W. B. Worthen, I suggested in a review of his Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (1997), swims with the sharks. So thorough is his argumentation, so sophisticated is his mapping of contemporary theory and scholarship, so tenacious is he to prove irrefutably his wisest and most commonsensical points, so determined is he to use the masters' theoretical tools to tear down the theory masters' houses, that he sometimes, almost inadvertently, appears to be making the very points he is in fact refuting.

Benjamin Griffin takes an innovative approach to studying the history-play genre in early modern England. Rather than comparing history plays to their chronicle sources or interrogating their political implications, Griffin studies their relationships with other early modern English dramas, contextualizing them for “those who wish . . . to understand the history play by way of the history of plays” (xiii). He seeks to identify the genre's distinct characteristics by selecting a relatively broad spectrum of plays and examining their dramatic structure, their historical content, and their audiences' relationship to the subject matter.

I was introduced to sourcebooks as an undergraduate in the 1960s. At that time, the most frequently used were A. M. Nagler's A Sourcebook in Theatrical History (1952), Toby Cole's Directors on Directing (1963), and Toby Cole and Helen Chinoy's Actors on Acting (1948). These books first introduced me to the process of theatre history, and as I believe it is important to introduce this process to students, I continued to use both Nagler and the Cole and Chinoy volume, which was expanded in 1970, in teaching theatre history.

Readers excited by the recent and growing body of work on audience studies, such as Richard Butsch's The Making of American Drama, will be pleased to discover in Neil Blackadder's Performing Opposition a lucid historical examination of a very specific kind of theatre audience: the protesting one. Covering the scandals that greeted performances of plays by Hauptmann, Jarry, Synge, O'Casey, and Brecht, Blackadder provides us with a thorough reading of the events themselves, based on extensive use of firsthand accounts, reviews, court decisions, and more, as well as with a useful contextualization of the protests within the increasingly detailed—and important—history of theatre audiences.

Gaspare Vigarani, the Italian architect and set designer, was hired in 1659 to build a new theatre in the Tuileries Palace for the festivities celebrating Louis XIV's marriage in 1660. This theatre, the ill-fated albeit magnificent Salle des Machines, was not completed in time for the wedding celebration. It opened in February 1662 with a production of Cavalli's opera Ercole amante. His sons Carlo and Ludovico had assisted Vigarani in creating the scenery and machinery for this production. In 1663, Carlo was invited back to France to supervise royal entertainments, a function he exercised until 1680. In 1673, he joined the composer Lully at the newly created Académie royale de musique, where he designed scenery until 1680. Jean Berain, who was named to the post of “dessinateur de la chambre et du cabinet du Roi” in 1674, had assisted Vigarani early in his career and designed costumes for Lully's operas. He succeeded Vigarani as set designer at the Opera in 1680, a post he would hold until 1710.

The century that featured two world wars, mass murder, and nuclear terror was also a century in which clowns ceased to be comic. So Donald McManus suggests in his book about clowns who face their own deaths: suicides, mock executions, and hangings. No wonder the book is titled No Kidding! That phrase is a translation of the Swiss clown Grock's “Sans blââgue!”—words through which the popular circus artist indicated “to his audience the potentially serious nature of his comic turns,” according to McManus (11).

The title of Robert Henke's latest book accurately reflects its innovative contents. The close study of manuscript and printed texts of various kinds—contracts, letters, poems, memorializations, scenarios, treatises, and diaries—sits alongside examination of actors, actresses, the character system, and individual roles to provide the first study devoted to the interaction, indeed cross-fertilization, between the oral and the literary aspects of commedia dell'arte, contrasting yet complementing each other as did binary pairs of arte figures.

New historicism has come under fire in certain quarters for its perceived tendency to merely replace older totalizing histories with new ones that reify the very univocity they ostensibly strive to complicate. To respond to Deleuze and Guattari's call for “rhizomatic” histories in preference to “arboreal” ones has proven quite difficult to achieve in practice, even for the most dedicated adherents. Andrew Sofer's The Stage Life of Props comes as close as any history to realizing a comprehensive and comprehensible study of physical objects in the theatre that eschews master narratives in favor of a more fungoid methodology. In so doing, Sofer has created a convincing text that does for the history of stage properties what Joseph Roach's The Player's Passion (1985) did for the history of acting: set the stage, as it were, for a revitalized look at one of the murkier zones of theatre history as useful for students of props in general as it is to period specialists looking for new approaches to old mysteries.

This lavishly illustrated collection covers a period of time that has seen tremendous growth in English-language kabuki scholarship. In 1966, there were in print but three introductory books on kabuki in English—Faubian Bowers's Japanese Theatre (1952), Earle Ernst's The Kabuki Theatre (1956), and A. C. Scott's The Kabuki Theatre of Japan (1966)—along with a handful of plays in translation and a few journal articles. Today, thanks to the work of such researchers as Samuel L. Leiter, James R. Brandon, Leonard Pronko, Donald Shively, Lawrence R. Kominz, Andrew C. Gerstle, and others, kabuki scholarship can boast of dozens of books and book chapters, as well as scores of articles covering a range of topics from music, theatre architecture, and dramatic text to actors, acting, and audience. Furthermore, with the recent publication of the four-volume series Kabuki Plays on Stage (edited by Brandon and Leiter, 2002–3), fifty-one previously untranslated plays are now available in English. No longer is it necessary to spend years learning the Japanese language in order to carry out research into kabuki theatre.

Originally published in 1999, this book is the first and still the only major collection of primary sources in English translation for the study of Chinese theories of theatre and performance. In an earlier Theatre Survey review of this anthology (42:1 [May 2001]: 96–8), Sara Davis focused on the historical development of Chinese theatre and devoted a substantial portion of her comments to the earlier periods, noting with regret that these eras and the professional folk performance that flourished during them are underrepresented in this volume. This is undoubtedly true, but the unequal coverage does not originate with editor Fei. Very few literati-scholars wrote for or about the performing arts prior to the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). Written theatre theory in China being primarily in the hands of these gentlemen until the modern era, the relative paucity of early primary sources is therefore an unavoidable reality. With the 2002 republication of Fei's anthology in paperback form, it therefore seems appropriate to reassess her work, describing and evaluating the materials that are included for the larger readership now provided access.