Yes. Where Essie Jenyns, the much beloved member of the Holloway family, credited with inspiring a Shakespeare revival, had retired from the stage a long while before this, she'd married and left the stage in 1888. So here in 1914 in the Sydney Morning Herald, her return to the stage to play in a scene from the Merchant of Venice was a cause for great local excitement.

Larissa Turtin: The association of England's most famous Shakespearean actress of modern times with Australia's greatest Shakespearean actress in the performance of the trial scene from the Merchant of Venice at Her Majesty Theatre in Sydney. Next Tuesday afternoon is a unique and historic event in the theatrical world.

Kate Flaherty: At the end of October, 1914, Terry finally boarded the Makura in Sydney to begin her long journey home. This postcard was hastily penned on hotel stationary just before she steamed out. And it reflects something of the warmth that Terry felt for her Australian actor and actress colleagues in the Actors Association of Australia.

Larissa Turtin: 29th of October, 1914, the Australia, Sydney in great taste. Dear Mr. Bentley, I am delighted to receive my badge of membership of the AA of Australia. Delighted and proud and grateful to one and all my assurances of the honour and my great thanks for the sweet kindnesses they lately showered upon me. Believe me very sincerely, Ellen Terry. Excuse my haste. I have one foot on sea and one on shore Australia. The Makura starts in an hour.

Kate Flaherty: So the phrase, one foot on sea and one on shore is from Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. And it's an apt, literal description of how so many actors from Australia or visiting Australia spent their lives in this era. For the first time in history, the figurative words of Jaques in as you like, it had become a lived reality.

Joe Turner: All the worlds a stage and all the men and women merely players, they have their exits and their entrances. And one man in his time plays many parts.

Kate Flaherty: In the 16th century, Shakespeare's drama had transformed a little round playhouse into a space that could represent the world, treacherous sea voyagers, unknown people's strange flora and fauna that evoked curiosity and wonder. Rapacious greed, the despair of exile and the surprise of restored community were all bodied forth at that theatre called The Globe on the South Bank of the Thames River. But now let's leap over some 300 years. Imagine boarding a ship with your company, your props, your costumes. You endure four months on the open sea and perhaps a storm or two. The moment you set foot in the bright light of Melbourne, you open a production of Twelfth Night or the Tempest. Plays that begin with storms or As You Like It, which begins with exile. The distance and scale of the world is inside you now in a way that the actors of Shakespeare's age could scarcely imagine.

Between the Gold Rush and the Great War players began to stroll the globe. I'm fascinated by this period in which Shakespeare went on the move globally because I believe the plays were newly energised by this mighty motion. Shakespeare's far reaching invention was no longer such stuff as dreams are made on, but the stuff of their everyday lives. And thanks to the marvellous collections and theatrical ephemera at the National Library of Australia, some of that stuff is preserved. The past is not gone. We have a million tantalising clues with which to piece together the stories of people from Australia and beyond, for whom the world actually did become a stage.

Susannah Helman: Thank you very much. Kate, Larissa, and Joe, we have some time for questions. If anyone wants to raise their hand, we'll just get the lights up.

Audience member 1: Yeah, thank you. That was fantastic. Oh, thank you. Yeah, that was fantastic. And I knew it was being viewed online and I'm just wanting to ask if it's recorded because I'd like to share it with some people.

Susannah Helman: Yes, I can answer that. It is being recorded. You can watch it on our NLA YouTube channel.

Joe Turner:
Go NLA. Very cool.

Susannah Helman: Any more questions?

Audience member 2: Thank you. It was a great occasion, thank you very much. But I'm wondering, is anything known about the audiences? I'm thinking in terms of socioeconomic terms and social class, who actually went to these performances about, and by Shakespeare,

Kate Flaherty: Shall I tackle that one? A much more mixed audience than we would expect in socioeconomic terms today. So in the 19th century theatre as it was in Shakespeare's time, was really entertainment for everybody in a sense. So you would have every social class represented in the theatre and much less polite and reverential than theatre is today, as you can see from the spikes that were required along the front of the stage. But yeah, I've done quite a lot of research on the rowdiness of those early audiences and riots at the theatre. So yeah, it was a more mixed demographic than we'd expect at the theatre today. And you could get in half price halftime, so you could actually get into the theatre halfway through the show for half the price of the ticket. That gives you some kind of indication.

Audience member 3: For about 40 years. I've had on my bookshelf books about these travelling companies and what strikes me was how they travelled around and how they used the trains later on in the century and the organisation involved in that transport shattered me. I think you've passed over a very important side of the mechanics of Shakespeare in Australia at the time.

Kate Flaherty:
We were just talking in the green room about the Alan Wilke Shakespeare Company, which is kind of a predecessor of the Bell Shakespeare Company in terms of its travelling and touring mission. So maybe that's content for another event. Who knows? They were granted free train travel by the Australian government so they could take Shakespeare all over Australia

Joe Turner: After you.

Susannah Helman: I know that we do certainly have quite a lot of administrative details for the JC Williamson company. We've got, say, copies of cables that were sent between the Sydney and Melbourne offices and they talk about you've got to make sure you look after the dog. That's all I remember, a performing dog. And there's a lot of administrative. But yeah, it's a good note and good question to ask. I mean, oftentimes these kinds of things don't necessarily survive, but in some cases they do. So it's always a win when you can find that kind of detail.

Joe Turner: Yeah, I was just going to add to the conversation, say that, well, Bell Shakespeare is really the only national touring company in Australia, so the logistics behind organising that company are insane. Last year you were working with the players. Would you be able to give a brief summary of how many places you went to and how you got there?

Larissa Turtin: Yeah, I mean, we were lucky enough to have a nice cushy Kia Carnivale to drive us around, but very lightweight set and props so that we could take it all over and on planes and to places where we had very limited space to set up and perform. So

Joe Turner: Do you know how many performances you gave over that year? Did anyone add them up?

Larissa Turtin: Yes, it was around 180 or so, and there was another team of players doing the same thing that would've done a similar amount. So getting up to 350 or so between the two teams, I'd say. Yeah.

Joe Turner: Yeah. So organising that tour, I don't want to do that job. That's tough.

Susannah Helman: Any more questions? No. Okay. Thank you.

Daniel Gleeson: Well, thank you so much. But we've come to the end of the night, but I just wanted to say before you all head off that if you do love all things theatre, then there's another wonderful event we're hosting here in the same place on Friday at 6:00 PM we've got the acclaimed theatre and film director Jim Sharman AO. He's coming here to the Library to reflect on his amazing career with the aid of digitised images, which have been drawn from visual diaries that he has kept throughout his career. So when you're looking at some of the ephemera here tonight, same thing, but more modern. Of course. Jim also directed many of Shakespeare's works famously with radical interpretations. And after that we'll be screening a documentary about the cultural phenomena surrounding his film, the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which is now the longest running theatrical release in film history. So tickets to that free event are going very fast now as we get closer to Friday through our website. But look, tonight's event was just amazing. I hope you enjoyed it. Can we have a round of applause for Kate? Joe, Larissa, Susanna, and Linda?