The study of theatre’s history often begins with questions about playwriting, acting, directing, stage design, audiences, and similar subjects. Early theatre historians often looked at these subjects narrowly, but today they usually place them within much larger contexts. For example, they may be interested in how theater has been shaped by social forces such as race, class, and gender, or how it has challenged those forces. The question of how audiences of the past interpreted or experienced performance poses important challenges. The ways in which theatre from one part of the world has affected theatre elsewhere is of interest to some historians. Another topic concerns theatre’s relationship to other types of performance, such as courtroom argument, or other public venues such as museums. These are just a few of the questions that interest today’s theatre historians.
To do their work, theatre historians need to be aware of problems that can arise in interpreting evidence and of the different methods and goals that can guide historical analysis. For historians, facts seldom “speak for themselves”: their significance is shaped by historians’ ideas about historical process, social structures, and the making of meaning.
Theatre historians mainly aim to enlarge our understanding of theatre – the people, events and relationships involved in theatre’s development, the causes of change, the ideas underlying forms of performance, and so forth. But sometimes theatre history also helps directors, dramaturgs, actors and designers understand a play and how they might approach its performance. Tobin Nellhaus