The William Seymour Family Papers (TC011) were donated to the Princeton University Library in 1936 to be the nucleus of the Library’s Theater Collection, originally called the William Seymour Theater Collection. William Seymour (1855-1933) was a prominent American theatrical stage manager, director, and actor, whose seventy-year career is documented in the papers. Seymour was born into an Irish-American theatrical family, the only child of well-known actors James Seymour (1823-64) and Lydia Griffith Seymour (1830-97), who by 1858 were engaged at the Varieties Theatre in New Orleans under the management of Lawrence Barrett. It was there that Seymour began his acting career, notably playing Hendrick to Joseph Jefferson’s Rip Van Winkle. Seymour continued to work as an actor for the next several years while gradually moving into stage management. Beginning in 1869, he worked at Edwin Booth’s Theatre; and in autumn 1871 moved to Boston’s Old Globe Theatre, where he played alongside Edwin Forrest. He became a touring actor and stage manager, first with Lawrence Barrett’s acting troupe from 1872 to 1875, and then as assistant stage manager under A.M. Palmer at Union Square Theatre in New York City from 1875 to 1877. Seymour was then engaged by John McCullough for his stock company at the California Theatre in San Francisco from 1877 until 1879 when he returned to Boston to serve as stage manager for Richard M. Field’s Boston Museum. Remaining there for almost a decade, he gradually took on the responsibilities of an artistic director, occasionally also acting in productions.

In 1882, Seymour married a member of Boston Museum’s company, May Marian Caroline Davenport (1856-1927) ,with whom he had several children. May also came from a theatrical family. She was the daughter of the prominent tragedian E. L. (Edward Loomis) Davenport (1814-77) and sister to Fanny Davenport (1850-98), one of the reigning American actresses of the day. After leaving the Boston Museum, Seymour worked as manager to several producing organizations, including Abbey, Schoeffel & Grau (1889-1897), working principally at the new Tremont Theatre, Boston (1897-98) and for Maurice Grau from 1900 to 1901 at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York—that is, the Old Met, located at 1411 Broadway, between 39th and 40th streets. From about 1897 to 1900, Seymour also worked as an independent producer-manager with E. H. Sothern, Julia Marlowe, and Maude Adams. Seymour’s longest and most well-known association was with Charles Frohman and the Empire Theatre in New York where he worked as general stage director from 1902 to 1915. Seymour’s remaining active years in the theater were spent directing, managing, and acting in shows for various organizations and producers, such as George C. Tyler.

Contemporary accounts of the well-publicized donation of Seymour’s massive collection by his children to Princeton in 1936 note that the collection included a significant number of files of correspondence, photographs, and other personal material as well as about eight hundred bound volumes, three thousand play scripts and prompt books, many heavily annotated, several thousand playbills, and a large number of programs, clippings, magazines, production notebooks, musical scores, and various stage mementos. The collection would have included even more materials; however, papers, artwork, and objects related to New York City theatrical productions were presented to the Museum of the City of New York as Seymour’s oldest daughter, May Davenport Seymour, was the curator of its Theater Collection. Moreover, since this collection was acquired almost eighty years ago, many materials—particularly particularly photographs, playbills, play scripts, artwork, and objects—have been dispersed and integrated into form-based collections within the former Theater Collection; the Rare Book Division, such as the 19th-century Playbooks Collection (TC023), currently described in the Princeton University Library catalog; and the Graphic Arts Collection.

As it now stands, the William Seymour Family Papers (TC011) consists primarily of Seymour’s correspondence with various prominent actors, directors, stage managers, and producers of the period, and numerous production-related materials, such as playscripts and prompt books, notes, diaries, scene sketches, sheet music, ephemera and memorabilia among others. The scope is principally Seymour’s connections with the New York, Boston, and New Orleans stage, though other cities are also represented. Other materials include some family correspondence; articles and essays that Seymour authored about his career and about the theater; newspaper clippings; and a few personal documents. Among Seymour and Davenport family members who were active in the theater, Fanny Davenport (1850-98) is probably the most important. Correspondence, production materials, ephemera, and newspaper clippings document her career. Researchers interested in Fanny Davenport will likely also be interested in viewing the Fanny Davenport Collection (TC108).

The William Seymour Family Papers (TC011) is one of numerous theater and film-related collections that were incorporated into the Manuscripts Division. Strengths of these collections include 19th-century British and 20th-century American theater, as well as popular entertainment, such as the circus, minstrel shows, and movies. Click here to see a comprehensive list of these collections. For information about using the William Seymour Family Papers (TC011), researchers can consult the online finding aid or contact rbsc@princeton.edu

William Seymour

Fanny Davenport

The Library congratulates PEN American Center on its successful $300,000 grant application to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Humanities Collections and Reference Resources, in support of PEN’s two-year project, “Digital Archive of Free Expression.” Approved in March, this project aims to preserve and digitize approximately 1,200 hours of PEN American Center audio/video media, including nearly all of the media in the PEN archives at Princeton (C0760) and a significant portion of that still held by PEN itself. For the past twenty years, the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, has served as the archival repository for PEN American Center, which was founded in 1922, with offices in New York City. PEN American Center (www.pen.org) is the largest and most influential of 144 PEN Centers worldwide. It is dedicated to freedom of expression and a belief that the free exchange of information and ideas is a universal human right and essential to a free and open society. The PEN archives contain 282 cartons and boxes of historical materials, 1922-2008, and are complemented by PEN-related holdings in the papers of Edmund Keeley, Mario Vargas Llosa, and other authors, editors, and translators in the Manuscripts Division.

The PEN archives include about 30 boxes of audiovisual materials at Princeton, containing approximately 500 reel-to-reel audiotapes, film, video cassettes, audio cassettes, and other formats that date from 1966 to 1994. The archives document award ceremonies, conferences, dinners and receptions, panels and symposia, press conferences, programs, and radio and television programs. Among those who have taken part in the World Voices Festivals and whose voices are captured in PEN’s collection are Margaret Atwood, Martin Amis, Vladimir Sorokin, Umberto Eco, Annie Proulx, Ian McEwan, Mario Vargas Llosa, Michael Ondaatje, and Nobel Laureates Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, and Orhan Pamuk. Of particular interest are addresses, interviews, and conversations involving important authors, such as Arthur Miller, Susan Sontag, Salman Rushdie, Grace Paley, Margaret Mead, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Heinrich Böll, and Chinua Achebe. Captured here are the candid thoughts of authors in public discourse, speaking spontaneously or in lively discussions, on subjects of vital interest to authors.

People are often surprised to learn that tape recordings, floppy disks, and other forms of modern information technology are far more endangered than writing materials that are thousands of years old. Software and hardware obsolescence are major problems for born-digital files, and audiovisual materials are at great risk due to the impermanence and physical deterioration of the media, complicated by a lack of playback equipment and technical documentation. Content can be unrecoverable without professional reformatting, which is costly. Some years ago, the Preservation Office surveyed archival collection containing media and found that the Manuscripts Division has hundreds of such collections. Old media needs to be remastered before it can be safely used.

The Library experimented several years ago with outsourcing preservation of a small sampling of PEN media. But given the large quantity of media in the PEN Archives, external support was needed for staff and contractual services. The present NEH-supported project is an outgrowth of conversations between PEN American Center and the Princeton University Library, as well as a pilot project for PEN funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Once remastered, the Library will house copies of the digitized files and the original source materials already in the collection, as well as others in PEN’s possession that are part of the overall digitization project. As part of the project, an archivist will analyze the intellectual content of the media in order to produce searchable metadata to improve access.

The Library will store the original media, after professional remastering at the Media Preserve, in the Library’s media vaults at its ReCAP storage facility; incorporate links to the online digital files and metadata PEN compiled during the digitization project into the Library’s online finding aid for the PEN Archives, as well as into online discovery tools; offer archival and technical expertise and advice as needed to PEN American Center. Princeton will be able to use these archival digital copies and derivatives for scholarly dissemination, including from patron photoduplication orders to website content. The principal goal of the initial project is for the digital files to reside on PEN’s proposed website and be made accessible via links through Princeton’s finding aid and other online resources, when possible. Princeton is committed to strengthening and building upon this partnership and collaboration with PEN American Center and invites PEN to continue to send to the Princeton University Library all PEN archival records of enduring value.

A detailed finding aid for the Archives of PEN American Center is available online. For more information, contact Public Services at rbsc@princeton.edu

PEN American Center media.