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While much has been done in the past hundred years to add to our stock of knowledge on the existence of the theatre at Newington Butts, questions relating to names persist: there is no agreement over the origin of the name of the location itself—whence the 'Butts' in Newington Butts—and studies of the theater invariably concede that we have no way of knowing the name of the playhouse itself. Answers to both questions are to be found in the public record: in the case of the origin of 'Butts', I consider a Privy Council document that is readily available in the Acts but that seems to have passed unnoticed to date; regarding the name of the playhouse, I point to where the answer has been hiding in plain sight in lease documents that scholars have been discussing for half a century.

Jacques Derrida's writings on memory, loss and haunting are well known, yet little work has been done on the influence on Derrida of Nicolas Abraham's early work on the same issues. The two were good friends, prior to Abraham's death in 1975, although they never collaborated directly. In this paper, I suggest that Derrida's later work on the gift of death in some ways responds to Abraham's contribution to his own work. I also propose that Glas from 1974 anticipates this debt by connecting some of its wordplay to key terms in Abraham's own unpublished writings.