Thomas Postlewait: The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography (2009).
The following below collects my thoughts and observations on Thomas Postlewait’s text The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre (2009). For the purpose of time, I have tried to summarize each subheading with a suitable statement that corresponds to the topic at hand.
EVENT CONTEXT
“All events are illustrations of the theory, which defines the context and controls the interpretation” (Postlewait, 2009, 10).
“…the event presents, portrays, reflects, or contains aspects of a representational world. The characters on stage bear comparison to people in the world” (Postlewait, 2009, 10).
“The Aristotelian principle of mimesis yokes the event to its idea of imitation, though the idea of representation is more appropriate. […] various scholars, including Raymond Williams, prefer the metaphor of “embodying” for the relationship between theatrical events and the conditioning contexts” (Postlewait, 2009, 10).
“we study events by placing them within some kind of narrative, then we identify the large social, economic, religious, or political institutions, forces, or ideologies that contain and determine the meaning of narrative” (Postlewait, 2009, 10).
EVENT = CONTEXT
“our need to place historical events within framing structures and systems (e.g., geographical and economic conditions in the Annales model, the Marxist idea of base and superstructure) …” (Postlewait, 2009, 11).
“there is no reason to define the context in the singular” (Postlewait, 2009, 11).
EVENT-WORLD
“Initially, this model implies that theatrical events provide a perspective on and of the world. And the world, correspondingly, provides a basis and meaning for the event. (Note that the troubling equal sign ( = ) used earlier has now been replaced by a dash, which could have arrow heads on both ends; influence runs in both directions.) Every human event articulates and mediates a series of relations with the world of which it is part. Our reactions occur as continual negotiations, back and forth, with the surrounding conditions29” (Postlewait, 2009, 12).
AGENTS – EVENT
“The event also embodies aspects of the agents’ final cause: the purpose and aims” (Postlewait, 2009, 13).
“The idea of agent and agency also imply the various strands of creativity: inspiration, imagination, originality, genius, and the muses. Agency taps those inspirational forces that the romantic writers celebrated with the metaphors of lamp and fire, active energy in contradistinction to the mirror metaphor derived from the concept of mimesis30” (Postlewait, 2009, 13).
EVENT- RECEPTIONS
“The meaning of the event, is achieved in the reception of the various spectators” (Postlewait, 2009, 13).
EVENT-ARTISTIC HERITAGE
“The heritage encompasses the artistic milieu of the event, the kind of event, the kinds of genres of drama, the canons, the aesthetic ideas and institutions, the artistic ideologies that may influence the work, the crafts of playwriting and theatre production, the mentors and models, the rhetorical codes and styles, the rules and regulations, the available poetics, and the cultural systems.” (Postlewait, 2009, 14).
“Each artistic work is in dialogue with the heritage” (Postlewait, 2009, 14).
“Every performance, if it is intelligible as such, embeds features of previous performances: gender conventions, racial histories, aesthetic traditions – political and cultural pressures that are consciously and unconsciously acknowledged33” (Diamond, cited in Postlewait, 2009, 15).
“Everything in the theatre, the bodies, the materials utilized, the language, the space itself, is now and has always been haunted, and that haunting has been an essential part of the theatre’s meaning to and reception by its audiences in all times and places” (Carlson, cited in Postlewait, 2009, 16).
Works Cited.
Postlewait, T. (2009) The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. 9-20.
Edit: Due to errors WordPress would not allow me to upload images to this post.