Some of the most thoughtful analysis of the theatre during this century was generated by a group of semiotically-oriented linguists and aestheticians in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in the 1930s and 1940s. These Prague theorists considered all aspects of the theatre experience—the dramatic texts, the various production elements, the audience—but they gave special attention to the complex matter of acting, developing a three-part model for the analysis of this phenomenon that may be taken as typical both of their strategies and of their theoretical concerns. They began with the actor, the living being appearing on the stage. This actor utilized expressive work, physical and vocal, to create the impression of an absent personage. The sum of this work resulted in the creation in the theatre of the stage figure. This figure was then interpreted by the audience, using whatever strategies seemed appropriate to them, to result in their mental image, the character. The character in short was the stage figure as received by the audience.

The characters whose interaction constitutes the plot of a play are sets of meanings which build up images of the persons supposedly involved in the “story” the play represents. Just as the “story” can be inferred from the plot, through not always completely with assurance, so the person can be discerned through the character. But in both cases the playwright's artifact includes features that are extraneous to the represented events or persons and arises from the process of dramatic representation itself.

After a century of carefree source research conducted against the background of positivist objectivism, theatre historiography now finds itself in the throes of a methodological paradigm shift. Quite independent of its historical disciplinary affiliations, whether as an extension of literary criticism of the various national literatures or as a subsidiary of the historical sciences, theatre historiography is no longer able to resist engagement with fundamental and increasingly complex methodological debates. Particularly in North America there has been a broad discussion on the crisis of traditional, positivist theatre history. The result has been to open up theater historiography to other approaches such as semiotics and diverse theories and methodologies of a poststructuralist provenance. Despite this intensifying and often broad-ranging methodological debate there have been hitherto hardly any attempts to bring theatre history into a dialogue with historical anthropology or ethnohistory, both of which are strongly influenced by the methodologies of cultural anthropology. The deficit is all the more remarkable as these areas have ignited a veritable explosion of interest amongst historians and ethnologists which has transcended the narrow disciplinary borders of both fields of scholarship.

“That night, a blind singer recited a Michinoku ballad to the accompaniment of his lute. He performed not far from where I was trying to sleep, and I found his loud, countrified falsetto rather noisy … But then I realized how admirable it was that the fine old customs were still preserved in that distant land.” In writing The Narrow Road of the Interior (Oku no hosomichi, ca. 1694), from which these lines are taken, the poet Bashō (1644–94) recalled a trip he had taken a few years earlier through Japan's northeast—what he referred to as “that distant land.” In the work Bashō reflects on the past as it survives in the present, on places made famous by poets of earlier times, and on the traditional performing arts that live on in such places. Even today Japan's northeast is known as a region where many traditional performing arts are still preserved.

Following the translation of Jürgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere into English in 1989, we have come to see “the public” and “the private” as historically contingent categories bearing upon nests of social practices. The public and private are not just distinctions of geography—so that beyond our front doors we are necessarily and unavoidably in the public—for they bear on authority, authorized voice, citizenship, and credibility in democratic societies. Whereas the Hellenic Greek social order recognized freedom only in the public realm, and only embodied by household masters, the nineteenth-century model of separate spheres cast the public realm as the place where individuals defended the family (equated to the private) from state domination while debating the proper roles for the sexes. Unacknowledged in both models is that agents of the state and the private individuals who have access to the public realm are normalized as exclusively male and of the hegemonic class. The Greek and Victorian models—explicitly relegating women to the home (private) and men to the marketplace (public)—are equally open to critique for being as class-blind as they are hyperbolically universalizing of all cultures and sub-cultures, as if they obeyed a natural law instead of ideological preferences. If we write theatre history with either model in mind and assume that “the public” does not carry with it connotations of power, then we are distorting the evidence and misfiring on our interpretations.

In his Paradoxe sur le comédien, written around 1770 but not published until the nineteenth century, the French philosophe Denis Diderot argued that the great actors of his day suppressed their individuality onstage; rather than personally experiencing the emotions called for by the playwright, they denied their own private subjectivity in order to create a more seamless public illusion. By an act of self-effacement, therefore, they paradoxically rendered themselves capable of impersonating anyone. In his essay, Diderot repeatedly turned to the example of his contemporary, the Comédie-Française actress Mlle Clairon, to illustrate this phenomenon. Off the stage, the philosopher claimed, Clairon was physically unimposing, and displays of her true feelings in the privacy of her home seemed artificial and unconvincing. In the theatre, however, she swelled in size and emotional presence until she dominated an audience and deepened the sentiments invoked by the playwright. According to Diderot, in the moment of public performance she was double: both the “little Clairon” and the “great Agrippina”, the socially inconsequential actress and a mythic heroine of the French stage.

Ecstatic religious trance and spirit possession occur across a broad cultural and socioeconomic range, from Pentecostal possession by the Holy Ghost to Ethiopian zar possession cults. Interestingly, this phenomenon is most frequently experienced by young women in their early teens. Folklorists such as Felicitas Goodman postulate that this generational and gendered proclivity for trance reception is a response to the powerlessness of girls within their communities. As such, spirit possession allows young women to claim a degree of cultural power through the performance of a spiritual manifestation. Although I want to make it clear that I am not questioning the very real physical (and perhaps metaphysical) effects of the trance state during religious ecstasy, I argue that the trance state is a consciously induced performance and the enactment of spiritual power.

Despite the many admirable qualities of Mr. Clyde Fitch's play, The Way of the World at the Victoria Theatre is not so much a dramatic entertainment as a social function. Any well-ordered comment upon it must take cognizance of the audience as well as of the mummers who perform on the far side of the footlights. They are as much a part of it as the stage setting, and the result of their presence is that the five-act drama and its four intermissions and final curtain form a continuous performance the like of which New York has never seen before.

In the third week of December 1908, a group of 300–400 prominent actors, actresses, and dramatists gathered at the Criterion Theatre in London to celebrate the formation of the Actresses' Franchise League. The inaugurating resolution, passed with one dissent, read: “That this meeting of actresses calls upon the Government immediately to extend the franchise to women, that women claim the franchise as a necessary protection for the workers under modern industrial conditions, and maintain that by their labour they have earned the right to this defence” (Votes for Women 24 Dec. 1908, p. 211). The resolution's emphasis upon labour as the enabling criterion qualifying women for the franchise reflects the roots of the British suffrage movement in the working class industrial north, where, as David Rosen notes, the Independent Labour Party had supported early suffragists (57).