When historians reflect on how history has been written, they consider choices of subject matter, methods, intentions, contextual frameworks, and teleologies. These choices merit scrutiny. When the Marxist historian E. H. Carr, writing in 1961, rejected the empirical view of the historian’s work as an accretion of facts, he brought a new awareness of how historians’ interests shape what facts they select to create some sort of narrative. Creation of a narrative, however partial, is necessary to create history––that is, if the term is to signify more than a collection of facts lacking cohesion or meaning.
While the history play is generally based on a particular historical narrative, the play about history examines the nature of that partiality. It frames the omissions or distortions created by narrative in order to show how historical narrative can be exploited or manipulated: the telos of the historian, so frequently based on ideological assumptions that s/he may not even be aware of, becomes the object under examination. The multivalent nature of theater complicates the singular perspective of historians; our work, built on twentieth-century schools of historiography, examines how playwrights are responding to historical narratives.
Jean Howard discusses Brian Friel’s play Making History, based loosely on the life of Hugh O’Neill, which directly addresses the question of how historical discourse creates the past it is often believed merely to represent. Embedded within the play is a figure, Peter Lombard, who is writing a history of O’Neill’s public life and does so from an obviously interested position. Howard argues, however, that the most fundamental shaping force on history’s creation in this play is not a singular person but the set of practices and attitudes that together constitute Englishness. This almost mythic constellation determines the way in which the history that matters in this play is forged. Friel thus joins a range of other post-World War II dramatists, both Irish and English, for whom the phrase “making history” is inextricably bound up with a fraught relationship to Englishness.
Jennifer Low points out in her paper that the themes of Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage (1990) and Alan Bennett’s The History Boys (2004) arise from the turn towards social history in both our cultural imagination and the discipline of history. Both playwrights are concerned about sensationalizing history and what happens when narratives stand in uneasy relation to historical fact.
As a form of mimesis, drama bears a stronger relation to reality than oral or written tale-telling by virtue of its use of enactment; yet insofar as drama manifests a refracted relation to reality, historical drama drives a wedge between the reenactment of actual events and historical fact. Both The History Boys and Lettice and Lovage dramatize the dilemma of historical narratives; they present opposing views of what history should be and create skeptical audiences who assess those views. Yet these works’ self-consciousness acknowledges that the genre of theater undermines the viability of representing history onstage. Beneath these plots the playwrights concede that the drama inevitably lies about its relation to reality.
Alex Feldman begins with Lindsay Farmer’s term “reconstructive trial,” distinguished from the earlier “altercation trial” by the diminished roles of the judge and accused, the increased significance of detection, forensic evidence, and the cross-examination of witnesses, and the expanded role of lawyers in marshalling evidence to construct competing versions of events. The modern, ‘adversarial’ trial may be described as historiographical in nature, its reconstructions determined by the generative tension between competing theories of the case.
While ideological antagonism has always been at the heart of plays that dramatize history’s most notorious inquisitorial trials, recent documentary trial plays use the apparatus of courtroom theatre to interrogate the process of history-making itself by adversarial means. Articulating postmodernist preoccupations with the indeterminacy of the past by means both archival and anachronistic, Moises Kaufman’s Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde applies the reconstructive paradigm not merely to the events of Oscar Wilde’s life, but to the trials that publicized them. The play’s anti-illusionist aesthetics permit a self-reflexive examination of the evidence, charting the encoding of Wilde’s story by the press, the courts, and by cultural history in a manner that both derives from and reflects upon the adversarial historiography of the courtroom.