The Memory be Green...

I missed out May and almost missed June as well! I'm so sorry.  I started writing something and then it got left behind when the world took over, as it so often does.  

I'm struggling to comprehend the fact that the first year of my PhD has almost officially finished.  It seems no time at all that I was in Stratford in September feeling excited and out of my depth.  Still excited, still out of my depth... However, I seem to have been successful enough to be allowed to continue into Year 2.  The Progress Panel meeting I was dreading was actually really supportive and the chance to talk about my project was really helpful.  Sometimes I feel as if I'm just stumbling around in the dark, making up a route as I go along, so getting feedback on my work in progress from an outside eye was very useful.

A couple of serendipitous things happened in June.  I regularly do an ebay search for anything Benson or Greet related, and most of the time the same few items reappear.  However, in June, on two separate occasions, I struck gold.

The first was a very unassuming piece of paper, which had obviously been kept and treasured by someone for a very long time.  It refers to performances in Bristol in June 1888 at the Clifton Zoological Gardens, later better known as Bristol Zoo and contains a wealth of information about the productions - staging and effects, prices of admission and a full cast list.

It had to be mine!!! I love the fact that the AYLI side contains a synopsis of Act 1 for those unfamiliar with the play, as Greet's outdoor version only included the scenes which take place out of doors, a practice that Harcourt Williams and Garnet Holme also adhered to in their productions around the turn of the century.  

However, the excitement did not stop there.  A few days later, I found the most incredible publicity postcards for the Benson production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, from a postcard dealer in Boston, Massachusetts.  Not only have I never seen anything similar before, but the detail of the overprinting of the venue gave me goosebumps, because they are advertising performances in my home town 3,165 miles away from where they ended up:

They must date from 1907 because of the performance dates and are in wonderful condition.  The perforated edge suggests that they were printed as a booklet or part of a larger sheet and then separated.  Were there just these two designs, or were they part of a set?  

The choice of characters seems unusual - Puck and Starveling as Moon, rather than Titania or Bottom.  The Puck illustration seems to have a quite generic Art Nouveau inspired setting, although the texture of the upper part of the costume and the horned headdress is similar to the costume shown in photographs of Nora Nicholson seen here.  The 'Moon' postcard is unmistakably H.O. Nicholson, accompanied by... the dog! 

Sadly, there's no printer credited anywhere on the card - the back is just a standard divided back postcard - but there is a name, presumably of the artist 'Montravel' . Although I've not found evidence to  confirm this,  I did wonder if they might have been painted by May de Montravel Edwardes, a young watercolour artist studying at a private art school in South Kensington in 1906-7, prior to her acceptance to the Royal Academy.  There are very few examples of her work available on-line but the background blues and the shadows in the 'Starveling' one and clear, almost illustrative outline seems very similar. Benson's art-world connections are well documented through his brother, William and it is possible that this commission came about through that connection.   

Whether or not these are May Edwardes's works, they are absolutely delightful and I can't believe that I have managed to bring them all the way back home to where they started from!  Like the Greet flyer, someone has treasured these as souvenirs, perhaps keeping the memory green of a particularly happy theatre visit.