thumb|upright|right|Phelps, 1870s
Samuel Phelps (13 February 1804 – 6 November 1878) was an English actor-manager. He is known for reviving the fortunes of the neglected Sadler's Wells Theatre and for his productions of Shakespeare's plays which were presented with attention to period detail and dramatic veracity, and used texts purged of 18th-century alterations and additions.
Stage-struck from an early age, Phelps performed as an amateur before becoming a professional actor in 1826. Working his way up in provincial companies he graduated from small supporting parts to leading roles, making his London début as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice in 1839. From 1844 to 1862 he ran Sadler's Wells, presenting all but four of Shakespeare's plays as well as those of dramatists from the Renaissance to the current period.
As an actor, Phelps was widely seen as a good, but not a great, tragedian; his performances in comic roles including Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2 and The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream received widespread praise.
Life and career
Early years
Samuel Phelps was the seventh child and second son of Robert Phelps and his wife Ann, daughter of Captain Mark Turner. Phelps was born on 13 February 1804, in what is now called Devonport, but was then known as Plymouth Dock. He was educated at a local school and then at a classical school at Saltash, Cornwall. The family was well connected and prosperous, and Phelps's father provided him with opportunities to visit London, where a cousin who was a dramatic critic frequently took him to the theatre. During the season of 1814–15 the family spent several months in London, and Phelps saw celebrated actors including John Philip Kemble, Charles Kemble, Charles Young and Edmund Kean. A year later he moved to London, hoping to find work in a theatre. Failing to do so, he worked as a proofreader for The Globe, With Douglas Jerrold and W. E. Love, two colleagues from the papers, he formed an amateur theatrical group, performing at a small theatre in Islington, giving up to three performances a week.
Professional actor
thumb|left|As [[Hamlet, late 1830s|alt=young white man, clean-shaven, with medium length wavy hair, in 16th-century costume]]
Phelps turned professional in 1826, in which year he married the sixteen-year-old Sarah Cooper. It was a happy, lifelong marriage; they had three sons and three daughters. From 1826 to 1837 Phelps built up a career in the provinces, beginning with small, meagrely-paid parts and gradually moving up to leading roles.|group=n His biographer J. P. Wearing comments, "his early career was a catalogue of numerous towns and of roles growing gradually in importance". Among the towns where Phelps played, Wearing lists Hull, Sheffield, Leeds, Preston, Perth, Dundee, Aberdeen, Inverness and Belfast, and his roles as Malcolm (Macbeth), Benvolio (Romeo and Juliet), the Ghost (Hamlet), Macduff (Macbeth), Claudius (Hamlet), and the title role in Julius Caesar.|
In 1837 Phelps received offers of West End engagements from two rival actor-managers: Benjamin Webster at the Theatre Royal Haymarket and William Macready at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. The Western Times reported:
This turned out to be an overestimate of Macready's magnanimity. After Phelps made a successful London début, starring as Shylock in Webster's production of The Merchant of Venice, and then playing Hamlet, Othello and Richard III at the Haymarket, he moved to Covent Garden, where he remained from 1837 to 1839. Macready, finding himself equalled and even outshone by Phelps, soon restricted him to secondary supporting roles such as Antonio in The Tempest, and the Constable of France in Henry V.|group=n After his contract with Macready expired, Phelps played at the Haymarket and the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane between 1840 and 1843.
Phelps became the first to take advantage of the change in the law. It had the advantages of a large capacity (2,500) and a low rent, and the disadvantages of a location far away from the West End, and a local Islington audience, largely working class and poorly educated.
thumb|alt=White man, with medium-length hair and neat beard, in medieval tunic and cross-gartered leggings|As [[Macbeth, 1850]]
The new management opened on 27 May 1844, with a production of Macbeth, with Phelps in the title role and Warner as Lady Macbeth. In the programme for the opening night, Phelps wrote:
During his eighteen years in charge of Sadler's Wells – fifteen in sole charge, after Warner left at the end of the third season – Phelps produced more than 1,600 performances of thirty-one of Shakespeare's plays, as well as many plays dating from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century. According to the director Michael Blakemore his uncut production of the play in the 1970s was the first such in London since the 1930s.|group=n – he cut many of Shakespeare's lines, he cut those of his own characters as readily as he cut those of others', and unlike other actor-managers (then and later) he did not build up the star parts at the expense of the supporting ones. Care was taken to ensure that scenery and costuming were historically accurate and enhanced the play rather than being merely spectacular. And of his performance in Twelfth Night the same journal said, "The Malvolio of Mr Phelps is a part by which he will be remembered. The making up is so complete that the actor's person cannot be identified until he speaks. The execution of the part is equally complete; elaborately finished – thoroughly carried out to the minutest particular." British critics had long observed that one of the characteristics of Phelps's acting style – contrasting with those of Kean and Macready – was his ability to express intensity and depth of emotion without resorting to unnatural vehemence and overt theatricality. The German critics were similarly impressed – one praised his "psychological truthfulness" as Macbeth – but they were at least as impressed by Phelps as a director and the unobtrusive naturalness of his productions.
Greenwood retired as the company's business manager in 1861; Phelps found the strain of running the theatre single-handed, at a time when his wife was gravely ill, too much, and in March 1862 he resigned.
A succession of colds weakened Phelps and he died at a sanatorium near Epping on 6 November 1878, aged 74. He was buried, alongside his wife, at Highgate Cemetery on 13 November 1878.