In 1923 a young hospital orderly entered Jacques Copeau's École du Vieux-Colombier in Paris to study diction. He held himself aloof from the world of actors, fixing his ambitions upon a lofty conception of politics. Nicknamed “the Orator,” he was Etienne Decroux; and Decroux was a militant socialist who brought to his theatrical studies a belief that “art is a publicity seeker, truth is a saint; a saint should never lower herself, no matter how ugly she may be, before a publicity seeker.”

From its beginning, America was a frontier. Initially, the Eastern Seaboard was a frontier for Europe, and this was still true in 1750 when professional theatre began to be a regular feature of American life. Within a century the variables changed, but were still bound together in the frontier equation. By 1850 the trans-Mississippi West had become a frontier for urban centers in the East. In particular, the North-Central region of California sprang into popular consciousness: here was the ultimate undeveloped area to which one could migrate in the search for economic competence. As America's first major mining frontier it offered a prospect of sudden wealth which was far more appealing than the slow seasonal accumulation of agriculture, and which did not require the large initial investment of industry.

In 1917, the editor of Edison's Monthly looked disdainfully back on the era of gas in the theatre: “Stage lights,” he said, “took up almost as much room as the scenery itself. Long yards of rubber pipe trailed across the stage and wings. Only the footlights were permanent and only the crudest stage effects were possible.” He might have mentioned the unbearable heat they generated and their malodorous fumes. This house organ for the electrical industry had, of course, a vested interest in deprecating gas and extoling the virtues of electricity. But there were also enthusiasts for gas; in 1923, for example, Louis Hartmann reported that one of the best of the old gas men—William Hall—had told him:

I have always claimed that the electric switchboard and dimmer equipment is only the evolution of the old gas table or switchboard, not a new creation. With the gas table of the other days we accomplished the same results you obtain today—in a crude way, we will admit, but with wonderful results. I will state without fear of contradiction that the combination of old gas lighting equipment and the calcium [i.e., lime] light apparatus, we have given productions that even in this era of advancement have never been equalled, that is so far as stage spectacular effect is concerned.

When Henry Fielding enlarged his one-act afterpiece, The Welsh Opera (1731), he named the new version The Grub-Street Opera to point to the extensive travesty it contains. The title also makes a target of hack-writers of the day and implies a connection with The Grub-Street Journal, whose authors maintained a policy of non-partisan satire on hack-writing. The amount of imitation it contains makes it resemble the literary travesty of The Author's Farce (1730) and Tom Thumb (1730), likewise written by Scriblerus Secundus, Fielding's pseudonym which alluded to the “Scriblerus” of his illustrious contemporaries, most obviously to Pope in the Dunciad notes and “Peri Bathous” (1728). The Grub-Street Opera has remained a puzzle to scholars of Fielding's plays, perhaps because its relationship to contemporary drama, politics, and journalism has been neglected.

No doubt conditioned by the pointed use of the rehearsal format in Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author as a vehicle for that playwright's theme of philosophical relativism, I have often conjectured that similar thematic concerns are implicit in almost any play using such a device. Once the artifices of the theatre are laid bare, and the discrepancies between life as it is represented on the stage and life as we know it are brought into focus, the relative truths and realities of each may be measured and evaluated. Although I would not wish to argue that philosophical relativism is a major or even an intentional concern of Sheridan's The Critic, I am convinced that it is an inescapable ingredient, at least for a modern audience.

W. B. Donne, writing to Mrs. Fanny Kemble in America, called it “the most remarkable event in current history, setting aside Garibaldi and The Civil War on your side of the water.…” Speaking of the same event, Charles Dickens was later to declare: “Perhaps no innovation in Art was ever accepted with so much favor by so many intellectual persons precommitted to, and preoccupied by, another system.…”