In 1947, Carlo Anti published Teatri Greci Arcaici da Minosse a Pericle. In this book, he formulated what one reviewer termed ‘the dogma of the originally rectangular orchestra’. This directly contradicted over a century of research which had concluded that Greek performance areas began with a completely circular dancing place and gradually changed to an arrangement which used a partial circle backed by a scene house. Over a hundred part-circular orchestras, lastingly embalmed in stone, attest to the accuracy of at least part of this curvilinear hypothesis. All of these stone remains, however, are from the mid-fourth century or later; nothing remains of the wooden theatres in which the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes were first performed.

The scena per angolo, a phrase coined by Ferdinando Galli Bibiena in his 1711 publication, L' archittetura civile, is the consummate expression of high baroque scenography. Per angolo designs for stage sets typically show corners of palatial interiors or courtyards through the use of multiple vanishing points [Fig. 14]. Secondary diagonals which radiate off the major oblique lines defining the space lead the eye, as well as the understanding, into an implied infinity beyond the frame of the proscenium and mirror the early eighteenth century's fascination with, and indeed insistence upon, boundless space. Even theatrical designs whose main vanishing points are on the centre line rely heavily on multiple minor vanishing points to provide the essential dynamic diagonal thrust beyond the implied boundary of the proscenium.

In 1616 Christopher Beeston converted a cockpit in Drury Lane into a playhouse known as the Phoenix or Cockpit in Drury Lane. It was the second enclosed and private theatre in Jacobean London, Blackfriars being the first. With the exception of the Cockpit in Court, this theatre not only survived the vicissitudes of the Interregnum, continuing to operate covertly and sporadically, but also it emerged at the Restoration already adapted with some limited capacity for mounting productions decorated with changeable scenery. Yet in spite of their historical importance what is known about the architecture of this and the other private theatres, the Blackfriars and the Salisbury Court, remains essentially speculative. Because of the lack of specific internal and external graphic evidence, reconstructions of these theatres have been made from deductions drawn from close readings of play texts. With regard to the Phoenix or Cockpit in Drury Lane, Leslie Hotson laid the foundations for basic research into its reconstruction when, in The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage, he wrote up his discovery of documents in the Public Record Office that dealt obliquely with the site on which the theatre was built. However, he was reluctant to accept the contemporary evidence afforded him by Hollar in his View of West London, 1657, [Fig. 26],

Unfortunately we have no graphic information as to the shape and appearance of the Cockpit Theatre, I fully expected to find a clear representation of it in Hollar's Bird's-eye View of West Central London, drawn in 1657, but I was disappointed; unless indeed we are to take a three-gabled structure, which stands where the Cockpit should be, for the theatre.

In 1976 a drawing, today at the Bibliothèque Nationale, by the French artist, Pierre Alexandre Wille (1748–1821) was published in Theatre Research International. The picture is signed and dated: ‘P. A. Wille filius del 1767’ and depicts a performance in the Hôtel de Bourgogne, at that time called the Théâtre Italien or the Comédie Italienne. But the drawing has not yet been analysed, nor has the artist's motif been identified. [Plate I]

Fifty years ago, the renowned American humorist, Don Marquis, creator of the ‘Archy and Mehitabel’ stories, sat in the dining room of the Players Club and contemplated a playbill: ‘Mr. Bogumil Dawison will appear at the Winter Garden as Othello. Mr. Edwin Booth will play Iago.’ Who was Bogumil Dawison, he wonders? Why did his name appear at the top of the bill above Booth's? Perhaps he had a European reputation like Salvini or Coquelin, but if so why had Marquis never heard of him? He could not have been a Nobody, Marquis concludes, otherwise Booth would never have acted with him. Marquis thinks that perhaps he should find out all he can about Dawison, but then decides that he'll have another brandy instead: ‘Damn Bogumil Dawison! Maybe he was a bad actor, he mooned around and drank himself to death, because the wind was cold and wet … a ridiculous person undoubtedly, and I don't want to know his ghost.’