“She is full of strength and grace, and though cold in surface there is burning Etna beneath”—this was Helen Faucit in 1849, as described by Mrs. Mary Coleridge. Perhaps the graphic words were meant for Helen Faucit as a person, but, if so, they apply equally well to her acting style in its maturity, a style that was distinguished alike by power and charm, by passionate “nature” and classical “art.”

The notoriety of the two most popular antebellum stage versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin naturally has led theatre historians to examine both the adaptation choices and their political intentions, continuing a debate which began in earnest on 7 November 1853. On that day the Henry J. Conway adaptation opened at P. T. Bamum's American Museum in New York, entering into direct competition with the version by George Aiken, at that time in the fourth month of its run across town. Barnum aggressively promoted the Conway text as “the only just and sensible Dramatic version of Stowe's book,” despite such changes as a rewritten happy ending and the use of minstrel humor and music. Incensed abolitionist critics countered by dubbing the Conway adaptation “pro-South,” a label which still remains in use, especially in comparisons of the Conway and Aiken texts.

In 2011 and 2012, I undertook a two-part survey to answer some large questions about the use of plays in translation in the higher education drama classroom in Anglophone North America and to test my ideas regarding the simultaneous ubiquity and invisibility of translation there. My project here is to report on that survey and to make clear why translation studies is ready to take a prominent role in theatre studies. U.S. colleges and universities constitute one of the largest single markets in the world for drama translated into English. Most U.S. theatre history classes include plays from the world canon, and many specialized classes in theatre departments focus on plays from non-Anglophone cultures. In English departments, where other genres in translation (e.g., the novel) may be approached with caution, drama seems to be offered a “pass” because the notion of being dramaturgically literate depends on some knowledge of a sizable canon of non-Anglophone plays. Yet despite its ubiquity, translation is often so normalized as to be invisible to those who depend on it. As Laurence Senelick notes, “For most students, a work exists wholly in its translated form, spontaneously generated.” Translation, as the survey confirmed, is part of the DNA of theatre studies. As such, I argue, it needs to be brought to the foreground of the field. In saying this, I am not unaware of the rich work undertaken by scholars, editors, and practitioners who are enmeshed in the difficult issues involved with translating plays, which include pressing for greater attention to cultural sensitivity and literacy. My focus here is on the academy and the classroom, where, for better or worse, the vast majority of future dramaturgs and audience members will cut their teeth on a critical mass of plays and where no single language or production entity or publisher can claim pride of place.

Almost as soon as Paris was liberated from Nazi Occupation on 25 August 1944, Yiddish actors took back the stages on which they had once performed. In fact, on 20 December 1944, while war and the Holocaust still raged, a small cohort of actors produced what they advertised in the Naye prese as the “first grand performance by the ‘Yiddish folks-bine.’” This performance was to take place at the four-hundred-seat Théâtre Lancry, a performance space located in Paris's 10th arrondissement, not far from the Place de la République and the Marais. “Lancry,” as it was known, had played host to Yiddish theatre as early as 1903 and, during the interwar years, it was the center of Parisian Yiddish cultural activity: dozens of theatre performances occurred there and it was where the Kultur-lige pariz was based, among other institutions. During the postwar years, it also went by the name Théâtre de la République after 1947 and Théâtre du Nouveau-Lancry after 1951, but many still referred to it simply as “Lancry.”

There is so much to say about the persistent critiques of and mobilizations against Chris Dercon's vision (or lack thereof) of the newly named Volksbühne Berlin. My task here, however, is a different one: to begin to understand why there has also been such persistent mobilization on behalf of the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. In what follows, I provide some critical context for reflection upon the unique role the Volksbühne played in post-Wall Berlin. I suggest that in his twenty-five-year tenure at the Volksbühne, Frank Castorf worked to refunction the theatre apparatus itself, to transform the theatre as state institution, as interrelated set of supporting structures that extend beyond and behind the proscenium arch. Further, Castorf's work as both director and artistic director helps us to understand the complex relations between a theatre aesthetic, which exposes and critiques the structures of its (state) support, and a theatrical institution with similarly ambitious goals. As an aesthetic and as an infrastructural project, Castorf's Volksbühne enacted a new kind of public theatre in Berlin—and it is this project of institutional dis/avowal that we must remember (and dare to reenact) as so much more than reactionary or provincial nostalgia.

This is a portrait of five-year-old Miss Rose, who shone brightly albeit briefly on the London stage in the years 1769–70 before fading away into the gloom of historical obscurity (Fig. 1). She stands here as Tom Thumb, the eponymous diminutive hero of Henry Fielding's farce. With impressively plumed helm, her beautiful black eyes fierce, chin set in a determined tilt, padded right leg stretched out aggressively, and her somewhat chubby hand gripping the hilt of her sword, Miss Rose looks ready to engage some unseen enemy just outside the picture frame. Impressive as she looks, however, there is something poignant about this little girl's confidently heroic stance in the context of her prematurely terminated theatrical career. Miss Rose appears on the Haymarket stage in the summer of 1769, garners much praise and a small degree of celebrity, and then disappears from the theatre by 1771. Her departure is shrouded in nebulous but persistent accusations by her mother, Elizabeth de Franchetti, that she was being blackballed by the powerful theatre managers David Garrick and Samuel Foote, who for some reason refused to employ her despite her talent. After lingering a few years on the offstage London entertainment scene of concerts and variety shows, she drops out of historical view altogether before she is nine years old.

In 1967 the National Theatre of Japan (Kokuritsu Gekijô) published a facsimile version of Okyôgen Gakuya no Honsetsu (What Really Happens Backstage), a two-volume, four-part work, originally published in the midnineteenth century in Edo (Tokyo), and written by Santei Shunba, with the first volume (1858) illustrated by Baichôrô Kunisada and Ichieisai Yoshitsuya, and the second (1859) by Ichiransai Kunitsuna. The book offers numerous illustrations of kabuki stage effects, with brief explanations of their purposes. Despite its great value as a historical resource, this work had been barely known to the Japanese academic community, apart from the fact that one of its pictures appeared in Ihara Toshirô's 1913 Kinsei Nihon Engeki Shi (History of Japanese Theatre from the Edo Period) and was reproduced frequently thereafter. The chief source of information concerning its contents was an entry in the six-volume Engeki Hyakka Daijiten (Encyclopedia of the Theatre), published by Waseda University in 1962. This entry contained several inaccuracies, including errors in the number of the book's volumes and its publication date.

The study of medieval drama is relatively new but rapidly developing area of humanistic concern. Unfortunately, however, students of the medieval drama lack accurate modern texts of the plays, all of which are now being re-edited, and complete and accurate transcriptions of the historical documents which are so important to our understanding of the history, development, and production techniques of the medieval cycle plays. Of particular importance to the history of the plays are the dramatic documents of Chester, not only because they are more numerous than those of most other cities, but also because they include the earliest and fullest descriptions of the performance of the plays. Many of these documents remain unpublished and some of the published ones contain inaccuracies; for example, of the twelve extant disbursement accounts for performances of the plays, only seven have been published and of these seven, only three are accurate. Because complete transcriptions of contemporary documents referring to the plays have been unavailable, much of the critical commentary has been speculative. While making available the extant documents, a task I am currently engaged in, will not solve all the problems of the plays, it will narrow the limits of our speculations about them and give us a firmer basis of fact upon which to work. The discussion which follows is restricted to that of the frequency of performance of the Chester plays; it is designed to report facts and correct errors about the years in which the plays were performed and to speculate about the frequency of performances for years in which the facts are few or non-existent. In addition, the paper presents a preliminary report on the Chester dramatic documents and a discussion of the kind of evidence to be found in municipal records.

The Age of Reason brought with it a new faith in the future of humanity which evolved from abstract ideas into a tremendous social power. Nowhere is this more evident than in the increasing influence of Freemasonry in England throughout the eighteenth century. Almost fifty years ago Bernard Fäy gave an eloquent tribute to this phenomenon: “… It [the new faith] became a social force and a concrete fact through the agency of Freemasonry which at once accepted it and advocated it; the great historical importance of modern Freemasonry results from this attitude that it took then and to which it has since consistently adhered.…”

Until relatively recently, melodrama has been an unfairly maligned genre of theatre history; its pejorative associations based on the prejudiced assumptions that its aesthetics of excess (in terms of its extravagant emotion, sensationalism and popularity amongst predominantly working class audiences) meant, therefore, that it was for simpletons. What Walter Benjamin excoriated as the “ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator” fuelled bourgeois disdain for this theatrical form and the derision of the Theatrical Inquisitor’s dismissal of melodrama as “aris[ing] from an inertness in the minds of the spectators, and a wish to be amused without the slightest exertion on their own parts, or any exercise whatever of their intellectual powers” remained the dominant critical response throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, such views continued well into the twentieth century and certainly characterized the modernist reactions of the founding figures of the Irish national theatre in this period. Frank Fay, cofounder of the National Dramatic Society, denounced both the aesthetics of Dublin's Queen's Theatre as the “home of the shoddiest kind of melodrama,” and the intelligence of its audiences who, “wouldn't, at present, understand anything else.”

It is commonplace to observe that there are no mothers in the casts of Spanish Golden Age comedias. There are rare exceptions, but in such cases the mother is young. For example, in Tirso de Molina's La prudencia en la mujer (Prudence in Woman), the queen Dona María de Molina is the mother of a small child. As a general rule, the female characters of the Spanish comedia are young damas, or ladies. They are looked after by fathers and brothers, by male servants, or by young female servants, but not by a mother, an aunt, or even an older servant.

Henry James Byron (1834–1884) was a brilliant, witty, literary Englishman who wrote equally witty plays, infused with a cleverness of conception that deserves more than superficial analysis. While he had careers as diverse as those of actor, manager, novelist, editor, journalist, and playwright, it is upon the last mentioned that his “fame” rests.

The work of those designers who followed Jean Nicolas Servandoni (1695–1766) at the Royal Academy of Music, at Court, and elsewhere in Paris, is, like his own, preserved only in the pages of Le Mercure de France, L'Avant-Coureur, and other journals and memoirs. While the museums abound in easel canvases and drawings by François Boucher (1703–1770), we are hard-pressed to find one print which has even a remote connection with the stage. On the other hand, we have several volumes of costume sketches and a few scene prints by Louis-René Boquet (1717–1814) which give us a rather good impression of at least one side of his style. Unfortunately, the work of the men who may have been more influenced by Servandoni than any others—Pietro Algieri, Louis-Alexandre Girault, Antoine de Machy, Tremblin, Baudon, Guillet, Moulin, de Leuze, Canot, Lallemand, Spurney, etc.—is probably lost to the eye forever. Their careers, which took place in an extravagant age of theatrical design, must be pieced together from scattered paragraphs in the Paris periodicals. In most cases, we cannot even assign dates to the spans of their activities.

In his recent overview of the staging of medieval religious drama, A. M. Nagler concludes his commentary on the twelfth-century Adam play with a statement made by Karl Grass in 1928: “As far as the question of structure of the stage is concerned, the stage directions leave us in the lurch. … A reconstruction of the stage, as it was intended for the play, is scarcely possible on the basis of these particulars.” Since the 1920s, when scholars such as Grass, Paul Studer, and Gustave Cohen examined the possible staging of the Anglo-Norman drama, attention has remained almost exclusively on the didascalia, the Latin stage directions interspersed throughout the text. Despite the more recent work of Grace Frank, Michel Mathieu, Uda Ebel, and Wolfgang Greisenegger, Grass's comment about the stage directions leaving us in the lurch is still true. There are other sources of evidence, however, which have been used insufficiently or not at all in reconstructing the staging of the Mystère d'Adam. Not all clues in the dialogue having to do with the position or movement of actors have been examined by theatre historians.

Bassanio's words, as he chooses the correct casket to win Portia as his wife, might offer an insight to the production history of the Royal Shakespeare Company:

An impressive number of the RSC's greatest theatrical triumphs have been stagings of Shakespeare's “meager lead,” his lesser or minor plays. To seek the common element in these surprising coups, I will examine four productions of such plays, one from each of the conventional generic categores, and spanning four decades in the history of the RSC: Brook's Love's Labor's Lost (1946) and Titus Andronicus (1955), Hall's and Barton's Troilus and Cressida (1960), Hands' Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III (1977).

Standard accounts of the masque in British culture between 1600 and 1640 have tended to give primary attention to those presented at court at the festival seasons of Christmas and Shrovetide. Thematically, they have concentrated on the artists who had a major responsibility in making themBen Jonson and Inigo Jones (with less attention to musical composers and choreographers, whose contributions to the entire event must have been of great importance, but of whom we know less). Politically, they have taken the masque's function of encomium and endorsement of the monarch as a sign of crisis, growing to its most ironic excess in Salmacida Spolia, written by William Davenant, presented in January and again in February of 1640. What C. V. Wedgwood emblematically identified as “the last masque” in fact happened twice.C. V. Wedgwood, Truth and Opinion (London: Collins, 1960).

It is useful to begin with some immutable facts: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg died on the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison on Friday, 19 June 1953, and were pronounced dead at 8∶06 and 8∶17 p.m., respectively. Nearly seventeen years later, on 23 April 1970, Donald Freed's Inquest opened at the Music Box Theatre in New York City. The play about the Rosenberg case ran for eight previews and twenty-eight performances, closing just twenty-three days after its premiere. In its first minutes, Inquest alerted the audience that “every word you will hear or see on this stage is a documented quotation or reconstruction from events.” Freed asserts that he used only primary sources, no matter how “bizarre or poisoned” the words might have seemed, to construct his script. He employed these sources in three distinct ways and, accordingly, called for a divided stage to present the play. In Stage A, the players enacted portions of the 1951–3 court transcripts, whereas Stage B served as a plastic space, where flashback scenes of the characters' out-of-trial lives, pieced from letters, tapes, memos, and other available archival sources, interrupted the legal proceedings. Finally, relying on a large, partitioned screen situated upstage and on voice-over recordings, Freed assembled photographs, newspaper headlines, visual evidence submitted in the courtroom, and quotations from public figures to comment on the Rosenberg saga. The playwright thus toyed with time and place, offering the central story of the trial in a nonlinear manner. He bombarded the audience with projections and sounds to reinforce the reality on which the play was based and, at the same time, to evoke a nightmarish, multimedia world.

The past fifteen years have been a period of active revisionism in the study of the stage history of medieval England. Through the efforts of Richard Southern, Martial Rose, and others, we have gained a quite different perspective on the staging of the religious drama of the Middle Ages. Now the Cornish plays are no longer considered to be an aberration, for we have seen the principle of stationary performance extended to Wakefield and Lincoln, and enough questions have been raised concerning performance in York that processional staging even there seems doubtful. More and more we are being led to the conclusion that not processional staging on pageant carts, but stationary performance was the norm in England, just as it was on the Continent.