Introduction: the Performing Society

Abstract

The taxonomies of writing about theatre morph with time. What originated as memory was committed to the page in reviews, diaries or letters; anecdotes were codified in memoirs;¹ the theatre was increasingly remembered through biographies of its stars and histories of its buildings; and only later did the recording of performance become a scholarly activity of theatre history. Recounting that history — the history of theatre history itself — thus inherently poses a problem of methodology as well as creating a falsely precise stratification of generations of scholarship and criticism the history produces.