Recent surveys of theatre theory and historiography have given only very limited attention to a critical episode in the organization, development and legitimation of modern theatre scholarship, the Theaterwissenschaft writings of German-language theorists of theatre study in the first half of the twentieth century. I propose to survey briefly the major moments in this group's emergence, characterize the theoretical approaches associated with some principal figures in the group, outline something of their influence (or reception), and make a few suggestions about their importance for further study. Their work has been undergoing a steady re-appraisal in the contemporary German theatre academy, and some members of the group, like Hans Knudsen and Artur Kutscher, were sufficiently self-conscious about the process of institution-building that their own history has itself been subject to historiographic comment. Consequently I will offer some German reconsiderations of the structure and significance of the field where they seem appropriate. Though there is some sense in the current American construction of this group as “positivist,” the label does not quite acknowledge the variety of theatre theories in which their relatively adequate theory of empirical evidence can be applied, nor does it do justice to the group's interest in theatre as a social phenomenon. The work of the group is so varied in relation to its empirical basis, and so involved in the emerging discourses of sociology, anthropology, and psychology, that it gives us reason to doubt any narrow construction of the theatre-historical tradition as theoretically naive or one-dimensional.

After centuries of study, an untold number of scholars have agreed that the City Dionysia of fifth-century Athens involved an animal sacrifice to the god Dionysos, and that this event took place in the theatre before the beginning of the play competition. The usual assumption has been that this sacrifice was offered upon an altar situated at the exact center of a circular orchestra.

This placement fits well with the theory that tragedy grew from a dithyrambic chorus dancing in a circle around the altar of Dionysos. But now that the dogma of the originally circular orchestra has been questioned, some attention must also be given to the location of the altar, a supposedly standard piece of theatre furniture. The following pages will (1) discuss the origin of the concept of a centrally located altar; (2) examine the literary, artistic, and architectural evidence which relate to altar placement; and (3) suggest a possible alternative to the central location.

In 1708 an actress named Mary Morein filed a bill of complaint in the Court of Chancery against William Pinkethman. Morein's name appears nowhere in The London Stage, and there is no entry for her in the Biographical Dictionary. Other than the lawsuit testimony by and against her, I am aware of no evidence about her. Thus the lawsuit is of interest because it documents the existence of an otherwise unknown performer at a stormy time in the history of the London theatre. Perhaps more important, however, it contains significant factual evidence about the employment conditions of minor actresses, and gives specific figures for what such a person might earn by performing at the Fairs.

In 1882, Walter Besant declared that the hinterland beyond Aldgate had two million people yet “no institutions of their own to speak of, no public buildings of any importance, no municipality, no gentry, no carriages, no soldiers, no picture-galleries, no theatres, no opera—they have nothing.” The fact that Whitechapel first appeared in the theatrical annals in 1557, Stepney contained several of the largest engineering projects in Regency London, and Shoreditch's Britannia was one of the most successful theatres in Victorian Britain belies the prejudice in Besant's statement. Cultural historians of all types need to resist such propaganda and have good cause to suspect the entire record of life, leisure, and entertainment in the industrialized inner suburbs. The history of nineteenth-century English theatre has—with very few exceptions—focussed on London, yet apart from essays by Michael Booth and Clive Barker little serious attention has been paid to theatre in the East End. Booth points out the limitations arising from scholarship that ignores the area where half of the metropolitan theatre seats were located, while Barker shows the methodological difficulties that arise once a redressive investigation into the audience is undertaken. The omissions from the historical record are compounded by narrow selectivity of enquiries: leading performers receive scholarly attention while supernumeraries (supers), ballet dancers, front of house staff, property makers, and the many functionaries who made up the whole community responsible for running a theatre are consistently neglected. These characteristics are somehow more evident in scholarship on the East End, where no matter how sociogeographically biased the enquirers may be the working class and its conditions are central themes, and the repertoire has always been allowed (perhaps stereotyped) as sensational.

British theatre in the nineteenth century operated very much like a family business. Touring companies of necessity depended upon core family groups to manage the affairs, to perform the plays, and to nurture the children. London companies—though not so inbred as the provincials—often saw husbands and wives, parents and children perform together; indeed acting dynasties established in the last century extended well into this one. These actors, at whatever age, were perforce versatile, as an evening's bill might require appearances in an opening melodrama, a Shakespearean tragedy, then a farce to finish. And each of the items on an evening's playbill required scenery. The job of providing those sets was likewise often a family undertaking, though one that lacked female roles: father taught son; son taught grandson. From the beginning of the century until almost the end, the Grieve family—John Henderson Grieve (1770–1845), his sons Thomas (1799–1882) and William (1800–1844), and grandson Thomas Walford Grieve (1841–1899)—designed and painted scenery for some of the most important productions of those years—as well as for some of the most inconsequential and forgettable.

Along with Robert Edmond Jones, Norman Bel Geddes, and Lee Simonson, Joseph Urban brought the New Stagecraft to America in the 1920s. No other designer of his period lavished more lush color on the stage or brought scene design closer to the level his contemporaries called “Art.” Urban produced the backdrops of the famous Follies for Florenz Ziegfeld, and the Metropolitan Opera continued to use his sets for more than two decades after his death. As early as 1917 the New York Times risked the prediction that “when the historian of the New York stage writes the record, of the uplift of the art of its decoration received in the teens of the twentieth century he will have to give the greatest credit to Joseph Urban.” Instead, he has been virtually ignored: for example, Brockett and Findlay in their history of the modern theatre, Century of Innovation, fail to mention Urban at all. In view of his extensive design record it is surprising that he remains so little known.

Although history and culture are now being read from below, dramatic texts are still being read from above: critical scrutiny persistently favors the articulate principal characters of a play over the minor figures with whose muted assistance great words and deeds are performed. My intention is to compensate for the neglect by decentering the dominant characters and concentrating instead on the minor and mute roles in the margins of Shakespeare's King Lear, and the way they were “doubled,” among the supporting players. While taking note of the principal roles, I will focus upon the smaller parts and walk-ons. The questions I will address are three: What was the fewest number of players needed to accommodate all the parts of King Lear? How were the minor roles distributed among the available players? What conclusions can be derived from doubling patterns concerning the structure of the companies?

In his seminal studies of Shakespeare on film—one appearing in an earlier number of this publication—Robert Hamilton Ball traced Beerbohm Tree's involvement with four film projects that spanned his twenty-year career (1897–1917) at His Majesty's Theatre: the opening shipwreck from his 1904 revival of The Tempest, captured on film at His Majesty's in 1905 by Charles Urban; a five-scene version of Henry VIII based on his 1910 production featuring him as Cardinal Wolsey and filmed in February 1911 at William Barker's Ealing studio; a 1916 Macbeth, bearing no direct resemblance to his 1911 stage version, filmed in California by D.W. Griffith with Tree playing the title role; and, though allegedly not as extensive as the others but certainly the most important historically, a brief segment from his King John revival filmed in 1899 on the Adelphi embankment—Tree's initial cinematographic venture and the very first record of Shakespeare on film. Although little is known about the exact nature of these films because the primary sources—the films themselves—are lost, Ball, working from the knowledge that the films were, in the main, transcriptions of either the stage revivals or Tree's roles, reconstructed their contents by culling mostly from theatrical documents such as reviews and programs and augmenting these with rare descriptions or photographs from the films whenever available.

In 1594, as stability was about to return to the London stage after several years of disruption, a company under the patronage of the fifth Earl of Sussex played two brief engagements at Philip Henslowe's theatre, the Rose. Historians of the Elizabethan stage have had little to say about Sussex's men, for although the company appears fairly regularly in performance records of the 1590s, and although Henslowe's Diary lists their day-by-day repertory for a few weeks in 1594, their plays do not seem to have formed an important part of the Elizabethan drama (only George a Greene survives as a piece attributable solely to Sussex's men), and their personnel do not seem to have aroused sufficient interest to leave any record of an actor's name after 1576. Yet there may be a story to tell about Sussex's men after all. If we look closely at their repertory of 1594, keeping in mind the affairs of other companies at this time, we can see that the Sussex company may have briefly included some of the most important figures of the Elizabethan theatre.

With the advent of the 1917 Revolution, “the whole of the Russian cultural world [became] an icon.” Soviet power retroactively encoded revolutionary imminence and immanence in history and fetishized the revolutionary historical moment as the pregnant body of past, present and future. Leon Trotsky wrote: “If the symbol is a concentrated image, then the revolution is the supreme maker of symbols, since it presents all phenomena and relations in concentrated form.” Lenin's belief that “a communist [proletarian] culture must embody the entire store of knowledge accumulated in the pre-revolutionary past” could not, however, fully predict the Soviets' gross and wholesale advertisement of self-made objects inscribed with ideological desire. This owed more to what Renato Poggioli called the “pronounced tendency of the Russian critical spirit to translate artistic and cultural facts into religious or political myths.” This tendency was exploited by Joseph Stalin, who recognized that “Totalitarianism is … its own Utopia.”

Julia Marlowe's career, 1887–1924, came at an awkward point in the history of the American theatre, a transitional period when old traditions were fading and new ones had not yet been established. During her thirty years as an actress, a heterogeneous mixture of plays was seen on the American stage: Shakespeare and other old classics, emotional dramas adapted from the French and German, melodramas old and new, early attempts at realism, problem plays. Most strikingly innovative in this period were the dramas of Ibsen, Shaw, and O'Neill (his early plays), which questioned conventional values and often presented a disturbing view of human life and relationships. The range of plays was varied for performers, and the acting styles employed by the actors revealed a comparable diversity. According to Garff Wilson's classification, players like Helena Modjeska performed in the classic style characterized by grace, symmetry, and poetic grandeur; Clara Morris and Fanny Davenport perfected a highly emotional style, both specialists in the art of stage weeping; Otis Skinner abandoned the classics of Shakespeare and Restoration drama and became famous in sentimental comedy and romantic costume drama such as Kismet; Ada Rehan and Viola Allen, part of the “sisterhood of sweetness and light,” achieved popularity as actresses of the “personality school”; Richard Mansfield, a thoroughly transitional figure, clung to the classics in his repertoire but also produced and performed in the modern plays of Shaw and Ibsen; Minnie Maddern Fiske championed the works of Ibsen and a style of acting called the school of psychological naturalism.