Among the many devices of the pageant carpenter's art, including the Trees of Jesse, mountains “inuironed with red roses and white,” thrones of justice, dragons, and fonts, the castle had become, at least by the mid-fifteenth century, practically a cliché. Its origins as a pageant structure, however, have yet to be satisfactorily explained, and its iconography is still open to interpretation. Theatre historians have long been interested in the “castle” pageant that the Goldsmiths' guild organized for the coronation of Richard II because it is the first English civic pageant for which any detailed description survives. The nineteenth-century antiquary, William Herbert, believed there to be no record of the “castle” pageant in the Company's own books, however, and following this lead, Robert Withington, the great compiler of pageant history, so reports the matter.

David Garrick played King Lear ninety times over the course of his career, a figure which qualifies the mad king as the most frequently performed among his tragic roles. Such frequency is not, I think, an accident; nor are the profusion and enthusiasm of contemporary accounts of Garrick in the role the result of chance. In this essay I shall depart both from the previous scholarly treatments of Garrick's Lear which have amassed eyewitness accounts of the performance, letting these speak essentially for themselves, and from those which have treated Garrick's alteration of King Lear as if it referred only to other pre-existent versions of the play.

Bassanio's words, as he chooses the correct casket to win Portia as his wife, might offer an insight to the production history of the Royal Shakespeare Company:

An impressive number of the RSC's greatest theatrical triumphs have been stagings of Shakespeare's “meager lead,” his lesser or minor plays. To seek the common element in these surprising coups, I will examine four productions of such plays, one from each of the conventional generic categores, and spanning four decades in the history of the RSC: Brook's Love's Labor's Lost (1946) and Titus Andronicus (1955), Hall's and Barton's Troilus and Cressida (1960), Hands' Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III (1977).

The commedia dell'arte, which spanned three centuries from the sixteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth and nationalities as diverse as Italian, French, Austrian, Polish, and English, went through a number of metamorphoses before it attained the form we now associate with it. Very briefly, that form is based on stock characters (Arlecchino, Pantalone, Il Dottore, Pedrolino or Pierrot, etc.), improvisation around standard plots, and the use of masks. In Italy, this kind of commedia was established by the end of the sixteenth century. In this paper, I would like to explore the developments that led to this form, concentrating especially on the convention of maschere (stock characters) as it appeared early in sixteenth century Venice and the Veneto. I concentrate on Venice because it is there that these maschere first developed and were then elaborated into the kind of characterization that becomes the defining feature of the commedia dell'arte.

In a seminal article entitled “The Development of Theatre on the American Frontier, 1750–1890,” published in the May, 1978, issue of Theatre Survey, Douglas McDermott began synthesizing information about the nineteenth-century American theatre available in books, journals, theses, dissertations, and unpublished primary sources. His thesis of a three-phase development of American frontier theatre—consisting of small and strolling troupes, then standard repertory companies in small towns, and finally resident urban companies—must now be tested and modified by detailed examinations of particular stars, families, and companies touring in provincial America. This study of the Jefferson company corrects, supports, and expands McDermott's theory with evidence about one group of American actors who trouped, in various combinations, through the East, Mid-West, and South from 1830 to 1845.

A number of questions about Stanislavski's writings on acting and the theatre still hang in the air nearly fifty years after his death. It seems curious that this should be the case when the ideas and books by the great Russian director-actor-teacher are so well known and have exerted such a profound influence on the modern theatre. The persistence of these questions through the years has even raised doubts concerning the authenticity of the writings attributed to Stanislavski and the accuracy of translations from his original Russian texts. As a result, serious students of Stanislavski's “System” feel unable to discriminate among the current interpreters of the man born Konstantin Sergeyevich Alexeyeff.