bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“What Really Happens Backstage”: A Nineteenth-Century Kabuki Document
Authors: Leiter Samuel L.
Published: July 2009

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.
Rose McClendon and the Black Units of the Federal Theatre Project: A Lost Contribution
Authors: Plum Jay
Published: July 2009

Although the then-called Negro Units of the Federal Theatre Project arguably played a pivotal role in the development of African-American theatre, Rose McClendon (1884–1936) is unarguably one of the most overlooked contributors to its history. This oversight is extremely puzzling, in view of the fact that McClendon co-directed the Harlem Unit with John Houseman when it opened in 1935. Five years later Federal Theatre Project director Hallie Flanagan attributed much of the initial success of the unit, as well as the very idea of creating separate black units, to McClendon. Yet, except for a paragraph in Flanagan's Arena, little else has been recorded about McClendon's participation in the Project. Even the official history of the Negro Units written by the Federal Theatre Project's Department of Information claims that “guiding the destinations of the Negro Theatre at its inception were John Houseman and Orson Welles.” The history makes no reference to McClendon.
Performance and Politics in Process: Practices of Representation in South African Theatre
Authors: Steadman Ian
Published: July 2009

In many studies of South African theatre, critical scholarship has elucidated the ways in which playwrights have dramatized their views of oppression and struggle under apartheid. As political change in the country in the 1990s determines new developments in cultural expression, theatre in many quarters finds itself no longer thematically bound to the unambiguous morality which characterized anti-apartheid theatre in the 1970s and 1980s. The issues, and the forms and methods used to construct interpretations of the issues in the theatre, appear increasingly more complex in the 1990s. In academic commentary on South African theatre, a moral outrage shared with theatre practitioners against a repugnant social system has frequently blunted critical faculties. Gayatri Spivak warns us that in the writing of history we need to “look at [our] own subjective investment in the narrative that is being produced.“ There is, in South African theatre studies, a great deal of room for critical vigilance when considering “theatre against apartheid.”
The Haunted Stage: Recycling and Reception in the Theatre
Authors: Carlson Marvin
Published: July 2009

Some of the most thoughtful analysis of the theatre during this century was generated by a group of semiotically-oriented linguists and aestheticians in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in the 1930s and 1940s. These Prague theorists considered all aspects of the theatre experience—the dramatic texts, the various production elements, the audience—but they gave special attention to the complex matter of acting, developing a three-part model for the analysis of this phenomenon that may be taken as typical both of their strategies and of their theoretical concerns. They began with the actor, the living being appearing on the stage. This actor utilized expressive work, physical and vocal, to create the impression of an absent personage. The sum of this work resulted in the creation in the theatre of the stage figure. This figure was then interpreted by the audience, using whatever strategies seemed appropriate to them, to result in their mental image, the character. The character in short was the stage figure as received by the audience.
Dramatic Characters and Composite Dramatis Personae
Authors: Veltrusky Jarmila F.
Published: July 2009

The characters whose interaction constitutes the plot of a play are sets of meanings which build up images of the persons supposedly involved in the “story” the play represents. Just as the “story” can be inferred from the plot, through not always completely with assurance, so the person can be discerned through the character. But in both cases the playwright's artifact includes features that are extraneous to the represented events or persons and arises from the process of dramatic representation itself.
Kagura, Chaban, and the Awaji Puppet Theatre: A Literary View of Japan's Performing Arts
Authors: Thornbury Barbara E.
Published: July 2009

“That night, a blind singer recited a Michinoku ballad to the accompaniment of his lute. He performed not far from where I was trying to sleep, and I found his loud, countrified falsetto rather noisy … But then I realized how admirable it was that the fine old customs were still preserved in that distant land.” In writingThe Narrow Road of the Interior (Oku no hosomichi, ca. 1694), from which these lines are taken, the poet Bashō (1644–94) recalled a trip he had taken a few years earlier through Japan's northeast—what he referred to as “that distant land.” In the work Bashō reflects on the past as it survives in the present, on places made famous by poets of earlier times, and on the traditional performing arts that live on in such places. Even today Japan's northeast is known as a region where many traditional performing arts are still preserved.
Actress to Activist: Mlle Clairon in the Public Sphere of the 1760s
Authors: Ravel Jeffrey S.
Published: July 2009

In hisParadoxe 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.
Representation and Reality: The Case of Documentary Theatre
Authors: Favorini Attilio
Published: July 2009

From its origins and throughout its history, Western theatre has engaged, represented, and/or attempted to affect the course of history. Phrynichus and Aeschylus wrote plays on the Persian wars when they were still fresh in the memories of their auditors—too fresh in the case of Phrynichus, who was censured by the Athenians. Early in the sixteenth century French sotties commented on Papal politics; late in the same century Elizabethan playwrights began to exploit contemporary crime stories. During the French Revolution hack writers issued dramatic accounts of Marat's death within a month of its occurrence. Astley's had spectacular recreations of Crimean War battles on stage almost before they occurred. In the twentieth century, technological innovation has stimulated this tendency and extended it throughout the mass media in numberless examples of reality-driven representation.
Archibald MacLaren's “The Negro Slaves” and the Scottish Response to British Colonialism
Authors: Gale Richard
Published: July 2009

As the end of the eighteenth century approached, Britain experienced many changes in power and prestige: the American colonies had broken away; the philosophy of expansionism and imperial domination was being attacked from within and without, and the primacy of the British fleet and trade organizations was fast becoming a thing of the past. All of these factors, and others, forced a mood of re-evaluation upon the British government and people. Throughout the empire and its colonies the discussion of the merits and morality of the slave trade, for example, reached previously unheard of proportions, as the newly-rediscovered sciences of free-trade economics, moral philosophy, and cultivation technology turned towards the examination of slavery. Nowhere was this more active and adamant than in the Scottish university cities, which had become the centers of intellectual and scientific thought and practice. Thus it is no surprise to find this thematic focus upon the newly strengthened and emboldened Scottish stage. One manifestation was Archibald MacLaren's The Negro Slaves, a play in which can be found the seeds and fruits of the Scottish Enlightenment as it relates to the British abolitionist movement, the economic shift in overseas trade, and the overall milieu of colonial perception.
Shakespeare and Postmodern Production: An Introduction
Authors: Worthen W. B.
Published: July 2009

This issue of Theatre Survey explores the condition of postmodern Shakespeare production, and by implication the situation of classic drama on the horizon of the contemporary stage. Working on this issue has been, for both of its coeditors, a surprising experience. Theatre Survey is a distinguished journal in the field of theatre history and historiography, and with this issue we intended to press the journal's agenda toward the history and theory of contemporary culture, generating a series of articles on radical, revisionist, and alternative ways of putting “the ‘classics’ into play.” Because we understand this enterprise—from the Kathakali King Lear to Robert Wilson's When We Dead Awaken to Heiner Müller's Medeamaterial to Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet—to stand in a strategic relation to modernity, we were calling the issue “Performance: Modern and Postmodern.”
Between Text and Cultural Performance: Staging Greek Tragedies in Germany
Authors: Fischer-Lichte Erika
Published: July 2009

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.
Performing Resistance:Seven Last Wordsand the Carceral Culture
Authors: Cleary Beth
Published: July 2009

We face a social landscape with more (or at least as much) need for radical change than we faced in the 1960s, an era that produced, flawed though it was by lack of follow-through, a mighty impulse toward change…Prison walls are being posed as a final solution. They symbolize our shortsightedness, our fear of the real problems caging us all. The pity is how blindly, enthusiastically, we applaud those who are constructing the walls dooming us.

John Edgar Wideman

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

Walter Benjamin
Partisan Theatre in the Early Years of the United States
Authors: Wilmer S. E.
Published: July 2009

The 1790s were an important decade for clarifying and reaffirming the values of the newly created United States of America. Following the establishment of a Federal constitution and the election of George Washington as the first President, political factions in America used the theatre to promote contradictory political agendas. Leading theatre scholars have described many of the plays from this era as nationalistic. In this essay, I want to look closely at the rhetoric of four of these plays and at their political and social context in order to demonstrate that they contributed to a dynamic political discussion about the future of the country. Rather than simply uniting the audience in proclaiming the virtues of their heritage, some of these plays were partisan and divisive. By contrasting their rhetoric, I will examine how each play helped to define the values of the nation in a particular manner.
Strindberg's A Dream Play: Postmodernist Visions on the Modernist Stage
Authors: van den Berg Klaus
Published: July 2009

Since the 1980s, new approaches to theatre historiography, the study of what Sue-Ellen Case has called the “convergence of history and theory,” have begun to arise in a challenge to generally accepted principles of theatre history, such as the supremacy of independent facts, the autonomy of dramatic texts, and the hierarchy of text, performance, and culture. The French critic and philosopher Michel Foucault has pointed out that the grouping and ordering of events into historical periods creates a “space of reference,” which lends some events a heightened meaning, while obscuring or submerging others. In a substantial challenge to traditional methods of theatre history, historiographers influenced by this view have begun to examine the theoretical underpinnings of historical periodization. In theatre theory, Thomas Postlewait has investigated the often unarticulated assumptions by which theatre historians isolate a group of historical events and designate them with period names.Many scholars now center their attention on historical discontinuity: searching for ruptures in the historical narrative, focusing on dynamics which lend instability rather than stability to historical periods, and reconceptualizing temporal historical narratives into spatial relationships. For example, from a perspective of discontinuity, a play is conceived not simply as a fixed entity created at some moment in history, but as a representation of layers of historical influences; likewise, a theatre building is not simply a material location in space, but a physical expression of historically emergent architectural styles and sociopolitical circumstances, and a performance is not simply a translation of a text to the stage, but a collage of past and emergent cultural and aesthetic processes.
Mrs. Siddons' Currency
Authors: Nipe Christine
Published: July 2009

“At last, Hollywood publicists and their high-profile clients have a chance to pay homage to their patron saint, Sarah Siddons,” claimed the August 17–23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter in its story on the concurrent exhibits of portraits of Sarah Siddons this summer at the J. Paul Getty Museum and he Huntington Art Collection (27 July-19 September). Also characterizing Siddons as calculating media mogul, the Los Angeles Times of July 25 compared the fame of the historical tragic actress (1755–1831) to that of current stars like Madonna, O.J., Diana, and even Monica. England's highly respectable muse of tragedy would likely reject these dubious associations, but the first actress of preeminent stature on the English stage was a symbol of female success, the subject of public scrutiny, and an emblem of ideal femininity. Siddons, who achieved celebrity status during an extraordinarily successful, forty-year career in England, Scotland, and Ireland, recently inspired a constellation of events which included not only these two art exhibitions, but a new play produced by Mark Taper Forum and an academic conference at the Huntington as well. In addition to detailing her sublime acting and renowned position in the Georgian theatre, these happenings emphasized Siddons' use of portraiture to cultivate and maintain her celebrity status.
Cork and Community: Postwar Blackface Minstrelsy in the Rural Midwest
Authors: Sacks Howard L.
Published: July 2009

Nearly a century-and-a-half after urban professional entertainers first attained instant popularity for music, dance, and humor performed in blackface, amateur minstrels in the rural Midwest continued to pack school auditoriums and smalltown theaters with their homespun variety. Blackening their hands and faces with storebought makeup (the modern equivalent of the burnt cork of the nineteenth century), farmers and schoolteachers sang spirited renditions of “There's Nothin Like a Minstrel Show” mechanics and school board members donned tutus in an exotic ballet burlesque; and a realtor with a rich baritone sang his version of “Mammy,” a perennial favorite.
Paul Robeson, Will Vodery's “Jubilee Singers,” and the Earliest Script of the Kern-Hammerstein Show Boat
Authors: McMillin Scott
Published: July 2009

An early stage in the writing of the Kern-Hammerstein musical Show Boat is captured in a typescript marked “from the Ziegfeld Collection” in the Theatre Collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The script, #7430 in the Library numbering, is undated, but Paul Robeson, Elizabeth Hines, and Guy Robertson are penciled in for the roles of Joe, Magnolia, and Gaylord, with “Aunt Jemima” (Tess Gardella, in her famous blackface role) set for Queenie, Norma Terriss for Ellie, and Andy Tombes for Frank. These are principal parts. Magnolia is the ingenue who will fall in love with the dashing, undependable Gaylord, a gambler, in Act 1 and then will grow up to become a singing star after her marriage fails in Act 2; Ellie and Frank are performers on the show boat; Queenie is the boat's cook, and Joe—the part intended for Robeson—is her husband. As yet uncast are Julie, the leading actress who is forced off the show boat when it is discovered that she is mulatto, and Magnolia's parents, Cap'n Andy Hawkes and his shrewish wife Parthy.
Edward Kilanyi and American Tableaux Vivants
Authors: McCullough Jack W.
Published: July 2009

On Wednesday, 4 December 1895, Edward Kilanyi died in New York without ever having witnessed the stage presentation which was to crown his short but spectacular career in America. That presentation, known as the “Glyptorama,” was a grandiose exhibition of tableaux vivants staged at Koster and Bial's famous music hall.
Colley Cibber Plays Richard III
Authors: Kalson Albert E.
Published: July 2009

In the closing months of 1699, the winter of his discontent, an established London actor and occasional dramatist hit upon a plan to change his public image from comedian to tragedian; he would fashion for himself a leading tragic role in which his uncontrollable voice and ungainly figure might prove to be assets rather than liabilities; in this way he would demonstrate to himself and to the world that he was unquestionably a complete master of his art. The alteration of Shakespeare's Richard III, the effort by which Colley Cibber, dramatist, attempted to aid the career of Colley Cibber, actor, was for the adapter a decided failure; Cibber's portrayal of England's most notorious monarch was too comic to be convincing. Yet in reshaping Shakespeare's play to suit the taste of the contemporary playgoer, he unknowingly manufactured one of the greatest box-office attractions in the history of the theatre. His alteration was to be the most lasting of all the many revisions of the plays of Shakespeare and was to hold the stage in preference to the original for nearly two hundred years. Although Cibber never explicitly admitted the reasons behind his choosing the role of Richard III for his tragic bow, his motivations become clear to the reader who patiently follows his career through the intricacies of An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber.
The Shoemaker's Holiday at the Mercury Theatre
Authors: France Richard
Published: July 2009

Barely eighteen months before his production of The Shoemaker's Holiday, Orson Welles could not claim for himself a single credential in the professional theatre. Beginning with his very first production, the celebrated “Voodoo” Macbeth, in 1936, Welles quickly became the center of mounting popular and critical attention with Horse Eats Hat, Dr. Faustus and The Cradle Will Rock for the W.P.A. He followed these in the Winter of 1937–38 with the first two productions for his own, newlyformed Mercury Theatre: Julius Caesar and The Shoemaker's Holiday.
Kean versus Macready: Sheridan Knowles's Virginius
Authors: Ritchie Harry M.
Published: July 2009

Certain historians delight in pinpointing moments of change, the intersection of trends that mirror social progress. Charts are drawn to establish the point in time when ascending television viewing crosses descending newspaper circulation, or where rising city surpasses falling rural population. Dramatic history is rarely the product of such simplistic trends, but perhaps such a nexus may be cited in London in the spring of 1820. On 17 May of that year, William Charles Macready opened in Sheridan Knowles's Virginius at Covent Garden. It was a great success and established Macready as the leading actor in England, confirming the supremacy of a new style based on “domesticity” and “humanity.” On 29 May 1820, Edmund Kean opened at Drury Lane in another version of the Virginius story and failed completely. This was Kean's first London defeat and started him on a ten-year slide to oblivion, a slide which took much of romantic acting and dramaturgy with him.
Helen Faucit's Acting Style
Authors: Carlisle Carol J.
Published: July 2009

“She is full of strength and grace, and though cold in surface there is burning Etna beneath”—this was Helen Faucit in 1849, as described by Mrs. Mary Coleridge. Perhaps the graphic words were meant for Helen Faucit as a person, but, if so, they apply equally well to her acting style in its maturity, a style that was distinguished alike by power and charm, by passionate “nature” and classical “art.”
James Robinson Planché and the English Burletta Tradition
Authors: Dircks P. T.
Published: July 2009

In 1879, many years after his initial success in the burletta, James Robinson Planché recalled how the renewed popularity of Kane O'Hara's Midas at the Haymarket in 1825, with the piquant Madame Vestris featured as Apollo, had moved him to write a similar play. He recalled, too, that, despite the fact that his works in burlesque and melodrama had been well received at the patent theatres, he could not persuade any manager, of either a major or minor house, “to accept my classical bantling.” The young playwright put away his manuscript and busied himself with a variety of successful works, opera and melodrama and farce. It was only on meeting Madame Vestris one day late in 1830 and learning that this outstanding actress, now without a permanent means of support, had conceived the idea of opening her own theatre on the site of the little Pavilion in Wych Street which Elliston had formerly occupied, that Planché resurrected his early manuscript and offered it to her for the initial presentation at the new Royal Olympic Theatre. She accepted, and Olympic Revels was performed on 3 January 1831. It was a most successful play in what was to become a most successful playhouse.
The English Critic and the Romantic Ballet
Authors: Cohen Selma Jeanne
Published: July 2009

“L'Étang danced with nobility and precision, while Pécourt took all kinds of parts with grace, precision and lightness.” So P. Rameau delineated the qualities desired of a dancer in his Maître à danser (1725). Across the channel, John Weaver wrote in his Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures upon Dancing (1721) that Hester Santlow was “the most agreeable, the most correct Performer in the World.” The ballerina of the romantic period still pleased audiences with her grace, but no longer with her nobility. As the stately declamation of Kemble gave way to the exuberance of Kean, the style of theatrical dancing changed in somewhat similar fashion. In order to cope, the critics had to alter their standards and find a new set of adjectives to deal with the values of the new dance.
Adventures in Nineteenth-Century Biography: Some Problems and Principles, with Examples from the Life of Andrew Ducrow
Authors: Saxon A. H.
Published: July 2009

As every historian of the period is aware, the nineteenth-century English theatre offers a seemingly inexhaustible mine for research. So many actors, managers, playwrights, designers, critics, theatres—major, minor, and provincial—were active during the century that no one could possibly be expected to keep track of all of them, let alone know them all in any depth. To a large extent this cause for perpetual rejoicing by doctoral students and their grateful supervisors is due to the awesome amount of theatrical reportage during the century—some 550 periodicals alone covering the performing arts, according to the latest edition of Stratman, not to mention all the newspapers and other publications that regularly devoted columns to theatrical matters. Then, too, the period abounds in memoirs and biographies; there is an astonishing amount of iconographic material; while the great collections of ephemera and theatricalia at such places as the British Museum, the Bodleian, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Harvard have preserved for us an immense treasure trove of playbills, prints, diatribes against hated rivals, illicit love letters, locks of hair, even the shoemaker's lasts for the boots of a reigning star—items invaluable to prospectors after theatrical truth. Add to this the data that can be found in archives, and what it all comes to is a staggering mass of information.
Staging the YorkCreation, and Fall of Lucifer
Authors: Davidson Clifford , Mason Nona
Published: July 2009

The Creation, and Fall of Luciferby the York Realist was intended to provide a spectacular opening for the Corpus Christi cycle, of which the city of York felt very proud in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Since the York Realist appears to have been particularly sensitive to the conditions of production, this opening play provides a useful focus for attention to the staging used in the York cycle. The internal evidence of the Realist'sCreation, and Fall of Luciferdemonstrates that he was not writing a mere literary exercise, but kept in mind the specifics of stage production.
First American Theatre Contracts: Wall and Lindsay's Maryland Company of Comedians, and the Annapolis, Fell's Point, and Baltimore Theatres, 1781–1783
Authors: Haims Lynn
Published: July 2009

Almost nothing survives of contractual arrangements between actors and managers in eighteenth-century America. The earliest known theatre contracts appear to be two documents, “Articles to be strictly observ'd, by the Managers and Performers belonging to the Maryland Company of Comedians” and “Rules to be Observ'd in the Baltimore Theatre, respecting Benefits.” They are undated but almost certainly from 1782, during the single year the company was managed by Thomas Wall and Adam Lindsay, whom the contracts name. The only other eighteenth-century documents of the kind, to my knowledge, are the well known “Articles of Agreement” between Hallam, Hodgkinson, and Dunlap of May 1796; “Regulations for the Old American Company at the Ensuing Benefits,” dated 24 March, 1797; and a briefly written contract of 1798 between Dunlap and the actress Mrs. Oldmixon.
Henry Irving's Shakespearean Productions
Authors: Moore Edward M.
Published: July 2009

Henry Irving was by far the most celebrated actor during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. He had few rivals, and literally none in Britain. But I believe no other actor has caused such extensive and continual controversy regarding his genius. From the beginning of his triumph, shortly after he joined the company of Hezekiah Bateman at the Lyceum in 1871, until long after his death in 1905, his devotees claimed for him a place among the greats of the past: Alleyn, Burbage, Betterton, Garrick, Edmund Kean; indeed, the claim is still occasionally heard today. No less a man of the theater than Gordon Craig wrote, twenty-five years after Irving's death, “I have never known of, or seen, or heard of, a greater actor than was Irving.” Certainly Irving made the Lyceum the most celebrated theater in England, and not even his severest critics denied his status as the head of his profession. He was the first actor in history to be knighted, and he was given burial in Westminster Abbey. And yet, the best critics of the day were from the first almost unanimous in their condemnation of his acting, and, after he took over the management of the Lyceum in 1878, of his productions. With none of the other “greats” of the stage was there any such distinguished chorus of dissent. A glance at the list of parts Irving performed and plays he produced reveals that he did nothing—absolutely nothing—for contemporary drama.
Rewriting the Hallams: Research in 18th Century British and American Theatre
Authors: Myers Robert J. , Brodowski Joyce
Published: July 2009

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.
Method Acting and the Cold War
Authors: McConachie Bruce
Published: July 2009

Triumphalist accounts of the spread of “the Method” in post-World War II America generally explain its success as the victory of natural truths over benighted illusions about acting. InMethod Actors: Three Generations of An American Acting Style, for instance, Steve Vineberg follows his summary of the primary attributes of “method” acting with the comment: “These concerns weren't invented by Stanislavski or his American successors; they emerged naturally out of the two thousand-year history of Western acting.” Hence, the final triumph of “the Method” was natural, even inevitable. Vineberg's statement, however, raises more questions than it answers. Why did it take two thousand years for actors and theorists of acting to get it right? Or, to localize the explanation to the United States, why did more American actors, directors, and playwrights not jump on the Stanislavski bandwagon and reform the American theatre after the appearance of the Moscow Art Theatre in New York in 1923 and the subsequent lectures and classes from Boleslavski and others? The Group Theatre demonstrated the power of Stanislavski-derived acting techniques in the 1930s, but their substantial successes barely dented the conventional wisdom about acting theory and technique in the professional theatre. Yet, in the late 1940s and early fifties, “method” acting, substantially unchanged from its years in the American Laboratory and Group theatres, took Broadway and Hollywood by storm.
Vichy's Theatrical Venture
Authors: Rosenberg Merrill A.
Published: July 2009

When, on June 22, 1940, the French government signed an armistice with the Third Reich, France was divided into a northern zone, comprising about two-thirds of its total area including the Atlantic and Channel coasts, and a southern zone restricted to the lower third of the country. While the French government was to enjoy political autonomy in both zones, the southern zone was to be free of occupying troops. Less than three weeks after the signing of the Armistice, an overwhelming majority of the National Assembly annulled the Constitution of the Third Republic and invested Marshall Pètain with the authority to promulgate a new Constitution for the French State. Vichy, a small city in the southern zone, was chosen as its capital.
Edward H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe on the Art of Acting
Authors: Sogliuzzo A. Richard
Published: July 2009

Edward H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe, two of the most popular Shakespearean actors in the history of the American theatre, are usually regarded as practitioners of a fading nine-nineteenth-century tradition in American acting. The judgment is essentially correct. They acted Shakespeare in the spirit of the “gentlemanly” melodrama: excluding the ugly and exalting the beautiful. Julia expressed the philosophy that guided the Sothern-Marlowe productions: “For the Land of Romance for that I was bound, and I desired those who were tired or troubled to follow.” However, the repeated reference to “natural” acting both in Sothern and Marlowe's discussions of acting as well as the judgments of certain of their contemporaries indicate that they were at least responsive to the trend toward naturalistic Shakespearean acting of the twentieth century.
Theatre in a Package
Authors: Snyder Frederick E.
Published: July 2009

The theatrical fare that eventually became known as American vaudeville began as a random assortment of acts staged whereever there was space large enough for people to gather. It was called, appropriately enough, “variety,” and was an undisciplined affair consisting of routines pilfered from practically every element of theatrical convention: the drama, the circus, the standup comic, burlesque, the ministrel show, the omnibus act of the touring trouper.
Fragmented Autobiography
Authors: Morley Malcolm
Published: July 2009

Rehearsals of Joseph and his Brethren had begun some days before the bit players, among them myself, joined the company. Sets had been planned and the vast number of costumes designed and put in hand some months previously. The production was to be one of the most lavish I ever encountered. Drama and pageantry were combined in a big spectacular offering resembling Ben Hur, The Garden of Allah, The Daughter of Heaven and other stage epics which preceded the mammoth photography of the cinema. Based upon the Biblical narrative, Joseph and His Brethren by Louis Napoleon Parker was first performed on January 11, 1913, at the Century Theatre erected between 62nd and 63nd Streets at Central Park West. The house was labelled “the Millionaires' Theatre” because several of New York's millionaires were responsible for its building. Considered the last word in theatre construction, the place yet managed to convey the idea of a luxury hotel. It was under the management of George Tyler, an associate of the Liebler Company.
Hernani's Revolt from the Tradition of French Stage Composition
Authors: Carlson Marvin
Published: July 2009

The best known date in French theatre history between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries is surely February 25, 1830. On that night and for weeks thereafter, the opposing schools of classicism and romanticism clashed openly and bitterly at the Comédie-Française over Victor Hugo's new play, Hernani. To gain some idea of the significance of the struggle, one must remember that for a century and a half the strict formulae of the grand siècle had dominated the stage, that before the romantics no serious dramatist had dared to challenge the quasi-divinity of Racine and Corneille. Their works served as the unquestioned examples for later dramatists, whose tragedies were expected to follow those of the masters not only in the famous three unities, but in every detail of construction, down to the proper placement of pauses within the rigidly controlled poetic line, the alexandrin. Sterile imitations were the almost inevitable result, leading by the beginning of the nineteenth century to the lifeless neoclassic epics of such now mercifully forgotten dramatists as Antoine Vincent Arnault and Luce de Lancival.
Richard Mulcaster and the Elizabethan Theatre
Authors: DeMolen Richard L.
Published: July 2009

During the early years of Elizabeth's reign, the theatre was dominated by boy companies:

Out of seventy-eight rewards for Court performances between 1558 and 1576, twenty-one went to the Paul's boys, fifteen to the royal chapels, and ten to schoolboys, making a total of forty-six, as against only thirty-two paid to adult companies.
The Medieval Theatre in the Streets
Authors: Pentzell Raymond J.
Published: July 2009

In 1957 Richard Southern published a book dedicated “to the memory of Bertolt Brecht and to the Berliner Ensemble.” It was written, as he says in his Foreword, from the point of view “of a practising scene designer” enthusiastic about his “discovery of how the ‘new’ open stage demanded a new form of auditorium and implied a new form of theatre.” His book, while historical in subject, was a gesture towards “joining the avant-garde who stand on the threshold of a new world.” Since 1957 new worlds have come and gone. In contrast, The Medieval Theatre in the Round has become for some theatre historians a fixed star by which to plot their interpretations of the surviving evidence of late-medieval stagecraft.
A Curious form of Protest Theatre: The Pièce À Écriteaux
Authors: Striker Ardelle
Published: July 2009

Near the end of his long career at the fairs, Alain-René Lesage wrote a play entitled L'Histoire de l'Opéra-Comique ou les Métamorphoses de la Foire which was presented at the St.-Laurent Fair, the theatre of Pontau, on the 27th of June, 1736. It had indeed been a metamorphosis that Lesage had seen in his twenty–four years with the forains, and in this, almost his last production, he wished “to give an idea of the different changes that the Opéra-Comiquc had suffered since its establishment up to the present time, and to demonstrate with what relentlessness the theatre had been persecuted by its rivals.” On the threshold of his retirement he recalled the various forms used by the actors to circumvent the restrictions and attacks of the Comédie Française and the Académie Royale de Musique.
The Edwin Booth Promptbook Collection at the Players: A Descriptive Catalog
Authors: Oggel L. Terry
Published: July 2009

For several years Edwin Booth had nurtured the idea of establishing an American counterpart to England's famous Garrick Club in London, and by January of 1888, when he had focused the idea well enough to broach the subject formally, he invited fifteen friends to become its “Incorporators,” among them such representatives of the arts and letters as Brander Matthews, Laurence Hutton, and Samuel L. Clemens. Within the year the idea became reality, and The Players Club at 16 Gramercy Park in New York was officially opened.
Toward a Reappraisal of the Children's Troupes
Authors: Shapiro Michael
Published: July 2009

Although most of the extant plays acted by children's troupes were performed in the late 1590s or 1600s, the companies themselves actually grew out of the elaborately formalized court life of the late Middle Ages, and their social functions changed remarkably little over the years. We can therefore best understand certain aspects of this diversified body of work by studying the role played by the children's troupes in the ritualistic entertainments which Elizabeth and James inherited from their Lancaster and Tudor forebears.
Hodgkinson's Last Years: At the Charleston Theatre, 1803–05
Authors: Harbin Billy J.
Published: July 2009

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.)
The Star System at Ben Webster's Haymarket
Authors: Nichols Harold J.
Published: July 2009

Ben Webster's management of the Haymarket Theatre from 1837 to 1853 was one of the longest and most successful theatrical ventures of the mid-nineteenth century. As one contemporary journalist put it, “the mere fact of a management lasting nearly sixteen years is in itself remarkable. At Drury Lane a management of as many months would approach the miraculous.” In addition to mere length, Webster's tenure was notable for the production of original plays, with 212 premièring under his management. These included such works, well-known in their time, as Tom Taylor and Charles Reade's Masks and Faces, Douglas Jerrold's Time Works Wonders, Westland Marston's Strathmore, and Bulwer-Lytton's Money. In fact, Webster's willingness to produce full-length original tragedies and comedies led the Theatrical Journal to label him one of the “few that have of late years laboured to uphold the legitimate drama.” Although Webster's management is remembered primarily for these original plays produced by a strong, balanced company, even a cursory examination of his managerial policies shows that he was plagued by that bane of all mid-nineteenth-century managers, the star system. In fact, his ability to cope with the system and eventually to master it was undoubtedly a major reason for his success, since Webster was then able to devote his energies to the original plays that brought him managerial fame. The purpose of this essay is to trace Webster's struggle with and mastery of starring actors.
Inigo Jones and the Use of Scenery at the Cockpit-In-Court
Authors: Star Leonie
Published: July 2009

One aspect of Inigo Jones's work that has received little attention is his dual approach to staging at the Stuart court. The growing popularity of the masque and the important part Jones played in directing and moulding the form are well known. The Caroline masque in particular was a glittering and prestigious vehicle for Jones's experimentation with scenery and scenic devices, and one which displayed his creativity to the best possible advantage. With the emergence of recent works such as Orgel and Strong's Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, which concentrates almost wholly on the masque, it could be assumed that after Charles I ascended the throne in 1625, all of Jones's theatrical energies were directed towards scenic displays and his gradual approach towards fully perspective scenery.
The Development of Theatre on the American Frontier, 1750–1890
Authors: McDermott Douglas
Published: July 2009

The Garden of Eden is the first frontier of which we have record, and every subsequent new geographic region has been invested with the same sense of mystery and promise as the first one. Nowhere has this been more true than in America. From the time of its discovery it has been a promised land for those residing elsewhere, and after the initial settlement of the eastern seaboard its western territory continued to beckon. So strong and continuous was the appeal of the frontier that in 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner could assert: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.”
The Staging of the Mystère D'Adam
Authors: McConachie Bruce A.
Published: July 2009

In his recent overview of the staging of medieval religious drama, A. M. Nagler concludes his commentary on the twelfth-century Adam play with a statement made by Karl Grass in 1928: “As far as the question of structure of the stage is concerned, the stage directions leave us in the lurch. … A reconstruction of the stage, as it was intended for the play, is scarcely possible on the basis of these particulars.” Since the 1920s, when scholars such as Grass, Paul Studer, and Gustave Cohen examined the possible staging of the Anglo-Norman drama, attention has remained almost exclusively on the didascalia, the Latin stage directions interspersed throughout the text. Despite the more recent work of Grace Frank, Michel Mathieu, Uda Ebel, and Wolfgang Greisenegger, Grass's comment about the stage directions leaving us in the lurch is still true. There are other sources of evidence, however, which have been used insufficiently or not at all in reconstructing the staging of the Mystère d'Adam. Not all clues in the dialogue having to do with the position or movement of actors have been examined by theatre historians.
The First Quarter Century of ASTR
Authors: Marshall Thomas F.
Published: July 2009

In every theatre historian there lurks the shadow of the amateur. For the commitment always begins with a sharing of the theatre-goer's delight in seeing the curtain rise, and a strong sense of being in the presence of history in the making. To record this moment is the instinct of the enthusiast; to recapture it from the past is the function of the historian.
Valenciennes and Banqueting Hall: Theatre Research in Three and Four Dimensions
Authors: Sarlós Robert K.
Published: July 2009

In a recent essay I argued for broader acceptance of two methods for understanding “past styles of performance”—the building of three dimensional models and the staging of four dimensional performance reconstructions. These alternatives to the traditional narrative essay make greater use of theatrical imagination, and aim at raising new kinds of questions rather than answering the old kind. However, lack of appropriate apparatus has prevented widespread use of these forms. Since performances are by nature “short-lived phenomena” and can be recorded but fragmentarily, unique methods are required for their study. Theoretical reconstructions cannot approximate the physical and psychological ambience of a respectable performance essay. On the other hand, performance reconstructions do not allow for scholarly caveat during presentation, or for lacunae where knowledge is lacking. Therefore I see the promise of a rich harvest in two-way stimulation between theoretical and performance essays. A pair of reports, based on personal involvement in the types of projects I advocate, follows.
Texting the Fugitive Performance
Authors: Taylor Thomas J.
Published: July 2009

Theatre historians have always lamented the scarcity of documentary material with which to recreate the theatrical milieu that by definition lives in time and perishes. What we know of yesterday's stage art comes down to us in fragments, pieced together with the skills of the detective, virtually never whole, never complete. If only, we ask, if only theatre persons had the foresight to leave behind some coherent record of the marvels of their time, some busy notebooks, some hard facts, some interpretations, some organized recapitulation of the events themselves.