For eight days in January 1919 the theatre industry was at war with the U.S. Congress, a nationwide event surprisingly overlooked in previous theatre history. Theatre management and its host of workers joined with the public to wage a well-orchestrated campaign in the newspapers and mail, in the theatres and on the streets to stop what was perceived as a gross injustice to the American theatre and its paying audience.

When the United States Congress was framing a six billion dollar tax revenue bill to recover exorbitant war costs from the first world war, it attempted to slip in a new tax which would raise theatre admissions by ten per cent in order to return between seventy-five and eighty-one million dollars to the government. The original bill levied a twenty per cent tax on all tickets of admission above thirty cents (thus most movie houses were exempt). In addition box seat holders at theatres and the opera were to be taxed twenty-five per cent.

The early twentieth century found American suffragists experimenting with a diverse array of techniques to argue their cause. Among those who gave their talents to this effort was a skilled theatrical professional, Hazel MacKaye (1888–1944). A radical suffragist, MacKaye was a charter member of the Congressional Union, which in 1914 formally split off from the National American Woman Suffrage Association and evolved into the militant wing of the suffrage movement, the National Woman's Party. Hazel MacKaye created four women's rights pageants to propagandize for the suffragists between the years 1913 and 1923, which this paper will describe and examine.

On the night of 7 June 1861, at a playhouse in Albany, New York, actress Adah Isaacs Menken, on horseback, wearing nothing but a fleshcolored bodystocking, galloped up a stage mountain into theatrical history. The combination of danger and nudity shocked and excited her Victorian audience. In an age when women swathed themselves in yards of crinoline, her performance proved scandalous; critics agreed that, though she wore “pink fleshings,” she so explicitly revealed the female form that she might as well have been naked. One reviewer warned that “no pure youth could witness her performance and come away untainted. Naturally, such cautions increased curiosity; soon Menken became the most notorious, highest paid actress of her day. She toured with her show Mazeppa through the northeast, the American west, and the capitals of Europe before succumbing to cancer a short seven years later in Paris.

How popular was The Merry Wives of Windsor in the eighteenth century? Because records show that the original, unadapted version of the play was performed a substantial number of times, scholars have usually assumed that it was both a critical and theatrical success during this period. This opinion is, however, based on an incomplete picture of the play's stage history, and it does not take into account the importance of casting to a play's popularity. A review of commentaries and theatrical records indicates that we should alter our view of the comedy's place in the eighteenth-century repertory. The play was not, overall, as popular as has long been believed, and it owed much of its vogue to James Quin in the role of Falstaff.

To nineteenth-century theatre managers, who believed in the play as a commercial venture rather than an aesthetic one, portrayal of the modern American woman presented a dilemma. Sophisticated theatregoers, familiar with the rhetoric of the women's suffrage movement, looked to female role models for direction on how to maintain a delicate balance between independence and subservience: to project strength of convictions without loss of femininity (traditionally measured by male desirability), and to remain dependent on the economic necessity of marriage (Ziff, 278–80). Speculative theatre managers found Shakespeare's comedies especially adaptable to modern audience's tastes because the plays lacked stage directions, required no royalty payments, were exempt from copyright laws, and centered on ambiguous female characters. American audiences, believing they were becoming cultured, supported Shakespearean revivals, and strongly applauded those plays Americanized by theatre managers. Two late nineteenth-century productions of Much Ado About Nothing, one in 1882 by Henry Irving, the other in 1896 by Augustin Daly, clearly demonstrate how each speculative manager, acting in the name of art, refashioned Shakespeare's text and interpreted Beatrice around his own ideal of femininity, an ideal each believed American audiences would endorse.

The Academy of Music in Charleston, South Carolina, opened its doors in December 1869 to a public who, according to the local newspaper, “for the past four years … had been sighing for, writing for, combining for, and begging for–a first class Opera House and Theatre.” This first post-Civil War theatre in Charleston had inherited a theatre history dating back to as early as 1703, as well as an ardent and long-standing interest in Shakespearean playgoing which, despite the Civil War's devastating interruption, continued to be an essential part of the city's way of life for the next two decades. Because of its importance as both a literary and a drama centre before the Civil War, Charleston has already attracted the attention of several theatre historians, and numerous studies have been made of this city's brilliant antebellum stage. However, there were no records of Charleston's post-Civil War theatre until I undertook my study of the Academy of Music, the principal playhouse between 1869 and 1936—indeed, its only post-Civil War theatre except for approximately seven years between 1888 and 1893 when the Charleston Opera House offered sporadic entertainment. Particularly in the first three decades of the Academy of Music, the worlds of audience and stage seem to have coincided to a remarkable degree. Charleston's theatre years between 1869 and 1899 offer insights into the changing cultural attitudes and needs of an impoverished Southern city as its leaders struggled to meet the challenges of that difficult time. The best theatrical index to such cultural changes I have found is the degree of the Charlestonians' response to Shakespearean drama during these transitional years.