For French theatre history, the seventeenth century paradoxically stands out as both the Grand Siècle, or golden age, in which Pierre Corneille, Molière, and Jean Racine produced their masterpieces, and as a period of intense antitheatrical sentiment in which Jansenist theologians like Pierre Nicole and Catholic bishops like Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet composed treatises against the stage and its players. French historiographers have given the name la querelle de la moralité du théâtre, or the quarrel over the theatre's morality, to the diverse episodes that called into question the theatre's place in public life in prerevolutionary France.1 This quarrel merits a performance analysis. Whereas theatre scholarship has devoted careful attention to the material features of early modern theatre practice, antitheatrical sentiment's story has largely been told as a progression of ideas.2 In works that remain essential reading, scholars such as Moses Barras, Marc Fumaroli, Jonas Barish, Simone de Reyff, Jean Dubu, Sylviane Léoni, and Laurent Thirouin have examined the rise and development of French arguments against the stage, reconstructing French antitheatrical sentiment's intellectual history from antiquity through the French Revolution.3 As demonstrated by titles such as Dubu's Les Églises chrétiennes et le théâtre [Christian churches and the theatre] and de Reyff's L’Église et le théâtre [the church and the theatre], enough of the period's antitheatrical fervor had religious roots that French theatre polemics are often also conceptualized as a conflict between the church and the theatre.

Bend your ear to Saturday, 23 July 1853. On that morning, America's first Black concert vocalist and operatic singer, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, performed at Stafford House, home of prominent English Abolitionist the Duchess of Sutherland, during her UK tour. Born into captivity on a plantation in Mississippi and raised free in Philadelphia, Taylor Greenfield's voice sounded out the fever pitch of America's conflict over slavery. A multioctave singer, she smashed boundaries for race and gender as a Black woman who sang “white” vocal repertoire across registers heard as both female and male. Writing on an early public performance in 1851, one newspaper reviewer summed up the revolutionary threat of Taylor Greenfield's voice by stating “we can assure the public that the Union is in no degree periled by it,” meaning of course, that the Union was. Whether received by pro- or antislavery audiences, Taylor Greenfield's voice was understood to peal out Black emancipation. In his 1855 review of Taylor Greenfield's New York Tabernacle performance, James McCune Smith went as far to compare Taylor Greenfield's voice to the firearms employed by escaped slaves defending their freedom against the Fugitive Slave Act.

In 1901, the popular American actor and playwright, William Gillette, arrived in the United Kingdom to tour his new play, Sherlock Holmes. Born in Connecticut in 1853, Gillette was by this time a well-established actor and playwright in his native United States and not unknown to British audiences. Just a few years earlier, he had brought his play Secret Service to London, where his performance as an American Union spy had “created a sensation.” Despite his prior reputation and relative celebrity, there was a seeming belief at the time in a natural accord between Gillette and the character that would go on to define his career. A tale recounted by Harold J. Shepstone in the Strand magazine—already the fictional home of the world's most famous sleuth—underlines the belief in the symbiosis of William Gillette and Sherlock Holmes:

Germany's amateur agitprop theatre movement produced some of the most popular, pervasive, and politically contentious art in the Weimar Republic, not least because of the way performers inserted themselves into the fabric of working-class life with the unequivocal intention of politicizing audiences. Germany's first agitprop troupes formed within youth clubs affiliated with the Communist Party (KPD) around 1925, but the movement quickly grew beyond established club culture, with troupes sprouting up “like mushrooms,” as one critic of the period put it. By 1929 police estimated there were about two hundred self-proclaimed agitprop troupes spread across Germany, all pursuing a transparently aggressive political agenda: to turn the theatre into a site of revolutionary class struggle. If the Weimar period saw an unprecedented mixing of art and politics, agitprop took this tendency to the extreme by declaring theatre to be a weapon in the hands of the proletariat. As the slogan of the 1931 International Meeting of Agitprop Troupes in Cologne put it: “Workers’ theatre is class struggle.”