The last years of Robert Merry's life, which were spent in America, have been enveloped in an obscurity which no scholar writing about him has attempted to dispel. The only two considerable biographical sketches written of him, the one appearing soon after his death in the Monthly Magazine for April, 1799, and the other in the Dictionary of National Biography, give the barest attention to his American exile. Fred Lewis Pattee, who writes more about him than any other historian of American literature, limits himself exclusively to the vagaries of the Della Cruscan School which Merry had founded in England, makes no mention of his connection with the American theatre to which he devoted all his writing here, indeed appears not even to have known that Merry emigrated to this country. I have here supplemented with new details the scanty record of Merry's life and especially that of his dramatic writing and connections with the stage in this country.

Nathaniel Currier's spectacular lithograph of the “Great Riot at the Astor Place Opera House, New York” (1), is one of the most well-known images depicting a nineteenth-century U.S. theatre building left to us by the popular pictorial reporting of that prephotographic era. The background of the event in terms of drama history is familiar, when It is the building itself, as a theatrical monument, that we tend to overlook, except for its appeal as a bygone relic, and architecturally it is easy to dismiss it as simply another manifestation of the rage which was caustically described by the New York correspondent of The Architectural Magazine (London) in 1834: One factor which discourages the theatre historian is the difficulty of relating any one theatre of the period with other examples in a city, let alone the country.

The Galli-Bibiena Family, whose members were summoned, one or another, sometimes several together, to the principal centers of Baroque culture, created fantastically grand scenic decorations for the lavish courts of Europe and built magnificant theatres for both prince and populace. Although charm of artistic beauty and power of phantasmal scenic creation were found in varying degrees among all of this mighty line of scenographers, their grandiose conception was epitomized in the illusionistic immensity of Giuseppe Galli-Bibiena. The Baroque period was the supreme age of illusion in the sphere of theatrical scene design and decoration, and Giuseppe was its reigning genius.

There has been a good deal of speculation by theatre scholars concerning when realistic interior stage settings, or to be more specific, the box-set was first used on the English stage. Waitzkin contends that the box-set made its first appearance in England at the Olympic Theatre in a production of The Conquering Game by W. B. Bernard given on November 3, 1832. Armstrong agrees with Waitzkin's contention except he dates the performance as given on November 28, 1832. Rowell believes that the etched frontispiece to The Conquering Game“…is insufficient to confirm that this ‘more perfect enclosure’ involved flats entirely surrounding the scene and a ceiling cloth as well.” Hunter agrees with Rowell and can find “No positive indication” in the etching for the claim that this was the first box-set used on the English stage (l).

In the midst of the currently fashionable lament over the death of the drama, or of the theatre, or of the idea of a theatre, it is strange that the Workers' Theatre, deliberately created to meet a specific cultural ideal and productive of its own particular theory, literature, and style of production, could exist for nearly twenty years, flourish in popularity for half that time, and yet remain unknown. Stranger still that the only study which is even partially comprehensive should choose to view this theatre as an organ of the Communist Party, to be given the same condescending treatment as that political movement itself. Such are the dangers of treating theatre as a weapon rather than as an art.