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SH O WM AN
over the worn paint on the theater's flats. It was wonderful what you could pack away in a trunk. For "Under the Gaslight" we used to carry a whole demountable locomotive— cow-catcher, smokestack, boiler and all, folded up in the middle like a paper-doll.
In the process of playing everything from farce to "Hamlet," we paid very little attention to copyright and royalties. Back then nobody bothered with such details, except the flossiest theaters in the largest towns where performances were conspicuous and a check-up easy. The bootleg playbroker flourished in the land. As soon as a new success appeared, the broker's henchmen would go and take shorthand notes of the lines and business, print the results up in a hurry— these bootleg texts were incredibly mangled most of the time— and distribute copies to fly-by-night troupes all over the country for an average price of $5 apiece. Sometimes they took the precaution of changing the title a bit— "The Two Orphans" would be bootlegged as "Two Little Children," say— but it wasn't really necessary. Things like "Hazel Kirke" and "The Silver King" and "Rosedale" and "The White Slave" were played thousands of times without the author's getting a penny. If the author could hunt out an illicit performance in Tombstone or Ashtabula or Pierre, he could sue. But hunting them out was expensive and ten to one you couldn't collect from a barnstorming manager even if you got a verdict, so there was little point in resistance.
After a while, when things got too thick, managers
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