Samuel Phelps' Antony and Cleopatra in Australia: An Unrecorded Promptbook for Performance in Melbourne, 1856. (2nd January 2017) - McInnis, David
ABSTRACT: The University of Melbourne's Baillieu Library holds an unrecorded and virtually unknown document related to Samuel Phelps' landmark production of Antony and Cleopatra (Sadler's Wells, 1849): a promptbook apparently marked up for a slated performance in Australia, bearing a half-title inscription that reads: "R. W. Younge / Theatre Royal / Melbourne. Feby 1856″. Although there is no record of a performance having actually taken place, the promptbook offers a fascinating glimpse of how Phelps' extraordinarily successful English production – which is, remarkably, the earliest documented performance of Shakespeare's play rather than Dryden's adaptation – was considered for an overseas performance. It is especially valuable in that the promptbook for Phelps' original production is also still extant, meaning that we have both an original and a touring promptbook for the same nineteenth-century production of a Shakespeare play. When Antony and Cleopatra did eventually premiere in Australia in 1867 at the Theatre Royal, Melbourne, it was Charles Calvert's much abbreviated version, following performances in Manchester and London. Younge's promptbook therefore represents not only a potential production in Australia over a decade before Antony and Cleopatra 's true premiere there, but also an ambitious attempt to emulate the success of Phelps' earlier production in England.