“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 of Coriolanus as 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.”

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.

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.”

In his history of the Crimean War Henry Tyrrell describes the victory celebration held in Green Park, London in 1856. The celebration began with a burst of color in the night sky. Then “for two hours, followed every conceivable design of elegant and dazzling pyrotechnic art. Flights of rockets, a hundred at a time; revolving wheels, suns, stars, golden streamers, and fiery serpents chas[ed] each other through the air.… The triumph, however, of the entertainment was reserved for the close of it.…” A stationary piece blazing and revolving fantastically, “exhibited the words ‘God save the Queen. … ‘”

The early twentieth century found American suffragists experimenting with a diverse array of techniques to argue their cause. Among those who gave their talents to this effort was a skilled theatrical professional, Hazel MacKaye (1888–1944). A radical suffragist, MacKaye was a charter member of the Congressional Union, which in 1914 formally split off from the National American Woman Suffrage Association and evolved into the militant wing of the suffrage movement, the National Woman's Party. Hazel MacKaye created four women's rights pageants to propagandize for the suffragists between the years 1913 and 1923, which this paper will describe and examine.

On Monday, October 16, 1758., Hugh Gaine reported a novelty. “Friday last,” he told his readers in the New-York Mercury, “arrived here from the West Indies, a Company of Comedians; some Part of which were here in the Year 1753.” This brief notice, which went on to assure its readers that the company had “an ample Certificate of their Private as well as publick Qualifications,” marks the beginning of the most significant event in American theatre history: the establishment of the professional theatre on this continent. The achievements of the Company of Comedians during its sixteen-year residence in North America are virtually without parallel in the history of the theatre, and have not received sufficient recognition by historians and scholars.

Among the pioneer artists who sought with uneven luck to bring some reflection of European culture to the crude seaports and market towns of the American eastern seaboard in the eighteenth century, none had such lasting importance as the Hallam family, the founders of the first permanent and stable theatrical company in North America.

The fact that live performance is unrepeatable is both its greatest attribute and a constant worry to theatre historians. How is it possible to study an art form that is fleeting, short-lived, ephemeral? Nowhere is the challenge more acute than with Carnival, a popular art form that comes from the grassroots and is acknowledged as an art of resistance. Initiated by newly emancipated Africans in British colonies in 1834, Caribbean-derived Carnival struggled against endless confrontations with governmental authorities for its survival. In 1962, when Trinidad and Tobago achieved independence from Britain, the country's first prime minister, Eric Eustace Williams, recognized Carnival as the national art form. Despite this recognition, Carnival artists continue to struggle because of lack of funding, misrepresentation in the press, and lack of appropriate credit for their role as artists. So it is particularly gratifying to find the National Library of Trinidad and Tobago leading the way by making the work of Carnival artists available digitally on its Web site. This essay examines this new online resource and considers issues related to studying and researching Carnival.

Editor's Note: Under Mike Sell's excellent editorship, the Critical Stages column in Theatre Survey was developed as a venue for representing current issues for subdisciplinary divisions within the broader field of theatre and performance studies. As the new editor for the column, I hope to build upon Sell's previous editorial work by shifting the form of these short essays in two ways: first, by spotlighting concerns that reach both inside the many corners of our field and outside into a range of broader “publics”; and second, by engaging multiple scholars and artists in “conversations” in order to provide plural perspectives on these concerns. For this first column of my editorship, Eng-Beng Lim, Lisa Duggan, and José Esteban Muñoz track several micro- and macromaneuverings of neoliberalism—from the classroom to the department to the “global university”—and consider how theatre and performance scholars might approach the political difficulties currently threatening the mission of higher education.

The curtain rose at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh, on 14 August 2011 to reveal a richly textured production of The Tempest on a bare stage with minimal props. As the lights came up, a group of white-robed sailors were caught in a meticulously choreographed storm, dancing to the mesmerizing beats of the master drummer upstage. The performers’ costumes echoed traditional Korean hanbok attire and their acting style incorporated t'alch'um mask-dance drama techniques. Their long white sleeves flapped and swayed in sync with their movements. Engulfed in stagewide sapphire and then crimson lighting, their sleeves were transformed from symbols of violent wind and waves to raging fire on board a ship approaching a world where, as Gonzalo aptly summarized, “no man was his own” (5.1.211). With Prospero (King Zilzi) as the drummer upstage and Ariel dancing in the midst of the unfortunate sailors, the storm scene—one of the longest renditions of the “direful spectacle” (1.2.26) in the performance history of The Tempest—served as an anchor to the tragicomic narrative about the self and the other. For a fleeting moment, Prospero gave the impression of being a drillmaster at the helm.

One of the basic facts of eighteenth-century London theatre history is the disinclination of the managers of the patent theatres to engage in serious competition of any sort following the Licensing Act of 1737. This preference for peaceful coexistence was not, in fact, a new development: a strong inclination toward a modus vivendi can be proven as early as 1720. The evidence is a pair of almost entirely neglected manuscript charters (contracts) preserved in the British Library. In both instances we find the managers of the two theatres attempting to restrict actor transfers. The first contract (dating from September 1720) was apparently never formally concluded, but the second (dated April 1722) was duly signed and sealed, and evidently remained in effect until about 1730. Taken together, the two charters shed considerable light on the accommodation eventually reached between the two companies after the reestablishment of competition in 1714, and they also give us lists of performers in 1720 and 1722 that add significantly to the company rosters in The London Stage.

It is ironic that the works of Antonin Artaud, who called for the rejuvenation of theatre as such, come to us today not on their own, but through an unusually dense filter: a peculiarly persistent critical/theoretical apparatus doubles his own writings and practice. Artaud's work has occupied a cultish space in both French and English criticism for several decades. Each major trend in Artaud scholarship has reinforced the image of Artaud as a brilliant/mad theoretician and inspirational writer but a failed theatre practitioner—worse, one doomed to failure. The French school of criticism has plumbed the depths of the paradoxes of Artaud's oeuvre, examining the impossibility of reconciling the inadequacy of expression with the need to express. Derrida has argued that Artaud's projects, by their nature, by his nature, cannot succeed: They betray him the moment they begin to be articulated; they cannot stand upright the minute they leave his body. Much French criticism takes Artaud's madness and uses it as a touchstone for discussion of his legacy. The French Artaud begins at the asylum in Rodez.

As the most critically lauded dramatist of her time, Joanna Baillie recently has received considerable attention from critics interested in arguing that our neglect of Romantic drama has arisen from “conventional and mistaken assumptions about its strategies and principles.” In a recent issue of Wordsworth Circle devoted exclusively to Romantic drama, Baillie figures in three of its seven articles as a central dramatist of the period, while Jeffrey Cox devotes an entire section of his introduction in Seven Gothic Dramas 1789—1825 (1992) to her work. Even more recently, she has been the subject of special sessions of recent Modern Language Association meetings, and an edition of her Selected Works is scheduled to be published by Pickering and Chatto Press in 1998.

The Corpus Christi celebrations of medieval York provide a good opportunity for studying how symbolic power structures social relations, and how institutions reproduce their legitimacy at a time when the procession as well as the presentation of the pageant wagons were rigorously supervised by the city council. The elaborate procession of torches honoring the sacrament, a little discussed aspect of these celebrations, is particularly useful for such a study, because the records of the guilds provide surprising indications of the extent to which the supposedly solemn procession honoring the sacrament was characterized by disruption. These documents contradict those historians who normally treat both the procession and the pageants as representations staged in civic space that mirrored a united civic body. The negotiations surrounding the Skinner's participation in the Corpus Christi ceremonies of 1419 and the conflict of civic, religious, and royal authority in determining the position of the Cordwainers in the celebrations of 1490 provide traces of a different history—a history of a representation of social distinctions rather than a representation of undifferentiated community. This is a history of struggle between groups with different interests, engaging in symbolic struggle to maintain or alter the social distinctions embodied in the form of the procession.

The year 1714 has long been acknowledged as the publication date of America's earliest extant play, Androboros, a short and bawdy political farce by Col. Robert Hunter, governor of the New York colony from 1710 to 1719. Some scholars even go so far as to cite August 1, 1714 as the exact date, and not without good reason. The title page of the only known copy, now in the Huntington Library, clearly states: “Printed at Monoropolis since 1st August, 1714.” Such evidence would appear to be conclusive were it not for two references within the playscript itself that prove Androboros was written and printed no earlier than 1715.

This essay explores the socioeconomic resonance of Italian professional theatre in the early modern period by considering a few records of performance by indigent entertainers, and by exploring the persistent theatrical and textual presence of poverty and hunger in texts both central and adjacent to the professional actors. Whether or not a given troupe or actor directly experienced or even cared about poverty, famine, destitution, or other social issues, by the time of the commedia's “golden age” these themes had by dint of theatrical tradition and performance sedimentation become part of the actors' repertoire, much more central to their performance tradition than they were in English and Spanish early modern theatres. Partly because of the medieval legacy of the itinerant mendicant orders in Italy, the commedia dell'arte inherited a culture in which poverty, begging, itinerancy, and a certain disposition to perform degradation were in the air, and this was absorbed into the grammar of their performance. Not only were tropes and gags of hunger and destitution continually deployed in the commedia, but some of the actors assumed, for their own rhetorical purposes, the histrionic pose of destitution. In other words, whatever their professional fortunes, they “played” poverty both onstage and in their offstage personae.

Political activism among actors has become common in twentieth-century America, from patriotic support for war bonds in the two world wars to antiwar declarations during the Vietnam era; from campaigning for presidential hopefuls to more recent environmental activism. We may forget, then, that actors, wary of social disapproval, traditionally had maintained a low political profile in America. The spread-eagle rhetoric of Edwin Forrest may have made his Democratic sympathies well known in antebellum America, but the subsequent actions of John Wilkes Booth only reinforced actors' belief that they were best served by political quietism.

The most magnificent of the Restoration playhouses, yet the one with the most lamentable history, was the Dorset Garden. Conceived by Sir William Davenant, the building was not erected until after his death. Though it was the most expensive and lavishly equipped of all the theatres built between 1660 and 1700, it fell into partial disuse eleven years after it opened and was demolished in 1709 after a life of only thirty-eight years.

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.

In 1996, R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols edited a remarkable volume of essays called Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, in which seventeen scholars pondered, through detailed philological analysis and imaginative cultural-studies approaches, the legacy of the Middle Ages and its relevance to modern times. “WORD'S OUT,” they began, “There's something exciting going on in medieval studies, and maybe in the Renaissance too. The study of medieval literature and culture has never been more alive or at a more interesting, innovative stage.” Bloch and Nichols understood, as few others, the pertinent critical stages of the interdiscipline of medieval studies. But, critically speaking, where was the stage? With the exception of Seth Lerer's terrific piece on Eric Auerbach's gender-biased editorial establishment of the text of the twelfth-century Play of Adam, theatre was nowhere to be found.