Abstract
Abstract The reception of the English Comedians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is connected to their representation in modern theatre histories by ideations of travelling theatre in Enlightenment theatre projects. Theatre-historical chronicles began to be written in the second half of the eighteenth century, by which time there was already a vocabulary for itinerant theatre ready to be applied to the English Comedians in order to understand their effect on national dramatic culture. Setting these relations next to the development of Theaterwissenschaft out of philology in early twentieth-century German universities, this concluding chapter reflects on the influence of disciplinary structure upon the investigation of controversial historical phenomena. Various sorts of patriotism and methodologism have distorted the comprehension of the itinerant theatre and concealed its involvement in the generation of dramatic art. The contemporary crisis within the discipline of theatre history is explained with reference to the underestimation of theatre professionalization, which was a profound discontinuity in the history of Western culture.
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