ALAN FILEWOD
Oscar Brockett's History of the Theatre may be a text more taught against than taught, but for those (like me) who caution against its monumental positivism while relying on its empiricist authority, it is never far from hand. For three decades "Brockett," as the book is known to generations of theatre students, has governed the teaching of undergraduate theatre history courses in North America, aided by a minor industry of editorial assistants, fact checkers, academic reviewers and marketers. The cover boasts that this is "the most comprehensive coverage of European,American, Asian and African theatre found in any competing textbook."It would be more accurate to describe it as a weighty, metachronic narrative encyclopedia arranged more or less in periodic structure organized around national and continental paradigms that appear to shift in response to unseen pressures.
One such pressure came from the Association for Canadian Theatre Research, which ten years ago wrote to Oscar Brockett to ask that he consider including some materials on Canadian theatre history in future editions. He wrote back with the expected promise to do so, and it is not hard to imagine that he was busy sending similar messages to petitioners around the world. The boundaries (disciplinary, political and cultural) and methodologies of theatre history have expanded in breadth and reach over the life of this book, and it is to Brockett's credit that he has been able to encompass the shape of those changes.
This 9th edition, co-authored by Franklin Hildy, advances the innovations of previous editions, with its somewhat cautious embrace of performance studies, particularly in the beginning chapters that attempt to locate theatre in the wider fields of human performance, and a nod to cultural relativism that tries to reconcile the disciplinary narrative of European-derived theatre practice and formation with a recognition that every theatre history syllabus wants material for lectures on Asian and African theatre. Aside from new sections that extend the reach of English-language theatre histories into Canada and Australia, this edition offers a new chapter on contemporary theatre and some reorganization of the chapter order. The result is a book that is generous in its attempt to be inclusive, but it is a particularly American kind of generosity: humanist, rational, confident in its normative values. It acknowledges difference but cannot in the end recognize it.
It should, therefore, be no surprise that the "new material" on "often-overlooked areas of theatre history" proclaimed on the cover is reductive and distorted. But the failures of the Canadian references derive from the failures of the sources, and these in turn mark a general failure of the professional discipline of Canadian theatre history. Relying on a handful of books rather than the articles that refute and correct them, Brockett and Hildy stray into historiographic (and historical) errors. Reading through these selections it is not hard for any student of the discipline to discern the sources: they speak through in nuances, phrases, and nomenclatures. The resulting summary of Canadian theatre is exactly the boundary narrative that we would expect an undergraduate to write if asked to read the usual suspects: Benson and Conolly, Murray Edwards, Renate Usmiani, Denis Johnston, and the Canadian article in the World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre. This list embraces a fairly wide range of scholarly efforts – some more reliable than others – but they share an unapologetic faith in the liberal federalist cultural narrative, its humanist sources, and its positivist strategies. In effect, this is a second-generation reading of Canadian theatre history that fails to acknowledge the considerable explorations into historiographic principle that have been so apparent in this journal.
The derivative summary of Canadian theatre may be cribbed, but in a book that in the end has little more to offer than a narrative compendium of facts, the major offence is inaccuracy. The Canadian sections frustrate because of numerous small errors and misjudgments. It may not be wrong, but it is certainly imperial to refer to "native groups" throughout the Americas as "preliterate" (237). Readers outside of Ontario and Quebec will wonder what happened to the rest of the country: there are fleeting references to occasional events elsewhere in Canada, but the national map has huge gaps. Newfoundland disappears entirely, as colony, nation, and province, with the exception of a passing mention of the Mummers Troupe, here misnamed the Mummers Theatre (551).
Some of the errors reflect a fundamental unfamiliarity with Canadian political history: The Theatre of Neptune is said to have taken place in "the French colony of Nova Scotia" (238). Later we are told that "Canada had been divided into the largely French Catholic Lower Canada (now Quebec province) and the British loyalist Upper Canada (now Ontario)" (351), a statement that is only true if we ignore that the Canadas were only two of several provinces in British North America. The 1841 joining of Canada East and Canada West is inverted into "East and West Canada,"and following the "Federation of Canada" in 1867 we "became a fully sovereign country in 1982" (sovereignty, it might be argued, derives from the exercise of power, not the location of a document) (351). Some mistakes could have been avoided with a simple Google search: the Canada Council is here named the "Canadian Council/Conseil des Arts du Canada," and Toronto Workshop Productions becomes "Toronto's Workshop Theatre (TWT)" (505). These are small points but they erode the authority that is the book's major selling point.
Factual errors are easily corrected; discursive errors less so, and it is in this domain that the book relies too closely on its sources. For a narrative produced from an empiricist historicism, its allegiance to sources is curiously dehistoricized. Take for example this sentence: "Stratford has been a target of criticism by Canadian nationalists. They see little value for Canada's national aspirations in the Festival's repertory" (505). That may have been true for a brief period in the 1970s, but to identify continuing criticism of Stratford as nationalist is a gross oversimplification; postcolonialism and nationalism are not the same thing, and it is possible to identify forms of colonialism without allegiance to "national aspirations." This sentence reflects a particular statist tendency in Canadian theatre historiography that I would have liked to think is behind us.
Perhaps it is, because it is axiomatic that monumental reference works must always be a generation behind in their conceptual schema. The delays of research and the various steps of publication ensure that the facts, vocabularies, and questions compiled in the final work are out of date before it appears. That is why, in a discussion of Canadian drama, Michel Tremblay gets eight lines, David French seven, George F.Walker eight. Judith Thompson, who has "become known for her complex and highly emotional dramas," gets three (552).
But does it matter? In the final analysis, it is not the facts that are important here, but the point that, accurate or not, Canada, with Australasia and Latin America (the other ascendants in this edition), have been uploaded into the imperial history and acknowledged in their particularities. But their particularities are erased in the great diachronic stream of disciplinary genealogy. Brockett's expanding reach provides increasing detail on how nations produce theatre, but in the end I will not use it in the class- room because its encyclopedic humanism is incapable of addressing how theatre produces nations.