The history of the theatre from the late sixteenth to late in the nineteenth century is usually framed around dominant periods of national dramatic literatures: theatre of the Spanish golden age; Shakespeare and his contemporaries; the classic theatre of France; the comedy of manners of the English Restoration; Weimar and the golden age of German theatre. Given the longevity, authenticity and the archaeological value of the printed play text, this framing is understandable and inevitable. Nevertheless, these histories with their focus upon ‘great works’ have the effect of identifying the written and spoken word as both the prime instigator and the most important archival souvenir of theatre. Inevitably such theatre histories have shaped our contemporary perception: what we consider to be ‘good’ dramatic literature. For example, beyond the small output of R. B. Sheridan and Oliver Goldsmith, the British eighteenth-century theatre produced few plays that are today considered to be ‘good’ dramatic literature, and yet in terms of audience popularity, famous actors and scenic developments, the period clearly produced great theatre. Likewise, during the period c. 1830–c. 1880, theatre throughout Europe was a hugely popular form that responded fully and widely to social and political events, and yet, in marked contrast to opera, few plays from the period have entered the canon of dramatic literature. There appear, therefore, to be distinctive periods of European theatre history when the co-existence of ‘great’ dramatic literature with ‘great’ theatre did not occur. It would therefore seem to be important to treat with caution modern judgements about what is great dramatic literature and to inflect the assumption that ‘great plays’ are a necessary ingredient of great theatre. Whilst dramatic literature is of considerable importance, it should serve as only one approach to the making of histories of theatre. This essay aims to use the framing of the baroque and the romantic in order to make a narrative of theatre as a spatial and visual phenomenon from the late sixteenth century to the modernist revolt against romantic and material realism, which began in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

How?

It is an illusion to think that history exists and that historians subsequently choose how to study it. Rather, the method of historical study defines the outcome, the history that is created. Historians work from sources, and sources tend to be gathered together in libraries, museums, databases and other forms of archive because somebody has anticipated that researchers in the future may find this material useful, while judging that other material can be discarded. Thus the present does much to determine how the past will be regarded by future historians, even though the best will characteristically work across the grain and use sources in ways that could never have been anticipated.

Documents, often loosely conceptualised as ‘facts’, sit at the heart of the historian’s work. The first chapter in this section, Chapter 15, takes up one particular constellation of documents in order to address a specific historical problem. This chapter is concerned with the nature of historical argument and the discipline of responsibility to facts that governs all historical work. Decisions to be made usually involve trust. We consider the difficulty of knowing anything for sure, when so many ‘primary’ source materials derive ultimately from word of mouth. Most of us think that what we see with our own eyes is more reliable than what we are simply told. Chapter 16 considers one particular category of evidence that might be found in an archive, pictures, which often create the impression that, unlike words, they are unmediated records of how the play was actually done. The truth is that the historian needs a high level of visual literacy in order to determine how and why a given image was created, and how, in a different historical environment with a different mode of seeing, that image might once have been interpreted. Chapter 17 is concerned with the way documentary material has been collected into archives, for the use of future scholars and practitioners. We see how the gathering of data is increasingly regarded not as a hoarding of wealth but as an intervention upon the present, involving communication and distribution as much as accumulation.

When?

Theatre historians always work with a map of the past in mind. To put it less metaphorically, they write with some sense of a temporal continuum, where one phase leads to the next, linked by complex relations of cause and effect. The historian’s task is to impose order upon the chaos of events that were once lived and experienced by a multiplicity of confused human beings, and, though hindsight brings undoubted benefits, there is always something arbitrary about the retrospective imposition of order. Historians are interested in moments or processes of change, because only by identifying change can they map continuities, but they differ radically in the kinds of changes that they think significant. Their priorities stem from different aesthetic tastes and different ethical priorities regarding the world they themselves inhabit.

In this section we shall look at how theatre historians within the European or Western tradition have mapped the past. The story that we shall explore in the next four chapters belongs to an intellectually and politically dominant tradition. This narrative seeks to track the journey that brought us to where we are now, and, for all its many byways and detours, it comprises a single story that countless historians of theatre have each tried to retell in their own way. It is a story that always needs to be challenged, and creative historiography necessarily involves questioning received versions in the light of new understandings or intuitions about the present. Historians never work on a blank slate. It is impossible to look at the past objectively as a set of unmediated events because past events always come to us packaged up as stories, and sources are always shaped and ordered by someone. Just as the Greek tragedians kept telling the same old stories of Oedipus or Orestes in new ways for new purposes, so historians keep reshaping old stories in order to accomplish their own intellectually creative work. It is necessary to see how historians have previously configured the past in order to configure it afresh.

Following the lead in the next chapter, a cursory glance at Wikipedia delivers a list of over 178 historical re-enactment groups of which at least 48 organisations are identified as UK-based, over 40 are in the USA, with others offering cross-national membership in groups as far afield as Romania and Taiwan. Their activities chiefly offer involvement in battles and military events, dating from as early as 284 ce to the South African border wars in 1989. The long-established practice of reconstructing and re-enacting military engagements is far from the only area upon which scholarly interest around re-enactment has begun to focus. The desire to ‘know’ about one’s own past, the individualised genealogical quest for a personal family history, has elided with a public desire for a shared cultural memory, both coming together to satisfy what cultural historians recognise as a ‘yearning to experience history somatically and emotionally – to know what it felt like’. British television companies have embraced this appetite for popular histories with re-enactment programmes on life in Edwardian country houses, Victorian pharmacies, Georgian town houses and village high streets down the ages. These places are all brought to life by teams of historians, behind and in front of the camera, aided by willing (re-en)actors, offering a stream of entertainment that is educational in remit and, crucially, economically successful. Worldwide spin-offs promise participants and their audiences a ‘just-as-it-would-have-been’ experience, which often, as Anja Schwartz observes of the Australian Outback House (Australian Broadcast Corporation, 2005), ‘mixes traditions of re-enacting historical events in period dress with documentary television and Big Brother’s “fly-on-the-wall” format that portrays participants subjected to a group endurance test’. For those wanting more than a couch-bound experience, Google offers a calendar of re-enactment events and a portal to a tempting array of retail outlets for chainmail, medieval shoes, and battle-ready helmets, with specialists like Seraphima Needlework offering to provide tailor-made ‘bespoke garments’ for male and female re-enactors who ‘“play” in the Napoleonic period’. It is this crossover between play and performance, this slippage between the real and the imagined, that provokes the academic unease expressed in my epigraph. That half-joking analogy between these activities and the diseases of sexual promiscuity goes to the heart of the matter: we are deeply alarmed by the fetishistic attention to, and visceral excitement of, the embodied engagement with the past.

All historians divide the past into periods, distinguishing moments of decisive change from times of relative stability. There is no other way to give the past a shape and thereby perceive it as something other than a random stream of events. Every label we put upon a historical period is already an interpretation and contains a story embedded within it. There is no escaping from this process into objectivity. Telling the story of the past in terms of centuries may appear to be a neutral process, but it is not, for the world flows on when centuries change. Italian theatre historians are relatively comfortable when framing books or essays around the cinquecento, the 1500s, because at the start of that century we find dramatists adapting Roman comedies into Italian in a decisive move into ‘renaissance’ drama, whilst at the end we find dramatists, again in imitation of antiquity, creating new forms of music-theatre that will later be defined as ‘baroque opera’. English historians struggle harder to make ‘sixteenth-century drama’ work as a narrative frame and usually opt for ‘Tudor drama’, since the Tudor dynasty ruled from 1485–1603. Shakespeare’s writing career straddled two centuries, not to mention two dynasties, and he has become the reference point for creating a sense of English theatre history. His mid-career Hamlet was probably written in 1601, while nothing remarkable seems to have happened in around 1500. The ‘Sixteenth Century’ works as an organising frame if the English historian wants to trace a process that culminated in the masterpieces of Shakespeare, but it yields a different kind of story to the Italian cinquecento.

The word ‘medieval’ (i.e., of the ‘middle ages’) has proved one of the most resilient of all period labels. The idea of a time in the middle emerged as early as the fifteenth century, when Italian intellectuals tried to emulate a lost classical civilisation, believing that the ten centuries since the fall of the Roman Empire had been a time of cultural darkness. With the ruins of ancient buildings littered about their cities, Italians sensed the importance of a vanished civilisation and wanted to recoup what they saw as their own past; in the Germanic world of central Europe, on the other hand, the institution of the Holy Roman Empire implied that a line of continuity joined the first pagan emperors of Rome to their Christian successors, so the concept of a ‘middle’ ages dividing then from now was slower to emerge..

Dionysius, the Syracusan tyrant, was an aspirant playwright and was also said to have been the proud owner of the writing tablets, desks and lyres that in the previous century had belonged to the tragedians, Aeschylus and Euripides. Some two and a half millennia later, devotees of Noel Coward are being invited to bid for a lock of Coward’s hair, attached to an interview script dating from 1968. While many such objects have been cherished by fans over centuries, others have only survived on account of their neglect in public institutions: a random list might include a pair of Lydia Lopokova’s ballet shoes, David Garrick’s gloves, and, more bizarrely, the amputated leg of Sarah Bernhardt, which was recently rediscovered in the anatomical collection at the University of Bordeaux.

Collecting of all kinds has a long and fascinating history, and the desire to possess the relics of star performers, in particular, has resulted in a lucrative trade for dealers in recent years. Many observers have pointed to the erotic impulses behind collecting – Benjamin speaks of ‘the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition’ – and it is the ‘thrill’ of the chase, especially, that fuels the ardour of the collector. As Phillip Blom has noted, ‘The most important object of a collection is the next one.’ And when the object itself is sexually titillating – as is the case with much ancient sculpture – there has often been a self-conscious awareness on the male collector’s part of the interrelations between the sexual pursuit of a beautiful woman and the allure and ‘penetration’ of antiquity.

What?

In order to write a history of the theatre, one has to determine what ‘theatre’ is. As became increasingly clear in the last section, this is a political question. We had originally hoped that Part III would include a chapter on South African theatre. In his proposal for that chapter, Temple Hauptfleisch planned to address

How can we construct a history of the art of acting? Acting is an evanescent art form that leaves few visual traces behind, while the creative work leading up to a performance is soon effaced from memory. What approach should we adopt in order to trace the evolution of the actor’s art? Should we study key dates, or should we instead concentrate on the talent of particular actors whose art assumed a distinctive form?

The history of performance can be written in different ways, depending on which of these two approaches is chosen. In the first, the sum total of past events generates a developmental sequence that today we dismiss as a utopian vision – merely the reflection of the researcher’s selective gaze upon moments that have been privileged over other moments. In the second approach, focusing on individual artists and their performance skills, the picture seems to disintegrate, since an impressionistic overview, brought into close-up, cannot capture the overall reality of an art.

Beyond this fundamental question about how to create the history of the actor’s art lies a much more crucial question – one that arises in critical discourse and in acting schools – concerning the very necessity of this history. Can a better understanding of history really shed light on the present of a theatre characterised by its urgent need to get on with the show, to illuminate the text, or to stage a collective work? These questions are fundamental to any historical inquiry. They are questions that the historians of the ‘Annales’ School addressed by creating a history of ideas and attitudes rather than a history of facts and events, a history that places events in their contexts and geographic settings and, crucially, examines the bearing these events have on the present. In what follows, my thoughts will be guided by the responses of three directors to the question ‘What place do you accord to history?’ These directors are Jacques Delcuvellerie, Jerzy Grotowski and Antoine Vitez.

Valorising liveness, in the face of a threat from the endlessly remediated art of the day, performance studies has tended to reject the historical; on the other hand, documentation of the live event has become not only a funding imperative but a personal obsession with many practitioners. It is not enough to do what we do; we must record it, and put it on YouTube. In the spirit of this take – or assault – upon historiography, this essay begins with a live moment that has led to a revision of the plan of this book, and continues with some perhaps uncomfortable historiographical questions.

On 18 June 2010 the editors called together a conference of the contributors to this volume, and an audience of interested scholars and postgraduate students, to discuss and co-ordinate approaches to its content. I (Jacky Bratton) spoke late in the day, with a brief to address the history of ‘the comic’ – solo performers of humorous material – and to suggest how the dominant aesthetic has variously appropriated, discarded, hidden or demonised the ‘popular’ art of the entertainer, and then suggest what the historian might do about this. I decided to demonstrate the complexities by showing a picture (Fig. 36) found on a calendar and asking delegates to name the performer. Of course they could not; as I had hoped, they did not even guess right as to the gender of the figure posing perfunctorily as a monster chicken, clamp-jawed, toothless and befeathered, in skull cap and big three-toed comedy boots.

In 2004, Marvin Carlson asked what was the single most important thing we could do to bring theatre history into the new millennium. His answer was simple: ‘Become Less Provincial’. His argument, that theatre history must broaden its remit both in terms of forms and of geographical reach, seems an obvious one in an increasingly global world, one in which perspectives have sometimes been very limited. But in lifting our heads upwards and outwards, there have been consequences. The local, never a very fashionable concept for mainstream historians, has become increasingly marginalised. It could be argued that we have found ‘new locals’, as the authors of Theatre Histories might claim in a book that covers not only performance from Western traditions (including late-Neolithic ritual pilgrimage), but also Bunraku from Japan, social drama from Kerala in India, and Gao Xingjian’s Wild Man from post-Cultural Revolution China. Whilst this approach does allow for neglected areas of theatre and performance to be considered, there is also a danger that the ‘old locals’, i.e., Western ‘provincial’ theatre (in particular that based in theatre buildings), become increasingly marginalised. This neglect is further compounded by the increasing concerns to widen the events we encompass in our consideration of performance. Here, Theatre Histories includes cultural performances such as tourism and Times Square, shamanism and ritual and urban carnivals. At the same time, the old binary of the metropolitan and the local is still very much in evidence. Michael Billington’s The State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945, for example, a book that claims to explore the pattern and shape of British theatre (my emphasis) since the end of the Second World War is in essence a book about theatre in the capital. He does include two short sections on regional theatre, one in a chapter called ‘Scenes from an Execution’, the very title of which sums up a pervading and sweeping perception of theatre outside of London: it is either in crisis or facing closure. The generalised view of the repertoire of regional theatre is summed up in another history that offers us very few real clues about the local outside of London, Simon Shepherd’s Modern British Theatre, which talks about the sense of repertory theatres’ staleness in the 1980s when ‘a rash of musicals and modern classics followed like a nasty infection’.

It is the traditionally held view that the history of all European theatre begins with ancient Greek theatre, which is regarded as the first and thus original form of theatre in Europe from which later forms evolved. This notion is underpinned by a linear concept of history, which implies that any phenomenon in history can be directly traced back to its ‘roots’. This notion of history was dominant during the nineteenth century, but today history is no longer seen from within the narrow strictures of such a linear, even universalist, concept. We neither see Hegel’s ‘World Spirit’ realising itself in history, nor recognise within history the law-governed inevitability of development from a primitive ur-community via class society to a Marxist classless society. We also no longer adhere to the modernisation theory of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, according to which the course of history leads to the perfection of humanity. Such totalising and teleologically oriented constructions of history have long been overcome. In order to prevent the reader from walking into the trap of such a construct by blindly following a chronological order, it was decided to begin the historiographical section of this volume with modernist theatre, ending with ancient theatre.

Since belief in a single ‘grand narrative’ told by historians has been superseded today, the historian’s task nowadays lies in writing multiple histories. Instead of macro-history – i.e. the grand narrative – we have to deal with many micro-histories. Theatre historiography constitutes a never-ending project, and historians of different eras will focus on different aspects of the past and follow varying traces and trajectories. This applies in particular to the historiography of classical theatre – and for good reason. If ancient Greek theatre is assumed to be the origin of European theatre, then in each epoch the need arises to link one’s own contemporary theatre to that of ancient theatre – be it in agreement with or in opposition to it.

From the perspective of Western culture, ‘modernity’ can be summed up as an era that began in around 1500, shaped by the emergence of capitalism, industrialisation, secularisation and rationalism. By contrast, ‘modernism’ is characterised by developments during the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century in the sphere of culture, which correlate with political and social upheavals, technological innovation and aesthetic experimentation. The terms ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’ are the subject of controversies striking at the very self-image of Western culture. This debate is made ever more complex when seen through the lens of the twenty-first century within a globalised world: the modern age? post-modern? Were we ever ‘modern’?

In academic discussions, the terms ‘modern theatre’ and ‘modernist theatre’ entail a difference of focus in respect of timescale and subject matter. However, the language of theatre history is often inconsistent. For instance, in The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre, John Russell Brown divides the period since 1500 into two sections: ‘From the Renaissance to 1700’ and ‘European and Western Theatres from 1700’. The notion of modernity does not come into play, though it could have served as a pointer to the influence of capitalism, industrialisation, secularisation and rationalism upon theatre since 1500. The time-span between 1500 and 1700 is split into four chapters based on national criteria (Italy, Spain, England, France), whereas the span between 1700 and 1970 fills four chronologically organised chapters that include ‘Eighteenth-Century Theatre’ and ‘Nineteenth-Century Theatre’ before ‘Modern Theatre: 1890–1920’ comes to be investigated. The mismatch here between a strictly limited time-frame and the expansive adjective ‘modern’ is striking. This chapter by Martin Esslin covers what is normally regarded as ‘modernist’ theatre, namely Naturalism and the movements that distinguished themselves from it: Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, etc. We see that theatre historiography tends not to discuss under the sign of ‘modern’ the longue durée, which is to say the long time-span of theatre’s evolution since 1500, but tends rather to trace developments in smaller segments. If it does not differentiate between ‘modern theatre’ and ‘modernist theatre’, this is perhaps because our everyday language fails to do so, using ‘modern’ essentially as a relational concept setting a boundary to what constitutes the present. Or perhaps theatre historiography fails to address modernity because it has decided to take as its subject matter the opposition between Naturalism and Anti-Naturalism that theatre practitioners like to describe as ‘modern’.