When in 1932 M. C. Bradbrook put forward the view that the Elizabethan style of acting was probably formalistic, she initiated a debate that has not yet ended, between those who accept her view and those who, like Marvin Rosenberg, believe that Elizabethan acting style was probably realistic, akin to modern style. She wrote: ‘There would be comparatively little business, and gesture would be formalised. Conventional movement and heightened delivery would be necessary to carry off dramatic illusion.’ There is no real conclusion to be drawn, and those who take a middle way, arguing for a more complex fusion of the formalistic and the naturalistic, are probably close to the truth. The reason why the argument cannot be resolved is that there is virtually no contemporary evidence about acting styles in general or about particular performances, so that discussion rests less on scholarship than on conjecture based upon the few hints that can be gleaned from the plays and elsewhere. In this paper I want to consider the ways in which female roles might have been acted by boys and young men, taking my perspective from the performance of the onnagata, or female impersonator, in the Japanese Kabuki theatre.

Sicut infantes audi nos. This motto, which Nicolas Médard Audinot caused to be emblazoned on the proscenium curtain of his theatre on the Promenades des Remparts (the future Boulevard du Temple), tells us in the first place that, however primitive the shows he put on, he was bent from the start in attracting a rather more cultivated clientèle than the artisan families and small traders who are supposed to have made up the staple of his audience. Only men of some education could have been expected to appreciate the pun (audi nos = Audinot). And only such men could have interpreted the legend, which we may render, a little prolixly perhaps, as: Give us a hearing, remembering we are children. There is the additional point that the Latin word infans meant originally ‘one not yet capable of speech’.

Poor Man's Bread (El pan del pobre) is the work of two little-known Spanish authors, Félix González Liana and José Francos Rodriguez. First performed on 14 December 1894 at the Teatro de Novedades in Madrid, Poor Man's Bread was, according to its authors, inspired by a reading of Gerhart Hauptmann's The Weavers (1893). Both The Weavers and Poor Man's Bread describe the appalling conditions suffered by industrial workers, the indifference of their bosses to their plight, and their eventual ransacking of the bosses' property. While the German play deals with the lot of the weavers in Hauptmann's native Silesia, its Spanish counterpart is concerned with a metal smelting plant, a fundición, and is set in a small town in the south east of Spain. There are, naturally, many similarities between the two plays, but also a number of important differences which serve to highlight some of the characteristics of the Spanish social drama of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

‘Otto Weininger sent me his Geschlecht und Charakter, a terrific book that seems to solve the most difficult of all problems. He pronounces clearly what I only managed to utter. Voilà un homme!’ These words, from Strindberg's article ‘Idolatry, Gynolatry’ are meant as an homage to Otto Weininger (1880–1903) who was barely twenty-three years old when he committed suicide. Strindberg's article was published by the famous Vienna periodical Die Fackel which played an important part in defending and propagating Weininger and his book. Weininger's extraordinary and scandalous work, the full title of which is Geschlecht und Charakter. Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung (Sex and Character. A Fundamental Investigation; English edition – 1906) was published in June 1903. It was a revised version of his doctoral thesis presented at Vienna University in June 1902. Outstanding as the book is, it also posseses some disturbing features and it did not receive the welcome its author had expected. This poor reception, or rather the lack of any serious response, was an important factor in the author's suicide on 4 October 1903. The book became the subject of critical interest only after its author's death: suicide turned out to be a good advertisement.

New Year purification ceremonies are perhaps spread more widely over African fiction than African drama, ranging from the disposal of the old year's yams at the Feast of the New Yam in Achebe's Things Fall Apart to the Somalian Rendezvous of the Brooms which, in Nurridin Farah's novel Sweet and Sour Milk, the military dictatorship perverts into a political circus. More specifically, the annual rite of the carrier, who bears away the sins and misfortunes of the past year in the form of a miniature wooden boat, a bundle of twigs or a wicker effigy, is handled figuratively in the first novels of the Ghanaians Kofi Awoonor and Ayi Kwei Armah. This particular ritual practice does make some vestigial dramatic appearances, however – for example, in the symbolic dismemberment of Tufa in the cleansing floods at the end of J. P. Clark's play The Masquerade – and it receives what is probably its most complex and experimental treatment in two plays by Wole Soyinka, The Strong Breed and his adaptation of Euripides' The Bacchae.

The volume of critical writing on the theatre of Wole Soyinka both in Nigeria and abroad indicates his unrivalled pre-eminence among African play wrights. His work is still not as well known in the West as it should be, though his plays do occasionally get performed, especially in the USA, and it is encouraging that six of them have recently been published in one volume in the Methuen ‘Master Playwrights’ series. If cultural chauvinism is at least partly to blame for ignorance of the Third World's leading dramatist, there is also a genuine problem of access to a writer whose work is ‘difficult’ even for the educated élite among his own people. Indeed, some younger Nigerian critics have persistently accused Soyinka of obscurantism and of being too much immersed in private myth-making, an arcane metaphysics, at the expense of communicating with a popular audience about issues which directly concern it. A heated and sometimes acrimonious debate has arisen in the last few years around Soyinka's theater, in which the dramatist himself has participated both as critic and artist. Since the controversy, like the drama, is not well-known, and some of its key texts are not easily available, my purpose here is to summarize its main features, the implications of which go well beyond the work of a particular writer, however important. In conclusion, I shall briefly review Soyinka's more recent work and its bearing on the critical debate.