1. I have adopted the temporal boundaries for Restoration drama generally assumed by early twentieth-century reviewers and frequently advocated by late twentieth-century scholars. See, for example, Hume, Robert D., The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 3–10Google Scholar.

2. Avery, Emmett L., Congreve's Plays on the Eighteenth-Century Stage (New York: MLA, 1951), 163–165Google Scholar.

3. The Monthly Mirror 13 (03 1802): 202Google Scholar in Congreve, William: The Critical Heritage, eds. Lindsey, Alexander and Erskine-Hill, Howard (London: Routledge, 1989), 300Google Scholar.

4. I use the following abbreviations for magazines: SR = Saturday Review, NA = New Age, SP = Spectator, N&A = Nation and Athenaeum, G = Graphic. The abbreviations for newspapers are T = Times, ST = Sunday Times, DT = Daily Telegraph, MP = Morning Post, DN = Daily News, DC = Daily Chronicle, PM = Pall Mall Gazette, O = Observer, MG = Manchester Guardian, E = Era. Many newspaper reviews of Restoration revivals between 1900–1930 were unsigned, particularly those which appeared in the Daily Telegraph, the Morning Post, the Pall Mall Gazette, and the Era. Many of the Daily Telegraph reviews were probably written by W. A. Darlington, who began writing for that paper in 1920. However, in the absence of a byline, I am reluctant to use his or any other theater critic's name.

5. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communties: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 16Google Scholar.

6. See Nicoll, Allardyce, English Drama 1900–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 78–89Google Scholar.

7. From the Stage Society's Twentieth Annual Report, quoted in Miller, Anna Irene, The Independent Theatre in Europe (New York: Ray Long & Richard R. Smith, 1931), 183Google Scholar.

8. Pamphlet, Theatre Museum collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum.

9. I have found one other semi-private revival of a Restoration comedy in this period: the Art Theatre's production of The Beaux' Stratagem in 1919. Because the play was greatly abridged and the Russian ballet-influenced, futuristic production had no stylistic impact on subsequent Restoration revivals, I have not included a discussion of it here. For descriptions of this anomalous revival see, for example, ST 2/9/19, O 2/9/19, and DT 2/5/19.

10. For a discussion of the Restoration plays rediscovered and canonized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Corman's, Brian, “What is the Canon of English Drama, 1600–1737?” ECS 26, no. 2 (Winter 1992–1993): 307–320.Google Scholar There is, of course, considerable overlap in the early twentieth century between the canonized texts and those that were performed.

11. Nigel Playfair claimed that limited funds prevented the Mermaid players from devoting adequate time to rehearsals or attention to the mise en scène. See Hammersmith Hoy: a Book of Minor Revelations (London: Faber & Faber, 1930), 170.Google Scholar But some contemporary reviewers thought the productions were well or at least “well-enough” mounted. See, for example, PM 4/19/04 and E 12/3/04.

12. Summers, Montague, The Restoration Theatre (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1934), 324Google Scholar.

13. DC 11/29/04. N&A 11/21/25 indicates that the script of The Plain Dealer used by the Renaissance Theatre was cut too, but I do not know how much, if any, of this editing suppressed risqué material.

14. Summers, The Restoration Theatre, 325. Summers notes that Edmund Gosse lent him the first quarto of The Double Dealer for the Stage's production of that play. Programs for subsequent productions of Restoration comedies given by the Stage and Phoenix indicate that he had access to other first quartos, most likely also borrowed from Gosse.

15. See Lowenthal, David, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar and Taylor, Gary, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 269Google Scholar.

16. See Styan's, J. L. summary in Restoration Comedy in Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 43–45Google Scholar.

17. See Powell, Jocelyn, Restoration Theatre Production (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 87–105Google Scholar.

18. Marshall, Norman, The Other Theater (London: John Lehmann, 1947), 77.Google Scholar Cf. Powell, 100–103.

19. Marshall, 77.

20. Phoenix Society Box, Theatre Company Files, Theatre Museum collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum.

21. Child, Harold, “Revivals of English Dramatic Works, 1919–1925,” Review of English Studies 2:6 (1926): 179Google Scholar.

22. It was, however, consistent with the practices of other early twentieth-century experimenters. In their Shakespeare productions, both William Poel and Harley Granville-Barker used early editions and refused to cut or alter them. They, too, did this as part of an effort to be faithful to the theatrical conventions current when the plays were first performed. See Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare, 267–269, 274–75.

23. Marshall, 77. To be sure, the societies' revivals offered the visual interest of extravagant seventeenth-century dress and the aural appeal of period songs and orchestral music, generally Henry Purcell's. But such attractions paled beside the spectacular effects then popular in West End and suburban theaters. Until World War I melodramas feasted spectators on Alpine avalanches, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, sinking yachts, chariot races, and train wrecks. Musical revues such as Chu Chin Chow were another banquet for the senses. That entertainment, whose run from 1916 to 1921 broke all records, offered non-stop music and dancing, “clouds of delicious incense…two real donkeys, several goats, some sheep, and at least one camel.” Gielgud, John, Backward Glances (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1989), 109–110Google Scholar.

24. See, for example, E 12/3/04.

25. The Galanty Show: An Autobiography of Montague Summers, ed. Sewell, Brocard (London: Cecil Woolf, 1980), 124Google Scholar.

26. Summers, , ed., The Rehearsal, by Villiers, George, Duke of Buckingham (Stratford-Upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1914), xxvGoogle Scholar.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid.

29. Summers, ed., The Rehearsal, xxiv.

30. Dodd, , “Englishness and the National Culture,” in Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920, eds. Colls, Robert and Dodd, Philip (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 6.Google Scholar See, in general, 4–7.

31. See de Jongh, Nicholas, Not in Front of the Audience: Homosexuality on Stage (London: Routledge, 1992), 1–9.Google Scholar This rhetorical strategy may have been a mask for Summers's own homosexuality as well. In general, he referred admiringly to physical passion in the Restoration but not when it was expressed between men. In the introduction to his multivolume edition of Aphra Behn's writings, for example, he notes Behn's intimacy with John Hoyle without moral editorializing but says about Hoyle's sexual relations with men: “Unfortunately Hoyle was reported to be addicted to the grossest immorality, and rumours of a sinister description were current concerning him.” See Summers, , ed., The Works of Aphra Behn (1915; rpt. New York: Phaeton Press, 1967), I: xxxiv–xxxvGoogle Scholar.

32. Summers, ed., The Rehearsal, xxiv.

33. Summers, ed., The Rehearsal, xxiv–xxv.

34. Jerome, Joseph [Sewell, Brocard], Montague Summers: A Memoir (London: Cecil and Amelia Woolf, 1965), 4–8.Google Scholar For definitions of Decadents and Aesthetes, see Beckson, Karl, London in the 1890s: a Cultural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 32–70Google Scholar and Beckson, , ed., Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890's: an Anthology of British Poetry and Prose (New York: Vintage, 1966), xvii–xlGoogle Scholar.

35. Jerome, 5.

36. Beckson, London in the 1890s, 49–50.

37. See Jerome's inconclusive investigation of whether he was ever admitted to the priesthood, 11–23.

38. Jerome, 26.

39. So did many society members, including two of the Phoenix Society's most well-known supporters George Moore and Lady Cunard. For an account of Decadence in the 1920s, see Green, Martin, Children of the Sun: a Narrative of “Decadence” in England After 1918 (New York: Basic Books, 1976)Google Scholar.

40. Wilde's plays provided a frame for appreciating the Restoration revivals. And in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literary and theatrical criticism about Wilde's plays, Congreve in particular was periodically invoked as one of his important forbearers.

41. See also, for example, O 1/19/19 and T 11/17/25.

42. Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Nice, Richard (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1984), 28–32Google Scholar.

43. Marshall, 76. See also T 1/31/22.

44. Reviewers also sometimes focussed on how “authentic” certain features of a production had been. This concern had the same distancing effect because it involved situating theatrical conventions in historical context.

45. See Bourdieu, 44–50.

46. Summers, ed., The Rehearsal, xxv.

47. Pamphlet, Theatre Museum collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum.

48. Bourdieu has a useful description of this “engaged” style of consumption. See 32–34.

49. Shakespeare was similarly cast at this time as an intellectual who wrote “for an educated and powerful cultural elite” in his time and in the early twentieth century. See Taylor, 250.

50. See, for example, Ward, A.C., A History of English Dramatic Literature, Vol. 3, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1899), 297–300Google Scholar and the review of the Drury Lane production of Love for Love in T 11/21/1842.

51. For contemporary beliefs in the beneficial national role of various cultural institutions, see, for example, Doyle, Brian, English and Englishness (London: Routledge, 1989), 1–67Google Scholar; and Whitworth, Geoffrey, The Making of a National Theatre (London: Faber and Faber, 1951)Google Scholar.

52. Kruger, , The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 85–87Google Scholar.

53. Quoted in Whitworth, 155.

54. Marshall, 76.

55. Nicoll, 88–89.

56. Brown is a reliable witness. But cf. E 2/20/24.

57. Wade, , Memories of the London Theatre 1900–1914, ed. Andrews, Alan (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1983), 41Google Scholar.

58. “English” was the word that he and other cultural nationalists at this time used. Yet Playfair was a Scotsman who, according to his son Giles, liked to peruse a privately published tome, Notes on the Scottish Family of Playfair. He also frequently vacationed in Scotland at his father's birthplace, St. Andrews. Giles Playfair noted that “when in the days of his fame, a St. Andrews local newspaper referred to him as ‘an English visitor’ he was deeply offended.” See My Father's Son (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1937), 11Google Scholar.

59. See, for example, Story of the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith (1925; rpt. New York: B. Blom, 1969), 126, 159–175Google Scholar.

60. Story of the Lyric, xxv.

61. Story of the Lyric, xxvi.

62. Story of the Lyric, 5–6; Hammersmith Hoy, 244.

63. Hammersmith Hoy, 243.

64. Hammersmith Hoy, 228.

65. Gielgud, John, Stage Directions (1963; rpt. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1992), 62Google Scholar.

66. I found the review by “Carados” [H. Chance Newton] in the Harvard Theatre Collection file on The Way of the World; it was dated 2/10/24. The name of the newspaper was not on the clipping, although “Carados” generally wrote for The Referee.

67. Program, Theatre Museum collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum.

68. Marshall, 36.

69. See also Marshall, 40.

70. Marshall, 37. The word “bite” actually belongs to J.L. Styan, who has sided with early twentieth-century critics of Playfair's work. See Restoration Comedy in Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 39Google Scholar.

71. Marshall, 37. See also the review quoted in Hammersmith Hoy, 287–288.

72. Macaulay, , “Comic Dramatists of the Restoration,” The Edinburgh Review 72 (1841): 490Google Scholar.