The Emperor Was Not Amused
Ostensibly, this is a piece about our recent discovery of a Proclamation in which Emperor Norton, in 1867, prohibited unauthorized stage depictions of himself.
But, a theater’s offending play and the Emperor’s response are the bread of the sandwich on offer here. The real meat is a brief history of the varied theatrical/“amusement” enterprises and their producers/impresarios that, over the course of a decade or so in the 1850s and ‘60s, occupied the second floor of the building where the play was staged — a building just around the corner from the Emperor’s imperial digs on Commercial Street in San Francisco.
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