The presence of Italian professional actors has, for the second half of the sixteenth century, been signalized in Bavaria, at the Emperor's court in Vienna and at the court of the French kings, in England and elsewhere, but it has not yet been shown that the comedians also included the Low Countries in their wanderings. It is therefore interesting to find that an identifiable troupe visited Antwerp in the year 1576. This year was a particularly critical and turbulent one in the protracted struggle of the Netherlands against Spanish domination, for it was, among other things, marked by the outrages of the Spanish Fury, which started in the week beginning Sunday, 4 November. The period of the Spanish Fury, soon to be followed by the negotiations of the Pacification of Ghent, constituted the apogee of the leadership of William of Orange. It was in the tense months preceding the sack of Antwerp that Italian actors were performing their plays in the city. By a happy chance the records of their presence, now preserved in the Municipal Archives in Antwerp, have survived because the city authorities had to make sure that the players were not disbanded or mutinous soldiers and so a certain number of Italian merchants residing in the city were asked to stand surety for them. This appears from the so-called Certificatieboeken; that is, books in which statements were entered to ‘certify’ formally that certain people fulfilled temporarily enforced legal requirements. Thus the Certificatieboeken bearing the numbers 36 and 39 contain the following entries relevant to Italian actors.

It is without any doubt that the theatre historian in Britain is greatly indebted to visitors from other lands, for evidence found in their letters, diaries and sketches has informed us of theatre architecture, plays and performances of which our own countrymen, neglecting to record what for them was a commonplace, made no mention. Now it is possible to reciprocate with material to be found in the sketch-book diary of Sir James Thornhill concerning the Hôtel de Bourgogne. The purpose of this article is to examine two sketches in that diary by Thornhill and consider them in the light of data already collected concerning that theatre.

The changes in social composition and cultural taste that came over theatre audiences in the late eighteenth century and in the first decades of the nineteenth century had a profound effect upon their attitude to, and consequently the production of, Shakespeare. The social mix of the London playhouse remained relatively unchanged through much of the eighteenth century. Within a fairly small auditorium the aristocratic and upper middle-class gentility of the boxes and the bourgeois respectability of the pit effectively dictated a style of drama and performance that most appealed to the tastes of this, the most dominant audience group. Combined with the limitations imposed upon the techniques of production by an adequate but undeveloped technology and the social stability provided by the slow pace of political and industrial evolution, the early and mid-Georgian theatre (including Shakespeare) preserved a remarkably uniform structure and dramatic viewpoint over a long period.

In a previous article I examined Terence Gray's contribution to the development of theatre architecture and design in England. I argued that Gray's work was not so much an innovation in theatre practice but rather an attempt to bring into the English theatre the production methods that were being developed in Europe. Ideas and techniques were borrowed from Craig and Appia, Meyerhold in Russia, Jessner in Germany, Gaston Baty in France and Norman Bel Geddes in the United States and introduced into the English theatre which had remained isolated since the end of the First World War. Many of Gray's ideas were indeed second hand, but the freshness and exuberance of his work startled the English theatrical scene of the thirties and are still relevant to the theatre of today. One only has to compare the designs of the new National Theatre with Gray's plans for a Festival Theatre at the National Sporting Club, King Street, to see the influence of his work.

In writing El gesticulador, which marks the opening of the modern theatre in Mexico where it was first performed in 1947, Rodolfo Usigli (b. 1905) faced a number of problems, so that the play's technique represents a compromise between conflicting aims. The predominant aspect of the work is the expression of political protest and criticism; the plot hinges on the election of a new governor for a northern Mexican state. But Usigli described the drama in the year it was performed as the first serious attempt at tragedy in the modern Mexican theatre.

Unfortunately for the development and history of the modern German theater, the several attempts at collaboration between Edward Gordon Craig and Hugo von Hofmannsthal from 1903 to 1910 were fraught with frustration, intrigue, and misunderstandings which resulted in disappointment and failure despite constant efforts by Count Harry Kessler to mediate between them and promote a viable working relationship.