This article examines the role and reputation of Ellen Terry, the most eminent British Shakespearean actress of the late-Victorian period, and the extent to which she interrogated her function on the eminently spectacular stage of London’s Lyceum theatre. The article contends that in her writing – her autobiography, annotations of playscripts and lectures – Terry self-consciously and deliberately repositions herself as a Shakespeare commentator, and hence as one no longer subject to the temporal and visual limitations of the spectacular stage.
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Mayali, Laurent (1991) ‘For a Political Economy of Annotation’, pp. 185-191 in Stephen Barney (ed.) Annotation and its Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press .
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Terry, Ellen (1908) The Story of My Life. London: Hutchinson .
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Terry, Ellen (1932) Four Lectures on Shakespeare. London: Hopkinson .
