What shape was the Blackfriars' auditorium? Those reconstructions that have been made to date are agreed that it was rectangular, the galleries following the line of the walls of the Upper Frater or Parliament Chamber, the large rectangular room in which the theatre was fitted up by James Burbage in 1596. Because the room was oblong, so was the auditorium. Yet the sparse material evidence about the playhouse is silent on this point, and no serious study has been made in an attempt to justify the usual interpretation. The matter is far from trivial, for a rectangular house suggests kinship with the routine fitting-out of the various halls at Court for the performance of plays and masques, while the alternative – that the Blackfriars had a segmental or U-shaped auditorium – would almost certainly indicate derivation from a European theatre tradition most readily available in the woodcut designs published by Sebastiano Serlio in the second book of his Architettura (Paris, 1545), and stemming originally from the rounded form of the ancient Roman theatre.

French-speaking African drama owed much of its growth in the colonial era to French initiative and support. From 1933 to the late 40s, French-speaking African drama was virtually synonymous with the end-of-year theatrical presentations at the William Ponty School in Gorée, Senegal. Not only did the French colonial administration encourage the students to tour the capitals of French West African colonies with their plays during the holidays but it also sponsored a William Ponty School troupe to the International Exhibition in Paris in 1937, where it performed Sokamé and Les prétendants rivaux.

An interesting incident at one of the London theatres, which has been overlooked by theatre historians, is recorded in the Historical Collections of Nehemiah Wallington, a citizen and turner of London. Wallington (1598–1658) operated a small independent business in Eastcheap and, in common with many other contemporaries of middling station, had a very pious cast of mind. For thirty years he compiled a collection of memorabilia of men and affairs, and particularly of events which revealed the workings of Providence. Early in 1642 he recorded the following:

Mark the judgement of God upon one that stood in defence of plays, and to maintain them.

The importance of the actor benefit in the eighteenth-century London theatre is manifest. An actor's benefit was a key part of his or her contract, and the income it produced was a crucial supplement to the performer's ordinary salary. A benefit for a single performer could easily yield more than £50 (after expenses) early in the century – a. sum which might double the annual income of a second or third rank member of a company. The long string of benefits at both Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn.Fields each spring soon after 1700 (visible as soon as daily newspaper advertisements become customary) often total twenty or more at each house, and the actor benefit was to remain a basic feature of financial arrangements in London theatres throughout the eighteenth century.

As late as 1962 Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper made the following remark at Oxford about African history:

Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at the present time there is none; there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness… and darkness is not the subject of history.

At the end of this essay is a list of the black French plays first published in book form between 1980 and May 1983. In all there are 43 plays in 31 books, not counting mimeographed and journal items, nor performed plays that have not yet been printed. The rate of book publication continues high. I commented on most of the 1980 and 1981 plays in ‘Black French Theatre: The Latest Plays’ and ‘Black French Theatre Update’ so in a first section I shall present those missed from that period as well as the ones of 1982 and 1983. This will be done alphabetically by author except that Diouf is postponed until Sall, the two having written on the same subject.

‘Before attending the performance of Tragedy, it is easy to know what the Characters in it will be. If one expects to see appear a Tyrant, a Usurper, an unhappy Prince, a Princess who loves and hates; one will not be much mistaken. One does not at all fear being placed in the ranks of the plagiarists, when one gives to the Hero of a new Play, the same passions which have already served as subject for a hundred Tragedies …’ (Nougaret, 1979, I, p. 169). So wrote Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret in Paris, and indeed a feature of central importance in eighteenth-century tragedies is their use of idealized characters. The range of types from which the tragedian selected his cast was small and specialized – hero, heroine and villain or villainess with their confidants, noble elders who were often parents of the hero or heroine, forthright soldiers – and equally restricted was the range of passions proper to each role, in accordance with its bienséances. The choice of plot for the writer was similarly specialized. A well-known eighteenth-century writer on rhetoric remarked that ‘in tragedy it is necessary to be especially careful that the action of the hero who usually gives his name to the tragedy is not unfamiliar and drawn from the obscurity of an unknown tale’ (Jouvency, 1725, p. 75). Thus the eighteenth-century classical tragedian worked within strict bounds of form and content in accordance with the conventions of his time, in which the artistic proprieties were closely linked with those of everyday life and its rigid code of social deportment. Mercier, a well-known writer and dramatist, even went so far as to say: ‘…we have only one single Tragedy, that is to say, one same mould, one same tone, one same progress.’ (Mercier, 1778, p. 119)

‘Francophonie’ arrived relatively recently in Africa; it has only been systematically nurtured since the colonial occupation. The French have often even believed that the French language was ‘the best solution’ for Africa. Was there not, after all, only one culture, the French culture? And therefore it must, as far as possible, be spread throughout the world. A commission set up to formulate France's aid policy to developing countries confirmed the necessity ever to extend the influence of the French language as follows:

La France désire, plus que toute autre nation, diffuser au loin sa langue et sa culture. Son besoin de rayonnement intellectuel trouve bon emploi auprès de peuples dont la langue convient mal aux idées et aux techniques modernes (…): elle leur apporte un mode d'expression et une méthode de pensée.

The historic château of Fontainebleau was a favourite temporary residence of French kings from the twelfth century to the time of Napoleon. The château served as a place of rest and relaxation for the Jung and his court and at least one voyage was customarily made each autumn for the purposes of hunting and recreation. During the reign of Louis XV such voyages were carefully planned and the king set down the dates of arrival and departure on his calendar each New Year's day. Nothing was allowed to interrupt this schedule.

Since 1970, the young generation of dramatists in the Ivory Coast has questioned the approach to the theatre represented by the tradition of the Ecole William Ponty and even by the new writing of Bernard Dadié, with his Monsieur Thôgô-gnini and, especially, Béatrice du Congo. Following Aimé Césaire's example, Dadié began writing political plays after 1966, but did, at the same time, incorporate some features of the traditional theatre. The founders of La Griotique, discussed below, thought these reforms too timid and were determined to break completely with the old style. This was the starting point for the new trends we shall be examining in this article.