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The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography Thomas Postlewait Cambridge University Press, 2009 £16.99, pb. 360 pages, 18 b/w ill. ISBN 9780521499170
This work not only offers a much needed attempt to deal systematically with the difficulties and complications of Theatre Historiography but, in its ruthless pursuit of reliable foundations on which to construct narratives that are at least open to further testing, it leads the reader into those very difficulties and complications. It is the result of some twenty years of scholarship and publication and the comprehensive nature of the bibliography is, in itself, a testament to the thoroughness of the research. The result makes always fascinating and instructive reading, with a discourse that is as much concerned with "how not to" as with "how to" set about reconstructing and analysing past theatre and performance.
As Postlewait stresses from the beginning, the essential problem in attempting to embark on the task of any historiographical investigation (be it theatrical, or not) is that the term has come to combine two distinct but related areas of enquiry. He quotes Peter Novick: "there is a distinction between "logys" and "graphys" ... [the science of, and the description of] ... The once respectable word historiology has dropped out of just about everybody's vocabulary, and historiography has had to do double duty for both historical science and descriptive accounts of historical writing" (2)....