Subscription Theater: Democracy and Drama in Britain and Ireland, 1880-1939 9780812297416

Citation preview

Subscription Theater

MATERIAL TEXTS Series Editors Roger Chartier Leah Price Joseph Farrell Peter Stallybrass Anthony Grafton Michael F. Suarez, S.J. A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

SUBSCRIPTION THEATER Democracy and Drama in Britain and Ireland, 1880–1939

MATTHEW FRANKS

universit y of pennsylvania press phil adelphia

Copyright 䉷 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Control Number: 2020001875 isbn 978-0-8122-5247-7

CONTENTS

Introduction. Stages of Subscription

1

Chapter 1. Private Subscription: The Incorporated Stage Society and Ephemeral Repertoire

17

Chapter 2. Public Subscription: Audience Impressions in Dublin, Glasgow, and Liverpool

46

Chapter 3. Subscription On and Beyond the Stage

76

Chapter 4. Affiliative Subscription: Paying to Play with Amateur Groups

109

Chapter 5. Virtual Subscription: The Mask as Readers’ Theater

143

Epilogue. Subscribe Now

177

Notes

183

Bibliography

223

Index

241

Acknowledgments

253

INTRODUCTION

Stages of Subscription

In 1996, playwright August Wilson delivered a speech to the U.S. Theatre Communications Group in which he called subscribers the “life blood” of American theater. “But,” he continued, “the subscription audience holds the seats of our theatres hostage to the mediocrity of its tastes, and serves to impede the further development of an audience for the work that we do. While intentional or not, it serves to keep blacks out of the theatre where they suffer no illusion of welcome anyway. A subscription thus becomes not a support system but makes the patrons members of a club to which the theatre serves as a clubhouse.”1 Disparaged for their insularity, subscribers are as vital to today’s theater as Wilson’s hematic metaphor acknowledges. Although their numbers have fallen in recent years, subscribers remain the largest individual donors, the second-highest revenue contributors, and the surest return visitors to not-for-profit U.S. theaters.2 In Britain, government cuts are prompting more and more subsidized theaters to adopt similar membership schemes, from the National Theatre to the Donmar Warehouse to the Leicester Curve.3 For theater and performance scholars as much as for professional theater producers, subscription lists offer among the clearest documentation of the individuals who have comprised theater audiences over the last century. Yet despite the centrality of subscription to theater, beyond trade journals and industry books, we have largely ignored the funding model’s origins or impact.4 When we mention subscribers at all, we highlight their homogeneity. Richard Schechner has asserted that the “subscription audience” is “not a very representative one.” For him and other critics, subscription forecloses diverse races, incomes, and ages by pursuing “that ‘2%’ of the population who will pay to go to the theatre”—in other words, those who are white, middle class, and middle-aged or older.5 This perceived representational

2

Introduction

imbalance has even led director Andre Gregory to ask whether subscribers “maintain or strangle a theatre.”6 At once enabling and inhibiting, subscribers incarnate the button-down bourgeois straw man that modern theater so pugnaciously and productively resists. Casting patrons as philistines and dinosaurs, subscriber bashing upstages high modernism’s rejection of the uncultured masses. Subscribers uncomfortably remind us that even the most avowedly not-for-profit theaters need playgoers who pay, prompting disgruntled Australian actress Anna Broinowski to cunningly dub them “a bank of semi-comatose.”7 While money-minded marketing managers and communications officers flatter subscribers in pre-show announcements and promotional leaflets, artistically inclined playwrights, directors, actors, and critics compound subscription’s reputation for stifling the performance repertoire and subverting the ideal that theater audiences reflect society as a whole. By turns shorthand for and negative impression of the audiences they contentiously represent, subscribers toggle between endowing and debarring. Although spectatorship theorists like Susan Bennett and Christopher Balme have emphasized what Balme calls the “closed circuit” of subscription audiences, an account that attends to both sides of these contradictions would help us better understand subscribers’ contributions to theater history.8 When we actually read theater subscription lists, we see that the individuals named on them have not always been as uniform as critics suppose. In fact, this study argues that subscribers have been responsible for determining the very values we assign to audience and repertoire today. Subscribers first took up their alternately cliquish and communitybuilding roles at a time when “the drama” had reached its much-bemoaned nadir as an art form—replete, its critics claimed, with hack writing, ham acting, and the pursuit of profit above all else. Theater historians often quote Matthew Arnold’s 1879 injunction to “organise the theatre,” but so far none has acknowledged that this call for a professional not-for-profit sector was answered by different subscription schemes.9 While it had long been possible to subscribe to the professional theater by contributing to a theater building fund, renting a private box, or purchasing a season ticket (newspaper advertisements suggest that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this practice was used far more frequently for operas, concerts, and exhibitions than for plays), the new West End model seeking profitable longer runs that appeared in the 1860s undermined any desire to subscribe to a theater as such.10 From a consumer’s perspective, late Victorian playgoers had never

Introduction

3

seemed so powerful: increasing numbers voted with their pocketbooks every week, ensuring that unpopular productions met a quick death while crowd favorites were extended for indefinite runs and carbon-copy provincial tours. And yet, spectators from across Britain and Ireland became increasingly frustrated that their options had been vetted for them by London theater managers and the Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner of Plays—up until 1968, the Lord Chamberlain’s Office read and licensed every play before it could appear onstage. Darkened auditoriums and new rules proscribing demonstrative behavior further constrained audiences. Until spectators could find a way to “bind themselves together,” as one theater reformer later put it, their power would remain fundamentally passive and the repertoire fundamentally profit driven.11 Enter subscription, which has a long history in the English language, first emerging in the fifteenth century to signify an individual’s signed consent to articles of religion. Six hundred years on, one study cites contemporary playgoers in Britain, Australia, and the United States who claim to subscribe “religiously” to theater companies, which in turn represent just a handful of the many enterprises “raising money for a particular purpose by collecting contributions from a number of individuals,” to borrow a rung from the OED definition.12 One way to make sense of these centuries of schemes would be to describe a gradual widening of access. Where in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, relatively small clusters of male aristocrats contributed relatively large sums of money to subscription lists for anything from lexigraphy books to masquerade balls to army barracks, the rise of associational life and the lowering of subscription fees meant that subscription eventually came to be defined by its relation to a mixed, middle-class public. By 1800, the contrasting terms “private subscription” and “public subscription” indicated whether this general public was excluded from or invited onto lists funding enterprises as varied as clubs and concerts; hospitals and charities; libraries and schools; prisons and turnpikes.13 Over the course of the nineteenth century, the growth of trade unionism and the popularity of shilling, penny, and farthing fees signaled that this concept of a subscribing public had expanded to include the laboring classes, who contributed to schemes private (such as workmen’s penny banks) and public (such as tributes for statesmen like William Gladstone). Operating within this homegrown tradition and drawing inspiration from independent and state-sponsored Continental theaters, turn-of-the-century theater subscription redistricted the public in seemingly contradictory

4

Introduction

ways: private-subscription schemes appealed to coteries, while publicsubscription schemes appealed to crowds. At times, the subscription theater derived power from exclusivity, as when productions whose tickets had been sold by private subscription legally bypassed the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship by theoretically offsetting the threat of mass social unrest. At other times, however, the subscription theater derived power from inclusivity, as when public subscription was held up as a model for making notfor-profit theater accessible to everyone. The target audience was not always clear, but a changing landscape at least was apparent to theater critic Arthur Bingham Walkley, who in 1902 declared that “like nearly everything else in the modern world the new theatrical demand has of late years been worked . . . with the usual apparatus of prospectuses, pamphleteering, and, above all, subscription lists.”14 At stake in the back and forth between exclusivity and inclusivity was a nascent expression of Schechner’s wish that the subscription audience be representative. Like American college brochures today, turn-of-the-century British and Irish theater subscription lists were assessed for their diversity. In 1908, the English newspaper World fretted that London’s Incorporated Stage Society “had done for itself” because the latest private-subscription lists revealed “what a number of ‘influential’ people had joined it”—some influencers would be essential, the paper hinted, but too many would spoil the soup.15 Striking a more congratulatory tone a few years later, the Sunday Chronicle reported that Liverpool Repertory Theatre’s public-subscription lists “include the names of everybody who is anybody in Liverpool and district, and a large number of faithful pittites and galleryites who have rolled up with their mites,” with the Daily Chronicle adding that they represented “all ranks and stations in life.”16 Purporting proportions of different social strata, the press characterized subscription audiences for readers. So did pen pals: in a private letter to George Bernard Shaw, socialist Sidney Webb mused that Harley Granville Barker’s Kingsway Theatre mailing list subscribers were nearly all “Fabians and Aristocrats.” That Webb collected this list, as well as the lists for the Stage Society and Liverpool Rep, in order to solicit some 5,000 potential subscribers for his and Shaw’s embryonic magazine, the New Statesman, confirms that subscription has always been a minority activity: whatever their professed privacy or publicity, most of the theater schemes discussed in the following chapters list fewer than 1,500 subscribers—the apparent limit to the number of individuals with whom one could cooperate at the turn of the century who were “interested in

Introduction

5

drama, and largely in Shaw,” as Webb described them.17 But rather than signal a lack of interest in the burgeoning not-for-profit theater, these numbers figure subscribers standing in for their fellow citizens. At a time when women, the working classes, and the Irish were advocating for greater political representation outside the theater, subscribers gained the right to determine repertoires and policies on the rest of the public’s behalf. Webb’s paper chase anticipates the robust exchange of acquisition lists among theaters and other arts organizations today. As he and Walkley remind us, subscription comprises an extremely material apparatus of pamphlets, prospectuses, and other printed ephemera. In this way, subscription challenges any assumption that theatrical collectivity is confined to the live performance event. Of all the arts, theater is most celebrated for its capacity to gather a limited audience in a specific place for a particular duration of time. But Peggy Phelan’s evocative claim that performance “leaves no visible trace” has always seemed like half the story when confronting theater archives that overflow with sketches, playbills, promptbooks, press clippings, photographs, and video recordings.18 As we parse past performances with students and colleagues today, we are accustomed to recognizing these ephemera as mere traces of irreproducible happenings, like breadcrumbs leading to people and places we’ll never ultimately reach. When such documents contradict each other, upending our most oft-repeated legends about the Globe Theatre’s humanistic layout or the Ubu Roi premiere’s revolutionary riot, the archive only further “performs the institution of disappearance,” to borrow Rebecca Schneider’s haunting formulation.19 Foraging for proper nouns, we have lost sight of how playgoers actually interacted with these materials before, during, and after the performance event. Turn-of-the-century subscribers were hardly the only playgoers treading ink. Thanks to increasing mechanization of lithographic printing, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, new theatrical ephemera like souvenir programs, picture postcards, and colored posters joined up with elegant reading editions and theater trade journals such as The Era and The Stage. Playgoers began to be defined by the copy as well as by the company they kept: in the New Age, critic Ashley Dukes claimed he was able to spot gallery first-nighters who clutched issues of the Sunday Referee—“that healing plaster for the wounded pride of actors and dramatists”—and who fondled programs “like a sacred relic of the Church, a leaf of a palm branch or a fragment of the true Cross, carried off as a trophy and added to the pile.”20 By the 1910s, it was common for American programs to be decked with

6

Introduction

blank spaces for the “name of the play, the friend or friends you were with, and where you dined after the performance,” in a print extension of the scrapbook. Print imbued theatergoing with metaphor: actor-manager George Alexander made his St. James’s Theatre tickets of pasteboard so they would look like railway passes, while across the channel Andre´ Antoine embossed his to resemble wedding invitations.21 Arnold Bennett even proclaimed that print was holding the theater back: “the organs which give special attention to the theatre, and by their adjectival exertions promote the sale of photographs and postcards and the collecting of ‘souvenirs,’ are utterly reactionary in tone.”22 Yet by the next year, Bennett had published his play What the Public Wants in a special supplement of the literary magazine the English Review to coincide with the Stage Society’s jubilee production, which subsequently figured last in a Chiswick Press volume of one hundred souvenir programs. As theater adopted and inflected Victorian publishing taxonomies to demarcate high-minded drama from trivial entertainment, subscription sharpened the aggregative impulse behind the souvenir. The evening bill’s familiar lists of plays and players were amplified across a variety of printed ephemera to suggest literary repertoires and collaborative ensembles, while circulated lists of subscribers evoked newly cooperative audiences. Quantitatively, subscription offered reams of seemingly hard data: of subscribers and their contributions, of actors, and especially of plays—English, foreign, new, old, one acts, three acts—all meticulously recounted next to the incomes and expenditures in which subscribers now were literally invested. Qualitatively, subscription created virtual stages on which subscribers could enact and reimagine their social relationships, whether by pinning their tickets together in order to secure adjoining seats, or by crowding newspaper columns with letters protesting unfair treatment from theater managers, or simply by reading their name—or a name—next to others on a list. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the scholars closest to coming up with a vocabulary for these qualitative interactions have been historians of subscription book publication, a practice whose heyday had been some hundred and fifty years earlier. Thomas Lockwood has remarked that the spelling out of true names, which at that time was reserved for marriage and death registers unless you were a criminal or a bankrupt, gave subscription lists both a homosocial clubby-ness and a “slightly pornographic frisson.” Sometimes more than slightly: when book historian Pat Rogers claimed that “few facts in literary discussion are so unambiguously facts

Introduction

7

as the names of subscribers,” he probably wasn’t thinking of the smutty travel narrative A Voyage to Lethe (1741), whose fifteen fictitious subscribers all had “cock” in their surnames, including “Sir Roger Allcock,” “Lord Lobcock,” and “Alderman Slycock.”23 Though the democratization of subscription ensured that readers a century and a half later were far more accustomed to encountering a variety of names in print, the subscribers who appear in the following chapters raise different red flags. While the proper names circulated in private annual reports might appear more innocuous than the mask-like pseudonyms bandied about in public correspondence columns, be the latter playful (“An Enemy of the People”) or earnest (“The Woman in the Stalls”), the fact remains that any subscriber’s name still invites suspicion—if not of identity at least of motive. Even before the subscription theater, subscribing had long been synonymous with both performing and being performed for: throughout the nineteenth century, the caricature of the passive and blubbering John Bull who could be documentarily seduced into subscribing to anything jostled alongside that of the duplicitous self-promoter who subscribes to charity only so that others might see her name in print.24 For both kinds of subscriber, the putative funding goal mattered less than identifying with a particular community. Whether that is ultimately exciting or off-putting depends on your reaction to the machinations of one Bristol Little Theatre manager who in the 1920s mailed invitational postcards to the city’s 128 registered dentists explaining that the first act of the company’s latest production took place in a dental surgery (the play was Shaw’s You Never Can Tell); his efforts anticipated San Diego Repertory Theatre marketers who seventy years later would produce specific season prospectuses for white, Latinx, and African American subscribers emphasizing the text and images with which marketers hoped each group would identify.25 Were theater marketers rolling out a red carpet or a blindfold? Subscription ephemera primed playgoers to sit together in a theater believing that at least some members of the audience had read the same materials as they had—since theaters were becoming darker and playgoers quieter, this was an increasingly easy belief to accept. But as surely as subscribers began to get typecast by eager “subscription hunters,” they also were newly able to represent both their own and other citizens’ interests in such a way that gendered honorifics, classed pseudonyms, and provincial postcodes worked in the opposite direction to prize apart the stage from its regulatory bodies: to give subscribers actual as

8

Introduction

opposed to imaginary ownership of the theater. Subscription set the stage, or the template, for audience delegates to talk back to the Lord Chamberlain, metropolitan managers, and wealthy producer patrons and eventually to form alliances with new institutions: the postwar Arts Council of Great Britain; national theaters in Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales; the academic study of World Theater. Even today, subscription forces us to ask how the public inside the theater relates to the public outside it. Do playgoers stand in for the rest of society, or do they represent particular communities within it? Are audience communities instantaneous and ephemeral, or do the loyalties that playgoers feel toward one another begin before the performance and continue long after it? Do playgoers experience a sense of equality toward those seated next to them or in other sections of the theater—and even if they do, do they feel equal to the characters represented onstage or to the actors playing those roles, or to the citizens beyond the theater walls? My chapters aim to identify the different theatrical collectivities that subscription introduced into the modern theater. Chapter 1 argues that in addition to evading the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship, privatesubscription play-producing clubs such as the Independent Theatre Society and the Incorporated Stage Society trained audiences to imagine a performance library that could be compiled, catalogued, and chosen from at will— the Stage Society even had a library but no permanent theater. Though their critics compared subscription societies to laboratories and medical museums whose unlicensed wares would not appeal to the general public, quantitative analysis reveals that societies introduced nearly a third of the most frequently revived plays and nearly half of all new translations to the commercial repertoire from 1890 to 1959. Even more crucially, subscription societies assembled the very idea of a modern dramatic repertoire by listing plays in their prospectuses, programs, and annual reports, whose supposedly private contents were trumpeted and then picked apart by the national public press. Subscription lists and newspaper accounts gendered playgoing as female and playwriting as male, yet both were figured as influencing the repertoire. That most subscription theatergoers were middle-class women, many of them unmarried, was particularly subversive, since this was the very demographic the Lord Chamberlain most sought to protect. By adopting the graphic codes and distribution strategies used by other turn-ofthe-century political clubs for their prospectuses, membership forms, and annual reports—and carrying over that aesthetic to programs, posters, and

Introduction

9

even tickets—the Stage Society capitalized on a ready apparatus for organizing and circularizing. The subscription ephemera in this first chapter trouble our traditional disciplinary assumptions about ephemera and literary value, demonstrating how unmarried middle-class women used printed materials to shape a literary theater authored and regulated by men. Chapter 2 expands to the provincial repertory theater movement whose spread was assiduously tracked in the Stage Society’s annual reports. Metropolitan repertorists compared provincial playgoers to schoolchildren in need of teaching, patients in need of nursing, and savages in need of civilizing. For repertory companies in Glasgow, Dublin, and Liverpool, public subscription challenged repertorists’ analogies by representing playgoers more equitably as citizen shareholders. The provincial press transformed sheets of newsprint into crowdfunding platforms by publishing appeals, prospectuses, and subscription forms that readers could cut out and mail in. Writing letters to newspaper editors, subscribers took up pseudonyms representing their class, gender, and age, staking a claim to the day-to-day running of the theater and setting themselves apart from the professional critics whose priorities differed from their own. Since correspondents from the pit and gallery were accorded the same typographical treatment as those from the stalls and dress circle, their letters further challenged the hierarchy of the physical theater; however, because correspondence columns more often were filled by lower-middle-class patrons, wealthier playgoers were perceived as less influential in the provinces, while the reverse was true in London. Most surprising to us today, playgoers saw public subscription in civic terms that exceeded the representative authority of democratically elected city councils. Audiences considered public-subscription theaters to be “Citizens’ Theatres” and “public institutions,” even though the theaters technically were privately owned. Because theaters represented only a few of the many turn-of-the-century public-subscription initiatives, including hospitals, schools, libraries, and museums, subscription ephemera shed light on provincial newspapers’ wider role in constituting a civic performance space. Chapter 3 pivots from subscription lists that circulated around the stage to those that featured on it as props in plays by Shaw, Henrik Ibsen, St. John Hankin, Elizabeth Robins, John Galsworthy, Arthur Wing Pinero, William Boyle, and other turn-of-the-century playwrights. In the hands of characters who give or collect subscriptions to any number of nontheatrical funds and societies, these props smuggled the public plot into the

10

Introduction

private drawing room and help explain how so-called “social drama” was able to bring large crowds to the stage while keeping casts small. Subscription-list props register complementary and competing political affiliations: metonymically, they represent otherwise absent groups among whom the lists circulate, from provincial constituents to gentlemen bachelors; metaphorically, they represent further unseen groups on whose behalf subscribers claim to speak, such as poor widows and orphans. That such props enter onto the figurative “backstage” of the drawing room and then exit again into the public world underscores the theatricality of subscription, as characters like ambitious politicians and industrious nubiles participate in ostensibly collectivist endeavors with the selfish intention of getting elected or married; meanwhile, crowds of unseen subscribers gather offstage in order to be entertained: to hear bands play or politicians orate. By alternately aligning subscribing with performing and being performed for, subscription-list props alerted audiences to the dangers of passive, uncritical spectatorship, even as such props made playgoers reluctant to actually subscribe. The contemporaneous vogue for charity matinees, whose repertoire avoided plays with subscription-list props, instead staging massive crowd scenes in which hundreds of actors appeared onstage, suggests that audiences were more willing to contribute money when crowds were identified as performers rather than as spectators. Spotlighting subscription lists as well as petitions, letters, signed terms, collecting books, checkbooks, notebooks, visitors’ books, and even lists of eligible bachelors, this chapter posits that ephemera—while not as advanced as telephones, gramophones, radio, or film; or as enduring as statues or monuments—were preeminent props because they circulated between onstage and offstage, showing how papers that were visible to the audience might stand in for persons who were not. This chapter argues that in the act of committing their names and subscriptions to paper, citizens engaged with ephemera as a form of representational politics. Chapter 4 moves from thinking of subscribers as metaphorical performers to thinking about them as literal ones taking part in amateur theater groups spread across Britain’s and Ireland’s cities, towns, and villages. Far from being incidental, paying to play was a precondition for establishing the social function of amateur theater. While amateurs frequently get defined both by and in opposition to the professional theater industry, subscription enabled amateurs to dictate the terms for professional involvement, whether this meant rejecting the standards and priorities of

Introduction

11

professional playwrights and actors or pooling funds to pay copyright fees and hire outside professional producers in order to satisfy artistic ambitions or ape commercial trends. Even though the amateur movement vaunted the inclusivity of its subscription lists, promising clerks, plumbers, typists, and maids the opportunity to play starring roles alongside their social superiors, in practice, performing with multiple groups counted more than loyally paying your dues, but wealth counted most of all, with amateurs who paid the highest subscriptions wielding the greatest influence over cast lists. By contrast, the amateur groups that were most often described as “democratic” were the ones that excluded individuals who did not vote with the party, work at the factory, identify with the gender, or otherwise share in the aims of the institution to which the group was connected, yet which thereby made space for subscribers to theatrically transcend the identities that connected them to those institutions in the first place. As women played men, laborers played emperors, pastors played lechers, and mutes played speakers, a parallel discourse of authenticity rooted conversations about performance in the everyday, anticipating the postwar performative turn in anthropology and sociology. If repertory theaters in cities relied on provincial newspapers to create a sense of community, amateur groups in towns and villages used ephemera to manufacture artificial distance, from spectators writing anonymous letters in order to avoid offending friends and neighbors, to actors withholding their names from printed programs in order to facilitate professional incognito. Programs especially manifested amateurs’ competing desires to belong to an acknowledged community and to become somebody else, with amateurs fixating on the program seller as a figure who, by virtue of distributing ephemera, vacillated between marginality and significance. The final chapter asks what happens when subscribers abandon the theater building entirely, as a disaffected Edward Gordon Craig did when he quit Britain and devised a virtual stage in The Mask, a theatrical little magazine that he published in Florence from 1908 to 1929. Craig roamed the world collecting names, enlisting imaginary contributors and real subscribers as far afield as Japan, Syria, South Africa, and Bolivia with an accumulative fervor that impelled his editorial practices and theatrical theories alike. Alongside articles and essays on theater history and theory, The Mask published a number of imagined dramatic dialogues between Craig, who played the autocratic “Stage Director,” “Critic,” or “Editor,” and his subscribers, who played the respective “Playgoer,” “Professional Performer,” or “Queer

12

Introduction

Reader.” Casting subscribers in roles may have required putting words in their mouths, but as Craig’s interlocutors switched between theatergoers and theater professionals, his dramatic dialogues prompted subscribers to behave like stage performers, and performers to see themselves as readers. By allowing Craig to be simultaneously in England and attacking it from outside, the mobile Mask helped to separate “Theater” as subject from “theater” as building, launching an idea of World Theater that reflected the journal’s international subscription lists even while Craig tried to convince English readers to give him a literal theater of his own. Letters to editors, submitted designs, and testimonial postcards reveal that subscribers around the world saw the journal as a metaphorical theater in which they alternately were encouraged to spectate or to perform but always to pay. For a study in which ephemera have facilitated not only theaters but so many other non-print initiatives, periodical subscription brings together ends and means. This chapter contends that Craig envisioned a new relationship between theater and reading in which annotating text was both a method for realizing stage productions and a performance for other readers. It is worth emphasizing that my chapters do not follow a strict chronology: Craig’s magazine in some ways acts as a bridge from the late Victorian play-producing societies to the new stagecraft championed by repertory theaters, and both play-producing societies and repertory theaters were established to perform several of the plays that featured subscription lists as props. Rather, each chapter offers a test case for subscription’s democratic aspirations, asking how subscribers acted and spoke as representatives for a wider public. Philosophers from Cicero to Hannah Arendt have located the emergence of political representation in the world of theater, specifically in the idea of persona—originally, the clay, wooden, or bark mask worn by Roman actors.26 Whether affixing “true” or pseudonymous names to their contributions, turn-of-the-century subscribers performed not just as themselves but also, more metaphorically, for and on behalf of other citizens. Subscribers substituted or stood in for other members of society in whose names the theaters had been established—those who might one day visit the theaters or share in the repertoire—with activities that ranged from drafting and circulating articles of association, to electing and seeking positions on theater managing committees, to discussing their own and others’ views about theater in meetings and in public and private correspondence. Such relatively subdued gestures inside theaters have helped subscribers to pass unnoticed in a period more often celebrated for alienating and antagonizing audiences—for

Introduction

13

prompting early exits and riots (as though either phenomenon had not also characterized the commercial theater of the previous century). Challenging familiar narratives about the scandalized bourgeois or the rowdy Irishman, this study proposes that subscription audiences made theater fundamentally more representative. At the same time, subscribers made theatergoing both more collective and more critical—two values that often get opposed in contemporary theorizations of spectatorship. If a new age of theatrical consent sounds too utopian, we should bear in mind that subscribers were not all treated equally. Amateur-theater subscribers who paid the highest fees lobbied producers to keep lower-paying servants from starring roles, for example, while The Mask’s minority of readers with English mailing addresses received far more of Craig’s attention than the bulk of his subscribers who resided elsewhere. Beyond subscribers themselves, as August Wilson reminds us and as newspaper correspondence confirms, many playgoers or potential playgoers did not feel at all represented by the subscription audiences who claimed to speak for them, whether due to differences in race or, more often in this study, in gender, class, or province. Yet while such evidence suggests that subscribers large and small took advantage of the opportunity to express at least their own dramatic priorities, together subscription audiences advanced an ideal that was greater than the sum of their parts. To fully account for subscribers’ representational power, this study performs close readings of printed ephemera that often get dismissed for storing rather than generating meaning, paying particular attention to how lists of plays and playgoers inspire analogies for theatrical collectivities—whether by transforming audiences from schoolchildren into shareholders, or repertoires from laboratories into libraries. The recent spate of books on lists with adjectives like “charm,” “pleasures,” and “deserving of a wider audience” in their titles suggests that lists traditionally have been seen as boring, when they have been seen at all.27 By reading lists and the ephemera that embed them such as programs, tickets, posters, postcards, prospectuses, annual reports, and provincial newspapers, the following chapters hope to offer a less bounded perspective on the tension between page and stage, which has traditionally been debated in terms of published drama.28 Redirecting attention from the printed book to the printed non-book, and telescoping out from theatrical subscription ephemera to non-theatrical subscription ephemera, this study contributes to a growing body of research into new forms of collectivity enacted by day-to-day printed materials.29

14

Introduction

Recognizing how ephemera create meaning in day-to-day terms does not mean ignoring what they tell us at a historical distance. Many of this study’s arguments incorporate digital or quantitative methods, drawing especially on a database of 23,000 productions assembled from J. P. Wearing’s reference series, The London Stage, 1890–1959.30 Every data set has limitations that mirror its strengths, and a focus on the professional metropolitan stage inevitably means that the activities of provincial, amateur, and overseas playgoers get short shrift—a problem of which subscribers were well aware, as Chapters 2, 4, and 5 demonstrate. At their most useful, quantitative methods help us break down disciplinary barriers that frequently appear in studies of modern theater. While drama scholars tend to applaud the emergence of modern playwrights like Shaw and Synge, who, as the story goes, saved the stage after a century of decline, theater historians urge us to remember that theater was the most popular form of entertainment during the same century. That so many of the data set’s most performed plays were infrequently revived suggests trade-offs inherent to competing kinds of ephemerality determined less by playwrights than by playgoers: long runs over a relatively short period of time, or short runs over a relatively long period of time—a phenomenon most familiar to book historians in terms of steady sellers versus best sellers.31 Although this study focuses on an activity designed to transcend the commercial theater’s limitations, Chapter 1 reveals that many subscription plays in fact went on to become commercial successes. As subscription cuts across the literary and the popular, it further suggests that scholarship on modern coteries and crowds might find common ground with a wider-ranging investment in audiences, stretching as far back as the distinction between private theaters and public playhouses in early modern England and as far afield as, for example, the samurai-exclusive noh and commoner-inclusive kabuki of Edo Japan—both sets of traditions get taken up by Craig in Chapter 5.32 Rather than choose between coterie and crowd, turn-of-the-century subscribers combined tendencies of the private clubhouse with the public playhouse in order to achieve a theater-making practice that better represented the audience. Both up close and at a distance, then, the subscription theater makes visible how subscription theatrically expanded the terms of political representation from the later years of Victoria’s reign to the beginning of World War II. As the following pages will suggest, subscription schemes underpinned and extended far beyond theaters to the period’s most recognizable

Introduction

15

political movements, such as women’s suffrage, trade unionism, and Irish nationalism. If, in the eighteenth century, subscription was a game for male aristocrats, by the twentieth it was being held up as a right for everyone who had a farthing or more to give: women as well as men, working class as well as wealthy, provincials as well as metropolitans. For the first and possibly only time in these lands, citizens valued a representative subscription list as an end in itself. Claims about whether subscription lists were “democratic” or “representative” cropped up in discussions of not just theaters but also Diamond Jubilee gifts, soldiers’ memorials, workers’ dispensaries, voluntary schools, cathedral organs, temperance associations, auto-cycle clubs, and Conservative societies, among a tremendous variety of enterprises whose managing committees typically permitted subscribers to vote and hold office.33 In this way, subscription gave citizens the ability to participate in what was in legal respects a more inclusive alternative to Parliament and local government, from which so many members of the public—namely women and propertyless men—were excluded. Moreover, by prompting citizens to imagine lists as democratic and representative, subscription paved the way for the public subsidy of civic subscription initiatives, including theaters, hospitals, universities, museums, parks, tram lines, and electric grids, even as subscription initiatives frequently were seen to offer greater representational opportunities to citizens compared to government-administered equivalents. On the other hand, subscription perpetuated plenty of undemocratic practices, too. Because better-off subscribers were able to buy outsize influence (for example, by contributing to political parties and campaign funds), subscription further compounded the problems of unequal wealth distribution that had led trade unionist George Howell to coin the phrase “one man, one vote” in 1880. Yet if wealthy male subscribers continued to exert the greatest influence in many spheres of society—playwrights depict such gentlemen clubbing together to grease the wheels for their own social advancement while feigning benevolence—other subscribers managed their own enterprises “on democratic lines” even at the apparent expense of inclusivity—as when factory workers voted to exclude nonworkers from their union executive committees, or when middle-class women subscribed to and administered anti-suffragist societies. Whether subscribers adopted public-spirited guises to selfish ends or employed democratic tactics to exclude or to limit the rights of others (justifiably or not), such contradictions hint at the complexities of determining if and when subscription, or indeed any political model, fulfills its representational ideals.

16

Introduction

But why did turn-of-the-century citizens attach such aspirations to subscription in the first place? Why did they spend so much time and not inconsiderable amounts of money adding their names to and evaluating the contents of and going door to door with and seeing plays about subscription lists? This book asks what potential collectivities subscription made available to those citizens, and what debts our own attitudes toward subscription and other forms of collective funding today owe to their encounters with ephemera, drama, and democracy.

CHAPTER 1

Private Subscription The Incorporated Stage Society and Ephemeral Repertoire

In November 1901, the Stage Society sent circulars to its 523 members announcing one Sunday evening and one Monday matinee performance of Mrs. Warren’s Profession. The Lord Chamberlain had banned Shaw’s play three years earlier, and although the Stage Society’s members-only performances technically were exempt from both the pre-performance licensing requirement and the long-standing prohibition on Sunday theatrics, managers feared the loss of their operating licenses. By the time the play premiered at the New Lyric Club in January, the Stage Society had been forced to change venues three times, after approaching at least twelve theaters, two music halls, three hotels, and two galleries. The society also had postponed the production once due to an actress’s last-minute scheduling conflict. With each change, the society printed new sets of circulars, programs, and tickets—sometimes, only a day apart. Dedicated to the discovery of new or sometimes very old drama, subscription societies were experimental coterie clubs composed of members whose annual fees financed, and secured tickets to, a season of private productions. Societies used professional and amateur actors and often performed a given play only once or twice, frequently borrowing West End theaters on dark nights and for afternoon matinees. J. T. Grein founded the first such group in Britain, the Independent Theatre Society (1891–97), in order to stage a performance of Ibsen’s Ghosts, which the Lord Chamberlain had banned from the public stage. Over 140 subscription societies followed; the Stage Society (1899–1939) ran longest and most successfully.1 Though extreme, the

18

Chapter 1

case of Mrs. Warren’s Profession demonstrates the extent to which subscription societies lacked actors and theaters of their own and relied on printed ephemera to constitute, as much as to communicate, their performances. Compared to bound books, ephemera—from the Greek for things lasting no more than a day—better approximated the transience of live performance. But ephemera also could virtually assemble repertoires and audiences beyond a single theater or performer. The Stage Society’s annual report meticulously recounted the Mrs. Warren saga and boasted of the speedy production of ephemera: “Tickets and programmes and a circular to Members were printed and ready within twenty-four hours.” The curtain would go up after the letterpress had come down: when the theater changed five days before another performance, members “[suffered] no further inconvenience than a late receipt of programmes and tickets consequent on the delay due to reprinting.”2 Subscription societies produced more ephemera than plays, such that Shaw received a prospectus from the fictitious “Pornographic Play Society (Limited),” which stated that the success of Mrs. Warren’s Profession “encourages the Committee of the P. P. Society to follow it up by a series of performances suitable to the taste of supersensuous audiences.”3 The prospectus satirized the tastes of subscription society members and the plays promised to them by committees. It also mocked the “limited” nature of such societies, conflating legal registration with limits on influence. Though their critics compared subscription societies to laboratories and medical museums whose unlicensed wares would not appeal to the general public, this chapter uses a database of 23,000 productions to reveal that societies introduced nearly a third of the most frequently revived plays and nearly half of all new translations to London’s commercial repertoire from 1890 to 1959.4 Even more crucially, this chapter argues that subscription societies introduced the very idea of a modern dramatic repertoire, and an audience for it, by means of ephemera such as prospectuses, programs, annual reports, and tickets. In 1904, one theater manager observed that a public for subsidized drama existed, “but it wants organising and circularising, and that is the work for [subscription] societies to take in hand.”5 Drawing comparisons from beyond the theater, other onlookers compared societies to legal bodies like corporations and syndicates. In the 1902 inaugural issue of the Times Literary Supplement, critic Arthur Bingham Walkley observed: Like nearly everything else in the modern world the new theatrical demand has of late years been worked by corporations and syndicates, with the usual apparatus of prospectuses, pamphleteering,

Private Subscription

19

and, above all, subscription lists. In this kind the Independent Theatre Society begat the New Century Theatre Society, and the New Century Theatre Society begat the Stage Society, and by-and-by— say, at the coming of the Cocqcigrues—the Stage Society may beget that new theatrical supply which ought to meet the new theatrical demand, but, somehow, never does.6 As Walkley anticipated, the Stage Society became a limited company two years later, changing its name to the Incorporated Stage Society to suggest a wider membership and influence. With incorporation, the society halved the annual fee to one guinea, and membership doubled from 617 to 1,082. But that a vital list of modern drama seemed as likely as a mythical monster to appear throws into relief the astounding accomplishments of the next decade, during which the Stage Society launched the playwriting careers of Shaw, Harley Granville Barker, St. John Hankin, and John Masefield, as well as introducing canonical foreign dramatists like Maurice Maeterlinck, Anton Chekhov, August Strindberg, Luigi Pirandello, and Jean Cocteau to the English stage; after passing the Stage Society test, many of these avantgarde plays successfully crossed over into the commercial theater repertoire.7 Yet more important than these playwrights and performance records was how ephemera created the concept of a modern dramatic repertoire in the first place. Prospectuses, by looking forward to an imagined series of future performances, and annual reports, by looking backward to take stock of successes and failures, trained audiences to think of plays not as performance pieces belonging to a particular actor or company but as parts of a more expansive dramatic library that could be compiled, catalogued, and chosen from at will. Repertoire even took the place of a permanent theater building; as the journal the New Age reported in 1908: “In London the only permanent home the drama we want possesses is in those pioneer dramatic societies which are financed by the subscriptions of members.”8 The Stage Society’s membership never exceeded 1,600 and only a fraction of theatergoing audiences saw subscription performances, but the society’s productions were reviewed in newspapers and revived in commercial theaters throughout Britain. Subscription lists and reports of Stage Society audiences in the public press gendered playgoing as female and playwriting as male; both were thought to influence the repertoire. Printed ephemera orbited around the live performance event, with the distance of the prospectus and the annual report, and the proximity of the ticket and program.

20

Chapter 1

Because they list the plays and productions that constituted the performance repertoire, these ephemera contextualize our own use of digital performance databases today.

Ephemera Are (Not) Ephemeral As changes in communications technology invite us to reimagine the relationship between what disappears and what endures, performance scholars and book historians alike have been increasingly drawn to ephemera.9 Not long ago, both disciplines grasped for ephemera only to shore up their namesakes. On the one hand, performance theorists treated ephemera like programs and photographs as valuable evidence of past performances, but they were “certainly not the thing itself,” as Jose´ Esteban Mun˜oz put it—“the thing” meaning the once live and now irretrievably lost performance event.10 On the other hand, book historians confined themselves to ephemera relating to the publishing and circulating of books, including prospectuses, bookmarks, booksellers’ labels, and library postcards. While ephemera like playbills and tickets until recently received little attention from either side of the aisle, only in the last decade or so have scholars begun to seriously test the relationship between the plural noun “ephemera” and its adjectival form.11 Borrowing a page from book historians who foreground the contingencies of print, performance scholars like Paul Clarke and Julian Warren have pointed out that although ephemera might seem stable compared to live performances, such materials are nevertheless ephemeral too, unable to be saved forever.12 Conversely, by following the logic that enabled performance theorists to set their sights beyond theater to rituals and other social activities, book historians like Martin Andrews have invoked theatrical ephemera like programs, posters, tickets, and flyers as examples of life’s ephemerality: most ephemera will not survive, but when they do, they call to mind everything else that hasn’t, from long-discarded papers like cards, invitations, certificates, and calendars to long-past events like births, graduations, marriages, and funerals.13 If book history and performance studies have not always engaged in dialogue with each other, perhaps it’s because they represent the longerstanding contest over the page versus the stage—a struggle that emerged with the advent of print and peaked with Romantic critics for whom the question of whether a play was better read or staged upstaged the question

Private Subscription

21

of how reading and spectating influence one another.14 In late twentiethcentury custody battles that made text the domain of literature departments and performance the province of theater and performance studies departments, ephemera were, by turns, not literary enough to get read closely like drama and not ephemeral enough to get interpreted as anything more than dregs of the live event.15 While the page-stage tension has energized drama scholarship—especially modern drama scholarship—the ephemera in this chapter question disciplinary assumptions about literariness by pointing out how non-literary printed forms like prospectuses and annual reports manufactured literary value, creating both the concept of a modern dramatic repertoire and an audience for it.16 Although literariness has made as ready a foil for book historians championing marginal print forms like chapbooks, broadsides, and photocopy lore as for performance theorists attuned to marginalized groups, this chapter troubles easy generalizations about ephemera and literary value, demonstrating in particular how unmarried middle-class women used ephemera to shape a literary theater authored and regulated by men.17 For book historians and performance scholars in equal measure, it is worth remembering that theatrical ephemera grew up side by side with other kinds of ephemera. From at least the mid-eighteenth century, jobbing printers throughout London and the provinces produced theater tickets, prospectuses, and playbills along with turnpike tickets, school prospectuses, and medical handbills. Lottery agents who introduced decorated woodcut letters to their advertising bills in the 1810s were following a practice pioneered on metropolitan theater bills a decade before.18 By the end of the nineteenth century, playgoers and non-playgoers alike encountered much of the ephemera itemized by collector John Kennedy Melling a century later: the newspaper in which a play advertisement or review appeared; the poster or box-office card hanging in the street or shop; the paper ticket handed out by the cashier; the program or playbill marking the occasion.19 Although the practice of printing playbills, posters, and programs goes back to the sixteenth century and of collecting them goes back to at least the seventeenth, it was only with the mechanization of photolithography and the rise of art nouveau and antique printing in the 1880s and 1890s that theatrical ephemera reached new heights of visual exuberance, setting off a vogue for souvenirs and theatrical scrapbooking and offering an easy target for critics fretting about drama’s apparently diminished cultural status.20 Even while seeking to reform the commercial theater, the subscription

22

Chapter 1

theater both engaged and circumvented these graphic trappings. Engaged, in the sense that many subscription societies defaulted to using printers connected with the theaters where they performed their plays, which meant that their programs often were visually indistinguishable from commercial fare mounted at the Globe, Criterion, Royal Court, or Duke of York’s; moreover, many subscription plays were advertised and reviewed alongside commercial plays in popular newspapers like the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Daily Telegraph, and Sketch, save for the difference that, with short runs, subscription plays were less likely to include illustrative photographs. Yet circumvented, too, in the sense that societies further employed subscription ephemera, including membership lists, newsletters, circulars, and annual reports—papers that had hitherto been absent from late Victorian theatergoing. Although both listed names and dates, subscription ephemera differed from commercial-theater ephemera politically, logistically, and aesthetically. David Vincent has identified organizational ephemera like membership rules and newsletters as key to nineteenth-century political protest.21 In this respect, ephemera circulated by the Stage Society evoked similar documents circulated by turn-of-the-century political associations like the Fabian Society (est. 1884), the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (1897–1918), the Divorce Law Reform Union (est. 1906), and the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology (est. 1913), all of which counted Stage Society subscribers as members; like these reformist groups, the Stage Society distributed ephemera with the intent of challenging, and thereby improving, the commercial theater.22 Of course, subscription ephemera did not belong to reformist clubs alone. As Aileen Fyfe has shown, the Victorians especially loved to gather and publish narrative and numerical information, with organizations ranging from charitable societies to railway companies distributing subscription ephemera in order to set out clear goals and provide accountability—not least, to attract subscribers.23 With this in mind, the Stage Society harnessed subscription ephemera to draw attention to the deliberate construction of repertoire and audience; because subscribers and plays were always being added to and removed from the lists, only by constantly refreshing the page could liveness be properly experienced. By adopting not only the periodicity but also the staid typefaces and standardized graphic codes of prospectuses, membership forms, and annual reports—and carrying over that aesthetic to programs, posters, and even tickets—the Stage Society capitalized on a

Private Subscription

23

ready apparatus for organizing and circularizing, in a turn-of-the-century iteration of what James Raven has called ephemera’s “reputation and authority.”24 In these ways, subscription ephemera at once inspired reform, organized data, and encouraged trust—although, as the Pornographic Play Society prospectus suggested, these imperatives were easily burlesqued, too, particularly when last-minute programming changes came into play. Thus, while many devoted playgoers preserved ephemera in scrapbooks and private collections, this chapter highlights the different uses to which ephemera were put before and even as they were being discarded, namely: to assembling new audiences and repertoires in defiance of the Lord Chamberlain and metropolitan commercial producers. Yet while it might seem easier to valorize serious-minded annual reports over showy souvenirs, it would be a mistake to dismiss commercial-theater ephemera out of hand. As Gillian Russell has pointed out, late Victorian theater historian Thomas Edgar Pemberton claimed that many of the playbills in his collection had been given to him by working-class persons: “ ‘I’ve never been able to afford pictures,’ said one worn-out old fellow, as, with trembling hand, he pressed his little bundle upon me, ‘but my playbills has been pictures to me as long as I remember.’ ”25 Pemberton’s anecdote prefigures Paul Gilroy’s more recent claim that by decorating record store walls with posters and album art of popular music, black immigrants to 1970s and 1980s Britain used ephemera to counteract racial dispossession.26 In other words, although I focus on theatrical subscription ephemera here and throughout this study, this category by no means delimits the ways in which different social groups have used ephemera to articulate and reappropriate a shared sense of identity. My bigger claim is that examples from the theater could help us sketch the contours of how citizens have engaged with ephemera more widely. Another way of putting it is that while ephemera sometimes attract collectors, more often they perform as collectors. Following Matthew Kirschenbaum and Andrew Piper, this chapter argues that the material form of text shapes our imaginative perception of its content.27 What happens, then, when the names and numbers listed in ephemera become the basis for a published reference series and then a digital database of 23,000 London productions mounted over seventy years? Debra Caplan highlights this very tension when she observes that databases “tackle a recurring and significant challenge in [performance studies]—the ephemerality of our medium and the dispersal of theatrical ephemera that may shed light on a performance

24

Chapter 1

event.”28 If our aim is to account for the subscription theater’s influence, how do we reconcile the fleeting and forgotten with a record based on the relatively few ephemera that endured, including inaccurate newspaper advertisements and programs for unrealized productions?29 Rather than settle for quantitative claims made with a very large grain of salt, this chapter redirects focus from numerical figures to figurative language, drawing attention to historical moments when a repertoire is compared to a library or a storehouse, or a database is compared to a dictionary or a cloud.30 In this way, this chapter contends that databases, like ephemera, participate in a long tradition of mediating collectivity, offering textual technologies that invite us to imagine virtual assemblages of plays and playgoers.31

From Laboratory to Library Turn-of-the-century theater reformers compared subscription societies to different storage facilities: laboratories, museums, storehouses, libraries. Each analogy had something to say about the nature of the repertoire, be it experimental, esoteric, explosive, or classical. These analogies conceptualized plays as discrete objects that could be arranged on a shelf, in a mental shift hastened by the late Victorian renaissance in dramatic publishing, which helped to literalize the metaphor.32 Ephemera’s institutional associations further inspired such comparisons. The paragraphs that follow weigh the various trade-offs of such collectivities before offering a quantitative analysis that evaluates their accuracy. To what extent did subscription societies discover drama for the commercial repertoire? The majority of subscription productions were performed only once or twice; in this respect, societies resembled laboratories. William Archer imagined a “test performance society” that would operate as a “safetyvalve” for plays that might upset the censor.33 Statutorily speaking, the British stage had been censored since the 1737 Licensing Act, and the 1843 Theatres Act that gave the Lord Chamberlain an explicit directive to focus on decorum remained in effect until 1968. However, in 1882, Sydney Grundy evaded the Lord Chamberlain by mounting a subscription performance of his unlicensed play The Novel Reader (1879) under the name May and December at the Globe Theatre; in 1886, the Shelley Society (generally considered a literary rather than a play-producing society) staged a subscription performance of Shelley’s banned play The Cenci (1819) at the Grand

Private Subscription

25

Theatre.34 Authorities’ willingness to consider these performances private and beyond the scope of the 1843 Act established a precedent for future play-producing societies as far as censorship was concerned.35 In a parallel development, around this time dramatic publishing returned to being integral to a play’s literary value. As Henry Arthur Jones proclaimed after the passage of the 1891 American Copyright Act, which ostensibly protected English playwrights from unauthorized transatlantic performances: “If a playwright does not publish within a reasonable time after the theatrical production of his piece, it will be an open confession that his work was a thing of the theatre merely, needing its garish artificial light and surroundings, and not daring to face the calm air and cold daylight of print.”36 Apparently, playgoing was for the evening and reading, the daytime. Copyright law newly defined performance through print: in order to secure copyright before publication, the play had to be “publicly performed,” which meant that a playbill had to be exhibited outside the venue and the performance advertised in two newspapers.37 (Subscription performances did not count.) Reading editions of Shaw and other “advanced” dramatists followed, spurred by publisher involvement in societies. This included William Heinemann, who asked John Lane to publish Heinemann’s banned play The First Step (1895) after the Independent Theatre Society decided not to stage it; Gerald Duckworth, who was secretary of the New Century Theatre Society and later published all of Galsworthy’s plays; and Grant Richards, who published Shaw’s Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898) and was listed as a signatory on the Stage Society’s invitational circular. By Edward’s reign, critics had inverted the print/performance paradigm. One lamented that the Stage Society had gone the way of “other experimental dramatic societies” by performing Mrs. Warren’s Profession, “which one could have been content to read.”38 With less ambivalence, the Stage Society’s secretary Allan Wade recalled that Richards’s Shaw volumes “were very amusing . . . to read. The thought that they might be acted did not seem to occur to anybody.”39 Societies devoted themselves to testing the so-called “great unacted,” the iceberg of which Shaw was assumed to be only the tip. They may have wanted for quality plays, but they were never short of submissions. The Stage Society’s Reading & Advising Committee received an average of three plays a week (most of which had never been published), and the society’s ten-year jubilee celebrations included a special midnight burlesque that depicted a strike of great unacted dramatists who compel the “Ultra-Drama Society” to stage a gloomy play.40

26

Chapter 1

Laboratory-like, societies engineered the rise of modern drama by creating a controlled environment where theater would not be subject to the blunt forces of commercialism, which favored the long run or popular hit rather than a backlist. Although Jones and Arthur Wing Pinero penned a number of popular yet high-quality society plays, George Sims, Sydney Grundy, and F. C. Burnand hacked out melodramas, comedies, farces, and musical comedies that enjoyed long runs but rare revivals.41 Of the advanced drama printed in the 1890s, Wade recalled: “I must have taken it for granted that one could not expect to see these tender plants exposed to the ordeal of performance at a West End theatre.”42 Anathema toward the commercial West End earned societies a reputation for producing seedy, as much as plantlike, plays. Closely related to the analogy of the laboratory was that of the museum. As one critic observed: “There is a medical museum in London—from which the frivolous are excluded by the fact that admission can only be obtained by a card from a doctor—where, ranged on shelves, are exhibited all the various disease to which the interior of Man— and, for aught we know, his exterior also—is liable. . . . The Stage Society performs somewhat the same salutary and scientific function.”43 This critic underscored the self-seriousness of Stage Society members and emphasized the subscription card by likening it to the institutional medical card. (With all these tender plants and medical cards, one can’t help but compare societies to today’s cannabis clubs: like cannabis clubs, subscription societies provided a loophole for accessing illicit and supposedly dangerous wares.) The use of the word “liable” also connected this intrapersonal conflict to the shared, or limited, liability of the Stage Society’s members. The salutary and scientific function came not only from a shared investment in humankind’s private pathologies, such as venereal disease or drug addiction (presented in plays such as Ibsen’s Ghosts [1881] and W. L. Courtney’s On the Side of the Angels [1908]), but also from arrangement and exhibition.44 As time went on, arrangement and exhibition came to include the dramatic experiments of Anglophone literary modernists: one of the Stage Society’s less-remembered plays was a one-act called One Day More (1905) by Joseph Conrad; the society later was responsible for the London premieres of James Joyce’s Exiles and D. H. Lawrence’s The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (both 1926). David Kurnick has described theatrical failure as a driving engine behind the modernist novel; that Conrad and Lawrence both adapted their plays from short stories suggests further cross-genre exchanges.45 In terms of media rather than genre, in 1914, art critic Huntly

Private Subscription

27

Carter observed that subscription societies “strongly resembled the new socalled advanced journals which are springing up to-day, and which serve as a dust-hole for literary and moral outpouring.”46 More recently, Elizabeth Miller has compared subscription societies to the “slow print dynamic of the radical press”; she dubs them the theatrical counterpart to socialist magazines like To-Day, which published Ibsen’s plays before societies staged them.47 However, reviews of these particular productions tended to affirm that sterling novelists made poor dramatists. The Observer’s critic noted that Exiles “left me with the impression that I had strayed into the consulting-room of a psycho-pathologist.”48 The Stage Society mounted literary modernists rather like hunting trophies: Lawrence’s and Joyce’s plays were accepted in 1926, only after their authors had secured their credentials with Women in Love and Ulysses, each play having been rejected approximately a decade before.49 A later Stage Society poster even championed Conrad, Lawrence, and Joyce as three authors who “owe their first performance on the English Stage to the Stage Society.” Yet societies by no means shunned commercial success. In 1920, J. T. Grein both repeated and refuted the museum analogy: “In our Theatre the Stage Society, in spite of its not having a fixed abode, has cemented its own place; and it is, perhaps, not presumptuous to express the hope that henceforth it will be looked upon by the regular managers not merely as a kind of freakish museum, an intellectual refuge of the destitute, but as a splendid auxiliary channel to increase the re´pertoire of the Commercial Theatre.”50 The lack of a physical theater turned repertoire itself into both medium and destination. If museum implied aberrant or esoteric specimens, Grein hoped instead that societies ultimately would contribute to the mainstream. Quantitative analysis of over 23,000 London productions from 1890 to 1959 demonstrates that many of the Stage Society’s plays crossed over into the commercial repertoire. There is no question that a great deal changed over these seventy years, both in the theater and outside it, but using the entire spread of Wearing’s data helps us to appreciate which society plays ended up becoming part of a modern dramatic library that is still very much with us today. All of the plays named in the discussion that follows had their premiere before the Stage Society wound up in 1939. Shaw’s Man and Superman, which the society premiered in 1905, was revived 17 times on the public stage between 1905 and 1960. To put this in perspective: when we remove operas, ballets, musicals, pantomimes, and the data-skewing Shakespeare, the most produced play from 1890 to 1959 was J. M. Barrie’s

28

Chapter 1

Peter Pan (1904, revived 53 times); any play revived more than seven times, including subscription and non-subscription performances, numbers among the top hundred (around 1 percent) of the corpus (Table 1). Cerebral Man and Superman ties with James Bernard Fagan’s adaptation of Treasure Island for the eleventh most produced play. The Stage Society’s first production was the premiere of Shaw’s You Never Can Tell (1899, revived 14 times), and other frequently revived plays include Stanley Houghton’s Hindle Wakes (1912, revived eight times) and R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End (1928, revived six times). This list suggests that domestic commercial crossovers were primarily Shavian. As Grein recalled: “Practically from the beginning ‘G.B.S.’ lent his storehouse for the Society, and whenever Shaw was on the programme up went membership, interest, and prestige.”51 This formulation figured Shaw’s plays as a hoard of weapons that might explode the theater—rather than arcane specimens that would put it to sleep—and metonymically substituted the program for the live performance event.52 Shaw’s crossover appeal also stabilized the famous Vedrenne-Barker Court Theatre seasons (1904–7), which sought commercially viable ways to stage plays on the repertory, or short run, model.53 The Stage Society premiered first plays by Barker, Hankin, and Maugham; none was much revived, but each dramatist went on to write plays that were among the Edwardian theater’s most popular. No other society produced English-language playwrights with such broad appeal. The society record for introducing new translations of foreign plays to the commercial repertoire was even more substantial. Between 1890 and 1959, 96 of 204 new translations (or 47 percent) were subscription productions. What’s most striking about these plays is the way that they move from the avant-garde to the commercial theater. Ibsen’s controversial Ghosts was revived 16 times after the Independent Theatre Society production—of the next productions, the first two were by other societies, but the play was revived 14 times on the public stage after the Lord Chamberlain removed the ban in 1914, tying with Sheridan’s The Rivals as the thirteenth most revived play in the corpus. A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler also top the list. Although Chekhov’s plays never ran afoul of the censor, the Stage Society premiered The Cherry Orchard (1911) and Uncle Vanya (1914), which were revived on the public stage 10 and 9 times, respectively, including internationally touring productions. Societies premiered a number of banned works that have been foundational to modern dramatic criticism but that exerted much less influence on the commercial repertoire

29

Private Subscription

Table 1. The Twenty-Three Most Produced Plays (Excluding Shakespeare, Musical, Pantomime) in London, 1890–1959 Play title

Playwright

First performance

Productions

1. Peter Pan

J. M. Barrie

1904

54

2. Charley’s Aunt

Brandon Thomas

1892

37

3. A Doll’s House*

Henrik Ibsen

1879

28

4. She Stoops to Conquer*

Oliver Goldsmith

1773

27

4. The School for Scandal

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

1777

27

6. La Dame aux Came´lias

Alexandre Dumas, fils

1852

25

7. When Knights Were Bold

“Charles Marlowe” [Harriett Jay]

1906

24

8. Mrs. Hilary Regrets

S. Theyre Smith

1892

21

9. The Ballad Monger

Walter Besant, Walter Herries Pollock

1887

20

10. David Garrick

T. W. Robertson

1864

19

11. Man and Superman*

Bernard Shaw

1905

18

11. Treasure Island

James Bernard Fagan

1922

18

13. The Rivals

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

1775

17

13. Ghosts*

Henrik Ibsen

1882

17

15. Everyman*

Anon.

1495

16

15. The Bells

Leopold Lewis

1871

16

17. You Never Can Tell*

Bernard Shaw

1899

15

17. Pygmalion

Bernard Shaw

1914

15

19. Hedda Gabler*

Henrik Ibsen

1891

14

19. Arms and the Man

Bernard Shaw

1894

14

19. The Importance of Being Earnest

Oscar Wilde

1895

14

19. Candida*

Bernard Shaw

1900

14

19. The Playboy of the Western World

J. M. Synge

1907

14

Source: J. P. Wearing, The London Stage, 1890–1959, 7 vols. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013–14). *Play was performed by a subscription society.

30

Chapter 1

of the time, including Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1912), Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1922), and Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine (1935); because the database does not extend beyond the abolishment of theater censorship in 1968, we are less able to determine whether these plays subsequently figured in the commercial repertoire.54 But although censorship electrified the society movement, of the 1,652 subscription productions to be staged in theaters, only 24 (less than 2 percent) were of banned plays. This number is somewhat lower than the total because the database does not include productions in non-theater venues such as galleries and clubs. Still, it reflects the reality that the Lord Chamberlain historically banned only a minority of plays. Between 1895 and 1909 the censor banned 30 out of 7,000 plays, though he wielded his blue pencil to strike lines from a great many more.55 Certain societies did not concern themselves with new or banned plays, focusing instead on unearthing older dramas that subsequently were reintroduced to the commercial theater repertoire. William Poel’s Elizabethan Stage Society (1902–12) produced Everyman in 1903 after Poel’s own revival a year before, and the play was produced 14 more times on the public stage before 1960, tying Leopold Lewis’s sensational The Bells as the fifteenth most produced play in the corpus. An outgrowth of the Stage Society, the aptly named Phoenix Society (1919–35) specialized in Elizabethan and Restoration plays, the most popular of which was Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675); after the society revived it in 1924, it was produced five times on the public stage before 1960. Other societies attempted to revive classical Greek tragedy in the style becoming popular at Oxford, including the very short-lived Greek Play Society (1924).56 The most important discovery was Euripides’ Hippolytus, which the New Century Theatre (1897–1904) briefly resuscitated in 1904; the Vedrenne-Barker Court Theatre produced the tragedy later that year, and it was produced three more times before 1960. (Even if that does not sound like a large number of revivals, it is still among the top 2 percent.) A handful of societies specialized in the performance of Shakespeare, including the Elizabethan Stage Society, the British Empire Shakespeare Society (1906–30), and the Fellowship of Players (1923–27), but they tended to produce oft-revived plays such as Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice. Though they sometimes revived lesser-produced history plays, none of these subsequently reentered the commercial repertoire. The influence of societies on Shakespeare staging was significant, particularly Poel’s vigorous attempts to re-create

Private Subscription

31

the boards of Elizabethan England. Barker, who began directing with the Stage Society, went on to direct a handful of symbolist Shakespeare productions in the years before the war.57 This assessment of London societies’ influence on the commercial repertoire has a number of shortcomings. An obvious one is location: many subscription plays subsequently were revived in the allied repertory theaters of Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, and Birmingham, and reducing British repertoire to the London stage underplays the provinces as well as the numerical success of these plays. From the opposite direction, the Stage Society’s world premiere of Houghton’s Hindle Wakes was performed by Annie Horniman’s Manchester Repertory Theatre Company; in general, though, new plays from the provinces did not figure into London’s commercial repertoire to anywhere near the extent that subscription plays did. The data further exclude the activities of amateur groups, which were important for spreading the new theatrical movement beyond the metropolis.58 Another limit is periodization: 1890–1959 covers a little more than Shaw’s lifetime of theatergoing, and we do not yet have data for how plays by him, Ibsen, and Chekhov fared once Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, and Harold Pinter began to influence the British stage. However, in 1946 Britain granted a Royal Charter to the Arts Council, thus ending the era when subscription was the only collective, not-for-profit method for counteracting commercialism. (And from which point it would become necessary to define what I have called the “commercial repertoire” as the open-to-the-public repertoire.) Government-subsidized theaters such as the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre took up the laboratory role that had been filled by societies, and the abolishment of theatrical censorship in 1968 further diminished the need for subscription performances. It is also worth bearing in mind that there are other ways of determining a play’s significance to repertoire than the number of times it has been revived. If measured by number of performances rather than productions, far fewer subscription plays would top the list, though with over 800 performances, Man and Superman would come closest as among the top 50 most performed plays in the corpus. What is most interesting from this vantage is how infrequently the most performed plays get revived: though 1,000 or more total performances signal that a play numbers among the top 20, the only such plays that also appear on the most produced list are Peter Pan, Charley’s Aunt, and When Knights Were Bold; in other words, a high

32

Chapter 1

number of total performances often indicates that a play was revived infrequently if at all. Generally, plays with a very large number of total performances but few revivals tend to have massively successful premieres and unsuccessful or only moderately successful revivals.59 So although audiences flocked to see 1,178 performances of Edward Sheldon’s opera prima donna play Romance (1915) as opposed to 221 performances of Everyman over the same half century, it matters that Everyman was revived 15 times after its 1902 subscription performance and Romance only once, in 1926.60 Hit plays like W. Gayer Mackay and Robert Ord’s Paddy the Next Best Thing (1920), Merton Hodge’s The Wind and the Rain (1933), and Mazo de la Roche’s Whiteoaks (1936) were seen only by one generation of theatergoers, albeit a relatively large number of them. Conversely, that interested theatergoers were able to see a particular play is at least as significant as whether crowds actually did; this was the very paradigm shift advocated by subscription societies. Short runs also conform to the repertory ideal, which trades momentary popularity for a chance at posterity. In any case, the data do not take into account theater capacity or audience size, only revivals and performances. What this analysis does offer is a means of evaluating the societies’ successes in discovering or testing plays that might then get placed on the shelf not of a laboratory but of a library. This mission informed Barker’s analogy of a repertory playhouse that would keep plays “on the shelf of a theatre, so that, as from time to time a reasonable number of people is likely to want to see it, it can be taken down without overwhelming trouble and expense.”61 The government-subsidized National Theatre that Barker envisioned ultimately found its feet in 1963, and it has since revived a great many subscription plays. By extension, when subsidized plays make West End transfers today, they follow a principle pioneered by the subscription theater more than a century ago. Moreover, the influence of subscription can be counted throughout the database: of all the non-Shakespearean plays produced more than once between 1890 and 1959, almost one in five were produced by subscription. Subscription plays had a 25 percent chance of being revived; plays produced only in the commercial theater had a 15 percent chance. Acting in subscription productions, which required memorizing many lines for only one or two performances with little to no pay, could have an even greater effect on one’s career: although 30 percent of the actors who performed in societies never performed on the public stage and might be called “amateurs,” actors who performed in societies averaged twelve

Private Subscription

33

productions on the public stage from 1890 to 1959; actors who never performed in societies averaged three.62 In these respects, societies did, in fact, serve as a splendid auxiliary channel to increase the commercial theater repertoire, slotting modern drama in among a list of frequently revived popular plays like Mrs. Hilary Regrets, David Garrick, and Treasure Island, and integrating a consciously created avant-garde repertoire into a broader commercial repertoire that we only now are able to construct retrospectively.

Reporting the Repertoire Just as important as the data of play premieres and revivals is the very idea of repertoire. After all, few if any playgoers actually went to see all eighteen productions of Man and Superman between 1905 and 1959. The OED dates “repertoire” to the early nineteenth century, when it emerged as an alternative to “stock” as a way to describe the list of “dramatic or musical pieces which a company or performer has prepared or is accustomed to play.” This best applied to the stock companies that toured the provinces of Victorian England, as articulated by the actor Jerome K. Jerome in 1885: “I got hold of the re´pertoire and studied up all the parts I knew I should have to play.”63 For Jerome, repertoire meant a collection of sides or pages containing a character’s lines preceded by cue words. How did the idea of a modern dramatic repertoire as a library of literary and artistic plays emerge? The concept of a theatrical canon that was independent of a company or performer first emerged with other stage genres: the most frequently revived works are not plays but operas and ballets. In London, the number of ballet productions was miniscule before the visits of the Ballets Russes in the years leading up to World War I, and it was not until the 1930s when Marie Rambert formed the Ballet Club (later the Ballet Rambert) and Ninette de Valois started the Vic-Wells Ballet (later the Royal Ballet Company) that the number of ballets rapidly escalated to match that of other stage genres.64 Opera, however, emerged as a major performance genre in the late eighteenth century. As Jennifer Hall-Witt observes, a local operatic repertoire developed at King’s Theatre in the early nineteenth century.65 Hall-Witt credits the value increasingly attributed to original (though not necessarily new) works and the romantic cult of the artistic genius for audiences’ willingness to pay to see revivals of operas by popular composers.

34

Chapter 1

Midcentury copyright laws encouraged managers to stage older operas, as well as to perform the same few works by a particular composer.66 That the OED dates “repertoire opera” to 1864 and “repertoire plays and operas” to 1874 further suggests this teleology. In practice, operatic repertoire exerted (and still exerts) far greater control than does dramatic repertoire. While the percentage of one-off operas per decade decreases from 1890 to 1959, the percentage of one-off non-musical plays increases. The idea of a modern dramatic repertoire emerged from subscription ephemera. Grein’s 1891 prospectus for the Independent Theatre Society proclaimed the object “to give special performances of plays which have a LITERARY and ARTISTIC, rather than commercial value. . . . The following Plays will form the Repertoire.”67 Grein believed he would reform the commercial theater by nurturing plays that opposed its values; even if much of his repertoire never made it onto the public stage, he would later boast that the best work of mainstream dramatists like Pinero and Jones dated from the society. Indeed, much of Grein’s proposed repertoire never even made it onto the subscription stage, but his mixed list of English and foreign plays, both original and classical, influenced all subsequent attempts to define the modern dramatic repertoire in Britain. Circulars further assembled the repertoire ideal, but they (like the productions they marked) lacked regularity. As Grein’s widow recalled: “Announcements of future productions were made and then altered. Dates were given out, later to be postponed.”68 The first suggestion of the 1899 invitational circular announcing the formation of the Stage Society stated that the group “should meet regularly once a month, and should give at least six performances during the year.”69 This introduced to the subscription theater periodicity, which the society reinforced through routine prospectuses, annual reports, and, for a time, a bimonthly newsletter edited by St. John Hankin, which included updates on upcoming plays and new members, short articles on the independent theater movement, a book review section, and a correspondence column. The society also settled on Sunday evening performances, which had not taken place since Charles I.70 Sunday performances were both practical, since this was the day commercial theater managers could afford to let their theaters, and “just a little naughty,” in the words of the playwright Herbert Swears (though a Sunday matinee would have been naughtier still).71 After the first season, the society also offered Monday matinee performances to which the press was expressly invited.

Private Subscription

35

The Stage Society continued the self-conscious construction of a modern dramatic repertoire through its prospectuses and programs.72 Sent to members at the beginning of each season, prospectuses listed the Managing Committee, the productions of all previous seasons, and the first several plays of the coming season. Performance dates and venues were not listed for past or future productions, with the proviso that arrangements for the coming season would be announced by circular. Though this probably was due to the difficulty of securing venues and actors in advance, it implied that the thoughtful selection of plays was more important than performance details, which were liable to change at a moment’s notice. Subscribers would know which plays were coming long before they knew where to and when, and often these details were stripped from subsequent lists. Programs for individual performances, called “Meetings,” replicated this forwardand-backward-looking structure by reserving the back page of the folio for a list of the season’s “previous meetings” and “further arrangements,” as appropriate (Figure 1). Programs further divided the plays from their performance details by listing only the venue, date, time of performance, and sequence in season on the front cover, with the title, genre, and author inside. Although this might suggest a desire to hide the name of a controversial work from prying eyes, the back cover listed plays liberally; the perhaps unintentional effect was to separate performance details from repertoire. Playgoers would have been fully aware that they were attending one play (or occasionally two or three shorter plays on a single bill) from a growing library. Simple typefaces and a conspicuous lack of the advertisements with which programs were traditionally crowded further separated the avant-garde from the commercial theater.73 The society cemented the idea of a modern dramatic repertoire through their annual reports.74 These reports included lists of all previously produced plays, along with extracts from the society’s rules, an account of the year’s activities, and membership statistics reflecting the society’s finances.75 Starting with the second annual report, the society adopted the practice of publishing complete membership lists. The annual reports took the trouble to list the repertoires of other London societies (such as the Pioneer Players [1911–25], who took up the Stage Society’s practice of publishing annual reports and membership lists), provincial repertory theaters (such as those in Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham), and London repertory seasons (such as Lillah McCarthy and Barker’s 1913 season at the St. James’s), later publishing a complete list—or proto-database—of “Plays for Repertory

36

Chapter 1

Figure 1. The back and front of a Stage Society program with previous and future productions listed, 1900. MS Thr 939 (2543), Harvard Theatre Collection at Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Theatres” (Figure 2).76 Although Stage Society membership topped out at 1,571 in 1911, newspapers throughout Britain had long reviewed the society’s annual reports; in the year of incorporation, the annual report was reviewed in at least the Referee, Times, Sunday Times, Era, Clarion, Stage, Derby Telegraph, Bristol Mercury, and Nottingham Guardian. Reviewers fetishized the report’s materiality: the Pall Mall Gazette ironically praised the report as “a lordly document of twenty-six pages, beautifully printed, and enclosed in a stiff cover.”77 The press took care to report the repertoire, including the names and numbers of English and foreign plays since 1899. Apart from prospectuses and annual reports, the Stage Society further attempted to render the modern dramatic repertoire in print. An early

Private Subscription

37

Figure 2. Two pages detailing repertoire from the Incorporated Stage Society annual report, 1913–14. Courtesy of Yale University Library.

example was the Stage Society’s Series of Plays, published by Grant Richards. This was similar in spirit to Grein’s Independent Theatre Series of Plays, published by Henry and Co., which brought out a small run of Widowers’ Houses (1893) along with five other subscription plays.78 In 1902, Richards published an edition of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, which included a preface by Shaw and photographs of the Stage Society players; limited interest meant that the series ended here.79 The idea of a more than ephemeral series emerged again in 1909, when the Stage Society celebrated its ten-year jubilee and fiftieth production by privately printing a souvenir collection of programs. The volume included a foreword highlighting the production of playwrights “whose work has since appealed to a wider public,” as well as “plays for which the Censor has refused a licence.”80 The Stage Society assumed responsibility for keeping track of the repertoires of other subscription societies, as well as provincial repertory theaters, London repertory seasons, and a projected

38

Chapter 1

national theater. Barker indicated as much at the society’s Jubilee Dinner, where he made a speech arguing that “through the medium of the Stage Society the repertory theatre could be fed, leading towards a representative drama suitable for the national theatre to work upon,” further suggesting that the Stage Society could “train” theatergoers to understand the idea of repertoire, as Charles Frohman had attempted to do that same year by taking subscribers for his weekly Repertory Cards sent from the Duke of York’s Theatre.81 In 1915, the society went so far as to organize a committee to publish both a list with notes of “Plays for Repertory Theatres” and a plan for how to found a local repertory theater. Although the ongoing war prevented both projects from reaching completion, the society’s Library of Theatrical Literature, formed in 1911, offered some indication of the works likely to be included. In addition to plays by English and foreign dramatists, the library included books and magazines (among them Craig’s The Mask) dealing with both contemporary theater and theater history. The library also meant that members had access to a permanent library but not a theater. One could argue that the forward-and-backward-looking dynamic created by prospectuses and annual reports rendered the ideal of an annual season as much as a modern dramatic repertoire. But by listing all past productions, rather than just those of the past season, the ephemera evoked marble rather than ice sculptures. The critical consensus was that, as much as the Stage Society managed to produce an important list of plays, the society’s democratic organization prevented cohesive seasons. Reviewing the 1914 season, critic Ashley Dukes declared: “The Stage Society, with a large membership, has the defect of being ruled by a council, a committee, and a democratic constitution. This results, of course, in confusion and compromise. . . . It was a typical season, creditable enough as regards each individual performance, but lacking in direction and continuity. A hotch-potch, in brief. . . . The Stage Society would perform a great service by converting itself into a literary theatre, under a dictatorship.”82 As we will see in later chapters, Dukes was not the only figure at this time to link the subscription model to democratic politics, however unfavorably. (Each season’s plays were chosen by an elected committee.) Moreover, his assessment suggests that by 1914, the Stage Society had helped change playgoers’ perception from Jerome’s handful of stock sides to a modern dramatic repertoire from which a hodgepodge selection would no longer be adequate.

Private Subscription

39

The Coterie Sensation Dukes’s assessment was also sexist: the Stage Society’s membership had an increasingly female majority, whose efforts he implicitly judged as incompetent. Subscription lists and reports of the Stage Society’s membership in the public press diagrammed a division of labor, where women were the majority of the playgoers and men were the majority of the playwrights; both were thought to sculpt the repertoire. The notion that both playgoers and playwrights shaped the theater was not new, but the sense of a specific, intellectual coterie was. When the Stage Society publicly campaigned for funds to establish a permanent repertory theater in 1905, Archer published a letter in the Morning Leader advising against it: A popular playhouse is the last thing [members] ask for or care about. They love the coterie sensation. They want to have their own ideas, and no others, mirrored for them by the stage. If any considerable number of people were found to share their tastes, they would make haste to adopt some new aestheticism. The theatre, as an instrument of popular culture, does not interest them. . . . The dilettante theatre, the coterie theatre, the pioneer theatre, has its uses; and even if it had no other use than to gratify the predilections, and occupy the Sunday evenings, of a literary clique, that, in a free country, is a legitimate function. But the dilettante theatre is one thing, and the repertory theatre another.83 This letter came less than a year after the Stage Society had incorporated, and Archer may not have known that the membership of 617 was about to double. Still, these words were somewhat hypocritical coming from a man who had founded his own “coterie theatre,” the New Century Theatre Society, less than ten years before. In any case, Archer’s use of the word “mirror” imputed to the Stage Society’s subscribers a considerable amount of control over the works that appeared onstage. In a manner typical of the public press, Archer’s hyperbolic concerns both reflected and distorted the Stage Society’s own virtual assembly of audience. This virtual assembly was perhaps best exemplified by the society’s subscription cards: subscribers wishing to be balloted together for the purpose of securing adjoining seats were requested to send in their cards securely pinned together, suggesting the extent to which the society’s collectivity was

40

Chapter 1

conditioned by print.84 A shared sense of collectivity also emerged from, or was reinforced by, the society’s subscription lists, in which the number of last names followed by “Miss” and “Mrs.” increasingly outnumbered those without. These lists were alphabetized by last name and included the year when members had been elected, as well as (like a faculty webpage) whether they were regular, honorary, or associate members or part of the managing committee. The society soon abandoned the honorary and associate schemes but began to include the numerical order in which members had joined; under this scheme, all levels of membership were equal, save for any prestige accorded to having joined the society earlier. The lists did not distinguish between playwrights, actors, production staff, and patrons, suggesting that the so-called “Earnest Students” of the drama were as important as the theatrical personnel who were listed alongside them. Though such lists might have radiated exclusivity, the society was open to anyone who wished, and could afford the one guinea annual fee, to subscribe. Guineas were the traditional fee of doctors and lawyers, and the new theater intended to be a professional service. (A guinea was £1,1s.; £1 was approximately a quarter of a lower clerk’s or shopkeeper’s weekly income.)85 The fee also echoed that at Mudie’s Circulating Library (est. 1842), with the important difference that Mudie’s selected (i.e., censored) books with an eye to conservative morality, even if the press sometimes accused the library of contaminating their subscribers.86 Like most readers of fiction, most subscription theatergoers were middle-class women, many of them unmarried—in other words, the precise social group that the Lord Chamberlain and his supporters most often invoked to justify censorship.87 The invitational circular’s proposed membership limit of 300 was abandoned quickly, and although the society raised the limit to 600 and, with incorporation, 1,600, both of these limits were provisional (and, given the precedent, extremely optimistic); the legal articles of association declared the number of members to be unlimited.88 The Stage Society constructed its coterie status both privately and publicly by sending materials to both members and the press. In the first season, a later annual report recounted, consent from skittish theater managers “could only be secured by placing special stress on the character of the Society as a Club producing Plays exclusively for its Members and their guests. To establish this principle a Circular was issued to the dramatic critics (many of whom were Members of the Society), and all forms of advertisement were carefully avoided.”89 This special stress was relaxed in

Private Subscription

41

the second season, when Monday matinee performances were added to which the press was now officially invited. From the beginning, however, the implication was that the Stage Society could be both selective and open to all interested theatergoers. Although subscription forms required two nominations from members, this was little different from the referral system at institutions such as the British Library. But to say that the Stage Society was open to anyone in London would be a stretch. Recounting his years as an aspiring actor, Allan Wade illustrated the tension between public and insider knowledge: “It was doubtless because I had read some press notices of these performances that I became fired with a desire to become a member of the Stage Society, and happening to meet one day at a friendly house a brother of Frederick Whelen, the originator of the Society, I asked him to propose me for membership.”90 The Stage Society could have its coterie and eat it, too. The lists were circulated privately in the society’s annual reports, but their contents were reviewed in the public press. In 1908, one critic observed: “I was afraid the Stage Society had done for itself when I heard not long ago that it had saved a lot of money, and when I saw by the latest membership list what a number of ‘influential’ people had joined it. To become rich and respectable is as fatal to a Society as it is to an individual.”91 This critic recognized the power subscribers wielded over the society’s artistic product: the repertoire. Critics inevitably characterized the membership as either too fashionable or not fashionable enough. Of a 1905 performance, one ladies’ journal commented on the habiliments of the baronesses and captains’ wives with the breathlessness of a red carpet reporter.92 Other columnists remarked on an overabundance of green, apparently due to the natural vegetable dyes favored by socialist dress reformers.93 (Though the Stage Society chairman and several dramatists served on the Fabian Executive Committee, a comparison of lists from 1904 suggests that only around 5 percent of members were registered Fabians.)94 In 1902, the society created a minor fashion scandal by asking ladies to remove their matinee hats because they disrupted audience sightlines. In addition to obstructing the stage, fashion was seen to both reflect and dictate the repertoire. In a 1908 review, the Scots Pictorial wondered “why the faculty . . . of seeing beauty only in the hideous and the unclean side of writing and acting, should also have taken away all nice taste in the matter of clothes. The majority of the playgoers were women, but there were not a dozen well-dressed women in the theatre. The remainder were drab and dingy, and every second woman among them seemed to

42

Chapter 1

be wearing spectacles.”95 Women subscribers had become dramatis personae. Although members were allowed to bring a guest (subject to availability), the popular press amplified the collectivizing gesture of the subscription lists and reported on subscribers as a unified coterie, whether fashionable or unfashionable, serious or unserious. One such guest included the impressionable, if fictional, heroine of H. G. Wells’s 1909 novel Ann Veronica, who attends the Stage Society’s Monday afternoon performance of Mrs. Warren’s Profession as the companion of her “advanced” friend Hetty Widgett and disastrously decides to model her behavior on Vivie Warren.96 The Stage Society’s mostly female subscribers dictated and reflected a repertoire that the society’s mostly male dramatists wrote: of 188 plays, only 14 were by women. When we remember the frequency with which subscription plays migrated onto the public stage, where the ratio of female to male playwrights was no less dismal, we are better able to appreciate the role played by women subscribers in shaping the commercial theater repertoire. Subscription ephemera structured critics’ awareness of this role, which meant that the newspaper-reading public knew of it, too.

Quantifying the Audience The two approaches to repertoire spotlighted in this chapter—what actually gets performed and how we imagine or represent what gets performed—are stuck in a perpetual feedback loop. So, too, are old and new media. Tara McPherson’s legitimate concerns about converting archives into “postarchival” databases might be even further contextualized by recognizing that the former already contain the latter; any database whose subject is more than a decade or so old once was paper based.97 Today, databases sometimes promote an antimaterialist tendency precisely opposite to that which led turn-of-the-century theater reformers to compare repertoires to laboratories, museums, and storehouses. In our own backyard, scholars have been using reference books—databases avant la lettre, as Lev Manovich has pointed out—for millennia; like calculators, the digital kinds enable us to count much more quickly.98 Just as a reference book is not yet an argument, neither is a database; both are starting points for posing provocative questions whose answers require the rigorous connecting of dots. Like fashion magazines or Twitter feeds, databases announce trends easily but have trouble explaining them. Why, for example, does the one-act briefly

Private Subscription

43

replace the three-act as the dominant play structure just before World War I?99 Though they correspond at the end of the nineteenth century, why over the next sixty years does the number of works that self-describe as “drama” plummet while “play” skyrockets? Why are original works at best one-third and at worst one-fifth or less of all works produced on the London stage each year from 1890 to 1959? In short, tracing the influence of subscription societies through the database is merely one of many lines of inquiry, all of which need to be balanced with archival research. To put it another way: quantitative methods yield relative, some might say obvious, observations. They confirm that operas and ballets are revived much more frequently than plays; that musicals and pantomimes run longest; that Shakespeare dominates the dramatic repertoire. Rather than trace a history parallel to the rise of so-called “literary” and “artistic” plays based on an alternate performance canon—welcome and necessary though such a history would be—the findings presented in this chapter dramatize how quickly avant-garde turned old-guard and how frequently artistic risk returned commercial reward. Perhaps repertoire isn’t a representative way of discussing theater history at large: of approximately 13,000 unique stage works, nearly 10,500 (or 80 percent) were never revived; of those, around 2,600 (or 25 percent) were performed just one time. In this way, Franco Moretti’s “slaughterhouse” of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels equally applies to the modern theater.100 But while databases might seem to privilege the long running or the most revived, they also make it easier to find needles in the play-stack: the handful of plays that feature a pregnant woman or the thousand more that feature a domestic servant.101 Lists of familiar plays encompass lists of unfamiliar players: databases cast their net beyond 23,000 production titles to the over 40,000 persons who brought them to life—none more promiscuous than William Clarkson, for example, who provided the wigs for more than 2,500 productions. And then there are the playgoers: this chapter has tried to suggest that any discussion of repertoire ultimately leads to a discussion of audience, whose names might not figure in a London stage database but whose imprint cannot help getting counted. That the most performed plays are rarely the most revived suggests trade-offs inherent to competing kinds of ephemerality determined by the audience: long runs over a relatively short period of time or short runs over a relatively long period of time. My approach to repertoire, focalized through plays that were introduced by a self-consciously literary avant-garde and that also are most likely

44

Chapter 1

to show up in twenty-first-century drama anthologies, might seem antithetical to Diana Taylor’s widely recognized definition. She distinguishes “between the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual).”102 Taylor’s approach would remind us rightly, for instance, that Man and Superman’s first performance did not include the third act, Don Juan in Hell, which received four stand-alone productions between 1907 and 1952; the play was not performed with all four acts until 1925, and after that only occasionally, so it is not quite accurate to say that the play was produced 18 times before 1960. Even so, this chapter, too, invests in ephemeral repertoire: the repertoire assembled by printed ephemera. Though theater historians have long mined archives for textual nuggets—the proper nouns of the event; the pearled strings of a future digital database—generally, we have thought much less about how theatergoers actually interacted with such fugitive print matter. This approach would mean dusting off ephemera in order to process what book historians call bibliographic and what theater scholars might well call performative codes, asking how layout, typography, ink color, and paper weight, along with distribution and circulation, condition the sociability of theatergoing. Such an approach would recognize the extent to which the performance event, and the process by which we store that event in our mental conception of the dramatic repertoire, has been and continues to be conditioned by interactive media. This kind of research should be made easier by the cutting-edge efforts of the Abbey Theatre Dublin and BAM to digitize their ephemera. If we’re now ready to count live-tweeting, blogging, and digital images under the umbrella of performance, as Sarah Bay-Cheng has suggested, then why not count old media too?103 Our present-day impulse to quantify the dramatic repertoire in performance databases apes a practice instigated in the Stage Society’s ephemera over a century ago. At that time, the society’s subscribers assembled (and were acknowledged to be assembling) the same modern dramatic library that would later be adopted by (and seen by millions of playgoers at) Britain’s National Theatre. While the Stage Society’s nominal exclusivity was the price paid for circumventing the Lord Chamberlain, its democratic constitution nevertheless signaled that, henceforward, the dramatic repertoire would be determined at least in part by subscribers. Where the Stage Society and other metropolitan play-producing clubs sought a repertoire

Private Subscription

45

that represented their own tastes and interests, this impetus was all the more pronounced in provincial cities like Dublin, Glasgow, Manchester, and Liverpool, where audiences recognized that the productions playing in their local theaters largely had been chosen by metropolitan elites. For provincial playgoers in these cities, subscription offered an even more insistent promise that the repertoire would represent the public for which it was performed.

CHAPTER 2

Public Subscription Audience Impressions in Dublin, Glasgow, and Liverpool

When the Abbey Theatre installed a nightly police cordon to silence protesting playgoers during the 1907 run of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, spectators voiced their objections in newsprint. Under pseudonyms like “A Western Girl,” “A Commonplace Person,” “A Much Interested Foreigner,” and “A Lover of Liberty,” correspondents sent letters to the Dublin Evening Telegraph, Freeman’s Journal, and Dublin Evening Mail. “Vox Populi” wrote that the arrested protesters “showed an admirable public spirit, which in any other country would be highly honoured.”1 “Oryza” reported a conversation overheard from the stalls in which Synge had said that the audience’s hissing was “quite legitimate.”2 After journalist and Galway MP Stephen Gwynn penned a letter supporting the Abbey, biographer D. J. O’Donoghue responded that “the vindictiveness which has been shown night after night in expelling and prosecuting people who ahve [sic], in their excitement, called out ‘It’s a libel’ or ‘shame,’ or otherwise mildly protested, is a serious menace to the freedom of an audience.” He referred to the furor as a “newspaper controversy”; others called it a “newspaper war.”3 In a public discussion at the Abbey after the play’s run, Yeats quoted from the correspondence when defending his decision to call in the police. According to playwright William Boyle, the controversy boiled down to political representation. In a letter to the Freeman’s Journal, he argued that protesters had not reacted “by staying away,” as some supporters had suggested they should, “because the ‘Abbey’ is a subsidised theatre, independent of the money taken at the door. Therefore . . . the public had no remedy,

Public Subscription

47

but the one resorted to.”4 Private subsidy had muffled the democratic shuffling of playgoers’ pocketbooks; forced to shut their mouths inside the theater, playgoers opened up to the newspapers that circulated around it. The history of the British and Irish provincial repertory movement can be told through playgoers registering their right to representation, not just in the correspondence columns of local newspapers but in the shift to notfor-profit funding models that were subsidized by the community rather than by a single wealthy individual. In 1904, tea heiress Annie Horniman purchased and refurbished the Abbey, which she continued to subsidize annually. In 1908, amid growing tensions over an Englishwoman financing an Irish theater, Horniman established the first English repertory company at the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester. The following year, over 200 “citizen shareholders” founded the Glasgow Repertory Theatre; two years later, more than 1,000 did the same for Liverpool. When Horniman withdrew her Abbey subsidy in 1910, the endowment to replace it was crowdfunded by nearly 100 small donors. Though these shareholder and benefactor schemes differed from each other, with only the former granting shares, all raised funds under the banner of “public subscription.” The money came from private individuals, but public subscription was considered “public” because it appealed to an inclusive, though not necessarily diverse, subscription base—a crowd, rather than a coterie. Victorian reformers had financed hospitals, schools, libraries, and museums by public subscription before and even after those institutions began receiving municipal aid, and turn-of-the-century repertory proponents, or “repertorists,” saw public subscription as an intermediary step toward the goal of government subsidy.5 Most surprising to us today, playgoers saw public subscription in civic terms that exceeded the representative authority of a municipal theater controlled by a democratically elected city council. Playgoers considered public-subscription repertory theaters to be “Citizens’ Theatres” and “public institutions,” even though the theaters technically were privately owned. This chapter charts the ways in which public subscription affected representations of repertory audiences in the years before World War I, focusing on subscription ephemera— especially subscribers’ correspondence—published by the provincial press. In 1905, Arthur Bingham Walkley declared: “we are all for repertory theatres; everybody who is ambitious of becoming somebody in the theatrical world has a scheme (and blank form of subscription) for one at your service.”6 Unlike most of the subscription services with which we are familiar today, from Netflix to the New Yorker, public-subscription payments

48

Chapter 2

were neither for recurring nor for fixed amounts; though the minimum usually was £1, some subscribed as little as 6d., or as much as £1,000 or more. In exchange, shareholders received voting rights at general meetings and potential dividends in the company, whereas benefactors saw their names in the local newspaper—as did other readers. Unlike the last chapter’s play-producing societies, public-subscription theaters were open to any member of the public who could pay, no referral necessary. And unlike the season-ticket or abonnement schemes popular with play- and operagoers today, public subscription did not confer the right to attend the theater, which was accessible to anyone who could afford to purchase tickets and therefore still subject to the Lord Chamberlain’s licensing (technically, Ireland did not fall within his purview); however, subscribers sometimes received discounts or first dibs on prime seats. “Broad-based upon the public will,” public subscription promised provincial audiences theater that was more meaningful than the touring commercial fare imposed by London and more democratic than the private subsidy imposed by a single wealthy patron.7 Until the provincial repertory movement, playgoers looking for professional alternatives to the commercial theater had to visit the metropolis. Now, the new theater was compared to municipal services like gas, water, tramways, parks, museums, galleries, and libraries, supplying a perceived public need and open—even belonging—to any playgoer, subscriber or not. Though British and Irish repertory theaters first appeared at the turn of the century, collectively funded theaters in these same lands have a much longer history. Provincial Theatres Royal received patents as early as 1767 and were financed by local share capital. Unlike German and Scandinavian royal theaters, they were “strictly commercial concerns,” according to Tracy Davis. Apart from the Theatres Royal, share capital usually was not used for theaters until the 1860s Companies Acts enabled true limited liability. The new laws ushered in a wide variety of theatrical enterprises, but—until the repertory movement—none were not-for-profit. Even though some earlier provincial companies had viewed collective ownership in civic terms, they lacked the new movement’s commitment to original, artistically adventurous productions performed for short runs by a local ensemble rather than a touring company led by a star actor.8 “Short run” usually meant a week or two, in contrast to the hundreds of performances racked up by London’s megahit productions and their tours; rarely did repertory theaters adhere to the Continental model of

Public Subscription

49

“true repertory” in which plays alternated nightly.9 In general, the movement pursued a repertoire of plays by so-called “new” or “modern” dramatists such as Ibsen, Shaw, Synge, Chekhov, Masefield, and Galsworthy, give or take a helping of classics by Shakespeare and Sheridan and a smattering of lesser-known or emergent local playwrights. The Abbey, however, performed only Irish plays, which were the only “homegrown” provincial plays to enter Britain and Ireland’s modern drama canon. But repertoire was just one concern of a movement whose related and sometimes contradictory descriptors included: city, civic, civilized, public, ratepayers’, citizens’, people’s, local, municipal, state, national, endowed, artistic, exemplary, organized, and subsidized. These names aside, the movement asked above all whether audiences could be trusted to determine how their theaters would operate. Provincial newspapers were key to public subscription. The number of British and Irish newspapers reached historic proportions before the war; for cities like Dublin, Manchester, Glasgow, and Liverpool, the press transformed sheets of newsprint into crowdfunding platforms, publishing a patchwork of subscription ephemera that included appeals, prospectuses, subscribers’ correspondence, and even subscription forms that readers could cut out and mail in. Although metropolitan repertorists put playgoers on the receiving end of vertical collectives, comparing them to schoolchildren to be taught, patients to be nursed, and savages to be civilized, public subscription challenged repertorists’ analogies by representing playgoers in more horizontal collectives, as citizen shareholders. Writing letters to newspaper editors, a diverse body of subscribers and other playgoers took up pseudonyms representing their class, gender, and age, offering their opinions about theater management policies and differentiating their views from those of professional critics. Since newspapers accorded correspondents who claimed to hail from the pit and gallery the same typographical treatment as those from the stalls and dress circle, letters to the editor further challenged the class hierarchy of the physical theater; however, since correspondents more often identified as lower-middle-class patrons, these playgoers were perceived to be more influential in the provinces, whereas upper-middle-class patrons were seen to dominate London. Inasmuch as theaters represented only a few of the many turn-of-the-century publicsubscription initiatives—others included hospitals, schools, libraries, and museums—the subscription ephemera in this chapter illuminate provincial newspapers’ wider role as a civic performance space.

50

Chapter 2

Reciprocal Resonance Media historians and theater scholars alike have long compared audiences to political publics, evoking nations of citizens brought together by newspaper reading or theatergoing.10 The related tradition of contrasting theatrical publics with print publics extends back to at least Yeats’s remarks four years before the Playboy controversy, in which he claimed that press publics were less refined than dramatic ones.11 Yet even as media history and theater studies become increasingly focused on reception, relatively little work has been done to show how either newspaper readers or theatergoers engaged in what Christopher Balme has called “reciprocal resonance,” or two-way communication—particularly in the dynamic space where newspapers and theaters overlap.12 Two-way communication is especially important because it draws out the differences between national identity (figured as unidirectional and emanating from the metropolis) and civic identity (figured as multidirectional and constituted locally). At the peak of repertory fever, newspapers like the Dublin Evening Telegraph, Glasgow Herald, and Liverpool Courier published dozens of playgoer letters daily; from our present vantage, these communications read like ancestors to theatrical discussion forums, live-tweeting, and blogs.13 Correspondents sang praises or voiced criticisms of performers and performances; they applauded or picked fights with the management and each other; they frankly stated what theater meant to them and to their families and communities. Their published epistles fill in data missing from even the most thorough accounts written by theater historians and critics, as well as from playgoer memoirs and scrapbooks, all of which bend toward London.14 As repertory managers weighed the importance of two-way communication with subscribers, they anticipated theater scholars’ own relationship with audience response. Until recently, this relationship had been practically nonexistent, prompting Helen Freshwater to ask: “Why do [theater scholars] appear to prefer discussing [our] own responses, or relaying the opinions of reviewers, to asking ‘ordinary’ theatre-goers—with no professional stake in the theatre—what they make of a performance? Could this apparent aversion to engaging with audience response be related to deepseated suspicion of, and frustration with, audiences?”15 Reading the responses of repertory playgoers, this chapter hedges somewhat on subscribers’ professional stake: the entire point of public subscription was to make theater the public’s business, and thereby to make the public believe that

Public Subscription

51

their thoughts and opinions about theater—rather than just their ticket money—mattered. Yet if Freshwater’s critique rings true, then perhaps today’s theater scholars have inherited our mistrust of audiences from the last century’s repertorists who jestingly compared playgoers to pupils, patients, and savages. Perhaps we, steeped in our expertise like those repertorists, at some level believe that audiences lack the cultural knowledge necessary to speak meaningfully about theater. Jacques Rancie`re refutes that assumption in his essay on the “Emancipated Spectator,” rebalancing the unequal relationship between cultured scholar and uncultured spectator, as well as between schoolmaster and pupil, by insisting on “equality of intelligence”—a point that comes across even more forcefully from subscribers who challenge repertorists’ patronizing analogies in their published letters. And yet, for all their equality of intelligence, Rancie`re still mistrusts spectators as a group, describing them as “carried in the flood of the collective energy or led to the position of the citizen who acts as a member of the collective. . . . The collective power shared by spectators does not stem from the fact that they are members of a collective body.”16 On the contrary, theater subscribers suggest that the collective power shared by spectators stems precisely from the fact that they are members of a collective body. Building on David Wiles’s description of theatergoing as a practice of local citizenship, this chapter locates collective power in playgoers’ demands for democratic theater ownership, arguing that subscription gave theater audiences a legitimate claim to represent their communities.17 If Rancie`re, like so many others, feared that spectators would whip themselves into a mob-like frenzy, it is easy to see where he was coming from: the riotous or scandalized audience holds a prominent place in our scholarly narrative, and for good reason.18 At the time of Playboy’s premiere, most playgoers throughout Britain and Ireland had only three options: to act out loudly and demonstratively, as had been common throughout the nineteenth century but was increasingly characterized as barbaric; to sit quietly as polite consumers; or to stay home. Subscription offered an alternative that was at once civil and politically engaged. The idea was that subscribers would jointly fund a theater for the community’s benefit, and subscribers and non-subscribers alike would be free to share their views in the local press. Crucially, the idea only worked if subscription ephemera were seen to include citizens from across the community. This representative ideal was both enhanced and complicated by correspondents’ rampant use of pseudonyms. While we might think that part of

52

Chapter 2

trusting audiences to run theaters entails trusting correspondents to represent themselves truthfully, many repertory correspondents kept their names private. Though their reasons for taking pseudonyms often can only be guessed, the overriding consequence was that correspondents seemed to speak on behalf of particular audience groups: of proud locals (“A Plain Liverpolitan”; “Lover of Ireland”); of specific seating sections (“Pittite”; “One of the Gods”); of diverse ages (“An Elderly Playgoer”; “A Gallery Boy”), occupations (“A Docker”; “Undergraduate”), and affects (“Interested”; “Non-receptive playgoer”). Where giving one’s true name may have suggested a degree of self-importance—indeed those who gave their names or initials tended to be prominent members of the community— pseudonyms enabled playgoers to justify publishing their views on the grounds that those views might be shared by other members of the community. Pseudonyms gave audiences the freedom to express themselves at a time when managers were darkening auditoriums and proscribing effusive behavior with an arsenal of warnings in playbills, placards, etiquette manuals, and seatback notices. Such constraints were exacerbated in the provinces, where local stock actors had ruled the roost before railways introduced touring companies that crowded out the market with secondrate productions of West End commercial hits.19 Provincial audiences thus felt doubly patronized by managers of commercial and artistic persuasions, and pseudonyms empowered playgoers to talk back without fear of reprisal. Moreover, repertory managers actually began listening and even penned letters of their own. Similar to online commenters today, anonymous correspondents spoke more critically and more personally than they otherwise might have. Like masks for actors, pseudonyms gave playgoers—or anyone claiming to be a playgoer—the power to assume a new identity.20 One of Liverpool’s especially irate playgoers, “Disgusted,” anticipated the legendary English correspondent “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells,” who supposedly emerged in the 1950s when a local editor asked his staff to help fill empty correspondence columns.21 Obviously, there was no guarantee that correspondents were who they claimed to be, and correspondents occasionally disputed one another’s identities. Rebalancing the unequal relationship between schoolmaster and pupil in a different way, private records suggest that “A School-boy” whom the Irish Times listed as having subscribed six pence to the Abbey Theatre Endowment Fund might really have been an Irish Quaker schoolmaster named Arnold Marsh.22 But that scholars today can never truly know a correspondent’s

Public Subscription

53

identity or motives is less important than that most newspaper readers could never have known either. Because theaters represent only the most dramatic of turn-of-thecentury public-subscription initiatives, they illuminate provincial newspapers’ wider role in constituting a civic performance space. Rachel Matthews has described how late Victorian provincial newspapers deliberately aligned themselves with civic institutions by headquartering next to town halls, libraries, and museums.23 When we break down newspapers into their constituent sections, their civic role comes into even sharper focus. As Harry Cocks and Matthew Rubery have pointed out, many recent theorizations of ephemera take as their subject newspaper sections that feature reader-submitted content, including correspondence columns, personal ads, agony aunts, and classifieds.24 From this vantage, reading newspapers as an assemblage of subscription ephemera foregrounds how the local press functioned like a public forum or message board. After all, alongside theater subscription appeals, provincial newspapers published monorail-company prospectuses, free-library subscription lists, and hospital-fund subscription forms; correspondence columns printed repertory shareholders’ impressions next to those of voluntaryschool and public-park subscribers. Of course, provincial newspapers still were for-profit companies, but while commercial shareholding enterprises paid for advertising space in newspapers across the country, most civic subscription ephemera appeared without payment from the organizers, and local journalists covered public-subscription initiatives generously, under the assumption that it was good business for newspapers to cater to the community. As at Glasgow and Liverpool Reps, many publicsubscription initiatives had newspaper owners, editors, or journalists on their managing committees. Readers treated newspapers like crowdfunding platforms: in 1904, Miss Ida Sharman-Crawford sent £10 to the Irish Times with a request that the paper start a subscription list for a modern art gallery (the editor obliged).25 At the same time, playgoers were hardly the only correspondents suspected of wearing masks: when “Jubilee Nurse” wrote to the Aberdeen Free Press criticizing a 1903 communityfundraising plan for district nurses, one of the organizers replied that she “should be sorry to think any Queen’s Nurse would write such a letter, and, moreover, the letter displays so much ignorance of our work and methods that I am bound to believe the signature an assumed one. . . . No well-trained and loyal nurse would criticise the medical men in a letter to

54

Chapter 2

a public paper.”26 By framing correspondence columns as a public performance space, both in terms of displaying one’s ignorance and behaving with impropriety, the organizer’s letter anticipates the charges leveled against theatergoers who interrupted Synge’s play. As the spats between subscribers and repertorists in this chapter reveal, civic initiatives particularly raised questions about who was qualified to speak for whom, and how.

Patronizing the Patrons Even as the public-subscription initiatives at Glasgow, Dublin, and Liverpool were under way, ardent repertorists benevolently, if patronizingly, described playgoers as pupils to be taught, patients to be nursed, and savages to be civilized. These vertical collectives were the perhaps inevitable corollary of a project to convince municipalities that theater was a public good that deserved government funding like a school or hospital. The provincial press reverberated with these characterizations as the repertory movement spread. In the words of the Glasgow Herald: “The first duty of any repertory theatre is to establish itself on a secure basis. . . . Then, unobtrusively but systematically, it must train its audience.”27 The Yorkshire Telegraph concurred: “All over the country . . . people are endeavouring to create the ‘Perfect audience.’ ”28 One prevailing attitude was that this perfect audience would draw less on existing theatergoers than on the new “reading class,” whose expansion repertorists attributed to the 1870 Elementary Education Act. Glasgow Rep producer Alfred Wareing observed that the repertory audience “was mostly not in the theatre. They were great readers, and the growth in the publication of 4s. 6d. novels, the extension of circulating libraries, together with the attraction of the feet on the fender . . . meant it was a herculean task to win these people back to the theatre.”29 The audiences who flocked to melodramas, music halls, and the new cinematographs were not part of “the public that reads,” in the words of Liverpool Rep chairman and university professor Charles Reilly.30 Appealing to this reading class was key. While in the 1890s dramatic publishers had introduced reading editions of plays by Ibsen and Shaw that were not intended for performance, in the 1900s firms like T. Fisher Unwin and Gowans & Gray published series that emphasized the reciprocal relationship between page and stage, such as

Public Subscription

55

Plays of To-Day and To-morrow and Repertory Plays. By 1909, the New Age acknowledged that “the era of the printed play is upon us. . . . The published play and the repertory theatre go hand in hand; it is the function of the one to educate an audience for the other.”31 Commending Unwin’s one-shilling series, the same journal observed: “The ideal repertory theatre, indeed, is one with such a literature of its own, forming a complete record of its work, offering a convenient medium for the exchange or translation of plays, and constantly attracting new hearers from the reading class.”32 Page was more nimble than stage: Anglophone repertory companies would link up with a network of “advanced” European theaters by exchanging and translating printed plays for homegrown (rather than metropolitan touring) productions—a practice Glasgow and Liverpool Reps literalized by adding to their foyers bookstalls of published plays, available for sale or “inspection.”33 In Liverpool, repertory coupon books could be obtained from booksellers and libraries in addition to the theater box office. When actor and director Lewis Casson claimed that “what a library is to the individual the theater should be to the town,” he implied that the reading class was the demographic repertorists imagined would be most susceptible to the education from which the entire theatergoing public stood to benefit.34 In this respect, “reading class” also was a pun: a classroom, as well as a social stratum. In a letter to the Manchester Guardian, Mancunian playwright W. A. Brabner quoted a correspondent who in a private letter had asked: “ ‘Will the Reportory Theatre (sic) be any good to me or is it only for cranks?’ (I regret to say he adds ‘like you,’ which is more personal than polite, and is not germane to the question.) To him, the Repertory Theatre may bring revision of orthography and a closer acquaintance with some good dictionary, both resulting in the ‘good’ of which he stands apparently in the greatest need.”35 Like “reading class,” “good” had two meanings tottering between recreation and instruction; for more than a few observers, repertorists’ insistence on the latter meant they were “cranks” or “reformers”—pseudo-intellectuals who “admire, or pretend to admire, only the gloomy, morbid drama.”36 When a critic described the whitepainted Manchester Gaiety as “more like a schoolroom than a theatre,” he was referring to atmosphere as much as appearance.37 Repertorists embraced the curricular approach. University professors were prominent repertorists in Glasgow and Liverpool. In Liverpool, Leeds, Stockport, Sheffield, and Bristol, playgoers’ clubs organized lectures and play readings according to a seasonal “syllabus.” These clubs also published journals,

56

Chapter 2

newsletters, and guides to plays in the region; took out circulating library subscriptions; and sponsored theatergoing trips between cities. (The Abbey and Liverpool Rep programs listed train and tram timetables so playgoers could return home.)38 Such clubs were instrumental to assembling the repertory “nucleus.” However, members were perceived to be culturally similar to elitist metropolitan coteries like the Incorporated Stage Society; one Liverpudlian described the local Playgoers’ Society as “a ‘cranky’ lot of people who gave you the impression that they are also vegetarians and Freethinkers as well as the high priests of the drama”—an impression no doubt strengthened by dramatist John Masefield having poetically christened the Liverpool Rep “a temple for the mind.”39 If repertorists weren’t schoolmasters, then they were church ministers. As one Glaswegian put it: “Of course the ‘reformers’ may, by dint of perseverance, bring about the day when people will go to the theatre in the same spirit as they go to the church. . . . It will be the recognised function of the theatre to disseminate physical, moral, and spiritual instruction, and we will sit out the ‘play’ from a sense of duty—surreptitiously eating peppermint lozenges and stifling yawns.”40 As a result, claimed the Liverpool Porcupine, the proverbial man in the street “somewhat mistrusted the word ‘Repertory’; it suggested to his mind an attempt on the part of a coterie of cranks to foist upon him weird, esoteric dramas tinged with gloom, and totally above the comprehension of the multitude.”41 As was characteristic of such vertical collectives, repertorists apparently imagined the majority of playgoers on the submissive end: lectured at, condescended to. For repertorists, pedagogy meant reforming taste. Though the provinces had once prided their stock actors, the railways introduced London touring companies that had crowded out the provincial market with second-rate productions of West End commercial successes; as a result, claimed the Pall Mall Gazette, the provinces “have for decades been practically starved, so far as original work is concerned.”42 While conceding the advantages of stock companies with regard to training versatile actors, repertorists like Keble Howard emphasized aesthetic refinement: “whereas the old stock company put up some good work and, in the same evening, any amount of trash—it was a curious hotch-potch kind of meal—the repertory theatre does not do that. It aims at putting up only the best.”43 More stringent repertorists even insisted that provincial playgoers were in need of healthful nourishment, figuratively and sometimes even literally. As critic St. John Ervine put it: “Sickly people, because their palate has been ruined by

Public Subscription

57

unhealthy food, prefer tinned salmon to fresh salmon because it has a nippier taste.”44 In a curiously mixed metaphor that compared playgoers to both babies and boozers, Liverpool Rep board member Robert Hield proclaimed: “however obscure the true diet, it is a step in the right direction to have weaned the infant from such unwholesome comestibles as pickles and gin.” The repertory diet would be medicinal, Hield averred, for “[to] urge that the repertory public exhibits the symptoms which the Repertory Theatre was established to cure is like complaining that the occupants of a sanatorium are tuberculous.”45 In Glasgow, Wareing tried to make this easier to swallow, saying it was “necessary to gild the pill, if pill there was.”46 Contemplating theater as a nurse or schoolmaster represented one of the most dramatic reversals in British and Irish theater history since the collapse of the morality play. In 1909, one Glaswegian could still observe that “to go two or three times in one week even to Shakespearean tragedy is rank dissipation, and a collection of play bills, like proficiency in billiards, is evidence of a misspent youth.”47 Now, ardent repertorists compared provincial playgoers to soon-to-be-enlightened savages. Annie Horniman preferred the term “civilised” to “repertory,” stating her aim “to gather together a company which will be able to act a number of different plays of decent sorts such as are to be seen in the civilised theatres in all civilised countries where the drama takes its proper place.”48 Liverpool Rep producer Basil Dean concurred: “The production of fine drama ought to be a burden upon the community, and the community should receive its dividend in the exquisite enjoyment of one of the most civilising influences of the present day.”49 It fell to actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree to carry this line of thinking to its inevitable conclusion: “But if it is great to conquer black races, to bring them the blessings (sometimes doubtful) of civilisation in exchange for land and gold and ivory and peacocks, it is no less splendid, it is no less a victory, to conquer the white races at home.”50 The provinces were a primitive wilderness, with these repertorists—all of whom were from London—figured as missionaries. As it happened, the metropolis was not in much better shape, inarticulately attempting to organize a Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre in time for the tercentenary, but the provinces were doubly patronized.51 Even though their analogies were tongue-in-cheek, repertorists reinforced vertical collectives all the more ironic for the emphasis they placed on audiences. Imagining playgoers as pupils, patients, and savages enabled repertorists to insist that theater was a public good that deserved municipal

58

Chapter 2

funding. Repertorists expounded in language similar to the sporadic rumblings for Continental-styled municipal theaters that had been spreading from Victorian theatricalists since the 1870s. In the last decade of his life, actor Henry Irving campaigned for the establishment of “rate-aided” theaters on the principle that they were public utilities. (In contrast to national taxes, rates were property taxes used to fund local government; today, rates are known as Council Tax.) The British “might burn municipal gas, consume municipal water, sleep in a municipal lodging, travel on a municipal tramway, study municipal antiquities, read municipal books, enjoy the air in municipal parks, gaze at municipal pictures; but they could not go to the municipal play and applaud the municipal actor.” Irving made the case for “adopting the drama formally amongst the agencies of instruction and recreation already classed in the sacred category of public works.”52 This sacred category was expanding; Britain’s growing pride in public infrastructure prompted the British Architect to pun, in 1898: “There is, of course, no reason why a theatre should not take rank as a public building on the same footing as our town halls, free libraries and art galleries, and in this way it might fairly be hoped that the architectural quality of our theatres would be considerably raised.”53 The arguments of these early municipalists and later repertorists were by no means identical—Irving would have been dismayed by the avant-garde fare proposed by repertorists, and Horniman initially believed repertory theatres should be “self-sustaining”—yet by 1910, repertorists presented theirs as the kind of theater that would best merit municipalization.54 But repertorists’ biggest burden was indifference: according to some critics, the problem with thinking of the theater as a public good was that the public didn’t think much of the theater at all. Far from questions of enlightenment or amusement, actor Frank Curzon remarked: “You cannot put the theatre on the same plane as an art gallery, a park, or a swimming bath. You would be surprised to know how small a percentage of the population patronise the theatre regularly.”55 The Glasgow Herald agreed, contrasting theater with services like paving and lighting, which apparently had been “spontaneously demanded by the citizens through their municipal representatives.”56 It is questionable whether a utilities comparison would end up benefiting the theater—when actor-manager George Alexander observed that “people would take as much interest in their [municipal] theatre as in drains or tramways,” this could just as easily be bad as good: citizens want their drains to flush but usually don’t care where the water

Public Subscription

59

comes from or where the waste goes.57 In truth, spontaneous demand was rarely the case for municipal services, particularly the theater’s more obvious cousins like libraries, galleries, and museums, which tended to be vertically managed by city councils; Shakespeare scholar Sidney Lee anticipated the logic of repertorists when he observed in 1906 that “the State, in partnership with local authorities, educates the people, whether they like it or no.”58 According to Basil Dean, the public would only embrace theater that was seen as instructive: “Until we have a thorough awakening of the public conscience as to the educative value of the theatre we cannot have [repertory theaters] existing as part of the real life of a town—as supplying a public want.”59 When purchasing the Gaiety building, Horniman pragmatically surmised that playgoers who wanted a municipal theater would “have to elect on the town councils, or to Parliament, those who are in sympathy with such an idea and who will push it forward.”60 Short of that, the only viable option was for a wealthy patron to finance the theater herself, which meant that playgoers would continue to be represented as pupils, patients, and savages—or so it seemed.

Shareholder Democracy In the months before Annie Horniman established the Gaiety, some Mancunians anticipated problems with the angel-investor model, which already had proved troublesome in Dublin. W. A. Brabner wrote the Guardian’s editor to ask: “Would Mr. Carnegie build [a repertory theater] for us? And if he would, should we not accept it? I say no. To be all that it should be, it must be our own.”61 When Glasgow launched a theater company by public subscription, the Daily Chronicle compared it to Manchester’s: “Both are repertory schemes, but, on the one hand, Manchester has left its theatre to private enterprise. . . . On the other hand, Glasgow’s experiment is a communal one, and so much more interesting in its character. It is our nearest approach to the French and German municipal theatres. Its working, it is true, is not undertaken by the city council, but by a body of representative citizens, either shareholders or directors, who select the plays to be enacted and who control the entire management of the theatre.”62 Today, we might think that a democratically elected city council is a body of representative citizens, but here the implication seems to be that public subscription enabled citizen shareholders to exert more representative control than they

60

Chapter 2

would were the theater actually tax funded and “citizen” or “public” in the contemporary sense. In other words: public subscription, though technically a private transaction, actually was closer to the ideals of representative democracy than municipalization. It is curious that a theater that was thus contrasted with a city council–funded theater emerged from what was supposed to be an intermediary step from private enterprise toward municipalization. (Indeed, Glasgow Rep briefly received Glasgow Corporation patronage in 1914.) Civic pride played a big role. The Liverpool Courier goaded subscribers “in order that Glasgow may not enjoy another great advantage in its rival claim to the title of Second City of the Empire. To establish a Repertory Theatre by public subscription will be an achievement which no endowment, however handsome, can emulate.”63 Like a displaced pageant queen, the Glasgow Times pointed out that Liverpool’s theater “was frankly modelled on the pioneer example of Glasgow” and remarked that some of the details given by the chairman “are calculated to raise a little envy in the breast of the Repertory enthusiast in Glasgow.”64 Both Glasgow and Liverpool referred to their repertories as “Citizens’ Theatres” and this ideal extended to all patrons, whether subscribers or not. In Liverpool, Basil Dean reported “an extraordinary local interest; wherever one goes one finds that the theatre is spoken of as ‘our theatre,’ and unconsciously it has a different footing from either of the two other large theatres, which are regarded merely as places of entertainment and not as public institutions.”65 When parliamentary elections coincided with a repertory season in Glasgow, the Herald declared that “by the time [Glaswegians] have elected their representatives for the ensuing Parliament they will already have practically decided, by their bestowal or withholding of adequate support, whether or not the Repertory Theatre is to become their dramatic representative.”66 Apparently, playgoing had turned into poll-going, despite the fact that many playgoing women and men still were ineligible to vote in national or municipal elections. Twenty-first-century scholars might object to a comparison between corporate shareholding and representative democracy: though shareholders have some control over a board of directors usually proportional to the number of shares they own, this is different from the control citizens have over elected officials. Nevertheless, at the time critics and playgoers celebrated public subscription as a return to theater’s mythically democratic spirit. They used the word “democracy” to mean that all classes could contribute according to their means and thereby share equally in the theater.

Public Subscription

61

(On most questions submitted to Liverpool Rep shareholder meetings, every subscriber present had just one vote, regardless of how many shares they held.) Yet even as the Times praised “the ancient Greek or medieval Italian spirit,” the Observer cautioned: “Popularity with the largest number indicates not invariably, but nearly always, in nearly all things, the lowest average of taste. In Athens and Florence the appeal within a nominal democracy was to an effective aristocracy of influence and mind.”67 The Manchester Guardian shifted from thinking of democracy nominally to alchemically and nautically: “Will the proverbial magic of property turn the sand of ‘advanced’ drama into gold? Or will the old gibe that democracy is like a crowd trying to sail a ship be found to apply to an audience trying to run a theatre?”68 Public subscription sought to transform theatergoers from consumers into citizen patrons, “to give the public a feeling of ownership and responsibility towards their local theatre, and thereby to make the middle classes an instrument . . . in the general elevation of the public taste,” as the Eastern Daily Press put it. This fantasy of elevation did not require the schoolmaster’s patronization: the Daily Press emphasized that subscription was not “an attempt on the part of the wealthy and cultured to educate the masses”; rather, the object was “making the theatre depend for its material, as well as for its spiritual, existence, upon the public for which it exists.”69 The circular logic was that the public would patronize a theater they had funded. Public-subscription campaigns conditioned playgoers’ sense of horizontal collectivity. In November 1909, the Glasgow Herald published the directorate’s appeal for shares in an open letter, while clarifying that it was “not sued for in forma pauperis, but claimed as a tribute justly due to a native institution of tried and sterling worth. We have no doubt that the general public will respond spontaneously to that appeal, and justify the confidence of the directors by making the concern a financial success, a success which will be all the more permanent for having been won through merit alone, without any direct official patronage.”70 The subtext was clear: native rather than London; general rather than elite. After months of anticipatory coverage, in May 1911 both the Post and the Courier ran the Liverpool Rep prospectus, along with an application for shares that readers could fill out, detach, and submit.71 (It helped that the papers’ editors served on the repertory’s directorate.) In both cities, subscriptions were priced on a £1 share scheme planned “to enlist the help of the theatre-going class, which as a whole is not opulent,” in the words of one Liverpudlian.72 Glasgow Rep

62

Chapter 2

Figure 3. Theater director Basil Dean’s share certificate in the Liverpool Repertory Theatre, Ltd., 1911. Copyright of the University of Manchester.

warned that it was “not a dividend-hunting company,” and Liverpool Rep limited dividends to 6 percent, with “the rest of the profits being allocated to the encouragement of repertory plays.”73 Though a 6 percent dividend would turn out to be optimistic, one subscriber later noted, perhaps disingenuously: “we thought more of assisting a desirable addition to the attractions of the city and have the pleasure of contemplating ‘our theatre.’ ”74 The Glasgow directors began with £1,000 in capital and offered the public £2,000 in shares; 200 shareholders subscribed to the minimum £1,000 required for allotment, and in April 1909 the Glasgow Repertory Company took the first of many leases at Howard and Wyndham’s Royalty Theatre, for £80 a week. By mid-1912, the company had raised over £5,000 in share capital. In Liverpool, the directors offered the public £20,000 in shares (Figure 3); by June 1911, more than 900 shareholders had subscribed for a total

Public Subscription

63

of £12,000, and the directors purchased and renovated the Star Theatre. (The decision to buy, rather than rent, would prove crucial to surviving the war.) By 1912, 1,400 shareholders had subscribed for £13,700 in all. The largest shareholder had taken £1,000 in shares, but the majority were businessmen, clerks, tradesmen, workingmen, and young women. One plumber subscribed £100.75 As the Sunday Chronicle reported, the unpublished subscription lists “include the names of everybody who is anybody in Liverpool and district, and a large number of faithful pittites and galleryites who have rolled up with their mites,” with the Daily Chronicle adding that they represented “all ranks and stations in life.”76 In Glasgow, Wareing proudly emblazoned programs and posters with the words: “The Repertory Theatre is Glasgow’s own theatre, financed by Glasgow money, managed by Glasgow men. It is a Citizens’ Theatre in the fullest sense of the term, established to make Glasgow independent of London for its Dramatic Supplies” (Figure 4).77 (Wareing was from Greenwich.) In Liverpool, programs boasted that the theater “is the property of upwards of fourteen hundred Liverpool citizens. It is the first English Repertory Theatre to have been founded by these public means.”78 The Westminster Gazette speculated “that within two or three years there will be a dozen of these theatres in the country; a dozen theatres, municipal in one sense, though unassisted directly by the municipalities. . . . Indeed, it may not be long before the provinces dictate in matters of taste to London.”79 Though the war would put a temporary hold on their endeavors, Bradford, Stockport, Leeds, Birmingham, and Sheffield all had active playgoers’ societies and trial repertory seasons, which were promoted in newspapers like the Leeds Mercury, Birmingham Mail, and Sheffield Telegraph.80 Provincial papers were in a key position to advance the repertory movement, given that they historically had been on the passive end of a similarly vertical configuration with the metropolis. Although the Abbey had been operating for six years before Annie Horniman stopped her subsidy, the democratic spirit behind the publicsubscription campaign was similar. The Irish Times illustrated this point by publishing a list of the first 75 subscribers to the Abbey Theatre Endowment Fund, ranging from its treasurer, Lady Tennant (£350), to “A Schoolboy” (six pence) (Figure 5).81 The fund ultimately raised £2,800. Though Glasgow and Liverpool boasted of local shareholders, many Abbey subscribers, including the treasurer taking subscriptions, lived in London. Irish independence fell by the wayside. Though nationalist sentiment had pushed Horniman out from what by that time was known officially as

Figure 4. A program for the Scottish Repertory Theatre featuring Bernard Shaw and local playwright J. J. Bell, 1911. By permission of University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections.

Figure 5. Subscriptions received for the Abbey Theatre Endowment Fund, 1910. Courtesy of the Irish Times.

66

Chapter 2

the National Theatre Society, Ltd., the Irish Independent observed that “subscriptions to the endowment fund have come from persons of most diverse views on all questions that can divide us.”82

Letters to the Editor The sources described so far mostly have been representations of—rather than by—playgoers. If repertorists initially did not comprehend the challenge public subscription posed to their authority, they soon read the writing on the fourth wall. The sense of playgoers in horizontal collectives as shareholders, citizens, and patrons manifested most strongly in their letters to the editor, which they penned under pseudonyms like “A Shareholder” and “A Plain Citizen.” After Liverpool Rep’s first season, the Porcupine observed: “It is ludicrous and amusing to read the foolish fulminations pouring out from these indiscreet well-wishers in the columns of the daily papers. They one and all express in general a decided opinion that the season has been a huge success, and that the theatre has amply justified its existence, and then, mirabile dictu, apply the scalpel and dissecting knife and ruthlessly cut the whole proceedings into shreds.”83 The repertory’s sharpest critics weren’t newspapers but their readers. When Liverpool Rep mounted James Sexton’s The Riot Act (1913), whose subject was the shipping trade, “A Docker” wrote the Post’s editor to critique the costumes and dialect, concluding: “And now, having had my growl, may I be allowed to say how heartily I appreciate the play as a whole.”84 “Non-militant Suffragist” had a different opinion, given that the play’s sole female character was a villainous suffragette: “Heaven knows we have enough opposition to overcome in gaining the recognition of our citizenship without having further stumbling blocks put in our way.”85 The newspapers invited criticism of their own; as one correspondent joked: “Running a theatre like editing a paper is one of those easy jobs we all think we are fit for.”86 After the Liverpool Courier’s theater critic lambasted a Christmas production of Cinderella (1913), “A Gallery Boy” wrote in to defend it: “Surely those who profess leadership in Art, with a big A, must have missed, or have failed to perceive, the real artistic beauty of the production. Happily the audience, though, perhaps, not quite such authorities in the big A line, were humane enough and clear-eyed enough to appreciate the beauty, charm, and grace apparently unseen or uncomprehended by your contemporary.”87 As playgoers announced their ostensible class, gender, and age in their

Public Subscription

67

pseudonyms, they virtually populated the much larger newspaper-reading public’s mental picture of the audience. Repertory patrons were not to be patronized. Contesting the notion that provincial audiences lacked taste, one playgoer wrote to the Glasgow Herald: “The citizens’ theatre is for the citizens, for all sorts and conditions of men, not for that highly developed section only whose fastidious taste craves caviar.”88 In the Liverpool Post, “Playfellow” similarly dismissed the idea of playgoers as patients: “We all know that the phrase ‘worth a guinea a box’ does not actually increase the medicinal value of Beecham’s pills, but it helps to sell them. And, unfortunately, the Repertory Theatre has chosen a label [‘intellectual’] which only damns it in the eyes of the ordinary mortal.”89 More provocative are the instances when playgoers affirmed repertorists’ patronizing analogies. Reiterating the comparison of playgoers to savages, “Disgusted” wrote in: Sir,—What is the matter with Liverpool theatre audiences? As one who was present at the last performance of “A Doll’s House” at the Repertory Theatre on Saturday night, may I beg the courtesy of your columns to ventilate a grievance which I fear is not mine alone—the amazing behaviour of the great many of those present during certain of the most tragic passages? . . . In the last act, where Nora, learning for the first time that Doctor Rank’s feeling for her is deeper than friendship, ends a conversation painful to them both by ringing for the lamp to dispel the twilight in which they have been sitting, will you believe it, sir, but at this moment some of the audience, a good half I should judge, guffawed—I can use no more expressive word—loudly? . . . The Repertory Theatre has been taunted with its failure to reach the high ideals its founders set before them. Small wonder when its audiences can treat the most solemn and moving scenes of a wonderful play, perfectly interpreted, with such disgusting levity. Until Liverpool people go to the theatre in a different spirit and learn to regard a masterpiece like the “Doll’s House” as something more than a low comedy or a farce “adapted from the French,” dramatic art in this city will never reach a high level.90 “Disgusted” separated a “good half” into a bad half; reciprocal resonance meant that even antidemocratic impressions could circulate. A more generous reading might interpret such criticism constructively: the Liverpool

68

Chapter 2

Courier reported that members of the elitist Playgoers’ Society had considered issuing a manual on “How to Behave in the Theatre,” since “the perfect theatre required a perfect audience, and the audience at the Repertory Theatre was by no means perfect”: the interruptions of unnecessary applause “were to be deprecated,” as was the practice of audience members entering the theater during the course of the play, “who should be compelled to stand at the back until the act was over.”91 From proscribing loud guffaws to constraining latecomers, new rules scaffolded the repertory theater’s climb to artistic respectability as surely as light comedies were mounted “to pay for the less popular” modern drama.92 Another aspect of representation for which correspondents clamored had to do with local playwrights, as opposed to simply local productions. As “Convinced” complained to the Herald: “The [Glasgow Rep, also known as the Scottish Playgoers’ Company] is called Scottish and it is not. . . . It gives us plays dealing with life in Norway and England.”93 Any hope for an alternative could be attributed to the Abbey. In 1907, the Guardian declared: “From being theatrically provincial, Dublin has become a centre; instead of merely going by rote to London’s cast-off entertainments, she produces comedy and tragedy of her own which ‘go on tour’ as far as Berlin and Prague. There is no reason why Lancashire too should not in time have an unborrowed dramatic art of its own.”94 Even though Glasgow was the city most politically similar to Dublin, the Herald remarked sanguinely: “English dwellers within our gates need anticipate no references, save historical ones, to the question of Scottish Home Rule; and a nation that delights in music-hall caricatures of its own idiosyncracies is not likely to accuse its poets and dramatists of holding it up to ridicule.”95 Still, correspondence columns registered hopes for a Glaswegian or Lancastrian Synge. Paradoxically, the search for local peculiarity reduced it to a universal label not entirely dissimilar to today’s “buy local” movement. Though repertory companies tried to nurture local playwrights, none produced any lasting original dramas. The Glasgow Rep is better remembered for the first British production of Chekhov’s The Seagull (1913) than for J. A. Ferguson’s oneact Campbell of Kilmohr (1914); the company also synchronized with London to premiere Galsworthy’s Justice (1910), coming just under the wire, over the wire—as Wareing claimed: “At the end of every act I telegraphed to Mr. Galsworthy in London the reception the play received in Glasgow, so that he knew it was a big success in Scotland before the prolonged cheering which greeted it in London confirmed the judgment.”96 Apart from

Public Subscription

69

Dublin’s widely toured Synge–Yeats–Lady Gregory triple bill, the repertory movement’s greatest original dramatic successes were the Manchesterschool playwrights Allan Monkhouse, Harold Brighouse, and Stanley Houghton; Houghton’s Hindle Wakes (1912) became an international sensation after Horniman’s company performed it in London. British provincial repertory theaters were a circuit for these playwrights’ work, with Glasgow premiering new works by Brighouse, and Liverpool, by all three. The push for new provincial drama was in part a reaction against Shaw and other metropolitan dramatists who refused to allow their most recent plays to be licensed for production in the provinces. But a local dramatist to rival Synge proved elusive; as “Playgoer” wrote to the Herald: “vernacular dramas . . . do not exist. . . . If the limitations are necessary, why complain?”97 If not any major playwrights, at least playgoers were proud local shareholders and citizens, as pseudonyms like “A Plain Liverpolitan” communicated.

Columns and Rows The biggest obstacle to equality among playgoers has always been the physical theater space. As Ric Knowles points out, ticket prices and seats stratify spectators by “continu[ing] effectively to reflect and reify currently dominant social hierarchies.”98 The Edwardians inherited theatergoing types that reflected these stratifications, such as gilded “Johnny in the stalls,” the manabout-town whose “benumbing influence” had arrested the English drama, and “ ‘Arry and ‘Arriet,” the cockney couple who howled and chirruped in the pit or gallery.99 These social hierarchies registered in theatrical ephemera, with lower-priced seats receiving a single folio sheet where expensive seats were given a scented octavo program that advertised the perfumer. Repertorists’ vertical collectives and playgoers’ horizontalizing responses might lead one to imagine that wealthier patrons would support the repertory theater at least in proportion to their means. In fact, correspondence columns suggested the opposite: the provincial repertory theater disproportionately depended on lower-middle-class playgoers who sat in the pit and gallery. For provincial playgoers, correspondence columns in some ways were more egalitarian spaces than were actual theaters. Of course, correspondents had to be literate and approved by the editor, but once admitted all were accorded the same typographic treatment, whereas one early repertory

70

Chapter 2

playgoer complained to the Liverpool Porcupine that occupants of the “bob seats” were “not allowed in the foyer as not being class enough to mingle with the elite of the stalls and dress circle”; the playgoer further complained that he had been compelled to pay 6d. for a souvenir because the penny programs were sold out, “and ten minutes afterwards saw new numbers of the latter being dispensed.”100 But as time went on, playgoers from the less prosperous parts of the theater began filling columns with explanations for unfilled seats. Playgoers remarking on empty seats could be divided into two camps: those who faulted the management and those who faulted each other. A member of the second camp insisted that those responsible for empty seats were “not, sir, your democratic public, but your ‘nobility’ of orchestra stalls and dress circle. This is where the shoe pinches! The family circle will be filled time and again—aye, and the pit stalls, too—but that the ‘aristocracy’ of Liverpool should enter their seats is apparently unthinkable!”101 This playgoer used correspondence columns to reach the wider newspaper-reading public, hoping that “aristocratic” patrons would remember their “democratic” duty. “Two Pun’ Ten” made a similar observation but concluded that the shortfall justified municipal support: If the liking for sound elevating drama is most markedly displayed by people who can only afford to pay a shilling or two shillings to see it, that fact is itself a pretty good argument in favour of the municipality giving the enterprise the encouragement of material aid. My own observation is that the patrons of the family circle and the pit stalls belong to the same social class as myself, which is what is called, I suppose, the lower middle class. This is the class for which the municipalities and the State do the very least, and a small grant to the Repertory Theatre, or any other worthy institution in which the lower middle class has shown an appreciative interest, would be at least a recognition of the claims which that class has upon the distributors of public benefits.102 Like the playgoer above, “Two Pun’ Ten” (who very well could have been a plant) hoped to reach the wider newspaper-reading public—here, the municipal authorities. Unsurprisingly, playgoers who blamed the public were difficult to placate. Playgoers who faulted the management met greater success. In Liverpool, “An Elderly Playgoer” wrote in to the Post to say that although she or

Public Subscription

71

he was “very fond of the Repertory Theatre, and much interested in the discussion, particularly . . . in your paper,” the playgoer also was “rather deaf” and so had trouble hearing the discussion inside the theater from the less expensive seats, remarking: “While the cheaper parts of the theatre were well filled, the orchestra stalls were a wilderness of empty seats. Would it not pay better to fill the seats at half a crown than to keep them empty?”103 This was a kind of wilderness repertorists would not be able to civilize. In Glasgow, a playgoer similarly complained about the pit booking system, arguing that those “who visit the theatre every week” should have the same consideration as “the less regular clients” who sat in more expensive seats.104 Taking a different view, some lower-middle-class correspondents argued the management could do better than to produce middling fare. “A Plain Liverpolitan” had not enjoyed the repertory’s production of a frothy play by Rudolf Besier called Lady Patricia: I am not much of a theatregoer as a rule, but I have found real entertainment in the Repertory. Far from being a place of gloom and chilly intellectuality, it seems to me an exceedingly cheerful little theatre where one gets a feeling of really social enjoyment. . . . The moral it seems to me, is not that one should go to see every play that the Repertory management chooses to put on, but that the Repertory management should be a little more careful in selection of plays. After all, many of the most loyal supporters of the Repertory in Liverpool are folk of humble means, and it is quite absurd to expect them to pay out week after week, no matter what sort of fare is offered to them.105 Here, the lesson was for the management rather than the playgoers: repertory’s frequent change of bill—usually every two weeks—meant that regular, lower-paying clients were far more valuable than higher-paying ones who showed up only for a play or two each season. One could point out an inherent bias: poorer playgoers are more likely than wealthier to complain of ticket prices and for this reason might be better represented among correspondents. Nevertheless, these poorer playgoers demanded concrete changes and usually got them. Glasgow Rep’s director took to the Herald to “acknowledg[e] communications from numerous anonymous correspondents who have lately favoured me, some wise helpful criticisms.”106 Liverpool Rep’s chairman remarked that he “had

72

Chapter 2

been studying with care and interest the criticism which had been appearing in the correspondence columns” and agreed with “A Plain Liverpolitan” in particular.107 Professor Reilly contended that in the provinces, cultural geography could be mapped onto playhouse layout: “It is in the stalls that the real provincialism sits; they fill on some well known name or on the production of a London success. The richer people of the town do not yet seem to have the pluck to come to a new play on which London has not yet pronounced.”108 This was the exact opposite of the dynamic in the metropolis, where, as Frank Curzon observed, “we depend chiefly upon our stalls and circles.”109 (For example, one of the relatively few letters sent to the Times about the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre was signed “The Woman in the Stalls.”)110 Provincial playgoers in the pit and gallery emerged as the saviors who would counteract what Horniman described as “the men and women who were well off and too well fed, who had supported rubbish in London, and so made it possible to take the plays round the country until the taste of the whole nation had become deteriorated.”111 This is not to suggest that correspondents’ power was equivalent to that of shareholders, or to that of the directorate or of the management that the directorate appointed. But since the theaters could not survive with only shareholders for playgoers, the debate as to how these theaters should run was crowd-sourced to newspaper readers. As the Liverpool Post reported: “Last December correspondence was invited in these columns on the subject of the Repertory Theatre. . . . The public, as represented by a large number of correspondents, showed a lively interest in the theatre’s welfare, but little unanimity as to the best methods of promoting it; and at the annual meeting of shareholders the problem was admitted, regretted, and left unsolved. . . . Now the adoption of certain of these suggestions . . . has brought about remarkable results.”112 Following on the heels of a sparsely attended season, these suggestions submitted by newspaper readers included varying the bill to include a mixture of light comedy and serious drama, as well as adopting a “true repertory” schedule that alternated plays nightly rather than a series of one- to two-week runs—an idea that repertorist Harley Granville Barker had strongly promoted. Liverpool Rep balanced the books by enacting these two particular suggestions and crediting newspaper readers, and on the eve of the war that would shutter Glasgow and suspend Liverpool, both companies had started to turn a profit. Liverpool Rep survived as the Liverpool Playhouse and eventually received state subsidy with the 1946 establishment of the Arts Council of Great Britain.

Public Subscription

73

The Abbey achieved state subsidy much sooner, with Irish independence.113 Collective subsidy did not always prove more robust than an angel investor: Birmingham Repertory Theatre (est. 1913) survived thanks to the inherited wealth of its West Midlands–hailing founder, Barry Jackson.114 But publicsubscription repertory theaters continued to be launched throughout the interwar period, from Northampton to York to Perth.115 As journalist Cecil Chisholm recommended in 1934: “Make a man a shareholder and you may make him an habitue´.”116 By way of conclusion, it bears mentioning that playgoers were not the only readers treating newspaper columns as virtual extensions of theater buildings. Even before the playhouse had been purchased, actor Nigel Playfair charged into the pages of the Liverpool Courier on a quest to keep it clean: “SIR,—Will you grant me the hospitality of your columns while I endeavor to mop up, drop by drop, the deluge of kindly disapprobation which your correspondent ‘Truepenny’ showers upon the Repertory Theatre scheme in to-day’s issue.”117 From metaphorical to literal mopping up, house manager Thomas Pigott chastised “A Shareholder” who had dared to question Liverpool Rep’s cleanliness by calling its atmosphere “amateurish” in a letter to the Post: “There are four female cleaners working every day for eight or nine hours, supervised by a very reliable housekeeper, and assisted by a male cleaner. From two to three gallons of special disinfectant liquid soap is used weekly in the water for scrubbing purposes, and a large quantity of disinfectant dust—Sweepodust—is sprinkled on all the floors before the sweeping begins.” Pigott registered a hygienic concern also reflected in Abbey and Glasgow Rep programs, which assured audiences that Jeyes’ Fluid had been used for the same purpose.118 He concluded: “It seems to me that ‘Shareholder’ is not able to speak out for himself unless he is behind the screen of a nom-de-plume.”119 This letter was dated December 23, 1913. Two days later, “A Shareholder” sent the following reply: It is Christmas Day, and, detesting controversy for the rankle it too often leaves behind, I wish frankly to apologise to [Mr. Pigott] for any such irritation, and trust my statement will be as frankly accepted when I say that my little list of grievances were simply general, and had no particular individual in view, as no one individual was known to me. May I assure Mr. Piggott [sic] that I am not directly or indirectly “professional.” My identity covers that of a clerk, who has found in

74

Chapter 2

books and plays some recompense for irksome surroundings at times; and looked to, and does look to, the Repertory to assist that end. From my knowledge of town life I think there are many such like frequent the Repertory. It was only on the last lap that I entered myself and little family as small holders, in order to quicken their interest in real good plays, and keep a taste for them when once attained; and with that end we have made up our little parties as means would afford, and, naturally, when the little things happened which I have mentioned it was annoying. . . . It was like finding out some petty fault in one’s sweetheart. Had I the means I would just as gladly assist further, and I am sure that all the small Repertory shareholders would do the same.120 Both manager and shareholder misapprehended one another as fantasies composed of no particular individuals. By describing the repertory theater as an erudite, family-friendly fiance´e, “A Shareholder” romanticized the repertory theater in much the same way that contemporary theater scholars have romanticized the audience. As Christopher Balme has observed: “Although the spectator and his/her collective cousin, the audience, are regularly invoked as being at the ‘heart’, ‘centre’ or otherwise located in the vicinity of the ‘theatrical event’, the amount of serious scholarship available stands in stark disproportion to these ritualized rhetorical enunciations.”121 In other words, theater scholars’ effusions would be better supported if we paid more attention to how playgoers represented themselves, and we could do worse than to venture beyond the metropolis. Claiming democratic ownership, repertory playgoers shared their impressions—if not always their Christian names. That privately owned repertory theaters were deemed “Citizens’ Theatres” and “public institutions” emphasizes how subscription enterprises could exceed, as much as anticipate, the representative authority of democratically elected city councils. Public-subscription theaters thrived in the provinces rather than the metropolis not only thanks to civic pride and friendly competition among neighboring cities but also because provincial playgoers felt keenly that London was dictating theatrical taste for the rest of Britain and Ireland. Yet although play-producing societies and repertory theaters offered competing visions of whether exclusive metropolitan clubs or inclusive provincial communities would set the agenda for the modern theater, in both models, subscribers lay claim to speak on behalf of much

Public Subscription

75

larger publics: club subscribers assembled a dramatic library based on their own tastes for the ultimate benefit of commercial theater audiences, while repertory subscribers contributed money and opinions in a bid to represent their fellow citizens. Of course, theaters were only some of many subscription enterprises to appear at the turn of the century. As more and more theaters were funded by subscription, playwrights increasingly gravitated toward dramatizing subscription’s representational dynamics in society at large.

CHAPTER 3

Subscription On and Beyond the Stage

Often acknowledged as the father of modern drama, Henrik Ibsen has less often been credited with putting the subscription list onstage. In Pillars of Society, subscription lists for a railway line symbolize Karsten Bernick’s social standing. Presenting “a bundle of papers” to fellow community leaders, he instructs them (in William Archer’s edition) to “put our names down first. Our position in society makes it our duty to do as much as we can.” Metaphorical hierarchy translated typographically, the prop materializes the play’s title. When Bernick later learns that the townspeople intend to “strike their names off the lists,” he knows how this will look—filled, the lists scaffold his position as leader of the community; crossed out, they portend his collapse—so he averts disaster by circulating new subscription lists for shares in land along the line.1 While one play’s filled subscription lists assure a character’s position in the community, another play’s lists signal that a character has become persona non grata. When Peter Stockmann discovers contamination in the town baths, he believes the townspeople will celebrate him by putting together a subscription list for a testimonial; instead, the Homeowner’s Association perverts this fantasy by “sending round a circular from house to house, in which all well-disposed citizens are called upon not to employ [him].” Evidently, one gets labeled “an enemy of the people” when “not a single father of a family will venture to refuse his signature.”2 In plays by Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, St. John Hankin, Elizabeth Robins, John Galsworthy, Arthur Wing Pinero, William Boyle, and others, circulated lists of names represent an individual character’s relationship to large social groups. Where previous chapters have showcased the subscription lists of play-producing societies and repertory theaters, this chapter

Subscription On and Beyond the Stage

77

moves from the material world around plays to the material world represented in productions onstage—a world that reproduced and influenced the external world of subscribers. In Norway as in Britain and Ireland, theaters were far from the only subscription enterprises to proliferate at this time. From railway lines, land schemes, and testimonials to libraries, schools, newspapers, magazines, church buildings, charity balls, temperance societies, trade unions, gentlemen’s clubs, orphanages, hospitals, canals, political parties, and regimental bands—all raised funds by subscription, whether or not subscribers also were considered members, shareholders, benefactors, or readers. As more plays were staged thanks to subscription, more plays were written that thematized subscription. This meant that in production after production, subscription lists were taken up as stage props. Stage props have a long history of representing group affiliations. The English term for a stage “property” emerged in the sixteenth century, when acting troupes pooled money to purchase stage objects that were considered “company property.”3 However, the term soon acquired strong associations with individual performers; over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, certain props became what Frances Teague has described as “a metonymic token of that performer’s identity in the role . . . even function[ing] as a substitute for the actor”—think of Thomas Betterton’s chair or Frances Abington’s fan.4 The subscription list’s late Victorian apotheosis as stage “prop” (whose singular abbreviation first appeared across the Atlantic in 1911) once again foregrounded social relationships: like a chair or fan, the subscription-list prop substituted for actors but in this case for groups of actors—or ensembles—otherwise unseen.5 Although crowds of townspeople gather onstage at the climaxes of both Pillars of Society (1877) and An Enemy of the People (1883), in the turn-of-the-century plays that feature in this chapter, circulated lists often are the audience’s only visual representation of crowds who gather in the offstage world of the play. By focusing on subscription lists as well as circulated petitions, letters, signed terms, collecting books, checkbooks, notebooks, visitors’ books, and even lists of eligible bachelors, this chapter suggests that printed ephemera were preeminent props because they circulated between onstage and offstage, showing how visible papers might represent absent persons. In this way, these plays literalize how subscribers themselves served as political stand-ins for their fellow citizens, showing us what subscription meant not just to the theater but to the contemporary social reality.

78

Chapter 3

Training our eyes on the subscription list as a stage prop reveals both its ubiquity in and centrality to turn-of-the-century plays—and, by extension, subscription’s importance to the representational politics of turn-of-thecentury Britain and Ireland. Though it was not nearly as technologically advanced or as dramaturgically new as the electric lamp, telephone, gramophone, or automobile, no other prop so proudly embodied the desire “to join a society, or, more desperately, to write a cheque,” as Virginia Woolf famously described the era.6 Here, I read props not just as metaphors for interiority, as William Worthen and Andrew Sofer have done, but as metaphors and metonyms for exteriority.7 The need to portray dramatic exchanges between politicians and constituents or industrialists and charity cases edged playwrights toward props that listed hundreds of names. In the hands of principal characters who give or collect subscriptions, subscription lists brought the public plot into the private drawing room and offer some explanation of how “social drama” dealt with large crowds despite keeping casts small. Metonymically, subscription-list props represent offstage groups among whom the lists circulate, from provincial constituents to wealthy industrialists and bachelors; metaphorically, these props represent further unseen groups on whose behalf subscribers claim to speak, especially poor women and orphans. Such props enter onto the figurative “backstage” of the drawing room and then exit again into the public world, foregrounding the theatricality of turn-of-the-century subscription. Onstage, principal characters like ambitious politicians, guilty industrialists, and industrious nubiles participate in ostensibly collectivist endeavors with the selfish intention of getting elected, saved, or married; between the acts, crowds of unseen subscribers gather somewhere offstage in order to be entertained: to hear bands play or politicians orate. As subscribers alternate between performing and being performed for, subscription-list props warned theater audiences against both uncritical spectatorship and indiscriminate subscription. Meanwhile, an emergent charity-matinee repertoire steered clear of plays with subscription-list props, instead staging huge crowd scenes in which hundreds of actors appeared onstage, which suggests that audiences were more inclined to contribute to charitable causes when crowds were identified as active performers rather than as duped spectators. Together, these plays demonstrate how subscription constituted a more pervasive system of political representation than did state or local government in turn-of-the-century Britain and Ireland. In the first instance, subscribers—particularly women or propertyless men who could not legally

Subscription On and Beyond the Stage

79

vote in parliamentary elections—used subscription to pressure political candidates, whether by withholding their subscriptions to political parties or electoral campaigns or by demanding politicians subscribe to their own clubs, charities, and associations. In the second instance, subscribers metonymically represented similar individuals who wished to join in their subscription schemes, such as when cricket club subscribers introduced new gentlemen to their membership pavilions. In the third instance, subscribers metaphorically represented dissimilar individuals who benefited or stood to benefit from their subscriptions, such as when orphanage subscribers nominated orphans for adoption. “Subscription hunters” enhanced this metaphorical representation by using theatrical techniques, from society doyennes hosting charity matinees for prisoners of war to petty criminals roaming the countryside with fraudulent petitions to collect subscriptions on behalf of fictitious busmen’s widows. More pervasively, if we take “theatrical” to be synonymous with any kind of illusionistic display, these plays reveal that subscribers had a number of reasons for subscribing other than supporting the putative funding goal. All of their reasons revolved around situating themselves within a particular community of subscribers on behalf of a particular community of beneficiaries, but that relationship could be motivated by ambition (as when politicians subscribed to their constituents’ hobby groups), guilt (as when industrialists subscribed to workers’ charity funds), or even lust (as when eligible bachelors subscribed to funds promoted by marriageable young women.)

Dialogue in Typography Turn-of-the-century playwrights avoided crowds. Although crowd scenes and large casts do not always go together, cast size can be a useful way of accounting for scenes containing many actors. With few exceptions, from 1890 to 1918 the largest non-musical play casts to appear on the London stage were in Shakespeare revivals and Cecil Raleigh sensation dramas. Topping the list was a 1916 Shakespeare Tercentenary Commemoration production of Julius Caesar with 164 actors, none more prominent than Frank Benson, who played the title role and was knighted by King George V while still in costume; other colossal productions included Raleigh’s The Great Ruby (1898; 68 actors) and The Great Millionaire (1901; 81 actors). By contrast, most new plays had an average cast of 11 actors—a relatively constant

80

Chapter 3

figure from 1890 to 1959.8 Susan Schuyler has argued that late Victorian playwrights began instituting “crowd control” because playgoers had gentrified: drawing-room drama walled itself off from expansive melodrama, and scenes featuring large numbers of working-class characters rioting or reveling were pruned away, sacrificing melodrama’s public plots to isolate its domestic or romantic plots.9 Crowd scenes threatened bourgeois audiences, and their absence made sense first for the parlor and later for the professional play-producing societies and repertory companies that emerged at the turn of the century. Large ensembles migrated to other performance genres: professional and amateur revivals, musical comedies, mass pageants, and eventually films.10 As actors vanished, props proliferated. T. W. Robertson’s 1860s “cup and saucer” dramas meticulously re-created contemporary social rituals that spilled over into the Bancrofts’ 1880s Haymarket productions as part of a broader movement toward realism in the arts. Furniture famously cluttered up the Continental stages managed by Konstantin Stanislavsky, who imported from Norway, and Andre´ Antoine, who borrowed from his mother; in London, audiences actually complained that real department store furniture looked phony under the footlights.11 In 1878 one Era critic observed: “The stage accessories become so substantial that the actors begin to wear a shadowy look—especially when they are required to represent rather unlife-like characters. Real horses, real dogs, real water, real pumps, and washing tubs are now supplemented by real bric-a`-brac, bijouterie, and drawing-room knick-knackery.”12 Props became important enough that in the 1860s American publisher Samuel French started listing “properties” in some of his company’s acting editions, and the practice spread to Britain in 1872 when French bought fellow dramatic publisher Lacy’s.13 Across the Atlantic, property men came out from behind the scenes—or didn’t: in 1898, Maurice Hageman published an absurdist curtain-raiser in which a gentleman monologues that he can’t write his letter because the property man has forgotten the electric lamp; in 1912, George C. Hazelton wrote a “property man” character into his soon-to-be-world-famous play The Yellow Jacket, a decade before Pirandello did the same in Six Characters in Search of an Author.14 Props and their masters were more prominent than ever before.15 The prominence of props and the absence of crowds readied the stage for subscription lists and related printed ephemera, which for this chapter includes any circulated documents that appeal to or record the names of

Subscription On and Beyond the Stage

81

subscribers: letters, checks, and collecting books. Such documents function as avatars for characters on but mostly off the list of dramatis personae; neighboring name-bearing props (not demanding payment) include petitions, signed terms, visitors’ books, and lists of eligible bachelors.16 Broadly, these documents could be considered cousins to what Andrew Sofer has called “speaking props”—objects such as letters that “relay information to an audience that would otherwise require the presence of an actormessenger.”17 But rather than bring news from elsewhere, thereby eliminating a single actor, the props here stand in for a whole crowd not present onstage. Late Victorians who put subscription lists onstage were picking up a name-bearing prop tradition that goes back to at least Shakespeare.18 Peter Quince reads off a literal list of dramatis personae at the beginning of rehearsals for Pyramus and Thisbe, and Falstaff functionally does the same thing with a roll of soldiers’ names that includes “Mouldy” and “Shadow.” Capulet hands his servant party invitation lists; more grimly, Mark Anthony announces a list of victims to be murdered.19 One difference between Shakespearean and these later lists is that the former identify characters whom playgoers also see onstage, whether as rude mechanicals or as part of Julius Caesar’s riotous crowd scenes. Turn-of-the-century British and Irish subscription-list props, on the other hand, register the stresses imposed by otherwise absent ensembles; reading backward, they might seem to have more in common with the CGI crowds of twenty-first-century Hollywood blockbusters. This is not to suggest that subscription lists were meant to be synonymous with the heaving crowds and masses so important to nineteenth-century culture—on the contrary, these plays reflect a social reality in which subscribing presented a powerful, if more costly, alternative to thronging.20 But that the OED definition of “crowd” includes both “a mass of spectators; an audience” and “a collection of actors playing the part of a crowd” points to the theater as a special site for showcasing subscription as just such an alternative.21 Many subscription lists represented groups that might never convene in person, but audiences—especially audiences who subscribed to theaters, or to other causes when they attended charity matinees—were keenly alive to the ways in which crowds were or were not represented onstage. In the era of the so-called “discussion play,” what was the difference between speaking props and speaking about props, or between representing crowds and mentioning them in conversation? Drawn mostly from

82

Chapter 3

dialogue, Frances Teague’s ambitious catalogue of all the props in Shakespeare’s plays reminds us that in the theater we hear about objects and persons that might never be present physically onstage. Nevertheless, this chapter tries to zero in on scenes where stage directions describe subscription lists in characters’ hands; when props tell us anything useful, it is usually with the help of actors’ words and gestures. Accounting for the subscription-list prop is not the same as suggesting that the world of a play never before had extended beyond the dramatis personae list. But on stages that were crowded with objects rather than persons, these props offered one way of materially representing large-group relationships using the printed ephemera that persons exchanged. Reading subscription-list props requires some detective work: while the ephemera that circulate around the stage sometimes wind up in archives, those that circulated on it as props rarely seem to—although Richard Foulkes describes a Nottingham Royal Theatre accounts book from the 1920s that survived despite (or thanks to) use as a prop.22 In this chapter, published plays make for better sources than do props themselves; discussing subscription lists as props makes puns not only of more contemporary theatrical terms like “prop list” and “prop table” but also out of the directive, imported from film, that a prop must “read well.” In contrast to stage props, for all the genuine petitions, signed terms, account books, and visitors’ books that do survive in archives, such specimens offer only some indication of how citizens engaged with them at the time. Where previous chapters have looked closely at programs, tickets, annual reports, and local newspapers, this chapter observes ephemera at a remove, through the looking glass of social drama. In this way, these plays help us appreciate how subscription ephemera served as metaphorical props offstage, in real life, as well as actual props onstage, and not just in the sense of counterfeit subscription lists that had long been used to bilk unsuspecting investors and benefactors. Lisa Gitelman has described the “know-show” function of printed ephemera, arguing that context and environment shape how a paper document theatrically displays or performs.23 By setting ephemera within a zoo-like simulacrum of their turn-of-thecentury habitus, the plays in this chapter reveal that, given the right circumstances, leaflets appealing for subscriptions could pressure politicians to cave to the demands of their constituents or husbands to contemplate leaving their wives. While it’s hardly surprising, for example, that a parish chapel collecting book is more threatening when carted door to door than

Subscription On and Beyond the Stage

83

when left to languish in the nave, more striking is how often one form of ephemera might inadvertently cause a character to imagine another document in its place: a list of shareholders’ terms might make the signer think guiltily of a charity subscription list; a circulated list of orphans might cause a young woman or her guardian to mull over the list of eligible bachelors written in her notebook. That one list might prompt a character to think of another list is less surprising bearing in mind that even as far back as the 1780s, a single British jobbing printer could claim to supply eighty-five different yet genetically related “blank” forms that drew upon a common bank of paper stock and typefaces; by the 1890s, blank books manufactured in the United States included account books, visitors’ books, collection books, and notebooks, along with cotton-weight books, salesmen’s order books, and lumber and log-tally books.24 Even though we would not want to conflate these many different kinds of document, the plays in this chapter suggest that subscription ephemera brought together different social domains: politics and religion; industry and charity; art and entertainment. Because they ask that subscribers write something (often a name) and pledge something (often a relatively small amount of money), the subscription ephemera in these plays expand our vocabulary for discussing what Michael Twyman has called “dialogue in typography.”25 Although we might expect that this dialogue would take place between the subscriber who writes his or her name and the voice that animates the text of the appeal—bearing in mind the absence of a designated author and that jobbing printers generally kept their own names off the ephemera they published—these plays show us just how many other agents got folded into the conversation. For example, while the attractive young woman presenting a charity subscription list to her would-be husband might be taken as a proxy for the voice of the appeal itself, the mail-gathering clerk advising his candidate to subscribe to a local interest group couches that appeal in terms of the candidate’s self-interest, and signs on his boss’s behalf. Ironically, whenever the stage directions specify that a character actually writes down his own name himself, the action takes place in a moment of pronounced silence, foregrounding how much his interests don’t genuinely align with whoever penned, or benefits from, the appeal: by giving his subscription, he is more properly (and literally) saying something else. Above all, these plays reveal that the names listed on subscription ephemera cannot be taken at face value but are instead part of a complex social performance—literalized in productions, this chapter ultimately suggests, by the presence of a theater audience.

84

Chapter 3

That in these plays we so often witness well-off male protagonists subscribing under pressure exerted at least in part by unnamed, offstage others revises the Carlylean distinction between great men and forgotten crowds—a distinction that, while long contested, seems in some ways to follow from nineteenth-century material culture. James Mussell has contrasted forgettable printed ephemera like pamphlets, handbills, blank forms, and tickets with enduring monuments, whether towering tomes of history and literature or public libraries, museums, and statues that figure so prominently in the late Victorian imagination. And yet, he suggests, where monuments left grand legacies but were relatively few in number, ephemera provided “a complementary form of persistence based on circulation.”26 This chapter posits that at the turn of the century, it became newly important for the circulation of subscription ephemera to be perceived as democratic so that otherwise anonymous crowds might fund civic monuments like war memorials, hospitals, and universities in the first place—no less than so that they might manipulate their MPs. Susan Stewart has described the inscriptions on public monuments that encourage viewers to acknowledge heroes and historical figures, whether as individual names (“Cecil Rhodes”; “Queen Victoria”) or as collectives (“the Hull soldiers, 54 in number, who fell in South Africa”).27 Subscriber names written onto blank forms or into blank books and reprinted in circulars and press columns vitally counterbalance the names carved in stone or etched in bronze: these plays suggest that often, what was most important was having one’s name down on a list. On the other hand, anonymized inscriptions like “erected by public subscription” or “erected by the inhabitants” ask their own audiences, now as then, to imagine ourselves inhabiting the role of subscribers who funded the monuments for our benefit.

Electoral Registers Ibsen’s community pillars and public enemies find Anglo-Irish equivalents in eager-to-please parliamentarians and county councillors. In Pinero’s His House in Order (1906), an aristocratic MP’s popularity with his Midlands constituency revolves around the MP’s gift to the town of a formerly private park. The townspeople have subscribed to a fund for flags, garlands, and banners to commemorate the occasion, and the mayor who topped the list shows up in Overbury Towers’ majestic drawing rooms to “[turn] the leaves

Subscription On and Beyond the Stage

85

of” a petition for a permanent bandstand signed by “three hundred and eighty-five—eighty-six . . . good, sound names”—the MP’s house may not be in order, but the townspeople certainly are. As noted above, while threatening crowds gather onstage at the climaxes both of Pillars of Society and An Enemy of the People, in His House in Order and other turn-of-thecentury plays, this circulated list is the only way in which hundreds of townspeople are represented visually for the audience, even though the aristocrats greet them offstage at the park between Acts 3 and 4. When the mayor exits the house in apparent dismay, he caustically remarks that the petition “will come in handy for lighting your fire,” but the only documents to burn in this play are those from the MP’s deceased wife to her secret lover; Pinero sets the documentary weight of the private past against that of the public present.28 Dramaturgically as much as politically, this prop is how the will of the town bears down on the drawing room. Beyond receiving petitions for bandstands, more common was the trope of the political candidate inundated with letters asking for further subscriptions to any number of forgettable clubs and funds, as in this exchange between a South London MP and his mail-sorting clerk from James Fagan’s The Earth (1909): [MP]. (. . . he reads the letter.) “Tooting Wanderers, Tooting, SouthWest.—We suggest that you might like to subscribe to the Tooting Wanderer’s Cricket Club, remembering your speech made at the opening of the Tooting Free Library, and the interest you have always taken in Toot—” I don’t take the faintest interest in Tooting. [Clerk]. There’s a by election probable in the autumn. [MP]. So there is. (With a sigh.) Oh well, send them the usual. Do any more of these want subscriptions? [Clerk]. All except one, I’m afraid.29 Tooting had in fact opened a library in 1902, but to the apathetic MP, the causes matter less than the district. As is typical of such plays, these letters are the only representations we get of the constituents. If the MP wants to represent the constituents in turn, he’ll have to subscribe to their causes. By means of the subscription-list prop, then, offstage citizens make their wishes known to onstage politicians, demanding contributions to various funds, clubs, or societies. In the absence of actually meeting these embodied

86

Chapter 3

constituents, we see only the mailings that they send to their political candidates. While bringing constituents to the stage figuratively makes sense theatrically (if only to keep cast numbers small), the subscription-list prop further highlights the extent to which subscription gave everyday citizens political bargaining power. Because these plays feature politicians subscribing to conflicting causes in order to win popular support—no less than to win further subscriptions to their own electoral campaigns—theater audiences grew accustomed to situating subscription within a wider representational system, only one facet of which involved voting for politicians. Before diving into more examples from these plays, a bit of historical context. In turn-of-the-century Britain and Ireland, the relationship between independent subscription initiatives and institutions run by MPs or local councillors was not especially clear-cut: many subscription enterprises sought state or municipal support, and many tax- or rate-aided organizations sought additional subscriptions. The last chapter’s metaphors comparing repertory playgoers to schoolchildren and hospital patients carry added meaning in this wider social world. During a period in Britain more or less bookended by the Education Act of 1870 (which provided for elementary education out of rates) and the Local Government Act of 1929 (which empowered councils to take over Poor Law Union hospitals), journalists and politicians celebrated the autonomy of schools and hospitals that were subscription funded or “voluntary” in contrast to their municipalized counterparts. In 1902, the Derbyshire Advertiser and Journal framed the voluntary movement in terms of civic pride by boasting that since the Education Act had been passed, five new local schools costing around £2,000 each had been financed by subscription “without one farthing from rate or State.”30 Conversely, in 1910 a House of Commons committee patronizingly warned Warrington’s municipal corporation that levying a farthing rate to support a local Infirmary and Nursing Association “would be a dangerous precedent and would, indeed, be a start in the direction of the municipalisation of hospitals,” ironically illustrating how government assistance might be seen as overreaching.31 In this way, subscription negotiated the boundary between endeavors to which all taxpaying citizens were obliged to contribute and those to which they could elect to contribute. Significantly, both kinds of endeavors were seen as key components of citizenship. Yet the rationales for distinguishing between obligatory taxes and voluntary subscriptions often collapsed in discussions about individual rights

Subscription On and Beyond the Stage

87

versus elective benefits. We see this, for example, in Whitstable Urban District Council’s awkward promise, in 1913, “to try to get an electric light company here with sufficient capital to carry out the undertaking [of installing electricity without asking for additional subscriptions] so that the ratepayers would get the advantage of it without paying anything towards it”—if electricity was to be a public good rather than a private service, ratepayers were already paying for it.32 Such contradictions intensified around goods and services that were for the primary benefit of individuals other than subscribers. When in 1918 the mayor of Rochdale asked the local Trades Council to impose a levy on members toward a scheme for “adopting” British and Irish prisoners of war (i.e., supplying them with food), members saw it as an infringement on their right to subscribe to their chosen charities even as they asserted “that it should be the duty of the State to provide [men disabled by war] with a sufficient wage, instead of leaving the matter to the charity or generosity of either employers or employees.”33 Extragovernmental subscription schemes frequently outperformed the government’s own fundraising initiatives; later that year, the Cheltenham Chronicle pointed out that the local Traders’ Association had been able to raise more contributions for prisoners of war than municipal officials would have been able to do.34 At other times, the government amplified subscription’s lead, with Parliament using taxes to double voluntary contributions to distress funds in mining areas in 1929.35 On still other occasions, subscription and state played tit for tat, as when trade unions only subscribed to the Prince of Wales’s charity fund on the condition that the government agreed to make necessary provisions for wartime unemployment.36 Subscription further gave ordinary citizens a platform from which to intervene in government institutions like the courts, such as in 1893 when one Kent newspaper raised testimonial subscriptions for a local murder inspector whom many residents believed had been unfairly censured by the judge.37 Even more strikingly, subscription endowed these collective endeavors with democratic legitimacy: opening a new wing of the Ulster Volunteer Force Hospital in 1915, Lord Londonderry remarked that “it was not a hospital which had been provided by a few rich people to whom a subscription was nothing whatsoever, but was one which had been provided by, if he might use the term, democratic subscriptions. It had been subscribed to by the people to whom the very smallest subscription meant a certain amount of difference, and so they could realise that it was a proof of the regard which the people of Belfast held towards those who were

88

Chapter 3

fighting their battles across the seas.”38 Four years later, Gloucestershire Echo speculated that a war memorial organized by the local Traders’ Association would have “the most representative, the most ‘democratic’ subscription list ever compiled in Cheltenham.”39 As the rhetorical modals and quotation marks suggest, “democratic” was the buzzword of the age, and aspirations for representative and democratic subscription lists characterize turn-of-the-century subscription schemes for any range of funds and associations. When publishing the complete subscription lists for the local cathedral’s new organ in 1899, one Norwich newspaper claimed that “a more generous and representative subscription roll has rarely been issued for any object. From Mr. Hugh Barclay’s munificent donation at the top to the widow’s mite at the bottom it embraces almost every class of giver.”40 Ten years later, a Sheffield newspaper remarked that the tribute to a long-serving secretary of the local Women’s Council “must have been particularly gratifying to the recipient, because it was an informal friendly gift from the members on a democratic subscription list.”41 Rallying for subscriptions to endow a university college in 1930s Devon, principal John Murray argued that poor men and women should contribute because “no more convincing proof of the deep desire there is in the South-West for a full University of its very own can be placed before potential subscribers from afar than a substantial and representative subscription list from the home country.”42 Two years after that, Wellington’s local Athletic Union chairman insisted: “We are not an exclusive club, but very democratic and our subscription for any section is very low and reasonable.”43 While “democratic” tended to connote low minimum subscription fees, “representative” could be a relative term, as when one newspaper columnist complained in 1907 that “with a more representative subscription list [to the Tedworth fox-hunting club] the number of hunting days would never have been reduced to three.”44 But the guinea’s exclusive reign was over: subscription enterprises increasingly put their money where their mouth was by promoting shilling, penny, and especially farthing contributions. For the first time, an enterprise’s civic value was tied to the purported accessibility of its subscription lists—though, crucially, this is not the same as saying that the enterprise itself ultimately would have been accessible to subscribers, as we see with the Ulster Volunteer Force Hospital and the South-West University. Farthings were particularly symbolic: in 1904, London Daily News reported that a “farthing hospital” in Stratford, London,

Subscription On and Beyond the Stage

89

had attracted coins “from little girls, who wrap them up in tissue paper as though they were of priceless value. Fifteen coins came from Gainsborough with the inscription, ‘The Widow’s Mite.’ A gentleman wrote from Stroud: ‘I have 114 of these coins if you care for them.’ One donation was designated ‘The Mighty Atom.’ ”45 Puffed-up notices like these spoke to a renewed faith in the aggregate contributions of small denominations as much as to a civic pride all the more philanthropic because citizens in Stroud and Gainsborough likely never would have had the opportunity to receive treatment at a London hospital. Above all, the trend toward representative and democratic subscription lists meant that subscribers of large and small amounts saw themselves as delegates acting on behalf of other citizens. While subscribers had long given small contributions to causes—widow’s mites are listed on subscription lists going back to at least the 1790s—the difference now was that having a representative subscription list was prized as an end in itself.46 It was more politically important than ever before, for example, that a Northern Irish servant girl might be seen to subscribe 27 farthings to her local 1926 Diamond Jubilee Fund.47 Despite claims that subscription lists were representative and democratic, differences naturally emerged between the relative and absolute values of subscriptions and the corresponding benefits thereby conferred. In 1924, a Devon and Exeter Gazette columnist complained that “the worst aspect of some flag-days [civic celebrations to raise funds for local hospitals and charities], to my mind, is the differentiation in the emblems given to the subscriber of a penny and the subscriber of a shilling. In this way the man who gives a shilling and does not miss it receives an award of merit more conspicuous than does the donor of a hard-earned copper.”48 Acknowledging such disparities, in 1915 the chairman of Shipley’s Unionist club proclaimed that in order for the organization to be “really democratic,” the annual subscription would remain fixed at five shillings: “While the Committee would be glad to receive larger subscriptions from those who could afford to pay more, no member would have any greater advantages than another.”49 On the other hand, when a 1909 Bradford Chamber of Commerce free trade ballot came in especially close, the organization’s secretary was careful to point out that the vote had been taken in accordance with the group’s articles of association, which stated that each subscriber of a guinea should have one vote; two guineas, two votes; three guineas and upwards, three votes.50 In pursuit of democracy, subscription could hardly paper over the disparities of unequal wealth distribution.

90

Chapter 3

But the important thing to remember is that even if such benefits were unevenly distributed, they still afforded subscribers greater representational opportunities than those offered to tax- and ratepayers by state and municipal institutions, particularly when subscribers coincided with beneficiaries. While for most of the Victorian era, the idea of “having a bed” in a voluntary infirmary meant that you had subscribed a sum large enough to endow a bed for somebody else’s benefit, by World War I, workers in the North of England who subscribed one penny a week to voluntary infirmaries were able to appoint representatives from among the works to the infirmary house committees—a right generally not accorded to ratepayers at municipal hospitals, which tended to be administered by committees of unelected upper- and middle-class citizens.51 Even more significantly, subscription paved the way for extending the franchise. In 1916, two years before suffrage was extended to all British men over the age of twenty-one regardless of class, the Bristol Workers’ Medical Institute Fund chairman declared that “a subscription should operate the same in respect to the worker as to any other individual, both in regard to governorship, voting, and election to Committee of Management, and equal opportunity should be open to all alike.”52 Here, we see that subscription was the means by which workingclass citizens demonstrated their fitness not just for the right to vote in national elections but also for the right to serve as elected officials. If subscription anticipated franchise, this was especially true in the case of women’s suffrage—a point tellingly made when one Hampshire newspaper predicted that the local 1897 Diamond Jubilee Fund would have “a large and representative subscription list from ‘all sorts and conditions of men,’ and, of course, women.”53 In 1872, the year of the formation of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage, “A Lady and a Radical” wrote to the Western Daily Press to point out that women already had been active in the democratic legislation of the previous century: “None worked harder than women to free the slave—what could be a more democratic measure? The subscription lists of the Anti-Corn Law League Fund, and the toil that produced a Covent Garden Theatre Bazaar, bear witness to the reality of women’s zeal for free trade.”54 By means of subscription, she suggested, women had served as political representatives working on behalf of slaves and laborers—shouldn’t these same women be eligible to vote and run for office? Due to its connection with charitable giving and domestic expenditures, subscription had long been gendered female, and not just among ladies and radicals. Throughout the nineteenth century, workers’ cooperative societies sometimes limited

Subscription On and Beyond the Stage

91

subscriptions to one per family unit because, according to interwar political theorist G. D. H. Cole, “if the wife was a member of the Society she tended to regard the dividend as her own property—even though, in the days before the Married Women’s Property Act [1882], she could clearly have no legal title to it.”55 In 1927, the year before suffrage was extended to all British women over the age of twenty-one, Royton MP Vernon Davies claimed in a House of Commons debate that as a rule, in Lancashire, subscriptions are paid by the wife. The man after earning his money keeps a certain amount of it for his legitimate personal expenses, and hands the rest over to his wife. Out of that sum, the wife has to pay all the expenses of the house, the doctor’s bills, very often for the man’s tobacco, etc., and his subscriptions. It is quite possible that if [Labour Party] agents go round the houses collecting signatures to these forms [for subscriptions] the wife may turn round and say, “No, why should I pay this shilling out of my own pocket?” and the Labour Party may lose a certain amount of money for that reason.56 In short, even if wealthy subscribers might buy outsize influence (as when Chamber of Commerce subscribers bought the right to cast more votes), subscribers who could not vote in parliamentary elections still could subscribe to political parties. As the delegate for her household, a wife exerted political pressure on the Labour Party; in these ways, we see that subscription expanded the remit for who counted as a voter—and, just as significantly, who counted as a representative—in turn-of-the century Britain and Ireland. In dramaturgic terms, it turned out that the optimum way of representing subscribers’ collective political power was by spotlighting not individual women and men giving or withholding their contributions but rather the elected politicians who came under pressure from these aggregate subscriptions. Against the backdrop I’ve just described, turn-of-the-century plays suggest that pressure intensifies when different funding goals compete for a politician’s attention. Funds for bandstands and cricket clubs might seem innocent enough, but in Henry Arthur Jones’s The Middleman (1889), a Tatlow porcelain works proprietor standing for Parliament has a theological chat with his campaign manager:

92

Chapter 3

[Candidate]. . . . By the way, about that subscription to the Wesleyan Sunday Schools—I should think a ten pound note, eh? [Manager]. You gave twenty to the Baptists. All the fat will be in the fire if you don’t treat ’em both alike. [Candidate]. Very well, twenty then. I wish there weren’t quite so many sects. It gives one a very poor opinion of religion. [Manager]. When you’ve got to subscribe to them all, it does. But you can’t get into Parliament without it.57 This version of the scene plays on subscription’s origins in compliance with religious articles; substitute Heaven for Parliament, and subscription replaces papal indulgence. But more important, since private subscriptions likely will become public information, the manager advises his candidate to keep up appearances of parity, whatever the cost. Yet as other plays employing this trope reveal, blessed was the politician whose constituents’ sense of contradiction pertained only to subscription amounts. In Hankin’s Return of the Prodigal (1905), one wealthy clothing manufacturer standing for MP of Gloucester finds himself in a comical exchange with his election committee chairman after the local branches of the Licensed Victuallers’ Association and the Order of Good Templars each read in the local paper that the candidate has subscribed to the other (five and ten guineas, respectively). While it is far easier to subscribe to conflicting causes than it is to promote conflicting legislation once elected, the chairman’s observation that the MP is “running with the hare and hunting with the hounds” suggests that it is also easier to subscribe to conflicting causes from a study or office than to speak out of both sides of your mouth on the campaign trail.58 However much difficulty subscription letters cause MPs, these plays suggest that apart from schemes that explicitly aimed to extend the franchise (such as for women’s suffrage groups, as we will see), subscription more generally reflected and assuaged anxieties about political representation: from both a dramaturgic and diegetic perspective, managing mail would have been infinitely less troublesome than managing mobs. William Boyle’s The Eloquent Dempsy (1906) was the exception that proved the rule. As Cloghermore county councillor Jeremiah Dempsy’s wife describes him: “You’re a publican by trade and a member of the AntiTreating League for recreation. You denounce Emigration on the platform, and behind the counter you sell tickets for the shipping companies. You’ll go anywhere and subscribe to anything if they’ll only let you make a speech

Subscription On and Beyond the Stage

93

about it.” That tragic flaw drives the comedy, in which we see the electioneering Dempsy sign his name to proclamations issued by the judicial officeholders and those issued by the townspeople who oppose them. When Dempsy is caught out by having the lists presented in his home at the same time (“His name’s here!” “And here!!”), everyone dumps him by post: Mrs. Dempsy. . . . Look at the bundle I have here. (She takes papers from the table.) Dempsy. More poisoned shafts! More arrows for my bosom! Mrs. Dempsy: Ay, a dozen of them. They were coming in all the week. . . . (Taking up a paper.) You are expelled from the Tenants’ League, the Football Club, the United Temperance Association. Dempsy. Is that all? Mrs. Dempsy. Oh dear no! [She reads aloud several more, including the Anti-Treaters, Anti-Emigration Society, Loyal and Patriotic Cricket Club, True Blue Cyclists, Imperial-Minded Society for the Protection of Milestones, Royal Irish Constabulary, and Old Maids’ Hospital, before concluding:] The Committee of the Fife and Drum Band resolved at last meeting to refuse the next subscription you may be induced to offer them. . . . (Putting away papers.) . . . The public taste is off you, Jerry. In this farcical take on a familiar scene, the burden of appeals gets upstaged only by the arrows of refusals. The townspeople who fire these poisoned shafts never appear onstage, but from his second-story window Dempsy addresses a “crowd of people off stage” in speeches that close Acts 1 and 3. In the second speech, Dempsy chooses sides: he holds up his Justice of the Peace commission, “tears up [the] paper and flings it to the crowd, who cheer frantically.” The torn prop recalibrates against the refusal letters as much as against Dempsy’s “badly torn” frock coat, which the offstage crowd damages as he returns home from the town hall after losing his reelection.59 Like Peter Stockmann’s broken windows, these metonymic scraps concretize onstage the voting public’s presence offstage: we may hear the crowds, but we see them as bundles of paper. Although Dempsy begins the play weighing the costs of speaking publicly, feigning illness in order to get out of making a speech on the Chief Secretary’s behalf, he ultimately learns the price of a paper trail. Of course, politicians were hardly the only individuals

94

Chapter 3

to subscribe to so many groups. As the Bedfordshire Times observed in 1929: “The man in the street is bewildered by these Leagues, Councils, Associations, Unions, and Committees, and may well wonder what they are all for. It is easy for the average citizen in Bedford to belong to a couple of dozen, but it is not easy to remember when all the subscriptions fall due.”60 For politicians as for average men and women, subscription was a condition of citizenship: it was simply the case that dramas ostensibly about politicians more easily represented subscribers pressuring and competing with government institutions. The corollary to politicians subscribing promiscuously in order to get elected is politicians’ own reliance on subscriptions to fund their campaigns. In Shaw’s Press Cuttings (1909), Jones’s Mary Goes First (1913), and Arnold Bennett and Edward Knoblock’s Milestones (1912), cynical citizens point out that peerages and baronetcies always go to party funds’ biggest subscribers.61 In Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island (1904), a different “Dempsey,” this one a cleric, assesses a hypothetical parliamentarian who could “afford to live in London and pay his own way until Home Rule comes, instead o wantin subscriptions and the like.”62 It seems playwrights were less likely to register the enthusiasm evinced by one Durhamite who in 1907 wrote a letter to his local paper suggesting that if each county farmer subscribed a farthing per acre, the resulting £5,200 could be used “to run a candidate or two for Parliament, or it could be spent in pressing their wants upon those who make the laws of our country.”63 To explain why playwrights treated with suspicion subscriptions not only from but also for politicians, we need to understand how such schemes fit into an even more expansive subscription economy.

Indulging in Subscription For another group of plays that put subscription lists onstage, the conflict between Wesleyans and Baptists or Licensed Victuallers and Good Templars maps onto a different tension between charitable and commercial enterprises—or, in moral terms, between altruism and avarice. Here, the subscriber’s goal is to get saved rather than elected: these plays depict a social reality in which charity subscriptions are used like indulgences or carbon offsets to compensate for mercenary behavior. Dramaturgically, the contest between complementary forces becomes even clearer: circulated

Subscription On and Beyond the Stage

95

lists represent metonymically the group of subscribers and metaphorically the group that stands to benefit or lose out. The tension between charitable and commercial enterprises arises from their parallel histories. The limited liability–guaranteeing Companies Acts of the 1850s and 1860s spurred a second wave of innovation similar to when charitable associations had first borrowed the conventions of trading companies following the eighteenth-century emergence of joint-stock companies. These same midcentury Companies Acts also instituted the requirement of annual accounts, which themselves had originated in eighteenthcentury charitable associations.64 Even for the Edwardians, today’s modern legislative divide separating commercial from not-for-profit companies did not exist; as a King’s Counsel lawyer observed in 1904: “Companies may be formed for the purpose of promoting art, science, religion, charity, or other like objects not involving the acquisition of gain by the company, but with few exceptions the companies which are formed under the Companies Acts are companies with limited liability, having a capital divided into shares.”65 In other words, there were no registered charities or 501(c)(3) designations.66 Although artistic, scientific, religious, and charitable organizations did not necessarily incorporate, they still raised funds by subscription, whether for shares or as dues or donations. All of this is to underline that these enterprises were very much the same on paper, circulating prospectuses, checks, reports, appeals, newspaper columns, and subscription lists. In this way, a hospital subscription list could evoke a railway shareholders list, and vice versa. Despite the superficial similarities between a hospital subscription list and a railway shareholders list, however, it was clear which was ethically superior. If The Middleman jokingly compares Parliament to Heaven and subscriptions to papal indulgences, other plays more earnestly station subscription lists on the path to salvation. In Boyle’s comedy The Building Fund (1905), two Irish farmers lug the parish chapel’s collecting book to the doorstep of a miserly old woman and the stingy son who stands to inherit everything on her death. For a play with a cast of five, the book metonymically represents an offstage congregation of parishioners; one collector observes: “Everyone subscribes but [the miser and her son]. If they won’t subscribe, they ought to be made examples of.” But the heavy book metaphorically evokes the miser’s bank statements, pointing to the moral contest between philanthropy and avarice in the mode of Everyman; as the collectors implore: “You and your mother have more money in the Bank

96

Chapter 3

than either of you knows what to do with; and you can’t spare a trifle between you for the good of your poor, old miserable souls!”67 When the miser dies, it emerges that the list of names stirred her conscience after all: she leaves her fortune to the church, much to her son’s chagrin. By subscribing, she saves her soul. The idea that subscription leads to salvation comes to the fore again in Shaw’s Major Barbara (1905). Here, however, we see a list not of subscribers but of the names, addresses, and trades of everyone who comes to the Salvation Army Shelter seeking services, which Barbara enters into her notebook. The abusive ruffian Bill Walker insists that he does not want charity: Barbara. (Sunnily apologetic and ladylike, as on a new footing with him.) Oh, I beg your pardon for putting your name down, Mr. Walker. I didnt understand. I’ll strike it out. Bill. (Taking this as a slight, and deeply wounded by it.) Eah! you let my name alone. Aint it good enough to be in your book? Barbara. (Considering.) Well, you see, theres no use putting down your name unless I can do something for you, is there?68 To Barbara, the notebook is a record of the souls she has saved; to theater audiences, it’s the only visual representation of the hundreds of converts who gather for a rapturous Assembly Hall meeting between Acts 2 and 3. But unlike the farmers in The Building Fund, Barbara explicitly frames her notebook of souls against subscription when she rejects the sovereign that Bill tries to donate as penance for striking Jenny Hill in the mouth, telling him: “No: the Army is not to be bought. We want your soul, Bill; and we’ll take nothing less.” Her world comes crashing down when an officer announces that the whisky distiller Bodger has promised to subscribe five thousand pounds to the Army if a matching sum can be raised, and her father Undershaft writes a check for the full amount: Undershaft. . . . (. . . He sits at the table and writes the cheque. Cusins rises to make more room for him. They all watch him silently.) Bill. (Cynically, aside to Barbara, his voice and accent horribly debased.) Wot prawce Selvytion nah? This is one of Shaw’s rare scenes in which props say more than the characters. As Barbara later describes it to her father: “in a moment, at a stroke

Subscription On and Beyond the Stage

97

of your pen in a cheque book, I stood alone; and the heavens were empty.”69 Undershaft’s checkbook steals the show from Barbara’s notebook as a subscriber buys his way onto a list of the saved—he even goes on to play trombone at the offstage Assembly Hall meeting.70 In this case, adding one’s name to a list of the saved paradoxically means not writing it down at all: that Undershaft gives the Army his subscription but declines to give his name publicly seemingly undermines subscription’s political performance. Thanks to a baronetcy for restoring a cathedral and baronetage for giving half a million to party funds, even Bodger has been theatrically rechristened “Lord Saxmundham,” so Barbara could at least be mollified that his Army subscription is not, in effect, “writing Bodger’s Whisky in letters of fire against the sky; so that the poor drink-ruined creatures on the embankment could not wake up from their snatches of sleep without being reminded of their deadly thirst by that wicked sky sign”—a stunt to which she has already implored the County Council to put a stop. This attention to names suggests that Bodger and to some extent Undershaft truly want to save their souls, as Undershaft claims, rather than attract publicity for their businesses. (By contrast, in Jones’s aptly titled Hypocrites, one brewer’s well-publicized subscriptions to the local schools mean that he symmetrically “provides sound food for the children’s minds, while he provides sound beer for the parents’ bodies,” yet his subscriptions prevent the curate-protagonist from converting a proposed brewery site into a workingmen’s recreation club.)71 But resisting publicity makes their generous acts more, not less, hypocritical. In the play’s prefatory “first aid to critics,” Shaw explained: “We frantically scatter conscience money and invent systems of conscience banking, with expiatory penalties, atonements, redemptions, salvations, hospital subscription lists and what not, to enable us to contract-out of the moral code . . . Cain took care not to commit another murder, unlike our railway shareholders (I am one) who kill and maim shunters by hundreds to save the cost of automatic couplings, and make atonement by annual subscriptions to deserving charities.” If Barbara’s notebook stands in for the offstage congregation of converts that swells to include Undershaft, by the play’s end it also photo-negatively represents the three hundred soldiers that his battleship has just wiped out in Manchuria. The prop represents these offstage crowds metonymically, by evoking Barbara’s circulation among the saved, and metaphorically, by symbolizing a complementary group of dead soldiers. The former gain from the latter’s losses; the prop symbolizes Major Barbara’s conflict between charity and

98

Chapter 3

industry. At the same time, Shaw’s play unmasks anonymous donors and phony peers who use subscription to “contract out of the moral code.”72 Onstage industrialists who mask their contributions to charitable causes found even more sinister costars in the real-world industrialists who bankrolled political campaigns on the sly. In 1907, the London and Northwestern Railway Company Board helped to introduce a parliamentary bill that would have allowed the company to continue subscribing to the London Municipal Society, an organization that supported pro-business parliamentary candidates who helped employers contract out of employer liability obligations. Liberal and Labour MPs objected that beyond the railway company burying this information in a section of the annual report typically reserved for “literary institutes or other similar institutions,” “London Municipal Society” was a stage name—the society apparently operated under thirty-two ironic aliases such as “National Conference of Working Class Representatives” and “British Labour Protection League.” One cannot help but think of the more recent U.S. Citizens United case; in fact, compared to elected representatives in turn-of-the-century America (where, as Elland MP Charles Trevelyan claimed, “railway and other corporations . . . subscribed largely to Party funds, they paid candidates, they bought votes, they got obedient assemblies to pass laws, and obedient Judges to administer those laws”), in Britain many MPs expressed paranoia about wealthy subscribers covertly manipulating elections.73 Yet Conservative MPs were quick to insist that trade unions overwhelmingly subscribed to the Labour Party—why should railway companies be treated any differently? Trade unions had been legitimized by the Trade Union Act of 1871 and were legally distinct from joint-stock companies; furthermore, trade unions drew their funds from membership subscriptions rather than from shares. Nevertheless, that both trade unions and commercial companies subscribed to political parties invited comparisons between them. Board of Trade president and Liberal MP David Lloyd George used that logic to argue against the bill: “If a trade union carried a Bill through this House to give that union a monopoly of the business of a whole district, it would be in the same position as a railway company.”74 A further ostensible point of comparison was that trade unions could intimidate members into making political subscriptions as easily as industrialists could conceal their own. Twenty years later, when Shoreditch MP Ernest Thurtle attempted to unmask political donors by introducing legislation

Subscription On and Beyond the Stage

99

requiring all political parties to publish their subscription lists—an initiative that he claimed was supported by over four million trade unionists— Royton MP Vernon Davies claimed that trade union officials hunting for subscriptions bullied members with documents: “The official will go to members’ homes with a large bundle of forms and say, ‘Now, look here, I want you to sign this paper.’ [If the member refuses, t]hen the secretary will say, ‘But look at this list of the members who have paid. You are in a minority. Hundreds have paid!’ ” Apparently, members who refused the “political levy” faced difficulties collecting their union benefits. If you kept your name off the list, you were corralled in person: earlier that same year, Colchester MP Worthington Evans reported that twenty-eight dissenting workers had been “paraded” before Durham Lodge.75 Whether subscriptions represented covert or unwilling political contributions, the point was that they could not be taken at face value from either industrialists or trade unionists. Comparisons between industrial shareholders and trade union subscribers come to the fore in John Galsworthy’s Strife (1909), which confronts capitalism’s collateral damages by dramatizing the end of a monthslong labor dispute between Trenartha Tin Plate Works’ committee of workmen and the company’s board of directors. Both strike and play end with compromise, but not before the most obstinate workman’s wife dies of starvation. The grieving workman arrives in the manager’s drawing room just as the directors sign the terms, which fall short of his goals: [Trade Union Official]. (Holding out the Director’s copy of the terms.) The Board has signed! ([The Grieving Workman] looks dully at the signatures—dashes the paper from him, and covers up his eyes.) [A Director]. . . . If there’s any fund started for the women and children, put me down for—for twenty pounds. (He goes out into the hall, in cumbrous haste . . .)76 Here, a list of directors’ names evokes a complementary charity subscription list for the workmen’s families. Compared to the ambitious politician who subscribes to conflicting causes, the guilty industrialist’s hypocrisy is even more figuratively cast in relief. Galsworthy’s ending might be usefully compared with the real-life case of the Sharnbrook Parish Council, which

100

Chapter 3

in 1911 proposed a public-subscription fund for the railway men who had continued to work through a recent strike, in order to commend the men for their “loyalty.” But many locals wondered: To whom, exactly, had the men been loyal—the company, the public, the men’s families? The Bedfordshire Times claimed to “have heard on the best authority that some of the men intend, if they get any share of the fund, to send it up as a contribution to the men’s Union! That would be a curious perversion of the wishes of subscribers.”77 In other words, subscribers had acted on the railway men’s behalf without any consideration for how the workers would like to see the funds distributed: the names below the line did not actually represent the interests of the names above it. Both Galsworthy’s play and the Sharnbrook Parish Council fund reveal that while subscribers may have feigned to represent the interests of others, they often wound up representing their own.

Men, Women, and Children Male subscribers tried to get into Parliament, Heaven, or—in yet another group of plays to take up this prop—a lady’s drawers. Here, the balance between charity and commerce grafts onto another symmetry between female and male. In these plays, subscription huntresses behave like politicians acting on behalf not of voters but of poor widows and orphans. Because these nubile women recruit hot-to-trot men, the lists evoke metaphorically the women and children subscribed for and metonymically the men subscribing. In one way or another, every individual’s subscription is “on behalf” of one or more other individuals, from a fund for workplace accident victims, to a church organ for fellow parishioners, to an athletic union for other municipal users, to a gentlemen’s club for as-yet-to-be-elected members. As the gap between subscriber and beneficiary gets wider, metonymy slides into metaphor. When the amount subscribed was a guinea, infirmary subscribers gained the right to recommend four outpatients (or one inpatient); convalescent home subscribers earned the privilege of nominating sick children; National Health Society subscribers won the authority to arrange talks for the working people in their districts.78 Conversely, subscriptions of the smallest amounts on the occasion of a monarch’s birthday allowed poor servants and laborers to feel that they represented their queen or king.

Subscription On and Beyond the Stage

101

Subscribers to the new wing of the Ulster Volunteer Force Hospital contributed alongside their fellow Belfasters, on behalf of the soldiers and sailors who were themselves fighting for the subscribers, and in honor of Lord Londonderry (after whom the wing was named). But beyond being motivated to speak for others, we have seen that subscribers frequently contributed under the duress of documents foisted on them by others. Consider James Wetherby, the “good” brother of Hankin’s The Two Mr. Wetherbys (1903), who subscribes to no less than the Bishop’s Sustentation Fund, Hairy Ainos Protection Society, and Tobago Diocesan Conference not to appeal to voters or save his soul but to please his wife, Margaret, whose sanctimonious brother peddles charity leaflets. The couple shares a rare moment apart from her in-laws: (. . . James with a sigh of relief goes to writing-table with Mahommedan Appeal, eyes it with strong disfavor, glances at a page or two, then with a wry face takes out cheque book and writes cheque. Margaret returning from window goes to him, and noticing his depression, lays hand on shoulder.) Margaret. Tired, dear? James. A little. (There is a pause, during which Margaret pats James affectionately on the shoulder while he fidgets with paperknife. . . .) Margaret. (Kneels by him, fondling his hair.) What’s the matter with you, dear? You seem out of spirits. James. (Taking her hand and pressing it.) It’s nothing. Only we never seem to get any time to ourselves, do we? It’s clear what James would rather do than subscribe to the Mahommedan Appeal. He reaches a boiling point in the next act, when he tells his wife: “I’ve read [your aunt] her newspaper and given [your brother] his subscriptions and generally made my life a burden because you liked it. I’ve done it long enough. I’m going to turn over a new leaf.”79 He apparently means this literally, having traded charity appeals for the illicit music-hall program that Margaret discovered in his coat pocket only moments before. In the end, Margaret realizes that she must send her relatives away and accept her husband’s imperfections.

102

Chapter 3

With a brother to shoulder the blame, those two get off lightly. The stage trope of women wrangling charity subscriptions from men goes back to at least T. W. Robertson’s Ours (1866), which opens on a Russian prince signaling his amorous intentions toward the ingenue by giving “any amount you please” to her subscription book for a parishioner on the birth of her twins; the couple’s engagement follows shortly after but is later broken off. (The brewer who rejects her appeal, on the other hand, signals that he will court someone else.)80 In Jones’s The Dancing Girl (1891), the Duke of Guisebury falls in love with the heroine of the title who calls on him at home for an unspecified charity affair: “I saw she was two-thirds delightful Quaker innocence, and one-third the devil’s own wit and mischief, so—I gave her the subscription!”81 But their relationship also is doomed: she meets a premature death because she dances on Sundays. In these plays, gentlemen’s subscriptions are as good as billets-doux that prelude a thwarted romance. Fittingly, the trope tends to involve the same two kinds of beneficiaries: an ensemble of women and children who are never seen onstage. This version of the prop also works by metonymy and metaphor: it is as though by subscribing to these phantom characters, the gentleman propels himself closer to attaining the subscription huntress and their future children, before the relationship breaks down for one reason or another, and subscription prop gives way to what we could call subscription plot. Here, subscription interposes between lovers in proportion to the ensemble’s passivity—unlike bandstand-subscribing constituents or church-subscribing parishioners, women and children usually are subscribed to at another woman’s insistence. By extension, each scene in which a suitor adds his name to a subscription list suggests an offstage ensemble of eligible bachelors. Jones deploys the subscription list most elaborately in The Masqueraders (1894). The first act is set in a country hotel’s courtyard and bar, on whose outside wall “is hung a subscription list, in which the words ‘Widow and Orphans’ . . . are discernible.” The poor barmaid who circulates the list vows to do “anything to keep [the widow] and her chickabiddies out of the workhouse,” and someone suggests that she auction her kiss to the highest bidder.82 Though she protests, an impromptu auctioneer sets the bid in motion, and for three thousand guineas the prize goes to a wealthy nobleman who makes his offer more palatable by pretending that he already has proposed to her. But the marriage that fills out the remaining acts is a poor one: the nobleman is a gambling, abusive alcoholic, and the barmaid would

Subscription On and Beyond the Stage

103

have been far better off if her charitable appeal had gone unheeded. As is typical of these plays, we never learn how things turn out for the widow and orphans. The same goes for the charitable objects of Hankin’s far sunnier Charity That Began at Home (1906), in which an eligible young man becomes engaged to an altruistic young lady (Margery, rather than Margaret) and promises to prove his devotion by writing one hundred letters to orphanage subscribers. But he quickly decides that if wedding and bedding Margery takes this much paperwork, he can do without it. Nobody seems too disillusioned—Jones’s tragedy is Hankin’s comedy.83 By the same logic, while the unmarried woman who collects subscriptions inadvertently advertises her availability, the divorce´e who does the same approaches a failed relationship from the opposite direction. In Maugham’s Our Betters (1917), a wealthy American divorce´e (technically se´pare´e) channels her sexual frustration into raising orphan subscriptions by pillaging her hostess’s visitors’ book. The se´pare´e’s hot pursuit leaves the married hostess alone onstage to flirt with the young gigolo who will imperil the hostess’s reputation—apparently, orphan subscriptions spell bad news for marriages past, present, and future.84 The subscription plot surprises because it should lead to the perfect power couple: he brings in shareholders to industry, she raises subscriptions for charity; he surveys the accounts books, she oversees the visitors’ books. We see this tidy split in Pillars of Society, which opens with the ladies of the Red Cross Guild reading together from a manual titled Woman as the Servant of Society as Bernick presents the railway subscription lists to the men and explains: “We, the men of practical work, will support society by spreading prosperity in as wide a circle as possible. And our women—yes, come nearer, ladies; I am glad that you should hear—our women, I say, our wives and daughters, will work on unwearied in well-doing.”85 That this dynamic never seems to play out in British drama could be due to the British gentleman’s complicated relationship with industry: if collecting charity subscriptions is a feminine endeavor, the gentleman who doesn’t also have an occupation of his own is liable to be swallowed up as an accessory. This happens not only in Hankin’s comedies but also in Cusins’s transformation from a dandified Greek scholar collecting charity subscriptions at Barbara’s bidding to the masculine heir of Undershaft’s munitions factory. Even more predictably, the woman who collects subscriptions for suffrage rather than charity undermines her marriageability in plays like Elizabeth Robins’s Votes for Women (1907), whose heroine rejects the man

104

Chapter 3

who proposes to her, as does Vivie Warren, who drafts shareholder prospectuses for commercial rather than charitable enterprises in Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1902).86 But like Pillars of Society’s unwearied well-doers, in British plays this trope sometimes points to a group of society women rather than a sole subscription huntress. In Misalliance (1910), Mrs. Tarleton tells her daughter about “the first day I spent with the marchioness, two duchesses, and no end of Ladies This and That. Of course it was only a committee: theyd put me on to get a big subscription out of [my husband]. I’d never heard such talk in my life. The things they mentioned!” The punch line comes when daughter asks, “What sort of things?” and mother replies: “Drainage!!”87 A jab at municipal reform or a dirty joke? Charity subscription lists get doubled more literally in the lists of eligible bachelors possessed by Lina in Misalliance; Mrs. Lunn in Overruled (1912); and Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), who with her “pencil and note-book in hand” tells Jack that he is “not down on my list of eligible young men, although I have the same list as the dear Duchess of Bolton has. We work together, in fact. However, I am quite ready to enter your name, should your answers be what a really affectionate mother requires.” But if the subscription huntress squeezes lists of eligible men from lists for orphans, Lady Bracknell strikes Jack from the former when she realizes he belongs as a beneficiary on the latter, for having been “born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag.”88 In the final moments of the play, Jack remembers the Army lists that represent his ticket back onto Lady Bracknell’s list of eligible men; lists beget lists, and a tree that goes up a respectable distance is permitted to grow out and down. With subscription-list props, orphans looking for mothers invite comparisons to bachelors looking for wives. In Charity That Began at Home, the eligible young man writing letters on behalf of an orphan claims to be an orphan himself. In The Masqueraders, the barmaid quickly becomes the object being subscribed to, with the orphans ironically juxtaposed to the sixteen excitable men who surround her onstage. Jones’s scene suggests that eligible bachelors are more easily stage-managed as lists of subscribers than as an aroused crowd that stage-manages the barmaid in turn. But what would be the fun in that? As the impromptu auctioneer proclaims: “We must all admit that the methods of raising the wind for all sorts of worthless persons and useless charities stand in need of entire revision. Fancy fairs, amateur theatricals, tableaux vivants, and such grotesque futilities have had

Subscription On and Beyond the Stage

105

their day. . . . The only really vital question . . . is ‘How shall we amuse ourselves in the sacred cause of charity?’ (Cries of ‘hear, hear.’)” Sos Eltis has pointed out that on the eighteenth-century stage a woman asking “for charity” signified that she was a lady of the night; fast-forward to Adrian Ross’s musical farce, The Shop Girl (1894), in which a chorus of professional performers wears tiny outfits to help raise money at a charity bazaar, and we might wonder how much had changed for a cultural form historically associated with prostitution.89

“Come up . . . and give your names” Principal characters like ambitious politicians, guilty industrialists, and industrious nubiles treat subscription as a stage on which to perform for offstage audiences of fellow subscribers on behalf of the supposed beneficiaries of their subscriptions. Often, these performances have an explicitly theatrical element: the townspeople in His House in Order gather signatures for garish decorations and a bandstand to commemorate the MP’s dead wife, not unlike like the crowds who assemble in the wings to hear Undershaft play trombone or the Eloquent Dempsy orate. How did the representation of subscribers and audiences within productions speak to the actual subscribers and audiences who attended them? Subscription societies and repertory theaters mounted many of the plays that thematized subscription. In Shaw’s The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet (1909), a group of nineteen American townsfolk have gathered for the promise—undelivered, it turns out—of Posnet’s public execution. As consolation to the townsfolk for being “disappointed of their natural sport,” the Sheriff decides to take up a collection for a bereaved widow; when asked how this is “sport,” the Sheriff replies: “The sport comes in, my friends, not so much in contributing as in seeing others fork out. Thus each contributes to the general enjoyment; and all contribute to his.”90 There’s no subscription list, but this tongue-in-cheek conception of theatrical collectivity would have resonated with the audiences who attended the Stage Society’s 1909 production: if the townsfolk are responsible for the spectacle of Blanco Posnet’s trial and release, subscription theatergoers were responsible for the spectacle of Blanco Posnet, which had been banned by the Lord Chamberlain. On the opposite side of the Irish Sea (and curtain), when the Chief Secretary moved the opening of the subscription list for the

106

Chapter 3

Abbey Theatre Endowment Fund, he reportedly apologized amid laughter “for being a very poor substitute for the Eloquent Dempsy.”91 From spectacle as schadenfreude to spectacle as swindle, these moments reflect the notfor-profit theater’s unease with asking for money, which, as we have seen, had a decent chance of dooming any romance. But subscriptions to play-producing societies and repertory theaters were far outweighed by turn-of-the-century theatrical fundraising, as evidenced by a tremendous enthusiasm for charity matinees. From 1890 to 1904, the average number of charity matinees in professional London theaters was nearly 23 per year; from 1905 to 1918, this number expanded to 37, with record years in 1908 (54) and 1915 (57), before deflating in the mid1920s. Charity matinees drawing on professional actors were performed once in aid of such diverse causes as the Irish Distress Fund, Printers’ Pension Corporation, Theatrical Anti-vivisection League, and Daily Telegraph Titanic Fund; as soon as the war began, these were replaced by the British Red Cross Society, Home Camps Concert Fund, and Lady Limerick’s free buffets for soldiers and sailors at London Bridge station. (Theater hardly had a monopoly on wartime charity, as Shaw cynically observed in the preface to Heartbreak House: “Men were seized with the illusion that they could win the war by giving away money. And they not only subscribed millions to Funds of all sorts with no discoverable object . . . but actually handed out money to any thief in the street who had the presence of mind to pretend that he [or she] was ‘collecting’ it for the annihilation of the enemy.”)92 The practice was so prevalent partially because it was so successful: a single charity matinee usually raised somewhere between £150 and £2,000 (almost $10,000 and $150,000 today), and one 1928 matinee of The Scarlet Pimpernel raised £7,479.15s. in aid of King George’s Pension Fund for Actors and Actresses. Yet although Shaw, Pinero, Jones, Hankin, Fagan, and Maugham all had other plays performed for charity matinees, the repertoire discussed in this chapter curiously was avoided.93 Why did charity matinee organizers steer clear of plays about subscription? The representation of crowds may have been one reason. By alternately aligning subscription with performing protagonists and spectating crowds, these plays alerted theater audiences to the dangers of passive, uncritical spectatorship. After all, these plays gave playgoers a view into the figurative “backstage” of the drawing or meeting room, where politicians and industrialists reveal their true, selfish reasons for subscribing, before going offstage to perform for crowds filled with other subscribers. Perhaps it is no

Subscription On and Beyond the Stage

107

surprise that plays in which offstage crowds get manipulated by these protagonist-subscribers would have made playgoers reluctant to come up and give their own names. By contrast, the productions with the biggest onstage crowds were all charity matinees. The 1916 production of Julius Caesar with 164 actors was a charity performance in aid of the British Red Cross and the Order of St. John. Other large charity productions included Jones’s The Silver King (1914; 116 actors), which raised £1,690 for King George’s Pension Fund for Actors and Actresses, and School for Scandal (1915; 71 actors), which raised more than £2,000 in aid of the Actor’s Benevolent Fund.94 As Catherine Hindson has shown, charity performers playing both starring and ensemble roles often appeared in their capacity as celebrities.95 This suggests that audiences were more willing to subscribe when crowds were identified as active performers rather than as gullible spectators. The correlation between crowd scenes and audience subscriptions would also explain Elizabeth Robins’s anomalous Votes for Women, whose middle act features an infamous suffrage meeting in Trafalgar Square. When mounted by Barker at the Court in 1907 with an ensemble of around 48 actors, the Sunday Times called the scene the “most brilliant piece of stage-management we have ever had in an English playhouse,” and the Daily Mail commented that “for sheer stage management this scene beats anything that we can remember on the London stage.”96 Critics with longer memories compared the scene to the touring Saxe-Meiningen crowds of the 1880s, Victorian melodrama, and Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s recent production of Julius Caesar. Apparently, critics and playgoers had grown accustomed to seeing their crowds collated, and by and large would continue to do so, at least as far as social drama was concerned. Like many of the plays mentioned in this chapter, Votes for Women also features a politician who must give his name to a cause: when the Unionist MP for Hertfordshire ultimately signs a telegram supporting women’s suffrage—a last-ditch stick of career-saving “political dynamite” rather than a principled stand—he accedes to the suffragist heroine’s command to the Trafalgar crowd to “Come up after the meeting and give your names.”97 Of course, this call also was meta-theatrically directed to playgoers: after the production’s run, Robins publicly subscribed a percentage of her receipts to the Suffrage Society and Women’s Social and Political Union in the hope that she might “[lead] others to exercise one of the ‘rights’ women already possess.”98 As we saw near the beginning of this chapter with “A Lady and a Radical” who

108

Chapter 3

helped kick off the suffrage campaign in 1872, women may not have been able to vote or run for office, but they could subscribe and collect subscriptions, as many suffrage plays reminded them. Another such play consists of a monologue by the secretary of the Little Pendleton Anti-Suffragist Society that ends with her calling on the real-life audience to “please let me have your subscriptions as soon as possible.”99 In productions, pro-suffrage audiences were ironically compared to anti-suffragist subscribers, suggesting that audiences were likelier to subscribe when they were given the opportunity to perform theatrically—in this case, to portray a crowd of antisuffragists. Of course, a great many citizens did subscribe to anti-suffragist societies, though likely not the citizens who attended this play. Like Stockmann’s monologue to an auditorium in An Enemy of the People, which frequently has been staged with the doctor addressing the audience rather than an onstage crowd, actors could be substituted with playgoers as well as with props. By using subscription lists as stand-ins for the individuals who stand to benefit from subscriptions—either implicitly (by the logic of metonymy: the subscribers below the line) or explicitly (by metaphor: the beneficiaries above it)—the plays in this chapter showcase subscription’s expansive role in turn-of-the-century Britain and Ireland. That subscription enabled politicians, industrialists, and unmarried women alike to speak on behalf of unseen others—and often not with others’ genuine interests at heart— indicates that municipal and national government comprised only a fraction of political representation at this time. If the last chapter highlighted the ease with which public subscription at once evoked and improved the idea of a public institution, we see here that women and working-class subscribers exerted political pressures in excess of electoral systems that prevented them from voting or running for office—even though, as we have also seen, some of those same subscribers might well have felt pressured to subscribe in the first place. In the narrower terms of literal theater productions, turn-of-the-century audiences were encouraged to see themselves as a crowd of performers by contributing to subscription theaters and charity matinees. But subscription also offered the opportunity for average citizens to take up actual roles in stage performances, as the amateur actors in the next chapter reveal.

CHAPTER 4

Affiliative Subscription Paying to Play with Amateur Groups

Midway through his rambling account of 1930s Britain, J. B. Priestley describes his West Yorkshire hometown, Bradford: “Nearly every organization appears to run a dramatic society as an off-shoot. The young man frowning into vacancy, at the other end of the tram, is probably busy working out the movements of the first act of The Silver Box. The large man who just nodded to him is probably about to turn himself into the comic bailiff in Tilly of Bloomsbury. There are soubrettes and tragediennes in all the shops. The very factories produce their own revues and pantomimes. All the town’s a stage.” If provincial newspapers two decades before had imagined representative bodies of citizens joining together to support their local repertory theater, Priestley’s report of a town where “every second typist is an inge´nue lead somewhere, every other cashier a heavy father or comedian” locates civic value in collective performance rather than patronage.1 But where an earlier insistence that subscription lists included clerks and plumbers along with businessmen and young women lent repertory theaters democratic legitimacy, here Priestley invokes typists, cashiers, and factory workers to make the additional point that these Bradfordians did not earn their living by performing—they were amateur actors. As members of dramatic societies, they also were subscribers. Amateur actors by definition perform without remuneration. Less remarked is that in many cases, amateurs contribute not only their spare time but also their own money. The period after World War I saw a rapid increase in amateur theater participation across Britain and Ireland, as energy that pulsed from metropolitan play-producing societies and provincial repertory theaters spread to towns and villages at a dizzying rate. By

110

Chapter 4

1936, a handbook titled Organising an Amateur Theatre Society claimed that “something approaching five hundred new amateur societies come into being annually, while almost as great a number cease to exist.”2 According to other estimates, some thirty thousand amateur societies appeared over a couple of decades, with the North of England alone seeing a membership of over half a million and a wider audience of five million.3 New umbrella organizations like the National Operatic and Dramatic Association (est. 1899), the British Drama League (BDL; 1919–90), the Village Drama Society (which ultimately amalgamated with the BDL), and the Scottish Community Drama Association (est. 1926) pooled resources, coordinated festivals, and published handbooks; new magazines like the Amateur Stage (1926–29), the Amateur Theatre and Playwrights’ Journal (1934–38), and the Scottish Amateur Theatre (1936–37) catered to enthusiasts and printed their correspondence. The amateur movement picked up the rhetoric of democratic and representative ownership that had emerged from the professional subscription theater. Yet where professional theaters drew subscriptions from playgoers, amateur theaters drew from the players and backstage personnel, too, usually in the form of membership fees ranging anywhere from a shilling to two guineas or more.4 This chapter points to subscription as the means by which amateur theater participants articulated their loyalties: to themselves, to their dramatic societies, to the organizations or communities of which their dramatic societies were an offshoot. If the last chapter showed that theaters were far from the only enterprises to which turn-ofthe-century subscribers contributed, this chapter reveals that by the 1920s, subscribers throughout Britain and Ireland had the option of taking part in theaters that represented an immense variety of social and political affiliations. Priestley was not alone in listing non-theatrical occupations to link amateurism with democratic participation. A 1926 Board of Education report titled The Drama in Adult Education remarked that a recent Shoreham Village Players (est. 1924) production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream had been “organised on a democratic basis, the great majority [of performers] being local tradesmen and agricultural and other workers. The part of Quince was, for instance, played alternately by a local haulage contractor and one of the village grocers, Lysander and Demetrius by a civil engineer, an innkeeper and a carpenter.”5 Thirty years later, a BDL guidebook described the fictional first meeting of a “typical Amateur Society”: “By the fireplace sat the doctor, and next to him the bank cashier; then the butcher,

Affiliative Subscription

111

the music master from the Grammar School, the postmaster, a newsagent, an oxy-acetylene welder and a waitress. There were also some students, a couple of nurses and two shorthand typists.”6 Both descriptions seem as, if not more, invested than Priestley’s in presenting a town’s or village’s representative jobs list—democracy rendered typographically—yet these lists differ from his by suggesting that amateurs were actually working together for the same dramatic society. As amateur fever rose in Scotland, the Aberdeen Press and Journal shifted from occupations into an even more expansive register of nouns: “The clerk, the typist, the student, the chorister, the minister’s wife, the beadle, the Boy Scout, the Girl Guide, the factory worker, all must set their stage and act.”7 Certainly, the list was meant to be broadly representative, but was “their stage” meant to be one shared civic stage or many different individual stages? The diversity of performers taking part in amateur theater was upstaged only by the diversity of societies facilitating it. In 1934, League of British Dramatists secretary H. F. Rubinstein proclaimed: “The modern amateur movement, a post-war development, is to-day probably the most vital force in the English theatre.”8 Yet as amateur enthusiast Robert J. Gendall had pointed out earlier that year: “Amateur Theatricals is a very wide term and covers all grades of Societies from the semi-professional type down to the society run as a side line to a Sunday School. We all get [criticism and advice] in the same strain, from the same highfalutin viewpoint whether we are members of a society attached to a bank organisation or a Baptist Church.”9 Some of the others he might have added included synagogue, university, army corps, athletic club, tea manufacturer, law office, booksellers’ league, tax inspectors’ association, girls’ grammar school, working men’s college, Indian students’ union, Women’s Institute federation, and Conservative society. Even beyond affiliation, one size did not fit all. As BDL founder Geoffrey Whitworth claimed in 1936: “Some of these societies will consist of an all-playing team of a dozen or so. Others will number two or three hundred, perhaps an available cast of forty or fifty and the rest of a very loyal but highly critical permanent audience.”10 Loyalty may have been paramount, but while a village with a population of four hundred might have as much as a tenth of its population in the local drama group, even village amateurs saw drama societies as only one of a number of subscription affiliations that included other neighboring drama societies. That multiple and occasionally contradictory descriptors like civic, community, living, free, little, town, village, arts, and industrial were all subsumed under

112

Chapter 4

the “amateur theater movement” banner invites parallels with the earlier repertory movement even as it suggests that a single representative theater per locality would not have left enough room for the variety of affiliations pursued by its citizens. Shared locality was just one among many organizing principles for amateurs who wanted to set their own priorities for the theater they produced and consumed. The amateur push for autonomy was especially striking because, unlike earlier professional repertory theaters, amateur dramatic societies in many cases did receive municipal and other subsidies along with subscription income. State and municipal authorities finally began to invest money in the promise of theater as an educational instrument—an idea that had been circulated by metropolitan repertorists since the 1880s. In 1930s Devon, for example, amateur groups received support from the taxpayer-funded Devon County Education Committee in addition to the Carnegie Trust and the Workers’ Educational Association (both charities).11 Yet despite these subsidies and the aspirations to cultivate provincials that came with them, travel-book writer T. G. Barman celebrated subscription as an alternative to top-down cultural evangelism, contrasting British amateur theaters with state theaters in Europe, which “may be forced upon the people from above. . . . It seems to me that active membership in an amateur dramatic society proves, indeed, a wider and stronger love of drama than does a National Theatre.”12 If a wide and strong love of drama was valued as a civic good in itself, then it was all the more important that this love be expressed voluntarily. At the amateur-run Leeds Art Theatre (est. 1922), producer Charles Smith yoked amateur subscription to civic good in a 1923 appeal to potential players and playgoers: “We want neither alms nor guarantees—merely subscriptions, for which unequalled value is given. A community with pretensions to culture cannot dispense with a live theatre without ultimate detriment to its civic life.”13 Though Smith saw cultural value in pursuing a self-consciously artistic repertoire, this chapter argues that artistic pretensions took a backseat to the right to determine exactly who would and would not get to make and see the theater produced by different, overlapping communities. Endlessly compared to professionals, amateurs used subscription to collectively determine their relationship to professionalism: Did they want to reject professional values in favor of local independence, or to pool their funds in order to secure the rights to copyrighted plays or to bring in professional producers? But the amateur versus professional debate was only

Affiliative Subscription

113

one aspect of am-dram politics. In theory, inclusive subscription lists promised typists, clerks, maids, and plumbers the opportunity to star in plays alongside their social betters, but in practice, subscribers who paid the largest amounts wielded the most power over cast lists. Loyalty often counted for little, as talented interlopers stole parts from long-time subscribers and gender ratios allowed some men to avoid paying dues. Paradoxically, the amateur groups that most often were described as “democratic” were actually the ones that excluded members who did not belong to the institution to which the group was affiliated, whether men at Women’s Institute groups, nonworkers at factory groups, or atheists at church groups. At the same time, such exclusions made it possible for amateurs to transcend the identities that tied them to those institutions in the first place, enabling women to play men, workers to play rulers, and pastors to play drunks. Meanwhile, amateurs who took up onstage roles closely mirroring their offstage lives, such as fishermen, farmers, and the unemployed, encouraged onlookers to see everyday behaviors as social performances, anticipating the postwar performative turn in anthropology and sociology. In these ways, the question shifted from whether theaters represented their subscribers to whether subscribers represented their theaters. Previous chapters have shown how various kinds of theatrical collectivity were conditioned by ephemera. Metropolitan subscribers announced their names in annual reports, linked arms by ticket, and braced themselves for judgment from the public press. Provincial citizens filled in subscription forms published by their local newspapers, in whose columns those same citizens donned pseudonyms and claimed to speak on behalf of suffragists and schoolboys. Theater audiences across Britain and Ireland symbolically stood in for the offstage characters listed in onstage subscription props. Mostly, these ephemera have foregrounded intersubjectivity: the postcard inviting you and others like you to a performance; the program listing train times so that you and others like you could return home. To a large extent, the amateur theater continued to make use of subscription ephemera in these ways. J. T. Grein described the hunt for subscribers to the Leeds Art Theatre: “A letter in the leading paper read by all sounds the clarion. Circulars go forth to members of the philosophical, literary, and kindred societies. The telephone-book—funny but practical thought—was fingered, and from it culled a list of names of promise.”14 But this chapter further reveals just how often ephemera were used to complicate feelings of collectivity and instead to assert new identities predicated on estrangement. Obviously,

114

Chapter 4

there was the difference in scale: if repertory theaters in cities capitalized on provincial newspapers to enhance civic collectivity, amateur groups in towns and villages used paper to screen themselves from their local communities, whether performers leaving their names off programs so as to maintain professional incognito or spectators writing anonymous letters directly to amateur societies in order to avoid alienating friends and acquaintances. Where repertory companies in cities sent subscribers postcards with updates about coming plays, amateur groups in towns and villages indulged their actors by sending them “call” postcards to remind them about rehearsals, as though amateurs were not already neighbors. Amateurs fixated particularly on programs. As one festival judge observed: “Many an amateur producer seems to regard the programme as an additional member of his cast, quite forgetting that it isn’t every member of the audience who has bought one.”15 Programs were the staging ground for being recognized—both in the sense of being appreciated and in the sense of being identified as oneself. In some cases, it was simply a matter of getting the spelling correct: one Lancastrian amateur-society secretary complained of two-pence programs “on flimsy paper, of bilious hue, printed with type which suggests an auction-room, with no attempt at pleasing layout or design, and—worst of all—full of errors. (‘Romio played by James Drown.’ You know the sort of thing.)”16 But in a more existential sense, programs tested the limits of inclusion. One amateur group connected with a London office listed in programs the names of over a hundred amateurs “in order to show that the play was intended to be a common enterprise rather than a histrionic exhibition by a few select people.”17 On the other hand, when the Maddermarket Theatre (est. 1921) withheld actors’ names from programs, an observer remarked that this was “a very good method of ensuring that the name of the Norwich Players shall be very much more important than that of any individual player. This method is even carried so far that at the end of the performance the company does not take a call.”18 More surprisingly, questions of inclusivity coalesced around the figure of the program seller herself. Where the London office amateurs emphasized communality by “[giving] on their programmes the names of everyone taking part, including the programme sellers,” Geordie amateur producer Norman Veitch maintained that “a virile amateur dramatic club needed to have its actors, its builders of scenes, its makers of dresses freed from the trouble of booking the seats, directing the audiences to their places, selling programmes.”19 While Veitch clearly promoted lofty

Affiliative Subscription

115

artistry over administrative competency, the problem was that program sellers often were drawn from among female would-be actors, and amateurs who did not have the fortune or talent to make the cast list were mocked for loyally taking up the part.20 This chapter proposes that one reason for the amateur obsession with program sellers is that programs manifested the competing desires to belong to an acknowledged community and to become somebody else. If the program seller could not get a role in the program, she could still help distribute it and thereby sometimes even gain entry into the program after all. Priestley, for one, expressed surprise at how many amateurs found significance in handling ephemera, the very marginality of which helped amateurs to reimagine their own role in society: “Some [amateurs], in various places, have told me what this dramatic work has meant to them, and in many instances the persons in question have not been producing, designing scenery, playing big parts, but may only have been selling programmes, taking tickets, or doing the accounts”—skills, it is worth noting, on which the prototypical amateur, figured as a typist or clerk, could always fall back.21 Indeed, by stereotyping amateurs as typists and clerks, observers represented amateurs as wanting to step out from the social identities that they held in common with a great many others in order to play more individualized (if nevertheless more communal) roles, in what Jonathan Rose has called “a desire for singularity.”22 As John Carey has described, clerks even had their own language: alongside goofy phrases like “old cake” and “sound egg,” part of clerk slang included the term “your label” for “your name,” suggesting the playful readiness with which clerks saw themselves as a large group of undifferentiated workers whose most distinguishing trait might come from text written on a piece of paper or cardboard.23 From this vantage, theater programs offered amateurs—typists, clerks, and everybody else—a chance at a new label. In fact, this chapter suggests that amateurs were best positioned to step away from their social identities when they performed in groups segregated by those identities.

Seeking Professional Help Of course, amateur theater was hardly a phenomenon new to the 1900s. Until not long ago, theater historians took the view that, as one former National Operatic and Dramatic Association president once put it: “In the

116

Chapter 4

late nineteenth century ‘Theatricals’ was a sort of game played by a privileged few and tolerated by their relatives and friends.”24 Although recent scholarship has turned this generalization on its head, the twentiethcentury amateur movement sought to distance itself from its Victorian forebears by demoting the drawing room, elevating the repertoire, and recruiting amateurs of all classes, in villages and towns as well as large cities, thereby extending the inclusivity of the repertory movement to many more parts of Britain and a newly independent Ireland.25 It is no accident that amateur theater “professionalized”—that is, adopted the values of professionalism such as skill and artistry—at the precise historical moment that it became democratically accessible.26 A 1925 BDL amateur theater handbook saw no tension between these goals, proclaiming that amateurs could “best further the cause of the professionals by abandoning ‘private theatricals,’ and assuming the community status that is theirs for the taking.”27 But for a movement that prided itself on the diversity of occupations taking to the stage—from office administrators to assembly line workers to typists and maids—the relation of amateurs to professional theater workers preoccupied both parties. As they were bombarded by professional priorities (fixated on parsing the differences between commercial and artistic repertoires, or trained skill and natural talent, or work and leisure), amateurs exerted sovereignty by subscription. Perhaps unsurprisingly, professional playwrights, producers, and actors viewed amateur efforts solely in terms of helping or hindering the professional stage—which was ironic, since professionals’ main criticism was that amateurs cared only for themselves and not for theater or drama more generally. In the 1910s and 1920s, the professional theater industry confronted fresh existential threats: the rise of cinema palaces and especially talkies had turned the phrase “living drama” into a desperate selling point for the ailing art form. If the professional theater had lost some of its cultural primacy, professional actor Seymour Hicks compared the amateur theater to a “poultice” that was “keeping the place warm for the return of the professional theatre.”28 More than a bandage, amateurs were a shot in the arm: theater historian Harold Downs recognized that “[amateur society] membership runs into hundreds, and the attendance of members at a theatre, plus the influence they can wield to turn the attention of others to the desirability of attendance, is not only illuminating in varying degrees to members themselves, but valuable to the sundry interests of the commercial —or if you prefer it—the professional theatre.”29 These medical analogies

Affiliative Subscription

117

ironically reverse the ones employed by metropolitan repertorists less than a generation before: where once audiences were imagined as the patients and repertory theaters as the cure, now it was theater as patient and amateurs as cure. Downs had made a revealing equivalence: while Victorian theater critics had little reason to distinguish between professional and commercial interests, the rise of subscription theater introduced a repertoire that artistically inclined professionals felt amateurs were ideally positioned to pursue. As previous chapters have described, amateurs played an important if subsidiary role in earlier subscription theaters, performing alongside professionals at the Incorporated Stage Society and the Abbey Theatre.30 Now, amateurs took center stage: where before World War I reformers believed that the future of the theater was “in the hands” of the audience, after the war they claimed it was in the hands of the amateur, figured as a professional theatergoer-in-waiting. Endorsing the credo that amateur was to professional as artistic was to commercial, professional actress Sybil Thorndike proclaimed that amateurs “should be pioneering in things for which the commercial theatre cannot find a public,” since professionals were forced “to put acting first and the play second.”31 Perhaps she had something in mind like Shaw’s complete Back to Methuselah cycle, mounted by amateur companies at the Bradford Civic Playhouse (est. 1929) and the People’s Theatre, Newcastle (est. 1911) in the 1930s. However, the flipside of professionals performing inferior plays with superior acting was amateurs desecrating superior plays with inferior acting—a threat apparently upsetting enough that Harley Granville Barker felt compelled to insist that amateurs “no more compromise [a play’s] high quality than a band of climbers belittles a mountain.”32 But if amateurs were trailblazers and mountaineers with respect to a high-quality repertoire, they were thieves with respect to a commercial one. Professional actor Robert Newton characterized the jealousy between amateurs and professionals as “something like that which existed between crooks and detectives who were on the same job in the same kind of business.”33 The lighthearted metaphor highlights a very real perception of theft: amateurs were thought to be stealing the very audiences from which professionals derived their livelihood. Actor’s Equity president Godfrey Tearle saw amateurs as genuine competitors; he complained when a stock season in Bath had been adversely affected by amateurs breaking in for a week. Bemoaning amateurs who participated for free in touring professional productions, Tearle calculated that “every time those amateurs fulfill an engagement for

118

Chapter 4

love, a qualified professional is robbed of his bread and butter.”34 He might have noted that such amateurs likely would have been recruited by professionals. What’s more, amateurs often were out-of-work professionals: the Lantern Players of London once had to cancel a tour because four out of five male cast members had left to take up professional engagements.35 For his part, Tearle claimed not to have any problem with amateurism per se, merely with amateurs cutting into commercial territory.36 But Tearle had non-professional actors in mind when he denounced “shamateurs” who “[took] money out of the professional theatre by exploiting the local reputations of bank clerks, typists, and people of similar professions. I wonder what those same bank clerks would say if I came along and offered to do their job in my spare time for nothing?”37 As Tearle juxtaposed local celebrity with itinerant skill, he overlooked the non-acting labor that kept amateur theater afloat, whether bank clerks managing a society’s finances, dressmakers sewing costumes, printers designing programs, or plumbers fixing piping.38 Moreover, by shifting from metaphorical roles like climber and crook to actual jobs like clerk and typist, resentful theater professionals abandoned the commercial and artistic binary to denounce amateurs’ ostensible lack of acting skill with more than a whiff of class snobbery. As professional producer Tyrone Guthrie insisted: “A Mexborough plumber, if he has any talent at all, can act pretty decently in parts which do not completely transcend his own experience, physical and spiritual. But the Mexborough plumber who could play Sheridan, Shaw, Shakespeare and revue wouldn’t be plumbing in Mexborough—he’d be in Hollywood.”39 Guthrie’s contrasting of manual and histrionic talent shortchanged not just the amateur performers but also the technicians who eventually “progressed” to the professional theater, such as the four professional actors, two professional dancers, and one professional stage electrician who trained at the amateur-run Citizen House, Bath (est. 1913) in the 1920s.40 Professionals’ view of amateur actors as shams was markedly different from the attitude during the first, much smaller and more middle-class amateur dramatic society boom in the 1880s and 1890s, during which professionals saw amateur theatricals as a valuable way to train actors for the professional stage—a role that was much diminished, as Michael Booth points out, by the formation of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (est. 1904) and the Central School of Speech and Drama (est. 1906).41 Indeed, it bothered professional actor Alastair Prentice that anyone should treat his job as a hobby: “The amateur has no conceivable right, with the small amount of time left

Affiliative Subscription

119

over from his daily occupation, to invite an audience to watch a performance which lack of technique must inevitably prove of no artistic consideration.”42 Who did Prentice believe had more of a right to be offended: theater professionals who might otherwise have been on the clock or theatergoers with limited leisure time? On the other hand, by further conflating professionalism with commercialism, pro–amateur theater professionals took the opposite tack to frame lack of skill as an artistic advantage. Addressing the Peterborough Playgoers’ Society (est. 1935), professional producer E. Martin Browne derided West End acting, which “although technically and mechanically perfect, lacked life and failed to move [the audience], whereas the acting of an inexperienced and untried amateur sometimes achieved the end which his professional counterpart, with all his stock-in-trade and tricks, could not reach.”43 Bernard Shaw praised a production of Candida (1898) at the People’s Theatre that same year: “It is in performance of this kind—by people who are doing the thing for the love of it, work hard at it, and are not paid for it—that you can get a quality of performance that you cannot get from even the most highly skilled professional actors.”44 Amateurs seemingly evaded the commercial exploitation that afflicted any actress who sang for her supper: if performers’ pleasure was genuine, spectators’ could be, too. Whether celebrating amateurs as prophylactics and pioneers or condemning them as talentless thieves, professionals failed to acknowledge that the movement flourished most in towns and villages that had never had local professional theaters of their own; many such villages did not even have cinemas. Missing from these varied assessments were any attempts to define amateurs not in relation to professionals but on their own terms. As Gordon Bottomley, president of the Scottish Community Drama Association and vice president of the BDL, declared: “The shrinkage in the professional theatre of Great Britain has resulted in an instinctive, myriad-minded impulse in the people at large to provide their own theatre. Instead of paying a small, intensively trained profession to provide drama for them, they have now been involved for over a dozen years in a huge, half-conscious movement to provide their drama for themselves; as they progress they clarify their ideas as to the nature of drama and the kind of drama they want.”45 Subscription was key to establishing this provision, not least in helping to determine the kind of drama each society wanted—though who “themselves” included was an elastic category, as Bottomley himself illustrated when he urged Manchester’s Unnamed Society (est. 1918) to avoid

120

Chapter 4

“realism about the uncomfortable classes” in a private letter accompanying a subscription mailed from his residence sixty miles away in Carnforth.46 Since amateur productions were still subject to copyright fees, many societies insisted on performing original or out-of-copyright drama, while other groups used subscriptions to obtain licenses for more recent plays, whether drawn from the commercial or artistic repertoire. (Reviving the repertoireas-food metaphors, Amateur Theatre cautioned: “When visitors are invited to dinner, the wise housewife does not risk quality by running round all the cut-price shops to find the cheapest goods.”)47 Apparently, societies attached to factories and offices favored West End hits, while village societies went in for Shakespeare, medieval drama, and dialect plays, all of which saw a publishing bump.48 But apart from repertoire, which varied considerably even among amateur drama societies in similar institutional contexts, if such societies were free from the burden of paying professional actors, what should subscriptions be used to do? Start a costume wardrobe or drama library? Pay to enter a BDL festival? Improve lighting equipment? Acquire a playhouse? Of course, the first thing many amateur societies pooled subscriptions to do was hire outside professional producers. Trading autonomy for autocracy, East Sussex Bexhill Amateur Theatrical Society (est. 1935) actor Stanley Courtenay argued that he “was prepared to submit without qualification to the instructions of a professional producer who had made it his life’s work and study; but, quite frankly, he [Courtenay] was not prepared to change his interpretation of a role simply because it did not coincide with the ideas of an amateur no more experienced than himself.”49 While in the 1920s metropolitan producers like Edy Craig and Nugent Monck brought highbrow plays and experimental stagecraft to amateurs at the Leeds Art Theatre and Maddermarket Theatre, in the 1930s Yorkshire Holmfirth Cliffe Players secretary George Taylor complained when more transitory professional producers helped amateurs import the latest commercial trends: “What does the average society do? It chooses some West End success and puts it into rehearsal with a professional producer, hires the scenery, and employs the local joiner to set it up.” Taylor insisted that the “ideal amateur society is one that can rely entirely on its own efforts, write and produce its own plays, design and build its own scenery,” even if this meant recruiting the local joiner rather than paying him.50 Local newspapers felt that this sort of rugged self-sufficiency was especially important for village drama societies, which were helping “to check the incessant drain

Affiliative Subscription

121

of the country’s best young blood away into the alluring glow of the street lamps,” as the Yorkshire Post put it.51 In the early 1930s, the West Riding Council initiated plans to train village producers so that local amateur societies would not need to lean on outside aid. In 1932, drama galvanized the first Village Life Conference in Leeds; other topics included rural industries and the welfare of young people in the agricultural areas.52 Nevertheless, it seemed that for every amateur society that rejected or ignored the professional stage, another sought to imitate it in the provinces. As a result, amateurs were haphazardly chastised either for too closely following or for not paying close enough attention to professional actors and trends. But as Derby amateur enthusiast Lionel Dingle exasperatedly pointed out: “These wretched [amateur] players, living in the depths of the country, are frequently accused of copying actors they have never seen at all! . . . Nine out of every ten of these have never seen Marie Tempest in Hay Fever, and therefore to play ‘Judith’ is for them as creative a piece of work as to play the heroine in a ‘new’ play by some tedious local playwright.”53 As creative, perhaps; such productions certainly were more expensive for subscribers, at least in terms of royalty payments to Noe¨l Coward’s agent. Amateurs’ contrasting attitudes toward professional involvement make clear that self-sufficiency was not nearly as important as self-determination: like repertory theaters importing metropolitan rather than locally sourced plays, societies could vote to give up their creative independence, but at least the decision would have been reached democratically. Yet beyond an amateur society’s relative autonomy from theater professionals, each society still had to contend with a far more vexing concern: the autonomy of its individual subscribers. Getting into a Part The 1925 BDL guide for community players offered tips on forming an amateur drama society: “After the first few months, but not earlier, the Group should frame a simple constitution on democratic lines. The annual subscription of, say, 2s. 6d. should carry with it the right to . . .”54 Amateur drama society subscriptions conferred any number of individual rights: to vote at meetings, access a theatrical library, and obtain serial tickets for performances, as well as to attend rehearsals, lectures, debates, play readings, and acting lessons. In regard to this last right especially, amateur theater subscription did not confer to individuals the right to perform, merely

122

Chapter 4

to be considered for roles. As a 1930s Bradford Civic Playhouse brochure warned applicants: “It must be understood that the acceptance of a subscription for membership does not necessarily imply a guarantee on the part of the Society to an offer of a part.”55 Despite such warnings, Bromley amateur actor Victor Thornton castigated drama societies for misleading prospective applicants: “[Societies] need a large membership to bolster up their ticket sales, and there must be thousands of ‘aspirants’ who join in the forlorn hope of getting a part. This band of innocents is one of the most pathetic features of the amateur dramatic movement, and disillusion at an early date would be the kindest thing that could be done for it.”56 Like lottery tickets (themselves in greater circulation with a 1934 act legalizing small lotteries), subscriptions baited dreamers. For all the doctors and clerks and maids and mistresses who were brought together by subscribing to the amateur theater, the matter of casting opened up undemocratic practices. Although Chapter 2 showed that theater subscribers were subjected to class hierarchies in terms of preferential booking or glossier programs, such stratifications paled in comparison to the taxonomies introduced by casting subscribers. Loyal subscribers who paid their membership dues year in and year out found themselves overruled by amateurs who were wealthy enough to buy influence or talented enough to affiliate with more than one amateur group. It is worth pointing out that a large part of the amateur theater’s democratic appeal was the need for a variety of talents, as encoded in different subscription categories. As late as 1952, one sample amateur-society press notice reiterated that “there are many jobs to be done, and the actor is only one of a large team,” which included “stage-designers, costume-makers, lighting experts, makers of the properties and odd-job men.”57 Summoning a vision of equally shared effort, in 1927 Devon amateur-theater evangelist F. G. Thomas suggested that by opening night, “the person who has done the sewing realises that she has pulled her weight quite as much as the person who is taking the leading part.”58 Many subscribers claimed to prefer working behind the scenes, and some explicitly stipulated that they must not be asked to act; others were interested in supporting the amateur theater as spectators.59 Confronting a financial shortfall, the secretary of Durham’s Bishop Auckland Drama Company remarked that “there were many people in the town . . . who did not want to act, but who would take a keen interest in the company’s activities if they were allowed to become members.”60 A popular strategy was to distinguish between active, acting,

Affiliative Subscription

123

or playing members and associate, non-acting, or non-playing members—a category that sometimes denoted stage staff and sometimes patrons. At the People’s Theatre, playing members were active on and backstage, while non-playing members ran the box office and front of house.61 By contrast, the Burnley Garrick Club (est. 1929) divided into active members “who are prepared to take parts in plays” and associate members “who will constitute the audiences and critics, and take part in the social events.”62 In practical terms, using subscriptions for spectators enabled amateur societies to bypass not just the stage licensing requirements but the Entertainment Tax, which had been introduced in 1916 and required that a portion of professional and amateur ticket sales be sent to Inland Revenue.63 In more spiritual terms, by having subscribers appear both on the stage and around it, amateur societies illustrated how players and playgoers could, in the 1925 BDL guide’s idealistic description, “become as one man in the thrill of an experience that they are creating together. For such moments the word ‘audience’ is too colourless. Everyone present is a participant.”64 Enhancing the communal sensation of public-subscription repertory theaters, amateur theaters would bring citizens together in democratic collectivity. Such was the fantasy; in reality, many disgruntled would-be actors took their subscriptions elsewhere. At a 1936 National Operatic and Dramatic Association meeting, one player earned applause when he quipped: “ ‘If a society doesn’t want me, it is up to them not to “cast” me; but I think it is very unfair for any society to come along and use me, and then cast me aside. I think we ought to be at liberty to go to any society that will have us.’ ” Publishing and rebuffing that claim, an Amateur Theatre editorial declared: “The best members of a society are those who, if they are not suited for a certain play, are prepared to work in the front of the house or behind the scenes rather than walk out on the production. . . . All over the country can be found men and women who, often in heart-breaking circumstances, have been steadfast in their affection for a society even when they could get better personal chances elsewhere. Invariably that loyalty has strengthened the society and helped it to live.”65 Subscription meant that affection and loyalty were financial as much as metaphysical values: Why should an amateur waste time and money by literally paying dues when her prospects for getting a part were so bleak? On the other hand, many smaller town and village societies did not have the means to cast selectively. In 1937, one Yorkshire amateur pointed out that his local group was “looked upon as a social circle to which anyone in the place who wishes may obtain

124

Chapter 4

admission, however limited his or her ability. The committee cannot refuse applicants, since the very existence of the local society depends on its popularity, and there is no surer way of losing this than by turning down wouldbe members.”66 At the opposite extreme, the Bradford Civic Playhouse required a test for admission to the acting list, forcing many aspiring actors to pursue their dreams with a different theater.67 Yet even for societies that welcomed all aspirants without formal tests or membership auditions, competition for roles could be stiff. As People’s Theatre producer Norman Veitch admitted: “It is still left to the individual [member] to force his way to prominence as best he can, and this generally done by turning up at the Theatre regularly and throwing oneself with vigour and persistence into its many activities.”68 Specifically, Veitch touted play-readings for giving untried members a chance to show off. (Thanks to lower-stakes casting politics, amateur enthusiast E. A. Baughan elsewhere conceded that reading “affords rather more fun for the players than an actual performance.”)69 But contrary to Veitch’s advice, parts often went to players with greater experience, whether or not that experience was with the society doing the casting. Loyalty to a society did not mean that the society would be loyal in return, and by the 1930s, the betrayed subscriber had become a recognizable type. Southampton amateur enthusiast Stanley Mackenzie described the fictional “Miss Jones”: “She has been a member for three years, and has sold programmes for every show. On the last occasion she applied for a part, preference was given to a girl (the cat!) from another society. . . . Although many reasons are politely suggested as to why she failed to secure the part, we are compelled, through sheer observance of etiquette, from putting forward the one that we feel would be most frank, i.e., the one that her programme selling is better than her acting!”70 If Miss Jones can’t get her name onto the cast list, she’ll at least have a hand in distributing it. Further complicating the tension between insider loyalty and outsider talent, many locals apparently were reluctant to criticize friends and neighbors. The problem cut both ways, prolonging careers as often as stifling them. As Scarborough amateur enthusiast R. A. H. Goodyear complained: “Shameful to say to the leading man, ‘You were better than ever, old chap,’ when we are all yearning for his overdue retirement. Cowardly to tell the leading lady, ‘You seem to grow younger and more marvelous each year’ if you know she is keeping a cleverer Sweet-and-Twenty in the shadows.”71 With this in mind, pseudonymously airing one’s criticisms in local newspapers remained a much-utilized option. The Trevescan

Affiliative Subscription

125

Amateur Dramatic Club in North London solicited anonymous written feedback from audiences after each show, so that writers could be “as frank as they like, without the risk of breaking friendships or coming to blows with those whom they are criticising.”72 Evidently, casting or not casting a loyal amateur was easier than giving honest feedback to her face. While repertory theaters used provincial newspapers to create a sense of community, amateur groups used ephemera in order to protect existing social ties. The loyal but betrayed subscriber found a ready foil in the interloping subscriber. As Stanley Mackenzie elaborated: “So long as [the amateur actor] is doing good work he cannot be accused of disloyalty to his group if he temporarily deserts it for another.”73 Although here Mackenzie implies a short affair in an otherwise stable marriage, performing with multiple groups was commonplace rather than exceptional. Amateur theater was filled with Eloquent Dempsys; amateur actors could become so forgetful of their many theatrical commitments that one handbook recommended sending them reminder postcards four days before rehearsal.74 Amateur drama societies recognized that they were all drawing from the same pool of amateurs; more surprising, perhaps, was when drama societies enlisted other drama societies to help them recruit. When the Todmorden Amateur Players (1909–34) wanted to expand their roll of acting members, secretary A. C. Wood advertised in the local paper, requesting “that the hon. secretaries of the many local dramatic societies should bring this appeal to the notice of their committee and members, and if this is done the Players’ Committee are of opinion that the talent they require can easily be found within the borough. The acting member’s subscription has now been reduced to a nominal sum, so that this consideration need not debar any person from applying for membership.”75 Playing with multiple societies carried a cachet of being in demand, and societies manipulated this to their advantage; the suggestion here that the sum was “nominal” promised that joining another group would not lead to penury. Recruiting from within the amateur drama network could be even more targeted: bit parts and “crowd” work were sometimes advertised by larger societies as opportunities for players from smaller groups. At other times, however, amateur societies were forced to reach beyond the usual talent pool: anticipating the recent social media efforts of Shropshire’s Mad Cow Productions to find players for a 2015 amateur production of Hairspray, in 1930 the Leeds (1925–33) and Bradford Civic Playhouses circulated in local newspapers a casting call for an upcoming production of an oratorio called St. Paul: “Negroes Wanted.”76

126

Chapter 4

Emerging from these circulated appeals for subscriptions were competing conceptions of democratic casting: equal distribution of parts among members, equal distribution of large and small roles, equal distribution of membership among all parts of society. Democratic casting alternately was celebrated for elevating collectivism or condemned for lowering civic consciousness. At the People’s Theatre, Norman Veitch believed that “the distribution of parts amongst the members is an important matter and should always be made as widely as possible.”77 In 1929, one Exeter League amateur drama society report boasted that of 359 total members, 44 had acted during the past year, 13 for the first time.78 On the other hand, in 1936 chairman of the BDL London & Middlesex Divisional Committee G. E. Middleditch asserted that “the art of the theatre” was not helped “by making sure that every acting member, however innocent of ability, shall at some time or another play a lead.”79 According to Leeds Art Theatre producer Charles Smith, by privileging artistic theater, the amateur player’s democratic loss was the price paid for the amateur playgoer’s civic gain: “If [drama enthusiasts] believe sincerely that a heightened regard and intelligent interest in the art of the theatre is calculated to extend the mental life and deepen the civic consciousness, it is their definite duty to create playgoers.”80 But compared to professional repertory theaters, an intellectual repertoire was even further demoted when calculating the amateur theater’s civic benefits. The 1926 Board of Education report observed that the ideal amateur societies “have been successful in combining a co-operative enterprise with a reasonable standard in choice of play,” but the report further acknowledged the benefits of “societies which, while performing West End successes, are drawn from many social grades.”81 Each of these models valued inclusivity of a kind, whether this meant giving inexperienced amateurs the chance to perform alongside their social superiors or unsophisticated provincials the chance to see quality performances of high-minded dramas. Add to these models of democratic casting the gap between real and imaginary. Michael Mangan has described the pleasurable “double consciousness” that comes from an audience watching amateurs they know in “everyday life” playing fictional parts.82 In 1934, Ammanford amateur Ken Etheridge pointed out that familiarity made the amateur actor’s task more difficult: “Perhaps it would be a good thing if amateurs adopted some of the professional incognito, or refrained from putting names on the programme, so that Smith would no longer be teased for having to make love to Miss Jones, and old Mr. Thomas would be quite free to get drunk on the

Affiliative Subscription

127

stage without fear of being twitted about it.”83 Professional incognito was among the reasons that a number of amateur companies refrained from printing performers’ names in programs, including the Great Hucklow Village Players (1927–71), Stoneland Players (est. 1910), London’s Unity Theatre (1936–75), and the Maddermarket Theatre, Norwich; other reasons were to emphasize collectivity or, at the opposite extreme, the producer’s name. Yet too great a gap between amateurs and audiences produced other problems. The 1925 BDL amateur theater guide warned that “the susceptibilities of village audiences demand thoughtful consideration. Thus, plays with servant parts should be innocent of offence to servants and their parents. Again, dread of the workhouse is a tragic reality to the laboring class.”84 By the same token, critics appreciated that amateurs were able to bring their everyday experience into their role-playing. After witnessing the Long Riston Village Players’ 1935 production of Eden Phillpotts’s The Farmer’s Wife (1916), the Hull Daily Mail remarked: “These ambitious village actors played their parts as members of village families with an ease born of everyday acquaintance with such characters.”85 This conception of authenticity is somewhat different from simply “looking the part,” as with the hunt for West African amateurs to play Pauline slaves. While in England questions about authentic theatrical representation go back to debates about white males portraying women and Moors, amateur actors further trouble the relationship between performer and role because they substitute the professional’s adaptability with the amateur’s offstage life. By extension, performance comes to look like something we do even when we are playing ourselves. As amateur enthusiast F. G. Thomas remarked of the amateur movement: “We are all of us more or less actors in some degree or other. We act in order to fence against the encroachments of life, and the more sensitive we are, the more intimate our personal experiences are of life and human nature, the more we act to conceal them from the world at large.”86 By yoking performance to concealing as well as displaying, amateur theater both literalized and anticipated the theatrical metaphors that would soon be adopted by postwar sociologists and anthropologists to describe everyday social behavior. Once everyday persons had become actors, everyday actions could become performances. But rather than simply “[uprooting] the everyday . . . to a place where it can be better lit” (in Alan Read’s memorable phrase), subscribing to amateur theater further offered a promise of social elevation, at least for a short time.87 In September 1937, Amateur Theatre remarked: “Hardly a

128

Chapter 4

newspaper or magazine at this time of year is without an article on ‘amateur theatricals’ and how bank clerks, domestic servants, scavengers and mill hands will shortly become prophets, priests and kings for a night or two.”88 Two years earlier, amateur enthusiast John McKenzie wondered more sociologically “if part of the motive underlying the countryside’s interests in the drama is the chance to give outlet, in dramatised form, to the ambition to occupy a place other than economic and educational opportunity has given them.”89 By the same token, when amateurs refused to play lowerclass roles, or at least to play them “authentically,” they reinforced the idea that amateur theater was either an aspirational exercise for the poor and middling or a self-affirming one for the already well off. West Kensington amateur enthusiast Maisie Grune insisted that the problem applied especially to actresses: “In one case the dear lady insisted on being ‘decently dressed’ in a slut-of-a-girl part; in the other, the actress refused to talk ‘common’ in a ‘docks’ character. When argued with, she said she had interpreted the character as having an ‘hereditary refinement of manner and speech.’ ”90 But the dear lady had a point in rejecting the role of prostitute— after all, she was paying rather than being paid to play. Yet for all that the amateur theater promised democratic access, dignified representation of the everyday, and the possibility of temporarily advancing to a higher social position, subscription mapped class hierarchies onto cast lists, particularly in villages. Great Hucklow Village Players producer Dr. L. du Garde Peach joked: “ ‘Everybody wanted to play the handsome young baronet . . . and the part generally went to the middle-aged member who paid the largest subscription.’ ”91 Where the archetypical nineteenth-century amateur might well have been a baronet, the 1920s amateur with money to spare could purchase titles, and youth, by subscription. Wealthy subscribers’ outsize influence further emerged in more subtle ways. In Amateur Theatre’s weekly dispatch from fictitious village drama society producer “Nora Ratcliffe,” amateur drama society member “Mrs. Verney” offers the writer a lift home: Apologises off-handedly for not bringing Mollie, my little maid, as well. En route begs me not to offer Mollie’s sister (Mrs. V.’s housemaid, and a grand little actress) a part in one of the plays. “It takes her mind off her work, and, of course, it’s very awkward the week of the show, if she’s out three or four nights together. I’m very keen about the Players, my dear, and you can count on my help. Just tell

Affiliative Subscription

129

me what you want me to do.” I long to tell her that she can occasionally set and clear her own dinner table. But a sub. of two guineas a year means a lot to the Bedderby Players.92 By Mrs. V.’s logic, a hobby shouldn’t get in the way of a job, but one senses it isn’t really about the dishes: if maid eclipsed mistress onstage, an especially large subscription coupled with a well-placed word behind the scenes could always restore the social order. For all of Nora’s class consciousness, she has a maid, too; while village amateur societies may have claimed to welcome servants as subscribers, those societies inevitably were managed by well-heeled producers and committee members, who would have made up a larger proportion of village populations when compared to cities and towns with more middle-class residents. In terms of gender rather than class politics, subscription further differentiated men from women, the latter of whom disproportionately participated in amateur theater. Out-performing even the talented interloper was the male player who was so in demand, he didn’t have to pay. Enfield amateur enthusiast Percy Chisnall complained of the men who hired their acting services out at a cost to amateur societies, “for these human octopii pay no subscription, and sell no tickets.”93 At the Unity Theatre, the gender ratio apparently allowed heterosexual men to change girlfriends frequently.94 To counter gender imbalance, a great deal of amateur theater was organized through Women’s Institutes, whose “essentially democratic” subscriptions of two shillings (“from the Queen, who is a member of the Sandringham W.I., down to the humblest worker,” as Belfast’s Northern Whig put it) generally excluded men from taking part.95 Women who performed with these groups were criticized both for playing male roles and for appearing in plays with only female roles.96 Even Village Drama Society founder Mary Kelly deplored “feminist acting” on the grounds that theater benefited from male perspectives, urging drama societies affiliated with Women’s Institutes to break away or go coed, which several did.97 Lamenting the rise of publishing figures for all-women plays, the Scotsman claimed that “this aptitude for acting on the part of women is only due to the fact that they are habitual pretenders; that they are brought up to study appearances; that they give first place to appearances, the reality behind the appearances counting with them for little.”98 Gender stereotypes extended backstage, too: one traveling theater group evangelized that prospective village amateurs should “draw up a scheme showing how the ladies can sew

130

Chapter 4

the curtains for the ‘fit-up,’ and make the costumes, and how the men, with hammers and beams of wood, can construct the ‘skeleton’ stage.”99 But rather than “sex-antagonism,” a Taplow amateur instead blamed “the practical politics of everyday life”: “Many women can more conveniently rehearse in the afternoons when they are free. Many men do not want to be left alone when they come from work, and many go to the village club on some evenings—in which case the women have to be at home with the children.”100 This generalization applied only to married mothers who were wealthy enough not to have to work. Yet the more fundamental question of whether men should be included in or excluded from amateur societies linked to organizations tasked specifically with helping women formed part of a larger question about how to balance inclusionary and institutional prerogatives. Was it more socially desirable for women to play male roles or for men to play roles in Women’s Institutes?

Federate, or Segregate? As amateur activity multiplied, umbrella organizations—each with their own additional subscription fees—helped consolidate the movement. In Birmingham, the local federation’s annual report boasted of joining thirtyfive amateur drama societies in order to provide common social activities, a library, a panel of critics, and an advisory bureau.101 The Village Drama Society offered a library along with costumes, producers, and lecturers for hire. Among its many services, the BDL negotiated to provide block subscriptions to gramophone records from HMV, Columbia, and Decca. At a 1935 conference of the eastern section of the National Operatic and Dramatic Association, professional playwright and producer Conrad Carter spoke of amalgamation: “You will form theatres where you once formed societies, groups of companies where you once had single entities before. . . . The entire amateur world will be labouring in a wider, more imaginative, and more cohesive sphere than possibly any of us has yet contemplated.”102 Though pleased with the importance accorded to the amateur movement, Amateur Theatre questioned Carter’s reasoning: “Is there not tremendous value in the Society that is a single entity? In thousands of cases, such societies have a reason for their existence in the interests that have, in the first place, brought them together. We are thinking of the societies connected with churches, business houses, settlements, the Y.M.C.A.

Affiliative Subscription

131

and other institutions. . . . We would go so far as to say that the church dramatic society has its first duty to the church; the Y.M.C.A. society its chief contribution to that excellent and broad-minded movement.”103 Apparently, the amateur movement’s civic value derived at least in part from the freedom to prioritize other institutional affiliations—religious, political, social, and occupational. In 1939, the Rochdale Observer remarked on a struggling effort to unionize some eighteen local amateur dramatic societies: “One of the strangest characteristics of the amateur actor is his evident reluctance to associate with his kind, especially in the role of spectator at other amateur shows.”104 But rather than attribute this behavior to dilettantism or exhibitionism, as so many critics did (and, for that matter, still do today), perhaps the newspaper could have started by recognizing the importance of the amateur’s existing associations. Subscription was the staging ground for determining how or even whether amateurs should represent institutional priorities, especially when those institutions were also subsidizing the theaters connected to them. It was only when theaters enforced concordance between subscribers and institutions—that is, women belonging to an amateur group affiliated to a Women’s Institute; factory employees belonging to an amateur group for industrial workers— that amateurs were able to transcend theatrically the social roles that aligned them to those institutions in the first place. Consider that most towering of institutions: the church. One of the biggest surprises of the amateur movement was how readily Church embraced Theater after centuries of antipathy. As hundreds of societies emerged in connection with religious institutes of all denominations, religious authorities dictated the terms for membership and repertoire—a right naturally assumed whenever churches, chapels, and synagogues doubled as rehearsal and performance spaces. In 1936, fifteen-year-old St. Stephen’s Amateurs in Bradford disbanded suddenly when the church’s vicar decided that the society should consist exclusively of church members. In an interview with the Bradford Daily Telegraph, the vicar was careful to point out that it was not he who had shuttered the society but the subscribers, who felt that it could not continue under such restrictions.105 Beyond membership regulations imposed from above, subscribers’ right to choose the repertoire was limited, too: even if subscribers technically could evade the Lord Chamberlain, they could not evade the church to which their theater society was affiliated. Writing to Amateur Theatre from Cornwall in 1934, a pseudonymous “Deacon’s Son” asked: “I wonder how many of your readers

132

Chapter 4

appreciate the difficulties of the average dramatic society connected with a church or chapel? . . . No play, however reverently produced, would be tolerated in the Methodist Chapel of which I am a member.”106 Deacon’s Son claimed that plays dealing with divorce were taboo, as were those treating Catholicism or murder—thus doubly ruling out T. S. Eliot’s forthcoming Murder in the Cathedral. But if church societies kept divorce out of the chapel, they also turned pastors into profligates: that same year, Warrington reverend Cyril Thomas denied the non-conformist objection to theater, writing that in his town, “local Methodists had to sit and see their own minister in the part of Sir Toby Belch, and although we did not cut the drinking scene, they thoroughly enjoyed the production.” Of course, the reverend still had his limits: “Even I have not yet tried Ibsen’s Ghosts upon our audience, nor have I any intention of doing.”107 Improved relations between Christians and theatricalists saw a rise in the publication and performance of mystery, miracle, and nativity plays across the board, and although the formation in 1935 of a Religious Drama Society was encouraging, it is revealing that the conference date clashed with the BDL’s annual conference. The influence of institutional priorities on repertoire was inevitable, according to another Amateur Theatre editorial: “Nobody would expect a Labour group to put on propagandist plays for the Imperial League; and nobody would expect a Temperance club to perform a play which made a hero of a drunkard.”108 The socialist Unity Theatre went further, excluding from their subscription rolls all policemen, soldiers, and fascists (though Colin Chambers notes that only the first two conditions were written into the rules).109 In general, socialist political structures grafted extremely well onto amateur drama societies, leaving behind a legacy of workers’ and agitprop plays in which policemen, soldiers, and fascists were represented as caricatures by actors who denounced such personages in real life.110 More surprising was when drama societies enforced politically neutral membership regulations with the aim of extracting greater loyalty from subscribers—counterintuitive because one would expect that having more interests in common would strengthen rather than diminish loyalty. In 1931, the socialist-leaning Driffield Imps Amateur Dramatic Society lost nearly twenty members who broke off to form a new dramatic society “on nonpolitical lines,” with a membership open to anyone willing to pay a 5s. subscription and 5s. entrance fee. Framing the endeavor in terms of widening the talent pool, the Driffield Times reported: “By the fact that political

Affiliative Subscription

133

beliefs will not be considered in regard to membership, the Society is hopeful that some of the best amateur talent which would not otherwise be available, will be at its disposal.” But such inclusivity was swiftly counterbalanced by a measure requiring prospective members to receive the committee’s majority vote while reserving the committee’s right to demand any member’s resignation without assigning a reason. (Apparently, this last part of the measure was to avoid lawsuits.) Members were free to perform with other societies, provided their commitments did not interfere with rehearsals; two committee members insisted on recruiting subscribers “whose heart and soul were in the Society, and who would give preference to the Society.”111 In this case, rivals were not just other drama societies but other institutional communities. Where institutional priorities may have constrained the subscription lists and repertoires of amateur theaters connected to churches and political parties, amateur theaters subsidized by employers blurred the line between occupation and avocation. Harrow amateur enthusiast Leonard Paine argued that such groups should be self-contained: “In cases where the society is associated with a factory or an office, surely the only people who should be allowed to take part in dramatic performances are those belonging to the firm.” He spoke from experience: when his office had gone elsewhere in search of a tenor, “the ‘outsider,’ although nothing to do with the firm with which the society was associated, was made a member and continued to play leads,” irking employees.112 The outsider ultimately resigned after not receiving a bigger role in a subsequent production—how could he have been a team player? Surprisingly, though, it was only when membership was restricted to employees that social hierarchies could be more fully dismantled. The 1926 Board of Education report featured testimony from an amateur society connected with a London firm that included university-educated administrators along with non-university-educated clerks and typists. Once more, representation was key: “more important than [the fact of attracting four hundred subscribers] was the fact that they were drawn from every grade.”113 Inviting an outsider to do the casting, the society toppled office hierarchies: messengers played courtiers; managers played artisans. Yet by remaining exclusive to employees, employer-subsidized societies marshaled theatrical collectivity for the greater aim of making profit.114 While societies attached to factories and offices apparently were more likely to mount West End hits, artistic drama could just as easily be appropriated for commercial gain via the corporate sponsorship of leisure activities.

134

Chapter 4

These scuffles over membership regulations reveal that in many cases you did not have to be a woman to subscribe to a Women’s Institute dramatic society, a Christian to subscribe to a church dramatic society, a socialist to subscribe to the Unity Theatre, or a factory employee to subscribe to an employer-subsidized theater: a male atheist botanist who voted Conservative, for example, might conceivably belong to all four, trying on and representing different affiliations like theatrical roles, without ever actually joining (or, absent significant adjustments, being capable of joining) the institutions to which the theater societies were connected. But whenever amateur theater societies introduced or upheld exclusive membership regulations, these societies denied representational authority to individuals who did not share their institutional affiliations. By erecting a bulwark against indiscriminate subscription, amateur groups shifted emphasis onto the reversal of social roles taking place onstage. We see this especially at the Leeds Industrial Theatre (1921–24), a federation joining 27 amateur societies comprising a total of 950 factory workers who subscribed three pence a week to attend and take part in productions of Hamlet, Peer Gynt, and The Cenci along with original workers’ plays. Although the Industrial Theatre had the opportunity to attract wealthier subscribers and even to take money at the door, the main subscription scheme remained open only to “genuine working people.”115 In September 1922, the Yorkshire Evening Post published a letter from “S. W.” complaining about this policy: Out of the twenty-five or thirty performances [that the Industrial Theatre] are giving this winter, the public may gain admittance to two by becoming “honorary patrons”—that is, by subscribing 2s. 6d. The other performances are only open to members, who must be workpeople in the employment of half-a-dozen firms; for them, the charge is threepence a week—less than the cost. Meanwhile, however, the hall is half empty; and the public, who would be willing to pay a reasonable price, are excluded from the empty seats. No one will grudge to the workpeople their obtaining good drama cheaply, but the general policy of the Industrial Theatre seems to be a piece of democratic exclusiveness.116 The sneering and oxymoronic “democratic exclusiveness” captures the problem with calling subscription lists “democratic” or “representative” in

Affiliative Subscription

135

the first place: though lists preceded by these adjectives often tried to represent society as a whole, what if that very inclusivity threatened the social group that the subscription scheme was intended to benefit? From this perspective, democracy looks less like having inclusive subscription lists and more like having a representative distribution of exclusive ones. For S. W., the Industrial Theatre was “democratic” because its constitution prescribed low subscription fees in order to attract workers, even as the rules rather undemocratically excluded everyone else. In response to that letter, manufacturing boss and Industrial Theatre founder W. B. Dow penned his own: “Your correspondent overlooks the fact that the Industrial Theatre was intended as a big workpeople’s amateur dramatic company acting to each other turn in turn. . . . One can hardly expect private individuals by the hundred to give money and time free for an outside public as an entertainment.”117 His point was that an exclusive membership policy enabled factory workers to insulate themselves from middle-class demands and expectations, in much the same way that a 1913 Workers’ Defence Union claimed that “workingmen only should have the executive control of the Union” because “where members of one class come into unrestricted intellectual competition with members of the working classes, the latter find themselves at an unfair disadvantage.”118 But did the Industrial Theatre really insulate workers in this way? Though not an entertainment for an outside public, the Industrial Theatre was nevertheless praised in terms of public good, articulated in an inescapably middle-class tenor. At the University of Leeds, Professor Lascelles Abercrombie proclaimed: “The Industrial Theatre Movement makes a healthy society; for an art which cannot fail to enrich and deepen the lives of those engaged in it, cannot fail to be of the greatest benefit to the whole community.”119 Other critics pointed out the educational gains, from improving literacy rates to training new theater audiences. The Industrial Theatre’s professional producer, J. R. Gregson—who at twelve years old began working at a cotton factory before becoming a railway clerk and eventually a playwright—described amateurs rehearsing for The Merchant of Venice: “The chap that wrote this,” says one actor, “wrote it just reight.” Another, hearing Shylock’s lines, “For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe,” said, with quiet feeling, “And there’s thousands of years all put in one line.” A third, asking my advice about further reading,

136

Chapter 4

said “Acting this play has made me see something of what’s behind it. Not all, by a long way I’ve a lot to learn, I know. But I could see nothing in it before; now I can see something in the other Shakespeare plays, because of the ‘Merchant.’ I’ve nearly read them all now, and I want you to put me on to other poetry. I expect there’s others besides Shakespeare.”120 Such secondhand accounts of enlightenment come across somewhat more patronizingly when delivered by Dow, who subsidized the Industrial Theatre and who was, incidentally, manager of a perambulator and bassinet factory: “It is indeed refreshing to come round a factory wall at lunch time, and find discussions of Shakespeare’s plays. . . . One almost smiles when a lorry driver or a mill-hand hums Grieg’s music instead of the latest catchsong, or a sturdy politician uses ‘Julius Caesar’ as an example of what happens to ‘Bolshies.’ ”121 Clearly, cultivation rather than revolution was the order of the day. Dow’s use of “sturdy politician” to describe a pontificating worker was at once ironically condescending and potentially accurate: every fifty workpeople joining the Industrial Theatre from one firm were entitled to appoint a member to the General Committee, and Dow claimed to promote such leaders to executive posts within his factory, showing how representation in the theater could lead to representational gains beyond it.122 But for many workers, the endeavor needn’t have been political, merely a means of breaking up the monotony of industrial labor. According to Gregson, another Industrial Theatre actor said simply: “ ‘I have been miles away to-neet and I feel pounds lighter for’t.’ ”123 All it would have cost the actor was three pence a week. As we weigh the representational contradictions of a society limited by employment, a useful corollary might be a society limited by unemployment. In the 1930s, the National Council of Social Service kept tabs on a handful of unemployed drama groups who performed in unemployment centers across the country.124 From the opposite direction to employersubsidized drama, unemployed drama strikes at the heart of amateur theater because it undermines the idea of hobbyists making theater in their spare time. After losing his job of four years, writer L. G. Simms spent five fruitless months at a London Labour Exchange before ultimately finding in a local unemployed drama group a way to counter, as he described it, the sense of wasting time, “not so much time in hours but time—part of a lifetime—in which no progress is being made and which is profitless both

Affiliative Subscription

137

to oneself and to other people.”125 Playing on “profitless,” Simms analogizes the financial capital of gainful employment to the social capital of amateur theater participation. Unemployed amateurs further challenged the division between work and leisure by exploiting the link between fiction and reality. Reversing the model of workers playing merchants or women playing princes, unemployed amateurs attracted the greatest attention for portraying their own social roles, somewhat like when village amateurs performed as farmers and fishermen. As they had for village amateurs, critics agreed that unemployed amateurs brought an authentic perspective to roles as laborers and servants: after a 1933 performance of Galsworthy’s social drama Escape (1926) by the North Shields Unemployed Drama Group, the local newspaper remarked that “most of the players have very little to learn as far as sense of drama, characterisation and ‘getting into a part’ are concerned.”126 Yet unlike with village amateurs, critics differed as to whether such easy identification was helpful, both for actors and audience. Reviewing a 1936 production of an original shipyard-unemployment drama by the Nottingham Unemployed Association at the association’s headquarters, the Nottingham Journal suggested “that plays dealing with the lighter side of life might be chosen for presentation by the unemployed section rather than those dealing with their own personal problem. . . . surely it does not hold such morbid fascination that [unemployed actors] find recreation in play-acting it as well as living it day by day. The play itself is good and there are many local societies who would be happy to deal with it and at the same time provide the unemployed people with plays of a lighter calibre.”127 By emphasizing recreation, the journal underestimated the group’s ambitions, whether to dignify the experiences of unemployed actors and audiences or to educate employed ones. Moreover, by suggesting that other local societies “would be happy to deal with it,” the journal completely missed the political point of having unemployed amateurs portray unemployed characters in their “spare” time. Amateur Theatre further warned of the dangers of demarcating drama for the unemployed: “Nothing, of course, could be more inimical to drama, or the welfare of the unemployed, than such a separation. What these men and women need more than anything else is friendship and a sense that they are as fully citizens as any of their more fortunate brethren. The more they are encouraged to mix with the employed, the better for both, and the better for drama.”128 Yet it did not occur to the journal that part of enacting citizenship might include claiming one’s employment status as a political affiliation worthy of being performed

138

Chapter 4

onstage. If unemployed drama brought solidarity to the unemployed at the expense of potentially walling them off from the rest of society, it exemplified the trade-offs that confronted any subscription theater group organized around a community of interest.129 An alternate way for amateur groups to support the unemployed was through theatrical fundraising: the program for one Christian charity group’s production of Naunton Davies’s The Schemer (1920), whose proceeds would go to the local unemployed center, invited the unemployed in the audience to “Become United by joining the Trecynon Unemployed Social Centre. Utility Before Idleness.”130 On the one hand, then, amateur theater offered the opportunity to authentically represent your own social position, whether playing a farmer as a farmer or an unemployed as an unemployed; on the other, amateur theater offered the opportunity to inauthentically represent a different social position, whether playing a man as a woman or an emperor as a factory worker. Village Drama Society founder Mary Kelly spoke of both practices when she proclaimed in 1937: “Every community, whether formed by nationality, class, or occupation, made its contribution to the art of drama as a whole, giving it some peculiar flavor.”131 But as the gap widened between actors and characters, a related gap emerged between actors and spectators, particularly in terms of audience comprehension. While organizers claimed that employed or middle-class audiences might have trouble adequately appreciating theater produced by unemployed or working-class amateurs, the Paisley Deaf and Dumb Dramatic Club demonstrated the representational value that accrued from maintaining a limited subscription membership with their 1934 sign-language production of Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton (1902)—a play about how aristocrats use language and manners to artificially set themselves apart from the lower orders. As performers who were deaf and dumb played aristocrats who could hear and speak, the club further inverted today’s more commonly known practice of having a signing interpreter onstage by having an oral interpreter deliver commentary for the benefit of hearing audience members who, according to a promotional notice, would be in the minority.132 The difference between the language used by the actors and the language comprehended by the audience was especially prevalent at drama competitions. After placing well in two regional competitions, one Yorkshire amateur group fared poorly before an audience of uncomprehending Scots, only placing ahead of a Welsh group. Apparently, linguistic barriers were easier to deal with as an amateur group rather than as an individual performer: after having been

Affiliative Subscription

139

mocked by a London drama competition judge for his native accent, an amateur originally from Yorkshire wrote to Amateur Theatre to advertise a new Northern drama society in South East London. In this case, though, the amateur insisted that he had had every right to play his part (the uncle in A. A. Milne’s one-act The Boy Comes Home [1918]) with a Yorkshire accent, grounding his dialect firmly in the diegetic world of the play.133 Whether to regard verbal expression as a thematic choice or a non-diegetic necessity had more to do with accent and dialect than language tout court: English-speaking actors expended relatively little fuss about playing Russian and Scandinavian characters, so long as Hedda had a different accent from her maid, Bertha. For this reason, the conundrum of linguistic representation manifested at two extremes: in terms of plays, a proliferation of “dialect dramas” (Amateur Theatre even jokingly solicited Cockney, Devonian, Lancastrian, and Welsh “translations” of an exchange from A Midsummer Night’s Dream); in terms of players, a BDL collection of twenty-four dialect records ranging from Lancashire and Yorkshire to the Scottish border and South Wales, which were available on subscription from the 1930s. If these gramophone records evoke the upward mobility of Eliza Doolittle, the reverse often was the case: such records effectively enabled amateurs to more “authentically” represent other classes and regions while remaining “intelligible” to audiences and judges, potentially upstaging amateurs who spoke that way in the first place, not unlike the more recent phenomenon of movie stars “uglying up” to win Oscars. That differences between amateur actors and audiences were so often exposed at drama competitions indicates the sizable role played by these events in determining the stakes for federating or segregating. Amateur enthusiast Robert Gendall framed this tension in terms of the equitable distribution of talent: “What chance has, say, a Works Team, run entirely by amateurs and attached to a Works, got against a team of players selected from a circle of thirty or forty different Societies?”134 Here, Gendall suggests that the bonds forged by local communities should not be scuttled in favor of a more individualistic survival-of-the-fittest model. A common critique of national drama competitions—called “festivals” after the Athenian tradition—was that they abstracted theater from the community for which it was intended. To be sure, that community might rally together to support a competition bid, as when the Scottish towns of Ardrossan and Saltcoats raised £1,000 by public subscription to enable the local Players Club to travel to America to compete for (and ultimately win) the 1928 David

140

Chapter 4

Belasco Cup, having already won the Lord Howard de Walden Cup at London’s Community Theatre Festival.135 But a vocal subset of amateurs deplored the BDL national festival on the grounds that it had been “engineered from some distant headquarters that knows [amateurs] mainly as annual subscribers [to its competition fund],” as Amateur Theatre put it.136 For the critics who felt that a “pot-hunting” rather than “festival” spirit pervaded competitions, one solution was to keep festivals local rather than national, which was more faithful to the classical model anyway. Yet beyond these objectors, only a third of BDL subscribers even participated in national festivals, emphasizing the importance both of the BDL’s other resources and of keeping performances close to home.137 But decidedly not in it: whether or not amateur theater groups enforced exclusive membership regulations, they scrambled citizens’ relationships to their immediate environments. Writing in his parish magazine in 1934, the vicar of St. Paul’s Church, Bournemouth, claimed: “ ‘We live in days of craze for the dramatic; it has invaded our schools, colleges and so many of our institutions. . . . It has entered into parochial life and many parishes now have a dramatic society. No place is now considered too sacred for it.’ ”138 He wasn’t just speaking metaphorically. Theater forced its way into all kinds of non-theater spaces, backed by subscribers who hadn’t otherwise spent time in them. The Stockport Garrick Players (est. 1901) were evicted from the local Unitarian Church after digging a passage underneath to facilitate stage entrances, undermining the church’s foundations both literally and figuratively. Schools, village halls, and university auditoriums became temporary playhouses, prompting one architect to remark that it was strange his profession did not know more about stage scenery. Disused factories, laundries, garages, canteens, and even crypts were repurposed into theaters, as subscribers made the point that they valued intelligibility in a repertoire more than accessibility in a building. Manchester’s Unnamed Society performed in a former carpet warehouse that was so remote, programs included a map (Figure 6).139 But amateur subscribers also transformed very public outdoor spaces, ranging from the unremarkable, such as when Workers’ Theatre Groups performed on street corners and random pitches, to the highly symbolic, such as when the Leeds Civic Playhouse staged Everyman in front of the town hall in 1929.140 Everyman especially prompted subscribers and non-subscribers alike to think of their city differently: the Leeds Mercury noted that on the same steps “which lawyers and witnesses and defendants and all those who hurry about the

Affiliative Subscription

141

Figure 6. A leaflet with map indicating the new room for Manchester’s Unnamed Society, 1923. Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives.

mundane affairs of life are accustomed to climb, [the audience] saw Everyman climbing out of the lusts of life.” Or didn’t: the Yorkshire Post added that “trams, ‘buses, motors and bicycles continued their way oblivious to the plight of Everyman,” these vehicles serving as more than adequate stand-ins for the family and friends who refuse to accompany Everyman to Heaven.141 In this way, amateur subscribers quite literally eliminated the walls between theater and the rest of society. At a time when professional

142

Chapter 4

theater workers claimed that the art form was ailing, it instead became a part of everyday life for more people across Britain and Ireland than ever before. By allowing citizens to represent social groups to which they did not otherwise belong—whether by playing a king when you were a servant, or a man when you were a woman; or by joining an amateur society that was affiliated to a church, or a political party, or a business firm to which you had no other connection; or even simply by witnessing an outdoor performance mounted by a society you might never have gone to see— subscription invited citizens to acknowledge their differences and temporarily to transcend them. As amateurs searched out alternatives to traditional theater buildings, they nevertheless found themselves performing in actual spaces, even if it took a map to get there. The final chapter asks what happens when the only place subscribers gather is on paper.

CHAPTER 5

Virtual Subscription The Mask as Readers’ Theater

In 1924, the stage director Lennox Robinson claimed he was “almost certain that Mr. [Edward] Gordon Craig is the personage in the English theatre today who most ‘matters.’ ” Craig, who had not resided in England since 1904, did not own a theater. He had not designed for the stage in over ten years, directed in over twenty, or acted in nearly thirty. Robinson credited Craig’s long-running quarterly The Mask (1908–29), calling it the “best theatrical magazine in the world.”1 Others agreed: from New York, the poet Marianne Moore wrote that The Mask was “a publication in which the art of the theatre is inclusive of pictures, writing, the art of names, and of literary arrangement—each of these graces as invented often by The Mask itself; the better for being so.”2 From Stockholm, businessman and diplomat Louis Zettersten declared there was “nothing like it.”3 From Tokyo, theater enthusiast S. Kikuchi dubbed it “a Pilot of Theater arts.”4 If, as Robinson acknowledged, Craig was only figuratively in the English theater, his theater journal was literally in all parts of the world: Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australia. Despite a global distribution, The Mask counted few actual subscribers. Unlike Robinson, who wrote for the Observer, Moore, Zettersten, and Kikuchi mailed their testimonials on special postcards included with the magazine. On the back: “What I Think of The Mask.” On the front: a request to furnish “the names and addresses of three or four friends who would, you believe, enjoy and subscribe for the Journal” (Figures 7 and 8). Craig roamed the world collecting names, sending them from the Moscow Hotel Metropole or the Paris Hotel Chatham to his overworked and undercredited managing editor Dorothy Nevile Lees at the editorial offices in

Figures 7 and 8. The back and front of a testimonial postcard from S. Kikuchi to The Mask, 1927. MS Thr 423 (4220), Harvard Theatre Collection at Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Virtual Subscription

145

Florence. Although he once dreamed that the journal would attract 10,000 subscribers, he never even reached 1,000. In sheer length rather than geographic breadth, Craig’s subscription lists resemble those of metropolitan play-producing societies, provincial repertory theaters, charity-matinee fundraisers, and amateur theater groups. But if previous chapters have argued that subscription mediated playgoer experiences of collectivity before, during, and after a visit to the theater, The Mask stands as a limit case of what happens when subscribers, like Craig, abandon the theater building and instead construct theater entirely around an audience that never convened in person. For a study in which subscription ephemera have enabled not just theaters but so many other enterprises, Craig brings together ends and means. Then again, Craig might not seem like a natural end point for a study arguing that subscription aspired to give playgoers representative control of the theater. His own politics flirted with fascism, which found an analogue in his campaign to institutionalize the stage director.5 The illegitimate son of celebrity actress Ellen Terry and architect E. W. Godwin, Craig briefly worked as an actor and scenic designer before quitting England in search of success abroad. Although he initiated collaborations with Eleonora Duse in Florence, W. B. Yeats in Dublin, Max Reinhardt in Berlin, and Konstantin Stanislavski in Moscow, Craig was a notorious control freak who is better remembered today for his writings and illustrations than for any of his work on actual stages. He may have dreamed of being chosen to lead an English national theater, but it was from the metaphorical stage of The Mask that Craig nurtured and disseminated his artistic vision—one that could be satisfied only by autocratically unifying scene, action, and voice. It was also from the magazine’s pages that Craig famously argued for actors to be replaced with giant marionettes, transforming performers into nothing more than passive extensions of a godlike puppet master. At first glance, The Mask only seems to confirm Craig’s desire for omnipotence. Filled with articles and essays on theater history and theory written under his name or one of more than sixty pseudonyms, The Mask has been read as the ultimate one-man show, mounted by an exiled enfant terrible to challenge England’s commercial theater establishment.6 Yet by redirecting the spotlight from Craig to his subscribers—the journal was mailed to a variable cast of between one hundred and six hundred theater professionals and enthusiasts annually over the course of nearly two decades—we observe that The Mask’s most significant accomplishment

146

Chapter 5

was to endow readers of all professions with the representational authority of stage performers.7 In this respect, Craig’s autocratic tendencies further test the limits of subscription’s democratizing effects. If on the one hand The Mask published imagined dramatic dialogues between Craig and his readers (with Craig rather dictatorially writing in both voices), then on the other the subscription model hitched the magazine’s editorial politics to a more collectivist internationalism, as Craig increasingly shifted from telling readers what they thought to asking them. Subscribers steered The Mask toward democracy despite Craig’s undemocratic predilections; even his authoritarian dialogues inspired critical reading practices alongside exuberant praise, as readers’ contributed letters, designs, and testimonial postcards reveal. The English-language theater journal goes back to at least 1720, when Sir Richard Steele launched his biweekly The Theatre to protest his ousting from Drury Lane’s management—apparently, “magazine editor” sounded like a good Plan B for more than one thwarted theatricalist.8 But while most earlier theater journals marketed themselves to domestic theater personnel, The Mask’s revolutionary appeal to a limited number of theater professionals and enthusiasts around the world invited readers to imagine that they all belonged to a global community of theater artists. The Mask linked up subscribers by circulating theatrical news from cities like Budapest, Copenhagen, London, Philadelphia, Tokyo, and Warsaw. It published theoretical essays on dance, movement, scenography, and theatrical reform; historical articles on commedia dell’arte, Javanese puppetry, Elizabethan theater architecture, and Japanese noh; English translations of theatrical texts from German, French, Dutch, and Italian sources; and woodcut illustrations based on old theater maps, plans, paintings, and caricatures. Even more crucially, The Mask encouraged subscribers of all professions to see themselves as performers. Using dramatis personae lists and dramatic dialogues, The Mask prescribed an active reading program that conceived of reading itself as a repeatable performance, prompting subscribers to adopt theatrical metaphors in their own correspondence with the magazine. In this way, The Mask helped to separate “Theater” as subject from “theater” as building, articulating a vision of World Theater that represented the journal’s international subscribers even as Craig hoped to persuade English readers to give him a literal theater of his own. Until now, this study has argued for the democratization of culture by way of subscription, so it is worth asking: How do we account for some of

Virtual Subscription

147

The Mask’s more undemocratic and even antidemocratic habits? The journal wrote approvingly of stage censorship and disapprovingly of women’s suffrage, but in general, Craig professed that Politics and Art should not mix, and The Mask mostly used politics outside the theater to illustrate arguments about politics inside it.9 So, for example, a review of a book about American ballet describing a production in which the central figure had been diminished by raising the surrounding figures on stools remarked: “We dislike that artificial process of levelling up even in ordinary and civic affairs, and infinitely more so in Art.”10 The Mask filtered its politics through the corresponding implications for theater artists like Craig, often blaming “Democracy” for sidelining “real artists” in favor of “the host of pretenders.”11 The journal’s elitism had little to do with social class; at other times, The Mask praised “those aristocratic and democratic circles in which we have so many true and loyal friends.”12 Craig may have been making a virtue out of necessity—and ignoring that he devoted far more of his energy to hunting for wealthy or influential subscribers—but his journal attracted a range of readers, many of whom worked in the arts and had little money to spare. For this reason, Craig refused to raise the annual subscription fee above fifteen shillings, although he did introduce a double-priced edition de luxe.13 Like other theatrical schemes discussed throughout this study, The Mask used subscription to generate a not-for-profit alternative to commercialism, yet rather than make decisions democratically (say, by committee), subscribers were meant to invest their absolute trust in Craig, selecting him as England’s artistic leader in a process that he analogized to voting— despite the fact that most subscribers, like Craig, did not actually live in England. Even when Craig democratically expounded on “the value of giving every village a theatre and every boy and girl the chance of acting,” he still foregrounded the need for artistic leaders to “control . . . direct . . . inspire . . . guide.”14 Beyond his suspicion of democratic politics, Craig’s desire to provide strong artistic leadership led The Mask to engage with two emerging political spheres: one often associated with democratic governance, the other opposed to it. The first and most energetically embraced sphere was internationalism, perhaps best exemplified initially by “Realism and the Actor: An International Symposium,” a Mask feature that published questionnaire responses from theatrical celebrities like actress Gertrud Eysoldt, dramatist Sydney Grundy, and theater manager Andre´ Antoine throughout 1908.15 By 1913, English literary critic Edward Storer could allude to The Mask as the key

148

Chapter 5

agent of an “internationalism” whereby “a new idea introduced by one of the artists presiding over the Russian ballet in Petersburg or Moscow is heard within a few months in London and Paris, and imitated or modified. Florence or Moscow are neither of them at too great a distance from Berlin to prevent the thoughts of Mr. Gordon Craig reaching a sympathetic intelligence in Max Reinhardt.”16 More recently, Charlotte Canning has connected turn-of-the-century theatrical internationalism to the political internationalism of institutions like the League of Nations (1920–46), with both versions believing that cooperation and friendly competition would enable nations to “participate on the world stage” in pursuit of common interests.17 The Mask never mentioned the League, but internationalist tropes figured in Craig’s open letter proposing a collaboration with the English opera conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, published in The Mask in 1928: “When Englishmen shall have united to establish at home a theatre as strong as that of Reinhardt in Germany and of Stanislawski in Russia, it will be time enough for us to let our attention be diverted with talk of the internationalism of art, for we shall have made safe what is at present in doubt—the British contribution to that internationalism.”18 By talking up his and his magazine’s internationalist credentials ad nauseam, Craig positioned himself as the ideal figure to lead an English national theater that would advance theatrical art more widely. But Craig and his celebrity friends were not the only individuals to shape The Mask’s internationalism, which, as we will see, depended on the journal’s non-celebrity as well as non-European subscribers. At the same time, Craig’s desire to provide strong artistic leadership pointed The Mask toward a second and more sinister political sphere: fascism. In 1924, The Mask reviewed an English translation of Hungarian intellectual Odon Por’s book about fascism approvingly; a 1926 review of a published collection of Benito Mussolini’s speeches expressed admiration for “all that Signor Mussolini says and does.”19 Craig’s dalliances with fascism grew more opportunistic in the 1930s and 1940s, including meeting with Mussolini in an unsuccessful attempt to attract funding for a production of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion as part of a proposed festival celebrating fascism and later selling The Mask archives to the Nazis in line with Adolf Hitler’s plan to rebuild Germany’s national theaters after the war as part of a more successful deal to get out of a prison camp for English nationals in France.20 On the whole, references to fascism within the journal remained minimal, tangential, and naı¨ve. But beyond actual

Virtual Subscription

149

fascism, there seems something peculiarly authoritarian and dictatorial about Craig’s imaginary dialogues printed in the pages of The Mask, where he is actually writing all the voices in dramatic exchanges involving characters like “English Reader” or “Queer Reader.” Ultimately, this chapter will argue that those authoritarian tics inculcated quite different responses from the uncritical devotion Craig may have desired, because the dialogues modeled an active reading practice that he otherwise promoted for stage directors and actors. It is worth remembering, too, that scripting readers’ reactions may have been one way for Craig to manage his greatest fear: being ignored. Thus, if subscription facilitated the dissemination of Craig’s more antidemocratic views and practices, it counterbalanced them by creating the conditions for an international and highly responsive readership to weigh in on his journal’s content. In a testimonial postcard, English historian W. A. D. Englefield even clamored for The Mask to exercise greater editorial control: “More tastes appear to be catered for in the variety of fare so interestingly displayed, but rather at the expense of the magazine’s unity of purpose (if any) concerning which one is always rather mystified.”21 In other words, The Mask fused Craig’s authoritarian streak with a thoroughly pluralistic view of theater. Where The Mask’s antidemocratic gestures suggest that representative governance might always be shadowed by the specter of despotism (Craig exercised far more control over a subscription enterprise compared to anyone else featured in this study, although some professional producers who worked with amateurs, such as Nugent Monck, come close), in practice the journal’s subscribers made their views known regularly—debating and disagreeing with Craig, shaping and contributing to a vision of World Theater that remains with us today. To that end, this chapter identifies subscription ephemera as documents of reader response, drawing on mailed forms, questionnaires, and postcards, along with sections of The Mask that represented (or claimed to represent) readers’ words: letters to the editor, celebrity symposia, dramatic dialogues, and Craig’s own marginalia. Before Craig, the relationship between theater and reading had been described primarily in terms of reading drama. As Julie Peters has shown, readerly anti-theatricalism reached its zenith in Britain when Romantic critics like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt praised Shakespeare as a poet of the page by contrasting the experience of reading in “the closet” with what Hazlitt called the “unmanageable reality” of theatergoing.22 It might seem surprising that the fervently pro-theatrical Craig

150

Chapter 5

quoted Lamb and Hazlitt approvingly, in order to justify replacing actors with puppets. But Craig envisioned a new relationship between theater and reading, in which reading was both a means to realize stage productions and a performance for other readers. He encouraged actors to read widely in theater history and theory, and instructed “stage managers” (i.e., stage directors) to read and reread playtexts, marking their notes and impressions throughout. In his own marked-up copy of Macbeth, for example, Craig wrote: “The duty of a stage manager as perhaps the chief of the interpretors of the work of the poet to the public, is to be careful that he acts as interpretor Ⳮ not as anything else. . . . He is not ashamed to support new readings as they have been called.”23 By framing this emergent professional as an interpreter, Craig suggested that the art of the theater should be driven by readerly sensibilities. The imaginative stirrings prompted by reading a play at least in part like the Romantics, as a closet drama, would lead to new stagings, here figured as new readings. Of course, there had long been different ways to read a play. Stephen Orgel has described the reasons early modern readers marked up their playtexts, including pursuing personal edification, expressing scholarly interest in the history of drama, and making pragmatic use of the playtext as a promptbook—reasons, he observes, that had more to do with the reader’s aims than the publisher’s.24 Still, if the closet drama (or authorial version) has represented one end of the text-performance spectrum, the promptbook has represented the other: where the former imagines ideal and even impossible performances, with infinite time to linger over a metaphor or turn of phrase, the latter has been used either to assemble or to retroactively reconstruct actual performances, attending to the practicalities of performance such as cut or added dialogue and, eventually, notations about movement, props, light, and sound.25 Craig consciously combined the interpretive strategies of critic, historian, and practitioner. Even more strikingly, he projected his hermeneutic onto theatrical, if non-dramatic, texts. Where the Romantics celebrated the closet drama, Craig immersed himself in what we might call the closet theater—a rich and culturally diverse library of published drama, history, biography, scenography, and acting theory. An erstwhile bookplate engraver and bibliophile who had previously edited an arts journal called The Page (1898) and would go on to publish a collection of essays titled Books and Theatres (1925) and the Cranach Press edition of Hamlet (1930), Craig worshipped theatrical publications and was equally attuned to form and content. Never before had

Virtual Subscription

151

theatrical books been gathered together so omnivorously or read so explicitly toward the goal of advancing theatrical art. Yet Craig further intended for his annotations to be read by others, distributing marked-up copies of his books to friends and going so far as to publish his marginalia in The Mask. In reaching for a vocabulary with which to describe Craig’s social reading practices, it is ironic that we should return to the same Romantic critics who privileged reading over theatergoing. As Heather Jackson has demonstrated, Coleridge, Lamb, and a great many other Romantic readers annotated their own copies of books, including plays, for an anticipated audience of close friends and paying customers.26 If reading drama nurtured what Coleridge called “spiritual vision” and “imaginative reflex,” annotating drama was more like leaning over to whisper in your fellow playgoer’s ear, in perpetuity. Where the social conventions that governed Romantic marginalia seemed to apply irrespective of whether the book was drama, as well as whether annotations were addressed to the author or to other readers, Craig foregrounded marginalia’s inherent theatricality: the written dialogue between author and reader, or between earlier and later reader, would always exist as a performance for future reading audiences. Moreover, in order to maximize theatricality across content and form, Craig transposed and published every kind of readerly exchange as a dramatic dialogue—from his own notes made on a rival critic’s article about repertoire to a reader’s mailed-in query about a new scenography book. As subscription ephemera reveal, Craig inculcated this theatrical reading practice in his subscribers, too.

Theatrical Little Magazines How to situate a journal as singular as The Mask in the era that arguably gave rise to the discipline of periodical studies?27 Even in the years immediately preceding it, The Mask was far from the only periodical devoted to theater. In England alone, weekly newspapers The Era (1838–1939) and The Stage (est. 1880) both specialized in theater and offered news, reviews, and advertisements covering London and the provinces. An early Mask staked out its territory: “Theatrical journals often contain interesting announcements which could be easily curtailed in a single page. . . . That such papers reflect the Modern Theatre is certain, and if these journals are compared

152

Chapter 5

with the journals of the Arts of Architecture, Painting and Poetry the relative position of Acting as an Art will be ascertained. This was one of the reasons for founding The Mask . . . so that it should no longer be said that the stage was the only art which possessed trade instead of art journals.”28 By contrasting trade and art journals, Craig conflates different target audiences (theater industry professionals rather than those interested in theater but without a professional stake, i.e., enthusiasts) with different value judgments (theater important for its aesthetic rather than commercial worth). After all, a periodical about commercial theater can be marketed to the general public as easily as to the theater worker, giving us, on the one hand, broadly appealing Continental magazines like Italy’s Il Teatro Illustrato (1905–14) and Germany’s Die Schaubu¨hne (1905–18) and, on the other, English and American trade newspapers like The Era, The Stage, and the New York Dramatic Mirror (1879–1922)—all five were name-checked in The Mask. Yet by distinguishing between trade and art here, Craig shifts attention away from industry professionals and toward a wider public interested in theater, even as the jump from commercial to artistic theater narrows that public numerically. From the perspective of art journals, invoking “the Arts of Architecture, Painting and Poetry” further enabled Craig to position The Mask alongside periodicals like English fine-arts journal The Studio (1893–1964), Italian literary journal Poesia (1905–9), and Dutch architecture journal Wendingen (1918–32), all of which The Mask would also mention by name at one time or another. By the mid-1920s, these art journals and scores of others would be known, in English at least, as “little magazines.”29 By consciously aligning The Mask with both theater journals and little magazines, Craig invites us to retheorize the theatrical metaphors and devices that recur throughout the little magazine archive, from the preponderance of stage name–like pseudonyms and dramatic dialogues to invocations of a virtual performance space. It is worth remembering that theatrical tropes and devices are hardly unique to little magazines, especially if we define those magazines by the size of their audience rather than by the artistic pretentions of their content. Yet because their subscription audiences often would have been small enough to fit into a literal theater—curator Richard Price figures typical circulation “in the low thousands, or, as likely, in hundreds or even in tens”—little magazines were ideally positioned to take advantage of theatrical metaphors and to develop theatrical theories.30 By extension, because the ratio of contributors to subscribers was more balanced at little

Virtual Subscription

153

magazines than at popular ones, divisions separating producer from consumer, or performer from subscriber, blurred by allowing both sides to identify as artists. Consider how often little magazines evoke metaphorical stages. Prospectuses proclaimed The Mask’s aim “to play up to the Public, not to play down to it.”31 We see a similar positioning of magazine as performer in the opening issue of the French Symbolist journal Le Scapin (1885–86), in which the editors announce: “We are neither hateful nor prejudiced as we enter the stage. With no anger to vent nor devotions to give, we are free and shall remain so in our judgments and reviews. . . . Enough of these limp bodies without substance. We want spine, muscle and nerve, we do! Now is the time for those who feel.” While the oldest and most familiar journalistic theater tropes emphasize the optics of critical spectating, as in the English “spectator” or “observer,” here, the magazine is the one performing onstage, playing up to the public by histrionically gesticulating and emoting as much as by offering uncensored judgments and reviews. Like The Mask, Le Scapin’s circulation at this time has been estimated at around two hundred. It therefore would have seemed natural to imagine playing for a reading audience who could have fit inside an actual theater. The conflation of journal with performer further emerged from artistic polymathy: as was typical of Symbolist and Decadent periodicals, many of Le Scapin’s literary contributors also wrote for the stage. Indeed, the journal was named for the commedia character Scapino, anticipating Craig’s own use of commedia characters in The Mask.32 Since playwrights were to literary contributors as stage designers were to graphic artists, other little magazines evoked stages graphically as well as textually. Jennifer Buckley has demonstrated the reciprocal influence between Craig’s woodcuts for The Mask and the scenic designs for his and Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre production of Hamlet (1911–12). Conversely, Maurice Denis’s set designs were replicated in his mise-en-page for Le Mercure de France (1889–1965), while Alfred Roller’s cover designs for Ver Sacrum (1898–1903) anticipated his work as stage designer at the Vienna Court Opera.33 Like Craig’s Mask, a number of little magazines were edited by bona fide stage designers, including Gustaf Collijn’s Thalia (1909–13) in Stockholm and Enrico Prampolini’s Avanscoperta (1916–17) in Milan.34 Little magazines increasingly behaved as stewards of the stage. In 1925, the Polish arts journal Blok devoted nearly an entire issue to stage design; the next year, the American literary magazine the Little Review organized an International Theatre Exhibition in New York.35

154

Chapter 5

As little magazines began looking and sounding more theatrical, some upped the ante by serving as organs for actual theaters. Although Craig enlisted The Mask in his unsuccessful lifelong campaign to be given his own theater in England, for many years, The Mask’s offices were at the historic Arena Goldoni in Florence, literally on a stage. In 1913, the Arena also became the site (and The Mask, the de facto organ) for Craig’s short-lived School for the Art of the Theatre. This, too, heralded a larger trend: that same year in Paris, dramatist Jacques Coupeau founded the influential The´aˆtre du Vieux-Colombier during his tenure as director of La Nouvelle Revue Franc¸aise (1909–43), which heavily promoted the endeavor; in 1924, the Milanese Il Convegno (1920–40) established its own theater as part of a larger cultural center.36 Among little magazines associated with particular theater companies, two of the most prominent were Beltaine (1899–1900) and Samhain (1900–1908) of the Irish Literary Theatre (later, the Abbey). Like The Mask, Beltaine and Samhain frequently served as soapboxes for their editor—in this case, Yeats, who, writing under his own name, shared Craig’s desire to create artistic rather than commercial theater by employing rhythmical movement and non-naturalistic scenery. To this end, the two collaborated at the Abbey in 1910 to stage Yeats’s one-act The Hour Glass using Craig’s famous rolling screens, and The Mask published a revised version of the play three years later.37 However, Yeats’s overall vision ultimately differed from Craig’s by insisting that theater remain fundamentally literary. Where Yeats wondered how a reading public might scale up to sustain a playwrights’ theater, Craig envisioned a directors’ theater led by artists who were well versed in theater history and theory.38 In this respect, The Mask joined league with German Expressionist little magazines that served as organs for radically new or even impossible theaters. If The Mask dreamed of a wordless theater of the future where actors were replaced with giant marionettes, Sturm-Bu¨hne (1918–19) imagined a theater that would showcase battles royal between huge machines.39 While The Mask saw the stage director as a puppet master, Der Sturm (1910–32) compared the stage to an altar and the stage director to a priest.40 Where The Mask asked how theaters might be redesigned so that every member of the audience would have the same point of view, Das Hohe Ufer (1919– 20) called for theaters to open up to the community by abolishing the divisions between curtain, foyer, and facade.41 It probably helped that little magazines were capable of metaphorically enacting these theories, whether by means of editors who autocratically controlled text and layout

Virtual Subscription

155

or subscribers who did not need to gather inside a particular building in order to catch the performance. How much of the little magazine’s theatricality should we attribute to Craig? According to him, all of it. Craig acknowledged “twenty or thirty offspring” of The Mask (but not always his own children, it must be said, of whom he had at least ten with four women—his son Edward Carrick worked at The Mask, uncredited).42 The Mask’s influence is clearest on the Detroit-based journal Theatre Arts (1916–64). Both magazines shared an interest in publishing content drawn from World Theater history and theory, but Theatre Arts went on to achieve an enviable peak circulation of 77,000 in 1957.43 More diffusely, Craig’s essays on theater appeared in the English poetry magazines Voices (1919–21) and Chapbook (1919–25); for the latter, Craig edited a 1921 special issue called Puppets and Poets, and he also took credit for special theater and marionette issues of Wendingen.44 But the more pressing question is: Why were little magazines so susceptible to theatricality in the first place? In terms of technology, advances in linotype, monotype, and lithography lowered the cost of printing to bring periodicals into the realm of semiprofessional experimentation that had also proved generative for the subscription theater. In terms of genre, experimental writers dabbled in theatrical forms like dramatic dialogues, sketches, and closet dramas. In terms of media, both page and stage were feeling besieged by film and radio. (Even after the advent of talkies, when Craig tried to revive The Mask in the 1930s he insisted that his readers “don’t want anything to do with the cinema.”)45 As these developments prompted questions about what it meant to call a theater or a journal (or a genre, or a medium) commercial or artistic, the changing media landscape emphasized above all the role played by audiences in determining content—particularly when those audiences were imagined seated around a stage. American theater critic Richard Burton proclaimed in 1919 that it was not until The Mask emerged that there was a serious English or American publication “devoted to the legitimate interests of the stage from the point of view of the patron of the theater, the critic-in-the-seat whom we have so steadily in mind . . . rather [than] in the interests of the stage people, actors, producers, and the like.”46 Strengthening Burton’s comparison of seated journal readers to seated theater patrons was the analogous size of subscription audiences: the year before, The Mask had compared the growing number of little magazines to “little” (i.e., subscription) theaters, cautioning: “heaven forbid that we, in our modern craze for inversion, should come to consider all little

156

Chapter 5

things as mighty just because of their littleness!”47 Because the ratio of consumers to producers was inherently more balanced at both subscription theaters and little magazines than at their more popular equivalents, it was newly important for subscribers to be represented as patrons and even as fellow artists; later, more highly circulated theater magazines and more highly trafficked commercial theaters would popularize the content. Low circulation was a boon for this select group of subscribers, if only because it forced artists to address their audiences more intimately, and even—as we see in The Mask—to invite them onstage.

Craig’s Lists If Craig offers a limit case for the subscription theater’s virtuality, he is also the figure who most characteristically trafficked in lists, whether in The Mask’s pages or its business records. Umberto Eco has distinguished between “poetic” and “pragmatic” lists: the former include “any artistic end for which the list was proposed and whatever art form is used to express it,” while the latter “have a purely referential function . . . they refer to objects in the outside world and have the purely practical purpose of naming and listing them.”48 Subscription lists from previous chapters run the gamut from pragmatic to poetic. While play-producing society subscribers listed their Christian names more or less straightforwardly in annual reports, repertory subscribers took up dramatic pseudonyms in provincial newspapers. Social dramatists employed subscription lists as stage props in order to evoke offstage crowds, and amateur groups withheld names from their programs in an attempt to manufacture distance between actors and audiences. Yet more than any of the lists we have seen so far, Craig’s most playfully scramble the distinction between referential and artistic. While a list of dramatis personae might seem to fit more comfortably into the “poetic” category, what about a list of imaginary magazine contributors marshaled to recruit a list of very real subscribers? On the more pragmatic side of things, Craig found lists to be an especially potent argumentative tool due to their air of facticity. Even if one fabricated the data, as he often did, The Mask published lists alongside articles and essays for much the same reason that (to use a Craigian example) medieval Hungarian kings added to their intitulations lists of territories they did not actually hold: in order to give the impression of objectivity

Virtual Subscription

157

despite extreme subjectivity.49 Craig’s lists padded polemics. In one issue, The Mask published charts showing Berlin’s theater program for two weeks from 1904 and 1908, with corresponding tables indicating author, number of performances, and number of theaters. Of 1904, Craig observed: “This is a good record . . . 3 Foreign Masters, 7 German Masters.”50 Craig’s barely concealed argument was that he should be appointed to advise a proposed English National Theatre, and he had the data to back it up. In another issue, Craig designed a chart of “Theatre Men in Europe,” with a column for name and nationality next to others for different theater roles: actor, playwright, designer, stage manager, architect, craftsman, light expert. A sample entry lists: “Stanislawsky, Russian, Yes, No, No, Yes, No, No, No.”51 It follows that Craig, who authored a handful of original motions for marionettes, could have marked “Yes” for all columns. Other Mask lists preserved the argumentative tenor but avoided the veneer of referential facticity, inclining instead toward a more literary abstraction. If pragmatic lists are designed to be consulted, these lists are written to be read and imagined. When haranguing subscribers to pay up, for example, Craig piled on the compliments: “You are delightful people, witty . . . up to date . . . well-dressed . . . delicious . . . intelligent . . . profound . . . wealthy . . . powerful . . . everything . . . but you are inactive.”52 Moving from flattery to mockery, Craig pivots on the list’s predilection for excess; here, a feast of adjectives suggests a famine of verbs. Conversely, Craig made lists of who was missing from the English theatergoing public in order to suggest how the theater might improve. The Mask urged theater managers to “think of the doctors, priests, writers, painters, musicians, architects, citymen, engineers, army and navy men, politicians, secretaries, editors, journalists and other social men and women to whom a vigorous living theatre might prove refreshing and who are today obliged to avoid the place because of its pretentiousness.”53 Like many turn-ofthe-century theater reformers, Craig felt that too much power belonged to London’s managers, who did not truly represent playgoers’ interests; like the democratic lists of occupations from previous chapters, here an idealized list of occupations conjures in type the very public Craig hoped to attract. In fact, alongside theater professionals like actors, playwrights, designers, and stage managers, The Mask’s subscription lists included representatives from all of the non-theatrical occupations listed here (though of course not very many in number), further suggesting how much The Mask functioned as a template for Craig’s theatrical ambitions. As Craig moves

158

Chapter 5

from healers to artists to civil servants to the press, he suggests a vigorous living public brought together by the poetic logic whereby different occupations perform interlocking social roles. The Mask’s contributor lists most obviously unsettle the distinction between referential facticity and poetic abstraction. Through a daisy chain of associations, subscribers were invited to compare themselves to both real-life contributors and fictional dramatis personae. Rather than cordon off subscribers from contributors, The Mask yoked them together as “friends,” implying that subscribers could become friends of celebrity contributors like dancer Isadora Duncan, dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and theater historian Jean-Jacques Olivier.54 However, any invitation to see such celebrity contributors as friends was complicated by the appearance of fictitious contributors listed alongside them on The Mask’s masthead and prospectuses (Figure 9).55 Scholars have long established that many little magazine editors and writers employed pseudonyms, whether to inflate staff lists, as Katherine Mansfield did at Rhythm (1911–13); to stage arguments, as Beatrice Hastings did with feminist and anti-feminist perspectives at the New Age (1907–22); to play the expert, as Theo van Doesburg did by inventing alter egos as a Dutch Dadaist poet or Italian philosopher at De Stijl (1917–32); or to shroud oneself in mystery, as Mino Maccari did by writing under the names “Fottivento” (“Nighthawk”) or “Sugo di Bosco” (“Forest Sauce”) at Il Selvaggio (1924–43).56 The Mask helps us appreciate the theatricality of this practice by harmonizing form and content. Craig’s dramatis personae included the editor “John Semar,” named for the comic figure in Javanese marionettes; “Allen Carric,” who was often in Paris; and “John Balance,” whom dramatist George Calderon described in a letter to the editor as “a most unbalanced person.”57 In The Mask’s first issue, Balance theorized that actors should wear masks in order to render abstract emotions symbolically.58 But rather than abstract emotions, Craig’s personas represented discrete metropolises, ranging from “John Bull” in London to the more convincing “Jan van Holt” in Amsterdam, “Adolf Furst” in Munich, and “Tao” in Tokyo.59 The contributor list was not all smoke and mirrors: The Mask’s actual contributors included director Alexander Hevesi in Budapest, poet Anatole France in Paris, and art historian Dr. Ananda Coomaraswamy in Calcutta. But almost 70 percent of The Mask’s published text came from Craig or Lees, usually appearing under a pseudonym; an additional 10 percent came from translations and reprints, leaving just 20 percent for original contributions.60 Craig’s rampant use of pseudonyms

Virtual Subscription

159

Figure 9. A Mask prospectus featuring real contributors alongside Craig’s pseudonyms such as Allen Carric, Adolf Furst, and Jan van Holt, 1908. MS Thr 423 (4084), Harvard Theatre Collection at Houghton Library, Harvard University.

was an open secret: when another publication accused Craig of writing the first eight Mask volumes himself, editor Semar asserted that such a feat would be impossible.61 Craig’s subscribers could never be sure if a given contributor was a real person or a persona, and this uncertainty nurtured a sense of otherworldliness that bled into the purely referential.

160

Chapter 5

As Craig doggedly aggregated lists of subscribers and contributors from around the globe, he freely mixed Eco’s ideas about pragmatic and poetic lists. In a private letter to Lees, he wrote: “One way or another I saw exactly 20 new subscribers to The Mask. I saw [the] name of Mr. F Jeunant of Paris . . . I saw the name of Jordan Ⳮ Gotch and I fancied. . . . Everyway I saw something.”62 If real subscribers were subsumed into typographical representations of their names, imaginary contributors became reciprocally lifelike: as he had for his lists of subscribers, Craig kept notebooks with detailed lists of over sixty pseudonyms, noting their cities of residence. For Semar, he even wrote a biography and engraved a portrait.63 By recruiting subscribers to generate their own mini-subscription lists via testimonial postcards and published appeals, Craig spurred subscribers to think of themselves as textual personas in The Mask’s business and financial records. In a letter “To some of our subscribers,” Craig asked readers to send in “2 or 3 or 5 names of people who wish definitely to subscribe. . . . The effort would not kill you [to] remember this small service to us, on which possibly the fate of the ‘Mask’ depends. Some very busy people remember it so why should not you too. We know this because we keep careful notes of who is keen or who merely talks about being keen.”64 Like a parish chapel collecting book, Craig’s subscription list functions as a record of moral behavior as much as a social register. In this case, Craig perversely uses the threat of his private naughty and nice lists in order to goad subscribers into generating their own lists of potential subscribers. When the journal published a list of historic commedia characters from Arlecchino to Zaccognino, noting the city of origin for each, subscribers could draw parallels not just to lists of contributors printed in the journal’s masthead and prospectuses but to the lists The Mask had asked them to compile of the names and addresses of three or four friends.65 The most significant consequence of toying with the distinction between actual people and dramatis personae was that Craig’s subscribers saw both themselves and The Mask’s contributors as characters performing on a metaphorical stage. In a 1912 book on playmaking, William Archer described the process of reading a list of dramatis personae at the start of a published play: “There is a peculiar and not irrational charm in looking down a list of quite unknown names, and thinking: ‘In the course of three hours, I shall know these people: I shall have read their hearts: I shall have lived with them through a great crisis in their lives: some of them may be my friends for ever.’ ”66 Similar language figured in a 1924 letter to The Mask

Virtual Subscription

161

by subscriber Emily Willard, a London actress turned children’s author under her own nom de plume “Rachel Penn,” who rejoiced in The Mask’s contributor list as though it were a list of dramatis personae: “I want to meet ‘Acca’ again! And all the other writers in it. . . . [The stage] always had the effect of filling me with a kind of intoxication: it made me almost dance with impatience to take up my cue to ‘enter’ even if I had only a line to speak: so again I say: ‘Oh, Mask! Live forever’. You are the Theatre!”67 Willard delights in The Mask’s characters, but where Archer imagines living together, Willard substitutes performing together. By this logic, the very act of mailing a letter along with her subscription enables Willard’s own dramatic entrance.

Dialogue with Readers Given that Craig called for actors to be replaced with giant puppets, perhaps it’s no surprise that he reduced his various reading audiences to prescripted interlocutors. The Mask published a number of imagined dramatic dialogues between Craig, who played the all-knowing “Stage Director,” “Artist of the Theatre,” “Critic,” or “Editor,” and his subscribers, whom Craig ventriloquized, respectively, as the inquiring “Playgoer,” “Theatrical Manager,” “Professional Performer,” or “Queer Reader.” Writing these dialogues may have involved putting words into his readers’ mouths, but as Craig’s dramatic interlocutors toggled between audience members (“Playgoer”; “Queer Reader”) and theater professionals (“Theatrical Manager”; “Professional Performer”), his otherwise dictatorial dialogues counterintuitively encouraged readers of all occupations to try on one another’s roles. By expanding the idea of a dramatic dialogue to include both Craig’s marginalia and subscribers’ mailed queries, Craig prompted theater professionals like stage directors and actors to identify as readers, and theater enthusiasts to see themselves as metaphorical performers. Dramatic dialogues appear in little magazines as just one of many textual genres, from poems and narratives to manifestos, aphorisms, and sketches. For example, the Soviet avant-garde journal Lef (1923–25) deployed dramatic dialogues to stage arguments between competing characters who wonder why Mayakovsky and futurism should be praised but Marinetti and fascism condemned.68 The Mask’s dramatic dialogues index Craig’s growing appreciation for subscribers’ power. In “The Art of the

162

Chapter 5

Theatre”—a dramatic dialogue between a “Stage Director” and a “Playgoer” published as a pamphlet in 1905, three years before Craig founded The Mask—the stage director spends most of the conversation expounding on his own role. By contrast, the follow-up Mask dialogue from 1910 gives more lines to the disaffected playgoer, whom the stage director explicitly advises to subscribe: “Here is a way to revive your interest. Connect yourself with such a theatre.”69 By this point, three years of wrangling Mask subscribers had helped Craig discover the importance not of engaging in truly reciprocal dialogues with his audience but of getting them to contribute financially. Craig certainly needed the money, yet he further hoped that his subscribers could behave like an Electoral College or Citizens’ Assembly, selecting him as England’s artistic leader (even though, like its editor, most Mask subscribers did not actually reside in England—the breakdown of subscribers by nationality is discussed in more detail later in the chapter, but for now it’s only important to note that English subscribers consistently were in the minority). In another 1910 dramatic dialogue between a “Theatrical Manager” and an “Artist of the Theatre,” the artist remarks: “The Public cannot speak for itself; if the whole lot speak at once no one is heard; if one man speaks he is not listened to unless he is elected as spokesman by the whole nation. No one. Therefore until it does elect some representative how shall we know its wishes?”70 By Craig’s logic, to subscribe to The Mask was to cast a vote for “EGC,” as he often referred to himself. Craig’s dramatic dialogues might seem paradoxical because he endows a relatively small group of subscribers with the power to elect him as England’s artistic leader at the same moment that he autocratically prescripts their interlocutions. As they moved from dialogue to dialogue, subscribers had the unusual opportunity to try on different roles opposite Craig’s authoritarians, even as readers’ various supporting roles served mainly to let out steam generated by his heated polemics. But that the dialogue form progressively spilled over into other Mask essays and articles suggests a less tyrannical purpose: Craig may have found it helpful to imagine that readers—especially English readers—cared enough to respond. In a 1913 essay titled “English Sentimentality,” John Balance argues that an inundation of feminine feeling has drowned out masculine reason; threefifths of the way through, a “Reader” intrudes: “I cannot let you continue. I note you intended this to be an essay, but I must make it a duologue.” By the end, dialogue alone cannot contain the reader’s emotion: now identified as an “English Reader,” he proclaims that The Mask is jealous of him and

Virtual Subscription

163

resolves to stop subscribing. Stage directions indicate that he “throws this copy at a statue of Venus and goes out to the Cafe´ Royal,” giving more verbs to the delightful, witty, yet inactive subscriber.71 By anticipating indignant subscribers, perhaps Craig hoped to diffuse them, or perhaps he simply wanted to ensure that they—like the reader who scrolls to the comments section before, or without, reading the article itself—came away with an opinion about him. In this light, Craig’s stage directions look more like a script to be followed rather than avoided. Interjection was precisely what Craig modeled for his subscribers, but instead of throwing a text, scribbling in the margins was his recommended form of readerly engagement. After all, what was marginalia if not another form of dramatic dialogue, but with Craig switching places to play interlocutor rather than authority figure? At one point, Craig conceived of a regular Mask column titled “Conversations with My Real Friends” in which he planned to publish his own notes alongside excerpts from books by long-dead Continental theatricalists such as Jules Champfleury and The´ophile Gautier.72 In a different issue, Craig included his comments around reprinted sections of an article on the current state of British theater by Manchester critic and playwright Allan Monkhouse.73 In a book review column, Craig instructed readers: “Where we correct statements made in books we do so in the hope that readers who possess the books in question will enter our correction in their margins.”74 As Craig moved from putting words in his readers’ mouths to their books, he modeled a theory of active reading that had different implications depending on whether subscribers identified mainly as theater professionals or theater enthusiasts. Professionals like actors and directors read in order to facilitate performances on literal stages, while enthusiasts read in order to perform on metaphorical ones. As noted earlier, Mask subscription lists were composed of both theater professionals and theater enthusiasts. When readers belonged to the former camp, thumbing apparently eclipsed throwing: for every paying subscriber, possibly dozens of “young employe´s” perused what Craig called a “single well-thumbed copy.” In an article titled “After You’ve Finished with It,” Craig’s persona John Balance blamed The Mask’s intellectual rigor for its failure to recruit subscribers from the English stage. Though happy to freeload off theater managers and friends, the young theater employee “dislike[s] study, dislike[s] reading books,” and “would feel it extremely extravagant to spend a shilling a month upon printed matter which is only

164

Chapter 5

calculated to make him wince.”75 Financial concerns were real enough: as Barbara Couper, a twenty-five-year-old actress from Surrey, explained in a note sent with her 1928 subscription: “I had to overdraw to get you this year, but that is of no consequence. I should steal rather than go without you.”76 But while Craig’s calculating suggests that English theater employees were the subscribers The Mask sought most rather than least, his emphasis on study and reading reimagines the long-standing contest between page and stage as one in which reading has become essential to theater making. Craig introduced a theory of active reading for theater professionals, beginning with the stage director. In the first “The Art of the Theatre” dialogue, the director observes that the act of reading and rereading drama is central to his role; it is his duty to follow the text faithfully, by taking notes as he reads the play “at least a dozen times,” with lengthy intervals during which “his mind’s eye mixes his palette . . . with the colours which the impression of the play has called up.” Romantic critics like Hazlitt and Lamb had seized on Hamlet’s phrase “the mind’s eye” to justify a readerly privileging of page over stage, but Craig differs from his predecessors by insisting on the importance of reading and rereading from the perspective of production rather than reception. According to Craig’s theory, the director’s vision will grow more definite with each successive reading, and he must continually “make a note” of his impressions.77 Though the goal of reading is to produce an actual stage performance, reading itself becomes a repeatable performance. Craig practiced what he preached: his personal copy of Macbeth shows annotations, stage designs, and character sketches made over sixty-five years. The inscription reads: “I worked on this play here in (its book) in 1896, 1897, 1907–1909, 1910, 1911, 1922–1923, 1928–29, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1938, 1960–61.” A note from 1953 states: “In this book I have thrown bits in without care as to whether one bit flatly nullifies another. . . . From this pile of rubbish let’s see if one cannot draw out all the (A) bits and the (B) bits and so on. . . . Not as a learned person like Dover would do, but like any innocent ignoramus like Smith man-of-the stage would do: and, if I must, some EGC added.” By contrasting himself with textual editor J. Dover Wilson, Craig dismisses a purifying scholarly apparatus in search of an ideal text for one that better renders the excitement of sequential and possibly contradictory readings. Next to Lady Macbeth’s line: “Your face, my thane, is as a book where men may read strange matters,” Craig’s note from 1909 reads: “Yes but she reads it wrongly. His thoughts are of Malcolm—hers of the king.” In 1951, he crossed out the

Virtual Subscription

165

second sentence and wrote below: “Does he think at all?”78 For Craig, active reading meant annotating. It is worth pointing out that Craig’s attitude toward reading plays differs substantially from the literary approach promoted by Bernard Shaw a few years earlier. That both men sought to control their readers through print (Craig with his dramatic dialogues and Shaw with his extensive stage directions in reading editions), and that both later found themselves attracted to fascist dictators, should not obscure their divergences.79 One was a symbolist who thought that politics had no place in the theater; the other, a social realist whose characters talked politics endlessly. Moreover, Craig kept up a long-running feud with Shaw, resenting (among other things) the playwright’s stage directions, which Craig claimed inhibited stage directors.80 Shaw, for his part, thought of Craig as a talented but unreliable artist who consistently had failed to translate his ideas from page to stage, and the two even traded barbs to this effect in The Mask, to which Shaw subscribed.81 Craig’s insistence on the importance of reading and rereading plays for the purpose of realizing stage performances clashed with Shaw’s desire to have his own drama appreciated primarily as literary rather than theatrical art, and when publishing designs for an uncompleted project to stage Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) in Berlin, Craig actually claimed that he had been forced to ignore the stage directions and omit the dialogue.82 As far as print was concerned, Shaw’s ideal was only ever supposed to be Craig’s springboard, although ironically the opposite proved true in practice. Craig later argued that active reading was as critical for the actor as for the director. But instead of sticking to playtexts, Craig prescribed a syllabus for actors so that they could avoid becoming “stereotyped faces.” In his 1925 essay “Books and Actors,” Craig claimed that the main reason why good actors do not exist today is because they do not study as artists study and do not use their brains or imaginations to work—and although reading is painful work, it makes actors restless to do better work. Craig offered a list of exemplary actor-writers and a reading list of histories and technical books from “nearly every land”—Luigi Rasi’s Comici Italiani (1897), Karl Mantzius’s A History of Theatrical Art (1905), George Odell’s Shakespeare: From Betterton to Irving (1920).83 Unsurprisingly, Craig saved his own writings for last, but he would not have been the only person to include them: in her testimonial postcard, Emily Willard insisted that The Mask “should be on the bookshelf of every actor and actress if they wish to be conversant

166

Chapter 5

with everything great connected with their craft.”84 Willard’s use of “conversant” points to the dialogic engagement Craig modeled by publishing dramatic dialogues and his own marginalia. For actors and directors alike, Craig represented active reading, rereading, and annotating as a performance that would lead to improvements on actual stages. Yet for readers who identified mainly as theater enthusiasts rather than theater professionals, The Mask was a virtual stage in itself, at least by the logic of Craig’s dramatic dialogues. In a 1915 Mask dialogue between a “Queer Reader” and “The Editor,” Craig represented readers’ mailed queries as dialogue (Figure 10). As a result, readers of all occupations were invited to imagine themselves jumping up from their seats, so to speak, and onto the stage. The punctuation at the end of the editor’s last line of dialogue—a period where a question mark should be—suggests how much Craig resisted playing interlocutor for the reader, even as he demonstrates an awareness of how pedantic the dialogue form could be. Just as the English Reader above turns a monologue into a duologue, here “Queerer Reader” turns a duologue into a trialogue, but in this case Queerer Reader registers the impossibility of reducing Craig’s various reading audiences to a single speaking role—a lesson Craig seemingly learned halfway into The Mask’s run. As well he would: this dramatic dialogue reflected actual exchanges between Craig and his subscribers. It seems subscribers enjoyed playing no role so actively as copy editor—which was handy, since Craig could not afford to employ one.85 For one Dorset reader, every two Mask mistakes merited one potential subscriber: painter Francis H. Newbery returned his testimonial postcard listing six errata from the latest issue on one side and three potential subscribers on the other.86 Craig joked about such slipups in an editorial notice filled with deliberate mistakes: “Two suhscribers have written to us to complain that they have discovered errors in the text of their copies of ‘The Mask’. This leads us to fear lest these errorrs may have crept into other copies whose owners have borne the discovery without complaint, and we therefore ooffer a comprehensive apology for our Printers’ errors to all readers of ‘The Mask’, past, psesent or to come.”87 In his suggestion that only some copies of the magazine would have errors, Craig playfully inverts the logic whereby marginalia individualizes a text. Reciprocally, subscribers recognized that anything they told The Mask was fair game for reproduction. As Bristol film director Thorold Dickinson wrote in a letter to The Mask: “(at the risk of being quoted on the back page of

Figure 10. “A Design for a Scene,” The Mask 7, no. 2 (May 1915): 165. Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University.

168

Chapter 5

your admirable journal) [I] beg to state my opinion that The Mask is the only sign of active energy in the English theatre today.”88 Dickinson was never, in fact, quoted on the back page. Nevertheless, the active reading practices championed by The Mask’s dramatic dialogues and taken up in subscribers’ correspondence elevated ordinary readers to the level of worldfamous actors like Ellen Terry, Yvette Guilbert, and John Martin-Harvey, whose thoughts about The Mask were blurbed in promotional materials and reproduced in the magazine’s symposia. If, as Lori Cole has argued, little magazine questionnaires “instantiate a community [by calling] a provisional collective into being,” Craig’s virtual community joined subscribers to contributors, theater enthusiasts to theater professionals.89 The postcard prompt “What I Think of the Mask” was a more succinct formulation of a question posed to actors whose answers constituted one symposium: “Do you consider The Mask does wrong in asking everything of the Theatre as a Public Institution and as a Fine Art?”90 Aligning himself with MartinHarvey, Bristol solicitor and subscriber R. N. Green-Armytage wrote a letter to The Mask claiming that “our actors and public [are] without touchstones or standards. Men like Martin-Harvey cannot face the odds alone, unless they are prepared to starve! We get the diet we deserve.”91 Here, GreenArmytage credits artistic advancement to both actors and public: actors starve without a paying public; the public starves without artistic nourishment. If theater professionals and enthusiasts were part of the same virtual community of subscribers, both parts of that community looked up to Craig. Yiddish actress Bertha Kalich captured this comprehensive community in her own blurbed testimonial: “The Mask is a school to the actor and to the general public.”92 As noted earlier, Craig had for a time believed that The Mask would be the organ for an actual school—his School for the Art of the Theatre, which operated briefly from 1913 until World War I. The school intended to train theater professionals in a list of areas similar to the topics covered in the magazine: gymnastics, music, voice, scene and costume design, stage modeling, fencing, dancing, mime, improv, lighting theory, and theater history.93 In a Mask dramatic dialogue from early 1914, “Master” quizzes “Pupil” on terms like “stage rostrum” and “stage brace”: Pupil. But, Master, I thought you hated all that nonsense. I thought you detested Bayreuth, the Lyceum, and His Majesty’s. I thought you wrote and fought against the old-fashioned stage for years. . . . that you planned out a new stage which you believed in, and which was to be the Stage of the Future. . . .

Virtual Subscription

169

Master. . . . You come here expecting me to tear up the old Theatre before your eyes. . . . You expected to find an accomplice and you are surprised to find a master.94 Comparing The Mask’s metaphorical stage to more famous literal stages (“Bayreuth, the Lyceum, His Majesty’s”), Craig conversely imagines the “old Theatre” as paper only in order to disavow tearing it up. By the time it had become clear that his school would exist only on paper (that is, as The Mask), Craig realized that his journal could no longer be so pedantic if it wanted to survive. While Craig penned, republished, or commissioned articles on a variety of theater history topics—from Javanese marionettes and Indian dramatic technique to Reformation and Restoration theater—he also increasingly ceded the lectern, publishing essays and old theater designs contributed by subscribers.95 Unsurprisingly, this, too, became part of a performance managed by Craig. In a 1927 article titled “An Astounding Discovery Made by a Subscriber to ‘The Mask,’ ” the editor announced that a subscriber had unearthed a rare plan of a Florentine theater that would be reproduced in the next issue, yet he neglected to mention that the subscriber was Craig’s son and sometime assistant, Edward Carrick.96 What was the value of saying that a contribution came from a subscriber rather than a family member and assistant? Apart from the collective effort implied, subscribers could be used to make a point better than could a named, polemical contributor. When in 1925 professor Allardyce Nicoll proposed a School of Dramatic Study and Research at the University of London, The Mask ran a letter from “One of your Earliest Subscribers” asking when Craig’s School for the Art of the Theatre was due to reopen.97 Craig thought that Nicoll had stolen his idea; the early subscriber may well have been a plant to emphasize who got there first. However, the difference between their schools was that Nicoll ultimately aimed to improve reception rather than production. In a series of Mask articles, Nicoll acknowledged that university graduates would comprise a great many theater audiences and that they ought to learn to appreciate theater through formal study “during the comparative leisure of their student days.”98 Though Craig’s school targeted future theater professionals and Nicoll’s future theater enthusiasts, The Mask was seen as the print extension of both projects; by 1925, public and university libraries made up over 10 percent of Mask subscribers, and Nicoll claimed that his school would “engage in research work such as is so ably presented in the

170

Chapter 5

pages of ‘The Mask.’ ”99 In The Mask’s later years especially, making such research work seem like a genuine dialogue between theater artists and subscribers appears to have been just as important as whether it actually was one.

A Girdle Round the Earth This chapter began by comparing Lennox Robinson’s laudatory comments with those from Craig’s American, Swedish, and Japanese subscribers, but after reading The Mask’s many dramatis personae and dramatic dialogues, a question remains: How did the journal negotiate between its English and non-English readers? The headnote to Craig’s marginalia on Allan Monkhouse’s 1924 state-of-British-theater article begins: “As The Mask goes to Roma, Moscow, New York, California and Japan, let me state before I write these Notes that it is felt that they can only interest readers in England. Our friends abroad will remember that England is entirely surrounded by water, and things such as ideas take a long time reaching us in England: for we are born obstinate—and it can’t be helped.”100 As Craig compares the border crossings of a physical magazine to those of a metaphysical idea, “Our” (The Mask) slips into “us” (resident in England) and then “we” (the English, even when they reside abroad); the magazine’s mobility permitted Craig to be simultaneously in England and attacking it from outside. Sustaining those attacks required appealing to international subscribers even as Craig seated his English readers in the proverbial front row. If the little magazine has a reputation as a “world form,” Eric Bulson has argued that this results from globetrotting contributors rather than geographically dispersed subscribers. Bulson emphasizes the numerous material challenges facing international delivery: postage fees, customs, shipping timetables, and agents and booksellers who refused to pay.101 Although The Mask encountered all of these obstacles, Craig still managed to send it to an international list of subscribers throughout its run, which included a few erratic and severely downsized issues during World War I, when its international contributors became potential liabilities.102 By 1929, The Mask at one time or another had counted subscribers in England, America, Italy, Japan, Canada, France, Germany, Russia, Switzerland, Australia, India, China, Denmark, the Netherlands, Taiwan, the Philippines, South Africa, Ireland, Scotland, Austria, Belgium, Mexico, Spain, and Wales. For the readers who kept it afloat, The Mask meant access. As Michigan subscriber and puppeteer Paul

Virtual Subscription

171

McPharlin enthused: “One of the things about ‘The Mask’ which makes it so delightful and valuable to me as a student of the history of the theatre is its policy of publishing articles and designs that are entirely new or so unaccessible as to be practically so.”103 Unlike today’s websites that publish, link to, or repackage content from other websites for which the barriers to entry are equally low, The Mask could better justify aggregation; like Google Books, it provided global access (albeit to a very small subscription audience) to materials that until then could be found only in a couple of libraries. In an example of global access that particularly heightened the tension between local and mobile, The Mask published miniaturized reprints of eighteenth-century city maps, inviting readers to “see playhouses in their respective cities [and] trace the road the actors took when they went down from their houses.” Craig may have encouraged readers to imagine Garrick or Sheridan in London, Talma or Beaumarchais in Paris, or La Gabrielli or Metastasio in Rome, but only for the handful of subscribers actually located in each of these cities could tracing the roads have been done with anything more than a finger. When Craig claimed that reading the huge folios on his worktable was “like nursing the donkey which tried to play the lap-dog,” the downsized maps further emphasized The Mask’s mobility.104 In this way, The Mask not only went to wherever subscribers resided but took them to as many places as they could take it. Craig played up this mobility, comparing The Mask to an explorer in the mold of Robert Falcon Scott. In Craig’s second dramatic dialogue on “The Art of the Theatre,” the director has just returned to London from abroad, where he has hunted, conquered, and made friends with “an absurd monster called The Theatrical.”105 The director likens himself to an Arctic explorer as he assesses the theatrical activity in Europe’s considerably warmer metropolises, from the Paris Opera to the Berlin Schauspielhaus. In a 1911 dialogue between a “Critic” and a “Professional Performer,” the critic advises: “Take the trouble to go abroad so as to study the work of your contemporaries. Visit Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Munich, Vienna and Moscow more often; and then do not forget that there are possibly still more Important places for you to visit, . . . Warsaw, Cracow, Amsterdam, Naples, Palermo, Budapest.”106 The critic’s list of cities that would have been relatively accessible to the English traveler evokes the list of cities where The Mask so often boasted of circulating. Reconfiguring the familiar model of touring performer and sedentary spectator, Craig advises the insular theater professional to become a cultured theatergoer by traveling—or simply by reading the Mask.

172

Chapter 5

Juxtaposed to literal theater buildings, the little magazine’s mobility was thrown into even sharper relief, since journals were mailable, whereas theaters were not—a point neatly encapsulated by Florence’s historic Arena Goldoni stage, which for many years anchored the magazine’s mailing address, ensuring that subscribers could always reach The Mask even if The Mask couldn’t reach subscribers.107 As Craig pursued his dream of being given an English theater of his own, his journal stretched to new limits the gap between “theater” as building and “Theater” as subject. As John Semar wrote in 1924: “The Theatre is a world thing: the theatre of England is a local thing. In the World Theatre the theatre of England has a place, but not the first place . . . UNTIL all the artists, and the whole art of the Theatre, be reinstated in the English Theatre, and placed under one leader. . . . The English Theatre will remain in the place it now fills with such unnecessary distinction,—a back seat.”108 Here, Craig puns on “local” to suggest a provincialism that extends beyond any particular English theater building. Conversely, he imagines “World Theatre”—a term only just starting to circulate in the 1920s, thanks to both Craig’s magazine and proposals for “World Theatre” festivals in New York (1925) and London (1927)—as an arena populated with various national theater traditions in which “place” refers not to geographical space but to relative position.109 If England were to move up to “first place,” it would do so by selecting a leader and training a team strong enough to compete against Russia, Germany, Italy, and France in what Craig depicted as a theatrical Olympics. Despite being sustained by international subscribers, The Mask focused on advancing Craig’s bid to represent England as director of a national theater. Or, moving from playing field to battlefield, The Mask’s format and mobility enabled Craig to analogize it to a weapon for exploding the English stage. Suzanne Churchill and Adam McKible have attributed the military metaphors that editors and scholars have adopted to describe little magazines to both the genre’s characteristically adversarial stance and pragmatic jockeying in a crowded field, not to mention the two world wars going on in the background.110 Craig reached for these metaphors too, comparing the distribution of the magazine to the distribution of weapons; what is perhaps more striking is how these metaphors were formulated to enlist the support of subscribers, now figured as soldiers. Lamenting that he could not afford Caslon old Face, an English-baroque type then in vogue with private presses (and with Bernard Shaw), Craig called on subscribers to furnish the “polish necessary to give the finishing touch to our gun.”111 On

Virtual Subscription

173

another occasion, he compared the magazine to a battle flag: publishing designs by Albrecht Du¨rer and calling them cubist, the journal asked “the thousand readers of The Mask to keep their heads, not to crow too exultantly over their neighbours, and not to go down the High Street waving The Mask in their hands crying ‘we always said our journal was the best, the most up-to-date.’ ” By contrast, to “the enemies of the theatre, the chattering circle of London, the pretended lovers of the stage,” Craig dedicated a narrow rectangular “blank space,” giving his enemies nothing to wave in the air.112 Even the magazine’s name, Craig later claimed, was meant to suggest a “fight to the death, never give in—therefore, never let anyone know who was fighting, how many the numbers, who were the assistants, and what exactly was the cause.”113 English subscribers took up these militaristic metaphors but pointed them in the opposite direction. Moving from physical magazine to metaphysical mudslinging, photographer and subscriber John H. Ahern of Hampstead wrote in a letter to The Mask: “I like the paper ‘The Mask’ is printed on and the type styles and sizes used, and I like the city plans very much and the book reviews are usually pretty good. What I don’t like is the everlasting carping depreciation and mud chucking at everybody who is trying to do anything in the Theatre over here.”114 Historian and subscriber W. A. D. Englefield of Streatham likewise wrote to say that The Mask’s criticism “inclined to be destructive rather than constructive.”115 By contrast, actress and subscriber Emily Willard found the combat invigorating, saying that she loved the contributors “who come, lance joyously, fairly poised, advance, tilt, throw the opponent! Then with lance or foot ask ‘Want more? I am ready to give it.’ Or the lie, and the sham is rammed home in the most satisfying manner and way; down the liar’s throat.”116 But the arena metaphor resulted as much from The Mask’s geographically dispersed subscribers as from its ideologically combative tone. Paradoxically, Craig’s perennial need for content to buttress his leadership campaign pushed the journal to cover increasingly international theater topics, since getting the journal to England depended as much on financing and filling it as mailing it. Naturally, content was packaged for Craig’s implied Anglophone reader: translations from German, French, and Italian texts made up almost 10 percent of the magazine’s text; it included the first English translation of F. T. Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” in 1914.117 The Mask further translated Continental ideas like cubism and futurism, and connected these ideas to European theater in articles about Richard

174

Chapter 5

Wagner, Ste´phane Mallarme´, Venetian costume, and Spanish drama. As Craig burned through material close to home, in the 1910s he began to research or commission detailed articles on Javanese puppets, Indian dramatic technique, and Japanese noh and kabuki.118 These articles kicked off a not-for-profit theatrical orientalism, inspiring modernists like Yeats, who first read about noh in The Mask.119 But while Craig’s orientalism might seem appropriative in the sense that he was bulking up his magazine in order to make a much narrower point to his English readers, his scholarly approach to European and non-European practices alike both reflected The Mask’s international readership and enabled intercultural transfers of knowledge: the journal subsequently experienced a rise in Japanese readers, who by 1929 made up over a tenth of subscribers. When the magazine folded that year, only around a quarter of subscribers lived in England; two-fifths lived in the United States. Like internationalist projects more generally, Craig’s internationalism skewed West and sometimes evoked cultural colonialism, as when subscriber Evelyn Nisbet of Kent used her testimonial postcard to suggest potential subscriber Miss V. L. Bawa of Colombo, Ceylon, noting: “She will be very interested I think in the article on the production of Shakespeare in India. He was produced in Ceylon at the Parsi Theatre quite 20 years ago.”120 But Craig increasingly made gestures to accommodate his non-English subscribers, eventually insisting on printing the name of each town “as spelt by its inhabitants—not as spelt by a visitor.”121 Still, Craig did not feel the need to specify “an English visitor.” For a time, The Mask even ran an advertisement claiming the journal was “so beautiful that even for those ignorant of English it is worth subscribing to it,” but, like the advertisement itself, Craig’s private correspondence with Lees suggests that he prioritized knowledge of English when recruiting subscribers abroad.122 As we acknowledge the contradictions and limitations of an English theatrical internationalism, even for a magazine as mobile as The Mask, a helpful counterpoint might be the state-funded theater with which Craig yearned to be associated. Though plans for a Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre had long been spurred by comparisons to national theaters in Prague, Dresden, Vienna, and Paris, and had long been debated in terms of whether the repertoire would be European or strictly English, committee organizers originally did not consider asking foreigners for subscriptions. But in 1911, the committee dropped “National” from the title, in the empty hope that contributions would “come pouring in” from around

Virtual Subscription

175

the world.123 When the committee sent a fundraising delegate to America in 1927, The Mask printed three letters from readers—two applauding the effort and another condemning it: “the spectacle of unauthorized little bodies of people in Europe, Asia, America and Africa going round with the hat on Shakespeare’s and England’s behalf somehow does not strike one as a spectacle warranted to encourage a right understanding of Great Britain’s power, or resources.”124 While international subscription sustained The Mask, the model apparently was not viable for an actual theater. Today, Western academics tend to think of World Theater (along with its siblings global, multicultural, and transnational theater) primarily as a discipline encompassing dramatic traditions from beyond Europe and North America. As Glenn Odom writes, the world in World Theater signifies “that portion of the world which is not Europe, Russia, or the U.S.— which is to say, most of the world.”125 Even while Craig’s journal pursued self-serving aims, The Mask envisioned World Theater as a virtual arena in which the common language was English. In this way, Craig’s journal models a different version of World Theater than one in which Shakespeare or Ibsen is translated and toured around the globe, or another in which modernists carry out—depending on whom you ask—either orientalist appropriations or intercultural exchanges involving Balinese dancing, Chinese acting, or Japanese noh.126 Save for Craig’s cult of personality and desperation to lead an English national theater, The Mask in many ways anticipates more recent theatrical internationalisms promoted by academic journals like Theatre Research International and news sites like the Theatre Times. The broader idea that Western and non-Western performance traditions should be studied and discussed alongside one another, in English but with participants drawn from around the world, resonates in conferences like Performance Studies international and the International Federation for Theatre Research. By extension, critiques of World Theater apply to Craig’s magazine. In Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture (1993), Rustom Bharucha calls Craig out for his appropriation of Sanskrit theater, suggesting that Shakuntala gets reduced to nothing more than Craig’s “Belle Dame Sans Merci.” “It is bad enough,” he writes, “when a text like Shakuntala (the source of so many myths of Indian grace, wisdom, romance) is decontextualized from its aesthetic and social context, but it is worse when a traditional performance is stripped of its links to the lives of the people for whom it is performed.”127 Bharucha’s point that we need to account for audiences strikes me as completely true, and not just for theater

176

Chapter 5

traditions that originate outside the West, as I hope this book has shown. Yet I would like to suggest that a reading even more faithful to the principle Bharucha sets out here would recognize that Craig’s internationalism was not due simply to an appropriative laziness or a contrived fatigue with Western traditions but rather to the very material need to represent the diversity of the subscribers who supported his theatrical project. That The Mask brought together readers from so many different countries updates the long-standing metaphor of the theatrum mundi. Here, the world is actually the world; men and women are not merely players but subscribers.

EPILOGUE

Subscribe Now

Theater offers us both an example of and a vocabulary for describing how subscription affected representational politics at the turn of the century. Subverting the much older practice of subscribing to gentlemen’s clubs and private balls, subscribers from “all ranks and stations in life” created their own spaces for performing social roles from which they had long been excluded. Where once hospitals, schools, museums, and libraries had been endowed by the wealthy for the benefit of the community, theater subscribers positioned themselves within a broader movement for democratic subscription lists, laying the groundwork both for extending the franchise and for supporting civic projects by taxation. Yet during the same years in which subscription was celebrated as a right for all citizens, the subscription theater revealed just how readily subscribers undermined that vision of democracy, whether by patronizing the citizens on whose behalf they claimed to speak (as when metropolitan repertorists compared provincial playgoers to schoolchildren and hospital patients), or by contributing to regressive causes (as when dramatic protagonists subscribed to anti-suffrage societies or corrupt political candidates), or by using their wealth to reinforce social barriers (as when well-to-do village residents kept their maids from starring roles). Subscribers might experience a greater collective sense of equality when mediated by printed ephemera than when actually gathered together, if they even gathered together at all; on the other hand, subscribers might use the mask of pseudonymity to either marginalize or misrepresent their fellow citizens. The theatrical logic of the theater program that teaches us to connect actors to roles helps explain how subscribers stood in for a rotating cast of different characters and communities: those with whom, for whom, in whose name, on whose behalf, and at

178

Epilogue

whose behest citizens subscribed. Could theater subscription continue to provide models for postwar representational politics? In economic terms, subscription might well be the fulcrum of the pivot in arts funding that Tracy Davis identifies, by way of Jacques Barzun, from a system of aristocratic patronage to one of taxation.1 Thanks to the Arts Councils of Great Britain (est. 1946) and Ireland (1951) and a 1948 UK Act of Parliament allowing local governments to devote a portion of rates to drama, by the 1970s, more than seventy repertory theaters and a hundred theater companies were receiving state or local subsidy across these countries.2 By 1958, the Arts Council of Great Britain referred to subscription as “private patronage” in our contemporary sense, expressing thanks to “those many thousands of men and women who subscribe to numerous ‘supporters’ clubs’ of theatres. . . . It is for their expression of personal concern and responsibility rather than for their monetary power that private patrons are to be cherished.”3 Cherished, perhaps, but hardly heeded: in the era of public subsidy, theater companies now needed to satisfy the Arts Council, regional arts boards, and local council authorities, each with their own attitudes toward repertoire. Audience representation fell by the wayside. The audience’s demotion became especially clear in the 1980s and 1990s, when over a quarter of Britain’s provincial theaters shuttered. Olivia Turnbull has described the case of Farnham’s Redgrave Theatre. Although the theater had been built in 1974 with a majority of the funds raised by public subscription, in 1993 the Waverly Borough Council reduced the Redgrave’s municipal subsidy and pressured the theater to mount pre–West End commercial tryouts, alienating the local audience as well as the Redgrave’s other major funding body, the South East Arts regional arts board. Attendance dropped precipitously, and the theater was forced to close the following year. To settle debts, the Redgrave was gutted and the costumes and props—many of which had been donated by the audience—were sold off. Even more alarmingly, over £20,000 raised by a public-subscription campaign to “Save Our Theatre” disappeared into the council budget without the subscribers’ consent.4 Gone were the days when subscribers’ authority rivaled that of local councils. Downgraded in importance, the subscriber’s demographic narrowed in tandem with the rest of the theater audience’s, even as season-ticket subscriptions became the box-office mainstay for many provincial theaters in the later decades of the twentieth century.5 Where once subscription connoted democratic theater audiences, now it suggests precisely the opposite.

Epilogue

179

No longer seen as adventurous young clerks, plumbers, typists, and maids, subscribers instead have become known for being older, affluent, and— perhaps most damningly—complacent. Theater critic Mark Fisher recalls the 1970s Perth Theatre subscriber who “only minutes before curtain up, peered down at his programme” to find out which play was being performed, so unconcerned was he with the dramatic fare.6 The sleepwalking subscriber finds an even less flattering image in the ornery subscriber. Describing the more conservative strain of early 2000s National Theatre audiences, director Nicholas Hytner remembers: “We had to develop a way of communicating in code when we described a play to them in the rep leaflet. ‘Experimental’ was a useful turn-off.”7 Too particular, or not particular enough—today’s subscribers are the guarantors of boredom. Clutching to a repertoire they once helped pioneer, subscribers seem tethered to the past. Why do we still so often couch our anxieties about playgoers in terms of their relationships with printed ephemera? Where once a collection of playbills might have been taken as evidence of moral dissolution, today the endurance of relatively marginal programs, tickets, and leaflets offends the primacy of the live event: theatergoers may seem all the more frivolous when they fixate on the peel rather than the fruit. Yet strong affective responses to theatrical ephemera help us to better appreciate the performative qualities of historical ephemera from beyond the theater, moving from repertory leaflets to orphanage and trade-union leaflets, or, a century earlier, from theater tickets to the lottery, seamen’s, and Methodist tickets that, as Sarah Lloyd has claimed, “gave physical form to ideas and feelings.”8 Maurice Rickards has written that ephemera “represents the other half of history: the half without guile. When people put up monuments, published official war histories they had a constant eye on their audience and their history would adjust to suit, whereas ephemera was never expected to survive . . . so that it contains all sorts of human qualities which would otherwise be edited out.”9 While overlooked papers furnish evidence about overlooked persons, we do a disservice to turn-of-the-century subscribers if we assume that they engaged with ephemera without guile or without having kept a constant eye on their audience—whether repertory shareholders penning letters to newspaper editors, town residents signing petitions directed to local politicians, village amateurs selling programs to neighbors, or fraudsters peddling phony subscription lists to strangers. Ephemera were the material texts by which subscribers not only put on

180

Epilogue

shows but put up monuments: by circulating their names on sheets of paper, subscribers performed as political representatives for the dedicatees of citizens’ theaters, soldiers’ memorials, and children’s hospitals. Though subscription somewhat receded from view near the end of the twentieth century, in recent years, changes in communications technology have reawakened us to the commercial possibilities, at least, of what Forbes has dubbed “the subscription economy,” encompassing companies like Netflix, Spotify, and Zipcar, along with subscription boxes for niche items like comic books, vinyl records, fresh vegetables, and dog treats.10 Since 2013, Amazon has allowed customers to subscribe to products like tissues and toilet paper; even more recently, subscription has been mooted as a panacea to the online proliferation of worthless news. (As Facebook’s head of news has put it: “A social network that rewards only clicks, not subscriptions, is like a dating service that encourages one-night stands but not marriages.”)11 To be sure, these companies may make their subscribers feel less like fickle customers and more like loyal club members by providing ondemand access to a catalogue of movies, music, automobiles, household items, and news articles; part of the appeal of subscription boxes is that individual products are selected by the company on the subscriber’s behalf, not unlike Victorian circulating libraries that chose the books sent to subscribers by parcel. However, apart from the more historicist bloggers who half-seriously recommended reviving public subscription to pay for largescale civic events like Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding or Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, in the Internet age, civic subscription now goes by the name of crowdfunding.12 Like subscription, crowdfunding remains ambivalent about the distinction between commercial and not-forprofit enterprises (although most crowdfunding platforms, like the newspapers that preceded them, are for-profit companies). Also like subscription, crowdfunding comes in open-to-all or invitation-only—as well as membership, donor, and shareholder—varieties.13 Perhaps the biggest difference between subscription and crowdfunding is in their stance toward government. Where earlier public-subscription schemes anticipated eventual state or municipal subsidy, many of today’s “civic crowdfunding” campaigns aim to renew goods and services that the government once provided, frequently privatizing them in the process—from terraces, parks, and historical buildings to public-transportation links, neighborhood security services, and foreign-language classes. As Anna Minton has pointed out, many public services fall through the cracks: the last decade has seen both the rise of

Epilogue

181

civic crowdfunding and the closure of over 350 British libraries; she further notes that although local councils in London, Manchester, and Liverpool have embraced crowdfunding as a stopgap, projects for stigmatized groups, such as addicts and the homeless, rarely feature as crowdfunding campaigns.14 If turn-of-the-century subscription looked forward to a cooperative relationship between citizens and government, today’s crowdfunding magnifies the shortcomings or failures of official institutions.15 In this wider context, supporting theaters has become attractive again, at least in theory: a recent search of “theater” on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter yields over ten thousand projects from around the world (most of them concentrated in the United States and Britain), which lend new life to the idea of a collective arts subsidy that exists outside state or local government.16 But while the new subscription economy and civic crowdfunding both suggest a kind of consumerist democracy in terms of the moneyed public getting what it wants, the turn-of-the-century ideal that aspired to democratic subscription lists has all but disappeared—save for, of all places, a theater whose critics bemoan the absence of representative subscribers. Joseph Beuys claimed that “art is a basic metaphor for all social freedoms, but it shouldn’t only be a metaphor, it should be a real means, in daily life, to go in and transform the fields of power in society.”17 Though this study has argued for subscription’s importance to turn-of-the-century Britain and Ireland, questions about collective funding drive the representational politics of other art-making societies. One of the most popular plays of the modern kabuki repertoire is Kanjincho¯, or The Subscription List (1840). In that play, set in eleventh-century Japan but with a plot that would have been recognizable to many of the theatergoers featured in this study, a servant helps his master cross into enemy lands by pretending that both men are priests collecting subscriptions to rebuild a temple. In a famous scene, the servant bluffs for a road guard by reading aloud from a scroll that is actually blank, conjuring an imaginary collective from nothing. The Subscription List was the first kabuki play to be adapted closely from a noh play—in this case, a play called Ataka (1465), which had been composed and performed at a time when the hitherto samurai-exclusive noh theater was being opened to the general public through kanjin noh, or subscription noh performances held to raise funds to construct or repair temples.18 The original noh play encodes this new theatergoing public as though by magic, with the servant’s blank scroll metaphorically filled by the very real subscribers who sat watching the performance, willing the servant’s success.

182

Epilogue

While the original guard is fooled, in the kabuki version, the guard catches sight of the blank scroll—but he decides to let the men pass anyway.19 By toppling dramatic irony and bringing guard into complicity with audience, the change allegorized the difference between the older noh and the more inclusive kabuki, for which commoners no longer needed to subscribe in order to attend. Even more than the original, The Subscription List used its eponymous prop to remind playgoers that their presence in the theater was historically contingent. As the prop asked them to situate themselves in relation to the world depicted onstage and that beyond the theater walls, perhaps playgoers imagined that they were part of a collective whose access to theaters brokered access to political power in the wider society: much as British and Irish subscription plays participated in suffrage and nationalindependence campaigns, The Subscription List anticipated the Meiji government’s formal abolishment of the feudal class structure in the 1860s and 1870s. And yet, that the play takes its name from a bogus list might have reminded playgoers that the subscription ideal often was precisely that: an ideal. Like the guard confronting the servant, playgoers may have asked themselves about the extent to which subscription legitimately represents other citizens—or only ever pretends to.

NOTES

Introduction 1. August Wilson, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” American Theatre 13, no. 7 (1996): 14–16. 2. Glenn B. Voss and Zannie Giraud Voss, Theatre Facts 2014: A Report on the Fiscal State of the Professional Not-for-Profit American Theatre (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2014). 3. Lyn Gardner, “Theatre Membership Schemes: A Case of Short-Term Gain for LongTerm Pain?” Guardian, January 24, 2014. Season-ticket subscriptions in various forms have been around UK theaters since the 1970s. 4. Danny Newman is widely credited for evangelizing postwar theater subscription. Danny Newman, Subscribe Now!: Building Arts Audiences Through Dynamic Subscription Promotion (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1977). For a British perspective, see Vanessa Rawlings-Jackson, Where Now?: Theatre Subscription Selling in the ’90s?: A Report on the American Experience (London: Arts Council of England, 1996). The neighboring disciplines of musicology, sociology, book history, and cultural studies have better explored the origins of subscription. See, for example, Otto Erich Deutsch, “The Subscribers to Mozart’s Private Concerts,” Music & Letters 22, no. 3 (1941): 225–34. For a discussion of Georgian opera’s “subscription culture,” see Jennifer Hall-Witt, Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780–1880 (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2007), 57–97. For a case study of orchestra subscribers, see Fabien Accominotti, Shamus R. Khan, and Adam Storer, “How Cultural Capital Emerged in Gilded Age America: Musical Purification and Cross-Class Inclusion at the New York Philharmonic,” American Journal of Sociology 123, no. 6 (2018): 1743–83. For subscription libraries, see Geoffrey Forster and Alan Bell, “The Subscription Libraries and Their Members,” in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, ed. Alistair Black and Peter Hoare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 147–68. For similarities between the subscription premiums of the Royal Society of Arts (est. 1754) and Bernie Sanders’s proposed Medical Innovation Prize Fund Act (2011), see Steven Johnson, Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age (New York: Penguin, 2012), 121–48. 5. Richard Schechner, “Ford, Rockefeller, and Theatre,” Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 1 (1965): 42–43. 6. Richard Schechner and Andre Gregory, “The Theatre of the Living Arts,” Tulane Drama Review 11, no. 4 (1967): 21. 7. Emphasis mine. Anna Broinowski, “Why Did the Actor Cross the Road?” About Performance, no. 3 (1997): 121.

184

Notes to Pages 2–4

8. Christopher B. Balme, The Theatrical Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), ix. Bennett describes the subscriber’s horizon of expectations: “While, on the one hand, the purchase of a subscription or the early booking of tickets can build interest and anticipation, surely, on the other, the remoteness of the decision to attend from actual experience of the event might well add an element of unresponsiveness.” Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (New York: Routledge, 1990), 124. 9. Matthew Arnold, “The French Play in London,” Nineteenth Century, August 1879, 243. Among other places, the quotation reappears in William Archer and Harley Granville Barker, A National Theatre: Scheme & Estimates (London: Duckworth, 1907), vii; St. John Greer Ervine, The Theatre in My Time (London: Rich & Cowan, 1933), 82; George Rowell and Tony Jackson, The Repertory Movement: A History of Regional Theatre in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 18; Cary M. Mazer, “New Theatres for a New Drama,” in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, ed. Kerry Powell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 211. This study is able to focus on the cultural dimensions of theater subscription only thanks to the thorough economic analysis of Tracy Davis, who concludes that professional not-for-profit theaters “are with one exception [a subscription theater from 1811] limited to the latter part of the Victorian period and the Edwardian era.” Tracy C. Davis, The Economics of the British Stage, 1800–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 231. This study is further indebted to Claire Cochrane for charting the economic structures underpinning commercial and not-for-profit theater in the twentieth century. Claire Cochrane, Twentieth-Century British Theatre: Industry, Art and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 10. For example, Sir John Vanbrugh built the Haymarket Theatre in 1705 with the help of aristocratic subscribers. As Colly Cibber recounts: “[Vanbrugh] raised a Subscription of thirty Persons of Quality, at one hundred Pounds each, in Consideration whereof every Subscriber, for his own Life, was to be admitted, to whatever Entertainments should be publickly perform’d there, without farther Payment for his Entrance.” Quoted in A. M. Nagler, A Source Book in Theatrical History (London: Constable, 1959), 245–46. The Theatres Royal in Birmingham and Bristol offered season-ticket subscriptions at various points throughout the nineteenth century. 11. C. H. Reilly, “Repertory Theatre and Its Aims,” Education, August 16, 1912. 12. Caroline Heim, Audience as Performer: The Changing Role of Theatre Audiences in the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2015), 120. 13. Peter Clark’s distinction between British “private subscription clubs” and “public subscription societies” can be extended to the subscription phenomenon more generally. For example, Clark observes that “by the 1790s the capital’s Academy of Ancient Music had evolved from a fashionable performing club into a major subscription body, mainly championing older composers like Handel and the Italians.” Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 191, 198, 216, 246, 445. 14. Arthur Bingham Walkley, “New Theatrical Demands,” Times Literary Supplement, January 17, 1902. 15. H. Hamilton Fyfe, “The Stage Society’s Decline—‘Hannele’ by the Play Actors,” World, April 15, 1908.

Notes to Pages 4–7

185

16. Emphasis mine. “Liverpool’s Repertory Scheme,” Sunday Chronicle, June 18, 1911; “Citizens’ Theatres,” Daily Chronicle, December 13, 1911. 17. Webb was quoting his friend, the journalist Julius West. George Bernard Shaw, Beatrice Webb, and Sidney Webb, Bernard Shaw and the Webbs, ed. Alex C. Michalos and Deborah C. Poff (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 122. In New York in the 1920s and 1930s, the Civic Repertory Theatre had 8,000 subscribers, and the Theatre Guild had as many as 80,000. Mark Fearnow, “Civic Repertory Theatre” and “Theatre Guild,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, ed. Dennis Kennedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 18. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Psychology Press, 1993), 149. 19. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London: Routledge, 2011), 104. For case studies of the Globe and Ubu, see Thomas Postlewait, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 25–86. 20. Ashley Dukes, “Drama,” New Age 6, no. 24 (April 14, 1910): 570. 21. Walter Macqueen-Pope, Carriages at Eleven: The Story of the Edwardian Theatre (London: Hutchinson, 1948), 119, 47; Jean Chothia, Andre´ Antoine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 28. 22. Arnold Bennett, Cupid and Commonsense: A Play in Four Acts. With a Preface on the Crisis in the Theatre (London: New Age Press, 1909), 23. 23. Lockwood further observes that subscription publication was “a commercially expanded opportunity for lots of people to play cheaply at being patrons of old, in the way masquerades (also a fashion of the 1720s) enabled people to play at identities otherwise closed off to them.” Thomas Lockwood, “Subscription-Hunters and Their Prey,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 34, no. 1 (2001): 130–32. Pat Rogers’s quotation and the Voyage to Lethe subscribers appear in the latter work. Pat Rogers, “Book Subscriptions Among the Augustans,” Times Literary Supplement (1972): 1539–40; A Voyage to Lethe (London, 1741). See also Hugh Reid, The Nature and Uses of Eighteenth-Century Book Subscription Lists (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010). 24. In a much-reprinted selection from an 1822 essay on prison reform, Sydney Smith writes: “The English . . . love dates, names, and certificates. In the midst of the most heartrending narratives, Bull requires the day of the month, the year of our Lord, the name of the parish, and the countersign of three or four respectable householders. After these affecting circumstances, he can no longer hold out; he gives way to the kindness of his nature—puffs, blubbers, and subscribes!” Sydney Smith, “The Third Report of the Committee of the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline, and for the Reformation of Juvenile Offenders,” Edinburgh Review 36, no. 72 (February 1822): 355–56. In 1853, William Blanchard Jerrold and W. H. Willis published a satirical subscription list in Household Words, observing that “the conspicuous advertisement of Miss Latterday’s name and euphonious address at full length, betrays an anxiety that her benevolent desires, together with the fact of her being the possessor of Latterborough Hall, should be extensively known to the public at large.” Quoted in Catherine Waters, Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008), 33–34.

186

Notes to Pages 7–15

25. Cecil Chisholm, Repertory: An Outline of the Modern Theatre Movement; Production, Plays, Management (London: Peter Davies, 1934), 200; Rawlings-Jackson, Where Now? 15. 26. See Monica Brito Vieira and David Runciman, Representation (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 7–9, 25, 32–33. 27. See Robert Belknap, The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists: From Homer to Joyce (London: MacLehose, 2009); Lucie Dolezˇalova´, ed., The Charm of a List: From the Sumerians to Computerised Data Processing (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009); Liza Kirwin, Lists: To-Dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010); Shaun Usher, Lists of Note: An Eclectic Collection Deserving of a Wider Audience (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2015). 28. See Julie Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book: 1480–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Elizabeth Miller, Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 82–166. 29. For recent monographs on printed ephemera, see Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); Susan Zieger, The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018); Gillian Russell, The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century: Sociability, Print, and the Cultures of Collecting, 1640–1860 (forthcoming). See also Martin Andrews, “The Importance of Ephemera,” in A Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 434–50; Michael Twyman, “Printed Ephemera,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5: 1695– 1830, ed. Michael F. Suarez and Michael L. Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 66–82; Michael Harris, “Printed Ephemera,” in Book: A Global History, ed. Michael F. Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 226–39. 30. Using Python and MySQL, Michael Fountaine and I converted J. P. Wearing’s multivolume reference series The London Stage, 1890–1959 into a relational database that can be queried and graphed. Wearing published the first volume in 1976; all seven volumes were updated and republished in 2013–14. J. P. Wearing, The London Stage, 1890–1959: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel, 7 vols. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013–14). 31. See, for example, David D. Hall, “The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600–1850,” in Printing and Society in Early America, ed. William L. Joyce (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1983), 1–47. 32. On coteries, see Lawrence S. Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); on crowds, see Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Tiews, eds., Crowds (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). Andrew Davies describes the long-standing split between literary and popular in Other Theatres: The Development of Alternative and Experimental Theatre in Britain (London: Macmillan Education, 1987). For more on Edo theater, see Satoko Shimazaki, Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 33. To rework a formulation from Henry Turner originally about early modern corporations: when turn-of-the-century British and Irish citizens “thought about the reality and existence of groups, especially their political groups, they tended to turn to” subscription. Henry

Notes to Pages 17–20

187

S. Turner, The Corporate Commonwealth: Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516–1651 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 18.

Chapter 1 1. J. P. Wearing lists 144 “play-producing societies”; many self-describe as “association,” “league,” “club,” “guild,” “group,” “circle.” J. P. Wearing, The London Stage, 1890–1959: Accumulated Indexes (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013–14), 1063–64. 2. Stage Society Third Annual Report, 1901–1902, Incorporated Stage Society Archive, GB 71 THM/136, V&A Department of Theatre and Performance, London. 3. Quoted in L. W. Conolly, “Mrs. Warren’s Profession and the Lord Chamberlain,” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 24, no. 1 (2004): 57. 4. Following Allardyce Nicoll, I use the term “commercial” to encompass all performances open to the paying public. This includes productions at West End establishments such as Drury Lane and the Haymarket, as well as at more self-consciously experimental theaters such as the Court, the Hampstead Everyman, and the Lyric in Hammersmith. As Nicoll writes: “All of [these playhouses] were, in their own ways, commercial.” Allardyce Nicoll, English Drama, 1900–1930: The Beginnings of the Modern Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 324–25. 5. C. G. Compton, “A Subsidised Theatre,” This Week’s Survey, April 16, 1904. 6. “Cocqcigrues” are mythical French monsters; the expression “the coming of the Cocqcigrues” is akin to “when pigs fly.” See Arthur Bingham Walkley, “New Theatrical Demands,” Times Literary Supplement, January 17, 1902. 7. The question of how such an avant-garde or modern dramatic repertoire fits into modernist studies is complex. While artist-centered analyses by Lawrence Switzky and Toril Moi have evaluated Shaw’s and Ibsen’s modernist credentials in terms of intellectual or minority aesthetics, theater-historical accounts by Tracy Davis and Claire Cochrane have readily used the adjectives “modernist” and “avant-garde” to describe the societies that premiered these dramatists’ plays. Lawrence Switzky, “Shaw Among the Modernists,” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 31, no. 1 (2011): 133–48; Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theatre, Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Davis, The Economics of the British Stage, 139, 235–36; Cochrane, Twentieth-Century British Theatre, 6–7, 67, 114. From a historical perspective, the term “avant-garde” could not be more appropriate, since it was introduced into French dramatic criticism to describe the repertoire of Andre´ Antoine’s The´aˆtre Libre (1887–96), the Parisian subscription society that inspired Grein’s Independent Theatre; in their own heyday, British subscription societies were considered “advanced.” Chothia, Andre´ Antoine, xv. To the extent that the subscription repertoire crossed over into the commercial theater, societies could be said to subtend the gap that Penny Farfan has identified between “hegemonic modernism and mainstream theatrical practice.” Penny Farfan, Women, Modernism, and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4. 8. L. Haden Guest, “Towards a Dramatic Renascence II,” New Age 3, no. 13 (July 25, 1908): 256. 9. For a new media take on ephemera, see Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “The Enduring Ephemeral, or The Future Is a Memory,” in Media Archaeology, ed. Jussi Parikka and Erkki Huhtamo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 184–206.

188

Notes to Pages 20–21

10. For Mun˜oz, ephemera also might include props, bodies, and even immaterial memories. Jose´ Esteban Mun˜oz, “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (1996): 10. For Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “the ephemeral encompasses all forms of behavior—everyday activities, story-telling, ritual, dance, speech, performance of all kinds.” Barbara KirshenblattGimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 30. For a history of ephemerality (rather than ephemera) in theater and performance studies, see Schneider, Performing Remains, 94–96. 11. Much exciting work on theatrical ephemera comes from scholars of the long eighteenth century. For more on playbills, see Jacky Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 36–66; Balme, The Theatrical Public Sphere, 47–73; Gillian Russell, “ ‘Announcing Each Day the Performances’: Playbills, Ephemerality, and Romantic Period Media/Theater History,” Studies in Romanticism 54, no. 2 (2015): 241–68. For more on tickets, see Gillian Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Sarah Lloyd, “Ticketing the British Eighteenth Century: ‘A Thing . . . Never Heard of Before,’ ” Journal of Social History 46, no. 4 (2013): 843–71. 12. Paul Clarke and Julian Warren, “Ephemera: Between Archival Objects and Events,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 30, no. 1 (2009): 59. 13. Andrews, “The Importance of Ephemera,” 448. 14. See Peters, Theatre of the Book, 105, 294–307. 15. As Leah Price points out: “the scant attention devoted to tickets and handbills may suggest that book historians’ case studies have been imported wholesale from whatever cognate discipline happens to carry the greatest institutional weight—in this case, literary criticism.” Leah Price, “Introduction: Reading Matter,” PMLA 121, no. 1 (2006): 11. Paula McDowell suggests that when the book is taken as a proxy for literature, then pamphlets, tickets, posters, and cards are labeled as “paraliterary,” “subliterary,” or “nonliterary” forms. Paula McDowell, “Of Grubs and Other Insects: Constructing the Categories of ‘Ephemera’ and ‘Literature’ in Eighteenth-Century British Writing,” Book History 15, no. 1 (2012): 48. 16. For modern drama scholars, the tension between page and stage has revealed the importance of genres like the published play, the closet drama, and the performance text. See William B. Worthen, Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Jennifer Buckley, Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019). Olga Taxidou has written of “the impasse created by a critical tradition that views textuality (literary or otherwise) and materiality (stage, bodily or otherwise) as mutually exclusive discourses.” Olga Taxidou, Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 3. See also Claire Warden, British Avant-Garde Theatre (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Julia Jarcho, Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater Beyond Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 17. See Cathy Lynn Preston and Michael James Preston, The Other Print Tradition: Essays on Chapbooks, Broadsides, and Related Ephemera (New York: Garland, 1995). 18. Michael Twyman, “The Long-Term Significance of Printed Ephemera,” RBM 9, no. 21 (2008): 22.

Notes to Pages 21–24

189

19. John Kennedy Melling, Discovering Theatre Ephemera (London: Shire Publications, 1974), 4. 20. John Lewis, Printed Ephemera: The Changing Use of Type and Letterforms in English and American Printing (London: Faber, 1969), 7–8; Sharon Marcus, “The Theatrical Scrapbook,” Theatre Survey 54, no. 2 (2013): 283–307. 21. David Vincent, The Rise of Mass Literacy: Post-Empiricism and the Reconstruction of Theory and Application: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 134–37. 22. See, for example, British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, Policy and Principles: General Aims (London, 1915), B/D412; circular regarding Mr. Lacey’s book, November 12, 1912, Divorce Law Reform Union Archive, 346.016606 DIV; Fabian News [1891–1904], Fabian Society Archive, GB 097 FABIAN SOCIETY/ E/15–16; London Society for Women’s Suffrage, Annual Report (London, 1911), 324.62306041 LON. All from the British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics. 23. Aileen Fyfe, “The Information Revolution,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 6: 1830–1914, ed. David McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 576–78. 24. James Raven has suggested that the standardization of printed ephemera like tickets, passports, share certificates, and bills of exchange “encouraged trust,” claiming that “the repeatability of printed forms and the regularity of their appearance added to reputation and authority.” James Raven, “Why Ephemera Were Not Ephemeral: The Effectiveness of Innovative Print in the Eighteenth Century,” Yearbook of English Studies 45 (2015): 69. 25. “A Bill of Play,” All the Year Round 6 (November 25, 1871): 606, quoted in Russell, “ ‘Announcing Each Day the Performances,’ ” 261–62. 26. Paul Gilroy, “Wearing Your Art on Your Sleeve: Notes Toward a Diaspora History of Black Ephemera,” in Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993), 237–57. For another example, see Laura Lyons, “Hand-to-Hand History: Ephemera and Irish Republicanism,” Interventions 5, no. 3 (2003): 407–25. 27. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 9–11; Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 28. Debra Caplan, “Notes from the Frontier: Digital Scholarship and the Future of Theatre Studies,” Theatre Journal 67, no. 2 (2015): 357. 29. As Wearing acknowledges: “Readers should be aware of the difficulties of determining the lengths of runs accurately because of various factors: (1) inaccurate advertising in newspapers and the like; (2) sudden withdrawals of productions which nevertheless remained advertised for a day or two; (3) the dearth of programs on a complete day-by-day basis; (4) the existence of programs for productions which never, in fact, came to fruition.” J. P. Wearing, The London Stage, 1890–1900: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), viii-viv. 30. For more on how material form influences cognitive metaphors, see Brad Pasanek, Metaphors of Mind: An Eighteenth-Century Dictionary (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015); Sean Silver, The Mind Is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Kenneth Price distinguishes between the technical term “database” and a looser metaphorical collective. Kenneth M. Price,

190

Notes to Pages 24–26

“Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What’s in a Name?” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3, no. 3 (2009), http://digitalhumanities.org. 31. On virtuality in performance and new media studies, see David Z. Saltz, “Performing Arts,” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 121; Sue-Ellen Case, Performing Science and the Virtual (New York: Routledge, 2007), 9; N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 14; Steve Dixon, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 23. 32. Although most new English plays staged after 1660 were published, the rise of cheap acting editions in the Victorian era decoupled literary value from dramatic publishing. See John Russell Stephens, The Profession of the Playwright: British Theatre, 1800–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 116–17. 33. William Archer, “About the Theatre. The Censorship: Rejected Remedies,” Tribune, November 16, 1907. 34. See Miller, Slow Print, 158–66. Private-subscription entertainments—including card games, concerts, masks, and operas—go back to at least Teresa Cornelys’s “Society” at Carlisle House in 1760s and 1770s London. See Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre, 17–37. 35. Marion O’Connor, “Introduction: England, 1850–1914, B. 1880–1914,” in Naturalism and Symbolism in European Theatre, 1850–1918, ed. Claude Schumacher, Glynne W. Wickham, and John Northam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 334–35. 36. Henry Arthur Jones, “Preface to Saints and Sinners,” in The Renascence of the English Drama (London: Macmillan, 1895), 310. 37. This comes from Allan Wade, who was repeating one of many purported requirements for a public performance, none of which courts ever explicitly stated. Allan Wade, Memories of the London Theatre, 1900–1914, ed. Alan Andrews (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1983), 19–22. For more on copyright performances, see Derek Miller, Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1770–1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 207–34. 38. “The Stage Society,” Court Circular, October 18, 1902. 39. Wade, Memories of the London Theatre, 3. 40. A full summary of the burlesque (Dull Monotony by Gilbert Canaan), which took for its structure the plot of John Galsworthy’s drama Strife (1909) about a group of striking miners, can be found in “A Midnight Play,” Evening Standard, May 21, 1909. 41. The primary exception was Grundy’s A Pair of Spectacles (1889), adapted from the 1862 French comedy by Euge`ne Labiche and Alfred Delacour, which was revived twelve times between 1890 and 1960. J. P. Wearing observes that “the percentage of contemporary dramas produced in 1776–1800 is greatly inflated by largely ephemeral, short pieces produced for special occasions, whereas that percentage in the 1890s is derived from plays (both short and full-length) which ran for a substantial number of performances. What we see in the 1890s is the firm establishment of the modern practice of staging a long run of a new play.” J. P. Wearing, “The London West End Theatre in the 1890s,” Educational Theatre Journal 29, no. 3 (1977): 327–29. 42. Wade, Memories of the London Theatre, 2. 43. “The Stage Society,” The Era, September 16, 1905. 44. The Independent Theatre Society produced Ghosts in 1891; the Pioneers produced On the Side of the Angels in 1906.

Notes to Pages 26–33

191

45. David Kurnick, Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 46. Huntly Carter, The Theatre of Max Reinhardt (London: Palmer, 1914), 307. 47. Miller, Slow Print, 130. 48. Observer, February 21, 1926. 49. Exiles was rejected in 1916; The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, in 1914. For a thorough discussion of the theatrical output of Conrad, see Richard J. Hand, The Theatre of Joseph Conrad: Reconstructed Fictions (New York: Palgrave, 2005). For Lawrence, see James Moran, The Theatre of D. H. Lawrence: Dramatic Modernist and Theatrical Innovator (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015). And for Joyce, see John MacNicholas, “The Stage History of ‘Exiles,’ ” James Joyce Quarterly 19, no. 1 (October 1, 1981): 9–26. 50. J. T. Grein, The World of the Theatre: Impressions and Memoirs, March 1920–1921 (London: Heinemann, 1921), 53. 51. Grein, The World of the Theatre, 52. 52. The use of the term “programme” to mean a plan of proceedings that may or may not have been printed dates to the middle of the nineteenth century. OED. 53. The famous Vedrenne-Barker Court seasons owed their existence to the Stage Society. As Ashley Dukes observed: “The Stage Society, now in its eleventh year, has a finer record than any other society of its kind in Europe. By giving new dramatists a hearing it made the Court Theatre under the Vedrenne-Barker management possible.” Ashley Dukes, “Drama,” New Age 6, no. 22 (March 31, 1910): 524. For more, see Desmond MacCarthy, The Court Theatre, 1904–1907 (London: A. H. Bullen, 1907). 54. Plays like Six Characters in Search of an Author and The Infernal Machine were subsequently revived in private theater clubs. Like play-producing societies, private theater clubs were not subject to pre-performance censorship; unlike subscription societies, private theater clubs had permanent venues. Private theater clubs emerged in the mid-1920s and included the Gate Theatre Studio, the Arts Theatre Club, the New Lindsey Theatre Club, the Watergate Club, the Torch, and the New Lyric Club. The London Stage database includes few club productions. David Thomas, David Carlton, and Anne Etienne, Theatre Censorship: From Walpole to Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 112–15. 55. James Woodfield, English Theatre in Transition, 1881–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 101. 56. For more, see Amanda Wrigley, Performing Greek Drama in Oxford and on Tour with the Balliol Players (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2011); Yopie Prins, Ladies’ Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 57. See Joe Falocco, Reimagining Shakespeare’s Playhouse: Early Modern Staging Conventions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010). 58. Allardyce Nicoll, English Drama, 1900–1930: The Beginnings of the Modern Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 80. 59. Around half of the longest-running plays in the corpus premiered after 1939. 60. Even more extreme, we would not want to characterize the repertoire of today’s London stage as dominated by Agatha Christie’s Mousetrap, with over 26,000 performances since 1952. 61. Quoted in Rowell and Jackson, The Repertory Movement, 31. 62. Stage Society actors were paid one to three guineas for one to three weeks of rehearsal and two performances. Woodfield, English Theatre in Transition, 61.

192

Notes to Pages 33–35

63. Jerome Klapka Jerome, On the Stage—and Off: The Brief Career of a Would-Be Actor (London: Field and Tuer, 1885), 124. Tracy Davis has argued for an “associational, polytextual, intertheatrically citational” conception of repertoire in the nineteenth-century theater, and she observes that this “transmitted least well on the page.” Tracy C. Davis, “Introduction: Repertoire,” in The Broadview Anthology of Nineteenth-Century British Performance, ed. Tracy C. Davis (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2012), 14. 64. Ballet had been a regular feature of the opera in England since the eighteenth century but does not appear as a stand-alone genre in the database until the 1906 production of Les deux pigeons with music by Andre´ Messager and choreography by F. Ambrosiny. 65. Though there was an eighteenth-century opera canon in England as a result of the importation of Italian opera, according to Emanuele Senici “whereas during the decade 1760–70 three-quarters of the operas were performed for one season only, forty years later (1800–1810) the number was down to about half.” Quoted in Hall-Witt, Fashionable Acts, 51–52. 66. Hall-Witt, Fashionable Acts, 249–50. 67. Grein modeled his repertoire on Andre´ Antoine’s The´aˆtre Libre and Otto Brahm’s Freie Bu¨hne (1889–1901); essentially, he sought to introduce new English plays into the Continental repertoire. Grein even included “(The´aˆtre Libre)” in small type beneath the prospectus title. Prospectus reproduced in Alice Augusta Greeven Grein [Michael Orme, pseud.], J. T. Grein: The Story of a Pioneer, 1862–1935 (London: J. Murray, 1936), 76. Sally Debra Charnow describes the numerous subscription mailings that Antoine employed in order to “[offer] the possibility of watching a play develop, of meeting the actors, writers, and director, of being an insider,” including annual reports, review excerpts, season plans and tickets, invitations to rehearsals, form letters, and postcards. Sally Debra Charnow, Theatre, Politics, and Markets in Fin-de-Sie´cle Paris (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 43–44. 68. Grein, J. T. Grein, 148, 90. 69. Stage Society Invitational Circular, July 8, 1899, Incorporated Stage Society Archive, GB 71 THM/136/5, V&A Department of Theatre and Performance, London. 70. Grein, J. T. Grein, 180. Early productions were carried out without costumes or scenery. 71. Quoted in Katharine Cockin, Women and Theatre in the Age of Suffrage: The Pioneer Players, 1911–1925 (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 39. 72. A prospectus is a document that advertises or describes an enterprise in order to attract investors. The prospectus first emerged among publishers marketing books, since John Minsheu’s Ductor in Linguas (1617). Maurice Rickards and Michael Twyman, The Encyclopedia of Ephemera: A Guide to the Fragmentary Documents of Everyday Life for the Collector, Curator, and Historian, s.v. “Prospectus” (New York: Routledge, 2000). 73. Dennis Kennedy has remarked on the programs’ “seriousness of purpose,” which contrasted with cluttered commercial-theater programs. Dennis Kennedy, “The New Drama and the New Audience,” in The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage, ed. Michael Richard Booth and Joel H. Kaplan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 142. 74. The printed annual account first appeared in the late eighteenth century with the rise of organized charities, followed shortly by local authority institutions such as poor-law “unions,” schools, workhouses, lunatic asylums, prisons, and hospitals. In the middle of the

Notes to Pages 35–42

193

nineteenth century in Britain and the United States, it became legally binding on all public companies to publish formally edited accounts. Rickards and Twyman, The Encyclopedia of Ephemera, s.v. “Accounts, institutional.” 75. With an accountant as treasurer, only in 1911–12 did the society show a deficit, when the income was £1,694.13.9 and the expenditure £1,779.16.7. 76. For more on the Pioneer Players, see Cockin, Women and Theatre in the Age of Suffrage, 13. 77. “Theatrical Notes,” Pall Mall Gazette, September 11, 1905. 78. The other plays in the series were: Elizabeth Robins and Mrs. Hugh Bell’s Alan’s Wife, Zola’s The Heirs of Rabourdin, John Todhunter’s The Black Cat, Edward Brandes’s A Visit, and Michael Field’s A Question of Memory. 79. Stage Society Third Annual Report. 80. Incorporated Stage Society, Ten Years: 1899 to 1909 (London: Chiswick Press, 1909), 9. 81. Quoted in “ ‘What The Public Wants’: Stage Society Discusses the Drama at Annual Dinner,” Evening News, May 10, 1909; Charles Frohman, Duke of York’s Theatre, the Repertory Theatre prospectus, 1910, William Archer Collection, GB 71 THM/368/6/1/10, V&A Department of Theatre and Performance, London. 82. Ashley Dukes, “The Repertory Theatres,” Poetry and Drama 2 (1914): 420. 83. William Archer, “Study and Stage,” Morning Leader, January 28, 1905. 84. “The Ballot for Seats,” Stage Society News 24 (November 1906): 95. 85. Helen C. Long, The Edwardian House: The Middle-Class Home in Britain, 1880–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 9. 86. Mary Hammond, Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 28. 87. For example, during the 1909 Joint Select Committee hearings on theater censorship, the Liberal MP Lord Ribblesdale remarked: “My point is that because [the public] know that there is a censorship they know that plays will be of a kind that they can take their young ladies to see.” Report from the Joint Select Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Commons on the Stage Plays (Censorship) (London: Wyman and Sons, 1909), 238. 88. Incorporated Stage Society Articles of Association, July 1904, Board of Trade: Companies Registration Office: Files of Dissolved Companies, BT 31/34768/81604, National Archives, Kew. 89. Stage Society Third Annual Report. 90. Wade, Memories of the London Theatre, 5. 91. H. Hamilton Fyfe, “The Stage Society’s Decline—‘Hannele’ by the Play Actors,” The World, April 15, 1908. 92. “Great Friends,” Lady, February 9, 1905. 93. Cockin, Women and Theatre in the Age of Suffrage, 39. 94. Stage Society Sixth Annual Report, 1905, Incorporated Stage Society Archive, GB 71 THM/136/5, V&A Department of Theatre and Performance, London; Private List of Members of the Fabian Society, September 1904, Fabian Society Archive, GB 097 FABIAN SOCIETY/C/ 55/2 Item 13, British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics. 95. “The Stage Society: An Impression,” Scots Pictorial, March 14, 1908. 96. “Her ideas of women’s employment and a modern woman’s pose in life were based largely on the figure of Vivie Warren in ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession.’ She had seen ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’ furtively with Hetty Widgett from the gallery of a Stage Society performance

194

Notes to Pages 42–49

one Monday afternoon. Most of it had been incomprehensible to her, or comprehensible in a way that checked further curiosity, but the figure of Vivien, hard, capable, successful, and bullying, and ordering about a veritable Teddy in the person of Frank Gardner, appealed to her. She saw herself in very much Vivie’s position—managing something.” H. G. Wells, Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1913), 101. 97. Tara McPherson, “Post-Archive: The Humanities, the Archive, and the Database,” in Between Humanities and the Digital, ed. Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 483–502. 98. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 233. 99. One answer might be the link that John Muse has drawn between shorter plays and modernist experimentation. John H. Muse, Microdramas: Crucibles for Theater and Time (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 2–16. 100. Franco Moretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2000): 207–27. The slaughterhouse metaphor also applies to midcentury Broadway; see Derek Miller, “Average Broadway,” Theatre Journal 68, no. 4 (2016): 529–53. 101. To describe two participant-generated queries when I demoed the database at the 2015 Modernist Studies Association Conference. 102. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 19. 103. Sarah Bay-Cheng, “Pixelated Memories: Theatre History and Digital Historiography,” https://www.academia.edu/2131876/Pixelated_Memories_Theatre_History_and_Digital _Historiography.

Chapter 2 1. “Vox Populi,” letter to the editor, Dublin Evening Telegraph, February 3, 1907. 2. “Oryza,” letter to the editor, Dublin Evening Telegraph, February 4, 1907. 3. D. J. O’Donoghue, letter to the editor, Dublin Evening Telegraph, February 4, 1907; Michael O’Dempsey, letter to the editor, Irish Times, February 11, 1907. 4. Emphasis mine. William Boyle, letter to the editor, Freeman’s Journal, February 4, 1907. Boyle temporarily withdrew his plays from the Abbey during the Playboy controversy. 5. Confusingly, commercial shares frequently were sold by public subscription, regardless of the public-spiritedness of the enterprise. From the perspective of Company Law, parliamentarians recognized that the term was misleading. In 1900, Croydon MP Charles Ritchie proposed that the phrase “for public subscription” be replaced by “to the public for subscription.” House of Commons Debates (HC Deb), July 24, 1900, vol. 86, col. 1131. Ordinarily, “public subscription libraries” were libraries whose shareholders paid annual subscriptions. However, libraries might also have separate endowments to raise funds for the purchase of books by public subscription. 6. Arthur Bingham Walkley, “The Drama,” Times Literary Supplement, March 24, 1905. 7. S. R. Littlewood, “Citizens’ Theatres,” Daily Chronicle, December 13, 1911. 8. The only not-for-profit scheme to preexist the repertory movement was an 1811 plan for a subscription theater in Marylebone. Davis, The Economics of the British Stage, 231, 171, 10, 173, 238–40. 9. For more on true repertory and the origins of the movement, see Rowell and Jackson, The Repertory Movement, 18, 28–31, 42.

Notes to Pages 50–51

195

10. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1983); Loren Kruger, The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Jeffrey S. Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680–1791 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 11. W. B. Yeats, “Samhain: 1903—The Theatre, the Pulpit, and the Newspapers,” in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 8: The Irish Dramatic Movement, ed. Mary FitzGerald and Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 2008), 36–39. 12. Of the period before radio, Balme writes: “Apart from the occasional letter to the management or to a newspaper editor, there was little potential for reciprocal resonance.” Balme, The Theatrical Public Sphere, 63. For a reading of Playboy as Synge’s theory of Irish audience compared to press publics, including letters to the editor, see Paige Reynolds, Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 38–75. For a reading of American playgoers’ letters to the editor that contrasts theatrical and print publics, see Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 45–47, 141–48. 13. For a discussion of how the Internet has affected discourses around theater etiquette, see Kirsty Sedgman, The Reasonable Audience: Theatre Etiquette, Behaviour Policing, and the Live Performance Experience (New York: Palgrave Pivot, 2018). 14. See Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001); Henry George Hibbert, A Playgoer’s Memories (London: Grant Richards, 1920); Macqueen-Pope, Carriages at Eleven. For a reading of U.S. “audience construction” beyond New York City in the 1910s and 1920s, see Dorothy Chanksy, Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004). 15. Helen Freshwater, Theatre and Audience (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 3–4. For recent monographs drawing on audience interviews, surveys, and other empirical evidence, see Matthew Reason, The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experiences of Theatre (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books, 2010); Heim, Audience as Performer; Kirsty Sedgman, Locating the Audience: How People Found Value in National Theatre Wales (Bristol: Intellect, 2016). 16. Jacques Rancie`re, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), 15. 17. David Wiles, Theatre and Citizenship: The History of a Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). For a history and theory of theater and citizenship in Britain, see Tony Fisher, Theatre and Governance in Britain, 1500–1900: Democracy, Disorder and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). For an account of the relationship between audience participation and political empowerment, including how subscription audiences use their power to constrain the New York Metropolitan Opera repertoire, see Bennett, Theatre Audiences. For a psychoanalytic approach to audience, see Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). For theories of audience across theater, film, television, sports, and tourism, see Dennis Kennedy, The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 18. See Neil Martin Blackadder, Performing Opposition: Modern Theater and the Scandalized Audience (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003).

196

Notes to Pages 52–55

19. Michael R. Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 16–20. 20. For a discussion of anonymity in the provincial press, see Andrew Hobbs, A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855–1900 (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2018), 201, 320, 349–79. For debates surrounding the relatively recent practice of metropolitan theater critics signing their reviews, see Paul Prescott, Reviewing Shakespeare: Journalism and Performance from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 57–93. 21. Stephen Hancocks, “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells,” British Dental Journal 211, no. 5 (2011): 191. 22. Marsh would go on to write a nationalist play and an important economic treatise. “Abbey theatre fund [raising],” holograph lists of subscribers and subscriptions, April 1910, Lady Gregory collection of papers, Berg Coll MSS Gregory, New York Public Library. 23. Rachel Matthews, The History of the Provincial Press in England (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 77. See also Mark Hampton’s argument that the “representative ideal” replaced the “educational ideal” at the turn of the century. Mark Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 106–29. 24. Harry G. Cocks and Matthew Rubery, “Introduction: Margins of Print: Ephemera, Print Culture and Lost Histories of the Newspaper,” Media History 18, no. 1 (2012): 1–5. For a theorization of newspapers as ephemera, see Laurel Brake, “The Longevity of ‘Ephemera,’ ” Media History 18, no. 1 (2012): 7–20. 25. Miss Ida Sharman-Crawford, letter to the editor, Irish Times, December 8, 1904. 26. Miss J. Wade, letter to the editor, Aberdeen Free Press, December 3, 1903, quoted in Sarah Pedersen, “What’s in a Name? The Revealing Use of Noms de Plume in Women’s Correspondence to Daily Newspapers in Edwardian Scotland,” Media History 10, no. 3 (2004): 183. For more on correspondence columns, see Kirstie Blair, “ ‘Let the Nightingales Alone’: Correspondence Columns, the Scottish Press, and the Making of the Working-Class Poet,” Victorian Periodicals Review 47, no. 2 (2014): 188–207; Barbara Green, Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life: Women and Modernity in British Culture (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 147–80. 27. G. P. L., “Repertory Theory and Practice,” Glasgow Herald, January 10, 1914. 28. J. F. H., “The Perfect Audience,” Yorkshire Telegraph, May 9, 1912. 29. Quoted in “Theatre of the Future,” Glasgow Herald, November 11, 1911. Wareing was a Londoner who had helped Horniman organize a British tour for the Abbey’s Irish Players. For more on Wareing, see Winifred F. E. C. Isaac, Alfred Wareing: A Biography (London: Greenback Press, 1951). At the time, “producer” denoted something closer to today’s artistic director. 30. C. H. Reilly, “The Repertory Theatre and Its Aims,” Education (August 16, 1912): 98. 31. “Drama,” New Age 5, no. 27 (October 28, 1909): 480–81. 32. Ashley Dukes, “Drama,” New Age 7, no. 3 (May 19, 1910): 68. 33. “People’s Playhouses,” Yorkshire Telegraph, April 23, 1912. 34. Lewis Casson, “Steps Towards a Civic Theater,” Poet Lore 22, no. 111 (1911): 214. 35. W. A. Brabner, letter to the editor, Manchester Guardian, July 29, 1907. 36. “The Liverpool Repertory Theatre,” Liverpool Porcupine, supplement, March 21, 1914. 37. James Agate, quoted in Sheila Gooddie, Annie Horniman: A Pioneer in the Theatre (London: Methuen Drama, 1990), 121.

Notes to Pages 56–58

197

38. Irish National Theatre Society, program, December 27, 1904–January 3, 1905, George Roberts Papers Concerning the Abbey Theatre and the Irish National Theatre Society, 1901– 1942, MS Thr 24, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Programme, The Admirable Crichton, November 11, 1911, Liverpool Repertory Theatre Programmes, 792.1 PLA, Liverpool Central Library Archive. For a description of Liverpool repertorists attending plays at the Gaiety, see Grace Nisbet Goldie, The Liverpool Repertory Theatre, 1911–1934 (Liverpool: University Press of Liverpool, 1935), 34–36. 39. A. G., letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, December 27, 1913. Masefield’s poem was reprinted in A Souvenir of the Twenty-First Birthday, November 11, 1931, Liverpool Repertory Theatre Programmes, 792.1 PLA, Liverpool Central Library Archive. 40. J. G., letter to the editor, Glasgow Herald, April 29, 1909. According to the OED, “playgoer” follows from the earlier “churchgoer.” 41. “The Liverpool Repertory Theatre,” Liverpool Porcupine, supplement. 42. H. M. W., “Plays and Players,” Pall Mall Gazette, April 14, 1913. For more on the disappearance of provincial stock companies thanks to London touring companies, see Booth, Theatre in Victorian Age, 18–21. 43. Quoted in “Interview with Mr. Keble Howard,” Croydon Gazette, February 22, 1913. 44. St. John Greer Ervine, The Organised Theatre: A Plea in Civics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1924), 53. 45. Robert Hield, letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, November 25, 1912. 46. Quoted in “Repertory Theatres,” Manchester Guardian, March 18, 1912. 47. Alfred J. Bent, letter to the editor, Glasgow Herald, April 30, 1909. 48. Quoted in “Manchester and the Gaiety Theatre,” Manchester Guardian, December 17, 1913. For more on theater as a civilizing influence, see Hye-Kyung Lee, “Uses of Civilising Claims: Three Moments in British Theatre History,” Poetics 36, no. 4 (August 1, 2008): 287–300. 49. Quoted in “The Repertory Movement,” Yorkshire Observer, October 4, 1912. Dean was a London-hailing actor who had been a member of Horniman’s Manchester company. 50. Quoted in “Municipal Theatres,” Manchester Guardian, September 23, 1907. 51. Starting in 1909 with £70,000 anonymously donated by Sir Carl Meyer, organizers decided that the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre “would be far more national and real if it were erected by a large number of small donations rather than as the result of a few big subscriptions.” They managed to raise £30,000 (including a surprising £14 from Dublin) before dropping “National” from the title in the hope that subscriptions might come “pouring in” from America, Germany, Italy, Hungary, and South America. “Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre,” Times, April 7, 1910; “Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre,” Times, December 9, 1911. Dublin subscription amount from Receipt Book, 1910–16, Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre, GB 2080 SMNT/8/5, Royal National Theatre Archive, London. 52. Quoted in “Mr. Irving on the Drama,” Times, September 27, 1894. Chris Waters highlights the socialist insistence on municipal control of theater, music, and drink. Chris Waters, British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 136–37. 53. “Modern Theatre Design,” British Architect (February 11, 1898): 91. 54. Horniman: “This Playgoers’ Theatre is a speculation of my own, and I hope to make money by it . . . a financial success and an artistic success. I want to see plays produced that

198

Notes to Pages 58–63

it will be worth paying to see, from the point of view of the public.” Quoted in “Manchester’s New Theatre,” Manchester Courier, September 28, 1907. 55. Quoted in “New Theatres for the Provinces,” Daily Despatch, March 17, 1911. 56. “The Drama as a ‘Public Service,’ ” Glasgow Herald, October 29, 1910. 57. Quoted in “Repertory at Croydon,” The Era, February 22, 1913. 58. Sidney Lee, Shakespeare and the Modern Stage: With Other Essays (London: John Murray, 1906), 133. 59. Quoted in “The Repertory Theatre Movement,” Yorkshire Observer, October 4, 1912. 60. Quoted in “Manchester’s New Theatre,” Manchester Courier, September 28, 1907. 61. W. A. Brabner, letter to the editor, Manchester Guardian, July 23, 1907. 62. Constance Ray, “Theatre,” Daily Chronicle, November 4, 1909. 63. “£40,000 for a Theatre,” Liverpool Courier, June 1, 1911. 64. “Liverpool’s Repertory,” Glasgow Times, September 26, 1911. 65. Quoted in “The Repertory Theatre Movement,” Yorkshire Observer, October 4, 1912. 66. “Our Dramatic Candidates,” Glasgow Herald, January 7, 1910. 67. “Glasgow Repertory Theatre,” Times, October 19, 1909; “The Appeal for a Repertory Theatre,” Observer, January 4, 1914. 68. “Gaiety Theatre,” Manchester Guardian, October 31, 1911. 69. “The Repertory Theatre,” Eastern Daily Press, May 2, 1912. 70. “A Citizens’ Theatre,” Glasgow Herald, November 19, 1909. 71. “Prospectus,” Liverpool Courier, May 26, 1911; “Prospectus,” Liverpool Post, May 26, 1911. 72. Oliver Elton, letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, June 6, 1911. 73. “The Repertory Theatre,” Liverpool Post, June 14, 1911. 74. “Onward,” letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, January 14, 1914. 75. This was according to Professor Reilly, who lectured the Sheffield Playgoers’ Society and was paraphrased saying that although the moneyed classes supported music, they “did not support the drama very much, but left it to people like those he was addressing, and the same remark was true of literature. . . . A large number of subscribers were working-men, which was very good. The only thing that worried him was when he found a plumber with £100 in the company. It might mean something to such a man if the company did not pay its 6 per cent which was the maximum to which its dividends were limited.” “Wealth & Culture,” Sheffield Telegraph, January 22, 1912. 76. “Liverpool’s Repertory Scheme,” Sunday Chronicle, June 18, 1911; S. R. Littlewood, “Citizens’ Theatres,” Daily Chronicle, December 13, 1911. 77. Programme, Man and Superman, September 29, 1910, Records of Scottish Repertory Theatre, GB 247 STA Fm 11, Special Collections Department, Glasgow University Library. According to Winifred Isaac, Wareing first came up with the idea of founding a Citizens’ Theatre ten years earlier during a conversation about audiences with bookseller J. G. Wilson and playwright A. W. Yuille in Glasgow. James Birdie credits Wareing with founding the League of Audiences (1934–39), which advocated for a state subsidy for music and drama, preceding the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) and the Arts Council. Isaac, Alfred Wareing, 34, vii. 78. Programme, A Doll’s House, September 16, 1912, Liverpool Repertory Theatre Programmes, 792.1 PLA, Liverpool Central Library Archive.

Notes to Pages 63–71

199

79. E. F. S., “The New Liverpool Repertory Theatre,” Westminster Gazette, October 28, 1911. 80. For example, during a 1913 trial repertory season in Bristol, one hopeful repertorist distributed questionnaires during the interval, promising they would be used for statistical purposes and involved no actual liability: “(1) Do you approve of the idea of a permanent Repertory Theatre here? (2) Provided this theatre were conducted as a Repertory Theatre for six months in the year, and the syllabus of plays were to meet with your approval, would you be willing to subscribe a certain sum for seats? (3) If so, how much would you be prepared to subscribe? (Please state a sum, however small). Name and address.” “Proposed Repertory Theatre in Bristol,” Western Daily Press, May 27, 1913. 81. “Abbey Theatre Endowment Fund: Subscriptions Already Received,” Irish Times, November 7, 1910. In contrast to this public-subscription scheme, the Abbey Theatre introduced special season subscription tickets in both 1906 and 1908. For Yeats’s letters on the subject, see W. B. Yeats, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, vol. 4: 1905–1907, ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 492–94, 507, 510–14. 82. “Matters of Moment,” Irish Independent, October 29, 1910. 83. “Repertory,” Liverpool Porcupine, May 18, 1912. 84. “A Docker,” letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, February 7, 1914. 85. After protests from suffragettes, Sexton vowed to change the villain’s gender for future productions. “Non-militant Suffragist,” letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, February 16, 1914. 86. T. Herbert Kendrick, letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, December 22, 1913. 87. “A Gallery Boy,” letter to the editor, Liverpool Courier, December 30, 1913. 88. B. D. M., letter to the editor, Glasgow Herald, June 15, 1912. 89. “Playfellow,” letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, December 17, 1913. 90. “Disgusted,” letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, September 24, 1912. 91. “Liverpool Playgoers’ Society,” Liverpool Courier, May 10, 1912. 92. C. H. Reilly, “Repertory Theatre and Its Aims,” Education, August 16, 1912. 93. “Convinced,” letter to the editor, Glasgow Herald, June 24, 1909. 94. “The Manchester Playgoers’ Theatre,” Manchester Guardian, October 28, 1907. 95. “A Citizens’ Theatre,” Glasgow Herald, February 27, 1909. 96. “State of the Drama,” Globe, July 29, 1913. 97. “Playgoer,” letter to the editor, Glasgow Herald, June 24, 1909. 98. Ric Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 64. 99. In the nineteenth century, wealthy playgoers migrated from boxes to the renovated pit, now called the stalls. For a description of “Johnny in the stalls,” see “A National Theatre,” Tribune, October 28, 1907. For a description of “ ‘Arry and ‘Arriet,” see “Shakespeare Day,” Birmingham Gazette, April 25, 1910. 100. “The Repertory and Its Patrons,” Liverpool Porcupine, December 9, 1911. 101. I. L. W., letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, December 17, 1913. Another correspondent observed that the family circle was the “gallery rechristened (democratically).” Andreas, letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, December 15, 1913. 102. “Two Pun’ Ten,” letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, December 17, 1913. 103. “An Elderly Playgoer,” letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, December 20, 1913.

200

Notes to Pages 72–77

104. T., letter to the editor, Glasgow Herald, February 12, 1912. 105. “A Plain Liverpolitan,” letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, December 16, 1913. 106. Alfred Wareing, letter to the editor, Glasgow Herald, February 12, 1912. 107. Quoted in “Repertory Theatre Problem,” Liverpool Post, December 18, 1913. 108. C. H. Reilly, “Repertory Theatre and Its Aims,” Education, August 16, 1912. 109. Quoted in “New Theatres for the Provinces,” Daily Despatch, March 17, 1911. 110. “The Woman in the Stalls,” letter to the editor, Times, May 31, 1910. 111. Quoted in “Shakespeare Day,” Birmingham Gazette, April 25, 1910. 112. “What the Public Wants,” Liverpool Post, March 25, 1914. 113. The true repertory model, which allowed for plays to be taken down or reshelved with greater frequency, required even more cash up front; nobody had managed to implement it on a permanent basis before. Glasgow Rep’s subscription funds were redistributed to the Scottish National Players. The Rep’s mission statement later was adopted by the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow. For more, see David Hutchison, The Modern Scottish Theatre (Glasgow: Molendinar Press, 1977), 12–26. Liverpool Rep survived the war by reorganizing on a Commonwealth model. For more, see Ros Merkin, Liverpool Playhouse: A Theatre and Its City (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011). For more on the Abbey, see Adrian Woods Frazier, Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 114. For more, see J. C. Trewin, The Birmingham Repertory Theatre, 1913–1963 (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1963). 115. Cochrane, Twentieth-Century British Theatre, 75–76. 116. Chisholm, Repertory, 211. 117. Nigel Playfair, letter to the editor, Liverpool Courier, June 6, 1910. 118. Programme, John Bull’s Other Island, April 23, 1918, Abbey Theatre Digital Archive, National University of Ireland, Galway; Programme, You Never Can Tell, May 29, 1909, Records of Scottish Repertory Theatre, GB 247 STA Fm 11, Special Collections Department, Glasgow University Library. 119. Thomas Pigott, letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, December 23, 1913. 120. “A Shareholder,” letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, December 27, 1913. 121. Balme, The Theatrical Public Sphere, 13.

Chapter 3 1. Henrik Ibsen, “Pillars of Society,” in The League of Youth; The Pillars of Society; A Doll’s House, ed. and trans. William Archer, Authorised English Edition (London: Walter Scott, 1890), 176–77, 230. 2. Henrik Ibsen, “An Enemy of the People,” in Ghosts; An Enemy of the People; The Wild Duck, ed. William Archer, trans. Eleanor Marx-Aveling, Authorised English Edition (London: Walter Scott, 1904), 220. For a reading of how, in both plays, “large-scale public development projects galvanize entire communities and involve a complicated network of competing private and public interests,” see Alisa Zhulina, “The Modern Stage of Capitalism: The Drama of Markets and Money (1870–1930)” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2015), 43–48. 3. Jonathan Gil Harris, “Product Placement in Artisanal Drama,” in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 47–49.

Notes to Pages 77–80

201

4. Frances N. Teague, Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1991), 30. 5. “Prop,” OED. 6. Virginia Woolf, “Character in Fiction,” in Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 44. 7. For Worthen, “the more material the stage becomes, the more consistently it assigns explanatory power to mystified and indecipherable causes: to the romantic interiority of ‘character’ developed by acting in the Stanislavski/Method mode, and to the private freedom of the spectator’s consciousness, observing from the offstage environs of the auditorium.” In Sofer’s analysis, Ibsen’s props “externalize his characters’ internal (and hence ethical) characteristics, which emerge as damning evidence in the forensic anatomizing of the psyche that is Ibsen’s project . . . Mrs. Alving’s books, Nora’s forced signature, and Hedda Gabler’s pistols are no mere plot devices, but windows into the soul.” William B. Worthen, Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 6; Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 173. 8. Along with the 1916 Julius Caesar, many of the largest productions were one-off charity matinees, discussed in greater detail later in the chapter. Notably large contemporary plays included J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904; 50 actors) and Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts (1914; 52 actors). Unless otherwise noted, the plays discussed in this chapter fit the average cast size of 11, usually with somewhere between 5 and 22 actors; of course, crowd scenes could be staged with fewer actors, and avoided with more, so playtexts and reviews are more useful. Turn-ofthe-century critics frequently remarked on the crowd scenes in Shakespeare and Cecil Raleigh productions. Figures from London Stage database. 9. The melodramas with crowd scenes discussed by Schuyler include George Soane’s Masaniello, W. C. A. Clarke’s Old London Bridge, and various versions of Jack Sheppard, none of which were revived after 1890. Susan Amanda Schuyler, “Crowd Control: Reading Victorian Popular Drama” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2007), 9, 136. 10. See also the rise of “ensemble playing,” which emphasized the importance of the entire cast rather than one or two star performers; “ensemble companies,” like Victorian stock companies before them, used the same versatile actors in large and small roles and were the norm for provincial repertory theaters. Ensemble playing was thought to have originated in the Meiningen Company’s crowd scenes and was closely related to the displacement of the actor-manager by stage directors such as Harley Granville Barker and Edward Gordon Craig, especially in their productions of Shakespeare. The near-contemporary rise of subscriptionlist props and ensemble playing could be seen as parallel forms of crowd control, exerted by playwrights and directors, respectively. Woodfield, English Theatre in Transition, 14. See also Philippa Burt, “The Ideal of Ensemble Practice in Twentieth-Century British Theatre, 1900– 1968” (PhD diss., Goldsmiths, University of London, 2015). 11. Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, 98. 12. “Stage Properties,” The Era, May 26, 1878. 13. Stage directions for property men, however, had been transcribed in Shakespeare acting editions for over a century by such firms as Bell’s and Kemble’s, who “thro’ the[ir] ignorance,” Alexander Pope complained, insert “the notes of direction to the Property-men for their Moveables, and to the Players for their Entries.” Quoted in Peters, Theatre of the Book, 143.

202

Notes to Pages 80–82

14. Maurice Hageman, Oh, That Property Man!: A Monologue (Chicago: Dramatic Publishing Company, 1898); George Cochrane Hazelton and Benrimo, The Yellow Jacket: A Chinese Play Done in a Chinese Manner, in Three Acts (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1913). 15. At the turn of the century, British critics referred to props with scare quotes as “stage ‘properties.’ ” “Property mistress” emerged in the United States in 1916, though “propertywomen” had been around since 1795. “Prop,” OED. 16. Turn-of-the-century playwrights produced a handful of plays that thematized newspaper and magazine production (Arnold Bennett’s What the Public Wants and James Fagan’s The Earth were two of the most popular), which would seem pertinent to this chapter’s interest in props that appeal to and record the names of subscribers, in addition to being subscribed to themselves. While in these press plays we see article drafts and newspaper stacks on office desks and end tables, such decorative, reality-effect props do not carry the same dramaturgical charge as subscription lists. On occasion, though, press plays do invite us to consider the reverse scenario of characters becoming avatars of print. In Lady Gregory’s farce Coats, two rival newspaper editors threaten to fill their empty columns with one another’s obituary notices, and one demands: “Would nothing serve you to fill space but only my own corpse?” Lady Gregory, Coats (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913), 9. 17. Sofer, Stage Life of Props, 22. 18. Shakespeare has attracted the lion’s share of prop analysis in general and documentary prop analysis in particular. See Frederick Kiefer, Writing on the Renaissance Stage: Written Words, Printed Pages, Metaphoric Books (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996); David M. Bergeron, ed., Reading and Writing in Shakespeare (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996); Alan Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 19. A Midsummer Night’s Dream scroll of names (1.2.5); 2 Henry IV roll of soldiers’ names (3.2.96); Julius Caesar list of victims (4.1.1); Romeo and Juliet invitation list (1.2.36, 4.2.1). References from Teague, Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties, 158–93. 20. John Plotz reminds us to be wary of reducing crowds to literally assembled masses: “That to one writer a crowd was a set of bodies collected on the street, while to another it was the dispersed English citizenry of certain social classes, and to yet another it was the English nation, wherever and however arrayed, makes it vital to keep all three meanings open and available.” John Plotz, The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 7. See also William Johnsen, who argues: “Ibsen discovered several additional features of modern sacrificial behavior not elaborated by Shakespeare or Girard: in the modern period, reports of crowds abstracted by politicians and journalists substitute for real crowds. Journalists and politicians speak for a crowd too large to gather, which perhaps only exists in the hypothetical form they give it.” William A. Johnsen, Violence and Modernism: Ibsen, Joyce, and Woolf (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 57. 21. Emphasis mine. 22. “This volume, which has survived use as a stage property, bears eloquent testimony to the languishing fortunes of a small touring theatre, charting the nightly takings not only for the box office, but also for programmes and chocolates, alongside the outgoings to the theatre’s own permanent staff advertising, postage, gas, water and electricity charges, not forgetting the deeply resented entertainment tax first imposed in May 1916.” Richard Foulkes, Repertory at the Royal: Sixty-Five Years of Theatre in Northampton (Northampton: Northampton Repertory Players, 1992), 3–4.

Notes to Pages 82–89

203

23. Gitelman, Paper Knowledge, 1–12. Robin Bernstein’s concept of a “scriptive thing” or “scriptive prop” would also apply here, in the sense that “competent performers”—both protagonists in these plays and in real life outside the theater—will know how to use subscription ephemera to pressure other individuals or to signal an alignment with particular social groups. Robin Bernstein, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Social Text 27, no. 4 (2009): 67–94. 24. Twyman, “The Long-Term Significance of Printed Ephemera,” 39; Gitelman, Paper Knowledge, 22–23. 25. Twyman, “The Long-Term Significance of Printed Ephemera,” 39. 26. James Mussell, “The Passing of Print: Digitising Ephemera and the Ephemerality of the Digital,” Media History 18, no. 1 (2012): 82. 27. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 90. Across the Atlantic in 1885, 160,000 subscribers raised $250,000 to fund the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty at the behest of Joseph Pulitzer’s World; more than three-quarters contributed less than a dollar. See Rodrigo Davies, “Civic Crowdfunding: Participatory Communities, Entrepreneurs and the Political Economy of Place” (master’s thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014), 31–36. 28. Arthur Wing Pinero, His House in Order: A Comedy in Four Acts (London: William Heinemann, 1906), 82, 93. 29. James Bernard Fagan, The Earth: A Modern Play in Four Acts (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1910), 91. 30. “The National Education Question,” Derbyshire Advertiser and Journal, April 11, 1902, 8. 31. Paraphrased in “Assistance for Infirmary and Nursing Association,” Northwich Guardian, July 26, 1910, 6. 32. Emphasis mine. “Electric Light vs. Gas: Important Meeting of the Whitstable Urban District Council,” Whitstable Times and Herne Bay Herald, January 25, 1913, 5. 33. Paraphrased in “Trades Council & Disabled Men,” Rochdale Observer, June 15, 1918, 2. 34. “Cheltonian Chatter: Superb Figures,” Cheltenham Chronicle, August 17, 1918, 3. 35. “Strong and Stable,” Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, March 19, 1929, 4. 36. G. D. H. Cole, Labour in War Time (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1915), 82. 37. “The Ramsgate Murder,” Thanet Advertiser, July 22, 1893, 4. 38. Emphasis mine. “Volunteer Force Hospital,” Belfast News-Letter, October 2, 1915, 9. 39. “A Crowning Act,” Gloucestershire Echo, July 22, 1919, 4. 40. Emphasis mine. “Announcements,” Eastern Evening News, June 7, 1899, 2. 41. Emphasis mine. Spectator, “The Day’s Doings. Personal Impressions. A Pleasant Ceremony,” Sheffield Daily Independent, March 10, 1909, 6. 42. Emphasis mine. “University College of S.W.,” Western Times, February 7, 1930, 8. 43. Emphasis mine. “Wellington Athletic Union,” Taunton Courier, September 14, 1932, 5. 44. “Valesman,” “Hunting Topics,” Morning Post, March 8, 1907, 4. 45. Incidentally, Fred Winter started the hospital fund with the farthing that novelist Marie Corelli sent him after she obtained it in a libel action judgment against him. “Miss Corelli’s Farthing,” London Daily News, January 13, 1904, 6. 46. As G. D. H. Cole points out, when John Cartwright established his social reformist Society for Constitutional Information in 1780, it was filled with bourgeois subscribers, “not

204

Notes to Pages 89–96

mainly because its members wished to draw a sharp distinction between the aspirations of the middle and working classes, but rather because artisans and tradesmen could not afford the guinea subscriptions of the Constitutional Society, or the dinners which served that body in lieu of meetings.” G. D. H. Cole, Persons and Periods (London: Wyman and Sons, 1938), 105. 47. “A Diamond Jubilee,” Northern Whig and Belfast Post, March 29, 1926, 5. 48. “Onlooker,” “Notes of the Day,” Devon and Exeter Gazette, June 28, 1924, 4. 49. “New Unionist Club at Shipley,” Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, February 15, 1915, 5. 50. “Bradford and Free Trade,” Leeds Mercury, July 22, 1909, 3. 51. HC Deb, August 1, 1911, vol. 29, col. 213. 52. Paraphrased in “Workers’ Medical Institute Fund,” Western Daily Press, February 8, 1916, 6. 53. “Notes by the Way,” Hampshire Advertiser, March 31, 1897, 3. 54. “A Lady and a Radical,” letter to the editor, Western Daily Press, May 17, 1872. 55. G. D. H. Cole, A Century of Co-Operation (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1944), 184. 56. HC Deb, May 27, 1927, vol. 206, col. 2344. 57. Henry Arthur Jones, The Middleman: A Play in Four Acts (New York: Samuel French, 1907), 20. 58. St. John Hankin, “The Return of the Prodigal,” in Three Plays with Happy Endings (London: Samuel French, 1907), 25. 59. William Boyle, The Eloquent Dempsy: A Comedy in Three Acts (Dublin: O’Donoghue & Co., 1907), 14, 55, 68–70. 60. “Local Topics,” Bedfordshire Times, May 17, 1929, 6. 61. Bernard Shaw, Press Cuttings: A Topical Sketch Compiled from the Editorial and Correspondence Columns of the Daily Papers (London: Constable & Co., 1909), 10; Henry Arthur Jones, Mary Goes First: A Comedy in Three Acts and an Epilogue (London: G. Bell, 1913), 37; Arnold Bennett and Edward Knoblock, Milestones: A Play in Three Acts (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1912), 48. 62. George Bernard Shaw, “John Bull’s Other Island,” in John Bull’s Other Island, and Major Barbara: Also How He Lied to Her Husband (London: Archibald Constable, 1907), 62. 63. W. M. Pallister, letter to the editor, Durham County Advertiser, January 18, 1907, 3. 64. Rickards and Twyman, The Encyclopedia of Ephemera, s.v. “Accounts, institutional.” For more, see Leslie Hannah, The Rise of the Corporate Economy (London: Methuen, 1976). 65. Emphasis mine. International Law Association, “Report of the Twenty-First Conference Held at Antwerp, September 29–October 2, 1903” (London: West, Newman & Co., 1904), 254. 66. Cooperative shares were more regulated than those for joint-stock companies. The Industrial and Provident Societies Partnership Act 1852 restricted the transferability and personal limit of “subscriptions” (shares), although loan capital was more flexible. Cole, A Century of Co-Operation, 119. 67. William Boyle, The Building Fund: A Play in Three Acts, Abbey Theatre Series (Dublin: Maunsel, 1905), 6, 8. 68. Contrast Bill’s reaction with Eliza Doolittle objecting to Henry Higgins recording her speech (with her neighborhood, but not her name) at the beginning of Pygmalion.

Notes to Pages 97–104

205

69. George Bernard Shaw, “Major Barbara,” in John Bull’s Other Island, and Major Barbara: Also How He Lied to Her Husband (London: Archibald Constable, 1907), 223, 242, 245, 279. 70. In Cusins’s description: “It was an amazing meeting. Mrs Baines almost died of emotion. Jenny Hill went stark mad with hysteria. The Prince of Darkness played his trombone like a madman: its brazen roarings were like the laughter of the damned. 117 conversions took place then and there.” Shaw, “Major Barbara,” 255. 71. Henry Arthur Jones, The Hypocrites: A Play in Four Acts (London: Chiswick Press, 1906), 12. 72. Shaw, “Major Barbara,” 246, 187–88. 73. HC Deb, March 19, 1907, vol. 171, cols. 758–59. The next year, parliamentarians debated whether civil servants such as post office workers should be allowed to subscribe to political parties, since they theoretically would have been better positioned to misappropriate state resources for “political operations.” Technically, civil servants were not supposed to use their position to engage in politics, and MPs complained when in 1911 an Irish pensions officer pressured old age pensioners in his district with a subscription appeal for the Irish Parliamentary Party. HC Deb, March 16, 1908, vol. 186, col. 312; HC Deb, July 20, 1911, vol. 28, col. 1281. 74. HC Deb, March 19, 1907, vol. 171, col. 770. 75. HC Deb, May 2, 1927, vol. 205, col. 1276; HC Deb, May 27, 1927, vol. 206, col. 2344; HC Deb, May 3, 1927, vol. 205, col. 1497. Pursuing a similar de-veiling agenda, interwar Marxists denounced the Workers’ Educational Association as “fake” by pointing to its subscription lists, which, as G. D. H. Cole pointed out, included many “strange persons.” G. D. H. Cole, Labour in the Commonwealth (London: Headley Bros., 1919), 173. 76. John Galsworthy, “Strife,” in Plays: The Silver Box; Joy; Strife (London: Duckworth & Co., 1909), 108. 77. “Notes of the Week,” Bedfordshire Times, September 8, 1911, 7. 78. “Salop Infirmary,” Shrewsbury Chronicle, April 5, 1907, 1; “Public Notices: Convalescent Home for Children,” Leeds Mercury, February 29, 1928, 2; “Home Notes: The National Healthy Society,” London Daily News, October 4, 1902, 5. 79. St. John Hankin, The Two Mr. Wetherbys: A Middle-Class Comedy in Three Acts (London: Samuel French, 1907), 15–16, 59. 80. T. W. Robertson, “Ours,” in The Principal Dramatic Works of Thomas William Robertson (London: Samuel French, 1889), 2:429. 81. Henry Arthur Jones, The Dancing Girl: A Drama in Four Acts (London: Samuel French, 1907), 21–22. 82. Henry Arthur Jones, The Masqueraders: A Play in Four Acts (London: Chiswick Press, 1894), 1, 19. 83. St. John Hankin, “The Charity That Began at Home,” in Three Plays with Happy Endings (London: Samuel French, 1907). 84. W. Somerset Maugham, Our Betters: A Comedy in Three Acts (New York: G. H. Doran, 1923). 85. Ibsen, “Pillars of Society,” 179. 86. George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession: A Play in Four Acts (London: Archibald Constable, 1905).

206

Notes to Pages 104–110

87. George Bernard Shaw, “Misalliance,” in Misalliance; The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, and Fanny’s First Play. With a Treatise on Parents and Children (London: Constable, 1914), 15. 88. Oscar Wilde [The Author of Lady Windermere’s Fan], The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People (London: L. Smithers, 1899), 32, 38. 89. Sos Eltis, Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage, 1800–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 16, 196. Peter Bailey observes that George Edwardes employed tutors to teach the Gaiety Girls stage and social skills: “Thus groomed and instructed, the girls became ladies and were encouraged to frequent fashionable restaurants and parade themselves at Ascot.” Musical comedy performers portrayed young working women behind counters in telegraph offices, bars, teashops, and department stores. Peter Bailey, “ ‘Naughty but Nice’: Musical Comedy and the Rhetoric of the Girl, 1892–1914,” in The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage, ed. Michael R. Booth and Joel H. Kaplan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 39–40. 90. George Bernard Shaw, “The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet,” in The Doctor’s Dilemma, Getting Married, & The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet (London: Constable, 1911), 403. 91. “Abbey Theatre: The Endowment Fund; Education of Mr. Birrell; Conversion of Mr. Justice Ross,” Irish Times, October 28, 1910. 92. George Bernard Shaw, “Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall,” in Heartbreak House, Great Catherine, and Playlets of the War (London: Constable, 1919), xvii. 93. Exceptions included at least Mrs. Warren’s Profession, His House in Order, The Middleman, and The Dancing Girl. 94. All figures from London Stage database. 95. Catherine Hindson, London’s West End Actresses and the Origins of Celebrity Charity, 1880–1920 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016), 44–70. 96. Quoted in Jan McDonald, “ ‘The Second Act Was Glorious’: The Staging of the Trafalgar Scene from ‘Votes for Women!’ at the Court Theatre,” Theatre History Studies 15 (1995): 146. 97. Elizabeth Robins, Votes for Women: A Play in Three Acts (Chicago: Dramatic Publishing Company, 1907), 132, 93. 98. Quoted in Sheila Stowell, A Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 37. 99. H. M. Paull, “The Anti-Suffragist or The Other Side,” in The Methuen Drama Book of Suffrage Plays, ed. Naomi Paxton (London: Methuen, 2013), 115.

Chapter 4 1. J. B. Priestley, English Journey: Being a Rambling but Truthful Account of What One Man Saw and Heard and Felt and Thought During a Journey Through England During the Autumn of the Year 1933 (London: W. Heinemann, 1934), 157–58. Galsworthy’s drama The Silver Box and Ian Hay’s comedy Tilly of Bloomsbury both dealt with the relationship between upper and lower classes. 2. Dorothy G. Mason and W. Jenkins Gibson, Organising an Amateur Theatre Society (London: Lovat Dickson, 1936), 1. 3. Norman Marshall, The Other Theatre (London: John Lehmann, 1947), 86; George Taylor, History of the Amateur Theatre (Melksham: Venton, 1976), 59–60. 4. The 1928 Amateur Dramatic Year Book listed nearly 2,000 societies across Great Britain, with most specifying the annual subscription, which usually ranged from a shilling to a guinea.

Notes to Pages 110–114

207

So frequently was subscription required that a call for amateurs to participate in the Richmond Historical and Empire Pageant emphasized that (thanks to a £4,000 contribution from the local corporation) actors “will not be asked to contribute financially other than to pay for their costumes.” Outside of school performances, this precondition extended even to children: the Sudbury Dramatic Society agreed that for children, parents or others interested would pay the 2s. 6d. minimum subscription on their behalf. G. W. Bishop, ed., Amateur Dramatic Year Book and Community Theatre Handbook, 1928–29 (London: A. & C. Black, 1928), 87–179; “Amateurs Wanted at Richmond,” Amateur Theatre and Playwrights’ Journal (hereafter Amateur Theatre) 1, no. 20 (December 28, 1934): 36; “Sudbury Dramatic Society,” Suffolk and Essex Free Press, July 6, 1921. 5. Adult Education Committee of the Board of Education, The Drama in Adult Education, Adult Education Committee Paper 6 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1926), para. 331. 6. British Drama League, Amateur Drama: The Story of a Typical Amateur Society (London: British Council, 1952), 1. 7. W. A. M., “One Reason Why Amateur Drama Flourishes,” Aberdeen Press and Journal, September 16, 1933, 6. 8. H. F. Rubinstein, letter to the editor, Amateur Theatre, November 2, 1934. 9. Robert J. Gendall, letter to the editor, Amateur Theatre, May 11, 1934. 10. Geoffrey Whitworth, “Where the Stage Is Alive!” Amateur Theatre 2, no. 44 (January 31, 1936): 7. 11. F. G. Thomas, “Community Drama: Adult Education in Devon,” Western Times, November 4, 1927, 9. 12. T. G. Barman, letter to the editor, Amateur Theatre, May 11, 1934. 13. “Leeds Art Theatre’s Aims: Next Season’s Attractive Programme,” Yorkshire Post, May 14, 1923, 7. 14. He continues: “In London it would cost a good many pounds; in Leeds it was a matter of so many pennies and a circular. The result was more than gratifying. With a maximum subscription of one pound for a series of performances, and a few shillings as minimum, no less than £900 was gathered for the forthcoming season. And as the pound subscribers were the great minority, it may be safely calculated that the membership goes into thousands.” J. T. Grein, “The World of the Theatre. Virgin Soil.—The Leeds Art Theatre,” Illustrated London News, May 26, 1923, 912. 15. “The Things They Say,” Amateur Theatre 4, no. 70 (March 25, 1937): 137. 16. J. Walker, “Front of House: Recipe for Better Programmes,” Amateur Theatre 4, no. 71 (April 9, 1937): 8. 17. Adult Education Committee, The Drama in Adult Education, para. 274. 18. Marshall, The Other Theatre, 97. The lack of recognition went both ways. As one audience member wrote to the Eastern Daily Press: “I have attended the Maddermarket Theatre from its earliest days and am still greeted as a stranger.” Quoted in Charles Rigby, Maddermarket Mondays: Press Articles Dealing with the Famous Norwich Players, etc. (Norwich: Roberts & Co., 1933), 12. 19. Emphasis mine. Adult Education Committee, The Drama in Adult Education, para. 427; Norman Veitch, The People’s: Being a History of the People’s Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1911–1939 (Gateshead: Northumberland Press, 1950), 21.

208

Notes to Pages 115–118

20. Attendants who sold or distributed programs had long been gendered female, and sexualized. At the Liverpool Rep, one observer remarked that program sellers “wear the prettiest uniform of pale grey with pointed aprons and wide caps of white muslin.” At St. James’s Theatre, where George Alexander insisted that programs be given away free, attendants were strictly forbidden from accepting gratuities, lest payment hint at impropriety. “From a Woman Observer,” “The Repertory Theatre: Its First Production,” Liverpool Courier, November 13, 1911; Macqueen-Pope, Carriages at Eleven, 21. 21. Priestley, English Journey, 156. 22. Rose describes working-class participation in amateur theater: “Onstage, working people could enjoy an opportunity that they rarely had in life—to assume another role and express themselves to an audience.” Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 79–83. 23. John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), 59. 24. Horace Brierley, introduction to Fifty Years of Amateur Theatre, by Dumayne Warne (London: National Operatic & Dramatic Association, 1949). 25. See Judith Hawley and Mary Isbell, “Editorial: Amateur Theatre in the Long Nineteenth Century,” Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film 38, no. 2 (2011): xvii–xix; David Coates, “The Development of Amateur Theatre in Britain, 1789–1914” (PhD diss., University of Warwick, 2018); Michael Meeuwis, Everyone’s Theater: Literature and Daily Life in England, 1860– 1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019). 26. After all, professionalism itself only recently had become institutionalized for commercial actors with organizations like the Actors’ Association (1891) and Choristers’ Association (1892). For more, see Michael Baker, The Rise of the Victorian Actor (London: Croom Helm, 1978); Tracy C. Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1991). 27. British Drama League, Plays to Act and How to Act Them: A Guide for Community Players, 2nd ed., rev. and enl. (London: British Drama League, 1925), 5. 28. Seymour Hicks, “Fifty Hints for Amateur Actors,” Amateur Theatre 2, no. 34 (September 13, 1935): 8. 29. Harold Downs, “Reflex of Activities,” The Stage, November 13, 1924, 14. 30. Claire Cochrane has argued that “the very issues which so exercised modernists in their opposition to the industrial priorities of commercial theatre were integral to a continuum of distaste at the end of which lay amateur drama at its most stubbornly independent.” Cochrane, Twentieth-Century British Theatre, 116. 31. Quoted in “Amateur Players as Pioneers: Miss Thorndike on Scope of Civic Playhouse,” Yorkshire Post, November 11, 1929. 32. Harley Granville-Barker, “Hints on Rehearsing a Play,” in Amateur Dramatic Year Book and Community Theatre Handbook, 1928–29, ed. G. W. Bishop (London: A. & C. Black, 1928), 8. 33. Quoted in “Drama League: Should Dialect Be Preserved? National Theatre Scheme,” Devon and Exeter Gazette, November 3, 1930, 4. 34. Godfrey Tearle, “We Must Get Rid of ‘Shamateurs’!” Amateur Theatre 2, no. 35 (September 27, 1935): 7. 35. Frank Napier, letter to the editor, Amateur Theatre, August 1936. Elsewhere, Amateur Theatre claimed that “amateur bodies should book the professional on the understanding that

Notes to Pages 118–121

209

the onus is on him to provide an efficient substitute, and to name that substitute at the outset.” “Our Point of View,” Amateur Theatre 4, no. 68 (February 26, 1937): 50. 36. Helen Brooks has demonstrated that complaints about amateurs harming professionals’ statuses and revenues go back to at least the nineteenth century. Helen Brooks, “ ‘One Entire Nation of Actors and Actresses’: Reconsidering the Relationship of Public and Private Theatricals,” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 38, no. 2 (2011): 1–13. 37. Tearle, “We Must Get Rid of ‘Shamateurs’!” 7. 38. For example: “ ‘The Company I was in when I worked in the North,’ said the Bank Cashier, ‘brought in everyone possible to help to keep down expenses. Someone’s uncle was a printer, and someone else had an aunt who was a dressmaker, and who helped with the costumes. A builder got so interested that eventually, under his direction, we built our own theatre.’ ” British Drama League, Amateur Drama, 2. Norman Veitch describes a group of zealous plumbers among the People’s Theatre stage staff who were eager to ensure that the opening scene of Pygmalion was performed in the rain. Veitch, The People’s, 21. 39. “The Community Theatre: Professionals or Amateurs? Variety of Opinion,” Amateur Theatre 1, no. 20 (December 28, 1934): 36. 40. Adult Education Committee, The Drama in Adult Education, para. 167. 41. Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, 111. 42. Alastair Prentice, letter to the editor, Amateur Theatre, January 25, 1935. 43. Quoted in “The Actor’s Art: Mr. Martin Browne at Peterborough,” Amateur Theatre 2, no. 44 (January 31, 1936): 33. 44. Quoted in Veitch, The People’s, 163. 45. Quoted in “Scottish Summer School of Drama at St. Andrews: Dr. Gordon Bottomley’s Inaugural Address,” Gloucester Citizen, July 26, 1935, 9. 46. Gordon Bottomley to L. Stanley Jast, April 3, 1919, Prospectuses, photographs and leaflets, 1919–1931, The Unnamed Society (Manchester), Th792.094273Un4, Special Collections, Manchester Central Library. 47. “Our Point of View,” Amateur Theatre 2, no. 34 (September 13, 1935): 5. 48. Everton village producer Dorothy Rhodes claimed: “I know of no case where the socalled ‘sensitive vicar’ has anything to do with the rural dramatic movement. . . . We do not care for exaggerated or comic caricatures of ourselves flitting about with fantastic wings.” She cited recent productions of Everyman and Laurence Housman’s Bride Feast (1922) that had been performed before crowded audiences. Dorothy Rhodes, letter to the editor, Amateur Theatre, October 25, 1935. 49. Paraphrased in “Amateur or Professional? Bexhill Amateurs’ Likely Debate on Production,” Amateur Theatre 3, no. 66 (January 29, 1937): 36. 50. George Taylor, letter to the editor, Amateur Theatre, June 8, 1934. 51. “Community Drama at Caistor: A New Society Play ‘Macbeth,’ ” Yorkshire Post, December 13, 1923, 8. Apropos of lighting, Dr. L. du Garde Peach timed Great Hucklow Village Players productions to coincide with the full moon so that outlying villages on the moors could attend. “Amateur Drama. Its Cultural Value in Community Life. Dr. L. du Garde Peach at Chesterfield,” Derbyshire Times and Chesterfield Herald, January 30, 1932, 7. 52. “Village Drama Movement: Scheme for Training of Producers, W. Riding Council,” Yorkshire Post, May 25, 1932, 12. 53. Lionel Dingle, letter to the editor, Amateur Theatre, September 13, 1935.

210

Notes to Pages 121–126

54. British Drama League, Plays to Act, 12. 55. Bradford Civic Playhouse brochure, 1937, Bradford Civic Playhouse, Scrapbooks, 11D75, West Yorkshire Archive Service, Bradford. 56. Victor Thornton, letter to the editor, Amateur Theatre, August 3, 1934. 57. British Drama League, Amateur Drama, 5. 58. Thomas, “Community Drama,” 9. 59. “Community Drama. Interesting Advice to Amateurs. Cutting Away from Charities,” Burnley Express, November 9, 1929, 16; Veitch, The People’s, 114. 60. “Bishop Auckland Drama Company: Secretary’s Non-Acting Members Suggestion,” Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough, June 7, 1939, 3. 61. Though these were later changed to “playing” and “associate.” Veitch, The People’s, 63, 108. 62. “Table Talk: Dramatic Club for Burnley,” Burnley News, August 31, 1929, 9. 63. Though subscription often was used in this way, the technical regulations were more specific: “where the subscription covers other non-dutiable privileges (e.g. the use of a library of dramatic literature, definite tuition in acting, and the like; or where the society uses its subscription funds partly for educational purposes), application should be made in writing to the Commissioners of Customs and Excise, Custom House, E.C.3, for an ‘assessment’ of the proportionate value of these privileges or purposes, and when this is obtained duty will be payable only on the remaining part of the subscription. In sending the application, full particulars should be given of the activities and objects of the society. Note, however, that no tax is payable in any case if the subscription paid does not exceed the uniform rate of sixpence for each performance (e.g. a subscription of 5/-, admitting to ten shows, at 6d. each, would not be taxable).” “Brief Notes on the Entertainment Tax,” in Amateur Dramatic Year Book and Community Theatre Handbook, 1928–29, ed. G. W. Bishop (London: A. & C. Black, 1928), 71. 64. British Drama League, Plays to Act, 5. 65. “Our Point of View,” Amateur Theatre 3, no. 52 (June 1936): 5. 66. “Yorkshire Gamekeeper,” letter to the editor, Amateur Theatre, May 7, 1937. 67. Bradford Civic Playhouse brochure, 1937. 68. Veitch, The People’s, 146. 69. E. A. Baughan, “The Function of the Amateur,” in Amateur Dramatic Year Book and Community Theatre Handbook, 1928–29, ed. G. W. Bishop (London: A. & C. Black, 1928), 21. 70. Stanley Mackenzie, letter to the editor, Amateur Theatre, July 6, 1934. 71. R. A. H. Goodyear, letter to the editor, Amateur Theatre, July 1, 1938. 72. J. F. Wix, letter to the editor, Amateur Theatre, April 13, 1934. 73. Mackenzie letter to the editor. 74. British Drama League, Amateur Drama, 13. 75. “The Todmorden Amateur Players,” Todmorden & District News, July 29, 1932, 5. 76. Nadine Holdsworth, Jane Milling, and Helen Nicholson, The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 226. The casting call included a search for “20 six-foot men with ample chest expansion; 20 tall men with long noses. . . . The negroes are required to act as slaves. Tall and well-built men are to personate Roman soldiers, and the tall men, with long noses, will be Jews in the crowd scenes.” “Negroes Wanted: Search for Types in Yorkshire,” Yorkshire Evening Post, November 1, 1930. 77. Veitch, The People’s, 114.

Notes to Pages 126–130

211

78. “The Drama: Exeter League,” Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, June 26, 1929, 3. 79. G. E. Middleditch, “The Amateur Theatre Manager: Actor and Manager Must Collaborate,” Amateur Theatre 2, no. 43 (January 17, 1936): 10. 80. “A Civic Playhouse, Producing Drama That Is Worth While, What Bradford Can Do,” Bradford Telegraph and Argus, May 8, 1929. 81. Adult Education Committee, The Drama in Adult Education, paras. 113, 114. 82. Michael Mangan, “Theatre in Modern British Culture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Culture, ed. Michael Higgins, Clarissa Smith, and John Storey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 158. 83. Ken Etheridge, letter to the editor, Amateur Theatre, June 8, 1934. 84. British Drama League, Plays to Act, 7. 85. “Village Players in Village Play: ‘Farmer’s Wife’ at Long Riston,” Hull Daily Mail, April 12, 1935, 11. 86. F. G. Thomas, “Community Drama: Adult Education in Devon,” Western Times, November 4, 1927, 9. 87. Alan Read, Theatre and Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 1993), 123. 88. John Bourne, “All About the Coming Season,” Amateur Theatre 4, no. 79 (September 24, 1937): 499. 89. John McKenzie, “The Scot in Drama,” Amateur Theatre 1, no. 22 (January 25, 1935): 6. 90. Maisie Grune, letter to the editor, Amateur Theatre (April 27, 1934): 23. 91. Quoted in “Amateur Drama, Its Cultural Value in Community Life: Dr. L. du Garde Peach at Chesterfield,” Derbyshire Times and Chesterfield Herald, January 30, 1932, 7. 92. “Nora Ratcliffe,” “The Diary of a Village Amateur,” Amateur Theatre 4, no. 75 (June 1937): 354. 93. Percy C. Chisnall, letter to the editor, Amateur Theatre, August 30, 1935. 94. Colin Chambers remarks: “A favourite male plot was to insist that not only was female promiscuity consistent with the values of Marxism-Leninism but that it was a positive revolutionary duty.” Colin Chambers, The Story of Unity Theatre (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989), 127. 95. L. F. Ramsey, “Mostly for Women. Women’s Institutes: A Growing Movement,” Northern Whig, June 11, 1926. 96. Reviewing one West Sussex Women’s Institutes Festival in which over three hundred women performed The Merchant of Venice five times, an observer remarked: “During one performance I saw seven different Bassanios and four different Shylocks. Other lesser characters had even more interpretations, and, since they were of different sizes and temperaments, the afternoon became somewhat confusing.” Peter Puck, “The Gossip’s Bowl,” Amateur Theatre 1, no. 12 (August 3, 1934): 13. 97. “Community Drama. Interesting Lectures in Taunton: Choosing Village Plays,” Taunton Courier, October 3, 1934, 1. 98. “Arts Interests: Women and Art,” Scotsman, February 9, 1932, 12. 99. “One Reason Why Amateur Drama Flourishes: Wandering Players Show What Can Be Done with the Smallest Resources,” Aberdeen Press and Journal, September 16, 1933, 6. 100. A. Skimming, letter to the editor, Amateur Theatre, January 28, 1938. 101. “Our Point of View,” Amateur Theatre 2, no. 34 (September 13, 1935): 5. 102. Quoted in “Drama Conference: Delegates from Eight Counties at Bury St. Edmund’s, Awards for Local Players,” Bury Free Press, November 30, 1935, 2.

212

Notes to Pages 131–138

103. “Our Point of View,” Amateur Theatre 2, no. 41 (December 20, 1935): 6. 104. Richard Hanson, “The Amateur Stage,” Rochdale Observer, June 3, 1939, 3. 105. “Why a Bradford Society Closed Down,” Amateur Theatre 3, no. 58 (October 9, 1936): 34. 106. “Deacon’s Son,” letter to the editor, Amateur Theatre, April 27, 1934. 107. Cyril J. Thomas, letter to the editor, Amateur Theatre, May 25, 1934. 108. “Our Point of View,” Amateur Theatre 3, no. 66 (January 29, 1937): 3. 109. Chambers, The Story of Unity Theatre, 19, 106. 110. For more, see Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl, and Stuart Cosgrove, Theatres of the Left, 1880–1935: Workers’ Theatre Movements in Britain and America (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985). 111. “New Dramatic Society in Driffield,” Driffield Times, May 9, 1931, 3. 112. Leonard Paine, letter to the editor, Amateur Theatre, July 6, 1934. 113. Adult Education Committee, The Drama in Adult Education, para. 273. 114. See Wayne Booth’s argument that amateurs attempted to preserve individuality within a capitalist economy. Wayne Booth, For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 115. “Leeds Industrial Theatre: An Ambitious Programme,” Yorkshire Post, July 7, 1922, 12. 116. S. W., letter to the editor, Yorkshire Evening Post, September 30, 1922. 117. W. B. Dow, letter to the editor, Yorkshire Evening Post, October 3, 1922. 118. “The Red Rose Letters,” Walsall Advertiser, June 14, 1913, 2. 119. Quoted in “Industrial Theatres: Professor Abercrombie on Gospel of Leisure,” Yorkshire Post, October 21, 1925, 11. 120. J. R. Gregson, “The Industrial Actors,” Yorkshire Post, January 13, 1922, 6. 121. “Educating Through the Theatre: Intellectual Rivalry Between Parents and Children,” Gloucester Citizen, November 21, 1922, 2. 122. W. B. Dow, letter to the editor, Yorkshire Post, March 30, 1925. 123. Quoted in “Industrial Drama League,” Gloucester Citizen, February 22, 1922, 3. 124. “Unemployed Men’s Tour,” Amateur Theatre 1, no. 16 (November 2, 1934): 15. 125. Quoted in “Unemployed Drama Groups,” Sheffield Independent, July 20, 1936, 6. 126. “Unemployed Drama Group: Fine Performance by North Shields Workless,” Shields Daily News, December 5, 1933, 3. 127. Emphasis in original. H. K. Mount, “The Amateur Stage: Unemployed Men’s ‘Green Grass’ Experience,” Nottingham Journal, September 30, 1936, 4. 128. “Our Point of View,” Amateur Theatre 3, no. 59 (October 23, 1936): 5. 129. By contrast, when amateur theater was used pedagogically in a 1920s prison (and when its participants did not pay subscription fees), the prison brought in outside professional practitioners to encourage social mixing. As one organizer of a prison Shakespeare class remarked: “I cannot help feeling that the drama might be a great instrument for bringing healing into our social disorders which are so largely caused by suspicion and distrust brought about by our failure to get to know each other.” Adult Education Committee, The Drama in Adult Education, paras. 262–63. 130. Mountain Ash Toc H Amateur Dramatic Society program (The Schemer by Naunton Davies), April 6, 1933, D. R. Davies Collection of Drama Scrap Books, GB 0210 DRDIES 2/1, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.

Notes to Pages 138–146

213

131. Quoted in “Living Drama in Towns. Life’s Lethargy. Competition of Entertainments. Conference at Exeter,” Western Morning News, July 5, 1937, 3. 132. I find records of a London Deaf and Dumb Dramatic Club performing Hamlet as far back as 1886. 133. Taylor, History of the Amateur Theatre, 161; L. Beedham, letter to the editor, Amateur Theatre, April 8, 1938. 134. Robert Gendall, letter to the editor, Amateur Theatre, July 6, 1934. 135. “Ardrossan Players. Dinner in Edinburgh. Community Drama,” Scotsman, October 8, 1928, 13. 136. “Our Point of View,” Amateur Theatre 3, no. 53 (July 1936): 5. 137. “Our Point of View,” Amateur Theatre 2, no. 32 (August 1935): 5. 138. Quoted in “Plays Performed in Churches,” Amateur Theatre 1, no. 11 (July 6, 1934): 4. 139. Taylor, History of the Amateur Theatre, 52–53. 140. Taylor, History of the Amateur Theatre, 49; F. J. Watson Hart, “Scenery,” in Amateur Dramatic Year Book and Community Theatre Handbook, 1928–29, ed. G. W. Bishop (London: A. & C. Black, 1928), 46; “Our Point of View,” Amateur Theatre 2, no. 24 (February 22, 1935): 3. Apparently, one character’s bed was used during the day by those who had nowhere to sleep at night. Chambers, The Story of Unity Theatre, 72. 141. “ ‘Everyman’ on Steps of Town Hall: Leeds Performance,” Yorkshire Post, September 30, 1929.

Chapter 5 1. Lennox Robinson, “At the Play: ‘The Mask’ and Some Plays,” Observer, October 12, 1924. From March 1908 to February 1909 The Mask published monthly. From October 1909 to April 1914 it published quarterly, with numbers in January, April, July, and October. Volume 7 contains two numbers from July 1914 and May 1915. From March 1918 to April 1919, The Mask ran as a monthly leaflet obtained only with subscription to Craig’s short-lived magazine, The Marionnette. After a single, regular-sized number for 1923, The Mask returned as a quarterly in January 1924, publishing until October 1929. In total, The Mask issued 70 numbers in 15 volumes. 2. Marianne Moore, testimonial postcard, 1927. Unless otherwise noted, all manuscripts from Dorothy Nevile Lees Papers Relating to Edward Gordon Craig and The Mask, MS Thr 423, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 3. Louis Zettersten, testimonial postcard, 1927. 4. S. Kikuchi, testimonial postcard, 1927. 5. See Lawrence Switzky, “The Rise of the Director, 1734–1956: Negotiations with the Material World” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2010), 42–96. 6. Olga Taxidou has described The Mask as Craig’s “stage” and “periodical performance.” Olga Taxidou, The Mask: A Periodical Performance by Edward Gordon Craig (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998), 3. 7. These numbers hold across the surviving lists in the Dorothy Nevile Lees Papers Relating to Edward Gordon Craig and The Mask (1919, 1930) and the Fonds Edward Gordon Craig (1913, 1914–17, 1925, 1926, 1927, 1929, 1932), De´partement des Arts du Spectacle, Bibliothe`que nationale de France, Paris. Craig’s son Edward Carrick writes that according to Dorothy Lees, the circulation “was well under one thousand.” Edward Carrick, Gordon Craig: The Story of His Life (New York: Limelight Editions, 1985), 250.

214

Notes to Pages 146–148

8. Calhoun Winton, “Steele, Sir Richard (bap. 1672, d. 1729),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 9. For example: “But it has always been, and will always be an error, and a very great error too, to mix up Politics and Art.” “Mr Huntly Carter & M. Tairoff,” The Mask 10, no. 1 (January 1927): 41. John Semar, “The Censor and ‘The Mask,’ ” The Mask 2, no. 6 (October 1909): 49; John Semar, “The Anti-Suffrage League,” The Mask 4, no. 1 (July 1911): 78. 10. Review of The American Ballet, by Ted Shawn, The Mask 13, no. 1 (January 1927): 38. 11. Gordon Craig, “England for the English,” The Mask 8, no. 3 (May 1918): 12. 12. E. G. C., “We of the New Movement,” The Mask 8, no. 9 (November 1918): 35. 13. Fifteen shillings was approximately a fifth of a lower clerk’s or shopkeeper’s weekly income. Long, The Edwardian House, 9. Financial records indicate that regular subscriptions financed most publishing expenditures. Citing a related scheme that would consolidate The Mask and Craig’s School for the Art of the Theatre, critic Haldane Macfall reiterated: “Craig does not ask for large subscriptions from a few pedants; he asks a million people to support his endeavor to inspire a living theatre by subscribing a shilling.” Haldane Macfall, “The Significance of Gordon Craig in the Modern Theatre,” Academy, August 16, 1913. By contrast, in 1920, Craig returned to England looking for “a millionaire or a group of wealthy men, preferably of English extraction,” for a theater laboratory or workshop “along the same lines as Edison’s laboratory.” “Laboratory for the Theatre,” Daily News and Leader, May 26, 1920. For more on how Craig’s efforts anticipate Peter Brook’s Centre for Theatre Research and Jerzy Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre, see Christopher Innes, Edward Gordon Craig: A Vision of Theatre (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998), 206. 14. Review of The Civic Theatre, by Percy Mackaye, The Mask 5, no. 4 (April 1913): 378. 15. “Realism and the Actor: An International Symposium,” The Mask 1, no. 4 (May 1908): 81–83. The Mask published two additional international symposia and one symposium composed entirely of English theatrical figures: “A National Theatre: Its Advantages and Disadvantages,” The Mask 2, no. 6 (October 1909): 81–89; “The Position of the Theatre: A Symposium,” The Mask 4, no. 2 (October 1911): 124–133; “On a Design by Sangallo: An International Symposium,” The Mask 11, no. 4 (October 1925): 151–58. 16. Edward Storer, “Internationalism in Art and Literature,” Academy, December 13, 1913. 17. In this metaphor, Canning is actually describing the role of the U.S. magazine Theatre Arts, which was strongly influenced by The Mask. Charlotte Canning, On the Performance Front: US Theatre and Internationalism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 61. 18. “Mr. Gordon Craig and British Opera,” The Mask 14, no. 4 (October 1928): 172. 19. Review of Fascism, by Odon Por, trans. E. Townshend, The Mask 10, no. 1 (January 1924): 37; review of Empty Chairs, by Sir Squire Bancroft and Mussolini: His Political Speeches, 1914–1923, The Mask 12, no. 1 (January 1926): 42. A 1927 review of a book about Andre´ Antoine digressively described fascism in positive terms: “Fascism is not easy to define, but what is perfectly easy to see is that the Fascisti are men who work shoulder to shoulder, with mind to mind, and follow a leader.” Review of Antoine and the Theatre Libre, by Samuel Montefiore Waxman, The Mask 13, no. 1 (January 1927): 36. 20. Innes, Edward Gordon Craig, 136–37. German lawyer Heinrich Heim saw Craig’s books in Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company shop in Paris and (at least by his own recounting) introduced them to Hitler, in whose headquarters he worked. Lees was taken by surprise when Nazi officers showed up in Florence demanding the archives. Michael Holroyd,

Notes to Pages 149–153

215

A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families (London: Vintage, 2009), 558–60. 21. W. A. D. Englefield, testimonial postcard, 1927. 22. Peters, Theatre of the Book, 296. 23. Emphasis mine. Edward Gordon Craig, annotations in a copy of William Shakespeare, Macbeth (London, 1892), 1896–1961, Edward Gordon Craig Papers, MS Thr 345, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 24. Stephen Orgel, The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 50–83. 25. The distinction between promptbook and authorial versions is not always clear-cut. See, for example, Paul Werstine, Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 26. H. J. Jackson, Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 196. One of Coleridge’s many annotations was in Lamb’s copy of Beaumont and Fletcher plays: “I will not be long here, Charles!—& gone, you will not mind my having spoiled a book in order to leave a Relic.” Quoted in H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 7. For his part, Lamb insisted that the markings in the secondhand copy of Shakespeare he had given to Wordsworth were only critical readings “which some careful Gentleman the former Owner was at the pains to insert in a very neat hand from 5 Commentators. It is no defacement.” Quoted in Jackson, Romantic Readers, 58. 27. Sean Latham and Robert Scholes, “The Rise of Periodical Studies,” PMLA 121, no. 2 (2006): 517–31. 28. Emphasis mine. John Semar, “Editorial Notes,” The Mask 1, no. 8 (October 1908): 165. Craig also mentions The Theatre (1878–98) as “the nearest approach in England to an art journal.” For more on that journal, see Helene Harlin Wong, “The Late Victorian Theatre: As Reflected in ‘The Theatre,’ 1878–1897” (master’s thesis, Louisiana State University, 1955). 29. In 1925, The Mask blurbed a Morning Post review calling Craig’s magazine “the liveliest and wittiest little magazine known to us.” “Three London Estimates of The Mask,” The Mask 11, no. 3 (July 1925). 30. Richard Price, “Among Friends: Little Magazines, Friendship and Networks,” British Library, https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/among-friends-little-magazines -friendship-and-networks. Although Mark Morrisson ethnographically assesses The Egoist’s (1914–18) “solidly middle class” subscription lists, few have followed his example, perhaps because surviving lists are rare. Mark Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 236n42. 31. Prospectus [1913?]. 32. An editor of Le Scapin’s sister magazine, La Ple´iade (1886–90), described that magazine’s editorial strategy in private correspondence: “As it is impossible to get many people to subscribe to a magazine that is strictly literary . . . it is certainly not necessary to print many copies.” He proposed a circulation of “about 200.” Both translated quotations in Alexia Kalantzis, “The ‘Little Magazine’ as Publishing Success,” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 3: Europe, 1880–1940, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 60–67.

216

Notes to Pages 153–158

33. Buckley, Beyond Text, 25–60; Diane Silverthorne, “Vienna’s ‘Holy Spring’ and Beyond,” in Modernist Magazines, 3:1003. 34. Mats Jansson, “Crossing Border: Modernism in Sweden and the Swedish-Speaking Part of Finland,” in Modernist Magazines, 3:666; Chris Michaelides, “Futurist Periodicals in Rome (1916–39),” in Modernist Magazines, 3:563. 35. Przemyslaw Stroz.ek, “Cracow and Warsaw: Becoming the Avant-Garde,” in Modernist Magazines, 3:1205; Alan Golding, “The Little Review (1914–29),” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 2: North America, 1894–1960, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 83. 36. Anne-Rachel Hermetet, “Modern Classicism,” in Modernist Magazines, 3:102–4; Eric Bulson, “Milan, the ‘Rivista,’ and the Deprovincialization of Italy,” in Modernist Magazines, 3:520. 37. W. B. Yeats, “The Hour Glass,” The Mask 5, no. 4 (April 1913): 327–46. 38. For more on how Yeats negotiated reading and theatrical publics, see Paige Reynolds, “Reading Publics, Theater Audiences, and the Little Magazines of the Abbey Theatre,” New Hibernia Review 7, no. 4 (2003): 63–84. 39. Dorothea Dietrich, “Hanover: ‘True Art’ and ‘True Dada,’ ” in Modernist Magazines, 3:956. 40. Douglas Brent McBride, “A Critical Mass for Modernism in Berlin,” in Modernist Magazines, 3:790. 41. Dietrich, “Hanover,” 953. 42. Gordon Craig, “Designs for ‘Macbeth,’ ” The Mask 15, no. 2 (April 1929): 81. 43. Chansky, Composing Ourselves, 88. 44. Mark Morrisson, “The Cause of Poetry,” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 1: Britain and Ireland, 1880–1955, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 414, 424; “Magazines,” The Mask 9, no. 1 (1923): 40. 45. Article drafts, EGC-Ms-B-1114, Fonds Edward Gordon Craig. 46. Richard Burton, How to See a Play (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 208. 47. John Semar, “Size,” The Mask 8, no. 9 (November 1918): 35. Craig later noted that the same “incompetents” were running both. Ourselves, “To Nearly All of Us of the New Movement,” The Mask 10, no. 3 (July 1924): 122; “Magazines,” The Mask 11, no. 3 (July 1925): 148. 48. Eco, The Infinity of Lists, 113. See also Robert Belknap: “On the one hand, a list may fulfill a reference function, acting as a resource in which information is ordered so it can be swiftly and easily located. On the other, a list may convey a specific impression; its role is the creation of meaning, rather than merely the storage of it.” Belknap, The List, 3. 49. See Ja´nos Bak, “Lists in the Service of Legitimation in Central European Sources,” in The Charm of a List: From the Sumerians to Computerised Data Processing, ed. Lucie Dolezˇalova´ (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 34–45. 50. “The Energy of the German Theatre,” The Mask 1, no. 2 (April 1908): 20. 51. The Editor, “Theatre Men in Europe,” The Mask 9 (1923): 23. 52. Gordon Craig, “Epilogue,” The Mask 6, no. 4 (April 1914): 282. 53. Allen Carric, “Proposals Old and New: A Dialogue Between a Theatrical Manager and an Artist of the Theatre,” The Mask 3, no. 6 (October 1910): 60. 54. That is, if they weren’t already; Craig sometimes insisted on underlining particular contributor names in appeals to potential celebrity subscribers like actress Georgette LeBlanc. Craig to Lees, February 1909.

Notes to Pages 158–165

217

55. Prospectus [1908?]. 56. Faith Binckes, Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 8, 97–127; Ann Ardis, “Debating Feminisms, Modernism, and Socialism: Beatrice Hastings’ Voices in The New Age,” in The Gender Complex of Modernism, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 310–59; Sascha Bru, “ ‘The Will to Style’: The Dutch Contribution to the Avant-Garde,” in Modernist Magazines, 3:298; Mariana Aguirre, “The Return of Order in Florence,” in Modernist Magazines, 3:497. 57. George Calderon, letter to the editor, The Mask, January 1912. 58. John Balance, “A Note on Masks,” The Mask 1, no. 1 (March 1908): 10. 59. Carrick, Gordon Craig, 242. 60. Lorelei F. Guidry, “Gordon Craig’s Theatre Magazine” (master’s thesis, Tufts University, 1963), 58–61. 61. “Notice,” The Mask 10, no. 1 (January 1924): 46. 62. Emphasis mine. Craig to Lees, 1911. 63. Carrick, Gordon Craig, 242. 64. The letter may never have been sent, but it was intended for the April 1919 issue, which was the last to appear before 1923. Craig to Lees, February 11, 1919. 65. Gordon Craig, “The Characters of the Commedia Dell’arte: A List Compiled,” The Mask 4, no. 3 (January 1912): 199–202. 66. William Archer, Play-Making: A Manual of Craftsmanship (London: Chapman & Hall, 1912), 62–63. 67. Emily Willard to The Mask, September 11, 1924. Willard seems to be referring to a new stage language for actors called ACCA “by the author of ‘Films.’ ” “ACCA: A New Stage Language,” The Mask 10, no. 1 (January 1924): 19–21. 68. Emily Finer, “ ‘A Rift on the Left Front?’ ” in Modernist Magazines, 3:1330. 69. Emphasis mine. Gordon Craig, “The Art of the Theatre: The Second Dialogue,” The Mask 2, no. 9 (January 1910): 113. The first dialogue was published in Edward Gordon Craig, The Art of the Theatre (London: T. N. Foulis, 1905). 70. Carric, “Proposals Old and New,” 59. 71. John Balance, “English Sentimentality,” The Mask 6, no. 1 (July 1913): 51–53. In July 1911, Craig returned to England for a dinner in his honor at the Cafe´ Royal, as he gleefully recounted in “Foreign Notes,” The Mask 4, no. 2 (October 1911): 162–64. 72. Gordon Craig, “Conversations with My Real Friends,” The Mask 5, no. 3 (January 1913): 226–33. 73. Gordon Craig, “For Plain People: Some Comments on Mr. Monkhouse’s Article,” The Mask 10, no. 1 (January 1924): 10–16. 74. John Semar, “Books,” The Mask 10, no. 1 (January 1924): 40. 75. John Balance, “After You’ve Finished with It,” The Mask 3, no. 3 (July 1910): 17. 76. Barbara Couper to The Mask, January 31, 1928. 77. Craig, Art of the Theatre, 32–33. 78. Craig, annotations in a copy of Macbeth. 79. For a discussion of Shaw’s fascist leanings, see Matthew Yde, Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism: Longing for Utopia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); for an account of Shaw’s relationship with his publishers, see Katherine E. Kelly, “Imprinting the Stage: Shaw and the Publishing Trade, 1883–1903,” in The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw, ed. Christopher Innes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 25–54.

218

Notes to Pages 165–170

80. See James Fisher, “ ‘The Colossus’ Versus ‘Master Teddy’: The Bernard Shaw/Edward Gordon Craig Feud,” Shaw 9 (1989): 199–221. 81. e. g. c., “The Colossus: G. B. S.,” The Mask 12, no. 1 (January 1926): 21–23; G. Bernard Shaw, “The Colossus Speaks,” The Mask 12, no. 2 (April 1926): 81–82. 82. “I was asked to produce this play in Berlin, and the only thing I could do was to forget to read the author’s stage directions, so that I might make sure of getting at the meaning of the play. And as I read the words, I wanted to omit these too, for the Scenario Scene seemed so excellent. When I had got the words out of my head I looked to see what was left of the First Scene.” Edward Gordon Craig, Towards a New Theatre (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1913), 51. 83. Edward Gordon Craig, Books and Theatres (London: J. M. Dent, 1925), 72. 84. Rachel Emily Willard, testimonial postcard, 1927. 85. After misattributing an author in a book review, Craig ran a correction blaming an imaginary subeditor: “We have fined this zealous youth heavily, and we have also raised his salary, as by means of the expostulatory letters received we have been brought into touch with at least fifty of our subscribers with whom iu [sic] spite of our efforts, we had never before succeeded in establishing any communication.” John Semar, “Editorial Notes,” The Mask 3, no. 9 (January 1911): 146. 86. Francis H. Newbery, testimonial postcard, 1927. 87. Emphasis mine. John Semar, “Editorial Notes,” The Mask 1, no. 6 (August 1908): 28. 88. Thorold Dickinson to The Mask, February 13, 1927. 89. Lori Cole, “What Is the Avant-Garde? The Questionnaire as Historiography,” Journal of Art Historiography, no. 5 (2001): 2. 90. “The Position of the Theatre: A Symposium,” The Mask 4, no. 2 (October 1911): 126. 91. R. N. Green-Armytage to The Mask, August 15, 1928. That same year, Green-Armytage published an edited book on Martin-Harvey. 92. “A Letter from Mme Bertha Kalich,” The Mask 4, no. 2 (October 1911): 174. 93. Craig’s school received financial backing from Baron Howard de Walden, an avid motorboat racer and patron of the arts whom Wyndham Lewis named among the “blessed” in Blast. 94. Yoo-no-hoo, “On Learning Magic,” The Mask 6, no. 3 (January 1914): 235–36. 95. Bookseller A. E. Dobell sent The Mask an unpublished Wilkie Collins essay and Harlequin color designs, the latter of which could not be printed. “The Use of Gas in Theatres: An Essay by Wilkie Collins,” The Mask 10, no. 4 (October 1914): 163–67. A. E. Dobell, letter to the editor, The Mask, October 1925. E. Lylie sent educational engravings, which were printed. E. Lylie, letter to the editor, The Mask, October 1927. 96. John Semar, “An Astounding Discovery Made by a Subscriber to ‘The Mask,’ ” The Mask 13, no. 3 (July 1927): 87–88. 97. “One of your Earliest Subscribers,” letter to the editor, The Mask, October 1925. 98. Allardyce Nicoll, “The Universities and the Drama,” The Mask 11, no. 2 (April 1925): 66. 99. Allardyce Nicoll, “Universities and the Drama: A Reply,” The Mask 11, no. 4 (October 1925): 163. 100. Craig, “For Plain People,” 10. 101. Eric Jon Bulson, Little Magazine, World Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 15–16.

Notes to Pages 170–174

219

102. A “Special Notice” from 1915 reads: “A thorough revision of the staff has been forced upon us owing to the exigencies of the war, and subscribers, contributors, and others are requested not to send any communication addressed to anyone except the Editor or the Publishers.” “Special Notice,” The Mask 7, no. 2 (May 1915): 187. The Mask balanced contributor scrapping with subscriber commemorating, patriotically publishing the names of famous fallen English subscribers Walter Crane and Rupert Brooke and Anglophile producer Charles Frohman next to an engraving of a wreath. “In Remembrance Of,” The Mask 7, no. 2 (May 1915): 185. I find no evidence that The Mask was censored at any point, which must have been a disappointment to Craig. 103. Paul McPharlin to The Mask, September 3, 1926. 104. John Semar, “A Step in a New Direction,” The Mask 10, no. 4 (October 1924): 141–42; “About These Plans,” The Mask 12, no. 2 (April 1926): 50. 105. Gordon Craig, “The Art of the Theatre: The Second Dialogue,” The Mask 2, no. 9 (January 1910): 105. 106. Allen Carric, “The English Stage in 1911: A Dialogue Between a Critic and a Professional Performer,” The Mask 3, no. 12 (April 1911): 182. 107. The magazine’s offices were on or next to the Arena Goldoni until 1917, when a post office box was rented instead. Carrick, Gordon Craig, 250, 287–88, 306. 108. John Semar, “Theatre and English Theatre,” The Mask 10, no. 3 (July 1924): 36. As Craig claimed in a letter to Lees: “I want one thing only now—recognition from England— that, or nothing.” Craig to Lees, June 29, 1923. 109. “International Drama,” Times, April 18, 1925; “A World Theatre Festival,” Times, December 12, 1927. 110. For example, Ezra Pound writing to Poetry magazine editor Harriet Monroe in 1915: “NOW we must go in for weight and mass attack.” In 1946, Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Caroline F. Ulrich claimed that little magazines had launched “a realistic frontal attack against refinement and sentimental romance.” Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible, eds., Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007), 11–12. 111. John Semar, “Editorial Notes,” The Mask 6, no. 2 (October 1913): 182. Caslon or no, subscribers and reviewers praised The Mask’s appearance. From Sussex, George Wolfe Plank, an American arts illustrator, called it “a masterpiece of typographical composition,” and from New York, Stella Hanan wrote to say that the Provincetown Playhouse and the Greenwich Village Theatre modeled their programs on it. George Wolfe Plank to The Mask, February 8, 1924; Stella Hanan to The Mask, December 13, 1924. 112. “To the Enemies of the Theatre,” The Mask 6, no. 1 (July 1913): 5. 113. Article drafts. 114. John H. Ahern to The Mask, undated. 115. Englefield postcard. 116. Willard to The Mask. 117. Guidry, “Gordon Craig’s Theatre Magazine,” 58–61. 118. J. S. [John Semar], “Javanese Marionettes: A Note on Their Construction,” The Mask 6, no. 4 (April 1914): 283–85; Dr. Ananda Coomaraswamy, “Notes on Indian Dramatic Technique,” The Mask 6, no. 2 (October 1913): 109–28; Sheko Tsubouchi, “The Drama in Japan,” The Mask 4, no. 4 (April 1912): 309–20.

220

Notes to Pages 174–178

119. Or so Anthony Sheppard speculates. W. Anthony Sheppard, Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 74. 120. Evelyn Nisbet, testimonial postcard, 1927. 121. John Semar, “Foreign Notes: 1423–1923,” The Mask 9 (1923): 42. Craig also printed different recruitment postcards according to whether addressees were male (“Will you, Dear Sir, do this at once? Very truly Yours. The Mask.”) or female (“Beautiful Madam, will you do this at once? Respectfully and affectionately. The Mask.”). Craig originally planned to publish the magazine in English, German, and Dutch editions and invented the pseudonym “Ivan Ireland” for the editor of a French edition. Carrick, Gordon Craig, 261. 122. Advertisement, The Mask 12, no. 4 (October 1926). 123. “The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre,” Times, December 9, 1911. 124. “Englishman,” letter to the editor, The Mask, January 1928. 125. Glenn Odom, World Theories of Theatre (London: Routledge, 2017), 1. 126. Carrie Preston has recently distinguished between submission to tradition and subversive innovation with respect to the use of noh by modernists like Pound, Yeats, Brecht, and Beckett. Carrie Preston, Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 127. Rustom Bharucha, Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture (London: Routledge, 1993), 19, 4.

Epilogue 1. Jacques Barzun, The Culture We Deserve (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 30–31, quoted in Davis, The Economics of the British Stage, 5. 2. The 1948 Local Government Act represented a partial reversal of the 1925 Public Health Act, which forbade local authorities from funding entertainment. The Arts Council of Great Britain grew out of the wartime Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, which began when an American-funded charity asked the government to match funds to protect culture and education. In 1994, the Arts Council was divided by nation. For more, see Andrew Sinclair, Arts and Cultures: The History of the 50 Years of the Arts Council of Great Britain (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995). 3. Arts Council of Great Britain, Thirteenth Annual Report of the Arts Council of Great Britain, 1957–58: A New Pattern of Patronage (London: Arts Council, 1958), 7. 4. Olivia Turnbull, Bringing Down the House: The Crisis in Britain’s Regional Theatres (Bristol: Intellect, 2008), 145–56. In Britain, public subscription continued to create a sense of civic ownership even as the Arts Council and local councils played a bigger role in financing theaters. In Ireland, the Ciste Cholmcille Fund that provided annuities for arts workers was entirely financed by interest from public subscriptions. 5. For example, Baz Kershaw reads late twentieth-century subscription audiences as customers: “Many theatres adopted quasi-corporate identities, complete with obligatory logos, implying that audience loyalty was important to them. Ticket buying was made easier by box-office computerization and credit card payment, and pricing policies reflected a greater awareness of untapped markets through subscription and discounting schemes.” Baz Kershaw, “Oh for Unruly Audiences! Or, Patterns of Participation in Twentieth-Century Theatre,” Modern Drama 44, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 143.

Notes to Pages 179–181

221

6. Mark Fisher, “From Traverse to Tramway: Scottish Theatres Old and New,” in Scottish Theatre Since the Seventies, ed. Randall Stevenson and Gavin Wallace (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 50. My thanks to Claire Cochrane for this reference. 7. Nicholas Hytner, Balancing Acts: Behind the Scenes at London’s National Theatre (New York: Knopf, 2017), 66. The National Theatre offers a membership scheme but no seasonticket subscriptions. 8. In particular, Lloyd describes Methodists publicly throwing up their tickets when they wished to end their membership. Lloyd, “Ticketing the British Eighteenth Century,” 851, 855–58. 9. Quoted in Chris E. Makepeace, Ephemera: A Book on Its Collection, Conservation, and Use (Aldershot: Gower, 1985), 2. 10. Kimberly A. Whitler, “How the Subscription Economy Is Disrupting the Traditional Business Model,” Forbes, January 26, 2016, http://www.forbes.com/sites/kimberlywhitler/2016/ 01/17/a-new-business-trend-shifting-from-a-service-model-to-a-subscription-based-model/. See also Tien Tzuo and Gabe Weisert, Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company’s Future—and What to Do About It (New York: Portfolio, 2018). 11. Quoted in Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein, “Inside Facebook’s Two Years of Hell,” WIRED, February 12, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/inside-facebook-mark-zuck erberg-2-years-of-hell/. 12. See Paul Richards, “How to Pay for the Royal Wedding? Simple: Public Subscription,” Coffee House (blog), November 25, 2010, https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2010/11/how-to-pay-for -the-royal-wedding-simple-public-subscription/; Paul Bernal, “Thatcher’s Funeral: Why Not a ‘Public Subscription’?” Paul Bernal’s Blog (blog), April 11, 2013, https://paulbernal.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/thatchers-funeral-why-not-a-public-subscription/. 13. Although crowdfunding suggests the promise of overcoming the geographical limitations of traditional subscription schemes, in practice most funders live in close physical proximity to their projects. Ajay K. Agrawal, Christian Catalini, and Avi Goldfarb, “The Geography of Crowdfunding” (Working paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, February 2011), https://doi.org/10.3386/w16820. 14. Anna Minton, “Civic Crowdfunding Is Privatisation Masquerading as Democracy,” Guardian, October 24, 2017. See also Patricia Sullivan, “Raising Money for Civic Projects Raises Questions About Democracy,” Washington Post, April 24, 2016; John Keenan, “People Power: How Cash-Strapped Councils Are Turning to Crowdfunding,” Guardian, September 5, 2017. 15. See Davies, “Civic Crowdfunding,” 124–26, 139. 16. Despite the connective possibilities promised by the Internet, in 2011 the average successful U.S. Kickstarter theater campaign had just 53 funders and raised $3,929. Benjamin Boeuf, Jessica Darveau, and Renaud Legoux, “Financing Creativity: Crowdfunding as a New Approach for Theatre Projects,” International Journal of Arts Management 16, no. 3 (2014): 33–48. See also Alex Dault, “Crowdfunding Indie Theatre: Understanding the Costs,” Canadian Theatre Review 160, no. 1 (2014): 64–67. 17. Quoted in Richard Eyre, National Service: Diary of a Decade (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 127. 18. Kanjin noh became popular after 1413. Later, kanjin noh were held to raise funds for public works projects like roads and bridges as well as to fund noh theater troupes themselves.

222

Notes to Page 182

Steven T. Brown, Theatricalities of Power: The Cultural Politics of Noh (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 157n19. 19. Akira Kurosawa adapted the plot into the film The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail (1945). For more on different versions of the plot, see Helen S. E. Parker, Progressive Traditions: An Illustrated Study of Plot Repetition in Traditional Japanese Theatre (Boston: Brill, 2006), 101–33.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources newspapers and journals Aberdeen Press and Journal Academy Amateur Theatre and Playwrights’ Journal Bedfordshire Times Belfast News-Letter Birmingham Gazette Bradford Telegraph and Argus British Architect Burnley Express Burnley News Bury Free Press Cheltenham Chronicle Court Circular Croydon Gazette Daily Chronicle Daily Despatch Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough Daily News and Leader Derbyshire Advertiser and Journal Derbyshire Times and Chesterfield Herald Devon and Exeter Gazette Driffield Times Dublin Evening Telegraph Durham County Advertiser Eastern Daily Press Eastern Evening News Edinburgh Review Education Era Evening News Evening Standard Exeter and Plymouth Gazette

224 Freeman’s Journal Glasgow Herald Glasgow Times Globe Gloucester Citizen Gloucestershire Echo Hampshire Advertiser Hull Daily Mail Illustrated London News Irish Independent Irish Times Lady Leeds Mercury Liverpool Courier Liverpool Porcupine Liverpool Post London Daily News Manchester Courier Manchester Guardian Marionnette Mask Morning Leader Morning Post New Age Nineteenth Century Northern Whig Northwich Guardian Nottingham Journal Observer Pall Mall Gazette Poet Lore Poetry and Drama Rochdale Observer Scots Pictorial Scotsman Sheffield Daily Independent Sheffield Telegraph Shields Daily News Shrewsbury Chronicle Stage Stage Society News Suffolk and Essex Free Press Sunday Chronicle Taunton Courier Thanet Advertiser

Bibliography

Bibliography

225

This Week’s Survey Times Times Literary Supplement Todmorden & District News Tribune Walsall Advertiser Western Daily Press Western Morning News Western Times Westminster Gazette Whitstable Times and Herne Bay Herald World Yorkshire Evening Post Yorkshire Observer Yorkshire Post Yorkshire Telegraph manuscripts and archival collections Abbey Theatre Digital Archive. National University of Ireland, Galway. Annie Horniman Papers (GB 133 AEH). University of Manchester Special Collections, John Rylands Library. Board of Trade: Companies Registration Office: Files of Dissolved Companies (BT 31/34768). National Archives, Kew. Bradford Civic Playhouse, Scrapbooks (11D75). West Yorkshire Archive Service, Bradford. British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology. Policy and Principles: General Aims. London: 1915 (B/D412). British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics. D. R. Davies Collection of Drama Scrap Books (GB 0210 DRDIES). National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. Divorce Law Reform Union Archive (346.016606 DIV). British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics. Dorothy Nevile Lees Papers Relating to Edward Gordon Craig and The Mask (MS Thr 423). Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Edward Gordon Craig Papers (MS Thr 345). Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Fabian Society Archive (GB 097 FABIAN SOCIETY). British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics. Fonds Edward Gordon Craig (EGC). De´partement des Arts du Spectacle, Bibliothe`que nationale de France, Paris. George Roberts Papers Concerning the Abbey Theatre and the Irish National Theatre Society, 1901–1942 (MS Thr 24). Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Incorporated Stage Society Archive (GB 71 THM/136). V&A Department of Theatre and Performance, London. Lady Gregory collection of papers (Berg Coll MSS Gregory). New York Public Library. Liverpool Repertory Theatre Programmes (792.1 PLA). Liverpool Central Library Archive.

226

Bibliography

London Society for Women’s Suffrage Archive (324.62306041 LON). British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics. Printed Ephemera Relating to Theater, 1710–2008 (MS Thr 939). Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Prospectuses, photographs and leaflets, 1919–1931, The Unnamed Society (Manchester) (Th792.094273Un4). Special Collections, Manchester Central Library. Records of Scottish Repertory Theatre (GB 247 STA Fm 11). Special Collections Department, Glasgow University Library. Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre (GB 2080 SMNT). Royal National Theatre Archive, London. William Archer Collection (GB 71 THM/368). V&A Department of Theatre and Performance, London. published texts Adult Education Committee of the Board of Education. The Drama in Adult Education. Adult Education Committee Paper 6. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1926. Archer, William. Play-Making: A Manual of Craftsmanship. London: Chapman & Hall, 1912. Archer, William, and Harley Granville Barker. A National Theatre: Scheme & Estimates. London: Duckworth, 1907. Arts Council of Great Britain. Thirteenth Annual Report of the Arts Council of Great Britain, 1957–58: A New Pattern of Patronage. London: Arts Council, 1958. Baughan, E. A. “The Function of the Amateur.” In Amateur Dramatic Year Book and Community Theatre Handbook, 1928–29, edited by G. W. Bishop, 17–21. London: A. & C. Black, 1928. Bennett, Arnold. Cupid and Commonsense: A Play in Four Acts. With a Preface on the Crisis in the Theatre. London: New Age Press, 1909. Bennett, Arnold, and Edward Knoblock. Milestones: A Play in Three Acts. New York: George H. Doran Company, 1912. Bishop, G. W., ed. Amateur Dramatic Year Book and Community Theatre Handbook, 1928–29. London: A. & C. Black, 1928. Boyle, William. The Building Fund: A Play in Three Acts. Vol. 7. Abbey Theatre Series. Dublin: Maunsel, 1905. ———. The Eloquent Dempsy: A Comedy in Three Acts. Dublin: O’Donoghue & Co., 1907. “Brief Notes on the Entertainment Tax.” In Amateur Dramatic Year Book and Community Theatre Handbook, 1928–29, edited by G. W. Bishop, 71–74. London: A. & C. Black, 1928. Brierley, Horace. Introduction to Fifty Years of Amateur Theatre, by Dumayne Warne. London: National Operatic & Dramatic Association, 1949. British Drama League. Amateur Drama: The Story of a Typical Amateur Society. London: British Council, 1952. ———. Plays to Act and How to Act Them: A Guide for Community Players. 2nd ed., rev. and enl. London: British Drama League, 1925. Carrick, Edward. Gordon Craig: The Story of His Life. New York: Limelight Editions, 1985. Carter, Huntly. The Theatre of Max Reinhardt. London: Palmer, 1914. Chisholm, Cecil. Repertory: An Outline of the Modern Theatre Movement; Production, Plays, Management. London: Peter Davies, 1934. Cole, G. D. H. A Century of Co-Operation. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1944.

Bibliography

227

———. Labour in the Commonwealth. London: Headley Bros., 1919. ———. Labour in War Time. London: G. Bell & Sons, 1915. ———. Persons and Periods. London: Wyman and Sons, 1938. Craig, Edward Gordon. The Art of the Theatre. London: T. N. Foulis, 1905. ———. Books and Theatres. London: J. M. Dent, 1925. ———. Towards a New Theatre. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1913. Ervine, St. John Greer. The Organised Theatre: A Plea in Civics. London: George Allen, 1924. ———. The Theatre in My Time. London: Rich & Cowan, 1933. Fagan, James Bernard. The Earth: A Modern Play in Four Acts. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1910. Galsworthy, John. “Strife.” In Plays: The Silver Box; Joy; Strife, 1–110. London: Duckworth & Co., 1909. Granville-Barker, Harley. “Hints on Rehearsing a Play.” In Amateur Dramatic Year Book and Community Theatre Handbook, 1928–29, edited by G. W. Bishop, 6–16. London: A. & C. Black, 1928. Gregory, Lady. Coats. London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913. Grein, Alice Augusta Greeven [Michael Orme, pseud.]. J. T. Grein: The Story of a Pioneer, 1862–1935. London: J. Murray, 1936. Grein, J. T. The World of the Theatre: Impressions and Memoirs, March 1920–1921. London: Heinemann, 1921. Hageman, Maurice. Oh, That Property Man!: A Monologue. Chicago: Dramatic Publishing Company, 1898. Hankin, St. John. “The Charity That Began at Home.” In Three Plays with Happy Endings, 1–168. London: Samuel French, 1907. ———. “The Return of the Prodigal.” In Three Plays with Happy Endings, 1–134. London: Samuel French, 1907. ———. The Two Mr. Wetherbys: A Middle-Class Comedy in Three Acts. London: Samuel French, 1907. Hart, F. J. Watson. “Scenery.” In Amateur Dramatic Year Book and Community Theatre Handbook, 1928–29, edited by G. W. Bishop, 46–54. London: A. & C. Black, 1928. Hazelton, George Cochrane, and Benrimo. The Yellow Jacket: A Chinese Play Done in a Chinese Manner, in Three Acts. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1913. Hibbert, Henry George. A Playgoer’s Memories. London: Grant Richards, 1920. Ibsen, Henrik. “An Enemy of the People.” In Ghosts; An Enemy of the People; The Wild Duck, edited by William Archer, translated by Eleanor Marx-Aveling. Authorised English Edition, 103–237. London: Walter Scott, 1904. ———. “Pillars of Society.” In The League of Youth; The Pillars of Society; A Doll’s House, edited and translated by William Archer. Authorised English Edition, 155–284. London: Walter Scott, 1890. Incorporated Stage Society. Ten Years: 1899 to 1909. London: Chiswick Press, 1909. International Law Association. “Report of the Twenty-First Conference Held at Antwerp, September 29–October 2, 1903.” London: West, Newman & Co., 1904. Jerome, Jerome Klapka. On the Stage—and Off: The Brief Career of a Would-Be Actor. London: Field and Tuer, 1885. Jones, Henry Arthur. The Dancing Girl: A Drama in Four Acts. London: Samuel French, 1907. ———. The Hypocrites: A Play in Four Acts. London: Chiswick Press, 1906.

228

Bibliography

———. Mary Goes First: A Comedy in Three Acts and an Epilogue. London: G. Bell, 1913. ———. The Masqueraders: A Play in Four Acts. London: Chiswick Press, 1894. ———. The Middleman: A Play in Four Acts. New York: Samuel French, 1907. ———. “Preface to Saints and Sinners.” In The Renascence of the English Drama, 309–24. London: Macmillan, 1895. Lee, Sidney. Shakespeare and the Modern Stage: With Other Essays. London: John Murray, 1906. Marshall, Norman. The Other Theatre. London: John Lehmann, 1947. Mason, Dorothy G., and W. Jenkins Gibson. Organising an Amateur Theatre Society. London: Lovat Dickson, 1936. Maugham, W. Somerset. Our Betters: A Comedy in Three Acts. New York: G. H. Doran, 1923. Paull, H. M. “The Anti-Suffragist or The Other Side.” In The Methuen Drama Book of Suffrage Plays, edited by Naomi Paxton, 107–15. London: Methuen, 2013. Pinero, Arthur Wing. His House in Order: A Comedy in Four Acts. London: William Heinemann, 1906. Priestley, J. B. English Journey: Being a Rambling but Truthful Account of What One Man Saw and Heard and Felt and Thought During a Journey Through England During the Autumn of the Year 1933. London: W. Heinemann, 1934. Report from the Joint Select Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Commons on the Stage Plays (Censorship). London: Wyman and Sons, 1909. Rigby, Charles. Maddermarket Mondays: Press Articles Dealing with the Famous Norwich Players, etc.. Norwich: Roberts & Co., 1933. Robertson, T. W. “Ours.” In The Principal Dramatic Works of Thomas William Robertson, 2:419–87. London: Samuel French, 1889. Robins, Elizabeth. Votes for Women: A Play in Three Acts. Chicago: Dramatic Publishing Company, 1907. Shaw, George Bernard. “Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall.” In Heartbreak House, Great Catherine, and Playlets of the War, vii–xlvii. London: Constable, 1919. ———. “John Bull’s Other Island.” In John Bull’s Other Island, and Major Barbara: Also How He Lied to Her Husband, 1–116. London: Archibald Constable, 1907. ———. “Major Barbara.” In John Bull’s Other Island, and Major Barbara: Also How He Lied to Her Husband, 145–293. London: Archibald Constable, 1907. ———. “Misalliance.” In Misalliance; The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, and Fanny’s First Play. With a Treatise on Parents and Children, 1–99. London: Constable, 1914. ———. Mrs. Warren’s Profession: A Play in Four Acts. London: Archibald Constable, 1905. ———. Press Cuttings: A Topical Sketch Compiled from the Editorial and Correspondence Columns of the Daily Papers. London: Constable & Co., 1909. ———. “The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet.” In The Doctor’s Dilemma, Getting Married, & The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, 295–407. London: Constable, 1911. Shaw, George Bernard, Beatrice Webb, and Sydney Webb. Bernard Shaw and the Webbs, edited by Alex C. Michalos and Deborah C. Poff. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Veitch, Norman. The People’s: Being a History of the People’s Theatre, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1911–1939. Gateshead: Northumberland Press, 1950. Wade, Allan. Memories of the London Theatre, 1900–1914, edited by Alan Andrews. London: Society for Theatre Research, 1983.

Bibliography

229

Wells, H. G. Ann Veronica: A Modern Love Story. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1913. Wilde, Oscar [The Author of Lady Windermere’s Fan]. The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People. London: L. Smithers, 1899. Woolf, Virginia. “Character in Fiction.” In Selected Essays, edited by David Bradshaw, 37–54. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Yeats, W. B. The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, vol. 4: 1905–1907, edited by John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ———. “Samhain: 1903—The Theatre, the Pulpit, and the Newspapers.” In The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 8: The Irish Dramatic Movement, edited by Mary FitzGerald and Richard J. Finneran, 36–39. New York: Scribner, 2008.

Secondary Sources Accominotti, Fabien, Shamus R. Khan, and Adam Storer. “How Cultural Capital Emerged in Gilded Age America: Musical Purification and Cross-Class Inclusion at the New York Philharmonic.” American Journal of Sociology 123, no. 6 (2018): 1743–83. Agrawal, Ajay K., Christian Catalini, and Avi Goldfarb. “The Geography of Crowdfunding.” Working Paper. National Bureau of Economic Research. February 2011. https://doi.org/ 10.3386/w16820. Aguirre, Mariana. “The Return of Order in Florence.” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 3: Europe, 1880–1940, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, 491–510. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1983. Andrews, Martin. “The Importance of Ephemera.” In A Companion to the History of the Book, edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, 434–50. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Ardis, Ann. “Debating Feminisms, Modernism, and Socialism: Beatrice Hastings’ Voices in The New Age.” In The Gender Complex of Modernism, edited by Bonnie Kime Scott, 310–59. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Bailey, Peter. “ ‘Naughty but Nice’: Musical Comedy and the Rhetoric of the Girl, 1892–1914.” In The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage, edited by Michael R. Booth and Joel H. Kaplan, 36–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Bak, Ja´nos. “Lists in the Service of Legitimation in Central European Sources.” In The Charm of a List: From the Sumerians to Computerised Data Processing, edited by Lucie Dolezˇalova´, 34–45. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Baker, Michael. The Rise of the Victorian Actor. London: Croom Helm, 1978. Balme, Christopher B. The Theatrical Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Bay-Cheng, Sarah. “Pixelated Memories: Theatre History and Digital Historiography.” https://www.academia.edu/2131876/Pixelated_Memories_Theatre–History_and_Digital_ Historiography. Belknap, Robert. The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Bennett, Susan. Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception. New York: Routledge, 1990. Bergeron, David M., ed. Reading and Writing in Shakespeare. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996.

230

Bibliography

Bernal, Paul. “Thatcher’s Funeral—Why Not a ‘Public Subscription’?” Paul Bernal’s Blog (blog). April 11, 2013. https://paulbernal.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/thatchers-funeral -why-not-a-public-subscription/. Bernstein, Robin. “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race.” Social Text 27, no. 4 (2009): 67–94. Bharucha, Rustom. Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture. London: Routledge, 1993. Binckes, Faith. Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Blackadder, Neil Martin. Performing Opposition: Modern Theater and the Scandalized Audience. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. Blair, Kirstie. “ ‘Let the Nightingales Alone’: Correspondence Columns, the Scottish Press, and the Making of the Working-Class Poet.” Victorian Periodicals Review 47, no. 2 (2014): 188–207. Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Boeuf, Benjamin, Jessica Darveau, and Renaud Legoux. “Financing Creativity: Crowdfunding as a New Approach for Theatre Projects.” International Journal of Arts Management 16, no. 3 (2014): 33–48. Booth, Michael R. Theatre in the Victorian Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Booth, Wayne. For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Brake, Laurel. “The Longevity of ‘Ephemera.’ ” Media History 18, no. 1 (2012): 7–20. Bratton, Jacky. New Readings in Theatre History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Broinowski, Anna. “Why Did the Actor Cross the Road?” About Performance, no. 3 (1997): 121–32. Brooker, Peter, and Andrew Thacker. “General Introduction.” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 1: Britain and Ireland, 1880–1955, 1–27. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Brooks, Helen. “ ‘One Entire Nation of Actors and Actresses’: Reconsidering the Relationship of Public and Private Theatricals.” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 38, no. 2 (2011): 1–13. Brown, Steven T. Theatricalities of Power: The Cultural Politics of Noh. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Bru, Sascha. “ ‘The Will to Style’: The Dutch Contribution to the Avant-Garde.” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 3: Europe, 1880–1940, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, 293–312. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Buckley, Jennifer. Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. Bulson, Eric Jon. Little Magazine, World Form. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. ———. “Milan, the ‘Rivista,’ and the Deprovincialization of Italy.” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 3: Europe, 1880–1940, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, 511–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Burkert, Mattie, and Mark Vareschi. “Archives, Numbers, Meaning: The Eighteenth-Century Playbill at Scale.” Theatre Journal 68, no. 4 (2017): 597–613.

Bibliography

231

Burt, Philippa. “The Ideal of Ensemble Practice in Twentieth-Century British Theatre, 1900– 1968.” PhD diss., Goldsmiths, University of London, 2015. Burton, Richard. How to See a Play. New York: Macmillan, 1919. Canning, Charlotte. On the Performance Front: US Theatre and Internationalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Caplan, Debra. “Notes from the Frontier: Digital Scholarship and the Future of Theatre Studies.” Theatre Journal 67, no. 2 (2015): 347–59. Carey, John. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939. London: Faber & Faber, 1992. Case, Sue-Ellen. Performing Science and the Virtual. New York: Routledge, 2007. Chambers, Colin. The Story of Unity Theatre. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989. Chanksy, Dorothy. Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Charnow, Sally Debra. Theatre, Politics, and Markets in Fin-de-Sie´cle Paris. New York: Palgrave, 2005. Chothia, Jean. Andre´ Antoine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “The Enduring Ephemeral, or The Future Is a Memory.” In Media Archaeology, edited by Jussi Parikka and Erkki Huhtamo, 184–206. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Churchill, Suzanne W., and Adam McKible, eds. Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007. Clark, Peter. British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Clarke, Paul, and Julian Warren. “Ephemera: Between Archival Objects and Events.” Journal of the Society of Archivists 30, no. 1 (2009): 45–66. Coates, David. “The Development of Amateur Theatre in Britain, 1789–1914.” PhD diss., University of Warwick, 2018. Cochrane, Claire. Twentieth-Century British Theatre: Industry, Art and Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Cockin, Katharine. Women and Theatre in the Age of Suffrage: The Pioneer Players, 1911–1925. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Cocks, Harry G., and Matthew Rubery. “Introduction: Margins of Print: Ephemera, Print Culture and Lost Histories of the Newspaper.” Media History 18, no. 1 (2012): 1–5. Cole, Lori. “What Is the Avant-Garde? The Questionnaire as Historiography.” Journal of Art Historiography, no. 5 (2001): 1–13. Conolly, L. W. “Mrs. Warren’s Profession and the Lord Chamberlain.” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 24, no. 1 (2004): 46–95. Dault, Alex. “Crowdfunding Indie Theatre: Understanding the Costs.” Canadian Theatre Review 160, no. 1 (2014): 64–67. Davies, Andrew. Other Theatres: The Development of Alternative and Experimental Theatre in Britain. London: Macmillan Education, 1987. Davies, Rodrigo. “Civic Crowdfunding: Participatory Communities, Entrepreneurs and the Political Economy of Place.” Master’s thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014. Davis, Jim, and Victor Emeljanow. Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001.

232

Bibliography

Davis, Tracy C. Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture. London: Routledge, 1991. ———. The Economics of the British Stage, 1800–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ———. “Introduction: Repertoire.” In The Broadview Anthology of Nineteenth-Century British Performance, edited by Tracy C. Davis, 13–26. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2012. Deutsch, Otto Erich. “The Subscribers to Mozart’s Private Concerts.” Music & Letters 22, no. 3 (1941): 225–34. Dietrich, Dorothea. “Hanover: ‘True Art’ and ‘True Dada.’ ” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 3: Europe, 1880–1940, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, 947–68. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Dixon, Steve. Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Eco, Umberto. The Infinity of Lists: From Homer to Joyce. London: MacLehose, 2009. Eltis, Sos. Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage, 1800–1930. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Eyre, Richard. National Service: Diary of a Decade. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. Falocco, Joe. Reimagining Shakespeare’s Playhouse: Early Modern Staging Conventions in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010. Farfan, Penny. Women, Modernism, and Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Fearnow, Mark. “Civic Repertory Theatre” and “Theatre Guild.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, edited by Dennis Kennedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Finer, Emily. “ ‘A Rift on the Left Front?’ ” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 3: Europe, 1880–1940, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, 1319–40. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Fisher, James. “ ‘The Colossus’ Versus ‘Master Teddy’: The Bernard Shaw/Edward Gordon Craig Feud.” Shaw 9 (1989): 199–221. Fisher, Mark. “From Traverse to Tramway: Scottish Theatres Old and New.” In Scottish Theatre Since the Seventies, edited by Randall Stevenson and Gavin Wallace, 49–56. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996. Fisher, Tony. Theatre and Governance in Britain, 1500–1900: Democracy, Disorder and the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Forster, Geoffrey, and Alan Bell. “The Subscription Libraries and Their Members.” In The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, edited by Alistair Black and Peter Hoare, 147–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Foulkes, Richard. Repertory at the Royal: Sixty-Five Years of Theatre in Northampton. Northampton: Northampton Repertory Players, 1992. Frazier, Adrian Woods. Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Freshwater, Helen. Theatre and Audience. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Fyfe, Aileen. “The Information Revolution.” In The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 6: 1830–1914, edited by David McKitterick, 567–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Bibliography

233

Gardner, Lyn. “Theatre Membership Schemes: A Case of Short-Term Gain for Long-Term Pain?” Guardian, January 24, 2014. Gilroy, Paul. “Wearing Your Art on Your Sleeve: Notes Toward a Diaspora History of Black Ephemera.” In Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures, 237–57. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993. Gitelman, Lisa. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Goldie, Grace Nisbet. The Liverpool Repertory Theatre, 1911–1934. Liverpool: University Press of Liverpool, 1935. Golding, Alan. “The Little Review (1914–29).” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 2: North America, 1894–1960, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, 61–84. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Gooddie, Sheila. Annie Horniman: A Pioneer in the Theatre. London: Methuen Drama, 1990. Green, Barbara. Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life: Women and Modernity in British Culture. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Guidry, Lorelei F. “Gordon Craig’s Theatre Magazine.” Master’s thesis, Tufts University, 1963. Hall, David D. “The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600–1850.” In Printing and Society in Early America, edited by William L. Joyce, 1–47. Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1983. Hall-Witt, Jennifer. Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780–1880. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2007. Hammond, Mary. Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880– 1914. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Hampton, Mark. Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Hancocks, Stephen. “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.” British Dental Journal 211, no. 5 (2011): 191. Hand, Richard J. The Theatre of Joseph Conrad: Reconstructed Fictions. New York: Palgrave, 2005. Hannah, Leslie. The Rise of the Corporate Economy. London: Methuen, 1976. Harris, Jonathan Gil. “Product Placement in Artisanal Drama.” In Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, edited by Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, 35–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Harris, Michael. “Printed Ephemera.” In Book: A Global History, edited by Michael F. Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen, 226–39. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Hawley, Judith, and Mary Isbell. “Editorial: Amateur Theatre in the Long Nineteenth Century.” Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film 38, no. 2 (2011): xvii–xix. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Heim, Caroline. Audience as Performer: The Changing Role of Theatre Audiences in the TwentyFirst Century. London: Routledge, 2015. Hermetet, Anne-Rachel. “Modern Classicism.” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 3: Europe, 1880–1940, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, 101–19. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Hindson, Catherine. London’s West End Actresses and the Origins of Celebrity Charity, 1880– 1920. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016.

234

Bibliography

Hobbs, Andrew. A Fleet Street in Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855–1900. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2018. Holdsworth, Nadine, Jane Milling, and Helen Nicholson. The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Holroyd, Michael. A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families. London: Vintage, 2009. Hutchison, David. The Modern Scottish Theatre. Glasgow: Molendinar Press, 1977. Hytner, Nicholas. Balancing Acts: Behind the Scenes at London’s National Theatre. New York: Knopf, 2017. Innes, Christopher. Edward Gordon Craig: A Vision of Theatre. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2013. Isaac, Winifred F. E. C. Alfred Wareing: A Biography. London: Greenback Press, 1951. Jackson, H. J. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. ———. Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Jansson, Mats. “Crossing Border: Modernism in Sweden and the Swedish-Speaking Part of Finland.” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 3: Europe, 1880–1940, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, 666–90. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Jarcho, Julia. Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater Beyond Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Johnsen, William A. Violence and Modernism: Ibsen, Joyce, and Woolf. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. Johnson, Steven. Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age. New York: Penguin, 2012. Kalantzis, Alexia. “The ‘Little Magazine’ as Publishing Success.” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 3: Europe, 1880–1940, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, 60–75. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Keenan, John. “People Power: How Cash-Strapped Councils Are Turning to Crowdfunding.” Guardian, September 5, 2017. Kelly, Katherine E. “Imprinting the Stage: Shaw and the Publishing Trade, 1883–1903.” In The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw, edited by Christopher Innes, 25–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Kennedy, Dennis. “The New Drama and the New Audience.” In The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage, edited by Michael R. Booth and Joel H. Kaplan, 130–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Kershaw, Baz. “Oh for Unruly Audiences! Or, Patterns of Participation in Twentieth-Century Theatre.” Modern Drama 44, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 133–54. Kiefer, Frederick. Writing on the Renaissance Stage: Written Words, Printed Pages, Metaphoric Books. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996. Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Bibliography

235

Kirwin, Liza. Lists: To-Dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010. Knowles, Ric. Reading the Material Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Kruger, Loren. The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Kurnick, David. Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Latham, Sean, and Robert Scholes. “The Rise of Periodical Studies.” PMLA 121, no. 2 (2006): 517–31. Lee, Hye-Kyung. “Uses of Civilising Claims: Three Moments in British Theatre History.” Poetics 36, no. 4 (August 1, 2008): 287–300. Lewis, John. Printed Ephemera: The Changing Use of Type and Letterforms in English and American Printing. London: Faber, 1969. Lockwood, Thomas. “Subscription-Hunters and Their Prey.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 34, no. 1 (2001): 121–35. Long, Helen C. The Edwardian House: The Middle-Class Home in Britain, 1880–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993. Lloyd, Sarah. “Ticketing the British Eighteenth Century: ‘A Thing . . . Never Heard of Before.’ ” Journal of Social History 46, no. 4 (2013): 843–71. Lyons, Laura. “Hand-to-Hand History: Ephemera and Irish Republicanism.” Interventions 5, no. 3 (2003): 407–25. MacCarthy, Desmond. The Court Theatre, 1904–1907. London: A. H. Bullen, 1907. MacNicholas, John. “The Stage History of ‘Exiles.’ ” James Joyce Quarterly 19, no. 1 (October 1, 1981): 9–26. Macqueen-Pope, Walter. Carriages at Eleven: The Story of the Edwardian Theatre. London: Hutchinson, 1948. Makepeace, Chris E. Ephemera: A Book on Its Collection, Conservation, and Use. Aldershot: Gower, 1985. Mangan, Michael. “Theatre in Modern British Culture.” In The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Culture, edited by Michael Higgins, Clarissa Smith, and John Storey, 154–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Marcus, Sharon. “The Theatrical Scrapbook.” Theatre Survey 54, no. 2 (2013): 283–307. Matthews, Rachel. The History of the Provincial Press in England. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Mazer, Cary M. “New Theatres for a New Drama.” In The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, edited by Kerry Powell, 207–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. McBride, Douglas Brent. “A Critical Mass for Modernism in Berlin.” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 3: Europe, 1880–1940, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, 773–97. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. McDonald, Jan. “ ‘The Second Act Was Glorious’: The Staging of the Trafalgar Scene from ‘Votes for Women!’ at the Court Theatre.” Theatre History Studies 15 (1995): 139–60. McDowell, Paula. “Of Grubs and Other Insects: Constructing the Categories of ‘Ephemera’ and ‘Literature’ in Eighteenth-Century British Writing.” Book History 15, no. 1 (2012): 48–70.

236

Bibliography

McPherson, Tara. “Post-Archive: The Humanities, the Archive, and the Database.” In Between Humanities and the Digital, edited by Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg, 483–502. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Meeuwis, Michael. Everyone’s Theater: Literature and Daily Life in England, 1860–1914. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. Melling, John Kennedy. Discovering Theatre Ephemera. London: Shire Publications, 1974. Merkin, Ros. Liverpool Playhouse: A Theatre and Its City. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011. Michaelides, Chris. “Futurist Periodicals in Rome (1916–39).” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 3: Europe, 1880–1940, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, 560–88. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Miller, Derek. “Average Broadway.” Theatre Journal 68, no. 4 (2016): 529–53. ———. Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1770–1911. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Miller, Elizabeth. Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. Minton, Anna. “Civic Crowdfunding Is Privatisation Masquerading as Democracy.” Guardian, October 24, 2017. Moi, Toril. Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theatre, Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Moran, James. The Theatre of D. H. Lawrence: Dramatic Modernist and Theatrical Innovator. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015. Moretti, Franco. “The Slaughterhouse of Literature.” MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2000): 207–27. Morrisson, Mark. “The Cause of Poetry.” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 1: Britain and Ireland, 1880–1955, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, 405–27. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. ———. The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. Mun˜oz, Jose´ Esteban. “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (1996): 5–16. Muse, John H. Microdramas: Crucibles for Theater and Time. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Mussell, James. “The Passing of Print: Digitising Ephemera and the Ephemerality of the Digital.” Media History 18, no. 1 (2012): 77–92. Nagler, A. M. A Source Book in Theatrical History. London: Constable, 1959. Newman, Danny. Subscribe Now!: Building Arts Audiences Through Dynamic Subscription Promotion. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1977. Nicoll, Allardyce. English Drama, 1900–1930: The Beginnings of the Modern Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. O’Connor, Marion. “Introduction: England, 1850–1914, B. 1880–1914.” In Naturalism and Symbolism in European Theatre, 1850–1918, edited by Claude Schumacher, Glynne W. Wickham, and John Northam, 328–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Odom, Glenn. World Theories of Theatre. London: Routledge, 2017. Orgel, Stephen. The Reader in the Book: A Study of Spaces and Traces. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Bibliography

237

Parker, Helen S. E. Progressive Traditions: An Illustrated Study of Plot Repetition in Traditional Japanese Theatre. Boston: Brill, 2006. Pasanek, Brad. Metaphors of Mind: An Eighteenth-Century Dictionary. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. Pedersen, Sarah. “What’s in a Name? The Revealing Use of Noms de Plume in Women’s Correspondence to Daily Newspapers in Edwardian Scotland.” Media History 10, no. 3 (2004): 175–85. Peters, Julie Stone. Theatre of the Book: 1480–1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Psychology Press, 1993. Piper, Andrew. Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Plotz, John. The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Postlewait, Thomas. The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Prescott, Paul. Reviewing Shakespeare: Journalism and Performance from the Eighteenth Century to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Preston, Carrie. Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Preston, Cathy Lynn, and Michael James Preston. The Other Print Tradition: Essays on Chapbooks, Broadsides, and Related Ephemera. New York: Garland, 1995. Price, Kenneth M. “Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What’s in a Name?” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3, no. 3 (2009). http://digitalhumanities.org. Price, Leah. “Introduction: Reading Matter.” PMLA 121, no. 1 (2006): 9–16. Price, Richard. “Among Friends: Little Magazines, Friendship and Networks.” British Library. https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/among-friends-little-magazines -friendship-and-networks. Prins, Yopie. Ladies’ Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Puchner, Martin. Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Rainey, Lawrence S. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Rancie`re, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2009. Ravel, Jeffrey S. The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680–1791. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Raven, James. “Why Ephemera Were Not Ephemeral: The Effectiveness of Innovative Print in the Eighteenth Century.” Yearbook of English Studies 45 (2015): 56–73. Rawlings-Jackson, Vanessa. Where Now?: Theatre Subscription Selling in the ’90s: A Report on the American Experience. London: Arts Council of England, 1996. Read, Alan. Theatre and Everyday Life. London: Routledge, 1993. Reason, Matthew. The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experiences of Theatre. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books, 2010. Reid, Hugh. The Nature and Uses of Eighteenth-Century Book Subscription Lists. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010.

238

Bibliography

Reynolds, Paige. Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ———. “Reading Publics, Theater Audiences, and the Little Magazines of the Abbey Theatre.” New Hibernia Review 7, no. 4 (2003): 63–84. Richards, Paul. “How to Pay for the Royal Wedding? Simple: Public Subscription.” Coffee House (blog). November 25, 2010. https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2010/11/how-to-pay-for -the-royal-wedding-simple-public-subscription/. Rickards, Maurice, and Michael Twyman. The Encyclopedia of Ephemera: A Guide to the Fragmentary Documents of Everyday Life for the Collector, Curator, and Historian. New York: Routledge, 2000. Rogers, Pat. “Pope and His Subscribers.” Publishing History 3 (1978): 7–36. Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Rowell, George, and Tony Jackson. The Repertory Movement: A History of Regional Theatre in Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Russell, Gillian. “ ‘Announcing Each Day the Performances’: Playbills, Ephemerality, and Romantic Period Media/Theater History.” Studies in Romanticism 54, no. 2 (2015): 241–68. ———. The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century: Sociability, Print, and the Cultures of Collecting, 1640–1860. Forthcoming. ———. Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Saltz, David Z. “Performing Arts.” In A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, 121–31. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Samuel, Raphael, Ewan MacColl, and Stuart Cosgrove, Theatres of the Left, 1880–1935: Workers’ Theatre Movements in Britain and America. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. Schechner, Richard. “Ford, Rockefeller, and Theatre.” Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 1 (1965): 23–49. Schechner, Richard, and Andre Gregory. “The Theatre of the Living Arts.” Tulane Drama Review 11, no. 4 (1967): 18–21. Schnapp, Jeffrey T., and Matthew Tiews, eds. Crowds. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London: Routledge, 2011. Schuyler, Susan Amanda. “Crowd Control: Reading Victorian Popular Drama.” PhD diss., Stanford University, 2007. Sedgman, Kirsty. Locating the Audience: How People Found Value in National Theatre Wales. Bristol: Intellect, 2016. ———. The Reasonable Audience: Theatre Etiquette, Behaviour Policing, and the Live Performance Experience. New York: Palgrave Pivot, 2018. Shellard, Dominic, Steve Nicholson, and Miriam Handley. The Lord Chamberlain Regrets . . . : A History of British Theatre Censorship. London: British Library, 2004. Sheppard, W. Anthony. Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Shimazaki, Satoko. Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

Bibliography

239

Silver, Sean. The Mind Is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Silverthorne, Diane. “Vienna’s ‘Holy Spring’ and Beyond.” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 3: Europe, 1880–1940, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, 992–1013. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Sinclair, Andrew. Arts and Cultures: The History of the 50 Years of the Arts Council of Great Britain. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995. Sofer, Andrew. The Stage Life of Props. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Stephens, John Russell. The Profession of the Playwright: British Theatre, 1800–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Stern, Tiffany. Documents of Performance in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Stewart, Alan. Shakespeare’s Letters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Stowell, Sheila. A Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Stroz.ek, Przemyslaw. “Cracow and Warsaw: Becoming the Avant-Garde.” In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 3: Europe, 1880–1940, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, 1184–1206. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Sullivan, Patricia. “Raising Money for Civic Projects Raises Questions About Democracy.” Washington Post, April 24, 2016. Switzky, Lawrence. “The Rise of the Director, 1734–1956: Negotiations with the Material World.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2010. ———. “Shaw Among the Modernists.” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 31, no. 1 (2011): 133–48. Taxidou, Olga. The Mask: A Periodical Performance by Edward Gordon Craig. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998. ———. Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Taylor, George. History of the Amateur Theatre. Melksham: Venton, 1976. Teague, Frances N. Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1991. Thomas, David, David Carlton, and Anne Etienne. Theatre Censorship: From Walpole to Wilson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Thompson, Nicholas, and Fred Vogelstein. “Inside Facebook’s Two Years of Hell.” WIRED, February 12, 2018. https://www.wired.com/story/inside-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-2 -years-of-hell/. Trewin, J. C. The Birmingham Repertory Theatre, 1913–1963. London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1963. Turnbull, Olivia. Bringing Down the House: The Crisis in Britain’s Regional Theatres. Bristol: Intellect, 2008. Turner, Henry S. The Corporate Commonwealth: Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516–1651. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Twyman, Michael. “The Long-Term Significance of Printed Ephemera.” RBM 9, no. 21 (2008): 19–57.

240

Bibliography

———. “Printed Ephemera.” In The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5: 1695– 1830, edited by Michael F. Suarez and Michael L. Turner, 66–82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Tzuo, Tien, and Gabe Weisert. Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company’s Future—and What to Do About It. New York: Portfolio, 2018. Usher, Shaun. Lists of Note: An Eclectic Collection Deserving of a Wider Audience. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2015. Vieira, Monica Brito, and David Runciman. Representation. Cambridge: Polity, 2008. Vincent, David. The Rise of Mass Literacy: Post-Empiricism and the Reconstruction of Theory and Application: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Voss, Glenn B., and Zannie Giraud Voss. Theatre Facts 2014: A Report on the Fiscal State of the Professional Not-for-Profit American Theatre. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2014. Warden, Claire. British Avant-Garde Theatre. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Waters, Catherine. Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words: The Social Life of Goods. Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008. Waters, Chris. British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Wearing, J. P. The London Stage, 1890–1959: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel. 7 vols. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013–14. ———. The London Stage, 1890–1959: Accumulated Indexes. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. ———. “The London West End Theatre in the 1890s.” Educational Theatre Journal 29, no. 3 (1977): 320–32. Werstine, Paul. Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Whitler, Kimberly A. “How the Subscription Economy Is Disrupting the Traditional Business Model.” Forbes, January 26, 2016. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kimberlywhitler/2016/01/ 17/a-new-business-trend-shifting-from-a-service-model-to-a-subscription-based-model/. Wiles, David. Theatre and Citizenship: The History of a Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Wilson, August. “The Ground on Which I Stand.” American Theatre 13, no. 7 (1996): 14–16. Wong, Helene Harlin. “The Late Victorian Theatre: As Reflected in ‘The Theatre,’ 1878–1897.” Master’s thesis, Louisiana State University, 1955. Woodfield, James. English Theatre in Transition, 1881–1914. London: Croom Helm, 1984. Worthen, William B. Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. ———. Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Wrigley, Amanda. Performing Greek Drama in Oxford and on Tour with the Balliol Players. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2011. Yde, Matthew. Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism: Longing for Utopia. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Zhulina, Alisa. “The Modern Stage of Capitalism: The Drama of Markets and Money (1870– 1930).” PhD diss., Harvard University, 2015. Zieger, Susan. The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.

INDEX

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Abbey Theatre Dublin: ephemera digitization, 44; Horniman subsidy of, 47, 63; Irish Players tour, 196 n.29; Irish plays only, 49; local productions touring, 68; playgoers protesting Playboy, 46–47, 54, 194 n.4; public subscription of, 47, 52, 63, 65, 66, 105–6, 196 n.22; state subsidy, 73; theatergoing train trips, 56 acting: foreign character accents, 139; private subscription productions, 32–33, 35, 37, 43, 191 n.62; public subscription productions, 48, 52, 56; women in amateur theater, 128– 30, 211 n.96. See also amateur theater groups; crowds onstage advertising, 7, 21, 22, 24, 25, 35, 40 affiliative subscription. See amateur theater groups amateur theater groups: actor “call” postcards, 114, 125; actors contributing money, 109, 110, 113, 121–22, 125, 128, 136, 206 n.4; actors in multiple societies, 11, 125, 210 n.76; amateur theater movement, 31, 111– 12, 116, 119, 127, 130–31; anonymity in criticisms and programs, 11, 114, 124–25, 126–27, 156, 207 n.18; becoming somebody else, 11, 115, 126–28, 137, 138, 142, 208 n.22; Church embracing, 131–32, 140; class hierarchies onto cast lists, 13, 122, 128–30, 133, 177; copyright law, 120, 121; democratic participation, 11, 109, 110–11, 113–16, 118, 121–30, 133, 134–35, 209 n.38; drama competitions, 138–40; ephemera, 113–15; gender imbalance, 113, 128–30, 211 nn. 94, 96; institutional affiliation, 11, 131–42; numbers of groups, 109–10, 130–31, 140, 206 n.4; professionalism relationship, 10–11,

112–13, 116–21, 208 n.35, 209 n.36; programs and program sellers, 11, 114–15, 124, 126–27, 208 n.20; repertoire, 117, 119, 120, 121, 131–32; societies facilitating, 110, 111–12, 206 n.4; subscriber rights, 121–22, 210 n.63; subscription and parts cast, 11, 113, 121–24, 126, 128, 129; subscription prices, 121, 129, 132, 136, 206 n.4, 207 n.14; subscriptions for spectators, 123, 210 n.63; subscriptions spent on professionals, 11, 120–21; subsidies, 112; theater spaces, 140–41, 213 n.140; ubiquity of, 109, 111, 140, 212 n.129; unemployed drama groups, 136–38 annual reports: history of, 192 n.74; periodicity reinforced via, 34; repertoire created by ephemera, 19, 35–37; Stage Society, 18, 35– 38, 37, 41, 193 n.75 Antoine, Andre´: furniture cluttering stage, 80; Grein’s Independent Theatre modeled on, 187 n.7, 192 n.67; responses in The Mask, 147; tickets as wedding invitations, 6 Archer, William, 24, 39, 160 Arnold, Matthew, 2, 184 n.9 “ ’Arry and ’Arriet,” 69, 199 n.99 Arts Council of Great Britain, 8, 31, 72, 178, 220 n.2 Arts Council of Ireland, 178 audiences: alienation of via subsidy, 46–47, 54, 178–79; amateur theater, 123, 127; audience subscriptions and crowd scenes, 10, 78, 106–8; behavior of (see theater etiquette); comprehending language onstage, 81–82, 138–39; as crowd, 108, 181; database virtual view of, 24, 43; education of, 54–58, 61, 67, 112, 137, 169; empowered by public subscription, 7–8, 49, 51, 66–69, 74–75, 195

242

Index

audiences (continued ) n.17; as female, 8, 19, 21, 39, 41, 42; hierarchy of seating, 69–72, 199 nn. 99, 101; letters to newspapers, 9, 46–47, 49, 50–54, 66–69, 73–74, 113, 156, 195 n.12; onstage subscription appeals, 83, 105–8; as political publics, 46–47, 50–54, 195 n.12; “reading class” as, 54–56; repertorists’ views of, 9, 49, 51, 54, 56, 57–58, 177; representing communities, 1–2, 46–47, 51–52; subscription lists documenting, 1, 6; U.S. “audience construction,” 195 n.14 Balme, Christopher, 2, 50, 74, 195 n.12 banned plays. See censorship Barker, Harley Granville: on amateur actors, 117; Kingsway Theatre subscribers, 4; on repertory playhouse function, 32; Shakespeare productions, 31; stage director, 201 n.10; Stage Society launching, 19; Stage Society tracking repertoires, 37–38; true repertory schedule, 72; Votes for Women crowd scene, 107 Barrie, J. M., 27–28, 29, 31, 138, 201 n.8 BDL. See British Drama League behavior of audiences. See theater etiquette Bennett, Arnold, 6, 94, 202 n.16 Benson, Frank, 79 Besier, Rudolf (Lady Patricia), 71 Birmingham theaters, 31, 35, 37, 73, 130 Bottomley, Gordon, 119–20 Boyle, William, 46–47, 92–93, 95–96, 106, 194 n.4 Brabner, W. A., 55, 59 Bradford Civic Playhouse, 117, 122, 124, 125, 210 n.76 Brighouse, Harold, 69 British Drama League (BDL): amateur drama society guide, 121, 123, 127; amateur theater professionalism, 116; Bottomley as vice president, 119; dialect gramophone records, 139; gramophone record subscriptions, 130; national festival distrusted, 140; Religious society conference clash, 132; “typical Amateur Society” description, 110–11 campaign funding via subscription, 94, 98– 99, 205 n.73 Carrick, Edward, 155, 169, 213 n.7

cast sizes: charity matinee crowd scenes, 10, 78, 106–7, 201 n.8; lists substituting for unseen characters, 10, 77, 78, 81–82, 85–86, 93, 95, 96, 97, 99, 102, 156, 181–82, 201 n.10; numbers of cast members, 79, 107, 201 n.8; “social drama” large crowds, small casts, 10, 78 censorship: abolishment of, 3, 24, 30, 31; female middle-class theatergoers, 8, 40; Ghosts banned, 17, 28; Licensing Act, 24; Lord Chamberlain licensing plays, 3; The Mask not censored, 219 n.102; Mrs. Warren’s Profession banned, 17; number of banned plays, 30; private subscription performances evading, 4, 8, 17, 24–25, 28, 44, 105, 191 n.54; private theater clubs, 191 n.54; public subscription theaters subject to, 48; The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet banned, 105; Stage Society ten-year jubilee souvenir programs, 37; Theatres Act, 24 Central School of Speech and Drama, 118 charity matinees: celebrity performers, 107; charity subscriptions, 92, 94–100, 102–5; crowd scenes onstage, 10, 78, 106–8, 201 n.8; money raised by, 106; repertoire, 106–7, 206 n.93; subscription hunters hosting, 79 Chekhov, Anton, 19, 28, 49, 68 Church and amateur theater, 131–32, 140 cinema palaces vs. theater, 116, 119 citizenship nature of subscription, 90, 94 Citizens’ Theatres, 9, 47, 49, 60, 63, 64, 67, 74–75, 198 n.77 civic crowdfunding, 180–81, 221 n.16 civic pride of public subscription, 50, 60, 74, 86, 89, 100–101 Clarkson, William, 43 class hierarchies: amateur theater, 13, 122, 128–30, 133, 177; foreign characters, 139; newspapers printing letters, 9, 49; provinces vs. London, 9, 49; pseudonyms in letters to newspapers, 9, 49, 66–67; theater seating, 69–72, 199 nn. 99, 101 closet dramas, 149–51 Cocteau, Jean, 19, 30 commercial theater: amateur and professional theater relationship, 10–11, 112–13, 116–21, 208 n.35, 209 n.36; Arts Council Royal Charter, 31; avant-garde programs versus, 35, 192 n.73; “commercial” as term,

Index 187 n.4; “commercial repertoire” as term, 31; ephemera, 22, 23; long runs or popular hits, 2–3, 26; The Mask journal challenging, 145; periodicals about, 152; private society anathema to, 26, 27, 34; private society plays into repertoire, 8, 14, 18, 19, 26, 27–33, 43 (see also revivals); provincial repertory movement versus, 48; revivals, 29, 32; touring theater, 48, 52, 56, 72, 82, 117–18, 197 n.42, 202 n.22 commercial vs. not-for-profit enterprises, 94–100, 204 n.66 Conrad, Joseph, 26, 27, 191 n.49 copyright law, 25, 34, 120, 121, 190 n.37 correspondence columns: egalitarianism of, 49, 69–70; as ephemera, 53; information on, 196 n.26; local playwrights wanted, 68; managers responding to, 71–72; playgoers’ rights to representation, 47; poorer playgoers vs. wealthier, 71; private subscription society newsletter, 34; pseudonyms, 51–52, 196 n.20; as public performance space, 54; reciprocal resonance, 50; as virtual extensions of theater, 69–74 coteries, 14, 39–42, 56, 186 n.32 Coupeau, Jacques, 154 Craig, Edward Gordon: amateur theater, 120; annotating playtexts, 12, 150, 151, 163, 164– 65, 215 n.26; closet theater, 149–51; dialogue with readers, 11–12, 146, 149, 151, 161–70, 167, 218 n.85; English national theater director dream, 145, 148, 157, 172, 219 n.108; importance to English theater, 143; lists by, 156–61; marionettes replacing actors, 145, 150, 157, 161; The Mask, 11, 38 (see also Mask, The); personal information, 145, 155; Politics and Art should not mix, 147, 214 n.9; pseudonyms in The Mask, 145, 149, 158–59, 160, 161, 169, 218 n.85, 220 n.121; School for the Art of the Theatre, 154, 168– 69, 218 n.93; Shaw’s differences with, 165, 218 n.82; stage directors, 145, 150, 164–65, 201 n.10; theater laboratory pursuit, 214 n.13; theatrical publication affiliations, 11, 150, 155, 213 n.1. See also Mask, The crowdfunding: Abbey Theatre, 47; civic crowdfunding, 180–81, 221 n.16; newspapers as platform, 9, 49, 53, 203 n.27; public subscription as, 47, 180–81, 221 n.13, 221 n.16; Statue of Liberty pedestal, 203 n.27; ticket sales, 72

243

crowds onstage: amateur actor opportunities, 125, 210 n.76; audience instead, 108, 181; audience subscriptions and crowd scenes, 10, 78, 106–8; audience understanding representation, 81–82; characters representing, 202 n.20; charity matinee crowd scenes, 10, 78, 106–8, 201 n.8; ensemble playing, 201 n.10; lists identifying onstage characters, 81; lists substituting for unseen characters, 10, 77, 78, 81–82, 85–86, 93, 95–97, 99, 102, 156, 181–82, 201 n.10; meaning of “crowds,” 81, 202 n.20; plays with crowds onstage, 77–80, 85, 201 nn.8–9; playwrights avoiding, 79–80, 201 n.10; scholarship on crowds, 14, 186 n.32 darkened auditoriums, 3, 7, 52 database: ballet, 192 n.64; ephemera contextualizing, 20, 23–24, 189 nn.29–30; performances vs. productions, 14, 31–32, 191 n.59; as “post-archival,” 42–45; private society plays in commercial repertoire, 8, 14, 18, 19, 27–33, 43; private society revivals, 18; private theater clubs, 191 n.54; quantitative methods, 14, 42–45; Stage Society annual reports on repertoires, 35–36; stopping at end of censorship, 30; subscription list props, 82; virtual plays and playgoers, 6, 24, 43, 50; Wearing’s London Stage, 14, 27, 29, 186 n.30 Deaf and Dumb Dramatic Clubs, 138, 213 n.132 Dean, Basil, 57, 59, 60, 62 democratic nature: amateur theater group participation, 11, 109–11, 113–16, 118, 121–30, 133–35, 209 n.38; The Mask despite Craig, 146–47, 149, 157–58, 214 n.13; names on subscription lists, 4–5, 7, 15, 83–84, 87–89, 90, 177–79, 186 n.33, 203 n.46; print ephemera, 177; new subscription economy and civic crowdfunding, 181; private subscribers determining repertoire, 2, 5, 8, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44–45, 74–75; public subscription, 59–66, 84, 87–89, 90, 177–79, 203 n.46 (see also representation of citizens); shareholding as representative democracy, 60–61 dialect dramas, 139 dialogue in typography, 83–84 “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” pseudonym, 52

244

Index

dividends to shareholders, 48, 62, 198 n.75 Dow, W. B., 135, 136 Downs, Harold, 116, 117 drama competitions, 138–40 dramatic publishing: acting editions devaluing, 190 n.32; amateur theater repertoire, 120; copyright law, 25, 34, 120, 121, 190 n.37; dramatis personae listed, 160; Ibsen by socialist magazines, 27; “properties” listed in acting editions, 80, 201 n.13; reading editions, 54; repertory theater plays published, 54–55; Shaw’s extensive stage directions, 165; Shaw’s relationship with publishers, 217 n.79; Victorian renaissance in, 24 Dublin theaters, 45, 54, 69. See also Abbey Theatre Duke of York’s Theatre Repertory Cards subscription, 38 election-related lists of names, 84–94 ensemble companies, 201 n.10 ensemble playing, 201 n.10 ephemera: amateur theater, 113–15; amateur theater anonymity, 11, 114, 124–27, 156, 207 n.18; book historians on, 20–21, 44, 187 n.9, 188 nn. 11, 15; commercial theater, 22, 23; databased information, 14, 20, 23–24, 189 nn.29–30; definition, 18; digitization, 44; form shaping content, 23–24, 189 n.30; The Mask, 149; newspaper letters to the editor as, 47, 49, 51–54; newspapers as, 9, 21, 24, 47, 49, 53, 196 n.24; performance schedule changes, 17, 18, 23, 34, 35, 189 n.29; performance scholars on, 20–21, 44, 187 n.9, 188 n.10; playgoer representations, 13, 179–80; political protest, 22; private subscription, 8–9, 20–24, 37, 113, 192 n.67; programs as, 37 (see also annual reports; programs; prospectuses); repertoire created via, 8, 18–22, 34–38, 44; seating differences, 69; subscription-list stage props, 9–10, 76–78, 80–81, 82, 93, 202 n.16 (see also subscription lists onstage); theatrical ephemera overview, 5–7, 21–24, 83; theatrical scrapbooking, 5–6, 21, 23, 50; tickets as, 6, 18–23; virtual plays and playgoers, 6, 24, 43, 50 Fagan, James Bernard, 28, 29, 33, 85, 202 n.16 family circle as “gallery rechristened,” 199 n.101

farthing shares of public subscription, 88–89, 203 n.45 Gaiety Theatre, Manchester, 47, 55, 59, 206 n.89 Galsworthy, John: Duckworth publishing plays, 25; Escape, 137; Justice, 68; repertory theater modern dramatists, 49; The Silver Box, 109, 206 n.1; Strife, 99–100, 190 n.40 gender: amateur actors, 113, 129; amateur theater participation, 128–30, 211 nn. 94, 96; asking “for charity,” 105; Married Women’s Property Act, 91; The Mask recruitment postcards, 220 n.121; playgoing as female, playwriting as male, 8, 19, 21, 39, 41, 42; program sellers as female, 115, 208 n.20; promiscuity as revolutionary duty, 211 n.94; property men as characters, 80; property mistresses, 202 n.15; pseudonyms in letters to newspapers, 9, 49, 66–67; relationship with industry, 103; Stage Society, 39, 40, 41–42, 193 n.96; subscription as female, 90–91, 100, 102–5; voting rights, 15, 60, 78–79, 90, 91, 107–8; Woman as the Servant of Society manual, 103 Glasgow theaters: audience education, 55; bookstalls of published plays, 55; Brighouse plays produced, 69; cleanliness of, 73; Glasgow Repertory as Glasgow Corporation, 60; Liverpool’s might be better, 60; local playwrights, 68; newspapers supporting public subscriptions, 53; public subscription appeal for shares, 61; public subscription communal theater company, 59, 60, 63; repertoire sculpted by subscribers, 45; Repertory £1 shares, 61–62; Repertory as Citizens’ Theatre, 200 n.113; Repertory director responding to criticisms, 71; Repertory funds to Scottish National Players, 200 n.113; Repertory share distributions, 62; Scottish Playgoers’ Company, 68; Scottish Repertory Theatre program, 64; theaters as public good, 54; Wareing as Repertory producer, 54 Grein, J. T.: Independent Theatre Series of Plays, 37; Independent Theatre Society founder, 17, 34, 187 n.7; on Leeds Art Theatre appeals, 113, 207 n.14; on museum analogy for societies, 27; repertoire of

Index Independent Theatre Society, 34, 192 n.67; on Shaw’s effect on societies, 28 Grundy, Sydney, 24, 26, 147, 190 n.41 Hankin, St. John, 19, 34, 92, 101, 103 Haymarket Theatre, 80, 184 n.10 Hazlitt, William, 149–50, 164 Horniman, Annie, 47, 57, 58, 59, 63, 69, 72, 196 n.29, 197 n.54 Houghton, Stanley (Hindle Wakes), 28, 31, 69 Howard and Wyndham’s Royalty Theatre, 62 Ibsen, Henrik: avant-garde vs. modernist, 187 n.7; A Doll’s House, 28, 29, 67; An Enemy of the People, 76, 108, 200 n.2; Ghosts, 17, 26, 28, 29, 132; Hedda Gabler, 28, 29; The League of Youth, 36; Pillars of Society, 76, 103, 200 n.2; reading editions published, 54; repertory theater modern dramatists, 49; socialist magazines publishing, 27; subscription list onstage, 76, 200 n.2 Independent Theatre Society: Antoine’s The´aˆtre Libre as model, 187 n.7, 192 n.67; begetting New Century Theatre Society, 19; The First Step not staged, 25; Ghosts, 28, 190 n.44; Grein founding, 17, 34, 187 n.7; Independent Theatre Series of Plays, 37; prospectus, 34, 192 n.67; repertoire opposing commercial theater, 34, 192 n.67; Shaw’s effect on, 28 Industrial Theatre, Leeds, 134–36 Ireland, 48, 154, 178, 220 n.4. See also Dublin theaters Japanese Edo theater, 14, 186 n.32 Japanese kabuki The Subscription List, 181–82, 222 n.19 Japanese noh theater, 175, 181–82, 220 n.126, 221 n.18 “Johnny in the stalls,” 69, 199 n.99 laboratory role, 8, 18, 24–27, 31 Leeds Art Theatre, 112, 113, 120, 125, 126, 207 n.14, 210 n.76 Leeds Civic Playhouse, 140–41, 213 n.140 Leeds Industrial Theatre, 134–36 Lees, Dorothy Nevile, 143, 158, 159, 160, 174, 213 n.7, 214 n.20, 219 n.108 libraries: British libraries closing, 181; Mudie’s Circulating Library, 40; permanent library but not theater, 38; public

245

subscription, 194 n.5; “reading class,” 54–55; Stage Society Library of Theatrical Literature, 8, 38 licensing, 3. See also censorship little magazines, 151–56, 161, 168, 215 nn. 29, 32, 219 n.110. See also Mask, The Liverpool theaters: audience education, 55–56; bookstalls of published plays, 55; cleanliness of, 73; Dean as Repertory producer, 57; Liverpool Playhouse, 72; Manchester playwrights produced, 69; newspapers supporting public subscriptions, 53; Playgoers’ Society theater behavior manual, 68; public subscription theaters as public good, 54; public subscription to beat Glasgow, 60; Reilly as Repertory chairman, 54; Repertory £1 shares, 61–62; Repertory as first, 63; Repertory as “temple for the mind,” 56; Repertory dividends, 62, 198 n.75; Repertory filling empty seats, 72; Repertory letters to the editor, 66, 67; Repertory management responding to criticism, 71–72; Repertory program sellers, 208 n.20; Repertory prospectus printed, 61–62; Repertory share, 61, 62; Repertory share distributions, 62– 63, 198 n.75; Repertory state subsidy, 72; Repertory subscription list as democratic, 4, 63; Stage Society annual reports, 35, 37; theatergoing train trips, 56 London Stage, 1890–1959, The (Wearing), 14, 27, 29, 186 n.30 London Stage database. See database London theater: 23 most produced plays, 29; amateur theater repertoire, 120; ballet, 33; Browne favoring amateur, 119; charity matinees, 106; Community Theatre Festival, 140; Deaf and Dumb Dramatic Club, 213 n.132; long runs or popular hits, 2–3, 26; Northern drama society accent, 139; opera, 33–34; private societies lacking theaters, 19; private society plays into commercial repertoire, 8, 14, 18, 19, 26, 27–33, 43; productions of original works, 43; Stage Society tracking repertory seasons, 35–36, 37; touring commercial theater from, 48, 52, 56, 197 n.42; Unity Theatre, 127, 129, 132, 211 n.94; upper-middle-class patrons, 49; Votes for Women crowd scene, 107. See also commercial theater Lord Chamberlain, 3. See also censorship

246

Index

Maddermarket Theatre, 114, 120, 127, 207 n.18 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 19, 36 Manchester theaters: audience education, 55; Gaiety Theatre, 47, 55, 59, 206 n.89; local playwrights, 69; private enterprise theater vs. Glasgow, 59; repertoire sculpted by subscribers, 45; Stage Society annual reports, 35, 37; Unnamed Society amateur theater, 119–20, 140, 141 Martin-Harvey, John, 168, 218 n.91 Mask, The (journal; Craig): active reading program promoted, 146, 149–50, 163, 164– 66, 168; annotating playtexts, 12, 150, 151, 163, 164–65, 215 n.26; Caslon Old Face type, 172, 219 n.111; content of, 11–12, 146, 153, 155, 158–59, 161–71, 167, 173–74, 218 n.95; contributors fictitious and real, 145, 149, 158– 59, 160, 161, 165, 169, 218 n.85, 220 n.121; democracy of, despite Craig, 146–47, 149, 157–58, 214 n.13; dialogue with readers, 11– 12, 146, 149, 151, 161–70, 167, 218 n.85; fascism, 148–49, 165; Florence offices, 11, 143, 144, 145, 154, 172, 219 n.107; The Hour Glass, 154; internationalism, 11, 12, 143, 147–48, 170–76, 214 n.15; lists in, 156–61; little magazines, 151–56, 161, 168, 215 n.29, 215 n.32, 219 n.110; marginalia of Craig published in, 151, 161, 163, 166, 170; praise for, 143, 146, 155, 161, 164–66, 168, 170–71, 173, 219 n.111; prospectuses, 153, 158, 159; publication dates, 11, 213 n.1; Shaw subscribing to, 165; Stage Society Library of Theatrical Literature, 38; subscriber numbers, 143, 145, 156, 163–64, 213 n.7; subscriber residences, 147, 162, 170–76; subscribers as artists, 12, 146, 153, 156, 160–61; subscribers as artists’ friends, 158; subscription fee, 147, 214 n.13; testimonial postcards, 143, 144, 146, 149, 160, 165–66, 168, 174; as virtual theater, 12, 143, 145, 146, 152–56, 160–61, 166–70, 167, 172, 213 n.6; world wars and, 170, 172–73, 219 nn. 102, 110 “meetings” as society performances, 35, 36 melodrama crowds on stage, 79–80, 107, 201 n.9 modernists, 26–27, 174, 175, 187 n.7, 208 n.30 Monck, Nugent, 120, 149 Monkhouse, Allan, 69, 163, 170 museum analogy for private societies, 8, 18, 24, 26, 27

New Century Theatre Society, 19, 25, 30, 39 newspapers: amateur theater, 113, 120–21, 124–25; audiences as political publics, 46– 47, 50–54, 195 n.12; as civic performance space, 9, 53–54; as crowdfunding platforms, 9, 49, 53, 203 n.27; as ephemera, 9, 21, 24, 47, 49, 53, 196 n.24; performance copyright requirements, 24; plays about, 202 n.16; private subscription and commercial theater together, 22; public subscriber letters to the editor, 9, 46–47, 49–54, 66–69, 73–74, 113, 124–25, 156, 195 n.12; public subscription forms, 9, 49, 53, 61, 113; repertory movement promoted, 9, 49–50, 53, 54, 61, 63, 203 n.27; Stage Society in, 19, 36; theatrical newspapers, 151, 152. See also correspondence columns not-for-profit vs. commercial enterprises, 94–100, 204 n.66 Nottingham Royal Theatre accounts book, 82, 202 n.22 novelists as playwrights, 26, 27, 191 n.49 orphans and subscription, 79, 100, 102–3, 104 People’s Theatre, Newcastle, 117, 119, 123, 124, 126 performances: productions vs., 14, 31–32, 43, 191 n.59; programs separating repertoire from, 35 Pinero, Arthur Wing, 26, 84–85, 105, 206 n.93 Pirandello, Luigi, 19, 30, 80 playgoers as female, 8, 19, 21, 39, 41, 42. See also audience playwriting: crowds avoided, 79–80, 201 n.10; local playwrights wanted, 68–69; as male, 8, 19, 21, 39, 42; politicians and subscriptions, 91–94; repertory theater, 49 political facets: audiences as political publics, 46–47, 50–54, 195 n.12; campaign funding via subscription, 94, 98–99, 205 n.73; persona and political representation, 12; political pressure of subscriptions, 91–94, 107; political representation and subscription, 9, 14–15, 78–79, 85–86, 90–91, 108; political representation of playgoer protests, 46–47; politician characters representing crowds, 202 n.20; private subscription and protest ephemera, 22; private subscription democratic chaos, 38; public subscription as step

Index toward government subsidy, 47, 86–88, 178; public subscription democratic nature, 59–66, 84, 87–89, 90, 177–79, 203 n.46 (see also representation of citizens); public subscription vs. state and municipal support, 15, 86–88, 90; shareholding as representative democracy, 60–61; subscription demonstrating fitness to vote, 90–91; subscription’s representational politics via theater lens, 8, 10, 78–79, 177–79 “Pornographic Play Society (Limited),” 18, 23 press. See dramatic publishing; newspapers printed ephemera. See ephemera private subscription. See Independent Theatre Society; Stage Society; subscription societies private theater clubs, 191 n.54 productions: 23 most produced plays, 29; performances versus, 14, 31–32, 43, 191 n.59 professional and amateur theater relationship, 10–11, 112–13, 116–21, 208 n.35, 209 n.36 programs: amateur actors’ names withheld, 11, 114, 126–27, 156, 207 n.18; amateur theater groups, 114–15, 126–27; blank spaces for evening’s details, 5–6; cleanliness of theaters, 73; complaint about price of, 70; Glasgow Repertory Theatre, 63, 198 n.77; Liverpool Repertory Theatre, 63, 198 n.78; modeled on The Mask, 219 n.111; private society ephemera, 35, 192 n.73; program sellers, 11, 114–15, 124, 208 n.20; repertoire separated from performance, 35; Scottish Repertory Theatre program, 64; Stage Society program, 36; Stage Society ten-year jubilee, 37; as trophies, 5 promptbooks vs. authorial versions, 150, 215 n.25 props: accounts book as, 82, 202 n.22; acting editions listing “properties,” 80, 201 n.13; history of, 77, 81, 202 n.15; newspaperthemed plays, 202 n.16; proliferation of, 80; property men as characters, 80; property mistresses, 202 n.15; scriptive props, 203 n.23; Shakespeare prop analysis, 82, 202 n.18; speaking props, 81; stage directions for property men, 201 n.13; subscription lists as, 9–10, 76–78, 80–81, 82, 93, 202 n.16 (see also subscription lists onstage); substituting for actors, 77, 80; substituting

247

for characters (see subscription lists onstage) prospectuses: definition, 35, 192 n.72; Grein’s for Independent Theatre Society, 34, 192 n.67; marketed to specific demographics, 7; The Mask, 153, 158, 159; newspapers publishing, 9, 49, 53; periodicity reinforced via, 34; “Pornographic Play Society,” 18, 23; repertoire created by ephemera, 19, 34–35 provincial theaters: amateur theater, 119–21, 127, 128–30, 209 n.51; audience education, 54–58, 61, 67, 112, 137, 169; closing in 1980s and 1990s, 178; drama competitions, 138–40; ensemble companies, 201 n.10; hierarchy of seating, 69–72, 199 nn. 99, 101; local playwrights, 68–69; missionary repertorists in provincial wilderness, 57; newspapers promoting, 9, 49–50, 53, 54, 61, 63; pseudonyms for correspondence columns, 51–52, 196 n.20; repertoire determined by subscribers, 2, 5, 8, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44–45, 74–75; repertorists’ views of audiences, 9, 49, 51, 54, 56, 57–58, 177; Shaw denying provincial productions, 69; Stage Society tracking repertoires, 9, 35–36, 37–38; Theatres Royal, 48; touring theater versus, 48, 52, 56, 72, 197 n.42. See also repertory movement pseudonyms: amateur theater group criticisms, 124–25; articles in The Mask, 145, 149, 158–59, 160, 161, 169, 218 n.85, 220 n.121; class, gender, and age within, 9, 49, 66–67; correspondence columns, 51–52, 196 n.20; little magazines, 152, 158; for marginalization or misrepresentation, 177; names true on subscription lists, 6–7, 156, 185 nn.23–24; public subscriber letters to newspapers, 9, 46, 49, 51–53, 66–69, 73–74, 113, 156 public good of theater, 54, 57–59, 112, 135–36, 197 n.48 public subscription: Abbey Theatre, 47, 52, 63, 65, 66, 105–6, 196 n.22; acting in productions, 48, 52, 56; audience education, 54–58, 61, 67; audiences empowered by, 7–8, 49, 51, 66–69, 74–75, 195 n.17; Citizens’ Theatres, 9, 47, 49, 60, 63, 64, 67, 74–75, 198 n.77; civic ownership, 178, 220 n.4; civic pride of, 50, 60, 74, 86, 89, 100–101; commercial shares, 194 n.5; as crowdfunding,

248

Index

public subscription (continued ) 47, 180–81, 221 nn.13, 16; democratic nature of, 59–66, 84, 87–89, 90, 177–79, 203 n.46; description of, 47–48, 51; dividends to shareholders, 48, 62, 198 n.75; expansion during interwar period, 73; first English repertory theater, 63; history of, 48; Ireland’s Ciste Cholmcille Fund, 220 n.4; letters to the editor, 9, 46–47, 49, 50–54, 66–69, 73–74, 113, 156, 195 n.12; libraries, 194 n.5; Liverpool Repertory share, 61, 62; Lord Chamberlain’s licensing, 48; modern subscription economy, 180–81; newspapers promoting, 9, 49–50, 53, 54, 61, 63, 203 n.27; payments, 47–48, 61, 62; political representation and, 9, 14–15, 78–79, 85–86, 90–91, 108; as “private patronage,” 178; provincial repertory theaters via, 47–48, 54, 59–63, 65, 66, 73; as public good, 54; reciprocal resonance, 50–54, 67; repertoire, 49; representation enabled by, 7–8, 14–15, 51, 59–60, 74–75, 89, 100–101, 108, 180, 182; shareholder rights, 48, 61, 89, 91; share prices, 48, 61, 62, 88–90, 203 n.46; state and municipal support versus, 15, 86–88, 90, 177, 178; subscription as female, 90–91; subscriptions “on behalf” of others, 12, 100–101, 105, 177–78; ticket sales, 48, 60, 70–71, 72, 199 n.81; voluntary infirmaries, 90, 100. See also repertory theater public subsidy: civic crowdfunding, 180–81, 221 n.16; cuts leading to membership schemes, 1; public subscription as step toward, 47, 86–88, 178; rates as property taxes, 58; subscription versus, 15, 60, 86– 88, 90, 177, 178; theater as public good, 57– 59, 112 publishing of plays. See dramatic publishing Raleigh, Cecil, 79, 201 n.8 “reading class” as audience, 54–56 reciprocal resonance, 50–54, 67 repertoire: amateur theater groups, 117, 119, 120, 121, 131–32; avant-garde, 19, 28, 33, 35, 55, 187 n.7, 192 n.73; charity matinee crowd scenes, 78, 106–7; charity matinees, 106–7, 206 n.93; Church influencing, 131–32; “commercial repertoire” as term, 31; definitions of, 33, 34, 192 n.63; ephemera creating, 8, 18–22, 34–38, 44; Grein’s influence,

34, 192 n.67; operatic repertoire, 33–34; performances vs. productions, 31–32; private societies, 33–38, 192 n.67; private societies’ lack of theaters, 19, 27; as private society concept, 8, 18–19, 21, 34–35, 38; private society into commercial, 8, 14, 18, 19, 26, 27–33, 43 (see also revivals); private subscribers determining, 2, 5, 8, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44–45, 74–75; programs separating performance details from, 35; public subscription theaters, 49; public subsidy theater companies, 178; Repertory Cards subscription, 38; repertory theater modern dramatists, 49; Shakespeare dominating, 43; Stage Society, 34–38; storage facility analogies, 24; subscribers stifling, 1, 2; theatrical canon, 33–34 repertory movement: amateur theater movement extending, 116; local playwrights, 68–69; new or modern drama repertoire, 49; newspapers promoting, 9, 49–50, 53, 54, 61, 63, 203 n.27; playgoers’ letters to newspapers, 50–54; provincial professional alternatives, 48; provincial trial repertory seasons, 63, 199 n.80; public subscription for, 47–48, 54, 59–63, 65, 66, 73; Stage Society tracking repertoires of other societies, 9, 35–36, 37–38 repertory theater: audience as pupils, patients, and savages, 9, 49, 51, 54, 56, 57– 58, 177; audience education, 54–58, 61, 67; audiences empowered by public subscription, 7–8, 49, 51, 66–69, 74–75, 195 n.17; civilizing influence of, 57, 197 n.48; cleanliness of, 73; as coterie of cranks, 56; crowd scenes avoided, 80, 201 n.10; ensemble companies, 201 n.10; first appearance of, 48; first English public subscription theater, 63; first English repertory company, 47; local ensemble, 48; local playwrights wanted, 68–69; lower-middle-class vs. wealthier patrons, 69, 70, 71; municipal funding of, 57–59; provincial theater revivals, 31; provincial via public subscription, 47–48, 54, 59–63, 65, 66, 73; public subscription as “Citizens’ Theatres,” 9, 47, 49, 60, 63, 64, 67, 74–75, 198 n.77; publishing of plays, 54–55; “reading class” as audiences, 54–56; short runs of, 28, 32, 48; Stage Society “Plays for Repertory Theatres,” 38;

Index Stage Society tracking repertoires, 9, 35–36, 37–38; subscription as themes of plays, 105–6; translated plays published, 55; true repertory model, 49, 72, 200 n.113; Vedrenne-Barker Court Theatre, 28, 30, 191 n.53. See also repertory movement representation (conceptual): art and social freedoms, 181; characters representing crowds, 202 n.20; lists evoking different lists, 22, 83, 95, 104; monument subscription includes monument visitor, 84; names on subscription ephemera, 83, 181–82; newspaper/magazine production plays, 202 n.16; persona and, 12; political constituents represented by appeals for subscription, 85–86; printed ephemera’s playgoer representations, 179–80; prop lists representing crowds offstage, 10, 77, 78, 81–82, 85–86, 93, 95, 96, 97, 99, 102, 156, 181–82, 201 n.10; props substituting for actors, 77, 80 representation of citizens: amateur theaters and subscribers, 113; democratic nature of names on subscription lists, 4–5, 7, 15, 83– 84, 87–89, 90, 177–79, 186 n.33, 203 n.46; despotism shadowing, 149; local playwrights, 68–69; The Mask endowing readers, 146; monuments and names on a list, 84; playgoers protesting subsidized Abbey, 46–47; political pressure of subscriptions, 91–94, 107; public subscriber letters to the editor, 9, 46–47, 49, 50–54, 66–69, 73–74, 113, 156, 195 n.12; public subscription enabling, 7–8, 14–15, 51, 59–60, 74–75, 89, 100–101, 108, 180, 182; “representative ideal” replacing “educational ideal,” 196 n.23; shareholding as representative democracy, 60–61; subscribers for fellow citizens, 1–5, 7–8, 12, 13, 77–78, 89, 90; subscription and judicial representation, 87; subscription and political representation, 9, 14–15, 78–79, 85–86, 90–91, 108; subscription demonstrating fitness to vote, 90–91; subscriptions “on behalf” of others, 12, 100–101, 105; subscription’s representational politics via theater lens, 8, 10, 78–79, 177–79; trade worker fund subscribers vs. beneficiaries, 99–100; voluntary infirmaries, 90, 100; women and propertyless men, 15, 60, 78–79, 90

249

revivals: 23 most produced plays, 29; ballets, 33, 43; commercial theater contributions, 32; one-off plays quantified, 34, 43; operas, 33–34, 43, 192 n.65; performances vs. productions, 14, 31–32, 43, 191 n.59; plays, 27– 33, 44; private society plays into commercial repertoire, 8, 14, 18, 19, 26, 27– 33, 43 Richards, Grant, 25, 37 Robertson, T. W., 29, 33, 80, 102 Robins, Elizabeth, 103–4, 107, 193 n.78 Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, 118 School for the Art of the Theatre (Craig), 154, 168–69, 218 n.93 Scottish Community Drama Association, 110, 119 Scottish Playgoers’ Company, 68 Scottish Repertory Theatre, 64 scriptive things, 203 n.23 season-ticket subscriptions, 2, 178, 183 n.3, 184 n.10, 199 n.81, 220 n.5 seats: adjoining via pinned cards, 6, 39–40; amateur theater spaces, 140–41, 213 n.140; empty seats, 70–71, 72, 134, 178; hierarchy of, 69–72, 199 nn. 99, 101. See also tickets Shakespeare, William: amateur theater repertoire, 120; cast sizes, 79, 201 n.8; catalogue of all props, 82; dominating dramatic repertoire, 43; Hamlet, 150, 153, 164, 213 n.132; Henry IV, 81; history of name-bearing props, 81; India productions, 174; Julius Caesar, 79, 81, 107, 201 n.8; Lamb marking up, 215 n.26; lists identifying onstage characters, 81; Macbeth, 150, 164–65; The Merchant of Venice, 135–36, 211 n.96; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 81, 110, 139; as poet of the page, 149; prison Shakespeare class, 212 n.129; prop analysis, 82, 202 n.18; repertory theater, 49; Romeo and Juliet, 81; societies specializing in, 30–31; stage directions for property men, 201 n.13; stage directors displacing actor-managers, 201 n.10; Stage Society program, 36 shareholders of public subscriptions: audience as horizontal collectives, 49; dividends, 48, 62, 198 n.75; newspaper columns of shareholders’ impressions, 53; nominations for institutional care, 79, 100; political pressure by, 91–94, 107; shareholding as

250

Index

shareholders of public subscriptions (continued ) representative democracy, 60–61; share prices, 48, 61, 62, 88–89, 90, 203 n.46; share prices and benefits conferred, 89–90; voting rights, 48, 61, 89, 90, 91, 100 Shaw, Bernard: Arms and the Man, 29, 64; avant-garde vs. modernist, 187 n.7; Back to Methuselah cycle, 117; Caesar and Cleopatra, 165, 218 n.82; Candida, 29, 36, 119; Caslon Old Face type, 172; Craig’s relationship with, 165, 218 n.82; denying provincial productions, 69; Don Juan in Hell, 44; effect on private subscription societies, 28; fascist leanings, 165; Heartbreak House, 106; John Bull’s Other Island, 94; Major Barbara, 96– 98, 204 n.68, 205 n.70; Man and Superman, 27, 28, 29, 31, 33, 44, 63, 198 n.77; Misalliance, 104; Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 17, 18, 25, 37, 42, 104, 206 n.93; New Statesman magazine, 4–5; Overruled, 104; Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, 25; “Pornographic Play Society” prospectus, 18; Press Cuttings, 94; Pygmalion, 29, 204 n.68, 209 n.38; reading editions published, 54, 165, 217 n.79; repertory theater modern dramatists, 14, 49; The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, 105; stage directions extensive, 165; Stage Society launching, 19; Widowers’ Houses, 37; You Never Can Tell, 7, 28, 29, 36 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 28, 29, 49 silence while writing down name, 83, 96 social hierarchies. See class hierarchies speaking props, 81 spectators. See audiences stage directions, 83, 96, 165, 201 n.13, 218 n.82 stage directors, 145, 150, 164–65, 201 n.10 Stage Society: actor pay, 191 n.62; adjoining seats via pinned cards, 6, 39–40; annual fee, 40; annual reports, 18, 35–38, 37, 41, 193 n.75; annual season prevented by democracy, 38; burlesque of unacted dramatists, 25, 190 n.40; costumes and scenery absent early, 192 n.70; coterie sensation, 39–42; ephemera building repertoire, 34–38; ephemera constituting performances, 18, 19–20; Hindle Wakes, 31; incorporation of, 19, 39, 40; as laboratory, 25–27; Library of Theatrical Literature, 8, 38; membership female majority, 39–42, 193 n.96; membership lists, 4, 35–36, 40, 41; membership

numbers, 39, 40; membership via nomination, 41; Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 17, 18, 25; New Century Theatre Society begetting, 19; permanent theater campaign, 39; plays in commercial repertoire, 27–33; playwriting careers launched by, 19, 27, 28; political association members, 22; repertoires of other societies, 9, 35–36, 37–38; repertoire via ephemera, 34–38; revenue, 193 n.75; Shakespeare productions, 31; Shaw’s effect on, 28; The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet, 105; signatory Grant Richards, 25; submissions to Reading & Advising Committee, 25; subscription ephemera, 22–23, 34–36; success of, 17; ten-year jubilee souvenir programs, 6, 37. See also subscription societies stalls in theater seating, 69, 199 n.99 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 80, 145, 148, 153, 157 Star Theatre, 63 St. James’s Theatre, 6, 35, 37, 208 n.20 subscription: audiences empowered by, 7–8, 49, 51, 66–69, 74–75, 195 n.17; history of, 3–4, 184 n.13; names true on subscription lists, 6–7, 156, 185 nn.23–24; printed ephemera of, 5–7 (see also ephemera); subscriber numbers, 4, 185 n.17; subscribers determining repertoire, 2, 5, 8, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44–45, 74–75; subscriber’s horizon of expectations, 2, 179, 184 n.8; subscription lists exchanged among theaters, 5; as theater lifeblood, 1–2, 178–79, 183 n.4; West End profit model enabling subscription, 2–3, 26. See also amateur theater groups; public subscription; subscription lists offstage; subscription lists onstage; subscription societies (private) subscription book publication, 6–7 subscription economy, 180–81 subscription ephemera. See ephemera subscription forms: private subscription requiring nominations, 41; public subscription forms in newspapers, 9, 49, 53, 61, 113 “subscription hunters,” 7, 79, 100 Subscription List, The (Kanjincho¯; 1840), 181–82 subscription lists offstage: as audience documentation, 1, 6; bewildering numbers of, 94, 101; campaign funding via subscription, 94, 98–99, 205 n.73; community of

Index subscribers, 7, 79; democratic nature of names on list, 4–5, 7, 15, 83–84, 87–90, 177– 79, 186 n.33, 203 n.46; democratic vs. representative, 88; exchanged among theaters, 5; kanjin (subscription) noh theater, 181, 222 n.18; lists evoking different lists, 22, 83, 95, 104; names true vs. pseudonyms, 6–7, 156, 185 nn.23–24; nominations by shareholders, 79, 100; political candidates, 85–86; political pressure of subscriptions, 91–94, 107; political representation and subscription, 9, 14–15, 78–79, 85–86, 90–91, 108; pressure of appeals effecting change, 82– 83, 203 n.23; scriptive things to coerce alignment, 203 n.23; state and municipal support versus, 15, 86–88, 90, 177, 178; “subscription hunters,” 79, 100; voluntary infirmaries, 90, 100 subscription lists onstage: as audience documentation, 1, 6; audiences appealed to, 83, 105–8; audience understanding representation, 81–82; character’s relationship to large social groups, 76; charitable vs. commercial enterprises, 94–100, 204 n.66; charity matinee crowd scenes, 10, 78, 106–7, 201 n.8; “Come up and give your names,” 83, 107–8; Craig’s lists on virtual stage, 156–61; democratic nature of names on list, 83–84; duress of appeals, 91–94, 101; history of name-bearing props, 81; as indiscriminate subscription warnings, 10, 78, 106–7; industrial vs. trade union subscribers, 99–100; lists identifying onstage characters, 81; lists substituting for unseen characters, 10, 77, 78, 81–82, 85–86, 93, 95, 96, 97, 99, 102, 156, 181–82, 201 n.10; newspaper production theme, 202 n.16; political campaign funding via subscription, 94; political candidates, 84–86; political pressure of subscriptions, 91–94, 107; pressure of appeals effecting change, 82–83, 203 n.23; prominence of props and absence of crowds onstage, 80–81; pro-suffrage audiences as anti-suffragist subscribers, 108; scriptive things to coerce alignment, 203 n.23; silence while writing down name, 83, 96; as stage prop printed ephemera, 9–10, 76–78, 80–81, 82, 93, 202 n.16; subscription plot, 102, 103; ubiquity and centrality of, 78; women wrangling subscriptions from men, 100, 102–5. See also crowds onstage

251

subscription societies (private): acting in productions, 32–33, 35, 37, 43, 191 n.62; Arts Council Royal Charter, 31; avant-garde repertoire, 19, 28, 33, 35, 55, 187 n.7, 192 n.73; banned plays quantity, 30 (see also censorship); censorship evasion, 4, 8, 17, 24–25, 44, 105, 191 n.54; commercialism as anathema, 26, 27, 34; coterie sensation, 39–42; database, 42–45 (see also database); description of, 17–18; drama nurtured by, 26; ephemera, 8–9, 20–24, 37, 113, 192 n.67; fashion of, 41–42; female majority membership, 8, 39, 40, 41–42, 193 n.96; frequently revived plays, 18, 29 (see also revivals); history, 190 n.34; as laboratories, 8, 18, 24–27; “meetings” as performances, 35, 36; modern dramatic repertoire development, 18–19, 21, 34–36; performances vs. productions, 14, 31–32, 191 n.59; plays in commercial repertoire, 8, 14, 18, 19, 27–33, 43 (see also revivals); quantitative methods, 42–45; repertoire as private subscription society concept, 8, 18–19, 21, 34–35, 38; repertoire determined by subscribers, 2, 5, 8, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44–45, 74–75; repertoire of, 33–38 (see also repertoire); Shaw’s effect on, 28; subscription as themes of plays, 105–6; subscription ephemera, 22–23; theaters lacked by (see theaters lacked by societies); translations of plays, 18, 19, 28, 30. See also Independent Theatre Society; Stage Society subsidy. See public subsidy suffrage: “Come up and give your names,” 107–8; marriageability and subscription appeals, 103–4; political associations with Stage Society members, 22; pro-suffrage audiences as anti-suffragist subscribers, 108; Robins’s Votes for Women suffrage subscription, 107; subscription demonstrating fitness to vote, 90–91; Suffrage Society and Women’s Social and Political Union, 107; suffragettes protesting The Riot Act, 66, 199 n.85; voting rights, 60, 90, 91, 107–8 Sunday theatrics prohibition, 17, 34, 102 Synge, J. M., 14, 29, 46–47, 49, 54, 195 n.12 Teague, Frances, 77, 82 theater as public good, 54, 57–59, 112, 135–36, 197 n.48

252

Index

theater etiquette: audiences constrained by rules, 3, 7; Internet effect, 195 n.13; letter to the editor on, 67; managers proscribing behavior, 52; Playgoers’ Society theater behavior manual, 68; pseudonyms in letters giving freedom from, 52 theater seating. See seats theaters lacked by societies: permanent library but not theater, 8, 38; printers of theatrical ephemera, 22; prospectus information, 35; repertoire taking place of, 19, 27; scheduling changes, 17, 18; skittish theater managers, 17, 40–41; Stage Society theater campaign, 39; Sunday performances, 17, 34 theater tickets. See tickets theatrical canon, 33–34, 49, 192 n.64, 192 n.65 theatrical ephemera overview, 5–7, 21–24, 83. See also ephemera theatrical little magazines, 151–56, 161, 168, 170, 215 nn. 29, 32, 219 n.110 theatrical periodicals, 5, 110, 146, 151–56, 214 n.17, 215 n.28. See also Mask, The tickets: adjoining seats, 6, 39–40; empty seats, 70–71, 72, 134, 178; Entertainment Tax, 123, 210 n.63; as ephemera, 6, 18–23; hierarchy of seating, 69–72, 199 nn. 99, 101; Industrial Theatre “genuine working people,” 134; Methodist tickets, 179, 221 n.8; private subscription schedule changes, 17, 18; private subscription subscribers, 17; public subscription to anyone, 48, 60; quasi-corporate theaters, 220 n.5; season-ticket subscriptions, 2, 178, 183 n.3, 184 n.10, 199 n.81, 220 n.5 touring theater, 48, 52, 56, 72, 82, 117–18, 197 n.42, 202 n.22 trade unions, 98–100 translated plays of private societies, 8, 18, 28 Tree, Herbert Beerbohm, 57, 107 unemployed amateur drama groups, 136–38 United States, 25, 195 nn. 12, 14 Unity Theatre, 127, 129, 132, 211 n.94 Unnamed Society, Manchester, 119–20, 140, 141

Vedrenne-Barker Court Theatre, 28, 30, 191 n.53 Veitch, Norman, 114, 124, 126 Village Drama Society, 110, 129, 130, 138 virtual theater: correspondence columns as, 69–74; databases as, 24, 43; ephemera creating, 6, 24, 50; history of English-language theater journals, 146; The Mask as, 12, 143, 145, 146, 152–56, 160–61, 166–70, 167, 172, 213 n.6; The Mask’s testimonial postcards, 143, 144; The Mask subscriber numbers, 143, 145, 213 n.7; subscribers as artists, 146, 153, 156, 160–61 voluntary infirmary subscribers, 90, 100 voting rights: men without property, 15, 60, 78–79, 90; public subscription shareholders, 48, 61, 89, 90, 91, 100; subscription demonstrating fitness to vote, 90–91; women, 15, 60, 78–79, 90, 91, 107–8. See also suffrage Wade, Allan, 25, 26, 41, 190 n.37 Walkley, Arthur Bingham, 4, 18–19, 47 Wareing, Alfred: on audience education, 57; on Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, 63, 64, 198 n.77; as Glasgow Repertory producer, 54; on Justice, 68; League of Audiences founder, 198 n.77; organizer of Abbey’s Irish Players tour, 196 n.29; on reading class as audience, 54; responding to criticisms, 71 wartime charities, 106 Wearing, J. P. (The London Stage, 1890–1959), 14, 27, 29, 186 n.30 widows and subscription, 79, 100, 102–3, 105 Wilde, Oscar (The Importance of Being Earnest), 29, 104 Willard, Emily, 161, 165–66, 173, 217 n.67 Women’s Institutes amateur theater, 129–30, 211 n.96 Yeats, W. B., 46, 50, 145, 154, 174, 199 n.81, 216 n.38

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book got a lot of help from its first readers. I’m grateful to Leah Price for her expert mentoring, which kept this project fun over the years it took to complete, and for her enthusiastic backing of the book for this series. Derek Miller introduced me to theater databases and has been a model of intellectual generosity; his questions and suggestions shaped this book in countless ways. Martin Puchner supported this endeavor from the beginning and offered valuable advice at every stage. Elaine Scarry’s detailed notes on early drafts improved the whole project. During the course of researching and writing this book, I’ve benefited from conversations with a number of individuals, including Liz Barry, Beth Blum, Hayley Bradley, Jennifer Buckley, Matthew Buckley, Debra Caplan, Ken Cerniglia, Tarryn Chun, David Coates, Jenny Davidson, Jim Davis, Tracy Davis, Paul Duguid, Sos Eltis, Dana Foarta, Ross Forman, Maureen Freely, Lisa Gitelman, Darren Gobert, Tess Grant, Barry Houlihan, Tony Howard, David Hutchison, Penelope Ismay, Rebecca Kastleman, Bethany Kibler, Patrick Lonergan, Deidre Lynch, Sharon Marcus, Emma Mason, Katie McGettigan, Michael McKinnie, Michael Meeuwis, Ros Merkin, Jill Muller, Louise Owen, Elizabeth Phillips, John Plotz, Paul Prescott, Carrie Preston, Stephen Purcell, Colleen Reilly, Doug Reside, Heike Roms, Stephen Ross, Matthew Rubery, Carol Rutter, Mia Smith, Andrew Sofer, Rachel Stern, Lucie Sutherland, Lawrence Switzky, David Taylor, Sonia Tycko, Martha Vogeler, and Alisa Zhulina. Michael Fountaine, Amy Zhang, and, above all, J. P. Wearing deserve special thanks for helping to bring the database to life. I’m further grateful to staff at the Berg Collection, the British Library, the British Library of Political and Economic Science, the Harvard Theatre Collection, the James Hardiman Library, the John G. Wolbach Library, the John Rylands Library, Liverpool Central Library, Manchester Central Library, the Mitchell Library, the National Archives Kew, the National Library of Wales, the National Theatre Archive, the University

254

Acknowledgments

of Glasgow Library, and the V&A Theatre and Performance Archives. Colleagues and students at Harvard (especially at Cabot House) and at Warwick have given this project crucial support and encouragement. Research and publication costs were undertaken with financial assistance from the Sosland Family Graduate Fellowship, the Dexter Fellowship, the Weld Prize, and Warwick’s Humanities Research Fund. Thanks to Jerome Singerman for his steadfast support; to Claire Cochrane and Elizabeth Miller for incisive feedback; to Veronica Castro, Stephen DeVries, and Emily Walhout for help with images; and to Jennifer Backer, Erica Ginsburg, Sue Klefstad, and Lily Simmons for taking this book through the stages of publication. Part of Chapter 1 previously appeared in Modernism/modernity 24, no. 3 (2017): 549–74, and part of Chapter 2 previously appeared in Theatre Survey 58, no. 2 (2017): 186–208, and I’m grateful to the editors and readers for their helpful comments as well as for permission to reprint portions of those articles here. I owe the biggest thanks to my friends and family—especially to Bonnie Kaler, Bill Franks, and Jean Franks, for taking me to the theater; to Jennifer Franks, for camaraderie; and to Joseph O’Keeffe, for always patiently engaging with this project before insisting that we move on to a different topic.