One of the ways a scholarly journal maintains the appearance of impartiality—or, as some would have it, hides its prejudices behind a façade of impartiality—is by not publishing the work of its staff. Why, then, are there so many pages of this issue taken up by Milhous and Hume? Like several other articles in this issue and the next, this piece was part of the backlog accepted by my predecessor, Roger Herzel. Despite the awkwardness of the situation, he and I agreed that the account book format made for technical difficulties best left to me to deal with. Even with the time to experiment and the printing equipment under my own control I have not been able to solve all the typographical problems, but I am happy to have been able to spare Roger the nuisance presented by this very technical piece.

The volumes of the Pasquali edition of Goldoni's collected works are preceded by pieces of critical autobiography. Issued in Venice in 1761, the year before Goldoni's move to Paris, they constitute his first extended commentary upon his achievement and the life adventures in and outside of the theatre from which so much of it was derived. Not the least embarrassing of these immodest essays was that in the first volume, which displayed Goldoni's pride in his precocity as a child playwright. More was perhaps said, though, in the engraved frontispiece than in the verbal boasting.

According to his good friend and first biographer, Artur Kutscher, Frank Wedekind decided to become a professional actor because he felt that his plays were being misrepresented to the public by actors who didn't understand the characters he had created. Specifically, the failure of the first performances of Der Marquis von Keith [1899] in 1901 spurred Wedekind, the chagrined playwright, to brush aside any hesitations that had previously deterred Wedekind, the amateur and occasional actor. Wedekind was a man of intense contradictions. He increasingly would aspire to the respectability of middle-class family life; yet his self-assumed, dogged notoriety as a bohemian was to frustrate this ambition to the end of his life. He was a playwright who both celebrated the awakening of human sexual vitality and at the same time probed its inherent life-destroying potential. In rendering his own unique understanding of human nature, the totality of expression to which he aspired as a playwright hurtled him, as an actor, right into the torrid center of the dramatic world he had created.

In 1599–1600, after a lapse of almost ten years, the children's acting companies reappeared in London. The Paul's Children seem to have been the first to resume playing, quietly and modestly, no doubt testing the waters. After all, the boys' companies had one after another been officially suppressed between 1584 and 1590 because of their penchant for controversial material and the continual litigation among investors in the various earlier companies. Seeing the growing success of Paul's Boys, one of these earlier investors, Henry Evans, a Welsh scrivener, worked to reconstitute a company of boy actors at Blackfriars, seeking to make good on his aborted first attempt as a theatrical entrepreneur.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened on Broadway on 13 October 1962. The author, producers, director and two leading actors won Tony Awards for that season; the play won the New York Drama Critics' Award, and two members of the Pulitzer Committee resigned when that group refused to give Virginia Woolf its top honor. This production of the play captured the vigor and emotional daring of off-Broadway, brought it uptown, and made it pay, running for 644 performances on Broadway. Early in 1964, when Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill repeated their roles in London for twelve weeks, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? became the first post-war American production to achieve a critical success in the West End. The story of this landmark production has been told piecemeal by writers in the popular press, by theatre historians, and in sharply differing accounts by its director, Alan Schneider. Collation of published testimony about the production with unpublished materials such as correspondence, diaries, and interviews with principals reveals the complex artistic process that led to the success of this play. The different versions of the story reveal the risks of storytelling and some of the challenges storytellers present to theatre historians.

Among several sets of books kept by the treasurer and others at Covent Garden for the 1735–36 season, two have been preserved. British Library Egerton MS 2267 is a typical daybook. It records the daily box office totals, which have been reported in The London Stage. The other book is harder to identify and use. It exists in two nineteenth-century copies, one of which—a fair copy in the Frederick Latreille volume, British Library Add. MS 32,251, pages 299–308—has long been known to scholars. Yet full advantage has never been taken of it, perhaps because it is a transcription, not an original document, and is buried in the midst of a larger compilation. The authors of the Biographical Dictionary have made good use of the salary figures for particular performers and house servants, but the scattered reportage inherent in that format only hints at the value of this material. As far as we are aware, no one has made any serious attempt to utilize a slightly fuller transcription of the same source preserved in the “R. J. Smith” scrapbooks in the British Library (shelfmark 11791.dd.18, vol. 3, folios 177–89).