Historiography as Metonymy

This special issue takes as its conceptual starting point ‘theatrical things’ too commonplace to ordinarily deserve scholarly notice – bits of foam, cushions, mothballs or even elephants. It sheds light on how unassuming features of performance practice constitute critical apertures for the study of theatre historiography, telling us something vital about theatre-making and sense-making. In the study of theatre history, Tracy C. Davis says, there is a premium on asserting originality and innovation, so we are ill-disposed to acknowledge consistency, unoriginality and derivation. Following Davis’s line of thought, we consider how utterly commonplace theatrical things become interfaces between theatre and world-making or microcosms for understanding theatre practice in ways that social ‘context’ does not allow us to imagine. We denote this form of historiography as metonymy.