Introduction

Abstract

The essays collected in this volume look back from the world of the early twenty-first century — and from the United States of America and India as well as the constituent parts of the United Kingdom — to a variety of pasts, stretching from the late seventeenth-century English Restoration period to the individual pasts still alive and painfully active in twenty-first-century Northern Irish collective memory. All contributors, as individual historians and historiographers, question dominant narratives of theatre history. Some take on the responsibility of representing the histories of the living, while some show the way definitions of models of theatre and performance have broadened significantly in recent years. All grapple with the ethical issues raised by the concrete demands of specific histories; and in doing so, all seek to make clear the ways in which, in Rüsen’s terms, the creation of their histories is shaped by the ‘cultural constitution of themselves and their world’ (2004, 203).

Historians are, of course, not responsible for what actually happened. […] Historical responsibility for the past means that historians’ set of norms and values is a part of the past they interpret with them. In this respect the past is a moral predetermination of the intentions of present-day activities. It is an ethical legacy, already inbuilt in the cultural framework of topical life. Historians have to pick it up in order to become aware of the cultural constitution of themselves and their world. (Rüsen 2004, 203)