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 The rise of absolutism
Entertainments at court
CASE STUDY: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the perils of print culture in New Spain
Realizing absolutism in stage design
Louis XIV and Molière
CASE STUDY: Molière and carnival laughter
Absolutism and neoclassicism in France and England, 1660–1700
Reforming Baroque opera
Absolutism and neoclassicism in the German states and Russia, 1700–1770
The limits of neoclassicism and absolutism in France, 1720–1770
Summary

Part II: Works cited

PART III Theatre and performance in periodical print cultures

Part III timeline
Introduction: Theatre for bourgeois civil society

7 Theatre and sentiment: newspapers, private lives, and the bourgeois public sphere,
1700–1785
Sentiment and periodical print culture
Sentimental drama in England
Pantomime, satire, and censorship in England
CASE STUDY: Censorship in eighteenth-century Japan
Sentiment and satire on the continent
Changes and challenges in sentimentalism
Acting in the eighteenth century
CASE STUDY: Theatre iconology and the actor as icon: David Garrick
Performers and the public
Theorizing acting
Summary

8 Nationalism in the theatre, 1760–1880

Print, theatre, and liberal nationalism, 1760–1800
CASE STUDY: Friedrich Schiller’s vision of aesthetic education and the German dream
of a national theatre
The French Revolution, melodrama, and nationalism
European cultural nationalisms, 1815–1848
Nationalism in Russia and Italy, 1848–1880
Wagner and racial nationalism in Germany, 1848–1880
 Liberal and racial nationalisms in the Americas
CASE STUDY: Imagining a white nation: Minstrelsy and U.S. nationalism, 1840–1870
Summary

9 Performing “progress”: From imperial display to the triumph of realism and

naturalism, 1790–1914
Modern imperialisms
Performing imperialism and Orientalism at the great expositions
Distorting science to justify imperial entertainments
Imperialism and Orientalism in British theatre
Variety theatre and music hall
“Internal imperialism” and the origins of jingju (“Beijing Opera”)
Western artists appropriate non-Western imagery
CASE STUDY: Inventing Japan: The Mikado and Madama Butterfly
New media and new ideologies: Photography, science, and positivism
The rise of realist staging
Naturalism on stage
Realism and the rise of producer-directors
Ibsen and Romantic idealism
Chekhov undermines nineteenth-century theatre
Ibsen, Chekhov, and the critique of photography
CASE STUDY: Ibsen’s A Doll House: Problems in Ibsen’s problem play
Summary

10 New media divide the theatres of print culture, 1870–1930

Spectacular bodies on popular stages
CASE STUDY: Retailing glamor in the Ziegfeld Follies
Print culture for stars and playwrights
Audiophonic media after 1870
The emergence of avant-garde theatre
Symbolism and Aestheticism
German Expressionism
CASE STUDY: Strindberg and “The Powers”
Expressionism in the United States
Institutionalizing the avant-garde
Summary

Part III: Works cited

PART IV Theatre and performance in electric and electronic communication culture

 Part IV timeline
Introduction: Theatre and the unceasing communications revolutions

11 New theatres for revolutionary times, 1910–1950

War and the movies
Revolutionary predecessors
Theatricalizing the Russian Revolution
CASE STUDY: Lenin’s Taylorism and Meyerhold’s biomechanics
Revolutionary theatres West and East
CASE STUDY: Brecht and the science of empathy
Theatres of anti-imperialism, 1910–1950
Theatrical modernism
Yeats, Pirandello, and the modernist legacy
Theatricalizing modernism
Summary

12 The aftermath of the Second World War: Realism and its discontents in an
increasingly shrinking world, 1940–1970
The impact of the Second World War on the victors and the defeated
Postwar theatre and the Cold War
CASE STUDY: Cultural memories and audience response: A Streetcar Named Desire in
the 1940s
CASE STUDY: Social drama in Kerala, India: Staging the “revolution”
Happenings, protest, and the growth of alternative theatre in the U.S.
Summary

13 Art, politics, or business? Theatre in search of identity, 1968–2000

The 1960s: A historical crossroads
Theatre and electronic media
Theatre, politics, and cultural change
CASE STUDY: Athol Fugard: Theatre of witnessing in South Africa
Questioning the author(ity)
Performance art
The growth of non-commercial theatres
Summary

14 Theatres of local roots and global reach, 1970–present

Local roots, global reach, hybrid play, and social change in “Shakespeare”
Global theatre culture
Theatres of cultural differentiation
 Theatre as a zone of contact
CASE STUDY: Imagining contemporary China
The global reach of theatre for social change
Summary

15 Theatre in networked culture, 1990–present

New players
CASE STUDY: Online role-playing games as theatre
Changing platforms for theatre and performance
New performance structures and processes
CASE STUDY: Hip Hop theatre
Summary: Thinking through theatre histories

Part IV: Works cited

Pronunciation guide
Glossary
Index
Figures

Part I Introduction: The Rosetta stone

1.1 Zoumana hunter
1.2 Map: The Yoruba of Nigeria and Benin, West Africa
1.3 Mask worn to represent the character of Gorilla
1.4 The sacred barque of Amun-Ra in a relief from a temple of Seti I
1.5 Fragment from a relief from a tomb at Sakkara (c.1250 BCE)
1.6 Map of Egypt c.1850 BCE
1.7 Map of the Mayan and Aztec empires in Mesoamerica
1.8 Rabinal Achi, or the Man of Rabinal
1.9 Map of the eastern Mediterranean during the fifth century BCE
1.10 Theatrical figures on the Pronomous Vase
1.11 Aerial photo of the Theatre of Dionysus and the Parthenon
1.12 Model of the early classical Theatre of Dionysus at Athens
1.13 Model of the Theatre of Dionysus after its expansion in the fourth century BCE
1.14 The Hellenistic theatre at Epidaurus, 340–330 BCE
1.15 Theatre mask dating from the fourth or third century BCE
2.1 Menander, with three masks of Greek New Comedy
2.2 Roman marble relief showing a performance of masked characters typical of Roman comedy
2.3 Statue of a masked slave character from Roman comedy
2.4 Ground plan of the Theatre of Pompey (55 BCE), Rome
2.5 The Bhagavan or Hermit in a kutiyattam production of The Hermit/Harlot in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, 1977
The Bhagavan or Hermit’s wayward student, Shandilya in a kutiyattam production of The Hermit/Harlot in
2.6
Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, 1977
2.7 Floor plan of a playhouse for Sanskrit theatre in India
Temple theatre, known as a kuttampalam, built for kutiyattam in the Lord Vadakkunnathan (Siva) temple in Trissur,
2.8
central Kerala
2.9 Cross-section of the interior of the theatre in a temple in Trissur
2.10 The Progeny of Krishna, Scene 2
2.11 A Japanese no stage
2.12 No stage plan, indicating locations of musicians, chorus, and attendants
2.13 Zo-onna mask
2.14 Aka-hannya (“red demon”) mask
2.15 Performance of the nō play Dōjōji at the Kanze Theatre, Tokyo, 1962
2.16 Abbot and priests attempting an exorcism in Dōjōji
3.1 Battle of Carnival and Lent (1559) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
3.2 Performers of the Guatemalan Rabinal Achi wearing masks
3.3 Purim celebrations
3.4 The Three Marys at the Tomb (1425–35), altarpiece by Jan and/or Hubert van Eyck
3.5 Prayer book illustration of an early Corpus Christi ritual (c.1320)
3.6 Detail from a painting of a city procession honoring the visit to Brussels in 1615 of Spain’s Archduchess Isabella
Scene from the medieval play The Martyrdom of St. Apollonia, from the Livre d’Heures pour maître Etienne Chevalier
3.7
(c. 1452–1456)
3.8 Setting for a Passion play in Valenciennes, France, 1547
3.9 Plan of the mansions and playing area for the morality play The Castle of Perseverance, c. 1400–1425
3.10 Scissors dancer from Peru
3.11 Map showing extent of Christian and Moorish territories in 1490
3.12 Stonework depicting a sexualized Lucifer tempting Christ
Drawing made in 1942 of a Native American as a Spanish Christian saint on a horse in a moros y cristianos production
3.13
on Christmas Day at San Felipe Pueblo
3.14 Qur’an fragment
3.15 A nineteenth-century performance of Ta’ziyeh
3.16 A Ta’ziyeh commemorative performance
3.17 Effigy of Ravana, the ten-headed demon-king
3.18 A Ramlila svarup on Hanuman’s shoulders
Part II Introduction: A woodblock print of a Western European printing shop
4.1 Thirteenth-century (Song dynasty) music drama (zaju)
4.2 “Mountebank distributing his wares on the stage”
4.3 Scene from the 1457 French farce, La Farce de Maître Pierre Pathelin
4.4 Late sixteenth-century engraving showing three stock characters from the commedia dell’arte
4.5 Artist’s impression of the interior of the seventeenth-century Spanish playhouse, El Corral del Principe (c. 1697)
4.6 A plan of the new Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre
4.7 A 1596 drawing of the interior of the Swan Theatre, London
4.8 Detail from a painting showing Okuni, the dancer who originated kabuki
4.9 Japanese bunraku puppets
A performance of the popular kabuki play, Shibaraku (Wait a Moment!), in Tokyo’s Nakamura Theatre in the mid-
4.10
nineteenth century
4.11 Danjūrō XII as Sukeroku in the kabuki play Sukeroku: Flower of Edo
4.12 Onoe Baikō, in the onnagata (female) role in Fuji Musume (The Wisteria Maiden)
4.13a and b Tamasaburō as the courtesan Agemaki in the kabuki play Sukeroku, and as Lady Macbeth
Faustus (played by Edward Alleyn) conjures a devil on the title page for a seventeenth-century edition of The Tragical
5.1
History of Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe
5.2 Interior of the reconstructed Globe Theatre, London
5.3 Sketch of a set by Laurent Mahelot for Pierre Du Ryer’s Poliarque et Argénis
5.4 The “Mousetrap” scene from the 2008 production of Hamlet by the RSC

6.1 Political map of Europe, c.1730

6.2 Setting for a comic scene by Sebastiano Serlio, from De Architettura, 1569
6.3 Costume designed by Inigo Jones for The Masque of Queens (1609)
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in 1666 as a lady-in-waiting for the viceregal court in Mexico City, and as a nun in the Order
6.4
of San Jerónimo
Cut-away drawing by Gustaf Kull of the chariot-and-pole machinery for changing flats at the Drottningholm Court
6.5
Theatre in Sweden
6.6 Giacomo Torelli’s setting for Act II of Pierre Corneille’s Andromède at the Petit-Bourbon Theatre, 1650
6.7 Plan of the Salle des Machines, designed by Gaspar Vigarani
6.8 Scena per angolo stage setting designed for a chariot-and-pole theatre by Giuseppe Galli Bibiena
Detail from the painting Village Festival in Honor of St. Hubert and St. Anthony by Pieter Brueghel the Younger
6.9
(1564?–1637)
6.10 Orgon and Tartuffe in Molière’s Tartuffe
6.11 The stage of Dorset Garden Theatre, London
6.12 Aphra Behn
6.13 Portrait of Carlo Broschi (Farinelli)
6.14 Margrave’s theatre in Bayreuth, Germany
6.15 Touring players on their temporary stage before an audience in a market square in Munich in 1780
Part III Introduction: The first page of the first issue of The Spectator, 1711
7.1 A Scene from The Beggar’s Opera (1729) by William Hogarth
7.2 Kabuki actor
7.3 Scene from The Quarrel of the Theatres
7.4 Scene from Friedrich Maximilian Klinger’s The Twins
7.5 “Terror.” From J.J. Engel, Ideen zu Euer Mimik (1812)
7.6 Mr. Garrick in the Charakter of Richard the 3rd (1746), engraving by Charles Grignion
7.7 Mr. Garrick in Hamlet, James McArdell, 1754
7.8 Mr. Garrick in the Character of King Lear, James McArdell
7.9 Garrick and Hogarth, or The Artist Puzzled. Color print by R. Evan Sly, 1845
8.1 The Weimar Court Theatre interior in 1798
8.2 A scene from Pixérécourt’s The Forest of Bondy (1843)
8.3 Henry Irving in his production of The Bells at the Lyceum Theatre, London, 1871
8.4 Political map of Europe in 1820
James Robinson Planché’s antiquarian design for the king’s costume in Charles Kemble’s 1824 production of
8.5
Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1
8.6 Contemporary illustration of the Hernani riots
8.7 Tommaso Salvini as Othello
8.8 Political map of Europe in 1880
8.9 Floor plan for Wagner’s Festival Theatre at Bayreuth

8.10 Political map of South America in 1825

8.11 Henry Johnson posed as Barnum’s “What Is It?” (c.1872)

8.12 Cover for sheet music performed by Bryant’s Minstrels in an 1862 minstrel show in New York City
9.1 A view of the buildings and grounds for the Paris Exposition of 1867
9.2 George Leybourne (c.1867)
9.3 Jingju actor as Xiangyu, the king of Chu in The King’s Parting with His Favourite
9.4 Ruth St. Denis performing Egypta, one of her “Oriental dances”
9.5 a and b Examples of Japonisme in art (Van Gogh and Monet)
9.6 English actor/singer George Grossmith in The Mikado (1885)
9.7 Scene from Thomas W. Robertson’s Caste, at the Prince of Wales Theatre, 1879
9.8 Kei Aran performs in the Takarazuka theatre’s production of The Rose of Versailles
9.9 Emile Zola’s The Earth, Théâtre Antoine, Paris, 1902
9.10 Moscow Art Theatre production of Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths, 1902
9.11 André Antoine in the Théâtre Libre’s 1892 production of Hauptmann’s The Weavers
9.12 Crowd scene in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar at Drury Lane Theatre, 1881
V.S. Simov’s 1898 naturalistic design for Act I of the Moscow Art Theatre’s production of Anton Chekhov’s The
9.13
Seagull
9.14 Scene from Gundegowdana Chaitre, an Indian adaptation of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Rangayana Theatre in Mysore, 1995
9.15 Final scene of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, Lyttelton Theatre, London, 1982
9.16 Premiere production of A Doll House at the Royal Theatre Copenhagen, 1879
9.17 Trading card depicting the final scene from Ibsen’s A Doll House
9.18 Ibsen’s A Doll House at Center Stage, Baltimore, Maryland, 1991
10.1 U.S. vaudeville star Eva Tanguay
10.2 Dolores (Kathleen Mary Rose Wilkinson)
10.3 Sarah Bernhardt as Marguerite Gautier, 1880
10.4 Poster of Sarah Bernhardt in the title role of the young male poet in Alfred de Musset’s Lorenzacchio
10.5 Adolphe Appia’s design for Christoph Willibald Gluck’s opera, Orpheus and Eurydice, 1913
10.6 Scene from the 1919 Expressionist production of Transfiguration (Die Wandlung), 1918, by Ernst Toller
10.7 Old Cabot, Abbie and Eben Cabot in O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms, 1924
10.8 Karl Walzer’s design for a scene from Reinhardt’s production of Wedekind’s Spring’s Awakening (1906)
Part IV Introduction: A transistor and a vacuum tube
11.1 Political maps of Europe before (1914) and after (1922) the Great War
11.2 Photograph from the 1905 production of Shaw’s Major Barbara at the Royal Court Theatre, London
Alfred Jarry’s lithographed program for the 1896 Paris premiere of his play Ubu Roi (King Ubu), at the Theatre de
11.3
l’Oeuvre, staged by Aurélien Lugné-Poe
Lyubov Popova’s Constructivist set for Meyerhold’s 1922 production of The Magnanimous Cuckold, by Fernand
11.4
Crommelynck
The “meat mincer” setting, designed by Varvara Stepanova, for Meyerhold’s 1922 production of The Death of Tarelkin,
11.5
by Alexander Kobylin
Image from Triple-A Plowed Under, a 1936 “living newspaper” production by the U.S. Federal Theatre Project about
11.6
the Agricultural Adjustment Act
11.7 Helene Weigel singing as Mother Courage in the first scene of Brecht’s staging of Mother Courage and Her Children
in Berlin, 1949
11.8 Katrin in Scene 11 of the 1949 production of Brecht’s Mother Courage
11.9 The Old Vic production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, 1934
11.10 Stage of the Vieux-Colombier, designed by Jacques Copeau, as adapted for Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
12.1 Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in a 1970 revival directed by Roger Blin
12.2 Paris premiere production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (Fin de partie) in 1957 at the Studio Champs-Élysées
Peter Hall’s production of Pinter’s The Homecoming for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Aldwych Theatre, London,
12.3
1965
12.4 Jo Mielziner’s setting for Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, 1949
12.5 Scene from the Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955
12.6 Okhlopkov’s production of Hamlet, Mayakovsky Theatre, Moscow, 1954
12.7 A 1993 production of Memories in Hiding by Tooppil Bhaasi, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala
12.8 The jailed Paramu Naayar in Memories in Hiding
12.9 A 1970 production of Amiri Baraka’s Slave Ship, directed by Gilbert Moses at Theatre-in-the-Church
13.1 Poster for a production of Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist, at Wyndhams Theatre, London, 1980
13.2 Woza Albert!, Market Theatre, Johannesburg, South Africa, 1982
13.3 Philippine Educational Theatre Association’s 1896, performed in 1995 and 1996
13.4 Ryszard Cieslak in Jerzy Grotowski’s production of Akropolis at the Polish Laboratory Theatre, Wroclaw, 1962
13.5 Premiere production of Weiss’s Marat/Sade, at the Schiller Theatre in Berlin in 1964
13.6 Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Peter Brook with the Royal Shakespeare Company, 1970
13.7 Euripides’ The Bacchae, directed by Klaus-Michael Grüber, Schaubühne Theatre Company, Berlin, 1974
13.8 The Crucible sequence from the Wooster Group’s L.S.D. (… Just the High Points …), directed by Elizabeth LeCompte
“Spaceship” section of Einstein on the Beach (by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s
13.9
Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn, New York, December 8, 1984
Final scene of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches from the 1992 production of the
13.10
Royal National Theatre, London, directed by Declan Donnellan
13.11 Peter Hall’s 1984 production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus at the National Theatre
14.1 Touring production of Romeu & Julieta by Grupo Galpão in 2000
14.2 The cast of the musical The Lion King performs at the 62nd Annual Tony Awards in New York, 2008
14.3 A scene from the Colombian Carnival of Barranquilla
14.4 A tourist photographs the performance work Two Amerindians Visit
Peter Brook’s The Mahabharata: the archery tournament for the young cousins, in Part I: The Game of Dice, from the
14.5
1986 production at the Bouffes du Nord, Paris
Dancing chorus members in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulus, in the Les Atrides cycle as staged by the Théâtre du Soleil,
14.6 directed by Ariane Mnouchkine at the Cartoucherie, Paris, 1990

Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, in the Les Atrides cycle of the Théâtre du Soleil, directed by Ariane Mnouchkine,
14.7
Cartoucherie, Paris, 1990
The grandmother in Eréndira, an adaptation from Gabriel García Márquez’s short novel, directed by Amal Allana,
14.8
New Delhi, 2004
14.9 Cover image from playbill for eXtras, Mexico City, 2003
14.10 Butoh dancer Akaji Maro
14.11 Backstage of a wayang kulit shadow-theatre in the city of Yogyakarta, Indonesia
14.12 A SEKA performer in a large mask clowns for Zambian villagers
15.1 Australian performance artist Stelarc in Amplified Body
15.2 Les Frères Corbusier’s Heddatron
15.3 The Realm of Mystara, a role-playing region in Second Life
15.4 Scene from Arthur Kopit’s Wings, University of Kansas’s Institute for Exploration of Virtual Reality, in 1996
15.5 Oedipus Rex as performed in Second Life by the Avatar Repertory Theater, 2010–2011
15.6 A scene from Robert Lepage’s Zulu Time (2001)
15.7 Scene from Sleep No More
15.8 British playwright Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis
15.9 Impossible Theater’s [missed connections]
15.10 B-boys breakdancing in San Francisco, 2008
15.11 Aya de León’s Thieves in the Temple: The Reclaiming of Hip-Hop (2003)
About the authors

Bruce McConachie is Professor and Director of Graduate Students at the University of

Pittsburgh, where he also directs and performs. He has published widely in U.S. theatre
history, theatre historiography, and performance and cognitive studies. Some of his major
books include Interpreting the Theatrical Past, with Thomas Postlewait (University of Iowa
Press, 1989); Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (University
of Iowa Press, 1992, awarded the Barnard Hewitt Prize in Theatre History); American Theater
in the Culture of the Cold War (University of Iowa Press, 2003); Performance and Cognition,
with F. Elizabeth Hart (Routledge, 2006); Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to
Spectating in the Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Evolution, Cognition, and
Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Professor McConachie is also a co-editor of
the Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance series for Palgrave Macmillan and a
former President of the American Society for Theatre Research.

Tobin Nellhaus is an independent scholar and former Librarian for Performing Arts, Media
and Philosophy at Yale University. He has published mainly on the relationship between
theatre and communication practices, and on critical realism in theatre historiography. He is
the author of Theater, Communication, Critical Realism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and co-
editor (with Susan Haedicke) of Performing Democracy: International Perspectives on Urban
Community-Based Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2001). His articles have
appeared in Theatre Journal, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Journal of Critical
Realism, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, the collections Performance and
Cognition (ed. Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart, Routledge, 2006) and Staging
Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy (ed. David Krasner and
David Z. Saltz, University of Michigan Press, 2006), and elsewhere. He was a Fulbright fellow
at the University of Helsinki, and received a fellowship from the American Council of Learned
Societies.

Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei is Professor Emerita of Theatre at UCLA and was recently a Fellow
at the Institute for Theatre Studies’ International Research Center on Interweaving
Performance Cultures at Berlin’s Freie Universität. In 2014, she was honored by the
Association for Asian Performance as one of the Founding Mothers of Asian Theatre Studies.
She is the author of Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shūji and
Postwar Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2005), translations from Japanese, and many
articles and essays on Japanese and intercultural performance. Her sixteen original plays
include the award-winning Medea: A Noh Cycle Based on the Greek Myth, the kabuki-
flamenco Blood Wine, Blood Wedding, and (with director Zvika Serper) the Japanese-Israeli
fusion The Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds. Her newest play Ghost Light: The Haunting (with
director Penny Bergman) fuses the kabuki Yotsuya Kaidan and Macbeth. She is Associate
Editor of Asian Theatre Journal and Editor of the Newsletter of the Association for Asian
Performance.

Tamara Underiner is Associate Dean for Research for the Herberger Institute for Design and
the Arts at Arizona State University, and Associate Professor in the School of Film, Dance and
Theatre, where she directs the Ph.D. program in Theatre and Performance of the Americas.
She is the author of Contemporary Theatre in Mayan Mexico: Death-Defying Acts (University
of Texas Press, 2004), and has published on indigenous and Latina/o theatre and critical
pedagogy in Theatre Journal, Signs, Baylor Journal of Theatre and Performance, TDR, and
critical anthologies from academic presses in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. She is active in the
American Society for Theatre Research, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and
the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics.
Preface to the third edition

The third edition of Theatre Histories constitutes a major revision. Our overarching aims for
the book are the same, including global coverage, case studies on particular developments or
issues in theatre history, discussions of historiographical approaches, and a focus on
communication practices. For this edition, however, we sought four particular goals that
proved transformative: to address the connections between communication and theatre more
sharply; to reexamine the narratives or themes of each chapter; to rebalance the amount of
discussion on some topics; and to keep the book at roughly the same length to control costs.
As a result, material has been extensively reorganized and re-thought. The chapters of this
edition seldom match those of the second – most of them differ in their chronological
coverage and sometimes their themes. The material in the second edition’s lengthy Part
introductions has moved into regular chapters, and each Part now has a brief introduction
which establishes overall contexts and keynotes. Similarly, we decided that instead of a
chapter on popular entertainment, we would distribute those topics among other chapters. The
second edition’s Preface, which addressed some of the functions of a book introduction, has
been replaced with a fuller General Introduction that explains several central issues in
historiography and orients students to the book’s goals, focus, and structure. To accommodate
expanded discussion of some topics, material that we felt was useful but no longer central was
transferred to the website, to keep it available to instructors. The substantial percentage of the
book that was absorbed by bibliographies has been much reduced, to allow more space for the
chapters: we include the media resources and the works actually cited within the book, and we
list other consulted works on the Theatre Histories website.
We reshaped Part I of Theatre Histories most substantially. Topics that were in three
different chapters now appear in one, and coverage of ritual has been greatly reduced. There
were several reasons for these changes. We wanted to move to discussions of theatre sooner,
and in the process, sharpen the focus on how theatre is affected by changes in communication.
In addition, although the material on ritual was meant to illuminate the sorts of performance
appearing in oral cultures, due to its quantity it seemed to offer inadvertent support for the
now much-doubted theory that ritual (or alternatively, religion) is theatre’s origin. However,
instructors who want to address ritual and the development of language in more detail will
find those discussions on the website.
The apparent quieting of the “theory wars” within theatre studies and our desire to give
instructors more flexibility when addressing topics in theatre history led us to loosen the
relationship between case studies and theoretical approaches. In this edition, some case studies
introduce a specific approach, but others do not. Likewise, some of what we previously called
“Interpretive approaches” are now independent of a case study; but between expanding the
range of topics that the “Interpretive approaches” sections could encompass, and realizing that
the phrase “interpretive approaches” could be misconstrued as meaning the analysis of theatre
history consists merely of opinions, we decided to rename those segments “Thinking through
theatre histories.” They now discuss not only historiographical methods and perspectives, but
also narrative strategies and particular historiographical problems. Readers may notice that
there is no section explicitly on feminist approaches (of which, of course, there are many).
However, women’s activities and gender issues (including feminist and queer theory) are
addressed throughout the text and in some of the case studies.
The third edition provides several new case studies; we moved others to the website
(corrected as needed) so instructors who want to use them can do so. In several instances, the
new edition has a condensed version of a case study and we have put the full version on the
website. In the course of Theatre Histories’ revisions and online resource development, we aim
to build a repertory of case studies and other materials which instructors can select in order to
shape their courses in a manner that is both flexible yet consistent with the overall approach
taken in this book.
Readers of Theatre Histories’ first and second editions will notice a different roster of
authors for the third. Such turnover was intended from the book’s beginnings. Gary Jay
Williams and Phillip B. Zarrilli took the opportunity to step down; Tobin Nellhaus and Tamara
Underiner came on board. The new team adopted two connected goals for our revision
process: more collaboration and greater coordination. Toward the former, we took numerous
steps. All of the authors had a voice in major content and organizational decisions. Rather than
have a single author take sole responsibility for one of the book’s Parts, each author was
assigned chapters in at least two Parts. Nearly every chapter became the product of combined
authorship, bringing new perspectives throughout. The contributors are shown in each
chapter’s byline. And once all of the chapters were near their final form, we all read and
commented on each other’s work. To provide unity within this extensive collaboration, we
established the role of General Editor.
In the midst of our collaboration, however, we of course have our individual outlooks. We
agree on the main principles of theatre historiography, but we have differing views on how to
weigh the many factors that shape theatre at any particular time, and we have our own
interests within theatre history. We believe that these differences in themselves help this book
achieve its goals. Thus the plural in “theatre histories” refers to several things: the multiplicity
of performance practices in the world, both geographically and chronologically; the diversity
of theories, facets, emphases, and goals in theatre historiography; and the mix of perspectives
and personalities that contributed to the making of Theatre Histories’ third edition.
All of us, however, owe a deep debt of gratitude to the authors who are no longer involved
in the book. Specifically, Phillip B. Zarrilli’s contributions are embedded in Chapters 1–4 and
12, and work by Gary Jay Williams appears in Chapters 6–9 and 12–15. In addition, both of
them wrote materials in the previous editions that are now available on the website. Readers
will continue to hear their voices in this new edition of Theatre Histories.
 Bruce McConachie
Tobin Nellhaus
Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei
Tamara Underiner
Acknowledgments

The authors want to express again our gratitude to Routledge’s Talia Rodgers, Publisher, for
her belief in and long support of this project, from conception through this third edition. Talia’s
support of this new approach to creating a theatre history text has been an act of faith. We
also want to thank Suzanne Richardson, Development Editor, who assisted us through the
numerous complexities of producing this new edition, and the rest of Routledge’s textbook
production staff.
A history of this scope is possible in great part, of course, because of the specialized works
of many dedicated scholars. We are indebted to them; we have drawn on them often and
happily. Their works are cited in this text and in the extended bibliographies on our website.
Many of our colleagues have been especially supportive. We especially wish to thank for
their advice and encouragement Jay Ball, Daniel Banks, Jason Bush, Claire Conceison, Dave
Escoffery, Faye C. Fei, Lance Gharavi, Richard Hornby, David Jortner, Margaret Knapp,
Marianne McDonald, David Mayer, Paul Murphy, Stuart Sillars, Julia Walker, Andrew
Weintraub, E.J. Westlake, Gary Jay Williams, S.E. Wilmer, W.B. Worthen, and Jiayun Zhuang.
Simon Williams was initially involved in this project and provided valuable contributions at an
early stage. We have listened to and benefited from the external reviewers of our work,
including our critics; they have helped us serve our readers better. We look forward to future
conversations with our readers.
We are grateful to our students, who have been there at every stage of the journey, helping
to shape what we think is a necessary new step for thinking about theatre and performance
history. We have each benefited also from the long-term research support of our universities:
the University of Exeter, the University of Wisconsin – Madison, the University of Pittsburgh,
the Catholic University of America – Washington, DC, the University of California – Los
Angeles, and Arizona State University.
We have also had the strong, enduring support of families and partners. Their considerable
sacrifices made it possible for the work to get done, and we express our heartfelt thanks to all
of them, including Gerry Magallan, Stephanie McConachie, and Richard Hornby.
Routledge would like to thank all those archives and individuals who have given permission
to reproduce images in this textbook. In a few rare cases, we were unable, despite the utmost
efforts, to locate owners of materials. For this we apologize and will make any corrections in
the next reprint if contacted.

Bruce McConachie
Tobin Nellhaus
Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei
Tamara Underiner
General introduction

Tobin Nellhaus

The goals of Theatre Histories

Theatre Histories aims to introduce the history – or as we will explain, histories – of theatre,
drama, and performance. The meaning of that sentence may seem obvious: the book presents
information about people, plays, and performance practices such as acting, costumes, and
staging. But we also have two other goals. One is to consider theatre’s relationships with some
of its many social contexts. The other is to raise questions about the meaning of evidence and
events, and discuss different ways of interpreting them. Raising such questions often entails
“unpacking” facts and statements because they contain more (or perhaps less!) than meets the
eye.
For example, as the first sentence of this introduction shows, we will often use two or three
terms, sometimes in combination, to describe our focus: “theatre,” “drama,” and
“performance.” The three terms overlap each other, but one can distinguish them reasonably
clearly.
“Drama” is generally used to describe plays, collectively or in the singular. Occasionally it’s
used more broadly in order to refer to what is performed (fictional characters and actions,
even if based on historical people and events), as distinct from how it is performed; the drama
might not be a script at all, just ideas and character types in the performers’ minds. For some
people, “drama” carries the narrower sense of plays as literary works, printed texts to be read
as “dramatic literature,” apart from performance; however, for the authors of this book, the
connection to performance is essential.
By “theatre” we usually mean live performances by skilled artists for live audiences, usually
of drama or something drama-like. Such performances engage the spectators’ imagination,
emotion, intellect, and cultural perspectives, at varying levels. They may or may not take place
in buildings built specifically for theatrical performance. Sometimes the audience members are
also the performers. In theatre, everyone involved is aware that the performance presents a
fiction. True, occasionally people use “theatre” to describe performances which attempt to lead
observers into thinking that what they are watching is not fictional, or situations in which
spectators observe other people as though (unbeknownst to them) they are fictional
characters; but for the purposes of this book, these cases apply the term “theatre”
metaphorically.
The term “performance” generally refers to embodied presentation on stage (or with
surrogates for the body, such as puppets). However, the term has a special meaning today in
the field of performance studies to include all the ways in which humans represent themselves
in embodied ways. Scholars apply that sense of “performance” not only to the staging of plays
but also to religious rituals, state ceremonies, carnivals, political demonstrations, athletic
contests, the customs of a family dinner table, the ways people portray themselves in social
media, and many other activities. In that sense, theatre is but one of many kinds of
performance.
Occasionally Theatre Histories employs this broader sense of “performance.” We think it is
natural and enlightening to make connections between theatre and other types of
performance. For that reason, even though Theatre Histories is not a performance studies
textbook, we consider a wide range of performances – from Japanese puppetry to productions
of plays by Samuel Beckett, from the dance-dramas of India to early twentieth-century high-
fashion musical revues, and from ancient Greek drama to the Hip Hop plays created globally.
We believe the juxtapositions among these will attune the reader to appreciate better the wide
spectrum of theatre and performance in many cultures.
The scope of “theatre history” in Theatre Histories must also be unpacked. Knowing about
theatre globally is vital today. For example, it is not unusual for playwrights, directors, and
designers to be inspired by the theatre of other cultures (possibly ancient ones), and sometimes
actors are expected to know or quickly absorb foreign acting methods. In addition, cultures
today are constantly crossing national borders and influencing each other, such as the
importation of K-Pop music and Bollywood movies into Western countries, or the
performance of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in China and the adoption of rap music
across the planet. For those reasons we strive to provide an understanding of theatrical
performance around the world, throughout its known existence. We also believe that isolating
the study of Western from non-Western theatre does not serve students well. For that reason,
most chapters in Theatre Histories include theatre from various parts of the world, with a few
exceptions where thematic or other reasons made it unfeasible.
In our view, the history of theatre involves more than actors, performance spaces, plays, and
staging. Theatrical performances occur within society. Thus Theatre Histories often discusses
political, cultural, economic, and other social issues, and how they affected theatre, drama, and
performance. The relationships among these various social dynamics, and between them and
theatre, are extremely complex. However, Theatre Histories will pay one element special
attention: a society’s communication practices (its uses of speech, handwriting, printing, and
electronics). We discuss this focus in more detail below.
Writing theatre history involves more than accumulating facts. Historians have to make
decisions about what information is most important, and develop an understanding of how
events are related. In other words, the process of writing about history – historiography –
always involves interpretations of the past. One of the goals of Theatre Histories is to provide
not just information about theatre, and not just our own interpretations of that information,
but also an understanding of how interpretations come into being – how history is written –
in order to enable students to evaluate historical writing. The remainder of this introduction
surveys some of the core issues in historiography, the approach adopted by the authors, and its
influence on our discussions and even the organization of the book.

Historiography: Thinking about history

If historiography involves interpreting the past, then we need to consider what it means to
“interpret.” One view frequently encountered today is that any claim that “X is true” is really
“just an interpretation” – a complete matter of opinion. According to this perspective, there is
no way to choose between them: all opinions are equally valid, and whatever is “true for me”
is inherently unassailable.
As a general theory, this notion doesn’t stand up to analysis, since it is logically self-
defeating (the idea that every claim is merely an opinion must itself be merely an opinion),
and it cannot account for actual practice. Nobody has ever actually stopped gravity by not
believing in it; Western science hasn’t explained (in its own terms) how the Asian medical
technique of acupuncture works, but it has generally accepted that acupuncture can
successfully treat pain and nausea. Beliefs about these things do not alter their efficacy. In
addition, although many of those professing this theory intend well by trying not to impose
their views on others, they open the door wide for arguments that are incorrect, misinforming,
and/or malignant. The denial that during the Second World War the Nazi’s extermination
programs murdered 11 million people – Jews and non-Jews – is not an “equally valid opinion,”
it is a falsehood.
Nevertheless, the notion that every claim is “just an opinion” does sound a useful cautionary
note for historiography, because interpretation is a necessary part of it. Determining exactly
what, how, and why things happened is often extraordinarily difficult or even impossible;
frequently evidence is fragmentary and ambiguous; and innumerable events are always
happening simultaneously. One cannot perform experiments on history, and it is difficult to
perceive one’s own mistaken assumptions about the meaning of historical evidence. Although
history is often imagined (and occasionally taught) as a simple, plodding path of dry facts,
people experience history as a realm of fierce argument. We know what happened in history,
until we realize we don’t or we discover that someone else knows it differently. Even at the
personal level, when talking with someone about a shared event, we all encounter moments
when we say: “I don’t remember it that way!” There clearly are facts, but even if we agree on
them, we can fit them together in different ways, bringing out different perspectives,
illuminating different connections, or formulating different explanations. To give one example
of the role of perspective in historiography, the U.S. view of the American Revolutionary War
is often that the British government was increasingly imposing itself on local governance, and
demanded oppressive taxes to pay for the French and Indian War (1756–63, also called the
Seven Years’ War) in which many colonists had lost their lives; in contrast, to the British
Parliament the Americans were ingrates refusing to pay their fair share for a war that had
secured the colonies’ very existence, and the Parliament’s deliberations on managing the
rebellion were based on assumptions drawn from prior (but inapplicable) experience, leading
to serious miscalculations. Interpretation is intrinsic to historiography, and our understanding
of history is necessarily always open to revision.

Social context and cultural relativity

A theatre historian could try to evade the problem of interpretation by writing a history that
simply looks at what happens within theatrical practice: the eighteenth-century kabuki stage
had such-and-such shape and size, during the late sixteenth century Isabella Andreini was an
important commedia dell’arte actor in Italy and Christopher Marlowe was a major English
playwright, the philosophy espoused by Auguste Comte shaped nineteenth-century realist
theatre in Europe, and so forth. A theatre history like that would present no particular reason
for theatre’s changes or for the direction of change, such as why X was influential instead of Y.
What happens in the society at large (such as economic transformations, religious conflicts,
new ideas, and political rivalries) might be mentioned as the “larger context,” but the larger
context has little real bearing on theatre practices – it explains little and stays “outside the
building.”
Few theatre scholars today would accept such an approach to theatre history. In fact it could
never achieve its goal, because the idea that theatre can be divorced from its social context is
itself an interpretation. Theatre Histories is particularly emphatic that what happens inside the
theatre is deeply connected to what happens outside, not just as a matter of the topics
playwrights present on stage, but also how plays are performed, who performs them, who
attends them, and what social developments produced changes in cultural ideas that were
manifested in stylistic shifts. For instance, approaches to acting can be rooted in scientific
developments; the sorts of characters one sees in a play can be connected to the way people
use the printing press; whether plays are written at all (rather than improvised or orally
transmitted) may be the result of the society’s political and economic configuration. The
theatre’s doors are always open to the world, and the world always enters. In fact the world is
already part of theatre itself.
Just as theatre is thoroughly embedded in society, perspectives on history and society are
often connected to particular cultures and their values. We can see how ideas can be relative to
a specific society in an example drawn from theatre history. In Europe during the Middle Ages
and well into the Renaissance, people believed there was a hierarchy among all things in the
world, starting with rocks at the bottom and rising through plants, animals, humans, angels,
and ultimately God. Humans themselves were ranked from the lowliest beggars, up through
serfs, knights, earls, dukes, and finally the king. (Actors, incidentally, were lumped with
prostitutes.) All told, this vertical understanding of the world was called the Great Chain of
Being, and people acted on that understanding by (for instance) passing laws regarding what
clothes people could wear. But in the late seventeenth century another view began to emerge,
which slowly consolidated into a more horizontal concept of society expressed in statements
such as “All men are created equal,” and people acted on that belief (at least to some extent)
by establishing nations with democracies.
Such vertical and horizontal concepts are evident in theatre architecture. In the early 1600s,
theatre buildings in Europe usually allowed only one person, such as the king or duke, to have
a perfect view of the perspective scenery; everyone else’s view was fragmented and distorted.
In the late 1800s a new building design gave everyone a more equal view of the stage. Is
either the vertical or the horizontal concept of society “true”? Most historians today would
answer that each view is “valid” – acceptable – within some societies, but neither one is valid
for all societies: their validity is culturally relative.
The point is important because historians can unwittingly project their own perceptions,
assumptions, and beliefs (which may seem like common sense in their own culture) on to
earlier and foreign societies, leading to severe misunderstandings. For instance, scholars may
believe that religion involves the same type of concepts in other cultures as it does in their
own, not realizing that there can be significant differences. There is also a long, unpleasant
history of historians projecting their ideas and values in a way that implies (or states outright)
that their own society is superior to others. We will discuss examples of this practice at several
points in Theatre Histories.
For certain purposes, however, historians apply their perspective intentionally and for good
reasons, particularly when they pursue questions such as “Who gains?” and “Who is harmed?”
These concerns frequently arise in analyses of economics, gender, race, and politics. Capitalism
is one such topic often discussed in terms of gain and harm. Some people argue that capitalism
is good because competition and the search for profit have led to innumerable innovations
that have benefited people around the globe, and allow individuals to improve their economic
standing. Others hold that capitalism is bad because it makes working people dependent on
companies and corporations that prioritize profit over people’s needs, and because the system
suffers drastic cycles which can suddenly throw millions of people into poverty. Still others
believe that capitalism doesn’t exist: there are only free markets in which employers and
employees are on a level playing field and meet to conduct a fair exchange of labor for
payment, so the entire question is moot. Each perspective leads to different ways of writing
history, as does an approach that seeks to “balance” the pros and cons rather than say that one
side outweighs the other. (Notice that one can ask not only whether these claims are true, but
also who benefits or is harmed by the claim itself!) Questions of gain and harm also arise in
theatre history: for instance, as we will see, in the past many cultures allowed only men to
perform in plays, which historians deemed insignificant until some argued that the practice
was misogynistic, and others that it was homoerotic. (Its treatment as insignificant is itself
often considered misogynistic.) Further interpretations emerged in response. Such debates
force scholars to reexamine evidence and their own attitudes, and they have deepened our
insight into theatre’s complexity.
Clearly, however, there is tension between the desire to avoid projecting our own society’s
views on to others, and the desire to criticize inequality. There may be no completely
satisfactory solution to that tension. In Theatre Histories our goal is to introduce both, since
both bring much of value (and important values) to theatre history. We present some
examples of historical critique. At the same time we also strive to consider what performances
meant to their original audience; we recognize, however, that we can seldom be certain that
we’ve succeeded – the people of third-century India, for instance, aren’t around to tell us
whether we got things right, and their judgments would be colored by their own perspectives.

Evidence–theory connections
Evidence, then, is often subject to interpretation due to the historian’s assumptions, values, and
informational contexts. A historian’s social position, need to justify one side’s actions, and
sometimes even wishful thinking can also surreptitiously slip into historiography. One topic
where historians’ projections have strongly influenced their interpretations is the question of
theatre’s origins, especially in ancient Greece. In the early 1900s, Gilbert Murray and other
classical anthropologists contended that Greek tragedy evolved from religious rituals. The
hypothesis was surrounded by just enough apparent evidence to be taken as proved.
By the late 1920s, however, classicists showed that the logic behind Murray’s theory was
flawed, much of the evidence it presented was misconstrued, and contrary evidence had not
been considered. The problems with Murray’s thesis are so acute that the classical scholar
Gerald Else asserted that Murray had not accumulated evidence which he then realized could
be explained by the “ritual origins” theory, but instead was driven by “the determination at all
costs to find the origin of tragedy in religion, and therefore in ritual” (1965: 4) – in other
words, that Murray selected and interpreted his evidence in order to fit the theory he already
had in mind.
Although ancient Greek theatre may have had some sort of relationship to ritual, it was not
the evolutionary one that Murray proposed. But the “religious ritual origins” theory captured
many people’s imagination, and still appears in one form or another to this day, including
among some classicists. (Some writers dub refuted yet tenacious theories “zombie ideas.”) One
reason it persists is that some theatre practitioners and scholars feel that the theory offers an
inspiration for vitality in performance and a way to comprehend that vitality. Inspiration is
always “true” in the sense that a lived experience cannot be falsified (if you feel excited, I can’t
demonstrate that you’re actually bored), and in a sense, the inspiration is more valid if one
believes that the theory of “religious ritual origins” is correct. In other words, if an inspiration
is true then its source must be as well. For these practitioners and scholars, theatre’s factual
origin is not the most important truth: its “origin” as a belief or subjective experience is. (Note,
however, that rejecting ritual as the origin of theatre does not exclude other possible
relationships between them.)
In this example we see that there can be different perspectives on “what actually
happened,” but these different perspectives are not equally valid, nor are they impervious to
criticism. We can also see that for some people there are different “kinds” of truth (a position
that itself can be interpreted in various ways), and that not everyone thinks the different kinds
have the same level of importance; for others, there is only one kind of truth. We will return to
the question of theatre’s origins in Chapter 1.
In contrast, a historian may make an argument based on both strong argument and solid
evidence … and then the evidence changes. In one case of “facts” changing, the first known
theatre building – the Theatre of Dionysus, in Athens, Greece – was long thought to seat
15,000–17,000 people; but in light of recent archaeological evidence, classical scholars now
believe the theatre’s initial capacity was closer to 3,700–6,000 spectators, and the larger figure
refers to a later expansion (Roselli 2011: 64–5). As a result of this change in the evidence, an
excellent theory about the role of theatre in ancient Athens based on the previous estimate
might need to be revised or even rejected. People may discover that a piece of evidence about
theatre is more recent than was thought, or that the evidence believed to demonstrate
something true everywhere actually pertains only to one city, or that evidence was
misinterpreted, or that other pieces of evidence must be considered, or that a facet of theatre
(say, the significance of the actors’ gender) was left out of the picture entirely, or that the
source isn’t reliable.
Although historians usually strive to avoid forcing evidence into a predetermined theory, or
at least to be aware that there may be contrary evidence, historical evidence is always sought,
chosen, and interpreted. Evidence doesn’t “speak for itself,” the historian makes it speak to us.
Because historians must select and interpret, they can misunderstand or misrepresent historical
events; but by the same token, new interpretations can reveal aspects of history that weren’t
recognized before – “historical discoveries” may arise by understanding preexisting evidence
in innovative ways. In either case, whether one thinks the selection and description of
evidence is a problem or an advantage, it is a necessary part of historiography, and the
condition under which writing history must occur.

Intelligibility, plausibility, and narrative

Historians do more than select and interpret evidence: they also organize the evidence in order
to create an intelligible (and, they hope, persuasive) narrative. Chronological order is generally
part of making history plausible, especially when the causes of change are central, although in
practice much historical writing must go back and forth in time in order to pick up various
threads of a complex story. Historians also make events understandable by casting them in a
particular light or giving their narrative a particular tone. For example, a historian might
highlight historical ironies, such as the way President George W. Bush once criticized “nation
building,” in which the U.S. rebuilds a country’s economic and political structure when its
government fails; but later, as a consequence of launching a war in Iraq, Bush had to attempt
exactly that. Historians can also romanticize events, as did those who described John F.
Kennedy’s term as President as “Camelot,” alluding to a Broadway musical about the gallant
King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Similarly, one historian may view a certain
chain of events as improvement, while another may perceive it as a decline. These are just a
few of the ways historians may make narrative sense of history.
Of course, although historians strive to present a plausible narrative, “plausible” is not a
synonym for “true.” To take just one of the many complexities, discussions about historical
causes can run into a logical problem that’s often hard to detect. Imagine that the President of
the United States made a speech about the stock market, and later that day the stock market
indexes fell. It’s easy to infer that the President’s speech worried stock traders and led to the
sell-off. But even though that interpretation is very plausible, it might not be correct: the
traders might have actually been reacting to bad news coming from abroad. One would need
additional evidence to show what really caused the market decline. (This error, in which one
thinks that one event must have caused another event because it preceded the second, is called
a post hoc argument, short for the Latin post hoc, ergo propter hoc, translated as “after this,
therefore because of this.”) To avoid such mistakes, historians have to think carefully about
what evidence is required to support their analysis – and sometimes no further evidence is
available, or at least known to the historian. Plausibility may be the best we can get. This is yet
another reason why history is often subject to debate.

Causes of historical change

Narrative is intrinsic to any discussion of how and why societies change. True, to some
observers societies don’t fundamentally change at all: “the more things change, the more they
stay the same.” A less cynical and more truly historiographical view is that social changes
operate in regular cycles such as rise and fall. A related idea is that social change consists of
swings of a pendulum (say, between permissiveness and conformism). In contrast, sometimes
history is depicted as consistent progress toward some definite goal, at times perhaps delayed
but ultimately inexorable – the “march of reason,” for instance.
A problem facing all of these views is that they don’t provide any reason why there would
be cycles, pendulum swings, or progress, or why they should apply to the particular matter of
interest: these things just happen on their own, guided by an invisible hand. One answer to this
question is that there is no “why,” or even things like cycles and progress. Instead, history is a
matter of happenstance, contingency, and accident, without any particular direction or pattern:
the only agent of change lies in personal interactions. And certainly at the micro level, little
more than chance may explain why one person became a historical figure rather than another.
But this view misses the “big picture” of historical developments. For instance, it is striking
that during roughly 1550–1650, there were substantial changes in theatrical practices
throughout Europe, not always in synchrony but in the same basic direction. Performance
spaces increasingly moved indoors and used more realistic scenery; characters became more
psychologically driven. What drove this “change in taste”? Why had large numbers of people
come to prefer it? How and why had the concept of “realistic” changed? Surely more than
coincidence or personal influence was involved.
Those questions raise others. If there were large forces behind cultural changes, one must
ask what those forces were, or which of many forces was the most important. Various answers
have been proposed, most of them boiling down to three kinds. One kind points to material
activities, for example the production and exchange of goods and services (economics),
relationships between and among women and men (the sex/gender system), technological
developments, or the methods of communication. Another answer focuses on institutions, such
as political systems, religious organizations, or family structures. The third view assigns
primacy to ideas – theology, philosophy, science, or other sorts of worldview. One can of
course also see the three factors as interacting, although in the end, usually one has the
greatest weight. Earlier we explained how the Great Chain of Being was supplanted by a
more horizontal concept of the world, an example of idea-driven history; but a historian might
then ask what caused that change in ideas, and point to some material activity. Historians’
views of the main type of force that drives society, as well as the specific force they consider,
lead to very different historical narratives.

Theories of society
A key element of historians’ interpretations and narratives is their general concept of how
individuals and society are related. Their concept may be difficult to detect, since it is seldom
explicit (even to the historian) and sometimes several different concepts seem to be invoked.
As we will see, a particular concept of society directly shaped Theatre Histories. Understanding
these different theories helps explain some of this book’s organization and themes.
Sociologist Margaret S. Archer (1995) identifies four basic concepts of the relationship
between individuals and society. One is that society boils down to individuals. Nothing
happens in a society unless individuals do things; further, on this view the most important
things about individuals – their personal traits, abilities, experiences, and achievements – are
independent of any social context. According to this view, known as “methodological
individualism,” talk about social groups, institutions, power relationships, and society as a
whole is problematic or erroneous because such things cannot be perceived: all that can be
perceived are individuals’ behaviors. “Social relationships” are simply interactions between
individuals – family ties, buying and selling, being someone’s boss, and the like. But racism,
economic systems, and political power are abstractions about things that individuals do,
nothing more. History is essentially about individuals: “great men (and a few great women).”
Methodological individualism breaks down when one realizes that much of what describes
individuals is determined by society, such as economic class, race, age group (“generation”),
citizenship, language, and so forth, and these things regulate what people do (or may do). One
example is that laws, institutions and/or customs establish whether two people are married,
unmarried, or not permitted to marry. Even personal interactions involve social frameworks:
to understand, say, what happens between a store clerk and a customer, you need to know
what “shopping,” “store clerks,” “customers,” and “money” are, all of which require a concept
of society as a whole.
The second theory of society acknowledges this by focusing on the rules and systems that
govern social activities, continue a society’s existence, and keep it functioning as smoothly as
possible (and so one version of this theory is called “functionalism”). The rules and systems are
embodied in systems such as a society’s larger political and economic structures, and people
just follow their roles within them. People don’t have to be conscious that they’re maintaining
social structures: it happens by default, in the same way that speaking English keeps the
English language alive. Individuals and their activities are determined by their position within
the social systems that they’re part of.
The first theory suggests that individuals live in virtually unfettered freedom and are wholly
responsible for their personal fates, as if larger social conditions don’t exist or have no power
to limit or eliminate choices; the second theory describes people as having practically no
control over the world in which they live, to the point where they may be simply “cogs in the
machine” or “victims of society.” A third position proposes that the difficulty behind these
extreme positions lies in seeing individuals and society as wholly different things. But rules
and resources don’t exist independently – they depend on the existence of people and their
ideas about what they are doing. Equally, what individuals do is always within the context of a
society. At every moment, individuals are constructing society, and society is constructing
individuals. The two are inextricable. Thus, like the sides of one coin, if you look at an activity
from one perspective, you’ll see individuals going about their daily lives; look at it another
way, you’ll see rules and resources comprising social structures. The two are conjoined in a
single, active process, and once a moment in history has passed, what remains are but the
traces it leaves in memory. Society operates the same way as language does: speaking English
draws on one’s knowledge of the rules that make up the English language, and simultaneously
continues the language’s existence; but the language only exists when we speak, read or write
it. Thus society exists only through individuals’ acts of repeating the rules, in the present.
However, individuals can introduce small changes, which can accumulate. All told, institutions,
ideas, and individuals always have a social nature, and they have a fluid, ever-changing
quality. One version of this theory is termed “social constructionism.”
The final view agrees that individuals and society mutually shape each other, but it
maintains that the two remain different things, not flip sides of one thing. Individuals and
society each have features that are largely independent of the other, such as physical bodies
for the one and economic systems for the other. But because they’re different things, they
aren’t in sync, and society doesn’t exist only in the present. Time and the causes of social
change snap into focus as aspects of society’s existence. People can’t wake up one day with
new ideas about social roles and resources, and instantly transform the society they live in;
conversely, social rules may alter, yet some individuals will behave just as they did before
(e.g., some people discriminate even after it becomes illegal). People can change society, but
only within the preexisting circumstances that society has placed upon their actions. We live
in(side) the past: society depends on people’s activities for its existence, but principally on the
activities of people who lived previously. Some of their legacy has been swept away, some of
it remains but has been reshaped, some of it continues largely unaltered. (For instance, the
latest hit song in Western countries probably uses the notes of the twelve-tone scale that
began taking shape in ancient Greece 2,500 years ago, rather than a pentatonic scale like those
of Asia and Africa.) Thus one historical era may begin long before the previous one has come
to a close, and incremental adjustments can suddenly spark radical upheavals. Likewise, a
world phenomenon like globalization may seem to bulldoze everything in its path, yet its
impact on different countries varies drastically. In short, under this theory (which has been
called a “transformational” model of social activity), history is messy.
Although the authors of Theatre Histories have somewhat varying positions, on the whole
we take the last view. Theatre history’s messiness is reflected in every chapter, because
cultures don’t change at the same rate or in the same manner, and their genres of theatrical
performance vary widely. We make one aspect of theatre history’s untidiness particularly
conspicuous through our periodization. Chapters always overlap chronologically, sometimes
in complicated ways: for instance, Chapter 4 covers roughly 1250–1650, Chapter 5 addresses
1550–1650, and Chapter 6 examines 1600–1770, which overlaps even Chapter 4. Many
different factors came into play regarding our decisions about where to draw the dividing
lines (which are necessarily a bit arbitrary), and we often had to wrestle with questions about
where to place certain topics. In fact among historians generally, periodization is often
disputed. Was there a Renaissance in Europe, and if so, when, where and for whom? It
depends on what countries and social groups one has in mind, what activities one thinks
distinguish that period, and whether one thinks “Renaissance” is even a valid description.
Similarly, how does one periodize when developments in (say) East Asia and Western Europe
follow different paths? Sometimes themes tell us more than chronology.

History as the construction of truth

The need to focus on particular aspects of historical events, the collection and interpretation of
evidence, the development of a narrative, and the historian’s perspective and concept of
society can be summarized by the sentence “History is constructed.” We piece it together and
build an argument. However, even though any understanding of history is a construct, and a
range of interpretations may be supported by evidence and logic, neither the notion that all
perspectives are equally true nor the idea that they are all merely opinions (lacking a
distinctive validity) holds up to scrutiny. In short, interpreting the past is not a free-for-all. It
possesses objective as well as subjective facets. Not all interpretations are valid, historians can
make mistakes, and some theories are flat-out wrong, no matter how insistently they might
be espoused. We may never know with absolute certainty that certain claims are correct. But
absolute certainty isn’t required in order for us to be confident that a statement is true: truth is
more like “certainty beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Theatre and the history of communication

The interpretation of history adopted in Theatre Histories appears in the way we perceive an
interplay between individuals and society; it is also manifested through how we handle social
structures. Society has numerous structures, including the economic system, political power
relations, sex/gender relationships, race and ethnicity, religion, education, transportation,
agriculture, health care, international relations, and so on. Changes in one structure often
affect the others, and several may be involved in a single historical change. The relative
importance or weight one should give to a particular structure depends partly on what one is
discussing, and the perspective one brings to it. To take one example, the history of American
popular music might pay special attention to the role of race. Theatre, we believe, was most
deeply affected historically by communication practices, by which we mean the way a society
develops and uses one or more means of communication, such as speech, handwriting,
printing, and electric/electronic media.
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 DANCE ON STILTS AT THE GIRLS’ UNYAGO, NIUCHI

Newala, too, suffers from the distance of its water-supply—at least

the Newala of to-day does; there was once another Newala in a lovely
valley at the foot of the plateau. I visited it and found scarcely a trace
of houses, only a Christian cemetery, with the graves of several
missionaries and their converts, remaining as a monument of its
former glories. But the surroundings are wonderfully beautiful. A
thick grove of splendid mango-trees closes in the weather-worn
crosses and headstones; behind them, combining the useful and the
agreeable, is a whole plantation of lemon-trees covered with ripe
fruit; not the small African kind, but a much larger and also juicier
imported variety, which drops into the hands of the passing traveller,
without calling for any exertion on his part. Old Newala is now under
the jurisdiction of the native pastor, Daudi, at Chingulungulu, who,
as I am on very friendly terms with him, allows me, as a matter of
course, the use of this lemon-grove during my stay at Newala.
 FEET MUTILATED BY THE RAVAGES OF THE “JIGGER”
(Sarcopsylla penetrans)

The water-supply of New Newala is in the bottom of the valley,

some 1,600 feet lower down. The way is not only long and fatiguing,
but the water, when we get it, is thoroughly bad. We are suffering not
only from this, but from the fact that the arrangements at Newala are
nothing short of luxurious. We have a separate kitchen—a hut built
against the boma palisade on the right of the baraza, the interior of
which is not visible from our usual position. Our two cooks were not
long in finding this out, and they consequently do—or rather neglect
to do—what they please. In any case they do not seem to be very
particular about the boiling of our drinking-water—at least I can
attribute to no other cause certain attacks of a dysenteric nature,
from which both Knudsen and I have suffered for some time. If a
man like Omari has to be left unwatched for a moment, he is capable
of anything. Besides this complaint, we are inconvenienced by the
state of our nails, which have become as hard as glass, and crack on
the slightest provocation, and I have the additional infliction of
pimples all over me. As if all this were not enough, we have also, for
the last week been waging war against the jigger, who has found his
Eldorado in the hot sand of the Makonde plateau. Our men are seen
all day long—whenever their chronic colds and the dysentery likewise
raging among them permit—occupied in removing this scourge of
Africa from their feet and trying to prevent the disastrous
consequences of its presence. It is quite common to see natives of
this place with one or two toes missing; many have lost all their toes,
or even the whole front part of the foot, so that a well-formed leg
ends in a shapeless stump. These ravages are caused by the female of
Sarcopsylla penetrans, which bores its way under the skin and there
develops an egg-sac the size of a pea. In all books on the subject, it is
stated that one’s attention is called to the presence of this parasite by
an intolerable itching. This agrees very well with my experience, so
far as the softer parts of the sole, the spaces between and under the
toes, and the side of the foot are concerned, but if the creature
penetrates through the harder parts of the heel or ball of the foot, it
may escape even the most careful search till it has reached maturity.
Then there is no time to be lost, if the horrible ulceration, of which
we see cases by the dozen every day, is to be prevented. It is much
easier, by the way, to discover the insect on the white skin of a
European than on that of a native, on which the dark speck scarcely
shows. The four or five jiggers which, in spite of the fact that I
constantly wore high laced boots, chose my feet to settle in, were
taken out for me by the all-accomplished Knudsen, after which I
thought it advisable to wash out the cavities with corrosive
sublimate. The natives have a different sort of disinfectant—they fill
the hole with scraped roots. In a tiny Makua village on the slope of
the plateau south of Newala, we saw an old woman who had filled all
the spaces under her toe-nails with powdered roots by way of
prophylactic treatment. What will be the result, if any, who can say?
The rest of the many trifling ills which trouble our existence are
really more comic than serious. In the absence of anything else to
smoke, Knudsen and I at last opened a box of cigars procured from
the Indian store-keeper at Lindi, and tried them, with the most
distressing results. Whether they contain opium or some other
narcotic, neither of us can say, but after the tenth puff we were both
“off,” three-quarters stupefied and unspeakably wretched. Slowly we
recovered—and what happened next? Half-an-hour later we were
once more smoking these poisonous concoctions—so insatiable is the
craving for tobacco in the tropics.
Even my present attacks of fever scarcely deserve to be taken
seriously. I have had no less than three here at Newala, all of which
have run their course in an incredibly short time. In the early
afternoon, I am busy with my old natives, asking questions and
making notes. The strong midday coffee has stimulated my spirits to
an extraordinary degree, the brain is active and vigorous, and work
progresses rapidly, while a pleasant warmth pervades the whole
body. Suddenly this gives place to a violent chill, forcing me to put on
my overcoat, though it is only half-past three and the afternoon sun
is at its hottest. Now the brain no longer works with such acuteness
and logical precision; more especially does it fail me in trying to
establish the syntax of the difficult Makua language on which I have
ventured, as if I had not enough to do without it. Under the
circumstances it seems advisable to take my temperature, and I do
so, to save trouble, without leaving my seat, and while going on with
my work. On examination, I find it to be 101·48°. My tutors are
abruptly dismissed and my bed set up in the baraza; a few minutes
later I am in it and treating myself internally with hot water and
lemon-juice.
Three hours later, the thermometer marks nearly 104°, and I make
them carry me back into the tent, bed and all, as I am now perspiring
heavily, and exposure to the cold wind just beginning to blow might
mean a fatal chill. I lie still for a little while, and then find, to my
great relief, that the temperature is not rising, but rather falling. This
is about 7.30 p.m. At 8 p.m. I find, to my unbounded astonishment,
that it has fallen below 98·6°, and I feel perfectly well. I read for an
hour or two, and could very well enjoy a smoke, if I had the
wherewithal—Indian cigars being out of the question.
Having no medical training, I am at a loss to account for this state
of things. It is impossible that these transitory attacks of high fever
should be malarial; it seems more probable that they are due to a
kind of sunstroke. On consulting my note-book, I become more and
more inclined to think this is the case, for these attacks regularly
follow extreme fatigue and long exposure to strong sunshine. They at
least have the advantage of being only short interruptions to my
work, as on the following morning I am always quite fresh and fit.
My treasure of a cook is suffering from an enormous hydrocele which
makes it difficult for him to get up, and Moritz is obliged to keep in
the dark on account of his inflamed eyes. Knudsen’s cook, a raw boy
from somewhere in the bush, knows still less of cooking than Omari;
consequently Nils Knudsen himself has been promoted to the vacant
post. Finding that we had come to the end of our supplies, he began
by sending to Chingulungulu for the four sucking-pigs which we had
bought from Matola and temporarily left in his charge; and when
they came up, neatly packed in a large crate, he callously slaughtered
the biggest of them. The first joint we were thoughtless enough to
entrust for roasting to Knudsen’s mshenzi cook, and it was
consequently uneatable; but we made the rest of the animal into a
jelly which we ate with great relish after weeks of underfeeding,
consuming incredible helpings of it at both midday and evening
meals. The only drawback is a certain want of variety in the tinned
vegetables. Dr. Jäger, to whom the Geographical Commission
entrusted the provisioning of the expeditions—mine as well as his
own—because he had more time on his hands than the rest of us,
seems to have laid in a huge stock of Teltow turnips,[46] an article of
food which is all very well for occasional use, but which quickly palls
when set before one every day; and we seem to have no other tins
left. There is no help for it—we must put up with the turnips; but I
am certain that, once I am home again, I shall not touch them for ten
years to come.
Amid all these minor evils, which, after all, go to make up the
genuine flavour of Africa, there is at least one cheering touch:
Knudsen has, with the dexterity of a skilled mechanic, repaired my 9
× 12 cm. camera, at least so far that I can use it with a little care.
How, in the absence of finger-nails, he was able to accomplish such a
ticklish piece of work, having no tool but a clumsy screw-driver for
taking to pieces and putting together again the complicated
mechanism of the instantaneous shutter, is still a mystery to me; but
he did it successfully. The loss of his finger-nails shows him in a light
contrasting curiously enough with the intelligence evinced by the
above operation; though, after all, it is scarcely surprising after his
ten years’ residence in the bush. One day, at Lindi, he had occasion
to wash a dog, which must have been in need of very thorough
cleansing, for the bottle handed to our friend for the purpose had an
extremely strong smell. Having performed his task in the most
conscientious manner, he perceived with some surprise that the dog
did not appear much the better for it, and was further surprised by
finding his own nails ulcerating away in the course of the next few
days. “How was I to know that carbolic acid has to be diluted?” he
mutters indignantly, from time to time, with a troubled gaze at his
mutilated finger-tips.
 Since we came to Newala we have been making excursions in all
directions through the surrounding country, in accordance with old
habit, and also because the akida Sefu did not get together the tribal
elders from whom I wanted information so speedily as he had
promised. There is, however, no harm done, as, even if seen only
from the outside, the country and people are interesting enough.
The Makonde plateau is like a large rectangular table rounded off
at the corners. Measured from the Indian Ocean to Newala, it is
about seventy-five miles long, and between the Rovuma and the
Lukuledi it averages fifty miles in breadth, so that its superficial area
is about two-thirds of that of the kingdom of Saxony. The surface,
however, is not level, but uniformly inclined from its south-western
edge to the ocean. From the upper edge, on which Newala lies, the
eye ranges for many miles east and north-east, without encountering
any obstacle, over the Makonde bush. It is a green sea, from which
here and there thick clouds of smoke rise, to show that it, too, is
inhabited by men who carry on their tillage like so many other
primitive peoples, by cutting down and burning the bush, and
manuring with the ashes. Even in the radiant light of a tropical day
such a fire is a grand sight.
Much less effective is the impression produced just now by the
great western plain as seen from the edge of the plateau. As often as
time permits, I stroll along this edge, sometimes in one direction,
sometimes in another, in the hope of finding the air clear enough to
let me enjoy the view; but I have always been disappointed.
Wherever one looks, clouds of smoke rise from the burning bush,
and the air is full of smoke and vapour. It is a pity, for under more
favourable circumstances the panorama of the whole country up to
the distant Majeje hills must be truly magnificent. It is of little use
taking photographs now, and an outline sketch gives a very poor idea
of the scenery. In one of these excursions I went out of my way to
make a personal attempt on the Makonde bush. The present edge of
the plateau is the result of a far-reaching process of destruction
through erosion and denudation. The Makonde strata are
everywhere cut into by ravines, which, though short, are hundreds of
yards in depth. In consequence of the loose stratification of these
beds, not only are the walls of these ravines nearly vertical, but their
upper end is closed by an equally steep escarpment, so that the
western edge of the Makonde plateau is hemmed in by a series of
deep, basin-like valleys. In order to get from one side of such a ravine
to the other, I cut my way through the bush with a dozen of my men.
It was a very open part, with more grass than scrub, but even so the
short stretch of less than two hundred yards was very hard work; at
the end of it the men’s calicoes were in rags and they themselves
bleeding from hundreds of scratches, while even our strong khaki
suits had not escaped scatheless.

NATIVE PATH THROUGH THE MAKONDE BUSH, NEAR

MAHUTA

I see increasing reason to believe that the view formed some time
back as to the origin of the Makonde bush is the correct one. I have
no doubt that it is not a natural product, but the result of human
occupation. Those parts of the high country where man—as a very
slight amount of practice enables the eye to perceive at once—has not
yet penetrated with axe and hoe, are still occupied by a splendid
timber forest quite able to sustain a comparison with our mixed
forests in Germany. But wherever man has once built his hut or tilled
his field, this horrible bush springs up. Every phase of this process
may be seen in the course of a couple of hours’ walk along the main
road. From the bush to right or left, one hears the sound of the axe—
not from one spot only, but from several directions at once. A few
steps further on, we can see what is taking place. The brush has been
cut down and piled up in heaps to the height of a yard or more,
between which the trunks of the large trees stand up like the last
pillars of a magnificent ruined building. These, too, present a
melancholy spectacle: the destructive Makonde have ringed them—
cut a broad strip of bark all round to ensure their dying off—and also
piled up pyramids of brush round them. Father and son, mother and
son-in-law, are chopping away perseveringly in the background—too
busy, almost, to look round at the white stranger, who usually excites
so much interest. If you pass by the same place a week later, the piles
of brushwood have disappeared and a thick layer of ashes has taken
the place of the green forest. The large trees stretch their
smouldering trunks and branches in dumb accusation to heaven—if
they have not already fallen and been more or less reduced to ashes,
perhaps only showing as a white stripe on the dark ground.
This work of destruction is carried out by the Makonde alike on the
virgin forest and on the bush which has sprung up on sites already
cultivated and deserted. In the second case they are saved the trouble
of burning the large trees, these being entirely absent in the
secondary bush.
After burning this piece of forest ground and loosening it with the
hoe, the native sows his corn and plants his vegetables. All over the
country, he goes in for bed-culture, which requires, and, in fact,
receives, the most careful attention. Weeds are nowhere tolerated in
the south of German East Africa. The crops may fail on the plains,
where droughts are frequent, but never on the plateau with its
abundant rains and heavy dews. Its fortunate inhabitants even have
the satisfaction of seeing the proud Wayao and Wamakua working
for them as labourers, driven by hunger to serve where they were
accustomed to rule.
But the light, sandy soil is soon exhausted, and would yield no
harvest the second year if cultivated twice running. This fact has
been familiar to the native for ages; consequently he provides in
time, and, while his crop is growing, prepares the next plot with axe
and firebrand. Next year he plants this with his various crops and
lets the first piece lie fallow. For a short time it remains waste and
desolate; then nature steps in to repair the destruction wrought by
man; a thousand new growths spring out of the exhausted soil, and
even the old stumps put forth fresh shoots. Next year the new growth
is up to one’s knees, and in a few years more it is that terrible,
impenetrable bush, which maintains its position till the black
occupier of the land has made the round of all the available sites and
come back to his starting point.
The Makonde are, body and soul, so to speak, one with this bush.
According to my Yao informants, indeed, their name means nothing
else but “bush people.” Their own tradition says that they have been
settled up here for a very long time, but to my surprise they laid great
stress on an original immigration. Their old homes were in the
south-east, near Mikindani and the mouth of the Rovuma, whence
their peaceful forefathers were driven by the continual raids of the
Sakalavas from Madagascar and the warlike Shirazis[47] of the coast,
to take refuge on the almost inaccessible plateau. I have studied
African ethnology for twenty years, but the fact that changes of
population in this apparently quiet and peaceable corner of the earth
could have been occasioned by outside enterprises taking place on
the high seas, was completely new to me. It is, no doubt, however,
correct.
The charming tribal legend of the Makonde—besides informing us
of other interesting matters—explains why they have to live in the
thickest of the bush and a long way from the edge of the plateau,
instead of making their permanent homes beside the purling brooks
and springs of the low country.
“The place where the tribe originated is Mahuta, on the southern
side of the plateau towards the Rovuma, where of old time there was
nothing but thick bush. Out of this bush came a man who never
washed himself or shaved his head, and who ate and drank but little.
He went out and made a human figure from the wood of a tree
growing in the open country, which he took home to his abode in the
bush and there set it upright. In the night this image came to life and
was a woman. The man and woman went down together to the
Rovuma to wash themselves. Here the woman gave birth to a still-
born child. They left that place and passed over the high land into the
valley of the Mbemkuru, where the woman had another child, which
was also born dead. Then they returned to the high bush country of
Mahuta, where the third child was born, which lived and grew up. In
course of time, the couple had many more children, and called
themselves Wamatanda. These were the ancestral stock of the
Makonde, also called Wamakonde,[48] i.e., aborigines. Their
forefather, the man from the bush, gave his children the command to
bury their dead upright, in memory of the mother of their race who
was cut out of wood and awoke to life when standing upright. He also
warned them against settling in the valleys and near large streams,
for sickness and death dwelt there. They were to make it a rule to
have their huts at least an hour’s walk from the nearest watering-
place; then their children would thrive and escape illness.”
The explanation of the name Makonde given by my informants is
somewhat different from that contained in the above legend, which I
extract from a little book (small, but packed with information), by
Pater Adams, entitled Lindi und sein Hinterland. Otherwise, my
results agree exactly with the statements of the legend. Washing?
Hapana—there is no such thing. Why should they do so? As it is, the
supply of water scarcely suffices for cooking and drinking; other
people do not wash, so why should the Makonde distinguish himself
by such needless eccentricity? As for shaving the head, the short,
woolly crop scarcely needs it,[49] so the second ancestral precept is
likewise easy enough to follow. Beyond this, however, there is
nothing ridiculous in the ancestor’s advice. I have obtained from
various local artists a fairly large number of figures carved in wood,
ranging from fifteen to twenty-three inches in height, and
representing women belonging to the great group of the Mavia,
Makonde, and Matambwe tribes. The carving is remarkably well
done and renders the female type with great accuracy, especially the
keloid ornamentation, to be described later on. As to the object and
meaning of their works the sculptors either could or (more probably)
would tell me nothing, and I was forced to content myself with the
scanty information vouchsafed by one man, who said that the figures
were merely intended to represent the nembo—the artificial
deformations of pelele, ear-discs, and keloids. The legend recorded
by Pater Adams places these figures in a new light. They must surely
be more than mere dolls; and we may even venture to assume that
they are—though the majority of present-day Makonde are probably
unaware of the fact—representations of the tribal ancestress.
 The references in the legend to the descent from Mahuta to the
Rovuma, and to a journey across the highlands into the Mbekuru
valley, undoubtedly indicate the previous history of the tribe, the
travels of the ancestral pair typifying the migrations of their
descendants. The descent to the neighbouring Rovuma valley, with
its extraordinary fertility and great abundance of game, is intelligible
at a glance—but the crossing of the Lukuledi depression, the ascent
to the Rondo Plateau and the descent to the Mbemkuru, also lie
within the bounds of probability, for all these districts have exactly
the same character as the extreme south. Now, however, comes a
point of especial interest for our bacteriological age. The primitive
Makonde did not enjoy their lives in the marshy river-valleys.
Disease raged among them, and many died. It was only after they
had returned to their original home near Mahuta, that the health
conditions of these people improved. We are very apt to think of the
African as a stupid person whose ignorance of nature is only equalled
by his fear of it, and who looks on all mishaps as caused by evil
spirits and malignant natural powers. It is much more correct to
assume in this case that the people very early learnt to distinguish
districts infested with malaria from those where it is absent.
This knowledge is crystallized in the
ancestral warning against settling in the
valleys and near the great waters, the
dwelling-places of disease and death. At the
same time, for security against the hostile
Mavia south of the Rovuma, it was enacted
that every settlement must be not less than a
certain distance from the southern edge of the
plateau. Such in fact is their mode of life at the
present day. It is not such a bad one, and
certainly they are both safer and more
comfortable than the Makua, the recent
intruders from the south, who have made USUAL METHOD OF
good their footing on the western edge of the CLOSING HUT-DOOR
plateau, extending over a fairly wide belt of
country. Neither Makua nor Makonde show in their dwellings
anything of the size and comeliness of the Yao houses in the plain,
especially at Masasi, Chingulungulu and Zuza’s. Jumbe Chauro, a
Makonde hamlet not far from Newala, on the road to Mahuta, is the
most important settlement of the tribe I have yet seen, and has fairly
spacious huts. But how slovenly is their construction compared with
the palatial residences of the elephant-hunters living in the plain.
The roofs are still more untidy than in the general run of huts during
the dry season, the walls show here and there the scanty beginnings
or the lamentable remains of the mud plastering, and the interior is a
veritable dog-kennel; dirt, dust and disorder everywhere. A few huts
only show any attempt at division into rooms, and this consists
merely of very roughly-made bamboo partitions. In one point alone
have I noticed any indication of progress—in the method of fastening
the door. Houses all over the south are secured in a simple but
ingenious manner. The door consists of a set of stout pieces of wood
or bamboo, tied with bark-string to two cross-pieces, and moving in
two grooves round one of the door-posts, so as to open inwards. If
the owner wishes to leave home, he takes two logs as thick as a man’s
upper arm and about a yard long. One of these is placed obliquely
against the middle of the door from the inside, so as to form an angle
of from 60° to 75° with the ground. He then places the second piece
horizontally across the first, pressing it downward with all his might.
It is kept in place by two strong posts planted in the ground a few
inches inside the door. This fastening is absolutely safe, but of course
cannot be applied to both doors at once, otherwise how could the
owner leave or enter his house? I have not yet succeeded in finding
out how the back door is fastened.

MAKONDE LOCK AND KEY AT JUMBE CHAURO

 This is the general way of closing a house. The Makonde at Jumbe
Chauro, however, have a much more complicated, solid and original
one. Here, too, the door is as already described, except that there is
only one post on the inside, standing by itself about six inches from
one side of the doorway. Opposite this post is a hole in the wall just
large enough to admit a man’s arm. The door is closed inside by a
large wooden bolt passing through a hole in this post and pressing
with its free end against the door. The other end has three holes into
which fit three pegs running in vertical grooves inside the post. The
door is opened with a wooden key about a foot long, somewhat
curved and sloped off at the butt; the other end has three pegs
corresponding to the holes, in the bolt, so that, when it is thrust
through the hole in the wall and inserted into the rectangular
opening in the post, the pegs can be lifted and the bolt drawn out.[50]

MODE OF INSERTING THE KEY

With no small pride first one householder and then a second

showed me on the spot the action of this greatest invention of the
Makonde Highlands. To both with an admiring exclamation of
“Vizuri sana!” (“Very fine!”). I expressed the wish to take back these
marvels with me to Ulaya, to show the Wazungu what clever fellows
the Makonde are. Scarcely five minutes after my return to camp at
Newala, the two men came up sweating under the weight of two
heavy logs which they laid down at my feet, handing over at the same
time the keys of the fallen fortress. Arguing, logically enough, that if
the key was wanted, the lock would be wanted with it, they had taken
their axes and chopped down the posts—as it never occurred to them
to dig them out of the ground and so bring them intact. Thus I have
two badly damaged specimens, and the owners, instead of praise,
come in for a blowing-up.
The Makua huts in the environs of Newala are especially
miserable; their more than slovenly construction reminds one of the
temporary erections of the Makua at Hatia’s, though the people here
have not been concerned in a war. It must therefore be due to
congenital idleness, or else to the absence of a powerful chief. Even
the baraza at Mlipa’s, a short hour’s walk south-east of Newala,
shares in this general neglect. While public buildings in this country
are usually looked after more or less carefully, this is in evident
danger of being blown over by the first strong easterly gale. The only
attractive object in this whole district is the grave of the late chief
Mlipa. I visited it in the morning, while the sun was still trying with
partial success to break through the rolling mists, and the circular
grove of tall euphorbias, which, with a broken pot, is all that marks
the old king’s resting-place, impressed one with a touch of pathos.
Even my very materially-minded carriers seemed to feel something
of the sort, for instead of their usual ribald songs, they chanted
solemnly, as we marched on through the dense green of the Makonde
bush:—
 “We shall arrive with the great master; we stand in a row and have
no fear about getting our food and our money from the Serkali (the
Government). We are not afraid; we are going along with the great
master, the lion; we are going down to the coast and back.”
With regard to the characteristic features of the various tribes here
on the western edge of the plateau, I can arrive at no other
conclusion than the one already come to in the plain, viz., that it is
impossible for anyone but a trained anthropologist to assign any
given individual at once to his proper tribe. In fact, I think that even
an anthropological specialist, after the most careful examination,
might find it a difficult task to decide. The whole congeries of peoples
collected in the region bounded on the west by the great Central
African rift, Tanganyika and Nyasa, and on the east by the Indian
Ocean, are closely related to each other—some of their languages are
only distinguished from one another as dialects of the same speech,
and no doubt all the tribes present the same shape of skull and
structure of skeleton. Thus, surely, there can be no very striking
differences in outward appearance.
 Even did such exist, I should have no time
to concern myself with them, for day after day,
I have to see or hear, as the case may be—in
any case to grasp and record—an
extraordinary number of ethnographic
phenomena. I am almost disposed to think it
fortunate that some departments of inquiry, at
least, are barred by external circumstances.
Chief among these is the subject of iron-
working. We are apt to think of Africa as a
country where iron ore is everywhere, so to
speak, to be picked up by the roadside, and
where it would be quite surprising if the
inhabitants had not learnt to smelt the
material ready to their hand. In fact, the
knowledge of this art ranges all over the
continent, from the Kabyles in the north to the
Kafirs in the south. Here between the Rovuma
and the Lukuledi the conditions are not so
favourable. According to the statements of the
Makonde, neither ironstone nor any other
form of iron ore is known to them. They have
not therefore advanced to the art of smelting
the metal, but have hitherto bought all their
THE ANCESTRESS OF
THE MAKONDE
iron implements from neighbouring tribes.
Even in the plain the inhabitants are not much
better off. Only one man now living is said to
understand the art of smelting iron. This old fundi lives close to
Huwe, that isolated, steep-sided block of granite which rises out of
the green solitude between Masasi and Chingulungulu, and whose
jagged and splintered top meets the traveller’s eye everywhere. While
still at Masasi I wished to see this man at work, but was told that,
frightened by the rising, he had retired across the Rovuma, though
he would soon return. All subsequent inquiries as to whether the
fundi had come back met with the genuine African answer, “Bado”
(“Not yet”).
 BRAZIER

Some consolation was afforded me by a brassfounder, whom I

came across in the bush near Akundonde’s. This man is the favourite
of women, and therefore no doubt of the gods; he welds the glittering
brass rods purchased at the coast into those massive, heavy rings
which, on the wrists and ankles of the local fair ones, continually give
me fresh food for admiration. Like every decent master-craftsman he
had all his tools with him, consisting of a pair of bellows, three
crucibles and a hammer—nothing more, apparently. He was quite
willing to show his skill, and in a twinkling had fixed his bellows on
the ground. They are simply two goat-skins, taken off whole, the four
legs being closed by knots, while the upper opening, intended to
admit the air, is kept stretched by two pieces of wood. At the lower
end of the skin a smaller opening is left into which a wooden tube is
stuck. The fundi has quickly borrowed a heap of wood-embers from
the nearest hut; he then fixes the free ends of the two tubes into an
earthen pipe, and clamps them to the ground by means of a bent
piece of wood. Now he fills one of his small clay crucibles, the dross
on which shows that they have been long in use, with the yellow
material, places it in the midst of the embers, which, at present are
only faintly glimmering, and begins his work. In quick alternation
the smith’s two hands move up and down with the open ends of the
bellows; as he raises his hand he holds the slit wide open, so as to let
the air enter the skin bag unhindered. In pressing it down he closes
the bag, and the air puffs through the bamboo tube and clay pipe into
the fire, which quickly burns up. The smith, however, does not keep
on with this work, but beckons to another man, who relieves him at
the bellows, while he takes some more tools out of a large skin pouch
carried on his back. I look on in wonder as, with a smooth round
stick about the thickness of a finger, he bores a few vertical holes into
the clean sand of the soil. This should not be difficult, yet the man
seems to be taking great pains over it. Then he fastens down to the
ground, with a couple of wooden clamps, a neat little trough made by
splitting a joint of bamboo in half, so that the ends are closed by the
two knots. At last the yellow metal has attained the right consistency,
and the fundi lifts the crucible from the fire by means of two sticks
split at the end to serve as tongs. A short swift turn to the left—a
tilting of the crucible—and the molten brass, hissing and giving forth
clouds of smoke, flows first into the bamboo mould and then into the
holes in the ground.
The technique of this backwoods craftsman may not be very far
advanced, but it cannot be denied that he knows how to obtain an
adequate result by the simplest means. The ladies of highest rank in
this country—that is to say, those who can afford it, wear two kinds
of these massive brass rings, one cylindrical, the other semicircular
in section. The latter are cast in the most ingenious way in the
bamboo mould, the former in the circular hole in the sand. It is quite
a simple matter for the fundi to fit these bars to the limbs of his fair
customers; with a few light strokes of his hammer he bends the
pliable brass round arm or ankle without further inconvenience to
the wearer.
SHAPING THE POT

SMOOTHING WITH MAIZE-COB

CUTTING THE EDGE

 FINISHING THE BOTTOM

LAST SMOOTHING BEFORE

BURNING

FIRING THE BRUSH-PILE

 LIGHTING THE FARTHER SIDE OF
THE PILE

TURNING THE RED-HOT VESSEL

NYASA WOMAN MAKING POTS AT MASASI

Pottery is an art which must always and everywhere excite the
interest of the student, just because it is so intimately connected with
the development of human culture, and because its relics are one of
the principal factors in the reconstruction of our own condition in
prehistoric times. I shall always remember with pleasure the two or
three afternoons at Masasi when Salim Matola’s mother, a slightly-
built, graceful, pleasant-looking woman, explained to me with
touching patience, by means of concrete illustrations, the ceramic art
of her people. The only implements for this primitive process were a
lump of clay in her left hand, and in the right a calabash containing
the following valuables: the fragment of a maize-cob stripped of all
its grains, a smooth, oval pebble, about the size of a pigeon’s egg, a
few chips of gourd-shell, a bamboo splinter about the length of one’s
hand, a small shell, and a bunch of some herb resembling spinach.
 Nothing more. The woman scraped with the
shell a round, shallow hole in the soft, fine
sand of the soil, and, when an active young
girl had filled the calabash with water for her,
she began to knead the clay. As if by magic it
gradually assumed the shape of a rough but
already well-shaped vessel, which only wanted
a little touching up with the instruments
before mentioned. I looked out with the
MAKUA WOMAN closest attention for any indication of the use
MAKING A POT. of the potter’s wheel, in however rudimentary
SHOWS THE a form, but no—hapana (there is none). The
BEGINNINGS OF THE embryo pot stood firmly in its little
POTTER’S WHEEL
depression, and the woman walked round it in
a stooping posture, whether she was removing
small stones or similar foreign bodies with the maize-cob, smoothing
the inner or outer surface with the splinter of bamboo, or later, after
letting it dry for a day, pricking in the ornamentation with a pointed
bit of gourd-shell, or working out the bottom, or cutting the edge
with a sharp bamboo knife, or giving the last touches to the finished
vessel. This occupation of the women is infinitely toilsome, but it is
without doubt an accurate reproduction of the process in use among
our ancestors of the Neolithic and Bronze ages.
There is no doubt that the invention of pottery, an item in human
progress whose importance cannot be over-estimated, is due to
women. Rough, coarse and unfeeling, the men of the horde range
over the countryside. When the united cunning of the hunters has
succeeded in killing the game; not one of them thinks of carrying
home the spoil. A bright fire, kindled by a vigorous wielding of the
drill, is crackling beside them; the animal has been cleaned and cut
up secundum artem, and, after a slight singeing, will soon disappear
under their sharp teeth; no one all this time giving a single thought
to wife or child.
To what shifts, on the other hand, the primitive wife, and still more
the primitive mother, was put! Not even prehistoric stomachs could
endure an unvarying diet of raw food. Something or other suggested
the beneficial effect of hot water on the majority of approved but
indigestible dishes. Perhaps a neighbour had tried holding the hard
roots or tubers over the fire in a calabash filled with water—or maybe
an ostrich-egg-shell, or a hastily improvised vessel of bark. They
became much softer and more palatable than they had previously
been; but, unfortunately, the vessel could not stand the fire and got
charred on the outside. That can be remedied, thought our
ancestress, and plastered a layer of wet clay round a similar vessel.
This is an improvement; the cooking utensil remains uninjured, but
the heat of the fire has shrunk it, so that it is loose in its shell. The
next step is to detach it, so, with a firm grip and a jerk, shell and
kernel are separated, and pottery is invented. Perhaps, however, the
discovery which led to an intelligent use of the burnt-clay shell, was
made in a slightly different way. Ostrich-eggs and calabashes are not
to be found in every part of the world, but everywhere mankind has
arrived at the art of making baskets out of pliant materials, such as
bark, bast, strips of palm-leaf, supple twigs, etc. Our inventor has no
water-tight vessel provided by nature. “Never mind, let us line the
basket with clay.” This answers the purpose, but alas! the basket gets
burnt over the blazing fire, the woman watches the process of
cooking with increasing uneasiness, fearing a leak, but no leak
appears. The food, done to a turn, is eaten with peculiar relish; and
the cooking-vessel is examined, half in curiosity, half in satisfaction
at the result. The plastic clay is now hard as stone, and at the same
time looks exceedingly well, for the neat plaiting of the burnt basket
is traced all over it in a pretty pattern. Thus, simultaneously with
pottery, its ornamentation was invented.
Primitive woman has another claim to respect. It was the man,
roving abroad, who invented the art of producing fire at will, but the
woman, unable to imitate him in this, has been a Vestal from the
earliest times. Nothing gives so much trouble as the keeping alight of
the smouldering brand, and, above all, when all the men are absent
from the camp. Heavy rain-clouds gather, already the first large
drops are falling, the first gusts of the storm rage over the plain. The
little flame, a greater anxiety to the woman than her own children,
flickers unsteadily in the blast. What is to be done? A sudden thought
occurs to her, and in an instant she has constructed a primitive hut
out of strips of bark, to protect the flame against rain and wind.
This, or something very like it, was the way in which the principle
of the house was discovered; and even the most hardened misogynist
cannot fairly refuse a woman the credit of it. The protection of the
hearth-fire from the weather is the germ from which the human
dwelling was evolved. Men had little, if any share, in this forward
step, and that only at a late stage. Even at the present day, the
plastering of the housewall with clay and the manufacture of pottery
are exclusively the women’s business. These are two very significant
survivals. Our European kitchen-garden, too, is originally a woman’s
invention, and the hoe, the primitive instrument of agriculture, is,
characteristically enough, still used in this department. But the
noblest achievement which we owe to the other sex is unquestionably
the art of cookery. Roasting alone—the oldest process—is one for
which men took the hint (a very obvious one) from nature. It must
have been suggested by the scorched carcase of some animal
overtaken by the destructive forest-fires. But boiling—the process of
improving organic substances by the help of water heated to boiling-
point—is a much later discovery. It is so recent that it has not even
yet penetrated to all parts of the world. The Polynesians understand
how to steam food, that is, to cook it, neatly wrapped in leaves, in a
hole in the earth between hot stones, the air being excluded, and
(sometimes) a few drops of water sprinkled on the stones; but they
do not understand boiling.
To come back from this digression, we find that the slender Nyasa
woman has, after once more carefully examining the finished pot,
put it aside in the shade to dry. On the following day she sends me
word by her son, Salim Matola, who is always on hand, that she is
going to do the burning, and, on coming out of my house, I find her
already hard at work. She has spread on the ground a layer of very
dry sticks, about as thick as one’s thumb, has laid the pot (now of a
yellowish-grey colour) on them, and is piling brushwood round it.
My faithful Pesa mbili, the mnyampara, who has been standing by,
most obligingly, with a lighted stick, now hands it to her. Both of
them, blowing steadily, light the pile on the lee side, and, when the
flame begins to catch, on the weather side also. Soon the whole is in a
blaze, but the dry fuel is quickly consumed and the fire dies down, so
that we see the red-hot vessel rising from the ashes. The woman
turns it continually with a long stick, sometimes one way and
sometimes another, so that it may be evenly heated all over. In
twenty minutes she rolls it out of the ash-heap, takes up the bundle
of spinach, which has been lying for two days in a jar of water, and
sprinkles the red-hot clay with it. The places where the drops fall are
marked by black spots on the uniform reddish-brown surface. With a
sigh of relief, and with visible satisfaction, the woman rises to an
erect position; she is standing just in a line between me and the fire,
from which a cloud of smoke is just rising: I press the ball of my
camera, the shutter clicks—the apotheosis is achieved! Like a
priestess, representative of her inventive sex, the graceful woman
stands: at her feet the hearth-fire she has given us beside her the
invention she has devised for us, in the background the home she has
built for us.
At Newala, also, I have had the manufacture of pottery carried on
in my presence. Technically the process is better than that already
described, for here we find the beginnings of the potter’s wheel,
which does not seem to exist in the plains; at least I have seen
nothing of the sort. The artist, a frightfully stupid Makua woman, did
not make a depression in the ground to receive the pot she was about
to shape, but used instead a large potsherd. Otherwise, she went to
work in much the same way as Salim’s mother, except that she saved
herself the trouble of walking round and round her work by squatting
at her ease and letting the pot and potsherd rotate round her; this is
surely the first step towards a machine. But it does not follow that
the pot was improved by the process. It is true that it was beautifully
rounded and presented a very creditable appearance when finished,
but the numerous large and small vessels which I have seen, and, in
part, collected, in the “less advanced” districts, are no less so. We
moderns imagine that instruments of precision are necessary to
produce excellent results. Go to the prehistoric collections of our
museums and look at the pots, urns and bowls of our ancestors in the
dim ages of the past, and you will at once perceive your error.
MAKING LONGITUDINAL CUT IN
BARK

DRAWING THE BARK OFF THE LOG

REMOVING THE OUTER BARK

 BEATING THE BARK

WORKING THE BARK-CLOTH AFTER BEATING, TO MAKE IT

SOFT

MANUFACTURE OF BARK-CLOTH AT NEWALA

To-day, nearly the whole population of German East Africa is
clothed in imported calico. This was not always the case; even now in
some parts of the north dressed skins are still the prevailing wear,
and in the north-western districts—east and north of Lake
Tanganyika—lies a zone where bark-cloth has not yet been
superseded. Probably not many generations have passed since such
bark fabrics and kilts of skins were the only clothing even in the
south. Even to-day, large quantities of this bright-red or drab
material are still to be found; but if we wish to see it, we must look in
the granaries and on the drying stages inside the native huts, where
it serves less ambitious uses as wrappings for those seeds and fruits
which require to be packed with special care. The salt produced at
Masasi, too, is packed for transport to a distance in large sheets of
bark-cloth. Wherever I found it in any degree possible, I studied the
process of making this cloth. The native requisitioned for the
purpose arrived, carrying a log between two and three yards long and
as thick as his thigh, and nothing else except a curiously-shaped
mallet and the usual long, sharp and pointed knife which all men and
boys wear in a belt at their backs without a sheath—horribile dictu!
[51]
Silently he squats down before me, and with two rapid cuts has
drawn a couple of circles round the log some two yards apart, and
slits the bark lengthwise between them with the point of his knife.
With evident care, he then scrapes off the outer rind all round the
log, so that in a quarter of an hour the inner red layer of the bark
shows up brightly-coloured between the two untouched ends. With
some trouble and much caution, he now loosens the bark at one end,
and opens the cylinder. He then stands up, takes hold of the free
edge with both hands, and turning it inside out, slowly but steadily
pulls it off in one piece. Now comes the troublesome work of
scraping all superfluous particles of outer bark from the outside of
the long, narrow piece of material, while the inner side is carefully
scrutinised for defective spots. At last it is ready for beating. Having
signalled to a friend, who immediately places a bowl of water beside
him, the artificer damps his sheet of bark all over, seizes his mallet,
lays one end of the stuff on the smoothest spot of the log, and
hammers away slowly but continuously. “Very simple!” I think to
myself. “Why, I could do that, too!”—but I am forced to change my
opinions a little later on; for the beating is quite an art, if the fabric is
not to be beaten to pieces. To prevent the breaking of the fibres, the
stuff is several times folded across, so as to interpose several
thicknesses between the mallet and the block. At last the required
state is reached, and the fundi seizes the sheet, still folded, by both
ends, and wrings it out, or calls an assistant to take one end while he
holds the other. The cloth produced in this way is not nearly so fine
and uniform in texture as the famous Uganda bark-cloth, but it is
quite soft, and, above all, cheap.
Now, too, I examine the mallet. My craftsman has been using the
simpler but better form of this implement, a conical block of some
hard wood, its base—the striking surface—being scored across and
across with more or less deeply-cut grooves, and the handle stuck
into a hole in the middle. The other and earlier form of mallet is
shaped in the same way, but the head is fastened by an ingenious
network of bark strips into the split bamboo serving as a handle. The
observation so often made, that ancient customs persist longest in
connection with religious ceremonies and in the life of children, here
finds confirmation. As we shall soon see, bark-cloth is still worn
during the unyago,[52] having been prepared with special solemn
ceremonies; and many a mother, if she has no other garment handy,
will still put her little one into a kilt of bark-cloth, which, after all,
looks better, besides being more in keeping with its African
surroundings, than the ridiculous bit of print from Ulaya.
MAKUA WOMEN