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William B. Wood and the “Pathos of Paternalism”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2010

Bruce A. McConachie
Bruce A. McConachie
Affiliation:
Director of American Studies and Associate Professor of Theatre at the College of William and Mary
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Extract

Theatre historians have been kind to William B. Wood, actor and co-manager of the Chestnut Street Theatre in the early nineteenth century. Reese D. James, in his Old Drury of Philadelphia: A History of the Philadelphia Stage, 1800–1835 (1932), set the sentimental tone that subsequent historians would echo. Relying extensively on Wood's Personal Recollections of the Stage (1855), James lamented that the Chestnut Theatre, following the breakup of Warren and Woods' management in 1826, became “a body without a soul.” In his Theatre U.S.A. (1959), Barnard Hewitt quoted copiously from Wood's Recollections, allowing the co-manager the final word on the deleterious effects of the star system. Calvin Primer's two articles published in the 1960s on Warren and Wood continued the tradition, picturing both managers as the unfortunate victims of rapacious stars.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , May 1987 , pp. 1 - 14
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1987

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References

NOTES

1 See James (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), pp. 1–68; Theatre U.S.A., 1668–1957 (New York: McGraw, Hill), pp. 152–58; Primer, , “A Theatre and its Audience,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 91 (January 1967), 72–79Google Scholar, and “William Warren's Financial Arrangements with Travelling Stars — 1805–1829,” Theatre Survey, 6 (November 1965), 83–90. The full title of Wood's autobiography is Personal Recollections of the Stage, Embracing Notice of Actors, Authors and Auditors, During a Period of Forty Years (Philadelphia: H.C. Baird, 1855).Google Scholar

2 Regarding the success of Price and Hamblin, see Hewitt, Barnard, “‘King Stephen’ of the Park and Drury Lane,” in The Theatrical Manager in England and America, ed. Donohue, Joseph Jr., (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 87–142Google Scholar; and Shank, Theodore, “Theatre for the Majority: Its Influence on a Nineteenth-Century American Theatre,” Educational Theatre Journal, 11 (October 1959), 188–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On paternalism, see Sennett's, Authority (New York: Random House, 1980), pp. 50–83.Google Scholar

3 Sennett, pp. 71, 84.

4 Wood, p. 92. Durang, , History of the Philadelphia Stage Between the Years 1749–1855, 7 vols. (1868; rpt., Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilm), 11Google Scholar, chapter 66: 142. See also Famous Actors and Actresses of the American Stage, ed. William C. Young, 2 vols. (New York: R.R. Bowker, 1975), 11: 1202 – 05, for an early biography of Wood.

5 Murdock, James E., The Stage, or Recollections of Actors and Acting from an Experience of Fifty Years (1880; rpt., N.Y.: Benjamin Blom, 1969), p. 370Google Scholar; Durang, V, chapt. 87: 274.

6 Durang, 11, chapt. 66: 141; quoied in Famous Actors and Actresses of the American Stage, 11: 1205; Wood, p. 466; Durang, 11, chapt. 66: 144.

7 Wood, pp. 198, 316–17.

8 Wood, pp. 296–97,138, 402. Warren, William, in his Journal entry for April 23, 1822 (MS, Howard University Library)Google Scholar, noted the repeat performance.

9 Chestnut company intermarriages are discussed most fully in The Warren Family, an anonymous pamphlet in the Harvard Theatre Collection. Mary Durang, daughter of the choreographer-historian, recalled, in a letter, only one actor in the Chestnut company of the early 1820s “who did not belong to the theatre permanently.” Durang's letter is cited in Ireland, Joseph, Extra-Illustrated Records of the New York Stage (1867, MS, Harvard Theatre Collection), I, Pt. 7, p. 182.Google Scholar Wood, pp. 325, 348.

10 On the Wood-Wemyss dispute, see Durang, 11, chapt. 5: 173; and Wemyss, , Theatrical Biography, or the Life of An Actor-Manager (Glasgow: R. Griffin, 1848), pp. 70–78.Google Scholar Durang, 11, chapt. 5: 172.

11 Durang, 11, chapt. 5: 173; Wemyss, pp. 80–90.

12 Durang, 11, chapt. 30: 227; Wemyss, p. 92.

13 Durang, 11, chapt. 57: 127; 11, chapt. 66: 143; 11, chapt. 5: 173.

14 Durang, 11, chapt.5: 173. Primer's articles point up some of these problemsat the Chestnut in the 20s. In the 1822–23 season, for instance, the ratio of star appearances to stock performances was 63 to 16. For 1827–28, a more typical season of the 20s, the ratio was still 127–63—just about 2 to I for star appearances.

15 Wood, p. 332; Warren quoted in James, p. 49.

16 Wood, pp. 348, 349.

17 Wemyss, p. 139; Warren (December 6, 1828); and Wood, p. 353. Also see James, pp. 55–59, for more details of managerial problems during the two depressed seasons.

18 Warren (April 25, 1828). See James, pp. 57–63, and Primer's article on Warren and the stars for more details of the 1827–31 period.

19 Wood, pp. 343, 393, 391.

20 See Wood's discussion, pp. 436–55.

21 Wood, pp. 448, 196, 440, 267.

22 Wood, pp. 451, 436, 446, 438.