Problems of the Actor: With an Introd by Clayton Hamilton

LOUIS JAMES CALVERT (1859-1923) was a British stage and early film actor and manager of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is perhaps best remembered today for having created roles in plays by George Bernard Shaw and for appearing in King John (1899), the earliest known example of any film based on Shakespeare. Born in Manchester, Lancashire to actor parents, he was educated privately in England and Germany. He made his theatrical debut in South Africa in 1878. During the 1880s, he trained at Sarah Thorne’s School of Acting at Margate, Kent. He went on to appear with Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre in London and toured with Lillie Langtry in the U.S. He staged and produced an Elizabethan-style version of Richard II for the Manchester Committee of the Independent Theatre Society in 1895. This brought him to the attention of actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who made him co-producer of his production of Henry IV, Part 1 at the Haymarket Theatre in May 1896. Numerous starring roles followed, including in Julius Caesar, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Life and Death of King John. Calvert frequently toured the U.S., and in 1909 he was appointed as the actor-manager of the New Theatre in New York. He directed and starred in productions of English plays, particularly the works of William Shakespeare with a company of British and American actors. Calvert died in New York City in 1923. CLAYTON MEEKER HAMILTON (1881-1946) was an American drama critic. Born in Brooklyn, New York, he graduated from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1900 and Columbia University (M.A.) in 1901. He lectured in drama at Columbia University in 1903 and then served as drama critic and associate editor for a number of magazines, including The Forum, The Bookman, Everybody’s Magazine and Vogue. Hamilton was a member of The National Institute of Arts. He died of a heart attack in New York in 1946.