In his informative account of Bernard Shaw as a director, William Armstrong has noted a distinctive practice of the playwright during the rehearsal period:“…Shaw regularly sent private letters or postcards to his actors to supplement the advice he gave them in the theatre. It is to be hoped that one day a more or less complete collection of these documents will be made. They will reveal not only his great mastery of detail but also the remarkable shrewdness with which he adjusted his powers of persuasion to actors with very different temperaments.” Vast indeed is the undertaking Armstrong proposes, but it is possible to proceed towards its realization with respect to particular plays. Such documentation can be supplemented in some cases by the testimony of actors and other theater artists who worked with Shaw, by data from the extant prompt copies of his productions, and by his rehearsal notes. The result would do much not only to illuminate the particulars of his directorial performance, but to clarify many specific problems of dramatic interpretation as well.

In nineteenth-century greenrooms one of the most frequently quoted of David Garrick's remarks concerned his reaction when it was suggested that he introduce the toga and Roman hairstyles to the stage: “I have already stood my ground against the pelting of oranges, but I dare not venture to confront flying benches and bottles.” From the days of Kemble onwards, this comment has, for many theatrical historians, defined Garrick's place in the revolution in costuming taste which began in the mid-eighteenth century and culminated nearly a century later. A pioneer of historical realism, Garrick appears nonetheless a circumspect one; his “progress” was considerable, yet marked by a sense of restraint, either because his own taste was insufficiently advanced or because he shrewdly stopped short of affronting the taste of his audience. Whether one applauds historical costuming or (in the fashion of our own times) bemoans it, one still tends to leave Garrick in the limbo of the “transitional.”

William Winter, that arbiter of affairs dramatic during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, after paying high tribute in Shakespeare on the Stage to the greatness of Ellen Terry as an actress, dismisses her as a lecturer on Shakespeare with a few lines. Declaring that she would have been well advised to follow in the footsteps of Fanny Kemble and Charlotte Cushman by giving Shakespearean “readings” rather than lectures, he concludes that “Her views…were often incorrect, generally commonplace, and, in the matter of thought, superficial.” (p. 225)

Since Edwin Booth was so generally considered the best American actor of his time (some say of all time), and since Hamlet was his best known and most frequently performed role, our interest in it is more than academic. Booth knew Hamlet as well as any man in his century. His particular illumination of the role—an intellectual, neurotic, romantic Hamlet—has become a part of our own understanding of the character and has been reflected in the recent interpretations of Burton, O'Toole, and Plummer.

Booth first played Hamlet in California, at the suggestion of his father, Junius Brutus Booth, and it quickly became his most celebrated role. When Edwin joined with John (Sleeper) Clarke and William Stuart in the management of the Winter Garden Theatre in New York, Hamlet was his first production. It had a phenomenal run of one-hundred nights, setting a record which was not eclipsed for some time.

Unquestionably an awning or system of awnings was used as a protective cover over Roman theatres and amphitheatres during the Empire. Its appearance and operation however, still puzzle theatre historians.

Because only scanty descriptive evidence of it is available, historians mention the awning barely, if at all. What comments they do make are often incorrect. For example, Bieber's statement that the awnings were “to protect the spectators from rain and sunburn” is true only of the sunburn. In the light of this and other misconceptions about the Roman awning, a review of the evidence is now in order.