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Mr. Mansfeld
Mansfeld
also: г. Мансфельд
An invented cut-rate playwright-for-hire named in the fourth faux letter of "Letters", commissioned by mail to churn out comedies, dramas, and tragedies "the more Hamlet-like the better" for a flat three rubles -- a send-up of the era's cheap serial melodrama trade.
Reading notes
- Letters §13 г. Мансфельда
The fourth letter satirizes the cut-rate provincial trade in commissioned melodrama: a hack playwright is ordered a bulk lot of plays by mail, priced flat and paid partly in postage stamps, "the more Hamlet-like the better" -- mocking both amateur theatrical pretension and the shoddy commercial machinery that supplied it.