Tag: Theater
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The Very Considerable Merit (in a Certain Cast of Parts) of Harriet Taplin Chambers
You never know who you’ll meet when you catalog a rare book: a pair of conjoined twins, a dog-sledding bigamist, the terrible-tempered Mister Bang … This year I was fortunate enough to encounter Harriet Taplin Chambers in the pages of an eighteenth-century copy of Thomas Hull’s tragedy Henry the Second, or, The Fall of Rosamond,…
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The “Theatricals in Philadelphia” Scrapbooks: Or, How Yesterday’s Old Stuff Became the Treasure Trove of Today
Written by Siel Agugliaro If you work in an archival repository, you know that no matter how uninteresting or randomly assembled a collection may appear, it probably meant a lot to whoever decided to put it together. Archivists are also used to dealing with the hyperbolic language of the auctioneers from whom collections are sometimes…
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“Heavenly Monsters”: Horace Howard Furness, William Shak(e)spe(a)re, and the Furness Libraries
Written by Siel Agugliaro “You could not believe that he was true. He was as a picture, or as a character of imagination.” When author John Jay Chapman first met famous Shakespeare scholar Horace Howard Furness, he could hardly contain his astonishment. Claustrophobically surrounded by the books and Shakespeariana of his study in rural Wallingford,…
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Miniature Worlds Acting Big: Toy Theaters at the Kislak Center
“Ocean—strip of water in groove 2; strip of shore, groove 4; wreck, groove 1, right of stage; raft, groove 3, right; Crusoe A, groove 5, left. [Curtain rises]”. When it is performed on a toy theater, the reconstruction of Robinson Crusoe’s shipwreck requires a certain number of technical details. A good staging is about the…
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The Queer Career of Clyde Fitch
Written by Siel Agugliaro At the beginning of the last century, a playwright had four of his works being produced in Broadway at the same time. He was the first American dramatist to be regularly (and successfully) produced abroad. He wrote an impressive amount of plays, from society plays and historical dramas to farces and…
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Ghosts on the Shelf: Or, the Long-Awaited Return of Charles Durang’s “History of The Philadelphia Stage Between the Years 1749 and 1855” (But, Wait, Wasn’t that Thompson Westcott’s?)
Written by Siel Agugliaro Historians of American drama know it well: there is hardly a more precious source on 19th-century Philadelphia theater than Charles Durang’s work dedicated to the history of the city stage in the years between 1749 and 1855. A painstakingly detailed account of the theatrical activities that took place in Philadelphia over…
Unique at Penn 