Despite considerable advances in scholarship—achievements on which this essay builds—our knowledge of how eighteenth-century theatres were run remains worryingly thin. The managerial enterprise of theatre production, especially its daily practicalities, is largely obscure, though the facts of performance history are well documented. Knowledge of practice is not our only lacuna. Accounts of the interfaces among performances, institutional theatre practices, and the wider culture of the eighteenth century are too few, though wonderful work has been produced by Jane Moody, Felicity Nussbaum, and Gillian Russell, among others. This meager situation has arisen in part, as Robert D. Hume has argued, because scholars have yet to fully engage with those sources that have survived, although problems of missing evidence are serious and sometimes insurmountable. A related problem is that theatre historians are often averse to conceptualizing what they discover, as if analysis and certain modes of theoretical interpretation were the responsibility or more distinctly the failing of literary critics. But the discovery or reappraisal of an archive will only advance scholarship so far. New information about rehearsals, performances, finances, or contracts is vital, but it does not explain the motives or institutional momentum that animated theatre production. We need to know why some actors were favored by management while others seem to have been less well supported. It would also be useful to understand more precisely why some plays were performed repeatedly whereas others appeared only sporadically. The information contained in the London Stage should be crucial for theatre history, yet the repertoire of the patent theatres remains understudied. The impetus it gave to managers is too often ignored, while its political significance is barely understood, prompting justified complaint from Daniel O'Quinn. Great care will be necessary when addressing these issues. Overly general or prescriptive claims are probably best avoided; there are simply too many local factors. We should also recollect that theatrical production is necessarily a collective endeavor, a process in which many voices might be heard. Yet patterns and purposes can be found, even when what is most apparent is what Michel de Certeau terms the “‘polytheism’ of scattered practices.”

In his book On the Art of the Theatre (1911), Edward Gordon Craig recounted seeing a sign on the stage door at the Munich Künstlertheater that momentarily made him think he had discovered “heaven.” “Sprechen Streng Verboten” (speaking strictly forbidden), it read. So eager was he to find comrades who shared his radical vision of a wordless drama that Craig had misread an ordinary request for backstage silence as a ban on onstage speech. Although he sadly admitted that the German theatre was not as advanced as he had hoped, Craig insisted that the sign contained the “clue” to a modern theatrical renaissance—one he believed himself fully prepared to begin, if only someone else would provide the funds.

On 15 May 1995, the Alliance for Change (AFC), a coalition of opposition leaders in Ghana, organized a demonstration that came to be known by the name Kume Preko (which translates as “Kill me once and for all”) to protest the government's new value-added tax (VAT) policy. During the demonstration, armed supporters of Jerry Rawlings, Ghana's president, set upon the marchers, killing four people, including a fourteen-year-old boy. The AFC charged that members of the ruling party were implicated in the killings. It also dismissed a police report on the incident as a “cheap and fraudulent cover-up” that was “contradicted by the abundant evidence.” An article in the leading opposition newspaper, the Ghanaian Chronicle, criticized Rawlings's government for flouting the constitutional right to public dissent and called the violence against the demonstrators “Hitlerism in Ghana.” The Kume Preko violence dealt Rawlings a political blow: it dented his image as a man of the people and the credibility of his commitment to a new liberal democratic political regime in Ghana.

Librarian's nightmare or researcher's dream? Theatre historians frequently use and librarians happily acquire the rare theatrical scrapbook related to a single famous individual, but many undervalue and overlook ordinary theatrical albums, and with good cause: the ordinary theatrical scrapbook's provenance is often unclear, its compilers are usually unknown, and its contents are typically heterogeneous, commonplace, and decaying. The cracked bindings and flaking newsprint characteristic of such scrapbooks frustrate conservation, while their clippings, programs, and images pose serious cataloging challenges, shorn as they often are of identifying information. Finally, at least some of the material in these albums (such as newspaper clippings) is often duplicated elsewhere, making their contents easily seem redundant.