The Joint guest editor of the Canadian issue (TRI, Vol. 17, No.3) was, of course DENIS SALTER

Among the abundant iconographical records of the commedia dell' arte are a handful of engravings depicting vivaciously capering single characters, of which three have been reproduced by Allardyce Nicoll, where they are identified merely as ‘seventeenth-century engravings’. The same subjects were apparently copied by Adrian de Winter (1615–?) in a set of six groups of commedia characters entitled Titulus Stultorum, where they appear in reverse with the addition of half a dozen characters copied from Callot's Balli di Sfessania.

The première of It Is Never Too Late to Mend at the Princess's Theatre on 4 October 1865 marked the appropriately tumultuous return of Charles Reade to the London stage after an absence of nine years. That night, one of the most memorable disturbances in the nineteenth-century theatre occurred when the drama critics in attendance, led by Frederick Guest Tomlins of the Morning Advertiser, demanded that the play be halted because of its offensive subject matter and one particularly shocking scene. The dispute became a cause celebre among critics, dramatists, and the general public and was recalled (with varying degrees of accuracy) years later by its participants, witnesses, and other interested parties.

None of Sarah Barnhardt's many biographers has treated her American vaudeville tours as anything more than a footnote to a career remarkable in so many other ways. Examined more closely, Bernhardt's encounter with vaudeville suggests a not always tranquil marriage between high art and popular culture, and it serves as an index to the evolution of a distinctively American form.

Masterpieces of theatre are tantalizingly inaccessible, except in print. Before we can see or hear the great plays of past ages, a theatre company has to learn how to produce them in a very different world from that in which they were written. Directors, designers, and actors who are available today are very different from the people first responsible for staging the plays. The buildings and equipment of newly-built theatres make their own distinct and irresistible contributions to any production. Before old texts can be staged problems of meaning, characterization, convention, and stagecraft have to be tackled. How can classics become fully and engagingly alive under such changed conditions? Any responsible theatre should consider establishing its own laboratory in which to conduct the necessary research.

Armand Gatti is a recognized writer of politically committed plays. Jean-Paul Sartre speaking from the stage of the Théâtre National Populaire (T.N.P.) in Paris after the banning there of Gatti's La Passion du Général Franco saluted him as a leading exponent, along with Brecht, Gorki and Dürrenmatt of the popular theatre of the sixties.

Both actor and translator, and by extension translation and performance suffer the plight of second hand art. Disloyal to their original masters they commit adultery. Thus, translation and performance become the unfortunate bastards of literature. If translation is meant to overcome the difference between itself and its other, performance is accused of playing it out and playing up. Such is the attitude which both have shared in each of their respective literary histories. The emphasis here is on literary history, for it assumes the tyranny of the text, the sacredness of the word. The quest for the origin, the reconstruction of the original greatness will always follow the linear path to the bastardized version, towards its own inferiorization. Precisely because translation and performance share this secondary status, this paper will adopt the metaphor of translation and adapt it to describe the relationship between text and performance. Translation here will be taken as that process which underlies any meaning production; it will not be reduced to a merely linguistic motion, nor seen in the form of an obvious reduplication, but as a complex interrelation between two elements. We will thus examine the translatory processes between text and performance before exposing the most illegitimate member in this affair: the translated dramatic text.