Wolcott Gibbs once told the New Yorker's readers: Now, in 1938, only the invincibly naive imagine they go to a production of “Hamlet” for the purpose of watching a bunch of actors in a play. The others understand that they are about to be confronted with a ringing challenge to their culture. The man who has not seen Barrymore, Massey, Hampden, Lieber [sic], Gielgud, Howard, Evans, Tinker, and Chance (to round up enough for a little ball game) and is not prepared to discuss their respective performances might better go and live in Rockport, Indiana, though it is by no means certain that he would be safe even there. (22 Oct. 1938, p. 34)

Theatre is predominantly a social form. Social history, which invites perspectives from “below,” stories of resistance, and awareness of how social organization stratifies, has had a profound effect on theatre studies since the 1970s. A wide scholarly purview on performative forms dates from the later nineteenth century, but social history changed awareness about historical contiguities of categories of community, amateur, and folk performance; tensions and exchanges among court, community, and professional performance constituencies; as well as greater respect for nonliterary traditions and unwritten forms of preservation and lineage. Social history, in short, prompted questions about who made theatre and how it mattered to the people who partook of it, including those who made it as well as others who consumed it, rather than more narrowly determining what constituted theatre (or drama) worthy of posterity. This approach—society as a group with common territory and interactions, enveloping each individual—could not be investigated as theatre history without a commensurate interest in culture. That is to say, not culture as the pinnacle of elites' achievements, but rather any social group's interpretation and use of common beliefs and values patterned by behavior and practices into religion, behavioral protocols, cuisine, and so on, including the arts. Wariness of a narrow elite construal of culture may be what keeps theatre historians from calling our field “cultural history,” for, though we embrace the ambit of social history, cultural history often comes in through the side door of sociological or anthropological theory. Cultural expressions are evident via how a society socializes, interacts, and adapts in ways that make the contours of the society legible to those within it, as well as differentiated from those who are outside it.

In his informative account of Bernard Shaw as a director, William Armstrong has noted a distinctive practice of the playwright during the rehearsal period:“…Shaw regularly sent private letters or postcards to his actors to supplement the advice he gave them in the theatre. It is to be hoped that one day a more or less complete collection of these documents will be made. They will reveal not only his great mastery of detail but also the remarkable shrewdness with which he adjusted his powers of persuasion to actors with very different temperaments.” Vast indeed is the undertaking Armstrong proposes, but it is possible to proceed towards its realization with respect to particular plays. Such documentation can be supplemented in some cases by the testimony of actors and other theater artists who worked with Shaw, by data from the extant prompt copies of his productions, and by his rehearsal notes. The result would do much not only to illuminate the particulars of his directorial performance, but to clarify many specific problems of dramatic interpretation as well.

When, on June 22, 1940, the French government signed an armistice with the Third Reich, France was divided into a northern zone, comprising about two-thirds of its total area including the Atlantic and Channel coasts, and a southern zone restricted to the lower third of the country. While the French government was to enjoy political autonomy in both zones, the southern zone was to be free of occupying troops. Less than three weeks after the signing of the Armistice, an overwhelming majority of the National Assembly annulled the Constitution of the Third Republic and invested Marshall Pètain with the authority to promulgate a new Constitution for the French State. Vichy, a small city in the southern zone, was chosen as its capital.

It was bright in London on that day toward the close of the nineteenth century—or at least there were bright intervals. In the early morning the sun sparkled on the silver Thames, and as one strolled north along the Victoria Embankment from Westminster Bridge, Wordsworth's sonnet came to mind. Farther north still, as the river turned more and more to the east above Charing Cross it was pleasant to wander in the gardens. This was historic ground. At the foot of Buckingham Street was the seventeenth century Water Gate of York House and then the region known as the Adelphi, built by the brothers Adam. It had once been the site of Durham House, the home of the fourteenth century Bishop of Durham, and later of Lady Jane Grey and of Sir Walter Raleigh. Adelphi Terrace, looking on the Thames, had been inspired by Robert Adam's visit to the palace of Diocletian at Spalato though remodeling had now altered its original design. Robert and James Adam had resided at No. 4; Thomas Hardy had worked at No. 8; the Savage Club occupied Nos. 6 and 7. There were dramatic associations too. David Garrick had lived and died at No. 5; Richard D'Oyly Carte was in the Adam residence; and Bernard Shaw had recently moved into No. 10.

These three quotes will serve as a starting point as I enter into this discussion of the import and role of theatre history. While I make a case for theatre history generally, my examples and thesis are drawn from African American theatre history most specifically. My argument is for a critical historicism, a process that recognizes the need to historicize and situate dramatic criticism as well as the need to theorize history or, as Walter Benjamin suggests, to “rub history against the grain.” Rubbing history against the grain means that we must interrogate the past in order to inform the present, remaining cognizant of the material conditions that not only shape theatrical production but the historical interpretations of production. It implies a need to work against conventional historical narratives and the ways in which history has been told in the past.

One would today be hard-pressed to recall any other period since the mid-nineteen-twenties when such widespread concern among theatre practitioners has been devoted to planning of buildings primarily intended to house-performed legitimate drama. The government-supported reconstruction boom in German language countries, the conduct of three major international conferences on theatre building in the past three years, tangible progress on New York's Lincoln Center, and the Ford Foundation's widely-publicized support of theoretical planning for an Ideal Theatre-all these events are likely to overshadow for the moment efforts of those planners of the 'twenties who were forced by an economic and political untimeliness to “cast their anchor(s) far into the sea of fantasy and distant possibilities,” sadly realizing that little opportunity for innovation could exist at the time.

I am grateful to the Francis W. Parker School, Chicago, for allowing me free access to Morning Exercises and to the archives housed at the school. I would also like to thank the many current and former teachers and students who took the time to answer my questions, especially Andy Kaplan and John Holabird. I also thank Eric Martin, Christine Harris, and the anonymous readers at Theatre Survey for their patient editorial work.

Archeological evidence for the history of theatre art has always been less definitive and less extensive than either artists or historians have wished. We have the stone remains of late Greek theatres and we have the pictorial fragments from some ancient amphorae which, when co-ordinated with inscriptions, give us a modicum of knowledge concerning the performances in Greek theatres. From Renaissance architects and painters we have beautiful drawings and engravings of scenes and costumes which give us an indication of the grandeur which was possible in the court performances of Europe for two or three hundred years.

On 29 December 1845, Charlotte Cushman did an extraordinary thing at the Haymarket theatre: she convincingly transformed herself into a man. Audience members who witnessed this performance were captivated by “the transmuting power” of Cushman's “genius” as she became Romeo. This production (and Cushman's Romeo in general) continues to fascinate both contemporary theatre historians and feminist scholars, who are equally impressed with Cushman's seeming ability to create an unsettling paradox. In a recent article, Anne Russell discusses the positive reception that Cushman's Romeo received and questions how the cross-dressed actress could have been so successful “in a period when dominant gender ideologies assumed clearly delineated separate spheres for men and women, when stage reviewers as a manner of routine assessed the ‘womanliness’ or ‘manliness’ of characters and performers.” As Russell explains, the nineteenth-century audience member, critic, and/or commentator read the human figure on stage as either male or female; indeed, such antithetic thinking was pervasive throughout nineteenth-century culture. Cushman was unique, however, in that she repeatedly defied such categorization, both in her theatrical performances and in her “private” life.

When I first approached my colleague Jody Enders about the possibility of doing a special issue of Theatre Survey during her tenure as Associate Editor, I had no idea that she would translate my offer into a major event in the journal's history. We at Theatre Survey have long been blessed with a steady stream of excellent scholarship from theatre historians around the world, but seldom have we been able to amass, in a single issue, as prestigious a collection of scholars as those whose work grace the pages of our November issue. I am grateful to each and every one of them for their contributions. But I am especially grateful to Jody Enders for her (nothing short of) magical ability to recruit so many prominent voices in our profession and to place them in a dialogue about the future of theatre history in this new millennium. She well deserves our acknowledgment and admiration for the amazing work that she had done here, and I am delighted to have the occasion of this special issue of Theatre Survey to express my deep appreciation of the work that she has been doing for the journal since she became Associate Editor almost two years ago. Soon Jody's tenure as Editor will begin, and as you read the collection of essays she has compiled for this issue, I suspect your thoughts will concur with my own about what this transition in Editors means: while the future of theatre history in the new millennium may be subject to debate, the future of Theatre Survey looks very promising indeed.

Having secured production rights to Joaquin Miller's The Danites; or, The Heart of the Sierras, actor-manager Arthur McKee Rankin presented it in the United States, Canada, and the British Isles during the years 1877–1881. Rankin's method of operation typified an important phase of a period Alfred Bernheim refers to as “the industrial revolution in the theatre.” In this phase the dominance of the combination system over the stock company evolved. Although the combination system was firmly established by the early 1870's, it was not until the end of the 1870's that disbandment of nearly all remaining provincial stock companies signaled the close of a theatrical era — the end of isolation and local independence — and stimulated a momentous increase in the number of combination companies on the road.

The recently rediscovered dramatic works of a major thirteenth-century Egyptian author, Muhammad Ibn Dāniyāl, provides a striking example of how the strategies of microhistory can provide an important challenge to, and possible reassessment of, the grand narratives that theatre history has often accepted without serious question. Ibn Dāniyāl is an excellent example of the sort of outsider that has attracted the attention of microhistorians, one of those “peoples who would be left out by other methods.”

In every theatre historian there lurks the shadow of the amateur. For the commitment always begins with a sharing of the theatre-goer's delight in seeing the curtain rise, and a strong sense of being in the presence of history in the making. To record this moment is the instinct of the enthusiast; to recapture it from the past is the function of the historian.

African artists cannot and do not choose their subject matter, says critic Tejumola Olaniyan. “They are, on the contrary, chosen by their subjects.” While that liberates artists from the “heavy burden of a head-scratching search for what on earth to create their art about,” Olaniyan observes, it also imposes “the much heavier burden of how on earth to fashion from that surfeit of ‘what’ an imaginative sublimation worthy of the label ‘art.’ This has been the contemporary African artist's greatest challenge, more so than artists in other climes.”1

The nineteenth-century English speaking stage was the setting for some of the most significant and interesting productions of Shakespeare's plays. It was the age of both Keans, Macready, Phelps, the Booths, Beerbohm Tree, Irving, and Poel, to mention only a few of the innovators and stars. As usual, Shakespeare was the most popular and frequently produced playwright in the language, but performances were not limited to the traditional stage. Hundreds were presented as platform readings in most of the major cities of England and America, where the halls and lecture rooms were frequently filled. The readings were given by stars and neophytes alike: Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, William Charles Macready, Sarah Siddons, Charles Kemble, and others whose names are barely footnotes to the history of the theatre. The most accomplished, popular, and preeminent among these was Frances Anne (Fanny) Kemble, Charles' daughter and second generation to the great acting family. Her career and success as an actress are well documented, but comparatively little has been written about her reading performances of Shakespeare — an activity that occupied her for nearly a quarter of a century. For most of the others, the readings were spinoffs from their stage work, favors to friends, experiments or brief encounters; for Fanny reading was a serious business, indeed her very subsistence.