ALAN FILEWOD
The publication of the first Ball and Plant Bibliography of Canadian Theatre History, 1583-1975 in 1976 was an important part of the great effort that wrought a discipline into being. It was no coincidence that the bibliography appeared in the same year that the Association for Canadian Theatre History was formed. The identification of a coherent field of investigation was validated by the confident, indeed celebratory, assertion that there was now a body that had a history to be traced. Announcing the historical project of searching for origins and genealogies was at the same time a legitimization of the present as the consequence and culmination of the scrutinized past.
Any historical bibliography announces the present as the point of arrival that can perceive the past as a coherent field of exploration. By the same token, a bibliography is a way station in an evolving understanding of the present. It is the fate of all good bibliographies to be superseded by the research efforts they make possible. Such was the case with the first Bibliography of Canadian Theatre History, which has been one of the supporting instruments of Canadian theatre history, even as the discipline and its media (the association, this journal) have reconfigured into "theatre research."
This new edition is a long-awaited revision of its own past. The original edition contained some 2000 entries covering theatre in Canada (and pre-Canada) to 1975. This new volume contains over 10,000 entries to 1985 (listed by an improved numbering method). While many of the additions fall into the added decade, which saw an exponential increase in the amount of critical and historical writing, just as many are emendations to the period covered in the previous volume. The compilers also include several new categories, and a much more extensive section on Québec. The sheer scale of the increase shows how tentative a foundation the original provided.
The editors are boldly confident in their claims for the revised bibliography, which they describe as "exhaustive ... as is possible given the current nature of the discipline" (xii), although the terms that govern possibility are not explored. In fact the editors are-they can only be-as exhaustive as permitted by the terms they accept for themselves.
The most contentious aspect of the bibliography is the editors' choice of categories, which builds on the 1976 structure. At that time the question of categorization was much less problematic than it is now, because research in the field was still in the exploratory stage, with relatively few entries to categorize, and because critical discussion since has placed much greater emphasis on problematizing the narratives expressed by and concealed in such apparently straightforward projects.
The narrative proposed by the categorization in this edition is layered like an archaeological site. In the 1970s, when the discipline was first articulated as such, critical discussion tended to accept a genealogy of Canadian theatre that derived from the personal perceptions and experience of the generation of theatre artists who established a professional theatre industry in the 1950s and 60s. This genealogy traced the development of that professionalism from colonial origins, through the successive DDF, the founding of the Stratford Festival and the development of the regional theatres, to a climactic resolution in the alternative theatre movement. This periodization was rationalized by an implied concept of evolution, from a pre-national proto-theatre to the culminating professional industry of Canadian theatre of the 1970s, with its commitment to Canadian playwrights.
This historical ordering has been severely questioned by the more recent generations of scholars, who have tested it against the principles of feminist and postcolonial historiography and have found it wanting. Yet it is still the defining narrative of the bibliography, which will find itself in the curious position of functioning both as a foundation of scholarship and an exemplar of the principles of empiricism that much of that scholarship repudiates.
The bibliography is divided into fifteen main categories, with numerous sub-divisions. Some of these sub-divisions are new, such as a not-very-helpful listing for Native Theatre (a subcategory of "General Works"), which shows us only that the editors could find no more than 41 articles on the subject prior to 1985. Others restate the general structure of the previous volume, beginning with "General Works" (most of which are actually quite specific but difficult to categorize), proceeding to "History to 1900," subdivided by geographic region, and "Twentieth Century," again divided on a regional model. The principle of geographic region is one of the organizational premises of the book, although the regions themselves are ahistoric (so that pre-Confederation Newfoundland is clumped as part of "Atlantic Provinces"). The geographic thesis is abandoned when confronted with issues that clearly violate it, such as language (Acadian subjects appear under "French Canada" in the "General Works" section), and race. That only one racial category is isolated (the aforementioned "Native Theatre") suggests that its inclusion is political rather than ethnographic.
The myth of origins restated in the editorial scheme is the genealogy of national culture as validated by the historic process of institutionalization. In practice these mean that the bibliography is mainly a listing of writings in English and French, which concentrates on the cultural activities of the "founding peoples" as the term has been proposed and increasingly rejected. In that sense the bibliography reflects the statist ethnocentricism of the theatre and publishing industries.
The editors state that entries are listed "on chronological, geographical, linguistic and thematic bases (xiii)." That really means that they listed by convenience rather than method-although convenience itself may be the most useful organizational principle in a book that will be as much used as this. A section on "Little Theatre" covers the range of amateur theatricals, although the phrase is notoriously unstable, but it does not include the DDF, which appears as a sub-division of the next category, "Festivals," along with the Stratford and Shaw Festival theatres. Why theatres that call themselves "festivals" in a grandiose gesture of self-promotion should be entered under a heading different from all other theatres is left unexplained. The editors imply by their choice that there is in fact a theatrical phenomenon of festivals that embraces the annual competitions of the DDF and some but not all repertory theatres-but this is surely ludicrous. Rather it seems that Stratford and Shaw occupy their own domains because of the volume of writing on them, and their own claims to artistic seniority. Still, this does not explain why they don't fall into "Twentieth Century-Ontario" like all their neighbours.
Most of the remaining categories delineate the shape of the theatrical profession, itemizing entries under Architecture, Stage Design, Theatre in Education, Puppetry, Radio and Television, and so forth. A notable omission is a section that covers cultural policy and funding. Articles, pamphlets and government documents on policy presently fall under the mish-mash heading of "General Works." This results in some odd confusions: entry 226, for example, lists Actor's Equity's Canadian Theatre Agreement for 1983, (with Equity as author and PACT as publisher) but not for any other year. A browse through the section turns up the 1974 Canadian theatre agreement in entry 157, with no author credit but with Equity listed as publisher. Why these two sequentially related entries should be classified in two different places is not explained; we are left to assume that the difference is one of authorial credit. But surely these documents belong together; the one is a later edition of the other. For that matter, where are the agreements for the intervening years?
In a work of such monumental importance and scale, errors and disputable entries (and omissions) are inevitable. Two small errors struck me immediately: the defunct American journal Theatrework is listed as Theatre Work, and the Mummers Troupe appears in the index incorrectly as Mummers Theatre Troupe. Doubtless similar errors will catch the eye of specialists in other areas. These are easily forgiven however-minor blemishes in a work that will be a constant and indispensable companion.