This volume showcases civic theatre and display, with articles on Chester (Gerhardt), York (Twycross), Durham and Newcastle (Chambers and Jakovac), and London (Butterworth). There is a happy emphasis on particularities. In the second part of her article on stage lighting in broad daylight, Meg Twycross discusses, among other things, how the actors in the York Play knew what time it was, and how fast a medieval person was expected to walk. Philip Butterworth lays out the difficulties presented to London pageantry by unauthorised house extensions and horse-droppings. On a more elevated level, Gašper Jakovac, in the Newcastle section mapping James VI & I's tours of the North, talks about theatre and coal; and in his revelations about the Chester Waterleaders and Drawers of Dee, Ernst Gerhardt talks about theatre and fish.

As part of our remit to discuss parallel forms of theatre, we welcome Lucy Deacon's introduction to a living tradition of mystery plays, the Taʿzia khani of present-day Iran, seen and reported on by Western travellers from the seventeenth century AD onwards. Her account of its development has many suggestive parallels with Western pageant-waggon plays. Do not forget to check out the videos she cites (URLs on the METh website). Finally, Elisabeth Dutton and Perry Mills discuss their production of Wit and Science by Edward's Boys, the first, as far as we know, by a company of the right age and sex since the sixteenth century, which some of our readers will have seen at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa during SITM. Discussing the performance of allegory, it reveals some interesting cultural assumptions (ours and theirs): are boys always boys? and what about girls? and how do you ‘get an education’?

The 2019 METh Meeting celebrated our fortieth birthday with a (working) holiday in Switzerland. Elisabeth Dutton, Olivia Robinson, and Aurélie Blanc welcomed us to the University of Fribourg for two days of concentrated colloquium and partying in an unrivalled Alpine setting. The theme was ‘Peoples and Places: Networks, Communities, and Early Theatre’.