There have been few systematic studies in English of the signs of the theatre. I hope in this essay to indicate something of the range and interest of the topic. The focus of attention, clearly, will be the theatrical act of representation or performance rather than the dramatic text or script. The dramatic text has a life of its own, independent of all performances of it: on the one hand, as Gordon Craig, one of the great champions of the theatre over the text, recognized, it overflows all performances and is exhausted by none; on the other, any performance overflows the literary text that it purports to be a performance of, and is not reducible to it. A clear distinction must therefore be made between theatrical representation and literary text. As most theatrical performances are based on dramatic texts, however, some consideration of the nature of the relation between the two is desirable. Before broaching the subject of signs in the theatre directly, therefore, I propose to say a word or two about this question.

Among the additional manuscripts in the British Library is a nineteenth-century transcript of the diplomatic correspondence of the Florentine agents in London from 1616 to 1679/80. The agents – or Residents, as they were sometimes called – were during this period the Salvetti, father and son. Amerigo wrote the dispatches every week until his death in 1657, after which the task was undertaken by his son Giovanni, though there were at first a few letters also from Giovanni's brother, Amerigo the younger. As befitted people with Florentine connexions, both father and son were interested in the Court theatre, and among their voluminous accounts of the affairs of state there are frequent references to the staging of plays and masques, so frequent indeed that they constitute a useful supplement to the calendars of the period published by G. E. Bentley and W. Van Lennep. In this article I print for the first time translations of the dramatic references culled from the correspondence of 1660–9; passages from the letters of 1670–9 will appear in a later issue. The more methodical notes of Salvetti père on the Jacobean and Caroline Court stage will, I hope, be published elsewhere.

No translation can equal the original in all respects. Usually one is lucky if about three-quarters of the richness of a foreign masterpiece is communicated; only in very rare cases – such as Tieck's translations of Shakespeare into German and FitzGerald's rendering of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayam into English – does the translation become a work of art in its own right. But the odds against this happening are so long that a translator is forced to draw up a list of priorities before he starts work and to decide which particular aspects of the text in question he will strive to render most faithfully. In other words, he must make up his mind what particular function his translation will serve: the man who is providing an A-level ‘crib’ will then aim first and foremost at literal accuracy, the man who is concerned to render the niceties of philosophy may well put subtlety of definition before elegance of style – and so on. If I am to lay my own cards on the table, I confess that my primary aim in translating the plays of Goethe and Schiller has been to bring out their stageworthiness and the dramatic force of their language. I have done this for two main reasons: firstly, because it seemed to me that many existing translations of both poets obscured their theatrical qualities altogether, and secondly, because I am convinced that these theatrical qualities (conveyed in such things as speech rhythms, rhyme-schemes, use of rhetoric, use of assonance, etc.) are vital keys to the playwright's meaning.

If by successful is meant widely performed, the most successful playwright in the English theatre between T. W. Robertson in the 1860s and A. W. Pinero in the 1890s was a Frenchman, Victorien Sardou. This apparent paradox can be elucidated not only by the list of English adaptations of Sardou which concludes this survey, but by noting some of the leading English actors who appeared in Sardou. They include Irving (Madame Sons-Gêne, Robespierre, Dante); the Bancrofts (Nos Intimes, Dora, Les Bourgeois de Pont-Arçy, Odette, Fédora); the Kendals (Les Pattes de Mouche, Nos Intimes, Dora, Maison Neuve); Wyndham (Rabagas, La Papillonne); Hare (Les Pattes de Mouche, Dora, La Tosca); Tree (Fédora); Forbes-Robertson (Dora, Les Bourgeois de Pont-Arçy); Hawtrey (Divorçons!); Bourchier (Divorçons!); Du Maurier (Dora). The admission to the list of such leading ladies as Ellen Terry, Mrs Patrick Campbell, Modjeska, Elizabeth Robins, and Gladys Cooper would extend it further.

It is not, I think, a coincidence that the contemporary English stage, where so many of the new plays are so deeply concerned with problems of communication, is in some measure a translator's theatre, steadily giving us new translations – or ‘versions’, or ‘adaptations’ – of old classics. It is more than a coincidence when No Man's Land and a new English version of John Gabriel Borkman appear side by side in the National Theatre repertoire, as they did both at the Old Vic in 1975 and in the Lyttelton in 1976. For, as we follow the pattern of intimacy or (more often) mutual incomprehension traced by a Pinter dialogue, or as with Osborne we watch the English language come down, we are made forcibly aware that any verbal interchange involves each speaker in acts of translation. Or, as George Steiner puts it in a book which also appeared in 1975, ‘whether inside or between languages, human communication equals translation’. There is of course a sense in which any director of any play is a translator who, by the time the play is put before an audience, has searched for and found a theatrical language – verbal and non-verbal – to convey to the audience his vision of the play. But it is remarkable how often, recently, directors have themselves turned translators in the more orthodox sense, driven back to the original by a sense of the importance of the text.

Few people deny the intimate inter-relationship in new China of culture on the one hand, and the stage of the revolution on the other. Yet I do not think it has always been made clear why it is theatre that has been the main art for expressing that relationship.