The chapter of the life of Edwin Booth which deals with his emergence as a tragic actor during his early years in San Francisco is haunted by a friendly but flickering ghost called Ferdinand Ewer, critic. Booth declared to Ewer, many years afterward, that, although many “puffs” had appeared previously, “the first criticism of my acting was written by yourself.” And ever since that remark was printed in Edwina Booth Grossmann's collection of her father's letters (Edwin Booth, 1893), the biographers have hunted for, and even satisfied themselves that they have found, what Ewer wrote that Booth prized so highly.

Producing Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen has never been an easy task for singers and musicians, yet it is no less difficult for stage mangers and machinists. One of the more troublesome staging problems of this opera cycle is presented by the initial scene of Das Rheingold, the first of the four operas making up the Ring. Not only is the scene set under the waters of the Rhine but the three Rhinemaidens (Woglinde, Wellgunde, and Flosshilde) must float up and down and around the stage with simulated swimming motions as they mock and elude the dwarf Alberich and guard the Rhinegold atop a high pinnacle at stage center.

Dates and events are frequently useful scholarly pigeonholes into which may be neatly tucked whole periods of literature or significant literary trends. The scholar knows them to be oversimplifications, but so long as their limitations are recognized, they remain useful tools for teaching, talking, and writing. Occasionally, however, history is hung from a date so unreliable and so unjustified that delineation of material is blurred rather than clarified, traditions are obscured rather than illuminated, and fields of research are closed rather than opened. American theatre history affords a perfect example of the misused common reference point. The year 1866, with its production of The Black Crook, has been accepted as the landmark indicating the beginnings of American musical comedy. Cecil Smith, in Musical Comedy in America, says, “For all important purposes, the history of musical comedy in America starts with The Black Crook, as everyone has always said it did.”

In 1959, after a sparse and dismal stage history, All's Well that Ends Well was given two productions in the professional theatre. Surprisingly both productions were well received by critics and audiences. Both productions enjoyed long and successful runs; the number of performances in each case surpassed that of any previous production of the play. Yet, the two productions differed markedly in interpretation. I am tempted to say that the audiences saw two different plays.