This book traces blackface types from ancient masks of grinning Africans and phallus-bearing Roman fools through to comedic medieval devils, the pan-European black-masked Titivillus and Harlequin, and racial impersonation via stereotypical "black speech" explored in the Renaissance by Lope de Vega and Shakespeare.

2017 Freedley Award Finalist, Theatre Library Association2016 Best Circus Book of the Year, Stuart Thayer Prize, Circus Historical SocietyThe 1960s American hippie-clown boom fostered many creative impulses, including neo-vaudeville and Ringling's Clown College.

This book investigates how the British theatrical community offered an alternative and oppositional historical narrative to the heritage culture promulgated by the Thatcher and Major Governments in the 1980s and early 1990s.

This third volume in Wertheim's trilogy documents Fields's rise to iconic status during the counterculture 1960s, creating a legacy of his comedy for generations to come.

This book is a historical study of the use of Asian theatre for modern Western theatre as practiced by its founding fathers, including Aurelien Lugne-Poe, Adolphe Appia, Gordon Craig, W.