Edith Craig

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Standard Name: Craig, Edith
Birth Name: Ailsa Edith Geraldine Craig
Nickname: Edy
Self-constructed Name: Ailsa Craig
EC was primarily a theatre practitioner, known chiefly for her Pioneer Players , the women's theatre company she founded in 1911. Her literary output was scant. She published a handful of articles on stagecraft, and contributed to a revised edition of her mother Ellen Terry 's memoirs. She also wrote one unpublished play for children. Her unpublished papers—correspondence, prompt books, and playbills—document her significant contribution to feminist theatre history.
Black and white photograph of Edith Craig, shown from the shoulders up. Her head is leaning against one hand, her light hair is cut short, and she is wearing a black jacket with a white collar and cuffs, over a white shirt with ruffles at the front.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Production Christopher St John
The Theatre of the Soul's greatest innovations on the English stage lay in its representation of female desire through the character of a female dancer and in the use of innovative stage lighting techniques...
Residence Christopher St John
CSJ and Edith Craig rented a residence in London, a third-floor flat at 31 Bedford Street, Covent Garden; this flat became a refuge for suffragists just out of prison or wanted by police.
Cockin, Katharine. Edith Craig (1869-1947): Dramatic Lives. Cassell.
81
Holledge, Julie. Innocent Flowers: Women in the Edwardian Theatre. Virago.
121-2
Auerbach, Nina. Ellen Terry: Player in Her Time. W.W. Norton.
407
Performance of text Christopher St John
This had reached print bearing the date of 1911.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
After the play was banned from the public stage by the censor, a benefit performance was put on for the International Suffrage Shop . Kate Parry Frye
politics Christopher St John
Sime Seruya established the International Suffrage Shop as a feminist publisher and bookseller; it operated out of CSJ and Edith Craig 's home in Bedford Street.
Cockin, Katharine. Edith Craig (1869-1947): Dramatic Lives. Cassell.
87
Family and Intimate relationships Christopher St John
CSJ 's and Edith Craig 's household expanded to include the painter Tony (Clare) Atwood ; the three lived together in Smallhythe Place and London for the rest of their lives.
Cockin, Katharine. Edith Craig (1869-1947): Dramatic Lives. Cassell.
124, 181
Occupation Christopher St John
After the death of Ellen Terry , Edith Craig and CSJ turned the barn on their property at Smallhythe into a theatre ; the farm they renamed the Ellen Terry Memorial Museum .
Auerbach, Nina. Ellen Terry: Player in Her Time. W.W. Norton.
400, 453
Friends, Associates Christopher St John
CSJ , Edith Craig , and Tony Atwood spent much time in the company of Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge , who were staying temporarily in Kent while their house was being renovated.
Cockin, Katharine. Edith Craig (1869-1947): Dramatic Lives. Cassell.
161
Performance of text Vita Sackville-West
VSW gave a reading of The Land at the Barn Theatre at Smallhythe, run by Edith Craig and Christopher St John .
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin.
251
Textual Production George Paston
GP 's Clothes and the Woman: A Comedy in Three Acts was first produced by the Pioneers at the Imperial Theatre .
These Pioneers are not the same group as Edith Craig 's feminist Pioneer Players .
Nicoll, Allardyce. English Drama, 1900-1930. Cambridge University Press.
875
Kaplan, Joel H., and Sheila Stowell. Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes. Cambridge University Press.
164
Performance of text Edith Lyttelton
Edith Craig 's Pioneer Players mounted a production of Two Pierrots, EL 's adaptation of Rostand 's play Les deux Pierrots (which has been described as a curtain-raiser), at London's Little Theatre .
Nicoll, Allardyce. English Drama, 1900-1930. Cambridge University Press.
797
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Performance of text Constance Holme
CH 's dialect play The Home of Vision (one of her only two dramatic pieces to be performed in London over the course of her career) was acted by Edith Craig 's Pioneer Players .
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Performance of text Cicely Hamilton
Later that year it toured provincial suffrage societies for the Actresses' Franchise League , under the direction of Edith Craig . It eventually became a staple piece for Craig's Pioneer Players .
Textual Features Cicely Hamilton
The pageant required more than fifty actresses, only three of whom had speaking parts, to portray famous women from history (not all of them remembered today). In the initial, Scala production, the only speaking role...
Reception Cicely Hamilton
The play was both a critical success and enormously popular, though some trade papers attacked it as being propagandist.
Whitelaw, Lis. The Life and Rebellious Times of Cicely Hamilton. Women’s Press.
88
Edith Craig directed a nationwide tour (England and Wales) of the play in 1910...
Performance of text Cicely Hamilton
The premiere of CH 's suffrage drama A Pageant of Great Women, with direction and some collaboration by Edith Craig , was given at the Scala Theatre in London.
Cockin, Katharine. Edith Craig (1869-1947): Dramatic Lives. Cassell.
220
Cockin, Katharine. Edith Craig (1869-1947): Dramatic Lives. Cassell.
82-3
Cockin, Katharine. “Cicely Hamilton’s Warriors: dramatic reinventions of militancy in the British women’s suffrage movement”. Women’s History Review, Vol.
14
, No. 3/4, pp. 527-42.
529

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