Editorial

We trust our readers will forgive us some blowing of our own trumpet as we celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the first issue of Theatre Notebook. This issue reflects some perennial concerns of Theatre Notebook with consideration of eighteenth-century Italian opera in London, Frank Benson’s Shakespeare productions and Pepper’s Ghost as well as an essay on Donald Wolfit, who is seldom accorded serious academic scrutiny. The authors also reflect the heterogeneity of contributors to the journal: two scholars based in England who entered the recent STR New Scholars Essay Competition, both publishing academic work relatively late in their careers outside higher education, an American scholar based in Turkey and a third late entrant into the area of academic theatre history.

We are celebrating by reproducing our first issue in its entirety. Our extra pages also include a survey of some of the trends of the intervening seventy years by one of the journal’s stalwart but unsung business managers. As Geoff Davidson points out, Theatre Notebook was but one fruit of the labours of an extraordinary group of theatre aficionados who shaped the future of British and international theatre research through their efforts in the immediate post-war period. In October 1945 the UK was just emerging from the six years of war that had seen the destruction of much of the country’s infrastructure, including a significant number of theatres. Creating a new theatre journal was a mark of optimism, of a belief that culture did matter and that the history of theatre was worthy of celebration, analysis and exploration.

At that time British universities did not study theatre history and practice systematically. There were no drama departments and theatre history was the preserve of scholars whose jobs were not primarily concerned with the history of the theatre. Their amateurism related only to their employment status and not to their academic standards. The scholarly work of Sybil Rosenfeld, the longest serving editor, and Richard Southern has stood the test of time and, as one would expect, the academic credentials of our editors have always been of the highest quality. George Speaight served the journal as editor and manager as well as virtually creating the serious study of the juvenile drama. Similarly Michael Booth pioneered the academic study of nineteenth-century theatre and virtually invented the study of melodrama Considerations of space, and in the case of current editors, modesty, preclude a full listing of individual achievements. However, we should note that Theatre Notebook’s editors are not and have never been just chroniclers and critics of theatre but have contributed to the actual practice of theatre, if not necessarily where one might have expected to find them: Ifan Kyrle Fletcher, founder editor and co-founder of the Society for Theatre Research was an assistant examiner of plays for the Lord Chamberlain, whose office was responsible for the pre-censorship of new plays. As far as I can tell, only one of our editors, Bamber Gascoigne, fell foul of the censorship, with his 1966 play Leda Had a Little Swan, which was banned in its entirety. Other editors have worked with Kenneth Branagh, chaired touring theatre companies, staged historically informed performances of Handel and Purcell operas and explored the practical issues raise by Shakespeare’s Globe

The present editors are hugely aware of the debt they owe to their predecessors, even if they occasionally wish that they had chosen a somewhat more ambitious title for a journal that has transcended its beginnings to become an internationally recognised peer-reviewed research journal with contributors and readers from across the globe. The founding editors could scarcely have imagined the ways in which the practice of theatre research and scholarship would change with the growth of electronic media, which has transformed virtually everything we do, from conducting our own research to conducting the business of the journal.

All of us who are or have been associated with the journal share a love of theatre in all its various modes and believe it must continue to be recorded, analysed and celebrated. We cannot anticipate the ways in which technology will alter the practice of the...