Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: AUTHORS AND MANAGERS. jN author (we may take it) is a person who writes and sells ‘pieces, ’ and a manager is a person who buys and sells pieces. They stand precisely in the same relation to each other as the potato producer and the potato salesmen. The commodity they make, sell, buy, and sell is one much in demand. Fifty theatres, more or less; fifty managers, less or more; and four millions of people, in round numbers, in London alone are consumers of this commodity. The ‘ provinces ’ (in which offensive term the whole of Ireland and Scotland is included), with twenty-eight more millions of people, are also consumers of thisi ! commodity. Surveyors are now measuring the ground, architects are preparing the plans, and capitalists are finding the money (so I am told) for more theatres, but no one is building a new author. The small and de- voted band of six dramatic authors (more or … less) has been recently diminished by one who has taken one of the fifty London theatres, and has turned manager; while another, and the most fruitful and original of our authors, has again taken to the stage, and so diminished the hours during which he can cultivate the dramatic potato. ‘ Revivals, ’ however good and carefully done, cannot go on for ever. The playgoer will not always be fed upon hashed mutton. It requires a superhuman faith in the great law of supply and demand to go to sleep calmly in the face of such a prospect. I am not taking up my rusty pen, and dipping into my cobwebbed inkstand, to frighten my unknown friends, the untried authors; my purpose is rather to encourage these much-enduring, and sometimes muchinflicting, writers. They produce bundles of manuscript with amazing facility, but very few of these bundles ever take the form of acted plays. During t…
