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.Footnote 1 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 September 2015, Theatre Survey published our reflections on preparing to commission the six-book Bloomsbury (UK) set A Cultural History of Theatre. The set coheres to some of the publisher's Cultural History series parameters (such as chronological divisions from antiquity to the modern age) yet is guided by rubrics we determined would frame the ten chapters of each volume.Footnote 2 Here, we offer a follow-up to that earlier “Prospectus,” reflecting on what we, as general editors, see in the delivered results. Performance culture is intangible, its essence being in ongoing interpretation and use—models for living and patterning day-to-day interactions that cohere a society's expressive and interpretive knowledge schemes—and as such presents specific challenges for historical inquiry.Footnote 3 Theatre historians of Western cultures (for the most part) provide exemplars rather than surveys of cultural history, arguing on behalf of what matters indicatively as knowledge about cultural practices. There is ample cause to think that cultural history is fully imbricated in our field, though up to now we may not have collectively thought of it in quite these terms.
Chapters on the social functions of performance and on communities of production historicize how sectors of societies do or do not interact across hierarchical strata in the making of performance. Relationships of kin, guild membership, and fealty may determine the networks of theatre makers, contractually or honorifically, enabling participants to reify closed group identities or multiple forms and combinations of identity and belonging. Will West, for example, argues that institutions that produce theatre in the early modern period demand that participants engage differently depending on their age. Across the spectrum of these entertainments, witnessing bestows legitimacy on ceremonies of all kinds and, as the medieval volume explores from the perspective of affect theory, also has consequences for viewers.
With the firm establishment of commercial theatres in the sixteenth century, settler colonialism in the seventeenth, and celebrity in the eighteenth, the cultural capital and social function of performance shifted: in some cases the greatest social importance of theatrical events migrated from stage to auditorium, culture was consciously reconfigured on ambitious principles to enhance engaged citizenship, and select performers carefully preened their offstage reputations to generate exceptionality. As nations coalesced, theatres both consolidated and breached the confines of mere countrymen. As aesthetics internationalized, notably as Romanticism, new extraterritorial confederacies of cultural appreciation formed (coincident, it should be noted, with nascent interest in the ongoing and historical practices of hyperlocal and regional cultures). Theatre's link to tourism—fed by transient populations seeking manifestations of culture within a specific society's locus—developed extensive infrastructure in the later nineteenth century and reached its apogee at the end of the twentieth. For theatres, this challenges the idea that a society and its culture necessarily engage in reciprocal referentiality between auditorium and stage, or consumer and representation, not just by introducing strangers into events but also by commercial theatre's evolution into part of the service economy. The alienation of culture from the social base—through consumerism, globalization, and colonialism—is a major part of the story of twentieth-century cultural history. Awareness of cultural pluralities offers new ways to investigate theatre, flexibly regard identifications of ethnic, national, civic, and subcivic belonging, and thus reconstitute the “grand narratives” of the premodern period. Interestingly, though, it also opens new questions for antiquity, such as what constitutes a mass medium and how material culture documents the circulation of theatrical practices (and not just texts).
Canons and Margins
Grand narratives of theatre history coalesce around periodicity and repertoire; nevertheless, the imposed periodization of the six volumes foregrounds which editorial problems authors would be required to negotiate. Somewhat less demarcated are the questions of repertoire and canon, or, more generally speaking, what constituted theatre performance in a particular period. For both questions the “cultural perspective” produced surprising realignments in terms of clustering around epochal margins or borders. Acknowledging that periodicity always has a degree of arbitrariness, it is nevertheless striking to observe that many authors tend to gravitate with their examples toward the end or even beyond the stipulated temporal divisions. The dividing line between the Middle Ages and the early modern age is perhaps the most problematic, as the macroforms we associate with the former—the Passion plays and Corpus Christi plays—do not emerge until the end of the stipulated period (1400), and documentary evidence often dates from even later. This is not news to theatre historians who deal with this era, but the pattern is repeated throughout the volumes. The examples from the Age of Enlightenment gravitate toward to the late-eighteenth century, the nineteenth century pushes the boundaries occasionally into the 1920s. There are several reasons for this. The emphasis on institutional aspects, which are dealt with in at least three chapter rubrics (“institutional frameworks,” “social functions,” and “communities of production”) tends to acknowledge the longue durée, thus transcending significant aesthetic shifts. Epochal clustering also results occasionally in complete revision of traditional periodization and canonization. Perhaps the most striking case is the French classical period: the names Racine and Molière occur infrequently and peripherally, while Corneille is treated mainly in the early modern volume. The epochal divide between volumes 3 and 4—the year 1650—seems to have had the effect of creating a trapdoor through which the three geniuses of French drama have indecorously fallen, the Enlightenment in favor of a golden age, if you will.
A cultural historical approach has left clear traces on canonization, and not only through the seeming indifference to the literary-dramatic canon. Previously, we argued that the “cultural turn” was introduced into theatre history via performance studies because of the latter's heavy reliance on cultural anthropology.Footnote 4 The influence of performance studies certainly manifests itself in the volumes, albeit in asymmetrical fashion. If we follow the broad definition of the performance continuum proposed by Richard Schechner (“the formal relations between play, games, sports, theatre and ritual”),Footnote 5 which a number of authors reference, then we would expect the understanding of what could be potentially treated under the rubric “theatre” could and should include any element on the continuum. We also need to ask if theatre, as narrated in standard historical treatments, has a special quality that differentiates it from cognate forms of theatricality and cultural performances such as charivaris, weddings, funerals, and Mardi Gras festivities. Here, cultural anthropologists' useful distinction between “emics” and “etics” is germane.Footnote 6 The former refers to words the cultures in question use to describe or designate phenomena, whereas the latter are scientific terms that the discipline requires for epistemological reasons. Both emically and etically, citizens in Shakespeare's London knew perfectly well whether they were going to an execution or a play, and that the former represented or alluded to on the stage was just that: a representation and not the real thing. Although the dimension of “as if” is by no means adhered to as a defining differentia specifica of theatre, it is noteworthy that there are very few excursions into the realm of the paratheatrical in the volumes. There are, for example, no discussions of circus, an invention of the eighteenth century, but there is a detailed analysis of a tightrope walk in Venice in the chapter on medieval institutional frameworks. In fact, the volume on the Middle Ages is perhaps the one that moves the most fluidly along the Schechnerian continuum. It contains discussions of the medieval emics of theatre by referencing terms such as ludus, which was evidently much more current than theatrum, which alluded chiefly to a space.Footnote 7 Small analytical profit can therefore be gained from cementing etic boundaries that derive from other times and introduce both retrospectively and prospectively anachronistic categorical divisions.
In the Age of Enlightenment and beyond, we are confronted with a new set of problems pertaining to the processes whereby theatre “functionally differentiate[s]” (to borrow a term from Niklas Luhmann's systems theory) into institutional “systems” of drama, opera, and dance, each of which is sustained by an autonomous repertoire and perhaps even by specialized audiences.Footnote 8 Opera receives scant treatment and dance, particularly ballet, even less. On the one hand, we see reflected here the division of disciplinary labor that leaves theatre to drama, performance, or literature scholars, and opera to musicologists, with ballet increasingly the preserve of dance specialists who may or may not be affiliated with drama or theatre departments. Although this division mirrors in turn current artistic practice, it cannot be easily justified from a cultural historical perspective. Restricting theatre to performance of the spoken word cannot be sustained from a cultural perspective until the eighteenth century, by which time different training and performance practices—the virtuosic dancer and opera singer—had evolved to such a degree that interchange became restricted (the physical engineering perfected in southern Italy to produce castrati is perhaps the most extreme example). This was not, however, the case in dramatic theatre and popular theatre forms, where a performer was naturally expected to be able to sing, dance, and recite as the repertoire required.
Does Cultural History Change Theatre History?
Based on these volumes, we can say that writing the cultural history of theatre does not necessarily introduce new or different types of source material or methodologies, though it does valorize classes of information and orientations to inquiry that recognize performances' status as events within social fields. Aesthetics may remain the focus, yet the constructedness of representation—with multiple refractions of mimesis and artificiality—becomes interesting insofar as it sets the terms for intelligibility within a reception community. Tom Gunning's notable work on the “cinema of attractions” is an example of this, backdating the “invention” of cinema into a plethora of earlier technologies and consequently rewriting the emergence of film in music halls of the 1890s in terms of conditioned ways to experience projected images.Footnote 9 In a different vein, Diana Taylor's highly influential concept of the archive and the repertoire considers performance in two prominent modes of transmission, human-to-human and other forms of memory repositories, emphasizing the means by which intangibility is not commensurate with ephemerality.Footnote 10 Both insights reorient attention and bring awareness anew to different continuities, reject old epistemes, and enable novel types of inquiry.
With the emergence of media history as a discrete field, theatre historians are reckoning with the means by which live performance emerges and circulates. Essentially, this means that theatre, as cultural history, has a preperformance ontology (conception, rehearsal, and so on), a live ontology (this is typically the focus of “reconstruction”), and a postperformance afterglow (represented by artifacts of the other two temporalities, reputational effects, and circulated interpretations). A Cultural History of Theatre invites reflection on this under the category of “knowledge transmission—media and memory.”
The recording of theatre began long before the advent of video or wax cylinders. As Tiffany Stern's work shows, early modern print culture provided a plethora of recording media, utilized in reconfigured forms within printed playtexts.Footnote 11 The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries' exponential increase in information about the theatre highlight practices of remediation, both as a subject and object of knowledge within the Enlightenment. Initially as performance, then as fodder for the daily press, then as circulating iconography and playtexts, the theatre was a conduit for knowledge practices such as exemplifying proper behavior and social norms. The emergence of national theatres endorsed specific regimes for such knowledge, explicitly valorized as repositories of everything from literary achievement to acting style, in effect a form of museum (house of the Muses) to warehouse cultural heritage. Likewise, attention to cultural memory is evident in fourth-century bce Athens, when Lycurgus commissioned statues of playwrights, and ca. 306 bce when inscriptions of the Dionysia's victors were made public. This, of course, only ensured cultural memory if the public gave these efforts their regard, and in any case it is not the same as a transferrable memory of artistic knowledge any more than a playtext or scenic manual perfectly conveys either performance or rendering technique. Paradoxically, as in the medieval period, what we know may be as much through prohibition of practices as via their direct conveyance.
Cultural History: Theatre as a Microcosm of the Cultural Realm?
The relationship of theatre to the wider cultural realm is metonymic, albeit with highly disparate valences. It may appear the most visible and vital of cultural forms, as in ancient Greece or nineteenth-century Europe, where theatre (understood in its broadest sense of performed entertainment) was ubiquitous, even if many of its manifestations left only sparse archival traces. The volumes' claims for theatre's cultural presence range from wall-to-wall ubiquity (as in the case of communities of production in the medieval volume, where Bruce Burningham argues that everyone produced theatre), to more localized understandings of the relationship (especially in the final two volumes, where theatrical professions become highly specialized), to the modern age, where theatre becomes bracketed off as an art form. The cultural realm itself can be thought of in terms of different “fields” (Bourdieu) or “systems” (Luhmann), which gain in autonomy in post-Enlightenment Europe and America.Footnote 12 These spheres include politics, religion, economics, art, and education, and a cultural history of theatre needs to be attentive to these processes of differentiation. If we look at two of these fields, the political and the economic, and theatre's relationship to them, then we can observe a how cultural history of theatre can provide productive insights.
Theatre's relationship to the body politic varies congruent with the polysemic understanding of the term. While not quite inevitably political, institutionalized theatre reveals a high degree of imbrication with the political sphere simply because theatre tends to insert itself into the body politic and thereby generate the need for regulation, on the one hand, and authority and prestige, on the other. An anthropological understanding of the term “political” is useful here because it is better attuned to different scales of social organization than in mainstream political theory. Even before Foucault's theorization of diffuse yet pervasive power, political anthropology identified the political in a much more nuanced and useful way than in classical political theory. Victor Turner's influential study Schism and Continuity in an African Society demonstrated a structural-functional approach to the political dynamics of a village society that subsequently was scaled up by various disciplines, including scholars from theatre and performance. Political anthropologists follow power and authority wherever it manifests itself, be it through kinship, symbolic attribution such as mana or charisma (Max Weber), material possessions, or organizations like secret societies.Footnote 13 Most important, the political can be studied at many levels of complexity ranging from small-scale communities to “theatre state[s]” (Geertz) such as Bali in the precolonial period, to “performance [as] an epistemology of conquest” (Patricia Ybarra) in Tlaxcala, Mexico.Footnote 14
We find the insights of political anthropology—more often implicitly than explicitly—in many parts of the volumes. The excessively “wasteful” Greek theatrical festivities where wealthy citizens (the khoregoi) “agreed” to sponsor productions as a means to accrue prestige could be compared to the potlatch ceremonies organized by the peoples of the American Northwest coast. A similar, or perhaps even more pervasive political dynamic seems to have motivated Roman aristocrats, as Martin Revermann argues in his introduction to the volume on antiquity, since nonpermanent performance venues added power and leverage to the officials in charge of running festivals and sponsoring other performance occasions. The political reciprocity inherent in such festive practices are particularly visible in earlier periods but also continue (obscured) into more recent times: for example, in the organization and financing of large-scale performances in the late Middle Ages by English guilds, the “rhetoricians” of the Dutch Rederijker, or the confraternities and legal apprentices of Paris's Basochiens. Their motivations invariably have a political inflection inasmuch as the performances signal and consolidate prestige and influence, albeit at different levels of class and influence. The relationship of these groups to official political and/or church power also differed in the extreme and could even subvert official religious doctrine.
In the early modern period we see theatre being directly harnessed by royal courts, which continued and expanded the notion of political sponsorship and increased the element of excess. “Court magnificence,” as Rob Henke and Tim Bishop argue, was a political necessity for emerging absolutist rulers. As theatre moved to a more market-driven model, its relationship to the state shifted from that of an inner organ of the body politic to that of an increasingly irritable chancre requiring redress. From the sixteenth century onward theatre often stands in a conflictual relationship with both religious and political authorities, though both could on occasion harness its power for their own purposes, as in Jesuit theatre.
For the Enlightenment, John O'Brien argues that it was widely understood that the state had a role in overseeing the smooth operation of theatres, policing their repertoire in order to prevent moral contagion and political unrest. Thus began regimes of censorship and debates in the public sphere that still color our understanding of the state's relationship to the theatre: they were gradually dismantled in the twentieth century, except in totalitarian societies.Footnote 15 It is perhaps a logical irony of theatrical history that “political theatre” as a discrete aesthetic form was programmatically formulated in the Soviet Union (Meyerhold) and Germany (Piscator and Brecht), where it either directly served the state or diametrically opposed it in a society that had recently abolished censorship.
Although A Cultural History of Theatre does not have a discreet rubric on economics this dimension, like the political, is all-pervasive and confirms Bronisław Malinowski's observation of the Kula system in his classic study of the Trobriand Islanders, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: “it embraces a vast complex of activities, interconnected, and playing into one another, so as to form one organic whole.”Footnote 16 If we apply this insight to theatre we find it replicated throughout the volumes. The above-mentioned potlatch dimension of theatre, for example, is both political and economic, and indeed the expense incurred was already a concern in antiquity. Why else was the institution of the theoricon introduced, whereby poorer citizens were given financial aid to attend the Dionysia, if not to ensure that civic responsibility was guaranteed? Nineteenth-century German historian August Boekh termed the theoricon variously “the most pernicious issue of the age of Pericles” and “that cancer of the public welfare of the Athenians.” Boekh objected vigorously to the fact that at this period the Athenians spent more public money on theatre festivals than on defence.Footnote 17
Theatre in antiquity and the medieval period was not subject to market forces to any great extent. Therefore theatre's marketization in the early modern period is a significant shift and signals its growing autonomy from political imperatives. The formation of a joint-stock company as a basic unit of production in Padua in 1545 marks not just the birth of professional theatre in Italy (and with it of the commedia dell'arte) but also of a new relationship between performer and spectator, which, as we argued in our “Prospectus,” redefined questions of repertoire and patronage. If theatre, in its highly organized forms at least, had been the preserve of the state, church, or civic authorities, it became a means to acquire wealth.
Across Europe the theatrical entrepreneur, whose interests could be as much pecuniary as artistic, entered the scene. Entrepreneurialism was a crucial factor propelling theatre's circulation, and it became the driving force behind its economic liberalization in the nineteenth century, which saw theatre redefined as a “trade” in European countries.Footnote 18 The economics of theatre shift again in the twentieth century as social democracy introduced the idea that theatre, in its “high” culture version, should be publicly financed. Indeed, this was instrumental in defining the high as not deriving from elites yet being constitutive of patrimony for middling classes. Theatre split between artistic and commercial spheres, with only occasional movement between the two, as if they were separate media. The gradual but perceptible introduction of neoliberal policies has begun to bridge the gap, to the detriment of the former. Calls for theatre to “reengage” with the market leads ineluctably to the question proposed by Michael McKinnie in his discussion of institutional frameworks in the modern age: Can theatre simultaneously participate in marketization and promise to ameliorate the social antagonisms that marketization entails? This echoes indirectly a central argument taken up by Jen Harvie in her book Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism, that the “artrepreneurial” artist has become a kind of model worker: self-employed, flexible, risk-taking, indifferent to work–life balance.Footnote 19 In both examples, theatre is regarded as a site where political economy, like the Trobriand Kula trade, is woven into the fabric of the cultural.
Contact and Circulation
The so-called globalization of transportation, commerce, and exchange, which in our era has given rise to an incessant flow of cultural products—conceptual, virtual, digital, and material—between nations and continents also fosters opportunities for theatrical performances to be seen well beyond their places of origin. Performances are curated into festivals, some tour widely, and others are remounted by traveling specialists on new casts. However, these forms of circulation are not new to our era: in antiquity, actors and plays were sought after throughout the Hellenic world and traveled within a wide maritime compass; during the Renaissance, companies from England trekked throughout the continent; and in the late nineteenth century stage managers set out from European capitals to North America with design specifications and promptbooks in order to reproduce productions with the imprimatur and cachet of their originals.Footnote 20 The very recent live performance programs simulcast in HD from Moscow's Bolshoi, London's Globe and West End (Royal National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal Opera House, and English National Opera), the Glyndebourne Festival, New York's Metropolitan Opera House and Broadway, and Las Vegas are thus higher-tech, lower-cost ways of achieving similar forms of circulation and access to theatre, opera, ballet, and pop concerts that dynamically construct cosmopolitanism beyond territorial understandings of both “audience” (as presence) and theatre (as spatially contingent). No one—and, strictly speaking, no material thing—needs to travel, and yet ancient forms of circulation are achieved.
In many ways, theatre's circulation counteracts the concurrent tendencies to sustain and constitute civic and national cultures. Typically, theatre has either consolidated subcultures by enhancing an ethnos or challenged vernacularity by incorporating cross-cultural exposure. Theatre's facility for exchange is often noteworthy in fostering new forms of activity, as with the diffusion of Chinese and Indian puppetry through Southeast Asia and the Asian archipelago, but it can also be achieved even when direct cultural contact is minimal: for example, late sixteenth-century Spanish and English drama and dramatic theory share affinities even without exchanges of artists. In the Americas, especially, evidence of specific European, African, and Asian performance forms is a function of relocated populations, followed by hybridity and multiplicity. Cultural status (high or low) may also be exported through diasporas and recalibrated in creolized forms.
Only when national arts consolidated could an idea of comparative arts, or “world arts,” emerge. Yet world arts is a conceptually unwieldy and empirically unsustainable concept. As James Clifford argues, “the old localizing strategies—by bounded community, by organic culture, by region, by center and periphery—may obscure as much as they reveal,”Footnote 21 and this magnifies at greater scale. As categories, “world” and “global” are always subject to “different kinds of inequalities, rivalries and collaborations,” as Katherine Biers and Sharon Marcus point out in their introduction to a recent special issue on “World Literature and Global Performance” in Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film.Footnote 22 They tantalizingly invite grand insights of macrohistory, including cultural imperialism and circulation. Cultural imperialism was not new during the Cold War—arguably this was the Raj's way, Jesuits' way, and the Romans' way of impressing and enfolding subjugated peoples—but it does emphasize the kinds of cultural contestation that can occur overtly or sub rosa in the multidirectional interconnections of performing communities. Thus, both in Korean resistance to Japanese imperial domination, subjugation, and artistic theft as well as in Japanese exportations to the West that coincided with the earliest date of Japanese artists being permitted to travel, national arts are not contained within national borders. Illustrating vestimentary repertoires of modernism, Aoife Monks and Michelle Liu Carriger illustrate how nationalism and international exchange are practiced in dynamic tension in Ireland and Japan. Without necessarily questioning what culture is, theatre variously served to consolidate peripheral territories to a central node and to totalize imperialism; yet by lingering after empires fall performative repertoires also reveal multidirectional exchange in localized syntheses, fulfilling what Arjun Appadurai terms “imagination as a social practice.”Footnote 23
A Cultural History of Theatre is by no means a global history, or even comprehensively transnational. Our editorial collaborators sail between the Scylla of historiographic intervention and the Charybdis of coverage to craft ninety-five-thousand-word volumes. Sacrifices are made. Compromises are inevitable. Readers' hearts will be broken and garments rent. No essay traces, for example, how “the world-historical event of the Chinese coolie trade,” which Shu-Mei Shih reminds us “crossed the Pacific Ocean to the Americas and traversed the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean,” was a human event that dispersed laborers as well as culture along these arcs.Footnote 24 On the other hand, performance does serve as a means to carry cultural refashionings far afield: blackface minstrelsy, for example, codified a set of ideas about life on plantations of the Deep South and cities of the American republic to Europe, South Africa, Australia, and Pacific island nations and took root with new hybridities in most places where it toured. Likewise, Asian and European avant-gardes looked to each other for inspiration, with Brecht famously leveraging an antirealist aesthetic through his perception of Chinese opera.
Each volume's essay on circulation, for example, consistently asks who and what enabled mobility (whether what moved were performers, performances, texts of various kinds, iconography, curricula, or performance repertoires and techniques), recognizing the networks that carry theatre with them (aristocratic, fraternal, vocational, ecclesiastical, diplomatic, intellectual, and artistic) as well as the aesthetic vocabularies requisite for interpretability. As Patrick Hadley points out, Alexander the Great left performance traditions in his wake from Egypt to Afghanistan. And as Karen Newman notes, performances' traces, such as the triumphal arches that Romans built throughout Europe and North Africa, inspired Renaissance princes' allegorical extravaganzas; here, despite there being no human chain of transmission, performance was revitalized at the same loci.
The world has not always been the size or shape it is now. Thus, to transit dramatic technique from Syracuse (Sicily) to Athens, then to a pan-Hellenic “world” encompassed the navigable world as Greeks knew it; archaeology shows the footprint of this ambit wherein form, language, and comedy must have found—or created—legibility. Some authors ask how circulation runs counter to straightforward ideas of source and influence, or teleological development, for circulation is not uniform across an empire, and forms may not be sufficiently robust to survive distance and time. Material deposits of iconography can be tangible traces of the traffic, whether in the ancient world or the modern. Even so, this Eurocentric idea of space and time can be countered by the cosmologies of other cultures—such as Native Americans'—which embrace nonlinearity and storytelling on distinct grounds, which Jill Carter, Heather Davis-Fisch, and Ric Knowles detail. Thus, consistent with what Laura Doyle calls transhemispheric remappings within “an inter-imperial field and world system,”Footnote 25 theatre traces contact, resistance, adoption, centripetal as well as centrifugal tendencies, and political conquest as well as less totalizing cultural contact.
As Nic Leonhardt recently urged in Theatre Research International, key perspectives come from “searches for and studies of transfers, circulations of models, concepts, relationships, objects, acteurs in different directions, beyond geographical borders, temporally, spatially, imaginatively, etc.” as well as “studies of social connections, channels, and ‘flows’ of capital, trades, information, concepts, images, cultural productions, etc.”Footnote 26 Given that there are challenges and constraints in achieving this, what we can highlight are instances where performance is an indicator of complex modes of association; performance itself is a translocal, national, transnational, or transcultural product in circulation; and performance is the trace that reveals that contact and exchange occurred at all. In such cases, social history simply would not suffice: enactments of culture are what enable cultural history to be in evidence. Additionally, by forgoing biases about elite culture, the mixing of traditions among nonelites gives insight into aesthetic mestizaje. As John K. Thornton points out, “Lower-class people, slaves, and indentured servants rarely consumed imported pottery—they made it themselves,” resulting in a “highly mixed and eclectic set of functional wares.”Footnote 27 More likely to stay in place, less likely to be buffeted by fashion, the performance traditions evolving out of such circumstances were locally patronized until virtuosi were able to travel beyond their demographic group, geographic locus, and patronage culture. They in turn—as mountebanks, commedia players, jazz musicians, political or religious dissidents, or refugees—perpetuated the spiral of émigré cultural generation.
The Performative Turn and Cultural History
It is almost a commonplace that performance has been the category for cultural studies: a quarter century's scholarship on gender identity and display, manifestations of social belonging and cohesion, or public expressions of malaise or discontent could not have happened without calling upon the presentational aesthetics of performance to systematize attention on framing, reiterability, or reception of social critique. Performance's ability to organize and cohere markers of cultural belonging, difference, and dissonance are the hallmarks of contemporary life. A Cultural History of Theatre is a step toward sampling how this works in the historical and recent past from the perspective of performance historians. It offers ways to reconstitute our orientation toward culture per se, not just the place and role of theatre but its centrality to social life, organized interaction, and adaptations to circumstance. This is accomplished without manifestos, for indeed the insights themselves are not radical. Instead, the concatenation of examples showing how the insights permeate our field of inquiry is probably what will make the impact register most firmly: to make the claim, for the first time, that theatre history is a cultural history across all periods is also to claim (without caveats of borrowing, poaching, or adapting) that our field's place is among the humanistic social sciences.
