George Clinton Densmore Odell was an American theatre historian and educator.
Background
George Clinton Densmore Odell was born on March 19, 1866, in Newburgh, New York, the son of Benjamin Barker Odell, a businessman, and Ophelia (Bookstaver) Odell. Both parents came from early American families; the Odell line claimed descent from an ancestor who had emigrated from Bedfordshire, England, in 1637 and settled in western Connecticut. Odell's father served as mayor of Newburgh from 1884 to 1890, while his older brother, Benjamin Barker Odell, Jr. , was elected to the House of Representatives in 1895 and later became governor of New York (1901 - 1904).
Education
George received his early education at the local grammar school and the Newburgh Academy (1879 - 1883). After a year of further study at the Siglar Preparatory School in Newburgh, he entered Columbia College in 1885, largely, as he later confessed, to be near the Broadway theaters. Odell received his B. A. from Columbia in 1889 and took both the M. A. (1890) and Ph. D. (1892) from there also. His doctoral dissertation, "Simile and Metaphor in the English and Scottish Ballads, " was published in 1892 and reflected in a modest way his continuing interest in popular culture. Meticulously researched, this study sought to identify the most frequently used figures of speech in representative popular verse, as a way of testing the authenticity of other alleged folk ballads.
Career
Odell's obsessive interest in the stage developed early and owed little to his family surroundings. There were no theater people in the family, whose male members traditionally assumed careers in business and public service. A chance encounter with one of Augustin Daly's touring productions in 1876 left ten-year-old George permanently stagestruck. Thereafter he spent his weekly allowance on pictures of actresses, initiating a collection of theatrical memorabilia that expanded over the next half-century to become one of the most impressive private holdings in the country. During his undergraduate years at Columbia, Odell regularly attended the Manhattan theaters. In retrospect he hailed the mid-1880's as a "golden age" of great performers, trained in a larger-than-life style of acting that was fast disappearing. Edwin Booth, Ada Rehan, Sarah Bernhardt, John Drew, Otis Skinner, James Lewis, Modjeska, Richard Mansfield, Lillie Langtry, Joseph Jefferson - he saw them all in their most famous roles.
In 1895 Odell joined the English department at Columbia, where he taught until his retirement in 1939. He edited student texts of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1900) and Henry V (1905), with the avowed object of aiding teachers to present the material more attractively to youthful audiences. A complementary concern for the changing standards of Shakespearean performance led to his first important scholarly work, Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving (2 vols. , 1920), a history of English productions of Shakespeare from 1660 to 1902. Besides reconstructing the physical aspects of the London theaters, Odell included a wealth of detail on casts, box office receipts, textual changes, and the evolution of scene painting and costuming. Reviewers praised his intensive research and graceful style, and in 1924 the university appointed him professor of dramatic literature, a post formerly held by the distinguished critic Brander Matthews.
Odell's crowning achievement as a historian of the theater was reserved for the last twenty-two years of his life. During that period (1927 - 1949) he brought out, under the aegis of the Columbia University Press, fifteen volumes of his Annals of the New York Stage, an encyclopedic guide to all forms of public entertainment available in metropolitan New York from the mid-eighteenth century to 1894. Drawing upon years of careful research in primary source materials - newspapers, pamphlets, diaries, letters, autobiographies, playbills, account books, and the like - Odell attempted to compile an exhaustive catalogue of every play, opera, concert, dance recital, vaudeville and minstrel show performed in the New York area, together with some notice of each performer, writer, director, and producer. Through such a panoramic survey he hoped to chart changing urban mores, to "depict the city in successive eras, with all its prejudices and all its predilections, social, artistic and dramatic. "
The final result was a gargantuan potpourri that struck reviewers with awe. Deftly written and prodigiously detailed, Odell's Annals at once superseded all previous accounts of the New York stage, none of which approached their comprehensive scope or factual accuracy. They provided students with a permanently valuable repository of raw data, and it was altogether fitting that Odell received the New-York Historical Society's coveted Gold Medal for Achievement in History on October 23, 1942, in acknowledgment of his herculean labors. Yet his work, for all its excellence, fails to offer any sustained critical analysis or interpretive framework by which to measure the significance of his data.
A labor of love, it is permeated by a sentimental nostalgia for the kind of theater that disappeared around 1890. Odell was too much a product of the nineteenth century to criticize its dramatic conventions effectively. He reserved his jibes for twentieth-century "comedies and smart farces, " whose language, he thought, needed to be "fumigated. " Beginning in 1937 he suffered from anemia and was largely bedridden during the last two years of his life. He died at the age of eighty-three, and was buried in Newburgh, New York.
Personality
A tall, thin bachelor, with silver-gray hair and deep-set blue eyes, Odell lived in a modest apartment in the Hotel Seymour, at 50 West 45th Street, near Times Square.
