Book Description

Excerpt from The Romance of the Theatre There exists no complete history of the American theatre. William Dunlap, in 1832, put out what he called a history of the American theatre; but 1832 was more than eighty years ago, and Dunlap's history, though honest in intent, was far from accurate in con tent. Some thirty years ago George Seilhamer began to give to the world what promised to be an authentic history of the American theatre, the sources of infor mation which he used being chiefly the files of Colonial and Revolutionary newspapers; three volumes had been issued and the story brought up to 1800 when Mr. Seilhamer died. N 0 soul yet has been found brave enough to take up this task where it was then laid down. Brander Matthews, Lawrence Hutton, William Winter and, more recently, Montrose Moses have, however, made noteworthy contributions to the literature of this subject and to them, as to Seilhamer, Dunlap, and many others the present volume is deeply indebted. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.