Theatre History
Theatre history studies the development of dramatic performance, playhouses, conventions, and audiences across cultures and periods, from ancient ritual and Greek tragedy to the global stages of the present.
Definition
The historical study of theatrical performance, dramatic literature, playhouses, and conventions across periods and cultures.
Scope
This area surveys the historical evolution of theatre as a performance practice and cultural institution: its texts, performers, spaces, technologies, and social functions. It treats periods from antiquity through the medieval and early modern eras to modern, avant-garde, and contemporary theatre, attending both to canonical Western developments and to the historiographical question of how theatre's many pasts are reconstructed and narrated.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- How did theatrical forms, spaces, and conventions change over time?
- What relationships connect drama to ritual, religion, politics, and commerce?
- How is theatre history reconstructed from fragmentary texts and material evidence?
- Whose theatres and traditions have been centered or excluded in standard histories?
Key theories
- Survey historiography of the theatre
- The comprehensive period-by-period synthesis exemplified by Brockett and Hildy, narrating theatre's development through successive eras, their playwrights, performance spaces, and staging conventions.
- Revisionist and plural theatre histories
- The approach of Theatre Histories, which questions the single linear Western narrative and reconstructs multiple, culturally situated histories using diverse evidence and critical frameworks.
History
Theatre is traced from ritual and choral performance in the ancient Mediterranean and Asia, through the Greek and Roman stages, the religious and popular drama of the Middle Ages, the professional playhouses of the Renaissance and the Italian, English, and Spanish golden ages, the rise of realism and naturalism in the nineteenth century, the modernist avant-gardes of the twentieth, and the diverse experimental and global theatres of the contemporary period.
Debates
- Ritual origins of drama
- Scholars debate the once-standard claim that drama originated in religious ritual, with some emphasizing continuity from ritual and others stressing the limits and Eurocentrism of universal origin theories.
Key figures
- Oscar G. Brockett
- Glynne Wickham
- Phillip B. Zarrilli
- Marvin Carlson
Related topics
Seminal works
- brockett2013
- zarrilli2010
- carlson1993
Frequently asked questions
- Did theatre really begin as religious ritual?
- Many traditions show links between early performance and ritual, but the idea that all drama descends from ritual is now treated cautiously, since the evidence is fragmentary and the model risks imposing one culture's pattern on others.
- Is theatre history only about Western drama?
- No. While older survey histories centered Europe, current scholarship treats Asian, African, and Indigenous performance traditions as integral, distinct histories rather than appendices to a Western narrative.