Among the eleven promptbooks from the Morrab Library in Penzance sold at Sotheby's in 1964, by no means least interesting are three based on plays by John Dryden. After considerable study we are persuaded that all three were from Drury Lane Theatre. They came into the possession of H. C. Halliwell-Phillipps and were eventually presented to the City of Penzance as a token of his affection. We choose a musical term to suggest the great differences in origin and fortunes of the trio, for they represent a varied pattern: one comes from an early collaboration; one is a solo performance from late in the displaced laureate's career; one is a pastiche taken from a pair of heroic plays shortly after Dryden's death. At some risk of anticlimax we present them in the order of their appearance as promptbooks.

When Adrian Noble directed Measure for Measure at the RSC in 1983–4, colour supplement coverage focused on the costumes: the exuberance of the production was indicated by the extravagance of the designs. On 25 April 1985, before the opening of the director's new As You Like It, the Sunday Times Magazine ran an interview with him and with his Rosalind, Juliet Stevenson. There was a sense, not merely to be put down to the artificial hype of the publicity machine, that a new production and above all a new Rosalind were matters of concern and interest to a wide range of consumers of life's good things. Noble's Measure for Measure had been covered almost as a design story but As You Like It was treated very differently. Noble's views on the significance of the retreat into Arden were sought and reported: there was an underlying assumption that the readership had a stake in the representation of this play, that what was being staged was a property held in common by the journal's readers and that the play had a place in the public imagination independently of what directors did with it.

Repeatedly throughout French theatre history two subjects have aroused the passions of the French theatregoer: art and politics. The famous opening-night riots at Le Cid in 1636, Hernani in 1830, and Ubu roi in 1896 all resulted in the overthrow of stale artistic conventions by the new art that each of these works represented. Examples of productions that had political repercussions are abundant – like the historical dramas of Marie-Joseph Chénier that did so much to promote the French Revolution (until his Caius Gracchus in 1792 caused a backlash demonstration), or the 1943 Comédie-Française production of Claudel's mystico-religious Soulier de satin that was gleefully interpreted by the French in German-occupied Paris as ‘resistance theatre’. One noteworthy theatrical event that succeeded in arousing both artistic and political passions was not even a French play – nor was it contemporary, although the most often-repeated comment about it was: ‘It seems to have been written just yesterday.’ This was a production of Shakespeare's Coriolanus at the Comédie-Française in the 1933–4 season, just at the time when the Third Republic was nearly toppled by the public's response to press revelations of the Stavisky scandal.

It is my intention to derive the concept of ‘theatrical irony’ from the general theory of theatrical communication.

The basic meaning of the term ‘irony’, from the Greek word ‘ειρωνεια’, was ‘dissimulation’. Over the centuries, this term has been extended to additional semantic fields and consequently acquired new meanings as in ‘Socratic irony’, ‘philosophical irony’, ‘romantic irony’, ‘dramatic irony’, ‘tragic irony’, and so on. At the same time, a number of more colloquial expressions were introduced as well, as in ‘ironic smile’, ‘irony of events’, ‘irony of fate’, and so on. I am of the opinion, however, that despite the diversity of such phrases and regardless of their partial overlap, it is still possible to unveil a common semantic core. Furthermore, it is my belief that our understanding of theatrical irony benefits from all these additional usages.