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.

Theatre history sometimes amuses us with the persistence of certain notions which, no matter how roundly discredited, simply refuse to die. One of these speculations concerns the method of pairing role and actor in the Elizabethan theatre. Actors were assigned to their roles, and roles were written for actors, in accordance with the actor's “lines of business” — weren't they? T. W. Baldwin's long and influential book, The Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company, attempts to prove this method of role designation. However, his is one of those theories of remarkable stamina which, in spite of serious critical challenge, never stay down for the count, but stagger gamely back into lectures and appear unexpectedly in respectful citations. Given its shortcomings and inaccuracies under close scrutiny, Baldwin's hypothesis seems to demand a final and permanent interment. To that end, I will examine the question of acting lines — the theory, its champions and its challengers, and the evidence for and against it, taking Baldwin's work as a starting point.

Although the modern reputation of Molière is based upon a group of major comedies, these were not the sole source of his popularity during his lifetime. He and his troupe performed many minor plays which are no longer prominent in the Molière repertory. Among these plays is a group which feature a comedian named Sganarelle, a role always performed by Molière himself.

As the end of the eighteenth century approached, Britain experienced many changes in power and prestige: the American colonies had broken away; the philosophy of expansionism and imperial domination was being attacked from within and without, and the primacy of the British fleet and trade organizations was fast becoming a thing of the past. All of these factors, and others, forced a mood of re-evaluation upon the British government and people. Throughout the empire and its colonies the discussion of the merits and morality of the slave trade, for example, reached previously unheard of proportions, as the newly-rediscovered sciences of free-trade economics, moral philosophy, and cultivation technology turned towards the examination of slavery. Nowhere was this more active and adamant than in the Scottish university cities, which had become the centers of intellectual and scientific thought and practice. Thus it is no surprise to find this thematic focus upon the newly strengthened and emboldened Scottish stage. One manifestation was Archibald MacLaren's The Negro Slaves, a play in which can be found the seeds and fruits of the Scottish Enlightenment as it relates to the British abolitionist movement, the economic shift in overseas trade, and the overall milieu of colonial perception.

The first third of the twentieth century was the most important period in the performance history of Restoration comedies—with the exception of the years 1660–1710, when they were originally written and performed. Sixteen of the plays were presented in early twentieth-century London, six in at least two different productions. Post-Carolean works by William Congreve, George Farquhar, and John Vanbrugh held the stage through the war years, but, beginning in 1920, earlier comedies by John Dryden, William Wycherley, and George Villiers entered the repertoire of performed plays. This represents a limited selection of Restoration playwrights and plays, to be sure, but this relatively small cluster of productions takes on large significance when we situate it in the context of the comedies' entire performance careers.

If, as Professor Quinn maintains, the national dramas centering about the American Revolution held the spotlight in the United States during the period from 1825 to 1860, certainly the Indian plays featuring the noble savage rivaled them as the second most popular form of stage entertainment. Relatively little is known of the early productions of these Indian plays by American authors.

One of the earliest American productions took the form of an “operatic spectacle,” called Tammany. It was put on at the John Street Theater in New York on March 3, 1794, with a Mrs. Hatton in the lead, and is often credited as originating “that impossible type of stage Indian” which never existed in real life.

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.

It has long been known that details of the design of John Rich's Covent Garden theatre of 1732 are contained in the Chancery bill of complaint that he entered against the builder, Edward Shepherd, in Shepherd's lengthy answer, and his counter-complaint. These documents, written on the usual great membranes and now rather scuffed and rubbed, are difficult to work with because of their physical characteristics and their interminable repetitiveness.

The story of Molière and his theatre has been told a thousand times, the archives and libraries of France sifted again and again for the smallest nuggets of information. The story of the Comédie-Française after the union of 1680 has been almost as thoroughly studied. But the struggle of the survivors of the Troupe of the Palais Royal after Molière's death in 1673 has not attracted very much attention. Merged with the “better” actors of the Théâtre du Marais, Molière's widow and seven others were nearly lost in the murky political and economic seas of the 1670s and saved themselves, not with a new star or a new playwright, but with the most amazing display of spectacle ever seen on a Parisian public stage. The magic wand of Circé transformed the Troupe of the Hôtel Guénégaud into the profitable and secure enterprise which was to serve as the foundation of the French National Theatre.

In researching my dissertation topic, “Arthur McKee Rankin's Touring Production of The Danites by Joaquin Miller (1877–1881),” I became convinced that the casual use of the term “manager” in nineteenth-century press releases requires some clarification. Indeed, journalists often cited, without distinction, several individuals as “managers” of Rankin's traveling company.

Twenty years after Louis Jacques Daguerre. invented modern photography, Dion Boucicault incorporated the camera as a crucial plot device in his play, The Octoroon. When his character Salem Scudder discovers a freshly taken photograph lying by the body of a murder victim, he holds up the picture as evidence and cries: “Jacob M'Closky, ‘t was you murdered that boy! Here you are, in the very attitude of your crime….’ Tis true! The [camera] can't lie.”

In the climactic scene of James Baldwin's 1968 novel Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, the narrator and protagonist, Leo Proudhammer, appears with his friend and lover Barbara in the living room of a Jewish acting teacher named Saul San-Marquand, the artistic director of the Actors’ Means Workshop. Leo and Barbara have been hanging around the small town in New Jersey where the Workshop has decamped for the summer season. At last, they have been given their promised chance to perform a scene for Saul, who will decide on the basis of that scene whether or not they will be accepted as members of the Workshop. They have prepared a scene from Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty in which Flor and Sid, a young couple, break off their relationship under pressure from Flor's brother. Leo, who is black, and Barbara, who is white, have just admitted their love for each other; their impossible interracial relationship underlies the novel. When they arrive in Saul's apartment, they have just walked through town together to the obscene and threatening jeers of the white townspeople, validating their decision, made in bed hours earlier, that their relationship can never be public.

The nineteenth-century theatregoer in America and in England enjoyed a wonderful diversity of acting styles and roles among the actresses of the period. To be sure, it was an age of the womanly ideal, when playing Juliet appealed to every young actress. Perhaps too many aspired to the youthful, feminine charms of Juliet, for one disgusted New York critic complained that “40,000 American girls were doing the Balcony Scene that ought to be doing the family dishes.” Other roles such as Paulina, Galatea, and Parthenia thrived on the Victorian stage, male theatre critics applauding the feminine virtues of gentility and grace, loyalty, delicate humor, and occasional submissiveness. Interestingly, another sort of female role became extremely popular during this time: the breeches role.

For this special edition of “Critical Stages,” Chambers-Letson and Son meditate on the following questions: What are the exigencies that animate your entry into the field of theatre and performance studies? How does a shared project in Asian American performance offer a range of possibilities for thinking through pressing political questions and crises that seem otherwise insurmountable?

In 1806, Longman & Co. publishers commissioned the accomplished actress, playwright, and novelist Elizabeth Inchbald to compose a series of prefatory remarks for the plays to be included in their British Theatre series. One hundred and twenty-five in all, each of the plays for Longman's British Theatre was originally published and sold separately at a rate of about one per week. Once the series was complete, the plays were bound together and sold as a twenty-five-volume set. As the surviving diary entries from the two-year period during which she wrote her Remarks testify, the task proved both arduous and unrelenting for Inchbald, especially as she had no hand in selecting the plays to be included and no control over the order in which she was asked to compose her critical commentaries. Working almost constantly, no sooner had she read one play, drafted her remarks, and copyedited the proof, than she had to turn to the next play sent by Longman, collect her thoughts, and start the process all over again. For the most part, as Annibel Jenkins has noted, “[T]here seems to be no pattern of publishing by date or genre; a tragedy by Shakespeare came out one week and a contemporary comedy the next.” At one point, the strain of this process was so unbearable that Inchbald even tried to renege on her contractual obligations, writing to Longman, “begging to decline any further progress.” This request, as her first biographer, James Boaden, records, Longman “could not be expected to permit; and she was therefore compelled to remark through the whole year.” In the event, and however “dreadful” the task may have been for Inchbald, the widely advertised series proved a “great commercial success,” and Inchbald's Remarks have come down to us as one of the first great achievements in English dramatic criticism of the early nineteenth century.

Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess has long held a place of particular importance in studies of early modern English theatre history. Performed for a record nine straight performances (a feat not accomplished again until the Restoration), Middleton's production has attracted scholarly interest by virtue of both its unparalleled contemporary success and its overt religious and political messages of anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish propaganda. Performed by the King's Men at the Globe playhouse between 5 and 14 August (except for Sunday) 1624, A Game at Chess provides the most conspicuous instance from the period in which the stage addressed issues of immediate political significance. Certainly history plays, such as Shakespeare's series of works chronicling the Wars of the Roses, dealt with English politics, but no play dealt so directly with the politics of the moment. Even more important, the politics of the moment responded. John Woolley, the secretary of the English agent in Brussels, wrote “all the nues I have heard since my comming to towne is of a nue Play. It is called a game at Chess, but it may be a vox populy for by reporte it is 6 tymes worse against the Spanyard.” The play's politics struck such a chord and the performance was deemed so scandalous that it was ultimately shut down by King James himself after he received an official complaint from the Spanish Ambassador Extraordinary, Don Carlos Coloma.

The work of Joint Stock Theatre Company is the stuff of alternative theatre mythology. A self-defined socialist company that premiered plays like David Hare's Fanshen and Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine, the group is known as one of Britain's most enduringly innovative alternative-theatre groups, in part because of those playwrights' success, in part because of such famous actors and directors as Max Stafford-Clark and Bill Gaskill, whose visions forged the group. But the history of Joint Stock's final years is not well known, despite the existence of a company history, The Joint Stock Book. Although it might seem that the group lost touch with its artistic imperative after 1985 and that it closed amid the generally harsh climate for alternative theatre created by the arts-funding policies of the conservative government of Margaret Thatcher (in office during 1979–90), that is not entirely true. Reorganized in 1985–6 to maximize racial and gender parity in the company, Joint Stock produced significant work and traversed important cultural and political terrain until 1989, when it closed both because of lost funding and because of the decisions of individual artists.

The future of our field is obsolete. It has been accumulating for decades, and now we are stuck with it. Surveying the panorama of North America with a view framed by a Manhattan street ending at the Hudson, as in the old New Yorker cover, we might ask: Where is theatre research located? Can we find it on the map? It is not invisible, as some might complain. On the contrary, theatre research appears prominently as an array of widely planted scene houses, boxy protuberances rising above college and university performing-arts complexes, often located at the physical center of their campuses but rarely, if ever, close to their hearts. Set in concrete, they constitute what Harold Clurman, speaking at Murphy Hall for the Performing Arts at Kansas University in 1965, called “the Edifice Complex.” Our future, like fate, lies before us, but it was settled at our birth, when the buildings went up and acquired legions of technical specialists to service them. That's where the money went, and that's where it must go. Greater in number than the theatre scholars, well-intentioned but mostly vapid practitioners, acting with more or less skill, with more or less tenure, fill “slots” in largely indistinguishable seasons, block-booking their houses like mall multiplexes, from coast to coast. The reason that they are so visible on the map is that they stand isolated from everything else, in and out of the academy.

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.