The Companion became an OUP bestseller with a reprint in 1952, a second edition in 1957, further reprints and a third edition, largely revised, in 1967. It still features in the publisher's list and is accepted as the standard reference work in the field. Born in Egypt in 1906, the daughter of an army officer, Hartnoll was sent to England in childhood to stay with relatives and to be educated at St Mary's Convent, Wantage, Cheltenham Ladies College, and finally St Hugh's College, Oxford, where she read English. She continued her studies at the Universities of Lyons and Algiers .She worked briefly in Blackwell's Bookshop in Oxford and as a secretary in a girls' school in Jerusalem, and then, from 1929 to 1967, was employed as a reader, translator and editor by the publishing house of Macmillan. With a firm grounding in Latin and Greek she had a fluent facility for language, being trilingual in English, French and German, and able to converse in Italian, Swedish, Hebrew and Arabic.Poetry was an interest which continued throughout her life.
She had won the Newdigate Prize at Oxford in 1929, and the Oxford Prize for Sacred Verse in 1947 and 1965. Her passion, however, was for the theatre and in theatre history, a subject which she taught in the 1950s at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She served on the committee of the Society for Theatre Research for many years. She was also a founder member of the International Federation for Theatre Research and one of the early editors of its journal, Theatre Research/Recherches Theatrales.Although the re-editing and revising of the Companion was a lifelong occupation, she also produced A Concise Companion in 1979, A Concise History of the Theatre in 1968 and several other works such as Plays and Players (1984) and Who's Who in Shaw (1975). She assisted John Gielgud, who became a close friend, in the editing of his mother's early theatrical criticism.On her retirement to Lyme Regis she wrote plays for the local dramatic society - The Swedenheims and Peter Peppercorn, as well as an adaptation of George Colman's The Jealous Wife. There was one novel - The Grecian Enchanted (1952).Phyllis Hartnoll had an energy and a gift for the encouragement of others in a self-effacing, supportive way, and for the general good.
She was also generously hospitable and enjoyed an active social life. She had a formidable zest for work and an ability to concentrate her considerable organisational skills towards the achievement of a target. This was the more remarkable in view of her continuing battle against illness which shadowed her life from the typhoid contracted in childhood in Egypt.She is survived by her companion of many years, Winifred Kimberley.Jack ReadingPhyllis Hartnoll, theatre historian: born 22 September 1906; died Lyme Regis 8 January 1997.. Charles Craig was the most Italianate of British tenors. On summer evenings in the 1960s his voice, luscious-toned and with ringing top notes, could sometimes be heard on Italian radio broadcasts of Verdi's Aida or Otello, relayed live from the Roman Baths of Caracalla or the Doge's Palace Courtyard in Venice. British tourists, eating their supper in some Italian resort by the Mediterranean, would recognise the Radames who so lovingly and idiomatically phrased "Celeste Aida" and would laugh when local listeners claimed that the tenor's voice was "typically Italian". They knew better: the steady stream of golden tone was issuing from the throat of a Londoner born in the City Road, very nearly within sound of Bow bells. Charles Craig was the youngest of 15 children.
His parents were shopkeepers and no one else in the family was interested in music, apart from an elder brother who owned a few operatic records. The future tenor's first singing lessons came from listening to Caruso in "Vesti la giubba" from Pagliacci. On leaving school he worked at various jobs, in tailoring, as a warehouseman and as an assistant in his parents' shop.He was 19 when the Second World War broke out and he joined the army. Posted to India in 1943, he landed in an Entertainments Unit and for the first time dared to hope that one day he might have a musical career.
Demobilised and back in London in 1946, he auditioned for the newly-formed Covent Garden Opera Company and was accepted - but only for the chorus.Five very frustrating years followed. Craig was given only the smallest parts, servants, messengers, priests and gypsies; but he listened to other tenors from backstage and started to build up a repertory. In 1951 Sir Thomas Beecham, who was to conduct Balfe's The Bohemian Girl at Covent Garden, held some auditions. When he heard Craig, Beecham immediately offered to sponsor him, to provide him with lessons in singing, acting and languages, and also to pay him a salary on which he and his family could live until his career was launched. The tenor Dino Borgioli was chosen as singing teacher, but Craig refused to alter his natural method of voice production and merely allowed Borgioli to help him iron out certain technical difficulties and to coach him in various roles.Beecham had also promised to launch him at one of his own concerts and kept his word.