The theory of literature expounded by Rene Wellek and Austin Warren in 1942 embraces, if somewhat gingerly, the drama. The authors acknowledge – in the apparent afterthought of an endnote – that ‘the whole tendency of dramaturgic doctrine is against any judgment of a play divorced from … its stagecraftness or theaterness’. But in the body of their work, they treat drama as one form of narrative fiction, at one point approaching and then retreating from any substantial consideration of the ‘distinction between play and story’.

One of the most consistently overlooked topics in Elizabethan theatre history is the internal organization of the acting companies. Modern scholarship has considerably enlarged our knowledge of the public and private playhouses, and of certain aspects of acting and staging, but we remain woefully ignorant of the way in which the actors went about the actual business of producing their plays. Our ignorance in these matters is the more surprising in that a substantial amount of primary evidence relating to production management and finance has long been known to exist in the so-called ‘diary’ and papers of Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn. Whereas the relatively less accessible material relating to the theatres has been subjected to increasingly sophisticated analysis by various commentators in this century, Henslowe's diary remains a curiously neglected document.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, but especially from the late seventies onwards, several internationally renowned actors or companies presented their Shakespeare productions in the main cities of Flanders. Undoubtedly, they provided an important impetus to the creation of a Shakespeare tradition in Flemish cultural life. In the present article I wish to draw attention to the successful performances which the greatest Italian interpreters of Shakespeare, Ernesto Rossi and Tommaso Salvini, gave in Flanders and which hitherto have been left unnoticed.

When Basil Dean died in 1978 at the age of ninety, his death broke a link, though not the last, with one of the most important stage productions of the 1920s. The history of that performance and of the play itself is a complex one; it tells us a great deal about the problems of matching poetry to the modern theatre. For among Dean's major achievements was the production of Hassan.

With the opening in the year 1908 of the Bat theatre (Letuchaya Mysh') in Moscow and the Crooked Mirror (Krivoe Zerkalo) in St Petersburg, intimate theatres of ‘small forms’ made their first commercial appearance in Russia. Inspired in part by the cabaret theatres and caféschantants of Paris, Berlin and other Western capitals, these new theatrical undertakings soon established themselves as an alternative to the regular dramatic and operatic theatres. Beginning as tiny chamber theatres intended primarily for the bourgeois intelligentsia, the Crooked Mirror, and to a lesser extent the Bat, developed into genuine aesthetic theatres of parodox and wit. The Crooked Mirror in particular sought to entertain by satirizing and parodying stale conventions and stultifying routine prevalent in society and in the arts. The repertoires of these theatres consisted entirely of miniature forms – a combination of one-act plays and separate variety numbers with music and dancing. One important innovation to which both theatres contributed was the introduction to the Russian stage of the figure of the ‘conférencier’ or compère who, like his French predecessors, had the task of linking the various items of an evening's programme by means of witty, topical dialogue, innuendo and spontaneous asides. Nikita Baliev, the founder of the Bat, made a speciality of this.