After storming the Bastille on 14 July 1789, Joseph Arné had little time to take in the significance of his actions. Earlier that day, the twenty-something soldier from Franche-Comté had led a daring assault, neutralized several Swiss Guards with his bare hands, and supposedly disabled a cannon that was pointed at his charging comrades. As the sun set, Arné was greeted by throngs of cheering Parisians, who joined the young grenadier in patriotic songs, chants, and dancing. What Arné perhaps did not understand when he finally went to sleep that night was that he was about to become a theatrical star and a public figure. The next morning, Arné was back in the streets, this time “drawn through Paris in a triumphal chariot.” Several weeks later, he was portrayed as the protagonist in La Fête du grenadier, the first play dedicated to the July events, which premiered at the Théâtre de l'Ambigu on 3 September. That evening, the real-life Arné, and not the actor who was playing him, was “enthusiastically celebrated by the spectators and at the end of the piece went onstage to standing ovations.”

Stories of American democracy, whether critical or congratulatory, canonical or popular, feature “the public” as their recurring protagonist. “The public” is a rhetorical fixture of political campaigns and democratic theories, opinion polls and calls to action. Its influence is formidable: the very idea scores political speech, and calls citizens into being. Yet as many scholars have argued, “the public” is a moving target, and possibly even a total fiction. Perhaps the best-known challenge in recent decades has come from literary critic and social theorist Michael Warner. “Publics” he writes in his Publics and Counterpublics, “have become an essential part of the social landscape, and yet it would tax our understanding to say exactly what they are.” If a public is difficult to describe, it is in part, Warner explains, because the idea hovers in modern imaginaries between the concrete and the abstract. “A public” can conjure at once: a bounded audience—“a crowd witnessing itself in visible space”; a more abstract “social totality” like the constituents of a nation; and a community conjured through shared texts or identities.

In the late eighteenth century, and with increasing momentum in the early nineteenth, the minor theatres in London steadily challenged the monopoly of the two patent houses—with great ingenuity in circumventing several Licensing Acts; with highly imaginative and lively (albeit generally unsophisticated) bills; and with eager support from the workers, flocking to the capital as part of the industrial age, for whom the minor theatres provided escape. By the time Planché's “Mother Drama” admitted confusion about her sons “Legitimate Drama” and “Illegitimate Drama” on the stage of the Olympic Theatre on 16 April 1838, the minor theatres had prevailed.

Archeological evidence for the history of theatre art has always been less definitive and less extensive than either artists or historians have wished. We have the stone remains of late Greek theatres and we have the pictorial fragments from some ancient amphorae which, when co-ordinated with inscriptions, give us a modicum of knowledge concerning the performances in Greek theatres. From Renaissance architects and painters we have beautiful drawings and engravings of scenes and costumes which give us an indication of the grandeur which was possible in the court performances of Europe for two or three hundred years.

When Samuel Phelps revived John Webster's tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, at Sadler's Wells on November 20, 1850, its success was immediate. Based on an adaptation by Richard Hengist (Henry) Horne and presenting Isabella Glyn as the Duchess, the revival inspired numerous performances in subsequent years. The British performances varied little from the original revival, Miss Glyn's remarkable success as the Duchess having created an almost instant tradition that was seldom tampered with to any extent. However, in the United States there was less respect for what Horne-Phelps-Glyn had wrought, and the first performance of Webster's tragedy included innovations that were to have a lasting influence upon American productions. These changes are indicated in detail in the promptbook of James Stark, the actor-manager who introduced the Duchess of Malfi to the United States at the American Theatre in San Francisco on August 22, 1857. Stark's book is based upon Horne, consisting in fact of pages from the printed edition pasted in traditional fashion into a notebook, with the page opposite the printed text offering space for longhand revisions, notations of stage business, calls, and so forth. With the exception of the fifth act Stark makes few major changes in Horne's dialogue, merely shortening some speeches and noting a few longer passages which may be cut if necessary. Home's Act II, scene iii, where Ferdinand and the Cardinal discuss the Duchess' looseness, “Can be omitted,” Stark notes, suggesting that American spectators may have been even more prudish than their London cousins. The last act, on the other hand, has been completely revised. Although it retains most of Home's dialogue, it greatly simplifies his structure—a significant change, as Home's handling of the fifth act had not always satisfied even his admirers.

When, on June 22, 1940, the French government signed an armistice with the Third Reich, France was divided into a northern zone, comprising about two-thirds of its total area including the Atlantic and Channel coasts, and a southern zone restricted to the lower third of the country. While the French government was to enjoy political autonomy in both zones, the southern zone was to be free of occupying troops. Less than three weeks after the signing of the Armistice, an overwhelming majority of the National Assembly annulled the Constitution of the Third Republic and invested Marshall Pètain with the authority to promulgate a new Constitution for the French State. Vichy, a small city in the southern zone, was chosen as its capital.

In every theatre historian there lurks the shadow of the amateur. For the commitment always begins with a sharing of the theatre-goer's delight in seeing the curtain rise, and a strong sense of being in the presence of history in the making. To record this moment is the instinct of the enthusiast; to recapture it from the past is the function of the historian.

On 29 December 1845, Charlotte Cushman did an extraordinary thing at the Haymarket theatre: she convincingly transformed herself into a man. Audience members who witnessed this performance were captivated by “the transmuting power” of Cushman's “genius” as she became Romeo. This production (and Cushman's Romeo in general) continues to fascinate both contemporary theatre historians and feminist scholars, who are equally impressed with Cushman's seeming ability to create an unsettling paradox. In a recent article, Anne Russell discusses the positive reception that Cushman's Romeo received and questions how the cross-dressed actress could have been so successful “in a period when dominant gender ideologies assumed clearly delineated separate spheres for men and women, when stage reviewers as a manner of routine assessed the ‘womanliness’ or ‘manliness’ of characters and performers.” As Russell explains, the nineteenth-century audience member, critic, and/or commentator read the human figure on stage as either male or female; indeed, such antithetic thinking was pervasive throughout nineteenth-century culture. Cushman was unique, however, in that she repeatedly defied such categorization, both in her theatrical performances and in her “private” life.

African artists cannot and do not choose their subject matter, says critic Tejumola Olaniyan. “They are, on the contrary, chosen by their subjects.” While that liberates artists from the “heavy burden of a head-scratching search for what on earth to create their art about,” Olaniyan observes, it also imposes “the much heavier burden of how on earth to fashion from that surfeit of ‘what’ an imaginative sublimation worthy of the label ‘art.’ This has been the contemporary African artist's greatest challenge, more so than artists in other climes.”1

One would today be hard-pressed to recall any other period since the mid-nineteen-twenties when such widespread concern among theatre practitioners has been devoted to planning of buildings primarily intended to house-performed legitimate drama. The government-supported reconstruction boom in German language countries, the conduct of three major international conferences on theatre building in the past three years, tangible progress on New York's Lincoln Center, and the Ford Foundation's widely-publicized support of theoretical planning for an Ideal Theatre-all these events are likely to overshadow for the moment efforts of those planners of the 'twenties who were forced by an economic and political untimeliness to “cast their anchor(s) far into the sea of fantasy and distant possibilities,” sadly realizing that little opportunity for innovation could exist at the time.

The nineteenth-century English speaking stage was the setting for some of the most significant and interesting productions of Shakespeare's plays. It was the age of both Keans, Macready, Phelps, the Booths, Beerbohm Tree, Irving, and Poel, to mention only a few of the innovators and stars. As usual, Shakespeare was the most popular and frequently produced playwright in the language, but performances were not limited to the traditional stage. Hundreds were presented as platform readings in most of the major cities of England and America, where the halls and lecture rooms were frequently filled. The readings were given by stars and neophytes alike: Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, William Charles Macready, Sarah Siddons, Charles Kemble, and others whose names are barely footnotes to the history of the theatre. The most accomplished, popular, and preeminent among these was Frances Anne (Fanny) Kemble, Charles' daughter and second generation to the great acting family. Her career and success as an actress are well documented, but comparatively little has been written about her reading performances of Shakespeare — an activity that occupied her for nearly a quarter of a century. For most of the others, the readings were spinoffs from their stage work, favors to friends, experiments or brief encounters; for Fanny reading was a serious business, indeed her very subsistence.

It was bright in London on that day toward the close of the nineteenth century—or at least there were bright intervals. In the early morning the sun sparkled on the silver Thames, and as one strolled north along the Victoria Embankment from Westminster Bridge, Wordsworth's sonnet came to mind. Farther north still, as the river turned more and more to the east above Charing Cross it was pleasant to wander in the gardens. This was historic ground. At the foot of Buckingham Street was the seventeenth century Water Gate of York House and then the region known as the Adelphi, built by the brothers Adam. It had once been the site of Durham House, the home of the fourteenth century Bishop of Durham, and later of Lady Jane Grey and of Sir Walter Raleigh. Adelphi Terrace, looking on the Thames, had been inspired by Robert Adam's visit to the palace of Diocletian at Spalato though remodeling had now altered its original design. Robert and James Adam had resided at No. 4; Thomas Hardy had worked at No. 8; the Savage Club occupied Nos. 6 and 7. There were dramatic associations too. David Garrick had lived and died at No. 5; Richard D'Oyly Carte was in the Adam residence; and Bernard Shaw had recently moved into No. 10.

The recently rediscovered dramatic works of a major thirteenth-century Egyptian author, Muhammad Ibn Dāniyāl, provides a striking example of how the strategies of microhistory can provide an important challenge to, and possible reassessment of, the grand narratives that theatre history has often accepted without serious question. Ibn Dāniyāl is an excellent example of the sort of outsider that has attracted the attention of microhistorians, one of those “peoples who would be left out by other methods.”

Despite the many admirable qualities of Mr. Clyde Fitch's play, The Way of the World at the Victoria Theatre is not so much a dramatic entertainment as a social function. Any well-ordered comment upon it must take cognizance of the audience as well as of the mummers who perform on the far side of the footlights. They are as much a part of it as the stage setting, and the result of their presence is that the five-act drama and its four intermissions and final curtain form a continuous performance the like of which New York has never seen before.

These three quotes will serve as a starting point as I enter into this discussion of the import and role of theatre history. While I make a case for theatre history generally, my examples and thesis are drawn from African American theatre history most specifically. My argument is for a critical historicism, a process that recognizes the need to historicize and situate dramatic criticism as well as the need to theorize history or, as Walter Benjamin suggests, to “rub history against the grain.” Rubbing history against the grain means that we must interrogate the past in order to inform the present, remaining cognizant of the material conditions that not only shape theatrical production but the historical interpretations of production. It implies a need to work against conventional historical narratives and the ways in which history has been told in the past.

By Mabel Rowland's public accounting, the Institute of the Woman's Theatre helped hundreds of so-called stagestruck girls realize their ambitions by providing a safety net for the pitfalls of the commercial theatre. The organization, officially established in 1926 and in operation until roughly 1930, was said to have begun years earlier, “the outgrowth of a group which was formed in 1910 and used to meet in the Fitzgerald Building.” As president, Rowland—a press agent, well-known comedic monologist, and all-around theatre factotum—was supported by society women and a cadre of famous female writers and performers, including Florence Reed, who served as Vice President, and charter members Julia Arthur, Irene Castle, Rachel Crothers, Helen Hayes, Violet Heming, Elsie Janis, Anita Loos, Mary Pickford, and Mary Shaw, plus about a dozen more. At the time of its official founding, the institute announced that it would undertake three activities. First, it sought to establish a professional Broadway theatre as exclusively a women's operation, employing female playwrights, designers, directors, managers, producers, box-office staff, and so forth: “The only men who will be connected with the enterprise … are the actors and stagehands.” Second and third, the institute would give “aid and advice to girls from out of town who think they have something to offer the theater, read scripts and give opinions thereon, and in other ways labor in behalf of the feminine side of the stage.” The institute's goal of a theatre in tandem with discovering talented women looked to create a meaningful shift in women's inclusion and power within commercial theatre.

Germany's amateur agitprop theatre movement produced some of the most popular, pervasive, and politically contentious art in the Weimar Republic, not least because of the way performers inserted themselves into the fabric of working-class life with the unequivocal intention of politicizing audiences. Germany's first agitprop troupes formed within youth clubs affiliated with the Communist Party (KPD) around 1925, but the movement quickly grew beyond established club culture, with troupes sprouting up “like mushrooms,” as one critic of the period put it. By 1929 police estimated there were about two hundred self-proclaimed agitprop troupes spread across Germany, all pursuing a transparently aggressive political agenda: to turn the theatre into a site of revolutionary class struggle. If the Weimar period saw an unprecedented mixing of art and politics, agitprop took this tendency to the extreme by declaring theatre to be a weapon in the hands of the proletariat. As the slogan of the 1931 International Meeting of Agitprop Troupes in Cologne put it: “Workers’ theatre is class struggle.”

“Now, I don't want to take anything away from the French resistance,” protests a character in a recent novel. “… Its brave raids and acts of sabotage undermined the Germans and helped bring about their downfall. But in many ways Marcel Carné's movie, his Children of Paradise, was more important than the armed resistance. The resisters might have saved the skin of Paris, Carné kept alive its soul.” It is a fatuous remark, the kind we expect from the determinedly fatuous hero, but its praise of Carné suggests with embarrassing accuracy the seductiveness of Les Enfants du Paradis. A Paris of romantically roiling passions, of pure Pierrots and gay Robert Macaires, of the Boulevard du Crime, whose little theatres stand as metaphors for the brash vitality of le peuple — it is a spectacle that few of us can resist. All our dreams of the City of Light (save those of shabby accordionists strolling beneath balloonbedecked Eiffel Towers) are contained in its opening shot, alive with the turbulent crowds of the old quartier du Temple.