Contemporary interest in popular drama is not an adventitious one. It is part of a much wider shift in the basis of cultural concern; indeed, it is part of the revaluation of modern society itself. This gives the present study both its impetus and its difficulty. We not only approach areas of theatre that have previously been neglected, but we have to find appropriate critical terms which take into account the contemporary cultural debate. We have to be exploratory; yet we have to find some sense of direction or we will be lost.

In the past, popular drama has been studied under at least four categories, which have often been deployed within, or have relied for their specification upon, a quasi-chronological account. The first, which we may call folk drama, is related to a pre-literate, rural society. It is traditional, close to ritual and the everyday life of the common people. Industrialism and the growth of cities in the nineteenth century broke up the older genre. Large theatres were built to entertain the masses, exploiting possibilities of spectacle and sensation, and the star actor. This was the era of commercial workingclass theatre, music hall and melodrama. But the division of theatre along lines of the class of the audience was always uncertain, and with the development of film and then television we arrive at the period of mass media. In reaction to this, the radical elite created agit-prop theatre, attempting to restore drama to the people as part of the class struggle.

These categories and accounts are useful as far as they go, but they hide some dangerous assumptions.