Samuel Phelps
He is known for reviving the fortunes of the neglected Sadler's Wells Theatre and for his productions of Shakespeare's plays which were presented with attention to period detail and dramatic veracity, and used texts purged of 18th-century alterations and additions.
Working his way up in provincial companies he graduated from small supporting parts to leading roles, making his London début as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice in 1839.
[1] Unlike his younger brother Robert – a fine mathematician who became master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge – Phelps was not academically inclined and he developed a strong desire to go on the stage.
[2] The family was well connected and prosperous,[3] and Phelps's father provided him with opportunities to visit London, where a cousin who was a dramatic critic frequently took him to the theatre.
[1] From these, he moved up to the leading roles in King Lear, Macbeth, Othello and The Merchant of Venice, playing in theatres in southern England.
After Phelps made a successful London début, starring as Shylock in Webster's production of The Merchant of Venice, and then playing Hamlet, Othello and Richard III at the Haymarket, he moved to Covent Garden, where he remained from 1837 to 1839.
Knight adds that Phelps was an intelligent and spirited manager, and that Sadler's Wells became "a recognised home of the higher drama, and, to some extent, a training school for actors".
[1] After he played Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Athenaeum said of him, "We have been sometimes tempted to think that if Mr Phelps had early taken to comedy, and particularly to what are technically termed character parts, he would have accomplished a more profitable reputation than that he now enjoys as a tragedian.
[22] British critics had long observed that one of the characteristics of Phelps's acting style – contrasting with those of Kean and Macready – was his ability to express intensity and depth of emotion without resorting to unnatural vehemence and overt theatricality.
[23] Greenwood retired as the company's business manager in 1861; Phelps found the strain of running the theatre single-handed, at a time when his wife was gravely ill, too much, and in March 1862 he resigned.
[1] Phelps accepted an offer from Charles Fechter to join the latter's company at the Lyceum Theatre, but the collaboration was an unhappy one, and in 1863 he joined F. B. Chatterton and Edmund Falconer at Drury Lane, where he remained for seven years, successfully reprising many of his old parts and adding the title role in Byron's Manfred (1863), Mephistopheles in Faust (1866), and the Doge in Bayle Bernard's The Doge of Venice (1867).
