This paper has two principal, though interrelated, objectives: to survey issues concerning the status of the texts of Greek Tragedy, particularly with respect to specific distinctions between a play as text-based and as audience experienced, between the “eye” of the reader of a play text and the eye of the theatrical spectator; and to consider some implications of these distinctions for Euripidean drama, above all with respect to The Bacchae, since its procedures, albeit more developed or extravagant than elsewhere, may be construed as characteristic for this drama. Much of what I shall say has reference also to the other—Aeschylean, Sophoclean—texts that we have of Greek Tragedy. But it is with Euripides that the terms of the relationship of text and play are most explicit, and controversial, and, it seems to me, most dislocated. We have “read’ Euripides sometimes very wrongly because we have been reading Euripidean texts.

Charleston will be celebrating another bicentennial in 1993, the restoration of its theatre. Several illustrations of the Charleston Theatre of 1793, its scenery, costumes, and performers have recently surfaced, enabling us to celebrate its bicentennial more vividly. An oil painting of the theatre under construction reappeared in a private estate in 1989 and was purchased by the Gibbes Art Gallery, Charleston, the following year. In addition, watercolors and pencil sketches of the interior of the theatre, its scenery, and costumes have recently been deposited at the South Carolina Historical Society.

It has long been known that details of the design of John Rich's Covent Garden theatre of 1732 are contained in the Chancery bill of complaint that he entered against the builder, Edward Shepherd, in Shepherd's lengthy answer, and his counter-complaint. These documents, written on the usual great membranes and now rather scuffed and rubbed, are difficult to work with because of their physical characteristics and their interminable repetitiveness.

To view street actions of the American colonial period as theatrical events is nothing new. As Jeffrey Richards has shown in his much-admired book of 1991, writers of the colonial period—even in towns where “official” theatre performances were strictly prohibited—preferred the metaphors of theatre over any others in describing the actions of individuals and crowds upon what these writers saw as the “world stage.”

In order to recuperate from the rigors of the first production of The Ring at Bayreuth, Richard and Cosima Wagner took an Italian vacation. During their travels they visited the Sistine Chapel. After he had observed the interior, Richard pronounced, “This is like my theatre, one feels it is no place for jokes.” Cosima, never one to contradict her husband, reserved comment. In fact, there can be little doubt that she agreed with him, for in her Diaries she consistently invests the Festspielhaus with an aura of sanctity.

As a theatre practitioner I am interested in how the conventions and jurisdictions which determine what I can do and cannot do, under the sign of theatre, came to be. The most intriguing of these determinations are, of course, the silent ones, those about which least is said but on which most is predicated. These are what I call theatre taboos, a complex of shadowy restraints and controls, from prompting to possession, that transgress the theatre's limit, informs us politely what theatre is not and in so doing inadvertently tells us something about what theatre is.

Western scholarship on Russian theatre has been so dominated by a few prominent figures that the casual student of theatre history might justifiably be left with the impression that Russian theatre began in 1898 with the founding of the Moscow Art Theatre and ended in the 1930s with Stalin's “purification” of Soviet art and literature and the untimely disappearance of Meierhold. The absence of a significant body of research further reinforces the notion that a small gaggle of men—most notably, those associated with the MAT—were solitary beacons of progress in the otherwise barren landscape of nineteenth-century popular theatre.