When a company of Japanese actors under the leadership of Manzaburo UMEWAKA* presented some noh plays at the Aldwych Theatre in 1967 as part of the World Theatre Season, a good many British critics confessed themselves to be more than a little baffled. Opinions ranged from one reviewer's: ‘Noh is stylised to the point of static incomprehensibility’ to Philip Hope-Wallace's guarded appreciation: ‘The sound which prevails is curious; wailing and hooting noises like owls with indigestion. But the combination of strange noises and slow, potent, intense movement adds up to some very exotic and memorable poetry; to those (so to speak) in the know, it must be a lifetime's experience.’ To Irving Wardle the cultural barrier was impenetrable. ‘I found the performance totally alien: a blank cheque with no doubt centuries of artistic credit behind it, but which might equally almost have been staged as a hoax on the cultural community… I doubt whether any such vision can be transmitted without a shared language…’ Even critics anxious to enter into the spirit of this, to them, wholly new experience admitted that they found it hard going. W. A. Darlington wrote, ‘The plays were performed by a company trained from childhood to a stylised form of art of which one cannot hope, without study, to appreciate the finer points.’

Masks are age-old artefacts common to many cultures. In this paper I attempt to show, through the maskmakers' choice of materials, subject matter and innovations in the conventions basic to the traditional uses of mask, that the three which I have selected provoke useful speculations on the nature and function of masking itself.

This essay is an attempt at a partial reconstruction of the finances of the United Company in London between 1682 and 1692. Ideally, one would wish to discover the ‘day bookes of the Theatre’ so often referred to ‘for greater certainty’ in lawsuits after the turn of the century. But even without them, we can calculate approximate figures for the company's fixed expenses and its declared profits year by year. Such a framework gives us a perspective from which to view an analysis of house charges, managers' fees, actors' incomes, and investments in particular productions. I have drawn together various bits of evidence, some of them well-known to specialists, but I have used the information in new ways. I have also speculated freely on how the pieces we have might fit together. There are limits to what we can deduce from available evidence, but this reconstruction does give us a much clearer idea than we have previously had of the scale of theatre as a business in late seventeenth-century London. A startling amount of money flowed through the United Company.

In September 1781, Jean Van Gulpen, printer in the city of Maastricht, brought out a small octavo volume, entitled Tableau du Spectacle Français ou Annales Théâtrales de la Ville de Mastrigt. Now a rarity, this historical view of the Maastricht stage was the work of the lawyer François Bernard (fl. 1788), a shadowy figure today only remembered – if remembered at all – as the author of a number of works on political and economic history, all published at Leyden in the 1780s. Bernard dedicated his Tableau to ‘Madame Clairville, Première Chanteuse de l'Opéra Français de la Ville de Mastrigt’ and preceded his two-hundred page account of the ‘Spectacle Français’ with a lengthy defense of the stage, in which he claimed due recognition for the acting profession and greater support for the players whose condition was ‘flétri par l'injustice des hommes’.