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A Cultural History of Theatre: A Prospectus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2015

Christopher Balme  and
Tracy C. Davis
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Extract

If theatre historians had been paying attention to the proceedings at a Gilbert and Sullivan conference in Lawrence, Kansas in 1970, they would have heard a gauntlet strike the ground when Michael R. Booth delivered “Research Opportunities in Nineteenth-Century Drama and Theatre.” He called for research on audiences (“cultural levels, class origins, income, tastes, and development”), performance in the hinterlands (“we know that in 1866 60% of the theatre seats in metropolitan London were outside the West End”), economics (“theatre profits and losses, actors' wages, authors' income, management and organization, the pricing of seats”), and performance techniques (“technical developments in set construction, staging, lighting, traps, and special effects” as well as acting style). This cri de coeur to break the hegemony of literary teleologies is recognizable, in 2015, as a mandate to reorient inquiry toward how repertoires were delivered rather than how authorial talent was paramount, what buttressed profitability rather than what constituted fame, and who sustained a gamut of theatres rather than what demarcated elite taste. It set the agenda for aligning theatre studies in wholly new directions, and without citing a single source or calling out any particular historian it inventoried how theatre history could come into line with social history.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 56 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 402 - 421
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2015 

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References

Endnotes

1. Michael R. Booth, “Research Opportunities in Nineteenth-Century Drama and Theatre,” Gilbert and Sullivan, ed. James Helyar (Lawrence: University of Kansas Libraries, 1971), 17–23, quotes at 17, 18, 21.

2. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, Social Science Research Centre, 1956) and Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963); and Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1962; English, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989]).

3. Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. & Maria-Odilia Leal McBride (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1979) and Legislative Theatre: Using Theatre to Make Politics, trans. Adrian Jackson (London: Routledge, 1998); Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre, trans. M. Buszewicz and J. Barba (London, Methuen, 1968); Peter Brook, The Empty Space (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968); Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (London, Methuen, 1964); and Jacques Rancière, La Nuit des prolètaires (Paris: Hachette, 1981; English, The Nights of Labor, trans. John Drury [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989]), Le Partage du sensible: Esthétique et politique (Paris: La Fabrique, 2000; English, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. G. Rockhill [London: Continuum, 2006]), Le Spectateur émancipeé (Paris: La Fabrique, 2008; English, trans. Gregory Elliott [London: Verso, 2009]), and Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010).

4. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982); Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), ed. Eric Hobsbawm; and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Gender and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

5. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Conquergood, Dwight, “Performing as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of the Ethnography of Performance,” Literature in Performance 5.2 (1985): 1–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 10; Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

6. Postlewait, Thomas, “The Criteria for Periodization in Theatre History,” Theatre Journal 40.3 (1988): 299–318CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 305–6. See also the section in Christopher B. Balme, Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 107–8, which contains a “period table” of the many permutations engendered by the multiple criteria in use.

7. Peter Burke, What Is Cultural History? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 4.

8. In Burke's own understanding, cultural history means in the broadest sense “a concern with the symbolic and its interpretation,” perhaps the only common denominator that connects the many disparate interests. Ibid., 3.

9. Jacob Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (Vienna: Phaidon, 1937), 1. Originally published as Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch (Basel: Schweighauser, 1860).

10. This is the subtitle of the first English translation: Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries, trans. Frederik Jan Hopman (1924; repr. London: E. Arnold & Co., 1927). The subtitle of the Dutch original—Studie over levens- en gedachtenvormen—does not contain a specific mention of “art.” Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen: Studie over levens- en gedachtenvormen der veertiende en vijftiende eeuw in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden (Haarlem: H. D. Tjeenk Willink, 1919).

11. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, v.

12. Contemporary cultural historians tend to critique Huizinga's value judgments while often dealing with the topics he identified. See, for example, Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity during the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). See, however, Glynne Wickham's assessment: “The emphasis which Huizinga laid on costume, emblems, ceremonies and processions serves to direct our attention towards the dramatic tenor of daily life in the Middle Ages”; The Medieval Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 6.

13. The important mediating role of exiled German historians, art historians, philosophers, and sociologists must also be noted, the most important of which was the Warburg Institute in London. German Jewish scholars such as Erwin Panofsky, Ernst Cassirer, Ernst Kantorowicz, Norbert Elias, and Karl Mannheim were all concerned with symbolic forms and thereby processes of cultural transmission and transformation.

14. Marshall Sahlins, “Return of the Event, Again: With Reflections on the Beginnings of the Great Fijian War of 1855 between the Kingdoms of Bau and Rewa,” in Clio in Oceania: Toward a Historical Anthropology, ed. Aletta Biersack (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 37–99.

15. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 143.

16. Geertz, Clifford, “History and Anthropology,” New Literary History 21.2 (1990): 321–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 324. See also Balme, Christopher, “Cultural Anthropology and Theatre Historiography: Notes on a Methodological Rapprochement,” Theatre Survey 35.1 (May 1994): 33–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. It is possible to point only to a few of the more important studies; for example, the writings of the ethnologist Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981); see also the study by Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), and Anne Salmond's exhaustive study of the first encounters between Maoris and Europeans, Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maori and Europeans, 1642–1772 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1991).

18. The relevant studies include the following: Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Michael T. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993); Greg Dening, Performances (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985); and Roach. See also Christopher B. Balme, Pacific Performances: Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

19. Sahlins, Islands of History, xii.

20. Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).

21. All three have had a significant impact on theatre historical scholarship. Bakhtin's work is referenced explicitly in Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Methuen, 1985), and by Eli Rozik in his study The Roots of Theatre: Rethinking Ritual and Other Theories of Origin (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002), especially chap. 11, “The Spirit of Carnival.” Erika Fischer-Lichte uses Norbert Elias in her essay “Theatre and the Civilizing Process: An Approach to the History of Acting,” in Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, ed. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce McConachie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 19–36. Bourdieu applies his theories to theatre and drama in his study The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); see especially chaps. 2 and 3, “The Emergence of a Dualist Structure” and “The Market for Symbolic Goods,” respectively.

22. See here, for example, Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), and his follow-up volume: A Social History of Knowledge II: From the Encyclopaedia to Wikipedia (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).

23. Roach, 2.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid., 3.

26. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York City: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 69.

27. The application of anthropological research to ancient Greek culture begins with the Cambridge school of classical scholars such as Jane Harrison and Gilbert Murray. By the late 1980s ancient history was the field that boasted probably the most intense engagement with cultural anthropology. In 1988 the German ancient historian Wilfred Nippel cited dozens of studies relating alone to the field of ancient history: “Sozialanthropologie und Alte Geschichte,” in Historische Methode, ed. Christian Meier and Jörn Rüsen (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988), 300–18.

28. Georges Duby, Le Dimanche de Bouvines: 27 juillet 1214 (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 8.

29. Samuel, Raphael, “What Is Social History,” History Today 35.3 (March 1985), 34–44Google Scholar, at 34.

30. Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Marc Baer, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992); Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Helen M. Burke, Riotous Performances: The Struggle for Hegemony in the Irish Theater, 1712–1784 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003).

31. Taylor, 19–23.

32. Rozik, xi.

33. Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 5–6.

34. “Das Publikum reguliert die Aufführung”; Bertolt Brecht, Arbeitsjournal, ed. Werner Hecht (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1977), 128.

35. Samuel Johnson, “Prologue spoken by Mr. Garrick at the opening of the Theatre-Royal, Drury-Lane, 1747,” in Samuel Johnson, with Arthur Murphy, The Works of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., with an Essay on His Life and Genius, 2 vols. (New York: Alexander V. Blake, 1840), 1:551.

36. Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).

37. Patrice Pavis, “Reception,” Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis, trans. Christine Shantz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 304–6.

38. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class [1899], ed. Martha Banta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

39. Ric Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 91.

40. See here the analysis by Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany, trans. Quintin Hoare, intro. Inka Mülder-Bach (London: Verso, 1998). The German original appeared under the title Die Angestellten: Aus dem neuesten Deutschland (Frankfurt: Frankfurter Societäts-Druckerei, Abteilung Buchverlag, 1930). The reciprocal relationship between new gendered audiences and staged works can be seen in the numerous musical comedies staged by George Edwardes and the Gaiety Theatre featuring ‘girl’ in the title, from The Shop Girl (1894) to The Quaker Girl (1910); see Thomas Postlewait, “George Edwardes and Musical Comedy: The Transformation of London Theatre and Society, 1878–1914,” in The Performing Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre's History, ed. Tracy C. Davis and Peter Holland (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 80–102; and Peter Bailey, “‘Naughty but Nice’: Musical Comedy and the Rhetoric of the Girl, 1892–1914,” in The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage, ed. Michael R. Booth and Joel H. Kaplan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 36–60.

41. Ferdinando Taviani, “L'ingresso della Commedia dell'arte nella cultura del Cinquecento,” in Il teatro italiano nel Rinascimento, ed. Fabrizio Cruciani and Daniele Seragnoli (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987), 319–46, at 324.

42. Ben Jonson, Three Comedies: “Volpone,” “The Alchemist,” “Bartholomew Fair,” ed. Michael Jamieson (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1966), 333.

43. Indeed the theatrical and literary version of the public sphere in the form of “art criticism” emerges before the political one, and the former functions, in eighteenth-century Germany at least, as a training ground for the latter; see Habermas (English ed.), 41.

44. Jonas A. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).