The year 1674 is a very interesting one for the study of Racine. In that year a quarrel had temporarily separated Lully and Quinault, and the composer needed a new libretto. Racine (aided by Boileau) began work on La Chute de Phaëton, and although the opera was never finished (as Louis XIV forced Lully to work again with Quinault) the fact that Racine agreed, however reluctantly, to compose verse for opera is not without significance. Indeed, Vanuxem has argued that Racine was here showing a continuing interest in this form since he had already been engaged three years earlier on an opera based on the story of Orpheus, of which nothing survives. Quinault's extraordinarily successful opera Alceste was performed at Versailles on 7 July 1674 while, in the same year, Boileau celebrated his increasing importance at Court and in literary circles with the publication of a translation from the Greek of a Treatise on the Sublime, a work traditionally attributed to Longinus. And finally, in August 1674, Racine's Iphigènie received its first performance in a spectacular setting, in a theatre, built at the entrance of the Orangerie at Versailles, created for the occasion by the Vigarani brothers. The play was much applauded, and yet the excitement it aroused was outdone by the illuminations and fireworks which exploded immediately after its performance. Some 30,000 varied fireworks were invented by Le Brun to celebrate the magnificence of Louis XIV triumphing over his foes despite ‘L'Envie representée par le Dragon’ belching forth from every orifice torrents of flame and thick smoke.

The presence of Italian professional actors has, for the second half of the sixteenth century, been signalized in Bavaria, at the Emperor's court in Vienna and at the court of the French kings, in England and elsewhere, but it has not yet been shown that the comedians also included the Low Countries in their wanderings. It is therefore interesting to find that an identifiable troupe visited Antwerp in the year 1576. This year was a particularly critical and turbulent one in the protracted struggle of the Netherlands against Spanish domination, for it was, among other things, marked by the outrages of the Spanish Fury, which started in the week beginning Sunday, 4 November. The period of the Spanish Fury, soon to be followed by the negotiations of the Pacification of Ghent, constituted the apogee of the leadership of William of Orange. It was in the tense months preceding the sack of Antwerp that Italian actors were performing their plays in the city. By a happy chance the records of their presence, now preserved in the Municipal Archives in Antwerp, have survived because the city authorities had to make sure that the players were not disbanded or mutinous soldiers and so a certain number of Italian merchants residing in the city were asked to stand surety for them. This appears from the so-called Certificatieboeken; that is, books in which statements were entered to ‘certify’ formally that certain people fulfilled temporarily enforced legal requirements. Thus the Certificatieboeken bearing the numbers 36 and 39 contain the following entries relevant to Italian actors.

The town of Madrid was first chosen as the permanent seat of the Court in 1561; for a few years, from 1601 to 1606, Valladolid challenged Madrid's supremacy, but in that year Madrid was confirmed as the capital of Spain. The years from 1561 saw, as a result, a rapid growth in Madrid, an explosion of population and of size which was not to have its counterpart again until the 1870s and, more recently, the 1950s and 1960s. Inevitably, the growth of Madrid sucked into the town a great number of peasants and, by the early decades of the seventeenth century, a significant part of the population must have consisted of first- and second-generation town-dwellers, imbued, to judge from the evidence of the plays performed in the commercial theatres, with a nostalgia for the country-side, a nostalgia which was reinforced by and expressed in terms of the old literary topos of the dispraise of life in the city (or at Court) and the praise of country life.

It is without any doubt that the theatre historian in Britain is greatly indebted to visitors from other lands, for evidence found in their letters, diaries and sketches has informed us of theatre architecture, plays and performances of which our own countrymen, neglecting to record what for them was a commonplace, made no mention. Now it is possible to reciprocate with material to be found in the sketch-book diary of Sir James Thornhill concerning the Hôtel de Bourgogne. The purpose of this article is to examine two sketches in that diary by Thornhill and consider them in the light of data already collected concerning that theatre.

In the process of concluding my thesis, ‘Alfred de Vigny and the French Romantic Theatre’ (Cornell University, 1973), I had written to France requesting permission to publish the various iconographic material relevant to the productions of Vigny's plays. A note from M. Sangnier was forwarded to me via the Association des Amis d'Alfred de Vigny concerning the existence in M. Sangnier's collection of two costume sketches by Delacroix ascribed to Vigny's La Maréchale d'Ancre. This ascription came as a pleasant surprise to me as there is no mention of Delacroix' association with the production in either his or Vigny's published papers, or in contemporary reviews of the production. A quick check of Delacroix biographies and catalogues confirmed my suspicion that the sketches (Plates I and II) had been heretofore unknown.

The first public performance of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, the national anthem of the United States, was in the Holliday Street Theatre in Baltimore, Maryland, October 19, 1814. The performance came on the fifth night of a twenty-four performance season that extended between October 12 and November 21, 1814. The theatrical season paralleled the conclusion of the War of 1812. And in many ways, William Wood and William Warren, managers of the acting company, complemented the war with plays having military themes – Point of Honour, He Would Be A Soldier, and The Soldier's Daughter. The acting troupe that performed in Baltimore during this fall made the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia its headquarters. The Baltimore American and Commercial Advertiser lists only the following performers as appearing in Baltimore during this season – Miss Abercrombie, Mrs Mason, Mrs Seymour, Mrs Greene, Joseph Jefferson, Ferdinand Durang, Charles Durang, William Francis, J. Hardinge, Francis Blissett, and Mr and Mrs Waring who were making their first appearance in Baltimore. Available playbills add to the list of performers Mr Duff, Mr Harris, Mr Barrett, Mr Abercrombie, Mr T. Jefferson, Miss Jefferson, Mrs Francis, and Miss White.

‘What if Christ and Oedipus or, to shift the names, Saint Catherine of Genoa and Michael Angelo, are the two scales of a balance, the two buttends of a seesaw?’ Christ and Oedipus, the contrasting images in A Vision, were central figures in W. B. Yeats's theatre work in the late 1920s. Following the publication of A Vision in 1925, Yeats completed his versions of Sophocles' two plays of Oedipus. Designed for the main stage at the Abbey Theatre, King Oedipus was produced in 1926 and Oedipus at Colonus the following year. During that time Yeats wrote a play on the death of Christ based on his work with the Sophocles plays but designed for the smaller Peacock Theatre, the Abbey's new experimental stage. Yeats's play, The Resurrection, was produced there in 1934. Those three productions were the culmination of Yeats's long involvement in two aspects of non-naturalistic theatre – the relation between stage performance and audience in the amphitheatre, and the nature of the poetic and dramatic image produced in that type of theatre.

J. T. Grein, a Dutchman who was the founder of the Independent Theatre Society, first stated the aims such a body should have in the article he wrote with C. W. Jarvis in The Weekly Comedy (30 November 1889). It should be ‘a theatre free from the shackles of the censor, free from the fetters of convention, unhampered by financial considerations’.

The changes in social composition and cultural taste that came over theatre audiences in the late eighteenth century and in the first decades of the nineteenth century had a profound effect upon their attitude to, and consequently the production of, Shakespeare. The social mix of the London playhouse remained relatively unchanged through much of the eighteenth century. Within a fairly small auditorium the aristocratic and upper middle-class gentility of the boxes and the bourgeois respectability of the pit effectively dictated a style of drama and performance that most appealed to the tastes of this, the most dominant audience group. Combined with the limitations imposed upon the techniques of production by an adequate but undeveloped technology and the social stability provided by the slow pace of political and industrial evolution, the early and mid-Georgian theatre (including Shakespeare) preserved a remarkably uniform structure and dramatic viewpoint over a long period.

To anyone familiar with the work of Gabriel Cousin, adaptability is a natural and acceptable phenomenon that has been, and still remains, a feature of his writing for the theatre. As an evolving and creative activity, his dramatic output has expressed his ‘prise de conscience’ on social and political themes for the past thirty years. Since the end of the Second World War when, with the group known as Les Compagnons de la Saint-Jean, Cousin's rôle was to put to paper the collective product of their ideas, he has continued to work on a collaborative basis with producers, musicians, designers and theatre managements. Indeed, the willingness to do so frequently becomes a necessity in view of some of the difficult problems that a production of his plays entail – problems that affect the audience as much as the actors and producers.

In a previous article I examined Terence Gray's contribution to the development of theatre architecture and design in England. I argued that Gray's work was not so much an innovation in theatre practice but rather an attempt to bring into the English theatre the production methods that were being developed in Europe. Ideas and techniques were borrowed from Craig and Appia, Meyerhold in Russia, Jessner in Germany, Gaston Baty in France and Norman Bel Geddes in the United States and introduced into the English theatre which had remained isolated since the end of the First World War. Many of Gray's ideas were indeed second hand, but the freshness and exuberance of his work startled the English theatrical scene of the thirties and are still relevant to the theatre of today. One only has to compare the designs of the new National Theatre with Gray's plans for a Festival Theatre at the National Sporting Club, King Street, to see the influence of his work.

Was the Abbey Theatre company partly responsible for the original Playboy riots? Synge's comedy would have shocked Irish patriotism and propriety under any circumstances, but did the author and Frank and William Fay provide fuel for the flames by the manner in which they produced the work? The reaction of Dublin has been readily dismissed as mere philistinism, but without any attempt to assess how much the audience was provoked. Yet one thing is clear: the first night audience of Saturday, 26 January 1907, did not come to riot. On the contrary, they gave the play a fair critical hearing, and all accounts are agreed that vocal protest (far short of a riot) did not break out until late in the evening. It is also known that after the death of Synge and the departure of the Fays, the interpretation of the play was radically revised to make the production more palatable. It is reasonable to enquire, therefore, what the company originally had in mind.

The story of the production in 1928 by the Moscow Arts Theatre (MKhAT) of Valentin Kataev's play Rastratchiki (The Embezzlers) is of interest both in itself, as part of the history of the Russian stage, and for the light it sheds on the character and artistic ideas of the theatre's leading figure K. S. Stanislavsky. In order to understand the importance of the staging by MKhAT of modern plays written by young, relatively unknown authors, one must appreciate the uniquely prestigious position of the theatre and its directors in the cultural life of the country. The fact that Chekhov's plays had first been performed by the theatre, the importance of the new style of acting propounded by Stanislavsky and the venerability of Stanislavksy and Nemirovich-Danchenko secured for MKhAT a position of great cultural importance.

In writing El gesticulador, which marks the opening of the modern theatre in Mexico where it was first performed in 1947, Rodolfo Usigli (b. 1905) faced a number of problems, so that the play's technique represents a compromise between conflicting aims. The predominant aspect of the work is the expression of political protest and criticism; the plot hinges on the election of a new governor for a northern Mexican state. But Usigli described the drama in the year it was performed as the first serious attempt at tragedy in the modern Mexican theatre.

Simon Trussler, first in conjunction with the Bibliography of Drama and Theatre, planned to complement his revision of The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, and more recently in response to the proposal by the Commission for a British Theatre Institute for a union catalogue of British theatrical literature, has taken upon himself the awesome task of devising A Classification for the Performing Arts. He has made a thoroughly admirable job of it, and his system deserves the widest possible circulation and discussion among librarians, bibliographers, and scholars if it is to establish itself as a useful standard and model in collections worldwide. What should please all students of the performing arts is the system's remarkable combination of logical sequence and consistent format, coupled with a flexibility and adaptability to accommodate the most specialized of libraries or the most stubbornly anomalous of titles.

Unfortunately for the development and history of the modern German theater, the several attempts at collaboration between Edward Gordon Craig and Hugo von Hofmannsthal from 1903 to 1910 were fraught with frustration, intrigue, and misunderstandings which resulted in disappointment and failure despite constant efforts by Count Harry Kessler to mediate between them and promote a viable working relationship.

This is the way in which in 1882 the journalist and writer Julius Hart — later one of the founders of the Freie Bühne – experienced the magnetic attraction of the young German capital. Like Hart, hundreds of poets, journalists, writers, actors rushed to the rapidly expanding metropolis which seemed to offer opportunities for all talents. From 1880 until the 1930s, Berlin represented a sort of theatrical Mecca. Writing and performing artists alike were completely captivated by the Berlin theatres, looking for their inspiration particularly to the Deutsches Theater, the Lessingtheater, the Schauspielhaus am Gendarmenmarkt; similarly, the editors of the entertainment sections of the provincial newspapers took as gospel the reviews in the Vossische Zeitung, the Berliner Tageblatt and the Berliner Börsen-Courier.