There have been few systematic studies in English of the signs of the theatre. I hope in this essay to indicate something of the range and interest of the topic. The focus of attention, clearly, will be the theatrical act of representation or performance rather than the dramatic text or script. The dramatic text has a life of its own, independent of all performances of it: on the one hand, as Gordon Craig, one of the great champions of the theatre over the text, recognized, it overflows all performances and is exhausted by none; on the other, any performance overflows the literary text that it purports to be a performance of, and is not reducible to it. A clear distinction must therefore be made between theatrical representation and literary text. As most theatrical performances are based on dramatic texts, however, some consideration of the nature of the relation between the two is desirable. Before broaching the subject of signs in the theatre directly, therefore, I propose to say a word or two about this question.

The fifth century BC was the only period of theatre history when plays were created for a single performance. The sense of immediacy that this suggests in terms of the theatrical potential of the plays is frequently overlooked, as is the corresponding freedom from commercial pressures enjoyed by the playwrights. To think of the theatre of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes as entirely free from the ‘taint’ of other than sublime artistic and religious motives, however, is to underestimate both the practicality of the Athenians in organisational matters and the constant dependance of the theatre as an institution on its patrons.

Among the additional manuscripts in the British Library is a nineteenth-century transcript of the diplomatic correspondence of the Florentine agents in London from 1616 to 1679/80. The agents – or Residents, as they were sometimes called – were during this period the Salvetti, father and son. Amerigo wrote the dispatches every week until his death in 1657, after which the task was undertaken by his son Giovanni, though there were at first a few letters also from Giovanni's brother, Amerigo the younger. As befitted people with Florentine connexions, both father and son were interested in the Court theatre, and among their voluminous accounts of the affairs of state there are frequent references to the staging of plays and masques, so frequent indeed that they constitute a useful supplement to the calendars of the period published by G. E. Bentley and W. Van Lennep. In this article I print for the first time translations of the dramatic references culled from the correspondence of 1660–9; passages from the letters of 1670–9 will appear in a later issue. The more methodical notes of Salvetti père on the Jacobean and Caroline Court stage will, I hope, be published elsewhere.

Between 1657 and 1680 the Florentine agent in London was Giovanni Salvetti. His weekly reports to Florence include many references to the Restoration stage, some of which I published in Vol. II, No. 1 of Theatre Research International. The present article gives translations of passages of interest to the theatre historian taken from the dispatches of the decade 1670–1680. The original letters are in the Archivio Mediceo, held at the Archivio di Stato in Florence, but they are accurately transcribed in B.L. Additional MS 27962 A-W, and it is from these transcripts that I have made the translations. Each of the following entries begins with the volume and folio reference to the British Library transcript; then comes the date of the dispatch as given by Salvetti in the new style, followed by the old-style date (in brackets) then in use in England. All the letters from which I have quoted are addressed to the secretariat in Florence.

No translation can equal the original in all respects. Usually one is lucky if about three-quarters of the richness of a foreign masterpiece is communicated; only in very rare cases – such as Tieck's translations of Shakespeare into German and FitzGerald's rendering of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayam into English – does the translation become a work of art in its own right. But the odds against this happening are so long that a translator is forced to draw up a list of priorities before he starts work and to decide which particular aspects of the text in question he will strive to render most faithfully. In other words, he must make up his mind what particular function his translation will serve: the man who is providing an A-level ‘crib’ will then aim first and foremost at literal accuracy, the man who is concerned to render the niceties of philosophy may well put subtlety of definition before elegance of style – and so on. If I am to lay my own cards on the table, I confess that my primary aim in translating the plays of Goethe and Schiller has been to bring out their stageworthiness and the dramatic force of their language. I have done this for two main reasons: firstly, because it seemed to me that many existing translations of both poets obscured their theatrical qualities altogether, and secondly, because I am convinced that these theatrical qualities (conveyed in such things as speech rhythms, rhyme-schemes, use of rhetoric, use of assonance, etc.) are vital keys to the playwright's meaning.

Surveys of nineteenth-century drama and theatre in England fall approximately into two categories: an examination of the development of the drama itself – tragedy, comedy, melodrama, farce, etc. – with some theatrical context provided, and a study of changing theatrical conditions, with some reference to the drama. In both cases what we are told about the theatre relates to acting, architecture, methods of production, lighting, costuming, company organisation, the actor-manager, and so forth. Never, or hardly ever, are we told anything about audiences: what kind of audiences went to what theatres, what their class was, what jobs they did, how much they got paid, what their non-theatrical tastes were, how often they went to the theatre, where they lived and under what conditions. Such information, however, is essential if we are fully to understand the repertory or style of a particular theatre at a particular time in history, and ultimately the character and content of the drama itself.

If by successful is meant widely performed, the most successful playwright in the English theatre between T. W. Robertson in the 1860s and A. W. Pinero in the 1890s was a Frenchman, Victorien Sardou. This apparent paradox can be elucidated not only by the list of English adaptations of Sardou which concludes this survey, but by noting some of the leading English actors who appeared in Sardou. They include Irving (Madame Sons-Gêne, Robespierre, Dante); the Bancrofts (Nos Intimes, Dora, Les Bourgeois de Pont-Arçy, Odette, Fédora); the Kendals (Les Pattes de Mouche, Nos Intimes, Dora, Maison Neuve); Wyndham (Rabagas, La Papillonne); Hare (Les Pattes de Mouche, Dora, La Tosca); Tree (Fédora); Forbes-Robertson (Dora, Les Bourgeois de Pont-Arçy); Hawtrey (Divorçons!); Bourchier (Divorçons!); Du Maurier (Dora). The admission to the list of such leading ladies as Ellen Terry, Mrs Patrick Campbell, Modjeska, Elizabeth Robins, and Gladys Cooper would extend it further.

Ten-year intervals are well known to have been of special significance in the international history of staging Peer Gynt. The play was written in Southern Italy in 1866–7; it was first staged in Kristiania in 1876, and produced for the second time in Copenhagen in 1886. The Paris performance at the Théâtre de 1'Oeuvre with Lugné-Poë as The Old Man of the Dovre in 1896 marked the beginning of its becoming internationally known.

It is not, I think, a coincidence that the contemporary English stage, where so many of the new plays are so deeply concerned with problems of communication, is in some measure a translator's theatre, steadily giving us new translations – or ‘versions’, or ‘adaptations’ – of old classics. It is more than a coincidence when No Man's Land and a new English version of John Gabriel Borkman appear side by side in the National Theatre repertoire, as they did both at the Old Vic in 1975 and in the Lyttelton in 1976. For, as we follow the pattern of intimacy or (more often) mutual incomprehension traced by a Pinter dialogue, or as with Osborne we watch the English language come down, we are made forcibly aware that any verbal interchange involves each speaker in acts of translation. Or, as George Steiner puts it in a book which also appeared in 1975, ‘whether inside or between languages, human communication equals translation’. There is of course a sense in which any director of any play is a translator who, by the time the play is put before an audience, has searched for and found a theatrical language – verbal and non-verbal – to convey to the audience his vision of the play. But it is remarkable how often, recently, directors have themselves turned translators in the more orthodox sense, driven back to the original by a sense of the importance of the text.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, 25 October 1893, a well-dressed young woman alighted at the terminal station of the Great North of Scotland Railway line to Ballater. A discerning London playgoer, seeing her in the unlikely setting of this remote Scots village, would have recognised the stranger as Elizabeth Robins, one of the three most ‘interesting’ and advanced actresses of the day. American by birth and early stage training, she had passed through London in the summer of 1888 on her way to and from a Norwegian holiday and, encouraged by Oscar Wilde, she had remained to try her luck in the English theatre. Her moment had come in April 1891 when she had triumphantly created Hedda Gabler on the British stage, and early in 1893 – a year she afterwards referred to as ‘outstanding’ – she had won a still greater triumph when she acted Hilda Wangel in her own presentation of The Master Builder. Pioneering matinées, however, could not in themselves support an independent, impecunious and expatriate actress, and Miss Robins, who was now thirty-one, had appeared in two Adelphi melodramas as well as for fashionable actor–managers. In May of this very year she had magnanimously yielded the dazzling part of Paula in Pinero's new and adult drama The Second Mrs Tanqueray to her friend Mrs Patrick Campbell and so had lost, perhaps for ever, the chance of becoming a celebrated and modish actress.

Few people deny the intimate inter-relationship in new China of culture on the one hand, and the stage of the revolution on the other. Yet I do not think it has always been made clear why it is theatre that has been the main art for expressing that relationship.

I went to see Robert Aron in the summer of 1972. He was then seventy-four years old, a tall, striking man in an apartment of stuffed furniture overrun by books. In all my meetings that summer with former surrealists, people who had made avant-garde theatre in Paris in the 1920s, there was always a sense of trembling at reaching out to touch cobwebbed memories. Forty-five years had passed since the events we talked about. Tristan Tzara, recalled by Gide as a charming man with a young wife who was ‘even more charming’, had since fought with the French Resistance during World War II and later joined the Communist Party. André Breton, when he died in 1966, was accompanied to his grave by ‘waves of young men and young girls often in couples, with arms entwined’. They had come from all over France to pay him tribute. Philippe Soupault is a respected editor, critic and radio commentator, Louis Aragon is at the forefront of the French Communist Party and dislikes talking about his days as a Surrealist, Roger Vitrac is an acknowledged and produced playwright while Artaud is a cult figure. There are moments when in looking back, the whole Dada-Surrealist performance world looks like some great Dada swindle perpetrated on the only too fallible researcher and critic. Robert Aron does nothing to dispel this feeling. The man who sent a telegram to Breton warning him that he would stop at no measures to keep the fervent Surrealist claque from disturbing the performance of Strindberg's A Dream Play at the Théâtre Alfred Jarry, was elected a member of the French Academy before his death.

During the German occupation, theatres in France had never been so full; the reasons for this phenomenon are not difficult to understand: other traditional leisure-time activities were seriously curtailed – restaurants were closed, films were either out of date or impossibly pro-German and there was no petrol for motor-cars. One of the very few areas of French life which was not seriously affected was the theatre; of course the theatre had its difficulties – materials for scenery, costumes and make-up were difficult to come by, and the activities of the censor reduced the number of plays which could be produced.