For those who may have been a little dismayed by my previous questioning of such sacred absolutes of the Greek theatre as (1) the circular shape of the original orchestra, (2) the central placement of the altar, (3) the panoramic siting of Greek theatres, and (4) the dawn beginning of performance, please accept this assurance: the three-actor rule for tragedies is alive and well—and not presently refutable. I shall apply the three-actor rule to the extant tragedies in order to see what effect it had upon acting and production practices during the Classic period.

Our players are not as the players beyond the sea, a sort of squirting baudie Comedians, that have Whores and common Curtizans to playe womens partes, and forbeare no immodest speech, or unchast action that may procure laughter, but our Sceane is more stately furnisht than ever it was in the time of Roscius, our representations honourable and full of gallant resolution, not consisting like theirs of a Pantaloun, a Whore and a Zanie, but of Emperours, Kings and Princes, whose true tragedies they do vaunt.

The general opinion, voiced on instinct rather than conclusive evidence, has been that the Punch and Judy show came from Italy. The name Punch is clearly derived, via Punchinello (1667), Polichinello (1666), and Policinella (1664), from Pulcinella, the commedia dell'arte character who originated in Naples about 1600. Prints in abundance show a puppet performance, resembling Punch and Judy, in Naples, Rome and Venice in the eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth century. And one of the earliest, and perhaps the earliest Punch performer on the streets of London was an Italian, Piccini by name, whose show was immortalized by George Cruikshank's drawings and, to a lesser extent, by Payne Collier's edited text in 1828.

It is my contention that Shakespeare intended his plays to be performed using only two doors for entrances and exits. In the rapid repertory system of the Globe, stage-management was essential, but there is evidence that it was not based on the arbitrary, mechanical rule-of-thumb previously suggested. Analysis of the entrance and exit patterns in Macbeth shows that there was an organizing system in force, but that it depended on, and in turn reinforced, the spatial logic of the play.

All artistic conventions of each theatrical era have two intertwining aspects: the aesthetic goals, and the technical crafts for achieving them. In some cases, a particular combination or development of skills results in a refinement of the art or the discovery of a newly desirable aesthetic; in others, the demand for new artistic effects leads to the invention of appropriate techniques. Thus, when painterly standards and drafting methods of central perspective spread rapidly over Northern Italy in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, illusionistic spectacle became an indispensable element of theatrical performance. It was eagerly supplied by architects in whom the printing of Vitruvius's De Architectura (1486) awakened both the responsibility for and the challenge embodied in designing theatrical scenery. Conversely, as Elizabethan playwrights conceived of plots dependent on avoidance of meetings between certain exiting and entering characters, second and third entrances were provided—either by cutting into the tiring house wall, or by hanging a curtain with several slits in front of it, to accommodate stage traffic.

Textual and performance innovation in twentieth-century Peking Opera is not new and the experiments by practitioners in Taiwan today demonstrate approaches that both reflect past attempts and contemporary variation. There has been resistance to change in the art form, however, because it was supposed to have reached perfection with Mei Lanfang (1894–1961), who, because of his artistic pre-eminence and international status, was able to introduce several daring innovations that revolutionized the medium without upsetting its parameters. Mei not only experimented by acting in contemporary non-traditional plays, but also within the Peking Opera tradition and was responsible for shifting the limelight away from that of the old man role (laosheng) to that of the young woman (dan), his own role. He and his playwright collaborator, Qi Rushan, wrote new style Peking Opera scripts that made best use of Mei's unique performing talents. Instead of the stylized costume evolved from Ming and Qing, dress, Mei would occasionally use historically accurate costumes from earlier dynasties. He introduced the use of classical dances and encouraged the inclusion of the eihu, the second, lower pitched fiddle into the accompanying orchestra.

Performers in the second half of this century face an intensified confontation with physical expression in theatre. The question of how, or even whether, movement can express the ‘inner life’ of an actor/character is always present in the work of groups or individuals who wish to design innovative and physicalized performances.

When the Prague semiotician Jiri Veltrusky maintains that ‘in theater, the linguistic sign system, which intervenes through the dramatic text, always combines and conflicts with acting, which belongs to an entirely different sign system’, he makes explicit a commonplace premise: that the performance and the play constitute two distinct and parallel sign systems. This premise underlies the standard distinction between the dramatic text and the performance text, and forms the basis of what I will call the ‘two-text’ model of the play/performance relationship. The difference between a play and its performance is a difference between the ‘languages’ in which the two ‘texts’ are ‘written’: a play is a text constructed of linguistic signs, and a performance, a text constructed of theatrical signs.

Faber gave revealing service to Steven Berkoff by issuing simultaneously two volumes, Collected Plays Volume One (East; West; Greek; Sink the Belgrano; Massage and Lunch) and Volume Two (Decadence; Kvetch; Acapulco; Harry's Christmas; Brighton Beach Scumbags; Dahling You Were Marvellous; Dog/Pitbull; Actor), priced at £9.99 each. This supplanted the earlier Faber Berkoff collection, Decadence and Other Plays (including East and West), which I lament, in that it united some of his best writing in a single volume priced at less than ten pounds, such as I felt assured in requiring my students to buy for a single week's detailed work. These volumes contain more variable material at a higher price; Volume One is the stronger, but if I set it, I expect justifiable economic complaint. With the British student grant being eroded systematically in terms of real economic worth, this provides occasion for my suspicion that if playtexts cost less, students would buy more of them, creating in turn a more theatrically and socially informed, literate and inquisitive public readership of playtexts, rather than a readership confined to economically safe, carefully predetermined limitations. Speaking of predetermined limitations, some of these presented themselves to me strikingly in a survey of Berkoff's work which seemed exhaustive to the point of repetition. The central image of Dog/Pitbull—a sketch of a ‘repulsively attractive’ man and his pet, ‘amplification of his own insane and undirected energy’—seemed the kernel of both volumes’ content.