The material upon which this paper is based is divided into two sections. The paper concerns the problems presented to historians of the theatre confronted by staging conventions. The first section is intended to consider in general terms our own experience of some of these problems—problems which, while forming given constants in the preoccupations of theatre scholars, have been brought sharply into focus by Robert K. Sarlós' recent article in Theatre Research International, “Creating Objects and Events.” The second seeks to examine the generalities which we put forward in an account of the practical reconstruction of Mahelot's staging of Pyrame et Thisbé in the early seventeenth-century Hôtel de Bourgogne.

Being asked to write about the state of Asian theatre in the American academy makes me feel a little like Jean Genet explaining the origin of his play The Blacks: “One evening, an actor asked me to write a play for an all-black cast. But what exactly is a black? First of all, what's his color?”

Almost all of the major characters in Chekhov's plays are ambiguous; their interpretation poses no small task for directors and actors. The figure of Nina Zarechnaya in The Seagull, in particular, has been construed in many ways. She has been seen as a soaring seagull; a tumbled, tousled bird; a talentless country girl; an emerging artist of promise; a high-reaching neurotic wreck; a future actress of Arkadina's vein; and so on. Because of this interpretive ambiguity, Chekhov was often asked to clarify his position on one or another of his characters. In written form he did so explicitly only once, in a letter to Suvorin in connection with his Ivanov performance in St. Petersburg. In this letter and others as well, it is clear that Chekhov's principle was “better to blur the portrait than overdo it.” The recollections of Stanislavsky, Nemirovich-Danchenko, and many actors of the Moscow Art Theatre indicate, moreover, that most of the time Chekhov confined himself mainly to seemingly insignificant remarks if asked about a role. Stanislavsky remembers, for example, that when, after a rehearsal, he asked Chekhov to critique his portrayal of Trigorin, Chekhov said, “Wonderful! Listen, it was wonderful! Only you need torn shoes and checked trousers.” After these sorts of typically oblique remarks directors and actors were puzzled and would long ponder the hidden meaning of the playwright's comments. The famous actor of many Chekhov plays, V.I. Kachalov, also wrote in his memoirs about Chekhov's unwillingness to influence the actor straightforwardly.

Although the modern reputation of Molière is based upon a group of major comedies, these were not the sole source of his popularity during his lifetime. He and his troupe performed many minor plays which are no longer prominent in the Molière repertory. Among these plays is a group which feature a comedian named Sganarelle, a role always performed by Molière himself.

The work of Joint Stock Theatre Company is the stuff of alternative theatre mythology. A self-defined socialist company that premiered plays like David Hare's Fanshen and Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine, the group is known as one of Britain's most enduringly innovative alternative-theatre groups, in part because of those playwrights' success, in part because of such famous actors and directors as Max Stafford-Clark and Bill Gaskill, whose visions forged the group. But the history of Joint Stock's final years is not well known, despite the existence of a company history, The Joint Stock Book. Although it might seem that the group lost touch with its artistic imperative after 1985 and that it closed amid the generally harsh climate for alternative theatre created by the arts-funding policies of the conservative government of Margaret Thatcher (in office during 1979–90), that is not entirely true. Reorganized in 1985–6 to maximize racial and gender parity in the company, Joint Stock produced significant work and traversed important cultural and political terrain until 1989, when it closed both because of lost funding and because of the decisions of individual artists.

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.

A Play-by-Play history of King Lear in Germany, France, and Italy would be a dull thing; but a discussion of the special qualities found in the tragedy at historic theatrical moments can illuminate both the work of art and the cultural and artistic environment in which it was presented.

The German productions offer the best example of the range of possibilities found in Lear in Continental theatre because the play has had there its longest history of production, outside of England.

It has long been known that details of the design of John Rich's Covent Garden theatre of 1732 are contained in the Chancery bill of complaint that he entered against the builder, Edward Shepherd, in Shepherd's lengthy answer, and his counter-complaint. These documents, written on the usual great membranes and now rather scuffed and rubbed, are difficult to work with because of their physical characteristics and their interminable repetitiveness.

The purpose of this special section of Theatre Survey has been to bring together scholars in the field of medieval studies working specifically in theatre studies and those whose work reflects new strategies and current concerns in theatre historiography.

The nineteenth-century theatregoer in America and in England enjoyed a wonderful diversity of acting styles and roles among the actresses of the period. To be sure, it was an age of the womanly ideal, when playing Juliet appealed to every young actress. Perhaps too many aspired to the youthful, feminine charms of Juliet, for one disgusted New York critic complained that “40,000 American girls were doing the Balcony Scene that ought to be doing the family dishes.” Other roles such as Paulina, Galatea, and Parthenia thrived on the Victorian stage, male theatre critics applauding the feminine virtues of gentility and grace, loyalty, delicate humor, and occasional submissiveness. Interestingly, another sort of female role became extremely popular during this time: the breeches role.

In 1974, the maverick German director Klaus-Michael Grüber created a remarkable (and much remarked-upon) production of Die Bakchen (The Bacchae) at Berlin's Schaubühne theatre. It was then, and remains to date, the most significant German-language production of, and indeed one of the very few attempts to stage, Euripides' final play in Germany. This essay will attempt to trace the history of German abstention fromthe play and analyze how Grüber's Bacchae responded to that history of ambivalence and neglect, for what was played out in Grüber's mise-en-scène was not only the conflict between Pentheus and Dionysus for the soul of Thebes, but indeed, upon the rapidly shifting cultural and political ground of West Germany, a deeper conflict between mimesis and authenticity, presence and representation, and the soul of the theatre. The first volley in this conflict had been fired more than one hundred years before by Friedrich Nietzsche.

Money matters. In Act 2 of Spamalot, Eric Idle's Broadway musical based on the 1975 cult classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the show's star, Tim Curry, as King Arthur, comments that the characters are running around in a “dark and very expensive forest.” The joke, it turns out, is entirely on us. Monty Python and the Holy Grail was an inexpensive independent film, costing $250,000 to make, a bargain compared to the same year's The Rocky Horror Picture Show ($1,200,000) and Python's own 1979 Life of Brian ($4,000,000). From its release, Holy Grail ran continuously in many theatres, and large numbers of people could afford the price of a ticket; it still circulates widely in relatively inexpensive DVD and VHS editions. Fast-forward thirty years to March of 2005. Production costs for Spamalot, Eric Idle's Broadway musical “lovingly ripped off” from the film, top $14 million (not atypical start-up costs these days on Broadway). Playing in a single theatre that seats only about 1,600, the show commands ticket prices that begin around $100 and can cost $350 and up. According to the Wall Street Journal, Spamalot is setting the pace for the spiraling costs of Broadway entertainment. Many fewer people will see the musical than the film, and those who can will tend to be more affluent; Spamalot's target audience is Holy Grail's first audience “all grown up,” prosperous, middle-aged Monty Python fans (like the authors of this article). In their youth, Holy Grail denied this audience the pleasures of narrative cinema. It made fun of film, relentlessly disturbing the seamless illusion of reality that is the cornerstone of Hollywood cinema, refusing narrative coherence and narrative closure. A parody of the clichés of mass culture, it exposed the political conservatism of the various forms of nostalgia for a medieval past that never was, a past in which strange women lying around in ponds distributing swords could be a basis for a political system. Spamalot, on the other hand, adapts its cinematic original, repackaging the youthful rebellion of the 1975 film and offering the pleasures of nostalgia remarkably free from political consequences.

In the climactic scene of James Baldwin's 1968 novel Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, the narrator and protagonist, Leo Proudhammer, appears with his friend and lover Barbara in the living room of a Jewish acting teacher named Saul San-Marquand, the artistic director of the Actors’ Means Workshop. Leo and Barbara have been hanging around the small town in New Jersey where the Workshop has decamped for the summer season. At last, they have been given their promised chance to perform a scene for Saul, who will decide on the basis of that scene whether or not they will be accepted as members of the Workshop. They have prepared a scene from Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty in which Flor and Sid, a young couple, break off their relationship under pressure from Flor's brother. Leo, who is black, and Barbara, who is white, have just admitted their love for each other; their impossible interracial relationship underlies the novel. When they arrive in Saul's apartment, they have just walked through town together to the obscene and threatening jeers of the white townspeople, validating their decision, made in bed hours earlier, that their relationship can never be public.

Professor George F. Reynolds' The Staging of Elizabethan Plays at the Red Bull Theatre, 1606–1625 was the first major book, to cast doubt on the theory that there was a recessed room, an ‘inner stage,’ cut into the tiring house wall on the Shakespearian stage. Reynolds further restored the reputation of the much-maligned De Witt-van Buchell sketch of the Swan Theatre. Although a number of scholars recognized at once that Reynolds' book was something of a landmark, it was not until this decade that his methods and materials were made use of. C. Walter Hodges' The Globe Restored was the first book to take up where Reynolds had left off. Dependent on Hodges, but at the same time highly original, was A. M. Nagler's Shakespeare's Stage.

As the end of the eighteenth century approached, Britain experienced many changes in power and prestige: the American colonies had broken away; the philosophy of expansionism and imperial domination was being attacked from within and without, and the primacy of the British fleet and trade organizations was fast becoming a thing of the past. All of these factors, and others, forced a mood of re-evaluation upon the British government and people. Throughout the empire and its colonies the discussion of the merits and morality of the slave trade, for example, reached previously unheard of proportions, as the newly-rediscovered sciences of free-trade economics, moral philosophy, and cultivation technology turned towards the examination of slavery. Nowhere was this more active and adamant than in the Scottish university cities, which had become the centers of intellectual and scientific thought and practice. Thus it is no surprise to find this thematic focus upon the newly strengthened and emboldened Scottish stage. One manifestation was Archibald MacLaren's The Negro Slaves, a play in which can be found the seeds and fruits of the Scottish Enlightenment as it relates to the British abolitionist movement, the economic shift in overseas trade, and the overall milieu of colonial perception.

The commedia dell'arte, which spanned three centuries from the sixteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth and nationalities as diverse as Italian, French, Austrian, Polish, and English, went through a number of metamorphoses before it attained the form we now associate with it. Very briefly, that form is based on stock characters (Arlecchino, Pantalone, Il Dottore, Pedrolino or Pierrot, etc.), improvisation around standard plots, and the use of masks. In Italy, this kind of commedia was established by the end of the sixteenth century. In this paper, I would like to explore the developments that led to this form, concentrating especially on the convention of maschere (stock characters) as it appeared early in sixteenth century Venice and the Veneto. I concentrate on Venice because it is there that these maschere first developed and were then elaborated into the kind of characterization that becomes the defining feature of the commedia dell'arte.

Theatre history sometimes amuses us with the persistence of certain notions which, no matter how roundly discredited, simply refuse to die. One of these speculations concerns the method of pairing role and actor in the Elizabethan theatre. Actors were assigned to their roles, and roles were written for actors, in accordance with the actor's “lines of business” — weren't they? T. W. Baldwin's long and influential book, The Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company, attempts to prove this method of role designation. However, his is one of those theories of remarkable stamina which, in spite of serious critical challenge, never stay down for the count, but stagger gamely back into lectures and appear unexpectedly in respectful citations. Given its shortcomings and inaccuracies under close scrutiny, Baldwin's hypothesis seems to demand a final and permanent interment. To that end, I will examine the question of acting lines — the theory, its champions and its challengers, and the evidence for and against it, taking Baldwin's work as a starting point.

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.