By 1747, Thomas Sheridan had been on the stage four years–for the last year he had been actor-manager of the Smock-Alley Theater in Dublin. His decision to “turn player” had been a difficult one. He had been born and bred a gentleman. As the most promising son of the Reverend Dr. Thomas Sheridan, classical scholar and Dublin schoolmaster, he had gone to London to Westminster College, and after his father's death, he had prepared himself to teach–by taking his M.A. at Trinity College Dublin.

Professor George F. Reynolds' The Staging of Elizabethan Plays at the Red Bull Theatre, 1606–1625 was the first major book, to cast doubt on the theory that there was a recessed room, an ‘inner stage,’ cut into the tiring house wall on the Shakespearian stage. Reynolds further restored the reputation of the much-maligned De Witt-van Buchell sketch of the Swan Theatre. Although a number of scholars recognized at once that Reynolds' book was something of a landmark, it was not until this decade that his methods and materials were made use of. C. Walter Hodges' The Globe Restored was the first book to take up where Reynolds had left off. Dependent on Hodges, but at the same time highly original, was A. M. Nagler's Shakespeare's Stage.

The New Playwrights' theatre, a non-commercial company founded by Michael Gold, Em Jo Basshe, John Howard Law-son, John Dos Passos, and Francis Edwards Faragoh, and supported by a series of grants from Otto H. Kahn, produced eight consecutive failures in twenty-four months of feverish activity at the close of the nineteen-twenties. Its works were among the most boisterous and futile ever witnessed in the smaller playhouses of New York, and its record of acid notices and early closings has not been broken in some thirty subsequent seasons of off-Broadway production.

The career of Philip James de Loutherbourg, the Alsatian scene designer, assumes considerable importance in a history of the English theatre. More than anyone else, De Loutherbourg was responsible for freeing stage spectacle from the rigidities of the conventional wing and border system, thus preparing the way for Capon, Planché, Stanfield and the other great romantic designers of the nineteenth century.

Perhaps no family in the history of any art form has so completely dominated and influenced the artistic production of its century as did the Galli-Bibiena family from Bologna. Certainly in the sphere of theatrical scene design and decoration it was the family genius of the Italian Bibienas, working almost as a composite entity, that founded and maintained the Baroque Period of scene design as the age of supreme illusion.