During the last quarter century the majority of France's greatest stage directors have drawn extensively from Jacques Copeau's rich legacy of teaching, directing, and acting, thus establishing his theatrical paternity for all time. The fame of his innovations is international, and an ordinary summary of his work would only contribute to the obvious. However, a discussion of Copeau's Shakespearean productions can be fruitful since he was the first one in France to establish the English-speaking tradition of producing Shakespeare. And, as Antoine before him, his finest hour was demonstrated in Shakespearean production.

In Pittsburgh a well-known actress makes her entrance on the stage of the Nixon, and, so that there may be no danger of a provincialaudience mistaking the show's principal, her manager leads the applause from the wings. In Paris the renowned author of Ulysses establishes himself as leader of a fan club at the Opéra, and becomes such a nuisance that the director finally replaces the lauded singer.

Baroque opera reached a high point in Vienna during the reign of Karl VI as the result of simultaneous developments in the fields of poetry, music, and spectacle. Three successive court poets, Pietro Pariati, Apostolo Zeno, and Pietro Metastasio shared the endeavor of their contemporaries to enrich Italian poetry with a combination of “sonatia verba et antiqua,” and “gravis et decora constructio.” They found operatic libretti particularly well suited for this creative experiment, and Vienna provided the ideal atmosphere of musical sophistication, indispensable for such development. Musical life had flourished under the late Joseph I, who had been an outstanding musician, and the new Emperor was also an able pianist, composer, and occasional conductor.

Archeological evidence for the history of theatre art has always been less definitive and less extensive than either artists or historians have wished. We have the stone remains of late Greek theatres and we have the pictorial fragments from some ancient amphorae which, when co-ordinated with inscriptions, give us a modicum of knowledge concerning the performances in Greek theatres. From Renaissance architects and painters we have beautiful drawings and engravings of scenes and costumes which give us an indication of the grandeur which was possible in the court performances of Europe for two or three hundred years.

Although Thomas Duffett is hardly one of the shining lights of the Restoration drama, his prologues and epilogues contain much theatrical information that gives him a continuing, although non-literary, value. His New Poems, Songs, Prologues and Epilogues (London, 1676), besides providing the only known record of the so-called Duchess of Portsmouth's company, gives considerable evidence of private and vacation performances in the early 1670's.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, on the stages of England and France, there appeared a figure whose presence gives to the period a certain uniqueness. The prompter, usually functioning in other capacities and holding additional names, would seem to have been established in the theatre at this time; for the scholarship on the Greek and Roman theatre has, as yet, revealed no such person. Nor is there any suggestion of the presence of the prompter in liturgical drama. None of this, of course, rules out the possibility of the use of such a person; however, even if used in Athens, Rome, or the cathedral, he undoubtedly never held the prominence he enjoyed in that brief period of what we have been told was onstage glory.