This issue of Theatre Survey explores the condition of postmodern Shakespeare production, and by implication the situation of classic drama on the horizon of the contemporary stage. Working on this issue has been, for both of its coeditors, a surprising experience. Theatre Survey is a distinguished journal in the field of theatre history and historiography, and with this issue we intended to press the journal's agenda toward the history and theory of contemporary culture, generating a series of articles on radical, revisionist, and alternative ways of putting “the ‘classics’ into play.” Because we understand this enterprise—from the Kathakali King Lear to Robert Wilson's When We Dead Awaken to Heiner Müller's Medeamaterial to Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet—to stand in a strategic relation to modernity, we were calling the issue “Performance: Modern and Postmodern.”

Despite the etymological origins of “spectator” in looking and “audience” in hearing, the multiple activities involved in attending an event (whether formally in the theatre or in other reminiscent circumstances) involve the senses more than one at a time, and indeed they involve more than the senses. Some of the most compelling spectacles of the modern era, such as homelessness, seem to repel looking and hearing for too many who encounter them on the streets, and only hold the attention of a few when dramatized by Gorky in The Lower Depths.

Virtually every city in the United States now has a Civic Center. In large cities, this site functions variously as a convention center, a hockey rink, and the locale for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey circus. In smaller cities, it frequently serves as a venue for performance. Civic Centers host touring productions of Broadway shows, national dance companies, and local symphonies and operas. In addition to providing local access to a variety of performance forms, a city's Civic Center also signifies “the arts” and so implies the city's commitment to art and performance.

In the late 1990s, the endlessly reinvented Shakespeare has apparently become a popular and successful screenwriter. The recent release of Richard III, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Twelfth Night and Hamlet have brought an enthusiastic movie-going public to see, among other things, the Capulets and the Montagues on the beach and Hamlet striding through a cast of thousands at Elsinore. But this is not to suggest that this particular genre success is either new or inappropriate; the collection of artifacts known as Shakespeare (including but not limited to the plays themselves) has long signified as high art dedicated to the education of not just a theatre-going elite nor the mass audiences of popular media, but everyone. On a global scale, Shakespeare means culture or, as Michael Bristol would more wittily have it, Shakespeare is “big time.” This history of the cultural capital that is Shakespeare continues to have a fascination for, and a usefulness to the producers and distributors of films. Thus, to turn Shakespeare from playwright to screenwriter is, culturally speaking, both a pragmatic and predictable strategy. And it is a strategy that has more or less existed as long as film itself.

Judith Thompson's 1992 “relay” play, Lion in the Streets, opens with an address to the audience by the young Portuguese girl, Isobel, who provides the through-line and a bridge among the play's linked scenes. Her speech frames the play by introducing, among other things, issues of representation. “Doan be scare,” she says pointing to her downtown Toronto neighborhood. “Doan be scare of this pickshur! This pickshur is niiiice, nice! I looove this pickshur, this pickshur is mine!” In a later scene, a neighborhood woman, Joanne, tells her friend Rhonda that she has bone cancer, and asks for her help:

As scholars investigating historical audiences, we are always searching for that magic moment when the theatre critic shifts in his seat, notices the people around him and finds them interesting enough to write down his observations. When such a moment occurs, we are given the rare opportunity to witness a spectatorial presence and spectatorial response not usually represented by theatre reviews. One such magic moment occurred on April 22, 1922, in Frankfurt, Germany at the premiere of Arnolt Bronnen's play Vatermord (Patricide). Carl Zuckmayer, a fellow playwright, drew his eyes away from the expressionist play before him and lifted them to the gallery. He recorded his experience in his review for Die Neue Schaubühne:

“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.”

In October of 1903, The United Irishman, a leading newspaper of the Irish nationalist movement, published an essay by William Butler Yeats entitled “The Irish National Theatre and Three Sorts of Ignorance.” Yeats wrote this essay after an infuriated nationalist community protested the Irish National Theatre Society's production of John Millington Synge's play, In the Shadow of the Glen. In response to Yeats's admonishment of the nationalist movement for putting politics over aesthetics in their creation and judgment of Irish drama, Arthur Griffith, the editor of the newspaper, added some remarks of his own:

Mr. Yeats does not give any reason why if the Irish National Theatre has no propaganda save that of good art it should continue to call itself either Irish or National. If the Theatre be solely an Art Theatre, then its plays can be fairly criticized from the standpoint of art. But whilst it calls itself Irish National its productions must be considered and criticised as Irish National productions.

Our views about nineteenth-century London theatre audiences are often dominated by essentialist descriptions via which subjective impressions have been transmuted into received orthodoxy. In this article, with reference to topography, demography (based on the 1841–1861 censuses), police reports, and patterns of urban transportation, we are attempting to counter some of these received orthodoxies, using as our model a re-evaluation of what is meant by a “transpontine” or “Surrey-side” audience with reference to the Coburg (Victoria) and Surrey Theatres.

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin has become, since the 1950s, well-known for its holdings in twentieth century literature. I offer here a brief description of the holdings in British theatre in the Theatre Arts Collection and the Manuscripts and Archives division of the Ransom Center. My secondary purpose is to suggest: and encourage corollary research in other Ransom Center holdings, such as its Art Collection and Photography and Film Collection. A listing of selected holdings follows this overview below, together with information on fellowships for researchers.

Today, Rotterdam is best known as the largest port in the world. Around 1800, although the second city in the Dutch Republic, it was still a minor trade centre. A group of its merchants built a standing theatre in 1773, which was sold in 1851 and largely demolished in 1853. The very rich archives of the stock-holders' company, which exploited this theatre, permit us an insight into the patterns of theatre-going in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the record helps test the common conjecture about the decline of the theatre in those decades.

Theatre historians have given surprisingly little attention to theatre playbills and programs as documents of material culture. The modern theatre “magazine” program especially, which began to develop in the 1860s, offers more than primary documents for dates, performers, and scenic artists, visual evidence of a performance, or the dramaturg's notes. For the cultural historian, these are open books, symbolically. Programs of the late twentieth century, packed as they are with advertisements, news of the theatre, photo montages, and litanies of benefactors and “friends,” document that larger performance of which the staged event is but a part, the performance of the imagined community to which, and from which the theatrical event ostensibly speaks.