Mad folk of the theatre

Otis Skinner

Here are Thomas Betterton, a member of King Charles II's company at Drury Lane; Nell Gwinn, honest little alley cat who won that same King's fickle heart; James Quin and the gallant days of Bath; George Anne Bellamy, well-named the beautiful, who seems to have passed through every known adventure of living; Tate Wilkinson, eighteenth-century barnstormer; delectable Dora Jordan, who year after year was London's favorite, as well as the Sailor Prince's; George Frederick Cooke, the first actor of real power to face an American audience; Edmund Kean, "perhaps the greatest genius the English-speaking stage had ever known"; the Elder Book, with his strange moods of forgetfulness and frenzy; and in Will-of-Avon's Night, Shakespeare himself comes to life, with many another great figure of the stage, to revel in The Players' library. Certainly, a mad company, my masters, and glad and at times...