Money matters. In Act 2 of Spamalot, Eric Idle's Broadway musical based on the 1975 cult classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the show's star, Tim Curry, as King Arthur, comments that the characters are running around in a “dark and very expensive forest.” The joke, it turns out, is entirely on us. Monty Python and the Holy Grail was an inexpensive independent film, costing $250,000 to make, a bargain compared to the same year's The Rocky Horror Picture Show ($1,200,000) and Python's own 1979 Life of Brian ($4,000,000). From its release, Holy Grail ran continuously in many theatres, and large numbers of people could afford the price of a ticket; it still circulates widely in relatively inexpensive DVD and VHS editions. Fast-forward thirty years to March of 2005. Production costs for Spamalot, Eric Idle's Broadway musical “lovingly ripped off” from the film, top $14 million (not atypical start-up costs these days on Broadway). Playing in a single theatre that seats only about 1,600, the show commands ticket prices that begin around $100 and can cost $350 and up. According to the Wall Street Journal, Spamalot is setting the pace for the spiraling costs of Broadway entertainment. Many fewer people will see the musical than the film, and those who can will tend to be more affluent; Spamalot's target audience is Holy Grail's first audience “all grown up,” prosperous, middle-aged Monty Python fans (like the authors of this article). In their youth, Holy Grail denied this audience the pleasures of narrative cinema. It made fun of film, relentlessly disturbing the seamless illusion of reality that is the cornerstone of Hollywood cinema, refusing narrative coherence and narrative closure. A parody of the clichés of mass culture, it exposed the political conservatism of the various forms of nostalgia for a medieval past that never was, a past in which strange women lying around in ponds distributing swords could be a basis for a political system. Spamalot, on the other hand, adapts its cinematic original, repackaging the youthful rebellion of the 1975 film and offering the pleasures of nostalgia remarkably free from political consequences.

In the 1920s, the Royal Court Theatre still enjoyed the reputation earned earlier in the century by Harley Granville Barker and John Vedrenne, yet its daily fare was not remarkably distinctive from other West End theatres. In that context, an aspiring playwright was contracted to write a play for the Court's 1923 season. The playwright happened to be Marie Stopes, (in)famous author of the best-selling sex-education and birth-control manual Married Love. “Contracted” is the word Stopes uses. It could also be speculated that, in a year when the Court's five main undertakings had as many as five different producers and three different managers, the theatre was made available to Stopes, a celebrity on the London scene who had her own backing.

In this clear, concise, and accessible volume, Michael Patterson sets himself the task of examining “the work of nine talented and innovative British playwrights who shared a laudable but strange conviction: that by writing plays and having them performed they might help to change the way society is structured” (1). As if conscious of the inevitable charge that by focusing on Wesker, Arden, Griffiths, Barker, Brenton, McGrath, Hare, Bond, and Churchill he is perpetuating the damaging myth that political theatre in postwar Britain centers on these usual suspects, Patterson takes pains to define his terms. Political theatre for the purposes of his volume “implies the possibility of radical change on socialist lines: the removal of injustice and autocracy and their replacement by the fairer distribution of wealth and more democratic systems” (4). But as the Lord Chamberlain found in his increasingly desperate attempts in the 1960s to hold on to his power to censor British drama, the more you attempt to define, the more problematic the issues that arise. Theatre historians are now becoming increasingly aware of the power of “hidden theatre” in the evolution of postwar British theatre—that is, the large number of community-based and politically active groups that have been marginalized by a disproportionate focus on “representative” political playwrights and a few well-scrutinized collective organizations, such as 7:84, Monstrous Regiment, and Belt and Braces, who are all alluded to in this volume. In light of this fact, Patterson's interest in the phenomenon that saw a generation of playwrights flourish between the mid-fifties and the early eighties, who shared a desire to change society, now seems rather quaint. It is all the more to his credit, therefore, that he has produced a highly thought-provoking work.

The purpose of this special section of Theatre Survey has been to bring together scholars in the field of medieval studies working specifically in theatre studies and those whose work reflects new strategies and current concerns in theatre historiography.

As it affected the performing arts community, the Red Scare has been examined in great detail.1 Taken together, these studies make clear that external political forces influence the hiring decisions of performing-arts organizations. From the 1930s to the 1950s figures affiliated with left-wing causes and groups found their careers stifled either temporarily or permanently because of their political beliefs. Although attention has focused primarily on institutional pressures from outside the industry on leftist artists, we describe an instance of pressure from within the industry on an artist whose politics were isolationist rather than progressive. In this research note, we present the case of Lillian Gish, describing how interventionists pressured her to distance herself from the isolationism that she had publicly embraced in the period immediately prior to the entrance of the United States in World War II. The attack on those described as “Nazi sympathizers” and their isolationist brethren during 1940–4 has come to be described as the “Brown Scare,”2 playing off the more widely known “Red Scares” of 1919–20 and 1947–54.

“There is, indeed, little doubt,” the formidable scholar James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps confidently explained to the Victorian readers of his Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, “that the Birth-place did not become one of the incentives for pilgrimage until public attention had been specially directed to it at the time of the Jubilee.” That's broadly true. The earliest reference to the three-gabled, half-timbered house (two houses, originally) on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon as the birthplace of William Shakespeare dates only from the late 1750s, when it was so named in Samuel Winter's town map. During the Stratford Jubilee, which David Garrick organized in 1769, the “small old house,” as the actor's first biographer called it, was fully recognized and promoted as the place where Shakespeare was born. Even so, Halliwell-Phillipps's observation conceals more than it reveals, because there is also little doubt that the dwelling that tradition calls Shakespeare's birthplace did not suddenly acquire that status during the first week of September 1769. The process by which the unremarkable piece of real estate that John Shakespeare purchased sometime in the late sixteenth century was transformed into what Barbara Hodgdon has rightly called the “controlling ideological center” of Shakespeare biography was long, slow, and far from inevitable. That process is the subject of this essay.

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.

During the course of her summer's progress in 1575, Elizabeth I spent nineteen days at Kenilworth, the Earl of Leicester's Castle in Warwickshire, where she was presented with various entertainments—including plays, fireworks, bear-baitings, water-pageants, acrobatic performances, and dancing—at a cost of over a thousand pounds a day, as part of what has been called “unquestionably sixteenth-century England's grandest and most extravagant party.” Robert Langham, a minor court functionary who wrote an eyewitness account of the party, describes a “lyvely morisdauns” that was featured in this festive show of fealty to the queen. According to Langham, the morris performed for Elizabeth was danced “acording too the auncient manner” and featured “six daunserz, Mawdmarion, and the fool.” The dance was part of a bride-ale procession made up of “lusty lads and bolld bachelarz of the parish” arranged two by two in “marciall order,” who preceded sixteen horsemen and the bridegroom; after the horsemen came the morris dance, followed by three “prety puzels” carrying spicecakes and leading the bride (“ill smellyng” and “ugly fooul ill favord”), who was accompanied by “too auncient parishionerz, honest toounsmen” and a dozen bridesmaids. The procession marched to the castle in the great court in which a quintain had been set up for feats of arms; when these games were concluded, a performance of the traditional Hock Tuesday play from nearby Coventry was enacted. Though these festivities were staged outside her window, apparently the queen did not see much of them because, Langham tells us, “her highnes behollding in the chamber delectabl dauncing indeed: and heerwith the great throng and unruliness of the peopl, waz cauz that this solemnitee of Brydeale and dauncing had not the full muster waz hoped for” (11. 722–26). Elizabeth asked that the Hocktide play be performed again for her on the following Tuesday; Langham does not mention whether or not the morris dance was also repeated for the queen's pleasure.

Robert Barker of Edinburgh patented the panorama process on 19 June 1787 and opened the first panorama in London in 1792. Robert Fulton, the American inventor, obtained the patent to import the panorama to Paris at the end of 1799. Fulton opened the Paris panorama in 1800, but shortly thereafter ceded the patent to James Thayer. By the summer of 1800 there were two panorama rotundas in operation in a passage off the Boulevard Montmartre. At the end of 1802 a third rotunda was constructed in the Jardin des Capucines, Boulevard de la Chausée d'Antin.

Martha Morton was a remarkable woman — a talented and energetic person whose career in the New York theatre extended from 1890 to 1915, a time when women were expected to concern themselves with traditional roles and when public life and outside work were adventures for only a few daring women. In spite of efforts to sweep her aside, Morton opened the doors for American women, who followed after her, to participate in the theatre as playwrights, directors, producers, and professional members of theatre organizations.

No one at the Indian Bureau, in Washington, seemed interested when, early in the summer of 1876, Indian Agent John P. Clum suggested taking a carload of his San Carlos Apaches back East –“to see the greatness of our United States and become impressed by the progress of their white brothers.” So Clum relates in the semi-autobiographical book Apache Agent.

Two years before, in Feburary, 1874, he had been commissioned :by President Grant as Agent for the Apaches at the San Carlos Indian Reservation, Arizona Territory.

Female playwrights of varying degrees of quality were reasonably plentiful in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century England; but, except for Eliza Haywood, few of these playwrights doubled as actresses, at least with sufficient success for us to be aware of their talents. Even the stage career of Mrs. Haywood, one extending at least from 1715 to 1737, has not been documented in its entirety before now. It deserves attention because it adds some details to the scanty biography of this woman who is best known as a novelist, a novelist who turned out scandal chronicles long before Richardson made the novel morally acceptable, and who in 1751 produced what may be the first domestic novel in English, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless. Along the way she had some success as a publisher, as the first woman writer of a periodical for women, as a poet, and as a playwright and actress. It was her efforts in the theater that drew the attention of such men as Jonathan Swift and Richard Savage and brought her into a rather lengthy association with Henry Fielding. And it was her theatrical experience that contributed much to her eventual skill as a novelist. She liked the stage, and much of what we like in her later work she owed to the stage.

Firmin Gémier rose to the top rank of twentieth century French actors with a versatile talent that led to simultaneous success in the bourgeois commercial theatres of the boulevards, the elite independent theatres of the back streets, and the tawdry working class theatres of the suburbs. His historical reputation rests on his early career with Antoine's Théâtre-libre, and later accomplishments such as founding the Théâtre National Populaire, creating the role of Père Ubu, and tutoring Gaston Baty and Charles Dullin. Still, Gémier's work is seldom discussed and it is too easy to forget the major role he played in advocating the democratization of French theatre, a role he was uniquely suited to play given his eclecticism and willingness to popularize the Théâtre-libre style. He took middle ground between the elitism of Antoine and the commercialism of Sasha Guitry and encouraged later generations of theatre artists to actively seek an ever-widening audience.

In the papers of Sir Robert Walpole now deposited in the Cambridge University Library, there is an information prepared in 1724 by the office of the Attorney General for the prosecution of a number of players at the Court of King's Bench. This document provides insights not only into the climate of theatrical censorship at the time but also into the nature of the dramatic presentations at London street fairs such as this one at Bartholomew Fair in Smithfield. The actors and actresses involved were for the most part well-known professionals on the London stage. The offending dramatic vehicle, heretofore known only by its title as advertised in the periodical press, was a short comedy or droll called “The Prodigal Son,” based on the familiar parable in Luke's gospel (15: 11–32).

This rather proud statement is by Gerhart Hauptmann; anyone I wishing to challenge the validity of the boast will be wise to consider first the number of professional Shakespeare performances in the German language as compared with those in English, to take account of the amount and quality of German Shakespeare scholarship, and to realize that Shakespeare had reached many peoples in Eastern and Northern Europe by way of German transmission. In addition, the citation well illustrates the spirit in which German intellectuals approach Shakespeare.

Dates and events are frequently useful scholarly pigeonholes into which may be neatly tucked whole periods of literature or significant literary trends. The scholar knows them to be oversimplifications, but so long as their limitations are recognized, they remain useful tools for teaching, talking, and writing. Occasionally, however, history is hung from a date so unreliable and so unjustified that delineation of material is blurred rather than clarified, traditions are obscured rather than illuminated, and fields of research are closed rather than opened. American theatre history affords a perfect example of the misused common reference point. The year 1866, with its production of The Black Crook, has been accepted as the landmark indicating the beginnings of American musical comedy. Cecil Smith, in Musical Comedy in America, says, “For all important purposes, the history of musical comedy in America starts with The Black Crook, as everyone has always said it did.”

The founding of experimental ensembles dominates the history of Western theatre in the first half of the twentieth century. Groups of theatre artists, desperate to revive and resuscitate an art grown stale and lifeless, banded together, seeking common ground in the period's vast swirl of artistic and ideological sensibilities. These groups, from the Moscow Art Theatre to the Berliner Ensemble, produced a broad range of performances, yet all shared a common commitment to change and theatrical growth. Two of these, the Group Theatre and Jacques Copeau's Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier participated in and elevated this world-wide phenomenon. Since they share some common roots, an exploration of the relationship between the Vieux-Colombier and the Group yields some insights into the formation and maintenance of an acting ensemble.