“As a jester among jesters,” Jack Point commends himself to a would-be mountebank in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Yeoman of the Guard, “I will teach thee all my original songs, my self-constructed riddles, my own ingenious paradoxes; nay more, I will reveal to thee the source whence I get them.” The “source” in this case is a tome entitled The Merry Jestes of Hugh Ambrose, a compendium of asthmatic wheezes, Gilbert's thrust at not only Elizabethan jestbooks but their Victorian counterparts. At times it must have seemed as if printing had been invented only to enable aspiring comedians to plunder the wit of the past from cheap chapbooks, like the one that gave Joe Miller to the vernacular. In the United States, dissemination of these storehouses of “gags” began as early as 1789, and by the 1860s they were a staple of the bookstalls; the intended market for them was either the laugh-loving churchgoer who wouldn't be caught dead in a theatre, or the parlor entertainer, the “clown of private life,” ready to make unwilling interlocutors of his nearest and dearest. In the 1870s, however, publishers aimed at the professional; Henry J. Wehman's 25¢ paperback Budget of Jokes was meant to fill a need of the evergrowing number of variety performers.

The National Theatre's 1975–1976 production of Hamlet was its first since the inaugural production of 1963, director Peter Hall's first since the 1965 Royal Shakespeare Company version, and Albert Finney's first attempt at the title role. Originally intended to be the first play done in the Olivier Theatre, the large thrust-stage auditorium in the National Theatre's new London building, it instead became one of the last to be presented at the Old Vic when construction delays postponed the opening of the new house. Hamlet opened at the Old Vic on 10 December 1975, and moved to the Lyttleton, the smaller proscenium theatre in the new building, on 16 March 1976, to continue in repertory through the year.

One aspect of Inigo Jones's work that has received little attention is his dual approach to staging at the Stuart court. The growing popularity of the masque and the important part Jones played in directing and moulding the form are well known. The Caroline masque in particular was a glittering and prestigious vehicle for Jones's experimentation with scenery and scenic devices, and one which displayed his creativity to the best possible advantage. With the emergence of recent works such as Orgel and Strong's Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, which concentrates almost wholly on the masque, it could be assumed that after Charles I ascended the throne in 1625, all of Jones's theatrical energies were directed towards scenic displays and his gradual approach towards fully perspective scenery.

Karaghiozis—Greek shadow puppet theatre—is a performance which developed in Greece over a period of a hundred fifty years, using local character types, costumes, and dialects, folk anecdotes, contemporary events, topical humor, themes and motifs of classical, hellenistic, and Byzantine origin, Greek legends, songs, and dances. It is modelled on a fourteenth-century Turkish prototype, Karagoz, which itself finds its roots in fool lore and the classical mime (the dominant form of entertainment in the eastern empire from the fourth century B.C. to 1400 A.D.). The Turkish performance was introduced into occupied Greece possibly as early as the seventeenth century (the time of the consolidation of the Turkish hold over Greece). It had certainly appeared by 1809, at which time the traveller John Hobhouse records the earliest known date of the Turkish performance in Greece.

The Garden of Eden is the first frontier of which we have record, and every subsequent new geographic region has been invested with the same sense of mystery and promise as the first one. Nowhere has this been more true than in America. From the time of its discovery it has been a promised land for those residing elsewhere, and after the initial settlement of the eastern seaboard its western territory continued to beckon. So strong and continuous was the appeal of the frontier that in 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner could assert: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.”

A few points are suggested by James Maloon's interesting article, “From Beast to Mad Beast: A Further look at Tyrone Guthrie's Tamburlaine” (TS, XVIII, No. 1). First, there seems to be no warrant for and no future in considering the two parts of Tamburlaine as a unifiable production. As John D. Jump reminds us:

The two parts were apparently designed for production in theaters of very different sorts. In Part II, the Captain commanding Balsera and the Governor of Babylon stand upon their respective city walls to parley with enemies below; in the scene of her death, Zenocrate is discovered on her bed, and an arras is drawn before her when Tamburlaine and the rest retire. In planning these scenes, Marlowe must have counted on a theater with an upper stage and a discovery-space. But he counted on nothing of the sort when writing Part I. Even the siege of Damascus is managed without the use of an upper stage. Part I could have been successfully performed on a simple platform stage, but the full resources of a well-equipped London theater would have been needed for Part II.