In the seventeenth century, school plays were performed in practically all schools in Slovakia, which was then part of Hungary. The first teacher to stage plays with his pupils was Leonard Stöckel in Bardejov (Bartfeld) in the second half of the sixteenth century. After Stöckel's death, plays continued to be performed in Bardejov, but—thanks to a body of teachers who took Jan Amos Comenius as their model in the field of dramatic art—it was the neighbouring town of Presov (Eperies) which became the centre of Protestant school theatre in Slovakia in the seventeenth century. Comenius was active in the years 1650–4 in nearby Sárospatak, in present-day Hungary, and it was there that he wrote his Schola Ludus and performed it with his pupils.

One of the features of the growth of playing in London in the late 1580s shows itself in the size of casts needed for some of the new plays composed around 1590. The history plays in particular laid exceptional demands on the numbers in the companies playing in London. Presumably this was one result of the foothold for performing to large audiences that the new amphitheatres had given the players. But it raises many questions about the organization of the companies. Did they enlarge the companies for the occasion with hired men, using casual if stagestruck labour hanging around the playhouses, or did they take on extra sharers? There is no evidence that this happened. The number of sharers in the leading companies, apart from the uniquely-large Queen's Men, who were allotted twelve players in 1583 but split into two in about 1590, when most of the companies had eight or ten players. Which came first, the larger companies or the larger plays? Did different companies join forces to stage them? Did they, after performance in London, take these large plays on tour? The conventional assumption about that, based largely on the evidence of the ‘bad’ and shortened quarto texts of the early plays, is that the ‘large’ plays were cut down to the ‘bad’ quarto size to allow the plays to be taken on tour. So were the large plays written only for London audiences? The writing of plays for large casts was a short-lived phenomenon, starting at the end of the 1580s and dying by 1594. What changed the conditions in that year? I believe we can address these questions most sharply by considering one of theatre history's more intriguing chimeras, the so-called ‘amalgamated company’ that is thought to have occupied Henslowe's Rose through the early 1590s.

The Joint guest editor of the Canadian issue (TRI, Vol. 17, No.3) was, of course DENIS SALTER

When Louis XIV died, in 1715, the Comédie-Française was a weakened institution. It had barely survived the lean years at the end of the reign, and although it was sufficiently endowed with good actresses, it could boast no charismatic leading male actor who by his very presence might restore its fortunes in the new confident era that was beginning. Indeed, the adverse competitive environment created by the bawdy and vivacious theatres of the fairs on the one hand, and by the ever-popular Académie Royale (or Opera) on the other, was soon exacerbated by the return to Paris of the Italian actors, recalled in 1716 after an absence of nineteen years. It was in this context that in 1720, after an absence of nearly three decades, there returned to the Paris stage one of the most admired actors of the previous century, Michel Baron.

A Danish theatre group with a Swedish director, calling themselves the New Scandinavian Experimental Theatre, presented a provocative staging of Strindberg's Miss Julie in Copenhagen in April 1992. It was received with enthusiasm by the group of Strindberg scholars at the International Strindberg Conference being held in Copenhagen at that time. What was it about this production which was so appealing? The following three articles attempt to demonstrate different ways of approaching this production in retrospect — that is to say almost one year later. The first is mainly concerned with the actress playing Julie, the second is concerned with the director's concept and how this was realized on stage, whilst the third is interested in placing this production in the context of the Scandinavian Strindberg tradition.

Among the abundant iconographical records of the commedia dell' arte are a handful of engravings depicting vivaciously capering single characters, of which three have been reproduced by Allardyce Nicoll, where they are identified merely as ‘seventeenth-century engravings’. The same subjects were apparently copied by Adrian de Winter (1615–?) in a set of six groups of commedia characters entitled Titulus Stultorum, where they appear in reverse with the addition of half a dozen characters copied from Callot's Balli di Sfessania.

One of the incidental attractions of joining the Comédie-Française had always been that the Society could be relied on to look after the well-being of its veteran members even after they had left the stage, provided that they had given it a full twenty years' service counting from the date of their promotion to the rank of societaire. The policy of paying retirement pensions to superannuated actors at the royal theatre antedates even the coming into being of the Comédie-Française. In his Théâtre françois of 1674, Chappuzeau mentions the custom which had already grown up at that time for a new entrant to pay the older one whom he was replacing ‘une pension honnête’ out of his own earnings, so as to provide the retired actor with an income permitting him to live out his remaining days without falling into destitution. On 17 May 1728 the system was regularized by a proclamation to the effect that ‘les acteurs et actrices qui se retireraient jouiraient à l'avenir d'une pension viagère de mille livies, soit qu'ils eussent eu part entière, demi-part ou même un quart de part’; and although these arrangements fell into abeyance during the Revolution, causing acute distress to several former sociétaires who had only their personal savings to fall back on, they were reinstated by the Act of Association which all members of the Society were required to sign in 1804: clause 12 laid it down that ‘le sociétaire qui se retirera après vingt ans de service aura droit à une pension viagère de 2000 francs de la part du Gouvernement et à une pension égale de la part de la Société’. Even if they had no other resources, 4000 francs a year would relieve an ex-actor of serious financial anxieties; and since they might still be in their early forties when they took retirement, there was nothing to prevent them starting a business if they wished or cultivating a small farm in the country.

The première of It Is Never Too Late to Mend at the Princess's Theatre on 4 October 1865 marked the appropriately tumultuous return of Charles Reade to the London stage after an absence of nine years. That night, one of the most memorable disturbances in the nineteenth-century theatre occurred when the drama critics in attendance, led by Frederick Guest Tomlins of the Morning Advertiser, demanded that the play be halted because of its offensive subject matter and one particularly shocking scene. The dispute became a cause celebre among critics, dramatists, and the general public and was recalled (with varying degrees of accuracy) years later by its participants, witnesses, and other interested parties.

The theme of Strindberg's Miss Julie (Fröken Julie, 1888), the struggle for sexual ascendancy between a liberated young woman and an ambitious young man who is her social inferior, continues to hold fascination even in times such as our own, which purport to be sexually liberated, socially egalitarian, and feminist. Perhaps, one might speculate, fascination with the play, its characters, and its situation is especially intense in such times. Certainly awareness of an interest in sexual politics have not lessened in the century since the play appeared. Since it has been a century dominated to a large extent by the theories of Dr Sigmund Freud, this is hardly surprising.

In November 1909 William Archer wrote an article for McClure's Magazine in which he surveyed developments in the American theatre over the past twenty years. The most innovative work had been undertaken by non-commercial companies, such as Victor Mapes' Chicago repertory and Winthrope Ames' Castle Square Theatre in Boston, and in the universities: ‘Brander Matthews at Columbia, W. L. Phelps at Yale, and George P. Baker at Harvard’. These ventures took as their models Antoine's Théâtre Libre in Paris; the Freie Bühne in Berlin; J. T. Grein's Independent Theatre, the Stage Society, Vedrenne-Barker at the Court, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester and Charles Frohman's proposed repertory company at the Duke of York's Theatre. However whereas in the 1890s the progressive theatre in America had been heavily dependent on the European repertoire of plays, when he returned in 1907 Archer found ‘the scene entirely changed’:

Roman Ingarden's publication of ‘The Functions of Language in the Theater’ (1958) was a landmark in the development of theatre theory in the twentieth century. Since its appearance several methods of research have radically influenced our understanding of the functions of language within this art, particularly semiotics, pragmatics and philosophy of language. More than thirty years after publication of Ingarden's work, it is sensible to address the same question once again and to suggest a theory that reflects the state of the art today.

During the 1920s and 30s, several left-wing theatre movements developed in Britain, committed to creating a political discourse in venues and forms unknown within the existing cultural mainstream. Such organizations as The Workers′ Theatre Movement, Unity Theatre and Theatre of Action were all–to a greater or lesser extent–resolutely oppositional to the Establishment and outside the jurisdiction of the Lord Chamberlain's powers of censorship. In the early 40s the situation changed, as individuals and theatrical forms previously associated with the Left were adopted by the Establishment, most notably through ENSA and the BBC.

In Václav Havel's first published essay, ‘The Poet in the Contemporary Era’, he proposed a theory of interpretive understanding that emphasized a poetic response to the world, a combination of imagination with hermeneutic engagement. In this Heideggerian perspective, the things and events in the world, and the people, too, have aesthetic qualities—whether valuable or banal—that a poetic attitude toward perception can discover, and perhaps even communicate. Moreover, poets are supposed, in the same essay, to be unable to separate the quality of their literary efforts from the quality of their lives, i.e. ‘someone who writes kitsch poems on love has presumably had a kitsch love in life, too’.

If by a classic one means a work of art which has the ability to remain alive through various epochs and continue to engage people's attention, then the word is suitable to describe Birgit Cullberg's ballet Miss Julie. Perhaps one ought to adjust the notion slightly and describe the ballet as a ‘modern classic’, because we do not know how it will have endured in, let us say, fifty or a hundred years.

None of Sarah Barnhardt's many biographers has treated her American vaudeville tours as anything more than a footnote to a career remarkable in so many other ways. Examined more closely, Bernhardt's encounter with vaudeville suggests a not always tranquil marriage between high art and popular culture, and it serves as an index to the evolution of a distinctively American form.

On 1 December 1987, the production team for Strindberg's last and least performed chamber play, The Black Glove (Svarta Handsken) written in 1909, had gathered in one of the rehearsal rooms at the Royal Dramatic Theatre (Dramaten) in Stockholm. Wilhelm Carlsson, the director of the performance, started by explaining to the producer, the scenographer, the dramaturg, the composer, the actors and the other members of the team who were present, as well as myself who was going to follow the rehearsals, all in all about twenty people, that he had never directed Strindberg before, except for an exercise with Miss Julie during his training as a director at Dra-matiska Institutet in Stockholm. His plan was then to present this much more frequently performed piece with an on-stage double bed and to have Kristin leave the room when the relations between Jean and Julie become intimate.

Masterpieces of theatre are tantalizingly inaccessible, except in print. Before we can see or hear the great plays of past ages, a theatre company has to learn how to produce them in a very different world from that in which they were written. Directors, designers, and actors who are available today are very different from the people first responsible for staging the plays. The buildings and equipment of newly-built theatres make their own distinct and irresistible contributions to any production. Before old texts can be staged problems of meaning, characterization, convention, and stagecraft have to be tackled. How can classics become fully and engagingly alive under such changed conditions? Any responsible theatre should consider establishing its own laboratory in which to conduct the necessary research.

In July 1989 the ‘trilogy’ of Œdipe et les oiseaux, directed by Jean-Pierre Vincent with decor and costumes by Jean-Paul Chambas and dramaturgy by Bernard Chartreux, was presented in its ‘premier état’ at the Festival of Avignon. This preliminary version consisted of full scale productions of Œdipe tyran and Œdipe à Colone by Sophocles in new translations by Chartreux, and a reading of Cité des oiseaux, Chartreux's adaptation of The Birds by Aristophanes. The definitive version was presented at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre. Tyran and Colone opened in October and played in alternation until joined by Oiseaux in November. The complete trilogy—the three plays in succession on a single day—was performed to sold out houses on five successive Saturdays in November and December.

Skylight Theatre's productions of Shakespeare's The Tempest in Earl Bales Park in Toronto (1987 and 1989) situated Prospero on the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia, set the action during the late eighteenth-century voyages of Captain James Cook—the period of the area's colonization—and cast Ariel and Caliban as Haida Indians, Canadian Aboriginal people.