Whenever a new fragment by Wilde appears, it inevitably raises hope that the often vulgarized but still fascinating relationship between the life and the work will somehow be clarified. Did the one really get all the genius, the other merely the talent, as he told Gide? Were the two always so disparate, so irreconcilable, as he insisted? Did work always seems, as he once said it seemed, ‘not a reality but a way of getting rid of reality’? If so, was this why ‘the real life is the life we do not lead’, the life of the literary imagination? Or was it that the ‘real life’ and ordinary life alternately promised Wilde those intense experiences his imagination craved, then took it in turns to double-cross him?

Playacting in public has been considered suspect since the day Solon stepped backstage to ask whether Thespis felt ashamed to tell so many lies to such a great number of people. From the very beginning, there were recognizable dangers not only for the audience but also for the actors themselves. And every possible attempt was made to point out those dangers and to obviate them. In the Republic, Plato warned against imitating anything except pure virtue. Especially dangerous, in his opinion, was the imitation of a woman, ‘old or young, railing against her husband, or boasting of a happiness which she imagines can rival the gods', or overwhelmed with grief and misfortune; much less a woman in love, or sick, or in labour.’ Plato, and a long line of writers who followed, condemned such imitation, contending that the imitator could all too easily become what he imitated. In the Ion, Plato discussed the divine frenzy that overcame the actor and made him momentarily insane or unable to distinguish truth from illusion.

Eric Bentley's statement is singularly appropriate to L'Illusion comique, with its plays within a play and its apparent insistence on the magical art of Alcandre which conjures up for Pridamant a theatrical vision of the reality he seeks, and for him and for us a demonstration of the imaginative power of drama, a territory governed by its own laws which Corneille calls ‘les préceptes de l'art’, adding that ‘il est constant qu'il y a des préceptes, puisqu'il y a un art…’ In the dedication of the first edition of L'Illusion comique, which appeared in 1639, three or four years after its first performance, the dramatist called the play ‘un étrange monstre’, ‘une invention bizarre et extravagante’, ‘cette pièce capricieuse’, and when, in 1660, his Examen of the comedy appeared in his collected works, he used similar expressions to describe it, ‘une galanterie extravagante’ and ‘ce caprice’, referring deprecatingly to his failure to observe the rules, those ‘precepts’ which by then he appeared to accept as a necessity.

In The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage Leslie Hotson devoted a chapter to the playhouses of that period and discussed the background and development of Gibbons's Tennis Court. He drew attention to the early leases of the site on which the tennis court was built, to Gibbons's petitions, successful and otherwise, for permission to build the tennis court and to the subsequent litigation that was conducted by interested parties. Those parties were the Earl of Clare, the owner; Charles Gibbons, the tenant; and Sir Matthew Mennes, the frustrated holder of the lease of the property. Hotson also noted the extant graphic evidence for the tennis court, the Hollar engraving (PI. I); the map belonging to the Society of Lincoln's Inn, (PI. II); and the engraving (PI. III) published by Wilkinson in Londina Illustrata, 1811. Concluding his discussion of Gibbons's tennis court he traced the gradual infiltration of Davenant and his pre-Restoration theatrical activities down to the conversion of the building into Killigrew's Theatre Royal which ultimately became the home for the Nursery company.

Nineteenth century American theatre managers generally sought to attract mass audiences. Toward this end they usually featured variety, novelty, and the spectacular in attempts to provide a little something for everyone on each evening's program. By the end of the century many managers had begun to alter this policy, choosing instead to offer entertainments which appealed to only a particular segment of the theatre-going public. Accordingly, the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century brought the development of many distinct strains of theatrical entertainment like vaudeville, the circus, the Little Theatre movement, and the beginnings of the night-club industry.