The characteristic costume of Greek comic actors has been widely represented iconographically in statuettes and vase paintings from the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Theatre historians instantly recognize the grotesquely distorted expressions on the masks, the rotund shapes formed by ill-concealed padding, and, most distinctively, the comic phallus. A “dangling leather symbol… red at the tip, swollen,” the comic phallus, of course, represents male genitalia.

In his first plays, Shakespeare exercised great freedom in devising his plots. The First Part of King Henry VI, it has been said, “darts about the period in a bewildering way.” It is “not so much a Chronicle play as a fantasia on historical themes.” Its two episodic sequels are equally or perhaps even more loosely plotted, while Richard III picks and chooses among events that took place in the decade and a half before 1485 and also seems to incorporate matter from earlier plays (Latin as well as English). In the The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare began with a groundwork drawn from Plautus's Menæchmi but added the twin Dromios as well as some material from the Amphitruo. The Two Gentlemen of Verona integrates plot elements from a number of sources, including Montemayor's Diana, the well-circulated story of Titus and Giseppus, and the myth of Robin Hood. In making The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare combined elements from the oral tradition (the drunken peasant, the taming) with a literary subplot drawn from George Gascoigne's Supposes.

In the early 1960s, certain new developments in Western theatre occurred which in some ways seemed to complete the process of the re-definition of theatre that was initiated by the historical avant-garde movement at the beginning of this century. In a decisive move against the long established bourgeois, educational and commercial theatre, now theatre was explicitly being defined as the “detailed investigations of the actor-audience relationship”. As before, this new definition led to the search for new theatre spaces and genres and a new manner of using signs where the focus shifted from the semantic to the pragmatic level. Performances were held in a disused workshop (Richard Schechner's Performance Garage in New York), a factory (Ariane Mnouchkine's Theatre du Soleil in a former munitions factory in Vincennes), a slaughter house (Bremen), in cinemas (Bremen and Bochum), in an exhibition hall (the Schaubuehne Greek project), in a film studio (the Schaubuehne Shakespeare project at the Halleschen Ufer 1976–7), in a tram depot (Frankfurt), in the 1936 Olympic Stadium in Berlin (Gruber's Winterreise 1977).

In the nineteenth century darkness became visible in the English theatre. To know how this is so, one must glimpse the word “darkness” in its own shadow, its dimmest connotations. “That which hides or is hidden” is the root sense of “darkness,” but it is cognate with words meaning “to trouble or disturb.” The scene (in both spellings) will draw heavily on the unseen for its effect, and the darkness of the theatre resides in its capacity to both hide and reveal that which disturbs, playing always with the paradox of light and darkness, trouble and freedom from trouble, in such a way that darkness itself can become entrancing, an attraction, while the light(ed) repels or pales into insignificance. The theatre both chases troubling reality away from the brightly illuminated stage and gives centrality to the darkness at the focal point of the spectacle—that internal, infernal essence that Milton, in his portrayal of Satan's realm, termed “darkness visible.” A combination of circumstances during the nineteenth century brought dark phenomena to the fore in theatrical representations, first within the marginal exhibition halls and later on the legitimate stage. This essay will trace out one network of historical associations within that development.

The Parliamentary Act of 1843 that eradicated the duopoly of Covent Garden and Drury Lane affected London taverns as well as theatres. To skirt the ban on drama, minor theatres had long interpolated musical interludes into any sort of play, thus naturalizing indoors a variety format more common to the fairground or circus. The growing taste for miscellaneous entertainment was also served by tavern saloons, where variety bills supplemented alcoholic conviviality. The Act of 1843, amending the licensing act of 1737, merely recognized this fact of life and extended a welcoming hand to these and other performance spaces. All places of entertainment holding a “burletta license” might stage plays, provided that smoking and the sale of spirituous beverages were banned from the premises.

Twenty years after Louis Jacques Daguerre. invented modern photography, Dion Boucicault incorporated the camera as a crucial plot device in his play, The Octoroon. When his character Salem Scudder discovers a freshly taken photograph lying by the body of a murder victim, he holds up the picture as evidence and cries: “Jacob M'Closky, ‘t was you murdered that boy! Here you are, in the very attitude of your crime….’ Tis true! The [camera] can't lie.”

On 17 January 1816, a new semi-operatic adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream opened at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, the nineteenth century's first production of the play. Since Shakespeare's time, the play had been seen only in operatic adaptations. The libretto of the new one was by Frederick Reynolds, with music by Sir Henry Rowley Bishop, and it was built on the 1763 operatic version of David Garrick and George Colman the elder. But the more interesting and historically significant text of the 1816 production was in the staging and the new pictorial scenery, whose vocabulary must be read in the light of empire.

The founding of experimental ensembles dominates the history of Western theatre in the first half of the twentieth century. Groups of theatre artists, desperate to revive and resuscitate an art grown stale and lifeless, banded together, seeking common ground in the period's vast swirl of artistic and ideological sensibilities. These groups, from the Moscow Art Theatre to the Berliner Ensemble, produced a broad range of performances, yet all shared a common commitment to change and theatrical growth. Two of these, the Group Theatre and Jacques Copeau's Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier participated in and elevated this world-wide phenomenon. Since they share some common roots, an exploration of the relationship between the Vieux-Colombier and the Group yields some insights into the formation and maintenance of an acting ensemble.

“And as for ‘art,’ well, philosophers differ. But it's widely believed by wise people that art and ego sit uncomfortably together.” Joseph Sobran, The National Review, 1991.

Just when Madonna, the performer one critic recently referred to as a “schlockmistress,” seemed doomed to a future as the subject of scholarly articles on pop and post-modern aesthetics, she's in the news again with a coffee table best seller on the joys of sex with anything that moves and some things that don't. Madonna, the high priestess of American pop culture, has constructed a multi-million dollar performance empire, the success of which rests primarily on her extraordinary ability to behave outrageously and market it. Though pre-pubescent females are Madonna's most ardent and uncritical admirers, her concerts and films attract a heterogeneous crowd of men, women, gays, and straights–most of them under thirty. In spite of (or perhaps because of) her immense popular following, the press loathes her. Mainstream critics deplore her dissipated lifestyle, sexual athletics, and public exhibitionism, while avant-garde critics regard her performances as trendy schlock rather than legitimate art. This has little effect on Madonna except to increase curiosity about her (and therefore sales of the book and videotapes) among ordinary citizens who might otherwise be completely indifferent to the Madonna phenomenon.

The Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin was a theatrical showplace in several incarnations. The building itself was initially a great market situated near the Spree River in the center of Berlin. In the latter part of the nineteenth century it was converted to an enormous circus which drew crowds to see outstanding exhibitions of horsemanship and other circus acts. It also served as a great meeting hall for such events as Robert Koch's international congress dealing with tuberculosis in 1890. The large amphitheatre in the huge building was a symbol of the growing population of Berlin and its increasing prosperity. The history of the various uses to which the theatre was put in the twentieth century is an important reflection of the changes in German society in this period. During the time of the Third Reich it was an important element in culture and propaganda under the direction of Dr. Joseph Goebbels. This paper will analyze the unusual architecture of the theatre and the productions of several plays which were important during the Third Reich.

Before my performance of wayang golek menak (a rod-puppet performance of Islamic legends) Pak Narto, my teacher in Central Java, was trying to dress me for the role of a dhalang, the puppeteer of a wayang. He tugged down on the batik sarong, already wrapped low about my waist, and pulled at the dress hat and jacket that pinched my head and bound my shoulders, as if he could have concealed that I was anything more or less than a large American in Javanese dress. That evening, in the village of Gombong on the South coast of Central Java, I would perform a demonstration of wayang golek menak. I had only arrived a few months before to undertake my research with Pak Narto and was hastily prepared to perform for a celebration surrounding the wedding of his wife's cousin. After my brief demonstration, there would be an all night wayang performance by Pak Narto's brother, Pak Kuswanto.

“Who's afraid of the Tanks?” proclaimed the headline of the Lithuanian daily, Lietuvas Rytas, in its review of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in Vilnius in April 1990, six weeks into the nation's tumultous declaration of independence that had brought Soviet tanks onto city streets. Seizing the fundamental point of the play – the need to destroy illusion and face reality without fear – Lithuanian audiences saw a distinct analogy with their national situation that demanded they forswear dreams of some painless future solution and confront the reality of Soviet military intervention. Their grasp of the play, despite cultural chasms and the vagaries of simultaneous translation, testified to the clarity of Albee's staging of this classic of the American theatre.

From the days of Thespis to the knighthood of Henry Irving, society in general censured those who trod the boards, and historians frowned upon the theatre as a discipline worthy of scholarly attention. The records of performance, past and present, were neglected, ignored, and uncataloged—either tossed into cartons and relegated to attics and basements for future generations to discard, or they were filed in the nearest wastebasket. Only the drama and the literature of the stage (commentaries and criticisms, histories and reviews) were considered to be of substantial interest.

When she asked me to join this panel, Catherine suggested three subjects she would like me to comment on. The first is how scholarship to date has benefited from theatre collections; the second is the need for theatre collections as separate entities; and the third is what kinds of material should be collected in the future, particularly to avoid oversights in previous collecting policies. At the risk of telling you what you already know, and without pretending to speak for most scholars, let me first make some generalizations about how scholars have benefited from existing collections.

No, I am not going to talk about the amazing techno-age to come, when all documents from a single performance are compiled together on a hypermedia disk and transmitted readily over the wires in cyberspace as a virtual theatre research document. Nor am I going to suggest a future in which the theatre collections are singular—most having closed, one after the next, from lack of support. Rather than predicting the future, I wish to explore present elements of the problems now facing the fields of theatre librarianship and theatre research, and to suggest some directions we might take to solve these problems.