ABSTRACT
Ellen Terry's self-understanding and public image straddled Victorian and modern womanhood. But her lectures, delivered between her 53rd and 74th years, began to close the gap between her Victorian role of serving the vision of male artists and her modern role of serving her own vision as a writer and critic. This chapter argues that the voicing of Terry's Shakespeare lectures, both the use of her celebrated speaking voice ventriloquizing the women in Shakespeare's plays and her dedication of that voice to women, created a Shakespearean after voice in service to the feminist movement. Terry's voice evokes a memory of the greatness of the Lyceum seasons, an anachronistic, imperial greatness. It also evokes an earlier era of the great declamatory actors, planting their feet, inflating their lungs, posing their bodies and delivering set speeches with a repertoire of emphatic gesture and verbal emphasis that newer Ibsenite actors were replacing with a relatively understated inwardness.
