Alfred Bunn

Alfred Bunn, born in London on 8 April 1796 and died in Boulogne-sur-Mer on 20 December 1860, was an English theatrical manager and book writer whose career spanned several decades of British stage history. In 1819 he married Margaret Somerville, a minor actress.

Bunn's managerial career began at Drury Lane Theatre, where he was appointed stage manager in 1823. By 1826 he had taken on the management of the Theatre Royal in Birmingham, and in 1833 he assumed joint management of both Drury Lane and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. That undertaking brought sustained opposition: a bill calling for the abolition of the Patent theatres passed the House of Commons but was defeated in the House of Lords following Bunn's petition. He faced additional friction with his own company, with the Lord Chamberlain in his capacity as official censor, and with competing theatres.

His tenure was marked by two particularly notable personal conflicts. A prolonged dispute with the tragedian William Macready culminated in Macready physically assaulting Bunn, an incident Macready himself described in detail, recounting how he struck Bunn across the face and continued the attack until Bunn bit the little finger of his left hand. A separate quarrel arose with the opera singer Jenny Lind over the terms of her contract. According to her biographers Henry Scott Holland and W. S. Rockstro, Lind was so alarmed by the legal threats attributed to Mrs. Bunn that she became reluctant to appear at any English theatre under any conditions. Bunn documented his side of that dispute in The Case of Bunn Versus Lind.

Despite these controversies, Bunn's artistic management was broadly productive. Nearly every leading English actor of the period performed under his direction, and he made a sustained effort to establish English opera, producing the principal works of composer Michael Balfe. He translated the libretti for most of those operas himself, among them The Bohemian Girl, The Enchantress, The Daughter of St. Mark, The Magic Deer, and The Basket Maker's Wife — works that constitute his credited output as a book writer. In 1840 he published The Stage Before and Behind the Curtain in three volumes, a detailed account of his managerial career. That same year he was declared bankrupt, yet he continued managing Drury Lane and the Surrey Theatre until 1848.

Bunn also wrote two plays: Kenilworth in 1821 and The Minister and the Mercer in 1834. A lyric he wrote for the William Vincent Wallace opera Maritana — "Whose smile upon each feature plays with truthfulness replete" — later appeared in an incomplete form in the thoughts of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce's Ulysses.