At Florence, housed in the Archivio di Stato in the noble rooms of Vasari's Uffizi, there lies a great collection of letters sent back to Tuscany from the many parts of Europe where representatives of the Medicean court were posted. Among them are files of dispatches written from London during the seventeenth century, and buried within these is a mine of information about the court theatre of the time. Masques, tilts and plays were occasions of some significance for the diplomatic community, for they were external signs of the power of the Stuart realm, and the Florentine agents who took up their residence in London during the course of the century were careful to note when such events took place, how well they came off and who was invited to them.

Scholars familiar with the lesser lights of the 1830s and forties will recall the name of Felix Pyat. A lithograph executed in the 1850s by the designer Nadar (Félix Tournachon) and depicting the best-known Romantics, shows Pyat shoulder to shoulder with the greats, Chateaubriand, Hugo, Dumas, Vigny, Lamartine, Béranger, Heine, and others, as their youthful associate. Today he evokes incidental remembrance as the Berrichon companion of George Sand and Jules Sandeau and, according to his own reminiscences, the person who converted Eugène Suë into a socialist writer. In his day Pyat enjoyed prominence as a journalist and especially as a writer of melodrama, or, as he called it, ‘people's theater’.

‘Our two best men actors were not indeed chosen by chance, for one was a stage-struck solicitor's clerk and the other a working man who had toured Ireland in a theatrical company managed by a Negro.’ With these arrogant and misleading words, W. B. Yeats chose not to name to the Royal Academy of Sweden the two men who trained the original Abbey Theatre Company: the brothers Frank and William Fay. No one now credits Yeats's account, but a scholarly history of the Fays' work for the theatre has yet to be written, in part because the Irish theatre movement itself is only just emerging from the regions of anecdote and gossip, but in part also because of the dominance of the readily available material by the Fays' denigrator, Yeats himself. Thus, the best account of the stage-craft of the early Abbey, James W. Flannery's book W. B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre, sets the poet at the heart of the Irish dramatic movement, and although it is admitted to be ‘unjust and erroneous’ to dismiss the Fays' views on theatre as ‘simply ignorant’, it is with the ‘literary and intellectual’ values of Yeats's plays, and their stage-worthiness, that Flannery is primarily concerned. No other published study approaches the thoroughness and intelligence of Flannery's and the brothers Fay continue to suffer the penalties of modesty, inarticulateness, and partial failure.

Edward Albee's play All Over clearly is about death and dying. It is literally a death watch: an unseen man lies dying, surrounded by his wife, mistress, best friend, children, doctor, and nurse; they talk around him and about him; at the end of the play, the man dies. It is a drama, as Richmond Crinkley has observed, ‘in which nothing much happens … a prolonged doldrums, measured by the apocalypses which don't occur, by the conflicts which are never resolved, and by the rhythms which are repetitive rather than dynamic’. Like Albee's earlier avantgarde Box and Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, All Over utilizes an entropic vocabulary, employs similar primary themes and motifs, and gives the nihilistic impression – as its title aptly indicates – of being all over before the action has even begun. Unfortunately, most critics who saw the play's production when All Over opened in New York in March, 1971, applauded Albee's ingenious choice of title – but with an ironic twist. As far as they were concerned, the sooner the play's run was all over the better; All Over was denounced as – to give just a quick sampling – ‘deadly dull’, ‘an arrogant display piece, puffed up with sophomoric diction’, ‘self-indulgent’, ‘a depressing event in an enigmatic career’, and a ‘Death Prattle’.

There are few Tibetan manuscripts which give instruction on the performance of religious dance. The printing blocks were generally kept under seal in the monasteries in Tibet, but one such blockprint may be seen in the museum for Volkerkunde in the collection of Nebesky-Wojkowitz in Vienna. It is a ‘cham dupe’ on the performance of the Kun tu tzangpoi cham as carried out by members of the Nyingmapa sect, consisting of 40 volumes.