For our last meeting of the semester, we used William Ingram’s article, “What Kind of Future for the Theatrical Past: Or, What will Count as Theater History in the next Millennium?” (1997), as a springboard to ask: what has changed in theatre history? Considering the variables we now know a decade later, what is the most stable variable around which to arrange analysis when we think about sets of texts like Renaissance theatre repertories?

As a group we considered the notion of genre, and the ways in which plays like The Spanish Tragedy (and it’s less successful prequel, The Spanish Comedy) signal to audiences assumptions about genre conventions. This is an ineffectual model for Medieval drama, however; thinking in terms of region seems more productive, but comes with its own limitations. In a discussion of place-and-scaffold and earthenwork performance spaces in medieval England, we again returned to themes of location and fixity as “authenticating” categories or possible governing principles. (We had a brief side conversation about Cornish plain-an-gwarry, or “playing places.”)

Two other possible categories did arise from the conversation: playing licenses and actors—in short, commerciality. While personnel certainly changed, they were buying in and out of shares in a company that was organized around a license. Even as the companies depended less and less on patrons to authorize their activities, their licensed commerciality increasingly became an organizing factor in the public playhouses (and which was not true of the universities). If the structure of theatre as an institution makes a commerce, we can then better address the shared knowledges playgoers—in their plurality—brought into and shaped that commerce rather than trying to psychologize those individuals along the lines of identity politics.

The conversation ended with a number of observations about the ways in which archives are constructed narratives, that so many of these problems are our own problems thrust upon them, and all authenticities are inevitably cultural constructs. To what extent to we overthinking or under-ascribe the motivations of playing companies in the shaping of what we call Renaissance theatre?