Eighteenth‐century theater history and performance studies

Abstract

Over the last few decades, theater history has moved beyond a documentary and descriptive approach to become a field that increasingly embraces the “epistemological uncertainty” that comes with studying an unfixed medium. This shift owes much to the flourishing of performance studies in the 1990s and 2000s. This essay examines the effects of performance studies on 18th‐century theater history. Theater historians of earlier periods have long grappled with how to study a medium that is uncapturable by print alone. Performance's ephemerality and its embodiment, in particular, pose challenges to those working in the archives. This essay reviews the recent scholarship that brings together the archival work of theater history with newer performance‐oriented methodologies. The turn to performance studies allows us to better theorize the experiences and identities that archives have sometimes obscured, especially involving women and minorities. Moreover, taking the medium of performance seriously not just as an object of study, but as a mode of constructing and disseminating theater history enables us to experience vicariously sensory elements of performance that traditional print scholarship cannot fully capture.