Word: bickerstaff
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Times letter was signed Isaac Bickerstaff, the pseudonym under which Jonathan Swift once hoaxed his public...
...Brien remembers had a lyrically warm, intimate, unregimented spirit that was missing at the Music Hall. The blackface tradition, in one form or another, dates from the colonial days when whites first saw and imitated Negro entertainers. As early as 1769, during a Manhattan performance of Isaac Bickerstaff's comic opera The Padlock, an actor named Lewis Hallam got drunk on the stage in his role of a Negro slave and brought the house down. This eventually led to "the novel, grotesque, original and surpassingly melodious Ethiopian Band entitled the Virginia Minstrels...