On 30 March 2018, protesters in the Gaza Strip engaged in a peaceful demonstration for “Land Day,” a Palestinian commemoration of the expropriation of lands for Israeli settlements in 1976. During the march, Palestinians approached the border with Israel where the Israeli army opened fire with live ammunition and tank shells, killing at least fifteen demonstrators. Dozens of others were wounded. In the weeks and months that followed, Palestinian protesters continued to protest at the Gaza border. As this issue goes to print, the International Committee of the Red Cross reports that at least 116 Palestinians have been killed in protests framed as the “Great March of Return” since 30 March 2018, and as many as thirteen thousand have been injured. This spring's events, coinciding with the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel and the US decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem, offer yet another reminder of the violence and dispossession that for decades have characterized Palestinian life under Israeli occupation.

In an 1847 lecture before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, William Wells Brown stated: “Were I about to tell you the evils of Slavery, to represent to you the Slave in his lowest degradation, I should wish to take you, one at a time, and whisper it to you. Slavery has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented.” In these oft-cited lines, Wells Brown makes a strong claim for the absolute impossibility of representing slavery. But I wish to pause and stay with his earlier suggestion that it might just be possible to tell about slavery in a whisper. Breaking through the fastidiousness of the audience, a whisper can bring the condition of slavery close.

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.

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 vast caravan out of Ceylon … arrived safely in Europe in April 1884 … There were sixty-seven people, twenty-five elephants … and a great many oxen of various kinds. The ethnographic exhibition included hundreds of different shows, and even the vegetative world was represented in numerous exhibits … My Singhalese troupe was veiled in the ancient wondrous world of India; not only had we captured the vibrant, picturesque, outward appearance of India, but also the shimmer of its mystique. The colourful, captivating sight of the caravanserai, the majestic elephants, partly bedecked in golden saddlery, partly in work harnesses, pulling gigantic loads; the slim, attractive, doe-eyed dancers with their sensuous movements and last of all the great religious Perra-Harra procession-conjured up a magic web which subjected the public entirely to it … The exhibition was opened in Hamburg… After Hamburg came Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, and Vienna … From Vienna it went to Berlin … In the following years, 1885 and 1886, I traveled with the same exhibition through southern Germany, Switzerland and Vienna a second time, and finally set out for England … It was in Paris, at the height of its success, that the Ceylon exhibition finally came to an end. The average number of visitors to the Jardin d'Acclimatisation on a Sunday was 50,000-60,000. Throughout the two and a half month duration of the exhibition, the number of visitors was nearly one million.

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.

Originally published in 1999, this book is the first and still the only major collection of primary sources in English translation for the study of Chinese theories of theatre and performance. In an earlier Theatre Survey review of this anthology (42:1 [May 2001]: 96–8), Sara Davis focused on the historical development of Chinese theatre and devoted a substantial portion of her comments to the earlier periods, noting with regret that these eras and the professional folk performance that flourished during them are underrepresented in this volume. This is undoubtedly true, but the unequal coverage does not originate with editor Fei. Very few literati-scholars wrote for or about the performing arts prior to the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). Written theatre theory in China being primarily in the hands of these gentlemen until the modern era, the relative paucity of early primary sources is therefore an unavoidable reality. With the 2002 republication of Fei's anthology in paperback form, it therefore seems appropriate to reassess her work, describing and evaluating the materials that are included for the larger readership now provided access.

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.

As what follows is, in many ways, a history of absence, I begin with a poignant illustration of materializing something that wasn't there.

In 1974, the maverick German director Klaus-Michael Grüber created a remarkable (and much remarked-upon) production of Die Bakchen (The Bacchae) at Berlin's Schaubühne theatre. It was then, and remains to date, the most significant German-language production of, and indeed one of the very few attempts to stage, Euripides' final play in Germany. This essay will attempt to trace the history of German abstention fromthe play and analyze how Grüber's Bacchae responded to that history of ambivalence and neglect, for what was played out in Grüber's mise-en-scène was not only the conflict between Pentheus and Dionysus for the soul of Thebes, but indeed, upon the rapidly shifting cultural and political ground of West Germany, a deeper conflict between mimesis and authenticity, presence and representation, and the soul of the theatre. The first volley in this conflict had been fired more than one hundred years before by Friedrich Nietzsche.

A Play-by-Play history of King Lear in Germany, France, and Italy would be a dull thing; but a discussion of the special qualities found in the tragedy at historic theatrical moments can illuminate both the work of art and the cultural and artistic environment in which it was presented.

The German productions offer the best example of the range of possibilities found in Lear in Continental theatre because the play has had there its longest history of production, outside of England.

Almost all of the major characters in Chekhov's plays are ambiguous; their interpretation poses no small task for directors and actors. The figure of Nina Zarechnaya in The Seagull, in particular, has been construed in many ways. She has been seen as a soaring seagull; a tumbled, tousled bird; a talentless country girl; an emerging artist of promise; a high-reaching neurotic wreck; a future actress of Arkadina's vein; and so on. Because of this interpretive ambiguity, Chekhov was often asked to clarify his position on one or another of his characters. In written form he did so explicitly only once, in a letter to Suvorin in connection with his Ivanov performance in St. Petersburg. In this letter and others as well, it is clear that Chekhov's principle was “better to blur the portrait than overdo it.” The recollections of Stanislavsky, Nemirovich-Danchenko, and many actors of the Moscow Art Theatre indicate, moreover, that most of the time Chekhov confined himself mainly to seemingly insignificant remarks if asked about a role. Stanislavsky remembers, for example, that when, after a rehearsal, he asked Chekhov to critique his portrayal of Trigorin, Chekhov said, “Wonderful! Listen, it was wonderful! Only you need torn shoes and checked trousers.” After these sorts of typically oblique remarks directors and actors were puzzled and would long ponder the hidden meaning of the playwright's comments. The famous actor of many Chekhov plays, V.I. Kachalov, also wrote in his memoirs about Chekhov's unwillingness to influence the actor straightforwardly.

Professor George F. Reynolds' The Staging of Elizabethan Plays at the Red Bull Theatre, 1606–1625 was the first major book, to cast doubt on the theory that there was a recessed room, an ‘inner stage,’ cut into the tiring house wall on the Shakespearian stage. Reynolds further restored the reputation of the much-maligned De Witt-van Buchell sketch of the Swan Theatre. Although a number of scholars recognized at once that Reynolds' book was something of a landmark, it was not until this decade that his methods and materials were made use of. C. Walter Hodges' The Globe Restored was the first book to take up where Reynolds had left off. Dependent on Hodges, but at the same time highly original, was A. M. Nagler's Shakespeare's Stage.