In every theatre historian there lurks the shadow of the amateur. For the commitment always begins with a sharing of the theatre-goer's delight in seeing the curtain rise, and a strong sense of being in the presence of history in the making. To record this moment is the instinct of the enthusiast; to recapture it from the past is the function of the historian.

How many readers of, say, a Molière play, trying to visualize its performance 300 years ago, are aware that the stage was occupied not only by actors and actresses, but by dozens and, in the next century, hundreds of spectators as well? Indeed, it would appear that not even the history-conscious Ariane Mnouchkine, auteur of the recent film Molière, was well informed about this practice. Her scene depicting Molière's legendary collapse as he played the Malade imaginaire includes not a one of the 24 spectators who, according to the Registre d'Hubert for February 17, 1673, were sitting on the stage at that performance.

To review in detail the history of scholarship on the raisonneur in Molière would be to incur the charge of tedium often levelled against the character. In general, criticism in the last thirty years has steered a middle course between Michaut and Bray, between a well-filled gallery of spokesmen and a categorical: “il n'y a pas de raisonneurs dans le Théâtre de Molière” (“there are no raisonneurs in Molière's theatre”). Most of Michaut's raisonneurs have gone the way of Saint Christopher, and few commentators still heed the authorial voice Michaut so often heard.

In the “last analysis” the concern must always be for insight. Saul Bellow made it a demand: “Now I want insight.” So, too, should the reader of theatre history. Unfortunately, in the vast majority of recently published material on American theatre history that demand is not being met. Among the many young scholars researching and writing on this subject, few appear even to aspire to that mastery of the material which will produce major scholarship. The old guard persists, but today's youthful historians of American theatre tend toward an annual birth and death pattern rather than perennial growth. Obviously, such an observation should not be construed as an adverse criticism of all existing scholarship; yet, it does describe a general condition of research in American theatre history. There are surveys, general observations, memoirs, descriptions, expository and critical essays on various topics, studies of theatres and playwrights, essays on popular entertainment and ethnic or racial theatre. Some of these publications contribute meaningfully to an understanding of American theatre; few, however, suggest insight into the history of that theatre.

In 1956 a small group of scholars, all of them engaged in some way or other in the study of theatre, past and present, met and founded a certain remarkable organization. I hardly need to explain that that organization was the American Society for Theatre Research, then and still the only organization of American scholars devoted entirely to promoting the cause, the activity, and the results of research in theatre. Nor is it necessary here for me to recapitulate, even briefly, the course of events that now sees us celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Society. Fortunately, one of those founding members, Thomas Marshall, has generously accepted the charge offered him a year ago by the ASTR Executive Committee to write a concise history of the Society from the time of its founding. That review of the first twenty-five years has just come off the press, nicely timed for distribution to all members in attendance at this meeting. Subsequently it is to appear also in the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of the Society's journal, Theatre Survey.

Although the modern reputation of Molière is based upon a group of major comedies, these were not the sole source of his popularity during his lifetime. He and his troupe performed many minor plays which are no longer prominent in the Molière repertory. Among these plays is a group which feature a comedian named Sganarelle, a role always performed by Molière himself.

On the notorious question of sensibility—whether or not an actor should really “feel” the emotion he expresses—Denis Diderot brought off the best known volte-face in the history of acting theory. An erstwhile champion of inspiration and emotionality in theatrical performance, he came to believe, by the time he wrote the Paradoxe sur le comédien (1773), that an actor should not attempt to experience inwardly the passions he enacts onstage. Considerable speculation and controversy have attended Diderot's late substitution of head for heart as the mainspring of theatrical emotion.

The material upon which this paper is based is divided into two sections. The paper concerns the problems presented to historians of the theatre confronted by staging conventions. The first section is intended to consider in general terms our own experience of some of these problems—problems which, while forming given constants in the preoccupations of theatre scholars, have been brought sharply into focus by Robert K. Sarlós' recent article in Theatre Research International, “Creating Objects and Events.” The second seeks to examine the generalities which we put forward in an account of the practical reconstruction of Mahelot's staging of Pyrame et Thisbé in the early seventeenth-century Hôtel de Bourgogne.

In 1820 Pierre-Luc-Charles Cicéri (1782–1868) and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851) were the two most successful set designers in Paris, and for a two-year period (1820–1822) they shared the most prestigious design position in France: chief designer at the Paris Opera. During the Empire both men had worked at the Opera under the supervision of the designers Degotti and Isabey, Cicéri as a staff painter specializing in paysages and Daguerre as a day laborer specializing in the painting of architectural detail. In 1816, when Cicéri was promoted to the position of chief designer at the Opera, Daguerre worked briefly on his staff.

In a recent essay I argued for broader acceptance of two methods for understanding “past styles of performance”—the building of three dimensional models and the staging of four dimensional performance reconstructions. These alternatives to the traditional narrative essay make greater use of theatrical imagination, and aim at raising new kinds of questions rather than answering the old kind. However, lack of appropriate apparatus has prevented widespread use of these forms. Since performances are by nature “short-lived phenomena” and can be recorded but fragmentarily, unique methods are required for their study. Theoretical reconstructions cannot approximate the physical and psychological ambience of a respectable performance essay. On the other hand, performance reconstructions do not allow for scholarly caveat during presentation, or for lacunae where knowledge is lacking. Therefore I see the promise of a rich harvest in two-way stimulation between theoretical and performance essays. A pair of reports, based on personal involvement in the types of projects I advocate, follows.

In his essay in Theatre Research International “Creating Objects and Events,” Robert K. Sarlós cries in some anguish, “But does a production that reaches for…historic reconstruction deserve no scholarly attention at all unless or until it is recorded in (or accompanied by) a bulky tome?” His despair is comprehensible: the prospect of generating mounds of print material after completing a production is fatiguing to contemplate and daunting to attempt (indeed, lost in my own files are discarded drafts of such reportage on Giraldi Cinthio's Orbecche, an early attempt at a “performance essay”). However, the answer must be, unequivocally and despite fatigue, affirmative.

Like other major theatre artists at the turn of the twentieth century, André Antoine sought a new theatrical style to replace the dominant strain of realism. His development of naturalism and his championing of the cause of the school of Becque, Brieux, and Jullien are commonplaces of theatre history, but Antoine's efforts to extend his style, chiefly by applying it to a repertory of classical plays, have not received a great deal of attention. While it is easier to consign Antoine to a naturalistic pigeon hole, a consideration of the innovative course of his later career might help illuminate our similarly eclectic era.

Theatre historians have always lamented the scarcity of documentary material with which to recreate the theatrical milieu that by definition lives in time and perishes. What we know of yesterday's stage art comes down to us in fragments, pieced together with the skills of the detective, virtually never whole, never complete. If only, we ask, if only theatre persons had the foresight to leave behind some coherent record of the marvels of their time, some busy notebooks, some hard facts, some interpretations, some organized recapitulation of the events themselves.

Shakespeare's romantic comedy The Winter's Tale was not popular during the first half of the eighteenth century. Audiences of that period affected to prefer plays that observed the Unities, and this play of Shakespeare's with its sixteen-year gap between the third and fourth acts appeared fatally flawed. Goodman's Fields Theatre revived it on 15 January 1741 and played it eight additional nights in 1740–41. The following season it was produced at Covent Garden on 11 November 1741 and played for a mere four performances. But by 1742 The Winter's Tale had been dropped from the repertoires of all London theatres.

In his study of early nineteenth-century English pantomime, David Mayer III describes Harlequin Mother Goose—the 1806 Covent Garden production which first revealed the range of Joseph Grimaldi's comic genius—as “the end of nearly one hundred and forty years of fitful pantomime evolution.” For the next thirty years, the period dominated by Grimaldi, pantomime was at its peak: its structure and various production practices were stabilized; its potential for comedy and satire were realized more fully than ever before. Even the question of its use of dialogue was finally resolved: although, as Mayer says, “little in it was unexplainable by action,” early nineteenth-century pantomime was “rarely, if ever, silent in the way that we have come to think of pantomime today.”

On the short shelf of theatrical autobiographies that continue to be read long after their author has ceased to be newsworthy, Konstantin Stanislavsky's My Life in Art stands foremost. It is a textbook for acting classes, a sourcebook of theatrical history and a guidebook for those workers in the theatre who have lost touch with the meaning of their efforts and seek in Stanislavsky's trials and errors, goals and achievements, an artistic True North to put them back on their course. In the Soviet Union, it is lauded, in the words of the director Aleksey Popov, as “a model of superb literature and comparable to such books as Herzen's My Past and Thoughts.” In the West, no less a colleague than Jacques Copeau praised it in terms that made My Life in Art sound like the vita of an anchorite.