Late in the afternoon of 24 September 1812, Joseph Fay, a New York lawyer, was summoned to a well-known New York tavern called Mechanics' Hall to write the will of the actor George Frederick Cooke. In a letter to John Howard Payne written immediately after the event, Fay reflected on his unexpected experience.

Although the Spanish Inquisition ceased to function formally in 1834, the spirit that made this institution a metaphor for oppression continues to exist, even if in less dramatic fashion. In the broad sense, “inquisition” may mean any strict or arbitrary suppression of persons and ideas considered unorthodox—and consequently dangerous—to the ruling powers. Spain maintains an active force for its current brand of orthodoxy and, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, pays dearly for that luxury by being a fourth-rate power politically and no power at all intellectually. Even sympathetic but somewhat condescending Hispanists wonder if contemporary Spanish writers can produce anything of merit in this doctrinaire and puritanical atmosphere. Others, myself among them, believe that several Spanish writers active today would enjoy international prestige were not Spain ignored or shunned due to its present form of government. Despite discrimination from abroad and the lingering shadow of Torquemada at home, a tough breed of Spanish writers, hardened by adversity, manages to write, publish, and even perform. Since theatre is the art form that relies most heavily on the cultural condition of the people, the development of postwar drama particularly has been hampered. Moreover, theatre is the only form still under the yoke of prior censorship.

The study of medieval drama is relatively new but rapidly developing area of humanistic concern. Unfortunately, however, students of the medieval drama lack accurate modern texts of the plays, all of which are now being re-edited, and complete and accurate transcriptions of the historical documents which are so important to our understanding of the history, development, and production techniques of the medieval cycle plays. Of particular importance to the history of the plays are the dramatic documents of Chester, not only because they are more numerous than those of most other cities, but also because they include the earliest and fullest descriptions of the performance of the plays. Many of these documents remain unpublished and some of the published ones contain inaccuracies; for example, of the twelve extant disbursement accounts for performances of the plays, only seven have been published and of these seven, only three are accurate. Because complete transcriptions of contemporary documents referring to the plays have been unavailable, much of the critical commentary has been speculative. While making available the extant documents, a task I am currently engaged in, will not solve all the problems of the plays, it will narrow the limits of our speculations about them and give us a firmer basis of fact upon which to work. The discussion which follows is restricted to that of the frequency of performance of the Chester plays; it is designed to report facts and correct errors about the years in which the plays were performed and to speculate about the frequency of performances for years in which the facts are few or non-existent. In addition, the paper presents a preliminary report on the Chester dramatic documents and a discussion of the kind of evidence to be found in municipal records.

Today, Italian-Americans are largely integrated into the mainstream of American society. Nearly vanished is the simple, lively immigrant culture of the first generation of Italian-Americans. New York City, the center of that immigrant culture, once had a thriving theatre which served a large segment of the city's Italian-speaking population. Although the Italian-American theatre was a major ethnic theatre, its history remains neglected, and is virtually unknown to historians outside the area of Italian-American studies.