The Italian mountebank of the early modern period was a figure of great power and fascination, both to Italians themselves and to English audiences via Thomas Coryate's documentary account and Ben Jonson's fictional portrayal of Scoto of Mantua in Volpone. Italian and Spanish antitheatrical clerics, prompted by San Carlo Borromeo to extend Counter-Reformation cultural critiques to the increasingly successful commedia dell'arte, were quick to identify the mountebank—an itinerant doctor/pharmacist who typically enticed potential patrons with an array of musical and theatrical entertainments—with the professional actor, who also performed for money in Italian piazzas. Without the moral animus of the post-Tridentine critics, late twentieth-century theatre historians have reassociated the mountebank and the actor, seeing in the former's capacity to sell theatrical entertainment anywhere and anytime (independent of the religious or civic festival) a harbinger of the professional commedia dell'arte, which had to develop means of economic self-support that were independent of traditional courtly patronage. Arte actors seem to have been aware of their perceived kinship with itinerant quacks; at the turn of the century, Giovanni Gabrielli performed a routine involving trunks and vases of the kind used by mountebanks, his own sons turning out to be the “vases.” But culturally ambitious actor-writers, who in the early seventeenth century began to counter antitheatrical attacks with apologies for the moral integrity and the technical sophistication of the new theatre, sharply differentiated themselves from the charlatans. If the conventionality of their moral defenses often hindered them from saying what comedy was, they could at least say what it was not, and it was not quackery.

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.

If the London theatre of the Renaissance was one of the earliest examples of theatre as a commercial entertainment, then its playhouses were its largest physical investment and central visual focus. The Theatre, Curtain, Rose, Fortune, Globe, Swan, Hope and Cockpit were not only architectural inventions designed to replace previous itinerant playing practices with performances in fixed spaces where the acting companies could control admissions. They were also major financial investments by playhouse owners. The increase in the building of playhouses between 1576 and 1616 reflect a growing industry creating custom-built places of production that became regular fixtures in the urban geography of Renaissance London. The unprecedented rate of playgoing also increased interest in the possibility of profits by investors, shareholders, and those who operated the playhouses. In short, the London theatre was organized to make money, and London's playhouses were profit centers for the production and consumption of an aesthetic product. Within such a commercial climate, the decisions of playhouse owners concerning building, rebuilding, or abandonment of each facility were critical choices based on profits rather than aesthetics. The location of a playhouse was as important as what went on inside it. Decisions regarding playhouse location, then, can be examined as successful or unsuccessful pragmatic responses to competitive pressures, changing audience response, and expectation of profits in a speculative new industry within a fast-growing city.

Appended to Folcard's twelfth-century Vita of Saint John of Beverley is an account of a play of the Resurrection of Christ that was enacted by masked players in the churchyard of Beverley Minster in the presence of a great number of spectators. The story tells of some boys who, apparently desiring a better view of the play, entered the church and climbed up to the vaulting to look down at the performers from a window above. The church wardens, fearing the window might be damaged, chased after the boys in order to punish their rashness. One of the boys was able to dodge the blows inflicted upon his companions by scampering further up the stairs, but a stone was loosened by his foot and fell crashing to the pavement below. Shocked by the noise, the boy lost his balance and tumbled to the floor of the nave, where he lay, presumably dead. A group of people, who had entered the church to escape the crowds outside, gathered around the body that, to their amazement, rose from the dead without a mark of injury. And so it was brought about that those who were unable to see the representation of the Resurrection outside the church were provided with a sign of the Resurrection inside the church.

In the autumn of 1159, scarcely five years after the twenty-one-year-old Henry Plantagenet ascended to the English throne, John of Salisbury was already describing what he clearly regarded as a moment of historical transition. Midway through the Policraticus, the treatise on statecraft he was compiling for his friend and colleague Thomas Becket, then Chancellor of England, John remarked how the entire political character of the nation had been changing in recent years, the result of a new infusion of educated clerics into the workings of government.

As the most critically lauded dramatist of her time, Joanna Baillie recently has received considerable attention from critics interested in arguing that our neglect of Romantic drama has arisen from “conventional and mistaken assumptions about its strategies and principles.” In a recent issue of Wordsworth Circle devoted exclusively to Romantic drama, Baillie figures in three of its seven articles as a central dramatist of the period, while Jeffrey Cox devotes an entire section of his introduction in Seven Gothic Dramas 1789—1825 (1992) to her work. Even more recently, she has been the subject of special sessions of recent Modern Language Association meetings, and an edition of her Selected Works is scheduled to be published by Pickering and Chatto Press in 1998.

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.

In his “Special Formal Report” of 24 April 1808, Weimarian court actor Heinrich Becker informed his superiors about a little theatrical irregularity. Becker was reporting in his official function as controlling supervisor for representations—a kind of stage manager for the theatre. By this report the “graciously decreed Noble Saxonian Commission for Direction of the Court Theatre,” chaired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, had to take official notice of the following punishable histrionic faux pas:

Wednesday the 20th of April during the performance of Piccolomini [Schiller's] in the scene with the butler Actus 3, Scene 3. Mister Morhardt has willfully acted the cavalry captain Neumann in a comical way.

In the fifteenth-century East Anglian play, The Conversion of Ser Jonathas the Jewe by the Myracle of the Blissed Sacrament, five Jews desecrate a host to challenge the Christian doctrine of transubstantiation. In the play's image of Jewish characters, fifteenth-century English Christianity constructed an ethnic, religious, and cultural alterity. A Jewish merchant, Jonathas, bribes a Christian merchant, Aristorius, to steal a consecrated host from a local church. Five Jewish characters then stab the host, nail it to a pillar, boil it, and bake it in an oven over a fire. In this last trial, the oven bursts open to reveal the image of Christ as a bloody child. At the sight of the Christ, and upon hearing his reproach, the Jews confess and are baptized into the Christian faith.

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.

The Corpus Christi celebrations of medieval York provide a good opportunity for studying how symbolic power structures social relations, and how institutions reproduce their legitimacy at a time when the procession as well as the presentation of the pageant wagons were rigorously supervised by the city council. The elaborate procession of torches honoring the sacrament, a little discussed aspect of these celebrations, is particularly useful for such a study, because the records of the guilds provide surprising indications of the extent to which the supposedly solemn procession honoring the sacrament was characterized by disruption. These documents contradict those historians who normally treat both the procession and the pageants as representations staged in civic space that mirrored a united civic body. The negotiations surrounding the Skinner's participation in the Corpus Christi ceremonies of 1419 and the conflict of civic, religious, and royal authority in determining the position of the Cordwainers in the celebrations of 1490 provide traces of a different history—a history of a representation of social distinctions rather than a representation of undifferentiated community. This is a history of struggle between groups with different interests, engaging in symbolic struggle to maintain or alter the social distinctions embodied in the form of the procession.

In the annals of staged Shakespeare, John Barrymore, Arthur Hopkins, and Robert Edmond Jones have been much honored for their landmark productions of Richard III and Hamlet, first seen in New York during the 1919– 20 and 1922–23 seasons. Another collaborator in these revivals, however, has received little scholarly attention: Margaret Carrington, a Canadian-born voice teacher who contributed significantly to the success of these productions by “remaking” Barrymore's voice. Although reviews of Barrymore's performances in the years preceding his Shakespearean debut often mentioned his “monotonous” vocal quality, the result of his studies with Carrington was a vocal instrument of extraordinary range and flexibility. As Heywood Broun remarked in 1923: “Someone ought to write a tale about Barrymore called ‘The Story of a Voice.’ It is one of the most amazing adventures in our theatre. Here was a particularly pinched utterance distinctly marred by slipshod diction. Today it is among the finest voices in the American theatre.”

Roger Stevens has always been a visionary. His career began in real estate, where he gained national recognition for buying the Empire State Building for $51.5 million—at the time the highest price ever paid for one building—and selling it three years later for a ten-million dollar profit. As he expanded into theatre, he quickly became one of the nation's foremost producers on Broadway, producing more than 200 shows over the last half century, including West Side Story, A Man for All Seasons, Bus Stop, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Deathtrap, and Mary, Mary. He “discovered” playwrights such as Tom Stoppard, Peter Shaffer, and Terence Rattigan for New York audiences, and he has worked closely with others, already established, such as Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Harold Pinter, Jean Giraudoux, and T.S. Eliot Three United States presidents have depended on Stevens for their arts and humanities policy, and the American theatrical community has benefitted from his intuitive vision.

When Constantin Stanislavski's An Actor Prepares first appeared in English translation in 1936, the Moscow Art Theater had already made a great impact on American theatre. Particularly influential in the Soviet director's theories of acting was his concept of emotion memory. In An Actor Prepares, the young actor, Kostya, tries to understand how to access the “memory of life” rather than the “theatrical archives of his mind” and has an epiphany at the moment when he recalls and relives the violence of an isolated vehicular accident that had dismembered its victim: