The 1860s and 1870s are generally considered a hiatus in the history of Shakespearean production on the London stage. Accounts of the period usually move quickly from Charles Kean's retirement in 1859 (or the end of Samuel Phelps' management of suburban Sadler's Wells in 1862) to the beginning of Henry Irving's regime at the Lyceum in 1879—acknowledging the Phelps-Chatterton collaboration at Drury Lane as worthy, but hardly remarkable, and mentioning in passing such isolated events as Fechter's new Hamlet in 1861. Nevertheless, while no management comparable to Kean's or Phelps's, devoted principally to poetic drama, appeared during this time, there were occasional Shakespearean productions of exceptional interest. One such was the Bancrofts' version of The Merchant of Venice, which opened at the Prince of Wales's Theatre in out-of-the-way Tottenham-street on 17 April 1875. It ran for only thirty-six performances and lost the famous actormanager team £3,000. Despite its financial failure, however, the production attracted considerable critical attention at the time, much of it favorable, and it has since gained an honorable place in stage history. Beerbohm-Tree, for example, in an address to the Oxford Union Debating Society in 1900, called it “the first production in which the modern spirit of stage management asserted itself.”

Most of the leading comic roles in the plays of Molière were written to be performed by Molière himself. The fact is well known, and no seríous study of Molíère as a man of the theatre has neglected to see that his development as a playwright is inseparable from his development as an actor, from the conventional intriguing valet of the earliest plays, through his humiliating failure as the heroic Dom Garcie de Navarre, to the title roles in le Misanthrope, l'Avare, and le Malade imaginaire.

The reach of the American theatre between 1870 and 1900 was truly extraordinary, for those were the years when touring combinations crisscrossed the land, finding a ready welcome in countless opera houses, academies of music, and village halls. William Winter, one of the most long-lived of theatrical critics, estimated that by 1880 there were in the United States and Canada about 3,500 towns in which theatrical performances were habitually given in some 5,000 theatres. These hosted more than 250 theatrical companies employing some 5,000 actors. It was a “stirring” theatrical climate, giving employment to countless utility men and women, walking gentlemen, ladies in waiting, second old men and women, soubrettes and comedians—not to mention actors and actresses laying claim to stellar rank.

On Wednesday, 4 December 1895, Edward Kilanyi died in New York without ever having witnessed the stage presentation which was to crown his short but spectacular career in America. That presentation, known as the “Glyptorama,” was a grandiose exhibition of tableaux vivants staged at Koster and Bial's famous music hall.

In the closing months of 1699, the winter of his discontent, an established London actor and occasional dramatist hit upon a plan to change his public image from comedian to tragedian; he would fashion for himself a leading tragic role in which his uncontrollable voice and ungainly figure might prove to be assets rather than liabilities; in this way he would demonstrate to himself and to the world that he was unquestionably a complete master of his art. The alteration of Shakespeare's Richard III, the effort by which Colley Cibber, dramatist, attempted to aid the career of Colley Cibber, actor, was for the adapter a decided failure; Cibber's portrayal of England's most notorious monarch was too comic to be convincing. Yet in reshaping Shakespeare's play to suit the taste of the contemporary playgoer, he unknowingly manufactured one of the greatest box-office attractions in the history of the theatre. His alteration was to be the most lasting of all the many revisions of the plays of Shakespeare and was to hold the stage in preference to the original for nearly two hundred years. Although Cibber never explicitly admitted the reasons behind his choosing the role of Richard III for his tragic bow, his motivations become clear to the reader who patiently follows his career through the intricacies of An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber.

The fruits of scientific enterprise are never without their detractors, and so the Illustrated News of the World felt the necessity, early in 1891, to deplore a chain of events, pursuant to the invention of the talking machine.

The tradition of military theatre in America is one interwoven with the history of the United States. Members of the British army garrisoned in the Colonies before and during the Revolution performed plays for their amusement and for charity. The American military almost from the time of its inception also participated in theatrical productions, both as producers and as participants in non-military productions.

Barely eighteen months before his production of The Shoemaker's Holiday, Orson Welles could not claim for himself a single credential in the professional theatre. Beginning with his very first production, the celebrated “Voodoo” Macbeth, in 1936, Welles quickly became the center of mounting popular and critical attention with Horse Eats Hat, Dr. Faustus and The Cradle Will Rock for the W.P.A. He followed these in the Winter of 1937–38 with the first two productions for his own, newlyformed Mercury Theatre: Julius Caesar and The Shoemaker's Holiday.

The production of Alfred de Vigny's Chatterton at the Comédie-Française, 12 February 1835, comes toward the end of the middle period of French Romantic drama. After the success of Hugo's Hernani in 1830 the French Romantics abandoned and were abandoned by the official theatre. Between 1830–1835, most of the works of Dumas, Hugo, and Vigny were produced at the Odéon or the Porte-Saint-Martin—with the notable exception of the fiasco of Hugo's Le Roi s'amuse at the Comédie in 1832. The conventions and tastes of the popular theatre audiences had not been favorable to the literary concerns of the Romantics. Dumas especially, and Hugo, to some extent, compromised their principles, while Vigny chose to remain silent. In 1835, however, Hugo and Vigny, with Angelo and Chatterton, were to return to the more literary atmosphere of the Comédie-Française. After these productions, both successes, the history of the Romantic drama in France moves into its final period with a series of failures which would culminate in the production of Hugo's Les Burgraves at the Comédie-Française in 1843, generally considered to be the terminal date in the study of French Romantic drama.