In his history of the Crimean War Henry Tyrrell describes the victory celebration held in Green Park, London in 1856. The celebration began with a burst of color in the night sky. Then “for two hours, followed every conceivable design of elegant and dazzling pyrotechnic art. Flights of rockets, a hundred at a time; revolving wheels, suns, stars, golden streamers, and fiery serpents chas[ed] each other through the air.… The triumph, however, of the entertainment was reserved for the close of it.…” A stationary piece blazing and revolving fantastically, “exhibited the words ‘God save the Queen. … ‘”

The expanding American western frontier of the early nineteenth century was followed closely by travelling theatre companies. Since one of the primary modes of transportation was the riverboat, it is not surprising that floating theatres soon dominated theatrical activity in the towns along America's interior waterways. While the floating theatres often competed with land-based attractions, they also faced significant competition from other floating entertainments. One of the most successful of these was Spalding and Rogers' Floating Palace, which at various times operated as a floating circus, floating menagerie, and floating museum.

The Louisville burlesque war began in July of 1908 and ended in late August, 1909, with the opening of the Columbia Amusement Company's Gayety Theatre. In all, there were over ten court cases and thousands of dollars expended by both sides. It was a conflict which, with the help of the press, moved from a private business matter to embroil the whole community. Beyond its local significance, however, the “Gayety Theatre war” foreshadowed a revolution in national burlesque business.

Theatrical performance has often played an important role in communicating the manners and morals of one culture to another. In the main the information so communicated is valid and the impact is positive. There are instances, however, where one culture's theatre, yielding to its popular nature, has been too quick to apply the assumptions of its own concept of what foreign cultures ought to be. The effect then may be widespread misinformation about other peoples.

One of the more obscure episodes in the long history of the English stage is the foundation and short-lived existence of a French language Royal Academy of Music in the early 1670s. I intend to sum up here the evidence so far available and to show, using for the purpose a double MS. of Pierre Perrin's Ariane in the Bibliothèque Nationale, together with a few other documents, that the enterprise was indeed a very serious one, and was modelled on an earlier and very similar attempt in Paris a few years previously.

Until recently, the subject of Calderón's dominance of eighteenth-century popular theatre has been a closed case. What discussion there had been was centered on the heated polemics which surged during the second half of the century between the rabidly anti-Calderonian neo-classicists and the pro-Calderonian nationalists. Despite their conflicts over the literary and dramatic quality of his work, the general consensus on both sides was that Calderón's plays enjoyed widespread popularity among theatre-goers, and that his style influenced successive generations of dramatists throughout the century.

Since the publication of the John Philip Kemble Promptbooks in the Folger Library Series, it has been possible to determine both the extent and kind of changes made by Kemble in those roles most clearly associated with the great eighteenth-century actor-manager. Of these signature roles, perhaps none was so perfectly suited to his peculiar talents nor so universally acclaimed, by both his critics and supporters alike, as the role of Penruddock in Richard Cumberland's The Wheel of Fortune.

The year 1714 has long been acknowledged as the publication date of America's earliest extant play, Androboros, a short and bawdy political farce by Col. Robert Hunter, governor of the New York colony from 1710 to 1719. Some scholars even go so far as to cite August 1, 1714 as the exact date, and not without good reason. The title page of the only known copy, now in the Huntington Library, clearly states: “Printed at Monoropolis since 1st August, 1714.” Such evidence would appear to be conclusive were it not for two references within the playscript itself that prove Androboros was written and printed no earlier than 1715.

Bernard Dukore's “Clarification” of my review of the Analytical Sourcebook by Brownstein and Daubert raises some questions of sufficient importance to justify, I believe, some further discussion. The Diderot matter is a fairly minor one, though I must maintain that heading a section “Denis Diderot” which is made up of six short pieces, five actually by other writers, is potentially misleading, footnotes or not, the evidence being that Brownstein and Daubert were in fact so misled.