The Italian mountebank of the early modern period was a figure of great power and fascination, both to Italians themselves and to English audiences via Thomas Coryate's documentary account and Ben Jonson's fictional portrayal of Scoto of Mantua in Volpone. Italian and Spanish antitheatrical clerics, prompted by San Carlo Borromeo to extend Counter-Reformation cultural critiques to the increasingly successful commedia dell'arte, were quick to identify the mountebank—an itinerant doctor/pharmacist who typically enticed potential patrons with an array of musical and theatrical entertainments—with the professional actor, who also performed for money in Italian piazzas. Without the moral animus of the post-Tridentine critics, late twentieth-century theatre historians have reassociated the mountebank and the actor, seeing in the former's capacity to sell theatrical entertainment anywhere and anytime (independent of the religious or civic festival) a harbinger of the professional commedia dell'arte, which had to develop means of economic self-support that were independent of traditional courtly patronage. Arte actors seem to have been aware of their perceived kinship with itinerant quacks; at the turn of the century, Giovanni Gabrielli performed a routine involving trunks and vases of the kind used by mountebanks, his own sons turning out to be the “vases.” But culturally ambitious actor-writers, who in the early seventeenth century began to counter antitheatrical attacks with apologies for the moral integrity and the technical sophistication of the new theatre, sharply differentiated themselves from the charlatans. If the conventionality of their moral defenses often hindered them from saying what comedy was, they could at least say what it was not, and it was not quackery.

If the London theatre of the Renaissance was one of the earliest examples of theatre as a commercial entertainment, then its playhouses were its largest physical investment and central visual focus. The Theatre, Curtain, Rose, Fortune, Globe, Swan, Hope and Cockpit were not only architectural inventions designed to replace previous itinerant playing practices with performances in fixed spaces where the acting companies could control admissions. They were also major financial investments by playhouse owners. The increase in the building of playhouses between 1576 and 1616 reflect a growing industry creating custom-built places of production that became regular fixtures in the urban geography of Renaissance London. The unprecedented rate of playgoing also increased interest in the possibility of profits by investors, shareholders, and those who operated the playhouses. In short, the London theatre was organized to make money, and London's playhouses were profit centers for the production and consumption of an aesthetic product. Within such a commercial climate, the decisions of playhouse owners concerning building, rebuilding, or abandonment of each facility were critical choices based on profits rather than aesthetics. The location of a playhouse was as important as what went on inside it. Decisions regarding playhouse location, then, can be examined as successful or unsuccessful pragmatic responses to competitive pressures, changing audience response, and expectation of profits in a speculative new industry within a fast-growing city.

As the most critically lauded dramatist of her time, Joanna Baillie recently has received considerable attention from critics interested in arguing that our neglect of Romantic drama has arisen from “conventional and mistaken assumptions about its strategies and principles.” In a recent issue of Wordsworth Circle devoted exclusively to Romantic drama, Baillie figures in three of its seven articles as a central dramatist of the period, while Jeffrey Cox devotes an entire section of his introduction in Seven Gothic Dramas 1789—1825 (1992) to her work. Even more recently, she has been the subject of special sessions of recent Modern Language Association meetings, and an edition of her Selected Works is scheduled to be published by Pickering and Chatto Press in 1998.

In his “Special Formal Report” of 24 April 1808, Weimarian court actor Heinrich Becker informed his superiors about a little theatrical irregularity. Becker was reporting in his official function as controlling supervisor for representations—a kind of stage manager for the theatre. By this report the “graciously decreed Noble Saxonian Commission for Direction of the Court Theatre,” chaired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, had to take official notice of the following punishable histrionic faux pas:

Wednesday the 20th of April during the performance of Piccolomini [Schiller's] in the scene with the butler Actus 3, Scene 3. Mister Morhardt has willfully acted the cavalry captain Neumann in a comical way.

In 1967 the National Theatre of Japan (Kokuritsu Gekijô) published a facsimile version of Okyôgen Gakuya no Honsetsu (What Really Happens Backstage), a two-volume, four-part work, originally published in the midnineteenth century in Edo (Tokyo), and written by Santei Shunba, with the first volume (1858) illustrated by Baichôrô Kunisada and Ichieisai Yoshitsuya, and the second (1859) by Ichiransai Kunitsuna. The book offers numerous illustrations of kabuki stage effects, with brief explanations of their purposes. Despite its great value as a historical resource, this work had been barely known to the Japanese academic community, apart from the fact that one of its pictures appeared in Ihara Toshirô's 1913 Kinsei Nihon Engeki Shi (History of Japanese Theatre from the Edo Period) and was reproduced frequently thereafter. The chief source of information concerning its contents was an entry in the six-volume Engeki Hyakka Daijiten (Encyclopedia of the Theatre), published by Waseda University in 1962. This entry contained several inaccuracies, including errors in the number of the book's volumes and its publication date.

In the annals of staged Shakespeare, John Barrymore, Arthur Hopkins, and Robert Edmond Jones have been much honored for their landmark productions of Richard III and Hamlet, first seen in New York during the 1919– 20 and 1922–23 seasons. Another collaborator in these revivals, however, has received little scholarly attention: Margaret Carrington, a Canadian-born voice teacher who contributed significantly to the success of these productions by “remaking” Barrymore's voice. Although reviews of Barrymore's performances in the years preceding his Shakespearean debut often mentioned his “monotonous” vocal quality, the result of his studies with Carrington was a vocal instrument of extraordinary range and flexibility. As Heywood Broun remarked in 1923: “Someone ought to write a tale about Barrymore called ‘The Story of a Voice.’ It is one of the most amazing adventures in our theatre. Here was a particularly pinched utterance distinctly marred by slipshod diction. Today it is among the finest voices in the American theatre.”

Roger Stevens has always been a visionary. His career began in real estate, where he gained national recognition for buying the Empire State Building for $51.5 million—at the time the highest price ever paid for one building—and selling it three years later for a ten-million dollar profit. As he expanded into theatre, he quickly became one of the nation's foremost producers on Broadway, producing more than 200 shows over the last half century, including West Side Story, A Man for All Seasons, Bus Stop, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Deathtrap, and Mary, Mary. He “discovered” playwrights such as Tom Stoppard, Peter Shaffer, and Terence Rattigan for New York audiences, and he has worked closely with others, already established, such as Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Harold Pinter, Jean Giraudoux, and T.S. Eliot Three United States presidents have depended on Stevens for their arts and humanities policy, and the American theatrical community has benefitted from his intuitive vision.