Relatively little is known about the actual techniques employed in staging a play in the theatres of Restoration England (1660–1700), and consequently many problems concerning these techniques remain unsolved. One such problem, that of the amount of action which took place within the scene, that is, behind the proscenium arch, has received scant attention in published works. Theatre historians generally assume that Restoration actors confined their movements to the forestage and that they moved into the “scene” infrequently, if at all. However, a detailed study of the techniques for changing the scene and an analysis of the stage directions and lines of a large number of plays written and produced during the period under consideration affords an indication of the significant amount of action which took place within the scene.

When Europe moved from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, dramatic representations became markedly divided into secular and religious performances. No longer adjuncts of liturgical drama, the secular plays took on a certain autonomy. They became an aspect of civic life and were produced and presented by professional playwrights and performers. Needless to say, the church courtyard and cathedral steps could no longer be used as stages. The company directors and their actors took to public squares and city streets but, for convenience or necessity, were obliged to set up their stages in the open spaces between houses, in patios of large houses, or in the corrals of large apartment houses. These early and temporary theaters were put together only when the occasion arose; they were in no sense permanent playhouses.

A great legend has evolved about Minnie Maddern Fiske and her relation to Ibsenian drama, a legend which pictures her as a fearless, dedicated proponent of naturalism in the theatre, as an actress cast in an entirely new mould. As early as 1910, Walter Prichard Eaton wrote: “With that new drama and the consequent new methods of acting she at once identified herself, and she has remained their earnest champion and inspiring advocate.”

Of all the isolated plays and fragments of religious drama that have come down to us from fifteenth-century England, none has caused the literary or theatrical historian more difficulty than the mystery-miracle play of St. Mary Magdalene contained in Bodleian Digby MS 133. As Hardin Craig and others have stated, the rubrics call for the most elaborate staging indicated in any English medieval play. Unlike the short playlets of fifty to two hundred lines which comprise the bulk of such cycles as Chester or York, the Mary Magdalene is 2,144 lines long and demands a minimum of sixty-four speaking performers plus some twenty to thirty mute attendants.

Although there was probably more drama written in English during the nineteenth century than in any previous century, the most popular dramatist of the period had been dead for two hundred years. The frequent presentations of Shakespeare's plays on the nineteenth-century stage caused certain problems—he had written for a different audience and a different theatre. The new audience found much in Shakespeare's plays to admire; but of special interest were the romantic and melodramatic aspects of the plays and the spectacle with which some of the managers interlarded them—the processions, the battles, the crowds, the tableaux, and especially the magnificent costumes and scenery.