After a lapse of some years calypso drama reappeared in 1964 on the nightly calypso concert programmes tra ditionally offered to the Trinidad public in the weeks preceding the annual carnival celebration. These musical playlets have always enjoyed considerable popular appeal and, in a period of emerging nationalism, it has been argued that they contain the rudiments of a national drama and theatre. In this article I propose to trace the history of calypso drama and analyse the genre as a valid theatrical form.

A Play-by-Play history of King Lear in Germany, France, and Italy would be a dull thing; but a discussion of the special qualities found in the tragedy at historic theatrical moments can illuminate both the work of art and the cultural and artistic environment in which it was presented.

The German productions offer the best example of the range of possibilities found in Lear in Continental theatre because the play has had there its longest history of production, outside of England.

The office of Master of the Revels first appears in late fifteenth-century England. The appointment during the Elizabethan era was one which entailed the supervision of court entertainment of a theatrical nature. By the Jacobean period the Master was a censor of plays who exacted fees for pieces licensed for public performance. During the tenure of the most famous English Master of Revels, Sir Henry Herbert, the office declined in importance with the granting of patents to Thomas Killigrew and Sir William Davenant in 1660. By 1737 with the Licensing Act, the function of the Master of the Revels had become the province of the Lord Chamberlain.

The opening of Beerbohm Tree's new theatre, Her Majesty's, on April 28, 1897, was a major social event, but hardly a landmark in stage history. Desmond MacCarthy felt that “Her Majesty's … frankly forewent the claim to be the last word in dramatic art” in favour of “the grandly, lavishly popular in that line.” The art critic of the Weekly Sun suggested that it had foregone dramatic art altogether as it had been traditionally understood. “This is the age of the biograph and the cinematograph,” he wrote. “Mr. Tree's object was to give us living pictures which talked.”

In many English villages in the nineteenth century young farmworkers used to perform a traditional play, the origins of which probably stretch back to the centuries before the Conversion. William Barnes, the Dorset dialect poet and friend of Thomas Hardy, has left us this description of the actors in such a play:

John Philip Kemble, particularly during his palmy days at the rebuilt Covent Garden from 1809 to 1817, introduced a new style of production and management into English theatre. In producing Shakespeare's plays (twenty-seven in twenty-nine years) Kemble was determined “to bend every nerve to make them perfect, beyond all previous example.” His calculated “authenticity,” picturesque groupings, illusionistic scenery, and splendid processions revolutionized theatrical style. “Unquestionably all the truth, all the uniformity, all the splendour and the retinue of the stage came in, but did not die, with Mr. Kemble,” writes his biographer, James Boaden, with customary enthusiasm. “He transported us absolutely into the days of Henry VIII. or Coriolanus,” recalls one admirer.

When The New York Times on September 16, 1962 changed its official spelling from theatre to theater, it jumped headlong into a controversy actively alive since Shakespeare's day. On the day before, on Sunday, the Drama section showed a single face to the public as it reported and advertised an institution called theatre, but from the next day forward it looked as if the muse wrote in two languages because both spellings were used. The change was made without editorial comment, without a single letter to the editor, without any indication whatsoever that anyone cared. If a few noticed it, they undoubtedly concluded that The Times had fallen victim to an American spelling rule that must have long plagued its copyreaders and thus forgave the change.

A fully documented history of the Old American Company under the direction of Lewis Hallam, John Hodgkinson, and later William Dunlap, is yet to be written. When such a history appears, it will be an important contribution not only to our knowledge of the American theatre but also to our better understanding of the early social history of our country. From New England the young nation inherited its vigorous pioneering spirit as well as its puritan piety. In New England were formed enduring attitudes for the venue of the arts in general and the theatre in particular. The pioneer had little time for the theatre and the pious had little sympathy.