ABSTRACT
Ellen Terry and Henry Irving had a long and financially successful working relationship at the Lyceum Theatre, most memorably, perhaps, as partners in crime in Macbeth. Irving was known as the ‘Vicar’, the ‘Chief and the ‘Governor’. These patriarchal titles emphasised with every utterance that Irving, the actor-manager, was in charge. The tendency to blur the boundaries between stage and wings, to presume that an embrace on stage might linger after the lights have been extinguished, is still the staple of popular journalism, but George Bernard Shaw made an authoritative public statement about Ellen Terry's relationships after her death. In the very long preface he had the privilege to write to the controversial Shaw-Terry correspondence, he claimed:
One may say that her marriages were adventures and her friendships enduring. And all these friendships had the character of innocent love affairs: her friends were her lovers in every sense except the technical one; and she was incapable of returning their regard coolly: she felt either warmly or not at all. 1
