Putting Sherlock Holmes on the Stage
Written by Jacques Lamarre
Setting the Stage
Born in Hartford on July 24, 1853, William Gillette was the fifth and final child of former U.S. Senator Francis Gillette and Elisabeth Hooker, a descendant of Hartford’s founder Reverend Thomas Hooker. Substantially younger than his siblings, William would soon find himself the only remaining child in the family’s home on Forest Street in the city’s Nook Farm community. The wealthy and intellectual Hartford enclave would find him growing up in a highly literary society that included author/editor Charles Dudley Warner, suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker, and two giants of their time: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Samuel Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain.
In his youth, Gillette began to exhibit traits that would form the backbone of his future career: a flair for writing, public speaking, putting on amusements, and inventing. After his graduation from Hartford Public High School, Gillette announced a desire to bypass college to pursue a career in acting. During this period in American history, acting was often seen as a low profession, making his parents’ blessing a surprise.
Life Upon the Wicked Stage
In 1873 at age twenty, Gillette began his apprenticeship in stock theatre (companies that perform a repertory of plays with a resident company of performers) first in St. Louis and then in New Orleans. Working in stock can be a trial by fire for a young actor, with low pay and an intense schedule of performances. Gillette thrived in the environment while deepening his artistry playing small parts in such classics as Hamlet and Julius Caesar.
In 1874, Nook Farm neighbor and mentor Mark Twain asked Gillette to join the tour of the comedy Colonel Sellers, a stage adaptation of Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s novel The Gilded Age. It was in this production that Gillette appeared onstage for the first time as a professional actor in his hometown of Hartford. He would tour in stock for several years.
In 1878, Gillette’s father became ill, forcing the young actor off the road to be at home. During this time, Gillette began to turn his attention to a new goal that would build on his hard-earned stage education: playwriting, directing, stage managing, and starring in his own plays. Not only would this multi-hyphenate approach to his career ensure quality control, but it would also allow him to take a larger percentage of box office revenues.
In 1880, a year after his father’s passing, Gillette would take the stage for the first time in a full-length play of his own creation. An advertisement on the front page of The Hartford Courant announced a forthcoming amusement:
Roberts Opera House
WILL GILLETTE
In his most Comical Character Creation
THE PROFESSOR
Admission 35 and 50 cents. Reserved seats, 75 cents.
After tryouts in Columbus, OH, and New Haven, CT, The Professor was well received by Hartford audiences. The critic for Hartford’s Evening Post, however, took Gillette’s first play to task. “The piece is evidently so purely amateur, both in its conception and production, that the pen of criticism is partially disarmed, and the first effort of the author must be kindly dealt with.”
A Love Story Interrupted
In 1881, Gillette met and married Helen Nichols in Ontario. Together they would tour the United States, at first in The Professor and then in another comedy The Private Secretary. Gillette’s career as writer-director-actor-stage manager was off and running.
Although several of his plays are comedies, Gillette was adept at writing in the Victorian Melodrama style that was popular in the late 19th century. In an incredible stretch of over four decades, he would stage and, in most cases, tour approximately twenty original plays and adaptations.
In 1886, he debuted in New York in his Civil War spy drama entitled Held by the Enemy. The play was a sensation, due largely to a more realistic approach to stage design and more understated acting. In many ways, this attention to believability may have been Gillette’s greatest contribution to American Theatre. The published script for Held by the Enemy includes remarkably precise stage direction for the actors, notes on vocal inflection, and detailed instructions on scenic, lighting, sound, property, and costume elements. Nothing was left to chance (or liberal interpretation) in his storytelling.
Held by the Enemy transferred to London in 1887, making Gillette the first American dramatist to have a substantial success on a British stage. His success and happiness seemed assured until his beloved wife Helen died in Cos Cob, CT, in 1888. Bereft, he withdrew from public life for five years, primarily isolating himself in a cabin in North Carolina or at his family’s home in Hartford.
“Elementary, My Dear Fellow”
As Gillette emerged from seclusion in 1893, two of his greatest successes awaited him. Another Civil War spy drama, Secret Service, debuted in New York and moved to a well-received run in London. In 1898, Gillette’s producer Charles Frohman approached him with a tempting proposition: adapting Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s beloved detective Sherlock Holmes for the stage. Having killed off the character in the short story “The Final Problem,” Doyle found that public demand for Holmes and his own need of finances could both be met by bringing the detective to the stage. At first, Doyle attempted to write the script himself. Frohman suggested that Doyle allow Gillette – an American, of all things – to tackle the adapting and appear as the stage iteration of Holmes.
Setting aside Doyle’s own pass at a script, Gillette set about cobbling together plot elements from six of the Holmes stories. He also introduced something new for Sherlock Holmes – a love interest. When he approached Doyle with the prospect of marrying off Holmes at the end of the play, the British mystery writer responded, “You may marry him or murder him or do what you like with him.”
In staging the story, Gillette brought the full force of his onstage skills and backstage technical knowledge to the production. He also crafted a visual aesthetic for Holmes that has become synonymous with the character: deerstalker cap, curved pipe, smoking jacket, and magnifying glass. Moreover, Gillette embodied the cool and keen intellect of the character, underplaying the role to maximum effect.
Gillette would tour in Sherlock Holmes for an astounding 1,300 performances from 1899 to 1932. There would be other plays and successes (including a mystery novel), but Gillette’s stage creation of Holmes would remain his most singular achievement. Holmes cemented William Gillette as America’s preeminent stage actor of his time and afforded him the money to build his castle overlooking the Connecticut River in East Haddam, CT.
In 1916, Gillette was asked to write the preface for a short anthology of letters from noteworthy playwrights who had been asked to provide the ingredients necessary to write a successful play. In the brief essay that opens the equally-brief volume How to Write a Play, Gillette provides a few tips for prospective playwrights, while at the same time poking fun at the publication’s premise. “There are no workable rules for play-writing to be found here—nor, indeed, any particular light of any kind on the subject, so the letters may be approacht [sic.] with a mind arranged for enjoyment. I would be sorry indeed for the trying-to-be dramatist who flew to this volume for consolation and guidance. I’m sorry for him any way, but this additional catastrophe would accelerate my sympathy, making it fast and furious.”
Anthology Selections
Introduction to How to Write a Play
Secret Service: A Romance of the Southern Confederacy
Sherlock Holmes – A Play in Four Acts
As is the case with many stage plays of the era, the bulk of William Gillette’s plays remain unpublished. A quantity of William Gillette’s plays (produced and unproduced) can be found in the collection of the Stowe Center for Literary Activism.