At Florence, housed in the Archivio di Stato in the noble rooms of Vasari's Uffizi, there lies a great collection of letters sent back to Tuscany from the many parts of Europe where representatives of the Medicean court were posted. Among them are files of dispatches written from London during the seventeenth century, and buried within these is a mine of information about the court theatre of the time. Masques, tilts and plays were occasions of some significance for the diplomatic community, for they were external signs of the power of the Stuart realm, and the Florentine agents who took up their residence in London during the course of the century were careful to note when such events took place, how well they came off and who was invited to them.

Actors used the hands much more in the eighteenth century than is customary today. In this part we present general rules which were designed to ensure that the hands were used both elegantly and expressively. Later sections will deal with the use of the hands to externalize a particular passion being represented, such as fear, love and so on.

Scholars familiar with the lesser lights of the 1830s and forties will recall the name of Felix Pyat. A lithograph executed in the 1850s by the designer Nadar (Félix Tournachon) and depicting the best-known Romantics, shows Pyat shoulder to shoulder with the greats, Chateaubriand, Hugo, Dumas, Vigny, Lamartine, Béranger, Heine, and others, as their youthful associate. Today he evokes incidental remembrance as the Berrichon companion of George Sand and Jules Sandeau and, according to his own reminiscences, the person who converted Eugène Suë into a socialist writer. In his day Pyat enjoyed prominence as a journalist and especially as a writer of melodrama, or, as he called it, ‘people's theater’.

Falstaff is first pictured in the frontispiece engraving by an unknown artist for The Wits or Sport Upon Sport (Plate I), a collection of drolls and playlets adapted from earlier plays, originally published in two parts: part one by Henry Marsh in 1662 (with a second edition published by Francis Kirkman in 1672) and part two by Francis Kirkman in 1673. The engraving appears in both editions of part one and shows a rectangular stage lit by candelabra and footlights in front of a curtain hung from a gallery with a curtained window above. On stage are seven characters from six different pre-Restoration plays. In the lower left are ‘Sr. I. Falstafe’ and ‘Hostes’ from the first playlet in the collection, The Bouncing Knight or the Robbers Robbed, an adaptation of scenes from Henry the Fourth, Part One: II.iv, III.iii, IV.ii. V.i. and iv.

Soon after breakfast-time on the morning of 1 September 1910 ‘suburban ladies with their camp stools, sandwiches, and crochet work took up position outside the pit and gallery doors’ at His Majesty's Theatre in London's Haymarket; later they were joined by messenger boys reserving places for more affluent enthusiasts, and by the time the doors opened at 6.15 p.m. the queue had swelled to the extent that only half could be admitted. Amongst the more privileged members of the audience which thronged the theatre that Thursday evening were to be seen Prince Francis of Teck, the Ranee of Sarawak and Sir Arthur and Lady Conan Doyle, a notable turn-out at a time of year when, according to Vanity Fair, ‘London is supposed to be deserted by that fraction of the population whose absence or presence causes it to be designated as empty or full’. Such intense anticipation is rarely generated by a theatrical event, yet throughout that summer the press had dutifully recorded the latest developments in what was to prove to be Herbert Beerbohm Tree's most lavish Shakespearian production King Henry VIII. Whilst the press and public eagerly awaited the latest Bardic offering (his fourteenth) from the foremost actor-manager of the day, his theatre, from his office in the dome downwards, was a bustle of activity involving actors, designers, costumiers, and all the other participants in a great theatrical enterprise. Tree's own grasp on the mechanics and economics of theatre production was legendarily vague, but, fortunately for him and indeed for us, those matters were handled and meticulously recorded by his manager Henry Dana, and it is through Dana's account books, now in the Tree Archive in the Theatre Collection at the University of Bristol, that the financial framework, on which was to be placed the sumptuous spectacle of Henry VIII, can be found.

‘Our two best men actors were not indeed chosen by chance, for one was a stage-struck solicitor's clerk and the other a working man who had toured Ireland in a theatrical company managed by a Negro.’ With these arrogant and misleading words, W. B. Yeats chose not to name to the Royal Academy of Sweden the two men who trained the original Abbey Theatre Company: the brothers Frank and William Fay. No one now credits Yeats's account, but a scholarly history of the Fays' work for the theatre has yet to be written, in part because the Irish theatre movement itself is only just emerging from the regions of anecdote and gossip, but in part also because of the dominance of the readily available material by the Fays' denigrator, Yeats himself. Thus, the best account of the stage-craft of the early Abbey, James W. Flannery's book W. B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre, sets the poet at the heart of the Irish dramatic movement, and although it is admitted to be ‘unjust and erroneous’ to dismiss the Fays' views on theatre as ‘simply ignorant’, it is with the ‘literary and intellectual’ values of Yeats's plays, and their stage-worthiness, that Flannery is primarily concerned. No other published study approaches the thoroughness and intelligence of Flannery's and the brothers Fay continue to suffer the penalties of modesty, inarticulateness, and partial failure.

In an essay on ‘Collective creation,’ Theodore Shank observed that emphasis on the ‘cooperation of a creative collective,’ sometimes in combination with group living, is a response to ‘the fragmentation of established society,’ and as such, an essential distinguishing characteristic of the ‘alternative’ or ‘new’ theatre. Social fragmentation and individual alienation from society are not, of course, products exclusively of the nine-teen-sixties; the idea that individual survival is possible only within a group structure has emerged in previous generations that have felt threatened by a cult of individualism—a salient characteristic of Western civilization that has been carried ad absurdum in the United States.

Edward Albee's play All Over clearly is about death and dying. It is literally a death watch: an unseen man lies dying, surrounded by his wife, mistress, best friend, children, doctor, and nurse; they talk around him and about him; at the end of the play, the man dies. It is a drama, as Richmond Crinkley has observed, ‘in which nothing much happens … a prolonged doldrums, measured by the apocalypses which don't occur, by the conflicts which are never resolved, and by the rhythms which are repetitive rather than dynamic’. Like Albee's earlier avantgarde Box and Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, All Over utilizes an entropic vocabulary, employs similar primary themes and motifs, and gives the nihilistic impression – as its title aptly indicates – of being all over before the action has even begun. Unfortunately, most critics who saw the play's production when All Over opened in New York in March, 1971, applauded Albee's ingenious choice of title – but with an ironic twist. As far as they were concerned, the sooner the play's run was all over the better; All Over was denounced as – to give just a quick sampling – ‘deadly dull’, ‘an arrogant display piece, puffed up with sophomoric diction’, ‘self-indulgent’, ‘a depressing event in an enigmatic career’, and a ‘Death Prattle’.

There are few Tibetan manuscripts which give instruction on the performance of religious dance. The printing blocks were generally kept under seal in the monasteries in Tibet, but one such blockprint may be seen in the museum for Volkerkunde in the collection of Nebesky-Wojkowitz in Vienna. It is a ‘cham dupe’ on the performance of the Kun tu tzangpoi cham as carried out by members of the Nyingmapa sect, consisting of 40 volumes.

A relatively unknown period of Jacques Prévert's career, from 1932 to 1936, constitutes, as is now becoming apparent, more than a footnote in twentieth-century literary history: it marks the existence of the most successful French workers theatre company to be spawned by the agitprop movement. Born on Russian soil after the Revolution, the agitation-and-propaganda skit genre that brought news to soldiers on the front during the civil war there later traveled east to Germany, where leftist forces made political use of it until the Nazis, its primary target (along with police repression, the Church, the military and capitalism in general), banned it in the early thirties. By that time, however, the agitprop movement had firmly taken root in England and America as well as in France, where La Scène Ouvrière, the organ of the Fédération du Théâtre Ouvrier de France (FTOF), could boast of coordinating hundreds of amateur theatre troupes with a left-wing vocation. Every Parisian arrondissement, as did the majority of French provincial cities, came forth with a Phalange or a Porte-voix rouge or a Blouse bleue company composed of workers and, in most cases, middle-class amateurs, with an occasional theatre professional contributing his or her know-how to the productions. One such group, Prémices, the basic tendency of which was toward rather polished, dramatic work, underwent a scission in 1932 that resulted in the formation of a new, more militantly leftist company which came to be known as the Groupe Octobre, in commemoration of the Russian Revolution. Paul Vaillant-Couturier, the Communist leader and editor of the Party's daily, L'Humanité, was responsible for suggesting to the young troupe Jacques Prévert – ‘un gars très marrant qui a l'air très bien’ – as a potential source of material.