Comment

It is perhaps a commonplace to say that in the last decades of the twentieth century, the impact of work by women, both the artistic production itself and the scholarship about that production as well as about more canonical works, has brought about nothing less than a revolution. And, of course, the field of theatre studies has been no exception to this extraordinary shift. At the end of the year 2000, we know far more about women who wrote, produced, acted in and went to see plays than we knew 10, 20, or 30 years ago. Whether we are looking at the sixteenth century or the new twenty-first century, we now know the names of women playwrights, of their plays, and of practitioners who brought this writing to life whether in the public theatre or in less traditional performance venues. In short, this work now has (a) history.

One of the most important effects of this attention to women's cultural production has been to interrogate the practices and assumptions of our academic practice in the field. We have seen, for example, the assumptions behind the making of drama anthologies shift significantly. The books we teach from now all contain at least some representation of plays by women, something that was not the case when I started teaching. The textbook I was assigned as a first-time teaching assistant in the mid-1980s, Masterpieces of the Drama, was quite simply that: pieces by the "masters." Moreover, university and college theatres rarely included plays authored by women as part of the repertoire and the first few ventures into producing works by Caryl Churchill, Aphra Behn, Maria Irene Fornes, Susan Glaspell and others were seen as risky, daring and (at least at the school where I did graduate work) inappropriate. Since then, courses in drama and performance by women have made their way into the mainstream curriculum as have feminist and women-centered approaches to acting, directing and design as well as written scholarship.

This special issue of Theatre Journal turns its focus to another crucial impact of scholarship about women's dramatic writing--its ability to question, challenge and rewrite the assumptions and received knowledge of history, including, of course, theatre history. Feminist revisions of (theatre) history have meant that those narratives have become much more diverse, more self-conscious, and more inclusive in their sweep. The kinds of questions that history now asks are often quite different. Indeed, once we begin to know more about women's involvement in dramatic production throughout history, we cannot help but ask questions specifically about how our theatre histories have, historically speaking, been organized. Certainly theatre history has taught us that certain types of theatre venue and certain types of dramatic form and genre for those venues have constituted not only "good" theatre, but "the" theatre of any particular historical moment. When the dramatic writing of women is entered into the equation, the omissions of history are quickly evident.

Moreover, revisionist scholarship has thrown into question some of the key dates and fundamental beliefs of standard historical accounts. The very construction of historical periods, not to mention landmark events in those periods, comes sharply into view and can be radically recontextualized when the corpus of performance work is expanded and diversified. Julie Sanders' essay here, for example, in its careful thinking through of Queen Henrietta Maria's theatrical experimentations in the 1620s and 1630s, suggests how such involvement in court masques and dramatic entertainments played a vital role in the emergence of the professional actress on the public stage a few decades later. Sanders points out how male playwrights of the period (Ben Jonson and James Shirley are her subjects) contributed, too, to this shift in cultural possibility and thus also paved the way for women performers. We might further ask what we might learn, for our contemporary historical moment, from the kinds of cultural intervention and exchange that took place in the 1620s.

Received histories are also opened up in Catherine Schuler's essay which addresses two actresses in nineteenth...