Since the 1980s, new approaches to theatre historiography, the study of what Sue-Ellen Case has called the “convergence of history and theory,” have begun to arise in a challenge to generally accepted principles of theatre history, such as the supremacy of independent facts, the autonomy of dramatic texts, and the hierarchy of text, performance, and culture. The French critic and philosopher Michel Foucault has pointed out that the grouping and ordering of events into historical periods creates a “space of reference,” which lends some events a heightened meaning, while obscuring or submerging others. In a substantial challenge to traditional methods of theatre history, historiographers influenced by this view have begun to examine the theoretical underpinnings of historical periodization. In theatre theory, Thomas Postlewait has investigated the often unarticulated assumptions by which theatre historians isolate a group of historical events and designate them with period names.Many scholars now center their attention on historical discontinuity: searching for ruptures in the historical narrative, focusing on dynamics which lend instability rather than stability to historical periods, and reconceptualizing temporal historical narratives into spatial relationships. For example, from a perspective of discontinuity, a play is conceived not simply as a fixed entity created at some moment in history, but as a representation of layers of historical influences; likewise, a theatre building is not simply a material location in space, but a physical expression of historically emergent architectural styles and sociopolitical circumstances, and a performance is not simply a translation of a text to the stage, but a collage of past and emergent cultural and aesthetic processes.
Picturing Nineteenth-Century Female Theatre Managers: the Iconology of Eliza Vestris and Sara Lane