ABSTRACT
Primary sources, or what Phillip Zarrilli call ‘the material remains of a culture’, take multiple shapes and form the bedrock of historiographical enquiry. From the remains of ancient theatres, to the eye-witness testimony of actors and directors; from the visual ephemera produced in the documentation of performances, to the relatively dry records of theatre governance or attendance figures, primary sources capture cultural production, feeding the act of interpretation and the subsequent formation of secondary sources. Theatre history needs its primary sources, like any other discipline, to feed the industry of theatre criticism. They are the fossil fuels of scholarly enquiry. Without continuing scholarship, however, the scope for ‘later interpretations of these primary sources’, that is the secondary sources which form the majority of this Companion, may narrow; over time the well might just run dry.
