Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography (review)

Theatre historiography is surfing the crest of a wave: it is the subject of study for the most populous working group in the International Federation for Theatre Research; Henry Bial and Scott Magelssen have just published a collection of “critical interventions” in theatre historiography; and recently, Thomas Postlewait authored a Cambridge handbook on the practice of theatre historiography. Now comes a new anthology of pieces, which expands the field to include “performance historiography.”

The reason for this interest is not hard to seek. Theatre history has been under a cloud for decades, eclipsed in the curriculum by performance studies and theory. The Central European founders of theatre history had sought to determine, in Mommsen’s formulation, wie es eigentlich gewesen. To that end, they used empirical means, collecting and analysing documents and monuments and organizing them into a narrative sequence of ostensible facts. This traditional approach was dismissed as “nail-counting” by critics eager to put the study of performance on a scientific or at least more theoretical footing. An emphasis on the special nature of writing theatre history (in academic pidgin to “problematize” it) serves to rehabilitate the field’s professionalism. The editors of this volume announce that the skirmishes are now over and that “the positive expansion of the discipline” “no longer needs to demonize positivism” (5).

“The basic issue of historical representation provides the organizing principle for this collection of essays” (1), the introduction declares at the outset. Coming to grips with the niceties of distinguishing “representation” from traditional historiographic methods of “reconstruction” is adjourned, however, until after a parochial rehash of the internal skirmishes of the American Society for Theatre Research. This leaves the impression that its members invented revisionist historiography, doing less than justice to a number of Europeans, including some of the contributors to this volume. There follows an erudite and encyclopedic explication of the principles of historiography, implying “an inescapable hermeneutical entanglement of intertextuality that resides equally in the nature of historical events and the language we must use to describe or recover those events” (13).

While the historian’s task is described as a search for the “most equivalent representation within the possible temporal and spatial coordinates,” the specific difficulty for the theatre historian is having to construct “a representation of a representation,” making it “apparently . . . simultaneously a facsimile and a simulacrum, a copy and a counterfeit” (11). This hall-ofmirrors differentiation assumes that performance (in French, représentation) represents human action but is not itself action. Is not a historical description of the inauguration of George Washington as fraught with methodological difficulties as that of Garrick’s debut as Hamlet? If “accuracy” is always compromised and the result always a kind of mimetic ekphrasis, one wonders why a historian’s “representation” should be given points for critical acumen, but not for imagination, poetic flair, or effect on theatrical practitioners. The introduction keeps referring to the archive, though it might consider current performance as shedding light on bygone practices, which are remote and familiar at the same time. In any case, if we are to confute the Harvard Shakespearean scholar who declared, “There is no such thing as theatre history,” a sharper distinction needs to be drawn between standard practices of historiography and those techniques peculiar to the historian of performance.

The specifics are left to the individual contributors, the fifteen essays organized around “five abiding categorical ideas of archive, time, space, identity and narrative” (7; emphasis original). These tend to be somewhat arbitrary in practice. For example, Catherine Cole’s engrossing first-person account of her research in South Africa appears under “Identity,” for she considers in some detail how the identities of the researcher and her “informants” (a word she distrusts) colour the information. Half her essay, however, is devoted to the important issue of the archive and its putative reliability. Moreover, her well-taken points are applicable to historiography tout pur; and she rarely touches on specifically...