In 1985, Muriel Spark was acclaimed ‘the most gifted and innovative British novelist of her generation’; after her death in 2006, tributes and accolades multiplied, none, perhaps, more fitting than that of a fellow Scot, Ian Rankin, who deemed her ‘the greatest Scottish novelist of modern times’. Poet, playwright, editor, biographer, essayist, short story writer, most of all novelist, Muriel Spark achieved an eminence denied by few, but her work is often misinterpreted or misunderstood. Though she lived outside Scotland for most of her life, Spark was a Scottish writer, indelibly stamped by her first nineteen years in Edinburgh: she was ‘Scottish by formation’. And she was a theological writer, an artist of religious conviction and spiritual concerns, a Roman Catholic by conversion.

In Spark’s first novel, The Comforters (1957), Caroline Rose labours to integrate the demands of her faith within the context of her own life as a fledgling novelist. In this novel of decided autobiographical import for Spark (in addition to her conversion and artistic calling, Caroline is part Jewish), Caroline achieves a personal integrity, rejecting the evils embodied in the self-righteous Georgina Hogg, the detached contemplation of Edwin Manders and the misguided charity of Helena Manders as well as the diabolism, hedonism and nihilism displayed by other characters. In the end Caroline accepts the reality of the supernatural voices writing her novel for her, and acquires a more charitable attitude towards others, however physically repulsive or morally repugnant she may find them. The outward conversion that took place before this novel began finds its necessary complement in this inward conversion, and The Comforters ends with Caroline’s laughter echoing throughout a succinct parable of possibility. A lesser achievement in the canon of Spark’s works, The Comforters sets out her enduring concerns with matters of faith and fictionality.

The central figure in Allan Massie’s One Night in Winter (1984) is Fraser Donnelly, putative leader of a Scottish Nationalist movement which he claims will bring about ‘a real revolution, a revolution of consciousness, a revolution of morals’, one that will allow Scots to escape ‘the auld Scotland of kirk and kailyard’ and produce a country ‘that’s free and rich too’ (43). What Donnelly actually surrounds himself with, however, is not a modern political machine but ‘a Court’ (124), as full of intrigue and sexual corruption as any in Renaissance Italy. That archaic social structure is gateway to even more atavistic emotion – ‘sometimes you have to go back in time to make the next leap’ (124), he tells one of his courtiers, Jimmy, who later explains its significance:

In Fraser Donnelly, nationalism is figured as a return to paganism, as an invitation to the dark gods of the primitive to erupt again into the modern world. This Fraser re-enacts the return to the past that J. G. Frazer had undertaken in The Golden Bough at the beginning of the twentieth century:

Malcolm Mooney’s question, posed at the beginning of W. S. Graham’s late collection of verse, Implements in Their Places, articulates a concern shared by many modern Scottish poets. All poets are sensitive to the complexities of their medium, but in Scotland language itself has been ‘a question’ for centuries. As the great poets of the 1920s and 30s locked horns over the proper use of Scots, English or Gaelic, issues of patriotic loyalty became inextricably bound up with linguistic choices. While many applauded Hugh MacDiarmid’s resistance to what was often seen as the creeping, unavoidable incorporation of the Scottish languages into English, others debated Edwin Muir’s view that Scots had survived largely as a medium for unsophisticated kinds of writing and had little future as a serious literary language. The notion that a poet’s language was to be judged in terms of his national commitment, however, meant that the need to revive Scots and Gaelic was felt deeply – and widely. Graham’s query, presented as both a title and a refrain half a century later, is in part reflective of a sense shared with numerous writers of his generation that their art was somehow determined by their choice of language. It also anticipates, however, the response of many younger poets to the language question, which has been chary of absolute choices and tending instead towards more exploratory, interrogative, ironic or wittily tangential approaches. It is not that the question has been forgotten, but rather that the modes of address have been transformed for a newly devolved, twenty-first-century Scotland.

When Maurice Lindsay introduced his anthology of Modern Scottish Poetry in 1965, he emphasised the ‘variety of experience’ and ‘integrity of expression’ that distinguished the poems he had gathered, arguing that ‘these qualities, and not the question of which of Scotland’s three languages her writers choose to use, are what constitute the real Scottish Renaissance’. His very comment, however, reveals that in the 1960s it would generally seem strange to consider modern Scottish poetry without discussing the language question. Almost thirty years later, when Douglas Dunn turned his attention to editing another Faber collection, Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry, he still found it necessary to address the implications of the linguistic choices represented in his anthology, observing somewhat drily that ‘Scottish poetry has been steeped in politics ever since MacDiarmid’s instigatory drum-beating back in the early 1920s.’

Knowing when to start any discussion of Scottish literature, and where to mark its boundaries, has proven increasingly problematic over the past few decades. ‘Scottish Literature’, as a subject of academic enquiry, emerged primarily out of the sister discipline of ‘English Literature’, and as such has only in recent years begun to confront two significant blind spots resulting from that evolution. The first, not directly the concern of this chapter, is the virtual exclusion of material in Scottish Gaelic from the study of Scottish Literature for much of the twentieth century. The second, the topic of this chapter, is the exclusion of nearly eight centuries of literature from and about Scotland from consideration, the centuries before the middle of the fourteenth century. Scottish literature, whether we think here of its representation in anthologies or literary histories, has often been seen to begin with John Barbour (c. 1320–95) or his contemporaries. This is because theirs is the earliest substantial work we have preserved in the language of Older Scots, and thus may be seen as ancestral to the anglophone literatures of modern Scotland, those in Scots and English. Even the otherwise linguistically ecumenical Hugh MacDiarmid perpetuated this state of affairs, describing the short elegy ‘When Alexander our King was Dead’ as ‘the earliest extant piece of Scottish verse’, and only in his notes continuing this thought more subversively: ‘The earliest extant that is to say except in Gaelic’.

Robert Burns (1759–96) needs no introduction as Scotland’s national poet, but he also has a good claim to be considered the most original British poet writing between Alexander Pope and William Blake. Developing the eighteenth-century tradition of Scots verse associated with Allan Ramsay and especially Robert Fergusson, Burns crafted the first modern vernacular style in British poetry, providing a resource for subsequent verse written in non-standard English, especially by ‘peasant poets’ like James Hogg, Robert Bloomfield and John Clare, as well as later American poets like Walt Whitman. More immediately, Burns was a vital influence on the British Romantics, especially Wordsworth, in championing the values of rural and peasant life, and (despite Burns’s own debts to Pope, Gray and Shenstone) attacking the generalist aesthetics and poetic diction of much eighteenth-century Augustan poetry. Ironically though, while still enthusiastically celebrated in Scotland and globally at Burns Suppers on 25 January, Burns has been marginalised in English departments across the world, as a result of a mistaken view that his writing is linguistically incomprehensible, and of interest to Scottish readers only.

Burns was born on 25 January 1759, in Alloway, near Ayr, where his father William Burnes (the poet later dropped the ‘e’ from his surname) was initially employed as head gardener, before embarking on an ill-starred career as a tenant farmer at nearby Mount Oliphant and, later, Lochlie, in central Ayrshire. Robert described boyhood life on the farm as ‘the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing moil of a galley-slave’, and laboured at the plough to save his father the cost of hiring additional labour. Later, at the time of William Burnes’s death in 1784 (precipitated by a stressful litigation with the landlord of Lochlie), Robert took the joint lease of the farm of Mossgiel, near Mauchline, with his brother Gilbert. It was here that most of the poems published in his first Kilmarnock volume of 1786 were written, at a time when his farming career looked untenable, and his personal and amorous affairs had reached a crisis.

When in 1908 George Bernard Shaw was shown the new Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, he exclaimed that it looked like a palatial bank, though Shaw may not have been aware that in fact the building was financed by a private consortium of bankers and industrial leaders. The recently completed edifice looked like a palace: white with gilded details on the outside, white marble and colourful paintings in the foyer, and turquoise seats in the auditorium – all inspired by the fashionable art deco style of the time. The building was a manifestation of modernity and marked the beginning of European modernism in Swedish theatre. Furthermore, the Royal Dramatic Theatre was from now on organised as a joint-stock company, in which the state owned all the shares. How did these changes in an institution established in 1788 affect the audience of the new era?

Some days before the opening of the Marble Palace – as the citizens of Stockholm dubbed the building – a short announcement from the new management of the theatre appeared in newspapers. In a few lines the public was urged to refrain from the traditional end-of-scene applause and to restrict their clapping to the end of an act. What were the implications of this appeal?

The far-reaching significance of this insignificant little announcement, rarely observed in theatre histories, becomes obvious only in the light of audience behaviour in a wider perspective. I see this change of attitude towards the spectator around 1900 as a historical watershed at the rise of theatre modernism. I will briefly describe the spectators’ participation in performances of the nineteenth century and August Strindberg’s harsh opinion of the audiences of his day, before looking at the nature of spectatorship in some pre-modern performances. In the modernist era the audience was silenced, and its integral function as part of a public event was effaced, but theatre nevertheless continues to remain dependent on the close relationship between actors on stage and spectators in the auditorium.

i

What do theatre historians do? How do they do it? Two simple questions, but the answers are complex, as I wish to demonstrate in this chapter on historical evidence. In order to provide some useful answers to these two questions, especially the how question, I will feature an event in theatre history that continues to generate controversy among theatre historians: the sudden death of the English playwright Christopher Marlowe (1564–93), who was killed on 30 May 1593. Marlowe’s death is a mystery to be solved. How and why did he die? How was the event understood at the time, and how has it been reconstructed in our own time? What does the evidence reveal or conceal? As this last question implies, I want to conduct an investigation of not only the historical event itself but also the interpretive methods that are used to reconstruct the event. I will therefore consider the relative value of several kinds of evidence (e.g., written versus oral sources, official versus unofficial statements, eyewitness versus hearsay reports). I will also identify some of the challenges and problems that theatre historians face in their methods of research and analysis.

I recognise, of course, that no single event can offer a full perspective on the wide range of topics and research methods in theatre studies. Theatre historians investigate all kinds of performance events that have occurred throughout human time and across the whole globe. This rich heritage of human entertainment is not limited to the performance of plays, but also includes festivals, parades, circuses, animal acts, cabarets, puppetry, variety and magic shows, and political spectacles. Moreover, besides these many kinds of performance events, theatre historians and biographers also study the lives, communities and social worlds of the people who create and participate in these events. Despite this great diversity of possible topics, there are still some basic methods of inquiry that guide historical research. For example, those two questions at the beginning of this chapter provide a vital clue to the fundamental procedures that theatre historians share with all historians. One sentence begins with the word ‘what’, the other with the word ‘how’. Those two interrogatives launch this chapter, and most historical inquiries. Looking back at historical events, we want to know what happened and how. In turn, we are also guided by four additional interrogatives: who, when, where and why.

This chapter addresses the question of how we position ‘traditional’ theatre within a historical narrative that is likely to be constructed in linear terms and to be framed around the nation-state. Japanese Noh theatre offers a particularly interesting case study because it is self-evidently ‘theatre’ in terms of all normal Western definitions – Noh plays being based upon crafted literary scripts and offering the audience stories about distinctive characters – yet it sits outside the evolutionary narrative explored in Part II of this Cambridge Companion, which runs from twentieth-century modernist theatre back to the ancient Greeks.

In 1868, at the dawn of the Meiji restoration that overturned the military regime of the Tokugawa shogunate and restored the central position of the Emperor, Japan opened its borders to the outside world after more than two centuries of almost complete closure. It is during this period that notions of Noh theatre started to circulate in Europe and North America through the accounts of the few who visited Japan, mostly diplomats and literati. Noh performance was initially ridiculed because of its performative means, such as the use of masks and the melange of mime and dance, regarded as primitive by spectators used to the late nineteenth-century naturalistic stage. Noh was an antiquity seen through the lens of the archaeologist (see Fig. 14).

Like Hamlet, confronting his mother with portraits of his father and of the brother who murdered him, theatre historians work within a realm of loss, attempting to re-member who (and what) has disappeared. Yet visual traces of performance – engravings, paintings, drawings, cartoons and photographs – persist: ghosted images return to haunt us. Also like Hamlet, mapping one portrait’s features against another, inauthentic and authentic images of a father, what theatre historians most desire is a visual image that preserves the paradox of a ‘theatrical real’. For Shakespeareans, that ideal image might show costumed players at work in a 1590s theatre space, performing a moment recognisable as deriving from a particular play – even, perhaps, including spectators. In 1925, E. K. Chambers introduced a pen-and-ink drawing purporting to show just such a scene: since then, the ‘Peacham drawing’ – and the forty lines from Titus Andronicus transcribed below it – have undergone numerous interpretive changes.

Where?

History is constructed by the gaze of the beholder. To say this is not to deny the existence of hard historical data – to deny for example that a given number of real people suffered and died in Nazi-run gas chambers in the early 1940s. But as soon as bits of data are put together to form a story, the historian is at work, and the history that emerges reflects the perspective of whoever has assembled the story. There is no single authentic history out there to be recorded, although there are important disciplines by which the historian must abide, if she or he is to function as an ethical human being in search of truth.

Today the economic and political dominance of the ‘West’ is discernibly waning, which prompts a rethink about how we look back at cultural history. Ancient Greek maps placed Greece, often Delphi within Greece, at the centre of the world, while maps in medieval Christendom placed Jerusalem at the centre. In 1569 the Flemish map-maker Mercator used mathematical principles to render the globe as a flat surface, and he placed Europe in the centre because his map served the needs of European explorers who sailed north or south, east or west in search of new and profitable lands. Mercator’s projection remains the basis of most modern maps of the world, and the same principle governs most works of theatre history. We describe the past from the perspective of where we stand. Though history is not necessarily organised around places, the drive to create a local and national history is particularly strong because of the interplay between history and community: to have a shared history is to have a shared identity. In this section we shall focus upon what happens when history is written from a different physical point of orientation, when one looks at the world from the perspective of communities that do not regard themselves as satellites of London or Paris or New York.

We, the editors and contributors to this volume, are united by a shared conviction that history matters. We all wish to resist ‘presentism’, which may be defined as a belief that the past is irrelevant because its inhabitants, people just like us, are now irretrievably gone. We sense that our students are disempowered by their lack of appropriate maps of the past, yet we find it difficult to endorse standard accounts of the theatrical past because we have a different set of priorities. We find it a challenge, using available textbooks, to engender passion about the past, because these books do not explain why the past should matter to us, in the here and now. This lack of intellectual engagement with the theatrical past is a rather surprising state of affairs given that, in the domain of mass culture, there is a vast public following for historical novels and films, for museums and for heritage sites.

In the political domain there is a clear perception that history matters. When the contributors to this volume gathered for a conference in London in the summer of 2010, the teaching of history was being debated in the wider world. Niall Ferguson, a controversial historian of empire, drew media attention at a literary festival because the incoming Conservative Minister of Education, Michael Gove, leapt up and invited him to help shape the new schools curriculum. In his speech Ferguson lamented that his children had left school having learned history only in fragments, their knowledge seemingly confined to Henry VIII, Adolf Hitler and Martin Luther King, isolated moral case studies that offered no sense of how historical events interconnect. The left-wing press was fierce in its condemnation. The New Statesman, for example, concluded its attack on Ferguson and the new government by declaring that

When theatre history was established as a field of study in the late nineteenth century, its focus, like that of political or social history, was upon the changes and developments in the object of study over time. A spatial understanding of this art was recognised as crucial by theatre historians from the beginning. Indeed one might argue that the essential feature that distinguished theatre history from the field of literary history out of which it generally developed was an interest in theatre as a spatial rather than as a textual phenomenon. Soon, however, this spatial interest expanded from a specific interest in the dynamics of the enacted literary text to a concern with theatre as a cultural event, embedded within a particular cultural space. The overall organisation of theatre history, from its creation as a discipline, has been geographical in nature, primarily concerned with tracing the development of theatre within a small and highly select number of modern, almost entirely Western European nation-states.

When Max Herrmann in Germany and scholars with similar concerns began developing the historical analysis of theatre, the European nation-state was the major form of socio/cultural organisation with which they were familiar, dominant in Europe and widely and usually arbitrarily imposed throughout the rest of the globe by the European colonial powers. The major divisions within theatre history were the boundaries of these states. For most of its first century of development theatre history was not only essentially organised by nation-states but was extremely selective in its choice of which such states were considered worthy of study. Very soon an almost invariable and highly restricted narrative of so-called world theatre was developed, which may still be found in the majority of textbooks on this field of study. According to this narrative, after the obligatory introductory chapters on ritual drama in ancient Egypt and the theatres of classical Greece and Rome (in fact treated as modern unified nation-states – who noted where in the world Hellenistic theatres were actually located or observed that such ‘Roman’ church fathers as Augustine and Tertullian actually came from North Africa?), standard theatre went on to cover an only vaguely geographically designated ‘middle ages’ (in fact in its details largely English), and then settled more comfortably into individual narratives of the theatres within modern national boundaries, headed by England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the United States.

Books on European theatre and world theatre have generally ignored Finnish theatre and Finnish theatre history. There are no world-famous dramatists or theatre directors as in other northern European countries, such as Henrik Ibsen in Norway, August Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman in Sweden, or Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor in Poland. Nevertheless, the theatre infrastructure is as impressive and the theatre audience as engaged as in any country in Europe. Is Finnish theatre then only for the Finns? What is the relevance of Finnish theatre and Finnish theatre history for an international audience today? While Finnish theatre is isolated by its language and its location and idiosyncratic in many of its features, it is representative of many European systems that emerged in the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century. Many parallels can be drawn between the development of Finnish theatre and, for example, Hungarian, Norwegian, Czech, and Irish theatre. As in other emerging nations in Europe in the late nineteenth century, the Finnish theatre became a force for cultural nationalism, using the local language, folk poetry and mythology to stress the distinctiveness of the nation and ultimately its right to political independence. Like Czechs and Norwegians, for example, Finnish cultural nationalists built an impressive National Theatre in a prominent location in their capital city as a focal point for Romantic nationalist cultural expression in advance of becoming a nation-state.

Situated between Sweden and Russia and subject successively to the rule of both countries, Finland emerged as an independent country after the Russian Revolution in 1917. For much of the twentieth century, Finland occupied a strategic position between eastern and western Europe. During the Cold War, it acted as a border state, associated more with the West while maintaining political and military neutrality in the shadow of the Soviet Union. Even today Finland continues to occupy a frontier position as the most eastern state of the European Union. Although the Cold War has ended, the Russian government continues to flex its muscles and intimidate neighbours, such as Ukraine, Georgia and Estonia. Remembering the attempts by the Soviet Union to invade it during the Second World War, the Finnish population looks to the European Union for support but holds on to a semblance of neutrality by not joining NATO.

The circus might not at first glance appear to have much to do with either theatre or history. It mainly shows actual physical feats, not theatrical make-believe, story-telling or play-acting. It seems to inhabit a time of its own, separate from the course of events, ever the stuff of family outings and childhood nostalgia. Hasn’t the circus always been there? Even in the wake of the animal-free New Circus movement of the 1990s, and the advent of stylishly choreographed and expensive metropolitan shows such as the Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil, the great majority of the world’s circuses still peddle candy-floss and clowns, parping horns and miniature bikes, and sometimes sorry menageries. Nell Stroud, writer, performer and director of the successful neo-Edwardian-style Gifford’s Circus in England (see Fig. 19), has authored a children’s book on circus history, but assures me that, for the most part, circus people are not very interested in the subject. An honours degree in Circus Studies has for some years now been offered by Circus Space in London, but students receive only one lecture on circus history, with the theoretical emphasis firmly on the critical analysis of performance. By contrast, in art schools, the history of art and design has long been a mainstay of the classroom and indeed serves as the benchmark for progress and modernisation in these fields. It is my view that most circuses fail to engage in a conscious dialogue with their own past and so risk becoming slaves to a dwindling repertoire of hackneyed traditions. Attempting to rectify this situation, the journalist Tony Montague is, at the time of writing, currently working on a production for another Canadian company that draws upon key episodes of early circus in North America, but feels that this is quite a solitary and pioneering task.

Music theatre is a complex subject. We often find ourselves adrift in trying to conceptualise two interlocking art forms, our task complicated by the need to order and investigate music theatre’s rudimentary elements such as song, dance and dramatic text. These simple terms carry unfixed meanings because, throughout history, different traditions and practices have conceived them in various ways. The concept of music theatre covers not only twentieth-century avant-garde theatre, examples being Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, Philip Glass’s minimalist opera Einstein on the Beach, and a Meredith Monk piece of movement/vocal theatre, but also a spectrum of commercial work popularly known as ‘musical theatre’, such as West End and Broadway productions of Legally Blonde or Chicago. The blurry meaning of music theatre is further complicated by recent scholarly work in nineteenth-century popular theatre, which illustrates the difficulty of distinguishing theatre with musical elements from entertainments labelled as music hall. The figure of the actor–musician has always occupied the space between music-making and theatre-making. Such an apparently hybrid performer trained and worked in fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy, in Zeami’s fifteenth-century Noh theatre, in Sanskrit and Jingxi theatre, and in a John Doyle staging of a Stephen Sondheim musical.

To write music theatre history is to make sense of its complexity, establishing webs of transmissions and shared genealogies that join the worlds of music and of theatre together. To this end we have to accept the history of music theatre as more than the sum of its musical and theatrical parts; in other words, this history is inherently interdisciplinary. With this is mind, I will identify and describe key historical landmarks and developments in music theatre under the categories of ‘hybrid’, ‘collaborative’, and ‘totalising’. These three descriptors equate with the three notions of convergence, permeability and integration and offer a means of conceptualising the ways in which disciplines engage. They elucidate processes in music theatre that explode or reformulate boundaries in the arts. To some extent, most if not all works of music theatre possess all three attributes: that is, they are overtly cross-bred with past and contemporaneous styles, idioms and practices (hybrid); they combine music and theatre practices to produce innovations in form and content (collaborative); and they fuse both art forms so that our ways of hearing and seeing are redefined (totalising).

On 25 January 2011, millions of predominantly young Egyptians staged a historic popular uprising to demand the immediate end of Hosni Mubarak’s three-decade rule. Their action marked Egypt’s most recent major appearance on the global stage, performed in the hail of worldwide acknowledgements of the country’s history and civilisation. Holding that their homeland’s past should have earned it a better present, many of the protestors proclaimed it as umm al-dunnia (‘the mother of all the world’), a popular phrase that invokes a reminder of Egypt’s distinction as, perhaps, the longest existing political entity on earth. A closer look at the case of Egypt may reveal more to this claim than mere euphoric exceptionalism.

To be sure, Egypt seems unique in its fabled defiance of time, having preserved its borders virtually intact since time immemorial. Located at the centre of the Arab world, it was once hailed by its neighbours as ‘the beating heart of Arabness’, a carry-over from Arab nationalist times when Egypt became the de facto capital of the region’s culture and civilisation. Its Arab identity aside, however, the oft-invaded Mediterranean country has equally been shaped by its location at the intersection of different civilisations and continents, with each contributing a share to its makeup. As such, Egypt proudly bears the imprints of civilisations as diverse as the ‘Pharaonic’, Mediterranean/Graeco-Roman, Coptic Christian, Arabo-Islamic, Turco-Circassian and Nilotic/African. Yet this richly hybrid nature is but a facet of what gives meaning to the phrase ‘mother of all the world’, since today’s Egypt is, perhaps, the sum total of its myriad historical constituents in a single, potentially conflictual composite whole.