Once upon a time in medieval England, Saint Erkenwald was building his new church upon the foundations of an ancient pagan temple so that the edifice might be “torn down and turned to new ends.” All of a sudden, he and his men discovered a great tomb that housed the perfectly preserved corpse of some unknown royal ancestor. Upon opening the crypt, Erkenwald “turns to the tomb and talks to the corpse, / While he leans down to lift up the lids of its eyes: / ‘In this sepulcher stay in your silence no more! . . .' / Then the man through a miracle moved in his tomb! / And with sounds that were solemn, he spoke before all. . . .” When Erkenwald's pagan forebear “melted out of memory,” his reanimated body regained the power of speech and his listeners the power of knowledge—a stunning metaphor for the very project of theatre historiography.

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As what follows is, in many ways, a history of absence, I begin with a poignant illustration of materializing something that wasn't there.

In theatre and drama histories, the politics of the American stage has most often been judged by the litmus test of nationalism, primarily in the “rise” of American-authored drama set in America, the development of American character types, and the appearance of American-born actors on the stages of the early United States. To uncover in the old playbills the mention of a performance of Royall Tyler's The Contrast, to celebrate the development of the stage Yankee, or to focus on Edwin Forrest's muscular rant in The Gladiator is to score a palpable hit for national theatre. Given the scarcity of American texts before the War of 1812, this search for national needles in the (British) theatrical haystack is understandable. But the politics reflected in the theatre in early America is far more complex than traditional theatre histories have acknowledged. Fortunately, there are signs of a new historiography at work. Heather Nathans's recent history of the postrevolutionary playhouses (to 1800) in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, for instance, uncovers a web of economic and social relationships among the shareholders in the various theatres, which shows that simple party definition hardly accounts for a clear sense of who supports the stage and who does not. Examined more closely than as buildings in which to launch “Jonathan,” American theatres reveal their own traditions for handling topical material, a particularly thorny problem for cultural spaces dominated by British plays and actors. In other words, beyond identifying stage Yankees or following Forrest, finding the political in the theatrical may require other strategies of reading in order to determine the full range of interaction between the political and theatrical spheres.

In November 1910, New Theatre artistic director Winthrop Ames asked his former teacher, Harvard English professor George Pierce Baker, to speak at a reception honoring the theatre's financial backers. The occasion was the start of the New Theatre's second season, and Ames was hoping to raise morale after a disappointing first year. Endowed primarily by millionaires in New York City, the New Theatre was supposed to offer a venue for staging plays free of the usual commercial pressures of Broadway productions. The contradiction at the heart of such an enterprise was manifest, particularly in the New Theatre's architecture and opulent interior design, which continually marked the “noncommercial” house as a monument to the economic power of those wealthy enough to provide for its massive and gaudy construction. Audiences complained that the two-thousand-seat auditorium had lousy acoustics; critics deemed the productions undistinguished and condemned the twenty-three Founders Boxes that ringed the orchestra as vulgar and ostentatious. Maybe an English professor, Ames thought, would have something helpful to say on the matter.

It is ironic that the works of Antonin Artaud, who called for the rejuvenation of theatre as such, come to us today not on their own, but through an unusually dense filter: a peculiarly persistent critical/theoretical apparatus doubles his own writings and practice. Artaud's work has occupied a cultish space in both French and English criticism for several decades. Each major trend in Artaud scholarship has reinforced the image of Artaud as a brilliant/mad theoretician and inspirational writer but a failed theatre practitioner—worse, one doomed to failure. The French school of criticism has plumbed the depths of the paradoxes of Artaud's oeuvre, examining the impossibility of reconciling the inadequacy of expression with the need to express. Derrida has argued that Artaud's projects, by their nature, by his nature, cannot succeed: They betray him the moment they begin to be articulated; they cannot stand upright the minute they leave his body. Much French criticism takes Artaud's madness and uses it as a touchstone for discussion of his legacy. The French Artaud begins at the asylum in Rodez.

The first performance of Sarah Kane's Blasted in 1995 is already widely regarded as a landmark in the history of contemporary theatre in England, singled out for the same reason that Edward Bond's 1965 Saved and Howard Brenton's 1980 The Romans in Britain achieved notoriety. Blasted belongs in this genealogy of English plays in that all drew attention to themselves with instances of raw violence represented onstage and contextualized within situations of scathing social criticism. Saved contains an infamous scene in which the apathy of a group of dispossessed urban youths leads them to the casual stoning to death of a baby in its pram, and in The Romans in Britain a young Celtic seer is raped onstage by a Roman centurion. In both cases, these instances of visual shock became decontextualized and held up to the public eye, a disassembling of the part from the whole, which constituted an act of interpretive violence perpetuated against the dramas themselves. The violence in Blasted was similarly decontextualized and sensationalized in the British press. Yet in contrast to Bond and Brenton, Kane's brief body of work quickly received sober reevaluations on the part of previously hostile theatre critics, largely as a result of her suicide in February 1999 at the age of twenty-eight. While Kane had always had supporters among theatre workers, including Edward Bond, who had appreciated the strength of her work from the outset, Blasted is now also praised as a major work of theatre by critics who were previously happy to mock the play and vilify its author.

Brander Matthews (1852–1929), author, critic and a professor of English and Dramatic Literature at Columbia University, believed strongly that, to best study theatre, researchers and scholars needed to see and access the makings of the stagecraft itself. Based on personal experience, Matthews realized that the observation of sets, props, costumes, models, sketches, and other ephemera would enable a better understanding and visualization of actual productions. As a result, he set out collecting such objects, as well as puppets, masks, posters, and playbills. In 1911, the Brander Matthews Dramatic Museum collection was officially established at Columbia University.

Well-written reviews counteract the inertia that can afflict any field, given the pressures on the professorate and the limited resources of academic publishing houses. Between the demands of teaching, publication, production, and university service many theatre professors struggle to keep up with the literature related to their own research interests, let alone read broadly in the field. In such a context, no book—not even an excellent book—is assured an audience. Books that are not easily categorized, that do not fit comfortably in a given discipline, or that address underresearched topics are even less likely to reach a broad audience (and “broad” in terms of academic publishing is clearly a relative term). Reviews create audiences for books that might otherwise sit unnoticed in the margins of a field. Every review implicitly charts important directions for the field; reviews identify central conversations in the academy and indicate how theatre studies can engage these conversations. Reviews help us to be eclectic readers, and we must be such readers if we hope to speak beyond the circle that shares our individual research interests. It is in the spirit of eclecticism that Theatre Survey has instituted the column “What Are You Reading?” asking innovative scholars to share and reflect on the texts that feed their thinking. It is in the same spirit that Theatre Survey reviews a broad spectrum of the books received and invites both junior and senior scholars to propose reviews of books that the journal has not received but that should come to the attention of scholars of theatre and performance studies. Reviews help shape the field. Theatre Survey looks for reviews that cultivate new performance-centered historiographic study, reflecting a diverse range of methodological and critical perspectives.

Recently Ruby Cohn, the expert on Samuel Beckett, was staying at my house. One morning she announced to me in a disapproving tone: “Your library has no focus.” Nor, I fear, would Ruby find a focus in my reading. I read several books at once from various disciplines and approaches. They lay about in different rooms of the house, where I read them at different times of the day. For example, the 4:00 p.m. read in the library is something less demanding, suggesting rather than theorizing or documenting; whereas the morning read in my study is a note-taking venture, in proximity to little yellow stickies or the computer so I can type in passages as they generate new ideas. Worse yet, I am on the Internet multiple times daily, The New Yorker is usually open to some article I read while waiting for my partner to get ready for a date, and various novels are next to the bed for reading before going to sleep. Reading is not what it used to be. It more closely resembles online surfing than the removed, “focused” (as Ruby would say) reading in, say, the British Library. In part, my selection of books reflects the variety of articles I will be completing within the coming months; in part, the nature of current postcanon scholarship, which is held to account for a complex and variegated critical perspective.

There are few dependable books in English on political theatre in India. Professor Bhatia's collection of essays, therefore, fills a long-felt need. She introduces the subject contextually, followed by four chapters chronologically examining key areas (British censorship of nationalistic drama, Indianizations of Shakespeare as an anticolonial statement, the Indian People's Theatre Association as a mass phenomenon in the mid-twentieth century, and Utpal Dutt's reinterpretation of Raj history in his play The Great Rebellion 1857), and concludes with a short epilogue on contemporary activist theatre by women. Most valuably for theatre historians, she places in the public domain many primary sources previously untapped in English, and unearths much secondary material that has escaped academic attention. Not least of all, she writes articulately and readably.

One of the greatest challenges to teaching world theatre history in the United States is that the vast majority of survey history books spend two dozen chapters on the theatre of the West, giving the theatres of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East a single chapter each at best. In addition, there have to date been no comprehensive histories of African theatre covering the entire continent, Africa north of the Sahara being linked for cultural reasons with the Middle East instead of geographically with the rest of the continent. A History of Theatre in Africa, edited by the pioneer of African-theatre scholarship, Martin Banham, is an excellent, if uneven, redressing of those imbalances.

Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata are recognized as the most influential creators of the contemporary Japanese dance form known today as butoh. Since its wild and avant-garde beginnings in the late 1950s, butoh has evolved into an established and appreciated art form throughout the world. Despite its popularity and strong influences on the international modern dance world, butoh only recently became an accepted subject for academic research in Japan as well as in the West. With the new opening of butoh research centers and archives—such as the Ohno Dance Studio Archives at BANK ART 1929 in Yokohama, the Kazuo Ohno Archives at Bologna University in Italy, and the Hijikata Tatsumi Archives at Keio University in Tokyo—serious scholarly attention has been given to the art of butoh's founders. However, the lack of firsthand sources by butoh artists reflecting their own work still poses great limitations for a deep understanding of the art form. Kazuo Ohno's World from Without and Within is not only the first full-length book in English about the master's life and work, but also offers a rare inside view of butoh.

Gabriele Griffin's study of black and Asian women playwrights in contemporary Britain fills a gap in British theatre studies. Although a comprehensive study of black British theatre has yet to see print, two developments have, in the past decade or so, begun to stimulate critical attention in the field. One is the publication of plays by black and Asian authors, including collections of plays exclusively by women (such as Khadija George's edition of Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers of 1993), as well as the more systematic inclusion of works by writers such as Winsome Pinnock and Trish Cooke in anthologies of plays by new British dramatists. A second is the work of British cultural-studies scholars and sociologists during the same period, which has offered theatre historians some new approaches and challenges: Kobena Mercer's Welcome to the Jungle (1994); Catherine Ugwu's Let's Get It On (1995); Baker et al.'s Black British Cultural Studies (1996); Heidi Mirza's edited volume Black British Feminism (1997)—not to mention a vast body of work by Stuart Hall, Avtar Brah, Paul Gilroy, and others. Still, as Griffin notes at the outset, while immigrant and second-generation novels and films have received attention and accolades, black British theatre has tended to be ignored except by a handful of feminist theatre scholars.

Pity the scholar asked to review a biography of Kenneth Tynan; one finds oneself frantically searching one's pockets for aphorisms, witticisms, or—at the very least—a shocking obscenity or two. After all, Tynan was the critic who so memorably dismissed a popular musical as “a world of woozy song”; met the question, “Who are the new English playwrights?” with the sarcastic rejoinder, “Who were the old ones?”; and who cried out for new playwrights to invade the British theatre because he would “rather be a war correspondent than a necrologist.” Then, of course, there is the famous first use of the word “fuck” on television and the staging of Oh, Calcutta! and the magnificent New Yorker profiles, not to mention the nearly singlehanded reshaping of British drama through the powerful combination of exhortation and satire. All in all, it is a lot for a reviewer to live up to, and while I have neither Tynan's wit nor ability to provoke, I do find myself able to produce one single Tynanesque observation about Dominick Shellard's Kenneth Tynan: A Life. This is that the book has been shockingly missubtitled.

Both Philip Freund's The Birth of Theatre and Laurie O'Higgins's Women and Humor in Classical Greece deal with Ancient Greek drama. Freund, a theatre historian, attempts a fairly comprehensive survey of both Greek and Roman drama as well as its influence on postclassical theatre, with particular emphasis on the past century. O'Higgins, a classicist, offers what at first glance appears a far narrower exploration that might only be of interest to other classicists. Of the two writers, it is O'Higgins who crafts a readable study that resonates well beyond its ostensibly narrow subject, whereas Freund's book, geared toward a more general readership, is hampered by serious problems of presentation and organization that compromise his more ambitious work's usefulness.

In this brief but concentrated text, Rush Rehm attempts to go back to the “radical nature of Greek tragedy” (9), by which he means that he wants to go back to the roots, foundations, and sources of this ancient genre. Rehm carries out his plan in an unusual yet personal way: Dispersed throughout his study of the genre are his personal observations on such matters as the involvement of the United States government in Nicaragua, Haiti, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Chile, Granada, Panama, East Timor, Israel, and Cuba. The events of 9/11 are also central to the later chapters. These political statements and forays aside, the author makes clear in his “Introduction: Timely Thoughts” that the “stage per se—understood as a place for artistic enactments like Greek tragedy—has lost much of its power and significance” (13). Rehm has an equally negative disposition to performance study, performance theory, and a modern stage that has departed from the challenges posed by the “original form of ancient tragedy” (17). Radical Theatre: Greek Tragedy and the Modern World is a stimulating read and worthy of note.

In their well-written and extensively researched book Shakespeare, Law, and Marriage, B. J. and Mary Sokol explore the connections between the legal world of Shakespeare's England and the ways he dramatizes legal situations related to marriage. The result is a thorough and interesting contribution to the growing field of “law and literature” studies. The book moves chronologically through the legal issues connected to the stages of marriage, from arranged and consensual matches to the effect of death on marriage. Each chapter has a similar structure: first, an explanation of the legal conditions for the particular topic of marriage, followed by a discussion of how those issues are dramatized in Shakespeare's plays.

Frederick Kiefer's Shakespeare's Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters is a deceptively modest study, focusing on staged abstract representations and deities such as Spring, Time, Juno, and Ceres: “walking, talking personifications” (13). Kiefer presents case studies of individual personifications in particular plays, always speculating on their appearance in original stagings, and, most important, stressing their significance for contemporary and subsequent readings of the action. In the process, he compellingly argues for the significance of spectacle in Shakespeare's theatre. Though the length of the book might seem daunting, 138 pages are composed solely of impeccable notes, a meaty bibliography, and a useful index. The well-illustrated 220 pages of actual text are clear, jargon-free, learned, and convincing.

The Theatre of the Book—first published in a cloth edition in 2000—is a groundbreaking work. It is an elegantly written and erudite book, with 129 pages of endnotes, a works-cited list of 42 pages, and 60 illustrations. As Peters states in the introduction,