Drama – Paul Elder & Company

Antigone

28 March 202528 March 2025 by david

On the 17th and 19th of April 1902, Stanford University presented the ancient Greek tragedy Antigone of Sophocles—in the original Greek—with choral music by 19th-century composer Felix Mendelssohn. The actors were instructors and students of the Greek department, the musicians were the University orchestra, and the chorus were mostly members of the Glee Club. They rehearsed for four months and made their own costumes. In total, more than 120 students were involved, about 8% of the entire student body.

The two performances, at 1,500-seat Assembly Hall, were so successful that the play was taken on the road to Southern California (cast and crew filled two railroad cars) where it was performed in Los Angeles on April 23rd, Pasadena on the 24th, and Santa Barbara on the 25th. The road trip expenses were covered by the profits from the Stanford performances, and the University officially granted a week’s leave of absence for the performers.¹ Two weeks later, a third presentation was given at Stanford on May 8th, with a final performance in Berkeley on May 10th in 3,000-seat Harmon Gymnasium.

Title page of *The Antigone of Sophocles*

The entire project was the brainchild of Classics Professors Augustus Taber Murray and Henry Rushton Fairclough. They were out to show that Stanford University, just one decade old, could provide a classical education equal to any of the older, more famous universities. They were definitely thinking big: in addition to the wildly successful performances, Murray and Fairclough also arranged for the publication of two books, both issued by Paul Elder. (Murray and Henry Rolfe, mentioned below, also wrote for Impressions, Elder’s in-house magazine.)

The first book, The Antigone of Sophocles, featured Murray’s and Fairclough’s own English translation of the Greek text. As they wrote in their preface, “this translation was first undertaken with a view to providing the general public with a libretto for the presentation of Antigone, which is to be given in the original Greek at the University on the 17th and 19th of next month. It is hoped, however, that its publication will awaken or revive interest in ‘Our Sophocles, the royal,’ among cultivated people generally.” This volume was published by Elder & Shepard in March 1902, and printed by the Twentieth Century Press. The production & distribution of the book must have been very speedy indeed, given the specific “next month” dates mentioned in the preface.

The second book, Antigone, is an account of the production and performance itself, in four sections:

The Antigone at Stanford Unviersity, H. W. Rolfe
Antigone: A Dramatic Study, A. T. Murray
The Choral Side of Antigone, H. R. Fairclough
Programme of the Original Presentations at Stanford University

The book is also illustrated with twenty photographs, including seven of 20-year-old Eunice Cooksey, who was cast in the title role. Murray played Creon, Antigone’s uncle and the new King, while Fairclough was the coryphæus, the leader of the chorus. The book’s formal title, which appears on both the cover and title page, is in Greek: Αντιγονη, but is anglicized as Antigone on every page head and chapter head. As it happens, this book was in production just as “Elder & Shepard” was transitioning to “Paul Elder & Company,” and thus the book appeared in 1903 under the PE&Co imprint.

As part of this post, I must admit a big mistake: until today, I had not studied these two books closely, and had blithely assumed that they were two editions of the same work; thus Antigone only appears once on the checklist, as item #10. Ooof! With the realization that these are two completely different books—albeit concerning the same happy event—I have now adjusted the checklist. Because it has the same name as the original listing, the 1903 Paul Elder & Company Antigone remains as #10, while the 1902 Elder & Shepard Antigone of Sophocles has become checklist #422. Each entry now refers to the other, in order to make it clear that there have been corrections since the time of the printed checklists.

Augustus Taber Murray (1866-1940) was born in New York City. He earned his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University with a dissertation on Aristophanes. He also studied in Germany before becoming Professor of Greek at Earlham College (1888-90), Colorado College (1891-92), and then at Stanford, where he remained for the next forty years. Among his publications were translations of the Iliad and Odyssey for the Loeb Classical Library. He was also a prominent Quaker minister and spent 1929 and 1930 in Washington as pastor to President Herbert Hoover, a personal friend. Murray married Nella Howland Gifford in 1881; they had five children. He is buried at Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto, California.²

Henry Rushton Fairclough (1862-1938) was born in Barrie, Ontario, not far from Toronto. In 1893 he left Canada to become Associate Professor of Greek and Latin at Stanford, where he spent the rest of his career. During World War I, he served in the American Red Cross in Switzerland and Montenegro. In 1922, he was named Professor of Classical Literature at Stanford. He was also guest professor of Latin and Greek at Harvard, and president of the American Philological Association. His own research was on Roman poets, and he published translations and bilingual editions of Plautus, Terence, Virgil, and Horace. Fairclough married Frederica Emily Blanche Allen in 1888 and had one daughter with her. After her death, he married Mary Charlotte Holly in 1930. In 1941, his posthumous autobiography “Warming Both Hands” was published, where he described his experiences during the War. Fairclough is buried at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, California.³

Henry Winchester Rolfe (1858-1945) was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He was an English instructor at Cornell University (1883-85), professor of Latin at Swarthmore College (1885-90), lecturer in Latin literature at the University of Pennsylvania (1891-92), and associate professor of Greek at Stanford University (1900-10). His publications include an 1898 biography of Petrarch. Rolfe married Bertha Napier Colt in 1886; they had three daughters. He is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.⁴

Eunice Cooksey as Antigone [Stanford Archives]

Eunice Cooksey (1881-1946) was born in New York City. While a student at Stanford, she lived on campus with her parents in what is now Synergy House. She married John Dane about 1908. Later in her life, back in New York, she was a long-time member of the Jamaica Plain Tuesday Club. Paradoxically, to our modern eyes, Eunice was also Chair of the Jamaica Plain Anti-Suffrage Association (JPASA). Today the idea of women being against a woman’s right to vote is bewildering, but the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of the Suffrage to Women (MAOFESW) was founded in 1895 and worked with JPASA for twenty-four years until suffrage was passed nationally in 1919. Eunice is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.⁵

Page 3 of *The Antigone of Sophocles*. These are the only words printed in Greek in the book, from a speech by Antigone: “For not of to-day or yesterday, but for eternity is their [the gods’ laws] life, and no one knows the hour of their birth”

Page 4 of *The Antigone of Sophocles*, mentioning the upcoming performances

Antigone is sentenced to be entombed by her uncle Creon. [Stanford Archives]

Pages 1 of Αντιγονη, mentioning the successful performances

Page 4 of Αντιγονη, with Antigone and her sister Ismene.

1
“The Case For Classics,” 125 Stanford Stories #63, https://125.stanford.edu/the-case-for-classics/
2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus_Taber_Murray
3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Rushton_Fairclough
4
https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt3s20121x/
5
https://loring-greenough.org/suffrage-anti-suffrage-in-jamaica-plain/

Drawing Room Plays

31 March 202512 August 2018 by david

Some works deserve to be forgotten, and Grace Luce Irwin’s Drawing Room Plays (1903) is one of these.

Grace Adelaide Luce (1877-1914) grew up in San Diego, the daughter of lawyer and Civil War veteran Moses Augustine Luce and his wife Adelaide Mantania. After two years at Stanford University, Grace moved to San Francisco. There she met and married Wallace Irwin, author of what was perhaps Paul Elder’s best-selling book, Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum. They soon moved to New York City, where Wallace enjoyed success for some years. Grace also became a writer, mostly for magazines, but she also authored several books.

Why should you forget this book? At the turn of the 20th century it was acceptable in the American media to use overt racism in humor, especially towards the Chinese and Japanese. This is a common theme in Wallace Irwin’s work, and sadly, so it was in Grace’s writing as well. I will spare you the details.

Grace Irwin died on Long Island, New York in 1914 at the young age of 37. She is buried in San Diego.

The artwork, uncredited but signed “A. W.,” is by A. F. Willmarth, who also illustrated two other Paul Elder publications: Bachelor Bigotries by Laura B. Bates, and Widows Grave and Otherwise by Willmarth’s wife Cora.

The red and black vignette at the center of the title page appears to be a combination of the letters D R P G L I (Drawing Room Plays Grace Luce Irwin), with the red squiggles above and below part of a large lower-case “g”.

Elizabethan Humours and the Comedy of Ben Jonson

21 July 202021 November 2017 by david

Cover of "Elizabethan Humours" — Cover of “Elizabethan Humours,” with cover artwork by Henry R. Johnson

The introduction to Elizabethan Humours and the Comedy of Ben Jonson begins:

“The Stanford English Club issues this little book in connection with, and in commemoration of, the presentation of Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour at Stanford University in March, 1905.

“This is one of a series of presentations of old English plays in the Elizabethan manner, the first of which was the revival of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Knight of the Burning Pestle, in March, 1903. The enthusiastic reception accorded this effort encouraged the English Club to preserve the Elizabethan stage built for the play, so that it might be permanently available for such presentations, and to invite Mr. Ben Greet and his company of English players to come to Stanford in the fall semesters of both 1903 and 1904. the Greet company produced, beside the old Morality play of Everyman, two Shaksperean [sic] comedies, Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing, and last of all, Hamlet–the second time in America that Shakspere’s greatest work has been produced in full and in the Elizabethan manner.”

Title page and frontispiece of "Elizabethan Humours" — Title page and frontispiece of “Elizabethan Humours”

The stage that the Stanford English Club built (see frontispiece at right) was modeled in part on the Swan Theatre as represented in a 1596 drawing reproduced in 1903’s Knight of the Burning Pestle. The stage extended directly to the “pit” where the “groundlings” (who had only paid for standing room) were gathered. The stage included a rear portion between two pillars, screened if necessary from downstage by a curtain called a “traverse,” and a upper balcony on the second floor.

After the introduction, the book contains several essays on Jonson and the Elizabethan era:

Elizabethan Humours, by Raymond Macdonald Alden (author of the Elder publication Consolatio)
Jonson’s Learned Sock, by Melville B. Anderson (1851-1933. Professor of English at Stanford University)
Upon Ben Jonson, a poem by Edmund Waller
Ben Jonson’s Prologue to Every Man in His Humour
Epilogue, written for the 1675 revival of Every Man in His Humour by Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset
Dickens and His Friends, from The Life of Charles Dickens, vol. 2, chap. 9, by John Forster, 1845 (Charles Dickens played the part of Captain Bobadil [see plate below] during an 1845 revival)
reproductions of portraits of Jonson, Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, David Garrick, and Dickens
A Satire on a “Paul’s Man”, from Virgidemiarum, Book III, Satire 7, by Joseph Hall, 1597
A Satire on Humours, from The Scourge of Villainy, Satire XI, by John Marston, 1598
Ode to Jonson, by Robert Herrick

Page 6 of "Elizabethan Humours" — Page 6 of “Elizabethan Humours”

Ben Jonson wrote Every Man in His Humour in 1598 as a “humours comedy,” in which each major character is dominated by an overriding humour or obsession. The play was probably performed for the first time by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1598 at the Curtain Theatre. Based on the playlist published in the 1616 folio of Jonson’s works, the part of Kno’well, the aged father, was almost certainly performed by William Shakespeare himself, who evidently enjoyed playing older characters.

"Bobadil," plate opposite page 6 — “Bobadil,” plate opposite page 6

The True Historie of the Knyght of the Burning Pestle

21 July 20208 September 2014 by david

Title page of "Knight of the Burning Pestle" — Title page of “Knight of the Burning Pestle”

In March 1903, the English Club of Stanford University performed a production of “The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” an early 17th-century pastiche play by the English poet and dramatist Francis Beaumont. The English Club performed the work at both Stanford and UC Berkeley, and went so far as to write a short book about it. That book, The True Historie of the Knyght of the Burning Pestle, appears to have been published just as Paul Elder bought out Morgan Shepard and reorganized the firm: while the title page reads “Elder & Shepard,” the copyright notice on the verso reads “The Tomoye Press,” which did not exist until after the creation of Paul Elder & Company.

Cover of "Knight of the Burning Pestle" — Cover of “Knight of the Burning Pestle”

In 1903, it was thought that “Knight of the Burning Pestle” was jointly written by Beaumont and John Fletcher, but modern scholarship now credits only the former. Francis Beaumont (1584-1616), a contemporary of Shakespeare, is remembered today as a dramatist, but during his lifetime was known as a poet. “The Knight of the Burning Pestle” is a satire on chivalry, along the lines of Don Quixote, and is considered the first complete parody play in the English language.

The title page credits the author as “The English Club of Stanford University,” but the book was almost certainly written by Raymond Macdonald Alden (1873-1924), then assistant professor of English literature at Stanford. Two months later, Alden would write Consolatio, also published by Elder.

The book begins with a short introduction called “On Seeing An Elizabethan Play,” followed by three short essays by “R. M. A.” (Alden): “The Theatre”, “The Knight of the Burning Pestle”, and “The Songs and Music.”

Page 40 of "Knight of the Burning Pestle" — Page 40 of “Knight of the Burning Pestle”

Following the music essay, the book includes a number of facsimiles: music to several songs, the interior of the Swan Theatre, and the title page of Thomas Dekker’s Guls Horne-Booke. Lastly, the authors include the text of Chapter VI of the Hornbook, “How a Gallant Should Behave Himself In a Play-house.”

Bibliographically speaking, Elder has made it difficult to ascertain what the title of this book really is. Normally, the title is what’s printed on the title page, which is in this case is The True Historie of the Knyght of the Burning Pestle. The cover, however, reads “On Seeing An Elizabethan Play, with some particular discourse of The Knight of the Burning Pestle.” And in the colophon on page 59, the authors call the book “The Knight of the Burning Pestle.” I have chosen the text of the title page.

Facsimile of "The Guls" on p46 of "Knight of the Burning Pestle" — Facsimile of the Swan Theatre and “The Guls Horne-Booke” on p45-6 of “Knight of the Burning Pestle”

Page 16 of "Knight of the Burning Pestle" — Page 16 of “Knight of the Burning Pestle”

Notice of the Berkeley performance of "Knight of the Burning Pestle" in March 1903 — Notice of the Berkeley performance of “Knight of the Burning Pestle” of 28 March 1903