It has long been believed that the style of comedy depicted on southern Italian vases of the fourth century BC was a local Italiote form called phylax. A. D. Trendall, the leading authority on the vases, has consistently taken the view that the plays were ‘impromptu’ performances, ‘in which light, movable sets could be used to indicate the required background’. It is not surprising that this has become accepted history: the vases, it is believed, represent improvised farce performed on makeshift stages by strolling actors, also called phlyakes.

The group of actors from whom the Gelosi company arose are thought to have first come together in 1568, with the amalgamation of two troupes led by the prima donnas Vincenza and Flaminia. They were already known by the name Gelosi when they toured France in 1571; by 1572 they were popular enough to be able to complain that the stanze in Genoa could only hold an audience of 150; in 1574 their performance, and that of their leading lady, Vittoria Piisimi, were the highlight of Henri III's visit to Venice, and their reputation as the foremost com-media dell'arte troupe was fully established. Por-cacchi's pamphlet of 1574 notes some of the Gelosi actors of the time as Simon of Bologna, who played a facchino Bergamasco, Giulio Pas-quati as the Magnifico and Rinaldo. A Mantuan decree of 5 May 1579 names as Gelosi actors Simon the Bergamasco, Orazio and Adriano the innamorati, and Gabriele their friend.

In 1932 Terence Gray, the innovative director of Cambridge's Festival Theatre, was invited by the monthly journal of the British Drama League to contribute to a series exploring the possible modernization of British theatre. Gray's article was caustic and typically heretical. ‘Let the gangrenous old thing die’, he urged, denying the possibility of revitalizing something so riddled with sickness and already ‘sitting on its long-overdue coffin… waiting for the undertaker’. Within a year, Gray had abandoned not only the Festival theatre, which he had created in 1926, but all theatre.

I begin with two images of African actors. The first, from Asinamali by the South African playwright Mbongeni Ngema (1985; Plate 23), shows a group pose drawn directly from protest theatre—angry men in prison khaki, with fists clenched, bodies tensed in readiness and, one can assume, voices raised against the invisible but all too palpable forces of apartheid. The second, from the centenary celebrations of the American Board Mission in South Africa (1935; Plate 24), portrays the ‘smelling-out of a fraudulent umthakathi’ (which can be translated as diviner or trickster), which were followed, on this occasion, by other scenes portraying the civilizing influence of European settlers. While the first offers an image of African agency and modernity in the face of oppression, the second, with its apparently un-mediated reconstruction of pre-colonial ritual and, in its teleological juxtaposition of ‘tribal’ and ‘civilized’ custom, seems to respond to the quite different terms set by a long history of displays, along the lines of the Savage South Africa Show (1900), in which the authenticity of the Africans on stage was derived not from their agency but by their incorporation into the representation of colonial authority.

The first phase of a long and complex process of the Polish reception of William Shakespeare's oeuvre ended in the middle of the nineteenth century with the popularization of new translations and the gradual elimination of French and German classicist adaptations. Vilna, vital centre of Polish culture, science and art, was the birthplace of Polish Romanticism and a hotbed of theatrical innovation. Vilna was also, at the turn of the eighteenth century, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and one of the major cities of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The school stage of Vilna Academy, established by Stefan Batory in 1578, had been active since 1582. In 1639, English actors belonging to Robert Archer's company may have visited the town; though the performances planned by King Wladyslaw IV did not take place. A permanent professional theatre was opened in 1785, when Wojciech Boguslawski, the greatest personality of the theatre of the Polish Enlightenment, came up from Warsaw with his troupe.

‘Shakespeare in our theatres is nothing but a lie. As we know, his plays are staged to be mentioned in the paper list to blind people's eyes with great repertory’, wrote Stefan Jaracz in 1936, one of the most famous Polish actors in the inter-war period. This bitter statement made by the performer of, among other parts, Caliban and Shylock sounds exaggerated. After the First World War Shakespeare remained one of the most appreciated ‘classics’ in our theatre. There was no stage, including those of minor importance, which would not have Shakespeare in its repertory, on many he was the most frequently performed foreign author.

The first night of Konrad Swinarski's A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Stary Teatr in Cracow took place on 22 July 1970, then a national holiday commemorating the establishment of the People's Republic of Poland. Thanks to Swinarski the Stary Teatr was one of the best companies in Poland; he expected the actors to engage fully with their work, and he had a great gift for inspiring their imagination and emotions. Actors of great personalities belonged to the cast of this Midsummer Night's Dream: Wojciech Pszoniak (Puck), Anna Polony (Helena), Wiktor Sadecki (Oberon), Wojciech Ruszkowski (Quince), yet the main quality of the production resided in the high standard of acting of the ensemble. Swinarski set his actors a difficult task—he wanted them to act both comedy and quite serious drama at the same time. His idea was to search for and enlarge analogies among the threads of the drama, accentuating the oppositions and contrasts in order to stress the internal contradictions of the fictional world. Moreover, he wanted to show all the events of the play in two different, contradictory perspectives: the fairy-tale perspective and the court perspective.

The fall of communism in Poland has meant that theatre is no longer a substitute for normal public and political life—the Denmark of Hamlet has ceased to be the necessary metaphor for our prison, and the attractions of a gloomy Prince, representing repressed Poland, have waned. There is now a burgeoning interest in Shakespearian comedy, shared by theatre people and their spectators.