St James's Palace, which was perhaps planned by Henry VIII to be the court of the heir to the throne, came into far more regular use under the prolific Stuarts than it had enjoyed under the Tudors. Under James, the various members of the royal family were assigned particular palaces and royal residences for their own households, and St James's became the London court of the Prince of Wales.

The number of late seventeenth-century promptbooks known to scholars has increased astonishingly in the last thirty years, but further discoveries are always welcome. We are pleased to be able to report a new find: a very full prompt copy for what is clearly a 1660s production of James Shirley's Loves Crueltie by the King's Company at Bridges Street. The prompt notes are written in a copy of the 1640 edition held in the Brotherton Collection (University of Leeds). Cropping has cut away significant portions of the markings, but fortunately enough remains that we can reconstruct the original annotation in almost all instances.

Among the eleven promptbooks from the Morrab Library in Penzance sold at Sotheby's in 1964, by no means least interesting are three based on plays by John Dryden. After considerable study we are persuaded that all three were from Drury Lane Theatre. They came into the possession of H. C. Halliwell-Phillipps and were eventually presented to the City of Penzance as a token of his affection. We choose a musical term to suggest the great differences in origin and fortunes of the trio, for they represent a varied pattern: one comes from an early collaboration; one is a solo performance from late in the displaced laureate's career; one is a pastiche taken from a pair of heroic plays shortly after Dryden's death. At some risk of anticlimax we present them in the order of their appearance as promptbooks.

On 6 November 1946, in New York City, three enterprising women of the theatre – Margaret Webster, Cheryl Crawford, and Eva La Gallienne – launched a noble experiment with a lavish production of Shakespeare's Henry VIII. Their goal was to found a national repertory company, modelled on the European national theatres, to be a home for the classics and a training ground for a new breed of classically trained American actors – ‘an American Old Vic’. Webster and her partners had been trained in such a tradition, and their dream of an American national theatre had been given additional impetus by the Old Vic's successful visit to New York in 1945. Despite the good wishes of the theatrical community, an able band of established actors (such as Walter Hampden, Victor Jory, and the founders themselves), and generally sympathetic critical notices, the fledgling American Repertory Theatre (ART) foundered financially after one season, and the dream was abandoned (though it has recently been revived by Peter Sellars and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.).

On 22 July 1823 William Godwin addressed the following in a letter to Mary Shelley, who was returning to London after five years on the Continent:

It is a curious circumstance that a play is just announced, to be performed at the English Opera House in the Strand next Monday, entitled, Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein. I know not whether it will succeed. If it does, it will be some sort of feather in the cap of the author of the novel, a recommendation in your future negociations with booksellers.

When Adrian Noble directed Measure for Measure at the RSC in 1983–4, colour supplement coverage focused on the costumes: the exuberance of the production was indicated by the extravagance of the designs. On 25 April 1985, before the opening of the director's new As You Like It, the Sunday Times Magazine ran an interview with him and with his Rosalind, Juliet Stevenson. There was a sense, not merely to be put down to the artificial hype of the publicity machine, that a new production and above all a new Rosalind were matters of concern and interest to a wide range of consumers of life's good things. Noble's Measure for Measure had been covered almost as a design story but As You Like It was treated very differently. Noble's views on the significance of the retreat into Arden were sought and reported: there was an underlying assumption that the readership had a stake in the representation of this play, that what was being staged was a property held in common by the journal's readers and that the play had a place in the public imagination independently of what directors did with it.

In 1965, in an interview in Sight and Sound, Peter Brook eloquently discussed the difficulties of filming Shakespearian plays, decrying the ‘sad history of Shakespeare on the screen’ and denouncing the majority of Shakespearian films as ‘pitiful’ and ‘unspeakably bad’. Speaking at UNESCO's Shakespeare Quatercentenary Celebration in Paris, he said, in essence, that Shakespeare was impossible to film at all. However, the winter of 1968–9 found Brook in Northern Jutland, filming one of Shakespeare's most profoundly intricate tragedies, King Lear. When the film was released in 1970–1, critical reaction ranged from rapture to outrage. Nigel Andrews called Brook's Lear ‘a distinct achievement’, praising the acting, the setting, and, above all, Brook's use of the camera to ‘transcend repre-sentationalism’. Frank Kermode hailed Lear as a ‘fully realized and deeply imagined version of this great work … a masterly conception of the play’. Charles Phillips Reilly cautiously labelled the film ‘a mixed bag’, lauding Paul Scofield's performance as Lear and Brook's understanding of the themes of the play, but criticizing the camera work, especially in the storm sequence. Pauline Kael, the formidable reviewer for The New Yorker, simply said ‘I hated it’, and dismissed the film as ‘gray and cold … the drear far side of the moon’. According to Kael, the concept was ‘second-rate’, the script ‘plotless’, and the actors walking corpses.12 She dubbed the film ‘Peter Brook's “Night of the Living Dead”’.

Repeatedly throughout French theatre history two subjects have aroused the passions of the French theatregoer: art and politics. The famous opening-night riots at Le Cid in 1636, Hernani in 1830, and Ubu roi in 1896 all resulted in the overthrow of stale artistic conventions by the new art that each of these works represented. Examples of productions that had political repercussions are abundant – like the historical dramas of Marie-Joseph Chénier that did so much to promote the French Revolution (until his Caius Gracchus in 1792 caused a backlash demonstration), or the 1943 Comédie-Française production of Claudel's mystico-religious Soulier de satin that was gleefully interpreted by the French in German-occupied Paris as ‘resistance theatre’. One noteworthy theatrical event that succeeded in arousing both artistic and political passions was not even a French play – nor was it contemporary, although the most often-repeated comment about it was: ‘It seems to have been written just yesterday.’ This was a production of Shakespeare's Coriolanus at the Comédie-Française in the 1933–4 season, just at the time when the Third Republic was nearly toppled by the public's response to press revelations of the Stavisky scandal.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, it had become almost de rigueur for aspiring British entertainers to include at least one tour abroad in their career. Exchange – albeit initially a somewhat one-sided exchange – with North America dated back to the beginning of the century; as white settlement of Australasia developed, so from the third decade did theatre, and Gustavus Vaughan Brooke's success, particularly in Sydney, between 1855 and 1861, revealed a new opening for the more adventurous.

It is my intention to derive the concept of ‘theatrical irony’ from the general theory of theatrical communication.

The basic meaning of the term ‘irony’, from the Greek word ‘ειρωνεια’, was ‘dissimulation’. Over the centuries, this term has been extended to additional semantic fields and consequently acquired new meanings as in ‘Socratic irony’, ‘philosophical irony’, ‘romantic irony’, ‘dramatic irony’, ‘tragic irony’, and so on. At the same time, a number of more colloquial expressions were introduced as well, as in ‘ironic smile’, ‘irony of events’, ‘irony of fate’, and so on. I am of the opinion, however, that despite the diversity of such phrases and regardless of their partial overlap, it is still possible to unveil a common semantic core. Furthermore, it is my belief that our understanding of theatrical irony benefits from all these additional usages.

I wrapped myself in a woollen cloak against the chill of an October Indian night in 1980. Camera in hand and squatting in the dirt, I was surrounded by villagers and their laughing children. We all were waiting for a performance to begin. The occasion was a Bhavāī Mela at the village of Sola near Gujarat's largest city, Ahmedabad. The Mela was sponsored by the National School of Drama (New Delhi) and the Gujarat State Sangeet Nritya Natya Akademi. The privileged, urban students of the NSD were conspicuous in their reserved seating area, disdainfully rejecting the attempts of the villagers to join them. Far in the back of the crowd I glimpsed the still-beautiful Mrinalini Sarabhai, one of India's most famous dancers, swathed in silk and carrying a large palm-frond fan. Next to her was the white-haired Kailish Pandya, director of Drama at Miss Sarabhai's Darpana Academy of performing arts at Ahmedabad. With the first eerie, insistent blast of the Bhavāī trumpets (bhūṇgaḷs), an excitement swept the crowd extinguishing physical discomforts and personal slights. The fact that I would spend the next seven days sleeping on bare, stone floors to see this Mela, became unimportant as the actors began their intricate dances and spirited singing. From my first exposure to the Bhavāī in 1976, I had awaited this moment, a performance not in a university playhouse, but in a village.

On Saturday, 10 February, 1827, the Manchester Guardian announced the coming appearance of ‘the African Roscius’ at the Theatre Royal, Manchester. After referring to ‘his success in New York and in all the principal theatres in the United States’ and to his performances ‘in the Theatres Royal, Bath, Bristol, Brighton, Plymouth, Exeter, and upwards of fifty nights at the Royal Coburg Theatre, London, with universal approbation’, the notice states that he will spend one night in Manchester on his way to Edinburgh and Glasgow. A note in the Manchester Courier the following week (17.2.1827) emphasizes the adventurous nature of the theatrical event, telling the public that ‘the spirited manager of this establishment seems determined to spare no pains to render the theatre as attractive as circumstances will permit’. The attitude behind this retains a protective ambiguity towards the experiment.