A Memory of Ellen Terry's Beatrice
"A Memory of Ellen Terry's Beatrice" is a sonnet by Helen Gray Cone that celebrates the celebrated Victorian actress Ellen Terry in her famous stage portrayal of Beatrice, the witty heroine of Shakespeare's *Much Ado About Nothing*. The poem captures the essence of Terry's performance through a series of vivid and sensory metaphors, building a portrait of a characterization that was widely regarded as one of the great theatrical achievements of the era. The poem opens with a succession of natural images designed to evoke the quality of Beatrice as Terry embodied her. She is compared to a spring wind that scatters blossom petals and then vanishes, elusive and playful, made of mockery yet carrying within it the promise of deeper feeling, symbolized by the prescience of the rose. This opening movement establishes Beatrice as a figure who is light and teasing on the surface but who conceals genuine tenderness beneath her wit. The comparison to a musical strain that drifts through memory but cannot quite be caught by the voice suggests the ineffable quality of great acting, something felt and remembered but resistant to precise description or reproduction. The image of a dissembled flame that is lit only to tease, whose touch would be almost a kiss, reinforces the erotic and playful tension at the heart of the Beatrice and Benedick relationship as Terry brought it to life. The flame is real but it hides itself, just as Beatrice's love for Benedick is genuine but masked by her sparkling refusals and verbal combat. In the sestet, Cone shifts to images drawn from the world of falconry and the Sicilian seascape of the play's setting. Beatrice is set against Hero, Leonato's gentle daughter, whom the poem calls a dove, and by contrast Beatrice is named a falcon, a creature of proud and spirited independence, destined to be possessed by a prince, adorned with the bells that falcons traditionally wore and that here suggest her perpetual brightness and chiming wit. The final image distills the whole into one luminous picture: Beatrice as a wave on the bright blue Sicilian water that has caught within itself the swaying reflection of a dancing star. This image fuses movement, radiance, instability, and delight, suggesting a personality that is always in motion, always catching and throwing back light, joyful and dazzling and fundamentally tied to something celestial. The poem as a whole functions as an act of memorial tribute, attempting through poetry to preserve what the stage could only offer fleetingly. Cone's admiration for Terry is evident throughout, and the work reflects the broader Victorian and Edwardian fascination with Terry's Shakespearean performances, which were seen as definitive interpretations. By encoding the memory of the performance in richly wrought imagery, Cone transforms a theatrical event into something enduring, offering readers who never saw Terry play Beatrice a sense of what made the performance feel like a natural force, simultaneously airy and charged with hidden warmth.
By Helen Gray Cone · First published 1897 · Genre: Literary Criticism, Poetry, Drama Commentary