Ever since the project of supplying objective knowledge was challenged by the debates about colonialism, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity, academics from different fields have begun to share a conception of knowledge as representational, differing primarily in the accounts of how their, “representations” are related to objects that are represented. Understandably, Plato's and Aristotle's definitions of mimesis have acquired new currency. According to Plato, whenever “you see one, you conceive of the other.” According to Aristotle, the relationship between techne and phusis is contained in the formulation that, on the one hand, art imitates nature; on the other hand, art carries to its end what nature is incapable of effecting. Both Plato and Aristotle perceive mimesis as the process of either epistemological or ontological repetition or doubling in which “one” (thought or subject) becomes “two” (thought or subject doubles as idea or object), in theatre studies, for example, the prevailing tradition defines representation in terms of a promise of a performative act. Such an act signifies that the “I” or “we” making the promise understands or knows the problem, the object, or the text and will be able to transfer it from nature, that is, from the real space, to the theatrical, “imaginary” space where the declaration of its existence and the formulation of its speech will be staged in a tight spotlight. This process is authorized by an institutional structure that safeguards the promise, its execution, and its use.

In the 1750s, Charles Macklin's theatrical career was in limbo. While he is now remembered and studied as an important playwright and one of the principal (and longest-lived) actors of the eighteenth century, by the mid-1750s he can only have felt that he was a failure. Poor relations with the managers of Drury Lane and Covent Garden, a series of unsuccessful plays, and a diminishing repertory of roles led to his (enforced) retirement in 1753. He then opened a tavern, which quickly bankrupted him. Too little attention has been paid to this grim period in Macklin's career and to the triumphant retrieval of his theatrical fortunes in 1759 with his farce Love à la Mode. The importance of Macklin's return to the stage was recognized by William W. Appleton, who devoted an entire chapter of his 1960 biography of Macklin to this episode. Nonetheless, several important biographical questions remained unanswered or insufficiently answered—questions I would like to reopen based on some newly discovered evidence.

On 29 December 1845, Charlotte Cushman did an extraordinary thing at the Haymarket theatre: she convincingly transformed herself into a man. Audience members who witnessed this performance were captivated by “the transmuting power” of Cushman's “genius” as she became Romeo. This production (and Cushman's Romeo in general) continues to fascinate both contemporary theatre historians and feminist scholars, who are equally impressed with Cushman's seeming ability to create an unsettling paradox. In a recent article, Anne Russell discusses the positive reception that Cushman's Romeo received and questions how the cross-dressed actress could have been so successful “in a period when dominant gender ideologies assumed clearly delineated separate spheres for men and women, when stage reviewers as a manner of routine assessed the ‘womanliness’ or ‘manliness’ of characters and performers.” As Russell explains, the nineteenth-century audience member, critic, and/or commentator read the human figure on stage as either male or female; indeed, such antithetic thinking was pervasive throughout nineteenth-century culture. Cushman was unique, however, in that she repeatedly defied such categorization, both in her theatrical performances and in her “private” life.

I start with the circumstantial evidence. The first year that the professional companies ever had specific amphitheatre playhouses in London to work in was 1594. Before that, they expected to live an essentially transient life, moving from one playing space to another. The Queen's Men, between 1583 and 1594, are recorded as playing at just about every location there was in London, three inns, and three suburban playhouses. On November 28, 1583, a city permit allowed them to perform, “at the sygnes of the Bull in Bushoppesgate streete, and the sygne of the Bell in Gratioustreete and nowheare els within this Cyttye.” The Bull is confirmed as one of their venues in Tarlton's Jests. They also were playing at the Theatre in about 1584 (Nashe reported them there in Pierce Penilesse, I.197, referring to Gabriel Harvey's Saturn and Jupiter, of 1583: “one in mockage threw him in this theame, he playing then at the Curtaine”). Finally, one of the two divided Queen's Men's groups played at the Rose early in 1594. The Queen's was the most uniquely privileged of companies, over whom the Lord Chamberlain fought with the Lord Mayor in 1584 to secure the right for that one company to use the city's inns. If it moved so thoroughly between playhouses, all the others must have done the same.

Although Aida Overton Walker (1880–1914) belonged to the same generation of turn-of-the-century African American performers as did Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson, Bert Williams, and George Walker, she had a rather different view of how best to represent her race and gender in the performing arts. Walker taught white society in New York City how to do the Cakewalk, a celebratory dance with links to West African festival dance. In Walker's choreography of it, it was reconfigured with some ingenuity to accommodate race, gender, and class identities in an era in which all three were in flux. Her strategy depended on being flexible, on being able to make the transition from one cultural milieu to another, and on adjusting to new patterns of thinking. Walker had to elaborate her choreography as hybrid, merging her interpretation of cakewalking with the preconceptions of a white culture that became captivated by its form. To complicate matters, Walker's choreography developed during a particularly unstable and volatile period. As Anna Julia Cooper remarked in 1892.

On November 17, 1677, Sir Popular Wisdom, or the Politician was performed at Dorset Gardens by the Duke of York's Company. All we know of the play comes from a letter of Andrew Marvel: “Today is acted the first time Sir Popular Wisdom, or the Politician where my Lord Shaftsbury and all his gang are sufficiently personated. I conceive the King will be there.” Though we are offered little else, the fact that Shaftsbury and his gang are ridiculed is, I think, enough to situate the play fairly with other royally endorsed parodies of the Whig party that found a ready marketplace in the King's Theatre in the years of fervent, 1677–1683. Plays such as John Crowne's The Ambitious Statesman (1679) and City Politiques (1682), Thomas D'Urfey's Sir Barnaby Whig (1681) and The Royalist (1682), and Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd (1681) all were having no end of sport lampooning the Whig platform, with scarcely the benefit of a rebuttal.

The first third of the nineteenth century is described by most theatre historians, from the enormously influential William Archer down to the present day, as the “winter solstice” of the British stage. The generally held estimation of the theatre in Britain at this time is that it was a wilderness of vulgarity, bad writing, and self-indulgent acting that pandered to the lowest common denominator of popular taste. This judgment is, of course, an ideological construct, and one that began to be forged at the time to which it is applied. I would contend that “the decline of the drama” was a concept generated in the press and in critical writing of the period for the particular purposes of a newly ascendant hegemonic fraction, the literate (and overwhelmingly male) middle classes, whose project was to recapture the stage, a powerful medium of communication, for the exclusive transmission of their own voice. One tool of this appropriation was the assertion of a superior public morality; and for that purpose it was necessary to cleanse the stage of its immoral associations—especially its association with independent women. It has recently been argued, by Julie Carlson, that “anxieties about women…drive the age's antitheatricality” and account for the failure of the canonical Romantic writers to produce plays.

Though it has been almost completely overlooked, the arbitrary cancellation of the Seattle Negro Repertory Company's 1936 Lysistrata provides a remarkable opportunity to explore the connections between a single, seemingly localized action and a network of socially, politically, and racially repressive forces. Lysistrata's closure on ostensibly moral grounds reveals the operation of a set of cultural and social controls masked as standards of decency. An array of racist assumptions as rigid as those anywhere in the country, though somewhat more subtle, obscured the generally repressive ends that the control system served, both in Seattle and nationwide. The incident thus provides clues to the institutionalized antireform mechanisms that soon coalesced in a successful congressional attack on the Works Project Administration's Federal Theatre Project (FTP), of which the Negro Repertory Company (NRC) was a major unit. The Lysistrata cancellation's connection with that broader offensive also demonstrates the manner in which Hallie Flanagan's “free, adult, uncensored” national theatre threatened the nation's essentially conservative political power structure and drew the decisive backlash that eventually overturned efforts at social change during the Depression Era.

“Of all of Shakespeare's works, The Merchant of Venice holds the greatest interest for Jews,” writes critic and theatre historian Bernard Gorin in 1911. Gorin's observation may seem so obvious today as to verge on the axiomatic, but Yiddish theatre practice in the 1890s, when Shakespeare's plays began being produced in Yiddish, would not in itself have led to such a conclusion. The only recorded Yiddish production of the play in New York during that decade ran for just one weekend in February 1894, and such a commercial failure would have been an unlikely export to other American cities.

In the fall of 1993, I had the pleasure of interviewing the world-renowned Czech scenographer Josef Svoboda. We spent some time talking about his career and his longevity as a designer, but it was his response to a question about a specific production that prompted further investigation. When asked about his first full-scale U.S. design for The Opera Company of Boston's 1965 production of Luigi Nono's Intolleranza, the already animated Svoboda exploded. His eyes sparkled as he recalled “the biggest, most complicated and best production I have ever done. It has not been surpassed since.” This was an intriguing comment from a man with over 700 designs to his credit in a career that has spanned six decades, and who has worked in virtually every major opera house and theatre in both Europe and America.

More than any other Caucasian critic of her generation, Rosamond Gilder created opportunities for people of color. While many critics came to find fault, Gilder helped African-American actors, playwrights, directors, scene designers and dancers, not only in her celebration and recognition of them, but in her fairness and objectivity in evaluating their work.

Two of the Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C., the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of American History, are celebrating Broadway and Hollywood with their collaborative exhibit “Red, Hot, and Blue: A Salute to American Musicals,” which runs 25 October 1996 to 6 July 1997, at the National Portrait Gallery.

This issue's cover illustration was selected from among the splendid engravings in the Folger Shakespeare Library's recent exhibition The Festive Renaissance. The show featured thirty-nine magnificent books printed between 1549 and 1768 that record some of the extravagant pageantry in which royal power celebrated itself on such occasions as coronations, weddings, births, baptisms, royal entries, processions, tournaments, state visits, and funerals. These pageant books and others, some so large and weighty that they defied efforts to exhibit them, are part of a bibliographic collection given to the Folger Library by Mrs. H. Dunscombe Colt, whom the exhibition honored. Armida Colt assembled the collection in collaboration with her late husband. The Director of the Folger Library, Werner Gundersheimer, described the Colt collection as one of the most important benefactions in the library's history.