Theatre historians have been kind to William B. Wood, actor and co-manager of the Chestnut Street Theatre in the early nineteenth century. Reese D. James, in his Old Drury of Philadelphia: A History of the Philadelphia Stage, 1800–1835 (1932), set the sentimental tone that subsequent historians would echo. Relying extensively on Wood's Personal Recollections of the Stage (1855), James lamented that the Chestnut Theatre, following the breakup of Warren and Woods' management in 1826, became “a body without a soul.” In his Theatre U.S.A. (1959), Barnard Hewitt quoted copiously from Wood's Recollections, allowing the co-manager the final word on the deleterious effects of the star system. Calvin Primer's two articles published in the 1960s on Warren and Wood continued the tradition, picturing both managers as the unfortunate victims of rapacious stars.

The most prominent names associated with the King's Company in the first half of the seventeenth century include Shakespeare, Burbage, Heminges and Condell. Yet John Lowin, one of the “Principall Actors” listed in the Heminges and Condell First Folio of Shakespeare and a leading performer for over half a century, rarely rates more than a mention. According to theatre historian G.E. Bentley, Lowin “was, of course, one of the most important Jacobean and Caroline actors”; and it is the use of the phrase “of course,” that apology for stating the obvious, along with a scarcity of biographical fact that combine to obscure Lowin's reputation so tantalizingly.

In the middle years of the eighteenth century a major shift took place in France concerning the idea of appropriate stage costume. The traditional dress of high classicism, with its helmets and high plumes for the men, large hoop skirts for the women, and elegant, symmetrical, and highly artificial dress for both began to be challenged by leading critics and artists, who sought—for greater realism, greater historical accuracy, or greater ease and beauty of movement on stage—a more relaxed and informal approach to stage dress.

Pan y cebolla — bread and onion. In Madrid or Mexico City, you may see construction workers at lunch or at a rest break having a nutritious and economical snack: an onion sandwich, made simply of a barra de pan — a hard roll — and a juicy Spanish onion, washed down perhaps with wine drunk from the bottle. It is an eminently proletarian lunch.

In the Presidential Address to the American Society for Theatre Research in 1981, Joseph Donohue cast his eye toward the future of theatre scholarship and the advent of computer technology. His exhortation that scholars must make friends with and make use of the microchip was based on syllogistic reasoning: since scholarly analysis includes the ordering of data into “clear, pertinent and discrete” patterns, and since the computer is the obvious tool for the storage and reordering of such data, therefore “a compelling need exists for greater computer literacy in the humanities.”