After centuries of study, an untold number of scholars have agreed that the City Dionysia of fifth-century Athens involved an animal sacrifice to the god Dionysos, and that this event took place in the theatre before the beginning of the play competition. The usual assumption has been that this sacrifice was offered upon an altar situated at the exact center of a circular orchestra.

This placement fits well with the theory that tragedy grew from a dithyrambic chorus dancing in a circle around the altar of Dionysos. But now that the dogma of the originally circular orchestra has been questioned, some attention must also be given to the location of the altar, a supposedly standard piece of theatre furniture. The following pages will (1) discuss the origin of the concept of a centrally located altar; (2) examine the literary, artistic, and architectural evidence which relate to altar placement; and (3) suggest a possible alternative to the central location.

In 1708 an actress named Mary Morein filed a bill of complaint in the Court of Chancery against William Pinkethman. Morein's name appears nowhere in The London Stage, and there is no entry for her in the Biographical Dictionary. Other than the lawsuit testimony by and against her, I am aware of no evidence about her. Thus the lawsuit is of interest because it documents the existence of an otherwise unknown performer at a stormy time in the history of the London theatre. Perhaps more important, however, it contains significant factual evidence about the employment conditions of minor actresses, and gives specific figures for what such a person might earn by performing at the Fairs.

British theatre in the nineteenth century operated very much like a family business. Touring companies of necessity depended upon core family groups to manage the affairs, to perform the plays, and to nurture the children. London companies—though not so inbred as the provincials—often saw husbands and wives, parents and children perform together; indeed acting dynasties established in the last century extended well into this one. These actors, at whatever age, were perforce versatile, as an evening's bill might require appearances in an opening melodrama, a Shakespearean tragedy, then a farce to finish. And each of the items on an evening's playbill required scenery. The job of providing those sets was likewise often a family undertaking, though one that lacked female roles: father taught son; son taught grandson. From the beginning of the century until almost the end, the Grieve family—John Henderson Grieve (1770–1845), his sons Thomas (1799–1882) and William (1800–1844), and grandson Thomas Walford Grieve (1841–1899)—designed and painted scenery for some of the most important productions of those years—as well as for some of the most inconsequential and forgettable.

In his seminal studies of Shakespeare on film—one appearing in an earlier number of this publication—Robert Hamilton Ball traced Beerbohm Tree's involvement with four film projects that spanned his twenty-year career (1897–1917) at His Majesty's Theatre: the opening shipwreck from his 1904 revival of The Tempest, captured on film at His Majesty's in 1905 by Charles Urban; a five-scene version of Henry VIII based on his 1910 production featuring him as Cardinal Wolsey and filmed in February 1911 at William Barker's Ealing studio; a 1916 Macbeth, bearing no direct resemblance to his 1911 stage version, filmed in California by D.W. Griffith with Tree playing the title role; and, though allegedly not as extensive as the others but certainly the most important historically, a brief segment from his King John revival filmed in 1899 on the Adelphi embankment—Tree's initial cinematographic venture and the very first record of Shakespeare on film. Although little is known about the exact nature of these films because the primary sources—the films themselves—are lost, Ball, working from the knowledge that the films were, in the main, transcriptions of either the stage revivals or Tree's roles, reconstructed their contents by culling mostly from theatrical documents such as reviews and programs and augmenting these with rare descriptions or photographs from the films whenever available.

With the advent of the 1917 Revolution, “the whole of the Russian cultural world [became] an icon.” Soviet power retroactively encoded revolutionary imminence and immanence in history and fetishized the revolutionary historical moment as the pregnant body of past, present and future. Leon Trotsky wrote: “If the symbol is a concentrated image, then the revolution is the supreme maker of symbols, since it presents all phenomena and relations in concentrated form.” Lenin's belief that “a communist [proletarian] culture must embody the entire store of knowledge accumulated in the pre-revolutionary past” could not, however, fully predict the Soviets' gross and wholesale advertisement of self-made objects inscribed with ideological desire. This owed more to what Renato Poggioli called the “pronounced tendency of the Russian critical spirit to translate artistic and cultural facts into religious or political myths.” This tendency was exploited by Joseph Stalin, who recognized that “Totalitarianism is … its own Utopia.”

Julia Marlowe's career, 1887–1924, came at an awkward point in the history of the American theatre, a transitional period when old traditions were fading and new ones had not yet been established. During her thirty years as an actress, a heterogeneous mixture of plays was seen on the American stage: Shakespeare and other old classics, emotional dramas adapted from the French and German, melodramas old and new, early attempts at realism, problem plays. Most strikingly innovative in this period were the dramas of Ibsen, Shaw, and O'Neill (his early plays), which questioned conventional values and often presented a disturbing view of human life and relationships. The range of plays was varied for performers, and the acting styles employed by the actors revealed a comparable diversity. According to Garff Wilson's classification, players like Helena Modjeska performed in the classic style characterized by grace, symmetry, and poetic grandeur; Clara Morris and Fanny Davenport perfected a highly emotional style, both specialists in the art of stage weeping; Otis Skinner abandoned the classics of Shakespeare and Restoration drama and became famous in sentimental comedy and romantic costume drama such as Kismet; Ada Rehan and Viola Allen, part of the “sisterhood of sweetness and light,” achieved popularity as actresses of the “personality school”; Richard Mansfield, a thoroughly transitional figure, clung to the classics in his repertoire but also produced and performed in the modern plays of Shaw and Ibsen; Minnie Maddern Fiske championed the works of Ibsen and a style of acting called the school of psychological naturalism.