When John Hodgkinson made his American debut at Philadelphia's Southwark Theatre on 26 September 1792, he was hailed as “superior to any other actor” who had yet appeared in the United States. For some ten years thereafter, Hodgkinson remained the unrivalled leading performer of the Old American Company in all the principal theatrical centers in America. In New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, the actor and his wife, Frances Brett Hodgkinson, dominated the bills of the troupe managed initially by Lewis Hallam and John Henry. They eventually became, in 1800, the highest paid performers in American stage history up to that time. (Hodgkinson received $70 weekly, his wife, $50. In comparison, Mr. and Mrs. Hallam, whose combined salary was second highest, received $50.)

In this paper we will focus on the Hallams, major originators and sustainers of the eighteenth-century American theatre. We have not attempted to write their biographies, only to present new information that can provide answers to long-standing questions and suggest alternatives to earlier assumptions. Among other things, we present the case for George Hallam, not Thomas, being the father of the line of actors; we have established the probable paternity for Nancy Hallam; we have discovered the wills of both William Hallam and Lewis Hallam II; we have more fully identified Lewis II's first wife, Sarah Perry; and we have found new information concerning his second wife, Eliza Tuke.

John Joseph Holland, one of the most prominent scene painters of the early American theatre, was born in England about 1776 and apprenticed at the age of nine to Gaetano Marinari, chief artist at the King's Theatre, Haymarket. “For upwards of forty years,” George Raymond recalled, Marinari “was accounted one of the first scene painters in Europe.” He trained Holland in scene painting and architecture, and the young artist taught himself landscape painting in watercolors. Soon after his apprenticeship was over, Holland went to Convent Garden, where he was employed from August, 1794, to February, 1795, but he later returned to the King's Theatre, where Thomas Wignell found him in 1796 and engaged him for the Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia.

During the late Middle Ages and until after the middle of the sixteenth century, outdoor production of the British drama took place, in general, in three different kinds of temporary theatre. These are the theatre of a circular platea or Place surrounded by “scaffolds”; the theatre of pageant-wagons each performing part of a scriptural cycle at successive “stops” throughout a town or city; and the theatre of a booth stage set up in a marketplace or on a village green. In recent years much new information has accumulated about each of these three kinds of theatre; new problems have been defined; and it is now possible to advance some new evidence and some new interpretations of old evidence. This article is therefore an attempt to sum up the state of our present knowledge about the three major kinds of outdoor theatre in Britain before the age of Shakespeare. Since that knowledge is in some respects still imperfect and tentative, I shall deal chiefly with questions of physical form, since here, thanks to a fortuitous abundance of pictorial evidence, our information is fuller and more precise than in the case of origins or of use.

In the third week of December 1908, a group of 300–400 prominent actors, actresses, and dramatists gathered at the Criterion Theatre in London to celebrate the formation of the Actresses' Franchise League. The inaugurating resolution, passed with one dissent, read: “That this meeting of actresses calls upon the Government immediately to extend the franchise to women, that women claim the franchise as a necessary protection for the workers under modern industrial conditions, and maintain that by their labour they have earned the right to this defence” (Votes for Women 24 Dec. 1908, p. 211). The resolution's emphasis upon labour as the enabling criterion qualifying women for the franchise reflects the roots of the British suffrage movement in the working class industrial north, where, as David Rosen notes, the Independent Labour Party had supported early suffragists (57).

In his Paradoxe sur le comédien, written around 1770 but not published until the nineteenth century, the French philosophe Denis Diderot argued that the great actors of his day suppressed their individuality onstage; rather than personally experiencing the emotions called for by the playwright, they denied their own private subjectivity in order to create a more seamless public illusion. By an act of self-effacement, therefore, they paradoxically rendered themselves capable of impersonating anyone. In his essay, Diderot repeatedly turned to the example of his contemporary, the Comédie-Française actress Mlle Clairon, to illustrate this phenomenon. Off the stage, the philosopher claimed, Clairon was physically unimposing, and displays of her true feelings in the privacy of her home seemed artificial and unconvincing. In the theatre, however, she swelled in size and emotional presence until she dominated an audience and deepened the sentiments invoked by the playwright. According to Diderot, in the moment of public performance she was double: both the “little Clairon” and the “great Agrippina”, the socially inconsequential actress and a mythic heroine of the French stage.

Theatrical performance has often played an important role in communicating the manners and morals of one culture to another. In the main the information so communicated is valid and the impact is positive. There are instances, however, where one culture's theatre, yielding to its popular nature, has been too quick to apply the assumptions of its own concept of what foreign cultures ought to be. The effect then may be widespread misinformation about other peoples.

After a century-long attack from the Puritan progeny of nineteenth-century America, the theatre by 1860 had long since come to accept as a way of life the religious public's antipathy to the stage. The story of the war between church and theatre is an old but, understandably, not a very popular one with theatre historians; nevertheless, some of the most surprising ironies in American cultural history lie in the dynamics — the death of a president, the death and burial of a respected actor, and an ultimate concession on both fronts — which by the turn of the twentieth century brought a winding down of clerical attacks against the stage and a qualified victory for the comparatively poor, scorned, unorganized theatrical forces over their powerful adversary.

In “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, Rosalind Krauss writes about Marcel Broodthaers, James Coleman, and William Kentridge because, as she notes, these artists have decided not to follow the international fashion of installation and intermedia work in which “art essentially finds itself complicit with a globalization of the image in the service of capital.”Rosalind Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 56. Neither have they retreated into the etiolated forms of traditional mediums, such as painting and sculpture. Rather, their recent works have embraced the idea of differential specificity, in which a medium itself is reinvented and rearticulated.

In 1943, Britain had been at war with Nazi Germany for over three years. The USSR had become a rather unlikely British ally in 1941, and after two years of brutal conflict had begun to gain an advantage against German troops, who were demoralized by the fierce Russian winter and a lack of supplies. With this as a backdrop, on 21 February 1943, more than two thousand participants performed a large-scale pageant called Salute to the Red Army at the Royal Albert Hall in London to commemorate Red Army Day and celebrate the Soviet–British alliance against Nazi aggression. British cities such as Cardiff, Manchester, and Bristol also honored Britain's Russian allies with marches, rallies, and other celebrations. The pageant was London's contribution to these nationwide festivities. Although the audience at the Royal Albert Hall event comprised selected and invited guests, enormous crowds attended other regional events, as did prominent military dignitaries, members of local councils, local members of Parliament, and Russian military guests. This multicity event is one demonstration of how the extremes of war produce unlikely bedfellows.

From October 20, 1774, when the Continental Congress passed a resolution outlawing theatrical activities in America, until the formation of the Lindsay-Wall troupe that began performing illegally in Maryland in 1781 and, under the management of Dennis Ryan, shifted its base of operations to New York in 1783, the theatre in America was in a near-dormant state. The only significant exceptions to this condition were the productions of the occupying British military in various American localities, and a few productions by American military officers given in response.

In 1962, Polish director Jerzy Grotowski mounted an adaptation of playwright Stanisław Wyspiański's 1904 play Akropolis. When James MacTaggart filmed it in 1968, the production gained immediate cult status among American theatre critics, scholars, and practitioners. Although Grotowski's production had already been seen internationally (though by a very limited audience), the film made it available to those outside major theatre centers. Notwithstanding the buzz that surrounded the film's release, most of the interest was focused on the acting and the set design; the fact that the show was based on an obscure modernist drama evoked little critical comment. Although the film's voice-over translated some lines of the play, the dialogue was not the main focus of commentary about the film or criticism of the play after the film was released. In 1974, Harold Clurman wrote that “the lines [of Grotowski's adaptation] spoken at incredible speed are not dialogue; they are tortured exclamations projected in the direction of another being, but with no shape as personal address. (It has been said that a knowledge of Polish does not make the lines readily intelligible… ” Clurman sidestepped discussing the text altogether, arguing that one does not need to understand it in order to understand the production.

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.

In the midst of the currently fashionable lament over the death of the drama, or of the theatre, or of the idea of a theatre, it is strange that the Workers' Theatre, deliberately created to meet a specific cultural ideal and productive of its own particular theory, literature, and style of production, could exist for nearly twenty years, flourish in popularity for half that time, and yet remain unknown. Stranger still that the only study which is even partially comprehensive should choose to view this theatre as an organ of the Communist Party, to be given the same condescending treatment as that political movement itself. Such are the dangers of treating theatre as a weapon rather than as an art.

Ever since the project of supplying objective knowledge was challenged by the debates about colonialism, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity, academics from different fields have begun to share a conception of knowledge as representational, differing primarily in the accounts of how their, “representations” are related to objects that are represented. Understandably, Plato's and Aristotle's definitions of mimesis have acquired new currency. According to Plato, whenever “you see one, you conceive of the other.” According to Aristotle, the relationship between techne and phusis is contained in the formulation that, on the one hand, art imitates nature; on the other hand, art carries to its end what nature is incapable of effecting. Both Plato and Aristotle perceive mimesis as the process of either epistemological or ontological repetition or doubling in which “one” (thought or subject) becomes “two” (thought or subject doubles as idea or object), in theatre studies, for example, the prevailing tradition defines representation in terms of a promise of a performative act. Such an act signifies that the “I” or “we” making the promise understands or knows the problem, the object, or the text and will be able to transfer it from nature, that is, from the real space, to the theatrical, “imaginary” space where the declaration of its existence and the formulation of its speech will be staged in a tight spotlight. This process is authorized by an institutional structure that safeguards the promise, its execution, and its use.

On the short shelf of theatrical autobiographies that continue to be read long after their author has ceased to be newsworthy, Konstantin Stanislavsky's My Life in Art stands foremost. It is a textbook for acting classes, a sourcebook of theatrical history and a guidebook for those workers in the theatre who have lost touch with the meaning of their efforts and seek in Stanislavsky's trials and errors, goals and achievements, an artistic True North to put them back on their course. In the Soviet Union, it is lauded, in the words of the director Aleksey Popov, as “a model of superb literature and comparable to such books as Herzen's My Past and Thoughts.” In the West, no less a colleague than Jacques Copeau praised it in terms that made My Life in Art sound like the vita of an anchorite.

On 30 June 2006 at the annual National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa, two giants of South African protest theatre, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, performed as the original cast of the landmark struggle drama Sizwe Banzi Is Dead (1972). The revival marked the first production of the play in over twenty-five years. After its brief stint at the National Arts Festival (30 June–5 July 2006), the play transferred to the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town (11 July–5 August) and then entertained a monthlong run at the State Theatre in Pretoria (17 August–17 September). After its turn at the State, the production stopped shortly at the Hilton College Theatre in KwaZulu Natal (19–23 September) before settling into an extended engagement at Johannesburg's Market Theatre (28 September to 22 October). In March 2007, the original cast revival of Sizwe traveled to the British National Theatre before finally ending its tour at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in April 2008.

Palestine, as an Ottoman province, was distanced from the main Arab cultural activities of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries; no literature bearing distinctive marks of Palestinian national identity was to be found before the First World War. After the war there was some national cultural revival, but it was mainly poetry, not fiction or theatre, that was traditionally perceived as a possible national weapon against external threats. The national revival however also covered folklore and religious culture, both of which combined some semitheatrical dimensions—the shadow theatre (khayāl al-ẓill), the storytellers (ḥakawātī; shāעir), and the peep show, that is, "Box of Wonders" or "Magic Box" (ṣundūq al-dunyā or ṣundūq al-עajab); the religious festivals, such as the traditional Prophet's birthday (mawlid) or the birthdays of saints (mawālid), the nighttime shows presented during the fast of Ramadan; and the popular peasant culture, such as the dabka dances. Modern theatrical and dramatic activities—most of them marked by European influence, whether by way of translations or adaptations—were very limited; because many of the plays were intended for staging in schools, most of them were flavored with didactic aims. Visiting troupes from Egypt and Lebanon created some public demand for theatrical activities, and in both the 1930s and the 1940s there were active Palestinian devotees of theatre, such as the brothers al-Jawzī.

Stage naturalism made its first appearance in Denmark—and, for that matter, in Scandinavia as a whole—unaccompanied by the fanfare or enthusiastic manifestoes which heralded its arrival in many other countries. The breakthrough of this new style of theatrical production did not coincide with the founding of small, independent art theatres like André Antoine's Théâtre Libre (1887), Otto Brahm's Freie Bühne (1889), J. T. Grein's Independent Theatre (1891), or, somewhat later, Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre (1898). Nor was it acclaimed from the outset as a pioneering realization of a novel aesthetic program. On the contrary, the methods and techniques of the new naturalism were introduced, and proceeded to take root inconspicuously, when the Danish Royal Theatre in Copenhagen engaged the 36-year-old playwright William Bloch as a stage director in 1881, having been impressed with an “unusual eye for scenic requirements” in his plays. Two years later, Bloch's epoch-making production of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People firmly implanted the new ideas.