For about 130 years in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, spectators sat on the stage in Paris public theatres. In Molière's theatre only 32 spectators were permitted on stage. However, by the mideighteenth century, before the practice was discontinued, there were often more than 200 persons behind the curtain of the Comedie Française, sitting on benches or standing around at the back of the stage. This contingent of spectators was exclusively male – a collection of foppish petty nobility who found the stage an excellent vantage point from which to ogle and be ogled.

The Karaghiozis performance – a shadow puppet form introduced to Greece by the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries by its Ottoman conquerors – became hellenized over the century following Greece's liberation from the Turks in 1821 to develop into a form significantly different from its prototype in its plots, stock characters, structure, and themes. A performance which attracted widely-ranging popular support, Karaghiozis took on until recently greater importance than live theatre in Greece both as a cultural reflection and as a viable dramatic medium. Traditionally, the performance opens with a prologue which functions very much like a curtain-raiser. The Greek prologue differs from that of its Turkish forerunner in which the hunchback fool hero's cohort, Haciavad, recites a poem, sings a song, and offers prayers. In the Greek performance, a modern prologue typically includes some combination of the following scenes: Karaghiozis' opening dance, his marching and quizzing of his sons, a quarrel between the rustic Barba George and the palace guard Veligekas, an announcement by Karaghiozis and his sons of the evening's performance, and an extended stock scene of some type (the supposed death and resurrection of Karaghiozis, for example).

In these notes I shall deal with the origin of the Drama for Fools – a drama for marionettes by E. G. Craig. That is, I intend to approach the drama along the thread that Craig himself must have followed from his initial liking for marionettes up to his writing of playlets for them. Naturally by thread I mean Craig's artistic experience in the development of its events. I have been stimulated to proceed along this line by practical and theoretical problems. Practical because I have been able to examine many unpublished papers which, however, still require a long period of study; for this reason the present notes must be considered preliminary conclusions. Theoretical because I believe that for a full understanding of the Drama it is essential to examine the contribution of the marionette ‘Toward a New Theatre’, Craig's outstanding project elaborated between 1900–10. It can be said without a shadow of doubt that the marionette is the source from which the characters of the ‘New Theatre’ have drawn inspiration: it has characterized the human element in the scene, it is the prototype of what he chose to call the übermarionette, that new figure created by Craig and integrated into his scenic machine. It dictates his style to the actor-artist. This leads me to the conclusion that the Drama begun in 1914 was nothing but the continuation of the ‘New Theatre’ with other means and in another period.

Recent productions of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, especially those by Patrice Chereau at Bayreuth and Peter Stein at the Paris Opera, have caused the greatest hue and cry from audiences since Wieland Wagner first presented his controversial interpretations of his grandfather's works. Once again, the distressing knee-jerk reaction from many critics has been to admonish today's directors and scenic designers to ‘go back to Wagner's original intentions’ and restore the illusionism prescribed in his stage directions. The debate over the proper performance of Wagner's works is tied to the larger and inherently unresolvable question concerning the proper domain of theatrical interpretation. It is very appropriate for one of the most heated arguments on this subject to center around Wagner because his music dramas were the springboard of the modern scenographic revolution, and there has been a tendency to brand Wagner as one of the prime movers behind twentieth century theatrical abuse. At the end of the last century a Swiss Wagnerite named Adolphe Appia changed the art of scenic interpretation through his stagings of The Ring and Tristan und Isolde. As every student of theatre history knows, Appia's designs and writings published in his book Die Musik und die Inscenierung (1899) form the basis of modern scenography. What most people fail to recognize, however, is that Appia's book is an immensely valuable study of Wagner. His ideas for staging The Ring influenced the most important Wagner interpreters of the twentieth century, and his analysis of the ‘profound significance’ of the music dramas anticipated most of literary studies about Wagner published in recent years.