Between 1921 and 1925, an experimental form of nongovernmental censorship of the theatre was developed and practiced in New York City. Referred to variously as volunteer juries, citizens' juries, or the play-jury system, the experiment attempted to overcome the shortcomings of existing legal controls on the theatre and to relieve public concerns about the exploitation of sexually suggestive and obscene materials in stage plays. Although the play-jury system was short-lived, a review of its brief career reveals significant accomplishments and can provide a clearer picture of some of the issues confronting the American theatre in the first part of the twentieth century.

This book, which focuses on the manner in which four Renaissance actor-playwrights justify their practice as dramatists, is both stimulating and exasperating, since it is based on a splendid idea insufficiently realized. The central premise of Nora Johnson's study is her contention that recent scholarship has tended to overemphasize Ben Jonson's model of “sovereign” authorship to the exclusion of those early modern English dramatists who acknowledged the communal and collaborative sources of their labor.

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.

This is a tale of two directors. The setting is the Republic of Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony and a tiny archipelago nestled off the coast of Senegal in West Africa. Framing the story is Cape Verde's annual Mindelact International Theatre Festival, which since 1997 has invited Lusophone theatre artists from three continents to perform a wide array of theatre genres on a mainstage program alongside Cape Verdean troupes. João Branco, a Portuguese director who moved to the islands in the early 1990s, is the artistic director of both the Mindelact Festival and the veteran Cape Verdean theatre troupe GTCCPM (Grupo de Teatro do Centro Cultural Português do Mindelo/Theatre Group of the Mindelo Portuguese Cultural Center). For Mindelact 2003, GTCCPM performed an abridged version of King Lear rendered in Cape Verdean Crioulo, a mix of Portuguese and several West African languages. Beyond bolstering Branco's cherished goal of creolizing Shakespeare's plays by transporting them to Cape Verde's Afro-European cultural milieu, Rei Lear worked in concert with the festival's media blitz to extol local spectators in Mindelact's host city, Mindelo, for their good taste. Two years later, Herlandson Duarte, a young Cape Verdean director and Branco's former theatre student, staged a Crioulo-language Midsummer Night's Dream at Mindelact with his new theatre company, Solaris. Duarte's production transformed Bottom's play-within-a-play into a searing critique of Mindelense audiences and the structures of authority that prop up the festival itself.

The death of Sir Winston Churchill in 1965 focused renewed attention upon his colorful American mother, Jennie Jerome (1854–1921), who distinguished herself as a political aide of Lord Randolph Churchill (1849–95), her first husband, and also as an authoress, public speaker, and indefatigable worker in behalf of numerous charities. Her manifold activities have been described by Ralph G. Martin (Jennie: The Life of Lady Randolph Churchill) and Anita Leslie (Lady Randolph Churchill: The Story of Jennie Jerome). Neither biographer, however, describes Lady Randolph's theatrical ventures in detail, and neither relates those activities properly to the movement to establish a National Theatre in Great Britain.

Italian prima donna Francesca Cuzzoni (ca. 1698–1770) was the first internationally recognized virtuosa to sing high soprano women's roles. Although her work served as a model to the female performers who followed, no in-depth critical study has been written about her groundbreaking career on the opera stage of the Royal Academy of Music in London, where she was the celebrated prima donna from 1723 to 1728. During her tenure, the Royal Academy became one of the most important opera companies in Europe, rivaling those of the Viennese court, the Paris Opera, and the Italian opera houses of Naples and Venice. Her arrival on the London stage signaled a shift in the ways composers set roles in relationship to vocal categories and gender. In particular, Cuzzoni's superior virtuosic vocal abilities influenced and inspired German George Friedrich Handel's (1685–1759) compositional style and his musical treatment of dramatic elements.

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.

When artist-inventor Samuel B. Morse alleged that the Bowery Theatre performance of French ballerina Madame Hutin was “to all intents and purposes the public exposure of a naked female,” he was expressing an opinion that conflicted with that of other critics, who felt that the performance of French dancers would “put to shame our splay-footed indigenous sprawlers, and will greatly refine the taste in dancing in the play-going public.” In Jacksonian American, citizens who were concerned with the direction of the nation's culture engaged in a debate about the respective merits of the less-polished art created in the New World and the more refined offerings of the Old World that was played out in critical reactions to an increasingly popular theatrical form: ballet. Ballet gradually became an important part of American theatre during the first half of the nineteenth century as dancers appeared on stages in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston in front of the same audiences that attended the dramatic plays whose productions have received the bulk of academic attention. Three waves of European dancers came to the Americas during the period 1790 to 1845. The first wave (1790–1825) consisted of small companies who presented dance to a broad range of audiences, typically before other plays or during entr'actes. This article focuses on performances that occurred during the second wave (1825–40), when impresarios recruited established (though not top-tier) European ballerinas to come to specific theatres. These dancers brought the repertoire and styles of the Romantic ballet to America, including evening-length performances with fairy-tale plots and an emphasis on charismatic female stars, such as La Sylphide. The first American ballerinas, Mary Ann Lee and Augusta Maywood, made their debuts during this period. The third wave (1840–5) consisted largely of “headliners” such as Fanny Elssler, who toured the country performing selections from their famous roles and pas with a corps de ballet recruited from each city they visited.

In the fall or winter of 1661, Chapoton's tragédie à machines, La Descente d'Orphée aux Enfers, was produced at the Phoenix or Cockpit in Drury Lane by a visiting French Company. The performance is recorded in a rare pamphlet, The Description of the Great Machines of the Descent of Orpheus into Hell. Presented by the French Commedians at the Cockpit in Drury-lane, a copy of which survives in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. This pamphlet consists of a resumé in both English and French of Chapoton's work. Its purpose was to allow an English audience to follow the opera, which was performed in French.

Editor's Note: For this issue of Critical Stages, Ari Osterweis and Barbara Browning consider the multiple publics at play in the work of artist-performer Narcissister.

Among the many devices of the pageant carpenter's art, including the Trees of Jesse, mountains “inuironed with red roses and white,” thrones of justice, dragons, and fonts, the castle had become, at least by the mid-fifteenth century, practically a cliché. Its origins as a pageant structure, however, have yet to be satisfactorily explained, and its iconography is still open to interpretation. Theatre historians have long been interested in the “castle” pageant that the Goldsmiths' guild organized for the coronation of Richard II because it is the first English civic pageant for which any detailed description survives. The nineteenth-century antiquary, William Herbert, believed there to be no record of the “castle” pageant in the Company's own books, however, and following this lead, Robert Withington, the great compiler of pageant history, so reports the matter.

This article deals with a very short period in the long history of the semiotic conception of theatre. It concentrates on the relationship between the theatrical avantgarde and the theories developed during some twenty years in Czechoslovakia, by Otakar Zich on the one hand and the members of the Prague Linguistic Circle on the other. Broadly speaking, this is the Prague School theory of theatre. A Polish scholar has called it “semiotics of theatre in statu nascendi.” This designation is no doubt pertinent as far as the recent development of the discipline is concerned; its more remote past still remains largely unexplored. But another commentator went much further, claiming that until 1931, the year when Zich's treatise on the theatre and Mukařovský's article on Chaplin's City Lights appeared, “dramatic poetics—the descriptive science of the drama and theatrical performance—had made little progress since its Aristotelian origins.” In fact, semiotics is a very old discipline and the semiotic interpretation of the theatre was not invented in Czechoslovakia between the two World Wars.

Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess has long held a place of particular importance in studies of early modern English theatre history. Performed for a record nine straight performances (a feat not accomplished again until the Restoration), Middleton's production has attracted scholarly interest by virtue of both its unparalleled contemporary success and its overt religious and political messages of anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish propaganda. Performed by the King's Men at the Globe playhouse between 5 and 14 August (except for Sunday) 1624, A Game at Chess provides the most conspicuous instance from the period in which the stage addressed issues of immediate political significance. Certainly history plays, such as Shakespeare's series of works chronicling the Wars of the Roses, dealt with English politics, but no play dealt so directly with the politics of the moment. Even more important, the politics of the moment responded. John Woolley, the secretary of the English agent in Brussels, wrote “all the nues I have heard since my comming to towne is of a nue Play. It is called a game at Chess, but it may be a vox populy for by reporte it is 6 tymes worse against the Spanyard.” The play's politics struck such a chord and the performance was deemed so scandalous that it was ultimately shut down by King James himself after he received an official complaint from the Spanish Ambassador Extraordinary, Don Carlos Coloma.