ABSTRACT
The majority like him very much; the minority detest him beyond endurance,” wrote Lewis C. Strang of De Wolf Hopper in 1900. It must have been a large majority and a small minority, for Hopper had been one of the busiest comic-opera comedians of the 1890s, having reached stardom in the Gustave Kerker comic opera Castles in the Air in 1890. The fact that his success in New York was something less than triumphant partially justifies Strang’s acid comment for it was the road and not the metropolis that first gave Hopper his solid position in the American theatre.
