More than a century after Edward Gordon Craig published “The Actor and the Über-Marionette” (1908), the core of his conception of acting still poses a hermeneutical challenge to the theatre scholar. Many intriguing interpretations have stemmed from his statements on acting: from Denis Bablet's or Christopher Innes's argument that the Über-marionette is a metaphor for the perfect performer, to Irène Eynat-Confino's thesis that it is a real, oversized puppet; from the idea (Lindsay Mary Newman's or Cesare Molinari's, for instance) that the concept evolved with time along with the details of Craig's acting theory, to Patrick Le Boeuf's recent hypothesis that the Über-marionette is a full-body puppet. Le Boeuf's interpretation is somehow a telling example of the puzzling quality of Craig's acting theory: his studies originally led him to believe that the Über-marionette was a technically perfect gymnast, in perfect control of his own body, but he was induced to reconsider his hypothesis only a couple of years later, in the light of newly recovered documents. The same ineffable quality Jane Goodall detects in “stage presence” seems to be an inherent feature of Craig's ideal performer, and as with presence, the Über-marionette appears to be best definable by approximation.

With the modesty then expected of a daughter of Britain's theatrical royalty, Fanny Kemble attributed the necessity of her 1829 stage debut to the hard circumstance of financial need. As she explained in her journal, hers was not an act of self-promotion; rather, she exposed herself to the scrutiny of London's critical establishment with the hope that interest in her performance might draw much-needed revenue into the cashbox of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, a venue jointly managed by her father and uncle, Charles and John Philip Kemble. However rhetorically necessary the narrative was for preserving her respectability, Kemble's financial motivation was also very real. The theatre was fiscally impaired, never quite able to square itself in relation to the expensive footing upon which the new building was erected after the fire of 1808. With construction costs high and materials scarce in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, Charles attempted to raise ticket prices in the new theatre to help cover his expenses, raising instead public ire, in the form of protracted demonstrations known as the Old Price Riots, which bullied him into restoring the original ticket prices.

“Threescore years and two have now elapsed since our fathers ventured on the grand experiment of freedom.” So said the renowned actor Edwin Forrest in a Fourth of July address at New York City's Broadway Tabernacle in 1838. The similarity to the start of the Gettysburg Address in 1863 is striking: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty.”