Tag Archive: 0theatre

On the evening of 27 April 1848, at St James’s Theatre in London, a special charity performance of Colman’s comedy The Heir-at-Law took place, to raise funds for the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution (founded 1814 and still in existence today). It was billed as an ‘Artists’ Amateur Performance’, and all the male roles were taken […]

Sometimes, as a bookseller, you get the chance to buy back a book you have sold before. This happened to me just recently, and here is the book, a wonderful collection of caricatures of leading lights in contemporary Russian theatre, ballet, and opera, from 1916. I sold this copy in 2015 and have not seen […]

‘Without a play-bill’, stated The Tatler in September 1830, ‘no true play-goer can be comfortable.  If the performers are new to him, he cannot dispense with knowing who they are: if old, there are the names of the characters to learn, and the relationships of the dramatis personæ: and if he is acquainted with all […]

One of the items in my recent Theatre list is this playbill, which advertises an important performance of Romeo and Juliet in 1832. If you look closely, you will see that the role of Romeo, ‘for this night only’, was taken by Ellen Tree (1805–1880; Kean as she subsequently became, on her marriage to the […]

Yesterday I published my annual summer Theatre list, and I thought I would share here details of one of the items featured. It is a series of etchings published to commemorate the first Cambridge Greek Play, from 1883. ‘The tradition of performing a Greek play in Cambridge goes back to 1882, when the very first […]

As I wrote last week, I am currently cataloguing new material for a Theatre list, which will go out next month. I love lithography, and so was particularly interested in researching this, from 1823: It’s an apparently unrecorded publication: four fine large hand-coloured lithograph portraits of four leading performers of the day, each accompanied by […]