“There is, indeed, little doubt,” the formidable scholar James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps confidently explained to the Victorian readers of his Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, “that the Birth-place did not become one of the incentives for pilgrimage until public attention had been specially directed to it at the time of the Jubilee.” That's broadly true. The earliest reference to the three-gabled, half-timbered house (two houses, originally) on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon as the birthplace of William Shakespeare dates only from the late 1750s, when it was so named in Samuel Winter's town map. During the Stratford Jubilee, which David Garrick organized in 1769, the “small old house,” as the actor's first biographer called it, was fully recognized and promoted as the place where Shakespeare was born. Even so, Halliwell-Phillipps's observation conceals more than it reveals, because there is also little doubt that the dwelling that tradition calls Shakespeare's birthplace did not suddenly acquire that status during the first week of September 1769. The process by which the unremarkable piece of real estate that John Shakespeare purchased sometime in the late sixteenth century was transformed into what Barbara Hodgdon has rightly called the “controlling ideological center” of Shakespeare biography was long, slow, and far from inevitable. That process is the subject of this essay.

Although the long-awaited murder of Arden in the anonymous Arden of Faversham (ca. 1592) takes place during a game of tables, or what we call backgammon,1 critics have been quick to overlook the choice of game in this climactic scene, underestimating its importance to the play's central concerns and even mistakenly calling it a game of dice or cards.2 These games do share some common features—backgammon, for instance, involves the use of dice—but the distinctions among them are significant, especially for the play's often-observed interests in geography and place. In attending to the intersection between games and theatre, I participate in a long tradition of performance studies scholarship. But in contrast to much of this scholarship, I emphasize the formal qualities of particular games—which vary widely from one game to another—arguing that different games call for unique competencies in players and in spectators of games.3Arden of Faversham reflects on spatial relations in the early modern theatre by staging and enacting the ludic competencies peculiar to backgammon.

Although Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin is widely credited with helping turn the nation against slavery and hastening the Civil War, the theatrical productions based on her novel have precisely the opposite reputation. Many scholars believe that despite the initial antislavery influence of George L. Aiken's 1852 dramatization, the Uncle Tom plays rapidly degraded, becoming more harmful than helpful to African Americans. The plays are also frequently blamed for turning Uncle Tom, the heroic Christian martyr of Stowe's novel, into the submissive race traitor his name connotes today. The “process of vulgarization” that afflicted the Uncle Tom's Cabin dramas is said to have begun almost immediately, with the 1852 premiere of H. J. Conway's adaptation. Today, Conway's version is widely designated a pro-Southern or compromise dramatization of Uncle Tom's Cabin, especially compared to Aiken's influential adaptation, which is considered to have the strongest antislavery message of the many adaptations and to be the most faithful to Stowe's novel.

Whether through its association with 1789 or 1830, with the German labor movement of the nineteenth century, or the fight against fascism in the twentieth, the stirring sound of the national anthem of France is familiar to us all.1 (And film buffs everywhere have a powerful image of this last association thanks to the unforgettable depiction of the song in Casablanca.) Less well known is that this famous song, though feared during the 1790s as the terrorist “chant” of the guillotine,2 also provided René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt with the ingredients, and a ready-made dramaturgical recipe, for inventing a new theatrical genre.3 With its simple division of the world into vulnerable, imperiled enfants on the one hand, and powerful, plotting tyrans on the other, and its demand that the latter be killed, “La Marseillaise” may well have helped to stoke the fire of the Terror and certainly helped legitimize its violence. But in terms of its plot, characters, and politicomoral thought, even in terms of its diction and spectacle,4 “La Marseillaise” also laid down the dramaturgical rules for playwriting in revolutionary Paris, showing the father of melodrama how to make for the happiness of the enfants de la patrie—those in the audience and those on the stage.

Returning fresh from her summer vacation, the suntanned managing director of Gothenburg City Theatre, Karin Kavli (1906–90), proudly announced at a press conference in early August 1955 that she had secured the rights to produce the European premiere of Tennessee Williams's acclaimed play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.1 Well aware of the importance of creating a balanced repertoire that would satisfy the more artistically and literally minded audience and those who wanted some lighter forms of entertainment, Kavli understood that hosting the premiere of Williams's latest drama was quite a coup, especially in an age when television had begun to pose a great threat to theatre.

During his final years in exile, Oscar Wilde derived as much income as he could from selling the rights to his as-yet-unpublished writings. Although at that time he was as pragmatic in his approach to the business of authorship as he had been during the height of his dramatic career in the early 1890s, Wilde nonetheless resisted publishing one of his earliest plays, the 1883 blank-verse tragedy The Duchess of Padua. In an 1898 letter to Robert Ross, Wilde noted of the play (which was finally produced in 1891) that “The Duchess is unfit for publication—the only one of my works that comes under that category. But there are some good lines in it.” Wilde had not always had such a dim view of his second completed play. Indeed, he once promoted it as “the masterpiece of all my literary work, the chef-d'oeuvre of my youth” and had worked hard to see it produced. Literary history, however, has tended to concur with Wilde's more mature assessment of the play's artistic merits. Katharine Worth, one of the few critics to assess the play in detail, suggests that it “is the one completed play of Wilde's which can scarcely be imagined in a modern performance.” Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small place the play among a group of early works by Wilde that “have been judged by modern critics to be failures.” According to their view, The Duchess “is seen as an embarrassment.” This essay instead regards The Duchess as an uneven experiment in both staging aestheticism and late Victorian theatrical “archaeology,” a practice that sought to mount historical dramas with as much accuracy and precision in costume and design as possible. In a letter to Mary Anderson, the American actress whom he hoped would star in the play, Wilde contextualized the spectacle to which he aspired in The Duchess: “the essence of art is to produce the modern idea under an antique form.”

In the climactic scene of James Baldwin's 1968 novel Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, the narrator and protagonist, Leo Proudhammer, appears with his friend and lover Barbara in the living room of a Jewish acting teacher named Saul San-Marquand, the artistic director of the Actors’ Means Workshop. Leo and Barbara have been hanging around the small town in New Jersey where the Workshop has decamped for the summer season. At last, they have been given their promised chance to perform a scene for Saul, who will decide on the basis of that scene whether or not they will be accepted as members of the Workshop. They have prepared a scene from Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty in which Flor and Sid, a young couple, break off their relationship under pressure from Flor's brother. Leo, who is black, and Barbara, who is white, have just admitted their love for each other; their impossible interracial relationship underlies the novel. When they arrive in Saul's apartment, they have just walked through town together to the obscene and threatening jeers of the white townspeople, validating their decision, made in bed hours earlier, that their relationship can never be public.

In The Great Wet Way, a humorous account of transatlantic travel, American theatre critic Alan Dale represents ocean liners as sites of transformation, frivolity, and performance. In the passage above, he ponders the peculiar metamorphosis that overtakes him whenever he crosses the Atlantic. Cut off from the hustling world of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, he loses his “real self,” becoming instead an autograph-hunting, bridge-playing, opera-glassing “ship self.” It is as though the ship has remade Dale and the social world around him (Fig. 1). Within this altered world, new sights become old sights, and eccentric clothing or mannerisms come to seem commonplace. Dale recalls seeing a young woman wearing a Panama hat covered with autographs from her fellow passengers. If the woman dared to “walk down Broadway or Fifth Avenue wearing that hideous autograph hat,” he writes, “[s]he would probably be followed by a howling and derisive mob. . . . Yet on board she was unmolested. After the first few days nobody noticed the autograph hat.”

Editor's Note: In this previously unpublished conversation from 2007, Tina Takemoto and Angela Ellsworth discuss their collaboration during a period when Ellsworth was diagnosed with and underwent treatment for Hodgkin's lymphoma. For those compelling collaborations, the artists confronted the effects of diagnosis and prognosis on the experience of embodiment, the gendered and racialized practices of medical care, and the limits of empathy in communicating across illness/health. In this conversation, Takemoto and Ellsworth reconvene after a crisis in their collaborations to work through the complications that arose for each in their attempts to stage and manage performances that would make a difference in the treatment of cancer. This interview was conducted in New York City on 16 September 2007.

Editor's Note: For this issue of Critical Stages, Ari Osterweis and Barbara Browning consider the multiple publics at play in the work of artist-performer Narcissister.

Patience Worth, a British Puritan girl who lived and died sometime in the seventeenth century, produced a prolific four million words in the form of novels, plays, poems, prayers, and short stories. “Produced” is the best word for what she did; we certainly can't say she “wrote” them. We can't, in fact, say that Patience Worth existed at all. But neither can we comfortably say that Pearl Pollard Curran (1883–1937) wrote the material in question, though she is usually credited as its author. Between 1913 and 1937, Curran (Fig. 1), a St. Louis, Missouri, housewife, spoke these four million words aloud (often in an idiosyncratic, pseudo-Shakespearean dialect) with the aid of a Ouija board and a planchette. A series of secretaries transcribed what she said: Curran claimed that Worth was a thwarted authoress who had long been searching from beyond the grave for a suitable host and that she had selected Curran as her channel. Some of the material she (they?) generated was ultimately published with the assistance of Casper S. Yost (1863–1941), editor of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and founder of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Intrepid librarians have cataloged this perplexing material in ways that attempt to account for its convoluted provenance: “Hope Trueblood, by Patience Worth, communicated through Mrs. John H. Curran, edited by Casper S. Yost, published by Henry Holt and Company, 1918.” Questions of authorship, ownership, and voice are central to this perplexing body of work.

For generations, scholars of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spanish drama have been attempting to define the parameters that characterize the comedia suelta, but to date no firm consensus about the form's textual or generic qualities has been reached. Broadly defined, the term comedia suelta embraces theatrical works written in a variety of styles, including farsas (short, humorous, carnivalesque texts); sainetes (short productions or distinct portions of larger works that are normally danced and sung); eglogas (brief pastoral works, often with sad or somber overtones); entremeses (concise comedic pieces emphasizing the burlesque and the grotesque); and autos (succinct allegorical religious productions frequently tied to the celebration of the Eucharist). Other theatrical forms and subgenres current in Spanish drama of the period might also easily be classified as sueltas, depending on one's particular point of view.

The three books that have recently been traveling between my desk and an airplane seat are placed by their respective publishers into the following categories: “business/marketing,” “economics & finance,” and “popular culture/American anthropology.” Yet each of these recent publications has something to say to and about our field as well; the authors engage with theatre, theatricality, and performance as crucial to their interrogations of the contemporary world.