A Dust-Jacket that Was Never Meant to Be

Two weeks ago my post was on the subject of the relationship between different, often seemingly contradictory, forms of information media. I’d like to pick up that thread again this week. This book was a gift to me from a professor who specializes in the history of the book; he uses a similar book in his classes to teach this concept of the persistence of material forms as media change, and when he gave it to me he suggested that I might find it useful to do the same.

The book is the first edition of Seven Famous One-Act Plays, published by Penguin Books at their then-new headquarters near Heathrow at Harmondsworth (Middlesex, England) in 1937. It retailed for six pence (about $1.70 in modern money) and was one of many titles that, beginning in 1935, Penguin sold through numerous outlets, including the unique Penguincubator vending machine (the spine title on the early Penguins is inverted from the customary direction -- running from bottom to top rather than top to bottom -- because it was designed to be loaded into the machine cover down so it would be dispensed cover up upon purchase; the inverted spine title allowed it to be read through the machine’s display glass).

It is, as the title indicates, a selection of brief plays ideal for reading and amateur production -- book number 117 in Penguin’s famous paperback series. Each of the plays includes a brief introductory “note” about it, its performance, and the playwright. The book itself begins with a longer introduction (pp. 11-14), likely written by J. A. Ferguson (whose play Campbell of Kilmohr is included) principally dedicated to explaining and defending the then-relatively new genre of the one-act play (essentially, the one-act play is not an incomplete or partial version of the conventional two-act play; rather, through an “extreme of verbal economy”, the one-act play is a complete and whole dramatic narrative of its own).

The seven plays included are (in order of appearance):

A Marriage Has Been Arranged, by Alfred Sutro; first produced at London’s Garrick Theatre on March 27, 1904 and published that year by Samuel French. pp. 15-31.

The Cloak: A Studio Play, by Clifford Bax; first produced by the Travelling Theatre of the Arts League of Service (undated) and apparently first published in this collection. pp. 33-49.

Two Gentlemen of Soho, by A. P. Herbert; first produced by William Armstrong at the Liverpool Playhouse on September 3, 1927 and first published in 1927 by Samuel French. pp. 51-77.

Campbell of Kilmohr, by J. A. Ferguson; first produced by Lewis Casson for the Scottish Repertory Theatre Company at Glasgow’s Royalty Theatre on March 23, 1914 and first published by Samuel French in 1915. pp. 53-100.

The Maker of Dreams, by Oliphant Down; first produced by the Scottish Repertory Theatre Company, directed by A. Wareing, at Glasgow’s Royalty Theatre on November 20, 1911 and apparently first published in this collection. pp. 101-123.

The Dear Departed, by Stanley Houghton; first produced by “Miss Horniman’s Company” at Manchester’s Gaiety Theatre on November 2, 1908 and first published in 1910 by Samuel French. pp. 125-147.

The Monkey’s Paw, by Louis N. Parker, adapted from the story by W. W. Jacobs; first produced at London’s Haymarket Theatre on October 6, 1902 and first published by Samuel French in 1910. pp. 149-180.

Following the plays, the book concludes with eight pages (unpaginated) of a “Complete list of all Penguin and Pelican Books to the end of 1937” (“NB: New books may have been added to the series since this book was printed. Ask your bookseller for the latest list.”) The list of Penguin Books, in which each title has a number, is organized by genre: fiction (orange covers), crime fiction (green covers), travel and adventure (cerise covers), and biography and memoirs (dark blue covers); the list concludes with a grouping of titles under the heading “November, 1937” (which includes Seven Famous One-Act Plays) and another under “January, 1938” (presumably forthcoming at the time this was published). These lists are repeated on the back cover of the book, but in numeric order.

In the advertising on the final pages, there is also a list of Pelican Books (numbered but with the letter “A” prefixed; in light blue covers), a “series of books on science, economics, history, sociology, archaeology, etc.”. The last page of the advertising is for “The Penguin Shakespeare”: “A sixpenny Shakespeare specially edited for Penguin Books by Dr. G. B. Harrison” (numbered with a “B” prefixed; only 12 published at that time). The advertising concludes with the welcoming comment, “If you have any suggestions to make for future books, please don’t hesitate to send them in.”]

Collationally, the book may be described as 16^o: A¹⁶-F¹⁴: $1. The stock is flimsy and acidic (though it is in very good condition, with no foxing, tearing, or staining). It is a softcover, bound in paper. What makes this copy so peculiar is that, though it is a paperback, the book has a dust-jacket. Eventually dust-jackets on paperbacks vanished -- a product both of paper rationing during the war and the eventual realization that using paper to protect paper covers was pointless. But when Penguin first began popularizing these cheap, handy paperbacks, the idea of a book was that it had to have a dust-jacket: putting a jacket on a paperback -- especially during the strict paper-rationing during wartime -- is a testament to the durability of certain publishing conventions. Despite radical changes in the material form of the book and the increasing costs of paper, the old ways only gradually changed. New forms, after all, so often mimic the old forms simply because that is what is known and familiar: the first printed books looked like manuscripts, the first films resembled stage plays, and even the latest e-books are made to emulate the appearance of the printed page.

The oddity of a paperback bearing a dust-jacket is perhaps best captured by surveying dealers’ listings for this particular book: 16 dealers list carrying a “complete” copy of the 1937 Seven Famous One-Act Plays; only 6 mention the dust-jacket. And simply looking at a photograph of the book won’t indicate the presence or absence of the jacket, since the front cover, spine, and back cover were printed to look exactly like the dust-jacket itself. The new changes the old, but it can never absolutely replace it.

A New Edition of an Old Manuscript Play

The Malone Society was founded in 1906 with a mission to make rare and unique materials essential to the study of English Renaissance drama more accessible to scholars and the public. Its history is one of prestigious and superlative scholarly research. Every year for the past century the Society publishes anywhere from one to six editions of manuscript or obscure printed plays, theatrical records, and other relevant documents. In order to ensure the material is as useful as possible for scholarly purposes, these editions always avoid heavy editorial intrusions: a brief (anywhere from one page to twenty or so) textual introduction is followed by a record of collations of extant copies and then the text itself, either as a diplomatic reprint (for manuscript plays and for printed plays up until the past few decades) or as a photographic facsimile (for most printed plays published by the Society in the past few decades). The books’ familiar tan cloth binding, plain and unadorned but for black lettered titles on the spine, should be immediately familiar to anyone in my field; they are a staple and necessity for studying English dramatic literature and theatre history.

This week’s book is the Malone Society’s centennial edition for the years 2007-2008. It is volume 172 in the Malone Society Reprints series and presents a full-color, 1:1-scale photographic reproduction of the elegant scribal-copy manuscript of John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed (1611) held by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC (MS J.b.3). The edition was attentively prepared by Meg Powers Livingston and checked for accuracy by two of the Society’s most prestigious elder scholars, G. Richard Proudfoot and Henry R. Woudhuysen. The book was published for the Malone Society by Manchester University Press and printed by Alden HenDi of Oxfordshire.

Fletcher’s play is a sequel to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, but in it the tables are turned: following the death of his first wife, Katherine, Petruchio marries Maria, who “tames” her brat of a husband by -- Lysistrata-like -- leading the women of the play in withholding sex from their husbands until the men change their ways. It was likely written in 1611, but it underwent quite a bit of revision and changes due to censorship; in 1633, after first having performance of the play blocked by the Master of the Revels (the government official responsible for censoring and licensing all public plays) because of perceived indecencies in it, the King’s Men were finally allowed to stage it and The Taming of the Shrew together before King Charles and the queen at St. James’s Palace. According to the Master of the Revels, Shrew was “liked”; Tamer was “well liked”.

The play was quite popular on the Jacobean and Caroline stage and was also frequently performed on the Restoration stage as well, often in repertory with Taming of the Shrew (in 1667, in fact, John Lacy revised Shakespeare’s play to make it a better fit with Fletcher’s). After a prolonged absence from the stage, it was most recently performed (again, in repertory with Shrew) by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2004.

Livingston dates the manuscript of the play to anytime between 1611 and 1623. It differs from the 1647 folio in several ways, including in textual changes that were no doubt due to the 1633 revisions demanded by the Master of the Revels. The hand is an elegant, clear, and rather large italic, making it much easier to read than most early modern play manuscripts (which are usually scribbled in English secretary hand). Care has been taken with this copy and the scribe (probably a professional) has dutifully corrected mistakes as he worked. Later hands have also made some annotations and changes as well. The dignity and beauty of the work suggests that the fair copy was made as a presentation gift for someone of importance. Livingston demonstrates that the cuts and wording in the stage directions point to a playhouse manuscript as the scribe’s copy-text (that is, the scribe copied his work from a manuscript that had been actually used for performance).

The contents of the Malone Society edition begin with Livingston’s introduction (p. v-xxviii), which includes: information on the manuscript’s modern provenance (v-vi), the play’s authorship (vi-vii) and date (vii-viii), the manuscript’s physical characteristics (viii-x) and its corrections and annotations (x-xiii), a comparison to the printed folio versions of the play in 1647 and 1679 (xiii-xx), dating of the manuscript itself (xx-xxi), and a statement of editorial conventions and acknowledgements (xxi). Following the introduction are several appendices: a list of corrections made by the original scribe of the manuscript (xxiii), a list of differences between the manuscript and the 1647 folio that can be attributed to censorship imposed on the play’s oaths, ribaldry, and profanity by Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, in 1633 (xxiv-xxv), and a table cross-referencing the through-line numbering system of the edition to the page numbers and signatures of the 1647 folio and the act/scene/line marks of Fredson Bowers’s modernized edition of 1966.

Each page of the facsimile provides the full-color image of the manuscript page in the center, with through-line numbers marked every ten lines printed in the inner margin and the folio pagination centered in the bottom margin. The manuscript is a total of 52 folio leaves (103 pages; the verso of the final leaf is blank, but Livingston includes it in the reproduction anyway; one leaf, no. 22, is interleaved and pasted in, perhaps to replace a gross error in the transcription [left]) measuring 19.7cm x 29.5cm. The paper in the book is a very high-quality glossy stock; the pages measure 26.5cm x 35.5cm. The binding is the usual Malone Society tan buckram publisher’s cloth, with the title of the play in black letters on the spine.

As a member of the Malone Society, I receive the annual publications directly from the publisher. Inserted into my copy is a letter from the then-newly installed U.S. Secretary-Treasurer for the Society, Professor Eric Rasmussen of the University of Nevada, Reno. The letter briefly introduces the volume and indicates Rasmussen’s pleasure that distributing the volume to the U.S. members is his “first act as incoming U.S. Secretary-Treasurer”.

The edition has been received very enthusiastically by scholars in the field. The following notice is from the Malone Society website:

[The edition has been] enthusiastically reviewed in the TLS by Laurie Maguire, who noted that 'The reader can enjoy flicking back and forth from Powers's descriptions and analysis to the high-quality pictorial evidence' and predicted that the continuing adaptability of the Society in the digital age 'points towards several more Society centenaries'. William Proctor Williams has also praised this volume (‘a magnificent facsimile') and the work of the Society: ‘So where does the Malone Society stand in the age of the pixel? … I submit that no matter how good the resolution is on your computer screen, … the Malone Society Reprint is a superior and more scholarly useful item than the digital form. … I trust that some reviewer a hundred years from now will get the same pleasure from reviewing the Society's bicentennial volume as I had reviewing The Woman's Prize ' (Notes and Queries , 57 (2010), 136-8).

The enthusiasm for high-quality photographic editions of manuscript plays is not an understatement. With the wide-spread use of digital resources such as Early English Books Online and Literature Online it has become relatively easy for scholars around the world to access and work with rare printed materials from the early modern period. To work with manuscripts however -- which are, by definition, unique -- it has always been necessary to either travel to the library holding the document (almost always in the UK, though the Folger and the Huntington in California have some) or rely on a diplomatic transcript (nearly always from the Malone Society). Photographic reproductions of manuscripts from the period have suffered from camera technologies insufficiently subtle and sophisticated to capture the nuances of color, tone, impression, texture, etc. that embed important material evidence into the physical object of the text. High-resolution digital photography is beginning to make those problems obsolete, and the ability to zoom and navigate those images on a computer screen should revolutionize the study of early manuscripts: not only does it democratize scholarship by making those unique materials accessible to thousands, if not millions, of users, but it also helps ensure the preservation and longevity of the materials themselves by reducing the need for users to actually handle the document.

Williams’s suggestion that Malone Society reprints, in book form, will always be “superior and more scholarly useful” than digital facsimiles seems purely optative -- conservative thinking from a scholar very firmly (and professionally) entrenched in print culture. Certainly there is a need for full-color, scale reproductions of manuscript plays in print; there is a permanence to the book-form of the edition that digital technologies -- so often changing and going out of date -- have yet to successfully replicate. But as the next generation of scholars begins to populate academia -- a generation of scholars who are intensely digital natives -- the use of digital media to advance the centuries’ old mission of critical inquiry and analysis will evolve and improve. The goals of the scholarship will change little; the tools that make the realization of those goals possible, however, will change radically.

E. H. Sothern's 1901 Acting Version of "Hamlet"

To celebrate the second installment of The Henriad broadcasts this weekend, I’ve decided to dip into my Shakespeareana volumes for this week’s book.

The full title is Hamlet, A Tragedy: The E. H. Sothern Acting Version, published by McClure, Phillips & Co. of New York in 1901. Meant to commemorate the short-lived 1900 staging of Hamlet by noted American actor Edward Sothern (1859-1933), this edition of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy presents the text, stage directions, and cast of the play as it was produced by Daniel Frohman at New York’s Garden Theatre between September and October 1900. Historically particular “acting versions” (sometimes called “production versions”) such as this are excellent evidence for theatre historians seeking to recover evidence for how Shakespeare’s plays were received at specific moments in the past. A subsequent edition of Sothern’s Hamlet was printed by McLure in 1903 and, since at least 2004, Kessinger Publishing and Gardners Books have both offered unremarkable print-on-demand editions of the book as well. 

Bound in papered boards with a colored illustration on the cover (the illustration shows Horatio restraining Hamlet during Ophelia’s burial; one dealer online claims that this art is “after painting by McLellan” but I’m not certain to what painting this refers), the spine is cracking slightly where it meets up with the front and back boards and the paper is hanging loose from the back hinge. Though a beautiful and rather uncommon piece of turn-of-the-century biblioart, the book is not exceptionally valuable on the market ($25-$45). Throughout the book are inserted 14 photographic plates showing Sothern’s staging of various scenes and characters; these plates are of unparalleled help in reconstructing how early twentieth century America perceived of Hamlet, but they are also interesting in their own right as part of the first generation of photographs to be bound into books (a practice that was just beginning between 1870-1900). There is no marginalia in my copy, though the evidence of some mild damage (the cracking and loose spine, some leaves working slightly loose, and a significant tear in the lower outer corner of p. 47/48) suggests it has been read in its day.

The pages measure 14cm x 22.5cm and are made of a heavy, though darkening, paper with vertical 2cm chain-lines. No watermarks are evident. The edges of the pages are rough-cut in places, and some have darkened particularly severely over time. The book was printed in octavo with no signatures on the gatherings but with pagination running from [i]-v for the preliminaries and from [1]-136 for the play proper (given its length, I estimate that an uncut performance of this script would run over four hours...!).

The contents of the book are as follows: blank flyleaf with evidence of some repairs done to the inner hinge connecting it to the front board); half-title; photographic plate (on verso of leaf) showing Sothern as Hamlet, captioned “To be or not to be.”; tissue leaf (coming loose of the binding at the top); two toned title-page (“Hamlet” in red letter) with publisher’s ornate device imprinted in the middle of the page (the imprint illustration shows an idealized early modern printing shop including pressman, compositor, proofer, and a fancily dressed man who may be either the stationer himself or perhaps the author), copyright notice on the verso; “Dramatis Personae” of the Garden Theatre production’s cast (see below); inner half-title; the play itself; final blank flyleaf.

It is obvious that Sothern himself was the main attraction for the book (or, at least, as with most members of his profession, he saw himself as such and had some hand in overseeing the publication) as nearly all of the photographs -- with the exception of the Ophelia series between pp. 98 and 107 -- feature him or scenes that include him. That he allowed Virginia Harned so many photographs in the book may be attributable to the fact that she was, at the time, his second wife. The plates and their captions, in order of their appearance in the book, are:

Frontispiece: Sothern as Hamlet, “To be or not to be.”

Between pp. 10 & 11: The Danish court gathering around Arthur R. Lawrence as Claudius, the new king; “And now my cousin Hamlet and my son.”

Between pp. 12 & 13: Hamlet in a melodramatic pose with a chair; “I shall in all my best obey you, madam.”

Between pp. 28 & 29: On the (patently fake) battlements, Hamlet crouches in awe before William Harris as the Ghost; “I am thy father’s spirit.”

Between pp. 64 & 65: Hamlet, this time sitting on the chair, resting his hand on a metal post of some sort sticking out of a (patently fake) rock, staring wistfully into the air, gesturing gracefully with his other hand; “The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.”

Between pp. 76 & 77: The court (many of whom are wearing Arabian-style turbans?) and Charlotte Deane as the queen (looking terrified) and the king (looking bored, out at the audience) gathered around and above a small proscenium arch within the proscenium arch, framing the climactic poisoning moment of the Mousetrap; “What do you call the play? The Mouse-trap.”

Between pp. 78 & 79: The same setting but the court is in an uproar, all are standing, Claudius is at center stage about to swoon, Hamlet holds a torch up above his head but the king fends the prince off with a sweep of his robe, on the opposite side of the robe from Hamlet two guards gesture menacingly with their spears at the prince; “You shall see anon, how the murderer gets the love of Gonzago’s wife.”

Between pp. 98 & 99: Virginia Harned as Ophelia, wistfully strumming a lyre; “He is dead and gone, lady.”

Between pp. 100 & 101: Ophelia inviting the viewer to see the collection of flowers spread out before her on the ground; “At his head a grass green turf, at his foot a stone.”

Between pp. 102 & 103: Ophelia, back of her hand to her forehead in grief, lyre neglected at her side; “And in his grave rain’d many a tear.”

Between pp. 104 & 105: Ophelia, her hair down in tangles suggesting lunacy, clutches flowers in one hand and admires a single flower held above her head with her other; “There’s a daisy!”

Between pp. 106 & 107: Vincent Sternroyd as Laertes, joined by the king, queen, and other mourners, gather around Ophelia’s funeral bier; “There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke; when down her weedy trophies and herself fell in the weeping brook.”

Between pp. 118 & 119: Hamlet, dressed now all in black traveler’s robes and hat, gestures towards Yorick’s skull in his hand, and gazes sadly at the camera; “Alas, poor Yorick!”

Between pp. 120 & 121: Hamlet and Laertes come to blows in the graveyard, surrounded by the courtiers, mourners, king and queen, guards, and what looks like a group of nuns (?), in the background are many two-dimensional trees and a (patently fake) church facade; “The devil take thy soul.”

Between pp. 132 & 133: The court (including a foppish Osric, the king and queen, and an unnamed court jester) watch as Hamlet triumphantly grabs Laertes’s sword from his hands; “The exchange of the foils.”

Between pp. 134 & 135: Several dead bodies litter the stage as Hamlet’s body is carried off under a hedge of soldiers’ spears, Henry Carvill as Horatio, on his knees, reaches longingly after the procession, George E. Bryant as Fortinbras (dressed like something out of Wagner’s Ring Cyle) points the way authoritatively off stage, and in the down left corner a group of courtiers look mildly concerned about the dead Laertes at their feet (one of the courtiers stares blatantly out of the scene and into the camera); “Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage.”

The individual actor portrait photographs may have been taken at a different time and place, and by a different photographer, from the full stage photographs; they have the quality of having been staged artificially for the camera in a studio and they bear a signature (“Schloss N.Y.) not present on any of the stage photographs. In many of their details, some of the stage photographs look like they may have been altered after the picture was taken, particularly in the way of having extra scenery painted on in the background.

The cast of Frohman’s production included many notable (and some not so notable) New York performers. This is the cast list in the order in which it is presented in the book (the links will direct you to the Internet Broadway Database entry for that performer):

Arthur R. Lawrence as Claudius

E. H. Sothern as Hamlet

Edwin Varrey as Polonius

Vincent Sternroyd as Laertes

Henry Carvill as Horatio

Richard Lambart as Osric

Taylor Holmes as Rosencrantz

E. F. Bostwick as Guildenstern

Basil West as “A Priest”

George E. Bryant as Marcellus

Sydney C. Mather as Bernardo

Daniel Jarrett as Francisco

E. Raymond as Reynaldo

Leonard Outram as the First Player

Arthur Scott as the Second Player

Rowland Buckstone as the First Gravedigger

John J. Collins as the Second Gravedigger

George E. Bryant (again) as Fortinbras

Charlotte Deane as Gertrude

Virginia Harned as Ophelia

Adelaide Keim as the Player Queen

The cast also included a great deal of unnamed supernumeraries as “Lords, Ladies, Officers, Soldiers, messengers, Followers of Fortinbras, and other Attendants”. The Garden Theatre production was directed by Fred Williams, produced by Daniel Frohman, with sumptuous set design by Edward G. Unitt, one of the most prolific Broadway designers of the 1880s-1920s.

The 1900 production, a particularly elaborate and spectacular staging of Hamlet that Sothern had been dreaming up for decades (it was his first professional performance in a Shakespeare role!), opened on Monday, September 17, hard on the heels of a particularly successful staging of the play at the Knickerbocker Theatre with popular sensation Johnston Forbes-Robertson in the title role and Gertrude Elliott as Ophelia. Despite this shadow of competition, Sothern’s production opened to strong reviews, but it ran for only sixteen performances before a bit of particularly bad luck forced it to close early. One night, less than two weeks into the run, during the sword fight of the final scene Sternroyd accidentally stabbed Sothern in the foot with his foil. The injury was minor and would have been inconsequential but that it became infected and Sothern was stricken with severe blood poisoning as a result. 

Several months later, on Christmas Eve, the production finally reopened on tour in St. Louis, where it was evidently well received. This means that the show was probably in its revival when the book was published (the photograph of the duel scene does not directly show how Sothern may have been stabbed in the foot, but his recklessly haughty expression, combined with his bare-handed grasp on Laertes's blade, suggests how the accident may have come about...). But there must have been something about this production that drew the ire of the theatre gods, for within a few months disaster struck again; while on tour in Cincinnati, a fire in the playhouse destroyed all of Unitt’s sumptuous costumes and sets. Sothern decided to call it quits. He returned to New York, and didn’t resume playing in Shakespeare’s plays until 1904 when he began to collaborate with his third wife, Julia Marlowe, in a number of very well-received productions both in the city and on tour (including a revival of his Hamlet, photographed -- once again -- by Schloss of New York). Sothern was a very active and successful actor for the remainder of his life and even appeared in some early films in the mid-1910s.

Returning to the book, a close examination of the text -- in conjunction with the photographs -- provides a fairly comprehensive view of how the show was staged. The text is largely a conflation of the 1604 quarto and 1623 folio editions and I suspect that a closer collation would reveal that it follows fairly precisely the text as presented in one of the standard editions of the day, such as the 1866 Globe edition. The scene-breaks, however, don’t seem to follow a logical pattern, such as that traditionally followed from the 1676 quarto; III.i, for example, bizarrely includes both the “To be or not to be” sequence and the Mousetrap. Given more time and space, it might be intriguing to look closer at certain passages to check for modernizations, emendations, or borrowings from the so-called “bad quarto” of 1603 (which had been discovered in 1823), but for now this brief foray will have to suffice.

In addition to the language of the play, the stage directions -- nearly all of which have been added by the director -- spell out in precise detail how various scenes both looked and moved. In one place, the telling inclusion of an exact stage action suggests that the book was printed precisely from a copy of the acting text used for the production (either Sothern’s own or perhaps the stage manager’s): on p. 47, in II.i, after Hamlet’s cryptic response to Polonius, “You cannot, sir, take from me any thing that I will more willingly part withal: except my life, except my life, except my life”, there is a parenthetical stage direction reading “(Down L.)”. This kind of stage jargon does not appear in the other added stage directions of the play, most of which are elaborate scene-setting statements. In other places, the added stage directions provide more clues as to how the play was performed, such as the moving image given by the direction for Hamlet’s exit following his accidental murder of Polonius in III.ii -- “(Hamlet weeps over body of Polonius.)” -- or the more delicate staging called for when Hamlet asks Ophelia “Lady, shall I lie in your lap?” -- “(Lying down at Ophelia’s feet.)” --  and, my favorite, the inadvertently graphic image of the First Gravedigger who several times is assigned the rather wonderfully disgusting direction: “(Throws up a skull.)”.