Alfred Bunn

In Macready's own words, he walked past Bunn's door and “going up to him as he sat on the other side of the table, I struck him as he rose a backhanded slap across the face.

I did not hear what he said, but I dug my fist into him as effectively as I could; he caught hold of me, and got at one time the little finger of my left hand in his mouth, and bit it.”[2] Bunn also quarreled with the opera singer Jenny Lind, the "Swedish Nightingale", over her contract.

According to Lind's biographers, Henry Scott Holland and W. S. Rockstro, the singer “was so terrified at the penalties, the law-suits, and the disgrace with which Mrs. Bunn had threatened her, that her dearest and most trusted friends could not persuade her to entertain the idea of appearing at an English theatre, under any circumstances, or upon any terms whatever.

[1] In James Joyce's Ulysses, the main character Leopold Bloom thinks briefly (and incompletely) of a lyric Bunn wrote: "Whose smile upon each feature plays with such and such replete”.

The original lyric, from the William Vincent Wallace opera Maritana, is: “Whose smile upon each feature plays with truthfulness replete".