Recent researchers into the documentary evidence of Shakespeare's professional life as a writer–performer have understandably restricted themselves to his human fellows and rivals. But on Bankside in the 1590s bear-baiting vied for popularity with theatre, and in this article, Nick de Somogyi seeks to correct a long-standing error of naming among the celebrity fighting bears of Paris Garden – stabled some hundred yards west of the Globe. Scholars are agreed that the careers of George Stone, Harry Hunks, and the great Sackerson competed for attention with the dramatist's own. But while Sackerson's is the only contemporary name Shakespeare ever dropped in his plays, and while George Stone probably expired in the same season as witnessed the premiere of Macbeth, it is argued here that the only scholarly basis for the existence of ‘the famous Harry Hunks’ lies in the erratic contemporary punctuation of a single poem. A Contributing Editor to NTQ, Nick de Somogyi gained his PhD at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and is now an independent scholar and textual consultant. He was the founder editor of the Globe Quartos series for Nick Hern Books, and The Winter's Tale, the eighteenth play in his Shakespeare Folios series (with Simon Trussler) appeared in early 2011. He curated three successive exhibitions at Shakespeare's Globe (2003–5), contributed to the National Portrait Gallery's Searching for Shakespeare exhibition (2006), and is the author of Shakespeare's Theatre of War (1998) and Shakespeare on Theatre (2011). This is the first in a series of pieces on the relationship between playhouse and beargarden he is currently researching.

Paul Robeson's Othello, first seen in London during the season of 1929–30, stands as a high-water mark of twentieth-century Shakespearean interpretation. Robeson was the first actor of African descent to appear in an extended-run Shakespearean production at a leading West End venue (Ira Aldridge, whose last London appearance came sixty-five years earlier, had made only three brief appearances at major London theatres). Here, Michael A. Morrison examines the circumstances surrounding Robeson's London Othello in 1930 and the far-reaching influence of his achievement on future generations of performers and playgoers. Michael A. Morrison is a New York-based writer and teacher. He is the author of John Barrymore, Shakespearean Actor (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and the forthcoming Paul Robeson's Othello.

In this essay the social historian Simon Featherstone examines the theatre of the Scottish medium Helen Duncan and argues that her strange, illicit performances offer a way of re-reading British popular performance in the 1930s and 1940s. This critically neglected period has been characterized by the decline of the radical energies of nineteenth-century music hall and the variety theatre which displaced it. Duncan's performances, however, with their extravagant display and management of her body and deployment of a range of references to popular materials, including puppetry, melodrama, children's games, and sentimental narratives, suggest the existence of other trajectories. Like the ‘dark village’ that Eric Hobsbawm identified as the illegal shadow of nineteenth-century social practices, Duncan's ‘dark theatre’ can be seen as a shadow world of mid-century performance styles. It provided a knowing yet emotionally fulfilling theatrical experience for her audiences while at the same time posing radical questions about the limits and meanings of the representation of gender and class in the unregulated venues of the spiritualist circuit. Politically ambiguous in their mixture of entrepreneurial exploitation and willingness to offer forthright challenges to social and legal authorities, Duncan's performances indicate the persistence of complex spaces and traditions of popular theatricality in the period.

Mark O'Rowe's work marks a shift in Irish theatrical form and practice, positing his stories in urban landscapes that defy modernist dramatic frames and established linguistic styles. Here, angels and demons roam the earth with lost human souls and, though mythical creatures and influences are frequently made manifest, the connection to the other world does not remove the presence of popular culture – karate movies and salty snacks in particular. But perhaps the most viscerally striking aspect of O'Rowe's dramaturgy stems from the sense of pain, isolation, and trauma his characters embody and enact. His dramatized communities are either in crisis or no longer visible, thereby situating the scope for human connection or reconnection as the prize sought from their struggle – while comedy is not lost, and the ‘skullduggerous’ tone so applauded in Howie the Rookie accompanies these later works alongside an evolved dramatic voice and sense of theatrical form. Miriam Haughton is currently in the second year of her doctoral work on postmodern Irish drama in the School of English, Drama, and Film at University College Dublin. Her research interests include drama studies, Irish studies, anthropology, and sociology.

The concept of the performing body consists of two elements: the performer's and the spectator's performing bodies. The performer's body is an active and creative body on stage, while the spectator's body is considered an uncreative body, passive in his or her seat. In this article, findings regarding the duality of the performing body, its interchangeability, and its intertwinement, derive from researching Via Negativa, a Slovenian-based (yet international in its nature) theatrical project established almost a decade ago by theatre director Bojan Jablanovec. The mission of Via Negativa is to investigate the relationship between the performer and the spectator exclusively through theatrical means. Tomaž Krpič is a sociologist of the body with particular interest in postmodern theatre and performance. He was until recently Lecturer in Cultural Sociology in the Faculty of Social Sciences, Ljubljana University, Slovenia.

In January 2008 the Eritrean capital of Asmara witnessed a theatre production that did not sit easily with the cultural imaginary of the country. Performed by a group of university graduates rather than the well-versed artists in government employ, Beyene Haile's Weg'i Libi, or Heart-to-Heart Talk, caused a stir among the local art-loving community in that it defied common strands of Eritrean theatre arts. Difficult to understand, with no clear plot or clear-cut message, it nonetheless drew crowds during the two weeks of its performance, largely because, as Christine Matzke suggests in this article, it allowed audiences to participate in the intellectual flânerie presented on stage. Basing her article on material collected in autumn 2008 and spring 2010, the author here provides an interpretation of the play and an outline and contextualization of its production process. Christine Matzke has spent well over a decade researching Eritrean theatre arts and cultural production. Her publications include the co-edited African Theatre 8: Diasporas (2009) and Postcolonial Postmortems (2006) on transcultural crime fiction. She teaches at the University of Bayreuth.

Report on the Fifth Festival Novog Cirkusa, Zagreb, in November 2009.

Report on the conference, ‘Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority: Theatre Censorship Around the World’, held in Dublin from 30 September to 2 October 2010.