University of Virginia Library

Whose Mistress? Thomas Hardy's Theatrical Collaboration
by
Pamela Dalziel

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

and rejected a dramatization of the novel that they themselves had submitted and that was, in certain respects, still closer to The Squire; Pinero denied all knowledge of any such adaptation and asserted that the play was 'solely the result of [his] own plan and purpose'.[1] Supporters rallied to both camps, and the argument was intermittently sustained in a number of newspapers and magazines over the next several months, kept alive by the commercial success of The Squire and the decision of Hardy and Carr to produce their own version of Far from the Madding Crowd, under that title, first in Liverpool and other provincial cities and then at the Globe Theatre in London. The two plays in fact ran head to head for several weeks in the late spring of 1882, with Far from the Madding Crowd faltering and falling first and The Squire emerging as the clear commercial victor.

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

the authorship of The Mistress of the Farm, disentangle much more clearly than before the compositional history of the Hardy-Carr Far from the Madding Crowd, and establish the complexly collaborative status of the document that constitutes its unique textual witness.

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

in April 1910 to a request from the Society of Authors for a list of his dramatic works, he wrote: 'A dramatization by J. Comyns Carr of Far from the Madding Crowd was produced in 1882. I had no hand in this beyond authorizing it' (Collected Letters, iv. 80). And in 1926 Florence Hardy spoke of Far from the Madding Crowd as having been dramatized 'very badly, by Comyns Carr, and my husband says that it would have been a success if it had been done differently'.[12]

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

(to which a leaf of rust-brown paper has been glued to form a front cover) plus the front free endpaper and two other leaves, the second of sixteen leaves, the third of seventeen leaves, the fourth of seven leaves, the fifth of four leaves, the sixth of nine leaves, the seventh of two leaves (two further leaves having been torn away), and the eighth of four leaves. The final gathering is followed by the rear free endpaper and the rear endpaper (to which another leaf of rust-brown paper has been glued to form a back cover).

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,

and finally in Carr's hand. A number of leaves in this second notebook also bear pencil comments and additions in Hardy's hand, for the most part erased, though legible still.

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:

But there is evidence indicating that both Carr and his wife were involved in the dramatization at quite an early stage and that The Mistress of the Farm in its printed form (as distinct from Hardy's presumed but now vanished manuscript) incorporates whatever of their suggestions Hardy agreed to accept.

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

in the letter of protest against The Squire that Hardy sent to The Times: 'Moreover, a gipsy, who does not exist in the novel, was introduced into our play, and I see that a gipsy figures in The Squire' (2 January 1882, p. 6). Although Hardy's phrase 'our play' is not in itself definitive, it does suggest that while Hardy himself may have sought to condense the action of the novel by omitting the role of Boldwood,[19] giving his surname to Fanny Robin, and introducing a new character, Fanny's brother Will,[20] as the instrument of revenge on Sergeant Troy, it was probably Carr who turned him into the 'mad' figure of The Mistress of the Farm as actually printed. Curiously, Will is nowhere identified as a gipsy in any of the printed pages that survive,[21] but if, as would appear, the version submitted to the St James's Theatre was the printed text of The Mistress of the Farm in its complete and unaltered form, then such a characterization of Will could have appeared in the subsequently deleted first act, or even in the list of dramatis personae.

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

that seems—apart from the few printed pages retained from The Mistress of the Farm—to have been completely rewritten.

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

[it] but as the actors have the parts don't alter more than you can help.'[25] It seems fair to assume from Carr's use of 'before' that this letter was in fact accompanied by the new Act III as contained in the second of the Far from the Madding Crowd notebooks. The implication would also seem to be that Hardy had by this time already seen and approved the alterations to Acts I and II contained in the first notebook. This sequence of events suggests a possible explanation for the slightly puzzling use of a second notebook when a considerable amount of blank space remained at the end of the first: Acts I and II, heavily dependent on the printed text of The Mistress of the Farm, could have been reworked relatively quickly and sent to Hardy for comment, while Act III, only minimally dependent on The Mistress of the Farm, required more time for its comprehensive rewriting.

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

pointed out) render absurd several of the preceding events, including Bathsheba's ruse to get Lydia out of the house and her appeal to her work-folk to remember their pledge of good will should they have cause in the future to think ill of her.

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:

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

sought to disown the work in later years. There is perhaps a lesson here for modern students of Hardy, who may need to recognize that neither the surviving dramatization called Far from the Madding Crowd nor even what remains of The Mistress of the Farm can be viewed as other than the product of a complex revision process involving at least three hands, an intricately collaborative work with a far from automatic claim to inclusion in Hardy bibliographies.

Notes