YIDDISH MANUSCRIPTS IN THE BRITISH LIBRARY

Horowitz's Shol hameylekh: a biblishe drame in 7 akten [King Saul: Biblical Play in 7
Acts] (London, 1933) is described by the author on the title-page as 'Copy T and
'Manuscript Print by the Author'. Although sometimes perceived as a lithograph and
recorded as such among the library's Hebrew printed books/^ this is simply a manuscript
prepared by the author and presented to the British Museum Library as if a book. A
work of dogged application, it is graphically curious, but poetically deficient.^^
THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN'S PLAYS
The Licensing Act of 1737 required the Lord Chamberlain to license a new play before
it could be publicly performed on the stage. This practice continued until 1968. It will
be news to many that Yiddish plays and play synopses were similarly presented for
decades to the Lord Chamberlain's Office [LCO] for licensing. ^^ Yiddish troupes in
Britain have since 1880 staged at least a thousand different works,^'^ but they do not seem
to have applied for permission to perform as many as a quarter of them. From the late
1890s until the 1940s the practice appears to have been for a Yiddish theatre manager
- if he bothered at all - to submit an English synopsis of the Yiddish play, together with
two guineas for the registration fee. Sometimes a printed or manuscript text accompanied
the synopsis, which was generally poorly written and sloppily presented. The examiners
had additional cause for irritation when the fee was late in arriving. The examiners
regarded careful attention to a play's contents as superfluous if the play were in Yiddish;
this indifference bred ignorance and a certain contempt. At least one Yiddish play,
Shalom Asch's Got fun nekome ('God of Vengeance'), was banned in Britain as late as
1946.
Copies of all plays licensed between 1824 and 1968, formerly held in the Lord
Chamberlain's Office, are now in the British Library, together with all correspondence
and examiners' reports, where these survive. All of this material is now accessible and
may be seen in the Department of [Western] Manuscripts.^^ Plays can be searched
through a card catalogue of titles and through bound volumes in which plays were
recorded by the LCO as received. Yiddish plays can be found only through their
translated English titles, a formidable obstacle unless one knows the material intimately.
For most of the Yiddish plays licensed there are only poor English plot abstracts, but
there is also Yiddish language material, printed and manuscript. The plays run the
gamut between raucous musicals, sentimental operettas and tear-jerking melodramas on
the one hand, and serious art theatre on the other. Spanning the years 1880 to 1961, the
LCO plays are an important source for the study of Yiddish theatre in Britain.^^
MS. NOTES IN PRINTED BOOKS
A comprehensive list of Yiddish manuscripts would also include Yiddish marginal
glosses in Hebrew printed books such as we find, apparently in a contemporary hand, in
the British Library copy (pressmark C.5o.d.2o) of the incunable Makre Dardeke
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