Helena Faucit - Career With Macready

Career With Macready

William Charles Macready joined the Covent Garden company in the middle of 1836. In the following year, Faucit played numerous Shakespearean roles, among them Juliet, Imogen (Cymbeline), Hermione (The Winter's Tale), and Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing), alongside both Macready and the soon-to-retire Charles Kemble. Her non-Shakespearean roles during the three years at Covent Garden included the female leads in Lytton's Duchess de la Vallikre, Lady of Lyons, Richelieu, The Sea Captain, and Money, in Robert Browning's Strafford, and in Knowles's Woman's Wit.

Faucit followed Macready to the Haymarket Theatre in 1840; in December of that year, however, she suffered an attack of a recurrent lung ailment. While she recuperated at the coast, rumors circulated that she was pregnant with Macready's child; her physicians published diagnoses that scotched these rumors. She returned to the Haymarket the next year, when she performed in Zouch Troughton's Nina Sforza and Lytton's Money.

After a visit to Paris and a short season at the Haymarket, she joined the Drury Lane company under Macready early in 1842. There she played Lady Macbeth, Constance in King John, Desdemona, and Imogen, and took part in the first production of John Westland Marston's Patrician's Daughter (1842) and Browning's Blot on the Scutcheon (1843).

Her Lady Macbeth of the 1843 season was, however, a failure; Macready found her conception deficient in "heart", and she was physically unable to achieve the commanding presence of Sarah Siddons, as Macready wished. She was, moreover passed over for Rosalind in favour of Louisa Cranstoun Nisbett; this role would later become one of her best-known Shakespearean roles. Nevertheless Macready considered her "beyond all compare" the best English actress of the period.