During the late Middle Ages and until after the middle of the sixteenth century, outdoor production of the British drama took place, in general, in three different kinds of temporary theatre. These are the theatre of a circular platea or Place surrounded by “scaffolds”; the theatre of pageant-wagons each performing part of a scriptural cycle at successive “stops” throughout a town or city; and the theatre of a booth stage set up in a marketplace or on a village green. In recent years much new information has accumulated about each of these three kinds of theatre; new problems have been defined; and it is now possible to advance some new evidence and some new interpretations of old evidence. This article is therefore an attempt to sum up the state of our present knowledge about the three major kinds of outdoor theatre in Britain before the age of Shakespeare. Since that knowledge is in some respects still imperfect and tentative, I shall deal chiefly with questions of physical form, since here, thanks to a fortuitous abundance of pictorial evidence, our information is fuller and more precise than in the case of origins or of use.

My subject this afternoon is “Early American Professional Acting.” To those who have not dipped into the beginnings of theatre history in this country, it may come as a surprise to learn that it's a vast subject, with a huge cast of characters, more scenes than the fourth act of Anthony and Cleopatra, and that liberal use of time which so offended Sir Philip Sidney.

The theatrical fare that eventually became known as American vaudeville began as a random assortment of acts staged whereever there was space large enough for people to gather. It was called, appropriately enough, “variety,” and was an undisciplined affair consisting of routines pilfered from practically every element of theatrical convention: the drama, the circus, the standup comic, burlesque, the ministrel show, the omnibus act of the touring trouper.

Apollo is the god of measure. “Captain of Sevens,” his cithara brought seven-stringed order to music and seven-walled order to Thebes. As god of measure, symmetry informs the myth describing his birth: amid the Cycladic islands (which the Greeks considered a circle surrounding Delos) four adamantine columns bore Delos above the foam as Leto gave birth to the shining god. And, as in the birth of the Greek god of measure, so also in the emergence of the Greek world: a strict symmetry prevails in the myth describing how the omphalos, the earth's navel stone, came to be at the locus of what was to become Apollo's sacred seat. Zeus, it was told, freed two eagles from the ends of the earth, their paths crossing at the earth's center, at Delphi. The symmetric image of this aerial encounter over the terrestrial center suggests schematically the Apolline triad: two tensional extremes and, at the point of balance, a mediating mean.

The scholarly work of reconstructing vanished theatres is of crucial importance to theatre history. The playhouse provides the physical plant for the drama; therefore its shape exerts enormous influence upon plays written for it. Its size and accommodations for the audience reflect and may even determine the drama's function within a given society. To ignore the physical setting of a play's first production is an error almost as damning for the theatre historian as the practice of the literary scholar who forgets that plays are not written for examination in classes.

On April 7, 1919, almost exactly two years after the United States had entered World War I, the Vieux-Colombier theatre gave its final performance in New York, where it had spent the last eighteen months of the war presenting two seasons of repertory. The rather surprising presence of Jacques Copeau's troupe in New York at this time can be largely attributed to the war itself. Copeau had first been dispatched on a lecture tour in January of 1917 by the French Ministry of Fine Arts, with the aim of “countering German propaganda in the realm of culture,” strengthening ties between France and the United States, and stemming the tide of pro-German feeling then running in America. Though Copeau had already performed a similar task in Switzerland and was aware of the significance of his brief, his approach was subtle. Clayton Hamilton tells us that in the six lectures he delivered Copeau “talked to us of art and Molière, and said no word about the war … talked to us only about Truth and Beauty in the midst of many things succumbing momentarily to death. We welcomed Jacques Copeau because he wore the face of Dante.…”

John Joseph Holland, one of the most prominent scene painters of the early American theatre, was born in England about 1776 and apprenticed at the age of nine to Gaetano Marinari, chief artist at the King's Theatre, Haymarket. “For upwards of forty years,” George Raymond recalled, Marinari “was accounted one of the first scene painters in Europe.” He trained Holland in scene painting and architecture, and the young artist taught himself landscape painting in watercolors. Soon after his apprenticeship was over, Holland went to Convent Garden, where he was employed from August, 1794, to February, 1795, but he later returned to the King's Theatre, where Thomas Wignell found him in 1796 and engaged him for the Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia.

The past fifteen years have been a period of active revisionism in the study of the stage history of medieval England. Through the efforts of Richard Southern, Martial Rose, and others, we have gained a quite different perspective on the staging of the religious drama of the Middle Ages. Now the Cornish plays are no longer considered to be an aberration, for we have seen the principle of stationary performance extended to Wakefield and Lincoln, and enough questions have been raised concerning performance in York that processional staging even there seems doubtful. More and more we are being led to the conclusion that not processional staging on pageant carts, but stationary performance was the norm in England, just as it was on the Continent.

Rehearsals of Joseph and his Brethren had begun some days before the bit players, among them myself, joined the company. Sets had been planned and the vast number of costumes designed and put in hand some months previously. The production was to be one of the most lavish I ever encountered. Drama and pageantry were combined in a big spectacular offering resembling Ben Hur, The Garden of Allah, The Daughter of Heaven and other stage epics which preceded the mammoth photography of the cinema. Based upon the Biblical narrative, Joseph and His Brethren by Louis Napoleon Parker was first performed on January 11, 1913, at the Century Theatre erected between 62nd and 63nd Streets at Central Park West. The house was labelled “the Millionaires' Theatre” because several of New York's millionaires were responsible for its building. Considered the last word in theatre construction, the place yet managed to convey the idea of a luxury hotel. It was under the management of George Tyler, an associate of the Liebler Company.