On 8 November 1755, at Drury Lane, Garrick introduced a French company performing Jean Georges Noverre’s ballet The Chinese Festival—to the mounting displeasure of a xenophobic audience, hissing, clapping and crying ‘No french Dancers’. By the fifth night a riot was underway, and the sixth night proved to be the last. A contemporary print depicts several members of the audience, one wielding a club, moving through the orchestra pit and up onto the stage. At either side of the forestage appears an ornamental barrier, and the stage boxes, just below the proscenium doors, are outlined by rows of spikes — largely symbolic, to judge from the ease with which they are being breached. The audience’s agitation is highlighted by the five chandeliers above the scene, four in parallel and another in the centre. Candles in pairs, four sets at either side of the downstage area, also record the artist’s attempt to indicate the full illumination of forestage and auditorium.

The illustration epitomizes a widely held view of the eighteenth-century theatre audience as an unruly mob, an image captured here for posterity on one of those occasions when an ordinarily vociferous audience became indignant over some perceived insult or other failure to defer to their tastes and preferences, and reacted accordingly. Over against such images should be placed depictions of other moments in which that same autocratic audience expressed its pleasure in universal laughter or applause, as in Hogarth’s robust representation of a London theatre audience in 1733. Both images are true, and equally characteristic of that open-hearted (if not open-minded) cohort of citizens from various walks of life who attended the theatre as often as they could and who insisted on being well entertained.

Liz Lochhead’s celebrated prologue to Mary, Queen of Scots got her Head Chopped Off (1989) provides an apposite epigraph to a history of twentieth-century Scottish theatre. The choric commentator, La Corbie, the crow, with whip in hand is a personification of the topic: ‘an interesting, ragged, ambiguous creature in her cold spotlight’. Her speech contains a series of oppositions, topographical (‘peatbog’ or ‘coal mine’), socio-economic (‘tenement’ or ‘merchant’s ha’’) and moral (‘hure hoose’ or ‘humble cot’). This may be seen as reflecting a pattern of binaries that has existed in Scottish theatre itself, and an analysis of its achievements and failures in representing a fluid set of national identities.

This chapter will trace the development of indigenous theatre in Scotland in the twentieth century, without ignoring the foreign influences that shaped it. The history may be divided into two main parts, the watershed being around 1950. Indigenous playwriting and production in the first part is largely amateur. In the second part an embryonic profession burgeoned into a major cultural industry, as a result of the introduction of state funding after World War Two, the creation of a professional training school for actors in 1950, and the promotion of Scottish dramatists, initially through radio, in the 1960s and 1970s.

In this chapter I will discuss Arabic and Persian philosophical trends as presented in texts mainly from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and their more recent continuation. Philosophical activity continued especially in the lands marked by the geopolitical boundaries of Persianate influence, centered in the land of Iran as marked since the Safavid period beginning in 1501. Of the philosophers in the earlier, formative period of Arabic philosophy, it was Avicenna whose works made the most direct and lasting impact on all subsequent philosophical trends and schools. The structure, techniques, and language of Avicenna’s philosophy - best exemplified in his two main works, al-Ishārāt wa al-tanbīhāt and al-Shifā' - define a holistic system against which all subsequent philosophical writings, in both Arabic and Persian, are measured. Avicenna’s philosophical texts give Arabic and Persian Peripatetic philosophy its technical language and methodology, as well as setting out a range of philosophical problems in semantics, logic, ontology, epistemology, and so on. Later trends must be regarded as refinements and developments from within philosophical texts already established by the twelfth century C.E.

1800 to 1843: tradition, innovation and regulation

Over the long period beginning with the restoration of King Charles II, the iron grip of the patent theatres on spoken-word performance, abetted by governmental oversight, had seriously impeded but not defeated the growth of theatres down through the late eighteenth century. Thanks in part to the vagueness of the laws related to burletta, as the new century began there were some ten theatres in operation in London, and by the end of the first decade fifteen.

The theatres in Drury Lane and Covent Garden were complemented by the opera house in the Haymarket, the King’s, the smaller theatre across the street, traditionally known as the Little Theatre (largely a summer venue), the Lyceum (built in 1771, converted to a theatre in 1794) and the Royalty in Wellclose Square, intermittently called the East London Theatre, burned in 1826 but swiftly rebuilt. Charles Dibdin’s hole-in-the-wall establishment, the Sans Souci, in the Strand near Southampton Street, lasted only from 1791 to 1796, but at his next venue, the New Sans Souci, in Leicester Square, he continued to charm audiences until 1804 with his idiosyncratic blend of songs and quasi-theatrical entertainment – meanwhile writing a five-volume history of the English stage. Earlier on, he had composed ballad operas such as ThePadlock, in which he created the role of Mungo, at Drury Lane in 1768. His one-man entertainment, Private Theatricals; or, Nature in Nubibus, which opened the first Sans Souci, offered such songs as ‘The Sailor’s Consolation’, ‘Roses and Lilies’, and ‘The Soldier’s Last Retreat’. Dibdin’s prolific output, amounting to hundreds of songs, contributed abundantly to popular pleasures of the time.

In the history of Western philosophy the role played by texts written in Arabic is crucial. This can be seen from the sheer volume of works that were translated (see the table that follows this chapter). We have hints of Arabic-speaking teachers of philosophy. Adelard of Bath (fl. 1116-50) speaks of his studia Arabica/Arabum studia (in reference to natural philosophy) and magistri, which he probably encountered in southern Italy and Sicily. Stephen of Pisa (fl. 1127), who wrote on cosmology in Antioch, expresses his debt to “a certain Arab.”Kamal al-Din ibn Yunus of Mosul (d. 1242), the greatest Muslim teacher of his time, in turn, boasted of Christians among his pupils; one of Ibn Yunus' pupils, Siraj al-Din Urmawi, became a member of Frederick II Hohenstaufen’s household and wrote a book on logic for him. Andrea Alpago (d. before 1546) acquired knowledge of Avicenna’s psychology from the Shī'ite scholar Muhammad ibn Makkī Shams al-Dīn al-Dimashqī (d. 1531) in Damascus. But it is through the surviving Arabic texts and their translations that we can best gauge the extent of the impact of Arabic philosophy. The works translated reflect the various genres current in Arabic.

In March 1660 the parliamentary general George Monck marched on London, restored to the Rump Parliament the members excluded in 1648, and thereby made possible the return of the King, in May. The fall of the Puritan régime restored not only the monarchy but legal, regular theatre, the right to perform plays being quickly restricted to two companies, the King’s and the Duke’s. Indeed Monck’s intervention was celebrated on the stage as it was happening, in the first Carolean comedy, John Tatham’s The Rump. A year later, these events were redramatized in a more serious form in the Earl of Orrery’s tragicomedy The Generall, whose hero Clorimun unwillingly fights for a usurper, but eventually restores the true king. Orrery’s next play, The History of Henry theFifth, also portrays the restoration of royal authority (the recovery of France), and so close was the relationship between theatre and politics that (not for the first time) Charles II loaned garments from his coronation, so that the final spectacle of the play is of stage royalty resplendent in the finery of the true.

Yet the dramatist who thus made free with Charles’s coronation apparel had not long before made free with his crown, for Orrery had served Cromwell throughout the 1650s, and in 1657 had taken a leading role in urging him to become king. After Cromwell’s death, however, he had established links both with Monck and Charles II, and had indeed hoped to claim the role of restoring hero for himself. In his service of the usurper, Clorimun reflects Orrery’s position in the 1650s; in his restoration of the true line, however, he performs an act of which Orrery was only an envious and frustrated onlooker.

There have been theatres in which social commitment and aesthetic experiment work in tight tandem. The most familiar and sharpest example is probably that of Brecht. But whilst this chapter touches on practices that align quite well with the Brechtian model, it has a more complex and fragmentary story to tell. There are a number of reasons for this. In general terms, in this period of British theatre there were also instances of aesthetic experiment for its own sake, of progressive belief wedded to ‘conservative’ forms, and of conservative ideology wedded to ‘progressive’ forms. The analysis of theatre practices that follows mirrors that range of possibility. And whilst most of them, in different ways, were part of the great ‘modernist’ project of the first half of the twentieth century, each had a particular and often complex relationship to its own historical moment. Their experiments negotiated quite specific rhetorical engagements with audiences, typically by exploiting theatre’s quintessential capacity as a reflexive and ironic apparatus.

More specifically, this chapter deals with theatrical phenomena that are marginal in a double sense. First,whilst the impact of modernity in this period – at once exhilarating and alienating – was potent in Britain, the burgeoning of European modern theatre movements was only faintly reflected there. This was despite fairly frequent visits, mostly to London, by such in fluential foreign companies as Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (1910–14), the Moscow Art Theatre (1928), the ensemble Compagnie des Quinze (1931) and Kurt Jooss’s dance theatre (1933).

From the first incursion of Islam into Spain in 710 until the eventual success of the Christian reconquest in 1492, the Iberian peninsula was partially or wholly under Muslim rule, the westernmost outpost of a sprawling Muslim empire. For many decades the intellectual and cultural climate of “al-Andalus” was thus subsidiary to that of the East. Philosophy was no exception: it came first from the East, but in time acquired an autonomous life. This is reflected in the history of Andalusian philosophy, which at first followed in the footsteps of al-Fārābī and Avicenna, but soon developed along two very different paths. On the one hand, the Andalusians took up al-Fārābī’s project of reconstructing and further developing the thought of Aristotle, a process that would culminate in the commentaries of Averroes. On the other hand, Andalusian philosophers were attracted by Sūfism. Most prominently, the mystic Ibn ‘Arabī hailed from al-Andalus. But as will be indicated below, even authors who worked within the falsafa tradition were not immune to the appeal of the Sūfīs. This chapter will illustrate these competing traditions in the thought and writings of the two most significant Muslim philosophers of al-Andalus prior to Averroes: Ibn Bājja (known as Avempace to the Latins) and Ibn Tufayl.

Approaching the Restoration theatre

Paradoxically, the theatre of the English post-Restoration seems more remote to us than the theatre of Shakespeare, Jonson and Webster. The Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre has been fully assimilated by modern and post-modern stagecraft, but the theatre of the Restoration, Georgian and Victorian years – from Dryden, Wycherley and Aphra Behn through Goldsmith and Sheridan to the dawn of the modern day – largely remains encapsulated in its historical and theatrical milieu. The Importance of Being Earnest scintillates in 1930s finery, but The Beaux’ Strategem is almost never mounted in late Victorian lounge suits or Congreve as if contemporary to Coward. In recent times ’Tis Pity She’s aWhore has been set in a romantic faux Regency surround and The Merchant of Venice in a fascist, anti-Semitic Italy; by the same token, the Elizabethan-Jacobean repertory has been cloaked in the modernist panoply of Gordon Craig or Granville Barker. But Boucicault’s comedies and Pinero’s farces still walk unmediated in the costume of their day. We simply do not treat post-Restoration plays metaphorically, whether historically or stylistically. True classics of the theatre are timeless, we think, and may be redressed in the habits of any amenable time, but plays from the days of Charles II to the near end of the nineteenth century have yet to become classics in the theatre, though some have done as literary art. A greater leap of historical imagination is therefore required to understand the post-Restoration theatre for what it is and to measure its considerable aesthetic and cultural distance back from our own time.

Britain came closer to outright class war in 1926 than at any other time in the twentieth century, and theatre, as one of the principal media through which ideas were disseminated, was a crucial battleground in the struggle. A few years earlier, a play called The Right to Strike had led to arguments and fighting in the auditorium, articles in the Times, polls by the Daily Mirror, extracts being performed in church, and the intervention of Buckingham Palace. ‘One feels’, wrote the Saturday Review, that the author, if he had liked to do so, might quite easily have provoked a riot’. It is only necessary to see how concerned the Censors were about licensing plays for public performance to realise how significant theatre was seen to be in preventing or encouraging class conflict. In 1925 a licence had been refused to Strindberg’s Miss Julie partly because of its ‘very questionable theme in these days of the relations between masters and servants’, and in 1926 Noel Coward’s This Was a Man suffered the same fate at the hands of the Lord Chamberlain and his Advisory Board:

England was facing a revolt in the American colonies, and Horace Walpole feared the worst. To Sir Horace Mann on 27 May 1776 he wrote: ‘Oh madness! To have squandered away such an empire! Now we tremble at France, which America enabled us to resist.’ The following 11 June in Philadelphia Thomas Jefferson and four others were elected to frame a Declaration of Independence. Meanwhile, George III, who had already shown signs of madness, was becoming a hands-on ruler and interfering with the running of England more than some of his government leaders liked. Captain Cook was on his ill-fated third Pacific voyage, Beaumarchais was working on The Marriage of Figaro, and the steam engine had just been perfected by James Watt. Goethe’s Weimar years were beginning and Mozart’s youthful works were being composed; Goya was finding himself as a painter while the portraitist Reynolds was completing his career. Voltaire had recently retired, Eli Whitney’s life was just beginning, Byron, Shelley and Keats were not yet born. Gibbons’s first volume of his examination of imperialism, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, had just appeared; Adam Smith pleaded for a free economy in The Wealth of Nations; Tom Paine’s Common Sense argued passionately for American liberty. The year 1776 was one of crises, doldrums, successes, failures, endings, beginnings; it was the best and the worst of years: one like no others, one like all the rest. The world, as always, was on the brink.

A stranger visiting London in June 1776, however, might have thought that the most serious threat to the even tenor of English ways was not some national or international confrontation, but rather the retirement of the century’s greatest theatre personality. On the evening of the 10th at Drury Lane Theatre the actor-manager David Garrick played Don Felix in The Wonder; or, A Woman Keeps a Secret, a popular comedy by Susanna Centlivre.

The London stage of 1918–45 has often been characterised as pandering to an undiscerning audience, waiting with baited breath to be entertained by the latest frivolous or escapist offerings of the day – but this is an overly simplistic reading. To begin with, it condones an assumption that our contemporary interpretations of theatre in the period are that much more sophisticated and somehow nearer the ‘truth’ than those of people who were actually a part of it. Moreover, underlying such readings is a failure to understand the complexities of an interwar society that was transformed by enormous social and cultural upheavals over a very short period of time. This chapter reflects upon key issues raised in an analysis of the London stage between the two world wars, in three sections. Firstly, it investigates historiographical approaches to the history of theatre during the era, looking at the nature and social significance of drama for its audiences. Secondly, it examines the growth of theatre as an industry, owned and managed by a new class of entrepreneur, in the light of arguments about a new commercialism versus a belief in theatre for arts’ sake. Thirdly, it proceeds to give an outline of popular themes and genres in playwriting and performance, including an examination of audiences, and closes by looking at government and state intervention in the making of theatre during the period.

British people experienced endemic social paradoxes during the interwar years, with the country plunged into hardship at the same time as benefiting from technological and social development. The nation was in a state of shock after the massacres of World War One, victory soured by the fact that a whole generation of young men had been killed.

By the 1920s, after three decades of playwriting, Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) had finally attained the status of a major modernist writer. Heartbreak House, written during World War One, had opened in London in 1920. St Joan followed in 1923, and Shaw received a Nobel prize for literature in 1926. Since the 1890s Shaw had been creating a new kind of drama that blended the narrative genres of comedy, fable, history and romance with the rhetorical modes of disquisition, debate and declamation. London audiences, though at first slow to respond, had come to appreciate his unique wit and style, if not always his ideas. Shaw had become a celebrity, famous not only for the series of plays but also for his steady flow of wry pronouncements and grand pontifications. Peppering the English-speaking world with his thoughts on almost any conceivable topic of the day, from theatre reform to spelling reform, he challenged received opinions and traditions. And by means of his political activities in the Fabian Society, he helped to create the new Labour Party. Thus, through his plays and polemics, Shaw – the Irish outsider – had situated himself at the centre of London culture and society.

LIFE AND WORKS

The philosophy of al-Fārābī stands in marked distinction to that of al-Kindī but is no less representative of the major trends of thought inherited by the Islamic world. His tradition is consciously constructed as a continuation and refinement of the neo-Aristotelianism of the Alexandrian tradition, adapted to the new cultural matrix of the Near East. The Neoplatonic element of al-Fārābī ’s thought is most obvious in the emanationist scheme that forms a central part of his cosmology, though that scheme is much more developed than that of earlier Neoplatonists in its inclusion of the Ptolemaic planetary system. His theory of the intellect appears to be based on a close reading of Alexander of Aphrodisias and develops the concept of an Active Intellect standing outside the human intellect. Above all, al-Fārābī ’s legacy to later thinkers is a highly sophisticated noetics placed within a rigorous curriculum of instruction in Aristotelian logic. Fārābī was above all a systematic and synthesizing philosopher; as such, his system would form the point of departure on all the major issues of philosophy in the Islamic world after him.

The status accorded al-Fārābī’s intellectual legacy here stands somewhat at odds with what we can reconstruct of his life with any certainty. With the exception of a few simple facts, virtually nothing is known of the personal circumstances and familial background of al-Fārābī. The great variety of legends and anecdotes about this second major philosopher of the Islamic period is the product of contending biographical traditions produced nearly three centuries after his death.