“Now, I don't want to take anything away from the French resistance,” protests a character in a recent novel. “… Its brave raids and acts of sabotage undermined the Germans and helped bring about their downfall. But in many ways Marcel Carné's movie, his Children of Paradise, was more important than the armed resistance. The resisters might have saved the skin of Paris, Carné kept alive its soul.” It is a fatuous remark, the kind we expect from the determinedly fatuous hero, but its praise of Carné suggests with embarrassing accuracy the seductiveness of Les Enfants du Paradis. A Paris of romantically roiling passions, of pure Pierrots and gay Robert Macaires, of the Boulevard du Crime, whose little theatres stand as metaphors for the brash vitality of le peuple — it is a spectacle that few of us can resist. All our dreams of the City of Light (save those of shabby accordionists strolling beneath balloonbedecked Eiffel Towers) are contained in its opening shot, alive with the turbulent crowds of the old quartier du Temple.

On Monday, October 16, 1758., Hugh Gaine reported a novelty. “Friday last,” he told his readers in the New-York Mercury, “arrived here from the West Indies, a Company of Comedians; some Part of which were here in the Year 1753.” This brief notice, which went on to assure its readers that the company had “an ample Certificate of their Private as well as publick Qualifications,” marks the beginning of the most significant event in American theatre history: the establishment of the professional theatre on this continent. The achievements of the Company of Comedians during its sixteen-year residence in North America are virtually without parallel in the history of the theatre, and have not received sufficient recognition by historians and scholars.

From October 20, 1774, when the Continental Congress passed a resolution outlawing theatrical activities in America, until the formation of the Lindsay-Wall troupe that began performing illegally in Maryland in 1781 and, under the management of Dennis Ryan, shifted its base of operations to New York in 1783, the theatre in America was in a near-dormant state. The only significant exceptions to this condition were the productions of the occupying British military in various American localities, and a few productions by American military officers given in response.

Representation of battle on the stages of the late Sixteenth Century is described in three oft-quoted statements:

…two Armies flie in, represented by foure swords & bucklers, and then what hard hart will not take it for a pitched field.

…with three rusty swords, And help of some few foot and half-foot words, Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars, And in the tiring house bring wounds to scars.

…we shall much disgrace With four or five most vile and ragged foils (Right ill dispos'd in brawl ridiculous) The name of Agincourt.

Henry Fielding's Author's Farce, performed forty-one times in the spring and summer of 1730, was the hit of London's theatrical season. In this, his third play, Fielding turned away from the stylized realism of his Love in Several Masques (1728) and The Temple Beau (1730). In the earlier plays, and indeed throughout his career, he perceived and judged social behavior by comparing people who play roles in daily life to actors who assume roles on stage; in particular, he scrutinized the theatrical rituals and fashionable deceit of courting couples. By adopting the techniques of burlesque in The Author's Farce, he exposes simultaneously the false roles of courtship in daily life and the way that the theatre itself portrays such love-making. Understanding the technique by which Fielding criticizes courtship clearly reveals his larger purpose — to criticize the deceptive behavior and mercenary values, implicit in the stage's conventions, which the theatre fosters and endorses in real life.

When “the floodgates of emigration from Europe were opened by the political upheavals on the continent in 1848 … Texas was the goal of the thousands of refugees who fled from the turmoil.” Throughout the following decade, waves of German immigrants were thrust onto the shores of the Texas Gulf Coast at Indianola and eventually spread over much of Southwestern and Central Texas.

John Banvard was one of the more colorful and eccentric entrepreneurs of the nineteenth century American popular theatre. The hero of a Horatio Alger “rags to riches” story, he garnered honors, wealth, and fame on the strength of the enormous success of his massive panorama, now lost, of the Mississippi River. In the 1860s, his reputation as an artist secure, he dreamed of establishing a theatre and museum that would not only reflect the emerging cultural consciousness of the American urban population, but turn a neat profit as well.

Henry James Byron (1834–1884) was a brilliant, witty, literary Englishman who wrote equally witty plays, infused with a cleverness of conception that deserves more than superficial analysis. While he had careers as diverse as those of actor, manager, novelist, editor, journalist, and playwright, it is upon the last mentioned that his “fame” rests.

Theatre critics and historians generally acknowledge a movement toward realism in nineteenth century American dramaturgy and cite Augustin Daly, Bronson Howard, William Gillette, and James A. Herne as innovators in the development of American realism. Steele Mackaye, however, is rarely included as a significant part of this movement; although his theatrical inventions are hailed as far-sighted and innovative, his plays are usually dismissed as unworthy of consideration, as conventional melodramas reflecting the fashion of the day. The close study of Mackaye's plays, however, reveals that he was in the vanguard of the movement toward realism.

One of the more enduring images of actors is that they are a highly sociable, gregarious people. Perhaps less so today, but in the nineteenth century this characterization had solid basis in fact. The origins of this trait are easily understood. It was encouraged by the cooperative aspect of the theatre and the closed nature of the acting fraternity, which resulted from both the constant travel and the social proscription that actors had always faced. It also was based in the acting personality itself which, though varied and incapable of stereotyped description, often contains an extra measure of extroversion and companionability.

Martha Morton was a remarkable woman — a talented and energetic person whose career in the New York theatre extended from 1890 to 1915, a time when women were expected to concern themselves with traditional roles and when public life and outside work were adventures for only a few daring women. In spite of efforts to sweep her aside, Morton opened the doors for American women, who followed after her, to participate in the theatre as playwrights, directors, producers, and professional members of theatre organizations.

The conventional reliance upon “memory,” the lyric subtleties of both writing and scenery, and the ubiquitous mood of emotional despair characterize three early Tennessee Williams plays — The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Summer and Smoke — and set them a part from the less “poetic” currents in the Williams canon. The plays are remarkably similar in organic configuration; their shape and texture reveal a theatrical form of considerable distinction. Although they gained articulate theatrical expression under three different directors, the scenery for all three was designed (in the “Broadway” productions) by Jo Mielziner, whose ideas have continued to influence subsequent productions. The unique fusion of the Williams-Mielziner artistry has given the American drama a consummate theatre aesthetic: a vision of dramatic life most subtle in its use of human values and most articulate in its visual definition of mood.

Although critics generally agree that Thomas Forrest wrote The Disappointment; or, the Force of Credulity (1767; rev. ed. 1796), no one has explained the significance of his pseudonym, Andrew Barton. Were the play typical of early American drama, the matter of authorship would be relatively unimportant; but because The Disappointment has historical, cultural and literary value, the pseudonym deserves attention.

Of particular interest to scholars of the early American theatre is a 1798 water-color by Cotton Milbourne entitled “Saint Paul's Chapel, Broadway Between Fulton and Vesey Streets,” in the possession of the New-York Historical Society. Besides depicting the Chapel, the watercolor shows the Park Theatre as it appeared at the time of its opening in 1798. As such, it replaces the unreliable Elkanah Tisdale engraving, found in David Longworth's 1797 American Almanack, New-York Register and City Directory, as the most accurate view of the theatre prior to its reconstruction in 1820.