Prior to its debut on Broadway at the Broadhurst Theatre in 1976, the play “A Matter of Gravity,” starring Katharine Hepburn, did a tryout run at Boston’s Colonial Theater. One of the attendees was Boston University Professor, Herbert B. Myron, who sent her a letter about her Boston performance. The Theater Autograph File (MS Thr…
Mr. Handel takes the Oaths
In a rare document recently added to the John Milton and Ruth Neils Ward Collection at the Harvard Theatre Collection, the long journey from youthful economic immigrant to established middle-aged citizen is traced in just a few lines of text….
You’ve Got Mail: “I have the honour to report further explorations”
Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), best known for his novels Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, spent the final four years of his life on his estate near the village of Vailima in Samoa. Over the course of these years, he wrote 45 letters to his dear friend…
You’ve Got Mail: “So do the Sacred Writings shew still another usefulness”
Sherlockians have long recognized the wisdom and practical utility of the “Sacred Writings,” the four novels and fifty-six stories that comprise the Sherlock Holmes canon. This letter from Baker Street Irregulars founder Christopher Morley (1890-1957) to Edgar W. Smith (1894-1960), a vice-president of the General Motors Export Company and prominent Baker Street Irregular, illustrates a…
You’ve Got Mail: “These long dyings are dreadful”
Grief overcame members of the Twenty-eighth Congregational Society of Boston as Deacon Samuel Joseph May read aloud a letter from their ailing minister, the Unitarian abolitionist Theodore Parker: “I shall not speak to you to-day; for this morning, a little after four o’clock, I had a slight attack of bleeding in the lungs or throat.”…
Edward Lear exhibition opens
Houghton is pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibition, “The Natural History of Edward Lear,” guest-curated by Robert McCracken Peck, Curator of Art and Artifacts and Senior Fellow at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University. The exhibition will be on view in Houghton’s Edison and Newman Room through August 18, 2012….
New on OASIS in April
Finding aids for 11 newly cataloged collections have been added to the OASIS database this month, including photos of burlesque performers and the papers of Richard Brinsley Sheridan….