Although most of the extant plays acted by children's troupes were performed in the late 1590s or 1600s, the companies themselves actually grew out of the elaborately formalized court life of the late Middle Ages, and their social functions changed remarkably little over the years. We can therefore best understand certain aspects of this diversified body of work by studying the role played by the children's troupes in the ritualistic entertainments which Elizabeth and James inherited from their Lancaster and Tudor forebears.

When John Hodgkinson made his American debut at Philadelphia's Southwark Theatre on 26 September 1792, he was hailed as “superior to any other actor” who had yet appeared in the United States. For some ten years thereafter, Hodgkinson remained the unrivalled leading performer of the Old American Company in all the principal theatrical centers in America. In New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, the actor and his wife, Frances Brett Hodgkinson, dominated the bills of the troupe managed initially by Lewis Hallam and John Henry. They eventually became, in 1800, the highest paid performers in American stage history up to that time. (Hodgkinson received $70 weekly, his wife, $50. In comparison, Mr. and Mrs. Hallam, whose combined salary was second highest, received $50.)

Considerations of developing realistic acting styles on the English stage between the debut of Macready in 1817 and the triumph of Fechter in 1860 usually focus their attention on Macready, Charles Kean, and Phelps. Although these three men differed significantly in their approaches to acting, their styles shared in common a romantic goal that René Wellek attributes to Coleridge: “to domesticate the wonderful.” The means of attaining this goal varied. Macready relied on developing the audience's appreciation of his conscious artifice at playing domesticated points. He was, consequently, less realistic than Phelps and Kean, who were primarily concerned with trying to make an audience feel what they believed their characters felt. This concern with transmitting character feeling is compatible with Kean's excellence at gentlemanly melodrama and Phelps' ability at playing the pathetic elements in comic characters.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century the average life of a theatre in Europe was about twenty years; the life expectancy of a theatre in the United States was much less. Chances were that the theatre would burn. Nothing seemed sufficient to prevent accidental fires from getting started, and, once the fires had begun, they could rarely be brought under control. In practically every case, however, the general public remained indifferent to its safety. Theatres destroyed by fire were rebuilt, reopened, and refilled almost immediately. Three major theatre catastrophes spanned the nineteenth century in America: the burning of the Theatre in Richmond in 1811, where seventy died; the fire at Mrs. Conway's Theatre in Brooklyn in 1876, which killed two hundred and eighty-five; and the worst of the theatre disasters, the Iroquois Theatre fire in Chicago in 1903, where six hundred and two perished. These were the most devastating fires in a century during which hundreds of theatres burned, many thousands of dollars worth of property was destroyed, and well over a thousand spectators lost their lives. Such tragedies were in the general pattern of conflagrations in America throughout the nineteenth century. Imagine a closely built-up street running from New York to Chicago. If all the buildings on both sides of that street were burned, the loss would equal the estimated costs from fires in this country in 1907.

The most magnificent of the Restoration playhouses, yet the one with the most lamentable history, was the Dorset Garden. Conceived by Sir William Davenant, the building was not erected until after his death. Though it was the most expensive and lavishly equipped of all the theatres built between 1660 and 1700, it fell into partial disuse eleven years after it opened and was demolished in 1709 after a life of only thirty-eight years.