page_title: Effie Bancroft
section_title: Prince of Wales's Theatre (1865–80)
hierarchical_section_title: Effie Bancroft / Life and career / Prince of Wales's Theatre (1865–80)
caption_attribution_description: Marie Effie (née Wilton), Lady Bancroft, by Thomas Jones Barker (died 1882). See source website for additional information. This set of images was gathered by User:Dcoetzee from the National Portrait Gallery, London website using a special tool. All images in this batch have been confirmed as author died before 1939 according to the official death date listed by the NPG.
context_page_description: Marie Effie Wilton, Lady Bancroft was an English actress and theatre manager. She appeared onstage as Marie Wilton until after her marriage in December 1867 to Squire Bancroft, when she adopted his last name. Bancroft and her husband were important in the development of Victorian era theatre through their presentation of innovative plays at the London theatres that they managed, first the Prince of Wales's Theatre and later the Haymarket Theatre.
context_section_description: In April 1865, she began, in partnership with Henry Byron, the management of the Prince of Wales's Theatre.  For two seasons before her marriage she managed the theatre alone.  She secured as a leading actor Squire Bancroft, whom she had met shortly before in Liverpool and married in December 1867.   The Prince of Wales's soon became noted for its series of successful comedies by T. W. Robertson, namely: Society (1865), Ours (1866), Caste (1867), Play (1868), School (1869) and M. P. (1870).
  Bancroft regularly took the principal female parts in these pieces, her husband playing the leading man.  Together, Robertson and the Bancrofts are considered to have instigated a new form of drama known as 'drawing-room comedy' or 'cup and saucer drama'.  The Bancrofts gave Robertson an unprecedented amount of directorial control over the plays, which was a key step to institutionalizing the power that directors wield in the theatre today.
  The Bancrofts were also responsible for making fashionable the 'box set', which Lucia Elizabeth Vestris had first used at the Olympic Theatre in the 1830s – this consisted of rooms on stage which were dressed with sofas, curtains, chairs, and carpets on the stage floor.  They also provided their actors with salaries and wardrobes.  Also, the Bancrofts redesigned their theatre to suit the increasingly upscale audience: "The cheap benches near the stage, where the rowdiest elements of the audience used to sit were replaced by comfortable padded seats, carpets were laid in the aisles, and the pit was renamed the stalls."
  Other plays that the Bancrofts produced at the Prince of Wales's Theatre were Tame Cats (1868), The School for Scandal (1874), Sweethearts (1874), The Vicarage (1877), and Diplomacy (1878, an adaptation of Victorien Sardou's Dora).  Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft likewise presented at their theatre a number of prominent actors, among them Hare, Coghlan, the Kendals, and Ellen Terry.  In 1879, she reprised a favourite role of hers, Nan, in John Baldwin Buckstone's Good for Nothing, in a mixed bill alongside W. S. Gilbert's Sweethearts, in which she played Jenny Northcott.
caption: Portrait of Bancroft painted by Thomas Barker, c. 1870s
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