From The Editor

Extract

Once upon a time in medieval England, Saint Erkenwald was building his new church upon the foundations of an ancient pagan temple so that the edifice might be “torn down and turned to new ends.” All of a sudden, he and his men discovered a great tomb that housed the perfectly preserved corpse of some unknown royal ancestor. Upon opening the crypt, Erkenwald “turns to the tomb and talks to the corpse, / While he leans down to lift up the lids of its eyes: / ‘In this sepulcher stay in your silence no more! . . .' / Then the man through a miracle moved in his tomb! / And with sounds that were solemn, he spoke before all. . . .” When Erkenwald's pagan forebear “melted out of memory,” his reanimated body regained the power of speech and his listeners the power of knowledge—a stunning metaphor for the very project of theatre historiography.