In preparing this paper I wrote, among others, to David Lees, Edward Gordon Craig's photographer son. In reply to my request for help, he wrote: ‘EGG and his schoob:[the final consonant underlined in red] this plural leaves me a bit surprised, for I have always known of just one school, that being “The School for the Art of the Theatre” started at the Arena Goldoni in Florence, on March 1913.’ He goes on to refer to A Living Theatre which is primarily concerned with the School in Florence. He concludes the paragraph by writing: ‘As for the schools – in the plural – as I said in the beginning, I know of no other school beside this one’.

In 1699, James Wright's Historica Histrionica … In a Dialogue on Plays and Players chronicled the troubles of the London theatrical community after the Civil War, during which it had supported the Royalists almost to a man. Wright's character Trueman, in the spirit of Dryden's and Dennis' spokesmen, tells his compatriot Lovewit that

Afterwards in Oliver's time, they used to act privately, three or four Miles, or more, out of Town, now here, now there, sometimes Noblemens Houses, in particular Holland-house at Kensington, where Nobility and Gentry who met (but in no great Numbers) used to make a Sum for them, each giving a broad Peice, or the like.

Stage speech, like the other techniques of acting, such as gesture, movement, and the interpretation of character, has always been subject to the theatrical conventions of an age. The conventions, while superficially based on current fads and fashions are on a more profound level the result of an underlying creative method reflecting commonly held views about the correct or ‘natural’ methods of imitating nature on the stage. Nothing demonstrates the enormous changes in stage speech over the last hundred years more vividly than the few existing recordings made by actors who had most of their training and their careers in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.

Playgoers needed no special incentive to attend the opening of T. W. Robertson's Caste at the Broadway Theatre in New York on 5 August 1867. The same author's Ours had been the hit of the previous New York season, and the enthusiastic reception of his latest domestic comedy in London heralded its American appearance. A few days before the première, however, Broadway manager Barney Williams received an unwelcome piece of extra publicity: a temporary injunction against the forthcoming production had been granted by the New York Supreme Court to Lester Wallack, actor-manager of the renowned Wallack's Theatre. Although the essential facts of the subsequent hearing have been accurately preserved in Odell's Annals, the case deserves to be reopened and examined more carefully. To contemporary observers, the proceedings revealed the court's inability and unwillingness to protect the work of a respected English dramatist. Yet events following the judge's decision ultimately won for Robertson and Wallack the vindication denied by the court, and the case is now remarkable as a judicial ‘last stand’ against the legitimate rights of foreign authors.

John Banvard was a nineteenth-century adventurer, painter, poet, and theatre owner. Born in 1815 in New York City, he was forced to leave home at fifteen years of age when his father died and left the family penniless. He followed an older brother to Louisville, Kentucky, where he worked as an apothecary's helper and amateur artist. In 1833 he joined the Chapman Family as a scenic artist on the Floating Theatre, also known as Chapman's Ark, America's first showboat. This experience inspired Banvard to operate his own showboats and display his landscape paintings.