bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Slave Spectacles and Tragic Octoroons: A Cultural Genealogy of Antebellum Performance
Authors: Roach Joseph R.
Published: July 2009

In recent critical theory, the wordperformancehas undergone a significant expansion, some would say an inflation. As the Editor's Note to the May issue ofPMLA(“Special Topic: Performance”) observes, “What once was an event has become a critical category, now applied to everything from a play to a war to a meal. The performative … is a cultural act, a critical perspective, a political intervention.” Theatre historians will perhaps greet such pronouncements with mixed emotions. On one hand, they may welcome the acknowledgment by the principal organ of the Modern Language Association that performance (as opposed to drama merely) can count for so much. On the other hand, they may wonder what exactly is intended by the conceptual leap that takes performance beyond the established theatrical genres to encompass armed conflict and comestibles.
Cultural Anthropology and Theatre Historiography: Notes on a Methodological Rapprochement
Authors: Balme Christopher B.
Published: July 2009

After a century of carefree source research conducted against the background of positivist objectivism, theatre historiography now finds itself in the throes of a methodological paradigm shift. Quite independent of its historical disciplinary affiliations, whether as an extension of literary criticism of the various national literatures or as a subsidiary of the historical sciences, theatre historiography is no longer able to resist engagement with fundamental and increasingly complex methodological debates. Particularly in North America there has been a broad discussion on the crisis of traditional, positivist theatre history. The result has been to open up theater historiography to other approaches such as semiotics and diverse theories and methodologies of a poststructuralist provenance. Despite this intensifying and often broad-ranging methodological debate there have been hitherto hardly any attempts to bring theatre history into a dialogue with historical anthropology or ethnohistory, both of which are strongly influenced by the methodologies of cultural anthropology. The deficit is all the more remarkable as these areas have ignited a veritable explosion of interest amongst historians and ethnologists which has transcended the narrow disciplinary borders of both fields of scholarship.
Private Women and the Public Realm
Authors: Davis Tracy C.
Published: July 2009

Following the translation of Jürgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere into English in 1989, we have come to see “the public” and “the private” as historically contingent categories bearing upon nests of social practices. The public and private are not just distinctions of geography—so that beyond our front doors we are necessarily and unavoidably in the public—for they bear on authority, authorized voice, citizenship, and credibility in democratic societies. Whereas the Hellenic Greek social order recognized freedom only in the public realm, and only embodied by household masters, the nineteenth-century model of separate spheres cast the public realm as the place where individuals defended the family (equated to the private) from state domination while debating the proper roles for the sexes. Unacknowledged in both models is that agents of the state and the private individuals who have access to the public realm are normalized as exclusively male and of the hegemonic class. The Greek and Victorian models—explicitly relegating women to the home (private) and men to the marketplace (public)—are equally open to critique for being as class-blind as they are hyperbolically universalizing of all cultures and sub-cultures, as if they obeyed a natural law instead of ideological preferences. If we write theatre history with either model in mind and assume that “the public” does not carry with it connotations of power, then we are distorting the evidence and misfiring on our interpretations.
Oh I Love Mother, I Love Her Power: Shaker Spirit Possession and the Performance of Desire
Authors: McCully Susan
Published: July 2009

Ecstatic religious trance and spirit possession occur across a broad cultural and socioeconomic range, from Pentecostal possession by the Holy Ghost to Ethiopian zar possession cults. Interestingly, this phenomenon is most frequently experienced by young women in their early teens. Folklorists such as Felicitas Goodman postulate that this generational and gendered proclivity for trance reception is a response to the powerlessness of girls within their communities. As such, spirit possession allows young women to claim a degree of cultural power through the performance of a spiritual manifestation. Although I want to make it clear that I am not questioning the very real physical (and perhaps metaphysical) effects of the trance state during religious ecstasy, I argue that the trance state is a consciously induced performance and the enactment of spiritual power.
The Actresses' Franchise League Prepares For War: Feminist Theatre in Camouflage
Authors: Kelly Katherine E.
Published: July 2009

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).
An Artistic Mission in Nazi Berlin: The Jewish Kulturbund Theatre as Sanctuary
Authors: Rovit Rebecca
Published: July 2009

These remarks made by the actor, Fritz Kortner, stem from a 1932 book in which the leading stage performers of the Weimar Republic portray themselves in photographs and through their own words. In response to the editor's questions, Kortner—among other artists—analyzes his role as an actor within Germany's greater cultural and historical context, linking the crisis in theatre to existent economic and intellectual crises. Given the unstable socio-economic situation at the end of the Weimar Republic, the cultural years ahead looked particularly grim. The actor's commentary reveals the vulnerable situation of German theatre in a country on the brink of dictatorship.
“To Submit and Patiently to Wait”: The Career of Mrs. Stirling
Authors: Rinear David L.
Published: July 2009

Almost half a century ago, the late Alan S. Downer argued that the work of Alfred Wigan, Leigh Murray, and Fanny Stirling marks the transition to an increasingly colloquial and realistic style of acting on the London Stage usually attributed to the Bancrofts at the Prince of Wales Theatre. Of those three performers, only Mrs. Stirling has not received subsequent scholarly attention. The single detailed twentieth century account of the neglected actress, The Stage Life of Mrs. Stirling, published by her grandson, Percy Allen, in 1922, is useful but suffers from the pitfalls all too common to familial obsequies and lacks both theatrical and social/cultural context.
Godard and Lear: Trashing the Can(n)on
Authors: Bennett Susan
Published: July 2009

In the late 1990s, the endlessly reinvented Shakespeare has apparently become a popular and successful screenwriter. The recent release ofRichard III, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Twelfth NightandHamlethave brought an enthusiastic movie-going public to see, among other things, the Capulets and the Montagues on the beach and Hamlet striding through a cast of thousands at Elsinore. But this is not to suggest that this particular genre success is either new or inappropriate; the collection of artifacts known as Shakespeare (including but not limited to the plays themselves) has long signified as high art dedicated to the education of not just a theatre-going elite nor the mass audiences of popular media, but everyone. On a global scale, Shakespeare means culture or, as Michael Bristol would more wittily have it, Shakespeare is “big time.” This history of the cultural capital that is Shakespeare continues to have a fascination for, and a usefulness to the producers and distributors of films. Thus, to turn Shakespeare from playwright to screenwriter is, culturally speaking, both a pragmatic and predictable strategy. And it is a strategy that has more or less existed as long as film itself.
“The Real of It Would Be Awful”: Representing the Real Ophelia in Canada
Authors: Knowles Richard Paul
Published: July 2009

Judith Thompson's 1992 “relay” play, Lion in the Streets, opens with an address to the audience by the young Portuguese girl, Isobel, who provides the through-line and a bridge among the play's linked scenes. Her speech frames the play by introducing, among other things, issues of representation. “Doan be scare,” she says pointing to her downtown Toronto neighborhood. “Doan be scare of this pickshur! This pickshur is niiiice, nice! I looove this pickshur, this pickshur is mine!” In a later scene, a neighborhood woman, Joanne, tells her friend Rhonda that she has bone cancer, and asks for her help:
The Last Post:Henry V, War Culture and the Postmodern Shakespeare
Authors: Shaughnessy Robert
Published: July 2009

“Marketing, that mysterious part of the theatre industry, can produce surprising effects,” observes Peter Holland in his recent book on Shakespearean production in Britain during the 1990s. Discussing the material constraints on the repertory of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Holland cites the promotion of the 1994 production ofCoriolanusas it transferred to the Barbican, which, knowingly addressed a “youth” market versed in the work of Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino. The RSC poster displayed a blood-soaked Toby Stephens in the title role, accompanied by the slogan “A natural born killer too.” For an even more surprising and mysterious example of optimistically modish marketing, consider the tactics of the newspaper advertisement announcing the 1996 season at Stratford-upon-Avon. Avoiding any direct mention of Shakespeare, his plays, or theatre, it pictured an ominously darkened cloudscape, with slogans projected onto it, almost like skywriting. These posed a question, “Virtual reality?” and a riposte: “Try the real thing.”
British Theatre Collections in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Authors: Miller Melissa
Published: July 2009

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin has become, since the 1950s, well-known for its holdings in twentieth century literature. I offer here a brief description of the holdings in British theatre in the Theatre Arts Collection and the Manuscripts and Archives division of the Ransom Center. My secondary purpose is to suggest: and encourage corollary research in other Ransom Center holdings, such as its Art Collection and Photography and Film Collection. A listing of selected holdings follows this overview below, together with information on fellowships for researchers.
Dionysus in Deutschland: Nietzsche, Grüber, andThe Bacchae
Authors: Remshardt Ralf Erik
Published: July 2009

In 1974, the maverick German director Klaus-Michael Grüber created a remarkable (and much remarked-upon) production ofDie Bakchen (The Bacchae) at Berlin's Schaubühne theatre. It was then, and remains to date, the most significant German-language production of, and indeed one of the very few attempts to stage, Euripides' final play in Germany. This essay will attempt to trace the history of German abstention fromthe play and analyze how Grüber'sBacchaeresponded to that history of ambivalence and neglect, for what was played out in Grüber'smise-en-scènewas not only the conflict between Pentheus and Dionysus for the soul of Thebes, but indeed, upon the rapidly shifting cultural and political ground of West Germany, a deeper conflict between mimesis and authenticity, presence and representation, and the soul of the theatre. The first volley in this conflict had been fired more than one hundred years before by Friedrich Nietzsche.
Recasting Race: Casting Practices and Racial Formations
Authors: Pao Angela C.
Published: July 2009

He used to come to the house and ask me to hear him recite. Each time he handed me a volume ofThe 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)
Molière's Actors and the Question of Types
Authors: Herzel Roger W.
Published: July 2009

Most of the leading comic roles in the plays of Molière were written to be performed by Molière himself. The fact is well known, and no seríous study of Molíère as a man of the theatre has neglected to see that his development as a playwright is inseparable from his development as an actor, from the conventional intriguing valet of the earliest plays, through his humiliating failure as the heroic Dom Garcie de Navarre, to the title roles in le Misanthrope, l'Avare, and le Malade imaginaire.
A Survey of Early Military Theatre in America
Authors: Malone Diane B.
Published: July 2009

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.
An Exemplary French Romantic Production: Alfred De Vigny's Chatterton
Authors: Daniels Barry V.
Published: July 2009

The production of Alfred de Vigny's Chatterton at the Comédie-Française, 12 February 1835, comes toward the end of the middle period of French Romantic drama. After the success of Hugo's Hernani in 1830 the French Romantics abandoned and were abandoned by the official theatre. Between 1830–1835, most of the works of Dumas, Hugo, and Vigny were produced at the Odéon or the Porte-Saint-Martin—with the notable exception of the fiasco of Hugo's Le Roi s'amuse at the Comédie in 1832. The conventions and tastes of the popular theatre audiences had not been favorable to the literary concerns of the Romantics. Dumas especially, and Hugo, to some extent, compromised their principles, while Vigny chose to remain silent. In 1835, however, Hugo and Vigny, with Angelo and Chatterton, were to return to the more literary atmosphere of the Comédie-Française. After these productions, both successes, the history of the Romantic drama in France moves into its final period with a series of failures which would culminate in the production of Hugo's Les Burgraves at the Comédie-Française in 1843, generally considered to be the terminal date in the study of French Romantic drama.
Shakespeare in Tottenham-Street: An “Aesthetic” Merchant of Venice
Authors: Kleb William E.
Published: July 2009

The 1860s and 1870s are generally considered a hiatus in the history of Shakespearean production on the London stage. Accounts of the period usually move quickly from Charles Kean's retirement in 1859 (or the end of Samuel Phelps' management of suburban Sadler's Wells in 1862) to the beginning of Henry Irving's regime at the Lyceum in 1879—acknowledging the Phelps-Chatterton collaboration at Drury Lane as worthy, but hardly remarkable, and mentioning in passing such isolated events as Fechter's new Hamlet in 1861. Nevertheless, while no management comparable to Kean's or Phelps's, devoted principally to poetic drama, appeared during this time, there were occasional Shakespearean productions of exceptional interest. One such was the Bancrofts' version of The Merchant of Venice, which opened at the Prince of Wales's Theatre in out-of-the-way Tottenham-street on 17 April 1875. It ran for only thirty-six performances and lost the famous actormanager team £3,000. Despite its financial failure, however, the production attracted considerable critical attention at the time, much of it favorable, and it has since gained an honorable place in stage history. Beerbohm-Tree, for example, in an address to the Oxford Union Debating Society in 1900, called it “the first production in which the modern spirit of stage management asserted itself.”
“All Trivial Fond Records”: On the Uses of Early Recordings of British Music-Hall Performers
Authors: Senelick Laurence
Published: July 2009

The fruits of scientific enterprise are never without their detractors, and so theIllustrated News of the Worldfelt the necessity, early in 1891, to deplore a chain of events, pursuant to the invention of the talking machine.
Editing Victorian Playwrights: Some Problems, Priorities, and Principles
Authors: Jones John Bush
Published: July 2009

In his “Defence of Nineteenth-Century English Drama,” Michael R. Booth could confidently declare, “I am not preaching to my friends but to my enemies, and am resolved to do so unaided in this particular sermon.” I envy Professor Booth's easy task of separating friends from foes, for as a bibliographer and textual editor, I am faced with the dilemma of so many others in this field: the lines of demarcation are blurred or often nonexistent; friend and enemy are frequently one and the same. I find it unlikely that anyone to whom these remarks are addressed questions the value of nineteenth-century theatre and drama as legitimate scholarly pursuits, but I am equally confident that some—as is proportionally true in the entire community of literary scholars—have not the slightest concern for the precise and accurate transcription of the words and their forms that make up the extant theatrical texts. If these remarks sound somewhat defensive, I make no apology, for while it is probably true that “theatre scholars are not generally given to engaging in polemics,” the sad fact is that bibliographers and textual critics often are (or are forced to), thanks to the recalcitrance or shortsightedness of what seems a majority of scholars of literature and theatre. So while Professor Booth could cheerfully face his enemies “unaided,” I feel no shame in having at my back a small but valiant army of textual scholars ready to assist in defending the value of preparing authoritative critical editions—if and when they feel a work or body of works worth editing at all.
Strange Images of Death: Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree'sMacbeth,1911
Authors: Mullin Michael
Published: July 2009

Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1853–1917) is a perplexing figure in Shakespearean stage history. At the turn of the century and in the decade following, he was esteemed as Irving's successor, the pre-eminent Shakespearean actor and producer in Great Britain. That reputation rested largely on his great “revivals” of Shakespeare at Her (later His) Majesty's Theatre. Highly regarded in his own day, Tree is now commonly thought of as a somewhat ludicrous impressario: “He was at heart a comedian, a character actor, a make-up artist specializing in the eccentric,” writes Charles H. Shattuck in his authoritative history of Shakespeare in performance. And, Shattuck continues, Tree's staging is remembered chiefly for its “tricky business, tableaux and dumbshows,” the kind of elaborate, literal-minded stage “illustration” which put a barge onstage inAntony and Cleopatraand live rabbits inA Midsummer Night's Dream. It is easy to laugh at Tree's excesses, as many have, because so little is known about his achievements. For until 1974 the Tree promptbooks and theatre records (scrapbooks with complete newspaper reviews) were controlled by the Tree Estate, and were therefore all but inaccessible to scholars. Lacking the direct evidence of reviews and promptbooks, theatre historians have relied on the harsh judgments of Tree's enemies—chiefly George Bernard Shaw and A. B. Walkley of the LondonTimes—who denounced Tree in favor of William Poel, Gordon Craig, and Harley Granville-Barker.
New Light on Vanbrugh's Haymarket Theatre Project
Authors: Milhous Judith
Published: July 2009

The general outlines of Vanbrugh's Haymarket theatre project are well known. Since 1695 two companies had been playing in London: Christopher Rich's, with rights to Drury Lane and Dorset Garden; and Thomas Betterton's rebels, making shift in the cramped old Lincoln's Inn Fields theatre. The Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket was the first new theatre in London since “Wren's” “plain built” Drury Lane (1674), and the first lavish one since Dorset Garden (1671)—which had fallen into disrepair, and by the turn of the century was barely usable. The standard account of Vanbrugh's project is Colley Cibber's.
Antigone's Example: A View of the Living Theatre's Production, Process, and Praxis
Authors: Rosenthal Cindy
Published: July 2009

The Living Theatre is a metaphor for the sixties, its very name conjuring up the undulating movement, the pulsing flow, the argumentative spirit that characterized that time.

At the center of the Living Theatre's production of Sophocles' Antigone, translator and director Judith Malina presented the verbal battle between the State/Authority/Patriarchal-figure, kreon (played by Living Theatre co-director Julian Beck), and the Individual/Disenfranchised/Woman, Antigone, (played by Malina herself). At performances of Antigone presented throughout Europe during the dynamic years of 1967 and 1968, spectators were meant to see with new eyes the incendiary struggles taking place outside the theatre. Following Antigone's example, they were meant to take on—individually—the political responsibility and the challenge, and to take part in revolutionary actions. Foregrounded onstage was the battle of the sexes, the battle of the generations, the fire in the belly of the cultural/sexual/political Zeitgeist.
The Theatre Museum of Repertoire Americana
Authors: Blackstone Sarah
Published: July 2009

Sarah Blackstone is Chair of the Department of Theatre at Southern Illinois University and serves on the Advisory Board for the Theatre Museum of Repertoire Americana. Neil and Caroline Schaffner started collecting memorabilia from the repertoire theater movement during the 1950s. They dreamed of one day establishing a museum that would display their collection and other items connected with this wide-spread popular entertainment form. In 1973, with the help of the Midwest Old Settlers and Threshers Association, and endless hours of effort, their dream was realized in the small town of Mt. Pleasant, Iowa. Since that time, the Museum of Repertoire Americana has prospered, and it currently houses an impressive collection of uniquely American research materials. Dedicated to preserving the rural theatrical heritage of the Midwest, the Museum has materials related to opera houses, circle stock companies, Uncle Tom shows, showboats, and tent shows of all descriptions. I offer here a brief description of the collection, together with information about the National Society for the Preservation of Tent, Folk, and Repertoire Theatre and the annual Theatre History Seminar this organization holds at the Museum each April.
“Webster, Horne and Mrs. Stowe”: American Performances of The Duchess of Malfi
Authors: Wadsworth Frank W.
Published: July 2009

When Samuel Phelps revived John Webster's tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, at Sadler's Wells on November 20, 1850, its success was immediate. Based on an adaptation by Richard Hengist (Henry) Horne and presenting Isabella Glyn as the Duchess, the revival inspired numerous performances in subsequent years. The British performances varied little from the original revival, Miss Glyn's remarkable success as the Duchess having created an almost instant tradition that was seldom tampered with to any extent. However, in the United States there was less respect for what Horne-Phelps-Glyn had wrought, and the first performance of Webster's tragedy included innovations that were to have a lasting influence upon American productions. These changes are indicated in detail in the promptbook of James Stark, the actor-manager who introduced the Duchess of Malfi to the United States at the American Theatre in San Francisco on August 22, 1857. Stark's book is based upon Horne, consisting in fact of pages from the printed edition pasted in traditional fashion into a notebook, with the page opposite the printed text offering space for longhand revisions, notations of stage business, calls, and so forth. With the exception of the fifth act Stark makes few major changes in Horne's dialogue, merely shortening some speeches and noting a few longer passages which may be cut if necessary. Home's Act II, scene iii, where Ferdinand and the Cardinal discuss the Duchess' looseness, “Can be omitted,” Stark notes, suggesting that American spectators may have been even more prudish than their London cousins. The last act, on the other hand, has been completely revised. Although it retains most of Home's dialogue, it greatly simplifies his structure—a significant change, as Home's handling of the fifth act had not always satisfied even his admirers.
Early Theatres in Rhode Island
Authors: Mullin Donald C.
Published: July 2009

In the decade before the Revolutionary War, the city of Newport was one of the major centers of Colonial culture, ranking with New York and Philadelphia, and far ahead of the village of Boston. It was the only settlement in New England thought cosmopolitan enough by David Douglass to support the introduction of a professional theatre troupe. The Douglass-Hallam company had performed successfully in the southern and middle-Atlantic colonies, and the manager apparently was determined to attempt his luck further north in order to supplement the rather thin living the company managed to make from giving performances in America. Boston, with its sectarian rigidity, was clearly out of the question. Newport, on the other hand, with its wealthy and travelled shipping interests, seemed distinctly possible as a base for what was hoped to be a larger sphere of performance. Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (“Rhode Island” in Colonial times meant only the Island of Rhode Island, not the entire area we now know as the State) had no law against theatrical performances, principally because none had ever been given in the Colony to object to. The Douglass-Hallam company moved north in 1761 and began what was to be a series of attempts to penetrate the resistance of New Englanders to frivolities and delights.
Three Kinds of Outdoor Theatre Before Shakespeare
Authors: Hosley Richard
Published: July 2009

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 circularplateaor 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.
Notes on John Joseph Holland, with a Design for the Balitmore Theatre, 1802
Authors: Stoddard Richard
Published: July 2009

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.
Early American Professional Acting
Authors: Downer Alan S.
Published: July 2009

My subject this afternoon is “Early American Professional Acting.” To those who have not dipped into the beginnings of theatre history in this country, it may come as a surprise to learn that it's a vast subject, with a huge cast of characters, more scenes than the fourth act of Anthony and Cleopatra, and that liberal use of time which so offended Sir Philip Sidney.
The Symmetry of Delphi
Authors: Currie Ryder Hector
Published: July 2009

Apollo is the god of measure. “Captain of Sevens,” his cithara brought seven-stringed order to music and seven-walled order to Thebes. As god of measure, symmetry informs the myth describing his birth: amid the Cycladic islands (which the Greeks considered a circle surrounding Delos) four adamantine columns bore Delos above the foam as Leto gave birth to the shining god. And, as in the birth of the Greek god of measure, so also in the emergence of the Greek world: a strict symmetry prevails in the myth describing how the omphalos, the earth's navel stone, came to be at the locus of what was to become Apollo's sacred seat. Zeus, it was told, freed two eagles from the ends of the earth, their paths crossing at the earth's center, at Delphi. The symmetric image of this aerial encounter over the terrestrial center suggests schematically the Apolline triad: two tensional extremes and, at the point of balance, a mediating mean.
“A Constructive Promise”: Jacques Copeau in New York, 1917–1919
Authors: Harrop John
Published: July 2009

On April 7, 1919, almost exactly two years after the United States had entered World War I, the Vieux-Colombier theatre gave its final performance in New York, where it had spent the last eighteen months of the war presenting two seasons of repertory. The rather surprising presence of Jacques Copeau's troupe in New York at this time can be largely attributed to the war itself. Copeau had first been dispatched on a lecture tour in January of 1917 by the French Ministry of Fine Arts, with the aim of “countering German propaganda in the realm of culture,” strengthening ties between France and the United States, and stemming the tide of pro-German feeling then running in America. Though Copeau had already performed a similar task in Switzerland and was aware of the significance of his brief, his approach was subtle. Clayton Hamilton tells us that in the six lectures he delivered Copeau “talked to us of art and Molière, and said no word about the war … talked to us only about Truth and Beauty in the midst of many things succumbing momentarily to death. We welcomed Jacques Copeau because he wore the face of Dante.…”
Alfred Wigan: Victorian Realist
Authors: Rinear David
Published: July 2009

Considerations of developing realistic acting styles on the English stage between the debut of Macready in 1817 and the triumph of Fechter in 1860 usually focus their attention on Macready, Charles Kean, and Phelps. Although these three men differed significantly in their approaches to acting, their styles shared in common a romantic goal that René Wellek attributes to Coleridge: “to domesticate the wonderful.” The means of attaining this goal varied. Macready relied on developing the audience's appreciation of his conscious artifice at playing domesticated points. He was, consequently, less realistic than Phelps and Kean, who were primarily concerned with trying to make an audience feel what they believed their characters felt. This concern with transmitting character feeling is compatible with Kean's excellence at gentlemanly melodrama and Phelps' ability at playing the pathetic elements in comic characters.
Curtain Down On Theatre fires
Authors: Willis Richard A.
Published: July 2009

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century the average life of a theatre in Europe was about twenty years; the life expectancy of a theatre in the United States was much less. Chances were that the theatre would burn. Nothing seemed sufficient to prevent accidental fires from getting started, and, once the fires had begun, they could rarely be brought under control. In practically every case, however, the general public remained indifferent to its safety. Theatres destroyed by fire were rebuilt, reopened, and refilled almost immediately. Three major theatre catastrophes spanned the nineteenth century in America: the burning of the Theatre in Richmond in 1811, where seventy died; the fire at Mrs. Conway's Theatre in Brooklyn in 1876, which killed two hundred and eighty-five; and the worst of the theatre disasters, the Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago in 1903, where six hundred and two perished. These were the most devastating fires in a century during which hundreds of theatres burned, many thousands of dollars worth of property was destroyed, and well over a thousand spectators lost their lives. Such tragedies were in the general pattern of conflagrations in America throughout the nineteenth century. Imagine a closely built-up street running from New York to Chicago. If all the buildings on both sides of that street were burned, the loss would equal the estimated costs from fires in this country in 1907.
“Howe's Strolling Company”: British Military Theatre in New York and Philadelphia, 1777 and 1778
Authors: Brown Jared A.
Published: July 2009

In September 1776, General Sir William Howe's troops took possession of New York City, having badly defeated Washington's forces in the Battle of Long Island. Howe, who had accepted his assignment in America with the greatest reluctance, set about making life as pleasant as possible for himself and for those around him. He had grown greatly concerned about the morale and comfort of his troops in a city that, compared to London, was little more than a backwater. Howe wrote to Lord George Germain, Secretary of State for the American Colonies, in England: “The troops had been so much harassed in the course of the last campaign, that I could not but wish that no manoeuvre of the enemy might hinder them from enjoying that repose, in their winter quarters, which their late fatigues rendered necessary, and their services entitled them to expect.”
Canada's First Professional Company
Authors: Bains Yashdip Singh
Published: July 2009

To write about theatrical entertainment in Canada before the Confederation is to enter a relatively unfilled field. In the absence of a fully documented account of stage presentations, historians like Jean Beraud and Murray D. Edwards have tended to underrate the frequency and quality of performances in assembly rooms and makeshift theaters in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and slighted the crucial role of strolling players in the growth of the theater in British North American provinces. One of the topics still to be investigated is the pioneering work of a trio of actor-managers—Edward Allen, John Bentley and William Moore—who arrived in Montreal from the United States early in 1786 and deserve recognition for founding Canada's first professional company, which gave evenings of entertainment along the lines of London companies. In his history of Montreal theater, Franklin Graham recorded a performance by Allen and Company in 1786, and E. Z. Massicotte uncovered a lease signed by Edward Allen in 1787, but neither explored further. Pierre Georges Roy who compiled data about theatrical performances in Quebec City from the Quebec Gazette and Quebec Mercury began his investigations in 1790 and missed the earlier events.
Nation and Class in the Karaghiozis History Performance
Authors: Myrsiades Linda Suny
Published: July 2009

Karaghiozis—Greek shadow puppet theatre—is a performance which developed in Greece over a period of a hundred fifty years, using local character types, costumes, and dialects, folk anecdotes, contemporary events, topical humor, themes and motifs of classical, hellenistic, and Byzantine origin, Greek legends, songs, and dances. It is modelled on a fourteenth-century Turkish prototype, Karagoz, which itself finds its roots in fool lore and the classical mime (the dominant form of entertainment in the eastern empire from the fourth century B.C. to 1400 A.D.). The Turkish performance was introduced into occupied Greece possibly as early as the seventeenth century (the time of the consolidation of the Turkish hold over Greece). It had certainly appeared by 1809, at which time the traveller John Hobhouse records the earliest known date of the Turkish performance in Greece.
Notes and Comments
Authors: Murray Christopher
Published: July 2009

A few points are suggested by James Maloon's interesting article, “From Beast to Mad Beast: A Further look at Tyrone Guthrie's Tamburlaine” (TS, XVIII, No. 1). First, there seems to be no warrant for and no future in considering the two parts of Tamburlaine as a unifiable production. As John D. Jump reminds us:

The two parts were apparently designed for production in theaters of very different sorts. In Part II, the Captain commanding Balsera and the Governor of Babylon stand upon their respective city walls to parley with enemies below; in the scene of her death, Zenocrate is discovered on her bed, and an arras is drawn before her when Tamburlaine and the rest retire. In planning these scenes, Marlowe must have counted on a theater with an upper stage and a discovery-space. But he counted on nothing of the sort when writing Part I. Even the siege of Damascus is managed without the use of an upper stage. Part I could have been successfully performed on a simple platform stage, but the full resources of a well-equipped London theater would have been needed for Part II.
Marie Wilton (Lady Bancroft) as an Actress
Authors: Kleb William
Published: July 2009

The Bancrofts' work, first at the Prince of Wales's (1865–1879), then, briefly, at the Haymarket (1880–1885), played a crucial role in the evolution of the Victorian “idea” of theatre, providing a model for their contemporaries, a “symbol of innovation” and a focal point for debate concerning the “new” realism. Their collaboration with T. W. Robertson formed the core of this work, but attention has recently shifted from a concern with the dramatic value (or lack of it) of Robertson's six Prince of Wales's comedies to an appreciation of the playwright's role in this larger, more complex theatrical achievement—one which also included management and public relations, as well as production and acting style. The precise nature of this achievement is only now coming into focus, and while much remains to be done and said on the subject, at this point one facet seems to require special attention; the important dramatic, scenic and managerial aspects of the Bancrofts' work should not be allowed to obscure the fact that their theatre was also fundamentally an actors' theatre.
A Census of the Provincial Theatre in Eighteenth-Century Spain
Authors: Falk Heinrich Richard
Published: July 2009

The recorded history of the Spanish theatre has been, in large measure, a history of the Madrid stage. Madrid, like London and Paris, was not only the political center of its nation, but also its cultural capital. Performers and playwrights may have served enforced periods of apprenticeship in the provinces (the example of Molière comes to mind), but success in the capital remained a constant goal. Historians of the theatre in Spain have tended to follow the lead of the actors in fixing their attention almost exclusively on Madrid. N. D. Shergold's A History of the Spanish Stage becomes primarily a history of the Madrid stage after his chronicle moves from medieval times to the establishment of the first public theatres in late sixteenth-century Madrid. René Andioc's study of the eighteenth-century Spanish theatre, Sur la querelle du théâtre au temps de Leandro Fernández de Moratín (Theatrical Polemics in the Time of Moratin), is almost entirely about the theatre in Madrid, a fact recognized in the title of the Spanish version, Teatro y sociedad en el Madrid del siglo XVIII (Theatre and Society in Eighteenth-Century Madrid). Many additional examples could be cited from the Golden Age to the present of historians purporting to study the Spanish theatre, but in reality considering only the Madrid theatre.
Theatre Scholarship and Technology: A Look at the Future of the Discipline
Authors: Donohue Joseph
Published: July 2009

In 1956 a small group of scholars, all of them engaged in some way or other in the study of theatre, past and present, met and founded a certain remarkable organization. I hardly need to explain that that organization was the American Society for Theatre Research, then and still the only organization of American scholars devoted entirely to promoting the cause, the activity, and the results of research in theatre. Nor is it necessary here for me to recapitulate, even briefly, the course of events that now sees us celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Society. Fortunately, one of those founding members, Thomas Marshall, has generously accepted the charge offered him a year ago by the ASTR Executive Committee to write a concise history of the Society from the time of its founding. That review of the first twenty-five years has just come off the press, nicely timed for distribution to all members in attendance at this meeting. Subsequently it is to appear also in the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of the Society's journal, Theatre Survey.
The Touchstone (1779) and the Return of the “Speaking Pantomime”
Authors: Fahrner Robert
Published: July 2009

In his study of early nineteenth-century English pantomime, David Mayer III describes Harlequin Mother Goose—the 1806 Covent Garden production which first revealed the range of Joseph Grimaldi's comic genius—as “the end of nearly one hundred and forty years of fitful pantomime evolution.” For the next thirty years, the period dominated by Grimaldi, pantomime was at its peak: its structure and various production practices were stabilized; its potential for comedy and satire were realized more fully than ever before. Even the question of its use of dialogue was finally resolved: although, as Mayer says, “little in it was unexplainable by action,” early nineteenth-century pantomime was “rarely, if ever, silent in the way that we have come to think of pantomime today.”
Cooke Among the Yankee Doodles
Authors: Wilmeth Don B.
Published: July 2009

Late in the afternoon of 24 September 1812, Joseph Fay, a New York lawyer, was summoned to a well-known New York tavern called Mechanics' Hall to write the will of the actor George Frederick Cooke. In a letter to John Howard Payne written immediately after the event, Fay reflected on his unexpected experience.
Torquemada in the Theatre: A Glance at Government Censorship
Authors: O'Connor Patricia W.
Published: July 2009

Although the Spanish Inquisition ceased to function formally in 1834, the spirit that made this institution a metaphor for oppression continues to exist, even if in less dramatic fashion. In the broad sense, “inquisition” may mean any strict or arbitrary suppression of persons and ideas considered unorthodox—and consequently dangerous—to the ruling powers. Spain maintains an active force for its current brand of orthodoxy and, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, pays dearly for that luxury by being a fourth-rate power politically and no power at all intellectually. Even sympathetic but somewhat condescending Hispanists wonder if contemporary Spanish writers can produce anything of merit in this doctrinaire and puritanical atmosphere. Others, myself among them, believe that several Spanish writers active today would enjoy international prestige were not Spain ignored or shunned due to its present form of government. Despite discrimination from abroad and the lingering shadow of Torquemada at home, a tough breed of Spanish writers, hardened by adversity, manages to write, publish, and even perform. Since theatre is the art form that relies most heavily on the cultural condition of the people, the development of postwar drama particularly has been hampered. Moreover, theatre is the only form still under the yoke of prior censorship.
Etienne Decroux and the Advent of Modern Mime
Authors: Angotti Vincent L. , Herr Judie L.
Published: July 2009

In 1923 a young hospital orderly entered Jacques Copeau's École du Vieux-Colombier in Paris to study diction. He held himself aloof from the world of actors, fixing his ambitions upon a lofty conception of politics. Nicknamed “the Orator,” he was Etienne Decroux; and Decroux was a militant socialist who brought to his theatrical studies a belief that “art is a publicity seeker, truth is a saint; a saint should never lower herself, no matter how ugly she may be, before a publicity seeker.”
Tommaso Salvini: An American Devotee's View
Authors: Powers Edward Carroll
Published: July 2009

American theatre audiences of the last two decades of the nineteenth century saw three internationally famous Shakespearean actors in the role of Othello. One, Edwin Booth, was their own; another, Henry Irving, shared their language and heritage; the third, Tommaso Salvini—though without common citizenship, language, or heritage—nonetheless made an indelible impression on the American stage history of the tortured Moor.
Legal protection of the environment during international armed conflict
Authors: Tarasofsky Richard G.
Published: July 2009

Since the 1991 Gulf War, the challenge of protecting the environment during armed conflict has been high on the global agenda. Over the past two years there have been at least five major Meetings of Experts on the subject, the Sixth (Legal) Committee of the UN General Assembly (hereafter Sixth Committee) began deliberations on it, as has the UN General Assembly itself, and it was addressed at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (hereafter UNCED), ultimately forming part of the Rio de Janeiro Declaration on Environment and Development (hereafter Rio Declaration) and Agenda 21.
The law of multinational bays and the case of the Gulf of Fonseca
Authors: Gioia A.
Published: July 2009

On 11 September 1992, a Chamber constituted by the International Court of Justice delivered a long-awaited judgment in the case concerning the Land, Island and Maritime Frontier Dispute between El Salvador and Honduras.
Diversity in secondary rules and the unity of international law: some reflections on current trends
Authors: Wellens K.C.
Published: July 2009

During a meeting of our Editorial Board which took place as far back as October 1990, we found ourselves debating the question whether closed or semi-closed systems as they could be seen to emerge in various fields of international law (e.g., GATT practice, community legal order) would become a potential risk, constituting a threat to the global unity and efficacy of the international legal order. Bruno Simma's thorough and stimulating analysis in the 16th issue of this Yearbook (1985) entitled ‘Self-contained Regimes’ additionally fuelled the very early stages of our preliminary thoughts with regard to the scope and implications of the question raised.