On the light fantastic toe: Dance scholarship and academic fashion

Abstract

In his stimulating essay, Comparative Theatre Historiography, R. W. Vince quotes Oscar Brockett's outline of the nature, scope, materials and methods of historical study, in which he stressed the necessity of authenticating the documents, of verifying their contents, and finally of searching for significant patterns of meaning. The first two of these requisites are, of course, preliminary to the third, and their fulfillment does not make history. But without them there can be no history either.2 During the nineteenth century, much serious scholarly attention was paid to music and art by positivist historians, and a solid foundation was established that allowed these artistic pursuits to become academic disciplines in their own right and, eventually, independent departments within the university. In this century, the works of E. K. Chambers, Allardyce Nicoll, and, later, of Glynne Wickham, among others, secured a similar status for drama. Wickham was one of the first to draw attention to the impossibility of certain knowledge in the writing of theatre history and he began to suggest the complex

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