MacKaye, Percy (Wallace) (1875-1956)

US playwright and poet. He had a strong interest in pageants and in amateur community theatre. His pageant The Canterbury Pilgrims (1903) was made into an opera by Reginald De Koven in 1917. Several works produced in the 1920s drew on tales and folklore collected in Kentucky by him and his wife. In 1949 he produced The Mystery of Hamlet: King of Denmark, a series of four verse plays that develop the characters and plot to a point that precedes the action of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

MacKaye was born in New York City. He graduated from Harvard University in 1897, taught in New York City (1900-04), then settled in Cornish, New Hampshire. His plays, many of them using historical material, include Jeanne D'Arc (1906), Sappho and Phaon (1907), and The Scarecrow (1908), based on Nathaniel Hawthorne's story ‘Feathertop’.