Craig, Edward Gordon, 1872-1966

Edward Gordon Craig, the object of Oenslager's collecting efforts and study, was an actor, artist, theater designer and director. Craig was born in Stevenage, England on 16 January 1872, the second of two children produced from the liaison between the actress Ellen Terry and the architect Edward William Godwin. He was baptized Edward Henry Gordon at the age of sixteen (taking the names of his godparents, Henry Irving and Lady Gordon) and added the surname Craig at the age of twenty-one. Exposed to the theater from an early age, Craig had made his stage debut by the age of six. After completing his studies in 1889, Craig became a member of Henry Irving's company at the Lyceum Theatre.

Although Craig received strong critical praise for his acting, he soon retreated from this promising career. In 1893, Craig married May Gibson, an actress, and moved from London to Uxbridge, where he met the artists James Ferrier Pryde and William Nicholson. From them he learned various techniques of printmaking and developed an enthusiasm for wood engraving in particular. His new interest in graphic design was soon coupled with the chance to direct a production of Alfred de Musset's On ne badine pas avec l'amour(1893), for which he also created the designs. In 1898, Craig started a magazine, The Page, which was filled almost entirely with his own work. By the end of 1899 he had engraved nearly 200 blocks and published a book, Gordon Craig's Book of Penny Toys.

During this period, Craig continued to develop as a stage designer and director. He worked with the musician, Martin Shaw, on a production of Dido and Aeneas in 1900 that was groundbreaking in its approach to stage design. The limitations of the space (the Hampstead Conservatoire) enabled Craig to depart from the elaborate, realist traditions of Victorian stagecraft. Craig’s innovations in lighting and design were admired by critics and radical artists, but often proved impractical to mount in the conservative climate of the English commercial theater. In 1904, Craig moved to Berlin for greater opportunities and designed a production of Venice Preserv’d for the Lessing Theatre in 1905. In that same year he produced a significant essay, The Art of the Theatre, which he later reworked as On the Art of the Theatre (1911). Perhaps most importantly, it was in Germany that he met the American dancer, Isadora Duncan. Although their affair was relatively brief in duration, Duncan was to be a major influence on Craig. The two shared a belief in a theater in which all of the arts were united. They collaborated on a book and had two children during the short time that they were together, but the affair was over by 1907 and Craig moved to Florence with his former lover, Elena Fortuna Meo, and established his own theatrical publication, The Mask (1908-1929). It was his association with Duncan, however, that earned Craig an invitation from Konstantin Stanislavsky to design a production of Hamlet for the Moscow Art Theatre in 1912. Following that success, Craig returned to Florence and opened his own School for the Art of the Theatre at the Arena Goldoni, which operated until the outbreak of the First World War.

Craig continued to live in Italy following the war, having moved to Rapallo with Elena Meo and their children in 1917, but he began to shift away from practice into theory, focusing more of his attention on his writings and wood engravings. By the late 1920s, Craig had executed what would be his final stage designs, a Danish production of Ibsen’s The Pretenders (1926) and a New York production of Macbeth (1928). He left Elena Meo again in the early 1930s and moved to France with his secretary, Daphne Woodward, and their child. Among his wood engravings, Craig’s work on the 1929 edition of Hamlet for the Cranach Press is often viewed as one of his greatest accomplishments. Following the end of World War II, Craig settled in the small town of Vence in the south of France, where he completed an autobiography, Index to the Story of My Days (1957) and was visited frequently by his admirers. Craig died in Vence on 29 August 1966.