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.

For eight days in January 1919 the theatre industry was at war with the U.S. Congress, a nationwide event surprisingly overlooked in previous theatre history. Theatre management and its host of workers joined with the public to wage a well-orchestrated campaign in the newspapers and mail, in the theatres and on the streets to stop what was perceived as a gross injustice to the American theatre and its paying audience.

When the United States Congress was framing a six billion dollar tax revenue bill to recover exorbitant war costs from the first world war, it attempted to slip in a new tax which would raise theatre admissions by ten per cent in order to return between seventy-five and eighty-one million dollars to the government. The original bill levied a twenty per cent tax on all tickets of admission above thirty cents (thus most movie houses were exempt). In addition box seat holders at theatres and the opera were to be taxed twenty-five per cent.

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.

The early twentieth century found American suffragists experimenting with a diverse array of techniques to argue their cause. Among those who gave their talents to this effort was a skilled theatrical professional, Hazel MacKaye (1888–1944). A radical suffragist, MacKaye was a charter member of the Congressional Union, which in 1914 formally split off from the National American Woman Suffrage Association and evolved into the militant wing of the suffrage movement, the National Woman's Party. Hazel MacKaye created four women's rights pageants to propagandize for the suffragists between the years 1913 and 1923, which this paper will describe and examine.

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.

On the night of 7 June 1861, at a playhouse in Albany, New York, actress Adah Isaacs Menken, on horseback, wearing nothing but a fleshcolored bodystocking, galloped up a stage mountain into theatrical history. The combination of danger and nudity shocked and excited her Victorian audience. In an age when women swathed themselves in yards of crinoline, her performance proved scandalous; critics agreed that, though she wore “pink fleshings,” she so explicitly revealed the female form that she might as well have been naked. One reviewer warned that “no pure youth could witness her performance and come away untainted. Naturally, such cautions increased curiosity; soon Menken became the most notorious, highest paid actress of her day. She toured with her show Mazeppa through the northeast, the American west, and the capitals of Europe before succumbing to cancer a short seven years later in Paris.

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.

How popular was The Merry Wives of Windsor in the eighteenth century? Because records show that the original, unadapted version of the play was performed a substantial number of times, scholars have usually assumed that it was both a critical and theatrical success during this period. This opinion is, however, based on an incomplete picture of the play's stage history, and it does not take into account the importance of casting to a play's popularity. A review of commentaries and theatrical records indicates that we should alter our view of the comedy's place in the eighteenth-century repertory. The play was not, overall, as popular as has long been believed, and it owed much of its vogue to James Quin in the role of Falstaff.

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).

To nineteenth-century theatre managers, who believed in the play as a commercial venture rather than an aesthetic one, portrayal of the modern American woman presented a dilemma. Sophisticated theatregoers, familiar with the rhetoric of the women's suffrage movement, looked to female role models for direction on how to maintain a delicate balance between independence and subservience: to project strength of convictions without loss of femininity (traditionally measured by male desirability), and to remain dependent on the economic necessity of marriage (Ziff, 278–80). Speculative theatre managers found Shakespeare's comedies especially adaptable to modern audience's tastes because the plays lacked stage directions, required no royalty payments, were exempt from copyright laws, and centered on ambiguous female characters. American audiences, believing they were becoming cultured, supported Shakespearean revivals, and strongly applauded those plays Americanized by theatre managers. Two late nineteenth-century productions of Much Ado About Nothing, one in 1882 by Henry Irving, the other in 1896 by Augustin Daly, clearly demonstrate how each speculative manager, acting in the name of art, refashioned Shakespeare's text and interpreted Beatrice around his own ideal of femininity, an ideal each believed American audiences would endorse.

The Academy of Music in Charleston, South Carolina, opened its doors in December 1869 to a public who, according to the local newspaper, “for the past four years … had been sighing for, writing for, combining for, and begging for–a first class Opera House and Theatre.” This first post-Civil War theatre in Charleston had inherited a theatre history dating back to as early as 1703, as well as an ardent and long-standing interest in Shakespearean playgoing which, despite the Civil War's devastating interruption, continued to be an essential part of the city's way of life for the next two decades. Because of its importance as both a literary and a drama centre before the Civil War, Charleston has already attracted the attention of several theatre historians, and numerous studies have been made of this city's brilliant antebellum stage. However, there were no records of Charleston's post-Civil War theatre until I undertook my study of the Academy of Music, the principal playhouse between 1869 and 1936—indeed, its only post-Civil War theatre except for approximately seven years between 1888 and 1893 when the Charleston Opera House offered sporadic entertainment. Particularly in the first three decades of the Academy of Music, the worlds of audience and stage seem to have coincided to a remarkable degree. Charleston's theatre years between 1869 and 1899 offer insights into the changing cultural attitudes and needs of an impoverished Southern city as its leaders struggled to meet the challenges of that difficult time. The best theatrical index to such cultural changes I have found is the degree of the Charlestonians' response to Shakespearean drama during these transitional years.