Among the important collections of memorabilia concerning eighteenth-century London playhouses is that known as The Ms. Diaries of the Drury Lane Theatre, thirteen manuscript notebooks or theatrical calendars of quarto size among the holdings of The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. While there is a gap of two seasons, 1760–1762, and another of four seasons, 1764–1768, these documents are valued for their chronological record of theatrical seasons at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, throughout the management of David Garrick and his partner James Lacy, 1747–1776. Each night's reckoning is set down with the plays and entertainments produced, the box office receipts in round numbers, the numerical position of the performance in the particular season, and very often the prompter's notations concerning anything unusual about production, performers, the temper of the audience, or merely “the way things went” on a particular evening. Together with Course of Plays, 1740–1742, a similar calendar of the 1740–1741 season at Covent Garden Theatre and the 1741–1742 season at Drury Lane attributed to Richard Cross, these diaries have become known popularly as The Cross-Hopkins Diaries, after the two Drury Lane prompters, Richard Cross and William Hopkins, acknowledged compilers of the greater part of the series.

During the last quarter century the majority of France's greatest stage directors have drawn extensively from Jacques Copeau's rich legacy of teaching, directing, and acting, thus establishing his theatrical paternity for all time. The fame of his innovations is international, and an ordinary summary of his work would only contribute to the obvious. However, a discussion of Copeau's Shakespearean productions can be fruitful since he was the first one in France to establish the English-speaking tradition of producing Shakespeare. And, as Antoine before him, his finest hour was demonstrated in Shakespearean production.

On June 15, 1763, Jean Nicholas Servandoni was hired for one year at a salary of 15,000 marks (7,500 gulden), travel expenses, free lodging, and a carriage to work at the court of Herzog Karl Eugen in Württemberg. Thanks to the industry of Joseph Uriot, the Duke's librarian, we have brief but invaluable descriptions of the fifteen decorations which he produced for the spectacles of February 11, 1764, the magnificent festival in honor of the Duke's birthday.

Not at the opera, nor at any time in his career, was Servandoni's genius challenged as it was here, for he was in the company of Europe's most celebrated theatre personalities and perhaps its most sophisticated audience. His colleague for the occasion was Innocenz Colomba (1717–1793), an Italian designer of wide reputation, who had worked for the Duke since 1761. The operas were in the charge of Niccolo Jommelli, the chapel master there, and the ballets of Jean-Georges Noverre and his company of one hundred dancers, not including twenty principal performers each of whom had been first, dancer at one of Italy's chief theatres. The costumes were designed by Louis Boquet who spent a month each year at Württemberg.

In Pittsburgh a well-known actress makes her entrance on the stage of the Nixon, and, so that there may be no danger of a provincialaudience mistaking the show's principal, her manager leads the applause from the wings. In Paris the renowned author of Ulysses establishes himself as leader of a fan club at the Opéra, and becomes such a nuisance that the director finally replaces the lauded singer.

In Japan it is easier to realize than in America a basic but neglected truth, namely, that the audience, and not the people on the stage, is the heart of the theatre. In America plays are, and have been generally, written to attract audiences, but not definite audiences: actually audiences in hodgepodge, whatever multitude can be induced to attend. In Japan, traditionally, the drama has been created for definite audiences.

The Noh drama was originally produced for an audience of nobility and high dignity, both from the religious and from the civil standpoints. Originally Noh plays were acted exclusively in shrines to propitiate the deities of Shinto. On the other hand, they were enthusiastically supported by the shōguns (the Japanese military dictators who, though paying nominal court to the emperors, were the real rulers in Japan for several hundred years) and somewhat regulated by the tastes and preferences of the daimyōs (the hereditary feudal nobles).

Baroque opera reached a high point in Vienna during the reign of Karl VI as the result of simultaneous developments in the fields of poetry, music, and spectacle. Three successive court poets, Pietro Pariati, Apostolo Zeno, and Pietro Metastasio shared the endeavor of their contemporaries to enrich Italian poetry with a combination of “sonatia verba et antiqua,” and “gravis et decora constructio.” They found operatic libretti particularly well suited for this creative experiment, and Vienna provided the ideal atmosphere of musical sophistication, indispensable for such development. Musical life had flourished under the late Joseph I, who had been an outstanding musician, and the new Emperor was also an able pianist, composer, and occasional conductor.

Archeological evidence for the history of theatre art has always been less definitive and less extensive than either artists or historians have wished. We have the stone remains of late Greek theatres and we have the pictorial fragments from some ancient amphorae which, when co-ordinated with inscriptions, give us a modicum of knowledge concerning the performances in Greek theatres. From Renaissance architects and painters we have beautiful drawings and engravings of scenes and costumes which give us an indication of the grandeur which was possible in the court performances of Europe for two or three hundred years.

Female playwrights of varying degrees of quality were reasonably plentiful in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century England; but, except for Eliza Haywood, few of these playwrights doubled as actresses, at least with sufficient success for us to be aware of their talents. Even the stage career of Mrs. Haywood, one extending at least from 1715 to 1737, has not been documented in its entirety before now. It deserves attention because it adds some details to the scanty biography of this woman who is best known as a novelist, a novelist who turned out scandal chronicles long before Richardson made the novel morally acceptable, and who in 1751 produced what may be the first domestic novel in English, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless. Along the way she had some success as a publisher, as the first woman writer of a periodical for women, as a poet, and as a playwright and actress. It was her efforts in the theater that drew the attention of such men as Jonathan Swift and Richard Savage and brought her into a rather lengthy association with Henry Fielding. And it was her theatrical experience that contributed much to her eventual skill as a novelist. She liked the stage, and much of what we like in her later work she owed to the stage.

This rather proud statement is by Gerhart Hauptmann; anyone I wishing to challenge the validity of the boast will be wise to consider first the number of professional Shakespeare performances in the German language as compared with those in English, to take account of the amount and quality of German Shakespeare scholarship, and to realize that Shakespeare had reached many peoples in Eastern and Northern Europe by way of German transmission. In addition, the citation well illustrates the spirit in which German intellectuals approach Shakespeare.

Although Thomas Duffett is hardly one of the shining lights of the Restoration drama, his prologues and epilogues contain much theatrical information that gives him a continuing, although non-literary, value. His New Poems, Songs, Prologues and Epilogues (London, 1676), besides providing the only known record of the so-called Duchess of Portsmouth's company, gives considerable evidence of private and vacation performances in the early 1670's.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, on the stages of England and France, there appeared a figure whose presence gives to the period a certain uniqueness. The prompter, usually functioning in other capacities and holding additional names, would seem to have been established in the theatre at this time; for the scholarship on the Greek and Roman theatre has, as yet, revealed no such person. Nor is there any suggestion of the presence of the prompter in liturgical drama. None of this, of course, rules out the possibility of the use of such a person; however, even if used in Athens, Rome, or the cathedral, he undoubtedly never held the prominence he enjoyed in that brief period of what we have been told was onstage glory.