ABSTRACT
In 1900 Craig proposed for himself a characteristically far-reaching scheme of work: designing "Scenes, Costumes, Props, Movements and the rest" for seven of Shakespeare's plays (including Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Merchant of Venice), for romantic poetic dramas such as Peer Gynt and Faust, for "pantomimes and masques," and for musical productions ranging from "Symphonies by Mozart and Beethoven" and Bach's Passion to three Wagner operas and Purcell's Fairy Queen.! This "list of things to be prepared and done" ends with the note, "Prepare slowly my book on the Theatre and its Art," and the fact that this is the final item is significant. Productions precede theory. In a sense the main outlines of all his works for the conventional theater are contained in these early notes. He was later to design The Merchant of Venice for Ellen Terry, Macbeth for Beerbohm Tree in 1909 and then for Tyler in 1928, and Hamlet for Stanislavski. One of Ibsen's romantic plays was the first straight drama he directed, and another closed his stage career; and he worked on masques and The St. Matthew Passion off and on over the next thirty years. The fact that, right at the outset of his career as a director, so much of his future program was already articulated in outline gives unexpected consistency and coherence to his development, which otherwise seems so full of fresh starts and new directions. What the list also indicates, however, is a simultaneous preoccupation with such a wide diversity of projects that the odds were against any single production ever being completed - and this scattering of energy is indeed one of the reasons why Craig achieved relatively little on the stage.
