By Claire Cochrane, Joanna Robinson

This number of essays explores how historians of theatre practice moral considering to the try to in truth characterize their topic - no matter if that be the lifetime of a well known performer, or the little recognized background of colonial theatre in India - via exploring the method in which such histories are written, and the demanding situations they raise.

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Extra info for Theatre History and Historiography: Ethics, Evidence and Truth

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Although the dynastic affiliation had changed radically since 1661, the effect Cibber describes was not so different in the immediate aftermath of the Restoration, when audiences sought out plays of a peculiar hybridity that allowed them to re-live from a relatively safe distance the traumatic journey from regicide to Restoration (Maguire 1992). Hamlet, the prince who mourns a father killed by a ruthless politician, was a focal case; that Betterton’s interpretation was held, according to his prompter John Downes, to follow ‘every article’ of a performance overseen by Shakespeare himself intensified the point in so far as it made theatrical heritage a matter of political necessity (Downes 1987, 73).

The issue of how far this sensitive, inward-looking, recuperative activity can move out to the social arena to achieve what Ricoeur considers the ethico-political ‘duty to tell’ raises further questions about the ethical use of evidence derived from individual memory and what kind of ‘archive’ results. Rather than becoming a ‘house of records’, and thus potentially an instrument of state control as Derrida conceived it, could it, Jeffers suggests, become a ‘community of records’ developed through a Taylor-style repertoire of acts of embodied memory?

Her emphasis on the need for historians to eschew ‘bias’ grounded in inadequate scrutiny of evidential sources is a reminder of the importance of ‘epistemic virtue’ for the maintenance of ethical scholarship. In the final essay of Part I, Viv Gardner recognises the challenges and temptations for the historian in constructing her or his own master narrative, utilising different registers of writing to comment on, question and undermine the apparent certainties in her understanding of the life of her subject, the 5th Marquis of Anglesey, and to make transparent her own role as academic, researcher and writer in the construction of her history.

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