“Many years ago, wnen I was looking over Piranesi's Antiquities of Rome” writes Thomas De Quincey in his essay on the effects of opium-eating, “Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called his Dreams, and which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever.” When De Quincey published his Confessions in 1821, the international reputation of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) was firmly established among men of letters and artists alike. The style and thematic content of Piranesi's remarkable etchings fascinated diverse members of the Romantic movement—from Walpole to Hugo, from Goethe to Gautier, from DeLoutherbourg to Sanquirico.

“As a jester among jesters,” Jack Point commends himself to a would-be mountebank in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Yeoman of the Guard, “I will teach thee all my original songs, my self-constructed riddles, my own ingenious paradoxes; nay more, I will reveal to thee the source whence I get them.” The “source” in this case is a tome entitled The Merry Jestes of Hugh Ambrose, a compendium of asthmatic wheezes, Gilbert's thrust at not only Elizabethan jestbooks but their Victorian counterparts. At times it must have seemed as if printing had been invented only to enable aspiring comedians to plunder the wit of the past from cheap chapbooks, like the one that gave Joe Miller to the vernacular. In the United States, dissemination of these storehouses of “gags” began as early as 1789, and by the 1860s they were a staple of the bookstalls; the intended market for them was either the laugh-loving churchgoer who wouldn't be caught dead in a theatre, or the parlor entertainer, the “clown of private life,” ready to make unwilling interlocutors of his nearest and dearest. In the 1870s, however, publishers aimed at the professional; Henry J. Wehman's 25¢ paperback Budget of Jokes was meant to fill a need of the evergrowing number of variety performers.

The National Theatre's 1975–1976 production of Hamlet was its first since the inaugural production of 1963, director Peter Hall's first since the 1965 Royal Shakespeare Company version, and Albert Finney's first attempt at the title role. Originally intended to be the first play done in the Olivier Theatre, the large thrust-stage auditorium in the National Theatre's new London building, it instead became one of the last to be presented at the Old Vic when construction delays postponed the opening of the new house. Hamlet opened at the Old Vic on 10 December 1975, and moved to the Lyttleton, the smaller proscenium theatre in the new building, on 16 March 1976, to continue in repertory through the year.

More than fifty years have elapsed since Worcester College Library, Oxford, acquired Thomas Killigrew's copy of the 1664 folio of his own plays. Almost all the plays are annotated in Killigrew's hand. Only two of them—The Princess and The Prisoner escaped his pencil entirely. The two parts of Cicilia and Clorinda were untouched except for a preliminary instruction to his copyist. Claricilla was subjected to cuts totalling less than 250 lines, but significant directions were added in manuscript to the final act. All the remaining plays were revised with varying degrees of severity.

One aspect of Inigo Jones's work that has received little attention is his dual approach to staging at the Stuart court. The growing popularity of the masque and the important part Jones played in directing and moulding the form are well known. The Caroline masque in particular was a glittering and prestigious vehicle for Jones's experimentation with scenery and scenic devices, and one which displayed his creativity to the best possible advantage. With the emergence of recent works such as Orgel and Strong's Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, which concentrates almost wholly on the masque, it could be assumed that after Charles I ascended the throne in 1625, all of Jones's theatrical energies were directed towards scenic displays and his gradual approach towards fully perspective scenery.

If George Farquhar knew, as these lines from his prologue to David Crauford's Courtship A-la-Mode indicate, the futility of trying to bolster the popularity of a bad play by its prologue, his career as a prologist and epilogist must have reinforced his scepticism. Besides the five prologues and four epilogues he wrote for his own plays, Farquhar wrote at least three prologues and two epilogues for other authors' plays, plus two occasional prologues and one occasional epilogue, a total of ten known prologues and seven epilogues.

In the late eighteenth century, and with increasing momentum in the early nineteenth, the minor theatres in London steadily challenged the monopoly of the two patent houses—with great ingenuity in circumventing several Licensing Acts; with highly imaginative and lively (albeit generally unsophisticated) bills; and with eager support from the workers, flocking to the capital as part of the industrial age, for whom the minor theatres provided escape. By the time Planché's “Mother Drama” admitted confusion about her sons “Legitimate Drama” and “Illegitimate Drama” on the stage of the Olympic Theatre on 16 April 1838, the minor theatres had prevailed.

Karaghiozis—Greek shadow puppet theatre—is a performance which developed in Greece over a period of a hundred fifty years, using local character types, costumes, and dialects, folk anecdotes, contemporary events, topical humor, themes and motifs of classical, hellenistic, and Byzantine origin, Greek legends, songs, and dances. It is modelled on a fourteenth-century Turkish prototype, Karagoz, which itself finds its roots in fool lore and the classical mime (the dominant form of entertainment in the eastern empire from the fourth century B.C. to 1400 A.D.). The Turkish performance was introduced into occupied Greece possibly as early as the seventeenth century (the time of the consolidation of the Turkish hold over Greece). It had certainly appeared by 1809, at which time the traveller John Hobhouse records the earliest known date of the Turkish performance in Greece.

The Garden of Eden is the first frontier of which we have record, and every subsequent new geographic region has been invested with the same sense of mystery and promise as the first one. Nowhere has this been more true than in America. From the time of its discovery it has been a promised land for those residing elsewhere, and after the initial settlement of the eastern seaboard its western territory continued to beckon. So strong and continuous was the appeal of the frontier that in 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner could assert: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.”

Robert Barker of Edinburgh patented the panorama process on 19 June 1787 and opened the first panorama in London in 1792. Robert Fulton, the American inventor, obtained the patent to import the panorama to Paris at the end of 1799. Fulton opened the Paris panorama in 1800, but shortly thereafter ceded the patent to James Thayer. By the summer of 1800 there were two panorama rotundas in operation in a passage off the Boulevard Montmartre. At the end of 1802 a third rotunda was constructed in the Jardin des Capucines, Boulevard de la Chausée d'Antin.

For those interested in the activities of those great Italian theatre artists, the Bibiena family, the early work of Ferdinando, founder of this prestigious group of stage designers and theatre architects, is still not fully documented. Although Ferdinando was identified as “Pittore di Corte” to the Farnese Dukes of Parma between 1680 and 1708 by Giampetro Zannotti, his first biographer in 1739, information concerning his early theatrical activities is still meager. It is generally assumed that Ferdinando began his theatrical career with his work for the Farnese wedding festival in Parma in 1690.

A few points are suggested by James Maloon's interesting article, “From Beast to Mad Beast: A Further look at Tyrone Guthrie's Tamburlaine” (TS, XVIII, No. 1). First, there seems to be no warrant for and no future in considering the two parts of Tamburlaine as a unifiable production. As John D. Jump reminds us:

The two parts were apparently designed for production in theaters of very different sorts. In Part II, the Captain commanding Balsera and the Governor of Babylon stand upon their respective city walls to parley with enemies below; in the scene of her death, Zenocrate is discovered on her bed, and an arras is drawn before her when Tamburlaine and the rest retire. In planning these scenes, Marlowe must have counted on a theater with an upper stage and a discovery-space. But he counted on nothing of the sort when writing Part I. Even the siege of Damascus is managed without the use of an upper stage. Part I could have been successfully performed on a simple platform stage, but the full resources of a well-equipped London theater would have been needed for Part II.

The editors of A Biographical Dictionary of Actors … in London, 1660–1800 have overlooked an episode in the life of the popular late-Restoration actress Elizabeth Watson Boman which may help explain her rapid rise to the position of a principal actress in the United Company. Thomas Southerne tells us that after the death of her father in 1691, Elizabeth Watson was adopted and trained as a player by the great actor Thomas Betterton. However, from new evidence it appears that the childless Thomas and Mary Betterton, who often acted as surrogate parents to young actresses and the orphaned children of friends, had assumed the roles of Elizabeth's guardians before this date, perhaps as early as 1686.

Students of the eighteenth-century English theater are familiar with the bitter rivalry between Oliver Goldsmith and Hugh Kelly. The two had been friends until January 1768, when Kelly's False Delicacy and Goldsmith's The Good Natur'd Man opened within a week of each other. The Good Natur'd Man was moderately successful, but whatever satisfaction Goldsmith might otherwise have taken in this fact was marred by the overwhelming popularity of Kelly's comedy. To add to Goldsmith's discomfiture was the chagrin of having had one scene in his play hissed off the stage because of its low humor. In large measure, the reception given Goldsmith's first comedy influenced his intentions in his second: She Stoops to Conquer is an example of “laughing” comedy, deliberately set against the sentimental variety written by Kelly.

Five years ago we launched a major theatre research project, “The London Stage 1800-1900: A Calendar of Performances,” with the ambitious goal of recording every important fact about every performance on the London stage in the nineteenth century. Our experience with archives, source materials, participants, and funding agencies has suggested that a reorganization and redefinition of the project, with identification of discrete phases and segments of the work, will make it more manageable and attractive, even if this means a delay in the completion of the full daily calendar that remains our ultimate goal.

Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume are editing the Coke theatre papers from the original MSS at Harvard and elsewhere. Most of the papers concern the introduction of Italian opera into England at the Haymarket theatre, 1705-1714. They include letters, box-office reports, orchestra rosters, protests to the Lord Chamberlain, financial demands, contracts, lists of tradesmen's bills, etc. The collection (once owned by James Winston, and partially transcribed by him in BL Add. 38,607) was dispersed at auction in 1876. Another incomplete nineteenth-century transcription is now in the New York Public Library. From the 1876 Sale Catalogue, however, we know of about a dozen documents of which we lack any copy at all—documents by W. Armstrong, Barton Booth, Dieupart, Thomas Doggett, Motteux, Margarita de l'Epine, Lord Mohun, the Duke of Shrewsbury (Charles Talbot, 1660-1718), and an affadavit of 7 January 1714 signed by Wilks and Cibber.