My subject this afternoon is “Early American Professional Acting.” To those who have not dipped into the beginnings of theatre history in this country, it may come as a surprise to learn that it's a vast subject, with a huge cast of characters, more scenes than the fourth act of Anthony and Cleopatra, and that liberal use of time which so offended Sir Philip Sidney.

Apollo is the god of measure. “Captain of Sevens,” his cithara brought seven-stringed order to music and seven-walled order to Thebes. As god of measure, symmetry informs the myth describing his birth: amid the Cycladic islands (which the Greeks considered a circle surrounding Delos) four adamantine columns bore Delos above the foam as Leto gave birth to the shining god. And, as in the birth of the Greek god of measure, so also in the emergence of the Greek world: a strict symmetry prevails in the myth describing how the omphalos, the earth's navel stone, came to be at the locus of what was to become Apollo's sacred seat. Zeus, it was told, freed two eagles from the ends of the earth, their paths crossing at the earth's center, at Delphi. The symmetric image of this aerial encounter over the terrestrial center suggests schematically the Apolline triad: two tensional extremes and, at the point of balance, a mediating mean.

On April 7, 1919, almost exactly two years after the United States had entered World War I, the Vieux-Colombier theatre gave its final performance in New York, where it had spent the last eighteen months of the war presenting two seasons of repertory. The rather surprising presence of Jacques Copeau's troupe in New York at this time can be largely attributed to the war itself. Copeau had first been dispatched on a lecture tour in January of 1917 by the French Ministry of Fine Arts, with the aim of “countering German propaganda in the realm of culture,” strengthening ties between France and the United States, and stemming the tide of pro-German feeling then running in America. Though Copeau had already performed a similar task in Switzerland and was aware of the significance of his brief, his approach was subtle. Clayton Hamilton tells us that in the six lectures he delivered Copeau “talked to us of art and Molière, and said no word about the war … talked to us only about Truth and Beauty in the midst of many things succumbing momentarily to death. We welcomed Jacques Copeau because he wore the face of Dante.…”

The past fifteen years have been a period of active revisionism in the study of the stage history of medieval England. Through the efforts of Richard Southern, Martial Rose, and others, we have gained a quite different perspective on the staging of the religious drama of the Middle Ages. Now the Cornish plays are no longer considered to be an aberration, for we have seen the principle of stationary performance extended to Wakefield and Lincoln, and enough questions have been raised concerning performance in York that processional staging even there seems doubtful. More and more we are being led to the conclusion that not processional staging on pageant carts, but stationary performance was the norm in England, just as it was on the Continent.