At the end of the 1940s, individuals and groups, as well as the government in Ireland, recognized the need for and benefits of arts enterprises. The Inter-Party coalition, which came to power in early 1948 (under John Costello), recognized the importance of tourism as an industry and the potential of theatre to attract foreign visitors to Ireland. In 1949, the Cultural Relations Committee of Ireland, operating under the auspices of the Minister for External Affairs, undertook production of a series of pamphlets designed “to give a broad, vivid, and informed survey of Irish life and culture.”1 In 1951, the Republic of Ireland established the Arts Council; the first National Fleadh (Festival) for traditional music was held in Mullingar; Liam Miller founded the Dolmen Press; and Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann (Traditional Irish Music Advisory) was established. Even after the 1951 election returned de Valera and Fianna Fáil to power, organizational infrastructures to support the arts continued to appear: the Irish tourist board (Bord Failte) and Gael-Linn (an organization to promote Irish language, literature, and culture) both debuted in 1952. Cork held its first International Choral and Folk Dance Festival and its first International Film Festival in 1953. Some of these developments may have anticipated the imminent inauguration of regular air passenger service to North America, but all responded to cultural opportunities precluded during what Ireland knows as the Emergency and other nations as World War II. These agencies and events all sought to project a positive, progressive image of Ireland. Most important, they all mark a departure from the isolationism that prevailed in Ireland before and during the Emergency and that characterized de Valera's tenure as Taoiseach in the 1930s and 1940s.

The theatrical map in London during the 1960s consisted of four notable theatrical companies: the English Stage Company, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre Company, and the Theatre Workshop. The first three companies, although somewhat transformed, fill major roles in British theatre to the present day. What happened to the fourth company, the Theatre Workshop? This question is all the more intriguing in light of the tribute current historical and critical accounts pay to the founder-director of this company, Joan Littlewood. Theatre critics and historians today view Littlewood as a major representative of radical theatre in the 1960s. Littlewood's position during her era, however, was quite a different story, and the tale of then versus the tale of now is a primer in theatre historiography. I will trace that tale in this essay by juxtaposing the diverse receptions she and her works have received during the past forty years.

This article is a development of a paper submitted to last year's ASTR conference at City University of New York as part of a panel discussion on the legacy of the 1960s. That paper was prepared to the conference brief that submissions should involve some reflexive investigation of research methods and scholarly practices. Reviewing existing material written on the causal links between Situationist theory and theatre practice in the 1960s counterculture in England, I began to question the “fit” between these two areas. A critical narrative concerning the development of a post-Brechtian theatrical style in the work of a generation of English political dramatists — such as Howard Brenton, Trevor Griffiths, and David Edgar — during the late 1960s and early 1970s has come to read Situationism as a dominant shaping force. On closer examination, however, this relationship is neither as clear nor as convincing as this now commonplace critical model would suggest. Additionally, neglected and underreported instances and examples — some of which are explored in this article — seem to tell contrasting, or more complex, stories about the forms and practices of English theatre in the counterculture. Investigation of some of these issues has led me to consider why it is that particular historical orthodoxies develop to account for movements and moments in cultural and performance history. What happens to make a small and, at the time, not widely published or read group of theorists such as the Situationists take on a retrospectively key position in scholarly accounts of cultural history? Thus, this article investigates the transmission of Situationist ideas in English theatre practice to conclude that there may be a broader, more idiosyncratic, history to read against dominant accounts of influence and causation.

Theatre historians have long acknowledged John Weaver as the father of English pantomime. In 1985, however, the foremost Weaver scholar, Richard Ralph, noted that no one had systematically studied Weaver's pantomime descriptions, printed in The Loves of Mars and Venus, nor had classical influences upon Weaver been sufficiently investigated.1 Scholarship in the past fifteen years has not filled these gaps; thus, this article begins an examination of these two areas of Weaver's work. They are especially significant because the pantomime descriptions and classical influences reveal that Weaver was a scholar-artist, a rare combination in his era, whose theories and practices deepened the interplay among the arts in early eighteenth-century England.2

In November 1991, Brown University announced the addition of the Sidney P. Albert-G. B. Shaw Collection to its Special Collections. The purchase of the private collection of Sidney P. Albert was accomplished with the support and encouragement of the then president of Brown, Vartan Gregorian. At the same time, and upon Albert's recommendation, Brown acquired the correspondence and other documents relating to Shaw's dealings with his American publisher, Dodd, Mead & Company (and, by extension, other publishers). An inaugural exhibit of material from the Albert Collection (“Quintessential Shaw”) was mounted in Brown's John Hay Library, 5 May –28 July, 1995, curated by former Brown Curator for Printed Books, Jennifer Lee. To celebrate the opening of the exhibit and to mark the addition of the Albert-Shaw Collection to Brown's holdings, the Friends of Brown Library hosted a dinner-reception on 5 May with readings from Shaw plays and a brief talk (“100 Years Ago: G.B.S. in 1895”) by Albert, followed by a public lecture (“Shaw's Utopia”) delivered by Shaw biographer Michael Holroyd.

In the 1970s, during the first major wave of stage-centered Shakespeare scholarship, Shakespeare Quarterly started dedicating so much space to reviews of contemporary Shakespeare productions that it took up a whole issue. Space pressures created a dilemma for editors and contributors: should the reviews document (listing personnel, cuts and alterations, and running time) describe (concept, tone, unusual line readings, and business) or assess (individual actors and overall effectiveness)? That wave, and the annual dedicated issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, passed (with another journal, Shakespeare Bulletin, taking up the banner). One legacy of that era has been the continuing efforts of the World Shakespeare Bibliography, published annually as a special number of Shakespeare Quarterly, to record as much as it can about Shakespeare in the theatre — not just scholarly books and articles, but contemporary productions and journalistic reviews.

It is a curious comment on the evolution of American theatre scholarship when a reissue retains nearly its original force. That, however, seems the case with Benjamin McArthur's Actors and American Culture, 1880 – 1920, originally published in 1984 and out of print for several years. McArthur was considerably ahead of the pack in 1984 and drew together a wide range of generally thorough research, and the work thus remains a principal, and the most thorough, overview of a crucial era. Since Iowa's is a reissue rather than a new edition, hindsight prompts more exceptions than on first issue, but its basic direction and impulse reaffirm the book as a valuable, if slightly problematic, resource.

William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his Wild West show have not wanted for ink. There are Cody's own autobiographical accounts of his frontier and his theatrical adventures, Don Russell's well-researched standards on Cody's life and the Wild West shows, Sarah Blackstone's examination of the economic basis of the Wild West show in general, Joseph G. Rosa and Robin May's pictorial biography of Cody, Paul Reddin's overview of Wild West images, and a host of other, related books. In fact, there have been so many books written about “Buffalo Bill” Cody and Wild West shows, it is somewhat remarkable that Joy Kasson has found such a productive new angle on the western hero and his dramatic presentations.

The first question to pose of Arthur Bloom's fine new biography of Joseph Jefferson is, Why did it take so long? Not Bloom's work, which has been long awaited for the obvious reason of its exhaustive research, but, rather, why has it taken until the new millennium for any scholarly biography to be written of arguably America's most popular comedian of the nineteenth century? Modern studies of Edwin Booth, Edwin Forrest, and Charlotte Cushman have appeared alongside hosts of books on lesser figures, but, for Jefferson, readers had to be content with appreciations by friends such as William Winter, Francis Wilson, daughter-in-law Eugenie Paul Jefferson, and granddaughter Eleanor Farjeon. And, of course, there was the Autobiography. That most delightful of all theatrical memoirs may explain the absence of biographical treatment. It seemed to be all there, a life retold with more charm than any historian could muster.

The past two decades have witnessed an increasing interest in the work of Susan Glaspell. C. W. E. Bigsby's collection of her plays, published in 1988, introduced many readers to her work for the first time. Reviewing the collection, critic Michael Goldman called Glaspell “the only playwright of her generation worthy of comparison with O'Neill.” Since that time, essays about Glaspell's work have been published in multiple books: Mary E. Papke published the very thorough and useful Susan Glaspell: A Research and Production Sourcebook (1993); a lengthy analysis of Glaspell's plays, with particular emphasis on their expressionistic qualities, appeared in my book American Women Playwrights, 1900 – 1950 (1995); and there have been academic conferences devoted to Glaspell's work. Now Barbara Ozieblo has written an excellent critical biography that will be of value to theatre scholars.

After all these years I am glad to see that the correspondence (letters, notes and wires) of O'Neill and his second wife Agnes Boulton have finally reached print. I have had occasion to use some of these letters in my research, but many I had not read until this publication. Boulton was married to O'Neill during his most experimental period as a playwright, 1918 – 29, and some of the letters provide material related to productions and his writing of the plays, but most of the letters focus on the marriage and the daily vicissitudes of living in a volatile, love-hate relationship which vacillates between the euphoric and the accusatory, much like the text of O'Neill's 1924 play Welded — a thinly disguised account of their relationship.

As women emerged from the constraints of whalebone corsets, trailing skirts, and woolen knickers into skirts that skimmed their ankles or even knees, socioeconomic and political forces were massing against this new physical freedom. The questions Posing a Threat asks are how did women test their newborn freedom through fashionable clothing choices — primarily bathing costumes — and what were the lasting consequences of these experiments? “Flappers” and chorus girls were the principle targets of self-proclaimed moralists and socially prominent spokesmen in the twenties. The emergence of the working-class woman and her fashion decisions created an amalgam of conflicting social, economic, and moral attitudes, and forced negotiations with the hegemonic dictators of acceptable female behavior.

This exhaustive, but by no means exhausting, book about John Gielgud is well-titled. Jonathan Croall has taken Gielgud's career, rather than his personal life, as his focus and, in so doing, provides a valuable look at English theatre as it grew and evolved through the twentieth century.

Playwright Tony Kushner has called the remarkable generation of gay and lesbian playwrights examined in these two books a “weird little golden age” of dramatists, filmmakers, and theorists. Each book deals with aspects of this twentieth-century gay – lesbian renaissance and, for scholars, opens the field of sexuality and gender to an emphasis on theatre history, culture, and literary theory. Of these two works, Alan Sinfield's Out on Stage stands out as an essential critical history of homosexuality in modern drama, while Straight with a Twist, edited by Calvin Thomas, is an interesting collection of a dozen essays on aspects of Queer Theory (embracing variant definitions of the term from Rimbaud to Foucault) viewed through the prism of the heterosexual gaze and its complex relation to the gay – lesbian “other.”