“Many years ago, wnen I was looking over Piranesi's Antiquities of Rome” writes Thomas De Quincey in his essay on the effects of opium-eating, “Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called his Dreams, and which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever.” When De Quincey published his Confessions in 1821, the international reputation of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) was firmly established among men of letters and artists alike. The style and thematic content of Piranesi's remarkable etchings fascinated diverse members of the Romantic movement—from Walpole to Hugo, from Goethe to Gautier, from DeLoutherbourg to Sanquirico.

More than fifty years have elapsed since Worcester College Library, Oxford, acquired Thomas Killigrew's copy of the 1664 folio of his own plays. Almost all the plays are annotated in Killigrew's hand. Only two of them—The Princess and The Prisoner escaped his pencil entirely. The two parts of Cicilia and Clorinda were untouched except for a preliminary instruction to his copyist. Claricilla was subjected to cuts totalling less than 250 lines, but significant directions were added in manuscript to the final act. All the remaining plays were revised with varying degrees of severity.

If George Farquhar knew, as these lines from his prologue to David Crauford's Courtship A-la-Mode indicate, the futility of trying to bolster the popularity of a bad play by its prologue, his career as a prologist and epilogist must have reinforced his scepticism. Besides the five prologues and four epilogues he wrote for his own plays, Farquhar wrote at least three prologues and two epilogues for other authors' plays, plus two occasional prologues and one occasional epilogue, a total of ten known prologues and seven epilogues.

In the late eighteenth century, and with increasing momentum in the early nineteenth, the minor theatres in London steadily challenged the monopoly of the two patent houses—with great ingenuity in circumventing several Licensing Acts; with highly imaginative and lively (albeit generally unsophisticated) bills; and with eager support from the workers, flocking to the capital as part of the industrial age, for whom the minor theatres provided escape. By the time Planché's “Mother Drama” admitted confusion about her sons “Legitimate Drama” and “Illegitimate Drama” on the stage of the Olympic Theatre on 16 April 1838, the minor theatres had prevailed.

Robert Barker of Edinburgh patented the panorama process on 19 June 1787 and opened the first panorama in London in 1792. Robert Fulton, the American inventor, obtained the patent to import the panorama to Paris at the end of 1799. Fulton opened the Paris panorama in 1800, but shortly thereafter ceded the patent to James Thayer. By the summer of 1800 there were two panorama rotundas in operation in a passage off the Boulevard Montmartre. At the end of 1802 a third rotunda was constructed in the Jardin des Capucines, Boulevard de la Chausée d'Antin.

For those interested in the activities of those great Italian theatre artists, the Bibiena family, the early work of Ferdinando, founder of this prestigious group of stage designers and theatre architects, is still not fully documented. Although Ferdinando was identified as “Pittore di Corte” to the Farnese Dukes of Parma between 1680 and 1708 by Giampetro Zannotti, his first biographer in 1739, information concerning his early theatrical activities is still meager. It is generally assumed that Ferdinando began his theatrical career with his work for the Farnese wedding festival in Parma in 1690.

The editors of A Biographical Dictionary of Actors … in London, 1660–1800 have overlooked an episode in the life of the popular late-Restoration actress Elizabeth Watson Boman which may help explain her rapid rise to the position of a principal actress in the United Company. Thomas Southerne tells us that after the death of her father in 1691, Elizabeth Watson was adopted and trained as a player by the great actor Thomas Betterton. However, from new evidence it appears that the childless Thomas and Mary Betterton, who often acted as surrogate parents to young actresses and the orphaned children of friends, had assumed the roles of Elizabeth's guardians before this date, perhaps as early as 1686.

Students of the eighteenth-century English theater are familiar with the bitter rivalry between Oliver Goldsmith and Hugh Kelly. The two had been friends until January 1768, when Kelly's False Delicacy and Goldsmith's The Good Natur'd Man opened within a week of each other. The Good Natur'd Man was moderately successful, but whatever satisfaction Goldsmith might otherwise have taken in this fact was marred by the overwhelming popularity of Kelly's comedy. To add to Goldsmith's discomfiture was the chagrin of having had one scene in his play hissed off the stage because of its low humor. In large measure, the reception given Goldsmith's first comedy influenced his intentions in his second: She Stoops to Conquer is an example of “laughing” comedy, deliberately set against the sentimental variety written by Kelly.

Five years ago we launched a major theatre research project, “The London Stage 1800-1900: A Calendar of Performances,” with the ambitious goal of recording every important fact about every performance on the London stage in the nineteenth century. Our experience with archives, source materials, participants, and funding agencies has suggested that a reorganization and redefinition of the project, with identification of discrete phases and segments of the work, will make it more manageable and attractive, even if this means a delay in the completion of the full daily calendar that remains our ultimate goal.

Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume are editing the Coke theatre papers from the original MSS at Harvard and elsewhere. Most of the papers concern the introduction of Italian opera into England at the Haymarket theatre, 1705-1714. They include letters, box-office reports, orchestra rosters, protests to the Lord Chamberlain, financial demands, contracts, lists of tradesmen's bills, etc. The collection (once owned by James Winston, and partially transcribed by him in BL Add. 38,607) was dispersed at auction in 1876. Another incomplete nineteenth-century transcription is now in the New York Public Library. From the 1876 Sale Catalogue, however, we know of about a dozen documents of which we lack any copy at all—documents by W. Armstrong, Barton Booth, Dieupart, Thomas Doggett, Motteux, Margarita de l'Epine, Lord Mohun, the Duke of Shrewsbury (Charles Talbot, 1660-1718), and an affadavit of 7 January 1714 signed by Wilks and Cibber.