Editorial Comment:This Discipline Which Is Not One Ric Knowles There are two distinct pleasures in coming onboard as coeditor of Theatre Journal. The most frequently bruited is the opportunity proactively to help lead and shape the field by selecting and editing special topic issues that prompt new thinking, open new areas of inquiry, or revisit old ones from new perspectives. Thus recent special issues have focused on Asian and Russian theatre, introduced new ways of thinking about digital media and performance, probed the intersection between popular culture and theatre history, and revisited theatrical interculturalism, feminism, and contemporary women playwrights. A very different and less interventionist kind of pleasure, however, is to be had from witnessing the shifting contours of the field as it is represented by the myriad of unsolicited submissions that arrive in our inboxes weekly. I began my work as coeditor only in August 2011, but in the months since then I have read historical essays, theoretical essays, philosophical essays, polemical essays, analytical essays, surveys, close readings, feminist essays, queer essays, queer feminist essays, polemical philosophical surveys, historico-theoretico-critical essays, and essays of enough other kinds and categories to make Polonius cringe. And these essays have covered what feels to me to be an unprecedented number of historical, geographical, and theatrical sites of performance, from one-person shows presented to one-person audiences to vast hotels and warehouses for perambulating crowds, and from Asia to Africa, South America to furthest Ireland, Scotland, and the First Nations of what is now called Canada. Not all of these submissions were appropriate for Theatre Journal, but taken together, they do represent what folks in the field we collectively toil are up to. So what, on the evidence of the past few months, does that field look like? This general issue—in part a winnowing of those months' submissions—may provide something of a window. The issue is organized more or less chronologically by subject, and while it does not have the historical reach of the full body of submissions received, which range from prehistory to the present and even future of performance, it does provide some sense of how theatre history, contemporary performance art, and a range of philosophical and theoretical approaches have come to coexist, more or less comfortably, within our umbrella discipline—if it is "one." And, indeed, part of the experience of reading through submissions has been to reinforce the sense that theatre (and performance) studies in the second decade of the twenty-first century is an extraordinarily capacious umbrella, an interdiscipline that houses many mansions. The issue's first essay is exemplary in bringing three of our disciplines into conversation with one another: thick archival theatre historical research, revisionist historiography, and scenography. In David Muller's "Bajazet '37: Jacques Copeau's Palais à Volonté at the Comédie-Française," a long-standing myth about the staging of Racinian tragédie classique—that of the palais à volonté as a neutral, universal setting inscribed or implicit in Racine's texts and developed in the mid-seventeenth century—is exposed as a latter-day invention. It is a myth that most of us learned, and many of us still teach. The myth evolved slowly over the centuries after Racine's death, but was solidified, Muller argues, only in 1937 by Jacques Copeau and his scenographer, architect Louis Süe, in their modernist production of Racine's Bajazet, a critical failure that nevertheless served as a scenographic model for subsequent productions of Racine. Not least of the essay's contributions is its location of that production within debates between Copeau (and his followers), who supported the development of a single scenographic model and acting style suitable to presenting the larger oeuvre of Racine and promoting an overarching theory of Racinian tragedy, and Antoine (and others), who promoted distinctive stagings developed to represent the distinct and separate worlds of each of the playwright's individual works. Muller's detailed, copiously illustrated essay in the modernist history of French classical scenegraphy is followed by David Kornhaber's closely argued "The Philosopher, the Playwright, and the Actor: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Modern Drama's Concept of Performance." [End Page 1] Kornhaber's...