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Hardy scholars and others have long been familiar with the outlines of the controversy over the production of Arthur Wing Pinero's The Squire at the St James's Theatre on 29 December 1881. Pinero was immediately accused by several theatre critics of having plagiarized Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd; in letters to the press both Hardy and his collaborator, Joseph Comyns Carr, insisted that the management of the St James's had read
Familiar as the outlines of the controversy are, it has rarely been considered in the context of Hardy's career-long interest in the theatre or of the several other instances of his entering into collaborative relationships.[2] Nor has any sustained attempt been made to engage with the one surviving textual witness, the copy of Far from the Madding Crowd submitted to the Lord Chamberlain's Office for licensing just prior to the play's first performance, at the Prince of Wales Theatre in Liverpool, on 27 February 1882,[3] or with the small group of surviving letters from Carr to Hardy in the Dorset County Museum.[4] Richard Little Purdy, in his Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study, provides the fullest available account of the dramatization,[5] but his principal concern is to identify and bibliographically 'reconstruct' a printed ur-text, called The Mistress of the Farm, from the extensive fragments incorporated into the collaborative (and predominantly manuscript) Far from the Madding Crowd, which is itself only briefly referred to. Purdy acknowledged it to be 'more probable' that The Mistress of the Farm reflected a first collaboration between Hardy and Carr rather than Hardy's exclusive work, but by isolating it so decisively from the Hardy-Carr Far from the Madding Crowd within the context of a Hardy bibliography he created an exaggerated impression of the extent to which the textual stage represented by its surviving leaves was both readily distinguishable and arguably Hardyan. By giving full attention in this paper to all elements of the Far from the Madding Crowd manuscript as submitted to the Lord Chamberlain's Office, I hope to be able to substantiate Purdy's scrupulous but evidently reluctant suspicion about
One of the difficulties hampering any close investigation of the original Hardy-Carr collaboration has always been the conflicting testimony of those most immediately involved. The two principal participants told somewhat different stories in the public letters they wrote in response to the first reviews of The Squire, Hardy declaring in The Times that the managers of the St James's Theatre had had in their hands, not only 'the novel accessible to everybody', but also 'a manuscript play of my own', based on the novel but in some unspecified sense 'improved' by Carr before submission, while Carr himself recalled that he had 'prepared in collaboration with Mr. Hardy a dramatic version of his story'.[6] Many years later, in the official biography of himself that Hardy wrote for posthumous publication over his wife's name, he characterized the Liverpool production as a 'dramatization . . . prepared by Mr J. Comyns Carr some months earlier' (Life and Work, p. 158). Later still, Alice Carr, Comyns Carr's wife, implied in one set of memoirs that she had herself initiated a dramatization of Far from the Madding Crowd that her husband had then taken over, 'only keeping portions of the dialogue as I had adapted it to stage necessity',[7] while in another set she intimated that her husband was the initiator and that he and she had then carried out the task together: 'with the consent and assistance of the author we constructed a play from Thomas Hardy's book'.[8] It is small wonder that James F. Stottlar, in his account of the controversy as an episode in the history of the theatre, is forced to admit his inability to 'reconcile all of the discrepancies'.[9]
Such reconciliation may indeed be impossible. It is clear, for example, that Alice Carr's memories, demonstrably self-conflicting, were unreliable in other respects,[10] and that Hardy in old age was deliberately distancing him-self from a play that was 'not sufficiently near the novel to be to [his] liking' (Life and Work, p. 158) and that he had no wish to see revived.[11] Responding
That these negative responses to the dramatization were not solely the consequence of altered aesthetic assumptions is clear from the indications in Carr's letter to Hardy of 20 January 1882 that Hardy had doubts about associating his name—and, indeed, his novel—with the production that was now being launched in opposition to The Squire: specifically, he wanted the authorship of the play to remain anonymous and its title to be something other than Far from the Madding Crowd. But Carr, recognizing that it would be advantageous to exploit the publicity generated by the Squire controversy, argued strenuously against such drastic measures and against an alternative suggestion of Hardy's that theatrical colleagues had found 'too circuitous and too unusual for a playbill'. He proposed instead that the play be advertised as 'Far From The Madding Crowd "adapted by J. Comyns Carr from the novel of that name in conjunction with the author Mr- Thomas Hardy". I am assured [he added] that in case of failure this description would quite relieve you of responsibility' (Dorset County Museum). In the event this formula too was abandoned in favour of the thoroughly conventional 'By Thomas Hardy and J. Comyns Carr',[13] and Hardy, generously invoked by Carr in his first-night speech, found himself much mentioned in reviews and in the extensive quotations from those reviews included in the advertisements for the play which appeared in the London newspapers.[14]
In order to obtain a better understanding of Hardy's profound ambivalence about the play, and a clearer sense of the different phases and different hands involved in its composition, it is necessary to turn to the other available evidence. The Lord Chamberlain's copy of Far from the Madding Crowd is comprised of two notebooks, the first containing Acts I and II of the play as submitted, the second containing Act III. The first notebook, measuring 17.7 by 11.9 cm., is made up of sixty-one leaves, plus front and rear endpapers, stitched and glued together and wrapped along the spine with purple cloth tape. The gatherings are irregular, the first consisting of the front endpaper
The first gathering, final three gatherings, and rear endpapers are all of the same type of unruled paper, but the notebook has been disassembled and reassembled on at least one occasion and in the second through fifth gatherings the same paper has been interleaved with leaves of a printed text, each of whose pages bears the running head 'the mistress of the farm.' Present are pages 19-36 of The Mistress of the Farm, constituting the entirety of its second act,[15] and pages 37-58, constituting the entirety of its third act. The first gathering (fos. 1-4 in the British Library foliation[16]) is in the hand of Alice Carr; the second through fifth gatherings (fos. 5-33) contain revisions in her hand and her husband's hand on both the printed (ex-Mistress) leaves and the facing blank leaves; the final three gatherings consist entirely of blank leaves. Evidence of Hardy's hand can be found on only a single page (fo. 14v), where he has struck through his own incomplete comment.
The actual text inscribed or incorporated into the first notebook terminates at the conclusion of Act II of Far from the Madding Crowd—corresponding closely, though by no means precisely, to the conclusion of the third act of The Mistress of the Farm. Act III of Far from the Madding Crowd, instead of occupying those available final leaves of the first notebook, was submitted to the Lord Chamberlain's Office in a separate, commercially produced notebook. Measuring 19.7 by 16.3 cm., this notebook is comprised of a single gathering of forty-eight ruled leaves stitched through the centre to the cover of red cloth over flexible card. The first twenty-six leaves (fos. 35-60) constitute a fair-copy transcription of the greater part of Act III, beginning in Carr's hand but continuing in Alice Carr's hand and then in an unidentified hand. The twenty-seventh through twenty-ninth leaves (fos. 61-63) have pasted on to them complete or fragmentary leaves torn from at least two copies of The Mistress of the Farm—pages 64-66 from its fourth act and one numberless fragment apparently from its first act.[17] The thirtieth leaf is blank, and the thirty-first through thirty-ninth leaves (fos. 64-72) complete the transcription of Act III—first in the same unidentified hand, then in Alice Carr's hand,
The segments of The Mistress of the Farm incorporated into these two notebooks represent all that now remains of what was clearly a complete dramatization of Hardy's novel presumably put into print[18] with a view to its submission to one or more theatrical managers. Because both the plot and dialogue of The Mistress of the Farm tend to conform so closely to the plot and dialogue of Hardy's novel, it is tempting to think that it could indeed be a purely Hardyan text, the unalloyed product of the first stage in the process Hardy described to William Moy Thomas, the dramatic critic of the Daily News, on 30 December 1881:
Less than ideally specific is an undated letter from Carr, annotated ''80' by Hardy, in which he tells Hardy that 'We are hard at work upon your play and have some suggestions to make to you about it' (Dorset County Museum). However, in a later letter—again undated but written from Liverpool shortly after Far from the Madding Crowd had opened—Carr mentions valuable suggestions of a theatrically effective nature that Hardy himself had made on earlier occasions. When he speaks of Hardy's having 'proposed the total abolition of the first act', the reference must be to the abandonment of the first act of the printed Mistress of the Farm, which is wholly absent from the licensing copy of Far from the Madding Crowd, replaced there by a few pages of scene-setting and character-introducing rustic dialogue in Alice Carr's hand. But when Carr goes on to add, 'It was you also who at a much earlier date suggested that the second act should find them married' (letter of [early March 1882]; Dorset County Museum), the reference is clearly to an alteration incorporated into the printed text of The Mistress of the Farm, where the opening of the third act—which becomes, with the removal of the first act, Act II of Far from the Madding Crowd—is shortly followed, on pages 40-41 (fos. 23v-24r), by the entrance of Troy and Bathsheba, just returned to Weatherbury Farm following their secret marriage.
The 'suggestions' made by the Carrs at the same early stage in the history of the dramatization are impossible to reconstruct, but a possible clue is contained
According to the letter Carr wrote to Hardy immediately upon learning of the production of The Squire, their own play had been accepted at the St James's Theatre, managed by John Hare and William Hunter Kendal, but then 'rejected on the caprice of Mrs- Kendal'—that is, Madge Kendal, the actress and wife of William Kendal (letter of [29 December 1881?]; Dorset County Museum). In his letter to the Daily News, Carr said that the play had been well received by Hare—who 'undertook to produce it at the St. James's Theatre, provided it was found equally acceptable to his partner'—but it was 'not favourably received by Mr. and Mrs. Kendal' (2 January 1882, p. 2). The exact details of the situation—as of the extent, if any, of Pinero's knowledge of it[22]—now seem irrecoverable, but it is not in any case difficult to imagine why The Mistress of the Farm, as submitted, might finally have been judged commercially unviable. That the first act was in some way awkward and tedious is sufficiently indicated by Hardy and Carr's subsequent decision to scrap it entirely, and since Troy was already dead (shot by Fanny's brother) by the end of the third act little would seem to have remained for the fourth and final act other than the slow and not especially dramatic process of Oak and Bathsheba's resumption of courtship and eventual marriage. For whatever reason, the final version of the dramatization abandoned the existing last act, found in Bathsheba's revelation of her marriage a theatrically effective conclusion to what (with the disappearance of the old first act) was now Act II, and reserved Troy's death for the penultimate event of a new final Act III
The revisions to what were now Acts I and II mostly involved additions to the existing text, the excision of material at the beginning presumably mandating expansion later on, and it is of some interest that both the additions and the revisions to these acts (as contained in the first notebook) seem to have been aimed chiefly at reducing the stiffness of the dialogue, decreasing the incidence of dialect in Oak's and Bathsheba's speeches, intensifying the dialect of the more 'rustic' characters, and bringing the text of the play closer to that of the novel. One might speculate that some at least of the changes had been made or recommended by Hardy himself and were simply being transferred (chiefly by Alice Carr) to this particular copy, but a likelier explanation —especially in light of Alice Carr's later references to adapting Hardy's dialogue to stage necessities—is perhaps that, for the Carrs, the simplest and quickest way of amplifying a text that already followed the novel fairly closely was to refer back to the novel yet again.
It is not in any case certain that Hardy participated at all actively in the process of final revision, his reluctance to be too prominently associated with the production seeming symptomatic of a desire to distance himself from the possibility of further controversy that might be damaging to his essential career as a novelist.[23] However, the presence of his hand in the first notebook —albeit only on one page—does suggest that he had at least read the final version of Acts I and II, though his sole comment,[24] struck through before completion, offers no criticism, thus further suggesting that he did not have any substantial objections to the revised text, unless, of course, he articulated them in a now lost letter. With the substantially rewritten concluding act the situation was quite different, since Carr—because of time constraints, because Hardy had given him a nearly free hand, or simply because it seemed to him the only practicable procedure—did not send a copy of Act III to Hardy until it was already too late for changes to the production to be put into effect. In an undated letter written when the play was already in rehearsal, Carr confirms that things are going to plan ('We have decided as agreed between us to put the play back early in the present century') and gives reasons for the delay in supplying Hardy with the text of the new Act III: 'I should have sent you down the last act before but time so pressed that I was obliged to have the parts copied first. I have made more action in it and I think you will like
What seems certain is that Hardy was deeply dissatisfied with Act III in its radically altered form, but was rendered essentially powerless—by time, distance, and theatrical inexperience—to affect the production in any significant way. His comments and suggestions—still visible on the licensing copy—evidently reached Liverpool only a few days before the opening night. Carr must himself have been under pressure from the more experienced Charles Kelly, who was playing Gabriel Oak but also acting as a stage manager, and he perhaps had less power to influence the final form of the production than Hardy imagined. The letter Carr wrote to Hardy shortly after the opening (i.e. in early March) and in response to Hardy's comments on the early reviews seems in any case to be offering for the first time an explanation of why his suggestions for the new Act III had not been adopted. Carr chiefly pleads, as in his letter sending the text of the act, the pressure of time and the fact that the actors had already learned their parts, but he also insists, in respect of particular suggestions, that they 'would have entirely dislocated the play as it stands and involved an amount of rewriting for which there was absolutely no time or opportunity' (Dorset County Museum).
Carr clearly had some grounds for arguing as he did. A fundamental change had been made between the shooting of Troy by Fanny's brother, Will, at the end of the penultimate act of The Mistress of the Farm and the postponement of that shooting to the end of the final act of Far from the Madding Crowd, the alteration requiring Act III now to begin with Bathsheba's retrospective narration of Troy's disappearance and presumed death two years earlier, on the very day of their wedding. Hardy's pencilled, erased, and then newly pencilled suggestion, 'Would it not be more natural if they had been married 2 or 3 months',[26] entirely overlooked the pains that had been taken in the preceding act to suggest that Troy and Bathsheba, though married, had not in fact spent a night together.[27] It would also (as Carr's letter
Equally problematic was Hardy's objection to a reference in Act III to Fanny Robin's suicide by drowning:[28] 'Why not died in workhouse, or hung herself in workhouse? I should much prefer keeping as near the book as possible.'[29] Again, he seems to have forgotten that Fanny's suicide and Troy's responsibility for it had been established—melodramatically and at some length—in Act II, so that Carr could with some justification respond: 'I do not myself see that anything is gained by the suggested alteration but I am quite certain that it would have involved the entire rewriting of the act [i.e. Act II] and I know of no one who has seen the play who does not find this act its best part' (letter of [early March 1882]).
Hardy's unease with the entire situation is well signalled by his preference for 'keeping as near the book as possible', and it would seem that his reading of the final act of Far from the Madding Crowd, reinforced by the first reviews of the Liverpool production, had given him a strong sense of the extent to which the play had departed not only from the novel but from his own control. From a description of the play in one early review it would appear that some aspects of the production may have gone even beyond the limits of the 'script' as represented by the licensing copy:
The story as told in the stage version may thus be briefly detailed:—Bathesheba [sic] Everdene, the young mistress of Weatherbury Farm, while secretly loved by a farmer named Gabriel Oak, with all a female's infatuation and waywardness, gives her affections to a Dragoon sergeant named Troy, a scoundrel who has already done irreparable injury to the maid Fanny Robin. During an interview between Gabriel Oak and Will Robin, the gipsy, the latter announces that Troy has seduced his sister, and he (Robin) means to be avenged on him. Gabriel attempts to pacify him, and they depart. Next the wronged girl and the faithless sergeant have an interview, which concludes with an attempt on the part of the villain to knock his victim down the village well. [The stage direction indicates only that he knocks her down.] Finally Bathesheba and her pretty maid, Lydia, enter and observe that a straw rick has taken fire, and they dispatch the rustics to put out the flames. The hero of the fire turns out to be Garbriel Oak, who is rewarded with the appointment of farm bailiff to Miss Everdene.
In the second act we find that the sergeant and Bathesheba have been clandestinely married, and almost the first act of the husband is to insist upon the dismissal of Gabriel Oak from the position of farm bailiff. This is accomplished by the heroine, who finds a pretext in the solemn warning against Troy, which Oak sees fit to address to her. Then the two men have an exciting encounter, at the end of which the wily soldier, by means of clever inuendoes, [sic] renders Oak as anxious to get the sergeant
After the supposed lapse of two years, the third act opens with a situation in the course of which we gather that Sergeant Troy has been drowned. Bathesheba is found mourning for her husband, and still loved by her bailiff. He, hearing his name coupled with that of his mistress, decides to quit the country, and so gives her notice to leave. This she will not accept, and ends by asking him to stay, and to stay as her husband. Then comes the greatest situation of the play, for, whilst the villagers and servants are rejoicing at the news and congratulating the happy pair, Troy suddenly returns and claims his wife. She is about to follow him, when Will Robin comes on the scene and shoots him dead, whilst Bathesheba returns to the loving protection of Gabriel Oak. It will be gathered from this outline that there are several situations in the play, especially those at the close of the second and third acts, and the curtain fell on each occasion amid the most enthusiastic applause of the crowded audience.[30]
Although the play was still billed as a 'Pastoral Drama' and much of the dialogue was still recognizably close to that of the novel, the centrality now given to the role and actions of Will Robin[31] allowed one critic to pronounce that whereas Pinero in The Squire had achieved a genuinely 'idyllic and pastoral tone', even 'the purity and freshness of Mr. Hardy's style', Carr, on the other hand, 'with the apparent sanction of Mr. Hardy', leant 'rather to the melodramatic than to the idyllic spirit. The scent of the hay is there, but the smell of powder is stronger.'[32]
The mixed fortunes of The Mistress of the Farm were not such as to deter Hardy from all subsequent involvement in theatrical matters, but the experience brought him frustrations and disappointments that can hardly have been recompensed by Carr's first-night curtain speech,[33] in which he was variously reported as attributing to Hardy 'all that was original in character and plot in the play', 'all that was original in the plot or incident in the drama', or, simply, 'all the excellence of the work'.[34] Hardy knew well enough that such terminology, though no doubt generous in its intentions, nonetheless left ample room for much in the play that was not in fact his, and it is surely neither surprising nor, on his part, disingenuous that he should have
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