The number of late seventeenth-century promptbooks known to scholars has increased astonishingly in the last thirty years, but further discoveries are always welcome. We are pleased to be able to report a new find: a very full prompt copy for what is clearly a 1660s production of James Shirley's Loves Crueltie by the King's Company at Bridges Street. The prompt notes are written in a copy of the 1640 edition held in the Brotherton Collection (University of Leeds). Cropping has cut away significant portions of the markings, but fortunately enough remains that we can reconstruct the original annotation in almost all instances.

On 22 July 1823 William Godwin addressed the following in a letter to Mary Shelley, who was returning to London after five years on the Continent:

It is a curious circumstance that a play is just announced, to be performed at the English Opera House in the Strand next Monday, entitled, Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein. I know not whether it will succeed. If it does, it will be some sort of feather in the cap of the author of the novel, a recommendation in your future negociations with booksellers.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, it had become almost de rigueur for aspiring British entertainers to include at least one tour abroad in their career. Exchange – albeit initially a somewhat one-sided exchange – with North America dated back to the beginning of the century; as white settlement of Australasia developed, so from the third decade did theatre, and Gustavus Vaughan Brooke's success, particularly in Sydney, between 1855 and 1861, revealed a new opening for the more adventurous.

I wrapped myself in a woollen cloak against the chill of an October Indian night in 1980. Camera in hand and squatting in the dirt, I was surrounded by villagers and their laughing children. We all were waiting for a performance to begin. The occasion was a Bhavāī Mela at the village of Sola near Gujarat's largest city, Ahmedabad. The Mela was sponsored by the National School of Drama (New Delhi) and the Gujarat State Sangeet Nritya Natya Akademi. The privileged, urban students of the NSD were conspicuous in their reserved seating area, disdainfully rejecting the attempts of the villagers to join them. Far in the back of the crowd I glimpsed the still-beautiful Mrinalini Sarabhai, one of India's most famous dancers, swathed in silk and carrying a large palm-frond fan. Next to her was the white-haired Kailish Pandya, director of Drama at Miss Sarabhai's Darpana Academy of performing arts at Ahmedabad. With the first eerie, insistent blast of the Bhavāī trumpets (bhūṇgaḷs), an excitement swept the crowd extinguishing physical discomforts and personal slights. The fact that I would spend the next seven days sleeping on bare, stone floors to see this Mela, became unimportant as the actors began their intricate dances and spirited singing. From my first exposure to the Bhavāī in 1976, I had awaited this moment, a performance not in a university playhouse, but in a village.