This article examines the ramifications of the hypothesis that encoded in the dialogue of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre texts are precise indications for the actors as to then-entrance and exit points, and that such indications constitute a stage management system, a dramaturgical system and a system of spatial semiotics which might invest these movement patterns with thematic or semiotic significance. Such a suggestion, that we may be able to access a range of ‘spatial’ meanings from an understanding of original performance conditions, is likely to be viewed with some scepticism by Shakespearian scholars of a literary orientation, so strong is the word-based tradition of analysis and interpretation. Yet this is the suggestion that underlies this work: that, complementing the verbal signification of the texts there may also be a verbally inscribed spatial semiotic which provides an additional range of meanings—and that such possible semiotic functions ride upon pragmatic stage management patterns which governed entrances and exits and the rhythms of the original performance context. It is argued that when the texts are interrogated in this light they reveal precise, consistent and coherent traces of such systematic indications in regard to the onstage-offstage spatial relationships operating in performance.

Of all the various features associated with the kabuki theatre, few are as well known outside Japan as the hanamichi, the raised runway joined to the stage at the actors' right and proceeding through the auditorium to a curtained room at the rear. Used for major exits and entrances, it is also the site of important acting sequences. Because the hanamichi brings actors and spectators into close proximity without abandoning a stage-auditorium relationship similar to that in Western proscenium theatres, it has been of considerable interest to international theatre artists. Although its aesthetic and practical uses have been described in various Western sources, little attention has been paid to the hanamichi's origins. Among Japanese scholars, there is nearly as much contention surrounding this question as there is among Western scholars regarding the origins of the proscenium arch, the Elizabethan theatre's alcove, or the classical Greek theatre's use of a raised stage.

At the beginning of October 1777, Sumarokov, dramatist and first director of the first Russian professional theatre, died in Moscow alone, poverty-stricken and deserted by all. A few actors carried the deceased to the cemetery of the Donskoy Monastery and buried him at their own expense. A week later Catherine II received a communication from Prince Volkonsky: ‘In the last few days Aleksandr Sumarokov, being afflicted with a violent illness, has died, but otherwise all here goes well; having nothing more at present worthy of report to Your Imperial Majesty, I commit myself to Your Imperial Grace’.

The importance of scene painters to English theatre increased markedly toward the end of the eighteenth century—in part a response to the contributions of Philip James De Loutherbourg at Drury Lane in the 1770s. Advertisements began routinely to record the name of what we would now call the scene designer. Gaetano Marinari was identified as principal painter and machinist at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket between 1785 and 1789, when the old opera house burned. Thomas Greenwood held the equivalent position at Drury Lane, John Inigo Richards at Covent Garden, and Michael Angelo Rooker at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. For particular productions the names of assistant painters might also be advertised. On 20 December 1785, for example, Covent Garden listed Richards, Carver, Hodgins, Catton Jun., and Turner as the crew that executed scenery for the travelogue Omai, which turned out to be De Loutherbourg's last designs for the London theatre.

In 1875 George Henry Lewes published the following analysis of William Charles Macready's acting:

Whenever he had an emotion to depict he depicted it sympathetically and not artificially; by which I mean that he felt himself to be the person, and having identified himself with the character, sought by means of the symbols of his art to express what that character felt; he did not stand outside the character and try to express its emotions by the symbols that had been employed for other characters by other actors.

Of cherry-wood or pressed tin, lined with red plush or gutta-percha, hand-held or mounted in a self-standing case, the stereoscope was, by the mid-1850s, ubiquitous in the Victorian parlor, where the viewing device and its attendant cards provided an inoffensive and instructive amusement. ‘The stereoscope is now seen in every drawing-room’, reported the Art Journal of 1856, ‘philosophers talk learnedly upon it; ladies are delighted with its magic representations; and children play with it.’

A primary theme of twentieth-century theatre has been the actor's body. Numerous directors from Stanislavsky to Anne Bogart have evolved stage theories and related training methods to promote a more expressive body on stage. In her 1995 article ‘Developing a Physical Vocabulary for the Contemporary Actor’, Lea Logic provides an overview of many of these approaches. While acknowledging the contributions of these director-teachers, she suggests, ‘If body shape and movement are to retain and increase their power as the central focus of theatre, actors must learn to maximize the expressive potential of their bodies.’ Quoting Copeau, Chekhov, Stanislavsky or Barba, she maintains the primary problem is an actor's tendency consistently to return to physical choices related to their personality and not necessarily to the role they are playing. She quotes Copeau's description of actors: ‘I always know, in advance what they are going to do. They reduce everything to the level of their habits, their clichés, their affectations. They do not invent anything.’ While Copeau's complaint is not directed at actor teachers, but actors, his words define one of the primary challenges for them, to teach actors to expand their expressive abilities beyond their self image.

Space, as Einstein has taught us, has no limits, and time is relative to where you are moving and the speed of light. Our millenium, then, is only a speck in eternal space. It is, nevertheless, a point relative to which we are positioned and on which we place a limit—a date—so that our actions may be chronicled, measured, and brought to some sort of completion, thus releasing us from living forever in the present. Yet, notwithstanding our ability to construct, contain and count time, somewhere someone has made a slip, for there is a ‘glitch’ in the system that still prevents millions of computers from recognizing the year 2000, by which devilry we are sent back to less than zero, to zero twice, 00. This error may well have disastrous consequences, although it would be preferable not have any of them happen—hospital operations failing, aeroplanes losing their bearings and going down in apocalyptic spectacles that are considered appropriate for a millenial ending. is as if this error might be interpreted as a token of what Jean Baudrillard, in a different context that has nothing to do with computers, sardonically suggests may be our desire to wipe out history, even, perhaps, to start again from scratch. Baudrillard's is, of course, one of multiple theses on the ‘end of history’ and millenial nothingness that have emerged, not least via the theatre, with the approach of the twenty-first century.