The young Swedish artist Nicodemus Tessin, traveling through Italy in 1687, records seeing a scene at the Teatro SS. Luca (also known as the Teatro San Salvatore) in Venice in which the spaces between the side wings were filled in to enclose the playing space, to form what has become known as a box setting. He even drew a sketch (fig. 1), explaining how the wings were “turned back” to enclose the space. He describes a book flat attached to a chariot; when the chariot was moved to its onstage position, stagehands swiftly swung the hinged section of the book flat backward until it joined the next chariot to the rear.

Several traditional views have dominated the attitude of literary and theatre historians towards eighteenth century English drama. The most influential perspective has been that of Allardyce Nicoll, who lists plays, discovers coherent schools of playwriting, and traces chronology as if it were causality. A second approach looks at the century as a gallery of worthy dramatists, one hanging beside the other: Farquhar, Addison, Steele, Gay, Lillo, Goldsmith, and Sheridan. This approach is exemplified in F.S. Boas's Introduction to Eighteenth Century Drama, an appreciation of the tall peaks which tends to ignore the broad valleys.

The origins and early development of American vaudeville remain shrouded in the fog of nineteenth-century theatre history. Most historical accounts focus upon the evolution of vaudeville from entertainments performed in honky-tonks, beer gardens, and “concert saloons” of the 1860s and 1870s. Itinerant artists were hired to keep customers in a drinking mood with jigs, songs, acrobatics, and jokes. According to Douglas Gilbert, the audience for “variety,” as the sum of these peripatetic performers was then called, consisted of “tosspots, strumpets, dark-alley lads, and shimmers.” Few “respectable” men would dare venture into such places because of the drunkenness of the audience and the salacious nature of the entertainment.

Jesse James was shot on April 3, 1882. By the next theatrical season three different companies were presenting the story of the James gang to New York audiences.

Drama about American frontier figures was nothing new; late nineteenth century audiences were enamoured of tales of the frontier. Frank Murdoch's Davy Crockett, in which Frank Mayo starred for over twenty years, and William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody's Wild West show, which played for over thirty years, were but the most famous and successful of the hundreds of plays, lectures, exhibitions, and demonstrations about frontier life that regaled theatre patrons.

On 14 March 1892, dedicated theatregoers in Cleveland, Ohio, found themselves facing a difficult decision: the city's two major touring houses were presenting similar star performers in superficially similar plays. One actress was an old acquaintance, having made regular appearances in Cleveland for more than a decade. The other was making her Cleveland debut, although she was a highly publicized, world-famous star. As the debutante was performing in French and the old favorite played in English—even though an English heavily accented by French—not surprisingly, the larger audience opted for their native tongue.

J. T. Grein's Independent Theatre has long been considered the counterpart to Antoine's Théâtre Libre and Brahm's Freie Bühne: a subscription-based theatre introducing experimental drama to a coterie audience in the 1890s. However, just as in Paris there were rival production groups such as Paul Fort's Théâtre d'Art, so in London Grein was not the sole purveyor of the new drama. He had many individual competitors, the most important of whom were women who produced primarily the plays of Henrik Ibsen.

On May 5, 1921, Eleanora Duse presented her second debut, performing the part of Ellida in Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea at the Teatro Balbo in Turin. Her re-appearance at sixty-three, after an absence of twelve years, was a moment of extraordinary excitement, and when “Ellida” set foot on stage, she was greeted with a ten minute ovation. La Duse had retired in 1909, with no intention of ever performing again. Many praised her for leaving the boards at the height of a stunning career, ensuring an enduring image. And, indeed, it is the Eleanora Duse of the first career that is generally remembered, even today. Nevertheless, her second career, risking the destruction of that earlier image, serves to illumine much about the nature of her art, for her endeavor was to bring to the Italian stage a sweeping reform.

While researching my dissertation topic, “Edwin Booth: Theatre Manager,” I happened upon a previously unpublished letter written by Booth to a Jno. M. Leavitt. In this letter, Booth gives a contemporary and perhaps surprising evaluation of Dion Boucicault's playwriting, he articulates a set of guidelines for playwrights, and his comments on playwriting indicate a theory of play production which actually guided Booth's own work as actor-manager of Booth's Theatre from 1869 to 1873.

I would like to make an addition to Walter J. and Ruth I. Meserve's “The Stage History of Roar China: Documentary Drama as Propaganda,” Theatre Survey, 21 (May 1980), 1–11. The propagandistic qualities of Tretiakov's play can be seen in a production I mention in my article “Theatrical Activities in Nazi Concentration Camps,” Performing Arts Journal, 1 no. 2 (Fall 1976), 3–11. In 1944 an inmate of the Polish concentration camp in Czestochowa, Shie Tigel, was allowed to organize theatrical activities. Tigel, who had been an actor in the Warsaw Yiddish theatres, was allowed to construct “a special barrack for theatre with a stage, curtains, and light reflectors.”

Readers of Grace King's New Orleans may recall that the first play ever performed in French Louisiane was The Indian Father, a tragedy inspired by an incident during the Marquis de Vaudreuil's administration and performed in the Governor's mansion in 1753. A Colapissa Indian fled to New Orleans after killing a Choctaw, whose relatives followed and demanded the murderer. When the Colapissa escaped, his father offered his own life in atonement in place of his son. A Choctaw chief then struck off his head.