In 1957 Richard Southern published a book dedicated “to the memory of Bertolt Brecht and to the Berliner Ensemble.” It was written, as he says in his Foreword, from the point of view “of a practising scene designer” enthusiastic about his “discovery of how the ‘new’ open stage demanded a new form of auditorium and implied a new form of theatre.” His book, while historical in subject, was a gesture towards “joining the avant-garde who stand on the threshold of a new world.” Since 1957 new worlds have come and gone. In contrast, The Medieval Theatre in the Round has become for some theatre historians a fixed star by which to plot their interpretations of the surviving evidence of late-medieval stagecraft.

Though records of medieval drama in Scandinavia are few and fragmentary, they allow us to trace there a tradition similar to that developing in much of Europe at this time. There are surviving examples of quasi-dramatic church ceremonies at Easter and Christmas, of early liturgical dramas such as the famous Quem quareitis, and of later, more elaborate resurrection plays and mysteries. There is a far greater development of dramatic production in Scandinavia after 1500, however, when the church drama of the middle ages gives way to the school drama of the Renaissance. Throughout northern Europe, the schools served as the centers for the establishment of a new style of drama. But nowhere was school drama so exclusively dominant as in Scandinavia where, in contrast to the rest of Europe, it served as the popular and court theatre of this period as well.

Near the end of his long career at the fairs, Alain-René Lesage wrote a play entitled L'Histoire de l'Opéra-Comique ou les Métamorphoses de la Foire which was presented at the St.-Laurent Fair, the theatre of Pontau, on the 27th of June, 1736. It had indeed been a metamorphosis that Lesage had seen in his twenty–four years with the forains, and in this, almost his last production, he wished “to give an idea of the different changes that the Opéra-Comiquc had suffered since its establishment up to the present time, and to demonstrate with what relentlessness the theatre had been persecuted by its rivals.” On the threshold of his retirement he recalled the various forms used by the actors to circumvent the restrictions and attacks of the Comédie Française and the Académie Royale de Musique.

For several years Edwin Booth had nurtured the idea of establishing an American counterpart to England's famous Garrick Club in London, and by January of 1888, when he had focused the idea well enough to broach the subject formally, he invited fifteen friends to become its “Incorporators,” among them such representatives of the arts and letters as Brander Matthews, Laurence Hutton, and Samuel L. Clemens. Within the year the idea became reality, and The Players Club at 16 Gramercy Park in New York was officially opened.