A Victorian actress who undertook the part of Shakespeare's Juliet was faced with a paradoxical situation typical of her age: the role offered her a chance to create two effects that had tremendous appeal to her audience — ecstatic love and gothic horror — yet she could not take full advantage of her opportunities without risking some critical condemnation. Among the actresses who successfully exploited the possibilities without being caught in the pitfalls was Helen Faucit, who chose Juliet for her “first appearance on any stage” in 1833 and continued to act it until her last professional engagement in 1871. Because Miss Faucit was particularly skillful in resolving the problems I have mentioned, her Juliet offers an interesting study in technique. I propose, first, to discuss the problems themselves, then to describe two closely-related methods by which Helen Faucit dealt with them, and, finally, to illustrate her use of these methods in several major scenes.

Regency toy Theatre flourished in England in the years between 1811 and 1830. At the height of its popularity thousands of middle and working class youths, together with their upper class “betters,” escaped the grim realities of industrial London for the joys of staging — and playing all the parts of — The Fairy of the Oak, or Harlequin's Regatta (1811), Ferdinand of Spain, or Ancient Chivalry (1813), Bluebeard (1824), or even more exotic pieces such as “The Grand New Spectacle called Korastikan, Prince of Assassins” (1824).

The general outlines of Vanbrugh's Haymarket theatre project are well known. Since 1695 two companies had been playing in London: Christopher Rich's, with rights to Drury Lane and Dorset Garden; and Thomas Betterton's rebels, making shift in the cramped old Lincoln's Inn Fields theatre. The Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket was the first new theatre in London since “Wren's” “plain built” Drury Lane (1674), and the first lavish one since Dorset Garden (1671)—which had fallen into disrepair, and by the turn of the century was barely usable. The standard account of Vanbrugh's project is Colley Cibber's.

The Ethiopian Art Theatre was founded in response to the racial strife of early twentieth-century Chicago. From 1910 to 1920, the migration of Southern blacks to Chicago more than doubled the black population from 44,103 to 109,458. White citizens felt threatened by the influx, fearing unemployment and epidemics in crime and health. Racial tensions increased from 1917 to 1919 as white gangs openly assaulted blacks. So-called “neighborhood improvement societies” bombed black homes and realty offices suspected of attempting to break up white residential areas. The Chicago Association of Commerce and the Chicago Tribune encouraged blacks to return to the South.

Although the then-called Negro Units of the Federal Theatre Project arguably played a pivotal role in the development of African-American theatre, Rose McClendon (1884–1936) is unarguably one of the most overlooked contributors to its history. This oversight is extremely puzzling, in view of the fact that McClendon co-directed the Harlem Unit with John Houseman when it opened in 1935. Five years later Federal Theatre Project director Hallie Flanagan attributed much of the initial success of the unit, as well as the very idea of creating separate black units, to McClendon. Yet, except for a paragraph in Flanagan's Arena, little else has been recorded about McClendon's participation in the Project. Even the official history of the Negro Units written by the Federal Theatre Project's Department of Information claims that “guiding the destinations of the Negro Theatre at its inception were John Houseman and Orson Welles.” The history makes no reference to McClendon.

In September 1776, General Sir William Howe's troops took possession of New York City, having badly defeated Washington's forces in the Battle of Long Island. Howe, who had accepted his assignment in America with the greatest reluctance, set about making life as pleasant as possible for himself and for those around him. He had grown greatly concerned about the morale and comfort of his troops in a city that, compared to London, was little more than a backwater. Howe wrote to Lord George Germain, Secretary of State for the American Colonies, in England: “The troops had been so much harassed in the course of the last campaign, that I could not but wish that no manoeuvre of the enemy might hinder them from enjoying that repose, in their winter quarters, which their late fatigues rendered necessary, and their services entitled them to expect.”

Imagine a festival taking place before about five thousand people in a park in Adana, Turkey, in June 1992. In the middle of the park is a stage made of concrete. A touring Kurdish theatre company comprising four men, Hüseyin Kaytan, Kazım Öz, Nihat Öz, and Kemal Orgun, is performing a short play called Du Şivan (Two Shepherds). They enact a village raid and choose the villagers from among the audience. Kemal Orgun plays the commander of the task force raiding the village. The other three carry out the operation, rounding up the villagers. Orgun struts among the villagers, harassing them. All of a sudden, a woman jumps onstage and tries to grab the gun Orgun is carrying. He tries to wrest the gun from her, but she won't let go. A great commotion ensues, and more people clamber onstage to help the woman and attack the actors. When a man tries to strangle Orgun, he yells out in Kurdish, “Bira ma tu çi dikî, te ez kuştim?” (Hey my friend, what are you trying to do, kill me?). When the attacker finally understands Orgun is Kurdish, he releases and embraces him. Recounting this incident in his interview with me, Orgun remarks that they were almost lynched. The Kurdish woman who had jumped onstage and impulsively attacked Orgun had thought this was a real raid, just like those that had been taking place in Kurdish villages in Turkey for years. Her rage and instinctive self-protection is at one level slightly amusing, but this was also a bitter episode that demonstrated the consequences of the oppression of Kurdish people in the country. After the festival, Orgun and the other members named their theatre company Teatra Jiyana Nû (New Life Theatre). This became the foremost Kurdish theatre company and has trained many Kurdish actors, who in turn have further sustained and promoted Kurdish theatre by establishing their own companies.

More than a century after Edward Gordon Craig published “The Actor and the Über-Marionette” (1908), the core of his conception of acting still poses a hermeneutical challenge to the theatre scholar. Many intriguing interpretations have stemmed from his statements on acting: from Denis Bablet's or Christopher Innes's argument that the Über-marionette is a metaphor for the perfect performer, to Irène Eynat-Confino's thesis that it is a real, oversized puppet; from the idea (Lindsay Mary Newman's or Cesare Molinari's, for instance) that the concept evolved with time along with the details of Craig's acting theory, to Patrick Le Boeuf's recent hypothesis that the Über-marionette is a full-body puppet. Le Boeuf's interpretation is somehow a telling example of the puzzling quality of Craig's acting theory: his studies originally led him to believe that the Über-marionette was a technically perfect gymnast, in perfect control of his own body, but he was induced to reconsider his hypothesis only a couple of years later, in the light of newly recovered documents. The same ineffable quality Jane Goodall detects in “stage presence” seems to be an inherent feature of Craig's ideal performer, and as with presence, the Über-marionette appears to be best definable by approximation.

The University of Houston (UH) Libraries' Special Collections possesses several groups of papers and other items related to theatre and the performing arts, one of which is the Nina Vance Alley Theatre Papers. These items were donated to Special Collections in 2000. What follows is a brief biography of Nina Vance and history of the Alley as well as some highlights of items contained within this collection. Nina Vance was the Alley's first artistic director, from 1947 until her death in 1980. Along with Margo Jones and Zelda Fichandler, she helped shape the American regional-theatre movement in the later twentieth century. During her tenure at the Alley she directed 102 plays, produced 245 shows, and was awarded major grants, including significant funding from the Ford Foundation. Despite Vance's achievements in these areas, as well as in establishing the Alley as a respected theatre in the United States and across the world, few works of scholarship exist on her career. This could be partially due to the fact that many primary sources on the Alley Theatre and its founder, such as those found at the UH Libraries' Special Collections, have not been well publicized.

Why should a country bumpkin, a secondary character in the ballad opera afterpiece Flora, be one of the most frequently illustrated roles in eighteenth-century English theatre? The character was named “Hob” because he was a bumpkin, or “clown,” but even while the name Hob was becoming naturalized this way during the seventeenth century, it still retained echoes of Robin Goodfellow, the native trickster figure (OED) (Fig. 1). Unnoticed by theatre historians, the pictures to which I refer have been granted only passing mention by music and art historians. The images began as illustrations in a songbook, which spawned, among other things, two series of captioned engravings that were reissued periodically. The engravings were also transferred to other media (oil paintings and paintings on glass), and the Hob character turns up in a political cartoon as late as 1793.Anon. [Cruikshank], “Hob in the Well,” published by T. Prattent, 46 Cloth Fair West Smithfield, 4 September 1793 (Lewis Walpole Library, 793.9.4.1). To clarify the relation of these images to one another, we must understand their origins. Although they were undoubtedly inspired by the production of Flora (1729), the extent to which they record its staging is difficult to determine. Their chief purpose was to make money, not for the theatre but for the publishers, a factor that must be kept in mind when considering how the pictures were understood. Over time, the images became detached from the play altogether, and what they meant then is even harder to discern.

Geography has been accorded surprisingly little attention in the study of world theatre history. Maps are by no means the sum total of geographic knowledge, but their existence (or the lack thereof) provides a handy indicator of an author's interest in the subject. Oscar G. Brockett and Franklin J. Hildy's History of Theatre has numerous pictures of actors and diagrams of theatres but only one map that directly pertains to theatre. All the rest of its maps (of which there are fewer than two dozen) are standard-issue political maps. Theatre Histories: An Introduction, by Phillip B. Zarrilli and others, is groundbreaking in many ways, but it includes only six maps, and none of these directly concerns theatre. Each of the six volumes of The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre includes only one map, a basic political one. Other standard reference works on the history of theatre contain no maps; these include The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance. Numerous types of map might be relevant for a study of theatre, but aside from the occasional political map, the basic overviews of theatre history do not include such resources.

My subject this afternoon is “Early American Professional Acting.” To those who have not dipped into the beginnings of theatre history in this country, it may come as a surprise to learn that it's a vast subject, with a huge cast of characters, more scenes than the fourth act of Anthony and Cleopatra, and that liberal use of time which so offended Sir Philip Sidney.

The Weimar Republic occupies a period in German history that has long fascinated students of theatre and drama. It was a period of profound change in German social, political, and cultural experience, and rarely has the confluence of those experiences figured so influentially upon the performance of William Shakespeare's plays. In decades previous to Weimar, German Shakespeare productions manifested the awed reverence in which the playwright was held, since most German actors, directors, and designers regarded Shakespeare in the same light as they did Goethe and Schiller. In 1864, for example, Germany celebrated the three-hundredth anniversary of the playwright's birth with the founding of the Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft and the proclamation that Shakespeare was not “a foreign poet, but one which England must share with us, due to his inborn Germanic nature.” In the Weimar Republic, however, the view of Shakespeare as playwright changed; it did so perhaps because everything else was changing in that volatile period, and also because Weimar culture encouraged innovation and experimentation. The republic itself, after all, was an experiment. If in retrospect the Weimar Republic's experimentation with democracy seems a failure, its success and achievement in painting, architecture, music, literature, and theatre cannot be denied. One overlooked area of particular achievement is the work of Weimar theatre artists who succeeded in their attempts to dismantle Shakespeare's status as a cultural icon.

An inquiry into eighteenth-century American scene painting must draw upon sources other than painter's renderings, since few are known to survive. The most promising source other than printed descriptions, barren at best, are the non-theatrical landscape and topographical (view) paintings of America's early scenic artists. No employment of these materials is possible, however, until the parameters of the relationship between easel and scene painting have been established.

Although Langston Hughes's Mulatto holds the record as the second longest Broadway production of a play by an African American playwright (surpassed only by Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun), the reasons behind its commercial success have been virtually ignored. This oversight in part reflects a tendency among theatre scholars to treat the dramatic text as the primary (if not the only) source of a play's meaning. In the case of Mulatto, academic critics have debated its literary merit according to questions of form and genre. Webster Smalley, in his introduction to the collected plays of Langston Hughes, for instance, defends Mulatto as a tragedy, arguing that the play avoids the tendency of social dramas of the 1930s “to oversimplify moral issues as in melodrama” because of the recognition of Bert's “tragic situation” (he must kill himself or be killed by an angry lynch mob). For those critics who insist that Mulatto is melodramatic, Smalley advises, “let [them] look to the racial situation in the deep South as it is even today [i.e., 1963]: it is melodramatic.” Smalley presupposes a dichotomous relationship between fiction and reality, advancing a mimetic theory in which representation directly corresponds to the real. Rather than answering specific charges, he defines contemporary race relations as melodrama, implying that Mulatto, even if melodramatic, is “natural” and “accurate.”

In the “last analysis” the concern must always be for insight. Saul Bellow made it a demand: “Now I want insight.” So, too, should the reader of theatre history. Unfortunately, in the vast majority of recently published material on American theatre history that demand is not being met. Among the many young scholars researching and writing on this subject, few appear even to aspire to that mastery of the material which will produce major scholarship. The old guard persists, but today's youthful historians of American theatre tend toward an annual birth and death pattern rather than perennial growth. Obviously, such an observation should not be construed as an adverse criticism of all existing scholarship; yet, it does describe a general condition of research in American theatre history. There are surveys, general observations, memoirs, descriptions, expository and critical essays on various topics, studies of theatres and playwrights, essays on popular entertainment and ethnic or racial theatre. Some of these publications contribute meaningfully to an understanding of American theatre; few, however, suggest insight into the history of that theatre.

The Baltimore Company of Comedians which had performed openly and successfully in Maryland since 1782 attempted to gain a foothold in the traditionally hostile state of Pennsylvania in November, 1783. The troupe's manager, Dennis Ryan, petitioned the Pennsylvania legislature to rescind its statute prohibiting plays. When his petition was denied, he produced three evenings' entertainment through the use of a clever subterfuge: The Temple of Apollo, a play and pantomime disguised as a concert, reading, and dance. Although Ryan's ruse was clever, it was not wholly successful: he and his actors had to take precipitous leave of Philadelphia when a riot swept through the house during the last of their three scheduled performances and alerted the sheriff to their activities. Nevertheless, Ryan was the first actor-manager to attempt to evade post-revolutionary legislative opposition to theatre by making plays appear non-theatrical.

After centuries of study, an untold number of scholars have agreed that the City Dionysia of fifth-century Athens involved an animal sacrifice to the god Dionysos, and that this event took place in the theatre before the beginning of the play competition. The usual assumption has been that this sacrifice was offered upon an altar situated at the exact center of a circular orchestra.

This placement fits well with the theory that tragedy grew from a dithyrambic chorus dancing in a circle around the altar of Dionysos. But now that the dogma of the originally circular orchestra has been questioned, some attention must also be given to the location of the altar, a supposedly standard piece of theatre furniture. The following pages will (1) discuss the origin of the concept of a centrally located altar; (2) examine the literary, artistic, and architectural evidence which relate to altar placement; and (3) suggest a possible alternative to the central location.

In the late 1990s, the endlessly reinvented Shakespeare has apparently become a popular and successful screenwriter. The recent release of Richard III, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Twelfth Night and Hamlet have brought an enthusiastic movie-going public to see, among other things, the Capulets and the Montagues on the beach and Hamlet striding through a cast of thousands at Elsinore. But this is not to suggest that this particular genre success is either new or inappropriate; the collection of artifacts known as Shakespeare (including but not limited to the plays themselves) has long signified as high art dedicated to the education of not just a theatre-going elite nor the mass audiences of popular media, but everyone. On a global scale, Shakespeare means culture or, as Michael Bristol would more wittily have it, Shakespeare is “big time.” This history of the cultural capital that is Shakespeare continues to have a fascination for, and a usefulness to the producers and distributors of films. Thus, to turn Shakespeare from playwright to screenwriter is, culturally speaking, both a pragmatic and predictable strategy. And it is a strategy that has more or less existed as long as film itself.