HERSEY TELLS ANECDOTES OF THEATRICAL HISTORY

Anecdotes of eighteenth century Blue Laws, when theatre productions were banned in Boston and circumspect managers had to advertise "Hamlet", "Romeo and Juliet", and the like as "moral lectures", were related by Mr. F. W. C. Hersey '99 in his stereopticon lecture on the Harvard Theatre Collection at the Boston Public Library yesterday afternoon.

Mr. Hersey also brought out the fact that Bostonians were accused of pseudo-culture long before the day of Hampden and Clive; he quoted the memoirs of an 1850 dramatist who bewailed the ill fortune of Shakespeare, Sheridan, and the like, when any cheap production with glitter, blare, and tinsel packed the house.

The lecture was an attempt, by means of slides, to give Botsonians an idea of the scope and value of the largest theatre collection in the world. He traced the rise of the theatre in England and America from the Elizabethan days of the Garrick down through Edmund Kean and Sir Henry Irving to the twentieth century with Cyril Maude and Julia Marlowe.

Mr. Hersey exhibited a picture of the Howard Athenaeum taken in the 1840's, when it was being changed from a church to a theatre. A photograph of the oldest Amerecan playbill, printed in 1750, showed how far ahead of Puritanic Boston was New York, since the first Boston theatre, the Federal, dates back to 1794. A copy of the Ford Theatre program for April 14, 1865, was a sharp reminder of Lincoln's assassination.

Mr. Hersey ended with a plea to the audience to collect theatrical material and to contribute to the collection wherever possible.