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Vaudeville

Vaudeville is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment which began in France at the end of the 19th century. A vaudeville was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a dramatic composition or light poetry, interspersed with songs or ballets. It became popular in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s, while changing over time.

In some ways analogous to music hall from Victorian Britain, a typical North American vaudeville performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill. Types of acts have included popular and classical musicians, singers, dancers, comedians, trained animals, magicians, ventriloquists, strongmen, female and male impersonators, acrobats, clowns, illustrated songs, jugglers, one-act plays or scenes from plays, athletes, lecturing celebrities, minstrels, and films. A vaudeville performer is often referred to as a "vaudevillian".

Vaudeville developed from many sources, including the concert saloon, minstrelsy, freak shows, dime museums, and literary American burlesque. Called "the heart of American show business", vaudeville was one of the most popular types of entertainment in North America for several decades.

Etymology
The origin of the term is obscure but often explained as being derived from the French expression voix de ville voice of the city. A second speculation is that it comes from the 15th-century songs on satire by poet Olivier Basselin, "Vau de Vire". In his Connections television series, science historian James Burke argues that the term is a corruption of the French Vau de Vire Vire River Valley, an area known for its bawdy drinking songs and where Basselin lived. The Oxford English Dictionary also endorses the vau de vire origin, a truncated form of chanson du Vau de Vire song of the Valley of the Vire. Around 1610, Jean le Houx collected these works as Le Livre des Chants nouveaux de Vaudevire, which is probably the direct origin of the word. Some, however, preferred the earlier term "variety" to what manager Tony Pastor called its "sissy and Frenchified" successor. Thus, vaudeville was marketed as "variety" well into the 20th century.

Beginnings
With its first subtle appearances within the early 1860s, vaudeville was not initially a common form of entertainment. The form gradually evolved from the concert saloon and variety hall into its mature form throughout the 1870s and 1880s. This more gentle form was known as "Polite Vaudeville".

In the years before the American Civil War, entertainment existed on a different scale. Similar variety theatre existed before 1860 in Europe and elsewhere. In the US, as early as the first decades of the 19th century, theatergoers could enjoy a performance consisting of Shakespeare plays, acrobatics, singing, dancing, and comedy. As the years progressed, people seeking diversified amusement found an increasing number of ways to be entertained. Vaudeville was characterized by traveling companies touring through cities and towns. A handful of circuses regularly toured the country; dime museums appealed to the curious; amusement parks, riverboats, and town halls often featured "cleaner" presentations of variety entertainment; compared to saloons, music halls, and burlesque houses, which catered to those with a taste for the risqué. In the 1840s, the minstrel show, another type of variety performance, and "the first emanation of a pervasive and purely American mass culture", grew to enormous popularity and formed what Nick Tosches called "the heart of 19th-century show business". A significant influence also came from "Dutch" (i.e., German or faux-German) minstrels and comedians. Medicine shows traveled the countryside offering programs of comedy, music, jugglers, and other novelties along with displays of tonics, salves, and miracle elixirs, while "Wild West" shows provided romantic vistas of the disappearing frontier, complete with trick riding, music and drama. Vaudeville incorporated these various itinerant amusements into a stable, institutionalized form centered in America's growing urban hubs.

From the mid-1860s, impresario Tony Pastor, a former singing circus clown who had become a prominent variety theater performer and manager, capitalized on middle class sensibilities and spending power when he began to feature "polite" variety programs in his New York City theatres. Pastor opened his first "Opera House" on the Bowery in 1865, later moving his variety theater operation to Broadway and, finally, to Fourteenth Street near Union Square. He only began to use the term "vaudeville" in place of "variety" in early 1876. Hoping to draw a potential audience from female and family-based shopping traffic uptown, Pastor barred the sale of liquor in his theatres, eliminated bawdy material from his shows, and offered gifts of coal and hams to attendees. Pastor's experiment proved successful, and other managers soon followed suit.

Popularity
B. F. Keith took the next step, starting in Boston, where he built an empire of theatres and brought vaudeville to the United States and Canada. Later, E. F. Albee, adoptive grandfather of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee, managed the chain to its greatest success. Circuits such as those managed by Keith-Albee provided vaudeville's greatest economic innovation and the principal source of its industrial strength. They enabled a chain of allied vaudeville houses that remedied the chaos of the single-theatre booking system by contracting acts for regional and national tours. These could easily be lengthened from a few weeks to two years.

Albee also gave national prominence to vaudeville's trumpeting "polite" entertainment, a commitment to entertainment equally inoffensive to men, women and children. Acts that violated this ethos (e.g., those that used words such as "hell") were admonished and threatened with expulsion from the week's remaining performances or were canceled altogether. In spite of such threats, performers routinely flouted this censorship, often to the delight of the very audience members whose sensibilities were supposedly endangered. He eventually instituted a set of guidelines to be an audience member at his show, and these were reinforced by the ushers working in the theatre.

This "polite entertainment" also extended to Keith's company members. He went to extreme measures to maintain this level of modesty. Keith even went as far as posting warnings backstage such as this: "Don't say 'slob' or 'son of a gun' or 'hully gee' on the stage unless you want to be canceled peremptorily... if you are guilty of uttering anything sacrilegious or even suggestive you will be immediately closed and will never again be allowed in a theatre where Mr. Keith is in authority." Along these same lines of discipline, Keith's theatre managers would occasionally send out blue envelopes with orders to omit certain suggestive lines of songs and possible substitutions for those words. If actors chose to ignore these orders or quit, they would get "a black mark" on their name and would never again be allowed to work on the Keith Circuit. Thus, actors learned to follow the instructions given to them by B. F. Keith for fear of losing their careers forever.

By the late 1890s, vaudeville had large circuits, houses (small and large) in almost every sizable location, standardized booking, broad pools of skilled acts, and a loyal national following. One of the biggest circuits was Martin Beck's Orpheum Circuit. It incorporated in 1919 and brought together 45 vaudeville theatres in 36 cities throughout the United States and Canada and a large interest in two vaudeville circuits. Another major circuit was that of Alexander Pantages. In his heyday, Pantages owned more than 30 vaudeville theatres and controlled, through management contracts, perhaps 60 more in both the United States and Canada.

At its height, vaudeville played across multiple strata of economic class and auditorium size. On the vaudeville circuit, it was said that if an act would succeed in Peoria, Illinois, it would work anywhere. The question "Will it play in Peoria?" has now become a metaphor for whether something appeals to the American mainstream public. The three most common levels were the "small time" (lower-paying contracts for more frequent performances in rougher, often converted theatres), the "medium time" (moderate wages for two performances each day in purpose-built theatres), and the "big time" (possible remuneration of several thousand dollars per week in large, urban theatres largely patronized by the middle and upper-middle classes). As performers rose in renown and established regional and national followings, they worked their way into the less arduous working conditions and better pay of the big time. The capital of the big time was New York City's Palace Theatre (or just "The Palace" in the slang of vaudevillians), built by Martin Beck in 1913 and operated by Keith. Featuring a bill stocked with inventive novelty acts, national celebrities, and acknowledged masters of vaudeville performance (such as comedian and trick roper Will Rogers), the Palace provided what many vaudevillians considered the apotheosis of remarkable careers. A standard show bill would begin with a sketch, follow with a single (an individual male or female performer); next would be an alley-oop (an acrobatic act); then another single, followed by yet another sketch such as a blackface comedy. The acts that followed these for the rest of the show would vary from musicals to jugglers to song-and-dance singles and end with a final extravaganza – either musical or drama – with the full company. These shows would feature such stars as ragtime and jazz pianist Eubie Blake, the famous and magical Harry Houdini, and child star Baby Rose Marie. In the New-York Tribune's article about Vaudeville, it is said that at any given time, Vaudeville was employing over twelve thousand different people throughout its entire industry. Each entertainer would be on the road 42 weeks at a time while working a particular "Circuit" – or an individual theatre chain of a major company.

While the neighborhood character of vaudeville attendance had always promoted a tendency to tailor fare to specific audiences, mature vaudeville grew to feature houses and circuits specifically aimed at certain demographic groups. Black patrons, often segregated into the rear of the second gallery in white-oriented theatres, had their own smaller circuits, as did speakers of Italian and Yiddish (see below). This foreign addition combined with comedy produced such acts as "minstrel shows of antebellum America" and Yiddish theatre. Many ethnic families joined in on this entertainment business, and for them, this traveling lifestyle was simply a continuation of the circumstances that brought them to America. Through these acts, they were able to assimilate themselves into their new home while also bringing bits of their own culture into this new world. White-oriented regional circuits, such as New England's "Peanut Circuit", also provided essential training grounds for new artists while allowing established acts to experiment with and polish new material. At its height, vaudeville was rivaled only by churches and public schools among the nation's premiere public gathering places.

Another slightly different aspect of Vaudeville was an increasing interest in the female figure. The previously mentioned ominous idea of "the blue envelopes" led to the phrase "blue" material, which described the provocative subject matter present in many Vaudeville acts of the time. Many managers even saw this scandalous material as a marketing strategy to attract many different audiences. As stated in Andrew Erdman's book Blue Vaudeville, the Vaudeville stage was "a highly sexualized space ... where unclad bodies, provocative dancers, and singers of 'blue' lyrics all vied for attention." Such performances highlighted and objectified the female body as a "sexual delight", but more than that, historians think that Vaudeville marked a time in which the female body became its own "sexual spectacle". This sexual image began sprouting everywhere an American went: the shops, a restaurant, the grocery store, etc. The more this image brought in the highest revenue, the more Vaudeville focused on acts involving women. Even acts that were as innocent as a sister act were higher sellers than a good brother act. Consequently, Erdman adds that female Vaudeville performers such as Julie Mackey and Gibson's Bathing Girls began to focus less on talent and more on physical appeal through their figure, tight gowns, and other revealing attire. It eventually came as a surprise to audience members when such beautiful women actually possessed talent in addition to their appealing looks. This element of surprise colored much of the reaction to the female entertainment of this time.

Women
In the 1920s, announcements seeking all-girl bands for vaudeville performances appeared in industry publications like Billboard, Variety and in newspapers. Bands like The Ingenues and The Dixie Sweethearts were well-publicized, while other groups were simply described as "all-girl Revue". According to Feminist Theory, similar trends in theater and film objectified women, an example of male gaze, as women's role in public life was expanding. These expectations for women in the 19th century played a big role in the compelling aspects of vaudeville. Through vaudeville, many women were allowed to join their male counterparts on the stage and found success in their acts.

Leila Marie Koerber, later Marie Dressler, was a Canadian actress who specialized in vaudeville comedy, and eventually won an Academy Award for Best Actress later in her career. Being the daughter of a musician, she moved to the United States of America in her childhood. At just fourteen years old, she left home to begin her career, lying about her age and sending her mother half of her paycheck. Dressler found great success and was known for her comedic timing and physical comedy, like carrying her male co-stars. She eventually worked on Broadway, where she had a great desire to become a serious actress but was advised to remain in comedy. She went on to star in a few films but again returned to vaudeville, her original career.

Another famous vaudevillian actress was Trixi Friganza, originally born Delia O'Callaghan. She had a famous catchphrase; "You know Trixi with her bag of tricks." She began her career in opera, performing to help provide for her family. The oldest of three daughters, she wanted to help her family financially but had to do it secretly, as female performers were frowned on at the time. She worked largely in comedy and gained acclaim and success due to her willingness to step into other's roles who had fallen ill, and were otherwise unable to perform. In her acts, she often emphasized her plus-size figure, calling herself the "perfect forty-six". Friganza was also a poet and writer. She used many of her performances as ways to raise money to support the poor or disenfranchised and went on record publicly numerous times to support these social causes. Friganza also spent much of her life fighting for women's equality and pushing for self-acceptance for women, both publicly and within themselves, as well as their rights in comparison to men.

Betty Felsen was an American ballerina, vaudeville star, and teacher. She was born on June 9, 1905, in Chicago, IL Betty began taking lessons at a local Chicago ballet school when she was eight years old, and often performed solo dances in shows presented by that school. Just before her tenth birthday in 1916, her parents enrolled her as a ballet student with the Pavley-Oukrainsky Ballet School within the Chicago Opera Association. Then, in 1919 Betty was accepted to be a member of the Chicago Opera’s Pavley-Oukrainsky Ballet corps de ballet. From December 1920 until the fall of 1922 Betty was a ballerina soloist and performed with them throughout North America. Under the name Buddye Felsen, Betty landed a starring dancing role in a new show at Fred Mann’s Million Dollar Rainbo Room in the Rainbo Gardens. The show, Rainbo Trail, directed by Frank Westphal, opened on December 15, 1922, and ran until March 1, 1923. In the winter of 1923 Betty began a partnership with Jack Broderick. From then until the end of 927 Broderick & Felsen performed on the B.F. Keith and Pantages vaudeville circuits throughout the U.S. and Canada. Their act evolved from a simple dance act to one with over twenty dancers, an orchestra, and elaborate costumes and sets. From 1925 to 1926 they played for 20 straight weeks at the huge Colony Theater on Broadway in New York City. In 1926 and 1927, they starred in two spectacular musical productions, touring across the United States and Canada, first for about three months in Emil Boreo’s Mirage de Paris followed by nine months in their own Ballet Caprice. After Jack quit the act near the end of 1927, Betty continued to manage the troupe and, with a new dance partner, toured throughout the northeastern United States for the next six months as Betty Felsen and Company. The final performance of Ballet Caprice was on June 4, 1928, at Broadway’s Palace Theater in New York City.

Another famous comedienne, one who brought in thousands of audience members with her signature improvisational skills, was May Irwin. She worked from about 1875 to 1914. Originally born Ada Campbell, she began her life on the stage at thirteen years old following the death of her father. She and her older sister created a singing act called the "Irwin Sisters". Many years later, their act had taken off and with performances in both vaudeville and burlesque at famous music halls, until Irwin decided to continue her career on her own. She then changed her approach to vaudeville, performing African-American-influenced songs, even later writing her songs. She introduced her signature in vaudeville, "The Bully Song", which was performed in a Broadway show. This is when she began experimenting with improvisational comedy and quickly found her unique success, even taking her performances global with acts in the U.K.

Sophie Tucker, a Russian Jewish immigrant, was told by promoter Chris Brown that she was not attractive enough to succeed  in show business without doing Blackface, so she performed that way for the first two years onstage, until one day she decided to go without it, and achieved much greater success  being herself from that point on, especially with her song "Some of These Days."

Moms Mabley was a comedienne who got her start in Vaudeville  and the Chitlin circuits in the 1920s, and ended up with mainstream success in the 20th century. Other 20th century women performers who started in Vaudeville included blues singers Ma Rainey, Ida Cox and Bessie Smith. Women-led touring companies like Black Patti's Troubadours, the Whitman Sisters and the Hyers Sisters were popular acts. Other women worked the business side of Vaudeville, like Amanda Thorpe, a white woman who founded a black theater in Virginia, and the Griffin Sisters, who managed several theaters in their efforts to create a Black Vaudeville circuit.

Black vaudeville

Black performers and patrons participated in a racially segregated vaudeville circuit. Though many popular acts like Lewis and Walker, Ernest Hogan, Irving Jones, and the Hyers Sisters played to both white and black audiences, early Vaudeville performances for white audiences were limited to one Black act per show, and performers faced discrimination in restaurants and lodging. Entertainers and entrepreneurs like The Whitman Sisters, Pat Chapelle and John Isham created and managed their own touring companies; others took on theater ownership and management and created Black vaudeville circuits, as was the case for Sherman H. Dudley and the Griffin Sisters  Later, in the 1920s, many bookings were managed by the Theatre Owners Booking Association.

African-Americans challenged the prevailing Blackface stereotypes played by white performers by bringing their own authenticity and style to the stage, composing music, comedy and dance routines and laying the groundwork for distinctly American cultural phenomena like blues, jazz, ragtime and tap dance. Notable Black entertainers in Vaudeville included comedians Bert Williams, and George Walker, dancer/choreographer Ada Overton Walker, and many others. Black songwriters and composers like Bob Cole, Ernest Hogan, Irving Jones, Rosamond Johnson, George Johnson, Tom Lemonier, Gussie L. Davis, and Chris Smith, wrote many of the songs that were popularized  onstage by white singers, and paved the way for African-American musical theater.

Immigrant America
In addition to vaudeville's prominence as a form of American entertainment, it reflected the newly evolving urban inner-city culture and interaction of its operators and audience. Making up a large portion of immigration to the United States in the mid-19th century, Irish Americans interacted with established Americans, with the Irish becoming subject to discrimination due to their ethnic physical and cultural characteristics. The ethnic stereotypes of Irish through their greenhorn depiction alluded to their newly arrived status as immigrant Americans, with the stereotype portrayed in avenues of entertainment.

Following the Irish immigration wave were several waves in which new immigrants from different backgrounds came in contact with the Irish in America's urban centers. Already settled and being native English speakers, Irish Americans took hold of these advantages and began to assert their positions in the immigrant racial hierarchy based on skin tone and assimilation status, cementing job positions that were previously unavailable to them as recently arrived immigrants. As a result, Irish Americans became prominent in vaudeville entertainment as curators and actors, creating a unique ethnic interplay between Irish American use of self-deprecation as humor and their diverse inner city surroundings.

The interactions between newly arrived immigrants and settled immigrants within the backdrop of the unknown American urban landscape allowed vaudeville to be utilized as an avenue for expression and understanding. The often hostile immigrant experience in their new country was now used for comic relief on the vaudeville stage, where stereotypes of different ethnic groups were perpetuated. The crude stereotypes that emerged were easily identifiable not only by their distinct ethnic cultural attributes, but how those attributes differed from the mainstream established American culture and identity.

Coupled with their historical presence on the English stage for comic relief, and as operators and actors of the vaudeville stage, Irish Americans became interpreters of immigrant cultural images in American popular culture. New arrivals found their ethnic group status defined within the immigrant population and in their new country as a whole by the Irish on stage. Unfortunately, the same interactions between ethnic groups within the close living conditions of cities also created racial tensions which were reflected in vaudeville. Conflict between Irish and African Americans saw the promotion of black-face minstrelsy on the stage, purposefully used to place African Americans beneath the Irish in the racial and social urban hierarchy.

Although the Irish had a strong Celtic presence in vaudeville and in the promotion of ethnic stereotypes, the ethnic groups that they were characterizing also utilized the same humor. As the Irish donned their ethnic costumes, groups such as the Chinese, Italians, Germans and Jews utilized ethnic caricatures to understand themselves as well as the Irish. The urban diversity within the vaudeville stage and audience also reflected their societal status, with the working class constituting two-thirds of the typical vaudeville audience.

The ethnic caricatures that now comprised American humor reflected the positive and negative interactions between ethnic groups in America's cities. The caricatures served as a method of understanding different groups and their societal positions within their cities. The use of the greenhorn immigrant for comedic effect showcased how immigrants were viewed as new arrivals, but also what they could aspire to be. In addition to interpreting visual ethnic caricatures, the Irish American ideal of transitioning from the shanty to the lace curtain became a model of economic upward mobility for immigrant groups.

Decline
The continued growth of the lower-priced cinema in the early 1910s dealt the heaviest blow to vaudeville. This was similar to the advent of free broadcast television's diminishing the cultural and economic strength of the cinema. Cinema was first regularly commercially presented in the US in vaudeville halls. The first public showing of movies projected on a screen took place at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in 1896. Lured by greater salaries and less arduous working conditions, many performers and personalities, such as Al Jolson, W. C. Fields, Mae West, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, Jimmy Durante, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Edgar Bergen, Fanny Brice, Burns and Allen, and Eddie Cantor, used the prominence gained in live variety performance to vault into the new medium of cinema. In doing so, such performers often exhausted in a few moments of screen time the novelty of an act that might have kept them on tour for several years. Other performers who entered in vaudeville's later years, including Jack Benny, Abbott and Costello, Kate Smith, Cary Grant, Bob Hope, Milton Berle, Judy Garland, Rose Marie, Sammy Davis Jr., Red Skelton, Larry Storch and The Three Stooges, used vaudeville only as a launching pad for later careers. They left live performance before achieving the national celebrity of earlier vaudeville stars, and found fame in new venues.

The line between live and filmed performances was blurred by the number of vaudeville entrepreneurs who made more or less successful forays into the movie business. For example, Alexander Pantages quickly realized the importance of motion pictures as a form of entertainment. He incorporated them in his shows as early as 1902. Later, he entered into a partnership with the Famous Players–Lasky, a major Hollywood production company and an affiliate of Paramount Pictures.

By the late 1920s, most vaudeville shows included a healthy selection of cinema. Earlier in the century, many vaudevillians, cognizant of the threat represented by cinema, held out hope that the silent nature of the "flickering shadow sweethearts" would preclude their usurpation of the paramount place in the public's affection. With the introduction of talking pictures in 1926, the burgeoning film studios removed what had remained the chief difference in favor of live theatrical performance: spoken dialogue. Historian John Kenrick wrote:

"Top vaudeville stars filmed their acts for one-time pay-offs, inadvertently helping to speed the death of vaudeville. After all, when 'small time' theatres could offer 'big time' performers on screen at a nickel a seat, who could ask audiences to pay higher amounts for less impressive live talent? The newly-formed RKO studios took over the famed Orpheum vaudeville circuit and swiftly turned it into a chain of full-time movie theatres. The half-century tradition of vaudeville was effectively wiped out within less than four years."

Inevitably, managers further trimmed costs by eliminating the last of the live performances. Vaudeville also suffered due to the rise of broadcast radio following the greater availability of inexpensive receiver sets later in the decade. Even the hardiest in the vaudeville industry realized the form was in decline; the perceptive understood the condition to be terminal. The standardized film distribution and talking pictures of the 1930s confirmed the end of vaudeville. By 1930, the vast majority of formerly live theatres had been wired for sound, and none of the major studios were producing silent pictures. For a time, the most luxurious theatres continued to offer live entertainment, but most theatres were forced by the Great Depression to economize.

Some in the industry blamed cinema's drain of talent from the vaudeville circuits for the medium's demise. Others argued that vaudeville had allowed its performances to become too familiar to its famously loyal, now seemingly fickle audiences.

There was no abrupt end to vaudeville, though the form was clearly sagging by the late 1920s. Joseph Kennedy Sr. in a hostile buyout, acquired the Keith-Albee-Orpheum Theatres Corporation (KAO), which had more than 700 vaudeville theatres across the United States which had begun showing movies. The shift of New York City's Palace Theatre, vaudeville's center, to an exclusively cinema presentation on 16 November 1932, is often considered to have been the death knell of vaudeville.

Though talk of its resurrection was heard during the 1930s and later, the demise of the supporting apparatus of the circuits and the higher cost of live performance made any large-scale renewal of vaudeville unrealistic.

Architecture
The most striking examples of Gilded Age theatre architecture were commissioned by the big time vaudeville magnates and stood as monuments of their wealth and ambition. Examples of such architecture are the theatres built by impresario Alexander Pantages. Pantages often used architect B. Marcus Priteca (1881–1971), who in turn regularly worked with muralist Anthony Heinsbergen. Priteca devised an exotic, neo-classical style that his employer called "Pantages Greek".

Though classic vaudeville reached a zenith of capitalization and sophistication in urban areas dominated by national chains and commodious theatres, small-time vaudeville included countless more intimate and locally controlled houses. Small-time houses were often converted saloons, rough-hewn theatres, or multi-purpose halls, together catering to a wide range of clientele. Many small towns had purpose-built theatres. A small yet interesting example might include what is called Grange Halls in northern New England, still being used. These are old-fashioned, wooden buildings with creaky, dimly-lit, wooden stages all of which is meant to offset the isolation of a farming lifestyle. These stages can offer anything from child performers to something called contra-dances to visits by Santa to local, musical talent, to homemade foods such as whoopee pies.

Vaudeville's cultural influence and legacy
Some of the most prominent vaudevillians successfully made the transition to cinema, though others were not as successful. Some performers such as Bert Lahr fashioned careers out of combining live performance with radio and film roles. Many others later appeared in the Catskill resorts that constituted the "Borscht Belt".

Vaudeville was instrumental in the success of the newer media of film, radio, and television. Comedies of the new era adopted many of the dramatic and musical tropes of classic vaudeville acts. Film comedies of the 1920s through the 1940s used talent from the vaudeville stage and followed a vaudeville aesthetic of variety entertainment, both in Hollywood and in Asia, including China.

The rich repertoire of the vaudeville tradition was mined for prominent prime-time radio variety shows such as The Rudy Vallée Show. The structure of a single host introducing a series of acts became a popular television style and can be seen consistently in the development of television, from The Milton Berle Show in 1948 to Late Night with David Letterman in the 1980s. The multi-act format had renewed success in shows such as Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar and The Ed Sullivan Show. Today, performers such as Bill Irwin, a MacArthur Fellow and Tony Award-winning actor, are frequently lauded as "New Vaudevillians".

References to vaudeville and the use of its distinctive argot continue throughout North American popular culture. Words such as "flop" and "gag" were terms created from the vaudeville era and have entered the American idiom. Though not credited often, vaudevillian techniques can commonly be witnessed on television and in movies, remarkably in the recent, worldwide phenomenon of TV shows such as America's Got Talent.

In professional wrestling, there was a noted tag team, based in WWE, called The Vaudevillains.

In 2018, noted film director Christopher Annino, maker of a new silent feature film, Silent Times, founded Vaudeville Con, a gathering to celebrate the history of vaudeville. The first meeting was held in Pawcatuck, Connecticut.

Archives
The records of the Tivoli Theatre are housed at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, with additional personal papers of vaudevillian performers from the Tivoli Theatre, including extensive costume and set design holdings, held by the Performing Arts Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne.

The American Vaudeville Museum, one of the largest collections of vaudeville memorabilia, is located at the University of Arizona.

The Elgin and Winter Garden Theatres in Toronto houses the world's largest collection of vaudeville props and scenery.

The Benjamin Franklin Keith and Edward F. Albee Collection housed at the University of Iowa includes a large collection of managers' report books recording and commenting on the lineup and quality of the acts each night.

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Saunders Lewis

Saunders Lewis (born John Saunders Lewis; 15 October 1893 – 1 September 1985) was a Welsh politician, poet, dramatist, Medievalist, and literary critic. Born into a Welsh-speaking ministerial family in Greater Liverpool, Lewis studied in a public school growing up. He rediscovered the importance of both his heritage language and cultural roots while serving as a junior officer in the British Army during the trenches of the First World War. As a vocal supporter of Welsh nationalism, Lewis believed, however, that heritage language revival, cultural nationalism and the decolonisation of Welsh-language literature, the dramatic arts, and culture needed to precede Welsh devolution or political independence. If the excessive Anglophilia and colonial mentality traditionally known as Dic Siôn Dafydd was never challenged or defeated, Lewis predicted in 1918, "the Welsh Parliament would [only] be an enlarged County Council."

Lewis accordingly became a co-founder of Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru (The National Party of Wales), now the Welsh nationalist political party known as Plaid Cymru, at a covert meeting with fellow nationalists during the 1925 National Eisteddfod of Wales. Lewis has been described by Jan Morris as, "the most passionate of twentieth century Welsh patriots", and as being, "one of the few twentieth century writers in Welsh with a European reputation, but for many Welshmen [he was] chiefly the keeper of the national conscience." Lewis is usually acknowledged as one of the most vitally important figures in 20th-century Welsh-language literature. He is also widely credited, through his 1962 radio address Tynged yr Iaith ("The Fate of the Language"), with almost singlehandedly bringing Welsh back from the brink of language death.

In 1970, Lewis was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature and was appointed as a Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory by Pope Paul VI. Saunders Lewis' traditionalist Catholic and distributist beliefs gave him a simultaneously anti-Marxist and anti-colonialist interpretation of Welsh history and a similar vision, influenced by his study of what had he considered to have worked in Irish nationalism, for the future of the Welsh people. In the 21st century, he continues, for this reason to be the target of posthumous attacks by far left politicians from the very party he helped to found. Even so, Lewis was overwhelmingly voted the tenth greatest Welsh hero in the '100 Welsh Heroes' poll, released on St. David's Day 2004.

Early life
John Saunders Lewis was born into a Welsh-speaking family in Wallasey in the Wirral, Cheshire, in the north-west of England, on 15 October 1893. He was the second of three sons of Lodwig Lewis (1859–1933), a Calvinistic Methodist minister, and his wife Mary Margaret (née Thomas, 1862–1900). When was only six years old, Lewis's mother died and his unmarried maternal "Aunt Ellen" (Ellen Elizabeth Thomas) moved into the manse and helped to raise him.

Jan Morris has described Liverpool as the closest there is to a metropolis for the people of North Wales. During a television interview with Aneirin Talfan Davies, Lewis later recalled that this was also true during his childhood, as in and around Liverpool, "there were around about a hundred thousand Welsh-speaking Welsh people... So I was not born in English-speaking England... but into a society that was completely Welsh and Welsh-speaking."

Even though his father was a scholar, "who liked solitude and study", and possessed a very large library of Welsh literature, the only Welsh-language books that Saunders Lewis read while growing up were Bishop Morgan's Bible, the hymnbook, and Sunday school commentaries.

Lewis attended prestigious English-speaking Liscard High School for Boys where he was bullied at first, due to the fact that what little English he could speak, "was full of Welsh words." In time, however, Lewis became, "a typical product of the English education system." He became editor of The Liscard High School Magazine and often visited the Wallasey Public Library, where he read contemporary English literature and, as a teenager, was enthusiastic when he discovered the recent mythopoeic poetry and prose reimaginings of Irish folklore and mythology by Irish nationalists William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, and Padraic Colum.

Lewis later recalled that through these writers, "I came for the first time to understand what patriotism meant and the spirit of the nation meant. And I soon began to think that things like those, which had seized hold of them in Ireland, were the things I should seize hold of in Wales."

Lewis' earliest attempts at writing poems were in English and were inspired by William Wordsworth, Walter Pater, John Wesley and the King James Bible.

Personal life
After entering Liverpool University to study English literature in 1911, Lewis is believed to have first met fellow student Margaret Gilcriest, a Roman Catholic from County Wicklow and staunch believer in Irish political and cultural nationalism, in December 1913. Lewis and Gilcriest shared an enthusiasm for literature and in their subsequent courtship by letters, all of which have since been published, there are references to the writings of Dora Sigerson, Katherine Tynan, James Clarence Mangan, Alice Meynell, Emily Lawless, Thomas Kettle, Daniel Corkery, and James Joyce.

After his aunt Ellen persuaded his father "to accept the inevitable", Lewis and Margaret Gilcriest (1891-1984) were married at Our Lady and St Michael Roman Catholic Church in Workington, Cumberland, on 31 July 1924. They had one child, a daughter, Mair Saunders Jones (1926-2011).

First World War
When the First World War broke out, an idealistic Lewis, feeling inspired by the Aesthete philosophy of Walter Pater to, "savour this experience of life-energy at the utmost", enlisted in the 3rd Battalion, King's Liverpool Regiment on 4 September 1914. British Army records describe Lewis at the time as five-feet and three inches in height, weighing just over seven and a half stone, and as having red hair and grey eyes.

In April 1915, Lewis applied for a commission with the South Wales Borderers and was promoted to full lieutenant in February 1916. The following summer, he was deployed to active service on the Western Front.

During the war, Lewis read the trilogy of novels The Cult of the Self (French: Le Culte du moi) by the French writer Maurice Barrès. Barrès, a French nationalist, had called since the 1890s, alongside Paul Claudel and Paul Bourget, for, "a 'return' to national values and traditions." This volume heavily influenced Lewis' growing sense of his own Welsh identity and belief in the vital importance of cultural nationalism.

Furthermore, according to Jelle Krol, Lewis, was amazed to see how his own father's recent words of advice were echoed by Barrès, who wrote, "the only way to cultivate your personality as an artist and to develop your own resources, is to go back to your roots". Lewis accordingly, "discovered the importance of his Welsh roots during his service in France."

In April 1917, Lewis was severely wounded in action in the left leg and thigh near Gonnelieu, with, "the calf of the leg nearly blown away", as part of the Battle of Cambrai. Afterwards, Lewis needed more than a year to convalesce, during which his younger brother, Ludwig Lewis, was killed in action on 7 July 1917. Although Lewis desperately wanted to visit and help comfort their grieving father at Swansea, his own battlefield injuries were still far too severe to permit him to travel.

In a 23 July 1918 letter to The Cambria Daily Leader, Lewis, as he would do for the remainder of his life, explained why he felt cultural nationalism needed to precede political decolonisation, "In Wales, if we gave ourselves less to party politics and more to the development of our own education and culture, we should make Wales more fitted to have an independent life of her own under Home Rule. And Home Rule, before we have a real national spirit, would mean simply that the Welsh Parliament would be an enlarged County Council."

Return to Wales
After his return from the trenches, Lewis entered the literary field by arguing that three conditions needed to be met for Welsh literature to become truly meaningful. Firstly, "a more professional attitude to Welsh drama". Secondly, the reestablishment of a direct link between Welsh culture with that of mainland Europe, and particularly with French culture, and, lastly, a more continual religious and cultural exploration of pre-Reformation Wales by Welsh writers and intellectuals.

In a 22 October 1919 letter to The Cambria Daily Leader, called for a revival of drama in the Welsh language, beginning with the improvement of dramas set in the villages, "All the plays we have seen so far describe, and rather idyllically describe, village manners. But village life is more than 'manners'. It includes memories and traditions and song and even dance and mummery. Village and peasant drama, if it should tell the round truth, must include romance, the Mabinogion, the monastery, witchcraft, fairyland, and all the ancient playgrounds of men. Let us widen our field."

In a letter of 25 October 1919 to the same newspaper, Lewis urged Welsh-language playwrights and the theatre going public to both, "take note of the dramatic history of Europe." Lewis continued, "And so it seems to me we should begin anew with translation. We should translate into Welsh the plays of the acknowledged masters, of Euripides, of Corneille, of Racine, of Moliere, of Ibsen, of the Spaniards, and we should act them continually; we should learn the classics."

In 1922, he was appointed as lecturer in Welsh literature at the University College of Wales, Swansea. During his time at Swansea he produced some of his most significant works of literary criticism: A School of Welsh Augustans (1924), Williams Pantycelyn (1927), and Braslun o hanes llenyddiaeth Gymraeg (An outline history of Welsh literature) (1932). He continued in this post until his dismissal for a political act of arson at Penyberth, Gwynedd, in 1936.

Founding Plaid Cymru
Discussions of the need for a "Welsh party" had been conducted since the 19th century. With the generation or so before 1922 there "had been a marked growth in the constitutional recognition of the Welsh nation", wrote historian John Davies. By 1924 there were people in Wales "eager to make their nationality the focus of Welsh politics". Lewis's experiences in World War I, and his sympathy for the cause of Irish independence, brought him to Welsh nationalism. He was an advocate for Welsh independence

In 1924, Lewis founded Y Mudiad Cymreig ("The Welsh Movement") with a small group of fellow nationalists. The group met secretly for the first time in Penarth on 7 January 1924. The group continued to meet in secret throughout 1924 and began drawing up a set of aims and policies intended to "rescue Wales from political and cultural oblivion".

At around the same time as Lewis formed Y Mudiad Cymreig, another group of nationalists formed Byddin Ymreolwyr Cymru ("The Welsh Home Rule Army") in Caernarfon. The group was led by Huw Robert Jones, who made contact with Lewis in early 1925 and proposed to form a new political party.

Lewis met with Jones, Lewis Valentine, Moses Griffith, Fred Jones and D. Edmund Williams in a café called Maes Gwyn during the 1925 National Eisteddfod in Pwllheli, Gwynedd, with the aim of establishing a "Welsh party". They founded Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru ("National Party of Wales"), on 5 August 1925. The principal aim of the party would be to foster a Welsh-speaking Wales. To this end it was agreed that party business be conducted in Welsh, and that members sever all links with other British parties. Lewis insisted on these principles before he would agree to the Pwllheli conference.

According to the 1911 census, out of a population of just under 2.5 million, 43.5% of the total population of Wales spoke Welsh as a primary language. This was a decrease from the 1891 census with 54.4% speaking Welsh out of a population of 1.5 million. With these pre-requisites, Lewis condemned Welsh nationalism' as it had hitherto existed, a nationalism characterized by inter-party conferences, an obsession with Westminster and a willingness to accept a subservient position for the Welsh language", wrote Davies. It may be because of these strict positions that the party failed to attract politicians of experience in its early years. However, the party's members believed its founding was an achievement in itself; "merely by existing, the party was a declaration of the distinctiveness of Wales", wrote Davies.

The Lewis Doctrine 1926–1939
During the inter-war years, Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru was most successful as a social and educational pressure group rather than as a political party. For Saunders Lewis, party president 1926 to 1939, "the chief aim of the party [is] to 'take away from the Welsh their sense of inferiority ... to remove from our beloved country the mark and shame of conquest. Lewis sought to cast Welshness into a new context, wrote Davies.

Lewis wished to demonstrate how Welsh heritage was linked as one of the 'founders' of European civilization. Lewis, a self-described "strong monarchist", wrote "Civilization is more than an abstraction. It must have a local habitation and name. Here its name is Wales." Additionally, Lewis strove for the stability, educational and cultural advancement, and economic prosperity of local communities in Y Fro Gymraeg. He also denounced both laissez faire capitalism and Marxism, and instead promoted what he called perchentyaeth: (lit. "distributing property among the masses"), based on Catholic social teaching, Distributism, and Christian democracy.

Broadcasting
Saunders Lewis perceived the early development of BBC radio broadcasting in Wales (which was almost entirely in English) as serious threat to his aim of arresting the decline of the Welsh language (then down to 36%) and turning Wales back into a 100% Welsh-speaking nation. At the same time he also recognised that if he could exert influence and pressure on the BBC, the Corporation could become a useful tool to serve Plaid Cymru's political ends. In 1929 he declared it would soon be necessary to arrange for "thousands of Welshmen to be prosecuted for refusing to pay for English programmes". The following year Lewis was commissioned by E.R. Appleton, Director of the BBC's Cardiff radio station, (who had banned broadcasting in Welsh) to broadcast a talk which would "explain Welsh Nationalism". On vetting the script, which advocated political nationalism in preference to "cultural nationalism", Appleton decided it was too controversial and inflammatory to be broadcast. In October 1933 the University of Wales Council, which had been lobbying for more Welsh-language broadcasting, appointed a ten-man council to press the case with the BBC. It included David Lloyd George, William George, W. J. Gruffydd and Saunders Lewis – who was continuing to incense the BBC by publicly alleging it was "seeking the destruction of the Welsh language". The University Committee, which was described by BBC Director General John Reith as "the most unpleasant and unreliable people with whom it has been my misfortune to deal" gained ever more influence on the BBC in Wales not least in the selection of BBC staff – a function delegated to the committee by the corporation. As newspapers of the time noted, appointees seemed primarily drawn from the families of the Welsh-speaking elite including "the son of a professor of Welsh and the offspring of three archdruids". Saunders Lewis's assiduous campaigning over the years was to succeed in cementing an ongoing Plaid Cymru influence within the BBC. When the BBC's Welsh Advisory Council was eventually established in 1946, although half its members were Labour, several Plaid Cymru supporters were appointed including Saunders Lewis's successor as Plaid Cymru president, Gwynfor Evans.

Tân yn Llŷn 1936
Welsh nationalism was ignited in 1936 when the UK Government settled on establishing an RAF training camp and aerodrome at Penyberth on the Llŷn Peninsula in Gwynedd. The events surrounding the protest, known as Tân yn Llŷn ("Fire in Llŷn"), helped define Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru. The UK Government settled on Llŷn as the site for its training camp after similar proposed sites in Northumberland and Dorset met with protests.

However, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin refused to hear the case against building this "bombing school" in Wales, despite a deputation representing 500,000 Welsh protesters. Protest against the project was summed up by Lewis when he wrote that the UK Government was intent upon turning one of the "essential homes of Welsh culture, idiom, and literature" into a place for promoting a "barbaric" method of warfare. Construction of this military academy began exactly 400 years after the passage of the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542.

On 8 September 1936, the building was set on fire and in the investigations which followed Saunders Lewis, Lewis Valentine, and D. J. Williams claimed responsibility. They were tried at Caernarfon, where the jury failed to agree on a verdict. The case was then sent to be retried at the Old Bailey in London, where "the Three" were convicted, and sentenced to nine months imprisonment. On their release from Wormwood Scrubs, they were greeted as heroes by 15,000 Welsh people at a pavilion in Caernarfon.

Many Welsh people were angered by the judge's scornful treatment of the Welsh language, by the decision to move the trial to London, and by the decision of University College, Swansea, to dismiss Lewis from his post before he had been found guilty. Dafydd Glyn Jones wrote of the fire that it was "the first time in five centuries that Wales struck back at England with a measure of violence... To the Welsh people, who had long ceased to believe that they had it in them, it was a profound shock."

However, despite the acclaim the events of Tân yn Llŷn generated, by 1938 Lewis's concept of perchentyaeth ("home ownership") had been firmly rejected as not a fundamental tenet of the party. In 1939 Lewis resigned as Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru president, saying that Wales was not ready to accept the leadership of a Roman Catholic.

Although Lewis was the son and grandson of prominent Welsh Calvinistic Methodist ministers, he had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1932.

Second World War
Lewis maintained a strict neutrality in his writings through his column Cwrs y Byd in Y Faner. It was his attempt at an unbiased interpretation of the causes and events of the war.

Outside of the party's initial position on the war, party members were free to choose for themselves their level of support for the war effort. Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru was officially neutral regarding involvement the Second World War, which Lewis and other leaders considered a continuation of the First World War. Central to the neutrality policy was the idea that Wales, as a nation, had the right to decide independently on its attitude towards war, along with opposition towards the UK government's decision to involve Wales in the conflict. With this challenging and revolutionary policy Lewis hoped a significant number of Welshmen would refuse to join the armed forces.

Lewis and other party members were attempting to strengthen loyalty to the Welsh nation "over the loyalty to the British State". Lewis argued "The only proof that the Welsh nation exists is that there are some who act as if it did exist."

However, most party members who claimed conscientious objection status did so in the context of their moral and religious beliefs, rather than on political policy. Of these almost all were exempt from military service. About 24 party members made politics their sole grounds for exemption, of whom 12 received prison sentences. For Lewis, those who objected proved that the assimilation of Wales was "being withstood, even under the most extreme pressures".

University of Wales by-election, 1943
Prior to 1950, universities could elect and return representatives to the House of Commons. The University of Wales seat had become vacant when the constituency's Liberal Member of Parliament, Ernest Evans, had been appointed a county court judge in 1942. Lewis was selected to contest the seat for Plaid Cymru in the ensuing 1943 University of Wales by-election.

His opponent was former Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru Deputy Vice-president William John Gruffydd. Gruffydd had been voicing doubts about Lewis's ideas since 1933, and by 1943 he had left Plaid Cymru and joined the Liberal Party. His other opponent, independent candidate Alun Talfan Davies, was another former member of Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru who would later become Chairman of the Welsh Liberal Party.

The "brilliant but wayward" Gruffydd was a favorite with Welsh-speaking intellectuals and drew 52.3% of the vote, to Lewis's 22.5%.

The election effectively split the Welsh-speaking intelligentsia, and left Lewis embittered with politics, leading him to retreat from direct political involvement. However the experience proved invaluable for Plaid Cymru, as "for the first time they were taken seriously as a political force." The by-election campaign led directly to "considerable growth" in the party's membership.

Tynged yr Iaith and the 1961 census
In 1962 Lewis gave a radio speech entitled Tynged yr iaith ("The Fate of the Language") in which he predicted the complete extinction of the Welsh language by 2000 unless immediate action was taken.

Lewis's radio speech was in response to the 1961 census, which showed a decrease in the percentage of Welsh speakers from 36% in 1931 to 26%, of the population of about 2.5 million. In the census the counties of Merionethshire (Meirionnydd), Anglesey (Ynys Môn), Carmarthenshire (Sir Gaerfyrddin), and Caernarfonshire averaged a 75% proportion of Welsh speakers, with the most significant decreases in the counties of Glamorgan, Flint, and Pembroke.

Assuming, "a gloomy sepulchral tone", Lewis argued that the Welsh language was, "driven into a corner, ready to be thrown, like a worthless rag, on the dung heap." The responsibility for this lay, according to Lewis, less in the hands of the British civil service bureaucracy than with the timidity and indifference of the Welsh-speaking people themselves. As he had fully intended it to do, Lewis' lecture immediately touched a raw nerve.

While Lewis' had wished to shame Plaid Cymru into more direct action promoting a Welsh language revival, his speech instead led to the formation of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (Welsh Language Society) later that year at a Plaid Cymru summer school held in Pontardawe in Glamorgan. The foundation of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg allowed Plaid Cymru to focus on electoral politics, while the Cymdeithas launched a campaign of civil disobedience aimed at the State's policy of coercive Anglicisation.

According to Marcus Tanner, "For the first time, the British government was forced to recognise the existence of a substantial non-Anglophone culture, and to rethink attitudes that had been set in stone since Henry VIII's so-called Acts of Union. The new, more conciliatory attitude began under Labour, but continued under the Conservatives."

Responding to escalating demands for devolution in the United Kingdom, in 1964 the Labour Government established the Welsh Office (Swyddfa Gymreig) and the post of Secretary of State for Wales. The Welsh Language Bill of 1967 granted Welsh equal status to English in the legal system. Further legislation belatedly granted century-old demands for Welsh-medium education.

Later life and death
In 1970, Lewis was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In March 1983, at the age of 89, Saunders Lewis was made an honorary Doctor of Letters of the University of Wales at a ceremony specially conducted at his home in Penarth. The Catholic Herald, reporting the honour, noted that in the previous year Lewis had made a plea for the restoration to the Catholic Church in Wales of the Tridentine Mass in Ecclesiastical Latin, rather than the Mass of Paul VI in the "foreign language of English", which he pointed out was "a later arrival".

Lewis died at St Winifred's Hospital in Cardiff, on 1 September 1985. Lewis' final request for a Tridentine Requiem Mass in Ecclesiastical Latin was denied by Bishop Daniel Mullins, who personally offered the Mass of Paul VI instead. Following the Funeral Mass, Lewis was buried in the same grave as his wife Margaret in St. Joseph's Roman Catholic cemetery in Penarth. Lewis's medal as a Knight Commander of the Order of St Gregory, to which he had been appointed by Pope Paul VI, was laid on Lewis' casket during the funeral ceremony and then buried with him.

Literary legacy
His literary works include stage plays, poetry, novels and essays. He wrote mostly in Welsh, but he also wrote some works in English. By the time of his death in 1985 some rated him as amongst the most celebrated of Welsh writers.

Lewis was above all a dramatist. His notable plays include Blodeuwedd (The woman of flowers) (1923–25, revised 1948), Buchedd Garmon (The life of St. Germain) (radio play, 1936), Siwan (1956), Gymerwch chi sigarét? (Will you have a cigarette?) (1956), Brad (Treachery) (1958), Esther (1960), and Cymru fydd (Tomorrow's Wales) (1967). His plays drew upon a wide range of material and covered a range of subject matter including Welsh mythology and history, as well as the Christian Bible, although he also wrote plays set in contemporary Wales.

Lewis also translated Samuel Beckett's En attendant Godot from French into Welsh.

Lewis' use of poetic forms in the Welsh language included both the use of the traditional 24 strict metres in cynghanedd such as cywyddau and awdlau as well as the Sicilian School's sonnet form, "a variety of other rhyming stanzas", and "full breathed free verse", which were derived from poetry in other languages.

Following his conversion to the Catholic Church, Lewis also wrote many works of Christian poetry inspired by his new faith. These included poems about the Real Presence in the Blessed Sacrament, a poem that sympathetically describes St. Joseph's crisis of faith, about the traumatic but purgatorial sense of loss experienced by St. Mary Magdalen after the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ, and about attending the Tridentine Mass on Christmas Day.

Lewis wrote the libretto for Arwel Hughes's opera Serch yw'r doctor (Love's the doctor), based on Molière's L'Amour médecin (first performance 1960 by Welsh National Opera).

He published two novels, Monica (1930) and Merch Gwern Hywel (The daughter of Gwern Hywel) (1964) and two collections of poems as well as numerous articles and essays in various newspapers, magazines and journals. These articles have been collected into volumes including: Canlyn Arthur (Following Arthur) (1938), Ysgrifau dydd Mercher (Wednesday essays) (1945), Meistri'r canrifoedd (Masters of the centuries) (1973), Meistri a'u crefft (Masters and their craft) (1981) and Ati ŵyr ifainc (Go to it, young men) (1986).

Political and cultural legacy
Lewis's legacy remains a controversial one and his simultaneously anti-Marxist and anti-colonialist interpretation of Welsh history and distributist vision for the nation's future have often been the target of attacks from both the Far Left and the Far Right.

Particularly controversial was his belief, as expressed in Braslun o Hanes Llenyddiaeth Gymraeg, a 1932 outline of the history of Welsh-language literature, that the Edwardian conquest of Wales was less damaging to Welsh culture and literature in the long run than the Protestant Reformation, which began under King Henry VIII with the destruction of the independence of the Catholic Church in Wales from control by the State. This was because, according to Lewis, King Henry's legacy ensured that subsequent Welsh literature was cut off by religious persecution and government censorship of the bardic profession from their own religious past and from their previously close links to the rest of Europe.

This was why Lewis urged Welsh-language writers as early as 1919 to read, translate, and draw influence from literature in many other European languages, rather than, as he and many others before him had once done, only reading and emulating literature in English. This is also why he particularly recommended translating into the Welsh-language and arranging regular performances in the theatres of the best French poets and playwrights of the Counter-Reformation and the Baroque era. Despite his own Francophilia, Lewis had also mentioned the importance of combatting the Black Legend by exposing the Welsh people to the literary canon of Spanish Golden Age theatre, whose greatest playwrights included Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Pedro Calderón de la Barca.

Without mentioning Pope Gregory XI or his 1373 "règle d'idiom", command for the Catholic clergy to both learn and communicate with their flocks in the local vernacular, Lewis believed that the coercive Anglicisation of the Welsh people began with the Acts of Union passed under King Henry VIII following his break with the Holy See and commented, "it was this materialistic and pagan triumph that destroyed our Wales."

Explaining his preference for the era before King Henry VIII, Lewis wrote, "There was one law and one civilisation throughout Europe, but that law, that civilisation took on many forms and many colours. It did not occur to the rulers of a country to destroy another land's civilisation, even when they conquered that land... Despite being conquered, being oppressed, too, and quite cruelly, it (Welsh civilisation) grew upright and without losing the innate qualities of its culture. No doubt Wales often yearned for freedom, but did not fear losing its heritage, nor did it. Because there was one law and one authority throughout Europe, Welsh civilisation was safe, and the Welsh language and the special Welsh way of life and society."

For example, historian John Davies writes that, "in a notable article", Saunders Lewis argued that the Welsh bards of the Medieval era, "were expressing in their poetry a love for a stable, deep-rooted civilization." Lewis added that the bards "were the leading upholders of the belief that a hierarchical social structure, 'the heritage and tradition of an ancient aristocracy', were the necessary precondition of civilized life and that there were deep philosophical roots to this belief."

Unlike Marxist historians and politicians, Lewis' intense hostility to the Welsh nobility was not for existing at all, but for abandoning noblesse oblige and their traditional duties between the 16th and 18th centuries. Instead of acting, as their ancestors had done, as the Welsh people's natural leaders and patrons of Welsh-language literature and the arts, the gentry completely assimilating into the British upper class between the 16th and 18th centuries. Even worse, in Lewis's eyes, and was the Welsh gentry of the era's widespread practices of rackrenting and political bossism enforced by evicting the families of tenants who voted independently of how they were ordered. A disgusted Lewis wrote about the era, "The gentry betrayed their birthright, behaved like rich bourgeois and denied... the civilisation which they boasted they were cherishing."

Despite his many statements to the contrary, Lewis' allegedly "condescending attitude towards some aspects of the Nonconformist, radical and pacifist traditions of Wales", also drew extremely harsh criticism from fellow Welsh nationalists such as D. J. Davies, a Marxist Plaid Cymru member.

Lewis, however, always insisted that his conversion to Catholicism did not keep him from understanding the sensibilities or appreciating the role played in Welsh culture by the Nonconformists. For example, he praised Methodism and Calvinism for preserving the uniqueness of Welsh-language literature and culture against the Anglophilia and linguistic imperialism favoured by the Victorian era Welsh gentry, the Government in Westminster, and the Established Church.

Along with his careful study of what had worked and what had failed in Irish nationalism, these were the real roots of Lewis' beliefs that Welsh cultural and language revival, Christian democracy, rural landscape conservation, and an Irish-style Land War -- meaning direct action tactics intended to reduce rents and coerce an Irish-style breakup and sale of the gentry's estates to their tenants -- were preferable causes for the Welsh nationalist movement to embrace than Socialism and which have attracted such extreme criticism, both during Lewis' lifetime and since his death.

In particular, Marxist D.J. Davies denounced Lewis' calls for Welsh language revival and cultural nationalism. Davies called instead for engaging the English-speaking South Wales valleys. Davies also pointed towards Left Wing political parties in Scandinavia as a model for Plaid Cymru to emulate, and was accordingly far more interested in the "economic implications" of Welsh self-determination.

Left wing historian Geraint H. Jenkins has written, "Lewis was a cold fish. His reedy voice, bow tie, cerebral style and aristocratic contempt for the proletariat were hardly endearing qualities in a political leader, and his conversion to Catholicism lost him the sympathy of fervent Nonconformists. Heavily influenced by the discourse of right-wing French theorists, this profoundly authoritarian figure developed a grand strategy, such as it was, based on the deindustrialization of Wales. Such a scheme was both impractical and unpopular. It caused grave embarrassment to his socialist colleague D. J. Davies, a progressive economist who, writing with force and passion, showed a much better grasp of the economic realities of the time and greater sensitivity towards the plight of working people.

A further source of continuing Left Wing nationalist opposition to Lewis was rooted his expressions of support during the 1930s for Engelbert Dollfuss in the Federal State of Austria, António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal, and for the Nationalist faction during the Spanish Civil War. Even though Lewis' support for the latter was rooted in his horror over both the religious persecution of the Catholic Church in Spain and the Red Terror by the Second Spanish Republic, the Far Left political leadership of Plaid Cymru, reportedly, "have never forgiven him."

For these reasons, while it was Lewis's "brilliance and charismatic appeal" which was firmly associated with Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru in the 1930s, it was D. J. Davies's Leftist ideology which was adopted by Plaid Cymru after the Second World War. For the remainder of his life, however, Saunders Lewis continued to fight for the causes he cared most deeply about and remained an ideological thorn in the side of the Far Left leadership of the very political party he had helped to found.

During the post-World War II battles between Plaid Cymru and the Labour Party over political control of South Wales, a hostile 1946 portrait mocked Saunders Lewis for thinking himself to be the "Masaryk of Wales" and that both the United Kingdom and the very concept of Britishness would one day to collapse similarly to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918. The same writer then sarcastically feigned sympathy for Plaid Cymru, a political party which was allegedly burdened by, "bitterness and hate and the (possibly unintentional) air of physical superiority with which only too many of its members have regarded the bulk of their countrymen."

During the 1990s, in the midst of a debate over the Government of Wales Act 1998, Saunders Lewis was also accused in the House of Commons of having praised Adolf Hitler in 1936 with the words, "At once he fulfilled his promise — a promise which was greatly mocked by the London papers months before that — to completely abolish the financial strength of the Jews in the economic life of Germany."

In 2001, former Plaid Cymru President Dafydd Elis-Thomas accused Saunders Lewis during a television documentary of being, "lousy as a politician, lousy as a writer, but a good Catholic".

In contrast, however, Marcus Tanner, while researching in his 2004 book The Last of the Celts visited the decaying English-speaking industrial towns, which D.J. Davies once saw as Plaid Cymru's future. Pointing out that they were both dominated for decades by Far Left political machines, leading to Soviet-inspired concrete architecture, political corruption, and skyrocketing unemployment, Tanner compared South Wales to the many similarly decaying and disillusioned industrial towns behind the former Iron Curtain after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In the same book, Tanner credited the famous 1962 radio lecture by Saunders Lewis with being the primary reason why the Welsh language was, as of 2004, the only one of the Celtic languages that was neither dead or critically endangered.

According to Tanner, "Welsh is more visible than ever before. The moment I drove across the Severn Bridge, signs written in a different language proclaimed that I had entered a different land. It was not like Scotland, where Gaelic bilingual signs were limited to a few Highland areas. As for the Bretons in France, they can only dream of such symbols of recognition. You can live your life in Welsh now, at least in theory. The officials of the North Western Railway, who fired workers on the line from Holyhead to Chester for their inability or unwillingness to speak English in the 1890s, would have a tough time of it now. It is the English-speaking monoglot who faces a problem in trying to work in the public sector, and the language sections of universities do a booming trade in teaching basic Welsh to English professionals who have taken up such posts. Saunders Lewis saved more than most people though possible by his stirring radio address back in 1962."

Lewis' legacy is further reflected by the fact that, even in decaying and traditionally English-speaking Welsh colliery and industrial towns and cities, Welsh-medium education is increasingly used as a means of both heritage language learning and reasserting national identity.

For this and many other reasons, Saunders Lewis was overwhelmingly voted by the Welsh people as their 10th greatest national hero in the '100 Welsh Heroes' poll, the results of which was released on St. David's Day, 2004.

Electoral record
Lewis contested the University of Wales Constituency on two occasions, once in the general election of 1931;and again in the University of Wales by-election of 1943.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Saunders Lewis


text:
Celestial sphere

In astronomy and navigation, the celestial sphere is an abstract sphere that has an arbitrarily large radius and is concentric to Earth. All objects in the sky can be conceived as being projected upon the inner surface of the celestial sphere, which may be centered on Earth or the observer. If centered on the observer, half of the sphere would resemble a hemispherical screen over the observing location.

The celestial sphere is a conceptual tool used in spherical astronomy to specify the position of an object in the sky without consideration of its linear distance from the observer. The celestial equator divides the celestial sphere into northern and southern hemispheres.

Description
Because astronomical objects are at such remote distances, casual observation of the sky offers no information on their actual distances. All celestial objects seem equally far away, as if fixed onto the inside of a sphere with a large but unknown radius, which appears to rotate westward overhead; meanwhile, Earth underfoot seems to remain still. For purposes of spherical astronomy, which is concerned only with the directions to celestial objects, it makes no difference if this is actually the case or if it is Earth that is rotating while the celestial sphere is stationary.

The celestial sphere can be considered to be infinite in radius. This means any point within it, including that occupied by the observer, can be considered the center. It also means that all parallel lines, be they millimetres apart or across the Solar System from each other, will seem to intersect the sphere at a single point, analogous to the vanishing point of graphical perspective. All parallel planes will seem to intersect the sphere in a coincident great circle (a "vanishing circle").

Conversely, observers looking toward the same point on an infinite-radius celestial sphere will be looking along parallel lines, and observers looking toward the same great circle, along parallel planes. On an infinite-radius celestial sphere, all observers see the same things in the same direction.

For some objects, this is over-simplified. Objects which are relatively near to the observer (for instance, the Moon) will seem to change position against the distant celestial sphere if the observer moves far enough, say, from one side of planet Earth to the other. This effect, known as parallax, can be represented as a small offset from a mean position. The celestial sphere can be considered to be centered at the Earth's center, the Sun's center, or any other convenient location, and offsets from positions referred to these centers can be calculated.

In this way, astronomers can predict geocentric or heliocentric positions of objects on the celestial sphere, without the need to calculate the individual geometry of any particular observer, and the utility of the celestial sphere is maintained. Individual observers can work out their own small offsets from the mean positions, if necessary. In many cases in astronomy, the offsets are insignificant.

Determining location of objects
The celestial sphere can thus be thought of as a kind of astronomical shorthand, and is applied very frequently by astronomers. For instance, the Astronomical Almanac for 2010 lists the apparent geocentric position of the Moon on January 1 at 00:00:00.00 Terrestrial Time, in equatorial coordinates, as right ascension 6h 57m 48.86s, declination +23° 30' 05.5". Implied in this position is that it is as projected onto the celestial sphere; any observer at any location looking in that direction would see the "geocentric Moon" in the same place against the stars. For many rough uses (e.g. calculating an approximate phase of the Moon), this position, as seen from the Earth's center, is adequate.

For applications requiring precision (e.g. calculating the shadow path of an eclipse), the Almanac gives formulae and methods for calculating the topocentric coordinates, that is, as seen from a particular place on the Earth's surface, based on the geocentric position. This greatly abbreviates the amount of detail necessary in such almanacs, as each observer can handle their own specific circumstances.

Greek history on celestial spheres
Celestial spheres (or celestial orbs) were envisioned to be perfect and divine entities initially from Greek astronomers such as Aristotle. He composed a set of principles called Aristotelian physics that outlined the natural order and structure of the world. Like other Greek astronomers, Aristotle also thought the "...celestial sphere as the frame of reference for their geometric theories of the motions of the heavenly bodies". With his adoption of Eudoxus of Cnidus' theory, Aristotle had described celestial bodies within the Celestial sphere to be filled with pureness, perfect and quintessence (the fifth element that was known to be divine and purity according to Aristotle). Aristotle deemed the Sun, Moon, planets and the fixed stars to be perfectly concentric spheres in a superlunary region above the sublunary sphere. Aristotle had asserted that these bodies (in the superlunary region) are perfect and cannot be corrupted by any of the classical elements: fire, water, air, and earth. Corruptible elements were only contained in the sublunary region and incorruptible elements were in the superlunary region of Aristotle's geocentric model. Aristotle had the notion that celestial orbs must exhibit celestial motion (a perfect circular motion) that goes on for eternity. He also argued that the behavior and property follows strictly to a principle of natural place where the quintessential element moves freely of divine will, while other elements, fire, air, water and earth, are corruptible, subject to change and imperfection. Aristotle's key concepts rely on the nature of the five elements distinguishing the Earth and the Heavens in the astronomical reality, taking Eudoxus's model of separate spheres.

Numerous discoveries from Aristotle and Eudoxus (approximately 395 B.C. to 337 B.C.) have sparked differences in both of their models and sharing similar properties simultaneously. Aristotle and Eudoxus claimed two different counts of spheres in the heavens. According to Eudoxus, there were only 27 spheres in the heavens, while there are 55 spheres in Aristotle's model. Eudoxus attempted to construct his model mathematically from a treatise known as On Speeds (Περί Ταχών) and asserted the shape of the hippopede or lemniscate was associated with planetary retrogression. Aristotle emphasized that the speed of the celestial orbs is unchanging, like the heavens, while Eudoxus emphasized that the orbs are in a perfect geometrical shape. Eudoxus's spheres would produce undesirable motions to the lower region of the planets, while Aristotle introduced unrollers between each set of active spheres to counteract the motions of the outer set, or else the outer motions will be transferred to the outer planets. Aristotle would later observe "...the motions of the planets by using the combinations of nested spheres and circular motions in creative ways, but further observations kept undoing their work".

Aside from Aristotle and Eudoxus, Empedocles gave an explanation that the motion of the heavens, moving about it at divine (relatively high) speed, puts the Earth in a stationary position due to the circular motion preventing the downward movement from natural causes. Aristotle criticized Empedocles's model, arguing that all heavy objects go towards the Earth and not the whirl itself coming to Earth. He ridiculed it and claimed that Empedocles's statement was extremely absurd. Anything that defied the motion of natural place and the unchanging heavens (including the celestial spheres) was criticized immediately by Aristotle.

==Celestial coordinate systems== These concepts are important for understanding celestial coordinate systems, frameworks for measuring the positions of objects in the sky. Certain reference lines and planes on Earth, when projected onto the celestial sphere, form the bases of the reference systems. These include the Earth's equator, axis, and orbit. At their intersections with the celestial sphere, these form the celestial equator, the north and south celestial poles, and the ecliptic, respectively. As the celestial sphere is considered arbitrary or infinite in radius, all observers see the celestial equator, celestial poles, and ecliptic at the same place against the background stars.

From these bases, directions toward objects in the sky can be quantified by constructing celestial coordinate systems. Similar to geographic longitude and latitude, the equatorial coordinate system specifies positions relative to the celestial equator and celestial poles, using right ascension and declination. The ecliptic coordinate system specifies positions relative to the ecliptic (Earth's orbit), using ecliptic longitude and latitude. Besides the equatorial and ecliptic systems, some other celestial coordinate systems, like the galactic coordinate system, are more appropriate for particular purposes.

History
The ancient Greeks assumed the literal truth of stars attached to a celestial sphere, revolving about the Earth in one day, and a fixed Earth. The Eudoxan planetary model, on which the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic models were based, was the first geometric explanation for the "wandering" of the classical planets. The outermost of these "crystal spheres" was thought to carry the fixed stars. Eudoxus used 27 concentric spherical solids to answer Plato's challenge: "By the assumption of what uniform and orderly motions can the apparent motions of the planets be accounted for?" Anaxagoras in the mid 5th century BC was the first known philosopher to suggest that the stars were "fiery stones" too far away for their heat to be felt. Similar ideas were expressed by Aristarchus of Samos. However, they did not enter mainstream European and Islamic astronomy of the late ancient and medieval period. Copernican heliocentrism did away with the planetary spheres, but it did not necessarily preclude the existence of a sphere for the fixed stars. The first astronomer of the European Renaissance to suggest that the stars were distant suns was Giordano Bruno in his De l'infinito universo et mondi (1584). This idea was among the charges, albeit not in a prominent position, brought against him by the Inquisition. The idea became mainstream in the later 17th century, especially following the publication of Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds by Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1686), and by the early 18th century it was the default working assumptions in stellar astronomy.

Star globe

A celestial sphere can also refer to a physical model of the celestial sphere or celestial globe. Such globes map the constellations on the outside of a sphere, resulting in a mirror image of the constellations as seen from Earth. The oldest surviving example of such an artifact is the globe of the Farnese Atlas sculpture, a 2nd-century copy of an older (Hellenistic period, ca. 120 BCE) work.

Bodies other than Earth
Observers on other worlds would, of course, see objects in that sky under much the same conditions – as if projected onto a dome. Coordinate systems based on the sky of that world could be constructed. These could be based on the equivalent "ecliptic", poles and equator, although the reasons for building a system that way are as much historic as technical.

title: Celestial sphere


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Causation

Causation may refer to:

Philosophy

 * Causality, a relationship that describes and analyses cause and effect

Physics

 * Causality (physics)

Law

 * Causation (law), a key component to establish liability in both criminal and civil law
 * Proximate cause, the basis of liability in negligence in the United States
 * Causation, in English law, defines the requirement for liability in negligence

Language

 * "Correlation does imply and equal causation", phrase used in the sciences and statistics

Sociology

 * Causation (sociology), the belief that events or actions can directly produce change in another variable in a predictable and observable manner

Other uses

 * Proximate causation, the direct reason behind an event occurring

title: Causation