I need to get my DAZ/Poser 3D artistry blog back online, so there’s no time today for a long involved ‘Picture Postals’ post this Friday.

Rhode Island History 1942-2011 is now online at Archive.org from microfilm, with ‘dark but large’ pictures. Here one has been extracted and rectified and given a touch of colour by myself, a rare (perhaps the only) picture of the audience’s view, showing the stage. Presumably made in the late 1920s when the place was under threat of demolition.

This is a rare interior picture (it doesn’t appear to have survived into the current era, to be scanned) of the place which Lovecraft called his second home and the stage from which he “slung” Shakespeare as a youth.

The 1,500 seater was experienced early…

… we were acquainted with Mr. Morrow [Robert Morrow], the lessee & manager of Providence’s chief theatre — The Providence Opera House — (he lived directly across the street) so that it was not thought too shocking to let my aunt take me to see something [on the stage, when a young boy in 1896]” — H. P. Lovecraft, letter to Kleiner dated 16th November 1916.

He later recalled (Letters to Family)…

What a second home the old Opera House used to be to me!

Evidently this was not restricted to boyhood, as he also recalled that he had “slung from the stage” of the Opera House great slabs of a Shakespearean tragedy, given with “vigorous, orotund delivery”. Indeed the full quote, in a letter to Bonner in 1936 (Selected Letters Vol. 5) reveals he had once been out and about at many theatres in the city…

I used to sling from the stage of Forbes’ Theatre, Smarts Hall, Harrington’s Opera House, and the Providence Opera House

That doesn’t sound like a school theatre group ‘show for the parents’. Was he once quietly an actual ‘turn’ on the boards, one wonders?

This is also somewhat strange given his performance at the Boston amateur journalism conference in February 1922 (Selected Letters Vol. 1, pp. 123-24). There he decided to give his banquet speech impromptu rather than from his prepared script, and was thus rapturously recieved as “a born public speaker”. On which he commented…

All of which was rather amusing to me, since I am a hermit who has never before addressed a banquet

He did however note in his letter that he used at least one theatre trick during the speech, with some stock lines delivered and these being…

borrowed from the manner of vaudeville monologue artists

So what are we to make of this? He “slung from the stage” from several theatres, and one has to assume this was to an audience rather than an empty hall. Yet later he appears surprised at his facility with public speaking. I suppose the distinction he may have been making in his mind was between i) large theatre recital of lines from Shakespeare and ii) impromptu after-dinner public speaking with off-the-cuff remarks and tangents. These things, despite having a similar bodily stance, hand-gestures and vocal projections, are probably rightly considered to be different from one another.

Incidentally, I have now started in on a re-reading of the Selected Letters, skipping those I already have in later per-correspondent volumes, and I’ll be posting notes on these volumes as and when. I did think of asking Joshi if I could update his Index to the Selected Letters (second edition), but it would be a huge task and the full mega-index for all volumes of the Letters is anyway said to be forthcoming from someone else in the next few years. I assume this work will also expand the index for the Selected Letters a bit. I was spurred to my passing notion by the very first mention of Venus (the planet, in connection with Develan’s Comet) in Selected Letters Vol. 1 (p. 5), when I found that the planet had no entry in the Index.