In Pirotechnia (1558), Vanuzzo Biringuggio describes several ways of making ‘fuochi lavorati’ or fireworks, and he mentions the great skill of the Florentines and Romans in this special art. Their famous ‘castelli’ and ‘girandole’ were built for special festivities, such as Pentecost in Florence or the election of a new Pope in Rome. The custom of using firework displays as a popular expression of joy or ‘allegrezza’, was shared by several Italian towns during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and Ferrara was no exception. The capital of Este's duchy provides an interesting example of how pyrotechny eventually became independent of popular and Carnival-like displays, and an established feature of court entertainments. Ferrara, one of the liveliest theatrical cities of the Italian Renaissance, provided a fertile ground for the development of firework displays.

That a large number of Elizabethan plays are the product of dramatic collaboration is well known. Just how this process of ‘collective creation’ operated in the public theatres, however, remains something of a mystery. Attempts to explore the mechanics of collaborative play writing have been of different kinds. The most common have been studies of published plays undertaken in the hope that characteristics of style would reveal the shares of contributing dramatists. In spite of valuable work (notably by Cyrus Hoy), however, too many of these studies suffer from the weaknesses described by Samuel Schoenbaum in his analysis of the limitations of conclusions about authorship based on internal evidence. As a consequence, assertions about patterns of collaboration based on the identification of an author's stylistic characteristics, such as those made in the early 19205 by Dugdale Sykes, are not as fashionable as they once were.

After the triumph of its première in Prague in November 1787, Don Giovanni enjoyed little immediate success in the theatres of central Europe. It was received with indifference in Vienna, with unease, even outright hostility elsewhere. Mozart's music on its own aroused almost universal admiration, but as a dramatic medium it unsettled audiences. This was best expressed by a correspondent for the Chronik von Berlin, who saw the first performance at the Berlin National Theatre in December 1790. In his review he granted readily that ‘Mozart is an excellent, a great composer’ but in Don Giovanni he felt that greatness to have been betrayed.

The semiotics of drama has proved incapable of formulating a theory of segmentation that can be used in practice. Tadeusz Kowzan admits that his suggestion, ‘l'unité sémiologique du spectacle est une tranche contenant tous les signes émis simultanément, tranche dont la durée est égale au signe qui dure le moins’ (1975, 215), leads to a multitude of small, totally unrelated segments. As Erika Fischer-Lichte pointed out (1983, 186–7), it is impossible to tell in advance whether any distinguishable sign system (or combination of sign systems) will manifest itself at all times in the performance. Her conclusion was therefore that semiotics should stop searching for homogeneous units. However, she added, anyone who for practical reasons seeks a division should proceed from the two categories of character and space without which no theatrical process is possible and which can never be consumed into one another. This will not create homogeneous units either, but together these two categories comprise everything to which the various types of theatrical signs may refer.

Two major theoretical requirements should be fulfilled before embarking on an attempt to suggest an adequate description of stage metaphor. First, an appropriate description of verbal metaphor is mandatory. Such a prerequisite does not imply that stage metaphor is a derivative of verbal metaphor; it assumes, rather, a common deep structure underlying both verbal and stage metaphors and recognizes the fact that theories of verbal metaphor are much more advanced. There is no way to avoid striving for a unified theory of metaphor, which assumes the existence of a common deep structure, and explains the generation of both particular types of metaphor. Second, an appropriate description of theatrical language, which is a particular case of iconic communication, is also mandatory since, according to the same premise, differences in the structure of metaphor in varying languages should be accounted for on the grounds of the specific features of the respective languages.

The challenge and the excitement of expanding both the focus of our research and the field of our praxis beyond Theatre (or Film, Pop or Video) to Performance is to identify phenomena which transcend one medium and may enable us to know something about acting as such, spectating as such and thus ‘being’ as such: performance, not as a second-hand version of some more primary reality, but as a ‘realm’ in its own right.