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  • The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography
  • James Peck
The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography. By Thomas Postlewait. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; pp. xi + 346. $80.00 cloth, $26.99 paper.

In chapter 5 of his erudite new book, Thomas Postlewait delves into the problem of periodization in theatre history. He urges theatre historians to reflect upon the names they choose for particular spans of time. A “Renaissance,” an “Elizabethan,” and an “early modern” history of London theatre in the 1590s, for example, would probably examine the same well-established array of theatrical documents. But each of these historiographic frameworks, so designated, might value the evidence according to different criteria, impute it into incommensurate master narratives, and position it in relation to distinct extrinsic sources. The assumptions implicit in each period title could lead to fundamentally contradictory interpretations of what the evidence means. Postlewait does not suggest that such tensions are avoidable, as if it were possible to conduct historical research outside a hermeneutic context; rather, he argues that such contexts constitute an essential object of study and that examining them often reveals gaps or illuminates points of resistance in historical analysis. “Since we are wandering in a labyrinth,” he writes, “we should attend to its design” (192).

This last sentence encapsulates the way this useful book approaches the topic of theatre historiography. Postlewait has authored an extended missive to the field that alternates between cautionary tale and exhortation. In a series of shrewd chapters, he shows that theatre historians often find themselves befuddled within traditions of research and interpretation ill-suited to their subject matter. As a first step toward superior theatre history, he enjoins his colleagues to account for the discursive traditions that shape their field. The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography provides a learned, eager entrée into this discussion.

In his introduction, Postlewait proposes to focus on “the basic procedures of historical scholarship” (6). The book is indeed a primer on the process of making historical knowledge. However, his deferential claim to focus on “basic procedures” belies the text’s theoretical density. Although it will be of great value to aspiring theatre historians, this is not, per se, a research manual; rather, Postlewait surveys problematics common to the last generation of scholarship. As a condition of its disciplinary identity, he argues, theatre history establishes relationships among theatrical events, the contexts that influenced them, and the consequences of their [End Page 305] enactment. His chapters explore the contours of this project in case studies drawn from his several areas of expertise, including Renaissance English theatre history (chapters 1 and 6), the historical avant-garde (chapter 2), and the production of Ibsen’s plays in England (chapters 4 and 7). Although Postlewait is a perspicacious researcher, these topics do not in and of themselves supply the animating questions of his study; rather, he considers how scholarly trends have shaped the interpretation of these topics. Unexamined historiographic habits, he demonstrates, have often led to erroneous conclusions. Self-conscious attention to relevant historiographic principles, by contrast, can fend off misreading and suggest more persuasive ways of constellating the data into a compelling historical analysis.

Each chapter focuses on a common approach and unfolds some of its pitfalls. Chapters 1 and 2 establish two poles of the field, exemplifying the purportedly agonistic modes of “documentary” and “cultural” history. Chapter 1 assays the practice of reconstructing performance conditions via archival documentation, the tradition of Theatrewissenschaft. Postlewait synthesizes the bountiful scholarship about the production of Shakespeare’s plays in the Globe Theatre. He does not so much arrive at a definitive account of Shakespearean theatrical practice as show how damnably difficult it is to assemble the existing evidence into a single coherent description. He wonders, too, about the ultimate importance of such work taken in isolation from wider ranging questions of social value. Chapter 2 turns to theoretically inflected cultural histories. Postlewait commends the quest to establish the impact of theatrical events, but counsels that commonplace narratives easily supplant thorough research. His case study here is the premiere of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. Through a scrupulous examination of the documents, Postlewait demonstrates that the reputation of this production as an...

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