Harley Granville-Barker
born Nov. 25, 1877, London, Eng.
died Aug. 31, 1946, Paris, France
English dramatist, producer, and critic
whose repertoire seasons and Shakespeare
criticism profoundly influenced 20th-century
theatre.
Barker began his stage training at 13 years
of age and first appeared on the London
stage two years later. He preferred work
with William Poel’s Elizabethan Stage
Society and Ben Greet’s Shakespeare
repertory company to a West End career, and
in 1900 he joined the experimental Stage
Society. His first major play, The Marrying
of Ann Leete (1900), was produced by the
society. In 1904 he became manager of the
Court Theatre with J.E. Vedrenne and
introduced the public to the plays of Henrik
Ibsen, Maurice Maeterlinck, John Galsworthy,
John Masefield, and Gilbert Murray’s
translations from Greek. His original
productions of the early plays of George
Bernard Shaw were especially important. His
wife, Lillah McCarthy, played leading roles
in many of the plays he produced. Among new
plays produced at the Court Theatre were
several of his own: The Voysey Inheritance
(1905), the most famous, showing Shaw’s
influence; Prunella (1906), a charming
fantasy written with Laurence Housman; Waste
(1907); and The Madras House (1910).
Also revolutionary was his treatment of
Shakespeare. Instead of traditional scenic
decor and declamatory elocution, Barker
successfully introduced, in the Savoy
productions (1912–14) of The Winter’s Tale
and Twelfth Night, continuous action on an
open stage and rapid, lightly stressed
speech. He and William Archer were active in
promoting a national theatre, and by 1914
Barker had every prospect of a brilliant
career.
After World War I, however, during which
he served with the Red Cross, he found the
mood of the postwar theatre alien and
contented himself with work behind the
scenes, including presidency of the British
Drama League. He settled in Paris with his
second wife, an American, collaborating with
her in translating Spanish plays and writing
his five series of Prefaces to Shakespeare
(1927–48), a contribution to Shakespearean
criticism that analyzed the plays from the
point of view of a practical playwright with
firsthand stage experience.
In 1937 Barker became director of the
British Institute of the University of
Paris. He fled to Spain in 1940 and then
went to the United States, where he worked
for British Information Services and
lectured at Harvard University. He returned
to Paris in 1946. A selection of his letters
was published in 1986 as Granville Barker
and His Correspondents.
