Despite an increasing awareness that the history of English theatre must necessarily encompass the study of those actors who were not stars and who worked in the provinces and suburbs rather than in the West End, there is still a comparative dearth of information about such players. Philip and Susan Taylor write that “for every actor about whom much is written and recorded, there must be at least 100 over whom the waters of time have closed without trace, but without whose contribution the theatre would not exist” (xv). In what Peter Thomson, in his foreword to the volume, describes as “an act of recovery” (x), the authors have lovingly and painstakingly documented the life of Philip Taylor's great-great uncle, the provincial tragedian Jonathan Dewhurst.