Among the pioneer artists who sought with uneven luck to bring some reflection of European culture to the crude seaports and market towns of the American eastern seaboard in the eighteenth century, none had such lasting importance as the Hallam family, the founders of the first permanent and stable theatrical company in North America.

Administrative records of the French theatre during the First Empire are fairly abundant, but the researcher interested in documents concerning the physical side of production at this time faces a difficult and frequently unrewarding search. The documents preserved in Paris are few, and political vicissitudes, inadequate storage, and fire have combined to leave still fewer documents in the provinces. Particularly important, therefore, is a collection of dossiers preserved in the Archives départementales de l'Herault which include both mises en scène and information on settings at the Montpellier Comédie during the Empire period. No similar records have survived from any of the other great provincial theatres of this period–Bordeaux, Rouen, Marseilles, Nancy, Toulouse, and Strasbourg.

The Master of the Revels, Edmund Tilney, entered a traveling charge of one pound in the Revels Accounts when he was called to court “to choose out a companie of players for her majestie. Stow recorded this event in his Abridgement of the English Chronicle:

This yeare 1583, the Queene being at Barne Elmes, at the earnest suite of sir Francis Walsingham, shee entertained twelve Players into her service, and allowed them wages and liveries as Groomes of the Chamber, and untill then she had none of her owne, but divers Lords had Players.

No subsequent production of Major Barbara commanded Bernard Shaw's attention as fully as did the original one in 1905 at the Royal Court Theatre, in which he served as director as well as author. Nonetheless, revivals and contemplated revivals elicited from him lively suggestions about how to stage and perform this complex drama; and in a few of these he again became an active participant in rehearsals. The surviving comments, however incomplete, afford a useful supplement to his earlier counsel. They also add valuable details to Shaw's own commentary on the play and to our knowledge of him as peerless director of his own dramas.

Malcolm Morley was born at Aldershot, England, on 20 May 1890. Intensely interested in the theatre from an early age, he took part in amateur and semi-professional productions. Due to some parental opposition to a theatrical career, he left England in 1912, to make his way as an actor on the American Stage. His early efforts are described in the following pages.

Returning to England in 1920, he led an active theatrical life as actor, producer and manager. He was associated with the management of the Everyman Theatre, Hampstead, during its most influential years, when its successes included the first English productions of Strindberg's The Father and Ostrovsky's The Storm.