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The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography sets the agenda for inclusive and wide-ranging approaches to writing history, embracing the diverse perspectives of the twenty-first century and Critical Media History. Written by an international team of authors whose expertise spans a multitude of historical periods and cultures, this collection of fascinating essays poses the central question: “what is specific to the historiography of the performative?” The study of theatre, in conjunction with the wider sphere of performance, involves an array of multi-faceted methods for collecting evidence, interpreting sources, and creating meaning. Reflecting on issues of recording — from early-modern musical scores, through VHS technology to latest digital procedures — and on what is missing from records or oblique in practices, the contributors convey how theatre and performance history is integral to social and cultural relations. This expertly curated collection repositions theatre and performance history and is essential reading for Theatre and Performance Studies students or those interested in social and cultural history more generally.

Angesichts derimmergrosseren Bedeutung digitaler Verfahren furdie kulturwissenschaftliche Forschung diskutiert der Aufsatz die Potenziale fur die Theaterhistoriographie. Dabei geht es nicht allein um die innovativen, digital gestutzten Methoden, sondern vielmehr um die spezifische Logik theaterhistorischer Forschung. Ausgehend von einer kritischen Diskussion des fachinternen Diskurses uber die Entwicklung neuer Forschungsfragen und - paradigmen, formuliert der Aufsatz schliesslich die Perspektive einer umfassenden Medienokologie, in der auch Forderungen nach einer substanziellen Dekolonialisierung des historischen Diskurses aufgezeigt werden konnen. Medienokologie ist gekennzeichnet als: polyglott, polyzentrisch, polyphon und polymorph sowie in einem umfassenden Sinne als durchlassig und vernetzt. Ein Beispiel einer solchen Perspektive bildet schliesslich der Modellversuch Kolner Chrono-Atlas, der Ereignis--und Personendaten zusammentragt und in einem ubergreifenden Modell zu vernetzen erlaubt. Obgleich das Projekt noch am Anfang steht, wird schon deutlich, dass das hier gewahlte Verfahren abgeschattete Aspekte der Theatergeschichte, wie etwa das Unternehmertum weiblicher Prinzipial*innen nicht mehr als anekdotische Einzelfalle, sondern als Konstante des Feldes, aufzeigt.

Max Reinhardt's theatre is an intriguing example of the social function of commodification in the late nineteenth century; while critics praised him as the leading figure of a renewed theatre, they also blamed him for a merely decorative style. Notwithstanding the fact that economic success was a substantial precondition of Reinhardt's theatre, Reinhardt's style was highly eclectic and determined by a visual or pictorial order rather than by literary concepts. But this theatre not only followed an aesthetic programme, it also answered to a major change in German society: the process of urbanization which produced a new community of urban dwellers which had to be integrated in the role models of society. The paradoxical reception of Reinhardt thus is not only a matter of taste but rather the hallmark of bourgeois theatre in a period of transition, rearticulating the cultural legacy by commodifying it for a new audience.

When in 1926 Leopold Jessner (1878–1945) staged Hamlet at the Prussian State Theatre in Berlin, the production created a major scandal. This uproar was not only related to aesthetic matters but also to the discourse of national identity. With reference to Marvin Carlson's concept of the ‘haunted stage’ the article examines the traces of this scandal in the genealogy of Hamlet on the German stage and its intersection with the politics of national identity. These traces indicate that German productions of Hamlet have always been determined by an implicit politics of exclusion. Jessner's production, by contrast, offered a radical re-reading of Hamlet, aiming to adapt it for the, then newly democratized society. The rejection of this adaptation by major parts of the audience, thus revealed the still powerful and active anti-democratic forces in the Weimar Republic.

The concept of the world, which has long been discredited because it seemed to promise in a naively naive way 'reality' and unquestionable 'factuality', has been experiencing a remarkable boom in recent years. This is made clear by a look into recent contemporary literature, where works such as Daniel Kehlmann's The Surveying of the World (2005), Ilja Trojanow's The World Collector (2006) or Stephan Puchner's Nebelheim (2008) wrestle literarily and poetically to capture the world. It is obvious that all novels are characterized by a multitude of narration voices, as if they wanted to hint at the idea of a holistic world as a phantasm in order to make their impossibility through the narrative construction aesthetically effective.