Stage naturalism made its first appearance in Denmark—and, for that matter, in Scandinavia as a whole—unaccompanied by the fanfare or enthusiastic manifestoes which heralded its arrival in many other countries. The breakthrough of this new style of theatrical production did not coincide with the founding of small, independent art theatres like André Antoine's Théâtre Libre (1887), Otto Brahm's Freie Bühne (1889), J. T. Grein's Independent Theatre (1891), or, somewhat later, Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre (1898). Nor was it acclaimed from the outset as a pioneering realization of a novel aesthetic program. On the contrary, the methods and techniques of the new naturalism were introduced, and proceeded to take root inconspicuously, when the Danish Royal Theatre in Copenhagen engaged the 36-year-old playwright William Bloch as a stage director in 1881, having been impressed with an “unusual eye for scenic requirements” in his plays. Two years later, Bloch's epoch-making production of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People firmly implanted the new ideas.

In 1923 a young hospital orderly entered Jacques Copeau's École du Vieux-Colombier in Paris to study diction. He held himself aloof from the world of actors, fixing his ambitions upon a lofty conception of politics. Nicknamed “the Orator,” he was Etienne Decroux; and Decroux was a militant socialist who brought to his theatrical studies a belief that “art is a publicity seeker, truth is a saint; a saint should never lower herself, no matter how ugly she may be, before a publicity seeker.”

From its beginning, America was a frontier. Initially, the Eastern Seaboard was a frontier for Europe, and this was still true in 1750 when professional theatre began to be a regular feature of American life. Within a century the variables changed, but were still bound together in the frontier equation. By 1850 the trans-Mississippi West had become a frontier for urban centers in the East. In particular, the North-Central region of California sprang into popular consciousness: here was the ultimate undeveloped area to which one could migrate in the search for economic competence. As America's first major mining frontier it offered a prospect of sudden wealth which was far more appealing than the slow seasonal accumulation of agriculture, and which did not require the large initial investment of industry.

The Lafayette Theatre of New York was built and owned by Charles W. Sandford (1796–1878), a colorful and sometimes eccentric personality, whose careers in law, business, and the military, combined with a personal predilection for pomp and display, made him a prominent member of New York's society. As a businessman, Sandford made and lost “several fortunes” in the course of his eventful life in a variety of financial speculations that included investments in real estate, hardware, and theatres. Most of these ended disastrously for him, but his ventures accrued enough profit to allow him to live stylishly all his life, entertain every prominent guest of the city and, on his death in 1878, leave his family a “comfortable competency.” As a lawyer, Sandford handled several celebrated cases and, being generally considered “among the finest” members of his profession, was eventually named vice-president of the New York Bar Association. But it was in his career as a soldier that his love for horses, parades, and gilded uniforms was most manifest and which led Sandford to erect the first full-scale equestrian theatre in America.

American theatre audiences of the last two decades of the nineteenth century saw three internationally famous Shakespearean actors in the role of Othello. One, Edwin Booth, was their own; another, Henry Irving, shared their language and heritage; the third, Tommaso Salvini—though without common citizenship, language, or heritage—nonetheless made an indelible impression on the American stage history of the tortured Moor.

In 1917, the editor of Edison's Monthly looked disdainfully back on the era of gas in the theatre: “Stage lights,” he said, “took up almost as much room as the scenery itself. Long yards of rubber pipe trailed across the stage and wings. Only the footlights were permanent and only the crudest stage effects were possible.” He might have mentioned the unbearable heat they generated and their malodorous fumes. This house organ for the electrical industry had, of course, a vested interest in deprecating gas and extoling the virtues of electricity. But there were also enthusiasts for gas; in 1923, for example, Louis Hartmann reported that one of the best of the old gas men—William Hall—had told him:

I have always claimed that the electric switchboard and dimmer equipment is only the evolution of the old gas table or switchboard, not a new creation. With the gas table of the other days we accomplished the same results you obtain today—in a crude way, we will admit, but with wonderful results. I will state without fear of contradiction that the combination of old gas lighting equipment and the calcium [i.e., lime] light apparatus, we have given productions that even in this era of advancement have never been equalled, that is so far as stage spectacular effect is concerned.

When Henry Fielding enlarged his one-act afterpiece, The Welsh Opera (1731), he named the new version The Grub-Street Opera to point to the extensive travesty it contains. The title also makes a target of hack-writers of the day and implies a connection with The Grub-Street Journal, whose authors maintained a policy of non-partisan satire on hack-writing. The amount of imitation it contains makes it resemble the literary travesty of The Author's Farce (1730) and Tom Thumb (1730), likewise written by Scriblerus Secundus, Fielding's pseudonym which alluded to the “Scriblerus” of his illustrious contemporaries, most obviously to Pope in the Dunciad notes and “Peri Bathous” (1728). The Grub-Street Opera has remained a puzzle to scholars of Fielding's plays, perhaps because its relationship to contemporary drama, politics, and journalism has been neglected.

The death of Sir Winston Churchill in 1965 focused renewed attention upon his colorful American mother, Jennie Jerome (1854–1921), who distinguished herself as a political aide of Lord Randolph Churchill (1849–95), her first husband, and also as an authoress, public speaker, and indefatigable worker in behalf of numerous charities. Her manifold activities have been described by Ralph G. Martin (Jennie: The Life of Lady Randolph Churchill) and Anita Leslie (Lady Randolph Churchill: The Story of Jennie Jerome). Neither biographer, however, describes Lady Randolph's theatrical ventures in detail, and neither relates those activities properly to the movement to establish a National Theatre in Great Britain.

No doubt conditioned by the pointed use of the rehearsal format in Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author as a vehicle for that playwright's theme of philosophical relativism, I have often conjectured that similar thematic concerns are implicit in almost any play using such a device. Once the artifices of the theatre are laid bare, and the discrepancies between life as it is represented on the stage and life as we know it are brought into focus, the relative truths and realities of each may be measured and evaluated. Although I would not wish to argue that philosophical relativism is a major or even an intentional concern of Sheridan's The Critic, I am convinced that it is an inescapable ingredient, at least for a modern audience.

Arthur Freeman's rediscovery and publication of an Elizabethan dramatic manuscript, which he calls “The Argument of Meleager” would seem to make an important and as-yet-unnoticed difference to a continuing discussion regarding The Spanish Tragedy: did Andrea's Ghost and the Spirit of Revenge originally sit on opposite sides or corners of the platform stage, or “aloft” in a gallery? A detail in the Meleager MS may settle the question, for its evidence suggests that the two Inductor-Presenter-Chorus characters sat in the gallery. Additional light on the controversy is shed by Frances A. Yates's theories about the physical conditions of the public stage.

W. B. Donne, writing to Mrs. Fanny Kemble in America, called it “the most remarkable event in current history, setting aside Garibaldi and The Civil War on your side of the water.…” Speaking of the same event, Charles Dickens was later to declare: “Perhaps no innovation in Art was ever accepted with so much favor by so many intellectual persons precommitted to, and preoccupied by, another system.…”