‘He was either the favorite of the public, or he was entirely forgotten. He would flash before the world, a brilliant meteor; then disappear, without even leaving a trail of light behind him’
—‘Miss Field’s Fechter’, 251

1Charles Fechter’s life and career defy easy definition. Fechter was born in London, but he was brought up in Paris, performed throughout Europe, and considered himself to be French; his biographer, Kate Field, however, called him ‘a man without a country’ (1886, 209). Edmund Yates described the actor as ‘the best love-maker I ever saw on the stage’ (1882, 148), and Henry Austin Clapp agreed: ‘Mr. Fechter’s love-making was the best I ever witnessed’ (124). Errol Sherson read his popularity as that of the first ‘Matinée Idol’ (362), and Edward Robins called him ‘the prince of melodramatic lovers’ (348). Dion Boucicault, however, protested in a memorial of the actor for the New York Sun that Fechter’s Hamlet was ‘a performance a deaf man might have revelled in’ (10 Aug 1879). Robins’s positive comment came after the same author’s complaint that Fechter’s characterisations ‘lacked dignity, spirituality, [and] soul’ (339). In addition, many critics—both professional and amateur—found that Fechter’s enduring French accent ‘not infrequently spoiled the effect’ (Watson 376) of even his most successful performances. He lived surrounded by friends and admirers—he was acquainted in London with such mid-century names as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and William Charles Macready and in Paris with Alexandre Dumas fils, Rachel Félix, and Frédérick Lemaître—but died alone on an isolated farm in Pennsylvania.

2Such contrasts encapsulate not only Fechter’s life and career but also more broadly the status of foreign actors on the mid-nineteenth-century English stage. People of all nations were burlesqued on stage—especially those of American, Irish, and French extraction—and actors from other countries were never certain of the reception they might receive in London. An actor’s or company’s success often depended on popular sentiment and prejudice, which could shift daily in response to current socio-political events. While Fechter’s career on the English stage and the general reaction to his work in London in the 1860s reflect the ambiguous status of the French on the London stage, his particular acting style also marks a distinct turning point in London stage history. Fechter’s work as an actor and later as a manager was influential in bringing about the shift from the traditional staging and styles of the first half of the nineteenth century to the Naturalism and Realism that were increasingly favoured during the second half of the century.

The Life of Charles Fechter

5Following this dramatic exit, Fechter avoided Paris for the better part of a year, performing in Berlin and in London, where he spent four months at the St. James’s Theatre as a member of one of the many French companies to make that theatre their temporary London home. In his four months in London, Fechter caught the eye of John Maddox, then the manager of the Princess’s Theatre. Fechter’s acting stood out as fresh and unique, even in a company of his countrymen, and the Frenchman would have made a remarkable spectacle to add to Maddox’s repertoire. The manager was willing to offer the exorbitant sum of £40 a week for three years to secure the young French actor. Fechter was forced to turn down the offer, as he had already committed himself to appear at the Ambigu upon his return to Paris, but the offer clearly suggested to Fechter the possibility of returning to the London stage. When the Ambigu was forced to close during the 1848 revolution, Fechter wrote to accept Maddox’s offer, but the manager had engaged an opera troupe instead, and Fechter put his English aspirations on hold.

6In the 1850s, Fechter became one of the most highly sought-after actors in Paris, though his acting choices and the readings he gave to his roles often sparked controversy and divided critical reception. Over the course of the decade, he appeared in at least three of the major Parisian playhouses in a vast array of classic and melodramatic roles. His greatest success of this period came in creating Armand Duval in the stage adaptation of Alexandre Dumas fils’s La Dame aux Camélias at the Vaudeville. In Dumas’s novel, and in the original conception of the adaptation, Armand takes a supporting role, and the casting of one of the leading actresses in Paris, Eugénie Doche, as Marguerite Gautier seemed to solidify this expected hierarchy. Fechter’s ‘impassioned’ acting repeated the successes of his earlier jeune premier roles, building from the ‘tenderness’ of the desperate lover, through the ‘finest pathos’ to reach ‘a magnificent climax in the fourth act, where Duval bursts out into scornful denunciation of the heroine’ (Robins 334). Dumas himself was entranced by the passion of his re-imagined hero and wished that another author had written the piece so he could ‘say of Fechter all that ought to be said’ (qtd in Robins 335). For Field, the singularity of Fechter’s treatment of Armand was a mark of his ‘genius’, his ability to ‘carr[y] the author’s conception beyond the letter’ (Field 1882, 42) in such a way that even the author himself could be favourably impressed with the actor’s interpretation.

8In the summer of 1860, at the moment of this crucial disappointment, Fechter happened to return briefly to England. There, he met with Augustus Harris, who had followed Maddox as manager of the Princess’s and who succeeded where Maddox had failed in enticing Fechter to make his English-language debut on the London stage. Harris made a point of emphasising his new star’s origins in the advertisements for his new season, selling the actor as a novel spectacle. The playbill for Fechter’s first night announces the ‘First Appearance on the English Stage of Mr. FECHTER The Favourite Actor of Parisian Renown, and original representative of “THE CORSICAN BROTHERS”, “PAULINE”, “THE BACHELOR OF ARTS” And many other Dramas that are now familiar to the London Public’ (Sat. 27 Oct 1860; original emphasis). Fechter’s English-language debut, then, was successful not only because he was a new face performing in a well-loved drama at a well-attended theatre, which was always a draw, but also because he was already an established theatrical name in France. In addition to the usual excitement that greeted guest appearances by foreign actors, though, he was successful as a spectacle because he was attempting what no French actor of his rank had yet done. Fechter made his English-language debut as the star of a regularly performing London company rather than as a one-off or short-contract performance.

10In March of 1861, Fechter ventured to fulfil his lifelong goal of acting Shakespeare in English, first taking on Hamlet—which met with mixed reviews—and then Othello, which was a complete failure. When Othello returned after Harris’s Christmas 1861-62 pantomime, audiences saw Fechter as Iago instead of as the title character. This, too, failed, and his only later attempts at legitimate English drama were revivals of his Hamlet, which had become, for its novelty value, nearly as prominent a sensation as his French romantic leads. In the 1862-63 season, Fechter took over as manager of the Lyceum. Fechter hoped, as he had done with the Odéon, that the role of manager would allow him to play the classical roles of legitimate drama, but again he was disappointed, and again he staged a continual stream of melodrama and romantic drama.

11While Fechter’s term of management may not have taken the route he had hoped, it cemented his popularity with London audiences and his associations with the leading figures of the literary and theatrical worlds. Fechter left the Lyceum in 1867 to originate the role of Obenreizer in the adaptation of Charles Dickens’s and Wilkie Collins’s No Thoroughfare at the Adelphi. By this point in his career, the Adelphi Theatre Calendar for 1867-68 notes, Charles Fechter had achieved ‘an international reputation’ and was just as well-known as either of the authors (Cross, Donohue, and Nelson 67/8). After farewell performances both in London and in the provinces, Fechter left England and Europe. Perhaps, as Clapp speculates, his temper and impetuosity had once again gotten the better of him (115); perhaps his appearance at the Adelphi, the home of melodrama in London, had finally convinced Fechter of the impracticality of his dream to appear in legitimate English drama on the London stage.

Controversy and Spectacle: Charles Fechter’s Hamlet

15As Austin Brereton notes, ‘[a]t some time or other in the course of his career, it is the ambition of every actor who loves his work to appear as Hamlet’ (v). In the nineteenth century, most critics and audience members, even those not deeply familiar with Shakespeare’s text, carried with them a long list of preconceived notions on the part. Many actors took full advantage of this familiarity and expectation, playing to specific points and limiting their own reading of the character to those aspects of tradition that were most fashionable (or most acceptable) to contemporary audiences. The chance to play Hamlet, then, was often less a chance to take on a challenging role in an original manner than it was a chance for the actor to prove that he or she understood the tradition. This tradition, of course, was a particularly English one, and so Fechter met with opposition not only to his original reading of the character but also to his attempting the role at all.

16A majority of the London theatre world—filled with ‘curiosity’ at the mere ‘idea of a Frenchman playing the Dane, in the very city where so many English Hamlets had appeared’ (Robins 338-39)—descended on the Princess’s to see the spectacle of the Frenchman playing Hamlet. Of this majority, many went expecting the worst, ‘bristl[ing]’ with ‘British jealousy of the foreigner’ (Baker 490). Amongst those critical of Fechter were such high-profile actors as Charles Kean, Samuel Phelps, and John Ryder, who ‘did all they could to pour ridicule on the attempt, and freely prophesied the break-up of the School of British Acting with all its great traditions if the interloper from Paris were permitted to play Hamlet’ (Sherson 147). Macready, who was bed-ridden and unable to see Fechter on stage, expressed his views in a more conciliatory manner. Although he confessed himself ‘predispos[ed]’ to a ‘favourable, indeed a high opinion’ of the French actor, his preference would have been to see Fechter act in French; in English, ‘the substance and passion of the scene would be given, but minuter beauties and more subtle meaning, belonging to the genius of the language, must, I cannot but think, escape the apprehension of a foreigner’ (Macready 716). Henry Ottley, whose analysis of Fechter’s later Othello mercilessly condemns each element of the actor’s performance, summarised in his prefatory remarks the general discontent with Fechter’s choice of role by asking, ‘Is not our stage already abased enough, but it must receive a new indignity, and from a foreign source?’ (Ottley 3). The idea of a Frenchman playing Shakespeare—not to mention a French melodramatic actor playing Shakespeare’s greatest role—filled the traditionalists of the London stage with dread.

17Of course, many of those who saw Fechter’s Hamlet were less determined to be appalled by what critics like Ottley saw as the actor’s direct assault on the traditions of the English theatre. Rather, there was a distinct split between those audience members and reviewers who were ready for a change and thus were positively struck by Fechter’s choices and those who remained attached to the idea of the traditional Hamlet as a national treasure sullied by this foreign portrayal. Charles Dickens, one of those who supported Fechter’s innovations, declared that ‘no innovation in art was ever accepted with so much favour by so many intelligent persons pre-committed to, and pre-occupied by, another system as Mr. Fechter’s Hamlet’ (Dickens 182). George Henry Lewes, similarly, remarked on the naturalistic quality of Fechter’s performance: ‘If Shakespeare’s grandest language seemed to issue naturally from Fechter’s lips, and did not strike you as out of place, which it so often does when mouthed on the stage, the reason was that he formed a tolerably true conception of Hamlet’s nature, and could represent that conception’ (Lewes 118; original emphasis).

18The spectacle and novelty of Fechter’s performance and the debate it engendered transformed the actor into a household name, ‘a veritable lion’ (Robins 340). His portrayal of the character marked a turning point in the English theatrical tradition. Fechter’s reading of the role was singular in its treatment of the character with the actor’s melodramatic, ‘colloquial’ style (Morley 275; Shattuck 22). Fechter’s Hamlet was at once naturalistic and romantic: ‘it was his intention to make Shakespeare’s heroes, beginning with Hamlet, resemble Armand Duval as nearly as possible—colloquial, suave, genteel, domesticated to drawing room and boudoir’ (Shattuck 144). Fechter’s Hamlet, like the romantic leads that had made his reputation, was ‘a suffering man, never an actor’ (Field 1882, 105; emphasis added). Rather than hitting the expected points, Fechter made his own choices based on the interiority of the character—a character who is, after all, one of the most introspective of Shakespeare’s creations. Fechter presented his Hamlet not as a prepared stage persona but as ‘an ordinary individual’ (à Beckett 23). Fechter’s melodramatic training and style would seem at odds with this focus on interiority. The actor, however, used this background to incorporate choice gestures that reflected the interiority of the character—that is, gestures that proceeded naturally from his characterisation rather than gestures which were necessarily over-emphasised to reach the back rows of the London playhouses.

19The popular interest in Fechter’s performance had less to do with the effectiveness of the performance itself, or with the emotional connection between actor and audience, than with its status as spectacle. Brereton suggests that Fechter ‘interested rather than moved his audience’ as Hamlet (Brereton 46). As with any performance, those moments read most positively by some critics were the same moments with which others found the most fault. In opposition to those who saw Fechter’s greatest innovation as his introspective treatment of the character, Brereton critiqued Fechter’s decision to give ‘undue prominence to the meditative element in Hamlet’s nature, concerning himself chiefly with the play of intellect revealed in the soliloquies’ (Brereton 46). Fechter’s main flaw, in Brereton’s critical view, was not that he had departed from tradition but that he lacked ‘the tragedian’s personality’ and thus ‘the qualities which give the force of animal passion demanded by tragedy, and which cannot be represented except by a certain animal power’ (Brereton 50). Clapp, who saw Fechter’s later American portrayal of Hamlet, expressed a similar reaction to the actor’s departure from traditional interpretations: ‘His Hamlet’s feet were planted firmly on the earth; and his head was six feet above them,—not in the clouds, where Shakespeare put it’ (Clapp 120-1). For some audience members, Fechter’s interpretation was too natural, too far removed from the accepted separation of reality and staged reality.

The French Actor on the London Stage

20Fechter’s Hamlet sparked controversy because Fechter himself was a Frenchman taking on (and changing) the most iconic English role. When Fechter limited his roles to romantic leads and dramas from the French, he was impressive and irresistible. In the traditional legitimate English drama, however, he was out of place. The split critical reactions to Fechter’s Hamlet that illustrate the violence with which some critics and audience members clung to their respective ideas of tradition also reflect the ambivalent audience reactions faced by anything French on the English stage in the middle of the nineteenth century. While adaptations of the French drama and of novels by, for example, Victor Hugo or Alexandre Dumas were endlessly popular on the English stage in the first half of the century, convention dictated that these dramas be appropriately anglicised for performance. Often these changes consisted merely of adding English names or settings, but in some cases the attempts to give an English flavour to a French drama were all but nonsensical. Watson recalls, for instance, one of the earliest translations of a Guilbert de Pixerécourt melodrama, into which a British sailor is ‘most absurdly introduced’ for patriotic (rather than narrative or theatrical) purposes (Watson 5).

21This prejudice against the foreign in part resulted from a jingoistic nationalism coming out of the wars of the early nineteenth century and English pride in an ever-expanding empire. Specific reactions against French actors varied based on the current political situation. In the 1840s, for instance, the Company of the Théâtre Historique in Paris attempted to stage Dumas’s adaptation of his The Count of Monte Cristo at Drury Lane. This adaptation was never particularly well-received—it ran far too long, for one thing, and had to be played over two nights. On this occasion, the audience, discontented with the appearance of foreign players on a traditionally English stage, refused to allow the play to be heard (Emeljanov 25). In Sherson’s later analysis, the riotous scenes were meant to have occurred ‘in the interests of the British Drama’, but instead became ‘a rather pitiful example of how far British insularity [could] go’ (Sherson 359). In Fechter’s own experience, the press capitalised on these popular sentiments to justify a critical review. When the Prince of Wales commanded a performance of Ruy Blas in 1865, Fechter, of course, complied. The papers, however, exploded ‘at the idea of royalty leaving native talent unhonored, and commanding a performance at the theatre of what they were pleased to call “a French importation”’ (Field 1882, 57). The public and the popular press happily left the French actor to his own devices and supported his innovations so long as he did not threaten the perceived superiority of the English stage and its traditions.

23I have claimed throughout that although reactions to Fechter (especially negative reactions) tend to focus on his foreignness, he nevertheless played a significant role in the evolution of the English drama. Situated midway through the century—in the midst of the gradual shift from melodrama to Naturalism—Fechter’s decade on the London stage is notable for the stylistic and practical alterations he implemented into the English tradition. Fechter based his style on the belief that characters were ‘written to be acted not recited’ (Othello iii; original emphasis), a conviction more readily associated with melodrama and French romantic drama. Throughout his career, Fechter’s characterisations relied heavily on the gestures often associated with melodrama or pantomime. Fechter appeared on stage as ‘a master of the exterior symbolism of the histrionic art’ (Clapp 125). He displayed and developed his characters through movement and the expressions of his body and face—in keeping with the melodramatic style—but he also used these gestures to develop a naturalistic emotional interiority.

24Such reliance on gesture was in no way controversial; many of the performance styles of the nineteenth-century London stage depended on such a gestural vocabulary. What made Fechter’s style revolutionary was the way he paired the exteriority of melodrama with an unprecedented level of the kind of interiority that would come to be associated later in the century with Naturalism and Realism. Wilkie Collins described Fechter’s acting not only as ‘noble and romantic’—that is, as befitting melodrama and the jeune premier roles he favoured—but also as ‘firmly founded on truth to nature’ (156). A later reviewer for The New York Times glosses the centrality of this “truth to nature” as the organising principle of all Fechter’s characterisations: “Is it natural? Would a man do thus and so in the given situation? appear to be his constant questions” (16 Feb 1870, 5). Fechter in many ways anticipated twentieth-century acting techniques by, for instance, deliberately assuming aspects of his characters off stage as well as on (Collins 163), creating each as an individual who existed even beyond the staged world of the play. Robins records the story of an argument the younger Fechter had with George Sand over the actor’s role as a ploughboy in her Claudie. Fechter had studied the part and infused the character with his naturalistic ideas, all of which went against both tradition and the playwright’s expectations. Fechter’s reaction, as related by Robins, was that ‘Madame Sand can write, but she has proved that she does [not] know the meaning of acting’ (333). Even at this early point in his career, ‘the meaning of acting’ centred, in Fechter’s view, on capturing and expressing the realism of the role. When performing at the height of his talents, Fechter’s combination of melodramatic gesture and naturalistic emotional expression presented on stage ‘something that was like life, and glowing, ardent life at that’ (Sherson 147). This union of melodrama and Realism is Fechter’s greatest and most lasting contribution to English stage history.

Gentlemanly Melodrama: The Lasting Influence of Charles Fechter

25In 1860, when Charles Fechter arrived in London, the English stage tradition had already begun to develop away from a sole reliance on melodramatic exteriority. Charles Kean, the star name at the Princess’s immediately before Fechter’s arrival, had imported French dramas such as The Corsican Brothers and staged them in ways that were—to the traditionally minded members of the London theatre audience—unconventional. Even Kean, however, was never so bold as to attempt to perform Shakespeare in a modern, melodramatic style, as Fechter would do. As Watson has noted, ‘this destructive service’, this disregard of traditional style and introduction of more naturalistic elements of acting and staging, was both Fechter’s ‘just and worthy claim to celebrity’ (240) and the ‘beginning of our [English] contemporary stagecraft’ (235). In this way, Fechter not only allowed for future generations of foreign actors to perform on the English-language London stage, he also set the bar for ‘that brilliant succession of actor-managers who were the shining lights of the Stage during the closing years of the nineteenth century’ (Sherson 153). In challenging so many traditions of the English stage, Fechter both anticipated and allowed for the innovations of later actor-managers such as Henry Irving and Herbert Beerbohm Tree who would continue the evolution of the nineteenth-century English stage.

28Fechter’s implementation of these techniques of acting and staging marked what Watson over-zealously calls ‘the decisive victory of French methods over the English stage tradition’ (235). I would suggest ‘influence’ as a more fitting term than ‘victory’: the changes imported from Paris were so quickly incorporated into the existing English stage style that they rapidly merged with other changes particular to the English stage in the immediately succeeding period. English stage histories, then, often elide the role of the French theatre—and especially the part played by Charles Fechter—in advancing English drama in the final third of the nineteenth century. Watson perhaps tries best to redeem Fechter’s influence, reminding his readers that the growth of a naturalistic theatrical style was neither particularly English nor ‘the single-handed work of Fechter’ but the eventual result of a series of innovations that began as far back as David Garrick in the eighteenth century, all of which made Fechter’s own work on the London stage possible (Watson 128-9). Watson goes on to claim that Fechter’s effectiveness was very much of his time: by 1860, ‘faith in the entertainment value of the new naturalistic French art was already widespread among the theatre-going public. . . .  The populace was not only prepared to greet favorably the daring foreign invasion, but many, it is certain, were even eager for it’ (Watson 373). The London stage, then, readily absorbed Fechter’s innovations, even though its critics remained split on the Frenchman’s own performances.

29While Watson ends his discussion of Fechter’s place in the evolution of the English drama by remarking that the Frenchman’s style was ‘perishable’ (377)—of its time and place—Fechter’s ‘gentlemanly melodrama’ (238) influenced many of the actors, managers, designers, and playwrights associated with the shift to Realism in the final third of the nineteenth century. Henry Irving especially, who followed in Fechter’s footsteps both as manager of the Lyceum and in favouring a similarly gentlemanly melodramatic style in the ‘coat-and-waistcoat domestication’ of his tragic heroes (Shattuck 145), traced his early influence to Fechter. Irving played Laertes to Fechter’s Hamlet on tour, and his own later Hamlet owed much to the Frenchman’s influence (Richards 122). At the Lyceum, Irving played many of the roles Fechter had originated and similarly favoured the expressive qualities of melodrama over the declamatory power of earlier actors. By the end of the nineteenth century, these choices in performance and staging were more acceptable and less controversial than they had been in Fechter’s productions of the 1860s. The naturalistic acting style and realistic staging practices of Fechter were no longer considered the foreign importation of an upstart Frenchman. They had become an intrinsic part of a modern dramatic style and an intrinsic part of London stage history.

30At the beginning of the nineteenth century, actor, manager, and playwright Henry Siddons averred that ‘the whole merit of an actor can only be appreciated in his own country: in the midst of those whose manners he imitates, and whose customs he has observed: thus, he can only appear with his true eclat upon his national theatre, and seldom on a foreign one’ (Siddons 326). Although prejudice against the French was still strong following the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, countless French actors made their respective ways, both temporarily and permanently, to the nineteenth-century London stage. Charles Fechter, though he enjoyed the ambivalent reception Siddons finds to be reserved for foreigners, was a fixture of the London stage for over a decade and contributed significantly to the mid-century development of Victorian acting and staging styles. Fechter finally proves Siddons’s reading of the insularity of the English stage to be outdated: the actor’s combination of melodramatic technique with a constant consideration of nature was instrumental in the development of what would by the end of the century become the accepted modern English drama. Fechter’s life and career, however, were both full of contradiction and controversy. He was at the same time the perfect stage lover and an ardent critic of the traditions of the stage. He was a dedicated Frenchman who wrote even his last letters in French and retained his accent but also the actor who adapted Shakespeare—that most English of playwrights—to the modern theatre. At a time when the French were still looked on with distrust in London and still suspected of intending to incite revolution, Fechter revolutionised the London stage.