Stages of Subscription, 1880–1930

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Stages of Subscription, 1880–1930

A dissertation presented

Matthew Scott Franks

The Department of English

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the subject of

English

Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts

December 2016

Dissertation Advisor: Professor Leah Price Matthew Scott Franks

Stages of Subscription, 1880–1930

Abstract

Subscription redistricted turn-of-the-century British and Irish theater audiences in seemingly contradictory ways, alternately appealing to coteries or crowds. At a time when women, the working classes, and the Irish were advocating for greater political representation outside the theater, subscribers circumvented the Lord Chamberlain and

London commercial theater managers in order to legislate repertoires and policies on the rest of the public’s behalf. Printed subscription ephemera 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.

By listing plays in programs, prospectuses, and annual reports, private subscription clubs such as the Incorporated Stage Society assembled the very idea of a modern dramatic repertoire. Membership lists gendered club playgoers as unmarried women—precisely the demographic the Lord Chamberlain most sought to protect.

Although metropolitan managers characterized provincial playgoers as pupils to be taught, patients to be nursed, or savages to be civilized, public subscription repertory theaters in Glasgow, Dublin, and Liverpool challenged these analogies by representing

iii

repertory audiences as “citizen” shareholders. Writing pseudonymous letters to newspaper editors, playgoers variously identified as clerks, schoolboys, dockers, and suffragists, staking claim to the day-to-day running of what they considered to be

“Citizens’ Theatres” and “public institutions,” even though the theaters technically were private. George Bernard Shaw, Henrik Ibsen, St. John Hankin, John Galsworthy, Arthur

Wing Pinero, and other late-Victorian and Edwardian playwrights used subscription lists as stage props to smuggle the public plot into the private drawing room, helping to explain how so-called “social drama” was able to bring large crowds to the stage while keeping casts small. Edward Gordon Craig’s theatrical little magazine The Mask separated “Theater” as subject from “theater” as building, launching an idea of World

Theater that reflected the journal’s international subscribers as far afield as Syria, South

Africa, Bolivia, and Japan even while Craig tried to convince English readers to give him a literal theater of his own.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vi

Introduction 1

1. Play-producing societies and ephemeral repertoire 20

2. Provincial repertory theaters and audience impressions 60

3. Prop lists and assembled ensembles 100

4. Craig’s lists and readers theaters 133

Bibliography 165

Acknowledgements

At the top of the list, tremendous thanks to Leah Price, Martin Puchner, Derek

Miller, and Elaine Scarry for their patience and generosity in advising this project. Claire

Cochrane, Tracy Davis, Barry Houlihan, David Hutchison, Penelope Ismay, Patrick

Lonergan, Deidre Lynch, Ros Merkin, Elizabeth Miller, John Plotz, Mia Smith, and

Martha Vogeler provided gracious and much-appreciated expertise along the way.

Michael Fountaine, Amy Zhang, and above all J. P. Wearing helped bring the database to life. Tarryn Chun, Rebecca Kastleman, Elizabeth Phillips, and members of the Harvard

Drama Colloquium facilitated a vibrant intellectual community. Rachel Stern, Julia

Tejblum, and Elizabeth Weckhurst have been great friends and colleagues. Gwen

Urdang-Brown contributed warmth and wit. I’m further grateful to staff at the British

Library, the British Library of Political and Economic Science, Houghton Library, 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 Theatre Archive, the New York Public Library, the

University of Glasgow Library, and the V&A Theatre and Performance Archives. Cabot

House tutors, students, and staff have been among my most constructive interlocutors.

Catherine Benson, James Fry, Hannah Howard, Steven Howes, Jennifer Martin, and Elise

Spiers have put me up during research trips. I owe the biggest thanks to my family:

William, Bonnie, Jennifer, and Jean Franks, and, last but not least, Joseph O’Keeffe.

Introduction

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 scholars, subscription lists offer among the clearest documentation of the individuals who have comprised theater audiences over the last century. Nevertheless, beyond industry books and marketing journals, we have largely ignored subscription’s origins or impact.4

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 Long-Term Pain?,” The Guardian, Jan. 24, 2014.

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, book history, and cultural studies have better

When we mention subscribers at all, we highlight their homogeneity. Richard

Schechner has asserted that the tellingly-singular “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 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 buttoned-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. With financial commitment indicated by their title, subscribers (unlike theatergoers, audiences, or spectators) uncomfortably remind us that even avowedly not-for-profit theater needs playgoers with purses, prompting disgruntled Australian actress Anna Broinowski to punningly dub them “a bank of semi-comatose.”7 While money-minded managers and marketers flatter subscribers to their faces, artistically-inclined playwrights, directors, actors, and critics compound subscription’s reputation for stifling the performance

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 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’ 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,” The Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 1 (1965): 42–43.

6 Richard Schechner and Andre Gregory, “The Theatre of the Living Arts,” The Tulane Drama Review 11, no. 4 (1967): 21.

7 Anna Broinowski, “Why Did the Actor Cross the Road?,” About Performance, no. 3 (1997): 121.

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.

Commercial theater redistricted

Subscribers first took up their cliquish clubber and communal contributor roles at a time when “the drama” had reached its much-bemoaned nadir as an art form. 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 Subscription’s proponents believed that

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,’ The Nineteenth Century, August 1879, 243. Among other places, the quote 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

mass theatergoing had led to hack writing, ham acting, and other hallmarks of the late-

Victorian commercial theater—not because the masses were uncultured, but because they were uncoordinated. From a consumer’s perspective, playgoers had never 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 long runs and carbon-copy provincial tours. And yet, spectators became increasingly aware 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 put it, their power would remain fundamentally passive, and the repertoire, fundamentally cautious.10

Enter subscription, which has a long history in the English language, first emerging in the fifteenth century to signify one’s signed consent to articles of religion; six hundred years on, one study cites contemporary playgoers in Britain, Australia, and the United States claiming 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 use a rung from the

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 aesthetic and political dimensions of theater subscription only thanks to the thorough economic analysis of Tracy Davis, who concludes that professional not-for-profit theater schemes “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.

10 C. H. Reilly, “Repertory Theatre and its Aims,” Education, Aug. 16, 1912.

OED definition.11 Accounting for centuries of schemes, historian Peter Clark’s distinction between British private subscription clubs and public subscription societies could extend to the subscription phenomenon at large: by 1800, the contrasting terms “private subscription” and “public subscription” indicated whether the general public was excluded from or invited onto lists bankrolling anything from libraries, hospitals, and prisons to concerts, operas, and balls.12 Following this tradition and drawing inspiration from independent and state-sponsored Continental theaters, subscription redistricted mass theatergoers in seemingly contradictory ways, alternately appealing to coteries or crowds.

At times, subscription derived power from exclusion, as when productions whose tickets had been sold by private subscription legally circumvented censorship by theoretically offsetting the threat of mass social unrest. At other times, however, subscription derived power from inclusion, as when public subscription was held up as a model for making not-for-profit theater accessible to everyone. The target audience was not always clear, but a changing landscape was at least apparent to critic Arthur Bingham Walkley, who in

1902 declared that “[l]ike 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.”13

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

11 Caroline Heim, Audience as Performer: The Changing Role of Theatre Audiences in the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2015), 120.

12 Sometimes private clubs matured into public societies. For example, Clark observes that “[b]y 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.

13 Arthur Bingham Walkley, “New Theatrical Demands,” Times Literary Supplement, Jan. 17, 1902.

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.14 Striking a more celebratory 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.”15 Purporting proportions of various social groups, 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, all of the lists discussed in the following chapters have their own Dunbar’s number somewhere below

1,500—the apparent limit to the number of individuals with whom one could cooperate in the years surrounding the Great War who were “interested in drama, and largely in

14 H. Hamilton Fyfe, “The Stage Society’s Decline—‘Hannele’ by the play actors,” The World, Apr. 15, 1908.

15 Emphasis mine. “Liverpool’s Repertory Scheme,” Sunday Chronicle, June 18, 1911; “Citizens’ Theatres,” Daily Chronicle, Dec. 13, 1911.

Shaw,” as Webb described them.16 But rather than signal a lack of interest in the burgeoning not-for-profit theater, these numbers figure subscribers standing in for a much larger play-going public. 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 legislate repertoires and policies on the rest of the public’s behalf. In this respect, however, subscribers were not as homogenous as list length and an interest in Shaw might suggest. Harmonious microcosm may have been one ideal, but in reality subscribers variously marked and were marked by their gender, class, and province.

A modern readers theater

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 physical apparatus of pamphlets, prospectuses, and other print. In this way, subscription challenges any assumption that theater 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.17 As we parse past performances with students and colleagues, we are accustomed to recognizing these

16 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.

17 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Psychology Press, 1993), 149.

documents as mere traces of irreproducible happenings, like breadcrumbs leading to people and places we’ll never ultimately reach. When documents contradict each other, upending our most celebrated 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.18 Foraging for proper nouns, we’ve lost sight of how playgoers actually handled these materials before, during, and after the performance event.

Turn-of-the-century subscribers were hardly the only playgoers getting their hands dirty. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, new theatrical print like souvenir programs, picture postcards, colored posters, reading editions, and specialized journals such as The Era and The Stage started appearing on the scene. Thanks to the

1870 Education Act, mass theatergoers were fast becoming mass literates. 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.” By the 1910s, it was common for American programs to be decked with blank spaces for the “name of the play, the friend or friends you were with, and where you dined after the performance.”19 Print imbued theatergoing with metaphor: manager

George Alexander made his St. James Theater tickets of pasteboard so they would look

18 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.

19 Ashley Dukes, “Drama,” The New Age 6, no. 24 (April 14, 1910): 570.

like railway passes, while across the channel André Antoine embossed his to resemble wedding invitations.20 Arnold Bennett even proclaimed that print was holding the theater back: “[t]he 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.”21 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 cribbed and inflected publishing taxonomies demarcating 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 print media to suggest literary repertoires and collaborative ensembles, while circulated lists of subscribers evoked newly cooperative audiences. Quantitatively, subscription offered seemingly concrete 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 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.

20 Walter Macqueen-Pope, Carriages at Eleven: The Story of the Edwardian Theatre (London: Hutchinson, 1948), 119, 47; Jean Chothia, André Antoine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 28.

21 Arnold Bennett, Cupid and Commonsense: A Play in Four Acts. With a Preface on the Crisis in the Theatre (London: The New Age Press, 1909), 23.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the scholars closest to coming up with a vocabulary for these qualitative interactions have been literary historians of subscription book publication, a practice whose heyday was the mid-eighteenth century. 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 clubby-ness and a “slightly pornographic frisson.” Sometimes more than slightly: when Pat Rogers wrote that “few facts in literary discussion are so unambiguously facts as the names of subscribers,” he probably wasn’t thinking of the smutty travel novel Voyage to Lethe (1741) whose fifteen fictitious subscribers all had

“cock” in their surnames, including “Alderman Slycock” and “Mr. Smallcock.”22 Though changes in publishing technology and the rise of associational life ensured that readers a century and a half later were far more accustomed to encountering both Christian and profane names in print, the subscribers spotlighted in the following chapters raise different red flags. While the proper names circulated in private ephemera 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 stone faced (“Five Years’

Subscriber To The Gaiety”), the fact remains that any printed name still invites suspicion—if not of identity, at least of motive. Even before 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

22 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.

of the duplicitous self-promoter who subscribes to charity only so that others might see her name in print.23 It is precisely this tension between evidential fact and theatrical fiction that, sitting astride the tension between exclusivity and inclusivity, lends representational force to subscription.

Whether that’s 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), thereby anticipating San Diego Repertory Theatre marketers who seventy years later would produce specific season prospectuses for white, Latino, and

African American subscribers emphasizing the text and images with which marketers thought each group would identify.24 Were companies rolling out a red carpet, or a blindfold? Subscription primed playgoers to sit together in a theater believing that at least some members of the audience had read the same things as them; 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 with or without their consent, they also

23 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 heart-rending 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,” The 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).

24 Cecil Chisholm, Repertory: An Outline of the Modern Theatre Movement (London: Peter Davies, 1934), 200; Rawlings-Jackson, Where Now?, 15.

were able to represent themselves in such a way that gendered honorifics, classed pseudonyms, and overseas postcodes worked in the opposite direction to prize apart the stage from its regulatory bodies: to give subscribers actual as opposed to imaginary ownership of the theater, with results that were perceptible even to readers who never set foot in one. Subscription set the stage, or the template, for audience representatives to talk back to the Lord Chamberlain, metropolitan managers, and producer patrons, and eventually to form alliances with new institutions: the Arts Council; a Royal National

Theatre; the academic study of World Theater.

Subscribe here; subscribe now

A “stage” can refer to a space or a time; in both senses, the first stage of subscription commenced in 1882, when Sydney Grundy evaded the Lord Chamberlain by mounting a subscription performance of his banned play The Novel Reader at London’s

Globe Theatre. Chapter 1 argues that in addition to censor-skirting, private subscription 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 in the period before 1960. Even more influentially, 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 play-going as female and playwriting as male, yet both were figured 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.

Chapter 2 expands to the provincial repertory theater movement whose spread was assiduously tracked in the Stage Society’s annual reports. Leading articles in local newspapers quoted metropolitan repertorists who 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. Writing letters to newspaper editors, playgoers took up pseudonyms representing their class, gender, and age, staking claim to the day-to-day running of the theater, and setting themselves apart from the professional critics whose interests differed from their own. Since correspondents from the pit and gallery were accorded the same typographical treatment as those from the stalls and dress circles, their letters further challenged the hierarchy of the physical theater; however, because correspondence columns more often were filled by lower-middle and working-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 private.

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, John

Galsworthy, Arthur Wing Pinero, William Boyle, and others. In the hands of principal characters that give or collect subscriptions, these props smuggled the public plot into the private drawing room, and help to 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 voters to gentlemen bachelors; metaphorically, they represent further unseen groups on whose behalf subscribers claim to speak, such as poor women 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 principal 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 matinées, 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.

The final chapter asks what happens when we abandon the literal theater 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. The Mask published a number of dialogues between Craig, who played the “Stage Director,”

“Critic,” or “Editor,” and his readers, who played the respective “Playgoer,”

“Professional Performer,” or “Queer Reader.” Casting readers in roles may have required putting words in their mouths, but as Craig’s interlocutors switched between theatergoers and theater professionals, his dialogues encouraged playgoers to think of themselves on a par with 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 little-t theater of his own. Letters to editors, submitted designs, and testimonial postcards invited subscribers around the world to see the journal as a metaphorical theater in which they alternately were encouraged to spectate or to perform, but always to pay.

In Craig’s magazine and throughout the modern theater more widely, subscription gave spectators virtual stages on which to perform like actors. Philosophers from Cicero

to Hobbes and Rousseau 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.25 Whether affixing pseudonyms or “true” names to their faces, turn-of-the-century subscribers represented the interests of diverse audience groups who derived political agency from virtual assembly rather than simply the literal congregating to which audience power usually gets ascribed. Although subscribers continued to be vulnerable to their social, economic, and geographical realities, subscription enabled audiences to use these circumstances to set the priorities for modern theater. To fully account for such agency, this study performs close readings of print materials that have often been dismissed for storing rather than generating meaning, paying attention to how lists of plays and playgoers determined metaphors for theatrical collectivities—whether by transforming audiences from schoolchildren into shareholders, or repertoires from laboratories into libraries—and arguing, as Neil Postman once did, that the material form of information shapes our metaphorical perception of it.26 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. Lists are the latest frontier in new-media-prompted reassessments of old-media genres.27

25 See Monica Brito Vieira and David Runciman, Representation (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2008), 7–9, 25, 32–33.

26 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin Books, 1985).

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 Doležalová, 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

Recognizing how lists create meaning up close doesn’t mean ignoring what they tell us at a distance. Many of this study’s arguments have been inspired by digital or quantitative methods, drawing especially on a database of 23,000 productions made from

J. P. Wearing’s reference series, The London Stage 1890–1959.28 Every dataset has limitations that mirror its strengths, and a focus on the metropolitan stage inevitably means that the activities of provincial and overseas playgoers get short shrift—a problem of which turn-of-the-century audiences were well aware, as chapters 2 and 4 demonstrate.

At their most useful, quantitative methods help us break down disciplinary barriers that frequently appear in studies of modern theater. While literary drama scholars tend to celebrate the emergence of canonical playwrights like Shaw and Synge, who, as the story goes, saved the stage after a century of decline, democratic theater historians urge us to remember that theater was the most popular form of entertainment during the same century. That so many of the dataset’s most-performed plays were infrequently revived suggests tradeoffs inherent to competing kinds of ephemerality determined by audience: long runs over a relatively short period of time, or short runs over a relatively long period of time. Although this study focuses on an activity designed to transcend the limitations of the commercial theater, chapter 1 reveals that many subscription plays in fact went on to become commercial successes.

Defined through and against the commercial theater, the subscription theater might seem like a proxy for modernism more generally. Most relevant to the arguments

(Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010); Shaun Usher, Lists of Note: An Eclectic Collection Deserving of a Wider Audience (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2015).

28 Using Python and MySQL, Michael Fountaine and I converted J. P. Wearing’s multi-volume 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, 7 vols. (Lanham, M.D.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013–14).

developed here, modernist scholars have provided some of the most fruitful analysis of the relationship between print and theater, drawing attention to the importance of the published play, the closet drama, and the avant-garde performance text.29 By reading subscription ephemera such as programs, tickets, props, and periodicals, this study offers a fresh vantage on the tension between page and stage, which has traditionally been debated in terms of published drama.30 Conversely, while modernist studies has long acknowledged that publics and counter-publics can be virtualized in print, theater scholars could think more along these lines.31 Yet if print’s role in conditioning audiences has been overlooked, perhaps this is only because theater audiences have been overlooked more broadly. Though theater scholars frequently announce the importance of audience, relatively few studies address audiences in any serious way. Those that do tend to focus on the opinions of professional artists and critics, rather than on what audiences themselves have to say about performance.32 This study attempts to rectify a disciplinary

29 See W. 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, “The Bühnenkunstwerk and the Book: Lothar Schreyer’s Theater Notation,” Modernism/modernity 21, no. 2 (2014): 407–28.

30 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.

31 In an extended footnote, Mark Morrisson ethnographically evaluates The Egoist’s “solidly middle class” subscription lists. Mark Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 236–37. Jacky Bratton has called playbills “a very unimaginatively used resource.” Jacky Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 39. See also Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001).

32 Helen Freshwater asks: “why, when there is so much to suggest that the responses of theatre audiences are rarely unified or stable, do theatre scholars seem to be more comfortable making strong assertions about theatre’s unique influence and impact upon audiences than gathering and assessing the evidence which might support these claims? Why do they appear to prefer discussing their 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?” Helen Freshwater, Theatre and Audience (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 3–4.

shortcoming by illuminating the representations—including especially the self- representations—of representative audiences. Using these audiences as a jumping off point, it argues for subscription as a novel form of materialized consent that cuts across art, politics, industry, and philanthropy by combining the representational power of the few with the democratic legitimacy of the many.

Chapter 1

Play-producing societies and ephemeral repertoire

In November 1901, the Stage Society sent circulars to its 523 members announcing one Sunday evening and one Monday matinée 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 longstanding 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 12 theatres, two music halls, three hotels, and two galleries. The society also had postponed the production once due to an actress’ 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. In 1891, J. T. Grein founded the first such group in Britain, the Independent Theatre Society, 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 case of Mrs. Warren’s

1 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, M.D.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 1063–64.

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.

How did these avant-garde societies shape the performance repertoire? This chapter begins by quantitatively analyzing a database of over 23,000 London productions from 1890 to 1959 in order to determine the extent to which subscription societies

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.

introduced a modern dramatic repertoire to the public stage, otherwise known as the commercial theater. Then, it argues that subscription societies virtually assembled the very idea of a modern dramatic repertoire using ephemera such as prospectuses, programs, annual reports, and tickets. The methodological aims with respect to the study of repertoire are two-fold: to demonstrate the potentials and limitations of digital databases, and to make a case for integrating them with book history. As Debra Caplan has observed, databases “tackle a recurring and significant challenge in [theater and performance studies]—the ephemerality of our medium and the dispersal of theatrical ephemera that may shed light on a performance event.”4 This chapter follows through on her pun by tracking the relationship between theatrical ephemera and performance databases in the era of modernity, when Britain’s professional not-for-profit theater sector first emerged, and with it, a quantifiable avant-garde.5

More expansively, this chapter’s combination of book-historical and digital- quantitative methods offers a new approach for integrating modernist studies with theater and performance research. While artist-centered analyses by Lawrence Switzky and Toril

Moi have designated Shaw and Ibsen as (or among) the capital-M Modernists, theater- historical accounts by Tracy Davis and Claire Cochrane have readily, even casually, used the adjectives “modernist” and “avant-garde” to describe the societies that premiered

4 Debra Caplan, “Notes from the Frontier: Digital Scholarship and the Future of Theatre Studies,” Theatre Journal 67, no. 2 (2015): 357.

5 Tracy Davis considers societies to be “not-for-profit schemes”; not-for-profit schemes “are with one exception [a subscription theater from 1811] limited to the latter part of the Victorian period and the Edwardian era.” Tracy Davis, The Economics of the British Stage, 1800–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 231.

these dramatists’ plays.6 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 André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre, the Parisian subscription society that inspired Grein’s Independent Theatre; in their own heyday, British subscription societies were considered “advanced.”7 Nevertheless, modernism’s contentious relationship with the stage exceeds historical definitions. 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”—a bifurcation that further maps onto Anglophone literary modernism and Continental theatrical avant-gardism.8 The tension between textual page and material stage has been especially generative for

William Worthen, Martin Puchner, and Jennifer Buckley, who have argued for the importance of the published play, the closet drama, and the performance text to the formation of modern drama, modernism, and the avant-garde, respectively.9 This chapter is less concerned with parsing those categories in terms of individual artists’ aesthetics, since subscription societies mounted naturalist, symbolist, and expressionist plays alike, and playgoers saw each style as new and experimental; rather, it seeks a new perspective by pivoting away from the textual page and toward material ephemera—an under-

6 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; Claire Cochrane, Twentieth-Century British Theatre: Industry, Art and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 6–7, 67, 114.

7 Jean Chothia, André Antoine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), xv.

8 Olga Taxidou, Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 3.

9 W. 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, “The Bühnenkunstwerk and the Book: Lothar Schreyer’s Theater Notation,” Modernism/modernity 21, no. 2 (2014): 407–28.

theorized print genre, but one essential to structuring collectivity for any institution, particularly theater.10

That print, if not strictly ephemera, conditions collectivity comes as no surprise to scholars of modernist little magazines and private presses. In addition to convening coteries, subscription societies were similar to subscription publishers in that both assembled stables of writers like fantasy baseball teams of all-stars and pinch hitters.

Often, overlapping teams: one of the Stage Society’s less-remembered plays was a one- act called One Day More (1905) by Joseph Conrad, adapted from his short story “To- morrow”; 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). In 1914, art critic Huntly Carter observed that subscription societies “strongly resembled the new so- called advanced journals which are springing up to-day, and which serve as a dust-hole for literary and moral outpouring.” More recently, Elizabeth Miller has compared 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.11 Thus, while modernist studies has long acknowledged that alternative publics can be virtualized in print, theater and performance scholars could think more along these lines. Conversely, although Tiffany Stern has argued for the importance of ephemeral performance documents within an early modern context, little

10 See Lawrence S. Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

11 Huntly Carter, The Theatre of Max Reinhardt (London: Palmer, 1914), 307; Elizabeth Miller, Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 130.

comparable work has been done for modern theater.12 Yet ephemera are precisely the materials that can help us understand theatrical collectivity, especially a modernist theatrical collectivity that pursued coterie audiences and literary repertoires. Firing off a disciplinary signal flare, Christopher Balme has called for critics to “recognize that theatre is dependent on forms of communication beyond the exchange of libidinal energies between performers and spectators,” while Jacky Bratton has remarked that theatrical ephemera such as playbills are “a very unimaginatively used resource.”13 This chapter attempts to answer their call to arms, but with a twist, contending that the rise of digital databases further invites us to think about how theatrical collectivity is conditioned by media both new and old.

If the little magazine, the literary archive, the museum, the art collection, and even the encyclopedia have been characterized as institutions of modernist collectivity, the theater archive has more often been juxtaposed to a theatrical collectivity predicated on liveness.14 Performance studies has habituated us to recognizing theatrical ephemera like playbills, posters, press clippings, and picture postcards as mere traces of irreproducible happenings, like breadcrumbs leading to people and places we’ll never reach. When such documents contradict each other, upending W. B. Yeats’ account of the riotous Ubu Roi premiere (to choose a performance event that has become crucial to the story we tell about modernism), the archive only further “performs the institution of

12 Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

13 Christopher B. Balme, The Theatrical Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 48; Jacky Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 39.

14 See Ruth Hoberman, Museum Trouble: Edwardian Fiction and the Emergence of Modernism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011); Jeremy Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); Paul K. Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

disappearance,” to borrow Rebecca Schneider’s haunting formulation.15 By contrast,

Sarah Bay-Cheng recently has proposed situating theater and performance history within a new and old media ecology, thereby transforming personal and institutional archives alike into “networks” in which “performance does not disappear.”16 This chapter acknowledges the validity of both perspectives: our encounters with media, whether in theaters or rare books libraries, are as embodied as any performance; ephemera can be discarded (or deleted) as well as saved.17 What remains, so to speak, is to imagine ephemera in the hands of playgoers before, during, and after the performance event.

Ephemera’s affordances were clear to turn-of-the-century theater reformers. In

1904, one theater manager observed that a subsidized play-going public existed, “but it wants organising and circularising, and that is the work for [subscription] societies to take in hand.”18 He meant this literally: with ephemera such as circulars and annual reports, subscribers would hold much more than their applause. Others 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, 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

15 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London: Routledge, 2011), 104. For a case study of Ubu, see Thomas Postlewait, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 60–86.

16 Sarah Bay-Cheng, “Theater Is Media: Some Principles for a Digital Historiography of Performance,” Theater 42, no. 2 (January 1, 2012): 35.

17 See, for example, Sharon Marcus, “The Theatrical Scrapbook,” Theatre Survey 54, no. 02 (May 2013): 283–307.

18 C. G. Compton, “A Subsidised Theatre,” This Week’s Survey, Apr. 16, 1904.

supply which ought to meet the new theatrical demand, but, somehow, never does.19

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—and, over a longer period, the less-successful bids of Conrad, Lawrence, and Joyce. The Stage Society continued the work of earlier societies by further popularizing Ibsen, as well as introducing Maeterlinck, Chekhov, Strindberg, Pirandello, and Cocteau to the English stage. In other words, the society’s playlists knitted together modern dramatists, literary modernists, and theatrical avant-gardists.

And, perhaps more surprisingly, box-office successes: new media analysis reveals that after passing the subscription test, many of these playwrights successfully crossed over into the retrospectively-constructed commercial repertoire, subtending the gap that

Penny Farfan has identified between “hegemonic modernism and mainstream theatrical practice.”20 Rather than evaluate subscription plays in a vacuum, this approach takes stock of the entire professional London stage, placing Man and Superman and Hedda

Gabbler alongside Peter Pan and Charley’s Aunt. What’s more, old media analysis

19 “Cocqcigrues” are mythical French monsters; the expression “The Coming of the Cocqcigrues” is akin to “When pigs fly.” Arthur Bingham Walkley, “New Theatrical Demands,” Times Literary Supplement, Jan. 17, 1902.

20 Penny Farfan, Women, Modernism, and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4.

suggests that theatrical ephemera like prospectuses, pamphlets, and subscription lists played an important role in self-consciously fashioning 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 individual works, but as parts of a repertoire that could be compiled, catalogued, and chosen from at will. Even as their ephemera communicated practical administrative information, assembling this repertoire was subscription societies’ raison d’être. 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.”21 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 play-going as female and playwriting as male; both were thought to influence the repertoire. Even as print brought subscription societies into existence, 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.

Ephemera virtualized repertoire nearly a century before the advent of digital databases.

Database; repertoire; list—as Kenneth Price asks, “What’s in a name?” Price distinguishes between the technical term “database” and a looser metaphorical

21 L. Haden Guest, “Towards a Dramatic Renascence II,” The New Age 3, no. 13 (July 25, 1908): 256.

collective.22 Though this study uses a modern-day database for quantitative analysis and locates the emergence of the technical term “repertoire” in the nineteenth century, it recognizes that the more telling moments in both time periods emerge from metaphor: when a repertoire is compared to a library or a storehouse, say, or when a database is compared to a cloud or an internment camp (as when Donald Trump recently suggested a database for American Muslims).23 Moreover, it argues, as Neil Postman once did, that the material form of information shapes our metaphorical perception of it.24 Material and metaphor meet in virtuality, which has gained new currency in the digital age. But as

David Saltz reminds us, Artaud claimed the term “virtual reality” for the theater over fifty years before Jaron Lanier did for the computer.25 Taking an even longer view, Sue Ellen-

Case proposes that we conceptualize the literal theater as a space of virtual representation akin to the medieval cathedral, which “purported to provide an architecture of the virtual space of heaven.”26 Yet from the new media end of the timeline, Steve Dixon comes to a seemingly opposite conclusion, identifying “the inherent tensions at play between the live ontology of performance arts and the mediatized, non-live, and simulacral nature of

22 Kenneth M. Price, “Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What’s in a Name?” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3, no. 3 (2009), http://digitalhumanities.org.

23 Maggie Haberman and Richard Pérez-peña, “Donald Trump Sets Off a Furor With Call to Register Muslims in the U.S.,” The New York Times, Nov. 20, 2015; On the materiality of new media, see Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 9–11.

24 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin Books, 1985).

25 David Z. Saltz, “Performing Arts,” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth (Malden, M.A.: Blackwell, 2004), 121.

26 Sue-Ellen Case, Performing Science and the Virtual (New York: Routledge, 2007), 9.

virtual technologies.”27 The difference between these approaches to virtuality inheres in whether we take performance as our subject or our object: does performance imagine something else, as in the former; or are we asked to imagine performance itself, as in the latter? Or are we asked to imagine a performance repertoire, like the lists of plays we see embedded in subscription ephemera? Whether celestial, cybernetic, or canonical, each approach accesses virtuality from the point of a representational platform, be it stage, screen, or page. All, in the words of N. Katherine Hayles, “[play] off the duality at the heart of the condition of virtuality—materiality on the one hand, information on the other.”28 Throughout this study, the concept of the “virtual” serves as a bridge between media that are still too frequently considered in binary terms: live/non-live, unmediated/mediated, ephemeral/permanent.

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

27 Steve Dixon, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015), 23.

28 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 14.

in dramatic publishing, which helped to literalize the metaphor.29 Ephemera’s institutional associations further inspired such comparisons. This section weighs the various trade offs of such collectivities as it performs 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” which would operate as a “safety-valve” for plays that might upset the censor.30 In 1886, the Shelley Society (generally not considered a play-producing society) staged a subscription performance of Shelley’s unlicensed play The Cenci

(1819). This established a precedent for future play-producing societies as far as censorship was concerned. Theater historians have long observed that dramatic publishing returned to being integral to a play’s literary value at the end of the nineteenth century. As Henry Arthur Jones proclaimed after the passage of the 1891 American

Atlantic 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.”31 Apparently, play-going was for

29 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, 2006), 116–17.

30 William Archer, “About the Theatre. The Censorship: Rejected Remedies,” Tribune, Nov. 16, 1907.

31 Henry Arthur Jones, “Preface to Saints and Sinners,” in The Renascence of the English Drama (London: Macmillan, 1895), 310.

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.32 (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.”33 With less ambivalence, the

Stage Society’s secretary Allan Wade recalled that Richards’ Shaw volumes “were very amusing… to read. The thought that they might be acted did not seem to occur to anybody.”34 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 &

32 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, “Performative Performances: A History and Theory of the ‘Copyright Performance,’” Theatre Journal 64, no. 2 (2012): 161–77.

33 “The Stage Society,” Court Circular, Oct. 18, 1902.

34 Wade, Memories of London Theatre, 3.

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.35

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.36 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.”37 This 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

35 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.

36 The primary exception was Grundy’s A Pair of Spectacles (1889), adapted from the 1862 French comedy by Eugène 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 (October 1, 1977): 327–29.

37 Wade, Memories of London Theatre, 2.

Man—and, for aught we know, his exterior also—is liable… The Stage Society performs somewhat the same salutary and scientific function.38

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.)

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 and W. L.

Courtney’s On the Side of the Angels), but also from arrangement and exhibition.39

As time went on, arrangement and exhibition came to include the dramatic experiments of Anglophone literary modernists like Conrad, Lawrence, and Joyce. David

Kurnick has described theatrical failure as a driving engine behind the modernist novel; that Conrad and Lawrence both adapted their short stories into plays suggests further cross-genre exchanges.40 By extension, reviews of these 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.”41 The Stage Society mounted literary modernists rather like hunting trophies: Lawrence’s and Joyce’s plays were accepted only after their authors had secured high-modernist credentials with Women in Love and Ulysses, each play having

38 “The Stage Society,” Era, Sept. 16, 1905.

39 The Independent Theatre Society produced Ghosts in 1891; the Pioneers produced On the Side of Angels in 1906.

40 David Kurnick, Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

41 Observer, Feb. 21, 1926.

been rejected approximately a decade before.42 Still, grotesque metaphors were not quite the kind society organizers had hoped to inspire. 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 as a splendid auxiliary channel to increase the répertoire of the Commercial Theatre.43

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. 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 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%) of the corpus.

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

42 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.

43 J. T. Grein, The World of the Theatre: Impressions and Memoirs, March 1920–1921. (London: Heinemann, 1921), 53.

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. Sherrif’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.”44 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.45 Shaw’s crossover appeal also stabilized the famous Vedrenne-

Barker Court Theatre seasons (1904–1907), which sought commercially viable ways to stage plays on the repertory, or short run, model.46 The Stage Society premiered first plays by Granville-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%) 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

44 J. T. Grein, The World of the Theatre, 52.

45 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.

46 The famous Barker-Vedrenne 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,” The New Age 6, no. 22 (March 31, 1910): 524. For more, see Desmond MacCarthy, The Court Theatre, 1904–1907 (London: A.H. Bullen, 1907).

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 Gabber 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 nine 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 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.47 But although censorship electrified the society movement, of the 1,652 subscription productions to be staged in theaters, only

24 (less than 2%) 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.48

47 Plays like Six Characters in Search of an Author and The Infernal Machine were subsequently revived in private theatre clubs. Like play-producing societies, private theatre clubs were not subject to pre- performance censorship; unlike subscription societies, private theatre clubs had permanent venues. Private theatre 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.

48 James Woodfield, English Theatre in Transition, 1881–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 101.

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 (1902–1912) 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 with Leopold Lewis’ sensational The Bells as the fifteenth most-produced play in the corpus. An outgrowth of the Stage Society, the aptly-named Phoenix Society (1919–1935) 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).49 The most important discovery was Euripides’ Hippolytus, which the

New Century Theatre (1897–1899) 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 doesn’t sound like a large number of revivals, it’s still among the top 2%.) A handful of societies specialized in the performance of Shakespeare, including the Elizabethan Stage Society, the British Empire Shakespeare Society (1906–

1930), and the Fellowship of Players (1923–1927), 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 plays subsequently re-entered the commercial repertoire. The influence of societies on Shakespeare staging was significant, particularly Poel’s vigorous attempts to recreate the boards of Elizabethan England.

49 For more, see Amanda Wrigley, Performing Greek Drama in Oxford and on Tour With the Balliol Players (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2011).

Granville-Barker, who began directing with the Stage Society, went on to direct a handful of symbolist Shakespeare productions in the years before the war.50

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. (For more, see chapter 2.) The data further exclude the activities of amateur groups, which were important for spreading the new theatrical movement beyond the metropolis.51 Another limit is periodization:

1890–1959 covers a little more than Shaw’s lifetime of theatergoing, and we do not have data for how plays by him, Ibsen, and Chekhov fared once Brecht, Beckett, and 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 becomes necessary to define what this chapter has 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

50 See Joe Falocco, Reimagining Shakespeare’s Playhouse: Early Modern Staging Conventions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010).

51 Allardyce Nicoll, English Drama, 1900–1930: The Beginnings of the Modern Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 80.

societies, and the abolishment of theatrical censorship in 1968 further diminished the need for subscription performances.

It’s 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 813 performances, Man and Superman would come closest as the forty-fifth most-performed play in the corpus. What’s 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 twenty, 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 number of total performances often indicates that a play was revived infrequently if at all.52 While we would not want to glorify a half- century’s breadth of taste because it included 221 performances of Everyman when in fact people flocked to see 1,178 performances of Edward Sheldon’s opera-prima-donna play Romance (1915), it matters that Everyman was revived 15 times after its 1902 subscription performance, and Romance only once, in 1926.53 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.

52 Some of this is attributable to a postwar lengthening of successful runs for new plays.

53 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.

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 Granville-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.”54 The government-subsidized Royal National Theatre that

Granville-Barker envisioned ultimately found its feet in 1963, and it has since revived a great many subscription plays. 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% chance of being revived; plays produced only in the commercial theater had a 15% 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% of the actors who performed in societies never performed on the public stage and might be called “amateurs,” actors who performed in societies averaged 12 productions on the public stage from 1890 to 1959; actors who never performed in societies averaged three.55 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-

54 Quoted in George Rowell and Tony Jackson, The Repertory Movement: A History of Regional Theatre in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 31.

55 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.

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 répertoire and studied up all the parts I knew I should have to play.”56 Jerome pinned his understanding of repertoire to a collection of incomplete sides. This section argues that societies constructed the idea of a modern dramatic repertoire through subscription ephemera: prospectuses, programs, annual reports, and tickets.

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 the First World

War, and it was not until the 1930s when Marie Rambert formed the Ballet Club (later

56 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.

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 other stage genres.57 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.58 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. Mid-century copyright laws encouraged managers to stage older operas, as well as to perform the same few works by a particular composer.59 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.”60 Grein believed he

57 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 André Messager and choreography by F. Ambrosiny.

58 Though there was an eighteenth-century opera canon in England due to the importation of Italian opera, according to Emanuele Senici “[w]hereas 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 Jennifer Hall-Witt, Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780–1880 (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2007), 51–52.

59 Hall-Witt, Fashionable Acts, 249–50.

60 Grein modeled his repertoire on André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre (1887–1896) and Otto Brahm’s Freie Bühne (1889–1901); essentially, he sought to introduce new English plays into the Continental repertoire.

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.”61 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.”62 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. The society also settled on Sunday evening performances, which had not taken place since Charles I.63 Sunday performances were both practical, since this was the day theatre managers could afford to let their theaters, and “just a little naughty,” in the words of the playwright Herbert Swears

Grein even included “(Théâtre Libre)” in small type beneath the prospectus title. Prospectus reproduced in Alice Grein [Michael Orme, pseud.], J. T. Grein: The Story of a Pioneer, 1862–1935 (London: J. Murray, 1936), 76.

61 Alice Grein, J. T. Grein, 148, 90.

62 Stage Society Invitational Circular, July 8, 1899, Incorporated Stage Society Archive, GB 71 THM/136/5, V&A Department of Theatre and Performance, London.

63 Alice Grein, J. T. Grein, 180. Early productions were carried out without costumes or scenery.

(though a Sunday matinée would have been naughtier still).64 After the first season, the society also offered Monday matinée performances to which the press now was expressly invited.

The Stage Society initiated the self-conscious construction of a modern dramatic repertoire through prospectuses and programs.65 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 forward-and-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.

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

64 Quoted in Katharine Cockin, Women and Theatre in the Age of Suffrage: The Pioneer Players 1911– 1925 (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 39.

65 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 Lingua (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).

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, as with the one acts by Maeterlinck and “Fiona Macleod”

[the penname of William Sharp]) 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.66

The society cemented the idea of a modern dramatic repertoire through their annual reports.67 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.68 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, 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

Granville-Barker’s season at the St. James), later publishing a complete list—or

66 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.

67 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 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” (New York: Routledge, 2000).

68 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.

database—of “Plays for Repertory Theatres.”69 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.”70 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 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.71 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 the series stopped where it began.72 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

69 For more on the Pioneer Players, see Cockin, Suffrage, 13.

70 “Theatrical Notes,” Pall Mall Gazette, Sept. 11, 1905.

71 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’ A Visit, and Michael Field’s A Question of Memory.

72 Stage Society Third Annual Report.

public,” “continental authors of distinction,” and “plays for which the Censor has refused a licence.”73 The Stage Society took responsibility for the repertoires of other subscription societies, as well as provincial repertory theaters, London repertory seasons, and a projected national theater. Granville-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 by taking subscribers for his weekly Repertory Cards to convey the program at the Duke of York’s Theatre.74 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 Edward Gordon Craig’s The Mask) dealing with both contemporary theater and theater history. This interest in theater history suggested the modernist belief that the theater of the future would be discovered through the study of past theatrical traditions.

The library also meant that members had access to a permanent library but not a theater.

73 Incorporated Stage Society, Ten Years: 1899 to 1909 (London: Chiswick Press, 1909), 9.

74 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.

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, or more than, 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.75

This assessment suggested that by 1914, the Stage Society had helped to change playgoers’ perception from Jerome’s handful of plays to a modern dramatic repertoire from which a hodge-podge selection would be inadequate.

The coterie sensation

Duke’s assessment was also sexist: the Stage Society’s membership had an increasingly female majority. Subscription lists and reports of the Stage Society’s membership in the public press diagramed 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

75 Ashley Dukes, “The Repertory Theatres,” Poetry and Drama 2 (1914): 420.

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 not 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.76

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. Archer’s use of the word “mirror” imputed to the Stage Society’s subscribers a considerable amount of control over the works that appeared on stage. 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 conditioned by print.77 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

76 William Archer, “Study and Stage,” Morning Leader, Jan. 28, 1905.

77 “The Ballot For Seats,” The Stage Society News 24 (November 1906): 95.

outnumbered those without. These lists were alphabetized by last name, and included the year that members had been elected, and (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 or shopkeeper’s weekly income.)78 The fee also echoed that at

Mudie’s Circulating Library; like most readers of fiction, most subscription theatergoers were middle-class women, many of them unmarried—ironically, this was the demographic the Lord Chamberlain most sought to protect.79 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

78 Helen C. Long, The Edwardian House: The Middle-Class Home in Britain, 1880–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 9.

79 For example, during the 1909 Joint Select Committee hearings on theater censorship, the Liberal MP Lord Ribbesdale 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.

provisional (and, given the precedent, extremely optimistic); the legal articles of association declared the number of members to be unlimited.80

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.”81 This special stress was relaxed in the second season, when Monday matinée 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, which to this day requires a letter of reference for entry. 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

80 Incorporated Stage Society Articles of Association, July 1904, Board of Trade: Companies Registration Office: Files of Dissolved Companies, BT 31/34768/81604, The National Archives, Kew.

81 Stage Society Third Annual Report.

propose me for membership.”82 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.”83 This critic recognized the power subscribers wielded over the society’s artistic product: the repertoire.

Critics saw repertoire and fashion as two sides of the same mirror. They 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.84 Other columnists remarked on an overabundance of green, apparently due to the natural vegetable dyes favored by socialist dress reformers.85 (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% of members were registered

Fabians.)86 In 1902, the society created a minor fashion scandal by instituting a policy

82 Wade, Memories of London Theatre, 5.

83 H. Hamilton Fyfe, “The Stage Society’s Decline—‘Hannele’ by the play actors,” The World, Apr. 15, 1908.

84 “Great Friends,” Lady, Feb. 9, 1905.

85 Cockin, Suffrage, 39.

86 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.

that asked ladies to remove their matinée hats because they disrupted audience sightlines.

In addition to obstructing the stage, fashion was seen both to 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 be wearing spectacles.87

Women playgoers 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’ 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. 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.

87 “The Stage Society: An Impression,” Scots Pictorial, Mar. 14, 1908.

Quantifying the audience

The two approaches to repertoire spotlighted in this chapter—what literally 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 “post-archival” 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.88 Today, databases sometimes promote an anti-materialist 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 letter, as Lev Manovich has pointed out—for millennia; like calculators, the digital kinds enable us to count much more quickly.89 Just as a reference book is not yet a rigorous argument, neither is a database; both are starting points for posing provocative questions whose answers require the old school connecting of dots. Like fashion magazines, databases announce trends easily but have trouble explaining them. Why, for example, does the one-act replace the three-act as the dominant play structure just before the First World War? 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” explodes? 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?

88 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: MIT Press, 2015), 483–502.

89 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 233.

In short, tracing the influence of subscription societies through the database is merely one of many lines of inquiry, all of which would 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—this chapter dramatizes 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%) were never revived; of those, around 2,600 (or 25%) were performed just one time. In this way,

Franco Moretti’s “slaughterhouse” of eighteenth and nineteenth-century novels equally applies to the modern theater.90 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.91 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

90 Franco Moretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2000): 207–27.

91 To describe two participant-generated queries when I demoed the database at the 2015 Modernist Studies Association Conference.

discussion of audience, whose names might not figure in a London stage database, but whose imprint can’t help getting counted. For modernist studies more generally, quantitative methods could help to further expand the relatively small canon of artists who have traditionally anchored the field by shifting from discourses of autonomous production to those of collective reception. 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. Could the same be said of audiences for poem and novel print runs, painting and sculpture exhibitions, or orchestrations performed for live concerts and radio broadcasts?

This approach to repertoire, focalized through plays that were introduced by a self-consciously literary avant-garde and that also are most likely to show up in twenty- first-century drama anthologies, might seem antithetical to the canonical definition offered by Diana Taylor. She distinguishes “between the archive of supposedly enduring materials (ie., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice/knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual).”92 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 performatively assembled by literal ephemera. Though theater

92 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 19.

researchers have long mined archives for textual nuggets—the proper nouns of the event; the pearled strings of a future digital database—we have thought much less about how theatergoers interacted with such fugitive print matter. This approach would mean dusting off ephemera in order to process what book historians call bibliographic and what we 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 virtually store that event in our mental 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; fortunately for scholars, uploading is only the beginning of analyzing. 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?93

Our impulse to quantify and qualify contemporary theater audiences existed for the Stage Society, too. Privately-circulated but publicly-evaluated lists reflected the society’s minority patronage system, which figured an exclusive group of experimenting subscribers generating the modern dramatic library for a proposed national theater. While exclusivity was to some extent the price paid for circumventing the Lord Chamberlain, the shift from a professional-managerial to a subscriber-driven theater nevertheless began to take hold across Britain and Ireland. Subscribers’ identities came under close scrutiny,

93 Sarah Bay-Cheng, “Pixelated Memories: Theatre History and Digital Historiography,” accessed November 15, 2015, https://www.academia.edu/2131876/Pixelated_Memories_Theatre_History_and_Digital_Historiography.

and gender wasn’t the only issue attracting attention. As the Stage Society and the national press imperialistically charted the repertory movement’s playlists throughout the provinces, playgoers in Dublin, Glasgow, Manchester, and Liverpool engaged in their own mediated resistance to the dominance of the London stage, paving the way for a more representative subscription audience, not just in terms of location, but especially in terms of class. The next chapter raises the curtain on these provincial playgoers.

Chapter 2:

Provincial repertory theaters and audience impressions

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 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

1 “Vox Populi,” letter to the editor, Dublin Evening Telegraph, Feb. 3, 1907.

2 “Oryza,” letter to the editor, Dublin Evening Telegraph, Feb. 4, 1907.

3 D. J. O’Donoghue, letter to the editor, Dublin Evening Telegraph, Feb. 4, 1907; Michael O’Dempsey, letter to the editor, Irish Times, Feb. 11, 1907.

letter to the Freeman’s Journal, he argued that protesters had not reacted “by staying away,” as some supporters had suggested, “because the ‘Abbey’ is a subsidised theatre, independent of the money taken at the door. Therefore… the public had no remedy, 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 not-for-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 crowd-funded 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 advertised in the public press and appealed to public interests—more like a widow’s mite than a gentleman’s club.

Eighteenth and nineteenth-century reformers had financed libraries, schools, hospitals,

4 William Boyle, letter to the editor, Freeman’s Journal, Feb. 4, 1907.

and museums by public subscription before these institutions began receiving municipal subsidy, and turn-of-the-century repertorists saw public subscription as an intermediary step toward this goal. 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 private. This chapter charts the ways in which public subscription affected representations of Anglo-Irish repertory theater audiences in the years before the

First World War, and focuses on letters from playgoers published in the provincial press.

As Arthur Bingham Walkley declared in 1905: “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…”5 Unlike most subscription services today from magazines to Netflix, public subscription payments 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. (£1 was approximately a quarter of a lower clerk or shopkeeper’s weekly income.)6 In exchange, shareholders received potential dividends in the company, while benefactors saw their names in the local newspaper, as did other readers. Unlike the private subscription play-producing societies from the last chapter, public subscription theaters were open to any member of the public who could pay, no referral necessary. And unlike the seasonal abonnement schemes popular with play and operagoers today, public subscription did not confer the right to attend the

5 Arthur Bingham Walkley, “The Drama,” Times Literary Supplement, Mar. 24, 1905.

6 Helen C. Long, The Edwardian House: The Middle-Class Home in Britain, 1880–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 9.

theater, which was accessible to anyone who could afford to purchase tickets and therefore still subject to the Lord Chamberlain’s licensing; however, subscribers sometimes received discount coupons or first dibs on prime seats.7 “[B]road-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.8 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, museums, and libraries, supplying a perceived public need, and open—even belonging—to any playgoer, subscriber or not.

Though Anglo-Irish repertory theaters are exclusive to the twentieth 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 generated a wave 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 fixed company of local actors who rejected the star-actor system in favor of

7 Ireland was not subject to the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship.

8 S. R. Littlewood, “Citizens’ Theatres,” Daily Chronicle, Dec. 13, 1911.

collaborative, versatile ensembles.9 “Short run” usually meant a week or two, in contrast to the hundreds of performances racked up by London’s long-running productions and carbon-copy provincial tours; rarely did repertory theaters adhere to the Continental model of “true repertory” in which plays alternated nightly.10 In general, the movement pursued a repertoire or library 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 coincidentally 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, civilised, public, ratepayers’, citizens’, people’s, local, municipal, state, national, endowed, artistic, exemplary, organised, and subsidised. No matter these names, the movement’s central question asked whether audiences could be trusted to determine how their theaters would operate.

This chapter follows the fault line of public subscription as it coursed through the provincial press at the height of the repertory earthquake. The number of British and Irish newspapers reached historic proportions before the First World War; for provincial centers like Dublin, Manchester, Glasgow, and Liverpool, the press transformed columns of newsprint into virtual extensions of repertory theater buildings. In order to analyze the representation of repertory audiences, this chapter contrasts horizontal collectivism

9 The only not-for-profit scheme to preexist the repertory movement was an 1811 plan for a subscription theater in Marylebone. Tracy C. Davis, The Economics of the British Stage, 1800–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 231, 171, 10, 173, 231, 238–40.

10 For more on true repertory and the origins of the movement, see George Rowell and Tony Jackson, The Repertory Movement: A History of Regional Theatre in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 18, 28–31, 42.

(based on equality, such as between citizens) with vertical collectivism (based on inequality, such as between teacher and student). Leading articles in provincial newspapers quoted metropolitan repertorists who 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, representing playgoers in horizontal collectives as shareholders, patrons, and citizens.

Writing letters to newspaper editors, playgoers took up pseudonyms representing their class, gender, and age, staking claim to the day-to-day running of the theater, and setting themselves apart from the professional critics whose interests differed from their own.

Since correspondents from the pit and gallery were accorded the same typographical treatment as those from the stalls and dress circles, their letters further challenged the class hierarchy of the physical theater; however, because correspondence columns more often were filled by lower-middle-class patrons, these playgoers were perceived to be more influential in the provinces, while the reverse was true in London. It turned out that repertorists were being literal when they claimed that the future of the movement was “in the hands” of the public: provincial theatergoers held more than their applause.

By spotlighting the leading articles, public appeals, and playgoer letters printed in the local presses of Dublin, Manchester, Glasgow, and Liverpool, this chapter offers a representative sense of who constituted the repertory audience, extending Jim Davis and

Victor Emeljanow’s research chronologically to the First World War and geographically to beyond the metropolis.11 In methodological terms, it draws on provincial newspapers in order to engage with theories of spectatorship. Though Benedict Anderson famously

11 Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001).

imagined a community of citizens united by reading the daily paper, theater scholars may not realize that the provincial press afforded extraordinary potential for what Christopher

Balme calls “reciprocal resonance.”12 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. 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 their families. Their published epistles fill in data missing from accounts written by professional theater artists and critics as well as from playgoer memoirs and scrapbooks, all of which bend toward the metropolis.13 More generally, such letters point to a gap in scholarship about audiences, scant as it is on responses from ordinary theatergoers. Helen Freshwater attributes our disciplinary deficit to suspicion rather than scarcity:

[W]hy, when there is so much to suggest that the responses of theatre audiences are rarely unified or stable, do theatre scholars seem to be more comfortable making strong assertions about theatre’s unique influence and impact upon audiences than gathering and assessing the evidence which might support these claims? Why do they appear to prefer discussing their 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

12 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1983). 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.” Christopher B. Balme, The Theatrical Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 63. Theater researchers draw on playgoers’ letters to the editor from time to time. For an excellent example, 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 See, for example, Henry George Hibbert, A Playgoer’s Memories (London: Grant Richards, 1920); Walter Macqueen-Pope, Carriages at Eleven: The Story of the Edwardian Theatre (London: Hutchinson, 1948). For a discussion of theatrical scrapbooks, see Sharon Marcus, “The Theatrical Scrapbook,” Theatre Survey 54, no. 02 (May 2013): 283–307.

apparent aversion to engaging with audience response be related to deep-seated suspicion of, and frustration with, audiences? And, if so, what are the grounds for this suspicion? Why are audiences apparently not to be trusted?14

As it assesses the responses of ordinary theatergoers, this chapter fudges a bit on their professional stake: the entire point of public subscription was to make theater the public’s business, literally. Public subscription looked backward to a more private model of subscription patronage that had financed Pope’s translations and Mozart’s concertos, and forward to the Internet-wide crowd-funding lately investigated by Alex Dault and others; for what it’s worth, a recent search of “theater” on Kickstarter yields over 10,000 projects.15 But if Freshwater’s critique fundamentally strikes home, then perhaps today’s theater scholars have inherited our mistrust of audiences from last century’s repertorists.

In his famous essay on the “Emancipated Spectator,” Jacques Rancière equalizes the relationship between scholar and spectator, and between schoolmaster and pupil, much as subscribers challenged repertorists’ patronizing collectives in the columns of the local press. Yet playgoer letters question Rancière’s anti-communitarian claim that “[t]he collective power shared by spectators does not stem from the fact that they are members of a collective body.”16 The public subscription phenomenon suggests that his claim applies as well to an audience as to a corporation or a democracy. Though a number of scholars have described theatergoing as a form of citizenship, this chapter locates

14 Helen Freshwater, Theatre and Audience (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 3–4.

15 Pat Rogers, “Pope and His Subscribers,” Publishing History 3 (January 1, 1978): 7–36; Otto Erich Deutsch, “The Subscribers to Mozart’s Private Concerts,” Music & Letters 22, no. 3 (1941): 225–34; Alex Dault, “Crowdfunding Indie Theatre: Understanding the Costs,” Canadian Theatre Review 160, no. 1 (2014): 64–67; 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 (Spring 2014): 33–48.

16 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), 15.

political power in audience demands for representative theater ownership and in managers’ corresponding receptivity.17

Still, as Rancière observes, representative and representational are not synonyms—particularly in the theater, where anyone can pretend to speak for someone else. The repertory playgoers who have received the most scholarly attention, such as the infamous rioters at the Playboy premiere, have been stereotyped by their bold gestures inside the playhouse.18 One sometimes gets the sense that turn-of-the-century playgoers had only two options: to act out loudly and demonstratively, as had been common in the nineteenth century but was increasingly characterized as barbaric; or to sit quietly as polite consumers.19 Yet as “Lover of Liberty” announced in the Freeman’s Journal:

“There is an effort, which anyone might have foreseen, to pretend that the condemnation of this play is only an illustration of the ‘ignorance,’ ‘provincialism,’ and ‘obscurantism’ of the Irish audience. ‘They have been so long intellectually and spiritually enslaved.’

‘These are people who have no books in their houses.’” The same correspondent

17 For more on theatergoing as a form of local citizenship, see David Wiles, Theatre and Citizenship: The History of a Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). For a theory of theater and national, rather than local, citizenship, see Loren Kruger, The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 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 Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception (London: Routledge, 1990). For a psychoanalytic approach to audience, see Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

18 For an account of these rioters, see Neil Martin Blackadder, Performing Opposition: Modern Theater and the Scandalized Audience (Westport, C.T.: Praeger, 2003), 69–108. For a reading of Playboy as Synge’s theory of Irish audience and criticism of the modern press, including some letters to the editor, see Paige Reynolds, Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 38–75.

19 Caroline Heim writes that around 1880, “[a]udiences changed from being loud, extroverted and demonstrative performers to playing the role of audience consumer.” Caroline Heim, Audience as Performer: The Changing Role of Theatre Audiences in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Routledge, 2015), 64.

concluded: “I give you my name, which you can tell anyone who may care to know it; but there are reasons—purely personal—why I do not wish to attach it to this public letter.”20 This chapter demonstrates that the question of whether we trust audiences to run theaters is easily entangled with whether we trust the newspaper letter writer behind the proverbial curtain. Like “Lover of Liberty,” many repertory correspondents sought anonymity. Though their reasons for taking pseudonyms often can only be guessed, from ensuring privacy to misleading deliberately, the overriding consequence was that correspondents seemed to speak on behalf of larger groups: of proud locals (“A Plain

Liverpolitan”; “Lover of Ireland”); of specific sections (“Pittite”; “One of the Gods”); of diverse ages (“An Elderly Playgoer”; “A Gallery Boy”), occupations (“A Docker”;

“Undergraduate”), and reactions (“Interested”; “Non-receptive playgoer”). Some pseudonyms were witty (“An Enemy of the People”); others, literal (“A Shareholder”); but all created the impression of distinct affiliations desiring political representation. By the same token, giving one’s true name could have suggested a degree of misplaced self- importance, and indeed those who gave their names tended to be prominent members of the community. Another option was to use one’s initials, but unlike crafting a pseudonym, this tactic did not extend the implications of the correspondent’s representative point of view.

Pseudonyms provided playgoers with the opportunity to express themselves publicly, even dramatically—and this 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

20 “Lover of Liberty,” letter to the editor, Freeman’s Journal, Feb. 5 1907.

the provinces, where local stock actors had ruled the roost before railways introduced touring companies that crowded out the market with second-rate productions of West End commercial hits in the last half of the nineteenth century.21 Provincial audiences thus felt doubly patronized by metropolitan managers of commercial and repertory 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 both more critically and more personally than they otherwise might have; like actors wearing masks, pseudonyms gave audiences the freedom to perform, sometimes untruthfully. One of Liverpool’s especially irate playgoers, “Disgusted,” anticipated the legendary English correspondent

“Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells,” who tellingly, if apocryphally, cropped up in the 1950s when a local paper’s editor asked his staff to fill empty correspondence columns.22 In other words, correspondents may not have been who they claimed to be. Private records suggest that “A School-boy” who the local press listed as having subscribed six pence to the Abbey Theatre Endowment Fund might really have been a stage trick by an Irish-

Quaker schoolmaster named Arnold Marsh.23 But that theater researchers can never truly know a correspondent’s identity or motives is less important than that newspaper readers could never have known either. Correspondents shaped readers’ impressions of the repertory audience, whether readers visited theaters or not. In this way, public

21 Michael R. Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 16–20.

22 Stephen Hancocks, “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells,” British Dental Journal 211, no. 5 (September 10, 2011): 191.

23 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.

subscription showcases how print not only reflects but also conditions and imagines audience collectivity.

Patronizing the patrons

Even as the public subscription initiatives at Glasgow, Dublin, and Liverpool were underway, 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 flipside of convincing municipalities that theater was a public utility that deserved government funding like a library or a gasworks. The provincial press reverberated with these characterizations as the repertory earthquake 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.”24 The

Yorkshire Telegraph concurred: “All over the country… people are endeavouring to create the ‘Perfect audience.’”25

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 Education Act. Glasgow Rep’s 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

24 G. P. L., “Repertory Theory and Practice,” Glasgow Herald, Jan. 10, 1914.

25 J. F. H., “The Perfect Audience,” Yorkshire Telegraph, May 9, 1912.

people back to the theatre.”26 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.27 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 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.”28 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.”29 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.”30 In

Liverpool, repertory coupon books could be obtained from booksellers and libraries in

26 Quoted in “Theatre of the Future,” Glasgow Herald, Nov. 11, 1911.

27 C. H. Reilly, “Repertory Theatre and its Aims,” Education, Aug. 16, 1912.

28 “Drama,” The New Age 5, no. 27 (October 28, 1909): 480–81.

29 Ashley Dukes, “Drama,” The New Age 7, no. 3 (May 19, 1910): 68.

30 “People’s Playhouses,” Yorkshire Telegraph, Apr. 23, 1912.

addition to the theater box office. The reading class was the demographic repertorists imagined would be most susceptible to the education from which the entire theatergoing public stood to benefit.

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.31

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.”32 When a critic described the white-painted Manchester

Gaiety as “more like a schoolroom than a theatre,” he was referring to atmosphere as much as appearance.33 Repertorists embraced the curricular approach. University professors were prominent proponents 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, 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

31 W. A. Brabner, letter to the editor, Manchester Guardian, July 29, 1907.

32 “The Liverpool Repertory Theatre,” Liverpool Porcupine Supplement (March 21, 1914).

33 James Agate, quoted in Sheila Gooddie, Annie Horniman: A Pioneer in the Theatre (London: Methuen Drama, 1990), 121.

and tram timetables so playgoers could return home.)34 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 christening the Liverpool Rep “a temple for the mind.”35 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 sprit 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.36

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.”37 As was characteristic of such vertical collectives, repertorists imagined the majority of playgoers on the submissive end: lectured at, condescended to.

34 Irish National Theatre Society Programme, Dec. 27, 1904–Jan. 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, Nov. 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.

35 A. G., letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, Dec. 27, 1913. Masefield’s poem was reprinted in A Souvenir of the Twenty-First Birthday, Nov. 11, 1931, Liverpool Repertory Theatre Programmes, 792.1 PLA, Liverpool Central Library Archive.

36 J. G., letter to the editor, Glasgow Herald, April 29, 1909. According to the OED, “playgoer” follows from the earlier “churchgoer.”

37 “The Liverpool Repertory Theatre,” Liverpool Porcupine Supplement (March 21, 1914).

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.”38 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.”39 More stringent repertorists even insisted that provincial playgoers were in need of healthful nourishment. As critic St. John Ervine put it: “Sickly people, because their palate has been ruined by unhealthy food, prefer tinned salmon to fresh salmon because it has a nippier taste.”40 In a curiously mixed metaphor that compared playgoers both to babies and boozers, repertorist 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

38 H. M. W., “Plays And Players,” Pall Mall Gazette, Apr. 14, 1913. For more on the disappearance of the provincial stock company thanks to London touring companies, see Booth, Theatre in Victorian Age, 18– 21.

39 Quoted in “Interview with Mr. Keble Howard,” Croydon Gazette, Feb. 22, 1913.

40 St. John Greer Ervine, The Organised Theatre: A Plea in Civics (London: George Allen, 1924), 53.

tuberculous.”41 In Glasgow, Wareing tried to make this easier to swallow, saying it was

“necessary to gild the pill, if pill there was.”42

Contemplating theater as a nurse or schoolmaster represented the single most dramatic reversal in Anglo-Irish theater history since the collapse of the morality play. In

1909, one Glaswegian could still observe that “[t]o 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.”43 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.”44 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.”45 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

41 Robert Hield, letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, Nov. 25, 1912.

42 Quoted in “Repertory Theatres,” Manchester Guardian, Mar. 18, 1912.

43 Alfred J. Bent, letter to the editor, Glasgow Herald, Apr. 30, 1909.

44 Quoted in “Manchester And The Gaiety Theatre,” Manchester Guardian, Dec. 17, 1913.

45 Quoted in “The Repertory Movement,” Yorkshire Observer, Oct. 4 1912.

home.”46 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.47

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 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, megastar Henry Irving campaigned for the establishment of “rate-aided” (taxpayer- assisted) theaters on the principle that they were public utilities: 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”; he made the case for “adopting the drama formally amongst the agencies of instruction and recreation classed in the sacred category of

46 Quoted in “Municipal Theatres,” Manchester Guardian, Sept. 23, 1907.

47 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. The Royal National Theatre finally found its feet in 1963. “Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre,” Times, Apr. 7, 1910; “Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre,” Times, Dec. 9, 1911. Dublin subscription amount from Receipt Book, 1910–16, Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre, GB 2080 SMNT/8/5, Royal National Theatre Archive, London.

public works.”48 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.”49 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 Edward VII’s death in 1910, repertorists presented theirs as the kind of theater that would best merit municipalization.50

But repertorists’ biggest burden was indifference: 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.”51 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.”52 It’s questionable whether a utilities

48 Quoted in “Mr. Irving On The Drama,” Times, Sept. 27, 1894.

49 “Modern Theatre Design,” The British Architect (February 11, 1898): 91.

50 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 it will be worth paying to see, from the point of view of the public.” Quoted in “Manchester’s New Theatre,” Manchester Courier, Sept. 28, 1907.

51 Quoted in “New Theatres For The Provinces,” Daily Despatch, Mar. 17, 1911.

52 “The Drama as a ‘Public Service,’” Glasgow Herald, Oct. 29, 1910.

comparison would end up benefitting 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 comes from or where the waste goes.53 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 “[t]he State, in partnership with local authorities, educates the people, whether they like it or no.”54

According to repertorist Harley Granville-Barker, theater would only be embraced by the public when it 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.”55 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.”56 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.

53 Quoted in “Repertory at Croydon,” The Era (February 22, 1913).

54 Sir Sidney Lee, Shakespeare and the Modern Stage: With Other Essays (London: Constable, 1906), 133.

55 Quoted in “The Repertory Theatre Movement,” Yorkshire Observer, Oct. 4, 1912.

56 Quoted in “Manchester’s New Theatre,” Manchester Courier, Sept. 28, 1907.

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.”57 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.58

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 would were the theater actually tax-funded and “citizen” or “public” in the modern 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 this in a way anti-city-council theater emerged from what was supposed to be an intermediary step from private enterprise toward municipalization. (Indeed, Glasgow Rep briefly received

57 W. A. Brabner, letter to the editor, Manchester Guardian, July 23, 1907.

58 Constance Ray, “Theatre,” Daily Chronicle, Nov. 4, 1909.

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.”59 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.”60 Both Glasgow and Liverpool referred to their repertories as “Citizens’ Theatres” and this ideal extended to all patrons, whether subscribers or not. In Liverpool, Granville-Barker 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.”61 When Glasgow’s parliamentary elections coincided with a repertory season, 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.”62 Apparently, play-going had turned into poll-going.63

59 “£40,000 For A Theatre,” Liverpool Courier, June 1, 1911.

60 “Liverpool’s Repertory,” Glasgow Times, Sept. 26, 1911.

61 Quoted in “The Repertory Theatre Movement,” Yorkshire Observer, Oct. 4, 1912.

62 “Our Dramatic Candidates,” Glasgow Herald, Jan. 7, 1910.

63 At the time, single women ratepayers could vote in municipal but not national 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 diachronically 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. 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.”64 The

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?”65 Public subscription sought to transform theatergoers from consumers to 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 wasn’t “an attempt on the part of the wealthy and cultured to educate the masses,” rather, the object was “making the theatre depend for its

64 “Glasgow Repertory Theatre,” Times, Oct. 19, 1909; “The Appeal For A Repertory Theatre,” The Observer, Jan. 4, 1914.

65 “Gaiety Theatre,” Manchester Guardian, Oct. 31, 1911.

material, as well as for its spiritual, existence, upon the public for which it exists.”66 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.67

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.68 (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.69 Glasgow Rep warned that it was “not a dividend-hunting company,” and

Liverpool Rep limited dividends to six percent, with “the rest of the profits being allocated to the encouragement of repertory plays.”70 Though a six percent dividend would turn out to be optimistic, one subscriber later noted, perhaps disingenuously: “we

66 “The Repertory Theatre,” Eastern Daily Press, May 2, 1912.

67 “A Citizens’ Theatre,” Glasgow Herald, Nov. 19, 1909.

68 “Prospectus,” Liverpool Courier, May 26, 1911; “Prospectus,” Liverpool Post, May 26, 1911.

69 Oliver Elton, letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, June 6, 1911.

70 “The Repertory Theatre,” Liverpool Post, June 14, 1911.

thought more of assisting a desirable addition to the attractions of the city and have the pleasure of contemplating ‘our theatre.’”71

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. In Liverpool, the directors offered the public £20,000 in shares; by June 1911, over 900 shareholders had subscribed £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 £13,700. The largest shareholder had taken £1,000 in shares, but the majority were businessmen, clerks, tradesmen, workingmen, and young women. One plumber subscribed £100.72 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.”73 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. Established to make Glasgow independent

71 “Onward,” letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, Jan. 14, 1914.

72 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, Jan. 22, 1912.

73 “Liverpool’s Repertory Scheme,” Sunday Chronicle, June 18, 1911; S. R. Littlewood, “Citizens’ Theatres,” Daily Chronicle, Dec. 13, 1911.

of London for its dramatic supplies, it is a citizen’s theatre in the fullest sense of the term.”74 (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.”75 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.”76 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.77 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.

Though the Abbey had been operating for six years before Annie Horniman stopped her subsidy, the democratic spirit behind the public subscription 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

74 Programme, Man and Superman, Sept. 29, 1910, Records of Scottish Repertory Theatre GB 247 STA Fm 11, Special Collections Department, Glasgow University Library.

75 Programme, A Doll’s House, Sept. 16, 1912, Liverpool Repertory Theatre Programmes, 792.1 PLA, Liverpool Central Library Archive.

76 E. F. S., “The New Liverpool Repertory Theatre,” Westminster Gazette, Oct. 28, 1911.

77 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.

Tennant (£350), to “A School-boy” (six pence.)78 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 pride had pushed Horniman out from what by that time was known officially as 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.”79

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.80

78 “Abbey Theatre Endowment Fund: Subscriptions Already Received,” Irish Times, Nov. 7, 1910.

79 “Matters of Moment,” Irish Independent, Oct. 29, 1910.

80 “Repertory,” Liverpool Porcupine, May 18, 1912.

The repertory’s sharpest critics weren’t newspapers, but their readers. Pseudonyms consisted of indefinite articles followed by identitarian markers of class, gender, and age.

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.”81 “A 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.”82 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.”83 After the Liverpool

Courier’s theater critic slated 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.84

As playgoers announced their class, gender, and age in their pseudonyms, they virtually populated the much larger newspaper-reading public’s mental list of spectators.

81 “A Docker,” letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, Feb. 7, 1914.

82 After protests from suffragettes, Sexton vowed to change the villain’s gender for future productions. “A Non-militant suffragist,” letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, Feb. 16, 1914.

83 T. Herbert Kendrick, letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, Dec. 22, 1913.

84 “A Gallery Boy,” letter to the editor, Liverpool Courier, Dec. 30, 1913.

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.”85 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.”86 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.87

“Disgusted” separated a “good half” into a bad half; reciprocal resonance meant that even anti-populist impressions could circulate. A more generous reading might interpret such

85 B. D. M., letter to the editor, Glasgow Herald, June 15, 1912.

86 “Playfellow,” letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, Dec. 17, 1913.

87 “Disgusted,” letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, Sept. 24, 1912.

criticism constructively: in a different column, the Post 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.”88 From proscribing loud guffaws to late entrances, 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.89

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.”90 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…”91 Even though Glasgow was the city most politically similar to Dublin, the

Herald remarked sanguinely: “English dwellers within our gates need anticipate no

88 “Liverpool Playgoers’ Society,” Liverpool Courier, May 10, 1912.

89 C. H. Reilly, “Repertory Theatre and its Aims,” Education, Aug. 16, 1912.

90 “Convinced,” letter to the editor, Glasgow Herald, June 24, 1909.

91 “The Manchester Playgoers’ Theatre,” Manchester Guardian, Oct. 28, 1907.

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.”92 Still, correspondence columns registered hopes for a Glaswegian or Lancastrian Synge; paradoxically, the search for local peculiarity reduced it to a universal label similar 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 Campbell of Kilmohr (1914); the company also synchronized with London to premiere Galsworthy’s Strife (1909), 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.”93 Apart from Dublin’s widely toured

Synge-Yeats-Lady Gregory triple bill, the repertory movement’s greatest original dramatic successes were the Lancashire-school 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

92 “A Citizens’ Theatre,” Glasgow Herald, Feb. 27, 1909.

93 “State Of The Drama,” The Globe, July 29, 1913.

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?”94 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

“[continuing] to reflect and reify currently dominant social hierarchies.”95 The

Edwardians inherited theatergoing types that reflected these stratifications, such as gilded

“Johnny in the stalls,” the man-about-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.96 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 diagrammed 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 literal theaters. Of course, correspondents had to be literate

94 “Playgoer,” letter to the editor, Glasgow Herald, June 24, 1909.

95 Ric Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 64.

96 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, Oct. 28, 1907. For a description of “’Arry and ‘Arriet,” see “Shakespeare Day,” Birmingham Gazette, Apr. 25, 1910.

and approved by the editor, but once admitted all were accorded the same typographic treatment, whereas one early repertory 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.”97 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!”98 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.99

97 “The Repertory and its Patrons,” Liverpool Porcupine, Dec. 9, 1911.

98 I. L. W., letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, Dec. 17, 1913. Another correspondent observed that the family circle was the “gallery rechristened (democratically).” Andreas, letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, Dec. 15, 1913.

99 “Two Pun’ Ten,” letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, Dec. 17, 1913.

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 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 unless they purchased more 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?”100 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.101 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 theatergoer 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

100 “An Elderly Playgoer,” letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, Dec. 20, 1913.

101 T., letter to the editor, Glasgow Herald, Feb. 12, 1912.

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.102

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-payers 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 “[acknowledge] communications from numerous anonymous correspondents who have lately favoured me, some wise helpful criticisms.”103 Liverpool Rep’s chairman remarked that he “had been studying with care and interest the criticism which had been appearing in the correspondence columns,” and agreed with “A Plain Liverpolitan” in particular.104

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.”105 This was the exact opposite of the dynamic in the metropolis, where, as Frank Curzon observed, “we depend chiefly upon our stalls and circles.”106 (For

102 “A Plain Liverpolitan,” letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, Dec. 16, 1913.

103 Alfred Wareing, letter to the editor, Glasgow Herald, Feb. 12, 1912.

104 Quoted in “Repertory Theatre Problem,” Liverpool Post, Dec. 18, 1913.

105 C. H. Reilly, “Repertory Theatre and its Aims,” Education, Aug. 16, 1912.

106 Quoted in “New Theatres For The Provinces,” Daily Despatch, Mar. 17, 1911.

example, one of the relatively few letters sent to the Times about the Shakespeare

Memorial National Theatre was signed “The Woman in the Stalls.”)107 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.”108 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.109

Following on the heels of a sparsely attended season, these suggestions 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 Granville-Barker had strongly promoted. Managers balanced the books using playgoer criticism: on the eve of the war that would shutter Glasgow and

107 “The Woman in the Stalls,” letter to the editor, Times, May 31, 1910.

108 Quoted in “Shakespeare Day,” Birmingham Gazette, Apr. 25, 1910.

109 This model, which allowed for plays to be taken down or re-shelved with greater frequency, required even more cash up front; nobody had managed to implement it on a permanent basis before. “What The Public Wants,” Liverpool Post, Mar. 25, 1914.

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. The Abbey achieved state subsidy much sooner, with

Irish independence.110 Public subscription repertory theaters continued to be launched throughout the interwar period, from Northampton to York to Perth.111 As journalist Cecil

Chisholm recommended in 1934: “Make a man a shareholder and you may make him an habitué.”112

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.”113 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:

110 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 Frazier, Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

111 Claire Cochrane, Twentieth-Century British Theatre: Industry, Art and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 75–76.

112 Cecil Chisholm, Repertory: An Outline of the Modern Theatre Movement; Production, Plays, Management, (London: Peter Davies, 1934), 211.

113 Nigel Playfair, letter to the editor, Liverpool Courier, June 6, 1910.

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.114 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.”115 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 that I am not directly or indirectly ‘professional.’ My identity covers that of a clerk, who has found in 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.116

Both manager and shareholder misapprehended one another other as fantasies composed of no particular individuals. By describing the repertory theater as an erudite, family- friendly fiancée, “A Shareholder” romanticized the repertory theater in much the same

114 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.

115 Thomas Pigott, letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, Dec. 23, 1913.

116 “A Shareholder,” letter to the editor, Liverpool Post, Dec. 27, 1913.

way that contemporary theater scholars have romanticized audience. As Christopher

Balme observes: “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.”117 In other words, the effusions of theater and performance scholars would be better supported if we paid attention to the self-representations of spectators. At public subscription repertory theaters, at least, the romantic ideal of a communitarian audience was virtually assembled. Claiming collective ownership, playgoers gave us their impressions, if not always their Christian names.

That these technically private repertory theaters were deemed “Citizens’

Theatres” and “public institutions” gestures toward the wider political implications of turn-of-the-century subscription. Under the right circumstances, subscription enterprises could exceed, as much as prefigure, the representative authority of democratically elected city councils. Public subscription theaters thrived in the provinces rather than the metropolis not just thanks to civic pride, but because provincial playgoers felt keenly

London’s elitist dictating of tastes to the rest of Britain and Ireland. Yet although private subscription play-producing societies and public subscription repertory theaters offered competing visions of whether an exclusive club or an inclusive citizenry should control the destiny of modern theater, in both cases subscribers lay claim to speak on behalf of much larger audiences. As awareness of this representative power grew, so did the range of uses to which it could be applied. After all, turn-of-the-century theaters were far from the only enterprises to attract subscribers, and as more and more theaters were funded by

117 Balme, Theatrical Public Sphere, 13.

subscription, playwrights were increasingly drawn to dramatizing subscription’s broader political effects, as the next chapter shows.

Chapter 3:

Prop lists and assembled ensembles

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 literalizes 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

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.

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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, 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 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 by no means the only subscription enterprises. 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

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.

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.

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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 turn-of-the-century 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 late-Victorian and Edwardian plays that feature below, circulated lists often are the audience’s only visual representation of crowds who gather in the offstage world of the play. In this way, these plays replicate how subscription re-districted undifferentiated crowds into representative lists, showing us what subscription meant not just to the theater, but to the contemporary social reality.

Training our eyes on the subscription-list prop reveals both its ubiquity in and centrality to Edwardian plays. 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 This chapter reads props not just as metaphors for interiority, as Andrew Sofer and William Worthen have done,

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.

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but as metaphors and metonyms for exteriority.7 The need to portray dramatic exchanges between politicians and voters or industrialists and charity cases edged playwrights toward props that listed hundreds of names. In the hands of principal characters that give or collect subscriptions, subscription lists smuggled the public plot into the private drawing room, and help to explain how so-called “social drama” was able to bring large crowds onstage 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 voters to gentlemen bachelors; metaphorically, they represent further unseen groups on whose behalf subscribers claim to speak, such as poor women 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 turn-of-the-century subscription, as principal 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 theater audiences to the dangers of passive, uncritical spectatorship, even as such props made playgoers reluctant to actually subscribe. The contemporaneous vogue for charity matinées, whose repertoire avoided plays with subscription-list props,

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 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1992), 6; Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 173.

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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.

Standing in for the crowd

Edwardian 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 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

8 Along with the 1916 Julius Caesar, many of the largest productions were one-off charity matinées, discussed in greater detail below. 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 play-texts and reviews are more useful. Edwardian critics frequently remarked on the crowd scenes in Shakespeare and Cecil Raleigh productions. Figures from London Stage database.

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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 recreated contemporary social rituals that spilled over into the

Bancroft’s 1880s Haymarket productions in a broader movement toward realism in the arts. Furniture famously cluttered up the Continental stages managed by Konstantin

Stanislavsky, who imported from Norway, and André 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,

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 Jonathan Rose observes that for reasons of cast size, Shakespeare rather than modern drama was a popular choice for corporate-sponsored amateur drama societies, which attracted over 400 employees from companies like Lyons Teashop and Rowntree and Cadbury. Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 81. 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 subscription-list props and ensemble playing could be seen as parallel forms of crowd control, exerted by playwrights and directors respectively. James Woodfield, English Theatre in Transition, 1881–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 14. For more, see Philippa Burt, “The Ideal of Ensemble Practice in Twentieth-Century British Theatre, 1900–1968,” (PhD diss., Goldsmiths, University of London, 2015).

11 Michael R. Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 98.

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real dogs, real water, real pumps, and washing tubs are now supplemented by real bric-à- 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 ephemera, which for this chapter includes any circulated documents that appeal to or record the names of subscribers: letters, checks, and collecting books. Such documents function as avatars for characters both on but mostly off the list of dramatis personae; neighboring name-bearing props (not demanding

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,’ Pope complained, insert “the notes of direction to the Property-men for their Moveables, and to the Players for their Entries.” Quoted in Julie Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book: 1480–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 143.

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: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 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 “property-women” had been around since 1795. “Prop.”

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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 actor-messenger.”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. Because these props suppress mass bodies, we could think of them as “supernumerary props.”

When late-Victorians and Edwardians started putting subscription lists onstage, they picked 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 Edwardian lists is that the former identify

16 Edwardians 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. Putnam and 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.

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characters that 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 such an alternative. 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 visited one—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 referring to them in conversation? Drawn mostly from dialogue, Francis Teague’s ambitious catalogue of all the props in Shakespeare’s plays reminds us that in the theater we hear

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.

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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 supernumerary props offered one way of materially representing large-group relationships using the documents that persons exchanged. Reading subscription-list props requires some detective work: while the documents that circulate around the stage sometimes wind up in archives, those that circulated on it rarely seem to—although

Richard Foulkes describes a Nottingham Royal Theatre accounts book from the 1920s that survived use as a prop.21 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.”

Electoral registers

Subscription-list props register complementary and competing political affiliations. Whether demanding contributions to various funds, clubs, or societies,

21 “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 programs 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.

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offstage voters make their wishes known to onstage politicians. In the absence of embodied constituents, we get their mail. While representing voters metonymically makes sense dramaturgically, it further highlights the extent to which subscription operated as a political force in turn-of-the-century Britain and Ireland. Demanding subscriptions could be more efficacious than crowding, or even voting—unlike voting, participating in subscription enterprises was not legally restricted by age, gender, or class.

At the same time, because these plays frequently feature politicians subscribing to conflicting causes in order to win votes, theater audiences grew accustomed to witnessing subscription as a political performance.

Ibsen’s community pillars and public enemies find Anglo-Irish equivalents in eager-to-please parliamentarians and county councilors. 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 of” a petition for a permanent bandstand signed by “three hundred and eighty- five—eighty-six… [g]ood, 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 late-Victorian and Edwardian 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

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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.22 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 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, South-West.—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.23

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 voters. If the MP wants to represent the voters in turn, he’ll have to subscribe to them.

Similar scenes replayed throughout the countryside, swapping savvy metropolitan wonk for new-moneyed provincial industrialist. In Henry Arthur Jones’ The Middleman

(1889), a Tatlow porcelain works proprietor standing for Parliament has a theological chat with his campaign manager:

22 Arthur Wing Pinero, His House In Order: A Comedy In Four Acts (London: William Heinemann, 1906), 82, 93.

23 James Bernard Fagan, The Earth: A Modern Play In Four Acts (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1910), 91.

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[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.24

This version of the scene plays on subscription’s origins in compliance with religious articles; substitute Heaven for Parliament, and subscription replaces papal indulgence.

Since private subscriptions likely will become public information, the manager advises his candidate to keep up appearances of parity, whatever the cost. Fagan’s discreet “the usual” in the scene above this one is neither usual nor unusual; just as many plays give precise subscription amounts as don’t. Where Shakespeare editions gloss early modern connotations, the editor of the 2002 Norton Edition of Major Barbara notes that Lord

Saxmundham’s five thousand pound charity subscription is “Approximately $7,500.”25

By listing precise numbers of subscribers or contributions, these plays ingest the quantitative impulse expressed in the subscription theater’s annual reports and newspaper columns.

As other plays employing this trope reveal, blessed was the politician whose voters’ 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,

24 Henry Arthur Jones, The Middleman: A Play In Four Acts (New York: Samuel French, 1907), 20.

25 George Bernard Shaw, “Major Barbara,” in George Bernard Shaw’s Plays, ed. Sandie Byrne, 2nd edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), 251.

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respectively). While it’s 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’s also easier to subscribe to conflicting causes from a private study or office than to speak out of both sides of your mouth from the public campaign trail.26 However much difficulty subscription letters cause MPs, 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 publican and Cloghermore country councillor Jeremiah Dempsy’s wife describes him: “You’re a publican by trade and a member of the Anti-Treating 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 about it.” That tragic flaw drives the comedy, in which we see the electioneering Dempsy sign his name both to proclamations issued by the judicial office holders and 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…] The Committee of the Fife and Drum Band resolved at last meeting to refuse the next subscription

26 St. John Hankin, “The Return Of The Prodigal,” in Three Plays With Happy Endings (London: Samuel French, 1907), 25.

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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 re-election.27 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 sick in order to get out of making a speech on the Chief Secretary’s behalf, he ultimately learns the price of a paper trail.

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 philanthropy and avarice. Here, the subscriber’s goal is to get saved rather than

27 William Boyle, The Eloquent Dempsy: A Comedy In Three Acts (Dublin: O’Donoghue & Co., 1907), 14, 55, 68–70.

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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 lists represent metonymically the group that is being subscribed for and metaphorically the group that bears the cost.

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 mid-century Companies Acts also instituted the requirement of annual accounts, which in turn had originated in eighteenth- century charitable associations.28 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.”29 There were no registered charities or 501(c)(3) designations. 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

28 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. “Accounts, institutional” (New York: Routledge, 2000). For more, see Leslie Hannah, The Rise of the Corporate Economy (London: Methuen, 1976).

29 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.

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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 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!”30 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

30 William Boyle, The Building Fund: A Play In Three Acts, Abbey Theatre Series (Dublin: Maunsel, 1905), 6, 8.

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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?31

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 of your pen in a cheque book, I stood alone; and the heavens were empty.”32 Undershaft’s checkbook steals the

31 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.

32 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.

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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.33

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’ aptly- titled Hypocrites, one brewer’s generous subscriptions to the local schools means 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 workingman’s recreation club.)34 But resisting publicity makes their generous acts more, not less, hypocritical. In the play’s prefatory

“first aid to critics,” Shaw explained:

33 In Cusins’ 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.

34 Henry Arthur Jones, The Hypocrites: A Play In Four Acts (London: Chiswick Press, 1906), 12.

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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 ensembles 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 loses; the prop symbolizes Major Barbara’s conflict between charity and industry. At the same time, Shaw’s play unmasks anonymous donors and phony peers who use subscription to “contract out of the moral code.”35

A similar conflict between charity and industry animates John Galsworthy’s Strife

(1909), which confronts capitalism’s collateral damages by dramatizing the end of a months-long 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,

David Roberts, 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! (ROBERTS 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.

35 Shaw, “Major Barbara,” 246, 187–88.

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(He goes out into the hall, in cumbrous haste…)36

Here, a list of director’s 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.

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 potential voters, but of poor widows and orphans. Because these nubile women recruit hot-to-trot men, the lists evoke both the women and children subscribed for and the men subscribing.

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 paper-knife…)

36 John Galsworthy, “Strife,” in Plays: The Silver Box; Joy; Strife (London: Duckworth & Co., 1909), 108.

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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 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.”37 He apparently means this literally, having traded charity appeals for the illicit music-hall programme 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.

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 with a Russian prince signaling his amorous intentions toward the ingénue 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.38 (The brewer who rejects her appeal, on the other hand, signals that he will court someone else.) In Jones’ The Dancing Girl (1909), 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

37 St. John Hankin, The Two Mr. Wetherbys: A Middle-Class Comedy In Three Acts (London: Samuel French, 1907), 15–16, 59.

38 T. W. Robertson, “Ours,” in The Principal Dramatic Works of Thomas William Robertson, vol. II (London: Samuel French, 1889), 429.

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own wit and mischief, so—I gave her the subscription!”39 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’s 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- list prop gives way to what we could call subscription-list plot. Here, subscription interposes between lovers in proportion to the ensemble’s passivity—unlike bandstand- subscribing voters 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.

A repeat offender, 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.40 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

39 Henry Arthur Jones, The Dancing Girl: A Drama In Four Acts (London: Samuel French, 1907), 21–22.

40 Henry Arthur Jones, The Masqueraders: A Play In Four Acts (London: Chiswick Press, 1894), 1, 19.

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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 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. Same goes for the charitable objects of

Hankin’s far sunnier Charity that began at home (1906), in which an eligible young man named 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.41 Nobody seems too disillusioned—Jones’ tragedy is Hankin’s comedy. While the unmarried woman who collects subscriptions inadvertently advertises her availability, the divorcée who does the same approaches a failed relationship from the opposite direction. In Maugham’s Our Betters (1917), a wealthy American divorcée

(technically séparée) channels her sexual frustration into raising orphan subscriptions by pillaging her hostess’ visitors’ book. The séparée’s hot pursuit leaves the married hostess alone onstage to flirt with the young gigolo who will imperil the hostess’ reputation— apparently, orphan subscriptions spell bad news for marriages past, present, and future.42

The subscription-list 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 bifurcation in Pillars of Society, which opens with the ladies of the Red Cross Guild reading together from a manual entitled Woman as the Servant of Society as Bernick presents the railway

41 St. John Hankin, “The Charity That Began At Home,” in Three Plays With Happy Endings (London: Samuel French, 1907).

42 W. Somerset Maugham, Our Betters: A Comedy in Three Acts. (New York: G.H. Doran, 1923).

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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.”43 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 in Cusins’ transformation from a dandified Greek scholar collecting charity subscriptions at

Barbara’s bidding to the masculine heir of Undershaft’s munitions factory. More predictably, the woman who collects subscriptions for suffrage rather than charity undermines her marriageability in plays like Elizabeth Robins’ Votes for Women (1907), whose heroine rejects the man 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).44

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

43 Ibsen, “Pillars of Society,” 179.

44 Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren’s Profession: A Play in Four Acts (London: Archibald Constable, 1905).

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daughter asks “What sort of things?” and mother replies: “Drainage!!”45 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

“[p]encil 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 on the latter, for having been “born, or at any rate bred, in a hand- bag.”46 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’ 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? The impromptu auctioneer proclaims: “We must all admit that

45 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.

46 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.

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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 their day… The only really vital question… is ‘How shall we amuse ourselves in the sacred cause of charity?’ [Cries of ‘hear, hear.’]” As Sos

Eltis has pointed out, on the eighteenth-century stage a woman asking “for charity” signified that she was a lady of the night; fast forward to Adrian Ross’ 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 if much had changed for a cultural form historically intertwined with prostitution.47

Come up and give your names

Principal characters such as ambitious politicians, guilty industrialists, and industrious nubiles treat subscription as a metaphorical stage on which to perform before offstage audiences of provincial voters, charity cases, and eligible bachelors. 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

47 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 Richard Booth and Joel H. Kaplan (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 39–40.

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this representation of subscribers and audiences within productions speak to the actual subscribers and audiences who went to see these plays get performed?

Play-producing societies and repertory theaters mounted several plays that thematized subscription. In Shaw’s The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet (1909), a group of

19 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.”48 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 Abbey Theatre Endowment Fund, he reportedly apologized amid laughter “for being a very poor substitute for the Eloquent Dempsy.”49

From spectacle as Schadenfreude to spectacle as swindle, these moments reflect the not- for-profit theater’s unease with asking for money, which, as we’ve seen, had a decent chance of spoiling any romance.

48 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.

49 “Abbey Theatre: The Endowment Fund; Education Of Mr. Birrell; Conversion Of Mr. Justice Ross,” The Irish Times, Oct. 28, 1910.

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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 matinées. From 1890 to 1904, the average number of charity matinées in London was nearly 23 per year; from 1905 to 1918, this number ballooned to

37, with record years in 1908 (54) and 1915 (57), before a general deflation in the mid-

1920s. Charity matinées 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.”)50 The practice was so prevalent partially because it was so successful: a single charity matinée usually raised somewhere between £150 and £2,000 (almost

$10,000 and $150,000 today), and one 1928 matinée 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

50 Bernard Shaw, “Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall,” in Heartbreak House, Great Catherine, and Playlets of the War. (London: Constable, 1919), xvii.

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charity matinées, the repertoire discussed in this chapter curiously was avoided.51 Why did charity matinée 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 to 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 usually filled with more subscribers. Perhaps it’s no surprise that plays in which offstage crowds get manipulated by performing subscribers would have made playgoers reluctant to give their own names. By contrast, the productions with the biggest onstage crowds were all charity matinées. 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’ 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.52 As Catherine Hindson has demonstrated, charity performers often appeared in their capacity as celebrities.53

This suggests that audiences were more willing to subscribe when crowds were identified as active performers rather than as duped spectators.

51 Exceptions included at least Mrs Warren’s Profession, His House in Order, The Middleman, and The Dancing Girl.

52 All figures above from London Stage database.

53 Catherine Hindson, London’s West End Actresses and the Origins of Celebrity Charity, 1880–1920 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016), 44–70.

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The correlation between crowd scenes and audience subscriptions would also explain Elizabeth Robin’s anomalous Votes for Women, whose middle-act features an infamous suffrage meeting in Trafalgar Square. When mounted by Granville-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 “[f]or sheer stage management this scene beats anything that we can remember on the London stage.”54 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 above, 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.”55 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

54 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 (June 1995): 146.

55 Elizabeth Robins, Votes For Women: A Play In Three Acts (Chicago: Dramatic Publishing Company, 1907), 132, 93.

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‘rights’ women already possess.”56 In other words, women might not have been able to vote or run for office, but they could subscribe and collect subscriptions, as many suffrage plays reminded them. One 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.”57 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 like actors—in this case, to portray a crowd of anti-suffragists. 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.

The plays in this chapter reveal subscription’s wider effects on turn-of-the-century

Britain and Ireland. That subscription lists were shown enabling politicians, industrialists, and unmarried women alike to speak on behalf of large social groups indicates that municipal and national government comprised only one form of political representation.

Just as the last chapter highlighted the affinities between “public subscription” and

“public institution,” we see here that subscribers appointed themselves to represent the interests of various social groups alongside—or especially in the absence of—formal electoral systems in which the subscribers were eligible to participate. In theatrical terms, subscription encouraged audiences to see themselves as active performers rather than as passive spectators. By representing other groups of which they may or may not have been

56 Quoted in Sheila Stowell, A Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 37.

57 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.

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a part, from Wesleyans to Wanderers to widows and orphans, subscribers were able to wear different identities like masks—the subject of the next and final chapter.

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Chapter 4:

Craig’s lists and readers theaters

In 1924, the stage director Lennox Robinson claimed he was “almost certain that

Mr. Gordon Craig is the personage in the English theatre to-day 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 (1908–1929), calling it the

“best theatrical magazine in the world.”1 Others agreed: from New York, 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, Louis

Zettersten declared there was “nothing like it.”3 From Tokyo, S. Kikenchi dubbed it “a pilot of theater arts.”4 If, as Robinson acknowledged, Craig was only figuratively in the theater, his theatrical magazine was literally in all parts of the world: Europe, the

Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australia.

1 Lennox Robinson, “At the Play: ‘The Mask’ And Some Plays,” The 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, October. Volume seven 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. The Mask issued 70 numbers in 15 volumes.

2 Marianne Moore, testimonial postcard. 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.

4 S. Kikenchi, testimonial postcard.

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Despite a global reach, The Mask counted few actual subscribers. Unlike

Robinson, who wrote for the Observer, Moore and the others mailed their testimonials on special postcards included with the magazine. On the front: “What I Think Of The Mask.”

On the back: a request to furnish “the names and addresses of three or four friends who would, you believe, enjoy and subscribe for the Journal.” Like his journal, Craig roamed the world collecting names, sending them from the Moscow Hotel Metropole or the Paris

Hotel Chatham to his uncredited assistant, Dorothy Nevile Lees, at the editorial offices in

Florence. Although he once dreamed the magazine would attract 10,000 subscribers, he never even reached 1,000.5 In length rather than breadth, Craig’s subscription lists resemble those of metropolitan play-producing societies and provincial repertory theaters.

But if previous chapters have argued that subscription conditioned playgoer experiences of collectivity before, during, and after a visit to the theater, The Mask stands as a limit case of what happens when we, like Craig, abandon the theater building entirely and instead construct theater around its audience.

Craig might not seem a natural endpoint for a study arguing that subscription gave playgoers representative control of the theater. His own politics flirted with fascism, which found an analogue in his campaign to institutionalize the stage director.6 By most accounts, he was a control freak whose vision of artistic theater could be satisfied only by autocratically unifying scene, action, and voice. He famously argued that actors should be replaced with giant marionettes, transforming performers into nothing more than passive extensions of a god-like puppet master. At first glance, The Mask seems to confirm

5 List of subscribers, 1919; List of subscribers, 1930.

6 See Lawrence Switzky, “The Rise of the Director, 1734–1956: Negotiations with the Material World” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2010), 42–96.

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Craig’s desire for omnipotence: filled to the brim with articles and essays on theater history and theory written under his name or pseudonyms, it’s easy to see his journal as the ultimate one-man show, mounted by an outcast enfant terrible to challenge England’s commercial theater establishment.7 Yet perched at the nexus of two print genres—the theatrical magazine and the modernist little magazine—The Mask granted audiences new spaces for self-representation. The English-language theatrical magazine 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 earlier theatrical magazines marketed themselves mainly to domestic theater personnel, The Mask’s revolutionary appeal to both theatergoers and theater professionals around the world gave audiences as well as actors a metaphorical stage on which to perform.9 Alongside articles and essays, The Mask published lists encouraging subscribers of all professions to imagine themselves as dramatis personae, and dialogues prescribing an active reading program that conceived of reading itself as performance. Playgoers and performers were

7 Olga Taxidou has described The Mask as a “stage” and a “periodical performance.” Olga Taxidou, The Mask: A Periodical Performance by Edward Gordon Craig (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998), 3. More recently, Jennifer Buckley has pointed out a number of ways in which Craig resisted the conflation of page and stage. Jennifer Buckley, “Print, Performance, and the European Avant-Gardes, 1905–1948” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2011), 38–94.

8 Calhoun Winton, ‘Steele, Sir Richard (bap. 1672, d. 1729)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

9 According to American critic Richard Burton, it was not until the turn-of-the-century boom in European and American theatrical magazines that there was a “serious 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.” Burton lists The Mask among other British and American periodicals. Richard Burton, How to See a Play (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 208. Craig was keen to take credit, acknowledging “twenty or thirty offspring” of The Mask, including Theatre Arts Monthly, The Theatre Magazine, and Theatre Craft. Gordon Craig, “Designs for ‘Macbeth,’” The Mask 15, no. 2 (April 1929): 81. Craig also reviewed and counted among The Mask’s progeny modernist little magazines like The Dial, Broom, and Wendingen, the last of which, he noted proudly, issued special theater and marionette issues. “Magazines,” The Mask 9, no. 1 (1923): 40.

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invited to identify with each other and did, as evidenced by their many letters to editors, submitted designs, and testimonial postcards. One of the longest-running modernist little magazines, The 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 little-t theater of his own.10

The art of the list

Just as 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 editorial 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.”11 Craig’s lists playfully scramble this binary. While a list of dramatis personae might seem to fit more comfortably in the “poetic” category, what about a list of imaginary magazine contributors marshaled to recruit a list of very real subscribers?

10 The average cycle for the modernist little magazine was two to three years; The Mask published on and off in for 21. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, “General Introduction,” in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Volume 1, Britain and Ireland, 1880–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 22.

11 Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists: From Homer to Joyce (London: MacLehose, 2009), 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.” Robert Belknap, The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 3.

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For Craig, lists were an especially potent argumentative tool due to their seeming facticity. Even if one fabricated the data, as Craig often did, The Mask published lists alongside articles and essays for much the same reason that medieval Hungarian kings added to their intitulations lists of territories they did not actually hold: in order to give the impression of objectivity despite extreme subjectivity.12 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.”13 Craig’s barely concealed argument was that he should be appointed to advise a proposed English National Theatre. 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.”14 It follows that Craig, who authored a handful of original motions for marionettes, could have marked “Yes” for all columns.

This kind of negative argument—using a list of what was present to suggest what was missing—characterized many of The Mask’s published lists, especially those describing its audience. Rather than give actual names, these lists tended toward poetic abstraction and followed a progressive sequence in order to evoke collectivity. When urging subscribers to pay, Craig piled on the compliments: “You are delightful people,

12 See János 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 Doležalová (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 34–45.

13 “The Energy of the German Theatre,” The Mask 1, no. 2 (April 1908): 20.

14 The Editor, “Theatre Men in Europe,” The Mask 9 (1923): 23.

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witty… up to date… well-dressed… delicious… intelligent… profound… wealthy… powerful… everything… but you are inactive.”15 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 theater in order to argue for how it might improve. The Mask urged theater managers to “[t]hink 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 vigorous living theatre might prove refreshing and who are today obliged to avoid the place because of its pretentiousness.”16 Like many theater reformers, Craig believed that too much power rested with London’s managers, who did not represent the interests of potential playgoers; here, a list of professions conjures in type the very public Craig hoped to attract, in a speculative iteration of the actual subscription lists in annual reports and newspaper columns. As Craig moves from healers to artists to civil servants to the press, he suggests a vigorous living public connected through the logic whereby one profession blends into another. Though the list hardly describes a mass audience, Craig seemingly refutes the idea of an insular theater scene, instead welcoming all who would, or could afford to, subscribe. For this reason, he refused to raise The Mask’s annual subscription fee above fifteen shillings, though he did introduce a double-priced edition de luxe.17

15 Gordon Craig, “Epilogue,” The Mask 6, no. 4 (April 1914): 282.

16 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.

17 Fifteen shillings was approximately a fifth of a lower clerk or shopkeeper’s weekly income. Helen C. Long, The Edwardian House: The Middle-Class Home in Britain, 1880–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 9. Financial records indicate that regular subscriptions financed most publishing expenditures. Citing a related scheme that would consolidate The Mask and Craig’s short-lived School for

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If Craig’s list of professions suggests inclusive collectivity, it might seem contradictory that The Mask printed prospectuses with contributor lists that promised subscribers access to an exclusive who’s who of European and North American artistic theater. A typical solicitation letter ran: “Mayn’t we enter your name as a subscriber. It may interest you to see the list of contributors and the title of a few of the articles of the

1st numbers.”18 Given the lists we’ve seen so far, one might suspect that subscribers were to contributors as theatergoers were to theater artists, but alongside representatives from all of the non-theatrical professions named above, recruited subscribers included actors, directors, dramatists, and designers; as Craig addressed The Mask to different kinds of subscribers, he amalgamated and aligned them, which meant that subscribers of all professions inevitably were compared to contributors. (It’s also worth remembering that by definition subscribers are always at least financial contributors.) Rather than cordon off subscribers from contributors, The Mask yoked them together as “friends,” implying that subscribers could become contributors’ friends, too—that is, if they weren’t already.

Soliciting actress Georgette LeBlanc, Craig instructed his assistant Dorothy Lees to send a prospectus with the names “Duncan, Hofmannsthal and Olivier underlined with Red ink. If no prospectus with the names send the loose sheet which was in Dec or January number. Be exact in following what I say or you may lose her subscription. I dare say I

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,” The Academy, Aug. 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. Craig’s efforts anticipate Peter Brook’s Center for Theater Research and Jerzy Grotowski’s Theater Laboratories. For more, see Christopher Innes, Edward Gordon Craig: A Vision of Theatre (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998), 206.

18 Edward Gordon Craig to Dorothy Nevile Lees, Nov. 10, 1917.

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shall get 10 more subscribers here + an agent.”19 Yet while Mask contributors like dancer

Isadora Duncan, dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and theater historian Jean-Jacques

Olivier might already have been part of LeBlanc’s circle, a number of the unmarked names listed alongside theirs couldn’t possibly have been; they were Craig’s pseudonyms.20

Though many magazine editors have created pseudonyms to inflate their staff lists, The Mask helps us recognize the theatricality of this practice.21 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.”22 In the first Mask issue, Balance offered a theory that actors should wear masks in order to render abstract emotions symbolically: “It is better, provided it is not dull, that instead of six hundred expressions, but six expressions shall appear upon the face.”23

Rather than abstract emotions, Craig’s mask-like pseudonyms symbolized concrete metropolises, ranging from the transparent “John Bull” in London to the more convincing

“Jan van Holt” in Amsterdam, “Adolf Furst” in Munich, and “Tao” in Tokyo.24 The staff list wasn’t all just smoke and mirrors: The Mask’s actual contributors included director

Alexander Hevesi in Budapest, poet Anatole France in Paris, and art historian Dr. Ananda

19 Craig to Lees, Feb. 1909.

20 The Mask, prospectus for vol. II, 1909.

21 See, for example, Faith Binckes on Katherine Mansfield’s many pseudonyms. Faith Binckes, Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 8, 97–127.

22 George Calderon, letter to the editor, The Mask, January 1912.

23 John Balance, “A Note on Masks,” The Mask 1, no. 1 (March 1908): 10.

24 Edward Carrick, Gordon Craig: The Story of His Life (New York: Limelight Editions, 1985), 242.

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Coomaraswamy in Calcutta. But almost seventy percent of The Mask’s published text came from Craig or Lees, usually appearing under a pseudonym; an additional ten percent came from translations and reprints, leaving just twenty percent for original contributions.25 If the staff list was a dream, the fantasy cut both ways: when another publication accused Craig of writing the first eight Mask volumes himself, editor Semar asserted that such a feat would be impossible.26

The Mask’s imaginary staff lists were more tangible for readers than its actual subscription lists. The indirect representation of subscribers—as an abstract list of adjectives or professions rather than a list of names—hid from view Craig’s private lists, to which The Mask only ever alluded. 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.27

Here, Craig uses the threat of his unpublished lists in order to goad subscribers into generating their own. The only subscription lists that readers saw were the ones they compiled themselves.

As Craig doggedly aggregated lists of real subscribers and imaginary contributors from around the globe, he mixed pragmatic with poetic. In a private letter to Lees, he wrote: “One way or another I saw exactly 20 new subscribers to The Mask. I saw name

25 Lorelei F. Guidry, “Gordon Craig’s theatre magazine” (master’s thesis, Tufts University, 1963), 58–61.

26 “Notice,” The Mask 10, no. 1 (January 1924): 46.

27 The letter may never have been sent, but was intended for the April 1919 number, which was the last to appear before 1923. Craig to Lees, Feb. 11, 1919.

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of Mr. F Jeunant of Paris… I saw the name of Jordan + Gotch and I fancied… Everyway

I saw something.”28 Craig’s tongue-in-cheek claim to see names rather than persons overlays the magazine’s virtuality onto reality. If real subscribers could be subsumed to fantasy, fictional contributors could be conversely 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.29

An important consequence of blurring the lines 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: when Craig 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 the journal’s printed lists of contributors, but to their own compiled lists of the names and addresses of three to four friends.30

Around the same time but in a different venue, 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.’”31 Similar language figured in a letter to The Mask by subscriber

28 Emphasis mine. Craig to Lees, 1911.

29 Carrick, Gordon Craig, 242.

30 Gordon Craig, “The Characters Of The Commedia Dell’arte; a list compiled,” The Mask 4, no. 3 (January 1912): 199–202.

31 William Archer, Play-Making: A Manual of Craftsmanship (London: Chapman & Hall, 1912), 62–63.

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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:

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!32

Willard delights in the The Mask’s characters, but where Archer imagines living together,

Willard substitutes performing together; the very act of mailing her subscription facilitates her dramatic entrance.

Dialogue at the margins

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 pre-scripted interlocutors.

The Mask published a number of dialogues between Craig, who played the “Stage

Director,” “Artist of the Theatre,” “Critic,” or “Editor,” and his readers, who played the respective “Playgoer,” “Theatrical Manager,” “Professional Performer,” or “Queer

Reader.” Casting readers in roles may have required putting words in their mouths, but as

Craig’s interlocutors switched between theatergoer and theater professional, his dialogues encouraged playgoers to think of themselves on a par with performers, and performers to see themselves as readers.

Craig’s dialogues reveal his belief that subscription conferred representative authority. In “The Art Of The Theatre”—a dialogue between a “Stage Director” and a

“Playgoer” published as a pamphlet in 1905, when The Mask was only a dream—the

32 Emily Willard to The Mask, Sept. 11, 1924.

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director spends most of the conversation expounding on his own role; the follow-up Mask dialogue, by contrast, allows for a greater part to be played by the disaffected playgoer, whom the director explicitly advises to subscribe: “Here is a way to revive your interest.

Connect yourself with such a theatre.”33 By this point, three years of wrangling Mask subscribers had helped Craig discover not the importance of engaging in truly reciprocal dialogues with his audience, but with getting them to contribute financially. Craig certainly needed the money, yet he also recognized his right to speak on subscribers’ behalf. In a later 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?”34 In other words: to subscribe to The Mask was to vote “EGC.” But if the public couldn’t speak for itself, neither, apparently, could managers or performers, who, as Mask readers, also fell into the interlocutor’s pre-inscribed position.

In each asymmetrical dialogue, the reader took on a different role, even as that role served mainly to let out steam generated by Craig’s heated polemics. But that the dialogue form spilled over into other Mask essays and articles suggests an alternate purpose: Craig may have found it helpful to imagine readers caring enough to respond. In an essay on “English Sentimentality,” John Balance argues that an inundation of feminine feeling has drowned out masculine reason; three-fifths of the way through, a “Reader” intrudes: “I cannot let you continue. I note you intended this to be an essay, but I must

33 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).

34 Carric, “Proposals Old and New,” 59.

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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 resolves to stop subscribing. Stage directions indicate that he “[t]hrows this copy at a statue of Venus and goes out to the Café Royal,” giving more verbs to the inactive reader.35 By anticipating readers, perhaps Craig hoped to diffuse them, or perhaps he 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.

In fact, comment was precisely what Craig advised: rather than throwing a text, scribbling in the margins was his recommended form of engagement. After all, what was marginalia if not another form of dialogue, but with Craig playing interlocutor rather than speaker? At one point, Craig conceived of a regular Mask column titled “Conversations

With My Real Friends” in which he would publish his own notes alongside excerpts from books by long-dead Continental theatricalists such as Jules Champfleury and Théphile

Gautier.36 In another issue, Craig included his comments around reprinted sections of an article by Manchester critic and playwright Allan Monkhouse.37 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.”38 As Craig moved from putting words in readers’ mouths to their books,

35 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 Café Royal, as he gleefully recounted in “Foreign Notes,” The Mask 4, no. 2 (October 1911): 162–64.

36 Gordon Craig, “Conversations With My Real Friends,” The Mask 5, no. 3 (January 1913): 226–233.

37 Gordon Craig, “For Plain People. Some Comments On Mr. Monkhouse’s Article,” The Mask 10, no. 1 (January 1924): 10–16.

38 John Semar, “Books,” The Mask 10, no. 1 (January 1924): 40.

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he counter-intuitively modeled a theory of active reading that had different implications depending on whether readers were theatergoers or theater professionals.

We’ve seen that Mask subscription lists were composed of both players and playgoers, but when readers were aligned with the former, thumbing apparently eclipsed throwing: for every paying subscriber, possibly dozens of “young employés” perused what Craig called a “single well-thumbed copy.” In an article titled “After You’ve

Finished With It,” Balance blamed the magazine’s 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 calculated to make him wince.”39 Barbara Couper, a 25-year-old actress from Surrey, offered a different explanation in a note sent with her subscription: “I had to overdraw to get you this year, but that is of no consequence. I should steal rather than go without you.”40 As Craig would have known well, a theater professional’s salary left much to be desired. But while Craig’s calculating suggests that these professionals were the audience The Mask sought most rather than least, his emphasis on study and reading revises the contentious relationship between page and stage.

Craig introduced a theory of active reading for the theater professional, starting with the stage director. In the first “The Art of the Theatre” dialogue, the director observes that the act of reading and re-reading 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,”

39 John Balance, “After You’ve Finished With It,” The Mask 3, no. 3 (July 1910): 17.

40 Barbara Couper to The Mask, Jan. 31, 1928.

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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 William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb had seized on Hamlet’s phrase “the mind’s eye” to justify privileging the page over the stage, but Craig differs from his predecessors by insisting on the importance of reading and re-reading for training theater artists rather than enlightening theatergoers. 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.41 Though the end goal of reading is stage performance, reading itself becomes a repeatable performance. Craig evidently 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 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

41 Craig, Art of the Theatre, 32–33.

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of the king.” In 1951, he crossed out the second sentence and wrote below: “Does he think at all?”42 Evidently, active reading meant writing.

While reading drama is different from reading theater scholarship, Craig came to believe that active reading was as critical for the actor as for the director. In his essay on

“Books and Actors,” he provided a reading program for actors so that they could avoid becoming “stereotyped faces.” The main reason why good actors do not exist today,

Craig claimed, 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 also 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.”43 Unsurprisingly, Craig saved his own writings for last, but he would not have been the only one to include them; in her testimonial postcard, subscriber Emily Willard insisted that The Mask “should be on the bookshelf of every actor and actress if they wish to be conversant with everything great connected with their craft.”44 Willard’s use of “conversant” points to the dialogic engagement Craig modeled by publishing his marginalia. For actors and directors alike,

Craig depicted active reading, re-reading, studying, and annotating as a performance that would lead to improvements on literal stages.

Yet for these subscribers and especially for others who identified mainly as theatergoers, The Mask was a virtual stage in itself, at least according to Craig’s analogy.

42 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.

43 Edward Gordon Craig, Books and theatres (London: J. M. Dent 1925), 72.

44 Rachel Emily Willard, testimonial postcard.

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In a scene between a “Queer Reader” and “The Editor,” Craig represented readers’ mailed queries as dialogue:

Queer Reader. What book is it out of?…. What is the date?…. Who made the design?…. What does it represent?…. […] Are we down-hearted? The Editor. Yes, when we are asked such a number of questions. Queer Reader. Why not ask questions when one does not know? Queerer Reader. Oh, how frightfully interesting! What a fine thing…. Yes, it would make a splendid stage scene, …is the suggestion for something exactly right. The Editor. Really?…. And what leads you to be so convinced. Queerer Reader. I will tell you. (Prepares to give three quarters of an hour to a long and clearly worded, if somewhat pedantic explanation which, while being a self-revelation of psychology, reveals but one other thing,… the speaker’s good opinion of him (or her) self.)45

The editor’s punctuation in his last line—a period where a question mark should be— suggests how much Craig resisted playing interlocutor for the reader, even as he was aware of how pedantic the dialogue form could be. Just as the English Reader turns a monologue into a duologue, “Queerer Reader” turns a duologue into a trialogue, but in this case Queerer Reader registers the impossibility not just of speaking for readers, but of reducing them to a single character—a lesson Craig seemingly learned only halfway into The Mask’s run. Here, Craig represents readers as active, spontaneous speakers rather than pre-scripted interlocutors.

The scene reflects actual exchanges between Craig and his readers. It seemed subscribers enjoyed playing no role so actively as editor—which was helpful, since Craig didn’t employ any. After misattributing an author in a book review, Craig ran a correction blaming an imaginary sub-editor: “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

45 “A Design For a Scene,” The Mask 7, no. 2 (May 1915): 165.

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our efforts, we had never before succeeded in establishing any communication.”46 For one Dorset reader, every two Mask mistakes merited one potential subscriber: painter

Francis H. Newbery returned his testimonial postcard listing errata from the latest issue on one side and three potential subscribers on the other.47 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.48

In his suggestion that only some copies of the magazine would have errors, Craig whimsically 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 your admirable journal) [I] beg to state my opinion that

The Mask is the only sign of active energy in the English theatre today.”49

In this way, the active reading represented by letters to editors and testimonial postcards elevated ordinary subscribers to the level of world-famous actresses and actors like Ellen Terry, Yvette Guilbert, and John Martin Harvey, whose thoughts about The

Mask were blurbed in promotional materials and reproduced in so-called “international symposia,” or published questionnaires, on topics like “Realism and the Actor” and “A

National Theatre.” If, as Lori Cole has argued, little magazine questionnaires “instantiate

46 John Semar, “Editorial Notes,” The Mask 3, no. 9 (January 1911): 146.

47 Francis H. Newbery, testimonial postcard.

48 Emphasis mine. John Semar, “Editorial Notes,” The Mask 1, no. 6 (August 1908): 28.

49 Dickinson was never, in fact, quoted on the back page. Thorold Dickinson to The Mask, Feb. 13, 1927.

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a community [and call] a provisional collective into being,” Craig’s imagined community implicitly joined subscribers to contributors, theatergoers to theater professionals.50 The postcard prompt “What I Think Of The Mask” was a more pointed formulation of a question posed to actors whose answers were printed in one symposium: “Do you consider The Mask does wrong in asking everything of the Theatre as a Public Institution and as a Fine Art?”51 Aligning himself with Martin Harvey, Bristol solicitor and subscriber R. N. Armytage-Green 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.”52 This subscriber credits artistic advancement to both actors and public: literally, actors starve without a paying public; metaphorically, the public starves without artistic nourishment.

If performers and playgoers were part of the same imagined community of readers, that community looked up to Craig. Yiddish actress Bertha Kalich captured this dichotomy in her own blurbed testimonial from New York: “The Mask is a school to the actor and to the general public.”53 Craig had in fact envisioned that The Mask would be the organ for his School for the Art of the Theatre, which operated briefly from 1913 until the war; the school intended to train theater professionals rather than theatergoers 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

50 Lori Cole, “What Is the Avant-Garde? The Questionnaire as Historiography,” Journal of Art Historiography, no. 5 (2001): 2.

51 “The Position Of The Theatre. A Symposium,” The Mask 4, no. 2 (October 1911): 126.

52 R. N. Armytage-Green to The Mask, Aug. 15, 1928. That same year, Armytage-Green published an edited book on Martin Harvey.

53 “A Letter From Mme Bertha Kalich,” The Mask 4, no. 2 (October 1911): 174.

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theory, and theater history.54 But in a Mask dialogue between a “Pupil” and a “Master,” being labeled as a student took priority over being a practitioner. Quizzing the pupil on terms like “stage rostrum” and “stage brace,” The Mask summons up a virtual stage at the same time that the master insists for his pupil to understand a physical one beyond the superficial interests of a dilettante:

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… 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.55

Comparing The Mask’s virtual stage to more famous literal stages, Craig conversely figures the old Theatre as paper in order to disavow tearing it up. Yet by the time it had become clear that his school would exist only on paper, Craig’s lessons were no longer so

Socratic. While he penned and commissioned articles on a variety of theater history topics—from Javanese marionettes and Japanese Noh to Reformation and Restoration theater—Craig also ceded the lectern to his readers, reproducing essays and old theater designs contributed by subscribers.56

Or so the magazine claimed: in an article proudly 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

54 Craig’ 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.

55 Yoo-no-hoo, “On Learning Magic,” The Mask 6, no. 3 (January 1914).

56 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): 163–167. A. E. Dobell, letter to the editor, The Mask, Oct. 1925. E. Lylie sent educational engravings which were printed. E. Lylie, letter to the editor, The Mask, Oct. 1927.

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issue, but he neglected to mention that the subscriber was Craig’s son and sometime assistant, Edward Carrick.57 What was the value of saying that a contribution came from a subscriber? Apart from the communal effort implied, subscribers could be used to make a point better than could a named, polemical contributor. When professor Allardyce

Nicoll proposed a 1925 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 re-open.58 Craig thought that Nicoll had stolen his idea—the early subscriber well could have been a plant to emphasize who got there first—but 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.”59 Though Craig’s school targeted future theater professionals and Nicoll’s, future theatergoers, The Mask significantly was seen as the print extension of both projects; Nicoll claimed that his school would “engage in research work such as is so ably presented in the pages of ‘The Mask’.”60 For Craig, making such research look like a dialogic exchange seems to have been as important as whether it actually was one.

57 John Semar, “An Astounding Discovery Made By A Subscriber To ‘The Mask,’” The Mask 13, no. 3 (July 1927): 87–88.

58 “One of your Earliest Subscribers,” letter to the editor, The Mask, Oct. 1925.

59 Allardyce Nicoll, “The Universities And The Drama,” The Mask 11, no. 2: 66.

60 Allardyce Nicoll, “Universities And The Drama. A Reply,” The Mask 11, no. 4: 163.

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A girdle round the world

This chapter began by comparing Lennox Robinson’s laudatory comments with those from Craig’s international subscribers, but after reading The Mask’s many lists and dialogues, the question remains: how did the journal negotiate between its English and international readers? The headnote to Craig’s comments on Allan Monkouse’s 1924 state-of-British-theater article began: “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.”61 As Craig compares the border crossings of a physical magazine to those of a metaphysical idea, “Our” (The

Mask) slides into “us” (England) and then “we” (The English); the magazine’s mobility, exemplified by the materials as much as by the metaphors it vehicled, 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 contributes to the idea of global modernism, Eric Bulson has argued that this results from globetrotting contributors rather than geographically dispersed subscribers, pointing out the numerous material challenges facing international delivery: postage fees, customs, shipping timetables, and booksellers who refused to

61 Craig, “For Plain People,” 10.

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pay.62 Although The Mask encountered all of these obstacles, we’ve seen that Craig still managed to send it to hundreds of international subscribers throughout its run, which included parts of the First World War; by 1929, The Mask counted subscribers in at least

America, England, Italy, Japan, Canada, France, Germany, Russia, Switzerland,

Australia, China, Denmark, the Netherlands, Taiwan, the Philippines, South Africa,

Ireland, Scotland, Austria, Belgium, Mexico, Spain, and Wales. For the readers who kept it going, The Mask meant access. As Michigan subscriber and puppeteer Paul 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.”63 Unlike websites that steal 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 to materials that until then could be found only in a couple of libraries.

In one 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 in each of these cities could tracing the roads have been done with anything more than a finger.

But although the maps were of different cities, the cumulative effect, as in Italo Calvino’s

62 Eric Jon Bulson, Little Magazine, World Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 15–16.

63 Paul McPharlin to The Mask, Sept. 3, 1926.

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Invisible Cities or Niantic’s more recent location-based mobile game Pokémon Go!, was for them all to feel similar. 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.64 In this way, The Mask not only went to wherever subscribers lived, but took them to as many places as they could take it.

Juxtaposed to theaters rather than libraries or landscapes, the little magazine’s mobility was thrown into even sharper relief. Although little magazines are named for the size of their audience rather than their format, when The Mask temporarily downsized to leaflet in March 1918, Craig played on words; in an article titled “Size,” he compared the growing number of little magazines to little theatres, cautioning: “heaven forbid that we, in our modern craze for inversion, should come to consider all little things as mighty just because of their littleness!”65 Since the same “incompetents” were running both magazines and theaters at the cost of “£500 per year,” Craig mused about combining the endeavors.66 The difference, of course, was that 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 offices and mailing address, ensuring that subscribers could always reach The Mask even if The Mask couldn’t reach subscribers.67

The clinching irony was that all Craig wanted was a theater of his own, but in England.

64 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.

65 John Semar, “Size,” The Mask 8, no. 9 (November 1918): 35.

66 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.

67 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.

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As he pursued this goal, his journal stretched to new limits the gap between “theatre” as building and “Theatre” as subject. In the words of John Semar:

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.68

Here, Craig puns on “local” to suggest a provincialism that extends beyond an English theater building. Conversely, he imagines “World Theatre”—a term only just starting to circulate in the 1920s—as an arena populated with various national theater traditions in which “place” refers not to space, but to relative position. 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 funded by international subscribers without whom it could not have existed, The Mask remained preoccupied with advancing Craig’s nationalistic bid to represent England at the games.

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. Lamenting that he could not afford Caslon old Face, an English-baroque type in vogue with private presses (as well as with his nemesis, George Bernard Shaw), Craig called on subscribers to furnish the “polish necessary to give the finishing touch to our gun.”69 On another

68 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.

69 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 programmes on it. George Wolfe Plank to The Mask, Feb. 8, 1924; Stella Hanan to The Mask, Dec. 13, 1924.

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occasion, he compared the magazine to a battle flag; publishing designs by Albrecht

Dürer 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 as 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,” literally giving his enemies nothing to wave in the air.70 English subscribers took up these metaphors, but pointed them in the opposite direction.

Photographer and subscriber John H. Ahern of Hampstead wrote on his testimonial postcard: “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.”71 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.”72 By contrast, subscriber Emily Willard found the combat invigorating, saying 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.”73

70 “To The Enemies Of The Theatre,” The Mask 6, no. 1 (July 1913): 5.

71 John H. Ahern, testimonial postcard.

72 W.A.D. Englefield, testimonial postcard.

73 Willard to The Mask.

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Paradoxically, Craig’s perennial need for content to buttress the polemic pushed

The Mask to cover increasingly international theater topics, since getting the journal to

England depended as much on filling it as mailing it. Much of this content was packaged for the Anglophone reader: translations from German, French, and Italian texts made up almost ten percent of the magazine’s text, and included the first English translation of F.

T. Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto.”74 The Mask metaphorically translated Continental ideas like cubism, futurism, and fascism, and connected these ideas to European theater through Richard Wagner, Stéphane Mallarmé, Venetian costume, and Spanish drama. As he burned through material close to home, Craig began to research or commission articles on Javanese marionettes, Japanese Noh, and Indian dramatic technique. These articles conceived of a noncommercial theatrical orientalism, anticipating modernists like Yeats, who first read about Noh in The Mask.75 But while Craig’s orientalism might seem appropriative in the sense that he was bulking up his magazine in order to make a point to his English readers, his scholarly approach to European and non-European practices alike inspired intercultural transfers of knowledge: the journal subsequently experienced a boom in Japanese readers, who by 1929 made up over ten percent of subscribers.

Internationalism sometimes produced an inescapable whiff of colonialism, as when subscriber Evelyn Nisbet of Kent used her testimonial postcard to recruit Miss V. L.

Bawa in 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

74 Guidry, “Gordon Craig’s theatre magazine,” 58–61.

75 Or so Anthony Sheppard speculates. W. Anthony Sheppard, Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater (University of California Press, 2001), 74. Yeats was a Mask subscriber who collaborated with Craig to stage The Hour Glass using Craig’s screens at the Abbey Theatre in 1910. The Mask published a revised version of Yeats’ play in 1913. W. B. Yeats, “The Hour Glass,” The Mask 5, no. 4 (April 1913): 327–46.

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quite 20 years ago.”76 But Craig also made gestures to accommodate his international subscribers, eventually insisting on printing the name of each town “as spelt by its inhabitants—not as spelt by [an English] visitor.”77 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 correspondence with Lees suggests that he prioritized knowledge of English when recruiting subscribers abroad.78

As we begin to acknowledge the contradictions and limitations of an English theatrical internationalism, even for a project as mobile as The Mask, a useful 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 comparison 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 British, committee organizers did not originally imagine 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 the world.79 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

76 Evelyn Nisbet, testimonial postcard.

77 John Semar, “Foreign Notes: 1423–1923,” The Mask 9 (1923): 42. Craig also printed different recruitment postcards 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.

78 Advertisement, The Mask 12, no 4 (October 1926).

79 “The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre,” The Times, Dec. 9, 1911.

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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.”80 While international subscription sustained The Mask, the model apparently was not viable for a literal theater.

But war brought the limits of theatrical internationalism into even clearer focus, giving new contours to Craig’s military figures of speech. As Semar announced in

November 1918: “we know something about war now. Some of us have been at the front for fifteen years. I make no apology for my metaphor—it will serve.”81 During the war years, The Mask compared theater deserters to army deserters, wrote that allowing scantily clad women onstage was “on a par with the German gas poisoning,” and proclaimed that theater was “a matter of life and death to the nation—of mental life and death.”82 An editorial notice clarified the superiority of English art:

To talk of Russian, French, Italian or any Foreign Art, praising it before that of our own country, is not a whit less treacherous than is being a pro-German. The times do not allow it. And we need to strengthen every bolt of our ship, and not lightly and mischievously poo-pooh the idea that the Arts are bolts of no importance, that Art has no frontiers, is International, and that the Russians, Swedes and so forth are our friends.83

Craig’s posturing reflects his irrational fear that England would anoint a foreigner to lead the English stage—England would not, in fact, anoint anyone, but Craig never lost hope that his mother country would recognize his brilliance and offer him a theater. War also meant that Craig’s international contributor list suddenly had gone from asset to liability.

80 “Englishman,” letter to the editor, The Mask, Jan. 1928.

81 Semar, “Size,” 35.

82 John Balance, “Upon Several Things,” The Mask 7, no. 1 (July 1914): 67; John Semar, “Our Noble Theatre,” The Mask 7, no. 2 (May 1915): 185; John Balance, The Mask 8, no. 10 (November 1918): 38.

83 “Editorial Note,” The Mask 8, no. 4 (June 1918): 14.

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In a special notice, Craig renounced his foreign pseudonyms: “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.”84 The Mask balanced contributor scrapping with subscriber commemorating, patriotically publishing the names of Walter Crane,

Rupert Brooke, and Charles Frohman next to an engraving of a wreath.85 Now lacking imaginary as well as real contributors, Craig downsized The Mask and launched The

Marionnette, which he called a “performance… for Fools” rather than a journal. With no semblance of a staff, it would publish articles on one subject, and would begin with the curtain’s rise at 12.30 sharp, pointing to the magazine’s periodicity and affinity with the theater while at the same time undermining it: the first number was dated April 1, the second, March 15.86 The journal read like the ravings of a shell-shocked poet prophet, but

The Marionette valuably shuttled the more coherent if significantly reduced Mask to

Craig’s subscribers. A note appearing at the end of the first issue pointed out: “The

Marionnette is small; but with its companion, ‘The Mask’, travels far. It cannot enter all the countries and cities where ‘The Mask’, during its first six years of life, found its way: for some of these are closed by war: but the following list of places, taken from our subscriber’s list, shows that it still makes its way and finds its welcome far afield.” The list included Waco, Texas; Poona, India; Harlech, Wales; and an unspecified city in

Bolivia.87 Internationalism would continue at the level of subscribers, if not contributors.

84 “Special Notice,” The Mask 7, no. 2 (May 1915): 187.

85 “In remembrance of,” The Mask 7, no. 2 (May 1915): 185.

86 Marionnette prospectus [1918?].

87 “‘I’ll Put A Girdle Round The World In Forty… Years,’” The Marionnette 1, no. 3 (May 1918): 96.

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Despite some inevitable disruptions, it seems that in times of both war and peace,

The Mask came to you. In the second “The Art of the Theatre” dialogue, the director has just returned to London from abroad, where he has hunted, conquered, and made friends with “an absurd monster called The Theatrical.” The director compares himself to an

Arctic explorer as he assesses the theatrical activity in Europe’s warmer metropolises, from the Paris Opera to the Berlin Schauspielhaus. In a later dialogue between a “Critic” and a “Professional Performer,” the former advises the latter:

Begin by remembering that you have the disadvantage of being insular and art makes no allowances for this misfortune. 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; and even then you have not exhausted the list of places where the theatre shows more profitable activity than you are showing in London.88

This list resembles the list of places where The Mask so often boasted of circulating, knitting European metropolises with cities around the world. Reconfiguring the traditional dynamic between touring performer and sedentary spectator, Craig advises the insular theater professional to become a cultured theatergoer by traveling—or simply by reading the mobile Mask.

Today, scholars tend to think of World Theater primarily as a discipline encompassing national traditions beyond Europe and North America. Even while Craig’s journal pursued nationalistic aims, The Mask envisioned World Theater as a virtual arena where the common language was English. By representing both theatergoers and theater professionals, Craig’s journal models a different idea of World Theater than one in which

88 Allen Carric, “The English Stage In 1911. A Dialogue Between A Critic And A Professional Performer,” The Mask 3, no. 12 (April 1911): 182.

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Shakespeare or Ibsen is translated and toured around the globe, or another in which orientalist appropriations are carried out by modernists like Yeats, Brecht, and Beckett.89

That The Mask united subscribers in so many countries updates the longstanding metaphor of the theatrum mundi: here, the world is actually the world, and men and women are not merely players, but readers. In 1912, painter William Rothenstein of

London hastened to enclose a letter with his subscription: “It is such a delight to see [The

Mask], to handle it, to read it.”90 In the twenty-first century, anyone with an Internet connection can see or read The Mask by logging onto one of the many digital archives for modernist little magazines.91 But those who want to handle it must travel to one of several hundred libraries in North America, Europe, or Australia. No longer does The

Mask brave land and sea to travel to subscribers.

89 For a version of this second strain, see Carrie Preston, Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 201.

90 William Rothenstein to The Mask, 1912.

91 For a complete list, see Monoskop. https://monoskop.org/Avant-garde_and_modernist_magazines.

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