Robert Speaight
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Robert Speaight
(1904–76), British actor and author. Having been Falstaff in 2 Henry IV while an undergraduate at Oxford, he played Osric and the First Player to the Hamlet of John Barrymore at the Haymarket and Edmund in King Lear at the Old Vic, both in 1931. Next year he returned to the Vic as King John, Malvolio, Cassius, and Hamlet. He created Becket in T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral at Canterbury in 1935 and repeated this performance in Britain and abroad over 1,000 times. He was also Christ in the BBC's radio cycle The Man Born to be King in 1941. With his mellifluous voice he became identified with the revival of poetic drama and religious plays. He wrote copiously—often biographies of Catholic thinkers and artists. Among his books which touch on Shakespeare are William Poel and the Elizabethan Revival, Nature in Shakespearean Tragedy, Shakespeare on the Stage: An Illustrated History, and his memoirs The Property Basket. For more than ten years he contributed reviews of British productions to Shakespeare Quarterly.
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Robert Speaight
Robert Speaight (1904 – 1976) was a British actor and writer, and the brother of George Speaight the puppeteer.
He was an early performer (from 1927) in radio plays. He came to prominence as Becket in the first production of T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. He went on to Shakespearean roles, and to direct.
He also wrote criticism and essays, works on the theatre and biography. He was a Roman Catholic convert, and biographer of Hilaire Belloc and Eric Gill. In the case of Gill, a personal friend, he suppressed material about Gill's sexual interests, which would only come out in the 1989 biography by Fiona MacCarthy.
He married the Welsh actress Evelyn Bowen, with whom he had a son; they separated in 1939. Evelyn later married the celebrated Irish writer Frank O'Connor.
Works
- Mutinous Wind (1932)
- The Lost Hero (1934) novel
- Legend of Helena Vaughan (1936) novel
- The Angel in the Mist (1936)
- St. Thomas of Canterbury (1938)
- Acting: its idea and tradition (1939)
- The Unbroken Heart (1939)
- Since 1939 - Drama, the Novel, Poetry, Prose Literature (1949) with John Hayward, Henry Reed, Stephen Spender – earlier as pamphlet Drama Since 1939 (1947)
- George Eliot (1954)
- William Poel and the Elizabethan Revival (1954)
- Nature in Shakespearian Tragedy (1955)
- Life of Hilaire Belloc (1957)
- Letters from Hilaire Belloc (1958) editor
- Christian Theatre (1960) volume 124 in the 20th Century Encyclopedia of Catholicism
- William Rothenstein: The Portrait of an Artist in His Time (1962)
- Ronald Knox: The Priest, The Writer (1965) with Thomas Corbishley
- The Life of Eric Gill (1966)
- Teilhard de Chardin: A Biography (1967)
- Teilhard de Chardin: Re-Mythologization.Three Papers (1970) with Robert V. Wilshire and J. V. Langmead Casserly
- Vanier : Soldier, Diplomat and Governor General : A Biography (1970) on Georges Vanier
- The Property Basket. Recollections of a Divided Life (1970) autobiography
- A Bridges-Adams Letter Book (1971) editor
- Essays by Divers Hands Vol. XXXVII (1972) editor
- Shakespeare on the Stage; an Illustrated History of Shakespearian Performance (1973)
- Georges Bernanos: A Study of the Man and the Writer (1974)
- The companion guide to Burgundy (1975)
- Francois Mauriac: A Study of the Writer and the Man (1976)
- Shakespeare - the Man and his Achievement (1977)
Recordings
- Thomas a-Becket's Sermon from Murder in the Cathedral (T. S. Eliot)
- Four Quartets (T. S. Eliot)
Filmography
- London 1942 (1943) - narrator
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Oxford Companion to Shakespeare
The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. © 2001
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