¹ “An artist's life is like cigar smoke—so obvious, so pungent, and so vanishing.” The quotation, dated “Boston [,] 11 Maggio 1886 [or 1888?],” appears in one of several otherwise indistinguishable T. R. Sullivan notebooks among the collected papers of Thomas Russell Sullivan at the American Antiquarian Society. Further references to Sullivan Papers are to this collection.

² Rice, Charles, Dramatic Register of the Patent Theatres, 7 vol. (Mss., 1835–1837)Google Scholar and Diaries, 2 vol. (Mss., 1840 and 1850)Google Scholar, Harvard Theatre Collection. Edited portions of the Dramatic Register were published by Sprague, Arthur C. and Shuttleworth, Bertram as The London Theatre in the Eighteen-thirties (London, 1950)Google Scholar. In the first two volumes of the Register, Rice used his space and energy to copy published newspaper reviews of plays he had seen. After the second volume, he continued the practice but added his own criticisms as well.

³ Cf. Brown, Eluned, ed., The London Theatre, 1811–1866: selections from the diary of Henry Crabb Robinson (London, 1966)Google Scholar.

⁴ Shattuck, Charles H., The Hamlet of Edwin Booth (Urbana, Illinois, 1969)Google Scholar.

⁵ Sullivan, born in Boston on 21 November 1849, was the son of Rev. Thomas Russell and Charlotte Caldwell (Blake) Sullivan. After completing his education, he lived in Europe from 1870–73), then returned to Boston where, until 1888, he worked as clerk and cashier in Lee, Higginson & Co., a banking and brokerage firm. From 1888 on, his work became exclusively literary. Among the comedies alluded to in the Pilot article are Midsummer Madness (1880) and two works translated from the French, The Spark (1879) and Papa Perrichon (1880). The novel is probably Roses of Shadow, which appeared in 1885.

⁶ Sullivan, T[homas]. Russell, My First Acquaintance with Salvini (unpublished typescript: Sullivan Papers, n.d.), p. 1Google Scholar.

⁷ Ibid., p. 2.

⁸ Sullivan says in the introduction of his typescript biography that in 1882, after his first full evening with Salvini, he knew that “to know him really well,” he must at least “listen in Italian” (Ts., p. 4). He adds that after he had mastered the rudiments, the language “opened out like the sea” but for a long time he was unable to “plunge into the sea, and come up” (Ibid.). He then sums up his learning experience with Italian: “Yet before very long I could write a respectable Italian letter; by slow degrees acquiring a working vocabulary. Frequent visits to Italy helped me in this. I lived surrounded by dictionaries and phrase books, gradually improving my style. But to the last hour, writing a long, familiar Italian letter was to me a task, how difficult I think Salvini never knew” (Ibid.).

⁹ Ibid., p. 1.

¹⁰ Quoted in T[homas]. Sullivan, Russell, Macaroni with Salvini (unpublished manuscript: Sullivan Papers; 17 01 1881, and 27 03 1881), p. 14Google Scholar. From 1880 on, Salvini alone read his role in Italian; the rest of the cast used the English text of the play. In his Leaves from My Autobiography (London, 1893)Google Scholar. Salvini states that the proprietor of the Globe Theatre, Boston, convinced him that with this method of performance the audience could “concern itself only with following [Salvini] with the aid of the play books in both languages” and would thus “not have to pay any attention to the others, whose words it [could] understand” (p. 75).

¹¹ T[homas]. Sullivan, Russell, The World's Othello (unpublished MS, Harvard Theatre Collection, n.d.), p. 1Google Scholar.

¹² Ibid., p. 2.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 3.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 4.

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 5.

¹⁷ Shakespeare, William, “Othello,” The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Craig, Hardin (Chicago, 1961), III, iii, 90–92Google Scholar. All further line citations are to this text.

¹⁸ Sullivan, World's Othello, p. 3.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 8.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Ibid., p. 4.

²² Ibid., p. 7.

²³ Ibid., p. 5.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 8.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 9.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ Ibid., p. 10.

²⁸ Ibid., p. 11.

²⁹ Sullivan, Macaroni, p. 1.

³⁰ Ibid., p. 2.

³¹ William Winter, the New York Tribune reviewer, thought well of Booth's Othello but called the other interpretation an “Italian view of the Moor …which makes him a snorting animal in his love and a ferocious beast in his jealousy” (Winter, William, Life and Art of Edwin Booth [New York, 1893], p. 246)Google Scholar. On another occasion he wrote that Salvini in the role was “an incarnation of animal fury, huge, wild, dangerous, and horrible, but … a consistently common and bestial” (Shakespeare on the Stage [New York, 1911], p. 290)Google Scholar. He probably summed up his reaction when he said that such actors had “substituted a paroxysm for a distinct, round, beautiful ideal” (Life and Art, p. 260).—The New York Evening Post critic, J. Rankin Towse, an Englishman himself, considered Salvini's Moor more realistic than the “traditional English stage Othello (generally interpreted scholastically by uninspired performers).” He felt that to adhere literally to the text was to present only Shakespeare's Moor, an anomalous creation of “tenderness, courtesy, credulous simplicity, magnanimity, and a liberal allowance of [Shakespeare's] own poetic and civilized imagination” (John Rankin Towse, Sixty Years of the Theatre [New York, 1916], pp. 159–160)Google Scholar.—Clara Morris, for a time a member of Salvini's English-speaking company, recalls how a Salvini performance had evoked from her the response, “Ugh! you splendid brute!” She further adds that her words, spoken loudly enough to be audible, had received a response from some other onlooker: “Make it a beast, m'am, and I'm with you” (Morris, Clara, “Tommaso Salvini,” McClure's Magazine, XVIII [12 1901], 177)Google Scholar,—Edwin Booth, though in 1886 he finally played Iago to Salvini's Othello, was not sympathetic to the interpretation. In 1883, writing to William Winter from Vienna, he dismissed the Austrian critics' discontent with his fifth act: “They want the howler here,” he observed but added—with obvious allusion to Salvini's method—“I don't care. They can't make me yank Desdemona about the floor like a clothes bag” (Watermeier, Daniel J., Between Actor and Critic: Selected Letters of Edwin Booth and William Winter [Princeton, New Jersey, 1971], p. 241)Google Scholar.

³² Sullivan, World's Othello, final oversize-leaf page, n.p.