Reading Context Into Performance: Theatrical Formations and Social History

Abstract

In seeking valid interpretations and explanations, all historians face the problem of relating small events to broader contexts. Mindful that the general trends of a period always limit specific occurrences within it, most historians will also insist that some events lend shape and direction to their age. Theatre historians confront one variety of this dilemma when they attempt to relate performance events to the historical society and culture of which they were a part. Since empirically based research has yet to verify-and may be incapable of ascertaining-the general relationship between performance and society, the theatre historian needs some guidance in framing questions and pursuing leads when dealing with this issue. More than that, he or she needs some definitions and assumptions, since writing history without these foundations is impossible. In the following discussion, I will draw on my own research into nineteenthcentury American melodramatic theatre and the orientation of neo-Marxism to suggest one way of approaching-not, I hasten to add, solving-the performance-society relationship problem. Many American cultural historians have adopted a climate of opinion model to relate these phenomena. Performance events are understood as part of a general consensus of values and ideas which somehow reflect and express larger and presumably more powerful social arrangements and forces. Orthodox Marxist historians have also reduced culture to a passive expression of other realities, though using a different paradigm to do it. In the work of Lukacs and others, the base of economic forces and relations largely determined the superstructure of culture—a culture conflicted by class antagonisms, however, not contained by patterns of consensus. Ironically,

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