Like Hamlet, confronting his mother with portraits of his father and of the brother who murdered him, theatre historians work within a realm of loss, attempting to re-member who (and what) has disappeared. Yet visual traces of performance – engravings, paintings, drawings, cartoons and photographs – persist: ghosted images return to haunt us. Also like Hamlet, mapping one portrait’s features against another, inauthentic and authentic images of a father, what theatre historians most desire is a visual image that preserves the paradox of a ‘theatrical real’. For Shakespeareans, that ideal image might show costumed players at work in a 1590s theatre space, performing a moment recognisable as deriving from a particular play – even, perhaps, including spectators. In 1925, E. K. Chambers introduced a pen-and-ink drawing purporting to show just such a scene: since then, the ‘Peacham drawing’ – and the forty lines from Titus Andronicus transcribed below it – have undergone numerous interpretive changes.