Theatre History and Historiography: Ethics, Evidence and Truth ed. by Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson (review)

Theatre historiography–understood as the theoretical reflection on the premises by which theatre historians write history–is now an established academic sub-discipline. Although all theatre history is implicitly historiographical, not all historians make explicit the theoretical, methodological and evaluative assumptions which guide their research and writing. This collection edited by Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson adds to an already well-established scholarly tradition which goes back at least as far as the groundbreaking volume, Interpreting the Theatrical Past, edited by Thomas Postlewait and Bruce McConachie in 1989. Since then there has been a steady production of books, mostly edited collections, which continue this important discussion. An impressive summary of this line of scholarly reflection can be found in Postlewait's recent Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography (2009). The focus of the present collection is, as signalled by the subtitle, squarely on ethics and evidence, with somewhat less engagement with the third element, truth. The originality and intellectual challenge of the volume is provided without doubt by the discussion of ethics. Whereas evidence has always been a subject of historiographical reflection, the same cannot be said for the multifaceted ethical issues posed by the writing of theatre history. Until recently most historians probably considered ethics to be either a branch of philosophy or something of relevance only to medical researchers and perhaps social scientists interviewing living human subjects. That this is no longer tenable can be seen by the far-reaching ethical requirements and guidelines now being enacted across the research community. The issues at stake are made very clear in the editors' rigorous and theoretically challenging introduction. They are also manifold and include questions such as the probity of evidence, "truthful" representation (probably insoluble), ideas of objective standards, and also more personal questions of theatre historians' own (guilty?) pleasure in what they do (7). The editors also highlight the older and more familiar dilemmas around aesthetic and ideological bias that led to an over-emphasis on intellectually challenging high modernist and avant-garde theatre enjoyed by an elite minority and a neglect of popular and putatively less challenging forms frequented by the mass majority. This imbalance has long been rectified, especially in the Anglo-American academy, but is still strongly entrenched in German theatre studies for example.

Judging by the individual contributions in the volume, the most challenging and influential influence remains the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. His redefinition of ethics as an encounter with the Other (thereby challenging the focus on the autonomous individual subject) resonates throughout all the essays to highly productive effect. Although difficult to "apply" to theatre history, Levinas's ideas of ethical responsibility as a constitutive moment of subjectivity "require an understanding that in addressing the past we are dealing with someone else's present" (16) which generates in turn a responsibility "to the material" (ibid.). The editors argue that this responsibility is not just epistemological (getting the facts right) but also ethical.

The individual contributions are extremely wide-ranging in their subject matter and do not focus on a particular theatre-historical period. There is perhaps a predictable and productive interest in biography, which is one of the more difficult fields for theatre historians because, as David Roberts argues in his closely argued essay on Thomas Betterton, historians, and perhaps scholars in general, find the contradictions attendant on writing biography resistant to the historiographical need for conceptual framing. The latter can be in Betterton's case either materialist (the work of Robert Hume and Judith Milhous) or postcolonial (Joseph Roach); in both cases scholarship sacrifices Levinas's insistence on the "being" Betterton for the "concept" advocated, in Roach's case "to implicate this Restoration black-face Othello in the ideologies of early empire" (46).

Empire and its attendant ethical dilemmas are at the centre of Poonam Trivedi's essay on garrison theatre in colonial India. From the point of view of mainstream...