Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes by William Gillette, with cooperation of Arthur Conan Doyle. Gillette's Sherlock Holmes consisted of four acts. Combining elements from several of Doyle's stories, he mainly utilized the plots 'A Scandal in Bohemia' and 'The Final Problem.' Also it had elements from A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Boscombe Valley Mystery and The Greek Interpreter. However, with the exception of Holmes, Watson, Moriarty and Billy the Pageboy, all the other characters were his own creations. Different from the intellectual-only original, 'a machine rather than a man', Gillette portrayed Holmes as brave and open to express his feelings. He wore the deerstalker cap on stage, which was originally featured in illustrations by Sidney Paget. Gillette introduced the curved or bent briar pipe, instead of the straight pipe pictured by illustrators, supposedly so that Gillette could pronounce his lines more easily; since it is as difficult to pronounce lines clearly whether the pipe is bent or straight, it may have been that Gillette's face was easier to see from the seats with a bent briar in his mouth. Gillette also made use of a magnifying-glass, a violin and a syringe, which all came from the Canon and which were all now established as 'props' to the Sherlock Holmes character. Gillette formulated the complete phrase: 'Oh, this is elementary, my dear fellow', which was later reused by Clive Brook, the first spoken-cinema Holmes, as: 'Elementary, my dear Watson', Holmes's best known line and one of the most famous expressions in the English language