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The Edwin Booth Promptbook Collection at the Players: A Descriptive Catalog

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2009

L. Terry Oggel
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Extract

For several years Edwin Booth had nurtured the idea of establishing an American counterpart to England's famous Garrick Club in London, and by January of 1888, when he had focused the idea well enough to broach the subject formally, he invited fifteen friends to become its “Incorporators,” among them such representatives of the arts and letters as Brander Matthews, Laurence Hutton, and Samuel L. Clemens. Within the year the idea became reality, and The Players Club at 16 Gramercy Park in New York was officially opened.

Type
Research Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , May 1973 , pp. 72 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1973

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References

Notes

Mr. Oggel takes this opportunity to express his gratitude to the Council of Academic Deans of Northern Illinois University for financial aid, to the Members of the Bibliographical Society of Northern Illinois for continued encouragement and support, and most especially to Mr. Louis Rachow for making this material available to him and for assisting Mr. Oggel in many personal and professional ways.

1 “Dedication”, MS. at The Players. See also Winter, William, Life and An of Edwin Booth (New York, 1894), pp. 205ffGoogle Scholar.

2 Performing Arts Review, II, 4 (1971), 717Google Scholar.

3 As used in this catalog, “promptbook” means, most simply, a playbook which is based on a text of a play and specially altered for the purpose of producing the play. Usually this means a marked copy of a full text, but it also includes such sub-species as cutbooks, partbooks, studybooks, workbooks, preparation books, souvenir books, and the like, some of which may not be marked but which certainly are altered or annotated for the purposes of production. Hence, the figure “155” refers to the total of individual books in the collection, whether physically connected to another book (like the Surry partbook which is fastened into the Richard III promptbook in No. 64) or not (like the twenty partbooks for Richard III in No. 66, which are all separate). They have been described in only 87 different entries since several of them are catalogued together, housed together, and are clearly meant to be used together. Seven of the entries are multiple-book entries: Nos. 28, 29, 58, 64, 66, 67, and 78.

4 Possible exceptions are Nos. 13, 37, 41, 73 and 87. These five J. B. Booth books are included, however, on the theory that since the son was particularly close to the father in the last years of the elder's life, he might easily have acquired, not to say even used, all of his father's books. The evidence of No. 42 gives strength to this theory.

5 “Holograph” in this catalog simply means “handwritten.”

6 Rufus Dawes (1803–1859), lawyer, lay-preacher, and author, wrote and published at least one drama (Athenia of Damascus, 1839), as well as fiction and poems. In 1839 he published Nix's Mate, a two-volume “historical romance” set in Boston in 1688–89 and with the same characters and plot as those in the drama. The play is quite clearly contemporaneous with the novel since the Dramatis Personae of the promptbook lists a Mr. Cartlitch as the actor who played the title role in the original cast at Boston's National Theatre. Clapp, W. W. Jr., in A Record of the Boston Stage (Boston, 1853)Google Scholar, refers to a Mr. Cartlitch as contributing to the success of the theatre about 1840 (p. 404). In the same Dramatis Personae, a Mr. Clapp is listed as playing a midshipman.

7 They provide some interesting comparisons. In the first two, which Booth copied, the handwriting is careful, almost professionally neat. In Sylvain, Booth's writing is much less so. Searches for sylvain in bibliographies and histories of French and American drama reveal no clues as to authorship. Documents at The Players indicate that Booth gave the promptbook to William Seymour in 1869, from whose estate The Players eventually acquired it.

8 The catalog cards, in most cases, follow in turn the form established by Shattuck, Charles H. in The Shakespeare Promptbooks (Urbana, 1965)Google Scholar.

9 First played in 1753. See Quinn, Arthur H., A History of the American Drama from the Beginning to the Civil War (New York, 1943), p. 90Google Scholar.