The last years of Robert Merry's life, which were spent in America, have been enveloped in an obscurity which no scholar writing about him has attempted to dispel. The only two considerable biographical sketches written of him, the one appearing soon after his death in the Monthly Magazine for April, 1799, and the other in the Dictionary of National Biography, give the barest attention to his American exile. Fred Lewis Pattee, who writes more about him than any other historian of American literature, limits himself exclusively to the vagaries of the Della Cruscan School which Merry had founded in England, makes no mention of his connection with the American theatre to which he devoted all his writing here, indeed appears not even to have known that Merry emigrated to this country. I have here supplemented with new details the scanty record of Merry's life and especially that of his dramatic writing and connections with the stage in this country.

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.

General acceptance of the concept of theatre as an institution possessing positive values worthy of public support is a comparatively recent development in the history of the British theatre. The traditional public attitudes which were unfavorable to theatre (focal point of disorder, disease, moral corruption, and sinful activity) were created during the sixteenth-century power struggle between the Crown, London authorities, and the Church. The formulation of public attitudes favorable to theatre (aesthetic, social, moral, and intellectual stimuli) began when theatre became an agent of social change in the nineteenth century.

Nathaniel Currier's spectacular lithograph of the “Great Riot at the Astor Place Opera House, New York” (1), is one of the most well-known images depicting a nineteenth-century U.S. theatre building left to us by the popular pictorial reporting of that prephotographic era. The background of the event in terms of drama history is familiar, when It is the building itself, as a theatrical monument, that we tend to overlook, except for its appeal as a bygone relic, and architecturally it is easy to dismiss it as simply another manifestation of the rage which was caustically described by the New York correspondent of The Architectural Magazine (London) in 1834: One factor which discourages the theatre historian is the difficulty of relating any one theatre of the period with other examples in a city, let alone the country.

One would today be hard-pressed to recall any other period since the mid-nineteen-twenties when such widespread concern among theatre practitioners has been devoted to planning of buildings primarily intended to house-performed legitimate drama. The government-supported reconstruction boom in German language countries, the conduct of three major international conferences on theatre building in the past three years, tangible progress on New York's Lincoln Center, and the Ford Foundation's widely-publicized support of theoretical planning for an Ideal Theatre-all these events are likely to overshadow for the moment efforts of those planners of the 'twenties who were forced by an economic and political untimeliness to “cast their anchor(s) far into the sea of fantasy and distant possibilities,” sadly realizing that little opportunity for innovation could exist at the time.

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.

The so-called river view of the Dorset Garden playhouse and the Dolle engravings in Settle's The Empress of Morocco (1673) have long been familiar to theatre historians, but these are not the only pictures we have of this elegant Restoration theatre, and it may be helpful to gather together here all the pictorial material that has been found, much of which is new, intriguing, and sometimes baffling.

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).

In the midst of the currently fashionable lament over the death of the drama, or of the theatre, or of the idea of a theatre, it is strange that the Workers' Theatre, deliberately created to meet a specific cultural ideal and productive of its own particular theory, literature, and style of production, could exist for nearly twenty years, flourish in popularity for half that time, and yet remain unknown. Stranger still that the only study which is even partially comprehensive should choose to view this theatre as an organ of the Communist Party, to be given the same condescending treatment as that political movement itself. Such are the dangers of treating theatre as a weapon rather than as an art.

No one at the Indian Bureau, in Washington, seemed interested when, early in the summer of 1876, Indian Agent John P. Clum suggested taking a carload of his San Carlos Apaches back East –“to see the greatness of our United States and become impressed by the progress of their white brothers.” So Clum relates in the semi-autobiographical book Apache Agent.

Two years before, in Feburary, 1874, he had been commissioned :by President Grant as Agent for the Apaches at the San Carlos Indian Reservation, Arizona Territory.