Theatre Historians Research Articles

A produção de balanços historiográficos no Brasil: entre o poder político e o poder discursivo (1990-2011)

A produção de balanços historiográficos, entendidos como avaliações/apresentações de um conjunto de textos historiográficos referentes a um determinado tema, apesar de ser uma prática de longa data, configurou-se como tópico até hoje ainda não problematizado de forma sistemática pelos teóricos da história. No presente artigo pretendemos fazer uma análise de algumas das relações de poder que acreditamos estar no cerne da produção de tal modalidade enunciativa. A partir de duas funções do balanço historiográfico, a do balanço enquanto expressão de um lugar político, e a do balanço enquanto procedimento de delimitação discursiva, buscamos fazer uma análise de alguns balanços ligados à temática do passado escravista no Brasil e produzidos entre 1990 e 2011. Trata-se de um recorte temático e temporal pertinente, uma vez que foi neste período que se deu a consolidação dos cursos de pós-graduação no país, o que fomentou, por parte dos autores do período, a percepção de um novo modo de se fazer história.Palavras-chave: balanço historiográfico, relações de poder, discurso, escravidão.

Rise of the Monkey Tribe: Simian Impersonation in the British Theatre

In this article Bernard Ince surveys and critically examines for the first time the bizarre phenomenon known as the ‘Monkey Drama’ in the British theatre. A genre of early origin, pre-dating the age of Darwinism, it is to be found in all areas of entertainment, especially during the nineteenth century when the quintessential characteristics of simian mimicry were established. Commonly juxtaposed with the legitimate drama in afterpieces, ‘man-monkey’ spectacles not only blurred conventional man–beast boundaries, but also challenged prevailing conceptions of theatrical legitimacy. The genre attracted myriad performers of varied origins and specialisms, whose ability to mimic simian characteristics stemmed not only from agility and flexibility, but also from careful study of the ‘monkey tribe’ itself. While some familiar names figure among the roll-call of simian impersonators, many artists are little known. Although difficult to quantify precisely, the genre had reached its zenith before the middle of the nineteenth century, the 1820s through the 1840s being a significant formative period. After mid-century, popularity was maintained, but to a lesser degree, largely through pantomime, only to decline significantly after 1900. In a broader context, the study furnishes new material for current interdisciplinary debates regarding the relationship between performance, evolution and visual culture in the Victorian period. Bernard Ince is an independent theatre historian who has contributed earlier studies of the Victorian and Edwardian theatre to New Theatre Quarterly.

Seicento intersections of Spanish comedy and Italian theatre

In January 2015 Fausta Antonucci and Anna Tedesco (specialists respectively in Spanish literature and music history of the 17th century) organized an interdisciplinary conference in Rome, focusing on the intersections of their interests and involving also scholars of theatre and Italian literature. The results are published in the edited volume now under review, where Antonucci and Tedesco each outline their own perspective in separate prefaces. The book comprises eleven chapters by different contributors in three languages, Italian, English and Spanish: the multilingual structure, in addition to the multiple disciplines involved, should ensure a wide circulation among academic readers. The opening chapter is written by Maria Grazia Profeti, the pioneer of research in Spain and Italy on the diffusion of the ‘Comedia nueva’ in the Spanish Golden Age (‘Siglo de Oro’). Profeti, now emerita of the University of Florence, was the main organizer and chair of several meetings of scholars interested in this topic, whose proceedings were later published in the series ‘Commedia aurea spagnola e pubblico italiano’, in which ten volumes have appeared (Florence: Alinea, 1996–). Her chapter summarizes the state of research on this topic during the last three decades, mainly from the point of view of the history of theatre and comparative literature. A similar introductory summary on the musicological side is entrusted to Lorenzo Bianconi, one of the main protagonists in the reappraisal of the Spanish comedias as sources for Italian opera librettos during the 17th century. Around Bianconi, similarly to what happened around Profeti with young scholars of Spanish theatre and literature, a group of young (mostly Italian) musicologists have started a systematic investigation of the Spanish models for Italian operas. The two groups exchanged their results for the first time during the 2015 conference in Rome. In the proceedings their contributions are complemented with work by historians of Baroque theatre (chaired by Silvia Carandini, who includes a further introductory essay, this time on the bibliography of studies on Spanish–Italian theatrical exchanges in the 17th century), and by eminent musicologists such as Margaret Murata and Louise Stein.

Opera by the Book

In 1944 with Nazi Germany just months from defeat, a curious and now little-known book was published in Regensburg: a collection of essays and biographies that strove to define the contemporary state of opera. Titled Die deutsche Oper der Gegenwart (German Opera of the Present Day), this substantial and lavishly produced volume documents the aesthetics of opera during the Third Reich through its profiles of sixty-two composers, more than 250 design drawings and photographs, prose essays on drama and staging, and an extensive works list. The National Socialist alignment of the book’s primary author (the theater historian Carl Niessen) and publishing company (Gustav Bosse Verlag) contextualizes the volume’s problematic scholarly priorities. Niessen interleaved explanations and endorsements of viable manifestations of contemporary German opera with anti-Semitic rhetoric and venomous critiques of rival aesthetic views. The book’s time-capsule version of the “state of the art” also includes evidence that contradicts postwar claims by composers, such as Winfried Zillig, who later recast themselves as persecuted modernists but whose statements within the volume demonstrate their complicity. Pamela Potter has recommended that musicologists address the longstanding historiographical problem of defining “Nazi Music” by paying detailed attention to particularities. Analyzing the form, contents, and rhetoric of a single printed object permits insights into the definition, valuation, and canonization of contemporary opera near the end of the Third Reich.

HISTORY TO THE MAX

ABSTRACTSteven G. Smith advocates a maximal approach to history by both historians and theorists of history, maintaining that a commitment to fullness or totality should always serve as an ideal. In my review, I try to explain what the author means by this ideal, and consider how practical such an ideal can be. He further maintains that history is mostly about shared action, and is itself an instance of shared action. I have certain reservations about this notion, though I think Smith's book deserves credit for calling attention to it.

Haptic insights: model making as historical methodology

ABSTRACTThis article explores the value of digital reconstruction practice to the theatre historian in general, but in particular to the historian concerned with exploring visual histories offered by the areas of theatre design and architecture. It will articulate differences between the expectations and reality of digital reconstruction as illustration (both fixed and interactive) and suggest caveats and opportunities offered by digital (and virtual) outputs as a mode of communication. While the article will explore practice and critical commentary related to reconstruction as illustration, it will focus in more detail on the model as practice as research. The intention is to explore the methodological value of reconstructive practice in the process of the historian and identify possibilities for communicating the tacit knowledge generated by these approaches in ways that move beyond the simple presentation of visualised outputs as illustration.

From Colonial Performers to Actors of ‘American Liberty’:Black Artists in Bourbon and Revolutionary Río de la Plata

From the late eighteenth century through most of the nineteenth, Buenos Aires and Montevideo were hosts to a joint theatrical circuit characterized by the regular comings and goings of impresarios, artisans, musicians, and actors between the two cities. The military conflicts that shaped this period actually encouraged these connections, as they stimulated both exile and repatriation between one locale and the other. Africans, and particularly their Rioplatense descendants, were an integral part of popular entertainment circuits in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Some of the first Argentinean historians of theater and music, among them Vicente Gesualdo and Teodoro Klein, were aware of this connection and included in their initial scholarship links that connect the history of free and enslaved Afro-descendants to the early theater of Río de la Plata.

Off the clock: Is drag ‘just a job’?

Abstract Many contemporary performance scholars and ethnographers define drag as ‘just a job’, a professional identity often presented as incompatible trans identity. However, recent events, such as Facebook’s ‘real names’ issue, and trans drag performer Peppermint’s highly publicized tenure on RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–present), have put tension on this fairly narrow definition of drag. In this article, I use these recent moments of tension between drag and trans identity as a jumping off point to track the history of the definition of drag as ‘just a job’ and scrutinize the simplicity of this statement. Drawing on the work of trans historian Susan Stryker, theatre historian Laurence Senelick and drag ethnographer Esther Newton, among others, I use both recent and historic moments of convergence and overlap between drag and trans communities to problematize the definition of the two identities as mutually exclusive.

Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound in the Light of Contemporary Concepts of Tragedy

ABSTRACTMost literary and theater historians emphasize the historical importance of Ibsen, Strindberg, and André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre and as a consequence Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound is reduced to a parenthesis in the history of drama. Can contemporary views on tragedy expressed in theoretical works by Hans-Thies Lehmann and put on stage by, for example, Jan Fabre, Romeo Castellucci, and Olivier Dubois, cast a new light on Shelley’s play and make it more familiar with the stage? Prometheus Unbound does not replace the lost play of the trilogy of Aeschylus. Rather, it questions the premises of the Greek play and it is to a certain extent a metadrama. The concept of excess, central to Lehmann and Fabre, is one of the characteristics of Shelley’s drama. The Aristotelian concept of opsis, neglected in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tragedy theory, is fundamental in Prometheus Unbound just as are music and voices. Prometheus Unbound is a typically Romantic drama as its action takes place on several levels at the same time: on stage and on a cosmic level, on stage and in a phantom world, on stage and in the mind. The use of metaphors and similes (“as,” “like”) are consitutive of the play and they constantly draw our attention to new modalities (memories, dreams, visions) and back again and thus make the modality of the action insecure. In these respects, Shelley’s drama can be looked upon as a forerunner of the avantgarde theater of today.

Staging Ajax's Suicide: A Historiography

Staging Ajax's SuicideA Historiography Peter A. Campbell (bio) When I was commissioned to write an adaptation of Sophocles's Ajax for a theatre festival in lower Manhattan in 2004, I immersed myself in the various translations and editions of the play, which of course included editorial notes and commentaries. These notes often emphasized the great poetry of Ajax's monologues and the unevenness of the play's structure. But every single one of them discussed at length the staging of Ajax's suicide. There are numerous ideas of how this scene was originally staged and of its significance to the logistics and aesthetics of Greek staging practice, dramaturgy, and reception. The suicide is considered important because it is one of the few moments in Athenian tragedy in which an act of violence may have been staged in view of the spectators. As a playwright and director, I was compelled by the challenges of staging that moment and looked to the editorial notes and commentaries for information and suggestions. As a theatre historian, I was also interested in exploring how the moment of Ajax's suicide came to be understood as such a compelling piece of theatrical history. In reading the various versions of play, I was initially struck by the difficulty the writers had in describing the stage action at this key moment of the play. Sir Richard Jebb's translation, from 1893, has the most straightforward stage direction: "Ajax falls on his sword."1 Jebb suggests that the action is visible but does not fully address the logistical concerns of the original staging, which begs a central question for a director and a theatre historian: how does the actor portraying Ajax fall on his sword? Since we may assume he doesn't actually fall on an actual sword, which would likely kill him, Jebb requires us to imagine the staging [End Page 67] of this moment. In John Moore's popular and well-respected translation from 1957, Ajax "falls on his sword and collapses behind the bushes."2 If Ajax falls on his sword and then falls behind the bushes, the original question of how he falls on his sword remains, and more staging elements like "the bushes" are brought into play but not described. In Herbert Golder and Richard Pevear's Oxford University Press translation of 1999, "The platform is wheeled back, disappearing into the grove as Aias speaks his last words."3 Here it seems the act of suicide is not visible. But if there is a platform that moves backward, an ekkyklêma, does the action take place on the moving platform, before it leaves, or offstage, after the platform has left? The ekkyklêma also typically rolls in to reveal things, not out to hide them, leading to additional staging questions.4 In Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff's translation, published in 2007, the stage direction, similar to Golder and Pevear's, reads: "The ekkyklêma withdraws through the skene door, and the door closes."5 In an extended footnote, the translators explain the reasoning behind their stage directions: "Many commentators and a scholiast's note on a later manuscript of the play suggest that the suicide was staged in full view of the audience. We think Ajax's language of withdrawal from the light and discovery of his body at line 891 point to the exiting of the ekkyklêma here and not to a depiction of the act of suicide onstage. The myth of Ajax's death was well known to the audience…and Sophocles would increase suspense by not depicting this most private of acts."6 Meineck and Woodruff make a set of choices based on their interpretations of the text as they read it and the historical staging and how they understand it. And they do not suggest that the suicide is visible. Their primary reasoning here is that the audience would already be familiar with the image and thus would not need to see it. These stage directions illuminate the complicated nature of playtext and its relationship to staging and to theatrical history. They also reflect the scholarly commentaries that attempt to reconstruct the original staging of the...

London’s West End Actresses and the Origins of Celebrity Charity, 1880–1920 by Catherine Hindson

Reviewed by: London’s West End Actresses and the Origins of Celebrity Charity, 1880–1920 by Catherine Hindson Anna Andes LONDON’S WEST END ACTRESSES AND THE ORIGINS OF CELEBRITY CHARITY, 1880–1920. By Catherine Hindson. Studies in Theatre History and Culture series. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016; pp. 222. Catherine Hindson’s London’s West End Actresses and the Origins of Celebrity Charity, 1880–1920 is remarkable in its timeliness and in the breadth and depth of its value for numerous fields of study. Thoughtful and well-researched, Hindson’s work appears at a time of great interest among theatre historians and performance theorists in the late Victorian, Edwardian, and pre–World War I era. In particular, the role and contributions of women in British theatre during this time has garnered much attention. Hindson’s study fills a significant gap by appreciating and analyzing the unpaid labor of theatre women during this period through charity work and its societal and professional implications. Hindson’s book is part of a broader, longstanding effort by scholars of women’s history and feminist theory to appreciate the significance of women’s unpaid labor throughout the evolution of human history. She focuses in particular on the unpaid labor of actresses in the form of charity work in support of both ongoing social concerns, such as hospitals and orphanages, as well as acute concerns such as national disasters, like the sinking of the Titanic and military actions overseas. All of this unpaid labor, Hindson argues, required actresses to constantly renegotiate their professional identities. For instance, their work within the historically paternalistic organizational structures of established charities raised the question of exactly what professional skills the actress had to offer, beyond the presumed merely decorative and performative. Additionally, audiences began to perceive actresses differently, as their onstage personas were now complicated by new offstage personas. And finally, charity work involved working in close association with society women, requiring the negotiation of class boundaries and age-old prejudices against the morally suspect theatrical profession. Hindson’s exploration of all of these sites of identity negotiation is woven throughout her careful and thorough defining and documentation of various charity activities with which actresses worked. The book’s seven chapters are grouped together in three parts. In each chapter, the author carefully defines each type of charity activity and provides a discussion of its history leading up to the era covered in the book. At times, these discussions seem to lose sight of actresses, either as a collective group or as individuals; however, this is no doubt due to her reasonable assumption that the work must first provide a thorough historical and categorical grounding in each charity topic that is likely not familiar to most theatre historians. Ultimately, although pages go by without a discussion of actresses per se, her exhaustive background material on so many different types of charity events certainly supports her thematic goal of orienting and evaluating the unpaid charitable work of actresses during this time. In part 1, “Charity and the West End Theatre Industry,” Hindson discusses the history of intra-theatrical charity engagement within West End theatre culture and practice, paying particular attention to the changing purpose and form of the traditional fundraising matinee. In part 2, “Public Charity Events,” she provides a comparative analysis of the emergence of such extra-theatrical charity activities as costume balls, bazaars, tea parties, and garden parties. Her analysis of these events pays particular attention to an increase in the physical access of spectators to actresses who were no longer confined to the formal stage of a fundraising matinee, but were now, for example, selling goods and pouring tea. Hindson’s research in this area opens up interesting avenues for further inquiry regarding the actresses’ now differently commodified body and audiences’ perception of it. In this part of her work, Hindson documents the emergence of certain celebrity cultural forms with which we are familiar [End Page 575] today, such as the sale of autographed pictures in support of charity. Part 3, “The Stage and War,” highlights yet two more forms of charity performance: recitations in support of the Second Boer War, and “Concerts at the...

"On the [Historical] Sublime": J. R. Planché's King John and the Romantic Ideal of the Past

"On the [Historical] Sublime"J. R. Planché's King John and the Romantic Ideal of the Past Andrew Gibb (bio) The 1823 Covent Garden production of King John, which featured costumes designed by James Robinson (J. R.) Planché, is often credited with the first systematic deployment of historically accurate costuming. For many years, theatre historians treated this notable moment in design as one of many steps in a seemingly centuries-long march toward progressively greater stage realism. The extent to which this interpretation held sway is evidenced by the fact that historians customarily linked Planché's antiquarianism to the earlier practices of habit à la romaine, local color, and eastern exoticism, as well as to eighteenth-century spectacles such as David Garrick's Elizabethan-dressed Shakespearean tragedies and Macklin's 1741 Shylock.1 The problem with such an understanding of King John lay in its progressivist stance. It relied upon an assumption that historical accuracy in stage effects was an inevitable standard, one that slowly but surely evolved over time. But while the earlier practices noted heretofore certainly contributed to an artistic trajectory that allowed for a new way of representing history onstage, they neither individually nor collectively provided a satisfactory explanation of why artists and audiences should have chosen 1823 as the moment to enthusiastically embrace historically accurate costuming. To my mind, the answer to that question cannot be located in the spectacular innovations of Planché's costumes themselves, although they were undoubtedly something new and exciting. Ultimately, there was something far more profound about the experience of King John than that of an audience recognizing the genius of a designer. What was happening in the space of the Convent Garden theatre was that a group of early [End Page 127] nineteenth-century Londoners, through the medium of theatre (or more specifically, theatrical costuming), were talking to each other about history in a new way. Given my interpretation of the event, this essay reveals little that is new about the facts of the 1823 Covent Garden production. Instead, with it I seek to tell the origin story of a particular theatrical convention, that of historically accurate costuming. For this reason, in the pages that follow, I engage far more deeply with the context of period events and philosophies than with the archival details of Planché's costumes.2 One could say that my primary interest with this essay is not the particulars of King John as a historical production, but rather the historical embeddedness of King John's costuming practices. For some time now, historians have been steadily moving away from presentist and progressivist explanations of past theatrical practice, and with respect to King John, the old characterization of Planché's choices as a kind of budding realism has largely been supplanted by interpretations that privilege social contexts over aesthetic ones. Most compellingly, theatre historians have tied the nineteenth-century desire for historical accuracy in costuming to rising nationalist sentiment among period audiences, an argument convincingly made by Richard Schoch, and echoed by the authors of the next-generation Theatre Histories textbook.3 There is, however, a notable discrepancy between Schoch's study and the treatment of King John by McConachie et al. The latter authors see nationalism at work in the success of the 1823 production, while Schoch, though prominently mentioning Planché, nevertheless takes as his primary exemplars the productions staged by Charles Kean in the 1850s, a generation after Planché's innovation. Why should Kean's stagings prove to be a more fitting example of theatrical nationalism than Kemble's? Interestingly, the lag between Kemble and those who followed was noted by Oscar Brockett as early as 1968, when he wrote: "In spite of the success of these productions, Kemble did not repeat the experiment until 1827, and it was not until Macready accepted it in 1837 that authenticity was consistently exploited. Thus, while Planché's work in 1823 must be considered a landmark, it did not bring an immediate revolution in theatrical practice."4 What can account for the delay between Planché's 1823 innovation and its full adoption at mid-century? While I would judge as sound the connection between the popularity of...

Farces and Sotties. Performance Practice, Print Practice, and Manuscript Practice

At the heart of our enquiry is the debate about what we can really learn from documentation about medieval theatre. Pleased as they may have been to uncover some traces of this production, historians of medieval theatre have not sufficiently considered the nature and the logic of these documents nor how representative they might be. What documents have come down to us and why they have been preserved determine, however, what we can and cannot say about the subject. What is actually documented by our sources? The main problem is the inconsistency of our sources and their relationship to what has been lost. For example, a printed play is an anomaly that needs explication; it is not a gift from heaven. Thus, when someone writes down a play, we need to explain why it happened, keeping in mind that archival sources speak of theatre only when something went wrong or when there was some financial matter to be settled.

The Many Middling Failures of Miss Virginia Calhoun

The Many Middling Failures of Miss Virginia Calhoun Brian Eugenio Herrera (bio) Performance historiography is premised on success. Watershed dates, events, and figures focus our narratives, coordinate our periodizations, and anchor our claims for significance. Our traditional tales of theatre’s history depend on such moments of invention and intervention, or on occasions of disruption and discovery: Thespis steps from the chorus; Okuni dances in the riverbed; Nora slams the door. Synecdochic evocations of past “success” stand as privileged cues to apprehending what matters, then and now, in performance history. Those tales of obscurity and failure that we tell are likewise typically rendered in triumphant terms. Theatre historians routinely rediscover and retroactively celebrate the heretofore unacknowledged genius, undervalued technique, or overlooked influence of previously forgotten theatre-makers, events, or movements. Theatre history is thus comparatively bereft of non-triumphant tales. Our most favored failures are those readily rendered as episodes within triumph’s long arc or as epic enough to warrant a place within theatre history lore and legend. Performance history’s triumphal tendency might also be seen in how it does not narrate the undeniably unsuccessful performances of someone like Virginia Calhoun. Calhoun—a mercurial, eccentric, mysterious woman who labored for nearly a half-century as an actress, writer, and producer as the nineteenth century became the twentieth—believed herself to always be on the verge of success. Having decided to become an actress shortly after her thirtieth birthday, the California-born and -educated Calhoun spent much of the 1890s studying in France and England. She returned to the United States as the century turned and enjoyed a brief stint as a touring trouper (mostly performing Sardou along the Southeastern coast) before resettling in Los Angeles, a newly booming city in her home state. In 1903 Calhoun secured the exclusive dramatic rights to Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1883), the hugely popular fictional narrative of life in California’s southland during the Spanish colonial era. She then began what she would come to call her “lifetime’s work”: to bring a suitably artistic, authentic, and uplifting version of Jackson’s epic treatment of California’s “mission past” to respectable theatre audiences in California and beyond. As writer, star, producer, and marketer, Calhoun staged not only her own theatrical adaptation of Ramona, but also led two major, independent regional tours of her production throughout the Far West, Southwest, and Midwest in 1905 and 1906. Over the subsequent three decades the unmarried and unmoneyed Calhoun persisted, experimenting with form, style, and venue for her constantly revised script, all while vigilantly defending her Ramona from the creative predations of her usually male and always more successful rivals. Yet, despite her creativity, tenacity, and productivity, Calhoun is only remembered, if remembered at all, as a peripheral figure in accounts of more successful Ramonas (fig. 1). Calhoun’s most sustained accomplishment is her accumulation of nearly fifty years of near success. Yet, as if to confirm that “near success” registers archivally as failure, Calhoun—a prodigious writer of letters, scripts, and stories; an avid collector of Southern California memorabilia; a prodigious contributor to a broad range of civic performance traditions—left no “Virginia Calhoun Collection” (at least not one that an existing archive or repository considered worthy of keeping). [End Page 75] Still, after more than fifteen years of my own on-again/off-again research tracking brief mentions of her in the printed record and her occasional appearances in other peoples’ papers, I find that the pieces of the Virginia Calhoun story have slowly come together and feel that I can now tell her story. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Virginia Calhoun as Ramona, circa 1905. (Source: As published in Pleasures and Palaces: The Memoirs of Princess Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich by Eleanor Hulda Calhoun Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich [New York: Century Company, 1915].) But what is the point of telling a story like Calhoun’s? Why would, why should any reader or publisher care about the many middling failures of someone like her? My years of puzzling over the question of “what’s at stake” in telling Calhoun’s story has led me to appreciate that, for all her idiosyncrasy, she...

Theater; or, Looking beyond Plays and Places

Theater; or, Looking beyond Plays and Places Amy E. Hughes (bio) Alas: some readers, having read nothing but my title, are already annoyed with me. This is because many US theater practitioners, professors, and aficionados have surprisingly strong opinions about how "theater" should be spelled. The subject comes up perennially and persistently in articles, blog posts, and conference panels.1 It seems the spelling debate gained considerable rigor in 1962, when the New York Times quietly changed its editorial policy to use theater instead of theatre—even going so far as to "correct" the names of theaters that called themselves Theatres.2 But the dispute can be traced back to 1789, when Noah Webster advocated for a pronunciation-based approach to US spelling in his Dissertations on the English Language. Observing that the spelling of French words had been retained even though they were pronounced differently in English, Webster complained, "Ought [the Americans] at once to reform these abuses, and introduce order and regularity into the orthography of the AMERICAN TONGUE?"3 He answered his own call in the American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), offering postcolonial alternatives to the spellings of many British (cum French) words. When Chauncey A. Goodrich revised Webster's Dictionary in 1847, he formalized this orthographic philosophy by proclaiming in the preface that the re in centre, metre, and other "words of this class" should be transposed.4 But in contrast to centre and metre, the debate over theatre's ending is far from over. As director and theater historian Francis Hodge once observed, "There is an emotional context that surrounds this word that has made and will continue to make a shift to the-er spelling difficult."5 Further [End Page 411] complicating the matter is the insistence by some that theatre and theater are not merely variant spellings but actually two different words, with the former referring to the art form (and, concomitantly, the body of work it generates) and the latter referring to a place where plays are performed.6 I rehearse this history not because it is interesting but because it is revealing: the theater inspires fervent passion, intense loyalty, even cliquish elitism in those who love and study it. Proponents of the idea to embrace both spellings—theatre as play, theater as place—illustrate this most clearly. As architecture and activity, edifice and event, refuge and recreation, the theater is deeply beloved. However, we need more definitions when looking at the nineteenth century, when "the theater" was also a performance practice, a form of labor, and a community. By attending to these connotations, the chaotic complexities of nineteenth-century US theater culture can be seen more clearly: the eclectic amusements staged in playhouses, the diverse work and workers involved in theatrical enterprises, and the dynamic camaraderie that sustained theater/s. Such nuances expose enduring biases in historiography—among them, a tendency to privilege literary legibility over quotidian praxis; a continuing emphasis on the rich, white, and famous; and a benign neglect of the communal processes that shaped nineteenth-century US cultural production. The literature most closely associated with theater is the so-called legitimate drama: narrative-based plays that were professionally produced and/or published. Yet records of actual performances, such as promptbooks marked up by actors and stage managers, suggest that scripts served merely as starting points. Promptbooks exhibit a wide range of alterations—scenes rearranged, large swathes of dialogue omitted, or entire characters removed to meet the needs of a company. Managers frequently reduced five-act plays to four, three, two, or even one act, depending on what the evening's bill would accommodate or what the audience would tolerate. Even promptbooks cannot fully capture what happened on stage. Actors added personal flourishes or "points" to impress the audience, and often, they were "imperfect" in their parts due to last-minute casting changes and the limited time they had to memorize lines. Their improvised dialogue is undocumented, except for scattered anecdotes in diaries and autobiographies. Additionally, many scripts have been completely lost, for the simple reason that they were never intended to be kept. Sassy parodies; saccharine patriotic skits; [End Page 412] slapdash dramatizations of...

Bernard Shaw and William Archer ed. by Thomas Postlewait

Reviewed by: Bernard Shaw and William Archer ed. by Thomas Postlewait Matthew Yde BERNARD SHAW AND WILLIAM ARCHER. Edited by Thomas Postlewait. Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw series. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017; pp. 552. Few professional relationships offer such a panoramic view of the emerging modern theatre as that of playwright Bernard Shaw and critic William Archer, as seen through their longstanding epistolary correspondence. Of course, to identify their two professions in this way is imprecise, as Shaw was himself one of the greatest critics of modern theatre and drama, only retiring from professional criticism in 1898 after the publication of his first seven plays concurrently in two volumes, Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant. And while it might be reasonably argued that Archer was the most important theatre and drama critic writing in the English language between 1880 and 1920, he ended his life as a successful playwright. Theatre historian Thomas Postlewait has spent decades hunting down the letters of the famous pair, never quite satisfied that there were not more letters to be found. The volume consists of 181 epistles, mostly from Shaw to Archer, and spans from January 6, 1885 to December 17, 1924, just ten days before Archer died. Although some of the letters have appeared elsewhere, many are being published here (unabridged) for the first time. Of particular note is one letter that Postlewait discovered, finding it enclosed in one of Archer's censorship-article scrapbooks in the now-shuttered British Theatre Association in London. The copy that he made of that letter—published in this volume—remains the only record of this missive, as the original somehow disappeared when Archer's archives were moved (83). More generally, Postlewait suggests that many of Archer's responses to Shaw are simply lost, most likely destroyed during World War II. What makes this book so compellingly readable, despite the gaps created by the lost letters, is Postlewait's extraordinary scholarship. He provides extensive headnotes, which "supply the immediate context and the connecting narrative for each letter." He also follows each letter with a comprehensive endnote, identifying "people, references, allusions, and quotations that Shaw and Archer mentioned in their letters" (lxxxiii). Rarely have headnotes and endnotes been so pleasurable to read and so enormously helpful. They complement the letters brilliantly, especially because Postlewait provides excerpts from the reviews, essays, and books by the two authors that fill in lacunae. He began his career with Prophet of the New Drama: William Archer and the Ibsen Campaign (1986), an important book, and Bernard Shaw and William Archer is a significant extension of that work. [End Page 426] In his lengthy introduction, Postlewait identifies "six major fronts" where the two men "battled for the birth, development, and fulfillment of the modern theatre: the new drama, the new theatre, the new criticism, the establishment of a national theatre, the revitalization of Shakespearean theatre, and the opposition to stage censorship" (xii). All of these topics are discussed in the letters, most of them at great length. For instance, Archer and Shaw were both deeply involved in the efforts to establish a national theatre in London during the early part of the twentieth century, Archer starting the Theatrical Reform Committee in 1902 and then composing, with Harley Granville Barker, A National Theatre: Schemes and Estimates in 1907. This was a decades-long conversation, turning eventually into an argument when the national theatre scheme transformed into a national Shakespeare theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. In fact, their discussions on Shakespeare make for some of the most interesting reading in the book, as Archer and Shaw frequently debate such issues as staging and cutting Shakespeare's plays; Shaw contended, for instance, that William Poel's spare and supposedly uncut productions with the Elizabethan Stage Society were the perfect model for Shakespearean production, while Postlewait notes that such "praise must have made Archer see red because he was a relentless critic of Poel's productions" (336). Both Shaw and Archer were fervent supporters of Ibsen and the new theatre (both are discussed frequently), but the two men differed throughout their forty-year correspondence on the topic of dramatic construction, which is a source of constant contention in...

World Theatre: The Basics by E. J. Westlake

Reviewed by: World Theatre: The Basics by E. J. Westlake Jennifer A. Kokai World Theatre: The Basics. By E. J. Westlake. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017; pp. 218. In some ways, E. J. Westlake’s World Theatre: The Basics begins and ends with Peter Brook. She starts the introduction of her accessible and useful textbook with an oft-cited quote from The Empty Space: “A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged” (1). She includes in the last main chapter, on intercultural collaborations, a critique of Brook’s Mahabharata production, which she argues was well-received by Western audiences but viewed as disrespectful cultural appropriation by many Indian artists. Therein lies the difficulty of any world-drama textbook intended for Western theatre students: How does one resist Eurocentric and colonialist understandings of a myriad of cultures and traditions, while at the same time frame those theatrical conventions in a way that Western students will understand? Westlake makes deliberate and thoughtful choices to resist the trap of presenting everything in terms of Western theatre, but this tension remains throughout. She states at the beginning that she has decided “to omit most discussion of Europe and the United States except when examining ideas that have influenced artists elsewhere in the world and to emphasize the work of artists who are not descendants of Europeans” (vi). She has instead chosen to organize the work into eight geographical regions—the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, East Asia, Oceania, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas (Canada and South America)—with a largely chronological discussion of theatre traditions within each chapter. She has also chosen to focus on what she refers to as “a recognizable set of theatre conventions,” including narrative, costumes, playing space, and audience. In a work such as this, it is important to narrow the scope of materials, as Westlake does, or risk the terrible textbook custom of long lists of names, plays, and dates that are meaningless to students. At the same time, however, it is arguably true that the recognizable theatre tropes she chooses to limit by are recognizable because they are Western conventions of performance. This is another example of the tension between needing to curate the material and unintentionally privileging Western definitions of theatre by means of that curation. Likewise, the section on aesthetics in the introduction begins with a discussion of Aristotle. There is no doubt this is the aesthetic guideline that students are likely to be most familiar with, but again, it foregrounds Eurocentric standards of theatre. How to select and structure materials were surely incredibly difficult tasks, and despite these issues, the text works admirably to respect cultures and art forms in and of themselves. The structure of the chapters is clear and beneficial. Each begins with a historical overview of the region that focuses largely on political and social changes that helped set the stage or promoted formal theatre’s emergence. Given the likelihood that students may be unfamiliar with these histories and cultures, this inclusion is vital to help set the stage for the cultural import of the theatrical traditions. These histories often fold in complex theoretical notions in an engaging and approachable fashion. The discussion of the Middle East begins, for example, with an analysis of the Abydos Passion Play. Westlake both introduces the play, long a staple of theatre history classes, and cites scholars like Alan Sikes, who provide an important critique of historical appropriation of the Abydos ritual. In this moment, she is both providing information and a historiographical critique of the ways in which Western theatre historians have claimed performances as “theatre,” when the claim is tenuous at best. Westlake states in the introduction that “[b]ecause the territory of world theatre is enormous, we will explore a few key examples; examples that can be contrasted and compared, but from which no universal ideals should be drawn” (2). This is both a true and nuanced statement, but can also be a bit frustrating for a textbook reader. Each chapter contains so much valuable information that I found myself...

Alexander Kisil: components of theatrical research method

An attempt on the basis of archival materials and scientific works of Olexander Kisil to outline the main milestones of his scientific biography as a researcher of the theater, especially the methodological principles of the study of the history of Ukrainian theater was made. Kisil’s theoretical representations concerning the task, object and history of theater research methods were presented. The main elements, on which Kisil rests in his own works, were outlined, the concepts, on which the researcher relies, were analyzed. The main aspects of Kisil’s research, which distinguished his work from the studies of contemporary Ukrainian historians of Ukrainian theater, were described.

Vladimir Rezanov — Ukrainian theater historian

The article attempts to outline the main points of the scientific biography of Vladimir Rezanov, the theater historian. On the basis of lectures, printed and archival materials analysis, the theoretical principles of Vladimir Resanov research were described, the methodological peculiarities of his theater studies (object and subject of research, method, tasks, etc.) were determined; The features of researcher concept of the theater history and features of the applied methodology of the stage art study are outlined. Vladimir Rezanov’s contri­bution to the development of the Ukrainian theater history was characterized.

Precarious Professions: Insolvency and Bankruptcy among Theatrical Artistes in Victorian and Edwardian England

In this article Bernard Ince analyzes the characteristics and causes of personal insolvency and bankruptcy among professional theatrical artistes in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, 1830 to 1913, within England and Wales. This offers an illuminating development of the author's previous studies of the impact of bankruptcy laws on the Victorian theatre and the pattern of failures in theatre management over this period. It identifies key points of convergence and divergence between the trends in failure of managers and artistes, considering reasons for these variations and for the number of failures overall. It concludes that prominent among the many causes of insolvency in artistes were touring company failures and irregularity of employment, which goes some way to explain why a higher percentage of artistes than managers were engaged in at least one occupation unrelated to theatre work. The article also provides a necessary methodological foundation for future study of an area that has often been overlooked. Bernard Ince is an independent theatre historian who has contributed earlier studies of tne Victorian and Edwardian theatre to New Theatre Quarterly.