ABSTRACT
This book arose out of work for the Records of Early Drama: Scotland project. Its original aim was to identify and discuss instances of early Scottish play and ceremonial which might be found in chronicles, as a way of complementing the more prolific sources of such information: the management records of kirk, burgh and other private and public bodies. However, like all battle plans, it failed to survive the first encounter with the enemy. It became obvious that various kinds of activity, while not plays or even ceremonial in the modern sense, were nonetheless theatrical in nature and effect, and that the narrative sources were keen to pass these episodes on to the reader. The chronicle writers wanted to take what had originally been witnessed with the eyes, narrate it, and permit their readers through this translation to witness the events again in their imaginations. The ambiguity of the term ‘witness’ seemed helpful: issues of value and spectatorship were implicit in the process, in that these narrative texts were bearing witness to events which had originally been recognized as significant, and were, in turn, recreating that spectatorial experience for the reader, and declaring its value in doing so. Simon Shepherd has written recently, ‘Theatre is an art of bodies witnessed by bodies. Witnesses are something more than passive viewers. In the act of witnessing a person attests to the truth of something that is or was present for them.’1 In looking at theatricality, rather than examples of theatre, my book does not focus so closely on bodies, and does not insist on the witness actually being present, since theatricality can be presented to the imagination through memory or tradition, but it agrees completely that valueladen witnessing is at the core, both of theatre and theatricality. The transmissory process of witnessing, which turns theatrical event into chronicle narrative in order to permit it to be revisualized, raises intriguing questions. These include what analytical approach might be suitable for deriving the originating theatrical event from the narrative matrix in which it is now fixed; whether such a derivation can be made at all; and how far one’s own analysis continues the process of translation and renarrativization. What began as an attempt to identify actual instances of play became something very different under the pressure of such questions: a more selfreflexive study of different kinds of theatricality as they were transmitted in a quite different mode of reproduction: the continuous narrative.
