Abstract
‘All the world’s a stage, and all men and women merely players’. This famous phrase from Shakespeare’s As you Like it aptly encapsulates what this collection of nine eloquently-written and lavishly illustrated essays seeks to convey – that we are all players and participants in the performance of our history. Staging historical events, as this book explores, is fundamentally a social performance of identities, since individuals and the cultures they occupy are mutually constitutive. Seen from a performative angle, and according to Tracy Davis, ‘as we negotiate life as social beings [. . .], we perform. As we perform, we are also historical’. The material of the book is drawn largely from the Bodleian Library’s recent exhibition with the same title, Staging History, which took place between 14 October 2016 and 8 January 2017, and this accompanying publication is intended as a complement to the exhibition. Many studies, including this one, concur that the theatre was an important social space for the promotion and consumption of historical drama in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.