The theatrical descriptions of Hippolytus Guarinonius are among the most substantial of several significant discoveries of visual and textual documentation relating to the commedia dell'arte in recent decades. Not noted in the standard bibliography of the commedia dell'arte, they have made far less impact on theatre historians than their early date and richness of theatrical detail warrant. Here, selected descriptions are examined in the context of related textual and visual records, in order to highlight aspects of the new information they offer on the staging of comic routines, and to draw attention to some limitations of using material of this type as historical evidence for stage practice.

An important shift occurred in the work of many analysts of performance in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a shift suggested by the title and the main argument of a book appearing at that time, Gerald Hinkle's 1979 Art as Event. Hinkle argued that critical understanding of the performing arts had been hindered by the application to them of strategies evolved in arts such as literature and painting, where temporal placement and duration were not so central a part of the experience. Instead of attempting to analyse a phenomenon like a theatrical performance as an art object, Hinkle suggested, it should rather be considered as an event, a shift in orientation that not only places more emphasis on the working out of the performance in a temporal dimension, but also on the embedding of the entire experience in a particular historical and cultural moment which normally operates on a more direct and conscious fashion in both the creative and the receptive processes than it does in such arts as literature and painting.

A small, anonymous grisaille(Figure 1)from the collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris is among the more familiar images of seventeenth-century French theatre history. It depicts Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII, and other members of the royal family at the theatre. The setting for the scene is the Grande Salle of Richelieu's Parisian home, the Palais Cardinal. Designed by the palace architect Jacques Lemercier and completed in 1641, this theatre was among the first purpose-built proscenium theatres in France. In the 1660s it became the site of the public performances of Molière's most successful plays; after the playwright's death, it housed the Paris Opéra until a fire destroyed it in 1763.

I assume that any work of art reflects authorial intention. Its determination, however, is probably one of the most difficult tasks in interpretation. I also assume that accounts by the authors themselves are not necessarily valid, and indeed they are often conspicuously inadequate. Therefore, for the scholar, the work itself essentially remains the only reliable object of research. In the following paragraphs I intend to suggest, apply and eventually formalize a method of research whose main objective is to determine authorial intentions and purposes in a given theatrical performance text.

Little by little we are building up a reliable picture of what a seventeenth-century Parisian theatre looked like. In Theatre Research International we published an important article by Graham Barlow's on the Hôtel de Bourgogne in our first volume, and we return to the subject with the eye-opening reconstruction of the Palais Royal by Christa Williford in this, our last issue. In the intervening twenty-five years we have published articles on the problem of law and order in the auditorium, on actors and acting in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France; on the interaction between tragedy and the emerging opera, on theory, on dramatic literature, on the morality of actors and actresses, even on publicity; but nothing, specifically, on the identity of the spectator. And without a clearer impression of who patronized the Parisian theatres, we are in danger of missing important clues, not only concerning the theatrical performance, but also in our reading of the dramatic text—which will inform our theatrical decisions.

Woyzeck 91, was staged by the Itim Ensemble and the Cameri Theatre, Tel Aviv, in 1991. The production was adapted from Büchner's Woyzeck and directed by Rina Yerushalmi. The adaptation expands Büchner's play text mainly through the addition of scientific lectures, mostly about human physiology, which present the human being as a biological organism: heart, sex organs, reproducing cells, nervous system as the source of feelings. These additional scenes focus attention on Woyzeck's body as an experimental model, along with other performative devices (slides of body parts, and a skeleton). The juxtaposition of the human body (human subject) with its scientific and technological fragmentation reflects the performance's central theme: it objectifies the human subjects in our modern world of genetic experiments, technological innovations and socio-political reactions, which threaten the destruction of humanity.

The principle of a new professional theatre was decided in Sofia, in 1956:the State Theatre of Satire. Founded in 1957, its aim was to promote comedy and satire. For obvious reasons, party politics could not have allowed its creation earlier in years when satire was not considered serious enough; but in the late 1950s official aesthetics was beginning to crumble.

Britain began making Shakespeare her national poet early in the eighteenth century, and Germany followed suit a few decades later, progressively turning ‘unser Shakespeare’ into one of three national poets, with Goethe and Schiller. As early as 1773, Johann Gottfried Herder included his essay on ‘Shakespear’ in a collection entitled Von Deutscher Art und Kunst. The drama of the ‘Sturm und Drang’, which Herder's collection programmatically inaugurated, appropriated what Goethe (Götz von Berlichingen), Schiller (The Robbers) and their contemporaries (mis)understood to be Shakespeare's dramatic technique. By the end of the century, the assimilation had advanced far enough for August Wilhelm von Schlegel, the famous translator of seventeen of Shakespeare's plays, to indulge in no slight national chauvinism: ‘I am eager’, he writes in a letter to his cotranslator Ludwig Tieck, ‘to have your letters on Shakespeare.… I hope you will prove, among other things, that Shakespeare wasn't English. I wonder how he came to dwell among the frosty, stupid souls on that brutal island? … The English critics understand nothing about Shakespeare.’ Even though Tieck failed to prove that Shakespeare was not of English birth, the conviction that Shakespeare was best understood by German rather than by English critics only grew in the course of the nineteenth century. Appropriately, it was in Germany that the first periodical devoted exclusively to Shakespeare, the Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, was founded in 1865. Fifty years later, the German novelist Gerhart Hauptmann could still claim that ‘there is no people, not even the English, that has the same right to claim Shakespeare as the German. Shakespeare's characters are a part of our world, his soul has become one with ours: and though he was born and buried in England, Germany is the country where he truly lives.’

Charles Mee, before turning to playwriting, authored several well-known political histories. To the last of these, from 1993, he gave the ironically portentous title of Playing God: Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men Met to Change the World. With this deconstructive final word after two decades as a historian, he did not in fact abandon history, but began to write it in the medium of theatre. In doing so Mee has come to share a view articulated by Roland Barthes, who was once a university student of theatre and actor in Greek tragedies: the view that theatre, and Greek tragedy in particular, can illuminate our history as a story unfolding before us, allowing us to connect critically past with present as our best hope for the future. The American director Tina Landau, a frequent collaborator with Charles Mee, likewise believes that the ancient Greek tragedies helped constitute, articulate, and today still codify the structural base in myth and history of Western civilization. Accordingly, Mee and Landau have created a number of what they call ‘site-specific pieces’ adapted from Greek drama, site-specific in that they are created out of the specific material space and time at hand. One of these is The Trojan Women a Love Story which was developed and premiered at the University of Washington in Seattle in the spring of 1996. The production was based on Euripides' play The Trojan Women and Hector Berlioz's 1859 opera Les Troyens, which in turn retells the story of Aeneas and Queen Dido of Carthage from Virgil's epic, The Aeneid.

The playwright Konstantin Iliev (b. 1937) states: ‘The theatre, in its origins, is an art form recreating human relationships and, certainly, the most human means of communication is language. The colour red, for example, influences both the bull and the spectator in a specific manner but the word “blood” leaves the animal indifferent.’ Indeed language in each of Iliev's plays has a special function, both constructive and opening up the richness of human characters into their multiple parts. Iliev's plays are exploring the tangle of human relations, almost with a scientific method of analysis, man's ‘disease’ and his life, man and his surrounding world.

This is the story of a Jew from Israel, who dreams that he is a Marrano priest in Spain, who dreams that he is a Jew in Israel.… And as the reader stands between these mirrors.… and looks at the faces doubly reflected all around, there is certainly no need to tell him whose face he is seeing.

The Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in Paris (1897–1962) achieved a legendary reputation as the ‘Theatre of Horror’, a venue displaying such explicit violence and blood-curdling terror that a resident doctor was employed to treat the numerous spectators who fainted each night. Indeed, the phrase ‘grand-guignolesque’ has entered the language to describe any display of heightened, remorseless horror. Such is the myth of the Grand-Guignol: the reality is subtler and far more complex.

Over the last forty years, Bulgarian drama has displayed a remarkable variety, reflecting recent political changes. Most playwrights write poetry as well as plays, which may account for the metaphorical quality of a great proportion of contemporary Bulgarian drama. Their talents have blossomed in a wealth of productions dealing with topical issues and concerns, deeply rooted in the country's cultural traditions and way of life. In the following, non-exhaustive, survey, we shall try to present that variety through brief vignettes of those playwrights most familiar to a Bulgarian audience.

Over the last few years—which for Bulgaria were years of great political, social and psychological change, related to the disintegration of ideological systems and conventions, and to the destruction of established social and theatrical structures—the very term ‘Bulgarian drama’ seemed entirely missing from the theatre practice of the country. In the new theatre system that emerged from this period of change there was a dearth of new Bulgarian plays.

‘Iconoclasm grew from the destruction of religious images and opposition to the religious use of images to, literally, the destruction of, and opposition to, any images or works of art and, metaphorically, the “attacking or overthrow of venerated institutions and cherished beliefs, regarded as fallacious or superstitious”’. Dario Gamboni.