Colin Visser's recent article, “The Descent of Orpheus at the Cockpit, Drury Lane,” performed a valuable service by calling attention to the presence of technically sophisticated French “Machine” drama in London as early as 1661. Visser bases his argument on a pamphlet in the Malone collection at the Bodleian, “The Description of the Great Machines, of the DESCENT of ORPHEUS Into Hell. Presented by the French Commedians at the Cock-pit in Drury-lane.” This libretto, printed in both English and French, does not identify the French troupe, but Chapoton's Descente d'Orphée was in the repertory of les comédiens de Mademoiselle d'Orléans, a touring company whose name disappears from the Continental records for most of the period of French activity at the Cockpit.

Regency toy Theatre flourished in England in the years between 1811 and 1830. At the height of its popularity thousands of middle and working class youths, together with their upper class “betters,” escaped the grim realities of industrial London for the joys of staging — and playing all the parts of — The Fairy of the Oak, or Harlequin's Regatta (1811), Ferdinand of Spain, or Ancient Chivalry (1813), Bluebeard (1824), or even more exotic pieces such as “The Grand New Spectacle called Korastikan, Prince of Assassins” (1824).

The nineteenth-century theatregoer in America and in England enjoyed a wonderful diversity of acting styles and roles among the actresses of the period. To be sure, it was an age of the womanly ideal, when playing Juliet appealed to every young actress. Perhaps too many aspired to the youthful, feminine charms of Juliet, for one disgusted New York critic complained that “40,000 American girls were doing the Balcony Scene that ought to be doing the family dishes.” Other roles such as Paulina, Galatea, and Parthenia thrived on the Victorian stage, male theatre critics applauding the feminine virtues of gentility and grace, loyalty, delicate humor, and occasional submissiveness. Interestingly, another sort of female role became extremely popular during this time: the breeches role.

Vera; or, The Nihilist was Oscar Wilde's first performed play, a work, as Wilde described it, “not of politics but of passion,” expressing the “cry of the peoples for Liberty.” Liberty as subject — and the rhetoric of republicanism that made liberty a catchword — came naturally to Wilde, as son of the Irish patriot Speranza and as a concerned and compassionate individual. But Wilde was also professionally ambitious. By writing a wordy tragedy of self-sacrifice with Russia and the Nihilist movement as background, Wilde hoped to appeal to popular taste in the theatre and to capitalize on public interest in current affairs. He may well have drawn his dramatic characters and the events of his play directly from a contemporary newspaper, The Era.

As an adjunct to my note in the May 1984 edition of Theatre Survey on the publishing of Robert Hunter's Androboros, I offer the following information concerning the identification of one of the play's characters, “Flip.” Although an apparently subtle reference, it provides clear justification for the numerous scatological references within the script and clarifies one of the more controversial scenes in the play. Moreover, it may indicate an additional impetus for the play's creation.

No special skill is required to light a stage; we need only switch on the fluorescents, or perform in daylight like the Greeks and Elizabethans. Our troubles began when we decided that we wanted to control light. The sun remains as intractable as Phaeton found it, so we excluded it by enclosing our theatres. Even then, the battle with artificial light was long and hard, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon established the goal: a measure of control that could duplicate on stage and in motion the painterly variation of color and chiaroscuro that had been mastered on canvas in the High Renaissance and Baroque.