I’d recommend:

Lighting the Shakespearean stage, 1567-1642
by R. B. Graves (1999)

Yes, and strange not to credit the actors anywhere at all.

Yes, I see - in which case, if it was filmed earlier, my first thought was to wonder if it might possibly be Richard Wordsworth, who I see was in the 1939 Stratford season.

www.theatricalia.co.uk/01smt/smt293...

Here’s a comparison with him in the 1955 film of The Quatermass Xperiment:

Maybe the Baim Collection could confirm where the extracts came from, or if, as you wonder, they were filmed earlier:

www.baimfilms.com/the-collecti...

John Byron & Viola Lyel, if this Letterboxed reviewer is correct:

letterboxd.com/loureviews/f...

They certainly played the parts in Stratford in 1944:

theatricalia.com/play/2/hamle...

Byron would go on to play Hamlet again in a 2-part TV version in 1947:

learningonscreen.ac.uk/shakespeare/...

Sir Henry’s body was whisked down to London by train, and the sculptor Sir George Frampton was employed to make a death mask.

I’ve traced 9 copies of it - back in 2019 I bought one of them at auction that had belonged to the Irving family.

It hangs on the wall and is looking over me now.

Interesting, and that would fit, with him not master to just one but working across the company with any / all apprentices where necessary, especially when they had extended scenes all together without their masters - for example in Dream, where, as its author, he would be best placed to do that.

Related: as well as being an actor & playwright, I often wonder if he took particular responsibility for training / directing the younger actors in the plays he had written, so took roles that meant he was either acting with them, or free to rehearse them.

Older actors could look after themselves.

🤞

Here he is on the cover of The Sphinx magazine in 1944 (for sale on eBay)

Have you seen this?

Cantu (the first magician to make doves appear, apparently) eight years earlier, doing part of his act in Politiquerías, the Spanish version of Laurel and Hardy’s Chickens Come Home (1931).

m.youtube.com/watch?v=qIOD...

4K Wicker Man Box Set… 👌