Despite considerable advances in scholarship—achievements on which this essay builds—our knowledge of how eighteenth-century theatres were run remains worryingly thin. The managerial enterprise of theatre production, especially its daily practicalities, is largely obscure, though the facts of performance history are well documented. Knowledge of practice is not our only lacuna. Accounts of the interfaces among performances, institutional theatre practices, and the wider culture of the eighteenth century are too few, though wonderful work has been produced by Jane Moody, Felicity Nussbaum, and Gillian Russell, among others. This meager situation has arisen in part, as Robert D. Hume has argued, because scholars have yet to fully engage with those sources that have survived, although problems of missing evidence are serious and sometimes insurmountable. A related problem is that theatre historians are often averse to conceptualizing what they discover, as if analysis and certain modes of theoretical interpretation were the responsibility or more distinctly the failing of literary critics. But the discovery or reappraisal of an archive will only advance scholarship so far. New information about rehearsals, performances, finances, or contracts is vital, but it does not explain the motives or institutional momentum that animated theatre production. We need to know why some actors were favored by management while others seem to have been less well supported. It would also be useful to understand more precisely why some plays were performed repeatedly whereas others appeared only sporadically. The information contained in the London Stage should be crucial for theatre history, yet the repertoire of the patent theatres remains understudied. The impetus it gave to managers is too often ignored, while its political significance is barely understood, prompting justified complaint from Daniel O'Quinn. Great care will be necessary when addressing these issues. Overly general or prescriptive claims are probably best avoided; there are simply too many local factors. We should also recollect that theatrical production is necessarily a collective endeavor, a process in which many voices might be heard. Yet patterns and purposes can be found, even when what is most apparent is what Michel de Certeau terms the “‘polytheism’ of scattered practices.”

In seeking to explain the decline of Yiddish drama in America after its “first Golden Age” (1892–1902), contemporary critics and later historians have primarily blamed the rapid proliferation of vaudeville and moving pictures. Above all, the collapse of literary drama has been described as a direct consequence of the growing popularity of Yiddish variety shows among Jewish immigrant audiences.The Yiddish press, socialist papers in particular, frequently blamed the Yiddish music halls for the decline of literary drama. The tone was set by Abraham Cahan, the editor of the Jewish Daily Forward (Forverts) in a series of articles that appeared in the Tsaytgayst, the Forward’s weekly supplement, in October 1905. Bernard Gorin, the first historian of the Yiddish stage, also concluded that success of the music halls destroyed the movement for a better Yiddish drama. Di geshikhte fun yidshen teater, 2 vols. (New York: Literarisher ferlag, 1918), vol. 2, 178–80. Others followed his lead. For instance, Nahma Sandrow, Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater (1977; Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 161. Recently, Nina Warnke presented a far more elaborated analysis of the rise and decline of Yiddish literary drama, but again she does not seriously challenge the predominant view that the Yiddish music halls were to blame for the crisis in the Yiddish theatre. Nina Warnke, “Reforming the New York Yiddish Theater: The Cultural Politics of Immigrant Intellectuals and the Yiddish Press, 1887–1910” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, May 2001), esp. 195. In film history, it is widely assumed that the movies killed ethnic theatre (both “legitimate” and vaudeville theatre). E.g., Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 103. The fact that the cultural and financial position of the “legitimate” Yiddish stage declined in a period in which Yiddish music halls flourished and moving pictures achieved large-scale commercial exploitation certainly suggests a correlation between these phenomena. Yet, as I will argue, there were also more structural economic forces at work in shaping the fate of the American Yiddish theatre, forces that were determined by the stringent conditions of the ethnic marketplace.

This is a portrait of five-year-old Miss Rose, who shone brightly albeit briefly on the London stage in the years 1769–70 before fading away into the gloom of historical obscurity (Fig. 1). She stands here as Tom Thumb, the eponymous diminutive hero of Henry Fielding's farce. With impressively plumed helm, her beautiful black eyes fierce, chin set in a determined tilt, padded right leg stretched out aggressively, and her somewhat chubby hand gripping the hilt of her sword, Miss Rose looks ready to engage some unseen enemy just outside the picture frame. Impressive as she looks, however, there is something poignant about this little girl's confidently heroic stance in the context of her prematurely terminated theatrical career. Miss Rose appears on the Haymarket stage in the summer of 1769, garners much praise and a small degree of celebrity, and then disappears from the theatre by 1771. Her departure is shrouded in nebulous but persistent accusations by her mother, Elizabeth de Franchetti, that she was being blackballed by the powerful theatre managers David Garrick and Samuel Foote, who for some reason refused to employ her despite her talent. After lingering a few years on the offstage London entertainment scene of concerts and variety shows, she drops out of historical view altogether before she is nine years old.

Frankly, I'm not much of a historian. That is, the past interests me mostly as grist for my theoretical mill. I am not nostalgic. I don't often trek through ruins—whether of stone, paintings, videotape, paper, library stacks, or my own many notebooks. Of course, I've done the right thing when it comes to this kind of activity. I have climbed the pyramids at Teotihuacan and in Mayan country, sat on stone benches of the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens and in Epidaurus (where I was tormented by some really awful productions of ancient Greek dramas), and visited the theatre museums of four continents. On the art-history front, I've gazed at more paintings and sculptings than I can readily organize in memory. But my strongest meetings with “history” have been at the cusp of the past and present—living events always already changing as they are (re)performed. This has been the core of my “anthropology-meets-theatre” work whether among the Yaquis of Arizona, at the Ramlila of Ramnagar in India, in the highlands of Papua–New Guinea, at Off-Off Broadway in New York, in the interior of China, and at very many other events in a wide variety of places.

Until relatively recently, melodrama has been an unfairly maligned genre of theatre history; its pejorative associations based on the prejudiced assumptions that its aesthetics of excess (in terms of its extravagant emotion, sensationalism and popularity amongst predominantly working class audiences) meant, therefore, that it was for simpletons. What Walter Benjamin excoriated as the “ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator” fuelled bourgeois disdain for this theatrical form and the derision of the Theatrical Inquisitor’s dismissal of melodrama as “aris[ing] from an inertness in the minds of the spectators, and a wish to be amused without the slightest exertion on their own parts, or any exercise whatever of their intellectual powers” remained the dominant critical response throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, such views continued well into the twentieth century and certainly characterized the modernist reactions of the founding figures of the Irish national theatre in this period. Frank Fay, cofounder of the National Dramatic Society, denounced both the aesthetics of Dublin's Queen's Theatre as the “home of the shoddiest kind of melodrama,” and the intelligence of its audiences who, “wouldn't, at present, understand anything else.”

Tom Stoppard's 2006 play Rock ‘n’ Roll revolves around the story of the Plastic People of the Universe (1968–88), an underground Czech rock band best known in the United States for their connections to Václav Havel and possibly for their ties to the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and the fall of communism in the Eastern bloc. Often tangentially referred to in progressive Western journalism, the Plastic People have come to signify a kind of subcultural capital for mainstream bourgeois writers, a way for moderate Western liberals to appear edgy and cultured. Stoppard's play draws on this popular consumption of the Plastic People, fetishizing them both for their grungy, underground lifestyle and for their status as underground rock legends. After all, the play seems to ask, how many rock bands can claim to have started an actual revolution? The play's twin narratives dramatize the clash between rock music and philosophical Marxism in Cambridge and Prague from 1968 to 1990. The stories are linked through the protagonist, Jan, a Czech intellectual who abandons his studies at Cambridge to return to Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Soviet invasion of 1968. He is determined to “save” rock music, socialism, and his mother. Jan soon discovers the Plastic People of the Universe, whose music he holds up as a positive ray of light in the dreary decades preceding the Velvet Revolution. Placing the Plastics’ music and story alongside the work of male rock megastars such as the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, the Beach Boys, and Bob Dylan, Stoppard celebrates the Plastic People as a band that preserves the revolutionary roots of rock music.

Returning fresh from her summer vacation, the suntanned managing director of Gothenburg City Theatre, Karin Kavli (1906–90), proudly announced at a press conference in early August 1955 that she had secured the rights to produce the European premiere of Tennessee Williams's acclaimed play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.1 Well aware of the importance of creating a balanced repertoire that would satisfy the more artistically and literally minded audience and those who wanted some lighter forms of entertainment, Kavli understood that hosting the premiere of Williams's latest drama was quite a coup, especially in an age when television had begun to pose a great threat to theatre.

The work of those designers who followed Jean Nicolas Servandoni (1695–1766) at the Royal Academy of Music, at Court, and elsewhere in Paris, is, like his own, preserved only in the pages of Le Mercure de France, L'Avant-Coureur, and other journals and memoirs. While the museums abound in easel canvases and drawings by François Boucher (1703–1770), we are hard-pressed to find one print which has even a remote connection with the stage. On the other hand, we have several volumes of costume sketches and a few scene prints by Louis-René Boquet (1717–1814) which give us a rather good impression of at least one side of his style. Unfortunately, the work of the men who may have been more influenced by Servandoni than any others—Pietro Algieri, Louis-Alexandre Girault, Antoine de Machy, Tremblin, Baudon, Guillet, Moulin, de Leuze, Canot, Lallemand, Spurney, etc.—is probably lost to the eye forever. Their careers, which took place in an extravagant age of theatrical design, must be pieced together from scattered paragraphs in the Paris periodicals. In most cases, we cannot even assign dates to the spans of their activities.

In his commendatory poem from the First Folio, Ben Jonson asserted that Shakespeare “was not of an age, but for all time.” This has proved true, and Shakespeare has been able to speak to many succeeding generations of readers and theatregoers. This, however, is not because essential, unchangeable, and universal truths about human nature, the world, and experience lay hidden in his plays or his characters but (quite the opposite) because succeeding generations, over the centuries, have been able to appropriate, exploit, and reuse Shakespeare to make sense of their world and their lives. Shakespeare is for all time precisely because he has relentlessly changed over time. The author and his texts have been unceasingly reinvented, and a virtually infinite number of “alternative Shakespeares” has come to embody specific contemporary issues and conflicts. As Jean Marsden put it in 1991, Shakespeare is the object of “an ongoing process of literary and cultural appropriation in which each new generation attempts to redefine Shakespeare's genius in contemporary terms, projecting its desires and anxieties onto his work.” This is true for both the “dramatic” Shakespeare and the “theatrical” Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays have been as tirelessly reinterpreted on the page by scholars (and others) as they have been reinvented on the stage by actors and directors. The fate of King Richard III, however, is peculiar from this point of view, insofar as an often-denigrated Restoration revision of Shakespeare's play totally replaced the “original” one in the theatre and held the stage for nearly 200 years. This peculiarity acquires interesting overtones when we look at the treatment the staged play received at the hands of the Romantics, who, in spite of the bardolatry prevailing at the time and their often-vented disesteem for the adapted version, apparently missed their opportunity to make Shakespeare's original play speak for their own time.

In early modern Italy, an unusual form of exchange between Jewish and Christian communities materialized in Mantua: Jews in Mantua were required to perform an annual play as a tribute to their Gonzaga rulers. Elsewhere in the Italian peninsula, far more onerous “performances” were extorted from the Jews during carnival, but in the Mantuan performances, several communities—the ruling Gonzaga family, the Jewish community, and Christian audience members—interacted. I consider these performances a form of taxation because the full cost, which was extensive, was borne by the Jewish community. However, the performances were more than mere payment; they also gave the Jewish community a degree of autonomy and expression and enabled performers to develop their artistic skills, albeit always as the members of the company of “the Jews,” a group that was set apart from the rest of society in early modern Mantua. These theatrical performances can be seen as a public reification of the Jewish community as a distinctively marked but legitimate component of Mantua's economy and social landscape. This dynamic continued in Mantua even as Jews in other parts of Italy were subjected to extremely harsh conditions during the Counter-Reformation and the Catholic Inquisition.

Writing in 1853, Gábor Egressy, one of the leading actor-directors of the Hungarian-speaking National Theatre in Pest-Buda (Budapest), observed that representatives of different nations were appearing in increasing number on and off the stages of the major cities of Eastern Europe:

Egressy shared this observation with readers when the black, British-American actor Ira Aldridge visited the National Theatre in 1853. Aldridge and his English company received a warm welcome from Hungarian audiences and leading intellectuals. At the same time, however, he was under surveillance by the Habsburg secret police, and was later politely asked to leave the city. In my article, I investigate Aldridge's visit to Pest-Buda using the concepts of surrogation (Joseph Roach) and mediatization (Christopher B. Balme), and pay close attention to the way the actor's contemporaries interpreted his visit.

In theatre and drama histories, the politics of the American stage has most often been judged by the litmus test of nationalism, primarily in the “rise” of American-authored drama set in America, the development of American character types, and the appearance of American-born actors on the stages of the early United States. To uncover in the old playbills the mention of a performance of Royall Tyler's The Contrast, to celebrate the development of the stage Yankee, or to focus on Edwin Forrest's muscular rant in The Gladiator is to score a palpable hit for national theatre. Given the scarcity of American texts before the War of 1812, this search for national needles in the (British) theatrical haystack is understandable. But the politics reflected in the theatre in early America is far more complex than traditional theatre histories have acknowledged. Fortunately, there are signs of a new historiography at work. Heather Nathans's recent history of the postrevolutionary playhouses (to 1800) in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, for instance, uncovers a web of economic and social relationships among the shareholders in the various theatres, which shows that simple party definition hardly accounts for a clear sense of who supports the stage and who does not. Examined more closely than as buildings in which to launch “Jonathan,” American theatres reveal their own traditions for handling topical material, a particularly thorny problem for cultural spaces dominated by British plays and actors. In other words, beyond identifying stage Yankees or following Forrest, finding the political in the theatrical may require other strategies of reading in order to determine the full range of interaction between the political and theatrical spheres.

It is useful to begin with some immutable facts: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg died on the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison on Friday, 19 June 1953, and were pronounced dead at 8∶06 and 8∶17 p.m., respectively. Nearly seventeen years later, on 23 April 1970, Donald Freed's Inquest opened at the Music Box Theatre in New York City. The play about the Rosenberg case ran for eight previews and twenty-eight performances, closing just twenty-three days after its premiere. In its first minutes, Inquest alerted the audience that “every word you will hear or see on this stage is a documented quotation or reconstruction from events.” Freed asserts that he used only primary sources, no matter how “bizarre or poisoned” the words might have seemed, to construct his script. He employed these sources in three distinct ways and, accordingly, called for a divided stage to present the play. In Stage A, the players enacted portions of the 1951–3 court transcripts, whereas Stage B served as a plastic space, where flashback scenes of the characters' out-of-trial lives, pieced from letters, tapes, memos, and other available archival sources, interrupted the legal proceedings. Finally, relying on a large, partitioned screen situated upstage and on voice-over recordings, Freed assembled photographs, newspaper headlines, visual evidence submitted in the courtroom, and quotations from public figures to comment on the Rosenberg saga. The playwright thus toyed with time and place, offering the central story of the trial in a nonlinear manner. He bombarded the audience with projections and sounds to reinforce the reality on which the play was based and, at the same time, to evoke a nightmarish, multimedia world.

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.

Standard accounts of the masque in British culture between 1600 and 1640 have tended to give primary attention to those presented at court at the festival seasons of Christmas and Shrovetide. Thematically, they have concentrated on the artists who had a major responsibility in making themBen Jonson and Inigo Jones (with less attention to musical composers and choreographers, whose contributions to the entire event must have been of great importance, but of whom we know less). Politically, they have taken the masque's function of encomium and endorsement of the monarch as a sign of crisis, growing to its most ironic excess in Salmacida Spolia, written by William Davenant, presented in January and again in February of 1640. What C. V. Wedgwood emblematically identified as “the last masque” in fact happened twice.C. V. Wedgwood, Truth and Opinion (London: Collins, 1960).

As the conventions of theatre design would have it, a clock onstage is a distraction for the audience. This has not always been true. Late nineteenth-century popular plays were alive with the sights and sounds of working clocks, their pointing hands, swinging pendulums, and striking bells announcing the time of significant events and actions in the fictional stage world. Visible on the mantelpiece, or audible in the town square, stage clocks in this era lent verisimilitude while heightening suspense, mirroring the broader aesthetic conventions of popular fin-de-siècle productions, in which highly realistic and detailed settings coexisted with the suspenseful plots and broad character types familiar from older melodramas.

In his recent overview of the staging of medieval religious drama, A. M. Nagler concludes his commentary on the twelfth-century Adam play with a statement made by Karl Grass in 1928: “As far as the question of structure of the stage is concerned, the stage directions leave us in the lurch. … A reconstruction of the stage, as it was intended for the play, is scarcely possible on the basis of these particulars.” Since the 1920s, when scholars such as Grass, Paul Studer, and Gustave Cohen examined the possible staging of the Anglo-Norman drama, attention has remained almost exclusively on the didascalia, the Latin stage directions interspersed throughout the text. Despite the more recent work of Grace Frank, Michel Mathieu, Uda Ebel, and Wolfgang Greisenegger, Grass's comment about the stage directions leaving us in the lurch is still true. There are other sources of evidence, however, which have been used insufficiently or not at all in reconstructing the staging of the Mystère d'Adam. Not all clues in the dialogue having to do with the position or movement of actors have been examined by theatre historians.

The seven drawings shown below are designs for baroque stage machines identified as machines “for Venus and Mars” and are reproduced from MS Majie, V, 4, 1–38, The Archivio di Stato, Parma. These designs are particularly interesting since they are at the same time characteristic of baroque stage machines which performed similar functions, found in other sources, and yet unique for their simplicity, rendering them easy to interpret and understand. Although several of these designs have been published individually in various places, the group of seven is published here in its entirety for the first time. Together, these designs illustrate the use of sliding winches in the grid to produce spectacular effects on the stage as well as the “Mars machines.”

The study of medieval drama is relatively new but rapidly developing area of humanistic concern. Unfortunately, however, students of the medieval drama lack accurate modern texts of the plays, all of which are now being re-edited, and complete and accurate transcriptions of the historical documents which are so important to our understanding of the history, development, and production techniques of the medieval cycle plays. Of particular importance to the history of the plays are the dramatic documents of Chester, not only because they are more numerous than those of most other cities, but also because they include the earliest and fullest descriptions of the performance of the plays. Many of these documents remain unpublished and some of the published ones contain inaccuracies; for example, of the twelve extant disbursement accounts for performances of the plays, only seven have been published and of these seven, only three are accurate. Because complete transcriptions of contemporary documents referring to the plays have been unavailable, much of the critical commentary has been speculative. While making available the extant documents, a task I am currently engaged in, will not solve all the problems of the plays, it will narrow the limits of our speculations about them and give us a firmer basis of fact upon which to work. The discussion which follows is restricted to that of the frequency of performance of the Chester plays; it is designed to report facts and correct errors about the years in which the plays were performed and to speculate about the frequency of performances for years in which the facts are few or non-existent. In addition, the paper presents a preliminary report on the Chester dramatic documents and a discussion of the kind of evidence to be found in municipal records.