Among the pioneer artists who sought with uneven luck to bring some reflection of European culture to the crude seaports and market towns of the American eastern seaboard in the eighteenth century, none had such lasting importance as the Hallam family, the founders of the first permanent and stable theatrical company in North America.

Robert William Elliston launched into management in 1809, when Drury Lane, where he had been leading actor ever since Kemble defected to Covent Garden, was destroyed by fire. He chose as his new theatre the Royal Circus in St. George's Fields, on the Surrey side of the Thames. According to the monopoly laws, productions here were limited to pantomime, ballet, pageantry, and equestrian displays. Drama as such was outlawed, except for what were termed “burlettas”: short sketches in rhymed recitative accompanied by the endeavors of what might flatteringly be dubbed an orchestra. By acting there himself, however, and by so adapting legitimate drama that it could be legally considered no more than burletta, Elliston determined to raise this theatre into a respectable competitor of London's major theatres. With characteristic fanfare Elliston first bowed before the Circus audience in the part of Macheath in an adaptation of The Beggar's Opera which, perhaps for its novelty alone, met with auspicious popularity. He followed up with an adaptation of Macbeth, advertised as a “Ballet of Music and Action, founded on” Shakespeare's play, which proved to be the first major breakthrough in London's struggle for a free stage.

Administrative records of the French theatre during the First Empire are fairly abundant, but the researcher interested in documents concerning the physical side of production at this time faces a difficult and frequently unrewarding search. The documents preserved in Paris are few, and political vicissitudes, inadequate storage, and fire have combined to leave still fewer documents in the provinces. Particularly important, therefore, is a collection of dossiers preserved in the Archives départementales de l'Herault which include both mises en scène and information on settings at the Montpellier Comédie during the Empire period. No similar records have survived from any of the other great provincial theatres of this period–Bordeaux, Rouen, Marseilles, Nancy, Toulouse, and Strasbourg.

When, on June 22, 1940, the French government signed an armistice with the Third Reich, France was divided into a northern zone, comprising about two-thirds of its total area including the Atlantic and Channel coasts, and a southern zone restricted to the lower third of the country. While the French government was to enjoy political autonomy in both zones, the southern zone was to be free of occupying troops. Less than three weeks after the signing of the Armistice, an overwhelming majority of the National Assembly annulled the Constitution of the Third Republic and invested Marshall Pètain with the authority to promulgate a new Constitution for the French State. Vichy, a small city in the southern zone, was chosen as its capital.

The Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney, entered a traveling charge of one pound in the Revels Accounts when he was called to court “to choose out a companie of players for her majestie. Stow recorded this event in his Abridgement of the English Chronicle:

This yeare 1583, the Queene being at Barne Elmes, at the earnest suite of sir Francis Walsingham, shee entertained twelve Players into her service, and allowed them wages and liveries as Groomes of the Chamber, and untill then she had none of her owne, but divers Lords had Players.

When Samuel Phelps revived John Webster's tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, at Sadler's Wells on November 20, 1850, its success was immediate. Based on an adaptation by Richard Hengist (Henry) Horne and presenting Isabella Glyn as the Duchess, the revival inspired numerous performances in subsequent years. The British performances varied little from the original revival, Miss Glyn's remarkable success as the Duchess having created an almost instant tradition that was seldom tampered with to any extent. However, in the United States there was less respect for what Horne-Phelps-Glyn had wrought, and the first performance of Webster's tragedy included innovations that were to have a lasting influence upon American productions. These changes are indicated in detail in the promptbook of James Stark, the actor-manager who introduced the Duchess of Malfi to the United States at the American Theatre in San Francisco on August 22, 1857. Stark's book is based upon Horne, consisting in fact of pages from the printed edition pasted in traditional fashion into a notebook, with the page opposite the printed text offering space for longhand revisions, notations of stage business, calls, and so forth. With the exception of the fifth act Stark makes few major changes in Horne's dialogue, merely shortening some speeches and noting a few longer passages which may be cut if necessary. Home's Act II, scene iii, where Ferdinand and the Cardinal discuss the Duchess' looseness, “Can be omitted,” Stark notes, suggesting that American spectators may have been even more prudish than their London cousins. The last act, on the other hand, has been completely revised. Although it retains most of Home's dialogue, it greatly simplifies his structure—a significant change, as Home's handling of the fifth act had not always satisfied even his admirers.

No subsequent production of Major Barbara commanded Bernard Shaw's attention as fully as did the original one in 1905 at the Royal Court Theatre, in which he served as director as well as author. Nonetheless, revivals and contemplated revivals elicited from him lively suggestions about how to stage and perform this complex drama; and in a few of these he again became an active participant in rehearsals. The surviving comments, however incomplete, afford a useful supplement to his earlier counsel. They also add valuable details to Shaw's own commentary on the play and to our knowledge of him as peerless director of his own dramas.

In the decade before the Revolutionary War, the city of Newport was one of the major centers of Colonial culture, ranking with New York and Philadelphia, and far ahead of the village of Boston. It was the only settlement in New England thought cosmopolitan enough by David Douglass to support the introduction of a professional theatre troupe. The Douglass-Hallam company had performed successfully in the southern and middle-Atlantic colonies, and the manager apparently was determined to attempt his luck further north in order to supplement the rather thin living the company managed to make from giving performances in America. Boston, with its sectarian rigidity, was clearly out of the question. Newport, on the other hand, with its wealthy and travelled shipping interests, seemed distinctly possible as a base for what was hoped to be a larger sphere of performance. Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (“Rhode Island” in Colonial times meant only the Island of Rhode Island, not the entire area we now know as the State) had no law against theatrical performances, principally because none had ever been given in the Colony to object to. The Douglass-Hallam company moved north in 1761 and began what was to be a series of attempts to penetrate the resistance of New Englanders to frivolities and delights.

Edward H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe, two of the most popular Shakespearean actors in the history of the American theatre, are usually regarded as practitioners of a fading nine-nineteenth-century tradition in American acting. The judgment is essentially correct. They acted Shakespeare in the spirit of the “gentlemanly” melodrama: excluding the ugly and exalting the beautiful. Julia expressed the philosophy that guided the Sothern-Marlowe productions: “For the Land of Romance for that I was bound, and I desired those who were tired or troubled to follow.” However, the repeated reference to “natural” acting both in Sothern and Marlowe's discussions of acting as well as the judgments of certain of their contemporaries indicate that they were at least responsive to the trend toward naturalistic Shakespearean acting of the twentieth century.

Malcolm Morley was born at Aldershot, England, on 20 May 1890. Intensely interested in the theatre from an early age, he took part in amateur and semi-professional productions. Due to some parental opposition to a theatrical career, he left England in 1912, to make his way as an actor on the American Stage. His early efforts are described in the following pages.

Returning to England in 1920, he led an active theatrical life as actor, producer and manager. He was associated with the management of the Everyman Theatre, Hampstead, during its most influential years, when its successes included the first English productions of Strindberg's The Father and Ostrovsky's The Storm.