ABSTRACT
The encyclopedia has been with humankind since the ancient Greeks. Aristotle’s works are certainly encyclopedic in nature; that is to say, they encircle particular aspects of knowledge, some extremely specialized, some more general. Pliny the Eider (AD 23-79) compiled a thirtyseven-volume encyclopedia of natural Science. The largest encyclopedia seems to have been edited by the Emperor of China, Yung Lo, in the fifteenth Century. Called the Yung Lo Ta Tien, it required 2,169 scholars to write it and ran to 917,480 pages in 11,100 volumes. The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary
Theatre (WECT) is a somewhat less exhaustive encyclopedia than Yung Lo’s. When complete, we expect it to run to only 3,000 or so pages in a mere six volumes. However, Yung Lo sought to cover a much wider ränge of subjects than WECT. His goal was to examine nothing less than all of Chinese literature from the beginning of time. WECT makes no such claims about its com-
prehensiveness. WECT is specifically an ency clopedia of nations and their theatres. The starting point is 1945, the end of World War II, a time of change politically, socially and culturally for much of the world. Sketching out a social and political context for each of the coun tries being studied, WECT seeks to explore in a comparative fashion each country’s theatrical history since that time. The assumption from the beginning has been that theatre is an art form which grows from its society and which feeds back into it through reflection, analysis and challenge.
