In her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Susan Sontag includes Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake (1875–6) in a list that illustrates “random examples” from “the canon of Camp.” Though the ballet has become an integral part of the classical repertory for professional companies from Moscow to New York to Sydney as well as the inspiration for numerous figure skaters (most notoriously in Johnny Weir's outré and rhinestone-bedecked interpretation in 2006), it has, as suggested by Sontag, been creative afflatus for gay underground performers for more than a century. But what are the origins of the swan gone queer? As this article demonstrates, I suggest that one way to trace both the swan's queer genealogy and its continuity lies in the dramatic history and lived performance of the ill-fated Ludwig II (hereafter “Ludwig”) of Bavaria (1845–86)—the Swan King (Fig. 1). Tchaikovsky, after all, had been inspired by the dramatic story of the effete young king (and perhaps titillated by a shared closeted gay desire), who would become a prototype for the ballet's tragic hero, Prince Siegfried. In fact, dance scholar Peter Stoneley suggests that “Swan Lake confirms the virtual impossibility, in Tchaikovsky's [and Ludwig's] era, of accommodating homosexuality within wider society.” Ludwig's desire was expressed through a lens of his same-sex fantasies and their inspired artistic interpretations, most notably taking form in the construction of his neo-Romanesque, fairy-tale castle Neue Burg Hohenschwangau (more commonly known as Neuschwanstein or New Swan on the Rock Castle, though it was not renamed until after Ludwig's death). Ludwig's queer positionality also arises from the theatrical way that he performed a highly aesthetic (though hardly effective) approach to monarchy with his swan-bedecked castle and its environs as a sort of metastage set. In this context, the swan may be read as an example of what Donna Haraway calls “a companion species,” or a personal animal symbol (real or mythical) that represents a variety of feelings that are otherwise difficult to express in the hegemonic context of a given time and place (like homosexuality in Roman Catholic Bavaria in the nineteenth century). Ludwig chose the swan (drawn from family heraldry but primarily envisioned in his own life through storybook-driven fantasy) as a means of alternative expression to that normally available to a man in his position and with his responsibilities, and also as a way to enact his forbidden desires.

Until relatively recently, melodrama has been an unfairly maligned genre of theatre history; its pejorative associations based on the prejudiced assumptions that its aesthetics of excess (in terms of its extravagant emotion, sensationalism and popularity amongst predominantly working class audiences) meant, therefore, that it was for simpletons. What Walter Benjamin excoriated as the “ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator” fuelled bourgeois disdain for this theatrical form and the derision of the Theatrical Inquisitor’s dismissal of melodrama as “aris[ing] from an inertness in the minds of the spectators, and a wish to be amused without the slightest exertion on their own parts, or any exercise whatever of their intellectual powers” remained the dominant critical response throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, such views continued well into the twentieth century and certainly characterized the modernist reactions of the founding figures of the Irish national theatre in this period. Frank Fay, cofounder of the National Dramatic Society, denounced both the aesthetics of Dublin's Queen's Theatre as the “home of the shoddiest kind of melodrama,” and the intelligence of its audiences who, “wouldn't, at present, understand anything else.”

In 1967 the National Theatre of Japan (Kokuritsu Gekijô) published a facsimile version of Okyôgen Gakuya no Honsetsu (What Really Happens Backstage), a two-volume, four-part work, originally published in the midnineteenth century in Edo (Tokyo), and written by Santei Shunba, with the first volume (1858) illustrated by Baichôrô Kunisada and Ichieisai Yoshitsuya, and the second (1859) by Ichiransai Kunitsuna. The book offers numerous illustrations of kabuki stage effects, with brief explanations of their purposes. Despite its great value as a historical resource, this work had been barely known to the Japanese academic community, apart from the fact that one of its pictures appeared in Ihara Toshirô's 1913 Kinsei Nihon Engeki Shi (History of Japanese Theatre from the Edo Period) and was reproduced frequently thereafter. The chief source of information concerning its contents was an entry in the six-volume Engeki Hyakka Daijiten (Encyclopedia of the Theatre), published by Waseda University in 1962. This entry contained several inaccuracies, including errors in the number of the book's volumes and its publication date.

Writing in 1853, Gábor Egressy, one of the leading actor-directors of the Hungarian-speaking National Theatre in Pest-Buda (Budapest), observed that representatives of different nations were appearing in increasing number on and off the stages of the major cities of Eastern Europe:

Egressy shared this observation with readers when the black, British-American actor Ira Aldridge visited the National Theatre in 1853. Aldridge and his English company received a warm welcome from Hungarian audiences and leading intellectuals. At the same time, however, he was under surveillance by the Habsburg secret police, and was later politely asked to leave the city. In my article, I investigate Aldridge's visit to Pest-Buda using the concepts of surrogation (Joseph Roach) and mediatization (Christopher B. Balme), and pay close attention to the way the actor's contemporaries interpreted his visit.

Returning fresh from her summer vacation, the suntanned managing director of Gothenburg City Theatre, Karin Kavli (1906–90), proudly announced at a press conference in early August 1955 that she had secured the rights to produce the European premiere of Tennessee Williams's acclaimed play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.1 Well aware of the importance of creating a balanced repertoire that would satisfy the more artistically and literally minded audience and those who wanted some lighter forms of entertainment, Kavli understood that hosting the premiere of Williams's latest drama was quite a coup, especially in an age when television had begun to pose a great threat to theatre.

As the conventions of theatre design would have it, a clock onstage is a distraction for the audience. This has not always been true. Late nineteenth-century popular plays were alive with the sights and sounds of working clocks, their pointing hands, swinging pendulums, and striking bells announcing the time of significant events and actions in the fictional stage world. Visible on the mantelpiece, or audible in the town square, stage clocks in this era lent verisimilitude while heightening suspense, mirroring the broader aesthetic conventions of popular fin-de-siècle productions, in which highly realistic and detailed settings coexisted with the suspenseful plots and broad character types familiar from older melodramas.

Tom Stoppard's 2006 play Rock ‘n’ Roll revolves around the story of the Plastic People of the Universe (1968–88), an underground Czech rock band best known in the United States for their connections to Václav Havel and possibly for their ties to the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and the fall of communism in the Eastern bloc. Often tangentially referred to in progressive Western journalism, the Plastic People have come to signify a kind of subcultural capital for mainstream bourgeois writers, a way for moderate Western liberals to appear edgy and cultured. Stoppard's play draws on this popular consumption of the Plastic People, fetishizing them both for their grungy, underground lifestyle and for their status as underground rock legends. After all, the play seems to ask, how many rock bands can claim to have started an actual revolution? The play's twin narratives dramatize the clash between rock music and philosophical Marxism in Cambridge and Prague from 1968 to 1990. The stories are linked through the protagonist, Jan, a Czech intellectual who abandons his studies at Cambridge to return to Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Soviet invasion of 1968. He is determined to “save” rock music, socialism, and his mother. Jan soon discovers the Plastic People of the Universe, whose music he holds up as a positive ray of light in the dreary decades preceding the Velvet Revolution. Placing the Plastics’ music and story alongside the work of male rock megastars such as the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, the Beach Boys, and Bob Dylan, Stoppard celebrates the Plastic People as a band that preserves the revolutionary roots of rock music.

On November 17, 1677, Sir Popular Wisdom, or the Politician was performed at Dorset Gardens by the Duke of York's Company. All we know of the play comes from a letter of Andrew Marvel: “Today is acted the first time Sir Popular Wisdom, or the Politician where my Lord Shaftsbury and all his gang are sufficiently personated. I conceive the King will be there.” Though we are offered little else, the fact that Shaftsbury and his gang are ridiculed is, I think, enough to situate the play fairly with other royally endorsed parodies of the Whig party that found a ready marketplace in the King's Theatre in the years of fervent, 1677–1683. Plays such as John Crowne's The Ambitious Statesman (1679) and City Politiques (1682), Thomas D'Urfey's Sir Barnaby Whig (1681) and The Royalist (1682), and Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd (1681) all were having no end of sport lampooning the Whig platform, with scarcely the benefit of a rebuttal.

Bassanio's words, as he chooses the correct casket to win Portia as his wife, might offer an insight to the production history of the Royal Shakespeare Company:

An impressive number of the RSC's greatest theatrical triumphs have been stagings of Shakespeare's “meager lead,” his lesser or minor plays. To seek the common element in these surprising coups, I will examine four productions of such plays, one from each of the conventional generic categores, and spanning four decades in the history of the RSC: Brook's Love's Labor's Lost (1946) and Titus Andronicus (1955), Hall's and Barton's Troilus and Cressida (1960), Hands' Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III (1977).

Despite considerable advances in scholarship—achievements on which this essay builds—our knowledge of how eighteenth-century theatres were run remains worryingly thin. The managerial enterprise of theatre production, especially its daily practicalities, is largely obscure, though the facts of performance history are well documented. Knowledge of practice is not our only lacuna. Accounts of the interfaces among performances, institutional theatre practices, and the wider culture of the eighteenth century are too few, though wonderful work has been produced by Jane Moody, Felicity Nussbaum, and Gillian Russell, among others. This meager situation has arisen in part, as Robert D. Hume has argued, because scholars have yet to fully engage with those sources that have survived, although problems of missing evidence are serious and sometimes insurmountable. A related problem is that theatre historians are often averse to conceptualizing what they discover, as if analysis and certain modes of theoretical interpretation were the responsibility or more distinctly the failing of literary critics. But the discovery or reappraisal of an archive will only advance scholarship so far. New information about rehearsals, performances, finances, or contracts is vital, but it does not explain the motives or institutional momentum that animated theatre production. We need to know why some actors were favored by management while others seem to have been less well supported. It would also be useful to understand more precisely why some plays were performed repeatedly whereas others appeared only sporadically. The information contained in the London Stage should be crucial for theatre history, yet the repertoire of the patent theatres remains understudied. The impetus it gave to managers is too often ignored, while its political significance is barely understood, prompting justified complaint from Daniel O'Quinn. Great care will be necessary when addressing these issues. Overly general or prescriptive claims are probably best avoided; there are simply too many local factors. We should also recollect that theatrical production is necessarily a collective endeavor, a process in which many voices might be heard. Yet patterns and purposes can be found, even when what is most apparent is what Michel de Certeau terms the “‘polytheism’ of scattered practices.”

The study of medieval drama is relatively new but rapidly developing area of humanistic concern. Unfortunately, however, students of the medieval drama lack accurate modern texts of the plays, all of which are now being re-edited, and complete and accurate transcriptions of the historical documents which are so important to our understanding of the history, development, and production techniques of the medieval cycle plays. Of particular importance to the history of the plays are the dramatic documents of Chester, not only because they are more numerous than those of most other cities, but also because they include the earliest and fullest descriptions of the performance of the plays. Many of these documents remain unpublished and some of the published ones contain inaccuracies; for example, of the twelve extant disbursement accounts for performances of the plays, only seven have been published and of these seven, only three are accurate. Because complete transcriptions of contemporary documents referring to the plays have been unavailable, much of the critical commentary has been speculative. While making available the extant documents, a task I am currently engaged in, will not solve all the problems of the plays, it will narrow the limits of our speculations about them and give us a firmer basis of fact upon which to work. The discussion which follows is restricted to that of the frequency of performance of the Chester plays; it is designed to report facts and correct errors about the years in which the plays were performed and to speculate about the frequency of performances for years in which the facts are few or non-existent. In addition, the paper presents a preliminary report on the Chester dramatic documents and a discussion of the kind of evidence to be found in municipal records.

Frankly, I'm not much of a historian. That is, the past interests me mostly as grist for my theoretical mill. I am not nostalgic. I don't often trek through ruins—whether of stone, paintings, videotape, paper, library stacks, or my own many notebooks. Of course, I've done the right thing when it comes to this kind of activity. I have climbed the pyramids at Teotihuacan and in Mayan country, sat on stone benches of the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens and in Epidaurus (where I was tormented by some really awful productions of ancient Greek dramas), and visited the theatre museums of four continents. On the art-history front, I've gazed at more paintings and sculptings than I can readily organize in memory. But my strongest meetings with “history” have been at the cusp of the past and present—living events always already changing as they are (re)performed. This has been the core of my “anthropology-meets-theatre” work whether among the Yaquis of Arizona, at the Ramlila of Ramnagar in India, in the highlands of Papua–New Guinea, at Off-Off Broadway in New York, in the interior of China, and at very many other events in a wide variety of places.

The work of those designers who followed Jean Nicolas Servandoni (1695–1766) at the Royal Academy of Music, at Court, and elsewhere in Paris, is, like his own, preserved only in the pages of Le Mercure de France, L'Avant-Coureur, and other journals and memoirs. While the museums abound in easel canvases and drawings by François Boucher (1703–1770), we are hard-pressed to find one print which has even a remote connection with the stage. On the other hand, we have several volumes of costume sketches and a few scene prints by Louis-René Boquet (1717–1814) which give us a rather good impression of at least one side of his style. Unfortunately, the work of the men who may have been more influenced by Servandoni than any others—Pietro Algieri, Louis-Alexandre Girault, Antoine de Machy, Tremblin, Baudon, Guillet, Moulin, de Leuze, Canot, Lallemand, Spurney, etc.—is probably lost to the eye forever. Their careers, which took place in an extravagant age of theatrical design, must be pieced together from scattered paragraphs in the Paris periodicals. In most cases, we cannot even assign dates to the spans of their activities.

It is commonplace to observe that there are no mothers in the casts of Spanish Golden Age comedias. There are rare exceptions, but in such cases the mother is young. For example, in Tirso de Molina's La prudencia en la mujer (Prudence in Woman), the queen Dona María de Molina is the mother of a small child. As a general rule, the female characters of the Spanish comedia are young damas, or ladies. They are looked after by fathers and brothers, by male servants, or by young female servants, but not by a mother, an aunt, or even an older servant.

How has “America” been performed, reimagined, and contested for the past 250 years? Or as J. Ellen Gainor puts it, what “role” has theatre played in the “construction of American identity”? One need not concur with Jeffrey D. Mason's foreword that there is a “void” of theatre scholarship on this topic (remember the pioneering histories of Richard Moody and Walter Meserve) to agree with him and his co-editor, J. Ellen Gainor, that questions of nationalism and cultural representation in the United States remain far from exhausted (4). As evidence for this claim, Mason and Gainor invoke a bibliography of recent (and not-so recent) scholarship by “New Americanists” like Sacvan Bercovitch, Annette Kolodny, Donald Pease, Myra Jehlen, and Lauren Berlant that should rightly spur theatre scholars to engage the problem of “performing America” with fresh vigor.