The theatrical descriptions of Hippolytus Guarinonius are among the most substantial of several significant discoveries of visual and textual documentation relating to the commedia dell'arte in recent decades. Not noted in the standard bibliography of the commedia dell'arte, they have made far less impact on theatre historians than their early date and richness of theatrical detail warrant. Here, selected descriptions are examined in the context of related textual and visual records, in order to highlight aspects of the new information they offer on the staging of comic routines, and to draw attention to some limitations of using material of this type as historical evidence for stage practice.

A small, anonymous grisaille(Figure 1)from the collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris is among the more familiar images of seventeenth-century French theatre history. It depicts Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII, and other members of the royal family at the theatre. The setting for the scene is the Grande Salle of Richelieu's Parisian home, the Palais Cardinal. Designed by the palace architect Jacques Lemercier and completed in 1641, this theatre was among the first purpose-built proscenium theatres in France. In the 1660s it became the site of the public performances of Molière's most successful plays; after the playwright's death, it housed the Paris Opéra until a fire destroyed it in 1763.

Little by little we are building up a reliable picture of what a seventeenth-century Parisian theatre looked like. In Theatre Research International we published an important article by Graham Barlow's on the Hôtel de Bourgogne in our first volume, and we return to the subject with the eye-opening reconstruction of the Palais Royal by Christa Williford in this, our last issue. In the intervening twenty-five years we have published articles on the problem of law and order in the auditorium, on actors and acting in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France; on the interaction between tragedy and the emerging opera, on theory, on dramatic literature, on the morality of actors and actresses, even on publicity; but nothing, specifically, on the identity of the spectator. And without a clearer impression of who patronized the Parisian theatres, we are in danger of missing important clues, not only concerning the theatrical performance, but also in our reading of the dramatic text—which will inform our theatrical decisions.

Britain began making Shakespeare her national poet early in the eighteenth century, and Germany followed suit a few decades later, progressively turning ‘unser Shakespeare’ into one of three national poets, with Goethe and Schiller. As early as 1773, Johann Gottfried Herder included his essay on ‘Shakespear’ in a collection entitled Von Deutscher Art und Kunst. The drama of the ‘Sturm und Drang’, which Herder's collection programmatically inaugurated, appropriated what Goethe (Götz von Berlichingen), Schiller (The Robbers) and their contemporaries (mis)understood to be Shakespeare's dramatic technique. By the end of the century, the assimilation had advanced far enough for August Wilhelm von Schlegel, the famous translator of seventeen of Shakespeare's plays, to indulge in no slight national chauvinism: ‘I am eager’, he writes in a letter to his cotranslator Ludwig Tieck, ‘to have your letters on Shakespeare.… I hope you will prove, among other things, that Shakespeare wasn't English. I wonder how he came to dwell among the frosty, stupid souls on that brutal island? … The English critics understand nothing about Shakespeare.’ Even though Tieck failed to prove that Shakespeare was not of English birth, the conviction that Shakespeare was best understood by German rather than by English critics only grew in the course of the nineteenth century. Appropriately, it was in Germany that the first periodical devoted exclusively to Shakespeare, the Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, was founded in 1865. Fifty years later, the German novelist Gerhart Hauptmann could still claim that ‘there is no people, not even the English, that has the same right to claim Shakespeare as the German. Shakespeare's characters are a part of our world, his soul has become one with ours: and though he was born and buried in England, Germany is the country where he truly lives.’

The Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in Paris (1897–1962) achieved a legendary reputation as the ‘Theatre of Horror’, a venue displaying such explicit violence and blood-curdling terror that a resident doctor was employed to treat the numerous spectators who fainted each night. Indeed, the phrase ‘grand-guignolesque’ has entered the language to describe any display of heightened, remorseless horror. Such is the myth of the Grand-Guignol: the reality is subtler and far more complex.

‘Iconoclasm grew from the destruction of religious images and opposition to the religious use of images to, literally, the destruction of, and opposition to, any images or works of art and, metaphorically, the “attacking or overthrow of venerated institutions and cherished beliefs, regarded as fallacious or superstitious”’. Dario Gamboni.

The lack of constant speech is not contempt But silence measures those compelled to speak. What does not change is will to change, they say, Though changes do outrun the will's control. Each person has a story that rolls on Beyond the boundaries of the play in which they're placed, Unless they fall in love at last with limits And try to die into an old play's shape. Not even witches know what happens after, But once I met an actor, wild and broken, Who said, ‘The play is dead: long live the play’, with laughter, Then wept at faces he saw in the bracken.