Charles Brookfield
Encyclopedia
Saturday Review (London)
The Saturday Review of politics, literature, science, and art was a London weekly newspaper established by A. J. B. Beresford Hope in 1855....
. His most famous work for the theatre was The Belle of Mayfair
The Belle of Mayfair
The Belle of Mayfair is a musical comedy composed by Leslie Stuart with a book by Basil Hood, Charles Brookfield and Cosmo Hamilton. The story is inspired by the Shakespeare play Romeo and Juliet....
(1906).
Brookfield achieved success in a 20-year acting career, including with the company of Squire Bancroft
Squire Bancroft
Sir Squire Bancroft , born Squire White Butterfield, was an English actor-manager. He and his wife Effie Bancroft are considered to have instigated a new form of drama known as 'drawing-room comedy' or 'cup and saucer drama', owing to the realism of their stage sets.-Early life and career:Bancroft...
at London's Haymarket Theatre
Haymarket Theatre
The Theatre Royal Haymarket is a West End theatre in the Haymarket in the City of Westminster which dates back to 1720, making it the third-oldest London playhouse still in use...
in the 1880s. After he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, in 1898, Brookfield focused on writing plays and musical theatre
Musical theatre
Musical theatre is a form of theatre combining songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The emotional content of the piece – humor, pathos, love, anger – as well as the story itself, is communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an...
. In his last years, he was Britain's Examiner of Plays, even though he had been criticized as biased against various playwrights and also for writing a particularly risqué comedy in 1908.
Early life and career
Brookfield was born in LondonLondon
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, the third child of Rev. William Henry Brookfield
William Henry Brookfield
William Henry Brookfield was an Anglican priest, Inspector of Schools, and chaplain-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria. His son was the playwright Charles Brookfield.-Biography:...
, curate of St. Luke's, Berwick Street and his wife, Jane Octavia Elton, novelist, daughter of Sir Charles Elton, 6th Baronet
Elton Baronets
The Elton Baronetcy, of Bristol, is a title in the Baronetage of Great Britain. It was created on 31 October 1717 for Abraham Elton, Mayor of and Member of Parliament for Bristolfrom 1722 to 1727. The second Baronet was also Mayor of Bristol and represented Taunton and Bristol in the House of...
and niece of Henry Hallam
Henry Hallam
Henry Hallam was an English historian.-Life:The only son of John Hallam, canon of Windsor and dean of Bristol, Henry Hallam was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, graduating in 1799...
. Brookfield was named after his paternal grandfather, a solicitor. His mother was a close friend of Thackeray
William Makepeace Thackeray
William Makepeace Thackeray was an English novelist of the 19th century. He was famous for his satirical works, particularly Vanity Fair, a panoramic portrait of English society.-Biography:...
and other literary figures, and his father was a devotee of the theatre, and young Brookfield grew up used to the company of artists and celebrities. With his brother Arthur, he created "dramatic diversions" at home. He was educated at Westminster School
Westminster School
The Royal College of St. Peter in Westminster, almost always known as Westminster School, is one of Britain's leading independent schools, with the highest Oxford and Cambridge acceptance rate of any secondary school or college in Britain...
, from 1871 to 1873, and over the next two years attended lectures at King's College London
King's College London
King's College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the federal University of London. King's has a claim to being the third oldest university in England, having been founded by King George IV and the Duke of Wellington in 1829, and...
, while also studying French theatre and becoming a reviewer of novels for The Examiner and a member of the Savile Club
Savile Club
The Savile Club was founded in 1868 for the purpose of conversation and good company. Though located somewhat out of the way from the main centre of London's gentlemen's clubs, closer to the residences of Mayfair than the clubs of Pall Mall and St James's Street, it still contained some prominent...
at the early age of seventeen. He then entered Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 170 Fellows...
(1875–78), participating in the productions of the Amateur Dramatic Club. There he earned the Winchester Reading Prize
Winchester Reading Prize
The Winchester Reading Prize, endowed in 1867 by John Noble, is awarded at the University of Cambridge for the public reading of passages:* of classical English Prose and Poetry;* of the Old and New Testament and the English Liturgy; and...
in 1878. After this, he tried studying law but disliked it.
Despite opposition from his family, Brookfield decided to try acting and made his professional stage debut in 1879 in a production of Still Waters Run Deep at the Alexandra Palace Theatre. In his first year, he appeared mostly on tour. In 1880, after a severe bout of ill health, Brookfield joined the company of Squire Bancroft
Squire Bancroft
Sir Squire Bancroft , born Squire White Butterfield, was an English actor-manager. He and his wife Effie Bancroft are considered to have instigated a new form of drama known as 'drawing-room comedy' or 'cup and saucer drama', owing to the realism of their stage sets.-Early life and career:Bancroft...
at London's Haymarket Theatre
Haymarket Theatre
The Theatre Royal Haymarket is a West End theatre in the Haymarket in the City of Westminster which dates back to 1720, making it the third-oldest London playhouse still in use...
, earning complimentary reviews for his performances in supporting roles. In 1884 he married actress and author Frances Mary Grogan (1857–1926), who used the stage name Ruth Francis. The couple had one child, Peter, born in 1888. Brookfield became known for witty repartee and was popular at clubs and social gatherings. His acting career ranged from pantomime
Pantomime
Pantomime — not to be confused with a mime artist, a theatrical performer of mime—is a musical-comedy theatrical production traditionally found in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Jamaica, South Africa, India, Ireland, Gibraltar and Malta, and is mostly performed during the...
and farce
Farce
In theatre, a farce is a comedy which aims at entertaining the audience by means of unlikely, extravagant, and improbable situations, disguise and mistaken identity, verbal humour of varying degrees of sophistication, which may include word play, and a fast-paced plot whose speed usually increases,...
to Shakespeare. He starred in plays together with such stars of the day as Ellen Terry
Ellen Terry
Dame Ellen Terry, GBE was an English stage actress who became the leading Shakespearean actress in Britain. Among the members of her famous family is her great nephew, John Gielgud....
, Herbert Beerbohm Tree
Herbert Beerbohm Tree
Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree was an English actor and theatre manager.Tree began performing in the 1870s. By 1887, he was managing the Haymarket Theatre, winning praise for adventurous programming and lavish productions, and starring in many of its productions. In 1899, he helped fund the...
and the Kendals.
Early in his acting career, Brookfield began to write plays, including adaptations of French plays. His Poet and Puppets, a travesty of Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
's Lady Windermere's Fan
Lady Windermere's Fan
Lady Windermere's Fan, A Play About a Good Woman is a four act comedy by Oscar Wilde, first produced 22 February 1892 at the St James's Theatre in London. The play was first published in 1893...
, was well received at the Comedy Theatre in 1892, starring Charles Hawtrey and Lottie Venne
Lottie Venne
Lottie Venne was a British comedienne, actress and singer of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, who enjoyed a theatre career spanning five decades. Venne began her stage career in musical burlesque before moving into farce and comedy. She appeared in several works by each of F. C. Burnand and W. S...
. He also wrote To-day in 1892 and The Twilight of Love in 1893. In November 1893, he became the first actor known to portray Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective created by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The fantastic London-based "consulting detective", Holmes is famous for his astute logical reasoning, his ability to take almost any disguise, and his use of forensic science skills to solve...
on stage, appearing at the Royal Court Theatre in Under the Clock, a musical parody of Holmes and Watson written with Seymour Hicks
Seymour Hicks
Sir Arthur Seymour Hicks , better known as Seymour Hicks, was a British actor, music hall performer, playwright, screenwriter, theatre manager and producer. He married the actress Ellaline Terriss in 1893...
, who played Watson. Lottie Venne played Hannah, a maid of all-work. The piece angered Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle DL was a Scottish physician and writer, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, generally considered a milestone in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger...
. His play, A Woman's Reason, which ran at the Shaftesbury Theatre
Shaftesbury Theatre
The Shaftesbury Theatre is a West End Theatre, located on Shaftesbury Avenue, in the London Borough of Camden.-History:The theatre was designed for the brothers Walter and Frederick Melville by Bertie Crewe and opened on 26 December 1911 with a production of The Three Musketeers, as the New...
in 1895, was the first of his plays to appear on Broadway
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...
, in 1896. One of Brookfield's last acting roles was in The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein
La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein
La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein is an opéra bouffe , in three acts and four tableaux by Jacques Offenbach to an original French libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy...
, as Baron Grog, with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company
D'Oyly Carte Opera Company
The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company was a professional light opera company that staged Gilbert and Sullivan's Savoy operas. The company performed nearly year-round in the UK and sometimes toured in Europe, North America and elsewhere, from the 1870s until it closed in 1982. It was revived in 1988 and...
at the Savoy Theatre
Savoy Theatre
The Savoy Theatre is a West End theatre located in the Strand in the City of Westminster, London, England. The theatre opened on 10 October 1881 and was built by Richard D'Oyly Carte on the site of the old Savoy Palace as a showcase for the popular series of comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan,...
in 1897. He prepared the English adaptation of this piece, in which he bowdlerized
Thomas Bowdler
Thomas Bowdler was an English physician who published an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare's work, edited by his sister Harriet, intended to be more appropriate for 19th century women and children than the original....
the more risqué French version.
Later years
In 1898, after nearly two decades on stage, Brookfield gave up acting when, after a severe illness, he was diagnosed with advanced tuberculosis. He then focused, despite continued bouts of ill health and periods of convalescence in Europe, on journalism and writing farcical plays and musical theatre works. In 1900, he became a Roman Catholic and later visited Downside AbbeyDownside Abbey
The Basilica of St Gregory the Great at Downside, commonly known as Downside Abbey, is a Roman Catholic Benedictine monastery and the Senior House of the English Benedictine Congregation. One of its main apostolates is a school for children aged nine to eighteen...
, in Somerset, where his son became a pupil in 1901. His stage works, in addition to those mentioned above, include the farce The Cuckoo, which played at the Vaudeville Theatre
Vaudeville Theatre
The Vaudeville Theatre is a West End theatre on The Strand in the City of Westminster. As the name suggests, the theatre held mostly vaudeville shows and musical revues in its early days. It opened in 1870 and was rebuilt twice, although each new building retained elements of the previous...
(1899), also playing on Broadway the same year; a comic opera
Comic opera
Comic opera denotes a sung dramatic work of a light or comic nature, usually with a happy ending.Forms of comic opera first developed in late 17th-century Italy. By the 1730s, a new operatic genre, opera buffa, emerged as an alternative to opera seria...
, The Lucky Star
The Lucky Star
The Lucky Star is an English comic opera, in three acts, composed by Ivan Caryll, with dialogue by Charles H. Brookfield and lyrics by Adrian Ross and Aubrey Hopwood...
(1899), written in conjunction with Adrian Ross
Adrian Ross
For the NFL player see Adrian Ross Arthur Reed Ropes , better known under the pseudonym Adrian Ross, was a prolific writer of lyrics, contributing songs to more than sixty British musical comedies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries...
and Aubrey Hopwood for the D'Oyly Carte; a play called I Pagliacci, based on the opera, at the Savoy Theatre
Savoy Theatre
The Savoy Theatre is a West End theatre located in the Strand in the City of Westminster, London, England. The theatre opened on 10 October 1881 and was built by Richard D'Oyly Carte on the site of the old Savoy Palace as a showcase for the popular series of comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan,...
(1904); the comic play What Pamela Wanted at the Criterion Theatre
Criterion Theatre
The Criterion Theatre is a West End theatre situated on Piccadilly Circus in the City of Westminster, and is a Grade II* listed building. It has an official capacity of 588.-Building the theatre:...
(1905); and another comedy, The Lady Burglar at Terry's Theatre
Terry's Theatre
Terry's Theatre was a West End theatre on Strand, in the City of Westminster, London. Built in 1887, it became a cinema in 1910 before being demolished in 1923.-History:...
(1906). Brookfield's most successful work was the long-running Edwardian Musical Comedy
Edwardian Musical Comedy
Edwardian musical comedies were British musical theatre shows from the period between the early 1890s, when the Gilbert and Sullivan operas' dominance had ended, until the rise of the American musicals by Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart, George Gershwin and Cole Porter following World War I.Between...
, The Belle of Mayfair
The Belle of Mayfair
The Belle of Mayfair is a musical comedy composed by Leslie Stuart with a book by Basil Hood, Charles Brookfield and Cosmo Hamilton. The story is inspired by the Shakespeare play Romeo and Juliet....
(1906), together with Basil Hood
Basil Hood
Basil Willett Charles Hood was a British librettist and lyricist, perhaps best known for writing the libretti of half a dozen Savoy Operas and for his English adaptations of operettas, including The Merry Widow. He embarked on a career in the British army, writing theatrical pieces in his spare...
and Cosmo Hamilton, with music by Leslie Stuart
Leslie Stuart
Leslie Stuart was an English composer of early musical theatre, best known for the hit show Florodora and many popular songs. Stuart began writing songs in the late 1870s, including songs for blackface performers, such as "Lily of Laguna"; songs for musical theatre; and ballads such as "Soldiers...
, which also ran on Broadway beginning the same year. Another musical, the same year, was See-See, with lyrics by Ross and music by Sidney Jones
Sidney Jones
James Sidney Jones , usually credited as Sidney Jones, was an English conductor and composer, most famous for producing the musical scores for a series of musical comedy hits in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods....
, at the Prince of Wales Theatre
Prince of Wales Theatre
The Prince of Wales Theatre is a West End theatre on Coventry Street, near Leicester Square in the City of Westminster. It was established in 1884 and rebuilt in 1937, and extensively refurbished in 2004 by Sir Cameron Mackintosh, its current owner...
. His play I Pagliacci ran on Broadway in 1908. Brookfield's work as a journalist included several years on the staff of The Saturday Review
Saturday Review (London)
The Saturday Review of politics, literature, science, and art was a London weekly newspaper established by A. J. B. Beresford Hope in 1855....
. In 1902, Edward Arnold published Brookfield's volume of Random Reminiscences. He and his wife together wrote Mrs Brookfield and her Circle (1905).
One of his later works, Dear Old Charley, another French adaptation, was produced at the Vaudeville Theatre
Vaudeville Theatre
The Vaudeville Theatre is a West End theatre on The Strand in the City of Westminster. As the name suggests, the theatre held mostly vaudeville shows and musical revues in its early days. It opened in 1870 and was rebuilt twice, although each new building retained elements of the previous...
in 1908 starring Charles Hawtrey. Though the critics admitted that the play was funny, it "caused a storm of controversy and became a synonym for the extremest stage naughtiness" and was criticized as unsuitable for the stage. It therefore amazed the public, and amused The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, that Brookfield became the Examiner of Plays in the Lord Chamberlain
Lord Chamberlain
The Lord Chamberlain or Lord Chamberlain of the Household is one of the chief officers of the Royal Household in the United Kingdom and is to be distinguished from the Lord Great Chamberlain, one of the Great Officers of State....
's office in 1911. He also was attacked in the press as hostile to the "New Drama", such as Ibsen and Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
, and also to Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
, helping to gather evidence against Wilde in his trial of 1895. However, Brookfield ignored public criticism and performed his duties, although his health continued to fail.
Brookfield succumbed to tuberculosis in 1913 at his home in London, aged 56. He is buried at Stratton on the Fosse, Somerset
Somerset
The ceremonial and non-metropolitan county of Somerset in South West England borders Bristol and Gloucestershire to the north, Wiltshire to the east, Dorset to the south-east, and Devon to the south-west. It is partly bounded to the north and west by the Bristol Channel and the estuary of the...
, in the Catholic Church.
External links
- "Charles H. E. Brookfield" at the IBDB database
- Charles Brookfield biography and list of plays at Who Was Who (1920)