On April 7, 1919, almost exactly two years after the United States had entered World War I, the Vieux-Colombier theatre gave its final performance in New York, where it had spent the last eighteen months of the war presenting two seasons of repertory. The rather surprising presence of Jacques Copeau's troupe in New York at this time can be largely attributed to the war itself. Copeau had first been dispatched on a lecture tour in January of 1917 by the French Ministry of Fine Arts, with the aim of “countering German propaganda in the realm of culture,” strengthening ties between France and the United States, and stemming the tide of pro-German feeling then running in America. Though Copeau had already performed a similar task in Switzerland and was aware of the significance of his brief, his approach was subtle. Clayton Hamilton tells us that in the six lectures he delivered Copeau “talked to us of art and Molière, and said no word about the war … talked to us only about Truth and Beauty in the midst of many things succumbing momentarily to death. We welcomed Jacques Copeau because he wore the face of Dante.…”

In his commendatory poem from the First Folio, Ben Jonson asserted that Shakespeare “was not of an age, but for all time.” This has proved true, and Shakespeare has been able to speak to many succeeding generations of readers and theatregoers. This, however, is not because essential, unchangeable, and universal truths about human nature, the world, and experience lay hidden in his plays or his characters but (quite the opposite) because succeeding generations, over the centuries, have been able to appropriate, exploit, and reuse Shakespeare to make sense of their world and their lives. Shakespeare is for all time precisely because he has relentlessly changed over time. The author and his texts have been unceasingly reinvented, and a virtually infinite number of “alternative Shakespeares” has come to embody specific contemporary issues and conflicts. As Jean Marsden put it in 1991, Shakespeare is the object of “an ongoing process of literary and cultural appropriation in which each new generation attempts to redefine Shakespeare's genius in contemporary terms, projecting its desires and anxieties onto his work.” This is true for both the “dramatic” Shakespeare and the “theatrical” Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays have been as tirelessly reinterpreted on the page by scholars (and others) as they have been reinvented on the stage by actors and directors. The fate of King Richard III, however, is peculiar from this point of view, insofar as an often-denigrated Restoration revision of Shakespeare's play totally replaced the “original” one in the theatre and held the stage for nearly 200 years. This peculiarity acquires interesting overtones when we look at the treatment the staged play received at the hands of the Romantics, who, in spite of the bardolatry prevailing at the time and their often-vented disesteem for the adapted version, apparently missed their opportunity to make Shakespeare's original play speak for their own time.

“L'Étang danced with nobility and precision, while Pécourt took all kinds of parts with grace, precision and lightness.” So P. Rameau delineated the qualities desired of a dancer in his Maître à danser (1725). Across the channel, John Weaver wrote in his Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures upon Dancing (1721) that Hester Santlow was “the most agreeable, the most correct Performer in the World.” The ballerina of the romantic period still pleased audiences with her grace, but no longer with her nobility. As the stately declamation of Kemble gave way to the exuberance of Kean, the style of theatrical dancing changed in somewhat similar fashion. In order to cope, the critics had to alter their standards and find a new set of adjectives to deal with the values of the new dance.

The fruits of scientific enterprise are never without their detractors, and so the Illustrated News of the World felt the necessity, early in 1891, to deplore a chain of events, pursuant to the invention of the talking machine.

Both historically and critically, in one important area our view of Victorian drama and theatre closely parallels that of the Victorian theatre historian and critic. We tend to regard that history as fully expressed by the cumulative record of the middle-class West End theatre and the middle-class West End drama. Drury Lane, Covent Garden, the Adelphi, the Olympic, the St. James's, the Haymarket, the Princess's, the Strand, the Lyceum—these are the theatres that always appear in our books and articles; and Taylor, Buckstone, Boucicault, Robertson, Maddison Morton, and Pinero the dramatists we always write about. The representative Victorian commentator upon the theatre, drama critic or historian, did the same. In 1866 Henry Morley stated categorically: “In our provinces and colonies the form of entertainment will be, as it now is, mainly determined by the example of the eight or nine theatres in or near the West end of London, of which I hold the performances to be worth serious attention.” And in Morley's Journal of a London Playgoer, a selection of his dramatic criticism from 1851 to 1866, there is no evidence that Morley paid serious attention, or any attention at all, to theatres outside this magic circle.

Henry Fielding's Author's Farce, performed forty-one times in the spring and summer of 1730, was the hit of London's theatrical season. In this, his third play, Fielding turned away from the stylized realism of his Love in Several Masques (1728) and The Temple Beau (1730). In the earlier plays, and indeed throughout his career, he perceived and judged social behavior by comparing people who play roles in daily life to actors who assume roles on stage; in particular, he scrutinized the theatrical rituals and fashionable deceit of courting couples. By adopting the techniques of burlesque in The Author's Farce, he exposes simultaneously the false roles of courtship in daily life and the way that the theatre itself portrays such love-making. Understanding the technique by which Fielding criticizes courtship clearly reveals his larger purpose — to criticize the deceptive behavior and mercenary values, implicit in the stage's conventions, which the theatre fosters and endorses in real life.

Returning fresh from her summer vacation, the suntanned managing director of Gothenburg City Theatre, Karin Kavli (1906–90), proudly announced at a press conference in early August 1955 that she had secured the rights to produce the European premiere of Tennessee Williams's acclaimed play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.1 Well aware of the importance of creating a balanced repertoire that would satisfy the more artistically and literally minded audience and those who wanted some lighter forms of entertainment, Kavli understood that hosting the premiere of Williams's latest drama was quite a coup, especially in an age when television had begun to pose a great threat to theatre.

The seven drawings shown below are designs for baroque stage machines identified as machines “for Venus and Mars” and are reproduced from MS Majie, V, 4, 1–38, The Archivio di Stato, Parma. These designs are particularly interesting since they are at the same time characteristic of baroque stage machines which performed similar functions, found in other sources, and yet unique for their simplicity, rendering them easy to interpret and understand. Although several of these designs have been published individually in various places, the group of seven is published here in its entirety for the first time. Together, these designs illustrate the use of sliding winches in the grid to produce spectacular effects on the stage as well as the “Mars machines.”

On November 17, 1677, Sir Popular Wisdom, or the Politician was performed at Dorset Gardens by the Duke of York's Company. All we know of the play comes from a letter of Andrew Marvel: “Today is acted the first time Sir Popular Wisdom, or the Politician where my Lord Shaftsbury and all his gang are sufficiently personated. I conceive the King will be there.” Though we are offered little else, the fact that Shaftsbury and his gang are ridiculed is, I think, enough to situate the play fairly with other royally endorsed parodies of the Whig party that found a ready marketplace in the King's Theatre in the years of fervent, 1677–1683. Plays such as John Crowne's The Ambitious Statesman (1679) and City Politiques (1682), Thomas D'Urfey's Sir Barnaby Whig (1681) and The Royalist (1682), and Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd (1681) all were having no end of sport lampooning the Whig platform, with scarcely the benefit of a rebuttal.

Writing in 1853, Gábor Egressy, one of the leading actor-directors of the Hungarian-speaking National Theatre in Pest-Buda (Budapest), observed that representatives of different nations were appearing in increasing number on and off the stages of the major cities of Eastern Europe:

Egressy shared this observation with readers when the black, British-American actor Ira Aldridge visited the National Theatre in 1853. Aldridge and his English company received a warm welcome from Hungarian audiences and leading intellectuals. At the same time, however, he was under surveillance by the Habsburg secret police, and was later politely asked to leave the city. In my article, I investigate Aldridge's visit to Pest-Buda using the concepts of surrogation (Joseph Roach) and mediatization (Christopher B. Balme), and pay close attention to the way the actor's contemporaries interpreted his visit.

John Banvard was one of the more colorful and eccentric entrepreneurs of the nineteenth century American popular theatre. The hero of a Horatio Alger “rags to riches” story, he garnered honors, wealth, and fame on the strength of the enormous success of his massive panorama, now lost, of the Mississippi River. In the 1860s, his reputation as an artist secure, he dreamed of establishing a theatre and museum that would not only reflect the emerging cultural consciousness of the American urban population, but turn a neat profit as well.

How has “America” been performed, reimagined, and contested for the past 250 years? Or as J. Ellen Gainor puts it, what “role” has theatre played in the “construction of American identity”? One need not concur with Jeffrey D. Mason's foreword that there is a “void” of theatre scholarship on this topic (remember the pioneering histories of Richard Moody and Walter Meserve) to agree with him and his co-editor, J. Ellen Gainor, that questions of nationalism and cultural representation in the United States remain far from exhausted (4). As evidence for this claim, Mason and Gainor invoke a bibliography of recent (and not-so recent) scholarship by “New Americanists” like Sacvan Bercovitch, Annette Kolodny, Donald Pease, Myra Jehlen, and Lauren Berlant that should rightly spur theatre scholars to engage the problem of “performing America” with fresh vigor.

Frankly, I'm not much of a historian. That is, the past interests me mostly as grist for my theoretical mill. I am not nostalgic. I don't often trek through ruins—whether of stone, paintings, videotape, paper, library stacks, or my own many notebooks. Of course, I've done the right thing when it comes to this kind of activity. I have climbed the pyramids at Teotihuacan and in Mayan country, sat on stone benches of the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens and in Epidaurus (where I was tormented by some really awful productions of ancient Greek dramas), and visited the theatre museums of four continents. On the art-history front, I've gazed at more paintings and sculptings than I can readily organize in memory. But my strongest meetings with “history” have been at the cusp of the past and present—living events always already changing as they are (re)performed. This has been the core of my “anthropology-meets-theatre” work whether among the Yaquis of Arizona, at the Ramlila of Ramnagar in India, in the highlands of Papua–New Guinea, at Off-Off Broadway in New York, in the interior of China, and at very many other events in a wide variety of places.