\"Dramatic Literature\" Brander Matthews Hand Written Note on Card For Sale

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\"Dramatic Literature\" Brander Matthews Hand Written Note on Card:
$34.99

Up for sale "Dramatic Literature" Brander Matthews Hand Written Note on Card Dated 1914. 

ES-3978

James

Brander Matthews (February

21, 1852 – March 31, 1929) was an American writer and educator. He was the

first full-time professor of dramatic literature at an American university and

played a significant role in establishing theater as a subject worthy of formal

study in the academic world. His interests ranged from Shakespeare, Molière, and Ibsen to French boulevard comedies,

folk theater, and the new realism of his own day. Matthews born to a wealthy

family in New Orleans, grew up in New York City, and graduated from Columbia

College in 1871, where he was a member of the Philolexian Society and

the fraternity of Delta Psi, and from Columbia Law School in

1873. He had no real interest in the law, never needed to work for a living

(given his family fortune), and turned to a literary career, publishing in

the 1880s and 1890s short stories, novels, plays, books about drama,

biographies of actors, and three books of sketches of city life. One of

these, Vignettes of Manhattan (1894), was dedicated to his

friend Theodore Roosevelt. From

1892 to 1900, he was a professor of literature at Columbia and

thereafter held the Chair of Dramatic Literature until his retirement in 1924.

He was known as an engaging lecturer and a charismatic if demanding teacher.

His influence was such that a popular pun claimed that an entire generation had

been "brandered by the same Matthews." During his long tenure at

Columbia, Matthews created and curated a "dramatic museum" of

costumes, scripts, props, and other stage memorabilia. Originally housed in a

four-room complex in Philosophy Hall, the collection was broken up and sold after

his death. However, its books were incorporated into the university library and

its dioramas of the Globe Theatre and

other historic dramatic venues have been dispersed for public display around

campus, mainly in Dodge Hall. Matthews was

the inspiration for the now-destroyed Brander Matthews Theater on 117th Street,

between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive.

An English professorship in his name still exists at Columbia. Matthews' students knew him as a man well-versed in the

history of drama and as knowledgeable about continental dramatists as he was

about American and British playwrights. Long before they were fashionable, he

championed playwrights who were regarded as too bold for American tastes, such

as Hermann Sudermann, Arthur Pinero, and preeminently Henrik Ibsen, about whom he wrote frequently and eloquently. His students

also knew him as an opinionated man with a somewhat conservative political

bent. Playwright S.N. Behrman, who studied with him

in 1917, recalled in his memoirs, "One day I made the mistake of bringing

into class a copy of [the liberal magazine] The New Republic. I had, actually, a contribution in

it. Matthews looked at The New Republic and said, 'I am sorry

to see you wasting your time on that stuff.' As a staunch Republican and

intimate of Theodore Roosevelt's, he had his duty to do." He could also be

"easy and anecdotal," Behrman acknowledged, and he was respected on

campus as a man-of-the-world. He lived for the theater and made clear his

belief that theater was a performance art, first and foremost, and that plays

as literary texts should never be viewed in the same light. Yet in the

classroom he was an exacting guide to stage craftsmanship. Other students recalled him as a teacher

who elicited "mingled affection and impatience" and who conducted himself in a manner that

never attempted to hide his privileged background, connections, and

connoisseurship. His relations with Columbia colleagues were sometimes

adversarial. His conservatism became more pronounced in his later years: he was

adamant about not admitting women to his graduate courses and publicly expressed the opinion that women

did not have the natural ability to be great playwrights. According to Mark Van Doren, he taught an "ancient" American

literature elective that he refused to revise over the decades. Not

surprisingly, he was a natural target for the World War I-era generation of

writers and activists. Reviewing Matthews' autobiography in 1917, the radical critic

and fellow Columbia graduate Randolph Bourne complained that for Matthews,

"literature was a gesture of gentility and not a comprehension of

life."] In On Native Grounds, Alfred Kazin characterized him as a "literary

gentleman." Matthews

taught a number of students who went on to have major careers in the theater,

including playwright Behrman and drama critics Stark Young, Ludwig Lewisohn, and John Gassner

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