It might be impossible to count all of the actors in all of the productions of Shakespeare’s nearly forty plays over the past few centuries. Our extensive collection of postcards features nearly two hundred actors (“players”) and actor-managers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who appeared in productions Shakespeare’s plays. Some names you may recognize, and some may be new to you. The collection features iconic persons such as Sir Henry Irving and Dame Ellen Terry, and a litany of their successors such as Lily Brayton and Lewis Waller. Seeing the identities of the actors playing various roles will surely raise interesting questions and comments from all degrees of Shakespeare scholars and theater enthusiasts. Either way, surely there’s something of interest for all in our collection.

Our bibliography offers an extensive array of titles written by and about the players in the postcard collection. The early edition by Walter Browne and E. De Roy Koch, Who’s Who on the Stage, 1908, serves as a fantastic starting point for research into many of these players as many of them were alive and working when it was written. Also, many of the biographies on the player-specific pages (like those linked in the paragraph above) on the site feature first-hand accounts or anecdotes from the players themselves about their craft and experience on stage. New on the site is a selection of audio and video clips featuring some of the prominent actors on the site.

Take a look around! The Players menu (under “The Postcards” tab) above is organized by last name.

In the two featured images to the right, you can see (A) the versatile Lily Brayton as Kate in a 1904 production of The Taming of the Shrew, and (B) acting team and couple Sir Martin Harvey and Nina de Silva in a production of Hamlet.

Our collection features images of productions of many of Shakespeare’s most memorable plays. We encourage you to browse through the postcards to view the variations in players and productions. The plays are organized according to the genres listed in Shakespeare first published volume, the 1623 First Folio—Comedy, History, and Tragedy. There are three more authoritative folios of Shakespeare (1632, 1663, 1685) which provide interesting counterpoints for comparison and discussion.

THE GENRES OF SHAKESPEARE:

Comedy may indeed provoke much laughter, but that isn’t the key component. One general sense of Elizabethan comedy is that it throws order into disarray at the beginning but concludes with some kind of union (marriage) and a reconstitution of social order. These include popularly performed plays such as As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Twelfth Night.

Tragedy can be identified, in the most general sense, by the dramatic fall of a noble character from prosperity to misfortune or death due to some error in judgment, serious mishap, or character flaw. Shakespeare’s tragedies like Othello and Julius Caesar more or less follow this classical model but, in many ways, like Hamlet, they transcend, complicate, or dispel the model completely. Notice also how the titles of the Tragedy plays differ from those of the Comedies.

A Shakespearean History play is one which is based on the legendary events of English monarchs in the Middle Ages (King John) leading up to the Tudors (Henry VIII) as retold by contemporary chroniclers. Unlike the other genres, many of Shakespeare’s history play titles begin with “The Life of – .” Shakespeare did not fictionalize every single monarchy, just those which he, his audiences, and his patrons found most compelling and relevant. There are two grand sequences in his History plays: the First Tetralogy (Henry VI, Parts 1-3 and Richard III), and the Henriad (Richard II, Henry IV, Parts 1-2, Henry V). The First Tetralogy was written prior to the Henriad although it covers the chronological periods after the reign of Henry V.

Some plays, like The Tempest, Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, and The Merchant of Venice are considered Comedies in the First Folio—they end in marriages—but are considered to be much more nuanced or “tragic” than a traditional comedy. These are often called “problem plays” or “tragicomedies.” Furthermore, plays such as Richard III and Richard II are called Tragedies in the Folio (and indeed might be read as such), but are listed under the History genre and are normally considered History plays.

For more information, Susan Synder’s chapter, “The Genres of Shakespeare’s Plays,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare offers a nuanced discussion of this contentious and lasting topic of interest.

Below is a shortcut to the play menus. You can also reach them under “The Postcards” tab above.

COMEDY

HISTORY

TRAGEDY

The postcards featured here are: (A) a 1911 production of Romeo & Juliet featuring Phyllis Neilson-Terry and Vernon Steel; (B) a 1904 production of The Tempest featuring Nora Kerin and Basil Gill; and (C) a scene from a production of Henry V starring Lewis Waller and Madge Titheradge.

In our bibliography, we’ve included a list of the most used and studied Shakespeare editions – i.e. the Oxford Shakespeare, the Arden Shakespeare, the RSC Shakespeare, etc. Pick up any of these, or their accompanying critical editions, from your library or bookstore to get a sense of the discussions around Shakespeare’s characters and how they’ve been interpreted over the years. Some of the players featured on our postcards were integral to shaping modern interpretations of and some of the best scholarship around certain characters, like Sir Henry Irving‘s Shylock or Constance Collier‘s Cleopatra.

Please search “The Postcards” menu above for a full array of our postcard images of Shakespeare’s memorable characters. You can access characters by name as they are listed with their corresponding plays, organized by genre. Also, you can quickly access them here:

COMEDY

HISTORY

TRAGEDY

If you would like to browse all of our characters, click here: #Characters

The postcard featured to the right depicts the incomparable Sir Henry Beerbohm Tree as the Scottish king Macbeth.

WHO MADE THESE CARDS?

Some of the more famous publishers of these cards were also major publishers of postcards as a whole. Featured in our collection, some of the giants of the postcard industry include Percy Guttenberg, Rotary, Raphael Tuck, C. W. Faulkner, and J. Beagles & Co. Guttenberg had a monopoly on the postcard publishing industry for performances in Manchester—second only to London in the volume of Shakespeare stagings in England. His “Revival Series” for the Queen’s Theatre in Manchester is well-represented here. The Rotary Photographic Company Ltd. was active in London between 1897 and 1916 and published an astonishing volume of postcards including some famous images of Ellen Terry and Henry Irving in The Merchant of Venice. Marlis Schweitzer, in her book Transatlantic Broadway: The Infrastructural Politics of Global Performance (2015), discusses the power of postcards to serve as tools for imperialist enterprises at the turn of the century. the fact that so many of these cards featured Shakespeare raises many questions.

HOW POPULAR WERE THESE CARDS?

The postcards were sold in a variety of places—often alongside other popular cards featuring landscape scenes and cityscapes. Many were sold at gift shops and stores. In 1911, one post office reported selling over seventeen million postage stamps destined to be stuck to millions of postcards. In his article, “Shakespeare for a Penny,” Rusche suggests that even if a fraction of the nearly 735 million cards sold in England in 1906 featured Shakespeare, that would still an enormous amount of Shakespeare proliferating the country at the time (22). The messages on the backs of many of the cards suggest that many of these cards were sold at the theaters themselves during performances. They functioned, in this way, as mini-advertisements for the shows. If you notice, some of the cards in our collection feature performance schedules on the backs so that playgoers would know when their favorite plays would be showing and actors playing in them. Some people would even take these cards to the shows to get autographs from their favorite matinee idols such as Lewis Waller, who we might compare to a Leonardo DiCaprio in today’s world. Many people, Rusche observes, traded postcards with one another—for either sending or collecting—which is how he says that he came into possession of much of his collection.

THE IMPACT OF WWI

The time span of our collection stops in the year 1914. World War I signaled a major shift for the postcard industry, especially the so-called “golden age” of postcards, for various reasons. First, consumer needs changed as war was waged. Second, Germany was one of the major producers of the chrome lithography used in the beautiful glossy images and was the location of some of the major holding companies for such publishers as Rotary (Neue Photographische Gesellschaft). However, once Britain declared war, these associations were severed in the name of patriotism. After this severance, materials used in the production of postcards changed considerably as national funds went toward the war effort. Although the production of stage plays in England generally declined in 1914, Anslem Heinrich notes in his essay, “Reclaiming Shakespeare: 1914-1918,” that some of the major names, like Terry, Forbes-Robertson, Tree, and Benson, continued to perform Shakespeare, especially some of the more nationalistic plays from the History canon on stage and on the radio. Benson reputedly staged a rousing performance of Henry V at the conclusion of his popular Stratford Summer Festival on the same day that Britain declared war on Germany. Heinrich gives evidence of an array of Shakespeare which continued to be produced, in various ways, during the war. Histories and Tragedies were configured on stage in England and on the battlefront, often in snippets, to convey nationalistic pride. Comedies were staged and broadcast across the channels to raise the national spirit. The “national hero” Shakespeare, nonetheless, was often—and still is—appropriated for patriotic purposes.

Read more about world events and the performance history of the players in “Moments of Note.”

For more information and an in-depth analysis of the impact of the postcards during this period, please read Harry Rusche’s Preface to Shakespeare & the Players.

The three postcards images to the right show (1) Charles Doran as Brutus in Julius Caesar, (2) Annie Russell as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and (3) Halliwell Hobbes and Matheson Lang as Tybalt and Romeo in Romeo and Juliet.

COMPOSITION COURSES

The postcard collection can be useful in first year writing courses as students have written reflectively about how the distribution of the postcards may have affected how audiences a century later experience Shakespeare. At Emory, our First Year Writing program allows graduate student instructors the chance to create course themes and build writing courses around key writing concepts such as audience, genre, rhetorical situation, discourse community, and conversation. Courses on the rhetoric of images, on voyeurism, on disability representations, and on re-writing Shakespeare have all utilized the postcard collection in different ways. Students may be asked to:

• Reflect on the audiences of the postcards then (when they were produced) compared to now;
• Write about the genre of postcard as a mode of communication anticipating the genres of text messaging and social media today;
• Analyze themselves as actors in the process of interpretation as they gaze or stare at the images a century later.

LITERATURE, THEATER, HISTORY COURSES

The postcards in the collection have been used in classrooms across the disciplines and we want to continue to encourage new ways of incorporating this site into dynamic instruction:

• Literature courses to talk about notions of race, of gender, and of disability, particularly in how they intersect in Shakespeare’s work;
• Theater Studies courses have used the collection in thinking through stage design (particularly in the work of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree), costuming, and Shakespeare in performance.
• Business courses might conduct analyses of the postcards as advertisements for shows;
• History courses have utilized the postcard collection in a myriad of ways by looking at the history of the theater in London and New York, of these postcards and the images as representations of their historical moments, and so much more;
• Art History courses may discuss the materiality of the postcards and the history of photography. Curators can design exhibits around the postcards in the collection.

IMAGE DESCRIPTIONS

Instructors and students may utilize the postcard collection, and the site itself in a variety of ways. In the past, students have worked to provide descriptions of the postcard images as a well as transcriptions of the handwriting on the backs of many of them. The process of describing images, as many will notice, presents a unique set of challenges for students and researchers alike. One must negotiate between current descriptors of items in the image versus descriptors in use at the time. This is particularly challenging for scholars describing images of such figures as Matheson Lang or E. Harcourt Williams, who both play the role of Othello with their faces painted in black makeup. Likewise, one may find it difficult to describe certain poses and costuming particulars, and to determine how much description is too much, when one is not familiar with the staging traditions of the period. But then again, describing the images in a language familiar to us in the 21st Century may have its own merits as well. For more information about how image descriptions and alternative benefits everyone, and how you can add your own, please read more here.

RESEARCH WITH US

Dr. Harry Rusche’s original digital project has long been admired as a pioneering work of digital scholarship and been referenced many times in such titles as:

Michael Best, “Shakespeare on the Internet and in Digital Media” The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts, Eds. Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete, and Ramona Wray, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2011. 558-76.

Michael Best, “Shakespeare and the Electronic Text,” A Concise Companion to Shakespeare and the Text, Ed. Andrew Murphy, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 145-64.

Marc Shell, Talking the Walk and Walking the Talk: A Rhetoric of Rhythm, New York: Fordham UP. 2015.

Dieter Mehl, “Shakespeare Reference Books,” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, Eds. Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 297-314.

Sheila T. Cavanagh and Kevin A. Quarmby, “‘The World Together Joins:’ Electronic Shakespearean Collaborations,” The Shakespearean International Yearbook, Vol. 14: Special Section, Digital Shakespeares, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. 117-32.

CONTACT US

Also, please let us know by sending us a note about how you’ve used or would like to use Shakespeare and the Players in your research and teaching.

We would love for you to use our images for your teaching and research. Please make sure you read our policy about using and documenting the images on the site.

The postcard images to the right feature (a) Phyllis Neilson-Terry as Juliet in a production of Romeo and Juliet, and (2) Ella Thornton, Miss Darragh, and Phyllis Relph in Antony and Cleopatra.

“Shakespeare & the Players” may look new, but its origins are quite old, dating back to the early days of the web and public digital scholarship.

When Dr. Harry Rusche, English professor and Shakespeare scholar, began the site with the help of a handful of graduate students in the 1990s, he envisioned a practical, simple way of exhibiting his extensive and antique postcard collection to the world beyond his Emory office. For years Rusche had been collecting postcards of actors in Shakespeare productions at the turn of the 20th century. Wanting a scholarly component, he developed a critical apparatus for the collection that stands firmly beside those published in physical books (this appears as the “Preface” on the new site).

With this, Shakespeare & the Players came to life, but Rusche was far from finished. He had begun to teach courses dealing with even more images of Shakespearean performance. This lead him to create another site and pair it with Shakespeare & the Players under the umbrella, Shakespeare’s World.

Like most digital scholarship of the 1990s and early 2000s, the project imitated the print environment to which visitors were accustomed. The pre-Wikipedia site was usefully heavy on text, organized around a table of contents and the traditionally formatted pages expected in a print volume.

By 2015, Shakespeare’s World had been a fully operational online resource for twenty years and managed to continuously attract 375,000 visitors each year – no laughing matter for any type of scholarship. With the changing nature of the web and digital scholarship, the time was ripe for a site revision.

Justin Shaw, graduate student in English at Emory, had loved Shakespeare for years when he first stumbled upon Shakespeare & the Players during a graduate seminar on Disability Studies. In the Spring of 2015 during a Digital Scholarship and Media Studies seminar he jumped into revising the site for a new digital world.

The backstage work that occurs in digital scholarship is fulfilling if not laborious. Learning to work with WordPress and the often conflicting code of plugins and third-party developers was a challenge, but a fruitful one. The most time-consuming aspect of the site redesign involved re-scanning the individual postcards. Transferring the images from the old site was not an option: they were too small for the image-heavy focus of the new site, and they were very pixelated, remnants of limited technology in the past. To enable users to experience the postcards in superb detail, nearly 1,000 postcards were re-scanned (nearly 2,000 image files considering each card has two sides) and a brand new metadata set was added to each to organize the vast collection of new high quality images.

The process took several months, but it allowed ample time to develop acute knowledge about the actors and the cards themselves. Many of the biographies of the players on the site were revised and expanded to include, when relevant, first-hand accounts and personal anecdotes from the players themselves about their own acting. This research allowed doubling the number of titles on the bibliography.

The new ScholarBlogs site almost completely re-imagines Rusche’s original site, and through the homepage squares, offers a new visual introduction to the new “edition” of the site. The current web is organized around images and the ability to interact dynamically with content. Visitors now expect links to other pages, high quality visual content, and a tactilely intuitive interface in lieu of a print-like environment. The new site was especially designed to better enable this interactivity. It works on both mobile and desktop screens to ensure a fully portable and immersive experience whether browsing on a smartphone, tablet, or computer. The larger, clearer images on the new site are an asset to scholarship and general use, whether acting, teaching, or research.

“Shakespeare & the Players” explores new avenues for categorization and interactivity, hoping to ensure a more accessible and dynamic user experience. It is ECDS’ hope that the site will serve to foster more scholarly activity and a general eagerness to engage with Shakespeare as we enter into a new age of insight.

To the right are four postcards images featuring (1) Matheson Lang and Margaret Halstan as Othello and Desdemona in Othello, (2) Beerbohm Tree, Lily Brayton, Oscar Asche, and William Haviland in Richard II, and (3) Harley Granville Barker’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The fourth image shows Matheson Lang and Nora Kerin in a scene from Romeo and Juliet.

1890

On April 24 and 25, Frank Benson’s company travels from Stratford to give two performances of Othello at the Globe Theatre in London. Benson plays Othello, and his wife Constance plays Desdemona. Benson performs in blackface as there are no black actors on any major British or American stage playing Shakespeare between the late Ira Aldridge, who died in 1867, and Paul Robeson who won’t premiere on stage as Othello until 1930 at the Savoy Theatre in London.

1893

Henry Irving’s second production of Much Ado About Nothing opens at the Lyceum Theatre (London) on July 3 and runs for four performances—the 1890 production ran fifty-three shows; Irving and Ellen Terry revive their roles as Benedick and Beatrice. In two years, Irving will become the person ever to be knighted on the merit of his acting.

Also in 1893, Henry Clay and Emily Jordan Folger purchase their first of many First Folios (1623), an original copy of Shakespeare’s first published plays. In June, two years after playing his final performance as Hamlet, and suffering a pair of stokes, Edwin Booth, hailed as the greatest Shakespearean actor America ever produced, dies in New York.

1895

Julia Marlowe purchases a mansion at 337 Riverside Drive in Manhattan with the profits from her many Broadway successes including her roles in Shakespeare. Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, opens on February 14 and is a major success in the midst of his legal troubles. Evelyn Millard creates the role of Cecily Cardew in this play. Irene Vanbrugh, sister of Violet, creates the role of Gwendolyn Fairfax.

1898

Many of the postcards in this collection are published by the Rotary Photographic Company Ltd., which is founded this year in London as a subsidiary of Neue Photographische Gesellschaft, a German company. It is is to be liquidated after the outbreak of World War I.

After financing and rebuilding the grand Her Majesty’s Theatre in London, the enigmatic Herbert Beerbohm Tree plays Marc Antony in his production of Julius Caesar; the play runs from January 22 until June 18, with a total of 161 performances. The other players are Lewis Waller as Brutus and Evelyn Millard as Portia. Tree goes on to produce and perform in many other successful Shakespeare plays at this theatre.

Also this year, Sarah Bernhardt performs her celebrated Hamlet at the Adelphi Theatre in London; the play opens on June 12, and Bernhardt gives sixteen performances. Two years later in France, she will star as Hamlet again, this time in the first-recorded (non-silent) film version of Shakespeare.

1899

King John becomes (reputedly) the first-ever motion picture adaptation of a Shakespeare play. It is a short silent film, lasting at most a scene, and stars Beerbohm Tree in the leading role and Julia Neilson appears as Lady Constance. A brief segment of the short film still exists today, and one of our postcards depicts Tree in this role. Watch a video clip of this silent film.

1901

J. Comyns, as managing director, presents eighty performances of Henry V with Lewis Waller in title role. The play runs at the Lyceum Theatre (London) from December 22, 1900, until March 16, 1901. Others in the cast are William Mollison as Pistol and Sarah Brooke, who plays Katherine of France. The critics call the performance a “genuine and complete success.” Queen Victoria dies on January 22 and is succeeded by her son, Edward VII. In September, US President William McKinley is assassinated.

1904

On October 17, the New York City producer Charles Frohman presents E. H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe playing for the first time together in a Shakespeare play. They lead in Romeo & Juliet at the Illinois Theatre in Chicago. As time goes on, the many performances of the pair include Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, and Much Ado About Nothing. The two remain enormously successful on Broadway and will marry in seven years time.

Also this year, Adrienne McNeil Herndon, wife of Atlanta’s first black millionaire, debuts as Anne du Bignon to glowing reviews at Steinert Hall in Boston, reciting Antony & Cleopatra in its entirety. In the next years, she would go on to organize the first Class Day production of Shakespeare at Atlanta University, The Merchant of Venice, thereby opening up the University, and would-be black actors, to the wider world of theater and magnetizing Atlanta as the premiere center for dramatic arts in the American South.

1905

April 29 marks the beginning of Sir Henry Irving’s final London season. His illustrious career in Shakespeare ends with his playing Shylock, a role in The Merchant of Venice for which he became famous. On April 30, Albert Einstein completes his thesis and is soon awarded a PhD from the University of Zurich before going on to publish a series of some of his most groundbreaking papers, Annus Mirabilis. Also this year, Sarah Bernhardt gravely injures herself during a performance in Rio de Janeiro eventually leading to her entire right leg being amputated in 1915. She begins using a wheelchair for several months and eventually a prosthetic limb, and will continue her triumphant stage and film career for the rest of her life.

1906

On December 27, Beerbohm Tree stages a revival of Antony & Cleopatra at His Majesty’s Theatre. Tree plays Marc Antony with Constance Collier as Cleopatra. Basil Gill also appears in this production. In the next year, the internationally popular Australian actor Oscar Asche and his wife Lily Brayton (both former members of Tree’s company) will take over management of Tree’s theater and mount their own slew of successful Shakespeare productions.

1908

Matheson Lang’s production of Romeo & Juliet opens at the Lyceum Theatre, London, on March 3 and runs through May 30, with eighty-eight performances. Well received at the box office and by critics, the principal players are Lang as Romeo and Nora Kerin as Juliet. Maxine Elliott, sister of Gertrude and her husband Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, opens The Maxine Elliott Theatre on Broadway this year becoming the only woman in the US at the time running her own theater. Also this year, in Detroit, Henry Ford introduces the mass-produced Model T to the world.

1909

On February 8, H. B. Irving revives his production of Hamlet to much acclaim at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London. His wife Dorothea Baird plays Ophelia. On March 13, Matheson Lang plays Hamlet in his own revival at the Lyceum Theatre. Also this year, Beerbohm Tree is knighted by the king for his many contributions to theatre. Theodore Roosevelt is succeeded by William Howard Taft on March 4 as President of the United States.

1910

On September 1, at His Majesty’s Theatre, Sir Beerbohm Tree plays Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII; the other players include Violet Vanbrugh as Queen Katharine and Laura Cowie as Anne Boleyn. Edward VII of the United Kingdom dies on May 6 that year and his son, George V is later crowned.

1911

Fred Terry produces a version of Romeo & Juliet—he called it a “new arrangement”—at the New Theatre, London, with his wife Julia Neilson on September 2. The lead actors here are Vernon Steel and Terry’s daughter, Phyllis. Dubbed the largest ship in the world, the RMS Titanic is launched in Belfast on May 31. In one year’s time, it will hit an iceberg and sink in the Atlantic Ocean on its maiden voyage to New York, deterring much of the travel between Britain and America.

1912

On October 15, Richard III is released as a silent film starring Frederick Warde and becomes the oldest surviving American feature-length film. Also this year, the world-famous Sarah Bernhardt stars in the first film produced for the company that would eventually be re-branded as Paramount Pictures. In February, Arizona is admitted to Union as the forty-eighth and last state to be added to the contiguous United States.

1914

Frank Benson returns from a tour in the United States to again direct one of his nearly thirty Stratford Summer Festivals. He opens the four-week festival with Much Ado About Nothing followed by an impressive selection of fan favorites. It ends with a rousing performance of Henry V in which Benson’s entire company marches on stage holding weapons such as spears and halberds showcasing patriotic solidarity. The date of this performance is August 4, the same day that Britain declares war on Germany.

There are seven images of postcards to the right. The first shows a scene from Hamlet starring Julia Marlowe and E. H. Sothern. the second shows Dame Ellen Terry in Much Ado About Nothing. The third image shows Henry Ainley and Lily Brayton in As You Like It followed by Matheson Lang and H. B. Irving in Othello. The fifth image shows H. B. Irving, Walter Hampden, Oscar Asche, and Maud Milton in Hamlet. The sixth postcard image depicts A. Milroy, Halliwell Hobbes, R. Hatteras, and Nora Lancaster in Cymbeline. The final image shows Sir Beerbohm Tree, Lily Brayton, Oscar Asche, and William Haviland in Richard II.

The philosopher Jacques Derrida, in The Postcard, encourages us to read the two conflicting, yet resonating scenes – in our case, the Shakespeare image and the handwriting on the back – two sides of the postcards together. In Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence, Esther Milne discusses the idea of intimate presence (and of absence) in the materials of correspondence, both past and current. A collection of essays, Postcards in the Library: Invaluable Visual Resources, edited by Norman D. Stevens, argues the case for preserving the value and materiality of postcards in research libraries and makes a compelling case for the value of postcards in critical scholarship.You can find full citations of these and more texts in our bibliography.

You’ll find the backs of the cards along with their fronts throughout the collection, especially on the Play pages in the postcard galleries. We are working to post image descriptions for all the images.

EXAMPLES

Here is one example describing the first image presented here, which is the back of a postcard depicting a scene from Romeo and Juliet starring Nora Kerin and Blanche Stanley:

On the left side of the card, in black ink, cursive handwriting, reads: “Flo dear, Did you get the P.C. after all? How much did you have to pay? Funny things have happened this week at least they haven’t happened in reality + I hope they won’t. One of the things was what you are constantly wishing or what you say you are wishing although I don’t believe it. I saw cousin [not clear] in [not clear] yes’day. Thank Heaven tomorrow is Saturday x x Affectionately Yours [Albert?]

On the right side reads: “Miss Young
104 Lower Clapton Rd.
Lower Clapton
London”

At the very top of the card, there is a date, perhaps: “15 5 08.”

The second postcard image here doesn’t include any handwriting, but does showcase one of the primary uses of these cards, as advertisements for shows, during the period from roughly 1880-1914. This card, the back of one showing Robert B. Mantell as King Lear, lists him with fellow actress and wife Genevieve Hamper as they were on tour performing in the shows you see on the right side of the postcard: Macbeth, As You Like It, Richelieu (a non-Shakespearean play), Hamlet (in modern dress), and The Merchant of Venice. These performances starring Mantell and Hamper were scheduled for the Scottish Rite Cathedral over the course of three nights, beginning Wednesday, March 9. This card has no stamp, which suggests that it wasn’t sent, but was bought (for perhaps $8, as the pencil scribble at the top suggests).

View another exemplary example image description here done by @ekphrasists at Emory.