The drama in Scotland, as in other countries of Western Europe, emerged from ancient pagan rites. Remnants of these rituals became Christianized. The extant information about these early folk entertainments, which is meager and tentative, exists mainly in ecclesiastical edicts suppressing these festivities. The sword dance, morris dance, and mummers' play all are outgrowths of dances and fertility rites associated with the four seasons. These ceremonies of pagan inspiration developed into plays of a more literary character, such as representations of St. George and of Robin Hood. Guisards, or players who performed on various holidays, were familiar figures in sixteenth-century Scotland.

After the closing of the London theatres in 1642, William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice waited almost one hundred years before it was revived in an acting version approximating the original script. Charles Macklin was instrumental in bringing an unaltered, but somewhat cut, version to the Drury Lane stage on February 14, 1741. Though no contemporary account of Macklin's first performances as Shylock exists, later biographers and critics state that he performed the part in a serious, almost tragic, manner for the first time since the Interregnum.

Even allowing for the exaggeration implicit in obituaries as such, this American description of a nineteenth-century English actor seems excessive. Yet Beerbohm Tree was not primarily an actor at all, certainly not (as some of his contemporaries would have put it) a “professional.” An unusually diverting mixture of jack-in-the-box and Jack-of-all-trades, his lack of conspicuous, all-consuming dedication to the principles of the profession he had chosen for himself, coupled with his obvious delight in its shallower aspects (spectacle, makeup, effects), gained him admiration from the audience at large and aroused suspicion among his fellow artists.

William Dunlap thus records his impression of Anne Brunton's Covent Garden debut as Horatia in The Roman Father, October 17, 1785. Until less than a year before her London debut this young woman had never stepped before an audience. Her mercurial rise from the Theatre Royal, Bath, to London did not prepare her to displace or challenge Mrs. Sarah Siddons, reigning queen of the London stage. It did, however, launch Anne Brunton on a successful Covent Garden engagement, preparing her for a career in the United States between 1796 and 1808.