The town of Madrid was first chosen as the permanent seat of the Court in 1561; for a few years, from 1601 to 1606, Valladolid challenged Madrid's supremacy, but in that year Madrid was confirmed as the capital of Spain. The years from 1561 saw, as a result, a rapid growth in Madrid, an explosion of population and of size which was not to have its counterpart again until the 1870s and, more recently, the 1950s and 1960s. Inevitably, the growth of Madrid sucked into the town a great number of peasants and, by the early decades of the seventeenth century, a significant part of the population must have consisted of first- and second-generation town-dwellers, imbued, to judge from the evidence of the plays performed in the commercial theatres, with a nostalgia for the country-side, a nostalgia which was reinforced by and expressed in terms of the old literary topos of the dispraise of life in the city (or at Court) and the praise of country life.

The first public performance of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, the national anthem of the United States, was in the Holliday Street Theatre in Baltimore, Maryland, October 19, 1814. The performance came on the fifth night of a twenty-four performance season that extended between October 12 and November 21, 1814. The theatrical season paralleled the conclusion of the War of 1812. And in many ways, William Wood and William Warren, managers of the acting company, complemented the war with plays having military themes – Point of Honour, He Would Be A Soldier, and The Soldier's Daughter. The acting troupe that performed in Baltimore during this fall made the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia its headquarters. The Baltimore American and Commercial Advertiser lists only the following performers as appearing in Baltimore during this season – Miss Abercrombie, Mrs Mason, Mrs Seymour, Mrs Greene, Joseph Jefferson, Ferdinand Durang, Charles Durang, William Francis, J. Hardinge, Francis Blissett, and Mr and Mrs Waring who were making their first appearance in Baltimore. Available playbills add to the list of performers Mr Duff, Mr Harris, Mr Barrett, Mr Abercrombie, Mr T. Jefferson, Miss Jefferson, Mrs Francis, and Miss White.

‘What if Christ and Oedipus or, to shift the names, Saint Catherine of Genoa and Michael Angelo, are the two scales of a balance, the two buttends of a seesaw?’ Christ and Oedipus, the contrasting images in A Vision, were central figures in W. B. Yeats's theatre work in the late 1920s. Following the publication of A Vision in 1925, Yeats completed his versions of Sophocles' two plays of Oedipus. Designed for the main stage at the Abbey Theatre, King Oedipus was produced in 1926 and Oedipus at Colonus the following year. During that time Yeats wrote a play on the death of Christ based on his work with the Sophocles plays but designed for the smaller Peacock Theatre, the Abbey's new experimental stage. Yeats's play, The Resurrection, was produced there in 1934. Those three productions were the culmination of Yeats's long involvement in two aspects of non-naturalistic theatre – the relation between stage performance and audience in the amphitheatre, and the nature of the poetic and dramatic image produced in that type of theatre.

To anyone familiar with the work of Gabriel Cousin, adaptability is a natural and acceptable phenomenon that has been, and still remains, a feature of his writing for the theatre. As an evolving and creative activity, his dramatic output has expressed his ‘prise de conscience’ on social and political themes for the past thirty years. Since the end of the Second World War when, with the group known as Les Compagnons de la Saint-Jean, Cousin's rôle was to put to paper the collective product of their ideas, he has continued to work on a collaborative basis with producers, musicians, designers and theatre managements. Indeed, the willingness to do so frequently becomes a necessity in view of some of the difficult problems that a production of his plays entail – problems that affect the audience as much as the actors and producers.

Simon Trussler, first in conjunction with the Bibliography of Drama and Theatre, planned to complement his revision of The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, and more recently in response to the proposal by the Commission for a British Theatre Institute for a union catalogue of British theatrical literature, has taken upon himself the awesome task of devising A Classification for the Performing Arts. He has made a thoroughly admirable job of it, and his system deserves the widest possible circulation and discussion among librarians, bibliographers, and scholars if it is to establish itself as a useful standard and model in collections worldwide. What should please all students of the performing arts is the system's remarkable combination of logical sequence and consistent format, coupled with a flexibility and adaptability to accommodate the most specialized of libraries or the most stubbornly anomalous of titles.