How does a theatre historian account for the participation of Edwardian actor-managers on the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre (SMNT) committee? The SMNT, founded in 1908 with the expressed purpose of creating an operational national theatre by the tercentenary of Shakespeare's death in 1916, was the first actual institutional manifestation of the National Theatre in England, the product of a movement that had begun as early as 1848. The actor-managers, individual star actors who leased their own theatres, located their own private sources of finance, and wielded complete artistic and managerial control over their theatrical enterprises, embodied a system of theatrical organization that the National Theatre was designed to bypass and replace. In an age of free-market theatrical commerce, the SMNT wished to be free of commercial pressure; in an age of speculative finance, the SMNT wished to base its budget on an endowed trust fund; in an age that glorified the integrity and authority of the individual theatrical manager, the SMNT called for a theatre governed by committee.

In the fall or winter of 1661, Chapoton's tragédie à machines, La Descente d'Orphée aux Enfers, was produced at the Phoenix or Cockpit in Drury Lane by a visiting French Company. The performance is recorded in a rare pamphlet, The Description of the Great Machines of the Descent of Orpheus into Hell. Presented by the French Commedians at the Cockpit in Drury-lane, a copy of which survives in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. This pamphlet consists of a resumé in both English and French of Chapoton's work. Its purpose was to allow an English audience to follow the opera, which was performed in French.

It is commonplace to observe that there are no mothers in the casts of Spanish Golden Age comedias. There are rare exceptions, but in such cases the mother is young. For example, in Tirso de Molina's La prudencia en la mujer (Prudence in Woman), the queen Dona María de Molina is the mother of a small child. As a general rule, the female characters of the Spanish comedia are young damas, or ladies. They are looked after by fathers and brothers, by male servants, or by young female servants, but not by a mother, an aunt, or even an older servant.

The health and vigour of a theatre in a provincial town in North America in the nineteenth century may in part be judged from the dimensions and technical facilities of its building, the number of competent performers, and the support of its patrons. Late in 1825, Montreal acquired a well-equipped theatre with a professional company in residence, and one would have assumed that the publicity and excitement surrounding the new enterprise would ensure its success during its first year of operation. The Theatre Royal, however, did not draw full houses even though its management had spared no expense “in obtaining the first performers or in getting up the most attractive pieces.” The small size of the city's population, the linguistic division of the province into English and French sections, the opposition of the Roman Catholic Church to the theatre, the shareholders' preference for a legitimate theatre in English over the more popular combination of circus and light drama, and the political strife engendered by the bitter English-French conflict in Quebec in the 1820s can be cited here as some of the factors that doomed the theatre in Montreal. Some of these — the small size of the town, for instance — made theatre building an unprofitable business in many provincial centres in North America; the elements of language, politics, and religion, however, were peculiar to Quebec. The prospects of theatre managers in Montreal at this time were governed by highly complex forces that did not influence the work of others trying to start provincial theatres elsewhere in Canada and the United States. Focusing on the demographic, linguistic, and religious features of Quebec in 1825–26, this study examines the difficulties of operating an English-language theatre in a country without a common culture and also stresses economic mismanagement as a factor in the failure of the Theatre Royal.

The nineteenth-century English speaking stage was the setting for some of the most significant and interesting productions of Shakespeare's plays. It was the age of both Keans, Macready, Phelps, the Booths, Beerbohm Tree, Irving, and Poel, to mention only a few of the innovators and stars. As usual, Shakespeare was the most popular and frequently produced playwright in the language, but performances were not limited to the traditional stage. Hundreds were presented as platform readings in most of the major cities of England and America, where the halls and lecture rooms were frequently filled. The readings were given by stars and neophytes alike: Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, William Charles Macready, Sarah Siddons, Charles Kemble, and others whose names are barely footnotes to the history of the theatre. The most accomplished, popular, and preeminent among these was Frances Anne (Fanny) Kemble, Charles' daughter and second generation to the great acting family. Her career and success as an actress are well documented, but comparatively little has been written about her reading performances of Shakespeare — an activity that occupied her for nearly a quarter of a century. For most of the others, the readings were spinoffs from their stage work, favors to friends, experiments or brief encounters; for Fanny reading was a serious business, indeed her very subsistence.

The last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed the beginning of Mexico's “Golden Age.” During this time Mexico received bounteous foreign capital, industry and agriculture flourished, railroads pushed their way south from the United States, the ancient reales de minas of the Spaniards reopened, and smelters began to “belch their yellow fumes into the desert air.” The valuable silver, gold, copper, lead, and zinc flowed north to feed the rapidly expanding commerce and industry ofthe United States, and many domestic products found a ready market abroad. The capital city was cleaned up and modernized, electric lights and streetcars were everywhere, and many new buildings arose, such as the elaborate Palace of Fine Arts. Porfirio Díaz, Mexico's president during these years, surrounded himself with able científicos, a group of brilliant lawyers and economists who “worshipped at the new and glittering shrine of Science and Progress” and who as cultivated men brought, along with Mexico's material improvements, cultural ornaments as well. They encouraged poetry, novels, art, and music, all of which thrived in Mexico City. The theatre was just as much a part of that cultural growth as the other arts. Beyond question the economic and cultural development of Mexico during the regime of Don Porfirio was great.

Almost all of the major characters in Chekhov's plays are ambiguous; their interpretation poses no small task for directors and actors. The figure of Nina Zarechnaya in The Seagull, in particular, has been construed in many ways. She has been seen as a soaring seagull; a tumbled, tousled bird; a talentless country girl; an emerging artist of promise; a high-reaching neurotic wreck; a future actress of Arkadina's vein; and so on. Because of this interpretive ambiguity, Chekhov was often asked to clarify his position on one or another of his characters. In written form he did so explicitly only once, in a letter to Suvorin in connection with his Ivanov performance in St. Petersburg. In this letter and others as well, it is clear that Chekhov's principle was “better to blur the portrait than overdo it.” The recollections of Stanislavsky, Nemirovich-Danchenko, and many actors of the Moscow Art Theatre indicate, moreover, that most of the time Chekhov confined himself mainly to seemingly insignificant remarks if asked about a role. Stanislavsky remembers, for example, that when, after a rehearsal, he asked Chekhov to critique his portrayal of Trigorin, Chekhov said, “Wonderful! Listen, it was wonderful! Only you need torn shoes and checked trousers.” After these sorts of typically oblique remarks directors and actors were puzzled and would long ponder the hidden meaning of the playwright's comments. The famous actor of many Chekhov plays, V.I. Kachalov, also wrote in his memoirs about Chekhov's unwillingness to influence the actor straightforwardly.