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Hello! And welcome to my theater history pages.
If you have any questions about them, please contact me at kdoak@choate.edu.

Yesterday. Paul McCartney. A Draft. British Library.

I've used the above photo as the "icon" for this site in part because of its focus on the past, and the longing we sometimes feel to return to or (more joyfully) to explore what remains of the past.

But above all I included this image because seeing Paul McCartney's lyrics in the British Library -- along with the other extraordinary documents and manuscripts in the British Library reading room -- was a paradigm shifting experience for me. It changed my way of seeing literature and history and human effort.

Looking at the crossed-out scribbled-up drafts of revered texts, and seeing the painstakingly penned "fair" copy of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, changed me. I'd taken my Junior year at the University of London on the Strand, and one day I'd sortof stumbled into the old reading room at the British Museum not knowing what was there (this was before the British Library had its own buildings). And there in front of me were the books I'd been studying, hour after hour, in my dorm room.

I could not believe my eyes. I even asked the guard if they were copies or the real, handwritten texts.

THAT was written by Jane Austen!! THAT is Handel's Messiah? THAT is the MAGNA CARTA!? 

History became human. "Authors" became "people who write." And I became a different kind of student. I began to read literature as a product of human effort. Someone wrote these words, and it was difficult. And we get to read what they wrote - sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands of years later.

That is amazing. 

People can send something wonderful from "yesterday" into tomorrow.