During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the orientation of buildings in ancient Greece received a great deal of scholarly attention; since that time, it has fallen from favour. In 1939, William Bell Dinsmoor made an ‘attempt to illustrate a method of obtaining more accurate information concerning the dates of Greek temples and certain details of religious practice through the application of an outmoded theory, that of “orientation”’. When this complex study, replete with trigonometric calculations of seasonal star positions met with little favour, orientation became a dead issue for several decades, only reviving in 1962 with the publication of Vincent Scully's The Earth, The Temple, and the Gods (New Haven: Yale University Press).

The commedia dell'arte is a type of improvised acting based around the masked stock characters of the merchant, lawyer and servant, whose earliest names were Magnifico, il Dottore and Zanni (Plate I). From 1571 onwards, it was spread throughout Europe by visiting troupes of professional Italian actors, whose members, activities and travels are, for the most part, well-documented. The way in which it reached Bavaria is less clear. Records, including three festival books, suggest that already as early as February 1568, when crown Prince Wilhelm married Princess Renée of Lorraine in Munich, the commedia dell'arte was an established and popular feature of Bavarian court festivities, to which it contributed in three contexts. Some of its costumes were used in masquerades; the Venetian Magnifico, or merchant, and his servant Zanni (the servant-master pair who became the central comic focus of the commedia dell'arte) appeared as masked clowns on several occasions, and on 8 March 1568 there was a full-length play whose description in Massimo Troiano's festival book is generally acknowledged as the earliest known comprehensive description of a complete commedia dell'arte performance.

For late eighteenth-century London theatres, lighting is the facet of production about which we have least information. In his authoritative Lighting in the Theatre, Gösta Bergman describes Garrick's reforms of the 1760s with reference to contemporary French practice and then speculates on what de Loutherbourg's advances in scene design imply about lighting. However, no detailed lighting accounts like those for the Comédie-Française have hitherto been known for any English theatre of this period. This gap can now be partly filled: a ‘Schedule’ attached to the answer in a 1787 Chancery lawsuit gives two seasons' worth of the daily accounts of Joseph Hayling, a tinman and purveyor of lamps, who provided light at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket from about 1768 to 1782. His schedule can be compared with contemporary French and English records to clarify our picture of lighting practices in London in the late eighteenth century.

The ‘notice préliminaire’ to L.-H. Lecomte's unfinished Histoire des théâtres de Paris includes a list of eighteen major fires occurring between 1789 and 1900, each of which resulted in the total destruction of a theatre. The date of each disaster is given, as also the date at which the theatre was rebuilt, either on the same site or in a new location. But beyond these brief particulars, Lecomte gives little information on the circumstances and none at all on the probable causes of each catastrophe and the precautions taken subsequently to avert a recurrence. It is the purpose of this paper to flesh out the bare bones of Lecomte's statistics, and to extend the picture to embrace similar disasters befalling provincial playhouses in France over the same period. There had of course been spectacular fires before the Revolution at Paris theatres, notably that which destroyed the opera house located in the Palais-Royal on 6 April 1763 (incidentally severely damaging the palace itself), although, since it occurred during the Easter break, the theatre was fortunately empty at the time. The Opera was eventually rehoused on the same site, but on 8 June 1781 the building once more went up in flames and was reduced to a pile of smouldering rubble. Again there were no victims among the spectators, since it was only when they had left after the evening's performance that the fire broke out; but many of the dancers were still changing into their outdoor clothes at the time and two of them failed to follow the example of the others and make their escape across the roof and down to the street. A total of a dozen or fifteen people perished as a result of this fire, including one elderly woman living in the Cour des Fontaines who died of shock at witnessing the fearsome spectacle.

My approach to textual analysis is that of a practising director and actor although I am usually fairly familiar with the main streams of commentary on a particular play or playwright. Thus, when preparing a production I do not often engage in exhaustive examination of the literature. Such reading can actually be harmful, since it may interfere with the direct and intimate contact with the material that can sometimes lead to a fresh insight or approach.