We will GREET the time.

Until two days ago, the only 'Greeters' I knew of were those irritating employees that used to lurk at the entrances of ASDA supermarkets, dishing out shopping baskets with enforced bonhomie and a kind of manically frozen grin, no doubt brought on by standing for hours in the draught of an automatic door.

I am now aware, however, that the term also refers to those performers who worked with Sir Philip Ben Greet, the actor and theatre entrepreneur who was a direct contemporary of the Bensons and, arguably, the closest thing to a rival to the Benson tradition in the provinces.  As a purveyor of Shakespeare in the era I'm researching he is potentially a very significant character. Although his activities were not confined to Shakespeare touring, his 'Woodland Players' (also sometimes referred to as 'Pastoral Players') were influential in bringing 'outdoor' Shakespeare to Edwardian Britain, followed by other companies such as Benson's and the Williams/Holme Summer touring company.

I knew a little about Ben Greet, mainly in connection with Granville Barker, Lillah McCarthy, H.B. Irving and Sybil Thorndyke.  I'd also read Don-John Dugas's book 'Shakespeare for Everyman' when it first came out which deals specifically with Greet's activities in America and Canada.  

There is only one other book about Greet - a self-published volume from 1964 called 'Ben Greet and the Old Vic: a biography of Ben Greet' by Winifred Isaac, which landed on my desk on Thursday of last week and has proved to be fascinating and frustrating in equal measures. 

I should've been warned, really.  Dugas summarises Isaac's book in one sentence: 'More interested in programme transcription than analysis, unedited, often failing to specify(let alone cite) its sources, lacking an index and self-published, it is as frustrating as it is scarce.'  Actually, I think he may have been understating some of the issues. And yet... there's gold hidden in there.

Although the title itself is completely misleading, the biggest problem with it is with the arrangement of material.  Having appealed for information from former Greeters (as Trewin also did with Bensonians) Isaac seems to have been completely overwhelmed by what she was given and has tried to impose some kind of order onto it.  Instead of treating the topic chronologically, she divides her book up into chapters on various aspects of Greet's career - as actor, actor-manager, in Stratford, at the Old Vic, in America, at Regent's Park. The result is like an overfilled tumble-drier muddle of unconnected garments that have somehow become tangled together.

Having tried to 'read' the book conventionally, I found it impossible to keep track of what was going on as Isaac jumps from 1887 to 1891 to 1916 and then back to 1901 listing performance after performance, with cast list after cast list. The only way of dealing with it has been to make copious notes as I'm going along and then start to collate them into some sort of chronological order so that I can see where the gaps are and start to plug them from the British Library Newspaper archive.

So that is how the Christmas holiday is shaping up for this Merry Shrew: armed with highlighters and a stack of coloured paper, I'm going to try and 'sort out' the career of Ben Greet in analogue form by the New Year into something I can actually use as part of my research.  

I suspect I may need a lot of chocolate...