Perhaps the most neuralgic issue in the early modern debate between professional religion and professional theatre was the place of women. Clerical critics of the theatre consistently denounced the actress as the embodiment of all the corrupting influences inherent in the commedia. Seldom acknowledged, however, is that the energy fueling these rabid attacks on female performers oriented itself not only ad extra but also ad intra. At the same time that professional actresses were becoming more visible in various piazze and stanze throughout Italy and France, religiously inspired women were becoming more visible in the schools and hospitals sponsored by the reforming Roman Catholic Church. The animus of religious men toward the actress must be considered within a wider social context that also included a growing uneasiness with and hostility toward the more public activity of religious women intent on claiming their place in the apostolic mission of Roman Catholicism.

In the last fifteen years, a growing number of theatre historians have examined the relation between the British stage and British Imperialism, suggesting that the theatre has both reflected and helped constitute modern colonialism.Articles examining theatrical orientalism and British Imperialism in Victorian and Edwardian periods include Michael Booth, “Soldiers of the Queen: Drury Lane Imperialism,” Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre, eds. Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), 3–20; Heidi J. Holder, “Melodrama, realism and empire on the British stage,” Acts of Supremacy: the British Empire and the stage, 1790–1930, eds. J.S. Bratton et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991),129–149; J.S. Bratton, “Theatres of war: the Crimea on the London stage 1854–5,” Performance and Politics in Popular Drama: Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theatre, Film and Television, 1800–1976, eds. David Bradby, Louis James, and Bernard Sharrat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 119–138; and J. Ellen Gainor, “Bernard Shaw and the Drama of Imperialism,” The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics, eds. Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinelt (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 56–74. John M. Mackenzie provides a thorough overview of nineteenth-century theatrical orientalism in Orientalism: History, theory and the arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 176–199, and Gary Jay Williams examines orientalist images of colonial expansion in Covent Garden's 1816 operatic adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), 76–92. While scholars have examined colonialism and theatre in a range of periods, studies of Renaissance theatre are particularly rich in this area. Examples include Paul Brown, “'This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine': The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism, ” in Political Shakespeare: essays in cultural materialism, eds. Jonathon Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 48–71; Kim F. Hall, “Sexual Politics and Cultural Identity in The Masque of Blackness,” in The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics, eds. Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinelt (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 3–18; Patricia Parker, “Fantasies of 'Race' and 'Gender': Africa, Othello and Bringing to Light, ” in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, eds. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), 84–100; and Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986). At the same time, there has been an equally prolific effort by historians of the human sciences, examining a host of disciplines whose emergence coincided with colonial expansion.See Felix Driver, “Geography's empire: histories of geographical knowledge,” Society and Space, 10 (1992), 23–40; Brian Hudson, “The New Geography and the New Imperialism: 1870–1918,” Antipode 9 (1977), 12–19; George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press-Macmillan, 1987); Billie Melman, Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); and Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Of course all of these works, like this essay, are indebted to Edward Said's Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books-Random House, 1979). If, as Talal Asad has asserted, “the colonial power structure made the object of anthropological study accessible and safe” Talal Asad, Introduction, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, ed. Talal Asad (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1973), 17. for the European researcher, it would seem by extension that this same power structure made the object of anthropological study accessible and safe to the British theatre-goer. As theatre historians have pointed out, British theatre managers have cited orientalist authorities ranging from Vivant Denon, who accompanied the French expedition in Egypt, to the press artists that accompanied British colonial armies.The Edinburgh Review attested to the popularity of Denon's Voyages dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte, asserting “Few publications, we believe, have ever obtained so extensive a circulation in the same space of time as these travels.” Cited in Patrick Conner, ed., The Inspiration of Egypt: Its Influence on British Artists, Travelers and Designers, 1700–1900 (Brighton: Brighton Museum, 1983), 29. Pieter van der Merwe argues in The Spectacular Career of Clarkson Stanfield 1793–1867 that Voyages soon became “the theatre's major source for Egyptian subjects” (Tyne and Wear County Council Museums, 1979), 89. I argue elsewhere that Augustus Harris's exhibition of artifacts and illustrations lent by soldiers and press artists in the Sudan Campaign was intended to lend credibility to his depiction of the region in his concurrent production. See “From Geography to Landscape: Imperial Theatre and the Domestication of Exotic Space” in Land Scape Theatre: Views of the Twentieth Century, eds. Una Chaudhuri and Elinor Fuchs (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming). It was not simply that a new body o f research generated in colonialism's shadow provided raw material for Eastern plays, this research also served to “license curiosity” about the Orient (to borrow Nicholas Thomas's languageNicholas Thomas, “Licensed Curiosity: Cook's Pacific Voyages,” The Cultures of Collecting, eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 116–136.), transforming the theatre's detailed representations of the East into a scholarly and respectable undertaking that seemed, in some ways, allied with Europe's Imperial goals.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, there was a major effort in the United States to remove child performers from professional stages. The campaign began in New York State with the passage of An Act to Prevent and Punish Wrongs to Children (1876), prohibiting children from a variety of performance venues, and subsequently grew into a nationwide crusade. The movement was spearheaded by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC) and its leader, Elbridge T. Gerry. The intense response of the theatre industry resulted in a protracted political struggle.

Early in the twentieth century such a bias did not exist in the United States, especially on the New York stage, and Spanish plays enjoyed an extraordinary wave of popularity. Works by Benavente, the husband and wife team of Gregorio (1881–1947) and María (1874–1974) Martínez Sierra, the Álvarez Quintero brothers (Serafín, 1871–1938 and Joaquín, 1873–1944), and, somewhat later, Federico García Lorca (1898–1936), reached the English-language stage quickly and often with considerable success. In 1920 the Theatre Guild staged Benavente's The Passion Flower (La malquerida, translated by John Garrett Underhill); this rural tragedy of a dysfunctional family was an immediate box office hit. The Martínez Sierras' The Cradle Song (Canción de cuna, translated by Underhill) had its American premiere at the Times Square Theater in 1921 and later became a trademark production for Eva Le Gallienne and her widely respected Civic Repertory company.According to Julia S. Price, Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory “was not exactly Off-Broadway” but shared its “credo in regard to the presentation of the new, unusual play.” The Off-Broadway Theater (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1962), 18. María Martínez Sierra's name appeared as co-author of The Cradle Song on Civic Repertory's opening night program, 24 January 1927, but her contribution to this and other plays has often been overlooked. For a full discussion of María's authorship, see Patricia O'Connor's Gregorio and María Martínez Sierra, Twayne World Authors Series 412 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977). Burns Mantle chose the sentimental comedy of a foundling raised by convent nuns as one of the 1926–27 season's best plays.Robert Burns Mantle, The Best Plays of 1926–27 and the Year Book of the Drama in America (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1927). Another Martínez Sierra work, The Kingdom of God (El reino de Dios, translated by Helen and Harley Granville-Barker) was chosen as the inaugural production of the Ethel Barrymore Theatre and made the Burns Mantle list for 1928–29.Mantle, The Best Plays of 1928–29 and the Year Book of the Drama in America (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1929). In a single season, 1929–30, there were New York productions of no fewer than three comedies by the Álvarez Quinteros. In 1933, besides New York stagings of additional Martínez Sierra plays, The Cradle Song was made into a movie by Paramount Pictures.The film starred Dorothea Weick and Evelyn Venable. “Reviews uniformly praised the sensitivity of the stars and the beauty of the photography as they welcomed Cradle Song to the charmed circle of filmed masterpieces of modern international drama.” O'Connor, Gregorio and María Martínez Sierra, 36. Frederico García Lorca's Blood Wedding (Bodas de sangre; titled Bitter Oleander in the translation by José A. Weissberger) reached the American audience in 1935, a scant two years after its Spanish premiere.

David Garrick might be considered the Elvis of his age. His image appeared everywhere, not only in paintings, statues, and engravings, but on jugs, tiles, matchboxes, watch fobs, textiles, loving-cups—almost anything to which an image could be attached. If the eighteenth century had worn T-shirts, undoubtedly he would have been depicted there as well. A theatrical impresario and popularizer of Shakespeare, Garrick seems to have known everyone in the artistic and literary circles of the time, and to have been recognized by thousands more. One might say that he single-handedly created the Shakespeare “industry.” He produced twenty-four of the plays, acted in nineteen Shakespearean roles, and orchestrated the great Shakespeare Jubilee at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769, the first event that made that sleepy country town a tourist mecca. Today scholars who want to work on Garrick make their pilgrimage to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., site of the largest collection in the world of Garrick manuscripts and related items, including a ticket for the Jubilee Oratorio, signed by George Garrick, the actor's brother (Fig. 1), and the intricately carved Rococo chair made for Garrick's Temple of Shakespeare around 1756.

Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 1567–1642 rigorously explores the manner in which light functioned in early modern English playhouses and makes that information available to a readership that does not require specialist knowledge in either Renaissance theatre history or lighting technology to understand the text's contribution to both. Tracking down all of the historically relevant data available, Graves opens up a subject that has long been dominated by assumptions and conjecture. He develops as thorough a picture as possible of how light served both the theatres and the drama of the period.

Stage directions have long been used to “prove” one theory or another concerning the staging of plays in Shakespearean playhouses. With the remarkable increase in works on Shakespeare in performance that have paralleled the opening of the Globe reconstruction in London, it was inevitable that the examination of these intriguing indicators would increase. A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama 1580–1642 presents us with the raw materials that will make the process of researching stage directions infinitely easier for all scholars. The down side of this is that it is going to be a lot harder to “overlook” evidence that does not fit the theories we want to propose. Starting with The Three Ladies of London by Robert Wilson, a play written in 1581, despite the dictionary's claim of 1580, the authors read through some 500 plays known or at least likely to be “linked to the London professional theatres” up to their closing in 1642. (A complete list is provided on pp. 267–284. Some of these plays were published as late as 1661 but were included if it seemed to the authors that they were “certainly written earlier.”) From this Herculean effort, Thompson compiled a database of over 22,000 stage directions and, using criteria largely developed by Alan Dessen in Recovering Shakespeare's Theatrical Vocabulary (1995), they put together this dictionary of over 900 terms. Each word is defined by its usage and cross referenced. When we look at “pen,” for example, we do not get a definition of what a pen is, we get “a property almost always called for with ink and/or paper.” This is followed by representative quotations from the plays OED-style, though the authors “have not attempted to trace the evolution of the terms” because, surprisingly, “for the bulk of the period up through the 1630's, . . . continuity rather than evolution appears to be the norm.” The quotations are extensive but not exhaustive. When there are several hundred examples of the usage of an entry like “run, running” (260 examples), only a representative sampling is provided. If there are only a limited number of examples for a term, all are listed. In both cases the examples are provided in “roughly” chronological order. A special entry for “permissive stage directions” list all those entries that “leave key entries indeterminate” as with “They fight a good while and then breath” from Orlando Furioso.

Recent decades have seen a proliferation of critical discourses challenging an ostensible immutability of meaning and valuation in Shakespeare's texts, as the worlds they represent and even the manuscripts themselves are increasingly negotiated as ambivalent cultural constructs. Poststructural figurations of the instability of language and systems of representation inform Brian Vickers's and Gary Taylor's considerations of how Shakespeare is continuously “remade” vis-a-vis ever-evolving philosophical and sociopolitical mores. Stephen Greenblatt's seminal explorations of historicity, “cultural poetics,” and the performance of power likewise continue to bear fruit in recent works such as David Scott Kastan's Shakespeare After Theory. Invaluable as these branches of critical inquiry have been to countless scholars and practitioners alike (myself included on both counts), there is nonetheless a potential inattention to the core theatricality or playability of a text once it becomes embroiled in these larger discourses. Certainly, there are numerous branches of performance theory which address the performative act itself: Marvin Carlson's explorations of theatrical dialogism, Bert States's work on phenomenology in the theatre, or Patrice Pavis' postmodern ruminations on the plurality of significance in a critically self-reflective mise-en-scène. Yet critical considerations of individual plays in performance remain the exception rather than the rule.

The Great Wall of language that separates Chinese from Western theatre studies has been a challenging wall to climb until now. The hopeful climber must know both classical and modern Chinese (which are pretty much different languages), as well as, ideally, the strange landscape of postmodern theatre studies. Faye Chunfang Fei's book tries to make some of the vast Chinese literary tradition available to theatre scholars, as well as to sinologists. This is a daunting task and we should applaud her for taking it on. As a collection of interesting essays, the anthology is a good read, competently translated, and provides some invaluable and little-known texts. However, no historical anthology is objective, and what gets put in or left out determines how the history of the genre (and in this case, the nation) is constructed. This collection constructs a potentially misleading history for Chinese theatre, and thus unfortunately gets stuck halfway across the wall.

Thomas Rimer's Fall 1992 Asian Theatre Journal article, “What More Do We Need to Know about the Nô ?” notes that, despite the blossoming of interest in the nô during the decade of the 1980s, and, despite having the nô as a tradition and living performance to both study and enjoy, scholars of the nô miss a “certain understanding of the tradition in the larger perspective” (217). Though perhaps not responding directly to Professor Rimer's concern, Zeami and the Nô Theatre in the World successfully places nô in a larger context of theory, aesthetics, and performance. The editors of this volume, Benito Ortolani and Samuel Leiter, both widely published and highly respected scholars of traditional Japanese theatre, note in their introduction that Zeami (1363–1443), the acknowledged founder of the nô, has “become increasingly well known as one of the great figures in the history of world theatre,” and they “wish not only to encourage readers to more effectively appreciate and understand nô drama through increased access to his ideas, but to recognize Zeami's place in the pantheon of theatrical thinker artists as one whose insights are surprisingly pertinent on a universal plane.” The focus of the text is firmly fixed on Zeami as the creator of an art form that is at once ancient and modern, Japanese and universal. Despite the brevity of Zeami and the Nô Theatre in the World, the introduction by Ortolani and Leiter and the eleven essays they edited for inclusion in the volume attain the editors' stated goals, and, in so doing, provide a valuable resource for generalist and specialist alike.

This book is a great read for a number of reasons, the most significant of which is the author's demonstration that Alexander Moissi (Alessandro Moissi, 1879–1935) was the German-speaking theatre's first modern actor. That dubious distinction Moissi may have shared with Josef Kainz, Alexander Granach, Peter Lorre, and a few others, but there is little doubt that Moissi was among the twentieth century's first German-speaking superstars. Unlike most of the great German actors before him, Moissi was not a native German speaker. He was born in Albania, grew up speaking Greek and Italian, and had a lucrative career that spanned four decades in thousands of performances all over the world. In none of those performances did Moissi lose the Mediterranean inflections in the language of Goethe and Schiller. But that did not diminish his stature; it enhanced it. Near the end of his career, film director Ernst Lubitsch approached him in Hollywood to plead, “Herr Moissi, please allow me to embrace you, so that people will think I am somebody!”

Maurice Kurtz's insightful study of the achievements of visionary actor, director, and teacher Jacques Copeau (1879–1949) is among the most welcome and important theatre books of the past year. Copeau's concepts have had a widespread and profound influence on theatre practice since the first days prior to World War I when Copeau revitalized the French stage. Kurtz offers a thorough and, at times, moving portrait of a singular artist devoted to the greater glory of the theatre. Copeau began his career as a Parisian drama critic before transforming himself into reformer and practitioner who relentlessly attacked the tired conventions of Europe's fin-de-siècle stage. At the same time, Copeau also aimed to offer an alternative to the rise of realism, epitomized in France by André Antoine's Thétre Libre. Seeking a foundation for a new kind of modern theatrical art, Copeau looked to what he regarded as the unchanging truths of the past to create an as yet unknown future theatre.

Following the centennial celebration of Antonin Artaud's 1896 birth, a series of scholarly works on Artaud have appeared. Stephen Barber's The Screaming Body and Jacques Derrida and Paule Thévenin's The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud are concerned with Artaud's non-theatrical works—his drawings and audio recordings—and John Calder Publications has begun reissuing Martin Esslin's Antonin Artaud: The Man and His Work, a book that was first published in 1976, and six volumes of Artaud's Collected Works in translation. These publications come on the heels of several major Artaud exhibitions. Artaud's drawings have appeared at the Centre Georges Pompidou (1987 and 1994), Marseilles' Musée Cantini (1995), and New York's Museum of Modern Art (1996). Retrospectives of Artaud's work in the cinema—Artaud appeared in twenty-three films during the 1920s and early 1930s—were held at Centre Georges Pompidou in 1987, and in London, at the National Film Theatre, in 1993. And finally, Artaud's radio project, To Have Done With The Judgement of God (Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu), previously unavailable to scholars, was released in its entirety on compact disc in France, in 1995. The controversial recording, which was recorded six weeks before Artaud's death in 1948, was originally banned by the French director of the Radiodiffusion Française and labeled “blasphemous” and “obscene.” The ubiquity of Artaud's work and the current scholarly interest in Artaud cannot really be called a revival because Artaud has never gone out of fashion. In fact, Artaud's reputation—both in France and in non-Francophone cultures—has never been higher. Since the 1960s, Artaud's poetry, letters, and essays on dramatic theory have inspired theatre practitioners throughout the world.

While it might not be a stretch to get scholars and critics to agree that the work of people like Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman are postmodern, asking the same folks to agree upon this categorization for Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Sam Shepard might be more challenging. Stephen Watt address this issue of classification with regards to drama, which for Watt excludes “performance,” to concentrate on “what writers write” (4). This is not an easy task since, as Watt points out, the very idea of postmodernism dissolves “neatly sutured categories, such as genres themselves” (8). With this understanding, which prompts the dialectical slash in the book's title, Watt searches for a way to “begin to unravel the taut conceptual skein that results from the paradoxical union of the two terms” (13).

Trevor Griffiths first made his presence felt in British theatre with the 1970 production of Occupations, his account of the 1920 factory occupations in Turin, Italy. For the past three decades, he has produced a considerable body of work for stage, television, and film. Griffiths's journey as a writer reflects his lifelong commitment to the socialist cause in England, his exploration of the contradictions inherent in revolutionary politics, and his own struggles as a radical writer working within a capitalist system.

The year of publication of African Theatre in Development is significant. In the immediate years preceding its 1999 release, important works that mark the march of progress in African theatre had been published: Martin Banham, Errol Hill, and George Woodyard's The Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre (1994), Eckhard Breitinger's Theatre and Performance in Africa (1994), Marion Frank's AIDS-Education Through Theatre (1995), Jane Plastow's African Theatre and Politics (1996), David Kerr's African Popular Theatre (1996), Karin Barber, John Collins, and Alain Ricard's West African Popular Theatre (1997), Don Rubin's The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, Volume 3, Africa (1997), Oga Steve Abah's Performing Life: Case Studies in the Practice of Theatre for Development (1997), Robert Mshengu Kavanagh's Making People's Theatre (1997), Kamal Salhi's African Theatre for Development: Art for Self-Determination (1998), and Jane Taylor's Ubu and the Truth Commission (1998). Published as if with one eye on a fin de siècle assessment of past theatrical achievements and the other on millennial aspirations, African Theatre in Development is mostly a case-by-case study of how theatre has been developed in Africa, and how it has been used in and for development. It is the first in Indiana University Press's nascent African Theatre series edited by Martin Banham, James Gibbs, and Femi Osofisan, all eminent scholars of African theatre.

One of the most celebrated African writers of a generation, Athol Fugard has come to be regarded as a great playwright throughout the world. This white South African playwright witnessed firsthand the tyranny and eventual transformation of his racially polarized country into a multicultural society. Beginning with his play No-Good Friday (1958) about black African township life, Fugard has created a large body of work which includes plays about the destructiveness of racial apartheid, the alienation within families, and the role of artists in society. Although Fugard often writes autobiographically, dramatizing scenes and characters from his past, he has refrained from documenting political events in a sweeping social allegory of South African repression. On the contrary, as Wertheim points out, Fugard emulates the minimalist staging and style of Samuel Beckett by letting his disenfranchised and alienated characters speak for themselves about their condition in an inhumane society.

Stephen A. Black has brought to an impressive conclusion the important project on which he has been working for a couple of decades, the writing of a psychoanalytic biography of Eugene O'Neill. Black, who is a literature professor, underwent non-medical psychoanalytic training to carry out this work, and the result is a book that conveys both artistic and scientific insight into the self-analytical dramas of O'Neill.

At the First International Conference on the American Theatre at the University of Málaga, Spain in May 2000, one of the most worthwhile of the many fine papers was the plenary paper by Brenda Murphy, “Tennessee Williams's Metaphors of McCarthyism.” An outtake, as it were, from her book on the plays and films written during the McCarthy era in response to the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, the paper was a close analysis of Tennessee Williams's Camino Real (a notable failure in the American theatre), the critical response to it, William's own feelings and political views, and the political situation in America at the time. She also drew many fascinating parallels between the play and the well-known anti-fascist film, Casablanca. Like many others, I was eager to read the book.

How has “America” been performed, reimagined, and contested for the past 250 years? Or as J. Ellen Gainor puts it, what “role” has theatre played in the “construction of American identity”? One need not concur with Jeffrey D. Mason's foreword that there is a “void” of theatre scholarship on this topic (remember the pioneering histories of Richard Moody and Walter Meserve) to agree with him and his co-editor, J. Ellen Gainor, that questions of nationalism and cultural representation in the United States remain far from exhausted (4). As evidence for this claim, Mason and Gainor invoke a bibliography of recent (and not-so recent) scholarship by “New Americanists” like Sacvan Bercovitch, Annette Kolodny, Donald Pease, Myra Jehlen, and Lauren Berlant that should rightly spur theatre scholars to engage the problem of “performing America” with fresh vigor.