#ellen terry

The beetle wings dress

ELLEN TERRY AS LADY MCBETH AND THE BEETLE WINGS DRESS, 1889

"On 29 December 1888 a packed auditorium at London’s Lyceum Theatre sat in anticipation of the opening of Henry Irving’s revival of Macbeth. In taking the male lead and casting Ellen Terry (1847-1928) as Lady Macbeth, Irving was reuniting one of British theatre’s most cherished acting partnerships. Moreover, audience curiosity was piqued by Terry’s departure from her usual role of Shakespearean heroine to play a plotting villainess. As the curtain rose, her appearance on stage immediately drew gasps. For she emerged wearing a costume of bewitching splendour, a dress of shimmering green embellished with iridescent beetle-wing cases, finished with a velvet heather-coloured cloak over which her dark red hair, plaited in gold, cascaded.

Created by the esteemed costume designer Alice Laura Comyns-Carr and her dressmaker Ada Cort Nettleship, it was the first of three costumes intended to illustrate Lady Macbeth’s changing psychological state through the play. Inspired by a medieval effigy of Clotilde, queen of the Franks originally from Notre-Dame de Paris, Comyns-Carr combined the form of her open sleeved long gown and long braided hair surmounted by a crown with contemporary influences of artists in her circle, such as the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones. The dress’s green embodied the ruthless ambition and plot to murder of the play’s opening acts, while the crochet construction overlaid with beetle-wing cases combined the look of ‘soft chain armour’, with the ‘appearance of the scales of a serpent’.

Although critics and theatregoers were divided over Terry’s characterisation, they were united on the visual impact of her performance. Her costume created an ethereal vision that ‘might have stood in the court of Camelot’. Oscar Wilde, noting the contrast between her dress and the austere garb of the male cast, quipped ‘Lady Macbeth seems an economical housekeeper, and evidently patronises local industries for her husband’s clothes and the servants’ liveries; but she takes care to do her own shopping in Byzantium’. The dress was further immortalised in John Singer Sargent’s commanding full-length portrait of Terry as Lady Macbeth in 1889 which pictured the dramatic moment Lady Macbeth claims her crown as witnessed by him on opening night."

Nationaltrustcollections.co.uk

Ellen Terry was a close friend of Stoker's at the Lyceum theatre.

She depended upon Stoker, calling him "Ma” and "Mama,” relying on him equally for advice on stocks, small loans, tickets for friends, and proper material for costumes.

Married three times—each marriage as unusual as the others—Ellen Terry was Irving’s theater partner for twenty years, through twenty-seven productions.

She starred in theatrical productions of Henry Irving, including the role of Lady Macbeth

Catherine of Aragon On Stage and Screen: Part 1

Sarah Siddons, 18th Century/ Miss Glyn, 19th Century/ Dame Ellen Terry, 1856/ Mrs. Farren, 1859/ Gabrielle Krauss, 1883/ Violet Vanbrugh, 1912/ Hedwig Pauly- Winterstien, 1920/ Theresa Maxwell-Conover, 1922/ Phyllis Nelson-Terry, 1936/ Rosalie Crutchley, 1953.

Ellen Terry as Lady MacBeth

Artist: John Singer Sargent (American, 1856–1925)

Date: 1889

Medium: Oil paint on canvas

Collection: Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom

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