Not since the Cambridge History of American Theatre (1998–2000) has a multiauthored theatre history been as anticipated as Bloomsbury's A Cultural History of Theatre. General editors Christopher B. Balme and Tracy C. Davis published an extended prospectus of the project in the September 2015 issue of Theatre Survey, and a year later followed this up with their reflections on the completed collection (“A Cultural History of Theatre: A Desideratum”). These articles outlined their ambitious program of rethinking theatre as a sociocultural institution and network of practices. By sharing their intentions and decision-making process in North America's leading theatre history journal and providing a preliminary evaluation of the resulting collection, they involved the discipline itself in the project's momentous endeavor. Having read all six volumes (1,636 pages), I can testify to the magnitude of their accomplishment. A Cultural History of Theatre is a profound reconsideration of how we understand theatre, its myriad social contexts, and the cultural work it accomplishes.

Balme and Davis's collection joins a number of other titles in Bloomsbury's extensive Cultural Histories series. Published and projected volumes in this series include cultural histories of, among other things, animals, the environment, medicine, and sexuality. All titles follow the same historical demarcations (though dates vary), with individual volumes on Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Early Modern Age, the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Empire, and the Modern Age. Each of these volumes includes an individual introduction and ten chapters that address specific rubrics, or issues, determined by the general editors. This structure allows readers to engage the volumes in each collection diachronically (tracing cultural topics through different historical periods) as well as synchronically (adopting different viewpoints on a given period). Bloomsbury's cultural histories are available in print and as an interactive online resource that can be accessed through subscription.

Bloomsbury's template for its series presented challenges as well as opportunities for a cultural history of theatre. The historical organization dictated for the collections, for example, imposed a traditional period model that has been widely critiqued by theatre and cultural historians. Rather than challenging this model by proposing a different one—a battle they probably would have lost—Balme and Davis allowed the editors of each volume to transgress period boundaries when residual and emergent theatrical currents required this. Overlap is particularly pronounced between the classical and medieval periods and between the medieval and early modern periods, but all of the volumes explore temporal continuities with adjacent (and sometimes nonadjacent) periods. In addition, volume editors and chapter authors sometimes suggest alternative ways of thinking about theatrical periodization in their fields of specialization.

One of the things that makes A Cultural History of Theatre so remarkable is the rubric of chapter headings that Balme and Davis selected to structure their project. In contrast to the national, regional, generic, or purely institutional categories that organize traditional theatre histories—categories that privilege elite over nonelite theatre and the activities and social networks that constitute and enable it—the editors chose a series of cultural approaches to theatre as social formation and practice. Their rubrics are the following: institutional frameworks, social functions, sexuality and gender, environment, circulation, interpretations, communities of production, repertoire and genres, technologies of performance, and knowledge transmission. As Balme and Davis conceive them, these categories are nuanced and expansive. Institutional frameworks refers not only to the physical structures of historical theatres but also to the wider network of relations, public occasions, and material support through which theatre is enabled. Social functions includes the social dimension of theatrical attendance, audience response and behavior, and the relation of theatre to other forms of public and private consumption. Sexuality and gender examines these two categories and the cultural anxieties that accompany them as evidenced in performed stories, casting practices, divisions of theatrical labor, and attendance. Environment includes the geographies of theatre, its modes of emplacement, and its natural and urban landscapes. Circulation refers to the movements of theatre within and between cultures. Interpretations considers the philosophical, religious, and aesthetic discourses that have framed theatre since its beginnings. Communities of production covers kinship, training, and other social networks of those who produce theatre. Repertoire and genres designates the subject matter and forms of theatre as these reflect and negotiate competing interests and ideologies. Technologies of performance refers to theatre's use of technology during different periods and the modes of representation that technology makes possible. Finally, knowledge transmission includes the relation of theatre to print culture as well as the other media, material artifacts, and social practices that constitute and transmit theatrical knowledge.

The editors of and contributors to each volume were allowed to determine how these rubrics would be applied to specific historical periods, and how the periods themselves would be covered geographically and historically. Chapter authors chose their own approaches to their topics, and they decided how broadly or specifically they wanted to focus their discussions. The resulting eclecticism reflects the theoretical and methodological richness of theatre history and cultural studies in recent decades. Because contributors were given the freedom to interpret their rubrics individually, their discussions vary in exciting ways across volumes. David Wiles's chapter on the environment of theatre in the ancient world, for example, takes a phenomenologically inflected approach to the meanings of place in the stone theatre of Thorikos and the Theatre of Pompey in Rome, whereas Laura Weigert's equivalent chapter in the medieval volume examines artifacts—linen cloths, metal crosses, drawings, and tapestries—in order to reconstruct the viewing environments of theatrical performance. Kim Solga and Joanne Tompkins explore the trope of home in institutional and site-specific modern theatre as a way of understanding the social, political, and environmental frameworks of neoliberal globalization. Different and equally illuminating approaches to theatre's environments can be found in Karen Newman's chapter on urbanism and theatre building in early modern Europe, Mechele Leon's Lefebvrian analysis of monumental public playhouses, society theatres, and spaces of alterity (fairgrounds, boulevards, and festivals) in Enlightenment Paris, and Tobias Becker's discussion of urban nineteenth-century theatre's integration with surrounding commercial institutions and service industries.

Later in this review, I return to the thematic through lines of A Cultural History of Theatre and reflect further on the cultural history that its collected chapters produce. To restrict myself to global observations, though, would be to neglect the synchronic variety of individual volumes and the impressive work of the editors who oversaw them and contextualized their chapters in editorial introductions. Ideally, each of these excellent volumes would be reviewed on its own terms by specialists in the historical period it covers. In offering brief overviews of all six volumes, I regret that I cannot mention or give equal justice to all sixty-six introductions and chapters and to the seventy-one authors and coauthors who participated in this project.

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A Cultural History of Theatre in Antiquity was edited by Martin Revermann, who also wrote two of the volume's chapters. Covering a thousand-year span from early to late antiquity (500 bce to 500 ce), the book's chapters set Greek and Roman theatre in dialogue with each other. This double focus goes against the traditional practice of classical theatre scholarship, which tends to isolate the two traditions, and it allows for a broader, richly interactive view of theatrical institutions and practices during this period. Jane Lightfoot's chapter on communities of production—which traces “the process by which theatre came to be constituted as commodity in classical antiquity, how its personnel developed into a profession, and how the whole business was funded” (1: 121)—notes important similarities and differences in the financing of theatrical festivals in Greece and Rome and in the structure of artists’ guilds and associations. Geographical and cultural overlaps predominate in the book's chapters, especially in Sicily and Southern Italy, where early forms of Greek theatre culture had an influence on Attic drama and the subsequent development of Roman theatre. Both Athens and Rome exported theatre throughout their orbits of influence, and theatres were built as far away as the Black Sea region and present-day Afghanistan. As Revermann points out in his chapter on institutional frameworks, when Rome added scenic games to the Ludi Romani in 364 bce, it “entered the nexus of festivals which covered all of the Mediterranean” (1: 30). Patrick Hadley discusses the process of remediation by which drama circulated inside and outside Greek and Roman cultural spheres in the form of performances, written texts, images, pedagogical recitation, and oratorical citation.

Like the other volumes in A Cultural History of Theatre, the Antiquity collection combines innovative cultural approaches with an examination of the evidence available to theatre historians. These contributions are related, of course, since the study of theatre as a social and cultural institution expands the scope of what constitutes evidence. Although Revermann's volume is an excellent reference source for traditional scholarship on classical theatre—recent research on the Thorikos theatre, for instance, in Wiles's environment chapter and the evidence concerning female theatre attendance in Ian Ruffell's chapter on sexuality and gender—it also offers new ways of looking for this theatre's cultural traces. Particularly suggestive in this regard is Johanna Hanink's chapter on knowledge transmission, which employs Diana Taylor's categories of archive and repertoire to discuss the ways that knowledge about theatre was generated, preserved, and transmitted within antiquity. Opening her chapter with a reference to Euripides’ private library of scripts and theatrical costumes, Hanink discusses the preservation of theatrical memory during this and the following period in inscriptions, texts, memorabilia, scholarly and rhetorical treatises, and manuscript notations (scholia) from postclassical antiquity. Although many of the materials and memorializing practices she writes about have been lost, much remains for cultural theatre historians to examine.

Knowing where to look—and what to look at—is a central question of Jody Enders's excellent A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages. In her bold introduction, Enders challenges traditional medieval theatre scholarship's emphasis on text-based theatrical forms over the myriad other forms of performance that characterized and animated medieval life. Because the thousand-year period between Rome's fall and the advent of modernity (500–1500) did not produce purpose-built theatres, the vibrant theatricality of medieval culture has to be sought elsewhere. For Enders and her collaborators, medieval theatre was ubiquitous, highly mobile, and resistant to modern distinctions such as sacred–secular, liturgy–theatre, and amateur–professional. Seeta Chaganti, Noah Guynn, and Erith Jaffe-Berg discuss the theatrical frameworks of medieval performance using a “choreographic” (2: 19) model of institutions as living, moving organisms, whereas a chapter written by the late Claire Sponsler proposes that we “unfreeze” performances from books and archives in order “to return them to the processes of circulation in which they once participated and to trace their surprisingly expansive movement across spaces, cultures, media and more” (2: 105). This mobility characterizes communities of production as well. Bruce R. Burningham examines official communities (the Church, universities, and trade guilds), and “jongleuresque” communities (itinerant street performers), but he also devotes considerable attention to quotidian communities, a category that embraces masking, mumming, and dancing as well as simple pastimes and “small moments of personal theatre” (2: 160). By arguing that everyone in the Middle Ages produced theatre, Burningham is one of a number of scholars in this volume who challenge the boundary between theatre and other performance activities. In her chapter on knowledge transmission in the medieval period, Carol Symes notes the gap between what was scripted and what was actually performed. Understanding medieval theatre, she argues, “means studying every variety of medieval performativity, from rituals of homage to the tricks of beggars” (2: 211). When such a perspective is adopted, the essays in this volume make clear, the long-standing evolutionary model of medieval theatre—secular theatrical forms emerging from religious ritual—becomes untenable.

A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages is also geographically expansive. Whereas traditional theatre histories of the period center on England and Western Europe, Enders notes that medieval theatre appeared “in every future European nation, from Greece to Portugal, the Ukraine to Switzerland, Scandinavia to the Middle East” (2: 7). Chaganti, Guynn, and Jaffe-Berg review evidence that theatrical guilds existed in the Muslim world and that Christian and Muslim theatrical traditions may have influenced each other, and Sponsler discusses British adventurer Sir Humphrey Gilbert's 1583 expedition to Newfoundland, which included morris dancers to entertain “the savages” as well as those who sailed the Atlantic to encounter them (2: 113). With its attention to theatrical circulations such as these, Enders's medieval volume is one of the most geographically venturesome books in Balme and Davis's collection.

Sponsler's discussion of Gilbert's Elizabethan expedition indicates the porous historical boundary between the Middle Ages collection and the early modern volume that follows it. This overlap is not surprising. Religious drama and the popular forms that thrived alongside it did not go away in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and many of the foundations of early modern drama can be found in medieval practices and attitudes. Robert Henke's A Cultural History of Theatre in the Early Modern Age (1400–1650) is attentive to these continuities and antecedents while also providing a bold account of what is new in the period it represents: the establishment of purpose-built playing spaces, the rise of professional acting, new social conditions in the early modern city, and the parallel rise of capitalism and absolutism. As Henke notes in his introduction to the volume, Renaissance and early modern studies has a privileged place in cultural history, starting with Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) and continuing through the French Annales school, the work of Raymond Williams, and New Historicism. Theatre histories of this period, however, have been slow to incorporate the insights of cultural history. Henke and his collaborators—most of whom are members of the Theatre Without Borders research group—address this situation by drawing together exciting recent work in early modern theatre history with new approaches in social and cultural history.

Traditional early modern theatre history focuses on England (especially Shakespearean theatre), Italy, France, and Spain. A Cultural History of Theatre in the Early Modern Age moves within these theatrical centers and beyond them, demonstrating the transnational diversity of early modern theatre and the mobility of a medium that never seemed to sit still, even with the construction of permanent theatres. Friedemann Kreuder analyzes the genre systems of London, Madrid, and Paris, but he gives equal attention to the dialect theatre of Venice and the diversity of theatrical influences in Germany. In their chapter on theatrical frameworks, Tom Bishop and Henke provide a transnational analysis of theatrical activity based on the level and continuity of resources available to it; their field of study ranges from government-sponsored missionary theatre in colonial Mexico to the skomorokhi, or wandering satiric minstrels, in Russia. Pavel Drábek traces the circulation of early modern theatre across aristocratic, commercial, church, and intellectual networks. The movement of commedia dell'arte actors through the courts of Europe is a familiar example of this mobility, but Drábek gives equal attention to puppeteers and other performers who followed commercial networks and to religious orders, such as the Lutherans, Jesuits, and Piarists, who developed and circulated didactic theatre forms. Because the Jesuits carried their missionary agenda beyond Europe, they reappear a number of times throughout this volume. Eric Nicholson's chapter on sexuality and gender ends in Japan, where Jesuit drama encountered and blended with the native theatrical traditions of nōh and kyōgen.

Because early modern theatre history has a long and exhaustive scholarly tradition, one can sometimes feel that there's not much new to say about the major urban theatre centers during this period, especially London. By bringing new approaches to familiar and not-so-familiar material, the contributors to A Cultural History of Theatre in the Early Modern Age demonstrate that this is not the case. Erika T. Lin's chapter on social functions examines the cognitive tendencies and affective predilections that audiences brought with them to scripted and unscripted theatrical events as a way of understanding the social functions of drama. In a strikingly original project, William N. West explores communities of production in early modern theatre by focusing on the different life stages of those involved in it: childhood, youth, majority (or adulthood), and senescence. And in one of the volume's most suggestive chapters, Ellen MacKay's essay “Knowledge Transmission: Theatre at the Crossroads of Concept, Medium, and Practice” looks at the complex ways that knowledge of the early modern theatre was produced and disseminated through objects, print, performative practices, and cultural offshoots. MacKay's examples range from street performer Gros Guillaume's clown performance, which he developed while working as a baker's boy, to the “performance heritage tourism” that developed around the tomb and festival dedicated to the German trickster figure Till Eulenspiegel (3: 198).

If Henke's volume offers a transnational perspective on early modern theatre history, Mechele Leon's A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Enlightenment (1650–1800) concentrates on the national theatre cultures of France and Great Britain. Although this choice may appear restrictive in comparison to the other volumes in the collection—there is comparatively little on theatrical developments in other countries, for example—it allows considerable depth and focus. The choice of these countries also makes sense historically. As Logan J. Connors makes clear in his chapter “Interpretations: From Theatrephobia to a Theatrical ‘Science of Man,’” France produced the period's richest meditations on theatre's social functions. Furthermore, as Leon notes in her introduction, “[I]t is through the perspective of British theatre, with its strong influence on the development of commercial theatre, theatrical labour and grand touring networks, as well as wide colonial reach and cross-channel relationships, that we can see major trends that obtained for theatre in the period more globally” (4: 5). That a cultural history of British theatre is also an international history is evident in the figure of David Garrick, who features prominently in this volume. Mita Choudhury's chapter on the circulation of European theatrical personnel, practices, and dramatic representations discusses Garrick's French and Italian excursions, his importation of foreign theatrical talent, and the circulation of British plays in North America and Calcutta. John O'Brien, whose chapter on institutional framework opens with a Garrick anecdote, argues that British theatre reflected broader “tensions between the state and the marketplace” during the long eighteenth century “in particularly acute ways” (4: 16).

Two important themes in A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Enlightenment are the production of sociality and the individual's relation to theatre as a public and private institution. In her communities of production chapter, Deborah C. Payne applies Jürgen Habermas's theory of the public sphere to Enlightenment playhouses in order to argue that acting companies were instrumental in “replicating ‘everyday experience’ in the playhouse and therefore productive of the new Enlightenment citizen” (4: 148). Performers were also arbiters and models of good taste, especially in colonial outposts, where audiences lacked access to traditional spaces of sociability. Taking issue with Habermas, Daniel O'Quinn's knowledge transmission chapter characterizes eighteenth-century theatre as “a physical zone where power and knowledge coalesced, not in an abstract Habermasian sphere of reasonable discussion, but rather in a far more volatile matrix where history was understood viscerally among a crowd of other observers” (4: 211). This concern with sociality provides an important backdrop for other chapters in the volume, such as Lisa A. Freeman's analysis of ideological change and generic transformation on the London stage and Helen E. M. Brooks's chapter on the economic structures, material experiences, and changing social models of women in the professional theatre.

The business of theatre plays a central role in Peter W. Marx's A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Empire. This emphasis on the economics of culture is fitting for a period (1800–1920) that witnessed expanding transatlantic and transpacific trade routes; changing modes of theatre management; and new forms of commodification, marketing, and leisure that were concentrated in modernizing urban settings. Nic Leonhardt and Stanca Scholz-Cionca's chapter on circulation traces “the rise of an international theatre industry and its professionalization” through the activities of theatre agents, brokers, and managers (5: 121). In a chapter mentioned earlier, Tobias Becker discusses nineteenth-century theatre's commercial ties with the hotel industry, restaurants, department stores, and the fashion industry. Anselm Heinrich considers funding models governing theatrical entertainments by contrasting Britain, where theatre was viewed as a commercial enterprise, with Germany, where theatre was considered a moral, national, and educational institution that required state support. Finally, Derek Miller's knowledge transmission chapter uses copyright laws, performance rights, theatrical contracts and unionization, changes in the theatre industry, and even the rise of theatre history as an academic discipline to demonstrate “theatre's status as property, and how theatre's commodification transformed the circulation of theatre in a rapidly industrializing and globalizing cultural economy” (5: 227).

As these chapters make clear, the economics of theatre during the long nineteenth century reflect a number of overlapping and competing geopolitical, economic, and cultural formations that define this period. In his introduction to the volume, Marx identifies these formations as empire, nation, and cosmopolitanism. A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Empire offers numerous insights into these networks and their interactions. In his chapter on audiences and the social functions of theatre, Jim Davis moves from a sociocultural description of the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton to a discussion of Shakespearean dramatic productions in British India and the Australian colonies. Marx's chapter on interpretations includes a section on the role of theatre in nation building, and national identity is the topic of the two essays constituting the volume's chapter on communities of production: Kathleen M. Gough's on the Irish National Theatre Movement and Zoltán Imre's on the Viennese–Budapest Operetta. Cultural cosmopolitanism is evident throughout the volume in theatre artists and entrepreneurs who traversed the globe, such as Kawakami Otojirō’s Japanese troupe, which performed in Paris under Loïe Fuller's sponsorship, and the troupe of Burhanettin Tepsi of Constantinople, which performed throughout Europe and the Middle East.

Marx's volume makes other forays into nineteenth-century theatre culture, addressing such issues as modernization, theatrical celebrity, and visuality and spectacle. Christopher Balme explores repertoire and genres during this period in light of progressive theatre deregulation. Freeing theatres to respond to cultural and class differentiation, deregulation led to what Balme calls the “variety principle,” an evening of theatre consisting of multiple genres (5: 182); the emergence of specialty theatres devoted to popular genres, such as vaudeville, melodrama, and pantomime; and the cultural consolidation of Shakespeare's works, which “straddled the emerging divides between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’, between highbrow and lowbrow” (5: 199). Embracing generic variety, Laurence Senelick's engaging chapter on sexuality and gender advances a counternarrative to the view that the nineteenth century made theatre respectable. Examining the vogue of courtesan plays, theatres specializing in female display, and the opportunities for cross-dressing afforded by variety theatre, he argues for “the persistence of the theatre's sexually subversive aspect” and its challenge to “the embourgeoisement of the ambient society” (5: 78).

The final volume in Bloomsbury's theatre history, Kim Solga's A Cultural History of Theatre in the Modern Age, was, I expect, the most challenging to conceptualize. The book's historical parameters—1920 to the present—fit awkwardly with most definitions of the modern, and the term itself has a sometimes conflicting range of cultural, artistic, economic, and philosophical referents. Solga addresses these challenges by proposing the modern as a site of interrogation. Arguing that “the modern is not an historical marker so much as a cultural fantasy, one in which human beings across the earth invest and share unequally,” her introduction frames the chapters that follow in terms of two questions: When and where is the modern age, and whose lives count as modern? (6: 1, 4). Approached through this framework, the theatre of the past hundred years becomes a field where different modernities interact, contest each other, and declare their stakes for those who are included and those who are not. In one of the most original of the collection's circulations chapters, Jill Carter, Heather Davis-Fisch, and Ric Knowles reject the dominant Western narrative of theatrical circulation, which emphasizes the movement of performances through imperial networks, in favor of an Indigenous historiography grounded in visual sovereignty, tribalography, and what Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor calls transmotion. In his chapter on the social functions of modern theatre, Nicholas Ridout uses Partha Chatterjee's “distinction between ‘consumers’ and ‘producers’” (6: 37) to investigate “theatres as practices in a range of different modernities” (6: 36). Whereas “theatre for consumers” (6: 37) is limited in its ability to challenge the logic of work in capitalism, “theatre for producers” (6: 37), like that of the West Bengalese Jana Sanskriti Center for Theatre of the Oppressed, merges labor and consumption with social activism.

The locations of theatre are as important to A Cultural History of Theatre in the Modern Age as they are to the earlier volumes in Balme and Davis's collection. I have already mentioned Solga and Tompkins's chapter, which analyzes home “as the environment that em-places twentieth-century theatre within the larger social, political, and economic frameworks of modernity” (3: 76). Using The Theatre Centre in Toronto as his example, Michael McKinnie analyzes the intricate relationships among theatrical institutions, urban planning, and marketization. In her chapter on sexuality and gender, Kirsten Pullen suggests that over the course of the twentieth century “critical and popular responses to sexually explicit work come more and more to be marked by assumptions about the space of sex, about the appropriateness of certain venues for the performances taking place there” (6: 57). Christin Essin and Marlis Schweitzer attend to the multiple sites where communities of theatre workers—craft and service workers as well as performers—ply their trade: shop spaces, luxury cruise ships, and the Manhattan sidewalks where striking chorus girls marched in 1919 and where Times Square street performers work today. Dassia N. Posner's chapter on the audience's interpretive role in twentieth-century political theatre focuses on the Petrograd and Moscow productions of Mayakovsky's Mystery-Bouffe and the Johannesburg production of Jane Taylor's Ubu and the Truth Commission. Finally, Sarah Bay-Cheng's chapter “Knowledge Transmission: Media and Memory” reveals the changing emplacements of theatre through the rise of recording technologies during the modern period. “As recording technologies expanded from radio and cinema to television and digital media,” she argues, “theatre performances gradually circulated outside of theatrical spaces, and their historical traces could be found in more than scripts, scores, and other textual documents” (6: 203–4). In 2002, according to a National Endowment for the Arts report on American arts participation that Bay-Cheng cites, theatre was consumed in mediatized form two or three times more than it was attended live (6: 218).

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As my overviews indicate, the cumulative history provided by these six volumes looks markedly different from the trajectories and accounts of most existing theatre histories. In place of an evolutionary narrative premised on individuals and dramatic achievements, A Cultural History of Theatre offers networks, practices, social formations, and locations. Familiar landmarks are downplayed or absent, and new ones take their place. Under Balme and Davis's guidance, the authors make no attempt at completeness, and the collection falls defiantly short of providing a “whole history” of theatre. Countries and regions that occupy the center of one volume move to the periphery or vanish entirely in another. Inevitably, because the editors and contributors were required to work within Bloomsbury's Cultural Histories historical and regional model, the collection shares a Western bias with the press's other titles. Many of the essays in A Cultural History of Theatre resist this bias by reaching into Africa, the Americas, Australia, and Asia (Japan makes an extended appearance in three of the volumes) and into Indigenous performance forms. In his introduction to the Age of Empire volume, for example, Peter W. Marx acknowledges the non-Western empires that shared the global stage with Europe's imperial networks: the Ottoman, Chinese, and Japanese empires and the United States, which never defined itself as a colonial power but asserted its hemispheric field of influence in 1823 (5: 7). These excursions do important work globalizing A Cultural History of Theatre, but they also underscore the regrettable absence of a seventh volume devoted to non-Western theatre—particularly in Asia, where varied and sophisticated social, cultural, and theatrical traditions developed with often minimal Western contact. Nobody, I'm sure, laments the absence of such a volume more than the collection's editors, who were handed a six-volume geohistorical template that precluded it.

Scholars of classical, medieval, and other periods of Western theatre will understandably be interested in the volumes of A Cultural History of Theatre that fall within their specializations. In view of this, one hopes that Bloomsbury will make these books available for individual purchase in print as they have with some of the other titles in their Cultural Histories series. Reading the period volumes will introduce scholars and students to archival and other forms of theatre research in their area and to the equally important contributions being made in economic, social, and institutional history; performance studies; geography; and material culture studies. Lavish illustrations in each volume provide visual documentation of the social, cultural, and theatrical territory under examination. Although the one-paragraph series preface that accompanies each volume only hints at the larger project's theoretical underpinnings, the individual introductions to these books do a magnificent job of reframing their periods of theatre history from a social and cultural-historical point of view. In fact, Revermann, Enders, Henke, Leon, Marx, and Solga deserve tremendous credit for the work they did theorizing, assembling, and shaping their parts of this groundbreaking project. The volumes they produced are seminal contributions to their fields, and the essays they solicited and wrote will help shape these fields for years to come.

Reading all six volumes of A Cultural History of Theatre, as I have done, is an even richer experience. The collection as a whole presents an epic overview of Western theatre and its global engagements, and its chapters reach across volumes to establish through lines of development and divergence. One of the tightest of these through lines can be found in the collection's technologies of performance chapters. From Peter von Möllendorff's essay on machine, props, and dramaturgy in ancient theatre to Ashley Ferro-Murray and Timothy Murray's discussion of machinic staging and corporeal choreographies in the modern period, these chapters could constitute a book in their own right on the relationship of technology, representation, and bodies. Katie Normington discusses the ways in which theatrical spectacle during the Middle Ages “drew upon the skills, knowledge and advances of contemporary technology and craft” (2: 180), and Blair Hoxby analyzes the impact of subsequent technologies on the early modern theatre of machines. Following Pannill Camp's analysis of the impact of scientific rationalism and the instrumentalization of scientific knowledge in eighteenth-century architecture, scenery, and light, Sophie Nield writes about the technologies of space and seeing on the Victorian stage and their relationship to nineteenth-century visual and performance culture. In the final essay under this rubric, Ferro-Murray and Murray argue that “bodies and technologies oppose, limit, or even extend one another” in twentieth- and early twenty-first-century theatre (6: 182).

Other insights reward diachronic reading across volumes. A Cultural History of Theatre offers a powerful account of theatre's relation to other social, economic, and cultural institutions. In the guild performances of the later Middle Ages, the state-sponsored theatre of Louis XIV, and the commercialized theatre that gained ascendancy in the nineteenth century, one can trace theatre's changing role as an instrument of symbolic capital. The collection also underlines theatre's remarkable mobility across trade routes, geopolitical formations, and media networks. It is fascinating to compare the circulatory dynamics at work in the Roman and British empires—to ask, for example, how imperial centers interact with their peripheries in each period and how cultural practices were transformed in these encounters. Additional issues and through lines will become apparent to those who read the entire Balme and Davis collection. I found the following topics particularly important: the ideological functions of theatre throughout its history in relation to authority, gender, and collective identity formations such as nationhood; the complex ways that theatre's functions and effects are interpreted across periods and communities; the gendered, racially marked, and class-affiliated body's role in theatrical representation and the labor that produces it; theatre's status as a cultural medium where social practices are displayed, challenged, and reimagined; and the myriad forms in which theatrical knowledge is transmitted within theatrical communities and to those who seek to recover its histories.

More than anything else, of course, A Cultural History of Theatre is groundbreaking for its approaches to theatre history and the sociocultural emphasis they reflect. By exploring this interdisciplinary territory, its volumes bring together exciting new ways of thinking that have made their way into theatre studies in recent years but have never been integrated or theorized collectively as they are here. As I read through the volumes, it sometimes felt as if I were relearning theatre history. Institutions, events, personalities, historical boundaries, and categories that I had long understood one way revealed themselves differently and in startlingly new relation to each other. Nothing in my training on theatrical genre, for instance, anticipated Donnalee Dox's analysis of medieval plays in terms of affective trajectories and medieval structures of feeling, or Michelle Liu Carriger and Aoife Monks's discussion of costume as repertoire and genre in modern Irish and Japanese theatre. Rather than proposing a global model for cultural theatre history, the essays in this collection suggest innovative ways that its story can be told. The patchwork structure of its contributions is, in the end, one of its greatest strengths. Methodological eclecticism suggests multiple angles and combinations, alternative approaches to old problems. One of the strengths of A Cultural History of Theatre, therefore, is the fact that individual chapters can be imagined through other cultural lenses than the ones they employ. How might the theatrical environments of medieval or eighteenth-century theatre be understood using the affective approaches that Dox and other contributors apply to genre? How does knowledge transmission function institutionally? A cultural-historical approach to theatre can also be enriched by allied approaches that the Bloomsbury collection omits or only glances at—disability studies, animal studies, cultural ecology, thing theory, and cognitive studies are a few that come to mind. And because disciplines such as sociology, cultural geography, ethnolinguistics, and anthropology are always developing, a cultural history of theatre will continue to benefit from new and illuminating approaches in these fields.

At the end of her introduction to the Enlightenment theatre volume, Mechele Leon observes that “despite the apparent definitiveness and publishing prestige of a six-volume set of books, the cultural history of the theatre is never finished nor fixed” (4: 13). By embracing this incompleteness, Balme, Davis, and their contributors have opened the door to new research and new ways of understanding the social functions of theatre. A Cultural History of Theatre is the product of intellectual labor and creativity, and its accomplishments are many. A landmark work in theatre and social history, it illuminates theatre through the lens of culture, and culture through the lens of theatre.