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Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000 pp 48–61Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Many Masks of Clemence Dane

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Abstract

Clemence Dane (1888–1965), born Winifred Ashton, was one of the most prolific British women playwrights, screenwriters and novelists of her generation.1 Frequently mentioned in the recent centenary celebrations of Noël Coward’s life and work, she was one of his inner circle of friends, but her own celebrity has been persistently downplayed. Dane never worked under her real name, but achieved extraordinary success in both theatre and film, and demonstrated a remarkable talent to reinvent her public image at various points in her career. She was awarded the CBE in 1953, moved among the leading theatrical and film stars of the day and showed a rare versatility as a writer and public speaker; it is therefore very odd that she figures so little in twentieth-century theatre history.

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Notes

  1. Dane wrote over twenty plays and some eleven novels as well as numerous critical essays, poems and film scripts.

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  2. Clemence Dane, A Bill of Divorcement (London: Heinemann, 1961).

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  3. J. C. Trewin, The Gay Twenties: A Decade of the Theatre (London: MacDonald, 1958), p. 58. Quoted in Rebecca Cameron, ‘Irreconcilable Differences: Divorce and Women’s Drama before 1945’, in Modern Drama, 44:4 (2001), 476–90, 480.

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  4. Archibald Haddon, ‘What the Public Wants’, Sunday Express, 5 March 1922.

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  5. Clemence Dane, ‘What I Think about Divorce’, unmarked cutting, 14 December 1921, British Library Daily Express obituary file.

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  6. See Donald Childs, Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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  7. Mitchell A. Leaska and John Phillips, Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, 1910–1921 (London: Mandarin, 1991).

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  8. Daily Express obituary file: Clemence Dane, British Library, unassigned review, 4 March 1921.

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  9. Daily Express obituary file: Clemence Dane, British Library, unassigned review, 27 March 1921.

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  10. See Billie Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs (London: Macmillan, 1988).

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  11. Gay Wachman, Lesbian Empire (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), p. 54.

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  12. Clemence Dane, Will Shakespeare, in Recapture: A Clemence Dane Omnibus (London: Heinemann, 1932). The play ran in the West End for 62 performances.

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  13. Clemence Dane, Granite and Wild Decembers, in Recapture: A Clemence Dane Omnibus and Cousin Muriel (London: Heinemann, 1940).

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  14. St John Ervine, The Theatre in My Time (London: Rich and Cowan, 1933), pp. 137–9.

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  15. See unpublished manuscript of interview between author and the late Judy Campbell, who worked with Coward and for Dane on her expressionistic play about the effects of War on marital relationships, Call Home the Heart (1947). For published excerpts see ‘Interview: Judy Campbell’, in Joel H. Kaplan and Sheila Stowell, Look Back in Pleasure: Noel Coward Reconsidered (London: Methuen, 2000), pp. 194–9.

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  16. Perfect Strangers, directed by Alexander Korda in 1947, had the US title Vacation from Marriage and starred Robert Donat and Deborah Kerr.

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  17. Katherine Cornell commissioned Dane’s examination of the private world of Charlotte Bronte, Wild Decembers (1933).

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  18. Anna Karenina, directed by David O. Selznick in 1935, starred Greta Garbo and Basil Rathbone.

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  19. Dane features in a number of autobiographies of those working in mainstream theatre from the 1920s to the 1950s, for examples see Katherine Cornell, I Wanted to Be an Actress (New York: Random House, 1938); Basil Dean, Seven Ages (London: Hutchinson, 1970); and Nancy Price, Into An Hourglass (London: Museum Press Ltd, 1953).

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  20. Clemence Dane, London has a Garden (London: Michael Joseph, 1964).

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  21. Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (London: Vintage, 1986; repr. 1997), p. 584.

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  22. Clemence Dane, The Women’s Side (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1926), p. 138.

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  23. See Rebecca Cameron, ‘Women Playwrights and the Modernist Conception of Genius: Clemence Dane’s Will Shakespeare (1921); and Gordon Daviot’s The Laughing Woman (1934)’, Essays in Theatre, 18:2 (May 2000), 161–78.

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  24. Clemence Dane, Broome Stages (London: Heinemann, 1931).

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  25. See Maggie B. Gale, ‘From Fame to Obscurity: In Search of Clemence Dane’, in Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner, Women, Theatre and Performance: New Histories, New Historiographies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 121–41. For a brief and rather reticent critical biography of Dane’s work, see David Waldron Smithers, Therefore Imagine: The Works of Clemence Dane (Tunbridge Wells: The Dragonfly Press, 1988).

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  26. Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson, Gooseberry Fool (unpublished typescript in the Theatre Museum, London), pp. 48–51.

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  27. Jacky Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 198–9.

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  28. Katherine Cockin, Edith Craig (1869–1947): Dramatic Lives (London: Cassell 1998), p. 11.

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  29. Clemence Dane, Eighty in the Shade (London: Samuel French, 1958), pp. 55–6.

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  30. See Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880–1930 (London: Pandora, 1985).

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  31. Gyles Brandreth, ‘My Life with Noel’, Daily Telegraph, 21 November 1999.

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  32. Terry Castle, Noel Coward and Radcliffe Hall: Kindred Spirits (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 101.

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  33. Richard Huggett, Binkie Beaumont: Eminience Grise of the West End Theatre 1933–1979 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989), p. 139.

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  34. Noel Coward, The Autobiography of Noel Coward: Future Indefinite (London: Methuen, 1986 edition), pp. 349–40.

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  35. See Cole Lesley, Remembered Laughter: The Life of Noel Coward (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), pp. 227–9.

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  36. Graham Payn and Sheridan Morley, The Noel Coward Diaries (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), pp. 71–2.

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  37. There is now an archive of Dane’s film scripts in the Theatre Museum, London.

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  38. See for example Erica Beth Weintraub, ‘Clemence Dane’, in Stanley Weintraub, Modem British Dramatists 1900–1945 (Detroit, MI: Gale Research Corp. 1982), pp. 133–8.

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  39. Clemence Dane, Approaches to Drama (London: The English Association, 1961), p. 11.

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  40. Clemence Dane, ‘The Writer’s Partner’, in Dane, Recapture: A Clemence Dane Omnibus.

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  41. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (London: Hogarth Press, 1984), pp. 43–7.

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Authors
  1. Maggie B. Gale
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of York, UK

    Mary Luckhurst (Senior Lecturer and co-director of the Drama initiative) & Jane Moody (Professor in the Department of English and Related Literature) (Senior Lecturer and co-director of the Drama initiative) &  (Professor in the Department of English and Related Literature)

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© 2005 Maggie B. Gale

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Gale, M.B. (2005). The Many Masks of Clemence Dane. In: Luckhurst, M., Moody, J. (eds) Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523845_4

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