Live Web Event: John Wilkes Booth's "Richard III" on Feb. 2

[Colleary, Eric J]

Dear Colleagues,

Tomorrow night, the Harry Ransom Center is will be hosting a staged reading of John Wilkes Booth's Richard III, based on the promptbook held in the Ransom Center's collections. The reading will be performed by Austin-based Hidden Room Theatre<http://hiddenroomtheatre.com/>, who specializes in producing unpublished or rarely-seen works.

The performance will be webcast live and archived on our website, and might be of interest to those of you teaching Shakespeare or American theatre history. The Ransom Center will also be live-tweeting the event (@RansomCenter<https://twitter.com/ransomcenter>), and viewers can post comments or questions using the hashtag #BoothR3.

When: Live on Tuesday, February 2nd at 8pm EST/7pm CST/5pm PST, and then archived online
Where: http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/webcast/
Reading Format: Live music and costumed actors with scripts in hand, enacting the blocking and gestures culled from the promptbook and from contemporary reviews. A discussion will follow the performance.

A full digital facsimile of the promptbook can be found on our website at: http://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15878coll67

For those in or near Austin, TX, the promptbook is currently on display as part of the Ransom Center's Shakespeare in Print & Performance exhibition which runs through May 29, 2016.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions, and thank you for helping spread the word.

Additional Information:

John Wilkes Booth, son of the noted Shakespearean actor Junius Brutus Booth and brother to actor Edwin Booth, made his professional stage debut on August 14, 1855 in the Role of Richmond in Richard III. Within five years, Wilkes Booth had made a name for himself nationally as a star actor and took on the role of Richard himself. He took his job seriously, was encouraging of the actors he performed with, and received overwhelmingly positive critical reviews during his brief career. His talents matched with his good looks made him a box office success until his politics made it difficult for him to find a theatre that would hire him. Booth was shot and killed 12 days after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Much of his theatre material went to his brother Edwin, who had it burned.

It is not known how the promptbook for Wilkes Booth's Richard III survived the fire. A promptbook is the full script of a play with all of the script edits, acting, music, and technical cues specific to a particular production - in short, one of the best records of what a production looked like. Another handwritten copy of Booth's promptbook can be found in the Harvard Theatre Collection. It is believed that Booth had two copies - one to keep at the theatre where he was performing and one that he could send ahead. These are the only two promptbooks of John Wilkes Booth known to exist.

While Booth contributes his own edits, the promptbook primarily uses Charles Kean's version of Colley Cibber's Richard III, the latter of which dominated Shakespeare's play for over 120 years. Known as the "blood and thunder" or "rapid action" version, Cibber's Richard is written so that audiences wouldn't have needed to see any of Shakespeare's Henry plays to understand the action. Many 19th-century American audiences saw Cibber's King Richard as a tragic hero, rather than Shakespeare's villain.



Eric Colleary, PhD
Cline Curator of Theatre and Performing Arts
Harry Ransom Center | The University of Texas at Austin
P.O. Box 7219 | Austin, TX 78713-7219
Faculty, Performance as Public Practice Program, University of Texas Department of Theatre and Dance
Steering Committee, American Theatre Archives Project (ATAP)
Website Co-Chair and Webmaster, Theatre Library Association (TLA)
Web: http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/collections/performingarts<http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/collections/performingarts/>
Email: eric.colleary at austin.utexas.edu<mailto:eric.colleary at austin.utexas.edu>
Phone: 512.475.6502
Twitter: @ecolleary<https://twitter.com/ecolleary>

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