Between 1921 and 1925, an experimental form of nongovernmental censorship of the theatre was developed and practiced in New York City. Referred to variously as volunteer juries, citizens' juries, or the play-jury system, the experiment attempted to overcome the shortcomings of existing legal controls on the theatre and to relieve public concerns about the exploitation of sexually suggestive and obscene materials in stage plays. Although the play-jury system was short-lived, a review of its brief career reveals significant accomplishments and can provide a clearer picture of some of the issues confronting the American theatre in the first part of the twentieth century.

In the fall or winter of 1661, Chapoton's tragédie à machines, La Descente d'Orphée aux Enfers, was produced at the Phoenix or Cockpit in Drury Lane by a visiting French Company. The performance is recorded in a rare pamphlet, The Description of the Great Machines of the Descent of Orpheus into Hell. Presented by the French Commedians at the Cockpit in Drury-lane, a copy of which survives in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. This pamphlet consists of a resumé in both English and French of Chapoton's work. Its purpose was to allow an English audience to follow the opera, which was performed in French.

When Tyrone Guthrie rescued Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great from three centuries of theatrical oblivion, he raised several issues—some intentionally, some not—touching on the play's, and Marlowe's, adaptability to the modern stage and pertinence to the modern temper.

Communism was not always hated and feared by everyone in Eastern Europe. At a certain moment in recent post-war history, a group of influential intellectuals in Poland—now a place where even ex-communist politicians are careful to swear their allegiance to free markets—wanted to reform but still keep a Communist system. That moment was the Polish October, named for the month in 1956 when Wladyslaw Gomulka, a man who believed in a “Polish road to socialism,” took power as First Secretary of the Communist Party. Just as the Czechs in 1968 believed in “socialism with a human face,” the Poles in 1956 believed that Communism could be, in the jargon of their day, “revised” to better fit people's needs. The Polish October was the result of a complex network of events beginning with Stalin's death in 1953, coming to a climax with workers' strikes in June, 1956 in Poznan, and ending in Khrushchev's acquiescence to Gomulka's election in October, 1956. During this period, one of the important contributors to the intellectual ferment that led to the October, the theatre group Studencki Theatr Satyryków or STS, established a cultural niche for alternative theatre that mocked the Communist system and led to one of the most political, vital alternative theatre movements in the world.

Edward H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe, two of the most popular Shakespearean actors in the history of the American theatre, are usually regarded as practitioners of a fading nine-nineteenth-century tradition in American acting. The judgment is essentially correct. They acted Shakespeare in the spirit of the “gentlemanly” melodrama: excluding the ugly and exalting the beautiful. Julia expressed the philosophy that guided the Sothern-Marlowe productions: “For the Land of Romance for that I was bound, and I desired those who were tired or troubled to follow.” However, the repeated reference to “natural” acting both in Sothern and Marlowe's discussions of acting as well as the judgments of certain of their contemporaries indicate that they were at least responsive to the trend toward naturalistic Shakespearean acting of the twentieth century.

The Galli-Bibiena Family, whose members were summoned, one or another, sometimes several together, to the principal centers of Baroque culture, created fantastically grand scenic decorations for the lavish courts of Europe and built magnificant theatres for both prince and populace. Although charm of artistic beauty and power of phantasmal scenic creation were found in varying degrees among all of this mighty line of scenographers, their grandiose conception was epitomized in the illusionistic immensity of Giuseppe Galli-Bibiena. The Baroque period was the supreme age of illusion in the sphere of theatrical scene design and decoration, and Giuseppe was its reigning genius.

When Richard Klepac's monograph on Charles Mathews' “At Homes” appeared a few years ago, it addressed a glaring need in early nineteenth-century British theatre history. Mathews, one of the lions of the stage in his era, had been too long neglected, and existing biographies, aside from the two-volume memoir assembled by his wife, consisted of no more than a few puffing pamphlets.

The death of Sir Winston Churchill in 1965 focused renewed attention upon his colorful American mother, Jennie Jerome (1854–1921), who distinguished herself as a political aide of Lord Randolph Churchill (1849–95), her first husband, and also as an authoress, public speaker, and indefatigable worker in behalf of numerous charities. Her manifold activities have been described by Ralph G. Martin (Jennie: The Life of Lady Randolph Churchill) and Anita Leslie (Lady Randolph Churchill: The Story of Jennie Jerome). Neither biographer, however, describes Lady Randolph's theatrical ventures in detail, and neither relates those activities properly to the movement to establish a National Theatre in Great Britain.

Relatively little is known about the actual techniques employed in staging a play in the theatres of Restoration England (1660–1700), and consequently many problems concerning these techniques remain unsolved. One such problem, that of the amount of action which took place within the scene, that is, behind the proscenium arch, has received scant attention in published works. Theatre historians generally assume that Restoration actors confined their movements to the forestage and that they moved into the “scene” infrequently, if at all. However, a detailed study of the techniques for changing the scene and an analysis of the stage directions and lines of a large number of plays written and produced during the period under consideration affords an indication of the significant amount of action which took place within the scene.

In the closing months of 1699, the winter of his discontent, an established London actor and occasional dramatist hit upon a plan to change his public image from comedian to tragedian; he would fashion for himself a leading tragic role in which his uncontrollable voice and ungainly figure might prove to be assets rather than liabilities; in this way he would demonstrate to himself and to the world that he was unquestionably a complete master of his art. The alteration of Shakespeare's Richard III, the effort by which Colley Cibber, dramatist, attempted to aid the career of Colley Cibber, actor, was for the adapter a decided failure; Cibber's portrayal of England's most notorious monarch was too comic to be convincing. Yet in reshaping Shakespeare's play to suit the taste of the contemporary playgoer, he unknowingly manufactured one of the greatest box-office attractions in the history of the theatre. His alteration was to be the most lasting of all the many revisions of the plays of Shakespeare and was to hold the stage in preference to the original for nearly two hundred years. Although Cibber never explicitly admitted the reasons behind his choosing the role of Richard III for his tragic bow, his motivations become clear to the reader who patiently follows his career through the intricacies of An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber.

According to his good friend and first biographer, Artur Kutscher, Frank Wedekind decided to become a professional actor because he felt that his plays were being misrepresented to the public by actors who didn't understand the characters he had created. Specifically, the failure of the first performances of Der Marquis von Keith [1899] in 1901 spurred Wedekind, the chagrined playwright, to brush aside any hesitations that had previously deterred Wedekind, the amateur and occasional actor. Wedekind was a man of intense contradictions. He increasingly would aspire to the respectability of middle-class family life; yet his self-assumed, dogged notoriety as a bohemian was to frustrate this ambition to the end of his life. He was a playwright who both celebrated the awakening of human sexual vitality and at the same time probed its inherent life-destroying potential. In rendering his own unique understanding of human nature, the totality of expression to which he aspired as a playwright hurtled him, as an actor, right into the torrid center of the dramatic world he had created.

The Bancrofts' work, first at the Prince of Wales's (1865–1879), then, briefly, at the Haymarket (1880–1885), played a crucial role in the evolution of the Victorian “idea” of theatre, providing a model for their contemporaries, a “symbol of innovation” and a focal point for debate concerning the “new” realism. Their collaboration with T. W. Robertson formed the core of this work, but attention has recently shifted from a concern with the dramatic value (or lack of it) of Robertson's six Prince of Wales's comedies to an appreciation of the playwright's role in this larger, more complex theatrical achievement—one which also included management and public relations, as well as production and acting style. The precise nature of this achievement is only now coming into focus, and while much remains to be done and said on the subject, at this point one facet seems to require special attention; the important dramatic, scenic and managerial aspects of the Bancrofts' work should not be allowed to obscure the fact that their theatre was also fundamentally an actors' theatre.

An early stage in the writing of the Kern-Hammerstein musical Show Boat is captured in a typescript marked “from the Ziegfeld Collection” in the Theatre Collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The script, #7430 in the Library numbering, is undated, but Paul Robeson, Elizabeth Hines, and Guy Robertson are penciled in for the roles of Joe, Magnolia, and Gaylord, with “Aunt Jemima” (Tess Gardella, in her famous blackface role) set for Queenie, Norma Terriss for Ellie, and Andy Tombes for Frank. These are principal parts. Magnolia is the ingenue who will fall in love with the dashing, undependable Gaylord, a gambler, in Act 1 and then will grow up to become a singing star after her marriage fails in Act 2; Ellie and Frank are performers on the show boat; Queenie is the boat's cook, and Joe—the part intended for Robeson—is her husband. As yet uncast are Julie, the leading actress who is forced off the show boat when it is discovered that she is mulatto, and Magnolia's parents, Cap'n Andy Hawkes and his shrewish wife Parthy.

When artist-inventor Samuel B. Morse alleged that the Bowery Theatre performance of French ballerina Madame Hutin was “to all intents and purposes the public exposure of a naked female,” he was expressing an opinion that conflicted with that of other critics, who felt that the performance of French dancers would “put to shame our splay-footed indigenous sprawlers, and will greatly refine the taste in dancing in the play-going public.” In Jacksonian American, citizens who were concerned with the direction of the nation's culture engaged in a debate about the respective merits of the less-polished art created in the New World and the more refined offerings of the Old World that was played out in critical reactions to an increasingly popular theatrical form: ballet. Ballet gradually became an important part of American theatre during the first half of the nineteenth century as dancers appeared on stages in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston in front of the same audiences that attended the dramatic plays whose productions have received the bulk of academic attention. Three waves of European dancers came to the Americas during the period 1790 to 1845. The first wave (1790–1825) consisted of small companies who presented dance to a broad range of audiences, typically before other plays or during entr'actes. This article focuses on performances that occurred during the second wave (1825–40), when impresarios recruited established (though not top-tier) European ballerinas to come to specific theatres. These dancers brought the repertoire and styles of the Romantic ballet to America, including evening-length performances with fairy-tale plots and an emphasis on charismatic female stars, such as La Sylphide. The first American ballerinas, Mary Ann Lee and Augusta Maywood, made their debuts during this period. The third wave (1840–5) consisted largely of “headliners” such as Fanny Elssler, who toured the country performing selections from their famous roles and pas with a corps de ballet recruited from each city they visited.

Is there a real world out there? I'll soon be moving the question to other perceptual sites, but at bedrock, Ground Zero (now hallowed by 9/11), or when push comes to shove, making their peace with deconstruction, few historians deny it—and come, let's face it, none really can (no Bishop Berkeleys among them), it's real enough for them. With all the signifiers shifting, and some of them under erasure, there may be uncertainties in the referential structure, as out the window, through the rain, across the lake from me now in Seattle, what should be the Cascades is, with a hint of snowcaps above, mainly a minimalist gray vaporous wall of clouds, nothing to be seen on the landscape of what I am sure was there, but then for a moment the trees (from Berkeley's forest, perhaps?), but not as metahistory. And so it may be with the recuperated vagaries of any historical context that, however obscured by the years, somehow inhabited time, or survived the attritions of time, to more than suggest, if not certify, that there was a there there. The important thing, of course—no different in this millennium, but after the collapsing towers suddenly a crazier world, with there all over, dispersed or even secreted—is to determine how to get there, with the swift accrual of history affecting theatre history.

Samuel Phelps' revival of The Duchess of Malfi at Sadler's Wells on November 20, 1850 resulted in Webster's tragedy holding the boards in Great Britain and America for some twenty-five years. These performances were enumerated and their casts identified in an earlier article. I want now to attempt a fuller description of some representative productions, both for the light they throw upon the attitudes and practices of nineteenth-century theatre and for the useful insights they give us into the nature of Webster's tragedy itself.