Early eighteenth-century performance historiography: Problems and possibilities

This article was first presented as a paper to the History and Historiography Working Group of the Theatre and Performance Research Association in 2009. It responds to a discussion of the archive and repertoire (Taylor 2003) by considering how these ideas might be applied to scholarship on early eighteenth-century performance. In the first part, the article considers the ways in which a focus upon a particular body of archival evidence, the dramatic text, has shaped scholarship in the field. In the second part, the article suggests ways in which a renewed awareness of the repertoire, of embodied performance, might open up new directions in scholarship on the early eighteenth-century actress, as well as challenging prevailing discourses.