Sybil Marion Rosenfeld went to King's College London, where, aged 19, she took the year's top first class honours degree in English.
Sybil Marion Rosenfeld went to King's College London, where, aged 19, she took the year's top first class honours degree in English.
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Sybil Marion Rosenfeld was born on January 20, 1903, in London, United Kingdom. She was the only child of liberal Jewish parents. Her father was one of a family with prosperous ceramics and glass-making interests in Stoke-on-Trent and Czechoslovakia. With cultured parents, her early theatre and opera-going gave her very wide tastes.
Sybil Marion Rosenfeld went to King's College London, where, aged 19, she took the year's top first class honours degree in English. Originally drawn towards languages, she met there the young Allardyce Nicoll, a pioneer of English theatre studies, who redirected her interests and she went on to gain a Master of Arts with distinction, for work on the Restoration playwright George Etherege.
Rosenfeld's first publication after graduating was "1939’s Strolling Players and Drama in the Provinces, 1660-1765". She also wrote, "Theatre of London Fairs in the 18th Century" (1966), "A Short History of Scene Design in Great Britain" (1972) and "Georgian Scene Painters and Scene Painting" (1982).
Apart from brief work for the League of Nations, Sybil Rosenfeld had the means for a comfortable but never ostentatious independence and, with the Depression, followed her father's wish that she not take paid work when others needed it more. She always travelled widely and just before the Second World War (when she ran a club for Jewish girls in Paddington) moved into the Bayswater flat where she lived for the rest of her life and which, from 1945, became a centre of change in the status of theatre history.
Rosenfeld was also a founding editor of "Theatre Notebook" from 1945 until 1986, when she joined its advisory board. She also contributed some 80 articles, notes and reviews to it, and to many other scholarly publications. In 1948, TN's success led to the foundation of the Society for Theatre Research (STR) of which Rosenfeld was also joint honorary secretary until 1970, later vice-chairman, vice-president and a constant committee attender to her death.
Until the 1960s all such meetings were held at her flat, where the STR in 1955 initiated the Theatre Museum Association; the work of both bodies as pressure groups was seminal in the eventual creation of the present Theatre Museum. Sybil Rosenfeld was actively involved in the TMA and in the foundation, in 1955-1957, of the STR's other offshoot, the International Federation for Theatre Research, for which she sat on the Executive Committee and the editorial board of its journal "Theatre Research".
Her Foreign Theatrical Companies in Great Britain appeared as an STR pamphlet in 1955, followed by another ground-breaking book "Theatre of the London Fairs in the 18th Century" (1960). At this time, with Edward Croft-Murray of the British Museum, she began concentrating on another of her interests, the neglected history of British scene design. They jointly published a detailed Checklist of 18th-century British scene-painters (1964-1966); Rosenfeld wrote two more pioneering books: "A Short History of Scene Design in Great Britain" (1972) and "Georgian Scene Painters and Scene Painting" (1982).
To the end of her life she was active, encouraging, and contributing to plans for the 50th anniversary of the society she helped found. Some of her last work was on scenic entries for the New Grove Dictionary of Opera and, as much devoted to art, architecture and music as theatre.
Sybil Marion Rosenfeld died on October 2, 1996 in London, United Kingdom.
Besides her professional life, Rosenfeld devoted much of her energy to Jewish education and charity and served twenty-five years as an honorary manager of the Jews’ Free School.
Sybil Marion Rosenfeld was a founding member of the Society for Theatre Research (STR), the Theatre Museum Association and the International Federation for Theatre Research. In 1992 she was made an Honorary Fellow of King's College London.
