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.

In the “last analysis” the concern must always be for insight. Saul Bellow made it a demand: “Now I want insight.” So, too, should the reader of theatre history. Unfortunately, in the vast majority of recently published material on American theatre history that demand is not being met. Among the many young scholars researching and writing on this subject, few appear even to aspire to that mastery of the material which will produce major scholarship. The old guard persists, but today's youthful historians of American theatre tend toward an annual birth and death pattern rather than perennial growth. Obviously, such an observation should not be construed as an adverse criticism of all existing scholarship; yet, it does describe a general condition of research in American theatre history. There are surveys, general observations, memoirs, descriptions, expository and critical essays on various topics, studies of theatres and playwrights, essays on popular entertainment and ethnic or racial theatre. Some of these publications contribute meaningfully to an understanding of American theatre; few, however, suggest insight into the history of that theatre.

In 1956 a small group of scholars, all of them engaged in some way or other in the study of theatre, past and present, met and founded a certain remarkable organization. I hardly need to explain that that organization was the American Society for Theatre Research, then and still the only organization of American scholars devoted entirely to promoting the cause, the activity, and the results of research in theatre. Nor is it necessary here for me to recapitulate, even briefly, the course of events that now sees us celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Society. Fortunately, one of those founding members, Thomas Marshall, has generously accepted the charge offered him a year ago by the ASTR Executive Committee to write a concise history of the Society from the time of its founding. That review of the first twenty-five years has just come off the press, nicely timed for distribution to all members in attendance at this meeting. Subsequently it is to appear also in the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of the Society's journal, Theatre Survey.

The material upon which this paper is based is divided into two sections. The paper concerns the problems presented to historians of the theatre confronted by staging conventions. The first section is intended to consider in general terms our own experience of some of these problems—problems which, while forming given constants in the preoccupations of theatre scholars, have been brought sharply into focus by Robert K. Sarlós' recent article in Theatre Research International, “Creating Objects and Events.” The second seeks to examine the generalities which we put forward in an account of the practical reconstruction of Mahelot's staging of Pyrame et Thisbé in the early seventeenth-century Hôtel de Bourgogne.

In a recent essay I argued for broader acceptance of two methods for understanding “past styles of performance”—the building of three dimensional models and the staging of four dimensional performance reconstructions. These alternatives to the traditional narrative essay make greater use of theatrical imagination, and aim at raising new kinds of questions rather than answering the old kind. However, lack of appropriate apparatus has prevented widespread use of these forms. Since performances are by nature “short-lived phenomena” and can be recorded but fragmentarily, unique methods are required for their study. Theoretical reconstructions cannot approximate the physical and psychological ambience of a respectable performance essay. On the other hand, performance reconstructions do not allow for scholarly caveat during presentation, or for lacunae where knowledge is lacking. Therefore I see the promise of a rich harvest in two-way stimulation between theoretical and performance essays. A pair of reports, based on personal involvement in the types of projects I advocate, follows.

In his essay in Theatre Research International “Creating Objects and Events,” Robert K. Sarlós cries in some anguish, “But does a production that reaches for…historic reconstruction deserve no scholarly attention at all unless or until it is recorded in (or accompanied by) a bulky tome?” His despair is comprehensible: the prospect of generating mounds of print material after completing a production is fatiguing to contemplate and daunting to attempt (indeed, lost in my own files are discarded drafts of such reportage on Giraldi Cinthio's Orbecche, an early attempt at a “performance essay”). However, the answer must be, unequivocally and despite fatigue, affirmative.

Theatre historians have always lamented the scarcity of documentary material with which to recreate the theatrical milieu that by definition lives in time and perishes. What we know of yesterday's stage art comes down to us in fragments, pieced together with the skills of the detective, virtually never whole, never complete. If only, we ask, if only theatre persons had the foresight to leave behind some coherent record of the marvels of their time, some busy notebooks, some hard facts, some interpretations, some organized recapitulation of the events themselves.

Shakespeare's romantic comedy The Winter's Tale was not popular during the first half of the eighteenth century. Audiences of that period affected to prefer plays that observed the Unities, and this play of Shakespeare's with its sixteen-year gap between the third and fourth acts appeared fatally flawed. Goodman's Fields Theatre revived it on 15 January 1741 and played it eight additional nights in 1740–41. The following season it was produced at Covent Garden on 11 November 1741 and played for a mere four performances. But by 1742 The Winter's Tale had been dropped from the repertoires of all London theatres.

In his study of early nineteenth-century English pantomime, David Mayer III describes Harlequin Mother Goose—the 1806 Covent Garden production which first revealed the range of Joseph Grimaldi's comic genius—as “the end of nearly one hundred and forty years of fitful pantomime evolution.” For the next thirty years, the period dominated by Grimaldi, pantomime was at its peak: its structure and various production practices were stabilized; its potential for comedy and satire were realized more fully than ever before. Even the question of its use of dialogue was finally resolved: although, as Mayer says, “little in it was unexplainable by action,” early nineteenth-century pantomime was “rarely, if ever, silent in the way that we have come to think of pantomime today.”

On the short shelf of theatrical autobiographies that continue to be read long after their author has ceased to be newsworthy, Konstantin Stanislavsky's My Life in Art stands foremost. It is a textbook for acting classes, a sourcebook of theatrical history and a guidebook for those workers in the theatre who have lost touch with the meaning of their efforts and seek in Stanislavsky's trials and errors, goals and achievements, an artistic True North to put them back on their course. In the Soviet Union, it is lauded, in the words of the director Aleksey Popov, as “a model of superb literature and comparable to such books as Herzen's My Past and Thoughts.” In the West, no less a colleague than Jacques Copeau praised it in terms that made My Life in Art sound like the vita of an anchorite.

Alfred Radok, who died of a heart attack in 1976 in Vienna at the age of 61, was perhaps the outstanding Czech theatre artist of the post-war era. An assistant to E. F. Burian in the late 1930s, Radok in his subsequent work reflected not only that major artist's influence but also that of K. H. Hilar, the earlier towering directorial presence of Czech theatre. All three possessed an innate, intuitive sense of theatre as an autonomous art; all three were noted for their reworking of scripts for maximum theatrical impact; all three rejected the theatre of realistic illusion and were responsible for major innovations in total staging, in which all elements of production are exploited to serve the director's vision rather than to maintain fidelity to the surfaces of life.