The Stage in the Year 1900: A Souvenir (De Luxe Edition, Limited and Numbered)

A$200 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books

HOOPER, W. Eden Joseph KNIGHT. The Stage in the Year 1900: A Souvenir. Being a Collection of Photogravure Plates Portraying the Leading Players and Playwrights of the Day and a History of the Stage during the Victorian Era. London: Spottiswoode Co., Ltd., 1901. Thick 4to (25.5 × 19.5 cm). Publisher's full red morocco, profusely gilt decorated. Spine lettered in gilt with five raised bands and gilt-decorated compartments. Upper edge gilt, others uncut. Gilt dentelles. xiv, [250] pp.; frontispiece and 99 further photogravure portrait plates, followed by History of the Stage during the Victorian Era by Joseph Knight, with separate title page, iv, 184 pp. Édition de Luxe, limited to 300 copies. Copy number 45 of 300. Brass clasp present at time of binding; now absent. The year 1900 was both an ending and a threshold — the close of a Victorian theatrical era that had transformed the English stage from the disreputable fringe of respectable society into one of its central cultural institutions, and the opening of an Edwardian period that would consolidate and extend those gains. In the course of Queen Victoria's long reign, the theatre had been shaped by actor-managers of extraordinary authority — Henry Irving, Beerbohm Tree, John Hare, the Bancrofts — and had produced a repertoire ranging from the spectacular historical productions at the Lyceum to the drawing-room comedies of Pinero and Jones, from the Irish plays of Boucicault to the subversive wit of Oscar Wilde. This volume wa

• Binding: Hardcover

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