The Lyceum Theatre and its Double: Richard Mansfield's Visit to the Greenwich Meridian of Late-Victorian Theatre

Abstract

Despite his ambitions to be considered among the greatest actors in the world, Richard Mansfield only appeared as a starring performer outside of North America in one tour. Drawing on Pascale Casanova's notion of the “world republic of literature”, this paper analyses his London residency of 1888–89 and its financial and critical failure, characterising these as evidence of a transatlantic cultural system by which late-Victorian acting was accorded aesthetic value based on the judgment of professional critics in metropolitan centres like London. Mansfield's choices of repertoire are seen as part of his conscious desire to emulate, and compete with, Henry Irving, then the English world's most prominent actor. Ultimately, failure in London made Mansfield, a British citizen by birth, choose to embrace an identity as a distinctly American actor-manager.