At thirty he was lessee of the Herculaneum, one of the three fashionable theatrical houses in the Strand. He had probably borrowed far more money than he could ever repay but it made him one of the great actor-managers. Even his debts were equalised after the tercentenary revival of The Spanish Tragedy by Shakespeare’s great rival Thomas Kyd. Reviewers swore that the like of Caradoc as the mad hero Hieronymo had not been seen on the London stage since Edmund Kean, seventy years before.
After the last performance, he rose as Sir Henry Caradoc Price. Among his rivals at that time, only Irving had been so honoured. As a Knight of the Order of the British Empire, Caradoc was also one of the first men invited to record his voice upon the new wax discs of Thomas Edison. He showed little gratitude. After listening to the result he replied to the inventor, “Sir, I have tested your machine. It adds a new terror to life and makes death a long-felt want.”
Now he could afford to be popular. Comedies like The Corsican Brothers by Alexandre Dumas and such sentimental melodramas as Du Maurier’s Trilby or The Bells by Leopold Lewis ran at the Royal Herculaneum month after month. He threw down the gauntlet to Irving, a few doors away at the Lyceum, and the Gatti brothers at the Adelphi. “When I pass before the theatre and read my name in such large letters,” he once remarked, “I blush—but I instinctively raise my hat.” He was armed against all criticism. A notice above his dressing-room door read, “Every man is a potential genius—until he does something.” Elsewhere he answered those who denounced his “tampering” with the text and setting of Shakespeare, “A critic is merely one who uses dead languages to disguise his ignorance of life.”
There were by now many people who had reason to dislike Caradoc—or even to detest him. A mental crisis seemed to derail him after ten or twelve years of fame. He was more apt to take an evening off and let his understudy appear for him. He would be content to play King Claudius where once he must be Hamlet.
In money matters, his voice acquired a confident and jovial insincerity. It had the reassurance of a rogue who made common cause with you because his interest and yours were the same—and you were exhilarated to have him on your side rather than against you. Even those who subsequently counted their losses smiled at one another in the knowledge that they had Caradoc as their ally.
Saddest of all, he and Lady Myfanwy, the Celtic princess of his youth and the wife of his middle years, had grown apart from one another. Caradoc was apt to forget, as Holmes put it politely, where he should be sleeping. Yet he remained loyal to his childhood and his Welsh birth, if to nothing else. It was a point of honour that he should live in Hammersmith, only because it was the nearest London borough to Wales, a hundred and fifty miles away.
With the coming of the mass circulation newspaper and the monthly “society” magazine, far more people read about Caradoc than ever saw him on the stage. His photograph also appeared in the weekly sporting papers with their love of gossip and scandal. He was always ready to comment on any subject the reporters might put to him. Unfortunately, this opened the door to the most acrimonious public exchanges. The tongue that had been so mellifluous on the stage was apt to grow venomous in private quarrels.
Caradoc Price was a pitiless enemy, never more so than in his final vendetta with Oscar Wilde after 1890. The quarrel between the maverick Welsh actor and the egotistical Irish wit began during a long run of Hamlet at the Herculaneum. Robert Reynolds, a sycophant of Wilde, stole one of his master’s witticisms and applied it as the headline of his review of Caradoc’s characterisation of the Danish prince. “Price Without Value,” as the heading called it. Reynolds attacked what he called the vulgarisation of text and scene which Caradoc had inflicted upon Shakespeare’s play.
It might have ended there, for Reynolds did not say much that other journalists had not said already. Unfortunately, Wilde himself visited the Herculaneum during the run of the play. By this time the great Welsh Shakespearean had grown thick-set. Wilde was witty in the circle bar. Worse still, he became louder as his companions fell respectfully silent around him. He intoned Hamlet’s famous speech, “Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt.” It was “the lament of a man who can act the Prince of Denmark only by courtesy of the corsetier.” This pleasantry ran round until it hit its target. Caradoc recognised Wilde as his antagonist and flayed him as an example to others. To the sporting journalists he confessed, “I employ the services of a corsetier and perhaps should not. Wilde does not—and most certainly should—a middle-aged man who abandons his sex and casts himself as Salome.”
This would have been bad enough. Caradoc in his present mood apparently thought it fell short. He remarked to a wide circle of his own admirers at a green room supper after a performance of The Second Mrs Tanqueray that “Mr Wilde’s tragedy is to become the creator of laughter on the public stage and of sniggering in private conversations.” He was too close to the mark, and the endangered playwright dared not retort on such a subject. Within a few days, Caradoc’s epigram was quoted in the gossip column of The Winning Post. A fortnight later his portly antagonist was arrested at the Cadogan Hotel on charges of indecency.
Wilde’s plays closed and his books were withdrawn but Caradoc would not leave the wretched man alone to his destruction. He harped on Wilde’s physical appearance, assuring his Herculaneum audience, after a curtain call, “The London theatre has suffered a heavy loss in Mr Wilde. He has left a gap which it will be hard to fill.” There was little laughter and a long silence of embarrassment. Even death was no reason for mercy, at least in private conversation. “Mr Wilde has been such a bore all his life that it is no wonder the grave should yawn for him.”
In his later years Caradoc lost friends and made enemies. It was hard to say how many friends he lost or how violent were the enemies he made. People in the theatrical profession were simply frightened of him. Among his admirers, the laughter at his jibes grew hesitant and the silences became longer. Holmes knew more than I did, but to me it almost seemed that the poor fellow had become an obsessive, if not demented.
He always drank more than was good for him. Backstage, at the green room banquets which followed his performances, he presided as tyrant and buffoon before his own actors and a host of theatrical celebrities. Here he was in his element. The characters of men and, worse still, the reputations of women who had resisted his charms were publicly flayed in his harangues for the benefit of gossip columns of The Winning Post or Town and Turf. Private lives were turned to public laughter all over London. Once, notoriously, the soul of his partner in romance had been so brutalised in his onslaught that she could no longer face her family or friends. Mockery followed her everywhere. She was found several days later, having opened her veins in the bath like a dishonoured matron of the Roman world. It was a brave man who stood his ground against Caradoc and a still braver woman who defied him to do his worst. Yet he remained the great tragedian of his day
I thought of all this as I gathered and checked the details for the present narrative. I returned the Sassanoff programmes to their envelope. I took out one or two other documents and letters. Then I closed and locked the tin trunk again. As I went back cautiously down the attic steps, I recalled the comfortable New Year’s Eve when the whole thing began. How close and vivid it seemed as I held the papers in my hand—and yet what a different world it had been to the one I was living in now, so many years later!