The story of Molière and his theatre has been told a thousand times, the archives and libraries of France sifted again and again for the smallest nuggets of information. The story of the Comédie-Française after the union of 1680 has been almost as thoroughly studied. But the struggle of the survivors of the Troupe of the Palais Royal after Molière's death in 1673 has not attracted very much attention. Merged with the “better” actors of the Théâtre du Marais, Molière's widow and seven others were nearly lost in the murky political and economic seas of the 1670s and saved themselves, not with a new star or a new playwright, but with the most amazing display of spectacle ever seen on a Parisian public stage. The magic wand of Circé transformed the Troupe of the Hôtel Guénégaud into the profitable and secure enterprise which was to serve as the foundation of the French National Theatre.

The third quarter of the seventeenth century brought considerable changes in the social composition of theatre audiences in Italy. Gone was the exclusiveness of the ducal and academy theatres whose audiences of royalty and nobility attended by invitation only. These were replaced by an audience of a growing bourgeoisie with an ability to pay. As soon as this audience appeared entrepreneurs, quick to recognize the possibilities, opened public playhouses. Theatrical activities became a commercial rather than an artistic, intellectual or political enterprise. Although some vestiges of the past, such as the royal box for important dignitaries, were retained, public theatres soon assumed a more democratic aspect, patronized by audiences who had earned the right to attend by means of personal enterprise rather than by accident or privilege of birth. Foremost in this phenomenon was the city of Venice whose theatrical activities soon became the model. Mercantile families like the Tron, Grimani, Giustinian and Vendramini opened the first public playhouses in the 1630s. Audiences of courtiers and courtesans, Dukes and Doges, Princes and panderers, merchants and magistrates soon became involved in a social mix that would have amazed and scandalised the more formal audiences of earlier times.

The seven drawings shown below are designs for baroque stage machines identified as machines “for Venus and Mars” and are reproduced from MS Majie, V, 4, 1–38, The Archivio di Stato, Parma. These designs are particularly interesting since they are at the same time characteristic of baroque stage machines which performed similar functions, found in other sources, and yet unique for their simplicity, rendering them easy to interpret and understand. Although several of these designs have been published individually in various places, the group of seven is published here in its entirety for the first time. Together, these designs illustrate the use of sliding winches in the grid to produce spectacular effects on the stage as well as the “Mars machines.”

During the Siglo de Oro, the Golden Age of Spanish drama (1580–1680), the Spanish court sponsored many types of theatrical entertainments. The kings and queens of Spain enjoyed re-enactments of battles, processions using triumphal arches and cars, invenciones (scenic charades), ballets, and máscaras (masques). In addition to these theatrical forms, two major types of drama developed at court towards the end of the sixteenth century. N.D. Shergold refers to these forms as particulares, or command performances of plays from the public repertory, and festival plays: elaborate productions involving machines and Italianate scenery, which were performed on special occasions.

As a victim of “Garrick fever” for all of my adult life I admit to having accepted most modern-day criticism which avers that Garrick's supremacy in his age was due to his superior acting, strict management, rigourous attention to rehearsals, and consequent superiority over his Covent Garden and Haymarket rivals. All this is surely valid, but I remain curious about the “quality” of his casting and ensembles. Could it be that our critics today prefer romanticism to the practical truths of everyday operation of a repertory company in eighteenth-century London? Let us explore the situation once again.

When Richard Klepac's monograph on Charles Mathews' “At Homes” appeared a few years ago, it addressed a glaring need in early nineteenth-century British theatre history. Mathews, one of the lions of the stage in his era, had been too long neglected, and existing biographies, aside from the two-volume memoir assembled by his wife, consisted of no more than a few puffing pamphlets.

The Weimar Republic occupies a period in German history that has long fascinated students of theatre and drama. It was a period of profound change in German social, political, and cultural experience, and rarely has the confluence of those experiences figured so influentially upon the performance of William Shakespeare's plays. In decades previous to Weimar, German Shakespeare productions manifested the awed reverence in which the playwright was held, since most German actors, directors, and designers regarded Shakespeare in the same light as they did Goethe and Schiller. In 1864, for example, Germany celebrated the three-hundredth anniversary of the playwright's birth with the founding of the Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft and the proclamation that Shakespeare was not “a foreign poet, but one which England must share with us, due to his inborn Germanic nature.” In the Weimar Republic, however, the view of Shakespeare as playwright changed; it did so perhaps because everything else was changing in that volatile period, and also because Weimar culture encouraged innovation and experimentation. The republic itself, after all, was an experiment. If in retrospect the Weimar Republic's experimentation with democracy seems a failure, its success and achievement in painting, architecture, music, literature, and theatre cannot be denied. One overlooked area of particular achievement is the work of Weimar theatre artists who succeeded in their attempts to dismantle Shakespeare's status as a cultural icon.