The Challenge of World Theatre History [1st ed.] 9783030483425, 9783030483432

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xi
Introduction (Steve Tillis)....Pages 1-29
The Case Against World Theatre History (Steve Tillis)....Pages 31-59
The Fallacies of the Standard Western Approach (Steve Tillis)....Pages 61-92
Theatrical Events and Theatre Forms (Steve Tillis)....Pages 93-125
The Geography of World Theatre History (Steve Tillis)....Pages 127-169
The Long View of World Theatre History (Steve Tillis)....Pages 171-206
Continuity and Change in World Theatre History (Steve Tillis)....Pages 207-248
Periodicity in World Theatre History (Steve Tillis)....Pages 249-303
Back Matter ....Pages 305-320

Citation preview

The Challenge of World Theatre History

Steve Tillis

The Challenge of World Theatre History “The present volume is an important landmark in Prof. Tillis’ tireless efforts to make the theatre history curriculum more inclusive. Through a series of eight enlightening chapters, Prof. Tillis introduces the reader to the problems with the Standard Western Approach to theatre history. We learn from these discussions that not only does this approach present a skewed historiography of understanding theatre but that it also limits the scope of our discipline. He subsequently inaugurates avenues that would allow one to circumvent these trappings and create curriculums that truly address the vast breadth of our discipline without resorting to essentialist tactics. Without pontificating Tillis introduces readers to the major historiographical forces to have impacted the evolution of performance and suggests that a truly global curriculum centers around those forces rather than arbitrary geographies and artificial temporal markers. The volume is a must-read for both emerging and established theatre historians, and theatre history teachers. I hope we will take inspiration from Prof. Tillis’ yeoman work and will continue to revise our curriculums to eventually teach a true history of World Theatre.” —Arnab Banerji, PhD, Asst. Prof. of Theatre History, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, USA “As the culture in general and theatre specifically has become increasingly globalized, the traditional Eurocentric and teleological orientation of Western theatre studies has become more and more untenable. In this groundbreaking new work, Steve Tillis impressively confronts this situation, explaining in detail the reasons why the traditional system is no longer satisfactory and presenting a variety of convincing strategies for developing the new global perspective for this discipline which the evolving new order demands.” —Marvin Carlson, Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor of Theatre, Comparative Literature, and Middle Eastern Studies, Graduate Centre, CUNY, USA “Many of us teaching and working in theatre desire an approach that is more global—but lack the tools to really think about world theatre history. In this innovative, and accessible, study Tillis both informs readers about global theatre history and engages critical thinking about the very process of history-making. A must read for anyone teaching or making theatre. Inspirational and necessary!” —Jennifer Goodlander, Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, Indiana University, USA

“This is a book that carefully considers the implications of current research and pedagogy in the problematic and problematically underdeveloped area of theatre studies and theatre history from around the world. Tillis’s careful delineation of terms and basic units of analysis provide a flexible but impeccably organized system in which and against which scholars and artists can develop strategies to conceptualize a wide array of theatrical practices. The welcome clarity of the writing makes this book as suitable for the classroom as the researcher’s reference shelf. The fluency and passion with which Tillis moves around the globe and between the disciplines of history, theatre studies, comparative literature, and human geography challenges the reader to perpetually expand conceptions—not only of theatre history—but of the intellectual duties of a scholar.” —Glen Odom, Reader, University of Roehampton, UK “Tillis challenges the assumptions upon which world theatre history, and indeed theatre history in general, are constructed, in a compelling and clear examination of the preconceptions that have shaped the discipline so far. The different sections on “fallacies,” “geography,” and “periodization,” reveal the politics, trends, and logic of the debate over how to best approach the teaching of world theatre history. The Challenge of World Theatre History makes an important and thoughtful contribution to the field of theatre history studies.” —E.J. Westlake, Professor of Theatre and Professor of English, University of Michigan, USA “Tillis offers an important and provocative historiography of approaches to how theatre history is taught. For years textbooks have paid lip service to presenting a more globalized approach to dramatic literature and theatre history while remaining firmly focused on the west. The Challenge of World Theatre History offers a path forward, moving the center of our theatrical maps, and helping us think about how we think about theatre. It belongs on the shelf of every theatre student and teacher.” —Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., PhD, Professor and Chair, Theatre Arts, Loyola Marymount University, USA

Steve Tillis

The Challenge of World Theatre History

Steve Tillis Saint Mary’s College of California Moraga, CA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-48342-5    ISBN 978-3-030-48343-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48343-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © imaginima/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To my wife, Adrienne Baker

Acknowledgments

This book had its origins in a class I was asked to teach at the University of California, Berkeley: a world theatre survey. As I immediately saw when looking over the syllabi from previous years, the class’s “world” was remarkably constrained, not venturing beyond Europe and the United States. I immediately set about to broaden its horizons, handicapped though I was by my considerable ignorance of what I intended to teach. If I am somewhat less ignorant now, it is only thanks to the scholarship of innumerable others. As I comment in Chap. 2, every historian must, of necessity, rely on others’ work. For a book such as this, which touches on theatre throughout the world as well as a thousand years or more of world history, my reliance on theatre scholars as well as historians has been especially heavy. Although my citations and references indicate the specifics, a few debts are significant enough to justify mentioning them here as well. For my understanding of theatre and theatrical theory, I am especially indebted to Martin Banham, James R. Brandon, Marvin Carlson, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Donald Keene, Samuel L.  Leiter, Colin Mackerras, Thomas Postlewait, and Willmar Sauter, as well as to my former professors David Kahn, Karl Toepfer, Mel Gordon, David McCandless, and Dunbar Ogden. For my sense of history and historiography, my debt is especially to Janet L. Abu-­ Lughod, Jerry H. Bentley, Fernand Braudel, Ross E. Dunn, David Hackett Fischer, Andre Gunder Frank, Marshall G. S. Hodgson, Patrick Manning, William H. McNeill, and Jürgen Osterhammel. I have never met most of

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these people, and some are now dead, but I want to thank them all nonetheless for the inspiration they have given to me and to countless others. Over the years, students at the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and Saint Mary’s College of California have put up with me and my ideas, whether in theatre-history classes or in classes having nothing to do with theatre. I thank them all for their tolerance and good will, and for shaping my thinking in many ways. I also thank Stanford University for a Sabbatical semester during which I first conceived and began planning this book. Early versions of portions of the book were published as “The Long View of World Theatre History,” Theatre History Studies 35 (2016), pp.  95–121; “The Case Against World Theatre History,” New Theatre Quarterly 28.4 (November 2012), pp. 379–91; “Conceptualizing Space: The Geographic Dimension of Worth Theatre History,” Theatre Survey 52.2 (November 2011), pp.  301–27; “Remapping Theatre History,” Theatre Topics 17.1 (March 2007), pp. 1–19; “Theatre History’s ‘View of the World,’” TDR: The Drama Review 48.3 (Autumn 2004), pp. 6–10; and “East, West, and World Theatre,” Asian Theatre Journal 20.1 (Spring 2003), pp.  71–87. My thanks to the University of Alabama Press, the University of Hawaii Press, the MIT Press, the Johns Hopkins University Press, and the Cambridge University Press for permission to use this material. I am also deeply grateful for the assistance of Eileen Srebernik, Jack Heeney, Sarumathy Datchinamurthy, and their colleagues at Palgrave Macmillan, for making possible the publication of this volume. My thanks as well to the anonymous reviewers who made many helpful suggestions. And I am indebted to my friend John McClain, who helped create the maps I use here. Finally, I want to thank my family: my children Sam and Annie Tillis, whose own interests in theatre have provided endless stimulation, and my wife Adrienne Baker, whose love and support have left me with a debt I can never possibly repay, but can at least hope to acknowledge. As I trust will be clear, many people deserve credit for whatever value this book might have. But I alone must take “credit” for the foolishness it contains.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 The Parochial Perspective of Theatre Studies   1 World Theatre History  11 The Challenge  21 A Note on Nomenclature and Orthography  23 Works Cited  26 2 The Case Against World Theatre History 31 Four Practical Arguments  32 Four Ideological Arguments  44 Works Cited  57 3 The Fallacies of the Standard Western Approach 61 The Mainstream of Theatre History  62 The East–West Dichotomy  66 The Progressivist Thesis  76 Works Cited  90 4 Theatrical Events and Theatre Forms 93 A Minimal Unit of Study  94 A Basic Unit of Study 103 Scaling Down and Up from the Theatre Form 110 Works Cited 121

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5 The Geography of World Theatre History127 Geographies of Theatre 130 Theatre Regions 137 Scaling Down and Up from the Region 150 Works Cited 165 6 The Long View of World Theatre History171 The Scales of Time 174 Structures 179 Trends 189 Works Cited 203 7 Continuity and Change in World Theatre History207 The Imperatives of Continuity and Change 208 The Mechanics of Continuity 211 The Mechanics of Change 219 The Means of Change 235 Works Cited 244 8 Periodicity in World Theatre History249 The State of Periodicity 251 Principles for Periodization 256 Waves of Change and a Rising Tide 263 Why These Inflection Points? 269 Works Cited 297 Appendix: Roster of Emergent Theatre Forms305 Index313

List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 8.1

Theatre regions of the world, circa nineteenth and twentieth centuries141 Distribution of Greek and Roman theatres 148 Language families and masquerade traditions of Africa 153 London theatres, circa 1600 158 The emergence of theatre forms since 900 CE 265

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The Parochial Perspective of Theatre Studies The Standard Western Approach In the last years of the sixteenth century, the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci undertook an extraordinary mission to China, bringing with him a global map that incorporated the most recent “discoveries” in the Americas. The Chinese, though curious about the Americas, were appalled by the map because it placed Europe in the middle of the world, thereby relegating China to its right-hand margin. But as the map’s viewers knew, China was the “Middle Kingdom.” Father Ricci, diplomat that he was, quickly drew up a new map that was an equally accurate representation of the world, but that placed China very near the middle. According to Father Ricci, the new map gave the Chinese “a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction”: this was the way the world looked to them (Boorstin 57). It is easy to be amused by the Sinocentrism of the Chinese. Why, after all, must China be placed in the middle of the world map? But let us go back a step to Father Ricci’s original map, which had placed Europe in the middle, as do most world maps we see to this very day.1 Do Europeans (along with the people of its former settler colonies in the Americas and Australasia) also find amusement in this Eurocentrism, or have they grown so accustomed to it that they take for granted that world maps will center themselves on Europe—and not only on the East–West axis, but on the

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Tillis, The Challenge of World Theatre History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48343-2_1

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North–South axis as well, thanks to the misleading magic of the Mercator projection?2 More than four hundred years after Father Ricci’s expedition, we in the field of theatre studies are still heirs to the Eurocentric perspective of his original map, particularly in regard to our pedagogy. Centuries of explorations, immigrations, and all manner of inter-societal relations have still not led us to act upon the simple fact that Europe is not necessarily in the middle of the theatrical world. Indeed, the pedagogy of theatre studies has arguably taken a step backwards from Father Ricci, for our intellectual “maps” of theatre history are, on the whole, not just Eurocentric, but parochial in nature—“parochial,” that is, in the sense defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “relating or confined to a narrow area or region, as if within the borders of one’s own parish; limited or provincial in outlook or scope.” For whereas Father Ricci took pains to draw fair representations of the entire known world, the field of theatre studies still often acts as if vast portions of the world scarcely existed. Historical thinking, like map-making, necessarily requires adopting some perspective or another; it involves focus, selection, and emphasis and will therefore always be to some measure biased and incomplete. But it nonetheless maintains the goal of being at least “convergent on the truth,” as the historian Michael Stanford suggests (131). Philosophers and theorists of history can (and do) justifiably debate what it means to say that something is “true,” but for most practicing historians, convergence on the truth begins, above all, by avoiding demonstrable falsehoods (131). It is inexcusable to maintain a perspective that is known to contradict uncontested facts, but such has been the case in theatre studies. Once upon a time, Europeans might have been oblivious to the theatre of the wider world and might therefore be excused for adopting a perspective that placed everything but their own theatre beyond the margins of their theatre histories. Such narrow-mindedness cannot be justified today, when at least some information about the theatrical traditions of most of the world is readily available. And yet what I call the “Standard Western Approach” still dominates theatre studies. For about a century, this perspective has provided an overarching way to teach and study theatre history, and theatre historians have become deeply habituated to it, to the point that is still often taken as a “given,” however much it has come to diverge from the known facts of theatre history. Classical theatre, Medieval theatre, Renaissance theatre, and so on: The Standard Western Approach lines them up as a child might line up the

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wooden cars of a toy train. Give a pull on the “engine” of the ritual origins of theatre in Greece, and each car follows along, until the shiny red caboose of contemporary spoken theatre rolls merrily into sight.3 The approach will likely seem familiar even to people not conversant with theatre history, because it mirrors the approach taken by the “Western Civ” history courses that were popular in the United States through much of the twentieth century and can still be found to this day. According to the historians Edmund Burke III and Ross E. Dunn, Western Civ courses are “wholly teleological” in that their examination of the past is dominated by their goal of seeking out “an actual chain of cause and effect” that explains the current state of the Westernized world. “This view of history,” they argue, “is a well-ordered ideological construct, but it is no longer convincing or sufficient as a way to explain how the world, or even Europe, has changed over the centuries and millennia. Indeed, it can be seen as an effort to … endow the West with a uniquely privileged status, rather than to situate it alongside its sister civilizations” (523). The same is precisely the case with theatre’s Standard Western Approach, which privileges European theatre (especially its spoken theatre) above all else, thereby glorifying Europe and its theatrical past. The “ideological construct” of the Standard Western Approach is built upon a set of historiographic fallacies, three of which are of special importance. The first is a deep (if sometimes unintentional) ethnocentrism, which assumes that the history (and theatre history) of Europe and its descendants is the only history that matters. Second is a dichotomy assumed to exist between “East” and “West,” which allows for the examination of our history and theatre in opposition to the history and theatre of an undifferentiated Eastern Other, which can then be dismissed from further consideration. The third fallacy can be called “progressivism”; it is the belief (made possible through a highly selective use of historical evidence) that theatre history demonstrates an inevitable rise from “ritual to realism.” I will analyze these fallacies at greater length in Chap. 3. For now, it is enough to recognize that the Standard Western Approach, based on these fallacies, has effectively centralized a particular strand of European theatre while marginalizing (or even erasing) the rich and varied history of theatre in other regions of the world. It is an intellectually indefensible habit that, however innocently it might be held, yields a parochial and misleading view of the world—a view, in other words, that has no particular interest in being “convergent on the truth.”

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Now, a few decades into the twenty-first century, it should not be controversial to call for a theatre history that extends beyond Europe and its former settler colonies. And I am happy to report that over the past generation, there has been at least some movement toward the consideration of non-European theatre. Most of this movement, however, has taken place in the realm of specialized studies and the occasional elective course, even as studies and classes on theatre history, per se, have largely maintained the Standard Western Approach. At the same time as this first, halting, movement away from an exclusive focus on Europe and its colonial descendants, there has been a second movement—this one away from theatre history itself. In this movement, theatre history is treated as little more than a compendium of plays, performance practices, discrete historical moments, and interesting themes, among which one might pick and choose. Some years back, for example, a theatre department with which I am familiar had maintained a three-part historical survey that was divided along rather typical lines into courses on Classical, Medieval–Renaissance–Romantic, and Modern theatre. Although labeled a “world theatre history” sequence, it actually ventured out of Europe only for a short visit to the United States, to the complete exclusion of all other non-European lands: so much for the “world.” In the wake of the “canon wars” of the 1980s, and as one of the many (if occasionally dubious) accomplishments thereof, this survey was overthrown. One might say a blow was rightly struck against the Standard Western Approach, but no integrated treatment of world theatre history was put in its place. Instead, the department offered “Topics in Theatre,” with the specific topic for each class to be determined by the professor. Many of these “topics” classes proved quite successful, but it should come as no surprise that the only time the topics moved outside of Europe was to consider European-style spoken theatre in the Americas and (far less frequently) Africa. In effect, the program implicitly continued to promulgate the view that this form of theatre alone was worthy of study; now, however, this uniquely privileged theatre was taught ahistorically. It is difficult to see that much has been gained here, or at any of the many other institutions that have cast aside their outdated history courses but maintained the Eurocentrism on which they were predicated. Why was this department’s three-part history survey not replaced by a history of world theatre? A professor’s comment is instructive: “We know how to teach Western theatre history—but don’t even know how to think about world theatre history.” This comment can apply to both of the

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movements I have noted, one of which struggles, with limited success, to improve upon the deeply entrenched Standard Western Approach, the other of which abandons history itself, while still being imbued with precisely the perspective it has tried to leave behind. Survey Classes, Textbooks, and Anthologies Erika Fischer-Lichte suggests that “totalising and teleologically oriented constructions of history have long been overcome” (73). It is unclear if she is referring to “constructions” of general history (in which case she would largely be correct) or of theatre history. If she is indeed referring to theatre history, she might be correct about her native Germany, but she is demonstrably wrong in regard to the United States, where the Standard Western Approach still retains its grip on the way that theatre history is taught. We can see this through an examination of college survey courses in theatre history, as well as of the textbooks and play anthologies that are these classes’ prime supports. But I should note, by way of preface, that I am focusing here on academia because it is the primary place where one finds overviews of theatre history on anything larger than a national scale.4 This is not to dismiss national theatre histories or, indeed, histories of theatre on even more local scales. I am merely suggesting that if one wants to see how theatre history as a whole has been construed, one must perforce turn to survey courses, textbooks, and anthologies. This is the third time I have conducted this sort of examination, the first two having been published in 2003 and 2007 (Tillis, “East” and “Remapping”). Direct comparisons between these three studies are not always possible, owing to some differences in methodology, but essential points are reasonably clear. In my most recent look at survey courses, I examined the course catalogues of one hundred of the top five hundred colleges and universities in the United States, as listed in the Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings 2018.5 Of these hundred schools, seventy-two offered a major in theatre. This number is roughly the same as before, when 73% (in 2003) and 68% (in 2007) of the schools I looked at offered a theatre major. It seems then, that theatre is holding relatively steady as a discipline. The same cannot be said, however, about the scholarly requirements for fulfilling the major. Of the seventy-two schools offering a major, 61% required that their majors take a two-or-three semester survey of

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theatre history. Back in 2007, 87% required such a sequence. Unfortunately, I do not have a comparable percentage for 2003, but it seems clear that there has been a retreat from requiring a sequence of theatre-history classes. I should note that an additional 8% of schools with majors offer a full theatre history survey but do not require that their majors take all two or three semesters. Even overlooking this lack of requirement, that means that only 69% have a full sequence on the books. And yet there is mildly encouraging news concerning the content of the theatre history surveys. My most recent look at survey courses shows that 39% include some content from Asia and/or Africa; in 2003 and 2007, by contrast, I found about 25% and 28% of such classes having such content. Three major caveats are necessary at this point. First, course descriptions can be quite laconic, and their failure to mention Asian or African theatre does not necessarily signal a strictly Euro-American focus. Second, what actually happens in a course can differ from what appears in its catalogue description. Third (and most importantly), the amount of attention devoted to Asian and African theatre in the course descriptions is quite variable. Sometimes the impression is that this content might be fully integrated into the survey (“examines theatre around the globe”), while at other times it seems merely to be tacked on (“non-Western theatre will also be considered”) to a history that follows the Standard Western Approach. Still, it is reasonable to conclude that while the majority of theatre departments remain quite satisfied with survey classes that pay little or no attention to theatre beyond Euro-America, a growing minority are offering at least token recognition of the larger world. I also examined eight currently available theatre history textbooks that claim by title to treat of “theatre history” as a whole. As with the survey courses, these texts showed a modest improvement in coverage of the world beyond Europe and its former settler colonies, albeit while almost always maintaining the Standard Western Approach. The text most egregiously bound to that approach is Hartnoll and Brater’s The Theatre: A Concise History, 4th ed. (2012). Its thirteen chapters are, one might say, a textbook example of it: while the text offers very brief and occasional comments on theatre in China, India, and Japan, it never engages with the theatre history of any of those lands. I should add, though, that even this least global of textbooks is not guilty of the ugliness sometimes found in earlier (and thankfully out of print) texts. The short section on Chinese theatre in the textbook by George Freedley and John Reeves, for example, was entitled “Incomprehensible China” (Carlson 151). Textbook authors

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Kenneth Macgowan and William Melnitz, meanwhile, capped off their brief remarks on Chinese theatre by writing, “Obviously, this is all very odd, outlandish, and absurd,” continuing, “it seems far too remote from our own theatre for any Westerner to accept and enjoy” (quoted in Sorgenfrei 256). Six other textbooks occupy what amounts to the present-day middle ground, hewing closely to the Standard Western Approach while finding room for short stand-alone accounts of theatre in Asia and/or Africa. Not counting the Introduction, the seventeen chapters of Watson and McKernie’s A Cultural History of Theatre (1993) include a pair of chapters on “traditional theatre” in Japan and China, while the chapters on twentieth-century theatre make brief mention of developments beyond Europe and the United States. Similarly, the thirteen chapters of John Russell Brown’s Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre (2001) include stand-alone chapters on “Beginnings of Theatre in Africa and the Americas,” and on “Oriental Theatres.” In total, about 10% of each book is devoted to this material. Patterson and Donohue’s Concise History of Theatre (2014) is suggestive of the increasing attention paid to Asian and African theatre, with two chapters devoted to the former, and another to the latter; there are also some non-Euro-American portions of the another chapter (concerning the “globalization of theatre”). The book ends up devoting roughly 20% of its text to theatre in Asia and Africa, but most of this remains separated from the fully conventional Eurocentric account. Somewhat more impressively, Mark Pizzato’s Mapping Global Theatre Histories (2019) allots about a quarter of its text to Asia and Africa, but this total is heavily weighted toward the chapter on “global, postcolonial theatre.” The earlier chapter on “traditional forms of Asian theatre” is quite limited: after providing extensive timelines, its accounts of theatre history in Japan and China run to less than four pages of text each. I need scarcely add that this material is entirely removed from the historical spine of the book, which follows the Standard Western Approach. Wilson and Goldfarb’s Living Theatre: A History, 7th ed. (2018), is one of the most frequently used textbooks. Aside from its introductory section, it has fifteen chapters, one of which is devoted to “early theatres in Asia”; two other chapters offer a few additional pages to theatre beyond Europe and the Americas, yielding a total of some 45 pages out of almost 600 pages: roughly 7%. This is, however, a slight improvement over the 5% of the same text’s second edition, from 1994. Brockett and Hildy’s History of the Theatre, 10th ed. (2008), meanwhile, is no less popular, and

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no less conventional. It merely appends one chapter on Asia and another on Africa to its twenty-four chapters (not counting the introductory first chapter) relating the standard account.6 It should be noted, though, that Brockett and Hildy have gone to some lengths to incorporate Latin American theatre into four of the chapters. This is admirable, if not especially challenging, as the Latin American theatre they discuss largely follows European models. At this point, one must certainly agree with Marvin Carlson when he writes: “An almost invariable and highly restricted narrative of so-called world theatre … may still be found in the majority of textbooks” (149). In the six textbooks just discussed, the locations of the chapter or two on Asian and African theatre might vary, but their exclusion from the main line of the histories presented is painfully evident. The eighth of the currently available, full-length textbooks stands out by attempting to offer a more integrated account of world theatre history. Theatre Histories has recently undergone a change in authorship, with Tobin Nellhaus being credited as the general editor for the third edition (2016). Still, this edition follows the first two in seeking to provide an integrated historical account, to a degree otherwise unseen in other theatre history texts. It is surprising, therefore, to note that only 16% of its 121 sections (not counting the general introduction or chapter introductions and summaries) are specifically devoted to either Asian, African, Latin American, or “global” theatre—a similar percentage to the text’s earlier editions.7 As Carlson comments regarding the second of those editions, “Spatially, both in terms of content and geography, this new ‘world theatre’ text is not so radically different from its predecessors as it claims” (154). After expressing his admiration for the book, which “makes the most serious attempt so far to deal seriously with global theatre history,” he adds that its “shortcomings … can be largely traced to its reluctance to shift from traditional paradigms in both subject matter and presentational mode” (155). The changes made for the third edition do not reduce the cogency of Carlson’s criticism: the history presented by this textbook is certainly less Eurocentric than that of other texts, but it is still built upon the “traditional paradigm” of the Standard Western Approach. Anthologies present a comparable picture. They are noticeably less Eurocentric than I found in my previous examinations, but the great predominance of their plays continues to come from Europe and the United States. Four anthologies are appreciably more comprehensive than the rest, not only in the number of included plays, but also in their

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often-copious amounts of supplementary material. Of these anthologies, Jacobus’s Bedford Introduction to Drama, 7th ed. (2013), is the most heavily Euro-American, presenting fifty-seven plays, with but a single play from Japan and two from sub-Saharan Africa. Slightly better is Gainer et al.’s Norton Anthology of Drama, 3rd ed. (2017), which contains sixty-­ six plays, including one each from India, China, Japan, Egypt, sub-­Saharan Africa, and Latin America; this, however, is very essence of tokenism. Worthen’s Wadsworth Anthology of Drama, 6th ed. (2011), clearly does better with its sixty-five plays, two of which come from Japan, one each from China and India, four from sub-Saharan Africa, and three from Latin America (including the Caribbean); thus, about 17% of the plays are from outside Europe and the United States. Finally, we have Greenwald at al.’s Longman Anthology of Drama and Theatre: A Global Perspective, rev. 1st ed. (2004), whose sixty-one plays include three from Japan, two each from India and China, three from Africa, and six from Latin America (again, including Caribbean). The hopes raised by the anthology’s subtitle are at least partially justified, with these plays accounting for 26% of the total. Still it is worth observing that the anthology’s four plays from medieval Europe outnumber the total for the entire theatre histories of either Japan, or India, or China. The shorter versions available for some of the aforementioned anthologies maintain roughly the same proportions as their longer siblings, while other anthologies fail to rise even to that level. For example, Brockett and Ball’s Plays for the Theatre, 11th ed. (2014), contains fifteen plays, including one from Japan and one from Africa. Similarly, Wilson and Goldfarb’s Anthology of Living Theatre, 3rd ed. (2008), contains eighteen plays, one of which is from Japan. Wainscott and Fletcher’s Plays Onstage: An Anthology (2006) offers one Japanese and one African play among its twenty-one plays. These three anthologies, remarkably, provide the highest proportions of plays from beyond Europe and the United States to be found in the various shorter anthologies, so there is nothing to be gained by detailing the others. The overall picture we see in the anthologies is clear enough and is not fundamentally changed by the admixture of a few plays from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. They are primarily concerned with offering their readers a sequence of plays illustrative of the Standard Western Approach to theatre history. The attitude toward theatre beyond Europe and the United States, as seen in survey classes, textbooks, and anthologies can be illuminated by their treatment of theatre in China. Back in 1955, a historian

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pleaded that China “not be regarded as outside the mainstream of human history”; by 1991, another could note with satisfaction that no historian would now question China’s place within the mainstream (Barraclough, 124). Three decades later, can theatre historians make the same claim? Only two of the multi-semester theatre surveys I looked at even mention China or its plays; the most global of the textbooks I examined, Theatre Histories, devotes only three of its 121 nonintroductory sections to China; and the most plays from China in any anthology I examined is the two in The Longman Anthology. There are, to be sure, elective classes that deal with Chinese theatre (often as part of an omnibus Asian theatre course) at about one-third of the theatre departments I surveyed; but the point is that these classes are electives, and that the entire existence of Chinese theatre is largely construed to be, at best, an optional bit of learning. Certainly the past fifty years or so have seen a growing literature of scholarly studies and anthologies devoted to Chinese theatre, but these have apparently failed to make a broad impression on how theatre history as a whole is studied and taught. Carlson writes, “By the middle 1980s, theatre studies, with much more justification than thirty years before, regarded itself as a global discipline. Certainly great strides had been made in that direction, but very significant areas, such as the entire Arab world from Morocco to Indonesia, still remained outside the spatial awareness of the discipline as the new century opened” (153). All true—especially the lack of engagement with what might better be called Islamic theatre—and yet Carlson is, if anything, over-optimistic about the state of theatre studies, for even today a theatre as important as China’s remains largely “outside the spatial awareness of the discipline.” I mentioned earlier a professor who commented that “we don’t even know how to think about world theatre history.” This is essentially a problem of historiography—and it is the central issue of this book. Historiography might seem an abstract concern, but it underlies the histories that theatre scholars write and teach, and that students all-too-often uncritically absorb from their classes, textbooks, and anthologies. Scholars and students must, perforce, make use of some perspective or another when studying theatre history, but the Standard Western Approach that is still generally followed insensibly shapes their understanding of the subject, resulting in a parochialism that is untenable in the twenty-first century.

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I propose that the Standard Western Approach must be abandoned, but that we not give up on theatre history itself. We must forego ethnocentrism, cultural stereotyping, and teleological metanarratives to reach beyond parochialism, but not in favor of dehistoricizing theatre history. I propose, rather, that we must establish a conceptual framework that allows for the study of world theatre history. To be clear, I am not proposing that world theatre history should (or ever could) replace more localized studies of theatre history. But however much we might identify with one or another national, cultural, ethnic, or linguistic tradition, we are also inescapably members of the human race, living in an age of unprecedented global intercourse. William H. McNeill, the unofficial dean of world historians, contends that, in our contemporary age, “unless historians seek actively and energetically to construct a creditable portrait of the human past on a global scale, we will have failed to perform our professional function adequately” (95). For theatre historians, mutatis mutandis.

World Theatre History “World History” A preliminary sense of the term “world theatre history” is necessary here to avoid potential confusion, especially since it might otherwise be conflated with a “multicultural theatre history” that examines the range of theatre in one or another place, or with an “intercultural theatre history” that focuses exclusively on theatrical sharing between two or more places. World theatre history certainly includes both of these, but much more as well. “World theatre history,” however, has not really been theorized, so it will be best to speak first of “world history” in general.8 Perhaps the most important thing to note is that world historians themselves debate what “world history” means, as well as how it might best be conducted. The historian Sebastian Conrad, in a comprehensive overview, writes of “three varieties” of what he terms “global history” research. Although the relationship between the terms “global” and “world” is itself debated (an issue I will address shortly), Conrad’s typology of these varieties indicates the range of world/global history writing. The first of the varieties is “global history as the history of everything” (6), which itself comes in two distinct “strategies.” One “is what we could call the all-in version of global history,” as “seen in works of large-scale

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synthesis that attempt to capture global reality in a specific period,” such as the nineteenth century. This strategy is sometimes temporally expanded to account for whole millennia or even all of history; conversely, it can be temporally contracted to a single year. But “whatever the [temporal] scale, the general mode is identical: the ‘global’ here refers to planetary comprehensiveness” to the greatest possible degree. The other “history of everything” strategy seeks “to trace a particular idea or historical formation through the ages and across the planet,” such as a history of cotton or salt or warfare (7). The second variety of world/global history examines the history of “exchange and connections” and follows from “the general insight that no society, nation, or civilization exists in isolation.” Following from this insight, “the interconnectedness of the world, which can be traced back centuries, is the starting point for global historical research” of this kind. For such histories, “the reach of the connections and networks may vary and does not have to be planetary”: limited topics such as “trade in the Mediterranean,” “chain migrations between China and Singapore,” and “diplomatic missions to the Vatican” would be typical of this second variety, as would more general histories of intercultural exchange (9). Finally, the third variety (which is strongly favored by Conrad) is “narrower” than the second in that “it presumes, and explicitly reflects on, some form of global integration. At its core are patterns of exchange that were regular and sustained, and thus able to shape societies in profound ways” (9). With this variety of history-writing, “the global becomes the ultimate frame of reference for any understanding of the past” (10). Its aim “is not to write a total history of the planet.” It is, rather, “a matter of writing of demarcated (i.e., non-‘global’) spaces, but with an awareness of global connections and structural conditions”; recent global studies of this variety often limit themselves to “two or three locations,” which are set in their shared global context (12). Because world/global history can be (and has been) written in all three of these varieties, there is no reason to define any one of them as the exclusive way to conceive of such history. Each of them, likewise, would be appropriate for world theatre history. To bring the three varieties of history together in single phrase, I suggest that world theatre history strives for a more or less integrated view of theatre history in two or more regions of the world, or in a given region within the context of the world itself. “More or less” is no doubt a weasel phrase, but what I am suggesting is that simply placing accounts of, say, theatre history in India and China

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within the covers of a single book is not quite world theatre history. To speak of this pairing as world theatre history, one would need to show some sort of interaction or relationship between them, even if just to show how they were impacted by their shared global (or, more likely, Eurasian) context. And “context,” in the sense I use it (following Conrad), must mean more than a handful of generalized comments on the socio-political “background” of some particular time. The goal, rather, is to understand “how local events are … shaped by a global context that can be understood structurally or even systemically” (11), with attention paid precisely to  how that context serves to integrate the theatre history under examination. The two aspects of world history that have received the most attention from theatre scholars (among many others) are postcolonialism and interculturalism, both of which are by definition concerned with interactions between societies that are generally based in different regions of the world. These are, however, only two of the many possible areas of study. And curiously, both have exhibited an implicit Eurocentrism. According to an excellent overview provided by Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert, while “postcolonial theatre” has occasionally been used to refer to performance “expressing any kind of resistance politics, particularly concerning race, class, and/or gender oppression, the term more often refers to [theatre that has] emerged from cultures subjected to Western imperialism” (35). Note here the specification of Western imperialism. Europeans were obviously neither the first nor the only imperialists in human history, but postcolonial theatre studies have shown little interest in examining the effects of non-European imperialism, such as the Islamic conquests in northern India and the Ottoman Turkish conquests around the Mediterranean and in Southwest Asia, both of which had a deep impact on the theatre of the conquered lands. Regarding interculturalism, meanwhile, Lo and Gilbert recognize that “as it has been theorized and documented thus far, [it] is already overdetermined by the West,” with the prevailing concern having been “encounters between the West and ‘the rest’” (37, 32). Productions such as Peter Brook’s famous (or infamous) Mahabharata (first staged in 1985) have received extensive discussion; the reverse influence of Europe on non-European theatre (such as the Yoruba popular theatre), or of non-­ European regions upon each other (such as South Asia and East Asia upon Southeast Asia) have received relatively little attention. Even postcolonial and intercultural studies, in brief, are susceptible to a more thorough globalization.

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It might also be worth observing here that my understanding of “world theatre” is not analogous to the “world literature” of literary studies. David Damrosch notes that sometimes such literature has been defined in terms of “classics” or “masterpieces” or “windows on the world” (15). He prefers to define world literature as “a subset of the plenum literature” that “encompass[es] all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language” (4). This definition has itself come under attack for many reasons. Pheng Cheah, for example, argues that “the analogy between world literature and the circulation of commodities in a global market unwittingly has the … effect of diminishing literature’s worldly force” (28). Emily Apter, for her part, “harbor[s] serious reservations about the tendency of World Literature toward reflexive endorsement of cultural equivalence and sustainability, or toward the celebration of nationally and ethnically branded ‘differences’ that have been niche-marketed as commercialized ‘identities’” (2). I have no intention of stepping into these debates, but will say simply that my understanding of “world theatre” does not presume to determine what might be a masterpiece, classic, or “window on the world”; nor does it define itself as a subset of interculturally circulating plays or theatre forms; nor as any other subset, for that matter. The “world theatre” that is the subject of this book is theatre itself, in all its global variety. “World theatre history” seeks to analyze that variety in terms of the relationships (of any sort) between two or more regions, or any single region within the context of the world itself. “World,” “Theatre,” and “History” It is no doubt at least a bit pedantic to give detailed explanations of the major words in a book’s title, especially when they are perfectly familiar. And yet such words can often be quite contentious, so clarity requires at least brief explanations of how I will be using them. First (as I have already noted), historians debate the nuances of meaning that might distinguish world history from global history. According to the historian Bruce Mazlish, “The valence of the two terms is very different,” and he sees global history as a particular subset of world history: “Global history, when not confused with world history, seeks to inquire into one strand of the latter that can be addressed under the heading globalization. Where world history may take all of the past for its subject, global history restricts its attention to the theme of globalization.” And

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although this theme can be traced back for millennia, “it becomes a matter of sustained consciousness only sometime in the second half of the twentieth century” (37). Conrad, meanwhile, rather dismissively writes of “world history” as being “the global history of earlier decades” (14), implying that it is now out of date. But this chronological distinction is dubious, given that self-­ proclaimed world historians as well as self-proclaimed global historians have written (and continue to write) histories in each of the three varieties of “global history” that Conrad identifies. “Global history” is certainly the newer term, but that is not a meaningful basis for distinguishing between the two.9 Indeed, quite a few historians use the terms interchangeably, a point made clear by Jürgen Osterhammel, who subtitles his study of the nineteenth century “a global history,” but begins it by writing about the importance of “world history” and then goes on to casually intermix the two terms, to the point of employing both in the course of a single sentence (xv, xii). For my part, I have chosen to write of “world” theatre history because it is the more established (and possibly the more capacious, per Mazlish) of the two terms. But given the awkwardness of using “world” as an adjective—a “worldly” perspective being rather different than “the perspective of the world”—I will not hesitate also to refer to a “global” perspective.10 Second, and no less contentious, are the different meanings that have been given to the word theatre, particularly regarding its relationship to drama. Without rehearsing the various debates, let me say that this book is concerned with dramatic theatre.11 For the sake of convenience I will usually refer to this more simply as theatre, but I recognize that, strictly speaking, dramatic theatre is a subset of theatre, per se, being one of many kinds of theatrical performance. I will make clear those occasions on which I am referring to theatre in the broader sense. As I see it, that broader field (i.e., of theatre in all its variety) consists of what the folklorist Richard Bauman calls “aesthetically marked and heightened” performance presented for a live audience (41); in all such theatre there is a “frame” (as the sociologist Erving Goffman puts it) that “transforms an individual into a stage performer who may be ‘looked at’ and ‘looked to’ by persons in the ‘audience’ role” (124). All theatre performance is, in effect, an intentional artistic exchange between performers and audiences; as Willmar Sauter observes, “Neither performers nor spectators would gather in the theatre were it not for the presence of the other” (173). The implication of this observation is that while it is

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obviously important to note how the performers create their shows, it is no less important to recognize that their audiences must make sense of those creations according to the relevant set of codes and conventions. This is a broad understanding of theatre in that it includes performances of “pure” music (e.g., street-corner busking and orchestral performances), “pure” dance (e.g., pole dancing and some modern dance), circus and variety acts (e.g., jugglers and magicians), athletic displays (e.g., martial arts demonstrations), and at least some ritual (e.g., the Catholic Mass), as well as dramatic theatre. It is not so broad, however, as to include such things as sporting events (which are primarily competitions, not artistic exchanges, however much beauty onlookers might find in their athleticism) or car wrecks (in which there is no performer-audience frame between the unfortunate participants and the happenstance onlookers). The breadth of this understanding of theatre is useful because dramatic theatre not only avails itself of other manners of theatre (e.g., music, dance, tumbling, and martial arts), but is often presented along with non-­ dramatic theatrical activities (e.g., the ubiquity of variety-type shows that include, but are not limited to, dramatic theatre). Dramatic theatre, as with all other manner of theatre, has the characteristics of “aesthetically marked and heightened” performance and the co-­ presence of performers and audiences who share the frame of intentional performance. It has two additional characteristics, however, which together distinguish it from non-dramatic theatre. First is the pretense of the performers (or, in some cases, the single performer) that they are presenting characters in a story that is not really occurring at the time and place of the performance; second is the willing assent of the audience to participate in this pretense. In other words, dramatic theatre requires that the performers and audience alike share a frame of what can colloquially be called “make-believe” or “pretend.” Dramatic theatre does not exist without this shared frame. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet suggest that when observers are confronted with the presentation of certain actions, “there are only two possible responses” (233). They can either take those actions as reality and respond accordingly, or “enter into the game, understanding that what can be seen on the stage belongs not to the plane of reality, but to what must be defined as the plane of theatrical illusion. A consciousness of the fiction is essential to the dramatic spectacle; it seems to be both its condition and its product” (244).

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To misunderstand this frame of make-believe is to misunderstand the theatrical event itself. Martin Esslin recounts the perhaps apocryphal tale of the eighteenth-century peasant whose first visit to the theatre brought him to see Shakespeare’s Richard III. At the climax of the play, when Richard cried out, “My kingdom for a horse,” this peasant rushed through the audience to offer the beleaguered king his own nag. The actor playing Richard responded, “Come up yourself, an ass will do!” (90–91). It is worth noting, though, that the frame of make-believe does not exist for its own sake, but is inevitably pressed into service for one or more purposeful activities, including entertainment, ritual, devotion, commemoration, and social commentary (which itself might include education and social activism), any of which might be combined in given show. I want here briefly to expand on the relationship between dramatic theatre and ritual, as this has long been a debated issue when it comes to definitions. For generations, a rather amorphous line was drawn between the two, with theatre being seen as somehow having evolved out of ritual—a point to which I will return in Chap. 3. Richard Schechner prefers to see an “efficacy-entertainment dyad,” with efficacy mostly associated with ritual, entertainment mostly with theatre. But according to Schechner, “the basic polarity is between efficacy and entertainment, not ritual and theatre. Whether one calls a specific performance ‘ritual’ or ‘theatre’ depends mostly on function and context” (79–80). This recognition that ritual and theatre are not distinct entities is worthwhile, but the “polarity” between efficacy and entertainment, even when conceptualized as a “continuum” between these two poles (79), is less convincing. Surely efficacious action can be entertaining, just as entertainment can serve any number of efficacious purposes. A more convincing way to make sense of the relationship between ritual and theatre is offered by Eli Rozik, who argues that ritual and dramatic theatre “are entities on different ontological levels.” Rozik sees ritual as “a mode of action” reflecting “intentions and purposes,” whereas theatre is “a kind of medium” that “can be employed for any sort of action,” including (but not at all limited to) ritual (xi). By this view, some rituals might choose to employ the medium of theatre (just as they might choose to employ media such as speech, music, and dance), while other rituals might not: one needs to examine the rituals themselves to see what media they use. This view allows us to see that the medium of theatre can be used for a variety of different modes of action, including, but obviously not limited to, ritual; it undercuts not only claims that theatre evolved out of ritual, but Schechner’s polarized dyad as well.

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I also want to try here to forestall the understandable concern that my sense of dramatic theatre might in some way entail the imposition of a Eurocentric idea upon the rest of the world. As Bharata (the early theorist of Sanskrit theatre) has the god Brahma say, “The drama as I have devised, is a mimicry of actions and conducts of people, which is rich in various emotions, and which depicts different situations” (quoted in Odom 39). According to Zeami (the co-founder and earliest theorist of nō), “Role Playing … forms the fundamental basis of our art”; it involves “an imitation, in every particular, with nothing left out,” though “depending on the circumstances, one must know how to vary the degree of imitation involved” (10). Chinese theatre has no theorist of quite the stature of Bharata or Zeami, but the great sixteenth-century playwright Tang Xianzu commented that “theater creates heaven and earth, ghosts and deities. Theater can exhaust ten thousand possibilities of human characters and present a thousand changes in human history. Several actors on a stage … may show spectators the illusion of people a thousand years from now or scenes from any dream”; Tang’s friend, the scholar Wang Jide, meanwhile, observed that “drama imitates and describes events and situations in life” (quoted in Fei 55, 62). Sub-Saharan Africa, finally, has been something of an intellectual wrestling-match regarding even the existence of pre-­ colonial dramatic theatre. Osita Okagbue refers to the doubting scholars as “evolutionists,” who see in pre-colonial performance a “primitivity” that had not yet evolved from ritual into true dramatic theatre. He speaks of other scholars as “relativists” who, in their determination to oppose the evolutionists, broaden the definition of “drama” to such an extent that virtually “every performance, every theatre event, has to be drama.” Okagbue argues that neither extreme is called for. Even though pre-­ colonial African theatre did have not the written texts and formal stages that the evolutionists thought necessary for true dramatic theatre, Okagbue notes that in forms such as the kotè-tlon of the Bamana people, and the Ekong comic plays of the Ibibio, as in certain masquerade plays throughout West Africa, “drama is well developed, and there is nothing ‘quasi’ or ‘pre-drama’ about them.” But Okagbue also suggests that such theatre should not be subsumed into a vast undifferentiated mass of African performance; the relativists failed “to make any distinctions between the terms ‘drama,’ ‘theatre,’ and ‘performance’” (4–5). The fullness of theatre in Africa, in brief, has included both dramatic and non-­ dramatic theatre—which is precisely the same as can be said for theatrical performance everywhere.

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The sense of dramatic theatre I am proposing has certain consequences. It does not privilege literature, as does much of the scholarly tradition. I will further address this point in Chap. 3, but here it should be sufficient to note that my sense of dramatic theatre takes in the non-literary commedia dell’arte as well as European spoken theatre; it also recognizes that even within the European tradition, dramatic theatre is broad enough to include forms such as the English masque, ballet, opera, Passion plays, Punch-and-Judy shows, melodrama, panto, and zarzuela. And as the preceding paragraph suggests, this understanding of dramatic theatre also takes in innumerable theatre forms from all around the world. A given form of dramatic theatre might emphasize a written, orally transmitted, or improvised text; it might employ dialogue, oratory, music, song, or dance in any combination; it might be enacted by performers who carry their roles individually, or carry multiple roles, or share particular roles between them, or who wear masks or enact their role(s) through puppets; it might involve any manner of props, stagecraft and scenography, or simply be played on the bare ground. But despite dramatic theatre’s near-infinite variety, all of its forms have in common the basic elements of a frame of make-believe shared by the co-present performers and their audience.12 Another consequence of this understanding of dramatic theatre is that it somewhat effaces the line between it and storytelling. This line is usually predicated on the Aristotelian idea that while dramatic theatre relies on mimesis (usually translated as “imitation” or “representation”), epic literature (and by extension, storytelling) relies on narration. Role-playing, however, is no less common in storytelling than is the use of narration in dramatic theatre. Storytellers regularly take on the voices of characters, whom they physically enact through gesture and even movement through space. Among American Indians, for example, storytellers make use of “modified vocal features … carefully planned gestures, exaggerated emphasis, and the like, [to] vivify their presentations.” In the words of Yellowman, a Navajo story-teller, “Tales should not be viewed as narratives [in the common sense of the word] but as dramatic presentations performed within certain cultural contexts for moral and philosophical reasons” (quoted in Huntsman 88). Conversely, many forms of theatre make regular use of narration, perhaps none more extensively than bunraku, in which the narrator sits visibly to the side of the stage and delivers not only narration, per se, but all of the play’s dialogue, even as the puppets visually represent the characters who “speak” the dialogue. It is perhaps best to say that instead of there being any line between theatre and

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storytelling, the two media overlap, with many kinds of performance partaking (to whatever degree) of both. While I expect that much of what I suggest in the following pages will be applicable to other kinds of theatre performance, my focus will be on dramatic theatre. This is not because I see it as superior, or more advanced, or whatever, but because it is, on its face, a particularly strange activity. It is relatively easy to understand why people like to perform and to watch feats of talent and artistry, as in pure dance, music, circus acts, or whatever. It is less easy to understand the appeal of what performers and audience alike recognize to be what are, in effect, lies. The anthropologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides observe that while there are many aspects of human behavior that “are puzzling anomalies from an evolutionary perspective … chief among these are the human attraction to fictional experience (in all media and genres)” (7). The nub of the problem is that “organisms should have an appetite for obtaining accurate information, and the distinction between true information or false information should be important in determining whether the information is absorbed or disregarded”; and yet humans demonstrably desire and become deeply immersed in the “‘false information’ of stories, plays, movies, and so on” (12). But despite the apparent disadvantages of enjoying falsehoods being presented as if they were real (in however stylized a manner that “reality” might be enacted), anthropologists see dramatic theatre as a universal human behavior (D. Brown 104). Dramatic theatre, in brief, is particularly worthy of examination if only because of its bizarre hold on the human imagination. The third word of this book’s title that requires at least brief discussion is history. Thomas Postlewait teases out fourteen “meanings and applications” for this deceptively simple word, the most significant of which are the first and fourth: history as “the actual events that occurred” in the past (“history-as-event”), and history as “the report that a historian prepares” (“history-as-account”) (3). To speak of a “history book” is to speak of a book that is about history while also being a history. There is no simple way to reduce the complexity of the word, but fortunately, the appropriate way to understand it is usually clear from the context in which it is used. In this book, I am primarily concerned with history-as-account: How might theatre historians most usefully “report” on the “actual events” that have occurred in theatres around the world? I have already suggested that history writing involves perspective, focus, selection, and emphasis. It is, however carefully a historian uses his or her

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sources, an act of imagination that aims to give an accurate and meaningful, if inherently incomplete, account of certain past events. But as McNeill observes, “Eternal truth in history is unattainable because the historian himself shapes whatever it is that he finds out about the past, whether he wants to or not” (162). One cannot get outside of one’s self, as it were, to view historical data without implicit reference to one’s own time and place. Even in the so-called “hard” sciences, the impossibility of absolute objectivity is broadly recognized. Stephen J. Gould, an evolutionary biologist, says that “biases, preferences, social values, and psychological attitudes all play a strong role in the process of discovery”: what one discovers is conditioned by what one is looking for and what one is capable of seeing. This does not mean that there is no such thing as an empirical fact, but as Gould says, “Science, as actually practiced, is a complex dialogue between data and preconceptions” (244). The same applies to the practice of historians. R. G. Collingwood suggests that the work of the historian is remarkably similar to that of the novelist (244–45), a suggestion taken to the logical extreme by Hayden White, who virtually dissolves the boundary between history-as-account and fiction (23). This goes too far, if only for the simple reason that (contrary to historians) novelists have no responsibility to their sources and make no claim to being faithful to facts. Yet it is valid to say that, like novelists, historians trade in narratives that they themselves construct and that are, perforce, intrinsically subjective to at least a certain degree. This does not justify abandoning history-as-account, for there was a past, and there will always be a need to account for it. At best, though, the most that “history-as-account” can hope to accomplish is an honest approximation of certain aspects of “history-as-event.”

The Challenge There is one last important word from the title of this book to be discussed: In what ways does world theatre history present a challenge? I see it as a dual challenge. The first challenge is to convince theatre historians (and through them, their readers and students) that it is no longer sufficient to maintain the parochialism of a perspective that sees the main line of theatre history as running through Europe and its former colonies, with the rest of the world relegated to the status of an afterthought or curiosity. Chapters 2 and 3 of this book seek to meet this challenge, first by confronting possible objections to accounts of world theatre history, then by

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examining in detail the three main fallacies on which the Standard Western Approach is predicated. The second, and more complex, challenge is to help develop ways in which one might actually conduct world theatre history, as opposed to simply giving up on trying to make sense of it. Fortunately, this task need not be started from scratch, for there are useful methodologies to be found in the field of world history, as well as in related fields such as geography and sociology. These will all need to be adjusted to fit the particulars of theatre history, but they can at least provide inspiration and guidance. Chapters 4 through 8 seek to develop some of these methodologies. I begin, in Chap. 4, by considering the units of study appropriate to world theatre history, then move on, in Chap. 5, to the issue of dealing with world theatre’s geographic dimension. Chapters 6 through 8 deal with its temporal dimension. In Chap. 6, I introduce the concept of using variable time-scales, in particular what I call the “long view,” which can reveal aspects of theatre history that might otherwise go unnoticed. Chapter 7 turns to the critical issue of how continuity and change operate in theatre history. Finally, Chap. 8 examines the question of periodicity and offers a new way to conceptualize the most consequential times of change in world theatre history; it then concludes by making use of the methodologies previously discussed to offer an account of the historical forces that might have brought about those major turning points. In the end, the challenge facing theatre studies is different in a few critical respects from that which faced Matteo Ricci when he undertook his mapmaking for the Chinese. His challenge was to make a straightforward adjustment to a Eurocentric map, transforming it into a Sinocentric one. Theatre studies must not only break away from its habitual Eurocentrism, but also from a parochialism that pays little regard to theatre anywhere beyond Europe and its former settler colonies. Moreover, theatre studies must map the world in a way that does not, a priori, place anywhere in particular at its center; it must identify what theatrical borders might exist, but also attend to the multiple ways in which theatre everywhere is connected in larger, even global, web. It must also come up with new ways of mapping theatre’s chronology—a burden with which Father Ricci was blessedly unconcerned—because the temporal map of theatre studies is no less Eurocentric than its spatial map. The “borders” of its periods must be reconceived to account as best as possible for theatre around the world; but at the same time, this account must remain aware of the frequency and ease with which those temporal borders are transgressed. Despite its

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differences from the challenge faced by Father Ricci, however, I fancy that he would be sympathetic to the challenge facing theatre studies. The inherited way of looking at the world is patently insufficient for the current occasion, and to refuse the challenge of drawing a new map would be inherently self-defeating. The only option is to start drafting anew.

A Note on Nomenclature and Orthography Any book discussing theatre from around the world faces an inevitable problem: How should one refer to, and spell, the various names one encounters? I will admit immediately that there is no satisfactory solution. A Chinese proverb has it that “the beginning of wisdom is in calling things by their right names,” but the problem is precisely that many theatrical “things” have multiple “right” names. A fine example is the form of theatre known as Peking opera/theatre/ drama, or Beijing opera/theatre/drama, or Capital opera/theatre/ drama, or National opera/theatre/drama, which might also be called (according to the pinyin system of transliteration) jingju, or jingxi, or pingju, or pingxi, or gouju—each of which might also be transliterated in accordance to the Wade-Giles system, yielding very different Latinate spellings. The first issue is whether to use an English or an original-language name. Nancy A. Guy, author of a thoughtful deliberation on the form in question, concludes that, for English-language publications at least, the English name is preferable because it will be the most familiar to general readers: therefore, “Peking Opera” should be the name of choice. She further reasons that although “Peking” is transliterated in the older Wade-­ Giles system, it is employed even in mainland Chinese publications that give their place of publication (in the newer pinyin system) as “Beijing” (96–98). The Asian Theatre Journal, on the other hand, has decided not to use the English-language name: as the editor, Samuel Leiter, notes, “We don’t do the same for other forms of Asian theatre” (“From” iv). Specialists in Chinese theatre have generally applauded the decision, and since 1998, articles in The Asian Theatre Journal have used original-­ language names, transliterated in the pinyin system. I will do the same and whenever possible will use original-language names for theatre forms around the world. A second issue concerns which one of a set of possible original-­language names one should use. Sometimes this issue is linguistic. In Chinese, -ju

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and -xi mean roughly the same thing, and each has been translated as “opera,” “theatre,” or “drama”; preference for one or the other in regard to any particular theatre form seems to be a matter of rather unstable convention. Sometimes, though, there is a political dimension to the choice of a name. Scholars in mainland China generally refer to jingju or jingxi, with jing- meaning “capital”; Taiwanese scholars, on the other hand, do not accept Beijing as the capital and so prefer gouju, with gou- meaning “national,” or pingju, with ping- meaning “peace” (Leiter, “From” iv). These sorts of problems can be found virtually around the world, and there is no general solution for them. When dealing with South, Southeast, and East Asia, I will default when possible to the names and spellings given in Samuel L. Leiter’s The Encyclopedia of Asian Theatre because it is the most comprehensive reference source for many regions of Asia. I will depart from that source, however, in one notable way. In transliterated Japanese, a macron over a vowel (as in ō) has the same phonetic value as a circumflex (ô); adding an “h” at the end of a syllable also has the same value. The name of one of Japan’s most notable theatre forms can therefore be transliterated as nō, nô, or noh. Although the Encyclopedia of Asian Theatre uses the circumflex, the macron is far more common, so I have decided to use it here. For theatre outside of Asia, I will default when possible to The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, edited by Martin Banham. Neither of these sources, I should note, uses diacritical marks in Asian languages other than Japanese and Korean, and so neither will I. One last point. I will not hesitate to use familiar anachronisms when these sources use them. For example, I will use the nineteenth-century term bunraku to denote the famous Japanese puppet theatre, although when the form emerged early in the seventeenth century, it was called ningyō jōruri. I am painfully aware that each choice I have made is arbitrary and must therefore ask the forbearance of specialists.

Notes 1. I might also note that American versions of the Mercator map sometimes center on the Americas, set off in proud isolation by the vast expanses of the Atlantic and Pacific. 2. The North–South centering of Europe is made possible by dropping the equator almost two-thirds of the way to the bottom of the map. In Marshall G. S. Hodgson’s memorable phrase, Mercator has provided nothing less than a “Jim Crow projection” (5).

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3. Wole Soyinka uses the somewhat similar metaphor of a steam-engine taking on different kinds of fuel as it moves from station to station (43). 4. Among the few recent non-textbooks to take a broad perspective on theatre history, the most notable might be Nicola Savarese’s Eurasian Theatre. This book examines (as its subtitle states) “drama and performance between East and West from Classical Antiquity to the Present.” Although not quite global, the Eurasian scale is impressive. It is important to observe, though, that the word “between” (in the subtitle) is of central importance: the main burden of the book is an account of the influence of Asia (and its theatre) on the theatre of Europe, and, to a lesser degree, of Europe on Asia. Also noteworthy is Westlake’s World Theatre: The Basics, although unfortunately it leaves Europe and the United States outside of its “world.” 5. This source was chosen because it presents all schools in a single listing. I examined the course catalogue of every fifth school; if no catalogue was available, I skipped to the sixth school. 6. Confusingly, there has been an eleventh edition of this textbook, published by Pearson in 2013, but this edition is apparently out of print, while the tenth edition remains available. Also, there is the “Pearson New International” edition, but this is apparently the same text as the tenth edition under discussion here. 7. For the second edition, Carlson counts 70 out of 435 pages—excluding introductory material—as moving outside “the Euro-American axis” (154): the same 16% as I find for the third edition. 8. Westlake’s World Theatre: The Basics asks, in the title to its Introduction, “What is world theatre?” but does not really attempt to answer the question (1–12). 9. The term apparently first appeared in an English-language publication in 1962 (Colley 18). 10. It is worth noting that neither “world” nor “globe” is quite synonymous with the meanings of monde (in French) or welt (in German), and that each of these words (along with their associated terms) has its own “cosmopolitical, cosmological, and philosophical dimensions” (Apter 189); the same is presumably the case with other languages as well. An intriguing neologism is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “planetarity,” intended as a word “set apart from notions of the planetary, the planet, the earth, the world, the globe, globalization, and the like in their common usage.” Spivak writes: “The ‘global’ notion allows us to think we can aim to control globality. [But] the planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan” (1223). My use of “global” in these pages is not intended to convey any sense of “control[ling] globality.”

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11. For a clear discussion and rebuttal of the argument that theatre is essentially the performed interpretation of dramatic texts, see Osipovich; interestingly, Osipovich’s conclusions nicely align with those I have elsewhere advanced (Rethinking 65–92). I largely follow those lines here, with the main difference being that now I refer to dramatic theatre as “theatre,” whereas earlier I preferred to refer to it as “drama.” 12. Media such as film and video, which do not require the co-presence of performer and audience, can also present drama—in the absence of theatre, one might say. I will have little occasion, however, to discuss mediated dramatic in this book.

Works Cited Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. Verso, 2013. Banham, Martin, editor. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Rev. ed., Cambridge UP, 2000. Barraclough, Geoffrey. “The Prospects of World History.” The New World History: A Teacher’s Companion, edited by Ross Dunn, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000, pp. 123–30. Bauman, Richard. “Performance.” Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments: A Communications-Centered Handbook, edited by Richard Bauman, Oxford UP, 1992, pp. 41–49. Boorstin, Daniel J. The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself. Vintage Books, 1983. Brockett, Oscar G., and Franklin J. Hildy. History of the Theatre. 10th ed., Allyn & Bacon, 2008. Brockett, Oscar G., and Robert J. Ball. Plays for the Theatre. 11th ed., Wadsworth Publishing, 2014. Brown, Donald E. Human Universals. McGraw-Hill, 1996. Brown, John Russell, editor. Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre. Oxford UP, 2001. Burke, Edmund, III, and Ross E. Dunn. “Michael Doyle’s View on Western Civ: A Comment and Counterproposal.” The New World History: A Teacher’s Companion, edited by Ross E. Dunn, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000, pp. 521–26. Carlson, Marvin. “Reflections on a Global Theatre.” The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, edited by David Wiles and Christine Dymkowski, Cambridge UP, 2013, pp. 149–61. Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. Oxford UP, 1956. Conrad, Sebastian. What Is Global History? Princeton UP, 2016. Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton UP, 2003. Esslin, Martin. An Anatomy of Drama. Hill and Wang, 1976.

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Fei, Faye Chung, editor and translator. Chinese Theories of Theatre and Performance from Confucius to the Present. U of Michigan P, 1999. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. “Classical Theatre.” The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, edited by David Wiles and Christine Dymkowski, Cambridge UP, 2013, pp. 73–84. Gainer, J. Ellen, et al. Norton Anthology of Drama. 3rd ed., W. W. Norton, 2017. 2 volumes. Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Doubleday, 1974. Gould, Stephen J. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. W. W. Norton, 1989. Greenwald, Michael L., et al. Longman Anthology of Drama and Theatre: A Global Perspective. Rev. 1st ed., Pearson Longman, 2004. Guy, Nancy A. “Peking Opera as ‘National Opera’ in Taiwan: What’s in a Name?” Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 12, no. 1, Spring 1995, pp. 85–103. Hartnoll, Phyllis, and Enoch Brater. The Theatre: A Concise History. 4th ed., Thames & Hudson, 2012. Hodgson, Marshall G. S. Rethinking World History. Edited by Edmund Burke III, Cambridge UP, 1993. Huntsman, Jeffrey. “Native American Theatre.” American Indian Theater in Performance: A Reader, edited by Hanay Geiogamah and Jaye T. Darby, UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2000, pp. 81–113. Jacobus, Lee A. Bedford Introduction to Drama. 7th ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013. Leiter, Samuel L., editor. Encyclopedia of Asian Theatre. Greenwood Press, 2007. 2 volumes. Leiter, Samuel L. “From the Editor.” Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 15, no. 1, Spring 1998, pp. iii–vi. Lo, Jacqueline, and Helen Gilbert. “Toward a Topography of Cross-Cultural Theatre Praxis.” TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 46, no. 3, Autumn 2002, pp. 31–53. Mazlish, Bruce. “Terms.” Palgrave Advances in World Histories, edited by Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 18–43. McNeill, William H. Mythistory and Other Essays. U of Chicago P, 1986. Nellhaus, Tobin, et al. Theatre Histories. 3rd ed., Routledge, 2016. Nicoll, Allardyce. The Theatre and Dramatic Theory. George C.  Harrop & Co., 1962. Odom, Glenn. World Theories of Theatre. Routledge, 2017. Okagbue, Osita. African Theatres and Performances. Routledge, 2007. Osipovitch, David. “What is a Theatrical Performance?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 64, no. 4, Fall 2006, pp. 461–70.

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Osterhammel, Jürgen. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Patrick Camiller, Princeton UP, 2014. Patterson, Jim A., and Tim Donohue. A Concise History of Theatre. Pearson, 2014. Pizzato, Mark. Mapping Global Theatre Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Postlewait, Thomas. The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography. Cambridge UP, 2009. Rozik, Eli. The Roots of Theatre: Rethinking Ritual and Other Theories of Origin. U of Iowa P, 2002. Sauter, Willmar. “The Audience.” The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, edited by David Wiles and Christine Dymkowski, Cambridge UP, 2013, pp. 169–83. Savarese, Nicola. Eurasian Theatre: Drama and Performance Between East and West from Classical Antiquity to the Present. Translated by Richard Fowler, revised and edited by Vicki Ann Cremona, Routledge, 2010. Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. 3rd ed., Routledge, 2013. Sorgenfrei, Carol Fisher. “Desperately Seeking Asia.” Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 14, no. 2, Autumn 1997, pp. 223–58. Soyinko, Wole. “Selections from ‘Drama and the African World-view’ in Myth, Literature, and the African World.” World Theories of Theatre, edited by Glenn Odom, Routledge, 2017, pp. 43–49. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Planetarity.” Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, edited by Barbara Cassin et al., Princeton UP, 2014. Stanford, Michael. A Companion to the Study of History. Blackwell, 1994. Tillis, Steve. “East, West, and World Theatre.” Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 20, no. 1, Spring 2003, pp. 71–87. Tillis, Steve. “Remapping Theatre History.” Theatre Topics, vol. 17, no. 1, March 2007, pp. 1–19. Tillis, Steve. Rethinking Folk Drama. Greenwood Press, 1999. Tooby, John, and Leda Cosmides. “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction and the Arts.” SubStance 94/95, 2001, pp. 6–27. Vernant, Jean-Pierre, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece. Translated by Janet Lloyd, Zone Books, 1990. Wainscott, Ronald J., and Kathy J.  Fletcher. Plays Onstage: An Anthology. Pearson, 2006. Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings 2018. timeshighereducation.com/rankings/united-states/2018#!/ Watson, Jack, and Grant McKernie. A Cultural History of Theatre. Pearson, 1993. Westlake, E. J. World Theatre: The Basics. Routledge, 2017. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. John Hopkins UP, 1987.

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Wilson, Edwin, and Alvin Goldfarb. Anthology of Living Theatre. 3rd ed., McGraw Hill, 2008. Wilson, Edwin, and Alvin Goldfarb. Living Theatre: A History of Theatre. 7th ed., McGraw-Hill, 2018. Worthen, W.  B. Wadsworth Anthology of Drama. 6th ed., Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011. Zeami. On the Art of the Nō Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami. Translated by J. Thomas Rimar and Yamazaki Masakazu, Princeton UP, 1984.

CHAPTER 2

The Case Against World Theatre History

Why has world theatre history made only limited progress in the field of theatre studies? The contrast with the field of history in general is striking. As Sebastian Conrad writes, “In the United States and other parts of the Anglophone world, [world history] has for several decades been the fastest-­growing field within the discipline. This trend has also caught on in parts of Europe and East Asia, where global history is on the rise and finding increasing favor with a younger generation of historians” (1). The trend toward world history is also evident in the classroom. Colleges and high schools alike have for years been offering world history surveys, often in place of the traditional “Western Civ” surveys.1 But as we saw in the Introduction, progress has been far more hesitant in theatre studies. The Standard Western Approach still predominates, even if now supplemented by the occasional excursion into Asia and/or Africa; and where conventional survey classes have been cast aside, they often been replaced by ahistorical examinations of the same material favored by that approach. There seems, in brief, to be a clear (if unstated) disinclination to take up world theatre history. There are certainly quite a few scholars, especially over the past fifty years or so, who have specialized in the theatre of one or another land beyond Europe, and however much their work might be relegated to the margins of theatre studies, much of it is of sustained excellence. But although this work is sometimes said to be world theatre history, it almost always focuses on either a single theatre form, a single nation, or a single © The Author(s) 2020 S. Tillis, The Challenge of World Theatre History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48343-2_2

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world region: the history of Sanskrit theatre, say, or theatre in India, or in South Asia. Such histories are no more world theatre history than are histories of commedia dell’arte, or theatre in Italy, or in Europe. This specialized work is the invaluable material from which any study of world theatre history will be constructed, but it does not, in itself, seek for a more or less integrated view of theatre history in two or more regions of the world, or within the context of the world itself. In a world that some historians have divided into “the West and the Rest,”2 the theatre of the West is seen as separate from the rest of the world, and the many questions that might be raised by a more integrated view of theatre history go largely unexplored. World theatre history is apparently thought (or implicitly assumed) to be problematic. This chapter examines why. I will present eight arguments that might justify the hesitation to take up the global perspective. Anyone interested in that perspective needs to understand the arguments, if only to contest them—for in their various ways, they call the entire enterprise of world theatre history into question. The first set of arguments is practical, concerning the difficulties of studying theatre history on a global scale. The second set of arguments is ideological and attacks (from differing points of view) the very idea of a global approach. After presenting each argument, I will attempt to rebut it; in so doing, I will offer further clarification of what I mean by world theatre history, and why the disinclination toward it is self-defeating for theatre studies.

Four Practical Arguments The Argument of Manageability The first argument against world theatre history concerns the difficulty, perhaps even the impossibility, of managing the vast amounts of information that might potentially pertain to such a history, particularly when conducted on an “all-in” scale that seeks global comprehensiveness. John Russell Brown, in The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre, writes that although his text is concerned with theatre throughout the world, the need for a “continuous focus” requires “some curtailment of perspective”; he therefore chooses to examine “theatre history from the standpoint of British, European, and English-speaking cultures.” Brown admits that this curtailment “must falsify the [historical] account at some moments in time,” but contends that a “world-wide focus” would have “proved

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unmanageable” because a history with such a focus “would have become a compendium of local reports and a bewildering collection of disparate narratives” (7). Brown’s textbook is quite strong in regard to the materials on which it focuses, but his “curtailment of perspective” is troubling. For Brown, sub-­ Saharan Africa and the pre-Columbian Americas are noteworthy in regard only to “the beginnings of theatre” (7), while the entire account of what he calls “oriental” theatre is separated from his conventional survey of European theatre history, crammed into some fifty pages at the rear of the book. This gives the strong impression that these various regions stand outside the historical development of theatre. As I noted in the Introduction, the writing of any sort of history involves focus, selection, and emphasis; it necessarily requires adopting some perspective. “Curtailments” are inevitable. But while Brown recognizes that his curtailments must “falsify” the historical account, he seems unaware that the problem is not just “at some moments of time”; his disinterest in presenting any sense of an integrated history is a comprehensive problem. All that said, however, Brown’s argument of manageability highlights an issue that Jerry H. Bentley, one of the leading world historians, observes in history-writing at large. Without some sort of overarching structure, writes Bentley, world “history would become an incoherent collection of infinite unrelated and unrelatable micro-narratives,” and historians would be reduced to the condition of William James’s famous infant, who experiences the world as “one great blooming, buzzing confusion” (“World” 48). For generations of historians in Europe and the Americas, the “overarching structure” was the metanarrative of history as the progress of freedom (an idea I will discuss in Chap. 3); for theatre historians such as Brown, the equivalent (and related) metanarrative has been the Standard Western Approach. Bentley, along with almost all world historians for the past fifty years, recognizes these Eurocentric metanarratives as invalid. But that recognition need not condemn historians to a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” The key for Bentley (as for many of his colleagues), is the importance of cross-cultural interactions. The study of such interactions provides a conceptual structure that can encompass multiple world  regions, while still recognizing the diversity and variety of human life (“Cross-Cultural,” passim). The historian Patrick Manning makes much the same point, saying that “the world historian’s task is to portray the crossing of boundaries and the linking of systems in the human past.” It is “far less than the sum total of

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all history. Nevertheless, it adds to our accumulated knowledge of the past through its focus on connections among historical localities, time periods, and themes of study” (3). These connections can be examined on their own terms but can also be studied in regard to larger global contexts— which, as we saw in the Introduction, is the manner of “global” history favored by Conrad. World history is a specific perspective on the past, neither superior nor inferior to more localized perspectives. It is not concerned with accounting for everything, but with posing questions that Bentley says demand “large-scale explanations” that cannot be answered in terms of “cultural distinctiveness, exclusive identities, local knowledge, and the experiences of individual societies” (“World” 50). World theatre history, likewise, is not the accumulated history of theatre everywhere; it is not merely a copious collection of Brown’s “local reports” and “disparate narratives.” Jo Robinson has questioned “whether an expansion in geographical focus— taking in a range of different performances from around the world—is itself enough to allow the reader to gain a global perspective” (234). This question is quite legitimate but misses the point of the global approach. World theatre history does not imagine that a geographic expansion is, in itself, sufficient. If it were, then textbooks that merely toss a chapter on Asian theatre into their otherwise conventionally Eurocentric accounts would not be objectionable. According to Marvin Carlson, “The best critical approach currently available for approaching the challenge of dealing with global theatre history […] is to embrace a paradigm shift that replaces the narrative model of the European nation-state with the more flexible and open-ended intellectual model that has recently been widely applied in cultural and social studies, the model of the rhizome, as developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.” Contrary to traditional historical narrative, “The rhizome […] moves freely across phenomena, making connections potentially in all directions, without seeking fixed structures or linear narratives. It allows for fluid multiple connections without privileging any controlling models of either representation or interpretation.” With such an approach, theatre history “is best understood not as a series of […] linear narratives but as an ever-shifting web of cultural interweaving” (157). No doubt that replacing “the narrative model of the European nation-­ state” is necessary, as we will see in Chaps. 3 and 5. But it is not necessary to borrow the model of the rhizome (via Delueze and Guattari) from the field of biology; one might just as easily refer to “webs” (as Carlson does)

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to make much the same point.3 World theatre history can seek to investigate (in whole or in part) the webs that exist between theatre forms of different world regions, examining whether they might arise from actual contact (as with as the relationship between European spoken theatre and the Parsi theatre of India), or from similar societal opportunities (as with the commercial forms to be found in many Eurasian cities), or simply from choices made independently (as with presence of choruses in Greek tragedy, nō, and the alarinjo of the Yoruba). And it can seek to understand how those webs might arise from, or in some other way be related to, broader historical forces that have had a widespread effect on theatre. Robinson also warns that anyone seeking a global approach must “be wary of repeating the mistakes of interculturalism” and avoid “creating a view of theatre history which erases difference and imposes homogeneity” (235). Again, this is a reasonable concern, but the global approach does not seek to “erase difference”—it seeks to understand it. While there is much to learn from links between theatre forms, there is also much to learn from the differences that might lurk behind or within them. To continue with one of the examples I just gave, unless one is aware of the way choruses function in forms such as nō and alarinjo, one might all too easily assume that there is nothing distinctive or unusual in the Greek tragic chorus, and thereby fail to fully understand or appreciate it. The uniqueness of regional and local histories is certainly not something that world theatre historians would want to efface. The Argument of Detail The second argument against world theatre history is brought about by the very fact that such history is concerned with “large-scale explanations” (as per Bentley) and with the web of relationships between theatre in various locales. It is sometimes said that “God is in the details,” but for practitioners of world history, the no less common phrase “the devil is in the details” is far more applicable. Particularly when working on a broad scale, these practitioners cannot help but ignore innumerable details, thereby forfeiting what historians evocatively call “granularity.” For a theatre historian working on such a scale, many famous people and places might well go unmentioned and important theatrical events slip from sight. Indeed, world theatre historians might take only limited notice of the very details that usually get people interested in theatre. Can any study on the global scale justify the loss of all this detail?

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The historian David A.  Bell is by no means categorically opposed to world history, writing that “at its best, this new work opens up remarkable new perspectives on the past,” making possible numerous new insights by asking entirely new questions. But he argues that “it has proved less successful … at providing new, overall narratives with which to make sense of past human experience.” In a review of the first volume of a massive six-­ volume history of the world, Bell is concerned that the authors “have to cram so much information into such a small space”—albeit almost 1200 pages to cover a mere seventy-five year period!—“that individuals tend to disappear from view, even when their particular personalities and actions had a decisive effect on events.” He contends that a “general problem that has plagued the writing of global history” has been “how to bring individuals into stories told on such vast scales,” and suggests that “if it is so difficult to do global history in a satisfying and engaging manner and without doing injustice to the story’s manifold actors, then perhaps historians should not be investing quite so much effort and resources” into works of grand historical synthesis. Bell himself is fully aware that not all world history is written on “vast scales,” and in particular praises world historians who have “produced remarkably effective narratives centered on the experiences of otherwise obscure individuals caught up in global currents of migration, imperialism and trade.” As I have already suggested, there are multiple ways that one might conduct world history, with none defining the field or being inherently superior to the others. Still, even histories that sacrifice granularity can offer important contributions to knowledge. As William H. McNeill points out, we all “recognize that even though every leaf is different, we do not become unacceptably vague by calling a tree a tree. Similarly, in recognizing each tree as part of a forest and the forest as part of an ecosphere that extends right around the globe, we change scale without necessarily losing precision of meaning” (84–85). In other words, while every expansion of scale necessitates the loss of certain details, it also makes possible the consideration of a different sort of detail. The availability of multiple scales, whether temporal or geographic, is critical to historical research. Every theatrical event involves a unique combination of actors and audience; no two events are precisely alike, and each is potentially the subject of extensive research.4 As it happens, though, there are often obvious connections between events. Tonight’s performance of Hamlet, by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), is certainly worthy of study entirely on its own, but it will bear strong similarities to

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the troupe’s performances yesterday and tomorrow. Although we will lose certain details about tonight’s performance, the entire run can profitably be studied as a unit, to help us understand the methods, goals, and achievements of the production. Such study will also bring forth the differences between the run’s individual events, helping us understand the variables that inevitably affect those events. Pulling back our scale, we can also usefully examine the history of various Hamlets mounted over the years by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Again, we will lose many details pertaining to individual production runs, but new details will come into focus regarding patterns of textual interpretation, casting practices of the Company, the constitution of its audience, and so on. Pulling back our scale yet again, we can take on Hamlet’s place in the history of English theatre. Again, we will lose innumerable details; after all, only so much attention can be given to the Royal Shakespeare Company, however important its productions have been. But again, a different kind of detail will come into focus. How, for example, has Shakespeare’s play been “re-invented” (to borrow from the title of a fascinating study by Gary Taylor) over the centuries, and how do the RSC’s productions fit into England’s four-hundred years of Hamlets? The foregoing example recognizes a range of temporal scales, but the same principle applies to geographic scales. Again, one might study a single RSC performance (or, if one prefers, production run), but pulling the scale back to all roughly contemporaneous Hamlets in England can make possible comparisons of how Shakespeare was presented by different troupes, or in the provinces as opposed to in London. Scaling up to productions across Europe raises the same comparative question of presentation, but this time in regard to different countries, while also opening up issues of translation, audience response, and distinctions of stagecraft.5 And if one were to pull back to a global scale, questions of inter-societal exchange, modes of literary adaptation, and syncretism would be among those that leap to the fore.6 With each expansion of geographic scale, in other words, innumerable details would obviously be lost—but only through such scaling could innumerable other details even be noticed. No historical scale, whether temporal or geographic, is intrinsically more “true” or detailed than any other. Each scale, says McNeill, “has an appropriate conceptualization and amount of detail, just as each scale of a map has an appropriate projection and amount of detail.” Even the most local map is still a “schematic representation of selected features from the relevant landscapes”; the conceptualization of a globally scaled map might

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be more challenging, but it is not necessarily further from the truth (100, 101). The single leaf of an individual tree in, say, the Amazon basin might be endlessly fascinating in its details, but it can tell us nothing about the global distribution of rain forests. That will call for a much different scale, which will provide details no less fascinating.7 The “chief value” of a global perspective, suggests the historian Janet L.  Abu-Lughod, “lies in its search for explanations beyond the narrow confines of historical specialization in a given time and place”; it is “a vision that gives depth of perspective in historical (re)construction” (73). Or, to return once more to McNeill: the study of world history offers “a vision of the ecumenical [i.e., universal] setting within which each separate national state and more local community lived and moved and had its being.” Only consciousness of how “the processes of cultural interaction were running in a given age” can provide an adequate context for fully understanding more localized history (79). This point is of critical importance, for it suggests that even those who specialize in one or another theatre tradition can further their understanding of that tradition by recognizing its place in a more global context. I should add, though, that even details as granular as our single RSC performance of Hamlet are not necessarily lost to the historian of world theatre, who is free to drill down through the scales of history as deeply as she or he finds useful. As Manning suggests, “For world historians the issue of scale is not so much that of insisting on analysis at the planetary level but rather that of developing analysis of the past at a range of scales and linking the analyses at various scales to one another” (317). The ability to work with multiple scales, and to seek the information available only on those scales, is a vital aspect of the global approach, and I will have much more to say about it in later chapters. The Argument of Data The third argument against world theatre history holds that however well one might be able to manage details, and however freely one might make use of multiple scales in doing so, the details themselves are often simply unavailable. Even on the very limited scale of a single theatrical event, historians will likely know little or nothing about how, say, a particular actor emphasized certain words rather than others, or how the audience (not to speak of individual members thereof) responded to specific passages or scenes. Postlewait notes that “scholars who study modern theatre

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usually have accesses to production documents, promptbooks, reviews, interviews, feature articles, letters, and autobiographies” (60)—but these generally offer limited information about particular events (as opposed to the plans for them), especially after opening night. And as Postlewait is fully aware, there is little detailed information about theatrical events before the past century or so, either in Europe or beyond (57). While it is possible to “reconstruct many details of a complex theatrical event like the nightly riots” attendant to a price increase at Covent Garden in 1809 (60), there is little one can say of the shows that took place on those nights— and far less, certainly, to say of any particular contemporaneous show that might have been playing at the Comédie-Française in Paris, or in a rural temple courtyard in Rajasthan State, India. A paucity of information, in other words, is an endemic problem for theatre historians. This problem generally becomes more severe the further back one goes in theatre history. Even the most scrupulous and extensive surveys of data—such as that undertaken by the University of Toronto project called Records of Early English Drama, which has been ongoing since 1976, and has published nearly thirty collections of records—must rely on the happenstance survival of these records, often leaving great uncertainty about entire forms of theatre, such as the so-called Robin Hood plays.8 As a rule, the more removed a theatre form is from whatever literate elite might locally exist, the less is known about it, and so the histories of many forms of folk theatre are particularly ill-understood. To remain with an example from England, consider the Mummers’ play, which has excited much interest over the past century. Some scholars see it as a pre-Christian ritual, while others suggest it is a medieval form of theatre—but the first indubitable evidence of it comes only in the early eighteenth century, and the form might well have emerged only then (A. E. Green 142). However serious the lack of data might be for theatre history in England, or throughout Europe, or even across all of Eurasia, it cannot compare to the even graver lack regarding the theatre history of indigenous peoples in places such as Australasia, the Americas, and sub-Saharan Africa. One can certainly look to contemporary or near-contemporary theatrical events to gain some knowledge of theatre forms considered to be “traditional” (itself a slippery term), but there is no reason to make the general assumption that existing events are identical to those of the distant past. Each indigenous society in these regions, after all, had its own history even before the arrival of Europeans, and most have undergone profound trauma since that arrival, which might well have had an impact on their

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theatre. Observations from the earliest arriving Europeans can sometimes be helpful, but these observations were generally made by missionaries, conquerors, and the occasional anthropologist, all of whom brought their own biases to what they saw and whose accounts therefore cannot be considered authoritative. Indigenous oral traditions might also be available and can be quite helpful. But according to Jan Vansina, a historian and anthropologist especially concerned with oral histories, such traditions are generally less concerned with reporting the details of history than with shaping the meaning of that history: “[W]eakness in chronology is one of the greatest limitations of all oral traditions” (56). Chronology is by no means the whole of history (a point I discuss in more detail in Chap. 6), but if one is trying to construct a theatre history, it matters greatly if a theatre form developed 200 years ago or 2000, just as it matters if a form that that was once important ceased to be performed 2000 or 200 years ago. Finally, one can look to the indirect evidence that might be provided from fields such as demography, archeology, and genetics, which might then be combined with the evidence of current practices, European observations, and oral traditions.9 I think it is telling, though, that even in a splendid book such as Banham’s A History of Theatre in Africa, there is no attempt to offer a comprehensive historical account, while the book’s individual entries (mostly based on current nation-states) generally discuss “indigenous” or “traditional” theatre forms as currently practiced before moving into detailed histories of popular and literary theatre over the past hundred years or so. And as far as I can tell, African theatre history is far better served than indigenous theatre history in Australasia or the Americas. In light of such difficulties, Erika Fischer-Lichte states that one of the reasons “why we cannot construct a single grand narrative lies in the scarcity, randomness, and fragmentariness of our sources.”10 Indeed, this problem (in addition to what she sees as a general loss of belief in metanarratives) leads Fischer-Lichte to claim, “The historian’s task nowadays lies in writing multiple histories.” Rather than vainly reach after macro-­history, “we have to deal with many micro-histories” (“Classical” 73). This brings us back to John Russell Brown’s idea that a “world-wide focus” would result in a mere compendium of “local reports” and “disparate narratives.”11 Historians working on every scale must grapple with limitations of data. This problem exists even at the most micro-level, as Postlewait demonstrates when discussing the first performance of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, in 1896. Not only is the available information about this landmark event

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quite limited, but it is also riven with contradictions. Such elementary matters as the date of the event and the size of the audience turn out to be quite uncertain, as does the question of whether it is appropriate to call the audience’s response a riot. Finally, perceptions of how to interpret the information that does exist are twisted by the preconceptions both of participants in the event and historians (66–85). World theatre historians are by no means exempt from the problem of data, but sometimes actually have a distinct advantage when confronting it. For a micro-historian of the event, establishing the opening date for Ubu Roi (either December 10 or 11) would seem an essential task. For a world historian, however, who can scale out to the issue of the play’s place in the emerging European avant-garde, the precise date is far less relevant, and its undoubted year (1896) will likely suffice. And if the historian were to scale out even further, to consider the curious fact that even as some Europeans were turning away from realism, some theatre artists in China and Japan were explicitly turning toward it, then it would probably be sufficient merely to note that Ubu Roi opened near the start of the twentieth century. The world theatre historian, in other words, can often shift scales to take advantage of whatever evidence does exist. If the goal of world history were to write comprehensive histories that incorporated virtually everything, then the problems faced by micro-historians would be infinitely multiplied. But as Postlewait suggests, “Historians have a mandate to interpret, not simply to describe, the historical record” (57). A global perspective opens new possibilities of interpretation while freeing historians from the need to know everything about anything. But even if it is possible sometimes to finesse the problem of details, there is no getting around the difficulty presented to theatre historians by lands for which little or no information on theatre history is available. The unfortunate fact is that it is difficult to say very much about theatre in those lands before roughly 1800, and nearly impossible to say anything with certainty about their theatre histories before 1500. As the historian William A. Green observes, “A completely integrated world history is only possible after the hemispheres were in permanent contact.” While one might still be able to offers useful comments on the time before that contact, “some degree of fragmentation in writing and periodizing global history is inescapable” (386). World theatre historians need to recognize this problem and cannot simply assume that what we see today can somehow be extrapolated deep into the past, as if these lands, their societies, and their theatrical traditions were somehow timeless.

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The Argument of Reliance The final practical argument against world theatre history is directly related to the arguments of detail and of data. The information on which localized histories are based is discovered through painstaking labor, often involving materials that are difficult to attain or understand. To return again to Hamlet: a vast amount of research has been devoted to studying the theatre in which the play was first performed. The earliest available versions of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries are scoured for stage directions, implicit or explicit; old sketches of London are studied to make sense of the playhouses included in them; surviving contracts for the construction of some of those playhouses are analyzed for any useful information they might provide. And the primary sources under examination are by no means limited to texts: the discovery of the Rose Theatre’s actual foundations in 1989 presented a primary source in which one could actually walk.12 Work with primary sources is often considered to be the sine qua non of historical study; through the study of such sources, knowledge is said to be created. But as the historian Philip Pomper observes, “Unlike colleagues who focus more narrowly and use all relevant primary as well as secondary sources, practitioners of world history rely heavily on secondary sources. Such reliance evokes disapproval among guild members, for whom only direct scrutiny of documents validates the status of historian” (2). Pomper is being a bit snide when he refers of trained historians as members of a “guild,” but he correctly points us to the fourth practical argument against world theatre history, which is its inevitable reliance on the work of others. One might wonder if devotion to primary sources is nothing more than a fetish for positivists, who have been roundly abused for a generation or more. Bruce A. McConachie, for one, seeks to establish what he calls a “postpositivist” historiography of theatre. He argues, above all, that theatre historians need to pay greater attention to both sides of the actor– audience relationship. According to McConachie, the postpositivist theatre historian “will likely be guided first by the scripts (if they exist), but also by play reviews, musical scores, relevant designs, personal accounts by actors, directors, etc.” No less important, however, “is as much evidence as one can muster on the nature of the audience,” including “architectural plans of playhouses, ticket prices, advertisements, playbills,

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accounts by audience members, and a mound of secondary sources on the social history of the period” (485). McConachie’s argument is thoroughly reasonable, and I certainly agree about the centrality of the actor–audience relationship. Note, however, that the way he seeks to execute his postpositivist historiography remains largely based on primary sources of one sort or another, to be supplemented by “a mound of secondary sources.” Theatre historians might be able to rely on primary sources when engrossed in a study of, say, jingju, but they would have to make significant compromises when placing jingju in the context of a thousand years of Chinese theatre, and would certainly find it necessary to rely very heavily on that mound of secondary sources when placing jingju in a Eurasian or global context—especially when confronted by multiple languages and the need travel extensively to visit far-­ flung archives or performance sites. The argument of reliance, therefore, has an undeniable legitimacy. As McNeill notes, “Some may feel that to depend on someone else to search the sources to prove or disprove an idea is unsatisfactory”; but he also realizes that such dependence is generally unavoidable for world historians (89–90). How seriously, then, should we be concerned with this argument? McNeill makes the crucial point that “almost the same dependence on others holds for research in national and [even] more local history,” for “each historian depends on others—always.” He suggests, therefore, that “to argue that no ideas should be entertained that cannot be tested by oneself expresses an unrealistically solipsistic and indeed selfish attitude towards professional collaboration and mutual aid” (90). One must be careful, of course, in using the work of others, and seek multiple sources when possible. One must also be aware that specialists will almost habitually have their disagreements. So where does that leave the non-specialist? In much the same place, I imagine, as almost any other scholar. The historian of world theatre must, of course, rely on multiple communities of specialists, which certainly complicates matters, but the need to rely on others exists on every geographic and temporal scale. The argument of reliance, in brief, reminds us that world theatre historians must proceed with caution—recognizing both their dependence on specialists and the likelihood of disagreements among those specialists—but it falls far short of discrediting the idea of a global perspective as such. As the historian Jürgen Osterhammel summarizes the situation:

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To know all there is to know is not the key qualification of the world historian or global historian. No one has sufficient knowledge to verify the correctness of every detail, to do equal justice to every region of the world, or to draw fully adequate conclusions from the existing body of research in countless different areas. Two other qualities are the truly important ones: first, to have a feel for proportions, contradictions, and connections as well as a sense of what may be typical and representative; and second, to maintain a humble attitude of deference toward professional research. (xvii)

Four Ideological Arguments The Argument of Western Dominance As I noted in the Introduction, many theatre departments (as well as the texts and anthologies on which they rely) still maintain theatre history survey courses that progress along the well-worn path that runs from ancient Greece and Rome to medieval Europe to the Renaissance, and so on until they arrive at contemporary European and American theatre. One cannot help but think that the continued existence of this sort of survey is, to some extent, simply a matter of habit, but the present argument, along with the next, might nevertheless justify it. Unfortunately, there have been few if any published defenses of Eurocentric theatre historiography, probably because the occasional assaults upon it have had relatively little effect, so I will need to develop them myself, by analogy to the defense of Eurocentrism in general history. The first ideological argument seeks to justify a Eurocentric approach by appeal to what it takes to be historical fact. Europe, according to this argument, has been at the center of history, at least up until the past century when vast portions of the rest of the world themselves became “Westernized,”—which itself is evidence of European centrality. This centrality derives from the proposition that only the West experienced meaningful historical progress. In nineteenth-century England the so-called “Whig historians” developed their own version of this historiography, which found its place in the Western Civ courses I have mentioned. More recently, historian Jacob Neusner has argued for the legitimacy of this “whiggish” version, suggesting that the West should remain the primary concern of historians because it “has defined, and will continue to define, world civilization.” Western dominance is also demonstrated by the fact

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that “everybody wants what we [in the West] have”—as one can see in the very fact of global Westernization (104). This line of reasoning can easily be applied to theatre history. Focusing primarily on theatre history before the twentieth century, the argument of Western dominance begins by claiming that while no doubt there were developments in non-Western theatre, these were profoundly conservative in nature. Some forms of theatre, such as nō and kathakali, have gone centuries without significant change. Other forms, such as kabuki and jingju, are newer, but retain so much from earlier forms that their newness is thoroughly circumscribed. Glynne Wickham offers one of the clearest accounts of this point of view: “Much Eastern drama,” he writes, “has survived with many of its earliest elements safely preserved, like some animated museum treasure, which today’s spectator may still view swaying, gyrating and gesticulating, notwithstanding the many alterations and additions that the passing of some two thousand years of local history has imposed on its practitioners” (21). The argument of Western dominance holds that this sort of theatrical conservatism can scarcely claim a place in the mainstream of world theatre, which is marked by continuous change. Theatre that is marginal to the mainstream might be of some interest, but it is for specialists to examine, and is not of general concern. The argument continues by noting that European-originated theatre forms have, in the past few hundred years, managed to find a home in lands throughout the world. Opera is regularly performed not only in the major cities of Europe and the Americas, but in cities as diverse as Mumbai, Tokyo, Shanghai, Johannesburg, and Cairo. Spoken theatre, meanwhile, can be found in cities virtually everywhere, whatever local name it might go by (e.g., huaju in China). Moreover, it has influenced scores of non-­ European theatre forms that have emerged in the past couple hundred years, such as ludruk (in Indonesia) and the Concert Party (in Ghana and Togo). In light of all this, the argument runs, Neusner’s claim can also be said to apply to theatre: “Everyone wants what we [in the West] have” (104). I have tried not to make this a straw-man argument; indeed, it has at least some cogency, particularly if not overstated in the manner of Wickham’s dismissive comment. Still, it falls short of being convincing because it significantly understates how conservative European theatre itself has been, while overstating the conservatism of non-European theatre. Principles of music composition in European opera, for example, have seen only limited development despite intermittent changes in style;

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neither instrumentation nor vocal technique has substantially changed for hundreds of years; the repertoire is also fundamentally unchanged for at least the past century, despite occasional efforts to expand it; and the basic design of opera houses has remained mostly static for many hundreds of years. Kabuki, meanwhile, emerged at roughly the same time as opera, but has arguably exhibited far more change, whether it be in the constitution of its troupes, the introduction of entire new literary genres, or the development of its theatres.13 European spoken theatre has undoubtedly been far more protean than opera, but it too has been more conservative than is usually recognized. Most notably, plays from its earliest periods (by Shakespeare and Molière, among others) are still regularly performed; indeed, they continue to serve as models for—and challenges to—contemporary plays. Along with opera, the form emerged a little more than four hundred years ago, around the same time that kunqu emerged in China. But whereas spoken theatre continues to be one of the dominant theatre forms in Europe, the importance of kunqu has receded over the centuries in the face of newer forms, most notably jingju, which emerged around the start of the nineteenth century. Beyond all this remain two final rebuttals to the argument of Western dominance. First, the notion that we should study Western theatre history because of its current global status is, as Bentley say of whiggish history in general, both politically motivated and “breathtakingly teleological.” Because it looks at history only as a pathway to the present, it cannot help but offer a highly skewed vision of the past (“Myths” 62). Second, in an age of easily accessible air travel, unprecedented international commerce, and instantaneous global communication, the bias toward Western theatre becomes ever more myopic. The world is all around us. To insulate the theatre history of Europe and its colonial descendants from any consideration of the larger world is both ignorant and insulting. The Argument of Western Relevance The second ideological argument eschews the chauvinism of the first but seeks to justify a Eurocentric perspective to theatre history by emphasizing its importance to the contemporary theatre productions with which Europeans and Americans are most frequently involved. Indeed, this argument draws its strength through recognition of the aforementioned continuities in the Euro-American theatre tradition. The theatre that is most

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relevant to “us” is the theatre that has shaped us and in which we continue to work. Let us grant, this argument begins, that non-Western societies and their indigenous theatres all have complex and interesting histories. Let us also grant that the recent global domination of the West and its theatre should not be seen as a matter of historical necessity—the inevitable result of one or another kind of progress—but merely as one particular configuration of global power, subject as all such configurations have been to the vicissitudes of history. Nevertheless, this argument continues, Western theatre is the tradition in which people in Europe, the Americas, and Australasia actually work, whether as theatre artists (e.g., playwrights, directors, actors, etc.) or audience members. It is, in other words, “our” theatre, and is therefore the most relevant to “us”; given the vastness of that tradition, it is both necessary and sufficient to pay primary attention to it. This matter of relevance is exacerbated by the pull of nationalism, especially in lands with long and illustrious theatre histories: British theatre students understandably devote most of their study to British theatre, just as one would expect Chinese students to focus on Chinese theatre, and Japanese students on Japanese theatre.14 All of this, suggests the argument of relevance, is quite natural and as it should be. The importance of relevance cannot be understated. The vast majority of plays mounted in Europe, the Americas, and Australasia come from the Europe-based literary tradition and are staged in theatres that maintain the basic design that has dominated European theatres for hundreds of years. There is an indubitable logic, therefore, in studying and in training students in that tradition. Moreover, theatrical production is predicated on conventions that are shared between those who create shows and those who attend them—and this applies to European spoken theatre no less than to the Indian kathakali or the Javanese wayang kulit purwa. Such sharing is made possible by training, however casual that training might be. Even spoken theatre’s realism involves a detailed set of conventions, the most obvious of which is the strict separation of audience from performance, with the performance taking place in an apparent world of its own, behind what has been called an “invisible fourth wall.” The audience is expected generally to remain silent during the play; when that silence is broken, as with laughter, gasps, or tears, the actors are expected to take no notice. No doubt that training in these conventions is usually gained on the fly, but academia seeks to provide systematic training. In regard to

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theatre, the argument of relevance runs, it is most important that such training be concerned with Western theatre. All this might be true enough—but focusing on a single tradition is a self-imposed handicap that ultimately works against the very people it seeks to assist. An exclusive focus on the European tradition denies theatre artists access to plays and performance practices of other traditions that might be useful to them, either directly or indirectly, in developing their own art.15 Scholars and students are also impoverished because the focus on the European tradition denies them the chance to see that tradition from a broader perspective. As a result, they are unable to examine the ways in which the tradition differs from others, as well as the ways in which it is similar. Even if the European tradition is their primary concern, a global approach will enrich their understanding of that tradition. I am certainly not suggesting that the European tradition should be ignored, any more than that Chinese should ignore Chinese theatre or that Japanese should ignore Japanese theatre. The point is that a global perspective can enrich everyone’s understanding of any tradition of theatre. The argument of Western relevance is also dubious on demographic grounds: who, really, are this “we” who are its heirs? Europe, the Americas, and Australasia are home to many millions of people whose ancestors lived in lands other than Europe. However much they might be interested in the European tradition of theatre, other traditions are certainly also of relevance to them. Unless “we” seek to cast them out of “our” lands (either physically or symbolically), theatre traditions from around the world are an inescapable part of the theatrical heritage of Europe, the Americas, and Australasia. Finally—regarding theatre studies in the United States—the very idea that there should be a focus on “our” tradition is risible, for in fact, the specifically American theatre tradition is all too often ignored. In the course of my examination of theatre history survey classes, discussed in the Introduction, I also discovered that of the seventy-two schools offering a major in theatre, a mere three required their major students to take a survey of American theatre history. Obviously the teaching of “our” theatre history is not really of such paramount importance after all; what matters more is connecting American theatre to the more illustrious theatre of Europe.

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The Argument of Western Inevitability The argument to which I now turn is fully aware of the claims of Western dominance and recognizes the hold that the Western tradition has on “us.” It suggests, in fact, that the field of discourse from which this hold comes is so strong that the study of world history is itself inescapably compromised, and cannot help but be Eurocentric, even to the point of being culturally imperialistic. As the historian Arif Dirlik contends, “Even if EuroAmerica were to be taken out of history, so that history could be [entirely] written around non-EuroAmerican societies and their interactions, the spatial and temporal legacies of Eurocentrism would still be there” (121). Eurocentric ideas, in other words, will inevitably shape and distort any attempt to taking a global perspective, fatally flawing any such effort. Dirlik makes clear that he has “no objections to either the writing or teaching of world history … but this is not to be confounded either with an end to Eurocentrism, or an even-handedness in the representation of the past.” The enterprise of world history, in Dirlik’s view, is predicated on a mere “pretension” of “even-handed comprehensiveness” (124). The way one sees the world, he suggests, is inevitably dependent on one’s place in it. Although Dirlik might not object to studying world history as such, his criticism suggests that such study cannot help but be illusory. This criticism is certainly not unfounded in the study of theatre, in which Eurocentrism permeates scholarship that has little to do with Europe: Chikamatsu Monzaemon is often said to be the “Shakespeare” of Japan and Kalidasa the “Shakespeare” of India, while the theatre of China (as of other Asian and African lands) is scoured for evidence of the sort of tragic writing that was composed in ancient Greece and seventeenth-century Europe (Wallace, passim). No less notably, people in Europe and its former colonies are accustomed to studying theatre history in terms of nation-states: French theatre, English theatre, Japanese theatre, and so on. As I have noted, the chapters Banham’s History of African Theatre are likewise mostly based on nation-states, although the very concept of nation-states is a recent European import that had previously been unknown to Africa.16 No less striking is the larger organization of Banham’s book, with some of its sections being based on the languages introduced into Africa by European imperialism. Even beyond the matter of nations and languages, Eurocentrism can shape one’s view of theatre history. It is all too easy to view the theatre of

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other societies through the specific prism of European spoken theatre, focusing to an unwarranted degree on written texts, stage scenery, realism, and so forth. Ruth Finnegan, for example, is so bound by a Eurocentric perspective that she suggests: “With a few possible exceptions, there is no tradition in Africa of artistic performances which includes all the elements which might be demanded in a strict definition of drama—or at least not with the emphases to which we are accustomed” (516; italics added). Finnegan is one of the “evolutionists” who, as we saw in the Introduction, doubt the pre-colonial existence of dramatic theatre in sub-Saharan Africa. But as Osita Okagbue argues, “Only an ethnocentric tendency to approach the foreign through one’s own can account for Finnegan’s claim,” which implies an “embryonic primitivity of African theatre or performance forms” (4). Because Finnegan was looking for theatre that resembled European theatre, she was dismissive of what actually existed. The argument of Western inevitability can take a rather despairing tone. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, commenting some years ago on proposed changes to the humanities program at Stanford University, told the students, “Your solution to enlarge the curriculum is in fact a continuation of the neocolonial production of knowledge”; even though “this battle should be won does not mean at all that winning it does not keep a Euroamerican centrism intact” (284). Sometimes the argument can rise from the despairing to the incendiary. The historian Vinay Lal contends that “the enterprise of world history, from whatever angle it is attempted, must be disowned and repudiated.” He argues that world history informs non-Euro-American peoples “that the only history they have is to catch up with someone else’s history, or else they themselves will become history”; it therefore has “every potential to be a form of ‘cultural genocide’” (quoted in Bentley, ‘Myths” 72). Even though Sebastian Conrad is an exponent of the global approach, he suggests that “it is not immune to criticism that it neglects issues of power. The concept of the ‘globe’ … can conceal the social hierarchies and the asymmetries of power that have shaped the modern world” (228). Jo Robinson makes the point about “asymmetries of power” even more explicitly, noting the claim that “the language of globalization … in reality covers up a project of Western imperialism, and is, in fact, a celebration of a Western world view.” She quotes Rustom Bharucha to the effect that “the ‘global’ is subsumed within an uncritical assumption of the mores, mechanisms, and agencies that constitute First World affluence,” and concludes that “we must be extremely careful that the ‘global’ is not simply

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another substitution for ‘western’” (232–33). In brief, then, the often-­ unacknowledged power of European and American historians exhibits itself not only in the way their preconceptions can shape historical thinking, but also in their arrogating to themselves the right to, in effect, structure everyone’s history as a subsidiary part of their own. The argument of Western inevitability is quite serious, for it implicitly challenges the legitimacy of any historical study that extends beyond one’s own society. There seem to be two relatively distinct issues here. The first regards the biases that Europeans and Americans will bring to whatever non-Euro-American subject about which they might write. The second issue is that the very concept of a global approach is implicitly imperialistic. Let me discuss these in turn. The issue of bias can exist on any geographic scale. One might reasonably wonder how a European historian could possibly give an unbiased account of world history, or for that matter, how a British historian could write an unbiased account of European history. Indeed, if this historian were English, one might wonder how she could write an unbiased history of the British Isles. And if she were of the upper class, how could she write even of the entirety of the English social fabric? Ultimately, the issue of bias leads us, reductio ad absurdum, to the solipsism of believing that one can write only about oneself. This matches the solipsism noted earlier regarding the argument of reliance. Bias (whether explicit or implicit) is a fact of life—but so is the ability (however difficult it might be to exercise) to recognize and work toward compensating for one’s biases. As the historian David Hackett Fischer observes, “The fact that historical knowledge is itself historically caused by the situation of the historian does not in any degree imply that it is false” (181). Significantly, many critics of Eurocentrism are themselves either European or American, which suggest that is indeed possible for historians to look beyond their own personal “situations.” Bentley meanwhile, suggests that Dirlik—and implicitly the other writers I have just discussed— has fallen “into the trap of an originary fallacy … in assuming that historical scholarship must inevitably follow the lines established at its foundations” (“Myths” 71). While such lines can obviously be followed all too easily, numerous historians (many of whom I have been citing in these pages) have been able to transcend their personal identities sufficiently to produce work that is not misbegotten owing to the mere fact of those identities. Even more important, though, is the fact that world history (as with all history) is always tentative, always under construction. While flaws of bias

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inevitably exist in the work of every historian (working on every historical topic, and every scale of time and space), there is nothing, at least in theory, to stop other historians from criticizing and correcting for those biases and, quite possibly, changing the paradigms and perspectives of the field. There neither is nor can be any definitive end to the need for this sort criticism and correction, but the same can be said of any subject of historical study: no historical account is ever fully and irrevocably settled. The same process of criticism and correction is both possible and necessary for world theatre history. The second issue in the argument of Western inevitability follows from Robinson’s aforementioned concern that “the language of globalization … in reality covers up a project of Western imperialism, and is, in fact, a celebration of a Western world view” (232). Globalization is, of course, a hugely contentious issue; it is also a fact of modern life, and according to some global historians, it is the defining issue of our time. Bruce Mazlish suggests that it is a “conscious decision of global historians to start from the globalization proceeding apace today,” and in effect, work back from there (4). This decision easily leads to accounts that present a teleological vision of history, in which the development of present-day globalization is taken to be the central story in world history. These accounts might be either triumphalist or condemnatory; either way, the story they seek to tell is of how Europe and its cultural descendants have overwhelmed the rest of the world. This present-day starting point of “global” history is one of the reasons I favor the term “world” history, for history is not just the story of how present-day globalization came to be. Any theatre history that takes the current state of globalization (in particular, the massive impact of spoken theatre around the world) as its starting point would find itself ignoring huge swaths of the theatrical past. These problems are relatively easily avoided, however, by refusing the assumption that explaining present-day globalization is the central task of history-writing. Whether globalization is to be lauded or attacked is less relevant here than the fact that it merely one story of the many that might be studied and told. In the end, then, the argument of Western inevitability points to a very real problem, but one that is always susceptible to correction. It does not invalidate the study of world theatre history, although it should give scholars great caution as to how they proceed. World theatre historians must be on guard against taking European theatre as the standard or summation of world theatre; they must also recognize that the theatre of other regions cannot be subsumed into the history of an ostensibly world-conquering theatre of Europe.

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The Argument of Metanarratives The final argument against world theatre history is perhaps the most comprehensive of all. Jean-François Lyotard has famously written that the defining characteristic of postmodernism is an “incredulity toward metanarratives” (xxiv), or, as some would have it, of “master narratives” or “grand narratives.” As Michel Foucault has argued, “The traditional devices for constructing a comprehensive view of history and for retracing the past as a patient and continuous development must be systematically dismantled” (quoted in Besserman, 16). No doubt that many of the “traditional devices” are flawed, as we will see throughout this book. But the postmodernist claim, at its broadest, suggests that it is not just the “devices” that are flawed, but the very idea of any sort of “comprehensive view of history.” The immediate object of scorn for these scholars is the aforementioned Eurocentric metanarrative that focuses on the inevitable (if sometimes bumpy) progress toward universal human freedom, which emphasizes the centrality of Europe in this progress while readily ignoring those parts of the world that are seen as not contributing to it. As I noted in the Introduction (and will further discuss in Chap. 3), theatre history has its own version of this approach—the Standard Western Approach—which focuses on Europe and highlights a suppositious “progress” from ritual to realism, all the while ignoring theatre from elsewhere that has failed to contribute to that progress. Over the past generation, this metanarrative has become less frequently explicit because, as David Wiles observes, “Theatre historians have retreated from big stories, stories that catch the imagination and connect with the public domain, out of fear they will prove inherently elitist or nationalist, racist or masculinist” (4). Along with the postmodernists, I obviously have little regard for the sort of history that is built on a Eurocentric metanarrative. The postmodernist argument, however, goes further by implying that all metanarratives will inevitably distort history to an unacceptable degree, and that therefore theatre historians must abandon any effort to make sense of long-term history. It is, however, extremely difficult to abandon all metanarratives. As one critic has observed, Foucault’s notion of the episteme “seems to reinvest periods and periodization with the conceptual coherence … that he had

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been trying so hard to cancel” (Besserman 15). The standard Eurocentric history, in other words, is implicitly retained by Foucault, dressed up different terms and concepts. Other critics of the Eurocentric metanarrative, as Bentley notes, have not “rejected grand narrative, per se, so much as certain kinds of grand narrative.” That is, while rejecting Eurocentrism, they often have assumed some sort of “counter-narrative” that disparages Europe’s place in the world, and assigns central importance to India, Africa, or wherever (“World” 49)—but this is merely a substitution of ethnocentric metanarratives. And as the historian Barbara Weinstein observes, limiting one’s self to micro-narratives does not offer a solution, for “the micronarrative approach does not so much challenge grand narratives, or even deny them, as it ignores and obscures them, and the influence they continue to exert in how both scholars and the public view the past and present” (65). And even if we were truly able to reject all metanarratives, the costs would be appreciable. In the words of the historian Fernando Coronil, the rejection of all metanarrative “produces disjointed mini-narratives which reinforce dominant world-views; reacting against determinisms, it presents free-floating events; refusing to fix identity in structural categories, it essentializes identity though difference; resisting the location of power in structures or institutions, it diffuses it through society and ultimately dissolves it” (quoted in Bentley, “World” 48, n. 6). The idea of rejecting of all metanarratives might seem liberating, but that liberation would come at the cost of being able to change anything. Where does that leave us? Bentley readily acknowledges that “no single narrative or metanarrative or macro theory will accommodate all the multiplicity and variety of world history” (“Globalizing” 28). But still, he goes on to say, world history provides a crucial “framework” that allows scholars to escape a Eurocentric bias and analyze the “large-scale processes that connect the world’s many ostensibly distinct and discrete societies” (“Globalizing” 30). In this regard, he notes that the feminist scholars Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson have argued for “large-scale empirical narratives, as opposed to totalizing ahistorical metanarratives.” As he glosses their idea: “The point is not to universalize the experience of any particular society … but rather to entertain the possibility that beyond cultural distinctiveness … there might be some larger human stories, or at least larger contexts to serve as meaningful frameworks for thinking about the world’s past” (“World” 50–51). In terms of world theatre history, the most immediate issue in any “large-scale empirical narrative” is to avoid

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the near-exclusive concern with the theatre of Europe and its cultural descendants, and to repudiate the teleological suggestion that theatre history is nothing beyond the story of how such theatre has come about. In more positive terms, theatre historians need to recognize the obvious fact that history contains both continuity and change, both similarity and difference; it contains, that is, “some larger human stories, or at least larger contexts.” There should be nothing objectionable about “large-scale empirical narratives” that seek, however tentatively, to make sense of the diversity of theatrical experience. * * * The responses I have given to these various arguments should help clarify what I mean by “world theatre history.” As I have said, world theatre history strives for a more or less integrated view of theatre history in two or more regions of the world, or in the context of the world itself. This emphasis on integration enables historians to avoid the mere accumulation of facts. It encourages studies that seek for connections that might derive from actual contact, from aesthetic similarity, or from a shared context. It also notes the absence of connections, as well as the differences in various theatres, for absences and differences can also help historians understand the web of world theatre history. The potential scale of world theatre history can clearly raise problems, especially when working with multiple regions or the world itself, but even as details might be lost, different kinds of detail will emerge—details unobservable with a narrower historical focus. No scale is intrinsically better than any other, but all are valuable, and all are complementary. A crucial goal of world theatre history is to move beyond the provincialism that focuses on European theatre, because theatrical traditions of regions throughout the world are no less complex, and no less filled with historical development. Moreover, the world is, in effect, getting smaller, and an exclusive focus on the European-based theatre has become thoroughly myopic. A global perspective affords the chance to learn from and about the riches of world theatre, just as it recognizes the increasing integration of peoples from around the world. There is undoubtedly a danger that theatre historians will impose their own preconceptions on theatre elsewhere, but to over-emphasize this danger is merely to justify a historical solipsism. The study of world theatre history, as with the study of history on any scale, is an ongoing activity, in which the work of any historian

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can and will be criticized and corrected by other historians. Its goal is neither to create nor to sustain a totalizing narrative, but to develop empirically based narratives that recognize continuity and change, similarity and difference. Such narratives, on any interregional scale, allow historians to move beyond the mere compiling of micro-narratives by providing historiographic frameworks that avoid the straitjacket of Eurocentrism. Narratives of world theatre history, in short, are no less possible, and no less necessary, than narratives on any level of theatre history.

Notes 1. The development of world history classes was pioneered in the 1950s; by the 1970s “the introductory world history was beginning to gain acceptance in collegiate education” as a “curricular alterative” to Western Civ (Dunn 3). 2. See, for example, Ferguson’s triumphalist Civilization: The West and the Rest. 3. McNeill’s fairly recent “bird’s-eye view of world history,” written with his son J. R. McNeill, is actually entitled The Human Web. 4. I borrow the concept of the “theatrical event” from Willmar Sauter, The Theatrical Event, esp. 19–131; I will discuss it further in Chap. 4. 5. See, for example, John Pemble’s study of the reception of Shakespeare’s plays in France. 6. Studies of Shakespearean productions in various Asian and African lands have become quite common as such productions have multiplied in the past generation. See, for example, Kennedy and Yong, and the website “Global Shakespeares: Video and Performance Archive.” 7. In literary studies, Franco Moretti has offered fascinating (though controversial) studies in what he has called “distant reading,” in which “distance” from the individuality of each text is “not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall connection” (1). 8. The entire REED collection of records is accessible at the website REED Online. 9. I make a move in this direction, regarding African theatre, in Chap. 5. 10. Strikingly, Fischer-Lichte is writing here about the inadequacy of source-­ material for ancient Greek theatre, for which there is obviously far more information than for most of the world until quite recently. 11. Given Fischer-Lichte’s preference for micro-histories, it is worth noting that she herself is the author of History of European Drama and Theatre, which spans from ritual theatre and the Greeks all the way to the twentieth century.

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12. See Postlewait 27–59, for a fine account of numerous historiographic disputes pertaining to Shakespeare’s Globe theatre. 13. See, for example, the account of kabuki’s history in Ortolani 162–207. 14. This particular problem is less evident in the Americas. The national history of theatre in the United States, for example, reaches back little more than two centuries. Even up until the twentieth century, the vast majority of its theatre was clearly derived from, and inferior to, British theatre: little cause for nationalistic pride there. 15. Intercultural (or, as it is sometimes called, cross-cultural) borrowing is a very sensitive area in theatre scholarship; for a good overview of the subject, see Lo and Gilbert, passim. I will have more to say about the subject in Chap. 7. 16. I will return to the matter of nation-states as a geographic unit of study in Chap. 5.

Works Cited Abu-Lughod, Janet L. “The World-System Perspective in the Construction of Economic History.” World History: Ideologies, Structures, and Identities, edited by Philip Pomper et al., Blackwell, 1998, pp. 69–80. Banham, Martin, editor. A History of Theatre in Africa. Cambridge UP, 2004. Bell, David A. “This Is What Happens When Historians Overuse the Idea of the Network.” The New Republic, 25 October 2013. https://newrepublic.com/ ar ticle/114709/world-connecting-reviewed-historians-overusenetwork-metaphor Bentley, Jerry H. “Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History.” The New World History: A Teacher’s Companion, edited by Ross E.  Dunn, Bedford/St. Martin, 2000, pp. 376–84. Bentley, Jerry H. “Globalizing History and Historicizing Globalization.” Globalization and Global History, edited by Barry K.  Gills and William R. Thompson, Routledge, 2006, pp. 16–29. Bentley, Jerry H. “Myths, Wagers, and Some Moral Implications of World History.” Journal of World History, vol. 16, no. 1, March 2005, pp. 51–82. Bentley, Jerry H. “World History and Grand Narrative.” Writing World History, edited by Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs, Oxford UP, 2003, pp. 47–65. Besserman, Lawrence. “The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives.” The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, edited by Lawrence Besserman, Garland, 1996, pp. 3–27. Brown, John Russell, editor. Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre. Oxford UP, 2001. Carlson, Marvin. “Reflections on a Global Theatre.” The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, edited by David Wiles and Christine Dymkowski, Cambridge UP, 2013, pp. 149–61.

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Conrad, Sebastian. What Is Global History? Princeton UP, 2016. Dirlik, Arif. “Confounding Metaphors, Inventions of the World: What is World History For?” Writing World History: 1800–2000, edited by Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs, Oxford UP, 2003, pp. 91–133. Dunn, Ross E. “Introduction.” The New World History: A Teacher’s Companion, edited by Ross Dunn, Bedford/St. Martin, 2000, pp. 1–11. Ernst, Earle. The Kabuki Theatre. Grove Press, 1956. Ferguson, Niall. Civilization: The West and the Rest. Penguin Books, 2011. Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Literature in Africa. Clarendon Press, 1970. Fischer, David Hackett. Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. Harper & Row, 1970. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. “Classical Theatre.” The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, edited by David Wiles and Christine Dymkowski, Cambridge UP, 2013, pp. 73–84. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. History of European Drama and Theatre. Translated by Jo Riley, Routledge, 2002. Global Shakespeares. Video and Performance Archive. globalshakespeares.mit.edu/ Green, A. E. “Popular Drama and the Mummers’ Play.” Performance and Politics in Popular Drama, edited by David Bradby, Cambridge UP, 1980, pp. 139–66. Green, William A. “Periodizing World History.” The New World History: A Teacher’s Companion, edited by Ross E.  Dunn, Bedford/St. Martin, 2000, pp. 384–93. Kennedy, Dennis, and Yong Li Lan. Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance. Cambridge UP, 2010. Lo, Jacqueline, and Helen Gilbert. “Toward a Topography of Cross-Cultural Theatre Praxis.” TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 46, no. 3, Autumn 2002, pp. 31–53. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, U of Minnesota P, 1984. Manning, Patrick. Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Mazlish, Bruce. “An Introduction to Global History.” Conceptualizing Global History, edited by Bruce Mazlish and Ralph Buultjens, Westview Press, 1993. McConachie, Bruce A. “Towards a Postpositive Theatre History.” Theatre Journal, vol. 37, no. 4, December 1985, pp. 465–86. McNeill, William H. Mythistory and Other Essays. U of Chicago P, 1986. McNeill, J. R., and William H. McNeill. The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History. W. W. Norton, 2003. Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. Verso, 2007.

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Neusner, Jacob. “It is Time to Stop Apologizing for Western Civilization and to Start Analyzing Why It Defines World Culture.” The New World History: A Teacher’s Companion, edited by Ross E.  Dunn, Bedford/St. Martin, 2000, pp. 104–06. Okagbue, Osita. African Theatres and Performances. Routledge, 2007. Ortolani, Benito. The Japanese Theatre: From Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism. Rev. ed., Princeton UP, 1995. Osterhammel, Jürgen. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Patrick Camiller, Princeton UP, 2014. Pemble, John. Shakespeare Goes to Paris: How the Bard Conquered France. London, Hambledon and London, 2005. Pomper, Philip. “World History and its Critics.” History and Theory, vol. 34, no. 2, May 1995, pp. 1–7. Postlewait, Thomas. The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography. Cambridge UP, 2009. REED [Records of Early English Drama] Online. ereed.library.utoronto.ca/ Robinson, Jo. “Becoming More Provincial? The Global and the Local in Theatre History.” New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 3, August 2007, pp. 229–41. Sauter, Willmar. The Theatrical Event: Dynamics of Performance and Perception. U of Iowa P, 2000. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “The New Historicism: Political Commitment and the Postmodern Critic.” The New Historicism, edited by H.  Aram Veeser, Routledge, 1989, pp. 272–92. Taylor, Gary. Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History, from the Restoration to the Present. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989. Vansina, Jan. Oral Tradition as History. U of Wisconsin P, 1985. Wallace, Jennifer. “Tragedy in China.” The Cambridge Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 2, June 2013, pp. 99–111. Weinstein, Barbara. “The World Is Your Archive? The Challenges of World History as a Field of Research.” A Companion to World History, edited by Douglas Northrop, Wiley-Blackwell, 2015, pp. 63–78. Wickham, Glynne. A History of the Theatre. 2nd ed., Cambridge UP, 1992. Wiles, David. Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction. Cambridge UP, 2000.

CHAPTER 3

The Fallacies of the Standard Western Approach

Given the many arguments that can be levied against world theatre history, one might reasonably wonder why theatre studies should risk abandoning the Standard Western Approach. After all, it has managed for more than a century to offer scholars and students a framework for understanding what might be called the arc of theatre history. Undoubtedly the approach is parochial, but perhaps relatively modest adjustments could open it up to the wider world; such has been the effort, as we saw in the Introduction, of professors and textbook authors who have slowly added material on Asian, African, and (especially) South  American theatre to their otherwise traditional accounts. Undoubtedly, also, the Standard Western Approach is an example of the sort of metanarrative scorned by postmodernists. But if the metanarrative presents a reasonably accurate overview of theatre history, it might well be worth maintaining—again, with whatever adjustments might be deemed necessary—especially if the main alternative were an endless array of micro-narratives. Modest adjustments, however, cannot save the Standard Western Approach. The approach is predicated on a set of historiographic fallacies that undermine any claim it might have to being reasonably accurate. In this chapter I will focus on three fallacies in particular: the fallacies of the “mainstream,” the East–West dichotomy, and the progressivist thesis. These are certainly not the only fallacies of the approach: in Chap. 5 I will examine the fallacy of using continents and nation-states as theatre history’s basic geographical units, while in Chap. 8 I will consider the approach’s © The Author(s) 2020 S. Tillis, The Challenge of World Theatre History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48343-2_3

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fallacious use of theatre periods. But despite the significance of those other fallacies, the three I will discuss here are the most fundamental of its flaws. The fallacy of the mainstream is itself composed of a pair of historiographic fallacies: ethnocentrism and what has been call “presentism,” which are, respectively, biases of space and time. Together, they allow for the idea that there is a mainstream of theatre history that, by no mean coincidence, happens to run directly through Europe and point to contemporary European-style theatre as the culmination of theatre history. The fallacy of the East–West dichotomy is one of the main supports for the idea of a theatrical mainstream. By dividing the world into pair of ostensibly equivalent units, it seeks to draw a clear line between “us” and “them,” serving to glorify the Western “us” in the process. A variant of the East–West dichotomy draws (to similar effect) a no-less dubious line between the West and the “the world.” The fallacy of the progressivist thesis, finally, provides the spurious justification for the idea of a theatrical mainstream. It claims that Europe’s theatre history is unique in showing a progress from ancient ritual and dance to twentieth-century naturalism and spoken dialogue—a progress to which most of the world’s theatre has largely been irrelevant, and can therefore safely be marginalized or ignored. These three fallacies are not incidental features of the Standard Western Approach; they are its very basis. Absent them, the approach loses all intellectual coherence. As I hope to show, however, they are indeed fallacies. To accept the Standard Western Approach, regardless of whatever adjustments one might care to make, is to accept the falsification of theatre history generated by these fallacies.

The Mainstream of Theatre History Ethnocentrism and Presentism In his wickedly delightful Historians’ Fallacies, David Hackett Fischer takes his fellow historians to task for more than a hundred different fallacies of historical logic and methodology, offering examples primarily from the field of American history. Virtually all historians are guilty of committing at least a few of these fallacies (as I no doubt will be in the course of this book), but as Fischer writes, the purpose of examining the fallacies “is not to play traffic cop or magistrate,” but to point out some very common “wrong turnings” that one might strive to avoid (xviii). The “wrong

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turnings” I want to focus on here are ethnocentrism and presentism.1 Together, they create the fallacy of the mainstream. The fallacy of ethnocentrism, according to Fischer, “is committed by a historian who exaggerates the role of his own group in its interaction with other groups” (226). The “own group” in question might be a nation-­ state (as in Fischer’s examples) but can span from individual families up to entire global regions. The latter is the case with the Standard Western Approach, which grossly exaggerates the role of Europe in the history of theatre. Ethnocentrism is perfectly natural, and probably all peoples engage in it to a greater or lesser degree. As I noted in the Introduction, Chinese acceptance of Matteo Ricci’s world map was predicated on receiving a version that was appropriately Sinocentric. But the idea that Europe (or any other place) might be (or has been) the center of the theatre world is not necessarily fallacious. By way of analogy, China was for centuries the undoubted center of the international porcelain trade, just as nineteenth-­ century London was incontestably the center of international finance. Claims such as these are not mere presumption; they are based on clear historical evidence. If one place is to be recognized as the world center of theatre, it must be shown that theatre in most, if not all, other places has in some way been dependent on or derived from it. But of course this cannot be shown of the relationship between European theatre and the theatres of, say, India, China, Japan, and Africa at any point before the nineteenth century. Until then, European theatre was an utter irrelevance to those theatres, and therefore cannot be construed as having been central to world theatre history. The fallacy of presentism, meanwhile, is a kind of anachronistic thinking in which “the antecedent in a narrative sequence is falsified by being defined or interpreted in terms of the consequent.”2 In practice, writes Fischer, presentism “is the mistaken idea that the proper way to do history is to prune away the dead branches of the past, and to preserve the green buds and twigs which have grown into the dark forest of our contemporary world” (135). This is very much the technique of the Standard Western Approach, which takes as its starting point the present near ubiquity of European spoken theatre, then prunes away all the “branches” of world theatre that did not directly contribute to this present. Presentism is as common a habit of thought as ethnocentrism. The question “How did things become what they are today?” holds perpetual interest, down even to the level of individual lives, and is by no means an

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invalid question when one is looking to understand a specific series of events. But it is bad history precisely because it is willfully narrow-minded. As Fischer comments in regard to one of his examples, the author’s “backward projections of present phenomena so grossly distorts the past that the reader receives an utterly erroneous idea of events in earlier periods, and of tendencies in his own as well” (136). Imagine if, fifty years from now, India were the dominant power in the world, and Indian theatre artists were spreading their work throughout the world, influencing performances everywhere. A presentist account of theatre from that time would look radically different from a presentist account from the twentieth century: it might downplay or ignore realistic spoken theatre as a historical “dead end” and instead emphasize traditions of devotional theatre, such as the Passion play at Oberammergau, as presaging the newly dominant Indian theatre. But as Fischer states, “Surely any standard of significance which requires a 180-degree turn in interpretation [depending on current circumstances] is not merely mistaken, but absurd” (139). Europe in the Mainstream When the biases of space and time presented by ethnocentrism and presentism are combined, as in the Standard Western Approach, the result is the idea that European theatre is the veritable “mainstream” of theatre, and that anything that does not belong to or feed into that mainstream is of marginal interest at best. We can observe this idea of the mainstream in what Hodgson calls the “historical world-image of the West,” the contours of which will certainly look familiar to anyone who has studied theatre history: History [began] in the ‘East’—in Mesopotamia and Egypt…. The torch was then passed successively to Greece and Rome and finally to the Christians of northwestern Europe, where medieval and modern life developed. During the Middle Ages, Islam was temporarily permitted to hold the torch of science, which properly belonged to the West, until the West was ready to take it over and carry it forward. India, China, and Japan also had ancient civilizations but were isolated from the mainstream of history and ‘contributed’ still less to [it]. In modern times Western Europe expanded over the rest of the world, so that Islam, India, and China have ceased to be isolated, and have entered the orbit of the ongoing Western Civilization, now becoming a world civilization. (Rethinking 6)

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It is, of course, irrelevant to this Eurocentric worldview that the non-­ European societies mentioned—India, China, Japan, and Islamdom— have had continuous histories since their “ancient” formulations. According to this worldview, they only matter for their “contributions” to the “mainstream” that flows through Europe. It is also irrelevant that societies in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Americas have their own long and complex histories. From the Eurocentric perspective, they come into play (except perhaps as examples of some universal primitive background) only when Europe has imposed itself upon them—when, one might say, they have been flooded over by the mainstream. Hodgson argues that this understanding of history depends on what he calls a “Westward distortion.” Here is how it works. Ancient Greece was but the westernmost outpost of the entire Eastern Mediterranean-­ Southwest Asian complex of societies; the rest, however, can be ignored once their influence on Greece has been detailed. Ancient Rome was the successor to Greece, and once attention turns to it, the more easterly Greece can also be safely ignored, despite the fact that the Roman Empire (now based in Constantinople) carried on for about a thousand years after the fall of Rome itself. Instead, attention leaps across five centuries and many hundreds of miles, to a Germanic chieftain by the name of Charles who carved out a small domain in one of Rome’s westernmost provinces. From that point on, at least until it set out to conquer much of the world, Western Europe alone is worthy of mention. It is not history that has moved west, in other words, but only the attention of Western Europeans, determined to draw a line through history that leads directly to them (“Hemispheric” 120–23). All the theatre textbooks I have examined (with the partial exception of Theatre Histories) partake in this “Westward distortion,” fully engaging in the fallacies of ethnocentrism and presentism. Most do not address their reasoning, crucial though it is to the logic of the texts. But Allardyce Nicoll, in a textbook now out of print, does not hesitate to explain himself. Writes Nicoll: “A purely factual account of theatrical development would presumably treat of plays in all countries, East and West, according to their position in time; and it would, moreover, seek to deal with all manifestations of the art dramatic no matter where they were exhibited.” Nicoll, however, is unconcerned with that sort of account. “In the present volume,” he continues, “a different orientation has been adopted”: his book “is concerned chiefly with the Western drama,” leaving “other kinds of drama” to be “dealt with largely in so far as they have aided in the

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evolution of Western forms” (vi). Later, Nicoll states bluntly, “The focal point is the theatre of the West, and everything must be dependent upon that fact” (529). It will be useful here to note that the title of Nicoll’s book is World Drama: From Aeschylus to Anouilh. Nicoll’s explicit focus on Western drama can be squared with this title only thanks to the mainstreaming magic of ethnocentrism and presentism. Now consider how closely Wilson and Goldfarb’s Living Theatre follows the same logic, without explicitly stating it. The textbook begins with a short account of the “origins” of theatre, and makes the nowobligatory mention of ancient Egypt—throwing in a brief (and anachronistic) mention of an Aztec theatre form from the fifteenth century and a contemporary form of the Guru people in sub-Saharan Africa (2–5). From this point, North Africa, the  Americas, and sub-Saharan Africa disappear from theatre history, only to return when impacted by European theatre. After the authors have treated Greece and Rome, they confront a critical problem in mainstreaming European theatre: for nearly five hundred years, there was virtually no theatre in Europe. Wilson and Goldfarb fill the gap by shifting their attention to Asia, jamming perfunctory accounts of almost the entirety of Asian theatre history into about twenty-five pages. That chore dispensed with, they can proceed to ignore all of Asia until they reach twentieth century. Returning to the mainstream, the textbook traces the flow of European theatre for roughly a thousand years, with an overwhelming focus on a handful of Western European nations (most particularly, England). The “Westward distortion,” to use Hodgson’s phrase, points all of theatre history to London, the westernmost theatre capital in Eurasia. Only in their final chapters do Wilson and Goldfarb expand their focus, but even then, their main interest is the spread of European-style theatre. In sum, the mainstream of theatre history flows through, and eventually pours out from, Europe. Ethnocentrism and presentism rule supreme, and little else is of interest.3

The East–West Dichotomy The “Twain” A central prop to the mainstreaming of Europe has been the oft-­proclaimed dichotomy between East and West, a “twain” that (suggests a famous line from Rudyard Kipling) “never … shall meet.” Through much of European

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history, East and West were sometimes referred to as the Orient and the Occident, or (more simply) Asia and Europe.4 The boundaries in each of these dichotomies sometimes differ—indeed, all the boundaries have been surprisingly unstable over time, as I will discuss in Chap. 5—but the essential point of these dichotomies is identical. They are Europe’s attempt to distinguish itself from the rest of Eurasia. What was wanted was a division of the world into an us and an Other against which the European us might measure itself—and after finding itself superior, proceed to see the Other as either a threat or an irrelevance. Despite their lack of complete congruity, the dichotomies of Asia–Europe, Orient–Occident, and East–West have all admirably served that purpose. If the “twain” never shall meet, it is because Europeans have never really wanted them to. All these dichotomies, however, are deeply flawed. I will be referring primarily to the East–West pairing, as it is the one most regularly encountered at present. The first flaw I will discuss concerns the geographic and demographic absurdity of the East–West dichotomy—specifically, the idea that East and West are co-equals, as well as idea that the East can even be construed as a coherent entity. The second flaw concerns the unsupportable cultural stereotyping that animates the East–West dichotomy, distinguishing the one from the other in patently prejudicial terms. I will then look at the latest twist in this old story: a dichotomy that now separates the West from the entire world beyond it. The Geography and Demography of East and West The semantics of the East–West dichotomy implies an equivalence between two entities that divide the world. This implication, however, is nonsensical, and has been throughout history. The discrepancy is immediately apparent in the geography of Eurasia. Europe (including Russia up to the Ural Mountains) has an area of 10,180,000 square kilometers; the area of Asia (including most of the islands of Southeast Asia) is 44,579,000 square kilometers) square kilometers—that is, more than four times the size of Europe (World Atlas). Indeed, China alone has almost 10 million square kilometers, so if one were looking for a geographic equivalent of Europe, one would need to take China, rather than Asia as a whole. We can also see the lack of equivalence with a glance at population figures. In 1600, near the start of European colonization of the Americas, China had a population of about 150 million people, India about 100 million; Asia’s total population was over 300 million. By contrast, Europe had

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some 83  million people—far less than either China or India, and well under a third of the total Asian population (Frank 170).5 In 2017, China had a population of 1.4 billion and India had 1.3 billion; the entirety of Asia had a population of 4.5 billion. By contrast, Europe’s population was 742  million; North America’s was 361  million, and Latin America and the  Caribbean combined for 645  million; New Zealand and Australia, combined, added another 25  million people (United Nations, World Population 17–22). Taking together the population of all these regions as comprising the total population of the contemporary West yields a total of nearly 1.8 billion people—slightly larger than either China or India alone, but still well under half the total population of the East. The contemporary West, of course, would be at an even greater disadvantage if one were not to include Latin America and the Caribbean, as seems to be quite common—though this would place them in neither East nor West, an anomalous position they would share with Africa. Although any population figures from 1600 must of necessity be approximations, it is clear that neither four hundred years ago nor today can one claim any sort of equivalence between East and West. The dichotomy serves primarily to obscure the fact that Europe is, in Hodgson’s words, “historically simply one among several regions in the Eastern Hemisphere, each of the same order as itself in size, populousness, and cultural wealth” (“Hemispheric” 119). An even more critical problem for the East–West dichotomy is the assumption that the East and the West are actually coherent entities. I will put off for now discussing the West, for it is the coherence of the East that presents the more immediate problem. Whether one is speaking in terms of history at large or of theatre itself, there is no such thing as the East. Instead, there is a set of highly diverse regions. Despite extensive societal interactions among themselves (and, for that matter, with Europe), the regions collectively called the “East” have and have always had distinct identities; and more to the point here, they have and have always had distinct traditions of theatre. As James Brandon states, “There is no single Asian-Oceanic aesthetic of theatre nor is there a single structural pattern, but rather numerous, even opposing, aesthetics and structures” (Brandon and Banham 9). And as Leonard Pronko observes, “The abyss that separates Kathakali, for example, from Noh, or Peking opera from Kabuki, is as deep as that which distinguishes a Balinese dance from Oedipus.” Pronko goes on to tell of a Chinese theatre delegate who, after seeing a performance of kabuki at an international conference, could

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only respond, “It was so different, I didn’t know what to think!” (4–5). If the East were a single theatrical entity, one would expect neither this abyss nor this response. Let me try to be as fair as possible. Despite denying the existence of a “single Asian-Oceanic aesthetic of theatre,” Brandon does not hesitate to make the generalizing suggestion that “most Asian theatre is ‘total theatre’ in which all performance aspects are fused into a single form”; by way of contrast, “in the history of Western performing arts, we see ever-­ increasing specialization via performance medium” (Brandon and Banham 7). Is there then a single identity to Asian theatre after all, predicated on the idea of “total” theatre? Brandon goes on to recognize that in fact many European forms of theatre are also total theatre, noting musical comedy and opera as two such examples (Brandon and Banham 7). Many other forms could easily be adduced, most importantly, the tragedy and comedy of ancient Greece, from which the European tradition itself is usually said to derive. And although Brandon does not mention them, one might also observe that numerous traditional and contemporary theatre forms in sub-Saharan Africa and among indigenous Americans are also be said to be “total” theatre, in which “performance aspects” of music, song, dance, spoken dialogue, oratory, costuming (including sometimes masking), and so on, are readily combined in various ways. But if all this is the case, it would be absurd to argue that “total” theatre is in any way a defining characteristic of “Eastern” theatre in particular; it would be far more logical to say that it is common throughout the world, including even Europe. As Brandon recognizes, musical comedy and opera are frequently “ghettoiz[ed]” in discussions of theatre, referring to the “critical bias” in favor of “text-based” theatre (Brandon and Banham 7). And therein lies the nub of the matter. Forms of total theatre can be found virtually everywhere, but the “critical bias” of many European and American scholars leads them to take a single form of dramatic theatre—European spoken theatre—as theatre itself, relegating all other forms “to the status of ‘other’” (Brandon and Banham 7). Asian practices of total theatre, in brief, fail to justify the idea that the theatre of the East is in any way a coherent entity; a dichotomy between East and West cannot be based on their existence. Not only are the various Asian societies different from one another; they are about as different from one another as they are from Europe. While it is impossible to quantify proportions of cultural difference, Hodgson suggests that if one were compelled to divide Eurasia into two

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basic entities, “it would probably be a good deal more reasonable to divide [it] into Celestial and Barbarian civilizations, as the Chinese did; for the Chinese is probably the most distinctive of all [Eurasian] cultures” (Rethinking 40). It is also worth noting that although Europeans have sometimes taken Islamdom to be the very definition of the East—Edward Said’s classic study Orientalism is primarily concerned with European (mis)perceptions of Islamdom—historian Bernard Lewis points out that “Europe and Islam were old acquaintances, intimate enemies,” with “shared origins and common aims” (17). For this reason, the geographers Martin W. Lewis and Kären Wigen argue that the “the cleavage between Christendom and Islam” is actually “the shallowest of the major divisions in premodern Eurasia” (146). But the Europeans who divided the world into East and West were not looking for a logical point of division, they were looking to distinguish themselves from the rest of the world, and so the line between themselves and their nearest neighbors was their obvious line of choice. The East as “Other” Stereotypes of East and West have a long and cherished history in Europe. According to Said, “As a system of thought Orientalism approaches a heterogeneous, dynamic, and complex human reality from an uncritically essentialist standpoint; this suggests both an enduring Oriental reality and an opposing but no less enduring Western essence, which observes the Orient from afar and from, so to speak, above” (333).6 Stereotypical views of East and West, unsurprisingly, have long found their way into discussions of theatre. These views go far beyond the aforementioned idea that Asian theatre can, in some sense, be seen as a coherent whole on the basis of its interest in “total” theatre, as opposed to the dialogue-based spoken theatre taken as the European theatre. They pertain, rather, to a set of essentializing traits that Europeans assign to their Eastern Other, which allow Europeans to define themselves in opposition (and as superior) to that Other. Conversely, the traits that Europeans ascribe to themselves are counted among the prime reasons for the rise of the West to global dominance. The overt racism inherent in these stereotypes has somewhat bleached out over the past fifty years or so, but that has scarcely loosened their hold. There has also developed a counter-opinion that sees the essentialized Eastern traits to be of greater worth than the Western ones—but this position is less concerned with challenging the stereotypes of East and

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West than with reversing the valuations of them. As Lewis and Wigen observe, “Not only do the West’s defenders and attackers share a dependence on East-West comparisons, but more particularly there is a remarkable congruence in the contours of their respective cultural stereotypes” (75). It is not the valuations given to the stereotypes that are the problem in the current context. Rather, it is the underlying habit of thought that insists on seeing the world in terms of an essentialized dichotomy. Various stereotypes of East and West have been posited over the years. I will look here at two of the more enduring sets of stereotypes—the fatalism of the East (as opposed to Western dynamism) and the irrational excess of the East (as opposed to the balanced rationality of the West)—as they have been applied to theatre history. Later in this chapter I will examine a third stereotype: Eastern stasis as opposed to Western progress. At the start of the twentieth century, Brander Matthews wrote, “The orientals have no vital drama because they are fatalists, because they do not believe in that free will without which the drama cannot exist” (Study 96). Aside from noting that Matthews could scarcely have jammed more negatives into his assertion, a couple of observations are called for. First, Matthews stands at the head of the American tradition of theatre historiography (Jackson 60), and is its first exponent of the Standard Western Approach; his claim about “orientals” and their drama is no idle whimsy of an obscure racist, but a crucial element in a theatre historiography that has lasted to this day. The second observation is that Matthews is demonstrably wrong. Orphan of Zhao, written by Ji Junxiang for the Yuan zaju theatre, is rather unusual among that form’s plays because of “the tragic spirit” that pervades it, but it shares an important characteristic of almost all Yuan zaju plays, as identified by the Chinese scholar Wang Guowei: “Courageous acts are … performed through the heroes’ assertion of will” (107). The plays of Sanskrit theatre are even more insistent than those of Yuan zaju in offering happy endings for the hero, but such endings do not obviate the exercise of free will. Kalidasa’s The Recognition of Shakuntala conforms to the precepts of the great critical work, The Natyashastra, which holds (in Farley P. Richmond’s gloss) that “the principle objective of the plot is to show the hero struggling for and finally attaining the object of his desire” (72). Finally, the jointly authored Chūshingura (The Treasury of Loyal Retainers), written for bunraku puppets but quickly adapted for kabuki as well, belongs to a playwriting tradition in which “social duty, rather than religious principles, individual rights, or abstract notions of Good or Evil”

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determines “ethical behavior” and motivates character action (Ernst 226). The impress of such duty is often the central issue in these plays, with characters having conflicts between opposing social duties (giri) or between social duty and their own human feelings (ninjō). The exercise of free will, however grim the consequences might be, is inescapable when confronted with such conflicts.7 I mention these particular plays because they were all available to Matthews in English translation, however dubious of quality those translations might have been.8 He apparently either failed to seek them out or refused to allow any knowledge of them to shape his impression of “oriental” theatre. Rather, he quite plainly made up his mind about such theatre based on crude and totalizing suppositions about “orientals” themselves. My point here is not to abuse Matthews for failing to live up to some twenty-first century ideal of political correctness. I am criticizing the facility with which he was willing to roll up all of the various societies of Asia into a single cultural entity and impute the characteristic of fatalism upon the theatre of this alleged monoculture, without paying any attention to evidence that was readily available to him. One can also observe how his claim that “the oriental have no vital drama” is an easy justification for excluding any Asian theatre from the “mainstream” of theatre history. And indeed, in his major work of theatre history, The Development of the Drama (1916), Matthews failed to mention the existence of any Asian theatre. The second stereotype I will address here involves Europe’s favorite conceit about itself: its rationality, as opposed to one or another manner of irrational excess in the East. Sheldon Cheney was nearly as significant as Matthews in establishing the American version of the Standard Western Approach, most especially in The Theatre: Three Thousand Years of Drama, Acting and Stagecraft (1929). Contrary to Matthews, Cheney did devote a chapter (out of twenty-four) to theatre in Asia. And Cheney was not entirely unsympathetic to it, actually suggesting at one point that “our arts” have become “too rigid, realistic, and pale,” and that “our theatre might gain … much from the reintroduction of the discarded sensual elements”—though he quickly added, “God forbid!” that we import “some elements of Oriental art into our own” (104, 105). At any rate, Cheney knew enough about the diversity of Asian theatre to see the futility of a simple East–West duality, so instead he proposed that “Oriental theatre and drama,” is either more “sensuous” and “decorative”

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or more “formalized” and “intellectual” than that of Europe, which lies between these Asian extremes (105). One way or the other, Asian theatre presents “an impression of purposeful unreality, of formalized theatric beauty” (133) that is a far cry from the sturdy Western rationalism. No doubt some Asian theatre forms are “sensuous” and “decorative,” as might be suggested by the dictum that “in Chinese theatre, everything must be beautiful.”9 But is being “sensuous” and “decorative” limited to “oriental” theatre? European opera is notably sensual, particularly in its music and singing. Two vocal types are especially worth noting. First is the coloratura soprano, who specializes in ornamenting her vocal lines, quite literally bringing decoration to the music. Second is the castrato, who, in the unlamented past, produced such a sensuous sound that it was deemed worth the cost of the singer’s manhood. I might also add that the stages— indeed, the entire theatre venues—of opera are vastly more “sensuous and decorative” than the unadorned stages typically used for Chinese theatre forms. The “formalized and intellectual” East of which Cheney speaks, meanwhile, can be exemplified by kathakali, among whose practices are “twenty-four basic hand-gestures (mudra), eight different ways of performing hand-gestures while acting, nine basic facial expressions (navarasas), rhythmic patterns, choreography and movement patterns,” and so on (Zarrilli 73). But similar kinds of conventionalization can be found in European theatre as well. Consider the “formalized and intellectual” aspects found in ballet. The basic movements were first codified in 1760 by Jean Georges Noverre; that codification has been refined over the centuries, but still holds the floor (as it were) in most contemporary ballet performance. To advance the plot of ballet, Noverre also encouraged a highly conventionalized pantomime that would reveal a character’s “deepest and most secret feelings” without the aid of speech (Homans 74). No less conventional and formalized is the dancing en pointe by ballerinas, which was critical to the rise of romanticist ballet in the nineteenth century. Dancing en pointe is as unnatural a means of locomotion as can be found in theatre. Still, the apparent lengthening of the female dancers’ legs and the resulting delicacy of movement was an important element in ballet’s popularity and is still considered well worth the dancers’ quite literal pains.10 Is it illegitimate to refer to opera and ballet to show that the characteristics Cheney ascribed to the East are also easily found in European theatre? Cheney did not hesitate to devote short sections of two chapters to

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these forms, so he clearly did not discount them. Still, it is obvious that he was little concerned that they might contradict the East–West dichotomy he set forth. For regarding theatre, his main concern was less with the West, per se, than with the single form of European spoken theatre. As with Matthews (and also with later exponents of the Standard Western Approach), the dichotomy being drawn is actually between spoken theatre and everything else—but since spoken theatre is taken to represent the West, the characteristics of everything else are casually shunted off to the alien Other. The West and the “World” Thanks in part to a growing awareness that the East–West dichotomy somehow manages to displace large portions of the world, such as Africa (and, in some formulations, Latin America), the old dichotomy has lately sometimes been reconfigured, with the West’s alien Other being the “World” itself.11 Although theatre scholars who employ this newer dichotomy usually have the laudable intention of bringing attention to unfamiliar theatre traditions, it is no less dubious than the East–West dichotomy. Obviously the lack of equivalence in that older dichotomy persists (in an even more exaggerated form) in this newer dichotomy, and I need not demonstrate the point with geographic and demographic evidence. No less obviously, the difficulty inherent in taking all of the East as an undifferentiated entity is compounded when that Other must include all “non-­ Western” societies throughout the world. But even aside from all that, the “West-World” dichotomy presents a pair of serious problems. The more immediate of these problems pertains to a question I put off discussing earlier: is the West itself a coherent entity, and if so, what might its contours be? It is easy enough to see Western Europe as the geographic core of the West, although even in the twentieth century, Germany’s place in the West was sometimes disputed (Lewis and Wigen 58); but how far the West might extend from Western Europe is quite uncertain. The status of Russia as a Western land has long been in question (Lewis and Wigen 55–58), particularly when complicated by the twentieth-century political taxonomy that posed the democratic West against a communist East; there is also the complication presented by the fact that Russia extends all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Russia, however, is just the beginning of this problem, for one must also try to understand the place of Europe’s former settler colonies. Few people would hesitate to count Canada and the

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United States as Western; the same is probably true of New Zealand and Australia, though their inclusion makes a mockery of the “West” as a geographic concept. But what about South and Central America, as well as of the Caribbean, all of whose nation-states also developed out of European settler colonies? Their status is complicated by an economic taxonomy that often puts them, along with virtually all of Africa and much of Asia, in the “Third World” (Lewis and Wigen 4–6). The construction of the West in theatre studies is no less uncertain than in general discourse. We can see one configuration of it in E. J. Westlake’s valuable World Theatre: The Basics. Owing to the need to keep the book short (vi), Westlake omits discussion of theatre in what amounts to the West—a term, it is worth noting, that she scrupulously avoids. It goes without saying that no aspect of theatre in Europe or the United States (other than intercultural “collaborations”) receives discussion, but beyond that, Westlake draws some very fine distinctions. South and Central America, as well as the Caribbean, are implicitly seen as “World,” despite the fact that most (though by no means all) of their theatre that receives discussion is either derived from or in line with developments in European spoken theatre (e.g., Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête [A Tempest] and Griselda Gambaro’s Las Paredes [The Walls] [118–21, 139–41]). More surprising might be the inclusion in the book of New Zealand and Australia—but it turns out that aside from a few sentences, only the aboriginal theatre of these lands is implicitly part of world theatre. An even greater surprise might be Westlake’s treatment of Canada, which includes not only the theatre of indigenous peoples (i.e., “First Nations”), but also that of the French-speaking people of Québec, who seem to have somehow escaped from the West. If all this is the World, what then is the West that the book implies? Apparently it is little more than Europe, the United States, and those parts of Europe’s other former settler colonies that happen to speak English. Westlake offers an important service by calling attention to theatre that is relatively unknown to English-speaking readers, but this results in an implicit “West” that fails to make sense geographically, politically, or sociologically. It turns out to be nothing more or less than the us who need to be better informed about the Other. The second problem with the West–World dichotomy (however it might be drawn) is that it sees the West as apart from the world, rather than as a part of it. Such is the case not only with Westlake’s text, but also with Glenn Odom’s admirable World Theories of Theatre. Odom states that he “unapologetically uses the word ‘world’ to signify that portion of the

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world which is not Europe, Russia, or the U.S.” (1). While granting, with Odom, that terms such as “non-Western” and “Global East and South” each present their own difficulties (2), his use of “world” is illogical, since “world” is obviously an all-encompassing geographic category. To categorically exclude Europe (and whatever other lands one might consider “Western”) from the “world” implicitly (though in this case, quite unintentionally) reinforces the idea of Western exceptionalism by accepting that Europe’s theatre is somehow distinct from theatre everywhere else, and cannot be discussed or analyzed in the same terms.12 The separation of the West from the “world” denies the historical integration of theatre around the world, pulling the West out of the world’s theatrical web. It renders impossible the examination of similarities (of whatever sort) and differences that might exist between the theatres of West and various other regions. It is, arguably, even less plausible to pull the West out of the World than it is to draw a line between East and West. This new dichotomy is certainly no improvement over the older one.

The Progressivist Thesis Progressivism and History The Standard Western Approach—to recap—combines the fallacies of ethnocentrism and presentism to create a mainstream to theatre history that, as it happens, runs directly through the Europe. It uses a false dichotomy between East and West as a prime support: the significance of the world beyond Europe is grossly diminished in scope, leaving it no more than the Europe’s equal; and the particularities of each of the world’s regions are effaced by stereotypically tying the regions together as Europe’s unfortunate Other. Even given all of this, though, it remains to be discovered what rationale might be used to justify the idea that the mainstream flows through the Europe. I mentioned earlier that three sets of stereotypes about East and West are critical to the idea of a mainstream in theatre history. The first is Matthews’s idea that while Eastern theatre is suffused with fatalism, that of the West is all about free will. Second is Cheney’s more complex formulation that theatre in the East is either sensuous and decorative, or formalized and intellectual, while Western theatre sits at a rational midpoint between these Eastern extremes. We come now to the third set of stereotypes: Whereas the East is said to be immured in the stasis of hidebound

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tradition, the West is forward-looking and ever-changing. According to this stereotype, the mainstream of history (and of theatre history as well) flows through the West because that is where progress takes place. This progressivist thesis, as I will call it, is the application to theatre history of an idea whose modern formulation began captivating European thinkers during the Enlightenment. Hegel set the tone when he suggested that “the History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom” (19–20). Freedom, for Hegel, was the metaphysical Spirit of history, driving forward in a dialectical fashion as it seeks its eventual self-realization (Breisach 231). This history is deeply teleological, so whatever is not part of freedom’s progress is, by definition, not part of history. Sub-Saharan Africa, for Hegel, was an “Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature,” and required only a few paragraphs before he could proclaim: “At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again” (103). China and India had once played important roles in freedom’s progress, but that was long ago. For countless centuries, in Hegel’s eyes, they had “remain[ed] stationary, and perpetuate[d] a natural vegetative existence even to the present time”; they too could therefore be dismissed from history, having fulfilled their ancient roles (173). History was the story of progress, and so had long since become the story of Europe. Karl Marx developed his own progressivist theory in the mid-­nineteenth century. He followed Hegel in seeing the movement of history as dialectical, but (as Marx once said) he “stood Hegel on his head” by identifying history’s driving force not in a self-realizing Spirit of freedom, but in the material struggle between classes over modes of production. The resulting historiography was without Hegel’s creaky metaphysics but was no less teleological in pointing to a final (but still awaited) world of communist bliss. But perhaps because Marx’s progressivism was as universalist as was Hegel’s, he was troubled by the apparent failure of Asian societies to progress along the same lines as Europe. He therefore postulated the idea of an “Asiatic mode of production” that might account for what he saw as Asian stagnation. Even scholars who are sympathetic to Marx have been troubled by this idea. The historian Andre Gunder Frank suggests that Marx’s “characterizations” of Asia are “no more than a figment of his … imagination,” with “no foundation in historical reality whatsoever” (15); Edward Said sees Marx’s humanistic thinking being “usurped by Orientalist generalizations” and is appalled when Marx writes that English colonialism, however destructive, was nonetheless necessary for (as Marx wrote)

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“laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia” (156, 154). Only through being Westernized, apparently, could India join in human progress—and history. Progressivism in British historiography somewhat predated Marx but rose to the forefront slightly after Marx developed his theories: it came to be known as the “Whig interpretation” of history. The Whig historians “saw all history as moving toward the realization of human freedom, and were able to direct attention in the light of this idea to the critical episodes and periods, places and transactions that constituted the principle turning points in that story” (McNeill, Mythistory 101–02). The teleology of their approach took as its endpoint the specifically British notion of freedom with which they were familiar. As Herbert Butterfield wrote in the 1931 essay that first defined Whiggish history: The whig historian stands on the summit of the twentieth century, and organized his scheme of history from the point of view of his own day …. He can say that events take on their due proportions when observed through the lapse of time. He can say that events must be judged by their ultimate issues, which, since we can trace them no farther, we must at least follow down to the present. He can say that it is only in relation to the twentieth century that one happening or another in the past has relevance or significance for us. (12)

By the second half of the nineteenth century, “the idea of progress became almost an article of faith” in Europe (Collingwood 144).13 Progressivism found its way even into poetry. In “Locksley Hall” (1842), Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote, “Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay,” suggesting that in benighted China, there is only a wearying and pointless repetition of events, not the sort of progress that, in Europe, makes life worth living. Even as insightful an author as John Stuart Mill stated in no uncertain terms that “the greater part of the world has, properly speaking, no history, because the despotism of Custom is complete. This is the case over the whole East” (quoted in Lewis and Wigen 76–77). Despite its lineage in the philosophy of the Enlightenment, progressivist thinking was also motivated by less lofty considerations; the ease with which whole peoples are dismissed from history is, after all, inherently suspect. Openly racist expressions of progressivism were quite common through the nineteenth century, and conveniently served to justify the

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European imperialism of the time. According to William Swinton, writing in a respected history text used in US high schools and colleges at the time: If we trace back the present civilization of the advanced nations of the world—our own civilization, and that of England, Germany, France, Italy, etc.—we shall find that much of it is connected by a direct and unbroken line with the Roman. The Romans, in turn, were heirs of the Greeks. Now, all this is Aryan…. We are fully authorized to say that the Aryans are peculiarly the race of progress; and a very large part of the history of the world must be taken up with an account of the contributions which the Aryan nations have made to the common stock of civilization. (17; italics in the original)14

Needless to say, Swinton’s open racism has largely disappeared from progressivist accounts—but otherwise, his approach to history will be strikingly familiar. According to Swinton, although various other peoples “rose considerably above the savage state, their civilization was stationary, and they had no marked influence on the general current of the world’s progress” (16); they could therefore be discounted as active participants in history. The mainstream of history, instead, follows the current of progress, from Greece to Rome to Europe—precisely as in Hodgson’s “westward distortion” and in progressivist accounts of history (and theatre history). The progressivist thesis found expression in the United States, near the start of the twentieth century, in the surveys of “Western Civilization” that became popular in colleges and high schools. As the historian Carolyn Lougee observes: “In cultural terms, the Western Civ ideal was homogenizing and normative: it socialized the young from whatever particularist background traditions to a uniform standard of thinking and behaving that ought to characterize America’s expanding educated class” (quoted in Levine, 20). But as the historian Lawrence W. Levine suggests, there were also important “international factors” involved in the development of Western Civ, in particular the need “to place American history in a greater perspective” that would nurture “feelings of connection with Europe that had not been characteristic of nineteenth-century Americans” (20). Unsurprisingly, the Western Civ courses that “evolved on campus after campus” took up the Whiggish version of progressivism. According to Levine, they “envisioned the United States and Europe tied together in a cultural embrace that had its historical origins in the classical world and its

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development in medieval, Renaissance, and modern Europe.” This progressivist story “pictured ‘Western Civilization’ as the end product of all world history, or at least of the world history that mattered, since entire continents, whole peoples, and complete historical epochs were ignored as if they had not existed, and for the purposes of the new Western Civ, they hadn’t” (21; emphasis in the original). The rest of the world “joined the march of history,” as McNeill notes, “when Europeans arrived” to set its peoples “on the path toward civilization and eventual participation in the benefits of liberty under law” (Mythistory 92). Western Civ classes still exist at some colleges and high schools, though the Whiggish progressivism that underlies them has long since fallen into disrepute among most historians. But as McNeill comments acerbically, there still remain all too many historians who are “for the most part content to work (often unconsciously) within a liberal nineteenth-century interpretation of history whose principles, if overtly affirmed, would embarrass most of us because we no longer believe them” (“Changing” 23). This is certainly the case with theatre history. Progressivism and Theatre History In the first decades of the twentieth century, the progressivist thesis was pressed into service by the theatre programs then struggling to find a place in American colleges. The outcome would be the typical undergraduate theatre-history survey as we have it even today, as well as the typical textbooks that support those surveys. As Shannon Jackson astutely points out, the early theatre programs bore the stigma of academic illegitimacy: “Dramatic literature, especially drama performed, risked association with the feminine, the primitive, and the commercial” (87). In part, the stigma was attached to all of literature (86), but the problem was particularly acute for theatre as a performed art. According to the sociologist Richard Butsch, “Advocates of drama as an art had an image problem,” for dramatic theatre “was considered commercial entertainment by cultural elites, and feminine entertainment at that” (122, 124). The solution to this problem of femininity and commercialism, suggests Jackson, was for theatre scholars to introduce modes of discourse that were broadly accepted in academia for their “manifest rigor” (86). One such discourse was the positivist approach to historical materials (89); another was the progressivist thesis in its Whiggish variety, wherein theatre scholars sought to “reproduce turn-of-the-century conventions of historical singularity

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and progressive continuity” in creating a history of dramatic theatre, including the “evolutionary paradigm of ‘from ritual to theatre’” (88). Progressivism, in other words, seemed not only a plausible way of explaining the development of theatre history, but a way to legitimatize theatre studies in academia: two for the price of one. Following the model of Western Civ, the newly established theatre programs began teaching a progressivist theatre history. Just as the Western Civ course made use of the “elegant idea” of ordering history as the “evolution” or “progress of freedom” (Allardyce 48–49), the theatre history survey had its similarly elegant notion of an evolutionary progress from ritual to theatre. And because the most artistically respected—the least feminine, the least commercial—theatre of the day was naturalistic spoken theatre, it seemed perfectly reasonable to consider this the end-point of theatre’s progress (Butsch 121–22). It seems appropriate here to focus on theatre history textbooks, because it is in their accounts that we can most clearly see how theatre historians adapted the Western Civ model to the field of theatre.15 As I have noted, one of the earliest articulations of progressivism in theatre studies was presented by Sheldon Cheney, whose textbook came out in 1929, shortly after the establishment of the first theatre departments in American academia.16 In that text, Cheney stated quite plainly as an essential “truth pertinent to the whole of theatre art” that “from Greek times to [the] twentieth century, there has been a wider and wider deviation from conventional methods toward naturalism”; that is, “from being a convention, [theatre] had progressed through all the stages of part-artificial-part-­ imitational portrayal until it arrived at photographic representation of familiar men and women” (4; italics in the original). Perhaps it is churlish to wonder if plays such as Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata—to name a couple plays produced before Cheney first published his theatre history—are more “naturalistic” than, say, the comedies of Terence. And indeed, when it comes to details, the knowledgeable Cheney was willing to overthrow his thesis for the sake of accuracy, covering discrepancies with the reasonable proviso that “the progression has not been direct” (6); but the thesis of progress remains the structural basis of his text. He returned regularly to the “truth” of theatre history that he has discerned, reiterating his theme of “the long road of progress from the epic and highly conventional to the journalistic and familiar drama of today” (411). Glynne Wickham, in his much more recent textbook, A History of the Theatre (first published in 1985), offers a related version of the

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progressivist thesis, highlighting the ascendancy not of naturalism, per se, but of spoken language: “We find our starting point in a world [of ritual dance] altogether without text”; to that dance is added “a solo voice,” then “choric unison,” then “antiphonal exchange”; when these exchanges “come to relate legendary or historical events which are then re-enacted … we find ourselves confronted with dramatic art” (12; italics in the original). Theatre’s course from that point is harnessed to social progress: “As society achieves greater stability and coherence … it turns increasingly away from dance and toward language as a more flexible medium through which to formulate and express its views of itself in action” (33–34). In Wickham’s view, this progress toward language, toward the spoken word, is primarily a European phenomenon. Asian theatre, by and large, has apparently failed to progress because of its inherent traditionalism. As we saw in Chap. 2, Wickham claims that “much Eastern drama has survived with many of its earliest elements safely preserved, like some animated museum treasure… notwithstanding the many alterations and additions that the passing of some two thousand years of local history has imposed on its practitioners” (21). It is important to note the phrase “alterations and additions”: no doubt Asian theatre has undergone various changes, according to Wickham, but it nevertheless lacks the clear forward progress demonstrated in European theatre (30). Wickham also manages to dispense with obvious European exceptions to the ascendancy of spoken language by taking opera and ballet to be “reversions” to “the primacy of song and dance within primitive dramatic ritual” (14). This characterization, however, is predicated on nothing more than the a priori assumption that theatre history demonstrates a progress away from song and dance; no explanation is offered  as to why such a “reversion” might possibly appeal to audiences in highly civilized post-Renaissance Europe. To be clear then, whether in Cheney’s or Wickham’s formulation, the progress of theatre leads specifically to the single theatre form of European spoken theatre; all else can and should be written off as “preservation” or “reversion.” By this light, progressivist theatre historians are perfectly justified in focusing their histories on that form. Most of the contemporary textbooks I have examined avoid the sort of explicit claims about the direction of theatre history made by Cheney and Wickham. But they retain the central duality between a traditionalist East and a progressive West. Brockett and Hildy, for example, are still willing to offer the sweeping generalization, “To the traditional Eastern mind change and progress seem illusions, whereas to the Western mind they

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seem inevitable” (6).17 In earlier editions of their text, the authors logically extended this duality to the traditionality of Eastern theatre, as opposed to the progressive theatre of the West—but that point has now been suppressed. Nonetheless, they go on to state that their text “gives emphasis to the Western tradition” (6)—and specifically, to its spoken theatre above all—as well it should if that alone were where theatrical progress has actually taken place. Hiding their logic does not change the structure of their text. Hallmarks of the Progressivist Thesis There is a pair of hallmarks to progressivism in theatre history that warrant special notice. We saw the first alluded to by Shannon Jackson, when she commented that one of the ways early theatre programs sought academic legitimacy was by taking up the “evolutionary paradigm of ‘from ritual to theatre’” (88). Thus, Brander Matthews, in his early treatment of theatre history, wrote: “It is from religious exercises, set off always with music and often with dancing, that the drama has evolved in almost every literature” (Development 41). And as Matthews commented regarding medieval European theatre: “In its origin … the medieval drama was not unlike the drama of the Greeks,—in that the germ of it was religious, and it was slowly elaborated from what was at first only a casual accompaniment of public worship” (Development 110). The linkage between ritual origins in ancient Greece and in medieval Europe was by no means original to Matthews; it had already been broached in Europe. In 1838, for example, Charles Magnin “drew an analogy between the development of modern European theatre from the liturgy of the medieval Church and the process by which […] the ancient Greek theatre had emerged from the worship of Dionysus” (Vince 6). This analogy became a critical part of the Standard Western Approach. Almost all the textbooks I have seen begin with a discussion (of greater or lesser length) of ritual as the “origin” of theatre, although some also mention other possible points of origin. Wilson and Goldfarb, for example, offer a few paragraphs on “imitation, role-playing, and storytelling,” “popular entertainment,” and “‘participatory’ theatre” before moving on to a more fully developed discussion of “ceremonies and rituals” (1–6). Interestingly, the impression one receives from this and other textbooks is of a hesitation to fully embrace the theory of ritual origin, countered by a fear of abandoning it entirely. Brockett and Hildy, for their part, begin by

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noting that the theory of ritual origins is “the most widely accepted theory,” but then back away by explaining why doubts have arisen about it (1, 3). A reader of these texts might well be perplexed by their apparent irresolution—but a theory of ritual origin is, in a sense, baked into progressivism by theatre’s presumed birth from ritual in ancient Greek theatre and its presumed rebirth from ritual in medieval Catholic liturgy. To abandon the theory of ritual origins would implicitly call into question the idea that theatre (or, more specifically, European theatre) has actually progressed at all, as opposed merely to having undergone the same sort of “alterations and additions” on which Glynne Wickham commented in regard to supposedly tradition-bound Eastern theatre (30). This is not the place to engage in a full-on discussion of the origins of theatre. But I might observe that the ritual argument can mean one of two things. It might mean that all forms of theatre are related to one another in a single massive family and that the earliest forms in that family (usually taken to be Greek tragedy and comedy) evolved from ritual, with all subsequent forms therefore being able to trace their ultimate origin back to that same ritual. This seems extremely doubtful as a matter of history, particularly given the absence of historical interaction between the Eastern and Western hemispheres before around 1500. More plausible is the notion that while there are many unrelated theatre forms (or more likely, families of theatre forms), each of these forms or families has evolved independently from some local ritual. As Anthony Graham-White points out, the great sociologist Melville Herskovits “has suggested that Europeans have been [especially] alert to the possibility of a ritual origin for drama, while ignoring other possibilities, since in Europe drama seems to have sprung from ritual in classical Greece and in the medieval church.” But as Graham-White continues, “If West Africa provides evidence that supports the derivation of drama from ritual, it also supplies material which seems to point to other sources” (46–47). Among the most obvious of these sources is the impulse to engage in social commentary, which is evident not only in the playground antics of schoolchildren, but also in highly sophisticated forms such as European spoken theatre, most notably with its comedies that skewer human foibles and absurd social structures. There is no doubt, in other words, that while many theatre forms or families of forms have (or have had) some or another association with ritual, the suggestion that every form or family has evolved independently from the same ritual starting point is unsustainable. It is a

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Eurocentric assumption based on nothing more than a theory about the ostensible origins of theatre in ancient Greece and Europe. The second hallmark of progressivism in theatre history is its dubious use of evidence. As I noted in the Introduction, all history-writing is, of necessity, selective; but when that selectivity pointedly ignores evidence that might challenge a particular thesis, it must be seen as a tendentious instance of special pleading. The most obvious manifestation of this prejudicial selectivity involves the virtual exclusion of non-European theatre from that progressivist account. Discussion of theatre in Asia, Africa, and among American Indians is usually shunted off (as we have seen) into one or two chapters that are disassociated from the theatrical mainstream the textbooks seek to trace (except perhaps as samples of “primitive” theatre). But consider the problem presented by Sanskrit theatre, which emerged a few hundred years (estimates vary widely) after Greek tragedy and survived at least into the tenth century. Around the start of this timespan, Roman literary theatre had its heyday before sputtering into irrelevance; at the time-span’s very end, theatre was ostensibly “reborn” under the auspices of the medieval Church. Although Sanskrit theatre’s precise history cannot be traced, it is readily apparent that the form does not fit into a narrative whose mainstream is the death (or reduction to mere itinerant players) and subsequent ritual-based rebirth of theatre. If one were to include Sanskrit theatre in one’s history, one might well have to consider it the “mainstream” for nearly a millennium. The problem is that it seems to have been, on the one hand, markedly more musical and conventional than most Roman theatre; but on the other hand, it was significantly more literary and secular than the liturgical drama that would later arise in Europe (Richmond 33–67). The inclusion of Sanskrit theatre in theatre history, in brief, would render absurd the standard notion of that history’s progress. Indeed, even if one were to limit the progressivist narrative to “Western” theatre, there would remain the significant gap and extended retrogression between Roman and medieval theatre to account for. Glynne Wickham explains these away by pointing out that in the late ninth century, European society and theatre were undertaking a “fresh start” under new political and economic conditions (70); within the primitive society of early medieval Europe, in other words, the progressivist origins of ancient theatre in ritual were recapitulated. If this were the case, however, one wonders what to make of progressivist narratives that speak of “Western” theatre as a unified and directional entity. Recall Cheney’s

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claim that “from Greek times to [the] twentieth century, there has been a wider and wider deviation from conventional methods toward naturalism” (4). Although Cheney notes that “the progression has not been direct” (6), this modest proviso scarcely seems to account for a virtually complete theatrical collapse lasting half a millennium (longer, that is, than the timespan between Shakespeare and us). The basic problem here is that there is no progressive development in the “West” across this vast period. The best the progressivist thesis can do is hit the restart button with the emergence of liturgical theatre. To make any sense at all, the progressivist thesis needs to be confined strictly to Europe (and its later colonies), post-tenth century and beyond. But not even this confinement can salvage the thesis. Consider that just after Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606) hit the boards, Claudio Monteverdi presented his Orfeo (1607). The emergence of opera unquestionably challenges the progressivist thesis, for not only is the form based in song rather than speech, but many of its performance techniques—in particular its vocal techniques and the movement techniques of the ballet interludes that soon became a part of it—are highly conventionalized. No doubt opera was an early beneficiary of Renaissance Italian developments in scenic design and machinery, much of which sought to amaze with realism, but these preceded the origins of opera (Sebastiano Serlio died in 1554) and were almost immediately taken up not only within opera, but outside of it as well (the English court saw stagings of spoken theatre with perspective scenery and mechanical devices at least twelve times before 1634 [Gurr 208]). At any rate, it would be a curious thing indeed to suggest that opera continued the progress of theatre simply on the basis of staging techniques. What then to do with opera in the progressivist thesis, since from its very emergence it plainly cuts against the direction in which European theatre is supposed to have been progressing? The easiest solution is to implicitly deny its very status as dramatic theatre. In addition to surveying the course descriptions of many theatre  history surveys, I have had the pleasure of examining the syllabi of about sixty such courses and have noted that only a handful of them include any discussion of opera. Why this nearly complete shutout? As one professor told me: “We can’t include opera because it belongs to the music department.” This appeal to bureaucratic necessity ignores the question of why opera must be the exclusive provenance of music departments, but textbooks are only slightly more interested in the topic.18 Another theatre form that the progressivist thesis

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must scant is the Broadway musical, which is also slighted in textbooks and theatre history surveys, though I am not aware that music departments have staked a claim to it.19 The logic for excluding opera and Broadway musicals from the history of theatre, however, is deeply flawed. If it is based on these forms’ reliance on music (including songs) and dance, then this exclusionary principle must be applied consistently throughout theatre history. But if one so applies it, then one would need also to exclude Greek tragedy and comedy from the realm of dramatic theatre—and who in their right mind would want to do that? It seems clear that opera and Broadway musicals are excluded (despite the musicality they share with ancient Greek theatre) simply because they fail to conform to the expectations of progressivism. The inescapable fact is that theatre history, either on a global scale, a “Western” one, or merely a European one, is not the story of an inevitable progress as imagined by Cheney and Wickham. The past century of theatre (either globally or in Europe alone) has obviously not borne out Cheney’s sense of theatre history as showing “a wider and wider deviation from conventional methods toward naturalism.” Perhaps Cheney can be excused for not successfully predicating theatre’s future, but Wickham does not have that excuse. By the time (in 1985) he was writing of theatrical progress toward the supremacy of spoken language, aspects of Euro-­ American theatre were exhibiting a commensurate disinterest in words. Wickham himself is a good enough historian to recognize this, as his two chapters on twentieth-century theatre demonstrate, but it leaves his progressivist thesis in a shambles. It is understandable, in light of all this, that most current textbook authors avoid statements about the direction of theatre’s progress. It is far less understandable, though, why they continue to maintain the underlying progressivist structure. * * * Marvin Carlson writes, “Were we to create a definition of theatre history as it was conceived half a century ago, it might be something like this: ‘the study of the evolution, primarily in Europe and America, of the process of enacting literary dramatic texts.’” Carlson goes on to suggest that at present “a very different sort of definition might be more appropriate, perhaps something like ‘the study of particular theatrical events, or groups of such events, and how they operate within their cultural contexts’” (“Space” 205). On the basis of my examination of survey classes, textbooks, and

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anthologies, I fear that Carlson is too optimistic: theatre studies has only begun to move beyond theatre history as conceived “half a century ago.” But even Carlson’s conception of “the very different sort of definition” now gaining currency would be an unsatisfactory state of affairs, for it envisions theatre history as little more than a collection of micro-­narratives, each isolated in the context of its own specific culture. The problem is: How might one replace the Standard Western Approach without falling into the trap of simply enumerating micro-narratives? Carlson’s metaphors of “rhizome” and “web,” discussed earlier, can certainly guide one’s thinking about the innumerable interconnections that link theatre around the world and through time, but a metaphor is not a methodology. What units of study might be most useful? How might one effectively deal with theatre’s world-spanning geography and a chronology that runs far back into the human past? Is any sort of over-arching periodization possible for theatre history that does not echo the Standard Western Approach, and if so, how might it be designed? I do not imagine that I can offer any definitive answers to these questions, but I can at least begin the conversation—and to that purpose, the rest of this book is devoted.

Notes 1. To be clear, the presentism I will be discussing here is not related to what might be called the “present-ness” of live theatre and the way that historical memory might function in that theatre. But for discussion of that interesting subject, see Taylor. 2. This fallacy sometimes called the fallacy of nunc pro tunc (“now for then”) (Fischer 135). 3. Theatre history is not the only kind of artistic history that uses ethnocentrism and presentism to create the sense of a mainstream. Art critic Bernard Berenson, writing in the mid-twentieth century, engages in the same practice. “Significant events,” he claims, “are those events that have contributed to making us what we are today … art history must avoid what has not contributed to the mainstream, no matter how interesting, how magnificent in itself.” To be excluded are painters who “are neither in the main line of development nor of universal appeal to cultivated Europeans”; this means excluding “the arts of China and India, remarkable and deeply human as they are,” for they “are not history for us Europeans” (quoted in Fischer 137).

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4. Osterhammel suggests that “the category of ‘the West,’ or ‘the Western world’ … does not appear as a dominant figure of thought before the 1890s.” Although the opposition between the Occident and the Orient is quite ancient, “‘the Western world’ first arose out of the idea of an ­overarching Atlantic model of civilization” that presupposes that Europeans and North Americans “rank equally in global culture and politics” (86–87)—a position that obviously was (and remains) more appealing to North Americans than to many Europeans. 5. The population figures for 1600 are of course quite speculative, especially for India. Frank also offers a rather different set of numbers from another source, but the ratios between the figures for Europe and Asia are roughly the same (167–74). 6. Various Asian societies, in turn, have their own stereotypes regarding Europeans, but because they are not so prevalent in theatre studies, I will not be addressing them. See Buruma and Margalit for a quick survey. 7. Ernst does refer to “the cultivation of what has been described as ‘fatalism’ in a popular strand of Japanese Buddhist belief” (239). No doubt that this is present in some kabuki and bunraku plays, but it does not delimit the frequence with which the characters demonstrate free will, taking actions based on entirely human considerations. 8. The first English adaptation of Orphan of Zhao was in 1741 by William Hatchett (entitled The Chinese Orphan) (Crump 35). Shakuntala began its European career when translated into Latin and then English in 1789 by William Jones (entitled Sacontalā or The Fatal Ring) (Thapar 199–200). Chūshingura first appeared in English in 1880 in a translation by Frederick Victor Dickens (entitled Chiushingura: or The Loyal League) (Keene 25, n. 28). 9. I heard this dictum in a guest lecture (at the University of California, Berkeley) in April 1993, by the kunqu actress Hua Wenyi. 10. Switching back to opera, I might also mention the formalized vocalization it employs. As Pronko reports, when Italian opera was first introduced to Japan in the late nineteenth century, after the audience “had recovered from the first shock of surprise, [it was] seized with a wild fit of hilarity at the high notes of the prima donna…. The people laughed at the absurdities of the European singing till their sides shook, and the tears rolled down their cheeks” (170). This is no doubt the obverse of Macgowan and Melnitz’s comment, mentioned earlier, comment that Chinese theatre is “odd, outlandish, and absurd.” 11. I have already mentioned a more dismissive phrase that been applied to this newer dichotomy: The West and the Rest. 12. To be fair, Odom suggests that his exclusion of the West from the World is, in effect, a tactical move: “In order to determine if this idea of an inter-

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connected world is of value, we must first understand the [typically ignored] parts of the world on their own terms” (2). 13. Various other writers have, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, offered their own versions of progressivism, Auguste Comte (father of Positivism) and Herbert Spencer (advocate of Social Darwinism) being of particular importance. 14. Swinton recognizes certain “ancient Asiatic peoples, namely, the Hindoos and the Persians,” as also being Aryans, but they somehow get lost in his account, which focuses on “the present and past nations of Europe” (16). 15. For broader considerations on the historiography of theatre, see Jackson 146–75; for a meditation on the relationship between theatre and history—with a strong emphasis on the ambiguities of the “and” in the title— see Schneider, passim. 16. Carnegie-Mellon University established its School of Drama in 1914; Yale established its Department of Drama (later to expand into its School of Drama) in 1925. 17. Brockett and Hildy base their generalizations of West and East on an unspecified Joseph Campbell analysis of mythology. 18. Wilson and Goldfarb, for instance, devote about a page to the entire fourhundred year history of opera (134–35). 19. Wilson and Goldfarb give musicals give a relatively generous five pages or so, split between pp. 424–25 and 474–77.

Works Cited Allardyce, Gilbert. “Toward World History: American Historians and the Coming of the World History Course.” The New World History: A Teacher’s Companion, edited by Ross E. Dunn, Bedford/St. Martin, 2000, pp. 29–58. Brandon, James R., and Martin Banham, editors. The Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre. Cambridge UP, 1993. Brockett, Oscar G., and Franklin J. Hildy. History of the Theatre. 10th ed., Allyn & Bacon, 2008. Buruma, Ian, and Avishai Margalit. Occidentalism. Penguin Books, 2004. Butsch, Richard. The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990. Cambridge UP, 2000. Butterfield, Herbert. The Whig Interpretation of History. cdn.preterhuman.net/ texts/literature/general/Butterfield%20(Herbert)%20The%20Whig%20 Interpretation%20of%20History.pdf Carlson, Marvin. “Space and Theatre History.” Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography, edited by Thomas Postlewait and Charlotte M. Canning, U of Iowa P, 2010, pp. 195–206.

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Cheney, Sheldon. The Theatre: Three Thousand Years of Drama, Acting, and Stagecraft. Rev. ed., Longmans, Green and Co., 1952. Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. Oxford UP, 1956. Crump, J. I. Chinese Theater in the Days of Kublai Khan. U of Arizona P, 1980. Davies, Norman. Europe: A History. Oxford UP, 1996. Ernst, Earle. The Kabuki Theatre. Grove Press, 1956. Fischer, David Hackett. Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. Harper & Row, 1970. Frank, Andre Gunder. ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age. U of California P, 1998. Graham-White, Anthony. West African Drama: Folk Popular, and Literary. 1969. Stanford U, PhD dissertation. Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage. 3rd ed., Cambridge UP, 1992. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Translated by J. Sibree, London, George Bell, 1888. Hodgson, Marshall G.  S. “Hemispheric Interregional History.” The New World History: A Teacher’s Companion, edited by Ross E. Dunn, Bedford/St. Martin, 2000, pp. 113–23. Hodgson, Marshall G. S. Rethinking World History. Edited by Edmund Burke III, Cambridge UP, 1993. Homans, Jennifer. Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet. Random House, 2010. Jackson, Shannon. Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity. Cambridge UP, 2004. Keene, Donald, translator. Chūshingura (The Treasury of Loyal Retainers). Columbia UP, 1971. Levine, Lawrence W. “Looking Eastward: The Career of Western Civ.” The New World History: A Teacher’s Companion, edited by Ross E. Dunn, Bedford/St. Martin, 2000, pp. 18–24. Lewis, Bernard. Islam and the West. Oxford UP, 1993. Lewis, Martin W., and Kären E.  Wigen. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. U of California P, 1997. Matthews, Brander. A Study of the Drama. Longmans, Green, 1911. https:// archive.org/details/astudydrama02mattgoog/page/n33/mode/2up Matthews, Brander. The Development of the Drama. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916. ia902604.us.archive.org/20/items/developmentdram01mattgoog/developmentdram01mattgoog.pdf McNeill, William H. Mythistory and Other Essays. U of Chicago P, 1986. McNeill, William H. “The Changing Shape of World History.” World History: Ideologies, Structures, and Identities, edited by Philip Popper et al., Blackwell Publishers, 1998, pp. 21–40. Nicoll, Allardyce. World Drama: From Aeschylus to Anouilh. Rev. ed., Redwood Burn Limited, 1976.

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Odom, Glenn. World Theories of Theatre. Routledge, 2017. Osterhammel, Jürgen. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Patrick Camiller, Princeton UP, 2014. Pronko, Leonard Cabell. Theater East and West: Perspectives Toward a Total Theater. U of California P, 1967. Richmond, Farley P. “Characteristics of Sanskrit Drama and Theatre.” Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance, edited by Farley P. Richmond et al., U of Hawaii P, 1990, pp. 33–86. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Vintage Books, 1979. Schneider, Rebecca. Theatre & History. Red Globe Press/Macmillan International, 2014. Swinton, William O. “Outlines of General History.” The New World History: A Teacher’s Companion, edited by Ross E.  Dunn, Bedford/St. Martin, 2000, pp. 16–17. Taylor, Diana. “Performance and/as History.” TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 50, no. 1, Spring 2006, pp. 67–86. Thapar, Romila. Śakuntalā: Texts, Readings, Histories. London, Anthem Press, 2002. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. World Population Prospects: Key Findings & Advance Tables, 2017 Revision. esa. un.org/unpd/wpp/publications/Files/WPP2017_KeyFindings.pdf Vince, R. W. “Theatre History as an Academic Subject.” Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, edited by Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie, U of Iowa P, 1989, pp. 1–18. Wang Guowei. “Wang Guowei on Theatre.” Chinese Theories of Theater and Performance: From Confucius to the Present, edited and translated by Faye Chunfang Fei, U of Michigan P, 1999, pp. 103–08. Watson, Jack, and Grant McKernie. A Cultural History of Theatre. Pearson, 1993. Westlake, E. J.. World Theatre: The Basics. Routledge, 2017. Wickham, Glynne. A History of the Theatre. 2nd ed., Cambridge UP, 1992. Wilson, Edwin, and Alvin Goldfarb. Living Theatre: A History of Theatre. 7th ed., McGraw-Hill, 2018. World Atlas. “Map and Details of All 7 Continents.” www.worldatlas.com/aatlas/ infopage/contnent.htm Zarrilli, Phillip B. Kathakali Dance Drama: Where Gods and Demons Come to Play. Routledge, 2000.

CHAPTER 4

Theatrical Events and Theatre Forms

To begin writing about world theatre history it will be useful to consider the units of study (sometimes called units of analysis) that might most effectively be employed. A “unit of study” is simply a statement of the unit on which one will base one’s study. Two kinds of units seem relevant for world theatre history. First, it is important to be clear about the irreducible minimal unit of study that can be applied to theatre around the world—the unit beneath which we can no longer say we are discussing dramatic theatre, but only one or another aspect thereof. In other words, what, precisely, are we examining when we study dramatic theatre? For some sorts of study, the minimal unit will be both appropriate and sufficient, but for other studies it might not be. And so we might well need a second kind of unit, a basic unit of study, which groups together instances of the minimal unit into categories of one sort or another. We need to discern what might be the most useful basic unit for studying world theatre history, a unit that offers an appropriate and sufficient kind of categorization for use in study that might extend across many societies and through vast spans of time. Surprising as it might seem, deciding on the minimal unit of study for theatre has been a matter of some controversy, with many scholars favoring dramatic literature, while others look to theatrical performance. Deciding on a basic unit suited to the scale of world theatre history has been even more troublesome. All sorts of categorizations have been employed by theatre historians, as we will see. But the historian Marshall © The Author(s) 2020 S. Tillis, The Challenge of World Theatre History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48343-2_4

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G. S. Hodgson makes an important point: “Unless a scholar is content to accept his categories (and hence the questions he can ask and the answers he arrives at) as given by the accidents of current predispositions, he cannot escape the obligation of justifying his selection of units of study” (Rethinking 72). It will not do, therefore, to accept one or another unit of study simply because others have used it, especially given the confusions and contradictions among the many units currently in use. In this chapter I will argue that the irreducible minimal unit for the study of dramatic theatre, per se, is the individual theatrical event, while the most appropriate and sufficient way of categorizing world theatre’s multitudinous individual events for a basic unit of study is the theatre form; I will also argue that the basic unit of the theatre form has the virtue of being easily scalable, allowing one to identify subforms as well as larger groupings of forms. As I will be relying on the minimal unit of the theatrical event and the basic unit of the theatre form for the rest of this book, each needs to be given careful explanation.

A Minimal Unit of Study Literature or Performance? As far back as Aristotle, there has been a literary bias to the study of dramatic theatre. Aristotle recognized that among the various forms of literature, theatre is unique in being presented through mimetic enactment (6; 1448a). He suggested that Greek tragedy involved six elements, a suggestion that has often been generalized as being applicable to most, if not all, theatre. Four of these elements explicitly concern theatre-as-literature: plot, character, thought, and diction (13; 1450a). The other two elements—music and spectacle—concern performance, but Aristotle had precious little to say about to them (15; 1450b). Almost entirely missing from the Poetics is anything that might be considered either acting theory or audience-response theory, along the lines provided in Bharata’s Natyashastra (for Sanskrit theatre) or the major treatises of Zeami (for nō). Aristotle did offer his famous idea regarding the katharsis (usually translated as either “purgation” or “purification”) of phobos and eleos (often translated as “fear” and “pity”) but devoted only a few terse sentences to it, leaving his meaning unclear enough to provoke centuries of dispute. Following the Renaissance rediscovery of the Poetics, many European authors followed Aristotle’s lead and focused above all on dramatic

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literature, effectively taking it to be the minimal unit of study for theatre. Allardyce Nicoll, for one, claims that drama is “a literary work written, by an author or by several authors in collaboration, in a form suitable for stage presentation,” and that it is the “self-evident truth” that “in its language resides drama’s soul” (Theatre 37, 144). One implication of the literary bias is that the “literary work” can, in effect, stand in for any “stage presentation” of it. Samuel Johnson, for example, famously contended that “a play read, affects the mind like a play acted” (336). Johnson’s contention might not be utterly absurd in reference to a play whose manner of performance is well known to the reader, and who has the capacity and experience to interpret the text and imagine it in performance. As David Osipovitch notes, however, “Even when the presentation of a written play is the focus of a theater event, a live theatrical performance will have elements that exceed [a readers’] interpretation” (463); these elements include acting, costume, stage design, and so on. And actual performance offers even more than just interpretations that a reader might not have imagined. Many kinds of performance involve an appreciable amount of music; one only need to read the libretto of any unfamiliar European opera, and then listen to it in performance, to realize the futility of trying to understand the work on the basis of its written words alone. Further, attendance at a performance offers the social and psychological impact of being part of an audience, in the presence not only of the actors, but also of fellow audience members. I am not arguing (to be clear) that reading a play is an inherently inferior experience to watching a performance of it, for reading allows a luxury of contemplation and careful examination that is unavailable in live performance; my point is merely that it is a different experience that “affects the mind” in its own unique way. In regard to a kind of theatre with which the reader is not familiar, meanwhile, Johnson’s contention is clearly impossible. The inexperienced reader of a nō play, for example, might have no conception of the pacing of performance, and see the typical text (running some 12 to 20 pages) as indicative of a one-act play; similarly, the inexperienced reader of a jingju play might see the many passages marked “singing” and imagine something like European opera, or possibly even a Broadway musical. It short, reading a play is anything but a synecdoche for seeing it in performance. And there is one further, quite obvious problem with taking literature to be the minimal of unit of dramatic theatre. Much of the world’s theatre does not even have a literature, in the sense of having written scripts; at best, one might find occasional ex post facto transcripts of improvised or

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orally transmitted performance material. To use dramatic literature as one’s unit of study means to ignore, as a matter of definition, not only everything from non-literate societies, but also most folk theatre in literate societies; it also means ignoring theatre such as commedia dell’arte, whose quite literate performers made the conscious choice not to have a dramatic literature. For the study of world theatre history, in brief, the literary bias would prove a crippling limitation. Reacting against the literary bias, some theatre historians have chosen to identify theatre’s minimal unit of study as the performance, paying little or no attention to the text being performed or, for that matter, to the audience receiving the performance. This performative bias, as one might call it, was first explicated at the start of the twentieth century, when Max Hermann founded the field of Theaterwissenschaft—“the historical study of theatrical practice” (Vince 7). According to Michael L. Quinn, Hermann sought “to establish a set of rationales for the study of the non-literary aspects of theatre, which were resolved for him, primarily, by a focus on reconstructing the conditions of past theatre performances” (126–27). One of the most well-known exponents of the performative bias is A. M. Nagler, who argues theatre historians should be “engaged neither in historical philology nor in the study of literature, neither in folklore nor in sociology. The styles of performance and their more or less plausible reconstructions, these are our primary concern” (Medieval xi). The intellectual apartheid that Nagler desires is unfortunate. Theatre historians would be allowed to discuss how performance shapes a text, but not how texts shape performances. They would be allowed to discuss what happens in the performance, but not what happens to the audience viewing it. But consider the Turkish shadow-theatre of karagöz, whose eponymous character is regularly subject to uncontrollable (and highly visible) erections. Nagler would certainly note this curious feature of performance but would have us ignore both why the erections arise (as it were) in the plot, and why the audience finds them comic rather than obscene.1 Obviously one can usefully study either dramatic literature or dramatic performance in isolation from the other. Neither of these studies, however, is of dramatic theatre, per se: such theatre involves texts (written or not) and their performance, together. It also involves the audience toward whom the performed text is directed. Recent theatrical theory has recognized the importance of the audience. Bruce McConachie, for instance, approvingly cites Attilio Favorini’s call for “the relocation of the theatrical event ‘away from what transpires on the stage to some mid-point … of

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intersubjectivity between performer and audience’” (“Towards” 465). Marvin Carlson similarly argues, “The challenge to theatre historians working from a semiotic perspective is to recognize the importance of both sides [i.e., actors and audiences] of the semiotic process” (“Theatre” 10). This two-sided understanding of “dramatic theatre” informs the definition I gave to that term in the Introduction. It is not extreme to suggest that the actor-audience interaction is the sine qua non of theatre, without which theatre does not exist. And if this is indeed the case, then the minimal unit of study in dramatic theatre must include not only text and performance, but the audience as well. The Theatrical Event The most comprehensive concept of dramatic theatre as something that involves text, performance, and audience has been developed by Willmar Sauter, sometimes writing (where noted below) with Jacqueline Martin.2 He starts from the claim: “Theatre manifests itself as an event which includes both the presentation of actions and the reactions of the spectators, who are present at the very moment of the creation. Together the actions and reactions constitute the theatrical event.” Sauter takes pains to emphasize the “event-ness” of theatre (Theatrical Event 11), which requires the co-presence of the actors and their audience.3 The theatrical event is an especially useful unit of study for world theatre history because it is notably holistic in its purview, making no a priori claim for the ultimate significance of either text, performance, or audience. It can therefore accommodate any sort of dramatic theatre. Sauter’s work focuses on the centrality of the various communications that take place between actors and their audience in the course of the theatrical event. He finds it necessary to consider the actor in three distinct, though interrelated, ways: actor-as-person, actor-as-artist, and actor-as-­ fictional character.4 Each kind of communication between actor and audience can be associated with an entire category of theatrical traits, and identifying those traits can help provide a fuller picture of the elements that make up a theatrical event. Martin and Sauter first discuss the sensory communication that takes place between the actor-as-person and the audience. This communication arises from the immediate reality of actors presenting themselves to their audience as fellow human beings, and the audience responding to them with varying degrees of affection, expectation, and recognition (85,

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90–91). Some theatrical events, especially those with puppetry, occlude the presence of the actors (i.e. the puppeteers), but the puppet’s own physical presence serves, in effect, as representative of the corporeal actor (Tillis, “Actor” passim). Conversely, some events occlude the presence of the audience, usually by lowering the houselights and having the actors pretend that the audience is not actually there (i.e., the so-called “invisible fourth wall”); the presence of the audience, however, remains tangible both to the actors and to the individual audience members. Yet other events highlight the joint presence of actors and audience by means that include having the actors enter the audience area, placing a portion of the audience in the playing area, or encouraging the audience to respond audibly to the performance. But even absent these direct means of highlighting, innumerable events include actors who might be personally known by members of the audience, or who might in some way be famous. When a friend or a star takes the stage, an audience often responds with applause and/or callouts even before the actor has attempted to show artistry or enact a dramatic character. It is, in other words, the actor-asperson to whom the audience is responding. Just as sensory communication concerns the corporeal reality of the actors and audience, the associated category of theatrical traits concerns the theatrical situation, which includes all aspects of the theatrical event’s real-world existence: the who, what, where, and when of the event itself. Within this category are traits regarding the theatre artists, the audience, the occasion, the venue, and the funding. For the artists, to take one example, the most salient traits include their numbers, sex, functions (e.g., actor, director, musician, etc.), status, organization, compensation, and training/rehearsal. A similar set of traits is no less relevant for the audience. An event with a few dozen audience members, after all, cannot help but be different from one with an audience of ten thousand, just as an event with an all-male audience will differ from one with an all-female audience. But other traits of the theatrical situation are no less relevant to the event. To take one last example, events might be held on occasions that range from command performances for royalty to commercially scheduled offerings to casual street shows, any of which might be associated with one or another religious or festive occasion. The specific traits of the theatrical situation have a huge bearing on realities of any given theatrical event. Martin and Sauter next discuss the artistic communication that takes place between the actor-as-artist and the audience. This communication

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concerns the interaction between the “knowledge and the artistic ability” of the actors on the one hand, and the audience’s “artistic competence” on the other. The actor is expected to have knowledge of the relevant theatrical practices, as well as the talent to perform them effectively. The audience, meanwhile, is expected to able to understand the performance properly and to judge the craft with which it is presented (80–81). In some theatre forms this might be relatively easy for audience members to accomplish; in others it is more a hard-earned ability. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, for example, kathakali has twenty-four basic mudras (hand gestures), each of which carries a distinct meaning, and each of which can be modified in small ways to create an even larger set of meanings (Zarrilli, Kathakali 73). If the audience fails to understand these mudras, they will misunderstand the performance as a whole. But when an audience has the ability to properly understand a performance, it will likely be dissatisfied by less-than-competent actors, judging them quite harshly in regard to their artistry. Just as artistic communication concerns that artistry, the associated category of theatrical traits pertains to all the theatrical practices that are involved in it. Within this category, some of the most important traits concern the playing area (including sets and lights, if any), and the design (e.g., costume, mask, makeup, hairstyle, and personal props), movement, and speech of the characters. Regarding the traits of the playing area, for example, the shapes most commonly employed are the circle and the rectangle, but these are often modified by such expediencies as expanding the rectangle with a half-oval thrust or extending walkways out from the main playing area (whatever its shape). Beyond the playing area’s shape, of course, is the possibility of scenery. In some events there might be a change of scenery with every new act or scene; in others, there might be at least a few scenic elements that are permanent fixtures of the stage (as in nō, with its four pillars at the stage’s corners and its magnificent pine tree painted on the upstage wall); and in yet other events the playing area might be virtually bare (as in most Chinese theatre). The design of the characters, to take but one other trait of theatrical practice, is no less significant than that of the playing area. Even if one looks at the characters only from the neck up, one might see characters with simple or elaborate masks, with realistic or exaggerated make-up, or even virtually barefaced. And different traits of facial design can exist even in a single performance. To remain with nō, for example, shite characters (the lead actors in each show) wear masks that are “the lifeblood of a performance” (Keene, Nō 60):

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these include simple but beautiful masks for some female characters, but also far more colorful and expressive masks for characters such as demons, witches, and gods. By way of contrast, the waki characters (the supporting actors) perform with minimal makeup. Martin and Sauter’s third kind of communication is fictional; it takes place between the actor-as-fictional character and the audience. This communication concerns the presentation and reception of the dramatic fiction itself.5 Along with the personhood and artistic talents of the actors, a key factor in the audience’s understanding of, and response to, a show is its reaction to the story that it enacts (82–84). As audience members enter into a fictional character’s “life,” they might be moved to experience the phobos and eleos of which Aristotle wrote, or perhaps joy or sorrow or laughter or fulfillment, depending on the fiction being presented. They will instinctively identify with certain characters, based less on an actor’s personhood or talent than on the character’s role in the fictional world being presented. Audience members will also be moved to think about that fictional world and its characters as they try to make sense of them, perhaps in terms of their own personal experiences. In brief, the audience members will respond to the fiction as if what they are seeing and hearing is reality, even as they know it is the presentation of a “reality” that is not presently taking place. Just as fictional communication involves the stories presented by the actors, the associated category of theatrical texts pertains to the various traits to be found in those stories. Actors use their texts (of whatever kind or kinds) to communicate the fiction of the event to their audience. Obviously the verbal text of a play is the one that usually receives the most attention. Such texts might be fully prepared (either written out or orally transmitted), based on a scenario, created on the spot, or some combination thereof. Among the external traits of a verbal text are its origin and means of transmission, but of greater concern to an audience, on the whole, are the text’s internal traits, such as its plot-line, characters, themes, use of language, and modes of discourse (e.g., verse, prose, dialogue, monologue, songs, asides, and narration). Verbal texts, whether spoken or sung, provide the basis for much dramatic fiction, but even in theatre forms with such texts, musical texts (i.e., the scores), and movement texts (i.e., the choreography/blocking) can also contribute to the audience’s reception of the fiction, and in some forms these do most or even all of the work in creating the fiction.

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Martin and Sauter’s fourth and final kind of communication is social communication. Although the theatrical event is predicated on actors performing a text for an audience, Sauter (in a different work) argues that “the context of a theatrical event … is not something that exists outside or apart from the event itself; it is fully present in the Theatrical Event” (“Cyclical” 119). The social communication of theatre is a function of context, which means something more than a mélange of socio-historical details that happen to be temporally related to a theatrical event. As Bruce McConachie writes, a theatrical event “isn’t simply to be seen in the foreground with context as a kind of generalized background. There is interaction and interrelationship, all of the time at all kinds of levels, between what is usually called text and context, or performance and historical background” (“Realizing” 217). The category of theatrical traits associated with social communication is therefore context, which frames how a show is given by the actors and received by the audience. But because “context” can be such an amorphous idea, it is useful to specify three different kinds of context: societal, theatrical, and formal.6 Societal context pertains to the history (down to contemporaneous events), sociology, and ethnography of the event’s host society, insofar as they are related to the event. A present-day audience for plays from Greek Old Comedy, for example, becomes quite aware of how different the Greek societal context is from any twenty-first century context. To take but a single example, the politician Kleisthenes was a recurring target of Aristophanes’s barbs. Little is known about the historical figure, but Aristophanes mocked his effeminacy, perhaps merely because he was beardless in a society where men almost invariably wore beards, perhaps because he truly was effeminate. The original audiences for the shows in which Kleisthenes was mocked would surely have been familiar with the man (by reputation if not in person) and would have understood immediately what was so funny about the mockery. A twenty-first century audience, not knowing Kleisthenes, might take the jokes to be homophobic insults; but in ancient Greece, homosexual activity between grown men and boys was a socially acceptable practice (as is clear, for example, from Plato’s Symposium). So the insults of Kleisthenes might actually have been imputations that he was the passive partner in his homosexual activities, with this passivity being socially offensive enough to be worthy of comic abuse (MacDowell 257)—a possibility that would make little sense to an audience unfamiliar with Greek sexual practices. This example suggests how much societal context is, as Sauter insists, “fully present in the

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Theatrical Event.” It also suggests the difficulties that confront any audience seeing (or reading) plays from far-off places and times. The second context is theatrical: it refers to the relationship of a given event to other kinds of theatre (as well to non-dramatic performance) available in the society. In many theatre forms, for example, texts are transposed from other theatre forms as often as they are written from scratch. For example, because China had “such well established theatrical traditions, such an abundance of well loved plays and stories,” jingju performers would often adapt plays or scenes from other theatre forms (Dolby, History 193). European operas, likewise, have a long tradition of taking their plots from spoken theatre (e.g., Shakespeare’s Othello becomes Verdi’s Otello) as have Broadway musicals (e.g., Riggs’s Green Grow the Lilacs becomes Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!). And of course not only texts are transposed from form to form, but traits of theatrical practice. For example, the narrator used in many kabuki plays was originally developed in bunraku, while the movement style of the dancers in the Thai khon is derived from the movement of the shadow-puppets in nang yai (Brandon 144). Even traits of the performance situation move between different kinds of theatre, as can be seen in the employment of the proscenium stage not only by opera and ballet, but also by spoken theatre, the Broadway musical, panto, and numerous other forms, both in Europe and now globally. The third context is formal; it pertains to the relationship between a given event and other events that share most its traits and are therefore part of the same theatre form. As I will be discussing the idea of the theatre form in the next section, I will say here merely that theatrical events are rarely sui generis, but share many traits with events that have either gone before them or are taking place around them. Artists are certainly aware of those events and can easily find themselves either imitating or willfully differing from them in one or another respect. Audiences, for their part, will have a similar awareness, and will regularly compare the present event with any past events of the theatre form that they have attended; what might seem (for better or for worse) shockingly new to an audience that lacks a sense of the formal context might be recognized as painfully derivative to an audience familiar with the theatre form. A true appreciation of a theatrical event therefore requires knowledge of its formal context.

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Let me add, in conclusion, that the foregoing discussion of the theatrical event is highly schematic. To enumerate four kinds of communication and their associated categories  of traits is merely a heuristic device, intended to make possible as thorough an investigation of the theatrical event as possible. In practice, all these communications are inseparable. Indeed, this inseparability is why the theatrical event should be taken as the minimal and indivisible unit of theatre studies.

A Basic Unit of Study The Need for Categorization Theatrical events are, quite literally, not only beyond count, but beyond even approximation. They have been created for thousands of years, in all inhabited portions of the globe, and theatre historians can have precious little knowledge of the overwhelming majority of them. How then might one grapple with this astonishing quantity and variety of world theatre? Since the minimal unit of the theatrical event is impractical for any wide-­ ranging history, a second unit of study, building on that minimal unit, must be employed that will offer a plausible way to categorize those countless individual events. This will be the basic unit of study. Categorization can be treacherous, especially given the confusions (and sometimes even dangers) presented by poorly conceived and/or ideologically inflected categories, such as the categories of “Western” and “Eastern” theatre discussed in the previous chapter. But according to the linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson, it is impossible to avoid categorization: “Every living being categorizes. Even the amoeba categorizes the things it encounters into food or nonfood.” Categorization, in other words, “is an inescapable consequence of our biological makeup” (17, 18). The challenge is to construct categories that comport most closely to the often-messy reality being categorized. The cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker argues that the ability to create meaningful categories is of critical importance to the human mind. Categorization offers the benefits of, first, “reduc[ing] the load” of sheer information that must be mentally stored, and second, of bringing order to that information, lest “mental life … be chaos” (306, 307). Both of these benefits are quite necessary, but Pinker suggests a third benefit as well: “The mind has to get something out of forming categories, and that something is inference” (307). Sometimes, that is, one can observe only a

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limited number of traits of a particular item; but if one can, on the basis of those traits, assign the item to an appropriate category, then one should be able to infer other traits not actually observed. If one observes an organism that literally walks like a duck and talks like a duck, as it were, one can at least tentatively place that organism into the category of “duck” and infer an entire range of duck-like traits for it. With properly established categories, one can reduce information loads and bring order to mental chaos; one can also use the power of inference to expand one’s knowledge, even if given only limited information. Establishing reasonable categories, though, can be difficult. Pinker observes that in many areas of life, categories are “fuzzy.” Even science must sometimes settle for fuzzy categories: “In any realm in which history plays a role, such as biology, members drift in and out of lawful categories all the time, leaving their boundaries ragged” (310). Fuzziness around the edges of even carefully derived categories is the price we pay for living in a world with change. It is important to acknowledge this fuzziness, for it suggests the importance of examining the margins of one’s categories. Nevertheless, fuzziness does not detract from the value of categorization itself; it only indicates that categories based in history cannot be essentialized or treated as absolutes. Despite the fuzziness of categories, Pinker contends that, in the end, categorization “works because thing[s] come in clusters,” rather than each one being a universe unto itself (312). All fields of study use some type(s) of categorization, with the usual aims of reducing complexity, filtering noise, and taking advantage of inference. Sometimes these categorical units of study are arrived at haphazardly or scarcely even acknowledged as categories. In many fields, though, some basic unit or another is broadly agreed upon, and not only can serve to organize thought in an entire field but can also be scaled up or down to create additional units of study. Biology, to take an obvious example, often uses the species as its basic unit. As the biologist Edward O. Wilson comments, “The species concept … is the grail of systematic biology”; he goes on, “Not to have a natural unit such as the species would be to abandon a large part of biology into free fall, all the way from the ecosystem down to the organism” (38). Interestingly, Wilson notes that in the “remote Arfak Mountains of New Guinea,” the Arfak people recognize 136 species of birds in their region—a range of species “that matche[s] almost perfectly those distinguished by European museum biologists” (43). This observation has a dual significance. All people, not just scientists, engage in categorization as a way to help make sense of the world; what’s more, the categories

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that result are not mere “cultural artifact(s),” but can often claim to be reasonably accurate descriptions of reality (42–43). The field of theatre studies does not, however, have a basic unit appropriate for wide-ranging studies. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it has a preposterous assortment of them, which are generically referred to as periods. Some of these periods are geographically orientated, usually based on continents (e.g., Asian theatre, African theatre) or nation-states (e.g., Japanese theatre, French theatre); others are temporally oriented, and are based on pre-existing units of time (e.g., nineteenth-­ century theatre), on the reigns of particular political leaders (e.g. Elizabethan theatre), on time-spans derived from other arts (e.g., baroque theatre), or on yet other temporal criteria (e.g., the Age of Goethe). I will offer fuller discussions of theatre’s geography and its periodicity in Chaps. 5 and 8, respectively. For now, I want merely to point out that neither space nor time can effectively supply us with theatre’s basic unit of study, because neither is predicated on theatre itself. This is not to deny that geographic and temporal labels can provide useful markers while discussing theatre history, nor that theatre sometimes conforms to geographic and temporal boundaries, but the basic unit of theatre needs to be based, above all, on theatre. Only such a unit could be universally and consistently applied to all of theatre history. Beyond universal applicability, the basic unit of study must fulfill two fundamental criteria. It should group together theatrical events whose regular interactions have bred a demonstrable similarity of multiple significant traits. Conversely, the basic unit should avoid grouping together events that exhibit numerous important differences in their traits, even if the events happen to be offered in close proximity of time and/or space. The goal of having a basic unit is to identify those “clusters” that Pinker notes are common in the world. To do this, the unit will filter out the “noise” of relatively minor differences among the theatrical events of each cluster, while reducing the impossible load of trying to keep track of each of those events individually. It will also make it possible to draw inferences about the events of each cluster, though it does not presume that each of those events will be precisely the same. The Theatre Form One kind of unit accords very well with these criteria and offers itself as the most useful basic unit for the study of world theatre history: the theatre

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form. Some authors, I should note, refer to “genres” rather than forms, but my sense is that the term “genres” carries strong literary connotations (e.g., the genres of comedy and tragedy), and might therefore be a bit misleading. The use of the theatre form as a basic unit is especially common in the scholarship of Asian theatre: when writing about Japanese theatre, for example, one does not hesitate to refer to such forms as nō, kabuki, and bunraku. But because spoken theatre has been so dominant in European and American theatre studies, it can be difficult to see that it too is merely one theatre form among many, rather than the norm for all theatre. It will be best to begin by offering a formal definition of the theatre form, which I understand to be a population of associated theatrical events with a distinctive system of performance and reception. Let me break down the key parts of this definition. • A theatre form is a population of … theatrical events. As is self-evident, the theatre form is explicitly predicated on theatre itself, and is built on the minimal unit of the individual theatrical event. The events that make up a theatre form are, to return to Pinker’s term, a “cluster” of similar events; more formally, a population. The vast majority of organized theatrical events around the world belong to one such population or another, so this unit can be employed both universally and on a consistent basis. No doubt that the boundaries between populations are sometime fuzzy, because events can combine traits from multiple forms—either as one-off events or because they are among the first events of populations that are just coming into existence. Nonetheless, populations are generally identifiable. Looking back over the two hundred or so years of jingju for example, we see that hundreds of playwrights (many of them also actors) have written thousands of plays (many of them adaptations of plays from earlier theatre forms) that have been performed by tens of thousands of actors for millions of audience members.7 The full population of events within this form is unknowable, especially when one considers that jingju has been staged in venues ranging from the palaces of the imperial court, to professional stages in Beijing, Shanghai, and many other Chinese cities, to amateur groups all over China—and sometimes overseas as well, with performances by amateur and semi-professional troupes throughout the Chinese diaspora (Thorpe, passim; Mai, passim; Lei, passim). Within a population this expansive, it is inevitable that the events will exhibit significant variation, notwithstanding the desire of most jingju artists to maintain their tradition of performance. As a result, no single theatrical event can define this or any other form. Still, despite the “noise”

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created by variations in individual theatrical events, numerous similarities among the multitude of jingju events allow one to draw inferences that will generally apply to events for which little if any documentary evidence might exist. For example, their music will primarily be drawn from the erhuang and xipi systems (which, taken together, are known as the pihuang system); their texts will generally be secular, containing a mix of stylized speech, song, dance, pantomime, and sometimes acrobatics; their characters will be differentiated in accordance to established role-categories; the relative bareness of their stages will be offset by the splendor of the actors’ costumes (and, for some role categories, makeup); and simple stage properties will used as signifiers (e.g., a whip will be used to signify the presence of a horse). This is far from a complete list of jingju’s traits, but if one knew only that some particular theatrical event had most these traits (including, most importantly, the music system), one could reasonably infer the others and suggest it belonged to the jingju population. • The events that make up a theatre form are associated with one another. The theatrical events of a form are never found in a random distribution across space and time. That is, there is no likelihood that a performance of jingju would somehow be presented by a high school theatre group in rural Canada, unless some local resident, teacher, or student happened to have lived in or visited China, or to have been stimulated to mount the performance based on learning about jingju—but even this would present at least a tenuous association rather than a truly random event. A complex web of associations binds together the population of a theatre form, giving it its historical coherence. The most important of these associations are the relationships between theatre personnel, including actors, musicians, directors, composers, librettists, choreographers, designers, and so on. By way of example, let me look to the Broadway musical, and start from the first performance of Oklahoma!, at the St. James Theatre on March 31, 1943.8 The St. James was (and remains) located at 246 West 44th Street, in the heart of what Brooks McNamara refers to as the “occupational district” of Broadway—that occupation being “commercial theatre” offered with the intent “to be profitable” (126). The theatre was built in 1927 by Abraham Erlanger, who at the turn of the century had been a founding partner in the Theatrical Syndicate that dominated American theatre at the time. Before the demise of the Syndicate in 1916, almost every musical (and many spoken plays as well) in the United States was associated with it in some way or another. Soon

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after its construction, the St. James was purchased by the Schubert Brothers, who in subsequent decades would establish a similar dominance over theatre on Broadway. In 1957, the Schuberts sold the theatre, and it eventually became the first Broadway theatre owned and operated by Jujamcyn Theaters, which would come to engage in a decades-long competition with the Schuberts. Oklahoma! was the first collaboration of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, who had, individually, already been associated with some of the most important people in the history of the musical. Rodgers’s first partner was lyricist Lorenz Hart, with whom he created more than a dozen hits over some twenty years. As for Hammerstein, his father was a vaudeville impresario who built the first theatre in what is now the Broadway theatre district; his first partner was Rudolf Friml, the Czech composer who helped develop the operetta subform of the musical. More significant, perhaps, was Hammerstein’s partnership with Jerome Kern in the landmark musical Show Boat, which demonstrated that musicals could convey serious themes. In Hammerstein’s later years, he served as mentor to the young Stephen Sondheim, whose musicals would eventually bring a new intellectual range and musical sophistication to the form. Even this very partial account should suffice to demonstrate the web of associations that has created and maintained the Broadway musical, and I have not troubled to detail the associations that can be spun out from the many other people involved in the production of Oklahoma!, such as Agnes De Mille, the choreographer who worked on more than a dozen other musicals, or Lemuel Ayers, who was one of the leading scenic designers for musicals around the mid-century, or any of the actors, some of whom (such as Alfred Drake) performed in numerous musicals. Almost anywhere one might choose to start, one quickly finds a multiplicity of associations. This web of associations is at the heart of the living history of the Broadway musical. And the same sort of web can be found in every theatre form, for such webs are the fundamental means by which the inherited traditions of the form are transmitted through time and across space. • A theatre form has a distinctive system of performance and reception. If forms are to serve as the basic unit of study, each must be broadly identifiable through a set of traits its individual events  share in common, but which is distinct from the systems of other forms. The criterion of distinctiveness does not mean that different forms cannot share any of their traits; it means that as a system, the traits work together in a unique manner.

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This concept of distinctiveness, I should add, does not contravene the fact that theatre forms can and often are presented in conjunction with one another—as well as in conjunction with non-dramatic performance. Kyōgen plays, for example, are intermixed in the traditional presentation of a full nō program of events. Similarly, each trilogy of Greek tragedies was rounded off with a satyr-play from the same playwright. In such cases, one might say that an understanding of the distinctiveness of each theatre form involved is actually essential to an appreciation of the larger event: if the audience does not recognize the difference between kyōgen and nō, or between tragedy and satyr play, the performance can only be misunderstood. Distinctions between theatre forms are important to note because, among other things, an awareness of specific systems of production and reception guides an audiences’ expectations and responses. Some years ago, I witnessed an event that nicely illustrates what happens when the reality of one production system clashes with expectations derived from another. The Grand Kabuki troupe came to the University of California, Berkeley, to perform Chikamatsu’s Shunkan. When the draw curtain was pulled aside to start the show, it revealed, on upstage flats, a conventionalized rendering of the sea. The person sitting beside me turned to her companion and muttered, “I’ve seen more realistic sets in high school shows.” A few moments later, when a character entered from the rear of the house and proceeded to the stage along the hanamichi (“flower path”—that is, a raised walkway), the same person complained, “They’ve broken the fourth wall.” And so it went through the show. Most annoying to my neighbor was the fact that the female characters were played by onnagata actors (i.e., by men), as is traditional in the form. My neighbor, to be clear, was not the only person in the audience who found the system of kabuki to be alien. A traditional kind of audience response in kabuki is for enthusiastic members to call out encouragement to the actors during the performance, a practice known as kakegoe. At the Berkeley show, a few Japanese gentlemen followed this honored tradition. The first time one of them called out, it seemed that everyone in the house turned to stare at him. The second time, some members of the audience hissed. The third time, the gentleman was shouted down. The point of this little story is not that the person beside me (along with some other audience members) was a fool; rather, it is that she had no understanding of kabuki’s performance system and wanted to respond to it as one might have responded to a conventional production of European spoken theatre, with its very

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different system of performance and reception. The distinctiveness of kabuki was enough that even the relatively worldly audience in Berkeley had some difficulty with it.9 Having said so much about the theatre form, let me be careful to explain that this concept is not connected to the sort of formalism that, as Postlewait puts it, “operate[s] as a history or theory of genres” concerned with “establish[ing] abiding formal principles for tragedy and comedy, irrespective of historical conditions” (176). Two things in particular distinguish theatre forms from formalism. First, formalism deals almost exclusively with texts, whereas for theatre forms, the theatrical situation and theatrical practices are of no less importance than the texts. Second, formalism disdains historical context, whereas for theatre forms, contexts are an essential element. Theatre forms do not exist outside of history, but are created within, and subject to, it. As Gerald F. Else comments on one particular form: “Tragedy is a rare and special plant; not a universal form of serious literature but a unique creation born at a particular time and place” (8). Moreover, tragedy and comedy, as practiced in ancient Greece, are not “abiding” in the sense of being eternal, contrary to formalism. Greek tragedy, for instance, seen as a population of associated theatrical events with a distinctive system of performance and reception, ceased to exist nearly two thousand years ago, notwithstanding the occasional contemporary mounting of its plays. Productions of La Traviata, West Side Story, and Death of a Salesmen might be quite tragic (or sad, or ennobling despite their unhappy endings, or whatever) in some formalist literary sense, but they are not of the same theatre form as Sophocles’s Oedipus. And the comedy of ancient Greece is no less dead than its tragedy. Just as the original production of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata was comic (or mirthful, or with a happy ending, or whatever), so are productions of The Barber of Seville, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and The Odd Couple; yet all of these productions belong to different theatre forms.

Scaling Down and Up from the Theatre Form Scaling Down: The Subform Although I have defined theatre forms as populations of associated theatrical events with distinctive systems of performance and reception, it is plain that within many forms there is significant variation, with some events being more closely aligned with one another than with others.

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Even within forms, that is to say, there are clusters of especially similar events. This becomes particularly evident as a form extends across space or through time, with these clusters tending to be localized in one or the other dimension. It will be useful to designate them as subforms— but I must be clear that the prefix “sub” is being used here in the sense that biologists use it when referring to subspecies (i.e., as the taxonomic category just below species), and not in the sense that sociologists use it when referring to subcultures (i.e., to designate groups that are different from or in opposition to a dominant or mainstream culture). With theatre forms (as with species), there are either no subforms or multiple ones, and no subform can be taken as normative for the form. The concept of subforms, however, has some attendant difficulties, the most immediate of which regards the criteria by which one might distinguish between subforms. Literary differences (e.g., new styles of writing) would certainly be one such criterion, but differences in the composition of the audience (e.g., elite audiences as opposed to general audiences) or the occasions of performance (e.g., Christmas performance versus Easter performance) might well be no less meaningful. It is often difficult, though, to say whether one is looking at subforms or just the normal variation within a form. As the linguist Merritt Rhulen has observed, “In whatever field classification is carried out, scholars tend to limit themselves into two categories. At one pole are the ‘lumpers,’ who manifest a predilection for combining entities into more comprehensive groups. At the other are the ‘splitters,’ who tend to divide groups into a greater number of distinct entities” (215). The lumper–splitter problem can arise in regard even to entire theatre forms but becomes far more serious on the level of subforms, where differences are not as pronounced. For this reason, it is necessary to recognize that the identification of subforms can often be considered no more than provisional. A reasonable amount of clarity, however, is at least sometimes possible, especially if one does not become overly fine in “splitting” subforms. I would certainly not classify any single event, or even a single production run, as a subform in itself; as with forms, subforms need to be established in multiple shows before they can be recognized as such. As I mentioned earlier, Oklahoma! was not the first Broadway musical to present a serious story, but it decisively broke with the two main subforms of the time, the musical comedy and the operetta (Stempel 301).10 It brought in its wake hundreds of other shows that were

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similarly constructed and performed, and so stands at the head of a third subform of the Broadway musical. The issue of subforms is also complicated by the fact that if and when the population of a subform become sufficiently distinctive, at some point one must begin to think of it as a form in its own right. As Charles Darwin noted in regard to biological evolution, “Varieties [i.e., subspecies] are species in the process of formation”; that is, they are “incipient species” (143). But Darwin was resigned to the fact that it is difficult to determine at what point a subspecies becomes a species in its own right (77–78). This is a clear instance of the “fuzziness” in historical categories that we have seen recognized by Stephen Pinker. Note that a similar problem arises in linguistics: When, for example, did regional dialects of Latin become the separate languages of French, Spanish, and Romanian? To say it happened in the early Middle Ages is anything but precise; but it will usually suffice. We can return here to the karagöz shadow-theatre for examples both of the development of a geographically localized subform as well of that subform becoming a form in its own right. In the centuries following its emergence in Istanbul, karagöz was brought to other areas of the Ottoman empire, including what are now Greece, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, Iran, and Bosnia-Herzegovina (Chen 39). Detailed information on the shadow-theatre in most of these places is difficult to come by, but not so with what came to be called the karaghiózis shadow-theatre of Greece. Karagöz was introduced to Greece at some point after the Ottoman conquest in 1653, with the first recorded mention being in 1799 (Myrsiades and Myrsiades 39). The earliest detailed observations of the shadow-show in Greece were offered in 1809 by John Cam Hobhouse, who referred to the form by its Turkish name and was duly horrified by its obscenity (Myrsiades, “Karagiozis” 84). The show was performed in Turkish and presented for a non-Greek audience during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, just as in Istanbul (Myrsiades, “Karagiozis Performance” 87–88). Clearly this was, at the time, simply an expansion of the geographic range of karagöz—but significant changes would soon take place. By 1830, the shadow-shows were increasingly being called by their Greek name, karaghiózis (Myrsiades, “Karagiozis” 94); this suggests that their language and audiences were also increasingly Greek, a development that makes sense in light of the ongoing liberation of Greece from the Ottoman Empire over the course of the nineteenth century.11 And these were not the only changes. According to Linda Myrsiades, “There are no

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records indicating the appearance of the [main character’s highly visible] phallus in Greece after 1809,” when Hobhouse had been horrified by the show’s obscenity (“Historical” 219). Associated with that disappearance was a general tempering of the shadow-show’s traditional ribaldry. As Myrsiades notes, “An impression is … generated across the period from 1827 to 1894 … that Karaghiozis was closely monitored and even censored for its vulgarity and for the nature its ethical comments. Resistance becomes more specific and more heated as the performance becomes more widely spread toward the end of the century” (“Historical” 214). As karaghiózis developed in Greece, the structure of the plays changed as well, with the preliminary segments and the epilogue familiar in karagöz being dropped, and all attention focused on the central story itself (Mistakidou 82–83). At some point, given the changes in language, audience, moral tone, and structure, karaghiózis had developed into a distinct subform of karagöz. One should not, however, overstate its distinctiveness in these years. As Myrsiades notes, at least a few contemporary sources failed to make any distinction between the two names, which might suggest that karaghiózis “did not [yet] represent a form separate from or independent of” karagöz (“Historical” 223). This subform was, to use Darwin’s term, an “incipient” form. Not only were the comic performances of karaghiózis becoming distinctively Greek, but a new style of karaghiózis theatre was also emerging toward the end of the century. This was a heroic karaghiózis, in which the texts were mostly historical in subject matter, with Karaghiózis himself becoming a comical supplement to famous Greek personages, such as Alexander the Great (Myrsiades and Myrsiades 26). By the end of the century, in Myrsiades’s estimation, a “completely Greek form” had emerged, performed in Greek for Greek audiences on Greek holidays, shaped by Greek tastes and interests, “which permitted the moulding of a national performance reflecting the developing spirit of a free land.” It had “became a comic mirror of the Greek folk soul …, very much rooted in the Greek soil” (Myrsiades, “Karagiozis” 95–96, 97). This seems a reasonable assessment: from its beginnings as an overseas transplant of karagöz, karaghiózis developed first into a localized subform, then into a form in itself, with its own pair of easily identifiable subforms, one strictly comic, the other primarily heroic.

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Scaling Up: Homologies and Analogies Just as it is possible to scale down from the basic unit of the theatre form to subforms, one can also scale up to groupings of theatre forms. Recognizing these groupings is especially useful for world theatre history because it helps offset the tendency to see any particular theatre form (or any particular society’s theatre forms) as being disassociated from the rest of the world. The fact is that different forms of theatre often bear striking similarities to one another: these similarities can be either homologies or analogies. Stephen J.  Gould explains these terms, as used in biology: “Homologies are similarities based on inheritance of the same genes or structures from a common ancestor,” while “similarities formed within different genetic systems by selective pressures of similar environments are called analogies” (Hen’s 137). Homologies and analogies allow us to scale up from any individual theatre form and see how that form is bound into a wider web of forms. Let me begin with homologous groupings. The biological meaning of homology is only partially applicable to theatre, because whereas in biology a species generally descends from a single “parental” species, theatre artists can (and often do) combine traits transferred from two or more other forms in developing their theatre forms (an important point to which I will return in Chap. 7). Still, the idea of homologies as similarities “based on inheritance” is quite legitimate for theatre studies, and can be identified both in the transfer of entire theatre forms across space or time, and in the more limited transfer of specific traits from one form to another. In both ways, the resulting similarities are based on inheritance. We have already encountered one instance of this sort of development in our examination of karaghiózis’s development out of karagöz. For another example, we can look to sibling theatre forms that shares a forefather, one might say, in the festival-based theatre form known as moros y cristianos, which emerged in medieval Spain, and takes as its historical referent the Christian “reconquest” of Moorish Spain. At the heart of the form are a set of mock battles between massed performers representing Moors and Christians; the performance also typically involves parades of the two sides, episodes of combative dialogue, and the ultimate conversion of the Moors (Harris, “Muhammad” passim). A homologous theatre form, also called moros y cristianos, can be found in Mexico, subsequent to the Spanish colonization. The explicit referent remains the struggle between Christians and Moors, but for the conquistadores and

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missionaries who brought the form to the New World, there was also the implicit subtext of the Christian conquest of the American Indians. The form shares many traits (even beyond its name) with the Spanish moros y cristianos, but native theatre practices have been easily integrated into the form. As Max Harris observes, the indigenous societies had their own “tradition of skirmishes, mock battles, martial dances, and ritual combat” (Aztecs 67), which affected the way that the Mexican moros y cristianos would come to be performed. No less important is a change in the way the form is understood by its indigenous participants, who might not be expected to celebrate having been conquered. But as Harris points out, the literal subject of the form is not conquest but reconquest: “It was this image of liberation rather than of Spanish victory that attracted indigenous Mexicans to the imported tradition” (Aztecs 67). The Spanish moros y cristianos was also transferred to the Philippines, following the Spanish conquest of those islands in the sixteenth century. Here called komedya (but also known as moro-moro), the form still has its traditional referent of the struggle against Islam, though it has been extended to the contest between Christians and Moslems for dominance in the Philippines. Komedya also retains many of the basic traits of moros y cristianos, with parades, mock-combats, and tournaments, but its plots have significantly more textual development than its related forms in Spain and Mexico, with an “extensive repertoire” of dialogue-based plays having been written, especially in the nineteenth century (Ghulam-Sarwar 180). As with its Mexican sibling, local theatre practices have been incorporated into komedya, among the most significant being trickster-clown characters (pusong) (Banham, Cambridge 852) and a “vast corpus of pre-Spanish oral literature” (Ghulam-Sarwar 178). Sir Anril P. Tiatco, moreover, makes the point that although komedya’s specific point of origin was the Spanish moros y cristianos, it has since been marked by a “cosmopolitanism” that has led its performers to draw on a range of other European forms for its costumes, choreography, dramatic texts, and staging techniques. It is, by this account, more “an adaptation of various world theatres … than a translation” of the Spanish moros y cristianos (109). Far more easily transferable than entire forms is the transfer of specific traits (or suites of related traits) between theatre forms, and so partial homologies are easy to find. We can return again to karagöz, for an example, for the development of that shadow-theatre took place at roughly the same time and place as the “live” theatre form known as orta-oyunu, with which it had significant interactions. According to Metin And, “Anyone

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who has ever seen a shadow play notices immediately the similarity in characters, comic elements, and atmosphere to the Orta Oyunu. The only difference is that one uses puppets, the other live actors” (And, Karagöz 12). Given And’s own accounts of the two theatre forms, this is something of an exaggeration: orta-oyunu, for example, is performed on an open stage set in the middle of its audience; the full performing company traditionally consisted of between twenty-five to thirty players; and the main characters are named Kavuklu and Pişekâr, though their relationship is similar to that of Karagöz and Hacivat (And, History 40, 41, 45). At least some of these differences no doubt arise because of the different possibilities offered by live actors and puppets, but the point is that these differences are sufficient to justify speaking of orta-oyunu and karagöz as distinct forms that are so homologically related that is impossible to say in which ways each has been influenced by the other (And, History 39).12 One last point concerning homologies: it is best to be cautious in asserting them merely on the basis of observable similarities. There must also be a plausible historical mechanism for the transference of forms or traits. The Ottoman colonization of the Eastern Mediterranean allows one to confidently claim the homology between karagöz and karaghiózis; likewise, the Spanish colonization of Mexico and the Philippines justifies seeing the similarities of moros y cristianos and komedya as homologies. But to take a contrary example, there are notable similarities between medieval European Passion plays and the Persian taʻziyeh. On the basis of those similarities, Mohammad Jaʻfar Mahjub contends that taʻziyeh “is derived from [but is not a “blind imitation of”] the religious plays of the Western world in the Middle Ages” (146). But Mahjub does not provide any particular historical path for a homological derivation, and one must note that by the time of taʻziyeh’s emergence in the eighteenth century, hundreds of years had passed since Passion plays were widely performed in Europe.13 There is no need to argue for homology here, for devotional forms of theatre (often involving the sort of processions that can be found in Passion plays and taʻziyeh) have independently developed in many parts of the world. In the absence of historical evidence, one is on safer ground referring to the similarities between these forms as analogous. So let me turn now to analogies between theatre forms. As we have seen, Gould notes that in biology, analogies are created by the “selective pressures of similar environments.” The “environment” that matters in biology is primarily the physical environment; for theatre, however, it is the social environment (or, to return to a term I have already used, the

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societal context). When the “selective pressures” in societies of two or more distinct locations are similar, they can drive theatrical development along similar lines, leading to what is called convergent evolution. Sometimes, though, sheer coincidence between artistic choices will lead to analogies between theatre forms. And so both convergent analogies and coincidental analogies need to be considered. Convergent analogies are not particularly difficult to find, particularly regarding individual traits. One example is the many theatre forms that feature stock characters of the wily servant/slave type. The Italian commedia’s zanni characters, such as Arlecchino, might be homologous to the trickster slaves of Roman comedy; wayang kulit’s Semar and his family are certainly homologous across a range of theatre forms in Insular Southeast Asia; but no cross-societal influence between the Mediterranean and the South Pacific can account for the similar presence of servant characters in the theatres of these distant lands. Neither, however, is this presence mere coincidence. Only in societies that share the cultural practice of servitude could such characters gain theatrical preeminence; familiarity with real-­ world servants (along with the reliance on, and perhaps  condescension toward, them) creates an analogous opportunity to draw comedy from their presence. It is therefore no surprise that while they can also be found in European spoken theatre before the twentieth century (think of their ubiquity in the plays of Molière), they have become scarce in European and American plays of the past fifty years or more, as the use of personal servants has steeply declined. More complex convergent analogies, involving multiple related traits (that is to say, suites of traits) can also be identified. One of the more notable convergent analogies exists between early European spoken theatre and Tokugawa-era kabuki. To say this not to deny that these forms emerged in radically different societies, nor to doubt that each form developed in its own individual way. But in the fast-growing cities of seventeenth-century London, Madrid, and Paris, as in the no less burgeoning Edo (now Tokyo), Osaka, and Kyoto, the emerging forms of spoken theatre and kabuki developed a remarkably similar suite of traits, including cash-paying audiences drawn from both the middling and upper classes, and purpose-built theatres that were mostly clustered together and that offered price-segregated audience areas. Both spoken theatre and kabuki were, in brief, urban commercial forms of theatre that sought above all to make money by offering the enactment of secular plays for the pleasure of their audiences. Because this suite of traits is so familiar, it is worth

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emphasizing its relatively scarcity among the world’s theatre forms. It can exist only in places with substantial and economically mixed urban populations, in which cash not only is used, but is readily available to all but the poorest classes for spending on pleasure. In the cities of both Europe and Japan, all these conditions were newly in place, and their theatre artists independently struck upon this particular suite of traits to take advantage of the opportunities they presented.14 Coincidental analogies are no less easy to find than convergent ones. Kabuki theatres have, from early on, included the aforementioned hanamichi that reaches from down-stage right to the back of the audience area;15 the theatres of taʻziyeh have two or more walkways that reach from the circular stage out through the all-surrounding audience. In both kabuki and taʻziyeh, these extensions of the stage are important areas of performance, used to highlight significant entrances and exits. These two forms, then, are analogous in extending their performance areas into and through their audiences. But there is no evident homology between them. No “ancestral” form has bequeathed them this trait, nor has either had any influence on the other. Instead, kabuki’s hanamichi is homologous with the hashigakari (bridge) of nō theatre, which extends from the stage to the dressing room (Ernst 49–50); the walkways of taʻziyeh’s theatres, meanwhile, are probably homologous with the religious processions that are part of the form’s origin (Chelkowski 5). Nor do these theatres present a convergent analogy; similar societal pressures and opportunities do not seem to have stimulated the way they extend their playing areas via walkways. The analogy is simply a coincidence. * * * Let us return one last time to the karagöz shadow-show, and imagine a single actor performing his bawdy fiction for a coffee-house audience in nineteenth-century Istanbul. The fact that he performs with shadow puppets is intriguing, but not particularly relevant here; neither is the fact that his is virtually a one-man show for a small audience. Even if we were looking at a much larger show, we would see the same basic configuration of actors performing fictions for audiences; we would be seeing, in other words, theatrical events. The various elements of these events are fascinating in their own right, but cannot stand in for the events themselves. The theatrical event as a whole is the irreducible minimal unit of dramatic theatre.

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But although each theatrical event is unique, these events cluster together in largely predictable ways. If we happened also to see the show presented the following evening by the same karagöz puppet-master, we would see innumerable similarities in the theatrical situation, the theatrical practices, and the texts being performed, although the fiction being enacted would be different. The same would hold true even if we instead visited a different coffee-house and saw the performance of some other puppet-master. Such similarities allow us to categorize entire populations of theatrical events as belonging to specific forms of theatre. By making use of this unit of study, we can overlook the minor differences between the two karagöz shows; and even if we do not happen to see it, we can infer that the karagöz show being offered in a third coffee-house will, in most respects, also be similar. To be sure, there will be theatrical events that are outliers, but the vast majority of organized shows ever performed fall neatly into one or another theatre form, which makes the theatre form an excellent basic unit of study for world theatre. The theatre form has the additional virtue of being easily scalable. Within populations of similar events, there can often be found smaller, tighter clusters. Although their boundaries are often less distinguishable than those of forms themselves, these subforms allow a more granular look at theatre. Conversely, forms themselves will have certain similarities to other forms. These similarities might be the result of the actual transfer of entire forms or of specific traits (in either case being homologies), or they might arise either from similar societal pressures or from mere coincidence (in either case being analogies). Either way, these groupings of forms demonstrate the webs that bind together theatre everywhere. Our karagöz puppet-master presumably knows little if anything of such webs, aside no doubt from a familiarity with orta-oyunu. It is enough for him to know his trade. After he ends his show, he comes out from behind the shadow-screen for a quick bow, then carefully packs away his puppets. Eventually he steps out into the sweltering Istanbul night. The narrow streets in the neighborhood of the Grand Bazaar are still teeming with people, but the only thing the puppet-master notices is the whisper of a cool breeze blowing in from the sea. He heads straight home to dine and rest, for on the morrow he will once more light his magic screen and bring his puppets to life.

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Notes 1. As one nineteenth-century European observer wrote: “We had every evening, in a coffee-house open to all the curious and all the amateurs, a sight much relished by the Turks, and frequented even by the most decent women, although it most frequently presented scenes at which European families, the most shameless, would have blushed to be present” (Öztürk 297). 2. For additional discussion of the theatrical event, see the excellent collection of essays in Cremona et al., and also Postlewait 117–53. 3. Sauter’s emphasis on theatre as “event” recalls Bernard Beckermann’s statement that theatre “occurs when one or more human beings, isolated in time and/or space, present themselves to another or others” (8; italics in the original). Beckerman says theatre “occurs,” rather than “is,” because theatre “is not a thing and does not exist except when it is occurring” (6). 4. Sauter’s analysis of the actor is strikingly reminiscent of Gao Xingjian’s discussion of the “tripartite actor”; see, for example, the discussion in Łabędzka 82–92. 5. Sauter revisits this in a later work, suggesting that instead of speaking of a “fictional level,” it would be more appropriate to speak of a “symbolic level” of communication (Theatrical 6). Given the contradictory meanings of “symbol,” I think it more clear to continue referring to the “fictional” level of communication. 6. The three contexts that Sauter came to identify in his more recent work are “the playing culture,” “contextual theatricality,” and “the cultural context”—with the performance itself now being called “theatrical playing” (“Introducing” 13–14). This all seems more complex than strictly necessary, even though the three contexts I discuss have similarities to Sauter’s contexts. 7. Dolby states that there have been some 3800 jingju plays written, “of which some 1400 are still available for the stage” (History 179). 8. This account of the St. James Theatre and its associations is based on various entries in Wilmeth and Miller, Bordman, Botto, and IBDB. 9. There is a heartening coda to this story. After the show had ended and my neighbor was rising from her seat, I heard her tell her friend, “That was really strange, but I loved it!” A few minutes later, I saw her outside the theatre, in animated conversation with one of the Japanese gentlemen who had called out encouragement to the actors. 10. A competing producer’s dismissive comment at the opening of Oklahoma! illustrates the difference between it and standard musical comedy of the era: “No gags. No girls. No chance” (Stempel 301).

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11. The war for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire began in 1821, with Greece being established as an independent state in 1832. At the time it included only the southern portion (and some islands) of the current Greek state; additional territory would be gained piecemeal through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 12. Orta-oyunu also presents possible homologies with a series of theatre forms to the east, including the Persian ru-hozi and the North Indian svang: all are comic-improvisational, lightly plotted, performed in the center of their audiences, and reliant on outrageous female impersonation. Another possible homology, Metin And suggests, is with commedia dell’arte (“Turkish” 169). All of these possibilities deserve further study. 13. This is not to suggest that Passion plays had disappeared entirely. The most famous such play still extant is in the German town of Oberammergau, where performances were inaugurated in 1634 and continue to be presented every ten years (Loney, passim); for a Passion play that has survived to this day in Poland, see Young; for one in Italy, see D’Aponte. 14. For kabuki, see Shively, “Social Environment” and “Bakufu,” and Nishiyama. For spoken theatre in London, see Gurr and P.  Thomson. Earle Ernst is unconvinced by attempts to “show parallels between the development of the Elizabethan theatre and that of Kabuki.” The parallels he discusses are (1) the temporal proximity of the origins of the forms; (2) the fact that males represented women on the stages of both forms; (3) the oft-­encountered reference to Chikamatsu Monzaemon as “the Japanese Shakespeare”; (4) the emergence of each form in concurrence with the rise in each land of “an increasingly wealthy and powerful class of commoners”; and (5) the beginning in each land of a “new age”—the Renaissance in England and the Tokugawa age of peace in Japan (16). As Ernst insists, some of these parallels are indeed superficial or downright silly. Only his fourth and fifth parallels are truly significant, but as we have seen, they do yield significant convergent analogies in regard to an entire suite of traits shared by the two forms. 15. Most kabuki theatres, in fact, have long had a second hanamichi extending out from stage left. To this day this is called a “temporary hanamichi.”

Works Cited And, Metin. A History of Theatre and Popular Entertainments in Turkey. Ankara, Dost Yayinlari, 1963–64. And, Metin. Karagöz: Turkish Shadow Theatre. Rev. ed., Ankara, Dost Yayinlari, 1979. And, Metin. “The Turkish Folk Theatre.” Asian Folklore Studies, vol. 38, no. 2, 1979, pp. 155–76.

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Aristotle. “The Poetics.” On Poetry and Style, translated by G.  M. A.  Grube, Liberal Arts Press, 1958. Banham, Martin, editor. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Rev. ed., Cambridge UP, 2000. Beckerman, Bernard. Dynamics of Drama: Theory and Method of Analysis. Alfred A. Knopf, 1970. Bordman, Gerald. American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle. Expanded ed., Oxford UP, 1986. Botto, Louis. At This Theatre: 100 Years of Broadway Shows, Stories, and Stars. Edited by Robert Viagas, Applause Theatre & Cinema Books/Playbill, 2002. Brandon, James R. Theatre in Southeast Asia. Harvard UP, 1967. Carlson, Marvin. “Theatre Historiography and Semiotic Analysis.” Literary Research, vol. 11, no. 1, Spring 1986, pp. 5–10. Chelkowski, Peter J. “Taʻziyeh: Indigenous Avant-Garde Theatre of Iran.” Taʻziyeh: Ritual and Drama in Iran, edited by Peter J. Chelkowski, New York UP/Soroush Press, 1979, pp. 1–11. Chen, Fan Pen. “Shadow Theaters of the World.” Asian Folklore Studies, vol. 62, 2003, pp. 25–64. Cremona, Vicky Ann, et al., editors. Theatrical Events: Borders, Dynamics, Frames. Amsterdam, Rodopi B. V., 2004. Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. The Modern Library, 1998. Dolby, William. A History of Chinese Drama. London, Paul Elek, 1976. D’Ponte, Mimi Gisolfi. “A Passion Play Near Amalfi.” TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 18, no. 4, December 1974, pp. 47–55. Else, Gerald F. The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy. Harvard UP, 1967. Ernst, Earle. The Kabuki Theatre. Grove Press, 1956. Ghulam-Sarwar Yousef. Dictionary of Traditional South-East Asian Theatre. Kuala Lumpur, Oxford UP, 1994. Gould, Stephen J. Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes. W. W. Norton, 1983. Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage. 3rd ed., Cambridge UP, 1992. Harris, Max. Aztecs, Moors, and Christians: Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain. U of Texas P, 2000. Harris, Max. “Muhammad and the Virgin: Folk Dramatizations of Battles Between the Moors and Christians in Modern Spain.” TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 38, no. 1, Spring 1994, pp. 45–61. Hodgson, Marshall G. S. Rethinking World History. Edited by Edmund Burke III, Cambridge UP, 1993. IBDB [Internet Broadway Database] https://www.ibdb.com/ Johnson, Samuel. “Preface to Shakespeare, Part One.” Critical Theory Since Plato, edited by Hazard Adams, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971, pp. 328–36.

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Keene, Donald. Nō and Bunraku: Two Forms of Japanese Theatre. Columbia UP, 1990. Łabędzka, Izabella. Gao Xingjian’s Idea of Theatre: From the Word to the Image. Leiden, Brill, 2008. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books, 1999. Lei, Daphne. “The Production and Consumption of Chinese Theatre in Nineteenth-Century California.” Theatre Research International, vol. 28, no. 3, October 2003, pp. 289–302. Loney, Glen. “Oberammergau, 1634–1990: The Play and the Passions.” New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 27, August 1991, pp. 203–16. MacDowell, Douglas M. Aristophanes and Athens: An Introduction to the Plays. Oxford UP, 1995. Mahjub, Mumammad Jaʻfar. “The Effects of European Theatre and the Influence of Its Theatrical Methods Upon Taʻziyeh.” Taʻziyeh: Ritual and Drama in Iran, edited by Peter J.  Chelkowski, New  York UP/Soroush Press, 1979, pp. 137–53. Mai, Mae. “Chinese Ensembles in New  York.” silpayamanant.wordpress.com/ ethnic-orchestras-in-nor th-america/chinese-ensembles-in-the-us/ chinese-ensembles-in-new-york Martin, Jacqueline, and Willmar Sauter. Understanding Theatre: Performance Analysis in Theory and Practice. Stockholm, Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1995. McConachie, Bruce A. (interviewed by Ian Watson). “Realizing a Postpositivist Theatre History.” New Theatre Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 39, August 1994, pp. 217–22. McConachie, Bruce A. “Towards a Postpositive Theatre History.” Theatre Journal, vol. 37, no. 4, December 1985, pp. 465–86. McNamara, Brooks. “Broadway: A Theatre Historian’s Perspective.” TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 45, no. 4, Winter 2001, pp. 125–28. Mistakidou, Aekaterina. Comparison of the Turkish and Greek Shadow Theater. 1978. New York U, PhD dissertation. Myrsiades, Linda. “Historical Source Material for the Karagiozis Performance.” Theatre Research International, vol. 10, no. 3, Autumn 1985, pp. 213–25. Myrsiades, Linda. “The Karagiozis Performance in Nineteenth-Century Greece.” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, vol. 2, 1976, pp. 83–99. Myrsiades, Linda S., and Kostas Myrsiades. Karagiozis: Culture and Comedy in Greek Puppet Theatre. U of Kentucky P, 1992. Nagler, A. M. The Medieval Religious Stage. Yale UP, 1976. Nicoll, Allardyce. The Theatre and Dramatic Theory. George C.  Harrop & Co., 1962.

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Nishiyama Matsunosuke. Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–1868. Translated by Gerald Groemer, U of Hawaii P, 1997. Osipovitch, David. “What is a Theatrical Performance?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 64, no. 4, Fall 2006, pp. 461–70. Öztürk, Serdar. “Karagöz Co-Opted: Turkish Shadow Theatre of the Early Republic (1923–1945).” Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 23, no. 2, September 2006, pp. 292–313. Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. Postlewait, Thomas. The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography. Cambridge UP, 2009. Quinn, Michael L. “Theaterwissenschaft in the History of Theatre Study.” Theatre Survey, vol. 32, no. 2, November 1991, pp. 126–27. Rhulan, Merritt. A Guide to the World’s Languages, Volume 1: Classification. Stanford UP, 1987. Sauter, Willmar. “Cyclical Perseverance and Linear Mobility of Theatrical Events.” Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography, edited by Thomas Postlewait and Charlotte M. Canning, U of Iowa P, 2010, pp. 117–41. Sauter, Willmar. “Introducing the Theatrical Event.” Theatrical Events: Borders, Dynamics, Frames, edited by Vicky Ann Cremona et al., Amsterdam, Rodopi B.V., 2004, pp. 3–14. Sauter, Willmar. The Theatrical Event: Dynamics of Performance and Perception. U of Iowa P, 2000. Shively, Donald H. “Bakufu Versus Kabuki.” A Kabuki Reader: History and Performance, edited by Samuel L.  Leiter, Armonk NY, M.E.  Sharpe, 2002, pp. 33–59. Shively, Donald H. “The Social Environment of Tokugawa Kabuki.” Studies in Kabuki: Its Acting, Music, and Historical Context, edited by James R. Brandon et al., U of Hawaii P, 1978, pp. 1–61. Stemple, Larry. Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theatre. W. W. Norton, 2010. Thomson, Peter. Shakespeare’s Theatre. 2nd ed., Routledge, 1992. Thorpe, Ashley. “Transforming Tradition: Performances of Jingju (‘Beijing Opera’) in the UK.” Theatre Research International, vol. 36, no. 1, March 2011, pp. 33–46. Tiatco, Sir Anril P. “The Philippine Komedya and the Recuperation of the Cosmopolitan: From Colonial Legacy to Cross-Cultural Encounter.” Modern Drama, vol. 57, no. 1, Spring 2014, pp. 94–121. Tillis, Steve. “The Actor Occluded: Puppet Theatre and Acting Theory.” Theatre Topics, vol. 6, no. 2, September 1996, pp. 109–20. Vince, R. W. “Theatre History as an Academic Subject.” Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, edited by Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie, U of Iowa P, 1989, pp. 1–18.

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Wilmeth, Don B., and Tice L.  Miller. Cambridge Guide to American Theatre. Cambridge UP, 1996. Wilson, Edward O. The Diversity of Life. W. W. Norton, 1992. Young, Marjorie B. “The Bernardine Pilgrimage [Poland].” TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 21, no. 3, September 1977, pp. 33–38. Zarrilli, Phillip B. Kathakali Dance Drama: Where Gods and Demons Come to Play. Routledge, 2000.

CHAPTER 5

The Geography of World Theatre History

Geography has been accorded surprisingly little attention in the study of theatre history. Maps are by no means the sum total of geographic knowledge, but the existence (or the lack thereof) of relevant maps provides a handy indicator of a field’s interest in the subject. Brockett and Hildy’s History of Theatre has numerous pictures of actors and diagrams of theatres but only one map that directly pertains to theatre, showing the locations of theatres in early seventeenth-century London. All its other maps (of which there are fewer than two dozen) are standard-issue political maps that demarcate state borders and identify major cities.1 Nellhaus et al.’s Theatre Histories is no less lavishly illustrated, but offers only eleven maps, all of which are also political maps with no explicit bearing on theatre.2 Wilson and Goldfarb’s Living Theatre—to glance at one last textbook—is no less a visual feast than the others, but comes up even worse in regard to maps, having only five: four standard-issue political maps, one of which has been modified to indicate the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens; and a fifth map, which (again) shows theatre locations in early seventeenth-­ century London. Textbooks are by no means alone in scanting maps. Many standard reference works contain no maps at all; these include Banham’s Cambridge Guide to Theatre, Hartnoll’s Oxford Companion to the Theatre, and Kennedy’s Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance. And books that focus on one or another region of the world often do no better than textbooks or reference works when it comes to maps. Dolby’s History of © The Author(s) 2020 S. Tillis, The Challenge of World Theatre History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48343-2_5

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Chinese Drama provides a single political map that identifies the provinces and main cities of China.3 Richmond et al.’s Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance more generously supplies not only a political map of India (marking states and major cities), but also some localized political maps, offered in association with particular theatre forms. But these maps invariably extend far beyond the domains of the theatre forms under discussion, leaving unclear the forms’ actual geographic extent;4 they also fail to distinguish which cities are relevant to the theatre forms. Banham’s History of Theatre in Africa, finally, fails to offer even a political map of that continent. But however many maps might be found in these books, what is not to be found (with the exception of those London theatre maps) are maps that explicitly illuminate the geography of theatre. I do not mean to suggest that the authors and editors of these various works need to have created their own maps, although historians often do. But the lack of theatrical maps that might be reprinted in these works is a strong indication that the field as a whole generates few maps; otherwise, the authors would likely have included them in the same way they include often-copious amounts of other visual materials. The main inference one can draw from this is that historians of theatre do not, as a rule, think geographically.5 Theatre historians pay great attention to the dimension of time, but humans (as well as all other physical entities) obviously exist in space as well, and so geography matters. Although high-school teachers sometimes reduce geography to tedious memorization, it is a vitally important field of study with a direct bearing on history. As the historian Fernand Braudel writes, “Geography seems to me, in its totality, to be the spatial study of society, or, to take my thoughts to their conclusion, the study of society through space” (On History 115). Space, in this view, no doubt exists even in the absence of society (and the people thereof), but it becomes especially meaningful when people begin to use it in some way. As the geographer Tim Cresswell succinctly puts it, “Places are locations with meaning” (113). We imbue places with uses, experiences, thoughts, and attitudes, and in doing so, they become part of human history. This certainly applies to that part of human history we call the arts. Regarding literary history, for example, Franco Moretti argues that “geography is not an inert container, is not a box where cultural history ‘happens,’ but an active force, that pervades the literary field and shapes it in depth” (Atlas 3). Similarly, theatre history plays out across space no less than through time, and that

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space is anything but an “inert container.” To understand theatre’s history through time, we need also to understand its history across space. The tools that theatre historians use to gain this understanding, however, are sorely lacking, and the near-exclusive use of political maps in the aforementioned works perfectly exemplifies the problem. Not only do such maps fail to identify the specific geography of theatre, they are also based on a pair of geographic units—continents and nation-states—that serve more to distort theatre’s geography than to illuminate it. Theatre historians follow the logic of such maps by placing great emphasis on continents and nations in their historical accounts, using them as their basic geographic units of study: Asian, European, and African theatre, for example, or Chinese, French, and Nigerian theatre. Yet our understanding of the number and configuration of continents is far less settled than is generally realized, while the mutability of nation-states—in terms not only of their borders but also of their very existence—limits their general utility as a geographic unit of study for theatre. The uncritical acceptance of continents and nation-states as units of study has compromised theatre historians’ ability to make geographic sense of world theatre. As long as they accept these units, their work will continue to overstate the importance of European theatre and obscure both the differences and the similarities among the world’s various theatres. What follows is an attempt to provide a different way to conceptualize theatre’s geography.6 I begin by examining the problems inherent in the geographic units of continents and nation-states (as well as of more amorphous understandings of nationhood), then argue that a geography of theatre can best be constructed using world regions (defined specifically in terms of their theatre) as the basic geographic unit of study. After examining what one regional scheme might look like, I turn to the scalability of regions, with smaller units being the subregion and the theatre center, and the larger unit being the megaregion. My argument is that the unit of the world region (and the smaller and larger units derived from it) can free theatre historians from their unfortunate dependence on continents and nation-states, and allow for a more accurate understanding of theatre as it has existed across space.

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Geographies of Theatre Continents In the contemporary United States, people generally speak of seven continents as if they were self-evident features of the physical world. Surprisingly, though, this understanding of the continents was not firmly established until the mid-twentieth century (Lewis and Wigen 21). Before then, many people counted six continents, sometimes combining North and South America into a single American continent, other times combining Europe and Asia into a unified Eurasia. If one were to accept both of these quite plausible combinations, the result would be a world with five continents. Some people further note that Africa is physically connected to Asia and therefore posit an Afro-Eurasian continent (Frank, ReORIENT 2), which would reduce the number of continents to four. Finally, all of this accepts that Australia is a very small continent (rather than a large island) and that Antarctica should even be considered a continent—a point that, perhaps surprisingly, has not always been the case (Lewis and Wigen 32). The uncertainty over how many continents there might be is more than a curiosity, for it underlines the dubiousness of using continents as a geographic unit for theatre studies. It is certainly possible, for example, to overlook the Suez connection and see Africa and Eurasia as separate landmasses. Similarly, one can ignore the Isthmus of Panama and imagine North and South America as separate. We can convince ourselves, in other words, that these “more or less discrete masses of land … are almost distinct” (Lewis and Wigen 35; italics in the original), but in doing so, we bend standard definitions of “continent” to their breaking point simply to have the continents conform to expectations. And even that expedient fails with the continental division that is most dear to many people, for no stretch of the imagination can allow the map’s viewer to see Europe and Asia as anything but a single unbroken landmass. Yet the separation of Europe from Asia is the most fundamental of continental ideas, and Europe is still perceived as “the archetypal continent” (Lewis and Wigen 36; italics in the original). The futility of drawing a “continental” boundary between Europe and Asia, however, is readily apparent. The most important geographic features of this boundary have been the connected waterways of the Bosporus, the Sea of Marmara, and the Dardanelles. But these waterways are easily traversed (indeed, the last

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of them is quite swimmable, as Lord Byron notes in a humorous poem) and have been settled on both sides by Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and Ottomans—by everyone, in fact, who has ever settled in the area. These waterways, however, are the most reasonable points of demarcation between Europe and Asia. To their north, the demarcation becomes farcical. It was first drawn along the stretches of various rivers (though by this logic, North America would be two continents, divided primarily by the Mississippi River). More recently it has been set at the Ural Mountains, a boundary that appealed to Peter the Great because it allotted the dominant part of Russia to Europe, while consigning the more easterly part “to the position of an alien Asian realm suitable for colonial rule and exploitation” (Lewis and Wigen, 27). The problem here is that even if one is willing to use a mountain range as a boundary (and by this logic, North America west of the Rockies would be a separate continent), the Urals are particularly unsuitable, as a gap of several hundred miles to their south has historically served as an unimpeded highway. The simple fact is that the Europe–Asia divide is nothing more than a particular conception of social geography being foist upon a physical landmass that in no way justifies it. But thanks to this division, Europe is seen as a continent in its own right, whereas India (set off from the rest of Asia by the world’s mightiest set of mountains) is a mere “subcontinent.” The immediate (and by no means coincidental) effect of splitting Eurasia into two continents has been to place Europe on an equal footing with the whole of Asia, a point I have discussed in Chap. 3. But as the geographers Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen point out, “Europe is in actuality but one of half a dozen Eurasian subcontinents, better contrasted to a region such as South Asia than to the rest of the landmass as a whole” (36). The point is not merely an academic one. According to the historian Marshall G.  S. Hodgson, when one treats the relationship between China and India as analogous to that of Italy and France, “a sane interregional history is out of the question” (289). This is the case for theatre as well. Chinese and Indian theatre forms are distinct in their origins, histories, and practices; even today there is remarkably little intercourse between them. Italy and France, on the other hand, share all their major theatre forms, while scripts, actors, and even whole productions have long passed back and forth over their historically unstable border. Placing European theatre on an equal footing with all of Asian theatre misrepresents the realities of geographic scale, grossly exaggerates the

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importance of European theatre, and denies the heterogeneity of theatre in the regions of Asia. There is one final problem with using one or another continental scheme as a basis for discussing the world’s theatre. However we might number or construe the continents, they are, by definition, land based. Although most people earn their livelihood on land, continuities of climate and culture are sometimes stronger across seas than across continents. Moreover, inter-societal contact (in particular, commercial contact) has often been sea-based, since water-borne transportation has historically been far less expensive than overland transport. Why then should landmasses be the exclusive geographic units of study? The Mediterranean basin is a far more coherent unit of physical geography than is Europe, as Braudel demonstrates in his magisterial study of what Europeans long called the “Middle Sea” (Mediterranean, passim). K.  N. Chaudhuri, meanwhile, examines the entire Indian Ocean basin as a geographic unit in the years from the rise of Islam to 1750. Finally, Joseph Roach in his provocative Cities of the Dead posits a “circum-Atlantic” region that includes portions of the Americas, Africa, and Europe.7 As we will see, the geography of theatre is also sometimes more comprehensible when understood not in terms of landmasses, but of sea-based regions. In sum, the continental approach to the geography of theatre is unworkable. The number and boundaries of the continents are uncertain; the division between Europe and Asia is an egregious problem; and the very use of landmasses as geographic units forecloses the possibility of sea-­ based units. As Lewis and Wigen conclude, “When it comes to mapping global patterns, whether of physical or human phenomena, continents are most often simply irrelevant” (33). This dismissal of continents is surely applicable to the geography of theatre as well. Nation-States (and Other “Nations”) Even more than continents, the maps to be found in the works discussed earlier portray geography in terms of nation-states, and even the most cursory review of theatre history studies would demonstrate the obvious reliance on such states as geographical units of study. As with the adaptation by theatre historians of the progressivist thesis, this reliance had its origins in general historiography. The key figure here is Leopold von Ranke, who might well be called the father of modern historiography. Writing in the nineteenth century (at a time of great nationalistic fervor

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among his fellow Germans) Ranke saw nation-states as “spiritual entities” having (in the paraphrase of Ernst Breisach) “the purpose of civilizing mankind” and therefore being “the central concern of the historian” (234). On a less exalted plane, William H. McNeill points out that the rise of nation-based historiography was occasioned not only by nationalism, but also by “the fact that governments kept records and began to make them accessible to scholars”; as a result, “the vaunted scientific criticism of sources … developed very largely inside governmental archives” (72). This access left an unmistakable imprint on the field of history, and a focus on nation-states became de rigueur even when working outside the archives. Sebastian Conrad writes that modern social sciences and humanities have two “birth defects” that “hinder our ability to achieve a systematic grasp of process that span the world” (3). One of these will already be familiar, having been discussed in earlier chapters: The Eurocentrism that takes Europe as a global model, “imposing categories particular to Europe on everybody else’s past” (4). The other “birth defect” is a “methodological nationalism” that presupposes the nation-state “as the fundamental unit of investigation” (3). Theatre history has also been subject to this “defect.” As Marvin Carlson points out, “When Max Hermann in Germany and scholars with similar concerns began developing the historical analysis of theatre [in the late nineteenth century] the European nation-state was the major form of socio/cultural organization with which they were familiar, dominant in Europe and widely and usually arbitrarily imposed throughout the rest of the globe by the European colonial powers” (“Reflections” 149). However important the nation-state might be to recent political and diplomatic history, it is not at all well-suited as a geographic unit for world theatre history. The problems are legion, with the most obvious being that nation-states, as a type of political entity, did not even exist for much of history. Such is patently the case for sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, and the islands in the South Pacific, up until Europeans arrived in each area and began drawing boundaries to mark off their conquests and plot out their colonies. It makes little sense, for example, to speak of “Nigerian theatre” for the millennia before the British arrived and mapped a territory that bore no relationship to the societies that had long existed in that area. No less relevant, however, is the fact that even across Eurasia, the nation-­ state is but one kind of political entity; there have also been empires, for example, often with quite far-flung territories. Does the theatre of those territories “belong to” their empires, or to some other geographic unit?

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Consider Rabindranath Tagore, one of India’s greatest playwrights, who never lived in a nation-state called India, but spent his whole life as a subject of the British Empire. Shall we then refer to him as British? Even where nation-states have existed, the mutability of their borders must be recognized. As S. E. Wilmer notes, with considerable understatement, “What constitutes the geographical borders of the nation often poses a problem for the theatre historian.” He suggests that one approach to the problem is to “use today’s borders retrospectively”; another is to use the borders that existed in whatever period happens to be under examination (17). But consider Adam Mickiewicz, an important figure in the Romantic movement. Mickiewicz was born and raised in Vilna (sometimes Wilno, now Vilnius), which is now the capital of Lithuania. At his birth in 1798, the city (having long been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) belonged to the Russian Empire, but Mickiewicz actually spent most his adult life as an exile in Paris. And when, long after his death, his masterpiece Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve) received its first full production in Kraków (in 1901), that city belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, though it is now in Poland. Neither of the options that Wilmer suggests (current borders or borders at the time) is particularly helpful in making sense of all this, and the contradictions between them (and the national identities they imply) are irreconcilable. And yet regardless of the nation-state (or empire) in which his hometown has existed—regardless, even, of the fact that he never lived in a nation-state called “Poland”— Mickiewicz is often said to be Poland’s greatest playwright. As the cases of Tagore and Mickiewicz suggest, nation-states are sometimes quite useless for making sense of theatre history. But on what grounds are these authors said to belong to Indian theatre and Polish theatre, respectively? One possible answer is ethnicity. The philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder perceived his native eighteenth-century Germany to be a nation, though at the time the land we now think of as “Germany” was composed of over two hundred separate territorial units. In light of this political fragmentation, Herder postulated that a nation is a people (a volk): an organic whole that unites diverse individuals through a common language, shared institutions, and arts (Breisach 222). Defining nations in terms of ethnicity, however, is often of limited help. Perhaps one might speak of “tribes” in sub-Saharan Africa and among American Indians as “nations,” but however ethnically distinct they might be from their neighbors, such “nations” lack clearly defined geographic boundaries. More broadly, using ethnicity to define nations is problematic

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because people move from place to place, often forming familial bonds across ethnicities. Consider the actress of Slovenian-German descent who appeared (during World War One) in German-language theatres in territory that is now in Poland. Barbara Pušić notes that this actress represents “a kind of terra incognita equally for Slovenian, German, and Polish theatre researchers” (71; the actress is not named). Although this actress might present an extreme case, the problem she presents is real, especially when we consider that movement between lands not only takes place on an individual basis but can also involve larger populations. I have already noted the performance of jingju among diasporic Chinese communities. When a theatrical event such as this is offered in, say, Vancouver, it might be “ethnically” Chinese, but many of its performers and audience will be Canadian citizens, and it is obviously taking place in the nation-state of Canada: so is the event part of “Chinese” theatre history? Defining nationhood in terms of ethnicity means that it loses any meaning as a geographic unit—which is, to state the obvious, what we are seeking here. When Herder defined a nation as a people, he rhetorically asked: “Has a nation anything more precious than the language of its fathers? In it dwell its entire world of tradition, history, religion, principles of existence; its whole heart and soul” (quoted in Breisach 222). This offers another way to understand nationhood: people who share a common language. In their recent history of German theatre, Mark Hamburger and Simon Williams have taken up this understanding, explicitly defining German theatre in terms of “all of German-speaking Europe and the German-­ language theatre that was performed in this large area” (6), thereby including the theatre of multiple current nation-states. Perhaps this focus on language alone works for German theatre, but its lack of general utility becomes obvious when one contemplates the prospect of identifying most theatre in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (as well as a fair amount of African and Indian theatre) as English theatre. A further problem with using language to define nationhood is that in many places, people speaking different “national” languages might live quite literally as neighbors. Belgium, for example, sits at the interface of Germanic and Romantic cultures, with its population split primarily into a pair of ethno-linguistic communities. Frank Peters writes of a “cultural regime of apartheid,” in which each community shows an “ignorance of and consequent lack of understanding for the cultural production” of the other. Despite Belgium being a small country, there is a rough geographic division between its linguistic communities. But both communities are

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present in Brussels, and the separation exists even there, despite calls for mauerschauen—“over-the-wall observation of the other region” (89). Gautam Dasgupta notes that when a theatre festival in Brussels was held in 1980, “the festival was sharply divided into two [linguistic] halves”; tellingly, the press contingent (of which he was one) was invited to the plays of only one half (126). And there is an additional problem. Theatre sometimes uses two or more languages concurrently, especially for audiences that might themselves be multi-lingual. El Teatro Campesino, for example, a Chicano theatre troupe based in San Juan Bautista, California, performs in a mixture of Spanish and English.8 This mixing of languages is actually fairly common, especially in folk theatre forms popular in bilingual border areas (Bogatyrev 39–40). And I might further point to the important instance of Sanskrit theatre, in which Sanskrit is spoken by kings and Brahmins, while other characters generally speak one or another of a variety of local languages and dialects that are collectively referred to as Prakrits (van Buitenen 10–12).9 Finally, I need add that defining nationhood in terms of language has the same effect as defining it in terms of ethnicity: the nation loses meaning as a geographic unit—which, again, is what we are looking for. All too often, references to “national” theatres end up slipping easily between the theatre of a nation-state, that of an ethnicity, and that of a language. The result of this equivocation can only be confusion. I will note one last problem with nationhood (however it might be construed) as a geographic unit: forms of theatre sometimes transcend any sort of national boundaries. European opera began in early seventeenth-­century Italy (or rather, in territory that is now in the nationstate of Italy), performed in Italian for audiences that presumably would have identified themselves as ethnic Italians. Within a hundred years, though, Italian theatre artists had brought the form to France, where not only were Italian operas performed, but French ones began to be created. A similar internationalization took place in Germany (or rather, in territory that is now in the nation-states of Germany and Austria), where the popularity of Italian- and French-language operas (especially among the elite) stimulated the development of German-language operas. I might also mention the subsequent development of opera in Russia (brought about at first by the importation of artists from Western Europe), but my point should already be clear. One can go to any opera-house in Milan, Paris, Berlin, or St. Petersburg—as well as in many other cities—and hear operas from Italy, France, Germany, and Russia, each sung in its “native”

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language. When theatre so easily transcends political, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries, just how useful can any such boundaries be for understanding theatre history? I should make clear that I do not take the concepts of nation-states, ethnic nations, and linguistic nations to be without value. Political units, ethnicities, and languages are all quite real, and as we will see in Chap. 6, they are all relevant to theatre studies; they are also useful (and sometimes inescapable) markers. But the point is that the concept of the “nation,” in any its constructions, is unsatisfactory as the basis for a geography of theatre.

Theatre Regions The problems inherent in understanding the geography of theatre in terms of continents and nation-states might leave one tempted to give up on theatre’s global geography. Postmodernism’s aversion to historical metanarratives, discussed in Chap. 1, applies no less to what has been called “metageography,” which Lewis and Wigen define as “the set of spatial structures through which people order their knowledge of the world” (ix). Postmodern geography emphasizes “fluidity, contingency, movement, and multiplicity” and seeks to “break down conventional, static, and objectified regional schemes.” Most understandably, it attacks “the myth of continents, the myth of the nation-state, and the imprisoning thesis of European priority” (15). All this is well and good, but the broader postmodernist suggestion that all metageographic schemes are intrinsically flawed manages to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The geographer Tim Cresswell notes that “in its opposition to metanarratives, foundations, and totalizing theory, postmodernism puts the accent on difference,” thereby emphasizing the irreducible “particularity and uniqueness” of each locale (182). But one need not deny the particular and the unique to also recognize that physical geography and human sociality have conspired to give at least some shape to social  geography. As Lewis and Wigen rightly contend, we should not “succumb to the postmodern mood and declare the end of metageography altogether…. If one is to think seriously about the world, one must have recourse to a spatial vocabulary. In the absence of better alternatives, exhausted metageographical concepts will creep back into use, even in acutely critical postmodern texts” (205). This is analogous to the way that the Standard Western Approach creeps back into the historiographic void when it is not actively replaced by a

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different approach to theatre history. Metageography might be challenging, but the need to make sense of theatre’s geography is inescapable. World Regions Fortunately, an alternative to continents, nations, and postmodernism’s insistent localism can be found in the concept of world regions (which, for the sake of simplicity, I will usually refer to as regions). Marshall G. S. Hodgson defines these regions as geographic areas in which there are “historical interrelations and interactions, closely-knit enough so that many questions can be dealt with in its terms without spreading out to a still wider region.” Regions are understood to often include “strongly contrasting cultures in juxtaposition.” Thus, in “a hodge-podge like the Far South East [i.e., Southeast Asia] … Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and Confucians, and finally even Christians, lived out their history so much in each in others’ hair that however different their cultural patterns they formed a common region” (278–79). Lewis and Wigen, meanwhile, refer world regions as “more or less boundable areas united by broad social and cultural features” (13). It will not be satisfactory, however, simply to accept some existing scheme of world regions, even the fine one developed by Lewis and Wigen, for as they recognize as one of their “principles of critical metageography,” regional schemes must be based on “contextual specificity”; that is, “no geographic scheme can legitimately be developed as an all-purpose framework” (199). For our purposes, of course, the primary context is theatre. Just as theatre’s basic unit of study needed to be based on theatre itself, so too does the understanding of theatre’s geography—as will that of theatre’s periodicity, a point I will develop in Chap. 8. For the geographic scheme of theatre regions, we must identify areas where various theatre forms have meaningful “interrelations and interactions” with regard to dramatic texts, theatrical practices, or simply shared artists or audiences. We are looking, in other words, for areas that show homologies among theatre forms. This is not to say that a given form in a region need be fully homologous with all the region’s other forms. But if theatre form A has significant homologies with form B, which itself has them with form C, and so on, we can take these forms as belonging to a regional theatre complex: a notably dense web of theatre forms that are (in Hodgson’s colloquial term) “in each others’ hair” and that presents the “more or less boundable areas” to which Lewis and Wigen refer.

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The concept of world regions, I must note, has a rather mixed history. All too often, regions have been “distorted by the reification of the nation-­ state” (Lewis and Wigen 13), as is the case, for example, when the entire six-thousand mile expanse of Russia is construed as part of Europe. Another problem is that regions have sometimes been reified as “natural or suprahistorical entities” that are veritable universes of their own (Lewis and Wigen 14). But as already noted in regard to Europe, there is nothing “natural or suprahistorical” about it. What we now think of as geographic Europe was beyond anyone’s imaginings when Greece first called itself “European” in contradistinction to the “Asia” it confronted in the Persian Wars. Yet another problem is the tendency to overlook the diversity within regions, flattening each one out by giving it a single set of defining characteristics (Lewis and Wigen 183–85). But as we have seen with Hodgson as well as Lewis and Wigen, diversity is actually one of the hallmarks of most world regions.10 In light of this mixed history, I must offer a few caveats about world theatre regions. First, the boundaries I identify for the theatre regions sometimes match up to those of nation-states, but when they do, it is either on the basis of theatre itself, or because the details of theatre in border areas are difficult to ascertain, leaving me to default to the political boundary. Virtually all of my boundaries must be considered approximations, and the regions themselves understood (as Lewis and Wigen write) as “approximate intellectual constructs” that reflect, if only imperfectly, real “cultural and historical relationships” and “real patterns” in the world (14). Specialists might certainly want to adjust the regional boundaries where appropriate. Second, while each theatre region can be studied on its own terms, no region stands alone. There are often homologies that extend beyond specific regions (particularly in the past two hundred years), and there are always analogies (whether convergent or coincidental) that bind together the larger, looser web of world theatre. These interregional homologies and analogies do not obviate the concept of theatre regions, though, because each region maintains them in its own way. Undoubtedly, though, a map of regions in, say, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would look quite different from my map of regions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Theatre regions not only are interconnected, but change over time, a point rightly emphasized by Stephen H. Rapp, Jr., in his critical but appreciative analysis of Lewis and Wigen’s map of world regions (169–72).

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Third, the diversity within each theatre region must not be flattened out. No region can be said to have a single “archetypical” theatre form that defines it: India is no more reducible to Sanskrit theatre than Europe is to spoken theatre. Indeed, the acceptance of diversity in the concept of theatre regions points to a particular advantage of the concept compared to the various kinds of nationhood. As I noted earlier, people move from place to place; when they do, they might take familiar theatre forms with them. This does not present a challenge to the region as a geographical unit, because there is no claim that theatre forms are the exclusive property of one or another region, or that a region’s forms need to have historically arisen in that region.11 This is especially relevant regarding forms brought by immigrants, because the immigrants’ theatre might eventually start attracting audiences from outside their community, or the immigrants might start attending other theatres, or the theatre form itself might be adjusted in one way or another to be more fully integrated into the region’s theatre complex. This seems to have been the case, for example, with the theatre introduced into South Africa by Indians brought as indentured laborers by the British in the 1860s. Though information is scarce, it seems that up until the 1950s, Tamil- and Hindi-speaking enclaves preserved Indian “theatre practices”; but more recently, these have been replaced a more syncretic “Indic” theatre (T. Hansen 258). There is, however, the extreme case of large numbers of people moving to a “new” land, bringing their theatre with them. These people (more likely considered settlers than immigrants) might well have very limited interactions with the existing population (and the established theatres) of their new lands. As I have noted, theatre regions are neither natural nor ahistorical, and so when the population of a particular place is transformed, and the theatre that had previously been in that place is itself transformed, suppressed, or expelled, it is necessary to think in terms a new theatre region being established, even as an older one becomes delimited or destroyed. Such was the case, for example, in the wake of European colonialism in the Americas and Australasia. In constructing a regional scheme for world theatre, it is also necessary to note the last of Lewis and Wigen’s “principles of critical metageography”: The challenge of “devising a creative cartographic vision capable of effectively grasping unconventional” kinds of regions (200; italics in the original). Two such innovations are called for in mapping world theatre regions. First, the borders of theatre regions are often quite fuzzy. Where two (or more) regions are contiguous, sometimes the theatre forms

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familiar to each can be found in performance virtually cheek by jowl; sometimes they might exert a mutual influence and generate distinctive subforms that are found only near the border. For this reason, I suggest that along the borders of theatre regions it is necessary to recognize border zones, which might in some cases run hundreds of miles deep, especially where there has been a large amount of cross-border immigration. Second, areas that might otherwise be thought of as particularly expansive border zones might be home not only to the aforementioned intermixing of forms from the regions around them, but also to many fully developed theatre forms of their own. I will refer to such areas a border regions. Theatre Regions of the World We can now turn to Fig. 5.1, which presents a regional scheme for world theatre, circa the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is, I need scarcely note, a highly tentative effort, and is certainly open to modification by specialists in one or another region. The most important caveat that Lewis and Wigen offer in regard to their own map of the world’s regions can be applied here as well: it is at best “a rough approximation, a convenient but crude device for making sense of particular [geographical]  patterns of human life” (188)—in this case, the geographical patterns of theatre.

Fig. 5.1  Theatre regions of the world, circa nineteenth and twentieth centuries

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The map in Fig. 5.1 marks out seventeen world regions for theatre, as enumerated in the map’s legend: the solid lines indicate the regions’ borders (which should generally be considered as border zones rather than precise boundaries); the dotted lines indicate the boundaries of the border regions. Three regions, I need note immediately, are based on limited evidence and ample speculation: Indigenous South America (Region 3), Central Asia (Region 9), and Melanesia (Region 16). There is little more to say than that I think these are discrete regions, owing to the history of each, but there is scant information about their theatres, so confidence even in their existence awaits the attention of specialists. The most well-known of the other world regions should be relatively uncontroversial. South Asia (Region 11) is a good place to start for a quick look at them, particularly because it (or rather, India, which makes up the largest part of the region) presents a significant problem to nation-based geography. As Aparna Dharwadker argues: “In a larger comparative perspective, India … does not fit into the dominant Western schema that S. E. Wilmer … outlines for constructing national theatre histories on the basis of geography, language, ethnicity, or aesthetics.” Territorial boundaries have constantly shifted, and “with twenty-two official languages recognized in the national constitution, no common or unifying language can counterbalance this territorial instability.” In fact, “each major state within the Indian union is … comparable to a mid-sized European nation-­ state” both in size and individual identity (186). But when we take South Asia as a region, just as we take all of Europe as a single region, the criticism evaporates, because there is no expectation that a region will have consistent boundaries through time, nor that it will have a single (or even a dominant) language or ethnicity. Regions are most often “hodge-­ podges” (to return to Hodgson’s term) of one sort or another. Despite its great variety of languages, ethnicities and—most importantly for us—theatre forms, South Asia hangs together as a region because of the numerous homologies that connect the forms. Many of them, for example, share the trait of drawing narratives from the great Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. No less significantly, many show “a distinct carry-over of the structures and conventions of Sanskrit theatre,” such as the inclusion of ritual preliminaries to the performance, and/or the presence of two distinctive types of character: the sutradhara (on-­ stage manager or director) and the vidushaka (a jester character) (Vatsyayan 13). Lest one think that Indian theatre is entirely indebted to Sanskrit theatre, however, I should note that many forms also have homologies

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with other theatres. Kapila Vatsyayan writes that kutiyattam, perhaps the earliest of the many forms still extant in South Asia, is very much a syncretic form of theatre that drew “faithfully” from the ancient form, while having “unmistaken [sic] links with and elements from [local] traditions which have little or nothing to do with the Sanskrit theatre” (16). No less deeply syncretic are certain theatre forms to be found in the northern part of region. Nautanki, for one, draws not only on the Indian epics for its narratives, but on Arabic and Persian tales and (in some cases) performance practices as well (Swann 258). Forms such as this remind us of the centuries of Islamic control and settlement; they justify identifying a significant South Asian subregion that extends from Pakistan  through northern India to Bangladesh. I must also mention the nineteenth-­century introduction of European spoken theatre. By the last quarter of that century it was being written and performed by Indians for Indians, and its plays frequently dealt with issues of immediate concern to Indians (Richmond, “Characteristics” 338, 402). No less importantly, it soon began to be influenced by indigenous theatre forms, leading to what amounted to a syncretic theatre combining European and Indian traits (Wetmore Jr. et al. 181, 182). The syncretism continued to develop and, after India gained its independence in 1947, grew into a major movement known as “the theatre of roots,” in which, for example, a script-based play might use the spoken-theatre conventions of linear narrative, proscenium stage, and invisible fourth wall, while weaving in “structures, aesthetics and techniques” from traditional Indian forms (Wetmore Jr. et al. 195, 208). At least some of the other regions require relatively little comment. While the concept of Europe (Region 5) as a continent is, as I have argued, nonsensical, it is very plausible as a theatre region with a complex of forms (e.g., spoken theatre, opera, and ballet, among others) that are virtually pan-European. The one surprising feature of this region might be its eastern boundary, which I set just beyond St. Petersburg and Moscow, separating the European region from the North Asian one (to which I will return shortly). Another region that is easy to define on the basis of its well-established complex is East Asia (Region 11), consisting of Korea and most of China.12 Contrary to non-theatrical regional schemes, however, I see Japan as being its own theatre region (Region 13). Despite intermittent periods of extensive trade between Japan and the mainland, as well as the many important cultural elements that have been imported from China, Japan has clearly gone its separate way in theatre. Over the past seven centuries, it has developed its own highly distinctive theatre

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complex, made up of thoroughly indigenous forms such as nō, kabuki, and bunraku; Chinese theatre has scarcely affected Japan through these centuries. Japanese theatre had a more significant impact on China, especially with shingeki helping to stimulate huaju around the start of the twentieth century (Dolby 23); but somewhat ironically, both of these forms began as domesticated versions of European spoken theatre, leading me to see Japan and East Asia as still being separate regions. This complex set of influences, however, bears out the importance of not seeing any region as a self-contained entity. It should also not be controversial to divide Africa along the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. To the north is a region that extends across North Africa and well into Southwest Asia (Region 6: Southwest Asia– North Africa). Iran might seem to sit somewhat uncomfortably in this region, and it is certainly a distinct subregion, but in terms of theatre it is reasonably well-connected. On the one hand, its native taʻziyeh is performed at least as far west as the Shia communities in Lebanon; on the other hand, its most well-known puppet theatre, pahlavan kachel (literally, “bald wrestler”) resembles the karagöz of the Ottoman Turks, particularly in regard to the characteristics of its lead character (Floor 67–70). If one is saddled with a continental geography, this sort of region is impossible, but it is virtually inescapable when one considers social realities and the theatres that arise from them. Lewis and Wigen write, “While the Orient of European imagination is a fictitious entity, an area like Southwest Asia and North Africa … is in significant respects a real region, the home of a historically constituted civilization. Like all regions, it is fuzzy and ill-­ defined. Nor is it a totalizable entity, imbued with some sort of Platonic essence. Yet it remains an indispensable unit of historical and cultural analysis” (102–03). This applies to the region’s theatre as well. To the south of the Saharan boundary lies the sub-Saharan African Region (Region 7). A fair amount of information is available regarding current theatre forms in this region (especially in West Africa), but we know little about the deeper history of its theatre. Studies of sub-Saharan theatre are most often organized on the basis of the languages or national borders imposed by European colonists.13 Although this is understandable from a research perspective, it does not accurately reflect indigenous theatre. As I will argue in the next section, there might well be significant subregions of sub-Saharan theatre that have nothing to do with European-­ imposed languages or borders. Nonetheless, most scholars suggest that

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sub-Saharan Africa is a single theatrical region, with its complex of theatre forms being characterized by “certain common features” such as a “non-­ literary, improvisatory character,” a particular set of “thematic preoccupations,” and a “‘variety show’ format” (Conteh-Morgan 11–14). It seems best, at least provisionally, to follow this consensus.14 More controversial, perhaps, is my treatment of Southeast Asia, which I divide into three regions. Most geographers (including Lewis and Wigen) see Southeast Asia as a single highly complex region; but however well this might work for general history, it does not seem satisfactory in terms of theatre. What I call Insular Southeast Asia (Region 15) includes the various islands of Malaysia and Indonesia, which share a range of closely related wayang forms. These forms (most often using shadow or rod puppets, but sometimes having live actors who emulate puppet performance) are at home throughout the Insular Southeast (Ghulam-Sarwar 276). Mainland Southeast Asia (Region 12), on the other hand, seems better understood as a prominent border region; it includes what are now Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, and the Malay Peninsula. This region’s theatre is notable for the innumerable homologies it shows with the theatres of South Asia, East Asia, and Insular Southeast Asia, even as the forms of the region have developed their own distinct identities. The third region in the vicinity, the Philippines (Region 14) stands apart because its theatre forms have few if any homologies with those of Insular Southeast Asia. Instead, many of the Philippines’s most important forms were transferred from Europe hundreds of years ago and have since been fully domesticated. The result is a region that includes a range of forms (including sarsuela and the aforementioned komedya [moro-moro]) that are otherwise unknown in Southeast Asia. It remains to discuss the theatre regions that developed in other lands that Europeans began colonizing in the sixteenth century. The theatre in these now-former settler colonies has always been strongly influenced by that of Europe, but it would be bizarre to refer to, say, Australian theatre as European theatre, as if Australia were not many thousands of miles distant from Europe. As a way of avoiding this absurdity, it is customary to refer to these places (or at least some of them) as belonging to the “West,” but the concept of a unified West has its own serious problems, as we saw in Chap. 3. The historian Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., has introduced the useful term “Neo-Europes” for lands subjected to extensive European settlement. Geographically, the Neo-Europes are scattered around the world, but they all have climates similar enough to Europe’s to have allowed for the

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transfer of the plants and animals on which Europeans have historically depended. Further, the Europeans who settled in these lands eventually subordinated the indigenous populations and largely succeeded in imposed their culture (6, 7). Crosby identifies Australia, New Zealand, North America, and much of South America as Neo-Europes—but because in South America there remains an area (primarily in the vast Amazon basin) with relatively undisturbed indigenous populations, I have designated that area as a separate region, as noted earlier. I take Australia and New Zealand together as a single region (Region 17: Australasia), and count it with North America (Region 1) and South and Central America (Region 4) as three of the world’s Neo-European regions. There is no presumption in any of this that the theatres of the various Neo-Europes are mere extensions of European theatre. Each has its unique theatrical history; but at the same time, those histories continue to be closely related to that of Europe. The fourth Neo-European region, North Asia (Region 8) requires a bit more explanation. As I noted earlier, theatre in the western portion of Russia is obviously European: one thinks of Gogol, Chekhov, Stanislavsky, Mussorgsky (for his operas), and the Imperial Ballet. Even Russian folk theatre (in the country’s west) often fits European patterns (Warner, passim). On the other hand, the more lightly populated expanses to the east began to be colonized only in the seventeenth century, with Russia rooting a European-oriented culture in newly formed towns and cities. Crosby refers to Siberia as a “Neo-Europe manqué,” mostly because it does not produce the “colossal surpluses of food” typical of the other Neo-Europes (36). For the purposes of theatre history, however, it is reasonable to speak of it as a Neo-Europe because its theatre has become dominated by imported European models and remains aligned with European theatre. Likewise, it seems best to include the former Soviet lands east of the Caspian Sea (e.g., Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) in this same region, since, as Natasha Rapoport observes in regard to one of them, “The intensive process of cultural colonization … led to the total Europeanization and Russification of Kazakh life in many spheres of activity, especially in literature and the performing arts” (252). In the centuries before Russification, these lands were presumably part of the Central Asian theatre region, and there might still be elements of Central Asian theatre to be found in them; if so, perhaps they constitute something of an extensive border zone. The remaining region indicated on my map is the African–American border region (Region 2). Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, some twelve million enslaved Africans were transported by Europeans

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to the Americas (Manning104). The vast majority went to the Caribbean islands and Brazil, but significant numbers were sent to other parts of South and Central America and to  the southern United States.15 Lewis and Wigen designate these lands as a region unto themselves, which they call “African America” (182). I think it best to view this as a border region in which African, European, and North and South American theatrical traditions have deeply mixed, with the African presence especially prevalent in regard to traits of music and dance (Weiss et al. 72). There is one last theatre region I would like to note—a region that no longer exists but is the earliest identifiable region in the world. I refer to the Ancient Mediterranean, whose existence is worth mentioning if only to further emphasize the point that theatre regions are not eternal. The origins of this region are in the first performances of Greek tragedy, circa 500 bce, and the region developed rather quickly from its Athenian starting point. As Oliver Taplin writes: “I hope that it can now be taken as a well-grounded hypothesis that over the period 450 to 300 BC tragedies— predominantly though not necessarily exclusively Athenian tragedies— were being performed widely and regularly throughout the scattered Greek world” (236). The Hellenistic period, brought on by the conquests of Alexander (and conventionally dated from his death in 323 bce), extended the theatre region far beyond its previous boundaries. As Sarah Miles observes, the growing number of areas that can be called Hellenistic “share common features, including Greek language, a common city model, and a wide-ranging engagement with Greek drama.” To satisfy this engagement, the period saw the rise of professionalized touring troupes as well as an increase in theatre construction (46, 47). Greek theatre first reached Rome in the third century bce, and eventually became domesticated there, most notably by Terence and Plautus, who based their Latin plays on Greek New Comedies. Other Roman playwrights continued the domestication, developing homologous theatre forms (such as fabula togata) that set their plays in Italy and portrayed Italian characters (P.  Brown 72). These literary forms of theatre largely gave way to a pair of coarser forms that also had homologies with, but were quite distinct from, the foundational Greek forms. While tragedies continued to be mounted in Greece itself, mime and pantomime dominated elsewhere in the expanding territory of Rome, first in the Republic, then the Empire. According to Richard C. Beacham, “With the spread of Roman authority that quickened urbanization and the wealth and culture generated by prosperity and security, provincial citizens now became

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enthusiastic supporters of the ethos and ideals of Roman government and customs” (126). One of the most obvious manifestations of provincial enthusiasm was theatre: “The emphasis placed on the construction of permanent new theatres in Rome and throughout the empire reflected the importance that the Hellenistic world had long placed on theatre, thus marking a cultural coming of age for Roman society” (139). The map in Fig. 5.2 gives a sense of the ancient Mediterranean region by indicating the distribution of theatres around the Empire; the larger the circle, the greater the number of theatres in that area. Some of the theatres were originally of Greek construction, others date from Hellenistic times, but most were constructed (or reconstructed) by the Romans.16 As can be seen, the region encompassed the entire Mediterranean basin, but was not “European” in the sense that the term is currently used, in that it almost entirely excluded anything east of the Rhine and north of the Danube, and was centered primarily on the three shores of the Mediterranean. Germany and Britain had a combined twenty theatres— but this was scarcely more than the combined total for the islands of Crete and Cyprus, and it was less than a quarter of the total to be found in North Africa (81 theatres). Gaul and Spain, meanwhile, had more significant

Fig. 5.2  Distribution of Greek and Roman theatres. (Proportional circle map, based on data and maps from Frank Sear. Location names are those used by Sear)

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numbers of theatres (115 and 23, respectively) but these were easily surpassed by Asia Minor (with 150 theatres) and the Levant (with 58).17 In short, this was a sea-based region, not a “European” continental one. It would last until roughly 500 ce, when it was done in by a combination of imperial collapse (in the Western Empire) and Christian disapproval (in the continuing Eastern Empire). The alien nature of this ancient theatre region becomes perfectly apparent when one considers the theatre that emerged in medieval Europe almost half a millennium after the ancient region had collapsed. Whatever possible debt Europe’s itinerant performers (sometimes called “jongleurs”) might have owed to the mimes of the late Roman empire, there is no evidence they saw themselves as the heirs of Rome and Greece; instead, their variety-like performances (which included comic sketches) were of a sort that could be found as far afield as ancient China (Dolby 2–6). The dramatic literature of Greece was lost, and that of Rome was valued primarily as a model of classical Latin. The plays of Terence undoubtedly influenced Hrotsvitha, the playwriting canoness in the tenth-­ century Gandersheim Abbey, but they were no more relevant than those of Aeschylus to either the religious or secular forms of theatre that would emerge in medieval Europe. Even the numerous Greco-Roman theatres that still dotted portions of Western Europe were ignored by the emerging European forms and used primarily as quarries (Newbigin 10). Instead, European theatre was performed in or around churches, in the halls of the elite, in the streets of the towns, or in far-flung villages. The emergence of theatre in medieval Europe, in brief, had precious little to do with ancient theatre, and marked the creation of a new and different theatre region. Hundreds of years later, however, European scholars would begin taking a fresh look at the relatively few ancient texts at their disposal, and in 1453 the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks would send many Greek scholars scurrying westward, carrying with them their knowledge of the ancient world. The effect on European theatre would be transformative. Within a hundred years commedia erudite and commedia dell’arte would pave the way for the emergence of European spoken theatre, while misguided efforts to recreate Greek tragedy would eventually yield the emergence of opera. This sort of interregional influence is not uncommon (think, for example, of European theatre’s influence on the theatres of Africa and Japan, which I will look into in Chap. 8), but it stands out because it occurred not only across space (as is typically the case), but across the temporal span of many centuries.

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Scaling Down and Up from the Region Although the concept of world regions provides a basic geographical unit, it is certainly not the only meaningful such unit for the study of theatre history. As was the case with the basic unit of the theatre form, geographical units on more local and more expansive scales are also important to recognize. As Sebastian Conrad writes, “The issue of [geographic] scales is certainly not an exclusive preserve of global history; but it is one of the assets of the approach that it very explicitly raises the issue of interlocking [temporal] scales on the one hand, and of appropriate spatial perspectives on the other, and forces historians to be reflective about their choices.” In the “interplay of different measures of reality … different dimensions of the past become visible,” raising new questions and making possible new answers (136, 137). Scaling Down: Subregions and Theatre Centers When we scale down from the theatre region, the two most relevant units are subregions and theatre centers. The basic idea of subregions should be self-evident. If, as we have seen Hodgson suggest, regions are geographic areas in which there are “historical interrelations and interactions, closely-­ knit enough so that many questions can be dealt with in its terms without spreading out to a still wider region” (278), then subregions are areas within them in which “interrelations and interactions” are even more closely knit. Just as one can speak of regional theatre complexes, one can also speak of subregional complexes, in which the interrelations and interactions between theatre forms are more intense than on the regional scale. It is plausible to argue that there are, in fact, multiple levels of subregions within any given region, becoming progressively more localized and closely knit as one narrows the geographic focus. This is obviously all rather inexact, but it offers a way of referring to the differences that exist within regions. In the East Asian region, for example, the most obvious division is between the theatre of China and that of Korea. But the theatre of China itself (even if one limits discussion to the area of Han settlement) is certainly not homogenous. As I noted in Chap. 4, when jingju was transferred to Shanghai in 1867, a distinct subform quickly developed there (Li R. 42–43). This was not by chance, for as it happens, there is a longstanding north-south division in Chinese theatre, with the line lying part-way between Beijing and Shanghai. This theatrical divide goes back at least as

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far as China’s two earliest forms of literary theatre, Yuan zaju and nanxi, which emerged in the north and south, respectively. As one scholar from the Ming Dynasty generalized: “The north stresses vigour, urgency, boldness and vivacity, whereas the south stresses tranquility, insubstantiality, gentle softness, and ethereal remoteness” (quoted in Dolby 74). But an even more localized level of subregionality is at least as important in Chinese theatre history, and it is this level that is referred to when one reads of the more than 330 different kinds of “regional” theatre forms in China (Leiter 1.110). These forms are most often associated with one or another specific province (e.g. chuanju, also known as Sichuan opera). Despite the fact that the theatre forms are not necessarily limited by provincial boundaries (chuanju can be found not only in Sichuan Province, but also in parts of neighboring Yunan and Guizhou) (Leiter 1.121), the provinces offer a convenient shorthand for China’s most often discussed subregions. The matter of subregions is particularly interesting for sub-Saharan Africa, where the possibility of indigenous theatrical subregions has been under-explored. I noted earlier my willingness (at least provisionally) to see sub-Saharan Africa as a single region, but this region might well be made up of distinct subregions; the problem is how to identify them. The conventional habit of relying on European-imposed national or linguistic boundaries has likely obscured any indigenous subregions. But if significant similarities are present in, and limited to, the theatres of a geographically specific area, we might well be looking at homologies that would justify speaking of specific subregions. Osita Okagbue provides a possible clue to sub-Saharan Africa’s subregions when he lists its traditions of masquerade theatre (14)—to which can be added references to masquerade theatre given in other sources.18 The resulting list is undoubtedly incomplete, but it offers a starting point. As background, let me note that African masquerade forms have masked-­ and-­costumed performers who embody the entrance of supernatural spirits into the human world. As Banham et al. write in a helpful overview, “There are also many wild and imaginary animals, and while the sacred masquerades arouse fear and awe in the spectator, human and animal masquerades often contain a high degree of entertainment, comedy and informality and are valued for their play qualities.” Audiences take a critical view of the individual performances, which are “judged and appreciated” both for “the appropriateness of the movements to a character and for the degree of skill” in the performance (Banham et al. 4–5). Some of this takes us to the boundaries of dramatic theatre as discussed in the Introduction,

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but it does not go decisively beyond them, especially since I do not posit an opposition between theatre and ritual. Each of the masquerade traditions mentioned by Okagbue and the other sources should probably be considered a distinct form, shaped by and for the people who host them, but the similarities among them are such that it is plausible to view them, together, as a family of homologically related forms. Indeed, Okagbue notes significant similarities among the masquerades “in terms of their stories of origin, organizational structure and support, actual performance processes, and social and aesthetic functions” (14). He also suggests that “most African cultures south of the Sahara have a masking theatre tradition of one kind or another” (14)—but this is likely an overstatement, for the evidence suggests that masquerade traditions are limited to a rather specific (if substantial) portion of sub-­ Saharan Africa, as we can see in Fig. 5.3. This map shows the locations of the forty masquerade traditions referred to by Okagbue or mentioned by other sources.19 These traditions are all to be found south of the Sahara; they spread out from western Africa (where, as the inset map shows, they are most prevalent) to the east, then down into southern Africa.20 It is an imposing amount of territory, but three sub-Saharan areas are apparently devoid of these traditions: eastern Africa (primarily Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia), southwestern Africa (primarily parts of Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa), and Madagascar. On the basis of this evidence, one can tentatively suggest there are at least four distinct subregions below the Sahara. The base map on which I have plotted out the masquerades might supply an explanation for their distribution, while also suggesting that they are indeed a family of homologically-related theatre forms. That base map indicates the major language families (technically, the phyla) of Africa. I should note that the boundaries of the language families are inexact (one can scarcely find two maps that draw them the same), but their general contours are widely accepted and sufficient for our purposes. As the map shows, sub-Saharan languages can be classified into three major families, with a fourth family (Austronesian) on Madagascar; an additional family (Indo-European) is found in European-settled areas of South Africa and Zimbabwe but I have not indicated it on the map. The immediate point of interest is that all of the masquerade theatre forms are located among speakers of the Niger-Kordofanian language family; or, more precisely (since the Kordofanian branch of this family is both small and isolated), in the family’s Niger-Congo branch. Conversely, masquerade forms are not

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Fig. 5.3  Language families and masquerade traditions of Africa. (The base map shows the language families found in Africa, not including Indo-European languages of European settlers in southern Africa, as per Merritt Ruhlen’s classifications. The numbers indicate the following masquerade traditions, with the form name in italics, followed by the name (and common variations) of its host ethnic group, or of its location: 1. Yamama; Sherbro; 2. Gongoli; Mende/Mendi; 3. Kakadebul; (Sierra Leone); 4. Do; Bamana; 5. Koteba; Bamana; 6. Do; Bozo; 7. Koteba; Bozo; 8. Dama; Dogon; 9. Gwarama; (Yegueresso village, BF); 10. Yaie; (Bansie village, BF); 11. Gama; (Fada village, BF); 12. ???; Dan/Gio/Yakuba; 13. ???; Effutu/Awutu/Simpafo; 14. Egungun; Yoruba; 15. Gelede; Yoruba; 16. Igbabonelimhin; Esan; 17. Kwagh-hir; Tiv; 18. Akpmobe; Idoma; 19. Okonko; (Arondizuogu, Nigeria); 20. Ekpe; (Arondizuogu, Nigeria); 21. Ekang; (Arondizuogu Nigeria); 22. Okumpka; Afikpo; 23. Okonko; Ohafia; 24. Ekpe; Ohafia; 25. Okonko; Ngwa; 26. Mmonwu; Igbo, Nigeria; 27. Ekpe; Ngwa; 28. Ekpe; (Arochukwa, Nigeria; 29. Okonko; (Arochukwa, Nigeria); 30. Ekine; Kalibari; 31. Ekpo; Ibibio; 32. ???; Bushongo/Bushong,/Kuba; 33. Makisi; Mbunda; 34. Makisi; Chokwe; 35. Makisi; Lwena/Luvale; 36. Makisi; Lunda; 37. Makisi; Luchazi; 38. Gule wa Mkulu; Chewa; 39. ???; Nkonde/Nayakyusa; 40. Mapiko; Makonde)

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found in areas with Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, or Khoisan languages, nor on Madagascar.21 This distribution of masquerade forms is not likely to be happenstance. One of the signal events of African history was the expansion of peoples whose descendants now speak one of the Niger-Kordofanian languages and whose original home was in the area around current-day Nigeria. Some five thousand years ago, these peoples—who were likely the earliest agriculturalists in sub-Saharan Africa—began extending their range of settlement, both to the west and, more expansively, to the east and south, reaching their present range by about the fourth century ce (Reader 183–84). In fact, all these peoples not only speak related languages, but are also related genetically, despite some intermixing with the populations they largely displaced during their expansion (Li et al., passim). The linguistic relationship among the Niger-Congo speakers, in other words, is mirrored by their genetic relations.22 It is also mirrored, apparently, by their common engagement in masquerade theatre. Historical relationships between the various masquerade forms do not seem to have been studied, but it is possible that some very early form of masquerade theatre existed in the original home of these peoples, who brought it with them as they began their expansion. As it then developed in each of the ensuing societies, it grew into a multiplicity of distinct though homologically related theatre forms, giving shape to Africa’s largest theatrical subregion. Alternately, the idea of masquerade theatre might have spread through contact between the many societies at some later time, its transmission abetted by similar social structures among the various peoples. It is highly unlikely, however, that each of the societies—geographically adjacent and related in language and genetics—developed its masking tradition independently, especially considering the similarities between the names of many of those traditions. This is certainly a topic for study by specialists, but whatever the historical explanation might be, the apparent lack of masquerade theatres outside the area settled by Niger-Congo speakers leads to the tentative conclusion that West and Central Africa constitutes a distinct theatrical subregion; and if this is the case, it is likely that we should also recognize East Africa, Southwest Africa, and Madagascar as subregions. Even more geographically limited than subregions, but no less important to theatre history, are the locales where theatre is most frequently created. Because theatre requires an audience, it follows that theatre centers are most often found in places where people regularly gather. In

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societies with substantial populations, the most significant of these centers are cities and large towns. These offer large-enough audiences to provide full- or part-time theatre specialists with sufficient compensation—or at least the prospect of such compensation—to encourage continued production.23 It is important to note, though, that theatre centers are not always urban. Any place where significant numbers of people gather can be a theatre center, even if those gatherings are only intermittent, as during religious festivals. Such is the case, for example, with the Winter Ceremonial (also known as the tsetseka) of the Kwakiutl (an American Indian people). The Ceremonial is a seasonal gathering of multiple Kwakiutl populations, and includes a wide range of religiously significant performances, including dance, music, and enactment (Boas, passim). This sort of connection between religious festivals and theatre is common throughout the world; according to Oyekan Owomoyela, theatre can often be found “hobnobbing” with religious festivals because such festivals are, above all, “social institutions” for which entire communities or societies gather (259). Festive gatherings can function as if they were, in effect, temporary cities, offering readily available audiences for theatrical performances. In the same way, small towns and even villages can become temporary theatre centers when people gather for festivities that include one or another form of folk theatre, with the performance presented by amateur or semi-­ professional troupes who tour from one locale to another. All that said, however, urban theatre centers have loomed especially large in theatre history. According to Jürgen Osterhammel, a city is “a concentrated expression of a particular civilization—a place where the creativity of a society is expressed most clearly” (242). The geographer Henri Lefebvre emphasizes that the city is a perpetually dynamic space, creating and re-creating itself in new (and sometimes less than desirable) ways, and bringing one or another kind of order to the area around it (211–12). In a sense, cities call themselves into being, and in so doing, can also call theatre into being. They sort themselves out geographically, with professions and pastimes creating or being confined to districts of their own (e.g., red-light districts), and people seeking out or being limited to particular neighborhoods (e.g., wealthy enclaves and ghettos). In this way, cities organize the physical places where theatre is performed. And by virtue of their prestige and power, cities dominate relations that can span from relatively local areas all the way to entire regions, thus becoming critical nodes in the geography of theatre. Each of these aspects of cities’ relationships to theatre is worth brief examination.

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In the previous chapter I noted a suite of convergent analogies in kabuki and spoken theatre. These analogies were the result not of any direct contact between the theatre forms (and therefore were not homological), but of the urbanization of these regions. They illustrate how cities can, in effect, summon new theatre forms into existence by providing a ready audience that existing forms, for one reason or another, do not fully serve. Let me look now specifically at Tokugawa Edo and Elizabethan London. These two cities differed, of course, in ways too numerous to mention, but one thing they had in common was rapid growth, which would lead to the emergence of commercial theatre forms in both places. Edo had been a “sleepy, historic area” boasting little more than the ruins of a castle; but a hundred years after the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu had chosen it for the headquarters of his bakufu (military government), the city had expanded both inland and out into the sea on reclaimed land (Nishiyama 23–24), and its population had risen to over five hundred thousand people (Sansom 469). London’s growth, likewise, was “so rapid” that James I complained that soon “England will onely [sic] be London”; its population rose from about fifty thousand in 1520s to upward of five hundred thousand by 1650, spurred by London’s preeminence in both politics and economics (Hall 121, 115). In the course of their growth, these cities were significantly changed. In Edo, those portions of the old nobility that had survived the civil war that preceded Tokugawa rule, as well as many of the new nobles that had been produced by it, were required to spend alternate years in the new capital (bringing with them their numerous retainers), while their families resided permanently in Edo. Samurai also swarmed to the capital, either  attached to the military government or newly without masters (Nishiyama 28–29). In London, the Court was of course nothing new, but it was newly enriched. With the disestablishment of the Roman Catholic Church, vast wealth, primarily drawn from former Church holdings, fell into royal hands, with large portions of it being parceled out among royal favorites. In Edo, “the concentration of warriors in the city stimulated the emergence of a unique Edo economy. The presence of a large stratum of newly enfranchised warrior nobles required the procurement of a tremendous quantity of consumer goods. Supplying such goods was the responsibility of the official merchants and artisans who streamed to the capital from all parts of the country. Edo thus became a consumer capital” (Nishiyama 29). Although nō was quite well established among the elite, the growing

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urban population was mostly excluded from attendance. But they had money to burn and the desire for entertainment, and so it is no surprise that new theatre forms emerged to capitalize on the opportunity. The most successful of these new forms was kabuki, which through its period of emergence offered highly sexualized performances, but eventually came to enact visually exciting stories drawn from history, literature, and contemporary life. According to Peter Hall, London similarly underwent “nothing less than an economic revolution,” carried on in good part by “a class of ‘New Men’: clothiers, financiers, merchants, entrepreneurs who owed their power not to owning land but to business ability” (116), and who were abetted by numerous wage-laborers and apprentices, all of whom found themselves with a few pence to spare for entertainment. The implications for theatre were immediate: “[I]n one sense, the question—why did London theatre happen—hardly needs answering: London’s theatre arose because the audience was waiting, and the audience was waiting because it was newly rich, albeit well established, and leisured” (125). The mixed audiences of London were attracted to the emerging spoken theatre. Although the form did not provide quite the sexual frisson that early kabuki did, its plays were not radically dissimilar in subject-matter from those that kabuki eventually developed, being drawn from history, literature, and contemporary life. Cities do more than just call themselves, along with new theatre forms, into being. They also sort themselves into districts and neighborhoods in a manner that has a direct impact on the location of theatres. In ancient Greece and Rome, theatre was an affair of the state and its great festivals, and so theatres in ancient cities were conceived of as “civic monuments,” constructed at great expense in central places of importance (Carlson, Places 68). In Edo, by contrast, kabuki was wildly popular, but it was also disreputable, and so its theatres were restricted to specific districts such as Yoshiwara and Nakabashi (Shively 11). Alongside the theatres were “teahouses” that provided food and refreshment for theatregoers, as well as readily available prostitutes; also present in these districts were street performers who “recited tales from military epics,” as well as fortune tellers, jugglers, and tightrope walkers (Shively 24, 37, 11). Kabuki theatres, in brief, were commercially driven pleasure-houses, geographically confined to specific pleasure districts. In Elizabethan London, meanwhile, spoken theatre was similarly disreputable, even if not quite as sexually suggestive. While commercial

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theatre forms (such as spoken theatre) need venues that are easily accessible to their audiences, the authorities of the City of London were disapproving, seeing theatre as distracting from daily labor and enabling public disorder (Foakes 2). The first London venues for spoken theatre were inns (such as the Bull Inn) within the walls of the city, and although they were not shut down by the authorities, they were apparently under such close watch that theatre troupes sought freedom from official gaze. The geographical effect is evident on any map of London’s early theatres, including Fig. 5.4. As we can see, theatre troupes responded to official pressure on the inns by locating their theatres beyond the purview of London’s authority. A few venues (such as Blackfriars) were within the walls of the City, but as church-owned buildings with longstanding privileges, they were exempt from City authority (Foakes 7). The more common escape was to construct venues outside the City’s walls, or across the Thames in Southwark.

Fig. 5.4  London theatres, circa 1600. (The base map of London was engraved by J. Norden, Civitas Londoni. I have cropped the image, outlined the city walls in black, and added the approximate locations of theatres. The label “Theatre” marks the location of James Burbage’s theatre, built in 1593. Base map courtesy of the National Library of Sweden, KoB DelaG 89)

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As far as the audience was concerned, it was an easy-enough walk or ride to any of the venues beyond the walls; the Southwark theatres, meanwhile, were accessible via the London Bridge or by passage with one of the “watermen” who worked the river (Foakes 3). As in Tokugawa Edo, London’s theatre districts were pleasure districts. Southwark, in particular, already had a long history as such a district, being infamous for its brothels, alehouses, and bear-baiting arenas. The introduction of theatrical venues did nothing to detract from Southwark’s sordid reputation, but served primarily to encourage more Londoners to engage in its many pleasures (Shugg, passim). Cities that are theatre centers do not arrange just their own theatrical geography, but the theatrical geography of their surrounding areas, sometimes across entire subregions or even regions.24 Osterhammel writes that “cities are nodal points of relations and networks. They organize the area surrounding them” (242). Major theatre centers draw to themselves what can crudely be called the raw materials of theatre: the potential actors, directors, playwrights, designers, and so on who are necessary for theatrical productions; no less importantly, they attract the large numbers of people (either as immigrants or visitors) who will serve as audiences for those productions. They are also, of course, repositories of the wealth that will be needed to fund the productions. In return for these raw materials, theatre centers provide “finished products” to the area within their spheres of influence, in the form of touring shows, established scripts, polished actors, and so on. The result can be understood as a core–periphery structure. Around the start of the twentieth century, for example, theatre throughout the United States was thoroughly dominated by New York City, in particular by the Theatrical Syndicate (mentioned in Chap. 4) that was based there. Thanks to the expansion of railroads, the vast American periphery beyond the city was more accessible than ever, and theatre managers across the country realized that productions “direct from Broadway,” served to “fill their cashboxes with greater profits then their resident stock companies.” Members of the Syndicate were happy to provide such productions, and they eventually controlled between seven-hundred and eight-hundred theatres nationally, amounting to one theatre in every American city or town with a population of over five thousand people (Henderson 189). This level of national domination would not last, especially as repertory theatres began to be established in smaller cities throughout the country.

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The result was the development of a semi-periphery made up of secondary theatre centers, each with its own more limited sphere of influence. The relationship of the core to the periphery was (as is generally the case) mediated by these semi-peripheral theatre centers. For example, theatre artists within the broad sphere of the core’s influence might choose to go to a secondary theatrical center to receive the training and experience that could improve their chances in the core, though more often than not they would remain in the semi-periphery. In return for this locally derived raw material, the secondary theatre center would send its own finished product out to its local sphere of influence. But the secondary centers, for all their local power, remained in the core theatre center’s larger sphere of influence. Scaling Up: Megaregions At the other end of the geographic scale, the megaregion is a unit in which (in Hodgson’s words) “historical interrelationships and interactions” spill out, if only to a limited degree, beyond regional boundaries (279).25 In the history of world theatre, only one megaregion is evident, but it has been of huge significance. For thousands of years, but especially over the past millennium, the various regions of Eurasia, along with North Africa, have been in regular contact with one another, via interregional movements of people, commerce, and ideas. As Hodgson observes, there are no regionally-based “closed worlds” (such as Europe, India, and China) within Eurasia and North Africa, and “an attempt to construct a series of [fully-separated] historical fields leaves too many and too crucial loose ends” (249). This extensive contact was made possible by what the anthropologist Jared Diamond suggests is the directional “axis” of Eurasia (and North Africa). A broad swath of land, between 20° and 60° latitude, offers mostly temperate climates. Crops and farm animals native to any region within these latitudes could be (and were) easily diffused across its entire range. As Diamond notes, “By the time of Christ, cereals of Fertile Crescent origin were growing over the 10,000-mile expanse from the Atlantic coast of Ireland to the Pacific coast of Japan.” Citizens of the Roman Empire, meanwhile, had access not only to wheat and other food-stuffs that had originated in Southwest Asia, but also to “quince (originating in the Caucasus); millet and cumin (domesticated in Central Asia); cucumber, sesame, and citrus fruit (from India); and chicken, rice, apricots, peaches,

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and foxtail millet (originally from China)” (185). People could also travel across Eurasia (and North Africa), either by land or sea, leading to a certain amount of economic and cultural integration. But contact with regions beyond this megaregion was far more restricted. Relations with sub-Saharan Africa were by no means unknown; they were, however, limited to a few areas on the east coast (visited primarily by Arab traders), up the Nile into Sudan, and in a few West African locales at the end of trans-­ Saharan trade routes. According to the historian Christopher Ehret, even though sub-Saharan Africa was “not entirely sealed off from the effects of events outside Africa, nevertheless [it was] most powerfully affected by factors internal to the continent” (240). The Americas and Australasia, meanwhile, were truly “sealed off” from intercourse with Eurasia for many thousands of years, until the so-called “voyages of discovery” by Europeans left an aftermath of indigenous devastation and European settlement in their wake. The implications for theatre in the Eurasian-North African megaregion have been profound, especially over the past thousand years. An interregional network of trading cities came into existence, supported by innumerable farming communities that took advantage of the pan-Eurasian horticultural and agricultural practices. The result is that, despite the irreducible “localness” of Eurasia’s individual theatre forms, they share some important likenesses as well, generally being convergent analogues. Many of the megaregion’s theatre forms are centered in its cities and large towns, where populations and wealth were sufficiently concentrated to encourage the development of professional or semi-professional artists. Urban life is also an important reason that many of the forms in the megaregion use written texts; cities, after all, have been the loci of literate classes since the earliest scribes were called on to record the deeds of kings, the holy words of religions, and the mundane details of economic transactions. For all these reasons, we can take Eurasia and North Africa to have become a theatrical megaregion starting about a thousand years ago: that is, a set of regions (Europe, South Asia, East Asia, and so on) that, despite their appreciable differences, have some theatre forms that share important traits only rarely found elsewhere (at least until recent times). This is an aspect of theatre history that has significant implications. As we have seen, most theatre history textbooks focus almost entirely on Europe, ignoring any possible interconnections with non-European theatre until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when those connections become a matter of homology (e.g., the domestication of spoken theatre in many

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world regions). The concept of Eurasia and North Africa as a megaregion undermines the European exceptionalism of the Standard Western Approach and emphasizes that, for all its unique features, Europe is part of the larger world. Especially since the nineteenth century, interregional societal contact has increased to such a degree that the entire world has attained an unprecedented, if still very incomplete, level of integration. We are undoubtedly seeing the development of a global theatrical megaregion. Most noticeable, of course, is the spread of spoken theatre to locales (primarily urban) through much of the world. The theatre of non-European regions has in turn made an appreciable impact on that of Europe and the Neo-Europes; one need only mention the influence of Balinese dance on Artaud, of nō on Yeats, and of jingju on Brecht to hint at that impact (Artaud 53–73, Yeats 151–63, Brecht 91–100). Regional differences are still sharp enough, though, to doubt that all of the world as of yet belongs to a single theatrical complex. * * * A fresh consideration of the geography of world theatre is both necessary and possible. The necessity lies, above all, in removing Europe from the perceived center of world theatre studies, a removal that is possible only with the recognition that European theatre is the theatre of but one region of world, being of neither greater nor lesser intrinsic importance than that of any other region, nor removed in any way from the larger web of world theatre. The standard geographic concepts of the continent and the nation-­ state are not sufficient for this task. The geographical unit of the theatre region, being based on theatre itself, is far more precise in delineating the continuities and discontinuities of theatres’ geographic dimension. It is also particularly useful because it can be scaled down to subregions and theatre centers (allowing for more granular studies) or scaled up to megaregions (encouraging more interregional studies). The theatre of each world region is a remarkable achievement—or perhaps it would be better to say that theatre itself is a single remarkable achievement that is expressed in near-infinite variety around the world. Reconceptualizing the way in which we understand its geographic dimension makes possible a far richer understanding and appreciation of it.

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Notes 1. In a few instances, the authors claim that a map identifies “theatrical centers,” but this claim is questionable. The political map of Asia identifies cities and provinces, some of which have no particular theatrical significance. On the other hand, some hotbeds of theatre, such as the island of Bali, are not identified at all (Brockett and Hildy 606). 2. In earlier editions, the authors wrote of engaging in three different “mappings,” but they did not use the word in a geographic sense. 3. Although the map’s caption claims that these are “towns important in the history of Chinese theatre” (Dolby xii), many are scarcely (if at all) mentioned in Dolby’s text. 4. The map associated with raslila, for example, extends as far as Nepal, but the form is obviously not to be found there; see Richmond et al., Indian Theatre 178. 5. Among the relatively few theatre scholars with an interest in mapping is Jo Robinson, who has made good use of maps in a series of articles; see, for example, her “Mapping,” passim. Also, an excellent set of maps, tracing the history of theatre-related businesses in New York’s Broadway district, is offered by Timothy R. White. 6. I am not concerned here with perceptions of geography within the fiction of theatre. For that topic, see U. Chaudhuri, Staging. 7. See also Wigen for a general discussion on how a focus on oceans can help open what she calls “interarea history” (150). 8. For an overview of this troupe’s work, see Broyles-González. 9. Although a play might use two or more languages in an attempt to mirror language differences in the real world, such is not invariably the case. Petr Bogatyrev draws a useful analogy to forms that have certain characters speak primarily in poetry, while others speak primarily in prose (39); the multiple languages, by this reasoning, serve less to reflect reality than to signify relationships among characters. This certainly seems to be the case with Sanskrit theatre. 10. Beyond the criticisms I have already mentioned, further criticisms focus on the politics of world regions, especially as expressed in the “area studies” programs that gained some popularity in colleges in the United States after World War Two. As Jerry H.  Bentley notes, these programs have been accused of being “tainted” by “cold war interests,” of being “expressions of U.S. hegemony” or of “perpetuating orientalist constructs” (1). 11. Note that I am here discussing the movement of theatre forms; obviously an individual might write a play while residing in any location. 12. I presume the theatrical connection to be between the folk theatre forms of northern China and the various folk forms of Korea, but I have not seen

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any study that considers this issue. Notably, though, Chinese literary theatre forms have apparently had little impact on Korean theatre, so if Korea should indeed be placed in the same region as China, it must be seen as a very distinct subregion. 13. Martin Banham’s A History of Theatre in Africa organizes its main sections primarily in terms of European languages, while his Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre (co-edited with Hill and Woodyard) is organized nation by nation. 14. The status of Madagascar is a problem that defies easy solution. Its first settlers, via an extraordinary sea-journey from Southeast Asia, arrived by the sixth century ce, with Africans arriving around the eleventh century. Banham et al. include a section on Madagascar in the Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre, but Banham does not include it in his History of African Theatre. I have tentatively included it in the sub-Saharan African region. If it belongs there, it is obviously a highly distinct subregion, but it might better be considered a region in itself, or perhaps a border region. 15. Some 43% of all slaves were brought to the Caribbean islands, whereas 38.2% went to Brazil. The rest were divided between other portions of South America (11.8%), North America (4.5%), and Mexico and other parts of Central America (2.4%) (Bernstein 277). 16. The numbers, to be clear, are not precise, and likely understate the actual total. As Sear notes on various occasions, he does not include some smaller theatres and odea (that is, indoor theatres) (23, 43, 97, and 115). 17. All numbers are from Sear. For Italy, p.  97; for Asia Minor, p.  110; for Greece, p. 113; for the Balkans, p. 115; for the Levant, p. 106; for North Africa, pp.  102–05; for Britain and Gaul, p.  98; for Germany and Spain, p. 101. 18. I also looked in Banham, Banham et al., and Galembo. 19. The map marks every combination of form and ethnic group given by my sources. I have left off the map a pair of masquerade traditions found in Freetown, Sierra Leon. These are anomalous because they are performed in Yoruba communities (far removed from Yorubaland) that are descended from slave-ship escapees. 20. The concentration of forms in West Africa might possibly be the result of that area being better studied than other areas of Africa. 21. For Ruhlen’s complete analysis of African languages, see 76–124. 22. For a detailed discussion of the mirroring of linguistics and genetics, see Cavilla-Sforza et al. 180–85. 23. Although money is the most obvious form of compensation, it can also be in goods or favors of any kind, or in social status or opportunities. I discuss this issue in Chap. 7.

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24. In the following paragraphs I press into service concepts developed in the historiographic school of world system theory. For a quick overview, see Frank, “Plea.” Franco Moretti outlines a use of world-systems theory in the study of literature in a pair of articles, “Conjecture” and “More Conjectures.” 25. Referring to the same idea as megaregions, the historian Ross E.  Dunn writes of “superregions” (“Interregional” 161). But because “super” can too easily be misunderstood to mean “superior,” I prefer to avoid that term.

Works Cited Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and Its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline Richards, Grove Press, 1958. Banham, Martin, editor. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Rev. ed., Cambridge UP, 2000. Banham, Martin, editor. A History of Theatre in Africa. Cambridge UP, 2004. Banham, Martin, et  al., editors. Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre. Cambridge UP, 1994. Beacham, Richard C. Spectacle Entertainments of Early Imperial Rome. Yale UP, 1999. Bentley, Jerry H. “Regional Histories, Global Processes, Cross-Cultural Interactions.” Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History, edited by Jerry H. Bentley, et al., U of Hawaii P, 2005, pp. 1–13. Bernstein, William J. A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World. Grove Press, 2008. Boas, Franz. Kwakiutl Ethnography. Edited by Helen Codere, U of Chicago P, 1966. Bogatyrev, Petr. “Semiotics in the Folk Theater.” Semiotics of Art, edited by Ladislav Matejka and Irwin Titunik, MIT Press, 1976, pp. 33–49. Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Translated by Siân Reynolds, Harper & Row, 1972. 2 volumes. Braudel, Fernand. On History. Translated by Sarah Matthews, U of Chicago P, 1980. Brecht, Brecht. Brecht on Theatre. Edited and translated by John Willett, Hill & Wang, 1964. Breisach, Ernst. Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern. 2nd ed., U of Chicago P, 1994. Brockett, Oscar G., and Franklin J. Hildy. History of the Theatre. 10th ed., Allyn & Bacon, 2008. Brown, Peter. “Greek Comedy at Rome.” A Handbook to the Reception of Greek Drama, edited by Betine van Zyl Smit, Wiley-Blackwell, 2016, pp. 63–77. Broyles-González, Yolanda. Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement. U of Texas P, 1994.

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Carlson, Marvin. Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture. Cornell UP, 1989. Carlson, Marvin. “Reflections on a Global Theatre.” The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, edited by David Wiles and Christine Dymkowski, Cambridge UP, 2013, pp. 149–61. Cavilla-Sforza, L.  Luca, et  al. The History and Geography of Human Genes. Abridged paperback ed., Princeton UP, 1994. Chaudhuri, K.  N. Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge UP, 1985. Chaudhuri, Una. Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama. U of Michigan P, 1997. Conrad, Sebastian. What Is Global History? Princeton UP, 2016. Conteh-Morgan, John. “African Traditional Drama and Issues in Theatre and Performance Criticism.” Comparative Drama, vol. 28, no. 1, Spring 1994, pp. 3–18. Cresswell, Tim. Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction. Wiley-­ Blackwell, 2013. Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Cambridge UP, 1986. Dasgupta, Gautam. “A Theatre Divided: Brussels, Belgium.” Performing Arts Journal, vol. 6, no. 1, 1981, pp. 126–29. Dharwadker, Aparna. “Representing India’s Pasts: Time, Culture, and the Problems of Performance Historiography.” Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography, edited by Thomas Postlewait and Charlotte M. Canning, U of Iowa P, 2010, pp. 168–92. Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W. W. Norton, 1997. Dolby, William. A History of Chinese Drama. London, Paul Elek, 1976. Dunn, Ross E. “Interregional and Superregional History.” The New World History: A Teacher’s Companion, edited by Ross E. Dunn, Bedford/St. Martin, 2000, pp. 161–63. Ehret, Christopher. The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800. UP of Virginia, 2002. Floor, Willem. The History of Theatre in Iran. Washington, DC, Mage Publishers, 2005. Foakes, R.  A. “Playhouses and Players.” The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, edited by A.  R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway, Cambridge UP, 1990, pp. 1–52. Frank, Andre Gunder. “A Plea for World System History.” Journal of World History, vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 1990, pp. 1–28. Frank, Andre Gunder. ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age. U of California P, 1998.

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Galembo, Phyllis. Maske. London, Chris Boot, 2010. Ghulam-Sarwar Yousef. Dictionary of Traditional South-East Asian Theatre. Kuala Lumpur, Oxford UP, 1994. Hall, Peter. Cities in Civilization. Pantheon Books, 1998. Hamburger, Maik, and Simon Williams. “Introduction.” A History of German Theatre, edited by Simon Williams and Maik Hamburger, Cambridge UP, 2008, pp. 1–7. Hansen, Thomas Blom. “Plays, Politics and Cultural Identity Among Indians in Durban.” Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, June 2000, pp. 255–69. Hartnoll, Phyllis, editor. The Oxford Companion to the Theatre. 4th ed., Oxford UP, 1983. Henderson, Mary C. The City and the Theatre: New York Playhouses from Bowling Green to Times Square. Clifton, NJ, James T. White & Company, 1973. Hodgson, Marshall G. S. Rethinking World History. Edited by Edmund Burke III, Cambridge UP, 1993. Kennedy, Dennis, editor. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance. Oxford UP, 2003. 2 volumes. Lefebvre, Henri. Writings on Cities. Translated and introduced by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Leiter, Samuel L., editor. Encyclopedia of Asian Theatre. Greenwood Press, 2007. 2 volumes. Lewis, Martin W., and Kären E.  Wigen. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. U of California P, 1997. Li Ruru. The Soul of Beijing Opera: Theatrical Creativity and Continuity in the Changing World. Hong Kong UP, 2010. Li, Sen, et al. “Genetic Variation Reveals Large-Scale Population Expansion and Migration During the Expansion of Bantu-Speaking Peoples.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 281: 20141448. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.1448 Manning, Patrick. Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades. Cambridge UP, 1990. McNeill, William H. Mythistory and Other Essays. U of Chicago P, 1986. Miles, Sarah. “Greek Drama in the Hellenistic World.” A Handbook to the Reception of Greek Drama, edited by Betine van Zyl Smit, Wiley-Blackwell, 2016, pp. 45–62. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel: 1800–1900. Verso, 1999. Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review, vol. 1, January–February 2000, pp. 54–68. Moretti, Franco. “More Conjectures.” New Left Review, vol. 20, March–April 2003, pp. 73–81. Nellhaus, Tobin, et al. Theatre Histories. 3rd ed., Routledge, 2016.

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Newbigin, Nerida. “Secular and Religious Drama in the Middle Ages.” A History of Italian Theatre, edited by Joseph Farrell and Paolo Puppa, Cambridge UP, 2006, pp. 9–27. Nishiyama Matsunosuke. Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–1868. Translated by Gerald Groemer, U of Hawaii P, 1997. Okagbue, Osita. African Theatres and Performances. Routledge, 2007. Osterhammel, Jürgen. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Patrick Camiller, Princeton UP, 2014. Owomoyela, Oyekan. “Folklore and Yoruba Theatre.” Forms of Folklore in Africa: Narrative, Poetic, Gnomic, Dramatic, edited by Bernth Lindfors, U of Texas P, 1977, pp. 258–70. Peters, Frank. “Rewriting a National Theatre History in a Bilingual Country: The Case of Belgium.” Writing and Rewriting National Theatre Histories, edited by S. E. Wilmer, U of Iowa P, 2004, pp. 88–105. Porter, Roy. London: A Social History. Harvard UP, 1995. Pušić, Barbara. “Nationalism, Tradition, and Transition in Theatre Historiography in Slovenia.” Writing and Rewriting National Theatre Histories, edited by S. E. Wilmer, U of Iowa P, 2004, pp. 65–87. Rapoport, Natasha. “Kazakhstan.” The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, vol. 5, Asia/Pacific, edited by Don Rubin, et  al., Routledge, 2000, pp. 251–56. Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. “Chronology, Crossroads, and Commonwealths: World-­ Regional Schemes and the Lessons of Caucasia.” Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History, edited by Jerry H. Bentley, et al., U of Hawaii P, 2005, pp. 167–201. Reader, John. Africa: A Biography of the Continent. Vintage Books, 1999. Reischauer, Edwin O., and John K.  Fairbank. East Asia: The Great Tradition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1958. Rhulan, Merritt. A Guide to the World’s Languages, Volume 1: Classification. Stanford UP, 1987. Richmond, Farley P. “Characteristics of the Modern Theatre.” Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance, edited by Farley P. Richmond et al., U of Hawaii P, 1990, pp. 387–462. Richmond, Farley P., et al., editors. Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance. U of Hawaii P, 1990. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. Columbia UP, 1996. Robinson, Jo. “Mapping the Place of Pantomime in a Victorian Town.” Victorian Pantomime: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Jim Davis, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 137–54. Sansom, G. B. Japan: A Short Cultural History. Stanford UP, 1978.

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Savarese, Nicola. Eurasian Theatre: Drama and Performance Between East and West from Classical Antiquity to the Present. Translated by Richard Fowler, updated and edited by Vicki Ann Cremona, Routledge, 2010. Sear, Frank. Roman Theatres: An Architectural Study. Oxford UP, 2006. Shively, Donald H. “The Social Environment of Tokugawa Kabuki.” Studies in Kabuki: Its Acting, Music, and Historical Context, edited by James R. Brandon et al., U of Hawaii P, 1978, pp. 1–61. Shugg, Wallace. “Prostitution in Shakespeare’s London.” Shakespeare Studies, vol. 10, 1977, pp. 291–313. Swann, Darius L. “Nautankı̄.” Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance, edited by Farley P. Richmond et al., U of Hawaii P, 1990, pp. 249–74. Taplin, Oliver. “How Was Athenian Tragedy Played in the Greek West?” Theater Outside Athens: Drama in Greek Sicily and South Italy, edited by Kathryn Bosher, Cambridge UP, 2012, pp. 226–50. Van Buitenen, J. A. B. “Introduction.” Two Plays of Ancient India, translated and introduced by J. A. B. Van Buitenen, Columbia UP, 1968. Vatsyayan, Kapila. Traditional Indian Theatre: Multiple Streams. New Delhi, National Book Trust, India, 1980. Warner, Lisa. “The Russian Folk Play ‘Tsar Maximilian’.” Folklore, vol. 82, no. 3, 1971, pp. 185–206. Weiss, Judith H., et al. Latin American Popular Theatre: The First Five Centuries. U of New Mexico P, 1993. Wetmore, Kevin J., Jr., et al. Modern Asian Theatre and Performance 1900–2000. Bloomsbury, 2014. White, Timothy R. Blue-Collar Broadway: The Craft and Industry of American Theater. U of Pennsylvania P, 2015. Wigen, Kären E. “Cartographies of Connection: Ocean Maps as Metaphors for Interarea History.” Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History, edited by Jerry H. Bentley, et al., U of Hawaii P, 2005, pp. 150–66. Wilmer, S. E. “On Writing National Theatre Histories.” Writing and Rewriting National Theatre Histories, edited by S.  E. Wilmer, U of Iowa P, 2004, pp. 17–28. Wilson, Edwin, and Alvin Goldfarb. Living Theatre: A History of Theatre. 7th ed., McGraw-Hill, 2018. Yeats, William B. “Introduction to Certain Noble Plays of Japan.” Certain Noble Plays of Japan, translated by Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenellosa, New Directions Publishing, 1959.

CHAPTER 6

The Long View of World Theatre History

In their textbook Living Theatre: A History of Theatre, Edwin Wilson and Alvin Goldfarb offer a succinct summary of the historiographic principle that still undergirds much scholarship of theatre history: “By definition, a history is a chronicle—a recapitulation or a reconstruction of events from the past.” Their immediate point is less to make a historiographic claim than to juxtapose historical writing against theatre itself, which “exists only at the moment when it occurs” (xvii). Still, in subsequent pages, they do not hesitate to refer to their text as a “chronicle” (17, 18), which it surely is, offering a parade of “events,” mostly recapitulated, occasionally reconstructed, along with a mass of names and dates deemed to be important.1 Other textbooks follow the same route. Here is Thomas Postlewait on a no-less popular text: “[Oscar] Brockett’s chronicle of information lays out the theatre for the reader as a register of names, places, titles, techniques, terminologies, and events” that “struggles to place [its] extensive catalogue of information into a ‘relevant context’ of ‘social, political, and philosophical ideas’ and values of each era” (169).2 The advantage to such a presentation of history, suggests Postlewait, is that it allows interpretive freedom; the disadvantage “is that many classes remain committed to the memorization of facts rather than cultural studies and social history” (169). Postlewait’s claim about memorization is certainly exaggerated, and there is undeniable value in Brockett’s assemblage of facts. But as with all chronicling, it falls short of a basic goal of history writing, which

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is not merely the “recapitulation and reconstruction” of events, but a meaningful understanding of them. To be fair, these textbooks (along with most others) are not entirely chronicles. As I discussed in Chap. 3, they follow the Standard Western Approach—but in these texts that approach is offered in such an attenuated form (especially in contrast to earlier works by Matthews and Cheney) that their historiographic logic is scarcely addressed. As a result, we are left with histories that are no less misguided than the earlier works, but that fail to make any explicit effort to explain or justify themselves. A critical problem with chronicles, as we have seen with Postlewait, is that they fail to offer meaningful contextualization. Most textbooks (including the two just mentioned) offer short descriptions of the politics and social movements of the periods being discussed but fail to explain the relationship between these contexts and the theatre created in them. For example, when discussing Elizabethan theatre it is all well and good to note (as most textbooks do) that the Spanish Armada was turned back in 1588—but that does little to explain how and why a secular and commercial form of urban theatre, performed in purpose-built venues, happened to emerge simultaneously in Spain and England. But as Tobin Nellhaus suggests, “Without truly causal explanations of what happens in the world and in theatre, one is left with mere descriptions and speculations” (Theatre, Communication, 4; italics in the original.) Of all available textbooks, Theatre Histories: An Introduction, makes the strongest effort to move beyond chronicling, and does so by emphasizing one context above all others. In addition to being the most inclusive world theatre text, the authors structure their history “on the connection between a society’s communication practices, and the shifts and commonalities in performance and in the culture at large” (12). This structural principle has been used in Theatre Histories since its first edition, but in the third edition (with Nellhaus now as general editor) it is followed with new rigor. Theatre history is aligned with developments in communication practices: orality, literacy, print, the printing of periodicals (e.g., magazines and newspapers), and electric and electronic communication (e.g., film, television, computers). Theatre Histories, in other words, focuses on an important aspect of one of the historical trends I will be discussing later in this chapter: technological development. The results are sometimes quite striking, but at other times, the chronology becomes scrambled and the connections are unclear: does the framework of “early” literacy really elucidate meaningful connections between Roman comedy in the second

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century bce and the emergence of nō a millennium and a half later (Chap. 2)? The text’s single-minded emphasis on communications practices is too limiting, and other historical factors are given far too little discussion. At the same time, historical continuities receive scant analysis, leaving unexplained why some things remain largely unchanged despite developments in the way that people communicate: one can, after all, see nō theatre performed in roughly the same way it has been for half a millennium or longer, despite massive changes (including those of communication practices) in Japanese society. Theatre Histories, in brief, is an important first step toward moving beyond chronicling, but one that leaves much to be done. I will return to Nellhaus’s theories about communications practices in Chap. 7; for now, I want to address the idea of history as chronicle. How, for example, does my criticism of chronicling relate to world theatre history? Chronicles, after all, can at least potentially be expanded to encompass theatre from around the world. But there are practical limits to how much even the most massive chronicles can include. And the more one expands the geographic scope of one’s chronicle, the more pressing becomes the problem of making sense of theatre’s development. Chronicles pay little heed to that problem, assuming that with a sufficient enumeration of historical facts, an understanding of how and why that development took place will somehow present itself. But it does not, resulting in the sense that history is little more than the proverbial “one damned thing after another.” Adding even more “damned things” from around the world only exacerbates that problem. I suggest that just as theatre studies needs to reconsider theatre’s geography, expanding it as far as to the global scale, it needs a commensurate reconsideration of its temporality, especially when dealing with issues that might be measured in centuries or even millennia. This reconsideration will begin with the present chapter and continue in the following two. Here, I will discuss how employing differing scales of time can help one avoid the snares of chronicling. In particular, I will make use of what the historian Fernand Braudel calls the longue durée—which I will more casually refer to as “the long view”—to gain the sort of historical perspective that is unavailable when one is lost in the details of chronicling, but that echoes the broader geographic perspective offered by the global point of view. Given that this sort of analysis might seem to render the actions of individual men and women irrelevant, I will also examine the issue of

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agency. Then I will discuss various long-standing historical structures and trends that are made evident by the long view and that provide often overlooked contexts for theatre. An awareness of these contexts can help us understand the course of theatre history, not only in each of the world regions, but also in multiple regions together.

The Scales of Time Braudel’s Time-Scales Braudel, for many years the leading light of the Annales school of historiography, takes direct aim at the historiographic tradition that sees the past as a “mass of diverse facts,” contending that “this mass does not make up all of reality” (On History 28). He argues that history can better be understood in terms of multiple, though interrelated, scales of time. The historian Patrick Manning likewise argues for the importance of multiple time-scales, observing that on “any given scale there exist patterns and phenomena that are unique to that level” (267). These multiple time-­ scales are of course interdependent, and to emphasize the value of the long view does not entail abandoning more granular accounts of history; but the long view seeks to reveal “patterns and phenomena” that remain hidden from sight when one is limited to the  reporting of  a “mass of diverse facts.” Braudel’s idea of using multiple time-scales has rarely been explicitly applied to theatre history. Postlewait gives Braudel a shout-out, noting that his methodology “offers one means for getting beyond the pervasive historical practice of giving each period its single identity” (168); but he clearly has misgivings, which will be noted shortly. Stefan Hulfeld, meanwhile, uses Braudelian terminology to discuss “modernist theatre” in Europe, rightfully observing that “distance” is important to the historian, and that “unless we take a larger time-frame into consideration, connections will remain hidden” (17). A handful of other scholars have made some use of Braudel’s ideas for very specific purposes, such as examining Dutch theatre audiences in the “long nineteenth century” (Gras and Vliet).3 Rather confusingly, it must be admitted, Braudel has offered two somewhat different iterations of his approach to history. In the first version, he sets forth a tripartite scheme, whose most encompassing scale of time takes in phenomena “whose passage is almost imperceptible.” Specifically,

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this concerns “man in his relationship to the environment,” and Braudel refers to it a “geographic time.” The middle time-scale is what Braudel calls “social time,” which concerns “the history of groups and groupings,” and includes such phenomena as “economic systems, states, societies, and civilizations.” Finally comes traditional history: a history of “brief, rapid, nervous fluctuations.”  This is “the most exciting” time-scale of history, but one whose “resounding events are often only momentary outbursts, surface manifestations of these larger movements [observed in the more expansive time-scales], and explicable only in terms of them” (Mediterranean 1.20–21). This sort of traditional history is what one finds in chronicles: a near endless array of facts—each perhaps quite interesting in its own way—that has limited interest in any larger picture and so can offer only very partial explanations for why any of it happened when it did in the way that it did. In the second version  of his approach, Braudel somewhat rearranges the material under discussion, though he maintains a tripartite scheme. He introduces a new name for the most expansive time-scale—the longue durée—which concerns “history measured in centuries” or longer (On History 27). As such, it includes geographic time as well as the longer-lived phenomena associated with what he had previously called “social time.” Central to analysis on this time-scale are two concepts of special importance to us: “structures,” a term that encompasses both geography and all manner of “fairly fixed … relationships between realities and social masses”; and “the secular tendency,” which means, in effect, long-term trends (On History 30–31). Braudel’s middle time-scale, in this second iteration, deals above all with economic cycles and what he calls “inter-­ cycles”; its timespan is roughly ten to fifty years (On History 27). Finally comes the “history of events,” which is understood as in his earlier version. My concern in this chapter will be with the longue durée—history as measured in centuries and filled with structures and long-term trends— but since I have already discussed geography, I will leave it aside here. As we will see, taking the long view helps bring to light the enduring structures and trends that operate in and on theatre history, but that are mostly invisible in chronicles, which concern themselves with the accumulation of facts. Recognizing and examining these structures and trends offers a fresh way to understand the contexts in which theatre exists, and so can help explain how and why it has developed as it has, with structures having served as a powerful influence for historical continuity, even as trends have created opportunities for change.

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Agency and Contingency I need to pause here to consider an important criticism of Braudel’s work, for unless it is addressed, it might undermine much of what follows in this book. Braudel has been such an evangelist of the longue durée that he is sometimes guilty of dehumanizing history, as when he speaks of events as “the ephemera of history” (Mediterranean 2.901). Although he later states that “the only error … would be to choose one of these [time-­ scales] to the exclusion of all others” (On History 34), he has, in fact, regularly been accused of doing just that. According to François Dosse, in his book-length study of the Annales school, “Braudel was steadfast against traditional history …, showing an antipathy to events that [has been] call[ed] passionate and sometimes unreasonable” (93). And I alluded earlier to Postlewait’s misgivings about Braudel, the most notable of which is that however much Braudel “has taught us about the longue durée, he has not demonstrated that the study of specific events, places, individuals, and groups lacks significance” (109). World historians, however, continue to find much value in the long view. I have already referred to Manning’s appreciation of multiple time-scales. Another example is provided by Jo Guldi and David Armitage, who argue, “Longue-durée history allows us to step outside of the confines of national history to ask about the rise of long-term complexes, over many decades, centuries, or even millennia” (37). There is no claim being made here that longue-durée history is the only time-scale that provides for meaningful history—but it is one that has been habitually overlooked, and is of particular value when dealing with large swaths of time. But still, the question remains: When one is taking the long view, does one necessarily lose track of the human agency that seems so apparent when one is chronicling facts? And by emphasizing such things as enduring structures and long-term trends, does one also implicitly deny the role of contingency in history? Braudel himself wrestles with the question of agency. He asks, “By stating the narrowness of the limits of [human] action, is one denying the role of the individual in history? I think not”; he offers “the paradox that the true man of action is he who can measure most nearly the constraints upon him, who chooses to remain within them and even to take advantage of the weight of the inevitable, exerting his own pressure in the same direction.” This does not seem unreasonable, though one might hesitate to speak of anything as “inevitable.” But then Braudel goes on to say that “all

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efforts against the prevailing tide of history … are doomed to failure,” and that “when I think of the individual, I am always inclined to see him imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has little hand, fixed in a landscape in which the infinite perspectives of the long term stretch into the distance both behind him and before” (Mediterranean 2.1243–44). This is scarcely a ringing endorsement of human agency. Michael Adas is one of many historians who, while deeply sympathetic to Braudel, have pushed back against him, insisting that human agency and contingency (along with ideology) are significant factors in history, and that even the long view must account for them. Regarding agency, he writes: “In and of themselves, institutions, systems, and processes cannot account for historical change or causality. Rather, they comprise the contexts (essential to historical analysis) in which human agents, both as individuals and as members of social collectives, make history” (87). Along the same lines, Postlewait insists that “we need a model of action that includes both motivation and aim within the framing conditions of material culture and cultural conditions” (100). These points are well-taken. While human agents operate within the historical contexts of the longue durée, it is they who actually make history. It is also important to recognize the role of contingency (or what, when things go well, might also be called serendipity, fortuity, or luck) in theatre history. In theatre, the career of nō in the immediate aftermath of the Meiji Restoration (1868) is a compelling example of the significance of agency and contingency. The Meiji Restoration abolished the Tokugawa shogunate, restored power to the emperor, and set Japan on the path of modernization. This was all a terrible blow to nō. Its long-standing base of support—the shogunate and the feudal lords (daimyo)—was suddenly wiped out. As a result, “A great number of performers had to abandon their art, many nō stages were destroyed … or converted to other uses, and invaluable nō masks and costumes were sold” (Ortolani 106–07). In the words of Donald Keene, the form “was in disgrace,” along with the regime that had supported it; a mere handful of performers struggled to keep the tradition alive, and it was at grave risk of disappearing into history (43). “The turning point in the modern history” of nō (according to Keene) came through the agency of Iwakura Tomomi, an officer of the court, who saw that nō, despite its former association with the shogunate and feudal lords, might find a new niche as a repository of Japanese identity. In 1876 he arranged a performance for the imperial court and other

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dignitaries, which succeeded in arousing the emperor’s interest in the form. The future of nō, however, still looked bleak, for aside from this interest, the form was without support in a modernizing Japan that looked to Europe and the United States for cultural models. But as it happened, in 1879, Ulysses S. Grant became the first head (or former head) of a foreign state to visit Japan, and “the Japanese were understandably worried about how to entertain him.” Iwakura arranged a presentation of nō for the former U.S. president and the emperor. One might not expect Grant to have been a connoisseur of the ancient theatre form, but after the performance he is reported to have said, “So noble and beautiful an art is easily cheapened and destroyed by the changing tastes of the times. You must make efforts to preserve it.”4 His words were “taken to heart” by the emperor, who empowered Iwakura to establish a society for the preservation of nō. This society built the first new, permanent nō stage, arranged a regular schedule of public performances, and provided the basis for the reestablishment of the five major “schools” of nō (Keene 43–44). The historical context certainly shaped the world in which all this occurred, and indeed actually made possible its occurrence—but there was no historical necessity that Iwakura and the emperor would take an interest in the form, nor that Grant would prove so appreciative of it. Indeed, given the emphasis after the Meiji Restoration on modernizing Japan, the revival of an ancient theatre form closely associated with the discredited Tokugawa regime was unlikely at best. It would have been all too easy for nō to have gone the way of medieval European Passion plays: a form made obsolete by societal change, surviving only in a few vestigial traditions. As it turned out, however, the revived nō satisfied a latent desire for traditionality in a time of radical social change. As such, it became more conservative than ever in its texts and performance practices and was seen as the embodiment of “‘pure’ Japanese culture uncontaminated by foreign influences” (Keene 45). In light of this example, only a dogmatist (such as Braudel could sometimes be) could deny the historical role of human agents and contingency. That being said, however, it is also true that history is more than just agency and contingency. When we pull back from chronicling the “history of events,” the long view can expose the structures and trends within which the creators of those events must work. The survival of nō as a “living treasure” was dependent on the structure of Japanese nationalism, as well as on the trend of increasing societal interactions that happened to bring Grant to Japan. I will say more of these structures and trends shortly.

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For now, it is enough to observe that even while recognizing the importance of agency and contingency, the long view helps to expose the contexts in which agents work and contingency plays. If, as I have suggested, a key goal of the historian is to help us make sense of history, the long view offers a useful, even necessary, perspective that can expose contexts otherwise obscured by the luminosity of events.

Structures According to Braudel, a historical structure is “a construct, an architecture, but over and above that it is a reality which time uses and abuses over long periods. Some structures, because of their long life, become stable elements for an infinite number of generations …. Others wear themselves out more quickly. But all of them provide both support and a hindrance.” Structures can be as physically tangible as geography itself, but can also be abstract human constructs: Braudel, for example, mentions the “mental tools available to French thought at the time of Rabelais” (On History, 31, 32). Also, Braudel speaks of structures as being “fairly fixed.” By this he means that while structures endure through time, they remain susceptible to a certain amount of change before they break down (On History, 31). In other words, structures are not essentialist entities. One cannot hypostatize structures such as “Western creativity” and “Eastern traditionality”—to return to a pair of claims that are fundamental, as we have seen, to the Standard Western Approach—as if they were eternal truths. Social structures are the result of the accumulated choices of human agents. As Tim Cresswell writes, structures “cannot exist without the individuals in them acting in certain ways that produce and reproduce the structures.” Think of a line that customers might form while waiting for the cashier in a small shop: if the line is long enough, it might loop around one way or the other or extend out onto the sidewalk. If you want to purchase an item, you generally “reproduce the structure” of that line by placing yourself at the end of it. But the line does not have to be faithfully reproduced. You might choose, especially if you were at a critical node in the line, to bend it in a different direction. If others follow your lead, you will have successfully modified the line’s structure, even as it remains the “same” line. But as Cresswell notes, “Individual actions would have little meaning or efficacy without structures to hang on to” (203). If you were simply to stand alone in the middle of the shop and wait for service, you might never be served. Now of course the structures of which Braudel

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writes are far more durable than the line of my example, but the principle is the same, and helps to explain why structures and human agency should not be seen as incompatible: structures are created and maintained by individual agents as a way to help them accomplish their aims; one ignores them at one’s own risk, but they are always susceptible to change. The Theatre Form as Structure Theatre forms themselves are the most immediately significant structures in theatre history. Because I have already given ample discussion to the concept of theatre forms in Chap. 4, I want here to emphasize the form as a structure. Theatre forms are never static but maintain key continuities even as they undergo inevitable change over time and across space. When one takes the long view of a theatre form’s history, the form-as-structure becomes particularly clear, because whatever change might be introduced can more easily be seen as being balanced by no-less obvious continuities. Spoken theatre has been an unusually changeable form, but it is easy enough to a trace a clear line back to, say, Shakespeare and Lope de Vega, just as it is easy enough to distinguish it from the major forms that preceded it in medieval Europe. This is not to deny that the earlier forms had a great influence on spoken theatre, nor that the entire sixteenth century was a long period of transition; continuities through time are a central fact of theatre history. But in traits such as performance practices (e.g., the predominance of speech), personnel (e.g., professional artists), subject matter (e.g., secular material), occasion (e.g., regularly scheduled performances available through a long theatre “season”), and location (purpose-­ built venues in urban areas), spoken theatre quickly distinguished itself from earlier European forms and established a structure that is still evident today, despite hundreds of years of change within the form. The support provided by the structure of a theatre form should be fairly obvious. Among many other things, theatre artists (including playwrights, performers, designers, and so on) are provided with a living tradition within which to work, beginning with a set of relationships among people who go about creating theatre according to standards that might range from strictly regimented to casually agreed upon; established scripts serve as models and are often themselves performed; venues (or at least ways of organizing venues) appropriate to the form already exist, as do theatrical practices that have been honed for decades, even centuries. Theatre forms, moreover, provide a built-in audience, or at least a potential audience,

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because admirers of a form will naturally be inclined to keep seeing productions in that form. Also, this audience will be prepared (to a greater or lesser degree) to understand performances in that form. All this support reinforces continuity within a theatre form: artists and audiences alike will hesitate to give up what quite palpably “works” for them. It must be noted, however, that the structure of theatre forms can also provide a hindrance. The long shadows of respected scripts can intimidate playwrights, and their new works might have to compete with older ones even to reach the stage. Established theatrical practices can stifle creativity, while the venues themselves can inhibit innovation, having been designed expressly to enable or enhance a specific kind of performance. Audiences, meanwhile, can become dissatisfied with fare that is “more of the same,” especially when rapid social change leaves the form seeming archaic; alternately, their competence as viewers can become a straightjacket, limiting performers to that which their audience best understands and supports. The structure of a theatre form, whether a support or a hindrance, is above all a force for conservatism, channeling the work of artists along accepted lines. One can certainly defy that structure—and such defiance is at the heart of change within a form—but only at the risk of alienating one’s colleagues and audience. Structures of the Theatrical Context Virtually all forms of theatre exist within larger theatrical contexts, belonging as they do to the theatre complexes of their region, subregion, and locale. But a complex does not exist merely in the present day (whenever that might be); each complex reaches back into history as well. And when looking at a complex in the long view, enduring structures will often come to light. Traits are transferred, in one way or another, from theatre form to theatre form, often for centuries. These structures of the theatrical context lend a sheen of familiarity to newly emerging theatre forms, with their homologies providing points of orientation to artists and audiences alike. Two important examples come quickly to mind. The first is the use of “role categories” (also called “role types”) in Chinese theatre. These categories traditionally define certain types of characters, each of which has its own style of performance. They are based most immediately on gender but can also suggest a character’s age, social status, and personality (Li R. 25). According to William Dolby, the purpose of role categories “would seem to be to facilitate the organisation of

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the actor’s training,” but no less importantly, they “give the audience a feeling of familiarity and connoisseurship, in that they would to a considerable degree come to know what to look for and expect of the actor” (History 8). For the past millennium, “their use has been one of the main characteristics of Chinese drama” (“Early Chinese” 21). Although role categories are a remarkably pervasive structure, each theatre form modifies them to suit its own purposes, as a whirlwind summary (based on Dolby’s History of Chinese Theatre) will suggest. The early yuanben and zaju of the Song Dynasty had categories appropriate to their limited comedic content. But with the emergence of the more sophisticated nanxi (“southern plays”) and Yuan zaju (in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, respectively), a broader constellation of categories was established. In nanxi, the three main role categories were sheng (the male lead, usually a Confucian scholar or young student, rather than a martial character), dan (the female lead), and jing/chou (a pair of painted-face categories that were frequently interchangeable in this form and that Dolby sees as a single role category here) (86). Yuan zaju’s role categories were similar. Its main categories were zhengmo (“main man,” which might include younger or older men, sometimes being martial characters), zhengdan (“main woman”), and jing, a clown or villain type. As in nanxi, jing roles were notable for their painted faces (60). With the emergence of kunqu (in the sixteenth century), role categories saw significant elaboration, the main categories being sheng (“the more serious males roles”), dan (females), jing (“forceful” males, such as warriors or villains), and chou (comic characters.) Both of these latter categories customarily have painted faces; they now offer a clear distinction between the jing and chou roles of nanxi, while also splitting the jing category from Yuan zaju into its component parts of villains and clowns. Within each of the major categories, a range of more specific subcategories also developed, such as the laosheng (“dignified middle-aged or elderly roles”) (105). Jingju emerged a few hundred years later. It retains the basic categories of sheng, dan, jing, and chou, but offers an even more elaborate set of subcategories. Thus, the earlier laosheng is now subdivided into wulaosheng roles (“middle-aged or elderly dignified warriors” who typically wear white beards) and changkao roles (“high-ranking dignified warriors” who typically wear full armor, complete with flags attached to their shoulders to signify that they lead armies) (180–81). European theatre does not have anything quite like this Chinese tradition of role categories, although opera (with its vocal categories) and the

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Italian commedia (with its young lovers, various zanni, braggart soldiers, and so on) have certain similarities. Europe does, however, have its own region-wide, long-lived theatrical structures, one of which will serve as my second example. In a provocative article whose main concern is periodicity in English theatre, Margreta de Grazia suggests that 1660 might well be a more important historical marker than 1576 because “when the [English] theatres reopened [in 1660], a new kind of stage was on view. The proscenium stage had replaced the platform stage; a perspectival space set off from the audience had supplanted an open stage continuous with the audience” (18). According to de Grazia, “What was once a place in which action occurred becomes a representation or picture of a place where action occurs,” with this sort of representation being “a perfect materialization of [the] modern condition of visibility and knowability” (19; italics in the original). England was actually rather late in accepting this new sort of staging, which had its origins in the court theatre of Florence’s Uffizi Palace in 1568; it spread from there, most immediately to Italian opera-houses. The full package of Italianate staging included not only the proscenium that set off the staged action as a picture to be viewed, but also perspective scenery and machinery for stage effects, all brought together in purpose-built theatres (Lawrenson 9). As Maurice Slawinski writes, “The development of theatrical space, its technologies (moveable sets, lighting, sound effects) and the ‘language’ of spectacle and performance evolving out of them were almost entirely Italian achievements of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (127). This sort of theatrical space quickly diffused from Italy, and by the mid-seventeenth century its “full onslaught” was being felt in Paris (Lawrenson 188). When the Cavaliers associated with the English court returned to London in 1660, after nearly two decades of exile in France, they brought with them a taste for Italianate staging, and the new theatres of London were designed to satisfy that taste. Notably, this manner of staging was by no means limited to a single form of theatre, in the way that, say, kabuki staging is unique to that form. Instead, it became the de facto norm for all major European theatre forms. As George C. Izenour comments, “In eighteenth-century London, Paris, and Vienna, that which was understood as art and culture meant Italy, and it was therefore inevitable that Italian principles of theatre and stage design were generally adopted” (47). The result was that by the middle of that century, the staging that still dominates in Europe and the Neo-Europes

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was firmly in place, employed both for opera-houses and spoken theatre venues. As new theatre forms (such as panto and the Broadway musical) emerged in these regions, they have largely maintained the Italianate staging, modifying it only as necessary to suit their specific needs. Here then is a European structure that has existed for more than four centuries and has quite literally shaped performance in multiple theatre forms. The opportunities presented to theatre artists by Italianate staging have been enormous, so its endurance should not be surprising. It offers what amounts to a clean canvas on which theatre artists might paint as they please, a performance area that constitutes its own set-off world; this was especially the case after theatre reforms banned audience members from sitting on the stage. But this sort of staging has also restricted the possibilities for most European theatre forms, being inimical to the intimacy and interactivity of venues such as the now-superseded English playhouses. Italianate staging has not, of course, held exclusive reign in Europe. Platform staging has had a long, though not illustrious, half-life, especially in fairgrounds, while folk forms such as the Mummers’ play traditionally make do with streets, pubs, or private houses. Still, it has clearly been the dominant way to stage a show. In the early twentieth century, this dominance came under a sustained attack that targeted many established theatrical conventions, but it is not easy to do away with such a long-lived structure, and to this day most theatres in Europe and the Neo-­ Europes continue be built for prosceniums, perspective scenery, and elaborate stage machinery. The long view, as these examples illustrate, helps us to understand the theatrical contexts in which theatre forms are situated. As such, it can provide insight into why those forms are structured as they are, and why their events have some of the traits they do. The long view can also help bring to light the genetic relationship between different forms in a theatre complex by demonstrating the influences they have on one another. Structures of the Societal Context Beyond these structures of the theatrical context, one can also identify structures that do not arise specifically in theatre, but that exist in the societal context in which theatre is created. The society as a whole might well be considered a structure, but less amorphous are the more limited structures that exist in society, in particular language, religion, ethnicity/race, and statehood. These four structures are often so self-evidently embedded

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in theatre forms that they are easily overlooked. But like all structures, they have served to reinforce conservatism while providing both a support and a hindrance to theatre artists. In practice these structures are often intertwined, but for explanatory purposes it will be useful to discuss each in turn. Language is probably the most significant societal structure for theatre, if only for the elementary reason that words (whether spoken or sung) are one of the most widely used means of conveying dramatic action. It is reasonable to suggest that, as a general rule, audiences desire to understand what the actors are saying, so that they might more fully appreciate a show. This is not to deny that theatre can be wordless (as in ballet), nor that it is possible to enjoy a performance whose language one does not understand. European opera is perhaps the most obvious example of the latter, but a rather different kind of example would be nō, which employs an archaic vocabulary and densely allusive literary style that render the plays’ speech difficult even for native-Japanese speakers. As with opera, however, this problem is mitigated by the form’s emphasis on musicality and movement, as well as by the study given to the plays (Toki 113). The fact is, though, that while language provides an excellent way to convey the complexity of human thought, there are thousands of languages that are usually mutually incomprehensible. So even as language provides a support by giving artists a ready-made means of communication, it largely limits a theatrical event to those who happen to speak the language in which it is presented. For this reason, the plays of literary theatre forms are often subject to translation or adaptation; when these plays are recreated in another locale’s vernacular, the unfamiliar (which otherwise might have only a very limited audience) becomes at least relatively accessible. Translations and adaptations of French plays in particular (especially those by Molière and Scribe) stimulated theatre in much of Europe from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. More recently, translations and adaptations have introduced Asians and Africans to the classics of Greek tragedy and European spoken theatre,5 as well as to modern European playwrights. The translation of plays into European languages has been less frequent, unfortunately, but a decent collection could now be amassed, especially of plays translated from Chinese and Japanese. I should add, though, that translation inevitably changes a play: no two languages are fully commensurable, so even the most careful translations cannot help but introduce distortions. As the literary scholar Emily Apter argues, “With translation assumed to be a good thing en soi … the right to

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the Untranslatable was blindsided” (8). However valuable translation has been to overcoming language barriers in theatre, one must also recognize that many words, phrases, and concepts will be “untranslatable,” and that translation can at best offer an approximation of the original. The structure of religion, to continue on, has also had a massive impact on theatre history, as is particularly clear when one looks beyond secular European theatre forms. Obviously not all theatre has a religious dimension, but religious belief can be found in every society (however attenuated it might be in some places) and is taken very seriously in most. The result is that, in most societies, at least one theatre form is involved in some way with the local understanding of the sacred. Indeed, through much of the world it is essentially meaningless to speak of a distinction between secular and religious theatre. To take but two examples: the alarinjo theatre of the Yoruba, in what is now Nigeria, is usually presented in association with religious festivals, but mixes acts (idan) of a religious or ritualistic nature with others that satirize the foibles of people in contemporary society (Adedeji 241). In Korea, meanwhile, the Hahoe pyŏlsin-kut begins with prayer and seeks the “expulsion of evil spirits,” yet at the same time serves as “entertainment of the audience”; its short scenes, including one revolving around a pair of ox testicles, are almost entirely devoid of religious content (Cho 116, 125–28). The structure of religion is pervasive in many forms of theatre. It can supply a theatrical event’s narrative, characters, and themes, as well the performance occasion; and it can lend a play profound spiritual meaning for its artists and audiences. The Persian taʻziyeh, for example, presents cycles of plays that focus on the Imam Husayn, with an emphasis on the battle of Karbala, at which he and his followers were martyred; India’s ramlila relates stories about Rama, the seventh incarnation of Vishnu; the Passion and cycle plays of medieval Europe presented stories from throughout the Bible, focusing in particular on the Passion of Jesus; and on and on. The importance of religion is such that differing religious stories can sometimes be the basis of theatre forms that otherwise are largely homologous. The performance of the Jewish purimshpieln (Purim plays) closely follows the performance practices of European spoken theatre, but uses Old Testament narratives (especially from the Book of Esther) as well as other stories of perseverance in the face of oppression, with the specific occasion of performance being the Purim holiday (Rozik 139). Likewise, many of the stories told in the Javanese wayang kulit purwa are drawn from Javanese versions of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana;

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homologous to this form in most respects is wayang kulit menak, but this latter form focuses on legendary stories from the life of Amir Hamzah, an uncle of the Prophet Mohammad (Ghulam-Sarwar, 291, 290). It must be added, however, that the structure of religion can also be a hindrance to the development of a form: when one is not a co-religionist, one will generally have at best an academic or touristic interest in the form. And in contrast to the confinement brought about by the structure of one or another language, the particulars of a given religion cannot be overcome by translation. One can certainly appreciate, even admire, theatre devoted to an alien religion—but even if one is familiar with its historical and theological references, it remains a challenge to be spiritually moved by it. Next we come to ethnicity and race. The precise relationship between these terms is highly debated, but for our purposes, it will suffice to follow the sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel in saying that “racial/ethnic identity” is, in effect, a single concept (315). One’s racial or ethnic identity is often very closely associated with that of language and/or religion, but it is possible to find cases where different racial/ethnic groups are not separated by language or religion, yet have theatre forms that are theirs alone. Black and white Americans, for example, largely share the traits of being English-­ speaking and Christian, and I need scarcely note that activity in many theatre forms (especially spoken theatre and musicals) is shared by both groups—but still, there is at least one form that is specific to African Americans. I refer to what is known as the Chitlin Circuit, which (according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) is “of black folk, by black folk, and for black folk— a genuinely sequestered cultural preserve.” The plays of this form tell of “matters that are of immediate concern” to their urban Black audiences, such as “gang violence, crack addiction, teenage pregnancy [and] deadbeat dads” (140). They are not celebrations of, say, the Black struggle for equality; in fact, “the subject of racism—or for that matter, white people— simply never arises” (141). Rather, they reflect the realities that are part of many urban African American lives, and despite subject matter that is sometimes ugly, there is an “audience communion” with the performance (141). Nothing in the form’s staging or dramatic style should, in principle, limit it to Black audiences: Chitlin Circuit theatres use the aforementioned Italianate staging, and the form is, according Gates says, “basically a melodrama, with abundant comic relief and a handful of gospel songs interspersed” (140). As such, it belongs to a family of theatre forms whose existence dates back more than two centuries, albeit with an additional

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connection to a musical structure that evolved from African American worship. But it is the content of the plays, above all, that gives them their racial/ethnic identity, and is fundamental in their appeal to their audience, even as it largely limits them to that audience. As with the structures of language and religion, that of racial/ethnic identity is at once a help and a hindrance to theatre artists. The final structure I will consider is statehood. I refer here to any sort of political entity, including, but not limited to, nation-states. The structure of statehood is probably the least stable of the structures under consideration, at least from the perspective of individual people, who for one reason or another might easily find themselves living in states other than that in which they were born. Nonetheless, those entities, wherever they hold sway, are structures that can have a massive impact on the way that people live—and on the theatre they make or watch. Often that impact is associated with a particular religious ideology that is supported by the state, but one can also find examples where the government, for reasons having nothing to do with religion, imposes its will to change the way theatre is created. An especially clear example can be found in kabuki. In the form’s early years, most of its troupes consisted of women, many of whom were also (or even primarily) prostitutes; their theatrical performances, one might say, were a way of advertising their wares. In 1629, the shogunate began to issue a series of decrees that banned women’s kabuki. Interestingly, these decrees were not motivated by a concern for public morality; prostitution was a legal and licensed form of entertainment at the time. Instead, the government’s actions were in response to disturbances caused by audience members (particularly samurai) rioting to secure the favors of their favorite performers (Shively 7). Even before the ban on women, there were a few kabuki troupes whose performers were boys and young men. After 1629, these troupes became dominant, with their performers, like the women before them, often engaging in prostitution as well as theatre. The boys’ kabuki was itself decisively banned by the shogunate in 1652, once again because of disturbances in the audience for the favors of the performers. These various bans resulted in the supremacy of troupes consisting entirely of adult men, with onnagata performance of female characters; the plays presented by these troupes soon came to center on dramatic, as opposed to erotic, content. As Donald H. Shively puts it, “Governmental repression, ironically, had inspired the transformation of these popular performances from burlesque into a more serious art form” (9).

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Trends Counterposed to the structures of the longue durée are the long-term trends that have had no less of an effect on theatre, stimulating change even as the structures support continuity. Even to speak of trends, however, is to risk the sort of progressivism that is still prevalent in many discussions of theatre history. As I discussed in Chap. 3, the progressivist thesis holds that theatre history demonstrates an inexorable progress from ritual, with its emphasis on dance and music, to the more naturalistic theatre of the spoken word. Obviously, this is not the sort of trend I seek to identify. The trends I will be discussing are observable in general history. As we have seen, Braudel refers to them as the “secular tendency” but in the sense used here, “secular” has nothing to do with an absence of religion; the reference is to non-cyclical trends that extend over long periods of time, despite inevitable shorter-term variations. These trends operate on theatre both indirectly and directly—and either way, they are often implicated in theatrical change. But because they are, by definition, identifiable only when taking a long view of history, their impact on the development of theatre is all too easily overlooked when one is working on the more granular time-scale of the “history of events.” The historian Jerry H. Bentley offers a clear exposition on long-term trends, noting three in particular—“three realities of global human experience” that “reinforce one another with powerful effects throughout human history.” These trends are “rising human population, expanding technological capacity, and increasing interaction between peoples of different societies” (“World” 51). To these we can add the trend of accelerating urbanization, which derives from, but also helps to stimulate, the other three, and which plays an outsized role in theatre history. Evidence of rising population is all around us. The historian David Christian shows the trend in its broadest historical configuration. To take but a few numbers: ten thousand years ago, the total human population was approximately six million people; a thousand years ago, it was roughly two hundred fifty million; two hundred years ago it was nine hundred fifty million; at present, it is around six billion (143). As Bentley recognizes, “Population has risen at different rates in different lands, and … has been

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subject to numerous constraints,” such as famine, war, and plague. Still, “for any given thousand year period since the invention of agriculture, population has been higher at the end than at the beginning” (“World” 53). On a century-by-century basis, only the fourteenth century (out of the past thousand years) saw a decrease in the global population, owing to a series of famines and the pan-Eurasian Black Death (Frank 168). The only comparable demographic disaster took place in the Americas in the wake of their European “discovery,” but even as this disaster unfolded, population increases elsewhere kept the global population from declining. The rise in global population is of interest here primarily for its association with the other three trends. Human population has surged along with technological development, most notably since the invention of agriculture, making further development both more likely and more essential. Advancing population, in conjunction with technological developments, has also helped make interactions between societies increasingly possible. Finally, a rising population has made urban growth not only feasible, but necessary, with cities acting as loci for production, trade, and power (both civic and religious). In brief, then, rising population is a critical aspect of the three other trends, to which I will now turn. Technological Expansion Subsequent to the invention of controlled fire, the first great technological advance was the invention of agriculture some seven thousand years ago. Technological expansion has continued through the ensuring years, and since the late eighteenth century, its pace has become breathtaking. Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering, writes that it is driven by a simple principle: “Form follows failure.” When an available technology does not quite satisfy some immediate need, people will seek to improve its functionality; “since nothing is perfect, and, indeed, since even our ideas of perfection are not static, everything [technological] is subject to change over time” (22). But it is not the invention of a new technology, per se, that is critical. As Tobin Nellhaus argues, regarding communications technology: “What is at issue is not simply the effects of a [new] technology, but also how the technology is used and developed and the roles that it plays within a society. Major effects arise when the social utilization of a communication technology changes, even though the technology itself does not” (“Performance” 83). I would add that communications technology is only one of the many technologies that have impacted theatre

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history, and that technological development itself is but one of the important trends in human (and theatre) history. Expanding technological capacity has, of course, been no less uneven than population growth, and as with population, it has suffered numerous local setbacks. Some parts of Europe that had belonged to the Roman Empire did not recover the technological level of ancient Rome for over a thousand years. Indeed, sometimes technologies have been voluntarily abandoned, as when Polynesians gave up long-distance navigation in the fourteenth century, and Tokugawa Japan banned the production of guns (Bentley, “World” 55–56). Nor should we forget that older technologies can have surprisingly long half-lives, especially when put to new uses: windmills today are valuable far more for creating electricity than for grinding grain. Still, a general expansion of technology is undeniable, despite the “appalling cruelty, suffering, and environmental damage” that has sometimes accompanied the “increased human power, comfort, and safety” (Bentley, “World” 54). Technological expansion has affected theatre history both indirectly and directly, with the indirect effect often resulting from the way that a new technology can change the material circumstances of a society. One important example of this sort of indirect effect is the early development of European theatre. After the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, the western peninsula of Eurasia was roiled by incessant raids, invasions, and migrations. Agricultural communities, living mostly at subsistence level, bore the perpetual threat of attack. Urban life was virtually non-existent because cities required a sufficient agricultural surplus to support their populations of non-farmers, and also because concentrations of wealth are immediate targets of attack by outsiders, and therefore require a body of fighters who are also dependent on an agricultural surplus. But around the tenth century ce, the social order in Europe began to change. William McNeill, in a quick overview that necessarily skimps many details, specifies “three facets” of the new order that emerged at that time. First (and most critically) was the employment of a particular technology: the heavy moldboard plow, capable of working the thick, water-logged soil of Western Europe. Such plows had been invented centuries earlier, but “were not generally established as the essential basis of west European agriculture until the tenth [century],” when the incipient manorial system of social organization made possible the teaming of oxen necessary to pull the weighty plows. Once the moldboard plow technology was fully

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established, “medieval Europe attained an agricultural base broad enough to sustain both a numerous military aristocracy and a vigorous town life” (Rise 452, 453). McNeill’s second “facet” is precisely that military aristocracy. This “formidable class of professional fighting men” would, in subsequent centuries, become quite ostentatious, but “because the tastes of this class were at first simple, and the new type of agriculture was comparatively very productive, even a thinly populated and commercially primitive Europe became able to support relatively large numbers of knights.” With these warriors available to defend the thriving communities, “raiders and pirates soon lost their accustomed easy superiority [and] their depredations consequently slackened and soon ceased” (Rise 453). McNeill’s third “facet” results from the inability of raiders and pirates to now attain easy victory. They instead either settled down as agriculturalists themselves (as with the Vikings in England) or turned to trade as “an alternative way of getting possession of foreign goods,” with “pirate ships and raiding parties predictably [giving] way to merchant ships and pack trains.” Eventually, “merchant communities began to establish themselves permanently at some convenient location—often near a bishop’s seat or, more rarely, under the walls of an abbey or feudal castle” (Rise 455, 456); these were the seeds from which European urban life would grow.6 The increase in wealth made possible by the moldboard plow agriculture provided the material basis for the emergence of a European theatre that was more sophisticated than that of touring jongleurs. Religious institutions were among the earliest beneficiaries of the new wealth, thanks in part to tithing from commoners and bequests from the newly enriched elite, but also to the alacrity with which many of those institutions imposed serfdom on their own tenants (MacCulloch 369) As a result, institutions such as the Abbey of Gandersheim (where Hrotsvitha wrote Europe’s first-known plays) and the monasteries of Saint Martial and Saint Gall (early adaptors of the Quem Quaeritis trope) had sufficient wealth to free their inhabitants from field-work, allowing them to devote more time to the glory of God. Of the cities that soon developed in the shadow of one or another religious institution, Arras (associated with the Abbey of Saint-­ Vaast) was among the wealthiest, and by the late twelfth century, according to Carol Symes, was “a creative maelstrom of conflicting politics, unprecedented economic opportunities, and unfamiliar types of social mobility” (4). In this stimulating urban context, “five remarkable artifacts emerge: the earliest vernacular plays of medieval Europe” (1). To be clear, I am not suggesting that the wealth that followed from widespread use of

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the moldboard plow in any way “caused” the emergence of medieval European theatre. My point is that it provided the material basis for the institutions in which it was originated. By creating new opportunities for theatre, it was a critical part of the societal context in which the early European theatre artists worked, and helps to explain why their theatre emerged when it did and in the places it did. Technological development has also sometimes had a direct effect on theatre, with the technology of lighting being a particularly important example. Theatre has often been performed outdoors, in daylight, but for one reason or another this is not always desirable. Performing at night or indoors (or both) is sometimes preferred, but present the problem of visibility, and so various technologies for lighting these performances have been employed. The first and simplest was the torch, to be followed by the oil lamp and then mass-produced candles. But the most radical development in lighting technology was probably the introduction of gas lighting, which changed the nature of theatrical events wherever it was introduced. The technologies that preceded gaslight cast a mediocre light and often caused devastating fires, so a stronger and safer kind of lighting was desirable. Gas lighting was introduced into theatre in 1815, in London’s Covent Garden, though at first it was used only to light some of the public areas of the theatre. Lighting of the performance itself was not to come for another two years, when, on August 6, 1817, the playbill at the Lyceum Theatre in London announced, “The gas lights will this evening be introduced over the whole stage” (Rees 9). Curiously, it took some twelve years before most of the major theatres in London had gas lighting (Rees 12). This was due both to the sheer cost of installing gas and to the rather common complaint that gaslight “allowed people to see too much”: the “poverty” of scenic, costume, and prop materials was “instantly discovered by an excess of light” (Rees 189). As more and more stages across Europe were lit with gas, a new premium was placed on these materials, which helped promote a move toward realism in them. Associated with the introduction of gaslight was the ability to darken the house during performances. In 1821, the Lyceum began experimenting with lowering the house-lights during performances, though the practice was used “sparingly,” at least in England, for much of the century. The primary reason for this was the complaint, especially from long-time attendees, that “a darkened auditorium … demanded and focused their attention on the stage,” thereby restricting the social aspect of theatre-­ going (Rees 197, 188). As the practice became widespread, however, it

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helped to reinforce a key idea of Italianate staging: the inviolate stage-­ picture, disassociated from the (now-darkened) world of the audience. The 1878 introduction of gas lighting into kabuki similarly brought about “a considerable change in the aesthetics” of the form, since the stage had previously been illuminated only by candles, torches and the weak daylight allowed through paper windows. The brightness of gaslight, however, rendered the actors’ make-up too garish; their movements also now seemed too broad and stylized, appearing “simply ridiculous” in the bright new light; and the kōken (stage assistants), dressed in black, became clearly visible for the first time (Leims 113). Much of this echoes the European complaints about gaslight. Although the kabuki audience remained lit to reduce the shock effect of the light, more subtle makeup and movement were required of the performers, and the “invisibility” of the kōken became more a convention than a reality (Leims 113–14). At both ends of Eurasia, and elsewhere as well,7 the new lighting technology directly impacted the way that theatre was created and received. Increasing Societal Interactions In addition to the trends of rising population and expanding technological capacity is Bentley’s third trend: the increase of societal interactions. Bentley suggests that “from remote times to the present, interactions have had significant political, social, economic, and cultural ramifications for all the people involved” (“Cross-Cultural” 750). Among the historical processes involved in these interactions have been “large-scale migrations, campaigns of imperial expansion, long-distance trade, the spread of biological species, and encounters and exchanges of religious and cultural traditions” (“World” 58). As with the previously discussed trends, we must recognize that the increase in inter-societal contact has occurred at a highly uneven pace. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire isolated much of what is now Europe from intercourse with the more highly civilized lands to its east and south for about half a millennium. And a few societies, such as Tokugawa Japan, intentionally limited external contact for hundreds of years. Despite those fluctuations, however, the long-term trend has been toward an ever-greater level of interaction, thanks in large part to developments in transportation technology. The impact on history has been massive, and McNeill goes so far as to argue that “through the larger part of recorded history, the main drive wheel of historical change was contacts among strangers, causing men on both sides of such

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encounters to reconsider and in some cases to alter their familiar ways of behaving” (Shape 42). As with technological expansion, inter-societal relations have both indirectly and directly affected theatre. One of the most notable indirect effects was brought about by the spread of Buddhism from its native home in India. The religion, writes Bentley, “traveled the silk roads and established its presence in the diaspora communities of foreign merchants [and the monastic communities they supported] in central Asia and China,” via which it reached Japan by the fifth century ce; meanwhile, along with Hinduism, it “sailed the Indian Ocean and attracted the strong interest of southeast Asian elites, who voluntarily associated with Indian traders and converted to Indian faiths.” One of the reasons Buddhism was able to spread so widely was its “doctrinal flexibility,” which made it easily adaptable “to various needs, interests, and circumstances” (Old World 47, 44). This allowed it to co-exist or even blend with other religions—as in China, where it co-existed with Taoism and Confucianism, and  in most of Southeast Asia, where it blended with both Hinduism and the native animism (Lockard 35). Curiously, Buddhism has left little imprint on theatre in India, although one of the earliest playwrights of the ancient Sanskrit theatre, Asvaghosa, was himself a Buddhist and wrote plays on Buddhist subjects (Richmond 53). But Buddhism looms large as an influence on theatre elsewhere. In Central Asia, an example is the Nepalese theatre form called mani-rimdu. The public festival in which the form is presented lasts three days, with the second day being dedicated to a thirteen-part theatrical performance. The performers are Buddhist monks; the venues are in their monasteries; and “the main purpose” of the performance “is to reinforce traditionally held beliefs in Buddhism and to depict the superiority of the religion over the ancient Bon religion” (Banham 201). In China, meanwhile, Buddhism has provided the subject matter for numerous plays, including Journey to the West, which tells of the pilgrimage of Xuanzang to India, seeking sacred Buddhist texts; the play itself contains “copious quotations from the Buddhist scriptures and the theme of Buddhist morality” (Dolby, History 142). In Japan, nō plays often feature Buddhist monks as their waki characters, and Komparu Zenchiku (a leading actor, playwright, and theorist of the fifteenth century), writes, “At the foundation of every performance, as well as all art, all life, and all existence, is the fundamental Buddha nature” (quoted in Ortolani 128). Finally, in Southeast Asia, numerous theatre forms draw on Buddhist religious literature for their narratives. The now-obscure Burmese form called nibhatkhin, for example, offers

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“pageant productions of Buddhist birth-stories (Jataka)” that traditionally were performed “on carts in city streets for a popular audience” (Banham 17). Other examples could be adduced from all these regions, but the point should be clear. Although Buddhism was adopted (and adapted) through much of Asia for reasons having nothing to do with theatre, it nonetheless had a powerful effect on it wherever the religion was taken up. Sometimes, though, theatre is directly affected by societal interactions. The increased rate of such interactions in the past two centuries (made possible especially by new technologies of transportation and communication) has wrought profound developments as theatre forms of different regions have been brought into contact with one another. The emergence of the Yoruba popular theatre, in present-day Nigeria, is a fine example of the interaction between domestic and foreign traditions. The most obvious, yet fundamental, domestic element in the emergence of the form is the Yoruba language in which the plays are generally performed. Two additional domestic elements were also crucial. First is the ethnic heritage of Yoruba folklore, which provides “a vast treasury of theatre material,” including plots, proverbs, “ornamental dialogue,” and so on (Owomoyela 264). Second is the influence of an earlier theatre form, alarinjo, which emerged perhaps four hundred years ago and has lasted to the present day. All of the folkloric aspects mentioned earlier are to be found alarinjo, and to these we must add alarinjo’s ever-present drums, its regular recourse to dance and to chant/song, as well as the professionalization of its performers (Adedeji, passim). And yet foreign theatre forms also played a huge role in the emergence of the Yoruba popular theatre. British colonialism had introduced Christian missions into Nigeria; before long, some churches broke away to hold their services in the vernacular (Barber et al. 38). Within these churches, a popular form of performance was the “cantata”: “dramatized versions of well-known Bible stories, rendered entirely or almost entirely in song” (Barber et al. 39). In the mid-1940’s, Hubert Ogunde began staging cantatas that were, at first, rather typical church productions, although from the beginning he included vernacular music along with the more hymn-­ like music of earlier cantatas. In the next few years, however, he took a series of steps that exploded the cantata form. He introduced secular plots and themes, including folkloric and anti-colonial material; he made extensive use of drums and chanting, as well as of improvised dialogue between the set-piece songs; and he professionalized his troupe. Taking advantage

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of the astonishing increase in population and wealth in Lagos and other Yoruba cities, the troupe began touring through the urban and semi-­ urban areas of Yorubaland, performing in movie houses, night clubs, town halls, and community centers (Barber et al. 39–40; Jeyifo, Yoruba 70–73). The effect of societal interactions, in this case, was quite direct in bringing about change, for the Yoruba popular theatre could not have come into being without a particular set of indigenous and imported theatrical traditions being intermixed to create a new, highly syncretic, form. Accelerating Urbanization The fourth secular trend I want to examine is urbanization. As Jürgen Osterhammel observes, “Urbanization used to be understood in a narrow sense as the rapid growth of cities in conjunction with the spread of mechanized factory production; urbanization and industrialization appeared as two sides of the same coin.” This association of urbanization with industrialization is not illogical from a contemporary Eurocentric perspective, given that for the past few hundred years, the processes have been closely intertwined in European and Neo-European cities. Still, it is a misleading perspective, which, as Osterhammel notes, “can no longer be upheld.” A more broadly applicable definition highlights urbanization as “a process of social acceleration, compression, and reorganization, which may occur under a range of very different circumstances. The most important outcome of this process was the formation of spaces of increased human interaction in which information was swiftly exchanged and optimally employed, and new knowledge could be created under favorable institutional conditions” (249). Under such a definition, accelerating urbanization can clearly be seen as one of the most important secular trends in world history, having begun long before anything that could properly be called industrialization. Raw numbers can give some sense of urbanization’s scale. Regarding cities in Eurasia and North Africa, David Christian notes that “in the third millennium bce, there were perhaps eight cities with at least 30,000 inhabitants”; by 100 ce, there were some seventy-five cities of at least this size, with the largest of them holding some 450,000 people. A downturn in urban development, owing to plagues and the turmoil of foreign invasions, took place in the mid-first millennium ce, but by 1000 ce there were again seventy such cities; and from that point, the acceleration of urbanization has been virtually unabated (326). Currently, there are

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thirty-three “megacities” with populations of over ten million people each; indeed, according to a United Nations report, some 55% of the global population is now urban dwelling, up from 30% as recently as 1950 (United Nations). Generally speaking, one can say that—as with population, technological expansion, and societal interrelations—urbanization saw an erratic but regular increase across the past five thousand years or so, with a dramatic upturn over the past couple hundred years. I have already discussed (in Chap. 5) some of the direct effects that cities have on theatre, so here I want to focus on what is probably the most important indirect effect of urbanization on theatre: the city as “cultural crucible.” The term comes from the urban historian Peter Hall. Among the cities he examines are two (ancient Athens and sixteenth-century London) that he notes specifically as having been crucibles for theatre. I will focus on mid-twentieth century Lagos, Nigeria, the “crucible” in which the previously discussed Yoruba popular theatre was forged. Many hundreds of cities have emerged over the millennia, but relatively few have become the sort of cultural crucibles that Hall examines, and that Lagos became. Hall has identified some of the characteristics of these cities. The first is, in effect, a background characteristic: “A long accumulation of psychological and social traits, a kind of cultural reproduction over generations,” that makes the people of a given locale “especially amenable to art or to thought” (20–21). For our purposes, we are looking for an amenability to theatre, which is easily identifiable in the people of what is now Nigeria. As I noted in Chap. 5, when discussing subregions in sub-­ Saharan theatre, masquerade theatre forms are especially concentrated in current-day Nigeria, suggesting a distinct cultural amenity to theatrical expression. Indeed, in addition to the numerous masquerade forms to be found there, alarinjo theatre dates back to before European colonization, and as we have already seen, Hubert Ogunde borrowed from this form in creating the Yoruba popular theatre. The next characteristic of cultural crucibles is a growing population that is undergoing “rapid economic and social transformation” (284). They are cities “in transition,” heading “into new and unexplored modes of organization,” with “transformation[s] in social relationships, in values, and in views about the world” (284, 285). In these transitional cities, change is stimulating. It is important to note, though, that not all change is created equal, and that “societies in which all order, all points of reference, have disappeared” will not be cultural crucibles (286). In the previous chapter I discussed how the rapid growth of London and Edo created

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middling classes of sufficient size and wealth to become the bulwarks of spoken theatre and kabuki. Twentieth-century Lagos was also a city undergoing rapid growth and transition. At the start of that century, Lagos had a population of some 50,000 people (Encyclopedia Britannica); by 1948 it had reached 333,000, and it grew to over a million by 1960 (Barber et al. 3). Societal interactions were the prime reason for Lagos’s growth. British colonialism “accelerated the formation of new classes: cash-cropping farmers, an educated elite, and, between them, an amorphous urban ‘intermediate class,’ made up of wage laborers, artisans, traders, providers of services of all kinds, low-paid civil servants, [and] employees of big trading companies” (Barber et al. 2). It was by and for this “intermediate class” that the Yoruba popular theatre was created. Related to the characteristic of a fast-growing and transforming population is the sheer  concentration of people to be found in crucible cities. This has an impact on theatre artists and their audiences alike. For the artists, the concentration allows for collaborations, rivalries, and influences. Gary Taylor asks whether the playwrights of Elizabethan England were “rivals or partners.” The answer, of course, is both. But the more important point is that “each playwright’s individual success contribute[d] to the collective health of the theatrical economy on which they all depend[ed]” (53, 54). A similar dynamic took place in Lagos. Within a few years of Ogunde having established the viability of Yoruba popular theatre, others followed his lead. Each troupe developed its own “distinctive and strongly characteristic style” as they competed and interacted, and together they “blazed the trail for later groups” who would take advantage of the audiences that had been created (Barber et al. 40). In regard to the audience, the concentration of urban populations makes theatre physically accessible to sufficient numbers to justify its continued performance, and technological developments have made urban-based theatres accessible to increasingly dispersed audiences. Trams, buses, and subways serve city-dwellers who live far beyond walking distance; more recently, trains and automobiles have brought entire urban agglomerations within the sphere of the urban theatres, while (for some forms) airplanes have brought international audiences. For Yoruba popular theatre, interestingly, modern transportation has also allowed for the development of audiences who remain outside the city. As a result, the form’s troupes regularly engage in barnstorming tours throughout Yorubaland (Kerr 91). Another important characteristic of cultural crucibles is their function as centers of wealth, for according to Hall, “It [is] true that, as

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D.  H. Lawrence once said, culture [is] founded on the deep dung of cash.” For a crucible city, “wealth is important,” particularly “wealth to spare”: it meant “individual patronage, but it also meant community patronage” (284–85). The urban concentration of wealth frees at least a few people from more immediately productive labor so they can work (at least some of the time) in the service industry of theatre, relying on others (be they wealthy patrons or wage-laboring audiences) for financial support.8 A city in the sort of transition analyzed by Hall will likely be seeing a substantial increase in its overall wealth, but it will certainly be seeing that wealth distributed in new ways, sometimes among its established segments, but sometimes to segments that were previously nascent or even non-existent. The urban “intermediate class” of Lagos, mentioned earlier, did not exist before the twentieth century, and even up until the Second World War, write Barber et  al., “colonialism had been run on a shoestring.” But during the war and through the post-war boom, “the sector of paid employees” greatly expanded, “putting cash into the pockets” of farmers in the outlying area, wage workers, and entrepreneurs (3). Lagos had more wealth than ever before, and an increasing portion of the wealth was possessed by the “intermediate class,” which was willing and able to spend it on entertainment. And because the Yoruba-speaking area of Nigeria had “been urbanized since long before colonization,” and “the interaction between urban-based and rural-based people was seamless and continuous” (3), audiences for Yoruba popular theatre could be found throughout the area. Spoken theatre remained too foreign for many of these people, despite excellent Nigerian playwrights working in the form, likely because it was generally performed in English. But the Yoruba popular theatre—with its unique combination of domestic and European characteristics—proved a perfect fit. Hall mentions one final characteristic of cultural crucibles: “An element of serendipity that will refuse to be explained in any systematic way.” As I discussed earlier, it is all too easy, when taking the long view, to lose track of individual people. But people have their own individual wills; moreover, as Hall suggests, “People meet, people talk, people listen to each other’s music and each other’s words, dance each other’s dances, take in each other’s thoughts. And so, by accidents of geography, sparks may be struck, and something new come out of the encounter” (21). Hubert Ogunde was a policeman as well as a church choirmaster when he created his early, rather conventional cantatas. There was no necessity that he would go on to develop his art in entirely original ways, and in fact, his decision to give

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up his police career in favor of a theatrical one entailed a shocking loss of status (Kerr 87). But when he sought to professionalize, he was confronted by an immediate problem. Though it was easy enough to find men to perform in his troupe, it was difficult to find and retain female performers, owing to the social strictures of the time. Ogunde solved the problem, as he himself writes, by “remember[ing] the tradition back home—polygamy is the answer! So I had to keep the girls as wives in order to keep going on” (quoted in Jeyifo, Yoruba 81). As it happens, he had the good fortune to meet and marry women who were talented enough to serve as the core of his troupe even as the men he hired came and went. In fact, this manner of retaining female performers proved so effective (and perhaps pleasing in other ways as well) that subsequent troupe-leaders followed this expedient, with “many, if not all leading actresses” being the troupe-leaders’ wives (Jeyifo, Yoruba 87). As with the long-term trends of population growth, technological expansion, and increasing societal interactions, that of accelerating urbanization has generally fostered change—as opposed to the continuity that structures reinforce—by creating new opportunities for theatre artists. But I should be clear that the impact of these trends is not necessarily desirable. Over the past hundred years especially, these same trends have conspired to bring about the radical decline of countless theatre forms around the world. Modern media technologies such as radio, film, and television have siphoned away theatre artists and audiences; societal interactions have had a globally homogenizing effect, diminishing interest in local theatre forms; and the immiseration sometimes associated with contemporary urbanism—especially in poorer countries—can render insupportable the costs (however minimal) of theatre. Yoruba popular theatre has not been immune to these forces, and by the 1980s, many of its artists were turning to modern media to “reassert their distinctive popular ethos.” Barber et al. harbor the hope that these artists might also develop “a new phase of live theatre in the future” (54). This is certainly possible, but not at all assured. For just as the secular trends can create opportunities, they can alter the circumstances in which established theatre forms once thrived. The only thing that the secular trends will certainly remain associated with is theatrical change. * * *

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If the original sin of chronicling is that it reduces history to the tedium of “one damned thing after another,” the long view offers theatre historians a way to see that those “things” are by no means random. It seeks to identify and understand the enduring structures that reinforce continuities between the “things” of history, as well as the long-term trends that promote change in them. In this way, the long view helps to clarify the three contexts in which every theatrical event take place: the context of the event’s theatre form, that of the broader theatre complex in which it exists, and that of the society that hosts the event. These contexts do not determine the history of theatre, but the choices available to theatre artists, and the “serendipity” (to use Hall’s term) often involved in making those choices, are profoundly influenced by them. The structures that exist in each context offer support to artists by guiding them toward what has already proven successful, but at the same time impose limitations on what the artists can do. The long-term trends work both indirectly and directly on theatre: technological expansion, societal interactions, and accelerating urbanization (individually or together) create new opportunities for artists, even as they can also close off established ways of working. The long view offers a sense of scale that is not usually found in theatre studies, but as I have suggested in previous chapters (in regard to theatre forms and the geography of theatre), the ability to consider multiple scales is of great importance to historians, for what is discovered on each scale can illuminate one’s understanding of the others. It is by no means the case that world theatre history can be conducted only on the scale of the longue durée. As Sebastian Conrad observes: “The global dimension is not intrinsically connected to any [particular] time frames. Global perspectives can be integrated on every level, from macro-accounts spanning several centuries and more, to the analyses of the short-term and even of crucial moments” (149). But world theatre history does require that this time-­ scale be available, for, as Conrad also suggests, the challenge is “to balance … multiple scales and their explanatory claims,” for “whatever the topic, different layers of time will offer different perspectives” (160, 148). Just as expanding the geographic horizon of theatre opens up new ways to examine it on the local, regional, and global scales, expanding the temporal horizon to include the longue durée makes available new ways to understand specific theatrical events as well as the structures and trends that have helped to shape them. The global perspective and the long view need not be taken together, but when they are, they provide a new way of understanding theatre history.

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Notes 1. The concept of a historical “event” can be, as Thomas Postlewait notes, “quite ambiguous, complicated, obscure, and even [self-]contradictory” (89). In theatre, sometimes it is synonymous with what I have been calling a “theatrical event,” but sometimes not. Use of the word, however, seems unavoidable, however imprecise it might be. For a fuller discussion, see Postlewait 89–116. 2. The text to which Postlewait refers is the fourth edition of The History of the Theatre; the internal quotations come from Brockett’s claims for his text. Although there have been numerous further editions to this textbook, with the more recent having been co-authored by Franklin J. Hildy, Postlewait’s criticism is still germane. 3. Braudelian time-scales—in reference to literature as whole—are also noted in Franco Moretti, Distant, 85–87. 4. Grant was also treated to a lively kabuki performance; somewhat less surprisingly, he also enjoyed that. 5. See, for example, McDonald, Kennedy and Lan, Van Weyenberg, and Wetmore. 6. William Chester Jordan also notes the importance of the transition from a two-field system of planting to a three-field system, as well the introduction of a new kind of horse-collar that made possible the eventual use of horses for pulling plows. He also observes that any of these developments (as well as that of the moldboard plow) might be the response to the first growths in the population (8–10). 7. For the impact of the lighting change in China, see Li R. 33. 8. This is not to say that all theatre requires a direct transfer of money. As in other service industries (such as medical care), the service is sometimes performed for non-monetary remuneration, or even for free. But even “free” theatre requires sufficient wealth on the part of performers to allocate the time for rehearsal and performance. I will discuss this issue further in Chap. 7.

Works Cited Adas, Michael. “Bringing Ideas and Agency Back In: Representation and the Comparative Approach to World History.” World History: Ideologies, Structures, and Identities, edited by Philip Pomper, et al., Blackwell, 1998, pp. 81–104. Adedeji, Joel. “Alarinjo: The Traditional Yoruba Travelling Theatre.” Drama and Theatre in Nigeria: A Critical Source Book, edited by Yemi Ogunbiyi, Nigeria Magazine, 1981, pp. 221–48. Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. Verso, 2013.

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Banham, Martin, editor. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Rev. ed., Cambridge UP, 2000. Barber, Karin, et al. West African Popular Theatre. Indiana UP, 1997. Bentley, Jerry H. “Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History.” The New World History: A Teacher’s Companion, edited by Ross E.  Dunn, Bedford/St. Martin, 2000, pp. 376–84. Bentley, Jerry H. Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times. Oxford UP, 1993. Bentley, Jerry H. “World History and Grand Narrative.” Writing World History, edited by Benedikt Stuchtey and Eckhardt Fuchs, Oxford UP, 2003, pp. 47–65. Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Translated by Siân Reynolds, Harper & Row, 1972. 2 volumes. Braudel, Fernand. On History. Translated by Sarah Matthews, U of Chicago P, 1980. Cho, Oh-Kan. “Introduction and Translations.” Traditional Korean Theatre. Berkeley, CA, Asian Humanities Press, 1988. Christian, David. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. U of California P, 2011. Conrad, Sebastian. What Is Global History? Princeton UP, 2016. Cresswell, Tim. Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction. Wiley-­ Blackwell, 2013. De Grazia, Margreta. “World Pictures, Modern Periods, and the Early Stage.” A New History of Early English Drama, edited by John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, Columbia UP, 1997, pp. 7–21. Dolby, William. “Early Chinese Plays and Theatre.” Chinese Theatre: From Its Origins to the Present Day, edited by Colin Mackarras, U of Hawaii P, 1983, pp. 7–31. Dolby, William. A History of Chinese Drama. London, Paul Elek, 1976. Dosse, François. New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales. Translated by Peter V. Conroy, Jr., U of Chicago P, 1994. Encyclopedia Britannica (1911 Edition). “Lagos.” Frank, Andre Gunder. ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age. U of California P, 1998. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “The Chitlin Circuit.” African American Performance and Theatre History: A Critical Reader, edited by Harry J.  Elam and David Krasser, Oxford UP, 2001, pp. 132–48. Ghulam-Sarwar Yousef. Dictionary of Traditional South-East Asian Theatre. Kuala Lumpur, Oxford UP, 1994. Gras, Henk, and Harry van Vliet. “Paradise Lost nor Regained: Social Composition of Theatre Audiences in the Long Nineteenth Century.” Journal of Social History, vol. 38, no. 2, Winter 2004, pp. 471–512.

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Grosfoguel, Ramón. “Race and Ethnicity or Racialized Ethnicities? Identities within Global Coloniality.” Ethnicities, vol. 4, no. 3, September 2004, pp. 315–36. Guldi, Jo, and David Armitage. The History Manifesto. Cambridge UP, 2014. Hall, Peter. Cities in Civilization. Pantheon Books, 1998. Hulfeld, Stefan. “Modernist Theatre.” The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, edited by David Wiles and Christine Dymkowski, Cambridge UP, 2013, pp. 15–32. Izenour, George C. Theater Design. 2nd ed., Yale UP, 1996. Jeyifo, Biodun. The Yoruba Popular Travelling Theatre of Nigeria. Nigeria Magazine, 1984. Jordan, William Chester. Europe in the High Middle Ages. Penguin, 2002. Keene, Donald. Nō and Bunraku: Two Forms of Japanese Theatre. Columbia UP, 1990. Kennedy, Dennis, and Yong Li Lan. Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance. Cambridge UP, 2010. Kerr, David. African Popular Theatre: From Pre-Colonial Times to the Present Day. London, James Currey, 1995. Lawrenson, T. E. The French Stage & Playhouse in the XVIIth Century: A Study in the Advent of the Italian Order. 2nd ed., New York, AMS Press, 1986. Leims, Thomas. “Kabuki Goes to Hollywood: Reforms and ‘Revues’ in the 1980s.” The Dramatic Touch of Difference: Theatre, Own and Foreign, edited by Erika Fischer-Lichte, et al., Tübingen, Gunter Narr Verlag, 1990, pp. 107–17. Li Ruru. The Soul of Beijing Opera: Theatrical Creativity and Continuity in the Changing World. Hong Kong UP, 2010. Lockard, Craig A. Southeast Asa in World History. Oxford UP, 2009. MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. Viking, 2009. Manning, Patrick. Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. McDonald, Marianne. Ancient Sun, Modern Light: Greek Drama on the Modern Stage. Columbia UP, 1991. McNeill, William H. The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community. U of Chicago P, 1963. McNeill, William H. The Shape of European History. Oxford UP, 1974. Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. Verso, 2013. Nellhaus, Tobin. “Performance Strategies, Image Schemas, and Communication Frameworks.” Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, edited by Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart, Routledge, 2006, pp. 76–94. Nellhaus, Tobin. Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Nellhaus, Tobin, et al. Theatre Histories. 3rd ed., Routledge, 2016.

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Ortolani, Benito. The Japanese Theatre: From Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism. Rev. ed., Princeton UP, 1995. Osterhammel, Jürgen. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Patrick Camiller, Princeton UP, 2014. Owomoyela, Oyekan. “Folklore and Yoruba Theatre.” Forms of Folklore in Africa: Narrative, Poetic, Gnomic, Dramatic, edited by Bernth Lindfors, U of Texas P, 1977, pp. 258–70. Petroski, Henry. The Evolution of Useful Things. Vintage Books, 1992. Postlewait, Thomas. The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography. Cambridge UP, 2009. Rees, Terence. Theatre Lighting in the Age of Gas. London, The Society for Theatre Research, 1978. Richmond, Farley P. “Characteristics of Sanskrit Theatre and Drama.” Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance, edited by Farley P. Richmond et al., U of Hawaii P, 1990, pp. 33–86. Rozik, Eli. The Roots of Theatre: Rethinking Ritual and Other Theories of Origin. U of Iowa P, 2002. Shively, Donald H. “The Social Environment of Tokugawa Kabuki.” Studies in Kabuki: Its Acting, Music, and Historical Context, edited by James R. Brandon et al., U of Hawaii P, 1978, pp. 1–61. Slawinski, Maurice. “The Seventeenth Century Stage.” A History of Italian Theatre, edited by Joseph Farrell and Paolo Puppa, Cambridge UP, 2006, pp. 127–42. Symes, Carol. A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras. Cornell UP, 2007. Taylor, Gary. Cultural Selection: Why Some Achievements Survive the Test of Time— And Others Don’t. Basic Books, 1996. Toki, Zemmaro. Nō Japanese Plays. Tokyo, Japan Travel Bureau, 1954. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision, Highlights. esa.un. org/unpd/wup/ Van Weyenberg, Astrid. The Politics of Adaptation: Contemporary African Drama and Greek Tragedy. Amsterdam, Rodopi B.V., 2013. Wetmore, Kevin J., Jr. The Athenian Sun in an African Sky. Jefferson, NC, McFarland & Company, 2002. Wilson, Edwin, and Alvin Goldfarb. Living Theatre: A History of Theatre. 7th ed., McGraw-Hill, 2018.

CHAPTER 7

Continuity and Change in World Theatre History

According to the renowned nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt, “The essence of history is change.” Theatre historians have long taken this dictum to heart. As Stefan Hulfeld observes, the “historical narratives” in theatre studies “turn upon the dynamic element of change, whereas continuity and stability are described pejoratively or else suppressed” (16). And as I discussed in Chap. 3, the emphasis on change is at the heart of the progressivist thesis, where it serves to discount theatre in much of the world on the suppositious grounds it shows too much continuity. As should already be clear, this is flawed theatre history; more to the point now, however, is its misbegotten emphasis on change. The historian David Hackett Fischer, whom I mentioned in Chap. 3 for his study Historians’ Fallacies, identifies a pair of “fallacies of narration” that he considers “fundamental forms of error”: the fallacies of “presumptive continuity” and “presumptive change” (154–55). Fischer’s point is that neither continuity nor change is (in Burckhardt’s term) the “essence of history”; because history regularly shows both continuity and change, both require explanation. Indeed, those explanations are necessarily interrelated. As the sociologist Robert Nisbet suggests, “Paradoxical though it may sound, there is not the slightest possibility of understanding the mechanisms of change unless we understand, or at least recognize seriously, the mechanics of fixity and persistence in society” (quoted in Postlewait 107); the converse is no less true.

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This chapter continues the reconsideration of theatre’s temporality that I began in the previous chapter. As we have seen, consideration of the longue durée helps bring to light enduring structures that support continuity in theatre as well as long-term trends that stimulate theatrical change. In this chapter I will take a closer look at continuity and change themselves as they are expressed in individual theatre forms, and ultimately, in entire regions and on the interregional (or even global) level. This sort of examination is especially important for world theatre history because it can lead to an understanding of theatrical continuity and change that is applicable everywhere in the world and that might help explain the most widespread instances of change. As such, it is necessary if one seeks to construct a periodicity for world theatre history itself. That issue of periodicity will be the subject of the chapter after this one. Here, I will discuss how the impulses for both continuity and change are an inescapable part of theatre history and are in perpetual tension in every form of theatre. I will consider how each actually operates in theatre, focusing first on how continuity derives from the investments that artists and audiences make in formal, theatrical, and societal structures; then I will turn to the way that societal change, associated with fluctuations in the long-term trends, can alter the availability of niches in a theatre complex and promote theatrical change as artists (and their theatre forms) compete to fill those niches. Finally, I will discuss the typical means by which theatrical change is brought about. The chapter as a whole seeks a way to avoid the paired “fallacies of narration” noted by Fischer, and to provide a more detailed understanding of how continuity and change operate, for they are both the very stuff of theatre’s temporal dimension.

The Imperatives of Continuity and Change In theatre history around the world, both continuity and change can be traced to the nature of theatre itself. Theatre, as has often been noted, differs from arts such as poetry and painting in that it is possible for poets or painters to work on what amounts to a speculative basis, hoping to find some future audience; they might even have no expectations of an audience at all, but write or paint merely as a private pursuit. For better and for worse, however, performers cannot stash away their work in a desk drawer or dusty attic. By most definitions (including the one suggested in the Introduction) theatre requires actors and an audience that is present at

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their performance. The actor–audience relationship provides the key to understanding theatrical continuity and change. Theatre artists (including, but not limited to, the actors themselves) need the compensation that audiences (along with possible sponsors) can give them. Sometimes all they desire is the audience’s attention; more often than not, however, they seek some other kind(s) of compensation as well. Sometimes it is monetary, because creating theatre generally entails expenses of one kind or another, if only by taking up time that the artists could be using for more profitable pursuits. But other compensations also exist and might in certain cases be of paramount importance. Artists might seek to be compensated with gifts, food, or drink, or by a sense of aesthetic accomplishment or elevated social status or accrued spiritual favor; sometimes it is compensation enough to know that a communal obligation has been fulfilled or that the audience has been educated in some specific way. Other compensations also exist—including the sense of companionship that often develops among the artists—and obviously multiple compensations can be present at the same time. But the artists’ goal is not necessarily to gain the greatest possible compensation, especially in terms of money or size of audience. What is essential is that they gain sufficient compensation, however they themselves might define it, to feel justified in the effort of creating theatrical events. The desires of the audience (and possible sponsors) mirror those of the theatre artists in that a range of incentives can lie behind their willingness to attend and sometimes even pay for a performance. Entertainment is perhaps the most obvious of these incentives, along with emotional, intellectual, devotional and/or aesthetic stimulation. But, as with theatre artists, audiences can attend (or sponsor) a show to gain status, attain spiritual advancement, receive an education, or fulfill a communal obligation. They might also want simply to indulge their curiosity. Again, other incentives surely exist—including the pleasure of being part of an audience—and multiple incentives can obviously co-exist, but we can say that audiences seek sufficient satisfaction, however they might define it, to feel that the theatrical event was worth their support. Given this mutually dependent relationship between theatre artists and their audiences, it follows that each will have a strong interest in sustaining a relationship that has already succeeded at giving sufficient compensation and satisfaction. The artists will be motivated to give their audience what they have learned will “work,” just as audiences will be interested in supporting performances of a kind they have come to understand and

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appreciate. For this reason, artists and audiences become invested in the structure of one or another theatre form. As long as a given form continues to offer sufficient compensation and satisfaction, the artists and their audience will have good reason to maintain it. The upshot of this is what I call an imperative of formal continuity: a pressure on artists and audiences to uphold their relationship on its current terms. For better or worse, however, neither artists nor audiences are stable over time. Artists and/or audiences can chafe at the limitations of a form and desire a fresh direction, perhaps stimulated by their encounter with some other theatre form. And even if older artists and/or audience members prefer to hold fast to a form as it has existed, different (often younger) people filtering into their ranks might have their own ideas and seek to differentiate their theatre from that which currently exists. Dissatisfied artists or audiences, moreover, might be tempted away by competing theatre forms or by live performance beyond the domain of dramatic theatre, such as revues or sports; they might also be drawn by other (and newer) media, such as radio, film, or video. The occasional artist might strike out in a direction that is (to a greater or lesser degree) original, and manage to attract an audience that is open to (or deeply desirous of) change; if other artists follow suit, a new subform will emerge that might gain dominance. Many of these various instabilities will be associated with societal disruptions related to the secular trends of demographic growth, technological development, increasing interaction with foreign societies, or a rise in urbanization, as we will see. The upshot of all this can be called an imperative of formal change: a pressure on artists and their audiences (current and potential) to establish mutually satisfactory terms for a future relationship. These two imperatives—continuity and change—are in constant tension in every form of theatre, though one or the other might predominate for a while. As long as a form delivers sufficient compensation and satisfaction, continuity will have the upper hand; but when either is lacking, the pressure for change will increase. Theatre forms are, in effect, challenged to maintain a balance between the two imperatives. But theatre is created by and for people, and one cannot ignore the fact that people (perhaps especially those in the arts) are willful beings. They might be so devoted to their traditions—to continuity—that the long-term survival of the form itself becomes an issue. Conversely, people might be so deeply attracted to the stimulus of change that the form cannot achieve stability. There is no intrinsic value to either imperative, and the dominance of one or the other might be seen as a blessing or a curse; artists and

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audiences are the agents who, in effect, negotiate over the imperatives and determine their relatively desirability at any given time. One clarification, however, is necessary here. The actions taken (or not taken) by these agents are rarely the result of concern for the form’s success. People are usually driven by their individual aims: the desire for sufficient compensation (of whatever sort) by the artists, and the desire for sufficient satisfaction (again, of whatever sort) by the audience. The actions of artists and audiences, however, have a cumulative effect on the development of the form. With that clarification in mind, it should be an acceptable generalization to speak of the forms themselves as “obeying” the imperatives of continuity and change.

The Mechanics of Continuity The Basis of Continuity Writing about entire societies, the social geographer Robert A. Dodgshon suggests that “inertia is about persistence, the exclusion or absence of change.” Yet inertia is not a “dysfunction” leading to “anachronistic relic[s] from the past”; instead, it “operates as a constraint on change” and needs to be understood within the larger dynamic of continuity and change (162, 163). As Dodgshon further contends, “The experience of social systems when considered individually is that they ultimately resist ongoing change or cope with it badly” (51; italics suppressed). My argument is that this resistance can also be found in theatre forms, which we can take as artistic types of “social systems.” The imperative of continuity is powerful because artists and audiences alike have made investments in their theatre forms. The better those investments are paying off, the greater the disincentive for change, for as Dodgshon notes, “Those that gain the most from a system are less likely to change it” (183–84). I use the term investment to refer to expenditures of time, effort, emotion, and/or money, often over an extended period of years, that have been made in hopes of some present or future return. For a theatre form, the investment has essentially been made in all that has brought it to its present condition; the desired future return is the continuation of theatrical events within the form. More specifically, for the artists (including all on-stage and off-stage theatre personnel, as well as their troupes, theatres, and institutions) the investment will continue to pay off as long as the form continues to offer them the prospect of sufficient compensation. But their

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audiences (including not only those who physically attend shows, but also the people and institutions who offer sponsorship) have no less an investment in the form, which will be successful only as long as it continues to offer them the prospect of sufficient satisfaction. No one likes to write off a failing investment. This hesitation leads to what economists call the “sunk cost fallacy”: continuing to invest in something simply because one has already put so much into it, while harboring at least the faint hope that it might eventually pay off. Committing the sunk cost fallacy is a common reaction to an investment that seems to be failing, especially when the only option is to write it off and start over from scratch. In theatre, as long as the prospects (however dim) of sufficient compensation and satisfaction remain, people will hesitate to walk away from their investments. Investments, therefore, are a disincentive to change. According to Dodgshon, “Once viable structures, systems, codes, etc. have formed, they will be carried forward tacitly, not redeveloped. They will still have a learning and maintenance cost, but not a research and development or construction cost…. New forms and extensions might still be researched and developed, others might emerge as error copies or mis-translations, but existing forms will be taken as given and their transfer between generations reduced to minimum cost” (167). This is not to suggest there can be an absence of change in theatre forms—but change will be executed in a way that minimizes the threat to the investments that have been made in it. Maintaining the form as a viable structure remains the goal. There are many aspects to the investments that artists and audiences make in a theatre form. The expenditures of time, effort, emotion, and/ or money can be quite extraordinary, and the disinclination to write them off as sunk costs makes them important forces in the imperative of formal continuity. But forms themselves are only one of the structures that help reinforce continuity in theatre. Investments are also made in the structures of the larger theatre complex, as well as in societal structures such as language, religion, ethnicity/race, and statehood, all of which help reinforce the imperative of formal continuity. Investments in Theatre Forms Among the most prominent aspects of a theatre form in which artists and audiences make investments are the form’s venues, theatrical practices, and texts. There are, of course, others beyond these three—including the

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investments that audience members often make in personal identification with particular artists, or in self-identification as part of the fandom of a particular form—but these should be sufficient to illustrate my point. Some theatre forms, to be sure, use venues that have primarily non-­ theatrical purposes. As I have mentioned, the Mummers’ play is traditionally performed in pubs, private houses, or public thoroughfares; the free use of these venues is an economic requirement for a simple folk form that relies entirely on informal payments by the audience. Religious institutions can also provide venues for theatre, whether within the institutions themselves, as with European liturgical theatre, or on their grounds, as is the case with thol pavaikkuthu (tōl pāva kūttu)—a shadow-theatre in Kerala State, India, where many temple compounds include a “drama-­ house” wherein the performers mount their shows for an audience (now rather scant) that sits out in the open air (Blackburn 4–5). Indeed, entire towns can be turned into venues, as was the case with the cycle plays of medieval England, wherein parades of pageant wagons proceeded from station to station within the town.1 It is important to note, however, that while these various venues are ostensibly cost-free, all are owned or maintained by one or another party. Even if their primary uses are non-­theatrical, without the investment that has been made in them for those other uses, the theatrical productions they host would have to be moved elsewhere. And so one can speak of the willingness to host theatrical events as an indirect investment in a theatre form. Venues built specifically for performance, on the other hand, are a direct investment, and though some might be relatively inexpensive, the cost of others can be prodigious. Theatres built for European opera are costly enough that their construction and maintenance have almost always been subsidized by royalty, an ultra-wealthy elite, or the state itself. To give but one example: San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House was completed in 1932, for the presentation of both opera and ballet. It was originally paid for through municipal bonds, issued in 1927, worth four million dollars; accounting for inflation, that now (in 2019) equals just under sixty-million dollars. But there is more. A recent seismic upgrade and restoration of the opera house was budgeted by the city’s Department of Public Works at $96.5 million (San Francisco Public Works). When one considers that there are opera houses of more or less similar cost throughout Europe and in many Neo-European cities, it is evident that the total investment in these venues is quite staggering. As the example of San Francisco’s opera house suggests, given the cost of the original

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investment, there is very strong incentive to re-invest in such houses, and it might well be that the marked conservatism of opera is in part a reflection of the investment associated with its venues. But the investment in theatre forms is by no means limited to their venues. The next investment demanding mention is in theatrical practices. This investment is made by artists and audiences alike, for while the artists must learn to present their work in specific ways, audiences must develop the competence to understand them. For the artists especially, this investment can easily amount to a lifetime of effort. According to Phillip B. Zarrilli, for example, training for an aspiring kathakali performer traditionally began at seven or eight years old, though more recently it might start when the student is ten (66). The training begins with “body preparation” as well as learning the basic “expressive vocabulary” (73), then moves on to learning “every role in each play taught from the school’s syllabus,” which at one school is a set of twenty plays (80). After that a student can begin performing, but it is said that, with rare exceptions, a kathakali actor does not reach maturity until the age of forty (66). And lest it be thought that kathakali is unique in its training demands, one might consider the fact the training for ballet is scarcely less arduous. Experts say that “the ages of nine or ten mark a good starting point” for training, though “some systems, including the school of the Paris Opera, include eight year olds” (Greskovic 147), and even the most successful professional dancers continue to refine their art though arduous daily training. Similar regimes can easily be found throughout the world. With investments such as these, it is easy to see why kathakali performers and ballet dancers alike might (to use Dodgshon’s term) “research and develop” new ideas but resist a wholesale transformation or abandonment of their forms. But of course, all of this investment on the part of the artists is wasted unless the audience has also made the investments of time and effort (and also sometimes of money) necessary to understand what they are seeing. In many cases, the payoff sought for these audience investments is not merely competence, but a level of connoisseurship that allows audience members to finely judge the artistry of the performance and set it in the context of previous performances within the form. The final investment I will discuss here is in the corpus of texts established over the history of each theatre form. In some forms (as with Punch-and-Judy puppet shows) there is but a single basic text—or perhaps one might better say a single basic idea for a text, which allows for nearly endless variation.2 In these cases, the textual investment (though relatively

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minor) is in effect regularly renewed as troupes (or solo artists) develop their own versions of the show. In forms with literary texts, by contrast, some texts might be ascribed de facto canonical status; these texts provide artists with a body of proven material while also establishing textual norms within the form. In European opera, the canon is informal and at least marginally open, but certain essential works continue to be mounted regularly. In the course of 136 years (as of 2019), for example, New York’s Metropolitan Opera had performed Puccini’s La Bòheme 1331 times, while Verdi’s Aïda had received 1175 performances (MetOpera Database). In nō, the canon is virtually closed, with a total of about 240 plays in the repertoire of the five schools of the form (Ortolani 132). In forms such as these, the textual investments made many generations ago continue to pay off. Commercial theatre forms, which rely on the support of a broad population, have strong incentive to be nimble in their appeals to a popular audience, and so are particularly open to the development of new texts. Even these forms, however, seek to maintain their textual investments. European spoken theatre, for example, has developed many subforms over the centuries. But artists in English-speaking countries continue to find ways to mount the plays of Shakespeare, whatever changes might have taken place in venue-design and performance practices, and whatever liberties might be taken in the setting of the plays. Indeed, significant plot details have also been subject to change, even while the basic story and Shakespeare’s original language are mostly retained. Among the most notorious of these re-writings is Nahum Tate’s version of King Lear, which managed to contrive a happy ending with the union of Cordelia and Edgar.3 But despite the changes, the play was still promoted as being by Shakespeare, suggesting the continuing value of investments in that playwright’s work. In certain other theatre forms, it is not necessarily specific plays that make up the textual investment, but specific ways of structuring plays. In Java, for example, wayang kulit purwa plays are structured around “standard scenes” that recur in play after play. James R. Brandon identifies eighteen such scenes and notes that up to half a play might consist of them. A few of these scenes, in the order in which they might appear, are “First Audience” (in which a king receives in audience his relatives, allies, ministers, etc., leading to a statement of the problem of the play); “Opening Skirmish” (in which armies meet and fight an inconclusive battle); “Nature’s Turmoil and Clown Scene” (in which, amidst a natural

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disturbance such as an earthquake, the play’s clowns act up); “Hermitage Scene” (in which the hero is received by a religious teacher); “Great Battle” (the climax in which the opposing king himself usually fights and is defeated); and “Final Audience” (a celebration of victory that includes an offering of thanks to the gods) (On Thrones 20–27). Brandon also makes the interesting observation that some characters in the form’s plays “have no basis” in the mythological literature from which the plays draw their plots, and perform no function except to exist “in play after play” as characters in particular standard scenes (On Thrones 29); these characters are themselves textual investments. However many texts a particular theatre form might employ, and however binding the structural principles associated with those texts might be, the investment can be substantial: hundreds of years of labor, by artists known or unknown, go into the textual tradition of many forms, and countless hours of studying those texts have made it possible for performers to enact them. Audiences, meanwhile, have come to know and expect them, and sometimes to insist on their continued production even as some artists would prefer to make new textual investments (as has certainly been the case with European opera). Even if audience members do not know the specific text to be performed at a theatrical event, they might well still attend on the expectation that the text will fundamentally conform to those they already know. To casually cast all this aside is almost unthinkable, and so textual continuity is the general rule in almost all theatre forms. Investments in Other Structures Thus far I have been speaking of investments in the most important of the structures associated with theatre, the theatre forms themselves. But I need also briefly note the investments made in structures of the theatrical context and the societal context, for these also support for continuity. And while investments in any specific form might be relatively fleeting, those made in broader structures can pay off for many generations; they can also seem so natural that one might scarcely recognize them as investments. The investments made in the theatrical context are investments that are, in effect, transferred between theatre forms. In choosing to create or attend theatre of a particular form, one might never consider how much that form benefits from previously made investments. In Chap. 6, though, I discussed how the use of role categories has been pervasive in Chinese theatre across numerous theatre forms for nearly a thousand years, just as

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the use of Italianate staging has dominated theatre design in Europe and the Neo-Europes for nearly five hundred years. In both cases, investments originally made in one or another form have been transferred throughout the complex. These transferred investments create important continuities between otherwise distinct forms. But of course, even as these continuities can help a newer form succeed, they impose certain boundaries on how just how distinctive the form can be. Moving on, it is easy to overlook the relevance of investments in societal structures such as language, religion, ethnicity/race, and statehood simply because we tend to take these structures for granted. But we spend our first half-dozen years gaining linguistic competence, and both build on it and rely on it for the rest of our lives. Religious training also usually begins when one is young and can continue through a lifetime, and often offers a sense of identity and purpose that can be found in no other aspect of life. One might not need training, per se, to participate in an ethnic or racial group, but since it is less alterable than either one’s language or religion, the emotional investment in it might well make it a fundamental component of one’s self-identification. The investment in statehood, finally, is perhaps the simplest but most easily overlooked of all: not only can it be part of one’s identity, but there is generally also the not-­ inconsiderable cash investment that states demand of their inhabitants, in the form of taxes. Investments in the structures of language, religion, ethnicity/race, and statehood are obviously often intertwined, but we can briefly treat each in turn. The investment in language is probably the most significant of investments in societal structures, at least regarding theatre. As I noted in the previous chapter, while the shows in a few forms (such as European opera) might be given in a language that is foreign to some audiences, these are exceptions. Far more frequently, theatre is provided in a language its audience can understood. As a result, a theatrical event offered in any given language has, in effect, a built-in potential audience—but it also generally excludes the speakers of other languages. Canada, for example, is officially bilingual, but as of 2016, only 17.9% of the population reported being able to converse in both French and English (Statistics Canada/Statisque Canada). One might perhaps expect that the translation of plays from one to the other language would compensate for this limited bilingualism. But according to The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre, translation of Canadian plays from French into English has been very limited, while “the rarity of translations of Canadian plays from English to

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French is but another indication of the absence of creative and collaborative dialogue between the country’s two language groups” (Benson and Conolly 566, 564).4 The vast effort one applies to mastering a language receives a payoff (if only in small part) in the ability to understand what is being said on-­stage, but can also bring about a surprising disinterest in works written in a different language, even from within one’s own country. The investment made in religion is certainly no less significant as a force for continuity. A religion might emphasize any particular combination of beliefs, rituals, dogma, or life-styles, but all of these can be given expression in theatre; moreover, there are often narratives (written or oral) associated with a religion that can provide the plots and characters for religiously oriented theatre. The investments of artists and audiences include familiarity with these aspects of a religion, allowing for their effective theatrical usage. It is difficult, for example, to understand a cycle of taʻziyeh plays without at least some knowledge of the travails and martyrdom of the Imam Husayn. And it is even more difficult to understand the outpouring of emotion frequently seen at these plays without knowing that this narrative is a critical part of the belief structure of Shia Moslems: in response to the on-stage killing of Husayn, the tears of outrage are quite real, and the actors who play his killers are sometimes pelted with stones or otherwise physically attacked (Floor 181). The investment made in a specific religion is essential to the continuity of forms such as taʻziyeh. A person’s investment in ethnic or racial identity, meanwhile, can find expression in theatre traditions that reinforce that identity. Having already discussed the importance of “Blackness” to Chitlin Circuit theatre, I will turn here to another ethnically-based theatre tradition. Ethnic-Hungarian communities throughout Central Europe are familiar with the folk theatre form betlehemes játék, which is a kind of Shepherds’ play performed in public spaces or private homes on Christmas eve or Christmas. Immigrants brought the form to the United States, where it found a home in ethnic-­ Hungarian enclaves. In Toledo, Ohio, for example, performance is said to have been continuous “since the arrival of Hungarians” to the city (Penzell 180). Although the play is overtly Christian, “no particular spiritual benefit is thought to derive from performance…. The chief objectives are the fun of celebration and the maintenance of a group-identifying tradition” (Penzell 185). The power of ethnic identity, in brief, is critical in reinforcing continuity in this form of theatre. A person’s investment in statehood can also be a matter of identity, as I have said, but there is also the investment made through the payment of

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taxes and other assessments. The return on this investment, in terms of theatre, can be as simple as the provision of sufficient public safety to allow one to create or attend shows. In many states, however, theatre is subsidized to a greater or lesser degree. In Europe especially, this subsidy is to be found not only in the construction and maintenance of certain venues, but also in the ongoing support for the troupes that perform in them. In Great Britain, for example, there is not only the Royal Opera House (with its state-supported opera and ballet companies), but also two state-­ supported companies for spoken theatre, the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company; numerous “non-national companies” also receive governmental subsidy, though they might suffer a lingering resentment at having to “subsist on the crumbs that fell from the top table” (Shepherd and Womack 311). But even in far less affluent societies, government subsidy can be meaningful. In India, governments on both the national and state levels have “actively promote[d] productions by folk artists in remote villages.” The motivation for such support is not necessarily disinterested. The plays might be shaped to support governmental ends, as in a subform of tamasha, a folk theatre form that has proven to be particularly able to “survive all kinds of propaganda ‘loading’” without sacrificing “its traditional, entertaining features and conventions” (Abrams 407). One might add, though, that even if the British theatre subsidies are not so nakedly pragmatic, they serve the valuable function of shedding at least indirect glory onto the state. But whatever the amount of a subsidy, and whatever the purpose behind it, clearly the vast preponderance of state subsidies goes toward existing theatre forms and/or troupes, and so reinforce continuity.

The Mechanics of Change Current Approaches However much it is necessary to understand the mechanics of continuity, continuity itself is not difficult to conceptualize. This is not the case with change, beyond the basic observation that theatrical change is generally introduced as artists seek to create, maintain, or expand their audiences, so that they might gain sufficient compensation for their efforts. It is by no means unusual (nor incorrect) to claim that change in theatre is associated with societal change. It remains to be seen, however, just how theatrical and societal changes are associated. The theory of change

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embedded in the progressivism of the Standard Western Approach is reflectionist, and exponents such as Glynne Wickham do not hesitate to explicitly claim that theatre is “a mirror of society itself” (202). But it is left entirely unclear precisely how the mirroring occurs. This sort of unexamined reflectionism is scorned by Thomas Postlewait: “Theatre historians often depend upon a few standard analogies about art ‘mirroring’ or ‘reflecting’ society, as if these metaphors provide aesthetic and social explanations” (168). Metaphors, however intriguing they might be, are not explanations. A far better realized reflectionist theory of change has been advanced by Marxist historians. As Karl Marx famously wrote: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” (quoted in Eagleton 4); that “social being” is primarily created by “the precise relations between different classes in a society” in regard to the means of production (Eagleton 7). Marxism offers a clear explanation for how social change is reflected in arts such as theatre. Each period is understood to have an economic “base” which “generates a unifying principle” for the artistic practices (including theatre) of the “superstructure” associated with that base (Postlewait 166). A change in class relations therefore brings about a related change in the arts. Friedrich Engels, however, offered an important caveat that is sometimes missed by dogmatic Marxists: “According to the materialist conception of history, the determining element in history is ultimately the production and reproduction in real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. If therefore somebody twists this into the statement that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms it into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase” (quoted in Eagleton 9). Continuity through time and across space, however, can present a problem for Marxist thought, as Marx himself realized when considering the continuing appeal of Greek arts. Interest in Greek tragedy, for example, was first revived in sixteenth-century Italy; by the nineteenth century, it was being seriously studied (with its plays being performed) throughout Europe, and by the late twentieth century, its plays had gained performance in (among many other places) a number of cities in Africa. Obviously, though, the class structures in ancient Athens, Renaissance Italy, nineteenth-century Europe, and contemporary Africa are not the same. As Marx saw, “The difficulty is not in grasping that Greek art is bound up with certain forms of social development.” Rather, it “lies in

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understanding why it still constitutes with us a source of aesthetic enjoyment—and in certain respects, even prevails as the standard and model” (quoted in Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 237). The historian Hayden White rather hyperbolically speaks of this problem as a “scandal of Marxism.” Engels’s clarification of the Marxist approach does not quite solve the problem: whatever other factors might be involved, Greek tragedy’s appeal in these various times and places has nothing to do with any socio-economic similarities they might have with ancient Greece. So, White asks, how is it possible for tragedy to “escape the kind of ‘determinism’ Marxism must assign to it”? (156). Marx’s explanation was that Greek art is an expression of the “childhood” of humanity, and for that reason has remained important to us even as we have moved beyond that childhood (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 238). But as Terry Eagleton notes, this explanation has been “universally lambasted”—so he tries to rescue it. He suggests that we respond to Greek art “because our own history links us to ancient societies; we find in them an undeveloped phase of the forces that condition us.” Moreover, “each element of a society’s superstructure [such as art] has its own tempo of development,” and “is not tied in any simple one-to-one way to the mode of production” (13, 14). This rescue attempt is unconvincing. If Eagleton’s first suggestion is valid, the “forces that condition” contemporary African societies can be found, “undeveloped,” in ancient Greece. It is far more likely, however, that the more relevant undeveloped forces would be found in Africa itself. Eagleton’s second suggestion, meanwhile, implies that artists anywhere can produce art that does not actually reflect their current society’s economic structure. But if this is the case, then there is little left of Marx’s idea that social being determines consciousness. Even Engels’s caveat— that social being is the ultimate, but not the only, determining factor—fails to account for the performance of Greek tragic plays in lands whose class relations are thoroughly different from those of ancient Greece. None of this is to suggest that theatre is divorced from society. Eagleton goes on to argue that literature does not stand “in some reflective, symmetrical, one-to-one relation with its object. The object is deformed, refracted, dissolved” (49). He suggests that the relationship between art and society is rather analogous to the way that “a car reproduces the materials of which it is built” (51). There is nothing objectionable when the matter is put in this way. Theatrical events are undoubtedly built from the “materials” of the society in which they are created. Among these

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materials, as I have suggested, are societal structures such as language, religion, race/ethnicity, and statehood, as well as the materials available from other theatre forms in the region. But to say all this does not say terribly much about how theatrical change takes place, or about why there might be continuities between the theatres of very different societies. I will return later to the problem of Greek tragedy’s continuing appeal. For now, let me turn to a different approach to theatrical change that has been championed by Tobin Nellhaus and has been used, even from its first edition, to structure the textbook Theatre Histories. Nellhaus argues that “theatre’s key likeness to society is not a question of imitation or representation, but homology. Whether or not a theatre performance portrays a model of society, ontologically it is a model of society.” Most important for Nellhaus’s theory of change is his point that “theatrical performance possesses a special relationship not only to the ontological structure of society, but also in particular to [its] communication practices” (Theatre, Communication 155, 162). And so: The general theory … is that a society’s use and deployment of the modes of communication available to it (which may include speech, handwriting, printing, and electronics) have fundamental cognitive effects…. As a complex and dynamic whole, the communication framework generates image schemas establishing epistemological and ontological assumptions. These assumptions in turn are re-embodied in performance, both in the theatrical practices and in the dramatic text; that is, these assumptions establish the foundations of the performance strategies of the period. (“Performance Strategies” 82–83)

Whether or not one accepts the idea that theatre and society are homological, it seems clear that Nellhaus’s argument about changing “communication frameworks” should be an important aspect of any theory of theatrical change. One can wonder, though, whether changes in such frameworks should always be accorded primacy. Nellhaus himself recognizes that these are not the only factor in major theatrical change. Regarding Greek tragedy, he offers an addendum: “The notion that literacy per se has certain specific and inevitable effects … cannot be sustained: its effects depend on other conditions, especially political, economic and gender relations” (Theatre, Communication 67). This is reminiscent of Engels’ comment that while social relations are the ultimate cause of historical developments, they are by no means the only ones. But the question

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remains: Must changes in communication frameworks always be the most important factor in theatrical change? We can begin at this point to take stock by asking how all-encompassing these theories of change might be. Theatrical change, after all, takes place on multiple levels, ranging from change introduced in the course of a single production run, to change brought about by new theatrical  subforms and forms, to change that affects the theatre of entire societies or regions, or even to change that take place, more or less simultaneously, in multiple regions or around the world. Marxists and Nellhaus are concerned with the societal (and perhaps regional) level of change, and so any theatrical changes below the societal level must apparently go unexplained by their theories. But even at the societal and regional levels, can a change in class structures or communication frameworks really account for all theatrical change? And given that class structures and communication frameworks rarely undergo near-simultaneous change in multiple regions or around the world, how comprehensive can either of these factors really be? Both Engels and Nellhaus, as we have seen, admit to supplementary factors in change, but neither acknowledges the possibility that the factors with which they are primarily concerned might sometimes be of secondary importance, or perhaps even irrelevant. But if this is indeed possible, then these theories, however valid they might sometimes be, are at best incomplete. And while perhaps one might credit the progressivism of the Standard Western Approach for accepting any number of causal factors in theatrical change, its unexamined reflectionism fails to supply any particular mechanism that might explain why social change and theatrical change move in tandem toward a particular end. Another question one might ask of these theories of change is, how do they account for theatrical continuity, even in the face of one or another sort of societal change? These theories imply change alone requires a causal explanation, and thereby fall prey to one of the fallacies noted by David Hackett Fischer (as discussed earlier). But why (to return to a pair of earlier examples of continuity) does jingju continue to employ role-­ categories first established many centuries before the form even existed, and why are theatres in Europe and the Neo-Europes still usually designed to support Italianate staging? And how, if artistic superstructures are dependent on class structures, or if the way people think is literally changed by the communications frameworks that they employ, could theatre forms

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from far-different ages (such as kutiyattam and nō) continue to find purchase in their radically changed homelands? And if, as is quite evident, theatre forms that emerged at radically different times can co-exist in a given time and place, one must finally ask if it makes sense to analyze societies as if they were monolithic entities in which all theatre responds in concert to societal change. Postlewait, for one, fully accepts (with the reflectionists and Nellhaus) that “social and political relations” are “somehow located, situated, embodied, or embedded [in theatre] in such a manner that the context becomes the primary source of meaning.” But he also notes, “When we posit a controlling or reigning context … we fail to credit the multiple identities of the operating contexts” (202, 210). Reflectionist theories, as well as Nellhaus’s homological theory, share the critical flaw of treating societies as if each had a singular identity, thereby overlooking the diversity that marks all societies and the multiplicity of theatre forms that most of them host. In light of all these questions, it will be useful to develop a different approach to theatrical change: one that does not rely on any single aspect of society for causal explanations; one that does not assume that change alone needs a causal explanation; and one that does not assume that societies or regions can be treated as monoliths. To that task I now will turn. Theatrical Niches and Competition Let us imagine an adventurous theatre-goer who happens to be visiting New York City for an extended spring weekend. If all the relevant calendars are fortuitously aligned, it would be possible for her to attend a remarkable range of theatrical events. After this theatre-goer arrives on Wednesday afternoon, let us say a friend brings her down to Chinatown for dinner and a visit to the Chinese Cultural & Recreation Association of New  York, which that night is performing selected scenes from various yueju (Cantonese opera) plays.5 Although our theatre-goer cannot help but spend the next day shopping, in the evening she heads to Broadway to see a new mounting of Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard. Friday morning finds her on a bus for a short ride across the Hudson river to Union City, New Jersey, where she will take in an amateur theatre group presenting a traditional Passion play, as has been performed there for more than a hundred years (Union City); then in the evening, after hurrying back to the city,

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she attends the New York City Ballet’s performance of George Balanchine’s Harlequinade. Come Saturday afternoon, our theatre-goer returns to Broadway for a matinee performance of the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel, while that same evening, after a subway ride to Brooklyn, we find her at a Purim play to which she has been invited by another friend, a member of the Hasidic Bobov community.6 On Sunday afternoon, she goes to the Metropolitan Opera House to take in the matinee performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, while that evening calls for a subway ride uptown to Harlem, to catch A’ndre Davis’s Man of the House, a Chitlin Circuit play. On Monday, our weary theatre-goer spends the afternoon finishing her shopping, but as she happens past a schoolyard, she pauses to watch a group of kids getting laughs by imitating an unloved teacher attempting to control an unruly classroom. That evening, feeling rejuvenated, she caps off her weekend by taking the subway downtown to Soho for the strangest of all the shows she has seen: a self-proclaimed avant-garde production, performed in an imaginary language consisting of barks, moans, and grunts. On Tuesday, our traveler endures a shockingly expensive taxi-­ ride to Newark Airport for her flight back home—but unfortunately, her flight is canceled, so she takes refuge in a nearby hotel room. But what to do for the evening? After riding a New Jersey Transit train to nearby Lyndhurst, she settles in at “Medieval Times Dinner and Tournament.” As she struggles through a sketchy four-course meal, she watches a faux historical re-enactment, cheering on the Red King as he vanquishes his enemies (Medieval Times). The next morning, she hops on the hotel shuttle back to the airport and finally boards her flight home. There is scarcely a person alive who would actually subject herself to so much theatre over a long weekend—excepting perhaps a deranged graduate student—and not just because it would be exhausting. Some of the theatre forms I have mentioned (including the Purim and Chitlin Circuit plays) are narrowly circumscribed to appeal to audiences from specific segments of society and would be of little interest to outsiders. Opera and ballet are somewhat different in that their appeal is not predicated on characteristics such as religion or ethnicity/race; but the extensive training they demand of their audiences, as well as the sheer expense of attendance, leaves them with audiences that skew heavily toward the well-educated and wealthy. Spoken theatre and musicals, on the other hand, seek to satisfy audiences drawn from all segments of society. The avant-garde show

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and medieval combat finally, might also be open to all comers, but in practice their primary appeal is to rather specialized audiences, which one might perhaps call the hip and the square, respectively. New York City, in brief, has numerous niches (some overlapping, some not) in its local complex of theatre forms. The complexes of most other locales will obviously have far fewer niches, but a multiplicity of niches for theatre will exist in most societies and certainly in every region, and most major cities will have numerous niches, filled by a range of theatre forms.7 This is the main reason it is impossible to assign any single theatrical identity to most societies, and certainly to any region. The concept of niches comes from biology, where it is usually discussed on the taxonomic level of the species. Although its precise meaning has been the subject of debate, one definition suggests that “the niche of a species is the set of environmental states in which it thrives.” The concept has long been carried over into sociology, where, according to Pamela A. Popielarz and Zachary P. Neal, the “sociological analog [for the species is] typically the organizational form,” which refers to all organizations that share a “blueprint for organizational action, for transforming inputs into outputs” (68). As these authors also note, “Much of the strength of niche theory as a theoretical tool lies in its applicability to a broad range of social entities. Indeed, this tool can potentially be used to understand the nature and dynamics of any social entity, provided that an appropriate conceptual space can be defined within which to locate the entities and their niches” (77). Theatre is one such “conceptual space,” and for that space, the primary “social entity” to which niche theory can be applied—analogous with “species” and “organizational form”—is the theatre form. Each form, as discussed in Chap. 4, is made up of a population of associated theatrical events that share what is here called a “blueprint.” The “environment” of a theatre form is the societal context within which it seeks to find support, with a good environment being one that has the resources available to provide sufficient compensation to the form’s artists. New York City offers an especially rich set of environments, having a wide range of potential audiences that can support theatre, either directly (by attending) or indirectly (by sponsoring). According to Popielarz and Neal, “The diversity of organizational forms reflects the diversity of environments” (70). As we have seen in the itinerary of our dauntless theatre-goer, the demographic diversity of New York City allows it to offer a highly diverse set of niches in its local theatre complex.

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There are, however, variations among niches, and so also among the theatre forms that fill them. According to Popielarz and Neal, “A species with a narrow niche is very fit, but only under a small range of environmental states; it is known as a specialist because it is adapted to a highly specialized environment” (70). In this sense, the yueju performance our theatre-goer attended belongs to what is, in New York City, a “specialist” theatre form that is extremely “fit” because it draws support from a very precise societal environment. Its niche in New York’s Chinatown opened with the immigration of Cantonese-speaking Chinese. Its fitness, however, might be short-lived, because recent patterns of immigration are leading to Mandarin becoming Chinatown’s dominant dialect (Semple, passim); this might well bring about yueju’s replacement by jingju. Particularly narrow niches are often associated with specific occasions: The Passion play seen by our theatre-goer is fitted not only to a Catholic audience, but even more specifically to the Easter holiday. “Conversely,” Popielarz and Neal continue, “a species with a wider niche is relatively less fit, but under a wide range of environmental states; it is known as a generalist” (70). Spoken theatre and musicals are the great “generalists” in New York City, drawing large audiences from throughout the population. But because these forms are not specifically oriented toward a specific demographic group or occasion, their “fitness” is always in question. For this reason, they and other generalist forms are especially reliant on change as they seek to develop new productions that will draw audiences sufficient for their needs. An important aspect of niche theory is the recognition that, in the words of Popielarz and Neal, “Competition for resources is the key mechanism behind niche dynamics” (80). This point is critical for understanding how niches work in theatre, for in all but the narrowest specialist niches, competition is often the immediate motor to theatre’s imperative of formal change. Competition in theatre takes place on two levels: between theatrical events (and, by extension, their troupes) working in the same form, and between theatre forms themselves. Let me look at these in turn. According to Popielarz and Neal, “Competing organizations [in theatre terms, theatrical events] survive on the basis of their fit with local environmental conditions” (70); those that can find support are by definition well-fitted (even if they might not be the “best” according to one or another set of aesthetic criteria), and have the best chance of surviving. This competition is most obvious in generalist theatre forms such as spoken theatre and

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musicals, where there will usually be more events to choose among than can be supported by the potential audience. Competitive advantage might be gained in any number of ways. New modes of organization might increase the likelihood of sufficient compensation; a new approach to staging might catch the fancy of the audience; new actors, playwrights, or directors might bring their own appeal. Any of these efforts at gaining competitive advantage, however, will risk immediate failure in the face of competition with organizations, staging techniques, actors, and plays that are already well established. But if they were to prove successful, competitors would likely follow their lead if possible, with the result being change within the form; if the change were sufficient enough, it might occasion referring to the resulting shows as new subform, which might itself develop into a new form, given success and time. Competition between events in the same form exists not only in commercial theatre forms, I should add, but in more specialist forms as well. Ramlila, for instance, is a  devotional form associated with the annual Dussehra Festival. In larger locales there are multiple “organizing committees,” responsible for all the details of a given production, including its financing, its script, and the hiring and training of its performers. A city such as Delhi “has countless groups performing,” and owing to the “folk nature of the celebration,” there is generally nothing to stop the proliferation of organizing  committees (and consequently, of productions). The competition has the potential to be fierce, although in practice it is somewhat muted because committees and their productions tend to be neighborhood-­based (Swann 218)—but along the margins of neighborhoods, and well as in neighborhoods that have multiple committees and productions, competition rules. Along with competition between events of the same theatre form, there is also competition between theatre forms themselves, when the forms share the same niche or have overlapping niches. According to Popielarz and Neal, “two species cannot occupy the same niche in the long run” (69). But what counts as the “long run” is an open question, and if a niche is wide enough—or, to put the matter another way, if it has substantial enough resources available to it—then forms can compete for it over an extended period of time. Such was the long-lived competition, for example, between kabuki and bunraku, the two main generalist forms of Japan through much of the Tokugawa era. According to Brandon, a 1681 map of Edo’s major theatre district shows “13 theatres side-by-side in a four-­ block area.” Eleven of these theatres were large and government licensed:

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four kabuki theatres, six bunraku theatres, and one variety theatre. The two other theatres offered unlicensed variety shows. And “each theatre vied for the same customers” (“Kabuki” 20). Here we can clearly see competition between kabuki and bunraku, as well as their competition with non-dramatic variety shows. Samuel L. Leiter writes that kabuki and bunraku had “an intimate relationship throughout their history” (126): as they competed for their shared niche, neither hesitated to take from the other whatever might appeal to the potential  audience for which they competed. More than half of kabuki’s major plays were originally written for bunraku; because of their popularity in the puppet theatre, kabuki quickly adapted them, which also brought into kabuki the narrator and shamisen music of bunraku (48). But the influence was not all in one direction. Early bunraku puppets were small and simple, with each being controlled by a single operator. But by the eighteenth century, the puppets started looking and moving like kabuki actors, being almost life-sized figures with fully operable limbs, with most puppets requiring three operators (Keene 138, 140). What with all the mutual influence, other words, the two forms became more and more similar (Leiter, New 126), heightening their competition for the niche of popular theatre. The winner, one might say, was kabuki, for by the last years of the eighteenth century, bunraku was being performed only in a few small theatres in Osaka— though in the transformed social environment following the Meiji Restoration, the puppet theatre would make something of a comeback (Keene 143). A form that has lost its niche, however, need not wither away. As Popielarz and Neal note, “Competitive exclusion does not always result in extinction, because a species may adapt to changing conditions of resource availability by altering the size and/or position of its niche” (69). When a theatre form can no longer maintain enough support to give its artists sufficient compensation—or when, for that matter, its artists think that another niche presents the prospect of more satisfactory compensation of one sort of another—the form might seek to establish itself in a different niche. Such has been the case with numerous traditional theatre forms as they have dealt with their narrowing niches and the competition provided not only by newer theatre forms, but also with modern media. One common resort of these traditional forms has been to find an audience in cultural tourism, whether that audience be national or international in origin. The result is often what Dean MacCanell calls “staged authenticity”: the ostensive presentation of something as authentic in a performance

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situation (e.g., an audience of tourists who have little or no knowledge of the form) that palpably lacks that authenticity (595–96). But however one might feel about the change of niches, the new audience signifies a change in the form no less notable than any other major changes. Regarding niches in general, it is safe to say that when a theatre form successful occupies a niche, it has as a strong disincentive to change. According to Popielarz and Neal, “The process of change disrupts an organization’s routines, power structures, and internal and external networks, which should raise the likelihood of organization failure” (72). Or, to put it in the terms I have been using, as long as the investments made in a theatre form continue to pay off satisfactorily, artists will hesitate to risk them. This does not mean that competition within the form will cease, as various troupes will vie to most effectively take advantage of the form’s structure. But it does mean that this competition will generally avoid disrupting the form’s “routines, power structures,” and so on. The imperative of continuity is strengthened by success. Unfortunately for those who desire continuity, however, the niches available in a locale’s theatre complex are subject to significant change. Changes in the Societal Context Once we have in place the idea of niches—and of the competition (both within and between theatre forms) to control niches—the relationship between societal change and theatrical change becomes clearer. Societal change alters the niche structure of a theatre complex (on anything from the regional level down to that of an individual locale) by altering the specific environments from which theatre forms draw their support. For this reason, entire societies or even regions might see theatrical change happening in multiple forms more or less simultaneously. New niches might be opened, while some existing ones might be widened; conversely, other existing niches might be narrowed or even closed off. The successful competitors are those who (whether by forethought or chance) are best able to find sufficient compensation within the changed niche-structure. The sort of societal change that can lead to alterations in the niche structure of a theatre complex can broadly be  characterized as “disruptive,” though the term is less precise than one might desire. To be clear, it is not inevitable that societal disruptions will cause significant theatrical change: perhaps the investments made in one or another form will be strong enough to withstand them, or perhaps no one will find a way to

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take advantage of a newly opened or widened niche. Also, as we saw in Chap. 6, the gross disruption of societal chaos is not conducive to artistic creativity (Hall 286). Chaotic disruption will narrow or close off theatrical niches, and only when the society succeeds in re-establishing order will theatrical niches (often different than those that preceded them) be re-­ established. Marshall G. S. Hodgson writes, “Cultural fluorescence (with special rules in addition for art and science) will happen when the persistent forces of disruption become strong enough to overcome the powers of an authority without being so overwhelming as to suppress in their turn the equally persistent forces of creation” (285–86; italics in the original). What we are looking for might be called generative disruptions—that is, disruptions that alter niche structures without overwhelming societal order. The causes of generative disruptions are legion. Socio-economic change (per Marx) is obviously relevant, as are political and ideology changes, as well as (per Nellhaus) changing modes of communication. But whether or not any of these might be involved in a particular societal disruption, generative disruptions can usually also be identified with local surges in one or more of the secular trends discussed in Chap. 6: technological expansion, increasing inter-societal relations, and accelerating urbanization (any of which might well be exacerbated by population increase). There is no reason to assume that any one kind of societal disruption might be responsible for all, or even most, theatrical change. To begin with technology, I have already discussed (in Chap. 6) how the employment of the moldboard plow disrupted the economic and social status quo of early Europe, providing the material basis for the theatre that would emerge in religious institutions and the soon-to-develop towns. A different development in agricultural technology, supplemented by a development in commercial technology, disrupted China at roughly the same time. In the early eleventh century, fast-growing Champa rice was introduced from what is now Vietnam, along with new water-­ management technology that allowed for improved irrigation; the yield of rice was soon doubled, making possible a greatly expanded population, especially in China’s south (Tanner 218, 220). Meanwhile, trade within China was stimulated by the introduction (for the first time anywhere) of paper money (Tanner 221). The enhanced food supply and increase in domestic commerce worked together to spur urbanization. China had long had substantial cities, but now they were not only more densely populated, but altered in character. What had long been “largely centers of

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political administration” became “primarily great emporiums of trade” (Reischauer and Fairbanks 213), filled with the sort of newly-moneyed middling classes that (as we have seen elsewhere) provide fertile ground for commercial forms of theatre (Tanner 221). It was in this milieu that the efflorescence of Chinese theatre began with the zaju (“variety plays”) of the Song Dynasty, along with the closely related form known as yuanben (the meaning of which is uncertain). These two forms centered on comic sketches, though they also included non-dramatic theatre in their variety-show formats. The commercial theatres in which they were usually presented were located in the crowded “amusement quarters” of the bustling cities, but performances were also offered at the imperial palace (Dolby, History 17, 18), no doubt a valuable secondary niche. It is with these forms, William Dolby writes, “That we can first be sure of the existence of a thriving, enduring theater as part of a booming entertainment world” in China (“Early” 19). New farming technology (assisted, in the case of China, by a new technology of commerce) is obviously not the only technological cause of societal disruption that can change the niche-strictures of theatrical complexes. Although (as discussed earlier) I am not convinced by Nellhaus’s argument that changing communication frameworks is the key to understanding all theatrical change, one cannot doubt the disruptive impact of twentieth-century communications technology, which is notable less for its creation of new niches for theatre than for the way that it has narrowed or even eliminated niches in virtually all theatre complexes. As Nellhaus notes, “We are now in the midst of another transformation in communication structures,” even if the age of print culture has not yet entirely passed (Theatre, Communication 183). Radio, film, video, and computers have spread to every corner of the world that has the benefit of electricity (itself of course an advance in energy technology). These new media have “introduced forms of dramatic presentation that have much in common with theatre, but aren’t exactly theatre” (Theatre, Communication 184). Nellhaus offers a sophisticated argument that mediated drama (i.e., dramatic presentations on film, video, etc.) differs from theatre, per se, on the grounds that it does not share theatre’s homological relationship to society; he accepts, however, that mediated drama and theatre share a “family resemblance” (Theatre, Communication 188). This “family resemblance” is of central importance: mediated drama can offer its audience a kind of satisfaction that is similar enough to that of theatre to easily to attract at least a portion of theatre’s potential audience.

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Thanks to its centralized production and widespread (sometimes even global) reach, economies of scale allow mediated drama to offer high production values and popular artists. It also has the advantage of easy access, with all but film being, from their beginnings, available in one’s own home; and in the twenty-first century, even film has gained that availability thanks to video reproduction and streaming. Operating in conjunction with the widespread changes brought about by increasing inter-societal relations and urbanization, the disruptions of the twentieth century have indeed proven generative—but what they have generated is mediated drama, at the expense of dramatic theatre itself. In the face of this competition, there has been a drastic narrowing and winnowing of niches in theatre complexes throughout the world. Many theatre artists have responded by taking advantage of the “family resemblance” with mediated drama by transferring their talents to the new media, often taking with them some of the practices of their theatre forms. Such was the case in the mid-century United States, with numerous theatre artists leaving New  York for a chance at the riches of Hollywood. More devastating, though, has been the impact of mediated drama on traditional forms of theatre. By the nineteen-seventies, for example, the Greek shadow-theatre (discussed in Chap. 4) was “undergoing drastic, and what many considered disturbing, changes…. Live shadow theater performances were declining in popularity because of increased competition from movie theatres and television.” Puppet-masters took recourse to audio-recordings of their plays and “short weekly performances for children on national television”; and beyond the realm even of mediated dramas, they retold the stories of their plays in inexpensive pamphlets (Danforth 280). The narrowing or destruction of niches by the new communication technologies is one of the major stories of the past century of world theatre history, having been brought about by societal disruptions that virtually span the world. The other secular trends discussed in Chap. 6 have also profoundly affected the niches available in various theatre complexes, bringing theatrical change in their wake. Inter-societal relations have been a feature of humankind for thousands of years and have regularly created new niches in theatre complexes. But the situation has radically changed in the past few hundred years, thanks in part to developments in transportation technology. Sub-Saharan Africa, to take a single example, was always rich in theatrical traditions, but only after the arrival of European colonists did niches open for forms such as the previously discussed Yoruba popular

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theatre. And only after the European arrival did a niche open for literary theatre, thanks to the spread of literacy itself, as well as the establishment of European-style educational systems. Indeed, consideration of that niche can help resolve Marx’s problem of understanding how classical arts such as Greek tragedy could be relevant in societies far removed from ancient Greece. In sub-Saharan Africa, interest in Greek tragedy has been limited to the specific segment of the population capable of understanding a European language. It is difficult to determine just how large that segment might be, but John Conteh-­ Morgan (referring specifically to francophone Africa) suggests that “a drama that can be understood by only 20 per cent of the population cannot possibly hope to have a national resonance or significant social impact beyond the confines of the Westernized elite” (60).8 One need not (indeed, cannot) try to explain the appeal of Greek tragedy in terms of entire sub-Saharan societies. The niche available for the plays of Greek tragedy is quite narrow, being limited to the small segment of the population made up by urban, educated speakers of a European language. The existence of this elite niche, however, does not in itself explain why the plays of Greek tragedy might be used to help fill it. But once one considers the niche, an explanation begins to come into focus. Writing specifically of South Africa (but making a  widely applicable point), Aktina Stathaki comments that the presence of Greek tragedy “must be examined within the broader context of Western drama … and its function as a tool of cultural dominance that affirms European supremacy and reflects an elite education.” And yet, Stathaki goes on, Greek drama “is also an instrument of cultural resistance expressing dissatisfaction with [European] oppression and exploitation” (7). This aspect of “cultural resistance” is of special interest. According to Kevin J.  Wetmore, Jr., “Classical culture, while part and parcel of colonial education, was not in and of itself generally regarded as colonial culture…. Even while things European were [eventually] rejected, Greek culture was and is still acceptable to many postcolonial education systems” (32). How is this acceptance possible? Kenyan playwright Ngugi wa Thiongo speaks of the “unEnglishness” of the classical tragedians (along with Aristotle) and contends that their humanism (in the paraphrase of Wetmore) “establishes that these authors are different, [with] their humanism distinguishing them from the imperialist literatures of Europe” (32). The interest in Greek tragedy, in other words, is limited largely to an elite class that can use tragic plays as a means

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of turning their European education against colonial Europe and its despotic successor regimes. The final secular trend to discuss is that of urbanization. I have already commented on the impact of urbanization in places as diverse as London, Edo, Lagos, and Song dynasty Chinese cities. In each case, an upsurge in urbanization created a generative disruption in the theatre complex, most notably through the development of middling classes with access to cash. This opened niches that would be filled by newly emerging forms as diverse as spoken theatre, kabuki and bunraku, Yoruba popular theatre, and Song zaju. The disruptive impact of urbanization, however, need not always be as comprehensive as in those examples, and the ensuing theatrical change might be much more limited. Sometimes the change can result from the urbanization of a particular segment of society. A good example here is the Chitlin Circuit. This form had its origins in the 1920s, offering “performances for black audiences throughout the South and the Midwest.” Before long, performances were also being offered in numerous northern cities, with troupes “crisscrossing black America” (Gates 139). A bit of history will help explain this pattern of development. By the end of the nineteenth century, many Southern Blacks had already begun to leave the fields they had sharecropped since the end of the Civil War; large numbers would ultimately move to Northern cities, but “the movement from the South had its origins in movement within the South,” and in the early twentieth century, “more black people resided in Southern than in Northern cities” (Berlin 159). The development of the Chitlin Circuit tracks these demographic movements: the form was created as African Americans became urbanized in Southern cities, then traveled with them as they migrated to Northern cities. In every locale where Black urbanization occurred, a new theatre niche became available.

The Means of Change Syncretism A popular saw holds that “nothing comes from nothing,” and this is surely accurate regarding theatre. The emergence of new theatre forms is an important instance of theatrical change, but such forms are not created ex nihilo. Theatre artists have recourse to the traits of existing forms within their familiar theatre complex, and sometimes also to forms from beyond that complex; they also have access to other (non-dramatic) kinds of

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performance and artistic activities. The same can be said of many changes that artists make in already-established theatre forms, when they look beyond the bounds of their own form for inspiration. In addition, artists cannot help but avail themselves of the structures existing in their societies, such as language, both in the emergence of new forms or developments in established ones. In all these ways, continuities can be found even in the most radically new developments in theatre. All of this is to say that theatre is thoroughly syncretic by nature. Alternatively, one might speak of “hybridization,” but I prefer “syncretic” because it avoids biological implications and emphasizes instead the willful creativity of theatre artists. In a sense, syncretism is built into the nature of theatre itself, in that theatrical events integrate numerous arts that can and do have independent existences, such as music, dance, literature, oratory, painting, architecture, and so on. This not, however, the kind of syncretic activity with which I am concerned here. I am interested, rather, in the interactions between theatre forms (as well as with non-theatrical activities), when one or more of the traits of a form is in some way transferred to another form. Various terms are used to discuss this transference. One might say form A has been “influenced” by form B, or that form A has “borrowed” traits from form B, or that form A has “stolen” or “appropriated” the traits. Whatever terms we use, though, the emergence of theatre forms is invariably marked by the transference of traits from one or more forms of theatre or performance, as well as the employment of traits from the societal context. Or, to look at the matter another way, new theatre forms are created out of previously made investments that are “rolled over” into them, along with whatever new investments might seem worth making. At later points in their histories, meanwhile, many forms will take on traits from one or more different forms; investments made by others, in such cases, are taken over to support the already established investments in the form. Such was the case, as we have seen, in the interchange of performance traits between kabuki and bunraku. Whether in response to disruptions in the societal context or as a tool in the competitions in the theatrical and formal contexts, syncretism is the fundamental means of effecting theatrical change. Unsurprisingly, syncretism between the theatres of different societies is an ideological minefield. As Diana Taylor puts it, “It is clear that interaction [between dominant and dominated societies] is neither equal in power or degree nor, strictly speaking, reciprocal. We must not minimize

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very significant imbalances in the crossing of cultural borders: conquest, colonialism, imperialism, tourism, or scholarly interest all involve choice and require power, if only buying power” (63). As a result of these imbalances, suggests Craig Latrell, “Much of the critical rhetoric surrounding this phenomenon has (at least in theatre criticism) an accusatory tone, with Western popular culture pictured as a sort of juggernaut, rolling over helpless local cultures, taking what it wants and in the process ruining fragile local art forms and homogenizing all culture” (44). Lo and Gilbert find this sort of “moral critique” to be “absolutely essential to the politicizing of interculturalism”; at the same time, though, they worry that it “risk[s] instigating a kind of paralysis” in which “no form of theatrical exchange can be ethical” (41). This concern is understandable, but it betrays the surprising Eurocentrism that undergirds much commentary about societal interactions in the arts. As I mentioned in the Introduction, Lo and Gilbert define “intercultural” theatre as “a hybrid derived from an intentional encounter between cultures and performing traditions,” and state that it is “primarily a Western-based tradition with a lineage in modernist experimentation” (36). Their discussion of “postcolonial” theatre is no less Eurocentric. Part of the problem here is that they define “postcolonialism” explicitly in terms of societies that have been “subjected to Western imperialism” (35). The problem runs even deeper, however, in that Lo and Gilbert characterize syncretic postcolonial theatre as involving “the incorporation of indigenous material into a Western dramaturgical framework, which is itself modified by the fusion process” (36). What they do not discuss is the transfer of theatrical traits or entire forms between non-­ European societies; nor do they mention the scores of theatre forms in Africa and the various regions of Asia that have emerged in the past couple hundred years and make free use of some “Western” traits while not adhering to a “Western dramaturgical framework.” One such form is the Yoruba popular theatre, which I discussed in Chaps. 3 and 6. Another is bangsawan, a form which emerged in late nineteenth-century Malaysia. Although older scholarship (along with the Malaysian government itself) saw the form as traditional, more recent scholars, such as Tan Sooi Beng, have no doubt that it was “a new form” that retained many traditional traits, but was “commercial in nature and constantly innovating to suit the tastes of the audience,” incorporating “Malay, Western, and other foreign influences” (vii). It emerged in a society undergoing “rapid socio-economic, political, cultural, and

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demographic changes” that resulted from British intervention: “Colonialism saw the emergence of a multi-ethnic society, urbanization, the development of new communication systems, formal education, and the introduction of new foreign cultural activities” (Tan 191). To put the matter in terms I have been using in this chapter, the societal context in which bangsawan emerged had been profoundly disrupted—and in ways specifically associated with surges in the long-term trends of technology, inter-societal contact, and urbanization. The result was the opening of a niche for urban commercial theatre: “With the emergence of large urban centers, audiences with spare cash and leisure time were available and bangsawan was developed to entertain them” (Samsuddin and Bujang 126). The emergence of bangsawan drew on numerous investments that had been made in earlier forms of Malay theatre, providing the sense of continuity that allowed it to be seen as a “traditional” form. The further syncretism of bangsawan was reflected in many of its traits. The stories used for its plots, for example, included local history, but also came from Islamic lands, China, Europe, Indonesia, and Thailand; contemporary material was used as well (Ghulam-Sarwar 16). Other traits of bangsawan also came from various sources and included European-style “painted backdrops and wings presented on a proscenium-style stage, which represented all that was new and modern to local viewers” (Samsuddin and Bujang 123). Even after it had become established, bangsawan never stopped changing, driven by the competition within the form. As Tan writes, bangsawan “was constantly adapting to audience preferences,” which often involved yet further syncretism. Given the form’s wide niche as a popular theatre form, its artists were open to whatever might help them draw an audience that could provide them with sufficient compensation. And so, “with the rise of Malay nationalism, Malay stories with Malay costumes and sets were introduced. With the greater exposure to Western film, theatre, and books, audiences began to prefer realism to fantasy, and bangsawan responded accordingly” (189). The form also eventually had to compete with other forms for its commercial niche. Despite bangsawan’s moves toward nationalism and realism, a newer theatre form, sandiwara, proved more suited to the post-World War Two “mood and spirit of anti-­ colonialism and the drive towards independence.” While many of bangsawan’s traits were taken over by sandiwara, the new form’s advantage was largely the result of its fully scripted plays, which dealt directly with current politics and were presented with a realism of settings, costumes,

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and characters that bangsawan could not match (Tan 191). In the face of sandiwara’s success in the niche for which they competed, bangsawan eventually shifted to a new niche: since the 1970s, it has been “promoted by the government and its institutions” as a means of “promoting national unity” (Tan 191). This probably accounts for the government’s aforementioned claim that bangsawan is a “traditional” form of theatre. For all the discussion given to inter-societal syncretism, relatively little has been said of the syncretism that occurs within a given society. Drawing on the work of Rustom Bharucha, Lo and Gilbert suggest that “intracultural theatre serves a critical function in challenging ‘organicist notions of culture by highlighting the deeply fragmented and divided society […] that multicultural rhetoric of the state refuses to acknowledge’” (38). The point is well taken. As I have argued, no society has a single identity; nor does any theatre complex have a single identity. Most societies host multiple forms of theatre and these forms can and often do interact with one another, just as they can interact with non-dramatic kinds of performance. Jingju offers a clear example of intra-societal syncretism. For the occasion of the Emperor’s eightieth birthday in 1790, officials and merchants in South China sent the Anhui Sanqing Troupe to Beijing to participate in the celebrations; other southern troupes soon joined them. These troupes were remarkably versatile, performing both kunqu (an elegant theatre form especially appreciated by the elite) and huidiao (a form using an entirely different musical system), as well as other southern forms of theatre; they were also skilled in acrobatics (Li R. 18–19). Over the course of the next generation, artists from yet other theatre forms were incorporated into the companies, adding new acting styles and musical systems. Ultimately, traits from at least six different theatre forms were brought together by the time jingju was fully established.9 In brief, investments that had been made in numerous theatre forms were rolled over into the new form, providing a large set of continuities for that form. Unsurprisingly, jingju emerged at a time of great societal disruption in China. Peasant rebellions (such as the White Lotus Rebellion, 1795–1804) and foreign conflicts (such as in the First Opium War, 1839–1842) drove hordes of refugees to Beijing; these refugees “increased demand for services, including entertainment” (Li R. 23). The niche for urban commercial theatre, in other words, was substantially widened, and jingju, having continuities with many regional theatre forms, thrived in part because it could offer most everyone at least a modicum of familiarity. Indeed, as “a

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child of mixed blood surpassing its ‘regional ancestors,’ [it] was not only stronger than any of the pre-existent regional theatres, but also looked and sounded familiar in different areas” (Li R. 19–20). Thanks to its syncretism, in other words, jingju was well-poised to become China’s first truly national popular theatre. No doubt there are differences between inter- and intra-societal transfers of traits, especially regarding the aforementioned imbalance of power that often exists with transference between societies. Another difference is that inter-societal transference is generally a more complex process, owing to the differing societal, theatrical, and formal contexts of whatever traits are being transferred. The loss of societal context in such transference can be especially disturbing. Regarding Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata, for example, Bharucha contends that the epic poem on which the play is based “must be seen on as many levels as possible within the Indian context,” for “one cannot separate the culture from the text” (230). Gautam Dasgupta similarly comments that the play “falls short of the essential Indianness of The Epic by staging predominantly its major incidents and failing to adequately emphasize its coterminous philosophical precepts” (81).10 But the loss of context is more troublesome in some cases than in others, as Erika Fischer-Lichte notes: “While members of Western culture are generally indifferent as to what is made of their own traditions” by other cultures, “the intellectual elite of the so called Third World … resist such cultural exploitation and even the interpretation of their own culture in Western theatre”; this difference, she plausibly suggests, is a manifestation of “the actual power relationships between cultures” (150). Patrice Pavis has offered the most well-known model of inter-societal transference, using the visual metaphor of an hourglass and proposing an eleven-step process by which traits pass from the upper bowl (that is, the “source” society) to the lower bowl (the “target” society) (4–6). The model has been criticized for various reasons but underlying all the criticisms is the reality that inter-societal transference follows no single pattern. At one point, Pavis writes of traits as passing through a series of “filters” (4). This is curious, since hourglasses do not have filters. But the metaphor of filtering can be quite useful, especially if we imagine that there could be a variety of filters that could be used in any number of ways; that at least some material will resist passing through those filters, and that the material that does pass through might well be altered by the filtering.

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As it happens, a similar sort of filtering also takes place during the transference of traits between theatre forms within a society: which theatrical traits will be of use, and how might they best be modified to fit the current need? This filtering is undoubtedly less politically fraught as well as less complex than in inter-societal transfers, especially because the societal, theatrical, and even formal contexts associated with the traits will be far better understood and therefore less likely to be altered in the filtering process or entirely filtered out. Despite these differences, however, it seems that syncretism works in fundamentally the same way whether it takes place between or within societies. This suggestion is supported by the facility with which forms such as bangsawan and Yoruba popular theatre accept the transference of traits both from within their host societies and from societies that are quite alien.11 Productive Reception Why do artists sometimes avail themselves of traits from different theatre forms, wherever those forms come from and however much filtering might be involved? According to Fischer-Lichte, “The adoption of the foreign is sparked off by a problem which has arisen in the traditional theatre (and in extreme cases in the culture). This problem cannot be solved within the scope of the existing theatre forms,” so artists look to foreign theatre forms as a way “to solve the indigenous problem” (153). Fischer-Lichte’s examples are self-consciously “intercultural” productions like Brook’s Mahabharata, but her insight applies also to the many theatre forms in Africa and the various regions of Asia that have made use of traits from European theatre. Although artists might take an interest in the foreign for its sheer foreignness, they take advantage of the foreign (as they might of other forms in their own society) because they think it can help them solve the problem of creating viable theatrical events—that is, events that offer sufficient satisfaction to their audience and sufficient compensation to themselves. As Fischer-Lichte argues, “The communication of the foreign does not occupy foreground interest. The goal is not to bring the spectators closer to or familiarize themselves with the foreign tradition, but rather that the foreign tradition should be, to a greater or lesser extent, transformed according to the different conditions of specific fields of reception” (154). Artists seeking to create viable events might well cast around in every possible direction for something that might help solve the problem of

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creating viable events. Such was the case, as we have seen, with kabuki and bunraku, with each form making liberal use of traits developed by the other. Along the same lines, we have seen how jingju was created out of traits transferred from numerous established theatre forms. And as we have also seen, forms such as the Yoruba popular theatre and bangsawan have actively mixed traits transferred from foreign and domestic sources. The purpose of the transfers is the same whether they come from foreign or domestic sources: artists open to change will take advantage of whatever they think might help them. Sometimes, to be clear, this leads them into what might be called a productive misunderstanding, wherein they use a trait in a way that is based on a misapprehension (or sheer ignorance) of its original societal or theatrical meaning; this seems to be the root of the complaints against Brook’s Mahabharata. But European productions are by no means the only ones to productively misunderstand their sources. The Concert Party of Ghana, for example, is a highly syncretic theatre form that emerged in the mid-twentieth century. Its artists “appropriated material from American movies, Latin gramophone records, African American spirituals, Ghanian asafo, and ‘highlife’ songs,” along with a trickster character similar to Ananse (a well-known figure in West African folklore); most surprisingly, its actors (though African) wear minstrel-show-style blackface (Cole 1). As Catherine M. Cole notes, Concert Party artists (particularly older ones) “were genuinely unaware of the history of the history and ideological significance of blackface as practiced outside of Ghana.” As far as they were concerned, blackface was worth using because (as one artist said) “it is attractive”; also, “when you wear the trant [i.e., blackface], it creates laughter” (26). The filtering in cases of productive misunderstanding such as this is extreme, with the original contexts of the trait being thoroughly misunderstood. But there is no inherent reason why a misunderstood trait cannot still be put to effective use, however objectionable the misunderstanding might be to people who are more knowledgeable about the source of the trait. * * * Neither the continuities nor the changes exhibited over the course of theatre history (or, indeed, history in general) can be understood in isolation from the other: there is change even in continuity, and continuity even in change. The actual mechanics of continuity in theatre are often

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overlooked. But as we have seen, continuity is a function of the investments that artists and audiences alike make not only in particular theatre forms, but also in the theatre complexes with which they are familiar, as well in societal structures such as language, religion, race/ethnicity, and statehood. Theatre artists take advantage of any or all these continuities even when they instigate theatrical change. There is an important relationship between theatrical and societal change, but it is not a matter of the one simply “reflecting” the other. When societal disruption (usually associated with an upsurge in technological change, inter-societal relations, and/or urbanization) changes the niche structure of a theatre complex, artists and their theatre forms compete to secure a place in that changed structure, taking advantage of investments in continuity when possible, instigating change when it might give them a competitive advantage. This view of the mechanics of change resolves the three problems I identified in reflectionist theories of change as well as in Nellhaus’s homological theory. First, it does not rely on the implausible assumption that societies have single, monolithic identities. Multiple niches exist in the theatre complexes of most societies, and the forms that fill those niches each have their own histories. Second, this view makes no claim that there is a single and invariable causal factor for all theatrical change, such as class relations or communications frameworks. The immediate causal factor for change is nothing more or less than the artists competing for sufficient compensation by finding audiences (who themselves seek sufficient satisfaction). But beyond this are the shifts in a complex’s niche structure that offer new opportunities even as established niches might narrow or close. Third, this view recognizes that continuity and change must be understood together. Just as continuity is built out of the changes of the past, change takes continuities into the uncertain future. The understanding of continuity and change advanced in this chapter is applicable to theatre forms around the world. While it focuses on change in individual theatre forms, it also provides a way to understand more or less simultaneous change in entire regions and even in multiple regions: when generative disruptions occur, numerous theatre forms in a region can have their niches affected, and the artists of each form must respond accordingly; and because these disruptions can occasionally strike multiple regions, theatrical change can be stimulated in all those regions, or even (in the most extreme instances) globally.

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Notes 1. In other towns (most famously, Cornwall) these plays were performed in constructed open-air earthen “rounds” (Harris 113–16). 2. For the most complete textual history of the Punch-and-Judy show, see Byrom. 3. For detailed studies of the uses to which Shakespeare has been put, see G. Taylor and Marsden. 4. The works of Michel Trembley account for almost half the total number of French-language Canadian plays translated into English (Benson and Conolly 566). 5. For a listing of “Chinese Ensembles in New York,” see Mai; for a broader overview, see Zheng 117–32. 6. For a short introduction to Purim plays, see Rozik 129–39. 7. For an accounting of the wide range of theatre available in Tokyo on 24 November 20212, see Iwaki. 8. It is also noteworthy that the African playwrights who have most famously adapted Greek tragedies have almost uniformly received a European-style education. Wole Soyinka studied in England and worked with the Royal Court theatre in London; Ola Rotimi studied at Yale and Boston University; Femi Osofisan attended the elite University of Ibadan before doing some of his post-graduate study in Paris (Banham et al. 83, 81, 79); and so on. 9. These six forms were kunqu, huidiao, luolou qiang, jingqiang, handiao, and qingqiang (Li R. 21). 10. This sort of essentialism can be taken to almost comic levels. Martin and Sauter, for example, write of a European performance of Suzuki’s Macbeth, commenting that they found “it difficult to see past a Western body forcing itself to undertake Eastern [specifically, Japanese] body movements” (39). One wonders if they would also find it difficult to view an “Eastern” body (or an African one, for that matter) undertaking the “Western” body movements of ballet. 11. For an example of how inter- and intra-societal syncretism can take jointly take place in the context of a contemporary theatre project, see Li Ruru and Jonathan Pitches. I do not follow the model they propose, but take from them the idea that inter-and intra-societal transmissions work in fundamentally the same way.

Works Cited Abrams, Tevia. “Folk Theatre in Maharashtrian Social Development Programs.” Educational Theatre Journal, vol. 27, no. 3, October 1975, pp. 395–407.

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Banham, Martin, et  al., editors. Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre. Cambridge UP, 1994. Benson, Eugene, and L. W. Conolly. The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre. Oxford UP, 1989. Berlin, Ira. The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations. Penguin Books, 2010. Bharucha, Rustom. “A View from India.” Peter Brook and the Mahabharata: Critical Perspectives, edited by David Williams, Routledge, 1991, pp. 228–52. Blackburn, Stuart. Inside the Drama House: Râma Stories and Shadow Puppets in South India. U of California P, 1996. Brandon, James R. “Kabuki and Shakespeare: Balancing Yin and Yang.” TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 43, no. 2, Summer 1999, pp. 15–53. Brandon, James R. On Thrones of Gold: Three Javanese Shadow Plays. Harvard UP, 1970. Byrom, Michael J. Punch and Judy: Its Origin and Evolution. Aberdeen, Shiva Publications, 1972. Cole, Catherine M. Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre. Indiana UP, 2001. Conteh-Morgan, John. Theatre and Drama in Francophone Africa: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge UP, 1994. Danforth, Loring M. “Tradition and Change in Greek Shadow Theater.” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 96, no. 381, July–September 1983, pp. 281–309. Dasgupta, Gautam. “The Mahabharata: Peter Brook’s Orientalism.” Interculturalism and Performance: Writings from PAJ, edited by Bonnie Maranca and Gautam Dasgupta, PAJ, 1991, pp. 75–82. Dodgshon, Robert A. Society in Time and Space: A Geographical Perspective on Change. Cambridge UP, 1998. Dolby, William. “Early Chinese Plays and Theatre.” Chinese Theatre: From Its Origins to the Present Day, edited by Colin Mackarras, U of Hawaii P, 1983, pp. 7–31. Dolby, William. A History of Chinese Drama. London, Paul Elek, 1976. Eagleton, Terry. Marxism and Literary Criticism. U of California P, 1976. Fischer, David Hackett. Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. Harper & Row, 1970. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Show and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective. U of Iowa P, 1997. Floor, Willem. The History of Theatre in Iran. Washington, DC, Mage Publishers, 2005. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “The Chitlin Circuit.” African American Performance and Theatre History: A Critical Reader, edited by Harry J.  Elam and David Krasser, Oxford UP, 2001, pp. 132–48.

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Ghulam-Sarwar Yousef. Dictionary of Traditional South-East Asian Theatre. Kuala Lumpur, Oxford UP, 1994. Greskovic, David. Ballet 101: A Complete Guide to Learning & Loving the Ballet. Hyperion, 1998. Hall, Peter. Cities in Civilization. Pantheon Books, 1998. Harris, John Wesley. Medieval Theatre in Context: An Introduction. Routledge, 1992. Hodgson, Marshall G. S. Rethinking World History. Edited by Edmund Burke III, Cambridge UP, 1993. Hulfeld, Stefan. “Modernist Theatre.” The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, edited by David Wiles and Christine Dymkowski, Cambridge UP, 2013, pp. 15–32. Iwaki Kyoko. “Interlude: Charting Tokyo Theatre Today: 24 November 2012.” A History of Japanese Theatre, edited by Jonah Salz, Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 354–57. Keene, Donald. Nō and Bunraku: Two Forms of Japanese Theatre. Columbia UP, 1990. Latrell, Craig. “After Appropriation.” TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 44 no. 4, Winter 2000, pp. 44–55. Leiter, Samuel L. New Kabuki Encyclopedia: A Revised Adaptation of Kabuki Jiten. Greenwood Press, 1997. Li Ruru. The Soul of Beijing Opera: Theatrical Creativity and Continuity in the Changing World. Hong Kong UP, 2010. Li Ruru, and Jonathan Pitches. “The End of the Hour-Glass: Alternative Conceptions of Intercultural Exchange Between European and Chinese Operatic Forms.” Studies in Theatre & Performance, vol. 32, no. 2, 2012, pp. 121–37. Lo, Jacqueline, and Helen Gilbert. “Toward a Topography of Cross-Cultural Theatre Praxis.” TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 46, no. 3, Autumn 2002, pp. 31–53. MacCannell, Dean. “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 79, no. 3, November 1973, pp. 589–603. Mai, Mae. “Chinese Ensembles in New  York.” silpayamanant.wordpress.com/ ethnic-orchestras-in-nor th-america/chinese-ensembles-in-the-us/ chinese-ensembles-in-new-york Marsden, Jean. The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-­ Century Literary Theory. U of Kentucky P, 2014. Martin, Jacqueline, and Willmar Sauter. Understanding Theatre: Performance Analysis in Theory and Practice. Stockholm, Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1995. Medieval Times Dinner and Tournament. www.medievaltimes.com

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MetOpera Data Base. “Repertory Report.” archives.metoperafamily.org/ archives/frame.htm Nellhaus, Tobin. “Performance Strategies, Image Schemas, and Communication Frameworks.” Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, edited by Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart, Routledge, 2006, pp. 76–94. Nellhaus, Tobin. Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Ortolani, Benito. The Japanese Theatre: From Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism. Rev. ed., Princeton UP, 1995. Pavis, Patrice. Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture. Translated by Loren Kruger, Routledge, 1992. Penzell, Raymond J. “A Hungarian Christmas Mummers’ Play.” Educational Theatre Journal, vol. 29, no. 2, May 1997, pp. 179–98. Popielarz, Pamela A., and Zachary P. Neal. “The Niche as a Theoretical Tool.” Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 33, 2007, pp. 66–84. Postlewait, Thomas. The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography. Cambridge UP, 2009. Reischauer, Edwin O., and John K.  Fairbank. East Asia: The Great Tradition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1958. Rozik, Eli. The Roots of Theatre: Rethinking Ritual and Other Theories of Origin. U of Iowa P, 2002. Samsuddin, Mohd. Effindi, and Rahmah Bujang. “Bangsawan: Creative Patterns in Production.” Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 30, no. 1, Spring 2013, pp. 122–44. San Francisco Public Works. “San Francisco War Memorial Veterans Building Seismic Upgrade & Improvements.” sfpublicworks.org/veteransbuilding Semple, Kirk. “In Chinatown, Sound of the Future Is Mandarin.” The New York Times, 21 October 2009. www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/ nyregion/22chinese.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 Shepherd, Simon, and Peter Womack. English Drama: A Cultural History. Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Stathaki, Aktina. Adaptation and Performance of Greek Drama in Post-Apartheid South Africa. 2009. U of Toronto, PhD dissertation. Statistics Canada/Statisque Canada. “Census in Brief: English–French Bilingualism Reaches New Heights.” https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/as-sa/98-200-x/2016009/98-200-X2016009-eng.cfm Swann, Darius L. “Rām Lı̄lā.” Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance, edited by Farley P. Richmond et al., U of Hawaii P, 1990, pp. 215–36. Tan Sooi Beng. Bangsawan: A Social and Stylistic History of Popular Malay Opera. Singapore, Oxford UP, 1993. Tanner, Harold M. China: A History, Vol 1., From Neolithic Cultures through the Great Qing Empire. Hackett, 2010.

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CHAPTER 8

Periodicity in World Theatre History

Back in Chap. 6, I began discussing the temporality of theatre by arguing that Fernand Braudel’s notion of seeing history in terms of multiple time-­ scales could prove highly productive for theatre historians, for each time-­ scale raises its own questions and allows for the discoveries made on that scale to inform one’s understanding of history on all time-scales. I focused on Braudel’s scale of the longue durée, which reveals both the enduring structures that have reinforced theatrical continuity and the long-term trends that have stimulated theatrical change. I continued my discussion theatre’s temporality in Chap. 7 by directly considering continuity and change. As we saw, continuity is relatively easy to conceptualize: artists and audiences alike have strong incentive to maintain their investments they have made in formal, theatrical, and societal structures; there is little reason to seek change when something “works.” Conceptualizing change is more difficult, and existing theories seem either too vague or too limited. I therefore suggested the importance of competition both within theatre forms and between forms for theatrical niches, and proposed that when societal disruption alters the niche structure of a theatre complex, artists and their theatre forms compete to secure a place in that changed structure, taking advantage of investments in continuity when possible, instigating change when it might give them a competitive advantage. This chapter concludes my discussion of theatre’s temporal dimension by focusing explicitly on the issue of periodicity. Just as theatre forms and theatre regions are units of study that are valuable for their purposes, so © The Author(s) 2020 S. Tillis, The Challenge of World Theatre History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48343-2_8

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the period is a valuable temporal unit. Thomas Postlewait writes that “periods … are discursive models for historical understanding, models based upon the structural idea of maintenance or stability and the temporal idea of divergence or difference” (161); or, in the terms I have been using, they are “models” based on the ever-changing balance between continuity and change. The delineation of periods is not merely valuable in studying history; it is virtually unavoidable. As David Wiles comments, “There is no other way [aside from periodicity] to give the past a shape and thereby perceive it as something other than a random string of events. Every label we put on a historical period is already an interpretation and contains a story embedded within it” (55). One might reasonably argue, pursuant to Wiles’s comment, that any sort of periodization involves, in effect, imposing a metanarrative onto theatre history. But when looking at theatre on anything beyond the micro-historical level, the lack of a well-considered periodic scheme is an invitation to fall back on the flawed-but-familiar metanarrative of the Standard Western Approach. The reason for this is straightforward: “Coherence,” writes the historian David Carr, “seems to be imposed on us whether we seek it or not. Things need to make sense” (quoted in Postlewait 165). Without any sort of periodization, historians are left with either the most meaningless sort of chronicling or John Russell Brown’s nightmare (discussed in Chap. 3) of theatre history as nothing more than a “compendium of local reports … and disparate narratives” (7). Whatever the necessity of periodization, it is inescapably true that, in the words of the historian Ross E. Dunn, “All periodizations are in some measure biased, arbitrary, and illusory”; but despite that, Dunn contends that “they are also absolutely essential tools for making sense of the constructable past” (360). It is worth keeping in mind, as the historian Adam McKeown writes, that “grand historical narratives—whether of a nation, a region, or the world—are never meant to be a final explanation, or a sum of all knowledge…. They are heuristic tools, under constant modification. They provide frameworks that help shape new questions and research problems.” They are written, one might say, precisely so that others might “elaborate, modify, rethink, challenge, and even undermine” them (82). The immediate aim of this chapter is to develop a periodization of world theatre that, at the risk of being “biased, arbitrary, and illusory,” might help clarify its shape over the longue durée. The chapter’s larger aim is to try “making sense” of why theatre history has taken that particular shape. What I am proposing is not intended to be a “final explanation,”

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and is certainly not “a sum of all knowledge.” It is a “framework” that I hope will “help shape new questions and research problems,” and perhaps inspire others to develop a different periodicity of world theatre that better comports with the known facts. To begin, I will examine existing attempts to identify theatre’s periods. As we will see, such attempts draw heavily on criteria from beyond the realm of theatre itself and are rife with taxonomic confusion; even then, they are primarily concerned with European theatre and have little if any relevance to theatre elsewhere. In view of these difficulties, I will present a set of principles for establishing a coherent periodization of world theatre history, then apply those principles to a data set of theatre forms, seeking to discern the most significant moments of change in world theatre. Finally, I will consider the historical logic behind each of these inflection points—why they took place when they did and in the way that they did— for they have given world theatre history its particular shape over the past thousand years.

The State of Periodicity The Standard Western Approach to theatre history has served for generations as the default way to make sense of what might be called the “arc” of theatre history. It is, however, particularly “biased, arbitrary, and illusory” (to return to Dunn’s terms), having been designed to align with a Eurocentric “Whig” version of history. It also employs a bewildering array of periodic concepts. As Postlewait observes, “Most standard theatre history books, whether they present twelve, nineteen, or thirty-three periods, shift from social to political to formal to chronological classifications as if no problem attends to these taxonomic shifts” (188). There is, in other words, a pervasive taxonomic randomness to the way that theatre periods are conceived. Postlewait provides a summary of “some of the current designations used for defining periods of theatre history.” Here is his list of the different categories of designation, with a couple of his examples for each kind: 1. Political empires and dynasties (e.g., Hellenistic, Hapsburg) 2. Monarchies (Elizabethan, Victorian) 3. Traditional eras (medieval, Renaissance) 4. Normative attributes (primitive, bourgeois) 5. Nationalities (French, Russian)

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6. Pan-nationalism (Scandinavian, Asian) 7. Linguistics (Latin, Japanese) 8. Religion (Hindu, sacred) 9. Philosophical schools, systems, or perspectives (humanism, rationalism) 10. Chronology (seventeenth century, 1890s) 11. Institutions—religious, political, social, economic (feudalism, court societies) 12. Modes of institutional support (municipal, commercial) 13. Organizational formations (guild, artistic movements) 14. Art and literary movements (romanticism, expressionism) 15. Audience types (folk, bourgeois) 16. Performance modes and styles (kabuki, baroque) 17. Kinds of architectural spaces (courtyard, boxed playhouse) 18. Stage spaces (picture frame, in the round) 19. Famous people (Shakespeare, Garrick) 20. Mode of dramatic representation (ritualistic, historical) 21. Forms of drama (tragicomedy, naturalistic tragedy) 22. Styles of visual art and architecture (rococo, modernist). (189) As Postlewait comments, although “these categorical riches are no doubt a measure of the complexity of the field of theatre history,” they are also “a measure of [its] confusion” (189). Some of Postlewait’s categories can easily be dismissed in regard to periodization, including (4) “normative attributes,” (5) “nationalities,” (6) “pan-nationalism,” (7) “linguistics,” (8) “religion,” (9) “philosophical schools,” (11) “institutions,” and (20) “modes of dramatic representation.” Whatever their utility for other purposes, these designations have no specific temporal basis. Categories (16) “mode and styles” and (21) “forms of drama” and are also problematic: “modes and styles” muddies the water by running together entire theatre forms that have their own long and complex histories (e.g., kabuki) with temporally limited artistic styles (e.g., baroque), while the “forms” (as Postlewait uses the word) are those of formalism and are based dramatic literature alone. Other categories focus on particular theatrical traits, such as (12) “modes of institutional support,” (13) “organizational formation,” (15) “audience types,” (17) “kinds of architectural spaces,” and (18) “kinds of stage spaces.” But as Postlewait observes, “It is quite possible for a historian, following a specific model of periodization, to chart and analyze the

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history of theatre architecture; then, with a different model of periodization, to examine the history of audience types…. But can one period category—say, audience types—be successfully used to establish the periods of a different category—say, kinds of architectural space?” (190) If one seeks to periodize the way a particular trait is employed in a single theatre form, fine. But even for periodizing individual theatre forms, not to mention regional or global periodizations, these categories are of limited value at best. The somewhat-overlapping categories (14) “art and literary movements” and (22) “styles of visual art and architecture” are of special interest because they have frequently served as a basis for theatre’s periodic schemes. Such periods are almost always intended (explicitly or implicitly) to be applicable to Europe alone, and are of little or no value for any sort of wider periodicity. Even for Europe, however, their utility is dubious. Christopher Baugh offers a full-throated defense of using “terms of art-­ historical classification” to create a periodization for European theatre on the grounds that they help us not only “to understand the aesthetic concerns of theatre architecture and scenography, but also to consider theatre outside and beyond the periodisation created by the historiography of dramatic literature.” Further, they help us “to appreciate the way in which the social activity of theatre may be understood within broader cultural and artistic concerns,” alongside other arts (34). There is certainly nothing objectionable to emphasizing theatre as a visual (rather than literary) medium, but art-historical terms are notoriously vague as temporal units. While one should not expect the starts and conclusions of periods to be precisely datable, it is highly disconcerting that multiple art-historical terms can be applied to the same historical moment, even if limited to the theatre of a single form in a single location. As Postlewait notes, the so-called “Age of Goethe” has been called “romantic by one critic, classical by another” (212). Similarly, spoken theatre in France, in the years of Corneille, Molière, and Racine, can plausibly be characterized as Renaissance or Baroque or Neo-Classical. Each of these usages is justifiable in its own way, but if the terms are intended to designate periods, one obviously needs to be able to distinguish between them temporally. A further problem with art-historical terms is that when carrying them over into theatre history, one makes the implicit assumption that all the arts in a given society (or even region, such as Europe) develop in concert. Postlewait will have none of it. “Certain methodological similarities

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between theatre and art history should not … lead us to believe that art and theatre follow the same developmental laws, rules, conventions, and sequences” (183). Even more succinct is the comment he offers from the literary critic Alastair Fowler: “The notion of a universally valid systematic correspondence between the arts must be regarded as a chimera” (184). We can go further by recalling that even within a given society’s theatre complex, each form has its own unique history. This is not to suggest that these forms are isolated from each other or from the broader currents of their society. Each one, however, responds to those currents in its own way. We can turn now to Postlewait’s categories in which periodicity is predicated on political considerations: (1) “political empires and dynasties” and (2) “monarchies.” These categories are of course related, with monarchies being, in effect, sub-divisions of the dynasties to which they belong. It is immediately apparent that this sort of periodization differs from those associated with art-historical terms in that it makes no effort to characterize the theatre taking place in each period. A period called “the Baroque” seeks to describe something about the qualities of the theatre of the time; one called “Elizabethan” implies no qualitative analysis, however many connotations have become associated with it—but it does offer the great service of setting clear temporal markers. There are problems, however, with using political designations for a periodization of theatre history. The most obvious is that such designations are useless when discussing theatre history beyond specific political entities. While it might be legitimate to speak of the Elizabethan era in regard to England, it would be misleading at best to apply the designation to Europe as a whole, and ridiculous to use it on a Eurasian or global scale. Even for theatre in specific political entities, however, politics is of limited use for marking theatrical periods, for the simple reason that political change does not necessarily dictate or even align with developments in theatre. The dynastic change from the Tudors to the Stuarts (in 1603) was not nearly as decisive in English theatre as was the establishment of the first permanent theatre in London in the midst of Queen Elizabeth’s reign (in 1576), so one can readily understand why a term such as “the Tudor-­ Jacobean era” has gained a certain currency. And this sort of problem does not pertain merely to English theatre history. Chinese historians have long demarcated that land’s history according to the dynasties that ruled it, and theatre historians have largely followed suit. But as Colin Mackerras points out, “Dynastic changes rarely form sharp breaks from a socio-cultural point of view. The year 1644, which marked the accession of the Qing

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dynasty, is no turning point in the history of Chinese theatre” (“Drama” 92). I should make clear, though, that although empires, dynasties, and monarchs (and, one assumes, presidents, prime ministers, and other such designations) cannot provide the basis for a periodization of theatre history on any scale, they remain useful terms because of their familiarity as well as their temporal precision. Nothing, of course, can be more precise than periods based on Postlewait’s category (10) “chronology.” The great advantage of strictly calendrical periods such as centuries and decades is that they are entirely objective—at least once one settles on a particular calendrical system, such as with the bce/ce system I use in this book. Thanks to their objectivity, centuries and decades can be applied globally, though the conversion of dates between different calendrical systems can sometimes be challenging. Unfortunately, though, the very objectivity of the calendar militates against its usefulness as a basis for periodization. The theatrical events that happen to fall into a given century will not necessarily be any more related to one another than they are to events taking place in the years before or after that century. David Hackett Fischer refers witheringly to “hecto-­ history,” in which “history is neatly chopped into Procrustean periods, each precisely a hundred years long” (Historians 145). But history (including theatre history) is not clockwork. That said, centuries can be useful as chronological reference points. Moreover, historians sometimes customize centuries, as it were, so that they more adequately fit the realities of what happened. Jürgen Osterhammel, in his monumental study of world history in the nineteenth century, devotes an entire chapter to the apparently absurd question, “When was the nineteenth century?” (45–76). He notes that depending on their purposes, some historians refer to a “short” nineteenth century (typically 1815 to 1898) while others find value in a “long” nineteenth century (typically 1789–1914) (46). For his own part, Osterhammel is willing to customize the century however it might best fit the particular subject he happens to be discussing at a given moment (47). The problem at hand, in other words, must come first, not the calendar. Moving on, there is no need to say much about Postlewait’s category (19) “famous people.” Terms such as “the age of Shakespeare” are ubiquitous, but can be surprisingly vague: certainly that age would encompass the years of Shakespeare’s active work in theatre, but does it begin as his birth, and does it extend to the years after his retirement, or perhaps even to the decades beyond his death, all the way to the closing of theatres in

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London, in 1642? Another problem is that such “ages” tend to shape our perceptions more than we might realize. As Postlewait comments, “Unavoidably we are drawn to major artists and key artistic achievements to distinguish a period, but in many ways these artists and artworks are exceptional instead of standard and common” (186). A final problem is that ages named after famous people are absurd even on a regional level (dare one speak of the “Age of Goethe” in reference to Spanish theatre?), not to mention interregionally or globally. There remains Postlewait’s category (3) “traditional eras.” The division of history into ancient, medieval, and modern periods is the hoariest way to delineate major periods. Dates such as 500 ce and 1500 ce are often given as the termini for the first two periods, though others are also used. The tripartite division has an appealing simplicity, but as Marshall G. S. Hodgson notes, it “has been attacked by innumerable historians as inadequate for a fair long-run view even of European history,” while being “still more distortive of the world scene” (Venture 1.48). This is no less true for theatre history. The traditional medieval era, for example, spans a thousand years, but for the first four hundred or more, theatre in Europe consisted of little more than the occasional folk performance or troupe of traveling players; it seems evident that a critical change began in the tenth century, splitting the medieval era (as typically defined) almost in the middle. In India, meanwhile, the career of Sanskrit theatre—which thrived for roughly a thousand years, up to around 1000 ce—obliterates any meaningful division at 500 ce. The traditional modern era, meanwhile, might span a mere five hundred years, but is also patently over-long. If a minimal distinction between something like “early modern” theatre and “modern” theatre seems desirable for Europe, it is essential for virtually all Asian and African regions—despite the inapplicability of those particular terms (Ng, passim)—where the impact of Europe (especially post-1850) transformed theatrical landscapes. The tripartite scheme of eras offers simplicity, but obscures or ignores too much to be of continuing value.

Principles for Periodization Having found significant problems with each of Postlewait’s categories of period designations, what then is one to do? After his survey of the many ways that theatre has been periodized, Postlewait offers nine “very brief and initial recommendations” (191)—but although these are helpful, they do not point to any specific way to periodize theatre history.

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Periodization, however, is critical to the task of understanding theatre history, whether on the global level (with which I am primarily concerned) or any level down to individual locales or theatre forms themselves. As Postlewait writes (in his first recommendation), “We cannot avoid periodization any more than we can avoid generalization” (192). If it is unacceptable to fall back on the Standard Western Approach or to be resigned to theatre history as a bare chronicle or a collection of micro-histories, then it is necessary to set forth a different accounting. Postlewait’s sixth recommendation is that “we need to study and question our classificatory systems, not just take them for granted” (192). With that in mind, let me propose a few principles for periodizing theatre history. Theatre-Based Periods According to David Hackett Fischer, “The logic of any narrative scheme must conform to the logic of the problem at hand and not to some extraneous structure” (Historians 160). This parallels the argument I have made earlier against using “extraneous structures” (e.g., continents and nation-states) as the basis for units of study in world theatre geography. It also conforms to Osterhammel’s aforementioned practice of dating the nineteenth century based on the specific subject he is discussing. For theatre historians, Fischer’s dictum and Osterhammel’s example suggest that we should look neither to art history nor political history to provide a “narrative scheme” for theatre history; nor for that matter, should we look to the histories of class relations or communication frameworks, or any other such history. This is not to suggest that theatre history is necessarily autonomous from any of these histories; it might well be that, at least sometimes, the periods of other histories match up well with theatre history and can therefore be examined for some causal relationship. But to avoid the risk of forcing theatre history to conform to some other history, we should look first to theatre itself for clues to its historical shape, and only then expand our view. Taxonomic Clarity Theatre history’s taxonomic confusion brings to mind (as Postlewait notes) the taxonomy of animals that Jorge Luis Borges attributes to a fictional Chinese encyclopedia: “(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray

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dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (I) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) those that have just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies” (188). Borges is intentionally being absurd, but some theatre historians do not seem to have a much stronger sense of taxonomic clarity. It is illegitimate, for example, for theatre’s periods to range from “The Classical Era” to “The East,” to “The Renaissance,” to “The European Style,” to “The Nineteenth Century,” and so in, as Bamber Gascoigne’s now out-of-print textbook, which purportedly treats of world theatre history. Yet despite Postlewait’s longing for taxonomic clarity, his second recommendation is that “the variety and complexity of theatre is a given, so no unitary model of history will be sufficient. No single system of designation—political, normative, aesthetic—can fully comprehend and subsume all other modes of designation” (192). This is no doubt true—and the problem is precisely with the notion that any particular “system of designation” can or should be able to “fully comprehend and subsume” all others. As Postlewait also notes (in his ninth recommendation), “Though a period is a singular idea, no era, however long or short, has a singular identity” (193). I have already made the point (in the previous chapter) that no society has a singular identity, and the same is true of theatrical periods as well. This is most obviously the case on an interregional level, but also applies within regions and even subregions. We cannot seek to base a periodization on the “singular identity” of theatre for any given span of time, for every period contains multiple theatre forms and innumerable cross-currents; continuities from the past are carried forward even as changes are introduced in disorderly and sometimes contradictory ways. What then, might serve as the taxonomic basis for periodization? For an interregional periodization, I propose to focus on the emergence of theatre forms.1 New theatre forms have of course come into being throughout theatre history, and one might imagine that they have done so more-or-­ less regularly, on a more-or-less random basis, as might seem to follow from the observation that theatre history involves the unceasing interplay of continuity and change. But what if the emergence of theatre forms happens to cluster at a few specific moments—and not just in one region or another, but across multiple regions, perhaps to be accompanied by the rather sudden disappearance of many established forms? It would then be plausible to see those moments of widespread change as major inflection

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points in theatre history—in other words, as the start of new periods on an interregional or even global scale. Using the emergence of theatre forms as a taxonomic basis might help to define the onset of new periods, but it would also raise the critical question of why those moments of efflorescence have occurred. According to Sebastian Conrad, “If ‘comparisons and connections’ serve as the conventional shorthand for global history, then we must add a third ‘c’: causality, pursued up to a global scale” (72). If, as I have argued, the emergence of theatre forms is primarily an artistic response to the changing niche-­ structures of their theatre complexes, then we would at least have a starting point for understanding why period changes take place when they do. If multiple regions have undergone an unexpected degree of change at more or less the same time, we would be justified in considering what sort widespread societal disruptions might be implicated in changing the niche-structures of relatively independent theatre complexes. There are some obvious methodological problems with using the emergence of theatre forms as the basis for periodization. The most immediate is the unevenness of available data. As I have noted, we know all too little about the history (and even the existence) of numerous theatre forms, especially but not exclusively in the pre-Columbian Americas and sub-­ Saharan Africa. Even for many well-known forms in Eurasia, there is little reliable information about their origins. The poster child here is Sanskrit theatre, a hugely important form whose history is frustratingly uncertain. After surveying fragmentary literary references dating back thousands of years, V.  Raghavan suggests that “all the components” of “an active Sanskrit theater” existed in India by the mid-second century bce (13). This does not, however, necessarily refer to the actual existence of Sanskrit theatre. According to Raghavan, “We come to terra firma [only] with creations of the playwrights Kālidāsa (ca. 100 b.c., or a.d. 400) and Śūdraka (third to sixth century a.d.)” (15). Tellingly, even the “terra firma” to which Raghavan refers includes three to five centuries of uncertainty. Not all forms present the difficulties of Sanskrit theatre, but even those with ample historical evidence present an interpretive problem: How are we to identify a precise date of emergence? Jingju, as we have seen, is conventionally dated from a performance for the Emperor’s birthday in 1790. The form remained extremely fluid, however, and as Li Ruru observes, a “significant contribution to the emerging genre” came as late as the 1830s, when handiao actors were brought into its mix (19). Similarly, kabuki’s

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origin is traditionally dated from the river-bed performances of Izumo no Okuni around 1600, but at least half a century was to pass before the form gained any sort of stability. Ortolani refers to these years as kabuki’s “period of the origins,” which rightly implies that emergence is less a precise moment than a process of creation (174). These methodological problems are significant, but not fatal. Owing to the limitations of historical data from beyond Eurasia, we cannot hope to offer anything like a truly global periodicity for any time before the nineteenth century—but we can hope for an interregional scheme of periods applicable to the megaregion of Eurasia-North Africa before that time. Owing, moreover, to the increasing unavailability of data even for that megaregion as we reach back in time, we need to accept that periodicity in the distant past can be dealt with only in the broadest strokes. The data seem sufficient, however, for the picture to start coming into focus about a thousand years ago. The interpretive problem of dating the emergence of a form, meanwhile, becomes less acute if we follow Ortolani’s lead and recognize the emergence of forms as a process that takes place over time. For both jingju and kabuki, that process lasted roughly fifty years or so, which seems an acceptable approximation for the emergence period of most theatre forms. One might certainly desire greater precision, but when taking the long view of theatre history over the past thousand years or more, fifty years is little more than a rounding error. It should not make it impossible to determine if new theatre forms tend to emerge in clusters. Horizontally Integrative History The historian Joseph Fletcher writes that most of his colleagues “are alert to vertical continuities but blind to horizontal ones” (5); “vertical” here refers to time, “horizontal” to space. Only occasionally do scholars cross national or linguistic borders to note theatrical developments beyond those borders, no matter how relevant they might be to their immediate subjects. Fletcher is by no means alone in calling attention to continuities across space. Using a different terminology, Sebastian Conrad writes, “The concern with synchronicity, with the contemporaneous even if geographically distant, has become a hallmark of global approaches” to history. Conrad contrasts “synchronic” histories with diachronic, “genealogical” ones, which seek for locally-based “long continuities and the earliest roots of phenomena” (150). To be clear, neither Fletcher nor Conrad is being dismissive of histories that trace continuities through

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time; as Conrad notes, “Paying attention to synchronic factors and to relations in space does not of course mean ignoring the diachronic dimension of history” (151). It makes no difference whether one speaks (with Fletcher) of horizontal and vertical histories, or (with Conrad) of synchronic and diachronic histories, for their point is the same. Just as searching out continuities through time is of profound interest to historians, so too is the search for continuities across space. The methodology for the “horizontally integrative history” that Fletcher advocates is “conceptually simple, if not easy to put in practice: first one searches for historical parallels (roughly contemporaneous similar developments in the world’s various societies), and then one determines whether they are causally interrelated” (3). My proposition is that we can track the emergence of a sufficient number of theatre forms to allow for a tentative periodization of theatre history over the past thousand years or so. Where we find “roughly contemporaneous similar developments”—in this case, theatre forms in multiple regions emerging in clusters—we can then seek to understand why these clusters exist. The forms themselves might have some sort of direct relationship with each other; or they might not be directly related, but their societies might have direct interactions; or the forms might emerge in societies that have little if any direct contact, but have somehow been subject to similar societal forces. For the purpose of identifying clusters, the difference matters little, though of course it will matter a great deal for explaining these clusters. One might legitimately be concerned that horizontally integrative history will do little more than expose coincidences: chronologically aligned events that are in fact unrelated in any way. No doubt that some coincidences will come to light, but as I noted in Chap. 5, the various regions of Eurasia (along with North Africa) have long been linked by interregional movements of people, commerce, and ideas; starting around 1500, those linkages would begin to be truly global. If we had sufficient data to indicate that, say, post-classical Mayan society saw an efflorescence of new theatre forms concurrent with the emergence of Yuan zaju, nō, and European Passion plays, we would need to take it as a coincidence, since at that time there was no known contact between Eurasia and the Americas. But given the significant societal interactions across the megaregion of Eurasia, we do need to consider the possibility that the origins of those three Eurasian forms might in some way be related. As the historian Janet L. AbuLughod points out, “Changes have causes but only in context. The very same acts have different consequences when they occur at different times

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and when the surrounding system is structured differently” (369). The same “cause,” in other words, might help stimulate the emergence of very different theatre forms, with the differences arising from the specific theatrical and societal contexts of those forms, as well as the predilections and abilities of their theatre artists. But identifying clusters of emerging forms challenges us to consider the possible causes of those clusters—not just on a form-by-form or region-by-region basis, but interregionally. And if interregional causation can plausibly be argued, we would be justified in suggesting that—rather than being mere coincidences—clusters of new forms mark the start of new periods of theatre history. Horizontally integrative history, whether or not it focuses on the emergence of theatre forms, might seem an obvious concept, but theatre historians have largely disregarded it, as is evident in the way most textbooks separate Asian and African theatre from their main historical narrative, at least up to 1900 or so (Nellhaus et al.’s Theatre Histories is of course the major exception here). Horizontal integration, however, holds the prospect of revealing aspects of theatre history that can be observed only from a distance, as it were. As the historian Andre Gunder Frank writes: “However beautiful it may be to regard the individual pieces of the historical mosaic, to appreciate them more fully we also need to place them where they fit into integrative macrohistory” (257). Layering Periods As we have seen with Postlewait, “Though a period is a singular idea, no era, however long or short, has a singular identity” (193). Indeed, it is not an overstatement to suggest that any given moment is suffused not only with multiple identities, but with outright contradictions. Writing of the difficulties of periodization in general history, William A. Green observes that even while some societies are sending spaceships to distant planets, isolated hunter-gatherer societies still roam across portions of the world (385). Or, to put the problem in terms of theatre, in the same weekend that our adventurous New York theatre-goer (from the previous chapter) encountered the ageless practice of kids mocking their elders by imitating their actions, she was also able to see a Passion play derived from medieval Europe, an eighteenth-century opera, and a contemporary avant-garde play—among yet other theatrical events whose forms had emerged at widely divergent times and places.

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This being the case, it will be useful to emphasize what does not happen when we move from one period of theatre history to the next: everything associated with, or characteristic of, the older period does not suddenly cease or transform itself. As often as not, theatre forms will carry on for decades or centuries; and even if the forms themselves disappear, some of their traits might well be transferred to newer forms. Continuities, in brief, will abound across any demarcations of period. Moreover, with the onset of a new period, everything associated with or characteristic of that period does not suddenly begin; some developments will have deep roots in earlier periods, while others will take many years to make themselves known. One way to account for all this is to abandon the idea that each period is a discrete entity that ends when the next one begins, and to see them, rather, as a set of layers, with each new period being placed “atop” the previous ones. In this way, one can recognize the theatrical efflorescence that marks the start of a new period while still acknowledging the ongoing survival of at least some aspects of previous periods.

Waves of Change and a Rising Tide For a periodization of world theatre history, we are looking for moments when unexpectedly large numbers of theatre forms emerge more or less contemporaneously in multiple theatre regions. In other words, we are looking primarily for what might be called waves of change. The metaphor of a “wave,” however, is inexact, because the concern here is not with the sort of waves that regularly occur along every coast. The precise metaphor pertains to exceptional waves, such as those generated by the very occasional earthquake, volcanic eruption, or hurricane, which can dramatically reshape shorelines even on the far sides of an ocean. David Hackett Fischer, writing of “waves” of historical change, emphasizes their unpredictability, adding that they differ from one another “in duration, magnitude, velocity, and momentum”; in this regard they need to be distinguished from the “cyclical rhythms” of normal waves, which are “fixed and regular” (Great 9). To this I would add that the causes of these waves need not always be the same; also, whatever might cause a wave, its effect in different places will vary, depending on each place’s existing formal, theatrical, and societal structures, as well as on the choices made by the artists of theatre forms caught up in the wave. The idea of “waves of change,” in other words, is by no means deterministic.

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But periodic change does not necessarily come in self-evident waves. We need also be on the lookout for what I will call (to use another maritime metaphor) “rising tides”: change that develops more slowly, but that as it accumulates can be clearly differentiated from what had gone before it. As with that of waves, this metaphor is inexact, because (as with waves) the rising and falling of the tide is both predictable and rhythmic. More precisely, then, I am referring to the sort of change in sea-level that might be associated with periods of global warming or cooling: change that begins inauspiciously, practically unnoticeably, but that eventually establishes itself as an undeniable reality observable on coastlines of far-distant locales. A periodization of world theatre history based on the principles outlined above requires starting with a roster of theatre forms from as many regions of the world as possible, presented in their chronological order of emergence. I compiled such a roster from the datable forms mentioned in standard reference works such as The Oxford Companion to Theatre, The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, The Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre, The Encyclopedia of Asian Theatre, and The Dictionary of Traditional South-­ East Asian Theatre, as well as in various studies of theatre history in Japan, China, India, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The full roster contains more than one hundred and fifty theatre forms, and can be found in the Appendix, along with the sources on which I base their dating. It is likely that at least a few of these forms might better be considered important subforms rather than forms in themselves. As I noted in Chap. 4, this sort of determination—in any manner of classification—can be difficult to make. But for the purpose of discovering theatre history’s most decisive moments of change, the emergence of important subforms is not irrelevant, so I trust that those that have slipped in will not grossly unbalance the roster. As I have already suggested, this sort of roster presents significant methodological problems of data, dating, and precision. I would therefore reiterate that the roster does not profess to be comprehensive; one very important limitation is that (with the exception of Sanskrit theatre) I have not included the numerous forms mentioned in my sources that were not assigned a time of emergence more precise than a given century. Also, despite the authority of my sources, the dating of the forms cannot always claim to be authoritative. The sources sometimes disagree, and arguments can be made on behalf of each dating. I have used what seem the most plausible dates but make no presumption of having offered anything more

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than dates that are defensible. The roster I have created dates emergence in fifty-year periods, but no doubt in many cases the emergence of a form might have begun in the previous fifty-year period or concluded in the subsequent one; one must accept a certain amount of imprecision in a roster such as this. My goal with this roster, however, is neither to be comprehensive, authoritative, nor precise. I hope merely to discover if, indeed, theatre forms tend to emerge in clusters across multiple regions, thereby giving theatre history a perceptible shape. This can be considered no more than a first pass at the problem, and it is certainly open to amplification and modification. But when we look at the roster’s data as shown in a time series graph, a clear shape does indeed present itself. The graph in Fig. 8.1 starts in the year 900 ce. The roster itself goes much further back in history, but information about theatre in earlier centuries and millennia is (with obvious exceptions such as Greek theatre) too uncertain even to entertain speculative discussion, aside possibly from commenting on the dual breakthrough to literary theatre in ancient Greece and India. For about fifteen-hundred years following the

Emergence of Theatre Forms 30

new theatre forms

25 20 15 10 5 0

Fig. 8.1  The emergence of theatre forms since 900 CE. (Note that for forms whose emergence is identified by a century [e.g., “dates from the thirteenth century”] or by a period spanning two half-centuries [e.g., “dates from mid-­thirteenth century”], I have given half-value to each half-century.)

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emergence of Greek tragedy, there is no apparent pattern to the emergence of the few theatre forms of which we know. After 900 ce, though, the roster shows something unprecedented. Rather than forms popping up at highly irregular intervals, there is not a single fifty-year span without a new form, and the few fifty-year periods with less than two new forms might well be statistical artifacts rather than reality. For a region such as Europe, one might think that what we are seeing is not necessarily an increase in emerging theatre forms, but better record-keeping. That record-keeping, however, might itself be the result of the same societal developments that tend to open niches for new forms of theatre. What is more, the increase in theatre forms emerging post-900 is not limited to Europe, but comes from across Eurasia, including regions whose general level of literacy does not seem to have improved at the time (e.g., South Asia) as well as those that had long had well-established literary elites (e.g., East Asia). The strong impression given by the graph is that theatre across the Eurasia had entered a new period of creativity, albeit one that is not overwhelmingly self-evident, especially in its beginnings. We are seeing, in other words, a slowly rising tide of theatrical change. As the graph clearly shows, a true wave of new theatre forms appears rather suddenly in the sixteenth century, affecting theatre across Eurasia. Given that information about theatre generally becomes more available as we draw nearer to the present, one might suspect that this wave is the result of improved data, thanks perhaps to the development of printing. But this is not, in fact, the case, for the sixteenth-century wave includes many regions to which European-style printing had not yet been introduced. Moreover, while the sixteenth-century wave seems to come out of nowhere, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries do not continue to present an increasing number of new theatre forms, as we might have expected; instead, we see a relatively steady state at a significantly lower level than in the sixteenth-century. With the mid-1800s, however, we see another wave, which becomes truly massive in the early 1900s. The graph then shows a surprising decline in the second half of the twentieth century. In part, this no doubt reflects the fact that some nascent forms have not yet stabilized to the point where they can receive recognition, but it is likely also be a reality of contemporary world theatre, which (as we saw in the previous chapter) has been profoundly challenged by new media. The upshot of all this is that theatre forms do in fact emerge in clusters. They are not discrete and isolated occurrences, but come first in a rising tide, then in a pair of easily observable waves. However much the

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individual forms are influenced by the structures of their local theatrical and societal contexts, the global perspective allows us to see that the rising tide and waves are interregional phenomena, while the long view makes plain that they are limited in number and have become progressively larger, just as one might expect given the long-term trends discussed in the previous chapters. The rising tide begins in the tenth century; relative to earlier times (not included in Fig. 8.1, but obvious from the list of theatre forms in the Appendix) it is quite noticeable, though it will be dwarfed by the waves to follow. The first true wave clearly hits in the sixteenth century, while the second is evident by the mid-nineteenth century and over the next hundred years takes on the appearance of being a global tsunami. World Historians Tenth century, sixteenth century, nineteenth century: Although I have derived these dates entirely from theatre history, they are not unfamiliar to world historians, albeit sometimes with minor adjustments. From the perspective of the present, the sixteenth century might be the most obvious of them, and indeed, 1500 or thereabouts is the only date in the past millennium-plus on which the periodizations of four leading world historians (Peter Stearns, Jerry H.  Bentley, William A.  Green, and William H. McNeill) are in full agreement.2 Still, the first of our dates, albeit rounded up to 1000 ce, is noted by two of the aforementioned historians (Bentley and McNeill), and for the historian David Northrup, it is the most significant date of all. Northrup argues on behalf of an extremely broad periodization of world history, with only two periods. The first, extending from human beginnings until around 1000 ce., is an age of societies in “relative isolation from each other” (251). This isolation is not imagined to have been anything like complete, and as Northrup himself notes, “Every historian will recognize that convergence was a powerful element of history well before 1000 c.e.” (254). But in the long years up until then, according to Northrup, inter-­ societal contact was mostly irregular and generally had little or no effect on the vast majority of people, who lived in isolated farming villages. Large populations existed in only a handful of cities in Eurasia, and limitations of technology made it difficult for these populations to interact on a consistent basis. All of that, according to Northrup, began to change around 1000 ce, with increasing interconnections marking the start of “the Great

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Convergence” (251). From that time forth, the most important theme in history is the interaction between societies. Though Northrup’s two-part periodization might well be unnecessarily broad, he does succeed in highlighting the important change that began to take hold around 1000 ce. Having already mentioned the ubiquitous recognition of the sixteenth century as a key moment in world history, I will move on to the nineteenth century. This is not listed by all our world historians as a decisive point in history (indeed, only McNeill among them offers any period boundaries post-1500, giving 1750 as the start of a new period [Mythistory 62]), but many other historians certainly see it as such. Both R. Bin Wong and Kenneth Pomeranz, for example, emphasize the early nineteenth century as the decisive moment when Europe separated itself from the rest of the world (Stokes 521–23). Hodgson, meanwhile, suggests that Europe’s “great transmutation,” begun a few centuries earlier, reached fruition only in the 1800s, when European society was “set off decisively from the rest of mankind” (Rethinking 48). Hodgson is not making a claim for European exceptionalism—which he (along with all the historians I have mentioned here) strongly contests—but is noting the unescapable fact that in the 1800s, Europeans “found themselves in a position to dominate overwhelmingly most of the rest of the world” (Rethinking 44). For the globalist A. G. Hopkins, meanwhile, the nineteenth century saw the emergence of “modern globalization,” whose “new international order was created partly by persuasion and partly by command: free trade delivered one, empire the other” (“Globalization” 8). In this new order, while “the imprint of [older] universal empires endured,” peoples beyond the West “sought to turn Western knowledge to local advantage,” making use of the languages, ideals, institutions, and technologies “that had accompanied the imperial mission” (9). Finally, Jürgen Osterhammel argues that the years between roughly 1750 to 1850 were something of a “global Sattelzeit” (“saddle period”)—“a time of transition to modernity”—that would be followed by a time of “especially radical change” most notably after 1880 (58, 63). This chronology comports well with the roster of theatre forms, which is clear that it was after 1850, but even more so after 1880, that the wave of change struck most powerfully outside of Europe. The general congruity we see between the inflection points in theatre history and the period-boundaries often noted by world historians is no coincidence. If the most important triggers of theatrical change are generative societal disruptions that open new niches for theatre, we should expect nothing less. Northrup’s age of “convergence,” dawning about a

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thousand years ago, has been a time of unprecedented societal interactions, made possible by various technological developments, and centered on the increasing number and population of urban centers. This process has not been a smooth one, but there is no reason to assume that it would be, given the fluctuations of these long-term trends. Each of our clusters of new theatre forms, which is to say the rising tide and the two waves of change we have observed, correlates very neatly with upsurges in these secular trends, as we will now see.

Why These Inflection Points? Each of the inflection points we have discovered marks the onset of a new period of theatre, the first two being limited to Eurasia and North Africa, the third being truly global. To say this is not to claim that the theatre forms that emerged in each of these periods are similar to one another, though some  show homologies (owing to syncretism), while others are analogous (owing either to convergent responses to similar pressures or to mere coincidence). The inflection points are predicated on nothing more than the efflorescence of new theatre forms. Periodizations can certainly be created on more limited geographic scales—regions, subregions, locales, or individual theatre forms themselves—but this broadest of periodizations demonstrates that multiple regions have moved to same historical rhythm, a realization that can and should inform narrower periodizations. But to state a point that should be obvious by now, merely identifying the most decisive moments of change in theatre history—even if limited to the past thousand years, and even if limited, until the third of those decisive moments, to Eurasia—only begins to solve the problem of periodization. There remains the critical issue of why those moments took place when they did and in the way they did. As the historian William A. Green observes, “Ideally, all periodizations should be rooted in disciplined concepts of continuity and change…. We must identify how powerful historical forces interacted to generate particular forms of change at particular velocities” (386). These “historical forces” can be quite various, and the same forces might impact different societies (and also different theatre forms in a given society) in differing ways. Still, the most important of these forces are neither random nor (at least in theory) entirely unknowable. As we have seen, each of our theatrical inflection points happens to be congruent with well-known periodic markers in general history. This offers a critical clue as to why significant theatrical change took place in

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multiple regions more or less simultaneously: the relevant historical forces came from beyond theatre and were interregional in their impact. In the pages that follow I will discuss what these forces might have been, and for each inflection point will look at two or three theatre regions to show how the forces affected them. (Unfortunately, limitations of space make it impossible to look at all regions for each inflection point.) This means, I should note, that from here on I will no longer be presenting an argument about theatre historiography, per se, but instead will be analyzing theatre history itself, making use of the historiographic ideas I have previously discussed (e.g., theatre forms, theatre regions, the longue durée, structures and trends, continuity and change, and so on) to offer a new perspective on theatre history over the past thousand years. The Rising Tide in Eurasia (Starting c. 900 ce) As I noted earlier, David Northrup argues that by the end of the tenth century, “rising forces of convergence” began to take hold across Eurasia, drawing its societies “closer and closer economically, culturally, and politically” (251). Even though other historians might not agree that this was the single decisive moment in human history, its importance is widely recognized. As Janet L. Abu-Lughod suggests, “By the eleventh and, even more, the twelfth century, many parts of the Old World began to be integrated into a system of exchange from which all apparently benefitted.” Integration continued to escalate, and “the apogee of this cycle came between the end of the thirteenth and the first decades of the fourteenth century” (3). It is no coincidence that the rising tide of new theatre forms took place over these centuries. According to Abu-Lughod, “Increased economic integration and cultural efflorescence … were not unrelated. Technological and social innovations produced surpluses, which were, in turn, traded internationally to further intensify development. Parallel advances in navigation and statecraft facilitated contact among distant societies, which generated even greater surpluses. In all areas, prosperity— at least at the top—yielded high culture” (4). It was, however, a prosperity that took centuries to build, and so although the impact on theatre was evident early on, the most impressive theatrical achievements came well after the tide had begun to rise. China undoubtedly had the greatest influence on this global convergence, owing primarily to its economic dynamism, which would stimulate trade relations through most of Eurasia and parts of Africa. After half a

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century of contention following the fall of the Tang dynasty, the newly established Song dynasty (960–1279 ce) brought not only order, but what the historian Philip Curtain calls a “phase of economic growth that was unprecedented in earlier Chinese history, perhaps in world history up to this time. It depended on a combination of commercialization, urbanization, and industrialization that has led some authorities to compare [it] with the development of early modern Europe six centuries later” (quoted in Northrup 258). Beyond its vigorous internal market, China also conducted an interregional overland trade, but it was the remarkable expansion of its sea-based trade that was especially notable: “The Chinese had more extensive trade ties to foreign countries than any other people in the world in 1000. China exported high-end ceramics and other manufactured items halfway across the globe to its customers in the Middle East, [East] Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, and suppliers in those countries supplied goods for Chinese consumers”; in brief, they “lived in a globalized world [that] reached maturity during the three hundred years of the Song dynasty” (V. Hansen 199). As we saw in Chap. 7, technological advances were among the most important factors in China’s development. The expanding population and the rise of middling classes in newly commercialized cities opened a niche for the zaju plays of the Song dynasty. But in the early twelfth century, China was split apart when its northern half was conquered by a nomadic people from Central Asia who established the Jin dynasty; the Song dynasts fled southward, and their reduced empire is now known as the Southern Song (1127–1279). Neither of these dynasties would last terribly long. The Mongols (another Central Asian people) began chipping away at the Jin within a century of that dynasty’s founding. They took control of the north in 1234, establishing the Yuan dynasty; in 1279, they conquered the Southern Song as well. This political history is highly relevant, because by the time the Southern Song fell, China’s north and the south had developed a pair of distinct literary theatre forms that would establish the abiding difference between northern and southern styles of Chinese theatre to which I referred in Chap. 5. The first of the new forms, nanxi (“southern plays”), might have emerged just before the split of China, “but attained full popularity only with the advent of the Southern Song dynasty, with the transfer of the [Song] court to Hangzhou” (Dolby “Yuan” 32, 33). This city, already substantial, quickly grew into what the historian Morris Rossabi calls “the greatest capital city in the world.” With a population that might have

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reached as high as two million people, “bountiful agriculture and … seaborne trade fostered prosperity for the elite and the merchants.” After paying a visit, Marco Polo pronounced Hangzhou to be a place “where so many pleasures may be found that one fancies himself to be in Paradise” (203, 202, 206). It was in this thriving city that nanxi “entered into a new level of sophistication” (Dolby, “Yuan” 33). The second new form is known as Yuan zaju. Again, the form’s emergence is closely associated with a new capital city: in this case, Dadu (now Beijing), which the Mongols began constructing in 1267 on the site of the former Jin capital (Tanner 256). Here too the urban milieu proved critical. Colin Mackerras writes that although the plays of Yuan zaju “later found their way into the Chinese literary canon … they were definitely popular entertainments in their own day. The audiences were peasants, artisans, and traders on the one hand, the literati and educated on the other” (Chinese Drama 49). Perhaps the most striking thing about these new forms, aside from their virtually “universal social popularity” (Mackerras, Chinese Drama 49), is that both were fully literary. The most common explanation for the emergence of Chinese literary theatre is that the newly-established Mongol rulers, by suppressing Confucian scholar-officials, drove these “highly literate men into popular entertainment for careers or to vent their indignation in their writings” (Dolby, “Yuan” 34). This explanation, however, fails to account for the emergence of nanxi in the portion of China that was not yet conquered by the Mongols. A broader explanation is therefore desirable. China had, of course, long had the necessary literate elite to produce literary theatre, but it seems that it took the extraordinary growth of Hangzhou and Dadu to create the expansive niches that nanxi and Yuan zaju would come to dominate. To fill these niches for urban commercial theatre, playwrights forswore the classical Chinese of proper literature, and engaged in the sort of “popular” writing that was long “considered by the literati as unworthy of the name of literature” (Hsü 71). As Wilt T.  Idema suggests (writing specifically of Yuan zaju but implicitly of nanxi as well), “The constant demand of the burgeoning commercial theatre for new plays contributed to the rise of the playwright” (794). It was, in other words, the opportunity provided by the new niches for urban commercial theatre that attracted playwrights. One can follow the sea-based trade route to observe the growing “convergence” (to use Northrop’s term) of Eurasian regions. Southeast Asia already had well-established cultural and commercial relations with both East Asia and South Asia. The area was rich in natural resources (especially

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spices and rare woods) unavailable in other lands, and the Strait of Malacca (separating mainland from insular Southeast Asia) was already the most important seaway in the world, being the main route between the great powers to the north and west (Abu-Lughod 310, 306). Elite forms of theatre, based in the royal courts, began to emerge in what the historian Anthony Reid calls the “Charter Era,” which was dominated by polities that referred to themselves as nagara, a Sanskrit term that “essentially means a city or town and all that pertains to urban sophistication” (39). These elite theatre forms might well have been the earliest forms in Eurasian theatre’s rising tide. Here it becomes necessary to distinguish between the insular and mainland regions of Southeast Asia. Insular Southeast Asia is home to the entire wayang family of puppet theatre, which originated on the island of Java. There, “the two great Indian epics [had been] ‘Javanized’ into a poetic form of old Javanese” by the tenth century, and “the economy was commercialized and monetized in a trade boom of the tenth to thirteenth centuries” (Reid 43). The most notable early mention of shadow puppetry comes from a court poet of King Airlangga, in the eleventh century: “There are people who weep, are sad and aroused watching the puppets, though they know they are merely carved pieces of leather manipulated and made to speak” (quoted in Brandon, Thrones 3). It is unknown whether, or how much, the development of wayang kulit purwa—generally considered the earliest wayang puppetry form (Ghulam-Sarwar 291)—was indigenous. Its plays were (and largely remain) based on the “Javanized” epics (albeit intermixed with a range of other materials, both Indian and Javanese in origin); similarly, its puppets bear a resemblance to puppets found (in later-emerging theatre forms) in India (Chen 35). It is possible, though, that the Indian source-material (and perhaps also the manner of puppet design) was at some early point grafted onto an existing Javanese tradition of village-based shadow-theatre (Ghulam-Sarwar 276), helping to elevate it into a form suitable for court performance. Whichever might be the case, wayang kulit purwa would, over the following centuries, be versatile enough to fill niches both in simple villages and extravagant courts (Brandon, Theatre 82–83); it would also exert an “obvious influence” throughout the islands, spawning dozens of other wayang forms that took advantage of “its basic conventions, puppets, stories and music” (Osnos 26). Javanese shadow-theatre also crossed the Strait of Malacca to influence theatre not only on the Malay Peninsula, but also in what are now

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Cambodia and Thailand. According to Beth Osnos, “The Cambodians themselves say that ‘it was in fact Java that provided the great inspiration for Cambodian dancing and drama, in spite of themes borrowed from other sources,’” most notably India (Osnos 24). In what is now northern Vietnam, meanwhile, the Chinese influence was more evident. As Reid observes, “Far from vernacularizing an Indic language and script,” the “state aspirations were always Chinese/Confucian rather than Indian/ Shaivite,” even though Mahayana Buddhism was “crucial to its earliest stage of state formation” (47). A rather dubious legend has it Vietnam’s cheo (also known as hat cheo) was introduced from China at the start of the eleventh century (Brandon, Theatre 73), but likely it was a folk form that already existed at this time, being “thoroughly Vietnamese in origin, style, and themes” (Leiter 1.99). More plausible is the legend that in 1285, during an invasion from Yuan dynasty China, a troupe of Chinese performers was captured, and the troupe leader ordered to train Vietnamese actors in exchange for his life (Brandon, Theatre 73). The Vietnamese theatre form that came out of this training was tuang, which as it spread south would be known as hat boi. As the form developed, it continued to be influenced by Chinese theatre. In the nineteenth century, for example, Chinese performers and scholars were invited to train the troupe that performed for the Vietnamese emperor (Mackerras “Theatre” 4), and costuming to this day quite evidently bears a resemblance to that of jingju (Brandon, Theatre Plate 11). Tran Van Khe points out, though, that however much tuong has transferred from Chinese theatre, the form has “been able to retain and develop its own originality, to adapt the text of the plays, the stage effects and the songs and elocution to the tastes of its public” (quoted in Mackerras, “Theatre” 6). The same can be said of all the theatre forms of mainland Southeast Asia: despite influences from Java, South Asia, and East Asia, each of its forms “develop[ed] its own originality” as traits transferred from one place or another were brought together and domesticated in original ways. The next stop westward on the sea-route was India, which I will skip it for now and head on to Egypt.3 Cairo’s position at the far end of Asian trade (which would also eventually make it an important link to the more slowly developing commerce of Europe) strongly shaped its growth.4 By the eleventh century, as the capital of the Fatimid dynasty, Cairo was already well established as a “nexus of trade” (Raymond 60); its role in international commerce reached a climax in the early fourteenth century, under the Mamluk dynasty, thanks to the now-substantial trade with

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Europe. The growing city experienced a long period of “economic prosperity” (Raymond 118), with “the spice trade in the Indian Ocean [having] assumed central importance to the economy of Egypt” (Abu-Lughod 228). It was in the Cairo of these centuries that a literary form of shadow-­ puppet theatre emerged: khayāl al-zill. The earliest mention of the form comes in the eleventh century (Moreh 47), but as best we know, the form’s high point arrived two centuries later, in the plays of the poet Muhammad Ibn Dāniyāl (1248–1311). Ibn Dāniyāl’s poems were often satires of daily life in Cairo, and his three surviving plays continue that satirical impulse, incorporating many passages from his poetry (Guo 112–13). There is limited information about the performance situation for these plays, but it seems they were presented in “intimate gathering places” (i.e., private “salons”), as well as “tavern[s], among other locations” (Guo 95, 93), apparently for audiences of well-to-do urbanites who could appreciate ibn Dāniyāl’s self-proclaimed “high literary style” (Guo 94). The impression one receives is that the commercial activity of Cairo supported a growing class of merchants, traders, ship-owners, and so on, thereby opening a new and moneyed niche for theatre. At first, the shadow-theatre filled this niche with high-toned plays on “traditional topics” such as “religious myth, battles, life-and-death, and so forth”; Ibn Dāniyāl’s innovation was to introduce plays that were (as he himself bragged) “rather bawdy,” despite their “high literary style” (Guo 94). The niche for these plays does not seem to have been particularly wide; nor was it long to survive. A generation after ibn Dāniyāl’s death, Egypt was “hit by a catastrophic demographic event, the great plague epidemic in 1348,” which was merely “the first in a series of crises that prevented the country and the city from making a lasting recovery” (Raymond 138, 140). The form struggled on for a few more generations, but in 1518, khayāl al-zill was banned (Guo 108). At least a few of its traits, however, would be transferred to the Ottoman karagōz, providing an important continuity to theatre in Southwest Asia-North Africa. The Eurasian Wave of Change (Starting c. 1500 ce) The predicate for the wave of theatrical change that would begin in the sixteenth century was a pair of devastating developments back in the mid-­ fourteenth century. First was the “catastrophic demographic event” that hit not only Egypt, but most of Eurasia; Europeans called it the Black Death. Its spread was made possible by the loosely knit Mongolian empire

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that spanned from Yuan China all the way to eastern Europe, which allowed for an unprecedented ease of overland movement (McNeill, Plagues 133–34). In many areas, the plague befell a population that for decades had already been weakened by bad harvests, for which the onset of the Little Ice Age (beginning around the start of the fourteenth century) has been implicated (Brooke 166). The extent of the demographic catastrophe varied greatly across Eurasia; in Europe, roughly one-third of the population died (McNeill, Plagues 149). But according to Abu-­ Lughod, “Two consequences were fairly universal. One was a reemphasis on agricultural production, which absorbed a higher proportion of the smaller population than it had even decades before”; the other was “a drop in the rate of urbanization” (359), which occurred not only because the plague was deadliest in cities, but also because the declining number of agricultural workers led to improving rural conditions that drew workers back from the cities. The second mid-fourteenth-century development was the collapse of the Mongol Empire itself, which was roughly concurrent with (and likely abetted by) the Black Death. Genghis Khan had bequeathed his empire to multiple successors, who for a while were able to maintain a “fractious unity”; but by the 1350s, the empire “was in disarray,” greatly reducing the utility of the overland trade route across Eurasia (Abu-Lughod 359–60). Moreover, when the weakened Mongols lost control of China in 1368 to the newly established Ming dynasty, that route (portions of which remained under now-hostile Mongol control) was temporarily closed. Because it had worked in concert with the sea route in a well-developed system of commerce, the results “were felt throughout the trading world” (Abu-Lughod 360). A pan-Eurasian crisis ensued from the combination of failed crops, widespread plague, and disrupted trade patterns. The main historical force that stimulated the soon-to-come wave of theatrical change can be stated in a single word: recovery. In the late fourteenth century, according to the historian Scott C.  Levi, recovery “was slow and its progress was hampered by the tendency of the plague to revisit regions that it had already devastated.” But “demand for spices and other ‘luxury’ (i.e. nonessential) goods in both China and Europe— indeed, across the whole of Eurasia—increased dramatically from 1400” (328). Through the fifteenth century, populations began to rebound, and towns and cities to repopulate, even as long-distance commerce revived; all would soon reach unprecedented levels. No one region drove these developments. As the historian John Darwin observes, the traditional idea

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that Europeans “galvanized a somnolent Asia … [is] a travesty of fact. A dense mercantile network already linked ports and producers between the East coast of Africa and the South China Sea.” Indeed, “what really stood out” between 1500 and 1800 “was not the sharp economic contrast between Europe and Asia, but, on the contrary, a Eurasian world of ‘surprising resemblances,’” including “market economies” with “division of labor, specialized trades and urban development” (13). In brief, until after 1800, the Eurasian recovery was a pan-Eurasian development. The economic historian Angus Maddison estimates that, as of 1500, India and China each accounted for roughly a quarter of the world GDP; Europe (Western and Eastern combined) accounted for about 20% (261). When Christopher Columbus sailed west in 1492, his hope was to tap into the fabled riches of Asia. Although the Americas got in his way, his misadventure brought two signal results that inadvertently helped to spur the Eurasian recovery. First, his landing in the Americas initiated what the historian Alfred W.  Crosby, Jr., calls the “Columbian Exchange”: the transfer between the Old and New Worlds of plants, animals, diseases, and human populations. As we have seen in Chap. 5, the transfers from Eurasia made possible the Neo-Europes in which colonial Europeans could comfortably settle and come to dominate the indigenous populations. A contributing factor to the establishment of these Neo-Europes was the transfer of Eurasian diseases to which the indigenous peoples had no built-up immunity, leading to the New World’s own demographic catastrophe. The transfers from the Americas were less dramatic, but no less consequential. As the historian Ian Morris observes, American crops such as maize (corn), white and sweet potatoes, and peanuts “grew where nothing else would, survived wretched weather, and fattened farmers and their animals wonderfully. Across the sixteenth century millions of acres of them were planted, from Ireland to the Yellow River” (435). Together, these crops allowed Eurasia to more than compensate for the ongoing Little Ice Age. The second signal result of Columbus’s voyages was the expropriation of material goods from the New World, largely through the labor of enslaved American Indians and Africans. Although Columbus had gone in search of oriental spices and gold, the exportable wealth that proved most immediately significant was silver.5 Indeed, Andre Gunder Frank finds that “almost all European imports from the east were paid for by European exports of (American) silver,” and suggests that Europeans used their American-derived wealth to buy “a seat on the Asian [economic] train” (67, 277). In the sixteenth century, in sum, the on-going

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Eurasian recovery was supercharged by the introduction of American crops and silver, and it was at this time that the global wave of theatrical change began. Let me focus here on the very different recoveries and no-less different theatre histories of a pair of regions: Europe and South Asia. Europe’s recovery was led by, above all, by Italy—not a nation-state at this time, but a contentious collection of republics, duchies, kingdoms, and Papal States. Thanks primarily to its role as commercial intermediary between Europe and “the Orient,” Italy had quite literally been well-­positioned to take advantage of the ever-more lucrative trade that developed through the years of theatre’s rising tide. During the recovery of the fifteenth century, Italy’s role as intermediary was renewed, and its importance to the European economy—and, even more famously, to its cultural life—became especially evident (Braudel 32). The voyages of Columbus foretold a coming crisis, when the center of European commerce would shift from Mediterranean to Atlantic ports, but that was still in the future. For now, “the glory born of material wealth was the long-effective secret of the power” of the major Italian cities (Braudel 12). There was also an important ideological component to the recovering Europe, which also had its origins in Italy. This ideology was at first called “the New Learning”; now it is known as humanism. According to Fernand Braudel, to refer to humanism as “an ideology is to identify it as a loose system of ideas, beliefs, declarations, [and] prejudices, connected by a sometimes less than perfect logic, but connected all the same” (46). An important aspect of this ideology was the recovery of ancient knowledge that had previously been unknown to (or ignored in) Europe. But humanism was not mere antiquarianism. As the historian John Hale observes, “Whatever was brought to the surface from the deep strata of antiquity was interpreted by individuals in their own terms,” and “whatever was made in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was subject elsewhere to local adaptation” in the face of “personal genius” and “national temperament” (325–26). A network of humanists spanned much of Europe, and with the economic recovery, this network spread a new optimism, until (in 1517) the fifty-one year old Dutch scholar Erasmus would be moved to write: “At the present moment I could almost wish to be young again … for no other reason but this—that I anticipate the near approach of a golden age” (cited in Morris 417). In some European arts that age was already well underway; it was about to begin in theatre.

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Medieval forms of theatre did not suddenly cease with the dawning of this “golden age.” Indeed, as Alan E.  Knight comments, “In the late Middle Ages, the theatre in France, as elsewhere in Europe, experienced an unprecedented flourishing” (158). This “flourishing” carried on well into the sixteenth century. Alexandra F. Johnston observes that “the biblical cycles of Coventry, Chester, and York were suppressed [only] between 1575 and 1580,” and “were being performed in all their ‘medieval’ glory after the opening of the professional theatre in London. What we have long thought of as medieval morality forms co-existed with the school plays of the mid-sixteenth century with no apparent sense of incongruity” (118–19). None of this should be surprising: as Europe recovered, its existing theatre forms took full advantage of the increasingly propitious conditions for theatre. But something new was beginning—a new layer of theatre history that would overlay the resurgent medieval theatre and eventually outlast it. Humanists, whether independently or in association with a school or university, were not merely studying ancient plays. In Italy, some scholars used them as models for new plays, written in the vernacular. The result is known as commedia erudite (“comedy of the learned”). A similar process played out under humanist influence in academia through much of Europe, including Spain (McKendrick 50–52), England (Elliot 68), France (Banham 386), and German-speaking lands (Brandt 45–53). Three features of these new plays are particularly notable. First, their “human figures operated mimetically rather than symbolically,” allowing for fully developed characters (Andrews 26); second, the speeches and dialogue of those characters were generally spoken, with singing either recognized as song within the narrative of the play, or used to supplement the narrative in prologues, interludes or finales;6 and third, the plays had extended and complex structures based on those of ancient plays. Commedia erudite was never a popular theatre form: its narrow niche was among the learned. But it helped to inspire commedia dell’arte (“comedy of the profession”), which emerged around 1550. In a different world, this commedia might have been yet another kind of sketch comedy, similar perhaps to the farces familiar in German-speaking lands and France. But thanks in large part to the influence of commedia erudite, it quickly became something else. As Ollie Crick observes, its highly literate artists “would certainly have [had] access” to the work of the humanists, and they learned to create plays that “could now keep the audience’s interest over several hours, by the unfolding of a dramatic story” in a three- or five-act

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structure (222). And although their various masked characters (such as Arlequino) are justifiably renowned, commedia troupes had learned from commedia erudite to build their madcap comedies around the tribulations of sympathetic young lovers; according to Richard Stockton Rand, this allowed for “a connective thread between the lovers and their audience” (71, 70). Another reason for commedia’s remarkable development was its well-known characteristic of structured improvisation, which allowed the actors “the possibility of adapting in real time to the audience response to a performance” (Crick 222). The plentiful wealth of the many Italian towns and cities provided innumerable opportunities for paid performance, and shows could be shaped to suit any audience. As Kenneth and Laura Richards comment, “A given for late Italian Renaissance professional theatre companies was itinerancy,” which opened the way for performances “in the streets and piazze,” but also, increasingly, “in enclosed performance spaces,” sometimes on the estates of the elite, but in rented public halls as well, with the audience paying an admission fee (47). The adaptability of the commedia troupes also helped make their form eminently suitable for export—a path well-worn by countless other bearers of Italian culture. By the 1570s, commedia was being performed in most parts of Western Europe, with audiences ranging from the “plebeian” and “semi-bourgeois” to “princes, aristocrats [and] great lords” (Braudel 147). What these troupes offered, beyond even their immensely appealing plays, was a professional theatre with talented, well-seasoned performers. When they first traveled abroad, none of the countries they visited had a body of performers nearly as competent. But that would very shortly change, thanks in large part to the influence of commedia dell’arte itself, in conjunction with school-based humanist efforts. The result would be the emergence, starting in the late sixteenth century, of three distinct subforms (Spanish, English, and French) of the theatre form I have been calling “European spoken theatre.” Despite the many differences between these three subforms, brought about mostly by their local theatrical and societal contexts (e.g., the shapes of their theatres and the presence or absence of women among their performers), the subforms shared a set of traits that are still common to spoken theatre. First, the characters were presented as fully imagined individuals rather than as symbols, with their lines primarily being spoken, not sung. Second, the plays were literary, with narratives that were complex and extended; also, they were secular in subject-matter and often centered on the romance between a pair of lovers. Third, the shows were

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performed professionally and presented to the general public on the basis of an individual admission fee, though they might also be performed on special occasions in private elite settings. As we have already seen in Chaps. 4 and 5, the form filled the niche for commercial theatre that had opened up in fast-growing cities (although the niche in Paris was somewhat delayed by the brutal religious war waged there from 1562 to 1598). As I noted earlier, the center of European commerce would shift (over the course of the sixteenth century) from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. It is therefore no surprise that the newly prospering cities of the main Atlantic powers—Spain, England, and France—became the focal points of the new commercial theatre form. Even as the three subforms of spoken theatre were emerging, a very different form was starting its career in Italy. This form—eventually to be called opera—was also inspired by humanist study, in particular of Greek tragedy and Aristotle’s commentary on it. From these texts it was apparent that tragedy contained significant amounts of song, but the currently dominant musical practice of polyphony made it difficult to see how that could have been carried off effectively. According to Ruth Katz, the “puzzle” for a loose and shifting circle of Florentine humanists (known to history as the Camerata) “was to discover the ideal combination of words and music.” It did not really matter that no one had a clear idea of how Greek tragedy had been performed; indeed, “that was all the more reason to return again and again to the inadequacy of contemporary music, and to try yet another time to achieve the formula which could ‘move the understanding’” (367). The first successes of the Camerata, Dafne (1597–98) and Eurydice (1600), were created for “specific political or social occasions, and were performed before an invited patrician audience,” with virtually unlimited budgets (Rosand 4). Notably, they made use of the latest advances in perspective drawing for their elaborate scenery and incorporated newly-­ developed stage machinery for creating their spectacle; hence the origins of the Italianate staging discussed in Chap. 6. But while the Camerata’s work was a start, the “puzzle” of an “ideal combination of words and music” would first be solved by Claudio Monteverdi, who presented his landmark opera, Orfeo, in 1607. Although Monteverdi’s early operas were limited to the same sort of elite audiences that had attended the Camerata’s offerings, this changed when he moved to Venice in the late 1630s. Between 1637 and 1678, nine different Venetian theatres presented more than 150 operas, some by Monteverdi, many others by composers who followed his

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lead in this new way of creating theatre; for those theatres, “commercial success was of primary concern, and that could be achieved only by creating works with broad audience appeal” (Rosand 3, 15). Opera was now a commercial form of theatre, though in time it would eventually shift again to a more elite niche, especially outside Italy. Two other theatre forms of the period also had their prehistories in the festivities of the Italian elite. These festivities often included “elegant social dances” known as balli and balletti (Homans 4). After the Italian Catherine de Medici married into the French royal court in 1533, she began importing Italian dance-masters for her entertainments. The most significant early step in the development of these entertainments was the ballet de cour, which was fully established with the 1581 production of the Ballet Comique de la Reine, a carefully choreographed work whose purpose was to glorify the French court (Homans 7–8). This ballet had little perspective scenery and no stage machinery, but these would gain regular use in ballet productions within a generation (Lawrenson 184–88). In England, meanwhile, the royal court sought to celebrate its own glory. Under Queen Elizabeth I, royal “progresses” had already become quite elaborate (Butler 133). Near the end of her reign, and even more under her Stuart successors, these self-celebrations lost their peripatetic aspect and turned into what are known as court masques. These masques moved dramatic elements to the fore, and “scenery, song, and speech were brought together within a single integral fable that accommodated flattery of the monarch with an opportunity for social dancing between masquers and audience” (Butler 136). The form attained its full elaboration in the early 1600s, using Italianate staging, as well as highly literary texts unmatched by the more dance-oriented ballet de cour. What these two forms had in common, above all, was their willingness to expend prodigious resources for the purpose of glorifying their monarchs (Clarke and Crisp 27; Orgel 40–41); although their niches were quite narrow, the forms were perfectly fitted to them. What most differentiates the forms were their fates, for court masques would not outlast the execution of the second Stuart king in 1642, while ballet would shift niches to survive the French Revolution a century and a half later. South Asia’s recovery was quite different from Europe’s, both in the way it was brought about and the theatre that would emerge from it. For centuries, South Asia had been the pivot of Eurasian commerce, being “on the way to everywhere”; it was also a highly productive region in its own right (Abu-Lughod 261, 285). But the mid-fourteenth Eurasian crisis had

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a powerful impact. Abu-Lughod notes that while the southwest coast was relatively unaffected (thanks to ongoing trade with Egypt), “1350 is a significant cutoff date for both northern and southeast India” (282). In the north, the Delhi Sultanate “began to break up,” with the coup de grace to be delivered by Tamerlane, as we will shortly see. In the southeast, meanwhile, the state of Vijayanagar became dominant, but it “was oriented toward neither agrarian pursuits nor international trade” (283). Although the plague had relatively little impact on South Asia, the region still saw a decline in population between 1300 and 1400 (Frank 168), which is indicative of its troubles in the second half of the century. In regard to theatre, the ancient Sanskrit theatre had long since fallen into irrelevance: Farley P.  Richmond notes that “it is generally believed that the tenth century marks [its end] as a creative force,” around the time that serious incursions of Islamic military forces began (“Characteristics” 83).7 Little can be said of what Govardhan Panchal calls the “second generation” of South Asian theatre forms that emerged in its wake. The only such form for which there is substantial knowledge is kutiyattam, which apparently emerged in the early tenth century, on the southwest coast, where the local kingdom was “naturally rich and [with] an adequate income from trade with west Asia” (Thapar 369). Its wealth was largely in the hands of the Hindu elite (as well as of the foreign traders who had settled there), and kutiyattam’s niche was in the temples supported by that elite, with performance being “a sacred event” traditionally arranged “at the request of temple authorities or a local ruler,” and presented only to Brahmins and the royal family (Richmond “Kūtiyāttam” 94). Sanskrit theatre had certainly spread this far south in the preceding centuries, as evidenced by the trove of plays by Bhasa that was discovered in the town of Trivandrum in the early twentieth century (Leiter 1.57), but kutiyattam was very much a syncretic form of theatre (as noted in Chap. 5), drawing on both Sanskrit theatre and local theatre forms for its traits (Vatsyayan 16). Thanks to its location in the far southwest, it was secure from Moslem incursions and even the rise of the Mughal empire.8 Now, about that empire. First came Timur the Lame (aka Tamerlane), a Mongol prince from Central Asia who sought conquests no less grand than those of Genghis Khan. Having conquered Persia (and adopted the Muslim faith), he invaded South Asia in 1398, defeating the sultan in Delhi, and sacking the city (Keay 274); but when Timur sought further conquests, he suffered the great inconvenience of dying. Although the defeated sultan returned to his devastated capital, the scope and power of

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the Delhi Sultanate were permanently diminished (Keay 274). Second came Babur, whose mother (it was said) descended from Genghis Khan and whose father from Timur. His immediate goal was to control the Central Asian city of Samarkand (Timur’s former capital in the fracturing Mongol Empire); stymied in his efforts, he turned his attention southward. In 1526 he defeated the tottering Delhi Sultanate and established the Mughal Empire (Keay 289–92). Third came Akbar, the grandson of Babur. After his father had squandered away much of the territory won by Babur, Akbar quickly re-conquered it, then expanded his empire across vast stretches of South Asia. The reign of Akbar (1556–1605) “saw the real foundations of the Timurids’ Mughal empire,” writes John Darwin. “The wealth and glamour of Akbar’s imperium reflected the scale and productiveness of the Mughal economy.” Through export of “large quantities of food-stuffs, cotton textiles, tobacco, sugar, and indigo … Mughal India was a major trading power,” and “some estimates suggest that India’s manufacturing capacity in early modern times dwarfed that of Europe” (86). The collapsing Mongol imperium, one might say, had inadvertently bequeathed unto South Asia the Mughal Empire. That empire provided the central link to the Eurasian commerce that was being re-­ established, and its new-found stability and increasing wealth provided a rich environment for theatrical innovation. No less important for South Asian theatre history, however, was a religious movement known as bhakti. The word is usually (and not inaccurately) translated as “devotion,” but John Stratton Hawley, a scholar of North Indian religion, emphasizes that bhakti “is a heart religion, sometimes cool and quiescent but sometimes hot—the religion of participation, community, enthusiasm, song, and often personal challenge” (2). The bhakti movement had been a religious and literary force in the far south of India since before the tenth century ce. Starting in the late fifteenth century—the period of the declining Delhi Sultanate—it began establishing itself in the north, where it would provide the inspiration for many of the devotional theatre forms soon to emerge. One of the most striking aspects of the Mughal empire under Akbar was its religious tolerance. Marshall G. S. Hodgson observes that “even in the first years of [Akbar’s] reign his reforms took a direction that respected other faiths.” Of particular note, Akbar abolished taxes that had long been imposed “on certain Hindu pilgrimages” and “not only disallowed [religious] persecution of any sort … but contributed financially to the building of temples for various faiths” (Venture 3.71, 72). For example, eighteen

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temples in the holy city of Vrindavan (Brindaban)—soon to be the home of raslila—received “grants and guarantees from the Mughal throne” (Hawley 151). Akbar’s religious tolerance is clearly evidenced in the emerging third generation of South Asian theatre. There are many possible ways of categorizing South Asian theatre forms. Richmond et al. see them in terms of five “interlocking spheres of influence” (8). Putting aside the “classical” sphere (in which they include kutiyattam as well as Sanskrit theatre) and the “modern” sphere, the three remaining spheres are “ritual,” “devotional,” and “folk-popular” (10). There is precious little information concerning the histories of ritual forms, so I will reluctantly put them aside as well. This leaves the devotional and folk-popular forms. These categories are indeed “interlocking,” for devotional forms were often immensely popular, while folk-popular forms offered moments of ritual and did not hesitate to enact narratives of Krishna and Rama. Even so, one can broadly distinguish between the two spheres. Kathryn Hansen observes that the devotional forms (such as raslila and ramlila) were brought into being by bhakti. They “are meant to inspire reverence and love for God [or, more precisely, Krishna and Rama, respectively], and often produce audience emotion approaching rapture.” Also, the devotional forms function “within a religious matrix presided over by priests, patrons, and high-status interpreters,” and are presented in language that, while mostly vernacular, “is elevated and literary.” Conversely, folk-popular forms (such as bhavai and swang) “evoke merriment, wonder, lust, even fear”; these forms “rely on their commercial appeal, offering diversion in exchange for a price”; and they are presented in everyday speech, fully “accessible to all” (61). Despite these differences, however, the  devotional and folk-popular forms share certain characteristics. They are often based in one or more of the numerous small cities and large towns of South Asia, and are subregional in their appeal, with the subregions usually being definable on the basis of language.9 This theatrical geography is quite different from that of Europe at the time (in which the major forms were centered in a handful of large cities) and is perhaps suggestive not only of a decentralized increase in wealth, but also of the cultural individuality of the many South Asian subregions, despite Mughal sovereignty. Relatedly, the third-generation theatre forms are presented in the vernacular languages of the subregions, whether elevated (as in devotional forms) or not (as in folk-popular forms). And just as the language of the plays is comprehensible to the audience, their music is also usually in a popular subregional (or even local) style, rife

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with familiar melodies. As Govardhan Panchal writes of the third-­ generation theatre forms in general: “These were truly the people’s theatres, growing with the people, speaking their language, singing their songs, staging [performance] in their streets or near their temples” (11). They present, in all, a glorious efflorescence of theatrical innovation by and for the people. Dating the emergence of third-generation forms is difficult at best, for each has competing theories as to its origin; it seems, though, that the devotional forms mostly emerged slightly earlier than the folk-popular ones. Indeed, even before the Mughal conquests, the bhakti movement had found theatrical expression in ankiya nat, which emerged in Assam around the start of the sixteenth century (Leiter 1.35). This being the case, it is likely that at least some other bhakti-inspired forms would have emerged even in the absence of the Mughal Empire. But it seems no less likely that the wealthy empire (along with its acceptance and financial encouragement of Hinduism, at least under Akbar) combined with the performative impulse of bhakti to open up many subregional  niches for devotional theatre. Among folk-popular forms, meanwhile, bhavai might have emerged quite early, with its legendary founder, Asaita Thakar, dating to the late fourteenth century. Tellingly, Gujarat (where the form originated) was already under Islamic rule at that time, and the form’s dramatic sketches (veśas) regularly show “Hindus and Muslims living in harmony and peace” (Panchal 14). Even if this early dating for the form is correct— and Vatsyayan, among others, sees the form as emerging much later, in the sixteenth century (Appendix II)—it is easy to see how bhavai’s popularity would expand under the more consistently tolerant and prosperous rule of Akbar. Tamasha, another folk-popular form, emerged somewhat later than bhavai, with some sources dating it to the late sixteenth century, others as late as the eighteenth century (Abrams 275, Vatsyayan 169). The form is also clearly syncretic (Abrams 278), with its name coming from Persian, in which it means “fun, play, or entertainment” (Gargi 73). Interestingly, there was a Persian theatre form of the same name during Persia’s Safavid period (1501–1736). It was a comic-improvisational form, and frequently contained lewd material (Floor 41–43), as is also the case with the South Asian tamasha (Gargi 88). Moreover, the Persian form made use of female performers (Floor 42–43), as did the South Asian form in its early years (Gargi 75). Bhavai and the South Asian tamasha are somewhat unusual among folk-popular forms in so clearly exhibiting traits that show an interaction

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between Hindus and Muslims. But they demonstrate how the coming together of different groups, even across profound religious boundaries, can stimulate theatrical innovation. With the stability and relative wealth of the early Mughal empire, inter-religious theatrical syncretism was one of the ways to fill the niches for folk-popular theatre in that opened up in South Asia’s innumerable cities and towns. The Global Wave of Change (Starting c. 1850 ce) A person touring Eurasia to take in its variety of theatre in 1800 would have encountered theatre forms that had emerged during its rising tide that started in the tenth century (e.g. kutiyattam, nō, wayang kulit purwa) and, far more frequently, during the wave of change that began in the sixteenth century (e.g., kunqu in East Asia, the devotional and folk-­ popular forms of South Asia, kabuki and bunraku in Japan, and spoken theatre and opera in Europe). If this person were adventurous enough to travel beyond Eurasia, almost all the theatre to be seen would have been indigenous forms of uncertain history, with a salting of European forms in Europe’s colonial settlements. But a hundred and fifty years later, a tour of the world’s theatre would reveal a vastly different landscape. Although many of the earlier forms would still be present, scores of important new forms would have emerged during a global wave of change, brought about above all by the impact of European industrial imperialism and the spoken theatre that traveled in its wake. European theatre would itself be transformed by the internal developments associated with its rise to global dominance, as well as by its contact with theatre forms from larger world. Jürgen Osterhammel suggests, quite plainly, “The history of the nineteenth century was made in and by Europe” (xx). To be sure, globalizing forces did not come only from Europe: massive population movements included diasporas of Africans, Chinese, and Indians, as well as of Europeans themselves, while non-Europeans invariably modified the European influence on their lands (Hopkins, “History” 39). And as the historians Charles Bright and Michael Geyer argue, “We cannot presume the universalizing conceit of the West spilling over into the rest of the world. Rather, in the vortex of the global transformation [that began in the nineteenth century] all societies—the West and the rest—were thrown into nerve-wracking processes of radical self-transformation that remade them, from the inside out, by recombining themselves and their ways with adaptations and imports from all sides” (293). But that “vortex of global

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transformation” (including the aforementioned diasporas) was largely stimulated by Europe’s newly industrialized imperialism. Back in 1500, as we have seen, Europe’s share of the world’s GDP trailed the individual shares of China and India. But by 1870, it was greater than the combined share of those two lands, and Japan as well; and by 1913, Europe would account for almost half the world’s GDP, while the United States’s share would be about the same as the combined share of China, India, and Japan (Maddison 261). The global reach of Europe would disrupt societies almost everywhere, altering the niche-structures of their theatre complexes. The main historical force that stimulated the global wave of theatrical change that began in the mid-nineteenth century was very clearly Europe’s industrial imperialism. According to Osterhammel, “The basic connections of the nineteenth-­ century system of [global] trade were in place by the middle of the eighteenth century” (728). Thanks to these connections, Europe’s sea-based empires were flexing their global muscles well before the nineteenth century. But in these pre-nineteenth century empires, indigenous theatre traditions were only occasionally disrupted; the main exception was in the Spanish empire, where the colonists sought to suppress indigenous theatre in the Americas and the Philippines. As a rule, though, European theatre was limited to what were then small colonial communities of Europeans and their descendants. This pattern changed in nineteenth century. During the hundred years astride 1800, Great Britain’s industrial revolution transformed imperialism through technological advances in production (e.g., of textiles and steel), transportation (e.g., steam-powered trains and ships), and communications (e.g., the telegraph) (Osterhammel 638). Industrialization spread quickly from Britain: “Steamships, railways and the electric telegraph had been widely adopted in Europe and North America from the 1830s and ʼ40s. By the 1870s they were colonizing vast new areas of the world, carving corridors of access into regions where travel had been difficult (and costly) and information scarce”; indeed, “by the end of the century, no part of the world could be considered immune from the transforming effects” of the new technologies (J. Darwin 300). Between 1869 and 1913, world trade increased four-fold, mostly carried by immense new ships powered by steam and built in Europe or the United States (Headrick 112). The socio-economic impact of industrialized imperialism was nearly universal. According to Osterhammel, the second half of the nineteenth

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century was a period of intensive urbanization around the world, significantly increasing “the relative weight of middle ranks in society” (766). And the effect was not only socio-economic. John Darwin suggests that “the cultural theory of this imperial world was perhaps its most pervasive departure [from pre-industrial imperialism]. Europeans convinced themselves, and persuaded others, that, while non-European civilizations and cultures were exotic, fascinating, romantic, or beautiful, they were at best a series of culs-de-sac. Only Europe’s way was a proven path to ‘moral and material progress’—the title of the annual report issued by the (British-­ run) government of India” (299). The urban middling classes that were brought into being by European imperialism, along with new elite classes educated in “Europe’s way,” opened up new niches in the theatre complexes of almost every region, and theatre artists looking to fill those niches often turned to European theatre for inspiration. But I need to emphasize here that there was no single path these artists followed. David Kerr, writing about African theatre, observes that “a widely accepted model of cultural imperialism … suggests that colonialism had a thoroughly deracinating effect on indigenous culture,” leading to the collapse of pre-colonial theatre. In this model, writes Kerr, “an almost teleological perspective is applied to the impact of colonialism, so that it seems part of an inevitable evolution toward major post-colonial forms of literary theatre” (41). Kerr’s comment is applicable far more widely than just to Africa, for this dichotomy between pre-colonial (i.e., traditional) theatre and literary (i.e., modern) theatre has been suggested for many of the world’s theatre regions. And not only is there a teleology in this model of cultural imperialism, but also an implied hierarchy: pre-colonial forms might be treasured for their authenticity or scorned as antiquated, but European-style literary theatre is understood to be a more advanced kind of theatre. And this understanding was not limited to Europeans: tellingly, one of the early names that the Chinese gave to spoken theatre was wenmingxi, “civilization theatre” (Dolby, History 203). In fact, however, the variety of theatrical paths taken during the global wave of change included the continuation (sometimes with Euro-syncretism, sometimes without) of already-established forms; the emergence (again, sometimes with Euro-­ syncretism, sometimes without) of new forms that maintained strong continuities with the local past; and also the transfer in toto of theatre forms such as spoken theatre (which might themselves then be domesticated through syncretism with local theatre traditions).

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As Kerr’s comment regards sub-Saharan theatre, let me focus first on that region, and then on the very different theatre of Japan, to illustrate these many paths. Europeans had been deeply involved in the African slave-trade since the sixteenth century, but by the time European empires engaged in the so-called “scramble for Africa” starting in the 1880s, the trans-Atlantic slave-trade had largely been extinguished (Manning 16, 139–40). Instead, the imperial powers were motivated by greed for African resources such as gold, diamonds, and rubber; by missionary zeal and a broader, deeply racist sense of a civilizing mission; and by sheer imperial competition, with no power wanting to be left out of the takings (J. Darwin 304–18). To satisfy their ambitions, Europeans pushed their control far inland from the coasts they had long been prowling, establishing bureaucratic structures to wrestle their colonies under control. They had obvious technological advantages in their efforts, which were further aided by the winnowing of the African population that had taken place through centuries of slaving. But however dubious in motive and baleful in execution, this spasm of European imperialism would stimulate an effloresce of new African forms of theatre that would join the established forms that had survived colonization. Most often, those established forms were performed at festivals, in conjunction with non-dramatic performance. A festival of the Afikpo people (in current Nigeria), for example, has long included okumpa, whose “action consist[s] of a satirical rendition of actual events both in neighouring settlements and the village itself” (Soyinka 423–24). Similarly, the kotè-tlon of the Bamana people (in current Mali) presents a series of “satirical or farcical sketches” that deal with “contemporary life and situations” (Okagbue 136–37). These and many other festival forms have not been unchanged by the past two centuries. As Okagbue notes, “The indigenous forms are constantly reviewing and revising themselves in response to their ever-changing historical and cultural contexts” (10). For example, a character newly introduced to koté-tlon is named “Been-to”: he has “recently returned from China and Europe and [is] out to impress everyone with his new knowledge and wealth” (10). But such modest changes notwithstanding, these and many other pre-colonial forms have “remained true to their original forms and processes” and have “kept their developmental paths firmly rooted in their native cultures” (12, 175). Established theatre forms were sometimes quite professional, as was the case with alarinjo. A performance was seen in the 1820s by the British explorer Hugh Clapperton, who was not terribly amused by its inclusion

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of a hapless white man for whom he was likely the model (Jeyifo vii-viii). According to oral histories, the form had emerged around the start of the seventeenth century (Adedeji 221–23).10 Through much of its career, its professional troupes worked primarily at the court while also giving occasional public performances; it was one of those troupes that Clapperton had witnessed (Jeyifo xii). Performances have been largely unaltered by colonialism, though just as koté-tlon has added the character “Been-to,” the sketches of alarinjo have come to include not only outsiders like Clapperton’s white man, but also a variety of more contemporary figures (Götrick 98). Undoubtedly the swelling of African cities that began in the twentieth century narrowed the niches for many established forms, and encroaching modernity perhaps rendered them less comprehensible to portions of their remaining audience (Götrick 45–46). But at the same time, urbanization also created new niches that theatre artists were quick to fill with highly syncretic forms. I have already given (in Chap. 6) a short account of the emergence in the mid-1940s of the Yoruba popular theatre, which combines European and African traits (including from alarinjo) into a form with great appeal to the expanded middling classes of Lagos and other parts of Yorubaland. I also made brief mention of the Concert Party, a syncretic form of theatre that emerged in Ghana (and shortly after, became popular in Togo as well). Concert Parties began in the 1920s as vaudeville-like performances that drew from many sources (including the American minstrel shows that gave Concert Parties their blackface) and were performed for mostly white audiences. But by the 1950s the form was presenting original, full-length plays (interlarded with highlife music) in the indigenous language, drawing audiences largely from the African middling classes (Cole 76–77). As Catherine M. Cole comments, Concert Party is representative of how African theatre artists “have creatively responded to the tumultuous changes wrought by colonialism, industrialization, postmodernity, and the current neocolonial age” (8). It was, however, the spoken theatre transferred in toto from Europe that would eclipse all other forms “in terms of sheer social and cultural power.” In writing those words, John Conteh-Morgan refers specifically to former French and Belgian colonies, but the same point generally holds true in other parts of Africa as well. Despite the popular appeal of the various new syncretic forms, spoken theatre (or, as Conteh-Morgan calls it, “literary drama”) “has become the hegemonic form” of the African elite (114). Mineke Schipper observes that “the so-called modern African

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theatre” is usually written and performed in a European language; emphasizes the verbal element rather than music, song, and dance; separates the audience from the stage by using a proscenium and curtain; presents plays that are much shorter than the full evenings of traditional indigenous theatre; is concerned with very different themes; and is mostly attended by “a small upper class of the population” (154–55). But despite its differences from other forms of African theatre, African artists have clearly made spoken theatre their own. In Francophone lands (as likewise in many others), the subjects of African history, politics, and society have risen to the fore, even as indigenous traits of actor movement, improvisation, collective creation, and audience participation have been introduced into the form (Conteh-Morgan 125, 128). Although spoken theatre is still generally performed in one or another European language, the form has largely been domesticated, bringing into it powerful continuities with established African forms. The range of theatrical paths evident in sub-Saharan Africa is observable in other theatre regions as well. Each region is different, however, in part because each had its unique theatrical and societal contexts coming into the nineteenth century, and in part because no two regions had the same experience with imperialism. Let me turn now to Japan for a different example of the impact of Europe (and in this case, the United States), and the range of theatrical paths that ensued. When the American Commodore Matthew Perry steamed into Edo Bay in 1853, his flotilla was a mere four ships, “but they carried more firepower than all the guns in Japan combined.” Japan had pursued a generally isolationist policy through the peaceful centuries of Tokugawa rule, but in the aftermath of Perry’s demonstration of strength, that policy could no longer be maintained. Japan granted the United States trading rights in a pair of ports, with various European states receiving similar rights shortly after (Morris 517–18). In the face of its evident weakness, the Tokugawa regime itself could no longer be maintained, and on 3 January 1868, the court in Kyoto proclaimed “the Restoration of Imperial Rule of Old” (Tanner 312). This was, Osterhammel notes, “an act of pure usurpation,” but it set the stage for the world’s “most thoroughgoing revolution of the middle decades of the nineteenth century.” The Japanese “needed relatively little force to achieve far-reaching changes,” without ever having suffered “significant foreign military intervention” or “colonial subjugation” (416). But although Japan was never colonized, European and American models—most significantly, of military and

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industrial matters, but also of cultural matters such as theatre—proved highly attractive as a way to modernize Japan. As the historian Irokawa Daikichi writes: “The influence of European and American civilization on Japan during the 1860s and 1870s was traumatic and disruptive … [but] for a time any thought of defending traditional culture was scorned as an idle diversion from the critical need to respond to the urgency that faced the country. What had to be done was to penetrate the enemies’ camp, grasp their weapons of civilization for use against them, and then turn to use them in the national interest” (quoted in Jansen 456–57). Coming into this period, nō and kabuki were Japan’s most important theatre forms. The overthrow of the Tokugawa regime would, as we saw in Chap. 6, virtually wipe out the elite base of support for nō, leaving the form “in disgrace” (Keene 43). But nō managed to find a new niche as an official showcase and repository of national tradition, once again giving it every reason to maintain as much continuity as possible. The new era had a more complicated effect on kabuki. As with nō, a “process of crystallization” began, whereby it gained “a new respectability officially sanctioned by the visits of important dignitaries” (Ortolani 186). But it was also still a commercial form (which nō had never been); so along with presenting well-established plays in time-honored ways, it sought to attract a popular audience that was interested in current events and receptive to foreign influences. One result was a slew of plays of a nationalist bent: “Beginning with the first Sino-Japanese War in 1894, through the 1904 Russo-­ Japanese War, and up to the end of World War II in 1945, numerous new kabuki plays supporting Japan’s military action were produced” (Iezzi 131). Another result was the emergence of syncretic subforms of kabuki. In 1872, the actor Ichikawa Danjūrō IX proclaimed the need to “clean away the decay” of kabuki by modernizing it and emphasizing realism; at about the same time, “crop-hair plays” emerged, featuring “surface elements of Western culture and modernity,” with actors favoring “western suits, bowler hats and pocket watches,” while largely maintaining “traditional kabuki dramatic structures and performance conventions” (Wetmore et al. 25, 26). These efforts, however, did not hold the stage for long, and the more deeply syncretic subform called shin kabuki (“new kabuki”) emerged in the early twentieth century. The plays of this subform were “influenced by Western dramaturgy” and performed without many of kabuki’s traditional acting conventions or its special effects, music, stylized fighting, or makeup (Wetmore et  al., 26). But despite (or because of) these modernizing efforts, shin kabuki also failed to attain a  lasting

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popularity. Up through World War Two, kabuki would largely continue to follow the dual path of being, on the one hand, a “crystalized” form favoring Tokugawa-era plays and performance practices, and, on the other hand, a commercial theatre seeking to capture the shifting interests of its popular audience. A new commercial form called shinpa (also known as shimpa; meaning “new school” theatre) emerged at about the same time as shin kabuki, but offered a different approach to syncretism, attempting “to create a hybrid based on Western models [while] incorporating elements” of kabuki (Wetmore et al. 28). The form had moments of popularity, thanks especially to the sensationalism of scripts that were frequently based on serialized novels, but it never found an enduring niche, being compelled “to position itself between kabuki, some of whose conventions it successfully imitated, and more modern forms such as shingeki (‘new theatre’), the genre inspired by Western theatre” (Powell 205, 206). That “more modern form” would prove far more important for the future of Japanese theatre. At the start, shingeki was simply European-style spoken theatre transferred in toto to Japan. The initial agents of the transference, notably, were not colonizing Europeans (as had been the case in sub-Saharan Africa), but Japanese academics. Shingeki “was born,” writes Ortolani, “around two major Tokyo universities” and was based on “the serious study, translation, and performance of western dramatic literature,” with the hope of developing “a Japanese dramatic literature comparable to that of the West” (243). It was “the art of the playwright,” above all, that was of immediate concern, with “one of the aims of the Drama Reform movement [being] to establish the playwright as an independent artist in his own right” (Powell 207). The two European playwrights of greatest early interest were Shakespeare and Ibsen, “represent[ing] two very different approaches to the same ideal of modernizing Japanese theatre” (Ortolani 244). There soon developed a great diversity of approaches within shingeki, which could be safely indulged because the form’s artists “shunned commercialism and worked mostly outside Japan’s professional entertainment world” (Ortolani 237). Up through World War Two, it was performed primarily in small theatres that catered to educated audiences interested in the form’s political inspiration or psychological realism (Wetmore et al. 39–40). Its plays, however, were almost from the beginning presented not in a European language (as in Africa) but in Japanese (Ortolani 245–48), which helped it to become domesticated early in its

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career, and not quite “synonymous” with the European spoken theatre from which it derived (Wetmore et al. 32). * * * Each of the three inflection points I have been discussing saw an efflorescence of new theatre forms that marked the start of a new period in theatre history, either on a Eurasian scale or a truly global one. But each efflorescence came to an end. New theatre forms continued to emerge between these flurries of widespread change; but after each efflorescence, there was observably less change (at least as evidenced in the emergence of new theatre forms), and that change was neither pan-Eurasian nor global in scale. Having discussed the onset of each efflorescence, I need to offer at least a brief comment on how each came to its end. The end to the rising tide of change that began in the tenth century is easy to account for. As we have seen, the combined impact of the Black Death and the collapse of the Mongol empire crippled much of Eurasia, while the recovery from that impact stimulated the sixteenth century wave of change. By the mid-seventeenth century, that efflorescence had itself largely run its course. Some historians identify a “seventeenth century crisis” striking various regions between 1620 and 1690 (Frank 231), but perhaps even more important for theatre was the increasing rigidity of the ruling regimes and their socio-economic systems. This was an age of dynasties that over their careers tended to lock into place the social order of their societies: the Tokugawa shogunate (1600–1868) in Japan; the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) in East Asia; the Mughal dynasty (1526–1857) in South Asia; the Ottoman Empire (1453–1908) in West Asia and North Africa (as well as parts of Southeastern Europe); and the various Ancien Régimes in the rest of Europe. Social stability, for all its obvious virtues, tends to limit the sort of generative disruptions that alter the niche-­ structures of entire theatre complexes. Although new theatre forms continued to emerge in these years of stability, as is clear from the roster of theatre forms in the Appendix, it was only with the decline and/or collapse of these regimes that the nineteenth-century efflorescence of new forms began. In the wake of World War Two, the forces that drove the global wave of theatrical change—that is, the impact of industrial modernity on Europe, and the subsequent impact of Europe’s industrial imperialism on the rest of the world—were spent. Europe lost its industrial dominance

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and retreated from its overseas empires. The ensuing “postcolonial globalization,” as A. G. Hopkins calls it (“Globalization” 9), has seen remarkable technological advances in transportation and communications, an ongoing increase in urban expansion, and an unprecedented level of inter-­ societal contact. Although some of the disruption brought about by postcolonial globalization has undoubtedly been chaotic, it would seem that much has been the sort of generative disruption that could stimulate new theatrical niches, even as it closed the niches for some existing forms. And yet there has apparently been a decline in new forms since World War Two. This could be something of an illusion, given that nascent forms might not yet have gained enough stability to be recognized as such. But I suspect the relative paucity of emerging forms is a reality of contemporary world theatre. The main historical force behind this paucity is likely the intense competition presented to dramatic theatre by film, radio, video, and computers. As I noted in the previous chapter, wherever these media have reached, they have almost immediately presented a challenge to theatre. Ease of access and economies of scale have given mediated drama a clear advantage in the competition, and when one also factors in the socio-economic changes that have narrowed or eliminated innumerable traditional niches, the success of mediated drama must come as little surprise. Theatre, however, offers one thing that mediated drama never can: the live relationship between actors and their audience. With so many potential new audiences being created around the world, and with so much of the world’s theatre becoming easily accessible to any artists who wish to draw on it for their own syncretic purposes, I would hazard the optimistic guess that despite the competition from mediated drama, theatre will manage yet again to find new paths forward, though what those paths might be is as yet quite unclear.

Notes 1. For regional, subregional, and local theatre histories, one would also want to consider the emergence of subforms. 2. Dates for Sterns, Bentley, and Green are from Dunn, “Periodizing” 361, 362, 362, respectively; for McNeill, Mythistory 62. It is also worth noting that A. G. Hopkins, a historian of globalization, argues that the transition from “archaic globalization” to “proto-globalization” began around 1500 (“Globalization” 6).

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3. West from India, the main sea-route actually split in two, with one branch running though the Persian Sea (and thence to Baghdad), the other up the Red Sea (Abu-Lughod 202). I am here following the later of these routes. 4. The city of Fustat was founded in the eighth century ce, with a nearby companion city, Al-Qahirah, being established in the tenth century. Although they retained distinct identities for a couple hundred years, they eventually became known, together, as Cairo. 5. Before long, plantation crops would be no less important, first sugar and then also tobacco and cotton. 6. Music that is included within the dramatic fiction is sometimes called “diegetic” music. For example, in Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister, aside from the prologue, songs are generally introduced with a character telling another something like “Sing on, then” (e.g., I.3.89). ̄ 7. Note however, that while Indū Shekhar recognizes the impact of the Islamic invasions as a contributing factor in Sanskrit theatre’s decline, he places greater emphasis on factors intrinsic to the form itself (155–64). It might well be that the Islamic invasions were the coup de grace to a form that was already faltering. 8. The word “Mughal” is the Indo-Persian form of “Mongol,” but as Hodgson notes, it would be “seriously misleading” to speak of a Mongol Empire in South Asia (Venture 3. 62–63, note 2.) 9. Ramlila is the most widespread of third-generation forms, and “is played on the fairgrounds and in the marketplace[s]” across much of North India (Swann 215); but throughout this extensive subregion (which spans multiple current Indian states), Hindi is one of the dominant languages. 10. The dating for the emergence of alarinjo makes it tempting to think of the form as an African extension of Eurasia’s earlier theatrical wave of change. But it seems more likely to be a temporal coincidence, for the Yoruba had no contact with Europeans at this early point.

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Vatsyayan, Kapila. Traditional Indian Theatre: Multiple Streams. New Delhi, National Book Trust, India, 1980. Wetmore, Kevin J., Jr., et al. Modern Asian Theatre and Performance 1900–2000. Bloomsbury, 2014. Wiles, David. “Medieval, Renaissance and Early Modern Theatre.” The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, edited by David Wiles and Christine Dymkowski, Cambridge UP, 2013, pp. 55–72.



Appendix: Roster of Emergent Theatre Forms

550–500 bce—Greek tragedy (Athens) (Hartnoll 607) 500–450 bce—Greek “Old” Comedy (Athens) (Hartnoll 607) 350–300 bce—Greek “New” Comedy (Athens) (Hartnoll 551) 250–200 bce—Comedy and tragedy (Rome) (Banham, Cambridge 936) 250–200 bce—Mime (Rome) (Duckworth 13) 200–100 bce—Sanskrit Theatre (India) (Richmond et al. 1990: 27) 150–100 bce—“Horn butting game” (China) (Dolby, “Early” 11) 50–1 bce—Pantomime (Rome) (Beacham 142) 500–600 ce—Bukagu/gagaku (Japan) (Leiter 1.67) 600–650—Gigaku (Japan) (Leiter 1.227) 700–750—Canjunxi (Adjutant Play) (China) (Dolby, History 7) 700–750—Tayao niang (Stepping and Swinging Women) (China) (Dolby, “Early” 13) 800–900—Robam kbach boran (lakhon kbach boran) (Cambodia) (Ghulam-Sarwar118) * * * 900–1000—Liturgical theatre (Europe) (Hartnoll 674) 900–1000—Wayang kulit purwa (Indonesia) (Ghulam-Sarwar 276) 900–1000—Gambuh (Indonesia) (Ghulam-Sarwar 79) 900–950—Kuttiyatam (India) (Leiter 1.358) 900–950—Wayang beber (Indonesia) (Ghulam-Sarwar 276) © The Author(s) 2020 S. Tillis, The Challenge of World Theatre History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48343-2

305

306 

APPENDIX: ROSTER OF EMERGENT THEATRE FORMS

950–1000—Song (dynasty) zaju (China) (Dolby, History 15) 950–1000—Religious literary drama (Europe) (Banham, Cambridge 501) * * * 1000–1100—Dengaku (Japan) (Leiter 1.154) 1000–1100—Khayāl all-zill (Egypt) (Moreh 47) 1000–1050—Cheo (Vietnam) (Brandon 73) 1050–1100—Wayang topeng (Indonesia) (Ghulam-Sarwar 311) 1050–1100—Sangaku/Sarugaku (Japan) (Ortolani 62–63) * * * 1100–1150—Jin (dynasty) yuanben (China) (Dolby “Early” 19) 1100–1150—Oesterspiele (Easter plays) (Germany) (Banham, Cambridge 705) 1100–1150—Mua roi nuoc (Vietnam) (Leiter 2.92) 1100–1150—Sangaku (Japan) (Keene 29) 1150–1200—Nanxi (China) (Dolby, “Yuan” 32) * * * 1200–1250—Saints Plays (France) (Frank 98) 1200–1250—Auto Sacramental (Spain) (Hartnoll 46) 1250–1300—Yuan (dynasty) zaju (China) (Dolby, History 44) 1250–1300—Farce (France) (Axton and Stevens 195) 1250–1300—Tuong (hat-boi) (Vietnam) (Leiter 2.812) * * * 1300–1400—Passion plays (France) (Frank 126) 1300–1400—Kyōgen (Japan) (Ortolani 151) 1300–1400—Nibhatkhin (Burma) (Brandon and Banham 17) 1300–1350—Chanqui (marvel dramas) (China) (Leiter 1.200) 1300–1350—Cycle plays (Corpus Christi plays) (England) (Hartnoll 581) 1300–1350—Morality plays (England) (Banham, Cambridge 699) 1350–1400—Nō (noh) (Japan) (Leiter 1.466) * * *

  APPENDIX: ROSTER OF EMERGENT THEATRE FORMS 

307

1400–1450—Ache lhamo (Tibet) (Leiter 1.2) 1450–1500—Nang yai (Thailand) (Ghulam-Sarwar 186) 1450–1500—Wayang kulit gedog (Indonesia) (Ghulam-Sarwar 287) * * * 1500–1600—Bhavai (bhavāi) (India) (Vatsyayan, Appendix II) 1500–1600—Tsam (Mongolia) (Leiter 1.431) 1500–1600—Kuchipudi (India) (Leiter 1.352) 1500–1600—Bangzi quiang musical system, multiple forms (China) (Brandon and Banham 32) 1500–1600—Yiyang qiang musical system, multiple forms (China) (Brandon and Banham 31) 1525–1575—Raslila (rās lı̄lā) (India) (Leiter 2.606) 1500–1550—Ankiya nat (India) (Leiter 1.35) 1500–1550—Commedia erudita (Italy) (Hartnoll 174) 1500–1550—Khon (Thailand) (Brandon and Banham 237) 1500–1550—Karagöz (Ottoman Empire) (And 34) 1500–1550—European theatre introduced into the Americas (Weiss et al. 47) 1500–1550—Commedia dell’arte (Italy) (Banham, Cambridge 237) 1500–1550—Jatra (yatra) (India) (Leiter 1.288) 1500–1550—School drama (inc. Jesuit Drama) (Europe) (Hartnoll 741) 1500–1550—Yakshagana (India) (Brandon and Banham 115) 1500–1550—Matachines dance (Mexico) (Sponsler 17) 1500–1550—Moros y Cristianos (Mexico) (Weiss et al. 52) 1550–1600—Court masque (England) (Banham, Cambridge 689) 1550–1600—Cavittu natakam (India) (Leiter 1.80) 1550–1600—Bhagat (India) (Gargi 46) 1550–1600—Tamasha (India) (Richmond et al. 275) 1550–1600—European spoken theatre (England) (Banham, Cambridge 331) 1550–1600—Kunqu (China) (Dolby, History 92) 1550–1600—Ballet de cour (court ballet) (France) (Homans 7–8) 1550–1600—Bunraku (ningyō jōruri) (Japan) (Brandon and Banham 171) 1575–1625—Opera (Italy) (Banham, Cambridge 821) 1575–1625—Kathakali (India) (Leiter 1.317) * * *

308 

APPENDIX: ROSTER OF EMERGENT THEATRE FORMS

1600–1700—Lakon nok (Thailand) (Leiter 1.371) 1600–1700—Nang talung (Thailand) puppet (Leiter 2.590) 1600–1700—Maanch (maach) (India) (Leiter 1.389) 1600–1700—Dasavatar (India) (Leiter 1.153) 1600–1650—Kabuki (Japan) (Leiter 1.297) 1600–1650—Komedya (comedia, kumedya, moro-moro) (Philippines) (Ghulam-Sarwar 50) 1600–1650—Ramlila (rām lı̄lā) (India) (Richmond et al. 217) 1650–1700—Krishnattam (India) (Leiter 1.348) 1650–1700—Zarzuella (Spain) (Hartnoll 912) 1650–1700—Alarinjo (Apidan) (Nigeria) (Banham, History 140) 1650–1700—Kuravanci (India) (Leiter 1.357) * * * 1700–1800—Wayang wong (Indonesia) (Leiter 2.824–25) 1700–1800—Lakon chatri (Thailand) (Leiter 1.369) 1700–1800—Yaryu (Korea) (Leiter 2.864) 1700–1800—Cantonese yueju (China) (Leiter 2.870) 1725–1775—Swang (svang, svanga) (India) (Leiter 2.704) 1700–1750—Pasku (Sri Lanka) (Leiter 2.499) 1700–1750—Panto (English pantomime) (England) (Banham, Cambridge 837) 1700–1750—Ballad opera (England) (Hartnoll 52) 1700–1750—Zat pwe (Burma) (Leiter 2.878) 1700–1750—Wayang krucil (Indonesia) Puppet (Ghulam-Sarwar 280) 1700–1750—Khyal (khyāla) (India) (Leiter 1.328) 1750–1800—Ta’ziyeh (Iran) (Floor 125) 1750–1800—European spoken theatre introduced into South Asia (Leiter 1.257) 1750–1800—Yokthe pwe (Burma) (Ghulam-Sarwar 317) 1750–1800—Nadagam (Sri Lanka) (Leiter 1.451) 1750–1800—Jingju (jingxi, Peking/Bejing opera) (China) (Leiter 1.292) 1750–1850—Bhagavata mela (bhāgavatamelā) (India) (Leiter 1.54) * * *

  APPENDIX: ROSTER OF EMERGENT THEATRE FORMS 

309

1800–1900—Lakon phan thang (Thailand) (Leiter 1.372) 1800–1900—Drama (Philippines) (Leiter 1.176) 1825–1875—Nautanki (India) (Leiter 1.460) 1800–1850—Melodrama (France) (Banham, Cambridge 719) 1800–1850—Arja (Indonesia) (Leiter 1.37) 1800–1850—Sangeet natak (India) (Leiter 2.638) 1800–1850—Legong (Indonesia) (Brandon and Banham 138) 1850–1900—Parsi theatre (India) (Leiter 2.497) 1850–1900—Operetta (France) (Banham, Cambridge 814) 1850–1900—Género chico (Spain) (Weiss et al. 111) 1850–1900—Abdul muluk (dolmuluk, dermuluk) (Indonesia) (Leiter 1.1) 1850–1900—Bangsawan (Malay opera) (Malaysia) (Leiter 1.46) 1850–1900—Liké (likay) (Thailand) (Ghulam-Sarwar 140) 1850–1900—Nurti (Sri Lanka) (Leiter 1.473) 1850–1900—Shinpa (shimpa) (Japan) (Ortolani 234) 1850/1900—Komedi stambul (Indonesia) (Leiter 1.338) 1850–1900—Musical comedy (England) (Hartnoll 570) 1850–1900—Avant-garde theatre (Europe) (Banham, Cambridge 571) 1850–1900—Lakon rong (Thailand) (Leiter 1.374) 1850–1900—Speshal natakam (India) (Leiter 2.678) 1850–1900—Lakon dukdamban (Thailand) (Leiter 1.369) 1850–1900—Sandiwara (komedie, tonil) (Indonesia) (Brandon 50–51) 1880–1920—Sannata (dappinata) (India) (Leiter 2.639) * * * 1900–1950—Sarsuwela (Zarzuela) (Philippines) (Leiter 2.643–44) 1900–1950—Broadway musical (USA) (Banham, Cambridge 772) 1900–1950—Shingeki (Japan) (Leiter 2.663) 1900–1950—Shaoxing yueju (China) (Leiter 2.871) 1900–1950—Huaju (“spoken drama”) (China) (Leiter 1.111) 1900–1950—Ch’anggŭk (Korea) (Leiter 1.95–96) 1900–1950—Jangger (Janger) (Indonesia) (Leiter 1.277) 1900–1950—Shin’pagŭk (Korea) (Leiter 2.669) 1900–1950—Cai luong (Vietnam) (Brandon and Banham 248) 1900–1950—Bidesia (bidesiya) (India) (Leiter 1.61) 1900–1950—Concert party (Ghana) (Barber et al. 8) 1900–1950—Shumang lila (jatra, jatrawali) (India) (Leiter 2.672)

310 

APPENDIX: ROSTER OF EMERGENT THEATRE FORMS

1900–1950—Shingŭk (“new theatre”) (Korea) (Brandon and Banham 184) 1900–1950—Kich noi (Vietnam) (Leiter 1.329) 1900–1950—Kethoprak (ketoprak) (Indonesia) (Leiter 1.325) 1900–1950—Nang pramo thai (Thailand) (Leiter 2.591) 1900–1950—Boria (borea) (Malaysia) (Leiter 1.64) 1900–1950—Ludruk (Indonesia) (Brandon and Banham 138) 1900–1950—Bobadil (Philippines) (Leiter 1.63) 1900–1950—Opera batak (Indonesia) (Leiter 2.482) 1900–1950—School theatre (Senegal) (Banham, History 117) 1900–1950—Lakhon bassac (Cambodia) (Leiter 1.366) 1900–1950—Burrakatha (India) (Leiter 1.73) 1900–1950—Yoruba Popular Theatre (Nigeria) (Banham, History 148) 1900–1950—Chitlin Circuit (USA) (Gates 139) 1900–1950—Huaji xi (China) (Leiter 1.245) 1950–2000—Wuju (China) (Leiter 2.849) 1950–2000—Tarling (Indonesia) (Leiter 2.725) 1950–2000—Lakhon niyeay (lakon ciet) (Cambodia) (Leiter 1.368) 1950–2000—Butō (butoh) (Japan) (Leiter 1.74) 1950–2000—Kwagh-hir (Nigeria) (Kerr 166) 1950–2000—Sendratari (Indonesia) (Leiter 2.659) 1950–2000—Yangban xi (revolutionary “model plays”) (China) (Leiter 2.862) 1950–2000—Township musicals (South Africa) (Banham, History 352) 1950–2000—Drama gong (Indonesia) (Leiter 1.177) 1950–2000—Angura (Japan) (Leiter 1.34) 1950–2000—Kahani ka rangamanch (India) (Leiter 1.302) 1950–2000—Madangnori (Korea) (Leiter 1.391)

Works Cited

And, Metin. A History of Theatre and Popular Entertainments in Turkey. Ankara, Dost Yayinlari, 1963–64. Axton, Richard, and John Stevens, translator. Medieval French Plays. Barnes and Noble, 1971. Banham, Martin, editor. A History of Theatre in Africa. Cambridge UP, 2004. Banham, Martin, editor. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Rev. ed., Cambridge UP, 2000. Barber, Karin, et al. West African Popular Theatre. Indiana UP, 1997. Beacham, Richard C. Spectacle Entertainments of Early Imperial Rome. Yale UP, 1999. Brandon, James R. Theatre in Southeast Asia. Harvard UP, 1967. Brandon, James R., and Martin Banham, editors. The Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre. Cambridge UP, 1993. Dolby, William. “Early Chinese Plays and Theatre.” Chinese Theatre: From Its Origins to the Present Day, edited by Colin Mackarras, U of Hawaii P, 1983, pp. 7–31. Dolby, William. A History of Chinese Drama. London: Paul Elek, 1976. Dolby, William. “Yuan Drama.” Chinese Theatre: From Its Origins to the Present Day, edited by Colin Mackerras, U of Hawaii P, 1983, pp. 32–59. Duckworth, George E. The Nature of Roman Comedy: A Study in Popular Entertainment. 2nd ed., U of Oklahoma P, 1994. Floor, Willem. The History of Theatre in Iran. Washington, DC, Mage Publishers, 2005. Frank, Grace. The Medieval French Drama. Oxford UP, 1954. Gargi, Balwant. Folk Theater in India. Calcutta, Rupa and Company, 1991.

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Tillis, The Challenge of World Theatre History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48343-2

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Works Cited

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “The Chitlin Circuit.” African American Performance and Theatre History: A Critical Reader, edited by Harry J.  Elam and David Krasser, Oxford UP, 2001, pp. 132–48. Ghulam-Sarwar Yousef. Dictionary of Traditional South-East Asian Theatre. Kuala Lumpur, Oxford UP, 1994. Hartnoll, Phyllis, editor. The Oxford Companion to the Theatre. 4th ed., Oxford UP, 1983. Homans, Jennifer. Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet. Random House, 2010. Keene, Donald. Nō and Bunraku: Two Forms of Japanese Theatre. Columbia UP, 1990. Kerr, David. African Popular Theatre: From Pre-Colonial Times to the Present Day. London, James Currey, 1995. Leiter, Samuel L., editor. Encyclopedia of Asian Theatre. Greenwood Press, 2007. 2 volumes. Moreh, Shmuel. “The Shadow Play (‘Khayāl al-Zill’) in the Light of Arabic Literature.” Journal of Arabic Literature, vol. 18, 1987, pp. 46–61. Ortolani, Benito. The Japanese Theatre: From Shamanistic Ritual to Contemporary Pluralism. Rev. ed., Princeton UP, 1995. Richmond, Farley P., et  al., editors. Indian Theatre: Traditions of Performance. U of Hawaii P, 1990. Sponsler, Claire. Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America. Cornell UP, 2004. Vatsyayan, Kapila. Traditional Indian Theatre: Multiple Streams. New Delhi, National Book Trust, India, 1980. Weiss, Judith H., et al. Latin American Popular Theatre: The First Five Centuries. U of New Mexico P, 1993.

Index

A Abu-Lughod, Janet L., 38, 261, 270, 276, 283 Adas, Michael, 177 African-American Region, 146–147 Akbar, Emperor, 284, 286 Alarinjo, 186, 290 Ancient Mediterranean Region, 147–149 And, Metin, 115–116 Anhui Sanqing Troupe, 239 Ankiya nat, 286 Apidan, see Alarinjo Apter, Emily, 14, 185 Aristophanes, 101 Aristotle, 94 Armitage, David, 176 Arras, France, 192 Asvaghosa, 195 Australasian Region, 145–146 B Ballet, 73, 282 training, 214 Bamana, 18

Bangsawan, 237–239, 241, 242 Banham, Martin, 151 Baugh, Christopher, 253 Bauman, Richard, 15 Beacham, Richard C., 147 Beijing opera, see Jingju Belgium, 135 Bell, David A., 36 Bentley, Jerry H., 33, 34, 46, 51, 267 metanarrative, 53–55 secular trends, 189–190, 194–195 Betlehemes játék, 218 Bhakti, 284–286 Bharata, 18, 94 Bharucha, Rustom, 50, 239, 240 Bhasa, 283 Bhavai, 285, 286 Borges, Jorge Luis, 257 Brandon, James R., 68–69, 215–216, 228 Braudel, Fernand, 132, 249, 278 agency, 176–177 geography, 128 structures, 179 Bright, Charles, 287

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Tillis, The Challenge of World Theatre History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48343-2

313

314 

INDEX

Broadway musical, 87, 111 Brockett, Oscar G., 82, 83, 171 Brook, Peter, 13, 240 Brown, John Russell, 32 Buddhism, 195–196 Bunraku, 19, 24, 242 competition with kabuki, 228–229 Burckhardt, Jacob, 207 Burke, Edmund, III, 3 Burma, 195 Butsch, Richard, 80 C Cambodia, 274 Camerata, Florentine, 281 Canada, 215–218 Carlson, Marvin, 8, 10, 34, 87, 97, 133 Carr, David, 250 Central Asian Region, 142, 195 Césaire, Aimé, 75 Chaudhuri, K. N., 132 Cheah, Pheng, 14 Cheney, Sheldon, 72–74, 76, 81, 82, 85, 87 Cheo, 274 Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 49 China, 1, 9–10, 254–255, 270–272 Song dynasty economic expansion, 230–232 Chitlin Circuit, 187–188 origins, 235 Christian, David, 189, 197 Chuanju, 151 Cole, Catherine M., 242, 291 Collingwood, R. G., 21 Columbian Exchange (concept), 277–278 Commedia dell’arte, 117, 149, 279–280 Commedia erudite, 149, 279 Concert Party, 45, 242, 291 Conrad, Peter, 13

Conrad, Sebastian, 15, 31, 50, 133, 150, 202, 259, 260 varieties of world history, 11–12 Conteh-Morgan, John, 234, 291 Coronil, Fernando, 54 Cosmides, Leda, 20 Court masque, 282 Cresswell, Tim, 128, 137, 179 Crick, Ollie, 279 Crosby, Alfred W, Jr., 145, 146 concept of Columbian Exchange, 277–278 Curtain, Philip, 271 Cycle plays, English, 186, 213 D Damrosch, David, 14 Darwin, Charles, 112 Darwin, John, 276, 284, 289 Dasgupta, Gautam, 136, 240 De Grazia, Margreta, 183 Dharwadker, Aparna, 142 Diamond, Jared, 160 Dirlik, Arif, 49 Dodgshon, Robert A., 211, 212 Dolby, William, 181, 232 Dosse, François, 176 Dunn, Ross E., 3, 250 E Eagleton, Terry, 221 East Asian Region, 150–151, 195 Edo, 228 convergent analogy with London, 155–159 Egypt, 273–275 Ehret, Christopher, 161 Ekong comic plays, 18 El Teatro Campesino, 136 Elizabeth I, Queen, 282

 INDEX 

Else, Gerald, 110 Engels, Friedrich, 220–223 England, 254–255 Erasmus, Desiderius, 278 Esslin, Martin, 17 Europe material basis for medieval theatre, 191–193 European region, 143–144, 149, 278–282 F Favorini, Attilio, 96 Finnegan, Ruth, 50 Fischer, David Hackett, 51, 255, 257, 263 fallacies, 62–63, 207 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 5, 40, 240 Fletcher, Joeseph, 260–261 Formalism, 110 Foucault, Michel, 53 Fowler, Alastair, 254 Frank, Andre Gunder, 77, 262, 277 Fraser, Nancy, 54 G Gambaro, Griselda, 75 Gascoigne, Bamber, 258 Gas lighting, 193–194 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 187–188 Genghis Khan, 276 Geyer, Michael, 287 Ghana, 242, 291 Gilbert, Helen, 13, 236–237, 239 Goffman, Erving, 15 Goldfarb, Alvin, 66, 83, 171 Gould, Stephen J., 21, 114 Graham-White, Anthony, 84 Grand Kabuki Theatre, in Berkeley, 109–110

315

Grant, Ulysses S., 178, 293 Great Britain, 219 Green, William A., 41, 262, 267, 269 Grosfogeul, Ramón, 187 Guldi, Jo, 176 Guy, Nancy A., 23 H Hahoe pyŏlsin-kut, 186 Hale, John, 278 Hall, Peter, 157 city as “cultural crucible,” 198–201 Hamburger, Mark, 135 Hamlet, 37, 42 Hammerstein, Oscar, II, 108 Hansen, Kathyrn, 285 Harris, Max, 115 Hat boi, see Tuong Hat cheo, see Cheo Hawley, John Stratton, 284 Hegel, G. W. F., 77 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 134, 135 Hermann, Max, 96, 133 Herskovits, Melville, 84 Hildy, Franklin J., 82, 83 Hodgson, Marshall G. S., 69, 93–94, 131, 138, 150, 231, 256, 268, 284 westward distortion, 64–65 Hopkins, A. G., 268, 296 Hrotsvitha, 149, 192 Huaju, 45 Huidiao, 239 Hulfeld, Stefan, 174, 207 Humanism, 278 I Ibibio, 18 Ibn Dāniyāl, Muhammad, 273–275 Ibsen, Henryk, 294

316 

INDEX

Ichikawa Danjūrō IX, 293 Idema, Wilt T., 272 Imperative of continuity, 230 Imperative of formal change, 210, 227 Imperative of formal continuity, 210–212 India, 219 Indigenous South American Region, 142 Insular Southeast Asian Region, 145, 273 Irokawa Daikichi, 293 Italianate staging, 182–184, 217 Italy, 278 Iwakura Tomomi, 177 Izenour, George C., 183

Kathakali, 45, 73, 99 training, 214 Katz, Ruth, 281 Keene, Donald, 177 Kerr, David, 289 khayāl al-zill, 273–275 Kipling, Rudyard, 66 Kleisthenes, 101–102 Knight, Alan E., 279 Komedya, 115 Komparu Zenchiku, 195 Kotè-tlon, 18, 290 Kunqu, 46, 239 role categories, 182 Kutiyattam, 143, 283, 285

J Jackson, Shannon, 80, 83 Japanese region, 195, 293–295 Java, 273 Ji Junxiang, 71 Jingju, 23–24, 45, 46, 95, 106–107, 242, 259 origins, 239–240 role categories, 182 Johnson, Samuel, 95 Johnston, Alexandra F., 279 Journey to the West, 195

L Lagos, Nigeria, 198–200, 291 Lal, Vinnay, 50 Latrell, Craig, 237 Lefebvre, Henri, 155 Leiter, Samuel, 23 Levi, Scott C., 276 Levine, Lawrence W., 79 Lewis, Bernard, 70 Lewis, Martin W., 70, 71, 130–132, 144, 147 metageography, 137–141 Li Ruru, 259 Lo, Jacqueline, 13, 236–237, 239 London convergent analogy with Edo, 155–159 Lougee, Carolyn, 79 Ludruk, 45 Lyotard, Jean-François, 53

K Kabuki, 45, 46, 109–110, 118, 157, 242, 260, 293 competition with bunraku, 229 convergent analogy with European spoken theatre, 117–118 gas lighting, 194 origins, 188 Kalidasa, 49, 71, 259 Karaghiózis, 112–113, 233 Karagöz, 96, 112, 115–116, 118–119

M MacCanell, Dean, 229 Macgowan, Kenneth, 7

 INDEX 

Mackerras, Colin, 254, 272 Maddison, Angus, 277 Magnin, Charles, 83 Mahabharata (Epic), 142 Mahabharata (stage play), 13, 240 Mahjub, Mohammad Jaʻfar, 116 Mainland Southeast Asian Region, 145, 273–274 Malaysia, 237 Mani-rimdu, 195 Manning, Patrick, 33, 38, 174 Martin, Jacqueline, 97–103 Marx, Karl, 77–78, 220–221, 223 Matthews, Brander, 71–72, 76, 83 Mazlish, Bruce, 14, 15, 52 McConachie, Bruce A., 42, 101 McKeown, Adam, 250 McNeill, William H., 11, 21, 36–38, 43, 80, 133, 194, 267 moldboard plow, 191–192 Medici, Catherine D., 282 Melanesian Region, 142 Melnitz, William, 7 Metropolitan Opera, New York, 215 Mickiewicz, Adam, 134 Miles, Sarah, 147 Mill, John Stuart, 78 Monteverdi, Claudio, 86, 281 Moretti, Franco, 128 Moros y cristianos, Mexican, 114–115 Moros y cristianos, Spanish, 114–115 Morris, Ian, 277 Mummers’ play, English, 39, 213 Myrsiades, Linda, 112–113 N Nagler, A. M., 96 Nanxi, 151 origins, 271–272 role categories, 182 National Theatre, Great Britain, 219

317

Natyashastra, The, 71, 94 Nautanki, 143 Neal, Zachary P., 226–230 Nellhaus, Tobin, 172–173, 190 homological theory, 222–223 theatre and mediated drama, 232 Neo-Europes (concept), 145–146 Neusner, Jacob, 44, 45 New York City, 159, 224–225 Ngugi wa Thiongo, 234 Nibhatkhin, 195 Nicholson, Linda, 54 Nicoll, Allardyce, 65–66, 95 Ningyō jō ruri, see Bunraku Nisbet, Robert, 207 Nō , 45, 95, 99, 156, 173, 293 19th century revival, 177–178 North American Region, 145–146 North Asian Region, 146 Northrup, David, 267, 268, 270 Noverre, Jean Georges, 73 O Odom, Glenn, 75 Ogunde, Hubert, 196, 198, 200–201 Okagbue, Osita, 18, 50, 151, 152, 290 Oklahoma!, 111 Okumpa, 290 Old Comedy, Greek, 101–102 Opera, European, 45, 73, 87, 136–137, 213, 281–282 repertoire, 215 Orta-oyunu, 115–116 Ortolani, Benito, 260, 294 Osipovitch, David, 95 Osnos, Beth, 274 Osterhammel, Jürgen, 15, 43, 155, 159, 197, 255, 268, 287, 288 Owomoyela, Oyekan, 155

318 

INDEX

P Panchal, Govardhan, 283, 286 Passion plays, 116, 178, 186 Pavis, Patrice, 240 Peking Opera, see Jingju Perry, Matthew, 292 Peters, Frank, 135 Petroski, Henry, 190 Philippines Region, 145 Pinker, Steven, 103–104 Plato, 101 Plautus, 147 Pomeranz, Kenneth, 268 Pomper, Philip, 42 Popielarz, Pamala A, 226–230 Postlewait, Thomas, 20, 38, 40, 41, 110, 171, 174, 177, 220, 224, 258, 262 periodicity, 249–257 Pronko, Leonard, 68 Punch-and-Judy puppet show, 214 Purim plays, 186 Pušić, Barbara, 135 Q Quem Quaeritis trope, 192 Quinn, Michael L., 96 R Raghavan, V., 259 Ramayana, 142 Ramlila, 186, 228, 285 Rand, John Stockton, 280 Ranke, Leopold von, 132 Rapoport, Natasha, 146 Raslila, 285 Records of Early English Drama, 39 Reflectionism, 221–223 Reid, Anthony, 273, 274 Rhulen, Merritt, 111

Ricci, Matteo, 1, 2, 22–23 Richards, Kenneth, 280 Richards, Laura, 280 Richmond, Farley P., 283, 285 Ritual origins, 83–85 Roach, Joseph, 132 Robinson, Jo, 34, 35, 50, 52 Rodgers, Richard, 108 Role categories, 181–182, 216 Royal Opera House, Great Britain, 219 Royal Shakespeare Company, Great Britain, 219 Rozik, Eli, 17 S Said, Edward W., 70, 77 Sandiwara, 238 Sanskrit theatre, 71, 136, 142, 195, 259, 285 Sauter, Willmar, 15, 97–103 Schechner, Richard, 17 Schipper, Mineke, 291 Shakespeare, William, 86, 215, 294 Shin kabuki, 293 Shingeki, 294 Shinpa, 294 Sichuan opera, see Chuanju Slawinski, Maurice, 183 Song zaju, 232 South Africa, 140, 234 South and Central American Region, 145–146 South Asian Region, 142–143, 283–287 Southwest Asian-North African Region, 144 Spanish Armada, 172 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 50 Spoken theatre (in Africa), 291 Spoken theatre (in India), 143

 INDEX 

Spoken theatre, European, 46, 47, 74, 180, 280–281 convergent analogy with kabuki, 117–118 Stanford, Michael, 2 Stathaki, Aktina, 234 Stearns, Peter, 267 Storytelling, 19–20 Sub-Saharan African region, 144–145, 151–154, 290–292 appeal of Greek tragedy, 234–235 Sudraka, 259 Swinton, William, 78–79 Symes, Carol, 192 T Tagore, Rabindranath, 134 Tamasha, 219, 286 Tan Sooi Beng, 237 Tang Xianzu, 18 Taplin, Oliver, 147 Tate, Nahum, 215 Taylor, Dianne, 236 Taylor, Gary, 199 Taʻziyeh, 116, 118, 186, 218 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 78 Terence, 147 Thailand, 274 Theatre anthologies, analysis of, 8–9 Theatre history survey classes, analysis of, 5–6 Theatre history textbooks, analysis of, 6–8 Theatre of roots (India), 143 Theatrical Syndicate, 159 Thol pavaikkuthu, 213 Tiatco, Sir Anril P., 115 Tillis, Steve, 5 Togo, 291 Tooby, John, 20 Tragedy, Greek, 147, 222 beyond Greece, 221

319

Tran Van Khe, 274 Tsetseka (Winter Ceremonial), 155 Tuang, 274 U Ubu Roi, 40–41 United States, 48 V Vansina, Jan, 40 Vatsyayan, Kapila, 143, 286 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 16 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 16 Vietnam, 274 W Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings, 5 Wang Guowei, 71 Wang Jide, 18 War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco, 213 Wayang kulit menak, 187 Wayang kulit purwa, 117, 186, 273 “standard scenes,” 215–216 Western Civ classes, 79–81 Westlake, E. J., 75 Wetmore, Kevin J., Jr., 234 Whig interpretation, 78–80 White, Hayden, 21, 221 Wickham, Glynne, 45, 81, 82, 85, 87, 220 Wigen, Kären E., 70, 71, 130–132, 144, 147 metageography, 137–141 Wiles, David, 53, 250 Williams, Simon, 135 Wilmer, S. E., 134 Wilson, Edward O., 104 Wilson, Edwin, 66, 83, 171

320 

INDEX

Wong, R. Bin, 268 World history vs. global history, 14–15 Y Yellowman (Navajo storyteller), 19 Yoruba popular theatre, 196–197, 241, 242, 291 origins, 198–201

Yuan zaju, 71, 151 origins, 271–272 roles categories, 182 Yuanben, 232 Z Zarrilli, Phillip B., 214 Zeami, 18, 94