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).

For theatre historians, teaching the gradual emergence of the political aesthetics that shaped the performances and theatres of the 1960s can be a particularly daunting task, but it is also a task whose importance to our work as scholars and teachers is fundamental because the political aesthetics that took seed in the sixties continue to shape our critical practices at the beginning of the twenty-first century. When we teach the sixties, we are in effect teaching the impact of that period on the discourses and institutions of theatre scholarship. So, at one level, a consideration of the theatre of the sixties almost inevitably entangles us in difficult (but valuable) self-reflexive practices. These moments of scholarly self-reflection in relation to our not-so-distant past need to be encouraged. Above all, they need to be made the product of conscious and deliberate aim; otherwise, we risk committing the same errors that were warned against four decades ago. Such self-reflexivity can, potentially, teach scholars and students about the sociohistorical underpinnings of pedagogy, historical periodization, canon formation, and the multiple technical necessities of the theatre form.

Three auspicious premieres attested to an international “sixties” presence in the Argentinean capital. The Sala Planeta produced Jean-Claude Van Itallie's America Hurrah! under the direction of Carlos Gandolfo, an influential leader of the 1950s Buenos Aires independent theatre movement. Premiering as well at the Planeta was Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloan, directed by Alberto Ure, soon to travel to the United States to study the work of the Open Theatre, the Performance Group, and the Theatre of the Ridiculous. Shortly after his return to Buenos Aires, Ure would become known for his own psychodramatic performance techniques. The cast of Entertaining Mr. Sloan included Eduardo Pavlovsky, an actor who was rapidly establishing himself as one of Buenos Aires's important “absurdist” playwrights. A third production launched the Equipo Teatro Payró; their staging of Megan Terry's Viet Rock would run for three years and 409 performances. The production's director and Payró cofounder, Jaime Kogan, soon became one of Buenos Aires's most respected independent theatre directors, and its principal actors went on to successful independent and commercial theatre, television, and film careers. The legendary Argentine rock band Manal performed the production's music.

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.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, English low comedians were continually depicted in portraits, prints, illustrations, and caricatures, both in character and as themselves. Critical accounts of low comedians not only draw regularly on the language of contemporary art criticism, but also render in prose highly visual depictions of the comedians' physical appearance and performance. What is portrayed, whether in paint or prose, is not just the creation of the critic or the artist: comic actors, through imagination and observation, create both their individual stage personae and the characters they represent. While theatrical portraiture is inevitably influenced by the artist's own style and perceptions, the artist is also recording a copy of a portrait already created and delineated by another's hand. Even the critic's use of imagery in describing comic performance in prose is fired by what actors have already created.For a discussion of the influence of Hogarth and issues of caricature on discussions of comic actors, see Jim Davis, “They Shew Me Off in Every Form and Way: The Iconography of English Comic Acting in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” Theatre Research International 26.3 (October 2001): 243–56.

The term “Chicano” is as politically charged today as it was in the 1960s, when contemporary Chicano Theatre was born. No one can trace the etymology of the term, which is neither Spanish nor English, but it was adopted as a self-identifier by mostly urban, politicized Americans of Mexican descent during the period. To call oneself “Chicano” meant that you were neither Mexican nor “American” but, rather, someone who recognized the various forms of oppression your communities were suffering. Then, as now, Chicanos scorned people who identified themselves as “Mexican Americans,” dismissing them as middle-class conservatives who were more comfortable “blending in.” On the other hand, Mexican Americans shunned “those Chicanos” as rabble-rousers and troublemakers with undue grievances. There was a class distinction at play in which working-class Chicanos criticized middle-class Mexican Americans as “sell-outs.”

This essay addresses theatre scholars who self-identify as baby boomers or, more precisely, those who link the years of their youth to the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, those who, in the vernacular of that time, were participants in or influenced by “the Movement.” Of course, the singular “Movement” was really a number of different movements or forms of activism, public performance, and revolutionary effort. The unselfconscious use of singular terms like “Movement” was one of the defining conundrums of the period itself, but I do not want to begin with a never-ending series of qualifications indicating I have passed beyond the thinking of those years. I prefer, rather, to start with a basic affirmation of participation in the rhetoric as well as the struggles of that time. Although my discussion addresses a limited age cohort within the field of theatre and performance studies, I am ultimately suggesting that scholarly, pedagogical, or even performative projects based upon a period that one has lived through need, at some level, to incorporate openly and consciously a critical self-reflection based on that experience.

Performance brings Ophelia's madness to life. Painters and illustrators responded as much to performance as to text when representing Ophelia. This essay concerns those representations and the impact of the performer on a generation of French Romantic artists, writers, and their audiences.

In “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, Rosalind Krauss writes about Marcel Broodthaers, James Coleman, and William Kentridge because, as she notes, these artists have decided not to follow the international fashion of installation and intermedia work in which “art essentially finds itself complicit with a globalization of the image in the service of capital.”Rosalind Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 56. Neither have they retreated into the etiolated forms of traditional mediums, such as painting and sculpture. Rather, their recent works have embraced the idea of differential specificity, in which a medium itself is reinvented and rearticulated.

Photographs show what performers actually look like. They show details of costume. They apparently show gesture, posture, stance, and expression, which sometimes can be linked with specific moments in a drama. The idea of photographs as pictorial evidence of actors' work appeals because photos seem, paradoxically, both to describe and to resolve the disturbing contradiction which lies close to the heart of the historian's work: the transient intimate moment (the inherently unstable and ephemeral) arrested, caught forever. This is an idea (or an ideal) that makes the use of photos so appealing. Photographs seem to tell us that we have passed from the realm of the subjective artist, who aspired to reproduce a likeness of an event that lay beyond his or her capacity to realize fully, into the domain of the scientific observer. The camera, we are led to understand, is merely a scientific recording instrument, an objective machine that simply transcribes onto a sensitized plate anything which is placed before it. A baby, an actor, a steam engine, or a cow is recorded with equal impartiality. We are so grateful for any image of these elusive and fugitive moments of distant performance that we hesitate to query the source.

The state of theatre archives in Ireland was a major subject of the recent Irish Theatre History Conference (subtitled Archives, Historiography, Politics) held at the National University of Ireland, Galway, in November 2001. Many of the theatre-related collections in Ireland discussed at the conference, despite the best efforts of their curators, have historically lacked the resources to make materials fully accessible to scholars or to catalog their holdings comprehensively. This trend has changed in recent years, however, and new efforts in managing Irish theatre resources are planned. It seems an appropriate time to discuss one major Irish theatre collection that is both fully cataloged and readily accessible, although it is located at some distance from its original home.

The Hurley Music Library is on the campus of Centenary College of Louisiana, a small Methodist-affiliated college located in the northwest corner of the state. The school has nationally recognized programs in music, theatre, dance, and art, and serves as regional center for the arts in the Ark-La-Tex tristate area (all of the major arts organizations in the area either rehearse, meet, or center their activities at the Centenary College campus). The Hurley Music Library is the only branch library on the campus, and it has been housed in its own building, adjacent to the Hurley School of Music, since 1990. The Hurley Library owns special collections in musical theatre and opera, and it has musical instruments from West Africa on permanent display. Because of these collections, the library has been called the region's “hidden musical treasure” (Shreveport-Bossier Forum News, 30 July 1997).

Geographies of Learning maps the coordinates of several critical impasses in so-called progressive fields, while simultaneously insisting that the impasses may be negotiated or (in keeping with road terminology) maneuvered. Jill Dolan is passionately committed to the possibility of overcoming the sometimes fractious disagreements between feminists and lesbian/gay/queer folks, between theatre theorists and practitioners, between academics, artists, and activists. Her rich background in all of these areas (as lesbian activist, professor of theatre studies and women's studies, executive director of two programs, and president of a large professional organization) equips her to offer her readers substantial vision as well as concrete experience, and the example of someone who puts her convictions into practicewhat my parents' class and generation called “putting your money where your mouth is.”

Like other postmodern historians in the line of Foucault and de Certeau, Michal Kobialka treats surviving documents not as markers of historical facts but as traces of discursive fields. This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages takes four “epistemological fragments” of the period, some of which have been read by theatre historians as evidence of the origins of medieval drama and theatre, and analyzes the heterogeneous “representational practices” they embody. According to Kobialka, a representational practice determines “what is possible to be thinkable and expressed” within a given discursive field (282). As an antidote to the homogeneous notion of representation in the Middle Ages frequently construed by traditional theatre historiography, Kobialka lays bare the power relations and discursive instabilities that underlie a network of such practices in the early Middle Ages (970–1215).

The first significant wave of Western scholarship about Japanese theatre came after World War II in the combined efforts of Brandon, Ernst, Keene, Scott, Bowers, Maim and others, who provided an encyclopedic introduction to the histories, practices and aesthetics of traditional Japanese theatre. The scope of this collective undertaking (no less than the [re]construction of a cultural legacy pre-dating Shakespeare) was, and remains, a stunning achievement in terms of its sheer exuberance as well as in its revelatory contribution to Western knowledge. Yet, in spite of such an auspicious beginning (as well as the excellent contributions of subsequent scholars), extant studies of Japanese theatre in English remain scarce and new ones, scarcer still. Even now, more than a half-century after the war, the emphases of these examinations often privilege the study of traditional practices over contemporary ones. A near-absence of translated studies by Japanese scholars further compounds this imbalanced perspective.

Although we have long understood that audiences are comakers of meaning in the playhouse, most theatre histories pay scant attention to the role of spectators in constituting periods of theatrical history and motivating historical change. In part, our ignorance of audience dynamics has been due to the difficulty of researching the topic; reliable information on the social profile, expectations, behavior, and response of historical audiences is not easy to acquire. Before Butsch's survey, historians of American acting, playwriting, or theatre architectureindeed, of the entire range of theatrical phenomena that had to accommodate itself to the habits, mollify the concerns, and inflame the desires of past audiencesmight have been excused for their inattention to and/or misleading generalizations about American spectators before 1920. No more. The Making of American Audiences provides a firm foundation upon which a new generation of performance historians might build more socially engaged and responsible histories.

Opera buffs and anglophiles are sure to find their own pleasures in Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London and in volume 2 of Italian Opera in Late Eighteenth-Century London, but these new works will also appeal to general readers and theatre scholars who have long-standing interests in the profusion of theatrical entertainments in London during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Both volumes capture an overheated theatre scene, stoked by class-consciousness at its most acute. Both books, but especially Italian Opera, find uses for financial records. The meticulous bookkeeping of eighteenth-century London opera underscores the need for lots of money to run an enterprise made up largely of foreign performers, designers, and composers, none of whom came cheap, in the competitive bidding and prototypical stardom that marked the European opera scene of the time. Both works show opera managers spending money on attractions they could bring to London to aggrandize their patrons' vaunting senses of themselves, and vaunting came naturally at a time of high imperial ambitions and high colonial revenues, though neither book searches opera for its metatheatrical possibilities.

This study is part of Oxford Shakespeare Topics; a series of short, accessible books addressing “important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship.” It aims to reconstruct the conditions of performance in Shakespeare's own time. The relatively meager supply of hard historical evidence is supplemented by interpretive speculation, with the latter occasionally overbalancing the former.

Tracy Davis's monumental study of the economics of British theatre (and allied entertainment) in the nineteenth century is breathtaking in its scope, incessantly informative, frequently eye-opening, repeatedly assumption-shattering, and astonishingly well-researched. It is arguably one of the most important contributions to scholarship in Victorian theatre for at least a decade. It is also, for the first 150 of its 362 pages of text, difficult to read and almost impossible to digest.

In 1978, French historian François Furet announced that “the French Revolution is over,” by which he meant that the heated debates in France over the meanings of the Revolution, evident throughout the nineteenth and into the first half of the twentieth century, were at an end. Passions had cooled so sufficiently, Furet thought, that the historiography of the Revolution could pass from its long “commemorative” phase, dominated since 1917 by programmatic Marxist interpretations, to a more dispassionate, analytical approach. Since then, of course, historians in France and the anglophone world have vehemently debated the Furet thesis. While most of them have been willing to discard the idea that 1789 represented the triumph of a rising bourgeois class over a superannuated aristocracy, George Taylor's new book on the London and Paris stages in the Revolutionary period still situates theatrical production on both sides of the Channel within the context of a politically and economically ascendant bourgeoisie. Taylor argues that “new material circumstances created new audiences and new ideological opinions” (2) on the stages of both capitals during this sixteen-year period. Ultimately, however, the rise of Gothic melodrama by the time of Napoleon's self-coronation in 1804 was “reactionary;” the genre's Romantic emphasis on the “absolute self,” at the expense of holistic links among the self, the body, and the community, betrayed the failure of the Revolutionary spirit felt in both countries in 1789. Theatregoing after 1800, according to Taylor, became an exercise in “alienation,” allowing disaffected audiences to mourn a revolutionary moment that had yielded to oligarchy in Britain and Napoleonic authoritarianism in France.