Perhaps the most neuralgic issue in the early modern debate between professional religion and professional theatre was the place of women. Clerical critics of the theatre consistently denounced the actress as the embodiment of all the corrupting influences inherent in the commedia. Seldom acknowledged, however, is that the energy fueling these rabid attacks on female performers oriented itself not only ad extra but also ad intra. At the same time that professional actresses were becoming more visible in various piazze and stanze throughout Italy and France, religiously inspired women were becoming more visible in the schools and hospitals sponsored by the reforming Roman Catholic Church. The animus of religious men toward the actress must be considered within a wider social context that also included a growing uneasiness with and hostility toward the more public activity of religious women intent on claiming their place in the apostolic mission of Roman Catholicism.

At the end of the 1940s, individuals and groups, as well as the government in Ireland, recognized the need for and benefits of arts enterprises. The Inter-Party coalition, which came to power in early 1948 (under John Costello), recognized the importance of tourism as an industry and the potential of theatre to attract foreign visitors to Ireland. In 1949, the Cultural Relations Committee of Ireland, operating under the auspices of the Minister for External Affairs, undertook production of a series of pamphlets designed “to give a broad, vivid, and informed survey of Irish life and culture.”1 In 1951, the Republic of Ireland established the Arts Council; the first National Fleadh (Festival) for traditional music was held in Mullingar; Liam Miller founded the Dolmen Press; and Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann (Traditional Irish Music Advisory) was established. Even after the 1951 election returned de Valera and Fianna Fáil to power, organizational infrastructures to support the arts continued to appear: the Irish tourist board (Bord Failte) and Gael-Linn (an organization to promote Irish language, literature, and culture) both debuted in 1952. Cork held its first International Choral and Folk Dance Festival and its first International Film Festival in 1953. Some of these developments may have anticipated the imminent inauguration of regular air passenger service to North America, but all responded to cultural opportunities precluded during what Ireland knows as the Emergency and other nations as World War II. These agencies and events all sought to project a positive, progressive image of Ireland. Most important, they all mark a departure from the isolationism that prevailed in Ireland before and during the Emergency and that characterized de Valera's tenure as Taoiseach in the 1930s and 1940s.

The theatrical map in London during the 1960s consisted of four notable theatrical companies: the English Stage Company, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre Company, and the Theatre Workshop. The first three companies, although somewhat transformed, fill major roles in British theatre to the present day. What happened to the fourth company, the Theatre Workshop? This question is all the more intriguing in light of the tribute current historical and critical accounts pay to the founder-director of this company, Joan Littlewood. Theatre critics and historians today view Littlewood as a major representative of radical theatre in the 1960s. Littlewood's position during her era, however, was quite a different story, and the tale of then versus the tale of now is a primer in theatre historiography. I will trace that tale in this essay by juxtaposing the diverse receptions she and her works have received during the past forty years.

In the last fifteen years, a growing number of theatre historians have examined the relation between the British stage and British Imperialism, suggesting that the theatre has both reflected and helped constitute modern colonialism.Articles examining theatrical orientalism and British Imperialism in Victorian and Edwardian periods include Michael Booth, “Soldiers of the Queen: Drury Lane Imperialism,” Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre, eds. Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), 3–20; Heidi J. Holder, “Melodrama, realism and empire on the British stage,” Acts of Supremacy: the British Empire and the stage, 1790–1930, eds. J.S. Bratton et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991),129–149; J.S. Bratton, “Theatres of war: the Crimea on the London stage 1854–5,” Performance and Politics in Popular Drama: Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theatre, Film and Television, 1800–1976, eds. David Bradby, Louis James, and Bernard Sharrat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 119–138; and J. Ellen Gainor, “Bernard Shaw and the Drama of Imperialism,” The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics, eds. Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinelt (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 56–74. John M. Mackenzie provides a thorough overview of nineteenth-century theatrical orientalism in Orientalism: History, theory and the arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 176–199, and Gary Jay Williams examines orientalist images of colonial expansion in Covent Garden's 1816 operatic adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), 76–92. While scholars have examined colonialism and theatre in a range of periods, studies of Renaissance theatre are particularly rich in this area. Examples include Paul Brown, “'This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine': The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism, ” in Political Shakespeare: essays in cultural materialism, eds. Jonathon Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 48–71; Kim F. Hall, “Sexual Politics and Cultural Identity in The Masque of Blackness,” in The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics, eds. Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinelt (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 3–18; Patricia Parker, “Fantasies of 'Race' and 'Gender': Africa, Othello and Bringing to Light, ” in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, eds. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), 84–100; and Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986). At the same time, there has been an equally prolific effort by historians of the human sciences, examining a host of disciplines whose emergence coincided with colonial expansion.See Felix Driver, “Geography's empire: histories of geographical knowledge,” Society and Space, 10 (1992), 23–40; Brian Hudson, “The New Geography and the New Imperialism: 1870–1918,” Antipode 9 (1977), 12–19; George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press-Macmillan, 1987); Billie Melman, Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); and Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Of course all of these works, like this essay, are indebted to Edward Said's Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books-Random House, 1979). If, as Talal Asad has asserted, “the colonial power structure made the object of anthropological study accessible and safe” Talal Asad, Introduction, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, ed. Talal Asad (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1973), 17. for the European researcher, it would seem by extension that this same power structure made the object of anthropological study accessible and safe to the British theatre-goer. As theatre historians have pointed out, British theatre managers have cited orientalist authorities ranging from Vivant Denon, who accompanied the French expedition in Egypt, to the press artists that accompanied British colonial armies.The Edinburgh Review attested to the popularity of Denon's Voyages dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte, asserting “Few publications, we believe, have ever obtained so extensive a circulation in the same space of time as these travels.” Cited in Patrick Conner, ed., The Inspiration of Egypt: Its Influence on British Artists, Travelers and Designers, 1700–1900 (Brighton: Brighton Museum, 1983), 29. Pieter van der Merwe argues in The Spectacular Career of Clarkson Stanfield 1793–1867 that Voyages soon became “the theatre's major source for Egyptian subjects” (Tyne and Wear County Council Museums, 1979), 89. I argue elsewhere that Augustus Harris's exhibition of artifacts and illustrations lent by soldiers and press artists in the Sudan Campaign was intended to lend credibility to his depiction of the region in his concurrent production. See “From Geography to Landscape: Imperial Theatre and the Domestication of Exotic Space” in Land Scape Theatre: Views of the Twentieth Century, eds. Una Chaudhuri and Elinor Fuchs (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming). It was not simply that a new body o f research generated in colonialism's shadow provided raw material for Eastern plays, this research also served to “license curiosity” about the Orient (to borrow Nicholas Thomas's languageNicholas Thomas, “Licensed Curiosity: Cook's Pacific Voyages,” The Cultures of Collecting, eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 116–136.), transforming the theatre's detailed representations of the East into a scholarly and respectable undertaking that seemed, in some ways, allied with Europe's Imperial goals.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, there was a major effort in the United States to remove child performers from professional stages. The campaign began in New York State with the passage of An Act to Prevent and Punish Wrongs to Children (1876), prohibiting children from a variety of performance venues, and subsequently grew into a nationwide crusade. The movement was spearheaded by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC) and its leader, Elbridge T. Gerry. The intense response of the theatre industry resulted in a protracted political struggle.

This article is a development of a paper submitted to last year's ASTR conference at City University of New York as part of a panel discussion on the legacy of the 1960s. That paper was prepared to the conference brief that submissions should involve some reflexive investigation of research methods and scholarly practices. Reviewing existing material written on the causal links between Situationist theory and theatre practice in the 1960s counterculture in England, I began to question the “fit” between these two areas. A critical narrative concerning the development of a post-Brechtian theatrical style in the work of a generation of English political dramatists — such as Howard Brenton, Trevor Griffiths, and David Edgar — during the late 1960s and early 1970s has come to read Situationism as a dominant shaping force. On closer examination, however, this relationship is neither as clear nor as convincing as this now commonplace critical model would suggest. Additionally, neglected and underreported instances and examples — some of which are explored in this article — seem to tell contrasting, or more complex, stories about the forms and practices of English theatre in the counterculture. Investigation of some of these issues has led me to consider why it is that particular historical orthodoxies develop to account for movements and moments in cultural and performance history. What happens to make a small and, at the time, not widely published or read group of theorists such as the Situationists take on a retrospectively key position in scholarly accounts of cultural history? Thus, this article investigates the transmission of Situationist ideas in English theatre practice to conclude that there may be a broader, more idiosyncratic, history to read against dominant accounts of influence and causation.

Early in the twentieth century such a bias did not exist in the United States, especially on the New York stage, and Spanish plays enjoyed an extraordinary wave of popularity. Works by Benavente, the husband and wife team of Gregorio (1881–1947) and María (1874–1974) Martínez Sierra, the Álvarez Quintero brothers (Serafín, 1871–1938 and Joaquín, 1873–1944), and, somewhat later, Federico García Lorca (1898–1936), reached the English-language stage quickly and often with considerable success. In 1920 the Theatre Guild staged Benavente's The Passion Flower (La malquerida, translated by John Garrett Underhill); this rural tragedy of a dysfunctional family was an immediate box office hit. The Martínez Sierras' The Cradle Song (Canción de cuna, translated by Underhill) had its American premiere at the Times Square Theater in 1921 and later became a trademark production for Eva Le Gallienne and her widely respected Civic Repertory company.According to Julia S. Price, Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory “was not exactly Off-Broadway” but shared its “credo in regard to the presentation of the new, unusual play.” The Off-Broadway Theater (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1962), 18. María Martínez Sierra's name appeared as co-author of The Cradle Song on Civic Repertory's opening night program, 24 January 1927, but her contribution to this and other plays has often been overlooked. For a full discussion of María's authorship, see Patricia O'Connor's Gregorio and María Martínez Sierra, Twayne World Authors Series 412 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977). Burns Mantle chose the sentimental comedy of a foundling raised by convent nuns as one of the 1926–27 season's best plays.Robert Burns Mantle, The Best Plays of 1926–27 and the Year Book of the Drama in America (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1927). Another Martínez Sierra work, The Kingdom of God (El reino de Dios, translated by Helen and Harley Granville-Barker) was chosen as the inaugural production of the Ethel Barrymore Theatre and made the Burns Mantle list for 1928–29.Mantle, The Best Plays of 1928–29 and the Year Book of the Drama in America (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1929). In a single season, 1929–30, there were New York productions of no fewer than three comedies by the Álvarez Quinteros. In 1933, besides New York stagings of additional Martínez Sierra plays, The Cradle Song was made into a movie by Paramount Pictures.The film starred Dorothea Weick and Evelyn Venable. “Reviews uniformly praised the sensitivity of the stars and the beauty of the photography as they welcomed Cradle Song to the charmed circle of filmed masterpieces of modern international drama.” O'Connor, Gregorio and María Martínez Sierra, 36. Frederico García Lorca's Blood Wedding (Bodas de sangre; titled Bitter Oleander in the translation by José A. Weissberger) reached the American audience in 1935, a scant two years after its Spanish premiere.

Theatre historians have long acknowledged John Weaver as the father of English pantomime. In 1985, however, the foremost Weaver scholar, Richard Ralph, noted that no one had systematically studied Weaver's pantomime descriptions, printed in The Loves of Mars and Venus, nor had classical influences upon Weaver been sufficiently investigated.1 Scholarship in the past fifteen years has not filled these gaps; thus, this article begins an examination of these two areas of Weaver's work. They are especially significant because the pantomime descriptions and classical influences reveal that Weaver was a scholar-artist, a rare combination in his era, whose theories and practices deepened the interplay among the arts in early eighteenth-century England.2

David Garrick might be considered the Elvis of his age. His image appeared everywhere, not only in paintings, statues, and engravings, but on jugs, tiles, matchboxes, watch fobs, textiles, loving-cups—almost anything to which an image could be attached. If the eighteenth century had worn T-shirts, undoubtedly he would have been depicted there as well. A theatrical impresario and popularizer of Shakespeare, Garrick seems to have known everyone in the artistic and literary circles of the time, and to have been recognized by thousands more. One might say that he single-handedly created the Shakespeare “industry.” He produced twenty-four of the plays, acted in nineteen Shakespearean roles, and orchestrated the great Shakespeare Jubilee at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769, the first event that made that sleepy country town a tourist mecca. Today scholars who want to work on Garrick make their pilgrimage to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., site of the largest collection in the world of Garrick manuscripts and related items, including a ticket for the Jubilee Oratorio, signed by George Garrick, the actor's brother (Fig. 1), and the intricately carved Rococo chair made for Garrick's Temple of Shakespeare around 1756.

In November 1991, Brown University announced the addition of the Sidney P. Albert-G. B. Shaw Collection to its Special Collections. The purchase of the private collection of Sidney P. Albert was accomplished with the support and encouragement of the then president of Brown, Vartan Gregorian. At the same time, and upon Albert's recommendation, Brown acquired the correspondence and other documents relating to Shaw's dealings with his American publisher, Dodd, Mead & Company (and, by extension, other publishers). An inaugural exhibit of material from the Albert Collection (“Quintessential Shaw”) was mounted in Brown's John Hay Library, 5 May –28 July, 1995, curated by former Brown Curator for Printed Books, Jennifer Lee. To celebrate the opening of the exhibit and to mark the addition of the Albert-Shaw Collection to Brown's holdings, the Friends of Brown Library hosted a dinner-reception on 5 May with readings from Shaw plays and a brief talk (“100 Years Ago: G.B.S. in 1895”) by Albert, followed by a public lecture (“Shaw's Utopia”) delivered by Shaw biographer Michael Holroyd.

Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 1567–1642 rigorously explores the manner in which light functioned in early modern English playhouses and makes that information available to a readership that does not require specialist knowledge in either Renaissance theatre history or lighting technology to understand the text's contribution to both. Tracking down all of the historically relevant data available, Graves opens up a subject that has long been dominated by assumptions and conjecture. He develops as thorough a picture as possible of how light served both the theatres and the drama of the period.

In the 1970s, during the first major wave of stage-centered Shakespeare scholarship, Shakespeare Quarterly started dedicating so much space to reviews of contemporary Shakespeare productions that it took up a whole issue. Space pressures created a dilemma for editors and contributors: should the reviews document (listing personnel, cuts and alterations, and running time) describe (concept, tone, unusual line readings, and business) or assess (individual actors and overall effectiveness)? That wave, and the annual dedicated issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, passed (with another journal, Shakespeare Bulletin, taking up the banner). One legacy of that era has been the continuing efforts of the World Shakespeare Bibliography, published annually as a special number of Shakespeare Quarterly, to record as much as it can about Shakespeare in the theatre — not just scholarly books and articles, but contemporary productions and journalistic reviews.

Stage directions have long been used to “prove” one theory or another concerning the staging of plays in Shakespearean playhouses. With the remarkable increase in works on Shakespeare in performance that have paralleled the opening of the Globe reconstruction in London, it was inevitable that the examination of these intriguing indicators would increase. A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama 1580–1642 presents us with the raw materials that will make the process of researching stage directions infinitely easier for all scholars. The down side of this is that it is going to be a lot harder to “overlook” evidence that does not fit the theories we want to propose. Starting with The Three Ladies of London by Robert Wilson, a play written in 1581, despite the dictionary's claim of 1580, the authors read through some 500 plays known or at least likely to be “linked to the London professional theatres” up to their closing in 1642. (A complete list is provided on pp. 267–284. Some of these plays were published as late as 1661 but were included if it seemed to the authors that they were “certainly written earlier.”) From this Herculean effort, Thompson compiled a database of over 22,000 stage directions and, using criteria largely developed by Alan Dessen in Recovering Shakespeare's Theatrical Vocabulary (1995), they put together this dictionary of over 900 terms. Each word is defined by its usage and cross referenced. When we look at “pen,” for example, we do not get a definition of what a pen is, we get “a property almost always called for with ink and/or paper.” This is followed by representative quotations from the plays OED-style, though the authors “have not attempted to trace the evolution of the terms” because, surprisingly, “for the bulk of the period up through the 1630's, . . . continuity rather than evolution appears to be the norm.” The quotations are extensive but not exhaustive. When there are several hundred examples of the usage of an entry like “run, running” (260 examples), only a representative sampling is provided. If there are only a limited number of examples for a term, all are listed. In both cases the examples are provided in “roughly” chronological order. A special entry for “permissive stage directions” list all those entries that “leave key entries indeterminate” as with “They fight a good while and then breath” from Orlando Furioso.

It is a curious comment on the evolution of American theatre scholarship when a reissue retains nearly its original force. That, however, seems the case with Benjamin McArthur's Actors and American Culture, 1880 – 1920, originally published in 1984 and out of print for several years. McArthur was considerably ahead of the pack in 1984 and drew together a wide range of generally thorough research, and the work thus remains a principal, and the most thorough, overview of a crucial era. Since Iowa's is a reissue rather than a new edition, hindsight prompts more exceptions than on first issue, but its basic direction and impulse reaffirm the book as a valuable, if slightly problematic, resource.

William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his Wild West show have not wanted for ink. There are Cody's own autobiographical accounts of his frontier and his theatrical adventures, Don Russell's well-researched standards on Cody's life and the Wild West shows, Sarah Blackstone's examination of the economic basis of the Wild West show in general, Joseph G. Rosa and Robin May's pictorial biography of Cody, Paul Reddin's overview of Wild West images, and a host of other, related books. In fact, there have been so many books written about “Buffalo Bill” Cody and Wild West shows, it is somewhat remarkable that Joy Kasson has found such a productive new angle on the western hero and his dramatic presentations.

Recent decades have seen a proliferation of critical discourses challenging an ostensible immutability of meaning and valuation in Shakespeare's texts, as the worlds they represent and even the manuscripts themselves are increasingly negotiated as ambivalent cultural constructs. Poststructural figurations of the instability of language and systems of representation inform Brian Vickers's and Gary Taylor's considerations of how Shakespeare is continuously “remade” vis-a-vis ever-evolving philosophical and sociopolitical mores. Stephen Greenblatt's seminal explorations of historicity, “cultural poetics,” and the performance of power likewise continue to bear fruit in recent works such as David Scott Kastan's Shakespeare After Theory. Invaluable as these branches of critical inquiry have been to countless scholars and practitioners alike (myself included on both counts), there is nonetheless a potential inattention to the core theatricality or playability of a text once it becomes embroiled in these larger discourses. Certainly, there are numerous branches of performance theory which address the performative act itself: Marvin Carlson's explorations of theatrical dialogism, Bert States's work on phenomenology in the theatre, or Patrice Pavis' postmodern ruminations on the plurality of significance in a critically self-reflective mise-en-scène. Yet critical considerations of individual plays in performance remain the exception rather than the rule.

The Great Wall of language that separates Chinese from Western theatre studies has been a challenging wall to climb until now. The hopeful climber must know both classical and modern Chinese (which are pretty much different languages), as well as, ideally, the strange landscape of postmodern theatre studies. Faye Chunfang Fei's book tries to make some of the vast Chinese literary tradition available to theatre scholars, as well as to sinologists. This is a daunting task and we should applaud her for taking it on. As a collection of interesting essays, the anthology is a good read, competently translated, and provides some invaluable and little-known texts. However, no historical anthology is objective, and what gets put in or left out determines how the history of the genre (and in this case, the nation) is constructed. This collection constructs a potentially misleading history for Chinese theatre, and thus unfortunately gets stuck halfway across the wall.

The first question to pose of Arthur Bloom's fine new biography of Joseph Jefferson is, Why did it take so long? Not Bloom's work, which has been long awaited for the obvious reason of its exhaustive research, but, rather, why has it taken until the new millennium for any scholarly biography to be written of arguably America's most popular comedian of the nineteenth century? Modern studies of Edwin Booth, Edwin Forrest, and Charlotte Cushman have appeared alongside hosts of books on lesser figures, but, for Jefferson, readers had to be content with appreciations by friends such as William Winter, Francis Wilson, daughter-in-law Eugenie Paul Jefferson, and granddaughter Eleanor Farjeon. And, of course, there was the Autobiography. That most delightful of all theatrical memoirs may explain the absence of biographical treatment. It seemed to be all there, a life retold with more charm than any historian could muster.

Thomas Rimer's Fall 1992 Asian Theatre Journal article, “What More Do We Need to Know about the Nô ?” notes that, despite the blossoming of interest in the nô during the decade of the 1980s, and, despite having the nô as a tradition and living performance to both study and enjoy, scholars of the nô miss a “certain understanding of the tradition in the larger perspective” (217). Though perhaps not responding directly to Professor Rimer's concern, Zeami and the Nô Theatre in the World successfully places nô in a larger context of theory, aesthetics, and performance. The editors of this volume, Benito Ortolani and Samuel Leiter, both widely published and highly respected scholars of traditional Japanese theatre, note in their introduction that Zeami (1363–1443), the acknowledged founder of the nô, has “become increasingly well known as one of the great figures in the history of world theatre,” and they “wish not only to encourage readers to more effectively appreciate and understand nô drama through increased access to his ideas, but to recognize Zeami's place in the pantheon of theatrical thinker artists as one whose insights are surprisingly pertinent on a universal plane.” The focus of the text is firmly fixed on Zeami as the creator of an art form that is at once ancient and modern, Japanese and universal. Despite the brevity of Zeami and the Nô Theatre in the World, the introduction by Ortolani and Leiter and the eleven essays they edited for inclusion in the volume attain the editors' stated goals, and, in so doing, provide a valuable resource for generalist and specialist alike.

The past two decades have witnessed an increasing interest in the work of Susan Glaspell. C. W. E. Bigsby's collection of her plays, published in 1988, introduced many readers to her work for the first time. Reviewing the collection, critic Michael Goldman called Glaspell “the only playwright of her generation worthy of comparison with O'Neill.” Since that time, essays about Glaspell's work have been published in multiple books: Mary E. Papke published the very thorough and useful Susan Glaspell: A Research and Production Sourcebook (1993); a lengthy analysis of Glaspell's plays, with particular emphasis on their expressionistic qualities, appeared in my book American Women Playwrights, 1900 – 1950 (1995); and there have been academic conferences devoted to Glaspell's work. Now Barbara Ozieblo has written an excellent critical biography that will be of value to theatre scholars.