There is much evidence, it seems, that Elizabethan dramatists spent a measure of their creative energy revising old playbooks. The title pages of some quartos advertise that their contents are ‘amended’ or ‘newly corrected’, and the similarity of plays on such subjects as the Yorkist kings and tamable shrews have made it plausible that one text is a revision of the other. In the 1908 edition of Henslowe's Diary, W. W. Greg lent sanction to the idea of playhouse revision; defending the sign ‘ne’ as the mark of new plays, he offered as an exception a play ‘new in the sense that it was a revival with alterations’. In the Cambridge editions of Shakespeare's plays, J. Dover Wilson systematically identified textual variants and cruxes in the early plays as evidence of revisions, allegedly made for a revival. Over the years, editions of and monographs on plays with more than one textual version have reinforced the association of major alterations with a play's return to the stage after some period of retirement. For such an apparently widespread playhouse practice, G. E. Bentley developed a ‘rule of thumb’: ‘almost any play … kept in active repertory by the company which owned it is most likely to contain later revisions by the author or, in many cases, by another playwright working for the same company’.

A decade ago the analysis of the structure of the plays performed by the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline professional theatre companies, in order to discover patterns of doubling of the roles, seemed to hold considerable promise for further inquiry. D. M. Bevington's pioneering From ‘Mankind’ to Marlowe and W. A. Ringler's article ‘The Number of Actors in Shakespeare's Early Plays’ offered direct evidence and tools for structural analysis, and were followed by important studies by Scott McMillin, Irwin Smith, and others. Nevertheless, since then interest in this area – and particularly in doubling on the seventeenth-century stage – seems to have declined. The assumption made explicitly by Bevington and implied by most other commentators has been that as the professional acting companies expanded their resources, found patrons, and increased the number of their liveried personnel, the frenetic doubling of the Tudor era became unnecessary. Apart from some unhurried doubling of very minor characters and extras, they believe this practice virtually disappeared from the Jacobean stage, rendering further investigation unnecessary. The small amount of direct evidence to the contrary, first noted by W. J. Lawrence in 1927, has been analysed as an interesting but aberrant phenomenon; occasional atavistic survivals in a more opulent and refined age whose taste was turning towards ‘realism’ in acting and production methods.

On January 2nd 1773 the abbé Galiani wrote to his friend in Paris, Mme d'Epinay: ‘Qu'on voie Paris et Naples, on verra une légère esquisse du tout et du néant.’ He is referring to the dearth of interesting people and events he found on returning to his native Naples, in contrast to the flourishing social and cultural life which he had enjoyed with his many friends in Paris. Forced to leave the post he had held for ten years as secretary to the ambassador of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies because of a diplomatic blunder, Galiani dreaded his return to Naples, and his letters constantly complain of the intolerable conditions of what he termed his ‘exile’. While prone to a certain amount of exaggeration in his letters – thereby hoping to provoke sympathy amongst his Parisian correspondents – Galiani nevertheless had cause to complain of the intellectual ‘desert’ in which he now found himself. This is how he expressed it to Mme d'Epinay, his closest and most faithful correspondent:

Si vous ne me rendez pas ma gaîté, je n'écrirai plus à personne; car ici je n'ai rien qui me tourmente, si ce n'est que je n'ai ni d'amusements, ni de plaisirs, ni d'amis, ni d'écoliers, ni de dîners, ni de soupers, ni d'argent, ni de vanité, ni de gaîté, ni d'affaires agréables, ni d'amours. (I, 50–1)

It is therefore not surprising that an unusual theatrical event in Naples shook him out of the apathy into which he had retreated, and temporarily at least filled the Neapolitan ‘néant’ of which he complained. This was the arrival of a French theatre company; and for approximately two and a half months, from early January to mid-March 1773, Galiani's letters to Mme d'Epinay were almost entirely devoted to what he enthusiastically called his ‘Gazette des Spectacles’. The event could not fail to capture his undivided attention. The company, directed by Sennepart, was to perform seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French plays at the Teatro dei Fiorentini. Apart from delighting Galiani, this brief episode of theatrical history provides us with some interesting insights into the taste in drama, both French and Italian, at the mid-way point of the second half of the eighteenth century. In this article we propose to examine the choice of plays, and the reactions of the Neapolitan audiences, as reported by Galiani who, with his thorough and up-to-date knowledge of the French theatre and of the milieu which had inspired it, frequently amazes (and amuses) us with the perspicacity of the comments in his ‘Gazette’.

Following an exhibition in 1979 on the British theatrical scene-painter and marine artist Clarkson Stanfield R.A. (1793–1867) a previously unseen document came to light in the hands of one of his descendants.

A somewhat unlikely conjunction of personalities involving Marie Stopes, well-known sexologist and birth control advocate, and Alfred Sutro, writer of society dramas for London's West End, occurred during the last weeks of 1927. Part of the story has been told by Marie Stopes's biographer Ruth Hall, but hitherto unpublished letters from the vast Stopes Collection and elsewhere fill in the outlines of the brief, revealing encounter.