ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a critical overview of some of the most well-known and cited histories of audiencing: dominant, influential narratives focusing upon Western, primarily European, pre-twentieth-century performance practice that have reached a large popular and scholarly audience. It examines some of the most well-worn stories about the past experience of watching or witnessing the performing arts, covering scholarly accounts, artworks, fictional representations and the discourse which frames encounters with sites of performance past, or reconstructions of them. The chapter explores what these narratives tell us about scholarly and popular preoccupations, reflecting upon the accretion of mythology and the impact of affective attachments on our understanding of particular types of audiencing. It also considers what we may be missing – gaps in knowledge and understanding produced by disciplinary blindspots, distortions in the record created by a desire to defend and promote performance and complexities elided by the construction of a good story – and offers a reading of histories of audiencing which reflects upon the role that nostalgia, mythology and hope for the future may play in evocations of the past.
