Transmitting the Thinking: The Nineteenth-Century Stage Manager and the Adaptation of Text for Performance

Abstract

Charles H. Shattuck has described the promptbooks of the Victorian stage manager G. C. Ellis as ‘works of art’ which recorded ‘the stage art that was passing before him’, in which ‘a scholarly and artist-like stage manager is seen in the very act of transmitting the thinking of a scholar-actor of one age to a scholar-actor of the next.’ This article will consider the professional skill and artistic imperative of the initial and continual adaptation of scripts by stage managers in order to transmit, translate and represent the thinking of authors and actor-managers within promptbooks, and the contribution of such practice to maintaining the commercial viability of nineteenth-century performance.