Goldhill, Simon (1997). "The Audience of Athenian Tragedy". In Easterling, P. E. (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge Companions to Literature series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp.54–68. ISBN 0-521-42351-1. Beacham, Richard C. (1996). The Roman Theatre and Its Audience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-77914-3. Deal, William E. (2007). Handbook to Life in Medieval and Early Modern Japan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-533126-4. Because of the turmoil before this time, there was still some controversy about what should and should not be put on the stage. Jeremy Collier, a preacher, was one of the heads in this movement through his piece A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage. The beliefs in this paper were mainly held by non-theatre goers and the remainder of the Puritans and very religious of the time. The main question was if seeing something immoral on stage affects behavior in the lives of those who watch it, a controversy that is still playing out today. [61] Speirs, Ronald, trans. 1999. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. By Friedrich Nietzsche. Ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy ser. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. ISBN 0-521-63987-5.

Brown writes that ancient Greek drama "was essentially the creation of classical Athens: all the dramatists who were later regarded as classics were active at Athens in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE (the time of the Athenian democracy), and all the surviving plays date from this period". [7] "The dominant culture of Athens in the fifth century", Goldhill writes, "can be said to have invented theatre". [9] One of the big changes was the new theatre house. Instead of the type of the Elizabethan era, such as the Globe Theatre, round with no place for the actors to prepare for the next act and with no "theatre manners", the theatre house became transformed into a place of refinement, with a stage in front and stadium seating facing it. Since seating was no longer all the way around the stage, it became prioritized—some seats were obviously better than others. The king would have the best seat in the house: the very middle of the theatre, which got the widest view of the stage as well as the best way to see the point of view and vanishing point that the stage was constructed around. Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg was one of the most influential set designers of the time because of his use of floor space and scenery. Most Athenian tragedies dramatise events from Greek mythology, though The Persians—which stages the Persian response to news of their military defeat at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE—is the notable exception in the surviving drama. [34] [k] When Aeschylus won first prize for it at the City Dionysia in 472 BCE, he had been writing tragedies for more than 25 years, yet its tragic treatment of recent history is the earliest example of drama to survive. [34] [38] More than 130 years later, the philosopher Aristotle analysed 5th-century Athenian tragedy in the oldest surviving work of dramatic theory—his Poetics ( c. 335 BCE). Banham, Martin, ed. (1998) [1995]. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-43437-8.Robinson, Scott R. "The English Theatre, 1642–1800". Scott R. Robinson Home. CWU Department of Theatre Arts. Archived from the original on May 2, 2012 . Retrieved August 6, 2012. Modern theatre includes performances of plays and musical theatre. The art forms of ballet and opera are also theatre and use many conventions such as acting, costumes and staging. They were influential in the development of musical theatre. Participation in the city-state's many festivals—and mandatory attendance at the City Dionysia as an audience member (or even as a participant in the theatrical productions) in particular—was an important part of citizenship. [14] Civic participation also involved the evaluation of the rhetoric of orators evidenced in performances in the law-court or political assembly, both of which were understood as analogous to the theatre and increasingly came to absorb its dramatic vocabulary. [15] [16] The Greeks also developed the concepts of dramatic criticism and theatre architecture. [17] [18] [19] Actors were either amateur or at best semi-professional. [20] The theatre of ancient Greece consisted of three types of drama: tragedy, comedy, and the satyr play. [21] Drawing on the " semiotics" of Charles Sanders Peirce, Pavis goes on to suggest that "the specificity of theatrical signs may lie in their ability to use the three possible functions of signs: as icon ( mimetically), as index (in the situation of enunciation), or as symbol (as a semiological system in the fictional mode). In effect, theatre makes the sources of the words visual and concrete: it indicates and incarnates a fictional world by means of signs, such that by the end of the process of signification and symbolization the spectator has reconstructed a theoretical and aesthetic model that accounts for the dramatic universe." [3]

No tragedies from the 6th century BCE and only 32 of the more than a thousand that were performed in during the 5th century BCE have survived. [29] [30] [g] We have complete texts extant by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. [31] [h] The origins of tragedy remain obscure, though by the 5th century BCE it was institutionalised in competitions ( agon) held as part of festivities celebrating Dionysus (the god of wine and fertility). [32] [33] As contestants in the City Dionysia's competition (the most prestigious of the festivals to stage drama) playwrights were required to present a tetralogy of plays (though the individual works were not necessarily connected by story or theme), which usually consisted of three tragedies and one satyr play. [34] [35] [i] The performance of tragedies at the City Dionysia may have begun as early as 534 BCE; official records ( didaskaliai) begin from 501 BCE, when the satyr play was introduced. [36] [34] [j]Elam, Keir (1980). The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. New Accents series. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-03984-0. A theatre company is an organisation that produces theatrical performances, [4] as distinct from a theatre troupe (or acting company), which is a group of theatrical performers working together. [5] [6] Leach, Robert (2004). Makers of Modern Theatre: An Introduction. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-31241-7. Fergusson, Francis (1968) [1949]. The Idea of a Theater: A Study of Ten Plays, The Art of Drama in a Changing Perspective. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01288-1.

The first form of Indian theatre was the Sanskrit theatre, [43] earliest-surviving fragments of which date from the 1st century CE. [44] [45] It began after the development of Greek and Roman theatre and before the development of theatre in other parts of Asia. [43] It emerged sometime between the 2nd century BCE and the 1st century CE and flourished between the 1st century CE and the 10th, which was a period of relative peace in the history of India during which hundreds of plays were written. [46] [47] The wealth of archeological evidence from earlier periods offers no indication of the existence of a tradition of theatre. [47] The ancient Vedas ( hymns from between 1500 and 1000 BCE that are among the earliest examples of literature in the world) contain no hint of it (although a small number are composed in a form of dialogue) and the rituals of the Vedic period do not appear to have developed into theatre. [47] The Mahābhāṣya by Patañjali contains the earliest reference to what may have been the seeds of Sanskrit drama. [48] This treatise on grammar from 140 BCE provides a feasible date for the beginnings of theatre in India. [48]

In the Song dynasty, there were many popular plays involving acrobatics and music. These developed in the Yuan dynasty into a more sophisticated form known as zaju, with a four- or five-act structure. Yuan drama spread across China and diversified into numerous regional forms, one of the best known of which is Peking Opera which is still popular today. Spolin, Viola (1999) [1963]. Improvisation for the Theater (3rded.). Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press. ISBN 0-8101-4008-X. Mitter, Shomit. 1992. Systems of Rehearsal: Stanislavsky, Brecht, Grotowski and Brook. London and NY: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-06784-3. Some forms of improvisation, notably the Commedia dell'arte, improvise on the basis of ' lazzi' or rough outlines of scenic action (see Gordon 1983 and Duchartre 1966). All forms of improvisation take their cue from their immediate response to one another, their characters' situations (which are sometimes established in advance), and, often, their interaction with the audience. The classic formulations of improvisation in the theatre originated with Joan Littlewood and Keith Johnstone in the UK and Viola Spolin in the US; see Johnstone 2007 and Spolin 1999.

Brandon, James R. (1993) [1981]. "Introduction". In Baumer, Rachel Van M.; Brandon, James R. (eds.). Sanskrit Theatre in Performance. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. pp.xvii–xx. ISBN 978-81-208-0772-3. Carlson, Marvin (1993). Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present (Expandeded.). Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-8154-6. Bryant, Jye (2018). Writing & Staging A New Musical: A Handbook. Kindle Direct Publishing. ISBN 9781730897412.Benedetti, Jean (2005). The Art of the Actor: The Essential History of Acting, From Classical Times to the Present Day. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-77336-1. The Tang dynasty is sometimes known as "The Age of 1000 Entertainments". During this era, Ming Huang formed an acting school known as The Pear Garden to produce a form of drama that was primarily musical. That is why actors are commonly called "Children of the Pear Garden." During the dynasty of Empress Ling, shadow puppetry first emerged as a recognized form of theatre in China. There were two distinct forms of shadow puppetry, Pekingese (northern) and Cantonese (southern). The two styles were differentiated by the method of making the puppets and the positioning of the rods on the puppets, as opposed to the type of play performed by the puppets. Both styles generally performed plays depicting great adventure and fantasy, rarely was this very stylized form of theatre used for political propaganda. Equity, for many kind of performing artists as well as designers, directors, and stage managers in the UK [105] Johnstone, Keith (2007) [1981]. Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (Rev.ed.). London: Methuen. ISBN 978-0-7136-8701-9.