Despite the etymological origins of “spectator” in looking and “audience” in hearing, the multiple activities involved in attending an event (whether formally in the theatre or in other reminiscent circumstances) involve the senses more than one at a time, and indeed they involve more than the senses. Some of the most compelling spectacles of the modern era, such as homelessness, seem to repel looking and hearing for too many who encounter them on the streets, and only hold the attention of a few when dramatized by Gorky in The Lower Depths.

Virtually every city in the United States now has a Civic Center. In large cities, this site functions variously as a convention center, a hockey rink, and the locale for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey circus. In smaller cities, it frequently serves as a venue for performance. Civic Centers host touring productions of Broadway shows, national dance companies, and local symphonies and operas. In addition to providing local access to a variety of performance forms, a city's Civic Center also signifies “the arts” and so implies the city's commitment to art and performance.

As scholars investigating historical audiences, we are always searching for that magic moment when the theatre critic shifts in his seat, notices the people around him and finds them interesting enough to write down his observations. When such a moment occurs, we are given the rare opportunity to witness a spectatorial presence and spectatorial response not usually represented by theatre reviews. One such magic moment occurred on April 22, 1922, in Frankfurt, Germany at the premiere of Arnolt Bronnen's play Vatermord (Patricide). Carl Zuckmayer, a fellow playwright, drew his eyes away from the expressionist play before him and lifted them to the gallery. He recorded his experience in his review for Die Neue Schaubühne:

In October of 1903, The United Irishman, a leading newspaper of the Irish nationalist movement, published an essay by William Butler Yeats entitled “The Irish National Theatre and Three Sorts of Ignorance.” Yeats wrote this essay after an infuriated nationalist community protested the Irish National Theatre Society's production of John Millington Synge's play, In the Shadow of the Glen. In response to Yeats's admonishment of the nationalist movement for putting politics over aesthetics in their creation and judgment of Irish drama, Arthur Griffith, the editor of the newspaper, added some remarks of his own:

Mr. Yeats does not give any reason why if the Irish National Theatre has no propaganda save that of good art it should continue to call itself either Irish or National. If the Theatre be solely an Art Theatre, then its plays can be fairly criticized from the standpoint of art. But whilst it calls itself Irish National its productions must be considered and criticised as Irish National productions.

Our views about nineteenth-century London theatre audiences are often dominated by essentialist descriptions via which subjective impressions have been transmuted into received orthodoxy. In this article, with reference to topography, demography (based on the 1841–1861 censuses), police reports, and patterns of urban transportation, we are attempting to counter some of these received orthodoxies, using as our model a re-evaluation of what is meant by a “transpontine” or “Surrey-side” audience with reference to the Coburg (Victoria) and Surrey Theatres.

Today, Rotterdam is best known as the largest port in the world. Around 1800, although the second city in the Dutch Republic, it was still a minor trade centre. A group of its merchants built a standing theatre in 1773, which was sold in 1851 and largely demolished in 1853. The very rich archives of the stock-holders' company, which exploited this theatre, permit us an insight into the patterns of theatre-going in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the record helps test the common conjecture about the decline of the theatre in those decades.

Theatre historians have given surprisingly little attention to theatre playbills and programs as documents of material culture. The modern theatre “magazine” program especially, which began to develop in the 1860s, offers more than primary documents for dates, performers, and scenic artists, visual evidence of a performance, or the dramaturg's notes. For the cultural historian, these are open books, symbolically. Programs of the late twentieth century, packed as they are with advertisements, news of the theatre, photo montages, and litanies of benefactors and “friends,” document that larger performance of which the staged event is but a part, the performance of the imagined community to which, and from which the theatrical event ostensibly speaks.