Doing Things with Image Schemas: The Cognitive Turn in Theatre Studies and the Problem of Experience for Historians

Abstract

Can historians know and explain the experiences of people from the distant past? As performance historians, can we understand what Molière may have experienced during his wrangling with the bureaucrats of Louis XIV over the production of Tartuffe? Can we comprehend what working-class spectators in New York may have enjoyed while experiencing the performance of an apocalyptic melodrama in the 1840s? What Janet Achurch experienced while rehearsing for the London premiere of A Doll's House in 1889? Or, to frame these questions as a historiographical problem, is there enough common ground linking the present experience of the historian to the probable experience of people from the past (as understood from the available evidence) to arrive at some truths about these past experiences sparked by performance events?

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