A number of questions about Stanislavski's writings on acting and the theatre still hang in the air nearly fifty years after his death. It seems curious that this should be the case when the ideas and books by the great Russian director-actor-teacher are so well known and have exerted such a profound influence on the modern theatre. The persistence of these questions through the years has even raised doubts concerning the authenticity of the writings attributed to Stanislavski and the accuracy of translations from his original Russian texts. As a result, serious students of Stanislavski's “System” feel unable to discriminate among the current interpreters of the man born Konstantin Sergeyevich Alexeyeff.

In retrospect, that Roland Barthes's insistence on “the death of the author” should have provoked an emergent interest in theatre audiences is hardly surprising. As, in literary studies, this brought about a new privilege for and investment in the reader, so too, in theatre and performance studies, there was an explicit recognition that what went on in the theatre was qualitatively and quantitatively more complicated and more exciting than the study of the playtext in the classroom. At the same time, the move to challenge a universalized (and thus male) viewing subject created new readings of the audience and new understandings of both individual and collective spectatorship across a range of subjectivities. So, Jill Dolan could argue that the “feminist spectator viewing such a representation is necessarily in the outsider's critical position.” Dolan continued:

She cannot find a comfortable way into the representation, since she finds herself, as a woman (and even more so, as a member of the working class, a lesbian, or a woman of color), excluded from its address. She sees in the performance frame representatives of her gender class with whom she might identify—if women are represented at all—acting passively before the specter of male authority.1

“What is the single most important thing we can do to bring theatre history into the new millennium?”

What does it mean to perform presence or selfhood? What conditions necessitate these performances? In the opening epigraph, RCB articulates an instance when transparency was mapped onto his body—a moment in which he was simultaneously invisible as an individual and hypervisible as the projections of stereotypes surrounding homelessness and blackness collided on his body, rendering his history, present, and future as instantly knowable. During the election cycles of 2010, 2012, and 2014, KevinMichael Key, a prominent, formerly homeless Skid Row activist, community organizer, and member of the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), ran for a position on the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council (DLANC). As part of his campaigns, Key sought to help homeless residents of Skid Row exercise their right to vote. One instantiation of this objective involved tabling in the neighborhood. In a show of support, RCB lined up to vote and subsequently encountered the tabler. “And the way he said it, he knew I wouldn't have any ID. It was like I wasn't even there. I was invisible.” As understood by RCB, the tabler did not expect homeless individuals to possess government-issued identification. Instead of acknowledging RCB's individuality and subjectivity, the tabler assumed that RCB's status as homeless meant not having state ID, an official marker of occupancy in a state-recognized residence. In this interaction, RCB's political subjectivity was under erasure, invisible. For RCB, in this confrontation, homelessness marked him as a knowable (non)subject—a generic homeless man.

In the 1750s, Charles Macklin's theatrical career was in limbo. While he is now remembered and studied as an important playwright and one of the principal (and longest-lived) actors of the eighteenth century, by the mid-1750s he can only have felt that he was a failure. Poor relations with the managers of Drury Lane and Covent Garden, a series of unsuccessful plays, and a diminishing repertory of roles led to his (enforced) retirement in 1753. He then opened a tavern, which quickly bankrupted him. Too little attention has been paid to this grim period in Macklin's career and to the triumphant retrieval of his theatrical fortunes in 1759 with his farce Love à la Mode. The importance of Macklin's return to the stage was recognized by William W. Appleton, who devoted an entire chapter of his 1960 biography of Macklin to this episode. Nonetheless, several important biographical questions remained unanswered or insufficiently answered—questions I would like to reopen based on some newly discovered evidence.

If theatre historians had been paying attention to the proceedings at a Gilbert and Sullivan conference in Lawrence, Kansas in 1970, they would have heard a gauntlet strike the ground when Michael R. Booth delivered “Research Opportunities in Nineteenth-Century Drama and Theatre.” He called for research on audiences (“cultural levels, class origins, income, tastes, and development”), performance in the hinterlands (“we know that in 1866 60% of the theatre seats in metropolitan London were outside the West End”), economics (“theatre profits and losses, actors' wages, authors' income, management and organization, the pricing of seats”), and performance techniques (“technical developments in set construction, staging, lighting, traps, and special effects” as well as acting style). This cri de coeur to break the hegemony of literary teleologies is recognizable, in 2015, as a mandate to reorient inquiry toward how repertoires were delivered rather than how authorial talent was paramount, what buttressed profitability rather than what constituted fame, and who sustained a gamut of theatres rather than what demarcated elite taste. It set the agenda for aligning theatre studies in wholly new directions, and without citing a single source or calling out any particular historian it inventoried how theatre history could come into line with social history.

The history of the Théâtre du Marais is linked indissolubly with the name of Mme S. Wilma Deierkauf-Holsboer, the Dutch theatre historian whose archival researches brought to light some thirty years ago such a wealth of unsuspected new documentation about the theatre itself, the actors who worked there and the plays they presented. In 1954, in the first of her two-volume Théâtre du Marais, she published the central document for any understanding of the theatre's physical disposition in the early part of its life: the mémoire de ce qu'il faut faire au jeu de paume des Marais, a carpenters' contract which describes the reconstruction work to be carried out after the theatre had been destroyed by fire in January 1644. Historians were quick to pay tribute, not only to the thoroughness of Deierkauf-Holsboer's research, but also to the validity of her interpretation of the new evidence. In 1957 the late Tom Lawrenson established what soon became the general attitude:

The indefatigable researches of Mme Deierkauf-Holsboer have finally dragged this house, after centuries of neglect, into the light of day. We now have a very good idea of the aspect it must have presented after its rebuilding … in October 1644. We can do no better than to give the main details of her interpretation of her discovery, Mémoire de ce qu'il faut faire.…

In performances in Atlanta; Philadelphia; Washington, DC; Los Angeles; Rio de Janeiro; Chicago; and Denver in 2012, Ms. Lauryn Hill carved out space to voice black rage. In videos uploaded to YouTube, Hill sings, raps, talks, and riffs varied renditions of the song “Black Rage (Sketch),” a remix of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's “My Favorite Things.” During her November performance at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia, drumbeats punctuated Hill's rapping and singing. Her performance took the audience on a journey meant to leave no one behind; it moved from the highly choreographed rendition of the song with musical accompaniment and Hill acting as lead vocalist and band conductor to her slowly speaking the lyrics of the song and occasionally offering analysis of her words over the shouts and applause of audience members. She explains the line “when I'm feeling sad,” saying “that's a depressive mood.” As the title of her song suggests, in each reiteration Hill issues a different draft of the song, sketching her sound, mood, tempo, and emphasis with each new audience. Although renditions of the song shift, the lyrics consistently recount the physical, psychic, economic, and environmental vulnerability of black people in the United States. The lyrics transform the original song's references to beloved objects—“blue satin sashes” and “snowflakes”—into ironic things such as “Black human packages tied up in strings,” which Hill described in her Philadelphia performance as a reference to bureaucracy but which also resonates with familiar images of lynching. Shifting from the original song's depiction of the curative capacity of things to offset feeling bad, Hill explains that her set of things prevents fear: “I simply remember all these kinds of things and then I don't fear so bad!”

On 22 September 1776, the British army executed Captain Nathan Hale, Yale College class of 1773, officer of the Continental Army of the United States, and prisoner of war.James Staunton Babcock, Memoir of Captain Nathan Hale (New Haven: S. Babcock, 1844), 12. Babcock's biography of Nathan Hale is the first, and possibly the best, of its kind. Also indispensable is George Dudley Seymour's Documentary Life of Nathan Hale (New Haven: private printing, 1941), which reprints the known primary documents related to Hale's life, providing invaluable means for verifying Babcock's account, as well as a corrective for the enthusiasms of Hale's other biographers. Hale biographies are generally published in New Haven and, as a genre, tend toward fulsome sentimentality and paeans to the undying glory of Yale University, traditions established in Babcock's text. For typical examples of such Hale hagiography, see Henry Phelps Johnson, Nathan Hale, 1776 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1914), and Artemus Jean Haynes, The Story of Nathan Hale (New Haven: n.p., 1907). Hale's espionage stemmed from the Continental Army's disastrous loss at the Battle of Brooklyn in August 1776 and subsequent retreat to Manhattan. With his troops demoralized and vulnerable to further attacks, George Washington required intelligence about British troop maneuvers. When Washington asked for a volunteer from his officer corps, Hale's former schoolmate and fellow officer Captain William Hull records that Hale accepted the mission, in spite of his friend Hull's objections that “[h]is nature was too frank and open for deceit and disguise” and that “he was incapable of acting a part equally foreign to his feelings and habits.”William Hull, Revolutionary Services And Civil Life of General William Hull; Prepared From his Manuscripts, by his Daughter, Mrs. Maria Campbell: Together with the History of the Campaign of 1812, And Surrender of the Post of Detroit, By His Grandson, James Freeman Clarke (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1848), 35. Hull's narrative is the principal historical evidence for analysis of Hale's execution. Part, though not all, of his account is also reprinted in Seymour, 307–10. Hale traveled from Washington's encampment on Harlem Heights to Norwalk, Connecticut, before sailing to Huntington, Long Island. There, posing as a loyalist, he was captured while gathering intelligence and hanged.

It starts with a dress, or dresses. Among a menagerie of rainbow variations, certain features are standard: lace and ruffle-decked blouses under jumpers, aprons, or high-waisted belled and crinolined knee-length skirts; more skin covered than bare; headwear including bonnets, miniature hats, or massive bows over ringlets and long tresses. So many ruffles; so much lace (Fig. 1). Beginning in the late 1990s, gothic lolitas—overwhelmingly young women in their teens and twenties, and overwhelmingly girly in their outsized bows, platform Mary Jane shoes, and petticoated skirts—stood out as defiantly, bizarrely out of place and time on the Tokyo street scene, all bright white and concrete in Harajuku, a built-up postwar neighborhood of Tokyo known as a youth haven since the 1960s. More than twenty years later, although most Harajuku fashions have died out in keeping with a fad's typically short life cycle, the gothic lolitas have persisted and even multiplied, thanks in large part to the Internet, which has helped muster an army of misfit girl aristocrats not just in Japan but around the globe.

The narrative fabric of modern history, writes Roland Barthes, tends to be woven with a certain amount of “useless” details, which, though they are ultimately “filling” (“catalysis”), nonetheless have “indisputable symbolic value.” As a consequence, the past two centuries have seen the “development of techniques, of works and institutions based on the incessant need to authenticate the ‘real.’” These techniques include photography, reportage, exhibitions, and, I would like to emphasize, “the tourism of monuments and historical sites”—the subject of this essay. Indeed, for the tourist, the symbolic value accorded the minutiae on display at historic sites, preserved or re-created for public display, seem to be the very elements that guarantee real history, despite the fact that many of these details are often the most conjectural elements.

The origins and early development of American vaudeville remain shrouded in the fog of nineteenth-century theatre history. Most historical accounts focus upon the evolution of vaudeville from entertainments performed in honky-tonks, beer gardens, and “concert saloons” of the 1860s and 1870s. Itinerant artists were hired to keep customers in a drinking mood with jigs, songs, acrobatics, and jokes. According to Douglas Gilbert, the audience for “variety,” as the sum of these peripatetic performers was then called, consisted of “tosspots, strumpets, dark-alley lads, and shimmers.” Few “respectable” men would dare venture into such places because of the drunkenness of the audience and the salacious nature of the entertainment.

The tradition of military theatre in America is one interwoven with the history of the United States. Members of the British army garrisoned in the Colonies before and during the Revolution performed plays for their amusement and for charity. The American military almost from the time of its inception also participated in theatrical productions, both as producers and as participants in non-military productions.

He used to come to the house and ask me to hear him recite. Each time he handed me a volume of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.… He wanted me to sit in front of him, open the book, and follow him as he recited his lines. I did willingly.…And as his love for Shakespeare's plays grew with the years he did not want anything else in the world but to be a Shakespearean actor.

Toshio Mori

“Japanese Hamlet” (1939)

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a consensus existed among the German educated middle classes that Greek culture represented an ideal and that Greek fine arts and literature were to be regarded as the epitome of perfection. From Schiller's Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man) to Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics, the message was the same: Greek culture was unique in that it allowed and encouraged its members to develop their potential to the full so that any individual was able to represent the human species as a whole. The model it provided was, however, inimitable and its standards unattainable, but both were invaluable as objects of careful study. Thus, it is small wonder that all surviving tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were translated into German, some even several times over. Despite this, they were never staged during the eighteenth century.

In his second year at the University of California, Berkeley, Arthur William Ryder (1877–1938), the Ohio-born Harvard scholar of Sanskrit language and literature, collaborated with the campus English Club and Garnet Holme, an English actor, to stage Ryder's translation of the Sanskrit classic Mrichchhakatikam, by Shudraka, as The Little Clay Cart. The 1907 production was described as “presented in true Hindu style. Under the direction of Garnet Holme, who … studied with Swamis of San Francisco … [and] the assistance of many Indian students of the university.” However, in the twenty-five-plus cast, there was not a single Indian actor with a speaking part. The intended objective was grandeur, and the production achieved that with elaborate sets and costumes, two live zebras, and elephants. Seven years later, the Ryder–Holme team returned with Ryder's translation of Kalidasa's Shakuntala, “bear cubs, a fawn, peacocks, and an onstage lotus pool with two real waterfalls.” While the archival materials do not indicate the involvement of any Indian actors (barring one Gobind B. Lal, who enacted the Prologue), its importance is evinced by the coverage it received in the Oakland Tribune, the Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times.

Performance brings Ophelia's madness to life. Painters and illustrators responded as much to performance as to text when representing Ophelia. This essay concerns those representations and the impact of the performer on a generation of French Romantic artists, writers, and their audiences.

Decades before the rise of the international megamusical, Franz Lehár's operetta Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow) traveled the world, becoming a franchise surrounded by a constellation of commodities. Within two years of its opening in Vienna on 30 December 1905, the romantic tale of Hanna Glawari's second chance at love was playing in theatres across Europe and in “virtually every city in the German-speaking world,” including colonial communities in Africa and Asia. In Argentina, as many as five versions of the operetta opened simultaneously in Buenos Aires, each in a different language. By 1908, three Merry Widow road companies were touring the United States, and numerous burlesques of the piece were vying for the attention of theatregoers.

How popular was The Merry Wives of Windsor in the eighteenth century? Because records show that the original, unadapted version of the play was performed a substantial number of times, scholars have usually assumed that it was both a critical and theatrical success during this period. This opinion is, however, based on an incomplete picture of the play's stage history, and it does not take into account the importance of casting to a play's popularity. A review of commentaries and theatrical records indicates that we should alter our view of the comedy's place in the eighteenth-century repertory. The play was not, overall, as popular as has long been believed, and it owed much of its vogue to James Quin in the role of Falstaff.

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.