Actors used the hands much more in the eighteenth century than is customary today. In this part we present general rules which were designed to ensure that the hands were used both elegantly and expressively. Later sections will deal with the use of the hands to externalize a particular passion being represented, such as fear, love and so on.

Falstaff is first pictured in the frontispiece engraving by an unknown artist for The Wits or Sport Upon Sport (Plate I), a collection of drolls and playlets adapted from earlier plays, originally published in two parts: part one by Henry Marsh in 1662 (with a second edition published by Francis Kirkman in 1672) and part two by Francis Kirkman in 1673. The engraving appears in both editions of part one and shows a rectangular stage lit by candelabra and footlights in front of a curtain hung from a gallery with a curtained window above. On stage are seven characters from six different pre-Restoration plays. In the lower left are ‘Sr. I. Falstafe’ and ‘Hostes’ from the first playlet in the collection, The Bouncing Knight or the Robbers Robbed, an adaptation of scenes from Henry the Fourth, Part One: II.iv, III.iii, IV.ii. V.i. and iv.

Soon after breakfast-time on the morning of 1 September 1910 ‘suburban ladies with their camp stools, sandwiches, and crochet work took up position outside the pit and gallery doors’ at His Majesty's Theatre in London's Haymarket; later they were joined by messenger boys reserving places for more affluent enthusiasts, and by the time the doors opened at 6.15 p.m. the queue had swelled to the extent that only half could be admitted. Amongst the more privileged members of the audience which thronged the theatre that Thursday evening were to be seen Prince Francis of Teck, the Ranee of Sarawak and Sir Arthur and Lady Conan Doyle, a notable turn-out at a time of year when, according to Vanity Fair, ‘London is supposed to be deserted by that fraction of the population whose absence or presence causes it to be designated as empty or full’. Such intense anticipation is rarely generated by a theatrical event, yet throughout that summer the press had dutifully recorded the latest developments in what was to prove to be Herbert Beerbohm Tree's most lavish Shakespearian production King Henry VIII. Whilst the press and public eagerly awaited the latest Bardic offering (his fourteenth) from the foremost actor-manager of the day, his theatre, from his office in the dome downwards, was a bustle of activity involving actors, designers, costumiers, and all the other participants in a great theatrical enterprise. Tree's own grasp on the mechanics and economics of theatre production was legendarily vague, but, fortunately for him and indeed for us, those matters were handled and meticulously recorded by his manager Henry Dana, and it is through Dana's account books, now in the Tree Archive in the Theatre Collection at the University of Bristol, that the financial framework, on which was to be placed the sumptuous spectacle of Henry VIII, can be found.

In an essay on ‘Collective creation,’ Theodore Shank observed that emphasis on the ‘cooperation of a creative collective,’ sometimes in combination with group living, is a response to ‘the fragmentation of established society,’ and as such, an essential distinguishing characteristic of the ‘alternative’ or ‘new’ theatre. Social fragmentation and individual alienation from society are not, of course, products exclusively of the nine-teen-sixties; the idea that individual survival is possible only within a group structure has emerged in previous generations that have felt threatened by a cult of individualism—a salient characteristic of Western civilization that has been carried ad absurdum in the United States.

A relatively unknown period of Jacques Prévert's career, from 1932 to 1936, constitutes, as is now becoming apparent, more than a footnote in twentieth-century literary history: it marks the existence of the most successful French workers theatre company to be spawned by the agitprop movement. Born on Russian soil after the Revolution, the agitation-and-propaganda skit genre that brought news to soldiers on the front during the civil war there later traveled east to Germany, where leftist forces made political use of it until the Nazis, its primary target (along with police repression, the Church, the military and capitalism in general), banned it in the early thirties. By that time, however, the agitprop movement had firmly taken root in England and America as well as in France, where La Scène Ouvrière, the organ of the Fédération du Théâtre Ouvrier de France (FTOF), could boast of coordinating hundreds of amateur theatre troupes with a left-wing vocation. Every Parisian arrondissement, as did the majority of French provincial cities, came forth with a Phalange or a Porte-voix rouge or a Blouse bleue company composed of workers and, in most cases, middle-class amateurs, with an occasional theatre professional contributing his or her know-how to the productions. One such group, Prémices, the basic tendency of which was toward rather polished, dramatic work, underwent a scission in 1932 that resulted in the formation of a new, more militantly leftist company which came to be known as the Groupe Octobre, in commemoration of the Russian Revolution. Paul Vaillant-Couturier, the Communist leader and editor of the Party's daily, L'Humanité, was responsible for suggesting to the young troupe Jacques Prévert – ‘un gars très marrant qui a l'air très bien’ – as a potential source of material.