Both historically and critically, in one important area our view of Victorian drama and theatre closely parallels that of the Victorian theatre historian and critic. We tend to regard that history as fully expressed by the cumulative record of the middle-class West End theatre and the middle-class West End drama. Drury Lane, Covent Garden, the Adelphi, the Olympic, the St. James's, the Haymarket, the Princess's, the Strand, the Lyceum—these are the theatres that always appear in our books and articles; and Taylor, Buckstone, Boucicault, Robertson, Maddison Morton, and Pinero the dramatists we always write about. The representative Victorian commentator upon the theatre, drama critic or historian, did the same. In 1866 Henry Morley stated categorically: “In our provinces and colonies the form of entertainment will be, as it now is, mainly determined by the example of the eight or nine theatres in or near the West end of London, of which I hold the performances to be worth serious attention.” And in Morley's Journal of a London Playgoer, a selection of his dramatic criticism from 1851 to 1866, there is no evidence that Morley paid serious attention, or any attention at all, to theatres outside this magic circle.

Henry James Byron (1834–1884) was a brilliant, witty, literary Englishman who wrote equally witty plays, infused with a cleverness of conception that deserves more than superficial analysis. While he had careers as diverse as those of actor, manager, novelist, editor, journalist, and playwright, it is upon the last mentioned that his “fame” rests.

John Banvard was one of the more colorful and eccentric entrepreneurs of the nineteenth century American popular theatre. The hero of a Horatio Alger “rags to riches” story, he garnered honors, wealth, and fame on the strength of the enormous success of his massive panorama, now lost, of the Mississippi River. In the 1860s, his reputation as an artist secure, he dreamed of establishing a theatre and museum that would not only reflect the emerging cultural consciousness of the American urban population, but turn a neat profit as well.

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 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Susan Sontag includes Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake (1875–6) in a list that illustrates “random examples” from “the canon of Camp.” Though the ballet has become an integral part of the classical repertory for professional companies from Moscow to New York to Sydney as well as the inspiration for numerous figure skaters (most notoriously in Johnny Weir's outré and rhinestone-bedecked interpretation in 2006), it has, as suggested by Sontag, been creative afflatus for gay underground performers for more than a century. But what are the origins of the swan gone queer? As this article demonstrates, I suggest that one way to trace both the swan's queer genealogy and its continuity lies in the dramatic history and lived performance of the ill-fated Ludwig II (hereafter “Ludwig”) of Bavaria (1845–86)—the Swan King (Fig. 1). Tchaikovsky, after all, had been inspired by the dramatic story of the effete young king (and perhaps titillated by a shared closeted gay desire), who would become a prototype for the ballet's tragic hero, Prince Siegfried. In fact, dance scholar Peter Stoneley suggests that “Swan Lake confirms the virtual impossibility, in Tchaikovsky's [and Ludwig's] era, of accommodating homosexuality within wider society.” Ludwig's desire was expressed through a lens of his same-sex fantasies and their inspired artistic interpretations, most notably taking form in the construction of his neo-Romanesque, fairy-tale castle Neue Burg Hohenschwangau (more commonly known as Neuschwanstein or New Swan on the Rock Castle, though it was not renamed until after Ludwig's death). Ludwig's queer positionality also arises from the theatrical way that he performed a highly aesthetic (though hardly effective) approach to monarchy with his swan-bedecked castle and its environs as a sort of metastage set. In this context, the swan may be read as an example of what Donna Haraway calls “a companion species,” or a personal animal symbol (real or mythical) that represents a variety of feelings that are otherwise difficult to express in the hegemonic context of a given time and place (like homosexuality in Roman Catholic Bavaria in the nineteenth century). Ludwig chose the swan (drawn from family heraldry but primarily envisioned in his own life through storybook-driven fantasy) as a means of alternative expression to that normally available to a man in his position and with his responsibilities, and also as a way to enact his forbidden desires.

The best known date in French theatre history between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries is surely February 25, 1830. On that night and for weeks thereafter, the opposing schools of classicism and romanticism clashed openly and bitterly at the Comédie-Française over Victor Hugo's new play, Hernani. To gain some idea of the significance of the struggle, one must remember that for a century and a half the strict formulae of the grand siècle had dominated the stage, that before the romantics no serious dramatist had dared to challenge the quasi-divinity of Racine and Corneille. Their works served as the unquestioned examples for later dramatists, whose tragedies were expected to follow those of the masters not only in the famous three unities, but in every detail of construction, down to the proper placement of pauses within the rigidly controlled poetic line, the alexandrin. Sterile imitations were the almost inevitable result, leading by the beginning of the nineteenth century to the lifeless neoclassic epics of such now mercifully forgotten dramatists as Antoine Vincent Arnault and Luce de Lancival.

Henry Irving was by far the most celebrated actor during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. He had few rivals, and literally none in Britain. But I believe no other actor has caused such extensive and continual controversy regarding his genius. From the beginning of his triumph, shortly after he joined the company of Hezekiah Bateman at the Lyceum in 1871, until long after his death in 1905, his devotees claimed for him a place among the greats of the past: Alleyn, Burbage, Betterton, Garrick, Edmund Kean; indeed, the claim is still occasionally heard today. No less a man of the theater than Gordon Craig wrote, twenty-five years after Irving's death, “I have never known of, or seen, or heard of, a greater actor than was Irving.” Certainly Irving made the Lyceum the most celebrated theater in England, and not even his severest critics denied his status as the head of his profession. He was the first actor in history to be knighted, and he was given burial in Westminster Abbey. And yet, the best critics of the day were from the first almost unanimous in their condemnation of his acting, and, after he took over the management of the Lyceum in 1878, of his productions. With none of the other “greats” of the stage was there any such distinguished chorus of dissent. A glance at the list of parts Irving performed and plays he produced reveals that he did nothing—absolutely nothing—for contemporary drama.

Considering their importance in the history of the English theatre, we know remarkably little about the architectural features of the two Restoration playhouses which Thomas Killigrew and his King's Company built on the plot of ground where the modern Drury Lane now stands. In 1913 Hamilton Bell published reproductions of some designs by Sir Christopher Wren, two of which he felt might have some connection with these buildings, and of these the section view of a “Play House” has been frequently reprinted. The frontispiece to Perrin's Ariane (1674) shows the stage of Drury Lane, and we have two pictures from near the turn of the century depicting Joe Haines (or Haynes) mounted on an ass on the Drury Lane forestage. Other than these five prints, however, pictorial material on these important playhouses has been wanting. Therefore it may be worth considering more carefully what we already have and reporting on several new discoveries.

There has been a good deal of speculation by theatre scholars concerning when realistic interior stage settings, or to be more specific, the box-set was first used on the English stage. Waitzkin contends that the box-set made its first appearance in England at the Olympic Theatre in a production of The Conquering Game by W. B. Bernard given on November 3, 1832. Armstrong agrees with Waitzkin's contention except he dates the performance as given on November 28, 1832. Rowell believes that the etched frontispiece to The Conquering Game“…is insufficient to confirm that this ‘more perfect enclosure’ involved flats entirely surrounding the scene and a ceiling cloth as well.” Hunter agrees with Rowell and can find “No positive indication” in the etching for the claim that this was the first box-set used on the English stage (l).

Although the Spanish Inquisition ceased to function formally in 1834, the spirit that made this institution a metaphor for oppression continues to exist, even if in less dramatic fashion. In the broad sense, “inquisition” may mean any strict or arbitrary suppression of persons and ideas considered unorthodox—and consequently dangerous—to the ruling powers. Spain maintains an active force for its current brand of orthodoxy and, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, pays dearly for that luxury by being a fourth-rate power politically and no power at all intellectually. Even sympathetic but somewhat condescending Hispanists wonder if contemporary Spanish writers can produce anything of merit in this doctrinaire and puritanical atmosphere. Others, myself among them, believe that several Spanish writers active today would enjoy international prestige were not Spain ignored or shunned due to its present form of government. Despite discrimination from abroad and the lingering shadow of Torquemada at home, a tough breed of Spanish writers, hardened by adversity, manages to write, publish, and even perform. Since theatre is the art form that relies most heavily on the cultural condition of the people, the development of postwar drama particularly has been hampered. Moreover, theatre is the only form still under the yoke of prior censorship.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the major American theatre companies in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston relied little on the use of traveling stars. The theatres played a nightly change of bill, three or four nights each week; and the plays were performed almost entirely by the resident stock company. However, by the 1830's the regular use of traveling stars was firmly established. In later years the stars and the starring system were often blamed for the decline of the stock companies, the failure of theatrical managements, and a general deterioration of the theatre.