“There is, indeed, little doubt,” the formidable scholar James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps confidently explained to the Victorian readers of his Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, “that the Birth-place did not become one of the incentives for pilgrimage until public attention had been specially directed to it at the time of the Jubilee.” That's broadly true. The earliest reference to the three-gabled, half-timbered house (two houses, originally) on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon as the birthplace of William Shakespeare dates only from the late 1750s, when it was so named in Samuel Winter's town map. During the Stratford Jubilee, which David Garrick organized in 1769, the “small old house,” as the actor's first biographer called it, was fully recognized and promoted as the place where Shakespeare was born. Even so, Halliwell-Phillipps's observation conceals more than it reveals, because there is also little doubt that the dwelling that tradition calls Shakespeare's birthplace did not suddenly acquire that status during the first week of September 1769. The process by which the unremarkable piece of real estate that John Shakespeare purchased sometime in the late sixteenth century was transformed into what Barbara Hodgdon has rightly called the “controlling ideological center” of Shakespeare biography was long, slow, and far from inevitable. That process is the subject of this essay.

Although Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin is widely credited with helping turn the nation against slavery and hastening the Civil War, the theatrical productions based on her novel have precisely the opposite reputation. Many scholars believe that despite the initial antislavery influence of George L. Aiken's 1852 dramatization, the Uncle Tom plays rapidly degraded, becoming more harmful than helpful to African Americans. The plays are also frequently blamed for turning Uncle Tom, the heroic Christian martyr of Stowe's novel, into the submissive race traitor his name connotes today. The “process of vulgarization” that afflicted the Uncle Tom's Cabin dramas is said to have begun almost immediately, with the 1852 premiere of H. J. Conway's adaptation. Today, Conway's version is widely designated a pro-Southern or compromise dramatization of Uncle Tom's Cabin, especially compared to Aiken's influential adaptation, which is considered to have the strongest antislavery message of the many adaptations and to be the most faithful to Stowe's novel.

During his final years in exile, Oscar Wilde derived as much income as he could from selling the rights to his as-yet-unpublished writings. Although at that time he was as pragmatic in his approach to the business of authorship as he had been during the height of his dramatic career in the early 1890s, Wilde nonetheless resisted publishing one of his earliest plays, the 1883 blank-verse tragedy The Duchess of Padua. In an 1898 letter to Robert Ross, Wilde noted of the play (which was finally produced in 1891) that “The Duchess is unfit for publication—the only one of my works that comes under that category. But there are some good lines in it.” Wilde had not always had such a dim view of his second completed play. Indeed, he once promoted it as “the masterpiece of all my literary work, the chef-d'oeuvre of my youth” and had worked hard to see it produced. Literary history, however, has tended to concur with Wilde's more mature assessment of the play's artistic merits. Katharine Worth, one of the few critics to assess the play in detail, suggests that it “is the one completed play of Wilde's which can scarcely be imagined in a modern performance.” Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small place the play among a group of early works by Wilde that “have been judged by modern critics to be failures.” According to their view, The Duchess “is seen as an embarrassment.” This essay instead regards The Duchess as an uneven experiment in both staging aestheticism and late Victorian theatrical “archaeology,” a practice that sought to mount historical dramas with as much accuracy and precision in costume and design as possible. In a letter to Mary Anderson, the American actress whom he hoped would star in the play, Wilde contextualized the spectacle to which he aspired in The Duchess: “the essence of art is to produce the modern idea under an antique form.”

In The Great Wet Way, a humorous account of transatlantic travel, American theatre critic Alan Dale represents ocean liners as sites of transformation, frivolity, and performance. In the passage above, he ponders the peculiar metamorphosis that overtakes him whenever he crosses the Atlantic. Cut off from the hustling world of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, he loses his “real self,” becoming instead an autograph-hunting, bridge-playing, opera-glassing “ship self.” It is as though the ship has remade Dale and the social world around him (Fig. 1). Within this altered world, new sights become old sights, and eccentric clothing or mannerisms come to seem commonplace. Dale recalls seeing a young woman wearing a Panama hat covered with autographs from her fellow passengers. If the woman dared to “walk down Broadway or Fifth Avenue wearing that hideous autograph hat,” he writes, “[s]he would probably be followed by a howling and derisive mob. . . . Yet on board she was unmolested. After the first few days nobody noticed the autograph hat.”

Editor's Note: For this issue of Critical Stages, Ari Osterweis and Barbara Browning consider the multiple publics at play in the work of artist-performer Narcissister.

For generations, scholars of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spanish drama have been attempting to define the parameters that characterize the comedia suelta, but to date no firm consensus about the form's textual or generic qualities has been reached. Broadly defined, the term comedia suelta embraces theatrical works written in a variety of styles, including farsas (short, humorous, carnivalesque texts); sainetes (short productions or distinct portions of larger works that are normally danced and sung); eglogas (brief pastoral works, often with sad or somber overtones); entremeses (concise comedic pieces emphasizing the burlesque and the grotesque); and autos (succinct allegorical religious productions frequently tied to the celebration of the Eucharist). Other theatrical forms and subgenres current in Spanish drama of the period might also easily be classified as sueltas, depending on one's particular point of view.

Moment no. 1: It's the mid-1970s. I'm in graduate school at the University of Kansas. Ron Willis, a student of Brock's at Iowa in the 1960s and a brilliant, wise man, is teaching his class “The History of the Theatrical Event”; the required texts include Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (the midseventies were more or less the tail end of the sixties). We begin with the Greeks, and Ron asks, “How much was entry into the theatre?” Of course I'm prepared and know the answer. I jump in: “Two obols.” Then he says, “How much was a loaf of bread?” My head explodes. This was a moment when I got something about not just the economies of theatre, but about its ecology as well—its situatedness. I know my realization is a no-brainer rather than a mind-blower, but for me, given the year and my background, it was germinal.

I recently translated and then served as dramaturge on the English-language world premiere of Patricia Suárez's Matchmaker (Casamentera), a contemporary Argentine play about the early twentieth-century sex trade in Jewish women imported from Eastern European villages to Buenos Aires brothels. Matchmaker was published in an anthology I edited, Spectacular Bodies, Dangerous Borders: Three New Latin American Plays, along with my translation of The Girls from the 3.5 Floppies (Las chicas del tres y media floppies) by the Mexican playwright Luis Enrique Gutiérrez Ortiz Monasterio (who goes by the acronym LEGOM) and Heather McKay's translation of Passport by the Venezuelan playwright Gustavo Ott. In February 2012, Matchmaker was staged in the Thurber Theatre at The Ohio State University. The production was directed by Lesley Ferris.